The Invention of Fire

by Holsinger, Bruce

  “The coroner’s inquest yielded no suspects.”

  “Not so I heard neither. My poor old father killed dead but not a man killed him, so the sheriffs tell us.”

  “Do you have any notion who might have wished him harm?”

  “That’s what the sheriffs’ men asked, aye. No thoughts on the matter, myself.”

  “What about his work?”

  “What about it?”

  “Did he talk to you about a job along the wharf? Something recent, and under his cap?”

  Bray shrugged. “Never talked to me ’bout any of his haulings.”

  “This would have been a night job.”

  He started to shrug again, but his shoulders froze halfway down. The corners of his eyes lifted just slightly. “Night cartin’, you say.”

  “In the weeks before his murder. Did he say anything to you about a special commission, or a peculiar request?”

  “Only carters out at night be the soilers, moving shit about and out the walls,” he mused, avoiding my question. “But the gongfarmers hire that out, don’t they?”

  “So he spoke to you about this job?”

  He looked at my hand. I palmed him a few pennies and he tossed his chin, indicating a narrow house halfway down the alley. “Didn’t speak a whip to me. But I heard him talk about it with her.”

  “Who?”

  “His smooth coney back in there. Lower floor.”

  “Your mother?”

  He laughed roughly, raising his voice. “Not mine. Dead, like him. That one’s just a piece a queynt. She’ll be my own soon enough, you’ll see.”

  “Soon enough, he says,” joked one of the others at the loud boast.

  “Oh, we’ll all see that day right soon, Robert Bray,” said a second. “Shapely gallant such as yourself, got the slit linin’ up out to Mile End.”

  Bray shot them a snarl. I left him standing there, spitting at his fellows.

  The house he had pointed out to me was indistinguishable from the others along the alley. They all seemed to hang there, dilapidated and frail, as if they might collapse at any moment and leave the passageway a pile of broken boards and rubble. A deep step down into a drainage ditch and I was at the door to Jankyn Bray’s house. Outside it stood his horsecart, the two wheels positioned at the edge of a ramp to allow access to street level. Deep, long, well maintained, easily capable of carrying four or five men, whether living or dead. Three loads, then, perhaps four. His horse would be stabled somewhere nearby.

  The door sat half open. I looked within. A woman, quite young and pretty, sat on a bench, nursing an infant at her breast. Her eyes were closed, her face wan and troubled even at rest. Her head was leaning against a wooden beam to her side. I ducked out and waited until I heard the child start to protest the end of its feeding, then stepped back to the doorway.

  “Mistress?”

  Her eyes remained closed despite the infant’s mewl, her head still angled against the beam.

  “Your pardon, mistress.”

  At last one eye fluttered open, then the second. She straightened herself and came to her feet. The baby slapped at her cheek. “Yessire?” she said, looking stunned at the appearance of a gentleman at the door of her squalid home.

  “I have come to ask you about Jankyn Bray.”

  Her eyes darkened. “Won’t find him abouts here, sire. Gone to his grave, my Jankyn. Left me with this joy.” She heaved the infant to her shoulder, stroked its narrow back.

  “I know, and I am very sorry, Mistress—what is your name?”

  “Elizabeth Saddler.”

  “Mistress Saddler. Jankyn was a carter.”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “And well respected in the trade, from what I have gathered.”

  “He was that. Always the first asked for along Carter’s Alley, by lord and tradesman alike.”

  “Was he known as a discreet man?”

  “Sire?”

  “Did he keep mum about his business, not given to gossip like the young fellows up at the end of the alley?”

  “None a that for my Jankyn,” she said. “The closest carter you could find in the ward, and that’s sure. Pious, too, always visiting that hermit, spilling his sins and sads.”

  “Did he speak to you about any of his more . . . unpleasant commissions?”

  “Unpleasant, sire?”

  “This would have been a job at the river. A night haul up to Cornhill, near the crossing at the Poultry.”

  She turned away, hiding her face, a palm going to the infant’s head.

  I looked around the humble dwelling. “You have little to lose, Mistress Saddler, and a new mouth to feed, now without Jankyn’s income. Let me help you.”

  I jangled my purse. Her hand traveled down the infant’s back, her strokes growing shorter, hurried.

  “All I need is a name, or even a location,” I said. “Did he tell you which quay he hauled from, or its rough location?” The Thames waterfront with its many docks resembled the gap-toothed mouths of a hundred old crones. A barge of bodies could have been unloaded anywhere.

  “Two half nobles and a quarter as well, Mistress Saddler. You and your child may sup on this bounty for a month and more.”

  Her eyes widened at the sum. She considered it. “They’ll come for me then, won’t they,” she said, bouncing her infant. “And this joy. Toss him in the dung like his father on account of I opened my mouth to th’ likes of you.”

  “They may,” I allowed. “Though I am as tight-lipped as your Jankyn. The only secrets I breathe are those that need breathing. This one does not. Your information will be well protected, Mistress Saddler.”

  She sighed. “Jankyn knew it was rotten, that job.”

  I waited, let her draw out the thought.

  “Old friend of his slips up along Carter’s Way, lipping about a job the next night. ‘D’you want it, Bray? Yours for the having if y’do, Bray, and it’s three shil for you, Bray.’ Jankyn took it without a thought, though there was something in the matter of it that smelled overfoul, so he said.”

  “What was that?”

  “The coin, s’what it was. A half noble, for one night’s work? Fivepence be more like what Jankyn’d expect for such a job.”

  “Did this friend tell him what he would be hauling from the river?”

  “No.”

  “Did Jankyn suspect what it might be, have any sense at all?”

  She set the infant on a small table, the only flat surface in the room. With a rough and oversized blanket she bound its quivering limbs, like a cook bunning sausage. She looked up at me as she completed the task. “What was it he carried that night, good master? Do you know?”

  I averted my eyes from the snug young life on the table. “Dead men,” I said. “Cartloads of death.”

  She nodded, as if my ponderous response made perfect sense. I set several coins down next to the child.

  “The loading was to be at Lyman’s wharf,” she said, picking up the money rather than the infant. “John Lyman’s the friend of Jankyn’s who set ’im up with the job. He’d boat the load from wherever it come from, and Jankyn was to haul it up Cornhill.”

  “Who is John Lyman?”

  “Fisher, eeler. Has a dock under the bridge, down from the water gates. Those bad steps bankside of the fishwharf. You know the spot?”

  “I do,” I said, and there was good logic in it. The men who met the carter had chosen to put in along a particularly chaotic stretch of the wharfage, amidst a messy jumble of warehouses, misshapen docks, and random piers just before the bridge. The site also made sense for its distance from the Long Dropper. The men bearing the bodies would have received their cartloads right below Thames Street, which they could then have taken quickly west to the Dowgate channel, then north to the privy along Walbrook Street.

  After leaving the young mother I made the short walk to the bankside. There were three separate fishing docks at this wharf leading out from the bank, where fishermen busily sorted their catch
es as the gulls hovered and cawed for scraps. Fishmongers picked through the catch as a crew of boys emptied nets onto the long cleaning tables set back from the river. There the work of scaling and gutting for bakers and lords’ stewards was done, the offal raked and swept into the river.

  I approached the nearest cleaner, a stout, bare-chested fellow, his bronzed skin and breeches slimed with the day’s catch, hands on hips as he took a brief rest.

  “Where might I find Lyman’s wharf?” I asked him. He turned on me, his beard glistening and matted with sweat, the whole of him freshly pungent with his work.

  “John Lyman?”

  “Yes.”

  He pointed to a length of rough and splintered boards stubbing out five feet over the water, where a fishing boat bobbed gently. “That’s his skiff there. Won’t find him taking it out though, not today at all rates.”

  “Why is that?” I said, turning back.

  His lips tightened. “Lyman ha’n’t been adock these three days, nor’s any soul laid good eyes on the man. Probably drowned, poor boar. Slipped off the quay, could be. We lose one a month to the Thames, sad to say. Water bailiff’s like to find him, by and by. Lessen he’s already floated out to Gravesend, which could be.”

  A coldness spread along my arms and rose to prickle the back of my neck. I turned from the fisherman and walked to the water’s edge, then looked at Lyman’s craft. Though in poor shape it was quite large for a fisherman’s riverboat, long and with high gunwales, easily capable of carrying seven or eight dead men up from Greenwich, or wherever along the Kentish bank the victims’ bodies had been handed in.

  Two loads, possibly three.

  THAT NIGHT, WELL AFTER CURFEW had rung, I retraced the likely route of the sixteen corpses, coining my way across the bridge from Southwark and bribing a shore constable to trail me and keep the night watches in the parishes from troubling us. I began at the river, where I had learned that day of John Lyman’s death. By night the lapping of the Thames against the wharfage and gunwales created a calm and watery patter, joining with the creak of rope and settling board in the river’s nocturnal chorus. Moist stairs descended to the water.

  I stood on the lowest step, looking out across the gently roiling surface, thinking of a drowned fisherman. It was John Lyman, then, who had been hired to float the dead men across the river, from somewhere east of Southwark. To bring them here, to his own quay along the wharf, then hand them up to the waiting carter above. He would have been helped by some of his patron’s men, whoever he was. A man of sufficient rank for his name alone to keep the water bailiffs and shore patrol at bay. A man like Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester.

  I paced up the narrow steps, imagining each body bent between the hands of two men, to be tossed in Jankyn Bray’s waiting cart. Four loads of four bodies each, creaking along up to Cornhill. I walked the full length of it through the nighttime stillness, the lamp-bearing constable ten steps behind me at my request. Along Thames Street we passed the darkened bulks of All Hallows the Less and All Hallows the Great, the gaping emptiness of the steelyard, then turned northward along the Dowgate up to Walbrook Street. On certain corners pendant lamps hung from posts, pale beacons to the night walkers and ward patrols, the occasional daring violator of curfew. Only once was I accosted, two men policing the parish of St. John the Baptist. The constable hailed them off, spoke to them quietly, slipping them a few of the smaller coins I’d given him for the purpose.

  We stopped at the privy below the stocks conduit, across the street from the church of St. Stephen Walbrook. The trickle of the Walbrook sounded from below the Long Dropper, the earthy scent of waste and rot in the air. I walked up three steps and opened the privy door, which groaned unhappily on old leather hinges.

  “Your lantern,” I said to the constable. “Hold the door open for me, will you?”

  He backed away, his free hand waving me off.

  “What is the problem, constable?”

  “I don’t fancy holdin’ a privy door for no one, good sire.” The movement of his head was firm and fast, like that of a child refusing a chore.

  Exasperated, I held the door myself, then beckoned for him to approach. “I didn’t pay you to watch me piss. I simply need your light. Will another fivepence convince you?”

  He hesitated, peering up and down the street, then finally complied, taking the steps up to the privy door, which he held open as I entered the Long Dropper. The constable’s lantern revealed three round holes along the seat box, all too small for a grown man’s body, though the covering board lifted easily. I inspected its edges. Four iron nails had been removed, two bent stubs still protruding from the board, another from the box. Given the angle between the door and the seats, the constable was holding the lantern directly behind me as I peered into the dark pit, nearly overwhelmed by the stench. With the depth and my own shadow it was too dark to see the channel below.

  “Closer in, if you will.”

  “Sire?”

  “The lantern. Bring it over here so I can gauge the distance.”

  He gave a shallow and nervous laugh. “Not on St. Bride’s toe. One bad puff and the whole place’ll go up, and I don’t fancy the choke. But it’s fifteen feet down, more or less.”

  I shrugged, thinking nothing of his reluctance in the moment. Back on Walbrook Street I stood beside the central gutter, puzzling it out now that I had retraced the perpetrators’ many steps. You would want at least two men waiting behind with Lyman and the skiff, I reckoned, another two accompanying Jankyn up to the privy, where they would unload the bodies, lift the covering board, and toss the dead men through the opening. A crew of six to eight to perform the operation in London, then. And, on the other end, a wagon or cart on the far bank somewhere well west of Greenwich, perhaps Redriffe given the distance and currents, with several men waiting for the skiff’s return to take the second load.

  A considerable enterprise, involving at least a dozen men, perhaps as many as twenty. Lots of potentially loose tongues to threaten with the knife. And, of course, you would need to pay off—

  I slowly turned. From above the orb of his flickering lamp the shore constable stared at me, his eyes eerily aglow in the flame, something fearful and desperate in them. He was armed, a short sword and knife scabbarded along his belt.

  I glanced back at the privy, then again at the constable as the words of the fisherman resounded in my head. Lyman ha’n’t been adock these three days, nor’s any soul laid good eyes on the man. Probably drowned, poor boar.

  Then I knew.

  “Murder!” I bellowed, backing away, mouth to the sky, the greatest sound my lungs could muster. “A murder! Summon the watch! The parish watch! A murder done here! The hue and cry, good London, the hue and cry!”

  The constable twisted on his feet, looking about with a guilty man’s desperation, his hand on the pommel. What I’d just done was a risk, as I would end up seeming the fool if I had guessed wrongly.

  I stepped toward him, my hands spread open as a chorus of men’s shouts and clapping windows echoed from nearby lanes. “You have nothing to fear from me,” I said to him quietly. “When the watch and the beadle arrive we shall simply tell them we saw a body in the channel below the Long Dropper. You will be credited as first finder.”

  His eyes narrowed, seeing a way out. “You will not inform the sheriffs of my—”

  “You were bought for silence, not murder.”

  He nodded like a child eager to please. “Aye, sire.”

  “But you must tell me who hired you. Whose men bought your silence, constable?”

  Some shouts, rushing feet; the watch was almost upon us. “It was Gloucester’s men,” he whispered. “Badged with those twisted geese, wings out like this.” He spread his arms in imitation of Gloucester’s fluttering swans.

  “You’ve little to fear, then,” I lied. “And here we are.” The first watchmen had arrived, and the next minutes passed in a loud and ugly confusion as clusters of men, official and not,
came to enjoy the spectacle. Lanterns were brought into the Long Dropper, loud voices confirming the first sight of the body I had suspected would be found in the channel.

  “A grown man it is, lyin’ faceup. Splattered somewhat awful. And it—oh no.”

  “What then?”

  “There’s another. Smaller one. Looks to be a child.”

  “Ah, the stench.”

  Soon the parish constable arrived to join the throng and take control of the situation. Robert Griven, a respected master carpenter and a solid parishioner of St. Stephen, was too honest a man to sing for me, though not an enemy by any means. After getting a look at the bodies for himself, Griven started giving orders, sending someone for the ward beadle, three to gather lanterns from nearby corners, another riding for a crew of gongfarmers known to be working down in the Fleet channels by the Thames that night.

  Three men from this crew arrived before long and went into the Walbrook ditch through a gap between houses, roping themselves down one by one, calling for light and lines. Eventually the first corpse was hauled to the bank by two of the gongfarmers, then dragged to the street by a rope under its arms. The victim’s face and body were washed off with buckets of clean water from the stocks conduit, which also provided the two gongfarmers with a cold shower as the crowd gathered around the corpse.

  “Why, that’s John Lyman, that is,” someone said, lowering a lantern to the victim’s face.

  “The fisher?”

  “Aye. Wife’s passed but has a fair daughter. Elizabeth, her name is. House is in Cripplegate Ward just without. I’ll go fetch her m’self.”

  Now the child was handed up. One of the gongfarmers, his face startlingly clean above the filth that matted his clothing, had the body in his arms. As he set it beside the first corpse I felt a gathering dread.

  I had watched the whole procedure from the porch of St. Stephen across Walbrook Street, this city’s fumbling machinery of wrongful death. Now I forced myself to approach the middle of the scene, where a small crowd surrounded the two bodies, obstructing my view. I pushed my way through and looked down upon the dead boy. Water still trickled over his face, dripping through the child’s hair and exposing a severed ear on his left side. A mat of hair, clear skin on a pale face, the cutpurse’s cruel punishment visited on his head. Yet only the one ear was missing. This could not be Jack Norris. Pity and relief mingled in my conscience.