The Invention of Fire (23 page)

“Whyever not?”

“I will not tell you, Geoffrey. The thing is unmentionable.”

He gave me a sidelong frown.

“Believe me,
mon ami,
it is better that you don’t know,” I said. “For Brembre’s sake, and your own.”

Only our years of friendship and mutual trust could have persuaded him not to press me for more. “How is Pinkhurst involved?”

“There was a proceeding. Adam was the scrivener.”

Chaucer nodded. “I will send him a letter with instructions once I’m back in Greenwich. Pinkhurst will give you all you ask.”

“Why not walk with me now to the Guildhall and speak with him together? The matter is urgent.”

“He is with Exton’s retinue above Oxford, scribing about fish, and won’t be back for some days.” The incoming mayor, a powerful fishmonger, was known to be fiercely protective of the city’s fishing rights along the Thames, always a subject of dispute between London and Oxford. “Besides, John, your matter cannot be more urgent than my own. Though the two are closely related, I believe.”

“Tell me.”

“You are aware of my current office in Greenwich?”

“You are justice of the peace.”

“For the most part I pursue minor delinquents and scofflaws,” he said. “Trespassers, regraters, extorters—I help track them down, haul them into our various gaols, keep them safely in check until delivery to the eyre or the manor courts, depending on the level of the offense. Not the sort of work I’m suited for.”

“I should think not.” I tried to imagine Chaucer arresting a hardened thief.

“I don’t mind it, though,” he mused. “After so many years in the customhouse, at the king’s and the mayor’s cough and call, I suppose I needed a calmer sort of criminality, and a more restful place to write. The country air uniquely cultivates a man’s figures and rhymes. Though it’s just as murderous a place as the city.”

Poetry, murder: my friend always possessed the capacity to skim from light to dark, from salvation to sin and back again, and without a flicker of self-doubt. It was a trait I loathed and envied at the same time.

“At least twice a week I am forced to throw someone in one of the Kentish gaols,” he continued. “We have perhaps two dozen of them. I have come to know nearly all of them quite intimately, even in these short months in office.”

“How does this concern the Walbrook killings?”

We had reached the market barns, where Chaucer stabled his horse while in Westminster. He spoke to the boy, then turned back to me. “You must come to Greenwich, John, and see for yourself,” he said, now in English. “Otherwise you won’t credit it.”

“What have you found out?”

He coughed and said in a low and regretful voice, “I know where they died, John.”

I blinked.

“And I believe I am close to discovering who they were,” he said.

“When shall I come down?”

“Tomorrow. I will make the arrangements myself.”

“That is short notice, Geoffrey.”

“Short notice, short ride.”

“I will be there before noon,” I said. Jack Norris was still missing, and given what I had just learned of Adam Pinkhurst’s role in the discord between Gloucester and Brembre I was loath to leave the city. Yet the Walbrook murders had too sharp a hook in me already to ignore the fresh bait Chaucer was dangling at my mouth.

“Good, then,” he said. “Ask for me at the Thistle across the green from St. Alfege. They’ll know where I am when you arrive. You will stay the night.” He hesitated. “And it is your turn, I believe.”

It was. I had come prepared. From my hanging bag I removed a small quire of parchment, which I had stitched roughly before leaving the priory for the Scrope-Grosvenor hearing. Chaucer took the booklet from me and fanned the pages. “What is John Gower feeding me today?”

“You will find it quite topical,” I said. “Some lines on Wrath and Hate, two brothers who have been much in my thoughts.”

“Very well,” he said, stuffing my quire in a bag suspended from his saddle. “Until tomorrow, John,” he said, and then Chaucer mounted and was gone, swallowed by the parliamentary rabble.

T
HE VILLAGE OF GREENWICH
lies roughly four miles from Southwark, a short enough distance that I was tempted to take the long ferry and go by water, though the day’s crisp, dry air prompted me to make the journey on horseback instead. I departed St. Mary Overey that morning under high and blowing clouds that dappled the road in swift shadows as I rode along. Watling Street leaves Southwark at the far end of the high street to curve gently through the country parishes. The road was busy with herders, workers, and retailers hurrying themselves and their wares into the city. Flocks of sheep for the Southwark butchers and the autumn slaughter, loads of Kentish lumber, a parade of carts, wagons, and laden mules groaning for space on a crowded byway. It seemed that every commodity unable to reach London by water reached it by Watling Street, traveling up and into the bowels of the city through Southwark and the bridge. In the other direction flowed an equally varied chain of conveyances: carts returning to their rural origins laden with foodstuffs, a lady’s wardrobe, a suit of plate armor bound in oiled cloth.

A mile after leaving behind the Southwark high street I fell in with a company of monks making for the priory of St. Martin, a long journey nearing its end. The monks themselves were a sullen lot, unwilling to make idle talk with a stranger, so I slowed my horse to edge alongside their lay servant, a young man who looked perhaps twenty years old and, I guessed, eager for worldly conversation.

“What news, young fellow?” I asked, slipping him a few groats. Travelers were always one of the richest sources of information, and though their accounts could very often be discounted as unreliable hearsay, they invariably afforded new perspectives on the wider world, ever welcome to a city dweller like me.

The company of Benedictines had left Dover in early July, he told me, their charge to deliver the news of their prior’s death to as many houses in their order as practicable, and gather prayers and Masses in return. He reached back to pat one of his bags, a cylindrical packet of boiled leather strapped firmly to the saddle. The heavy parchment roll had been inscribed by some thirty Benedictine abbots, abbesses, and priors from Plymouth to York, he said, and the monks were just now completing the brutal circle begun twelve weeks before. Prior to their arrival in London the company had been traveling along the coast road from Norwich, stopping by several houses at the sea edge of England.

“Talk’s all of Burgundy and King Charles,” said the young man. “Extra garrisons at the ports, looking out over the channel to Sluys, ’specially after rumors a those Genoese cogs captured down at Sandwich. King’s men have hired whole flocks of men, women, even little boys and girls to watch up and down the coast, sound the alarm at first sight of the French fleet. They’ve bought up half the fishermen on the coast, pressed their old boats into service. And on land you got plowmen sharpening their scythes, herdsmen seeking new pasture inland, scared mothers stitchin’ their daughters’ queynts shut against all the rapin’ to come.”

He laughed gruffly, prompting a craned neck and a glare from one of the monks up ahead.

“Nothing remarkable, then?”

“Well now . . .” He thought about it. “There was one odd thing, little twig that’s been nubbin’ at my mind. Forgot about it once we left the coast, but now we’re in Kent it comes to me again.” He looked up and around at the landscape.

“And what’s that?” I said.

He slowed his horse a step, keeping an eye on the monks. “My recollection’s stuck, it seems.”

I handed over another coin. He sat up in his saddle, took a long draft from his skin, wiped an arm across his mouth.

“Not a week ago, this was,” he said. “We was in Chelmsford, two days up and out from London. Market day, all the usual crowds, and the sheriff’s criers were on the corners, shouting the king’s messages. One of them pricked up quite a few ears.”

“Oh?”

“A prison escape, it was, with some killings involved. Would have been the regular sort of hue and cry, the sheriffs seeking out the usual highwaymen and so on, calling on the help and aid of the commons in bringin’ them all to the bench. What plucked me, though, was that one of the fliers is a woman. Gentlewoman, in fact, of Dartford, escaped from Portbridge gaol. Killed a guard, or so it was cried.”

“A gentlewoman? That
is
rather unusual.” Though even as I said this I recalled the city crier outside Guildhall Yard, who had undoubtedly been spreading warnings about the same fugitives and asking for help from Londoners in their apprehension. Normally such shouted proclamations would go straight through my skull without stopping, and I had heard nothing in the shouted list of official business worthy of my attention that day.

Now the proclamation took on a darker resonance. I wondered what Chaucer, as local justice of the peace for the sprawling shire, might know of the fugitive pair—if pair they were. Dartford was just a few miles beyond Greenwich, well within his jurisdiction, and he would surely have been involved in the initial hunt after the killing at the Portbridge gaol.

“Do you recall their names?” I asked him.

“I do, strange enough,” said the young man. “Heard the cry three times and can’t get them out of my head.”

His silence lengthened. More coins traded hands.

“Margery Peveril’s hers. Robert Faulk’s his,” he said, and nothing else. The crier’s words came back to me in fragments as he rode ahead.
Know all present . . . poacher of His Highness the king’s forests . . . gentlewoman of Dartford and murderess of her husband . . . do now flee, together or alone, through country and city . . . destination unknown. . .

I parted company with the monks after the ford over the Ravensbourne, which was flowing low, and within less than an hour of closing my gate door at the priory I was riding up the hill to Greenwich with the steeple of St. Alfege a stub against the sky. Upon reaching the high street and the Thistle I dismounted, arranging for my horse’s stabling with the inn boy, and looked out over the Thames. The village’s situation gave a wide vista on the river, on which several ships at various stages of construction were docked by the building yards. Greenwich had recently become a major den of shipwrights, many of them swart crews from the south boasting the latest techniques from the ports of Italy and the Holy Land. From that spot in front of the Thistle I could make out the faint echoes of their shouts, oaths and curses traded in tongues as foreign to my ear as modesty to a baron.

“Why, our Southwark oyster has left his shell!” Chaucer, leaning on the inn door, greeted me with a curt wave. “Good to see you in a rural mode, John.”

“Let’s hope I survive the day.” I joined him at the door, suddenly thirsty, looking over his shoulder for the innkeeper.

He steered me back toward the yard. “No quenching for us, not for several hours. Retrieve your horse, John. We must set off.”

“For where?”

“You will see.” His face looked troubled.

“Tell me, Geoffrey.”

“Things are worse than I thought. Much worse, if what I have heard this morning is true. We must ride at once.” He gave a curt signal to the yard boy, who went off to retrieve our animals.

I thought for a moment. “Is this about these fugitives, Geoffrey? A man and woman who fled a manor gaol in the Portbridge hundred?”

“In part,” he said, looking mildly surprised at my information. “Peveril and Faulk are the talk of the shire, though their escape is the least horrific aspect of this matter. I can scarcely believe what I am about to show you. I will say no more at the moment, as I want your fresh judgment on what you see.”

Our horses arrived, and we set off down toward the main road, where traffic had slowed somewhat following the mercantile rush of
the earlier morning. We had several miles to ride, and as we passed by an empty gibbet at a crossing Chaucer said, “I have read your couplets, John.”

“The quire I gave you yesterday?”

“You’ve figured Homicide as the tongue of Wrath. I like that very much. I can see it, flickering serpentlike at the imminent victims of murder, or snapping like a whip at the feet of the almost dead, tripping them up in the courses of their lives.” He started reciting my verse back to me. A booklet passed to him late the day before, and he already had my lines by rote.

He looked over at me with an admiring smile, a rarity in this poetical circumstance. “Now the lathe and screw are verdant images, aren’t they,” he mused. “And yet—and yet I don’t see the precise point of the ‘engine’ or how it could be working in the way you describe . . .”

And so it went, so it always went with Chaucer and my verse, the well-meaning criticisms twisting like knives through my ribs. We rode another mile, as I listened to him prattle on about my sagging lines and stale images, ever with the best of intentions, of course, the most friendly disposition toward my making. Nothing could reduce me to a more childlike sullenness than Chaucer’s blithe cruelties.

Chaucer, too, sank into a studied silence once he had dispensed
with my verse. He seemed ill at ease, agitated in his saddle. We passed a large manor house at the edge of a half-cleared wood, then rode over a wide and swiftly flowing creek spanned by a stone bridge, well kept despite the heavy traffic on this byway from London. Upstream a train of late wheat wagons was lined up before a mill on the eastern bank, the tenants waiting their turn at the stone. Chaucer’s position allowed us to cross without paying the toll to the guards, though at the far end our way was barred by the bridge’s hermit. Robed in black with a closely cropped beard and a hood in the newest style, he cut a vivid contrast to the happily unkempt figure of Piers Goodman, a presence still heavy in my thoughts. I found the bridge hermit’s fastidious attire infuriating.

“Fair welcome to you, Master Chaucer,” he said with a bow to my companion.

“And a happy morning to you, Brother Roger.”

The hermit beamed up at me. “Sixpence for your crossing, good gentle,” he said with an entitled primness, his palm open by my left foot.

I heard myself scoff. “Here is a groat.” I flicked it down at him.

He caught it in the air, looked at Chaucer.

“John,” my friend murmured, turning from the affronted hermit. “You would never insult one of your own mouths. Please do not slight mine.”

I hesitated, my anger ebbing. “Of course.” I handed down eight pennies to make up for my rudeness, and after a satisfied nod from the hermit we were on our way.

When we had got beyond the man’s hearing Chaucer half turned in his saddle. “Margery Peveril,” he said at last, a certain reverence in his voice, as if the name were a minor sacrament.

“The woman,” I said.

“The woman, the murderess, and now the fugitive.” Chaucer hocked his throat, spat off to the side. “An unlikely fugitive, but a fugitive nonetheless. And I am charged with finding her, apprehending her and this Faulk, the smith, and bringing them both to London in chains for a glorious hanging before the commons.”

“What do you know about her?”

“Margery Peveril,” he said again, this time with a harsher inflection. “Not a lady, but an esquire’s wife, the respected mistress of a minor manor between Portbridge and Dartford, along the river Darent. I met her soon after my own arrival in Greenwich, the first week I was in office as justice of the peace. The only other time I saw her was just after her arrest.”

“Tell me about her.”

“An attractive woman,” he said. “Perhaps twenty years of age, pert, lively, though never a flirt or gossip, and by all indications a faithful wife and true. Strong-willed, beloved in the parish, with a reputation for great and genuine piety, and always bounteous toward her husband’s tenants—perhaps overly generous if anything. Her late husband’s tenants,” he corrected himself.

“The husband?”

“Twice her age, and Walter Peveril was a tyrant,” Chaucer said. “From a minor gentry family, the
most
minor, you would have to call them, with a bitter disposition toward everyone around him. Beat his servants and his horses, had his tenants whipped on a whim. His wife suffered a great deal, it is said.”

“Children?”

“None, though they have been married four years. My wife is barren, he’d say in his jars. One of the sources of his anger, perhaps.”

“There is no doubt that she killed him?”

“None. The servants heard a struggle in the hall, a scream, some furniture knocked down. They went in and she was sitting by his corpse with a bloody hatchet in her hand as poor Walter’s life left through his neck and chest. The sheriffs brought her in, and she’d been in the gaol at Portbridge until the—that is where we are heading now, before . . .”

He let out a frustrated breath. “I must apologize for my silence, John, and my clumsiness with you. There are things here I cannot fathom, that go so far beyond my experience that I don’t know how to comprehend them.”

“Will you simply tell me what has happened, Geoffrey?”

“I must see for myself first, and I want you to have your green eyes on this, without bias from what I have to tell you.”

I glanced over at him. “You do remember, don’t you, that you called me out here not about this fleeing couple but about the ugly mess in the privy channel?”

He returned my gaze. “I do, John. I do indeed.”

With that he turned from me, smacked his horse on the flank, and trotted ahead, closing our conversation. In another hour we had passed the river road to Dartford and arrived at the Portbridge manor, or Bykenors, as Chaucer called it, named for the family that had anciently controlled this part of the parish. The manor house was located at the far southeast of the Bexley heath, which we skirted along the southern edge. The soil out that way was dry, inclined to a gravelly loam that kicked up in ugly sprays from the hooves of Chaucer’s horse.