A Burnable Book (37 page)

“Seguina d’Orange,” I said at last, as the chill of certainty swept my limbs. “She was the girl murdered on the Moorfields.”

“She has to be one of the most resourceful women who has ever lived,” he said, his eyes flashing with admiration. “When I learned she had left Florence I discovered that she used my contacts from the wool trade to arrange passage on a ship from Pisa, with a company of Genoese bankers bound for England. When she came to London, her aim was to find the book and the cloth. She had met Weldon in Florence and knew he was the go-between to Oxford. Once in London she must have followed him, learned the location of the book, recovered it, and fled with it through the city—”

“Pursued by Weldon—”

“Who caught her in the Moorfields—”

“After she handed the book to a maudlyn,” I said, filling in what he didn’t know. I told him the rest: about Millicent Fonteyn, the murder of Bess Waller, the death of Sir Stephen Weldon. It was the knight’s violent death that brought us back to Seguina’s.

“But why?” I said. “What motivated her to make such an impossible journey to England? Was it—was it merely love, a desire to protect Geoffrey Chaucer, her adulterous suitor, from bodily harm?”

“I think not,” Chaucer said wryly. “That sort of sacrifice would have been predictable. Seguina was too great a woman for such a thing. Love was part of her motivation, I suppose. But remember, her life and her mother’s had been saved by Lancaster—and it was Lancaster whose life she came here to save. I was incidental in the end. She wrote me a long letter explaining it all, then ordered a servant to deliver it to me upon my return from Rome.” He absently patted his breast. “A story, really, and one for the ages.”

I looked at him, then guessed. “You never found it.”

“Her servant would have been terrified of being found out by one of Hawkwood’s men. I went to visit Seguina when I returned, only to learn she had left Florence a week before, ostensibly to visit a cousin of her mother’s. I distinctly recall the servant meeting me at the door, taking my bag while I waited for an audience with Seguina’s father. The servant hid the letter in my bag, assuming I would find it in the folds of my little book. This one, in fact, which I had commissioned from a leatherworker in Rome.”

He tossed it to me, and I examined the construction. Aside from the color and feel of the leather, it was an identical bifold to his old one, with matching vertical pockets on each inner cover, allowing the first and last folios of each new quire to be tucked inside. “I found her letter two days ago. The morning after you confronted me at my Aldgate house, in fact. I was switching out quires, and there it was. The letter confirmed everything I had suspected but never knew—including Simon’s authorship of the thirteenth prophecy.”

I thought for a moment. “So you had Seguina’s letter with you that day at Monksblood’s?”

“But without knowing it.”

“Extraordinary.” I handed back his book, moved and shaken by the knowledge that Chaucer had just shared. The entire story of the last several months, carried on my old friend’s person the entire time.

“When did Simon tell you of his involvement?” I asked him.

“At the St. George’s morrow feast at Windsor. That was the first time I had seen him since Florence, and he both admitted to stealing the book and confirmed Seguina’s presence in England, though he swore he knew nothing about the last prophecy. Seguina had been dead for weeks by that point, and I was furious at him for all he had done—but also terrified of the implications. I thought he might well have killed her himself.”

“Was that you at the river inn that night, after the Garter feast?” A dog’s bark, and Simon pissing from the landing, lying about his trip to the privy after that whispered encounter in the courtyard.

He looked confused.

“Simon told me he and Seguina were betrothed, you know,” I said quickly.

A bitter laugh. “Another lie. A way of finding out if you knew anything about her.”

“Which I did not.” I recalled the look on Philippa Chaucer’s face, the flash in Katherine Swynford’s eyes at the mention of Seguina d’Orange. “But Philippa did.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “I wrote a ballade on her name, before I knew she had died. ‘To Seguina, My Orange, Wherever She May Dwell.’ Scribbled it on a scrap of banker’s paper in our household account book. Philippa saw it when she was at our Aldgate house, and knew I had taken a lover in Italy.” He shook his head. “Stupid, I know, to leave something like that lying around. But there it is.”

I smiled at him. “You’re remarkably careless with your poetry, Chaucer. And always have been.”

He spread his hands, then leaned forward and placed his hands on my knees. “You know, John, despite everything, Simon could have betrayed me so easily once he was back in England with my first little book. Why, he could have taken it to Robert de Vere and proved that I wrote the prophecies even while trading on everything else he knew. No one would have noticed that the last prophecy wasn’t there. My draft was just a draft, after all, scratched in my hand. For all anyone else knew I was in league with Lancaster against the king.”

It was a good point, though I still had many doubts. I found myself sifting every word and gesture, going back over every hurried meal and whisper of cloth, looking for the missed seed of Simon’s mendacity.

Chaucer read my thoughts. “Simon is confused, John. Brilliant and confused. He has been for years, despite that cock’s face he wears. But confusion isn’t a sin. What matters most is love. And Simon, for all his faults, loves you deeply.”

I let Chaucer’s unmerited confidence hang in the priory air.

“There’s one part I still don’t understand,” he said. I tensed. “At the end of her account Seguina left me an enigma, a puzzle of the sort we often invented for one another.” He pulled the letter out of his breast pocket and read it aloud.

“Though faun escape the falcon’s claws

    
and crochet cut its snare,

When father, son, and ghost we sing,

    
of city’s blade beware.”

He looked at me as he put the letter away. “Have you heard this riddle, John, or read it yourself?”

“No,” I lied, recalling where I had seen those very words.

“A crochet, a city’s blade. A bit threatening, wouldn’t you say? Do you know what it means?”

“No,” I said, this time speaking the truth.
Hawks always strike twice.
Weldon’s final words sounded again in my mind, the latest inkling of something missed. I said nothing to Chaucer. He had done enough, and I had no further patience for his manipulations. I felt almost gratified by his ignorance. For there had been something weak about his whole story, a subtle sense that his account was incomplete. That it failed to comprehend the full complexity of the aims motivating those he thought he knew best: Hawkwood and Weldon, Seguina and Simon. Especially Simon.

He was looking at me, waiting for some wisdom. I shrugged, covering my agitation. “Likely just a lover’s riddle. The butcher’s blades did no harm, after all, and the king is alive. That’s the important thing, I should think.”

There seemed nothing more to say. By the time Chaucer stretched and yawned I felt utterly drained, despite my inner turmoil at hearing Seguina’s riddle. There was a twinge in my back. “We are becoming old men, Geoff.”

He barked a laugh over the orchard as we rose. “Old age is relative, John. It’s writing that keeps us young. Or so I hope this summer will prove.”

Not for the first time I found myself wishing I saw my making as Chaucer experienced his. The man aged backwards, it seemed, accumulating youth with each fresh scratch of ink. For me every line of poetry is another grey hair, a defeat as much as a victory.

“So what will you write?” I said to his back, willing him to leave. I had a suspicion to confirm. He preceded me through the kitchen, the darkened lower gallery, the hall. We lingered outside my door, soft moonlight playing on the priory lane. “This pilgrimage conceit, the miller and prioress and so on?”

His hand went to his chest again, and there was a whisper of parchment on his thumb. “That comes later, after more thought. For now I have in mind the story of Cressida, told in that book of Boccaccio I gave to you. An old tragedy of war and impossible love.” His dark eyes caught the flicker of the lanterns up by the gate. “And a remarkable woman who learns to survive in the cruelest of worlds.” With that we parted, and Chaucer moved through the Southwark darkness, his lover’s story still pressed to his heart.

Chapter lv

St. Mary Overey

E
mber Days. Penance and prayer, self-denial in all things, the mind focused on our faults and our tenuous hopes of salvation, so the priests instruct us. Chaucer swears that fasting clears the head like nothing else. Perfect for poets, he says, though his own abstinence is notoriously light. While Sarah was a pious observer of this Embers ritual, I tend to ignore it, as I do so many of the church’s more ascetic dogmas. I felt that week that I would have starved myself for a glimmer of discernment.

Over seven days had passed since Dunstan’s Day. The maudlyns had snuck the corpse out of the Pricking Bishop that same night and abandoned it to the animals of Winchester’s Wild. The king, the duke, and the earl had reached a tentative reconciliation, and in the aftermath of the palace affair it seemed that things had moved on. The king was resolved on a military expedition to the Scottish border, Gaunt was rumored to be plotting his return to Castile with the help of Lisbon, and the Earl of Oxford had left London for Hall Place, the de Vere family manor at Earls Colne. A papal delegation from Rome was to arrive before Trinity Sunday, and the court had bigger things to think about than an expired prophecy.

The Friday after Pentecost found me in my study, wondering once more what I had missed. Weldon’s dying words—
Hawks always strike twice
—carried a threat that would not leave my thoughts.

On the desk were the two copies of
De Mortibus Regum Anglorum
now in my possession. I knew every folio of Sir John Clanvowe’s manuscript, written out in his neat, restrained hand, as I had studied it with great care in those weeks leading up to St. Dunstan’s Day. The copy in Simon’s hand, the manuscript that had traveled from Italy and that I had taken from Robert de Vere, was different. The texts themselves were nearly identical, a few scribal errors here and there all that distinguished Clanvowe’s text from the version he had copied from the more ornate manuscript. While Clanvowe’s book was plain and undecorated, the margins of the Italian copy were decorated with the same four emblems found on Swynford’s cards. Thistleflowers, hawks, swords, and plums, arrayed in an ascending pattern: one of each embellishing the first prophecy, two of each the second, and so on.

Yet there was something more. Seguina’s couplet, composed in the common meter of the lays of Robin Hood or Sir Thopas, and scrawled beneath the last line of the final prophecy. I had dismissed the enigma’s importance when Chaucer read it to me from her letter, had even lied to him about seeing it previously. Though I had read those scribbled lines after taking the manuscript from Oxford at Winchester Palace, once the dreadful events of St. Dunstan’s Day were past I had given them little thought. Yet to learn that the enigma had emerged from the mind of the woman at the middle of all this changed everything. That very night I had rushed inside after Chaucer’s departure, opened the manuscript, and puzzled over the riddle’s meaning, as I had done every day since. The lines were written not in Simon’s neat hand, but in a thin and spidery script, scratched on the parchment with a charcoal nub and already fading.

Though faun escape the falcon’s claws and crochet cut its snare,

When father, son, and ghost we sing, of city’s blade beware.

The lines seemed meant to recast the imagery from the thirteenth prophecy while adding something darker to the mix. The “faun,” of course, was King Richard, and the “crochet” had to be Sir Stephen Weldon, whose scar resembled nothing so much as a fishing hook. The falcon was surely Sir John Hawkwood, and the meaning of “father, son, and ghost” seemed clear enough: the Holy Trinity. What continued to defeat me in this extra fragment of verse was the ominous evocation of the “city’s blade,” which could refer to practically anyone in a city as large as London.

And who had written Seguina’s peculiar couplet in the book? Perhaps Seguina herself, as she fled with the book from La Neyte, though it was hard to imagine her pausing to scribble a riddle in a manuscript while being pursued from Westminster and into the Moorfields. The lines did not appear in Clanvowe’s copy, yet they carried a threat all the more ominous for their very uniqueness. Making a decision, I packed the two volumes in my bag and left the house.

W
estminster. In the great hall Sir Michael de la Pole was holding forth inside the priest’s porch. When he saw me he gave a subtle nod, finished his business, then ushered me into his chambers. I spoke with the lord chancellor for over an hour, revealing nearly all I knew, even Simon’s authorship of the thirteenth prophecy, though somehow he had already been made aware of that unpleasant fact. I showed him both books as well, making sure he understood the full implications of what I was telling him.

“You’re saying there is to be a second attack on the king, then,” said the chancellor, sounding skeptical.

“Yes, my lord.” I repeated Sir Stephen Weldon’s final words at the Pricking Bishop. “ ‘Hawks always strike twice,’ he said. ‘Always twice.’ We all saw the first attack at Winchester’s palace, how that turned out. And now the king’s guard is down. I believe Seguina’s lines are telling us the second attack is to come on Trinity Sunday.” I paused. “Tomorrow, my lord.”

The chancellor still looked unconvinced. “How can we know for certain that—”

“The thirteenth prophecy, the butchers, all of that—it was smoke,” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth. “Hawkwood’s ruse, meant to turn suspicion on Lancaster, have him eliminated. And it nearly worked. But Lancaster was just the glaze on the bun. The real target is the king.”

“And you’re basing all of this on this girl’s two lines of doggerel? This chicken-scratch in your manuscript?”

“Not
my
manuscript, Lord Chancellor. This is the book from which Lord Oxford himself read on Dunstan’s Day. The book we have all been tracking down for months.”

He gave me a strange look. “Are you quite sure, Gower?”

“My lord?”

“You’re quite sure this is the book we’ve all been looking for?”

He could see the confusion on my face. With a studied calm, the baron stood, walked to a book chest against the wall of his chamber, and fussed with the lock. He removed a small volume, no thicker than a short quire and covered in a skin of plain and weathered black. It looked familiar.

Back at his desk he opened it and spun it around. I recognized the hand immediately as Chaucer’s. The quire was a messy jumble, the margins covered in notes and drawings: tables, columns of figures, sketches, maps. I had struggled with Chaucer’s shorthand before, and though I could make out little of it, I saw immediately that half of the quire was taken up with the
De Mortibus
. There was only one difference between this copy and the two on the chancellor’s desk, I saw as I paged through to the end—a rather major difference.

The thirteenth prophecy was missing. Chaucer, then, had told me the truth. He had not written the prophecy of Richard’s death.

“Three books,” I said, looking up.

“The one in your hands now is the original,” he said. “Chaucer’s draft, written in Florence, and covered with his notes and observations. Then came this one.” He tapped Oxford’s copy, the book in my son’s hand. “Simon, when he wrote it, added the thirteenth prophecy.”

“Which Sir John copied along with the rest,” I said, indicating Clanvowe’s manuscript.

“Though
before
your mysterious couplet was added. Otherwise Clanvowe would surely have copied that as well.”

I nodded absently. “But how did you get Chaucer’s original, my lord? Who gave it to you?”

A long pause. “Your son.”

Of course.
I thought of Simon waking me that night at Overey, the hole in my house’s wall. It made a strange kind of sense, though the chancellor’s subsequent account would leave me cold.

“As you know, Gower, King Richard made Sir John Hawkwood his ambassador to Rome just after the Rising,” he began. “Not the most courtly envoy in the world, but Italy is a privy. We needed a strong presence there, a man flexible in his alliances. Hawkwood fit the bill like no one else. And he’s one of us. An Englishman, yet with no ambition in his homeland.”

He settled his hands on his stomach. “Or so we thought. As we discovered about three years ago, Hawkwood has been buying up land and properties near his family seat. Nothing too substantial. Perhaps his wife was pregnant, and he was thinking about his legacy, was our thought. It happens. But then he started purchasing properties in other places. London, for one—a house here, a block of tenements there—as well as Essex. Gosfield, Sible Hedingham. It became clear that Hawkwood didn’t want to simply retire. He wanted to come back here as a powerful man. Not just titled but garrisoned, it seemed. We tried to keep an eye on him from afar, but he was growing increasingly erratic. Envoys and letters were not enough.”

“You needed a spy,” I said.

“We wanted a man in Hawkwood’s chancery, someone gifted with ciphers and scripts, who could tell us from abroad what he was up to, and get us the information we needed in a form we could trust. A forger, a cryptographer, a natural spy. We chose Simon.”

I frowned. “You
chose
him? And how soon after his arrival in Florence was this?”

The baron looked chagrined. “You don’t understand, Gower. We sent him to Florence.”

“You
sent
him?” It hit me. “What about the counterfeiting, the death of that man on the wharfage? Simon killed him. Chaucer cleaned it all up. That’s why Simon went into Hawkwood’s service in the first place.”

He gave a modest shrug. “A charade, every bit of it. My man More set it up. The ward constable who was killed—and not by Simon, if that’s any comfort—was an informant working for the French, lured to the wool wharf with the promise of an exchange. The watchmen were ours, paid from the royal treasury. It was a simple matter to get them swearing up and down they had watched a struggle and an accidental death at Simon’s hands.”

“But Chaucer—”

“Chaucer had to be convinced it was all legitimate. That Simon had to leave London, and quickly, with the taint of scandal following him.”

I gaped at him.

“You have to see it our way,” he said, leaning forward. “Chaucer and Hawkwood go back twenty, twenty-five years, since before Geoffrey was taken prisoner at Retters. It was Hawkwood who negotiated Chaucer’s release on behalf of King Edward, you know, along with the others. After that they were together in Spain, France, Italy—getting up to God knows what. You’ve heard the stories.”

I admitted I had. Most of them I didn’t believe, though the few that seemed credible could curdle milk. “So you exploited Chaucer’s long friendship with the man to get Simon placed down there,” I said. “Then why did you send Chaucer back last year? Wasn’t that something of a risk, given the circumstances?”

He grimaced. “We needed to get a message to Simon, but couldn’t risk having Hawkwood capture one of our messengers. So we sent Chaucer down there at the head of a diplomatic company, ostensibly to see about the wool.”

“Wool?”

“Nothing more complicated than that—nor more crucial to His Highness’s treasury.”

“Wool, the goddess of the merchants,” I murmured, recalling one of my own French lines.

“Our greatest export,” said the chancellor, “and the Genoese the only foreign shippers allowed to bypass Calais. Thousands of sacks a year from Southampton to Italy. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of pounds. We’re always stepping in to sniff around for smuggling and evasion. Chaucer has been controller of the wool custom for some time, and he was only too happy to make a discreet trip south for a few months, get him away from Philippa. ‘We need some feathers smoothed,’ he was told.”

“He contacted Simon on your behalf, then, while in Tuscany?”

The baron scoffed. “Hardly. We slipped one of our own men into his entourage.”

“Who?”

His look told me I didn’t need to know. “Simon got our message, did what we asked him to do. What he did next, though—copy Chaucer’s book, pen a treasonous prophecy? That was all Simon, I’m afraid.”

He avoided my gaze, and I felt a sting of remorse, knowing what he must have been thinking. His father’s son, apples falling close to trees. Everything I thought I knew about Simon had proved mistaken, as if my own son were a distant stranger, or one of Mandeville’s monsters, a three-headed beast perched on the edge of the world. From a counterfeiting traitor to a loyal spy for the realm to a forger and cryptographer for a mercenary, in the space of a few days.

The chancellor looked at me, not unkindly. “To be around a man like Hawkwood for that long, it has to rub off on you.” Thinking this would comfort me. “Chaucer’s company returned from Italy in early March. Simon had already been here for weeks, though without showing himself to anyone, including you.” I nodded vaguely, remembering Simon’s appearance at St. Mary Overey—exhausted after the long road from Italy, he had told me. “Once I learned your son was back in London my intention was to bring him in, hold his feet to the fire. Make him tell us why he had left Florence without warning us.”

“When did you know he had returned?”

“You’ll recall our chance meeting on Cat Street, that day you were searching out Strode’s clerk. Ralph himself had just told me Simon was back.”

Strode had been feigning ignorance that day about Simon’s return, then. Yet another deception. “You covered well, my lord.”

He waved it off. “When Simon came in that same week he told me he had simply left Hawkwood’s service a few months before. That he hadn’t bothered writing in advance of his return but had done everything we asked of him, and more. Then he was overheard having a heated conversation with Chaucer during the Garter morrow feast out at Windsor, telling him he planned to sell his little book to the highest bidder, get him strung up for his treachery. It was only then that we began to suspect Simon’s connection to these prophecies.”

“Was that one of Oxford’s men, then, at the river inn?” This was the question that had confused Chaucer during our last conversation.