The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  Piers Goodman, though thin of brain, was one of the city’s more useful hermits, with sharp eyes and good ears, unafraid to stick his head out of his hole and sell what he knew, which tended to be a great deal. The Hermit of St. Giles-along-the-Wall-by-Cripplegate was the rather pompous title he had chosen for himself long ago, and for years its grandeur fit him. Nobles from the king’s household, bureaucrats from the Guildhall and Chancery, mercers and aldermen: all sought his counsel on matters large and small, climbing up to the old storeroom he had claimed as his hermitage, offering thanks, charity, and spilled secrets to a man as discreet as he was pious—or so it appeared to most of those who consulted him. In reality the hermit leaked like an old wine cask, sharing the private lives of others for trifles: coins, fruits and pies, the occasional whore. In recent years the cask would often run dry, though with Piers Goodman you seldom knew what you might get.

  It took a while to lead him around to the subject of the day, but when I finally did, he was as usual quite forthcoming. “Strangers, you say? Company of men? Oh, we’ve had our share of strangers we have, and companies—why, just Saturday or was it Tuesday a little brace of—oh—Welshmembers it was. Whole flock of Welshmembers, herded through Cripplegate quick as you please. Piers saw them he did, looking down through his slitty slit, and Gil Cheddar told him all about it. Big trouble for the mayor, says Gil Cheddar, those Welshmembers. 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? Not faggots, mind, not beefs, mind, not Lancelot, mind, but—”

  “Stop there, Piers. A company of Welshmen, you say?”

  “Aye, Welshmembers they were, and right through the gate they went, says Gil Cheddar, who brings Piers his supper and his—”

  “You said this Gil Cheddar told you about them?”

  “Aye he did, told me all that business. Not ale, mind, not—”

  “And who is Gil Cheddar?”

  “An acolyte of St. Giles Cripplegate is Gil Cheddar, and the sweetest face you’ll ever see on him. Gil Cheddar brings his old hermit his suppers he does—not every day, but some days his suppers he does. Breads, fishes, cheeses, a dipper of ale for Piers and I’ll thank you for a piece of silver, and now a song for you, Gower? A song of hermits pricking bold, aye, that is what Piers’ll seemly sing.” And he intoned it in his nose: “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 . . .”

  I pushed a coin through the window and left him to his melody. Back on the walkway I had a decision to make: proceed along the wall through the remaining gates or descend to the outer part of the ward and try to find Gil Cheddar. It was not a feast, and as an acolyte, Cheddar would likely not appear at St. Giles until later in the day. I would return in several hours.

  Soon after Cripplegate the wall bent southward, angling past the peculiar roof of St. Olave’s and the five towers placed like sentries above this misshapen corner of the city. I learned nothing at Aldersgate nor at Newgate, where I had extensive connections among the guard, though I did gather a few nuggets about unrelated matters for later use. On leaving Newgate I got a warning from one of the guards to watch my step farther on. As I soon discovered, the walkway had collapsed perhaps forty feet short of Ludgate, beams leaning askance from the wall, planks dangling creakily in the wind. A heavy scaffold had crushed an abandoned shack beneath, leaving a sprawl of broken timber that looked too rotten for salvage.

  I retraced my steps to the stairs before Newgate and descended into the narrow ways of St. Martin, the small parish spread between St. Paul’s and the wall. My whole day had been spent floating above London, with scarcely a thought for the eternal squalor below, though descending now to the close streets I knew so well came almost as a relief, despite the fatigue of a long and trying day. I walked nearly to the cathedral before turning to approach Ludgate from the east, angling around the gateyard to avoid repair work on the conduit ditch, which looked to have sprung a leak. At the corner of the yard I bought three bird pies and a dipper of ale.

  From the pillory holes in the yard dangled the hands of Peter Norris, a parchment collar affixed to his neck, his uncovered hair lifting morosely with each gust of wind. He must have been in place for hours already, as the area was free of hasslers. A boy of about eleven sat at the foot of the stocks, faking a cough.

  Norris’s eyes were to the ground as I approached. His unshaven neck rasped against the parchment collar, inscribed in high, dark letters with his crime: I, Peter Norris, stole pigeons. His was quite a fall, for Norris had been a powerful man in former days, a wealthy mercer with nearly exclusive command of the city’s silk trade with France, though that was before he would be brought low by his own poor decisions.

  “Norris,” I said, handing two pies to the boy and holding one out to his father’s mouth.

  As the boy started to eat Norris made an effort to turn his head, angling his gaze up to meet my own.

  “Spit that out, Jack!” Norris commanded weakly when he saw me. The boy stopped chewing, his eyes gone wide. “John Gower here’s like to poison you dead, without a thought for your boy’s soul.”

  I sniffed. “Not today, Norris.”

  I glanced at his son. The boy, twig thin, wore a woolen cap, his golden hair stuffed beneath the narrow brim. The cap had ridden up slightly, exposing ugly stumps where his outer ears had once been. A cutpurse, then, caught knifing and sliced for his crime. He took a few coins from my hand and wandered off toward the gate, both pies already gone.

  Norris looked after his son as long as he could, neck straining against the skin-slicked wood. “That boy, he’s a loyal one, he is. He’s got as much rot thrown in the face this week as his father, with no fuss about it, and sits here with me all through the day. ‘The Earl of Earless,’ they taunt him on account of his stubs. Worse things, too.” He shook his head.

  “Can he hear it all?” I asked, curious about the boy’s affliction, thinking of my own.

  “Oh, young Jack hears what he wants to hear, as all boys do.” He laughed fondly.

  Norris, I realized as I followed the boy’s progress, had a perfect angle on the traffic into the city from Ludgate. Beyond the imposing façade lay the legal precincts and the royal capital. An important city entrance, bringing visitors and goods from Temple Bar, the inns, and finally Westminster a good walk up the Strand.

  “How long have you been at the pillory, Norris?” I held the cup for him.

  He took a slow sip of ale, smacked his lips. “Since the dawn bell,” he murmured. Another sip. “But an hour and a bite and I’m free, for all that’s worth.”

  “This is the last day of your sentence?”

  “Aye.”

  “And the rest of it?”

  “Ten hours in a day right through a week, as was my sentence at the Guildhall, and all for a festering brace of pigeons swiped and sold to a pieman! Constable wouldn’t have taken me in at all, if an alderman’s daughter hadn’t happened to stomach one and empty her guts.” He looked out at one hand, then the other. “Give me Jesu’s cross over the pillory. A man’s not meant to stand bent this long.”

  He was right about that. Though the punished generally stood at the stocks for no more than an hour at a time, the longer sentences could lead to permanent disfigurement. Pillory back, its sufferers easily identifiable by their crooked spines and frequent grunts of pain as they hobbled through the streets.

  After a few pitying murmurs I began gently, asking Norris whether he had noticed any unusual activity at the gate in recent days, particularly involving a large company of men.

  “Not Londoners, but a company from outside the city,” I said. “Sixteen of them. All dead now, thrown in the privy ditch beneath the Long Dropper. They were walked in some time in the last week—or carried, I suppose. Does anything come to mind?”

/>   Norris thought for a moment, then looked up and surprised me. “Welshmen, I’ll be bound,” he said.

  I felt a satisfied warmth. “What do you know of Welshmen, Norris?”

  “The first day of my sentence. A Wednesday it was,” he said. “Caught a little glimpse of them skirting along the yard, just there.” He nodded toward the mouth of Bower Row. “Only reason I remember it is, those Welsh carls gave us a nice respite.”

  “How is that?”

  “My first day in the stocks. Seemed half of London was out hurling eggs, cabbages, dungstraw at me and my boy, anything they could lift. But then those strangers come by, and all at once every man of them leaves off and starts tossing his rot at the poor Welshers instead.” He laughed weakly. “Should have heard them, Gower, our good freemen. ‘Savages!’ ‘Sodomites!’ ‘Child burners!’ ‘Leap off the walls, you filthy Welshers!’ Those sorts of roses, is what they shouted. And so it went until the strangers were beyond the bar.”

  “What were they doing at Ludgate?”

  “Wouldn’t know. Couldn’t hear a thing of them.”

  Young Jack had returned and took his place to the right of his father’s protruding head and hands. He had purchased himself an oatloaf and nibbled at it slowly.

  “You didn’t see who was leading them through?” I asked.

  He sniffed and spat. “What I’ve seen a lot of is my feet, and little Jack’s fair nose. Hard to look at Welshmen when your face is forced to the ground.”

  He bent his straitened neck upward into an awkward angle, grunted from the effort and relaxed, his frame sagging with the work. I wetted his lips again, then held the last pie below his mouth. He took a small nibble, a larger bite.

  “Tell me about your witness.”

  His jaw stopped, his eyes shifting to the side, away from me. “Ah. No act of charity, these pies and ale?”

  “You know me better than that, Norris. Who is it? What did he see?”

  A heavy gust spiraled a pile of leaves into the air above the pillory platform. “Why should I tell you? You’ll go and sell what I say to the Guildhall, and then where will Peter Norris be?”

  I shook my head. “The Guildhall is not disposed to believe anything you say. No buyers there, as you well know.”

  His eyes closed. He sighed. “Perhaps. Though I shall bide my time, Gower. My witness is quite convincing, and my sentence ends at the next bell. The right moment will come, I trust.”

  Was he lying, or simply a fool? Either way I could get nothing more out of the man despite my offer of considerable coin. I turned to leave him, and his earless son gave me a hateful and piercing look, as if my hand had been one of the many hurling filth at the boy and his father. I walked away and toward the gate.

  The guards and tollkeeper at Ludgate were forthcoming but unhelpful, none of them recalling the Welsh company, though promising to ask about. It was now past four. I hesitated just outside the walls, knowing I should walk back up through Cripplegate to see Gil Cheddar, the acolyte at St. Giles. Yet the occasional gaps in my vision had returned, as they often did with the fatigue of a long day and a late afternoon. The wind had moistened somewhat, too, and a distant rumble of thunder threatened a city storm. I would visit St. Giles the following morning, I resolved, and call on Cheddar then. It was one of several mistakes I made that day along the walls of London, hearing only what I wanted to hear, deaf to what mattered most.

  Chapter 3

  LIKE POURING OUT THE SUN. A lethal river of metal flowed from the cauldron, killing the thickness with a long hiss, filling the space between the clay molds. A heavy steam rose from the melting wax. Stephen Marsh, his gloved hands gripping the cauldron’s edge and an apprentice at each side for balance, tipped the last of the molten alloy into the small hole at the top of the mantle. Iron bars, tin ingots, a touch each of copper and lead, all melted together and skimmed for impurities before the pour. Soon enough the liquid bronze would cool into a bell duly stamped with the lozenge of Stone’s foundry. Then trim, sound, file, and polish until the instrument achieved its final shape and tone, made fit for a high tower across the river.

  Like pouring out the sun. For that was how his master Robert Stone always liked to describe it, this mysterious shaping of earth’s metal into God’s music. Pouring out the sun—until the sun withered and killed him.

  With the cauldron locked and pinned, Stephen wiped his brow and dismissed the two apprentices. He looked over toward the door to the yard, where the sour-faced priest stood with crossed arms, watching the founders at work.

  “Two bells formed like this one, Father,” Stephen said, removing his gloves as he walked toward the foundry’s newest customer. The parson of St. Paulinus Crayford, a parish to the southeast of London, here at the beck of the churchwardens about a commission for the new belfry. “The first tuned at ut, the second at re. I sound them myself after the molding, and I have the ear of Pythagoras, so you needn’t worry about a symphonious match. If our bells are not well sounding and of good accord for a year and a day, why, we’ll cart them back here to the city, melt them down from waist to mouth, and cart the new ones to you out at Crayford. All at Stone’s own expense, and all inside a month.”

  The parson looked skeptical. “And reinstall them in the belfry?”

  “Aye, and reinstall them in the belfry, hiring it out to the carpenters ourselves,” said Stephen. He removed his apron, a heavy length of boiled leather, and hung it on its posthook. “I poured side by side for five years with the master, bless his memory, and now am chief founder and smith retained at the widow’s will and pleasure. Your wardens shall be satisfied, I promise you that.”

  The parson asked a few more questions, then Stephen took him up front to the display room to settle sums. An advance of two pounds on six and thirteen, with the balance due upon delivery to Crayford, where the bells would arrive before the kalends of—

  “And installation,” said the parson, raising his chin, clearly fashioning himself a shrewd businessman.

  Stephen nodded briskly. “And installation, Father, with clapper and carpentry entire. Cleanup as well, and Stone’s will be pleased to throw in a cask of strong ale for the company.” The parson’s eyes twinkled at this. Stephen had seen it before, the way that last, trivial detail worked on the pastoral mind. How pleased my flock will be with their good parson, for getting them an extra day’s work and a free drunk in the bargain!

  The note was signed, the deal waxed, sealed with Stone’s lozenge stamp. Stephen was watching the parson leave the shop, preening over his bit of successfully transacted London business, when Hawisia Stone came in from the house passage. She stood there in her frozen widow’s way, her mouth a flat line on the hard rock of her face. She had thick, muscular hands for a woman her age, which was a year shy of thirty, or so Stephen thought, and her swollen middle mounded out obscenely beneath her bulky blacks. No confinement for Hawisia Stone, no feminine modesty for this steely widow, convention be damned.

  “Mistress Stone,” he said, and never knew what to say next. How does the good widow fare this day, Mistress Stone? What thousand tasks do you wish me to perform in the smithy today, Mistress Stone? And what new curses have you called down upon your servant’s murderous blood, Mistress Stone?

  “The parson’s to buy, then?” she rasped.

  “He will,” said Stephen. He nodded at the note and coin on the board counter. “A solid commission.”

  “Fine.” She went to the ledger and tucked the note into the book’s back lining. The coin went in her purse.

  He stood there, acting the thrashed whelp, Hawisia the grey bitch of the place. In the months since Robert’s death he had become newly familiar with her little noises, all those telling grunts he’d once been happy to ignore. Disapproving murmurs, low growls of contempt, long-suffering sighs in place of words withheld.

  “You’ve work to do?” she asked him without looking up from the ledger.

  “Aye.”

  “Go then.”

/>   Stephen backed and turned, slinking through the door to the foundry yard. He kicked a bucket, scaring off a yard dog, his gut clutched with all that might have been, and all that might still be.

  Only six months ago Stephen had been looking ahead to a full and verdant future. Robert Stone was on the verge of making him partner in the foundry and smithy, giving him his daughter’s hand to bind it all tight as you could like. Stephen’s master had worried often about losing him to a house of his own, where he could keep a greater share of his made coin. Why, if we lose our Stephen, he’d say to his wife, half our men’re like to go with him to start up a rival shop. We need him here, Hawisia, with all his cunning and craft. She had agreed.

  For Stone’s was a sprawling operation: a foundry, a smithy, an ironmonger all in one, and though Robert Stone had been its rightful master, it was Stephen Marsh at the artful center of this world of metal, bending, twisting, tapping, his adept hands shaping bronze and lead with the delicacy of a king’s silversmith, finding ways to swirl the hardest irons into the most intricate forms and configurations. “There is surely something of the devil in you, Stephen Marsh,” Robert Stone would say, always with a smile, and Stephen would smile with him, even as he inwardly spurned such talk of demons. His skill was inborn, a thing of kind wit, the work of Lady Nature at her forge, as much a part of him as his very tongue; the devil had naught to do with it.

  By his nineteenth year Stephen Marsh had won a reputation as the fellow to see for the subtlest metalwork to be had between Bishopsgate and the river. Magnates’ men would come to Stone’s to commission new armorial bearings for a bishop’s door, or to repair the hinges on an earl’s ewer, and Stephen would take up every job with a swiftness to match his skill. With the coming arrangement Stephen could keep his mind on his craft without a care for the management or upkeep of the shop, leaving these to Robert, who was more skilled at such things as recording accounts and filling supplies, or maintaining good relations with the guilds and the parish. God’s grace, the curate would say, grazing in the fields of our hearts.