The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  Nothing as humble as this ship, which, I learned upon embarking, had set sail from the Holy Land that summer. In Portsmouth the vessel had been pressed into service by one of the king’s admirals, and now the crew were girding themselves for war between powers, though it was hard to see where they might fit in, and on whose side. The merchant ship was a world worthy of Mandeville, fifteen swart and hearty men, heads wrapped in colorful scarves of impossible colors to match the variegated hues of their skin, which varied from sun-scorched red to nut brown to black as devil’s pitch. Though they spoke in innumerable languages they seemed to share a patchwork tongue all their own, befitting the culture of a crew gathered from the far corners of the earth, and indifferent to the nature of their cargo, whether men of war, Flemish cloth, or spices from the east.

  Only two of them were Englishmen. Northerners, one of them kind enough to comfort me through my several hours of misery. “Think nowt an it, squire. Earls, duchesses, queens—why, e’en the highest bloods lase it aff Dover, and no shame in it nathah.”

  Though shame, I reflected between bouts of sickness, comes in many forms.

  Perhaps it should not have surprised me to learn that Simon had been spotted working in and around Calais on behalf of an unidentified patron. The year before, in one of the darkest episodes of my life, Simon Gower had returned from Italy to deceive me and, worse, betray his sovereign nearly to the point of disaster. A book of seditious prophecies, a jealous rivalry over a woman, a young king’s life hanging by a silken braid. I vowed never to forgive him, even as the crisis seemed to pull us closer than we had been in many years. Afterwards I remained unsure whether Simon’s betrayals had been solely the result of youthful carelessness or part of an elaborate game of subterfuge I still could not comprehend.

  Such trickery, it seemed, would forever define our relations. Though I had originally sent him to Italy to join the company of Sir John Hawkwood, Simon had been working all along as an agent for the chancellor himself, and without my knowledge. From his childhood Simon showed unique abilities in the ways of deceit. Charming, swift of brain, too quick for his teachers and too slippery for his father, he possessed a natural inclination toward those covert worlds of counterfeit, espionage, and artifice he now inhabited, and a gift for languages and learning unrivaled by any other man I have known. In other words, Chaucer would wryly observe, he is your son.

  Now this son had returned, and in an equally enigmatic guise. From playing with fire during last year’s crisis, he had moved to playing with its most dangerous and explosive agent. And so you will make thunder and lightning, writes Roger Bacon of gunpowder, and when I thought of Simon in the harrowing days that followed I thought of him with fire in his hands, hurling missiles of flame at the world around him.

  So it was that I found myself on this cursed ship, tossed wantonly from wave to wave as the hours and miles passed. There was one other passenger, a trader in cloth heading for the staple at Middleburgh. I spoke briefly to him on deck during a rare lull in my sickness.

  “Dry land cures all ills,” he said to me at the starboard bow. A mast bobbed in the fair distance. Though young he had a head with thinning hair over a pleasant face, tawny from the sun. His eyes too were brown, and they teared in the sea wind as we looked out over the swell.

  I put a hand to my stomach. “On the next crossing I’ll bring a hammer, I think, and simply put myself to sleep.”

  “Pennyroyal and wormwood,” he said wisely. “Mash it together with vinegar and oil, apply it to your chest.”

  “I am out of fortune’s favor, then. No herb garden on this vessel.”

  “Nor vinegar, I fear.”

  A meaningless exchange, and I never learned his name.

  We pulled into the harbor at Calais under a hazed sun, the rowmen taking us through an elaborate system of sluices, dams, and dykes that kept the waterways flowing around the town. There was much admiring cant on the ship about the ingenuity of the master of the engines, whose job it was to oversee the maintenance of the system that kept the town defended and dry.

  As we neared our berth a dinghy pulled alongside, allowing the ship’s master to pay the toll to the representative of the échevins. Though Calais had yielded its status as the English staple to Middleburgh in recent years, money still flowed through the brokers’ hands, and the gold mint alone spat out more coins than even the Tower in those years. The Pale remained the main conduit for innumerable commodities into and out of England. Cloth and tin, lead and wine, and especially wool: sacks and fells by the hundreds and thousands.

  On the quay the cloth merchant bid me a brisk farewell and walked off to arrange transport to Middleburgh. The way up from the harbor to Calais Gate was a quick but sodden one, and with no pattens available, my shoes and the lower part of my breeches gathered weight and filth that clung coldly to my legs as I finally reached a patch of dry stone beneath the gate. The whole area bristled with spears, the garrison sharp, drilled, on alert for hostile movements by sea or land. The captain of Calais was known to be a fierce and demanding military leader, and it gave me some comfort to see our troops arrayed with precision and strength along the walls, the watchtowers well manned. In London, despite the formidable preparations there, it could often be too easy to forget the looming war, with the French navy massed just up the coast at Sluys, threatening to embark at any moment.

  The watch passed me in and I asked the way to the wool broker’s shop, proceeding along a street that felt oddly similar to one of its counterparts in London. Old King Edward was known to have refashioned Calais in the English style, changing everything from the quality of paving stones to the appearance of shopfronts, though I had not realized the extent of the surface similarities. I could have been walking along Cheapside or Cornhill, ducking in for a pie or measurement for a pair of shoes.

  Yet Calais was less a town than an ugly, hulking fortification, looming over the port and the surrounding lands and marshes it exploited like a gore-slicked raven at its meal, and the whole atmosphere of the place was one of unsettled gloom. Even the bustle of the market was subdued, and Staple Hall rose up in its unsightly height over the central square. The faces I saw on the streets were tight and drawn, all averted eyes and suspicion toward strangers like me. The town expected war, and soon.

  From Pierre Broussard, too, I got nothing but open hostility. The wool broker was leaning against his door when I approached the shop, gazing blankly down the street. At my arrival he turned his head slowly, looked me foot to forehead, and drew a short sniff of air into his nose, as if I were a rotting fish left at his door.

  “You must be this Gower,” he said in English.

  This Gower. Broussard acted aggrieved at the first sight of me, a Londoner come to trouble his home and his trade. Though he appeared young, he had a pinched and ugly face, eyes spaced too closely, a crooked nose that swooped up at the end, where it blossomed into a reddened ball peppered with black spots.

  “Your room is in back,” he said, now in French. “Three nights?” He held out his hand for payment.

  “Perhaps four,” I said.

  “A quarter then. More for your meat at the suppers.”

  I gave him the quarter noble, though I nearly had to beg ale and a light meal out of him to ease the recovery from disembarkation. The inn’s hall was closed for repairs to the ceiling, he claimed, so I ate in a back room off his baking kitchen, the heat from the ovens doing nothing to still my traveler’s nerves.

  I spent the remainder of that first day in Calais coining as much information as I could about the massacre at Desurennes from the many English residents of the town. The news had spread like a gust of wind among the French villages of the Pale. The general feeling was that a rogue faction from the Calais garrison had been responsible for the atrocity, though no one wanted to speak of it with a stranger. The tavern chatter was subdued, with few willing to speculate on any less obvious motivations behind the attack. Discontent in the countryside, a shared anti-English
sentiment among the towns, hints of rebellion and alliance with the French: nothing more specific, and I learned little that Edmund Rune had not already told me back in Southwark.

  The following morning I was awakened from a fitful sleep by the Mistress Broussard, who rapped loudly on my door with no sympathy for my throbbing head. I had been summoned, she told me, by Sir William Beauchamp, the captain of Calais himself, who expected me at the castle within the hour. After a hurried meal I gathered some things and walked to the keep, a block of stone to the north of the city gates, announcing myself to the gatekeeper, who in turn summoned a page to lead me to the captain’s chambers. Through the slitted walls in the west tower I got a glimpse of the town’s outer perimeter defenses to the north. Trenches carpeted in sticks, bulwarks bristling with spikes, all prepared for a French army reportedly strengthening by the day.

  The offices of the captain of Calais were situated in the castle’s second-floor gallery. I was led through the adjoining rooms of clerks and secretaries, speaking in hushed tones, the bureaucratic hum of an office well run.

  In addition to his duties as captain of Calais, Sir William Beauchamp, the Baron Bergavenny, served as the crown’s envoy to Flanders, and was thus a powerful figure in the king’s diplomacy. Beauchamp was also the younger brother of the Earl of Warwick, standing just outside that innermost circle of lords making trouble for King Richard and the chancellor in the Parliament that fall. He was a catlike man, small of face, his movements and his speech careful and calculated. I had met him several times, once in quite unpleasant circumstances, and he had impressed me with his ability to appear elusive and straightforward at the same time.

  His chamber was modestly furnished, with a single window looking out on the fortifications below. On the opposite wall hung a shield emblazoned with his family’s arms, a bold gold band differenced with a crescent sable. His greeting was cursory but not rude as he waved me in.

  “You chose not to return to Westminster for Parliament, my lord?”

  He moved a lean arm slowly across his desk. “I have an island to defend, Gower, and against a force the likes of which England hasn’t seen since King William sailed from Normandy. Thousands of ships a few leagues north of here, massed along the fjords and in the sea, ready to fly like so many darts into the breast of the realm. Calais will be the primary agent of defense by sea. Its captain can hardly spare a fortnight for politics.”

  “Of course not, your lordship,” I said. “Though in this season, politics seems to be eating more than its share of fortnights.”

  A slight smile. “So says my brother the earl. He wishes me to return to London before Exton’s riding, which he will be accompanying along with Gloucester. He claims that London could use the additional livery.” The king would often use such civic rituals to show a pretense of solidarity between the realm’s various factions, now fighting like dogs and bears in a Southwark cage. A day of feigned peace, years of ferocious rivalry set aside for a few hours of shallow ceremony. Yet if the Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Warwick were among the lords leading the Riding, it was not difficult to foresee an ugly clash marking the new mayor’s official assumption of office.

  “I trust his lordship the earl will allow for your absence, my lord.”

  “He will have to,” said Beauchamp. “And what will Suffolk do on that momentous day, do you suppose?”

  “That is up to the earl, my lord.”

  “It is good to know that you have the trust of the lord chancellor, Gower,” he purred. “Michael de la Pole’s word is the very mint of Westminster.”

  This was dangerous ground. As belted earls Gloucester and Suffolk were equal in rank, though the chancellor’s elevation was more recent, and he was regarded as something of a usurper by the king’s opponents. To show too much enthusiasm for Michael de la Pole in Beauchamp’s presence would not be helpful. Before I could shape a suitable reply he came to my aid.

  “The chancellor must go, Gower. There is no other way. He is being impeached even as we sit here.”

  The observation had been made in an easy but uncompromising tone, and despite all I had been hearing back in London and Westminster it was only in that moment that I truly understood the inevitability of the earl’s ouster.

  “May the next chancellor fit the office with the same dignity he has shown, my lord,” I said, risking a small and final show of loyalty.

  Beauchamp allowed it, moving on gracefully to the apparent object of my visit. “This incident—this atrocity—has roused me, Gower. Here I am, doing what I can to keep the peace in this region, and a massacre takes place under my nose.” He wriggled it, as if to sniff out the perpetrators. I could almost imagine whiskers. “The burgesses are in a heating roar, to say nothing of the Hainaults, lords of Le Quesnoy. We have powerful garrisons at the castles of Oye, Marcke, and Guisnes. I have paid spies in nearly every village in the Pale. Yet I got no wind of this until the deed was done. I have sent my sheriffs down there, along with the coroner of Calais, but there’s no sense of who these men might have been, or where they went once they shot up the town. The gunners seem to have appeared as if by magic out of the woods, then dissolved back into the trees once they’d murdered half the market.”

  “They like the forest,” I said, almost to myself.

  “What’s that?” he said sharply.

  “They have done this before, my lord.” I described the discovery in the Walbrook, though left the connection with Gloucester and the Tower unmentioned.

  He in turn told me what he knew about the killings at Desurennes and the progress of his sheriffs’ investigation. “You will want to begin with Pierre Longel, a witness. The old man was selling cheeses that morning up against the walls. He was not injured, though he saw several next to him killed and maimed—including his grown son. He was a soldier upon a time, and I’m told he has good information about the nature of these weapons and the tactics of the offending squad.”

  “Very well,” I said, and thanked Beauchamp for his assistance. I had just turned at the door to his chamber when I was seized with a strange and sudden desire. “I have one last question, your lordship. Or rather a request.”

  “What is that?” said Beauchamp.

  “I see that your defenses include large cannon. Bombards, culverins, and the like.”

  “What of them?”

  “Do you keep handgonnes in your arsenal?”

  He moved slightly, then pawed a cheek. “Are you suggesting that the Calais garrison was responsible for this massacre?”

  “Not at all, my lord.”

  “Then what do you want with our hand cannon?”

  “With your permission, I would like to see one fired.”

  “A singular request.”

  I inclined my head. “It is that, my lord.” I asked more out of curiosity than necessity, having developed a keen interest in the workings of the handgonnes. For weeks I had been tracking down the men who had employed the newfangled weapons against the victims found in the sewer channels, and now, it seemed, against the market crowd on this side of the sea. I had yet to hold one of these weapons myself, or witness one employed in firing.

  “I see no virtue in these weapons,” Beauchamp mused. “Clumsy, loud, the opposite of stealth. They take an eternity to reload, cannot be aimed with any reliability, and are as likely to explode in a man’s face as kill his enemy. Their only use, as far as I can see it, is to awe our enemy into submission with their noise and fire.”

  “Surely they are being refined by His Highness’s armorers.”

  “Not that I have witnessed, though there are rumors.”

  “Rumors, your lordship?”

  “There is talk of clever inventions, unforeseen developments at the Tower. One of my lieutenants has heard whispers of a new gun they have called ‘the Snake.’ A more lethal weapon than our rough tubes, and more efficient, or so it is claimed.”

  “The Snake,” I said, intrigued by the designation. “What distinguishes them from
the guns you have here?”

  “That is unknown to me.” He stood. “I see no reason not to honor your wish, given the distance you’ve come and the task you’ve set yourself. Let me see what we can prepare in short order.”

  “I thank you, my lord.”

  “It’s less than nothing.” He led me out into the gallery, where he summoned one of the guards waiting against the doors into the upper hall. “Smithson,” he called, snapping his fingers.

  “Yes, my lord?” said the guard, head high.

  “Take Master Gower here down into the yard and have Usk ready one or two of the small guns for him.”

  “The handgonnes, sire?”

  “Yes, from that store in the west keep.”

  “Aye, sire.”

  Beauchamp nodded a curt farewell and spun on his heel, heading back to the captain’s quarters. The guard led me down to the yard, where he spoke to a man named Usk, who looked me over with that soldier’s tired disdain for the noncombatant. After ordering out a few of the small guns, he took me to a corner of the castle yard in which a large quantity of wood had been piled to nearly my height: splintered boards, broken beams, the remnants of a shack. I would be shooting into the pile, he told me, and the boards would prevent the shot from caroming off the stone walls. Nearby a cook and his boy had set a meal for the soldiers on a log-and-board table, a fire crackling and smoking behind them.

  Another soldier arrived with the guns. He had four of them, simple-looking devices consisting of tubes of bronze bolted to wooden helves, each weapon no more than four feet in length. Along the barrels were fastened several metal rings, giving the guns a ridged appearance. We each took one in hand.

  “First pour a quantity of powder down the barrel, just so.” He demonstrated on his weapon, taking a pre-measured flask of grained powder and tipping it into the barrel. I followed his example on my own handgonne.