A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  With a deep yawn of old iron, the door yielded, giving way to the cold gloom of a long rectangular chamber. Little light penetrated through from the high windows. Before them on the east wall was painted the figure of a massive robed woman, a cloth binding her eyes, a set of balanced scales hanging from her left hand. IUSTITIA, the Latin inscription above her read. In Scroope’s Inn, Millicent mused, justice isn’t a pretty painting, for here the law sees everything, and the scales are always tipped. It could be no mistake that Pinchbeak had directed them to his own domain, the chambers of the serjeants-at-law, the most powerful legal officials in the land. There were fewer than thirty of them, king’s appointees all, with their own set of privileges, their own style of robe and coif, their own grand inn up on Holbourne. Sir Humphrey ap-Roger had known several of them, dined with them in this very inn as a guest on occasion, though even he, a knight of ancient lineage, had felt intimidated in the serjeants’ company.

  Doors off the front hall led out to a central courtyard, where a series of covered staircases on the outer walls rose to two levels of apartments. They reached another chamber, smaller though equally high. In an alcove off the far corner stood three writing desks arranged around an aged clerk, his bent form crammed between them. A mounted arc of candles hung chained from a lower rafter, rendering the man’s head, uncapped and bald, as a glowing orb.

  He did not look up at their approach. At his desk Millicent said, ‘We seek Master Thomas Pinchbeak, sir, serjeant-at-law. Where may we find him, if you please?’

  Still without moving his head, the old man replied, ‘First back stairs, top level, eastern corner rooms on the south side.’ Then he looked up, taking them in with something like terror. He sputtered a bit, shook his head, and gave them a stern frown. Millicent could almost hear his bones creak as he rose. ‘Women are not permitted in Scroope’s, nor in any of the inns of our art. You must leave at once.’

  ‘But Master Pinchbeak himself summoned us,’ said Millicent. ‘And here we are.’

  ‘Summoned you, did he?’ the man thundered. ‘Summoned the pair of you, and not tell old Wilkes? Couldn’t be bothered to – not that I – well … ahhhh.’ His voice weakened and his eyes shot upward, catching the flames. ‘Though do I recall something about …’ He grimaced down at his desk, his hands sorting through the loose sheaves around him. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Rykener,’ said Millicent. ‘My name is Eleanor Rykener.’

  Agnes gasped. Millicent silenced her with a look.

  ‘Eleanor Rykener, Eleanor Rykener,’ the old man intoned, patting around his desk. Millicent heard the clink of coins. He help up a felt purse. ‘This is for your troubles, an advance left for you by Master Pinchbeak. The serjeant had an urgent matter at the bench.’

  Millicent, torn between frustration and greed, took the purse, opened it, then showed it to Agnes, who reached inside and pulled out a small handful of coins.

  ‘Two marks of silver, that be,’ the old man said, ‘and not a farthing less. With the balance to be paid upon delivery, says Master Pinchbeak.’

  Millicent started to protest. They hadn’t brought the book with them, fearing some form of deception on the serjeant-at-law’s part. Their plan had been to gauge Pinchbeak’s seriousness and see the money before returning to the Pricking Bishop to retrieve the manuscript.

  ‘And this balance, good sir?’ Agnes asked in her pleasantest tone. ‘Its size?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘Master Pinchbeak said nothing to me about its size, my pretty. He requests your return tomorrow with the item in question.’

  Outside they considered the exchange as they walked back through the walls and toward the bridge. ‘Merely an advance, that man said,’ said Agnes. ‘And tomorrow we’ll collect the balance, eh, Mil?’

  ‘So it appears,’ said Millicent, though without her sister’s optimism. If Pinchbeak truly wanted the book, why would he have left a mere two marks, and why would he have put them off like this? Something about these dealings with the serjeant-at-law didn’t sit right, though Millicent couldn’t sort it before Agnes started pressing her about the Eleanor Rykener business. Millicent explained, telling her sister about Eleanor’s visit to her Cornhull house, then her use of Eleanor’s name in her meeting with Pinchbeak at the parvis.

  ‘It just happened, Ag,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t very well use my own, could I? Hers was in my head, and it spilled out when Pinchbeak asked me my name.’

  Agnes, visibly furious, said nothing all the way to the bridge, then across to Southwark, with Millicent tagging her heels. On Rose Alley their steps slowed at the sight before them.

  A small crowd of maudlyns, spilling on to the lane. The girls, some of them wearing only unlaced shifts, had gathered unexpectedly in the street, while others had dressed themselves in their shabby finery; few heads were covered.

  St Cath, arrayed in a faded purple gown and a hood four sizes too great for her shrunken head, sat with a cat on her lap, glowering up the alley. As her daughters approached Bess Waller turned to face them, her arms crossed tightly, her jaw set in anger.

  ‘What is it?’ Millicent asked, fearing the worst.

  ‘Thing’s gone.’

  ‘What’s gone?’ Agnes asked. ‘What thing?’ Millicent asked at the same moment.

  ‘The book,’ Bess said. ‘Nor will you credit who’s robbed us of it.’ She told them the details: Eleanor Rykener, all manned up, sneaking by St Cath and appearing in the Bishop’s kitchen. The slammed cellar trap. The spilled oats. Finally Bess’s release by one of the girls.

  Millicent spun on Agnes. ‘And it had to be that Eleanor Rykener, didn’t it?’ she spat, no longer regretting her use of the maudlyn’s name with Pinchbeak. ‘I hope that swerver hangs for treason.’

  Agnes gasped. ‘What – how could you—’

  ‘She stole it from us, Ag. Out from under our chins. And with it our only chance at a future.’

  The sisters turned away from one another, silent in their mutual fury.

  ‘So there it is, then,’ said Bess eventually. ‘What’s a biddy maud like Eleanor Rykener hope to do with a cursed stack of parchments?’

  It was at that moment that St Cath looked up from her trance. Her face shone with the confidence of a prophetess. ‘Only one place in London an unlettered maud could hope to sell a book,’ she croaked. ‘Leastwise in my experience.’

  They all looked at her, wondering what strange memory had provoked the old whore’s intervention.

  ‘And where’s that, St Cath?’ Bess Waller asked her with the patience the woman’s years deserved.

  ‘Ave Maria Lane,’ St Cath went on with a sage nod. ‘Hard by St Paul’s. Had it off there with a limner and his apprentice upon a time.’ Her eyes sparkled with the recollection. ‘Or Paternoster Row. That’s where I’d look for the tarred slut.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Broad Street, Oxford

  ‘How much for the copying?’

  ‘Three and two.’

  ‘And the subwarden let you have it for the week?’

  ‘“One of only two copies of Master Albertus in Balliol,” he tells me. “Mind it well, young Pelham, mind it well.”’

  ‘And you will?’

  ‘I’ll keep it chained to my wrist.’

  ‘And basted with your annotations.’

  ‘Basted, roasted, ruminated—’

  ‘And shat on Shitbarn Lane.’

  ‘Into the privy of theology—’

  ‘We call Balliol College.’

  The three students erupted in laughter as they walked by, sparing no glance for a robeless Londoner seated on a stone wall. One of them looked a bit like Simon, the same sparkle of wit and ardour in his eyes, brains and charm to burn. They passed beneath the arched gate into Balliol yard.

  With a heavy sigh I rose, feeling, as always in Oxford, like the slow third wheel of a swifter cart. Though I had travelled here several times in recent years, I was neither a former student nor, like Ralph Strode, a master, my education
having led me to the Temple rather than to Oxford or Cambridge. I knew men who had studied in both towns, Strode among them, and Chaucer always swore I could have been a fine philosopher or logician. But I had admitted to myself years before that certain dimensions of these disciplines were beyond me.

  Though what, I wondered as I looked up Broad Street at yet another ruined façade, can come of theology when its greatest home lies in rubble? The town of Oxford seemed to have declined since my last visit into a haven of thieves and whores, stealing and swyving in the empty plots and fallow fields along the London road, keeping company with the hanged. Yet as the keeper of the inn at St Frideswide’s had remarked, for every structure being pulled down outside the walls another two were going up on Cornmarket Street. Even the Durham monks had ambitions to expand their manse into a full-fledged college, with its own degreed faculty. As Will Cooper had observed to me on our way along the high street, Oxford was a confused town, it was plain to see: uncertain about its future yet eager to scrape away its pestilential past, caught in that strange land between decay and renewal.

  I walked through the outer doors of the Durham hospitium as the monks were concluding Tierce. The voice of the abbot dismissed the monks to their work, and outside they broke up into smaller clusters.

  One of the last to leave the oratorium was an old man in lay garb. His hose were cut tight around his ankles, tucked into rough boots that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a ploughman. He wore a loose jacket of thin brown wool, unbuttoned over a simple shirt dyed a dark red, and from its collar jutted a neck of remarkable length made all the more striking in contrast with its owner’s head, which seemed to block the sun as he approached me from across the quadrangle. Though deep crags lined his brow, his skin lay drum-tight against his cheeks, as if pulled by an unseen force somewhere behind his ears.

  ‘Master John Gower?’

  ‘The same.’ I half-bowed to the man. ‘You are Peter de Quincey?’

  ‘All my life,’ was his reply. ‘Come to sniff through the bishop’s books, have you?’ He asked a few other pointed questions, referring to the letter from Strode I had sent around the day before. Apparently satisfied, he led me to a far corner of the outer manse, where a narrow doorway opened to the dormitory passage.

  ‘Bishop Angervyle, Strode tells me, was a great man,’ I said to his back.

  ‘The greatest,’ said Quincey as he stepped along the narrow passage. ‘His lordship served as the king’s cofferer, as dean of rolls, as bishop of Durham, even as envoy to Avignon, to say nothing of his station as lord chancellor. A lustrous life.’

  ‘Though I’ve heard, too,’ I said, sensing his eagerness to expand, ‘that Angervyle was instrumental in the deposition of the second King Edward. That he was forced to hide out in Paris for a time.’

  A secretive smile over his shoulder. ‘I will not deny it. He was a man of powerful associations. An adviser and emissary to kings, emperors, and popes. But above all Richard Angervyle was a devoted collector of books. An amasser of books, one of unparalleled devotion. You undoubtedly know about the more immense holdings in our realm. Bury St Edmunds, St Albans, the libraries at Winchester and Worcester …’ We left the grange through a rear door facing on the walls. Fields and orchards beyond, workers toiling in the distance. ‘And the great libraries of Christendom: the holdings of King Charles of France, the curial libraries at Rome and Avignon.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, thinking of Chaucer’s account of the Visconti collection. Our apparent destination was a small, detached building positioned against the north wall and surrounded by a thick cluster of trees and shrubs. The building’s walls formed a hexagon of timber and stone.

  ‘Yet these libraries, while great in number, have no soul.’ Quincey pulled a long key from its dangle by his waist; it reminded me of Tom Tugg’s grotesque key to the Newgate cells, though more finely wrought. There was a click, then, with a reluctant breath, the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.

  ‘Such collections,’ Quincey continued as he stepped inside, ‘are rich men’s baubles, serving the purposes of vanity. Even the most sober monks regard their books as a reflection of their order. These men, Master Gower, collect books as the Duke of Lancaster collects palaces. And bastards.’ He gestured for me to enter.

  The first thing I noticed about the dark space was the smell: rich, deep, gorgeous. Cardamon, I thought, and cloves and cinnamon – and old parchment, and leather, and boards, and dust. It was overwhelming; I had to step back out for a moment to sneeze. Quincey, meanwhile, had taken a pair of wicksnips from a shelf and busied himself lighting several new candles. Despite the opened door the room was not well lit, the shutters having been nailed fast. Old, rickety-looking shelves lined five of the chamber’s six walls. All were empty. Angervyle’s books, I assumed, were stored in the many trunks arranged around the room, of varying sizes and laid out like a labyrinth of low walls.

  ‘You’ll pardon the spice,’ said Quincey. ‘An excellent preservative of books.’

  Though perhaps not in such quantity, I thought.

  ‘Bishop Angervyle’s library was different. Distinctive in every respect. Richard de Bury, you see, collected only those books that matter most to our modern minds.’ He rubbed his hands and approached one of the closer chests.

  ‘I’ve been told that the bishop was quite particular about his selections,’ I said. ‘No law texts, for example.’

  Quincey nodded. ‘The bishop had no patience for law, nor even for much theology, and those subjects he did favour did not exactly endear him to his superiors. The abbot here in Oxford – and this was before Angervyle’s elevation to the bishopric – was unwilling to give over a room to his manuscripts. He regarded the books, and also Angervyle himself, as vulgar.’

  ‘Vulgar?’

  ‘Supposedly it demeaned the order to be seeking out wisdom in the works of pagans. In lewd poems, in the spectacles of Seneca, even in the obscenities of Juvenal, one of his particular favourites. So here they are, left to rot in chests, with no dedicated library to house them, despite the talk of all the new building to come. I worry that these, these monks’ – he shuddered, as if swallowing a spider – ‘will ruin his legacy. That on my death the collection will be destroyed.’

  I surveyed the chamber, wondering if Quincey would let me buy the whole lot.

  ‘Or divided, with some books going to one college, others to another. The bishop’s fondest wish was to have all his books housed in a single room, made available for lending.’

  ‘So he writes in the Philobiblon.’ I looked around at the many chests, feeling greedy. ‘Did he make a catalogue?’

  ‘After a fashion. But the bishop’s own lists were organized into rather eccentric categories: books lending themselves to happiness, books sorting virtue from vice, books concerning animals. So I took it upon myself in the years after his death to systematize the collection. Even so, the handlist I’ve assembled leaves much to be desired, I’m afraid.’

  He led me to a standing desk. On it was a volume of moderate thickness, its clasps locked, its binding chained to the wall. Quincey inserted a small key into the clasp lock, and the tight straps sprang apart at the buckle. ‘Here, then.’

  I peered down at the neat lists, alphabetized by the author’s name if known, by the work’s opening words if not. ‘This will be enormously helpful,’ I said as I scanned incipits.

  ‘I hope so, Master Gower.’ He modestly bent his stick-like neck. ‘Though perhaps you might save yourself some time if you tell me what you are after. A particular work?’

  ‘Well, I suppose you might know of the author I’m looking for.’ I watched the man carefully. ‘What significance does the name “Lollius” have to you, or did it have to Angervyle?’

  ‘Lollius, you say.’ He rubbed his nose, looking everywhere but into my eyes. ‘Lolliuslolliuslolliuslolliuslollius,’ he intoned, his voice running an unmelodious gamut from high to low and back again. ‘Do I recall a moment in Petronius, per
haps, or was it Sallust?’ He squinted. ‘Horace,’ he said at last, with a snap of his long fingers.

  ‘Horace?’

  ‘Wrote a famous epistola ad Lollium.’

  ‘A letter to Lollius?’ I said. My hand twitched.

  ‘And an ode. Do you know Horace?’

  ‘A bit.’

  Quincey walked to a trunk against the far wall and came back with a moderate volume opened to a middle folio. With a growing excitement, I moved to a position near the door and sat on a trunk to read the Horace as Quincey puttered around the chamber, dusting the empty shelves, straightening the trunks, fooling with the latches. Lollius, I discerned from the ode’s first lines, was evidently a judge, consul, and well-regarded public figure in Rome. Horace had written the ode as a kind of promise to save the man’s memory from oblivion. The lines were also a paean to good and virtuous service for the state: Horace praised Lollius for his keen sense of ethics in his work, bending decisions to the right, turning away from bribes, facing down death while spurning the rewards of wealth.

  I turned the page and frowned. Where I had expected more lines to Lollius, a new poem began, this one the epistle to the same man, which the scribe had inserted between the two Horatian odes. I read it quickly. It largely duplicated the content of the first ode; the second was addressed to another man altogether.

  Neither the epistle nor the ode said anything about Britain, nor kings, nor cards; not a word about prophecies, nor assassinations, nor conspirators. Horace’s Lollius, as I should have realized when Quincey first mentioned him, could not possibly be the same man who allegedly authored the Liber de Mortibus Regum Anglorum. The Roman poet was writing during the lifetime of Christ Himself, fully a thousand years prior to the demise of the Conqueror, the first kingly death prophesied in the De Mortibus.