The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  I fingered the badge, the embroidered feathers and chain. I had seen dozens like it on the streets of London, and more recently in Gloucester’s castle in Kent, where the duke’s men had imprisoned Chaucer and me in the tower. The duke seemed to have an endless reserve of men. Hauling bodies on the Thames and through the streets of London, gunning down a market in the Pale, and now this.

  “Did you ever speak to any of the company?” I asked.

  “No,” he allowed. “I spoke to one of their buyers from Sluys, and learned that the arrangement has been going on for months. Since before Pentecost, he told me.”

  “I can hardly bring myself to believe it, Simon. The Duke of Gloucester—”

  “You must believe it, Father. I have seen it, and it can’t be denied that his men and Snell’s are involved in the highest treachery.”

  “And killing all in their way,” I murmured, newly awake to my peril.

  “Saltpetre and gunpowder are a mere portion of it, Father,” he said. “They are also trading in guns.” Simon stood and walked to a high pair of shelves by his door. He reached up, lifted a long object off the lower shelf, and brought it to me. It was a handgonne, of a similar length and heft to those I had fired at the Calais keep. A tubelike length of metal bolted to a carved wooden stock, a priming pan hammered into the barrel, a small hole bored through to the chamber.

  There the similarities ended, I saw as I slipped on my spectacles. For unlike the Calais gun, a rough if lethal contrivance, this weapon had been crafted by a master artisan. The barrel was of bronze in an octagonal shape, widening slightly from bottom to top, the stock expertly fashioned to join the metal with a smooth seam. I suspected the barrel had been poured at a foundry rather than beaten and welded at a smithy, though I could not be sure.

  The gun’s most distinctive feature was its firing mechanism. I rotated the weapon in the rushlight. Several inches from the butt end of the stock was a curved length of metal fashioned to resemble the spiraled tail of a snake. The twist of iron ended in a cleverly wrought snakehead, with a piece of cord held clenched between its fangs.

  “The Snake,” said Simon, reaching forward to finger the serpentine mechanism.

  The Snake. The same name Beauchamp had given to the gun rumored to be in development at the Tower. As Simon showed me the weapon’s parts I marveled at the ingenuity of this new gun in my hands. The center of the snake’s body had been attached to the gun with a hinged lever, the fulcrum sitting at the point where barrel met stock. By lifting the snake’s tail at the stock end, the user of the weapon would be lowering the serpent’s mouth—and thus the glowing cord—into the firing pan.

  The gun could be both aimed and fired, then, by one man alone, without the need for a partner to light the priming powder with a coal, indeed without the use of a coal at all. Instead the powder would be set alight with a cord anchored between the snake’s teeth, and the gunner could run from place to place on the field of battle without relying on a stationary fire to light a coal or stick.

  The Snake was a small revolution, a marvel of efficiency, a fierce and fell weapon. I wondered what other innovations were being imagined and engineered in the royal armory.

  “How did you get this, Simon?”

  “It was lifted from the same cog by one of my men at Dunkirk several days ago. He hooked over the side by night and found it wrapped in sailcloth belowdecks. I have two of them. This one is mine, to do with as I wish. The other is for you, to take back to the chancellor. I have already shortened it for ease of transport, though the snake is intact.”

  He went to the shelf and brought over a stubby version of the same handgonne, with most of the barrel sawed roughly away. The wooden stock had been shortened as well, leaving the device no longer than my forearm. Simon took the gun from me and laid it carefully on the table between us.

  “And now I have a question for you.” He leaned forward, his leg stilling beneath the table. “Who knows you are in Calais?”

  “The chancellor, certainly, and his man Edmund Rune. Ralph Strode knew I was coming over as well, and of course Beauchamp.”

  “Could Gloucester have been informed?”

  “Not by the chancellor,” I said. “Yet Beauchamp is the duke’s close ally against the earl. He might have got word back across while I’ve been here, though the timing would be rather strait.”

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  I felt compelled to ask him, “Who is paying you, Simon? Who is your lord and master this year?” My voice sounded bitter, even to me.

  “Hawkwood,” he answered instantly. “He pays me well to keep my fingers in the pies, and like him I am happy to sell what I know. In this case, however, I am offering it freely to you, and through you to the crown. To see this plot unfolding against my country and my king does not sit well, even to a man like me.”

  Sir John Hawkwood, the great English mercenary who had made half of Italy his domain in recent decades, hiring his services to popes, cities, dukes. It was three years now since Simon had left London to join Hawkwood’s company. That he was still in the ruthless mercenary’s good graces after what transpired last year came as a rude surprise. I regarded him closely, wishing for a look at the workings in his head, as opaque to me as the mysterious gears in a clock tower.

  “No man may serve two masters, Simon,” I said quietly, preachily.

  He lowered his head to place his chin on his folded hands. He looked into the burning rushes as he spoke. “You have quoted only part of Matthew’s verse, Father. Allow me to turn the leaf for you. ‘No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other, or he will love the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.’” His eyes tilted up, hooded but clear, and he gave me a sad smile. “We have made our choice of master, Father. We are servants of mammon, you and I, our only difference lying in the source of our servitude. What men and their private affairs are to you, nations and their secrets are to me. Things to slip from purses and sell to strangers, with little regard for law or convention.”

  Beneath the dark cast of his words there was a strange but welcome clarity in Simon’s comparison, a sense that he had freshened the air between us with such a forthright admission.

  “You will remain in the Pale?” I asked him.

  “For now,” he said. “Though given what has just occurred I suggest you leave as soon as you can, and as discreetly.”

  “Yes, though . . .” I hesitated. “I will need your help, as I know no one in town, nor along the harbor.”

  “I will arrange for your departure in the morning. A man will come here at first light. He will get you safely through the walls, take you down to the harbor, and put you on a ship to London. You cannot go back to Broussard’s, nor to the keep.”

  “No, I see that,” I said, thinking of the few things I had left in my travel bag at the wool merchant’s house: some clothes, a favorite writing tablet, a Latin book of myths and their glosses. The book would be a great loss, though perhaps I might send for it once back in Southwark. My own skin, I reasoned, was more precious than the parchment leaves making up a manuscript.

  With the details of my departure settled we sat in silence. Simon had calmed somewhat, as had I, and it came to me how great a risk he had taken to acquire the information passed on to me. What I perceived as weakness in him might be instead a hidden strength, a reserve of bravery and fortitude beneath the foolish and puerile exterior I knew. Simon served the worst of men, though perhaps was on his way to becoming a better man himself.

  Even as I had these sentiments I spurned them. Simon had lied to me so often and so casually that I needed to remain distrustful of every word from his mouth. Yet I longed to ask him to gloss for me the book of his experience, to untangle the braids of hardship, deception, and compromise twining through his adult life. Surprising myself, I reached to cover his clasped fingers with a palm. He moved his chin atop my hand, and in that position we remained until the rushes had reduced them
selves to a single glowing coal.

  At long last he moved against my hand, the smallest spark aflame in his eyes. “Tell me a story, Father.”

  “I—” My voice caught in my throat, and at once he was a young boy, and my eyes were strong again, and his hand was clasped in mine as I spoke to him of these myriad other worlds, of faery and dragon, of Arthur and Gawain, of gods of the godless and the myths of times past. It was a small thing we had shared before I turned from him, before my other children died and my heart hardened, losses piling on my shoulders into an unmoving burden. The rushes had gone dark, though an October moon waxed bright through the opened street window, which carried in the sea air from the west.

  “Once, in Asia,” I began, “there was a king named Cambuscan.” As I continued he turned his head to the side, giving me a view from above of the scar blemishing his forehead and face. My weak gaze wandered its jagged course, as if to discern the unknown itinerary that had brought him here, to this humble room, from wherever he had been. I told him a long, wandering tale, and we conversed quietly into the night.

  Chapter 34

  SIMON WAS GONE when I awoke, having slipped out some time in the still hours, though the pallet we had shared still bore his impression and something of his scent. His man appeared, as Simon had promised he would, promptly at the ringing of Prime, slipping into the garret wordlessly, nearly silent. I gathered the few things Simon had left me, including the shortened handgonne, into a leather bag open on the table. The man slung it over his shoulder, and without a word he took me down the outer stairs to the street. Avoiding the gate, we took a meandering route to a postern door on the north side of the town, where Simon’s man nodded for me to pay off the guard.

  It was more than a relief to step outside those walls, though Calais was small and my mind would not be eased until I was safely aship. Soon we were at the docks, among the fishing craft at the north end, where my guide handed me off to a rowman who would take me out into the harbor. Our destination was a neat-looking balinger standing out in the water, twenty oars to a side and outfitted for war, its lone mast pointing skyward and topped with the flag of the Merchant Staplers.

  As we pulled off from shore I looked back at the town and the castle, thinking of my son, and the miseries he seemed always to inflict. Somewhere in that heap of stone and fear Simon continued his machinations, spawning betrayals slight and great. Would I see him again? Would I wish to in another year, or another five?

  The balinger’s crew were all English, the master a weathered wool tradesman I had met through Chaucer years before. He took the purse I offered him without a glance at its contents.

  A smooth crossing on fair winds brought me no sickness on the return to Gravesend, and before midday we pulled up the river past Tilbury on the north bank, standing out from the many vessels clustered about the quays. Here trawlers headed out to deeper waters, flat-bottomed boats plumbed the shallower ways along the coast, gulls dove for guts cast out by fishmongers. Along the shore builders worked at full tilt, shipwrights clinging to the new vessels like bees to a hive. On the high street in town I went to an inn I knew and asked the keeper for a look at the bounty bill from Westminster. Issued from the royal courts in dozens of copies, such bills were circulated and cried regularly along the realm’s main roads and sea routes, listing the names of suspected traitors, pirates, and fugitives from justice, and, in time of war, asking for the aid of the commons in watching out for spies. Large bounties were promised to those who aided in apprehending such evildoers, though as anyone who sought to collect would quickly learn, such sums were larger in the promising than in the delivery. Yet the traveling documents had their uses. More than once I had found a piece of information in a bounty bill, a missing shard of knowledge that had helped me puzzle together a matter for extraction or purchase.

  The keeper slipped me the bill along with my second ale. The list filled one side of a parchment roll. I quickly found the names I was looking for.

  Robert Faulk, cook, for poaching £20

  Margery Peveril, gentlewoman, for murder £20

  This foul common man and this cursed woman, albeit she of gentil bloode, having broken from gaol togidere, do now sojourn in suspected compaignie of eche the othere, and do seke to flee the realm by any possible menes.

  Twenty pounds. An enormous sum for such a bounty, and a certain sign that someone in the upper aristocracy was desperate to find the two fugitives and complete the work begun in the massacre in Kent.

  For good reason, as Faulk and Peveril were not simply fugitives. They were witnesses to the crime that had started all of this. Where the two fugitives named in the bill were now, though, was anyone’s guess. Concealed at a Kentish farmhouse, hiding out in London, making their way abroad, already captured and hung: the possibilities were as limitless as the world itself, and I had little hope of adding their testimony to my purse.

  I joined a crowd on the long ferry from Gravesend, leaving at the turn of the tide and gathering all the news I could about affairs in the realm since my departure. I had been gone from London for less than a week, yet it seemed everything had changed in my absence. I listened to the chatter on the ferry.

  No great war levy, then, ’spite King Richard’s fondest plea to fight the French, though you have to bleed your heart a bucket for the Earl of Suffolk.

  Impeached by the very Commons, he was, then ranted out by the Lords.

  And a new lord chancellor for all to love. We give you Arundel, come to save King Richard’s young hide.

  A most wise and wonderful Parliament, everyone’s shoutin’ it. A new council to rule the realm, a dozen new helmsmen to steer our ship aright with good governance—

  And land the lighter levies on our poor shoulders. Much better to have a council than a king taxin’ our souls, though a penny’s a penny in my purse at all rates.

  Irreverent, slightly scandalous, though not touching treason; the sort of patter one often hears in the taverns and markets as a mark of casual discontent with the crown and Parliament.

  Yet the news of the chancellor’s impeachment, however expected, filled me with melancholy and a great worry for the realm. For years Michael de la Pole had stood as a fount of wisdom, prudence, and counsel, and while he had perhaps gone too far in supporting King Richard’s steeper war levy, his had been a calm and durable voice of reason at Westminster, without the rabid factionalism infecting relations among the upper gentry of late, from Robert de Vere on one side to Lancaster on the other. The new chancellor, Thomas Arundel, was a man utterly unworthy of the office, in my view, a flatterer and a conniver of the worst sort. It was more than distressing to learn of the Parliament’s successful ousting of a chancellor whom I had long counted my highest supporter in the king’s affinity.

  Once the ferry passed the Tower and pulled in by the customhouse I hired a wherry to take me to the Southwark bankside. Rather than shoring below the bridge or shooting through to dock at Winchester’s Wharf, the craft at my request let me off a good way short of the bridge, along the eastern butchers’ wharfs, nearly empty at that hour, though heavy with stench from the flows of offal and dung let loose in the Thames. Dodging around several piles of waste on the quays I took Butchers Lane above the wharf up to the high street, which I crossed while keeping a careful eye on the roaming crowds. Another two turns and I was at my own door, nestled at one side of a small courtyard against the priory wall. Unlocked, though not for long. Once inside I pushed it to, turned the lock, and set the rising bar tightly in place.

  Will Cooper took my cloak and coat, holding them over his arm as he greeted me with his usual efficiency. “Your bag, Master Gower?”

  “In Calais. I will send for it next week.”

  “Very well,” he said, then saw the distress on my face.

  “Are you quite well, master?”

  I nodded, calming myself. “I am, Will. Shaken from the travel.”

  “We have a guest in the house,” he said.

  “
Is it Simon?” My heart leapt. Could it be—

  His eyes widened; then he shook his head. “No, Master Gower. Not Simon.”

  “Ah,” I said, recovering from the absurd hope. “One of your family then?” The Coopers, with my permission, had more than once invited relations to lodge at the priory.

  “Warm yourself in the hall, if you will. I’ll summon him from the kitchens, where my wife has busied him peeling roots.”

  “A guest at St. Mary’s, peeling roots?”

  He smiled and left me to my hearth. A few minutes passed, and I had almost dozed off from my weariness when Will returned, leading a reluctant boy into my presence. It took me a moment to recognize young Jack Norris. I could not have been more astonished if King Richard himself had appeared in my hall.

  The boy stood straight at the sight of me, then gave a low and exaggerated bow. “The Earl of Earless at your service, sire.”

  “TELL ME WHAT YOU SAW.”

  Another child, another witness to atrocity, things the young should never have to behold. We had gone to the hall and taken chairs at one end of the table. Jack Norris spoke, and in remarkable detail he related everything he had heard and seen on the night it all began.

  He had settled down for sleep that evening in the church of St. Stephen Walbrook, where the parson was known to house and feed vagrants on occasion. Needing to relieve himself, he slipped out of the nave and up toward the crossing at Cornhill.

  “Needed a squat, didn’t I, and the parson doesn’t take friendly to dunging up the nave or yard. So I sneaked me out for a visit to the Long Dropper. Don’t have to pay at night. I was just stepping down a gutter ’cross the way when I hear the creaks.”

  “The cart?”

  “Aye, a cart and horse, comin’ right up the mids of the street, all dark, with no lamp to light the way. Couldn’t cross now, could I, not if I hoped to stay out of the Counter or the Tun. So I made small and thought I’d wait for it to pass. But it stopped, didn’t it, right spot in front of the Long Dropper. There’s one fellow leading the horse, and him and two others with him start takin’ somethings out a the cart, up the steps, and in. I could hear the splashings all the way across.”