The Invention of Fire (43 page)

S
TEPHEN MARSH CAME IN
from the foundry yard, stamping the cold from his feet and peeling off his gloves. He walked through to the display room, where Hawisia was speaking with a grey friar. They paid Stephen no mind as he edged along the side of the room toward the hearth.

“How long must the brethren wait, Mistress Stone?” the Franciscan was asking.

“Third week of Advent, could be,” Hawisia said in a low voice, so as not to wake the babe. “We are backed up near to Mile End with all the orders, and down a metalman or two. Even Greyfriars can’t expect a quicker bell, I fear.”

At her foot, near the hearth, sat the low cradle Stephen had crafted some weeks ago. It was designed with a small nook for Hawisia’s shoe, allowing her to rock it easily while standing or sitting nearby. At the moment her right toes were wedged beneath one of the rockers, and as she spoke to the friar she pushed up gently to move the cradle forth and back, forth and back in a soothing motion. Stephen felt a nip of annoyance that Hawisia was failing to take advantage of the nook, though the infant seemed calm. He would bring it up later, perhaps.

“A long wait, Mistress Stone,” said the friar.

To Stephen the cradle looked a bit close to the fire. Hawisia moved
her foot away as he approached. He inched the crib back a few nudges, then squatted and peered down into the wooden box.

“Aye, but can’t be helped, not if you want a Stone’s bell.”

The infant was swaddled tight, perfectly still.

The friar sighed. “The doctors of the
studium
are indifferent to the music of bells, though the warden is quite particular. We shall wait patiently on you, Mistress Stone.”

Stephen reached for the babe’s nose, the finest pearl.

“You will not regret it,” Hawisia said. She concluded her business with the friar, who left the shop on a rush of cold and clatter. Hawisia went out front to take in the foundry sign. Once back inside she barred the door, closing the shop snugly on the ending day. Stephen sensed her looking at him, that new fondness in her gaze. He felt it, too, and the warmth of her trust.

“I will watch her for a time, mistress.”

“Very well,” said Hawisia. “I’ll see about the coals.”

When Hawisia was gone he loosened the swaddling around the infant’s body, allowing her hands and arms to escape. They no longer performed those strange jerking motions they’d made in his early weeks when she was loose like this. Her movements had become more deliberate, still excitable but also artful in that curious way her hands swam through the air, grasped for the world and its shapes.

Her name was Mary, after the Blessed Virgin. Mary Stone, quite a name to live with, though Stephen had quickly come to cherish it in the babe’s first moon. He ran a finger along one of Mary’s forearms, no longer than the head of a smithing hammer, or the rod of a short awl. The babe’s fingers grasped the smallest finger of Stephen’s left hand. A powerful grip for such a tiny creature, a soft coil of muscle, bone, and fat. He stroked the closed fingers. An infant is a perfect machine, like a woman’s birthing parts, he thought, remembering Hawisia’s labor. Knuckles. Joints. Skin. Ears impossibly, horrendously small. Lips and a mouth and ways to make the strangest of noises.

Stephen settled into Robert Stone’s old chair by the hearth and lifted little Mary out of her crib, his finger still in the babe’s fist.
She would not let Stephen go, though he tickled her under the arm, stroked her skin. She burbled, gripped harder. Stephen tried to pull his finger from the babe’s hand and still she would not release him. Stephen laughed, trying again, yet Mary was fiercely strong, wasn’t she, a human pincer. She raised Stephen’s finger to her mouth and gummed contentedly, her small eyes fixed on his own.

Remarkable, Stephen thought with an almost painful burst of love and pride, and the strong tug of Mary Stone’s grip aroused his imagination to a sudden and unprompted vision. A new device, fitted for these wee hands. His eyes widened at the absurdity of it. Ludicrous, unthinkable. Yet he had thought it, after all, and as it worked on his mind he saw no reason such a thing could not be done, and in this very shop. He had made a hundred guns by his own hands and orders, after all, only to destroy them all in the end with a small plug of lead in the chamber. Who was he to deny further such inventions to the frail and defenseless? Why, the king’s armorer himself had said it, by God’s body and bread.
The handgonne is the ultimate weapon of the weak
.

Stephen Marsh brought his nose to the top of Mary’s little head, taking in her pure scent. His eyes closed, and he saw a child, a girl of eleven or twelve years. She was somewhere along the bounds of a city or a keep. She stood on a wall or peered through a slit. All her mind was on defending what she had, the people she loved, the place she lived, her virtue and the very sanctity of her flesh, and in her silken arms she cradled the smallest gun the world would ever know.

This book has its origins in a few surprising sentences from T. F. Tout’s classic work
Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England
concerning the existence of “handguns” in the Tower of London armory. Since coming across Tout’s account of the royal armorers and their
handgonnes
some years ago I have been curious about the earliest emergence of handheld gunpowder weapons before 1400, as well as the technological culture that, for better or worse, first developed them through a long process of trial and error. This was a culture evoked by Geoffrey Chaucer in his
The House of Fame
, which describes a blast speeding out of a trumpet “As swift as pelet out of gonne, / Whan fyr is in the poudre ronne.” The simultaneous allure and horror provoked by the new guns is apparent in the writings of contemporary chroniclers, who have given us sporadic accounts of their use among both military and civilian forces, including a group of rebels who assaulted the manor of Huntercombe in 1375 with an array of weapons that included portable “gonnes.”

Research for this novel has immersed me in the depthless fields of military history and the history of technology, particularly the metal industries and the crafts of smithing and founding, which were quite often located in the same shops in the fourteenth century. The works that I have found particularly indispensable for the details of trade, manufacture, and innovation include Kelly DeVries,
Medieval Military
Technology
; Robert Douglas Smith and Kelly DeVries,
The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy
; and Howard L. Blackmore’s indispensable guide,
Gunmakers of London 1350–1850
. I am particularly indebted to Lois Schwoerer, who shared with me the manuscript of her forthcoming book
Gun Culture in Early Modern England
; and to Sean McLachlan, author of
Medieval Handgonnes
and one of the world’s leading authorities on early gunpowder weapons, for his last-minute help.

Many thanks are owed also to the community of artisans, gunsmiths, and reenactors who have revolutionized our understanding of the early development of gunpowder weapons in recent years through their use of original materials and medieval technology. Their work continues to correct the erroneous but durable assumption that medieval
handgonnes
were primarily instruments of “shock and awe,” used to sow terror rather than gain military advantage. Working from the very few early descriptions and illustrations of these weapons, they have challenged historians’ understanding of the velocity and lethality of projectiles, the potential swiftness of load speeds between firings, the comparative strengths of smithing and founding, the accuracy of targeting, and other technological dimensions that the scant historical documentation alone cannot reveal. The Swiss craftsman Ulrich Bletscher, for example, has shown that it is possible to penetrate steel plate thicker than most surviving medieval armor with a ball shot from a forged iron gun using homemade powder. Multiple experiments with replicas of the Tannenberg
handgonne
(which is cast of bronze and likely shot iron or lead balls) have similarly confirmed the relative power of such gunpowder weapons. I have seen the hands-on work of several of these artisans and spoken, Skyped, or e-mailed with a number of others (including a craftsman known to me only as “Teleoceras”), and I am deeply grateful for their time and care in answering my many questions despite their suspicion of my motives.

The tenth year of King Richard II’s reign began in June 1386, and the autumn that followed marked the first great crisis of his kingship. Before and during the Wonderful Parliament of 1386, Richard and his closest advisers confronted fierce opposition from the appellant
lords over war levies, the ethical conduct of the crown, and the king’s blatant favoritism toward certain of his cronies. The most exhaustive treatment of this specific moment in the history of royal Parliamentary relations is John S. Roskell’s
The Impeachment of Michael de la Pole
, which I have relied upon (along with the Rolls of Parliament) for a number of details in fleshing out the political moment. King Richard’s emerging tyranny in these years was evident in any number of ways, including his self-regard; during this part of his reign Richard began insisting on being addressed as “Your Majesty,” as the historian Nigel Saul has shown (thus correcting those who still insist that this form of royal address originated in the Tudor period). Meanwhile the country was facing the threat of a massive invasion from Sluys involving thousands of French and Burgundian ships, a threat ably documented in the third volume of Jonathan Sumption’s definitive history of the Hundred Years War. If the medieval chroniclers are to be believed, Londoners reacted to the threat of invasion with widespread horror and hard work, clearing out the areas immediately inside and outside the walls and visiting untold destruction on the built perimeter of the city in an effort to prepare it for defense.

The Hundred Years War was characterized on all sides by numerous incidents of wanton and large-scale violence against civilian populations. The account of the massacre at Desurennes imagined in
The Invention of Fire
, though fictional, has been influenced in part by a 1382 incident at the Bridge at Comines recounted by the chronicler Froissart. David Green’s revisionist account
The Hundred Years War: A People’s History
emphasizes the brutality of the era’s military cultures, suggesting that there would have been nothing unusual in this period about a massacre of dissident civilians for military purposes, whether strategic or technological. Sir John Hawkwood, the expatriate English mercenary, had recently led the butchery of nearly the entire population of the town of Cesena in the Romagna, an incident in which thousands of women and children met their deaths by sword over a three-day period.

Readers are enouraged to consult the historical note at the end
of
A Burnable Book
to learn of the other kinds of resources I have drawn upon for the details of daily life, language, and so on. For
The Invention of Fire
I have turned to a variety of additional primary and secondary sources, such as Marcellus Laroon’s engravings and drawings of London’s criers and hawkers, which provided several of the street cries imagined in the city markets in London and York (one irresistible example of which I also anachronistically lifted from a play by Ben Jonson); Sheila Sweetinburgh’s volume
Later Medieval Kent, 1220–1540
, which helped me plot the incidents and locations in that shire; Geoffrey Parnell’s extensive work on the Tower of London, including its menagerie, armory, stables, and medieval fabric and geography; and recent work on the office of the medieval coroner, especially Sara M. Butler’s extraordinary new book
Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England
, which is likely to inspire a new generation of historical crime novelists in the years ahead. As R. F. Hunnisett once put it, in medieval England “coroners almost invariably refused to hold inquests on dead bodies until they had been bribed to do so”—hyperbole, perhaps, but welcome hyperbole for the novelist. On a lighter note, I am indebted to Richard Newhauser for an insightful chat over lunch in Charlottesville about John Gower’s “sweet tooth”—a phrase Gower invented, it turns out, and that gave me a reflective sentence in chapter one. The character of Hawisia Stone was inspired by Johanna Hill, inheritor and operator of a foundry in the parish of St. Botolph following her husband’s death. The known details of her biography, as recovered by Caroline Barron in a chapter of
Medieval London Widows
, are remarkable testimony to the variety of economic and social experiences characterizing women’s lives in the late medieval city.

The story told here has also led me to explore the official role of Geoffrey Chaucer in the system of shire justice in Kent. This stretch of the poet’s life has often been imagined as a period of rural semi-retirement, as Chaucer left London to take up residence in Greenwich. Yet the office of justice of the peace, which Chaucer had recently assumed, entailed any number of duties relating to the administration
of law: settling disputes, taking indictments, even assisting in the apprehension of violent criminals and their conveyance to gaol. With all due respect to his skeptical friend Gower, the notion of Geoffrey Chaucer’s aiding in a murder investigation and pursuing escaped fugitives during these years is more plausible than fanciful.

In addition to those named above, numerous friends and colleagues have given aid and advice in various forms. Many thanks are owed to a number of fellow writers I have had the pleasure of getting to know (or know better) over the last several years, especially Jane Alison, Nancy Bilyeau, Geraldine Brooks, John Casey, Jenny Davidson, Sarah J. Henry, Katherine Howe, Hugh Howey, Mary Beth Keane, David Liss, Jennifer McMahon, Jenny Milchman, Caroline Preston, Virginia Pye, David Robbins, Leslie Silbert, Art Taylor, Rupert Thomson, Christopher Tilghman, and Simon Toyne. I have benefited greatly from their generous willingness to share their time, wisdom, and experience. Others have provided support with invitations for readings, panels, and various events that have allowed me to introduce my work to new and diverse audiences. Here thanks are owed to E. A. Aymer, Katie Brokaw, Scott Bruce, Holly Crocker, Barbara Ferrara, Andrea Grossman, Jonathan Hsy, Matthew Irvin, Eric Jager, Wan-Chuan Kao, Michael Kindness, Ann Kingman, Lana Krumwiede, Rosemarie McGerr, Michael McKeon, Ingrid Nelson, Myra Seaman, Wayne Terwilliger, and Bob Yeager.

My students at the University of Virginia teach me time and again the power of historical fiction in shaping our comprehension of and empathy with the past and its human actors. I learned an enormous amount in this regard from the thousands of students around the world enrolled in “Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction,” a massive open online course I taught in the autumn of 2013; I thank them deeply for their attention and enthusiasm. Once again I am grateful to the editorial staffs at William Morrow (New York) and HarperCollins (London). Rachel Kahan and Julia Wisdom are brilliant and tireless editors who have championed my writing while helping me understand the craft and profession of commercial fiction.
Many thanks as well to Trish Daly, Jaime Frost, Tavia Kowalchuk, Ashley Marudas, Rachel Meyers, Anne O’Brien, Aja Pollock, Kelly Rudolph, and Kate Stephenson. Only my extraordinary agent, Helen Heller, knows the depth and extent of her contributions to this novel.

As always, my family has provided all the support, love, and humor a writer could want. Anna Brickhouse remains my best reader and critic; my mother and mother-in-law both read the manuscript with their typical precision and care; and my father has always been a source of unconditional kindness and inspiring capability.
The Invention of Fire
is dedicated to Elizabeth and Robert Brickhouse, loving parents-in-law (and, to others, loving parents, siblings, grandparents, friends) whose values, warmth, wisdom, and courage I have come to treasure over many years.