The Invention of Fire: A Novel Page 2

  The churchyard, rutted and pocked, made a skewed shape of drying mud, tufted grass, and leaning stone, all centered on the larger church within the hospital grounds. Not a single shrub or tree interrupted the morbid rubble. Shallow burials were always a problem at St. Bart’s. Carrion birds hooking along, small demons feeding on the dead. Though the air was dry, the soil was moist and the earth churned underfoot, alive with the small gluttonies of worms.

  Three men stood along the south wall gazing down into a wide trench. Ralph Strode, the largest and widest, raised his head and turned to me as I walked across, his prominent jowls swaying beneath a nose broken years before in an Oxford brawl and never entirely healed. His eyes, somber and heavy, were colored a deep amber pouched within folds of rheumy skin.

  “Gower,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to speak, closed it against a gathering stench, and then I saw the dead. A line of corpses, arrayed in the trench like fish on an earl’s platter. All were men, all were stripped bare, only loose braies or rags wrapping their middles. Their skin was flecked with what looked like mud but smelled like shit, and gouged with wounds large and small. At least five of them bore circular marks around their necks in a dull red; from hanging, I guessed. My eyes moved slowly over the bodies as I counted. Eight, twelve—sixteen of them, their rough shrouds still open, waiting for a last blessing and sprinkle from a priest.

  “Who are they?” I asked Strode.

  The silence lengthened. I stood there, the rot mingling with the heavy buzz of feeding flies. Finally I looked up.

  “We don’t know.” Strode watched for my reaction.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Not a soul on the inquest jury recognized a one of them.”

  “How can sixteen men die without being known, whether by name or occupation?”

  “Or rank, or ward, or parish,” said Strode. He raised his big hands, spread his arms. “We simply don’t know.”

  “Where were they found?”

  “In the Walbrook, down from the stocks at Cornhill. Beneath that public privy there.”

  “The Long Dropper,” I said. Board seats, half a door, a deep and teeming ditch. “And the first finders?”

  “A gongfarmer and his son. Their crew were clearing out the privy ditches. Two nights ago this was, and the bodies were carted here this morning by the coroner’s men. Before first light, naturally.”

  My gaze went back to the bodies. “An accident of some kind? Perhaps a bridge collapse? But surely I would have heard about such a thing.”

  “Nothing passes you by, does it, Gower?”

  Strode’s tone was needlessly sharp, and when I looked over at him I could see the strain these deaths were placing on the man. He blew out a heavy sigh. “It was murder, John. Murder en masse. These men met violent deaths somewhere, then they were disposed of in a privy ditch. I have never seen the like.”

  “The coroner?”

  “The inquest got us nowhere. Sixteen men, dead of a death other than their natural deaths, but no one can say of what sort. They certainly weren’t slashed or beaten.”

  “Nor hung by the neck,” said the older of the two men standing behind us.

  Strode turned quickly, as if noticing the pair for the first time, then signaled the man forward. “This is Thomas Baker and his apprentice,” he said. “Baker here is a master surgeon, trained in Bologna in all matter of medical arts, though now lending his services to the hospital here at St. Bart’s. I have asked him to inspect the bodies of these poor men, see what we can learn.”

  “Learn about what?” I said.

  “What killed them.”

  Strode’s words hung in the air as I looked over Baker and the boy beside him. Though short and thin the surgeon stood straight, a wiry length of a man, hardened from the road and the demands of his craft. His apprentice was behind him, still and obedient.

  “Surely you’re not thinking of the Italian way,” I said to Strode.

  His jowls shook. “Even in this circumstance the bishop won’t hear of dissection. You know Braybrooke. His cant is all can’t. Were these sixteen corpses sixteen hundred we’d get no dispensation from the bishop of London. Far be it from the church to sanction free inquiry, curiositas, genuine knowledge.” A familiar treatise from Ralph Strode, a former schoolman at Oxford, and I would have smiled had the circumstances not been so grim. He looked at Baker. “Our surgeon here is more enlightened. One of these moderni, with ten brains’ worth of new ideas about medicine, astronomy, even music, I’ll be bound.”

  “What makes you believe these men weren’t hung?” I asked the surgeon. “Those red circles around some of their necks? I would think the solution is apparent.”

  Baker shook his head, unaffected by my confidence. “Those are rope burns, Master Gower, or so I believe, though inflicted after death, not before.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  From a pouch at his side Baker removed a brick-sized bundle bound tightly in brushed leather. Unwrapping the suede, he took out a book that he opened to reveal page upon page of intricate drawings of the human form. Arms, legs, fingers, heads, whole torsos, the private parts of man and woman alike, with no regard for decency or discretion. Brains, breasts, organs, a twisted testicle, the interior of a bisected anus. The frankness and detail of the drawings stunned me, as I had never before seen such intimate renderings of the corporeal man.

  Baker found the page he was looking for. Strode and I leaned in, rapt despite ourselves by the colorful intricacies of skin and gut.

  “The cheeks of a hanged man will go blue, you see.” His finger traced delicately over the page, showing us the heads of four noosed corpses, the necks elongated and twisted at unlikely angles, eyes bulging, tongues and lips contorted into hideous grins, skin purpled into the shades of exotic birds. “I have seen this effect myself, many times. The blood rushes from the head, the veins burst, the aspect darkens. Leave them hanging long enough and they start to look like Ethiops, at least from the neck up. And there is more.”

  He squatted over the pit, gesturing for us to join him. In his right hand Baker bore a narrow stick, which he used to pry open the left eye of the nearest victim. “Do you see?”

  I looked at the man’s eyeball. “What is it I am to see?” I said.

  “The iris is white,” said Baker, reaching for the next man’s eyelid, this time with a tender finger. “As is this one. And this.” He moved along the trench, pausing at each of the ring-necked victims to make sure we saw the whites of their eyes. “Yet the eyes of a hanged man go red with blood. See here.” He fumbled with his book to show us another series of paintings a few pages on. Bulbous eyes spidered with red veins, like rivers and roads on a map of the world.

  I glanced at Strode, unsure what to think of this man’s boldness with the ways of death.

  “In Bologna the tradition is more—more practical than our own,” said the physician, noting our unease. “They slice, they cut, they boil and prove and test. They observe and they experiment, and they admit when they are wrong. Such has it been for many years, good gentles, since the time of Barbarossa. If you gentlemen are in any way interested in this line of inquiry I recommend the Anatomia of Mondino de’ Liuzzi, a surgical master at Bologna some years ago who was an adept of the blade, a man thoroughly committed to dissection and—”

  “Not hanged, then,” I said, less impressed by the man’s eloquence than convinced by the soundness of his evidence. “So how, in your learned view, were these men killed?”

  He smiled modestly, raised the second finger on his right hand, and reached for the chest of the nearest corpse. His fingertip found an indentation to the left of the victim’s heart, a mark I hadn’t noticed before. He gently pressed down, and soon his finger was buried up to the first knuckle.

  “Stabbed?” guessed Strode, probing with a stick at a larger, more ragged wound on the second man’s chest.

  “Run through with a short sword, I’d wager,” I said, walking down the ro
w of corpses and pausing at each one. All had holes at various places on their bodies: some in the chest, others in the stomach or neck, some of them a bit sloughy but not unusually ragged, though one poor fellow was missing half his face. Fragments of wood were lodged above his lips, like the splinters of a broken board.

  “Not a blade, I think,” said Baker, his voice hollow and low. “These wounds are quite peculiar. Only once before have I seen anything like them.” He looked up at Strode. “With your permission, Master Strode?”

  Strode, after glancing back toward the church, gave him a swift nod. Baker moved to a position over the first corpse and flipped the man onto his front, exposing a narrow back thick with churchyard dirt. His apprentice handed him a skin of ale, which Baker used to wet a cloth pulled from his pocket. He washed the corpse’s back, smoothed his hand over the bare skin.

  “As I suspected,” said Baker. “This one stayed inside, you see.”

  “What stayed inside?” I said. “A bolt, perhaps, from a crossbow?”

  Baker returned the corpse to its original position and held out a hand to his apprentice, who gave him what looked like a filleting knife of the sort you might see deployed by lines of fishermen casting off the Southwark bankside. With a series of expert movements, Baker sliced across the flesh surrounding the hole, widening it until the blade had penetrated several inches into the man’s innards.

  Another raised hand. The apprentice took the knife and replaced it with a pair of tongs. Baker inserted them into the hole, widening the wound, harder work than it looked. An unpleasant suck of air, the clammy song of flesh giving way to the surgical tool, and my own guts heaved, but soon enough the tongs emerged clasping a spherical object about the diameter of a half noble. The apprentice took the tongs, then, at Baker’s direction, poured a short stream of ale over the ball. Baker put it between his front teeth and winced.

  “Not lead. Iron, dripped from a bloom into a mold. The Florentines have been casting iron balls like these for many years.” He tossed the ball up to Strode, who caught it, inspected it for a moment, and handed it to me. I marveled at the weight of the little thing: the size of a hazelnut, but as heavy as a lady’s girdle book. I had never seen anything quite like it, though I had a suspicion as to its nature and use. I handed it back to Baker.

  Strode was signaling for the gravedigger, who left the churchyard to summon a priest.

  “And the others?” I asked Baker.

  “At least one was killed with an arrow, that one there.” He gestured to the third body along the line. “Half the shaft’s still in his neck. As for the rest, I am fairly confident in my suspicions, though I would have to perform a similar inspection on all these corpses to be sure.” He came to his full height and used more of the ale to cleanse his hands. “I assume that will not be possible, Master Strode?”

  Strode pushed out a wet lip. “Perhaps if the bishop of London were abroad. Unfortunately Braybrooke’s lurking about Fulham, with no visitations in his immediate future.”

  “Very well,” said Baker, and he watched with visible regret as a chantry priest arrived and started to mumble a cursory burial rite. The four of us made for the near chapel, keeping our voices low as Baker went over a few more observations gathered in the short window of time he had been at the grave. Some rat bites on the corpses but not many, and no great rot, suggesting the bodies had been in the sewer channel for no more than a day or two. I asked him about the wood splinters I had seen above the one man’s mouth.

  “Shield fragments, I would say,” said Baker. “Carried there by the ball, and lodged in the skin around the point of penetration.” We both knew, in that moment, what he was about to tell us, though neither of us could quite believe it. “These men have been shot, good masters, of that I am certain. Though not with an arrow, nor with a bolt.”

  The surgeon turned fully to us, his face somber. “These men were killed with hand cannon. Handgonnes, fired with powder, and delivering small iron shot.”

  Handgonnes. A word new to me in that moment, though one that would shape and fill the weeks to come. I looked out over the graves pocking the St. Bart’s churchyard, their inhabitants victims of pestilence, accident, hunger, and crime, yet despite their numberless fates it seemed that man was ever inventing new ways to die.

  “WHY AM I HERE, RALPH?”

  “Because you are you.” Strode raised a tired smile, his face flush with the effort of our short but muddy trudge back to the hospital chapel, where he had left his horse. Over the last few months he had been walking with a bad limp, and now tended to go about the city streets mounted rather than on foot, like some grand knight. No injury that I knew of, merely the afflictions of age. I worried for him.

  He adjusted the girth, tugged at the bridle. “And you know what you know, John. If you don’t know it, you know how to buy it or wheedle it or connive it. Brembre is smashing body and bone at the Guildhall. I have never seen him angrier. He considers it an insult to his own person that someone should do such a thing within the walls, leave so many corpses to stew and rot.”

  Nicholas Brembre, grocer and tyrant, perhaps the most powerful mayor in London’s history. “And namelessly so,” I said.

  “The misery of it.” Strode wagged his head. “There must be a dozen men in this city who know the names of those poor fellows eating St. Bart’s dirt right now. Yet we’ve heard not a whisper from around the wards and parishes in the last two days. Aldermen, beadles, constables, night walkers: everyone has been pulled in or cornered, but no one claims to have seen or heard a thing, and no men reported missing. As if London itself has gone blind and dumb.”

  “No witnesses, then?”

  He hesitated. “Perhaps one.”

  I waited.

  “You know our Peter Norris.”

  I smiled, not fondly. “I do.” Norris, formerly a wealthy mercer and a beadle of Portsoken Ward, had lost his fortune after a shipwreck off Dover, and now lived as a vagrant debtor of the city, moving from barn to yard, in and out of gates and gaols. We had crossed knives any number of times, never with good results.

  “He claims to know of a witness,” said Strode. “Someone who beheld the dumping of the corpses at the Long Dropper. He tried to trade on it from the stocks in order to shorten his sentence, though Brembre has refused to indulge his fantasy, as he called it.”

  “Who is the witness?”

  “Norris would not say, not once he learned the mayor’s mind. Perhaps you might convince him to talk. At the moment he’s dangling in the pillory before Ludgate, and will be for the next few days.”

  “I’ll speak with him tomorrow,” I said.

  “Very good.”

  “And what of the crown?” I was thinking of the guns. Weapons of war, not civic policing. To my knowledge the only place in or near London that possessed such devices as culverins and cannon was the Tower itself.

  Strode’s brows drew down. He led his horse to the lowest stair, preparing to mount. “The sheriffs have made inquiries to the lord chancellor, though thus far his men have flicked us away, claiming lack of jurisdiction. A London privy, London dung, a London burial, a London problem. No concern of the court, they claim, and the only word I’ve had from that quarter is from Edmund Rune, the chancellor’s counselor, who suggested we look into this as discreetly as possible—in fact it was he who suggested bringing you into the matter, John. With all the trouble the earl is facing at Parliament-time I can’t think he would want another calamity to wrestle with.”

  Though he might prove helpful, I thought. Michael de la Pole, lord chancellor of the realm, had recently been created Earl of Suffolk, elevating him to that small circle of upper nobles around King Richard. Yet the chancellor was swimming against a strong tide of discontent from the commons, with Parliament scheduled to gather in just one week’s time. De la Pole owed me a large favor, and despite his current difficulties I could not help but wonder what he might be holding on this affair. The unceasing tension between city and crown, th
e Guildhall and Westminster, rarely erupted into open conflict, more often simmering just beneath the urban surface, stirred by all those professional relations and bureaucratic niceties that bind London to its royal suburb up the river.

  Yet such conflicts are indispensable to my peculiar vocation. Nicholas Brembre was a difficult man, by all accounts, though I had never discovered anything on him, and John Gower is not one to enjoy ignorance. If I could nudge the chancellor the right way, then use what he gave me to do a favor to the mayor in turn, I would be in a position to gather ever more flowers from the Guildhall garden in the coming months.

  I put a hand on Ralph Strode’s wide back and helped him mount. He regarded me, his large nostrils flaring with his still-labored breaths. “You will help, then?”

  A slight bow to Strode and his horse. “Tell the lord mayor he may consider John Gower at his service.”

  He sucked in a cheek. “That I cannot do.” He glanced about, then hunched down slightly in his saddle, lowering his voice. “Here is the difficult thing, John. The mayor has been stirred violently by this atrocity, yet despite his anger he seems reluctant to pursue the matter, for reasons I cannot discern. He’s bribed off the coroner, discouraged the sheriffs from looking into things, and threatens anyone who mentions it. It was he who ordered me to oversee this quick burial, with quicker rites, and no consideration for the relations of the deceased, whoever they might be. Nor will he hear Norris out about his witness.”

  Here Strode paused to look over his shoulder. Then, softly, “There are whispers he may have had evidence destroyed.”

  “What sort of evidence?”

  “Who can say? The point is that Brembre has decided this will all be quashed, and no one has the stomach to gainsay him.”

  “What about the sheriffs and aldermen? Surely they would wish for an open inquiry.”

  He grimaced. “They are as geldings and maidens, when what’s needed is a champion wielding a silent and invisible sword.” Strode looked back toward the churchyard and the murmuring priest, then straightened himself. “That is why I have come to you. For your cunning ways with coin, your affinity with the rats, the devious beauty of your craft. And for your devotion to the right way, much as you like to hide your benevolent flame under a bushel of deceit. This atrocity has thrown you as much as it has thrown me, John. I can see it in your eyes.”