The Invention of Fire (18 page)

“Mistress?” he said with a frown, his smooth chin raised, his gaze fixed on the road ahead.

Margery watched the exchange, pondered how to stop it.

“Robert Faulk, as I spit and kick,” said the widow, inching her horse closer. “Why, you been the cook in Bladen Manor for nigh on ten years, and here you be, astride a fancy saddle in rich jet, acting a gentleman’s part.”

Margery watched him.
Do not flinch.
He remained impassive as he said to the widow, “You are mistaken, mistress.”

“Mistaken?” she scoffed. “Don’t you twist words with me, Robert Faulk. Why, you’re a famed poacher in our parts, a bowman to match a king’s archer you are! Selling your coneys and your hinds, the hides and the meat, door to door up and down the shire. ’Twas my young Will here, was he knew your face.”

“That’s Robert Faulk, sure,” said the boy, looking shyly up from beneath his hood. “Well met, Rob.”

Margery edged her horse forward, coming between Robert and the widow. “I am afraid you have mistaken my husband for another man, good mistress,” she said, trying to sound kind, reaching to place a protective hand on his arm. “He is Antony Brampton, an esquire
en service
of Sussex.” A condescending smile to put a nosing widow in her place. “Hardly a cook, I should think.”

“Though I do admire the craft of cookery greatly, my good mistress,” he said seamlessly, his voice almost jovial. Margery looked at him in awe. “My father’s family has employed a long, strong line of cooks in the manor kitchens for many generations. Their surname is Bolt, and there is a story about one of them from King Edward’s reign that your son here might enjoy. What is your name, young fellow?”

“I—I am called Hugh, if you please, sir.”

“Well, Hugh, in those days, before the great pestilence, there was a young maiden, a reeve’s daughter, living on the next manor to ours. She was a remarkable beauty, and in all the shire it was agreed that she would make a splendid match, bringing glory to her father and her family.” And he went on for nearly an hour, spinning a delightful tale of love, nobility, tragedy, and retribution that soon enough had several of the other pilgrims in the company listening in, nodding and laughing at the appropriate places. It was masterfully done, without a single lapse in voice or word, and thrilled her to her bones.

Later, with the story concluded, he nodded toward the front. “Let us ride ahead, Elizabeth.”

“Yes, my lord husband,” she said, and lifted her leg to kick lightly at the mare. From behind her she heard the widow’s soft mutter.

“It is a remarkable likeness, by Jesu’s blood. Truly remarkable.”

She allowed herself a private smile, her shoulders to settle. It had been the correct thing to do, the only thing, to escape the way they did. To fight, to flee, to deceive. Now to survive.

Yet how had he done it? A question nagging at her for days, as they had made their way from a clearing in a Kentish wood to this road so many leagues north of London, all the while pursued by the malevolence that sought to end them both. It had been Margery’s idea for them to travel together and take on the public semblance of marriage. Robert had gone along only reluctantly, yet had quickly become a master imitator. How had he managed to feign a gentleman’s voice and bearing so naturally and with such ease? She asked him.

He smiled almost shyly, still looking at the road. “There. You have stumbled upon my greatest secret, fair wife.”

“As unpublished as your poaching, my lord husband?”

“Indeed. And here it is.” He leaned slightly in her direction. “In my parish, at New Romney, I am renowned as an actor of great note.”

“Truly?”

“The church there performs an interlude of Jesu’s Passion every Whitsuntide. For two days entire the parish and town are given over to the wagons and costume, with the players picked out from households in the surrounding hundreds, high and low alike. When I was young I would seek out every moment of the plays, and rehearse them at home before the hearth or while peeling beets for Father. One day I was overheard by a playwarden, a fellow who fancied my elder sister. He pressed me into the willing service of our players. There was no role I wouldn’t take on. Herod, Herod’s wife, the figures of Mischance and Evil Grace. Pontius Pilate became my favorite. ‘Sire, what say you of Barabbas, a thief and traitor bold?’ Or, ‘There be no man here who will vouch you king, Jesu, but you be a lord or a gentleman.’ You see? Pilate is all in the song and the shoulders.”

“A lord is nothing more than a lofty voice and a heavy purse then, methinks,” she said furtively.

“And a title, and lands to his name, and a firm hand, and a whip,” said Robert.

He did not see her cringe, his words summoning the violence of her dead husband. She regarded him in a different light after this disclosure, admiring anew the deftness of his dissembling, the devilish magic he worked on the company they shared.

That night, in the common room at yet another inn, she sat among the women and the flickering candles as a company of minstrels sang for pennies around the hearth. A long tale of Guy of Warwick, the beautiful Felice, battles with giants, dragons, boars. At one point, as Margery listened with the others, she dozed off for a while, awakening to the sound of claps and laughs as the story reached a moment of absurdity. Yet her eyes fluttered open on a vision of the purest malice, a widow’s cold gaze on her lover’s face.

T
AXES AND TREACHERY WERE
the subject of the day when Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk and chancellor of the realm, opened Parliament that year. The lords had assembled that Monday morning in the chamberlain room near the Painted Chamber to hear the earl’s declaration of the causes of their summons to Westminster. The chancellor’s first move was to demand a crushing war levy of four tenths from the towns, and four fifteenths from the counties—such an excessive portion that talk of impeachment began almost immediately. The treasurer and the clerk of the privy seal were also in jeopardy, and the succeeding days and weeks would see a flurry of charges and countercharges, challenges and refusals as the Parliament worked itself into a bitter frenzy against King Richard, who would ride angrily to Eltham with half his household and refuse to hear petitions from the Parliament’s envoys. Everyone could see that the lord chancellor had made the wrong move in those first hours, and that his days in high office were numbered. Despite a political acumen that had kept him at the center of power going on thirty years, the earl never saw the dragons coming, and from every corner of the realm, until he stood within their flames.

All of this I gathered over that first week of Parliament without spending a farthing, as the taverns and shops of the royal capital throbbed with talk of the great events that would shape the realm for
years to come. My own business in Westminster on the eighth day of the month was less public, as I needed to see a Shropshire chaplain in town with his lord for Parliament. We met in the hall near Common Pleas, traded the whispers and coin we had come to trade, and I left the palace and walked toward the river, my intention to hire a wherry back to London, where I hoped to find Ralph Strode at the Guildhall. Too much had transpired to keep him uninformed for any longer, though I had yet to decide how much to reveal. Rysyng’s revelations about the mayor bore further investigation, and Piers Goodman’s death had chilled the bones. Strode’s reaction would be loud and violent, I feared, and I had little desire to risk his ire without sounder information.

Strode, it came about, saved me the float. Walking past the narrow line of vicars’ houses fronting the river I saw his distinctive form up ahead, standing on the pathway above the royal docks. He looked to be dawdling, waiting for someone. I was about to hail him when one of the south side doors to the palace flew open and out stepped Brembre himself, his company a dozen strong and including Strode, who fell in at the mayor’s behest and joined arms with him as they went along.

There was always a certain smugness about Nicholas Brembre, a sneering confidence in his own invulnerability. Not pride of blood, as with a higher lord, but the kind of stony façade one sees in those sorts of men who have worked and fought their way up from low places. In Brembre’s case this place was a tenement house in Bread Street Ward, where his father had been a humble cordwainer, shoeing his betters with the finest leathers to be had in London. The son came into the business with a ruthless eye on his future, somehow managing to buy himself into the Worshipful Company of Grocers and establish a successful shop that grew quickly, whether through cunning, corruption, or both. Within a matter of years he had ascended to alderman of his father’s ward, then began his first term as lord mayor of London a few months before old King Edward’s death. His greatest triumph came at Smithfield, when he stood with King Richard against a rebel force five thousand strong, then was knighted for his stolid loyalty.

A false knight, certain lords would always insist on calling him,
though he seemed to embrace the accolade rather than spurn the slander. He was Sir Nicholas to his face, Nick the Stick behind his back, and he wielded many rods against his enemies real and imagined. During his most recent election he’d had an opponent killed, knifed in the street, without a thought of penance or guilt.

Nicholas Brembre, it was whispered, could purchase your murder for half a groat.

Yet in Westminster that Parliament day Brembre was greeted like the king himself, the fawning masses delighted that the powerful mayor had deigned to step outside the walls for the occasion. He liked to surround himself with hard, armed men, who formed a diamond wedge that hustled him quickly through the crowd. The press deferred to him, parted ways for him, as if Lancaster himself were moving among them, though without the pomp and blood.

Slowly I closed the distance between us, pushing my way through a river of watchers and hucksters, drunks and whores, all stretching for a glimpse of the famed or a brush with the vulnerable. Brembre had ordered a pause, his apparent aim to speak with someone who had called to him from a gap between two of the cottages. His men spun around and stood forth, watching for a blade or a dart. Brembre and Strode turned toward the river, and as I neared their position I saw that the man who had hailed them along the vicars’ walk was Chaucer.

I spoke to one of the mayor’s guards. He got a nod from Strode, allowing me to join the three men. Though I stood half a head taller than Brembre, it was impossible not to feel diminished in the man’s presence. Taut, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, he was both knight and grocer and never let you forget either role. A lofty figure in the king’s affinity, yet the sort of man who was unafraid to pitch in and help load a wagon with barrels or boards whenever another pair of hands was needed. Brembre commanded more personal loyalty than Lancaster and the king together, and though a committed member of the royal faction, he had established over the years a fierce and widespread devotion from nearly every quarter. The mercers hated him, which in my view only burnished his reputation.

As I quickly learned, the three had been discussing the Court of
Chivalry and an ongoing dispute over livery. Chaucer flashed a rueful smile.

“As I was telling the lord mayor, John, I am to be deposed here in Westminster, one week hence, on this Scrope-Grosvenor matter. You have heard of it?”

“Not a man in England has not, Geoffrey,” I said. An exaggeration, though not by far. For months the earl marshal’s court had been traveling around the country deposing the cream of English chivalry in hopes of resolving a standing dispute between Sir Richard Scrope, a Yorkshire baron and onetime chancellor to King Richard, and Sir Robert Grosvenor, a Cheshire knight of limited influence in Westminster, over the right to a particular coat of arms. Despite the seemingly trivial subject of the dispute, many feared that blood would soon be spilled. Lords took their heraldry as seriously as their rights, investing a large portion of their honor in the disposition and protection of their arms.

“The fifteenth of this month,” Chaucer continued. “In front of Derwentwater himself, and possibly Gloucester.”

“I am to appear the same day,” said Brembre, with an ostentatious roll of his eyes. “As if a man doesn’t have better to do.”

“You must be thankful then, Lord Mayor, that your duties will soon be lightened,” I said.

Strode shot me an admonishing look, but the mayor laughed at my allusion to his coming departure from office. “I am more than happy to hand those duties on to Exton. The customs are keeping me busy enough. In fact I will be out at Gravesend for the next several days to see about these smugglers.” In addition to his duties as mayor Brembre was controller of customs for the crown, a position that would allow him to slide seamlessly from power to power upon Nicholas Exton’s inauguration at the end of the month.

“You will take the ferry?” Chaucer asked.

“My own barge,” said Brembre with a sniff.

Without a thought I asked him, “Will Lady Idonia be accompanying you, Lord Mayor?”

He turned to me, looking amused. “She’s currently at Peltham,
our house in Sussex. But she will be here later in the week. Not a happy traveler, my Idonia.”

“Too true, my lord.” Strode shook his big head. “I recall a particular journey to Oxford during your first term, when the lady—”

“Chaucer, what did you need?” said Brembre.

Strode, looking stung by the mayor’s interruption, turned away, his heavy jaw clenched shut.

“I’ve heard from Middleburgh, Lord Mayor,” said Chaucer. “The staplers are as restless as they are conniving, and there are some things you need to know before your departure. May I ride with you to the Guildhall?” Brembre had been collector of customs and thus Chaucer’s immediate superior during his time at the customhouse. The two still consulted frequently on matters of the wool trade.

“Come along, then,” said the mayor to Chaucer. “Ralph, I will see you shortly at council.”

“Yes, Lord Mayor,” said Strode, with a stiff and ungainly bow. Chaucer gave us a wink before turning away. In that moment after the mayor’s departure Strode looked aggrieved, as if put off by Chaucer’s sudden appearance and Brembre’s decision to curtail their appointed exchange.

“Where do things stand, John?” Strode asked, staring after the mayoral company folding into the crowd, with the guards closing around them. “What have you learned?”

How much to trust him? Though our friendship was long, Ralph Strode was a mayor’s man thick and through, his first loyalties owed to the Guildhall. I decided to tell him only what I suspected most strongly.

“Not as much as I would like,” I finally said. “Though what I do know is more than alarming. You heard about Piers Goodman?”

“The hermit up by Cripplegate?”

“He is dead.”

“A fire in the tower. Unfortunate.”

“Set by the Tower guard themselves. Piers never had a chance.”

He turned to me, his rheumy eyes closing with the news. I gave him a few more details gathered from my inquiries, then my most important
finding. “What I believe now, Ralph, is that the victims of this slaughter may have been Welshmen. ‘Welshmembers,’ poor Piers called them in his lunatic’s cant. He saw over a dozen of them come into the city a few nights before the bodies were found. They were brought in by the St. Giles parson, for reasons I have yet to discover.”

Strode stared at me for a long moment. “A crew of Welshmen, you say, entering by Cripplegate?”

“So Piers claimed. He also mentioned a Langbourn carter, perhaps the fellow thrown in the same privy. How the two are related I don’t yet know. Thin enough at this point, Ralph, but there it is.” Gloucester’s unknown threats to Brembre, the destroyed evidence, the identity of Norris’s witness: all this I kept to myself.

Strode’s heavy sigh was a whistle through his nose, his lips pressed tightly together. “Come with me, Gower.”

Turning from the palace Strode led me between the cottages and down to the bankside. We turned west and walked upriver a few hundred paces until we came to a position east of the royal pier, where an enormous jumble of boards, timbers, and stones sprawled fifty feet inland. The sight was a familiar one, a temporary blight on the king’s embankment during a major expansion of Westminster’s main point of access to the Thames. Three rows of new piles, eighteen in all and thick as masts, rose from beneath the water level, ending four feet above the river’s surface in iron shoes specially crafted for the purpose. Surrounding each length of timber was a large mass of stones, stacked artfully in a conical shape around every pile to reinforce the verticals against the flow of the tides. Soon the pile shoes would be connected with strong timbers, which would in turn be laid across with hundreds of boards to create a new platform several feet above the river. The effect would be a new artificial peninsula of considerable size and strength, befitting King Richard’s designs on the river.

Though the keeper of the king’s works generally called a labor halt at Parliament time, such was not the case for this job. A crew of fourteen or fifteen men had just completed a morning shift and were now ambling toward a warehouse to the rear of the wharfage.

“Dangerous work, this pier enlargement,” said Strode.

“I would think so,” I said, wondering why he had led me here.

“A week ago they were working on London Bridge, fortifying the starlings. Now they’re here.” He sighed. “These men are slaves, really. The keeper of the works has had more than one worker crushed by stones as heavy as ten men, he tells me. Several drownings. For a perilous job such as this you want outside men. Men willing to work long hours for little coin, and without wives and children in the city to feed or mourn.”

We reached the streetside door of the warehouse. An alewoman had come in and was standing among the men, filling and refilling three tin cups passed from hand to hand, lip to lip as they shared loaves and hunks of cheese among themselves. The men were haggard, worn down by the labors they had been forced to endure—though very much alive, and speaking in a tongue vaguely familiar to my ear.

“Here are your Welshmen, Gower,” said Strode, and now I knew why we were there. Piers Goodman’s “Welshmembers,” a crew of foreign laborers pressed into the most dangerous work to be found in London and Westminster. Yet these men assuredly had not been brought to the city for slaughter. I was left no closer to identifying the victims in the Walbrook than I had been that morning in the St. Bart’s churchyard.

We exchanged few words on our short and sobering walk back to the palace yard, where Strode left me for another appointment in the hall. Curls of smoke rose from two rubbish fires burning in the middle of the space, and a bank of heavy clouds was rolling in distantly from the west, threatening rain, though not for several hours. Feeling the need to clear my head after what I’d just learned, I decided to return to the city by way of the Strand, which would take me past the grand houses along the royal way.

As I neared the crowded mouth of Queen’s Street and the vintners’ stalls clustered there, I sensed a presence at that end of the square. I turned to see the pale face of Jack Norris, if anything thinner and more drawn than the last time I’d seen him. The boy was looking out over a long row of wine barrels, fixing me with a gaze both fearful and forlorn.

“Jack!” I called out. “Jack Norris!”

He continued to stare as I lunged through the crowd toward him, intent on netting him this time. Well before I reached him he pivoted on a foot, turned away, and slipped up Settler Lane, a narrow and tightly crowded way angling northwest from the square.