A Burnable Book (2 page)
Authors: Bruce Holsinger
DAY XV BEFORE THE KALENDS OF APRIL TO THE IDES OF APRIL, 8 RICHARD II
(18 MARCH–13 APRIL, 1385)
Newgate, Ward of Farringdon
I
f you build your own life around the secret lives of others, if you erect your house on the corrupt foundations of theirs, you soon come to regard all useful knowledge as your due. Information becomes your entitlement. You pay handsomely for it; you use it selectively and well. If you are not exactly trusted in certain circles, you are respected, and your name carries a certain weight. You are rarely surprised, and never deceived.
Yet there may come a time when your knowledge will betray you. A time when you will find even the brightest certainties—of friendship, of family, even of faith—dimming into shadows of bewilderment. When the light fails and belief fades into nothingness, and the season of your darkest ignorance begins.
Mine fell in the eighth year of Richard’s reign, over that span of weeks separating the sobriety of Lent from the revelry of St. Dunstan’s Day. London often treats the passing of winter into spring with cold indifference. That year was no different. February had been an unforgiving month, March worse, and as the city scraped along toward April the air seemed to grow only more bitter, the sky more grey, the rain more penetrating as it lifted every hint of warmth from surfaces of timber and stone.
So too with the jail at Newgate: a stink in the air, a coating on the tongue. I had come over the bridge that leaden morning to speak with Mark Blythe, jailed on the death of his apprentice. I had come, too, as a small favor to the prior of St. Mary Overey, the Southwark parish that Blythe once served as head mason. For years I had let a house along the priory’s south wall, and knew Blythe’s family well.
We had been chewing for a while on the subject of the coming trial, and whether I might help him avoid it. No fire in the musty side-chamber. I was losing my patience, and more of my vision than usual. “You have no choice, unless you want to hang, or worse,” I told him. “And there is worse, Mark. I’ve seen it. I’ve smelled it.”
“It was an accident, Master Gower.”
“So you’ve said, Mark. How could you have known the axle would break?” Despite the prison chill a bead of moisture, thick as wheel oil, cleared a path down his cheek. Blythe had lost three fingers, two from his left hand as well as his right thumb, his body marked with the perils of his craft, and Newgate’s heavy irons had scored his forearms. I softened my voice. “But the axle did break. The stones, half a ton of them, did spill out and crush that boy’s legs. Your apprentice did die, Mark. And the soundness of that cart was your responsibility.”
“Not’s how I saw it, and as for the axle . . .” His voice trailed off.
I heard a sigh, realized it was my own. “The problem, Mark, is that the law sees different kinds of accidents. You can’t claim accidental injury when your own negligence—when your carelessness has been taken as the cause of death.”
Blythe’s hands dropped to the table.
“Please don’t make me tell your wife you’ve just put your life in the hands of a petty jury.”
His eyes widened. “But you’d stand for me, wouldn’t you then, Master Gower?”
“I’m not an advocate, Mark. What I have are connections. And money. I can put those at your service. But not before a jury.” Poor timing, I didn’t say. Before the crackdown last year I could have bribed any jury in the realm.
His shoulders slumped. “No trial, then. How quick to get me out?”
I hesitated. “You’ll be here until next delivery. June, I would think.”
“More time, sir? In
here
?” He shook his head. “They’ll send me down, sir, down to the Bocardo. They press them down there, it’s said. Sticks them with nails like Jesu himself, do abominations each to the other. Don’t want the Bocardo, Master Gower, not by the blood.”
My hands settled on Blythe’s mangled fingers, stilling them against the wood. Mutilated, cracked, darkened with years of stonework, these fingers had shaped their share of useful beauty over the years: a lintel, a buttress, the pearled spans of a bishop’s palace, the mortaring so precise you would never know from beyond a few feet that what you saw was not a single stone. “Mark, I will do what I can to—”
“Have an end!”
I flinched at the yawn of old hinges and half-turned to the door. Tom Tugg, keeper of Newgate, a cock in the yard. He swung a ring of keys, each a gnarled foot of iron. “Fees to be tallied and collected presently,” he crooned, and two turnkeys did their work. Blythe moaned, the irons biting his swollen wrists.
It took a moment, but finally Tugg saw my face. Even in the scant light of three candles I caught his gape.
“Whatsit—who let this
fiend
speak to my prisoner?” He spun on his men. “Who put them in here?”
Your deputy. A small threat for a small thing. The turnkeys just shrugged.
“Take him back,” Tugg ordered, a spit of disgust. He looked at me and got my heartiest smile. He licked his lips. “Come along, then.”
I gave Blythe’s broad back a pat before he was pulled in the opposite direction. Tugg led me along the passage to the outer gatehouse. A fight had broken out in the women’s chamber, a crowd cheering the crunch of bone on the stone floor. At the gatehouse door Tugg turned on me. “Well?” His chin was pocked, unshaved.
“I would like Blythe transferred to Ludgate until delivery.”
Tugg wrinkled his heavy brow. “Ludgate, you say?” The new prison, recently completed at the western gate and now under the custody of the city chamber, housed those accused only of civil offenses. So pleasant were its conditions that stories were circulating of inmates striking deals to remain jailed. “You’ve got to understand my
situation
here, Gower,” he said with a slight twinge of his jaw. “Newgate’s abrim with spies.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said, prepared for this. “Secret alliances with the Scots, French agents lurking behind every door.”
“Twenty of them at last count, held without surety.”
“All the more reason to move Mark Blythe, then, for he’s no spy,” I said. “Relieve the overcrowding, put a petty criminal out of your mind.” Almost there. “You can say it was your idea, sound leader that you are.”
He blew out a breath. “A pound, Gower. It’ll take a pound to move him, what with that touchy keeper they got, dealings with the Guildhall—”
“Wonderful,” I said. “We’ll deduct it from your balance.” Tugg was still down to me many pounds; twenty shillings would make hardly a dent.
“See here, Gower—”
“Nothing to see, Tugg. I have your debt, I have your note. And I have the most horrendous bit of—”
“Ludgate, then,” he said, with another thick sigh. “He’ll be there till delivery.”
I gave him a hard look. “
Live
delivery.” He nodded.
Outside Newgate I retrieved my pattens, then trudged through the walls and up the muddy way to Holbourne, breathing shallowly on the bridge as I neared the outer reaches of the ward. Before the churchyard at St. Andrew a wild-haired man preached to the drizzle, his only parishioners a crescent of nosing goats. I caught a snatch of verse as I ducked into the narrow alley just east of Thavie’s Inn.
“Full long shall he lead us, full rich shall he rule,
Through pain of pestilence, through wounds of long war.
Yet
morire
is matter all sovereigns must suffer.”
All kings must die.
True enough, and the lines were well wrought, though the preacher soon lapsed into the usual fare. Corruption, gluttony, lust, the coming holocaust of the unfaithful. I wondered how long the poor man would last before joining Blythe in his cell.
At street level Monksblood’s stood open to the weather, a brick wedged beneath the alley door. I leaned in and gave a nod to the keeper. He tossed me a jar. At the foot of the stairs sat his daughter, a slight thing of about eight. With her foot resting on the next cask, she angled my jar beneath the tap and carefully turned the bronze spigot. I dropped a few pennies in her little palm. A wan smile, tired eyes bright for a moment beneath her shining brow, then she looked past me and up the stairs, waiting for her father’s next fish.
With the sour ale on my tongue I surveyed the undercroft tavern, lit weakly by a row of lanterns dangling from heavy beams. The tables were nearly empty, just two groups of men clustered along the hearth. Masons, fresh from work on the bridge. I got a few sullen looks. Steam rising from damp clothes, the muffled clatter of boots overhead.
In the far corner my friend sat alone, frowning into his jar as his finger traced a slow arc around its mouth. He seemed coiled on the bench, his brow knit, his eyes narrowed in concentration, the whole of him tensed against some unspoken thought.
“Geoffrey,” I said, and moved forward.
Half-turning with a start, he rose, his face blossoming into a smile. “
Mon ami.
” He spread his hands.
As my arms wrapped his frame I felt the familiar surge of anticipation: for court gossip, for poetic banter, for news of mutual acquaintances. Yet beneath the thin coat I also felt ribs, hard against tightened skin. Chaucer had lost a couple of stone that winter; there was less to him since his latest return from abroad, and his unfashionable surcoat, of undyed wool cut simply with straight sleeves, lent an almost rural aspect to his bearing. Normally he would dress like a bit of a fop. I wondered what explained the change.
For a while we just drank, saying nothing, two hounds sniffing around after a long separation. Eventually he leaned over the board. “How has it been, John? You know . . .”
I looked away. “Let’s not bleed that wound, Geoff.”
He let that hang, then touched my elbow. “I hope it has started to heal, at least.”
“I had her things removed and sold at Candlemas—most of them.” Candlemas: purification, purging, the scouring of the soul and the larder. I thought, as I hadn’t in weeks, of Sarah’s prayerbook, its margins and flyleaves full of her jottings. It was one of the few of her possessions I had kept.
Chaucer moved his hand away. I asked about Philippa. He picked a splinter from the table. “Keeps to court, hovering around her sister and the Infanta. It doesn’t help that I’m traveling all the time. Calais, the
cinque ports
.”
“And this recent trip, to Tuscany and Milan? The custom was able to spare you?” Back in November Chaucer had arranged for a deputy to step in for him at the customhouse. His trip south had been planned hastily, and for reasons he had kept to himself.
“Some negotiations for the chancellor: a bribe here, a false promise there.” He pushed a lump of talgar across the table. The Welsh cheese was an epiphany on my tongue: tart, rich, deliciously illegal. “Though this trip was a bit less official than the last.
Inglese italianizzato, diavolo incarnato.
” He feigned a sinister smile.
An Englishman italianized is the devil incarnate.
“A judgment you inspired, I suppose?”
“You’ve been practicing!”
I hadn’t, though the odd lesson from Chaucer in recent years had taught me a few useless phrases. “
Donde il formaggio?
” I said awkwardly, pretending to look around for the cheese.
He smiled. “It’s
dov’è
il
formaggio,
John, not
donde.
Where
is
the cheese, not where is the cheese
from.
” He pushed the talgar my way.
“
Dov’è.
Right.” I knifed another wedge.
He went on about his trip. “And the books! In the Visconti libraries you can’t reach out a hand without—speaking of books, I’ve brought you a little something.” From his bag he removed a volume and set it between us. “
Il Filostrato
. A work that has reminded me of you since I first read it years ago, though I can’t quite say why. It’s a tragedy of the Trojan War, and a story of love. Not to your usual tastes, though I have a feeling you’ll enjoy it. And it will give me an excuse to teach you more Italian.”
I thanked him and stroked the embossed spine and cover. Calf, dyed a deep purple, cool and smooth. “The writer?”
“Giovanni Boccaccio,” he said. “I tried to meet him once, but he wouldn’t see me. A recluse, practically a hermit.”
“Boccaccio.” A name, like the talgar, worth savoring. I mouthed the rubrics as I leafed, admiring the ghostly thinness of the abortive vellum. No full-page illuminations, but the larger initials were ornate, with gold flourishes, a full palette of inks, descenders reaching out to curl around the peculiar beasts in the margins. There was a poem on the second leaf, a single stanza in a hand I knew well.
Go, little book, to our unfathomed friend,
Above his silvered head to build a shrine,
Retreat of Wisdom, Ignorance to mend.
Full oft there shall you comfort and entwine
His long limbs in bookish fetters benign.
Thou shalt preserve those aquamarine gems,
Or Gower’s friend shall cast you in the Thames.
As always, Chaucer’s verse captured its subject with the precision of a mirror. My thinning hair, shot through with spreading grey. My long frame, which had two lean inches on Chaucer’s, and he was not a short man by any measure. Finally the eyes. “Gower green,” a limner I once knew named their shade, claiming no success in duplicating it. Sarah had always likened them to her native Malvern Hills at noon, though she had died without fathoming the truth about these eyes, and their diminishing powers. Only Chaucer possessed that knowledge, expressed in a touching bit of protectiveness in the couplet.
I looked up to see him staring vacantly at the far wall. I closed the book.
“Why did you want to meet here of all places?”
“I’m less known in Holbourne,” he whispered in French, teasing, “where there’s smaller chance of recognition than within the walls.”
“Ah, I see,” I replied, also in French. “I am the object of a secret mission, then. Like your visits to Hawkwood and the Florentine
commune
.”