The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  “Have you spoken with him in the last several days?”

  “And what if I have?” She took a step back, looked me up and down. “You’re not a beadle’s man, not of this ward at all rates. You’re with the new sheriffs, are you?”

  “My name is John Gower,” I said, sorting my thoughts. Here was Hawisia Stone, mistress of a shop that had recently lost its master and risked losing its most talented guildsman. A woman of significant means, heavy with her affliction yet resisting confinement prior to the birth. Instead she was out in the foundry with the boys and men, working them and herself to keep the shop alive despite her weakened condition. She needed help.

  “I work alone, Mistress Stone,” I said. “Yet I may well be able to help Stephen out of his predicament. Perhaps restore him to your shop. Not a promise, you understand, but a possibility, however faint.”

  “You’ll need to restore him to the streets first,” she said with a huff. “He sits in sanctuary presently, over at Staining.”

  “He is no longer there, mistress.”

  Her brow went up again, the surprise genuine this time.

  “Marsh has left sanctuary,” I told her. “He has been taken into the Tower.”

  Her exhalation was long and slow, her eyes losing something of their fierce glint.

  I brought out the serpentine device. “Mistress, is this familiar to you?”

  She stared at it. “Where did you come across that?”

  “It was given to me in Calais. You know what it is?”

  “It’s a bit of a gun, isn’t it? Stephen made it, and several like it, here in the smithy.” She nodded toward a far corner of the yard. “Just there.”

  “With your knowledge?”

  She scoffed. “Smithed it at night, and under my very nose. Wouldn’t have had such a thing at Stone’s if the master were alive.”

  “And Stephen used one of these snake guns to commit a crime. A murder.”

  “So the beadle says.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  Suddenly her attitude changed, and her face shone with sincerity. “Not a murder, I’ll be bound. He was out north of the walls, testing his guns. She came upon him and he killed her with the thing. An accident’s what it was, so he says.” Another test. She straightened her back. “I believe him. Spite of his night games and his slinking I do believe him, not that the Guildhall will.”

  “Yet he took sanctuary at Staining.”

  “Aye he did. My notion, and I put him there myself. Had no choice. He’d killed a girl, hid her body in his fright. Who’d believe his account of the thing after that, I ask you?”

  “You saved him, then, didn’t you? From the law. From a probable hanging.”

  “For now, at the least,” she said with a firm nod. “Stephen Marsh is no murderer, whatever the constables might claim. He’s not a warm soul, always distant from those around him, but there is a God’s measure of good in him. I sense it, have seen it. It was an accident, that girl’s death.”

  “I believe this entire affair is an accident of sorts, Mistress Stone.” Her eyes narrowed. “Stephen has become involved in a series of events beyond his ken and well above his head. He is a pawn in an ugly war between factions, with his craft sacrificed to the cause of men who wish him no good.”

  “And you wish him well, do you, sire?”

  “I wish him nothing. Yet I may be able to help him. And thus help you.” A plan was forming quickly in my mind. For weeks I had been ruefully aware that I possessed no avenue into the Tower of London, no leverage of any sort with the royal armory at the foul center of this murderous business. Now, in this widow’s palpable trust in the goodness of her captive guildsman, this peculiar mix of devotion and dependence she felt toward Stephen Marsh, I saw a way.

  “Help me?” she said with a skeptical look. “Why on Noah’s slaving back would you want to help a widow such as myself?”

  I looked around the foundry, then back at its owner. “Mistress Stone,” I said slowly, “I believe I have a commission for you after all.”

  “What’s it to be, then?” She had raised her chin, and as she did the sun glimpsed out from behind the low cloud that had obscured it for the duration of our exchange in the yard. In its full light Hawisia Stone’s beauty glistened like a cut gem. “A bell, a set of braziers?” she asked.

  I smiled at her. “No, mistress. I have a different sort of job in mind.”

  Chapter 37

  YOU ARE ALIVE, THEN.” Chaucer placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Barely.” I led him to the set of chairs by the hearth. “You were able to escape Westminster?”

  “By a nail’s width,” he said. The Parliament was in a tense recess the remainder of that week to mark the new mayor’s swearing-in and inauguration. Chaucer would be journeying back to Greenwich for several days, he told me, missing the Riding, and he was stopping over on his way east.

  We sat together in the hall, where Will Cooper served us with spiced wine. Chaucer asked about Calais. I told him most of it, including the accounts of the Desurennes massacre and my own narrow escape, though I kept the information about Gloucester’s trade in saltpetre to myself.

  “Simon saved my life.” It still felt strange to put it that way, even to my oldest friend. “Yet he remains as elusive and mysterious to me as ever. Spying along the coast on behalf of Hawkwood, yet somehow finding a way to get needful information to the chancellor. The former chancellor,” I corrected myself.

  Chaucer looked glum. “I spoke to the earl this morning, visited him as part of a delegation from the Commons to speak about transfer of seals and accounts. To see a lord such as Michael de la Pole defeated in this way wounds the heart. Yet the Commons are riled against him nearly to a man, so there was no hope for his retention. Now he’s lurking about Lintner, his house on the Strand, with soldiers from the Tower posted on the street and at the quay. Whether they are keeping him confined or guarding him from harm no one can quite say. He won’t ride with Exton, despite King Richard’s imploring him to do so.”

  “Why would the king make such a request?” The London hierarchy guarded its ceremonial prerogatives fiercely, frowning on any interference from the crown and the higher lords.

  “A number of peers are riding with Exton and Brembre as a show of fealty to the king. King Edward asked the same at Adam de Bury’s Riding, and several others.”

  I remembered. Like Bury’s some years ago, Exton’s Riding would serve as an occasion to unite city and crown, the civic bureaucracy and the upper aristocracy, though given the difficulties in the current Parliament I saw little hope of peace between the factions any time soon.

  “The king’s familia is taking it hard,” Chaucer went on. “No neck is safe, it seems. There is even talk of moving against Robert de Vere.”

  “What of Edmund Rune?”

  “He remains loyally with the earl, counseling him that his return to power can still be effected, despite the impeachment.”

  “Can that be true, given what you’ve seen in Parliament?”

  “Hardly,” he scoffed. “Outside the earl’s hearing Rune seems as resigned to Arundel’s chancellorship as anyone else. We spoke on the street as the delegation was leaving Lintner. Rune tells me that the earl has found it hard to accept his deposition. He has been pouring sweet stories into the earl’s ear to comfort the old man.”

  I thought of the deposed chancellor, the sacrifice of years of royal service to the political vagaries of the moment. The expedient cruelty of it. Rune’s loyalty to the end was admirable, if futile.

  “And these massacres?” Chaucer said.

  “Everything points to Gloucester, in both cases,” I said. “His livery, his men, his guns, procured through Snell at the Tower.”

  “A strange reversal, no? Westminster now belongs to the lords, London to the king. And Southwark—”

  “Belongs to no one. I feel as if I should establish a private garrison in my own house, laying permanent guards at the corners o
f the priory yard.”

  “Well, you can afford it, John, and if it gives you safety . . .”

  “What is it Tacitus tells us? ‘The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.’”

  He smiled. “The chronicler is talking there about statecraft, John, not your more intimate trade. I do hope you will keep yourself safe.”

  “Safe and idle,” I sighed, thinking of my lover’s confession, a poetic work I had begun many months ago and wished keenly to complete.

  “Perhaps this might provide some consolation, or at least some happier tedium.” He removed a thick quire from his bag. The parchment folds were sewn roughly together along the spine, the writing unblocked into verse. I felt a stab of envy at the quantity of Chaucer’s making, and a prick of irritation at its timing.

  “A tale of Melibee and his Dame Prudence,” he said. “It’s a little thing in prose, a translation from a certain Renaud. A mirror for princes about the virtue of good counsel. I started translating it a few weeks ago and could not stop myself from finishing. It fits this season of corruption in Westminster particularly well, I think. False soothsayers, advisers who keep mum when they should speak the truth, young men who cry ‘War!’ the loudest, yet know the least about it.”

  “True enough,” I said, taking the booklet from him and noting the unique look of the scribe’s hand. “Is this Pinkhurst’s work?”

  “It is,” Chaucer said. “He is back in town, you know. He’s promised me he will help you in any way he can. He is awaiting your visit at the Guildhall with warmth and fair welcome.”

  “I thank you, Geoffrey.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “And who will narrate this little thing?” I said, paging through, though it was hardly brief. The tale of Melibee covered the entire quire, leaving off only at the end of the sixteenth leaf.

  “The tale will be told by . . . well, by me, in fact.”

  “By you?” I glanced up from the booklet. “You are to be a character, then, in your own pilgrimage tale?”

  He looked offended. “There are precedents, and much grander ones. Dante Alighieri casts himself as a visitor to heaven and hell. Surely Geoffrey Chaucer can imagine himself on a short journey to Canterbury. And who is this?”

  His head turned. Jack Norris had slipped into the hall. The boy stopped when he saw Chaucer. His head was uncapped, his stubs clearly visible beneath his messy shock of blond hair.

  “This is an honored guest of the priory. Jack is his name.”

  Jack bowed to Chaucer, who nodded back, looking both troubled and amused.

  “A story for another occasion,” I said as Jack dodged out.

  Chaucer rose from his chair. “You are a man of peculiar alliances and loyalties, John. I hope you will find space to return to your own making in due time.”

  “As do I, Geoffrey,” I said, silently forgiving him his small blindness.

  “You cannot simply stay here in the priory, burrowed in like a hibernating bear,” he urged me. “Yet you need protection. I don’t want you to end up one of these factional men knifed in the street.”

  “You warned me that first day, didn’t you?” I stood to walk him to the door. “Yet I meddled in this mess, and now I’m paying the price for my curiosity.”

  “Not quite the right word for your craft, John,” Chaucer said with his elvish smile.

  HE LEFT FOR GREENWICH and I remained in the hall, puzzling it all out. A splinter company of English soldiers, armed with these new handgonnes, commits two atrocities and now surely plots a third. The first, a massacre in a Kentish wood, is a controlled slaughter with prisoners as its victims, the bodies hauled secretly to London for disposal in the privy channels. The second massacre takes place along the walls of Desurennes, a village in the Pale, a daytime assault on the unknowing population of a market town, the survivors left to fend for the dead and wounded themselves.

  What next? With Lancaster abroad, Gloucester was the most powerful of the lords opposing the king, and the hungriest for war. Despite the extent and depth of his conspiracy, the duke himself remained free, untouched by the hand of justice. Gloucester carried both houses of Parliament in his palm, and I could see no way to avoid the reckoning that was surely coming.

  Blindness, Christ tells us in Scripture, comes in many forms. “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” A paradox, one to which I had clung like a vine to a wall since first experiencing my own earliest failures of vision. Where shall my soul find solace when my flesh falters and quits? What inner sight shall I be granted once my outer sight fully abandons me?

  A man going slowly blind builds up too much confidence in his other senses. Touch, taste, smell, hearing: all grow more acute up to a certain point, and yet one’s thoughts inevitably dull somewhat, as the power of intellection wanes with the diminution of sight, the first and most primal of our worldly senses. As the eyes go, so goes the mind.

  My wife, perhaps a month before her death, told me about the strange pleasure she first took in my eyes. We had been married already for over a year, with our first child four months from birth. Nothing like love had been felt or spoken between us, not yet. Ours was a marriage of families in pursuit of an heir, with love and lust no matter to all concerned. Yet in those middle months of her first affliction our attraction grew suddenly keen. Ignoring the stern injunctions against meddling with a pregnant wife, I sought out her flesh at every opportunity.

  One morning we found ourselves coupling in the glare of a summer sun, which flooded our bedchamber with an almost heavenly fullness. I would like to think I remember that morning myself, though I cannot honestly say this is true. Yet what her memory took most clearly from that day, she told me all those years later, was the verdant intensity of my eyes, an unworldly green blazing down as I moved above her.

  “You always had the keenest eyes, John,” she said to me with one of her infrequent smiles in those final weeks. “The eyes of a hawk, able to sort wheat and chaff from a mountaintop.”

  Now I have the eyes of a mole, I thought, tunneling along, mouthing in all before me without sifting the soil for the worm. The blind, it is said, eat many a fly.

  Chapter 38

  A WIDOW WITH A GREAT babe in her greater belly: not an everyday sight at the Tower of London, and Hawisia was relying on the strangeness of it, and the silver in her purse, to get her an ear at the barbican. She left the foundry along Bellyeter Lane, walked down through the ward to Tower Street, and now stood by the entrance to the outer gatehouse, on the city side of this sprawling network of keeps, walkways, and bristling arms. The warden, summoned from his room above, regarded her as she stood within the King’s Lip, the covered court before the barbican door. A thickset man, with a massive black beard spread across his doublet, sleeves of beaten iron clasped at his forearms.

  “Want to speak with one of our wardrobe men, do you?” he said gruffly.

  “Aye, that’s it,” Hawisia replied. “Name’s Stephen Marsh.”

  “His office?”

  “Makes guns.”

  The warden looked at one of the guards. “Snell’s crew, then.”

  “I’ll send the page?” the guard said.

  “Do that,” said the warden. The guard went in.

  “Come along.” The warden gestured her forward, and she stepped along the path to the barbican, the first time she had ever set foot within the great royal compound. Once they were in the tower the warden pointed to a half-moon wooden bench stretching along the wall from the causeway door to another opening that gave onto a staircase. She took the portion of the bench nearest the descending stairs, feeling the movements of her coming child within her. A kick. A squirm. Another kick.

  The ceiling sat low over the windowless chamber, which was heavy with smoke and the sharp scent of dung and straw from the many boots treaded across the uncovered floor. Though only slits lined the walls, letting in little light, she could hear
a general racket from out and over the moat channel, the music of coming war. The neighing of horses, the shouts of troops, the pounding of hammers on metal. From beneath and above her in the same tower she heard other, stranger noises, the screeches and trumpets of foreign beasts in the king’s menagerie. Hawisia had no interest in such creatures, though their rare clamor chilled her skin.

  Soon enough there came a tired shuffle from the outer walk. She looked toward the causeway door. Stephen Marsh, accompanied by a Tower page seeming none too pleased at the haul up to the outer gates. Stephen walked like a beaten dog. Neck matted with whiskers, clothes sodden with sweat and ash, new burns streaking the backs of his hands. At the guard’s direction he came and sat at her side. She could smell the smoke on him, the hard stink of unceasing work.

  She took a breath and blew it sideways. “Sanctuary not high enough for you?”

  She felt his shrug. “Had no choice, mistress. In here I’m safe from the rope for as long as they’ll have me.”

  “So you believe. Yet what’s to keep them from roping you up once they have what they need from you?” She watched him.

  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and glanced back at her. “Little, in truth, not that I don’t deserve it.” His eyes were leaden blanks. “I killed my master your husband with a cauldron of molten ore,” he said softly. “Killed that poor maid in the woods with a gun. Even shot a lion.”

  “A lion? What are you prattling about, Stephen?”

  “And many more killings to come. Seems these hands be made for smithing death.” He looked down at them.

  “That is mad talk, Stephen Marsh.”

  His head swung from side to side like an old cow’s udder. “Was I who killed your Robert, mistress, with that last pour, my haste. The mold was ready, the thickness was perfect, but he wouldn’t give the go for the pour. He was about to say it, least I thought he was, move his hands away, but he never said it, and the mold man must always give the go before the pour, but Master Stone didn’t give it and I poured anyway. I was impatient. I killed him.”