The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  Now the proclamation took on a darker resonance. I wondered what Chaucer, as local justice of the peace for the sprawling shire, might know of the fugitive pair—if pair they were. Dartford was just a few miles beyond Greenwich, well within his jurisdiction, and he would surely have been involved in the initial hunt after the killing at the Portbridge gaol.

  “Do you recall their names?” I asked him.

  “I do, strange enough,” said the young man. “Heard the cry three times and can’t get them out of my head.”

  His silence lengthened. More coins traded hands.

  “Margery Peveril’s hers. Robert Faulk’s his,” he said, and nothing else. The crier’s words came back to me in fragments as he rode ahead. Know all present . . . poacher of His Highness the king’s forests . . . gentlewoman of Dartford and murderess of her husband . . . do now flee, together or alone, through country and city . . . destination unknown. . .

  I parted company with the monks after the ford over the Ravensbourne, which was flowing low, and within less than an hour of closing my gate door at the priory I was riding up the hill to Greenwich with the steeple of St. Alfege a stub against the sky. Upon reaching the high street and the Thistle I dismounted, arranging for my horse’s stabling with the inn boy, and looked out over the Thames. The village’s situation gave a wide vista on the river, on which several ships at various stages of construction were docked by the building yards. Greenwich had recently become a major den of shipwrights, many of them swart crews from the south boasting the latest techniques from the ports of Italy and the Holy Land. From that spot in front of the Thistle I could make out the faint echoes of their shouts, oaths and curses traded in tongues as foreign to my ear as modesty to a baron.

  “Why, our Southwark oyster has left his shell!” Chaucer, leaning on the inn door, greeted me with a curt wave. “Good to see you in a rural mode, John.”

  “Let’s hope I survive the day.” I joined him at the door, suddenly thirsty, looking over his shoulder for the innkeeper.

  He steered me back toward the yard. “No quenching for us, not for several hours. Retrieve your horse, John. We must set off.”

  “For where?”

  “You will see.” His face looked troubled.

  “Tell me, Geoffrey.”

  “Things are worse than I thought. Much worse, if what I have heard this morning is true. We must ride at once.” He gave a curt signal to the yard boy, who went off to retrieve our animals.

  I thought for a moment. “Is this about these fugitives, Geoffrey? A man and woman who fled a manor gaol in the Portbridge hundred?”

  “In part,” he said, looking mildly surprised at my information. “Peveril and Faulk are the talk of the shire, though their escape is the least horrific aspect of this matter. I can scarcely believe what I am about to show you. I will say no more at the moment, as I want your fresh judgment on what you see.”

  Our horses arrived, and we set off down toward the main road, where traffic had slowed somewhat following the mercantile rush of the earlier morning. We had several miles to ride, and as we passed by an empty gibbet at a crossing Chaucer said, “I have read your couplets, John.”

  “The quire I gave you yesterday?”

  “You’ve figured Homicide as the tongue of Wrath. I like that very much. I can see it, flickering serpentlike at the imminent victims of murder, or snapping like a whip at the feet of the almost dead, tripping them up in the courses of their lives.” He started reciting my verse back to me. A booklet passed to him late the day before, and he already had my lines by rote.

  “Homicide, as old books sayeth

  (And no man may gainst them prayeth),

  Be the sharpest tongue of Wrath.

  To meet Homicide in thy path,

  To see his maw in church or hall,

  Is to know man’s course since our Fall.

  Whose life endeth in Homicide

  Shall vengeance seek on every side.

  With touch of lathe and turn of screw,

  The engine of foul murder true

  Doth roll our conscience in black pitch,

  And casteth man in Hate’s own ditch.”

  He looked over at me with an admiring smile, a rarity in this poetical circumstance. “Now the lathe and screw are verdant images, aren’t they,” he mused. “And yet—and yet I don’t see the precise point of the ‘engine’ or how it could be working in the way you describe . . .”

  And so it went, so it always went with Chaucer and my verse, the well-meaning criticisms twisting like knives through my ribs. We rode another mile, as I listened to him prattle on about my sagging lines and stale images, ever with the best of intentions, of course, the most friendly disposition toward my making. Nothing could reduce me to a more childlike sullenness than Chaucer’s blithe cruelties.

  Chaucer, too, sank into a studied silence once he had dispensed with my verse. He seemed ill at ease, agitated in his saddle. We passed a large manor house at the edge of a half-cleared wood, then rode over a wide and swiftly flowing creek spanned by a stone bridge, well kept despite the heavy traffic on this byway from London. Upstream a train of late wheat wagons was lined up before a mill on the eastern bank, the tenants waiting their turn at the stone. Chaucer’s position allowed us to cross without paying the toll to the guards, though at the far end our way was barred by the bridge’s hermit. Robed in black with a closely cropped beard and a hood in the newest style, he cut a vivid contrast to the happily unkempt figure of Piers Goodman, a presence still heavy in my thoughts. I found the bridge hermit’s fastidious attire infuriating.

  “Fair welcome to you, Master Chaucer,” he said with a bow to my companion.

  “And a happy morning to you, Brother Roger.”

  The hermit beamed up at me. “Sixpence for your crossing, good gentle,” he said with an entitled primness, his palm open by my left foot.

  I heard myself scoff. “Here is a groat.” I flicked it down at him.

  He caught it in the air, looked at Chaucer.

  “John,” my friend murmured, turning from the affronted hermit. “You would never insult one of your own mouths. Please do not slight mine.”

  I hesitated, my anger ebbing. “Of course.” I handed down eight pennies to make up for my rudeness, and after a satisfied nod from the hermit we were on our way.

  When we had got beyond the man’s hearing Chaucer half turned in his saddle. “Margery Peveril,” he said at last, a certain reverence in his voice, as if the name were a minor sacrament.

  “The woman,” I said.

  “The woman, the murderess, and now the fugitive.” Chaucer hocked his throat, spat off to the side. “An unlikely fugitive, but a fugitive nonetheless. And I am charged with finding her, apprehending her and this Faulk, the smith, and bringing them both to London in chains for a glorious hanging before the commons.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “Margery Peveril,” he said again, this time with a harsher inflection. “Not a lady, but an esquire’s wife, the respected mistress of a minor manor between Portbridge and Dartford, along the river Darent. I met her soon after my own arrival in Greenwich, the first week I was in office as justice of the peace. The only other time I saw her was just after her arrest.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “An attractive woman,” he said. “Perhaps twenty years of age, pert, lively, though never a flirt or gossip, and by all indications a faithful wife and true. Strong-willed, beloved in the parish, with a reputation for great and genuine piety, and always bounteous toward her husband’s tenants—perhaps overly generous if anything. Her late husband’s tenants,” he corrected himself.

  “The husband?”

  “Twice her age, and Walter Peveril was a tyrant,” Chaucer said. “From a minor gentry family, the most minor, you would have to call them, with a bitter disposition toward everyone around him. Beat his servants and his horses, had his tenants whipped on a whim. His wife suffered a great deal, it is said.”
/>
  “Children?”

  “None, though they have been married four years. My wife is barren, he’d say in his jars. One of the sources of his anger, perhaps.”

  “There is no doubt that she killed him?”

  “None. The servants heard a struggle in the hall, a scream, some furniture knocked down. They went in and she was sitting by his corpse with a bloody hatchet in her hand as poor Walter’s life left through his neck and chest. The sheriffs brought her in, and she’d been in the gaol at Portbridge until the—that is where we are heading now, before . . .”

  He let out a frustrated breath. “I must apologize for my silence, John, and my clumsiness with you. There are things here I cannot fathom, that go so far beyond my experience that I don’t know how to comprehend them.”

  “Will you simply tell me what has happened, Geoffrey?”

  “I must see for myself first, and I want you to have your green eyes on this, without bias from what I have to tell you.”

  I glanced over at him. “You do remember, don’t you, that you called me out here not about this fleeing couple but about the ugly mess in the privy channel?”

  He returned my gaze. “I do, John. I do indeed.”

  With that he turned from me, smacked his horse on the flank, and trotted ahead, closing our conversation. In another hour we had passed the river road to Dartford and arrived at the Portbridge manor, or Bykenors, as Chaucer called it, named for the family that had anciently controlled this part of the parish. The manor house was located at the far southeast of the Bexley heath, which we skirted along the southern edge. The soil out that way was dry, inclined to a gravelly loam that kicked up in ugly sprays from the hooves of Chaucer’s horse.

  We dismounted some distance from the manse itself, near a disused barn that fronted a two-story building of timber and Kentish stone. Heavy bars had been fixed across the windows on both floors, and the lower doors were secured with two knotted sliding beams at the top and bottom.

  “The Portbridge gaol,” said Chaucer, indicating that we should tether our horses on a nearby fence. “We won’t be here long, though the lord and his lady have recently left for the autumn pilgrimage to Jerusalem, so we have the place largely to ourselves, aside from Tom Dallid there. The reeve.” He raised an arm to wave at a man approaching us slowly from the manor stables, limping badly with each step. Chaucer made the introductions; then Dallid stood and waited for us to begin, looking uncomfortable. The reeve had troughed his head, judging from the dripping hair and beard. Bloodshot eyes, ale breath, and he was clothed in the distinctive Kentish jet, with a square-cut cotte over loosely fitted hose dyed a uniform black.

  “Dallid manages the manor farms for Portbridge,” Chaucer explained. “He also serves as keeper of this gaol, which we use for those accused awaiting delivery to the general eyre. Most of them stay locked up here for many weeks until the judge arrives.”

  “Or many months, aye,” said Dallid. “This last lot? Most of them’d been within since June or thereabouts. Whole summer in m’lord’s sweetest hole.” He cackled.

  “And how many prisoners were confined here as of four weeks ago?” Chaucer looked at me as he asked the question.

  The reeve pursed his lips, raised his chin to look at the sky. “Eighteen, it was.”

  “Who were they?” I asked Chaucer. “Horse thieves, highwaymen?”

  “A potent stew of felons and general misdoers,” he answered. “Five were apprehended poaching in the king’s forests. Robert Faulk, one of the fugitives, was among their number, from all the way toward Canterbury, hauled up here awaiting delivery to King’s Bench. Four were from a company of highwaymen who waylaid a shipment of silks from Dover. Then two horse thieves, two cattle rustlers . . . I’m forgetting now. Two of the men had raped a neighbor’s daughter, and the rest were within for various felonies.”

  “Eighteen men, then, were being kept in this gaol,” I said.

  “Seventeen men and one woman.”

  I finally understood. I looked from Chaucer to Dallid. “The woman, then, was—”

  “Margery Peveril,” said Dallid. “And a wretched wretch she was after a few weeks in the cellar.”

  “You kept her in the cellar? Whyever would you do that, no matter her alleged crime?”

  Dallid bit his lip. “It was stay down the cellar or go abed in a prisonhouse a’ rough men, and all the foul dalliance and swyving that would lead to. You ask me? It was a gift to the lady to stow her down there with the rats and such.”

  “A gift,” I said, squatting to peer through the bars into the structure’s cellar. The space beneath the stone building was frightfully low, barely high enough for a full-grown man to crawl about like a dog. Even from where I hunched it stank. In the faint light from the cellar window on the other side I could see a spread of clutter in the middle of the area: a thin straw pallet, a jumble of filthy-looking blankets, a bucket for her waste. All of it surrounded a thick post to which Margery Peveril had apparently been chained. My gut heaved.

  “That Peveril, she liked to act the beneficent,” said Dallid to my back. “But she was a murderer, she was, thick and through.”

  “And a sow, to judge by your treatment of her.”

  “Least you won’t find my sows axing their masters, nor their hogs,” said the reeve with a strong note of righteousness. “But Dame Margery Peveril? Chopped her own lord husband through to the neck bone. One, two, three strokes it was, and a gush of blood wide and deep as the Darent. I seen them take the rushes out off the floor after they put his body in the cart. Had to peel ’em off for the stick. Looked like a fellow was dragging a halved mutton across the manor yard to the drive, smearin’ the master a Portbridge’s very life on the grasses and stones. So—treat Dame Margery Peveril like a dog? Suppose I did, and it was a sight more than she deserved.”

  He looked about to stalk off until Chaucer placed a calming hand on his arm. “There, there, my good Dallid. My friend here is a Southwark man. He has little moral sense about such things. He intended no offense. Did you, John?” He widened his eyes at me.

  “I did not,” I said, catching myself and giving the reeve a slight nod. “And my apologies if such an offense was caused. The circumstances . . .”

  “Course,” he said curtly. “Now, Master Chaucer told me you’d have questions for me?”

  “I do,” I said, eager to get to it. “You said many of the prisoners were here since the summer, and that they were within until four weeks ago.”

  “Aye.”

  “They are no longer in this gaol?”

  “They are not.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “I’ve no knowing as to that.”

  “Where were they taken initially, then?”

  “Sire?”

  “Where were they taken after their removal from Portbridge? Were they sent to Dartford? Or to another manor gaol?”

  He shrugged, his eyes shifting. “Don’t know where they went then, don’t know where they are now.”

  “Eighteen prisoners awaiting delivery and eyre under your watchful eye, and you have no sense where they went, where they are now?”

  “No, sire.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Didn’t ask.”

  “Why not?”

  “Weren’t the sort to take questions, not from a reeve, leastwise.”

  “Who moved them then?”

  A slight hesitation. “Some men.”

  “How many?”

  “Five—no, six.”

  “Six men, then, moved your eighteen prisoners out?”

  “Aye,” he said. His eyes shifted right. “Maybe eight.”

  “Did you know the men?”

  “Not by sight nor name.”

  “Did they wear badges?”

  “That they did.”

  “Of what livery?”

  Silence.

  “Whose men were they, Dallid?” The question we had been leading up to, the question I assumed Chaucer had brough
t me here to ask. “Whose men removed your eighteen prisoners?”

  I handed him a few pennies. He looked down at the coins, then up at Chaucer, who gave him a sober nod.

  “They were the duke’s men.”

  A dull ache began to form at the base of my skull. “Which duke?”

  He looked again at Chaucer. Another nod from my friend.

  Dallid exhaled. “Gloucester,” he said softly.

  “Woodstock?” I said.

  “Aye.”

  “Thomas of Woodstock empties a manor gaol in Kent? Under whose warrant?”

  Dallid shrugged, almost sadly, I thought. I looked at Chaucer. “Geoffrey?”

  “Gloucester holds great sway here and in the rest of Kent, John. Emptying a remote country gaol such as this one would have been an easy matter for the duke.”

  “But to what end?”

  Chaucer’s mouth was set in an unbent line. He turned to Dallid. “I thank you, Tom. You have been most helpful.”

  The reeve’s nod this time was sullen, scowlish. As we retrieved our horses and mounted, I watched Dallid slink off toward the manor house, his back hunched over a secret he likely regretted sharing—and, I suspected, others he had yet to tell.

  We made it quickly up to the main road, where Chaucer turned us west, toward Dartford.

  “You think these missing prisoners answer to the privy corpses?”

  “I do,” he said.

  “Eighteen prisoners in a Portbridge gaol, less our two fugitives, and sixteen bodies in the London ditches. You don’t believe this is a coincidence?”

  “I know it is not, John.”

  “You’ll share your reasoning and proof with me?”

  “I shall, within the hour.”

  “Yet why has Dallid cooperated with you, Geoffrey? Isn’t he in fear of Woodstock, as much as anyone else in these hundreds?”