Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Copyright © Bruce Holsinger 2015

Bruce Holsinger asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Map of London & Southwark © Nicolette Caven 2015

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Lettering by Stephen Raw

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This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007493364

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Version 2015-05-29

Dedication

For Betsy and Bob

And in the autumn of that year, in the village of Desurennes, a company came from the woods with small guns of iron borne in their hands, and laid great waste to the market, to the wares and those who sold them along the walls, and in the eyes of God made wondrous calamity with fire and shot.

Le Troisième Chronique de Calais, entry for year 1386

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

A Note to the Reader

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Two

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Epilogue

Keep Reading…

Historical Note and Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Bruce Holsinger

About the Publisher

A NOTE TO THE READER

The word handgun enters the English language in the final decades of the fourteenth century. The compound noun first appears in an inventory record from the Tower of London, occurring at the end of the phrase ‘iiij canones parue de cupro vocate handgonnes’ (‘four small copper cannon, called handgonnes’). These medieval handgonnes were metal tubes packed with gunpowder and fired with a burning coal or cord, a far cry from the sophisticated pistols and rifles found in modern arsenals. Yet across Europe, these decades witnessed unprecedented innovation and experimentation in the development of small arms, as gunpowder weapons grew increasingly portable, efficient, and thus terrifying. The emerging use of handgonnes on the battlefields of Europe, as well as their appearance in civilian contexts, marked a crucial technological shift in the development of weaponry – as well as a subtle but profound transformation in the long history of human atrocity.

Prologue

The water seeped past, groping for the dead.

It was early on an Ember Saturday, and low down along the deepest channel in London Alan Pike braced for a fall. He sucked a shallow breath as beside him his son moved through the devilish swill. The boy’s arms were thin as sticks but lifted his full spade with a ready effort, even a kind of cheer. Good worker, young Tom, a half knob shy of fourteen, reliable, strong, uncomplaining, despite all a gongfarmer has to moan about – and that’s a heavy lot it is, down here in the privy channels, moving the foul of thousands, helping the city streams breathe easy. Tom filled another bucket and hefted it to one of the older boys to haul above for the dungcart. From there it would be wheeled outside the walls, likely to feed some bishop’s roses.

Night soil, the mayor’s men primly called it, though it had commoner names. Dung and gong, fex and flux, turd and purge and shit. Alan Pike and his crew, they called it hard work and wages.

Dark work, mostly, as London don’t like its underbelly ripped open to the sun, so here he was with his fellows, a full four hours after the curfew bell, working in the calm quiet a few leaps down from the loudest, busiest crossing in London. The junction of Broad Street, Cornhill and the Poultry, the stocks market, and everything else. The brassy navel of the city by day; a squalid gut in the night.

Alan squinted through the pitch, peering past his son down the jagged line of buildings spanning this length of the Walbrook. Twenty privies, by his estimate, most attached to private houses and tenements hulked up over the open stream, but two of the highest seats had been built to the common good for use by all. The Long Dropper, this great institution was called, and a farthing a squeeze the custom, the coins collected by a lame beggar enjoying the city’s modest gesture of charity toward its most wretched.

At night, though, no one was posted at the hanging doors up top. The parish was at a hush. The only sounds to be heard were the shallow breathing of his son, a faint snore from one of the houses above, the scurryings and chewings of the brook rats all round.

‘Any closer, Father?’ Tom, always respectful even when tired out, though Alan could tell he was ready to leave off. It had already been a long night.

‘Let us have a look,’ said Alan, lengthening his back, hearing a happy pop. He legged it through the muck and mud to the middle of the stream. Earlier they had rigged up a row of lanterns at either end of the stretch to light the crew’s work, show them what they were meddling with. In the past hour the stream had loosened up fairly well at the north end, but the water was still damming farther in, and as he squatted and peered through the stink he had to shift both ways to spy the three orbs of pale light at the far end of the clogged channel.

He shook his head, sucked a lip.

A major blockage, this one.

Something big. Something stuck. The Walbrook’s moderate flow should have pushed most anything down to the Thames. Not this lot, whatever it was. A pile of rotten lumber, could be. Or a horse, lamed on the street and shoved over the bank to struggle and drown, like that old mare they’d roped out of the Fleet Ditch last month. Whatever this bulk turned out to be, the Guildhall would hear about it, that was certain.

Alan turned to his crew. ‘Fetch me one of those lanterns there.’ The young man behind Tom repeated the command to another fellow closer to the lamp string, who trudged back and removed one of the oil lamps dangling from the line. When Alan had it in his grip he held the light before him, up and to the side, and moved ahead.

One step, another. This section of the stream was almost impassable. Up to his hips now. The thick, nearly immovable sludge clung to his legs like a dozen rutting dogs. He had to will his body to move forward, every step a victory.

He was taking a risk, he knew that, and for what?

A gongfarmer’s pay was good enough, sure and certain, but one false step and he could be sucked right under, or release a pocket of devil’s air that would ignite and turn him into one of these lanterns, sizzling hair and all. Alan knew more than a few gongers who’d fallen to their deaths or close to it in these narrow depths. Why just upstream from here old Purvis crashed through the seat of a public latrine like the one over Alan’s head right now, poor gonger was rat food by the time they found him, a chewed mess of—

Then he saw it. A hand, pale and alone in the lamplight, streaked with brown and standing out against the solid mound of dung behind it.

‘By Judas!’ Alan Pike swore, and would have fallen backwards had the thick flow not braced him.

‘Father?’ Tom’s worried voice came from behind.

Alan looked again. The hand was not severed, as he’d first feared. No, the hand was attached to an arm, and the arm was attached to another arm, looked like, and that arm why that arm was sprouting from a leg – no no no, from a head, but that was impossible so then what in—

It bloomed in Alan Pike then, just what he was seeing. This was no pile of gong blocking the Walbrook, nor no horse neither. Why, this was—

‘Father, what is it then?’

Tom, beside him now, peering ahead with that boy’s curiosity he had about most everything in the world. Alan heaved an arm, wanting to cover his son’s eyes against the devilish sight, but Tom pushed it aside and grasped the lamp and Alan let it go, a slow, reluctant loosing as the oily handle slipped from his grasp and then he felt Tom’s smaller, smoother hand against his own. Slick clasp of love, last touch of innocence.

They stared together, father and son, at this mound of ruined men. No words could come.

PART ONE

ONE

What use is a blind man in the face of the world’s calamities? Turn to Scripture and you will quickly learn that the blind are Pharisees and fools, sorcerers and unbelievers. The Syrian army blinded at the behest of Elijah (2 Kings 16). The blind and the lame banished from David’s house (2 Samuel 5). Horses smitten with blindness (Zachariah 12). More often the blind are mere figures of speech, emblems of ignorance and lack of faith. The blind leading the blind (Matthew 15:14). The eyes of the blind, opened through the grace of the Lord (Psalm 146:8). The hand of the Lord rests upon thee, and thou shalt be blinded (Acts 13:11). Our proverbs, too, reek with the faults of the blind. Blind as a mole. Oh how blind are the counsels of the wicked! Man is ever blind to his own faults, but fox-quick at perceiving those of others.

Blind blinded blinding blindness blind. What did the men who wrote such things know of blindness? What can I know? For I am not blind, not just yet, though I am well on my way. If the final dark of unsight is a dungeon in a dale I am halfway down the hill, my steps toward that lasting shadow lengthening with each passing week even as my soul shrinks against that fuller affliction to come.

Yet this creeping blindness itself is not the worst of it. Far worse is the swelling of desire. As my sight wanes my lust for the visible world surges, a boiling pot just before the water is cast to the dirt. Dusted arcs of sunlight in the vaults of St Paul’s, crimson slick of a spring lamb’s offal puddled on the wharf, fine-etched ivory of a young nun’s face, prickle of stars splayed on the night. Colour, form, symmetry, beauty, radiance, glow. All fading now, like the half-remembered faces of the departed: my sisters, my children, my well-beloved wife. All soon enough gone, this sweet sweet world of sight.

There are some small compensations. Sin is to human nature what blindness is to the eye, the blessed St Augustine writes, and as the light dims, as crisp lines blur, I find I am discovering a renewed fondness for the weighty sensuality of sin and its vehicles. The caterpillar fuzz of parchment on the thumb. A thin knife slipped beneath the wax. The gentle pip of a broken seal. A man’s secrets opened to my nose, whole worlds of sin spread out like so many blooming flowers in a field, scent so heavy you can chew it. I have a sweet tooth for vice, and it sharpens with age.

No pity for me, then. Save your compassion and your prayers for the starving, the maimed, the murdered. They need them far more than I do, and in the weeks that concern me here pity was in especially short supply. It was instead malevolence that overflowed the city’s casks that autumn, treachery that stalked labourer and lord alike up the alleys, along the walls, through the selds of Cheapside and the churchyards of Cornhill. And if the blind must founder in the face of monstrosity, perhaps a man clinging to his last glimpses of the visible world may prove its most discerning foe.

Sitting before me that September morning was my dead wife’s father. A mess of a man, skin a waxy pale, his clothing as unkempt as his accounting. Ambrose Birch: a weeping miser, and a waste of fine teeth.

‘For— for her sake, John.’ He thumbed his moistening eyes and looked up into the timbers, darkened with years of smoke from an unruly hearth. My reading room, a low, close space lit only by a narrow slip of light from a glazed window onto the priory yard.

‘Her sake,’ I said. His daughter dead for nearly two years, and still the dull pieties. I stared through him, this cruellest of fathers, cruel in ways even I had never learned, despite all that Sarah once told me. Sarah, a soul always ready to give more than necessary. She had absolved him long before her death, and wished me to do the same.

Something I had noticed previously but never put into words was that peculiar way Birch had with his chin, rather a large one considering his smallness of face. When he said my name his chin bobbed, always twice, and his voice lowered and rasped, as if throwing out each John while a hoof pressed his throat.

‘How did you get it?’ Birch whispered. ‘I cannot – who sold it to you, John?’

His fortune and reputation hanging by this thread on my desk, and he is curious about a sale.

‘That should be your last concern, Ambrose,’ I gently told him. ‘The prickly question is, who will John Gower sell it to?’

‘How dare you threaten me, you milk-blood coward!’ His lips quivered, the upper one raised in a weak snarl. ‘Here you sit in your little hole, bent over your inky creations, your twisted mind working itself in knots to spit out more of this—what?’ He turned to look at the orderly rows and stacks of quires and books around the room, many of them lined with my own verse. Back at me.

‘She pitied you, John.’

I scoffed.

‘Ah, but it’s true,’ he said, warming to it. ‘She talked about it with her mother. What a burden it was getting to be, your trade in threats and little scandals. How it pushed away your friends and relations, reduced everything to the latest gossip or bribe. How sad it was to see you waste your life, your mind, your spirit.’ He paused, then, with meaning, ‘Your eyes.’

I flinched, blinked against the blur.

‘Just as I thought. You believe a husband’s growing blindness can be hidden from a wife, a wife as perceptive as our late Sarah? And do you think for a moment, John, that your position will not weaken once news of this affliction gets out? Imagine a blind man trying to peddle secrets at the Guildhall or Westminster. They’ll all be slipping you snipped nobles, laughing in your face, cheering behind your back. The mighty John Gower, lord of extraction, brought down by the most just act of God imaginable. A spy who cannot see, a writer who cannot read.’

I lifted a corner of the document. ‘I have no difficulty reading this, Birch.’

With a scowl he said, ‘For now, perhaps. For now. But in future you would be advised to remember that I have as much information on you as you have on me. Of course, I am a temperate man.’ He jerked at his coat, remembering why he was there. ‘Given the – the more immediate matter before us, I suppose there is room for a negotiation. But don’t expect to come back to me with additional demands, John. A man can only last so long doing what you do.’

We settled on three pounds. A minor fortune to Ambrose Birch, if a mouse’s meal to his son-in-law. The money, of course, was beside the point. It was the information that bore the value. Each new fragment of knowledge a seed, to be sown in London’s verdant soil and spring yet another flower for my use.

I gave him the usual warnings. I’ve made arrangements with a clerk across the river … In the event of my passing … And should there be another incident … Birch, still ignorant, left the house through the priory yard, the clever forgery he had just purchased curled in his moistened palm.

Will Cooper, my servant, bobbed in the doorway. Kind-faced, impossibly thin but well jowled, with the crinkled eyes of the ageing man he was. ‘Master Gower?’

‘Yes, Will?’

‘Boy for you, sir. From the Guildhall.’

Behind him stood a liveried page from the mayor’s retinue. I gestured him in. ‘Speak,’ I said.

‘I come from Master Ralph Strode, good sir,’ the boy said stiffly. ‘Master Strode kindly requests the presence of Master John Gower at Master John Gower’s earliest.’

‘The Guildhall then?’ Ralph Strode had recently stepped down from his long-time position as the city’s common serjeant, though the mayor had arranged an annuity to retain him for less formal duties.

‘Nay, sir. St Bart’s Smithfield.’

‘St Bart’s?’ I frowned at him, already dreading it. ‘Why would Ralph want me to meet him in Smithfield?’ Located outside the walls, the hospital at St Bartholomew tended to the poorest of the city’s souls, its precincts a stew of livestock markets and old slaughterbarns, many of them abandoned since the pestilence. Not the sort of place to which Strode would normally summon a friend.

‘Don’t know, sir,’ said the boy with a little shrug. ‘Myself, I came across from Basinghall Street, as Master Strode was leaving for St Bart’s.’

‘Very well.’ I dismissed him with a coin. Will gave me an inquisitive look as the boy left. My turn to shrug.

I had eaten little that morning so stood in the kitchen as Bet Cooper, Will’s wife, young and plump to his old and lean, bustled about preparing me a plate of greens with cut lamb. A few swallows of cider and my stomach was content. At Winchester’s wharf I boarded a wherry for the London bankside below Ludgate at the mouth of the Fleet. A moderate walk from the quay took me across Fleet Street then up along the ditch to the hospital.

St Bartholomew’s, though an Augustinian house like St Mary Overey, rarely merited a visit given the unpleasant location, easily avoidable on a ride from the city walls to Westminster. The hospital precinct comprised three buildings, a lesser chapel and greater church as well as the hospital itself, branched from the chapel along a low cloister. An approach from the south brought visitors to the lesser church first, which I reached as the St Bart’s bell tolled for Sext. I circled around the south porch toward the hospital gates, where the porter shared his suspicions about my business. They were softened with a few groats.

The churchyard, rutted and pocked, made a skewed shape of drying mud, tufted grass, and leaning stone, all centred on the larger church within the hospital grounds. Not a single shrub or tree interrupted the morbid rubble. Shallow burials were always a problem at St Bart’s. Carrion birds hooking along, small demons feeding on the dead. Though the air was dry the soil was moist and the earth churned underfoot, alive with the small gluttonies of worms.

Three men stood along the south wall gazing down into a wide trench. Ralph Strode, the widest, raised his head and turned to me as I walked across, his prominent jowls swaying beneath a nose broken years before in an Oxford brawl, and never entirely healed. His eyes, sombre and heavy, were coloured a deep amber pouched within folds of rheumy skin.

‘Gower,’ he said.

I opened my mouth to speak, closed it against a gathering stench, and then I saw the dead. A line of corpses, arrayed in the trench like fish on an earl’s platter. All were men, all were stripped bare, only loose braies or rags wrapping their middles. Their skin was flecked with what looked like mud but smelled like shit, and gouged with wounds large and small. At least five of them bore circular marks around their necks in dull red; from hanging, I guessed. My eyes moved slowly over the bodies as I counted. Eight, twelve – sixteen of them, their rough shrouds still open, waiting for a last blessing and sprinkle from a priest.

‘Who are they?’ I asked Strode.

The silence lengthened. I stood there, the rot mingling with the heavy buzz of feeding flies. Finally I looked up.

‘We don’t know.’ Strode watched for my reaction.

‘You don’t know?’

‘Not a soul on the inquest jury recognized a one of them.’

‘How can sixteen men die without being known, whether by name or occupation?’

‘Or rank, or ward, or parish,’ said Strode. He raised his big hands, spread his arms. ‘We simply don’t know.’

‘Where were they found?’

‘In the Walbrook, down from the stocks at Cornhill. Beneath that public privy there.’

‘The Long Dropper,’ I said. Board seats, half a door, a deep and teeming ditch. ‘And the first finders?’

‘A gongfarmer and his son. Their crew were clearing out the privy ditches. Two nights ago this was, and the bodies were carted here this morning by the coroner’s men. Before first light, naturally.’

My gaze went back to the bodies. ‘An accident of some kind? Perhaps a bridge collapse? But surely I would have heard about such a thing.’

‘Nothing passes you by, does it, Gower?’

Strode’s tone was needlessly sharp, and when I looked over at him I could see the strain these deaths were placing on the man. He blew out a heavy sigh. ‘It was murder, John. Murder en masse. These men met violent deaths somewhere, then they were disposed of in a privy ditch. I have never seen the like.’

‘The coroner?’

‘The inquest got us nowhere. Sixteen men, dead of a death other than their natural deaths, but no one can say of what sort. They certainly weren’t slashed or beaten.’

‘Nor hung by the neck,’ said the older of the two men standing behind us.

Strode turned quickly, as if noticing the pair for the first time, then signalled the man forward. ‘This is Thomas Baker and his apprentice,’ he said. ‘Baker is a master surgeon, trained in Bologna in all matter of medical arts, though now lending his services to the hospital here at St Bart’s. I have asked him to inspect the bodies of these poor men, see what we can learn.’

‘Learn about what?’ I said.

‘What killed them.’

Strode’s words hung in the air as I looked over Baker and the boy beside him. Though short and thin the surgeon stood straight, a wiry length of a man, hardened from the road and the demands of his craft. His apprentice was behind him, still and obedient.

‘Surely you’re not thinking of the Italian way,’ I said to Strode.

His jowls shook. ‘Even in this circumstance the bishop won’t hear of dissection. You know Braybrooke. His cant is all can’t. Were these sixteen corpses sixteen hundred we’d get no dispensation from the Bishop of London. Far be it from the church to sanction free inquiry, curiositas, genuine knowledge.’ A familiar treatise from Ralph Strode, a former schoolman at Oxford, and I would have smiled had the circumstances not been so grim. He looked at Baker. ‘Our surgeon here is more enlightened. One of these moderni, with ten brains’ worth of new ideas about medicine, astronomy, even music, I’ll be bound.’

‘What makes you believe these men weren’t hung?’ I asked the surgeon. ‘Those red circles around some of their necks? I would think the solution is apparent.’

Baker shook his head, unaffected by my confidence. ‘Those are rope burns, Master Gower, or so I believe, though inflicted after death, not before.’

‘How can you be sure?’

From a pouch at his side Baker removed a brick-sized bundle bound tightly in brushed leather. Unwrapping the suede, he took out a book that he opened to reveal page upon page of intricate drawings of the human form. Arms, legs, fingers, heads, whole torsos, the private parts of man and woman alike, with no regard for decency or discretion. Brains, breasts, organs, a twisted testicle, the interior of a bisected anus. The frankness and detail of the drawings stunned me, as I had never before seen such intimate renderings of the corporeal man.

Baker found the page he was looking for. Strode and I leaned in, rapt despite ourselves by the colourful intricacies of skin and gut.

‘The cheeks of a hanged man will go blue, you see.’ His finger traced delicately over the page, showing us the heads of four noosed corpses, the necks elongated and twisted at unlikely angles, eyes bulging, tongues and lips contorted into hideous grins, skin purpled into the shades of exotic birds. ‘I have seen this effect myself, many times. The blood rushes from the head, the veins burst, the aspect darkens. Leave them hanging long enough and they start to look like Ethiops, at least from the neck up. And there is more.’

He squatted over the pit, gesturing for us to join him. In his right hand Baker bore a narrow stick, which he used to pry open the left eye of the nearest victim. ‘Do you see?’

I looked at the man’s eyeball. ‘What is it I am to see?’ I said.

‘The iris is white,’ said Baker, reaching for the next man’s eyelid, this time with a tender finger. ‘As is this one. And this.’ He moved along the trench, pausing at each of the ring-necked victims to make sure we saw the whites of their eyes. ‘Yet the eyes of a hanged man go red with blood. See here.’ He fumbled with his book to show us another series of paintings a few pages on. Bulbous eyes spidered with red veins, like rivers and roads on a map of the world.

I glanced at Strode, unsure what to think of this man’s boldness with the ways of death.

‘In Bologna the tradition is more – more practical than our own,’ said the physician, noting our unease. ‘They slice, they cut, they boil and prove and test. They observe and they experiment, and they admit when they are wrong. Such has it been for many years, good gentles, since the time of Barbarossa. It’s really quite something and if you are interested in this line of inquiry I recommend the Anatomia of Mondino de’ Liuzzi, a surgical master at Bologna some years ago who was an adept of the blade, a man thoroughly committed to dissection and—’

‘Not hanged, then,’ I said, less impressed by the man’s eloquence than convinced by the soundness of his evidence. ‘So how, in your learned view, were these men killed?’

He smiled modestly, raised the second finger on his right hand, and reached for the chest of the nearest corpse. His fingertip found an indentation to the left of the victim’s heart, a mark I hadn’t noticed before. He gently pressed down, and soon his finger was buried up to the first knuckle.

A hole. ‘Stabbed?’ guessed Strode, probing with a stick at a larger, more ragged wound on the second man’s chest.

‘Run through with a short sword, I’d wager,’ I said, walking down the row of corpses and pausing at each one. All had holes at various places on their bodies: some in the chest, others in the stomach or neck, some of them a bit sloughy but not unusually ragged, though one poor fellow was missing half his face. Fragments of wood were lodged above his lips, like the splinters of a broken board.

‘Not a blade, I think,’ said Baker, his voice hollow and low. ‘These wounds are quite peculiar. Only once before have I seen anything like them.’ He looked up at Strode. ‘With your permission, Master Strode?’

Strode, after glancing back toward the church, gave him a swift nod. Baker moved to a position over the first corpse and flipped the man onto his front, exposing a narrow back thick with churchyard dirt. His apprentice handed him a skin of ale, which Baker used to wet a cloth pulled from his pocket. He washed the corpse’s back, smoothed his hand over the bare skin.

‘As I suspected,’ said Baker. ‘This one stayed inside,you see.’

‘What stayed inside?’ I said. ‘A bolt, perhaps, from a crossbow?’

Baker returned the corpse to its original position and held out a hand to his apprentice, who gave him what looked like a filleting knife of the sort you might see deployed by lines of fishermen casting off the Southwark bankside. With a series of expert movements, Baker sliced across the flesh surrounding the hole, widening it until the blade had penetrated several inches into the man’s innards.

Another raised hand. The apprentice took the knife and replaced it with a pair of tongs. Baker inserted them into the hole, widening the wound, harder work than it looked. An unpleasant suck of air, the clammy song of flesh giving way to the surgical tool, and my own guts heaved, but soon enough the tongs emerged clasping a spherical object about the diameter of a half noble. The apprentice took the tongs, then, at Baker’s direction, poured a short stream of ale over the ball. Baker put it between his front teeth and winced.

‘Not lead. Iron, dripped from a bloom into a mould. The Florentines have been casting iron balls like these for many years.’ He tossed the ball up to Strode, who caught it, inspected it for a moment, and handed it to me. I marvelled at the weight of the little thing: the size of a hazelnut, but as heavy as a lady’s girdle book. I had never seen anything quite like it, though I had a suspicion as to its nature and use. I handed it back to Baker.

Strode was signalling for the gravedigger, who left the churchyard to summon a priest.

‘And the others?’ I asked Baker.

‘At least one was killed with an arrow, that one there.’ He gestured to the third body along the line. ‘Half the shaft’s still in his neck. As for the rest, I am fairly confident in my suspicions, though I would have to perform a similar inspection on all these corpses to be sure.’ He came to his full height and used more of the ale to cleanse his hands. ‘I assume that will not be possible, Master Strode?’

Strode pushed out a wet lip. ‘Perhaps if the Bishop of London were abroad. Unfortunately Braybrooke’s lurking about Fulham, with no visitations in his immediate future.’

‘Very well,’ said Baker, and he watched with visible regret as a chantry priest arrived and started to mumble a cursory burial rite. The four of us made for the near chapel, keeping our voices low as Baker went over a few more observations gathered in the short window of time he had been at the grave. Some rat bites on the corpses but not many, and no great rot, suggesting the bodies had been in the sewer channel for no more than a day or two. I asked him about the wood splinters I had seen above the one man’s mouth.

‘Shield fragments, I would say,’ said Baker. ‘Carried there by the ball, and lodged in the skin around the point of penetration.’ We both knew, in that moment, what he was about to tell us, though neither of us could quite believe it. ‘These men have been shot, good masters, of that I am certain. Though not with an arrow, nor with a bolt.’

The surgeon turned fully to us, his face sombre. ‘These men were killed with hand cannon. Handgonnes, fired with powder, and delivering small iron shot.’

Handgonnes. A word new to me in that moment, though one that would shape and fill the weeks to come. I looked out over the graves pocking the St Bart’s churchyard, their inhabitants victims of pestilence, accident, hunger, and crime, yet despite their numberless fates it seemed that man was ever inventing new ways to die.

‘Why am I here, Ralph?’

‘Because you are you.’ Strode raised a tired smile, his face flush with the effort of our short but muddy trudge back to the hospital chapel, where he had left his horse. Over the last few months he had been walking with a bad limp, and now tended to go about the city streets mounted rather than on foot, like some grand knight. No injury that I knew of, merely the afflictions of age. I worried for him.

He adjusted the girth, tugged at the bridle. ‘And you know what you know, John. If you don’t know it, you know how to buy it, or wheedle it or connive it. Brembre is smashing body and bone at the Guildhall. I have never seen him angrier. He considers it an insult to his own person, that someone should do such a thing within the walls, leave so many corpses to stew and rot.’

Nicholas Brembre, grocer and tyrant, perhaps the most powerful mayor in London’s history. ‘And namelessly so,’ I said.

‘The misery of it.’ Strode wagged his head. ‘There must be a dozen men in this city who know the names of those poor fellows eating St Bart’s dirt right now. Yet we’ve heard not a whisper from around the wards and parishes in the last two days. Aldermen, beadles, constables, night walkers: everyone has been pulled in or cornered, but no one claims to have seen or heard a thing, and no men reported missing. As if London itself has gone blind and dumb.’

‘No witnesses then?’

He hesitated. ‘Perhaps one.’

I waited.

‘You know our Peter Norris.’

I smiled, not fondly. ‘I do.’ Norris, formerly a wealthy mercer and a beadle of Portsoken Ward, had lost his fortune after a shipwreck off Dover, and now lived as a vagrant debtor of the city, moving from barn to yard, in and out of gates and gaols. We had crossed knives any number of times, never with good results.

‘He claims to know of a witness,’ said Strode. ‘Someone who beheld the dumping of the corpses at the Long Dropper. He tried to trade on it from the stocks in order to shorten his sentence, though Brembre has refused to indulge his fantasy, as he called it.’

‘Who is the witness?’

‘Norris would not say, not once he learned the mayor’s mind. Perhaps you might convince him to talk. At the moment he’s dangling in the pillory before Ludgate, and will be for the next few days.’

‘I’ll speak with him tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Very good.’

‘And what of the crown?’ I was thinking of the guns. Weapons of war, not civic policing. To my knowledge the only place in or near London that possessed such devices as culverins and cannon was the Tower itself.

Strode’s brows drew down. He led his horse to the lowest stair, preparing to mount. ‘The sheriffs have made inquiries to the lord chancellor, though thus far his men have flicked us away, claiming lack of jurisdiction. A London privy, London dung, a London burial, a London problem. No concern of the court, they claim, and the only word I’ve had from that quarter is from Edmund Rune, the chancellor’s counsellor, who suggested we look into this as discreetly as possible – in fact it was he who suggested bringing you into the matter, John. With all the trouble the earl is facing at Parliament-time I can’t think he would want another calamity to wrestle with.’

Though he might prove helpful, I thought. Michael de la Pole, lord chancellor of the realm, had recently been created Earl of Suffolk, elevating him to that small circle of upper nobles around King Richard. Yet the chancellor was swimming against a strong tide of discontent from the commons, with Parliament scheduled to gather in just one week’s time. De la Pole owed me a large favour, and despite his current difficulties I could not help but wonder what he might be holding on this affair. The unceasing tension between city and crown, the Guildhall and Westminster, rarely erupted into open conflict, more often simmering just beneath the urban surface, stirred by all those professional relations and bureaucratic niceties that bind London to its royal suburb up the river.

Yet such conflicts are indispensable to my peculiar vocation. Nicholas Brembre was a difficult man, by all accounts, though I had never discovered anything on him, and John Gower is not one to enjoy ignorance. If I could nudge the chancellor the right way, then use what he gave me to do a favour to the mayor in turn, I would be in a position to gather ever more flowers from the Guildhall garden in the coming months.

I put a hand on Ralph Strode’s wide back and helped him mount. He regarded me, his large nostrils flaring with his still laboured breaths. ‘You will help, then?’

A slight bow to Strode and his horse. ‘Tell the lord mayor he may consider John Gower at his service.’

He sucked in a cheek. ‘That I cannot do.’ He glanced about, then hunched down slightly in his saddle, lowering his voice. ‘Here is the difficult thing, John. The mayor has been stirred violently by this atrocity, yet despite his anger he seems reluctant to pursue the matter, for reasons I cannot discern. He’s bribed off the coroner, discouraged the sheriffs from looking into things, and threatens anyone who mentions it. It was he who ordered me to oversee this quick burial, with quicker rites, and no consideration for the relations of the deceased, whoever they might be. Nor will he hear Norris out about his witness.’

Here Strode paused to look over his shoulder. Then, softly, ‘There are whispers he may have had evidence destroyed.’

‘What sort of evidence?’

‘Who can say? The point is that Brembre has decided this will all be quashed, and no one has the stomach to gainsay him.’

‘What about the sheriffs and aldermen? Surely they would wish for an open inquiry.’

He grimaced. ‘They are as geldings and maidens, when what’s needed is a champion wielding a silent and invisible sword.’ Strode looked back toward the churchyard and the murmuring priest, then straightened himself. ‘That is why I have come to you. For your cunning ways with coin, your affinity with the rats, the devious beauty of your craft. And for your devotion to the right way, much as you like to hide your benevolent flame under a bushel of deceit. This atrocity has thrown you as much as it has thrown me, John. I can see it in your eyes.’

I looked away, a sting in those weakening eyes. A friend is a second self, Cicero tells us, and knows us more intimately than we know ourselves.

‘The mayor cannot learn you are probing this out for us, or it will be my broken nose fed to the pigs.’

‘I understand, Ralph,’ I said, looking appropriately solemn, yet secretly delighted to learn of the mayor’s peculiar vacillations. A new bud of knowledge on a lengthening stem. ‘My lips shall be as the privy seal itself.’

‘Good then.’ With a brisk nod, Strode pulled a rein and made for Aldersgate. I followed him at a growing distance, watching his broad back shift over the animal’s deliberate gait until man and beast alike faded into the walls, blurring with the stone.

TWO

The gates of London are so many mouths of hell, Chaucer once observed, swallowing the sinful by the dozen, commingling them in the rich urban gruel of waste, crime, lust, and vice that flows down every lane. Yet each gate possesses a character and history uniquely its own: its own guards, residents, and prisoners, its own parish obligations, the particular customs and rituals that define every entrance to the inner wards as a small world unto itself. To know the gates of London is to know the truest pathways to the city’s soul.

In those middle years of King Richard’s reign the city gates were all connected by a series of towers, sentry walks, and repair scaffolds that together traced a wandering crescent around the lofty stone walls and provided the most efficient means of getting from gate to gate. You couldn’t stroll along the inner wall down below given all the clearing and destruction, while skirting the outer circumference would land you in waste ditches and subject you to the streams of refuse and trash – some foul, some quite dangerous – hurled from above.

On that windy day following the examination in St Bart’s churchyard I had determined to visit every gate in turn, worming beaks with coins as I went. If sixteen men could die in London, and not one of them be known to Ralph Strode, to the mayor and his men, to the king’s coroner and his, nor even to one of the dozen freemen of the city gathered for the inquest, they must have come from outside the walls. London is a large place though not exceedingly large, and to conceive of so many Londoners unrecognized and unsought by loved ones seemed an impossibility. Somewhere along the walls was a guard or a warden who had seen something, or knew someone who had.

My day would begin at Aldgate, where the walls separated the parish of St Katharine Cree from St Botolph-without, and end at Ludgate, where Peter Norris slumped in the pillory, claiming knowledge of a witness. I left Southwark early in the day to cross the bridge, angling from the bankside up to Aldgate Street, which I took to the edge of town. A stiff September wind burned at my eyes, creating especially fierce gusts along the broadening way before the gate, where thousands of colourful shapes whorled in a circling gale. A dozen children jumped about beneath them. The dancing shapes were cloth, I realized as I reached out to pluck one from the air. A sack of fabric scraps, spilled before some tailor’s shop and now dancing with the winds. Then a stiffer gust, and the spiral of colour was gone as quickly as it had arisen, the children chasing the shapes away to the west. Another beautiful, meaningless thing I would never see again.

Unlike the high and ugly bulk of Aldgate, which loomed above me now, a begrimed surface of stone and stupidity that seemed to attract more featherbrained schemes for enlargement and improvement than its brothers. As a result Aldgate had suffered its share of minor collapses over the years, as the collective folly of builders and masons led to ever more perilous attempts to reshape the fabric. A broad length of sailcloth hung down to cover a pitted scar in the stonework on the north tower, while above a crane arm jutted awkwardly from a high opening, its purpose to pulley stones to the upper reaches, though it looked to have gone unused for months.

Halfway up, where one set of stairs forked to the gate’s north tower, the other to a set of apartments in the south, I had to pause, scarcely believing my ears.

‘Sell this one – no, this one, and leave the others for Philippa to barter away. She’s hardly in a position to object. Perhaps her slutting sister can help her.’

A familiar voice, though tightened with uncommon anger. Reversing direction, I climbed up the right stair and made my way along the groaning walkway to an unassuming door, the main entrance to the series of rooms making up the small apartment atop the gate. For twelve years the house in the south tower had been the home of Geoffrey Chaucer, my oldest friend, though I thought he had left London some weeks before.

The door stood open, wedged with a chipped brick, and in the front chamber Chaucer was stooped over, tussling with an array of silver trinkets and goblets spilling out of a wood box. Crates, a stack of trunks, rolls of twine: the modest house was in a tremendous disarray, made all the more dire by the continual gusts blowing in from the door and scattering dust and invading leaves about the rooms. Despite the piles of belongings the place felt empty and bare, the only light coming from narrow slits low along the walls.

I stepped inside, further darkening the place. Chaucer turned. His scowl softened at the sight of me. A sad smile, and he tilted his head. ‘Mon ami,’ he said, coming to his full height. We embraced in the middle of the low space, surrounded by the detritus of his Aldgate life. Two servants brought in pieces of furniture from the back room, set them on the floor, returned for a next load.

We held each other at arm’s length. I searched his eyes. ‘You’re in London.’ A statement, also a question.

‘I am not.’ He went to the door, peered out. He turned back to me. ‘At least as far as Philippa is concerned. If you see her, you never saw me, yes?’

‘Fine fine,’ I said, amused, though also a bit melancholy about Chaucer’s continuing estrangement from a woman I admired so deeply. ‘You’re packing up then?’

‘I must surrender the apartment and Aldgate altogether.’ He said it with a careless air that I could tell was put on. ‘You haven’t heard? The common council wants me out. It seems that Richard Forster will take up residence here in a few weeks. Everything must go, to be sold or carted out to Greenwich.’ A village several miles from the city, and site of Chaucer’s new residence while performing his duties as justice of the peace in Kent. ‘Books, plate, books, furniture, books – oh, and also the books.’

Chaucer’s small apartment above Aldgate had once been stuffed with volumes. The four locked trunks along the far wall must have held dozens of manuscripts between them. It struck me how many times I had visited the Aldgate house over the years, for poetical exchanges reaching into the night.

He invited me to sit. I declined, with a hint at the day’s business.

‘An errand for Strode, then?’ he said, wanting to know more, though unwilling to ask directly.

‘A fool’s errand, I would call it. Aldgate seemed as good a place as any to begin.’ I gave him the bones of it, as the discovery of corpses in the privy was being bandied through the streets already. I kept quiet about the victims’ peculiar means of death, nor did I hint at the mayor’s apparent attempt to scuttle an inquiry. Chaucer had worked under Brembre in the customs office for several years, and the two remained close. ‘So today I troll the gates,’ I said, ‘hoping to scare up anything I can find about these men.’

His reaction was muted. ‘A dozen a day die in this city. Women, the elderly, children. Mass graves surround us on every side. What makes these unnamed men worthy of your time, John?’

The question surprised me. ‘Sixteen at once, thrown in the Walbrook? Curiosity, I suppose. And a fair measure of fear. No mayor wants to give death free rein in his city. The crown will use any excuse to tighten its chokehold on London. This is just the sort of thing to attract the worst kind of scrutiny from the king’s men.’

‘Now you sound like Strode himself,’ said Chaucer with his curling smile.

‘The freer the city the looser its purse.’

Chaucer moved to an east-facing window and glanced at the turret clock on St Botolph’s. ‘I’m due at Westminster shortly, you know, otherwise I would accompany you. I would welcome a break from all this.’ He looked around, gesturing to his crates and trunks. ‘But let me hail Bagnall up.’

‘Who?’

Chaucer walked to his door. ‘Matthew Bagnall,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘The warden of the gate. A man who knows more about the doings in and around Aldgate than all our ward-rats put together. I’ll get him up here.’ He stepped out to the rickety landing and called down to the foregate yard. ‘You there! Is Bagnall about?’

A faint reply floated up from street level.

‘Well send him up, will you? Master Chaucer has a question for him!’

He turned back and flattened himself against the wall. The servants slid around us bearing a large chest between them, which jostled and bumped along the railings as they descended the street-side stairs. When they were gone he looked at me, gestured at his eyes.

‘The same?’

‘No worse, at least,’ I lied, blinking away a spot. ‘Some days I scarcely notice, others …’

‘Ah,’ he said, his hands clasped. He tilted his head. ‘You know, John, there may be other remedies than resignation and despair.’

I said nothing.

‘There is a medical man newly in town, a great surgeon-physician. He is an Englishman, but trained in Bologna.’

‘Thomas Baker.’

‘You know him?’

‘We’ve recently met,’ I said, recalling the man’s fingers digging in a corpse. ‘He seems bright enough.’

‘More than bright,’ said Chaucer. ‘He was in my company on the return from Italy last year, and I got to know him quite well. Familiar with all the new techniques, unafraid to wield the knife when it’s needed. He is lodging in Cornhill for now, above the shop of a grocer named Lawler. Do you know the place?’

‘I do.’

‘I suggest you make an appointment to see him.’ Then, less formally, his voice lowered, ‘Surely it’s worth a visit, John, even if nothing comes of it. You have only two eyes. You’ll never get a third, no matter whom you extort.’

Matthew Bagnall arrived at the door. Squat, thick-necked, official, looking eager to get back to the gatehouse. Chaucer offered him drink. Bagnall declined, nor would he seat himself.

‘Mustn’t stay up here above my men for too long, Master Chaucer,’ Bagnall said, as if Chaucer’s house rested on an eagle’s eyrie, or some grand mountaintop in the Alps. He wore a cap that fitted tightly over a low forehead, covering what looked like a permanent frown.

Chaucer explained why I was there, then nodded at me to begin.

‘Fair thanks, Bagnall, for the trudge up the stairs.’ I handed him a few pennies.

He took the coins silently, glancing at them before slipping them into a pouch at his side.

‘The Guildhall is seeking information on a company recently arrived in London, and now deceased.’

His eyes widened slightly.

‘Violently deceased,’ I said.

‘Killed, you mean.’

‘It appears so. They were a group of men, a large group. Not freemen of the city. Outsiders of some kind.’

‘Frenchmen, or Flemings then?’

‘I think not,’ I said, recalling the stolid, rural look of the bodies, their rough hands, the dirt caked in their nails. ‘These were Englishmen, or I’m a bishop.’

‘Not soldiers – cavalrymen, say?’

I thought of those iron balls lodged in the victims’ chests. The gun wounds could have been inflicted in a battle, some factional conflict on the highway. Yet the fact that the men had been killed with small guns argued against the mess and melee of actual combat. ‘They might have been conscripts, I suppose, but recent ones if so. These men worked with their hands. Ploughmen, some of them, used to harrowing and manuring their fields.’

‘Dead when they got here, or killed within the walls?’

‘You ask sound questions, Bagnall. I don’t know.’

He considered me, hand at his thick chin. ‘You’re looking after that mess up at the Long Dropper.’

I allowed my silence to answer him.

‘Gongfarmers’re all jawing about it, the rakers and sweepers as well,’ he went on, loosening up. ‘It’s the gab of London. Fifty men, thrown in the sewers to drown and rot.’

‘An exaggeration,’ I said breezily. ‘Sixteen victims, all happily dead before they were tossed in the privy.’

‘That may be,’ he said, his black look making me regret my light and careless tone. ‘Yet treated no better than shit from a friar’s arse. Denied the ground, and a Mass, and a proper burial. Whoever’s done it had best keep his murdering nose free of Aldgate, or he’s in for a rough time of it from the guard, that’s certain.’

‘To be clear, Bagnall, you know nothing about these men?’

‘Aldgate hasn’t heard a whisper about this matter, Master Gower.’ He tugged at his cap. ‘I’ll own we’re a busy gate, what with all the Colchester traffic, marches out to Mile End. But a company of sixteen, riding or walking in from outside? Even the sleepiest of my men would take notice, and a pile of corpses would fare no better. Wherever those poor carls came in, they didn’t come in through Aldgate, nor the Tower postern, or I would have heard about it.’ The postern was a small entrance along the wall north of the Tower. Not a full-fledged gate but a heavy door, though just as carefully watched.

Bagnall left us with a curt nod. Chaucer stared after him as the old stairs protested his descent with a groan of loose nails. ‘Blunt man. Always has been.’

‘Bluntness has its place,’ I said. ‘Though I’ll need such frankness from more than your gateman if I’m to learn who these poor fellows were, and where they came from.’

Chaucer pressed my arm as he walked me to his Aldgate door for the last time. ‘I shall be back for Parliament soon. You will be in town?’

‘Do I ever leave?’

‘You’ve not come out to Greenwich yet, John. I have plenty of room for visitors – more than I ever had in this place.’ He looked around, his bright eyes mellowed with regret at leaving a city so much a part of his blood. Like his father, a London vintner, Chaucer had been born and would surely die within these walls, which he had always regarded as a sort of outer skin. I thought of him strolling through the countryside, waking to roosters instead of bells, attending Mass at the tiny church in Greenwich rather than at the urban parish that had been his devotional home for so many years.

He caught my sad smile, and at the door he turned his full attention on me. Ours was a unique friendship, its complexity never more deeply felt than at those moments of farewell, all too frequent in recent years.

‘Be careful with yourself, John, and mind your back.’ His palm was on my wrist. ‘Whoever threw those bodies in the Walbrook knew they would be found.’ He looked out along the rooftops of the inner ward. His grip tightened. ‘And didn’t much care.’

From the narrow passage before Chaucer’s house I walked north through the boundaries of the parish of St Botolph, lingering at each tower to dispense coins and questions. From that height London appeared almost tranquil, cleaner and somehow nobler than the square mile of squalor and moral compromise sprawled between these walls. The city’s roofs formed a grand patchwork of ambition and decay, the spans of greater halls and the thrusting heights of new towers set within the humbler timbers of tenements and lower shopfronts. Even the smoke rising from smithies and ovens possessed a humble majesty, grey tendrils striving for the sky, vaporous strands of the city’s hopes.

Yet London was hardly at peace. Masons were at work at every turn, fortifying the wall and heightening it in certain places deemed particularly vulnerable to engine or incursion. It was known that a great navy had been assembling at Sluys since mid-summer, ready to seek vengeance for years of English brutality in France and Burgundy. With the Duke of Lancaster in Castile seeking a crown and much of the upper nobility increasingly belligerent toward the king, a mood of lowering doom had settled over the realm of late, as the nation braced itself for invasion from the sea.

The feeling sharpened as I neared Bishopsgate and the armouries. Somewhere below three smiths worked in tandem, the varied weights of their hammers entwined in a clanging motet, turning out breastplates, helmets, hauberks, the mundane machinery of war. I spoke for a while to the tollkeeper, whose wife I had bought out of a city gaol the previous summer, though learned no more than I had from Bagnall.

Now Cripplegate. On the second level above the gatehouse there was a small hermitage, filthy from the habits of its longtime occupant though an unavoidable stop, given my needs. The low and nearly secret door, reached by squeezing around one of the guard towers from the lower walkway, was closed against the wind. A smudged face could be seen through the rectangular gap in the bricks that served as the chamber’s sole window aside from a narrow squint low on the far side. The hermit’s eyes were closed above his massive beard, a swath of matted filth that covered nearly every inch of a face thinned by years of self-denial and hunger. The stench from the hole was a rich stew of man, dung, and time.

I squatted and peered in. ‘Good day to you, Piers.’

With a start the hermit opened his eyes, then gapped his mouth in a dark and toothless smile. He kept his door closed but scooted his ragged frame toward the window, jutting his nose and lips into the aperture. ‘Why, John Gower himself, the Saint of Shrouded Song! You have – oh – spices in your pouch for Piers, do you, or – oh – a heady lass?’

Piers Goodman, though thin of brain, was one of the city’s more useful hermits, with sharp eyes and good ears, unafraid to stick his head out of his hole and sell what he knew, which tended to be a great deal. The Hermit of St Giles-along-the-Wall-by-Cripplegate was the rather pompous title he had chosen for himself long ago, and for years its grandeur fit him. Nobles from the king’s household, bureaucrats from the Guildhall and Chancery, mercers and aldermen: all sought his counsel on matters large and small, climbing up to the old storeroom he had claimed as his hermitage, offering thanks, charity, and spilled secrets to a man as discreet as he was pious – or so it appeared to most of those who consulted him. In reality the hermit leaked like an old wine cask, sharing the private lives of others for trifles: coins, fruits and pies, the occasional whore. In recent years the cask would often run dry, though with Piers Goodman you seldom knew what you might get.

It took a while to lead him around to the subject of the day, but when I finally did he was, as usual, quite forthcoming. ‘Strangers, you say? Company of men? Oh, we’ve had our share of strangers we have, and companies – why just Saturday or was it Tuesday a little brace of – oh – Welshmembers it was. Whole flock of Welshmembers, herded through Cripplegate quick as you please. Piers saw them he did, looking down through his slitty slit, and Gil Cheddar told him all about it. Big trouble for the mayor says Gil Cheddar, those Welshmembers. 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. What’s in his cart and cartloads, Gower, hmm, what’s in his cart and all his cartloads? Not faggots, mind, not beefs, mind, not Lancelot, mind, but—’

‘Stop there, Piers. A company of Welshmen, you say?’

‘Aye Welshmembers they were, and right through the gate they went says Gil Cheddar, who brings Piers his supper and his—’

‘You said this Gil Cheddar told you about them?’

‘Aye, he did, told me all that business. Not ale, mind, not—’

‘And who is Gil Cheddar?’

‘An acolyte of St Giles Cripplegate is Gil Cheddar, and the sweetest face you’ll ever see on him. Gil Cheddar brings his old hermit his suppers he does – not every day, but some days his suppers he does. Breads, fishes, cheeses, a dipper of ale for Piers and I’ll thank you for a piece of silver, and now a song for you, Gower? A song of hermits pricking bold, aye, that is what Piers’ll seemly sing.’ And he entuned it in his nose: ‘I loved and lost and lost again, my beard hath grown so grey. When God above doth ease my pain, my cock shall rise to play …’

I pushed a coin through the window and left him to his melody. Back on the walkway I had a decision to make: proceed along the wall through the remaining gates or descend to the outer part of the ward and try to find Gil Cheddar. It was not a feast, and as an acolyte, Cheddar would likely not appear at St Giles until later in the day. I would return in several hours.

Soon after Cripplegate the wall bent southward, angling past the peculiar roof of St Olave’s and the five towers placed like sentries above this misshapen corner of the city. I learned nothing at Aldersgate nor at Newgate, where I had extensive connections among the guard, though I did gather a few nuggets about unrelated matters for later use. On leaving Newgate I got a warning from one of the guards to watch my step farther on. As I soon discovered, the walkway had collapsed perhaps forty feet short of Ludgate, beams leaning askance from the wall, planks dangling creakily in the wind. A heavy scaffold had crushed an abandoned shack beneath, leaving a sprawl of broken timber that looked too rotten for salvage.

I retraced my steps to the stairs before Newgate and descended into the narrow ways of St Martin, the small parish spread between St Paul’s and the wall. My whole day had been spent floating above London, with scarcely a thought for the eternal squalor below, though descending now to the close streets I knew so well came almost as a relief, despite the fatigue of a long and trying day. I walked nearly to the cathedral before turning to approach Ludgate from the east, angling around the gateyard to avoid repair work on the conduit ditch, which looked to have sprung a leak. At the corner of the yard I bought three bird pies and a dipper of ale.

From the pillory holes in the yard dangled the hands of Peter Norris, a parchment collar affixed to his neck, his uncovered hair lifting morosely with each gust of wind. He must have been in place for hours already, as the area was free of hasslers. A boy of about eleven sat at the foot of the stocks, faking a cough.

Norris’s eyes were to the ground as I approached. His unshaven neck rasped against the parchment collar, inscribed in high, dark letters with his crime: I, Peter Norris, stole pigeons. His was quite a fall, for Norris had been a powerful man in former days, a wealthy mercer with nearly exclusive command of the city’s silk trade with France, though that was before he would be brought low by his own poor decisions.

‘Norris,’ I said, handing two pies to the boy and holding one out to his father’s mouth.

As the boy started to eat Norris made an effort to turn his head, angling his gaze up to meet my own.

‘Spit that out, Jack!’ Norris commanded weakly when he saw me. The boy stopped chewing, his eyes gone wide. ‘John Gower here’s like to poison you dead, without a thought for your boy’s soul.’

I sniffed. ‘Not today, Norris.’

I glanced at his son. The boy, twig thin, wore a woollen cap, his golden hair stuffed beneath the narrow brim. The cap had ridden up slightly, exposing ugly stumps where his outer ears had once been. A cutpurse, then, caught knifing and sliced for his crime. He took a few coins from my hand and wandered off toward the gate, both pies already gone.

Norris looked after his son as long as he could, neck straining against the skin-slicked wood. ‘That boy, he’s a loyal one he is. He’s got as much rot thrown in the face this week as his father, with no fuss about it, and sits here with me all through the day. “The Earl of Earless” they taunt him on account of his stubs. Worse things, too.’ He shook his head.

‘Can he hear it all?’ I asked, curious about the boy’s affliction, thinking of my own.

‘Oh, young Jack hears what he wants to hear, as all boys do.’ He laughed fondly.

Norris, I realized as I followed the boy’s progress, had a perfect angle on the traffic into the city from Ludgate. Beyond the imposing façade lay the legal precincts and the royal capital. An important city entrance, bringing visitors and goods from Temple Bar, the inns, and finally Westminster a good walk up the Strand.

‘How long have you been at the pillory, Norris?’ I held the cup for him.

He took a slow sip of ale, smacked his lips. ‘Since the dawn bell,’ he murmured. Another sip. ‘But an hour and a bite and I’m free, for all that’s worth.’

‘This is the last day of your sentence?’

‘Aye.’

‘And the rest of it?’

‘Ten hours in a day right through a week, as was my sentence at the Guildhall, and all for a festering brace of pigeons swiped and sold to a pieman! Constable wouldn’t have taken me in at all, if an alderman’s daughter hadn’t happened to stomach one and empty her guts.’ He looked out at one hand, then the other. ‘Give me Jesu’s cross over the pillory. A man’s not meant to stand bent this long.’

He was right about that. Though the punished generally stood at the stocks for no more than an hour at a time, the longer sentences could lead to permanent disfigurement: pillory back, its sufferers easily identifiable by their crooked spines and frequent grunts of pain as they hobbled through the streets.

After a few pitying murmurs I began gently, asking Norris whether he had noticed any unusual activity at the gate in recent days, particularly involving a large company of men.

‘Not Londoners, but a company from outside the city,’ I said. ‘Sixteen of them. All dead now, thrown in the privy ditch beneath the Long Dropper. They were walked in sometime in the last week – or carried, I suppose. Does anything come to mind?’

Norris thought for a moment, then looked up and surprised me. ‘Welshmen, I’ll be bound,’ he said.

I felt a satisfied warmth. ‘What do you know of Welshmen, Norris?’

‘The first day of my sentence. A Wednesday it was,’ he said. ‘Caught a little glimpse of them skirting along the yard, just there.’ He nodded toward the mouth of Bower Row. ‘Only reason I remember it is, those Welsh carls gave us a nice respite.’

‘How is that?’

‘My first day in the stocks. Seemed half of London was out hurling eggs, cabbages, dungstraw at me and my boy, anything they could lift. But then those strangers come by, and all at once every man of them leaves off and starts tossing his rot at the poor Welshers instead.’ He laughed weakly. ‘Should have heard them, Gower, our good freemen. “Savages!” “Sodomites!” “Child burners!” “Leap off the walls, you filthy Welshers!” Those sorts of roses, is what they shouted. And so it went until the strangers were beyond the bar.’

‘What were they doing at Ludgate?’

‘Wouldn’t know. Couldn’t hear a thing of them.’

Young Jack had returned and took his place to the right of his father’s protruding head and hands. He had purchased himself an oatloaf and nibbled at it slowly.

‘You didn’t see who was leading them through?’ I asked.

He sniffed and spat. ‘What I’ve seen a lot of is my feet, and little Jack’s fair nose. Hard to look at Welshmen when your face is forced to the ground.’

He bent his straitened neck upward into an awkward angle, grunted from the effort and relaxed, his frame sagging with the work. I wetted his lips again, then held the last pie below his mouth. He took a small nibble, a larger bite.

‘Tell me about your witness.’

His jaw stopped, his eyes shifting to the side, away from me. ‘Ah. No act of charity, these pies and ale?’

‘You know me better than that, Norris. Who is it? What did he see?’

A heavy gust spiralled a pile of leaves into the air above the pillory platform. ‘Why should I tell you? You’ll go and sell what I say to the Guildhall, and then where will Peter Norris be?’

I shook my head. ‘The Guildhall is not disposed to believe anything you say. No buyers there, as you well know.’

His eyes closed. He sighed. ‘Perhaps. Though I shall bide my time, Gower. My witness is quite convincing, and my sentence ends at the next bell. The right moment will come, I trust.’

Was he lying, or simply a fool? Either way I could get nothing more out of the man despite my offer of considerable coin. I turned to leave him, and his earless son gave me a hateful and piercing look, as if my hand had been one of the many hurling filth at the boy and his father. I walked away and toward the gate.

The guards and tollkeeper at Ludgate were forthcoming but unhelpful, none of them recalling the Welsh company, though promising to ask about. It was now past four. I hesitated just outside the walls, knowing I should walk back up through Cripplegate to see Gil Cheddar, the acolyte at St Giles. Yet the occasional gaps in my vision had returned, as they often did with the fatigue of a long day and a late afternoon. The wind had moistened somewhat, too, and a distant rumble of thunder threatened a city storm. I would visit St Giles the following morning, I resolved, and call on Cheddar then. It was one of several mistakes I made that day along the walls of London, hearing only what I wanted to hear, deaf to what mattered most.

THREE

Like pouring out the sun. A lethal river of metal flowed from the cauldron, killing the thickness with a long hiss, filling the space between the clay moulds. A heavy steam rose from the melting wax. Stephen Marsh, his gloved hands gripping the cauldron’s edge, an apprentice at each side for balance, tipped the last of the molten alloy into the small hole at the top of the mantle. Iron bars, tin ingots, a touch each of copper and lead, all melted together and skimmed for impurities before the pour. Soon enough the liquid bronze would cool into a bell duly stamped with the lozenge of Stone’s foundry. Then trim, sound, file, and polish until the instrument achieved its final shape and tone, made fit for a high tower across the river.

Like pouring out the sun. For that was how his master Robert Stone always liked to describe it, this mysterious shaping of earth’s metal into God’s music. Pouring out the sun – until the sun withered and killed him.

With the cauldron locked and pinned, Stephen wiped his brow and dismissed the two apprentices. He looked over toward the door to the yard, where the sour-faced priest stood with crossed arms, watching the founders at work.

‘Two bells formed like this one, Father,’ Stephen said, removing his gloves as he walked toward the foundry’s newest customer. The parson of St Paulinus Crayford, a parish to the southeast of London, here at the beck of the churchwardens about a commission for the new belfry. ‘The first tuned at ut, the second at re. I sound them myself after the moulding, and I have the ear of Pythagoras, so you needn’t worry about a symphonious match. If our bells are not well sounding and of good accord for a year and a day, why we’ll cart them back here to the city, melt them down from waist to mouth, and cart the new ones to you out at Crayford. All at Stone’s own expense, and all inside a month.’

The parson looked sceptical. ‘And reinstall them in the belfry?’

‘Aye, and reinstall them in the belfry, hiring it out to the carpenters ourselves,’ said Stephen. He removed his apron, a heavy length of boiled leather, and hung it on its posthook. ‘I poured side-by-side for five years with the master, bless his memory, and now am chief founder and smith retained at the widow’s will and pleasure. Your wardens shall be satisfied, I promise you that.’

The parson asked a few more questions then Stephen took him up front to the display room to settle sums. An advance of two pounds on six and thirteen, with the balance due upon delivery to Crayford, where the bells would arrive before the kalends of—

‘And installation,’ said the parson, raising his chin, clearly fashioning himself a shrewd businessman.

Stephen nodded briskly. ‘And installation, Father, with clapper and carpentry entire. Clean-up as well, and Stone’s will be pleased to throw in a cask of strong ale for the company.’ The parson’s eyes twinkled at this. Stephen had seen it before, the way that last, trivial detail worked on the pastoral mind. How pleased my flock will be with their good parson, for getting them an extra day’s work and a free drink in the bargain!

The note was signed, the deal waxed, sealed with Stone’s lozenge stamp. Stephen was watching the parson leave the shop, preening over his bit of successfully transacted London business, when Hawisia Stone came in from the house passage. She stood there in her frozen widow’s way, her mouth a flat line on the hard rock of her face. She had thick, muscular hands for a woman her age, which was a year shy of thirty, or so Stephen thought, and her swollen middle mounded out obscenely beneath her bulky blacks. No confinement for Hawisia Stone, no feminine modesty for this steely widow, convention be damned.

‘Mistress Stone,’ he said, and never knew what to say next. How does the good widow fare this day, Mistress Stone? What thousand tasks do you wish me to perform in the smithy today, Mistress Stone? And what new curses have you called down upon your servant’s murderous blood, Mistress Stone?

‘The parson’s to buy, then?’ she rasped.

‘He will,’ said Stephen. He nodded at the note and coin on the board counter. ‘A solid commission.’

‘Fine.’ She went to the ledger and tucked the note into the book’s back lining. The coin went in her purse.

He stood there, acting the thrashed whelp, Hawisia the grey bitch of the place. In the months since Robert’s death he had become newly familiar with her little noises, all those telling grunts he’d once been happy to ignore. Disapproving murmurs, low growls of contempt, long-suffering sighs in place of words withheld.

‘You’ve work to do?’ she asked him without looking up from the ledger.

‘Aye.’

‘Go then.’

Stephen backed and turned, slinking through the door to the foundry yard. He kicked a bucket, scaring off a yard dog, his gut clutched with all that might have been, and all that might still be.

Only six months ago Stephen had been looking ahead to a full and verdant future. Robert Stone was on the verge of making him partner in the foundry and smithy, giving him his daughter’s hand to bind it all tight as you could like. Stephen’s master had worried often about losing him to a house of his own, where he could keep a greater share of his made coin. Why, if we lose our Stephen, he’d say to his wife, half our men’re like to go with him to start up a rival shop. We need him here, Hawisia, with all his cunning and craft. She had agreed.

For Stone’s was a sprawling operation: a foundry, a smithy, an ironmonger all in one, and though Robert Stone had been its rightful master, it was Stephen Marsh at the artful centre of this world of metal, bending, twisting, tapping, his adept hands shaping bronze and lead with the delicacy of a king’s silversmith, finding ways to swirl the hardest irons into the most intricate forms and configurations. ‘There is surely something of the devil in you, Stephen Marsh,’ Robert Stone would say, always with a smile, and Stephen would smile with him, even as he inwardly spurned such talk of demons. His skill was inborn, a thing of kind wit, the work of Lady Nature at her forge, as much a part of him as his very tongue; the devil had naught to do with it.

By his nineteenth year Stephen Marsh had won a reputation as the fellow to see for the subtlest metalwork to be had between Bishopsgate and the river. Magnates’ men would come to Stone’s to commission new armorial bearings for a bishop’s door, or to repair the hinges on an earl’s ewer, and Stephen would take up every job with a swiftness to match his skill. With the coming arrangement Stephen could keep his mind on his craft without a care for the management or upkeep of the shop, leaving these to Robert, who was more skilled at such things as recording accounts and filling supplies, or maintaining good relations with the guilds and the parish. God’s grace, the curate would say, grazing in the fields of our hearts.

Then he dies, and everything changes. Hawisia Stone inherits the foundry and cruelly weds Robert’s daughter off to a vintner’s son, while Stephen is bound with ten full years of servitude to Stone’s, and all for an errant cauldron. A large job, a rushed pour, Robert’s arm aflame like a torch as he holds it aloft and screams those terrible screams.

Now Stephen was bound to the place like a wheel to a mill, his labour and his hand the due property of Hawisia Stone.

Ten more years of service to the widow and her shop: such was the sentence of the wardmoot after the incident, the result of Robert’s exhaustion and Stephen’s impatience – though was it simply haste? Or something malign, a demon’s breath on his hand, tipping the cauldron too early, bringing a death some dark part of him desired, despite everything his master promised him?

For it often seemed that Robert Stone still haunted the foundry, as if part of his soul inhered in each cast, his deep voice moaning from the hollows of every founded bell, calling out Stephen’s blame, a worm feeding at his conscience.

‘Fill the cooling troughs, and quick,’ he ordered an apprentice. The boy scurried off, two buckets yoked over his narrow shoulders.

Stephen went to the central forge, slipped on an apron, stomped the bellows, took up a steel bar. These days he found his sole consolation in his craft, the strength and spirit of the metals. If his fortunes wheeled from high to low these things of the earth would remain ever the same, constant and receptive in their beautiful predictability. Good Sussex iron, smelted in the furnaces of the Weald. The dearer Spanish ore, purer and more responsive to hammer and heat. Cornish tin and Welsh copper, the prices argued back and forth with the crown’s stannaries. Lead from the Mendip Hills. All of it ripped and drowned and raped from the bowels of the world, and now stacked here, some of it dull, some of it bright, all of it solid and silent, ready to do the bidding of his hands. He grasped his hammer and tongs, and soon enough was lost in the burning engine of his craft.

Later, as dusk closed around the streets of Aldgate Ward, Stephen wandered up through the parish of St Katharine Cree to the Slit Pig, an undercroft ale-hole against the walls and the evening haunt of London’s best metalmen. Low-ceilinged and poorly lit, heavy with hearth-smoke and the breaths of tired men, and soon Stephen Marsh was in the loud thick of it, taking strong beer with his fellows at the central board, slapping backs, trading lies. Every man could sense the approach of the curfew bell, like a pious curate chasing whores from the stews, and all did their best to drink their fill before it sounded. The cask boys were kept busy.

The talk of the evening was guns. Several of the city’s founders and smiths were boasting of their lucrative new commissions, having recently been recruited to assist the king’s works in the manufacture of artillery. Cannon, culverins, ribalds and bombards: a mass of powder-fired heavy arms, much of it hammer-welded and smithed, some founded from bronze, all of it for the defence of the Tower and the city when the French invasion came – quite soon, if the talk was to be believed.

Stephen listened to their exchange with a mounting scorn, and an itching envy. At one point, as the talk ebbed, he said, ‘A gun is but a bell turned on its side and poorly sounded.’

Two dozen eyes now on him. ‘Why, at Stone’s we could fashion twenty, thirty cannon in the coming months,’ he went on. ‘And with a quality of craft and precision you will be hard pressed to find at the Tower.’ A boast but a true one. He was pleased to see some nods, along with a few scowls.

‘Could you now?’ said one of the scowlers. Tom Hales, the aged master of a venerable smithy well across town off Ironmongers Lane.

‘That’s right, Hales. Power, precision, speed. You’d be hard pressed to find a better gun than a Stone’s gun.’

‘All three of them,’ Hales scoffed.

‘Give me a large enough commission and I shall line the walls of London.’

‘If the good widow allows it,’ said Hales.

A few rough laughs, a low whistle. This was another of his mistress’s small cruelties. While Robert had taken several gun commissions before his death, Hawisia soon curtailed any of Stephen’s ambitions in that direction. Together Robert and Stephen had poured just five large bombards, designed to fire the heavy bolts favoured by the Tower. Though they were adequate devices, Robert’s death had prevented Stephen from making further assays into the fashioning of guns.

‘That may be,’ Stephen went on, undaunted. He was too respected in the trades to be cowed by an old hammer man. ‘Yet at Stone’s I could bronze out a bombard to shoot twice as fast and thrice as long as any in the Duke of Burgundy’s army, or the devil take my body and bread!’

More laughs, some cruel, though soon enough the talk moved on to other subjects – the new scarcity of tin, the demands of young wives – and as the men settled back into their ales Stephen’s gaze wandered over to the far end of the undercroft.

In the south corner a man stood alone, looking straight at Stephen over the mingled crowd. Not a tall man but broad of shoulder, confident in his demeanour despite his solitude within the crowded space. He wore a short courtepy of dusky green, a hat fringed in black over dark hair falling in loose ringlets around a neatly trimmed beard and a thick neck. Stephen didn’t know the fellow, the Slit Pig tending to draw only men in the trades, and he thought little of the stranger’s presence until he came down from a piss to find the man waiting for him by the tavern door.

‘Depardieux, my good brother,’ said the man with a pleasant enough smile.

‘And fair evening to you.’ Stephen looked carefully at the stranger’s face. ‘We have met?’

He shook his head, the ringlets bouncing at his neck. ‘I am unknown in this parish and your own, though I should like to make your acquaintance very much, Stephen Marsh. Have you a span to spare? Your next jar will be mine to coin.’ He jangled a purse.

They found a place away from the benches, where a high stew table stood against the wall flanked by five empty casks ready for hauling up the cellar stairs to the street above.

‘What are you called?’ Stephen asked when they had settled.

‘I am called many things,’ said the man with a faint smile. ‘Though you may call me William.’

‘And why have you come for me here?’

‘I am come for your skills, Stephen. Your metalling, a subject of great renown.’

Stephen dipped his head to acknowledge the compliment. Nothing odd about a man coming around to sniff out his art, though it didn’t ordinarily happen in a tavern. ‘Very well. And what is your business?’

‘My business.’ He took a long slow draught of his ale, narrowed his eyes. ‘My business is guns.’

Stephen frowned. ‘What of them?’

‘Just now you were speaking to your fellows over there about your bronzecraft.’ He nodded toward the board. ‘About Burgundy’s bombards.’

‘Aye,’ said Stephen. He stole a look over to the benches. One of the apprentices from Stone’s, almost old enough to be counted a guildsman and get his key, caught him looking and gave him a friendly nod before turning back to the cheer. ‘The Duke of Burgundy’s said to have the cleverest cannon this side of Jerusalem. Bombards, culverins, your ribalds and pots-de-fer.’ He sipped then shrugged. ‘I was merely jawing.’

‘And you believe you could surpass Burgundy’s guns or – how did you speak your oath – “the devil take my body and bread”?’

‘Well now, as to that—’ He grimaced. ‘I’ve never put my hands on ’em. But the Tower’s bombards are unsound, I will tell you truly, cast in haste and unworthy of war. I have seen them tested along the Thames, watched more than a few of them crack with the powder and shot. A weak alloy, a bad pour. Stone’s could do better, is all I meant to say.’

‘A bad pour,’ the man mused. ‘Something you would know all about, aye? And how is the Widow Stone faring, Marsh?’

‘Well now,’ Stephen snarled. He reared back and stood. ‘Who are you, to enter this parish and bring such knifing words with you?’

The man’s eyes had gone cold, metallic. He remained seated and still. ‘I am William Snell, chief armourer to His Royal Highness the king.’

Stephen felt the blood rush from his head. William Snell, a name whispered with equal reverence and fear among the founders and smiths of London. A fierce, demanding master, with countless arms at his beck and command, charged with the very life of London in the event of war – and Stephen had just insulted his guns.

‘A fair welcome to our humble alehouse, Master Snell,’ said Stephen weakly. He retook his seat.

Snell considered him for a while. Then he leaned forward, his voice lowering as the tavern din reached a peak. ‘Here is why I have come, Marsh.’ He pushed a chunk of wood and metal across the board then emptied his jar in one long swallow. Stephen hefted the object. It was heavy in his hand, a darkened length of iron between fixed bands, a stubbed tube sawed from a longer rod. The wooden piece resembled a barrel stave, though it was the length of a forearm rather than the height of a boy. Stephen brought the object to his nose, catching the distinctive whiff of sulphur. He stroked the wrought metal, then turned the object over in his palm.

He set it back on the stew table. ‘What is this?’

‘A chamber, stock, and firing hole, hacked from one of our small guns,’ said Snell, leaving the thing in front of Marsh. ‘It’s an ugly thing, inefficient and clumsy. I would like you to design and fashion a better one, with more reliable results. These keep misfiring, or worse, exploding on my men.’

Stephen looked down at the piece and ran his finger along the seam. ‘A better hammer weld would improve it, I’d think. Hot work, but not complicated.’

‘We need these devices to be lightweight, and made to survive a dozen rounds at the least,’ said Snell. ‘Uniform in their shape, so they can be moved down a line from hand to hand. Cast of bronze, perhaps. Strength, yes, but also flexibility.’

Stephen thought about it. ‘Why not keep this in the Tower? You have your own metallers over there: Michael Colle, Herman Newport. I’ve trained some of those fellows myself, apprenticed with them before I got my guild key.’ Along with its outside commissions, the royal armoury had long employed its own smiths and founders and farriers, lines of men whose days were given over to the forging and pounding of guns and shot, boltheads and engines of war, infantry plate and helms and horses’ shoes.

Snell lifted then dropped the awkward lump of metal and wood. It hit the scarred surface of the table with a dull thud and took a half roll. ‘This is a special job, Marsh. A particular job, you see. I am concerned about the privity of the armoury. I want to have this done outside, and discreetly, so as not to arouse suspicions.’

‘Whose suspicions?’

‘None of your concern.’

‘With respect, Master Snell, I am not a fool,’ Stephen said, leaning in. ‘You are asking me to risk my position at the foundry, my guild key, my livelihood. I would have to make these devices right beneath the widow’s nose yet behind her back.’ He thought of Hawisia, the glimmer of suspicion in her eyes whenever she looked at him. ‘Stone’s is her foundry, the whole of it. Every hammer, every awl and anvil, every ingot of tin, every barrel of wax, every mound of clay. I cannot risk my position there, nor earn more of her fury than I have these four months since the master’s death.’

‘Your devotion to the widow is admirable,’ said Snell with a mocked sincerity. ‘Yet there are higher purposes than loyalty to a craft. There is your nation to think of, and your king. We are after something new at the Tower, Marsh. Something …’ The armourer’s eyes narrowed as his tongue sought out the hard spots on his upper lip. ‘Something more efficient. A maximum of delivery with a minimum of effort. Do you see?’

Stephen frowned. ‘Larger guns, then?’

Snell’s nose twitched, and a corner of his mouth turned up. ‘It’s smaller guns we are after. Smaller, quicker to load, more portable, more …’ He squinted, as if looking across a great distance. ‘More deadly. And thus more efficient.’

‘Efficient?’

‘Efficient,’ said Snell with a tight smile. ‘It’s the common word of the season at the Tower and among the king’s familia, from top to bottom. After what happened in Edinburgh last year, who could wonder that the king’s army is looking for better ways to fight, and happier machines of war? We chased the Scots from town to town and pile to pile but they wouldn’t engage, nor was our army swift enough to split up and catch them, what with all the equipment and baggage in tow. So now here we are, looking our own invasion in the nose, and the talk is all of effectiveness of operation. Do more killing, we tell the cavalry and infantry alike, but with fewer men, fewer arrows, fewer bolts. More slaughter, we tell them, but with less treasure, less shot, less powder.’

‘And less gun,’ Stephen mused.

‘And less gun,’ said Snell, his voice lowering to a gritty whisper. ‘Now you are seeing it, as I rightly knew you would. You are a man of solutions, Marsh. If we can find the right alchemist with his tinctures or the right priest with his sacraments, why, we should be able to shrink a gun to the size of a ram’s cock. I am not concerned with the look of these weapons, you understand. They needn’t be beautiful things, like your hinges and such. Deadly efficiency is what we are after here.’

Stephen stared at the wall behind Snell, and a procession of guns marched across his inner sight, great cannon leading the small, the pots-de-fer before the bombards before the ribalds before the culverins, throwing their balls and bolts to every side. Less gun. A stirring goal; an attainable one. He knew little of gunpowder and shot aside from the pieces he’d seen wheeled to the gates and stationed beneath a few sentry towers along the walls, and his sole work on artillery was represented in the few large guns founded for the Tower before the passing of Master Stone.

Yet Stephen could already imagine ways that might be discovered to render such devices more efficient, to constrict their girths, lessen their lengths, improve their firing, and now that the notion had entered his mind he yearned to get his hands on one of them and apply his own skills to the problem, to gauge for himself the intricate balances of weight and mass, force and propulsion guiding these wondrous instruments slowly multiplying across the battlefields of the world.

Stephen sat up straighter, feeling a need to impress the armourer. ‘Efficiency and beauty are hardly natural enemies,’ he said, ‘and weight can be compensated for by other means.’

Snell raised his heavy brow. ‘Go on.’

‘A simple solution to an unknown problem. A gun is no different from a hinge. The sorts of things I found and smith and repair at Stone’s – hinges, buckles, coffers, gates, bells, to say nothing of clocks and the like – they are the fittingest prologue one could imagine to the new guns your men are smelting and forging behind those walls. And no one in London melts and bends and tinkers as I do, or the devil take my—’

‘Body and bread,’ Snell completed the thought. ‘You make quite free with such oaths, Marsh. Are they sincere? Is this your earnest will, to know the privity of the armoury?’

Stephen took a large mouthful of ale and drew a sleeve across his lips. ‘Let me at your guns, Master Snell. Let me understand the tooling and mechanics of it all. By God’s bones you won’t be sorry.’

Snell studied him, fingers playing at his beard. ‘I hope not, Marsh. For your sake, and the sake of your craftsman’s soul.’

‘Aye,’ said Stephen confidently, and Snell seemed to coil up on himself as he reached for his jar. Stephen shivered, despite the tavern’s warmth.

‘You will come to the Tower in the coming days, then,’ said the armourer. ‘Give your name at the east barbican. One of my men will fetch you down to the yard.’

‘Very well, Master Snell,’ said Stephen, working to hide his pleasure, an anticipation something like lust. It was a too easy thing, in that flush of ale and ambition, to excuse the minor swell of vanity that had held him there talking to the king’s armourer, despite the sentence that kept him so tightly bound to Stone’s. For if Stephen’s heart lingered always at the foundry and forge, his pride looked now to the Tower, and the machines of a coming war.

Snell slipped out the cellar door as the taverner rang the closing bell. Stephen stood and mingled with the crowd of men staggering out to the lane. He crossed back over Aldgate Street as the first stroke of curfew rang from St Martin-le-Grand, and as he entered his own parish along Bellyeter Lane his pace quickened with his craftsman’s pulse, all his mind on the making of guns.

FOUR

‘I should feel worse,’ Hawisia Stone said.

‘And you don’t?’ Rose Lipton, midwife of Fenchurch Street, tapped at the sides of Hawisia’s belly, then bent to put an ear to her tightened skin.

‘The babe is less after prodding my bile this time. Haven’t coughed up a caudle in weeks.’

‘Nor would you, not at this stage,’ said Rose with a sniff. ‘You’re not longer than six weeks from birth, mistress. Now it’s all sore muscles and devil’s air, isn’t it?’

‘Aye, it is,’ said Hawisia ruefully.

‘And will only worsen these last weeks.’

Rose adjusted the poultice, an evil-smelling mixture of jasmine, roots, dung and St Loy knew what else, all gathered in a sack at the top of Hawisia’s bare belly, right below her breasts. Hawisia suspected the midwife reused her herbs and roots for her concoctions though didn’t want to say anything for fear of putting the woman off. It was hard enough keeping Rose Lipton happy and working as she should be. Often as not it felt as if Hawisia were the one hired to serve Rose rather than the reverse, despite the good coin the midwife took away after each visit.

Rose prodded some more, pressed her palms and fingers deeper into Hawisia’s heavy mound. At one point the midwife’s hands froze. She frowned.

‘What is it?’ said Hawisia.

‘Thing’s not turned round as it should be,’ said Rose as her hands resumed their wanderings. She clucked twice. ‘Don’t like it when they get footstrong.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Nothing good, my dear,’ said the midwife, with one of her dark looks. It changed to a smile and she patted Hawisia’s wrist. ‘Should straighten itself out in time, though, with the right charms. Let me see what we have here.’

She dug through her bag and came up with a much-thumbed little book. Hawisia had seen it before, heard its bootless charms wheeze out through Rose Lipton’s wide lips. ‘Have you straightened your husband’s girdle, as I asked?’

‘Just there,’ said Hawisia, pointing to the delicate metal chain dangling from a bedpost. Wrought pewter, a gift from Robert on their wedding day, though crafted by Stephen Marsh, his chief apprentice then. Rose lifted it from the post and draped it across Hawisia’s waist.

‘It is a husband’s charm, you know. Shame Robert’s not here to sing it himself. I’ll lip it out for you though,’ she said helpfully.

‘I thank you for it,’ said Hawisia, tightening her jaw.

Rose fixed the clasp before Hawisia’s nether way. Hawisia could do nothing but lie there, propped up on her bed, as Rose recited the familiar words by rote. ‘I bound, as so shall I also unloose. I bound, as so shall I also unloose. I bound …’ The midwife murmured the girdle charm ten times, not reading from the book, simply thumbing the page containing the words and the rubrics for their use.

When Rose had finished she tucked the book away, followed it with the poultice, and helped Hawisia dress and sit up on the edge of her bed.

Hawisia, unable to stop herself, asked, ‘All seems well, then, aside from the babe’s position?’

Rose waggled a hand, shot out her lower lip. ‘You are well past where you’ve got to before, Hawisia, I’ll give you that,’ she said, but then shook her head. ‘Yet that means little when it comes to the birthing. How many is it you’ve lost to the flux since Robert Stone took you to wife? Two is it, or three?’

‘Four,’ said Hawisia, remembering them all. The first three gone in rushes of blood that could have been her menses if she hadn’t known better and cramped so badly. The last one was stillborn early, an unchristened lump pushed out into a world it would never see or know.

‘And Eleanor, she gave him two, aye? Sweet one, that Eleanor.’

‘Two. Yes,’ said Hawisia flatly. ‘Both girls.’ Eleanor Stone, Robert’s first wife, had been dead these eight years. The daughters were departed from the foundry as well, one recently married off to a wine merchant of Cripplegate Ward, the other gone to fever in her childhood. Robert would often speak of his late wife with a certain longing skidding through his voice, and though he never said so she could feel the contrast between his wives working on his desires.

Eleanor, fertile and fecund. Hawisia, barren and fruitless. Robert, wanting a son.

‘So your evil fortune weren’t from his seed, then, was it?’ said Rose with her brow raised, an inquisitive tilt to her head.

‘I suppose not,’ Hawisia said.

‘Good then.’ She nodded. ‘But don’t give in to despair, Mistress Stone. For the babe’s quick in there now, I can feel him shifting about, and who can say? Could be that Lady Fortune will turn the thing out alive.’ She wagged a finger. ‘Though don’t let your hope spring too fresh, Hawisia. Not with your luck.’

No fear of that, Hawisia thought, feeling her hopes pushed and pulled by the midwife’s shifting wisdom.

‘Dead birth can be a fearful thing though, can’t it?’ said Rose. ‘I well recall it with my third. John, it was.’ She sat back plumply on her stool and folded her arms. ‘We thought he was a choked one too, all grey in the skin, not a twitch from his toes to his nose. But my old gossip Grace, she thwacked the little thing on the arse she did, and out comes his screamin’ breath, loud and full as you’d like!’ She laughed merrily at the memory, which Hawisia had now heard at least ten times.

Rose packed her remaining things, then pushed the stool back beneath the bed and smoothed her dress as Hawisia shoved herself to standing. ‘So you see, Hawisia, y’must trust in the grace of God to sort wheat from chaff. Some of us be fecund, bursting with bairns, like my eight. Others are chosen to be virgins in a house a nuns. Others to be barren, such as yourself. But better to be barren than rotting off in a grave, aye?’

Hawisia walked the midwife down the outer stairs and through the house door to the showroom. Stephen Marsh was there, watching the shop in Hawisia’s absence.

‘Why good morn to you, Stephen Marsh,’ said Rose, beaming widely at him.

Stephen gave the midwife a nod. ‘Mistress Lipton. And Mistress Stone.’ He showed one of his too easy smiles, brushed away a dangling lock from his brow, and pondered them with those wide-spaced eyes, a soft doey brown. In the parish there were wives and widows alike who giggled and gossiped on those eyes. Not Hawisia. She sniffed and turned away.

Rose, though, paused in the doorway like a mud-stuck log. ‘How is the work, Stephen? Bells shining bright this autumn?’

‘As bright as ever, Mistress Lipton,’ he said. They spoke for a few minutes of newborn infants in the ward, and of Rose’s two unbetrothed daughters, fresh as new buds on an elm, each as lovely as a daisy, the midwife claimed.

Hawisia could sense Stephen’s awkwardness. She watched his eye shift toward the rear of the shop and the foundry yard. Stephen hated being trapped up front, she knew, just a hundred feet from his natural home amid the forge and metals yet in his mind a sea’s width away. He was like a penned bear up here, never truly content unless he was at his work – and Hawisia wanted him at his work. For with Robert’s sudden passing Stephen Marsh’s needful craft was all that stood between pounds and penury for the foundry.

How different it had been while her husband lived, when what she desired most keenly was prestige and the awed respect of the guild wives. If she could not have children of her own she would have the richest, finest foundry and smithy in the city of London, and it was up to Robert and his workers to make it so. More commissions, more customers, an ever-growing share of the city’s metalling trades.

And it was this nagging want, this thoughtless avarice that killed Robert Stone, despite Stephen Marsh’s hand in the accident. This she knew, and felt the weight of it every day, though it was easier in her mind to blame Stephen – and have him blame himself. Now all she wanted was to survive the birth of this only child, with enough coin for their bread and this roof. Her ambition had diminished with her future.

‘Allow me to walk you through to Fenchurch Street, Mistress Lipton,’ Stephen was saying. Rose, delighted, took his arm, and together they left the shop.

Hawisia went to the door and watched them walk down Bellyeter Lane and past the Fullers’ Hall, Rose chatting gaily, her free hand flying wildly back and forth before her loud and prattling mouth, Stephen nodding, yessing, feigning a youthful interest in the midwife’s wisdom and wit.

Hawisia closed the street door, flattened her back against it, felt the rough board against her palms. Grey and old already, even with a babe stewing in her belly. She wondered how it would be, to live in that world of green life and vitality it seemed everyone inhabited but she.

FIVE

London’s most shadowed church sat nestled against the northernmost span of the wall, which rose behind it to block the morning sun and cast that corner of the parish in an eternal dusk. In those months the outer ward, like the other neighbourhoods ringing the city beyond the walls, lived in a state of violent transition, as tenement holders and shopkeepers fought back the royal army with bribes, pleas, and threats, all desperate to hold on to their small scraps of ground in the face of the great events unfolding around them.

For it was the soldiers’ mission to clear buildings, trees, and brush from the city’s outer circumference, a mission they took quite seriously. With the combined might of France and Burgundy massing in Flanders, the walls of London would need defending when the invasion came. It wouldn’t do to leave the enemy a high tree that might be felled, a shop that might be torched, a ready supply of natural engines and dry fuel to be used against the city and its people. So, just over the ditch, for fifty feet in every direction, the army’s labourers were beginning to pull down houses old and new, taking axes to the few larger trees that still stood in those precincts.

For all my lifetime the walls had been embraced by clusters of narrow streets and alleys, animal pens, shops and stalls, and an occasional smithy, yet now these wide areas in the outer wards would be opened to the Moorfields, and the orchards and grazing grounds beyond. A great denuding, and it had already transformed this part of Cripplegate-without from a teeming precinct of city life into an ugly and mud-churned plain.

The destruction was also stoking an always simmering conflict between city and crown. The aldermen were seething as they watched whole neighbourhoods disappear, complaining to the mayor in the overblown terms favoured by their superior sect.

A royal trampling of the outer wards!

Gross violations of ancient rights!

The commons kicked about like river rats!

St Giles, despite its close proximity to the walls, remained, though the old rectory between the sanctuary and the Cripplegate guardhouse had recently been sacrificed to the cause. Some of its rubble filled three hand carts pulled by a trio of sullen workers, pressed into service by the two infantrymen standing to the side. None of the five men acknowledged my presence as I walked past them and up the porch stairs.

A small group of petitioners waited on the porch, then the church’s dark and cold interior prickled my limbs. As my eyes searched weakly through the gloom I heard the distinctive voice of the longtime parson. He stood within one of the shallow side chapels, arguing with another man over some aspect of the parish rents.

‘Nor has he yet made good on the summer’s leasing,’ said the priest.

‘That old hole in Farringdon,’ said the other.

‘Yes.’

‘Two shill four, as I remember.’

‘Press him for it, will you?’

‘Aye, Father.’

‘Harder this time. I cannot have a tenant sucking the parish teats without paying for his milk like all our other lambs.’

‘Aye, Father.’

‘Be off, then.’

The two separated, the other man passing me on his way to the west doors, the priest making for the altar end of the nave. He spoke again as he disappeared through the chancel screen, calling out instructions to several parish underlings, all of whom answered with a respectful tone of assent. As I neared the low middle door he spoke more pointedly to one of his charges.

‘That pile of ash, Gil?’

‘Yes, Father, I removed it. As you asked.’ A higher voice. Young, a touch sullen, as if its owner were being inconvenienced by the parson.

‘Very well. Finish up with that polish, then, and you may go.’

‘Yes, Father. As you please.’ Almost insolent, as I heard it. I wondered that the parson let one of his charges speak to him in such a way.

The candles on the near side of the chancel beam flickered as I passed. I waited, fumbling with an unlit wick, until the echo of the priest’s footsteps receded and the vestry door opened and closed. I looked around and through the screen. Before the low altar two masons worked on the floor, which in that portion of the church had, over the years, decayed into an uneven surface of old planks and broken stones that the men were busily replacing.

I looked through the crossing toward the south door. The sullen voice I had heard belonged to the youth squatting by the door to the sacristy, working a rag over a sacring bell at a low table. He wore the high-cut robes of an acolyte, the plain jet of a young man in minor orders. I approached him quietly, stood at his back.

‘Gil Cheddar?’

The hand holding the rag flinched. The acolyte sat back in surprise, losing his squat and half-sprawling onto the church’s stone floor. With an embarrassed flutter of limbs and robes he came to his feet, his chin and jaw raised at me. ‘Gil Cheddar indeed. Who’s asking?’

‘John Gower,’ I said, unmoved by his tone. His uncovered hair, coal black, swept back from a brow as close to pure white as living skin can be. Early whiskers grew along his cheeks and chin in seemingly random patches, and his narrow shoulders topped a gaunt frame of medium height and slight build. ‘What does the good parson of St Giles have you about today, Gil?’ I asked him.

There is something in my voice that I have never comprehended, a quality of silken acuity that seems to work its peculiar charm even on those hearing it for the first time. Chaucer once compared it to a flat of sacrament bread. If unleavened bread could talk, he said, it would talk like John Gower, with no airy lift or taste of yeast to distract from the flat purity of the grain. A weak figure, though I have witnessed the effect of my own voice often enough to lend some credence to the image. There is no levity in it, no room for compromise.

At his own first nibble of this voice, Gil Cheddar answered my question with no trace of the arrogance he had just shown his parish master. ‘Cleaning tasks, sire, between the day services. Polishing and the like.’

‘I see. And you are now finished for the day?’

‘Nearly so. I’m to finish the burnish on this bell here, then it’s my lot to stow the sacristy items back in the cabinet, get it all locked up securely, with the key returned to Father. Then it’s—’ He stopped himself, looking puzzled by the extent of what he had divulged. His narrow lips found what must have been a familiar frown. ‘You are here to speak with me? Or is it the parson you wish to see?’

‘Oh, I am here for you, Gil, and only you.’

He shifted his weight. ‘Whatever for?’

‘As I understand it you spoke rather freely to a hermit in recent days.’

‘A hermit, sire?’

‘A hermit of our mutual acquaintance.’ My head tipped back toward the walls. ‘A fellow who lives out there, above Cripplegate.’

He took a half step away, his mouth fixed in a line. I followed his gaze as he looked up and out across the top of the screen. From where we stood you could see nothing of the walls or the upper reaches of Cripplegate, though Cheddar seemed to be peering through the layers of wood and stone to that low window where he had spoken to Piers Goodman.

‘I would very much like to learn about your conversation with our unkempt friend, Gil.’ I had moved my hand to the purse at my waist. I lifted a coat flap and showed it, though the sight seemed to terrify more than please him. The acolyte glanced toward the vestry, took in the stances of the workers by the altar, assessing the dangers of speaking to this intruder.

‘Not here,’ he said quietly. ‘The coops, outside Guildhall Yard?’

‘I know them,’ I said. A line of chicken houses along Basinghall Street, a short walk down from Cripplegate.

‘I should not be long,’ he said. ‘Give me the quarter part of an hour.’

The vestry door groaned open, the parson returning to the nave to call out an instruction to an unseen subordinate. Hunching slightly, I took a few sidelong steps and ducked through the screen door, then hurried down the aisle and back out onto the porch. The sun had made no further effort to crest the walls, only brushing my face once I entered through Cripplegate and turned left past Brewers’ Hall, nestled just east of the inner gatehouse. I crossed Guildhall Yard and entered Basinghall Street, a narrow, snakelike thoroughfare extending south from the wall to Cheapside, and always bustling with hucksters selling everything from unskinned coneys to silver plate.

There was city business being transacted out here as well, mayor’s men taking small coin, dispensing false promises in exchange, and above it all rose the shouts of the criers in a sonorous dance of service and enticement.

‘Buy any ink, will ye buy any ink? Buy any very fine writing ink, will ye buy any ink and pens?’

‘Any rats or mice to kill? Have ye any rats or mice to kill in your homes and stables, good London? Rob the Ratsbane, at your service!’

‘White radishes, lettuces, more radishes, two bunches a farthing!’

‘Have ye a sore tooth, an aching gum, an abscess or a bleeder? For know that I am Kindheart the Tooth-Drawer, my good people, with gentle pincers in my hand and opium in my purse.’

The criers rattled on, their pitches rising to an impossible volume as I passed down the street.

Then, from the top of the way, the din of a herald’s bell, sharp brassy clangs cutting through the street noise. The sound abated as a tall young man in the royal livery stepped up on a half-barrel, looking down at the commons and asking for our silence and attention.

He was a palace man, recognizable as one of the showy types increasingly favoured by King Richard in those years. A rich coat buttoned tightly at his neck, a fur-trimmed cape chiselled with decorative slits, long legs in particoloured hose, three ostrich feathers stemming ostentatiously from his hat. He spread his arms, shook his feathers like a plumed bird, then brought his hands to his mouth, cupping the rhythm of his cries.

‘And now for a taste of foul crime, my good gentles and commons!

Now shall I shout of brigands and killers, slayers and thieves!

A poacher of pigeons, a smith turned to pilfer!

The most lawless of ladies at large in our land!’

He had our attention. Several outliers moved closer to the crier’s perch, crowding in and looking up at the man’s raised and thinly bearded chin as he went on.

‘Now give me your ears and your good hearing, people of London! Know all present that Robert Faulk, cook of Kent and poacher of His Highness the king’s forests, along with Margery Peveril, gentlewoman of Dartford and murderess of her husband, having jointly slain a sheriff’s turnkey and escaped from the sheriff’s gaol at the manor of Portbridge, do now flee, together or alone, through country and city, their destination unknown, with great bounty from King Richard to any man who would aid in their apprehension and seizure, singly or together.’

There were scattered exclamations, a fair amount of murmuring at the notion of a murderess at large. The crier repeated the announcement, added a brief description, then went on to shout a series of royal proclamations. The crowd loosened, the hubbub returned. Soon enough the royal servant’s drones were drowned beneath the renewed barks of the hucksters and their hired mouths.

‘Oysters! Oysters! Oysters! Get your oysters here, and your eels!’

‘Grind your knives or your shears? The sharpest blades in London ground here, my good gentles!’

‘There is Paris, there is Paris in this thread, the finest in the land!’

The poulterers’ coops stood along the western span of the street, forming a low, loud wall of fowl that lent an air of barnyard looseness to this city lane. The old ordinances had tried to restrict the poulterers to the wall by All Hallows, though recent mayors had proved more lenient. Hens pushed their feathers and beaks through the slats in a ceaseless hunt for grains, while a rooster strutted proudly along the perimeter. The constant murmur made a happy cover for conversations both ill-intentioned and benign.

I gathered a handful of kernels from between the pavers and was pushing them through the slats of the nearest coop when I felt a hand at my shoulder. I turned into the thick-lidded eyes of Adam Pinkhurst, a scribe for the new common serjeant at the Guildhall. As always I was distracted by the pied spectacle of his face, a patchwork of burnt and healthy skin patterned like some elaborate Moorish cloth, as if he had got in the way of one of an alchemist’s acid flasks.

‘John Gower,’ he said, the cleft in his chin deepening as he spoke, his gaze direct and confident, regarding me as an equal. Pinkhurst’s stature among the Guildhall clerks had grown somewhat over the last few years since Chaucer had designated him as his favoured copyist, commissioning three manuscripts of his poem on Troilus. I had never employed his services for my poetry, preferring to hire a dedicated bookman along Paternoster Row rather than a city scrivener like Pinkhurst. The Guildhall scribes were notorious for passing around unauthorized copies of their clients’ work, and I had no desire to see my making treated like so much fodder for the common gut. Though Pinkhurst, by near-universal acclaim, was trustworthy and discreet, I knew him as a forger of remarkable skill.

‘Pinkhurst,’ I said as we clasped hands, his ink-stained but smooth. ‘What brings you out of your cage?’

He grimaced. ‘I drew the short lot today, so I go in search of pies for our chamber of scribblers. Pork, chicken, liver, dog, friar – makes no difference, so long as they’re not rancid. Six pies then I’m back to inking, sadly enough, and on such a delightful day.’

‘It is that,’ I agreed, appreciating the man’s wit. It was no surprise he was Chaucer’s favourite; Geoffrey had told me that Pinkhurst had more than once suggested alternative rhymes and phrases in the margins of his rough copies, just the sort of revisions and improvements to which Chaucer so often subjected my own verse – yet only rarely accepted from me in turn.

He saw the kernels in my hand. ‘And you? Are you considering renting yourself a chicken coop, relocating from Southwark to Basinghall Street?’

‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘My residence is as far from the Guildhall as it can be. No city politics for me.’

‘You are a wise man,’ he laughed, then, in a lower voice fragrant with noontime cider, ‘Brembre cannot depart these precincts soon enough, I tell you. The man is a tyrant, some new Nero laying waste to the city. Even Exton will be a better pick, despite his current lodging in Brembre’s purse. How the fair Idonia stands for such mistreatment I will never know.’

Nicholas Exton, newly elected mayor, would be inaugurated at the end of October. Chaucer had told me of Pinkhurst’s besotted admiration for Idonia, the current mayor’s wife. While I already knew of his contempt for Brembre, I wouldn’t have expected him to risk such incautious vitriol in front of me.

‘We shall hope that Exton brings a new golden age to the Guildhall, then,’ I said.

Pinkhurst shifted on his feet. He had spoken rather too loosely, and seemed to know it. ‘Well.’ He nodded. ‘You will excuse me, Gower. A pie-seeker’s quest is not to be taken lightly.’

‘No indeed,’ I said, and watched him spin on his heel then disappear in the crowd bunched near the corner of Cat Street.

Only a few moments passed before I saw Gil Cheddar approaching from the opposite direction. The acolyte had shed his robes and now looked like any respectable young man taking air on a London afternoon, though his eyes widened when he saw me standing by the coops. As he approached he shot worried glances up and down Basinghall Street.

‘Here?’ I asked him.

A nervous sulk. ‘Ask your questions, Master Gower.’

‘Fine then. I understand you spoke to our good hermit.’

‘Aye.’

‘You spoke to him about a company entering the city, yes?’

‘Aye.’

‘A company of Welshmen.’

‘Aye.’

‘Through Cripplegate.’

‘Aye.’

‘And when did you see these men, Cheddar?’

He thought about it. ‘More than ten days ago it would have been. A Thursday, of that I am certain. It was Holyrood Day.’

Five days before Peter Norris had seen the Welshmen circling the gateyard.

‘I was sent by the parson to help with the night service on the vigil. Was after cleaning up from that and dodging home when I saw them.’

‘What were they doing?’

‘Walking through the lodge doors at Cripplegate, and well after curfew bell too. Can’t say I wasn’t surprised, such a large group of them.’ The outer wall of the Cripplegate lodge was served by two small doors for use after the shutting of the gates each night. Any company of outsiders entering the city that late would not fail to attract notice, and demands for bribes.

‘Surely someone must have bought them in.’

‘Aye.’

Silence.

‘And who might that have been?’ My purse came out. He saw it. He twisted on a toe, scratching his reluctance in the dirt. He glanced in both directions and blew out a breath.

‘Father’s who it was. Left after the service and met them up the street without the walls, below the Moorfields. The parson led them to the gate himself, hustling them along. I was standing on the St Giles west porch. Had a knot in my breech tie, was trying to untangle it. I saw him leave by the vestry door, go up toward the Moorfields, then he was back quick as you please, hurrying them for the gate, like he was a sheeper herding ewes.’

Robert Langdon, the parson of St Giles Cripplegate, a respected clergyman, buying entrance to the city for a crew of Welshmen. How extraordinarily odd. Purchasing their deaths, too? But whatever for?

‘What can you tell me, Will, about Father Robert’s motivation? Did you learn the origin of his entanglement with these Welshmen?’

‘Aye,’ he said, with a slight smile. ‘There was another man with them. Not a Welshman but a Londoner, I’d warrant, hanging back with Father.’ His reluctance was now gone, as if he’d been waiting for the chance to spill. ‘They were standing just nigh the ditch. The first of the Welshmen were passing through the lodge. The other fellow, he was getting directions from Father.’

‘Directions to where?’

‘To a tenement-house off Thames Street, Queenhithe Ward. To a house in the parish rents of St Giles. I know it, as I ran an errand there for the curate only last month.’

‘Could you take me to it?’

‘Aye, but—’

‘Now.’

We passed down Ironmongers Lane and over Cheapside, soon reaching Thames Street and the quayside, where Cheddar turned east into Queenhithe Ward. This low way hard by the river smelled eternally of fish, which were cleaned right on the quays, strings of filth laid bare to the sun and washed away only at the end of the day, with the fresh catch hauled off by the fishmongers for sale in the markets. We paused at one point to allow a dungboat to take a load from three waiting carts. The gongfarmers shovelled the slop on board as a water bailiff watched primly from his skiff thirty feet off the quay, eager for a violation and a bribe.

Once the carts had cleared the quay we made our way another hundred feet. Cheddar angled up a crooked street leading north from the bank. He stopped in front of a house towering high over the narrow way. Few windows interrupted the flat surface of the outer wall, which was traversed by diagonal timbers cracked in several places. The door, opened to the street and splintered along one side, hung loosely from leather hinges. It gave onto a low front room, empty but for an octagonal standing table shoved against the far wall. The rushes, rotted and broken, covered only a portion of the splintered floor. The back room was in no better shape, nor was the kitchen, a sunken space shared with the two upper floors. Here several of the larger hearthstones had been removed. Two dented pans hung off hooks on the east wall, the whole of which leaned slightly forward, threatening to collapse inward.

The rear of the building shared a rectangular courtyard with four similar tenements, though the structure seemed in much worse shape than the others. An uncovered staircase climbed up the house’s back face. I took the steps gingerly, testing the next before leaving the last. The top two floors resembled the first in their condition, though unlike the lower part of the house, these storeys showed evidence of recent habitation: sleeping pallets, several torn or soiled garments, a clay jug and a piss pot, a moulded hunk of bread.

Sixteen Welshmen, sharing two floors. Not unthinkable in this section of the city, where the tenements clustered densely above and below Thames Street.

Cheddar’s attention was directed out the sole window onto the narrower lane. ‘Where are they now, do you suppose?’ I asked him.

He shook his head. ‘It’s what I was trying to tell you, before you rushed us down here.’ His palms faced outward, putting his silence on me. ‘Father Robert said it to the other man. I heard it plain from the porch. “Four days,” he said. “Four days they can stay, then they must be moved. After that they are the Guildhall’s problem.” Been more than four days, sure, and no one the wiser. As to where they are now? Couldn’t say. Nor, I suspect, could Father Robert.’

Though I could, or so I believed. The Welshmen brought into the city by the parson of St Giles were now feeding the worms of St Bart’s, after an ugly sacrifice of their corpses at the shrine of St Dung. A terrible end to sixteen unknown lives.

There was one part of Cheddar’s story that lodged in my throat like a half-swallowed bone.

The Guildhall’s problem.

Yet it was the Guildhall, in the person of Ralph Strode, that had set me off on this strange pursuit in the first place, despite the mayor’s reluctance to have the matter plumbed. I did not think for a moment that my friend was involved in the deaths of these men. Yet to imagine the mayor, or perhaps an alderman or two, concealing or even sanctioning these foul murders, then keeping the information from Strode – and Welshmen? England was not at war with Wales, any more than London was at war with York.

A city divided against itself, a realm churning with eternal crisis: rich bulges of opportunity for a man who does what I do. Yet London was growing increasingly strange to me, as if our ages and habits, flowing as one for so many years, were slowly parting around a rising isle in the stream. Looking back on that autumn, I liken my own sense of things to the steadily deteriorating condition of my eyes. On a bad day, when I looked at a line of trees, I would perceive it as a fluctuating plane, wobbling blurs of light and dark. If in the light I saw the promise of knowledge and resolution, the dark yielded a flat nothingness, or a foreign and shapeless world.

SIX

‘Mar— Elizabeth? Now, Elizabeth?’

The woman sighed. She could almost smell his dread, hear it in his tentative voice. Fear repulsed her. ‘Yes, Antony. Now.’

The false name came easily to her, and it seemed to give him some measure of confidence. He stood slowly, brushed at his too-tight doublet with those giant hands, and went to see the keeper in the front room. She heard the soft tink of coins, a satisfied ‘Very well, good sir’ from the keeper’s wife, then he reappeared in the low doorway.

She looked at his feet. Stop shuffling, said her frown. He lifted them, straightened that labourer’s spine. She gave him an approving smile as he sat.

‘And the horses?’ she said, tightening her plait and tucking it back in place beneath her hood. A strand still teased her cheek. She pushed it to and caught him watching her. She felt herself blush.

He nodded stiffly, oblivious to her discomfort, his own neck reddened from the restriction of the high collar. ‘A few moments. ‘Nother company’s just arrived, so stablers’re quite busy at the moment.’

She stifled another sigh. Much work to accomplish here, though the long journey north to Durham would give them plenteous time. St Cuthbert’s bones were hardly planning to get up and walk away.

She coughed into a balled hand. The back chamber was stuffy, close, full of smoke. Gentlefolks’ room, the keeper proudly called it, though she had stolen more than one envious look at the airy common hall up front, where a dozen or so lower travellers in their company, man and woman alike, relaxed and drank from the inn’s stock of dark, river-cooled ale. She sipped at warm wine, washing down the pigeon pies and greens, wondering if she would ever truly satisfy her hunger after such long privation. She closed her eyes, felt herself shudder in the stiff chair, let the images take her for a moment, as they daily would do. The filth, the fire, the smoke and death. A clearing in the woods, the strange crack of the guns.

When she looked up she saw him staring down at his food. She was happy to see him eating slowly, as she had instructed, but as she watched his bearded jaw work at the supper other considerations afflicted her. Where would their next meal come from? Should they stay the night here, with this new company of pilgrims, or push on along toward the next town, trusting their luck to find another inn before nightfall? On this main road, just three days north of London, there should be many choices. Yet not any inn would do, not for a couple in their situation. They – she – had to choose carefully, with a mind to appearances. The appearance of appearances.

She was preparing to push her chair out and find the privy when a clamour sounded from out front. Calls from the yardboys, loud neighs from a struggling horse. Another few shouts, then the inn’s street door slammed open. Their view from the back was blocked by a half-wall, but they could hear men’s businesslike voices from up front.

She grasped his arm, fixed him with a stare. Was it over already? ‘Steady now, Antony.’

‘Aye,’ he said, barely a whisper. He placed a hand on hers. She didn’t flinch at his touch, as she had at first. I am your wife, she silently assured him, and herself.

The alewife appeared in the doorway. ‘A nuncius, from down Westminster,’ she said, a finger aside her nose. She bent slightly toward them. ‘They pull in here, smelling like a wet dog, demanding our best, but then they’re always off eft soon. We’ll have him off your ear quicker’n a pig eats a corn.’

Her shoulders tightened as the alewife left, and her gut flipped. A royal messenger. Westminster, London, soldiers, and she saw it all again, heard and smelled the death.

In the front room the nuncius exchanged low words with the keeper, who sounded concerned, though about what she could not discern. She heard the muffled slap of a purse changing hands. The keeper approached their table, his face showing distaste.

‘With your pardon, mistress, and yours, gentle sir, this king’s man would like a word,’ he said. He ducked out, visibly relieved his part of the business was done. The messenger replaced him in the doorway. A short, hard man, his skin swarthy with the sun. There was a scar beneath his chin, a thin line of whitened flesh that disappeared into a loose shirt of dun wool, stained and flattened by the narrow saddlebags flung over his shoulders. These were affixed with the badge of King Richard, the white hart on a field of faded blue. His eyes, deep set and impassive, swept past her own as he turned to the man across from her.

Yes, we are done, she thought, her pulse a low throb in her ears. The nuncius started to speak. ‘Good sir, if you will—’

‘What is the meaning of this intrusion?’

‘Antony!’ she said, pressing his arm, though instantly regretting it. He had done well to question the messenger, to demand an explanation in that gentleman’s tone.

The nuncius loomed over their table in the small chamber. ‘My horse has gone lame,’ he said flatly. ‘A mile south of here.’

‘Oh?’ she said, taking on the same superior tone. ‘And what of it?’

‘The gentleman here – his is the best horse in the stable.’

‘Not the least surprised,’ said the horse’s rider with a proud nod. ‘Strong fellow, isn’t he?’

‘I will be commandeering him,’ said the nuncius, no hesitation or apology in his tone. ‘I have a full day’s ride to the next post, and the need for a swift mount.’

She felt her chest loosen. ‘There are no other horses suitable to your needs?’

He looked aside. ‘Others suitable? I would think so. But speedy, strong? No, mistress. And I’ve patents in my pouch that need handing off.’ He fingered the leather bags yoking his chest and shoulders. ‘I’ll take your horse now.’

‘If you must.’ She nodded tightly. ‘We will be compensated?’

‘Aye, and most generously.’ He opened his palm. On it sat ten – no, twelve nobles. A decent sum for a pressed horse, though the stallion would easily fetch fifteen at one of the larger markets. But she saw no need to quibble, and draw more attention.

She looked across the table. Take them, Antony. But he sat there like a lump, his mouth half-open, his gaze wide and fixed on the coins. Beneath the table she pressed his foot with her own, then watched as he closed his mouth and gave the nuncius a curt nod. He held out a hand, and the royal messenger let the nobles slip from his palm. Probably a greater sum than Robert Faulk has ever held, she mused.

‘Will that be all?’ she asked the messenger, feeling incautious.

‘It will. And the king’s thanks.’ King Richard’s messenger turned on his heel, leaving the inn by the yard door.

The keeper reappeared. ‘Apologies, good gentles.’ He rubbed his palms. ‘No choice, really, not when it comes to one of those Westminster riders.’

She tried to mask her worry. ‘You have a replacement you will sell us?’

‘I do indeed, mistress. Fine mare. Chestnut, four years, broke her myself. Name’s Nellie.’

His eyes had misted, and she could see what the transaction would cost him. Men and their horses. She gave him as kind a look as she could manage. ‘You have clearly been a good master to her. Nellie will be well taken care of, and you may depend on her safe return upon our own from Durham. We shall purchase you a relic of Cuthbert for your troubles.’

The keeper’s eyes widened over a spreading grin. He made a silent bow.

Later, as they prepared for sleep, Robert dawdled outside the door while Margery undressed and nestled in the wide bed. When it was his turn she silently watched him in the candlelight. He had removed his low shoes, which stood toes down against the door wall. His doublet lay loosely over a bench, covered by the fine cotte-hardie of dyed wool he had stolen from a drying fence during their flight. He was bare-chested now, a silent width in the dim light. He went to his knees. She saw a last flash of his face as he bent to the candle, his lips gathering wind then ending the flame.

She lay back on the raised pallet. This, a luxurious breadth of down and heather more fit for a lady’s chambers than a country inn, gave softly beneath her spine as she stretched the day’s travels away, though her eyes would not close.

He spoke from the floor. ‘Keeper’s not like to see that pretty mare again, or I’m the poxed Duke of Ireland.’ He grunted, adjusting his lanky frame to the lumps of his travel blanket, his makeshift bed atop the rushes.

She smiled at the low ceiling. ‘Aye,’ she said, and nothing more. Soon the rhythm of his breath slowed with the coming of sleep.

It was their sixth night together. She appreciated that he never snored. Not like her dead husband, curse his bones, who’d whistled and wheezed through every pore in his flesh. It wasn’t for snoring that Walter Peveril deserved the death he got, though these quiet nights were a blessing in themselves, despite the pressing peril of their flight.

Margery Peveril spoke into the gathering dark, thinking of the north, the stretch of the marches, the man on the floor. ‘We’ll sell the mare in Glasgow,’ she whispered to the night.

SEVEN

From the great doors the massive hall of Westminster Palace stretched languidly to the east, with partitions of varying heights separating the courts: Chancery, the Exchequer, King’s Bench. England had a leaking hulk for a ship of state, defeating the efforts of the palace’s small army of servants to maintain and improve its fabric. Despite the hall’s condition one could tell at a glance that the opening of that year’s Parliament was nearly upon us. Three glazers worked at a few broken windows overhead, limners touched up wall paintings here and there, and a team of masons trowelled mortar over gaps and holes in the stone.

The eve of Michaelmas found me in Westminster before the chambers of Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk and the lord chancellor. As Strode had told me at St Bart’s churchyard on that first morning, the chancellor was resisting all inquiries from the Guildhall concerning the murders, claiming they were no business of his or of his office. Yet the use of guns made the killings undeniably the business of the crown, a point I intended to press regardless of the chancellor’s reluctance.

Edmund Rune, the earl’s secretary and chief steward of his sprawling household, stood within the low passage leading to the chancellor’s chambers, expecting me. Rune was a new addition to Michael de la Pole’s familia, his predecessor Edward More having died earlier that year. Where More’s reliable and steady manner had mirrored the best qualities of the earl himself, Rune was known as a gossip and a backbiter. The chancellor, it was widely agreed, could have chosen better.

Rune had a protective air about him that morning, his eyes hanging open over a brown beard, his large frame angled toward me as I approached. ‘Go gently with him, Gower. He’s feeling it from all sides these days. None of your coiney cant.’

‘A peculiar request,’ I said, and an unnecessary one; I felt nothing but respect and admiration for Michael de la Pole, who had always treated me fairly. Yet for other, more powerful men, old King Edward’s most trusted counsellor had lately become an object of passionate resentment, even outright contempt, despite the man’s long service to the crown. The young king’s capricious favours had placed the earl in a precarious position with respect to several of the lords, who would be assembling in Westminster soon for Parliament.

‘Surely these rumours of the earl’s impeachment are false, Rune,’ I said. ‘Lordly gossip, nothing more.’

My tone had been light, meant to reassure. The look Rune gave me beneath his brown curls suggested any levity would be out of place. ‘The coming weeks will be crucial for his lordship. We are doing everything we can to hold off the spite from the Commons and the Lords alike, but I fear we may be too late. All rides on the king.’

He led me down the passage to the chancellor’s chambers, a set of rooms tucked within the southeastern sprawl of the palace, not far from the Painted Chamber. The chancellor sat not at his study desk but in his receiving room, a low-ceilinged and intimate space long regarded as the hidden heart of Westminster, though its walls were all Yorkshire, washed brightly with rural scenes inspired by the streets and saints of the earl’s native shire.

An old man already, Michael de la Pole seemed to have aged several years since I last saw him a few months before. Eye pockets smudged with fatigue, a neck carelessly shaved, cheeks bowed in above a jaw that had lost its confident jut and now trembled with a creeping palsy that had been coming on over the last two years. Not a broken man, not yet, though I believe he saw his defeat before him, drawn more sharply with each passing day.

‘I trust your lordship is well?’ I said, feigning ignorance of his distress.

‘The wolves are gathering round, Gower,’ he said brusquely, waving at me to be seated. ‘You know it as well as I do. So let’s slice through the politique.’

‘My lord?’

His look hardened. ‘What do you want, Gower?’

The abruptness of the question startled me. My voice betrayed it. ‘You – your lordship may have heard of an incident in the city,’ I said, with an unfamiliar stammer. ‘A rather grim discovery.’

‘In the sewers,’ said the earl.

‘Yes, my lord. Sixteen men, murdered, tossed in the ditch.’

‘Brembre may have said something about it, yes.’

‘You’ve spoken directly to the mayor, then?’

‘Just once,’ he said flatly.

‘Did he ask for your assistance?’

‘He did, at first, and as I told him, London deaths are London’s concern, not Westminster’s. I have enough to do keeping the lords at bay this season without meddling in the business of gongfarmers.’

‘I understand, my lord,’ I said, recalling Strode’s recollection of the mayor’s exchange with the earl, whose manner was putting me off at the moment. I knew the chancellor as a man of compassion and good judgment. Surely sixteen unexplained deaths beneath the streets of London should be arousing solicitude, not this show of lordly derision.

‘What concerns me, my lord – or rather what concerns the Guildhall, and I am here on the city’s behalf – is not simply the murders.’

‘Oh?’

‘What is of most concern is the unknown identity of these men, their nameless anonymity. Particularly the manner of their deaths.’

His brow edged up. ‘And how did they die, Gower?’

I hesitated. ‘They had been shot, my lord. Though not with arrows or bolts.’

Silence.

‘With guns, my lord.’

‘Guns,’ he said.

‘Guns.’

‘Cannon?’ said Rune, leaning in.

I shook my head. ‘Something smaller, as the corpses were largely intact, drilled through with small shot. Nothing much larger than a child’s thumb ball.’ My fingers brushed my thumb, recalling the heft of that first iron ball removed from one of the bodies, its killing weight.

The earl looked to the side. ‘Quite interesting.’

I waited, then said, ‘It is that, my lord.’

He glanced up at Rune, uneasily this time, then back at me. ‘Let me repeat my first question, Gower. What do you want?’

Once again I felt taken aback by the chancellor’s abrupt and peremptory tone, as if I were being impertinent with the questions I asked him, my presence a nuisance. ‘An answer, your lordship.’

‘To what question?’

‘Where did the killer or killers of these men procure these guns?’

‘Explain yourself.’

‘The city maintains no such handgonnes, as they are known. Nor are they in the possession of the church, and a hunter would hardly choose such instruments of war to bring down a hart. The only store of light artillery anywhere in or around London – if indeed a store exists at all – must lie within the Tower.’

Rune stepped out from behind me. I snapped my mouth shut and looked up at his protective sneer. ‘What are you implying, Gower? That the lord chancellor of England ordered the execution of sixteen unnamed men and had them thrown down a London privy?’

I showed him my palms, lowered my chin. ‘Nothing of the sort.’ I looked back at the earl. ‘Forgive me if I sound accusatory, my lord.’

De la Pole waved a hand.

‘I am merely suggesting that the weapons that took these men’s lives must have originated from within the royal army. As for who wielded them, and why – those are separate questions, and I am at a loss even to speculate at this point. But the guns strike me as a singular piece of evidence. I should be surprised if they don’t lead us to the source of this horrific violence.’

‘Westminster does not investigate common killings,’ said Rune. ‘That is the work of sheriffs, justices, and constables, not chancellors and kings.’

‘They are hardly common killings, my lord,’ I said, keeping my eyes on the earl. ‘Over a dozen men, shot through with iron, left to rot beneath—’

‘Rot. Now there’s an apt word, eh, Rune?’ The chancellor looked at his secretary. ‘Rotting bodies, rotting rights, rotting laws.’

‘How have I earned your disfavour, my lord?’ I said. ‘Given all that happened in May of last year, your words to me then …’ I let my voice trail off, asking for a small favour, and a sharper recollection from the earl.

The moment lengthened until finally the chancellor sighed, drummed his fingers on his desk. His jaw shook slightly. ‘What you’ve described, these deaths. A horror, and I will lend you what limited assistance I am able. Yet my authority diminishes by the day. You must be aware of the situation with that young fiend the Duke of Gloucester and the earls. FitzAlan, Beauchamp, even Mowbray is in on this plot. They will rise up to oppose me in the coming Parliament, I’ll be bound, and against Oxford as well.’

‘Though deservedly so, in his case,’ Rune muttered.

The chancellor laughed gruffly at this dismissal of Robert de Vere, the king’s sweet-faced favourite, soon to be created duke if the rumours were true: a title properly reserved for those of royal blood, yet given to this braggart with little thought, and littler wisdom. A further sign of the young king’s disregard for tradition and propriety in his royal appointments.

‘Is it really all as dire as you suggest, my lord?’ I said.

The earl tightened his mouth against the tremors.

‘Imagine yourself standing in the middle of a field, Gower. A field that has been the ground beneath your feet your whole life. You’ve tilled it, sown it, harrowed it, harvested it, repeated the cycle dozens, perhaps hundreds of times in your memory. You know every inch of the place. You’ve dug every furrow, hefted every stone, broken every clod.’

His gaze moved to the stone behind me. ‘Suddenly, without warning, the ground begins to shift. You stumble on unfamiliar rocks, tangle yourself in weeds you thought you had torn out from the root long ago. The soil stirs in places, little patches at first but growing, widening, joining together, and soon the entire field is churning at your feet, surging to your ankles. Then, as you watch, parts of the field begin to fall away. Square feet, square yards, misshapen patches of ground the size of rooms, swallowed by the unforgiving earth. Beneath it all is darkness, a great void, and all that prevents you from pitching into it yourself is the final patch of ground beneath your feet.’

He sat silently for a time, statued in his narrow chair.

‘And now you are powerless to do anything but stand there,’ he said, ‘waiting for that last bit of earth to dissolve, and you with it.’

The chancellor’s bleak vision of his deteriorating position left me rattled. I could scarcely believe it had come to this. For time out of mind Michael de la Pole had been a figure of staunch constancy in the realm, as solid as an oak, or the stone cross on Cornhill.

‘You are the king’s conscience, my lord,’ I said. ‘If conscience is defeated, what shall become of the realm?’

He narrowed his aged eyes, all withered shapes and angles. ‘Conscience, that hidden little worm, mining our souls. King Richard, I am afraid, has lost his worm.’

A harsh laugh escaped Rune’s throat. I looked up at him as he covered it with a shallow cough. ‘You’ll want an avenue to the Tower, then,’ Rune said to me.

At last. ‘Though a twisted alley will be sufficient, my lord, so long as it leads me there by and by.’

‘There is little enough to lose,’ said the earl, gesturing for Rune to take a seat next to me. ‘Edmund, what do you say to our dark friend’s entreaty?’

Rune settled himself on the corner of my bench, elbows on his knees, his fingers steepled as he talked through the delicacies of the Tower and its administration. ‘The place is a labyrinth of competing interests. Lieutenants, captains, treasurers, stewards of the wardrobe, the king’s mint, the armourers and their craft, the chief officers of the guard. Even the masons have their own little principality down there. Many pies, many fingers and arses to lick.’

‘I know what you must be thinking, Gower,’ said the earl before I could reply. ‘Shouldn’t the king’s own chancellor have free rein on Tower Hill?’

‘The castle and its appurtenances should be adjuncts of your office, my lord,’ I said. ‘As close as your own arm.’

‘A severed arm, perhaps, and not my own,’ he mused. ‘Often it feels as if the Tower is as distant from Westminster as Jerusalem itself, or the seat of the Great Khan.’

‘There are many good men down there, your lordship,’ Rune allowed. ‘Men with larger interests than their own.’ He turned to me with a smirk. ‘Though not, perhaps, in the armoury.’

‘Who runs it these days?’ I asked. The king’s armoury, though of central importance to the military machinery of the crown, had rarely provoked my interest, and I had no hold on anyone in the king’s wardrobe, under whose jurisdiction the armoury fell.

Rune’s grey eyes flicked briefly toward the earl. ‘William Snell. Armourer to the king.’

I had encountered the name though never met the man. ‘What can you tell me about him?’

‘Little enough,’ the chancellor said slowly, bringing his hands together on his desk. ‘He is a quite remarkable person, our Snell. An exceptional man, of greatest importance to His Highness. King Richard appointed him at the request of his uncle some years ago, before all the factions started tearing at each other’s throats.’

‘Lancaster?’

‘Gloucester. Snell was a man-at-arms in the duke’s household, and he’s been the king’s armourer for going on nine years now.’ Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, was the youngest of the king’s uncles, and one of the most powerful of the lords in the rival faction.

Further questions elicited from Rune and the earl that William Snell was at present charged with the building out and improvement of the king’s artillery. ‘Assembling as many guns as he can down there, more guns than the king’s armoury has seen in all its history,’ said Rune. ‘And not only assembling, but improving, enhancing, inventing, searching for the newest techniques and devices from Burgundy and Milan, the best men to rival their makers. He is also amassing gunpowder sufficient for a year’s siege and a great battle to follow. Why, last week I was given a bill for a quantity of saltpetre so immense that I sent my clerk back to the Exchequer twice in an hour simply to check the numbers.’

‘And he is doing all of this with King Richard’s approval?’ I asked.

The chancellor grimaced. ‘Certainly not with mine, nor, from what I understand, with Lancaster’s.’ John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and in those years the most powerful force in the realm next to King Richard himself. The king’s uncle was abroad in Spain that fall, running a small and ragged kingdom from his base in Ourense, a venture supported by several thousand English and Portuguese troops bought or pressed into a sizeable army. The massive company had sailed from Plymouth two months before, leaving a void in the domestic defences even as the French were massing at Sluys. I had heard no good explanations as to how Gaunt persuaded the king to approve the Castilian venture at such a delicate moment, though the damage was already done.

‘Lancaster’s absence seems to have knocked loose a nail or two,’ said the earl. ‘Snell has convinced himself that his artillery is the most important work in the realm. That London, even England, will stand or fall on the power of these new guns. The man’s self-regard knows no limit, it seems.’

‘Vainglory is the truest engine of our souls, my lord,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ His eyes settled on me. ‘You know, Gower, you would find the Tower a fitting subject for one of your poetical fancies. It sits there like a great maw between the river and the walls, swallowing iron, copper, wood, powder, chewing all of it to a paste then spitting out these strange and barbarous machines, pointing them at the future.’

‘Not an overly indebted future, I hope.’

‘A new subsidy is inevitable, I’m afraid,’ said the chancellor with a heavy sigh. ‘More taxes, more discontent, more force from above.’

‘And more rebellion?’

He blinked. ‘If not from the Commons then from the Lords, I fear.’

He looked at Rune, who nodded my way, signalling the end of our appointment. I rose. The earl’s face sagged as he received my bow then he looked aside, and I left his chambers sour-stomached and perturbed.

Rune walked with me to the great hall. We stood at the end of the passage. A droning bailiff descanted from Common Pleas.

I was about to take my leave of the chancellor’s secretary when Rune grasped my elbow, closed in. ‘Snell has isolated himself down there, Gower,’ he said, his breath slightly foul on my cheek. ‘This is more than bureaucratic arrogance. The man thinks himself a kind of god, running the armoury like some new Olympus. And he never comes out. Nor does he respond to letters, and our messengers have been beaten, thrashed, threatened with knives and swords. All we get up here are bills and rumours.’

‘The Tower is less than three miles from where we stand,’ I pointed out. ‘Surely his lordship the earl or any other of the higher lords could take a company down there with orders from King Richard and simply turn the man out.’

‘Surely,’ he responded with a note of disdain, ‘you cannot think we haven’t considered it, plotted it, mapped it all out? The truth is everyone is so terrified of the man, no one wants to confront him – not with Gaunt and our most tactical military men out of the country, and France massing for an invasion. Snell has himself and his guns and his men bulwarked all along the northern walls, practically daring us to come in and uproot him. A dragon, sitting on his hoard. The castle that is supposed to be guarding our city has instead become its greatest vulnerability.’

‘So what do you suggest, Rune?’ I said, hiding my surprise at this show of royal weakness. ‘Should we commission an actual dragon or two to fire the place? Or hire a mercenary army from Italy, perhaps Hawkwood and his company?’

He turned his face to me. It was stony, free of passion. ‘Jest if you wish, Gower. But there is more at risk here than you can possibly know. We need every ally we can maintain to help keep the Tower in line. And on the subject of allies, what of Brembre?’

I answered him cautiously. ‘The mayor is showing some reluctance to pursue the Walbrook murders.’

I watched Rune’s eyes. They narrowed at the edges.

‘That is disturbing news, Gower. Shall I confront him myself?’

Rune could sense my hesitation. Though the chancellor and the mayor were both in the king’s faction, they had very different interests at stake, and I hardly wished to unsettle relations between the two powerful men. Never stir waters that need no stirring, as my father liked to say. ‘Nicholas Brembre is no weak-kneed baron, eager to protect an unspotted reputation,’ I said. ‘Give me time to lift a few leaves, Rune. If I need another hand pushing on this I will let you and the earl know.’

‘Good then,’ he said, looking somewhat mollified. Rune palmed my elbow and shared one last thought. ‘You will be doing the lord chancellor a fair favour if you can find a way to rattle Snell. Pull him from his moorings down there, put things right. Discover who committed this atrocity, Gower, and the extent of Snell’s involvement. It would be a great help at Parliament time should things up here grow … dangerous.’

So there it was. With one finger in a hornet’s nest I was about to shove in an arm, and damn the thousand stings.

EIGHT

Stephen Marsh peered down at the swirled width of mud far below, the very bottom of the wide ditch separating the Iron Gate from the old Well Tower, which stood as the first built sentry to the great complex sprawling to the north and west of him. At Stephen’s insistence his entry to the Tower late that afternoon would be from the east rather than from the heavily trafficked entrance off Tower Street, always crowded with Londoners seeking alms, favour, and news. One of Snell’s men, after meeting him at the stairs below St Katharine’s wharf, had led him up and over this, the narrowest of passages, to the curtain wall, where he now stood alone, waiting for his audience with the king’s armourer. It was a glorious day, crisp and clear, and as he smelled the autumn air his gaze wandered toward the river. At the far end of the ditch, where the moat fosses met the Thames, a brave clutch of morning bathers sprawled on the wide quay, daring the guard to descend and try to take them. Beyond the swimmers two royal balingers stood out on the river, flashing colourful banners from yardarms and mastheads.

‘This way.’

Two new guards, one beckoning for him to follow. They walked north, away from the river, over the walls and through several towers. The whole perimeter bristled with men and spears. The sentryway then took them east before their descent through the Bowyer Tower just down from St Peter ad Vincula, the parish church that lay within the Tower grounds. The guards led him to that end of the wide yard, currently occupied with a hobelar company. Yorkshiremen, judging from the banner held by one of the frontmost riders, and though Stephen had always appreciated the vastness of the Tower, he was surprised to see such a quantity of horses at work among the towers and walls.

The guards left him in the yard and disappeared through a low door in one of the wide, squat buildings set against the inner wall. Marsh turned to watch the light cavalry at their martial labour. Champing and impatient in the mellow sun, the horses were agile, well muscled, light on their feet, their riders showing off for the king’s archers watching from a side rank. As London had armed itself over the preceding months it had pressed whole hosts of brigades from the shires, regional forces brought in to augment the defences of the city and the Tower. A mongrel army, was the talk, with little overall discipline, reliant on these pockets of ferocity and skill to engage an enemy of sprawling numbers and unknown strength.

‘Forward!’ the captain shouted. His board-straight back was to Stephen, his gaze sweeping the company, advancing in three unequal ranks. Four in front, then eight, then twelve. A wedge, as Stephen saw it, the first meant to penetrate the enemy’s ranks, with the subsequent lines pouring in behind. The captain backed his horse as he surveyed the moving lines, barking directions here and there.

‘Marsh.’

Stephen turned to see William Snell standing calmly behind him. He performed a half-bow that was answered by a slight nod from the armourer, who assessed him through narrowed eyes, birdlike and quick. Snell was a short man yet taut and muscled, seemingly compacted from the same iron and rock making up the engines and walls around them. As in the tavern a few nights before he was dressed with little regard to fashion or station, with a laceless and undyed coat thrown over his shoulders and fastened with a belt of twisted wool. The sleeves ended at his elbows in ragged hems, showing strong forearms that ended in thick wrists and fine-boned but coarsened hands.

He caught Stephen looking at his attire. ‘I am a working man, Marsh, like you and your men, not some ink-stained scrivener polishing his arse all day in the chancery. Come along.’

Turning past the church, Snell took him along a path between the edge of the yard and the low buildings against the north wall, which were joined by a cloister-like covered walkway built of rough beams and boards. Once inside the airy passage Snell led them from storeroom to storeroom, pausing at every turn to allow Stephen to marvel at the quantities of arms kept by the privy wardrobe. Whole chambers were given over to infantry armour and helms, all glistening with a pungent grease to ward off moisture and rust. Plated shields were stacked by the dozens from end to end and from floor to ceiling, their straps and braces removed for ease of storage and stuffed in bulging sacks suspended from the beam ceiling. The next room was a forest of whittled wood and low skeins of hempstring for the making of bows. Another consisted entirely of crossbow bolts. These were wrapped by the score in leather and thongs, the bundles stacked to the ceiling in the hundreds. Four, perhaps five thousand bolts, by Stephen’s estimation, all neatly stored for easy removal when war finally came.

Now the guns. Snell guided Stephen to the base of one of the larger towers in the complex, looking back at him with a flicker of quiet pride. They stood before a long, narrow portion of the main yard glistening with gunmetal. A team of carpenters was at work fitting the area with an addition to the sloping roof, fixed with notched rafters extending from the lower south wall to the higher tower wall on the north side. Only half the structure had been completed, leaving twenty bare beams jutting like bent masts from beneath the boards.

Snell placed a hand on Stephen’s back. ‘The guns themselves are just metal, of course,’ the armourer said. ‘Without powder and shot they are no more than water pipes. We have laid in enough shot – iron, lead, stone – for the defence of London. Of twenty Londons. Look there, and there.’

Piled in this portion of the yard were projectiles of numerous shapes and sizes. Pyramids of smoothed stones, crates of iron balls, purses of lead shot, as well as several pairs of casting moulds leaning against the stone and answering to the large foundry arrays positioned along the wall. In another temporary room off the yard Snell showed him the strange tools and mechanisms crafted for the charging of the brutal weapons: drills and firing-pans, rods and touches.

A cluster of long and narrow tubes sat against a corner timber. Stephen’s steps slowed. ‘May I handle these, Master Snell?’

‘At your pleasure, Marsh,’ said the armourer, looking pleased.

Stephen hefted one of the peculiar guns, inspected it top to bottom. Hollow for its full length, but capped at one end and flared at the other, with a small hole bored through near the capped end. He fingered the hole, guessing at its purpose.

‘Come,’ the armourer said.

Two sentries stood to either side of a heavy wooden door, crossed by strong widths of dulled metal. Six separate locks were positioned along the sides, two of them fastened through eyeholes at either end of an iron bar. Each sentry held the keys to two of the locks on his respective side, and opened them at the armourer’s order. Snell worked at the two bar locks, struggling to lift the heavy rod crossing the whole. It fell to the floor with a loud clong, bringing another guard hurrying around the corner from the yard. Snell waved him off.

‘And here, the heart of the Tower,’ he said to Stephen. ‘The heart of England, some would say.’

The door groaned open to reveal a modest chamber, no larger than the streetfront room back at the Stone foundry. There the similarities ended, and Stephen could only gape in the half-light cast by the barred window. At least one hundred kegs, each the height of a small child, all banded with iron and tightly sealed. The air was sharp, tinged with the thousand or more pounds of gunpowder sealed in the close chamber. Marsh’s eyes watered, his nostrils burning in the acrid air.

Snell scrutinized him. ‘The most dangerous room in all England.’

‘Aye, Master Snell,’ Marsh rasped, imagining what a single coal could accomplish in this enclosed space.

‘It’s taken a few years to build up an adequate supply,’ said Snell, a touch of fatherly pride in his voice as he surveyed the lethal store. ‘Endless shipments of saltpetre. Carts and carts of sulphur and coals, the piss of a hundred bishops.’ He laughed. Stephen smiled. ‘But well worth the effort, and we have learned of late how to mix a more stable powder, with a purer burn. Let the forces of France and Burgundy only try to take this fortress. Let them assault this city and its walls, and with everything they have. I shall welcome the challenge, Marsh. Welcome it. From any quarter.’

Stephen imagined such a scene. Rivers of blood, brains and offal, limbs blown across the Thames, all from the power of guns.

Snell closed the heavy door, supervised the replacement of the locks, then led Stephen to a quiet corner of the wardrobe complex. They climbed a flight of stone stairs to the upper level of a two-storey structure built against one of the northwest towers. In the chamber were a low table and several chairs, a stack of ledgers, a few candles and lamps. A long sword and a battered shield leaned by the door. Along the western wall hung a map of the Tower, ruled and sketched on two thick widths of calfskin sewn roughly together and nailed to the boards behind. A window looked out on the whole of the yard, giving the armourer an impressive view of his domain. The room smelled of damp timbers and sawdust, a welcome change from the acrid wisps of powder still tickling Stephen’s nostrils.

Snell started to shut the door to his chamber behind them. It caught on the latch. The armourer had to pull for a moment before the door came closed. ‘Must have that repaired,’ he mused as he gestured Stephen toward one of the chairs. ‘Sit,’ he said.

Stephen obeyed as Snell took the other chair.

‘War is all about logistics, Marsh,’ the other man began when he was seated. ‘As the king’s armourer I’ve learned a great deal about the intimacy of war and bureaucracy. A good supply line is every bit as important as a capable company of archers. More important, in many ways, as fighting the Scots taught us last July.’

Stephen recalled the news spreading through the city the previous summer. It was little over a year since King Richard had returned from the disastrous campaign in Scotland, provoked by news of a French admiral landing a sizeable force at Leith and providing arms and munitions to King Robert. Though the English army had destroyed a few towns and held Edinburgh for a short while, the Scots refused to engage Richard’s forces. The result had been a desultory campaign of pillaging and burning that gained the crown little in the way of spoils, and lost it a great deal in prestige.

‘We had twelve thousand men mustered at Newcastle for upwards of three weeks,’ said Snell. ‘Twelve thousand, Marsh, arriving by land and sea, crowding into the streets, camped around the walls, filling the fields, and all of them prattling in their different tongues. Bohemians, Picards, Welshmen, some unhappy Scots. The plain of Babel, spread before the Newcastle keep. It was a contract army, you see, most bought with indentures, and led by a hundred and fifty captains. Half of them had as much business taking men into war as my new daughter.’

Stephen smiled at the thought. ‘War gives you much to consider, Master Snell.’

‘You have no conception.’ He coughed loudly into his palm, then settled his hands on his knee. His legs were crossed, and there was a lustful glint in his eyes as he turned his full attention to Stephen.

‘Efficiency. Doing more with less. Less food. Less coin. Less powder,’ he said. ‘And ultimately, Marsh, less gun.’

Less gun. His own words, now coming from the mouth of King Richard’s armourer. He blinked.

‘You are a talented man, Stephen Marsh.’

‘You are too kind, Master Snell.’

‘Some of the greatest bellfounders in the realm are also some of its greatest gunfounders. Those bombards just there?’

He pointed out the low window, opened to the autumn air. Stephen leaned forward and looked into the yard, where a pair of great cannon stood gaping toward the walls.

‘The calibre is forty inches, Marsh. Forty inches! Shoots quarrels the size of a man. These ones are modelled on the guns Artevelde used at Oudenaarde a few years back. Poured at John Feel’s foundry, though I wouldn’t let Feel stamp the barrels himself. These are the Tower’s guns, with the stamp of the royal wardrobe.’

John Feel headed up a foundry in Tower Ward. A rival to Stone’s, known for good, solid work. ‘If you have Feel’s with you, why do you need Stone’s?’

Snell tilted his head. ‘It is not Stone’s I need, Marsh. It is you. Your mind, your skills. Your magic with the metals.’

Stephen breathed deeply, feeling a nice surge of pride.

‘The Tower has become a teeming bitch of cannon, Marsh. It is a – why, it is a womb of guns.’ The armourer turned and fixed Stephen with iron eyes. ‘And I want you to train up a new litter for us. A secret litter of guns, fashioned outside these walls.’

Stephen looked at the etched calfskins on the wall, the immense sprawl of the royal hold. ‘Such a prospect would be welcomed by my mistress,’ he said cautiously. ‘With my master’s death, a royal commission would make all the difference for the stability of the foundry.’

Snell barked a short laugh. ‘Don’t play the knave with me, Marsh. This is not a commission to Stone’s, for entry in the good widow’s ledgers, or prattling among the parish gossips. This is an individual assignment, to you and you alone. Hawisia Stone is to know nothing of it.’

Stephen fought against a frown, mindful of Hawisia’s sullen mistrust. ‘If this is to be done at Stone’s I’ll be forced to fire and forge behind her back yet under the widow’s nose. I fear she will catch me out at it, and drag me to the wardmoot or the Guildhall. My sentence is already enough of a burden.’ Ten years. Ten years.

‘Fear is a distraction, Marsh. One I don’t covet this season. I ask you to remember that I am giving you an opportunity here. A chance to serve your king and your country, in an hour of great need.’ Snell leaned forward to place a hand on the younger man’s knee. ‘We are facing war. The French are massing at Sluys once more, Lancaster is abroad in Castile. Men of talent must band together, give their best to the realm.’ He smiled broadly. ‘Besides, everyone knows you are the muscle and mind of that operation. Why you never struck out on your own while you had the chance is a mystery, at least to those I know in your craft. Surely you will find a way to work around her suspicions.’

Stephen felt himself nod, his confidence returning. ‘Aye, Master Snell. I surely will. I will, or the Devil take my body and bread.’

‘Another oath!’ Snell’s eyes flashed a greyish-red in the streaming light. ‘Good fellow.’ The armourer patted Stephen’s leg again. ‘You’ll learn that I am a hungry man, Marsh. Hungry for progress, for innovation.’

‘What sort of innovation?’

‘You will be working on a new kind of gun, Stephen, and in the process helping me solve a problem that has been perplexing me for some months. A problem of efficiency that only you can solve. It will take many tries, many failures, yet I am confident your mind and hands will find the answer for us.’

Stephen reached for one last objection. ‘Cannon are hard to hide in a foundry, Master Snell, even one as large as Stone’s.’

He shook his head. ‘You needn’t worry about concealment. You won’t be making cannon for us. Nothing as large as a bombard.’

‘What, then?’ Stephen asked.

A long silence followed. Through the window came the blare of a trumpet, the muffled calls of the captains out in the yard, a lion’s roar from the menagerie.

‘Handgonnes, Marsh,’ Snell finally said, a finger clawed over his lip. ‘The future of war. The future of death itself, perhaps.’

Handgonnes. A word delicious on the tongue, though coming from the armourer’s mouth it rang with the virtues of his office and the guiding spirit of the Tower itself.

Efficiency.

Precision.

Less powder.

Less gun.

Handgonnes.

‘Last month I had a vision,’ said Snell, rising at last from his chair. Stephen was able to breathe again, though he also felt a keen longing to remain with the man in the confines of the Tower, to do this work here, with the fine tools and hot forges of the crown, rather than return to the bleak drudgery of Stone’s foundry.

Snell had gone to the window and now looked out on the width of the Tower yard. ‘I saw a city on a plain, ringed with fire and belching smoke. A battle, one conscripting every man, every woman, every child within its walls to join the great fight. Every last soul.’

His voice softened, and he spoke the next words as if recounting a saint’s miracle witnessed with his own eyes. ‘And they all had guns, Marsh. The women, the boys, even the littlest of girls.’ Now a whisper, a soft breath of wonder. ‘They all had guns.’

There was a low aperture beneath the eaves of the building, above the window now filled with the armourer’s sturdy frame. Through this upper opening came a hazy gleam, the late hour of a dwindling day. Snell’s head appeared to Stephen’s eyes within a blazing circle of fire as the armourer began to expound this new world of guns and shot.

‘Let me tell you my dream …’

NINE

Poison, gallows, sword, hammer, faggot, gun, knife, arrow, tub, cross; berries, wood, hemp, iron, sulphur, river; earth, air, fire, water: man, it seems, is capable of fashioning nearly anything into an instrument of death. Four tired nags too old to plough a field can pull a living man apart. Samson slew an army with the jawbone of an ass. The earth is a verdant field of weapons.

Michaelmas, and as a small goose roasted in the kitchen I spent that morning in my study, sifting through what Chaucer had sent me from his house and offices in Greenwich. The package had reached me by means of a parliamentary messenger riding from Kent on his way to Westminster, stopping off in Southwark to deliver a letter and its accompanying matter. A leather packet, thonged and sealed. Recognizing the impression, I broke the wax and unstrung the parchment threading. Always an ambivalent pleasure, our trade in poetry, and I was in no mood for the frivolous or the bawdy.

I needn’t have worried. Inside was a thin quire of eight folios, covered by a brief letter from Chaucer.

To the worthy and right worshipful sir, John Gower of St Mary Overey in Southwark

Worshipful sir, I commend to you this humble quire, inked with sixteen tragedies that we hope will be pleasing to your ears, if not your eyes – for which I daily pray, old friend. Send us your own offerings when committed to sheepskin. We also appeal to your great courtesy in asking that you delay no longer in visiting us in Greenwich, home to many a shrew, and scoundrels aplenty. A man of your habits and skills would feel quite at home in these village precincts.

Leave aside your dark matter for a few days, John. London can surely spare your lurking presence.

Your prideful servant,

Geoffrey Chaucer

The invitation worked at my conscience, and I recalled our last exchange at Aldgate before Chaucer’s final departure from London. For months I had been meaning to take a horse or a walk to the Thames-side village, a short distance from Southwark. Chaucer had vacated the city so thoroughly since the last autumn that it could often seem as if he had never lived here at all.

At least I had his verse. I sat to read, adjusting a candle at each side of the quire, lined with one of the tales that would go into this pilgrimage collection he was sketching out. I had read several others in the past two years, every one of them peculiar, distinctive, uniquely his own. Romances, fabliaux, moral fables, tedious sermons, lives of the saints: he was building a strange mélange of stories, to no purpose I could yet discern.

This tale, to be told by a monk, sang more darkly than his usual fare, whispering of the many dead. It had been divided into a series of smaller parables, all concerning great men who suffer a hard and inevitable fall. Chaucer had written it in eight-line stanzas, ten syllables to the line.

I would bewail in manner of tragedy

The harm of them who stood in high degree

And fell so far, there was no remedy

To rescue them from their adversity.

For know this: when Fortune wishes to flee,

No man may her delay, nor fate withhold;

Let no man trust in blind prosperity.

Beware of these examples, true and old!

A monkish sentiment. Even the highest men must drop like stones, to settle in the mud. What followed were brief accounts of sixteen men who met their deaths in some form of misery: exile, murder, deposition. Chaucer included among the monk’s examples both the ancient and biblical – Adam, Samson, Hercules, Caesar – as well as contemporary greats only recently deceased. Pedro of Castile, Hugh of Pisa, even Bernabò Visconti, the lord of Milan who had passed away in December.

We know we are writing tragedy, I once heard Chaucer say, when our verses weep for Fortune’s assault upon the proud. Chaucer, one of the most blindly vain men I knew, loved nothing more than attacking the vice of pride in his own verse, yet beneath the particoloured skein of this monk’s stories I discerned a subtle warning to certain magnates of the realm. King’s favourites all, and Richard kept them in subsidies and baubles, created them earls and dukes with no counsel from the wise. Men whose hold on power seemed always on the edge of collapse, yet who managed to survive the various turns in royal favour.

Nor was I alone in sensing a quick and lethal shift afoot in the realm, its traces winding stealthily through Chaucer’s pretty tales. Whispers of discontent, of angry lords and weakening wills, of a sinking softness at the top. The tense truce between King Richard and the Duke of Lancaster had held for several years, notwithstanding some notable gaps. Yet Lancaster was in Spain that fall and would remain there for many months, leaving behind a void that other magnates seemed only too eager to fill with their grudges and cavillings.

A monk’s warnings are not to be taken lightly, even if voiced by a poet toying with his oldest friend. Sixteen deaths indeed, I thought grimly. Watch yourselves, my lords, this monk’s tale warned the realm, or you too shall suffer a long fall, and meet your end in a sewer.

‘Another messenger, Master Gower.’ Will Cooper, appearing in mid-stanza. ‘This one from Heath, concerning a new prisoner.’

Lewis Heath, a beadle of Lime Street Ward. I had several men there, as I did in most of the wards, paid to bring me news as it arose. Anyone above a common labourer brought into the city gaols and I would likely hear about it.

‘It is Peter Norris,’ Will continued, his voice somewhat strained. ‘He has been taken for theft, and jailed at the Counter.’ One of the city’s three busier gaols, holding pens for criminals of all varieties.

‘Which?’

‘In the Poultry,’ said Will. ‘He is to go before the Mayor’s Court Tuesday morning.’

The news came as little surprise. For a habitual thief like Norris there was a short ladder from the stocks to the gallows, despite his former prominence in the city government.

‘Will?’

‘Yes, Master Gower?’

‘Did you learn what he stole?’

He hesitated, knowing the implications. ‘Gold wares, Master Gower. A cup, I am told, and a girdle of purses. He had them in hand when taken.’

I sighed. Steal a pair of breeches and Peter Norris might have returned to the stocks, perhaps lost a foot. But pinching items like this meant he would need some extraordinary luck not to hang.

On the Tuesday I went across the river for Norris’s trial, with the likely futile aim of learning the name of his witness. The Guildhall always stank on court days. Though the building’s large main chamber normally felt airy and spacious, the ritual of gaol delivery would empty the city’s prisons, their inhabitants led over to be crammed into the northeast corner, screened off from the trestle tables at either end that served as the mayor’s and sheriffs’ benches for the twice-weekly sessions of the city courts. There they would stand until their matter was called, a thicket of dirt and fleas, the itchy scent filling the hall, with no breeze to mitigate the foul air. Some of these poor souls had lain in the Counter or Newgate for weeks, fed little more than crumbs, and showing it: gaunt faces, thinned limbs, bones protruding from shoulders and cheeks.

On that day a dozen prisoners awaited their turn before the city court. The accused were mostly men, though a few women were mixed in, all of them visibly aware of the sad spectacle they had become. They were a striking contrast to those at the Guildhall on civil matters, which would be heard before the common council. All men, most with self-important airs about them, seated in a double row around the open square of tables formed by the mayor and aldermen, awaiting their moment. One of Brembre’s recent and more controversial innovations, this allowance for spectators at the city courts seemed to me little more than a show of power, of a piece with the man’s preference for elaborate and expensive ceremony at every opportunity. I found a seat along the low cabinets by the Guildhall’s northern wall, allowing me to watch the proceedings at the bench while keeping an eye on the prisoners.

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