The Invention of Fire

by Holsinger, Bruce

  “However,” Baker said, his face brightening, “I can certainly help you in the shorter term with your reading and writing.”

  “Oh?”

  “Are you familiar with spectacles?”

  “I have heard of them. A clerk I know at the Guildhall tells me that one of his former colleagues possessed such a device. You recommend them?”

  Baker rose and went to a cabinet along the near wall. A drawer slid open, and he removed a tray that he brought over to me by the door. On the tray was an odd device that the surgeon held up for my inspection. Two circles of glass, each within a leaden teardrop, with the narrow ends of the oblong shapes hinged together in the middle. Baker lifted the device from the tray. Positioning the notch formed by the hinge over the bridge of my nose, he brought the glass toward my eyes. He took his manual off the bookstand and placed it in my lap.

  “There now,” he said. “Here is a book of surgery purchased in Genoa. Give that a try.”

  I am not a weeping man. Yet as I sat there in Thomas Baker’s peculiar chair I could feel the tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. They pooled beneath the odd lenses the surgeon had placed on my nose. I felt one trickle down, and before I could thumb it off, it dropped to the surface of the book. I wiped the parchment dry, felt the smooth flesh of the leaf.

  For the first time in years I was able to see and read a line of writing with all the clarity I recalled from my earliest lessons in grammar. It was as if the page came newly alive before me, the script enlarged to span across my field of vision, the hand rendered in its full and worthy complexity: the flourishes reaching out from certain letters, the marks of punctuation in the Italian style, the liberties taken with uppercase vowels. I am sure now that there was nothing special about this hand, though in the moment I regarded the nameless scribe as a kind of god, capable of filling a folio with this ingenious invention of readable script.

  This immediate sensation of miraculous clarity was short-lived. When I looked up—across the room, out the door, into Baker’s kind face—the world suddenly blurred.

  I reached up to claw at my eyes. Baker grasped my forearms. “Simply remove the spectacles,” he said patiently.

  I did, and focus returned, or at least the semblance of focus to which I was accustomed. My pulse slowed, and I breathed deeply.

  “The spectacles are for reading, and only reading,” said Baker. “They will enlarge everything within two feet of your eyes. Beyond that they are less than worthless.”

  The spectacles sat heavy in my hand. I fingered the frames, the clever hinge that joined the two lenses in the middle. “What sum for a set?”

  He named a price, which I happily paid after selecting an additional pair from his collection and trying them out again on the manual. The apprentice had returned from his errand, and went about the room neatening up, placing the optical instruments in their proper order.

  Baker led me to the door. It was nearly dusk, the coming evening settling on the city like a soft veil on an aging nun. We stood on the small covered landing outside, looking down on a neat courtyard formed by the grocer’s shop and three houses on each side of the square. He glanced at me kindly as I fingered the spectacle cases and slipped them into my inner cotte pocket.

  “In some ways blindness could be a sign of God’s grace, you know,” he said. “It will save you from seeing things a man is not meant to see.”

  I returned his look, thinking of the array of corpses in the St. Bart’s trench.

  “Londoners have been killing Londoners since the Romans arrived, I suppose,” said the surgeon, looking out on the jumble of rooftops below Cornhill. “Yet the city has changed in the years since my first departure for Lombardy. It murders more brutally now.”

  “And with new weapons.”

  “Old ones as well. You have heard about this carter?” He half turned to me.

  Something scratched at my memory.

  “Stabbed,” Baker went on. “In the throat, the heart, the stomach, the back. Repeatedly and savagely, then dumped in the Walbrook.”

  “Where?”

  “Same spot as the others.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I did not hear the man’s name,” said Baker. “But he was a carter, that much I know. From the parish of St. Nicholas Acons, where my mother still resides. It was she who told me. A good man, his woman with a new child.”

  St. Nicholas Acons, a parish in the ward of Langbourn, and for the second time that day I felt blinded as Piers Goodman’s words unfurled across my inner sight. And had a carter of Langbourn Ward up here—oh—last week? Weeping mess he was, too, with a sad sad sad sad story to tell about his cart and his cartloads. What’s in his cart and cartloads, Gower, hmm, what’s in his cart and all his cartloads?

  My face had whitened. Baker noticed and reached for me, thinking me ill, though I shook off his comforting hand this time and turned for the stairs.

  “What is it, Master Gower?”

  I murmured something, waved the physician off, and descended among the Cornhill throngs to begin one of the longest walks of my life, through the mids of London and the turn for Cripplegate, feet not feeling my stride, as if I were floating above the pavers even while weighted with an impossible burden, my skin clammy and cold, chest tight with dread.

  A lone sentry stood before the narrow walkway to the hermit’s cell. As I tried to ease past him he clutched my arm. “No passage here, sire.”

  “I’m here to see the hermit.”

  “What hermit is that, sire?” His cold look told me everything I needed but feared to know.

  I straightened to my full height. “The hermit of St. Giles-along-the-Wall-by-Cripplegate.” There was a certain dignity in speaking Piers Goodman’s florid title for perhaps the last time. “The hermit who has blessed this sector of the London wall for as long as you have been alive.”

  The soldier said nothing.

  “I want to see his cell.” I fished a quarter noble from my purse. He looked at it, took a glance in either direction and then the coin. His head angled slightly toward the narrow walkway.

  “Have your pleasure, sire. I’ve not got the key, but you’ll see all there is to see through the bars.”

  As I rounded the tower the smell hit me. Not the accustomed stench of the hermit’s filth, but a mingled air of burned wood and cloth. Beneath it was something darker, animal in its intensity. A lingering smell of cooked flesh.

  The day’s light was fading, though enough remained to illuminate the chamber behind the barred window, where I knelt as if at prayer. Scorch marks were visible on the sides and top of the small opening and along portions of the inner walls, which were marred by several blackened patches. One of them was a blurred handprint. Yet the cell itself had been emptied and cleaned, Piers Goodman’s meager belongings removed. In their place, along the far wall and protected from the weather, now stood a dozen powder kegs, banded and marked with the livery of the king’s wardrobe at the Tower.

  Back at the crossing I slipped the guard another coin. “Tell me all you know.”

  He glanced over his shoulder, gave a slight shrug. “Not overmuch,” he said. “Got shuffled up here from the Newgate guard only this morning. The old fellow died, is what he did, and they hauled him to St. Bart’s or Spitalfields. Would have been two, three days ago. Burned his things in place rather than deal with the scent, then cleaned out the room and loaded it with powder.”

  One of the city’s most durable hermits, tossed in a pauper’s grave. “Who burned him out?”

  The guard’s eyes widened, then narrowed as he caught the implication of my question and the tone of my voice. He sucked in his lower lip and turned slightly to the side. His head bobbed in the direction of the next tower along the wall. “See that fellow up top?”

  “Yes,” I said, pretending to discern the distant guard against the darkening sky.

  “That’s Burgess there. He saw it all. Heard it, too. Ask him.”

  Burgess, thankfully,
was a guard I knew, a solid and trustworthy denizen of the London walls who’d sold me any number of useful scraps over the years. Soon after leaving the crossing I was climbing the next tower, the highest between Cripplegate and the postern below the Moorfields. As I came to his side he turned to greet me with a nod and a tightening of his lips. He waved away my coin. “You’re asking after our Piers?” he guessed.

  “I am,” I said. “What did you see, Burgess?”

  “A pack of Tower dogs done the thing,” he told me, his jaw rigid with his indignation. He gestured me to a crenel at the edge of the parapet. I gazed through the gap in the stone. Piers Goodman’s former home was situated below us and to the north, the scorched window clearly visible from where we stood.

  “Seen it all from right here, this very spot,” he said. “They wedged the door from the outside, then shoved a clutch a torches and an armful of faggots through the bars. Poor old fellow never had a chance, did he?”

  “And they were Tower men?” I asked him. “You are quite sure of it?”

  “Sure’s a man can be,” he said. “One of those badged gangs. Wardrobe men, a dozen strong.”

  It was one of the emerging divisions within the military ranks, increasingly sharp as England prepared for war with France. Though the soldiers manning the nearly two miles of city walls could be a proud bunch, the London guard was generally considered a lesser station than the Tower garrison. Even within the Tower itself there were fiercely guarded distinctions among the regular infantry squadrons and several more elite units of highly trained men charged with special missions and duties for the king, and regarded with an accordant mix of fear and awe. At the top of this latter group were the guards of the Tower wardrobe, a handpicked company of elite fighters whose particular duty entailed the full and final defense of the great stores of wealth and instruments of royal power held in the treasury and the armory at the Tower: gold, jewels, the royal mint, the privy seal, gunpowder. It was one of these companies, I suspected, that had descended upon Piers Goodman’s filthy lair to torch him from life.

  At an odd sound from the soldier I looked back at him. His voice hitched as he tried to speak. Tears spilled down his young cheeks. I waited for his words.

  “Piers, you know, he—he never screamed,” said the man. “Nor never cried out when they came for him and cooked him, even when the flames and smokes were pushing out that window there. Piers, he just chanted that bit of foulness he’d always be sparrowing through his bars.”

  The soldier smiled sadly at the recollection, then, to my surprise, started to sing, a weak warble from his tongue at first, a faraway look in his hardened eyes as he chanted words I had heard a dozen times from Piers Goodman’s raving lips. “I loved and lost and lost again, my beard hath grown so grey—”

  From somewhere below us another voice took up the tune. “When God above doth ease my pain my cock shall rise to play.”

  A second guard at the lower parapet, adding a strong burden to the hermit’s tune. The two of them continued with the next verse.

  Merry it is while summer lasts,

  Though autumn bloweth cold;

  When God above doth calm these blasts

  Shall hermits pricketh bold.

  By the end of the verse two more guards had joined in, and as if by silent assent the four of them, then a fifth, then a sixth and a seventh began the hermit’s song anew, and soon the rough and growing choir of city guards and gatekeepers had become so many links in a sonorous chain stretching into the distance, as far as a man could hear.

  It was as if the entire northern wall of London were come alive to breathe the hermit’s song, to throw its stony echoes off dozens of churches and inns, to bowl its tuneful hopes down the narrowest alleys and along the widest streets of ward and parish, to fill the great city beneath the early stars at dusk, and to soften a hard, impregnable wall with this rough requiem for its most durable inhabitant.

  I loved and lost and lost again,

  My beard hath grown so grey;

  When God above doth ease my pain

  My cock shall rise to play.

  Merry it is while summer lasts,

  Though autumn bloweth cold;

  When God above doth calm these blasts

  Shall hermits pricketh bold.

  As the bawdy song of Piers Goodman filled the gathering dark I found my own lips shaping the hermit’s peculiar words, my tired lungs filling and emptying with his melancholy chant, like a creaky bellows gladdened with unfamiliar air. Dozens of soldiers were visible from our high parapet, their solemn faces down above Cripplegate and beyond lit with torches and lanterns against the coming of the night, as together we sang the death of the kindest, maddest, most selfless man we had ever known. A man who gave his life to God and to our city, burned to death in recompense.

  Yet there was more than a shared fondness or melancholy intoned among the singers that night along the walls. Beneath the voices of these men, London soldiers all, was intermingled a note of defiance, a faintly mutinous undertone of discontent at the Tower’s wanton destruction of a harmless, joyous man.

  To kill a hermit is a serious thing indeed. To burn a hermit alive, though, to trap him like a caged animal and crackle the very fat and flesh from his bones—this was something else. This, we all of us proclaimed in Piers Goodman’s fading song, this was evil.

  Chapter 14

  NEITHER SLEPT THAT NIGHT nor the following, and though they remained in their separate spaces, between them there grew a new, unspoken intimacy, born of desperation and fear. There was no question of leaving the inn and their company, of venturing out along the roads alone, not after hearing of the highwaymen who had injured the boy and killed his father. Nor could they simply let chance take its course. A decision had to be made.

  Though not this very hour, perhaps. “Tell me of your crimes, Robert,” she said into the dark.

  His breath stopped. “My crimes?” he said from the floor.

  “What put you in the Portbridge gaol?”

  “That. Well.” He sniffed. “A hundred pigeons, a dozen hinds, a boar, a faun or two.”

  “Yet you are a cook,” she said.

  “I am.”

  She propped herself up on an elbow. “Then by your station you are naturally accustomed to dealing in beasts and fowl for your lord. Why would such things put you in gaol?”

  “I am a poacher, aren’t I. No problems stewing harts and peacocks from those given license to shoot ’em, like m’lord on his hunts. But shoot ’em myself, to coin off the meat and hide and feathers? A gallows stands at the end of that road. They rode me on a pillory wagon through half the villages of Kent before tossing me in the gaol at Portbridge. Would have been the king’s justice at Westminster but for the guns.”

  “Was this your first arrest?”

  He laughed softly. “Hardly. Was my tenth, eleventh. They’d finally had enough of Robert Faulk, that’s sure.”

  She thought about this. A common criminal ravishing the hunting grounds of dukes and lords, likely going after the same hinds and boars pursued by her husband, though with much more skill and cunning. Yet in his work he was no better than a butcher. To Margery there seemed little difference between taking a hart in a royal wood and cutting up mutton in the kitchens. To put a man to death for the crime of killing a deer?

  “In the woods,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You shot like a royal archer. It is why we are alive.”

  “You are why I am alive.”

  He had said it simply, instantly. She felt a rush of desire.

  “You spared me, Dame Marg—”

  “No.”

  “You spared me, Margery. I saved you. There was no choice in the matter.”

  Some minutes passed. From far off in the hills came a long and lonesome wail, followed by another. She moved her elbow and settled back into the pallet, listening to the plaintive song of the wolves.

  “And your crimes, Elizabeth?” he asked softly. />
  She’d thought he was asleep. She considered her reply. “I am also a killer of beasts,” she eventually said. “Well . . . one beast.”

  AT DAWN, AS THE LOW bell tolled from the small parish church down the road, she woke to find him staring at his feet in the rising light. He sat on the floor of their room as if frozen, his long body angled against the wall. At the inn’s waking bell, when companies on pilgrimage were to gather in the hall, he refused to come with her. She willed him to find the strength, urged him to rise. He would not move.

  “You cannot remain in this room all day, Robert,” she pleaded.

  She looked at him, willing that new confidence to return from wherever it had fled. He would not meet her eyes. She left him there, bent and afraid.

  In the kitchen the keeper’s wife shredded greens. The curly leaves went in a heaping basket, the stalks in a pail for the hogs. On the long, narrow table dividing the room was a basket of pears, blushed a deep red. “May I take one, please?” she asked.

  “Course, mistress,” said the wife, offering her the lot. She took one of the fruits. Softened with ripeness, the pear’s skin gave beneath her thumb, spreading a thimble’s worth of juice along her skin. She wiped it on her sleeve.

  In their room she handed him the pear. Its light heft and perfect ripeness seemed to enliven him. From a pouch at his side he pulled a knife. He looked up at her from the floor, holding the fruit between them.

  An offer. She nodded and sat.

  First he cored it, plunged the big knife in from the bottom and drew forth the seeds and stem in a single movement. He set the core aside, a short length of stick, flesh, and clinging seeds. Then, more slowly, he separated the peel, curling it from the flesh in one long, delicate spiral. His fingers were quick like a child’s, nimble despite the size and strength of his hands. He palmed the quartered pear. She took a wedge. The sweet juice moistened her lips, dribbled to her chin. She moved to wipe it off with her sleeve but his hand had risen to the task, though he withdrew it before he touched her. She reached daringly for it, brought it to her face, moved his thumb across her chin, her lips, her nose. She kissed the pear juice from the rough pad, then pushed his hand back to his crossed ankles.