A Burnable Book (26 page)

Chapter xxxvi

Spitalfields, outside Bishopsgate

T
he three of them stood in the May drizzle as Agnes’s grave was carved in the earth. The strikes of shovel in soil were comforting in their way, though the digger’s glossing didn’t help. “Pull a skull out the pit every day, it seems,” he said during one of his breaks. “Reckon half of hell be filled with Spitalfields souls.”

Eleanor, shivering, could sense them there, waiting for the resurrection, when God would call them up, so the preachers said, when all the decayed flesh and old bones would rejoin their souls like some meat puppet in heaven.

They owed their presence at Agnes’s burial to Joan Rugg. In the commotion following the murder, Eleanor and Millicent had slipped out of the Aldgate neighborhood and back to the Bishop before the questions started, avoiding the gathering of the jury and the coroner’s inquest. A beadle recognized Agnes as one of Joan’s crew and, after summoning the bawd to the inquest, released the body for a pauper’s burial at the Spitalfields, where Joan’s cuz, Sam Varney, worked as underdigger. Joan sent word to Bess about the timing, and the three of them came across that morning. They bound Agnes in a rough shroud and loaded her onto the digger’s cart for the haul out to the burial yard.

As the hole deepened they gathered bluebells from the far corners of the churchyard and carried them to the edge of the pit, with stems of thyme to give Agnes safe passage to the world beyond, and some separation from the other bodies in the partially exposed pit. The gravedigger made quick work of lining the floor, the bluebell stems in the direction of her feet, the thyme a cushion for her head. Finally he coaxed his nag around to the top of the grave and pulled Agnes out by her feet, sending her shrouded form through the air. It landed on the bluebells with a muted finality. He shoveled dirt on top of her. Soon she was gone.

Bess Waller fell to the ground, smudging her dress in the morbid soil. “Oh, the beautiful little dear! Oh, the most precious body what ever lived!”

Eleanor, silent in her own desolation, watched Millicent. Her face was blank, though Eleanor could feel her fury at her mother as a living thing.

“Stop it, Bess,” Millicent finally said. “Just stop it.”

Bess’s voice hitched. “Stop it, you say?”

“Your sorrow is
feigned,
” Millicent said, the last word shot at her mother as an arrow of contempt. “Where was your concern for this ‘most precious body’ when Ag was a girl? Your ‘beautiful little dear,’ her arse split open by half the friars of London.” Millicent’s voice shook with hatred. “Agnes was nothing to you but pennies for her queynt.”

Bess pushed herself off the ground. The digger paused in his shoveling.

“Was you who killed her.” Bess shook a finger. “You who took the book away to sell to Pinchbeak’s man, leaving her in those rooms with nothing to bargain for her life. And for what? Bag of lead plugs, and a cold grave in the Spitalfields. So don’t you talk to
me
about concern for my Agnes. By St. Agnes herself, don’t you say a word. You’re the one put her in the ground.”

Millicent raised a hand, then turned away, clutched her stomach, and vomited on the soil. All her reserve left her then, her face losing its frozen pride in a bare moment. Eleanor stepped forward, but Millicent waved her off, shaking her head wildly, retching between words.

“She be—she be right, an’t she? Bess Waller be as—be as right as the cursed—cursed rain, don’t she? I killed me Agnes, right as if I bladed her meself.”

Eleanor stared at her in wonder. From the refined diction of a knight’s courtesan Millicent’s speech had lowered itself to the rough patter of the stews. She sounds like me now, Eleanor thought; no, like Agnes.

“That’s not true, Mil,” she said, but Millicent backed away, arms held before her face. She fled from the churchyard and disappeared beyond a distant garden.

Bess Waller turned back to the grave, ignoring her. After a final look at the soil covering Agnes, Eleanor made her way out of the Spitalfields yard. All her thoughts were on Gerald, now her one intimate in all the world.

She went through the city walls at Bishopsgate, then westward, to the Shambles. To her left were slaughterstalls, once the largest in London, now diminished by the Parliament and the city, though still redolent with mingled breaths of shit and death, halved cows hooked four to a beam, gutters spattered with new blood aglisten in the full sun. A few sheep, cows, and goats occupied the far stalls, while the walls of the abattoir were lined with the knives and cleavers for killing time.

Finally she reached the church. St. Nicholas Shambles, the stenchiest in all London, and the only one that was ever hers. Her parents had been steadfast parishioners all their lives, and their parents, and probably theirs for all she knew. Eleanor knew its crumbling stairs, its skewed porch, its plain rood screen like she knew her own teeth. After their mother’s death she and Gerald had come every day for alms, along with the rest of the parish’s poor, until the parson realized they were orphans and turned them over to the city.

Inside the church was silent, the air familiar despite her long absence from its damp and smell. Her brother stepped from a dark recess near one of the side chapels. He’d lost a bit of his sneer, and let Eleanor grasp his arm and lead him to a bench near the west door.

“That fellow from the Guildhall you sent around,” Gerald began. “Grimes didn’t like it much, when he got wind of the transfer, and all the questions.”

“Grimes killed him, then?”

“Not Grimes.” He looked off. She grabbed his chin, turned him toward her.

“Who then?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know their names. They’re the ones that bring the priest around and spread coin. The priest that has them all convinced it’s God’s will that the butchers of Southwark lead the new Rising, reading to them all from a prophecy, he calls it. Their destiny it is, to save all England with their flaying knives! Then I hear them in Grimes’s house, talking about Tewburn. He learned something, Tewburn did, something about the plot. Heard them saying he has to go or he’ll bring them all down. So they killed him. And now they’re all set to kill the king, kill King Richard! And they have a day set, too. They’re to do it on—”

“Dunstan’s Day,” she finished for him.

He looked at her, his eyes wide. “How’d you know that, Eleanor?”

She whispered it. “ ‘
On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.
’ ”

He swallowed, and she told him about the book, from the murder on the Moorfields to the deaths of James Tewburn and Agnes Fonteyn.

“Same as the parson says, and Grimes believes it,” said Gerald. “It’s all true, then. There
is
a prophecy.”

She gazed into the far end of the nave, through the gloom beyond the screen. “A prophecy, a plot, a pickle. Who knows? What I do know is, a maudlyn and a butcher’s boy don’t have any business meddling with a king’s death. This be far above us, Gerald.” She took his hand. “When you go back to Grimes you can’t let on that you know anything, you hear? Play it humble, like you’re his ass or dog got smacked into obeying. Do anything he says. Meanwhile I’ll figure it out from this end. If we want to come out of all this with our heads, and the king with his, we best find someone with sway. Some real weight.”

“Father Edmund?” Gerald asked, referring to the old parson of St. Nicholas.

“Not him,” said Eleanor, who had already discarded the thought. Though kind, Father Edmund was elderly and frail, and the parson of the poorest parish in London could hardly command the needed attention in royal circles. She looked at her brother. “But I know just the man.”

Chapter xxxvii

Bankside, west of Southwark

T
he days following my return from Oxford were some of the darkest of my life—as dark, in many ways, as that bleak time around the deaths of my children. Simon, seized in the night, facing torture and who knew what else, if he even remained alive. My greatest friendship, threatened with a treasonous book and a dead girl. Three murders, none of them comprehensible, yet all related in a way I could not yet see. I had lost, too, the trust and goodwill of Ralph Strode, and of other powerful men of the city and the court. I could only imagine the whispers in the Guildhall, at Westminster, in the parvis at St. Paul’s, at the inns and the Temple, the sneers of derision from the likes of Sir Stephen Weldon and Thomas Pinchbeak.
Gower’s finally got his due,
they would say;
serves him right, too, after the way he’s built his fortune and his name.
Though terrified for Simon, for the realm, and for myself, I felt frozen with indecision, and moved through each hour in an almost gluttonous torpor, feeding only on my desire for self-preservation.

On the first Sunday I roused myself early, intending to listen to the dawn office. Instead, without thinking, I made my way past the docks and onto the broad river path running west from Southwark. Soon I had left London far behind, passing Westminster on the far shore, skirting the great houses along the banks, walking as I hadn’t in years, from village to village, sometimes on the high road with the horses and hackneys, then along the narrower way by the river, among sheep and cows taking water. For hours I ignored my hunger, the pains in my legs and feet, and it was well past midday when I looked ahead and realized I had come as far as Staines Bridge, a river crossing easily twenty miles from London. The stone marker was there on the bank, leaving me stunned at how far I had walked, and walked alone, despite the dangers. The keeper at the inn gave me a heavy lamb sop with bread and a cheese. The food did nothing to revive my spirits. I thought of borrowing a horse for the return, thought twice, then set off on foot as the parish bell tolled for None.

Several hours later, as I neared the ferry at Putney at the approach of dusk, the storm clouds gathering behind me made their first distant rumblings. I had expected to find the quay nearly empty, as it had been that morning. Instead a large company of infantry filled the road above the embarkation point, visibly anxious to secure passage to Fulham and the highway to London before the coming storm. The ferry stood thirty feet out, but the ferrymen and his helpers would not bring it to shore. The unexplained delay was causing a growing resentment among the soldiers, several clearly drunk. Conscripts, I guessed, commoners without a knight or squire among them. Not the sort of armed crowd a lightly guarded ferryman would normally put off.

“Haul it in, Linton!” one of them called out, crashing his worn shield against a companion’s.

“Bring her to, you wastrel!”

“Want a boot to the neck, ferryman?”

The situation was growing uglier by the minute, and I kept my distance. Many of these conscripted garrisons were no better than loose gangs of highwaymen. I could smell the days of travel on these men, the crusted stink of a forced march. One of the rougher men approached a boy sitting on a post.

“See here, Linton!” the man called across the water, unsheathing a knife. “Tasty-looking son you have here. Shall we cook him up for our supper, have victualing from his flesh?” The boy leaned away, terror in his eyes.

“Let him go, now!” Linton called from the water. His servants started arguing among themselves. Within moments the quay and the vessel had erupted in a loud melee. Swords were drawn, knives unsheathed.

Then, out of nowhere, a trumpet and a call ahead: “The king’s guard! Make way for the king’s guard!”

King Richard’s chief herald, a clarion voice I would have recognized anywhere. There was a general shuffle as the rough crowd parted to allow the chargers through. Three knights looked down from their slowing mounts onto the double ranks of soldiers, all wearing neutral expressions as they obediently made way for better men.

Cavalry and infantry, the eternal hierarchy of war, and now it had likely saved a life. The advance guard approached the quay and called out to the ferryman, whose boy was already helping his father ready the ropes for the vessel’s arrival on the shore, explaining the delay. The ferryman had been waiting for these members of King Richard’s household, and had been unwilling to bear the infantrymen across the river for fear of incurring their wrath.

The situation was still tense, however, and I was about to call out for their protection of the boy—and myself—when the clatter of more hooves sounded from the high road. Eight more knights, riding two abreast, and between them King Richard and Bolingbroke, his cousin and Lancaster’s son. Every man went to his knees, doffed his hat or helmet.

“All hail the king!” one of them called out.

“All hail the king!” came the echo.

As he passed through, King Richard slowed his mount long enough to speak small words of encouragement, of the sort I had heard him deliver on other occasions to high and low alike. Bolingbroke wore a bored look, bemused, as if sharing his father’s disdain for any relations of noble and commoner beyond the barely necessary.

I knelt in an outer rank, my dress separating me from the crowd of infantry, though I wasn’t expecting to be noticed. I caught the king’s eye, assuming he would pass without a second look, though I also recalled his probing gaze at Westminster a few weeks before.

He pulled his charger to a stop. “Why, is that John Gower?”

“It is, Your Highness,” I said, hiding my reluctance. The crowd parted to allow the king full view of his hailed subject.

“Come forward,” Richard commanded me. I went to the horse’s side, my nose at the level of the king’s waist. Richard dismounted, signaling to Bolingbroke to do the same. He handed off his reins. “Walk along with us,” the king said. I obeyed, though not without fear for my head. Richard’s behavior had grown increasingly erratic by all accounts, and I worried that he would draw on me in his barge just as he had on Braybrooke not three months before. Did he know anything about my involvement in the search for the book, or about the seizure of Simon? The horses were led on and lashed at the ferry’s bow. “You’ll cross with us, Gower?”

“I would be delighted, Your Highness, if it’s not too much of an imposition.”

“Hardly! I tire of my cousin’s dismal company.”

Bolingbroke forced a smile. “We could use some sharper wit to get us over the river. These knights are a grim lot.”

Richard stepped onto the ferry, looking back at the infantry. “Unfortunate to make these men wait.”

I followed him onto the shallow vessel. “They are eager to cross before the storm, Your Highness.”

Richard looked at the low clouds now settling to the west. “You are far from home, Gower, and on foot. You live in London?”

“In Southwark, Your Highness.”

“Southwark—well! So we’ll be taking you
out
of your way, then.” He chuckled. The ferry cast off; the knights standing forward gathered into a loose cluster, listening to Bolingbroke as he regaled them in his vivacious way. For a while, as the shouts and work of the crew got us moving, I watched the king observe his cousin, his emotions unreadable. For the Duke of Lancaster the lack of a crown had seemed always a burden, as if he were weighed down by the continual failure of ambition. For his son this lack seemed a relief, an easing of expectation, perhaps, that gave him confidence in his high status without the desire or need to move beyond it. As a result, young Henry was more natural in front of a crowd than Gaunt, able to speak with older knights and gentlemen with an ease and grace that eluded his father. Richard, who shared Lancaster’s reserve, seemed to perceive this freer quality in Bolingbroke. I had often wondered whether the king wished he were more like his cousin.

There was a moment then, as the ferry reached the middle of the wide waterway, when I nearly told the king everything. Years afterwards I would look back on that river crossing with some regret, for speaking up might have forestalled all that would follow. Perhaps the king already knew everything there was to know about the prophecies, I reasoned then; on the other hand, he might be ignorant of the whole affair, and saying something to him would elevate the matter far above where it now stood. Richard and Gaunt were already at each other’s throats; who was I to insert myself into this running quarrel? So I said nothing, whether out of fear or self-doubt or lack of confidence in the young king’s wisdom I don’t know. How to present a king with the prophecy of his own death?

King Richard looked across the water. “And what are you composing these days, Gower, in your mind or on parchment?”

I stumbled a bit, mentioning my notion of a romance of sorts, though a moralized one, then sought to deflect the question onto him. “What sort of work would please you, Your Highness?”

King Richard shrugged. “I find biblical stories tedious. I do like Ovid, at least the chunks of him I’ve read. And modern stories that make us question ourselves, our motivations and character.”

“Question ourselves, Your Highness?”

“Think of the tale of Sir Lancelot
en la charrette,
” the king said, warming to the popular story. “Smitten with Guinevere, on a quest to rescue her from her abductor, Lancelot finds himself on foot. He’s on the road, fully armed, hardly able to walk—and horseless. Suddenly a cart comes by, a humble cart, driven along by a dwarf. Lancelot hitches a ride. Now he’s a knight in a cart, entering a city as if a traitor begs, or a murderer. But Lancelot loves Guinevere so severely that he’d do anything to keep on task, including enduring the humiliation of himself in front of an entire city. The story is about the extreme condition of love, teaching us the consequences of following its commands too blindly, and without regard for our reputation.”

“Quite right, Your Highness,” I said, impressed with the young king’s skills as an interpreter. “Lancelot embodies the danger of excessive love.”

“Perhaps,” the king said, tilting his head. “But do you know the detail of that story I like most, Gower?”

“What is that, Your Highness?”

“Do you recall the moment when the dwarf, driving the cart, invites Gawain to join Lancelot?”

I confessed that I did not.

“The dwarf invites him into the cart,” Richard continued. “And when he does, he says to him, ‘If you are as much your own enemy as is this humiliated knight, sitting here in my cart, why, climb on in, and I shall take you along.’ Gawain refuses, of course, for as he knows very well, it would be the height of dishonor for a knight to exchange his charger for a mere cart.

“Yet Lancelot has already done it. He has climbed into the humble cart, put himself in a base position while Gawain stays proudly out of it, disdaining the thought. But what if Gawain
had
joined Lancelot, as the dwarf asked him to? What if he had made a different choice, gone in a different direction than what his pride told him was right? And what if we, in turn, followed his example? ‘Are you Sir Lancelot, or are you Sir Gawain?’ the poet seems to ask. Will you abase yourself for the sake of something vitally important to you? Or will you stand aside like Gawain, loftily removed from the squalor, even as a greater man climbs within, risking it all?”

I nodded. “I see, Your Highness. The choices of the characters mirror our own choices.”

“Exactly,” he said, his young face brightening. “The best stories, it seems to me, are those that force us to ask the most difficult questions of ourselves. They want to be mined for these questions, even as they want our soul to be mined for its will, in the way a priest mines it at confession. The poet is asking us to become our own confessors.”

“Well said, Your Highness.”

The king looked off the stern, then back again, regarding me closely. “Though in the end, I think, the best story is always the simplest one. For your next work, Gower, I hope you will craft such a tale. Write it for me, your sovereign. Make it a confession, whether of a lover or a saint I don’t much care. We need more confession in the realm, don’t you think? More disclosure. More truth.” His eyes shone with a righteous luster, and a shudder moved over my limbs. I braced myself, once again almost spilling it all and appealing for Simon’s release; then the moment passed, and the king moved forward to speak with his cousin.

The river lapped at the ferry like the tongues of a thousand eager dogs. We were nearing Fulham Palace, the great house of Bishop William Braybrooke, in the gardens of which I had learned of the existence of the
De Mortibus.
What a distance I have traveled in these weeks, I thought. Since that first meeting with Chaucer I had been mired in complexity: conniving gossips at court, arcane prophecies of kings’ deaths, an unused library at Oxford. Yet what if this story, as the king had put it, were a simpler one? If Chaucer himself were to write this story, I mused, where would it go, and what would be its ending?

Before the Fulham wharf I had begun my bow to the king when he grasped my arm. “Will I see you at Wykeham’s feast?”

“How is that, sire?”

He hailed a page. “Be sure Master John Gower here is on the bishop’s list for the feast on St. Dunstan’s Day. On my name.”

“Yes, sire,” the page said with a bow.

It caught me from the flank, as if a predator stalking me all day along the river had finally pounced. I almost shouted in the king’s face, so violent was my reaction. “Thank you, Your Highness,” I managed to say.

“At my cousin’s urging, I am trying to calm the wrath between my uncle and the prelates who despise him,” he said, appearing not to notice my discomfiture. “All those bishops and archbishops Lancaster has mortally offended over the years. I am doing my best to gentle the roiled waters separating our factions, but the bishop of Winchester is a difficult man. A poet’s presence is a calming one on such occasions, Gower. Minstrels of the page, as I think of you and your scribbling ilk. And since you are a Southwark man you may easily step right over to Winchester Palace and join our company. Your friend Geoffrey Chaucer will also be there, at my request.”