The Invention of Fire (28 page)

“Yes.”

He pointed to a length of rough and splintered boards stubbing out five feet over the water, where a fishing boat bobbed gently. “That’s his skiff there. Won’t find him taking it out though, not today at all rates.”

“Why is that?” I said, turning back.

His lips tightened. “Lyman ha’n’t been adock these three days, nor’s any soul laid good eyes on the man. Probably drowned, poor boar. Slipped off the quay, could be. We lose one a month to the Thames, sad to say. Water bailiff’s like to find him, by and by. Lessen he’s already floated out to Gravesend, which could be.”

A coldness spread along my arms and rose to prickle the back of my neck. I turned from the fisherman and walked to the water’s edge, then looked at Lyman’s craft. Though in poor shape it was quite large
for a fisherman’s riverboat, long and with high gunwales, easily capable of carrying seven or eight dead men up from Greenwich, or wherever along the Kentish bank the victims’ bodies had been handed in.

Two loads, possibly three.

THAT NIGHT, WELL AFTER CURFEW
had rung, I retraced the likely route of the sixteen corpses, coining my way across the bridge from Southwark and bribing a shore constable to trail me and keep the night watches in the parishes from troubling us. I began at the river, where I had learned that day of John Lyman’s death. By night the lapping of the Thames against the wharfage and gunwales created a calm and watery patter, joining with the creak of rope and settling board in the river’s nocturnal chorus. Moist stairs descended to the water.

I stood on the lowest step, looking out across the gently roiling surface, thinking of a drowned fisherman. It was John Lyman, then, who had been hired to float the dead men across the river, from somewhere east of Southwark. To bring them here, to his own quay along the wharf, then hand them up to the waiting carter above. He would have been helped by some of his patron’s men, whoever he was. A man of sufficient rank for his name alone to keep the water bailiffs and shore patrol at bay. A man like Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester.

I paced up the narrow steps, imagining each body bent between the hands of two men, to be tossed in Jankyn Bray’s waiting cart. Four loads of four bodies each, creaking along up to Cornhill. I walked the full length of it through the nighttime stillness, the lamp-bearing constable ten steps behind me at my request. Along Thames Street we passed the darkened bulks of All Hallows the Less and All Hallows the Great, the gaping emptiness of the steelyard, then turned northward along the Dowgate up to Walbrook Street. On certain corners pendant lamps hung from posts, pale beacons to the night walkers and ward patrols, the occasional daring violator of curfew. Only once was I accosted, two men policing the parish of St. John the Baptist. The constable hailed them off, spoke to them quietly, slipping them a few of the smaller coins I’d given him for the purpose.

We stopped at the privy below the stocks conduit, across the street from the church of St. Stephen Walbrook. The trickle of the Walbrook sounded from below the Long Dropper, the earthy scent of waste and rot in the air. I walked up three steps and opened the privy door, which groaned unhappily on old leather hinges.

“Your lantern,” I said to the constable. “Hold the door open for me, will you?”

He backed away, his free hand waving me off.

“What is the problem, constable?”

“I don’t fancy holdin’ a privy door for no one, good sire.” The movement of his head was firm and fast, like that of a child refusing a chore.

Exasperated, I held the door myself, then beckoned for him to approach. “I didn’t pay you to watch me piss. I simply need your light. Will another fivepence convince you?”

He hesitated, peering up and down the street, then finally complied, taking the steps up to the privy door, which he held open as I entered the Long Dropper. The constable’s lantern revealed three round holes along the seat box, all too small for a grown man’s body, though the covering board lifted easily. I inspected its edges. Four iron nails had been removed, two bent stubs still protruding from the board, another from the box. Given the angle between the door and the seats, the constable was holding the lantern directly behind me as I peered into the dark pit, nearly overwhelmed by the stench. With the depth and my own shadow it was too dark to see the channel below.

“Closer in, if you will.”

“Sire?”

“The lantern. Bring it over here so I can gauge the distance.”

He gave a shallow and nervous laugh. “Not on St. Bride’s toe. One bad puff and the whole place’ll go up, and I don’t fancy the choke. But it’s fifteen feet down, more or less.”

I shrugged, thinking nothing of his reluctance in the moment. Back on Walbrook Street I stood beside the central gutter, puzzling it out now that I had retraced the perpetrators’ many steps. You would want at least two men waiting behind with Lyman and the skiff, I
reckoned, another two accompanying Jankyn up to the privy, where they would unload the bodies, lift the covering board, and toss the dead men through the opening. A crew of six to eight to perform the operation in London, then. And, on the other end, a wagon or cart on the far bank somewhere well west of Greenwich, perhaps Redriffe given the distance and currents, with several men waiting for the skiff’s return to take the second load.

A considerable enterprise, involving at least a dozen men, perhaps as many as twenty. Lots of potentially loose tongues to threaten with the knife. And, of course, you would need to pay off—

I slowly turned. From above the orb of his flickering lamp the shore constable stared at me, his eyes eerily aglow in the flame, something fearful and desperate in them. He was armed, a short sword and knife scabbarded along his belt.

I glanced back at the privy, then again at the constable as the words of the fisherman resounded in my head.
Lyman ha’n’t been adock these three days, nor’s any soul laid good eyes on the man. Probably drowned, poor boar.

Then I knew.

“Murder!” I bellowed, backing away, mouth to the sky, the greatest sound my lungs could muster. “A murder! Summon the watch! The parish watch! A murder done here! The hue and cry, good London, the hue and cry!”

The constable twisted on his feet, looking about with a guilty man’s desperation, his hand on the pommel. What I’d just done was a risk, as I would end up seeming the fool if I had guessed wrongly.

I stepped toward him, my hands spread open as a chorus of men’s shouts and clapping windows echoed from nearby lanes. “You have nothing to fear from me,” I said to him quietly. “When the watch and the beadle arrive we shall simply tell them we saw a body in the channel below the Long Dropper. You will be credited as first finder.”

His eyes narrowed, seeing a way out. “You will not inform the sheriffs of my—”

“You were bought for silence, not murder.”

He nodded like a child eager to please. “Aye, sire.”

“But you must tell me who hired you. Whose men bought your silence, constable?”

Some shouts, rushing feet; the watch was almost upon us. “It was Gloucester’s men,” he whispered. “Badged with those twisted geese, wings out like this.” He spread his arms in imitation of Gloucester’s fluttering swans.

“You’ve little to fear, then,” I lied. “And here we are.” The first watchmen had arrived, and the next minutes passed in a loud and ugly confusion as clusters of men, official and not, came to enjoy the spectacle. Lanterns were brought into the Long Dropper, loud voices confirming the first sight of the body I had suspected would be found in the channel.

“A grown man it is, lyin’ faceup. Splattered somewhat awful. And it—oh no.”

“What then?”

“There’s another. Smaller one. Looks to be a child.”

“Ah, the stench.”

Soon the parish constable arrived to join the throng and take control of the situation. Robert Griven, a respected master carpenter and a solid parishioner of St. Stephen, was too honest a man to sing for me, though not an enemy by any means. After getting a look at the bodies for himself, Griven started giving orders, sending someone for the ward beadle, three to gather lanterns from nearby corners, another riding for a crew of gongfarmers known to be working down in the Fleet channels by the Thames that night.

Three men from this crew arrived before long and went into the Walbrook ditch through a gap between houses, roping themselves down one by one, calling for light and lines. Eventually the first corpse was hauled to the bank by two of the gongfarmers, then dragged to the street by a rope under its arms. The victim’s face and body were washed off with buckets of clean water from the stocks conduit, which also provided the two gongfarmers with a cold shower as the crowd gathered around the corpse.

“Why, that’s John Lyman, that is,” someone said, lowering a lantern to the victim’s face.

“The fisher?”

“Aye. Wife’s passed but has a fair daughter. Elizabeth, her name is. House is in Cripplegate Ward just without. I’ll go fetch her m’self.”

Now the child was handed up. One of the gongfarmers, his face startlingly clean above the filth that matted his clothing, had the body in his arms. As he set it beside the first corpse I felt a gathering dread.

I had watched the whole procedure from the porch of St. Stephen across Walbrook Street, this city’s fumbling machinery of wrongful death. Now I forced myself to approach the middle of the scene, where a small crowd surrounded the two bodies, obstructing my view. I pushed my way through and looked down upon the dead boy. Water still trickled over his face, dripping through the child’s hair and exposing a severed ear on his left side. A mat of hair, clear skin on a pale face, the cutpurse’s cruel punishment visited on his head. Yet only the one ear was missing. This could not be Jack Norris. Pity and relief mingled in my conscience.

“He’s just there,” someone said. I looked up to see Griven murmuring with my friend the night constable, who pointed me out. Griven approached. Short, stocky, darkened eyes still bleary beneath his cap.

“First finder, are you, Master Gower?”

I turned from the bodies. “That honor would go to your constable, I believe.”

His eyes narrowed. “You hired Shalton for a night walk, did you?”

“I did.”

“And why’s that?”

“Ask Ralph Strode.”

“I am asking
you,
Gower. Why were you about at night in this ward?” When I said nothing he tilted his head up in an ugly scowl. “Shalton’s saying naught, but I know you’re not as thick as that fellow. How’d you know, Gower, hmm?”

“You are parish constable, Griven, not the king’s coroner, nor a justice. I will be happy to share my knowledge at the inquest. Not before. If you are suspicious of my motives here, I ask you, again, to talk to Strode.”

He considered me for a moment longer, then blew out an annoyed sigh and turned away. The shore constable came to my side to walk me back down to the bridge, which I crossed in a dispirited state of mind. Another death, more bodies cast into the bowels of the city, a witness pursued by men willing to murder an earless child for his silence.

R
ALPH STRODE APPEARED
at my house late the following morning, a day still and cold, with lowering clouds and a struggling sun. Despite the weather I sat out in the small garden beneath the last skeletal vines clinging to an arbor, listening to the opening of the noontime office from the priory oratorium. My eyes were closed against the leaden sky, the Latin hymn circling in my ears—
rector potens, verax Deus, qui temperas rerum vices
—when a graveled voice interrupted the silken flow of the canons’ song.

“We pray most fervently at noon, St. Ambrose tells us, for that is when the divine light is at its highest and fullest.”

I squinted up at Strode, who eased himself onto the wooden bench crosswise from my own. “And its most clouded,” I said.

He allowed the silence to lengthen. “What were you doing out there last night, John?”

“What you asked me to do weeks ago,” I said flatly. “Looking into these killings, pulling all the needful threads.”

“John Gower, the sheriff of Southwark, panting after murderers and their traces.”

“The tracks of wolves,” I said. “It was you who set me onto them, Ralph. Why the rancorous air?”

“Seems an unlikely happenstance, doesn’t it?” he said. “John Gower, sniffing around the privy where sixteen men bedded in shit.
And lo! On the one night he chooses for his illegal outing, two more show up in all their foul plenitude even as their souls mount to the celestial sphere.”

The ever philosophical Strode. I had been planning to visit him at the Guildhall that day to tell him what I had learned in Kent. Instead I told him all of it now. His shoulders fell at my description of the Portbridge gaol, the woods, the encounter with Gloucester. When I had finished, we gazed together toward the eastern span of the church, the soaring buttresses clinging to its sides like clawing hawks.

“Is all of England to end up in the Walbrook, then?” he said in a voice gruff with despair. “Are dukes and their factions to be given free license to murder and maim prisoners and carters and children, with no accountability, no hope of arrest?”

“Did Griven send you?” I said, wanting to remain with more immediate events. The constable had been riled the previous night, and I assumed he had spoken with Strode early that morning.

“Griven?” He scoffed. “Not likely. I am here at Rysyng’s request. The alderman got wind of your presence by the Walbrook from the sheriffs. He asked me to look in on you.”

“What did you tell him?” I said, wondering if Rysyng had revealed any of what he had told me.

“Little that he didn’t already know or guess. There is no burying these killings, not after all that has passed since our pleasant morning at St. Bart’s. The sheriffs are riled to the point of revolt, and the aldermen whisper of impeachment. Murder will out, despite the mayor’s efforts to keep it in.”

“Will Brembre thwart this investigation as well, then?”

“I’ve spoken to the coroner. The inquest has been delayed a week, perhaps two.”

“I’m hardly surprised,” I said, thinking of Gloucester and the night in his keep. “Delay seems to be the only constancy in all of this. Has Brembre confided in you?”

Strode fanned a hand before his face. “He grows more distrustful by the day, wild-eyed with suspicion, as if the very walls are closing in on him. First sixteen unknown bodies in the Walbrook, then the
ravaged corpse of that carter, now a fisherman and a boy cutpurse. The privy channels are become a charnel house. It seems almost as if—” He stopped, his lips shutting tight, a deep frown lining his brow.

“As if someone is taunting Brembre,” I completed the thought, testing him. “Taunting London herself.” Strode, I suspected, still knew nothing about Brembre’s entanglement with the swerver, nor about Gloucester’s extortions. Perhaps Rysyng was not as careless a gossip as he seemed—or too frightened of Brembre to loosen his lips without a threat.

The bench moaned as Strode shifted his weight forward. “The crown is stepping in, John.”

“Oh?”

“The chancellor has grown alarmed at the wantonness of it all, and these suggestions about Gloucester will only rile him further. He has sent several royal pursuivants to the Guildhall, to aid in the investigations, so they claim. In reality they will serve as his ears and eyes on the city, and Brembre knows it.”

“I had thought the earl saw all of this as a London problem. What explains his sudden change?”

“That’s the reason I have come, John.” He was about to continue when several voices sounded from the house behind us. He looked over my shoulder, his face grim. “I believe your answer is arrived.”

Through the higher branches on the arbor I saw Edmund Rune coming out of my house through the kitchen door, with Will Cooper leading him toward our benches in the priory garden. Our greetings were cordial, though I was confounded by the presence of the chancellor’s secretary at St. Mary. He sat beside Strode, the two of them pressed together on the narrow bench. Rune began generally enough, discussing the state of Parliament and the current threat to the chancellor.

“The pressure is immense, and King Richard seems prepared to accede to the appellants’ wishes,” he said.

“The chancellor will step down, then?” I asked.

“Or be impeached, should the Commons approve the article.”

“What will happen after that?”

“Will they come for the king?” asked Strode.

Rune shook his head. “I think not. The chancellor’s impeachment should appease them, along with the lord treasurer’s. Beyond that—who knows? Once a predator gets a first taste of meat, no creature of flesh is safe.”

The canons began a psalm with antiphon.

“How will the lord chancellor respond?” I asked. “Is there a chance he might remain in office?”

Rune’s eyes flashed with anger. “Not without King Richard’s support, which doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, his lordship’s long and loyal service to the House of Plantagenet be damned.”

“Long as the Thames itself,” Strode put in. “The earl deserves better from His Highness.”

“His Majesty, you mean to say,” said Rune wryly. “Or so he insists on having himself addressed in recent months.”

“Let’s not plant the seeds of sedition in the priory’s garden, if you please.” I glanced toward the oratorium. Strode laughed gently.

“Perhaps you are correct, Gower,” said Rune, then breathed out a long and florid sigh. “Some things are above mere
politique
. Indeed that is why I have come to see you this morning.”

I watched his face, searching for purpose.

“The chancellor feels that the security of the realm is at stake. He believes this latest news I bear merits the careful attention of the crown even in the midst of this crisis at Westminster, and despite the efforts of Parliament to depose him.”

The sentence sounded practiced, as if Rune had mouthed it several times on his way over the river. “Go on,” I said.

“There has been another massacre. A market town called Desurennes, a day’s ride from Calais.”

A bird swooped down from the near buttress, bringing memories of my last and only visit to the Pale of Calais, that ugly tongue of French land won by old King Edward some forty years ago and held as English territory since the great siege. I had traveled there with Chaucer in the first year of Richard’s reign, accompanying him on his mission to Paris for the marriage negotiations for the hand of Princess Marie of France. Despite their failure, we had spent several
weeks in Paris, yet what stayed with me most were the haunted and hate-filled looks of the townspeople as we rode through the villages of the Pale, a region beaten down by its English occupiers yet still riven with dissension. Such massacres of the innocent were nothing new in the province, where dissidence and outright revolt among the native populace were constant threats. So it remained.

“Were the victims prisoners?”

“Townspeople, farmers,” Rune said. “An attack on a market day, along the town walls, and by English troops. Women and children among the dead this time, in the dozens. Those who weren’t granted the mercy to die were gruesomely wounded.”

“Guns?” I guessed.

“Handgonnes. Many of them, and longbows as well. An English company in the bright of day advanced on the town, slaughtering all before them.”

“Surely the captain of Calais will bring these men to justice. They must have been part of his garrison.”

“That will not be so simple,” Rune said. “There’s great anger throughout the Pale, with all set on bloody vengeance rather than the king’s justice. The Calais garrison already sucks up a quarter and more of the royal treasury. Even that may not be enough to hold back rebellion once it comes. Desurennes has a reputation for sedition. Well deserved, and it’s no secret that new flames are sparking throughout the Pale. Stamping them out is one of the captain’s sworn duties.”

“Though not with such methods, I hope,” said Strode.

“Perhaps not. Yet fire must be met with fire, some would avow,” he said grimly. “The whole of the Pale is a cask of powder waiting for a spark. The people fear another attack—as do I.”

The canons had moved on to the collect, intoned by a cantor whose lone voice sounded faintly across the priory yard.

“Why have you told me all this, Rune?” I asked him. “Do you suspect the two massacres are related? And supposing they are, what can you expect me to learn about this new incident in the Pale that you haven’t already learned yourself?”

My visitors exchanged a look. Ralph nodded slightly. “There is something else, John,” said Rune.

The use of my given name by the chancellor’s secretary felt uncomfortable, too intimate. I scarcely knew the man, and he was in my own house uninvited.

“In addition to the massacre at Desurennes, there are disturbing reports out of the Pale. Reports of English ships along the coast of Flanders, between Calais and Sluys, selling saltpetre to the Flemings, allies of France and Burgundy. The company appears to be trading in arms to be used against England, and just as the French fleet prepares to sail against our shores.”

“Treason,” I said, and once again I saw this whole affair as an expanding circle, drawing more and more into its noose.

“The chancellor asks that you make your way to Calais. Your ostensible purpose will be to see what you can learn about the massacre and who was responsible. You will lodge at the house of Pierre Broussard, a wool broker. French, but one of our most trusted men in the Staple Company.”

“Chaucer knows him?”

“He must, though we’ve not spoken about the affair. The chancellor requests that you say nothing to him should you see him before your departure. When Chaucer left the wool custom he bent some beaks across the sea, in Calais and Middleburgh alike, so his involvement would do more harm than good.”

All of this was moving too quickly. “Why have you come to me, Rune? This is an absurdity. I have no men in Calais, no sources in the Pale. What role does the chancellor wish me to play here?”

He fixed Strode with another look. Before either could reply I spoke. “You said my
ostensible
purpose is to look into the massacre. What is the real purpose of this visit? Why are you here, Rune?”

Rune tightened his lips, then said, “Reports have come to us from an informer, a man slipping in and out of Calais in recent months, journeying overland between Flanders and the Pale, keeping an eye on the French fleet at Sluys. We’ve been paying him well for his information,
which has been solid and reliable. Now he claims to have proof of the identity of these smugglers. That is your second task.”

“Again, Rune, I fail to see—”

“He says he will give it only to you, John Gower, and to no one else.”

Rune’s words hit me like a slap to the cheek, drawing me to my feet. “I want nothing further to do with this.”

Rune stood with me. “He will make contact after you arrive in Calais.”

Strode struggled up as well. “John—” he began.

I held forth my hands, as if to shield myself from what he was about to tell me.

“We are here at the lord chancellor’s command,” said Rune. “He believes, as do I, that the answers are in Calais.”

The canons’ chanting had ceased with the close of the minor office. Edmund Rune spoke into the silence. “You must sail from Gravesend at the earliest opportunity,” he said. “You will travel through Calais to Desurennes, learn what you can about the massacre, then return to Calais. Our informant will contact you there.”

“This is an impossibility, Rune,” I said, my distress mounting. Strode was about to intervene when Rune cut us off.

“
Enough.
” His face bristled with impatience. “There is no choice in the matter, Gower. This is out of your control and ours, and it transcends the politics of the moment. Would you put your comfort here at the priory before the security of the realm?”

My face had gone rigid, and I was about to object again when he held up an appeasing hand. “You must pardon my manner, Gower. It is wearing on a man, to work so closely with a lord so admirable and good when the king and the Parliament will do nothing to support him. May I go on?”

I nodded tightly, arms crossed over my chest. Rune was all sincerity and true concern in that moment, the embodiment of all that Michael de la Pole had meant to England and its kings in years past. As the voice of the chancellor he deserved attention, perhaps compliance. Yet there was a sickening weight on my heart as I waited for the revelation to come.

“Tread carefully over there,” said Rune, now businesslike. “The captain of Calais, William Beauchamp, is Warwick’s brother, a strong ally of Gloucester’s against the king. He knows nothing about this gunpowder trade, or so we believe. When you speak with Beauchamp you must stay silent about our man and what he tells you, on peril of your life.”

“And his,” Strode added.

“Who is the informant?” The only question that mattered, though I already knew its answer.

Rune turned to Strode, who looked upon my agitation with sober and sympathetic eyes. Ralph stepped toward me and clutched my arm, fitting words of Scripture to this small calamity. “‘
For this my son was dead, and is come to life again. He was lost, and now is found.
’”