The Invention of Fire (8 page)

L
ONDON
’
S MOST SHADOWED CHURCH
sat nestled against the northernmost span of the wall, which rose behind it to block the morning sun and cast that corner of the parish in an eternal dusk. In those months the outer ward, like the other neighborhoods ringing the city beyond the walls, lived in a state of violent transition, as tenement holders and shopkeepers fought back the royal army with bribes, pleas, and threats, all desperate to hold on to their small scraps of ground in the face of the great events unfolding around them.

For it was the soldiers’ mission to clear buildings, trees, and brush from the city’s outer circumference, a mission they took quite seriously. With the combined might of France and Burgundy massing in Flanders, the walls of London would need defending when the invasion came. It wouldn’t do to leave the enemy a high tree that might be felled, a shop that might be torched, a ready supply of natural engines and dry fuel to be used against the city and its people. So, just over the ditch, for fifty feet in every direction, the army’s laborers were beginning to pull down houses old and new, taking axes to the few larger trees that still stood in those precincts.

For all my lifetime the walls had been embraced by clusters of narrow streets and alleys, animal pens, shops and stalls and an occasional smithy, yet now these wide areas in the outer wards would be opened to the Moorfields, and the orchards and grazing grounds
beyond. A great denuding, and it had already transformed this part of Cripplegate-without from a teeming precinct of city life into an ugly and mud-churned plain.

The destruction was also stoking an always simmering conflict between city and crown. The aldermen were seething as they watched whole neighborhoods disappear, complaining to the mayor in the overblown terms favored by their superior sect.

A royal trampling of the outer wards!

Gross violations of ancient rights!

The commons kicked about like river rats!

St. Giles, despite its close proximity to the walls, remained, though the old rectory between the sanctuary and the Cripplegate guardhouse had recently been sacrificed to the cause. Some of its rubble filled three handcarts pulled by a trio of sullen workers, pressed into service by the two infantrymen standing to the side. None of the five men acknowledged my presence as I walked past them and up the porch stairs.

A small group of petitioners waited on the porch; then the church’s dark and cold interior prickled my limbs. As my eyes searched weakly through the gloom I heard the distinctive voice of the longtime parson. He stood within one of the shallow side chapels, arguing with another man over some aspect of the parish rents.

“Nor has he yet made good on the summer’s leasing,” said the priest.

“That old hole in Farringdon,” said the other.

“Yes.”

“Two shill four, as I remember.”

“Press him for it, will you?”

“Aye, Father.”

“Harder this time. I cannot have a tenant sucking the parish teats without paying for his milk like all our other lambs.”

“Aye, Father.”

“Be off, then.”

The two separated, the other man passing me on his way to the west doors, the priest making for the altar end of the nave. He spoke
again as he disappeared through the chancel screen, calling out instructions to several parish underlings, all of whom answered with a respectful tone of assent. As I neared the low middle door he spoke more pointedly to one of his charges.

“That pile of ash, Gil?”

“Yes, Father, I removed it. As you asked.” A higher voice. Young, a touch sullen, as if its owner were being inconvenienced by the parson.

“Very well. Finish up with that polish, then, and you may go.”

“Yes, Father. As you please.” Almost insolent, as I heard it. I wondered that the parson let one of his charges speak to him in such a way.

The candles on the near side of the chancel beam flickered as I passed. I waited, fumbling with an unlit wick, until the echo of the priest’s footsteps receded and the vestry door opened and closed. I looked around and through the screen. Before the low altar two masons worked on the floor, which in that portion of the church had, over the years, decayed into an uneven surface of old planks and broken stones that the men were busily replacing.

I looked through the crossing toward the south door. The sullen voice I had heard belonged to the youth squatting by the door to the sacristy, working a rag over a sacring bell at a low table. He wore the high-cut robes of an acolyte, the plain jet of a young man in minor orders. I approached him quietly, stood at his back.

“Gil Cheddar?”

The hand holding the rag flinched. The acolyte sat back in surprise, losing his squat and half sprawling onto the church’s stone floor. With an embarrassed flutter of limbs and robes he came to his feet, his chin and jaw raised at me. “Gil Cheddar indeed. Who’s asking?”

“John Gower,” I said, unmoved by his tone. His uncovered hair, coal black, swept back from a brow as close to pure white as living skin can be. Early whiskers grew along his cheeks and chin in seemingly random patches, and his narrow shoulders topped a gaunt frame of medium height and slight build. “What does the good parson of St. Giles have you about today, Gil?” I asked him.

There is something in my voice that I have never comprehended, a quality of silken acuity that seems to work its peculiar charm even on
those hearing it for the first time. Chaucer once compared it to a flat of sacrament bread. If unleavened bread could talk, he said, it would talk like John Gower, with no airy lift or taste of yeast to distract from the flat purity of the grain. A weak figure, though I have witnessed the effect of my own voice often enough to lend some credence to the image. There is no levity in it, no room for compromise.

At his own first nibble of this voice, Gil Cheddar answered my question with no trace of the arrogance he had just shown his parish master. “Cleaning tasks, sire, between the day services. Polishing and the like.”

“I see. And you are now finished for the day?”

“Nearly so. I’m to finish the burnish on this bell here, then it’s my lot to stow the sacristy items back in the cabinet, get it all locked up securely, with the key returned to Father. Then it’s—” He stopped himself, looking puzzled by the extent of what he had divulged. His narrow lips found what must have been a familiar frown. “You are here to speak with me? Or is it the parson you wish to see?”

“Oh, I am here for you, Gil, and only you.”

He shifted his weight. “Whatever for?”

“As I understand it you spoke rather freely to a hermit in recent days.”

“A hermit, sire?”

“A hermit of our mutual acquaintance.” My head tipped back toward the walls. “A fellow who lives out there, above Cripplegate.”

He took a half step away, his mouth fixed in a line. I followed his gaze as he looked up and out across the top of the screen. From where we stood you could see nothing of the walls or the upper reaches of Cripplegate, though Cheddar seemed to be peering through the layers of wood and stone to that low window where he had spoken to Piers Goodman.

“I would very much like to learn about your conversation with our unkempt friend, Gil.” I had moved my hand to the purse at my waist. I lifted a coat flap and showed it, though the sight seemed to terrify more than please him. The acolyte glanced toward the vestry, took in the stances of the workers by the altar, assessing the dangers of speaking to this intruder.

“Not here,” he said quietly. “The coops, outside Guildhall Yard?”

“I know them,” I said. A line of chicken houses along Basinghall Street, a short walk down from Cripplegate.

“I should not be long,” he said. “Give me the quarter part of an hour.”

The vestry door groaned open, the parson returning to the nave to call out an instruction to an unseen subordinate. Hunching slightly, I took a few sidelong steps and ducked through the screen door, then hurried down the aisle and back out onto the porch. The sun had made no further effort to crest the walls, only brushing my face once I entered through Cripplegate and turned left past Brewers’ Hall, nestled just east of the inner gatehouse. I crossed Guildhall Yard and entered Basinghall Street, a narrow, snakelike thoroughfare extending south from the wall to Cheapside, and always bustling with hucksters selling everything from unskinned coneys to silver plate.

There was city business being transacted out here as well, mayor’s men taking small coin, dispensing false promises in exchange, and above it all rose the shouts of the criers in a sonorous dance of service and enticement.

“Buy any ink, will ye buy any ink? Buy any very fine writing ink, will ye buy any ink and pens?”

“Any rats or mice to kill? Have ye any rats or mice to kill in your homes and stables, good London? Rob the Ratsbane, at your service!”

“White radishes, lettuces, more radishes, two bunches a farthing!”

“Have ye a sore tooth, an aching gum, an abscess or a bleeder? For know that I am Kindheart the Tooth-Drawer, my good people, with gentle pincers in my hand and opium in my purse.”

The criers rattled on, their pitches rising to an impossible volume as I passed down the street.

Then, from the top of the way, the din of a herald’s bell, sharp brassy clangs cutting through the street noise. The sound abated as a tall young man in the royal livery stepped up on a half barrel, looking down at the commons and asking for our silence and attention.

He was a palace man, recognizable as one of the showy types increasingly favored by King Richard in those years. A rich coat buttoned
tightly at his neck, a fur-trimmed cape chiseled with decorative slits, long legs in particolored hose, three ostrich feathers stemming ostentatiously from his hat. He spread his arms, shook his feathers like a plumed bird, then brought his hands to his mouth, cupping the rhythm of his cries.

“
And now for a taste of foul crime, my good gentles and commons! Now shall I shout of brigands and killers, slayers and thieves! A poacher of pigeons, a smith turned to pilfer! The most lawless of ladies at large in our land!
”

He had our attention. Several outliers moved closer to the crier’s perch, crowding in and looking up at the man’s raised and thinly bearded chin as he went on.

“Now give me your ears and your good hearing, people of London! Know all present that Robert Faulk, cook of Kent and poacher of His Highness the king’s forests, along with Margery Peveril, gentlewoman of Dartford and murderess of her husband, having jointly slain a sheriff’s turnkey and escaped from the sheriff’s gaol at the manor of Portbridge, do now flee, together or alone, through country and city, their destination unknown, with great bounty from King Richard to any man who would aid in their apprehension and seizure, singly or together.”

There were scattered exclamations, a fair amount of murmuring at the notion of a murderess at large. The crier repeated the announcement, added a brief description, then went on to shout a series of royal proclamations. The crowd loosened, the hubbub returned. Soon enough the royal servant’s drones were drowned beneath the renewed barks of the hucksters and their hired mouths.

“Oysters! Oysters! Oysters! Get your oysters here, and your eels!”

“Grind your knives or your shears? The sharpest blades in London ground here, my good gentles!”

“There is Paris, there is Paris in this thread, the finest in the land!”

The poulterers’ coops stood along the western span of the street, forming a low, loud wall of fowl that lent an air of barnyard looseness to this city lane. The old ordinances had tried to restrict the poulterers to the wall by All Hallows, though recent mayors had proved more
lenient. Hens pushed their feathers and beaks through the slats in a ceaseless hunt for grains, while a rooster strutted proudly along the perimeter. The constant murmur made a happy cover for conversations both ill intentioned and benign.

I gathered a handful of kernels from between the pavers and was pushing them through the slats of the nearest coop when I felt a hand at my shoulder. I turned into the thick-lidded eyes of Adam Pinkhurst, a scribe for the new common serjeant at the Guildhall. As always I was distracted by the pied spectacle of his face, a patchwork of burned and healthy skin patterned like some elaborate Moorish cloth, as if he had got in the way of one of an alchemist’s acid flasks.

“John Gower,” he said, the cleft in his chin deepening as he spoke, his gaze direct and confident, regarding me as an equal. Pinkhurst’s stature among the Guildhall clerks had grown somewhat over the last few years since Chaucer had designated him as his favored copyist, commissioning three manuscripts of his poem on Troilus. I had never employed his services for my poetry, preferring to hire a dedicated bookman along Paternoster Row rather than a city scrivener like Pinkhurst. The Guildhall scribes were notorious for passing around unauthorized copies of their clients’ work, and I had no desire to see my making treated like so much fodder for the common gut. Though Pinkhurst, by near-universal acclaim, was trustworthy and discreet, I knew him as a forger of remarkable skill.

“Pinkhurst,” I said as we clasped hands, his ink-stained but smooth. “What brings you out of your cage?”

He grimaced. “I drew the short lot today, so I go in search of pies for our chamber of scribblers. Pork, chicken, liver, dog, friar—makes no difference, so long as they’re not rancid. Six pies, then I’m back to inking, sadly enough, and on such a delightful day.”

“It is that,” I agreed, appreciating the man’s wit. It was no surprise he was Chaucer’s favorite; Geoffrey had told me that Pinkhurst had more than once suggested alternative rhymes and phrases in the margins of his rough copies, just the sort of revisions and improvements to which Chaucer so often subjected my own verse—yet only rarely accepted from me in turn.

He saw the kernels in my hand. “And you? Are you considering renting yourself a chicken coop, relocating from Southwark to Basinghall Street?”