The Invention of Fire (13 page)

“We’ll hear none of your lies, Norris,” said Brembre.

“Yet I have a witness, my lords!”

“You have
nothing,
” the mayor snarled, and the chamber went silent. Brembre spoke into the quiet. “Now still your tongue or it will be sliced from your mouth this very hour.”

Another moment of silence, then, “With respect, Lord Mayor,” someone said from the dais, “should we perhaps listen to what the man has to say?”

All heads turned to the speaker. He was, I saw to my delight, William Rysyng, prior of Holy Trinity and the alderman of Portsoken Ward. It was a peculiar arrangement, though one in effect for many years: ever since King Henry I had granted the entirety of Portsoken to the priory by the city’s east gate, the prior had served ex officio as the ward’s alderman. While Rysyng’s two most recent predecessors had designated worldly men to serve in their places, deeming the civic office unfit for the sober life of an Augustinian canon, Rysyng had embraced his urban duties, involving himself in city affairs with an almost perverse glee. He was the only clergyman among the city’s aldermen, who generally served shorter terms. Not Rysyng. Going on his ninth year in office, the prior was a fixture at the Guildhall, exercising a power within the city bureaucracy surpassed only by the mayor’s own.

The prior was seated to the mayor’s left, his hand held up to delay the proceedings. It was not uncommon for such ripples to move
through the mayor’s court for one reason or another: a clerical question, a technical knot, a last-minute bribe.

Brembre turned on Rysyng with a dog’s snarl. “Not in this hall, Reverend Father. Not while I am mayor of this city. Is that understood?”

Rysyng kept his head high. “It is, Lord Mayor,” he said.

“Good,” said Brembre, though as the mayor brought his glare back down upon Norris I saw Rysyng exchange dark looks with several of the other men around the tables. Excellent, I thought. Rysyng was one of three or four aldermen on whom I held quite damaging information, though in his case I had yet to use what I possessed. I would visit the priory by Aldgate tomorrow.

As the cursory trial continued I looked over and across the bench, my eyes alighting on a slouching figure wedged against the far end of the bar. It was young Jack Norris, Peter’s son. The Earl of Earless, as the taunts named him, and he made a pitiful figure there in the depths of the Guildhall, his close-spaced and mournful eyes watching the proceeding unfold. His father’s short trial was soon concluded, the sentence pronounced. Norris would hang.

This mayor tolerated no delay in the execution of London’s convicted. Peter Norris and the two horse thieves were to be roped immediately—not at the Smithfield gibbet but out at Tyburn, as Brembre liked to keep the city free of corpses during Parliament time. The Guildhall was already emptying for the trek to the gallows, a choir of Londoners processing to sing the city’s crude office of execution. I rose with them, intent on getting a name out of Norris before his departure for the scaffold. Though the mayor’s court was still in session, the crowd had massed at the Guildhall’s south door, where I joined the departing throng.

I hurried from the Guildhall, crossed Aldermanbury, and jogged down to Cheapside, where the procession had slowed and lengthened considerably as it picked up interested spectators. Norris and the horse thieves had been stripped and thrown into a long, narrow cart drawn by two nags, led by a smirking young man strutting importantly
at the head of it all. Along each side of the cart walked two of Brembre’s armed pursuivants, noses up, searching the crowd for the cantankerous and drunk. Another kept up the rear, just to the back of the rickety contrivance. The expanding mass of Londoners was raucous but not disorderly, humming with the lurid excitement of the multiple deaths to come.

London is a forgetful, even forgiving city. Only five years before, in the wake of the Rising, the crown had erected gallows across the city to string up hundreds of rebels, many of them surely kin to some of the slavering crowd now panting after the noose. Memory, I mused as I walked, will lose out to oblivion every time.

The procession had passed over the Fleet before I managed to catch up with the cart. I slowed now, and handed the rearmost guard two groats to let me take his place for a moment. He edged to the left, leaving me just feet from Peter Norris and the other thieves.

The three condemned men sat naked in the cart, legs entangled, hands bound with rope, heads lolling along the splintered rails. Already dead, in all the ways that mattered.

“Norris,” I said.

Nothing.

“Norris,” I said more loudly.

His eyes, grimed and smeared, fluttered open. His head rolled to the side. He gave me a tired scowl.

“Forget about me, Gower,” he said through the noise. “It’s too late for your contrivances and connivings. We both know it.”

One of the thieves looked up for a moment, took us in, then let his chin sink back to his chest.

“About Jack,” I said. The constable gave me a warning look, fingered his thumb. I slipped him another coin.

“What about him?” said Norris, looking off to the side. The procession had reached the far end of Holbourne, where the road narrowed and bent northward, leaving the city’s last outskirts behind. Before us stretched the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, the broken spires of the leper hospital rising above the fallow plain. I heard song,
faint and unenthusiastic. I looked at the sun. The brothers in the hospital chapel, intoning the work of God.

“Have you spoken to anyone about taking him in?”

“He’ll be a ward of the city, now I’m gone,” said Norris. “Your friend Strode will see to that, I suspect. Unless you want the little brigand for yourself.” A weak laugh, fading quickly. “His father’s son, that one.”

“Wardship is reserved for the moral and upstanding,” I said as the cart creaked on. “But your son is a cutpurse and a rising felon, with a mutilated head. He will be turned out of the city if he’s not hanged like you first. You want that for him?”

He twisted in the cart.

“I will set him up nicely, Norris,” I said. “He won’t lack for meals and shelter, I can promise you.”

His scowl deepened. “Why would you do such a thing, Gower?”

I took a step closer, risked leaning over the edge of the cart, and whispered, “Your witness, Norris. His name—”

Just then a new murmuring went up from the crowd. A postern door along the north wall of St. Giles had opened to reveal a gaunt figure limping from the hospital churchyard. A large hood flopped sloppily around his head and his thin neck, hiding his face. Behind him walked a brother of St. Lazarus, hale enough, to judge by his appearance, bearing a bucket and dipper. The crowd parted for the two denizens of the hospital as they neared the cart, which slowed to a halt for the dreary ritual. The lame man looked up at the prisoners, and I caught a glimpse of his face. Scarred, slashed with crusted pustules, though not with the signs of leprosy. One of the crown’s decayed domestics, I suspected, and a late case of the pox.

One of the constables took the bucket, the other the dipper, and final ales were served out to the condemned. The three men sipped eagerly, as if some grain of salvation had been fermented into the heavy brew shared among the doomed. I waited as the constables finished the remaining drink. One of them returned the bucket and dipper to the St. Lazarus brother, who led the afflicted man back into the hospital grounds. With that, the procession began anew.

“A name, Norris,” I said as the cart groaned along. “All I want is a
name. Why did Brembre keep you from speaking it at the Guildhall?”

Norris’s eyes had closed again. I reached out and pressed his bare arm, hanging loosely against a cart rail. My hand nearly recoiled. His skin was cold to the touch, clammy, despite the full sun. He looked down at my fingers, then at me.

“Brembre, you say?” His eyes flashed, suddenly alert. “That scabbed swindler! You tell Nicholas Brembre I’ll be back for him, back from the grave. You tell him that for me, John Gower.”

“Think of your son, Peter. Young Jack.”

“A son, a sack of coin, the things we leave behind.” He turned and spat over the side of the cart. “All the same in the end, isn’t it?”

Now a new agitation. His hands struggled against the shared ropes, drawing low moans of protest from the other prisoners, whose limbs moved in tandem. “Save his hands, Gower, if you can,” said Norris, his eyes flashing with new awareness, as if he had suddenly woken from a stupor. He strained to lean back toward me. His mouth gaped, and he whispered hoarsely, “First the boy’s ears, and next they’ll take his hands. You must save his hands, John Gower, you must!”

“A name, Norris. Only a name, and his hands shall be safe. Your witness, Norris.”

He looked up at the clouds, then at me. “Jack,” he said, with the saddest of smiles. “Jack’s his name, isn’t it?”

Those were his final words to me, and it was clear I would get no more. It was enough. I slowed my steps as the cart pulled forward and the press thronged in.

A labored trudge up the Oxford Road brought us to the Tyburn Tree, freshly cleared of its most recent danglers. The crowd pooled almost luxuriously around the triangular scaffold as the cart creaked to a halt. The constables moved quickly to remove the three condemned. They were pitiful in their nakedness, their backs bent, their forms huddled forward as if to clutch at what dignity remained to them as they faced the high beams looming overhead.

To watch a man hang is like nothing else on this earth. For no other violation puts the body through such strange paroxysms, nor reminds us so starkly of what life is and what it is not. The quickness
and quality of death on the noose depend in part on the relative talent or perversion of the hangman. Just as often, though, they are a matter of luck.

The horse thieves were fortunate that day, their necks snapping as soon as the rope tightened, their bodies swaying gently before us, disappointing the spectators.

Peter Norris’s death was of another order, and far worse than most on the gallows. The drop, a jerk of his head, a heave of his full frame, the silence lengthening, and I thought it was done. So did he, it seemed, until his expiring mind awoke to his predicament. His frame jerked. His tongue shot from his mouth. A river of drool slathered his chin. Above it all his widened eyes bulged outward from their sockets, as if his skull were a bagpipe bladder invisibly squeezed.

Worse was what happened below, as it will sometimes do. His bowels emptied in one loud and liquid rush, soiling his legs and feet and leaving him a dribbling mess. His member, a flaccid nothing amidst the thick bristles of his lower hair, became stiffened and engorged, jutting obscenely outward as his body endured its final convulsions. This last indignity inspired a round of delighted shouts and claps from the assemblage, which treated the rude spectacle of Norris’s passing as they might the performance of a shrewish Noah’s wife in a mystery play.

Finally Norris’s soul had had enough. It abandoned his ruined flesh without a whisper, leaving just this dangling thing, man no more but spiritless flesh. I closed my eyes, said a prayer. When I opened them again the crowd had already started to disperse, its attention seeking new diversions, and turned coldly from these three dark drops against the cloudless sky.

Only one other remained in the gathering silence as the crowd made its way back to the walls. He stood directly across the Tyburn green from my position, his face small, round, pale. It was Jack Norris, watching his father’s ruined body swing and twist in the gentle breeze. The boy—the witness—had lost his cap, leaving the stubs of his severed ears plainly visible beneath the strawlike thatches of his hair. His features were still, his eyes expressionless. What had those eyes seen,
what knowledge lurked behind them in that cutpurse’s brain of his?

“Jack,” I said. He swiveled his head. His eyes widened when he saw me. I took a step toward him. “You remember me, Jack.” Another step. “We met in the yard, before Ludgate.” Two more. “I bought you pies.”

Speaking to children has never been one of my stronger skills. Feeling like a fool, I could only watch as he turned and sprinted off toward Holbourne, reaching the edges of the crowd before I had even left the Tyburn round. He looked back just once before being dissolved into the press of Londoners fresh from the killing of three of their own.

A
CLOUDED MOON THAT NIGHT,
though the dark hardly helped. In the smallest hours Hawisia, assaulted by the pounding kicks of her unborn child, rose to take turns around the upper rooms. She bent against walls, stretched her sore legs, and in the end descended to the larder for a little something to stave off the hunger. A wedge of cheese, some cider, a hunk of rough bread. The walking helped, though less than it had a few weeks before.

The climb back upstairs tired her further, moistened her face. She turned into the narrow cutout between the upper bedchambers and paused at the window, pushing open the shutter to get a bit of air. As she leaned out into a chill breeze her gaze wandered from the stars over the city rooftops and down into the foundry yard, cast in a darkness complete but for a narrow smear of light coming from the far side.

Well, that wasn’t as it should be.

She peered down across the darkened yard at the smithy, a half-roofed, squat structure that occupied one corner of the Stone complex. From beneath the eaves on the building’s west side shone the cone of lamplight she’d spied from the window. She listened, palm cupped at her ear, and caught the faintest sound of metal on metal, metal on wood.

Tap tap. Scrape.

Tap tap. Scrape.

Tap tap. Scrape.

Night work in the smithy, her own smithy! A practice strictly prohibited by the guild regulations, had been for an eternity, and there wasn’t one man in the whole Stone operation who didn’t know it, who hadn’t had that unbending principle of the craft ground into him in his first weeks under the foundry roof. Smithing at night produced inferior work, when you were more likely to slip weak metals onto the forge, make infernal sounds that would wake the parish, goad its fury like nothing else.

Hawisia stomped down the back stairs and through the house to the yard door, where she reached for the heavy wooden club kept leaning within. Mostly for shooing away slaughter beasts escaped from the shambles, or beating off hungry dogs, or going after the occasional thief on the prowl for copper or tin. But a reliable weapon, and it would do fine for the wayward apprentice or guildsman risking a large fine under Stone’s roof.

Once in the yard she silenced the door behind her and hefted the wooden club, feeling its weight, intent on delivering a well-deserved beating to whichever of the foundry’s workers might be violating the ordinances and risking her livelihood.

As she left the house behind she felt another stab of anger. Even from across the yard she could tell the forge was lit. An infernal glow came from the bed of coals, while smoke rose from the chimney to curl around the brighter stars. Hawisia could not tolerate such defiance in her shop. Fire or no, the night work would have to stop, and it was up to her to see that it did. She stopped some twenty feet from the near edge of the smithy and peered beneath the eaves.

Stephen Marsh.
She could make out his broad form, shoulders bent over his work. He stood between the anvil and the finishing table against the tool wall. She shivered, furious at him for swatting away the house’s rules yet reluctant to interrupt him, intent as he was in that moment. The man had been sullen for days on end. Hawisia needed him working and working well. If the night was what it took to get his craftsman’s blood flowing its fastest, should she allow it?

Their difficult relations aside, it was always a thing of fascination
for Hawisia, to watch Stephen Marsh at his rough magic. His hands gliding from wall to bench and back, taking one tool, then another, replacing each before lifting the next, all done with the deftness of a limner switching out his brushes. A file, an awl, pliers, a hammer, another file, the awl. Every now and again he would pause in his tinkering; lift the piece of metal before him in the lamplight; heat it on the coals; move his hands apart, then together, testing out the product of his subtle labor.

From her angle Hawisia could not make out what the object was, just that it seemed to be small, precise, crafty—and worth the skulking secrecy of the dark.

Ignoring the shooting pains down her legs she watched Marsh for an hour or more, her heavy middle brushing against a post, her weight shifting every little while to keep the blood running. The club was drooped at her side, forgotten as she kept this strange vigil.

At some point in the still night Stephen put a hand to his lower back, straightened, stretched, and yawned, then started to put away the tools and neaten the bench and wall. Before he extinguished the lamp Hawisia watched him reach up, rest a knee on the high bench, and place the object of his labor on the topmost shelf, a plain board otherwise bare running across the width of the bench. She turned quietly for the yard and bed, her limbs screaming for rest, her mind grasping at the riddle she’d witnessed.

The next morning she woke before the sun and stole across the yard, reaching the smithy before any of the apprentices left their shared rooms at the far end of the foundry to start the fires. Once beneath the eaves she pulled over a stool. One foot up, the other on the bench, and with a hand on the lower shelves she hauled herself upright, finding a dangerous balance between stool and bench. She reached up and over, searching blindly with her left hand, first here, then there, then—

There.

Smooth, curved, cold to the touch, and when she brought it before her eyes she could scarcely believe that Marsh had risked those night hours and her own wrath in fashioning such a little nothing—nor that
she’d risked her babe and her neck to discover it. The thing could have been a child’s bauble, this light length of metal. It gaped open at one end to show four pronglike teeth, then curled majestically to the side and back, and ended in an extravagant coil of spirals that left just enough room for the easy insertion of a finger or a thumb.

Yet the gadget was more cleverly made than it first appeared. On its underside was a narrow rod, and at the bottom of that a subtle hinge, as if the contraption were meant for attaching to some other, larger device.

Hawisia reached up and returned the object to the upper shelf. She left the smithy more bewildered than angry, and spent the whole of that day puzzling over the nature and use of what she had seen and touched, this sinister thing Stephen Marsh had fashioned in the dark of the moon.

A serpent.