The Invention of Fire: A Novel Page 6

  “What does it mean?”

  “Nothing good, my dear,” said the midwife, with one of her dark looks. It changed to a smile and she patted Hawisia’s wrist. “Should straighten itself out in time, though, with the right charms. Let me see what we have here.”

  She dug through her bag and came up with a much-thumbed little book. Hawisia had seen it before, heard its bootless charms wheeze out through Rose Lipton’s wide lips. “Have you straightened your husband’s girdle, as I asked?”

  “Just there,” said Hawisia, pointing to the delicate metal chain dangling from a bedpost. Wrought pewter, a gift from Robert on their wedding day, though crafted by Stephen Marsh, his chief apprentice then. Rose lifted it from the post and draped it across Hawisia’s waist.

  “It is a husband’s charm, you know. Shame Robert’s not here to sing it himself. I’ll lip it out for you, though,” she said helpfully.

  “I thank you for it,” said Hawisia, tightening her jaw.

  Rose fixed the clasp before Hawisia’s nether way. Hawisia could do nothing but lie there, propped up on her bed, as Rose recited the familiar words by rote. “I bound, as so shall I also unloose. I bound, as so shall I also unloose. I bound . . .” The midwife murmured the girdle charm ten times, not reading from the book, simply thumbing the page containing the words and the rubrics for their use.

  When Rose had finished she tucked the book away, followed it with the poultice, and helped Hawisia dress and sit up on the edge of her bed.

  Hawisia, unable to stop herself, asked, “All seems well, then, aside from the babe’s position?”

  Rose waggled a hand, shot out her lower lip. “You are well past where you’ve got to before, Hawisia, I’ll give you that,” she said, but then shook her head. “Yet that means little when it comes to the birthing. How many is it you’ve lost to the flux since Robert Stone took you to wife? Two is it, or three?”

  “Four,” said Hawisia, remembering them all. The first three gone in rushes of blood that could have been her menses if she hadn’t known better and cramped so badly. The last one was stillborn early, an unchristened lump pushed out into a world it would never see or know.

  “And Eleanor, she gave him two, aye? Sweet one, that Eleanor.”

  “Two. Yes,” said Hawisia flatly. “Both girls.” Eleanor Stone, Robert’s first wife, had been dead these eight years. The daughters were departed from the foundry as well, one recently married off to a wine merchant of Cripplegate Ward, the other gone to fever in her childhood. Robert would often speak of his late wife with a certain longing skidding through his voice, and though he never said so, she could feel the contrast between his wives working on his desires.

  Eleanor, fertile and fecund. Hawisia, barren and fruitless. Robert, wanting a son.

  “So your evil fortune weren’t from his seed, then, was it?” said Rose with her brow raised, an inquisitive tilt to her head.

  “I suppose not,” Hawisia said.

  “Good then.” She nodded. “But don’t give in to despair, Mistress Stone. For the babe’s quick in there now, I can feel him shifting about, and who can say? Could be that Lady Fortune will turn the thing out alive.” She wagged a finger. “Though don’t let your hope spring too fresh, Hawisia. Not with your luck.”

  No fear of that, Hawisia thought, feeling her hopes pushed and pulled by the midwife’s shifting wisdom.

  “Dead birth can be a fearful thing though, can’t it?” said Rose. “I well recall it with my third. John, it was.” She sat back plumply on her stool and folded her arms. “We thought he was a choked one, too, all grey in the skin, not a twitch from his toes to his nose. But my old gossip Grace, she thwacked the little thing on the arse she did, and out comes his screamin’ breath, loud and full as you’d like!” She laughed merrily at the memory, which Hawisia had now heard at least ten times.

  Rose packed her remaining things, then pushed the stool back beneath the bed and smoothed her dress as Hawisia shoved herself to standing. “So you see, Hawisia, y’must trust in the grace of God to sort wheat from chaff. Some of us be fecund, bursting with bairns, like my eight. Others are chosen to be virgins in a house a nuns. Others to be barren, such as yourself. But better to be barren than rotting off in a grave, aye?”

  Hawisia walked the midwife down the outer stairs and through the house door to the showroom. Stephen Marsh was there, watching the shop in Hawisia’s absence.

  “Why, good morn to you, Stephen Marsh,” said Rose, beaming widely at him.

  Stephen gave the midwife a nod. “Mistress Lipton. And Mistress Stone.” He showed one of his too easy smiles, brushed away a dangling lock from his brow, and pondered them with those wide-spaced eyes, a soft doey brown. In the parish there were wives and widows alike who giggled and gossiped on those eyes. Not Hawisia. She sniffed and turned away.

  Rose, though, paused in the doorway like a mud-stuck log. “How is the work, Stephen? Bells shining bright this autumn?”

  “As bright as ever, Mistress Lipton,” he said. They spoke for a few minutes of newborn infants in the ward, and of Rose’s two unbetrothed daughters, fresh as new buds on an elm, each as lovely as a daisy, the midwife claimed.

  Hawisia could sense Stephen’s awkwardness. She watched his eye shift toward the rear of the shop and the foundry yard. Stephen hated being trapped up front, she knew, just a hundred feet from his natural home amid the forge and metals, yet in his mind a sea’s width away. He was like a penned bear up here, never truly content unless he was at his work—and Hawisia wanted him at his work. For with Robert’s sudden passing Stephen Marsh’s needful craft was all that stood between pounds and penury for the foundry.

  How different it had been while her husband lived, when what she desired most keenly was prestige and the awed respect of the guild wives. If she could not have children of her own she would have the richest, finest foundry and smithy in the city of London, and it was up to Robert and his workers to make it so. More commissions, more customers, an ever-growing share of the city’s metaling trades.

  And it was this nagging want, this thoughtless avarice that killed Robert Stone, despite Stephen Marsh’s hand in the accident. This she knew, and felt the weight of it every day, though it was easier in her mind to blame Stephen—and have him blame himself. Now all she wanted was to survive the birth of this only child, with enough coin for their bread and this roof. Her ambition had diminished with her future.

  “Allow me to walk you through to Fenchurch Street, Mistress Lipton,” Stephen was saying. Rose, delighted, took his arm, and together they left the shop.

  Hawisia went to the door and watched them walk down Bellyeter Lane and past the Fullers’ Hall, Rose chatting gaily, her free hand flying wildly back and forth before her loud and prattling mouth, Stephen nodding, yessing, feigning a youthful interest in the midwife’s wisdom and wit.

  Hawisia closed the street door, flattened her back against it, felt the rough board against her palms. Grey and old already, even with a babe stewing in her belly. She wondered how it would be, to reside in that world of green life and vitality it seemed everyone inhabited but she.

  Chapter 5

  LONDON’S MOST SHADOWED CHURCH sat nestled against the northernmost span of the wall, which rose behind it to block the morning sun and cast that corner of the parish in an eternal dusk. In those months the outer ward, like the other neighborhoods ringing the city beyond the walls, lived in a state of violent transition, as tenement holders and shopkeepers fought back the royal army with bribes, pleas, and threats, all desperate to hold on to their small scraps of ground in the face of the great events unfolding around them.

  For it was the soldiers’ mission to clear buildings, trees, and brush from the city’s outer circumference, a mission they took quite seriously. With the combined might of France and Burgundy massing in Flanders, the walls of London would need defending when the invasion came. It wouldn’t do to leave the enemy a high tree that might be felled, a shop that might be torched, a ready
supply of natural engines and dry fuel to be used against the city and its people. So, just over the ditch, for fifty feet in every direction, the army’s laborers were beginning to pull down houses old and new, taking axes to the few larger trees that still stood in those precincts.

  For all my lifetime the walls had been embraced by clusters of narrow streets and alleys, animal pens, shops and stalls and an occasional smithy, yet now these wide areas in the outer wards would be opened to the Moorfields, and the orchards and grazing grounds beyond. A great denuding, and it had already transformed this part of Cripplegate-without from a teeming precinct of city life into an ugly and mud-churned plain.

  The destruction was also stoking an always simmering conflict between city and crown. The aldermen were seething as they watched whole neighborhoods disappear, complaining to the mayor in the overblown terms favored by their superior sect.

  A royal trampling of the outer wards!

  Gross violations of ancient rights!

  The commons kicked about like river rats!

  St. Giles, despite its close proximity to the walls, remained, though the old rectory between the sanctuary and the Cripplegate guardhouse had recently been sacrificed to the cause. Some of its rubble filled three handcarts pulled by a trio of sullen workers, pressed into service by the two infantrymen standing to the side. None of the five men acknowledged my presence as I walked past them and up the porch stairs.

  A small group of petitioners waited on the porch; then the church’s dark and cold interior prickled my limbs. As my eyes searched weakly through the gloom I heard the distinctive voice of the longtime parson. He stood within one of the shallow side chapels, arguing with another man over some aspect of the parish rents.

  “Nor has he yet made good on the summer’s leasing,” said the priest.

  “That old hole in Farringdon,” said the other.

  “Yes.”

  “Two shill four, as I remember.”

  “Press him for it, will you?”

  “Aye, Father.”

  “Harder this time. I cannot have a tenant sucking the parish teats without paying for his milk like all our other lambs.”

  “Aye, Father.”

  “Be off, then.”

  The two separated, the other man passing me on his way to the west doors, the priest making for the altar end of the nave. He spoke again as he disappeared through the chancel screen, calling out instructions to several parish underlings, all of whom answered with a respectful tone of assent. As I neared the low middle door he spoke more pointedly to one of his charges.

  “That pile of ash, Gil?”

  “Yes, Father, I removed it. As you asked.” A higher voice. Young, a touch sullen, as if its owner were being inconvenienced by the parson.

  “Very well. Finish up with that polish, then, and you may go.”

  “Yes, Father. As you please.” Almost insolent, as I heard it. I wondered that the parson let one of his charges speak to him in such a way.

  The candles on the near side of the chancel beam flickered as I passed. I waited, fumbling with an unlit wick, until the echo of the priest’s footsteps receded and the vestry door opened and closed. I looked around and through the screen. Before the low altar two masons worked on the floor, which in that portion of the church had, over the years, decayed into an uneven surface of old planks and broken stones that the men were busily replacing.

  I looked through the crossing toward the south door. The sullen voice I had heard belonged to the youth squatting by the door to the sacristy, working a rag over a sacring bell at a low table. He wore the high-cut robes of an acolyte, the plain jet of a young man in minor orders. I approached him quietly, stood at his back.

  “Gil Cheddar?”

  The hand holding the rag flinched. The acolyte sat back in surprise, losing his squat and half sprawling onto the church’s stone floor. With an embarrassed flutter of limbs and robes he came to his feet, his chin and jaw raised at me. “Gil Cheddar indeed. Who’s asking?”

  “John Gower,” I said, unmoved by his tone. His uncovered hair, coal black, swept back from a brow as close to pure white as living skin can be. Early whiskers grew along his cheeks and chin in seemingly random patches, and his narrow shoulders topped a gaunt frame of medium height and slight build. “What does the good parson of St. Giles have you about today, Gil?” I asked him.

  There is something in my voice that I have never comprehended, a quality of silken acuity that seems to work its peculiar charm even on those hearing it for the first time. Chaucer once compared it to a flat of sacrament bread. If unleavened bread could talk, he said, it would talk like John Gower, with no airy lift or taste of yeast to distract from the flat purity of the grain. A weak figure, though I have witnessed the effect of my own voice often enough to lend some credence to the image. There is no levity in it, no room for compromise.

  At his own first nibble of this voice, Gil Cheddar answered my question with no trace of the arrogance he had just shown his parish master. “Cleaning tasks, sire, between the day services. Polishing and the like.”

  “I see. And you are now finished for the day?”

  “Nearly so. I’m to finish the burnish on this bell here, then it’s my lot to stow the sacristy items back in the cabinet, get it all locked up securely, with the key returned to Father. Then it’s—” He stopped himself, looking puzzled by the extent of what he had divulged. His narrow lips found what must have been a familiar frown. “You are here to speak with me? Or is it the parson you wish to see?”

  “Oh, I am here for you, Gil, and only you.”

  He shifted his weight. “Whatever for?”

  “As I understand it you spoke rather freely to a hermit in recent days.”

  “A hermit, sire?”

  “A hermit of our mutual acquaintance.” My head tipped back toward the walls. “A fellow who lives out there, above Cripplegate.”

  He took a half step away, his mouth fixed in a line. I followed his gaze as he looked up and out across the top of the screen. From where we stood you could see nothing of the walls or the upper reaches of Cripplegate, though Cheddar seemed to be peering through the layers of wood and stone to that low window where he had spoken to Piers Goodman.

  “I would very much like to learn about your conversation with our unkempt friend, Gil.” I had moved my hand to the purse at my waist. I lifted a coat flap and showed it, though the sight seemed to terrify more than please him. The acolyte glanced toward the vestry, took in the stances of the workers by the altar, assessing the dangers of speaking to this intruder.

  “Not here,” he said quietly. “The coops, outside Guildhall Yard?”

  “I know them,” I said. A line of chicken houses along Basinghall Street, a short walk down from Cripplegate.

  “I should not be long,” he said. “Give me the quarter part of an hour.”

  The vestry door groaned open, the parson returning to the nave to call out an instruction to an unseen subordinate. Hunching slightly, I took a few sidelong steps and ducked through the screen door, then hurried down the aisle and back out onto the porch. The sun had made no further effort to crest the walls, only brushing my face once I entered through Cripplegate and turned left past Brewers’ Hall, nestled just east of the inner gatehouse. I crossed Guildhall Yard and entered Basinghall Street, a narrow, snakelike thoroughfare extending south from the wall to Cheapside, and always bustling with hucksters selling everything from unskinned coneys to silver plate.

  There was city business being transacted out here as well, mayor’s men taking small coin, dispensing false promises in exchange, and above it all rose the shouts of the criers in a sonorous dance of service and enticement.

  “Buy any ink, will ye buy any ink? Buy any very fine writing ink, will ye buy any ink and pens?”

  “Any rats or mice to kill? Have ye any rats or mice to kill in your homes and stables, good London? Rob the Ratsbane, at your service!”

  “White radishes, lettuces, more ra
dishes, two bunches a farthing!”

  “Have ye a sore tooth, an aching gum, an abscess or a bleeder? For know that I am Kindheart the Tooth-Drawer, my good people, with gentle pincers in my hand and opium in my purse.”

  The criers rattled on, their pitches rising to an impossible volume as I passed down the street.

  Then, from the top of the way, the din of a herald’s bell, sharp brassy clangs cutting through the street noise. The sound abated as a tall young man in the royal livery stepped up on a half barrel, looking down at the commons and asking for our silence and attention.

  He was a palace man, recognizable as one of the showy types increasingly favored by King Richard in those years. A rich coat buttoned tightly at his neck, a fur-trimmed cape chiseled with decorative slits, long legs in particolored hose, three ostrich feathers stemming ostentatiously from his hat. He spread his arms, shook his feathers like a plumed bird, then brought his hands to his mouth, cupping the rhythm of his cries.

  “And now for a taste of foul crime, my good gentles and commons! Now shall I shout of brigands and killers, slayers and thieves! A poacher of pigeons, a smith turned to pilfer! The most lawless of ladies at large in our land!”

  He had our attention. Several outliers moved closer to the crier’s perch, crowding in and looking up at the man’s raised and thinly bearded chin as he went on.

  “Now give me your ears and your good hearing, people of London! Know all present that Robert Faulk, cook of Kent and poacher of His Highness the king’s forests, along with Margery Peveril, gentlewoman of Dartford and murderess of her husband, having jointly slain a sheriff’s turnkey and escaped from the sheriff’s gaol at the manor of Portbridge, do now flee, together or alone, through country and city, their destination unknown, with great bounty from King Richard to any man who would aid in their apprehension and seizure, singly or together.”

  There were scattered exclamations, a fair amount of murmuring at the notion of a murderess at large. The crier repeated the announcement, added a brief description, then went on to shout a series of royal proclamations. The crowd loosened, the hubbub returned. Soon enough the royal servant’s drones were drowned beneath the renewed barks of the hucksters and their hired mouths.