A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  ‘Suggesting what?’

  Chaucer’s eyes clouded. ‘Suggesting there are other forces at work here, John. Larger forces, with motives far from poetical.’

  ‘Isn’t there a simple solution?’ I said. ‘You wrote the prophecies, after all. You can prove it, for the original manuscript is in your hand. And you have the good will of the duke. Why can’t we go to him and lay bare what you’ve done?’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s gone too far.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, there are already multiple copies circulating. This one you’ve brought me is in Clanvowe’s hand. I assume there are others. Who would believe I wrote it, even if I were to confess?’

  ‘So you’ll let another man be quartered for your own vanity?’

  ‘It’s not so simple.’ Chaucer stepped close to me. ‘The knowledge of this book reaches deep into Richard’s faction. Some of the most powerful men in the realm are arrayed against Lancaster. Warwick, Arundel, Oxford, Buckingham, who knows how many others, all of them convinced that the thirteenth prophecy will shatter the duke’s faction, pull the king away from his uncle. If it’s known that the De Mortibus was written by Geoffrey Chaucer, betraying the king’s affinity on the duke’s behalf, why – that would be just the wedge the earls need to drive apart Lancaster and the king, breaking an already fragile truce between Richard and Gaunt. Imagine it: Chaucer and Clanvowe, scribbling seditious prophecies at the behest of the recently deceased John Wycliffe and his chief supporter, the Duke of Lancaster. A scandal of the highest order.’

  ‘So it all comes down to politics? Factions and alliances, title and power, government and gossip.’

  Chaucer waved a hand. ‘Easy for you to say, John. You’re a man without a faction – the one fact about you everyone knows. The reason you were chosen for this task was precisely your neutrality. Your ability to do all your dirty work regardless of faction.’

  ‘I “was chosen”? As if the passive voice somehow excuses your choice of me as your tool?’

  ‘Oh, you weren’t my choice.’

  I froze. ‘Then whose?’

  Chaucer’s eyes closed.

  ‘I am sick of your petty secrets. Who suggested to you that I be sent on this fool’s errand?’

  Chaucer puffed his cheeks, looked at the ceiling. ‘Strode.’

  Of course. ‘And how long has Ralph known that you wrote the prophecies?’

  ‘Since my return from Italy, the week before our meeting at Monksblood’s. It was Ralph who convinced me I needed to recover the book. He believed it was already too late to confess I wrote it, which I was prepared to do. We needed your help, your skills. But then, when Simon returned, it was felt that you were too compromised. That you were both in danger.’

  I thought again of my trip to Oxford, that earnest conversation with Strode about the allure of false propositions. Strode had been tantalizing me, then, with his own false proposition, encouraging my trip to Oxford, even going so far as to write a letter to Angervyle’s keeper to help me find a book he knew I would never discover in the bishop’s collection. The only factors he had not controlled were my meeting with Clanvowe and the knight’s copy of the prophecies.

  ‘Strode was protecting you,’ said Chaucer. ‘Getting you out of town when things were at their hottest. He continues to protect you, and me as well.’

  ‘Protect me? From what? I don’t need protection, Geoffrey. My son needs protection. He’s the one suffering for my sake, as we stand here jawing about your ridiculous prophecies.’ I felt short of breath.

  ‘We all need protection,’ Chaucer gently said, risking a hand on my back. Despite myself I did not knock it away. ‘Don’t you see? The book is an axe at our necks. I wrote it in Italy. Simon read it there, and he’s missing. You are Simon’s father, and you have a copy of the De Mortibus yourself. You received it from Clanvowe while dining with Purvey, Wycliffe’s closest disciple. Barely four hundreds lines of my doggerel, and they threaten us all.’

  ‘And King Richard.’

  ‘And King Richard,’ he agreed.

  ‘Who is behind all this, Chaucer?’

  ‘Hawkwood.’ A blood-soaked name. ‘I believe he’s plotting a return to England. He wants to ensure his legacy, win a greater title for his descendants. Rather than retiring happily to Essex, though, he plans to destabilize the realm by implicating Lancaster in this plot against the king. Hawkwood has Oxford in his pocket, you see. His ties to the de Veres go back two generations, and that’s a family that would do anything to heighten its status. Weldon is the go-between. He’s now Oxford’s man, but for years he served Hawkwood in the White Company. He led the massacre at Cesena, the slaughter of an entire town.’

  I thought of the scar on Weldon’s chin, the butchery of which the man had long seemed capable. ‘And now Weldon is doing everything he can to see the plot to its completion.’

  ‘It’s why Simon was seized, I believe, because he’s associated with Hawkwood, and knows his plans.’

  ‘As do you, Geoffrey.’

  ‘Even Strode isn’t safe,’ he continued. ‘The only thing to do now is to recover my copy, hunt down any others, and hope for the best. Unless—’

  I looked at him. ‘Unless?’

  ‘Unless we can find the cloth.’

  ‘What cloth?’

  ‘An ornate piece of work, embroidered with the livery of Gaunt, the alleged conspirator, raising a sword against King Richard. It travelled with the book from Italy.’

  ‘Who made it?’

  He looked away and breathed deeply. ‘It fits the De Mortibus as a glove fits a hand,’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘From Strode’s inquiries we know that the book has been separated from the cloth. Whoever puts the book with the cloth, then—’

  ‘Will destroy the realm.’

  ‘Or save it,’ he said. Then he actually smiled. ‘There’s one final wrinkle.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’

  ‘I have it from Strode that the book was brought into the city by maudlyns.’

  ‘Maudlyns?’ A stir of the absurd.

  ‘Apparently some whore got ahold of it just as I was asking you to find it for me. You’ll remember the girl’s murder, outside the city walls—’

  ‘In the Moorfields,’ I said.

  ‘They sold the book, or tried to. Strode doesn’t know who paid them for it. He’s trying even now to find out, asking all kinds of questions. The cloth, on the other hand, has not been seen.’

  ‘So they still have it.’

  ‘Presumably.’

  I thought about this. ‘And I suppose there’s no one more suited, in Strode’s opinion and yours, to extracting this cloth from the maudlyns of our city than one John Gower.’

  ‘Well, if it’s any comfort, you may be the only one looking for it.’

  ‘Where should I begin?’

  ‘Gropecunt Lane, I imagine. Or Southwark. Perhaps Rose Alley, in your own neighbourhood.’

  ‘And how does one go about prying cloth from maudlyns, in your expert opinion?’

  Chaucer turned to me, his brow a world-weary arch. ‘Drag a sack of silver through the stews and there’s no telling what you might find.’

  He said it lightly, provoking me with a familiar humour that obscured those deeper truths he still had not revealed.

  You will remember, my soul, that Dante Alighieri, the great poet of Florence, first saw Beatrice at a feast. He was only nine at the time, as was she, yet even then the arrows of Amor penetrated him deeply, inspiring wild thrums and tremblings and pulsations in his heart despite its tender age.

  Our young lady was fully a woman when she first saw her love, though the effects on her soul were no less childish, no less urgent for her greater maturity.

  It was an autumn evening on the feast of St Luke, just after the procession of the physicians along the square before San Simpliciano. The last company had passed by, the raucous shouts of the chi
ldren following in their wake, the oily whiff of torches in the air. As the final cluster of drunk doctors walked past she looked across the open space to the opposite rank of spectators – and there he was, in the smoky light: a fair-haired man, twenty years her elder, she guessed, broad of chest, long of leg, a face that brightened the air as if some new Apollo had deigned to troll the streets of Florence.

  The man spared her no glance, turning from the procession and walking along the edge of the crowd.

  She saw him again the next week, at the Broletto, pausing at a tinker’s table while she examined silks. That day he wore a loose shirt of thin wool, a rough thing hardly fit for a clerk. As she passed behind him she glanced at his hands, those long fingers stained with gall. A man given to writing, despite his unslouched back and clear-eyed gaze at everything around him. He smelled of balsam, of honey mixed with ale.

  How she pined for him! How she ached to feel his touch, to guide his blotchy fingers in making of her very skin his vellum and his books.

  Then, as she watched him stroll across the market street, he was stopped and embraced warmly by a man she knew quite well.

  Il Critto! They were countrymen, of course, though there were so many Englishmen in Florence that she had not thought to ask her suitor about the one she most desired.

  ‘Who was that old fellow I saw you with at the Broletto?’ she casually asked him the next morning. They were in the upper gallery, finally usable after a months-long repair to the flooring, seated on the long bench beneath the Tribunale tapestry. Her stepmother sat with several visitors at a proper distance. Embroidery and gossip.

  ‘An envoy from Westminster, and an intimate friend of my father’s,’ he said, suspecting nothing. ‘He arranged my current position with Hawkwood, in fact. I owe him a great deal.’ He was proud of his knowledge of Hawkwood’s relations with the English envoy, whom he seemed to admire tremendously. He told her a bit about the man’s employment (royal customs official), purpose on the peninsula (some discreet diplomacy), obsession (poetry), and wife (estranged).

  With a frown and a strange tilt of his head, he pointed over her shoulder. ‘Why, look there! Those are the arms of his greatest supporter.’

  She turned, her gaze falling on the old cloth embroidered with the opposed livery of the foreign duke and prince. She felt it: the breath of Fate on her neck. To learn that the man she desired was in favour with the duke who had saved her life so long ago – this was a destined match. Everything else would naturally follow.

  So she dropped a hint, a mild suggestion, and the next day Il Critto (poor fool, she thought) dutifully brought the older man with him to her father’s house.

  It was a simple matter to put her ambitions in play. A half-hidden smile here, a dropped kerchief there. The Little Weasel no more, she had developed into a captivating beauty, one of the true gems among the ladies of the Commune. Soon enough his visits became the most longed-for part of her day.

  They discovered in one another a mutual love of stories and poems. His verses were artful and urbane, pleasuring some hidden part of her with their depth of knowledge and craft. He whispered, too, from some of his more lecherous lays, comparing his desire to a written map of the world, himself to a cold fish marinated in the spicy sauce of her favour. She became an avid listener to this Narcissus of the North, his impenetrable self-regard only warming her further.

  The ambassador wrote his poems not on wax but in little books, parchment quires folded within a worn cover of faded leather. Each time he filled one of these booklets with his notes and drafts he would remove it from its cover and place a new quire within. He wrote constantly, rejecting nine out of ten of his own crafted lines. She marvelled at how one man could waste so many words.

  Her own stories she spun from the tales of the Moors remembered from her mother. She was his Sherazade, filling her accounts with flying horses and evil viziers, moaning ghouls and poisoned fountains. The only tale she never told him was the story of her life.

  One of their favourite entertainments was trading in riddles. Enigmas, he called them, word puzzles in which simple truths are disguised and things are never what they seem. He would slip them to her on torn lengths of waste paper, and she would have to guess their solution before his next appearance.

  Some were trivial, riddles about roofless houses and eggs, or chairs and silent goats.

  Others were obscene, written to raise a blush on her fair skin.

  I am a long rod swinging by a man’s leg. He likes to shove me into familiar holes. Who am I? No, not that. A key.

  Between two curved legs I quiver, a twist of eager flesh, singing sweetly when fingered. Who am I? No, not that. A harpstring.

  The one that most provoked her was an enigma of the moon. He slipped it to her on the second Sunday in Advent, during a procession outside San Lorenzo.

  Whisper the middle of a moon,

  Think the wheel of a wagon,

  Trace the beginning of a king,

  And mine own shall be yours.

  For a full week she puzzled over its meaning, parsing each syllable, looking for that hidden kernel. And on the eighth night, as she slept, a wagon wheel spinning in her dreams—

  —she awoke, and she had it. A wheel? The letter O. The ‘beginning of a king’? ‘King’ is ‘rex’ in Latin. The letter R. And the ‘middle of a moon’? A half-moon, of course. The letter C.

  ‘Cor.’ Latin for ‘heart’. And mine yours, she silently promised him as she drifted back to sleep, and my flesh as well.

  Stories, riddles, sin: her father and stepmother were hardly pleased. Florence was starting to whisper, and consorting with this Englishman would only sully her reputation. Il Critto is the son of a landed gentryman, her stepmother scolded her, an upper esquire. This man you favour is merely an esquire en service, with no lands or rents to his name – and married!

  Il Critto, too, took notice of her growing attachment to the older man, coming around less frequently and casting dark looks on the two of them from afar. She ignored them all.

  Though she recognized the older man’s poetical genius (as, indeed, what living man or woman could not? you are surely thinking), some of his making struck her as facile and unserious. She coyly told him so, infuriating and delighting him at once. He told her of his plan for a greater work, a collection of tales in the manner of Boccaccio.

  ‘Though this work, unlike the Decameron, shall be framed not with pestilence but with pilgrimage,’ he said. ‘The pilgrims shall all tell their own tales as they travel from city to town. Two stories each on the journey out, two on the way home. The narrator will be a pilgrim as well, his feeble talents serving to convince us that the whole compilation bears the ring of truth.’

  She taunted him: ‘Your readers must be gullible indeed, to fall for such poetical tricks.’

  He waved a hand. ‘In this land poets are considered akin to prophets. Look at Florence’s own Dante, writing of a journey to Hell and back, telling us plainly it is all a lie even as he inks his tercets at his desk. And yet the people credit him as a true visitor to the underworld! Readers will believe anything they are told to believe.’

  She looked at him, a provocation in her gaze. ‘And you would be the new Dante? Spouting visions and prophecies with the ease of a sibyl?’

  ‘Prophecy is a game like any other, no more complex than our exchanges of riddles and enigmas,’ he said. ‘Show me a lunatic with a quill and I will show you a prophet.’

  ‘Prove it,’ she said.

  ‘I shall rise to your impertinent challenge,’ he vowed, and began a work that promised to redeem his talents in her eyes, and win her to his bed. ‘It shall be a book of kings,’ he told her. ‘A book of kings, and their deaths. Once I have completed it, you must quite me with a work of your own. For then it will be your turn to write for the gullible.’

  Less than a week had passed when, on a bright winter morning, the ambassador appeared at her door.

  ‘The work is done,’ he told her,
pleased with himself. He pulled out his current booklet, which he had filled to the last folio with a rough copy of his creation. ‘Take me within, muse, and I shall read it to you.’

  Just then his young rival appeared at the end of the street. Il Critto’s eyes darkened as he strode forward, his jaw a hard knot of envy. But her love put a kindly arm around the younger man’s shoulders and drew him into her father’s house, as if nothing was amiss. The three of them went up to the gallery, and it was there that she heard the prophecies.

  As her lover recited his tuneful lines, she listened with a thrilled amusement to these beguiling prognostications of royal deaths. How he laughed over his own audacity! The work was an amusement to him, its mortal prophecies cast in the gentle light of his wit.

  He had even thought to include an actual game in his prophecies: the thistleflowers, hawks, swords, and plums painted on the oval playing cards he often brought with him to her father’s house. Yet to anyone else hearing the work, these prophecies would appear genuine, the true products of some latter-day Jeremiah foretelling the deaths of twelve kings, from poor King William to the late King Edward.

  Il Critto laughed with them, his boyish grin easing their concerns that—

  Ah, but I must drop the pretence of story, my heart. As I think back on that fateful morning, all I see now are Il Critto’s owl eyes gazing over my shoulder at the cloth, those mole’s ears resounding with your baleful verse. The eyes and ears of Simon Gower, a serpent coiled in envy and plotting his revenge.

  FORTY-TWO

  Gropecunt Lane

  Years ago, soon after the deaths of my elder children, I once followed the Bishop of Ely up Soper Lane, watched him hand a few coins to a maudlyn, and waited as he disappeared into a stall. I confronted him that same afternoon with the evidence of his sin: a copy of the whore’s confession, purchased from a clerk at Guildhall after her arranged arrest. For a pound it can all be forgotten, I said. The archbishop won’t have to know.

  I’ll never forget the look he gave me, half scornful, half amused as he leaned against a column in the west end of St Paul’s. Know what, Gower? That I just swyved his favourite whore?