The Invention of Fire (27 page)

“I am.”

Chaucer tried to convince me to return to Greenwich with him, claiming a distracting night of parsing poetry would do our spirits some good. I declined, with more than a little regret. I would always envy Chaucer his too-easy ability to separate the various parts of his life one from the other, as if his moral soul were a dovecote, divided into dozens of chambers each designated for a distinct fraction of his attention and care. One for Parliament, one for poetry, one for murder; one for his wife, one for his mistresses, another, increasingly small, it seemed to me that year, for his friendship with John Gower. Chaucer’s attention would flit happily from chamber to chamber, never allowing those darker places to impinge on his enjoyment of the lighter, while I always found myself consumed by the matters most before me at any given time. And in that moment, as we separated on the Kentish road, there were three: an emptied gaol, a clearing in the woods, the beguiling whispers of a duke.

Y
OU MUST RECOGNIZE,
Mistress Stone, that this affair puts the parish in a passingly awkward position.”

“Yes, Father,” Hawisia said piously, wanting very much to smack him.

“Requests for sanctuary are quite unusual, and must be dealt with delicately.”

“Yes, Father.”

“I shall require some immediate information from you, then, and from Stephen.”

“Yes, Father.”

Hawisia Stone and the parson of All Hallows Staining had just stepped onto the church’s west porch, where they spoke below the loud bustle of Fenchurch Street. They had left Stephen within, huddled glumly in a side chapel at the end of the south aisle.

It was late morning on the day after their midnight arrival at All Hallows. The priest, though young and newly settled into his living at Staining, had not been pleased to be roused in the middle of the night by a pregnant widow of the parish and a criminal claiming sanctuary, and had taken Stephen in only after extracting her promise to return the following morning to give a fuller explanation. Hawisia had none of the old parish obligations to draw on with this fresh-faced sprite.
Why, it was Master Stone who’d cast the very bell thirty feet above their heads, and as a worthy gift to the parish. A gift that should have purchased some forbearance on the parson’s part, or at least some measure of kindness from a tender of the Staining flock.

“Of all the churches in London only St. Martin-le-Grand exercises the privilege of permanent sanctuary, Mistress Stone,” he went on in his priestly tone. “Now that Stephen is here he cannot leave or he will be apprehended. There are already watchmen along Fenchurch Street, working in shifts to ensure he remains within our walls. He will be taken the moment he steps out.”

Hawisia had seen them for herself now that the news had spread. Two men of the parish she knew by name, pacing importantly around the church and its small yard, rubbing their hands, eyes slitting through the gates, watching for Stephen Marsh to break the bounds. “Yet surely he is right to claim sanctuary here,” she said.

The priest shifted on his feet. “At All Hallows we are bound by agreements in force between the church and the realm. They are as unshakable as Jerusalem and Athens. A night on the chapel floor is one matter. But there are steps that must be followed before I can officially admit him to sanctuary and allow him to stay.”

“What are these steps?”

“First Stephen must confess his sin. What is the nature of his crime?”

She looked him straight on. “He has killed.”

“Here in London?”

“Up below Ware. It was an accident, he says. I believe him.”

“Your belief carries no weight. Stephen must confess this deed for himself, whatever way the worldly law takes him. Only then may I declare him truly in my protection as minister of this parish, and only with approval of the bishop of London.”

“How long may he remain within these walls, Father?”

He raised his chin, looked down at hers. “The right of sanctuary is neither inviolable nor eternal. Once he confesses Stephen has forty days to surrender himself to a trial. Otherwise he must abjure the
realm, though that option will be at the discretion of the justices, not the church. The king’s coroner will make a visitation soon to gather the facts as Stephen remembers them.”

“I understand, Father.”

He licked his reddened lips. “And then there is the subject of payment. Sanctuary does not come free.” His voice lowered and sober, as if to signal the matter of most importance in this affair.

Hawisia dug a finger into her purse, masking her disgust. “I’ll have one of our ’prentices bringing him his food, so no need there. What’s it to sleep on a stone chapel floor? Twopence for the first week, shall we call it?”

“Well.” He coughed. “He will hardly be sleeping on stone, mistress. We have a feather-and-straw pallet in there, newly stuffed. Some woolen blankets for warmth. He may want to keep a candle alight in the chapel if he likes. Tallow hardly bubbles from a spring, now, does it? There is also my meeting with the bishop to consider, and I shall be speaking with the alderman of the ward tomorrow. A parson’s time is freely given, Mistress Stone, though not so freely compensated. Stephen Marsh’s presence here has increased our burden tenfold. So let us call it a shilling for the week, shall we?”

His tongue, lizardlike, flickered from his mouth again to moisten his thin lips.

“A shilling, for a cloth stuffed with straw?”

“And feathers and down, Mistress Stone. It is a reasonable sum, though perhaps I can be content with fifteen pennies.”

“Very well,” said Hawisia, handing over the appropriate number of coins. When this business was over she would have to see about getting the parson removed. A wealthy widow of the parish with a full tithe could bend ears aplenty among the wealthier guildsmen, and more than once she’d seen a parish priest get a shoe at his arse for angering the wardens. Content with fifteen pennies indeed.

“We should go inside,” said the parson. “I will hear Stephen’s confession, then move this forward. I cannot do more for him, Mistress Stone.”

She smiled sweetly. “I understand, Father, and I am grateful for the assistance you have rendered.”

They went back into the church and approached the side chapel, where Stephen sat against the north wall. Painted above him was a vivid scene of Mary visiting Elizabeth, each of them reaching out to touch the other’s belly, neither as large as Hawisia’s prominent mound.

She listened as the priest repeated to Stephen the terms of sanctuary as he had explained them to her. The two men went through the chancel screen toward the altar, where Stephen would give his confession, with the priest as witness. Contrite murmurs, the priest’s questions, a careless death carelessly absolved. Stephen remained within as the priest returned to the bottom of the nave.

“May I speak to him before I depart, Father?” said Hawisia, craning to look through the door of the chancel screen.

The priest shook his head. “I have instructed him to pray. He is to remain in the chapel by the altar for the better part of an hour.” He put a finger to his lip. “As you are here, we should speak about the baptism once your child comes forth. Have you purchased a chrisom cloth, or considered your churching offering to the parish?”

Hawisia, having had enough of the parson’s worldly wants, turned for the doors. “Time for that after the birth, Father,” she said wearily. “I shall return in the days ahead, and my ’prentice with Stephen’s meals.”

Hawisia stood on the west porch, gathering her breath and her wits, breath and wits she’d sorely need in the weeks to come. There were metals to purchase, bells to sell, a foundry to run, a child to birth. She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer. “Jesu, forsake me not. Bind me to thee with sweetest knot. Give me of thy sweet love. I ask thee high above.” She looked out beyond the gate to the city teeming with life, and started the slow walk back to the foundry.

O
N LONDON BRIDGE,
just past the midpoint between the Southwark side and the St. Magnus green at the city foot, there is a narrow gap between houses that affords an expansive vista down over the river toward Westminster. In years past, before the slow darkening of my sight, I would sit in that spot for hours on end, surveying from that high perch the spires and towers lined up across the sky like sentinels at a wall. All Hallows, St. Mary Somerset, St. Peter, St. Paul’s, once sharply defined, now little more than remembered outlines in a hazy distance.

That day after my return from Greenwich I had come to this spit of stone in hopes that this broad view down upon the city might help me loosen the threads all tangled in my mind. Why bring the sixteen bodies to London, let alone cast them in the privy channel? Why not bury or burn them out in Kent, where no one would ever find them? As Chaucer had warned me early on, someone seemed to want the victims to be found, perhaps even identified, and all fingers pointed to Gloucester. If the reeve was to be believed, the duke’s men had taken the eighteen prisoners from the Portbridge gaol to meet their fate in the woods. It must have been his men as well who brought the sixteen dead to London to toss in a foul grave. Yet what was to be gained by such a violent and risky act? What did the king’s youngest uncle hope it would achieve?

There was also the practicality of it, the daunting mechanics of such an endeavor. What would it require to bring so many bodies from a wood in Kent to a London privy channel—and to accomplish it all secretly, without word getting out and abroad? First a group of tight-lipped men, all implicated in the massacre and invested in its concealment. Two or three wagons in Kent to haul the corpses along the road from the forest to the river, the procession guarded and masked as official business, and likely ending up on the bank somewhere well west of Greenwich, given the distance and the tides. Next a wherry or barge up the Thames, with the water bailiffs paid off to look away—little difficulty there. Then, that same night, a crew to transport the corpses through the narrow city streets and up to the privy at Cornhill. Several armed men keeping watch in case of discovery. Also a good-sized cart—and thus a carter.

I heard once again the words of Piers Goodman.
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.

The murdered carter, a snag I hadn’t yet tugged. My connections at the coroner’s office, once deep and strong, were tenuous at the moment due to the death the year before of Nicholas Symkok, the subcoroner. While Symkok had sung in my choir for many years, I had nothing on the man newly installed in his position, so our transactions were straight purchases of fact and rumor. A quarter noble for an inquest report, a few pennies for a name.

I called at the coroner’s chambers early that afternoon and told the subcoroner what I was after. He remembered the carter’s case, and once my coins were in his hand he found me the entry in the coroner’s roll for the date in question.
On Wednesday the even of St. Edwin’s Day after Michaelmas, Jankyn Bray, a carter of Carter’s Way in the parish of St. Nicholas Acon, lay dead of a death other than his rightful death in the channel of Walbrook below Cornhill, having been discovered there by Alan Pike, gongfarmer of the parish of St. Mary Aldermary.
The entry went on to recount the summoning of the jury and the determination of cause of death: to all appearances, a knife across the throat and multiple stabs to the chest and head. No witnesses, no suspects.

Upon reaching the edge of Langbourn ward I asked a few shopkeepers for directions to Carter’s Way, a twig of an alley off St. Nicholas Street. At the open end of the alley four carters were gathered, waiting for any small job and the pennies it would bring. Stones, kegs, coals, corpses: a carter will haul anything for anyone if the right coin kisses his palm.

“Load for you, sire?”

“Faggots or coals for your hearth ’n’ home, good master?”

“A carter a’ courage, a carter a’ care, a carter a’ can-do, a carter a carter a carter for you, sire.”

A more irreverent one was leaning beneath the archway. “Transport to Tyburn and the gallows tree, sire? When your time comes you call on your Robert Bray here, sire. He’ll make your last ride comfortable as can be.”

His companions shared a forced laugh. Grubby, brash, sour of breath, Bray was a wiry young man with a defiant air about him, and it was clear from the distance they kept that the others were uncomfortable in his presence.

“Robert Bray,” I said. “You are Jankyn Bray’s son?”

He showed me an arrogant jaw. “Was, more like. Suspect you know that already.”

“I do,” I said. “God give your father rest.”

“In an eternal bed of dung,” muttered one of the others.

Some rough laughs, and Bray turned on him. “Shut your maw, Thomas Daws, or I’ll nail it shut to your coillons.”

The offender rolled his eyes and said nothing as his fellows closed around him, all of them ignoring Bray. I showed him a coin and gestured for him to follow me into the alley. He hesitated for a moment, then shrugged gamely and came along. We stood just within the archway from Fenchurch Street. The tenements here were built out and nearly touching, with only a sliver of sky visible between the upper stories. Broken wheels, cracked axles, and unused sideboards lay stacked against the outer walls on either side, the whole area a busy testament to the meager trade of lading.

“Your father died last week,” I said.

“Aye,” said Bray.

“Thrown in the privy channel.”

“Happy reminder, I thank you for’t.”

“A victim of murder.”

“Why, you must be a master logicker up Oxford with that mind a’ yours, sire.”

“The coroner’s inquest yielded no suspects.”

“Not so I heard neither. My poor old father killed dead but not a man killed him, so the sheriffs tell us.”

“Do you have any notion who might have wished him harm?”

“That’s what the sheriffs’ men asked, aye. No thoughts on the matter, myself.”

“What about his work?”

“What about it?”

“Did he talk to you about a job along the wharf? Something recent, and under his cap?”

Bray shrugged. “Never talked to me ’bout any of his haulings.”

“This would have been a night job.”

He started to shrug again, but his shoulders froze halfway down. The corners of his eyes lifted just slightly. “Night cartin’, you say.”

“In the weeks before his murder. Did he say anything to you about a special commission, or a peculiar request?”

“Only carters out at night be the soilers, moving shit about and out the walls,” he mused, avoiding my question. “But the gongfarmers hire that out, don’t they?”

“So he spoke to you about this job?”

He looked at my hand. I palmed him a few pennies and he tossed his chin, indicating a narrow house halfway down the alley. “Didn’t speak a whip to me. But I heard him talk about it with her.”

“Who?”

“His smooth coney back in there. Lower floor.”

“Your mother?”

He laughed roughly, raising his voice. “Not mine. Dead, like him. That one’s just a piece a queynt. She’ll be my own soon enough, you’ll see.”

“Soon enough, he says,” joked one of the others at the loud boast.

“Oh, we’ll all see that day right soon, Robert Bray,” said a second. “Shapely gallant such as yourself, got the slit linin’ up out to Mile End.”

Bray shot them a snarl. I left him standing there, spitting at his fellows.

The house he had pointed out to me was indistinguishable from the others along the alley. They all seemed to hang there, dilapidated and frail, as if they might collapse at any moment and leave the passageway a pile of broken boards and rubble. A deep step down into a drainage ditch and I was at the door to Jankyn Bray’s house. Outside it stood his horsecart, the two wheels positioned at the edge of a ramp to allow access to street level. Deep, long, well maintained, easily capable of carrying four or five men, whether living or dead. Three loads, then, perhaps four. His horse would be stabled somewhere nearby.

The door sat half open. I looked within. A woman, quite young and pretty, sat on a bench, nursing an infant at her breast. Her eyes were closed, her face wan and troubled even at rest. Her head was leaning against a wooden beam to her side. I ducked out and waited until I heard the child start to protest the end of its feeding, then stepped back to the doorway.

“Mistress?”

Her eyes remained closed despite the infant’s mewl, her head still angled against the beam.

“Your pardon, mistress.”

At last one eye fluttered open, then the second. She straightened herself and came to her feet. The baby slapped at her cheek. “Yessire?” she said, looking stunned at the appearance of a gentleman at the door of her squalid home.

“I have come to ask you about Jankyn Bray.”

Her eyes darkened. “Won’t find him abouts here, sire. Gone to his grave, my Jankyn. Left me with this joy.” She heaved the infant to her shoulder, stroked its narrow back.

“I know, and I am very sorry, Mistress—what is your name?”

“Elizabeth Saddler.”

“Mistress Saddler. Jankyn was a carter.”

“Yes, sire.”

“And well respected in the trade, from what I have gathered.”

“He was that. Always the first asked for along Carter’s Alley, by lord and tradesman alike.”

“Was he known as a discreet man?”

“Sire?”

“Did he keep mum about his business, not given to gossip like the young fellows up at the end of the alley?”

“None a that for my Jankyn,” she said. “The closest carter you could find in the ward, and that’s sure. Pious, too, always visiting that hermit, spilling his sins and sads.”

“Did he speak to you about any of his more . . . unpleasant commissions?”

“Unpleasant, sire?”

“This would have been a job at the river. A night haul up to Cornhill, near the crossing at the Poultry.”

She turned away, hiding her face, a palm going to the infant’s head.

I looked around the humble dwelling. “You have little to lose, Mistress Saddler, and a new mouth to feed, now without Jankyn’s income. Let me help you.”

I jangled my purse. Her hand traveled down the infant’s back, her strokes growing shorter, hurried.

“All I need is a name, or even a location,” I said. “Did he tell you which quay he hauled from, or its rough location?” The Thames waterfront with its many docks resembled the gap-toothed mouths of a hundred old crones. A barge of bodies could have been unloaded anywhere.

“Two half nobles and a quarter as well, Mistress Saddler. You and your child may sup on this bounty for a month and more.”

Her eyes widened at the sum. She considered it. “They’ll come for me then, won’t they,” she said, bouncing her infant. “And this joy. Toss him in the dung like his father on account of I opened my mouth to th’ likes of you.”

“They may,” I allowed. “Though I am as tight-lipped as your Jankyn.
The only secrets I breathe are those that need breathing. This one does not. Your information will be well protected, Mistress Saddler.”

She sighed. “Jankyn knew it was rotten, that job.”

I waited, let her draw out the thought.

“Old friend of his slips up along Carter’s Way, lipping about a job the next night. ‘D’you want it, Bray? Yours for the having if y’do, Bray, and it’s three shil for you, Bray.’ Jankyn took it without a thought, though there was something in the matter of it that smelled overfoul, so he said.”

“What was that?”

“The coin, s’what it was. A half noble, for one night’s work? Fivepence be more like what Jankyn’d expect for such a job.”

“Did this friend tell him what he would be hauling from the river?”

“No.”

“Did Jankyn suspect what it might be, have any sense at all?”

She set the infant on a small table, the only flat surface in the room. With a rough and oversized blanket she bound its quivering limbs, like a cook bunning sausage. She looked up at me as she completed the task. “What was it he carried that night, good master? Do you know?”

I averted my eyes from the snug young life on the table. “Dead men,” I said. “Cartloads of death.”

She nodded, as if my ponderous response made perfect sense. I set several coins down next to the child.

“The loading was to be at Lyman’s wharf,” she said, picking up the money rather than the infant. “John Lyman’s the friend of Jankyn’s who set ’im up with the job. He’d boat the load from wherever it come from, and Jankyn was to haul it up Cornhill.”

“Who is John Lyman?”

“Fisher, eeler. Has a dock under the bridge, down from the water gates. Those bad steps bankside of the fishwharf. You know the spot?”

“I do,” I said, and there was good logic in it. The men who met the carter had chosen to put in along a particularly chaotic stretch of the wharfage, amidst a messy jumble of warehouses, misshapen docks,
and random piers just before the bridge. The site also made sense for its distance from the Long Dropper. The men bearing the bodies would have received their cartloads right below Thames Street, which they could then have taken quickly west to the Dowgate channel, then north to the privy along Walbrook Street.

After leaving the young mother I made the short walk to the bankside. There were three separate fishing docks at this wharf leading out from the bank, where fishermen busily sorted their catches as the gulls hovered and cawed for scraps. Fishmongers picked through the catch as a crew of boys emptied nets onto the long cleaning tables set back from the river. There the work of scaling and gutting for bakers and lords’ stewards was done, the offal raked and swept into the river.

I approached the nearest cleaner, a stout, bare-chested fellow, his bronzed skin and breeches slimed with the day’s catch, hands on hips as he took a brief rest.

“Where might I find Lyman’s wharf?” I asked him. He turned on me, his beard glistening and matted with sweat, the whole of him freshly pungent with his work.

“John Lyman?”