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Chapter vi

Florence, near Orsanmichele

Y
ou leave tomorrow. You will join the delegation at Bologna.” Adam Scarlett found a more comfortable position on the stool, one of four in the low single room that served as the friar’s occasional dwelling. His left foot rested on the floor, his right on the hearth, scattered with ash and meal. As he spoke to Paolo Taricani he rocked himself slowly back until his head touched the stone wall, the cool on his neck a pleasant contrast to the chamber’s stuffy heat.

“I will not do it.”

“Of course you will.”

“No.”

“Brother Paolo—”

“Send Teti. Or Efisio. Efisio makes sense. He is quick, young. Gets it up and in and twisted before the florin hits the floor.”

Scarlett ignored the hurried pleading. “But you are the best, Paolo. And Ser Giovanni knows it. That is why he has chosen you for this extraordinary task.”

“I am Il Prescelto
,
then.” Taricani’s sarcasm was thick, and Scarlett worried this could get difficult.

He sighed, recalling what Hawkwood had told him.
Take him as far as you can, Adam. If he’s still balking bring him to me.

He tacked right, appealing to Taricani’s ego; left, to his civic pride. Nothing worked. Finally Scarlett stood. “Let’s go, Brother Paolo.”

The man frowned suspiciously. “Go where?”

“San Donato a Torre.” Hawkwood’s villa that season, a short ride to the north.

Taricani shook his head, still showing no fear. That could change, and quickly, but for the moment Scarlett let him prattle on. “I will not go. I will not do this—this ‘extraordinary task,’ and I will not go with you.” He spat on the floor. His own floor. He looked tense, about to spring. His hand moved to his belt.

Scarlett spread his arms, slowly, and raised his hands to his sides. He gave the man a conciliatory nod. “
Bene,
” he said, and left the tenement, hating what he had to do next.

Taricani’s house sat at the ass end of a narrow alley leading south from Orsanmichele. At the other end waited three of Hawkwood’s roughest men, unmounted at the moment, their horses posted out in the piazza. Scarlett gave them the signal, then went to wait in front of the church, selecting the sharp corner at Via dei Pittori as his spot. The crumbling house of the Bigallo loomed overhead, knots of thirsty pilgrims draped around the plinths, waiting, like Paolo Taricani, for a miracle that would never come. On a high scaffold an old painter and his apprentice were at work retouching a David, hurling his stone at the giant. Scarlett wondered whether the outmatched Paolo, too, would fight, and if so, for how long. The man had too much to lose, though, and it was not long until he stumbled into the piazza, his hands bound at his waist, one eye blackened, the other cut and swollen.

Hawkwood’s men had fared no better. One of them had earned a long gash across his cheek. He wiped blood across his cheek as the others threw the friar over a horse and set off across the piazza. Scarlett took his time, arriving back at San Donato a full hour after the others. Hawkwood had waited for him, though, and as Scarlett walked through the dooryard toward the house the
condottiero
was just coming out the villa’s entrance. The men had bound Taricani to a chair, an ornate, high-backed seat brought out from the hall, and the man’s thin face now showed a few more bruises, a second black eye.

Hawkwood stood before the chair, fixing Taricani with a friendly smile. “You were Bernabò Visconti’s swiftest knife for years, Brother Paolo. Why he let you retire I’ll never know.”

Taricani shrugged. “The
signore
has his methods, Ser Giovanni.”

“Indeed,” said Hawkwood. “Might be interesting to plumb them with you someday.”

Taricani bunched his lips, exuding confidence. “At your pleasure, Ser Giovanni.”

Stay humble,
Scarlett silently warned the man.

Hawkwood knelt in the dirt. He placed a palm on each of Taricani’s knees, looked up at his face. “You have a beautiful woman, Brother Paolo.” He let that sit, then, “And a daughter who ripens by the day. My men have seen her at the markets, Paolo. She can’t be more than, what, ten, eleven?”

Taricani nodded, his eyes darkening.

“And her name, Paolo. It is memorable, isn’t it, but I seem to have forgotten it. Help an old man, Paolo. What is your daughter’s name?”

“Pic—Picco—Piccola—Piccolamela, sire.”

Hawkwood chuckled at Taricani’s difficulty. “Piccolamela. Now I remember! ‘Little apple’ in my native tongue. An exquisite name for an exquisite girl, this virgin bastardess of an uncelibate friar. Did you choose this name yourself, Paolo?”

“My—her mother chose it, sire.”

“Well, good for her. Piccolamela. How about that?” Hawkwood clapped his palms on Taricani’s thighs, reading the new terror on his face. “Though it’s a strange coincidence. For do you know what my favorite fruit is, Paolo?”

Taricani shook his head.

“Can you guess?”

He shook his head again. Less confidence this time.

“Apples, Brother Paolo. I like apples best.”

Taricani’s tongue flickered across his lips.

“And you know how I like my apples, Paolo?”

The assassin was still.

“Green, Paolo. I like my apples green.”

Taricani pressed against the ropes, then the pleas started.
No, Ser Giovanni, you wouldn’t, Ser Giovanni, she is only a girl, Ser Giovanni, oh mercy, Ser Giovanni, mercy mercy mercy!
Scarlett listened for a while, then looked off into the hills until the begging faded into the familiar moans of a newly broken man.

Hawkwood stood, all business. “The fate of your daughter’s virtue is entirely up to you. If you refuse us we’ll have her in hand this evening, and your whore as well. I’ll make you watch, Paolo Taricani. I’ll taste your little apple first, then hand her to my man Scarlett here, then we’ll bring the garrison up from the river. I’ll cut off your eyelids if I have to, but you’ll watch every man take her, one by one, and in every way imaginable. You know I’ll do it, too. You’ve seen me do worse. By God, you’ve
helped
me do worse, Paolo. And if you fail in your mission, if I get word you’ve bungled the thing, or fled, why—why then I will take your Piccolamela to Venice and sell her to the Turks. Little apples fetch a handsome price in the doge’s slave markets.”

He bent over the puddled friar. “On the other hand, Paolo, if you do this, know that I will take care of your daughter, and your woman too. They won’t be short of florins, and no one will lay a hand on them. And if you don’t come back I will still protect them. Your daughter, though the illegitimate spawn of a half-lapsed friar, will marry well.”

Scarlett could see the resignation on Taricani’s face, the defeated angle to his shoulders. But only for a moment. Taricani was a professional, after all, and this was a job like any other. Just a job. Scarlett watched him take a deep breath, nod at the ground, and look up at Hawkwood, his eyes lit with the cold flame of a born killer. “At your service, Ser Giovanni.”

Hawkwood clapped the man on the shoulder. “Very well, then.” He started to untie the knots, freeing Taricani from his chair. “The rendezvous is set for Bologna. You’ll have four spears of ours, in addition to any accompanying the delegation. From Bologna up to the Aosta pass and over to Geneva, then on the Rhine from Basel to Cologne. Next a hard ride to Hamburg, where you’ll sail to Dover. The French are likely massing in Flanders, so there’s no getting through by land to Calais.” Even as Hawkwood rattled off the sites along the itinerary Scarlett could hear the mix of wistfulness and anticipation in his lord’s voice, thick with longing to make this journey his own.

“You will arrive in London the third week of May or thereabouts, and the thing is set for—well, Scarlett here will fill you in on the details. Should be a beautiful spring day.”

Hawkwood walked inside. Scarlett spoke to Taricani for a while longer, then hailed several of the men who had brought the man up from Florence. “See him back to Orsanmichele. And, Paolo, this is for your woman, and for Piccolamela.” He tossed a purse on the dirt. Taricani rubbed his wrists, reached for it, and peered inside. He looked up at Scarlett. A grim nod. The job would be done, and done well, despite the cost. With that, Paolo Taricani was taken back to Florence, for a final farewell to his family.

Inside the villa Hawkwood was staring up at the arms of his father, Gilbert Hawkwood, now his brother’s: a lion rampant above a bend, the tendrils curling up the sides and the center. The Inheritor, Hawkwood liked to call his brother. The
condottiero
’s own arms, much more prominently displayed on the east wall, consisted of a lone falcon poised above a tangled forest of vines.

“My father was a strange man, Adam,” Hawkwood said into the gloom. “Imagine having three sons, and naming them all John. The eldest son, heir to the name, and all that comes with it. The youngest, also John Hawkwood, has the luck to die young. And the middle son? That’s right: John Hawkwood.”

He sniffed. “Middle John, my mother called me. ‘Does Middle John want his cider now?’ ‘Time for Middle John to get him to his lessons!’ And it all stacks on, doesn’t it? Thornbury and the others, fled back to suck on Lancaster’s teat with scarcely a word of thanks. My son-in-law takes my daughter away and now sits in Parliament, one of the highest men in Essex. Then all this business with Chaucer . . .”

“You’ve bought up half of Essex, John,” Scarlett said. “Sible Hedingham, the lands around Gosfield.” He put a hand on Hawkwood’s shoulder, a gesture to frame the familiar use of the
condottiero
’s first name. Hawkwood permitted it when they were alone, though Scarlett rarely took advantage. “You own more of England than your brother ever could, let alone Coggeshale.” The son-in-law. “Are you absolutely sure this is the wisest course? This is what you want for yourself, to reclaim your legacy under such circumstances?” He had been trying for weeks to turn the
condottiero
from his dark purpose; one last try, however weak, could not hurt.

Hawkwood reached up and patted Scarlett’s hand, clasping it tightly as he nodded at his family’s arms. “It is not about me anymore, Adam. It is about my son.”

“Your—your son, sire?”

“He’s in Donnina’s belly. I can
smell
him in there, baking away.”

This was news to Scarlett—and, he suspected, a bit of wishful thinking.

“The next Sir John Hawkwood will be a baron, Adam. Perhaps even an earl, belted by the king himself. And I won’t curse the poor fellow with a brother, either. Perhaps I’ll name him George.” He smiled, looked at his friend. “Or Adam.”

Scarlett felt it, more deeply this time. The warm glow of inevitability and fate. Sir John Hawkwood was a hard man, the hardest he had ever known, but this plan of his, despite its ruthlessness, was melting the great mercenary into a soup of sentiment. “His given name hardly matters, John. It’s his surname that will bear his nobility.”

“Well spoken, Scarlett.” Hawkwood turned back to his family’s arms, his eyes verdant with the ambition of a much younger man. “England, Adam,” the
condottiero
said. “It is time to go home.”

Chapter vii

Temple Hall

D
ozens of struggling lamps cast a hellish glow on the huddled apprentices, all stomping their feet against the raw air, their eager faces greyed by the smoke lowering down from those few chimneys rebuilt in this precinct since the Rising. I slowed in the middle of the courtyard and just watched them: their pent-up energy, their fear of rejection, their tentative pride at this rite of passage, all readable in the nervous poses struck as they waited. Forty young men, no more than half to be utter barristers by the evening’s end.

Fifteen years had passed since my own, less formal initiation at the Temple, yet the occasion could still raise the hairs. As I stepped beneath the row of arches along the cloister a familiar voice stopped me. “Is that you, John Gower?” I turned to see Thomas Pinchbeak hobbling along from Temple Church, with Chaucer holding an arm. “Wait there.” He wiped his high forehead, exposed by the tight-fitting coif worn by his order. A capped stick bore part of his fragile weight.

“Good evening, Thomas. Geoffrey.” I took his stick and his other arm, my hand brushing the silk rope belted around his banded robes. Pinchbeak was a man who had grown into his name, with a long, sharp nose that jutted forward above lips pursed against some unnamed offense. Behind the serjeant-at-law’s back Chaucer gave me a meaningful look, which I returned with a subtle shake of my head. We hadn’t spoken since Monksblood’s, I had no real news yet about the book, and I didn’t want him to think I was avoiding him.

“Lurking at the fringes, I see,” Pinchbeak said to me, and I smiled at the ribbing. My ambivalent ties to the legal world were a matter of occasional amusement to Pinchbeak, newly a member of the Order of the Coif, one of the most powerful lawmen in the realm and now a royal nod away from appointment to justice of the King’s Bench.

“You are one to talk.” I gestured across the lane at the last of the crowd straggling into the hall. “Late, as always.”

“Ah, but I have the excuse of a wound,” he said, though something in his eyes belied his easy manner. A compact and wiry man, Pinchbeak had taken an arrow in his left thigh at Poitiers yet stood and fought for hours after, an incident that had rendered him both lame and legendary. When he gave the gold and ascended to serjeant not a soul in the realm begrudged him the honor. Yet his face that evening was troubled, and he seemed about to say something more when a small group of other serjeants-at-law surrounded him, hustling him gaily into the throng.

Chaucer watched him go in, then turned to me, his face lined with concern. “Nothing?”

“Not really.”

“What did Swynford say?”

“Very little,” I said, deciding to mention nothing about the book’s theft, nor about Swynford’s peculiar suggestion regarding its prophetic nature. I needed to learn more first, and I was not in the business of giving away information, even to an intimate friend. “She doesn’t have it, if that’s what you want to know. She’ll do some discreet asking around.”

“I see,” said Chaucer, looking at me dubiously.

“I’ve only started searching, Geoff,” I said, wanting to give him something. “London is a big place. A book could be anywhere.”

He gave me a tense nod.

“Just one question.” I pulled him out of the human flow. His eyes darted to the hall door, then back to the lane as I leaned into him, my mouth inches from his ear. “What do you think this book is, my friend? What do you know about it that you haven’t told me?”

I felt his breath on my cheek. “Less every day, it seems.”

“And you’re aware you’re not the only one looking for it?”

“I suspect not,” he said. “But I need you to find it first, John.”

I backed away, found his eyes. “You know me, know my skills. If it’s there to be found I’ll find it.”

His shoulders rose slightly, and he grasped my arm before turning for the feast. We parted at the arched doorway into the great hall, where hundreds of lawmen were already at table, ladling soup, picking flesh from lavish trays of sauced cod and porpoise. At the front of the space stood the pageant wagon, covered in a cloth that obscured everything but the wheels. As I found a seat the men around a far table lifted their glasses in song. The crowd joined in, the din rising to the rafters and the darkened spaces high above.

Twice two full quarts we lawyers need,

To fill a legal jug.

With one, we’re gay, with two, we teach,

With three, we prophesy.

And four good quarts it takes to bind

Legal senses, legal tongues,

A lawyer’s hands and mind.

Cups and flagons clashed on the last word, drink sloshed, the sobriety of Lent set aside for an evening. The clamor stirred a familiar longing. Though I had spent two formative years at the Temple, my father had not allowed me to remain in the profession. For an esquire’s son the practical application of law was regarded in those days as a rather low trade. Had I been born ten years later I might well have been sitting that night with Pinchbeak and the serjeants instead of on that crowded bench, shrouded in ignorance.

The line of nervous apprentices formed for the tap. As the first hopeful presented himself, the presiding master leaned forward and plucked at his gown, the mark of unsuitability. The young man turned away, his eyes already moist at the prospect of another year before his next chance at admittance. Other unlucky souls followed him out over the next little while until the successful class stood at the front of the hall to great applause. A few pompous speeches, then, with cake and ale served out, the main event began.

Up stood Stephen FitzWilliams, master of the utter barristers. Delighting in his role, he pushed himself onto the pageant wagon, his legs swinging freely between the wheels, his gown hanging loosely on a gaunt frame. He spread his hands above his head, gathering silence.

“Gentlemen of the law,” he intoned. “I bid you fair evening, and good fare made of our moot!”


Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!
” the crowd replied.

“As your new-appointed liege, your sovereign, your emperor and king—”

Someone threw a fish spine.

“Leave that off!” He loudly cleared his throat. “It has fallen to me to determine our evening’s weighty matter, to be mooted before you.”


Huzzah!

“Last year on a similar occasion we mooted some obscure clauses of the Statute of Merton, did we not?”


We did!

“Our disputations involved the writ of redisseisin. In the Latin of our beloved Parliament, ‘
Et inde convicti fuerint
’ et cetera et cetera. Which is glossed, in our Frenchy cant, ‘
Ceo serra entendu en le breve de redisseisin vous vous cadew hahoo haloo
’ and thus and so. Shall we revisit this well-trodden ground, as dry as pestled bone?”


Nay!

“Perhaps we should dabble in the assize of novel disseisin.”


Nay!

“In default of a tenant
en le taile
?”


Nay!

“In the wrongful appropriation by a tortious patron?”


Nay!

“In theft?”


Nay!

“In misprision?”


Nay!

“In the law of bankruptcy?”


Nay!

“Well then, you leave me no choice!” A master of delivery, FitzWilliams had brought me and everyone else in the great hall to the edges of our seats.

“Our subject for this year’s moots shall be a matter of universal and urgent concern.” He leaned forward, an air of suspense in his thrown whisper. “Methinks the matter of our March moot, my matriculating men, must be . . .” The pause lengthened until finally FitzWilliams, his head bent back, his nose pointing to the ceiling far above, screamed, “
MUST BE
MURDERRRRR!

A collective whoop went up from young and old alike, followed by a round of sustained applause. As the claps and stomps faded and the men retook their seats, I glanced over at the upper benches, where the serjeants-at-law sat in high station. Thomas Pinchbeak, I saw, was leaning forward and speaking with some urgency to two of his colleagues. I could understand their consternation, as even the more festive moots generally treated the finer points of property and torts. A murder trial would not be unprecedented, but it would require the substitution of mere spectacle for legal rigor. I was somewhat surprised that the young men had opted for such a subject.

FitzWilliams hopped down and grasped a corner of the drapery. “Servants of the law,” he shouted, his eyes wild, “I give you the evening’s bench!” In one flourish he pulled off the canvas. The applause was thunderous as the crowd took in the mock court on the wagon: the stern judges in a ponderous line, the pompous bailiff, a hunchbacked recorder, and finally the accused, bound standing to a rail by his legs and wrists, his teeth gnashing, his face twisted in mock agony at the imagined hanging in his near future.

The most remarkable part of the spectacle was the scene laid out on a narrow platform jutting forward from the left front of the wagon. A scraggly hawthorn bush, potted in an oaken tub, suggested the outdoors, as did several inches of loose dirt spread around it. On the soil, facedown, lay a young man, his torso bare, his waist and legs clad in a flesh-colored costume, the buttocks exaggerated with padding.

“Our victim, if you please!” FitzWilliams called out over the roars of approval. The actor rose to his knees, cutting a ghoulish figure. His chest had been shaved clean and painted with wide crescents traced to suggest breasts. Between the legs of the suit had been sewn a triangle of animal pelt. And from his head, adorned with a wig of long, dark hair, a dried shower of red paint descended in a glistening path, its source a crusted wound mocked up in gruesome detail.

I looked again at the cluster of serjeants. At least five of the powerful men were now visibly agitated, their gestures conveying strong displeasure at the subject of the performance. There was clearly some disagreement, though: I guessed that several of them wished to halt the murder moot, while others felt reluctant to take action, with all the objections this would raise. Yet why, I wondered, was this spectacle provoking their concern at all, given the usual tenor of plays at the Temple? Such pageants were notorious for their bawdy and even violent content, some of them ending in blows; this one appeared no different.

FitzWilliams had pressed a cluster of utter barristers into service as the jury. He held up his hands.

“Let us review the facts of the case,” he said. “First: before us lies a young woman. A virgin, I’m told—though I have not, personally, performed the requisite inspection.” He put a finger in the air, drawing earthy calls.

The victim sat up, pursed his rouged lips in a kiss, then, with a wan wave, collapsed. “Her head crushed,” FitzWilliams continued, “her fair body stripped of its dress, her raiment laid carelessly over a rock. So far a straightforward matter, no? A fair maiden wandering in a place where a woman should never venture alone. Attacked. Perhaps ravished. Surely killed.”

An exaggerated frown. “But consider the complexities of the case before us. First, where did this act most foul occur? Not in London, but outside the walls—indeed in the Moorfields, hard by Bethlem Priory, where the wood are wont to wander.”

A crowd along a side wall sent up a wolfish howl, and my skin went suddenly cold. Katherine Swynford, at La Neyte.
It was a young woman . . . Someone skulled her, out on the Moorfields.

My vision blurred as FitzWilliams continued. “The location of the crime introducing, then, the matter of jurisdiction, which some will place under the abbot of Bethlem. Others will contend that the Moorfields as a whole lie within an outer ward of the city. In what court, then, and by whose authority shall this matter be adjudicated?”

A movement to my left. Pinchbeak had summoned two pursuivants.

“More central to our purposes this evening, though,” FitzWilliams continued, “shall be the nature of the crime: how are we to determine whether we are facing a killing
ex malicia praecogitata
or an accidental death? Was she killed with a club to the skull? Or”—he held up a knife, then placed the blade against his chest—“with a steely thrust to her heart?” At this last word FitzWilliams plunged the knife into his chest and doubled over.

A few shouts of alarm from the more gullible and drunk, but mostly laughter as he withdrew the wooden blade. For me the moot had lost all its humor.

“Ah, but wait!” The murmurs died down. “We must now reveal the identity of the accused.” He dug a hand into a pocket. “Why, what’s this?” He pulled out a parchment, waved it before the room. “The indictment, honorable gentlemen! Inscribed by His Honor himself, Justice Beelzebub Barnes of Brixton!” He stood at the top of the aisle between the rows of tables. “In this document,” he shouted, “is written the very name of the accused!”


Huzzah! Huzzah!

“As well as his profession, our next matter for rumination. And what is the profession of our accused, you may ask? A moment . . .” He held the document up to the lamplight. “Our alleged killer is—a highwayman?”


No!

“A street vagrant, then?”


Nay!

“How about—how about a friar?”


The friar!
The friar!

FitzWilliams shook his head, shining an exaggerated sadness around the great hall. “Incorrect, gentlemen of the bar, the killer is not a friar!”

General laughter, and as it crested, then ebbed, I noticed a small stir from afar, rendered peculiar only by its timing. In the hall’s north corner Chaucer rose from his seat, nodded an apology to his benchmates, and ducked through the low doorway leading to the buttery. As the door closed to on his back FitzWilliams adopted a more serious look. “Our alleged murderer is not a priest, nor a bishop, nor a cardinal. He is neither a cooper nor a cordwainer, neither a mercer nor a shipwright, neither a pinner nor a—”

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