The duke was trying for game, though his unease was apparent.
“Hardly, your lordship,” said Chaucer. “Gower here is merely a friend I’ve invited out to Greenwich for a few days to escape the Southwark filth. He, like me, is a poet, a versifier of great prolixity.”
“Though one of considerably lesser talents than your own, if all the talk is to be believed,” said the duke, and I did not flinch beneath his cold and condescending gaze. Chaucer said nothing in my defense, nor did I expect him to.
“So now I have Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower trespassing together in my forest, asking questions of my tenants at Bykenors, stirring up demons. And you claim you were abroad to catch the air, for a few hours’ amusement, do you?”
“The mass murder of innocents is hardly an amusement, my lord,” I said, hoping I would not regret my rashness. It was as if the Holy Spirit descended into the castle hall to inflame the crown of the duke’s head. He rose as two of his attendants moved from their stations along the walls. He waved them off. He approached and stood before us, his chin forward, his strangely centerless eyes alight with fury.
“What impudence, and from such a dark-souled man. He speaks for you as well, Chaucer?”
“I—” Chaucer stammered, then glumly sighed. “He does, my lord. Though you are Duke of Gloucester and the king’s uncle I must hear your lordship’s account of the incident in the forest.”
“The ‘incident,’ you say?”
“Yes, my lord. Eighteen prisoners unaccounted for at Bykenors gaol. We suspect they were—that they died in the forest where Gower and I were apprehended yesterday. By your men.”
“That’s what you suspect, is it?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” said Chaucer.
“And you believe that because this incident occurred on my lands it was done at my behest?”
“We have no evidence to suggest so, Your Grace. I am simply helping the sheriffs investigate the matter as justice of the peace for the shire.”
In fact there had been evidence. The strips from the duke’s banner binding the victims’ hands. Yet if I revealed my knowledge of Brembre’s destruction of the silken remnants I would virtually ensure our deaths at Gloucester’s hands.
“Eighteen dead, you say. Where are the corpses, then?” This time the duke’s question was directed at me.
“The churchyard at St. Bartholomew’s, Your Grace,” I said. “They were taken there after being dumped in the privy channel below Cornhill. And there were sixteen dead, not eighteen. Two, it seems, managed to escape.”
“How horrible,” said Woodstock, his voice flat. “You are confident they are the bodies of the prisoners?”
“I am now, my lord,” I said. Seeing no reason to conceal what we had discovered in the clearing, I went on. “They were killed with small powder guns shooting iron balls. Handgonnes, Your Grace.”
“I see.” The duke looked anything but surprised, his bland expression masking whatever inner turmoil our presence was stirring. “You know, nothing would pleasure me more than to see you both dangling from those trees back there, or from the Dartford gibbet. Yet I suppose I can’t very well hang a king’s justice of the peace, can I? Not with all that’s unfolding in Westminster this month.” He put a finger to his lips. “You shall receive my account in good time. You have my word.”
Chaucer bowed, looking relieved. “That is all we can ask, Your Grace.” They both looked at me expectantly.
I thought of Piers Goodman, that line of bodies on the St. Bart’s ground, and here was the man responsible for it all. “With respect, my lord, this matter is too grave for further dilatation.”
Gloucester scoffed. “Don’t bait me, Gower. I am not one of your fish to be speared in a barrel with a farthing and a secret.”
“This atrocity is hardly a secret, Your Grace, despite the best efforts of its perpetrator.”
“John,” said Chaucer, a warning in his voice.
The duke shot him an angry look. “I know what you saw in those woods, Chaucer.” Back to me. “Or rather what you think you saw. I saw it, too. But be forewarned that friendly appearances may soon prove cold illusions.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” I said.
“Yes, Your Grace,” he mocked me, then stepped forward and leaned in, ignoring Chaucer for the moment. “Tyranny and desperation are frequent bedfellows. Our chronicles teach us as much.” He had turned his head slightly so that his lips were mere inches from my left ear. In this intimate posture he whispered words that would stay with me in the weeks to come. “The truth wheels above you, Gower, yet you fix your eyes upon the ground. A king will do anything to stay a king. Anything. You would do well to remember that as you go about your foul work.”
He backed away, and we bowed as he turned for the door through which he had come; we were dismissed. With a visible reluctance the duke’s men returned our bags, knives, and purses (these last somewhat lightened), then led us out to the central courtyard, where our saddled horses were waiting. An hour’s ride toward London brought us to the crossing where Chaucer would turn for Greenwich. There we sat on our horses for a short while, discussing the events of the last two days, both of us in foul tempers only darkened by the duke’s dismissal of our inquiries.
“You are for Southwark, then?” he asked me.
“I am.”
Chaucer tried to convince me to return to Greenwich with him, claiming a distracting night of parsing poetry would do our spirits some good. I declined, with more than a little regret. I would always envy Chaucer his too-easy ability to separate the various parts of his life one from the other, as if his moral soul were a dovecote, divided into dozens of chambers each designated for a distinct fraction of his attention and care. One for Parliament, one for poetry, one for murder; one for his wife, one for his mistresses, another, increasingly small, it seemed to me that year, for his friendship with John Gower. Chaucer’s attention would flit happily from chamber to chamber, never allowing those darker places to impinge on his enjoyment of the lighter, while I always found myself consumed by the matters most before me at any given time. And in that moment, as we separated on the Kentish road, there were three: an emptied gaol, a clearing in the woods, the beguiling whispers of a duke.
Chapter 26
YOU MUST RECOGNIZE, Mistress Stone, that this affair puts the parish in a passingly awkward position.”
“Yes, Father,” Hawisia said piously, wanting very much to smack him.
“Requests for sanctuary are quite unusual, and must be dealt with delicately.”
“Yes, Father.”
“I shall require some immediate information from you, then, and from Stephen.”
“Yes, Father.”
Hawisia Stone and the parson of All Hallows Staining had just stepped onto the church’s west porch, where they spoke below the loud bustle of Fenchurch Street. They had left Stephen within, huddled glumly in a side chapel at the end of the south aisle.
It was late morning on the day after their midnight arrival at All Hallows. The priest, though young and newly settled into his living at Staining, had not been pleased to be roused in the middle of the night by a pregnant widow of the parish and a criminal claiming sanctuary, and had taken Stephen in only after extracting her promise to return the following morning to give a fuller explanation. Hawisia had none of the old parish obligations to draw on with this fresh-faced sprite. Why, it was Master Stone who’d cast the very bell thirty feet above their heads, and as a worthy gift to the parish. A gift that should have purchased some forbearance on the parson’s part, or at least some measure of kindness from a tender of the Staining flock.
“Of all the churches in London only St. Martin-le-Grand exercises the privilege of permanent sanctuary, Mistress Stone,” he went on in his priestly tone. “Now that Stephen is here he cannot leave or he will be apprehended. There are already watchmen along Fenchurch Street, working in shifts to ensure he remains within our walls. He will be taken the moment he steps out.”
Hawisia had seen them for herself now that the news had spread. Two men of the parish she knew by name, pacing importantly around the church and its small yard, rubbing their hands, eyes slitting through the gates, watching for Stephen Marsh to break the bounds. “Yet surely he is right to claim sanctuary here,” she said.
The priest shifted on his feet. “At All Hallows we are bound by agreements in force between the church and the realm. They are as unshakable as Jerusalem and Athens. A night on the chapel floor is one matter. But there are steps that must be followed before I can officially admit him to sanctuary and allow him to stay.”
“What are these steps?”
“First Stephen must confess his sin. What is the nature of his crime?”
She looked him straight on. “He has killed.”
“Here in London?”
“Up below Ware. It was an accident, he says. I believe him.”
“Your belief carries no weight. Stephen must confess this deed for himself, whatever way the worldly law takes him. Only then may I declare him truly in my protection as minister of this parish, and only with approval of the bishop of London.”
“How long may he remain within these walls, Father?”
He raised his chin, looked down at hers. “The right of sanctuary is neither inviolable nor eternal. Once he confesses Stephen has forty days to surrender himself to a trial. Otherwise he must abjure the realm, though that option will be at the discretion of the justices, not the church. The king’s coroner will make a visitation soon to gather the facts as Stephen remembers them.”
“I understand, Father.”
He licked his reddened lips. “And then there is the subject of payment. Sanctuary does not come free.” His voice lowered and sober, as if to signal the matter of most importance in this affair.
Hawisia dug a finger into her purse, masking her disgust. “I’ll have one of our ’prentices bringing him his food, so no need there. What’s it to sleep on a stone chapel floor? Twopence for the first week, shall we call it?”
“Well.” He coughed. “He will hardly be sleeping on stone, mistress. We have a feather-and-straw pallet in there, newly stuffed. Some woolen blankets for warmth. He may want to keep a candle alight in the chapel if he likes. Tallow hardly bubbles from a spring, now, does it? There is also my meeting with the bishop to consider, and I shall be speaking with the alderman of the ward tomorrow. A parson’s time is freely given, Mistress Stone, though not so freely compensated. Stephen Marsh’s presence here has increased our burden tenfold. So let us call it a shilling for the week, shall we?”
His tongue, lizardlike, flickered from his mouth again to moisten his thin lips.
“A shilling, for a cloth stuffed with straw?”
“And feathers and down, Mistress Stone. It is a reasonable sum, though perhaps I can be content with fifteen pennies.”
“Very well,” said Hawisia, handing over the appropriate number of coins. When this business was over she would have to see about getting the parson removed. A wealthy widow of the parish with a full tithe could bend ears aplenty among the wealthier guildsmen, and more than once she’d seen a parish priest get a shoe at his arse for angering the wardens. Content with fifteen pennies indeed.
“We should go inside,” said the parson. “I will hear Stephen’s confession, then move this forward. I cannot do more for him, Mistress Stone.”
She smiled sweetly. “I understand, Father, and I am grateful for the assistance you have rendered.”
They went back into the church and approached the side chapel, where Stephen sat against the north wall. Painted above him was a vivid scene of Mary visiting Elizabeth, each of them reaching out to touch the other’s belly, neither as large as Hawisia’s prominent mound.
She listened as the priest repeated to Stephen the terms of sanctuary as he had explained them to her. The two men went through the chancel screen toward the altar, where Stephen would give his confession, with the priest as witness. Contrite murmurs, the priest’s questions, a careless death carelessly absolved. Stephen remained within as the priest returned to the bottom of the nave.
“May I speak to him before I depart, Father?” said Hawisia, craning to look through the door of the chancel screen.
The priest shook his head. “I have instructed him to pray. He is to remain in the chapel by the altar for the better part of an hour.” He put a finger to his lip. “As you are here, we should speak about the baptism once your child comes forth. Have you purchased a chrisom cloth, or considered your churching offering to the parish?”
Hawisia, having had enough of the parson’s worldly wants, turned for the doors. “Time for that after the birth, Father,” she said wearily. “I shall return in the days ahead, and my ’prentice with Stephen’s meals.”
Hawisia stood on the west porch, gathering her breath and her wits, breath and wits she’d sorely need in the weeks to come. There were metals to purchase, bells to sell, a foundry to run, a child to birth. She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer. “Jesu, forsake me not. Bind me to thee with sweetest knot. Give me of thy sweet love. I ask thee high above.” She looked out beyond the gate to the city teeming with life, and started the slow walk back to the foundry.
Chapter 27
ON LONDON BRIDGE, just past the midpoint between the Southwark side and the St. Magnus green at the city foot, there is a narrow gap between houses that affords an expansive vista down over the river toward Westminster. In years past, before the slow darkening of my sight, I would sit in that spot for hours on end, surveying from that high perch the spires and towers lined up across the sky like sentinels at a wall. All Hallows, St. Mary Somerset, St. Peter, St. Paul’s, once sharply defined, now little more than remembered outlines in a hazy distance.
That day after my return from Greenwich I had come to this spit of stone in hopes that this broad view down upon the city might help me loosen the threads all tangled in my mind. Why bring the sixteen bodies to London, let alone cast them in the privy channel? Why not bury or burn them out in Kent, where no one would ever find them? As Chaucer had warned me early on, someone seemed to want the victims to be found, perhaps even identified, and all fingers pointed to Gloucester. If the reeve was to be believed, the duke’s men had taken the eighteen prisoners from the Portbridge gaol to meet their fate in the woods. It must have been his men as well who brought the sixteen dead to London to toss in a foul grave. Yet what was to be gained by such a violent and risky act? What did the king’s youngest uncle hope it would achieve?
There was also the practicality of it, the daunting mechanics of such an endeavor. What would it require to bring so many bodies from a wood in Kent to a London privy channel—and to accomplish it all secretly, without word getting out and abroad? First a group of tight-lipped men, all implicated in the massacre and invested in its concealment. Two or three wagons in Kent to haul the corpses along the road from the forest to the river, the procession guarded and masked as official business, and likely ending up on the bank somewhere well west of Greenwich, given the distance and the tides. Next a wherry or barge up the Thames, with the water bailiffs paid off to look away—little difficulty there. Then, that same night, a crew to transport the corpses through the narrow city streets and up to the privy at Cornhill. Several armed men keeping watch in case of discovery. Also a good-sized cart—and thus a carter.
I heard once again the words of Piers Goodman. 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.
The murdered carter, a snag I hadn’t yet tugged. My connections at the coroner’s office, once deep and strong, were tenuous at the moment due to the death the year before of Nicholas Symkok, the subcoroner. While Symkok had sung in my choir for many years, I had nothing on the man newly installed in his position, so our transactions were straight purchases of fact and rumor. A quarter noble for an inquest report, a few pennies for a name.
I called at the coroner’s chambers early that afternoon and told the subcoroner what I was after. He remembered the carter’s case, and once my coins were in his hand he found me the entry in the coroner’s roll for the date in question. On Wednesday the even of St. Edwin’s Day after Michaelmas, Jankyn Bray, a carter of Carter’s Way in the parish of St. Nicholas Acon, lay dead of a death other than his rightful death in the channel of Walbrook below Cornhill, having been discovered there by Alan Pike, gongfarmer of the parish of St. Mary Aldermary. The entry went on to recount the summoning of the jury and the determination of cause of death: to all appearances, a knife across the throat and multiple stabs to the chest and head. No witnesses, no suspects.
Upon reaching the edge of Langbourn ward I asked a few shopkeepers for directions to Carter’s Way, a twig of an alley off St. Nicholas Street. At the open end of the alley four carters were gathered, waiting for any small job and the pennies it would bring. Stones, kegs, coals, corpses: a carter will haul anything for anyone if the right coin kisses his palm.
“Load for you, sire?”
“Faggots or coals for your hearth ’n’ home, good master?”
“A carter a’ courage, a carter a’ care, a carter a’ can-do, a carter a carter a carter for you, sire.”
A more irreverent one was leaning beneath the archway. “Transport to Tyburn and the gallows tree, sire? When your time comes you call on your Robert Bray here, sire. He’ll make your last ride comfortable as can be.”
His companions shared a forced laugh. Grubby, brash, sour of breath, Bray was a wiry young man with a defiant air about him, and it was clear from the distance they kept that the others were uncomfortable in his presence.
“Robert Bray,” I said. “You are Jankyn Bray’s son?”
He showed me an arrogant jaw. “Was, more like. Suspect you know that already.”
“I do,” I said. “God give your father rest.”
The Invention of Fire: A Novel Page 25
