A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  ‘Very well, sire.’ Pietrasanta turned to exit, pushing past a young man entering from behind him. Desilio’s boy, sent up from the villetta.

  ‘What is it?’ Scarlett asked him.

  ‘Master Desilio requests your presences, good sirs,’ said the breathless youth.

  ‘Oh?’ Hawkwood’s eyebrows arched up, and he turned to Scarlett with an intrigued grin. They walked together to one of the villette, the line of small cottages in a line down the hill from the main house. The grapevines reached from the path up the sweeping rise to the south, and the late afternoon had settled into a mellow glow. My last season in Italy, Scarlett thought, whispering a quiet prayer.

  In the villetta they found Desilio wedged among several piles of books on a trestle table, which was covered with scribbled papers arrayed in an unpatterned mess around the quire. The scholar’s eyes gleamed with excitement as he stood, though he maintained a respectful silence until Hawkwood asked him to speak.

  ‘I have broken the first cipher, Ser Giovanni, and will soon break the second.’

  ‘Is that so?’ said Hawkwood, his gaze shifting between Desilio and the table. ‘Sit, please, and explain what you’ve found.’

  Desilio took his chair, Scarlett and Hawkwood each to one side.

  ‘The key was the first cipher. Without it everything else in the quire means nothing. It took a bit of thought and effort, but I was able to decipher these first pages without difficulty once I realized what was before me.’

  Scarlett peered over his shoulder. ‘And what is it?’

  Desilio waited a moment, letting the curiosity build. ‘Sardinian,’ he finally whispered.

  ‘Sardinian?’

  ‘Yes. Nothing complicated or encoded, just Sardinian. He used it as the first of his ciphers.’

  ‘So you read the language yourself, Maestro Desilio?’ Hawkwood asked.

  ‘Hardly,’ the logician scoffed. ‘I asked around among your men, and one of them knew another who was from that island. I read him the first few sentences, as well as I was able—’

  ‘You what?’ Hawkwood exploded, his hand poised to strike.

  Scarlett put a hand on his arm. Desilio was wagging his beard. ‘Nothing to worry about, I assure you, Ser Giovanni. The ciphers mean nothing in isolation. The man had no idea why I was even pulling him in here.’

  Scarlett felt Hawkwood relax, and took it upon himself to move the conversation along, reaching over Desilio’s shoulder to turn the page. ‘What about here, and here?’ He pointed to the script on the facing folio. The alphabet was Roman, the hand legible, but the words themselves were clearly nonsense, full of letters bunched seemingly at random, and what looked like extra vowels and consonants, such as an X within a circle.

  ‘It’s an extraordinary thing,’ Desilio said, a touch of pride in his voice as he looked up at them. ‘He was inventing a lingua ignota, as I’ve heard such things called.’

  ‘A new language,’ Hawkwood murmured.

  ‘It’s rudimentary, of course, without declined nouns or conjugated verbs, and the tenses are rather primitive. But a few hundred words is all one needs to put together fairly sophisticated messages.’

  ‘But how would the recipient know the meaning?’

  Desilio smiled. ‘A glossary, owned by both parties, translating each word back into Italian. Or any other language. The only way to decipher the code without such a glossary would be through an analysis of letters and their frequency, but for that to work you’d have to have a much larger sample of the language than the mere four pages here.’

  ‘So then,’ Scarlett said, confused, ‘how were you able to decipher the unknown language?’

  Desilio rubbed his palms. ‘It all begins with the Sardinian, the simplest of the ciphers. It’s merely another language, and anyone who knows it can crack the code, which I’ve now done with the help of your man. And as I’ve discovered in the process, the Sardinian is in effect the glossary to the lingua ignota. The Sardinian, that is, provides the key to the next cipher.’

  ‘Explain yourself,’ said Hawkwood.

  ‘Certainly, Ser Giovanni. Look here, at the beginning of the first column. It reads, “Word seventy-nine is míntza” – and míntza is Sardinian for “spring”. The next sentence reads “The twelfth word is bidduri” – Sardinian for “hemlock”. Once I had all of this translated I was stymied. The seventy-ninth word of what? What twelfth word is he talking about? Then I realized what your cryptographer was doing here. What he’s telling us is that word seventy-nine of the secret language – the next cipher in the quire – is “spring”. And word twelve is “hemlock”. And so on and so forth. And now, by translating the lingua ignota as the key, I believe I am opening the lock to the next code, which follows in the quire. The Sardinian unlocks the secret language. The secret language unlocks the numbers. Do you see?’

  Hawkwood nodded, all admiration. ‘Indeed I do, Master Desilio. You are Theseus in a labyrinth of sorts, with each cipher a length of rope guiding you to the next corner, and the next solution.’

  ‘A perceptive analogy, Ser Giovanni. I should have the solution to the subsequent code worked out as soon as I have transcribed and recombined the lingua ignota.’

  ‘And what is this next cipher?’ Scarlett asked him.

  Desilio turned back to the manuscript, showing us the next three pages, filled with scribbled numbers stacked in equations and scattered along lines, shapes, and angles. Once again they meant nothing to Scarlett.

  ‘The next one is numerical, drawing on the mathematics of Master Gersonides,’ said Desilio. ‘A Jew, and an astronomer of moderate renown. I believe your cryptographer was constructing a cipher based on some of Gersonides’ more arcane calculations. Extraction of square roots, binomial coefficients, that sort of thing.’

  Hawkwood laughed lightly, slapped him on the back. ‘Ah yes. Binomial coefficients. I eat them with my rabbit.’

  ‘It sounds more complicated than it is,’ Desilio said modestly. ‘This mathematics is several generations old, nothing I cannot untangle. A few more days, Ser Giovanni, and I should be ready to tackle the final cipher.’

  ‘And this final cipher? Do you have an inkling as to its solution?’

  ‘Not yet, sire, though I am confident I’ll get there.’ He thumbed through the booklet’s last few pages and set his finger in the middle of one of them. ‘Your cryptographer organized the last cipher around four discrete images, arranged in different combinations across these pages. Here is what looks like a falcon, perhaps. This one is clearly a sword, the next a flower – a spindly one, like a thistle. And here we have a grape, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘A plum,’ said Hawkwood, his voice suddenly taut. ‘It’s a plum.’

  ‘And the bird is a hawk,’ said Scarlett, seeing it at the same instant. Hawks, thistleflowers, plums, and swords. The four suits of Hawkwood’s cards, written in neat rows and columns across the last four pages of the quire in small groups of two – each group, Scarlett suspected, a letter or a word. The phrases came back to him, like pinpricks along his arms. At Prince of Plums shall prelate oppose … By Half-ten of Hawks might shender be shown …

  He should have seen it during his own scrutiny of the manuscript, yet these symbols had blended in with all the other mysterious writing in the quire, and he hadn’t taken the time to examine them in their own right before extracting Desilio from the studium. How differently all this might have turned out, Scarlett would think later, if he had.

  Hawkwood, who always carried a deck of cards slung in a purse, removed them and spread the painted ovals out on the table as they explained to the scholar what the two of them had noticed. Desilio nodded eagerly, getting it right away, and promising to let them know as soon as he had untangled the mathematical cipher and turned to the cards.

  ‘I am entrusting you with my favourite deck, Maestro Desilio,’ Hawkwood said as they prepared to leave him there. ‘Treat it well.’

  ‘I shall, Ser Giovanni.’

&n
bsp; As they turned into the lower gardens Scarlett repressed a shiver. Hawkwood knew him too well to let it pass.

  ‘What is it, Adam?’

  ‘Think about it, John,’ he began. ‘A book that just happens to survive a deliberate burning in the villetta, yet with enough of its pages intact to allow the ciphers to be broken. The first cipher is simply a translation into Sardinian – a tongue Il Critto could have heard spoken in the streets of Florence more than once. It would have been a simple matter to hire a Sardinian man and have him translate the words he needed. The next cipher, Desilio tells us, relies on mathematics that’s years, maybe decades old, presumably solvable by anyone with university training. And the final cipher? The only way to break the encryption is with your own cards, John. Doesn’t all of this feel too convenient somehow – too easy?’

  ‘Well, I suppose one could—’

  ‘It almost seems as if …’ Scarlett paused on the garden path, a hand to his mouth.

  ‘Say it, Adam.’

  ‘As if he wanted us to find the damned book. Find his book, and break his ciphers.’

  ‘To what purpose?’ said Hawkwood, intrigued, though not as troubled as Scarlett wanted him to be.

  ‘Betrayal?’ The first word that came to him.

  ‘Or information,’ Hawkwood rejoined, his gaze on a distant hill. ‘Something he wanted to tell us before he left, and this was his only way.’

  ‘If that’s the case, why not simply speak to us in person?’ Scarlett said. ‘He had an audience in the hall the day before his departure. Why the need for secrecy, when he could have spoken privately while seeking your permission for his trip?’

  ‘Well,’ said Hawkwood, taking Scarlett’s arm and moving on toward the main house, ‘if Il Critto wanted us to break his ciphers, he wanted it for a reason. And I, for one, am determined to nose it out, wherever it takes us.’ The condottiero gave Scarlett’s arm a squeeze. ‘Let Desilio continue his work, Adam. All we are after is the truth.’

  The truth. Scarlett pondered this weak notion as he resumed his day’s tasks. England seemed as far away as ever, and the more he thought over the content of the half-scorched quire, the more he convinced himself that the breaking of the final code would be the last thing in Sir John Hawkwood’s interests, or his own. The truth, he sensed with a warming fear, would prove a devastating lie.

  FORTY-ONE

  Aldgate

  On the fourth morning after Simon was taken, I crossed London Bridge at first light and walked once more to Aldgate. From the landing before Chaucer’s door I looked far down into the still silence of a London dawn, experiencing the everyday smells and sights – a baker’s wife airing a tray of cakes, a smith assaying his coals – with the kind of acuity that comes only with true clarity of purpose. It was time to confront my darkest suspicions.

  Chaucer’s face was always hard to read. That morning it might have been written in the script of the Moors. He greeted me in the front room. Sparse furnishings, dust-filled cloths on the wall, short shelves of tarnished plate and silver placed at irregular intervals around the interior. The room spoke of Philippa’s long absence from the Newgate house. Chaucer had chosen a troubled frown to frame his opening words. ‘Simon is missing, I understand.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘That hardly matters.’ Chaucer pulled a chair around for me. ‘What matters is his safety, and his return.’ His ready knowledge of Simon’s peril only made me more furious, though I was determined to show nothing.

  ‘Did you know this would happen, that Simon would be taken?’

  He pushed a second chair beneath him and sat, gesturing for me to do the same. ‘I worried it might come to this,’ he admitted.

  ‘The counterfeiting?’

  He shifted on his chair. ‘Not that. It’s the other matter, I fear.’

  ‘The other matter.’ I looked at him blankly.

  ‘Our matter, John.’

  I frowned. ‘Surely you can’t mean—’

  ‘The book.’

  ‘Why? Is there a connection between Simon’s abduction and the prophecies?’

  ‘I suspect so, though I have no proof.’

  I took the twin chair, maintaining my composure as this sank in. ‘I need to know more about the book, Geoffrey. I need to know it now.’

  He looked away. In the silence that followed I took Clanvowe’s manuscript from my bag and set it on the octagonal table between us. Chaucer stared at it for a moment, then picked it up and leafed through. He grimaced, set it down. ‘Clanvowe?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I recognized the hand.’

  ‘So did Strode.’

  ‘Though a different hand wrote the book you’ve been seeking.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘It’s – complicated, John.’

  ‘So you’ve known all along.’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘You knew the content of the De Mortibus down to the last prophecy.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘I’ll wager you have the thing by rote.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Yet you sent me chasing after it without bothering to tell me anything.’

  ‘John—’

  ‘And now my son has been taken, probably murdered like Tewburn, or poor Symkok. Will they come for me next, Chaucer?’

  ‘Please, John—’

  ‘And all for a small favour, as you called it. A little thing, John. You’ll help me, won’t you, John? Help me avoid all that unpleasantness with Swynford, will you, John? And there sat John, didn’t he, like a schoolboy waiting for the whip. So deeply in your debt that he couldn’t refuse you, not if his life – his son’s life – depended on it.’

  ‘Simon was—’

  ‘You think because you saved it once his life is now yours to throw away?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you because—’

  ‘Because my ignorance was amusing to you?’

  ‘Because—’

  ‘Because I’m your mouse, a little creature you can tease and claw till it dies?’

  ‘Because—’

  ‘Because you assume that John Gower—’

  ‘Because I wrote the damn thing, John!’

  At last. I let his words linger. ‘Say it again.’

  He looked at me, eyes watering. ‘Liber de Mortibus Regum Anglorum. The book is as much my invention as the book of Duchess Blanche, or the Parliament of Fowls.’

  I sat back, a cold rage running through my veins. Then my joints relaxed, my vision starring as I stood and moved away from him. I honestly did not think he would admit it. Now that he had, I realized how keenly I had wanted it not to be true.

  ‘John—’

  ‘Go to hell, Chaucer.’

  ‘John, as your friend—’

  ‘You are no friend. You are a curse.’

  ‘—as your friend, John, I beg you to see all this from my angle.’ From behind me I heard him rise, his shoes crackling the rushes. ‘There are constraints on my position. My wife is Swynford’s sister. To have revealed my hand in the composition of this work … it’s difficult to imagine the disaster that might have befallen the duke and his family.’

  ‘And my family, Geoffrey?’ I said faintly, still turned away. ‘Why didn’t you trust me with this information in the first place? Did you think I’d betray you to Westminster? You know me better than that.’

  ‘As well as you know me, John.’ I turned. Chaucer almost cringed; there were still things he wasn’t saying.

  ‘What about this Lollius, then? What was his role in writing the prophecies?’

  Chaucer lifted a vase from a nearby shelf, wiping at the dusty brass. ‘Lollius is also my invention. A Latinist of real distinction, and his stories are only now being translated into English. He’s the auctor of what will be my own great work someday, a romance of Troilus.’

  ‘Simon is missing, Chaucer,’ I spat. ‘Perhaps you might worry about your precious poetry some other time.’

  He set down t
he vase, looking perplexed by his own narcissism.

  ‘And the Lollius of Horace, the poet I chased through Oxford?’

  ‘No relation,’ he said. ‘Though certainly an inspiration. To blame it all on Horace’s Lollius, an unknown poet from ancient Rome? I couldn’t pass it up.’

  ‘But to write a poem prophesying the death of our king? You can’t be ignorant of the treason statutes, Geoffrey. How many times have you heard them read aloud on the street? To compass or even imagine the death of our king: treason pure and plain. You know this. I cannot imagine what might have motivated you to write this sort of thing. And “long castle”? You used the same wording in your book for Duchess Blanche. You might as well have signed the damned thing!’

  Chaucer was tapping his foot. ‘But I didn’t – ah, what can I tell you, John, that you won’t discover for yourself soon enough?’

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘I wrote the De Mortibus in Tuscany, John. In Hawkwood’s company, during that visit last year. It was a jest, an amusement that took me a few mornings. I never intended it to circulate. But then it went missing.’

  ‘Tuscany.’ My skin prickled into gooseflesh. ‘Simon knew you’d written it, then.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Did he read it?’

  ‘Oh, he read it quite carefully, I should think.’

  So Simon knew the De Mortibus, had known of it all this time. There was something in Chaucer’s tone, though, that bothered me. ‘Are you suggesting Simon stole it from you, brought the manuscript with him from Italy?’

  He looked at his shoes, a gesture I took then as a sign of shame. Despite his newfound forthrightness, he was still deceiving me, protecting me from knowledge he feared would destroy me. ‘The timing doesn’t work. It’s true that those who took Simon must have made a connection between the book, his service with Hawkwood, and his return to England. But the De Mortibus came to London weeks before Simon’s arrival.’