The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  “You’ll see two cursed Scots dangling from the gibbet as you ride into York, you will,” said a sheriff with a satisfied nod. He looked around at them. “Any of you met or heard of such vagrants and spies, consorting with Scotsmen in these parts?”

  Headshakes and sober denials all around. Soon the company was on its way with the sheriffs’ blessings.

  They rode in silence for the rest of that day, as words could do little to convey what they felt within. He looked over at her several times, and when she met his gaze she smiled grimly at him, as they shared their newfound lust and the certain knowledge of their peril. They sensed a world closing in around them.

  Chapter 31

  ENTERING DESURENNES THAT WEEK was like visiting a desolate church during pestilence time. The people’s faces were either twisted in sorrow or emptied of all passion, yet against my expectation I sensed little anger at the renewed appearance of English soldiers in this broken village. There was rather a shared sense of resignation apparent in the town, as the residents endured the lingering effects of the massacre.

  Le jour de canons, they had taken to calling it. The day of guns.

  The village lay some nine leagues from Calais along a well-maintained road. Beauchamp had sent along eight strong riders, all of us leaving at dawn and arriving before dusk, taking lodging at an inn that also served as the central gathering place for the market village. In the morning the soldiers brought in the old man mentioned by Beauchamp to speak with me in the hall. He was perhaps ten years my elder, his parchment skin taut against protruding bones. He sat before me stiffly. Despite his age his back was board-straight against the table behind him.

  We spoke in French. He told me how the strange men had first appeared. They came not from along the road but from within the forest, then calmly prepared their weapons, lit a fire on the gentle rise above the market, acting friendly and unconcerned with the townspeoples’ curiosity. Everyone saw the start of their approach with the guns, yet no one knew what the weapons were, and thus no one believed the market was in danger. Only two of the strangers were archers, he said, hiding their bows until the last moment. They stepped forward first.

  “The guards went down, and that was when I knew,” he said. “I was standing at the edge of the market, where the horse line forms, when I saw the first arrows fly. Two capable archers were all they needed, and the guards of the gate were slain. Then they advanced on the market.”

  He gave me a few more details: the number of troops, the formation. Each of the assailants had fired four guns already loaded, while a second man was required to light the powder, as I had experienced in the castle yard at Calais. It was relentless, he said, like a forest of limbs cracking all at once, bodies falling right and left, bits of blood and flesh flying through the market. His own son had fallen near the end of the assault, before the company turned for the woods and disappeared.

  The old man’s face was a waxen slate empty of passion. I considered him, this bereaved father, and wanted him to tell me more. “You are a former soldier, are you not?”

  “Oui, monsieur. I fought for King Philip at Crécy.” Beneath the man’s sorrow I heard a touch of pride in his voice. The Battle of Crécy had been fought some forty years before, near the beginning of this seemingly endless conflict between England and France. It represented the first use of gunpowder cannon by the English—bulky, inefficient ribalds, though they did good work, according to every account of the battle I had ever heard.

  “And you are well familiar with the tactics of companies and brigades.”

  “I am.”

  “Then perhaps you might give me your thoughts on the guns.”

  “Monsieur?”

  “I have fired several of these—these canons de la main myself,” I said. “They are remarkably inefficient. Had all of those men been armed with longbows they would have slain twice the number of villagers.” Then I posed a question that I realized had been nagging me since visiting the woods with Chaucer. “Why would they attack with handgonnes, do you suppose?”

  His eyes brightened with the challenge to his mind. He looked at the floor, thought for a long while, then gave a slow nod. “It was a trial,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “An assay is what it was,” said the old man, his gaze still on the floor but his nod strengthening. “They were testing their guns, weren’t they. Wanted to see how we would react, how we would dance in the fire of these new cannon.” Finally he looked up. “Whether we would fight back.”

  An assay. What would a crowd of innocents do if a company of handgonners were to fire on them en masse, pin them against a wall? Had the assault in the Kentish wood also been a trial of sorts, a test of new weapons on the flesh and fear of eighteen prisoners? And—the more urgent question—were the assailants planning a third attack?

  During our exchange I had noticed a young girl flitting around the yard, looking shyly through the two outer doors to the hall. Her eyes were shadowed, her face drawn. She seemed to want to enter the hall, though some hesitation or fear held her back.

  “Who is the girl?” I asked one of the town guards after the old man had left.

  He looked at me sadly. “An orphan now. Her parents went down in the shooting, there before the gate. She was up on the walls, along the parapet, when it all broke out, and saw two city guards taken down with arrows during the final approach. She says she was sent there by the leader of the squad just before the guns.”

  “In sympathy?”

  He raised a shoulder. “Perhaps, though several other children were slain in the firing.”

  “I would like to speak with her if I may.”

  He regarded me coldly. One of the Calais garrison, also in the hall, rebuked him. “Bring her in, or I will seize the little wench myself.”

  The Desurennes man made no reply as he left to get the girl. She sat where the old man had sat. Her eyes, deep-set, darkened, puffed with weeping and lack of sleep, rolled aimlessly about as I observed her.

  “You were there, demoiselle,” I began. “The day of guns.”

  “Yes, sire,” she said. Her voice was tinny, high and sweet like a sacring bell.

  “And what are you called, my young lady?”

  “I am Iseult.”

  “A meaningful name,” I said gently. “It may help you find your Tristram when the day comes.”

  “I have already found him, sire. He died at the market, like a dog,” she said, her voice going flat as a pond. “I saw him give the ghost there, bleeding on the ground.”

  “Will you tell me about it, Iseult? Tell me what you saw?”

  She twisted her lips into a sad pout, her eyes darkening, though her voice stayed eerily calm while she spoke. “Mostly his neck, when the thing went in. A ball, they said it was, afterwards. But when I saw it I thought it was a garland. Was like a blooming rose round about his neck, spread out in this deep, bright red, like a ruby necklace circling his collar. Did you make that necklace for me, my king? For it is a beautiful necklace, sire.”

  Her mouth widened as she grasped what she had said. She brought her palms to her face, then started to beat and tear violently at her eyes. I reached forward and took her wrists, thin as sticks, and pulled her arms away from her face. She shook her head in a rage, and I held her until she was becalmed and still. Her shoulders heaved; weak chokes escaped from a small and delicate mouth.

  A woman appeared in the doorway. I gestured her away.

  “Do not cast out your eyes, Iseult,” I said to the girl. “Our eyes are our windows to God, and to the world He has made. They are one of our greatest gifts. Go gentle on your eyes, Iseult.” I let that calm her for a little while, then, when her breathing had slowed, I spoke again. “Please, Iseult, for the sake of your Tristram, and of your poor mother and father. Tell me what you saw.”

  She told me, sparing no details. The cracks of the guns, the whizzing of the balls through the air, the puffs of sound as they struck flesh and stone, the stink
of powder and death. A dark magic in her child’s mind.

  “Now I need the testimony of your ears,” I said when she had finished. “Iseult, listen to me. I know from the monsieur there that you approached the men on the hill. That you spoke to one of them, and that he spoke to you. Was there anything he said to you, any words you could comprehend?”

  She shook her little head. “He seemed a nice man. He showed me his birds.”

  “His birds?”

  “Oui, sire,” she said, and her eyes recovered a gleam. “There was one thing he said to me, and in my own tongue. I had forgotten but now I recall it. He said, ‘Do you like swans, little mother?’ And he showed me the swans on his arm.” She looked up at me, and I felt the pulse quicken in her tiny wrists. “Two great white swans they were. Like this.”

  She thrust out her elbows, feigning the busy flapping of a bird’s wings. Then she encircled her neck with her hands. “Those swans, they were choked with gold, sire.”

  The Bohun swan, doubled and gorged. The household badge of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, a mark of his affinity and familia.

  “And was there anything else?”

  “Swans again,” she murmured. “The last thing the man said to me before I went to the wall.”

  “What was it, Iseult?” I leaned in toward her, not wanting the guards by the door to hear her reply.

  Her eyes lost their focus as her mouth curled into the saddest of smiles. “Rappelez-vous les cygnes, petite mère,” she said.

  Remember the swans, little mother.

  Chapter 32

  MARSH. STEPHEN MARSH.”

  He heard his name again, then the clap of hands.

  “Marsh, you must come awake.”

  The priest, back to trouble him for coins. Stephen rolled onto his side and dug his knuckles into his eyes. The straw pallet had lost all its softness over the days of his confinement, the chapel’s stone floor any trace of warmth with the coming of the autumn chill. A thin blanket was all he had for covering, so he’d kept everything on for bed, even his tunic. Not only his joints but also his clothing fought against him when he sat up to stretch away the sleep. Two dogs traded muffled barks somewhere outside, and a thin ray of morning light caught dust before the faded paintings on the chapel’s western wall.

  “Coming, Father,” Stephen called to the priest.

  He struggled to his feet and went to the curtain, drawn across the narrow entryway to the disused chapel to shield the ugly bedding from parishioners. The chamber functioned as makeshift lodging for the occasional undistinguished visitor: a family member of a rectory servant, a seeker of sanctuary like him, a vagrant on a cold night with a few coins to spare the parson. Stephen was the parish’s only boarder at the moment, and the parson let him have his peace for the most part in this period of forced confinement. Stephen had spent the first of these days idling about the church, then started to help the priest with some minor fabric repairs in exchange for his keep, a broken hinge on the screen gate, a few bent nails in the benches, his tools having been sent over by an apprentice from Stone’s.

  He had also tried to speak with several parishioners in and out of the church that week, though news gets out quickly in such matters, and already the entire ward was abuzz with Stephen’s new status as a man wanted for a girl’s death. Though he had known many of these men and women all his life, some since before the deaths of his parents, few would spare him so much as a friendly glance or nod. Even his brother could not bring himself to look Stephen in the eye—and all for an accident of circumstance and timing.

  “Yes, Father Martin?” he said when the curtain was pulled aside.

  The priest’s look mingled distaste with warning, both explained by the presence of the man behind him.

  “Fair morning to you, Marsh,” said William Snell, stepping around the priest. “You are looking poorly.”

  “What do you want, Snell?” Stephen backed into the chapel. The priest turned away, skulking up the north aisle toward the altar.

  “I want you, Stephen.” The armorer stepped in after him.

  “What can you want with me now? I have killed a woman, with a weapon fashioned for the Tower. Surely the king’s wardrobe can want nothing to do with Stephen Marsh after such an incident, and all the talk it’s spawning.”

  “Sed contra, Marsh,” said Snell, looking amused by Stephen’s distress. “I am really quite impressed at your facility with these guns of yours. From what I understand you spun on your heel and shot the girl in her delicate neck from fifty paces.”

  Marsh felt his fury rising. “How can you know that? I revealed those details only to Father Martin, within the privity of confession.”

  Snell’s eyes crinkled at their edges. “Confession.” He turned to look out on the nave, visible through the chapel’s interior window. The priest was murmuring in low tones with one of his lay deacons on the near side of the chancel screen. “A sacrament to buy and sell, if you know the right price.”

  “And the right priest,” said Stephen bitterly. He thought about the armorer’s knowledge, and the consequences of the priest’s indiscretion. If confession was not to be kept sacrosanct, how could he expect sanctuary to protect him? Was he safe any longer within the walls of All Hallows Staining? Would he be turned over to the city sheriffs or the watchmen outside, to be carted through the streets to Newgate and then the gibbet? Why, there was nothing now between his neck and a hanging but the word of a false priest! He began to doubt the wisdom of Hawisia Stone’s bringing him here, and to wonder where he might find a true measure of protection against the law’s probing finger.

  “The Tower, Stephen,” said Snell, as if a confessor himself, discerning his inmost thoughts, teasing out his fears. “Come with me. You have no real choice.”

  “I will abjure the realm,” said Stephen grandly. “Father Martin says I may do so in lieu of a trial. All it requires is a writ from the king’s coroner, and I shall be free to leave England of my own will and under my own power.”

  “What power?” Snell rejoined, almost jovially. “A naïve young fellow like you cannot survive abjuring the realm. As soon as you set foot outside the walls you would be attacked and dragged to your death by the family of that girl you shot. And where would you go, Marsh? Wales? Dublin? France, where you would be interrogated and tortured before meeting your end? Better to die now, on the rope of a skilled hangman.”

  Stephen, jellied in his legs, shuffled to the far corner of the chapel and leaned on the splintered altar, a width of scorched oak. He looked back at Snell. “And the Tower can offer protection?”

  “Of a fashion,” he said. “At least your natural talents would be employed to the benefit of the realm, even as the disposition of your case is sorted.”

  “Yet I will be considered a fugitive, to be hung on sight.”

  “As you are now,” he countered. “Consider your situation, Marsh. Here at Staining you are in constant jeopardy, and I cannot see this parish harboring for long a man who has done what you’ve done. But in the liberties of the Tower you would be safe. Protected. The justices and serjeants won’t dare pursue you there. Why, there are men within the compound who haven’t stepped outside those walls in twenty, thirty years. Criminals, slaves, deserters. Not that you would be counted among their number,” he added hastily. “But it will give a space of time to let this affair work itself out. Once you are installed in our foundries, before our own forges and anvils, doing what you do so well, why, all this will come to seem like a night terror.”

  “The Tower, then,” Stephen said, wishing he could discern a ray of hope in the armorer’s words. “I shall send word to Mistress Stone, then there will be the—”

  “No need for that. The less she knows about your whereabouts the better, hmm? Wouldn’t want to put the widow in jeopardy.”

  He wouldn’t, though the thought of leaving Staining without informing Hawisia was difficult to stomach. He felt a fresh and unfamiliar loyalty to his mistress, alone i
n the world yet willing to risk so much to save Stephen at his most miserable and endangered. In the moment, though, there seemed little he could do.

  “Time is short, Marsh,” said Snell briskly. “Move along.”

  They left the church together, Stephen carrying only a bundle of clothes tucked beneath his right arm. Snell led him down along the walls through the eastern edge of London, a walk that Stephen took in some fear, looking out all the while for the sheriff’s men. They reached the barbican without incident, however, and Stephen took a last glimpse of the river to his right. As he paced across the span over the moat Stephen felt as if he were walking through a gate of purgatory itself, down into an infernal machine of war, and such sensations of doom were only heightened once he found himself in the yard and the armorer’s precincts, where at least a dozen masons were being directed in the construction of several new kilns and furnaces along the north wall. The air was choked with ash and burning lime, grimy smiths at the forges hammering tangs, drawing out blades, folding steel upon steel, the din of metal ringing from every surface.

  Snell placed a hand between his shoulders. “Your serpent guns are just the thing, Marsh. My own master is quite pleased with them, you know.”

  “Is he?” said Stephen, his head spinning with the sudden flattery.

  “Those two you left here last time? They have done good work already, and now we need more. One hundred of your snakes, Marsh. Make them strong in barrel and true in aim, whether forged or founded I don’t much care, but with this firing device of your invention affixed to each one. I have already conscripted four of the cleverer smiths to work under you and hasten the process along, and you’ll have the near foundry to yourself. Consider yourself master here, Stephen. Recover your pride, straighten your spine, and act accordingly. You may test the guns just there, against the wall.” He pointed to the place where the noble beast had died. “If you do my bidding and accomplish this task, your crime may well be forgotten, or at the least forgiven.”