The Invention of Fire (2 page)

The word
handgun
enters the English language in the final decades of the fourteenth century. The compound noun first appears in an inventory record from the Tower of London, occurring at the end of the phrase “
iiii canones parue de cupro vocate handgonnes
” (“four small copper cannon, called
handgonnes
”). These medieval
handgonnes
were metal tubes packed with gunpowder and fired with a burning coal or cord, a far cry from the sophisticated pistols and rifles found in modern arsenals. Yet across Europe, these decades witnessed unprecedented innovation and experimentation in the development of small arms, as gunpowder weapons grew increasingly portable, efficient, and thus terrifying. The emerging use of
handgonnes
on the battlefields of Europe, as well as their appearance in civilian contexts, marked a crucial technological shift in the development of weaponry—as well as a subtle but profound transformation in the long history of human atrocity.

And in the autumn of that year, in the village of Desurennes, a company came from the woods with small guns of iron borne in their hands, and laid great waste to the market, to the wares and those who sold them along the walls, and in the eyes of God made wondrous calamity with fire and shot.

—LE TROISIÈME CHRONIQUE DE CALAIS,
ENTRY FOR YEAR 1386

T
HE WATER SEEPED PAST,
groping for the dead.

It was early on an Ember Saturday, and low down along the deepest channel in London, Alan Pike braced for a fall. He sucked a shallow breath as beside him his son moved through the devilish swill. The boy’s arms were thin as sticks but lifted his full spade with a ready effort, even a kind of cheer. Good worker, young Tom, a half knob shy of fourteen, reliable, strong, uncomplaining, despite all a gongfarmer had to moan about—quite a heavy lot, helping the city streams breathe easy. Tom filled another bucket and hefted it to one of the older boys to haul above for the dungcart. From there it would be wheeled outside the walls, likely to feed some bishop’s roses.

Night soil, the mayor’s men primly called it, though it had commoner names. Dung and gong, fex and flux, turd and purge and shit. Alan Pike and his crew, they called it hard work and wages.

Dark work, mostly, as London didn’t like its underbelly ripped open to the sun, so here he was with his fellows, a full four hours after the curfew bell, working in the calm quiet a few leaps down from the loudest, busiest crossing in London. The junction of Broad Street, Cornhill and the Poultry, the stocks market, and everything else. The brassy navel of the city by day; a squalid gut in the night.

Alan squinted through the pitch, peering past his son down the jagged line of buildings spanning this length of the Walbrook. Twenty privies, by his estimate, most attached to private houses and tenements hulked up over the open stream, but two of the highest seats had been built to the common good for use by all. The Long Dropper, this great institution was called, and a farthing a squeeze the custom, the coins collected by a lame beggar enjoying the city’s modest gesture of charity toward its most wretched.

At night, though, no one was posted at the hanging doors up top. The parish was at a hush. The only sounds to be heard were the shallow breathing of his son, a faint snore from one of the houses above, the scurryings and chewings of the brook rats all round.

“Any closer, Father?” Tom, always respectful even when tired out, though Alan could tell he was ready to leave off. It had already been a long night.

“Let us have a look,” said Alan, lengthening his back, hearing a happy pop. He legged it through the muck and mud to the middle of the stream. Earlier they had rigged up a row of lanterns at either end of the stretch to light the crew’s work, show them what they were meddling with. In the past hour the stream had loosened up fairly well at the north end, but the water was still damming farther in, and as he squatted and peered through the stink he had to shift both ways to spy the three orbs of pale light at the far end of the clogged channel.

He shook his head, sucked a lip.

A major blockage, this one.

Something big. Something stuck. The Walbrook’s moderate flow should have pushed most anything down to the Thames. Not this lot, whatever it was. A pile of rotten lumber, could be. Or a horse, lamed on the street and shoved over the bank to struggle and drown, like that old mare they’d roped out of the Fleet Ditch last month. Whatever this bulk turned out to be, the Guildhall would hear about it, that was certain.

Alan turned to his crew. “Fetch me one of those lanterns there.” The young man behind Tom repeated the command to another fellow
closer to the lamp string, who trudged back and removed one of the oil lamps dangling from the line. When Alan had it in his grip he held the light before him, up and to the side, and moved ahead.

One step, another. This section of the stream was almost impassable. Up to his hips now. The thick, nearly immovable sludge clung to his legs like a dozen rutting dogs. He had to will his body to move forward, every step a victory.

He was taking a risk, he knew that, and for what?

A gongfarmer’s pay was good enough, sure and certain, but one false step and he could be sucked right under, or release a pocket of devil’s air that would ignite and turn him into one of these lanterns, sizzling hair and all. Alan knew more than a few gongers who’d fallen to their deaths or close to it in these narrow depths. Why, just upstream from here, old Purvis crashed through the seat of a public latrine like the one over Alan’s head right now, poor gonger was rat food by the time they found him, a chewed mess of—

Then he saw it. A hand, pale and alone in the lamplight, streaked with brown and standing out against the solid mound of dung behind it.

“
By Judas!
” Alan Pike swore, and would have fallen backwards had the thick flow not braced him.

“Father?” Tom’s worried voice came from behind.

Alan looked again. The hand was not severed, as he’d first feared. No, the hand was attached to an arm, and the arm was attached to another arm, looked like, and that arm, why, that arm was sprouting from a leg—no no no, from a head, but that was impossible, so then what in—

It bloomed in Alan Pike then, just what he was seeing. This was no pile of gong blocking the Walbrook, nor no horse neither. Why, this was—

“Father, what is it then?”

Tom, beside him now, peering ahead with that boy’s curiosity he had about most everything in the world. Alan heaved an arm, wanting to cover his son’s eyes against the devilish sight, but Tom pushed it aside and grasped the lamp and Alan let it go, a slow, reluctant loosing
as the oily handle slipped from his grasp and then he felt Tom’s smaller, smoother hand against his own. Slick clasp of love, last touch of innocence.

They stared together, father and son, at this mound of ruined men. No words could come.

W
HAT USE IS
a blind man in the face of the world’s calamities? Turn to Scripture and you will quickly learn that the blind are Pharisees and fools, sorcerers and unbelievers. The Syrian army blinded at the behest of Elijah (2 Kings 16). The blind and the lame banished from David’s house (2 Samuel 5). Horses smitten with blindness (Zachariah 12). More often the blind are mere figures of speech, emblems of ignorance and lack of faith. The blind leading the blind (Matthew 15:14). The eyes of the blind, opened through the grace of the Lord (Psalm 146:8). The hand of the Lord rests upon thee, and thou shalt be blinded (Acts 13:11). Our proverbs, too, reek with the faults of the blind. Blind as a mole. Oh, how blind are the counsels of the wicked! Man is ever blind to his own faults, but fox-quick at perceiving those of others.

Blind blinded blinding blindness blind. What did the men who wrote such things know of blindness? What can I know? For I am not blind, not just yet, though I am well on my way. If the final dark of unsight is a dungeon in a dale I am halfway down the hill, my steps toward that lasting shadow lengthening with each passing week even as my soul shrinks against that fuller affliction to come.

Yet this creeping blindness itself is not the worst of it. Far worse is the swelling of desire. As my sight wanes, my lust for the visible world surges, a boiling pot just before the water is cast to the dirt.
Dusted arcs of sunlight in the vaults of St. Paul’s, crimson slick of a spring lamb’s offal puddled on the wharf, fine-etched ivory of a young nun’s face, prickle of stars splayed on the night. Color, form, symmetry, beauty, radiance,
glow
. All fading now, like the half-remembered faces of the departed: my sisters, my children, my well-beloved wife. All soon enough gone, this sweet sweet world of sight.

There are some small compensations. Sin is to human nature what blindness is to the eye, the blessed St. Augustine writes, and as the light dims, as crisp lines blur, I find I am discovering a renewed fondness for the weighty sensuality of sin and its vehicles. The caterpillar fuzz of parchment on the thumb. A thin knife slipped beneath the wax. The gentle
pip
of a broken seal. A man’s secrets opened to my nose, whole worlds of sin spread out like so many blooming flowers in a field, scent so heavy you can chew it. I have a sweet tooth for vice, and it sharpens with age.

No pity for me, then. Save your compassion and your prayers for the starving, the maimed, the murdered. They need them far more than I do, and in the weeks that concern me here pity was in especially short supply. It was instead malevolence that overflowed the city’s casks that autumn, treachery that stalked laborer and lord alike up the alleys, along the walls, through the selds of Cheapside and the churchyards of Cornhill. And if the blind must founder in the face of monstrosity, perhaps a man clinging to his last glimpses of the visible world may prove its most discerning foe.

SITTING BEFORE ME THAT SEPTEMBER
morning was my dead wife’s father. A mess of a man, skin a waxy pale, his clothing as unkempt as his accounting. Ambrose Birch: a weeping miser, and a waste of fine teeth.

“For—for her sake, John.” He thumbed his moistening eyes and looked up into the timbers, darkened with years of smoke from an unruly hearth. My reading room, a low, close space lit only by a narrow slip of light from a glazed window onto the priory yard.

“Her sake,” I said. His daughter dead for nearly two years, and still the dull pieties. I stared through him, this cruelest of fathers,
cruel in ways even I had never learned, despite all that Sarah once told me. Sarah, a soul always ready to give more than necessary. She had absolved him long before her death, and wished me to do the same.

Something I had noticed previously but never put into words was that peculiar way Birch had with his chin, rather a large one considering his smallness of face. When he said my name his chin bobbed, always twice, and his voice lowered and rasped, as if throwing out each
John
while a hoof pressed his throat.

“How did you get it?” Birch whispered. “I cannot—who sold it to you, John?”

His fortune and reputation hanging by this thread on my desk, and he is curious about a sale.

“That should be your last concern, Ambrose,” I gently told him. “The prickly question is, who will John Gower sell it to?”

“How
dare
you threaten me, you milk-blood coward!” His lips quivered, the upper one raised in a weak snarl. “Here you sit in your little hole, bent over your inky creations, your twisted mind working itself in knots to spit out more of this—what?” He turned to look at the orderly rows and stacks of quires and books around the room, many of them lined with my own verse. Back at me.

“She pitied you, John.”

I scoffed.

“Ah, but it’s true,” he said, warming to it. “She talked about it with her mother. What a burden it was getting to be, your trade in threats and little scandals. How it pushed away your friends and relations, reduced everything to the latest gossip or bribe. How sad it was to see you waste your life, your mind, your spirit.” He paused, then, with meaning, “Your eyes.”

I flinched, blinked against the blur.

“Just as I thought. You believe a husband’s growing blindness can be hidden from a wife, a wife as perceptive as our late Sarah? And do you think for a moment, John, that your position will not weaken once news of this affliction gets out? Imagine a blind man trying to peddle secrets at the Guildhall or Westminster. They’ll all be slipping you
snipped nobles, laughing in your face, cheering behind your back. The mighty John Gower, lord of extraction, brought down by the most just act of God imaginable. A spy who cannot see, a writer who cannot read.”

I lifted a corner of the document. “I have no difficulty reading this, Birch.”

With a scowl he said, “For now, perhaps. For now. But in future you would be advised to remember that I have as much information on you as you have on me. Of course, I am a temperate man.” He jerked at his coat, remembering why he was there. “Given the—the more
immediate
matter before us, I suppose there is room for a negotiation. But don’t expect to come back to me with additional demands, John. A man can last only so long doing what you do.”

We settled on three pounds. A minor fortune to Ambrose Birch, if a mouse’s meal to his son-in-law. The money, of course, was beside the point. It was the information that bore the value. Each new fragment of knowledge a seed, to be sown in London’s verdant soil and spring yet another flower for my use.

I gave him the usual warnings.
I’ve made arrangements with a clerk across the river . . . In the event of my passing . . . And should there be another incident . . .
Birch, still ignorant, left the house through the priory yard, the clever forgery he had just purchased curled in his moistened palm.

Will Cooper, my servant, bobbed in the doorway. Kind faced, impossibly thin but well jowled, with the crinkled eyes of the aging man he was. “Master Gower?”

“Yes, Will?”

“Boy for you, sir. From the Guildhall.”

Behind him stood a liveried page from the mayor’s retinue. I gestured him in. “Speak,” I said.

“I come from Master Ralph Strode, good sir,” the boy said stiffly. “Master Strode kindly requests the presence of Master John Gower at Master John Gower’s earliest.”

“The Guildhall, then?” Ralph Strode had recently stepped down
from his longtime position as the city’s common serjeant, though the mayor had arranged an annuity to retain him for less formal duties.

“Nay, sir. St. Bart’s Smithfield.”

“St. Bart’s?” I frowned at him, already dreading it. “Why would Ralph want me to meet him in Smithfield?” Located outside the walls, the hospital at St. Bartholomew tended to the poorest of the city’s souls, its precincts a stew of livestock markets and old slaughterbarns, many of them abandoned since the pestilence. Not the sort of place to which Strode would normally summon a friend.

“Don’t know, sir,” said the boy with a little shrug. “Myself, I came across from Basinghall Street, as Master Strode was leaving for St. Bart’s.”

“Very well.” I dismissed him with a coin. Will gave me an inquisitive look as the boy left. My turn to shrug.

I had eaten little that morning so stood in the kitchen as Bet Cooper, Will’s wife, young and plump to his old and lean, bustled about preparing me a plate of greens with cut lamb. A few swallows of cider and my stomach was content. At Winchester’s wharf I boarded a wherry for the London bankside below Ludgate at the mouth of the Fleet. A moderate walk from the quay took me across Fleet Street, then up along the ditch to the hospital.

St. Bartholomew’s, though an Augustinian house like St. Mary Overey, rarely merited a visit given the unpleasant location, easily avoidable on a ride from the city walls to Westminster. The hospital precinct comprised three buildings, a lesser chapel and greater church as well as the hospital itself, branched from the chapel along a low cloister. An approach from the south brought visitors to the lesser church first, which I reached as the St. Bart’s bell tolled for Sext. I circled around the south porch toward the hospital gates, where the porter shared his suspicions about my business. They were softened with a few groats.

The churchyard, rutted and pocked, made a skewed shape of drying mud, tufted grass, and leaning stone, all centered on the larger church within the hospital grounds. Not a single shrub or tree interrupted
the morbid rubble. Shallow burials were always a problem at St. Bart’s. Carrion birds hooking along, small demons feeding on the dead. Though the air was dry, the soil was moist and the earth churned underfoot, alive with the small gluttonies of worms.

Three men stood along the south wall gazing down into a wide trench. Ralph Strode, the largest and widest, raised his head and turned to me as I walked across, his prominent jowls swaying beneath a nose broken years before in an Oxford brawl and never entirely healed. His eyes, somber and heavy, were colored a deep amber pouched within folds of rheumy skin.

“Gower,” he said.

I opened my mouth to speak, closed it against a gathering stench, and then I saw the dead. A line of corpses, arrayed in the trench like fish on an earl’s platter. All were men, all were stripped bare, only loose braies or rags wrapping their middles. Their skin was flecked with what looked like mud but smelled like shit, and gouged with wounds large and small. At least five of them bore circular marks around their necks in a dull red; from hanging, I guessed. My eyes moved slowly over the bodies as I counted. Eight, twelve—sixteen of them, their rough shrouds still open, waiting for a last blessing and sprinkle from a priest.

“Who are they?” I asked Strode.

The silence lengthened. I stood there, the rot mingling with the heavy buzz of feeding flies. Finally I looked up.

“We don’t know.” Strode watched for my reaction.

“You don’t
know
?”

“Not a soul on the inquest jury recognized a one of them.”

“How can sixteen men die without being known, whether by name or occupation?”

“Or rank, or ward, or parish,” said Strode. He raised his big hands, spread his arms. “We simply don’t know.”

“Where were they found?”

“In the Walbrook, down from the stocks at Cornhill. Beneath that public privy there.”

“The Long Dropper,” I said. Board seats, half a door, a deep and teeming ditch. “And the first finders?”

“A gongfarmer and his son. Their crew were clearing out the privy ditches. Two nights ago this was, and the bodies were carted here this morning by the coroner’s men. Before first light, naturally.”

My gaze went back to the bodies. “An accident of some kind? Perhaps a bridge collapse? But surely I would have heard about such a thing.”

“Nothing passes you by, does it, Gower?”

Strode’s tone was needlessly sharp, and when I looked over at him I could see the strain these deaths were placing on the man. He blew out a heavy sigh. “It was murder, John. Murder en masse. These men met violent deaths somewhere, then they were disposed of in a privy ditch. I have never seen the like.”

“The coroner?”

“The inquest got us nowhere. Sixteen men, dead of a death other than their natural deaths, but no one can say of what sort. They certainly weren’t slashed or beaten.”

“Nor hung by the neck,” said the older of the two men standing behind us.

Strode turned quickly, as if noticing the pair for the first time, then signaled the man forward. “This is Thomas Baker and his apprentice,” he said. “Baker here is a master surgeon, trained in Bologna in all matter of medical arts, though now lending his services to the hospital here at St. Bart’s. I have asked him to inspect the bodies of these poor men, see what we can learn.”

“Learn about what?” I said.

“What killed them.”

Strode’s words hung in the air as I looked over Baker and the boy beside him. Though short and thin the surgeon stood straight, a wiry length of a man, hardened from the road and the demands of his craft. His apprentice was behind him, still and obedient.

“Surely you’re not thinking of the Italian way,” I said to Strode.

His jowls shook. “Even in this circumstance the bishop won’t hear of dissection. You know Braybrooke. His cant is all can’t. Were these sixteen corpses sixteen
hundred
we’d get no dispensation from the bishop of London. Far be it from the church to sanction free inquiry,
curiositas,
genuine knowledge.” A familiar treatise from Ralph Strode, a former schoolman at Oxford, and I would have smiled had the circumstances not been so grim. He looked at Baker. “Our surgeon here is more enlightened. One of these
moderni,
with ten brains’ worth of new ideas about medicine, astronomy, even music, I’ll be bound.”

“What makes you believe these men weren’t hung?” I asked the surgeon. “Those red circles around some of their necks? I would think the solution is apparent.”

Baker shook his head, unaffected by my confidence. “Those are rope burns, Master Gower, or so I believe, though inflicted after death, not before.”