A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  Agnes stepped back as if struck. ‘I been gone from Gropecunt Lane weeks now, Mil. So they’re looking for me, looking for the b—’

  ‘Stop!’ Millicent cried.

  They all turned at a harsh laugh from Lawler’s shop door. Mistress Lawler, arms folded, taking it all in. ‘Look at the shiny side of the coin, your ladyship,’ she said as Millicent felt herself redden. ‘Least now you’ll have an honest way of working off your debts.’

  Millicent turned and strode off, Agnes hurrying behind her.

  ‘Never had a doubt about that one, Lawler,’ she called to their backs. ‘A maud’s a maud, wherever she gets her pennies. Let that be a lesson to you, George. The wisdom of wives, deep as the sea is green.’

  ‘Aye,’ she heard Lawler mutter. ‘And just as cold.’

  They reached the corner. Millicent had to force herself to place one foot in front of the other.

  ‘Mil,’ said Agnes, working to keep up. ‘Mil, what if the men are still about? Shouldn’t we get away from here?’

  The visitors had been thorough in their inquiries. It seemed London’s entire cloth industry was staring at them as they slunk past the colourful displays and hangings lining the lane: dresses, smocks, hoods, coverlets, and a host of other goods that now made Millicent feel trapped by the opulence rather than a part of it. Finally they reached her house.

  The door stood ajar. Heedless of Agnes’s warnings, Millicent entered, surveying the destruction. In the front room, chair cushions had been torn apart, feathers and straw scattered across the floor, wooden shelves torn from the walls, leaving gaping holes in the plaster; in the kitchen larder, already-empty barrels were broken on the floor, her recent purchases from Lawler’s studding the rushes. She raced up the back stairs and into the rear bedchamber. Her trunk lay in pieces, hacked apart with an axe or sword. It seemed that nearly every garment she still owned had been sliced in two and tossed about the room.

  She turned to Agnes, who had followed her up the stairs. ‘Dearheart,’ Agnes said, holding out her arms.

  Millicent pushed her away. ‘This is on you.’ Her fall from wealthy consort of a peer to penniless sister of a Gropecunt Lane whore had been short but steep; now it was complete.

  ‘But, Mil—’

  ‘Shut it, Ag.’ Millicent’s hands shook as she gathered up those few items that were whole and stuffed them in a handled basket she kept for laundering.

  Agnes was peering down at the street through a gap in the front shutters. ‘They’ll be after us, sure. Folks are already staring up here, lot of talk in the street.’

  Millicent nodded tightly. ‘We’ll go then,’ she said. They left her house for the last time, stealing along the alley to Spinners Lane. There they paused as Millicent adjusted the load and hefted the light basket that contained all her earthly possessions: an extra bonnet, two faded dresses, the few shillings left from selling the dead woman’s bracelet, and the book, still wrapped in its cloth.

  There was only one place to go, a destination neither of them had to name. They walked silently to the river and over the bridge, then made the turn past St Mary Overey. Millicent felt her shoulders sag with defeat, and as they entered Rose Alley it seemed that every raw moment of her former life as a maudlyn assaulted her with a thickening of memory and shame.

  The neighbourhood hadn’t changed a bit. Same drab storefronts and sagging overhangs, looming over the lane like sullen birds of prey. Same sluggish gutters, carrying filth from house to pond and pond to river, filling the air with the stink of dead fish and tired whores. Same forlorn women and girls affecting cheer as they peddled their flesh to tradesmen, friars, and worse. No better than slaves, Millicent thought, and though I swore I would never return, now I’m all but one of them again.

  She glanced over at Agnes. Her sister walked tall, no shame on her face, appearing almost excited to be coming back to their childhood home. The strength of the girl, Millicent thought. Where does she get it?

  Finally they were in front of the Pricking Bishop. Millicent nearly gagged at her first sight of St Cath, the spirals and slashes of withered skin. The old woman looked at Agnes, then at Millicent, letting her wizened gaze wander slowly over her breasts and down to her thighs and feet.

  St Cath snickered, bobbing her chin. ‘It’ll be an honour, Lady Queynt, an honour to put your fair cheeks and teats to work again for the Bishop. Bess’ll be thrilled.’

  ‘Thrilled and gashed and swyved,’ said Bess Waller, appearing at the door. Millicent looked at her mother’s face for the first time in five years. More lines in her skin, more grey dusting her hair, but the Southwark bawd was as fetching as ever.

  Agnes seemed about to say something but Bess held up a hand. ‘Middle back room up top. Yours for a fortnight, but after that it’s suck or scram. Hear?’

  ‘Yes, mère,’ said Agnes, nodding dutifully.

  Millicent could not make a sound. Her mother stared at her with something between pity and contempt, then let out a thin whistle. ‘My, my, my. How the wheel of Lady Fortune turns.’

  Millicent gritted her teeth and pushed past her mother, entering the Pricking Bishop and hating herself for having to.

  TWENTY-ONE

  St Mary Overey, Southwark

  We quickly settled into a pattern. Always an early riser, I nibbled at bread in the kitchen, where I would sit by the hearth until Simon came in from the hall. We would exchange a few words, he would eat a little something, then he tended to go to the solar to read or scratch on a tablet for the rest of the morning. The first few days he never left the house. I would catch him staring vacantly out of a window, or sitting in a dark study by the hall fire. Invariably his smile would return when he noticed me, and soon enough he would start peppering me with questions about my affairs. He wanted me to take him to St Paul’s and Westminster, where I could introduce him around. Despite my reluctance I gave in the third time he asked.

  Simon had a new and easy way about him, open yet respectful as we spoke with these familiar clutches of lawmen and bureaucrats. He never seemed too free, his bearing modest and unpresumptuous, and I began to think these changes in him were genuine. Within days of his return to Southwark Simon was simply there, my natural son and only heir, more a part of my daily life than he had ever been before that night on the wharf. If his crimes were not forgotten they had diminished with time, miniaturized, I suppose, by the simple fact of his presence, and the brittle persistence of his mother’s last words.

  There is a particular image of Sarah that can slip from my memory for days or weeks at a time, only to reappear at the most unguarded moments, taking away my breath, nibbling at my conscience.

  It was Epiphany time, over fifteen years ago now. We had lost Elizabeth to fever the week before, this after the death of John, our eldest, that autumn. Now our two younger children, Alison, eight, and Simon, just shy of six, had fallen ill. Simon’s birth had been difficult. There would be no others. Unable to sleep over the rattles of his troubled breaths, I had crept from the lesser bedchamber down to the parlour, using the outer staircase so as not to disturb Sarah.

  My feet were carelessly bare. I remember the rough edges of cold stairs, the indifference of a January moon. In the parlour I slouched on a long bench against the western wall, thinking blankly of our dead, our barely living. At some point I drifted off.

  When I awoke Sarah was at the east window, framed against the night. We would often leave that window unshuttered, as it gave on to the far corner of the churchyard, and was thus in that part of the Overey house that lay within the priory’s walls. There was a high stool there, nestled in an angled nook that allowed its occupant to lean against a broad wooden post. It had been Bet’s favourite place to sit. Birds watering at the polygonal fountain, new buds on the gillyflower stems, Austin canons sneaking past to slip her a plug of mint: over this private world our elder daughter had sweetly reigned for most of her eleven years.

  Standing there in her nightclothes, washed by a half moon, her m
other looked like a glassed saint in a church window, pious and steady, every strand of her thick hair tucked properly beneath her night bonnet. Since our elder son died I had grown increasingly resentful of Sarah’s composure, which seemed only to have strengthened with Bet’s passing. She would reveal nothing of her grief, greeting friends and family with a sympathetic smile and a warm embrace, as if they were the ones needing comfort. My own state over those months could hardly have been worse. I would find myself weeping at a moment’s notice, bawling in a corner like a whipped schoolboy.

  Not Sarah. Great in a crisis, our Sarah, it was said among the women of the parish. A new Job. She had always been so, a tower of womanly strength as she bathed the foreheads of the dying, comforted the living with rote phrases from the prior. That night, as I watched her stand before the window, I felt a flash of fury and wanted to shake her, to scream some feeling into that placid skull. Instead I simply sat, mute and still, as if nailed to the bench, diminished by my wife’s stout quietude.

  Then the contortions came. Her entire frame gave a single heave. A choking sound rose from her throat, stifled as soon as it began. This convulsed her further, her arms spasming like the bound limbs of a criminal on a noose.

  Thinking she was ill, I was about to rise when she went to her knees and reached for the window. Her fingers stretched along the sill. She put her face to the bottom of the opening. Her cheek moved slowly along the rough board. I watched her, the strange sweeping movements of her hands as they whisked from the wood to her face, as she sniffed like some chained lunatic at her fingers and palms.

  It came to me then, the meaning of Sarah’s actions. She was gleaning the dust of our daughter. Discovering those places where Bet’s hands had played, gathering the last particles of her skin, the final remnants of her scent as they lingered on the windowsill. As if to take them in, and store them somewhere until the two of them could meet again.

  My breath stopped, yet I was too stunned by the change in my wife to go to her, despite the rush of sympathy swelling my lungs when I could breathe again. Sarah next turned away from the window and clutched the wooden stool. Flattening her cheek against the surface, she embraced the legs so tightly I thought she must be hurting herself. All the while she continued to draw indistinct moans from somewhere in her chest, which hummed with the pain of a dying animal.

  Now she was prone, writhing on her stomach, clutching at the rushes. Now on her back, groaning at the ceiling beams. This went on for an indeterminate time until I thought she was done. She had curled herself against the wall, still heaving, puddled in grief. I took a deep breath, preparing to rise.

  Then her voice, stealing from some shattered place, broke the room’s silence. ‘Not Simon … please not Simon … not Simon too … oh God not my Simon not Simon not Simon not Simon …’

  I frowned. What about Alison? Why wasn’t Sarah praying for our daughter, just as close to death as her brother? My thoughts darkened. Simon had always been Sarah’s favourite; it was obvious from the moment of his birth. She had been a model mother to all the children, in her way. Yet our youngest she treated differently. Lifted him more often, shouldered his governess aside at night, gentled him in ways she never had the others.

  It showed in him, too. Simon was a defiant, stubborn boy. Spoiled, coddled, contrary. Though astonishingly quick at his lessons, he could be an incorrigible brat, the object of numerous complaints from his schoolmasters and tutors, never willing to sit still and learn, whether sums from his teachers or bits of wisdom from his father. The very opposite of Alison, my child of light, seemingly born to please with her delicate embrace, her shy nods, her willing smile. She had been my only source of comfort over those awful months, as her older siblings died and her mother grew increasingly remote from everyone but her son. It was as if our family had been separated by some fathomless chasm, Sarah and Simon teetering on one side, Alison and I on the other, the voices of our departed sounding from the void, willing us to jump.

  Yet here we are, still among the living, and we must manage somehow. The thought guided me back to the present. Despite the favour Sarah had always showered on Simon, I could not believe she would ask God for his life over Alison’s. I waited for a prayer for our daughter. None came. Sarah continued her moaning for Simon, a thousand desperate pleas thrown into the night. Still nothing for Alison, not a motherly word.

  I ground my teeth, close to screaming at her, cursing her for preferring Simon even at a time like this. Instead I remained silent, and channelled my fury into my own, darker prayer. No, Lord God, I prayed inwardly, take him. Spare her, God. Spare my daughter, I beg of Thee, and take my son. In the name of Your own Son, my God, grant me my daughter’s life. Take Simon if You need another, so long as Alison lives.

  At the time these words seemed only natural, a bid for Alison’s life against her mother’s wishes. I imagined our warring prayers mounting to heaven, curling into God’s ears, and I felt a rush of righteousness as I asked Him for the life of my beloved daughter, at whatever cost.

  Sarah never saw me sitting there that night, feebly watching the spectacle of her sorrow.

  Alison died the next morning. My reaction was a tearless silence, as I shuffled about the Overey house, heavy with failure. Two days later Simon’s fever broke and he was out of bed, jumping about as if he had never been ill. Instead of joy in his recovery all I felt was the bitter unfairness of it, that Alison should die so Simon could live. For it seemed to me then that Sarah had traded something for Simon’s life that night, that some vital portion of her spirit had passed into him with all those spasms and wracks and grotesque snifflings, none of which she had spared for Alison.

  So I turned against her, against the good and against life, embracing the nothing that belongs to this world. She had God on her side, after all. She certainly didn’t need me. That chain of early deaths pulled me from my moorings, dragged me downward into that amoral place where I have dwelled for so many years. Once a loving husband who doted on his wife, I became a reserve of cold severity, indifferent to the comforts of intimacy and the pleasures of the marriage bed. Once a fair and judicious father even to Simon, I became distant, demanding obedience from a son whose very life I secretly resented. Once a poet of youthful love, I became a scribbler of cranky moralism, my writing nothing more than a means of access to high men and hidden information, much as I had once wished to craft such things of beauty as Chaucer gave the world.

  As for Sarah, Alison’s death and Simon’s survival seemed to have no effect on her, and as the years passed and our sole child grew from a boy to a man, she remained unflinchingly loyal to him, even as he proved himself again and again unworthy of her indulgence, drinking in the street, consorting with maudlyns, boxing with labourers, trying his thumb on the blade of the law. It would come as no real surprise when his juvenile indulgences culminated in the killing of another man. A fitting turn in a life of such frivolous waste.

  Then, within eighteen months of his departure for Italy and Hawkwood’s service, another death. A shallow cough one day, a fever the next, and Sarah was gone. There was a moment near the end, as I sat beside her, when she reached for my hand, her own a patch of warm parchment, loose against my palm. I blinked at her fading eyes, leaned down to catch a ragged whisper. ‘Try to love him, John. Just try.’ My head bent in a feeble nod. She never spoke again.

  Regret paints the memory in infinite hues, all blurring to a leaden grey with the passing of time. What future would have become possible had I gone to my Sarah that night in our parlour, had I pulled this wracked woman into my arms, cleared her nose with my thumb and finger, helped her gather up our daughter’s invisible dust? What could our remaining life have been, had I shown a half-ounce of compassion for this shattered mother, praying for one small life out of four?

  For only now do I see how much greater Sarah’s burden was than my own, and what Simon’s survival must have cost her. Only now do I see that her turn to God that night was done out of desperati
on, not spite or unthinking preference for one child over another. That her prayer for Simon’s life was in part a prayer for me, for our family, for the survival of the male heir by which every man judges his worth and ensures his legacy. That in that darkest of places she remained the most loyal of wives, even to the extent of praying to God, in the only way she knew how, for the survival of her husband’s name. That Sarah Gower, unlike her husband, never asked for a child’s death.

  Now, with her son back in our home and so many past roads converging, I found myself burning to speak to that shimmering woman in the window one last time, and ask for her forgiveness. Not for the way I treated her all those years. Sarah, in her stolid goodness, would not need to be asked for that measure of grace. I had seen it in her eyes as she passed, and knew it was mine to take with me to the grave.

  The forgiveness I sought was on behalf not of Sarah, but of Simon. For half a lifetime I had blamed my son for the extinguishing of his sister’s life, and for the slow moral decay of my own. All his life Simon Gower had carried that heavy load I had laid on his narrow shoulders so many years ago: the impossible burden of the unchosen child.

  Try to love him, John. Just try. I felt the womanly pressure of Sarah’s last words, the charge they gave me to live up to some modest ideal. Just try. That, at least, I could do.

  Word from James Tewburn arrived from the Guildhall. There was now definitive news on my property matter, and he hoped to deliver it in person. I called for Simon, thinking to bring him along, but he had already left the house. By noon I was on Basinghall Street, then in Guildhall Yard, which was busier than usual that day.

  There was a long board bench along the pavers outside Strode’s chambers. On it sat a typical collection of Londoners seeking attention: three starved-looking children, their clearly drunk guardian giving them the occasional head slap; a short row of bored apprentices over on legal business from Westminster or the inns, their robes hiked up to their knees to gather air; a young man tapping his foot, likely a ward nearing his majority; and a hollow-eyed man in faded hose clutching a sheaf of documents. All had business with the common serjeant’s office, and all had arrived before me.