The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  Stephen reached for one last objection. “Cannon are hard to hide in a foundry, Master Snell, even one as large as Stone’s.”

  He shook his head. “You needn’t worry about concealment. You won’t be making cannon for us. Nothing as large as a bombard.”

  “What, then?” Stephen asked.

  A long silence followed. Through the window came the blare of a trumpet, the muffled calls of the captains out in the yard, a lion’s roar from the menagerie.

  “Handgonnes, Marsh,” Snell finally said, a finger clawed over his lip. “The future of war. The future of death itself, perhaps.”

  Handgonnes. A word delicious on the tongue, though coming from the armorer’s mouth it rang with the virtues of his office and the guiding spirit of the Tower itself.

  Efficiency.

  Precision.

  Less powder.

  Less gun.

  Handgonnes.

  “Last month I had a vision,” said Snell, rising at last from his chair. Stephen was able to breathe again, though also he felt a keen longing to remain with the man in the confines of the Tower, to do this work here, with the fine tools and hot forges of the crown, rather than return to the bleak drudgery of Stone’s foundry.

  Snell had gone to the window and now looked out on the width of the Tower yard. “I saw a city on a plain, ringed with fire and belching smoke. A battle, one conscripting every man, every woman, every child within its walls to join the great fight. Every last soul.”

  His voice softened, and he spoke the next words as if recounting a saint’s miracle witnessed with his own eyes. “And they all had guns, Marsh. The women, the boys, even the littlest of girls.” Now a whisper, a soft breath of wonder. “They all had guns.”

  There was a low aperture beneath the eaves of the building, above the window now filled with the armorer’s sturdy frame. Through this upper opening came a hazy gleam, the late hour of a dwindling day. Snell’s head appeared to Stephen’s eyes within a blazing circle of fire as the armorer began to expound on this new world of guns and shot.

  “Let me tell you my dream.”

  Chapter 9

  POISON, GALLOWS, SWORD, HAMMER, faggot, gun, knife, arrow, tub, cross; berries, wood, hemp, iron, sulfur, river; earth, air, fire, water: man, it seems, is capable of fashioning nearly anything into an instrument of death. Four tired nags too old to plow a field can pull a living man apart. Samson slew an army with the jawbone of an ass. The earth is a verdant field of weapons.

  Michaelmas, and as a small goose roasted in the kitchen I spent that morning in my study, sifting through what Chaucer had sent me from his house and offices in Greenwich. The package had reached me by means of a parliamentary messenger riding from Kent on his way to Westminster, stopping off in Southwark to deliver a letter and its accompanying matter. A leather packet, thonged and sealed. Recognizing the impression, I broke the wax and unstrung the parchment threading. Always an ambivalent pleasure, our trade in poetry, and I was in no mood for the frivolous or the bawdy.

  I needn’t have worried. Inside was a thin quire of eight folios, covered by a brief letter from Chaucer.

  To the worthy and right worshipful sir,

  John Gower of St. Mary Overie in Southwark

  Worshipful sir, I commend to you this humble quire, inked with sixteen tragedies that we hope will be pleasing to your ears, if not your eyes—for which I daily pray, old friend. Send us your own offerings when committed to sheepskin. We also appeal to your great courtesy in asking that you delay no longer in visiting us in Greenwich, home to many a shrew, and scoundrels aplenty. A man of your habits and skills would feel quite at home in these village precincts.

  Leave aside your dark matter for a few days, John. London can surely spare your lurking presence.

  Your prideful servant,

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  The invitation worked at my conscience, and I recalled our last exchange at Aldgate before Chaucer’s final departure from London. For months I had been meaning to take a horse or a walk to the Thames-side village, a short distance from Southwark. Chaucer had vacated the city so thoroughly since the last autumn that it could often seem as if he had never lived here at all.

  At least I had his verse. I sat to read, adjusting a candle at each side of the quire, lined with one of the tales that would go into this pilgrimage collection he was sketching out. I had read several others in the past two years, every one of them peculiar, distinctive, uniquely his own. Romances, fabliaux, moral fables, tedious sermons, lives of the saints: he was building a strange mélange of stories, to no purpose I could yet discern.

  This tale, to be told by a monk, sang more darkly than his usual fare, whispering of the many dead. It had been divided into a series of smaller parables, all concerning great men who suffer a hard and inevitable fall. Chaucer had written it in eight-line stanzas, ten syllables to the line.

  I would bewail in manner of tragedy

  The harm of them who stood in high degree

  And fell so far, there was no remedy

  To rescue them from their adversity.

  For know this: when Fortune wishes to flee,

  No man may her delay, nor fate withhold;

  Let no man trust in blind prosperity.

  Beware of these examples, true and old!

  A monkish sentiment. Even the highest men must drop like stones, to settle in the mud. What followed were brief accounts of sixteen men who met their deaths in some form of misery: exile, murder, deposition. Chaucer included among the monk’s examples both the ancient and biblical—Adam, Samson, Hercules, Caesar—as well as contemporary greats only recently deceased. Pedro of Castile, Hugh of Pisa, even Bernabò Visconti, the lord of Milan who had passed away in December.

  We know we are writing tragedy, I once heard Chaucer say, when our verses weep for Fortune’s assault upon the proud. Chaucer, one of the most blindly vain men I knew, loved nothing more than attacking the vice of pride in his own verse, yet beneath the particolored skein of this monk’s stories I discerned a subtle warning to certain magnates of the realm. King’s favorites all, and Richard kept them in subsidies and baubles, created them earls and dukes with no counsel from the wise. Men whose hold on power seemed always on the edge of collapse, yet who managed to survive the various turns in royal favor.

  Nor was I alone in sensing a quick and lethal shift afoot in the realm, its traces winding stealthily through Chaucer’s pretty tales. Whispers of discontent, of angry lords and weakening wills, of a sinking softness at the top. The tense truce between King Richard and the Duke of Lancaster had held for several years, notwithstanding some notable gaps. Yet Lancaster was in Spain that fall and would remain there for many months, leaving behind a void that other magnates seemed only too eager to fill with their grudges and cavilings.

  A monk’s warnings are not to be taken lightly, even if voiced by a poet toying with his oldest friend. Sixteen deaths indeed, I thought grimly. Watch yourselves, my lords, this monk’s tale warned the realm, or you too shall suffer a long fall, and meet your end in a sewer.

  “Another messenger, Master Gower.” Will Cooper, appearing in mid-stanza. “This one from Heath, concerning a new prisoner.”

  Lewis Heath, a beadle of Lime Street Ward. I had several men there, as I did in most of the wards, paid to bring me news as it arose. Anyone above a common laborer brought into the city gaols and I would likely hear about it.

  “It is Peter Norris,” Will continued, his voice somewhat strained. “He has been taken for theft, and jailed at the Counter.” One of the city’s three busier gaols, holding pens for criminals of all varieties.

  “Which?”

  “In the Poultry,” said Will. “He is to go before the Mayor’s Court Tuesday morning.”

  The news came as little surprise. For a habitual thief like Norris there was a short ladder from the stocks to the gallows, despite his former prominence in the city government.

  “Will?”

  “Yes, Master Gow
er?”

  “Did you learn what he stole?”

  He hesitated, knowing the implications. “Gold wares, Master Gower. A cup, I am told, and a girdle of purses. He had them in hand when taken.”

  I sighed. Steal a pair of breeches and Peter Norris might have returned to the stocks, perhaps lost a foot. But pinching items like this meant he would need some extraordinary luck not to hang.

  ON THE TUESDAY I WENT across the river for Norris’s trial, with the likely futile aim of learning the name of his witness. The Guildhall always stank on court days. Though the building’s large main chamber normally felt airy and spacious, the ritual of gaol delivery would empty the city’s prisons, their inhabitants led over to be crammed into the northeast corner, screened off from the trestle tables at either end that served as the mayor’s and sheriffs’ benches for the twice-weekly sessions of the city courts. There they would stand until their matter was called, a thicket of dirt and fleas, the itchy scent filling the hall, with no breeze to mitigate the foul air. Some of these poor souls had lain in the Counter or Newgate for weeks, fed little more than crumbs, and showing it: gaunt faces, thinned limbs, bones protruding from shoulders and cheeks.

  On that day a dozen prisoners awaited their turn before the city court. The accused were mostly men, though a few women were mixed in, all of them visibly aware of the sad spectacle they had become. They were a striking contrast to those at the Guildhall on civil matters, which would be heard before the common council. All men, most with self-important airs about them, seated in a double row around the open square of tables formed by the mayor and aldermen, awaiting their moment. One of Brembre’s recent and more controversial innovations, this allowance for spectators at the city courts seemed to me little more than a show of power, of a piece with the man’s preference for elaborate and expensive ceremony at every opportunity. I found a seat along the low cabinets by the Guildhall’s northern wall, allowing me to watch the proceedings at the bench while keeping an eye on the prisoners.

  Peter Norris stood at the end of a loose middle rank, angled against the wall, his eyes downcast, his shoulders slumped, a man already resigned to his fate. His cheeks and chin had been shaved to the skin. The hangman likes a clean neck.

  At the west end of the hall was the mayor’s bench, positioned on a movable dais raised several feet above the floor. Brembre himself sat in the middle, with the city’s aldermen stretched beside and beneath him along the adjacent tables, all gazing down at the lower benches and the accused, who came forward to the bar one by one to answer to the charges or suits against them. The area before the bench was separated from the crowd by a low wooden barrier extending around the three sides, keeping the rabble at bay.

  Always some useful surprises in the mayor’s court, and in former years I had attended nearly every week, eager to gather what buds I could, though that day the civil matters offered little that was not routine. Aliens admitted to the freedom of the city, a dispute over the capture and cooking of an errant street pig, a wife and husband sent to the pillory for tearing a neighbor’s hood. The parties and the witnesses were demonstrative, and the arguments could be heated, but the court’s decisions brooked no argument. The matters heard in the first hour were all too minor for any kind of appeal, with the mayor’s judgment taken as final. Brembre looked both bored and in a hurry, surely eager to return to the more significant matters under debate up the river in Westminster. Parliament had opened the day before, and the mayor had little patience for the squabbles of ward and parish when the future of the kingdom was at stake.

  It was nearing the hour of eleven by the time the court came to the criminals. The bailiff called out the names of the jury members, gathered from various wards for that week’s service, with the sentences tailored to fit the crime or violation in question. A grocer accused of leavening his spices would forfeit his shop to the city for the space of a year. Others would go to the pillory for the minor theft of an egg or the selling of bad beef.

  Yet for certain of these Londoners life and limb were at stake. The Guildhall’s work here was quick and cruel, despite the moderating influence of the jury. Two horse thieves would hang that very afternoon, while a Dutchman who had twice escaped from Newgate was sentenced to the severing of his left leg below the knee. Still another man, a blacksmith barely out of his apprenticeship, would lose his hand, and with it his livelihood, for striking the alderman of Cripplegate Ward in a dispute over a property boundary. The alderman preened happily at his victory, and the thought of the axe.

  The saddest aspect of the law’s application in such cases, sadder to me the older I grow, is the pathetic reactions of the families of those convicted. You could hear their sobs, the loud anguish from Guildhall Yard as each sentence was delivered within and announced by the mayor’s caller outside. The mother of one of the horse thieves, rushing for her condemned son, held back inside the door by a ward constable and struggling in his arms. The fresh young wife of the smith, a hooded rose who would never again feel her husband’s strong grip at her waist. The Guildhall practiced a justice of arbitrary cruelty, made worse in the last year by a departing mayor with something to prove.

  Eventually Peter Norris’s matter was called. The tension increased, the aldermen exchanging looks around the bench, as Norris’s former position in the city government was well known. The bailiff read out his offense in his bureaucrat’s dull hum.

  “Be it known to all present that on the Thursday last, the eve of Michaelmas, in the tenth year of the reign of King Richard II, Peter Norris, vagrant, did feloniously remove two gold cups, a silver ewer, four purses of nobles and half nobles, and other smaller goods from the shop of Master Henry Gibbe, guildsman in the parish of St. Michael Paternoster, and that upon being spied by the curate of that parish, viz. Richard Hering, said Peter Norris, vagrant, did then flee through the streets, with four men of the parish in pursuit, viz. Peter Blome, John Braham, John Refham, and William le Tabler, and that upon reaching Bishopsgate said Peter Norris, vagrant, was apprehended by said men of the parish, with said gold cups, ewer, purses, etc. on his person and in his possession, by which evidence . . .”

  The bailiff’s account went on to detail Norris’s arrest and imprisonment, along with his futile repentance before his jailers. In addition to the theft, Norris was being pinned with vagrancy: the ultimate insult for a former ward beadle, and a charge that would render any leniency on the mayor’s part all the more unlikely.

  The proceeding went quickly, with the curate and two of the four parishioners giving their testimony. No facts were in dispute, the verdict rendered with little ceremony. Norris’s face had gradually whitened as his doom became clear, and when the time came for him to speak he had been reduced to a quivering mess, his skin an ashen grey, his voice rasping as he attempted to utter some words of regret. He stammered once, again, then clamped shut his lips and eyelids.

  “Speak up then,” said the bailiff, poking Norris in the gut with his rod. “Have you any words to say for yourself, Norris?”

  “Only, my lords . . .” His head swiveled from side to side, owl-like, though his eyes remained closed. “Only that what I did was done of out the barest need, and done for my son, though I am dreadful sorry for the theft, dreadful sorry, my lords. But I couldn’t let him starve, not young Jack. Couldn’t bear to see him—”

  “We are no fellows of yours, Norris,” said Brembre, half standing and leaning forward from the bench, unable to resist a final show of superiority over the diminished man. “Regret will buy you nothing here.”

  Norris lifted his chin. “Then perhaps I might use another coin, your lordship, for I have information for the aldermen of the city,” he said quickly. “It concerns the recent killings, the bodies in—”

  “We’ll hear none of your lies, Norris,” said Brembre.

  “Yet I have a witness, my lords!”

  “You have nothing,” the mayor snarled, and the chamber went silent. Brembre spoke into the quiet. “Now still yo
ur tongue or it will be sliced from your mouth this very hour.”

  Another moment of silence, then, “With respect, Lord Mayor,” someone said from the dais, “should we perhaps listen to what the man has to say?”

  All heads turned to the speaker. He was, I saw to my delight, William Rysyng, prior of Holy Trinity and the alderman of Portsoken Ward. It was a peculiar arrangement, though one in effect for many years: ever since King Henry I had granted the entirety of Portsoken to the priory by the city’s east gate, the prior had served ex officio as the ward’s alderman. While Rysyng’s two most recent predecessors had designated worldly men to serve in their places, deeming the civic office unfit for the sober life of an Augustinian canon, Rysyng had embraced his urban duties, involving himself in city affairs with an almost perverse glee. He was the only clergyman among the city’s aldermen, who generally served shorter terms. Not Rysyng. Going on his ninth year in office, the prior was a fixture at the Guildhall, exercising a power within the city bureaucracy surpassed only by the mayor’s own.

  The prior was seated to the mayor’s left, his hand held up to delay the proceedings. It was not uncommon for such ripples to move through the mayor’s court for one reason or another: a clerical question, a technical knot, a last-minute bribe.

  Brembre turned on Rysyng with a dog’s snarl. “Not in this hall, Reverend Father. Not while I am mayor of this city. Is that understood?”

  Rysyng kept his head high. “It is, Lord Mayor,” he said.

  “Good,” said Brembre, though as the mayor brought his glare back down upon Norris I saw Rysyng exchange dark looks with several of the other men around the tables. Excellent, I thought. Rysyng was one of three or four aldermen on whom I held quite damaging information, though in his case I had yet to use what I possessed. I would visit the priory by Aldgate tomorrow.