A Burnable Book

I left him there, gnawing at his past.

Back at St Mary Overey a letter awaited me in the hall. I took it up from the tray where Will Cooper would leave all my correspondence, expecting a bill from a local merchant, or a report from the bailiff of one of my estates. I was surprised at the letter’s weight until I turned it over and saw the heavy seal. The wax bore the impress of Robert Braybrooke, Bishop of London.

Rather unusual, to send a sealed missive across the river when the bishop’s messenger could have said a simple word to my servant. After a moment’s hesitation I broke the wax. The note was short and to the point, and in his chief secretary’s hand. The Lord Bishop of London requested my presence at Fulham Palace this Monday, at the hour of Tierce, upon his return from a visitation up north. The letter left the subject of the appointment unmentioned. London and I had had our moments, though all of that was far in the past, and I wondered what the bishop could possibly want with me. I thought about it for a while, ticking off a mental list of current complexities but coming up with nothing aside from Katherine Swynford’s brief mention of Braybrooke at La Neyte, and his distress over the book sought by Chaucer.

Whatever its subject, the bishop’s was an invitation I was in no position to decline. In my study I scribbled a reply at the foot of the letter, melted some wax, and left the missive in the tray for Will, who would arrange its delivery for that afternoon. Five days, then I would know more.

TWELVE (#ulink_8f387d5d-c39a-5e21-9d2f-d908e21b9010)

Cutter Lane, Southwark

The knife landed in muscle with a wet spit. A second blade quickly followed, nearly touching the first. The carcass swayed, and Gerald Rykener clapped his hands roughly on his tunic. ‘Have that, Tom.’

The other apprentice stepped up to the line, a blade pressed between his fingers. His wrist bent, his arm rose, and with a flash of metal the knife was buried in the flank just inches from Gerald’s. The second landed a half foot higher on the beef, missing its target. ‘Damn it to queynting hell,’ he said, then with a scowl handed Gerald a coin.

Eleanor watched her brother pocket it, and for a moment the simple joy of victory on his face turned him back into the sweet boy she remembered. Then Gerald saw her.

‘Ah, by St George. Swerving again,’ he muttered to his companion, his contempt for her undisguised.

The other apprentice looked over to where she stood by the fence. ‘What do you think, Gerald? Your brother a mare or a gelding?’

‘A mare with a cock?’ Gerald taunted. ‘A gelding with a queynt?’

‘Either way she-he’s got enough riders to keep him-her filled with oats ’n’ mash till the trumpet sounds, from what I hear.’

‘Aye that,’ said Gerald, ignoring her as his fellow turned for the barn. Gerald wiped a long crimson smear across his cheek, then from beneath the carcass removed a bucket of blood. He took it to a heated cauldron at the far end of the yard. Gerald was fourteen, yet already moved with a tradesman’s confidence that would have been endearing if he hadn’t turned so foul. His apron was cut small in the style of the craft. We butchers pride ourselves on leaving our aprons white, he’d explained in those days when he cared. Now it was stained a brownish red, his loose breeches slimed with gore.

When he returned to the fence she saw the latest bruises had faded. His lip, too, had mostly healed. He was close so she went for his neck, the line of faded scar tissue running from his jaw to his nape. He knocked her hand back but she reached for his head and felt a new knot. Size of a peach pit. ‘What’s that about?’

He ducked away. ‘He swings the mallet around, you know, got those teeth on it. It’s wood, though, so. But Grimes’d never hit me with the metal one. Not ever.’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘And when he does you’ll be dead as that beef side hanging behind you.’ Why Gerald took his master’s part so often she couldn’t reckon, though Nathan Grimes had been his effective father for going on three years, and children could develop peculiar loyalties.

He looked at her purse. She handed him the coins she’d come to deliver. ‘It’s hardly much. A shilling and five. Keep it somewhere, use it only in your most needful moments. Not for candied gingers on the bridge, now.’ She half-turned to go, but something in his eyes held her back. ‘What is it?’ Trying to sound impatient: she needed to be tough with him, tough as he was with her, or he’d never make it to his majority. ‘What is it, Gerald?’

He snarled and spat in the filthy straw. ‘No matter. Go away, Edgar.’

As her brother returned to his work Eleanor watched him sadly, marvelling at how much the boy had changed. They had been separated since their mother’s death, when Gerald was seven, Eleanor thirteen and starting to discover her second life. A man in body, but in soul a man and a woman both, a predicament that made her wardship a domestic hell: a wife who tormented her with the hardest household labour, a husband who wouldn’t leave her alone once he found out what she was. She had taken to the streets at sixteen. Gerald, though, had seemed to be getting by, floating from guardian to guardian, some good, some bad, yet all carefully regulated by the city, with appearances before the mayor himself once a year. Eleanor managed to see him nearly every month as they grew up. Finally, at his eleventh birthday, the office of the common serjeant arranged for his apprenticeship to a freeman of London and master butcher, and all appeared set.

Then, not six months after his apprenticeship began, the city passed the butchery laws, and Gerald’s master moved his shop across the river to Southwark to avoid the fines and fees. There not only butchers but guardians operated on their own authority, with little legal oversight from the town, and no common serjeant to take the orphans’ part. ‘Never heard no law against a butcher moving shop to Southwark,’ Grimes had said when Eleanor confronted him. He turned instantly cruel upon the move across the Thames: Gerald was on his own there, surrounded by meat yet starved for bread, beaten regularly and with no recourse. Eleanor had tried to intervene, but the laws of London, it was said, have no house in Southwark.

Soon enough Gerald was turning into one of them, these Southwark meaters, a nasty bunch of Cutter Lane thugs without guild or code, sneaking rotten flesh into the markets and shops across the river. The Worshipful Company of Butchers, London’s legitimate craft, had been trying for years to quash the flow of bad flesh into the city to no avail, and now that Gerald had been caught up in their illegal trade he, too, was slipping down the path to a hanging. It often seemed to Eleanor that Gerald’s entire self had changed, as if the Holy Ghost had sucked out his soul and the devil had blown in another.

‘Best be off,’ she said. He shrugged indifferently. From behind her, a whisper of straw. A pig, she thought. Gerald’s back was to her as he scraped at a pile of hardened dung. ‘May be a stretch before I can get out here again.’ She recalled the beadle’s questions, the threats, and thought of Agnes. Two sparrows perched on the side of the stall flitted off. Gerald started to turn. ‘There’s been some trouble on the lane, and I might have to be—’ He faced her now. His eyes widened.

Eleanor’s neck snapped back, her hood wrenched violently downward by an unseen hand. She was spun around into the face of Nathan Grimes, taking in his ale-breath. ‘Trouble on Gropecunt Lane? For a lovely boy-princess like yourself?’

‘You let my brother go, now!’ Gerald screamed, backing away. ‘You just let him go, Master Grimes!’

Grimes was a stout, boar-like man, with well-muscled arms that flexed as he held her. ‘I’ll let it go all right.’ With a hard push against her head, he shoved Eleanor to the stall floor. She backed up against the boards, then came to her feet, her breath shallow.

Grimes gestured toward Gerald. ‘Get inside, boy.’ Gerald stayed where he was. Grimes raised a hand. ‘Inside, boy.’ Gerald looked at Eleanor. She gave him a reassuring nod. He backed away, pushed open the pen gate, and walked reluctantly toward the house. The butcher leaned over Eleanor, toying with Gerald’s knives.

‘I know what you be, Edgar Rykener,’ said Grimes, with a small lift of his chin. ‘No place for swervers in a respectable butcher’s shop, now. Let your brother learn his craft in peace.’

‘Peace?’ said Eleanor under her breath; then, more loudly, ‘He getting any peace by your hand?’

‘Getting fed, isn’t he?’ Grimes retorted. ‘Getting schooled in hogs and calves, learning the way of the blade, got some thatch over his head. More’n you can say for lots of boys his age, in London or not.’

‘And getting a mallet to the skull in the bargain.’

Grimes spat in the dirt. ‘Boy needs to learn respect he wants to be a freeman like me.’

‘You took an oath, Master Grimes,’ she seethed. ‘In the mayor’s presence himself you swore to God you’d protect my brother, keep him from harm. Now you’d as lief kill him.’

Grimes lifted a cleaver, fingered its edge. ‘Never cut up a maudlyn in all my day.’ He looked over at the beef carcass. ‘Can’t imagine there’s much trouble to it, though.’ He smiled. ‘Now get back to London, sweetmeats.’

She edged out of the stall with a final glance at Gerald. He stood in the doorway to the apprentices’ shack, his face so much older than it should have looked. Once she was gone Grimes would paint it good. The burden of it all settled on her: a murder, a missing friend, a brother liable to be brained at any moment and clearly troubled by something he wouldn’t reveal.

Yet there was one man who might be capable of putting things right for Gerald, Eleanor speculated as she walked up toward the bridge, get him out of all of this. A kind man, from all she’d heard. A man with the authority to remove her brother from his Southwark dungeon and put him with a kinder master in London. As she passed back over the bridge she thought about this man, knowing, at least, where to find him; trusting, for she had to, in his kindness.

THIRTEEN (#ulink_6c86ae56-30af-5b3d-bd25-2d4266ac39f3)

St Mary Overey, Southwark

On the morning after Low Sunday I rose early, awakened by the buzz of the priory bell, cracked and unreplaced since the belfry fire two years before. My appointment with Braybrooke would not be for hours, but I left the house anyway, absorbing the quiet din of these Southwark streets at dawn, already alive with the work that sustained the greater city over the river. Here the trades commingled with none of London’s attempt at logic, the shops of haberdashers and carpenters, tanners and tawyers, fishmongers and smiths, coopers and brewers all side by side, spewing smells and sounds and petty rivalries even as small creeks of rubbish spilled out of alleys between them. I stepped into a baker’s shop and purchased two sweetbuns for the trip. At the river landing I paid my pennies and hopped on a common wherry, joining a few others westward bound.

I found a seat for the float to Fulham, and as the wherry passed St Bride’s on the north bank I squinted across the wide span at a group of young men in skiffs. They were tilting, I realized, their target a square of beaten tin suspended from the lampstick of an anchored barge. Four oarsmen per skiff made wide circles around the craft, the lanceman at the bow, loose on his knees; then, a speedy approach, the lance held at the shoulder, the skiff keeping steady over the rises; and finally impact, as the dulled point of the lance struck the tin, the noise carrying over the water. An awkward game, yet several of the young men were quite skilful with their lances, taking the applause of their mates with exaggerated pride.

These, I thought with a shudder, would be the first Englishmen killed were a French invasion force to sail up the Thames from Gravesend and destroy the bridge. How would these boys spend their final moments? Would they turn tail, ditching their skiffs on the bank, fleeing through the streets? Or would they stand and fight, tilting at warships in a futile attempt to save London?

At the quay of Patrisey I changed wherries and thought ahead to my appointment with the bishop. Knowing Braybrooke as I did, I could expect a meeting full of venom and insinuation, of parries and feints. Tread softly, I warned myself.

With a slow turn toward the north bank, we passed lines of oak and elm towering over the terraced lawns leading up to the bishop’s great house, which commanded an enviable position over the river. Above the dock was a pavilion trimmed in banners of silk, cloth of gold, and sable, displaying Braybrooke’s mascles over his personal barge.

As the bank came into view I saw not only Braybrooke’s colours, but the Earl of Oxford’s as well. The wherry bumped in just up-river from Braybrooke’s barge, and as I stepped up the bank I saw Robert de Vere striding across the lower terrace. Normally Oxford moved about with a larger retinue, yet his only companion that day was Sir Stephen Weldon. I bowed as the earl approached. He looked me over, his discomfort apparent as he waved me to my full height.

‘Gower,’ he finally said.

‘Your lordship.’ I nodded to Weldon. ‘Sir Stephen.’

Weldon returned the nod.

‘How is his lordship the bishop?’ I asked them.

‘Supervising plantings on the upper terrace,’ said the earl, forcing a smile. ‘Seems there are some questions about the rigor of the vines he’s got in from Bordeaux. But he’s still determined to pull a decent clairet from our English clay.’

I winced. ‘Prêtres anglais ont toujours aimé le vin.’