The Invention of Fire

by Holsinger, Bruce

  “Stephen,” she said. He stopped when he saw her.

  “What is it, mistress?”

  “The beadle has come by, asking questions.”

  No surprise on his face, nor unease in his voice. “What sorts of questions?”

  She watched him closely, the resignation already rimming his eyes. “About a dead girl, up toward Ware.”

  He blinked.

  “Another of your accidents, was it?”

  His lips quavered. “Mistress—”

  “Come along.” She spun around and strode down Bellyeter Lane. He followed her meekly. When they reached the foundry she led him through the house door.

  “Go into the chapel,” she said without looking at him. “Remain there until I come for you. You understand?”

  “Yes, mistress.”

  She went out to the yard, kept herself busy for the next several hours, her thoughts racing. The beadle returned at the end of the day, this time bringing along a constable. She lied them off, claiming Stephen had never come back from Bradley’s. Hawisia could sense Poppe’s skepticism, though thankfully he did not press her on the matter. Now she would have to wait.

  HOURS LATER HAWISIA DESCENDED the inner stair in the dark and cold, palms whispering along the rough wall. She turned before the kitchen, walked along the screens passage toward the street door, then came to the low entrance leading into the chapel.

  She ducked beneath the beam and stepped down into the family chapel, a long and narrow chamber sunk several feet below the first story of the main house. It had been added only two years before, after Stone’s best-ever string of sales, when Hawisia’s vanity led her to declare that a chapel would be a fitting ornament for a wealthy founder’s house. Robert had resisted, the frugal man, but she had won out in the end. The chapel was fully shuttered against the autumn chill, though with no fire going in the altar hearth the room was bitterly cold, and the first thing she saw was the icy breath of Stephen Marsh as he came to his feet at her entrance.

  A servant had lit a candle from the kitchen coals, and in its wavering light Hawisia witnessed Stephen’s present state. Skittish hands, trembling limbs, a fear burning in his eyes. If she didn’t know better Hawisia would have guessed he was afflicted with a fever or pox.

  “Mistress Stone.” His head hung low.

  She stepped forward and reached for his chin, opening his face to her own. “Look me in the eye, Stephen, and tell me true. You killed this little faun?”

  His lips loosened. “I did.”

  “With one of these snake guns, was it?”

  He gasped. “How—how did you—”

  “Never you mind that. What happened?” She let go his chin.

  “A misfiring is what it was. I heard something in the woods and I spun round and the snake came down—”

  “Yet you hid her body beneath a bush. The act of a coward, that, and a fool.”

  “Aye, mistress. After the accident I was taken with fright’s what it was, and didn’t think it out, and now . . .”

  “And now you face the sheriffs, Stephen, and the shire court by Ware. Had you found a shire justice, told him what happened, you might have begged a jury for mercy or gotten the ear of a barrister. But dragging a girl’s bleeding flesh into the shrubs? You will hang for certain, Stephen Marsh.”

  “It seems so,” he said softly. “Unless you help me, mistress.”

  She lowered her voice to match his. “First my husband, now you’ve killed this girl, both with your cursed metals and arts. And you have the shamelessness to ask me for succor and aid?”

  Stephen, surprising her, knelt and took her hands. His were hot on her skin, despite the cold in the chapel. “Shame’s too poor a word, mistress. Your husband was the finest of men, the greatest of teachers. Every day I see him again before the cast. Ten times a day I see him there, trusting me with the pour as always, and I tip the smelt again, and I see his arm bathed with fire again, hear him scream again. You cannot know the weight of it.”

  Oh, but I can, Stephen, she thought.

  He looked up at her, his face glistening with tears and phlegm. “All I can ask is your forgiveness, Hawisia, and your aid.”

  She gazed down at the man, feeling the grip of her own conscience, pushing against it with all her will. Why, if she hadn’t learned the source of Stephen’s recent distress she would have been enjoying the great change in him. It was as if all his pride and arrogance had whistled out of his soul, like a bladder slowly losing its air.

  “You are a fool, Stephen Marsh,” she said. “A weak and womanly fool.” And what does this fool deserve?

  Hawisia wanted nothing more than to swing open the street door to call for the watch. But open Stone’s gates to the parish constable and the foundry itself might be lost. Harboring a fugitive criminal carried stiff penalties, and Hawisia wanted no truck with Guildhall fines. This was Stephen Marsh’s affair, not hers. Stephen Marsh’s guns, Stephen Marsh’s snake, Stephen Marsh’s crime.

  Yet Stephen Marsh was Stone’s foundry, the source of its wealth and the only hope for its future. His hands, his mind, his skill. If he was caught and hanged there would be nothing for her. Worse, nothing for her coming child. What she needed—what they both needed—what all three of them needed—was time.

  A beam of fired gold flashed from the altar. She turned her head, gazing up at the gilt cross, and at the sight of it found new confidence in the solution she had devised. Not a permanent answer, not by a long measure; yet it would protect the foolhardy man for the time being, keep the simpering rabbit free from the talons of the city laws, though only if she could get him there without harm or seizure. It was a risk: to herself, to Stone’s and its livelihood. Hawisia Stone didn’t like risk.

  “We’ll leave at once,” she announced, rubbing her hands, thinking over the route.

  “To where?” said Stephen.

  “You shall see. I’ll just fetch my coat.” She went to the hall and came back through the screens passage to the chapel, bundled against the cold.

  “Come,” she said, beckoning for Stephen to follow. He took his own coat from a pew and came meekly along. She stepped up from the chapel and led him back through the passage to the street door. Hawisia peered out onto the street through a half-shuttered window. A thin moon overhead, the street cast in low light—low enough, she hoped, for what must be done. No sign of the parish watch, not yet at least.

  She unbarred the door and pulled the hasp slowly toward her. The hinges were well oiled and made no sound as the door swung open. Stephen followed her down into the street.

  Violators of curfew were not dealt with lightly by the city, and Hawisia risked a spell in the Tun should the two of them be caught. Yet she knew this parish, knew its turns and twists. They slipped along Bellyeter Lane silently until they came to the turn onto Fenchurch Street. Hawisia was about to move forward when she heard voices, approaching from the direction of the parish church.

  She pressed her hand on Stephen’s chest, flattened him against a wall. Two men. She listened to their idle chatter. The parish watch, trolling the streets. Soon they passed, their swung lanterns pushing puddles of light along the lane.

  Hawisia grasped Stephen’s wrist and pulled him with her until they reached All Hallows Staining. The churchyard gates were closed against the night, though this was hardly a barrier. They skirted the wall to the small opening before the porch, and soon they were together within the parish grounds.

  She led him silently around to the detached house that served as the parish rectory, a squat bump against the south wall. The chimney was still smoking. With no delay she knocked thrice at the door, repeated the poundings. Soon they heard a moaned protest from within. “A moment.”

  Eventually the rectory door opened to reveal the face of Father Martin, the parson of Staining. “Mistress Stone!” he said in surprise, then raised the candle to look at her companion. He frowned, the upper part of his body rearing back. “And Stephen Marsh. You are—” A short g
asp as he understood the purpose of their visit, though he still had to ask. He cleared his throat. “What do you seek from your shepherd at this hour of the night?”

  Hawisia looked at Stephen, back at the parson. Then she spoke the only word that might save the neck of this flawed and invaluable man.

  “Sanctuary.”

  Chapter 25

  THE BOW RELEASED. The gentle twang filled my ears as the missile streaked for my eye. Already in that moment before impact I felt the arrowhead slice through the tissues of my eyeball, destroying my vision even as it ravaged my skull and brain. Yet just as he sped forth, Death held himself at bay in some strange dilation as my vision filled with an illusion of sudden change. The arrow, as it hurtled toward its target, began to slow; then, with equal purpose, to shrink from one end to the other, collapsing and shortening on itself, gathering its full length into a compact roundness hovering before my eyes.

  All that was left in the end was a dull metal ball, a sphere of iron, small at first, then growing until it assumed the mass of the world before my eye, as if the entire earth had been moved by the hand of God to stand in my way and fill my vision. I fumbled for my own quiver and bow and aimed an arrow at this giant, threatening sphere, the easiest of targets. Yet my fingers could not release the string, and I stood frozen, impotent against the great round weapon looming before my eyes, as if shooting vainly at the world.

  I awoke washed in sweat. Chaucer, crushed next to me on the thin pallet, was snoring heavily. After talking far into the night we had both slept fitfully, our minds pressed with the peril of our situation. Only half a day before we had been roaming freely around the Kentish countryside. Now we were jailed in a nameless keep, with a single loaf between us and no coin to buy our way out and home. Our purses had been emptied, our horses and bags seized, our bodies handled carelessly as we were bound by the wrists and thrown over our saddles to be led along. The men had covered our heads with sacks, and by nightfall we’d had no sense of where we were or what would become of us. Hours later, as the day broke, I felt no less uneasy about our coming fate.

  After several minutes in quiet thought, I stood and walked to one of the three narrow slits in the wall, squatting to take in the view. Day had broken not long before, the treetops and fields awash in a burned haze, the chill air mingled with smoke from a fire somewhere down below. We were being confined in the uppermost floor of a small towerhold, which was perched on a high promontory overlooking a gentle downward slope to the east. The Thames was not in sight, though to the north I could make out the glinting blur of a tributary snaking through fields and trees, flamed with the early sun. The river Cray, perhaps, or a branch of the Darent. We were somewhere southwest of Dartford, as I reckoned it, a few hours’ ride to Southwark, though my home could not have seemed more remote as I hunched by the close aperture.

  Chaucer stirred on the pallet. “John?” he said in a morning croak. I looked at his waking form in the rising light, his yellow, sun-washed hair plastered to his forehead and cheeks, his beard in need of a trim. He had slept in all his clothes, and his cotte was bunched uncomfortably at his midsection.

  “Our blinders are off now, Geoffrey,” I said. “We are prisoners, where I don’t know. Do you have a guess?” To my weak eyes there was little to distinguish one hill or field from another.

  He groaned loudly, stretched, then rose and came to my side. Kneeling on the wooden floor and wedging his forehead into the beveled slit, he glanced in both directions, then did the same at the other two openings. “We are in Bexley parish, I would say. Foots Cray is there, just beyond that second rise, and St. Paul’s Cray beyond the next.” I followed his pointing finger and saw or at least imagined a small manse on a low hill, perhaps a quarter mile distant. “I know the keeper of Bexley Woods,” he said. “If I can manage it I will send him a message through one of the servants here, with promise of a good fee.”

  I looked at him, wondering where he got his confidence. Rather than questioning my friend I let hunger guide me to a basket near the trapdoor, which was locked against our possible descent. The castle guards had left us with some bread, cheese, and small ale, which we consumed quickly and with little talk between us.

  After a final swallow, Chaucer leaned over and patted my knee. “Don’t worry overmuch, John. We’ll jaw our way out of this.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I am a member of Parliament, a justice of the peace for this shire. These soldiers may be ruffians, but they are hardly murderers.”

  “Hardly murderers? More than likely they are the men who massacred those prisoners in the woods. What is to say they won’t do the same with us?”

  “Their lord, whoever he may be, would not allow it.”

  “We know nothing about these men, nor their lord. They wore no badges and no collars, bore no banners. I recognized none of them, and as you’ll recall they made little talk on the way here from the gaol.”

  “There is a code of behavior when it comes to holding gentles as prisoners,” Chaucer said with far more assurance than I could summon. “It remains in place even in the wars between the English and the French. No torture, no privation, no hanging. Those men wouldn’t have left us food if they intended us to die. A code, John. They will not harm us.”

  “Is this the same code that massacred those men and threw them in the privy channel?”

  He raised his chin, ignoring the question. Hours later, when we were starting to lose our patience with the close chamber and with each other, we heard footsteps on the stairs below. The trapdoor opened to show the head of one of our captors, the bowman from the previous afternoon. He clapped the board to and gestured for us to follow. We were led from the low tower and down into the hall, a close-ceilinged chamber with a tired fire sending slow puffs of smoke to the vented roof. Drab hangings were spaced randomly along the walls, all of them tattered or scorched. A large pile of broken furniture had been stacked in a far corner. The kitchen door hung askew on a single hinge.

  “Not a keep I visit often enough.” We turned to see Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, standing below a recessed window, and I could not have been more surprised. We bowed deeply as he approached us, then watched him turn for one of the trestle tables to either side of the central hearth. He took a large oaken chair. We remained standing.

  “Your accommodations have been comfortable and to your liking?” asked the duke.

  Chaucer bowed. “Infinitely so, Your Grace.”

  “I hardly bother to have this heap of stone servanted prior to my arrivals. The hawking around this part of Kent can be quite rich, though, so I suppose it’s worth maintaining in some minimal way.”

  “And in what great palace do we find ourselves, your lordship?” Chaucer asked.

  “The Rokesle hunting lodge, if you must know. It came to me through my dear sister, the Dowager Countess Joan.”

  “May her memory be cherished, your lordship.”

  “Oh, it shall be, Chaucer, it shall be.”

  We held a respectful silence in honor of Joan of Kent, mother of King Richard and the most beloved woman in the realm in the years prior to her death. The countess had fallen ill and died at Wallingford Castle just last August. Tongues were wagging that the king’s loss of his mother was what had turned him so cold these last months, as his severity had increased toward those around him.

  “Now to this matter of your trespass,” said Woodstock, breaking the stillness. “You were in my forest, Chaucer. A poet abroad in the woods, snapping my ducal twigs, stamping my ducal leaves, disturbing my ducal dirt. By what right do you intrude on my properties?”

  Chaucer inclined his head. “With respect, your lordship, we were merely out for a ride in the countryside around Greenwich.”

  “And what are you doing in Greenwich?”

  “Your Grace, I have been retained by His Royal Highness since midsummer.”

  “In what office?”

  “I am justice of the peace for the shire of
Kent.”

  “I was not informed of this by Westminster, though I suppose you cannot be blamed for that.” He lifted his jaw in my direction. “And who is your companion here?”

  Chaucer looked at me with a glint in his eye. I bowed. “My name is John Gower, your lordship.”

  The duke reared back in his chair, his mouth agape, then quickly recovered himself. “We have never met.”

  “We have not, my lord.”

  “Though by your reputation I feel that I know you quite well. Like a smear of dung on my boot.”

  I stared at the duke’s collar, lined with fur and cinched too tightly against his neck. This was the man who, by all indications, had ordered the slaughter of eighteen prisoners, the disposal of their corpses in a London sewer channel, and who knew what other atrocities. Now I too was but a smear of dung in his eyes.

  “And I am aware that the presence of John Gower in a lord’s castle cannot be good tidings for the lord,” the duke went on. He looked at Chaucer. “You have come with a threat in your purse, have you? Some hope of extracting a kidney from our royal gut?”

  The duke was trying for game, though his unease was apparent.

  “Hardly, your lordship,” said Chaucer. “Gower here is merely a friend I’ve invited out to Greenwich for a few days to escape the Southwark filth. He, like me, is a poet, a versifier of great prolixity.”

  “Though one of considerably lesser talents than your own, if all the talk is to be believed,” said the duke, and I did not flinch beneath his cold and condescending gaze. Chaucer said nothing in my defense, nor did I expect him to.

  “So now I have Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower trespassing together in my forest, asking questions of my tenants at Bykenors, stirring up demons. And you claim you were abroad to catch the air, for a few hours’ amusement, do you?”

  “The mass murder of innocents is hardly an amusement, my lord,” I said, hoping I would not regret my rashness. It was as if the Holy Spirit descended into the castle hall to inflame the crown of the duke’s head. He rose as two of his attendants moved from their stations along the walls. He waved them off. He approached and stood before us, his chin forward, his strangely centerless eyes alight with fury.