The Invention of Fire (24 page)

We dismounted some distance from the manse itself, near a disused barn that fronted a two-story building of timber and Kentish stone. Heavy bars had been fixed across the windows on both floors, and the lower doors were secured with two knotted sliding beams at the top and bottom.

“The Portbridge gaol,” said Chaucer, indicating that we should tether our horses on a nearby fence. “We won’t be here long, though the lord and his lady have recently left for the autumn pilgrimage to Jerusalem, so we have the place largely to ourselves, aside from Tom Dallid there. The reeve.” He raised an arm to wave at a man approaching us slowly from the manor stables, limping badly with each step. Chaucer made the introductions; then Dallid stood and waited for us to begin, looking uncomfortable. The reeve had troughed his head, judging from the dripping hair and beard. Bloodshot eyes, ale breath, and he was clothed in the distinctive Kentish jet, with a square-cut cotte over loosely fitted hose dyed a uniform black.

“Dallid manages the manor farms for Portbridge,” Chaucer explained. “He also serves as keeper of this gaol, which we use for those accused awaiting delivery to the general eyre. Most of them stay locked up here for many weeks until the judge arrives.”

“Or many months, aye,” said Dallid. “This last lot? Most of them’d
been within since June or thereabouts. Whole summer in m’lord’s sweetest hole.” He cackled.

“And how many prisoners were confined here as of four weeks ago?” Chaucer looked at me as he asked the question.

The reeve pursed his lips, raised his chin to look at the sky. “Eighteen, it was.”

“Who were they?” I asked Chaucer. “Horse thieves, highwaymen?”

“A potent stew of felons and general misdoers,” he answered. “Five were apprehended poaching in the king’s forests. Robert Faulk, one of the fugitives, was among their number, from all the way toward Canterbury, hauled up here awaiting delivery to King’s Bench. Four were from a company of highwaymen who waylaid a shipment of silks from Dover. Then two horse thieves, two cattle rustlers . . . I’m forgetting now. Two of the men had raped a neighbor’s daughter, and the rest were within for various felonies.”

“Eighteen men, then, were being kept in this gaol,” I said.

“Seventeen men and one woman.”

I finally understood. I looked from Chaucer to Dallid. “The woman, then, was—”

“Margery Peveril,” said Dallid. “And a wretched wretch she was after a few weeks in the cellar.”

“You kept her in the
cellar
? Whyever would you do that, no matter her alleged crime?”

Dallid bit his lip. “It was stay down the cellar or go abed in a prisonhouse a’ rough men, and all the foul dalliance and swyving that would lead to. You ask me? It was a
gift
to the lady to stow her down there with the rats and such.”

“A gift,” I said, squatting to peer through the bars into the structure’s cellar. The space beneath the stone building was frightfully low, barely high enough for a full-grown man to crawl about like a dog. Even from where I hunched it stank. In the faint light from the cellar window on the other side I could see a spread of clutter in the middle of the area: a thin straw pallet, a jumble of filthy-looking blankets, a bucket for her waste. All of it surrounded a thick post to which Margery Peveril had apparently been chained. My gut heaved.

“That Peveril, she liked to act the beneficent,” said Dallid to my back. “But she was a murderer, she was, thick and through.”

“And a sow, to judge by your treatment of her.”

“Least you won’t find my sows axing their masters, nor their hogs,” said the reeve with a strong note of righteousness. “But Dame Margery Peveril? Chopped her own lord husband through to the neck bone. One, two, three strokes it was, and a gush of blood wide and deep as the Darent. I seen them take the rushes out off the floor after they put his body in the cart. Had to peel ’em off for the stick. Looked like a fellow was dragging a halved mutton across the manor yard to the drive, smearin’ the master a Portbridge’s very life on the grasses and stones. So—treat Dame Margery Peveril like a dog? Suppose I did, and it was a sight more than she deserved.”

He looked about to stalk off until Chaucer placed a calming hand on his arm. “There, there, my good Dallid. My friend here is a Southwark man. He has little moral sense about such things. He intended no offense. Did you, John?” He widened his eyes at me.

“I did not,” I said, catching myself and giving the reeve a slight nod. “And my apologies if such an offense was caused. The circumstances . . .”

“Course,” he said curtly. “Now, Master Chaucer told me you’d have questions for me?”

“I do,” I said, eager to get to it. “You said many of the prisoners were here since the summer, and that they were within until four weeks ago.”

“Aye.”

“They are no longer in this gaol?”

“They are not.”

“Where are they now?”

“I’ve no knowing as to that.”

“Where were they taken initially, then?”

“Sire?”

“Where were they taken after their removal from Portbridge? Were they sent to Dartford? Or to another manor gaol?”

He shrugged, his eyes shifting. “Don’t know where they went then, don’t know where they are now.”

“Eighteen prisoners awaiting delivery and eyre under your watchful eye, and you have no sense where they went, where they are now?”

“No, sire.”

“Whyever not?”

“Didn’t ask.”

“Why not?”

“Weren’t the sort to take questions, not from a reeve, leastwise.”

“Who moved them then?”

A slight hesitation. “Some men.”

“How many?”

“Five—no, six.”

“Six men, then, moved your eighteen prisoners out?”

“Aye,” he said. His eyes shifted right. “Maybe eight.”

“Did you know the men?”

“Not by sight nor name.”

“Did they wear badges?”

“That they did.”

“Of what livery?”

Silence.

“Whose men were they, Dallid?” The question we had been leading up to, the question I assumed Chaucer had brought me here to ask. “Whose men removed your eighteen prisoners?”

I handed him a few pennies. He looked down at the coins, then up at Chaucer, who gave him a sober nod.

“They were the duke’s men.”

A dull ache began to form at the base of my skull. “Which duke?”

He looked again at Chaucer. Another nod from my friend.

Dallid exhaled. “Gloucester,” he said softly.

“Woodstock?” I said.

“Aye.”

“Thomas of Woodstock empties a manor gaol in Kent? Under whose warrant?”

Dallid shrugged, almost sadly, I thought. I looked at Chaucer. “Geoffrey?”

“Gloucester holds great sway here and in the rest of Kent, John.
Emptying a remote country gaol such as this one would have been an easy matter for the duke.”

“But to what end?”

Chaucer’s mouth was set in an unbent line. He turned to Dallid. “I thank you, Tom. You have been most helpful.”

The reeve’s nod this time was sullen, scowlish. As we retrieved our horses and mounted, I watched Dallid slink off toward the manor house, his back hunched over a secret he likely regretted sharing—and, I suspected, others he had yet to tell.

We made it quickly up to the main road, where Chaucer turned us west, toward Dartford.

“You think these missing prisoners answer to the privy corpses?”

“I do,” he said.

“Eighteen prisoners in a Portbridge gaol, less our two fugitives, and sixteen bodies in the London ditches. You don’t believe this is a coincidence?”

“I know it is not, John.”

“You’ll share your reasoning and proof with me?”

“I shall, within the hour.”

“Yet why has Dallid cooperated with you, Geoffrey? Isn’t he in fear of Woodstock, as much as anyone else in these hundreds?”

Chaucer leaned over in his saddle. “I have sliced a leaf from your quire, John,” he said. “Our friend Tom Dallid is a debtor of the highest order, with well over ten pounds owed to taverners and tinkers and grocers throughout this part of Kent. And debtors, as we know, make the poorest and most incautious thieves. He has been stealing from his lord for years to pay his creditors, and though he fears the wrath of Gloucester more sharply, he fears the sword of his lord more frequently.”

“Though his lord is on pilgrimage,” I pointed out, concerned about Chaucer’s looseness. “You trust his tongue?”

“I am a king’s justice of the peace, John. I hardly fear the petty resentments of a country reeve.”

His words struck me then as haughty and lax. To trade in sworn secrets, to barter with lies and threats, to buy and sell the best information
while knowing its quality and heft: my business is a demanding craft, with little room for the inexperienced or naïve. It requires as much skill and discernment as the delicate embroidery on an archbishop’s cope or the patient smithing of a great sword. To see Chaucer employing it with such lightness was worrying.

The middle of the afternoon, a lowering sun. We had ridden the half of an hour or so from Portbridge manor back roughly to the east, with turns at two crossings, and now reached the top of a narrow wooded valley, a shallow cleft between two rows of hills several miles south of Greenwich. We descended to the point where the road started to skirt the edge of the forest.

Chaucer reined in and dismounted. “The woods this way are thick. We’ll leave these fellows here.”

We tied our horses to some low-hanging branches and entered the woods. The trees around us were alive with the clicking whispers of jays, the impatient whirrings of warblers unhappy with intruders. There was no path leading us from the road, though I noticed some broken branches low along our way. Chaucer seemed to know where he was going, however. The growing dimness as the woods thickened made our progress slow, and we were reaching that time of day when my eyes were at their weakest, now further beset by obtrusive stands of saplings and shrubs, the deceptive play of shadow and light on flashing leaves.

Several minutes of walking brought us to the edge of a clearing, an oval perhaps forty feet by sixty and free of trees, whether by the hand of Lady Nature or man I could not tell. The angle of the sun against the highest limbs cast the area in a single broad shadow waffled in yellow and orange, like some fiery shield borne down from the sky. At the center of the glade were the remains of a large fire, which, judging by the number and spread of the charred logs, must have been quite something to see. The air was soft, only the slightest remaining tinge of ash carried on a gentle breeze that rustled the leaves overhead.

“There,” said Chaucer, pointing across the clearing to the western edge.

I looked and saw nothing.

“Follow me,” he said.

We walked over to the far trees. He reached for the branch of an oak, fingered an incision in the bark. “Just there.”

I leaned forward, taking the wood in hand. “A cut branch?”

“Not cut,” he said, walking farther along the edge of the clearing. “Here is another, and another. John, look at this trunk.”

I joined him before another oak, a wide-trunked variety free of branches along its first ten feet. Two holes a forearm’s length apart marred the grooved bark, the outer layer of which had splintered angrily along the edges of the impressions. Something about the holes looked familiar. I stuck my finger within up to the second knuckle. My fingertip touched what felt like metal. I had to be sure.

“Give me your knife,” I said. Chaucer removed a long knife from his side, holding the blade and presenting the handle. The ivory butt was cool against my palm, the grip firm as I dug and hacked away at the lower hole in the tree. Eventually I had widened it sufficiently to insert the tip of the knife beneath the object lodged at the bottom. A push, a pull, and the object loosened, spilling out of the hole and into my palm.

Chaucer looked down at it. “A lead ball?”

“Iron shot,” I said, confirming this gingerly with my teeth. The ball had retained its shape even in the hardness of the wood. It was identical in every respect—width, weight, and composition—to the balls Thomas Baker had removed from the corpses at St. Bartholomew’s.

“There are more holes here and here.” Chaucer had left my side to continue his inspection. Despite the gloom it was easy to make out the condition of the forest in that quadrant. The whole western edge of the clearing was savaged as if by some high-grazing herd of pigs, feeding on branches instead of roots. It looked like someone had attacked the trees with a dull axe.

“What’s this?” he said, and stepped into the trees. I lost sight of him for a moment. There was a grunt, and he emerged with an arrow in his grasp. He inspected it, then handed it to me. Not a rustic hunter’s shaft but a missile worthy of the royal armory, perfectly fletched, its length smoothed and polished to an impossible gleam. The arrow
was tipped in a beveled triangle of iron. I brushed the blade edge along the pad of my thumb. The arrow could have peeled a grape.

“There’s another on the next tree,” said Chaucer, pointing beneath the limbs. “And a bolt run in alongside it, as if someone were targeting the trunk.”

I looked at the opposite end of the clearing, to the east. The trees there were similarly ravaged, and I suspected we would find arrows, bolts, and balls lodged in their trunks and limbs if we cared to look. A glade in the woods, elms, ash, and oaks wounded to east and west—I looked down. In our initial inspection I had failed to notice the ghoulish signs that now shouted to me from the forest floor. This Kentish ground had been touched by little rain for some weeks. Perhaps it was the work of my imagination or a trick of my poor eyes, but on certain leaves there appeared faint traces of dried blood, congealed in the October chill, the marks of heels and heads where bodies had been dragged from the area.

I stepped to the edge of the clearing, my eyes now taking unaccustomed strength from the particular combination of sunlight and dark. At one of end of the clearing there was a stump, chest high and as wide around as a fry pan. The ash tree had been recently felled, I saw as I walked over to it, the wood still green and rough-hewn from the strikes of an axe. Most of the trunk lay on the forest floor, leaving only a stump in the ground. Its uneven top was scorched in a rough line dividing the middle. I rubbed my fingers along the blackened surface and brought them to my nose. Sulfur.