The Invention of Fire

‘As I suspected,’ said Baker. ‘This one stayed inside,you see.’

‘What stayed inside?’ I said. ‘A bolt, perhaps, from a crossbow?’

Baker returned the corpse to its original position and held out a hand to his apprentice, who gave him what looked like a filleting knife of the sort you might see deployed by lines of fishermen casting off the Southwark bankside. With a series of expert movements, Baker sliced across the flesh surrounding the hole, widening it until the blade had penetrated several inches into the man’s innards.

Another raised hand. The apprentice took the knife and replaced it with a pair of tongs. Baker inserted them into the hole, widening the wound, harder work than it looked. An unpleasant suck of air, the clammy song of flesh giving way to the surgical tool, and my own guts heaved, but soon enough the tongs emerged clasping a spherical object about the diameter of a half noble. The apprentice took the tongs, then, at Baker’s direction, poured a short stream of ale over the ball. Baker put it between his front teeth and winced.

‘Not lead. Iron, dripped from a bloom into a mould. The Florentines have been casting iron balls like these for many years.’ He tossed the ball up to Strode, who caught it, inspected it for a moment, and handed it to me. I marvelled at the weight of the little thing: the size of a hazelnut, but as heavy as a lady’s girdle book. I had never seen anything quite like it, though I had a suspicion as to its nature and use. I handed it back to Baker.

Strode was signalling for the gravedigger, who left the churchyard to summon a priest.

‘And the others?’ I asked Baker.

‘At least one was killed with an arrow, that one there.’ He gestured to the third body along the line. ‘Half the shaft’s still in his neck. As for the rest, I am fairly confident in my suspicions, though I would have to perform a similar inspection on all these corpses to be sure.’ He came to his full height and used more of the ale to cleanse his hands. ‘I assume that will not be possible, Master Strode?’

Strode pushed out a wet lip. ‘Perhaps if the Bishop of London were abroad. Unfortunately Braybrooke’s lurking about Fulham, with no visitations in his immediate future.’

‘Very well,’ said Baker, and he watched with visible regret as a chantry priest arrived and started to mumble a cursory burial rite. The four of us made for the near chapel, keeping our voices low as Baker went over a few more observations gathered in the short window of time he had been at the grave. Some rat bites on the corpses but not many, and no great rot, suggesting the bodies had been in the sewer channel for no more than a day or two. I asked him about the wood splinters I had seen above the one man’s mouth.

‘Shield fragments, I would say,’ said Baker. ‘Carried there by the ball, and lodged in the skin around the point of penetration.’ We both knew, in that moment, what he was about to tell us, though neither of us could quite believe it. ‘These men have been shot, good masters, of that I am certain. Though not with an arrow, nor with a bolt.’

The surgeon turned fully to us, his face sombre. ‘These men were killed with hand cannon. Handgonnes, fired with powder, and delivering small iron shot.’

Handgonnes. A word new to me in that moment, though one that would shape and fill the weeks to come. I looked out over the graves pocking the St Bart’s churchyard, their inhabitants victims of pestilence, accident, hunger, and crime, yet despite their numberless fates it seemed that man was ever inventing new ways to die.

‘Why am I here, Ralph?’

‘Because you are you.’ Strode raised a tired smile, his face flush with the effort of our short but muddy trudge back to the hospital chapel, where he had left his horse. Over the last few months he had been walking with a bad limp, and now tended to go about the city streets mounted rather than on foot, like some grand knight. No injury that I knew of, merely the afflictions of age. I worried for him.

He adjusted the girth, tugged at the bridle. ‘And you know what you know, John. If you don’t know it, you know how to buy it, or wheedle it or connive it. Brembre is smashing body and bone at the Guildhall. I have never seen him angrier. He considers it an insult to his own person, that someone should do such a thing within the walls, leave so many corpses to stew and rot.’

Nicholas Brembre, grocer and tyrant, perhaps the most powerful mayor in London’s history. ‘And namelessly so,’ I said.

‘The misery of it.’ Strode wagged his head. ‘There must be a dozen men in this city who know the names of those poor fellows eating St Bart’s dirt right now. Yet we’ve heard not a whisper from around the wards and parishes in the last two days. Aldermen, beadles, constables, night walkers: everyone has been pulled in or cornered, but no one claims to have seen or heard a thing, and no men reported missing. As if London itself has gone blind and dumb.’

‘No witnesses then?’

He hesitated. ‘Perhaps one.’

I waited.

‘You know our Peter Norris.’

I smiled, not fondly. ‘I do.’ Norris, formerly a wealthy mercer and a beadle of Portsoken Ward, had lost his fortune after a shipwreck off Dover, and now lived as a vagrant debtor of the city, moving from barn to yard, in and out of gates and gaols. We had crossed knives any number of times, never with good results.

‘He claims to know of a witness,’ said Strode. ‘Someone who beheld the dumping of the corpses at the Long Dropper. He tried to trade on it from the stocks in order to shorten his sentence, though Brembre has refused to indulge his fantasy, as he called it.’

‘Who is the witness?’

‘Norris would not say, not once he learned the mayor’s mind. Perhaps you might convince him to talk. At the moment he’s dangling in the pillory before Ludgate, and will be for the next few days.’

‘I’ll speak with him tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Very good.’

‘And what of the crown?’ I was thinking of the guns. Weapons of war, not civic policing. To my knowledge the only place in or near London that possessed such devices as culverins and cannon was the Tower itself.

Strode’s brows drew down. He led his horse to the lowest stair, preparing to mount. ‘The sheriffs have made inquiries to the lord chancellor, though thus far his men have flicked us away, claiming lack of jurisdiction. A London privy, London dung, a London burial, a London problem. No concern of the court, they claim, and the only word I’ve had from that quarter is from Edmund Rune, the chancellor’s counsellor, who suggested we look into this as discreetly as possible – in fact it was he who suggested bringing you into the matter, John. With all the trouble the earl is facing at Parliament-time I can’t think he would want another calamity to wrestle with.’

Though he might prove helpful, I thought. Michael de la Pole, lord chancellor of the realm, had recently been created Earl of Suffolk, elevating him to that small circle of upper nobles around King Richard. Yet the chancellor was swimming against a strong tide of discontent from the commons, with Parliament scheduled to gather in just one week’s time. De la Pole owed me a large favour, and despite his current difficulties I could not help but wonder what he might be holding on this affair. The unceasing tension between city and crown, the Guildhall and Westminster, rarely erupted into open conflict, more often simmering just beneath the urban surface, stirred by all those professional relations and bureaucratic niceties that bind London to its royal suburb up the river.

Yet such conflicts are indispensable to my peculiar vocation. Nicholas Brembre was a difficult man, by all accounts, though I had never discovered anything on him, and John Gower is not one to enjoy ignorance. If I could nudge the chancellor the right way, then use what he gave me to do a favour to the mayor in turn, I would be in a position to gather ever more flowers from the Guildhall garden in the coming months.

I put a hand on Ralph Strode’s wide back and helped him mount. He regarded me, his large nostrils flaring with his still laboured breaths. ‘You will help, then?’

A slight bow to Strode and his horse. ‘Tell the lord mayor he may consider John Gower at his service.’

He sucked in a cheek. ‘That I cannot do.’ He glanced about, then hunched down slightly in his saddle, lowering his voice. ‘Here is the difficult thing, John. The mayor has been stirred violently by this atrocity, yet despite his anger he seems reluctant to pursue the matter, for reasons I cannot discern. He’s bribed off the coroner, discouraged the sheriffs from looking into things, and threatens anyone who mentions it. It was he who ordered me to oversee this quick burial, with quicker rites, and no consideration for the relations of the deceased, whoever they might be. Nor will he hear Norris out about his witness.’

Here Strode paused to look over his shoulder. Then, softly, ‘There are whispers he may have had evidence destroyed.’

‘What sort of evidence?’

‘Who can say? The point is that Brembre has decided this will all be quashed, and no one has the stomach to gainsay him.’

‘What about the sheriffs and aldermen? Surely they would wish for an open inquiry.’

He grimaced. ‘They are as geldings and maidens, when what’s needed is a champion wielding a silent and invisible sword.’ Strode looked back toward the churchyard and the murmuring priest, then straightened himself. ‘That is why I have come to you. For your cunning ways with coin, your affinity with the rats, the devious beauty of your craft. And for your devotion to the right way, much as you like to hide your benevolent flame under a bushel of deceit. This atrocity has thrown you as much as it has thrown me, John. I can see it in your eyes.’

I looked away, a sting in those weakening eyes. A friend is a second self, Cicero tells us, and knows us more intimately than we know ourselves.

‘The mayor cannot learn you are probing this out for us, or it will be my broken nose fed to the pigs.’

‘I understand, Ralph,’ I said, looking appropriately solemn, yet secretly delighted to learn of the mayor’s peculiar vacillations. A new bud of knowledge on a lengthening stem. ‘My lips shall be as the privy seal itself.’

‘Good then.’ With a brisk nod, Strode pulled a rein and made for Aldersgate. I followed him at a growing distance, watching his broad back shift over the animal’s deliberate gait until man and beast alike faded into the walls, blurring with the stone.

TWO (#ulink_0cf34f49-918d-5d61-82d3-4a49a5bc5037)

The gates of London are so many mouths of hell, Chaucer once observed, swallowing the sinful by the dozen, commingling them in the rich urban gruel of waste, crime, lust, and vice that flows down every lane. Yet each gate possesses a character and history uniquely its own: its own guards, residents, and prisoners, its own parish obligations, the particular customs and rituals that define every entrance to the inner wards as a small world unto itself. To know the gates of London is to know the truest pathways to the city’s soul.

In those middle years of King Richard’s reign the city gates were all connected by a series of towers, sentry walks, and repair scaffolds that together traced a wandering crescent around the lofty stone walls and provided the most efficient means of getting from gate to gate. You couldn’t stroll along the inner wall down below given all the clearing and destruction, while skirting the outer circumference would land you in waste ditches and subject you to the streams of refuse and trash – some foul, some quite dangerous – hurled from above.

On that windy day following the examination in St Bart’s churchyard I had determined to visit every gate in turn, worming beaks with coins as I went. If sixteen men could die in London, and not one of them be known to Ralph Strode, to the mayor and his men, to the king’s coroner and his, nor even to one of the dozen freemen of the city gathered for the inquest, they must have come from outside the walls. London is a large place though not exceedingly large, and to conceive of so many Londoners unrecognized and unsought by loved ones seemed an impossibility. Somewhere along the walls was a guard or a warden who had seen something, or knew someone who had.

My day would begin at Aldgate, where the walls separated the parish of St Katharine Cree from St Botolph-without, and end at Ludgate, where Peter Norris slumped in the pillory, claiming knowledge of a witness. I left Southwark early in the day to cross the bridge, angling from the bankside up to Aldgate Street, which I took to the edge of town. A stiff September wind burned at my eyes, creating especially fierce gusts along the broadening way before the gate, where thousands of colourful shapes whorled in a circling gale. A dozen children jumped about beneath them. The dancing shapes were cloth, I realized as I reached out to pluck one from the air. A sack of fabric scraps, spilled before some tailor’s shop and now dancing with the winds. Then a stiffer gust, and the spiral of colour was gone as quickly as it had arisen, the children chasing the shapes away to the west. Another beautiful, meaningless thing I would never see again.

Unlike the high and ugly bulk of Aldgate, which loomed above me now, a begrimed surface of stone and stupidity that seemed to attract more featherbrained schemes for enlargement and improvement than its brothers. As a result Aldgate had suffered its share of minor collapses over the years, as the collective folly of builders and masons led to ever more perilous attempts to reshape the fabric. A broad length of sailcloth hung down to cover a pitted scar in the stonework on the north tower, while above a crane arm jutted awkwardly from a high opening, its purpose to pulley stones to the upper reaches, though it looked to have gone unused for months.