A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  ‘My lord?’ Scarlett said, hating the sudden fear in his voice.

  ‘I’m learning, you know,’ said the mercenary, placing down a first card. ‘I’ve got my own set of signals now. “When I wipe my lips, enter the hall and surround the disloyal sack of shit.” Not as sophisticated as Il Critto, perhaps, but it seems to work. And no need for a cipher.’

  Scarlett said nothing, though his breathing grew shallower with each card Hawkwood arrayed on the table.

  ‘Desilio came to me yesterday.’ Another card. ‘His face was pale, his hand shaking as he talked me through every step of the final code.’ Four more cards, all face up. ‘I was impatient at first, but he insisted that I work out the solution myself.’ The third row complete. ‘And he was right, for I would never have believed what I read had I not sifted through those pages myself, transcribed every letter in my own hand at his instruction. It wasn’t difficult, really.’ The last two cards, face up before Scarlett’s hands.

  From a bag at his side Hawkwood took out the scorched quire and went on, as if instructing a schoolboy in grammar. ‘Each grouping of cards is a letter, you see. Start at the end and the beginning of the deck, excluding the trumps and taking the first and last cards as the letter A.’ He pointed to the first pair he’d arranged. ‘The second and the penultimate are B, the third and the antepenultimate C, and so on until you’ve exhausted the cards and the alphabet. Then you start over, with the second and the penultimate cards standing for A this time, the third and the antepenultimate for B – I won’t go on. The suits must be ranked, of course, and it can get quite confusing if you forget which sequence you’re on. There are as many as five different pairs standing for the letter S in this message alone. But Desilio took me through it, and eventually I was able to work out the message I’ve just read you.’

  ‘I see,’ said Scarlett, his uneasiness growing.

  ‘What I didn’t read you, though, was the last little bit. Do you mind if I do so now?’

  ‘As you wish, Sir John,’ said Scarlett stiffly, dreading to hear what came next. One of the dogs moved at his feet, nosing for a hand.

  Hawkwood read.

  To ensure its delivery to your hands, and to guard against the seizure of a messenger, we have sent this same information by land and by sea. Trust you in the truth of this, for Hawkwood himself has revealed all. Written at San Donato a Torre, by Firenze, the feast of Sts Perpetua and Felicitas, by your humble servant Adam Scarlett.

  At the final words Hawkwood nodded up at his men, who descended on Scarlett as he sat frozen in his chair. He hardly noticed as his arms were thrust across the table, his wrists pinned in place by much stronger hands, his thumbs splayed to the sides as his palms were pressed against the wood’s cool surface.

  Hawkwood stood, took a heavy knife from one of the men, and brought it down on Scarlett’s right thumb. Scarlett screamed, his legs quivering beneath him.

  Yet even as his hand sang with an almost exquisite pain, his continuing screams now muffled by an oily cloth clamped over his mouth, he heard a sound that transcended agony. The crunch of bone, his bone, in the mouth of a dog.

  At Hawkwood’s signal the man behind him forced his head to the side, his eyes widening in terror as he watched the hound chew and spit, chew and spit, lick, then lip, then chew and spit again, the shards of his thumb now a moist bolus on the floor. Another flash of Hawkwood’s knife, and the second dog had his treat. The men pressed vinegared cloths on Scarlett’s fresh stubs, strumming his nerves even as they stanched the blood and kept him from passing out.

  ‘Every lying finger, Adam,’ said Hawkwood, his voice a calm promise of misery to come. ‘Then every false toe. Then each treasonous ball, then your traitorous cock. After that – well, after that we’ll heal you up and get to work on your face.’

  Scarlett closed his eyes, knowing it was useless to protest his loyalty to this man he would never have thought to betray. He was on the north downs, on Detling Hill after a walk from Maidstone. He had promised himself he would return there once back in England, and that his death, when it came, would not be in vain. So much for promises, and salvation.

  ‘We’ll keep you alive as long as we can, Adam Scarlett,’ said Hawkwood. ‘I wouldn’t want you to miss a moment of the feast.’

  FIFTY-NINE

  St Paul’s

  On St Boniface’s day, the fifth of June, I arranged an appointment at St Paul’s with the bailiff of the Aldermen’s Court. Nothing important, merely a glimpse at a recent deposition I had been wanting to see. But I suspected the chancellor would be at the cathedral that morning, and that he would be summoning me sooner or later in any case. While speaking with the bailiff I stood at a spot in the north transept by the passage to Minor Canons, where the baron would see me as he passed.

  It did not take long. Once the bailiff had left I leaned on the doorway, composing a pair of couplets in my mind, until I felt a presence behind me.

  ‘How did you do it, Gower?’ I turned to see the baron, framed against the crossing. I bowed. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘They were speaking in Italian, my lord,’ I said as we walked toward the less crowded south transept, our voices low. ‘That night on the Moorfields. Weldon was interrogating her in Italian. That was the first clue.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘So London had nothing to do with the “city’s blade”. The girl was being questioned about the book, but she knew more. And that’s what she revealed with her final words – in English, so that the maudlyn, Agnes Fonteyn, would understand and remember them. Weldon spent years with Hawkwood, and his Italian was as good as Chaucer’s. He knew what he was doing. Recovering the book was crucial to keeping everyone focused on these elaborate prophecies and ignorant of Hawkwood’s more direct plot against the king. The Trinity plot, like the book, originated with him.’

  ‘“City’s blade”,’ the chancellor mused. ‘A city in Italy, then?’

  ‘Florence, most obviously, though that wasn’t quite it.’ We had reached the opening to the chapel of St Katherine, empty but for a sole worshipper kneeling at the altar of Mary and Martha. ‘But once Agnes’s sister told me they were speaking Italian on the Moorfields it all came to me. London is to an Englishman what Rome is to an Italian: the principal city. After that it was a simple matter of translation. In Latin, the possessive of “city”, urbs, is urbis.’ I paused. ‘She was making a pun, my lord.’

  ‘The blade of Urban,’ said the chancellor with a rueful smile.

  ‘Pope Urban’s blade,’ I finished. And there it was, I explained. When father, son, and ghost we sing, of city’s blade beware. The assassin – the true assassin of King Richard, not the bumbling company of butchers riled up by Weldon and Oxford and their skulking priest for St Dunstan’s Day – would be a member of the papal delegation, scheduled to process with the king at the abbey on the morning of Trinity Sunday.

  ‘The man was a professional and seasoned killer,’ the baron said. ‘Bernabò Visconti’s deadliest knife, or so he claimed before we broke his neck. Planted by Hawkwood in the papal delegation. Had he not been stopped the king would surely be dead, taken with a blade in the ribs before his closest guard could blink.’

  I silently wondered whether Oxford, in the thick of the plot against Gaunt, had known about the planned attempt on the king, despite the close friendship between the two young men. Weldon surely had, though this ugly knowledge had died with him. The foiled assassination would remain known only to a few, I observed, and lost to history.

  ‘Just as well,’ the chancellor said with an air of tired discretion. ‘Though I do wish I could have met the girl, this Seguina d’Orange. Geoffrey Chaucer hardly deserved such a woman’s love.’

  ‘It wasn’t all about his clever book in the end, my lord, let alone about him,’ I said, speaking thoughts I had been mulling for days. ‘There was a greater purpose to her sacrifice than saving the skin of a London poet.’

  ‘That’s why Seguina d’Orange came to England
, then,’ the baron mused. ‘Not only to save Lancaster, or Chaucer, nor even to find the book, as important as that was.’

  I peered into the chapel, at a high wall scorched with years of pious smoke. ‘King Richard was the brother of her dead brother, and thus her own sibling, after a fashion. But he was also the son of her mother’s ravisher – and yet she came here in part to save his life.’

  ‘And she did it, didn’t she, with her last words,’ he said, his voice a soft coil of wonder.

  ‘Though only just.’ The close call before the abbey was still fresh in my mind.

  ‘I was there, you know,’ said the baron quietly.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘The battle at Nájera, with Prince Edward and Lancaster, all those years ago.’

  ‘You were in Edward’s household,’ I recalled, prompting a nod. ‘During the Castile campaign for Pedro.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been with them at that woman’s castle. I was with the Gascon encampment at Burgos during those weeks. But I remember Edward’s illness after the battle, the fevers and the raging, this sense that the man was … detaching from himself, that his mind had bent somehow. Everyone agreed afterwards that Spain was the sad beginning of a long end for the prince. Seguina’s mother wasn’t the first woman he brutalized in those years, nor the last.’

  We stood for a while longer, listening to the hurried murmurs of a priest from one of the chantries before the south porch. I think we both sensed a circle closing, though the machinations that had brought us here were clearly the beginning of something much larger. I thought of Hawkwood, spinning his sticky webs in Tuscany. Of Simon, fled for who knew where. Of Sarah, who had died knowing nothing of her son’s chosen profession; a minor blessing.

  ‘So what next?’ I eventually asked him. ‘Will you return the favour, have Hawkwood snipped?’

  The chancellor let out a sigh, a slow wind of realism. ‘We need Hawkwood, Gower, even more than Hawkwood needs England. I see a long war ahead of us. There’s no reason to go stirring the pot over an unfortunate incident easily gotten past. This is how it works in the end. We pardon our second-worst enemies, make treaties with our former slaughterers. Overlook treason to win a battle.’

  I told him I understood. He would get no objections from John Gower for choosing political expediency over moral purity. ‘And Simon?’ I asked neutrally. ‘Will you pursue him further?’

  ‘I will leave that in your hands.’ He gave me a baronial look. ‘The realm owes you a great debt, Gower. God knows your talents can create some peculiar twists. In this case, though, they’ve won the day.’

  There was a rather uncomfortable pause. I knew what the chancellor expected me to say. He stood there, waiting for my demands. The Exchequer’s books, a bishop’s house on the Strand. Even a knighting by the king was not out of the question.

  I surprised myself by not asking for a single shilling.

  The next morning, after one of the soundest sleeps of my life, I left the priory grounds on foot, crossing the bridge and walking beneath the outer arches of the St Thomas Chapel as the first glimmer of sun broke through low morning clouds. Once on the north bank I descended to the wharfage and the offices of the wool custom. Chaucer, so a clerk at the customhouse told me, was out of town. A difficulty at Hythe, rumours of illegal wool.

  The clerk stepped out for a moment, giving me the opportunity to take a glimpse at Chaucer’s desk. On it sat a small quire, weighted open to a page nearly empty of content: pen trials, a few doodles, some couplets. I leaned over and read.

  Befell that in that season, on a day,

  In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay

  Ready to ride forth on my pilgrimage

  To Canterbury with full devout courage,

  At night was come into that hostelry

  Well nine and twenty in a company

  Of sundry folk, by adventure fallen

  In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all,

  That toward Canterbury would ride.

  I had to read the lines again. In Southwark? Chaucer was a London man, through and through, and as far as I knew had never gone on pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine, or anywhere else, for that matter. If he travelled to Canterbury it would be for business or pleasure, not for faith. False prophecies, false pilgrimages: all the same to my slippery friend.

  Outside the customhouse I stood on the wharfage, watching the slow, careful movement of the Goose as it craned a pile of wool from the dock. On the decks of the trading vessels workers toiled at the crates and barrels of goods brought to London from around the earth, from the looms of Lyon, the vineyards of Alsace and Tuscany, the olive groves of al-Andalus, and there, on the river’s edge of London, with the low bulk of Southwark rising before me, with the dense span of the bridge against the sky, I felt the unboundedness of it all. A history I would never fully understand had passed me by, these great machinations linking Florence, London, the marches of Aragon and Castile – and the narrow lanes of Southwark, and a dead woman on the moor.

  We live in an immense world, whole universes of taste and touch and scent, of voices commingling in the light, and dying away with the common dread that stands at every man’s door. Yet we perceive and remember this world only as it creates those single fragments of experience: moments of everyday kindness, or self-sacrificing love, or unthinkable brutality. I angled my face to the sun and blinked away a spot, then another, these dark blemishes floating in my sight, mottling my vision, more of them by the day. Yet behind and beyond them I could imagine, for a moment, the holy sheen of Sarah’s skin, the faces of our children, the intricate gloss of some forgotten book, and I thought how simple it should be, to know and cherish the proper objects of our lives.

  On the near end of the bridge I bought a bird pie. The pigeon was bad, I realized after the first bite – though thankfully before swallowing. I spat it out. I thought about returning to the pieman’s booth though I would have to push back through the crowd, which had thickened with the unwelcome intrusion of aristocracy. A lower knight, mounted and shouting for space, passing over from the bankside. Then the catcalls, some trash dropped from the houses above, a few small missiles thrown, all done with that urban mix of defiance and cheer, the common resonance of this angry city I bafflingly loved.

  It came to me then, the source of Chaucer’s folly. A hostelry at night, a diverse company of pilgrims, a tale of fellowship and adventure, all beginning at the Tabard, of all places. A book for England’s sake: stories within stories, and the stuff of life, encompassed by the one great story we all must share yet none of us will ever get to read. At the foot of the bridge I stumbled on a loose paver but recovered my footing as a flock of starlings whorled above, as the way widened into the teeming breadth of Southwark, like a narrow river finding the sea.

  A Note to the Reader

  One of the strange pleasures of writing A Burnable Book has been the discovery and partial correction of my own ignorance about much of medieval life. After half a career spent studying and teaching the literature of the Middle Ages, it came as a rude awakening to realize I couldn’t answer a simple question posed by my younger son: ‘Did they have forks?’ (Yes, Malcolm, after a fashion, though not many of them, and mostly for serving, not eating.) Though I have drawn on many of the same sorts of sources I regularly consult in my academic work, fiction requires a more eclectic approach to research guided by the idiosyncrasies of story and character. As often as I have read around in the latest scholarship on aristocratic politics during the reign of Richard II, I have found myself consulting the work of nineteenth-century antiquarians on gutters and drainage in the Southwark stews.

  I hope this note will guide readers in following up on any aspects of the historical setting that interest them, as well as help answer questions about the specific choices I have made in depicting a medieval world so familiar yet so foreign to our own. Readers will find occasional posts about setting and sources on my blog, www.burnablebooks.com, and I am happy to receive quer
ies and corrections as they arise.

  John Gower’s London was three cities, not one, and much of its life and culture was shaped by the distinctive character of the two smaller suburbs lying outside the walled city itself (and beyond its jurisdiction). The history of London, Southwark, and Westminster in the decades following the Black Death has been the subject of considerable scholarship in recent years that has helped me flesh out the bones of a story set in a richly complex milieu. The works of urban history I have consulted most frequently include Caroline Barron’s London in the Later Middle Ages, a magisterial study of the medieval city, its institutions, and its diverse population; Sheila Lindenbaum’s numerous articles on everything from urban festivals to aristocratic tournaments; Robert Shepherd’s Westminster: A Biography, with its rich appreciation for the historical contours and character of the royal city; Martha Carlin’s Medieval Southwark, a thorough guide to the intricacies of life and politics in the small suburb across the bridge, where bishops and butchers, tanners and taverners lived side by side and elbowed for room; Barbara Hanawalt’s Growing Up in Medieval London, with its inspiring recreations of individual lives of the young; the myth-busting scholarship of Judith Bennett, Marjorie McIntosh, Cordelia Beattie, Kim Phillips, and others on the lives, careers, and literacies of medieval singlewomen; the work of urban archaeologists on Winchester Palace, the customhouse near Billingsgate, and other medieval sites; and Frank Rexroth’s Deviance and Power in Late Medieval London, a field guide of sorts to the underworld of urban grime and petty crime that surrounded Gower, Chaucer, and the other city-dwellers populating this story. I have also benefited from new work by Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs on the scribal culture of the London Guildhall, home to an urban bureaucracy that included the likes of Ralph Strode and Adam Pinkhurst – the latter, perhaps, Geoffrey Chaucer’s most notable scribe. (The map included at the beginning of the book is based in part on the map of late-medieval London included in Mooney and Stubbs’ Scribes and the City, enhanced by the renderings in Carlin’s Medieval Southwark and the wonderfully detailed maps created for the third volume of the British Atlas of Historic Towns.)