The Invention of Fire (42 page)

F
OR A MOMENT,
at least, it seemed I had Chaucer’s unalloyed attention. I read. He listened.

I stopped there. The lines came from a long lover’s confession I had been writing for some months, inspired by a royal encounter on the river the year before. During my short ride out to Greenwich that morning I had recited the lines to myself with a modest pride
in my making, though now that I sat with Chaucer in his hearth-warmed hall my couplets sounded plain and empty to my ear. A cold night, bleak verse, weak ale: I found myself wishing I had remained in Southwark.

Chaucer liked to listen with his eyes closed, his forehead on a palm. At the close of the final couplet he turned and looked at me. “Quite a beautiful passage, John. The woe of witnessing is a powerful theme, one too often neglected in our versifying. Yet so many of our earthly crafts rely on witnesses and their testimony. Lawyers, chroniclers, clerks—”

“Justices of the peace.”

His lips formed a smile that quickly faded. He looked away. “There was a witness in the woods.”

“Oh?” I had known there was something Chaucer wanted to tell me about the massacre, though I hardly thought to hope for a firsthand account. We had spoken already about the attack at the city gate, my encounter with Rune, the crown’s discreet dealings with Snell, the pardon for Stephen Marsh, arranged through one of Chaucer’s old associates now in the office of the privy seal. Yet Chaucer, I could tell, had been keeping something back, waiting for the right moment. Now it had come.

“You met him, in fact,” he said.

I thought about our trying days in Kent, the hollow eyes of a gaunt country reeve. “Tom Dallid?”

“The very one.”

“Did Rune’s men ask him along? Order him?”

“No, nor did they discover his presence. After they emptied the gaol he started to feel wretched about it, said he knew it was a foul business. He followed the prisoners and soldiers at a distance, to the edge of the woods, then left his horse, went after them, and concealed himself near the clearing. He saw it all unfold.”

I remembered Dallid’s face, the impression of sullen fear the man had left. “Rune said it was a test, of both men and guns.”

“It was.”

“How did it work?” Rune died before he had a chance to tell me.
Despite myself I felt a lingering curiosity about the details of the mass killing that had started all of this.

“A simple game,” Chaucer said. “Two men facing one another across the middle of the clearing, the distance between those two stumps we saw. They’re given instructions in how to load a handgonne, prop it on a stump, and fire. Then one is placed on the ground in front of each of the two men. Each prisoner is then ordered to load and fire at his opponent, and keep going until one of them dies.”

“And if they refuse?”

“They are shot by one of Rune’s archers—as indeed the first man was for refusing to play the game.”

At least one was killed with an arrow, that one there. Half the shaft’s still in his neck.
Baker’s observation, in the St. Bart’s churchyard.

“All they had to hand was a pouch of powder, a pile of shot, a fire for the coals. Whoever triumphed in each round would remain in the game to meet the next man up. The last to survive would be granted his freedom.”

“Or hers.”

“Margery Peveril was to go last,” said Chaucer. “Robert Faulk was the man opposing her. He had just killed five of his fellow prisoners, one of them apparently his cousin. Shot them without a moment’s hesitation. Then it was his turn to face Peveril.”

I imagined myself in his situation. “He could not bring himself to kill a woman.”

“Not so,” said Chaucer, shaking his head. “He was immersed in the game, fully prepared to slaughter her along with everyone else he’d shot. But when he went to raise his gun to the stump he saw that she had him beat. She’d watched carefully, you see, and by the time her turn came she had practiced in her mind the quickest means of loading the weapon. Half of Snell’s men were jeering at him, the other half urging her to put the coal to the hole and kill Faulk. She raised the coal, and then—”

“She turned on them.”

“And shot Snell’s ablest archer in the face from ten feet. Across the clearing, Faulk did the same to the bowman guarding him. Even
so it should have ended there, with Snell’s men drawing and making quick work of them. But Faulk is a renowned poacher. The sheriffs in Kent call him the quickest quiver in the shire. Once he had dispensed with the archer he snatched up the man’s bow, knelt by his corpse, and went for the others. He killed five of Snell’s men, fully half the company that had taken the prisoners out there, then escaped with the Peveril woman through the woods. At the tree line they took two horses and lamed the others with a hunting knife. Then they escaped.”

“Where did they go?”

“Northwards,” he said. “They joined a pilgrimage to Durham, traveled with them to the borders of the Palatinate.”

Cuthbert and his bones. “But they were coming from prison. How did they survive? Did they steal coin?”

“Peveril returned to the manor house after her escape, according to the loyal servants I questioned last week. Retrieved several large purses of coin she’d hidden away from her husband.”

“And where are they now?”

“Dead, I would guess. He was injured badly in a struggle at an inn near Derlinton, the sheriffs report. They escaped on horseback, in what direction isn’t known. I’ve had no news from the ports, which are carefully watched these days. As justice for Kent I would be one of the first to hear, but so far there has been only silence from the northern shires and the border. Her father’s family is Scottish, and I’ve wondered if she might have relations there.”

I considered it, though didn’t see how they could survive unmolested. “The marches are well guarded. A man and a woman, traveling alone?”

“Alone, yes, though they are clearly a resourceful pair.”

“Remarkable.” I thought of my elusive, resourceful son, who had endured much worse than a perilous border crossing. “Their tale should be romanced.”

“‘The Poacher and His Lady,’ perhaps?”

“These handgonnes certainly deserve their own verses, whatever their flaws.” I recalled Edmund Rune’s dark homage to the weapons in the Cheapside seld. My hands still felt the guns, still wanted them.
The warm length of the barrel, the smooth joining of iron and wood, the dangerous thrill of the shot. I wondered that something so lethal could possess such allure to a bookish man like me.

“‘
As swift as pellet out of gun, when fire is in the powder run,
’” Chaucer rhymed, and I realized I had heard the lines before. One of his dream poems: a temple of glass, an eagle, a vision of the Milky Way. As always, Chaucer’s verse had got there first.

“They are devilish inventions, to be sure,” he went on in his dreamy voice. “And William Snell the very devil incarnate, slipping from the hands of Lady Justice despite what he’s done. This Stephen Marsh must be some new demon or demigod, but instead of carrying divine brands from Olympus, he sires up guns from the bowels of hell.”

We sat in silence as the brands in front of us crackled and hissed, our thoughts on the tools of war and crime, these instruments of violence running like dark currents through the long history of mankind. Abraham with his knife, King David with his sling and stone, Pontius Pilate with his cruelest cross, Arthur with his sword—and, now, William Snell with his guns, promising a future, by God’s grace, we would none of us live to see. We remained in the circle of warmth as the flames sank to coals, and the fire slowly died.

S
OME MILES NORTH OF
the river Tweed, where the moors and fells of Northumberland begin their slow sweep up into the Scottish lowlands, there rises a range of mountains, broad and hulking mounds. Since our first maker pushed them up from the earth, the Cheviot Hills have filled the horizon with a somber dignity, strong sentinels against the northern sky, separated by gentle cols of heather and peat. Wyndy Gyle, Bloodybush Edge, Cairn Hill, the great mount of Cheviot itself: along these desolate and disputed hills wends a border separating two lands, two peoples, two kings. From south and north alike the area is under the watch and protection of the wardens of the East March, English and Scottish lords who expend the lives of their men in the preservation of ancient rights, timeless claims of clan and kin.

Yet no border is impenetrable, no borderland fixed and rigid in the lived experience of its inhabitants and visitors. The region separating England from Scotland is an ever-changing land of mixed allegiances and divided loyalties among the marcher lords and the lesser families who inhabit this frontier. Like their own tangled relations, their lands traverse the wandering course of the Picts’ Wall, that ancient barrier of half-buried stone that snakes across the border, to be met by innumerable roads and byways wending through empty heaths, along hidden valleys, over hills too many to name.

On the first Sunday of Advent, in the fifteenth year of King Robert’s reign and the tenth year of King Richard’s, a woman could be seen leading a horse down along the northern face of one such nameless hill. There was a fierce wind sluicing through the crags on that day, making an already steep and stony descent still more difficult. Yet she kept her footing well, her legs strengthened by long travel and wise experience. Her face had thinned over the last months, gone to gaunt yet still a thing of beauty to anyone looking at her, though there had been few enough of these in recent weeks. She pressed onward and downward, making her slow way north.

She walked alone.

Her horse, led by a thin and fraying rope, stepped along with equal confidence. A slight limp has come on in recent days, worrying her mistress. The mare’s journey from Essex and the south had been long and trying, and like her mistress she had thinned; though like her, too, she was strong, agile, willing to struggle through the minor sufferings of travel with the promise of rest to come. Both knew their journey was nearing its end.

On the mare’s broad back sat a man. He was asleep at the moment, and had been for the better part of two hours, though it was a healing sleep. For weeks, since their flight from Derlinton and the Palatinate, he had been ravaged by fever, closer to death than any man should come and hope to live. His leg had largely healed itself and remained whole, though like the mare he would walk henceforth with a distinctive limp. He was gaining strength by the day, walking slowly for stretches of the path, spelled by the mare when he grew weary.

Within another week they would join her relations on the coast, there to take up residence in a modest house on a bishop’s estate, where they would serve the diocese and manor well. They would live as husband and wife, never taking the sacrament yet fully and properly wedded in the eyes of God. There would be children, four or five in number. They would be content and safe in their adopted home. They would live long, their years blessed with small fortune and great love.

This, at least, is how Chaucer might have ended the story of Robert
Faulk and Margery Peveril, these intended victims of an unthinkable violence they together escaped, at least for a time. In my youth I made a pilgrimage to St. Cuthbert’s shrine in Durham, traveling the same overland route traversed by Robert and Margery in their long flight from the Kentish wood and the horror they encountered there. Our company never made it as far as Edinburgh, nor even to the marches, though once in the Palatinate we could taste something of the northern air, imagine ourselves among the green and endless hills of a wild borderlands we knew then only through the minstrels’ songs. Would such songs find Margery and Robert in the end, I wondered, or would their tale fade into the same long and tuneless oblivion that entombs so many bygone lives?

Chaucer is a lusty maker, a sharp-eyed poet of strong endings and firm moral lessons. Tales of learned roosters and cuckolded reeves, jests of broken wind, romances of pricking knights, the brief lives of martyred children and virgin saints. Even his tragedies make for a happy close, and if Geoffrey were to sit down and ink out a quire on the adventures of Robert Faulk and Margery Peveril, you can wager it would find resolution in a wedding feast with all the gilding, or some test of devotion and fidelity affirming the rightness and richness of their love. Upon reading the final lines you would doubtless set down the little book with some reluctance, give their story your tearful eyes and your sad smile, shake your head at the sobering beauty of it all. Oh, how bitter! Ah, how sweet!

I sip from the goblet of a darker muse. The stories I favor most are painted in the hues of choler, spleen, and bile, and they rarely end well. Tyrants drowning in a river of molten blood. Death’s trumpet, blowing at the gates of the hypocrites. King Albinus, inducing his ignorant wife to drink wine from her father’s burnished skull. Our atrocities require us to honor the strangest twists of our imagination, and without regard for the comforts of fitting issue or joyful resolution. A poet should not be some sweet-singing bird in a trap, feasting on the meat while blind to the net. The net
is
the meat, all those entanglements and snares and iron claws that hobble us and prevent our escape from
the limits of our weak and fallen flesh. Perhaps in my own translation of their legend Margery and Robert will starve to death on a barren heath, or drown at sea in sight of Zeeland. For survival is a curse as much as a blessing. Think of fire, an invention that taught us to cook the flesh of beasts, to light our way at night, to cast a tuneful bell—to die by powder, flame, and ball. After his betrayal but before his rescue Prometheus could only watch as an eagle hooked and pulled at his liver. I would have ended the story there.

Back in Southwark, as I took the final turn past St. Margaret’s Hill, Jack Norris went running ahead, eager for a return to the comforts of the priory. He, like Simon, had come to my aid at a dire moment, and I would never forget the wild in his eyes as he saw me backing toward the seld with Edmund Rune’s blade at my neck. At one point along the high street he returned to my side, and together we followed a merchant striding up the middle as if he were lord of the town.

I bought a meat bun from a walking huckster. Jack ate it greedily, taking random bites from around the edges as he worked his way to the rich middle, shoving the strips of crust between his lips. His new cap had edged up over his ravaged left ear, exposing the dry stub to the wind. As he nibbled the last of the bun I pushed the cap down, awkwardly patted his head. He looked up at me.

“Am I to hie back over the bridge, Mas’ Gower, now it’s all done?”

The question was posed so innocently, with such openness and acceptance of whatever my response would be, that I had to look away. “You will remain at my house for the present, Jack. If it suits you, that is.”

“What’s that, Mas’ Gower?” He moved his cap aside, put a cupping hand to the near stub. I repeated myself.

It took him a few moments to respond. “For a little piece a time it does. Though I have my work, so not overlong a stay.” He patted the hasp of his knife, taking the same pride in the tool of his trade as a cordwainer might in his awl. As if common thievery were a sanctioned craft, the cutpurses a civic guild, with livery and station.

Ahead of us the merchant’s gilt purse bulged almost obscenely at his waist. Jack was staring at it. Even I was tempted to reach for a knife.

“There are other ways, Jack,” I said, putting a hand between his shoulders.

“Aye, Master Gower,” the boy sighed. He drew closer. “Though none of them as quick.”

I could not disagree.