The Invention of Fire: A Novel Read online

  I looked away, a sting in those weakening eyes. A friend is a second self, Cicero tells us, and knows us more intimately than we know ourselves.

  “The mayor cannot learn you are probing this out for us, or it will be my broken nose fed to the pigs.”

  “I understand, Ralph,” I said, looking appropriately solemn, yet secretly delighted to learn of the mayor’s peculiar vacillations. A new bud of knowledge on a lengthening stem. “My lips shall be as the privy seal itself.”

  “Good then.” With a brisk nod, Strode pulled a rein and made for Aldersgate. I followed him at a growing distance, watching his broad back shift over the animal’s deliberate gait until man and beast alike faded into the walls, blurring with the stone.

  Chapter 2

  THE GATES OF LONDON are so many mouths of hell, Chaucer once observed, swallowing the sinful by the dozen, commingling them in the rich urban gruel of waste, crime, lust, and vice that flows down every lane. Yet each gate possesses a character and history uniquely its own: its own guards, residents, and prisoners, its own parish obligations, the particular customs and rituals that define every entrance to the inner wards as a small world unto itself. To know the gates of London is to know the truest pathways to the city’s soul.

  In those middle years of King Richard’s reign the city gates were all connected by a series of towers, sentry walks, and repair scaffolds that together traced a wandering crescent around the lofty stone walls and provided the most efficient means of getting from gate to gate. You couldn’t stroll along the inner wall down below given all the clearing and destruction, while skirting the outer circumference would land you in waste ditches and subject you to the streams of refuse and trash—some foul, some quite dangerous—hurled from above.

  On that windy day following the examination in the St. Bart’s churchyard I had determined to visit every gate in turn, worming beaks with coins as I went. If sixteen men could die in London, and not one of them be known to Ralph Strode, to the mayor and his men, to the king’s coroner and his, nor even to one of the dozen freemen of the city gathered for the inquest, they must have come from outside the walls. London is a large place, though not exceedingly large, and to conceive of so many Londoners unrecognized and unsought by loved ones seemed an impossibility. Somewhere along the walls was a guard or a warden who had seen something, or knew someone who had.

  My day would begin at Aldgate, where the walls separated the parish of St. Katharine Cree from St. Botolph-without, and end at Ludgate, where Peter Norris slumped in the pillory, claiming knowledge of a witness. I left Southwark early in the day to cross the bridge, angling from the bankside up to Aldgate Street, which I took to the edge of town. A stiff September wind burned at my eyes, creating especially fierce gusts along the broadening way before the gate, where thousands of colorful shapes whorled in a circling gale. A dozen children jumped about beneath them. The dancing shapes were cloth, I realized as I reached out to pluck one from the air. A sack of fabric scraps, spilled before some tailor’s shop and now dancing with the winds. Then a stiffer gust, and the spiral of color was gone as quickly as it had arisen, the children chasing the shapes away to the west. Another beautiful, meaningless thing I would never see again.

  Unlike the high and ugly bulk of Aldgate, which loomed above me now, a begrimed surface of stone and stupidity that seemed to attract more featherbrained schemes for enlargement and improvement than its brothers. As a result Aldgate had suffered its share of minor collapses over the years, as the collective folly of builders and masons led to ever more perilous attempts to reshape the fabric. A broad length of sailcloth hung down to cover a pitted scar in the stonework on the north tower, while above, a crane arm jutted awkwardly from a high opening, its intent to pulley stones to the upper reaches, though it looked to have gone unused for months.

  Halfway up, where one set of stairs forked to the gate’s north tower, the other to a set of apartments in the south, I had to pause, scarcely believing my ears.

  “Sell this one—no, this one, and leave the others for Philippa to barter away. She’s hardly in a position to object. Perhaps her slutting sister can help her.”

  A familiar voice, though tightened with uncommon anger. Reversing direction, I climbed up the right stair and made my way along the groaning walkway to an unassuming door, the main entrance to the series of rooms making up the small apartment atop the gate. For twelve years the house in the south tower had been the home of Geoffrey Chaucer, my oldest friend, though I thought he had left London some weeks before.

  The door stood open, wedged with a chipped brick, and in the front chamber Chaucer was stooped over, tussling with an array of silver trinkets and goblets spilling out of a wood box. Crates, a stack of trunks, rolls of twine: the modest house was in a tremendous disarray, made all the more dire by the continual gusts blowing in from the door and scattering dust and invading leaves about the rooms. Despite the piles of belongings the place felt empty and bare, the only light coming from narrow slits low along the walls.

  I stepped inside, further darkening the place. Chaucer turned. His scowl softened at the sight of me. A sad smile, and he tilted his head. “Mon ami,” he said, coming to his full height. We embraced in the middle of the low space, surrounded by the detritus of his Aldgate life. Two servants brought in pieces of furniture from the back room, set them on the floor, returned for a next load.

  We held each other at arm’s length. I searched his eyes. “You’re in London.” A statement, also a question.

  “I am not in London, nor anywhere near the place.” He went to the door, peered out. He turned back to me. “At least as far as Philippa is concerned. If you see her you never saw me, yes?”

  “Fine, fine,” I said, amused, though also a bit melancholy about Chaucer’s continuing estrangement from a woman I admired so deeply. “You’re packing up then?”

  “I must surrender the apartment and Aldgate altogether.” He said it with a careless air that I could tell was put on. “You haven’t heard? The common council wants me out. It seems that Richard Forster will take up residence here in a few weeks. Everything must go, to be sold or carted out to Greenwich.” A village several miles from the city, and site of Chaucer’s new residence while performing his duties as justice of the peace in Kent. “Books, plate, books, furniture, books—oh, and also the books.”

  Chaucer’s small apartment above Aldgate had once been stuffed with volumes. The four locked trunks along the far wall must have held dozens of manuscripts between them. It struck me how many times I had visited the Aldgate house over the years, for poetical exchanges reaching into the night.

  He invited me to sit. I declined, with a hint at the day’s business.

  “An errand for Strode, then?” he said, wanting to know more, though unwilling to ask directly.

  “A fool’s errand, I would call it. Aldgate seemed as good a place as any to begin.” I gave him the bones of it, as the discovery of corpses in the privy was being bandied through the streets already. I kept quiet about the victims’ peculiar means of death, nor did I hint at the mayor’s apparent attempt to scuttle an inquiry. Chaucer had worked under Brembre in the customs office for several years, and the two remained close. “So today I troll the gates,” I said, “hoping to scare up anything I can find about these men.”

  His reaction was muted. “A dozen a day die in this city. Women, the elderly, children. Mass graves surround us on every side. What makes these unnamed men worthy of your time, John?”

  The question surprised me. “Sixteen at once, thrown in the Walbrook? Curiosity, I suppose. And a fair measure of fear. No mayor wants to give death free rein in his city. The crown will use any excuse to tighten its choke hold on London. This is just the sort of thing to attract the worst kind of scrutiny from the king’s men.”

  “Now you sound like Strode himself,” said Chaucer with his curling smile.

  “The freer the city, the looser its purse.”

  Chaucer moved to an east
-facing window and glanced at the turret clock on St. Botolph. “I’m due at Westminster shortly, you know, otherwise I would accompany you. I would welcome a break from all this.” He looked around, gesturing to his crates and trunks. “But let me hail Bagnall up.”

  “Who?”

  Chaucer walked to his door. “Matthew Bagnall,” he said over his shoulder. “The warden of the gate. A man who knows more about the doings in and around Aldgate than all our ward-rats put together. I’ll get him up here.” He stepped out to the rickety landing and called down to the foregate yard. “You there! Is Bagnall about?”

  A faint reply floated up from street level.

  “Well, send him up, will you? Master Chaucer has a question for him!”

  He turned back and flattened himself against the wall. The servants slid around us bearing a large chest between them, which jostled and bumped along the railings as they descended the street-side stairs. When they were gone he looked at me, gestured at his eyes.

  “The same?”

  “No worse, at least,” I lied, blinking away a spot. “Some days I scarcely notice, others . . .”

  “Ah,” he said, his hands clasped. He tilted his head. “You know, John, there may be remedies other than resignation and despair.”

  I said nothing.

  “There is a medical man newly in town, a great surgeon-physician. He is an Englishman, but trained in Bologna.”

  “Thomas Baker.”

  “You know him?”

  “We’ve recently met,” I said, recalling the man’s fingers digging in a corpse. “He seems bright enough.”

  “More than bright,” said Chaucer. “He was in my company on the return from Italy last year, and I got to know him quite well. Familiar with all the new techniques, unafraid to wield the knife when it’s needed. He is lodging in Cornhill for now, above the shop of a grocer named Lawler. Do you know the place?”

  “I do.”

  “I suggest you make an appointment to see him.” Then, less formally, his voice lowered, “Surely it’s worth a visit, John, even if nothing comes of it. You have only two eyes. You’ll never get a third no matter whom you extort.”

  Matthew Bagnall arrived at the door. Squat, thick necked, official, looking eager to get back to the gatehouse. Chaucer offered him drink. Bagnall declined, nor would he seat himself.

  “Mustn’t stay up here above my men for too long, Master Chaucer,” Bagnall said, as if Chaucer’s house rested on an eagle’s aerie or some grand mountaintop in the Alps. He wore a cap that fitted tightly over a low forehead, covering what looked like a permanent frown.

  Chaucer explained why I was there, then nodded at me to begin.

  “Fair thanks, Bagnall, for the trudge up the stairs.” I handed him a few pennies.

  He took the coins silently, glancing at them before slipping them into a pouch at his side.

  “The Guildhall is seeking information on a company recently arrived in London, and now deceased.”

  His eyes widened slightly.

  “Violently deceased,” I said.

  “Killed, you mean.”

  “It appears so. They were a group of men, a large group. Not freemen of the city. Outsiders of some kind.”

  “Frenchmen or Flemings, then?”

  “I think not,” I said, recalling the stolid, rural look of the bodies, their rough hands, the dirt caked in their nails. “These were Englishmen, or I’m a bishop.”

  “Not soldiers—cavalrymen, say?”

  I thought of those iron balls lodged in the victims’ chests. The gun wounds could have been inflicted in a battle, some factional conflict on the highway. Yet the fact that the men had been killed with bullets argued against the mess and melee of actual combat. “They might have been conscripts, I suppose, but recent ones if so. These men worked with their hands. Plowmen, some of them, used to harrowing and manuring their fields.”

  “Dead when they got here, or killed within the walls?”

  “You ask sound questions, Bagnall. I don’t know.”

  He considered me, hand at his thick chin. “You’re looking after that mess up at the Long Dropper.”

  I allowed my silence to answer him.

  “Gongfarmers’re all jawing about it, the rakers and sweepers as well,” he went on, loosening up. “It’s the gab of London. Fifty men, thrown in the sewers to drown and rot.”

  “An exaggeration,” I said breezily. “Sixteen victims, all happily dead before they were tossed in the privy.”

  “That may be,” he said, his black look making me regret my light and careless tone. “Yet treated no better than shit from a friar’s arse. Denied the ground, and a Mass, and a proper burial. Whoever’s done it had best keep his murdering nose free of Aldgate, or he’s in for a rough time of it from the guard, that’s certain.”

  “To be clear, Bagnall, you know nothing about these men?”

  “Aldgate hasn’t heard a whisper about this matter, Master Gower.” He tugged at his cap. “I’ll own we’re a busy gate, what with all the Colchester traffic, marches out to Mile End. But a company of sixteen, riding or walking in from outside? Even the sleepiest of my men would take notice, and a pile of corpses would fare no better. Wherever those poor carls came in, they didn’t come in through Aldgate, nor the Tower postern, or I would have heard about it.” The postern was a small entrance along the wall north of the Tower. Not a full-fledged gate but a heavy door, though just as carefully watched.

  Bagnall left us with a curt nod. Chaucer stared after him as the old stairs protested his descent with a groan of loose nails. “Blunt man. Always has been.”

  “Bluntness has its place,” I said. “Though I’ll need such frankness from more than your gateman if I’m to learn who these poor fellows were, and where they came from.”

  Chaucer pressed my arm as he walked me to his Aldgate door for the last time. “I shall be back for Parliament soon. You will be in town?”

  “Do I ever leave?”

  “You’ve not come out to Greenwich yet, John. I have plenty of room for visitors—more than I ever had in this place.” He looked around, his bright eyes mellowed with regret at leaving a city so much a part of his blood. Like his father, a London vintner, Chaucer had been born and would surely die within these walls, which he had always regarded as a sort of outer skin. I thought of him strolling through the countryside, waking to roosters instead of bells, attending Mass at the tiny church in Greenwich rather than at the urban parish that had been his devotional home for so many years.

  He caught my sad smile, and at the door he turned his full attention on me. Ours was a unique friendship, its complexity never more deeply felt than at those moments of farewell, all too frequent in recent years.

  “Be careful with yourself, John, and mind your back.” His palm was on my wrist. “Whoever threw those bodies in the Walbrook knew they would be found.” He looked out along the rooftops of the inner ward. His grip tightened. “And didn’t much care.”

  FROM THE NARROW PASSAGE before Chaucer’s house I walked north through the boundaries of the parish of St. Botolph, lingering at each tower to dispense coins and questions. From that height London appeared almost tranquil, cleaner and somehow nobler than the square mile of squalor and moral compromise sprawled between these walls. The city’s roofs formed a grand patchwork of ambition and decay, the spans of greater halls and the thrusting heights of new towers set within the humbler timbers of tenements and lower shopfronts. Even the smoke rising from smithies and ovens possessed a humble majesty, grey tendrils striving for the sky, vaporous strands of the city’s hopes.

  Yet London was hardly at peace. Masons were at work at every turn, fortifying the wall and heightening it in certain places deemed particularly vulnerable to engine or incursion. It was known that a great navy had been assembling at Sluys since midsummer, ready to seek vengeance for years of English brutality in France and Burgundy. With the Duke of Lancaster in Castile seeking a crown and much of the upper nobility increasin
gly belligerent toward the king, a mood of lowering doom had settled over the realm of late, as the nation braced itself for invasion from the sea.

  The feeling sharpened as I neared Bishopsgate and the armories. Somewhere below three smiths worked in tandem, the varied weights of their hammers entwined in a clanging motet, turning out breastplates, helmets, hauberks, the mundane machinery of war. I spoke for a while to the tollkeeper, whose wife I had bought out of a city gaol the previous summer, though learned no more than I had from Bagnall.

  Now Cripplegate. On the second level above the gatehouse there was a small hermitage, filthy from the habits of its longtime occupant though an unavoidable stop given my needs. The low and nearly secret door, reached by squeezing around one of the guard towers from the lower walkway, was closed against the wind. A smudged face could be seen through the rectangular gap in the bricks that served as the chamber’s sole window aside from a narrow squint low on the far side. The hermit’s eyes were closed above his massive beard, a swath of matted filth that covered nearly every inch of a face thinned by years of self-denial and hunger. The stench from the hole was a rich stew of man, dung, and time.

  I squatted and peered in. “Good day to you, Piers.”

  With a start the hermit opened his eyes, then gapped his mouth in a dark and toothless smile. He kept his door closed but scooted his ragged frame toward the window, jutting his nose and lips into the aperture. “Why, John Gower himself, the Saint of Shrouded Song! You have—oh—spices in your pouch for Piers, do you, or—oh—a heady lass?”