The Invention of Fire (16 page)

During all of this my skin had cooled to near numbness. Now feeling stole back into my limbs. I risked a shallow breath, then a deeper
one, the pure and saving air filling my lungs, and with it came the realization that I still lived. That I could see. My very ribs seemed to open once more to the world. I looked up at the looming west face of Aldgate, where a bored guard observed my plight from a great height over the hoarding-walk. Another breath and I felt ready to move, slowly at first, then with more confidence as my sight returned to its full if weakened capacity. I went through the city to the bridge with a new aim in mind, my affliction winning out against my pride and fear.

W
HEN DID I FIRST
sense this creeping blindness? For the longest time I felt it as a dog suffers a single flea: an occasional nuisance, rarely acute, beneath notice or mention. Only in the last five years had it interfered somewhat with my everyday life, and only in the last three had it forced me to alter old habits and find new crutches: a head turned slightly to the side, additional candles on the desk, a hand more often raised against a brightening sun. Since Sarah’s death I had taken particular notice of the fully blind, those old men sticking their way along the pavers, rattling for alms. There goes John Gower, I would think, a few years hence.

The surgeon Thomas Baker was letting a pair of rooms atop a grocer’s shop in Cornhill, one for his accommodation, the other for procedures. The grocer, George Lawler, had purchased a grander house in the Mercery, returning with his wife to the shop along Broad Street only on select days of the week to sell spices and dried fruits to the wealthier denizens of the ward. On the afternoon I visited Lawler’s the shop was closed, so I walked around back and took the outer stairs to the surgeon’s rooms on the third floor. As I neared the top a woman’s high and muffled moans could be heard, a keening sound that nearly chased me down again.

Baker’s door stood open, allowing the surgeon to perform his grisly work in the morning’s full light. At the moment this consisted
of the draining of an abscess from the bound leg of a young woman, who lay writhing on his table and grinding at a rag between her teeth. Trembling limbs glazed with sweat, grunts of pain and effort, Baker’s apprentice and another man pinning her arms. Not wanting to interrupt or subject the woman to any further humiliation, I descended and ran a few errands in the district, returning an hour later to find Baker’s apprentice mopping up the last remnants of blood and bile from the floor. He tossed the rags aside and took up a bucket of sawdust and ash, which he sprinkled in a thin layer over the surface. The room on the whole was crowded but neatly and efficiently so, with an operating table angled across the center, a bulky chair by the door, and several shelves and tables laid neatly with the tools of the surgical craft. On a high stand by the table a thick volume lay open to a center folio, its opened pages spattered with old blood.

“Is Baker about?” I said to the apprentice.

He nodded slightly, then glanced at the door, where Baker had appeared bearing a bucket of surgical tools.

“Why, Master Gower. Good welcome to you.”

“And to you.” I blinked, agitated. “I am here about my eyes.”

“Ah,” said Baker, placing a hand on my arm. He gave the bucket of tools to his apprentice and guided me toward the large chair near the door. His grip was firm but gentle, as if he were leading an old man already blind. “Chaucer told me to expect you.”

“He did, did he?” I sounded haughty, even to myself.

“He is a great friend to you, I can see this. Please, sit here.”

Baker pushed around the heavy examining chair to take maximum advantage of the light. I sat and adjusted myself to the unfamiliar arrangement as the physician and his apprentice placed a table and tools to each side. The chair’s joint between the seat and back had been constructed so as to allow its user to rest at various angles, with pegs to adjust the position of both. Baker took a high stool to my left, while his apprentice stood to my right—his sole task, it seemed, to keep my eyes from shutting at all cost. For this he used a pincerlike instrument with rounded ends, which pressed into my eyelids and separated them for the surgeon’s convenience. The sensation was not
unpleasant, as the touch of the metal was cool and smooth, and I appreciated the sharpness and clarity that came with widened eyes.

Once the apprentice had performed this opening procedure on my left eye, Baker used a small hook to pull up the lid, then a flattened metal plane to scrape gently along the inner rim. He looked across my prostrate form at his apprentice. “No ungula or pannus. Do you see?”

The apprentice nodded. “
Sì.
”

“What about cataracts?” Baker asked, keeping my lid stretched forward.

The young man leaned over, peering carefully. “No sign of cataracts, master,” he said.

“
Bene.
Now the right.” He switched eyes, placing his thumb and forefinger gently on my cheek as the apprentice spread the skin. The right eye having garnered the same verdict from master and apprentice, Baker lifted a tubelike device from the table at his side and used it to peer into the depths of the opened eye. His apprentice moved a lantern above my face, shifting it slightly back and forth at his instruction until the examination was complete.

“That will be all, Agnolo,” said Baker, his hand at my elbow. “Now see about those new chisels, will you? And we have a case of earworm tomorrow. We’ll need juice of honeysuckle and calamint and we are depleted of both. You know where to go?”

“
Sì, signore.
” The apprentice left us, clomping down the rear stairs.

When he had gone Baker helped me sit up straight, and I swung my legs off the chair. He leaned back and regarded my face. “I see no external evidence of a disease or injury, Master Gower. No cataracts, no webbing on the eyelids nor excessive phlegm in the pouches. No floating matter or obstruction in your eyeball, either. How do you find reading?”

“Still bearable, though more difficult by the day,” I admitted. “It was once pure pleasure. Now it is something of a labor. I find myself avoiding it sometimes.” Like a dog veering from the room where its master died.

“And generally? How would you describe this gradual loss of sight?”

“It feels to me that my world is growing smaller,” I said, hearing
the weight in my voice. “Dimmer as well, as if a series of thin veils were being lowered before my eyes. Every month or so I will realize a new veil has come down, as things I once saw clearly appear blurred or dull. The streets of London are not as colorful as they once were. The faces of friends grow indistinct, hazed.”

“You speak like the poet you are,” said Baker, smiling kindly. “You have thought a great deal about your encroaching blindness.”

“Blindness,” I said, feeling the weight of it. “A bleak word.” And a commonplace figure: for stupidity, dumbness, ignorance in all its forms. How often had I used the device in my own verse, attempting to capture the felt condition of man’s distance from God, from love, from grace? To imagine that I was coming to embody such unseeing oblivion seemed impossible to accept.

“Your condition will grow only worse, I’m afraid,” said Baker. “If you were showing cataracts I could help you, but in a case like this, where the cause of deterioration is hidden, surgery would be foolish.”

“There is nothing you can do to arrest it, no procedure to perform in a case like mine?”

“A lancet peeling your eye, is that what you would like, Master Gower?”

“If it would help.”

Baker folded his arms. “One could operate on your eyes, I suppose. Perhaps relieve some pressure on the engines, retard the further deterioration of your vision, whether for a month or a year we can’t know. Yet the risks are quite severe. I have watched hale and healthy men put their eyes under the blade for mere cataracts and emerge entirely blind. There are barbers in this very town who would be only too happy to take your coin and slit your eyes.” The barbers, those blood letters and tooth-drawers plying their rusty tools around the city’s hospitals and tenements. A barber, or so surgeons like Baker were fond of saying, would slice your throat to treat your toe.

“With no hope of a cure?”

“One does not cure encroaching blindness of this sort, not in my experience. Temporary relief at great risk is the best we can hope for.” He placed his hand again on my arm. “What you describe to me is a
gradual process of deterioration, Master Gower.
Gradual.
There is no reason to think you will be entirely blind in six months, or even three years. You have two choices, as I see it.”

“And they are?”

“Stay on your present course and you will be a seeing man for as long as your vision lasts, and eventually a blind man. Or save yourself time by submitting to a painful, messy operation that will blind you now.”

A sentence devastating in its inevitability. “I understand,” I said, a little proud of myself for keeping my voice from hitching.

“However,” Baker said, his face brightening, “I can certainly help you in the shorter term with your reading and writing.”

“Oh?”

“Are you familiar with spectacles?”

“I have heard of them. A clerk I know at the Guildhall tells me that one of his former colleagues possessed such a device. You recommend them?”

Baker rose and went to a cabinet along the near wall. A drawer slid open, and he removed a tray that he brought over to me by the door. On the tray was an odd device that the surgeon held up for my inspection. Two circles of glass, each within a leaden teardrop, with the narrow ends of the oblong shapes hinged together in the middle. Baker lifted the device from the tray. Positioning the notch formed by the hinge over the bridge of my nose, he brought the glass toward my eyes. He took his manual off the bookstand and placed it in my lap.

“There now,” he said. “Here is a book of surgery purchased in Genoa. Give that a try.”

I am not a weeping man. Yet as I sat there in Thomas Baker’s peculiar chair I could feel the tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. They pooled beneath the odd lenses the surgeon had placed on my nose. I felt one trickle down, and before I could thumb it off, it dropped to the surface of the book. I wiped the parchment dry, felt the smooth flesh of the leaf.

For the first time in years I was able to see and read a line of writing with all the clarity I recalled from my earliest lessons in grammar.
It was as if the page came newly alive before me, the script enlarged to span across my field of vision, the hand rendered in its full and worthy complexity: the flourishes reaching out from certain letters, the marks of punctuation in the Italian style, the liberties taken with uppercase vowels. I am sure now that there was nothing special about this hand, though in the moment I regarded the nameless scribe as a kind of god, capable of filling a folio with this ingenious invention of readable script.

This immediate sensation of miraculous clarity was short-lived. When I looked up—across the room, out the door, into Baker’s kind face—the world suddenly blurred.

I reached up to claw at my eyes. Baker grasped my forearms. “Simply remove the spectacles,” he said patiently.

I did, and focus returned, or at least the semblance of focus to which I was accustomed. My pulse slowed, and I breathed deeply.

“The spectacles are for reading, and only reading,” said Baker. “They will enlarge everything within two feet of your eyes. Beyond that they are less than worthless.”

The spectacles sat heavy in my hand. I fingered the frames, the clever hinge that joined the two lenses in the middle. “What sum for a set?”

He named a price, which I happily paid after selecting an additional pair from his collection and trying them out again on the manual. The apprentice had returned from his errand, and went about the room neatening up, placing the optical instruments in their proper order.

Baker led me to the door. It was nearly dusk, the coming evening settling on the city like a soft veil on an aging nun. We stood on the small covered landing outside, looking down on a neat courtyard formed by the grocer’s shop and three houses on each side of the square. He glanced at me kindly as I fingered the spectacle cases and slipped them into my inner cotte pocket.

“In some ways blindness could be a sign of God’s grace, you know,” he said. “It will save you from seeing things a man is not meant to see.”

I returned his look, thinking of the array of corpses in the St. Bart’s trench.

“Londoners have been killing Londoners since the Romans arrived, I suppose,” said the surgeon, looking out on the jumble of rooftops below Cornhill. “Yet the city has changed in the years since my first departure for Lombardy. It murders more brutally now.”

“And with new weapons.”

“Old ones as well. You have heard about this carter?” He half turned to me.

Something scratched at my memory.

“Stabbed,” Baker went on. “In the throat, the heart, the stomach, the back. Repeatedly and savagely, then dumped in the Walbrook.”

“Where?”

“Same spot as the others.”

“Who was he?”

“I did not hear the man’s name,” said Baker. “But he was a carter, that much I know. From the parish of St. Nicholas Acons, where my mother still resides. It was she who told me. A good man, his woman with a new child.”

St. Nicholas Acons, a parish in the ward of Langbourn, and for the second time that day I felt blinded as Piers Goodman’s words unfurled across my inner sight.
And had a carter of Langbourn Ward up here—oh—last week? Weeping mess he was, too, with a sad sad sad sad story to tell about his cart and his cartloads. What’s in his cart and cartloads, Gower, hmm, what’s in his cart and all his cartloads?

My face had whitened. Baker noticed and reached for me, thinking me ill, though I shook off his comforting hand this time and turned for the stairs.

“What is it, Master Gower?”

I murmured something, waved the physician off, and descended among the Cornhill throngs to begin one of the longest walks of my life, through the mids of London and the turn for Cripplegate, feet not feeling my stride, as if I were floating above the pavers even while weighted with an impossible burden, my skin clammy and cold, chest tight with dread.

A lone sentry stood before the narrow walkway to the hermit’s cell. As I tried to ease past him he clutched my arm. “No passage here, sire.”

“I’m here to see the hermit.”

“What hermit is that, sire?” His cold look told me everything I needed but feared to know.

I straightened to my full height. “The hermit of St. Giles-along-the-Wall-by-Cripplegate.” There was a certain dignity in speaking Piers Goodman’s florid title for perhaps the last time. “The hermit who has blessed this sector of the London wall for as long as you have been alive.”