The Invention of Fire

Halfway up, where one set of stairs forked to the gate’s north tower, the other to a set of apartments in the south, I had to pause, scarcely believing my ears.

‘Sell this one – no, this one, and leave the others for Philippa to barter away. She’s hardly in a position to object. Perhaps her slutting sister can help her.’

A familiar voice, though tightened with uncommon anger. Reversing direction, I climbed up the right stair and made my way along the groaning walkway to an unassuming door, the main entrance to the series of rooms making up the small apartment atop the gate. For twelve years the house in the south tower had been the home of Geoffrey Chaucer, my oldest friend, though I thought he had left London some weeks before.

The door stood open, wedged with a chipped brick, and in the front chamber Chaucer was stooped over, tussling with an array of silver trinkets and goblets spilling out of a wood box. Crates, a stack of trunks, rolls of twine: the modest house was in a tremendous disarray, made all the more dire by the continual gusts blowing in from the door and scattering dust and invading leaves about the rooms. Despite the piles of belongings the place felt empty and bare, the only light coming from narrow slits low along the walls.

I stepped inside, further darkening the place. Chaucer turned. His scowl softened at the sight of me. A sad smile, and he tilted his head. ‘Mon ami,’ he said, coming to his full height. We embraced in the middle of the low space, surrounded by the detritus of his Aldgate life. Two servants brought in pieces of furniture from the back room, set them on the floor, returned for a next load.

We held each other at arm’s length. I searched his eyes. ‘You’re in London.’ A statement, also a question.

‘I am not.’ He went to the door, peered out. He turned back to me. ‘At least as far as Philippa is concerned. If you see her, you never saw me, yes?’

‘Fine fine,’ I said, amused, though also a bit melancholy about Chaucer’s continuing estrangement from a woman I admired so deeply. ‘You’re packing up then?’

‘I must surrender the apartment and Aldgate altogether.’ He said it with a careless air that I could tell was put on. ‘You haven’t heard? The common council wants me out. It seems that Richard Forster will take up residence here in a few weeks. Everything must go, to be sold or carted out to Greenwich.’ A village several miles from the city, and site of Chaucer’s new residence while performing his duties as justice of the peace in Kent. ‘Books, plate, books, furniture, books – oh, and also the books.’

Chaucer’s small apartment above Aldgate had once been stuffed with volumes. The four locked trunks along the far wall must have held dozens of manuscripts between them. It struck me how many times I had visited the Aldgate house over the years, for poetical exchanges reaching into the night.

He invited me to sit. I declined, with a hint at the day’s business.

‘An errand for Strode, then?’ he said, wanting to know more, though unwilling to ask directly.

‘A fool’s errand, I would call it. Aldgate seemed as good a place as any to begin.’ I gave him the bones of it, as the discovery of corpses in the privy was being bandied through the streets already. I kept quiet about the victims’ peculiar means of death, nor did I hint at the mayor’s apparent attempt to scuttle an inquiry. Chaucer had worked under Brembre in the customs office for several years, and the two remained close. ‘So today I troll the gates,’ I said, ‘hoping to scare up anything I can find about these men.’

His reaction was muted. ‘A dozen a day die in this city. Women, the elderly, children. Mass graves surround us on every side. What makes these unnamed men worthy of your time, John?’

The question surprised me. ‘Sixteen at once, thrown in the Walbrook? Curiosity, I suppose. And a fair measure of fear. No mayor wants to give death free rein in his city. The crown will use any excuse to tighten its chokehold on London. This is just the sort of thing to attract the worst kind of scrutiny from the king’s men.’

‘Now you sound like Strode himself,’ said Chaucer with his curling smile.

‘The freer the city the looser its purse.’

Chaucer moved to an east-facing window and glanced at the turret clock on St Botolph’s. ‘I’m due at Westminster shortly, you know, otherwise I would accompany you. I would welcome a break from all this.’ He looked around, gesturing to his crates and trunks. ‘But let me hail Bagnall up.’

‘Who?’

Chaucer walked to his door. ‘Matthew Bagnall,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘The warden of the gate. A man who knows more about the doings in and around Aldgate than all our ward-rats put together. I’ll get him up here.’ He stepped out to the rickety landing and called down to the foregate yard. ‘You there! Is Bagnall about?’

A faint reply floated up from street level.

‘Well send him up, will you? Master Chaucer has a question for him!’

He turned back and flattened himself against the wall. The servants slid around us bearing a large chest between them, which jostled and bumped along the railings as they descended the street-side stairs. When they were gone he looked at me, gestured at his eyes.

‘The same?’

‘No worse, at least,’ I lied, blinking away a spot. ‘Some days I scarcely notice, others …’

‘Ah,’ he said, his hands clasped. He tilted his head. ‘You know, John, there may be other remedies than resignation and despair.’

I said nothing.

‘There is a medical man newly in town, a great surgeon-physician. He is an Englishman, but trained in Bologna.’

‘Thomas Baker.’

‘You know him?’

‘We’ve recently met,’ I said, recalling the man’s fingers digging in a corpse. ‘He seems bright enough.’

‘More than bright,’ said Chaucer. ‘He was in my company on the return from Italy last year, and I got to know him quite well. Familiar with all the new techniques, unafraid to wield the knife when it’s needed. He is lodging in Cornhill for now, above the shop of a grocer named Lawler. Do you know the place?’

‘I do.’

‘I suggest you make an appointment to see him.’ Then, less formally, his voice lowered, ‘Surely it’s worth a visit, John, even if nothing comes of it. You have only two eyes. You’ll never get a third, no matter whom you extort.’

Matthew Bagnall arrived at the door. Squat, thick-necked, official, looking eager to get back to the gatehouse. Chaucer offered him drink. Bagnall declined, nor would he seat himself.

‘Mustn’t stay up here above my men for too long, Master Chaucer,’ Bagnall said, as if Chaucer’s house rested on an eagle’s eyrie, or some grand mountaintop in the Alps. He wore a cap that fitted tightly over a low forehead, covering what looked like a permanent frown.

Chaucer explained why I was there, then nodded at me to begin.

‘Fair thanks, Bagnall, for the trudge up the stairs.’ I handed him a few pennies.

He took the coins silently, glancing at them before slipping them into a pouch at his side.

‘The Guildhall is seeking information on a company recently arrived in London, and now deceased.’

His eyes widened slightly.

‘Violently deceased,’ I said.

‘Killed, you mean.’

‘It appears so. They were a group of men, a large group. Not freemen of the city. Outsiders of some kind.’

‘Frenchmen, or Flemings then?’

‘I think not,’ I said, recalling the stolid, rural look of the bodies, their rough hands, the dirt caked in their nails. ‘These were Englishmen, or I’m a bishop.’

‘Not soldiers – cavalrymen, say?’

I thought of those iron balls lodged in the victims’ chests. The gun wounds could have been inflicted in a battle, some factional conflict on the highway. Yet the fact that the men had been killed with small guns argued against the mess and melee of actual combat. ‘They might have been conscripts, I suppose, but recent ones if so. These men worked with their hands. Ploughmen, some of them, used to harrowing and manuring their fields.’

‘Dead when they got here, or killed within the walls?’

‘You ask sound questions, Bagnall. I don’t know.’