The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  He nodded tightly.

  “When did he first speak of it?”

  “After his previous arrest, a fortnight ago,” he said, looking around cautiously as we went along. “He started chatting about it his second day in the stocks, going on to the sheriff’s boys on his return to the gaol each night. No one paid him any mind, everyone thought he was raving. Then the bodies were found. One of the serjeants told Brembre what Norris had been saying. At first the mayor was after speaking to Norris right away. Then something changed, and he refused to hear or even see the man.”

  “And then?”

  “Then Norris’s sentence ends. But he robs again. After the second arrest Norris was taken in by my men and thrown in the Counter.” A city gaol in Rysyng’s ward. “The next morning he started larking again, this time to my beadle, who told one of Brembre’s sheriffs, who told the mayor. And then—” He shrugged. “Then Brembre intervened. Norris’s trial would be held before the Mayor’s Court the next day, he ordered. The Guildhall would hear nothing about this other matter. London would have done with Peter Norris. And so it was. A quick trial, a quick hanging—”

  “And any memory of a witness to this greater crime dies with him,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why was Brembre so intent on keeping Norris silent?”

  “Perhaps his witness saw something. Something damning, or at the least inconvenient.”

  “Does Brembre know who was responsible for throwing the bodies in the channel, then?”

  A short sigh, almost a gasp, as if Rysyng’s throat were reluctant to release its owner’s words. “He may.”

  “And do you believe Brembre himself killed these men, or had some role in their deaths?”

  The prior shook his head with confidence. “He did not, Gower. Of that I am certain.”

  “How can you be so sure, given how the mayor has been acting since the killings?”

  His swaying head jellied his cheeks as he walked. “I’ve told you all I know.”

  I observed him from the side. “You are hiding something from me, Rysyng. What is it?”

  His chin tilted up.

  “Very well,” I said, stopping in the street once more. “I will visit the bishop tomorrow. I trust you’ll hear from him shortly thereafter.”

  Rysyng stomped a shoe and wheeled on me. He puffed his reddened cheeks, then blew out a long, wheezing breath. “There was a piece of evidence,” he said. “Something found with the bodies. Brembre had it taken from the scene and ordered destroyed before the coroner’s arrival.”

  Strode had hinted at this, though he had known none of the details. The coroner would have examined the bodies shortly after their recovery from the Walbrook, while Strode hadn’t been pulled in until the day after the inquest.

  “What was it?”

  “Strips of a livery banner, used to bind several of the victims’ hands.”

  “The mayor ordered them removed?”

  “And burned, or so I understand. All prior to the inquest, which was a cursory affair in any case.”

  Nothing unusual there. The office of the king’s coroner lived on bribes, and if Brembre had wanted a cursory inquest he could have purchased one readily. “Could the heraldry on the banner be discerned?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “Yes. Early that first morning, when the bodies were spread together on the ground, one of the sheriffs removed the silk strips from ten pairs of wrists. He laid them out together, and there it was.”

  “Describe it.”

  He made a decision, then, “Twin swans gorged, their necks entwined,” he said while closing his eyes. We both knew what this meant. The entwined swans distinguished the favored livery of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of the king and leader of the appellant faction of lords opposing Richard. The man Michael de la Pole had invoked with such hatred at Westminster a few days before. The lord in whose household William Snell had labored before his appointment as king’s armorer—at the duke’s request. In that moment I felt something wobble on an unseen axis, as this inquiry into a London crime took on new weight and width, stretching itself beyond the city walls, reaching into the uppermost ranks of the realm.

  “What can it mean?” I wondered aloud.

  “Who can say?” Rysyng replied. Too lightly, I thought. “The duke, leaving his mark in the privy?”

  Or an enemy, leaving the magnate’s livery on the victims. I wondered why the mayor would destroy such a telling piece of evidence, and what else Rysyng knew. Gloucester was Brembre’s sworn enemy. Anything damning of the duke should have been a treasure in his eyes. Yet something or someone, perhaps Gloucester himself, had got to the mayor following the recovery of the corpses.

  We had made our way back to the priory’s almonry. Rysyng appeared eager to return within. I looked at him closely. “Why would Brembre do such a thing, Reverend Father? What kept him from publishing the duke’s banner far and wide, and thus casting his enemy in a foul light?”

  “Perhaps he is being discouraged from pursuing an inquiry against Gloucester,” he said hintingly.

  “By whom?”

  An arch smirk. “You are not England’s sole trader in damning secrets, Gower, much as you like to imagine yourself so.”

  “Only the most skillful,” I said wryly. “Now tell me.”

  His face assumed a distant sadness. It lasted only a moment, then he said, “I must be free and clear of this matter, Gower. No more threats and extortions, do you understand?”

  Not the murderous Walbrook affair, I realized, but his own, more delicate transgression.

  “Tell me what you know, Reverend Father, and the history of your calamities shall be scraped from the tablet of my memory,” I said. “You have my sworn word.”

  Though he had no reason to trust me the prior looked relieved. With relief came words. “I’ve heard only rumors, though believable ones. Several months ago the mayor’s name came up during a proceeding at the Guildhall. A routine interrogation by the sheriffs. The mayor himself was out of town.”

  “Whom were the sheriffs questioning?”

  “I wasn’t informed, though I’m told the subject was an embarrassing one for Brembre—quite dangerous as well. When Brembre returned to London he heard whispers of the interrogation and went into one of his rages. He threatened those involved, then seized the transcript of the interrogation by force before it could be copied into the rolls. Ripped it out of the scrivener’s hands, by all accounts.”

  “If Brembre has the record, how is it being used against him? He would hardly fear idle gossip.”

  “You assume he still holds it,” said the prior with a tight smile.

  I stared at the almonry wall. “Gloucester,” I said softly.

  “The record came into the hands of the duke soon after the proceeding at the Guildhall. No one knows how he laid his hands on it, nor will anyone say what it concerns for fear of Brembre’s swords.”

  “Who else knows about this?” I had no inroads to the Duke of Gloucester’s household, yet if what Rysyng had told me was true, Woodstock was at the foul center of this whole business. It was a humbling thought, to imagine my own craft being practiced so far above my head.

  Rysyng smiled. “You might speak to the Lady Idonia.” Brembre’s wife. Noting my surprise, he said, “The mayor is a venereal man, Gower. All anyone will say about his transgression is that it somehow involved his wife. She has been heard cursing him openly. She surely knows the nature of his offense.”

  The prior turned into the almonry, the door held open by a novice.

  “One last question, Reverend Father.” Rysyng had proved himself a goose well stuffed that day. Perhaps he held one morsel more.

  He paused at the opening, his back still to me. “What is it?”

  “Peter Norris’s son, the earless one.”

  “What of him?”

  “Norris was a man of your ward. I need to find the boy.”

  He turned around, looking amused. “What can
you want with a mutilated cutpurse?”

  “The boy is an orphan. He needs the city’s charity.”

  The prior scoffed. “Is John Gower going downy?”

  “Merely a gallows promise to his father that I would see to Jack’s wardship.”

  Rysyng’s reaction to my half-truth was bland and convincing. “I haven’t seen the boy since his father’s sentencing at the Guildhall. I’m sure the constables will net him soon enough, then they’ll take off his hand. Can’t help you on that one, Gower, no matter what scandals you threaten.”

  With that he left me at the low door through the almonry, and as it closed behind him my vision was engulfed with the most frightening darkness I have ever experienced. The world went black, as if some shade had stolen out of the underworld to tear across my sight. This sensation of utter blindness was accompanied by a deep pain in my skull, a stab followed by a continual throbbing that left me weakened in my limbs, sickened in my gut.

  I fell back against the priory wall, to the side of the door. My face and arms had broken out in a profuse sweat, drenching my clothing through to my cotte. My hands clutched at the wall, searching for purchase on the rough stone. Shallow, panicked breaths, no sensation in my legs or feet. I nearly collapsed.

  Slowly, as I bent forward over the wall-side gutter, my sight started its return, though in a manner that I found if anything more alarming than its initial loss. A flicker, a brighter flash and then another, and soon a thin halo of daylight began to gather above the void at the center. The glow widened to reach around the darkened middle. Now two concentric circles, the outer a nimbus aglow, the inner an unlit coal. The glow gradually thickened, pushing inward against the blackness, now melting like a disc of ice in full sun.

  During all of this my skin had cooled to near numbness. Now feeling stole back into my limbs. I risked a shallow breath, then a deeper one, the pure and saving air filling my lungs, and with it came the realization that I still lived. That I could see. My very ribs seemed to open once more to the world. I looked up at the looming west face of Aldgate, where a bored guard observed my plight from a great height over the hoarding-walk. Another breath and I felt ready to move, slowly at first, then with more confidence as my sight returned to its full if weakened capacity. I went through the city to the bridge with a new aim in mind, my affliction winning out against my pride and fear.

  Chapter 13

  WHEN DID I FIRST sense this creeping blindness? For the longest time I felt it as a dog suffers a single flea: an occasional nuisance, rarely acute, beneath notice or mention. Only in the last five years had it interfered somewhat with my everyday life, and only in the last three had it forced me to alter old habits and find new crutches: a head turned slightly to the side, additional candles on the desk, a hand more often raised against a brightening sun. Since Sarah’s death I had taken particular notice of the fully blind, those old men sticking their way along the pavers, rattling for alms. There goes John Gower, I would think, a few years hence.

  The surgeon Thomas Baker was letting a pair of rooms atop a grocer’s shop in Cornhill, one for his accommodation, the other for procedures. The grocer, George Lawler, had purchased a grander house in the Mercery, returning with his wife to the shop along Broad Street only on select days of the week to sell spices and dried fruits to the wealthier denizens of the ward. On the afternoon I visited Lawler’s the shop was closed, so I walked around back and took the outer stairs to the surgeon’s rooms on the third floor. As I neared the top a woman’s high and muffled moans could be heard, a keening sound that nearly chased me down again.

  Baker’s door stood open, allowing the surgeon to perform his grisly work in the morning’s full light. At the moment this consisted of the draining of an abscess from the bound leg of a young woman, who lay writhing on his table and grinding at a rag between her teeth. Trembling limbs glazed with sweat, grunts of pain and effort, Baker’s apprentice and another man pinning her arms. Not wanting to interrupt or subject the woman to any further humiliation, I descended and ran a few errands in the district, returning an hour later to find Baker’s apprentice mopping up the last remnants of blood and bile from the floor. He tossed the rags aside and took up a bucket of sawdust and ash, which he sprinkled in a thin layer over the surface. The room on the whole was crowded but neatly and efficiently so, with an operating table angled across the center, a bulky chair by the door, and several shelves and tables laid neatly with the tools of the surgical craft. On a high stand by the table a thick volume lay open to a center folio, its opened pages spattered with old blood.

  “Is Baker about?” I said to the apprentice.

  He nodded slightly, then glanced at the door, where Baker had appeared bearing a bucket of surgical tools.

  “Why, Master Gower. Good welcome to you.”

  “And to you.” I blinked, agitated. “I am here about my eyes.”

  “Ah,” said Baker, placing a hand on my arm. He gave the bucket of tools to his apprentice and guided me toward the large chair near the door. His grip was firm but gentle, as if he were leading an old man already blind. “Chaucer told me to expect you.”

  “He did, did he?” I sounded haughty, even to myself.

  “He is a great friend to you, I can see this. Please, sit here.”

  Baker pushed around the heavy examining chair to take maximum advantage of the light. I sat and adjusted myself to the unfamiliar arrangement as the physician and his apprentice placed a table and tools to each side. The chair’s joint between the seat and back had been constructed so as to allow its user to rest at various angles, with pegs to adjust the position of both. Baker took a high stool to my left, while his apprentice stood to my right—his sole task, it seemed, to keep my eyes from shutting at all cost. For this he used a pincerlike instrument with rounded ends, which pressed into my eyelids and separated them for the surgeon’s convenience. The sensation was not unpleasant, as the touch of the metal was cool and smooth, and I appreciated the sharpness and clarity that came with widened eyes.

  Once the apprentice had performed this opening procedure on my left eye, Baker used a small hook to pull up the lid, then a flattened metal plane to scrape gently along the inner rim. He looked across my prostrate form at his apprentice. “No ungula or pannus. Do you see?”

  The apprentice nodded. “Sì.”

  “What about cataracts?” Baker asked, keeping my lid stretched forward.

  The young man leaned over, peering carefully. “No sign of cataracts, master,” he said.

  “Bene. Now the right.” He switched eyes, placing his thumb and forefinger gently on my cheek as the apprentice spread the skin. The right eye having garnered the same verdict from master and apprentice, Baker lifted a tubelike device from the table at his side and used it to peer into the depths of the opened eye. His apprentice moved a lantern above my face, shifting it slightly back and forth at his instruction until the examination was complete.

  “That will be all, Agnolo,” said Baker, his hand at my elbow. “Now see about those new chisels, will you? And we have a case of earworm tomorrow. We’ll need juice of honeysuckle and calamint and we are depleted of both. You know where to go?”

  “Sì, signore.” The apprentice left us, clomping down the rear stairs.

  When he had gone Baker helped me sit up straight, and I swung my legs off the chair. He leaned back and regarded my face. “I see no external evidence of a disease or injury, Master Gower. No cataracts, no webbing on the eyelids nor excessive phlegm in the pouches. No floating matter or obstruction in your eyeball, either. How do you find reading?”

  “Still bearable, though more difficult by the day,” I admitted. “It was once pure pleasure. Now it is something of a labor. I find myself avoiding it sometimes.” Like a dog veering from the room where its master died.

  “And generally? How would you describe this gradual loss of sight?”

  “It feels to me that my world is growing smaller,” I said, hearing the weight in my voice. “
Dimmer as well, as if a series of thin veils were being lowered before my eyes. Every month or so I will realize a new veil has come down, as things I once saw clearly appear blurred or dull. The streets of London are not as colorful as they once were. The faces of friends grow indistinct, hazed.”

  “You speak like the poet you are,” said Baker, smiling kindly. “You have thought a great deal about your encroaching blindness.”

  “Blindness,” I said, feeling the weight of it. “A bleak word.” And a commonplace figure: for stupidity, dumbness, ignorance in all its forms. How often had I used the device in my own verse, attempting to capture the felt condition of man’s distance from God, from love, from grace? To imagine that I was coming to embody such unseeing oblivion seemed impossible to accept.

  “Your condition will grow only worse, I’m afraid,” said Baker. “If you were showing cataracts I could help you, but in a case like this, where the cause of deterioration is hidden, surgery would be foolish.”

  “There is nothing you can do to arrest it, no procedure to perform in a case like mine?”

  “A lancet peeling your eye, is that what you would like, Master Gower?”

  “If it would help.”

  Baker folded his arms. “One could operate on your eyes, I suppose. Perhaps relieve some pressure on the engines, retard the further deterioration of your vision, whether for a month or a year we can’t know. Yet the risks are quite severe. I have watched hale and healthy men put their eyes under the blade for mere cataracts and emerge entirely blind. There are barbers in this very town who would be only too happy to take your coin and slit your eyes.” The barbers, those blood letters and tooth-drawers plying their rusty tools around the city’s hospitals and tenements. A barber, or so surgeons like Baker were fond of saying, would slice your throat to treat your toe.

  “With no hope of a cure?”

  “One does not cure encroaching blindness of this sort, not in my experience. Temporary relief at great risk is the best we can hope for.” He placed his hand again on my arm. “What you describe to me is a gradual process of deterioration, Master Gower. Gradual. There is no reason to think you will be entirely blind in six months, or even three years. You have two choices, as I see it.”