A Burnable Book (4 page)

Chapter iii

La Neyte, Westminster

W
at Tyler. Jack Straw. The city as powerless as a widow, Troy without its Hector, the commons running like barnyard animals through her streets, taking her bridges, torching her greatest houses, storming the Tower and murdering the lord chancellor and the lord treasurer. Though it had been four years since the Rising swept through London, the memories still haunted our great but tired city, pooling beneath the eaves, drifting along narrow alleys with the continuing threat of revolt.

No one had been more affected by the events of those grim weeks than John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. After stealing everything worth taking, Tyler and his gang burned Gaunt’s Thames-side palace to the ground, and the ruins of the Savoy would sit along the Strand for years: a charred reminder of the brute power of the commons, and the constant threat embodied by the city’s aggrieved poor.

Now the duke avoided London as much as possible, centering his life and his business around the castle of Kenilworth far to the north. When his presence was required in the city Gaunt would appear for a few days or a week at a time, the grudged guest of those magnates willing to tolerate his household, and betting on his survival. Often he would lodge at Tottenham, though that Lent he was residing at La Neyte, the abbot of Westminster’s moated grange a mile upriver from the abbey, and it was there I would be granted an audience with his sometime mistress, arranged the day before.

The duke himself was just leaving the abbot’s house as I arrived in the upper gateyard, his retainers gosling along behind him. He half-turned to me, his brow knit in fury as he acknowledged my bent knee with a curt nod. Those around him knew better than to speak, as did I.

In the summer hall I moved slowly along the wall, mingling with the line of bored servants as thick hangings brushed my cheek. The chamber teemed with lords of various ranks who had been seeking a word with the duke before his abrupt departure, and I tried to go unremarked by those remaining. My eyes, uncooperative, failed to spy a drip bucket, full of rainwater from the porous ceiling. It surrendered its contents to my left foot, then clattered across the floor. There was a hush. It was Michael de la Pole who broke it in his graceful way. “Not to worry. The abbot has ordered some silken buckets,” said the lord chancellor into the silence, giving me a slight smile. Laughter, though not at my expense, filled that portion of the hall, and the baron resumed his conversation.

Standing behind the baron, shifting a little as the hubbub returned, Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, gave me an ugly look. I glanced away, though not before noting his discomfort. De Vere had likely been the target of Gaunt’s ire, and now here’s John Gower, come to brew more trouble, as if the particular group of magnates clustered in the hall at La Neyte that day did not promise enough. A duke, an earl, and a baron, a tensile triangle of mutual suspicion and dependence. Gaunt was still furious at de Vere for turning the king against him at the February tournament at Westminster, where a plot against the duke’s life was only narrowly averted—and this after all the business the year before at the Salisbury Parliament, where Gaunt’s supposed plot against his royal nephew nearly led to the duke’s hanging on the spot. The plot was spun of gossamer, of course, the invention of a Carmelite friar who was afterwards seized on the way to his cell and tortured to death. One year, two imaginary plots, and great trouble for the realm. De Vere, the young king’s current favorite and a notorious flatterer, was taking every advantage he could of the widening rift between the king and the duke, gathering nobles to his side in an open attempt to wrest power from the much older Lancaster. Caught in the middle of it all was the Baron de la Pole, chief financier to old King Edward and now lord chancellor, determined to keep the peace at all costs—and, it appeared to me, losing ground by the day.

Oxford had now turned his back on de la Pole, suggesting that he had taken the chancellor’s kind gesture toward me as an insult to him. Sir Stephen Weldon, chief knight of the earl’s household, noticed his lord’s vexation and excused himself. I set my face for the encounter. This took some effort, for Weldon’s most distinguishing characteristic was a crescent scar on his chin, a jagged curve of whitened skin. Whenever I saw it I imagined a line of Oxford’s wretched tenants hooked by their necks, swinging in the wind.

“Gower.”

“Sir Stephen.”

“Our fine town should consider itself gilded indeed whenever John Gower deigns to abandon Southwark to tread Westminster’s humbler lanes.”

“Even as these avenues acclaim your own passings through with their every voice.” How I hate this man.

Weldon assessed me, a peculiar glint in his eyes. “You look awful, Gower. I’d thought it was your wife who was sick.”

I stared at his scar. “Sarah died last year. The week of Michaelmas.”

He raised a hand to his mouth. “I’d not heard.”

I said nothing.

“You must forgive me, John,” he insisted. “It is inexcusable.”

“Though unsurprising, Sir Stephen.”

His eyes narrowed. He was about to say something more, then thought better of it. They usually do, even the higher knights. He inclined his head, spun on a toe, and rejoined the cluster around Oxford, leaving me wondering why the man had approached me in the first place.

Someone coughed, stifled it. Katherine Swynford was descending from the abbot’s chambers, given over to Gaunt for the duration of his stay. Her skin glowed with the duke’s recent departure, the cut of her gown too low by a coin’s span, her hood trimmed in a silk brocade that matched her emerald eyes. Stretching her compact frame, she looked about until her gaze settled on me. With a subtle toss of her head she directed me to the wide oratorium off the summer hall, where a group of five other ladies sat at their embroidery.

“Why did you want to see me, John?” she said when I joined her. She glanced over her shoulder, already impatient.

I recalled Chaucer’s anxious state at Monksblood’s.
You can’t be direct with her about it
. I opted against obedience. “Apparently Geoffrey thinks you might know about a book he’s seeking.”

She let me stand in silence, leaning over to correct a companion. “Unravel that. Less of an arc, more of a triangle. Lovely. Then pin out the
roet
.” Dame Katherine never failed to amaze me in those days, commanding the duchess’s ladies-in-waiting as if they were already her own.

At length she gave me her attention. “Always on the lookout for the next little book, isn’t he?”

“Too true.”

“What’s special about this one?” She took up a narrow strip of cloth of gold, which she proceeded to pick apart from the edges.

“It’s—delicate,” I said, hiding my ignorance behind a veil of discretion.

“Well, of course it is, John, or it wouldn’t be you standing before me but my own brother-in-law!” She continued to pick. “What a worm.”

I silently conceded the larger point. Gaunt’s subtle favoritism toward Chaucer was well-known and had been ever since Geoffrey composed an elegy upon the death of Duchess Blanche some years ago. Katherine viewed him as an unworthy rival for the duke’s attention. The current duchess certainly wasn’t getting much of it, despite Gaunt’s vow after the Rising to forsake his mistress in favor of his marriage. The duke had seen the rebellion as a warning from God to put away his long-standing consort, and indeed for several years the two had succeeded in avoiding each other’s presence, even as the duke plied her from afar with luxurious gifts, properties, and pounds. Now, by all indications, things were boiling up again, their liaisons increasingly out in the open, as they had formerly been for so many years.

Yet I remained one of Dame Katherine’s greatest admirers, both for her restraint and for her admirable fortitude in the face of so much calumny from her detractors. Despite what must have been nearly irresistible pressure from Lancaster, she had never broken her vows while her husband lived, even when Sir Hugh Swynford was abroad. That Lancaster was now breaking his own was the duke’s problem, not hers. She seemed determined in those years to see him through another duchess, whatever the cost to her reputation and prospects.

“So . . . what makes him think the book is here?” she said, giving me a look.

“He heard it indirectly from one of the duke’s hermits, so he says.”

“Oh? And did he bother to say which one?” She swept an arm toward the terrace doors. “Lancaster has hermits to spare. Richard of Chatterburn, John of Singleton, Gregory of Bishop’s Lynn—David of the Ditch, Tom of the Tavern, Peter of the Privy, as common as friars. Dozens of them, popping their heads out of their holes like rabbits, sniffing for nobles whenever Gaunt opens his purse.”

“He didn’t say.”

Her gaze lingered for a moment. “Will you play cards, John?” From a side table she removed a stack of parchment ovals.

“Cards?”

“You haven’t played such games?” She spread the cards across the table at her knees, and I marveled at the colorful shapes: blue swords, golden hawks, red plums, and purple thistleflowers, all arranged in differing numbers and patterns. “They are quite popular in Paris, though this pack comes from Florence. A gift from Chaucer, and now it’s my second.” She pointed to another deck, stacked neatly on the table, and to all appearances identical to the one she held.

I asked how the game was played.

“There are many games of cards; it seems I learn a new one every week.” There were four suits, she explained, each numbering thirteen. Pips from one to nine, then the four faces in each suit: the Prince of Hawks, the Duke of Plums, the Queen of Swords, the King of Thistles, and so on.

“Fifty-two cards in all, then,” I calculated.

“Plus the trumps, a dozen of them.” She laid out another row. “The Wheel of Fortune, the Magician, the Bleeding Tower, and this is the Sun.” An exquisite rendering of Apollo in full splendor.

“What part do the trumps play?”

“They wrestle with the pips and one another in various ways, depending on the rules of the particular game.”

Like the queen in chess, I observed.

“Though the queen has worthy rivals.” She laid out more trump cards. “Fate, the Devil, the Fool—and, most powerful of all, Death.” A skull, leering at the viewer, the skeleton mounted on an emaciated horse. She explained the rules to a simple game involving points doled out for each pip and face card, with the trumps acting as foils. For some time we played in silence, and I noticed her agility with the parchment shapes, a sleight of hand that involved a deft use of her palms and knuckles to deal and reposition the cards in play. Eventually, as I learned the rhythm, I relaxed back into the conversation.

“Perhaps the Earl of Cambridge might know something about this book?”

Swynford raised a shoulder. She caught me looking at her bare skin, didn’t seem to mind. “Our dear Edmund Langley?” She played the Four of Hawks, a shrewd move, evidently.

“The Infanta and her sister are at court this month, I’ve heard.” The wives of Gaunt and Langley, the eldest of Edward’s surviving sons. I went to take her four but flubbed my draw. She smiled as she swept the table clean in one movement and laid out a new play.

“Ah yes, the
hermanas
español
. Those dark bitches are my little hell.” Swynford looked up with a worried smile. “What a tangled web you spin for me, John Gower. Are you here to torture me or amuse me?”

“Your choice.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Let’s have a different game, a simpler one.” She picked up the cards again and laid ten of them face-up on the table. “Choose one. Any card at all.”

“What determines my choice?”

“Merely the condition of your soul.”

Feeling mischievous, I leaned forward and tapped the Devil.

She puckered her lips. “But that is Chaucer’s card.”

We shared a laugh as she gathered the cards into a loose pile, though just as quickly her face clouded. “I know something about this book.” She looked across the hall to the humming circles of gentry. “There have been whispers of a theft. A strange manuscript, stolen from La Neyte last week.”

“Silver I could understand, or plate. But who would steal a book?”

“It was a young woman, passing as a lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Bethune. Now she’s dead.”

I stared at her.

“Someone skulled her, out on the Moorfields.”

“The Moorfields? I can’t imagine—”

“And, John,” she breathed, leaning forward, her eyes attractively wide, “I think I may have seen her. Coming out of the abbot’s private chapel, right before she lifted it.”

“What sort of a book?” I asked, trying to keep up.

“I know nothing of its content, I swear to you. Only rumors.” To my surprise I believed her. “And now Braybrooke is involved, asking my duke all sorts of ugly questions. You know how suspicious everyone is since the council, and that crazed friar’s rantings last year. As if my duke and the king are mad dogs in a ring, circling one another, waiting for the next chance to lunge for a neck.”

This gave me pause. “Why would the bishop of London be after the same book as Chaucer?”

“Suppose it’s less innocent than you suspect. Not one of those romances everyone is reading. Not a saint’s life. But a book of prophecies.” She narrowed her eyes. “Heretical prophecies.”

“Prophecies.” I recalled the preacher spewing his verse out on Holbourne, and Chaucer’s agitation when I recited the man’s words. “Wycliffe’s work?” John Wycliffe: a heretic, thoroughly condemned and recently dead, but all the more dangerous for that.

“Lancaster doubts it, though—”

Swynford’s chin lifted. She stood. I twisted my neck as I rose to see the figure of Joan, Countess of Kent and the king’s mother, standing at the arched doorway. Greying hair pulled back from slivered eyes, widow’s weeds on a figure to make any man pause despite her considerable age. High cheekbones, set beneath a wide brow, and cobalt eyes that flashed as they settled on Swynford.

“Where is my brother?” she demanded as she approached, four of her attendants stepping aside. “He summons me up from Wickhambreaux, yet I am kept waiting at Westminster half a day.” I winced inwardly at Gaunt’s treatment of his sister-in-law. In the nine years since the death of Prince Edward, Gaunt’s elder brother and former heir to the throne, the countess had seen her status slowly decline. Had her husband survived the ancient King Edward, she would have ascended to queen consort, and helped the younger Edward rule with the same flawless grace and deliberation she had shown so many times on public occasions. Though still the most beloved woman in the realm, Joan was becoming more and more of an afterthought.