A Burnable Book

He hits her.

She falls to the ground. He squats, fingers coiled through her lush hair.

‘Doovay leebro?’ he gently chants.‘Ileebro, mee ragazza.Ileebro.’ It could be a love song.

The girl shakes her head. This time he brings a fist, loosing a spray of blood and spittle from her lips. A sizzle on a smouldering log. Now he pulls her up, dangling her head before him, her body a broken doll in his hands. Another blow, and the girl’s nose cracks.

‘Ileebro.’ Screaming at her now, shaking her small frame.

‘Nonloso!’ she cries. ‘Nonloso, seenoray.’ She spits in his face.

He releases her and stands. Hands on his knees, he lets fly a string of words. Agnes can make nothing of them, but the girl shakes her head violently, her hands clasped in prayer.

‘No no no, seenoray, no no no.’ She screams, sobs, now whimpers as her softening cries fade into the silence of the moor.

When she is still he speaks again. ‘Doovay leebro?’

This time the girl hesitates. Moonlight catches the whites of her eyes, her gaze darting toward the dense foliage.

In the thick brush Agnes stiffens, ready to spring. The moment lengthens. Finally, in the clearing, the girl lowers her head. ‘Nonloso.’ Her voice rings confident this time, unafraid.

The man raises a hand. In it he clutches a stick of some kind. No, a hammer. ‘This is your last chance, my dear.’

Agnes’s limbs go cold. Perfect gentleman’s English. More than that, she knows this man’s voice, has heard it close to her ear, though she can’t summon the face. One of a thousand.

Now the girl throws back her head, lips parted to the dark sky, the dread ascending in a last flux of words: ‘Though faun escape the falcon’s claws and crochet cut its snare, when father, son, and ghost we sing, of city’s blade beware!’

English again, brushed with an accent, confusing the night with these strange portents hurled at the stars. She’s taunting him, Agnes thinks. He hesitates, the hammer still in the air.

Finally it descends. There is a glint of iron, and a sound Agnes will never forget.

For hours Agnes waits, as the moon leaves the sky, as the din of night creatures falls slowly into a bottomless silence. Now dawn, birdsong mingling with the distant shouts of workingmen within the city walls. The priory rings Lauds, and light rises across the moor.

Time to move. She arms aside a span of branches, scoring her wrists on dense clusters of twigs and nubs. A tentative foot out among the primrose, a pale blanket of scent.

Her gaze glides over the clearing: the lean-to, the remnants of the fire, the body. Her killer has stripped the girl to the flesh. Not with unthinkable intent, but with a deliberation that makes clear his aim. He was searching her, picking at her, like a wolf at a fresh kill. No rings on the delicate fingers, no brooch at the slender neck, though a silver bracelet circles her wrist. With her right hand Agnes clumsily unclasps it, admiring the small pearl pendant, the delicate chain. She pockets it. The only other item of value is a damask dress, tossed over a rotten log. Too big and bulky to carry into the city, and too fine for Agnes to wear.

Her left arm, still pinned at her side, aches. The small bundle has been clutched too tightly to her breast, almost moulded to her body. A thousand thorns wake her limb as she examines what the doomed girl thrust wordlessly at her hours ago. A bright piece of cloth, tied in leather cord, wrapped around a rectangular object of some kind. She collapses on a high stone and rests the bundle on her knees. With one tug the cord comes free.

A book. She opens it, looking for pictures. None. She tosses the thin manuscript to the ground.

What she notices next is the cloth. A square of silk, the embroidery dense and loud, the whole of it still stiff with the volume’s shape. She spreads the cloth to its full span. Here is a language she reads: of splits and underside couching, of pulled thread and chain stitch, an occulted story told in thread of azure, gold, and green. At the centre of the cloth appear symbols that speak of ranks far above hers. Here a boy, there a castle, there a king; here lions rampant, there lilies of France; here a sword, there a shield.

Agnes knows something of livery, suspects the import of what she holds. A woman has just died for it, a man has just killed. For what? She remembers the girl’s last, haunting words.

Though faun escape the falcon’s claws and crochet cut its snare,

When father, son, and ghost we sing, of city’s blade beware!

The rhythm of a minstrel’s verse, one she has never heard. Yet the rhyme will not leave her mind, and she mouths it as she thinks her way back through the walls. Which road is less likely to be watched, which gate’s keepers less likely to bother with a tired whore, some random maudlyn dragging it into London at this hour?

Cripplegate. Agnes takes a final kneel next to the dead girl and whispers a prayer. She retrieves the book and wraps it once more in the cloth, hiding them both in her skirts.

Soon she has left the Moorfields and traced a route below the causeway, circling north of a city suddenly foreign to her, though she has spent nearly all her life between its many gates. She enters London dimly aware that she holds things of great value on her person and in her mind, though unsure what to do with any of them, nor what they mean, nor whom to trust.

A cloth, a book, a snatch of verse.

Which is worth dying for?

PART ONE The Prince of Plums (#ulink_d4958c65-fcfe-5efc-9038-3a280eb65da2)

Day xv before the Kalends of April to the Ides of April, 8 Richard II

(18 March–13 April 1385)

ONE (#ulink_cb6eb995-4088-5068-868a-9e570ca3970e)

Newgate, Ward of Farringdon

If you build your own life around the secret lives of others, if you erect your house on the corrupt foundations of theirs, you soon come to regard all useful knowledge as your due. Information becomes your entitlement. You pay handsomely for it; you use it selectively and well. If you are not exactly trusted in certain circles, you are respected, and your name carries a certain weight. You are rarely surprised, and never deceived.

Yet there may come a time when your knowledge will betray you. A time when you will find even the brightest certainties – of friendship, of family, even of faith – dimming into shadows of bewilderment. When the light fails and belief fades into nothingness, and the season of your darkest ignorance begins.

Mine fell in the eighth year of Richard’s reign, over that span of weeks separating the sobriety of Lent from the revelry of St Dunstan’s Day. London often treats the passing of winter into spring with cold indifference. That year was no different. February had been an unforgiving month, March worse, and as the city scraped along toward April the air seemed to grow only more bitter, the sky more grey, the rain more penetrating as it lifted every hint of warmth from surfaces of timber and stone.

So too with the jail at Newgate: a stink in the air, a coating on the tongue. I had come over the bridge that leaden morning to speak with Mark Blythe, jailed on the death of his apprentice. I had come, too, as a small favour to the prior of St Mary Overey, the Southwark parish that Blythe once served as head mason. For years I had let a house along the priory’s south wall, and knew Blythe’s family well.

We had been chewing for a while on the subject of the coming trial, and whether I might help him avoid it. No fire in the musty side-chamber. I was losing my patience, and more of my vision than usual. ‘You have no choice, unless you want to hang, or worse,’ I told him. ‘And there is worse, Mark. I’ve seen it. I’ve smelled it.’

‘It was an accident, Master Gower.’

‘So you’ve said, Mark. How could you have known the axle would break?’ Despite the prison chill a bead of moisture, thick as wheel oil, cleared a path down his cheek. Blythe had lost three fingers, two from his left hand as well as his right thumb, his body marked with the perils of his craft, and Newgate’s heavy irons had scored his forearms. I softened my voice. ‘But the axle did break. The stones, half a ton of them, did spill out and crush that boy’s legs. Your apprentice did die, Mark. And the soundness of that cart was your responsibility.’

‘Not’s how I saw it, and as for the axle …’ His voice trailed off.

I heard a sigh, realized it was my own. ‘The problem, Mark, is that the law sees different kinds of accidents. You can’t claim accidental injury when your own negligence – when your carelessness has been taken as the cause of death.’

Blythe’s hands dropped to the table.

‘Please don’t make me tell your wife you’ve just put your life in the hands of a petty jury.’

His eyes widened. ‘But you’d stand for me, wouldn’t you then, Master Gower?’

‘I’m not an advocate, Mark. What I have are connections. And money. I can put those at your service. But not before a jury.’ Poor timing, I didn’t say. Before the crackdown last year I could have bribed any jury in the realm.

His shoulders slumped. ‘No trial, then. How quick to get me out?’

I hesitated. ‘You’ll be here until next delivery. June, I would think.’