A Burnable Book (7 page)

“Let’s just have it, then, Fitzy!” someone shouted from the back.

FitzWilliams looked up, affecting offense. More titters. I sat forward, confused by Chaucer’s departure at the height of the apprentice’s spectacle. With a flourish, FitzWilliams gazed across the crowd. “Have it we shall. Our murderer is, rather, a p—”

“
Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!
”

Loud shouts, drowning out FitzWilliams’s revelation with the force of a gale. The serjeants-at-law, twenty strong and with Thomas Pinchbeak hobbling in the lead, rushed the pageant wagon as a single dark-robed mass, their gowns spread above their heads like bat wings as they mobbed the players. Three of the younger serjeants climbed on the wheels and proceeded to demolish the set, kicking apart the flimsy rails, ripping the robes from the judges, releasing the accused from his bonds. Two others grappled the “victim” off the side platform and stripped the costume from his flesh, leaving him only in his braies, then sent him into the crowd with a jar of wine over his head.

Utter pandemonium: screams of delight and alarm; cups, jars, and flagons flying overhead, to shatter against the walls; serjeants and apprentices alike screaming to the rafters, some enjoying the skirmish, others frightened nearly for their lives; the wagon overturned on the floor, its spoked wheels and siderails broken on impact; the melee thrown in long shadows by hooped candelabra casting pantomimes of disorder against every surface.

Even the wildest revels must end, however, and eventually, as the tumult subsided and the barristers and apprentices surveyed the results, there was a general quieting through the hall, an almost embarrassed assessment of the state of things. I watched and listened to the reactions. Many held that the disruption had been coordinated between the utter barristers and the serjeants, perhaps as a staged commentary on the poor quality of the recent moots. Others avowed that the serjeants saw murder as inappropriate for mooting, and broke the spectacle up accordingly. There were still others who had observed what I had during the lead-up to the interruption: the anger of the serjeants-at-law, the whispered conferrals among England’s most powerful lawmen, the decision taken to rush the players before their moot had even begun.

Yet there was something more that had disturbed me about the spectacle, something I would scarcely admit to myself as I lingered in the great hall. I sat at my bench for a long while, watching the overturned wagon as the space emptied of barristers, of serjeants, of apprentices and guests, until only the servers remained. Around me they swept up broken bits of glass and clay, gathered the leavings of the students’ extravagance into buckets that would now feed pigs, dogs, their children in the tenements. As the hall emptied my certainty deepened, and a tingling of unease began at the bottom of my spine, moved up my back, and settled into my heart as a coiled suspicion.

My memory replayed the course of the abbreviated moot: the introduction of the case, the gaudy spectacle of the victim, Chaucer’s unexplained departure through the kitchen door—and finally, the naming of the accused. In that moment before the serjeants shouted him down, I could swear with a near certainty that one final word had escaped FitzWilliams’s mouth.
Our murderer is, rather, a p—

It seemed unlikely in the extreme that the man had suggested such a thing. Yet I had heard it from his lips, was sure of it: the one word that could most have affected me as I took in the lewd spectacle of a young woman’s violent death.
Our murderer is, rather, a p—

One word:
poet.

Worshipful Sir, and Our Most Intimate Friend,

Your muse finds herself in peril. Upon your return from Rome you will fondle not her supple skin but this rough parchment. Here on the banks of the Arno it will await you, just as my flesh awaits reunion with your own.

Those pleasures must be delayed, for in the morning I leave our Tuscan Eden for the coast. From there I shall arrange passage to that faraway island our histories call Albion, and you call home.

You are a lover of stories. Stories of love, lust, and loss. Of wars, rivalry, and revenge. Of the commonplace and the unlikely. The story I must now tell you is woven of all these threads, and more besides.

You know its characters, some better than others, though you cannot know, as I do, the depths of their perfidy and the heights of their nobility. Even to commit this tale to writing is to subject you, its reader, to the same peril that stalks me now. For Hawkwood’s talons are sharp, his vision is keen, and his enemies tend to die young.

I can delay no longer. Time is short, and there is much to relate.

Here, my only heart, is the story.

Once, along the Castilian marches, beyond the Crown of Aragon, there lived a knight. Not a great knight; no one would have mistaken him for a Lancelot, a Gawain, a Roland, though where he fell short of these famed knights in ferocity, he matched every one of them in honor. To his lord he was a model of duty. To his own men he was the very mirror of chivalry: swift of sword, moderate in judgment. Toward his people he acted fairly and wisely in all things.

Our knight kept a castle. Not a great castle; no one would have mistaken it for the alcázar of Pedro the Cruel, nor for Avignon’s papal palace, nor England’s palace of Westminster. Yet its walls of broad stone and heavy mortar kept our marcher lord well defended from the occasional marauder.

Our knight had a wife. A beautiful wife indeed, so beautiful one might well have mistaken her for Helen, or Guinevere, or for the Laura of Petrarco. She was the daughter of a minor count of questionable lineage. A family of Moorish blood, not a few whispered, keeping the faith of Mahound while miming love of the Cross. Yet as the knight was trusted by his people, such whisperings were soon quieted, his small, dark wonder of a wife accepted into the circles of Castilian ladies gathered on occasion at court.

Soon a daughter arrived. She was, like her mother, dark and small. She captivated her parents. The knight, of course, wanted a son. The wife was still young, and though years went by with no further issue, there was little doubt that God would someday reward them.

It came to pass, when the daughter was approaching her seventh year, that the knight was summoned by his lord to battle. Not a minor border skirmish, but a major campaign in a larger war that threatened to conscript every able-bodied man from the Pyrenees to the port of Cádiz. You will know of this war: of Pedro the Cruel and Enrique de Trastamare, of brothers divided against themselves. When Pedro called, our knight gathered the might of his men, leaving only a small garrison behind.

Word soon came of a bloody battle in Nájera, a battle in which King Pedro won back the crown of Castile from his bastard brother. Though this victory was to be short-lived, the tidings brought considerable joy to the castle and town, despite the additional news that the lord’s return would be delayed many months as King Pedro led his army to further battles against the lingering enemies of the crown. In her knight’s long absence the lady saw to the needs of his property and people, with an added touch of feminine grace that delighted those around her.

On the Day of St. Dominic, as the lady and her daughter strolled in the castle’s herb garden, the scents of rosemary and lavender mingling in the hot calm of an August afternoon, a blotch on the northern hills caught the little girl’s eye. She squinted against the sun.

Dust, yet not from a storm. The road from Burgos was dry, and any single horse would kick up a mass of saffron powder that might linger for hours.

The cloud she saw now filled the horizon. Forty horses, perhaps fifty. She tugged at her mother’s dress. They gazed together at the approaching force, their hearts lifting against a darkening sky.

The Day of St. Dominic. The day the strangers came.

Chapter viii

Rose Alley, Southwark

T
he Pricking Bishop. Edgar Rykener shook his head at the painted sign, amazed that the Bishop of Winchester allowed such pictures in his liberties. Lord Protector of Whores, they called him up on Gropecunt Lane, defending his right to run as many houses as he pleased across the river in Southwark while the hardworking maudlyns of London got constantly harassed by the law. Joan Rugg would go on about it for half a day. Unlike Gropecunt Lane, the stews of Southwark embraced their natural filth, the half-pipe gutters stopped up with brackish water of a murky green, the conduits to the river long forgotten by the bishop’s underworked ditchers. Wobbly shacks had been built out into the streets to claim space for shops, while the oblong fishponds at the western end walled off the great houses on the riverbanks beyond. No sweepers or rakers to maintain the streets, nor regular dungcarts to haul away the most offensive waste.

On the Bishop’s front steps sat a withered old maudlyn, barely there beneath her shift and smock. St. Cath was her name, Edgar recalled, still alive after half a century on her back. A dozen cats wandered in and out of the half-opened door, pressing against St. Cath’s side or darting past while she ignored them.

“Is Bess about?” Edgar asked her. The old woman said nothing. “Bess Waller, be she about?”

St. Cath shifted against the step. “Bess Waller,” she said, as if speaking the name of a stranger. Her face, crossed by a thousand lines, registered no emotion.

Edgar tapped his foot.

St. Cath spat. “The matter of it?”

“Not your concern.”

“Nor be Bess Waller none of yours.”

Edgar stood on his toes and peered into the doorway.

“Not a peek more,” said the woman, pushing away one of the cats and struggling to stand, “but you proffer your pennies like the fine gentlemen of the parish.”

He snorted. “For the love of St. Thomas, woman, all I’m about here is looking out for Bess’s daughter.”

“Millicent?” she said quickly. “Hunting Millicent Fonteyn in the stews?” St. Cath shook her bent frame and wheezed, wagged her small head. “Won’t find that knight’s trull in Southwark. Best look up Cornhull for Millicent.
Duchess
Millicent by now, for all we knows over here.”

Edgar thought over the woman’s response. Something about it didn’t sit right. “It’s not Millicent I’m about. It’s Agnes.”

“Agnes?”

Not this again. “Yes, Agnes, you withered hag, sometime maud of the Bishop. Is Agnes Fonteyn about, or’d your witchcraft turn her into one of these cats?”

St. Cath glared at her. “Agnes hasn’t been about since Epiphany time.”

“That’s right.” Bess Waller, bawd of the Bishop, leaned against the doorsill looking Edgar over. Despite two daughters and years of swyving, Bess had angles to her face that could only be boasted by the mother of Agnes Fonteyn, also the same lithe form, the same golden hair still radiant as she neared fifty. “You’re El—Edgar Rykener, are you not?”

“I am,” said Edgar. They’d met last year, soon after Agnes had left the Southwark stews and joined Joan Rugg’s crew in Cheap Ward. Bess Waller had come after her younger daughter with a club while the bawd was away, trying to beat Agnes back to the Bishop, pleading the strength of family and roots. But Agnes had stuck to Gropecunt Lane, and now she was pure London.

“As I was telling your lovely serjeant-of-the-gate here, I need to have a word with your Agnes. She about?”

“She’s not,” said Bess. “We miss her round the stews, though, that right, St. Cath?”

The old woman nodded. “Miss her all right.”

“Agnes had the cock lining up at the door,” said Bess. “Something in the sweet air off her, that way she got with her head. That toss, you know?” She mimicked it perfectly. “And always had since she’s a girl. Sweet piece of sweetmeats, that one. Still sucking it off up Cheapside?”

Edgar rested a foot on the step, stretched his tired thighs. “Our bawd’s Joan Rugg.”

“Joan Rugg!” Bess cackled. “Taught that fat hen everything she knows about the cock. How to fondle it like one of St. Cath’s kittens here, how to clamp it atween her thighs for the while of a paternoster. The gentle cock’s your false idol, Joan, I tell her, and treating it right will bring you all the riches you can want. A fast learner, by St. Bride. Just like Agnes.”

And what a homily to motherhood Agnes had in you, Edgar thought. “So,” he said. “Not a sight of her, then?”

Bess wiped her nose. “Why you seeking out my Agnes?”

“Had some little business to pestle with her.”

“Business.”

“Thought she might’ve stepped over the river. If not, then . . .”

“Then . . . ?” Bess raised her eyebrows.

Edgar took a step back, his gaze moving up the façade to the second-story windows, one of them wedged open. A giggle, a slap, a moan.

Bess clucked. “Best you be off, pretty boy. Got some gentlemen coming by next bell. Don’t want my jakes inconvenienced.”

“I’m thinking the same,” said Edgar, also thinking there was more going on here than Bess Waller would reveal. He gave the bawd a meaningful look. “You tell Agnes her Edgar come by, though.”

“Sure sure,” said Bess. “Though could be Easter, could be All Souls all I know. But I’ll tell her you were by. You give Joanie a Jesu palm on the arse from her Bess, hear?”

Edgar turned and walked down Rose Alley to the bankside. There he paused and looked back at the Pricking Bishop. Bess Waller’s arms were in the air, her face beet-red as she let St. Cath have it, for what he didn’t know.

On the bridge he purchased a farthingloaf and pinched off pieces of coarse bread, washing them down with some warmed beer. As he crossed the Thames he thought of the peculiar twinge of suspicion he’d felt on first telling St. Cath why he was there. What was it about the old woman’s words that had unsettled him?

Millicent
.

Bess Waller’s older daughter, Millicent Fonteyn, lived in a decent house along Cornhull, had some money and wanted more. She’d had nothing to do with her mother or her sister for a long time. While Agnes had only recently left her mother’s stewhouse for the streets of London, Millicent Fonteyn was no more than a distant memory on Rose Alley. Yet the moment Edgar had asked St. Cath whether Bess Waller’s daughter was about, the old woman had responded swift as you please.

Millicent? Hunting Millicent Fonteyn in the stews?

Which meant what? Which meant St. Cath, flustered at Edgar’s prodding, was covering for Agnes. He nodded, sure of it now. Agnes has been at the Pricking Bishop, he thought; may be there still, the little tart. And who, he wondered for the hundredth time, was that poor dead girl on the moor?