The Invention of Fire (36 page)

I
T WAS INTO A CLEAR,
chill morning that I stole out of the priory and made for the Thames, with Will Cooper leading the way to look out for watchers. We left the walls of St. Mary Overey not by my own door but through the postern on the river side, our destination not the foot of the bridge but the wharfage, first along the walls of the bishop of Winchester’s great palace, then past the mill and down Rose Alley. When we reached the river’s edge I remained behind one of the old scalding sheds while Will coined me a float. He went to the waterfront and whistled for a wherry standing out forty feet. It approached, the waterman boarding his sculls as the craft bumped against the dock post. Still hooded, I slipped out and clambered over the low bow. The craft shoved off as Will backed away into the cluster of buildings along the shore.

The rower was a man I knew from many crossings over the years. “Just up from the Fleet, if you will, Sanders,” I said, pushing back the hood.

“Aye, Master Gower. The fosses there?”

“That will do.”

“Ever tell you of my brother Edward lived over that way?”

“No, you never did, Sanders.”

“A wheelwright, and never a rounder wheel did a man make.” He went on about his brother the wheelwright, and in great detail, as we
crossed the river: the carving, the tooling and lathing, the sanding and painting. One of those watermen who likes to jaw his way from bank to bank. We made small gossip as I feigned interest in everything the fellow had to say. It was an oddly welcome relief from the growing peril around me.

When we bumped up below the Fleet spill I paid the boatman, then walked along the ditch and up toward Smithfield. I took a winding route through the upper end of the market and skirted the ditch all the way to Bishopsgate, at this time of day the busiest portal into the city. Once through the walls I dodged west, avoiding Cornhill and the Mercery to approach the Guildhall from the north. From the yard I made for one of the detached buildings spaced along the western side of the hall.

The structure had been shuttered against the cold, though the central room was well lit, with numerous lamps and candles clustered to illuminate the work of the men within. The Guildhall scriveners were a quiet and industrious bunch, hived like bees in their cells at triangular writing desks positioned along the chamber’s spine. There were nine scribes working at any one time, with three to a desk, each given particular tasks identifiable in several cases from the documents stacked or set to their side: court rolls, summonses, account books, writs of various kinds. At the middle desk, his back to the doorway, sat the man I needed.

“Pinkhurst,” I said.

The scrivener looked up and half turned. When he saw me his pied face arranged itself into an arch and lofty regard. He had been expecting me.

“What is it, Gower?” he said. The others paid us little mind.

“May I speak to you, just out here?”

He looked down at his work, loudly sighed, then stood and shuffled out the door.

“What is it you want?” said Pinkhurst when we had reached the corner of the building. “As Master Chaucer knows, I’ve enormous amounts of work to do. Commissions from poets must be the lowest of my priorities for the time being.”

One poet excepted, he didn’t need to say. From everything Chaucer had told me, Pinkhurst’s copying for him in recent years had been prompt and reliable, with little delay caused by the press of work for the city, crown, and guilds. Rather young, yet with a steady hand at the quill, the scrivener had already established himself as an invaluable scribal asset for numerous parties, keeping accounts for the mercers’ guild and the wool custom while working doggedly for the Guildhall. Though written on parchment, however, what I hoped to ply from the scrivener that morning had nothing to do with poetry.

“I am here not for your services, Pinkhurst, but for your safety.”

“As I told you, I am quite busy,” he said, ignoring my darker implication. “Exton’s swearing-in is tomorrow. We have numerous writs of appointment to complete, notarizations to effect, and the courts will begin again in two days’ time.”

“This matter concerns our lesser king.” I tilted my head toward the Guildhall, knowing he would gather my meaning. According to Chaucer, Pinkhurst secretly despised Brembre, a hatred I hoped to exploit.

He sucked in a cheek. “What is it, then?”

“I think you know.”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “Do I?”

“A record of interrogation,” I said. “A swerver was questioned here at the Guildhall. You were the scribe.”

The lighter patches in his face paled further. “That record is not here, whatever Chaucer may have told you.”

“Chaucer knows nothing about this, nor shall he.”

“Nor do I. The record was seized.”

I gave him a long and deliberate stare. “I hadn’t believed it of you, Pinkhurst. That you would jeopardize Lady Idonia in such a callous way.”

He frowned, his lower lip jutting from his mouth. “What does this have to do with
her
?”

I told him what I knew about the record’s fate once it had left his hands. The mayor’s chest, Idonia’s letter, its interception by an agent of the duke. He looked at me, disbelieving. “So Lady Idonia used—”

“Yes,” I said. I watched his young eyes crinkle in indignation. “Your admiration for the mayor’s wife is well known, Adam.”

Pinkhurst squirmed.

“I hope you will reconsider what you have told me. The record has come into Gloucester’s hands since the killings. How I don’t know, but the fact is, the duke now possesses immensely damaging information on the mayor, and has been using it to twist him in the wind. If he makes it public, Brembre will suffer a great fall, and even greater embarrassment.” I waited, then, “As will Lady Idonia.”

Pinkhurst’s eyes were now directed at the pavers between the two buildings. “I have heard whisperings of Idonia’s discontent these last weeks,” he said. “You can see it on her fair face, in her manner when she walks to and from her house. I cannot imagine what she is enduring. The blame, the fury, the humiliation . . .”

“And they will only increase should Gloucester use what he has, Adam.”

“Yes,” said Pinkhurst absently.

I let him think about it, then spoke to him gently. “You made a copy, didn’t you?” A guess, but a sound one based on what I knew of the man’s habits.

He closed his eyes.

“You still have it?” I said, confident in the answer. When he shook his head my heart dropped like a stone; then he blurted out, “I kept the original.”

“What’s that?”

“After the interrogation of Rykener I made a copy of the confession,” he said, now in a low and urgent whisper. “The sheriffs were terrified of what Sir Nick would do if he got wind of it, so they asked me to make an additional copy for safekeeping, while giving the original to the keeper of the rolls for inscription. Instead I switched them. The original has her—his—the swerver’s mark on it, as well as the seal of the mayor’s own recorder. I made a rough copy of the confession, without the documentary trappings of signs and seals.
That
copy is the one the mayor seized when he stormed into the recorder’s office and took it from my hand.”

“So that copy is the record that Gloucester has used to force Brembre’s hand.”

He nodded tightly, a somewhat proud smile above his ugly. “The copy was good enough to deceive the duke, it seems. Yet nothing would be easier to forge. The original was in my own hand, after all.”

“You must surrender it to me, Adam.”

He shook his head. “If it gets out that I gave the mayor a falsified copy rather than the sealed original—”

“Why then you will be the mayor’s savior.” His eyes widened in bewilderment. “Think of it. Who had the foresight to make a feigned copy and preserve the damning original safe from harm? Why, Adam Pinkhurst. And all along the mayor has been terrified that Gloucester would use the original record to question his natural manhood before the eyes of London.”

His lips tightened.

“I will pay you any price you name, Pinkhurst. For the record and your discretion.”

“My
discretion
cannot be bought, Gower.” He looked offended. “It comes with the service I provide, as much a part of my copying as the gall scratched from my pen. What I copy I keep close, and always have.”

“Then consider this a payment for a very fine piece of parchment in your possession.”

Pinkhurst looked at the heavy purse dangling from my fingers. He took it, weighed it in his hand, then turned silently for the scriveners’ building. Before long he came out, a document in his hand. He put it in mine. I put on my spectacles and examined the interrogation. The recorder’s seal, the swerver’s mark, the names and stations of other magnates identified by Eleanor Rykener as her jakes. I flipped it. The overleaf was blank. No letter from Idonia.

Meanwhile Pinkhurst had fingered open the purse. He spilled the silver and gold out on his palm, mouthing the count.

“Is the mayor within?”

“Exton?” he said, not looking up.

“Brembre.”

“Cleaning out, I believe. Reluctantly.”

“Very well.”

Without a glance at me he turned and disappeared back inside. I stood in the shade and looked down at the document in my hand, still weighing its fate. A threat or a gift? It would serve well as either one, and given the names it contained I could harvest sweet-smelling buds for years from its florid branches. Yet in this case, I decided in the end, prudence must win out over ambition. Though Brembre would no longer be mayor two days from now, he would remain a man of immense power, and as I have learned through long experience, the fruit of favors owed will often taste sweeter than the ripest threats.

Court was off at the Guildhall and had been for two weeks, with all the attention of official London on the doings of Parliament up the river. It took whispers, coins, and several guards to get from the yard into the northwest corner of the building, where the mayor held private audiences behind two movable partitions that would be stacked along the walls on court days.

He was standing when I stepped within the chamber, looking down at a mess of documents spread before him on a trestle table. A fire crackled in the hearth behind him. From midway up the opposite wall rose a high window, once clear and clean, looking out on the yard, yet which Brembre had replaced with an unglazed substitute to ensure privacy but maintain light. Now the opaque surface created a dappled sheen along the floor, and a gleam of suspicion in the mayor’s eyes when he glanced briefly at me before returning to his work.

“Gower,” he said.

“Lord Mayor.”

“It’s a busy day at the Guildhall. Exton’s swearing-in is tomorrow, his Riding the day following. What brings you here?”

Watching him closely, I said, “The confession of a swerver.”

His hands froze. His face remained undisturbed. “What confession is that?”

“This one.” I held out the document.

His head turned slowly toward me. “But—but I took—”

“You seized a copy, Lord Mayor, made by Adam Pinkhurst. This
is the original, affixed with your recorder’s seal. Your wife’s letter does not appear on the back.”

He stood and walked around the table, approaching me with an attitude stiff and almost submissive. The mayor took the document, set it on the table, and pulled a candle near. He murmured his way through the opening clauses, then scanned down the document and fingered the seal. I heard the brush of his fingertip over the swerver’s mark at the base of the parchment. He turned to the overleaf and stood staring at the blank surface.

“Gloucester,” he said softly.

“Possesses a good forgery, with Idonia’s letter on the overleaf,” I said. “And perhaps knows it, but also knows
you
believe he has the original.” A pause. “You are free of the duke’s web, Lord Mayor.”

As I watched Brembre absorb this change I saw his shoulders relax, though cautiously, as if the most crushing part of a great weight had been lifted from his back yet might return at any moment. He looked askance at me. “Surely you didn’t come here to peddle this sheepskin, Gower. I have a dozen armed men just outside this chamber. You haven’t even a sword at your side.”

“It is a gift, Lord Mayor.”

Brembre barked a laugh. “A gift? John Gower doesn’t give gifts. That would ruin his reputation! Why, in addition to me this confession names two lords, a bishop, and a prior among this swerver’s arse-swyving jakes. Why are you not using it against them, and against me?”

“You cannot use it either, Sir Nicholas, for obvious reasons.”

A weak, grudging smile.

“The confession is not given freely,” I said. “It comes with a request.”

“What do you want?”

“Several things. First, protection.”

“Protection. From what?”

“From Gloucester and his men,” I said. “One of the duke’s agents in Calais attempted to murder me days ago.”

“Protection, then,” Brembre said, taking this in. “Guards at the priory?”

“Two for now, until this is resolved,” I said. “And the same to accompany me around the city. Not as grand as your entourage, though enough to keep me alive for another fortnight.”

“Very well.” He flicked a hand. “I will have it done this hour.”

“And you will now move on Gloucester?”

“A mayor doesn’t simply move on a duke, Gower,” Brembre mused, a hand rubbing at his chin. “Gloucester is a powerful force. His allies have played this Parliament like a chessboard, and even freed from this . . . encumbrance, I can see no easy means to bag the man for these killings.”

“There may be a way,” I said.

“Oh?”

“The duke has committed treason, Lord Mayor. He is selling gunpowder to the Duke of Burgundy.”

His hand ceased its motion. “Quite a serious accusation, Gower. What proof do you have?”

I pulled out the heraldic bend that Simon had given me in Calais and placed it on the table. “This fell from the arm of one of Gloucester’s men on the quay at Dunkirk. It appears the duke has been selling saltpetre to the French along the Flemish coast, with the aid of William Snell, king’s armorer. I believe as well that Snell has commissioned a new sort of handgonne with the same purpose in mind. The duke’s men are responsible for another massacre in the Pale. Desurennes, a market town. They used small guns.” I told him what I had learned from Simon about the gunpowder smuggling, and what the girl Iseult had said to me in Desurennes.
Remember the swans.