A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 37

Yet even the closest of them was nearly forty feet from Richard. It would take a great effort to clear the distance, especially with the royal rearguard positioned where they were. For the first time since leaving Bromley I felt a twinge of doubt.

My gaze moved forward, along the intermediate ranks between the cardinal's guard and the princ.i.p.als. Most of them were clergy, separated by order and office. In the rear walked monks of the abbey, a dozen of them in two close ranks. Next came the friars, six Franciscans and a lone Dominican, the seven of them forming a single rank. Before the friars marched five bishops: Wykeham, Braybrooke, William Courtenay the Archbishop of Canterbury, and two Italians, all of them grand with their caps and mitres in various bright hues.

In front of them, forming one rank behind Richard and the cardinal, walked the king's guard. Twelve hardened knights, a squat rectangle around the royal person and the papal delegate. Their heads swivelled at every step, looking for threats. My eyes swept back again, over the lines of clerics, back to the cardinal's guard, then forward once more, looking for something, anything that might indicate- There. A face, standing out against the others. A friar. One of the Italian Franciscans no, the Dominican, his black robe stark against the grey favoured by the other order. The balance of the clerics canons, monks, friars, and bishops alike had pious, beatific looks on their faces, all pretending not to be enjoying themselves as the citizens of Westminster and London showered the company with spring flowers and words of praise.

The Dominican was different. His features hard, his frame lean, his stance taut as he walked, coiled, ready to spring. His eyes two slits of malice, measuring distances, reckoning angles. The ripple of his robes, loosely cinctured, obscured his hands, which seemed at the moment to be tucked behind him as he walked.

The procession was nearing the abbey door. The frontmost rank of guards would soon start to slow. I looked for More and the chancellor. The pursuivants were still too far away. I looked back at the friar. He was making his move. A flash of steel, and his knife was out, held against his chest, partially obscured by his hands. No one near him had noticed.

'The friar!' I shouted into the deafening roar, waving from my position at the column. 'More, More! It's the friar!' The Dominican, oblivious of my shouted warnings, started to move, pus.h.i.+ng gently through the row of bishops in front of him.

'The friar!' I shouted again. More didn't hear me either. I might as well have been screaming into a bucket sunk in the sea. But just as I had that thought the chancellor looked up at the abbey door and saw me pointing wildly. He pulled on the sleeve of the pursuivant immediately ahead of him. They both gaped at me. On an impulse I clasped my hands together, bowed my head in mock prayer, and pointed urgently to the cl.u.s.ter of friars pressed against the king's guard, which had now slowed to a near crawl. The abbot of Westminster prepared to welcome the king and cardinal at the abbey door, less than twenty feet in front of King Richard.

I mock-prayed again, pulled on an imaginary hood. The chancellor's eyes widened. He understood. A friar, I saw him mouth to the nearest pursuivants.

With a surge of forgotten strength the aged Lord Chancellor pushed ahead, taking Edward More and two pursuivants with him. They were fifteen feet from the friar, twelve, eight. Then, with a snake-like precision, the Dominican, sensing movement behind him, leapt forward, slas.h.i.+ng at the necks of the king's guard, intent on his target. But one of the guards had heard More's and the chancellor's shouts. His sword was out. It slashed at the friar in a protective arc. The friar ducked, and it took another swipe to halt his lethal progress toward the king. Two of the chancellor's pursuivants had finally reached the spot. There was a brief but furious melee, arms and swords and knives flying about.

It ended quickly. By the time the king and the cardinal bothered to glance over their shoulders the threat had been neutralized, the friar sliced to a bleeding mess. The princ.i.p.als exchanged a few words with the abbot, received the blessings, and pressed forward through the doors, the seemingly minor nuisance behind them. Only the bishops looked somewhat fl.u.s.tered. Braybrooke, two ranks behind the king, gave me a dark look, which I returned with a low bow and a hidden smile.

The crowd surged against the abbey's west facade, all craning for a last glimpse of the king. The pursuivants dragged the friar against the tide of the commons, and few bothered to glance at them. Soon they had him hoisted on their shoulders, a trail of blood spattering the pavers in their wake. Walking behind the chancellor, Edward More turned to look back at me from the abbey's northwest corner. He gave me a small nod. The pursuivants, with the dying a.s.sa.s.sin, disappeared. More followed them.

Two groats to the abbey guard got me into the nave, where I watched the procession conclude before the altar. All was calm, disconcertingly normal after the madness outside. St Peter's nave glistened, gem-like, the clerestory windows casting mottled sun on a large crowd of n.o.bles and clerics of all orders finding their places. The grand service began, an elaborate introit in five voices echoing to the vaults.

Not feeling prayerful I decided not to stay for Ma.s.s, angling instead up the nave and into the south transept along the narrow pa.s.sage past the chapterhouse. There I paused for a moment before a painting of St Thomas I had always loved. Not St Thomas Becket, nor St Thomas Aquinas the philosopher, but St Thomas the Apostle. The great doubter, his unbelief perpetually etched in his face at that precise moment before he touches Jesus's side: his gaze cast down, his finger bent over his savior's open wound. This Thomas, I think, has always been my favourite occupant of the canon of saints. The patron saint of doubt and suspicion, of verifiable information, in whatever form it comes.

FIFTY-SEVEN.

Priory of St Leonard's Bromley 'Prioress Isabel has asked me to remain at St Leonard's,' Millicent Fonteyn said to Eleanor Rykener. The sky was clear that afternoon, awash in a blue deeper than any in Millicent's memory. They sat in the small herb garden off the almonry, a promise of summer in the piney waft of rosemary from behind the bench. 'Says she'll take me in again as a laysister.'

Eleanor had begged a slab of tar from a ditcher along the walls. She had her shoe off, patching the leather. 'Will you stay, do you suppose?'

Millicent nodded. 'Not a sole doubt in my mind. Though maybe one small regret.'

'What's that?' Eleanor rubbed dirt over the tar, smoothing the patch with her palm.

Millicent smiled, thinking of John Gower. Widowed, tall, rich. 'Can I live my life without the touch of another man?'

Eleanor snorted. 'I'm touched by another man six, seven times a day. Can't say it's much to miss.'

'I suppose not,' said Millicent with a sigh. 'Though I'll miss my figs.'

'No figs at St Leonard's?'

'No figs, no money, no men.'

Eleanor slipped her shoe on. 'Nothing wrong with going figless, Millicent. Nor penniless, nor even c.o.c.kless.'

'Millicent the c.o.c.kless,' she mused. 'I like it. And as Agnes used to goad me, I've always wanted a t.i.tle.'

'Agnes,' said Eleanor wistfully.

Millicent regarded Eleanor Rykener with a stab of shame. Millicent had spent just a few years in her mother's service at the Bishop before seizing the opportunity to flee to St Leonard's and a new life. Eleanor Rykener had lived nearly ten years now on her stomach, enduring the gropes of monks, squires, and franklins, and all without a trace of the bitter self-pity that Millicent spoke like a second tongue.

She thought of the saints, that litany of suffering women whose works and lives the nuns of St Leonard's would intone in their offices. Of St Margaret, swallowed by the dragon, then standing triumphantly on its back. Of St Cecilia, her virtue threatened by a Roman despot, suffering three sword-strokes to her neck. Of the Blessed Maudlyn herself, lifted by Jesu from the bowels of the swyve. And here was Eleanor Rykener, enduring more trials of the flesh than all these sainted women put together. Yet no one would think to write Eleanor's life for an Austin canon to include in the legendum. No one would compose St Edgar Rykener a hymn, nor sing a collect in praise of St Eleanor the Swerver.

She had a sudden thought. 'Would you take up other work, do you suppose, if the opportunity came?'

Eleanor waved away a fly. Shrugged. 'Seems G.o.d suited me for swyving. There's not another line of work would let me be true to my mannish side, least that I can tell.' She smiled sadly. 'Imagine I'll keep with it till Gerald reaches his majority. Then we'll see.'

The next day Millicent visited the prioress in her apartments. All was arranged with a few words to Isabel.

'Your timing is propitious, Millicent,' the prioress told her. 'Bromley has received a generous endowment, in the neighbourhood of twenty pounds.'

'Twenty pounds?' Millicent marvelled at the sum. 'Who established this endowment, Reverend Mother?'

'Our benefactor has asked not to be named, though I can tell you he's a Southwark man. But the funds are not given freely.' She said this with a trace of disapproval. 'The endowment's terms are quite clear. It is to be employed in perpetuity for the benefit of the maudlyns of Southwark and London, with Bromley required to come to their aid and succour whenever possible. So it won't be difficult to budget ten s.h.i.+ll a year for your Eleanor Rykener. Scullery work?'

Millicent nodded, delighted with the prioress's response. 'Or the animals, Reverend Mother. Whichever you think best.'

'She'll be your charge, Millicent, not mine,' said the prioress. 'But don't let me catch you running a flock of wh.o.r.es out of the gatehouse.' She went back to her book.

'No, Reverend Mother,' said Millicent with a hidden smile. She started to back out of the parlour.

'And, Millicent?'

She looked up. 'Yes, Reverend Mother?'

'Will Tewes, our yeoman cook, grows old,' said the prioress, her gaze still on the page. 'He's in need of a cutter, a young man good with a knife. See that one is found for him.'

FIFTY-EIGHT.

San Donato a Torre A knock at his opened door, then a boy's voice. 'Ser Giovanni invites you to dine with him, Master Scarlett.'

Adam Scarlett, annoyed at the interruption, turned from his desk with a frown. Not even a page at the door, but a boy from the villa's kitchens. He sighed, set down his pen, and closed the ledger. He followed the boy from his rooms and through the labyrinth of low hedges leading to the side door.

In the hall Hawkwood was bent over the central table, concentrating on a mess of papers. Two of his dogs, hunting hounds, all nose and tongue, were curled around his feet. The closer one licked Scarlett's hand as he sat.

A servant set a goblet of wine between them and a thick soup at Scarlett's place. At Hawkwood's inviting gesture he sipped contentedly until the condottiero looked up and joined him in the meal. Scarlett told him the news of the day another letter from Carlo Visconti, a herd of poached sheep lost in transit from near Poggibonsi. Hawkwood nodded at the right places, asked a few questions; all seemed perfectly normal. Yet Scarlett could sense a certain tension in the air. There was a stiffness to Hawkwood's manner, a formality he rarely saw in the man when they were alone.

Finally Hawkwood leaned back, sighed, and put a hand on Scarlett's arm. 'Desilio has broken the final cipher,' he said, a note of longing in his voice.

Scarlett felt a leap of hope, though Hawkwood quickly dashed it. The condottiero lifted the topmost paper and read, his gravelled voice weighing the deciphered message with a heavy finality.

My Lord, know by this that our earlier suspicions are confirmed. John Hawkwood, false knight and traitor to the crown, plots against His Highness's rule. His brigades will sail from Spezia no later than the Feast of St Edmund, to join the French fleet off Sluys. Five thousand spears, with a thousand from Hawkwood, four from France. The coastal garrisons must be reinforced, the forts heavily manned, the artillery strengthened, and with all deliberate speed.

As Hawkwood recited the missive Scarlett felt his shoulders sink, all his fears realized. 'We are done, then. Betrayed, and by that snivelling runt.'

'So it seems,' said Hawkwood, patting Scarlett's arm. Scarlett grasped his master's hand, feeling the surge of disappointment through the rough skin.

They finished their meal in silence, the air heavy with regret and stifled ambition. When the service was cleared Hawkwood took a final swallow of wine, wiped his lips, and handed the goblet to Scarlett, who sipped once, then again and his hand stopped in midair as three of Hawkwood's roughest men entered the hall from the direction of the main gallery. They positioned themselves in a shallow triangle around Scarlett's chair and stood, silent, as Hawkwood brought out his cards.

'My lord?' Scarlett said, hating the sudden fear in his voice.

'I'm learning, you know,' said the mercenary, placing down a first card. 'I've got my own set of signals now. "When I wipe my lips, enter the hall and surround the disloyal sack of s.h.i.+t." Not as sophisticated as Il Critto, perhaps, but it seems to work. And no need for a cipher.'

Scarlett said nothing, though his breathing grew shallower with each card Hawkwood arrayed on the table.

'Desilio came to me yesterday.' Another card. 'His face was pale, his hand shaking as he talked me through every step of the final code.' Four more cards, all face up. 'I was impatient at first, but he insisted that I work out the solution myself.' The third row complete. 'And he was right, for I would never have believed what I read had I not sifted through those pages myself, transcribed every letter in my own hand at his instruction. It wasn't difficult, really.' The last two cards, face up before Scarlett's hands.

From a bag at his side Hawkwood took out the scorched quire and went on, as if instructing a schoolboy in grammar. 'Each grouping of cards is a letter, you see. Start at the end and the beginning of the deck, excluding the trumps and taking the first and last cards as the letter A.' He pointed to the first pair he'd arranged. 'The second and the penultimate are B, the third and the antepenultimate C, and so on until you've exhausted the cards and the alphabet. Then you start over, with the second and the penultimate cards standing for A this time, the third and the antepenultimate for B I won't go on. The suits must be ranked, of course, and it can get quite confusing if you forget which sequence you're on. There are as many as five different pairs standing for the letter S in this message alone. But Desilio took me through it, and eventually I was able to work out the message I've just read you.'

'I see,' said Scarlett, his uneasiness growing.

'What I didn't read you, though, was the last little bit. Do you mind if I do so now?'

'As you wish, Sir John,' said Scarlett stiffly, dreading to hear what came next. One of the dogs moved at his feet, nosing for a hand.

Hawkwood read.

To ensure its delivery to your hands, and to guard against the seizure of a messenger, we have sent this same information by land and by sea. Trust you in the truth of this, for Hawkwood himself has revealed all. Written at San Donato a Torre, by Firenze, the feast of Sts Perpetua and Felicitas, by your humble servant Adam Scarlett.

At the final words Hawkwood nodded up at his men, who descended on Scarlett as he sat frozen in his chair. He hardly noticed as his arms were thrust across the table, his wrists pinned in place by much stronger hands, his thumbs splayed to the sides as his palms were pressed against the wood's cool surface.

Hawkwood stood, took a heavy knife from one of the men, and brought it down on Scarlett's right thumb. Scarlett screamed, his legs quivering beneath him.

Yet even as his hand sang with an almost exquisite pain, his continuing screams now m.u.f.fled by an oily cloth clamped over his mouth, he heard a sound that transcended agony. The crunch of bone, his bone, in the mouth of a dog.

At Hawkwood's signal the man behind him forced his head to the side, his eyes widening in terror as he watched the hound chew and spit, chew and spit, lick, then lip, then chew and spit again, the shards of his thumb now a moist bolus on the floor. Another flash of Hawkwood's knife, and the second dog had his treat. The men pressed vinegared cloths on Scarlett's fresh stubs, strumming his nerves even as they stanched the blood and kept him from pa.s.sing out.

'Every lying finger, Adam,' said Hawkwood, his voice a calm promise of misery to come. 'Then every false toe. Then each treasonous ball, then your traitorous c.o.c.k. After that well, after that we'll heal you up and get to work on your face.'

Scarlett closed his eyes, knowing it was useless to protest his loyalty to this man he would never have thought to betray. He was on the north downs, on Detling Hill after a walk from Maidstone. He had promised himself he would return there once back in England, and that his death, when it came, would not be in vain. So much for promises, and salvation.

'We'll keep you alive as long as we can, Adam Scarlett,' said Hawkwood. 'I wouldn't want you to miss a moment of the feast.'

FIFTY-NINE.

St Paul's.

On St Boniface's day, the fifth of June, I arranged an appointment at St Paul's with the bailiff of the Aldermen's Court. Nothing important, merely a glimpse at a recent deposition I had been wanting to see. But I suspected the chancellor would be at the cathedral that morning, and that he would be summoning me sooner or later in any case. While speaking with the bailiff I stood at a spot in the north transept by the pa.s.sage to Minor Canons, where the baron would see me as he pa.s.sed.

It did not take long. Once the bailiff had left I leaned on the doorway, composing a pair of couplets in my mind, until I felt a presence behind me.

'How did you do it, Gower?' I turned to see the baron, framed against the crossing. I bowed. 'How did you know?'

'They were speaking in Italian, my lord,' I said as we walked toward the less crowded south transept, our voices low. 'That night on the Moorfields. Weldon was interrogating her in Italian. That was the first clue.'

'So ...?'

'So London had nothing to do with the "city's blade". The girl was being questioned about the book, but she knew more. And that's what she revealed with her final words in English, so that the maudlyn, Agnes Fonteyn, would understand and remember them. Weldon spent years with Hawkwood, and his Italian was as good as Chaucer's. He knew what he was doing. Recovering the book was crucial to keeping everyone focused on these elaborate prophecies and ignorant of Hawkwood's more direct plot against the king. The Trinity plot, like the book, originated with him.'

'"City's blade",' the chancellor mused. 'A city in Italy, then?'

'Florence, most obviously, though that wasn't quite it.' We had reached the opening to the chapel of St Katherine, empty but for a sole wors.h.i.+pper kneeling at the altar of Mary and Martha. 'But once Agnes's sister told me they were speaking Italian on the Moorfields it all came to me. London is to an Englishman what Rome is to an Italian: the princ.i.p.al city. After that it was a simple matter of translation. In Latin, the possessive of "city", urbs, is urbis.' I paused. 'She was making a pun, my lord.'

'The blade of Urban,' said the chancellor with a rueful smile.

'Pope Urban's blade,' I finished. And there it was, I explained. When father, son, and ghost we sing, of city's blade beware. The a.s.sa.s.sin the true a.s.sa.s.sin of King Richard, not the b.u.mbling company of butchers riled up by Weldon and Oxford and their skulking priest for St Dunstan's Day would be a member of the papal delegation, scheduled to process with the king at the abbey on the morning of Trinity Sunday.

'The man was a professional and seasoned killer,' the baron said. 'Bernab Visconti's deadliest knife, or so he claimed before we broke his neck. Planted by Hawkwood in the papal delegation. Had he not been stopped the king would surely be dead, taken with a blade in the ribs before his closest guard could blink.'

I silently wondered whether Oxford, in the thick of the plot against Gaunt, had known about the planned attempt on the king, despite the close friends.h.i.+p between the two young men. Weldon surely had, though this ugly knowledge had died with him. The foiled a.s.sa.s.sination would remain known only to a few, I observed, and lost to history.

'Just as well,' the chancellor said with an air of tired discretion. 'Though I do wish I could have met the girl, this Seguina d'Orange. Geoffrey Chaucer hardly deserved such a woman's love.'

'It wasn't all about his clever book in the end, my lord, let alone about him,' I said, speaking thoughts I had been mulling for days. 'There was a greater purpose to her sacrifice than saving the skin of a London poet.'

'That's why Seguina d'Orange came to England, then,' the baron mused. 'Not only to save Lancaster, or Chaucer, nor even to find the book, as important as that was.'

I peered into the chapel, at a high wall scorched with years of pious smoke. 'King Richard was the brother of her dead brother, and thus her own sibling, after a fas.h.i.+on. But he was also the son of her mother's ravisher and yet she came here in part to save his life.'

'And she did it, didn't she, with her last words,' he said, his voice a soft coil of wonder.

'Though only just.' The close call before the abbey was still fresh in my mind.

'I was there, you know,' said the baron quietly.