A Burnable Book (35 page)

The earl shifted on his feet. I held his eyes, watching as the weakness I had always sensed in this man crept slowly over his features. Finally he looked away, then down at the manuscript still in his hands, this book that had caused so much anguish, sought by half a kingdom and now seemingly worthless. The earl appeared to realize this as he gave a slight shrug and handed me the volume. I stuffed it in my bag.

“You have made a wise decision, your lordship.” I gave him a slight bow, allowing him to save face in case of any onlookers. “We shouldn’t need to speak of this again.”

He waved me off as he turned, calling angrily for his page and making for the main gates. The Earl of Oxford was still young, though his back was stooped as he walked away from me, his stride unconfident and self-conscious. This magnate would end the day a lesser man.

I was about to turn for the stable gate and home when I saw a movement to the earl’s right. From the far side of the grange Sir Stephen Weldon emerged and stood in front of Oxford with his hands upraised, blocking his way. The two of them exchanged words. They were too far away to make anything out, but it was clear the knight was speaking angrily, even defiantly, to his lord, whose slouch now indicated the extent of his humiliation before the king. Oxford raised his fingers to his face, pinched his nose, wagged a hand. Not dismissing Weldon, I thought; it looked rather like a gesture of acquiescence.

Weldon spun on his heel and strode off, heading for the postern door farther down the wall. The earl watched him for a moment, then turned slowly back. I did nothing to conceal myself as I came into his line of vision. He looked unfazed by the evidence of my eavesdropping, which Weldon had not observed. The earl gave me a long look, then tilted his head slightly in the direction of the postern before turning for the main gate.

Weldon had already disappeared through the low door onto New Rents, though the earl’s message seemed clear enough. It would be in my interest to follow him, Oxford was telling me, wherever it led. I stood there for a moment, exhausted, wanting nothing more than a drink and a rest. Then, with a growing unease, I turned for the postern and the streets of Southwark.

Chapter lii

New Rents, Southwark

A
n attack on the king?

In the midst of mass.

But who done the thing?

And where can we find him to give our thanks?

Or a “Better luck next time!”

Or a “Richard? Why not Lancaster?”

None of that talk, now. Enough treason in the bishop’s liberties to go around.

Who done it, then?

Fishmonger, what I heard.

No, a butcher.

Butcher?

Whole scare of them, led by that cutter Grimes.

Ah! No surprise there.

Millicent hardly noticed the postern opening to her left, rapt as she was by the news being shouted about at the gate. The man who stepped through noticed her not at all, and until he passed she gave him no more than a glance, assuming that anyone exiting Winchester Palace by that door would be a servant on an errand. As he walked past, Millicent saw his lower face, though his eyes were shadowed beneath a knight’s hood. A scar traced a crescent-shaped path from his lip to the turn of his chin. Millicent knew that scar.

It came to her, finally. A hooked scar, white against sun-darkened skin. The ward watch, Eleanor said, had identified him as “Sir Stephen”—and now she recalled his surname. He was Sir Stephen Weldon, a longtime member of Sir John Hawkwood’s company, and a knight of Oxford’s household. Sir Humphrey had pointed him out to her at a tournament, making an acerbic comment on the Italian style of his arms and raiment. “Rides like a Visconti,” he’d said with disdain. “Scarred like one, too.” Weldon was a badged man, sporting Oxford’s livery proudly around his collar and his own on the back of his surcoat. Quarterly or and gules, and there, in the first quarter, a mullet argent: the silver star of the Veres, plain as the moon.

Yet even as she watched his back recede down New Rents she heard another voice in her head.
It’s the crochet. His face.
Some of her sister’s last words, gasped from a bleeding mouth. Now she understood them. Sir Stephen Weldon, the man with the hook on his face.

The killer of Agnes.

Without thinking Millicent followed him down the alley beside the Overey churchyard and onto the crowded high street past the fishwives and the pillory. He jogged left on Pepper Alley, then into a narrower lane that led toward the mills on the river side of the palace wall. Millicent kept a safe distance, though never once did Weldon glance behind him.

As they neared the bankside she slowed her steps. Weldon’s route had traced a full circle. He was now climbing a short but rough stairway built into the near embankment. He disappeared over the top. She took the steps slowly, stretching to peer over the dyke and down to the river. Just as she reached the uppermost step, she caught a glimpse of him on the near side of the wharf, keying open a low door set into the embankment. With his foot the knight dragged a small stone to the opening, wedging the door open before disappearing within.

She descended the stair to the embankment and realized where he had gone: into the underpassage below the great chamber and almonry of Winchester Palace, where the bishop had his stores of drink delivered directly from the quay. From this cellar the palace’s river doors opened to the wharfage through a series of covered channels and ramps carved into the Thames bankside. Silently she pulled open the door, keeping the stone in place, and followed the knight into the dank passageway. She had been here before, though not since her childhood, when the palace environs had been a favorite destination for games of hide-and-tag with her many companions in the liberties. The cold river air felt distantly familiar, the splash of dripping water from the vaults summoning old memories as she walked away from the river and toward the palace undercroft. She heard voices.

“The garrison is encamped at Dartford, Sir Stephen, by the abbey mill, awaiting your orders.”

“There’s been a change in plans.”

“A change in plans?”

“The men will need to stay in place for now.”

“For how long?”

There was a pause. Millicent edged around one of the great buttresses ascending to the undercroft’s roof and beyond. She peered around and down a short stair into a wider chamber perhaps three feet below, awash in pale light from an opened trapdoor above. Weldon paced the chamber’s width, giving orders to a nuncius wearing the king’s colors.

“Next Friday is the feast of St. Augustine, no?” the knight finally said, turning away with a hand to his mouth.

“And the third Ember Day.”

“They’re to come up that day and camp at Mile End, on the green. Their orders will come Trinity morning, likely by Tierce. Then it’s up Aldgate Street as planned.”

“Anything else, Sir Stephen?”

“That’s it for now. Keep me posted.”

“Yes, Sir Stephen.”

The man ducked through a low doorway. Millicent watched as the knight took a few slow turns around the dank chamber, one hand on his scarred chin, the other cupping his elbow. She thought about what she had heard, putting it together with the prophecies and the failed attempt on the king’s life. It sounded as if Weldon had been planning to bring troops up from Dartford in the aftermath of the planned assassination. Who knew what else he had in store. She turned for the river door.

She slipped. She quickly recovered her footing, but not before a small fragment of stone, dislodged by her shoe, tumbled down the stairs. Weldon’s head spun round. Frozen in terror, Millicent hesitated long enough for him to meet her gaze. His eyes widened, then narrowed in recognition. She knew that cold stare.

Rose Alley. Weldon had been the leader of the riders, the man challenged by St. Cath at the porch of the Pricking Bishop. Looking for Millicent, and the book.

Millicent shot up the stairs. Through the door, over the dyke, down Pepper Alley. She looked back. Weldon was just making the turn.

She ducked between two tanners’ stalls on the upper end. Rows of stretched hides gave some cover. An open door, at the end of the second yard. She sprinted through it. A tavern. Low ceiling, small crowd around a far table, the air sour with ale. She stepped from bench to bench and knocked several down on her way out, slowing Weldon a fraction. He stumbled, cursed. She heard his boots on the tables. The street door was also open.

The bankside again. She hesitated. Right, to the high street and the bridge? Or left, and into the stews? She went left.

The right decision, she knew as she sprinted past the mills. On the wide high street the knight would have had the advantage of speed. Here, among the dense and disconnected clusters of shops, houses, tenements, shacks, barns, yards, and pens making up the bishop’s liberties, she had the advantage of memory.

For though the neighborhood had undergone many changes in the last ten years, it was all so familiar. Every corner, every turn, every gap between buildings came back to her. Narrow passageways appeared right where she expected to find them. Through the twists and turns of the liberties she ran, the very air before her seeming to shape itself into the form of a child leading her on. She was not alone.

The little girl ran wildly before her, golden hair in tangled streams. Dodging barrels, cornering barns, leaping ditches.
This way, Millie! Faster, Millie!
She never slowed as she led Millicent through the twisted byways of the stews.
I will catch you, Agnes, I will catch you!
The Southwark breeze chilled the tears on her face, as the unmapped warren of the liberties became an elaborate labyrinth through which only this little girl knew the way. Finally, nearing the mills again, the girl slowed. Turning back, her face shrouded in a blinding pool of light, she rose from the soil like a dove lifted by the wind.

With no breath left in her, Millicent squatted at the corner of a pighouse facing the eastern edge of the larger millpond, the phantasm still burning her eyes. She looked behind her. No Weldon.

Loud voices on Rose Alley, a woman’s angry shout. Millicent peered around the corner of the low structure. Weldon stood at the door of the Pricking Bishop, having it out with St. Cath. His head started to turn.

Millicent hurdled the fence. Squatting beside a great sow, clutching her dress tightly against the muck, she watched through the slats as Weldon looked down the narrow lane to the millpond. The deliberate sweep of his scarred chin, the jeweled scabbard at his side, the devilish gleam of his eyes: all these Millicent took in as she humbled herself with these Southwark pigs. The Overey bell rang None. The knight turned and struck St. Cath with the flat of his sword. She collapsed against the doorway. Weldon spun on his heel and entered the Pricking Bishop.

Millicent hesitated, every part of her wanting to spring out and flee across the bridge, leaving Weldon to do what he wished. She thought of her mother, this woman who had never given her more than a bed to swyve on for her own profit. And why should I give her anything more in return? Then she thought of Prioress Isabel, and how the holy woman would answer this question. Finally she thought of Agnes, her sister’s generous, selfless spirit, and it was then that she knew what must be done.

Millicent closed her eyes, said a prayer, and hopped back over the fence. With her fists clenched at her sides, she strode down Rose Alley, wondering how on earth she might save her mother’s life.

St. Cath still lay on the stone, though she looked to be breathing. Millicent edged through the door and stood still, listening. She moved toward the rear of the building and heard the knight’s heavy footsteps above, as he stomped around the upper floors, raising screams of terror from the maudlyns, a few indignant shouts from their unlucky jakes.

“Millicent.” She peered through the gloom. Bess Waller stood at the kitchen door, beckoning her forward. “In here, girl,” she whispered.

Millicent dashed forward and had almost reached the kitchen when she tripped on the corner of a pallet. With a crash she fell into a deal table against the wall, knocking a brass ewer onto the floor. The
clang
resounded throughout the Bishop. The sound of the knight’s boots above ceased, then began again with a renewed vigor as he crashed down the side stairs.

“Quickly,” said Bess Waller, pulling Millicent from the floor. In the kitchen the cellar door lay open to the stairs. It was all Millicent could do to stay on her feet as her mother pushed her toward the gaping hole in the floor. Once below she scurried down the steps. Her feet met the dirt floor. She looked back and caught a last glimpse of Bess Waller’s face as the door slammed shut above, sealing her in darkness.

Chapter liii

New Rents

W
eldon was gone by the time I exited the palace through the postern and reached the market. I stepped up on a half barrel and peered in both directions. Nothing. The knight had disappeared, absorbed into the thick crowd. A clutch of five street urchins were plucking at my hose, begging for coin. About to swat them away, I thought better of it and stepped off the half barrel, reached into my purse, and knelt down, a handful of pennies clutched in my palm.

“One for each of you.” Three boys and two girls, their faces grimed in that way only a young Southwark face can be grimed, though they all seemed eager to earn despite the squalor. “And another if you’ll find someone for me.”

“Who, sir?”

“Who?”

“Who?”

“Who’s it to find, good sir?”

“Man or woman,
I’ll
find them, that’s sure,” said the smallest of them, a girl of five or six.

“You know Sir Stephen Weldon?”

A few tentative nods, but the little girl shook her head truthfully.

“A knight with a curved scar, just here?” I traced it on her small chin.

“Hook on his face, bright as the moon!” crowed the little girl.

Nods all around. “We know him, sir!”

“Find him for me, then,” I said. “He left by the postern a little while ago. He can’t have got far. First one back gets two pence.”

They sprinted off, getting underfoot of the merchants, pushing around the corners, spreading like a dropped sack of grain. It wasn’t long before the first of them, the little girl, returned. Out of breath, she steadied herself on my leg, then looked up in triumph.

“Saw him, sir, saw him I did.”

I knelt in the dirt. “And where did you see him, my dear?”

“Past the millpond,” she said, “on that Rose Alley. Going into the Pricking Bishop for a swyve, looked like.”

After paying the girl off I headed west past the Overey churchyard and toward the stews. Skirting the millpond, I dodged a pighouse and entered Rose Alley. Few residents were about, all drawn to the palace, and no one looked my way as I walked beneath the low awnings and haphazard upper extensions lining the narrow lane. I was halfway up when I saw a figure leaning over a prostrate woman before the front door. Not Weldon, but a much younger man, slight, almost feminine. The old woman gave a gentle moan as he leaned her against the house’s outer wall. He stroked her hair, then turned for the door, which was unlatched and partially open. He turned, we locked eyes; then he disappeared into the Bishop. After peering up and down the lane I jogged to the house and followed him within.

E
dgar heard the shouts from the back of the house, which he approached through the same front room he’d crossed weeks ago, before taking the book. Reaching the kitchen door, he pressed his ear against the rough wood surface.

A man’s voice. “ . . . in the rancid stews of Southwark. Home of women and fish.”

Then Bess Waller: “Get you gone from here, sir, there’ll be no—”

“Where is she?” A few mumbles, then: “So she
is
here, you lying whore.”

“No—no, sire, she’s not, I’d swear it on—”

“On what?”

“On the blood of Mary, and the Maudlyn, and—”

“And your own?”

“Sire?”

“Or perhaps on the blood of your daughter. Not the one I’ve just chased through the stews, but the younger one. That pretty little thing over by Aldgate.”

Silence. Edgar closed his eyes, the sight of Agnes’s body coming back to him with a wave of sadness. Then a groan of metal, a clap of wood, a shout.

“Leave her be!” Millicent’s voice.

“Ah!” shouted the man. “So
that’s
where you were hiding your snooping slut.”

Edgar pictured the kitchen. Bess Waller must have hidden Millicent in the cellar—the same dark space in which Edgar had trapped the bawd while searching for the book.

“You’re the devil.” Millicent this time, her voice low with fury. Edgar braced himself against the door.

“Millicent, is it?” the man hissed. “Former consort of the great Sir Humphrey ap-Roger, Humphrey the fat, Humphrey the codger, hmm? Your blood, perhaps?”

“Not her blood, false knight.” Bess’s voice had steeled. “Not Millicent’s blood. I’ll not have her harmed. Though this is Southwark there be laws in the bishop’s liberties, and you’re bound by them well as I. You leave her be.”

Edgar heard the swipe of the knight’s sword. “I’ll leave neither of you be.” Another swipe, a splinter of glass.

“
No.
”

Edgar had heard enough. He looked about for a weapon of some kind. He pictured Weldon’s short sword drawn, the point at Millicent’s throat. His hand brushed a heavy candlestick. It would have to do. Calming himself with a deep breath, he grasped the latch.

A hand squeezed his arm. He turned in fright, ready to swing.
Gerald.
His brother had removed the dress and stood in his breeches, bare chested and thin, though butcher’s muscles were already outlined on his arms and torso. A knife was still at his belt.

“There another way in?” he asked. “Through the alley, p’raps?”

Edgar thought about it, recalling his search through the kitchen. “The walls be eight, nine feet deep on the wharf side. Door’s bolted.” There had been so much flooding on this side of the Bishop’s Wild that high berms had been built between the river and the lanes and alleys up from the shore, leaving the embankment vulnerable to severe erosion in the event of the river’s swelling. “There’s a high window in there, you can get to it from the back. But you’d have to climb—”

He was already gone. Edgar watched his back for a moment, then turned to the kitchen door and pushed it open.

T
he door swung wide. Millicent saw Edgar Rykener, in butcher’s raiment and brandishing a candlestick. At his entrance Weldon spun and swiped the blade in an arc close to Edgar’s face. With one step Edgar sprang toward Bess and Millicent. Now he stood with them, the candlestick held in front, the three of them huddled against the kitchen wall.

The high windows beneath the eaves, fully covered in parchment during the winter but now partially open to the air, let in enough light to catch the glint along the blade’s embossed fullers. The same shafts brought out the scar on Weldon’s chin, the jagged crescent Millicent couldn’t help comparing even in her fear to the hooks aligned above the hearth. She imagined being impaled on them, suspended before the knight’s seething eyes, hooked iron in her brains.

She glanced sidelong at the garden door.

“Don’t think of it,” said Weldon. “I’ll cut you before you reach the bolt.” He moved to the side. Pushed a table and a heavy cutting board against the door, blocking any hope of escape. He took a step toward them, waving his blade. Another step.

Millicent shrank back. Edgar raised the candlestick. He gave it a feeble swing. Weldon dodged it. With one slash Weldon sliced Edgar’s hand. He dropped the candlestick. Millicent picked it up, then swung it through the air as hard as she could. The knight dodged this blow, too, with a deft step to the side. He raised his blade and plunged it into Bess Waller’s chest.

Millicent screamed, then the inner door to the kitchen was filled with the faces of Bess’s girls, drawn by the commotion. The moment stretched, and Millicent would always remember the three things that followed it. The first was a tearing sound from above, as the rolled parchment fell away and a figure leapt from the upper window. He landed on the knight’s sword shoulder, disarming him with the force of the impact. The second was the rush of the maudlyns, five Southwark whores descending on the knight. The third was the aquamarine eyes of John Gower, the gentleman from St. Leonard’s. Now he was here, in her mother’s kitchen. His features were the last thing she saw as her vision darkened and Bess Waller died in her arms.

I
have witnessed many deaths. Hangings, quarterings, drownings, knifings on the Southwark streets. Once I watched at a tournament as a knight of the king’s chamber was decapitated by a lance, his blood arcing toward the stands, his head falling to the earth with a gruesome finality as hundreds of England’s highest of birth held their stomachs.

Yet nothing had quite prepared me for the grim work of these Southwark maudlyns as they swarmed toward Sir Stephen Weldon, covering him like a hill of ants meeting a honeyed bun. They gouged his eyes, bit his ears, pummeled his neck and his stomach. They stretched his arms and legs to their full length, tore off his clothing, and wrote their fury on his bare skin. They killed him with their fingers, their fists, their feet. They killed him with their teeth and their nails. The way his body was tossed among them they might have been a pack of dogs at a hart. I could almost feel sorry for Weldon, despite the private satisfaction I took in his death.

“Enough!” I shouted into the dim light. “Enough!”

The fury slowed. The young man who had leapt from the window crawled toward the far wall, moaning with the pain of a broken leg. He made it to the side of the slight man I had seen on Rose Alley. The two embraced. Beside them was Millicent Fonteyn, the laysister from Bromley, holding her mother’s outstretched body in her arms. The maudlyns circled their dead bawd, pawing at her bloody neck and chest. I stared at them, wondering at their peculiar courage.

A wheeze from the floor. I looked down with amazement at Weldon. Incredibly, the knight was alive, though clearly moments from his last breath. I knelt beside him, shielding his broken frame from view of the maudlyns, who were still crowded around their dead bawd.

He looked at me, blankly at first, then his sole remaining eye flashed recognition as the ragged edges of his lips lifted into a thin, cruel smile. “Hawks,” he croaked, his windpipe nearly crushed. “Hawks always strike twice, Gower.”

“What’s that you say?” I hissed, shaking him, wondering what secrets would die with this man, wishing I could buy them all. I slapped his face. “Who are the hawks, Weldon? When will they strike?”

“Always twice,” he said, then his eyes froze in death, the meaning of his final words lost in the slaked howling of the whores.