A Burnable Book (8 page)

Chapter ix

Westminster

T
wo appointments set for that morning, the first with the wife of a disgruntled notary to the king’s secretary with a copy of a royal writ to sell. We met in an alley above the stone wharf. She had brought a maidservant along for appearance’s sake, and perhaps to impress me. As the servant dawdled at the end of the alley she sidled up close, wanting to flirt. She was an attractive woman, with soft curls peeking from beneath a loosened bonnet, full lips, cheeks pinched a bright pink, and I felt an unfamiliar stir that I promptly pushed aside.

“The writ?” I finally said, taking a small step back.

“Here, sir,” she said, offering it to me. The original, or so her husband claimed, had been sent under the king’s own signet, a sign of Richard’s increasing tendency to bypass set procedures in the administration of the realm. I read the hurried copy carefully, scanning for that useful detail.
The king to Sir Richard de Brompton, greeting. I command you to do full right without delay . . .
A knight of Shropshire, a mercer of Shrewsbury, and a debt of nearly two hundred pounds. Yet I knew Brompton, a notorious debtor I’d had occasion to pluck a few years before. This was nothing new.

I shook my head. “Sorry.”

She looked at me, a promise in her moist eyes. “Not even a shilling, Master Gower?”

I suppressed a shudder. “Nor a farthing, I’m afraid. But do tell your husband to be on the lookout for this sort of thing. You never can tell what might rise to the top. He knows how to reach me.”

She mumbled something, tightened her bonnet, then slunk off toward the palace with her maidservant. I followed them at a discreet distance and watched as they merged into the crowd around the south doors.

In the great hall I looked about for Ralph Strode, my second appointment in Westminster that morning, but when I reached our meeting place before Common Pleas at the north end a sudden silence swept the chamber. King Richard, in from Eltham Palace for the day, showing himself off. I went to my knee like every other man in the massive space, watching as the king came to the center of the hall, paused with a practiced deliberation, then gestured for all to rise and go about their business, though as always in his presence the talk was subdued. He wore long robes cut in the French fashion, a wide collar squeezing his thin neck. His fair hair, shoulder length and uncovered, swept from side to side as he spoke to his minions and those seeking a word. The king’s impromptu entries into Westminster Hall were of a piece with his increasing love of ceremony, these portentous shows of authority that brought him in ritual touch with his subjects as often as he liked. If he caught your eye on one of these occasions you took a knee, no questions asked.

Yet there was a strange gentleness in the young king’s bearing, a warmth of gesture and look I had never felt from his father, whose princely arrogance had surpassed even Gaunt’s among old King Edward’s sons. Though barely into his nineteenth year, this man had real reverence for the crown and its regal history, in ample evidence around the space. King Richard had recently commissioned statues of England’s past kings to be installed around the hall, with his own likeness culminating the series. The Confessor already stood in splendor against the south wall, his robes and crown gilded luxuriously, and a limner at work on his feet.

I leaned unobtrusively against one of the hall’s great pillars, watching the king, when his head turned in my direction. His eyes found mine, and sparkled with what looked like affection. It took me aback: since his coronation I’d had perhaps three brief interactions with the king, none of them remarkable in any way. Surprised by this sliver of royal attention, I went to my knee and held the pose until King Richard released me with a slight, boyish smile and a swivel of his chin. It was a moment of genuine connection I would hold in my mind in the weeks ahead, as I learned of our intertwined fates.

“Quite a mess up there.” Ralph Strode had come up behind me. He grasped my arm. We gazed together into the vaults, the moist flakes of sawdust descending in thin streams, stirred up by work on a platform high above. For years there had been talk of an entire new roof, though for now all was timber and shingle, the ceiling playing a constant game of catch-up against rain and birds, bats and wind.

King Richard left the hall, the accustomed din rising again in his wake. As I turned to walk with Strode I was struck by his appearance. The common serjeant’s skin was deeply veined, his eyes rheumy, his skin puffy and pink. He barked a wheezing cough into his sleeve.

“You’re the busiest man in London, Ralph. I appreciate the time.”

He shook his head. “For you I’d renegotiate the date of Easter with the Greeks!”

We strolled along the booths as I told him why I was there. For months I had been tangled up over my lands east of Southwark. A wealthy merchant, building a house on a neighboring lot, had sued for ownership, claiming that certain acreage fell within the boundaries of his property. Though the case hardly threatened my livelihood, it was requiring more of my time than it deserved, and I could find nothing to use against the man. Strode had just the sort of urban pull to finesse a transfer of jurisdiction from the bishop’s court across the river. He was one of the few men in London’s upper bureaucracy I could honestly call a friend, and he owed me a stack of favors as high as the north tower. “The short of it, Ralph, is that I want to get this moved to Westminster, into Common Pleas.”

“You’ll need a writ of
pone,
then,” Strode said.

“There may be some complications.”

He asked about the deeds, security, documentation, clarifying several matters. At the end he shook his head dismissively. “None of this should present a problem for writ of
pone
. I’ll put James Tewburn on it when I get back to the Guildhall.”

I inclined my head. “You’re a big gem, Ralph.”

“Believe me, it will be my most pleasant task of the week, and if I can use it to avoid other entanglements . . .” His stride stiffened a bit, a hint of trouble in his eyes. “Especially this Bethlem mess.”

“Oh?” He was turned away and didn’t see my reaction.

“The killing up there,” he went on. “Quite a foul business.”

“So I understand.”

“Didn’t help to have the whole thing played by those student hoodlums the other night. For days I’ve heard clusters of barristers bragging on the affair: the first moot ever busted up by the serjeants! The mayor’s courts at the Guildhall are buzzing with it, then I come out here and the murder and its mooting are the talk of Westminster.”

There did seem to be a certain thickness in the air, several animated conversations nearby clearly occupied with more than the usual legal matter. Michael de la Pole, whom I had last seen at La Neyte, stood in the middle of one of them. The chancellor gave me a slight nod when I caught his eye. “Has the killer been apprehended?” I asked Strode.

“No, nor the victim’s identity discovered. No name, no associates, no claimant to her body.” His voice lowered to a near-whisper. “She was last seen alive at La Neyte. Now it’s rumored she was an agent of Valois.”

“A spy? Here in England?” I thought back to that moment with Tugg at Newgate, which was supposedly filled with French spies.

“So it seems.”

“Why do they think she’s French?”

He shrugged. “Her clothing, for one. And those who heard her speak claimed her accent smacked of Provence. Avignon, perhaps.” A word with grim associations: the schism of the church, a holy empire divided against itself, and France’s ally against the true pope in Rome.

Our circles had brought us through each arcade twice, and we now approached the opened doors to the north porch, looking out on the yard. Strode gazed across the line of tents pitched along the hedges. “War’s coming, John. You can see it in the king’s face. All this business with the Scots, the truce nearly at an end.” The royal delegation had recently left for negotiations to extend the peace, though no one expected anything to come of them. “Imagine a French fleet, an invasion force, pulling its way up the Thames.” He looked over the shapeless mound of his nose and across the space. “Ten thousand Frenchmen set on revenging their countrymen starved at Calais, or slaughtered at Crécy. What would such a host do to Westminster, to our children?” He leaned over a balustrade, elbows on the stone. “To have their spies infiltrate London itself? Unthinkable.”

I needed more. “And the girl?”

Strode shrugged his heavy shoulders. “At La Neyte she was flitting from room to room, admired but unremarked. She was there a whole day, pretending to be a lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Bethune, one of Gaunt’s guests. Bethune and the countess had already left for Kenilworth, you see, so no one was there to discredit her. And her story was unassailable. She stayed behind, she told everyone who asked, in order to procure a particular variety of Flemish cloth desired by the countess. At last, by asking the right questions of the right people, the girl found what she was looking for. She stole it and fled, presumably to hand it over to another spy. No one knows whether she succeeded.” He licked his lips. “Then she was killed.”

“In the Moorfields.”

“Yes.”

“Who found her body?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who examined it, attempted an identification?”

His nostrils flared. “Tyle.” The coroner of London, Thomas Tyle, a man Strode had long despised. Lazy, incompetent, sloppy in his record keeping, Tyle was an intimate of the king’s chamberlain, and let everyone within hearing know it at every opportunity.

“Strange,” I said into the clamor of starlings angling toward the riverbank. “A murder in the Moorfields? That’s outside the walls. Not Tyle’s jurisdiction.” Ralph knew this as well as I did, and as I studied his face I could tell the irregularity had been gnawing at him.

He looked at me. “Nor Tyle’s usual practice, to show up and do his actual job.”

“True.” In cases of unnatural deaths, it was the subcoroner who nearly always performed the inquest. Why, then, had Tyle himself taken over the scene? I posed a final question, trying to keep my tone light. “And what did our French beauty steal out from under Lancaster’s nose?” Katherine Swynford had already told me, but I wanted to test Strode’s knowledge.

He gazed through the cloud of starlings, black slashes against the sky. “A book.”

Chapter x

Broad Street, Ward of Broad Street

A
nun and a maud, and here we are together again.”

Millicent looked at her sister, huddled in the darkness. Agnes had stayed in the Cornhull house that morning while Millicent went out to sell the bracelet her sister had found on the body in the Moorfields. The tiny piece had fetched a few shillings on Silver Street, enough to keep them fed for a week or two, though what they would do after that was a mystery. She sighed. “I was hardly a nun, Agnes.”

“Well, you lived among them out at St. Leonard’s Bromley. Got their speech, learned to read like a master.”

“Not quite,” said Millicent. “But I darned their robes, smoothed their wimples.” She stared at the book, wondering at the peculiar motivations of its maker. “Then Sir Humphrey ap-Roger came along, and they put me out as a concubine.”

“Girl who lives as a nun
is
a nun, leastwise in my book. Not that this is my book now, by the cross.”

Millicent had just struggled through a second reading of this dark work: a difficult book, filled with words and turns of phrase the Bromley sisters had never taught her.
An educated laity is our order’s highest aspiration, Millicent,
Prioress Isabel had reminded her many times.
To know that God’s teachings are well water to the thirstful—this is one of the central works of our contemplative life.
Millicent had cut her teeth on the devotional texts made available to her by the Bromley sisters, though she had never read anything like this. The verse was bumpy, like her heartbeat, with repeated letters throughout and four hammering thumps to each line. Like a minstrel’s romance, sung in the halls of lords.

The bone that he breaketh be baleful of harm,

Nor treachery’s toll with treason within . . .

A woman with womb that woes him to wander

For love of his lemman, his life worth a leaf . . .

Such lines, as she murmured them to her sister, carried dire threats, each one of them tuned to the fate of an English king. Yet much of the work remained obscure, its lines heavy with symbols she couldn’t decipher. Hawks, swords, thistles, and much else.

“So what’s it all mean, Mil?”

Millicent thought for a while. “Twelve prophecies, and I think I’ve undressed most of them. From the songs the minstrels sing, the plays they put on at Bromley Manor, St. Paul’s, everywhere.” The sisters knew these stories well, as did all Londoners: lays of olden kings, ballads of Harold and William the Conqueror, the story of the Lionheart, dying in his mother’s arms. “Twelve kings of England, Ag, all dead in the very way the minstrels say they went. Age, battle, disease, a poker in the arse.”

“Kings can die a lot of ways, eh?” Agnes shook her head.

“The great question, though, is, what will be the
next
way?” Millicent found the passage on the final pages that most concerned her: twelve lines of verse, speaking with a terrifying force of her own moment.

Agnes looked confused, so Millicent read through several of the prophecies and glossed along the way. “I hardly know all our kings, Ag, but as for the ones I do know, the book seems to have it about right. And now we have here, in these last lines, the thirteenth prophecy.”

“The thirteenth prophecy?”

“The death of King Richard himself.” Millicent recited the most baleful passage in the work.

“At Prince of Plums shall prelate oppose

A faun of three feathers with flaunting of fur,

Long castle will collar and cast out the core,

His reign to fall ruin, mors regis to roar.

By bank of a bishop shall butchers abide,

To nest, by God’s name, with knives in hand,

Then springen in service at spiritus sung.

In palace of prelate with pearls all appointed,

By kingmaker’s cunning a king to unking,

A magnate whose majesty mingles with mort.

By Half-ten of Hawks might shender be shown.

On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.”

“There it is, then,” said Agnes, her face brightening.

“There what is?”

“It lays out the place of the killing, doesn’t it? ‘In palace of prelate’ and ‘by bank of a bishop.’ A palace by a river. A bishop’s palace.”

“Braybrooke?” Millicent remembered a float with Sir Humphrey to the bishop of London’s riverside residence.

“Or our own Wykeham,” said Agnes. William Wykeham, the bishop of Winchester, whose palace in Southwark stretched along a fair span of the Thames. “Then it gives the killer’s method, aye? Nesting with knives in hand, then springing forth—”

“ ‘At spiritus sung,’ ” Millicent finished for her. “What’s that mean, then?”

Agnes shrugged. “Prayer, could be, ending in ‘
spiritus.
’ Like a signal.”

“A signal.”

“ ’Cause they’ll have help, won’t they?”

“From a ‘kingmaker,’ ” said Millicent. “A magnate whose majesty is mingled with
mort
.”

“Who’s this Mort?”

“Not who but what, dearheart,” Millicent said gently, stifling a laugh. “ ‘
Mort
’ is France’s word for ‘death.’ ”

“Ah.” Agnes frowned. “But the book tells who wants the king dead, or at least how to know them for what they be. The shenders’ll show themselves by ‘Half-ten of Hawks,’ whatever that might betoken.”

“Five hawks, then,” Millicent said.

Agnes frowned. “Why not say five?”

“
H
alf-ten.
H
awks.” Millicent emphasized the common first letter of each word. “It’s the verse.”

“So the killer of our king will be carrying five hawks on his arm?”

“That’s a lot of hawks for one arm,” Millicent mused.

Agnes crawled forward on the rushes, took the cloth that had covered the book in hand, and spread it over the floor. “Five hawks, the book says, and there they are, clustered around the shield. Now I see it, Mil!” She turned round to her sister. “It’s like wool and a spinning wheel.”

Millicent squatted by the cloth.

“Without the wheel, the wool is just wool.” Agnes cradled an imagined basket. “What good be a basket of wool if you haven’t made it into thread yet? But once you’ve wound it on the spindle, started turning your wheel”—her hands spun the air—“why, the wool starts to twist itself together, and soon you got so long a length of thread as you like.”

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s all on the cloth, isn’t it?”

Millicent had thought little of the piece of embroidery apart from the shilling or so it would fetch on Cornhull. Yes, it was an extraordinary sample. But what did it have to do with the book?

She surveyed it now, looking more closely at the marks of livery embroidered across its span. She had noted them earlier, when Agnes first unwrapped the book for her, yet now their significance hit her with real force. Around one of the shields had been embroidered a careful pattern—a circle of five hawks—while the other sat in the midst of a triangle formed by three delicate white feathers. The cloth, she realized, told a story, a story whose main characters were embodied by the livery set between its edges. And what a story it was!

If she had learned her reading from Isabel of Barking, Millicent had learned her heraldry on the lap of Sir Humphrey ap-Roger, who had loved to point out the subtle variations signifying relations of rank, status, and depth of lineage: fields and divisions, charges and crests, beasts rampant and supine. In the difference between a blue lion on an argent field and an argent lion on a blue field lay whole histories of conquest and submission, Sir Humphrey taught her;
learn these histories and the livery that tells them, Millie darling, and you’ll go far
. Yet the heraldry on this cloth required no great knowledge, for she recognized most of it instantly. The colors of the king and his uncle were depicted in a battle of some kind, with swords, knives, and arrows surrounding their emblems and supporters.

Millicent clasped her sister’s hands. “Without the wheel, then, the wool is just wool.”

Agnes nodded. “And without the cloth,” she said, continuing the thought, “the book is just . . .”

They said it together: “A book.”

There was one final piece. Millicent read the last line of the prophecy to her sister. “ ‘
On Day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.
’ ”

“Dunstan’s Day,” said Agnes. “Nineteen May, or I’m a fool.”

Millicent calculated on her fingers. “Six weeks, Ag,” she said into the darkness, the meaning of the prophecy chilling her limbs. “Our king has but six weeks to live.”

They had sat in silence for a while, absorbing the prophecy’s dire meaning, when Millicent saw a flicker of something cross her sister’s face. “What is it, Ag?”

“The faun,” she said, a faraway look in her eyes.

“What about it?”

“Right before that man killed her. She looked up at the sky, and she cried it out. A rhyme. ‘Though faun escape the falcon’s claws and crochet cut its snare, when father, son, and ghost we sing, of city’s blade beware!’ I remember it like my Ave Maria, her voice was so clear. It felt like she was screaming it to me,
to me
, while she’s kneeling there, waiting to die. It’s been stuck in my head since, just like that man’s
doovay leebro, doovay leebro
. So what’s it mean?”

“Say it again.”

As Agnes repeated the rhyme, Millicent scratched it onto the last page of the manuscript with a nub of coal in her unpracticed, spidery script. The words did nothing to clarify the rest of the prophecy, but writing them down seemed to calm Agnes somewhat.

“Whatever it means it’s only words, Ag. And we can’t eat words.” Millicent stood, the manuscript falling from her lap. “Nor a cloth, nor a damned book.” She slammed the chamber door behind her, clomping down the outer stairs, her hopelessness rising with each descending step. Her sister in her bed, the two of them together for the first time in years, yet Millicent felt more alone than ever. City’s blade indeed.