A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  Yet where is the woman’s sovereignty, her choice in the matter? The woman never writes her own story. She is rather like the lion in Aesop’s little fable, who sees a painting of another lion being strangled by a man. But who paints the lion? Tell me, who?

  He who paints the lion claims to know the lion, and with his brush he may colour whatever lies he wishes. The power of the teller, you see, is inestimable.

  And so it is with women in these pastourelles, these tales of rural virgins who know not their own desire well enough to keep from resisting the rapes they must suffer with all the inevitability of death. I have heard them in the langue d’oïl, I have heard them in the langue d’oc, in the tongue of Juan Ruiz, in the tongue of Dante, and translated from the tongue of the Jews. In every human language, it seems, men have depicted the joys of ravishment, and never with consequence for the ravisher. Just one time I would like to hear a version with a righteous end, one in which the perpetrator—

  —I flee my matter.

  One morning, as the girl sat with her mother in their bedchamber, learning to pin out a broad stitch on her frame, there came a pounding at the outer door. They heard voices, then one of the servingwomen entered.

  ‘The prince requests an audience, my lady.’

  ‘Very well.’ The lady gathered her embroidery and placed it in a basket. ‘I shall receive him in the salon.’

  As she left the bedchamber she turned, stooped down, and held her daughter by the chin. ‘Stay here, my sweet. Just here. Do not come out until I call you. Do you understand?’

  The girl nodded. Her mother kissed her nose and walked out of her private rooms, closing the door behind her.

  Through a knot the daughter watched as the foreign prince entered the salon. Her mother called for her maidservant, moving in frantic circles as she sought to elude his grasp. It happened so quickly: a brief struggle, a hand clamped over her mother’s mouth, her dress torn from her shoulders, the horrific sight of the lord in his nakedness.

  Through it all the girl obeyed her mother’s last command. ‘Do not come out until I call you.’ And she did not. What could she have done?

  The prince, dressing himself, left his victim on a cushioned chair, weeping with pain and humiliation. At the sight of her mother’s bruised thighs, her reddened breasts, the little girl let out a whimper of sympathy.

  The prince’s head whipped round. Before she could move he had flung open the door to the bedchamber, grabbed her small arm, and pulled her violently to the middle of the salon. He drew a knife, madness in his eyes, and made ready to cut the girl’s throat.

  A crash of splintered wood, and the door to the upper hall burst open. In the opening stood the foreign duke, a short sword in his hand. He took two long strides and held the blade at his brother’s throat. No words were exchanged, though the thunderous tension between the brothers filled the salon. Finally the prince shrugged, smirked at his younger brother, and left the room.

  That evening, as she walked with her mother through the lower hall, the girl sensed a movement behind them. She turned.

  There, in a doorway, with his grey, fish-like eyes, stood the prince. His arms were crossed over his doublet, pointed with the same lions and flowers depicted on his shield. His eyes took in her mother’s form, surveyed the bruised and battered flesh he had ravaged. Then he looked at the girl. She gave him her cruellest glare, surprising herself with her childish defiance, and on his face she saw it: a flinch, a smear of utter shame at what he had done.

  She felt a dark and secret thrill. For all his brutality, she recognized in that moment, for all his shows of strength, what defines this man above all is his weakness.

  A weakness I shall never show.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Guildhall, Ward of Cheap

  The gentleman the clerks called Gower had departed the Guildhall a while before. Edgar Rykener wondered whether he, too, should put his head in the doorway and ask them for assistance. But he’d overheard that James Tewburn wasn’t about, so he gave his name to one of the other clerks and returned to the bench. The wall’s dark stone cooled his blood, easing him into an upright slumber untroubled for once by thoughts of all that pressed him: that mess with Bickle the beadle, the dead girl on the Moorfields, his worry about Gerald, the missing Agnes.

  He was deep in a dream when a hand on his shoulder shook him gently. ‘Edgar? Edgar Rykener? You are here to see me?’

  ‘Ye—yes,’ he stammered, waking to the sight of James Tewburn. The clerk’s threadbare coat was cinched too tightly, giving his thin fingers no quarter as he kneaded the chapped skin at his neck. His eyes shifted about, darting from Edgar’s face to the chamber door. ‘As I was in the precincts of the Guildhall, I thought—’

  ‘Right, yes yes, of course,’ said Tewburn.

  Edgar glanced up and down the passage between the buildings. The bench had emptied during his slumber, though voices floated from the structures on either side.

  ‘Master Strode’s chambers are in heavy use today,’ the clerk continued. ‘Let’s find a more suitable spot.’ He led them in a circuitous path around several more buildings to a remote corner of Guildhall Yard, obscured from view by a high privet hedge. Had Tewburn recognized him this time? Edgar wondered.

  ‘Here,’ Tewburn said. There was a short stone bench slightly apart from the wall. The clerk sat forward with his elbows on his knees. ‘There have been some, ah, difficulties in the matter of your brother’s wardship,’ he rasped.

  ‘Difficulties?’ Edgar said with alarm. ‘Is Gerald well? Is he safe?’

  ‘I believe so,’ he said, though Edgar could hear the doubt in his voice. ‘His master knows nothing about the transfer, and he won’t know until the day it’s to take effect. Our common serjeant is scrupulous.’

  ‘I see,’ Edgar said weakly. ‘And what’s caused these difficulties?’

  Tewburn shrugged. ‘London and Southwark are discrete cities, with distinct laws, distinct manors, distinct courts. Master Strode has no jurisdiction on the far bank, and though his arm is long, there are limits to the speed and force with which even he can negotiate with his counterparts there. In Southwark he’s nothing.’

  ‘But what—’

  ‘We must find an accommodating judge in the Southwark manor court wielding jurisdiction over Grimes’s shop. And even to determine in whose authority Cutter Lane lies presents a considerable difficulty. The lane runs along the boundary between two Southwark boroughs, dividing them as prettily as Pythagoras himself could bisect a circle.’

  The flood of details overwhelmed Edgar, for what did he know of borough courts and jurisdictions, of bisected circles and Pythagoras? What he did know was that Gerald needed to be moved out of Nathan Grimes’s shop, and moved soon.

  He also suspected there was something Tewburn wasn’t telling him. The clerk’s voice was stiff, too proper even for a Guildhall man. For Edgar knew Tewburn, in that way he knew his most frequent jakes: knew his voice and his manner, the way he responded to certain gestures and inflections. ‘When will you know more, Master Tewburn?’

  ‘We should receive official word by Monday, I’m told, Tuesday at the latest, and we fully expect a resolution—’

  ‘James,’ Edgar said, his voice soft but severe.

  Tewburn stopped, then turned slowly, his eyes widening with recognition and desire. Tewburn knew that tone, asked for it every time.

  ‘I – how—’

  ‘James,’ he said again. ‘If you have something to tell me, tell it now, or there won’t be much of this in your future.’ He took Tewburn’s hand and put it on his breeches.

  The clerk’s face reddened, his tongue flicked his upper lip, then he sprang to his feet.

  ‘What is it, James?’

  He put a hand to his eyes. ‘Ah, hell with it all.’ He gazed through the privet, making sure they were not being observed, then blew out a long breath. ‘The truth is your brother’s mixed up with some foul men. The butchers seem to control that whole mano
r over there. They’ve paid off the judges, the bailiff, the prior for all I can tell. They’re a hard bunch, waylaying cattle and sheep before they’re driven to market, scaring off the inspectors. No one knows who’s in charge, and whenever I push for an answer on who has the authority to approve the transfer I get a spin on somebody’s finger.’

  Edgar considered telling the clerk what he knew but decided against it. Too risky. No reason to muddy the waters with all Gerald’s talk of treason, which could interfere with the transfer of wardship. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  Tewburn shrugged. ‘I’ll know more in a few days, after I’ve met with one of the Guildable justices. It looks to me like Gerald’s kept himself clean, but Grimes is thick in it. I’ll have it sorted by Monday. We can talk then.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Better that I come find you. Our usual place?’ Tewburn took the sacrament most often in the north churchyard at St Pancras, a disused and overgrown spot of land lying between Gropecunt Lane and Popkirtle Lane and running nearly up to Cheapside. The newer yard to the west of the church was now the parish’s burial plot, so the maudlyns tended to use the older one with certain jakes who were uncomfortable coupling in the horsestalls.

  Edgar nodded and stood. ‘Monday, then, just after the Angelus bell.’

  Tewburn peered through the privet, then back at Edgar, going to his knees with a questioning glance. Edgar allowed him to reach up and unlace his breeches. The clerk was eager, and within the short whiles of three paternosters, said in his mind while he was sucked by Strode’s clerk, his seed was in Tewburn’s mouth, Tewburn on his feet, and they were winding back through the mayor’s outbuildings. Edgar refused his offer of a groat. This one, he told the clerk with a grateful smile, is on my tally.

  As he left Guildhall Yard Edgar pondered the troubling encounter. Whatever Tewburn had learned across the river about Grimes and his gang of butchers couldn’t be good for Gerald. He shuffled along Cheapside back to Gropecunt Lane, his gloom returning. Perhaps Master Strode, for all his might and goodness, wouldn’t be able to help after all.

  No surprise there. Tewburn, after all, worked for the City of London, and Strode worked for the City of London, and Bickle the beadle worked for the City of London – yet the City of London, Edgar Rykener thought with a grim sense of his own place in this hateful town, most surely did not work for him.

  TWENTY-THREE

  St Mary Overey, Southwark

  Distraction, deception, subterfuge, mendacity, all those unspoken tools of the subtler crafts: government and trade, diplomacy and finance. For someone in my line of work these are tools ready to hand, and I wield them with an implicit confidence in my own mastery of any given transaction. Only rarely are they used against me, and when they are I generally recognize them before any harm is done.

  But not always.

  ‘You could write an algorism for it,’ said my son.

  ‘What is an algorism?’

  Simon looked at me almost pityingly. ‘A procedure for calculating something. Put an equation together with a few rules and you have an algorism. Named for al-Khwarizmi, one of the great mathematicians of Araby.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The metre of a poem is a measurable quantity,’ he went on.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Whenever you choose a word or a combination of words in putting together a line, you’re also choosing numbers. Any given elegiac couplet contains six feet, then five feet, with a finite variation in syllable count across the couplet.’

  ‘Finite. Like my patience.’

  Simon laughed, though I could tell he would not give it up. It was the day before the St George’s morrow feast out at Windsor, and we were eating a sparse midday meal together in the hall. Onion soup, drawn beans, a loaf of wastel, and a tart with an orange conserve that Simon had purchased at a spicerer’s on Bridge Street. An extravagance, I thought, but he intended it as a small gesture of gratitude; I decided to take it in that spirit. We had discussed his new employment with the chancellor, and he had just been asking me about my latest writing. I had complained about the drudgery of elegiacs. He was responding with this arcane defence of poetic metre.

  ‘An algorism would allow you to calculate rate of change in the metre, whatever sort you’re employing.’

  ‘But what would this information give you?’

  ‘A glimpse of the poet’s mind as he writes. How often does Cato craft an irregular line? With what frequency does a poet writing in elegiac couplets choose a spondee as opposed to a dactyl as the first foot of the hexameter?’

  ‘Again, though—’

  ‘You could do it with chronicles, too, starting with very simple calculations. What’s the most frequently used dactylic word in Vergil? Numine? Volvere? Omnibus?’

  ‘So one could tell a lot about a poet’s taste in images, say.’

  ‘Exactly. Or whether there’s less metrical or syntactical variety toward the end of a work.’

  ‘Suggesting what?’

  ‘That the poet grew lazy the closer he got to the end?’

  I looked at him, sensing a subtle shift in tone. ‘I take it you had lots of time for this sort of thing in Italy.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s how my mind operates, I suppose. At the moment I’m working through a similar sort of puzzle for the chancellor’s secretary.’

  ‘Oh?’ Simon’s appointment with de la Pole’s office had gone well, and the chancellor had given him some materials with which to assay his skills.

  ‘He asked me to prove my accounting skills on an old audit book.’ He rubbed a palm over the worn leathern cover of a small booklet. ‘Reconcile this sum, justify that expense, and all of it’s written in the most crabbed hand you can imagine, with these unique abbreviations I have never seen before. It’s like a code. Quite a mess, though I’ve almost got it cracked.’

  He went on for a while in this vein, and as I watched him eat his tart I wondered at this strange combination of genius and whimsy that defined so much of his person. Simon had killed a man, and his history of counterfeiting spoke to a capacity for deception that could still give me chills. Yet as Chaucer had once pressed me to recognize, the death was unintentional, an accident, and Simon had clearly been changed for the better by his two years in Hawkwood’s service. Gone was the arrogant self-confidence, the defiant puerility. In this new role as the dutiful son, he was capable of helping me to forget, even for a few hours, the subject of Chaucer’s murderous book.

  The respite ended abruptly when Will Cooper came in with a small bundle under his arm. ‘A delivery from the Guildhall, Master Gower. Compliments of the common serjeant, the Honourable Ralph Strode.’

  ‘Ah, the Angervyle.’ Remembering Strode’s promise, I eagerly untied the rope thongs binding the cloth around the volume and started to browse.

  ‘What is it?’ Simon asked, craning his neck.

  I hesitated, unsure how much to say. ‘It’s a book about loving books, I suppose. The Philobiblon, by Richard Angervyle of Bury, who was once the king’s envoy to the papal curia in Avignon.’

  We spent the next several hours in the solar, Simon sprawled in the south oriel overlooking the priory garden, I seated on a broad-backed chair along the northwest corner absorbing Angervyle’s bracing account. Written in Latin prose of an easy gait, the Philobiblon began with several straightforward chapters on the affection due to books, the wisdom they contain, their considerable cost. ‘No dearness of price ought to hinder a man from the buying of books,’ Angervyle wrote, ‘if he has the money that is demanded for them.’

  Angervyle possessed a strong sense of history, citing examples of renowned book-buyers from the past, including Plato and Aristotle, as well as some negative exempla of those who spurned their volumes. There was also a long discussion of the treatment and storage of the bishop’s own books. Dripping noses, filthy fingernails, pressed flowers, cups of wine brought too near the precious folios: all of these represented destructive forces to the volumes in
his collection, which he sought to preserve and protect against the ravages of their many potential abusers. To this end, he wrote, his plan was to endow a hall of books at Oxford, a chamber that would lend out his collection, rendering it a great public good to the entire Oxford community. ‘The treasures of our books,’ he wrote, ‘should be available to all.’

  Eventually I came to a chapter containing stories about certain notorious haters of books. I read it, then read it again, associating Angervyle’s story with the events of the last several weeks: prophecies, threats, the burning of books.

  An old woman came to Tarquin the Proud, the seventh king of Rome, offering to sell nine books of prophecy. But she asked an immense sum for them, so much that the king said she was mad. In anger she flung three books into the fire, and still asked the same sum for the rest. When the king refused, again she flung three others into the fire and still asked the same price for the three that were left. At last, astonished beyond measure, Tarquin paid for three books the same price for which he might have bought nine. The old woman disappeared, and was never seen again.

  My thoughts raced. The story of Tarquin spoke directly to Angervyle’s interest in books of prophecy, and his acute awareness of the value of such volumes even to kings. Could one of his own books have contained the prophetic work of Lollius, this manuscript it seemed everyone in England was seeking – this work that had already led to a young woman’s violent death? Despite my conviction that the De Mortibus must be a forgery, the cryptic mode of Angervyle’s treatise was giving me a taste for the hunt.

  ‘Prophecies, Father?’

  I looked up, realizing I had been murmuring. I tend to translate aloud as I read, an old schoolroom habit, and Simon had caught a word that tickled his curiosity.