The Invention of Fire: A Novel

by Bruce Holsinger

  “Who’s there?” she called out weakly. Floorboards moaned, a shadow fell across the doorway, and Stephen Marsh appeared at the end of the gallery. His mouth gaped. He stared at her. Hawisia was too gone with pain in that moment to think about what his presence at Stone’s might mean. She could scarcely speak.

  “Do not come within, Stephen,” she said, shaking her head and showing him a palm. “Birthing time. You must leave me.” He wouldn’t dare violate her privity, would he? He looked more frightened than she was as he stood there dumbly, the mute sheepdog. He needed a task.

  “Stephen,” she said between heavy breaths. “Stephen, you must run to Coleman Way and fetch Rose Lipton.”

  “The midwife,” he said, shocked from his daze.

  “Aye. Fetch her if you will.” She huddled herself into another seizing, though not too soon to see his face brighten with the assignment. He was gone, and absent for three more of the clutching pains before he returned. Alone.

  She lay on her side and glared up at him. He gaped down at her writhing form. He stayed near the bedchamber door, half in, half out. “Mistress Lipton wasn’t at home,” he said timidly. “Gone to the Riding, I suspect, with all the rest.”

  “Very well,” she said, girding herself for the shame of it. “You will have to—ohh!” The sharpest seizing yet. It spun her thoughts around, shot through from toes to skull.

  “Are you—can I—” He looked on, his face a mask of confusion and boyish fear.

  “Stephen,” she gasped. “Stephen, you must help me. You must—you must birth this babe.”

  He backed into the gallery, his hands up, his eyes round as shields. “Oh I could not do that, mistress. Not—not that.”

  Not that? Her fury rose above the pain. Not that. As if lifting her sodden dress and eyeing up her parts would put him in any worse state than he already was. She looked into his shifting eyes, thought of his strange mind, how it worked, how it tested things. Not the devil’s mind, as Robert would jest. Yet not fully human either, was Stephen Marsh. He saw everything in the world as part of his craft. Hawisia, in a moment of clarity in the midst of her pain, saw herself as she needed Stephen Marsh to see her.

  A machine.

  She seized up, yet even through the agony she forced the needful words together.

  “Stephen,” she gasped when the worst of it had passed. “Stephen, this is a matter of mechanics, this body you see. Think it as one of your devices, your snakes or your guns or your hinges. Bone, muscle, flesh, grease. Moving parts, all of them. Some fit, some not. Some work as they should, some not.” She suffered through another seizing, her eyes blurring with the sweat.

  “Yet the machine—the contrivance is meant to work, Stephen. God—God Himself means it to work, and God means a child to slip through. Now make it work, by God’s damned bones!” She cursed through the first moments of the next seizing, and she swam in a deep and throttling pain, the longest yet. Something shifted inside her with this one; she felt an opening in her inmost parts, a need to push the damned thing out, and yet it could be too early, the babe could be twisted or choked or broken and then what would she do?

  When the spasm passed, Stephen Marsh was at the foot of the bed. He had moved her onto her back somehow. His hands were on her knees, and his face had changed. The apprehension and boyish fear were gone, replaced by the confidence of the artisan. A smith at his forge, a founder at his mold. A craftsman, curious, quick, up for a new challenge. He told her to move to her hands and knees, then to her elbows and knees, and she did, exposing her nether world to him, queynt and arse and all, without a mind to modesty.

  What Hawisia would remember most clearly from the hour that followed was the reassuring steadiness of Stephen’s voice, the calm questions and observations as he manipulated her inner and outer flesh with the practiced adeptness of a born surgeon.

  You’ll be wanting to push. But not yet, mind. Circle’s opening up but needs a mite ’nother inch.

  Digging in your back, you say? Aye, makes sense, as the thing’s turned about, isn’t it.

  Oil’s what we need, just there, and there.

  Ah, the feet. All ten toes, Hawisia, not to fear. The thing needs a twist about now.

  So it went, for over an hour more; he told her when it was done. At the hazy end of it she was on her back, clutching a slimed, screaming thing at her breast. A daughter. Robert Stone’s living daughter, and her own. There were a few voices from the yard now, the youthful calls of the apprentices returned from the Riding.

  Hawisia looked at Stephen, who sat at a chair by her bed. He had been with her for nearly half that day, his voice in her ears, his hands within her privity, pulling life from her womb.

  “You did well, Stephen Marsh.”

  His eyes moistened. Hawisia handed him the sleeping babe. Stephen held the girl, smelled her swaddled head.

  Stephen sat with the babe all that day as the servants and apprentices and guildsmen drifted back to the foundry, murmuring among themselves down in the yard and the shop, worrying over the presence of Stephen Marsh back at Stone’s, wondering when the beadle or constable would come for him.

  At the stroke of four Rose Lipton appeared in the gallery. Stephen had gone out to the barn, his presence known only to the workers of the foundry. To Hawisia the midwife looked angry that the babe was alive. Rose’s hands were at her hips, her lips tightly pursed as she took in the sight of this widow lying abed, a new mother without her aid.

  Rose inspected the infant, then turned to Hawisia’s nether parts. “Quite a tear down there,” she said, sounding pleased as she fingered it roughly. “Don’t expect it to heal, and you’ll want to watch for fever, poor dear.”

  “I shall.”

  “She was swift out of your womb as well,” said Rose with a cluck. “And as we midwives will say, quick to life, quick to death. My own birthings were slow affairs, even the seventh!”

  “She came legs first. Like a mallet with a big head,” said Hawisia, smelling her sweet child, and silently thanking God a smith was there to take the handle.

  Chapter 49

  THE WARD WAS LIT UP with the talk in those first days after the Riding, every mouth a lantern burning with news and slander. Hawisia half listened as she went about her work in the foundry, knowing the truth was more wondrous than all the lies being whispered about the foiled massacre at the city gate. Stephen had told her what he’d done, and through the week of Hallowtide she kept him hidden in the ’prentice barn, the whole of Stone’s sworn to a secrecy all warily embraced. Stephen himself seemed as calm and content as a fugitive killer could be, warming touchingly to her new daughter, whose visits to the barn fast became part of the infant’s daily routine.

  Over a week passed before Hawisia learned what was to become of Stephen, and thus herself and the foundry. The first sign came from Mathias Poppe, the beadle who had sought out Stephen for questioning about the girl’s death in the woods. He arrived at Stone’s on the Thursday, asking after Stephen.

  “Haven’t seen his face in over a fortnight, Master Poppe,” she said, smoothing her hand over the small back of her child. “Not since he left sanctuary at St. Mary’s.”

  He could tell she was lying, Hawisia suspected, though he let it pass, acting satisfied with her denial. She promised to let him know the moment Stephen Marsh appeared at the foundry.

  The next visitors, less benevolent, were liveried men of the Tower wardrobe. She found the two of them slinking about the shop on the Friday when she returned from the smithy. Long knives at their sides, scowls on their hardened faces.

  “Where is he?” the first one asked her, without so much as a word of greeting.

  “Who?” she said, widening her eyes.

  “You know well enough,” said the second. He spat on the rushes.

  Her eyes went to the ugly spurt, back to him. “You’ll be leaving my shop now, the both of you.”

  “That’s what you think, is it, my pretty mother?”

  “And we
as well,” said a voice. Hawisia turned to see three burly workers at the yard door, each of them trained up in the craft by Robert Stone and Stephen Marsh, and all bearing lengths of iron in their hands. Two apprentices stood behind them, looking young, frightened, but passing brave.

  With the swords it wouldn’t be an even fight, nor a long one, but it could be messy. The Tower men knew it. They left the foundry spitting oaths. “We’ll be back for him, widow. You can wager on it. We’ll be back.”

  The next visitor arrived the following morning. He appeared not at the foundry but at the house, knocking on the street door and asking for Hawisia by name. A servant came to her in the shop. She went through to the hall, where the man had been asked to wait for the mistress.

  She saw John Gower standing by the glazed window in front, the Stone hours in his hand, opened to a thumb-rubbed painting of the Virgin and Child. She had not noted his height at his last visit. He was taller than her husband had been and a sight older, and though his hair had greyed he was not frail in any way. On his head he wore a plain and unfashionable cap of banded wool, something you might see on a middling mercer, and when he turned to her the tassels bounced on either side of his eyes.

  There was something missing in those eyes. Not kindness, as his look was clear and open. Unfocused and vague, his eyes wandered left and right before settling on her, then crinkling at the sides, lifted by a good-hearted smile.

  “Mistress Stone,” he said. “I am here about Stephen Marsh.”

  “You and half of London alike, it seems,” she said, leaning her broad hips against the central table, trying to sound hard. “What is it you want with me?”

  “Merely to give you this.” He held out a parchment. She took it from him, not daring to hope, though she was unable to read the clerical hand when she unfurled the thing. From it dangled a wax seal pendant on a strip of parchment tied to the main body of the document.

  “It is a pardon, Mistress Heath,” he said.

  She stared at it.

  “It pardons your man Stephen Marsh in the death of Eleanor Baxter of Ware. King Richard declares the matter an unfortunate accident, and proclaims the inestimable value of Marsh’s service to the realm as adequate recompense for the death. I can translate the wording for you if you like.”

  “Please,” she said, because she could find nothing else to say. She gave it back to him.

  He took out an odd instrument of glass and lead, unfolded it, and set it on his nose. “It begins, ‘Know all present and to come that I, Richard, king by the grace of God, in the tenth year of my reign, do grant unto Stephen Marsh, founder and smith of Aldgate Ward in the parish of St. Mary’s, full and complete pardon . . .’”

  He went on, and though she lost the trail of his words she understood where they led. When Gower had finished she said, “Stephen hasn’t been taken in yet, nor is there an indictment for murder.”

  “Nor will there be,” said Gower. “The royal pardon may come before arrest, after conviction, at the gallows—anywhere His Royal Highness wishes it to come. King Richard seals many dozens of them every month. This one required little persuasion.”

  Hawisia shook her head, staring at the magic writing on the parchment. “A great power for a man to wield, even a king,” she mused.

  “I believe the king’s power should best be used according to law,” he said stiffly, “and to speak truthfully, I have difficulty with the royal prerogative if exercised too freely. Yet there are certain circumstances in which the law must yield to the pardon and pity of the king. This is one of them.”

  “You are King Richard’s agent, then?”

  He smiled. “Hardly, Mistress Stone.”

  “Then how is it that you speak with his voice?”

  He considered his response. “The royal court is a diverse hive. Not all who labor there are unthinking drones. There are good men within those high walls, men who can be made or paid to listen to intercessors.”

  “You were the intercessor? For our Stephen?”

  “A friend of mine was happy to intercede, on my word.”

  “But why?”

  “I learned of Marsh’s work at firsthand. Once in Calais, then again during Exton’s Riding.”

  “You were there.”

  “I was.”

  “At the gate?”

  “Yes, mistress.” He hesitated. “I have fired similar handgonnes myself. I know what Stephen must have done, and believe I know how he did it. He saved innumerable lives, Mistress Stone. Important lives. Now he must work to preserve his own.”

  “He is in danger?”

  “I don’t know,” Gower confessed. “A royal pardon promises that Stephen will not die at the hands of the king, hung on a common gibbet. As for William Snell and the Tower guard . . . that I cannot say. With the death of Edmund Rune the king’s armorer has escaped penalty. There is no good evidence against him, only rumor, and the crown is content with laying all of this on the chancellor’s deceased counselor. Things will be cleaner that way, I suppose,” he mused. “But Stephen Marsh will end this affair with a new and powerful enemy.”

  “At all rates,” said Hawisia. To her the names and offices meant nothing, and she wished to hear no more about them. She reached out to press her hands to his. “God be thanked for this, and for you, Master Gower.”

  He left Stone’s without laying those peculiar eyes on Stephen Marsh, the man whose pardon he had somehow conjured from the king’s chancery. When he had gone Hawisia went out to the ’prentice barn and hollered for him. He looked fearful when he emerged, as if expecting arrest, and squinted in the unfamiliar light.

  She handed him the pardon. He looked at it and handled it as delicately as he did her daughter. He fingered the king’s seals, his fingertips whispering along the parchment. He could read the thing no better than she could, though she could tell he knew what it promised.

  “But how—?”

  “A mystery,” she said. “One we should accept as a sign of God’s grace, and a seal of his charity. Now we must live and work for the new moment we’ve been given.”

  “Aye, Mistress Stone.”

  “And in this moment, we have four bells to fashion. Two for the Charterhouse, one for All Hallows-on-the-Wall, and another for the east belfry at St. Alfege. You are ready for a return to your work, Stephen?”

  “I am,” he said, his voice gaining in confidence. “And to earn your trust.”

  “Oh, you have it, Stephen Marsh,” she said, walking within to get her daughter. “You have it in full.”

  Later she watched him oversee the first pour. Two cautious apprentices, aproned and gloved, tipped out the bronze ore, a cauldron of fire flowing into the clay molds, hissing through the wax. Like pouring out the sun, and the sun brings death but life as well, as Hawisia Stone saw it. Someday, perhaps, Stephen Marsh might see it, too.

  Chapter 50

  FOR A MOMENT, at least, it seemed I had Chaucer’s unalloyed attention. I read. He listened.

  “For Love is blind and may not see;

  Therefore may we no certainty

  Set upon his foul judgment,

  But as the wheel about doth wend

  He gives his small grace undeserved;

  And from that man who has him served

  Full oft he taketh all his fold,

  As cutpurse stealeth groat and gold.

  Yet nonetheless there is no man

  In all this world who may withstand

  His wrath. Now may we hope full fair

  To witness peace and end of war,

  And seek for remedy of Love

  Where saints doth tread, our souls to move.”

  I stopped there. The lines came from a long lover’s confession I had been writing for some months, inspired by a royal encounter on the river the year before. During my short ride out to Greenwich that morning I had recited the lines to myself with a modest pride in my making, though now that I sat with Chaucer in his hearth-warmed hall my couplets sounded plain and emp
ty to my ear. A cold night, bleak verse, weak ale: I found myself wishing I had remained in Southwark.

  Chaucer liked to listen with his eyes closed, his forehead on a palm. At the close of the final couplet he turned and looked at me. “Quite a beautiful passage, John. The woe of witnessing is a powerful theme, one too often neglected in our versifying. Yet so many of our earthly crafts rely on witnesses and their testimony. Lawyers, chroniclers, clerks—”

  “Justices of the peace.”

  His lips formed a smile that quickly faded. He looked away. “There was a witness in the woods.”

  “Oh?” I had known there was something Chaucer wanted to tell me about the massacre, though I hardly thought to hope for a firsthand account. We had spoken already about the attack at the city gate, my encounter with Rune, the crown’s discreet dealings with Snell, the pardon for Stephen Marsh, arranged through one of Chaucer’s old associates now in the office of the privy seal. Yet Chaucer, I could tell, had been keeping something back, waiting for the right moment. Now it had come.

  “You met him, in fact,” he said.

  I thought about our trying days in Kent, the hollow eyes of a gaunt country reeve. “Tom Dallid?”

  “The very one.”

  “Did Rune’s men ask him along? Order him?”

  “No, nor did they discover his presence. After they emptied the gaol he started to feel wretched about it, said he knew it was a foul business. He followed the prisoners and soldiers at a distance, to the edge of the woods, then left his horse, went after them, and concealed himself near the clearing. He saw it all unfold.”

  I remembered Dallid’s face, the impression of sullen fear the man had left. “Rune said it was a test, of both men and guns.”

  “It was.”

  “How did it work?” Rune died before he had a chance to tell me. Despite myself I felt a lingering curiosity about the details of the mass killing that had started all of this.