The Invention of Fire

‘Nay, sir. St Bart’s Smithfield.’

‘St Bart’s?’ I frowned at him, already dreading it. ‘Why would Ralph want me to meet him in Smithfield?’ Located outside the walls, the hospital at St Bartholomew tended to the poorest of the city’s souls, its precincts a stew of livestock markets and old slaughterbarns, many of them abandoned since the pestilence. Not the sort of place to which Strode would normally summon a friend.

‘Don’t know, sir,’ said the boy with a little shrug. ‘Myself, I came across from Basinghall Street, as Master Strode was leaving for St Bart’s.’

‘Very well.’ I dismissed him with a coin. Will gave me an inquisitive look as the boy left. My turn to shrug.

I had eaten little that morning so stood in the kitchen as Bet Cooper, Will’s wife, young and plump to his old and lean, bustled about preparing me a plate of greens with cut lamb. A few swallows of cider and my stomach was content. At Winchester’s wharf I boarded a wherry for the London bankside below Ludgate at the mouth of the Fleet. A moderate walk from the quay took me across Fleet Street then up along the ditch to the hospital.

St Bartholomew’s, though an Augustinian house like St Mary Overey, rarely merited a visit given the unpleasant location, easily avoidable on a ride from the city walls to Westminster. The hospital precinct comprised three buildings, a lesser chapel and greater church as well as the hospital itself, branched from the chapel along a low cloister. An approach from the south brought visitors to the lesser church first, which I reached as the St Bart’s bell tolled for Sext. I circled around the south porch toward the hospital gates, where the porter shared his suspicions about my business. They were softened with a few groats.

The churchyard, rutted and pocked, made a skewed shape of drying mud, tufted grass, and leaning stone, all centred on the larger church within the hospital grounds. Not a single shrub or tree interrupted the morbid rubble. Shallow burials were always a problem at St Bart’s. Carrion birds hooking along, small demons feeding on the dead. Though the air was dry the soil was moist and the earth churned underfoot, alive with the small gluttonies of worms.

Three men stood along the south wall gazing down into a wide trench. Ralph Strode, the widest, raised his head and turned to me as I walked across, his prominent jowls swaying beneath a nose broken years before in an Oxford brawl, and never entirely healed. His eyes, sombre and heavy, were coloured a deep amber pouched within folds of rheumy skin.

‘Gower,’ he said.

I opened my mouth to speak, closed it against a gathering stench, and then I saw the dead. A line of corpses, arrayed in the trench like fish on an earl’s platter. All were men, all were stripped bare, only loose braies or rags wrapping their middles. Their skin was flecked with what looked like mud but smelled like shit, and gouged with wounds large and small. At least five of them bore circular marks around their necks in dull red; from hanging, I guessed. My eyes moved slowly over the bodies as I counted. Eight, twelve – sixteen of them, their rough shrouds still open, waiting for a last blessing and sprinkle from a priest.

‘Who are they?’ I asked Strode.

The silence lengthened. I stood there, the rot mingling with the heavy buzz of feeding flies. Finally I looked up.

‘We don’t know.’ Strode watched for my reaction.

‘You don’t know?’

‘Not a soul on the inquest jury recognized a one of them.’

‘How can sixteen men die without being known, whether by name or occupation?’

‘Or rank, or ward, or parish,’ said Strode. He raised his big hands, spread his arms. ‘We simply don’t know.’

‘Where were they found?’

‘In the Walbrook, down from the stocks at Cornhill. Beneath that public privy there.’

‘The Long Dropper,’ I said. Board seats, half a door, a deep and teeming ditch. ‘And the first finders?’

‘A gongfarmer and his son. Their crew were clearing out the privy ditches. Two nights ago this was, and the bodies were carted here this morning by the coroner’s men. Before first light, naturally.’

My gaze went back to the bodies. ‘An accident of some kind? Perhaps a bridge collapse? But surely I would have heard about such a thing.’

‘Nothing passes you by, does it, Gower?’

Strode’s tone was needlessly sharp, and when I looked over at him I could see the strain these deaths were placing on the man. He blew out a heavy sigh. ‘It was murder, John. Murder en masse. These men met violent deaths somewhere, then they were disposed of in a privy ditch. I have never seen the like.’

‘The coroner?’

‘The inquest got us nowhere. Sixteen men, dead of a death other than their natural deaths, but no one can say of what sort. They certainly weren’t slashed or beaten.’

‘Nor hung by the neck,’ said the older of the two men standing behind us.

Strode turned quickly, as if noticing the pair for the first time, then signalled the man forward. ‘This is Thomas Baker and his apprentice,’ he said. ‘Baker is a master surgeon, trained in Bologna in all matter of medical arts, though now lending his services to the hospital here at St Bart’s. I have asked him to inspect the bodies of these poor men, see what we can learn.’

‘Learn about what?’ I said.

‘What killed them.’

Strode’s words hung in the air as I looked over Baker and the boy beside him. Though short and thin the surgeon stood straight, a wiry length of a man, hardened from the road and the demands of his craft. His apprentice was behind him, still and obedient.

‘Surely you’re not thinking of the Italian way,’ I said to Strode.

His jowls shook. ‘Even in this circumstance the bishop won’t hear of dissection. You know Braybrooke. His cant is all can’t. Were these sixteen corpses sixteen hundred we’d get no dispensation from the Bishop of London. Far be it from the church to sanction free inquiry, curiositas, genuine knowledge.’ A familiar treatise from Ralph Strode, a former schoolman at Oxford, and I would have smiled had the circumstances not been so grim. He looked at Baker. ‘Our surgeon here is more enlightened. One of these moderni, with ten brains’ worth of new ideas about medicine, astronomy, even music, I’ll be bound.’

‘What makes you believe these men weren’t hung?’ I asked the surgeon. ‘Those red circles around some of their necks? I would think the solution is apparent.’

Baker shook his head, unaffected by my confidence. ‘Those are rope burns, Master Gower, or so I believe, though inflicted after death, not before.’

‘How can you be sure?’

From a pouch at his side Baker removed a brick-sized bundle bound tightly in brushed leather. Unwrapping the suede, he took out a book that he opened to reveal page upon page of intricate drawings of the human form. Arms, legs, fingers, heads, whole torsos, the private parts of man and woman alike, with no regard for decency or discretion. Brains, breasts, organs, a twisted testicle, the interior of a bisected anus. The frankness and detail of the drawings stunned me, as I had never before seen such intimate renderings of the corporeal man.

Baker found the page he was looking for. Strode and I leaned in, rapt despite ourselves by the colourful intricacies of skin and gut.

‘The cheeks of a hanged man will go blue, you see.’ His finger traced delicately over the page, showing us the heads of four noosed corpses, the necks elongated and twisted at unlikely angles, eyes bulging, tongues and lips contorted into hideous grins, skin purpled into the shades of exotic birds. ‘I have seen this effect myself, many times. The blood rushes from the head, the veins burst, the aspect darkens. Leave them hanging long enough and they start to look like Ethiops, at least from the neck up. And there is more.’

He squatted over the pit, gesturing for us to join him. In his right hand Baker bore a narrow stick, which he used to pry open the left eye of the nearest victim. ‘Do you see?’

I looked at the man’s eyeball. ‘What is it I am to see?’ I said.

‘The iris is white,’ said Baker, reaching for the next man’s eyelid, this time with a tender finger. ‘As is this one. And this.’ He moved along the trench, pausing at each of the ring-necked victims to make sure we saw the whites of their eyes. ‘Yet the eyes of a hanged man go red with blood. See here.’ He fumbled with his book to show us another series of paintings a few pages on. Bulbous eyes spidered with red veins, like rivers and roads on a map of the world.

I glanced at Strode, unsure what to think of this man’s boldness with the ways of death.

‘In Bologna the tradition is more – more practical than our own,’ said the physician, noting our unease. ‘They slice, they cut, they boil and prove and test. They observe and they experiment, and they admit when they are wrong. Such has it been for many years, good gentles, since the time of Barbarossa. It’s really quite something and if you are interested in this line of inquiry I recommend the Anatomia of Mondino de’ Liuzzi, a surgical master at Bologna some years ago who was an adept of the blade, a man thoroughly committed to dissection and—’

‘Not hanged, then,’ I said, less impressed by the man’s eloquence than convinced by the soundness of his evidence. ‘So how, in your learned view, were these men killed?’

He smiled modestly, raised the second finger on his right hand, and reached for the chest of the nearest corpse. His fingertip found an indentation to the left of the victim’s heart, a mark I hadn’t noticed before. He gently pressed down, and soon his finger was buried up to the first knuckle.

A hole. ‘Stabbed?’ guessed Strode, probing with a stick at a larger, more ragged wound on the second man’s chest.

‘Run through with a short sword, I’d wager,’ I said, walking down the row of corpses and pausing at each one. All had holes at various places on their bodies: some in the chest, others in the stomach or neck, some of them a bit sloughy but not unusually ragged, though one poor fellow was missing half his face. Fragments of wood were lodged above his lips, like the splinters of a broken board.

‘Not a blade, I think,’ said Baker, his voice hollow and low. ‘These wounds are quite peculiar. Only once before have I seen anything like them.’ He looked up at Strode. ‘With your permission, Master Strode?’

Strode, after glancing back toward the church, gave him a swift nod. Baker moved to a position over the first corpse and flipped the man onto his front, exposing a narrow back thick with churchyard dirt. His apprentice handed him a skin of ale, which Baker used to wet a cloth pulled from his pocket. He washed the corpse’s back, smoothed his hand over the bare skin.