A Burnable Book (20 page)

Growing tired, I started to search out Simon, wandering past a canopy festooned with gay flags and branches of flowered crepe. Beneath it, in the glassy light of four hanging lamps, Katherine Swynford sat at a low marble table, laying out her cards. Her opponent in the game was Sir Stephen Weldon. A crowd had gathered around their table to watch, and there was much murmuring about the beauty of the cards. I recalled the rules of the game Swynford had taught me, though this one was different.

Swynford laid down four cards. I leaned in to see which they were: the Two of Thistles, the Eight of Swords, and the Four and Duke of Hawks. Weldon countered her move with a trump card, the Wheel of Fortune, which Swynford took with the King of Thistles. Weldon’s next play was the Prince of Plums.

I stared at the card, my vision starring.

The Prince of Plums.

I went cold, nearly breathless with the realization. As the game continued lines of verse burned through my mind, the letters searing my memory like a hot coal on skin.

With seven of swords to swing at their will . . .

At sovereign of swords in death swoon he will . . .

Seven of Swords. Sovereign of Swords. Three of Thistles. The strange phrases from the prophecies referred not to arcane symbols or figures of allegory, but to the suits of the playing cards of the sort dealt by Katherine Swynford.

The faces of the guests gathered around the card table took on a sinister cast. In the front rank stood Robert de Vere, the earl’s mouth set in a bemused grin at the sight of his knight losing badly to Lancaster’s concubine. Behind him loomed the imposing bulk of Ralph Strode, taking in the game with a slight frown as Thomas Pinchbeak watched over his shoulder, bent forward like a raven at a fresh corpse. Beside him Sir Michael de la Pole, the chancellor, cold in the April evening, arms wrapping his frame. A dozen others surrounded the pair, all transfixed by this unfamiliar game: the cards from Tuscany, the strategies from Lombardy, yet the players wholly English in their allegiances.

I imagined myself watching them from above, these lords, magnates, diverse bearers of the nation’s fortune. Had anyone else with knowledge of the
De Mortibus
made the association with the cards? Or was this my knowledge alone, shared only with those plotting against the king? And, I now wondered, was Katherine Swynford one of them?

“Not if I can help it,
damn
it all to hell, and now with all the rest . . .” A familiar voice, raised and angry, had barked from the cluster of shrubs at the range-end before fading into a loud whisper. Heads turned.

Chaucer, his features twisted in anger, strode past me without a look. At the sight of the lofty crowd beneath the canopy he recovered himself and affected a tired smile. He bowed to the assembled company, then without a word shot through the gateyard postern. I turned back to see Simon slinking away from the foot of the range. The light was such that no one else in the vicinity seemed to note my son as the target of Chaucer’s wrath.

Later, as we left the palace grounds and rode to the mill inn with a small company of other guests, I struggled for words. I suspected I knew the source of the dispute but wanted to make sure.

“Simon,” I eventually said, my voice low. At my initiative we were riding last in the group and wouldn’t be overheard.

“Yes, Father?”

“You had words with Chaucer.”

“I did.”

An owl hooted somewhere behind us.

“We talked about Hawkwood, and my homecoming,” said Simon. “Chaucer had—Chaucer
has
warm feelings regarding my decision to return to England.”

“What feelings?”

“Hawkwood—” He let out a breath, his head angled skyward. “Chaucer feels I haven’t acted in good faith toward the White Company. That I’ve made him look terrible in Hawkwood’s eyes.”

“Ah,” I said, my suspicions confirmed.

“Chaucer said it wasn’t easy to set me up in Hawkwood’s service after—after what happened,” he said, stumbling. “Said he had to call in quite a large favor with Sir John in order to obtain a position for me. And that my unexpected return to England suggests that I haven’t shown the trustworthiness he would expect. That it smacks of youthful indecision, as he put it.”

“He has a point,” I said wryly. “Rather a strong one.”

“I suppose he does,” said Simon. “But I was truthful with Hawkwood about the reason for my departure. He told me he would be happy to accept me into his service again if I return.” He turned to me. “Have I acted in bad faith?”

I thought for a moment, pleased by this unexpected request for fatherly wisdom. “Not toward Hawkwood, at least. You have given him two years of good service, and he’s invited you to return. But you
have
acted in bad faith toward Chaucer. The courteous thing would have been to write him in advance, informing him of your decision to return. Seeing you at Windsor while thinking you were still in Italy? That must have been quite a shock.”

He nodded. “I see that. But what can I do to make it up to him?”

We had reached the courtyard door and now stood in the road. The other palace guests were handing off their horses to the stabler and his boy. “If I know Chaucer it should be a simple matter. A letter. Doesn’t need to be long. Short and sincere. Once he reads it he’ll forget the whole thing.”

“Let’s hope so,” said Simon, holding the heavy door.

Simon slept deeply the first part of that night, snoring on his bolster as I thought back through the Garter feast, wondering what I had missed. It had been an evening of tense encounters and interrupted revelations: Swynford’s peculiar reaction to the name of Simon’s lover, my epiphany about the cards and the prophecies, that ugly spat between Chaucer and Simon. Though I knew more about the prophecies than I had that morning, I felt my ignorance like a bad meal in the stomach. For the first time in my life, it seemed that knowledge, which had always been my privileged coinage, was failing me. There were things I was not being told, knots my mind seemed incapable of unraveling. And always before me the murder on the Moorfields, and the deaths of kings.

It was at some point during the smallest hours when I awoke to the bark of the keeper’s talbot in the courtyard. The dog was quickly silenced, and I realized that Simon was no longer in our bed. I sat up, listening intently, and heard a series of low murmurs from below. One of the voices belonged to Simon. The other was too soft to recognize. I could make out nothing of the conversation. I went to the door and opened it a crack.

The hinges threw an angry squeal across the courtyard. The talk ceased abruptly. I crept back to bed and waited until Simon climbed the stairs, then listened as he pissed, loudly, from the upper landing down into the courtyard. He cleared his throat, spat. He entered our chamber quietly and slipped beneath the covers.

“Everything all right?” I whispered.

“Just a trip to the privy. That onion soup . . .”

“Right,” I said, feeling uneasy.

Hours later I awoke with a start, the sound of Simon’s piss, and his obvious lie, ringing in my ears.

Chapter xxvi

Rose Alley, Southwark

E
leanor wedged herself between the barrels, her attention back on the Pricking Bishop’s alley door. No sign of Agnes yet, but she’d seen Millicent, airing a blanket out the second-story window. It was only a matter of time before the sisters would make their move. And when they do, she vowed, I’ll make my own.

Out of a larger house along the bankside stepped a rail-thin woman, a basket of laundry in her arms. She set it down on the street side of the gutter. A boy followed her out. They walked together toward the high street, leaving the basket of clothing for a servant to wash. Eleanor glanced up and down the lane. She stepped across and pulled a few garments from the basket. In the far alley, bouncing on her toes to avoid the filth, she shoved first her left foot, then her right down the stolen breeches. The grey doublet fit snugly.

It was not an hour later when Edgar finally got what he’d been waiting for. The Fonteyn sisters, their hoods cinched tight, left the Pricking Bishop and strode with purpose toward the bridge. Despite the welter of affection and relief he felt at seeing Agnes alive and well, Edgar was also newly furious at her, and he was tempted to jump out and confront her right there, though he remained in place. When they had turned he took a deep breath and walked across Rose Alley.

St. Cath sat at her usual place. A loud snore shot from the old woman’s mouth. He waited for another, then stepped around her and slipped inside.

He stood in a small antechamber, dim with no windows. As his eyes adjusted he heard the choir: soft moans from the room to the left, rhythmic thumps from above. He crept through the lower level to the makeshift bakery. A squat oven, where Bess Waller’s crew baked wastel and other breads for illegal sale across the river in London. A cutting block with an upside-down mashing bowl. Two high tables with four stools. The heavy door to the rear yard was bolted shut, though the trapdoor to the undercroft stairs was open. From the space below rose a pale cone of candlelight and two voices.

“Pickled twenty pots and here it be George’s week with only two on the shelf?”

“Girls like the leeks and garlic, Bess. Gets the blood up, stiffens the cock.”

“Tell them to ease off a bit.”

“Sure.”

“And you’ll see about the cod? Half a barrel gone to rot, and the Bishop out good coin. As to the cider . . .”

Edgar stopped listening as he surveyed the room. He made his way carefully along the walls, peering into the shelves past the crockery, the warmth of the oven on his skin. On a shelf above the hearth rested a small array of pious items: a copper candlestick, a small pewter cross, both of which he pocketed; a wood painting of the Magdalene, which he left. He had nearly circled the room when his foot struck a pan, sending it to clatter across the floor.

“St. Cath! That you?” Bess Waller hollered up the cellar stairs.

Edgar held his breath.

“Agnes? Mil, that you, girl?” Bess’s bonnet came into view. “Can’t let a damned bawd sort her cellar without a rotting racket, by St. Bride.” She looked up. “
You!
” she screeched, legs already pumping.

Edgar bent down to lift the edge of the cellar door. Bess ran up the stairs to beat him to it. He took more than a few splinters in his fingers as the trapdoor rose from the floor. When it passed the midway mark he let go of the heavy board.

Whump.
The board slammed down on Bess’s hand. A rough scream from the bawd, who slipped her fingers from beneath the weight. Edgar stomped on the board to the pounding of Bess’s shoulders and fists from below. He reached for the cutting block and dragged it until it rested halfway over the trapdoor.

The women’s cries were muffled now. Given the kitchen’s separation from the main house there was little chance those within had heard the commotion. Nor was there a direct street entrance to the cellar, as far as Edgar knew. He had some time. He resumed his look through the shelves, peering into pots and pans, knocking plate and crockery to the floor with an abandon that gave him more angry satisfaction than he’d felt in weeks, since finding that corpse on the Moorfields.

Four grain barrels occupied the final bit of floor space beneath the shelves. He knocked the first barrel to the floor and reached for the next as the brown dust of wheat flour filled the air. Two more barrels, and now millet and barley dust rose in great clouds. The final barrel, quarter full with rough-cut and moldy oats. He knocked it down, then stood, panting in the bready air. No dust from the oats, but a lot of mess on the floor, take a full day to—

He saw it. A lump beneath the rancid grain. Pushing his dusted hair aside, he bent to the pile and pushed through a few inches of oats. He felt cloth. He grasped a leather thong and pulled, recovering a thin rectangular bundle, wrapped in embroidery. He felt its width and length, pressed his palms on the flat surfaces.

A book.

He stared down at it, scarcely believing his fortune. The girl in the moor, stripped of her clothing, creatures at her flesh; the beadle of Cripplegate, Richard Bickle, his gold-smelling fingers grasping Eleanor’s cheek; poor James Tewburn, slain in the churchyard with no one about. And this book, a book Edgar couldn’t read to save his soul yet a treasure worth a lot of killing and coin.

Edgar wiped flour from his eyes. After a last glance around the kitchen, he crept back to the Bishop’s front, squeezed onto Rose Alley, and headed for the bridge, the oldest maudlyn in Southwark still snoring in his wake.

Chapter xxvii

Holbourne

C
oming up from the Fleet River the sisters slowed, looking across at the imposing façade of Scroope’s Inn and the armorial bearings on the windows, the tracery spidering from the central medallions. The inn of the serjeants-at-law was an imposing block of stone, framed by two gardens and two small houses but with no front courtyard welcoming visitors. It would have to be entered directly from the street, in open view. Two wagons came from the left, a cart and a few riders from the right, though the wide street was relatively deserted on this sunny day. Millicent took Agnes’s arm, crossed to the high door, and, no one stopping them or asking a question, pushed against the heavy oaken barrier.

With a deep yawn of old iron, the door yielded, giving way to the cold gloom of a long rectangular chamber. Little light penetrated through from the high windows. Before them on the east wall was painted the figure of a massive robed woman, a cloth binding her eyes, a set of balanced scales hanging from her left hand.
IUSTITIA
, the Latin inscription above her read. In Scroope’s Inn, Millicent mused, justice isn’t a pretty painting, for here the law sees everything, and the scales are always tipped. It could be no mistake that Pinchbeak had directed them to his own domain, the chambers of the serjeants-at-law, the most powerful legal officials in the land. There were fewer than thirty of them, king’s appointees all, with their own set of privileges, their own style of robe and coif, their own grand inn up on Holbourne. Sir Humphrey ap-Roger had known several of them, dined with them in this very inn as a guest on occasion, though even he, a knight of ancient lineage, had felt intimidated in the serjeants’ company.

Doors off the front hall led out to a central courtyard, where a series of covered staircases on the outer walls rose to two levels of apartments. They reached another chamber, smaller though equally high. In an alcove off the far corner stood three writing desks arranged around an aged clerk, his bent form visible between them. A mounted arc of candles hung chained from a lower rafter, rendering the man’s head, uncapped and bald, as a glowing orb.

He did not look up at their approach. At his desk Millicent said, “We seek Master Thomas Pinchbeak, sir, serjeant-at-law. Where may we find him, if you please?”

Still without moving his head, the old man replied, “First back stairs, top level, eastern corner rooms on the south side.” Then he looked up, taking them in with something like terror. He sputtered a bit, shook his head, and gave them a stern frown. Millicent could almost hear his bones creak as he rose. “Women are not permitted in Scroope’s, nor in any of the inns of our art. You must leave at once.”

“But Master Pinchbeak himself summoned us,” said Millicent. “And here we are.”

“Summoned you, did he?” the man thundered. “Summoned the pair of you, and not tell old Wilkes? Couldn’t be bothered to—not that I—well . . . ahhhh.” His voice weakened and his eyes shot upward, catching the flames. “Though do I recall something about . . .” He grimaced down at his desk, his hands sorting through the loose sheaves around him. “Your name?”

“Rykener,” said Millicent. “My name is Eleanor Rykener.”

Agnes gasped. Millicent silenced her with a look.

“Eleanor Rykener, Eleanor Rykener,” the old man intoned, patting around his desk. Millicent heard the clink of coins. He help up a felt purse. “This is for your troubles, an advance left for you by Master Pinchbeak. The serjeant had an urgent matter at the bench.”

Millicent, torn between frustration and greed, took the purse, opened it, then showed it to Agnes, who reached inside and pulled out a small handful of coins.

“Two marks of silver, that be,” the old man said, “and not a farthing less. With the balance to be paid upon delivery, says Master Pinchbeak.”

Millicent started to protest. They hadn’t brought the book with them, fearing some form of deception on the serjeant-at-law’s part. Their plan had been to gauge Pinchbeak’s seriousness and see the money before returning to the Pricking Bishop to retrieve the manuscript.

“And this balance, good sir?” Agnes asked in her pleasantest tone. “Its size?”

He pursed his lips. “Master Pinchbeak said nothing to me about its size, my pretty. He requests your return tomorrow with the item in question.”

Outside they considered the exchange as they walked back through the walls and toward the bridge. “Merely an advance, that man said,” said Agnes. “And tomorrow we’ll collect the balance, eh, Mil?”

“So it appears,” said Millicent, though without her sister’s optimism. If Pinchbeak truly wanted the book, why would he have left a mere two marks, and why would he have put them off like this? Something about these dealings with the serjeant-at-law didn’t sit right, though Millicent couldn’t sort it before Agnes started pressing her about the Eleanor Rykener business. Millicent explained, telling her sister about Eleanor’s visit to her Cornhull house, then her use of Eleanor’s name in her meeting with Pinchbeak at the parvis.

“It just happened, Ag,” she said. “I couldn’t very well use my own, could I? Hers was in my head, and it spilled out when Pinchbeak asked me my name.”

Agnes, visibly furious, said nothing all the way to the bridge, then across to Southwark, with Millicent tagging her heels. On Rose Alley their steps slowed at the sight before them.

A small crowd of maudlyns, spilling onto the lane. The girls, some of them wearing only unlaced shifts, had gathered unexpectedly in the street, while others had dressed themselves in their shabby finery; few heads were covered.

St. Cath, arrayed in a faded purple gown and a hood four sizes too great for her shrunken head, sat with a cat on her lap, glowering up the alley. As her daughters approached Bess Waller turned to face them, her arms crossed tightly, her jaw set in anger.

“What is it?” Millicent asked, fearing the worst.

“Thing’s gone.”

“What’s gone?” Agnes asked. “What thing?” Millicent asked at the same moment.

“The book,” Bess said. “Nor will you credit who’s robbed us of it.” She told them the details: Eleanor Rykener, all manned up, sneaking by St. Cath and appearing in the Bishop’s kitchen. The slammed cellar trap. The spilled oats. Finally Bess’s release by one of the girls.

Millicent spun on Agnes. “And it had to be that Eleanor Rykener, didn’t it?” she spat, no longer regretting her use of the maudlyn’s name with Pinchbeak. “I hope that swerver hangs for treason.”

Agnes gasped. “What—how could you—”

“She stole it from us, Ag. Out from under our chins. And with it our only chance at a future.”

The sisters turned away from each other, silent in their mutual fury.

“So there it is, then,” said Bess eventually. “What’s a biddy maud like Eleanor Rykener hope to do with a cursed stack of parchments?”

It was at that moment that St. Cath looked up from her trance. Her face shone with the confidence of a prophetess. “Only one place in London an unlettered maud could hope to sell a book,” she croaked. “Leastwise in my experience.”

They all looked at her, wondering what strange memory had provoked the old whore’s intervention.

“And where’s that, St. Cath?” Bess Waller asked her with the patience the woman’s years deserved.

“Ave Maria Lane,” St. Cath went on with a sage nod. “Hard by St. Paul’s. Had it off there with a limner and his apprentice upon a time.” Her eyes sparkled with the recollection. “Or Paternoster Row. That’s where I’d look for the tarred slut.”