A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  ‘John, you’re here!’ Chaucer stepped into the customhouse, his eyes going to the bag at my side. He gave a few instructions to a waiting clerk, signed a bill of some kind, and sent the man back to the wharf. ‘Let me dig out my little book.’

  The air thickened immediately. He wanted to know. But our practice was always to begin with the poetry. He dug through the mess on his desk and emerged with his ‘little book’, as he called it: the familiar pigskin bifold in which he would keep only those quires of parchment currently in use. It was Chaucer’s custom, once he had filled an existing quire with his writing, to remove it and slip a fresh one within the covers. So familiar was his old, faded bifold that it took my poor eyes a moment to see he had replaced it with a new one.

  ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ he said, showing off the elaborate tooling and the shiny leathern cover, dyed a striking red. ‘It’s goat. From Africa, swears a leatherworker I know in Florence. He does great work for the Bardis.’ He opened it and took out two loose quires wedged between the fixed pages. ‘These verses are a small taste of a larger compilation I’ve been tossing around. The idea is a pilgrimage, a – well, the frame is unimportant. Two tales here, each to be preceded by a prologue. One is earnest, the other’s all game, and next time I’ll expect a devastating sed contra to both.’

  I tucked the parchment quires into my bag while Chaucer started humming distractedly and knuckling his desk. I waited.

  ‘Have you read them, Geoffrey?’

  He frowned.

  ‘My elegiacs, on the virtues and vices?’ I felt almost childlike, waiting for his attention.

  A reassuring smile. ‘Of course, John. Pardon my distraction.’ He sorted through the loose sheets on his desk, found my own booklet of verse. ‘Here we are. Let’s just see …’ He scanned his notes in the margins, his lower lip tightening in displeasure. ‘Rather stark, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘The lines weren’t written to be light, Geoffrey. Not like these fabliaux.’

  ‘As you’ll soon learn.’ He gestured at my bag, and the work he had given me. ‘Honestly, though, they could use some leavening.’ He took on a preacher’s voice, gazing at me over the folios as he spoke my Latin lines. ‘“The schism of our church has cursed us with two popes, one a schismatic and the other legitimate.” And the next couplet: “France worships the schismatic and holds him in awe, but England is a defender of the true faith.”’ He set the booklet down, a wry challenge in his gaze.

  ‘Should I be amused or offended by your tone?’ I asked him. ‘The church is divided: we’re allied with Rome, France with Avignon.’

  He shook his head. ‘Take these next lines, on bishops. Listen to yourself, John.’ He went on in my Latin.

  ‘As I seek for followers of Christ among the prelates

  I find that none of the rule survives that was once in force.

  Christ was poor, but they are overloaded with gold.

  He was a peacemaker, but they are war-mongers.’

  His voice had taken on a sing-song cadence, rising before the caesura, then falling toward the end of each line, as if my elegiacs were some child’s rhyme.

  ‘Christ was generous, but they are tight as a closed purse.

  He was occupied by labour, they have an excess of leisure.

  Christ was virginal; they are like maudlyns.’

  He stopped. ‘I won’t go on – nor, I think, should you.’

  I felt my fists clench, and my vision starred. ‘You’re parroting my lines, as if their faults chirp for themselves. I thought you approved of taking the clergy to task.’

  Chaucer squinted down at the quire, wetting a quill. ‘Perhaps if you lightened up a bit, added a dash of humour to your biting satire?’ He dipped, blotted, scratched. ‘We’ve talked about this before. In your poetry, everyone is either good or bad. There’s no room for moral ambivalence, no accounting for the complexity of character that renders us the fallen humans we are. It’s as if you are firing arrows blindly at the entire world.’

  ‘Are you saying the lines aren’t true to their subject?’

  He sighed, then turned to me. ‘Much worse, John. They are not true to you.’ I blinked. He leaned forward, his hand clutching his crowded desk. ‘You’re a dazzling Latinist, John, and your elegiacs could be taught as paradigms of the form. But why can’t you take some risks in your work? Your verses always preach the upright line while you spend your own life scurrying through the shadows, ratting up useful bits of information you turn to your own advantage. Do you write this way because you see yourself as some white-clad incorruptible, standing on a high place upheld by excellent moral foundations? I hardly think so. Do you pen lines like these to obfuscate, to keep us all looking away from what you do? Because no one who writes like this could be as devious as John Gower, mon ami. Whatever your reason, your making doesn’t come from your heart, from that place that makes you you. It doesn’t ring true. It never has.’

  I could say nothing. He looked at me for a long moment, a mix of puzzlement and affection in his eyes – and, as I think back on it now, a shadow of pity. ‘You are a stubborn man, John, and the stubbornest poet I know.’ He nudged me back my booklet and turned to his desk, straightening a small corner of the untidy surface. ‘Keep writing like this and you’re bound for oblivion.’

  Though his responses to my poetic making could often be harsh, Chaucer had never spoken to me like this. I sat there, goaded into silence by this cold assessment of my work, feeling something between long regret and immediate fury. Then one of Chaucer’s clerks put his head in the door, asking several questions about the transaction down at the quay.

  When he was gone I plunged straight in, my voice tight with anger. ‘The book you’re looking for is a work of prophecy. You didn’t think to tell me this?’

  ‘Prophecy,’ said Chaucer, his bright eyes unreadable. ‘What sort of prophecy?’

  ‘Braybrooke claims the book is treasonous.’

  He bent his neck and looked at the rafters. ‘“Treason” is a word tossed around like pigshit these days. Though considering the source I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. For the Bishop of London, thought itself is treason. Pose a few curious questions about the sacrament, get a hanging for your trouble.’

  ‘Don’t cling to Wycliffe, Geoffrey,’ I warned him. ‘Gaunt adored the man for some reason, but he was a heretic, and a dissident. His teachings have been roundly condemned.’

  ‘God help us. And now Braybrooke is convinced this book is heretical? From everything I have heard it’s just a light satire. A well-crafted look into England’s royal past, with a peculiar twist here and there.’

  I shook my head. ‘Believe me, Geoffrey, this is not a book you want to be associated with. There’s already been loads of trouble about it: at court, at the inns, with the bishops – foul circumstances that surround it on every side. Even a young woman’s death.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Murder, Geoffrey.’ I told him what Swynford and Strode had told me, and reminded him of the disrupted pageant at the Temple Hall. I said nothing about the business with Symkok, keeping that bit of information to myself.

  His hand went to his mouth. It trembled there, then went back to his side. ‘Who was the young woman?’

  ‘An agent of the French crown, by all appearances.’ He was still. ‘So you see, it’s not Katherine Swynford who is responsible for the disappearance of the book. This is much bigger than her.’

  He stared at me. Were those tears welling in the corners of his eyes? ‘But why, John? Why would anyone kill a young woman over a book?’

  ‘The work concerns the deaths of kings,’ I said, pushing on. ‘Of English kings.’

  He blinked. Yes, tears. One of them escaped, tracking down his left cheek.

  ‘By statute of Parliament it’s treasonous to compass or even imagine the death of the king,’ I went on. ‘Yet this work – and I’ve heard parts of it, with my own ears, from Braybrooke’s friars – this work prophesies the deaths of En
gland’s last twelve sovereigns, as well as—’

  ‘Ha!’ He gave a short, frantic bark of a laugh. ‘How is it that a work can prophesy deaths that have already occurred?’

  ‘I asked Braybrooke the same question. According to the bishop, it was written many years ago.’

  ‘Yet again, how—’

  ‘Its prophecies reflect the chronicles accurately. Consider the prophecy on the death of the second Edward.’ I repeated the memorable lines I had heard from Braybrooke’s friar.

  ‘In Gloucester will he goeth, to be gutted by goodmen

  With rod straight of iron, in arsebone to run.

  With pallet of pullet, his breath out to press,

  And sovereign unsound for Sodom be sundered.’

  As I spoke the lines Chaucer stood and walked to the opened door, where he leaned on the sill, his shoulders rising and falling to the shouts on the embankment, the clap of boards from an unloading barge.

  I gazed at his back. ‘I haven’t told you the worst. The thirteenth prophecy foretells the death of King Richard.’

  A dismissive cluck. ‘No no no, that’s wrong, Richard does not—’ He froze, his eyes widening as he turned to me. His face paled, going the colour of sunbleached bone. I approached him and took his hand, the earlier cruelty forgotten for the moment. ‘Geoffrey, what is it?’

  ‘It cannot be,’ he said, his voice just above a whisper, the tears giving way to something I took then as fear. ‘This explains – but it simply cannot be.’

  ‘You are making no sense, Geoffrey.’

  ‘But of course. Of course!’ Tears streamed down his face, his entire frame shaking with the strangest abandon.

  Baffling. ‘Why are you laughing? These are grave matters.’ And what are you not telling me?

  Chaucer calmed himself, placing a hand on my shoulder as he wiped the other across his eyes. ‘The book, John,’ he said. ‘Get me the book, and all shall be well.’

  ‘This is blind idiocy, Geoffrey. The Bishop of London himself says it: this is a burnable book, a work of high treason certain to destroy any man who holds it.’

  ‘Get me the book. At any cost.’

  ‘You’re acting like a little boy now. Do you want to see your reputation ruined over all this?’

  ‘Reputation,’ he said, as if the word were a rotten river oyster. ‘My reputation, you say?’ Suddenly back from wherever he had been, Chaucer leaned into me, his face a red mask of cruel intention, his neck a foreign bulge of tendons and veins. ‘You will find this book for me, O Moral Gower. I know it, and you know it. In a city where everyone owes John Gower, Esquire, a favour, Geoffrey Chaucer may be the only soul to whom he owes one himself. Quite a large one, too. And in a city in which John Gower, Esquire, has information on nearly every man of importance, it may be useful to call to mind the small matter of your son’s count—’

  ‘Enough.’ I stepped away. ‘How dare you threaten me like this?’

  He grabbed a pile of cockets from his desk and threw them in the air. The parchments snowed around our heads. His lips curled into a puerile sneer. ‘Call it a threat if you like. Whatever the case, your position is exceedingly weak. Do not test me, Gower.’

  I stared at him, waiting for him to retract the malicious threat behind his words, but his lips seemed frozen in place. ‘You’ve finally stripped the veil, my friend,’ I said, a trembling whisper. ‘Now you are no better than I am. At last you know what it’s like, to have a man’s soul in your hands.’

  The look Chaucer gave me then was the coldest I had ever seen. ‘Poets don’t traffic in souls. That is the work of priests. The sooner you learn the difference the better a poet you shall be.’ On that cruellest of notes he turned away. ‘Find the book. Find it, bring it to me, and just maybe you will see your son in England again.’

  As I left the customhouse and paced back along the wharfage, I carried Chaucer’s words as a profound weight on my spirit. Yet from our abrasive encounter one deeper question lingered, a question that concerned neither the viability of this deep friendship nor its tenuous basis in our poetry. The question concerned, rather, the young woman on the Moorfields, this alleged French agent murdered over the very book my difficult friend sought with such singular focus – and to whose death he had reacted with such exaggerated surprise that it seemed feigned. It was a question about Geoffrey Chaucer himself, and it had been haunting me for a week and more. A question no longer avoidable.

  Could Chaucer kill?

  The dust cloud grew as the company approached, massing into a great orb that filled the northern sky, as if God had obliterated a portion of the earth from His sight. Even from that distance the lady could recognize the arms borne by the herald: the livery of the king. The gate, she ordered, was to remain open, the defences unprepared. Castile is arrived, she told her husband’s men and her servants. Make the castle ready! Open our larders and cellars to his needs! Her orders carried out, the company arrived, to be greeted with the lady’s open arms.

  Yet once they had reached the castle gates and their leader stood before her, she realized she had been deceived. This was not King Pedro, nor was her husband among the company. These men wore livery she had never seen, spoke in a language she could not comprehend. The banners of Castile they flung carelessly to the ground.

  Their lord, a prince from a northern land, was a hard man, with a pale face that might have been cut from stone. A forked beard fell from his chin like two waterfalls of molten lead, and in him the lady sensed a certain cruelty, a flow of dark intention beneath the rituals of courtesy the situation demanded. He groused loudly of King Pedro’s unpaid war debts, and the poor condition of his troops.

  The prince had arrived in the company of his younger brother, a duke. Taller by half a head, this lord was a man of few words. He was of nobler bearing than the prince, and seemed almost ashamed by his older brother’s disposition.

  For weeks the lords remained in the castle, their troops garrisoned along the walls. The lady learned that a much greater force, thousands strong, was encamped near Burgos, growing hungry and ill as the foreign prince awaited payment of Pedro’s debts. As the unwelcome visit lengthened, the prince let the lady know her place at every opportunity.

  Your husband is in my debt, he said. And your husband’s lord, and his lord, and his lord in turn – all are in my debt. All that your husband claims to own shall properly be mine. Mine the harvest gleaned from the earth beneath your feet. Mine the flocks rutting and grazing in these fields. Mine the small treasure guarded in this castle’s hold. And mine—

  The prince did not say it, but from the moment of his arrival she had felt it. His eyes upon her constantly, his conversation crudely suggestive, his hand lingering too long upon her own at their moments of formal greeting.

  She made sure she was never alone, trailing her daughter with her wherever she went, ordering a maidservant to remain in her bed through the night. She bent her back to please the visitors. There were slaughters to order, hunts to organize, horses to water and feed. Her husband’s senescalo went nearly mad as the soldiers’ demands increased.

  The lady called on her villagers to help, appropriating their animals, their grain, their bodily labour to ensure adequate food and drink for the visiting lord and his men. All shall be returned to you in droves, she promised them. They gave willingly, that their lady’s honour might remain intact.

  Yet those hardened folk of the Castilian marches, their wisdom deep as the soil, understood what she did not. The darkest law of chivalry.

  When a great lord arrives at the home of a lesser, whether his vassal or not, the lesser shall consider all he owns to be the just property of the greater. All should be surrendered to him freely and without objection.

  And what the lord does not receive willingly, he is entitled to take by force.

  PART TWO

  Faun of Three Feathers

  Day xiv before Kalends of May to Nones of May, 8 Richard II

  (18 April–7 May 1385)
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  EIGHTEEN

  St Mary Overey, Southwark

  Two stories: one of lust, one of murder. One of revelry, of adulterous love, of untroubled joy in the flesh. The other of a young boy’s faith, of treachery, death and resurrection.

  In the first story, a randy student seduces a carpenter’s wife, deceives him with a false prophecy of a second flood, and causes a household disaster. There is also a parish clerk, a fop who seeks the wife’s favours for himself yet wins only a fart as his reward. The tale is told by a miller, who delights in the flaws of every character he portrays.

  In the second story, a young chorister hears a sacred song being performed by older boys and vows to learn this gorgeous antiphon on his own. As he moves back and forth through a Jewry, the song fills his throat. The offended Jews conspire against him, causing his murder and throwing his corpse in a privy. As his mother searches for him, the boy is miraculously resurrected. The narrator of this tale is a prioress, a holy woman leading a community of Christian nuns.

  Two stories, both scrawled in Chaucer’s loose hand in the quire he had given me at the customhouse. On a first reading no two stories could have been more unlike. The thought of compiling them within a larger work made no sense, yet such was Chaucer’s plan, inspired by the same Giovanni Boccaccio who wrote the tragic romance Chaucer had brought back from Florence.

  The more I thought about these stories, though, the more I came to see what, in Chaucer’s bent imagination, they might have in common. Both dealt with the consequences of sin and fallen flesh. Though the prioress’s story more directly concerned death, martyrdom, and persecution, this miller’s tale cast its own shadows: another Noah’s Flood, the degradation of the marital sacrament, hints of sodomy. As art, then, the stories seemed congruent, eerily so. Once again Chaucer had proven himself a superior teller of tales.

  Or a compelling liar. I sat back, my spine finding its worn place on the study wall. We had spoken often over the years about the proximity of poetry and deception. To write a great poem, Chaucer insisted, you have to be a greater liar. You must convince your readers that your characters are flesh and blood rather than words on dead skin, that their loves and hatreds and passions are as deep and present as the readers’ own. Your task is to delight, to pleasure, to lift your reader to another sphere of being and then strand him there, floating above the earth and panting for more lines.