A Burnable Book

By Half-ten of Hawks might shender be shown.

On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.’

‘There it is then,’ said Agnes, her face brightening.

‘There what is?’

‘It lays out the place of the killing, doesn’t it? “In palace of prelate” and “by bank of a bishop”. A palace by a river. A bishop’s palace.’

‘Braybrooke?’ Millicent remembered a float with Sir Humphrey to the Bishop of London’s riverside residence.

‘Or our own Wykeham,’ said Agnes. William Wykeham, the Bishop of Winchester, whose palace in Southwark stretched along a fair span of the Thames. ‘Then it gives the killer’s method, aye? Nesting with knives in hand, then springing forth—’

‘“At spiritus sung”,’ Millicent finished for her. ‘What’s that mean, then?’

Agnes shrugged. ‘Prayer, could be, ending in spiritus. Like a signal.’

‘A signal.’

‘’Cause they’ll have help, won’t they?’

‘From a “kingmaker”,’ said Millicent. ‘A magnate whose majesty is mingled with mort.’

‘Who’s this Mort?’

‘Not who but what, dearheart,’ Millicent said gently, stifling a laugh. ‘Mort is France’s word for death.’

‘Ah.’ Agnes frowned. ‘But the book tells who wants the king dead, or at least how to know them for what they be. The shenders’ll show themselves by “Half-ten of Hawks”, whatever that might betoken.’

‘Five hawks, then,’ Millicent said.

Agnes frowned. ‘Why not say five?’

‘Half-ten. Hawks.’ Millicent emphasized the common first letter of each word. ‘It’s the verse.’

‘So the killer of our king will be carrying five hawks on his arm?’

‘That’s a lot of hawks for one arm,’ Millicent mused.

Agnes crawled forward on the rushes, took the cloth that had covered the book in hand, and spread it over the floor. ‘Five hawks, the book says, and there they are, clustered around the shield. Now I see it, Mil!’ She turned round to her sister. ‘It’s like wool and a spinning wheel.’

Millicent squatted by the cloth.

‘Without the wheel, the wool is just wool.’ Agnes cradled an imagined basket. ‘What good be a basket of wool if you haven’t made it into thread yet? But once you’ve wound it on the spindle, started turning your wheel’ – her hands spun the air – ‘why, the wool starts to twist itself together, and soon you got so long a length of thread as you like.’

‘I don’t see it.’

‘It’s all on the cloth, isn’t it?’

Millicent had thought little of the piece of embroidery apart from the shilling or so it would fetch on Cornhull. Yes, it was an extraordinary sample. But what did it have to do with the book?

She surveyed it now, looking more closely at the marks of livery embroidered across its span. She had noted them earlier, when Agnes first unwrapped the book for her, yet now their significance hit her with real force. Around one of the shields had been embroidered a careful pattern – a circle of five hawks – while the other sat in the midst of a triangle formed by three delicate white feathers. The cloth, she realized, told a story, a story whose main characters were embodied by the livery set between its edges. And what a story it was!

If she had learned her reading from Isabel of Barking, Millicent had learned her heraldry on the lap of Sir Humphrey ap-Roger, who had loved to point out the subtle variations signifying relations of rank, status, and depth of lineage: fields and divisions, charges and crests, beasts rampant and supine. In the difference between a blue lion on an argent field and an argent lion on a blue field lay whole histories of conquest and submission, Sir Humphrey taught her; learn these histories and the livery that tells them, Millie darling, and you’ll go far. Yet the heraldry on this cloth required no great knowledge, for she recognized most of it instantly. The colours of the king and his uncle were depicted in a battle of some kind, with swords, knives, and arrows surrounding their emblems and supporters.

Millicent clasped her sister’s hands. ‘Without the wheel, then, the wool is just wool.’

Agnes nodded. ‘And without the cloth,’ she said, continuing the thought, ‘the book is just …’

They said it together: ‘A book.’

There was one final piece. Millicent read the last line of the prophecy to her sister. ‘“On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.”’

‘Dunstan’s Day,’ said Agnes. ‘Nineteen May, or I’m a fool.’

Millicent calculated on her fingers. ‘Six weeks, Ag,’ she said into the darkness, the meaning of the prophecy chilling her limbs. ‘Our king has but six weeks to live.’

They had sat in silence for a while, absorbing the prophecy’s dire meaning, when Millicent saw a flicker of something cross her sister’s face. ‘What is it, Ag?’

‘The faun,’ she said, a faraway look in her eyes.

‘What about it?’

‘Right before that man killed her. She looked up at the sky, and she cried it out. A rhyme. ‘Though faun escape the falcon’s claws and crochet cut its snare, when father, son, and ghost we sing, of city’s blade beware!’ I remember it like my Ave Maria, her voice was so clear. It felt like she was screaming it to me, to me, while she’s kneeling there, waiting to die. It’s been stuck in my head since, just like that man’s doovay leebro, doovay leebro. So what’s it mean?’

‘Say it again.’

As Agnes repeated the rhyme, Millicent scratched it on to the last page of the manuscript with a nub of coal in her unpractised, spidery script. The words did nothing to clarify the rest of the prophecy, but writing them down seemed to calm Agnes somewhat.

‘Whatever it means it’s only words, Ag. And we can’t eat words.’ Millicent stood, the manuscript falling from her lap. ‘Nor a cloth, nor a damned book.’ She slammed the chamber door behind her, clomping down the outer stairs, her hopelessness rising with each descending step. Her sister in her bed, the two of them together for the first time in years, yet Millicent felt more alone than ever. City’s blade indeed.

ELEVEN (#ulink_56417e51-fd81-5e09-9fe1-02f6e14a55f3)

Basinghaw Street, Ward of Basinghaw

In London, if you die of unnatural causes, your corpse will be inspected not by the coroner himself but by his deputy, who gathers witnesses, orders the beadle to summon the jury from around the ward, and performs the inquest at the site of demise. The procedures are well established, and in theory should function smoothly.

Things are somewhat messier in practice. Though he works on behalf of the city, the coroner reports to the king’s chamberlain, not to the mayor – a bureaucratic peculiarity I have found immensely useful over the years. Officials of city and crown can always be stirred against one another, and divided loyalties are to my vocation what a hammer is to a smith’s. Since the last year of Edward’s reign, the commons had been complaining regularly in Parliament about the coroner’s office and the mischief this arcane arrangement could cause. To have a city official unbeholden to the mayor of London? A scandal, and an opportunity.

As usual Thomas Tyle, king’s coroner, was absent when I arrived at his chambers on Wednesday of Easter week. The location spoke of the office’s tenuous relation to the city government: just outside Guildhall Yard but within shouting distance of the mayor’s chambers, and the common serjeant’s, though I had sent a boy ahead to confirm the common serjeant’s absence from the precincts. Seeing me here would raise uncomfortable questions in Ralph Strode’s mind, and I needed him on my side.

Two clerks, facing one another over a double-sided desk. Neither looked up.

‘Is Symkok about?’

The one to the left raised his jaw slightly, eyes still on his work. ‘He’s in there.’ The back room, which I’d visited more than once. It was a dark space despite the bright day, the shutters closed nearly to. I found Nicholas Symkok, chief clerk to the subcoroner, hunched over the end of a table, a ledger opened before him. A crooked finger followed a column downward. The curve of his back seemed part of the furniture, a bony arc some carpenter hadn’t thought to trim.

Nick Symkok was my first. It still startles me to think of how natural it all seemed when it began. Just a few years after the great dying, half of London beneath the soil, the city abuzz with news of the Oxford riots. That summer I found myself performing occasional clerical work in the Exchequer under the chancellor’s remembrancer. Though I hardly needed the money, my father had promised my temporary services to the treasurer, to whom he owed a favour.