A Burnable Book (3 page)

His smile dimmed. “Hawkwood. Yes. You know, I spent some time with Simon while I was in Florence.”

“God’s
blood,
Geoffrey!”

He looked uncomfortable. “You didn’t write to him after Sarah died.”

“No.”

“He’s your son, John. Your sole heir.”

The child who survived, when three others did not. I drained my jar, signaled the girl for another.

“Have you heard from him?” he asked, reading my thoughts.

A fresh dipper, and I drank deeply. “Tell me about your sons instead,” I said, in a feeble change of subject. “How is Thomas faring at the almonry?”

“Well enough, I suppose,” he said.

“And little Lewis?”

“With his mother, the little devil.” He gave a half shrug. “Some call
him
the devil, our Hawkwood. But I suppose our king knows what he’s doing when it comes to alliances.”

“What few of them he has left,” I said.

He looked at me, smiling. “No King Edward, is he?”

I held up my jar. “Full long shall he lead us, full rich shall he rule.”

His smile faded. “Wherever did you pick that up, John?”

“A preacher, versing it up out on Holbourne just now.”

“Our sermonizers are quite poetical these days, aren’t they?” he scoffed. There was a certain strain in his voice, though I thought nothing of it at the time.

“Fools, if you ask me, to versify on that sort of matter,” I said.

“Better to stick to Gawain and Lancelot, I suppose.”

“Or fairies.”

“Or friars.”

We laughed quietly. There was a long silence, then Chaucer sighed, tapped his fingers. “John, I need a small favor.”

Of course you do. “Go on.”

“I’m looking for a book.”

“A book.”

“I’ve heard it was in the hands of one of Lancaster’s hermits.”

I watched his eyes. “Why can’t you get it for yourself?”

“Because I don’t know who has it, or where it is at the moment.”

“And who does know?”

He raised his chin, his jaw tight. I knew that look. “Katherine Swynford, perhaps. If a flea dies in Lancaster’s household she’ll have heard about it. Ask her.”

“She’s your sister-in-law, Geoff.” I felt a twinge of misgiving. However innocent on its face, no request from Chaucer was ever straightforward. “Why not ask her yourself?”

“She and Philippa are inseparable. Katherine won’t see me.”

“So you’re asking me to approach her?”

He took a small sip.

“Why me?” I said.

“How to put it?” He pretended to search for words, his hands flitting about on the table. “This job needs a
subterranean
man, John. A man who knows this city like the lines in his knuckles, its secrets and surprises. All those shadowed corners and blind alleyways where you do your nasty work.”

I gazed fondly at him, thinking of Simon and so much else. It was one of the peculiarities of our intimacy that Chaucer seemed to appreciate talents no one else would value in a friend. Here comes John Gower, it was murmured at Westminster and the Guildhall; hide your ledgers. Hide your thoughts. For knowledge is currency. It can be traded and it can be banked, and more secretly than money. The French have a word for informers: “
chanteurs,
” or singers, and information is a song of sorts. A melody poured in the ears of its eager recipients, every note a hidden vice, a high crime, a deadly sin. Or some kind of illicit antiphon, its verses whispered among opposed choirs of the living and the dead.

We live in a hypocritical age. An age that sees bishops preaching abstinence while running whores. Pardoners peddling indulgences while seducing wives. Earls pledging fealty while plotting treason. Hypocrites, all of them, and my trade is the bane of hypocrisy, its worth far outweighing its perversion. I practice the purest form of truthtelling.

Quite profitably, too. The second son of a moderately wealthy knight has some choices: the law, the royal bureaucracy, Oxford or Cambridge, the life of a monk or a priest. I would rather have trapped grayling in the Severn for a living than taken holy orders, and it was clear that my poetry would never see the lavishments from patrons that Chaucer’s increasingly enjoyed. Yet I shall never forget the thrill I felt when that first coin of another man’s vice fell into my lap, and I realized what I had—and how to use it. Since then I have become a trader in information, a seller of suspicion, a purveyor of foibles and the hidden things of private life. I work alone and always have, without the trappings of craft or creed.

John Gower. A guild of one.

“You can’t be direct with her about it,” Chaucer was saying. “This is a woman who takes the biggest cock in the realm between her legs. She’s given Lancaster three bastards at last count—or is it four?” He waited, gauging my reaction.

“What is this book, Geoff? What does it look like? What’s in it?”

His gaze was unfocused and vague. “To be honest with you, John, I don’t know. What I do know is that this book could hurt me.” He blinked and looked at some spot on the wattle behind me. Then, in a last whisper of French, “It could cost me my life.”

Our eyes locked, and I wondered in that instant, as I would so often in the weeks to come, what price such a book might extract from my oldest friend. He broke the tension with one of his elvish smiles. “If you can do this for me, John, get me this book, I’ll be greatly in your debt.”

As you are so deeply in mine,
he did not say; nor did he need to, and in his position neither would I have. I left Monksblood’s that morning bound to perform this “small favor,” as Chaucer had called it, for the one man in all the world I could never refuse. The man who knew my own darkest song.

Chapter ii

Gropecunt Lane, Ward of Cheap

E
leanor Rykener grunted, spat, wiped her lips. The friar covered his shriveled knob. Wouldn’t meet her eyes, of course. Franciscans, they never liked to look. He dropped his groats on the straw. “Why thank you, Brother Michael,” she said, her voice a sullen nip. The friar stared coldly at some spot on her neck, then shrugged on his cowl, edged around the old mare, and left the stall.

When she had dressed Eleanor stepped out into the light rain, looking down toward the stone cross before St. Pancras. The friar wouldn’t give that a glance either as he slunk around the corner of the churchyard toward Soper Lane. She raised her face to the sky, cleansing his piety from her tongue.

“Regular as these little oinkers here.” Mary Potts leaned against a post, gesturing to a dozen pigs nosing street muck.

Eleanor tossed her gossip a tired smile. “And never has the good grace to render me confession after I grant him service.”

They stood in silence for a while, watching the flow of late-afternoon traffic up along Cheapside, the creak of old wheels, the low calls of sheep, the urgings of hucksters, though the din seemed always distant from the ladies of Gropecunt Lane, a quiet byway of leased horsestalls and abandoned shopfronts that absorbed sound the way a dry rag absorbs ale, and as central as St. Paul’s to the human business of London. Every now and then this business would be theirs, as some desiring man, face to the ground, mind on slit, would make the turn and find a maudlyn to take his groats and squirt. Despite the lane’s reputation, the girls kept things tidy, raking the dirt and pavers themselves, cleaning up after animal and man alike. It was their own small piece of the city, where jakes plucked coin from their purses and maudlyns tucked it into theirs, the ordinances be damned. A simple thing.

“Afternoon, m’pretties!”

Eleanor turned. Joan Rugg lifted her skirts as she hopped from stone to stone in a vain attempt to avoid the mud.

“What now what now what now,” Mary Potts murmured.

With a final grunt, Joan heaved herself onto the pavers fronting the stalls and straightened her dress, a shapeless thing of stained wool. The Dun Bell, Joan’s girls called their bawd, with three chins stacked against her neck, lips full and always moist, beady eyes that moved more quickly than any other part of her, and a mass of matted hair entwined through the band of a wide hat she never removed. This, a splendid circle of leather and wool adorned with flowers of faded silk, had been given to her by a lover in her youth, she liked to recall. On that misty day its perch lent her large form an air of botanical mystery, as if the viewer were approaching a mountaintop garden above the clouds, or some strange, Edenic island in the sea. “You ladies seen our Agnes?” she asked.

“Not today,” said Mary Potts.

“Thought you sent her up Westminster on Tuesday,” said Eleanor, suddenly concerned. As far as she knew Agnes Fonteyn had been consorting with one of the king’s substewards, a longtime jake who would request Agnes’s company for a few days at a time during royal absences.

“Didn’t come through.” Joan raised her sleeve to scratch at her forearm. “But I had a particular request for her this morning, from a fine gentleman of the Mercery. And a procuratrix’d like to make arrangements, right?”

“You talked to her mother down Southwark?” Mary asked.

“Sign of the Pricking Bishop,” Eleanor added quickly, naming a common house in the stews where Agnes’s mother had long peddled flesh.

Joan scoffed. “Would’ve had to wait in line a half day to get a word in. That whore’s swyving makes her daughter look like St. Margaret.”

“Did you try her sister?” Eleanor said. “Lives just up Cornhull.”

Joan wagged her head. “Took a peek in her fancy house, asked about a bit in Broad Street, but no sight of her ladyship.”

A dungcart turned up from St. Pancras on the way to the walls, banded wheels groaning under the weight, the waste of man and beast souring the air. When the clatter receded, Joan turned back to them. “Can’t have my maudlyns vanishing on me, not with Lents about to pass, appetites built up as they are. Forty days of nothing, then a week of everything, in my experience.”

Mary groaned, her arms wrapping a post. “Shoulda been a nun, shouldn’t I, maybe took vows with them Benedictines?”

“Ah, but then you’d
really
be getting it in every hole, my dear,” said Joan wisely.

The two of them shared the laughter for a bit, attracting a few looks from other girls up the lane as Eleanor clasped her hands in worry. Joan put a hand to her chin. With a sidelong glance at Eleanor, she said, “Agnes got a little spot, though, don’t she? Out in the Moorfields.”

“A small walk short of Bethlem,” said Eleanor with a natural shudder. “I’ve been there with her.” This was Agnes’s “lair,” as she called it: an old hunter’s blind outside the city walls where some of her wealthier jakes liked to take her, along with any other maudlyns they could cajole. They were, for the most part, young, reckless men with too much time and coin on their hands. Or fellows whose names might start with “Sir.”

“Go have a look then, will you?” said Joan. Her sweetest wheedle.

Eleanor hesitated. “Rather not go alone.”

Joan heaved a shoulder at Mary. “Take the child with you. Be back bell of six, or shortly after. Sky looks to be clearing, so we’ll likely be busy tonight, the blood of London rising strong.”

Mary, playing the genteel, crooked her elbow. Eleanor took her arm, and they left Joan Rugg standing beside the stalls. “Bell of six, now,” the bawd called after them. Eleanor waved an acknowledgment, only too glad to escape her sticky work for a few hours, though quite worried for Agnes.

A muddy trudge in the drizzle took them along Cheapside past the Standard at le Vout, where two vagrants hunching in the stocks chewed at tack as a one-armed boy softened the biscuits in ale. A straight course up Wood Street and they were at Cripplegate. Eleanor looked up as they passed beneath the gatehouse, the prisoners idling behind the high grates, the keepers giving the two mauds barely a glance. Agnes likewise would have strolled from the inner half of the ward to the outer without a second thought from these men. Strange, that she would have let off her work for longer than a few hours, let alone a full day; she seemed always wanting more shillings, the busiest girl on Gropecunt Lane and happy about it.

Strange, too, that she’d said nothing to Eleanor about her plans, for the two maudlyns had long been intimate, swapping jakes, lending a coin here and there, looking out for each other in their carnal trade, and always mindful of the situations that had led them to it: Eleanor, an orphan, her younger brother apprenticed to a Southwark butcher who beat him mercilessly; Agnes Fonteyn, who had fled her mother’s bawdy house in the stews for a higher cut of her skincoin.
Tightest yoke a’ mauds you’ll ever see,
Joan Rugg liked to say, and it was true.

Once past Cripplegate they skirted the northern wall past the bricked-up postern at the foot of the causeway and soon came to the edge of an overgrown orchard. Here the lane opened out into the broad expanse of the Moorfields, a linked series of marshy heaths that formed London’s nearest hunting grounds, mostly deer and fowl. A few drier, higher bits could handle cows at pasture, though for the most part the whole area was a fen. That late afternoon Eleanor and Mary saw no one moving among the high tufts of moorgrass.

The first path off the causeway led to a spot beneath a large, lone oak. From there a smaller path branched off to the east. Ahead loomed the mass of Bethlem Priory, its walls heightened and buttressed since the order started taking in lunatics the year before. Eleanor recalled her last visit to Agnes’s lair, the mix of routine coupling and utter terror. The desperate gropings of an aging squire, the loose spread of his gut on her back like a jelly blanket—then a sound that shriveled the squire’s cock, and her own as well: a lunatic’s scream, echoing from the Bethlem walls. Since that night Eleanor had heard similar accounts of the priory’s madmen, fighting their chains as the canons extended their charity to the wrong of mind.

Eleanor saw the white rock that marked the final turn. They pushed through the heavy foliage until they reached a high wall of hawthorn. A strong scent of primrose masked a sweeter, sicker smell beneath. Mary touched her arm. Eleanor held her breath and stepped into the dense brush. A flash of bare skin on the ground, glistening, moist. Eleanor pushed aside the last branches. They saw the body.

She was facedown in the wetness, naked, her skin marbled with mud and rain. Her hair, caked in soil, had spread into three slicked highways from the crown of her crushed head, opened to the vermin. Beside her left hand lay a shoeing hammer, its handle resting carelessly over a root. Eleanor, in a daze, picked it up, felt its killing weight. As she stood feeble guard, Mary, with a heavy sigh, squatted in the mud beside the body. “Oh, you poor thing,” she said. “Oh, Agnes, you were so lovely, oh, my beautiful.”

“Turn her over then, get her face out of the peat,” said Eleanor, hammer still at the ready. Something didn’t make sense. Agnes’s hair—

Mary pulled at the girl’s shoulders. With a suck of mud she came free. Once she was flipped Mary used her hem to wipe the dark patches from the girl’s ruined face.

They stared down at her, at first disbelieving what they saw. Eleanor glanced into the hunter’s blind. A pile of women’s finery thrown over a stump: an ivory busk, a taffeta cape trimmed with fur, more silk than she and her fellow maudlyns could ever hope to afford, all in a style that Eleanor—who had a poor girl’s eye for new jet, could tell you who in town sold the latest dresses from Ghent and Bruges—had rarely seen in London. She looked back at the face.

This dead girl was indeed lovely. She was not Agnes Fonteyn.