The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  She hadn’t noticed the bows.

  Iseult found the friendly soldier, waved wildly and hopped twice to get his attention. He looked up, his gaze lingering for a long moment; then he leaned over to speak to his fellows. The company advanced toward the market, slowly down the gentle rise.

  Iseult searched the soldiers’ faces. No lightness or laughter now, only a line of ugly frowns, the men’s eyes fixed on the market crowd before them. The friendly one glanced up at her, a last, bright glimpse. She smiled, started to wave again.

  No smile this time. His face was sad. He shook his head and looked away with a strange grimace. He looks, she thought, ashamed.

  Iseult felt her arms pimple, suddenly cold.

  Something was wrong.

  A glint of color, off to the right, from the horse string. It was Donard, passing by the stalls to look for his father, who came to the autumn markets selling beans and greens from a cart. Donard reached the cart and, after a whisper from his father, turned and found her on the wall. He spread his arms in a question. What are you doing up there, my only love?

  She pointed to the line of soldiers, now less than fifty feet from the edge of the market. He frowned and turned away. Iseult would forever remember that last pale flash of his face, the wisp of golden hair tumbling over his left eye as his head spun from her a final time.

  The din quietened as the soldiers reached the outer edge of the market, everyone now aware of the company’s march. With a deft swiftness that surprised her, the two soldiers on either end of the line spun their bows from their shoulders, nocked arrows, took aim, let fly.

  A hiss to her left, an ugly spit. She turned to look. The guard closest to her fell forward, collapsing against a merlon. An arrow protruded from his neck.

  At the far end of the parapet the second guard fell backwards, two arrows in his chest. A third missile whistled over the gate tower.

  Before she could scream Iseult heard a series of loud pops.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  Something came hissing through the tents. Fruits jumped and popped, throwing pulp and juice across the wagons.

  Iseult’s body clanged and shuddered as if a devilish bell had rung inside her. She wet herself. A stream of piss ran down both legs. Where was Donard?

  She looked through the crenel, her head a mush of sound, too muddled to think of her own protection.

  There he was. He had put a necklace on, a ruby shining from the center of his neck. Was it for her?

  Her ears rang with more hisses and cracks and pops. By the time the second round was fired, her ears were too full to hear the screams, though she saw the open mouths, the clutched chests, the ravaged limbs.

  At the center of it all she saw Donard, her once and always king, bleeding and ruined on the ground.

  Chapter 18

  IDONIA BREMBRE, QUEEN OF LONDON.

  The daughter of a prominent vintner, the mayor’s wife was as strong and intimidating a London presence as ever during those last weeks of her husband’s final turn at the head of the city. A series of coerced elections, silent bribes, and brutal struggles with Northampton had left Brembre in a precarious position upon his last assumption of the mayoralty, and the wagering then was that his rule would last mere days or weeks rather than the full mayoral term. Yet Idonia had weathered every crisis standing by her husband’s side, giving him a pillar to lean on and a shelter from political storms both powerful and relentless. At the Guildhall her name was whispered in mingled tones of fear and submission, and more than one dispute among the aldermen and guildmasters had been resolved in her household chapel. It was often said that what little Nicholas lacked in iron, Idonia made up in silk.

  The Brembres inhabited a fine three-story house in Bread Street Ward near Gissor’s Hall and the church of St. Mildred. The way widened somewhat at that point, inspiring Idonia to commission a low-walled forecourt to be built onto the front. Pushing out into the street nearly fifteen feet, the structure had the added virtue of forcing passersby to move across as they went along and thus take in the full view of the Brembre domain from the far side of the lane. Idonia saw to making this view a colorful, even splendid one, with fresh paint and wash every season, gilt trim along the jambs and sills. There was always a crowd gathered out front when Nicholas was at home. When I arrived that afternoon I was happy to note the absence of that usual press of fawners and flatterers all waiting for a taste of mayoral largesse. I wanted to speak with Idonia alone, and without being observed.

  I approached the forecourt door, a burnished span of dark wood embossed with the Brembre arms of three sable rings and mullet, and was stopped by an idling guard. Initially he refused to hear my request, claiming the lady of the house was still out of town, though my purse convinced him to relent.

  “A moment,” he said, then unlatched the door and went within. He was back quickly with Brembre’s yeoman, who ran his city house during his steward’s travels with the mayor.

  “Lady Idonia is completing a letter,” he said as he gestured me within. “She will see you in the parlor.”

  I followed him through the screens passage. Such letters were a peculiarity of Idonia Brembre’s reign as the mayor’s wife, part of a more general effort to nose out and manage every detail of her husband’s jurisdiction. At least two or three times a week she would send out a clutch of written instruments in her own name, and sealed with her ring. “Idonia’s snowflakes,” these missives were not so fondly called, their various cajolings, commands, and commendations delivered to their recipients with all the ceremony of a royal patent.

  I had received one of these letters myself several years before, during her husband’s second term, expressing gratitude for a minor difficulty I had helped to resolve on the mayor’s behalf, while also requesting that I avoid any future entanglements with the Brembre household. Women and writing? Not a happy mix, the bishop of Ely had once observed upon finding himself in receipt of one of Idonia’s terser missives. In Idonia’s case the mix was an unusually potent one.

  The oblong parlor spread out from the hall door along the north side of the house. A servant guided me to the far corner of the room, where Idonia sat at a writing table. The mayor’s wife had a narrow but not unattractive face, festooned that day with a coverchiefed hat of heavy ground and elaborate decoration. Her nose, quite sharp, looked out of place on a face and head so delicate, though the unnerving radiance of her eyes drew the viewer’s attention upward and inward. She rarely blinked these eyes, yet they seemed to remain watery almost to the point of tears while she spoke.

  “Gower,” she said, staying seated but gazing at me moistly. She looked uneasy, as if I might be about to pull a blade on her.

  “Lady Idonia.” I stood by her writing table. It was littered from one end to the other with parchment and paper in haphazard piles.

  “What can you want with me?” she said. “My husband the mayor is out at Gravesend. Surely it is my lord with whom you wish to converse.” Precise speech, her diction well above her natural station as a vintner’s daughter.

  “What I have to say is not for the mayor’s ears, Lady Idonia. He would surely object to my presence here, though I hope once you hear what I have to say you will prove more solicitous.” I waited for a reaction, saw the smallest flicker in her steady gaze. I imagined myself taking a deep breath, casting in the dark, then said, “You and your husband have a difficult situation that needs resolving. I have come to offer you my assistance.”

  She squinted at me, in a way that suggested the need of spectacles. I was tempted to offer her my own, though kept my generosity at bay.

  “What exactly is it that you do, Gower?”

  The randomness of the question surprised me. “My lady?”

  “What do you do with your time? You are neither a merchant nor a knight, nor do you practice the law in any official way. You slink about London and Westminster like a rat with a
florin in its gut, expecting everyone you meet to scurry down your throat to find it. Yet I cannot comprehend how you maintain your station and status in our city, nor from where your evident wealth derives. So I ask again. What is it you do?”

  Insulting, imperious Idonia. The first bell sounded from St. Mildred. “I find things, I suppose,” I said in the space before the next clap. My clouded gaze lingered on the window, then turned slowly back on her. “Then I sell them. Or use them.”

  She quivered, like a frightened doe at a rustle of leaves. Another stroke rang out, then dissolved in the parish air. Her narrow frame was shifting on her chair, and in her body’s unease I saw her acquiescence.“Well then,” she said, trying to smile. “Well then, I hope you might use these skills in finding something for me, and for his lordship the mayor. The peace of the city depends upon its safe recovery.” Her unblinking eyes finally blinked.

  “What is it you hope me to find, my lady?”

  “A letter.”

  “What does it concern?”

  “Merely the purchase of some yellow silk for a set of new dresses I desire.”

  I sensed even in her condition the toying amusement she was taking with me. “Surely there is more to this letter than yellow silk.”

  “My own letter holds no peril for anyone, Gower, let alone my husband. The overleaf, on the other hand . . .” She looked away, seeming confused, her hand agitating the cloth at her lap.

  Her suggestion fit with what I knew of her epistolary habits. The thrifty Idonia was known to reuse numerous specimens of writing from her house’s extensive cabinets of books and muniments, never wanting a good piece of parchment to go to waste. Shop inventories, account books, old court transcripts, even leaves from disused prayer books: all were fodder for her missives. Recipients of her correspondence, myself included, would often find one side of a letter lazily scratched or blotted out, the other filled with her peculiar commands. In this case, it seemed, she had salvaged a piece of writing she shouldn’t have.

  “Did you read the overleaf yourself, my lady?”

  “I did not, nor could I have done, as it was written in Latin. I simply wrote what I wished and sent it off with a servant, who gave it for delivery to a page, who was beaten to within an inch of his life for the transgression. The letter was intercepted, by whom I do not know, and now Nicholas claims it has imperiled his office, his station—his life.”

  “So you are ignorant of the nature of the document that prompts the lord mayor’s concern.”

  She huffed. “If I weren’t, I certainly wouldn’t tell you, Gower. The distaff only hits so hard on a poor husband.”

  “Would it surprise you to learn that it was an interrogation record?” I asked her.

  She looked away.

  “Your husband was implicated in a crime or scandal of some kind, yes?”

  The slightest of nods.

  “And now someone is holding it over him, playing him like a glove puppet.”

  Another nod.

  “But you don’t know who this is.”

  A shake. I waited for her to turn to me before telling her. “Lady Idonia, the interrogation record is in the hands of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester.” Her eyes went wide. “The only way I can help you and your husband is if I learn the nature of the mayor’s offense—and the name of the party questioned at the Guildhall. Before approaching Gloucester I need as much on this matter as you will give me. The mayor, as you are quite aware, is saying nothing.”

  Her hand had moved to her lips, her face gone the color of new vellum. She blinked several times, then clasped her hands in her lap. “It was a maudlyn, Gower,” she said. “A common whore of Gropecunt Lane, and Nicholas one of its most frequent jakes. I don’t know its name.”

  “I see,” I said. Though Idonia had been understandably humiliated, the information was deflating. Half the grown men of London frequented the precincts above St. Pancras Soper Lane. A loose-tongued maudlyn would hardly imperil a man as powerful as Nicholas Brembre. Before I could explain this gently to Idonia she told me more.

  “This was not just any maudlyn, Gower.”

  “Oh?”

  “It—she—he—is a swerver.”

  I felt myself recoil. “So Sir Nicholas is—”

  “A sodomite. The abominable vice, practiced with glee and regularity by the honorable lord mayor of London, paying a man to take a woman’s part.”

  And with a sworn record of confession to prove it. Though the crown and city did not prosecute sodomy as a civic matter, such a document could subject the mayor to an ecclesiastical tribunal before the bishop of London, who would surely relish the chance to humiliate Brembre in front of the city’s most prominent clergymen. Excommunication would inevitably follow. The mayor stood to lose everything: his office, his livelihood, his parish, and likely his wife, who would surely be granted an annulment as a result of her husband’s vice.

  I leaned to look through the screens passage toward the door, then turned back to Idonia. “Why did Sir Nicholas not destroy the record after seizing it, given its obvious dangers? He is not a reckless man, in my experience.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I asked him the same question. He claims other men were named in the document, and that destroying it would rob him of information on them. So he put it in the chest in our bedchamber, along with piles of meaningless scraps from the Guildhall scriptorium. Some eight weeks ago I was out of parchments, so I fished one of them out, wrote my letter, and the rest of it you know.”

  Keeping the interrogation record was understandable on the mayor’s part, if foolish. Better to forestall your own damnation than hold another man’s ruin in your hand. Yet Brembre had made a very large wager and lost badly, leaving his wife shamed and his own reputation hanging by the thinnest of threads—threads I fully intended to pull.

  Chapter 19

  I GIVE YOU THE GREATEST commission of your life.” William Snell’s voice had lowered to a soft threat. “A chance to forge and shape your infernal metals on behalf of the very king of England, to craft some new invention from the veins of the earth. And what do you bring me? A little snake? A child’s toy, tapped out in the smithy?”

  “It is hardly a toy, Master Snell.” It has, after all, killed a breathing body, Stephen did not say. One false word, he suspected, and Snell would have him tossed over the wall. Yet with the lethal accident in the woods still numbing his mind, Stephen would not allow himself to cower before the armorer’s rising wrath. His gun worked, worked all too well, and he was at the Tower that day to prove this to the man who had commissioned it.

  “The shape is serpentine, yes, and I will admit to taking special care to the design and crafting of its outer appearance,” he said. “But the snake is merely a disguise. A trick of the eye, meant to deceive anyone who discovers it, and hide the nature of your commission to me. As to the function and purpose of the device—to these, the snake is incidental.”

  “And now you confuse me with all this metalman’s cant.” Snell threw up his hands. “Can you not speak plainly to me, Marsh, and tell why you have mocked us in this way?”

  “If you will allow me—”

  “Allow you what? Further patience or forbearance? Not from this quarter of the Tower, Marsh.”

  “Yet if you will only let me show you, Master Snell. I believe you will be more than pleased. I ask merely for a demonstration on my part, and an observance on yours.”

  Snell stood there, chewing on a jutting lip. “An observance.”

  “A matter of minutes,” said Stephen.

  The armorer sniffed. “Very well, then. Prepare yourself.”

  “Aye,” said Stephen. Without further delay he took the bundle from beneath his arm and unwrapped the four weapons he had brought along for that day. He lifted Flame, the greatest and deadliest of his guns, the straightest in bore, the truest in aim, the elmwood stock as smooth against his palm as a woman’s flank.

  “What do you have there?” Snell demanded. “
One of our handgonnes, stolen from the Tower?”

  “Not the king’s gun, Master Snell, but a smaller replica,” said Stephen, dismayed that his imitation could pass for one of the armorer’s rough originals. “A shorter barrel and stock, a lesser weight, though the same width of shot.” He handed the gun to the armorer. Snell hefted it, turned it about in his hands, palmed the barrel and stock. He gave it back to Stephen.

  “A well-made gun,” he said, with some reluctance.

  “Aside from size and weight, the sole difference between this gun and your own lies in these three holes I have drilled into the barrel several inches back from the touchhole. Do you see?” He showed Snell the small bores placed in a tight triangle just where the stock met the barrel.

  “Their purpose?” the armorer asked.

  Marsh swallowed. The moment had come. “I have carefully observed the usage of these weapons, Master Snell,” he said. “I have seen how your soldiers prepare them and fire them. There must always be two men, each working toward a single firing of the gun. One steadies the gun and takes aim, the other prepares the coal for the touch. One holds the gun in place, the other lowers the coal to the powder. The gun fires, and the process begins anew, the same two men laboring over a single weapon and the multiple tasks required to deploy it.”

  “What is your point, Marsh?”

  “My point, Master Snell, is efficiency.”

  Stephen saw it, that flash of bureaucratic longing in Snell’s eyes. “Explain yourself.”

  “Take your archers,” he said, sweeping a hand in the direction of the armory, where so many thousands of bows, bolts, and arrows were stored. “Picture a company of fine English longbowmen, engaged in battle, the sky bristling with arrows at each volley. Fifty archers, fifty arrows hurling toward the enemy in one fell rush.” He paused to allow the scene to play out in the armorer’s imagination. “Now cut that number in half. Imagine the spectacle such a scene would become if every bowman were dependent on—on an arrowman for the loading of his bow.”