The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  Our first destination was Lintner, the Earl of Suffolk’s large house less than a quarter mile up the Strand from Lancaster’s ruined palace. I decided to avoid the house’s wharf and enter discreetly from the street side, as the servants did, and pay a guard or attendant to announce my visit to the earl himself. We neared the house’s street wall, currently the site of a traveler’s inn alongside a furrier’s shop. I asked one of the guards to wait there with Jack for my return from within. With the other guard behind me I entered the narrow passage between the inn and the furrier’s shop, and soon was at the rear postern. Two men wearing the livery of the Tower stood guard. They leaned on pikes and were otherwise armed with long knives and longer swords. One of them recognized the mayor’s man.

  “Well now,” he said to the other. “A Guildhall boy. What say you for yourself, Tilden?”

  My guard said nothing, keeping his chin up and his eyes averted.

  The Tower man lifted his pike, tapped it on the stones at his feet. “What say you for yourself, Tilden?” He took a step toward us. Tilden’s hand went to his short sword.

  “None of this, my good men,” I said, stepping between them. “There is enough hatred between the Tower and the Guildhall to feed everyone without your help.” I looked at the Tower guard, held up a quarter noble. “I seek an audience with the chancellor.”

  “The chancellor?” he scoffed. “There’s no chancellor within these walls that I know of. Merely an earl.”

  “The earl, then,” I said.

  “Ah, the earl.”

  “Aye the earl, you sodden jake,” muttered my guard. The second Tower man now stepped up.

  The postern door swung open. “Enough!” The speaker was John Staines, the steward of Lintner, a level-headed man. He regarded me closely. “Gower,” he said.

  “Staines. I’d like to speak with him, if it’s possible.” I nodded toward the house. “And soon.”

  The Tower man still had not taken my coin. Staines did. “Come along,” he said, stepping aside and letting us into the earl’s garden. “You are his lordship’s only caller today.” The door closed behind us, and I asked the city guard to remain there until I returned.

  Staines, surprising me, put a hand on my arm as we stood within the gate. “I am glad you are here, Gower. His lordship finds himself suddenly unwelcome within his customary circles. He feels himself disgraced.”

  “Only in his own eyes,” I said to the steward. “His reputation will surely outweigh these immediate troubles.”

  “Surely.” He sounded skeptical.

  “Is Edmund Rune about?” I asked, testing him.

  Staines shook his head. “He left some time ago. He is the only one those Tower men will let in or out of Lintner, and now he is about on business for his lordship. We would like to get the earl out of London, today if we can. Rune is hoping the Riding will provide some distraction. He is making arrangements now.”

  In his distress Staines had said too much, and his mouth clapped shut. I felt a rush of unease, a sour taste in my throat. The steward led me through the garden and into the grand house, a series of wide and elegant rooms that had been furnished and decorated over many years of the earl’s service to the crown. Lavish tapestries hanging from every third wall, others painted in scenes of civic and religious splendor, with particolored molding framing the doorways, and carved figures entwined among the foliated lintels. The chapel, which we passed on our way to the hall, shone like a box of jewels, chill air breathing from the depths, a haze of mingled hues glowing out from the windows on the east end.

  Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, sat on an oaken chair above a balustrade off the house’s summer hall. When Staines announced me he remained still in his seat, giving the slightest nod to acknowledge my arrival.

  “My lord,” I said softly to his back. He moved just slightly, sniffed. “I am truly sorry for your plight, my lord.”

  “Yes.” He spoke without emotion. “Exiled from Westminster, mere weeks after my very voice opened Parliament. Now I am prisoner in my own home, nor will I be permitted to ride along for Exton’s procession this morning. Rune has enjoined me not to attend, nor to dignify the opposing lords with my presence, though I suspect Gloucester and his men have prohibited it in any case. A hanging will be next.”

  “Not so, your lordship,” I said, reassuring him even as my alarm increased. “Men will see reason in time, and after all the king is your staunch ally.”

  “What a warm comfort, that thought.” He shifted his body so that his side was to me, and I could see his smirking lips. The earl’s face, haggard and sagging, had greyed in the weeks since I saw him last. “Old King Edward, now there was an ally. Reigned for fifty years, and never once did his support for his counselor waver. His grandson has proven more . . . variable, shall we say. I try to advise him wisely, help him act in the realm’s best interests over his own. Yet my words run like melted wax out of his royal ear.”

  “Though surely His Highness values your safety and wisdom,” I said, trying to mask my rising impatience. “Has he summoned you to an audience since the bill of impeachment was raised?”

  He shook his head sadly. “He was at Eltham to receive Gloucester and the others, all demanding my head. Then Richard rode up here to Westminster at Gloucester’s bidding to dismiss me and the treasurer. He remains there now, awaiting Exton, though without his most loyal counselor.”

  “And your own counselor?” I ventured.

  He sighed. “A good man.”

  “Where has Rune gone, your lordship?”

  The earl gave a melancholy shrug. “He makes plans for my removal from Lintner. Edmund assures me this deposition is temporary, that we will reassume our high position in a matter of days. When the smoke clears, he says.”

  We, I noted with a chill, and almost smelled the smoke. “Has he said how soon?”

  “More or less.”

  “Tell me his exact words to you, my lord. They are urgently important.”

  Finally the earl turned his head to regard me full-on. He frowned. “He said to me, ‘If you are not restored to the chancellorship by the close of Hallowtide, your lordship, I will cast myself from the highest parapet in Westminster.’ Now there’s an ardent counselor, eh, Gower? He’d give his life just to make his lord believe in himself again. And perhaps Edmund’s staunch hope will win the day after all.” As he laughed his eyes flashed with their old hale gleam, and for a moment I too wanted to credit Rune’s reckless prediction, which he had surely uttered to his lord with all the confidence of a cornered snake.

  “Yes, your lordship,” I said instead. “Perhaps it will.”

  The earl turned from me. By the close of Hallowtide, Edmund Rune had proclaimed. All Hallows’ was now three days away, with the completion of All Hallowtide in four. What would it take, I thought with a cold dread, to reinstate a deposed chancellor in the space of merely four days?

  A distant king, one able to wash his hands of the matter.

  A decapitated Parliament, frightened enough to remove the new chancellor and restore Michael de la Pole to his position.

  Above all it would require a pile of dead nobles. Gloucester, Arundel, Warwick, perhaps Mowbray: the magnates arrayed against Michael de la Pole and King Richard at Westminster. Four assassinations, all in the coming days.

  Or one massacre.

  I left the summer hall briskly, making my way to the house’s back garden and exiting with Jack and the mayor’s guards onto the Strand. As the alley door closed behind us I saw a familiar figure approaching from the direction of Fleet Street. It was Edmund Rune.

  His head was down, his brow furrowed in thought. Grabbing Jack roughly by his arm, I turned away and pretended to examine some pelts displayed by the furrier’s door.

  Jack, however, was frozen in place, staring at Rune as the earl’s counselor approached us.

  “Jack,” I whispered, gesturing for the guards to obstruct his view up the street. They started to move. “Not now, Jack.�
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  He would not listen. The boy’s face had gone white, and as Rune neared the gate Jack’s arm rose slowly, his finger pointing unmistakably at Rune’s face.

  “Master Gower, that’s—”

  I moved forward and clapped a hand over the boy’s mouth. I forced his arm down to his side, spinning him away just as Rune reached the gate.

  Rune saw me. His mouth gaped.

  “Gower,” he said, recovering with a feigned smile. The guards stepped aside as Rune paused with the gate door open. “What brings you to the earl’s—”

  Then he saw Jack, peeking out from beneath my arm. Rune’s eyes widened, then slowly rose to meet my own. His lips quivered before curling up into the slightest of smiles.

  TataTOOM-taTOOM-taTOOM. The clarion trumpets of the city heralds echoed distantly from the walls, enlivening the air around us. I looked down Fleet Street, then back at Rune. His eyes, a cold and metal grey, flickered with pride. He blinked.

  “You are too late, Gower.”

  The door closed behind him, and he was gone.

  Chapter 44

  THE PAIN STARTS AS a dream. Blood, a great puddle of it, spreads across a tiled floor. An unseen woman bends over the flowing mass. She holds a heavy rag in her hands. She goes to her knees. The rag moves across the crimson pool, sucking the puddle up in places, broadening it in others. Each time the rag is soaked through, the woman’s hands lift and squeeze the saturated cloth. The blood leaves the rag in short, rhythmic bursts at first, then there is one long gush that thickens and spreads the puddle and the floor becomes a pond, slick and messed with wet. Now the blood is water, a blooming gush between her legs. And the rag, Hawisia realized on waking, was her own flesh.

  Her middle seized up for a moment, then released her. The next thing she felt was the wetness, a sensation of spreading and flux. Then another wrack of pain as her insides twisted first one way, then the other. It seemed as if everything within her was tugging at everything else. The pain spread to her back, flared there, girdled her middle, tightened, and finally released.

  She staggered to her feet, bent over, sucking breath, shocked at how quickly it was all happening. “Bella!” She called for her servant. “Bella!” It was dawn. The girl should have been awake.

  She shook her head, furious at her thickness. No, not dawn, not dawn. She’d already been awake for an hour at the least before going up for a small nap in the midmorning—

  Another seizing. She grunted through the pain, writhed against the wall, sank to the floor. When her cheek touched the rough rushes she knew she was still alive.

  The seizing passed. She half stood and threw open the shutter onto the yard. She wanted a guildsman, an apprentice, a yard boy, someone to run for Rose Lipton.

  Empty. Where was everyone? Of all the times to—

  She remembered. Nicholas Exton, the new lord mayor, the Riding to Westminster and the throne of King Richard. All of London would be lined up around the Guildhall Yard and along Cheapside.

  And all of London meant all of Stone’s foundry. Four apprentices, two guildsmen, two house servants, two yard workers, ten in all, not counting Stephen Marsh and herself, not a one of them about but Hawisia. She listened.

  The neighing of an old goat, a crow’s random caw. Hardly a sound in all the parish. Only a distant human clamor from the direction of St. Paul’s and the Guildhall. But not up here, in the far corner of the ward. Here all was silence. And silence, on that day, meant death.

  She endured the next seizure with Rose Lipton’s child-proud face at the front of her mind, the focus of her pain and hate. The hurt ripped her middle and left her gasping for breath.

  There was no stool for the birthing. Merely a straw pallet, and herself. Hawisia gritted her teeth, pushed herself up, and sprawled on the bed just as the next seizing shook her from within.

  Chapter 45

  HIS GUNS AND HIS SNAKES, all of them, were now being doled out among this band of thirty men in the Tower yard. Stephen watched from afar as each of the infantrymen received three of his creations, bundled in cloth and slung over a shoulder for the march to their destination, wherever that might be. He did not recognize this company from his time within the walls. They were not Tower men, nor did they show any lord’s livery on their arms or chests, neither bends nor badges. The men were ranked in no particular order he could see, though what they lacked in discipline they made up in brashness and spit. Hard, seasoned men, with little patience for lordly niceties or royal pomp.

  Another man had joined Snell at the foot of the Wardrobe Tower, where they stood before the assembly of soldiers. He was tall, brown-haired and bearded, with an air of command. The two seemed to be arguing about something; the subject could not be heard, though this must have been the same man he had overheard speaking with Snell the week before. After giving an order to the leader of the company, Snell and his companion walked toward the Lion Tower and the city gate. The company remained in the yard until the next bell sounded from the king’s chapel, then began walking toward the south part of the complex.

  Curious, Stephen followed the company around the ward wall and toward the water gates. Rather than leaving through the barbican up above, he saw, the thirty men would be passing out through the river doors beneath Becket’s Tower, presumably to board a waiting barge. Two Tower guards stood at the river gate, one on each side, pulling the door chains to allow the company to exit. The doors came slowly open, their inward swing forcing the members of the infantry company to move back until they were nearly abreast of Stephen himself.

  With a sudden thrill he realized that no one was watching him, and for good reason. The other armorers and smiths had been relieved that day in order to attend Exton’s Riding to Westminster, and the few of Snell’s regular men who might recognize Stephen were gone with them. Seeing an opportunity, he stepped briskly forward, his heart racing with the risk, and joined them as the doors came fully open, then shuffled with the men toward the river. Not a one of them paid him any mind, assuming he was leaving on Tower business. The guards, not watching for anyone to escape, failed to spot him among their number.

  No waiting barge on the water. Instead the company took a sharp right turn and processed along the narrow passage above the moat fosses. This walkway, a span of board and brace, would be cut or burned in the event of an attack from the river, and it made for a somewhat perilous route above the waters. Stephen remained with the men until they reached the quay east of the customhouse. He stopped there, looking back at the massive hulk of the Tower, scarcely believing the sight. The company of soldiers continued along the wharfage, nearly empty for the great civic occasion.

  Stephen watched them go. Then, in an almost dreamlike state, he walked toward the customhouse, then up to Thames Street. He paused at the corner to look about and behind. No one had followed him from the Tower, it seemed, and no watchmen had been looking for him to appear. He went north along Mark Lane and past All Hallows Staining, walking freely through the streets of London for what might surely be the last time given what he had done.

  The streets and lanes were empty, wondrously so. It happened just a few times a year, for processions by the mayor or the king, and on that day it suited his purpose well. At first the vacant parishes seemed a sinister thing, as if swept by pestilence, the high houses leaning together in malicious allegiance to choke off the sky. Then, as the length of Fenchurch Street opened up before him, he began to see the city in its full majesty, a great cathedral cleared of its sinners and their sins.

  Soon Stephen reached the lane before the foundry. The gate was latched from within but he knew its tricks. Now he was standing in the yard, looking about at his home. Yes, home. Stone’s was where he belonged, practicing the simplicity of his craft. He looked at the smithing shed, saw his favorite hammer hanging there, felt his palm and fingers curl around it.

  Tra-DOOM.

  A clap of thunder sounded from the west, followed by another. Strange, Stephen thought, for the sky is as
glowingly clear as the sweetest water. A cloud of birds rose as if carried on the distant roar of the crowd, though it might have been a moaning wind, and soon enough quiet settled over the foundry yard once more.

  Stephen breathed deeply, closed his eyes. The face of his master came to him then, the sight of a dead girl on the forest floor.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  The guns, at a distance of a mile. He opened his eyes. His litter of snakes, their faint explosions of fire and steel echoing along the canyons of London, bowled from Aldersgate along Cheap, past the Guildhall and Cornhill, and into the ears of the man who birthed them. His greatest invention, destroyed in a glorious waste of powder and flame. They will quiet soon, he thought, and we shall see what comes of it all.

  Then he heard a scream.

  Chapter 46

  AN ALE WAGON HAD CAPSIZED outside Ludgate, throwing full casks to burst open on the pavers, making of the forecourt a slippery mess, with a dozen men arguing loudly over cause and culpability. We went up to Newgate with no happier result, as the Riding would be coming through shortly and no admittances were permitted until after the procession. Finally, as I started to give up hope, the guards at Aldersgate allowed us entry. We quickly made our way past the Goldsmiths Hall, then around St. Lawrence Jewry, ending up on Cat Street, thick with Londoners waiting upon the new mayor. Exton had taken his oath outside the hall the day before, with Brembre handing over the sword and doing his part to reinforce the illusion of a transfer of power.