For love of his lemman, his life worth a leaf …
Such lines, as she murmured them to her sister, carried dire threats, each one of them tuned to the fate of an English king. Yet much of the work remained obscure, its lines heavy with symbols she couldn’t decipher. Hawks, swords, thistles, and much else.
‘So what’s it all mean, Mil?’
Millicent thought for a while. ‘Twelve prophecies, and I think I’ve undressed most of them. From the songs the minstrels sing, the plays they put on at Bromley Manor, St Paul’s, everywhere.’ The sisters knew these stories well, as did all Londoners: lays of olden kings, ballads of Harold and William the Conqueror, the story of the Lionheart, dying in his mother’s arms. ‘Twelve kings of England, Ag, all dead in the very way the minstrels say they went. Age, battle, disease, a poker in the arse.’
‘Kings can die a lot of ways, eh?’ Agnes shook her head.
‘The great question, though, is, what will be the next way?’ Millicent found the passage on the final pages that most concerned her: twelve lines of verse, speaking with a terrifying force of her own moment.
Agnes looked confused, so Millicent read through several of the prophecies and glossed along the way. ‘I hardly know all our kings, Ag, but as for the ones I do know, the book seems to have it about right. And now we have here, in these last lines, the thirteenth prophecy.’
‘The thirteenth prophecy?’
‘The death of King Richard himself.’ Millicent recited the most baleful passage in the work.
‘At Prince of Plums shall prelate oppose
A faun of three feathers with flaunting of fur,
Long castle will collar and cast out the core,
His reign to fall ruin, mors regis to roar.
By bank of a bishop shall butchers abide,
To nest, by God’s name, with knives in hand,
Then springen in service at spiritus sung.
In palace of prelate with pearls all appointed,
By kingmaker’s cunning a king to unking,
A magnate whose majesty mingles with mort.
By Half-ten of Hawks might shender be shown.
On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.’
‘There it is then,’ said Agnes, her face brightening.
‘There what is?’
‘It lays out the place of the killing, doesn’t it? “In palace of prelate” and “by bank of a bishop”. A palace by a river. A bishop’s palace.’
‘Braybrooke?’ Millicent remembered a float with Sir Humphrey to the Bishop of London’s riverside residence.
‘Or our own Wykeham,’ said Agnes. William Wykeham, the Bishop of Winchester, whose palace in Southwark stretched along a fair span of the Thames. ‘Then it gives the killer’s method, aye? Nesting with knives in hand, then springing forth—’
‘“At spiritus sung”,’ Millicent finished for her. ‘What’s that mean, then?’
Agnes shrugged. ‘Prayer, could be, ending in spiritus. Like a signal.’
‘A signal.’
‘’Cause they’ll have help, won’t they?’
‘From a “kingmaker”,’ said Millicent. ‘A magnate whose majesty is mingled with mort.’
‘Who’s this Mort?’
‘Not who but what, dearheart,’ Millicent said gently, stifling a laugh. ‘Mort is France’s word for death.’
‘Ah.’ Agnes frowned. ‘But the book tells who wants the king dead, or at least how to know them for what they be. The shenders’ll show themselves by “Half-ten of Hawks”, whatever that might betoken.’
‘Five hawks, then,’ Millicent said.
Agnes frowned. ‘Why not say five?’
‘Half-ten. Hawks.’ Millicent emphasized the common first letter of each word. ‘It’s the verse.’
‘So the killer of our king will be carrying five hawks on his arm?’
‘That’s a lot of hawks for one arm,’ Millicent mused.
Agnes crawled forward on the rushes, took the cloth that had covered the book in hand, and spread it over the floor. ‘Five hawks, the book says, and there they are, clustered around the shield. Now I see it, Mil!’ She turned round to her sister. ‘It’s like wool and a spinning wheel.’
Millicent squatted by the cloth.
‘Without the wheel, the wool is just wool.’ Agnes cradled an imagined basket. ‘What good be a basket of wool if you haven’t made it into thread yet? But once you’ve wound it on the spindle, started turning your wheel’ – her hands spun the air – ‘why, the wool starts to twist itself together, and soon you got so long a length of thread as you like.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘It’s all on the cloth, isn’t it?’
Millicent had thought little of the piece of embroidery apart from the shilling or so it would fetch on Cornhull. Yes, it was an extraordinary sample. But what did it have to do with the book?
She surveyed it now, looking more closely at the marks of livery embroidered across its span. She had noted them earlier, when Agnes first unwrapped the book for her, yet now their significance hit her with real force. Around one of the shields had been embroidered a careful pattern – a circle of five hawks – while the other sat in the midst of a triangle formed by three delicate white feathers. The cloth, she realized, told a story, a story whose main characters were embodied by the livery set between its edges. And what a story it was!
If she had learned her reading from Isabel of Barking, Millicent had learned her heraldry on the lap of Sir Humphrey ap-Roger, who had loved to point out the subtle variations signifying relations of rank, status, and depth of lineage: fields and divisions, charges and crests, beasts rampant and supine. In the difference between a blue lion on an argent field and an argent lion on a blue field lay whole histories of conquest and submission, Sir Humphrey taught her; learn these histories and the livery that tells them, Millie darling, and you’ll go far. Yet the heraldry on this cloth required no great knowledge, for she recognized most of it instantly. The colours of the king and his uncle were depicted in a battle of some kind, with swords, knives, and arrows surrounding their emblems and supporters.
Millicent clasped her sister’s hands. ‘Without the wheel, then, the wool is just wool.’
Agnes nodded. ‘And without the cloth,’ she said, continuing the thought, ‘the book is just …’
They said it together: ‘A book.’
There was one final piece. Millicent read the last line of the prophecy to her sister. ‘“On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.”’
‘Dunstan’s Day,’ said Agnes. ‘Nineteen May, or I’m a fool.’
Millicent calculated on her fingers. ‘Six weeks, Ag,’ she said into the darkness, the meaning of the prophecy chilling her limbs. ‘Our king has but six weeks to live.’
They had sat in silence for a while, absorbing the prophecy’s dire meaning, when Millicent saw a flicker of something cross her sister’s face. ‘What is it, Ag?’
‘The faun,’ she said, a faraway look in her eyes.
‘What about it?’
‘Right before that man killed her. She looked up at the sky, and she cried it out. A rhyme. ‘Though faun escape the falcon’s claws and crochet cut its snare, when father, son, and ghost we sing, of city’s blade beware!’ I remember it like my Ave Maria, her voice was so clear. It felt like she was screaming it to me, to me, while she’s kneeling there, waiting to die. It’s been stuck in my head since, just like that man’s doovay leebro, doovay leebro. So what’s it mean?’
‘Say it again.’
As Agnes repeated the rhyme, Millicent scratched it on to the last page of the manuscript with a nub of coal in her unpractised, spidery script. The words did nothing to clarify the rest of the prophecy, but writing them down seemed to calm Agnes somewhat.
‘Whatever it means it’s only words, Ag. And we can’t eat words.’ Millicent stood, the manuscript falling from her lap. ‘Nor a cloth, nor a damned book.’ She slammed the chamber door behind h
er, clomping down the outer stairs, her hopelessness rising with each descending step. Her sister in her bed, the two of them together for the first time in years, yet Millicent felt more alone than ever. City’s blade indeed.
ELEVEN
Basinghaw Street, Ward of Basinghaw
In London, if you die of unnatural causes, your corpse will be inspected not by the coroner himself but by his deputy, who gathers witnesses, orders the beadle to summon the jury from around the ward, and performs the inquest at the site of demise. The procedures are well established, and in theory should function smoothly.
Things are somewhat messier in practice. Though he works on behalf of the city, the coroner reports to the king’s chamberlain, not to the mayor – a bureaucratic peculiarity I have found immensely useful over the years. Officials of city and crown can always be stirred against one another, and divided loyalties are to my vocation what a hammer is to a smith’s. Since the last year of Edward’s reign, the commons had been complaining regularly in Parliament about the coroner’s office and the mischief this arcane arrangement could cause. To have a city official unbeholden to the mayor of London? A scandal, and an opportunity.
As usual Thomas Tyle, king’s coroner, was absent when I arrived at his chambers on Wednesday of Easter week. The location spoke of the office’s tenuous relation to the city government: just outside Guildhall Yard but within shouting distance of the mayor’s chambers, and the common serjeant’s, though I had sent a boy ahead to confirm the common serjeant’s absence from the precincts. Seeing me here would raise uncomfortable questions in Ralph Strode’s mind, and I needed him on my side.
Two clerks, facing one another over a double-sided desk. Neither looked up.
‘Is Symkok about?’
The one to the left raised his jaw slightly, eyes still on his work. ‘He’s in there.’ The back room, which I’d visited more than once. It was a dark space despite the bright day, the shutters closed nearly to. I found Nicholas Symkok, chief clerk to the subcoroner, hunched over the end of a table, a ledger opened before him. A crooked finger followed a column downward. The curve of his back seemed part of the furniture, a bony arc some carpenter hadn’t thought to trim.
Nick Symkok was my first. It still startles me to think of how natural it all seemed when it began. Just a few years after the great dying, half of London beneath the soil, the city abuzz with news of the Oxford riots. That summer I found myself performing occasional clerical work in the Exchequer under the chancellor’s remembrancer. Though I hardly needed the money, my father had promised my temporary services to the treasurer, to whom he owed a favour.
It was during the Michaelmas audit when one of our counters came to me with a messy sheaf of returns from Warwick’s manors near Coventry. It seemed a sheriff had been drastically undercounting the number of tenants in his hundred, with the resulting decline in revenues from that part of the earl’s demesne. I received permission from the remembrancer to take a discreet trip out to the Midlands to investigate. A careful comparison with the original returns soon showed that nothing was amiss in the earl’s record-keeping. The guilty party, I realized, had to be one of our own.
A few days of digging back in Westminster turned up Nicholas Symkok, an auditor responsible for the embezzlement of nearly twenty pounds from the king’s treasury over the last several years. Not only that, but Symkok had been using these enormous sums to purchase the flesh of the boy choristers singing for a prominent chantry attached to St Paul’s.
When I confronted Symkok he melted in front of me, begging me to say nothing to the chancellor or the remembrancers – asking me to save his life. I agreed, on one condition. Symkok, I told him, would hereafter provide me any and all unusual information that came across his desk: the shady business of earls, the questionable holdings of barons, the conniving of knights. He was to digest all of it, slipping me anything of possible interest. I paid him, though just enough to keep him dangling on my hook. For several years after I left the Exchequer, Symkok was my main conduit, giving me my first clear look at the private lives of the lords of the realm.
Those years taught me much about the peculiar arts of chantage, and it was from the steady flow of copied documents in Symkok’s hand that my small reserve of knowledge gradually expanded to encompass the vast store of information it would become. The arrangement seemed to crush Symkok, though, and he was never the same man. His ambitions stifled, he had spent the last twenty years floating through a series of clerical positions in the London and Westminster bureaucracies, all of them happily useful to my own purposes, if not to his career. At present he worked for the coroner of London, counting corpses.
I watched him until he felt my presence. He turned slowly on his bench. His eyes widened. ‘Gower.’
‘Hello, Nick.’
‘What brings you here?’
‘Death, of course.’
‘Whose?’
‘A girl’s.’
‘Lots of dead girls in London.’
‘Not like this one.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Medusa? Persephone?’ I said wryly.
‘Name unknown, then?’
‘To me it is.’
‘And when did she die?’
‘A week ago, perhaps more.’
‘How?’
‘Clubbed, or stabbed,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Murder, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where did she die?’
‘The Moorfields.’
It was as if a flame blew out in his eyes. His face went flat, expressionless.
‘She was killed in the Moorfields, two weeks ago or more,’ I repeated. ‘I take it you know the circumstances?’
Symkok looked down at the ledger, his jaw rigid. ‘Can’t help you, Gower. Not on this one.’
A dog barked from Guildhall gate, a muffled sound that carried through the outer room. I let the silence linger. ‘But I think you can, Nick.’
He shifted on his bench. A vacant stare toward the shutters, and finally that reliable nod. From a cupboard at his feet he removed a wooden box and placed it on the table, then reached inside and withdrew a heavy roll. He spread it across the surface, the worn wooden handles gleaming with the polish of many hands, until he found the entry in question.
‘Be quick about it.’ He left the room, with the coroner’s roll opened on the table. In this document would be transcribed the original report, which was written out at the scene of the inquest. The roll, then, was the official copy of all the coroner’s investigations of unnatural deaths in London during the term of his appointment. A rich and morbid archive, I had found over the years. I read the inquest report.
Friday the eve of Lady Day, ao 8 Richard II, it happened that a certain woman, name unknown, lay dead of a death other than her rightful death beside a certain low wood building in the Moorfields, in the rent of the holy priory of St Bethlem. On hearing this, the coroner and the sheriffs proceeded thither, and having summoned good men of various wards – viz. James Barkelay, Will Wenters, Ralph Turk, Thomas de Redeford, mercer, Simon de Saint Johan of Cornhull, draper, Laurence Sely, Simon Pulham, skinner, John Lemman &c. – they diligently inquired how it happened. The jurors say that on some unknown day before said Friday, said woman was beaten in the face and struck on the head and bloodied, feloniously murdered by an unknown assailant. When asked who found the dead body, they say a certain Adam de Hoyne, carter, did raise the hue and cry upon discovering the lady in her natural state. Upon inquiring further they did learn that no witnesses were found to be present at the said woman’s death, nor did they find that anyone about knew her name, nor her station, nor her land of origin.
The corpse viewed &c.
Clothing appraised at 2s.
The surrounding inquests contained nothing out of the ordinary. I read the report again, memorizing certain details. The body had been discovered some days after the murder, it appeared. The woman had been beaten, her death apparen
tly caused by a blow to the skull. She had been found ‘in her natural state’, or unclothed. No witnesses, no identifying belongings. The appraisal of her clothing was high, though not unusually so.
In the outer chamber Symkok was conferring with his fellow clerks. When I emerged he gestured me outside. We reached the middle of Cat Street before he opened his mouth. ‘So?’
‘Seems simple enough,’ I said.
‘Murder usually is, in my experience.’
‘Tyle himself held the inquest?’
He nodded.
‘Bit unusual.’
Symkok shrugged. ‘Though not unprecedented. When an earl dies on us, or a knight—’
‘A nameless girl, stripped to the smooth? Hardly an earl, Nick.’
He wouldn’t meet my gaze.
‘Tell me, Nick.’
He straightened his back, his chin high. ‘Nothing more to tell, Gower.’
We stood for a time, Symkok squirming in his discomfort.
‘Do some digging, then,’ I quietly said. A cart passed behind him, a low groan from its wheels. ‘I need to know why Tyle took this one. Who told him to do the inquest himself rather than fob it off, like he usually does? And what did he find?’
He swallowed, his lined neck rippling with the effort.
‘Be discreet about it, Nick.’
He swallowed again. ‘Always am, Gower, at least where you’re concerned.’
I left him there, gnawing at his past.
Back at St Mary Overey a letter awaited me in the hall. I took it up from the tray where Will Cooper would leave all my correspondence, expecting a bill from a local merchant, or a report from the bailiff of one of my estates. I was surprised at the letter’s weight until I turned it over and saw the heavy seal. The wax bore the impress of Robert Braybrooke, Bishop of London.
Rather unusual, to send a sealed missive across the river when the bishop’s messenger could have said a simple word to my servant. After a moment’s hesitation I broke the wax. The note was short and to the point, and in his chief secretary’s hand. The Lord Bishop of London requested my presence at Fulham Palace this Monday, at the hour of Tierce, upon his return from a visitation up north. The letter left the subject of the appointment unmentioned. London and I had had our moments, though all of that was far in the past, and I wondered what the bishop could possibly want with me. I thought about it for a while, ticking off a mental list of current complexities but coming up with nothing aside from Katherine Swynford’s brief mention of Braybrooke at La Neyte, and his distress over the book sought by Chaucer.
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