A Burnable Book

‘Didn’t help to have the whole thing played by those student hoodlums the other night. For days I’ve heard clusters of barristers bragging on the affair: the first moot ever busted up by the serjeants! The mayor’s courts at the Guildhall are buzzing with it, then I come out here and the murder and its mooting are the talk of Westminster.’

There did seem to be a certain thickness in the air, several animated conversations nearby clearly occupied with more than the usual legal matter. Michael de la Pole, whom I had last seen at La Neyte, stood in the middle of one of them. The chancellor gave me a slight nod when I caught his eye. ‘Has the killer been apprehended?’ I asked Strode.

‘No, nor the victim’s identity discovered. No name, no associates, no claimant to her body.’ His voice lowered to a near-whisper. ‘She was last seen alive at La Neyte. Now it’s rumoured she was an agent of Valois.’

‘A spy? Here in England?’ I thought back to that moment with Tugg at Newgate, which was supposedly filled with French spies.

‘So it seems.’

‘Why do they think she’s French?’

He shrugged. ‘Her clothing, for one. And those who heard her speak claimed her accent smacked of Provence. Avignon, perhaps.’ A word with grim associations: the schism of the church, a holy empire divided against itself, and France’s ally against the true pope in Rome.

Our circles had brought us through each arcade twice, and we now approached the opened doors to the north porch, looking out on the yard. Strode gazed across the line of tents pitched along the hedges. ‘War’s coming, John. You can see it in the king’s face. All this business with the Scots, the truce nearly at an end.’ The royal delegation had recently left for negotiations to extend the peace, though no one expected anything to come of them. ‘Imagine a French fleet, an invasion force, pulling its way up the Thames.’ He looked over the shapeless mound of his nose and across the space. ‘Ten thousand Frenchmen set on revenging their countrymen starved at Calais, or slaughtered at Crécy. What would such a host do to Westminster, to our children?’ He leaned over a balustrade, elbows on the stone. ‘To have their spies infiltrate London itself? Unthinkable.’

I needed more. ‘And the girl?’

Strode shrugged his heavy shoulders. ‘At La Neyte she was flitting from room to room, admired but unremarked. She was there a whole day, pretending to be a lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Bethune, one of Gaunt’s guests. Bethune and the countess had already left for Kenilworth, you see, so no one was there to discredit her. And her story was unassailable. She stayed behind, she told everyone who asked, in order to procure a particular variety of Flemish cloth desired by the countess. At last, by asking the right questions of the right people, the girl found what she was looking for. She stole it and fled, presumably to hand it over to another spy. No one knows whether she succeeded.’ He licked his lips. ‘Then she was killed.’

‘In the Moorfields.’

‘Yes.’

‘Who found her body?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who examined it, attempted an identification?’

His nostrils flared. ‘Tyle.’ The coroner of London, Thomas Tyle, a man Strode had long despised. Lazy, incompetent, sloppy in his record-keeping, Tyle was an intimate of the king’s chamberlain, and let everyone within hearing know it at every opportunity.

‘Strange,’ I said into the clamour of starlings angling toward the riverbank. ‘A murder in the Moorfields? That’s outside the walls. Not Tyle’s jurisdiction.’ Ralph knew this as well as I did, and as I studied his face I could tell the irregularity had been gnawing at him.

He looked at me. ‘Nor Tyle’s usual practice, to show up and do his actual job.’

‘True.’ In cases of unnatural deaths, it was the subcoroner who nearly always performed the inquest. Why, then, had Tyle himself taken over the scene? I posed a final question, trying to keep my tone light. ‘And what did our French beauty steal out from under Lancaster’s nose?’ Katherine Swynford had already told me, but I wanted to test Strode’s knowledge.

He gazed through the cloud of starlings, black slashes against the sky. ‘A book.’

TEN (#ulink_dacfe123-ab4c-5fa4-9bbd-7d170c707234)

Broad Street, Ward of Broad Street

‘A nun and a maud, and here we are together again.’

Millicent looked at her sister, huddled in the darkness. Agnes had stayed in the Cornhull house that morning while Millicent went out to sell the bracelet her sister had found on the body in the Moorfields. The tiny piece had fetched a few shillings on Silver Street, enough to keep them fed for a week or two, though what they would do after that was a mystery. She sighed. ‘I was hardly a nun, Agnes.’

‘Well, you lived among them out at St Leonard’s Bromley. Got their speech, learned to read like a master.’

‘Not quite,’ said Millicent. ‘But I darned their robes, smoothed their wimples.’ She stared at the book, wondering at the peculiar motivations of its maker. ‘Then Sir Humphrey ap-Roger came along, and they put me out as a concubine.’

‘Girl who lives as a nun is a nun, leastwise in my book. Not that this is my book now, by the cross.’

Millicent had just struggled through a second reading of this dark work: a difficult book, filled with words and turns of phrase the Bromley sisters had never taught her. An educated laity is our order’s highest aspiration, Millicent, Prioress Isabel had reminded her many times. To know that God’s teachings are well water to the thirstful – this is one of the central works of our contemplative life. Millicent had cut her teeth on the devotional texts made available to her by the Bromley sisters, though she had never read anything like this. The verse was bumpy, like her heartbeat, with repeated letters throughout and four hammering thumps to each line. Like a minstrel’s romance, sung in the halls of lords.

The bone that he breaketh be baleful of harm,

Nor treachery’s toll with treason within …

A woman with womb that woes him to wander

For love of his lemman, his life worth a leaf …

Such lines, as she murmured them to her sister, carried dire threats, each one of them tuned to the fate of an English king. Yet much of the work remained obscure, its lines heavy with symbols she couldn’t decipher. Hawks, swords, thistles, and much else.

‘So what’s it all mean, Mil?’

Millicent thought for a while. ‘Twelve prophecies, and I think I’ve undressed most of them. From the songs the minstrels sing, the plays they put on at Bromley Manor, St Paul’s, everywhere.’ The sisters knew these stories well, as did all Londoners: lays of olden kings, ballads of Harold and William the Conqueror, the story of the Lionheart, dying in his mother’s arms. ‘Twelve kings of England, Ag, all dead in the very way the minstrels say they went. Age, battle, disease, a poker in the arse.’

‘Kings can die a lot of ways, eh?’ Agnes shook her head.

‘The great question, though, is, what will be the next way?’ Millicent found the passage on the final pages that most concerned her: twelve lines of verse, speaking with a terrifying force of her own moment.

Agnes looked confused, so Millicent read through several of the prophecies and glossed along the way. ‘I hardly know all our kings, Ag, but as for the ones I do know, the book seems to have it about right. And now we have here, in these last lines, the thirteenth prophecy.’

‘The thirteenth prophecy?’

‘The death of King Richard himself.’ Millicent recited the most baleful passage in the work.

‘At Prince of Plums shall prelate oppose

A faun of three feathers with flaunting of fur,

Long castle will collar and cast out the core,

His reign to fall ruin, mors regis to roar.

By bank of a bishop shall butchers abide,

To nest, by God’s name, with knives in hand,

Then springen in service at spiritus sung.

In palace of prelate with pearls all appointed,

By kingmaker’s cunning a king to unking,

A magnate whose majesty mingles with mort.