A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 24

'Perhaps,' the king said, tilting his head. 'But do you know the detail of that story I like most, Gower?'

'What is that, Your Highness?'

'Do you recall the moment when the dwarf, driving the cart, invites Gawain to join Lancelot?'

I confessed that I did not.

'The dwarf invites him into the cart,' Richard continued. 'And when he does, he says to him, 'If you are as much your own enemy as is this humiliated knight, sitting here in my cart, why, climb on in, and I shall take you along.' Gawain refuses, of course, for as he knows very well, it would be the height of dishonour for a knight to exchange his charger for a mere cart.

'Yet Lancelot has already done it. He has climbed into the humble cart, put himself in a base position while Gawain stays proudly out of it, disdaining the thought. But what if Gawain had joined Lancelot, as the dwarf asked him to? What if he had made a different choice, gone in a different direction than what his pride told him was right? And what if we, in turn, followed his example? "Are you Sir Lancelot, or are you Sir Gawain?" the poet seems to ask. Will you abase yourself for the sake of something vitally important to you? Or will you stand aside like Gawain, loftily removed from the squalor, even as a greater man climbs within, risking it all?'

I nodded. 'I see, Your Highness. The choices of the characters mirror our own choices.'

'Exactly,' he said, his young face brightening. 'The best stories, it seems to me, are those that force us to ask the most difficult questions of ourselves. They want to be mined for these questions, even as they want our soul to be mined for its will, in the way a priest mines it at confession. The poet is asking us to become our own confessors.'

'Well said, Your Highness.'

The king looked off the stern, then back again, regarding me closely. 'Though in the end, I think, the best story is always the simplest one. For your next work, Gower, I hope you will craft such a tale. Write it for me, your sovereign. Make it a confession, whether of a lover or a saint I don't much care. We need more confession in the realm, don't you think? More disclosure. More truth.' His eyes shone with a righteous l.u.s.tre, and a shudder moved over my limbs. I braced myself, once again almost spilling it all and appealing for Simon's release, then the moment pa.s.sed, and the king moved forward to speak with his cousin.

The river lapped at the ferry like the tongues of a thousand eager dogs. We were nearing Fulham Palace, the great house of Bishop Robert Braybrooke in the gardens of which I had learned of the existence of the De Mortibus. What a distance I have travelled in these weeks, I thought. Since that first meeting with Chaucer I had been mired in complexity: conniving gossips at court, arcane prophecies of kings' deaths, an unused library at Oxford. Yet what if this story, as the king had put it, were a simpler one? If Chaucer himself were to write this story, I mused, where would it go, and what would be its ending?

Before the Fulham wharf I had begun my bow to the king when he grasped my arm. 'Will I see you at Wykeham's feast?'

'How is that, sire?'

He hailed a page. 'Be sure Master John Gower here is on the bishop's list for the feast on St Dunstan's Day. On my name.'

'Yes, sire,' the page said with a bow.

It caught me from the flank, as if a predator stalking me all day along the river had finally pounced. I almost shouted in the king's face, so violent was my reaction. 'Thank you, Your Highness,' I managed to say.

'At my cousin's urging, I am trying to calm the wrath between my uncle and the prelates who despise him,' he said, appearing not to notice my discomfiture. 'All those bishops and archbishops Lancaster has mortally offended over the years. I am doing my best to gentle the roiled waters separating our factions, but the Bishop of Winchester is a difficult man. A poet's presence is a calming one on such occasions, Gower. Minstrels of the page, as I think of you and your scribbling ilk. And since you are a Southwark man you may easily step right over to Winchester Palace and join our company. Your friend Geoffrey Chaucer will also be there, at my request.'

'Again, sire, I thank you for your courtesy,' I said. 'I shall be happy to attend.'

'I'm delighted to hear it,' said the king. A gentle impact, ropes pulled to, the clank of metal on tack and stomps of hooves as knights led their mounts to the quay and up to the high road in the direction of Westminster and London. I waved off the offer of a horse. The storm had blown over, and though dusk approached I would easily make it on foot to the gates by sunset, then home on a wherry.

Bolingbroke gave his horse a final turn back toward the river, waiting for his cousin with the rear guard behind him. Four knights, still against the sky. The king spurred the charger ahead, the guard falling in behind. 'Until St Dunstan's Day, then,' King Richard called back to me.

As the company receded into the distance, I puzzled over the whole exchange, my pulse calming as I began the walk toward Westminster. Since reading the book in Oxford I had known when King Richard was to meet his fate by the terms of the prophecy. On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom. Now, thanks to the king, I knew where the a.s.sa.s.sination was to take place.

By bank of a bishop shall butchers abide ...

In palace of prelate with pearls all appointed.

The 'bank of a bishop': the precincts of Winchester Palace, the Southwark home of William Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, one of the great prelates in the realm. On the Thames adjacent to St Mary Overey, the palace was as familiar to me as St Paul's or Westminster, even more so: the priory and the palace shared the same span of wharf.a.ge, and Wykeham's episcopal offices at the palace had long served as the administrative hub of Southwark.

I thought it through. Pearls all appointed. The phrase had to refer to the oyster-and-pearl reliefs that Wykeham had commissioned during a past expansion of the great hall. The Blessed Virgin is like unto an oyster, he would say in his pretentious homilies: the Christ child is the precious pearl of her womb, created miraculously within, as a pearl within its sh.e.l.l. Matching his treasure to his theology, the bishop had commissioned a team of masons led by Mark Blythe, still imprisoned at Ludgate to craft stone chains of oyster and pearl along the inner walls of the hall. The carvings had been duplicated by Blythe and others on the palace's main outer wall facing New Rents, lined with subtle reliefs in the same pattern, mortared to the wall's uppermost span on either side of the gate. The De Mortibus even predicted the very moment of the attempt on the king's life: the killers would spring forth 'at spiritus sung' a phrase that had to be a reference to 'Ave Dunstane, praesulum', a popular carol proper to St Dunstan's feast day.

King Richard's death, then, was to take place at Wykeham's palace, during the episcopal feast on Dunstan's Day, at the procession preceding Ma.s.s. The prophecy put the plot squarely on Gaunt's shoulders, identifying 'long castle' as the traitor casting out the cor: deposing the king. Yet who was the 'kingmaker', and who precisely would attempt the murder of Richard? How would it happen? Who were these 'butchers', and what role would the cards the Prince of Plums, the Half-ten of Hawks play in the unfolding of the plot?

In the wherry the story of Lancelot came to me, in the form of King Richard's memories of Arthurian tales. My mind resounded with the questions he had posed on the ferry. Are you loyal to those you love, loyal to the point of humiliation? Or are you f.e.c.kless in your love, unwilling to risk the shame that lies in blatant self-sacrifice? Are you Lancelot, or are you Gawain?

Neither, I told myself with a creeping sense of my own blindness yet knowing the answer was almost within my grasp. You are, in fact, the dwarf.

In the service of Sir John Hawkwood, the knight settled with his daughter into a life as stable as any she had known since childhood. In those years, as now, Hawkwood s.h.i.+fted his alliances like a ram changes mates by summer he might be found fighting for Florence, by fall for Milan, in winter for the pope, in spring for the anti-pope. Despite all the political turbulence around them, though, the girl was provided for by her father in every way.

The knight chose a new wife, a kind woman from Hawkwood's homeland who took her in hand and reshaped her from the wild rodent she had become into a lady fit for an earl's table. Where this girl's father had taught her mannish things, her stepmother instructed her in the domestic graces of femininity: the correct way to do her devotions, the virtues of the wardrobe, the proper running of a household. She hired a tutor, as the wealthier families do, to instruct her stepdaughter in the reading and writing of Latin and the vulgar tongues, especially her own.

Her stepmother took particular pride in the girl's skills with the needle. You are a natural embroideress, she told the younger woman. Your handiwork will yield things of great beauty, perhaps help win you a husband.

One of the most artful items crafted by the girl a budding young lady of sixteen now was a needlework depiction of her most vivid and horrendous memory. She started it the very morning her father told her the news: Prince Edward of England, her mother's ravisher and the father of her brother, had met his end. A sickness, it was said, of mind and body both.

The tidings of the prince's death brought back images of her mother, brutalized by an honoured guest. Of the prince, in all his naked cruelty. Of his brother the Duke of Lancaster, saving her life and her mother's with a blade held to the prince's throat.

With this last scene newly alive in her mind, she resolved to embroider it. Two lords, clad in simple tunics and hose, their arms pointed out on s.h.i.+elds poised above their heads, details of livery and falconry added as she pleased: three ostrich feathers around the prince's s.h.i.+eld, five hawks around the duke's. She used the false hood of an old priest's silk cope as her base. Already bordered with ornate vines, leaves, and flowers embroidered by a more skilful hand, the cope made the perfect ground for the play of her memory. When she had finished her work, she snipped away the embroidered square and loosely pinned it to a large tapestry of a merchant's festival at the Tribunale, hanging in her father's gallery. There it remained for years, a constant reminder of the cruel l.u.s.ts of men, and the nature of true n.o.bility.

Such reminders were useful in Ser Giovanni's circles. Hawkwood had a reputation as a singularly brutal man. There were numerous stories of his cruelty. Some shrivel the ears.

Two of his men, having sacked an abbey, stood arguing over the flesh of a young nun found cowering in the dormitory. The matter was about to come to blows when Hawkwood strode up and demanded an explanation.

'She is mine,' said one, 'and I shall have her.'

'Nay, I shall have her,' said the other.

Hawkwood drew his sword. 'You will each have half.' He cut the nun in two, leaving her body divided on the tiles.

Such stories put the lie to chivalry, a myth she had seen violated so many times she could scarcely credit anyone still believed in it. Even her father, so n.o.ble in her sight, turned a blind eye to Hawkwood's ways. 'War is war,' he would say after hearing of some new atrocity. Hers was a world defined by men and their means, vicious spirals of brutality in which the flesh of a woman was utterly expendable, as cheap as pigs.h.i.+t on a paver.

She had suitors, of course. Though none of them interested her, her father pushed her toward a match. A gentleman of London, as her stepmother described the smooth young man. Suitable in every way.

He was a minor clerk in Hawkwood's chancery. Il Critto, they called him, a sobriquet reflecting his facility with numbers and ciphers. He served the great condottiero as a cryptographer, he boastingly confided to her when they met, dedicated to unravelling secret codes of all kinds, whether the signals of an approaching army or the rhythms of a lady's batting eyes.

Il Critto was young, handsome, quite obviously brilliant. She liked him enough at first, and the more time he spent in her father's house, seeking her company in the gallery, the closer she came to accepting the inevitability of a married life. He was tormented with love for her, or so he claimed.

Smitten. Tortured. Goaded. Martyred. Oppressed. Not a wordsmith like you, I am afraid, though the poor man tried.

Yet there was about him a certain blankness, some quality of sincerity or directness that seemed to be lacking, no matter how earnestly he spoke, and that caused her to question inwardly the wisdom of the desired union.

Nevertheless, he spoke well, and flattered her father with gifts and kind words. It is likely she would have been betrothed to him within a month's time had not her world changed in an instant.

PART THREE.

Half-ten of Hawks.

Day viii before Ides of May to Nones of June, 8 Richard II.

(8 May5 June 1385).

THIRTY-EIGHT.

Priory of St Leonard's Bromley.

To save our king.

The words of Agnes rang in Millicent's ears as she stood before the gate, the abbey's door to the secular world. A bored-looking porter leaned on the walls. These were now gap-toothed in places, collapsed into piles of rubble. Millicent had heard about floods doing some damage to St Leonard's properties, though she had had no real comprehension of the extent of the devastation. Several d.y.k.es along the Lea were collapsed, as were a few of the lesser structures on the outer grounds. The malting shack still stood, and the woodhouse, though the big barn's thatched roof was sinking in places. A pair of carpenters were at work up by the old manor house, their labours desultory, as if done in their sleep an att.i.tude shared by two men in the near field leading skinanchors of fuel, brought from woods that had receded a shocking distance from the walls. It seemed half the forest of Ess.e.x had been denuded, still another sign of how much had changed since Millicent's departure in the arms of Sir Humphrey ap-Roger.

She slipped a coin to the surprised porter and pa.s.sed through the priory's main gate, each structure and pa.s.sage laden with memories. The porch of the Lady Chapel, where the nuns performed the mystery play on Innocents' Day solely to themselves. The narrow cloister, through which the Ma.s.s priest, chaplain, and acolytes would pa.s.s on their way to the common room, bearing small ale past the mincing sisters. The scriptorium, where Millicent had acquired the gift of reading over long months with Isabel, now prioress the nun whose withering attention she would soon endure.

'Millicent?'

She turned. Sister Heda stared in bewilderment. Millicent embraced the nun. Beneath its wimple the narrow disc of Heda's face possessed the same sweet clarity she remembered, if lined with pa.s.sing years, and the abbey's recent troubles. Millicent pulled her around the corner of the dormitory. 'Where is the prioress today, Heda?'

'The prioress?' Heda's eyes widened still further. 'You wish to see the Reverend Mother?'

'Right away, my dear.'

'She is in her chambers today,' said Heda. 'The bishop has a visitation scheduled for next week. I've been appointed cellaress, you know, and there being so few of us now and it being so close there seems little we can do, so ...' She looked around in near despair. St Leonard's was in no state for one of the occasional rounds of official visits from its presiding bishop, Robert Braybrooke of London. Heda and her fellow officers of the house would be hard-pressed to make the place presentable in the coming days.

'Will you lead me there, Heda?' Millicent pleaded. 'I won't be stopped if you guide me.'

Heda hesitated, eyes s.h.i.+fting toward the gate. Then the nun silently turned and led her straight past the refectory, where the day's loaves lay stacked on the tables between meals. Left through the kitchen pa.s.sage, redolent with river eel. Another left across the herbal, its springtime offerings of sage, thyme, and dill. Down a gentle stair into a low, cold building of riverstone. The chapterhouse, the heart of St Leonard's, with voussoirs of banded fleurs-de-lis tracing high arcs along the vaulted entryway. The chamber was empty at that hour, though it would soon fill with the rustle of habits and the singing of Tierce.

Outside the prioress's private apartments stood a young novice. Millicent didn't know the girl, though her face was vaguely familiar. The girl started at the sight of an unknown laywoman in St Leonard's inner sanctum. Heda gave the novice Millicent's name and requested an audience.

'Your business with the prioress?' The novice's voice, like her face, betrayed nothing.

'She must see me,' Millicent said. 'It's a matter of grave importance for Bromley, and for the realm.'

The girl's smile was bemused? Cruel? Just throw me to the she-wolf, was Millicent's impatient thought.

The novice held up a finger, then pushed open the door to the prioress's parlour. Heda backed away, her brow showing a single worried line beneath her habit, then disappeared around the corner. Millicent heard a few mumbles. A piercing Who? The outraged e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of a voice she knew all too well. The novice returned, pale-faced, saying nothing as she held the door.

The prioress's parlour was a lushly furnished s.p.a.ce with three glazed windows, a writing desk, and a rug of black-dyed wool thrown over paving tiles bearing the Syward arms. Dame Isabel Syward, the Prioress of St Leonard's Bromley, gazed down from her raised chair with an air of taut disdain. Millicent lowered herself, remaining still until the leader saw fit to speak.

'You have-' Isabel's voice was gravelly with bile. 'You have come home at last, my dearest daughter.'

Millicent looked up in surprise, but the prioress's expression belied her welcoming words.

'And what a glorious homecoming it is,' Isabel continued. 'Perhaps you've reconsidered the wicked ways that led to your expulsion. Perhaps you've decided to be grateful for the gifts this house gave you. Food, shelter, rescue from a life of raw swyving, how to rap your Ave Maria on your knuckles. And reading. Oh! I taught you myself, didn't I? Every letter, holding your hand as your fingertips traced patterns in the letterbook. For hours, for weeks, for three years, Millicent, I taught you how to read, how to think, how to pray, how to live.'

The prioress put a hand to her mouth and sat back, seeming shocked at her own outburst. There was a glistening in the corners of the great woman's eyes. She wiped them and went on.

'Yet you threw it all away. And for what? A fat old January! At least you could have fallen for a squire, strong of arm and stiff of c.o.c.k. Now that would have been understandable, given our sisters something worthy to aspire to, an actual challenge. Instead, what do you do? Why, you settle for the first easy target that comes along, making yourself easy in the process, then off you go, abandoning the community that opened itself to you. Now you expect the same openness from Bromley? You think you can simply show up, demand an audience with the prioress, get a handout? Bah!'

The prioress spat. Millicent lay crumpled on the floor, stilled with the truth of all the woman had said to her, and with wrenching sorrow at the loss of this place from her life.

She squeezed her eyes shut. What could she say that might rein in Isabel's contempt, at least long enough for her to appeal for the help she sought? 'Reverend Mother,' she began, 'if you please-'

'But I know you, Millicent Fonteyn.' Isabel's voice was flat now, devoid of pa.s.sion. 'I know you to be the most calculating, self-interested woman in all England, a woman who would spare no thought to betraying friend and family alike. It is simply who you are, my dear.'

Millicent thought of Agnes. The prioress could not know the horrible accuracy of her judgment.

'So I suppose you would not have the spine to show yourself here if you didn't have good reason, and I suppose I am bound to hear it. "A matter of grave importance for Bromley, and for the realm." How grand. Tell us. Then get out.'

Millicent left nothing out, and when she was done the prioress studied her with an intensity she remembered. 'I'm very sorry about your sister, Millicent,' she said with lowered voice. 'Such a loss is difficult, even in these times when we lose so many to war and pestilence. To know that your own greed murdered her that doubles the guilt, and triples the pain. May Agnes be at rest in G.o.d's hands, her sins washed away in the waters of purgation.'

'Thank you, Reverend Mother. Your words are kind.'

Isabel stood with a sigh. She walked to the window looking up to the manor house. 'I have heard of this book from other sources in recent weeks. It is the talk of our order. The bishop has made inquiries about it to the houses in his diocese. A burnable book, Braybrooke calls it. The timing could not be worse, with Pope Urban's delegation set to arrive from Rome before Trinity Sunday.' She turned, her look incredulous. 'Yet you, Millicent Fonteyn, of all people, have read this book?'

'I have, Prioress. Several times.' Trinity Sunday. Pope Urban. Millicent thought, with a fleeting confusion, of her sister's death, and the words she had scribbled in coal inside the book. The crochet ... father, son, and holy ghost ... city's blade ... doovay leebro. Why were these phrases coming to her now? She had a.s.sumed that Agnes, in her own throes, was echoing the last words of the girl in the Moorfields, the couplet thrown into the night sky while Agnes watched from the shrubbery. For weeks she had dismissed Agnes's recounting of the doomed girl's dying utterance. The book and the cloth: these could be sold, after all, while words were just words, and there seemed little reason to credit the girl's final call as anything more than a cry of dread as the hammer fell. Yet now she caught herself wondering if there was something to these words after all, even if Agnes herself had never discovered their meaning. The Holy Trinity, a city's blade but what was it?

'This house is in enough peril already,' the prioress was saying. 'Our fortunes the property of the manor, our income shrunk to two hundred marks in the year. We've been forced to enclose the park, and lost a thousand acres in Dagenham. And here you are, slinking back like one of King Edward's dogs, with this news. I'd be within my rights to have you cast in the brew cellar, and the key thrown in the Lea. If our cellaress hadn't lost the d.a.m.ned key,' she muttered.

'I would have thought,' Millicent began, 'that the Reverend Mother's close relation to the crown-'

'Oh, yes, of course. We've had the corpse of Elizabeth of Hainault, old King Edward's sister-in-law, mouldering in our chapel for ten years. Why, we could sell it for relics! Why hadn't I thought of that? St Leonard's p.i.s.s is liquid gold!' Her hands dropped to her sides. 'I'm afraid we're no more protected from the threat of ruination than the shrinking forest around us.'

'Prioress-'

'Show me the cloth.'

Millicent reached within her skirts and pulled out the folded embroidery. Isabel spread it in her lap. She ran her fingers along the sides, where the thistleflowers, hawks, plums, and swords were arrayed in numbered sets. She stroked the heraldry arrayed against the king's arms.

'You say Pinchbeak has the book?'

'I handed it to Robert Dawson, his man. Pinchbeak wasn't there.'

The prioress put a slender finger to her lips. 'So we have this book of prophecies, one of them auguring the death of our king and pointing a finger at his uncle. We have the cloth, identifying the chief conspirator beyond doubt as Lancaster. And we have mere days until the feast of St Dunstan.'

'Yes, Reverend Mother.' Millicent watched the prioress's eyes, felt the shrewd calculations taking place behind them.

'I'm told you've been living up Cornhull.'

'Yes, Prioress.'