A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  This long struggle with my own poetry? Perhaps it’s just that, I thought: I don’t deal in colourful lies, but in plain truths, however coarse and hidden. What need is there for deception when the truth is so much more compelling, so much darker in its attachments?

  The truths before me now, though, were hidden beneath an impenetrable veil, despite all the damning facts and obscure information I had accumulated over the years. A prophetic book I hadn’t read and couldn’t find. A murdered woman I didn’t know and couldn’t name. A friend I couldn’t fathom and shouldn’t trust. And all the while a city I thought I’d mastered suddenly strange and alien to me, coiled like a serpent across the river, its tongue whispering a threat I could not comprehend.

  Caught up as I was in these clouds of enigma, it took me a few moments to notice the hard knock from the front of the house, followed by faint voices and the stomp of boots. A visitor, admitted by Will Cooper at the hour I defended most fiercely for my writing. I sighed, looked down at my quill, and stood. Thick clouds had been toying with the sun that morning, casting the interior of the house into peculiar shades that created illusions of presence in empty corners. It was for this reason that I thought at first I had imagined the man in the lower hall, as if a phantom of his form had flared up from Hell to burn through my very door.

  He turned, looked everywhere but into my eyes, his smile tinged with everything that had passed between us.

  ‘Father,’ he said.

  Nearly three years had passed since that dreadful Trinity Sunday, a feast Sarah particularly loved. She would order up everything in threes for the supper. Three soups, three wines, three meats, three sweets, enlisting every taste in the celebration of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The messenger arrived mid-morning, as we were returning from early Mass. Our house stood back from the priory walls on Overey Street by a good twenty feet, with two broad yew trees towering over a gated yard paved with riverstone. A young man waited within the courtyard. I recognized him as one of Chaucer’s clerks from the wool custom.

  He bowed slightly. ‘I must speak with you, Master Gower,’ he said, his eyes wandering toward Sarah. ‘I come direct from Master Chaucer, and at his orders.’

  There was an awkward moment which Sarah smoothed over by going inside. No one else was about, save a few churchgoers gathered farther down. The shops were closed, the street appropriately silent for the morning of a feast day.

  ‘Is Chaucer in some kind of trouble?’ It would not have been the first time.

  ‘Not – not Master Chaucer, sir. I’m here about your son, Master Simon.’

  ‘Simon? What has Simon got to do with your business at the wool custom?’

  ‘It might be best to leave such questions for Master Chaucer.’

  I pressed the man as we walked to the Southwark wharf and boarded the waiting skiff.

  ‘There’s been a killing, sir.’

  My heart thrummed in my ears. ‘Simon?’

  He shook his head. ‘Your son is safe.’ He would say nothing more, and my worry turned to dread as we floated toward the Tower. I sat back on the board seat, willing the small boat across the river.

  Chaucer was waiting at the quay. Above the water, as the skiff angled toward him, he stood still as a carved apostle, his face pale, his eyes swollen with exhaustion. When I stepped up he broke his stance and grasped my arm. We walked in silence to one of the warehouses down the wharf. At the door Chaucer stopped me. ‘Go easy on him, John.’

  The air inside stank of sheep. Bales of wool were piled high to the rafters. A thin shaft of sunlight outlined a peculiar shape on the floor, reflecting upwards to create a luminous sphere around Simon’s bowed head. He sat at the end of a long counting bench, nearly doubled at the waist. Low moans came from his chest, his body shaking with pain and fear. Against the near wall, just inside the door, rested the corpse: a form wrapped in sailcloth, a thatch of dark hair visible at one end, a trace of blood on the board floor.

  Chaucer signalled to the watchman to leave us, then shut the door from within. I approached my son.

  ‘What have you done?’

  Simon was filthy, his clothes torn, his flesh reeking of ale. He looked up. His face was an utter mess. ‘I killed him, Father. And … there’s more.’

  The moment stretched, my rising anger mingled with a helpless confusion. I turned to Chaucer. Back to Simon. Finally I approached the corpse and uncovered the face. I recognized it as belonging to a constable of Tower Street Ward, a man I had encountered once or twice, though I didn’t know his name.

  Simon, in his stuttering way, and with Chaucer filling in the last several hours, revealed everything.

  For some months, Simon told me, he had been involved in a counterfeiting ring, forging half-nobles with the help of a goldsmith and an under-master at the King’s Mint. The smith would concoct a weak alloy, the under-master having snuck one of King Edward’s obsolete stamps out of the Tower, and Simon would rough up the fake coins with bricks, trading them up for genuine nobles or down for groats and pennies. Too many of the three-shilling-fourpence coins appearing in London all at once would arouse suspicion, so Simon had arranged for quantities of them to be put into circulation at the markets in York, Hull, and Calais, as well as on deposit with two of the Italian banking houses on Lombard Street.

  As he explained his logic and actions, I stared at his mouth, spewing these numbers and calculations as if he had been born a criminal. I had always hoped Simon’s prodigious talent with numbers and words would open doors to a respectable career, perhaps on the logic faculty at Oxford, or in the law. Never would I have imagined my son conspiring with such men to forge a royal likeness on gold coins. Yet the scheme had been turning a handsome profit for some months, due in large part to Simon’s astute sense of the money supply.

  Their luck turned when a constable of Tower Street Ward stumbled on to their operation while chasing down a petty thief, who had taken refuge in the back of the goldsmith’s shop. Rather than turning the three counterfeiters over to his superiors, the constable had attempted to extort part of their profits, threatening them with exposure should they refuse him. So, with the approval of his partners, Simon had arranged a large payoff, setting the exchange for just after curfew at a rough alehouse on the wharf. The negotiation had grown heated and was taken out to the bankside, where the men came to blows. Simon described the fight, his fists flying at the man’s face, taking his own hits, then delivering the final blow that sent the constable reeling backwards on the wharf, his head meeting an iron shipping-hook as he fell. Hearing the commotion, two watchmen at the wool wharf had come running, one of them tackling Simon to the ground, the other attempting to revive the fallen man.

  Too late. Rather than summoning the authorities, they had sent for Chaucer, controller of the wool custom and something of a tyrant in his management of the wharf. At his direction the watchmen had hauled Simon inside, along with the constable’s body, and there they had waited for Simon to recover from his drunkenness before questioning him about the incident.

  ‘I made him tell me all of it before I sent for you,’ Chaucer explained. ‘I thought it best to limit the surprises, make sure Simon had all of this straight so we could get to the truth without a lot of hemming and hawing.’

  I nodded vacantly, the enormity of it all dawning on me. My only surviving child, a counterfeiter, and a murderer.

  Simon broke again, burying his face in his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Father, you – you have to appreciate my—’

  ‘You’ll get no appreciation from me, Simon. Nor forgiveness. Counterfeiting? Did you think for one moment of your honour, and my reputation?’

  He looked up at me, his eyes lit with a righteous clarity that seemed drastically out of place. ‘You’re right, Father. Perhaps I should have pursued a more honourable trade. Are you taking apprentices?’

  I hit him. Not a smack but a hard punch that sent him flying backwards to land on the filthy surface.

  ‘John!’ Chaucer rushe
d forward and reached for Simon, who was sprawled across the floor. Chaucer helped him to his feet, then stepped back, grasped my arm, and led me out to the wharf. He pushed me roughly against the side of the warehouse. ‘If Simon is taken – if there’s even an inquest – he’ll be hanged. Perhaps not for murder, my men will attest it was an accident, but for the coining. It’s treason to counterfeit the King’s Mint.’

  ‘Treason,’ I said, the word bitter on my tongue.

  ‘We can fix this,’ Chaucer said in an angry whisper. He looked up the wharf. ‘The constable never told anyone else what he found out – otherwise he couldn’t have used the information against Simon. Do you see?’

  I nodded tightly.

  ‘As for my men, they’ll stay silent. They’re well paid, and God knows they keep enough secrets as it is. So really this all comes down to destroying evidence, and staying mum.’

  Chaucer’s focus on the practical had a calming effect. I looked at him. ‘So what do you suggest we do?’

  There was no real choice in the end. The corpse was disposed of by the watchmen. A sack, four large stones, a skiff up to Stepney Marsh, the weighted body over the side and into the reeds. Simon, too, needed removal from London lest tongues start to wag. Chaucer would make all the necessary arrangements: passage to Tuscany; a letter of introduction to his old friend Sir John Hawkwood; a promise to check on Simon within a twelvemonth, as his business for the king would surely take him back to Italy before long.

  With dire threats, I forbade Simon from speaking any word about the matter to Sarah. I would tell her of an unexpected opportunity for him in the south, an offer of employment in the king’s service, working on behalf of Hawkwood, the great mercenary and Richard’s newly appointed ambassador to Rome.

  He left for Italy without bidding farewell to his mother. I thought it best that she remain ignorant. Within five days of the killing on the wool wharf, and with barely a whisper of notice in London, Simon’s presence in Southwark, and in our lives, was only a memory.

  Now, with all this coming back to me in an unwanted rush, I watched Simon unbuckle his belt, remove his surcoat, line up his boots on the doorside block in the same way I had seen him do hundreds of times. The elegant movements of his hands, the distinctive lines of his face, the almond curves of his eyes, curls as neat as if an iron had pressed his hair: all still spoke of that insolent boy who could never please his father. Yet Simon’s gaze was not, as it had been the last time I saw him, floating toward Gravesend for a new life in Italy, defiant or proud. Instead it was tired, or defeated. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  ‘Why have you come back, Simon?’

  Simon bowed his head. He was wearing a short gown, the sleeves long and wide in the Italian style. ‘I should have written ahead, Father, but with the roads, the French – I decided to come ahead on my own. I have taken a leave from Hawkwood’s service, with his consent, though I am not at all sure whether I shall go back to Italy. When Chaucer told me my mother had died I couldn’t help thinking of you, and of our home.’ He looked around at the hall, though still would not show me his gaze. ‘I don’t imagine I shall be much comfort to you, but it seemed the right time to come back to England, after so long abroad. I should like to find a position in London, or if you don’t want me that close I have contacts in Calais. I think my skills could be useful there.’

  He continued on in this vein, and more than anything else it was his pathetic curiosity about Sarah’s death that began to stem my anger. When did she first show signs of sickness? Did she speak lucidly to you, Father, in her final hours? Did she have any last words for me? Because Chaucer never said. Was her suffering great? It was as if Simon, within his first hours back in Southwark, became the voice of my own, unspoken sorrow, now so mingled with his.

  It was at some point in those hours that I found myself thinking of the Duke of Lancaster, and wondering where in his tangled relations he found the most comfort in the face of so much loss. John, Edward, the second John, Isabel, four of his children with Duchess Blanche, all of them buried in Leicester years ago; another John with Duchess Constance, felled by fever before his second year. Such childhood deaths harden a man, whip his heart with chill and heat even as he bites his lips to keep the pain from speaking for itself. Now this one boy who had somehow clung to life was here, with me, and despite all that he had done the feeling that almost overwhelmed me in that moment I can only describe as a grateful, joyous calm. The calm of kin, I suppose.

  We sat in the garden, eating a midday meal I barely tasted. As Simon devoured his food I turned the conversation to his life in and around Florence, at the service of the English condottiero. His position, as he described it, seemed to consist in a variety of clerical tasks for Hawkwood’s company: contracts for service, purchases of supply, provisions for garrisoned troops around the peninsula. At one point in our conversation his face darkened.

  ‘What is it, Simon?’

  He hesitated. ‘I should tell you as well, Father, that I was betrothed.’

  ‘Was?’

  His lips tightened. ‘She died. Fever. We never made it to our vows.’

  ‘How long has it been?’

  He slightly shrugged. ‘Months. But every day I wake up imagining she’s still alive.’

  ‘What was her name?’ I asked, thinking she might have died right around the time Sarah passed.

  He closed his eyes. ‘Her name … her name was Seguina.’ He could barely utter it, and when he had he started weeping, not the cry of a man with an eye to his status, nor a boyish mewl, but a ripping keen, the phlegm pouring from his nose to glisten his lips and chin, his chest and shoulders heaving in a haphazard rhythm, animal-like chokes barking from his throat. In a strange way I found myself feeling almost jealous of his pain, its comfortless depth. I had never wept with such abandon for Sarah.

  ‘Seguina,’ I finally said.

  ‘Seguina d’-d’-d’Orange,’ he hiccupped, still a boy in that moment.

  ‘A beautiful name,’ I said, and just like that it was settled. I still marvel at the ease with which Simon slipped back into my daily life, like a hand-warmed coin into a silk purse. Often I wonder how everything would have turned out had I gone with my first impulse, sending him away from Southwark with an oath and a boot. Or if I had demanded to search his meagre luggage.

  But Simon was my sole heir, as Chaucer would not stop pointing out, and with all the stir around the book and the Moorfields killing, the lingering emptiness left by Sarah’s death the year before, I suppose I was looking for some source of comfort in those turbulent weeks. No one can be blameless in such circumstances, and I now understand why I remained ignorant – was kept ignorant – even as the clouds thickened above. Yet as I look back on our reunion that day I can still be sickened by my self-deception, my blithe acceptance of its terms.

  That, I am afraid, was my own doing. For never once did I think to question the timing of my son’s return from Italy. Nor its meaning.

  NINETEEN

  San Donato a Torre, near Florence

  Adam Scarlett, hungry, muddy from the road, in no hurry to deliver his news, leaned against the stable wall and watched the battle unfold. Three lancemen, shields held high, began their charge at the small artillery company, who waited until the last moment to launch the payload. Clods and stones peppered the attackers, then the trebuchet broke, sending a cracked feed bucket rolling between the ranks. The five boys traded screams and blows, coming together in a loud melee before collapsing in a heap of giggles and sweat. The farrier, mumbling about the yearlings, came out and chased them off.

  Scarlett turned away and started his ascent to the villa, the scene replaying in his mind as the scent of freshly turned dirt rose from beneath his riding boots. War never ended in the communes, it seemed, every season grinding its hundreds of young men into the clay. Soon enough these boys, most of them sons of bought soldiers, would be riding out themselves, bound for a seasonal cattle raid, or another pillage in the Romagna.
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  In the gallery Hawkwood was dressing down one of his chief men, a tenente from the garrison near Perugia. Scarlett had arranged the man’s summons and transfer to Florence several weeks before, after Taricani’s departure, and now he was here to face due punishment. Private deals with a Jewish banker, sums moved off the books. Scarlett found his usual place along the south wall, within easy sight of the condottiero. With the mess he had in hand he was happy to wait.

  ‘Please, sire, if you would only—’

  ‘Silence, pig.’ Hawkwood was enjoying himself, and the kneeling man seemed to know it. Scarlett watched as the soldier’s cheek paled, his fright like a layer of wash swept over a fresco.

  ‘You think I haven’t had enough of this from my countrymen already? First Cocco, pulling his little truffa. And now you, Antonio?’

  ‘But, sire, the Raspanti—’

  ‘Ah, the Raspanti. Blame it on the poor, shall we? That’s the best you can do?’

  ‘Yes, sire – I mean no, sire—’

  ‘Enough,’ said Hawkwood, quietly this time, and in English. ‘Enough.’ He turned and his gaze found Scarlett, who gave his master the slightest of shrugs. A what-did-you-expect? sort of shrug. The condottiero widened his eyes in agreement, his irises white flecks on brown, hues of frosted mud, of winter campaigns and Yule sieges.

  Hawkwood reached down to his side for the stick. La Asta, the Rod, a notorious forearm’s length of hard elm, its core drilled out and filled with a pour of lead. He palmed it gently, looking from his hands to the tenente, now a whimpering dog waiting for a boot. With one movement Hawkwood brought the stick up, across, and the man’s head whipped to the side with a hard crack of bone. Wretched moans, lots of blood, and when he brought his head back to centre Scarlett could see the ruined jaw hanging by a slab of torn skin and ripped muscle. Hawkwood leaned forward and cupped the broken bones, shoving them back into place with an excruciating thrust. Scarlett winced for the tenente.