A Burnable Book

It was during the Michaelmas audit when one of our counters came to me with a messy sheaf of returns from Warwick’s manors near Coventry. It seemed a sheriff had been drastically undercounting the number of tenants in his hundred, with the resulting decline in revenues from that part of the earl’s demesne. I received permission from the remembrancer to take a discreet trip out to the Midlands to investigate. A careful comparison with the original returns soon showed that nothing was amiss in the earl’s record-keeping. The guilty party, I realized, had to be one of our own.

A few days of digging back in Westminster turned up Nicholas Symkok, an auditor responsible for the embezzlement of nearly twenty pounds from the king’s treasury over the last several years. Not only that, but Symkok had been using these enormous sums to purchase the flesh of the boy choristers singing for a prominent chantry attached to St Paul’s.

When I confronted Symkok he melted in front of me, begging me to say nothing to the chancellor or the remembrancers – asking me to save his life. I agreed, on one condition. Symkok, I told him, would hereafter provide me any and all unusual information that came across his desk: the shady business of earls, the questionable holdings of barons, the conniving of knights. He was to digest all of it, slipping me anything of possible interest. I paid him, though just enough to keep him dangling on my hook. For several years after I left the Exchequer, Symkok was my main conduit, giving me my first clear look at the private lives of the lords of the realm.

Those years taught me much about the peculiar arts of chantage, and it was from the steady flow of copied documents in Symkok’s hand that my small reserve of knowledge gradually expanded to encompass the vast store of information it would become. The arrangement seemed to crush Symkok, though, and he was never the same man. His ambitions stifled, he had spent the last twenty years floating through a series of clerical positions in the London and Westminster bureaucracies, all of them happily useful to my own purposes, if not to his career. At present he worked for the coroner of London, counting corpses.

I watched him until he felt my presence. He turned slowly on his bench. His eyes widened. ‘Gower.’

‘Hello, Nick.’

‘What brings you here?’

‘Death, of course.’

‘Whose?’

‘A girl’s.’

‘Lots of dead girls in London.’

‘Not like this one.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Medusa? Persephone?’ I said wryly.

‘Name unknown, then?’

‘To me it is.’

‘And when did she die?’

‘A week ago, perhaps more.’

‘How?’

‘Clubbed, or stabbed,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Murder, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did she die?’

‘The Moorfields.’

It was as if a flame blew out in his eyes. His face went flat, expressionless.

‘She was killed in the Moorfields, two weeks ago or more,’ I repeated. ‘I take it you know the circumstances?’

Symkok looked down at the ledger, his jaw rigid. ‘Can’t help you, Gower. Not on this one.’

A dog barked from Guildhall gate, a muffled sound that carried through the outer room. I let the silence linger. ‘But I think you can, Nick.’

He shifted on his bench. A vacant stare toward the shutters, and finally that reliable nod. From a cupboard at his feet he removed a wooden box and placed it on the table, then reached inside and withdrew a heavy roll. He spread it across the surface, the worn wooden handles gleaming with the polish of many hands, until he found the entry in question.

‘Be quick about it.’ He left the room, with the coroner’s roll opened on the table. In this document would be transcribed the original report, which was written out at the scene of the inquest. The roll, then, was the official copy of all the coroner’s investigations of unnatural deaths in London during the term of his appointment. A rich and morbid archive, I had found over the years. I read the inquest report.

Friday the eve of Lady Day, ao 8 Richard II, it happened that a certain woman, name unknown, lay dead of a death other than her rightful death beside a certain low wood building in the Moorfields, in the rent of the holy priory of St Bethlem. On hearing this, the coroner and the sheriffs proceeded thither, and having summoned good men of various wards – viz. James Barkelay, Will Wenters, Ralph Turk, Thomas de Redeford, mercer, Simon de Saint Johan of Cornhull, draper, Laurence Sely, Simon Pulham, skinner, John Lemman &c. – they diligently inquired how it happened. The jurors say that on some unknown day before said Friday, said woman was beaten in the face and struck on the head and bloodied, feloniously murdered by an unknown assailant. When asked who found the dead body, they say a certain Adam de Hoyne, carter, did raise the hue and cry upon discovering the lady in her natural state. Upon inquiring further they did learn that no witnesses were found to be present at the said woman’s death, nor did they find that anyone about knew her name, nor her station, nor her land of origin.

The corpse viewed &c.

Clothing appraised at 2s.

The surrounding inquests contained nothing out of the ordinary. I read the report again, memorizing certain details. The body had been discovered some days after the murder, it appeared. The woman had been beaten, her death apparently caused by a blow to the skull. She had been found ‘in her natural state’, or unclothed. No witnesses, no identifying belongings. The appraisal of her clothing was high, though not unusually so.

In the outer chamber Symkok was conferring with his fellow clerks. When I emerged he gestured me outside. We reached the middle of Cat Street before he opened his mouth. ‘So?’

‘Seems simple enough,’ I said.

‘Murder usually is, in my experience.’

‘Tyle himself held the inquest?’

He nodded.

‘Bit unusual.’

Symkok shrugged. ‘Though not unprecedented. When an earl dies on us, or a knight—’

‘A nameless girl, stripped to the smooth? Hardly an earl, Nick.’

He wouldn’t meet my gaze.

‘Tell me, Nick.’

He straightened his back, his chin high. ‘Nothing more to tell, Gower.’

We stood for a time, Symkok squirming in his discomfort.

‘Do some digging, then,’ I quietly said. A cart passed behind him, a low groan from its wheels. ‘I need to know why Tyle took this one. Who told him to do the inquest himself rather than fob it off, like he usually does? And what did he find?’

He swallowed, his lined neck rippling with the effort.

‘Be discreet about it, Nick.’

He swallowed again. ‘Always am, Gower, at least where you’re concerned.’