A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  No cause for despair, though. I had been in Angervyle’s library all of a quarter hour and had already acquired a significant bit of information. I looked over at Quincey, who was inspecting a binding. ‘Do you know of this Lollius’s poems?’

  He shook his head. ‘Only his memory, and only in that Horatian ode and letter.’

  ‘No other Lollius, then? An English one, perhaps?’

  ‘Doesn’t clap a bell, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Though perhaps his works are mentioned elsewhere in Angervyle’s library.’

  ‘Anything is possible, Master Gower.’ With this enigmatic reply Quincey set the volume back in its trunk and rose, brisk and businesslike. ‘In any case, you’re free to inspect the collection at your will.’ He pointed to two trunks near my knee. ‘These crates contain all the bishop’s holdings in historia. Chronicles of England, of times past, and the writings of the ancient historians of Rome, Lucan and such. And here we have books of science.’ Four trunks, arrayed against the western wall. ‘Aristotle’s Physics, treatises of Galen and Hippocrates, even the works of al-Kindi on astronomy and cryptography, translated from the Arabic.’

  ‘Cryptography?’

  Quincey gave me a queer look, his left brow edging up his broad forehead. ‘The art of secret writing, Master Gower. Transpositions, ciphers. Such techniques are employed mainly by alchemists, dabblers in magic, that sort. And spies, of course.’

  I felt a quiet thrill. Tom Tugg at Newgate, Ralph Strode at the Guildhall, and now Peter de Quincey here in Oxford, all quick to invoke the shadow of spies, unnumbered and anonymous, spectres of treachery and deceit in a time of war. I thought of the dead girl in the Moorfields – a French spy, according to Strode – and again I had the sense of a connection unmade, of knowledge hidden beneath veils I could not part.

  Quincey soon left me alone in the chamber – as alone as I could be with hundreds of books around me. I decided to begin with the histories, selecting four volumes from the first trunk and taking them to the reading desk. Settling on the stool and adjusting the candles, I arrayed the four manuscripts before me, admiring the unique embossments tooled on covers of various shades.

  No time for pleasure, I reminded myself. My king prophesied to die, and here I sit, plucking at chronicles. Secret writing indeed. First the Bede – no, Geoffrey of Monmouth. With a sigh and a squint at the crabbed script, I read, my vision, for once, unclouded.

  The strangers had arrived on the day of St Dominic. They departed on the Saturday following the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.

  At first the lady would not admit the truth to herself, and in the early weeks it was easy enough to ignore her condition. The first time she missed her menses she put it off to the trauma of her rape, the evil humours the foreign prince had left within her. After the second time she examined her frame in a glass. Her belly was undeniably growing.

  The daughter watched as her mother cursed her fortune, tore her hair, beat at her breasts. She swallowed anise, birthwort, chamomile by the mouthful, hoping with these herbs to abort the child. At one moment she reached for a knife, planning to tear out this foul life. At another she vowed to throw herself off a chalk cliff. Yet each time she would relent, unable to abandon her daughter.

  Soon enough it became impossible to hide her condition. The lady sensed her people turning on her. Oh, they would still serve her, carry out her commands in their dutiful way. Yet she had lost their goodwill.

  A lady in these times, bearing the child of a lord not her own? Unthinkable, and yet there she was.

  With her sixth month came new tidings of the war. A miserable defeat for her lord’s king, and as this bleakness descended the lady gave in fully to her despair. On the morning chosen for her death, she sat for a while in the outer courtyard, dandling her daughter one last time. The girl knew something was awry. Yet even as they kissed their farewells, they saw in the distance a cloud of dust, smaller than the last, moving slowly across the marches. The lady squinted against the scorching sun. Bevelled or and sable, six hawks argent ascending the middle rank.

  The livery of her lord and husband.

  The lady locked herself in her apartments and for two days would not see him, despite his pleas. Nor would his men nor his servants tell him what they knew, though in their averted eyes he read a calamity.

  Had she been ill, with pestilence or some other malady? Was she sick even now, afraid to pass on a mortal blight to her lord? Was she disfigured?

  Yes, the lady thought. Disfigured. She stripped to her thin shift and threw open the door, awaiting the sword.

  Call to mind, my heart, the story of Joseph’s trouble about Mary. It is not a story to be found in the Gospels, where Joseph thinks for a mere verse about divorce but then accepts the truth of the incarnation. I speak of the Father Joseph we see in the minstrels’ pageants. This is the Joseph our knight knew best: the foolish Joseph, the husband convinced his pregnant wife has sinned with another man.

  An angel came to you? Is that your claim? Ha! A man in the likeness of an angel, say I, come to cuckold me in sight of my relations – and you, my fresh wife, claim to be carrying the Messiah, though still a virgin?

  Yet even in this Joseph finally relents, his anger calmed by the angel into a cool acceptance of his fate as the earthly husband of the mother of our Lord.

  The mores of the time dictated that the knight should have cast her out of his home, exiled her as a harlot and a whore. Instead he listened to his lady’s account of her attack by this foreign prince. Though her swollen body was there for all to see, the knight would not put his wife away, as even Joseph was tempted at first to do. Wondrously, he wept with her instead, promising her his enduring love and protection.

  It was not to be. On the Tuesday after Pentecost, in the last year of Pedro the Cruel’s reign, God poured spirit into the body of an infant boy, and extracted it from the flesh of his mother. The little girl would hear her mother’s death-screams for years to come.

  The new child looked so much like his mother – and, the girl could plainly see, his malevolent father. Yet from the moment of the boy’s birth the knight took him as his own. One of the most self-sacrificing, self-denying loves in all history was this lord’s for a son not his own. They made a strange family, these three, yet there was a certain nobility to their devotion that inspired awe from more charitable souls.

  Love can be sustaining even in the worst of circumstances. Bare life, though, can be passing hard to endure. As the infant grew into a boy, the people started to look upon their lord with ill will. Betrayed by a strumpet of Mahound! And this bastard will be our lord’s heir, and thus our own future lord?

  No longer did they treat the knight with such solicitous fealty. There were whispers of insubordination, and gossip in the town.

  The situation could not stand. So the knight gathered his most loyal men, no more than thirty in number, and with his children left their home. This best of lords gave up his castle to become a wanderer, a knight errant served only by the few dozen men who would join him on the road.

  Though weakened in spirit, our knight was still strong in body, more than capable of leading a company of men in battle. He could sell these skills. He became a knight for hire, peddling the might of his men in the wars of that era, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the ports of Marseille and Toulon, adding other wayfaring men to his company as they went.

  The knight taught his daughter well in the course of their wanderings: how to butcher a hart, how to fight with her fists and teeth, how to ward off brigands with a knife. By the age of twelve she was a fierce, rodent-like thing, unrecognizable as the daughter of a wealthy lord.

  La Comadrejita: the Little Weasel, as she was known among the camp women. Small, lithe, quick on her feet, always sneaking up on the warriors and their women, dodging grasps and slaps, lifting coins and shiny objects from pouches and shelves. These she would give to her brother as tokens of their love, extracting solemn promises from the little
boy that he would do her bidding in all things.

  From her father’s men his growing daughter learned the many tongues spoken around the great inland sea – not only French and Italian but the languages of the Jews and the Moors, and the mixed tongue of sailors. She took a new name, too, after an old Roman town in the Dauphiné where her father’s company wintered one year, and after the orange scarf she wore in her hair.

  For eight long years she roamed with her father’s company among the hills and rivers of many lands. If not the happiest of girls, she was content, though the memory of her mother’s ravishment stayed with her always, like an aching tooth too frequently tongued.

  Sorrow comes in waves, it is said. In her sixteenth year the girl fell ill along with her father, her brother, and many of their company. The fever slew the weakest among them: a half-dozen ageing soldiers, two camp women heavy with child – and her brother. He was buried on a high cliff above the sea, with no priest to say Mass. So she said it herself for this sweetest of boys, murmuring through narrowed lips those rote snatches of unknown Latin heard so often in her life.

  In his bleakness at the loss of his son, and seeing his daughter’s devastation, her father made a decision. His child needed a home, a chance at a life worth living.

  He had heard tidings of a large company of mercenaries serving the signore of Milan, a much larger assemblage than his own, well managed and organized. So the knight travelled with his diminished company to Lombardy. There he sold himself and his men to this company, a wealthy band of mercenaries hiring their might to the most powerful magnates in the land: kings, dukes, popes.

  The leader of this company was a fearsome lord, tall, haughty, quick of wit and quicker of cruelty. Yet he was revered by his subordinates, and feared by those who hired his engines and his men.

  His name was Ser Giovanni Acuto. In your tongue, my sweet, Sir John Hawkwood.

  TWENTY-NINE

  San Donato a Torre, near Florence

  ‘It’s remarkable, Sir John,’ said Adam Scarlett. ‘And alarming.’

  Hawkwood, fresh from his weekly bath, had thrown on a loose robe. He peered into the mottled glass, shaving his neck. ‘Perhaps it’s nothing,’ he said.

  That morning a servingwoman and her husband had been cleaning one of the smaller villette to make room for an envoy from Rome. Four of the chancellor’s clerks had vacated the week before, having made a mess of the outbuilding, and it needed a top-to-bottom scrubbing. Her husband had been shovelling old coals from the main hearth when he came across a half-burned quire behind the grate. The edges were badly charred, several pages rendered unreadable. Yet there were at least a dozen nearly full sheets with legible letters and mysterious signs scribbled across both sides. The man had promptly brought the quire to the condottiero.

  ‘The hand matches Il Critto’s, I’ll be bound,’ said Scarlett, paging through the quire and eager to examine it further. ‘This could only have been his work.’

  Hawkwood towelled off. ‘So what did our friend leave behind?’

  Scarlett shook his head. ‘Hard to tell, sire. Only one of these pages makes any sense to me. It’s in Italian, if it even deserves the name.’ Scarlett read it aloud. A short set of awkward sentences conjugating the verb nascondere. I nascondere, si nascondono, si nasconde …

  I hide my knowledge beneath my words.

  You hide your ignorance beneath your power.

  He hides his treason beneath his loyalty.

  The fumblings of a man still practising a tongue not his own.

  When Scarlett had finished reading through the grammatical exercise Hawkwood shrugged, reached for his hose. ‘So he was honing his Italian. What does this prove, Adam? We’ve never had reason to doubt his loyalty.’

  ‘Nothing, Sir John. Merely that he used this quire for casual writing in addition to his ciphers. As for the rest …’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s like reading pebbles on sand. None of it means anything to me, and I don’t have the quality of mind capable of sorting it out. Il Critto kept his ciphers to himself.’

  ‘As I warned him he should, on peril of his life, and damn me for a fool!’ He laughed gruffly, then considered the matter. ‘I suppose we need some help, then.’

  Scarlett agreed. That afternoon he left for Siena, where he asked around at the studium. He was back two mornings later with the sharpest mind on the faculty. A purse, a polite request, a few vague threats: there had been little resistance. With Hawkwood there rarely was.

  In the gallery the condottiero invited the dazed man to sit with him on the padded bench he used at his desk. The wide surface was taken up in large part with a marked-up map of Tuscany, Lombardy, Romagna, and the Veneto: troop movements and garrisons, debts owed to the company, the intricate web of Hawkwood’s empire. He liked to hold his strategic conversations here, where his power could be spread out before him for the benefit of his visitors.

  ‘In what discipline is your training, Maestro Desilio?’

  ‘Law, Ser Giovanni, at Bologna. Though logic is my greater strength.’

  Hawkwood glanced at Scarlett. ‘Well good, then. We need a logician’s mind to crack these rocky nuts. Did my man Scarletto explain all this to you?’

  ‘He did not, Ser Giovanni.’

  So Hawkwood did. ‘What you see before you, sir, this mess of scorched parchments and half-burned papers? This is all that was left behind by one of my associates.’

  ‘Associates, Ser Giovanni?’

  ‘He left our service earlier this year. His mother dies, he’s the sole heir, he thinks of home – the details don’t particularly matter. Though his profession mattered a great deal to me, as it soon shall to you. You see, this man was my cryptographer, Master Desilio.’

  ‘Your – your cryptographer?’

  ‘Il Critto, we called him,’ said Hawkwood. ‘The man responsible for taking my dispatches and letters and casting them into cipher for delivery abroad. To my garrisons, to my contacts in Rome, Paris, London. You are familiar with cryptography?’

  Despite the peculiar situation the logician looked intrigued, provoked by the intellectual challenge. ‘I am, Ser Giovanni. At the studium we have several books on this craft. By Master Roger Bacon, by al-Kindi the Moor, the latter translated into Latin. I’ve not studied them carefully, but I know the rudiments, and I can certainly loan you these books.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Hawkwood said, nodding eagerly. ‘Though I have a different sort of loan in mind.’

  Scarlett watched them for a while, the way Hawkwood had of warming up his visitors, making them feel comfortable in his presence, even when he was delivering unwelcome news. Yes, you will be my guest here at San Donato, at least for a time. No, you won’t be going back to Siena today, nor tomorrow. Better to write a letter, requesting that the books in question be sent back with my man. You will certainly be paid well, and the studium compensated for your absence, however extended it should prove.

  ‘Do you have any further questions or concerns about this arrangement?’ Hawkwood asked him.

  The man paged through the quire, his mouth at a rueful slant. ‘Only that this task, Ser Giovanni …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘These sorts of ciphers do not lend themselves to expediency. Breaking them could take – it could take months.’

  Hawkwood’s smile stiffened. ‘Months I don’t have. Weeks? Perhaps. Days? Even better.’

  The logician, knowing better than to shake his head, took a heavy breath. ‘I will do my best, Ser Giovanni.’

  Scarlett watched Hawkwood incline his head. ‘I know you will, Maestro Desilio.’

  THIRTY

  Paternoster Row

  From the northwest corner of St Paul’s churchyard Edgar peered across the busy lane, his head filled with the muddle and din, his stomach rumbling with hunger. He’d hardly eaten in days, relying on the sparse alms of the parishes as he skulked around the city, trying to elude the constables, and that hook-scarred man on Gropecunt Lane. Swy
ving was a hard business, yet it was nothing compared to the week he’d experienced as one of the city’s thousand beggars: sleeping in abandoned horsestalls, mouldy bread plucked from gutters, the cold anonymity of London’s poorest souls, trying to stay invisible or feign lameness so they wouldn’t be put out at the gates. Yet now it was time.

  He pushed himself off the booth and walked toward Paternoster Row, past several parchmenters’ shops. Halfway down the street a shop matron, hair tied back in a simple scarf, bargained with a neat-looking man over a bundle at her feet. A reeve or steward, Edgar guessed, commissioned to purchase parchment for his employer.

  ‘That’s too high, Mistress Pinkley,’ the man wheedled. ‘The brothers of the Charterhouse toil for the Lord, not for themselves.’

  ‘The sum wasn’t too high for my late husband, nor too high for me. You should get a smell of what I charge the friary.’ A harsh cackle. ‘But for this stack of lambskin? Four shillings a dozen is passing fair for the holy disciples of the Grand Chartreuse, and I’ll have not a penny less. The finest lambs of Sunbury-on-Thames in these skins, nor will you find a thinner lot on Paternoster Row.’

  Edgar waited while the man paid and trudged off with the parchments. The parchmentress turned to him with a ready smile which faded somewhat when she saw this vagrant at her shop door.

  ‘What is it?’

  He looked down at his hands. ‘A book, mistress. A book to sell.’

  ‘A book to sell, eh?’ She took in the shoddy hose, the frayed cap. ‘Most come to Paternoster Row looking to purchase books, not sell them. And what’s a bairn like you doing with a book?’

  ‘Came into my possession, willed me by my mother, bless her,’ he lied. ‘I have no reading to speak of and don’t know the matter of it but I believe it’s a valuable thing.’