The Invention of Fire (21 page)

Stephen glanced about for a fire. “I must light the matchcord, Master Snell.”

Snell ordered one of the guards to assist. Stephen handed him the saltpetre cord. “Light it at one end only, if you please.”

The guard nodded and began to walk to the nearest forge, the cord held lightly between his fingertips.

“Quickly now,” Snell said. The soldier took off at a jog. Stephen turned to the lion, watched its tail flick through its last lashes, wondering at the beast’s solemn stillness.

The soldier was soon back with the cord, the tip smoldering with a steady glow. With care, Stephen fixed it by the middle within the snake’s mouth, careful to keep the hot end free of the powder.

“A moment, Marsh.” Snell approached him, asking for Flame. Stephen handed her over.

“The first shot is mine,” said Snell. “Show me.”

Stephen, hiding his displeasure, demonstrated the serpentine lever, showing Snell how to keep the spark from prematurely igniting the pan. “You may sight along the barrel, Master Snell, though you would be advised to keep the stock well away from your eyes.”

Snell asked a few more questions—keen, discerning, with an expert’s eye for details—then assumed a firing position. Just before lowering the gun he turned and said to Stephen, “After the ball leaves the barrel I will hand the gun back to you. You’ll reload it and fire, and I shall count the time elapsed between shots. My own ball will be well high of the mark, but yours must be true. Do you understand?”

“Aye, Master Snell.” Stephen’s gut roiled. It would be his lot, then,
to kill the lion, and as quickly as he could. A grim reward for a successful commission.

“Good.” The armorer turned toward the wall. Steadying the gun against his chest, he craned his head back, sighting along the side of the barrel, then lowered the snake.

Crack!

A fragment of wood flew off the wall several feet above the lion. The beast flinched across its body, then reared up feebly on its hind legs. As the report echoed across the Tower compound, the soldiers gathered round murmured their appreciation, and the lion made a vain attempt to throw off its muzzle. Snell handed Marsh the gun and began to count. “One. Two. Three. Four . . .”

As Snell ticked off the intervals Marsh seized Flame and went to work on unfouling, blowing, wiping, reloading, those hours in the woods coming back to him.

“Eight. Nine. Ten.”

A measure of gunpowder down the barrel.

“Sixteen. Seventeen.”

A ball.

“Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.”

A good tamp with the drivel to ram it all to—though not with too much force, as only powder leavened with air would ignite; nor with too little, as an excess of the same air would cause a misfire.

“Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.”

A small tap of powder in the pan.

“Thirty-two. Thirty-three.”

Stephen took his time, as this was the most delicate part of the reloading.

“Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.”

All the while Stephen kept the still-smoldering matchcord away from the pan and touchhole, moving gingerly but swiftly as the Tower guard and William Snell looked on.

“Forty-one. Forty-two.”

Now he took aim, settled his mind, and stared down the barrel at this beautiful creature, this noble beast.

“Forty-nine. Fifty.”

Just as his hand lifted the near end of the serpentine device, the lion turned to him. The beast stared at Marsh with the saddest eyes he had ever seen.

“Fifty-three. Fifty-four.”

Cord touched powder. A flash.

Crack
.

The sharp report echoed around the walls. A bloom of red jellied the animal’s skull. Flame had done her work. Stephen stared through the smoke as the beast collapsed, its mane rippling with the afternoon’s full sun. Over it, as if a reflection on the stillest water, he saw the milk-white face of the woman in the woods, the golden spread of her hair against the forest floor.

Stephen swooned.

He would never know how long he lay on the ground, with his senses closed to the world. When he awoke and sat up, he was alone in that portion of the Tower yard. Twenty feet away Snell was clustered with several of his men, all speaking in low voices. Noticing his alertness, a soldier by the near span of the wall pointed. His fellows laughed.

The armorer approached Stephen as he sat up. Snell’s hands were spread in exaggerated concern. “You are quite recovered, Marsh?”

“Yes, Master Snell.”

“Very well,” he said, looking down at him, contempt unmasked. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. Even the greatest of gunmakers may prove the weakest of killers. It unsettles you, does it, to put a ball in a brain?”

“N—no, Master Snell,” Stephen weakly said, seeing a girl’s ravaged neck. “I am merely fatigued. I’ve stayed up many nights perfecting the serpentine, the pan, the cord and its clip, measuring the ideal dose of powder and the quality of shot—”

“Never mind that. Indeed I am delighted that you fainted at the sight of a dying animal. It proves a point I have been trying to make about these new handgonnes, though I seem unable to get anyone in Westminster to listen.”

“What point is that, Master Snell?” said Stephen. He stood, relieved to have the armorer’s attention diverted from his unmanly show.

“Handgonnes are the ultimate weapons of the weak,” said Snell. “You have proved it yourself. It would take a skilled archer to bring down a lion with one arrow. A steady hand, a strong arm, a knowledge of anatomy. Yet you felled the beast with a single shot to the head, from a weapon you banged together in your own foundry. Simply point, touch, and a life is ended, with no strength or skill or even courage required.”

Stephen wanted to protest, to show Snell just how much skill and knowledge had gone into the making and testing of Flame and her sisters. Why, he had already killed a young and living person with his own gun, not only the already half-dead and compliant beast killed just now.

“Loud miracles of efficiency, these guns,” Snell went on. “Soon enough there will be one in every farmer’s hand, Marsh, to say nothing of Burgundy’s army. It will be up to us to stay ahead of those who oppose us. More and better guns, more and better powder. And that, Marsh, is why you are here. We shall keep three of your four guns and snakes in the Tower for now, and you will continue perfecting this device until I give you further instruction about your next role in this great matter. There is much work yet to be done.”

Snell left him there, staring at the lion, the great animal’s corpse still leaking on the Tower ground.

F
ROM THE CHURCH OF ST. PANCRAS
Soper Lane two narrow alleys run northward toward Cheapside, drawing vice from the thoroughfare as twin drains pull filth from a gutter. Popkirtle Lane twists up from the churchyard through a series of ugly bends, while Gropecunt Lane, its near companion, makes a straight line up to Cheap along a row of abandoned horsestalls and old shopfronts. Within London’s walls, it is here that a man, and more rarely a woman, can most easily find carnal companionship for two or three pennies, and avoid the public and visible arrangements across the river in the Southwark stews. Though I had never sought out a maudlyn for anything but information, many of my friends and acquaintances saw them regularly, and it was no rare thing to encounter a man I knew emerging from the precincts with a hung head, wiping a hand across his mouth, adjusting his hose.

Joan Rugg, the bawd of Gropecunt Lane, was a dun-clad mound of a woman, with as many chins as words, and a banded hat fitted with seeming permanence atop piles of curling, unpinned hair the color of old hay. We had met the year before during another crisis pitting town against crown. Though she would have no reason to recall me given the quantity of men who sought her services, to my surprise she remembered my name.

“Why, it’s Master Gower it is, come to nose out our fine ladies of Gropecunt Lane!”

“I am seeking out only one of your maudlyns, Mistress Rugg.”

“Have you a name, good master?”

“I do not, though I believe she fashions herself a swerver.”

“Aye, a swerver,” Joan said with a knowing nod. “Fancy some of that arse-queynt do you?”

“Hardly,” I said, refusing to show her my disgust.

“You’ll want Eleanor,” she said. “Edgar’s how she mans.” She looked up the lane and signaled to a fresh-faced young woman leaning against a post. “Get our Ellie, will you, Bet?”

“Aye,” called the girl. She went briefly around the corner and returned with another maudlyn who approached us with a light step, and when she arrived I looked at her closely. Rykener’s was a face I had glimpsed more than once on the city streets, one of those hundreds of nameless Londoners a man passes along the lanes and avenues without a thought. Yet there was something familiar about Rykener, and it came to me that she had been among the company of maudlyns at the center of last year’s turbulent events. I saw a young man entering a Southwark stewhouse, a broken kitchen door, a clutch of maudlyns avenging a bawd on the flesh of a dying knight.

She recognized me as well, I could tell from a flicker in her eyes. Yet we said nothing about that old business, moving immediately to her minglings with the mayor, which I got out of her with surprising ease. Brembre, it turned out, was one of the more frequent buyers of her peculiar services. Rykener seemed willing to describe their arrangements and couplings in as much detail as I wished.

“Aye, I swerve for my sustenance. Not many like me, not in London at least, though Oxford has a bevy of swervers, it does.”

“And your techniques? Do they make it apparent that you are a—that you are what you are?”

She poked a tongue against one of her cheeks, pushed it out, considering my question. “I got my own particular ways of tricking the fellows. Greased thighs, a pulsy hand.” She smiled. “My lord the mayor, though, he wants no tricks, as I told the Guildhall clerk. Arse up and straight in, no fuss and foisting about it.”

“Did he seem keen to protect his name?”

“Oh, aye, sire. Has me call him Harry, doesn’t he. As if I don’t know his face from his Ridings and mayoral entries and such.” Her eyes went wide. “Mayoral entries. You catch that, sire?” She laughed.

I allowed a smile, then asked, “Who questioned you at the Guildhall?”

“One of the sheriffs it was. Fierce fellow. Don’t know his name.”

I thought for a moment. “And who took the deposition?”

“Sire?”

“Do you recall the clerk taking down your words, his name or what he looked like?”

The swerver widened her eyes. “Now, him I remember. Strange face, that sribbling carl, all burned up, and an odd name to match. Pinkhouse or some likeness.”

“Pinkhurst?”

“Aye, Pinkhurst’s what it was.”

“I understand you named other jakes in this proceeding.”

“Oh, aye. Lords, abbots, your knights, and can’t say I haven’t swyved a bishop or two in my Gropecunt years. And one abbess, bless her nether lips!”

I was tempted to ask for their names but didn’t want to distract the maudlyn. “Why are you telling me all this so freely, even for good coin? And why did you confess before the sheriff? You’re not worried about Brembre’s taste for his accusers’ blood?”

Her eyes went cold. “I don’t take nicely to threats. But that sheriff said he’d have my cock off and all Joan Rugg’s mauds jailed if I didn’t spout the truth.” She smiled, her gaze unchanged above. “Sheriff wasn’t wagering on the truth I gave him, though. His face went white as a man’s seed when I told him Sir Nick Brembre lived a second life in my arse!”

T
HE FIRST PART OF THAT DAY
the mother, Mariota, rode alone toward the rear of the company. She had gathered a blanket about her shoulders against the chilling air along this stretch of the road below York. There was a lingering sadness in those shoulders, Margery observed, in the stooped back of the recently widowed.

The boy was doing better, in her estimation, having been befriended by a group of sympathetic men from the London group. They’d even got him laughing by the second day out from the last village, and now were on to snaring coneys and scaling fish, warning him his turn was coming to feed the company’s many maws with a good cooked meal.

The mother, though, sat heavy in her saddle, and Margery saw the faint sparks of doubt in those dull and sagging eyes. She decided to stoke them.

How to do it? At one point before the noon hour she slowed, then turned her horse in the road and waited for the widow to reach her. “A bright and cool morning, blessed with full sun,” she said once she was alongside Mariota.

The other woman did not look at her. “Aye,” was all she managed to say.

“We have had no storms along our way, with the roads free and clear,” Margery went on. “Often in these weeks it has felt as if the
blessed St. Cuthbert himself were guiding our way, with fair weather, no illness or accident, no sudden strokes of ill fortune—”

Mariota twisted to look at her sharply, fury in her beady eyes.

“Ah!” Margery shook her head, lifted a hand to her mouth. “What a mindless thing to say. You will forgive me?”

Mariota turned toward the front, her lips tight.

“Please forgive me, mistress,” Margery said, reaching out a hand. Mariota felt it on her arm, shook it off.

“I am dreadful sorry, Mariota. My—my mind muddles easily since the birth, you see. I often find myself thinking things happier than they truly are.”

Mariota squinted at her.

“We lost a babe, you see,” said Margery quickly. “Before the pilgrimage began. That is why we journey to Durham.”

The other woman nodded tightly, looking eager for their exchange to end, though she was kind enough to give a fitting reply. “Lost two m’self. It’s a woman’s lot, isn’t it.”

“It is that,” said Margery, letting her face relax into a semblance of melancholy. They passed a fallow field, unusually flat for this region, and watched as two men hauled stones to one of its near corners.

“What was your husband’s occupation, Mariota?” she asked softly.

Silence for a while. “We have a mill, don’t we,” Mariota eventually said.

“And who is watching it for you during your pilgrimage?”

“Left it in the care and running of our John, didn’t we.”

“He is your brother, or your husband’s?”

“Our son,” she said. “The elder.”

“Ah. Two sons for you then?”

“Two sons, aye,” she said. Her chin went up slightly. “And we’ve a daughter of fifteen, don’t we.”

“Fifteen and left alone, under her brother’s care?” Margery asked in mock surprise. “And a miller’s daughter, no less! You don’t worry for her virtue?”

Mariota scoffed. “Honest to say, there’s more worry for her dowry than her virtue.”

“Tell me about the river, then. Is it well situated, and quite beautiful?”

“It takes a fair wide bend for us, doesn’t it,” Mariota said, turning slightly in her saddle toward Margery. “Narrows above us, broadens below. The perfect perch for a mill, or so my late John’s grandfather would say. He’s the one what built it there, stone by stone, didn’t he, and the house that adjoins.”

“And the shire’s farmers grow enough to keep the wheel turning?”

“Oh aye, that they do,” said Mariota, and she was off describing the lands, the neighboring manors, relations with the lords.

It was a light condescension Margery practiced that day, a woman of gentle birth speaking down to a miller’s widow, yet with enough warmth and kindness to keep the widow talking for hours and with an increasing openness about all matters of life.

She saw Robert watching them warily, yet there was little danger in the exchange as long as he was kept from answering too many of Mariota’s prying questions. By the late afternoon the two women had become fast friends, or so it seemed.

A steeple loomed ahead, signaling their resting place for the night. Mariota turned to her as they passed an outlying smithy. “Now it be your turn to discourse to me, good mistress. What reason would a gentlewoman such as yourself have t’take up with a scullion such as Robert Faulk?”

“As I have told you already, mistress, my husband is hardly a—”

“Don’t give me hardly this, hardly that,” she said softly, and somehow the lowness of her voice was more threatening than her screechy accusations days ago. “I’d know Robert Faulk were he traipsing ’cross the face of the moon. You two go together like sop and snakes. You’ll tell me what’s this about or I’ll shout it to our company, I will, every man and woman of them.”

Just as Margery had suspected. The scowls, the cold glares, the ugly, suspicious looks. Mariota knew, despite the clever way Robert had sought to convince her otherwise. Yet Mariota had said nothing about the Portbridge gaol, nor about Robert’s poaching, let alone about murder. Margery suspected that none of this was yet known to the woman for the moment. That could change, however, and instantly
so, depending on how widely and speedily the sheriffs were searching the two of them out.

“Your son,” said Margery. She nodded to the boy up ahead.

“What of him?”

“You feel as if you would do anything to keep him safe, don’t you?”

“Aye to that, mistress,” said Mariota, raising her shoulders a notch. “Nothing I wouldn’t do to protect young Hugh.”

“Yet you have already lost your husband.”

“I have.”

“As I have lost mine, Mariota.”

“Yet Robert there—”

“Hardly my husband, as you have so shrewdly deduced, Mariota.”

“Then what are you—”

“My true husband beat me, Mariota. Used my flesh in every conceivable way. Hammered my ribs, bruised my legs. There was one day when he came home after a week of hunting boar with his lord the baron. He never took a boar himself, but the baron did, on that last morning. My husband had made some drunken wager with another in the party that he would butcher any man’s boar killed before his own, so it was up to him to string up the beast, skin it, gut it. No surprise that he made a mess of it. When he got to the manor he was still slathered with gore, still drunk, and he forced me up into our bedchamber in front of our servants, and with our doors and shutters open to the world he set upon me with every weapon in his arsenal. He made me bathe him afterwards.”

Margery cleared her throat, spat to the side, wishing the memory would leave her with the spittle. “He would have taken my life had I remained in his house much longer. So on a fair Sunday the next week I hid an axe in my dress. He came into the gallery late that morning. I waited for the blow I knew would come. When it fell I turned away from him, pulled out the axe, and chopped him to the neck bone. Three strokes.”

Mariota was staring at her, her mouth agape.

Margery smiled at the other woman. “I tell you my story not to inspire
your pity, Mariota, nor to spark your outrage. Consider it, rather, a warning, to you and to your son. I will do anything to protect what is my own. My body, my dignity. My name.
Anything.
You are comprehending my words, Mariota?”

Mariota nodded, the fright apparent in her widened eyes.

“Your husband has recently died. You have a young son with you as your burden and your responsibility. Yet think what awaits you back home. The mill, the river, a grown son to manage things in this hour of sorrow.”

She reached over to place a hand on the other woman’s arm. “It would be a far better thing, would it not, to return to your home rather than continue on this pilgrimage to the remotest end of England? The road is perilous enough with a good man by your side. Now you have but a weak little boy as your sole companion. So go south, Mariota. Buy a Mass for your husband at your parish. Extol his dying bravery to your neighbors. See that the mill is passed on to your elder son without incident, and that your younger son is provided for. Give a thought to your daughter’s betrothal.”

Margery sat straight, taking her hand away. “St. Cuthbert was renowned for his patience, you know. His bones can wait until another day for the arrival of good Mariota.”

THEY SPENT THAT NIGHT
in a pilgrims’ hamlet midway between York and Durham. In the morning Mariota announced to the company that she would be returning south, for London and Kent. Mother and son would remain where they were and join the next company traveling southward. There were some sad farewells though few tears as the company saddled and mounted.

Margery and Robert waited at the inn gate as the pilgrims departed the village for the way north. Once on the road they slowed their mounts until they rode at the rear of the company, and in the coming days they took what joy they could in the welcome reprieve from the widow’s presence. Yet their relief was mingled with a rising dread, neither of them knowing how many days and hours God would grant them to remain free.