Authors: Bruce Holsinger
A Burnable Book (42 page)
“Not hanged, then,” I said, less impressed by the man’s eloquence than convinced by the soundness of his evidence. “So how, in your informed view, were these men killed?”
He smiled modestly, raised the pointer finger on his right hand, and reached for the chest of the nearest corpse. His fingertip found a small indentation just to the left of the victim’s heart, a mark I hadn’t noticed before. He gently pressed down, and soon his finger was buried up to the first knuckle.
A hole. “Stabbed?” guessed Strode, probing with a stick at a larger, more ragged wound on the second man’s chest.
“Run through with a short sword, I’d wager,” I said, walking down the row of corpses and pausing at each one. All had holes at various places on their bodies: some in the chest, others in the stomach or neck, some of them a bit sloughy and not unusually ragged, though one poor fellow was missing half his face. Small fragments of wood were lodged above his lips, like the splinters of a broken board.
“Not a blade, I think,” said Baker, his voice hollow and low. “These wounds are quite peculiar. Only once before have I seen anything like them.” He looked up at Strode. “With your permission, Master Strode?”
Strode, after glancing back toward the church, gave a swift nod. Baker moved to a position over the first corpse and flipped the man onto his front, exposing a narrow back thick with churchyard dirt. His apprentice handed him a skin of ale, which Baker used to wet a cloth pulled from his pocket. He washed the corpse’s back, smoothed his hand over the bare skin.
“As I suspected,” said Baker. “This one stayed inside, you see.”
“What stayed inside?” I said. “A bolt, perhaps, from a crossbow?”
Baker flipped the corpse back over and held out a hand to his apprentice, who gave him what looked like a filleting knife of the sort you might see deployed by lines of fishermen casting off the Southwark bankside. With a series of expert movements, Baker sliced across the flesh surrounding the hole, widening it until the blade had penetrated several inches into the man’s innards.
Another raised hand. The apprentice took the knife and replaced it with a pair of small tongs. Baker inserted them into the hole, widening the wound, harder work than it looked. An unpleasant suck of air, the clammy song of guts giving way to the surgical tool, and my own guts heaved, but soon enough the tongs emerged clasping a round object about the size of a clay marble. The apprentice took the tongs, then, at Baker’s direction, poured a short stream of ale over the extracted object. Baker put it between his front teeth and winced.
“Iron.” He tossed the ball up to Strode, who caught it, inspected it for a moment, and handed it to me. I marveled at the weight of the little thing: the size of a hazelnut, but as heavy as a small book. I had never seen anything quite like it, though I had a suspicion as to its nature and use. I handed it back to Baker.
Strode was signaling for the gravedigger, who left the churchyard to summon a priest.
“And the others?” Strode asked.
“At least one was killed with an arrow, that one there.” He gestured to the third body along the line. “Half the shaft’s still in his neck. As for the rest, I am fairly confident in my suspicions, though I would have to perform a similar inspection on all these corpses to be sure.” He came to his full height and used more of the provided ale to cleanse his hands. “I assume that will not be possible, Master Strode?”
Strode bit a wet lip. “Perhaps if the bishop of London were abroad. Unfortunately Braybrooke’s lurking about Fulham, with no visitations in his immediate future.”
“Very well,” said Baker, and he watched with no small regret as a chantry priest arrived and started to mumble a cursory burial rite. The four of us strolled toward the small church, keeping our voices low as Baker went over a few more observations gathered in the short window of time he had been at the grave. Some rat bites on the corpses but not many, and no great rot, suggesting the bodies had been in the sewer channel for no more than a day or two. I asked him about the wood splinters I had seen above the one man’s mouth.
“Shield fragments, I would say,” said Baker. “Carried there by the ball, and lodged in the skin around the point of penetration.” We both knew, in that moment, what he was about to tell us, though neither of us could quite believe it. “These men have been shot, good masters, of that I am certain. Though not with an arrow, nor with a bolt.”
The surgeon turned fully to us, his face somber. “These men were killed with guns. Handguns, fired with powder, and delivering small iron shot.”
Handgonnes.
A word new to me in that moment. I looked out over the graves crowding the St. Bart’s churchyard, their inhabitants victims of pestilence, accident, hunger, and crime, yet despite their numberless fates it seemed that man was ever inventing new ways to die.
“Why am I here, Ralph?”
“Because you are you.” Strode raised a tired smile, his face flush with the effort of our short but muddy trudge back to the chapel, where he had left his horse. Over the last few months he had been walking with a bad limp, and now tended to go about the city streets mounted rather than on foot. No injury that I knew of, merely the afflictions of age. I worried for him.
He adjusted the girth, tugged at the bridle. “And you know what you know, John. If you don’t know it, you know how to buy it, or wheedle it or connive it. Brembre is smashing body and bone at the Guildhall. I have never seen him angrier. He considers it an insult to his own person, that someone should do such a thing within the walls, leave so many corpses to stew and rot.”
Nicholas Brembre, grocer and tyrant, perhaps the most powerful mayor in London’s history. “And namelessly so,” I said.
“The misery of it,” said Strode, shaking his head. “There must be a dozen men in this city who know the names of those poor fellows eating St. Bart’s dirt right now. Yet we’ve heard not a whisper from around the wards and parishes in the last two days. Aldermen, beadles, constables, night walkers: everyone has been pulled in or cornered, but no one claims to have seen or heard a thing, and no men reported missing. It’s as if London itself has gone blind and dumb.”
“No witnesses then?”
He hesitated. “Perhaps one.”
I waited.
“You know our Peter Norris.”
I smiled, not fondly. “I do.” Norris, formerly a wealthy mercer and a beadle of Portsoken Ward, had lost his fortune after a shipwreck off Dover, and now lived as a vagrant debtor of the city, moving from barn to yard, in and out of gates and gaols. We had crossed knives any number of times, never with good results.
“He claims to know of a witness,” said Strode. “Someone who beheld the dumping of the corpses at the Long Dropper. He tried to trade on it to shorten his sentence, though Brembre refused to indulge his fantasy, as he called it.”
“Who is the witness?”
“Norris would not say, not once he learned the mayor’s mind. Perhaps you might convince him to talk. At the moment he’s dangling in the stocks before Ludgate, and will be for the next few days.”
“I’ll speak with him tomorrow,” I said.
“Very good.”
“And what of the crown?” I was thinking of the guns. Weapons of war, not civic policing. To my knowledge the only place in or near London that possessed such devices as culverins and cannons was the Tower itself.
Strode’s brows drew down. He led his horse to the lowest stair, preparing to mount. “The sheriffs have made inquiries to the lord chancellor, though thus far his men have flicked us away, claiming lack of jurisdiction. A London privy, London dung, a London burial, a London problem. No concern of the court, they claim. With all the trouble the earl is facing at Parliament-time I can’t think he would want another calamity to wrestle with.”
Though he might prove helpful, I thought. Sir Michael de la Pole, lord chancellor of the realm, had been created Earl of Suffolk late the previous year, elevating him to that small circle of upper nobles around King Richard. The chancellor owed me a large favor, and despite his current difficulties I could not help but wonder what he might be holding on this matter. The perpetual tension between the city and the crown, the Guildhall and Westminster, rarely erupted into open conflict, more often simmering just beneath the urban surface, stirred by all those professional relations and bureaucratic niceties that bind London to its royal suburb up the river.
Yet such conflicts are indispensable to my peculiar vocation. Nicholas Brembre was a difficult man, by all accounts, though I had never discovered anything on him, and John Gower is not one to enjoy ignorance. If I could nudge the chancellor the right way, then use what he gave me to do a favor to the mayor in turn, I would be in a position to gather ever more flowers from the Guildhall garden in the coming months.
I put a hand on Ralph Strode’s wide back and helped him mount. He looked down at me, his large nostrils flaring with his still-labored breaths. “You will help, then?”
A slight bow to Strode and his horse. “Tell the lord mayor he may consider John Gower at his service.”
He sucked in a cheek. “That I cannot do.” He looked about, then hunched down slightly in his saddle, lowering his voice. “Here is the difficult thing, John. The mayor has been stirred violently by this atrocity, yet despite his anger he seems reluctant to pursue the matter, for reasons I cannot fathom. He’s discouraged the sheriffs from looking into things, and threatens anyone who brings it up. It was he who ordered me to oversee this quick burial, with quicker rites, and no consideration for the relations of the deceased, whoever they might be. Nor will he hear Norris out about his witness.”
Here Strode paused to look over his shoulder. Then, softly, “There are whispers he may have had evidence destroyed.”
“What sort of evidence?”
“Who can say? The point is that Brembre has decided this will all be quashed, and no one has the stomach to gainsay him.”
“What about the sheriffs and aldermen? Surely they object to the mayor’s attempt to suppress an open inquiry.”
He grimaced. “They are as geldings and maidens, when what’s needed is a champion wielding a silent and invisible sword.” Strode looked back toward the churchyard and the murmuring priest, then straightened himself. “That is why I have come to you, John. For your cunning ways with coin, your affinity with the rats, the devious beauty of your craft. The mayor cannot know you are probing this out for us, or it will be my broken nose fed to the pigs.”
“I understand, Ralph,” I said, looking appropriately sober, yet secretly delighted to learn of the mayor’s peculiar vacillations. A new bud of knowledge on a lengthening stem. “My lips shall be as the privy seal itself.”
“Good then.” With a brisk nod, Strode pulled a rein and made for Aldersgate. I followed him at a growing distance, watching his broad back until the animal’s deliberate gait took him back through the walls, into our hivelike city humming with new deceit.
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The Invention of Fire
BRUCE HOLSINGER
is a prolific and award-winning scholar of the medieval period who teaches at the University of Virginia. His books on medieval culture have won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the Medieval Academy of America, and other scholarly organizations. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Map and family tree by Nick Springer, copyright © 2013 Springer Cartographics LLC.
A BURNABLE BOOK.
Copyright © 2014 by Bruce Holsinger. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-224032-3
EPub Edition March 2014 ISBN 9780062240347
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