The Invention of Fire

by Holsinger, Bruce

  A false knight, certain lords would always insist on calling him, though he seemed to embrace the accolade rather than spurn the slander. He was Sir Nicholas to his face, Nick the Stick behind his back, and he wielded many rods against his enemies real and imagined. During his most recent election he’d had an opponent killed, knifed in the street, without a thought of penance or guilt.

  Nicholas Brembre, it was whispered, could purchase your murder for half a groat.

  Yet in Westminster that Parliament day Brembre was greeted like the king himself, the fawning masses delighted that the powerful mayor had deigned to step outside the walls for the occasion. He liked to surround himself with hard, armed men, who formed a diamond wedge that hustled him quickly through the crowd. The press deferred to him, parted ways for him, as if Lancaster himself were moving among them, though without the pomp and blood.

  Slowly I closed the distance between us, pushing my way through a river of watchers and hucksters, drunks and whores, all stretching for a glimpse of the famed or a brush with the vulnerable. Brembre had ordered a pause, his apparent aim to speak with someone who had called to him from a gap between two of the cottages. His men spun around and stood forth, watching for a blade or a dart. Brembre and Strode turned toward the river, and as I neared their position I saw that the man who had hailed them along the vicars’ walk was Chaucer.

  I spoke to one of the mayor’s guards. He got a nod from Strode, allowing me to join the three men. Though I stood half a head taller than Brembre, it was impossible not to feel diminished in the man’s presence. Taut, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, he was both knight and grocer and never let you forget either role. A lofty figure in the king’s affinity, yet the sort of man who was unafraid to pitch in and help load a wagon with barrels or boards whenever another pair of hands was needed. Brembre commanded more personal loyalty than Lancaster and the king together, and though a committed member of the royal faction, he had established over the years a fierce and widespread devotion from nearly every quarter. The mercers hated him, which in my view only burnished his reputation.

  As I quickly learned, the three had been discussing the Court of Chivalry and an ongoing dispute over livery. Chaucer flashed a rueful smile.

  “As I was telling the lord mayor, John, I am to be deposed here in Westminster, one week hence, on this Scrope-Grosvenor matter. You have heard of it?”

  “Not a man in England has not, Geoffrey,” I said. An exaggeration, though not by far. For months the earl marshal’s court had been traveling around the country deposing the cream of English chivalry in hopes of resolving a standing dispute between Sir Richard Scrope, a Yorkshire baron and onetime chancellor to King Richard, and Sir Robert Grosvenor, a Cheshire knight of limited influence in Westminster, over the right to a particular coat of arms. Despite the seemingly trivial subject of the dispute, many feared that blood would soon be spilled. Lords took their heraldry as seriously as their rights, investing a large portion of their honor in the disposition and protection of their arms.

  “The fifteenth of this month,” Chaucer continued. “In front of Derwentwater himself, and possibly Gloucester.”

  “I am to appear the same day,” said Brembre, with an ostentatious roll of his eyes. “As if a man doesn’t have better to do.”

  “You must be thankful then, Lord Mayor, that your duties will soon be lightened,” I said.

  Strode shot me an admonishing look, but the mayor laughed at my allusion to his coming departure from office. “I am more than happy to hand those duties on to Exton. The customs are keeping me busy enough. In fact I will be out at Gravesend for the next several days to see about these smugglers.” In addition to his duties as mayor Brembre was controller of customs for the crown, a position that would allow him to slide seamlessly from power to power upon Nicholas Exton’s inauguration at the end of the month.

  “You will take the ferry?” Chaucer asked.

  “My own barge,” said Brembre with a sniff.

  Without a thought I asked him, “Will Lady Idonia be accompanying you, Lord Mayor?”

  He turned to me, looking amused. “She’s currently at Peltham, our house in Sussex. But she will be here later in the week. Not a happy traveler, my Idonia.”

  “Too true, my lord.” Strode shook his big head. “I recall a particular journey to Oxford during your first term, when the lady—”

  “Chaucer, what did you need?” said Brembre.

  Strode, looking stung by the mayor’s interruption, turned away, his heavy jaw clenched shut.

  “I’ve heard from Middleburgh, Lord Mayor,” said Chaucer. “The staplers are as restless as they are conniving, and there are some things you need to know before your departure. May I ride with you to the Guildhall?” Brembre had been collector of customs and thus Chaucer’s immediate superior during his time at the customhouse. The two still consulted frequently on matters of the wool trade.

  “Come along, then,” said the mayor to Chaucer. “Ralph, I will see you shortly at council.”

  “Yes, Lord Mayor,” said Strode, with a stiff and ungainly bow. Chaucer gave us a wink before turning away. In that moment after the mayor’s departure Strode looked aggrieved, as if put off by Chaucer’s sudden appearance and Brembre’s decision to curtail their appointed exchange.

  “Where do things stand, John?” Strode asked, staring after the mayoral company folding into the crowd, with the guards closing around them. “What have you learned?”

  How much to trust him? Though our friendship was long, Ralph Strode was a mayor’s man thick and through, his first loyalties owed to the Guildhall. I decided to tell him only what I suspected most strongly.

  “Not as much as I would like,” I finally said. “Though what I do know is more than alarming. You heard about Piers Goodman?”

  “The hermit up by Cripplegate?”

  “He is dead.”

  “A fire in the tower. Unfortunate.”

  “Set by the Tower guard themselves. Piers never had a chance.”

  He turned to me, his rheumy eyes closing with the news. I gave him a few more details gathered from my inquiries, then my most important finding. “What I believe now, Ralph, is that the victims of this slaughter may have been Welshmen. ‘Welshmembers,’ poor Piers called them in his lunatic’s cant. He saw over a dozen of them come into the city a few nights before the bodies were found. They were brought in by the St. Giles parson, for reasons I have yet to discover.”

  Strode stared at me for a long moment. “A crew of Welshmen, you say, entering by Cripplegate?”

  “So Piers claimed. He also mentioned a Langbourn carter, perhaps the fellow thrown in the same privy. How the two are related I don’t yet know. Thin enough at this point, Ralph, but there it is.” Gloucester’s unknown threats to Brembre, the destroyed evidence, the identity of Norris’s witness: all this I kept to myself.

  Strode’s heavy sigh was a whistle through his nose, his lips pressed tightly together. “Come with me, Gower.”

  Turning from the palace Strode led me between the cottages and down to the bankside. We turned west and walked upriver a few hundred paces until we came to a position east of the royal pier, where an enormous jumble of boards, timbers, and stones sprawled fifty feet inland. The sight was a familiar one, a temporary blight on the king’s embankment during a major expansion of Westminster’s main point of access to the Thames. Three rows of new piles, eighteen in all and thick as masts, rose from beneath the water level, ending four feet above the river’s surface in iron shoes specially crafted for the purpose. Surrounding each length of timber was a large mass of stones, stacked artfully in a conical shape around every pile to reinforce the verticals against the flow of the tides. Soon the pile shoes would be connected with strong timbers, which would in turn be laid across with hundreds of boards to create a new platform several feet above the river. The effect would be a new artificial peninsula of considerable size and strength, befitting King Richard’s designs on the river.


  Though the keeper of the king’s works generally called a labor halt at Parliament time, such was not the case for this job. A crew of fourteen or fifteen men had just completed a morning shift and were now ambling toward a warehouse to the rear of the wharfage.

  “Dangerous work, this pier enlargement,” said Strode.

  “I would think so,” I said, wondering why he had led me here.

  “A week ago they were working on London Bridge, fortifying the starlings. Now they’re here.” He sighed. “These men are slaves, really. The keeper of the works has had more than one worker crushed by stones as heavy as ten men, he tells me. Several drownings. For a perilous job such as this you want outside men. Men willing to work long hours for little coin, and without wives and children in the city to feed or mourn.”

  We reached the streetside door of the warehouse. An alewoman had come in and was standing among the men, filling and refilling three tin cups passed from hand to hand, lip to lip as they shared loaves and hunks of cheese among themselves. The men were haggard, worn down by the labors they had been forced to endure—though very much alive, and speaking in a tongue vaguely familiar to my ear.

  “Here are your Welshmen, Gower,” said Strode, and now I knew why we were there. Piers Goodman’s “Welshmembers,” a crew of foreign laborers pressed into the most dangerous work to be found in London and Westminster. Yet these men assuredly had not been brought to the city for slaughter. I was left no closer to identifying the victims in the Walbrook than I had been that morning in the St. Bart’s churchyard.

  We exchanged few words on our short and sobering walk back to the palace yard, where Strode left me for another appointment in the hall. Curls of smoke rose from two rubbish fires burning in the middle of the space, and a bank of heavy clouds was rolling in distantly from the west, threatening rain, though not for several hours. Feeling the need to clear my head after what I’d just learned, I decided to return to the city by way of the Strand, which would take me past the grand houses along the royal way.

  As I neared the crowded mouth of Queen’s Street and the vintners’ stalls clustered there, I sensed a presence at that end of the square. I turned to see the pale face of Jack Norris, if anything thinner and more drawn than the last time I’d seen him. The boy was looking out over a long row of wine barrels, fixing me with a gaze both fearful and forlorn.

  “Jack!” I called out. “Jack Norris!”

  He continued to stare as I lunged through the crowd toward him, intent on netting him this time. Well before I reached him he pivoted on a foot, turned away, and slipped up Settler Lane, a narrow and tightly crowded way angling northwest from the square.

  By the time I moved thirty feet along Settler Lane myself he had already disappeared into the thick press. By that point Norris could have been anywhere, and I knew better than to attempt a pursuit, not with these weak eyes and unyouthful legs. I thought of him many times over the remainder of that day, haunted by the boy’s face, the earless head of a new orphan, his life no better than a rat’s.

  Chapter 16

  A LIGHT MORNING SHOWER was passing as Stephen Marsh went out from the city through Bishopsgate. The slickened stones along the lower end of Ermine Street spat up an ugly spray that wet and cooled his legs, helped to calm him as he left London behind for this first and perilous test. The way quickly thinned, a few last foot vendors barking for coin, and soon the urban street gentled into the dirt and gravel pack of the road north, though he wouldn’t travel even as far as Ware that day. Beneath him the mare relaxed into a steadier rhythm as any signs of the city receded with the gentle descent into the valley below Hornsey.

  This part of the ancient road was well patrolled and safe, at least in the daytime hours, crowded with cartloads of grains, greens, and fruits, all bound for the gates and the many mouths between the walls, and Stephen had little worry that he would be waylaid by highwaymen. He left London less than twice a year, though each time he did he vowed to make such sojourns a more frequent part of his life, which was too often consumed by his work and its demands. Founding, forging, bending, banding: metals and ores ran in Stephen’s veins, yet they were not all of his heart, and with this October sun on his face, these first nips of autumn in the air, his thoughts could turn for a while to the purer beauties of the natural world around him.

  It had been less than two hours by the sun when he reached the top of the rise he remembered. As Stephen knew from his last trip up this way, the fields on either side afforded an excellent vantage on the surrounding countryside. To the east of the road spread several long and narrow fields, all dead flat and several of them neatly furrowed, a line of tenants in the far distance likely sowing winter rye. Beyond the next furlong stood a manor house, with one of the new and higher chimneys of eight sides crafted from a lighter stone. To the west, a fallow field, then a wooded copse, perhaps a mile distant from where his horse stood, and leading to it a winding path partly obscured by the brush.

  Stephen looked back to the south, toward London. A quarter mile behind him the road cut sharply right. No traffic between here and there. Same to the north, where the way ahead went gently downhill before disappearing behind a high hedge. No one would see him leave the road, and with a bit of fortune, Stephen might even make the woods without being observed.

  A tug on the reins and the horse was cutting down the track, which soon met the course of a creek flowing along the edge of the field. No huts or houses in sight, and his progress was quick. At one point he heard the faint tinkle of bells from behind him on the road. He slowed his mount and turned in the saddle to look back up the track. A company was passing, five strong, merchants or tradesmen. Men’s voices, mingling, laughing. Marsh went unnoticed, and when they had gone he turned for the copse.

  At the far side of the small woods the land dropped sharply away over a stone cliff. The ground here was still damp, though he was able to gather enough dry brush and wood for his purpose. Lighting a fire took little time. Soon he had a small blaze crackling merrily beneath the trees, and all the while the question wormed through his mind, shaping and consuming his every thought.

  Will they work?

  For it was all very well to imagine such a clever firing device as he had created, to design it and craft it in the familiar safety of Stone’s. And it had been all very well to make these four simple handgonnes, two forged of iron and welded at the seam, two founded of bronze in a single piece. Yet to fix snake to gun and actually deploy it, with all the shot and powder and flame this required—this was something else entirely.

  Stephen started to prepare one of the iron guns. First he attached the serpent device in its proper place along the barrel, testing the hinged mechanism with his free hand. Then a measure of coarse powder procured from Snell, poured down the barrel and shoved to with a parchment wad and a drivel fitting the width of the barrel. No ball for this first firing, he’d decided, as he wanted to test the soundness of his weld before adding a projectile. Next the matchcord, a simple length of rope soaked in saltpetre and oil, dried, and cut to a few inches. Stephen carefully lit the cord at the fire, then clipped it into the upturned mouth of the snake. The snake’s mouth would bring the smoldering end of the rope into the firing pan, a small metal semicircle affixed to the barrel that would carry the flame through the touchhole and set ablaze the powder in the barrel, which would in turn fire the ball. Holding his breath, he filled the pan with a final tap of powder.

  He gave the loaded gun a close look, end to end, and thought through the firing. Left hand braces gun against chest. Right hand raises tail of snake. Snake’s mouth brings flame to pan. Pan lights powder in barrel through touchhole. Powder shoots ball.

  Simple. Efficient. Beautiful.

  Stephen grimaced. The matchcord, he saw, was cut too long, forming an awkward curve away from the pan. He could straighten it, though then he wouldn’t know how far the snake would have to travel to light the powder. As he pulled on the matchcord, still lit, to shorten the inner
length, Marsh’s hand jostled the snake. The mouth dipped, the ember touched the pan, and—crack!—the gun fired, throwing a spray of flame at his face.

  “By Jesu,” he cried, slapping at the scattered powder and reaching for water. He splashed it on his left cheek, where a flame had licked at his skin and caused a burn. The noise had astonished him, and as his ears rang with the report, his good sense told him to abandon his guns and powder and flee, so certain he was that the strange noise would bring unwanted attention, perhaps a pursuit.

  He jogged to the other side of the copse facing the highway. No movement on the road, and as his breaths lengthened he appreciated the security of his situation, at least for the moment. The gun’s report, though unfamiliar, could have come from anywhere, and no one curious about the alien noise would think to look in the copse. He would need to be cautious, however, and limit his test firings.

  Stephen was more careful with the next loading, as this time he would shoot one of the molded balls provided by the armorer. The barrel was fouled with powder, so first he had to spend some time cleaning it out with the drivel. Once the gun was loaded he kept the smoldering cord well away from the powder until nearly ready to fire. When all was prepared, he brought the stock up beneath his left arm, steadied the gun, and lowered the barrel. His target was a broad elm about thirty yards away, wide enough that he could reasonably hope to hit it, yet sufficiently distant to present a real challenge. A deep breath, and his right hand slowly lifted the snake’s tail, allowing the curved neck and the head to descend toward the pan. He whispered a prayer, then touched coal to powder.

  Crack.

  The gun’s slight jump raised his head, though his gaze remained steady enough to see a spray of wood fly from the elm. With the gun still in hand he darted toward the tree.

  A hit! And from his own gun!

  Not in the center of the trunk, but the ball was now embedded in the thick bark to one side. He fingered the splintered wound, marveling at the power of metal and fire to cause such damage to a surface so unyielding to the touch. A knight’s shield would be useless against these weapons. Even plate armor would be vulnerable to the new guns.