The Invention of Fire

by Holsinger, Bruce

  She returned to the common room to find the other women in their company already gathered around a table.

  “And where is your man of sorrows, Mistress Elizabeth?” said Constance, nudging her sister’s arm.

  “Swinking off his debt through Nocturns, I hope and expect,” Catherine chimed in.

  Margery gave the sisters a coy smile, raised her brow slightly, let them think what they would. She joined them at the common table. The food was simple, a spiced rye gruel with cream in a trencher of heavy, dark bread. She sat and ate, hardly tasting the meal as the mixed companies held forth in subdued conversations around the front room.

  Eventually the keeper came in to stand at the hearth and speak to his guests about their wishes for the day and night. The burial of the brigands’ victim would take place that afternoon in the parish churchyard, he said, with four shillingsworth for the parson and the sexton’s diggers. A cup was passed around, purses opened, bright clinks of pennies and groats. She put in a half noble, a gentlewoman’s share. After a brief consultation among the men, the decision was made in her own company to stay on in the village for a third night, out of respect for the widow and her son.

  The keeper stepped down from the hearth and made way for a stooping, bashful man who had arrived at the inn with the smaller Canterbury group. He fidgeted and hawed for a few moments, then voiced his request. “We would like to join ourselves to your fellowship, good gentles, if you will have us. The road north to Durham is long and, as we have already known, perilous. We have a widow and her child among us. The pall of death hangs over our sacred purpose. Yet there is safety of body in higher numbers. Good fortune in newly joined hands. Will you have us?”

  Their own company huddled and conferred in a corner. No one could find a strong reason to object to joining the second pilgrimage to their own. True, a larger company made for more difficulty in finding lodging—though they would be on main highways the entire journey, with many inns along the way. The presence of a child might complicate things—though who could deny this bereft boy and his grieving mother the gift of greater fellowship?

  Margery listened silently. Saying something contrary would only arouse suspicions. The decision was made with little delay. Afterward the mood in the room lightened despite the coming burial, as the two companies mingled and met, swapped bits of their lives and stories, becoming one. They would be twenty now, a full and merry group for the still-lengthy journey to Durham.

  She sat alone, weighted by the decision. They had hoped for a clear separation from the Canterbury group, assuming the other company would stay behind for the burial. Now it seemed inevitable that this widow would see Robert. Perhaps know him.

  In their chamber she told him the news. His eyes grew wild, unfocused as he paced the floor. He glanced out past the shutters more than once, as if planning to flee.

  She stood in his way. He looked down at her, his breaths coming quickly. She put her hands on his face, tangled her fingers in his thick beard, and made him look at her. “Sit just there,” she said, gesturing to a place along the wall. “Wait for me.” He sat.

  Back to the kitchen, where she procured a basin of heated water from the keeper’s wife, who also slipped her a clump of wood lye mixed with honey—a soap we keep only for our gentle guests, she explained.

  In their chamber, seated before him on the floor, she warmed the soap with the water and lathered her hands. The lye filled the air between them with a sweet and homely scent, reminding her of another, less trying time.

  “Your knife,” she said. He reached behind himself for the knife, which he placed on the floor between them.

  First she worked the soap through his beard. The hairs were not overly long but dark, rich, thick with the scents of woodsmoke and travel. Their rough ends abraded her fingertips like sand or soil. His cheeks moved beneath them, bulging up to his surprised eyes, lowering to thicken his jaw. She reached for more soap and spread the lather on his neck, used her palms to smooth the creamed lye down along the gentle slope to the top of his chest. She rinsed her hands, dried them on her dress, then reached for the knife.

  Her hands hesitated before his face. Yet how difficult could it be? She pictured Thomas, the barber-surgeon who shaved her father over all those years. Twice a month he would arrive with his straight knife and his gangly apprentice, to stand out in the manor foreyard, beneath the small elm, and service the whiskers of his lordship, who had always preferred the blade to the pumice stone for his shaves. He would sit in his great hall chair, brought outside by two servants for the occasion, obeying Thomas’s instructions to tilt his head to the left, to lean back, to raise his chin. It was the same Thomas who would cut open her mother, saving her last child while leaving her to die of flux in the wake of the birth. Part of her hated the man after that, but the shavings continued without a pause. She remembered the quick and expert flicks of the blade, the pleasing rasp as steel met skin.

  Her own hands moved slowly, inching the flat edge of the blade along his cheeks, gathering hair and lye in a humped line, like a row of raised dirt between furrows. She stretched his skin, scraped his neck, fingered his ears. His eyes never left hers as the knife discovered those angles and dimensions of his face she had not yet noticed, much less appreciated, but now had time to sculpt and clean.

  She cut him twice. A nick below his left ear, easily stanched. Another above his upper lip, to which he held his sleeve as she cleaned the blade. She looked at him. Without his beard he appeared if anything more of a gentleman, not less, despite the current fashion. A high brow now fitting to his face, eyes that could look both kind and severe, a strong jaw keeping a rigid course to below his ears before angling up to frame his lower hairline.

  He flexed his jaw as she inspected him. He took her hand. “A while longer, Elizabeth,” he said to her, in that new voice he’d learned. “Give me the smallest while, then I shall join you out front. Go now.”

  He emerged from their chamber in the middle of the afternoon, his back straight, his eyes clear, his chin right where it should be. He said nothing to the widow, keeping a distance from the new pilgrims joined to their company.

  From the next bench she watched him eat a sop. The morning bread was gone, so he sipped the thin broth from a shallow tin bowl. The tendons along his newly clean neck pulsed with his generous swallows, hardly tentative yet not too large for a gentleman. She admired her work.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, with the dead pilgrim in the ground, the joined companies gathered in the yard, where the din of departure brought the keeper’s dogs from the barn to nuzzle and sniff for scraps. The inn’s stableboys led the horses to the blocks, then locked hands and pushed their guests’ feet to get everyone mounted in turn. As she adjusted herself on the animal’s back her own helper stood by, his young eyes aglint with hope. Once astride she pressed a penny into his hand, and almost flinched at the touch of his skin, which despite the boy’s youth was the texture of his, and jolted her accordingly.

  The boy or someone else had stuffed her saddle well. It filled the width between her upper thighs with a pleasing firmness, rubbing her just there as the horse’s muscled back worked beneath her and a confessor’s old injunction sang in her mind. The saddle of thine horse shall be patience and purity, that thou may be patient in adversity and pure in the flesh. Not my saddle, she mused as she followed Robert through the wooden gate, thrown open to the road for the company’s departure. The saddle of mine horse shall be lust and want, that I may be quick in swinking and sated in the bed. She shuddered, let out a held breath.

  They left the village at the stroke of seven, twenty pilgrims strong. A few last houses, thatched roofs and low-cut hay, a sheepfold spilling onto a heath; groan of leather adjusting to new use, clank of pans on the cook’s packhorse.

  The widow shared a nag with her son, and as the company rounded the first bend in the road Margery turned to look at the woman’s face, wan and sad. All that day she watched the widow carefully, observing the
ways she tended to her son, now able to sit up on the saddle against his mother. Their occasional weeping was a sad music to the fellowship as the diminished family mourned the loss of a father and husband to a highwayman’s blade.

  IT WAS THE BOY who gave them away. The pilgrims had stopped for a rest and refreshment, just short of a wide area where the road had been washed out by a crossing stream. The horses were led to the water, and the women spread food on blankets up along the higher bank. Later, as they remounted and rode from their rest, the woman and her son started to edge closer. The boy was whispering to his mother, his eyes on them. On him, Robert.

  The company forded another, smaller stream. A step, a light jump, the horses having no trouble managing the crossing. Once on the far bank the widow and her son closed the distance, and when they were alongside she looked him full in the face. “Why, you are Faulk! I knew it,” the widow said, too loudly. Several of the other pilgrims turned toward them, their curiosity sparked by the widow’s first words in hours.

  “Mistress?” he said with a frown, his smooth chin raised, his gaze fixed on the road ahead.

  Margery watched the exchange, pondered how to stop it.

  “Robert Faulk, as I spit and kick,” said the widow, inching her horse closer. “Why, you been the cook in Bladen Manor for nigh on ten years, and here you be, astride a fancy saddle in rich jet, acting a gentleman’s part.”

  Margery watched him. Do not flinch. He remained impassive as he said to the widow, “You are mistaken, mistress.”

  “Mistaken?” she scoffed. “Don’t you twist words with me, Robert Faulk. Why, you’re a famed poacher in our parts, a bowman to match a king’s archer you are! Selling your coneys and your hinds, the hides and the meat, door to door up and down the shire. ’Twas my young Will here, was he knew your face.”

  “That’s Robert Faulk, sure,” said the boy, looking shyly up from beneath his hood. “Well met, Rob.”

  Margery edged her horse forward, coming between Robert and the widow. “I am afraid you have mistaken my husband for another man, good mistress,” she said, trying to sound kind, reaching to place a protective hand on his arm. “He is Antony Brampton, an esquire en service of Sussex.” A condescending smile to put a nosing widow in her place. “Hardly a cook, I should think.”

  “Though I do admire the craft of cookery greatly, my good mistress,” he said seamlessly, his voice almost jovial. Margery looked at him in awe. “My father’s family has employed a long, strong line of cooks in the manor kitchens for many generations. Their surname is Bolt, and there is a story about one of them from King Edward’s reign that your son here might enjoy. What is your name, young fellow?”

  “I—I am called Hugh, if you please, sir.”

  “Well, Hugh, in those days, before the great pestilence, there was a young maiden, a reeve’s daughter, living on the next manor to ours. She was a remarkable beauty, and in all the shire it was agreed that she would make a splendid match, bringing glory to her father and her family.” And he went on for nearly an hour, spinning a delightful tale of love, nobility, tragedy, and retribution that soon enough had several of the other pilgrims in the company listening in, nodding and laughing at the appropriate places. It was masterfully done, without a single lapse in voice or word, and thrilled her to her bones.

  Later, with the story concluded, he nodded toward the front. “Let us ride ahead, Elizabeth.”

  “Yes, my lord husband,” she said, and lifted her leg to kick lightly at the mare. From behind her she heard the widow’s soft mutter.

  “It is a remarkable likeness, by Jesu’s blood. Truly remarkable.”

  She allowed herself a private smile, her shoulders to settle. It had been the correct thing to do, the only thing, to escape the way they did. To fight, to flee, to deceive. Now to survive.

  Yet how had he done it? A question nagging at her for days, as they had made their way from a clearing in a Kentish wood to this road so many leagues north of London, all the while pursued by the malevolence that sought to end them both. It had been Margery’s idea for them to travel together and take on the public semblance of marriage. Robert had gone along only reluctantly, yet had quickly become a master imitator. How had he managed to feign a gentleman’s voice and bearing so naturally and with such ease? She asked him.

  He smiled almost shyly, still looking at the road. “There. You have stumbled upon my greatest secret, fair wife.”

  “As unpublished as your poaching, my lord husband?”

  “Indeed. And here it is.” He leaned slightly in her direction. “In my parish, at New Romney, I am renowned as an actor of great note.”

  “Truly?”

  “The church there performs an interlude of Jesu’s Passion every Whitsuntide. For two days entire the parish and town are given over to the wagons and costume, with the players picked out from households in the surrounding hundreds, high and low alike. When I was young I would seek out every moment of the plays, and rehearse them at home before the hearth or while peeling beets for Father. One day I was overheard by a playwarden, a fellow who fancied my elder sister. He pressed me into the willing service of our players. There was no role I wouldn’t take on. Herod, Herod’s wife, the figures of Mischance and Evil Grace. Pontius Pilate became my favorite. ‘Sire, what say you of Barabbas, a thief and traitor bold?’ Or, ‘There be no man here who will vouch you king, Jesu, but you be a lord or a gentleman.’ You see? Pilate is all in the song and the shoulders.”

  “A lord is nothing more than a lofty voice and a heavy purse then, methinks,” she said furtively.

  “And a title, and lands to his name, and a firm hand, and a whip,” said Robert.

  He did not see her cringe, his words summoning the violence of her dead husband. She regarded him in a different light after this disclosure, admiring anew the deftness of his dissembling, the devilish magic he worked on the company they shared.

  That night, in the common room at yet another inn, she sat among the women and the flickering candles as a company of minstrels sang for pennies around the hearth. A long tale of Guy of Warwick, the beautiful Felice, battles with giants, dragons, boars. At one point, as Margery listened with the others, she dozed off for a while, awakening to the sound of claps and laughs as the story reached a moment of absurdity. Yet her eyes fluttered open on a vision of the purest malice, a widow’s cold gaze on her lover’s face.

  Chapter 15

  TAXES AND TREACHERY WERE the subject of the day when Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk and chancellor of the realm, opened Parliament that year. The lords had assembled that Monday morning in the chamberlain room near the Painted Chamber to hear the earl’s declaration of the causes of their summons to Westminster. The chancellor’s first move was to demand a crushing war levy of four tenths from the towns, and four fifteenths from the counties—such an excessive portion that talk of impeachment began almost immediately. The treasurer and the clerk of the privy seal were also in jeopardy, and the succeeding days and weeks would see a flurry of charges and countercharges, challenges and refusals as the Parliament worked itself into a bitter frenzy against King Richard, who would ride angrily to Eltham with half his household and refuse to hear petitions from the Parliament’s envoys. Everyone could see that the lord chancellor had made the wrong move in those first hours, and that his days in high office were numbered. Despite a political acumen that had kept him at the center of power going on thirty years, the earl never saw the dragons coming, and from every corner of the realm, until he stood within their flames.

  All of this I gathered over that first week of Parliament without spending a farthing, as the taverns and shops of the royal capital throbbed with talk of the great events that would shape the realm for years to come. My own business in Westminster on the eighth day of the month was less public, as I needed to see a Shropshire chaplain in town with his lord for Parliament. We met in the hall near Common Pleas, traded the whispers and coin we had come to trade, and I left the palace and walked t
oward the river, my intention to hire a wherry back to London, where I hoped to find Ralph Strode at the Guildhall. Too much had transpired to keep him uninformed for any longer, though I had yet to decide how much to reveal. Rysyng’s revelations about the mayor bore further investigation, and Piers Goodman’s death had chilled the bones. Strode’s reaction would be loud and violent, I feared, and I had little desire to risk his ire without sounder information.

  Strode, it came about, saved me the float. Walking past the narrow line of vicars’ houses fronting the river I saw his distinctive form up ahead, standing on the pathway above the royal docks. He looked to be dawdling, waiting for someone. I was about to hail him when one of the south side doors to the palace flew open and out stepped Brembre himself, his company a dozen strong and including Strode, who fell in at the mayor’s behest and joined arms with him as they went along.

  There was always a certain smugness about Nicholas Brembre, a sneering confidence in his own invulnerability. Not pride of blood, as with a higher lord, but the kind of stony façade one sees in those sorts of men who have worked and fought their way up from low places. In Brembre’s case this place was a tenement house in Bread Street Ward, where his father had been a humble cordwainer, shoeing his betters with the finest leathers to be had in London. The son came into the business with a ruthless eye on his future, somehow managing to buy himself into the Worshipful Company of Grocers and establish a successful shop that grew quickly, whether through cunning, corruption, or both. Within a matter of years he had ascended to alderman of his father’s ward, then began his first term as lord mayor of London a few months before old King Edward’s death. His greatest triumph came at Smithfield, when he stood with King Richard against a rebel force five thousand strong, then was knighted for his stolid loyalty.