A Burnable Book

by Bruce Holsinger

  ‘I know, I know. But put yourself in my place, John. You come home after a long absence, terrified for your lover, only to hear lines of your own poetry being whispered at court, along with rumours of a seditious prophecy on the death of King Richard. I suspected Simon was involved but had no idea how. That’s why I had to meet with you as soon as I returned from Italy, and that’s why I set you on the trail. I needed to find out what Simon knew, and where all of this was coming from.’

  I recalled Chaucer’s early suspicions at Monksblood’s, testing my knowledge, more curious than concerned – then his shock when I confronted him at the customhouse.

  ‘And I know you, John,’ he continued, picking at a snag in his hose. ‘Once you learned the nature of this book you would stop at nothing until you had it. What I didn’t know, of course, was that there were two books all along.’

  ‘Three, actually,’ I said, thinking of Clanvowe’s copy, now stowed with Oxford’s manuscript in the wall of my house.

  ‘And more, for all we know, given how quickly everyone seemed to be quoting from it.’

  ‘Even Braybrooke’s friars.’

  ‘Yes. And it was Oxford, I gather, who started the ingenious rumours of interest in the prophecies among Wycliffe’s followers. Then the book itself, with the cloth, was planted at La Neyte, and its contents hinted to a number of hermits in Gaunt’s dependency, one of whom let it slip to me. The intention was to have it “discovered” at La Neyte by the king’s guard, and Lancaster hauled away for conspiring treason well before St Dunstan’s Day. The butchers, the card game, Oxford’s speech at the bishop’s palace – that all came later, once the book went missing.’

  I frowned. ‘So who stole the book from La Neyte?’

  Chaucer said nothing, the moist curves of his eyes reflecting the low moon.

  ‘Seguina d’Orange,’ I said at last, as the chill of certainty swept my limbs. ‘She was the girl murdered on the Moorfields.’

  ‘She has to be one of the most resourceful women who has ever lived,’ he said, his eyes flashing with admiration. ‘When I learned she had left Florence I discovered that she used my contacts from the wool trade to arrange passage on a ship from Pisa, with a company of Genoese bankers bound for England. When she came to London, her aim was to find the book and the cloth. She had met Weldon in Florence and knew he was the go-between to Oxford. Once in London she must have followed him, learned the location of the book, recovered it, and fled with it through the city—’

  ‘Pursued by Weldon—’

  ‘Who caught her in the Moorfields—’

  ‘After she handed the book to a maudlyn. After she handed the book to a maudlyn,’ I said, filling in what he didn’t know. I told him the rest: about Millicent Fonteyn, the murder of Bess Waller, the death of Sir Stephen Weldon. It was the knight’s violent death that brought us back to Seguina’s.

  ‘That’s how I see it.’

  ‘But why?’ I said. ‘What motivated her to make such an impossible journey to England? Was it – was it merely love, a desire to protect Geoffrey Chaucer, her adulterous suitor, from bodily harm?’

  ‘I think not,’ Chaucer said wryly. ‘That sort of sacrifice would have been predictable. Seguina was too great a woman for such a thing. Love was part of her motivation, I suppose. But remember, her life and her mother’s had been saved by Lancaster – and it was Lancaster whose life she came here to save. I was incidental in the end. She wrote me a long letter explaining it all, then ordered a servant to deliver it to me upon my return from Rome.’ He absently patted his breast. ‘A story, really, and one for the ages.’

  I looked at him, then guessed. ‘You never found it.’

  ‘Her servant would have been terrified of being found out by one of Hawkwood’s men. I went to visit Seguina when I returned, only to learn she had left Florence a week before, ostensibly to visit a cousin of her mother’s. I distinctly recall the servant meeting me at the door, taking my bag while I waited for an audience with Seguina’s father. The servant hid the letter in my bag, assuming I would find it in the folds of my little book. This one, in fact, which I had commissioned from a leatherworker in Rome.’

  He tossed it to me, and I examined the construction. Aside from the colour and feel of the leather, it was an identical bifold to his old one, with matching vertical pockets on each inner cover, allowing the first and last folios of each new quire to be tucked inside. ‘I found her letter two days ago. The morning after you confronted me at my Aldgate house, in fact. I was switching out quires, and there it was. The letter confirmed everything I had suspected but never knew – including Simon’s authorship of the thirteenth prophecy.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘So you had Seguina’s letter with you that day at Monksblood’s?’

  ‘But without knowing it.’

  ‘Extraordinary.’ I handed back his book, moved and shaken by the knowledge that Chaucer had just shared. The entire story of the last several months, carried on my old friend’s person the entire time.

  ‘When did Simon tell you of his involvement?’ I asked him.

  ‘At the St George’s morrow feast at Windsor. That was the first time I had seen him since Florence, and he both admitted to stealing the book and confirmed Seguina’s presence in England, though he swore he knew nothing about the last prophecy. Seguina had been dead for weeks by that point, and I was furious at him for all he had done – but also terrified of the implications. I thought he might well have killed her himself.’

  ‘Was that you at the river inn that night, after the Garter feast?’ A dog’s bark, and Simon pissing from the landing, lying about his trip to the privy after that whispered encounter in the courtyard.

  He looked confused.

  ‘Simon told me he and Seguina were betrothed, you know,’ I said quickly.

  A bitter laugh. ‘Another lie. A way of finding out if you knew anything about her.’

  ‘Which I did not.’ I recalled the look on Philippa Chaucer’s face, the flash in Katherine Swynford’s eyes at the mention of Seguina d’Orange. ‘But Philippa did.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘I wrote a ballade on her name, before I knew she had died. “To Seguina, My Orange, Wherever She May Dwell.” Scribbled it on a scrap of banker’s paper in our household account book. Philippa saw it when she was at our Aldgate house, and knew I had taken a lover in Italy.’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid, I know, to leave something like that lying around. But there it is.’

  I smiled at him. ‘You’re remarkably careless with your poetry, Chaucer. And always have been.’

  He spread his hands, then leaned forward and placed his hands on my knees. ‘You know, John, despite everything, Simon could have betrayed me so easily once he was back in England with my first little book. Why, he could have taken it to Robert de Vere and proved that I wrote the prophecies even while trading on everything else he knew. No one would have noticed that the last prophecy wasn’t there. My draft was just a draft, after all, scratched in my hand. For all anyone else knew I was in league with Lancaster against the king.’

  It was a good point, though I still had many doubts. I found myself sifting every word and gesture, going back over every hurried meal and whisper of cloth, looking for the missed seed of Simon’s mendacity.

  Chaucer read my thoughts. ‘Simon is confused, John. Brilliant and confused. He has been for years, despite that cock’s face he wears. But confusion isn’t a sin. What matters most is love. And Simon, for all his faults, loves you deeply.’

  I let Chaucer’s unmerited confidence hang in the priory air.

  ‘There’s one part I still don’t understand,’ he said. I tensed. ‘At the end of her account Seguina left me an enigma, a puzzle of the sort we often invented for one another.’ He pulled the letter out of his breast pocket and read it aloud.

  ‘Though faun escape the falcon’s claws

  and crochet cut its snare,

  When father, son, and ghost we sing,

  of city’s
blade beware.’

  He looked at me as he put the letter away. ‘Have you heard this riddle, John, or read it yourself?’

  ‘No,’ I lied, recalling where I had seen those very words.

  ‘A crochet, a city’s blade. A bit threatening, wouldn’t you say? Do you know what it means?’

  ‘No,’ I said, this time speaking the truth. Hawks always strike twice. Weldon’s final words sounded again in my mind, the latest inkling of something missed. I said nothing to Chaucer. He had done enough, and I had no further patience for his manipulations. I felt almost gratified by his ignorance. For there had been something weak about his whole story, a subtle sense that his account was incomplete. That it failed to comprehend the full complexity of the aims motivating those he thought he knew best: Hawkwood and Weldon, Seguina and Simon. Especially Simon.

  He was looking at me, waiting for some wisdom. I shrugged, covering my agitation. ‘Likely just a lover’s riddle. The butcher’s blades did no harm, after all, and the king is alive. That’s the important thing, I should think.’

  There seemed nothing more to say. By the time Chaucer stretched and yawned I felt utterly drained, despite my inner turmoil at hearing Seguina’s riddle. There was a twinge in my back. ‘We are becoming old men, Geoffrey.’

  He barked a laugh over the orchard as we rose. ‘Old age is relative, John. It’s writing that keeps us young. Or so I hope this summer will prove.’

  Not for the first time I found myself wishing I saw my making as Chaucer experienced his. The man aged backwards, it seemed, accumulating youth with each fresh scratch of ink. For me every line of poetry is another grey hair, a defeat as much as a victory.

  ‘So what will you write?’ I said to his back, willing him to leave. I had a suspicion to confirm. He preceded me through the kitchen, the darkened lower gallery, the hall. We lingered outside my door, soft moonlight playing on the priory lane. ‘This pilgrimage conceit, the miller and prioress and so on?’

  His hand went to his chest again, and there was a whisper of parchment on his thumb. ‘That comes later, after more thought. For now I have in mind the story of Cressida, told in that book of Boccaccio I gave to you. An old tragedy of war, and impossible love.’ His dark eyes caught the flicker of the lanterns up by the gate. ‘And a remarkable woman who learns to survive in the cruellest of worlds.’ With that we parted, and Chaucer moved through the Southwark darkness, his lover’s story still pressed to his heart.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  St Mary Overey

  Ember Days. Penance and prayer, self-denial in all things, the mind focused on our faults and our tenuous hopes of salvation, so the priests instruct us. Chaucer swears that fasting clears the head like nothing else. Perfect for poets, he says, though his own abstinence is notoriously light. While Sarah was a pious observer of this Embers ritual, I tend to ignore it, as I do so many of the Church’s more ascetic dogmas. I felt that week that I would have starved myself for a glimmer of discernment.

  Over seven days had passed since Dunstan’s Day. The maudlyns had snuck the corpse out of the Pricking Bishop that same night and abandoned it to the animals of Winchester’s Wild. The king, the duke, and the earl had reached a tentative reconciliation, and in the aftermath of the palace affair it seemed that things had moved on. The king was resolved on a military expedition to the Scottish border, Gaunt was rumoured to be plotting his return to Castile with the help of Lisbon, and the Earl of Oxford had left London for Hall Place, the de Vere family manor at Earls Colne. A papal delegation from Rome was to arrive before Trinity Sunday, and the court had bigger things to think about than an expired prophecy.

  The Friday after Pentecost found me in my study, wondering once more what I had missed. Weldon’s dying words – Hawks always strike twice – carried a threat that would not leave my thoughts.

  On the desk were the two copies of De Mortibus Regum Anglorum now in my possession. I knew every folio of Sir John Clanvowe’s manuscript, written out in his neat, restrained hand, as I had studied it with great care in those weeks leading up to St Dunstan’s Day. The copy in Simon’s hand, the manuscript that had travelled from Italy and that I had taken from Robert de Vere, was different. The texts themselves were nearly identical, a few scribal errors here and there all that distinguished Clanvowe’s text from the version he had copied from the more ornate manuscript. While Clanvowe’s book was plain and undecorated, the margins of the Italian copy were decorated with the same four emblems found on Swynford’s cards. Thistleflowers, hawks, swords, and plums, arrayed in an ascending pattern: one of each embellishing the first prophecy, two of each the second, and so on.

  Yet there was something more. Seguina’s couplet, composed in the common metre of the lays of Robin Hood or Sir Thopas, and scrawled beneath the last line of the final prophecy. I had dismissed the enigma’s importance when Chaucer read it to me from her letter, had even lied to him about seeing it previously. Though I had read those scribbled lines after taking the manuscript from Oxford at Winchester Palace, once the dreadful events of St Dunstan’s Day were past I had given them little thought. Yet to learn that the enigma had emerged from the mind of the woman at the middle of all this changed everything. That very night I had rushed inside after Chaucer’s departure, opened the manuscript, and puzzled over the riddle’s meaning, as I had done every day since. The lines were written not in Simon’s neat hand, but in a thin and spidery script, scratched on the parchment with a charcoal nub and already fading.

  Though faun escape the falcon’s claws and crochet cut its snare,

  When father, son, and ghost we sing, of city’s blade beware.

  The lines seemed meant to recast the imagery from the thirteenth prophecy while adding something darker to the mix. The ‘faun’, of course, was King Richard, and the ‘crochet’ had to be Sir Stephen Weldon, whose scar resembled nothing so much as a fishing hook. The falcon was surely Sir John Hawkwood, and the meaning of ‘father, son, and ghost’ seemed clear enough: the Holy Trinity. What continued to defeat me in this extra fragment of verse was the ominous evocation of the ‘city’s blade’, which could refer to practically anyone in a city as large as London.

  And who had written Seguina’s peculiar couplet in the book? Perhaps Seguina herself, as she fled with the book from La Neyte, though it was hard to imagine her pausing to scribble a riddle in a manuscript while being pursued from Westminster and into the Moorfields. The lines did not appear in Clanvowe’s copy, yet they carried a threat all the more ominous for their very uniqueness. Making a decision, I packed the two volumes in my bag and left the house.

  Westminster. In the great hall Sir Michael de la Pole was holding forth inside the priest’s porch. When he saw me he gave a subtle nod, finished his business, then ushered me into his chambers. I spoke with the Lord Chancellor for over an hour, revealing nearly all I knew, even Simon’s authorship of the thirteenth prophecy, though somehow he had already been made aware of that unpleasant fact. I showed him both books as well, making sure he understood the full implications of what I was telling him.

  ‘You’re saying there is to be a second attack on the king, then,’ said the chancellor, sounding sceptical.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ I repeated Sir Stephen Weldon’s final words at the Pricking Bishop. ‘“Hawks always strike twice,” he said. “Always twice.” We all saw the first attack at Winchester’s palace, how that turned out. And now the king’s guard is down. I believe Seguina’s lines are telling us the second attack is to come on Trinity Sunday.’ I paused. ‘Tomorrow, my lord.’

  The chancellor still looked unconvinced. ‘How can we know for certain that—’

  ‘The thirteenth prophecy, the butchers, all of that – it was smoke,’ I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth. ‘Hawkwood’s ruse, meant to turn suspicion on Lancaster, have him eliminated. And it nearly worked. But Lancaster was just the glaze on the bun. The real target is the king.’

  ‘And you’re basing all of this on this girl’s two lines of dog
gerel? This chicken-scratch in your manuscript?’

  ‘Not my manuscript, Lord Chancellor. This is the book from which Lord Oxford himself read on Dunstan’s Day. The book we have all been tracking down for months.’

  He gave me a strange look. ‘Are you quite sure, Gower?’

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘You’re quite sure this is the book we’ve all been looking for?’

  He could see the confusion on my face. With a studied calm, the baron stood, walked to a book chest against the wall of his chamber, and fussed with the lock. He removed a small volume, no thicker than a short quire and covered in a skin of plain and weathered black. It looked familiar.

  Back at his desk he opened it and spun it around. I recognized the hand immediately as Chaucer’s. The quire was a messy jumble, the margins covered in notes and drawings: tables, columns of figures, sketches, maps. I had struggled with Chaucer’s shorthand before, and though I could make out little of his notation, I saw immediately that half of the quire was taken up with the De Mortibus. There was only one difference between this copy and the two on the chancellor’s desk, I saw as I paged through to the end – a rather major difference.

  The thirteenth prophecy was missing. Chaucer, then, had told me the truth. He had not written the prophecy of Richard’s death.

  ‘Three books,’ I said, looking up.

  ‘The one in your hands now is the original,’ he said. ‘Chaucer’s draft, written in Florence, and covered with his notes and observations. Then came this one.’ He tapped Oxford’s copy, the book in my son’s hand. ‘Simon, when he wrote it, added the thirteenth prophecy.’

  ‘Which Sir John copied along with the rest,’ I said, indicating Clanvowe’s manuscript.

  ‘Though before your mysterious couplet was added. Otherwise Clanvowe would surely have copied that as well.’

  I nodded absently. ‘But how did you get Chaucer’s original, my lord? Who gave it to you?’

  A long pause. ‘Your son.’