Authors: Bruce Holsinger
“I do.” The prioress’s eyes sparkled, and she allowed Millicent the slightest of smiles before returning her attention to the cloth. “The other must be similarly altered, though with different arms. Here, parti per fesse gule, and on the chief of the second there must be—ah, what is it?”
“A demi-lion, rampant of the field,” Millicent said, remembering the shield. A tournament two years before, she on Sir Humphrey’s arm in the stands, the Earl of Oxford mounted below.
“Exactly. Now.” Isabel clapped her hands three times, summoning the young nun from the other side of the door. “Bring us thread of silver, gold, azure—all of it. We haven’t a moment to spare.”
Soon Millicent found herself in her old place at Isabel’s feet, frame and needle in her hands. Following the prioress’s instructions, she pinned out a portion of the pattern within the frame: the demi-lion, a complex figure to execute, though Millicent felt confident she could complete it in good time, at least as well as the earlier embroideress had pointed in the arms of Gaunt. The pull of the needle, the occasional click of the thimble against the frame: though her fingers soon ached with the unfamiliar labor, it was a good ache.
“Reverend Mother?” she said at one point, tentatively.
“You may speak, Millicent.”
Her given name from the prioress’s lips: a balm over a forgotten wound. “How can we know this will work?”
Isabel gave her a bland stare. “There is a great conspiracy in the land to slay our king, my child. We can be sure of nothing. But we must do what we can to foil the plot. To bring this cloth before the king on St. Dunstan’s Day, and from a credible source, we must put it in the hands of someone in the inmost circles at court. Someone of unassailable standing.”
“Your relations?”
The prioress snorted. “The concubine of the king’s second substeward has stronger connections in the court than my relations these days. No, I have in mind one of our dear sisters. Just there.” She nodded toward the door. “Margaret is her name. She’s properly a nun of Barking, but we’ve taken her in for a few months given the unpleasantness between the king and his uncle. Abbess Matilde wants her to disappear for a while, at least until after the bishop’s round of visitations.” Barking, the much greater house several miles to the east, would often impose on St. Leonard’s for “gifts” of space and provision, taking undue advantage of Bromley’s diminished numbers and extra dormitory space.
The girl, no more than fourteen, stood out of earshot in the half-opened doorway, her head pointed demurely to the floor.
“I don’t understand, Reverend Mother,” said Millicent.
“Her mother has an intimate connection to John of Gaunt,” said Isabel.
Her mother. “The Infanta?” It was a guess. Millicent knew the young woman had looked familiar, though the face of Gaunt’s Castilian duchess didn’t seem a match.
The prioress glanced up. Blinked. “Hardly. She’s Margaret Swynford, daughter of the late Hugh Swynford. And her mother is Katherine, Lancaster’s whore.”
Church of St. Lawrence Jewry
E
dgar Rykener joined the small knot of beggars gathered at the foot of the St. Lawrence steps. Some gave him unfriendly glances, taking him for an interloper who would diminish their proper share of charity. He ignored them; the wait wouldn’t be long. Master Strode was to appear at the first stroke of the Sext bells, he’d been assured at the Guildhall. The common serjeant likes to take a walk around the ward, one of his clerks had said, before returning for his midday meal with the mayor.
The St. Lawrence bell struck, Mary Magdalene soon followed, then Bassishaw, the three parishes competing for the proper ringing of the hour. Still no Strode. Edgar thought nothing of the delay at first, yet as the minutes wore on his concern mounted, until finally he pushed himself off the wall and stepped up onto the porch.
The interior was nearly silent, a heavy wheeze the only discernible sound. It came from one of the side chapels, a half-lit space with shuttered windows and several rows of old seats wedged askew against the walls. Ralph Strode sat on one of them, a silent mound of concern. Even in the dim light Edgar could see his face was ashen. His wide chin sat propped on his knuckles, robed elbows on his knees. The man could have been one of the painted statues, but for the whistley breaths from his guts.
“Master Strode,” said Edgar, his voice a small thunderclap.
Strode’s opening eyes caught the glare of the lone candle on the chapel altar. No other movement. Finally he half-turned, his brow bent in a distant frown. A slow nod. “Edgar, is it?”
“Yes, Master Strode.”
“Came about your brother a few weeks back.” He seemed mildly pleased that he had remembered.
“Yes, sir. James—Master Tewburn was a great help.”
“Tewburn.” Strode shook his head. “Senseless. A senseless loss of a good young man.”
“Yes, Master Strode. I’m sorry he had to go and die, sir.”
Strode’s gaze found him in the gloom. “You heard, then?”
Edgar nodded, casting about for what to say.
“For my life I can’t figure out what is happening in London,” he said. “Factions moving in stealth through the streets, with their feints and counter-feints. Young men being plucked off the lanes, tossed off the bridge, throats slit in churchyards, dragged from their homes and thrown in nameless pits, all for baseless suspicions from above. London is being torn apart at the seams, and despite my office I am feeling powerless to stop it.”
Edgar took a deep breath, then said, “It was I found his body.”
His eyes widened. “Tewburn’s?”
“Aye, sir.”
“It was you who alerted the constables, then?”
“Not—no, sir.” Strode was staring at him. “I found him the day before the coroner’s men took him from St. Pancras.”
He sat forward. “Yet you let his body lie there for another day?”
“We had us a time, you see, to meet in the churchyard, and—”
“Tewburn was at St. Pancras to meet
you
?” Strode clapped his knees, fixing him with the fiercest stare. “Whatever for?”
“Master Tewburn said he’d have some news for me about getting Gerald a wardship in London. Said he’d tell me that night when we met. But the justices over there, in the manors—”
“Guildable Manor.”
“Master Tewburn says they were giving him all kinds of grief just to find out how to transfer Gerald’s wardship from Grimes’s shop. And Gerald says the butchers are stirring up bigger trouble in Southwark. Got a priest riling them up, with Grimes taking the part of Wat Tyler, and the other butchers—”
“
The butchers.
My God.” It was as if the common serjeant had been struck with a seizure of the heart. The large man came to his feet with a surprising agility. He turned to the side, and with his body facing the chapel altar whispered a portion of verse.
“By bank of a bishop shall butchers abide,
To nest, by God’s name, with knives in hand,
Then springen in service at spiritus sung.”
Edgar gasped. The last time he’d heard these lines they’d come from the mouth of Millicent Fonteyn, who’d read them from the very book Agnes took from the doomed girl in the Moorfields. Now here was Ralph Strode, common serjeant of London, speaking the same verse.
He had to press him. Strode was staring off toward the upper nave, a haunted slackness to his face. “That verse, sir. You think it’s Grimes and his men set to kill King Richard?”
He barked a laugh. “It’s not what
we
think that matters. It’s what others can be
made
to think. The perfection of art is to conceal art, so Quintilian tells us.”
“Sir?”
“We have two sets of butchers before our eyes.” He stooped, hands on his broad thighs. “Butchers in this prophetic verse, and the butchers of Southwark—and one dead clerk. I am not a believer in coincidence, Edgar, not by a far sight. You say you talked with Tewburn about your brother, yes?”
“A few times, sir, he was very helpful, always—”
“Wait.” Strode grasped Edgar’s shoulders, his eyes wide. “What did you say?”
“That Master Tewburn was ever so helpf—”
“Before that. About the snatch of verse I recited.”
“Oh . . . yes. If you thought Grimes and his men were to be the butchers to kill the king.”
Strode’s stare was deep and cruel, as if a hand were reaching out from his eyes, down into Edgar’s bowels. “And how did you know?”
“Sir?”
Strode’s grip tightened on his shoulders. “How could you possibly have known those three lines referred to the slaying of King Richard?”
His jaw loosened. “Well, I—I suppose with the bishop, and the knives, and all that, it just seemed—”
“Don’t lie to me, boy.” Strode shook him. “You’ve heard someone else speak those lines, haven’t you?”
“Please, Mast—”
“What do you know about these prophecies, about the book?”
His hands squeezed harder. Edgar flinched with the pain. Could he trust him, after all, this great man of London, so many spheres above his own?
Edgar left nothing out. The Moorfields, the murder, Millicent, the man with the hooked scar on Gropecunt Lane, the death of Agnes. He even told him about the couplings with Tewburn, and his life of swerving—all of it. Strode breathed deeply when he was done, his lips sucking and blowing the stale air of St. Lawrence. The common serjeant’s face was calm now, his eyes agleam with a certainty Edgar wished he could share.
“Will the king die, Master Strode?” he asked, and looked into that confident gaze.
“It’s not the king we need to worry about,” said Strode. “No, Edgar—or is it Eleanor?”
He shrugged. “As you wish, sir.”
A smile, tentative but serene, played on Ralph Strode’s generous lips. “No, Eleanor, I’m afraid we have a smaller life to save.”
San Donato a Torre, near Florence
J
acopo da Pietrasanta stood at the door, clutching the letter. Scarlett watched with some amusement as Hawkwood’s chancellor worked up the nerve to speak. “Sire,” he finally said.
“What is it?” said Hawkwood, focused on the game.
“An urgent message, Ser Giovanni. From your brother-in-law.”
“Lodo?”
“Carlo, sire,” said Pietrasanta.
Hawkwood took Scarlett’s four. “Read it.”
Scarlett looked at his lord. With the coming departure for England Hawkwood had grown increasingly impatient with his Italian functionaries, even Pietrasanta, and it was all he could do at times to control his sharpness when addressing them.
The chancellor cleared his throat. “ ‘
We send this to inform you that in Milan the hateful count Giangaleazzo Visconti has unrightfully seized our beloved and magnificent lord Bernabò Visconti, as well as our beloved brother Lodovico. We are holding here at the fortress in Crema, and we have the castle at Porta Romana under our protection
.
We urge you to gather your garrisons and march to our comfort and defense in Milan. You will be amply rewarded for your effort. The time has come, Giovanni Acuto, to prove your mettle.
’ ”
Hawkwood made him read it again, and when he had finished his lips curled up into a sneer. “He’s taunting me, the hammy little shit.”
Pietrasanta flinched at the epithet. Scarlett knew what the man was thinking. The Visconti are the most powerful and ruthless clan in Italy, more than a match for this northern roughneck. Who is he to hurl such insults at
la famiglia lombarda principali
? “How would you like to respond, Ser Giovanni?”
Hawkwood shrugged. “We’re in no position to respond, Jacopo.”
“Ser Giovanni?”
“I am in Florence. Our brigades are massed in Bologna. Bologna still owes us, what, twenty thousand, thirty? What does Carlo expect, that I’ll pull up stakes and hoof it up to Milan at his bidding? It could take weeks, months, even, to prepare for such a relief effort.”
“What should we tell Ser Carlo in the meantime, Ser Giovanni?” Pietrasanta was working hard to keep his voice measured, Scarlett could tell.
“Write nothing for now.”
“Ser—” Pietrasanta began.
“There is no hurry, Jacopo.” Hawkwood turned on his chancellor, his eyes grown cold. “This is a family squabble, nothing more. We’ll bide our time.”
There was a heavy pause as Pietrasanta absorbed the
condottiero
’s decision. Hawkwood’s chancellor had no idea what his master was planning, nor the bearing of these plans on his own future. Within a few weeks the dirty wars of the Visconti would be only a memory to the man they had both served for so many years. And Pietrasanta would be out of a job.
“Very well, sire.” Pietrasanta turned to exit, pushing past a young man entering from behind him. Desilio’s boy, sent up from the
villetta
.
“What is it?” Scarlett asked him.
“Master Desilio requests your presences, good sirs,” said the breathless youth.
“Oh?” Hawkwood’s eyebrows arched up, and he turned to Scarlett with an intrigued grin. They walked together to one of the
villette,
the small cottages in a line down the hill from the main house. The grapevines reached from the path up the sweeping rise to the south, and the late afternoon had settled into a mellow glow. My last season in Italy, Scarlett thought, whispering a quiet prayer.
In the
villetta
they found Desilio wedged among several piles of books on a trestle table, which was covered with scribbled papers arrayed in an unpatterned mess around the quire. The scholar’s eyes gleamed with excitement as he stood, though he maintained a respectful silence until Hawkwood asked him to speak.
“I have broken the first cipher, Ser Giovanni, and will soon break the second.”
“Is that so?” said Hawkwood, his gaze shifting between Desilio and the table. “Sit, please, and explain what you’ve found.”
Desilio took his chair, Scarlett and Hawkwood each to one side.
“The key was the first cipher. Without it everything else in the quire means nothing. It took a bit of thought and effort, but I was able to decipher these first pages without difficulty once I realized what was before me.”
Scarlett peered over his shoulder. “And what is it?”
Desilio waited a moment, letting the curiosity build. “Sardinian,” he finally whispered.
“
Sardinian?
”
“Yes. Nothing complicated or encoded, just Sardinian. He used it as the first of his ciphers.”
“So you read the language yourself, Maestro Desilio?” Hawkwood asked.
“Hardly,” the logician scoffed. “I asked around among your men, and one of them knew another who was from that island. I read him the first few sentences, as well as I was able—”
“You
what
?” Hawkwood exploded, his hand poised to strike.
Scarlett put a hand on his arm. Desilio was wagging his beard. “Nothing to worry about, I assure you, Ser Giovanni. The ciphers mean nothing in isolation. The man had no idea why I was even pulling him in here.”
Scarlett felt Hawkwood relax, and took it upon himself to move the conversation along, reaching over Desilio’s shoulder to turn the page. “What about here, and here?” He pointed to the script on the facing folio. The alphabet was Roman, the hand legible, but the words themselves were clearly nonsense, full of letters bunched seemingly at random, and what looked like extra vowels and consonants, such as an
X
within a circle.
“It’s an extraordinary thing,” Desilio said, a touch of pride in his voice as he looked up at us. “He was inventing a
lingua ignota
, as I’ve heard such things called.”
“A new language,” Hawkwood murmured.
“It’s rudimentary, of course, without declined nouns or conjugated verbs, and the tenses are rather primitive. But a few hundred words is all one needs to put together fairly sophisticated messages.”
“But how would the recipient know the meaning?”
Desilio smiled. “A glossary, owned by both parties, translating each word back into Italian. Or any other language. The only way to decipher the code without such a glossary would be through an analysis of letters and their frequency, but for that to work you’d have to have a much larger sample of the language than the mere four pages here.”
“So then,” Scarlett said, confused, “how were you able to decipher the unknown language?”
Desilio rubbed his palms. “It all begins with the Sardinian, the simplest of the ciphers. It’s merely another language, and anyone who knows it can crack the code, which I’ve now done with the help of your man. And as I’ve discovered in the process, the Sardinian is in effect the glossary to the
lingua ignota
. The Sardinian, that is, provides the key to the next cipher.”
“Explain yourself,” said Hawkwood.
“Certainly, Ser Giovanni. Look here, at the beginning of the first column. It reads, ‘Word seventy-nine is
míntza
’—and
míntza
is Sardinian for ‘spring.’ The next sentence reads, ‘The twelfth word is
bidduri
’—Sardinian for ‘hemlock.’ Once I had all of this translated I was stymied. The seventy-ninth word of what? What twelfth word is he talking about? Then I realized what your cryptographer was doing here. What he’s telling us is that word seventy-nine of the secret language—
the next cipher in the quire
—is ‘spring.’ And word twelve is ‘hemlock.’ And so on and so forth. And now, by translating the
lingua ignota
as the key, I believe I am opening the lock to the
next
code, which follows in the quire. The Sardinian unlocks the secret language. The secret language unlocks the numbers. Do you see?”
Hawkwood nodded, all admiration. “Indeed I do, Master Desilio. You are Theseus in a labyrinth of sorts, with each cipher a length of rope guiding you to the next corner, and the next solution.”
“A perceptive analogy, Ser Giovanni. I should have the solution to the subsequent code worked out as soon as I have transcribed and recombined the
lingua ignota
.”
“And what is this next cipher?” Scarlett asked him.
Desilio turned back to the manuscript, showing the next three pages, filled with scribbled numbers stacked in equations and scattered along lines, shapes, and angles. Once again they meant nothing to Scarlett.
“The next one is numerical, drawing on the mathematics of Master Gersonides,” said Desilio. “A Jew, and an astronomer of moderate renown. I believe your cryptographer was constructing a cipher based on some of Gersonides’s more arcane calculations. Extraction of square roots, binomial coefficients, that sort of thing.”
Hawkwood laughed lightly, slapped him on the back. “Ah yes. Binomial coefficients. I eat them with my rabbit.”
“It sounds more complicated than it is,” Desilio said modestly. “This mathematics is several generations old, nothing I cannot untangle. A few more days, Ser Giovanni, and I should be ready to tackle the final cipher.”
“And this final cipher? Do you have an inkling as to its solution?”
“Not yet, sire, though I am confident I’ll get there.” He thumbed through the booklet’s last few pages and set his finger in the middle of one of them. “Your cryptographer organized the last cipher around four discrete images, arranged in different combinations across these pages. Here is what looks like a falcon, perhaps. This one is clearly a sword, the next a flower—a spindly one, like a thistle. And here we have a grape, if I’m not mistaken.”
“A plum,” said Hawkwood, his voice suddenly taut. “It’s a plum.”
“And the bird is a hawk,” said Scarlett, seeing it at the same instant. Hawks, thistleflowers, plums, and swords. The four suits of Hawkwood’s cards, written in neat rows and columns across the last four pages of the quire in small groups of two—each group, Scarlett suspected, a letter or a word. The phrases came back to him, like pinpricks along his arms.
At Prince of Plums shall prelate oppose . . . By Half-ten of Hawks might shender be shown . . .
He should have seen it during his own scrutiny of the manuscript, yet these symbols had blended in with all the other mysterious writing in the quire, and he hadn’t taken the time to examine them in their own right before extracting Desilio from the
studium
. How differently all this might have turned out, Scarlett would think later, if he had.
Hawkwood, who always carried a deck of cards slung in a purse, removed them and spread the painted ovals out on the table as they explained to the scholar what the two of them had noticed. Desilio nodded eagerly, getting it right away, and promising to let them know as soon as he had untangled the mathematical cipher and turned to the cards.
“I am entrusting you with my favorite deck, Maestro Desilio,” Hawkwood said as they prepared to leave him there. “Treat it well.”
“I shall, Ser Giovanni.”
As they turned into the lower gardens Scarlett repressed a shiver. Hawkwood knew him too well to let it pass.
“What is it, Adam?”
“Think about it, John,” he began. “A book that just happens to survive a deliberate burning in the
villetta,
yet with enough of its pages intact to allow the ciphers to be broken. The first cipher is simply a translation into Sardinian—a tongue Il Critto could have heard spoken in the streets of Florence more than once. It would have been a simple matter to hire a Sardinian man and have him translate the words he needed. The next cipher, Desilio tells us, relies on mathematics that’s years, maybe decades old, presumably solvable by anyone with university training. And the final cipher? The only way to break the encryption is with your own cards, John. Doesn’t all of this feel too convenient somehow—too easy?”
“Well, I suppose one could—”
“It almost seems as if . . .” Scarlett paused on the garden path, a hand to his mouth.
“Say it, Adam.”
“As if he
wanted
us to find the damned book. Find his book, and break his ciphers.”
“To what purpose?” said Hawkwood, intrigued, though not as troubled as Scarlett wanted him to be.
“Betrayal?” The first word that came to him.
“Or information,” Hawkwood rejoined, his gaze on a distant hill. “Something he wanted to tell us before he left, and this was his only way.”
“If that’s the case, why not simply speak to us in person?” Scarlett said. “He had an audience in the hall the day before his departure. Why the need for secrecy, when he could have spoken privately while seeking your permission for his trip?”
“Well,” said Hawkwood, taking Scarlett’s arm and moving on toward the main house, “if Il Critto wanted us to break his ciphers, he wanted it for a reason. And I, for one, am determined to nose it out, wherever it takes us.” The
condottiero
gave Scarlett’s arm a squeeze. “Let Desilio continue his work, Adam. All we are after is the truth.”
The truth.
Scarlett pondered this weak notion as he resumed his day’s tasks. England seemed as far away as ever, and the more he thought over the content of the half-scorched quire, the more he convinced himself that the breaking of the final code would be the last thing in Sir John Hawkwood’s interests, or his own. The truth, he sensed with a warming fear, would prove a devastating lie.