Authors: Bruce Holsinger
Low down within the deepest channel in London, early on an Ember Wednesday, William Springer, elbow on a spade and sucking a shallow breath, watched his son move through the foulness. The boy’s arms were thin as sticks but lifted the full shovel with a ready effort, even a kind of cheer. Good worker, young Tom, just a half knob shy of his fourteenth year, reliable, strong, uncomplaining, despite all a gongfarmer has to moan about—and that’s a heavy lot it is, down there in the privy channels, moving the muck of a thousand men, helping the city streams breathe easy. Tom filled the bucket, which was then hefted by one of the older boys on William’s crew to take to the dungcart waiting above. From there it would be hauled outside the walls, likely to feed some bishop’s roses.
Night soil, the mayor’s men primly called it, though it had commoner names. Dung and gong, fex and flux, turd and purge and shit. William Springer and his crew, they called it hard work and wages.
Dark work, mostly, as London don’t like its underbelly ripped open to the sun. So here he was with his fellows, a full four hours after the curfew bell, working in the calm quiet a few leaps down from what by day was always the loudest, busiest crossing in London. The junction of Broad Street, Cornhill, and the Poultry, the stocks market, and everything else. The brassy navel of the city in the morning; a squalid gut in the night.
William squinted through the pitch, peering past his son down the jagged line of buildings erected over this length of the Walbrooke. Twenty privies, by his estimate, most attached to private houses and tenements hulking over the open stream, but two of the highest seats had been built to the common good for use by all. The Long Dropper, this great institution was called, and a farthing a squeeze the custom, the coins collected by a lame beggar enjoying the city’s small gesture of charity toward its most wretched.
At night, though, no one was posted at the swinging doors up top. The parish was at a hush. The only sounds to be heard were the shallow breathing of his son, a faint snore from one of the houses above, the scurryings and chewings of the brook rats all round.
“Any closer, Father?” Tom, always respectful even when tired out, though William could tell he was ready to leave off. It had already been a long night.
“Let us have a look,” said William, lengthening his back, hearing a happy
pop
. He slogged through the muck and mud to the middle of the stream. Earlier they had rigged up a row of lanterns at either end of the stretch to light the crew’s work, show them what they were meddling with. In the past hour they’d cleared the stream fairly well up at the north end, but the water was still damming farther in, and as he squatted and peered through the stink he had to shift both ways to spy the three orbs of pale light at the far end of the clogged channel.
He shook his head, sucked a lip.
A major blockage, this one.
Something big. Something stuck. The Walbrooke’s moderate flow should have pushed most anything down to the Thames. Not this lot, whatever it was. A pile of rotten lumber, could be. Or a horse, lamed on the street and shoved over the bank to struggle and drown, like that old mare they’d roped out of the Fleet Ditch last summer. Whatever this bulk turned out to be, the Guildhall would hear about it, that was certain.
William turned to his crew. “Fetch me one of those lanterns there.” The young man repeated the command to another fellow closer to the lamp string, who trudged back and removed one of the oil lamps dangling from the line. When William had it in his grip he held the light before him, up and to the side, and moved ahead.
One step, another. This section of the stream was almost impassable. Up to his hips now. The thick, nearly immovable sludge clung to his legs like a dozen rutting dogs. He had to will his body to move forward, every step a victory.
He was taking a risk, he knew that, and for what?
A gongfarmer’s pay was good enough, sure, but one false step and he could be sucked right under, or release a pocket of devil’s air that would ignite and turn him into one of these lanterns, sizzling hair and all. William knew more than a few gongers who’d fallen to their deaths or close to it in these narrow depths. Why just upstream from here poor John Purvis crashed through the seat of a public latrine like the one over William’s head right now. Poor gonger was rat food by the time they found him, not to mention—
Then he saw it. A hand, pale and alone in the lamplight, streaked with brown and standing out against the solid mound of dung behind it.
“
By Judas!
” William swore, and would have fallen backwards had the thick flow not held him up.
“Father?” Tom’s worried voice came from behind.
William looked again. The hand was not severed, as he had first feared. No, it was attached to an arm, and the arm was attached to—another arm, looked like, and that arm was attached to a leg—no no no, to a head, but that was impossible, wasn’t it?
It bloomed in him then, just what he was seeing. This was no pile of gong blocking the Walbrooke, nor any horse neither. Why, this was—
“Father, what is it then?”
Tom, beside him now, peering ahead with that boy’s curiosity he had about most everything in the world. William lifted a hand, wanting to cover his son’s eyes against the devilish sight, but Tom pushed it aside and grasped the lamp and William let it go, reluctantly, the thin and oily handle slipping from his grasp, and then he felt Tom’s smaller, smoother hand against his own. A last touch of innocence.
They stared together, father and son, at this mound of ruined men, and no words could come.
A thin knife slipped beneath the wax. The gentle
pip
of a broken seal. A man’s secrets opened to my eyes, whole worlds of sin spread out like so many blooming flowers in a field. I have a sweet tooth for vice, and it sharpens with age.
Sitting before me that morning in late September was my dead wife’s father. A puddle of a man, skin a waxy pale, his clothing as unkempt as his accounting. Joseph Birch: a weeping miser, and a waste of fine teeth.
“For—for her sake, John.” He looked at the ceiling, sleeved his eyes. We were in my reading room, a low, close space lit only by a narrow slip of light from a glazed window onto the priory yard.
“Her sake,” I said. His daughter dead for nearly two years, and still the dull nothings. I stared through him, this cruelest of fathers, cruel in ways even I had never learned, despite all that Sarah once told me. Sarah, a soul always ready to give more than necessary. She had absolved him long before her death, and wished me to do the same.
Something I had noticed previously but never quite put into words was that peculiar way Birch had with his chin, quite a large one despite his smallness of face. When he said my name his chin bobbed, always twice, and his voice lowered and rasped, as if throwing out each John while a hoof pressed his throat.
“How did you get it?” Birch whispered. “I cannot—who sold it to you, John?”
His fortune and reputation hanging by this thread on my desk, and he is curious about a sale.
“That should be your last concern, Joseph,” I gently told him. “The question you need to be thinking about is, who will John Gower sell it to?”
“How
dare
you threaten me, you milk-blood coward!” His lips quivered, the upper one raised in a weak show of contempt. “Here you sit in your little hole, bent over your pounce, your twisted mind working itself in knots to spit out more of this—what?” He turned to look at the orderly rows and stacks of quires and books around the room, many of them lined with my own verse. Back at me.
“She pitied you, John.”
I scoffed.
“Ah, but it’s true,” he said, warming to it. “She talked about it with her mother. What a burden it was getting to be, your trade in threats and little scandals. How it pushed away your friends and relations, reduced everything to the latest gossip or bribe. How sad it was to see you waste your life, your mind, your spirit.” He paused, then said, with meaning, “Your eyes.”
I flinched.
He straightened a sleeve. “Oh, she was quite open about it with Meg.”
Sarah’s mother.
“Brought her to weeping more than once, yet she never told you she knew, did she? She loved you too much, the foolish girl. Didn’t want to shame you with her pity and concern. You never suspected a thing, did you?”
I looked away, blinked against the blur.
“Just as I thought. You believe a husband’s growing blindness can be hidden from a wife, a wife as perceptive as our late Sarah? And do you think for a moment, John, that your position will not weaken once news of this affliction gets out? Imagine a blind man trying to peddle secrets at the Guildhall or Westminster. They’ll all be slipping you snipped nobles, laughing in your face, cheering behind your back. The mighty John Gower, lord of extraction, brought down by the most just act of God imaginable. A spy who cannot see, a writer who cannot read.”
I lifted a corner of the document. “I have no difficulty reading this, Birch.”
He scowled. “For now, perhaps. For now. But in future you would be advised to remember that I have just as much damage on you as you have on me. Of course, I am a rational man.” He jerked at his coat, remembering why he was there. “Given the—the more
immediate
matter before us, I suppose there is room for a negotiation. But don’t expect to come back to me with any more demands, John. A man can only last so long doing what you do.”
We settled on three pounds. A minor fortune to Joseph Birch, if a mouse’s meal to his son-in-law. The money, of course, was beside the point. It was the information that bore the value. Each new fragment of knowledge a seed, to be sown in London’s verdant soil and spring yet another flower for my use.
I gave him the usual warnings.
I’ve made arrangements with a clerk across the river . . . In the event of my passing . . . And should there be another incident . . .
Birch, still ignorant, left the house through the priory yard, the clever forgery he had just purchased curled in his moistened palm.
Will Cooper, my servant, bobbed in the doorway. Kind faced, impossibly thin but well jowled, with the crinkled eyes of the aging man he was. “Master Gower?”
“Yes, Will?”
“Boy for you, sir. From the Guildhall.”
Behind him stood a page from the mayor’s retinue. I gestured him in. “Speak,” I said.
“I come from Master Ralph Strode, good sir,” the boy said stiffly. “Master Strode kindly requests the presence of Master John Gower at Master John Gower’s earliest.”
“The Guildhall then?” Ralph Strode had recently stepped down from his longtime position as the city’s common serjeant, though the mayor had arranged an annuity to retain him for less formal duties.
“Nay, sir. St. Bart’s Smithfield.”
“St. Bart’s?” I frowned at him, already dreading it. “Why would Ralph want me to meet him in Smithfield?” Located just outside Newgate, the hospital at St. Bartholomew tended to the poorest of the city’s souls, its precincts a stew of livestock markets and old slaughterbarns, many of them abandoned since the pestilence. Not the sort of place to which Strode would normally summon a friend.
“Don’t know, sir,” said the boy with a little shrug. “Myself, I came across from Basinghall Street, just as Master Strode was leaving for St. Bart’s.”
“Very well.” I dismissed him with a coin. Will gave me an inquisitive look as the boy left. My turn to shrug.
I had eaten little that morning so stood in the kitchen as Bet Cooper, Will’s wife, young and plump to his old and lean, bustled about preparing me a plate of greens with cut lamb. A few swallows of beer and my stomach was settled. I walked to Winchester’s wharf and boarded a wherry for the London bankside, just below Aldersgate. After that it was a short walk across Fleet Street and up to the hospital.
Though an Augustinian house like St. Mary Overey, St. Bart’s was a place I rarely visited given the unpleasant location, easily avoidable on a walk from the city walls to Westminster. The hospital precinct had been designed around three buildings, a lesser chapel and greater church as well as the hospital itself, attached to the chapel by a low cloister. An approach from the south brought visitors to the lesser church first, which I reached just as the St. Bart’s bell tolled for Sext. I circled around the south porch toward the hospital gates, where the porter shared his suspicions about my business. I softened them with a few groats.
The churchyard at St. Bart’s served as one of several London burial grounds for the poor and nameless. Rutted and pocked, it formed a skewed shape of drying mud, tufted grass, and leaning stone, all centered on the larger church within the hospital grounds. Not a single shrub or tree interrupted the morbid rubble. Shallow burials were always a problem at St. Bart’s, and it was no surprise to see carrion birds dotting the landscape, small demons feeding on the dead. Though the air was dry the soil was moist, and the earth seemed to be churning underfoot, teeming with the small gluttonies of worms.
Three men stood along the south wall gazing down into a wide trench. One of them, the largest, was Ralph Strode, and as I walked across the yard he raised his head and turned to me, his prominent jowls swaying beneath a nose broken years before in an Oxford brawl, and never entirely healed. Strode’s eyes, somber and heavy, were colored a deep amber pouched within folds of rheumy skin.
“Gower,” he said.
I opened my mouth to speak, closed it against a gathering stench, and then I saw the dead. A line of corpses arrayed in the trench like fish on an earl’s platter. All were men, all were stripped bare, only loose braies or rags wrapping their middles. Their skin was flecked with what looked like mud but smelled like shit, and gouged with wounds large and small. At least five of them bore circular marks around their necks in flaming red; from hanging, I guessed. My gaze moved slowly over the bodies as I counted. Eight, twelve—sixteen of them, their rough shrouds still open, waiting for a last blessing and sprinkle from a priest.
“Who are they?” I asked Strode.
The silence lengthened. I stood there, smelling their rot to the heavy buzz of sated flies. Finally I looked up.
“We don’t know.” Strode watched for my reaction.
“You don’t
know
?”
“Not a soul on the inquest jury recognized a one of them.”
“How can sixteen men die without being known, whether by name or occupation?”
“Or rank, or ward, or parish,” said Strode. He raised his big hands, spread his arms. “We simply don’t know.”
“Where were they found?”
“In the Walbrooke, just down from the stocks at Cornhill. Beneath that public privy there. The Long Dropper.”
“I know it,” I said, picturing the deep and teeming ditch beneath the board seats. “And the first finders?”
“A gongfarmer and his son. Their crew were clearing out the privy ditches. Two nights ago this was, and the bodies were carted here this morning by the coroner’s men. Before first light, naturally.”
My gaze went back to the bodies. “An accident of some kind? Perhaps a bridge collapse? But surely I would have heard about such a thing.”
“Nothing passes you by, does it, Gower?”
Strode’s tone was needlessly sharp, and when I looked over at him I could see the strain these deaths were placing on the man. He blew out an apologetic sigh. “It was murder, John. Murder en masse. These men met violent deaths somewhere, then they were disposed of in a city ditch. I have never seen such a thing.”
“The coroner?”
“The inquest got us nowhere. Sixteen men, dead of a death other than their natural deaths, but no one can say of what sort. They certainly weren’t slashed or beaten.”
“Nor hung by the neck,” said the older of the two men standing behind us.
Strode turned sharply, as if noticing the pair for the first time, then signaled the man forward. “This is Thomas Baker and his apprentice,” he said. “Baker here is a master surgeon, trained in Bologna in all matter of physical arts, though now lending his services to the hospital here at St. Bart’s. I have asked him to inspect the bodies of these poor men, see what we can learn.”
“Learn about what?” I said.
“What killed them.”
Strode’s words hung in the air as I looked over Baker and the boy beside him. Though short and thin the surgeon stood straight, a wiry length of a man, hardened from the road and the demands of his craft. His apprentice was behind him, still and obedient.
I looked at Strode. “Surely you’re not thinking of dissection?”
His jowls shook. “Even in this circumstance the bishop won’t hear of it. You know Braybrooke. His cant is all can’t. Were these sixteen corpses sixteen
hundred
we’d get no dispensation from the bishop of London. Far be it from the church to sanction free inquiry,
curiositas,
genuine knowledge.” A familiar treatise from Ralph Strode, a former schoolman at Oxford, and I would have smiled had the circumstances not been so grim. He looked at Baker. “Our surgeon here is more enlightened. One of the
moderni,
with all kinds of new ideas about medicine, astronomy, even music, I’ll be bound.”
“What makes you believe these men weren’t hung?” I asked the surgeon. “Don’t you see those red circles around some of their necks? I would think the solution is apparent.”
Baker shook his head, unaffected by my confidence. “Those are rope burns, Master Gower, or so I believe, though inflicted before death, not after.”
“How can you be sure?”
From a pouch at his side Baker removed a brick-sized bundle bound tightly in brushed leather. Unwrapping the suede, he took out a book that he opened to reveal page upon page of intricate drawings of the human form. Arms, legs, fingers, heads, whole torsos, the private parts of man and woman alike, with no regard for decency or discretion. Brains, breasts, organs, a twisted testicle, the interior of a bisected anus. The frankness and detail of the drawings stunned me, as I had never before seen such intimate renderings of the corporeal man.
Baker found the page he was looking for. Strode and I leaned in, rapt despite ourselves by the colorful intricacies of skin and gut.
“The cheeks of a hanged man will go blue, you see.” His finger traced delicately over the page, showing us the heads of four noosed corpses, the necks elongated and twisted at unlikely angles, eyes bulging, tongues and lips contorted into morbid grins, skin purpled into the shades of exotic birds. “I have seen this effect myself, many times. The blood rushes from the head, the veins burst, the aspect darkens. Leave them hanging long enough and they start to look like Ethiops, at least from the neck up. And there is more.”
He squatted over the pit, gesturing for us to join him. In his right hand Baker bore a narrow stick, which he used to pry open the left eye of the nearest victim. “Do you see?”
I looked at the man’s eyeball. “What is it I am to see?” I said.
“The iris is white,” said Baker, reaching for the next man’s eyelid. “As is this one. And this.” He moved along the trench, pausing at each of the ring-necked victims to make sure we saw the whites of their eyes. “Yet the eyes of a hanged man go red with blood. See here.” He fumbled with his book to show us another series of paintings a few pages on. Bulbous eyes spidered with red veins, like rivers and roads on a map of the world.
I glanced at Strode, unsure what to think of this man’s boldness with the ways of death.
“In Bologna the tradition is more—more
practical
than our own,” said the physician, noting our unease. “They slice, they cut, they boil and prove and test. They observe and they experiment, and they admit when they are wrong. Such has it been for many years, good gentles, since the time of Barbarossa. It’s really quite something and if you are interested in this line of inquiry I might recommend the
Arte anatomicalis
of Diamondus, a surgical master at Padua some years ago who was an adept of the blade, a man thoroughly committed to dissection and—”