A Burnable Book (18 page)

Chapter xxiii

St. Mary Overey, Southwark

D
istraction, deception, subterfuge, mendacity, all those unspoken tools of the subtler crafts: government and trade, diplomacy and finance. For someone in my line of work these are tools ready to hand, and I wield them with an implicit confidence in my own mastery of any given transaction. Only rarely are they used against me, and when they are I generally recognize them before any harm is done.

But not always.

“You could write an algorism for it,” said my son.

“What is an algorism?”

Simon looked at me almost pityingly. “A procedure for calculating something. Put an equation together with a few rules and you have an algorism. Named for al-Khwarizmi, one of the great mathematicians of Araby.”

“Oh.”

“The meter of a poem is a measurable quantity,” he went on.

“Right,” I said.

“Whenever you choose a word or a combination of words in putting together a line, you’re also choosing numbers. Any given elegiac couplet contains six feet, then five feet, with a finite variation in syllable count across the couplet.”

“Finite. Like my patience.”

Simon laughed, though I could tell he would not give it up. It was the day before the St. George’s morrow feast out at Windsor, and we were eating a sparse midday meal together in the hall. Onion soup, drawn beans, a loaf of wastel, and a tart with an orange conserve that Simon had purchased at a spicerer’s on Bridge Street. An extravagance, I thought, but he intended it as a small gesture of gratitude; I decided to take it in that spirit. We had discussed his new employment with the chancellor, and he had just been asking me about my latest writing. I had complained about the drudgery of elegiacs. He was responding with this arcane defense of poetic meter.

“An algorism would allow you to calculate rate of change in the meter, whatever sort you’re employing.”

“But what would this information give you?”

“A glimpse of the poet’s mind as he writes. How often does Cato craft an irregular line? With what frequency does a poet writing in elegiac couplets choose a spondee as opposed to a dactyl as the first foot of the hexameter?”

“Again, though—”

“You could do it with chronicles, too, starting with very simple calculations. What’s the most frequently used dactylic word in Vergil? ‘
Numine
’? ‘
Volvere
’? ‘
Omnibus
’?”

“So one could tell a lot about a poet’s taste in images, say.”

“Exactly. Or whether there’s less metrical or syntactical variety toward the end of a work.”

“Suggesting what?”

“That the poet grew lazy the closer he got to the end?”

I looked at him, sensing a subtle shift in tone. “I take it you had lots of time for this sort of thing in Italy.”

He shrugged. “It’s how my mind operates, I suppose. At the moment I’m working through a similar sort of puzzle for the chancellor’s secretary.”

“Oh?” Simon’s appointment with de la Pole’s office had gone well, and the chancellor had given him some materials with which to assay his skills.

“He asked me to prove my accounting skills on an old audit book.” He rubbed a palm over the worn leathern cover of a small booklet. “Reconcile this sum, justify that expense, and all of it’s written in the most crabbed hand you can imagine, with these unique abbreviations I have never seen before. It’s like a code. Quite a mess, though I’ve almost got it cracked.”

He went on for a while in this vein, and as I watched him eat his tart I wondered at this strange combination of genius and whimsy that defined so much of his person. Simon had killed a man, and his history of counterfeiting spoke to a capacity for deception that could still give me chills. Yet as Chaucer had once pressed me to recognize, the death was unintentional, an accident, and Simon had clearly been changed for the better by his two years in Hawkwood’s service. Gone was the arrogant self-confidence, the defiant puerility. In this new role as the dutiful son, he was capable of helping me to forget, even for a few hours, the subject of Chaucer’s murderous book.

The respite ended abruptly when Will Cooper came in with a small bundle under his arm. “A delivery from the Guildhall, Master Gower. Compliments of the common serjeant, the Honorable Ralph Strode.”

“Ah, the Angervyle.” Remembering Strode’s promise, I eagerly untied the rope thongs binding the cloth around the volume and started to browse.

“What is it?” Simon asked, craning his neck.

I hesitated, unsure how much to say. “It’s a book about loving books, I suppose. The
Philobiblon,
by Richard Angervyle of Bury, who was once the king’s envoy to the papal curia in Avignon.”

We spent the next several hours in the solar, Simon sprawled in the south oriel overlooking the priory garden, I seated on a broad-backed chair along the northwest corner absorbing Angervyle’s bracing account. Written in Latin prose of an easy gait, the
Philobiblon
began with several straightforward chapters on the affection due to books, the wisdom they contain, their considerable cost. “No dearness of price ought to hinder a man from the buying of books,” Angervyle wrote, “if he has the money that is demanded for them.”

Angervyle possessed a strong sense of history, citing examples of renowned book-buyers from the past, including Plato and Aristotle, as well as some negative exempla of those who spurned their volumes. There was also a long discussion of the treatment and storage of the bishop’s own books. Dripping noses, filthy fingernails, pressed flowers, cups of wine brought too near the precious folios: all of these represented destructive forces to the volumes in his collection, which he sought to preserve and protect against the ravages of their many potential abusers. To this end, he wrote, his plan was to endow a hall of books at Oxford, a chamber that would lend out his collection, rendering it a great public good to the entire Oxford community. “The treasures of our books,” he wrote, “should be available to all.”

Eventually I came to a chapter containing stories about certain notorious haters of books. I read it, then read it again, associating Angervyle’s story with the events of the last several weeks: prophecies, threats, the burning of books.

An old woman came to Tarquin the Proud, the seventh king of Rome, offering to sell nine books of prophecy. But she asked an immense sum for them, so much that the king said she was mad. In anger she flung three books into the fire, and still asked the same sum for the rest. When the king refused, again she flung three others into the fire and still asked the same price for the three that were left. At last, astonished beyond measure, Tarquin paid for three books the same price for which he might have bought nine. The old woman disappeared, and was never seen again.

My thoughts raced. The story of Tarquin spoke directly to Angervyle’s interest in books of prophecy, and his acute awareness of the value of such volumes even to kings. Could one of his own books have contained the prophetic work of Lollius, this manuscript it seemed everyone in England was seeking—this work that had already led to a young woman’s violent death? Despite my conviction that the
De Mortibus
must be a forgery, the cryptic mode of Angervyle’s treatise was giving me a taste for the hunt.

“Prophecies, Father?”

I looked up, realizing I had been murmuring. I tend to translate aloud as I read, an old schoolroom habit, and Simon had caught a word that tickled his curiosity.

“Just an old Roman tale,” I said.

“Though I’d be happy to hear it, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Well—fine then.” I translated Angervyle’s account.

“Fascinating,” said Simon.

“How so?”

“I was just doing a little calculation here, for the chancellor’s secretary, on the price of barley during a drought year.” He tapped the book on his table and set aside the tablet he had been using for his sums. “The smaller the supply, the greater the cost—or so you would think. In fact, though, like the old sibyl’s books in your story there, the price will often stay constant even when the supply diminishes suddenly. What do barley and books have in common? Well, if we look at your typical bill of sale . . .”

And we were on to another exchange about the predictive virtues of numbers and algorisms, the weak proofs of mere words. Soon enough I was caught up in it myself, amused by his serious tone though aware of how much he knew about a subject utterly foreign to his father.

What struck me most about that afternoon, though, was the distracting ease of our conversation, despite following so closely on Simon’s unexpected return. I realize now how pathetically grateful I was for his renewed presence in Southwark. I even felt reluctant to depart for Oxford in a few days’ time, so warmed was I by his company after those bleak months. My guard was down, the air thick with questions I never thought to ask: what Simon was scratching on his tablet, the nature of the book he held throughout our long hours together, the purpose of all this talk about algorisms and the price of barley.

Surely, I see now, this was Simon’s intent. For by the time I returned to reading, the one moment of curiosity he had shown about Angervyle’s book was entirely forgotten.

Chapter xxiv

Watelyng Street, Cordwainer Ward

E
leanor spent the afternoon preceding her rendezvous with Tewburn away from Gropecunt Lane, taking it from a wealthy merchant down from Coventry. Joan Rugg had sent her to the man’s inn at half Sext, and by Vespertime her tongue, her lips, her arse, even her cock ached from a day of hard use. She needed cider, and she needed it cursed soon or she might’s well nail herself to the side of the stable and let every freeman of London have his turn with her corpse. She shed her dress and pulled on her breeches. It was that sort of a day.

The Painted Lion off Watelyng Street was fairly packed at that hour; seemed half the workingmen of London lined its benches, calling for ale. Edgar was able to nudge himself a space on the broad hearth, where he sipped contentedly and watched the crowd.

The talk was all of labor statutes and poll taxes. He heard names and titles he recognized, all spoken in contempt. The Duke of Lancaster, the Earl of Oxford, the Duke of Dung and let him rot in his privy.

My brother Joseph farms out Suffolk way for Sir Rillardain. What he tells me, the pollers are counting his very children. Twelve groats per to the royal coffers, if you please, and not a penny left for bread.

Where’s the injustice in that, hey? Suppose if you be the mighty Duke of Lancaster, you need gold to pave the steps of your new palace, the Savoy being torched and all.

Can’t have our dukes goin’ penniless, now, can we?

Nor our good king.

Where’d our England be without the king has enough gilded hawks to hunt Waltham Forest?

And enough of our blood to spill for the sodden fields of France?

But thank St. Lazarus we got the Parliament to sort it for us.

Got me there. A blessed shining lot of common profit for the nonce.

A handsome statute it was, too, the poll tax. Makes a fleet of good common sense.

Your married pardoner paying twelve shill, your mayor of Chester paying forty and six, your widowed second cousin of the third son of the alderman’s clark-in-chief of Bridge Ward paying three shill four—why, what could be simpler than them sums to figure up in the Ex-cheker?

Edgar laughed along with them, raising his jar to the Prickling Pickled Pricks of the Poll Tax, though the men’s words went right around and over his muddled head. The workings of Westminster and the Exchequer were a fathomless mystery to Edgar; no reason to start plumbing them now. For a while longer he sat with the laborers, listening to the discontented talk of tax and toll, of collections and conscriptions, until he reckoned it was time.

The Angelus bell had already sounded from St. Martin le Grand by the time he turned up Soper Lane toward St. Pancras. The ward watch generally left the maudlyns and their jakes alone after curfew, though he didn’t want to risk further delay. He angled onto Popkirtle Lane, avoiding Joan’s crew and the prying eyes of the bawd, then went through a narrow gap between storefronts and over the low wall.

Beneath a waxing moon the St. Pancras churchyard could assume an unearthly cast, as if the bodies below its soil were reaching up for the ankles of those who passed above them. Long grasses whisked at his hose. Under his shoes he could feel forgotten graves, and there was a faint musky smell carried on the churchyard air. When he reached the meeting place he stopped and leaned on a tilted slab, a stone rectangle that served well for coupling. No sign of Tewburn yet. It was a peaceful night in the parish. The gentle breeze was cool on his face and a blanket of quiet settled among these stones.

Too quiet. Normally at night, until hours after the curfew bell, the churchyard would hum with the giggles and groans of maudlyns at their labor, with catcalls from the two whoring lanes to east and west as jakes wandered their length. Even on slow nights the ladies would fill the air with a low chatter that could easily be heard in this grassy space behind St. Pancras. That night Edgar heard nothing.

A rustle in the grass, low and to the right. He turned and backed away, heart pounding. Only a bird, picking at something—a carrion bird, at its foul work. It gave him an ugly look as he stepped toward it. He stamped the ground. The scavenger flew sluggishly away.

Edgar moved forward several feet, then retched in the high grass. He turned back and looked. Before him lay the ruined body of James Tewburn. His head had been half-severed from his neck, now a gaping valley of torn skin and blackened flesh. The skin above, pale under the quarter moon, was a ghoulish lantern, glowing brightly among the looming stones. One of the clerk’s eyes was already gone, the bird’s easiest meal.

Squatting in the grass Edgar closed his eyes again and said a prayer. After a careful look around he stood and crept between the stones to a gap in the western wall, thinking only of reaching the safe company of his fellow maudlyns. A few more steps brought him out to Gropecunt Lane.

He shrank back with a gasp, now understanding the silence. The narrow street was abandoned, as if Joan Rugg’s sturdy gaggle of maudlyns had simply fled. Doors sat askew, their hinges broken apart. A pendant-lamp lay on the pavers, its glass shattered, the frame bent. No candlelight from the stalls or beneath the eaves.

Edgar huddled against the corner of a horse barn. Sure, the mauds got their share of grief from the authorities. Once a season or so the alderman might send his men down to make a few arrests, usually at the behest of an abbot or prior. Curfew violations were a way of life, though every once in a great while there would be some trouble about it.

Yet this was more than the typical hassle from the constables. The maudlyns were simply gone. Vanished, like Agnes Fonteyn, and now James Tewburn was dead in the churchyard.

From the darkest shadows to Edgar’s left a figure stole out onto the narrow lane. From his belt he pulled a short sword, the blade glistening in the moonlight. Edgar quickly calculated the distance between them. He looked over his shoulder at the churchyard. Back at the man. The stranger paced slowly forward, peering beneath the eaves.

Then, from the top of the lane, a torch. Night watchers, patrolling the ward. “You there!” one of them shouted, seeing the man in the lane.

For a moment it looked as if the intruder would turn and run, but he decided against it, clearly not wanting the entire parish after him. If he was Tewburn’s killer, Edgar thought, flight would cast immediate suspicion on him once the body was found. He discreetly sheathed his blade and approached the watchers, his hands raised. “Just out for a bit of queynt, good fellows. Where are all the mauds?” A gentleman’s voice.

The first walker clucked his tongue. “Not here, that’s sure. Popkirtle Lane and Gropecunt Lane both. Busted up earlier today, sluts hauled away, and who knows when they’ll be back.”

“How unfortunate,” said the man.

“Aye,” agreed the first walker with a rough laugh.

There was a pause. “Sir Stephen, if I’m not mistaken?” said the second.

“The very same,” said the man, his voice taut with the recognition. Edgar heard the jangle of coins as the man prepared to pay off the walkers for their poor memories.

As the chatter continued Edgar edged backwards, away from the arc of lamplight, until he was at the end of the alley leading back to the churchyard. He took a final glance at the trio on Gropecunt Lane. At one point the stranger shook his head with a laugh, and it was then Edgar saw it.

A hook on his chin, a whitened scar. And a face he would remember.
Sir Stephen.
Edgar turned and made for the wall.