A Burnable Book

‘It was a young woman, passing as a lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Bethune. Now she’s dead.’

I stared at her.

‘Someone skulled her, out on the Moorfields.’

‘The Moorfields? I can’t imagine—’

‘And, John,’ she breathed, leaning forward, her eyes attractively wide, ‘I think I may have seen her. Coming out of the abbot’s private chapel, right before she lifted it.’

‘What sort of a book?’ I asked, trying to keep up.

‘I know nothing of its content, I swear to you. Only rumours.’ To my surprise I believed her. ‘And now Braybrooke is involved, asking my duke all sorts of ugly questions. You know how suspicious everyone is since the council, and that crazed friar’s rantings last year. As if my duke and the king are mad dogs in a ring, circling one another, waiting for the next chance to lunge for a neck.’

This gave me pause. ‘Why would the Bishop of London be after the same book as Chaucer?’

‘Suppose it’s less innocent than you suspect. Not one of those romances everyone is reading. Not a saint’s life. But a book of prophecies.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Heretical prophecies.’

‘Prophecies.’ I recalled the preacher spewing his verse out on Holbourne, and Chaucer’s agitation when I recited the man’s words. ‘Wycliffe’s work?’ John Wycliffe: a heretic, thoroughly condemned and recently dead, but all the more dangerous for that.

‘Lancaster doubts it, though—’

Swynford’s chin lifted. She stood. I twisted my neck as I rose to see the figure of Joan, Countess of Kent and the king’s mother, standing at the arched doorway. Greying hair pulled back from slivered eyes, widow’s weeds on a figure to make any man pause despite her considerable age. High cheekbones, set beneath a wide brow, and cobalt eyes that flashed as they settled on Swynford.

‘Where is my brother?’ she demanded as she approached, four of her attendants stepping aside. ‘He summons me up from Wickhambreaux, yet I am kept waiting at Westminster half a day.’ I winced inwardly at Gaunt’s treatment of his sister-in-law. In the nine years since the death of Prince Edward, Gaunt’s elder brother and former heir to the throne, the countess had seen her status slowly decline. Had her husband survived the ancient King Edward, she would have ascended to queen consort, and helped the younger Edward rule with the same flawless grace and deliberation she had shown so many times on public occasions. Though still the most beloved woman in the realm, Joan was becoming more and more of an afterthought.

Katherine put a hand to her breast. ‘He just left us, Countess. An appointment at Fulham.’ She straightened her skirts and retook her seat, the other ladies doing the same; a subtle insult.

Joan’s lips tightened. ‘Tell the duke my patience wears thin. I shall return to Wickhambreaux tomorrow.’

‘I will tell him, Countess,’ said Swynford.

Turning to leave, the countess looked at me. She sucked in her cheeks. ‘John Gower.’

I bowed deeply. ‘Your servant, Countess.’

She regarded me closely. ‘I’ve gazed into your mirror, Gower.’

‘My lady?’

‘I have read your great work, the Mirour de l’Omme.’

My cheeks flushed. ‘You surprise me, Countess.’

‘Why is that?’

‘I would not expect such a humble work to make its way to so noble a reader as yourself.’ Nor its writer’s name to be remembered.

She waved a hand. ‘Rot, Gower. The breeding of Death and Sin, the bastard births of Hypocrisy and her sisters – why, you could be describing the household of Lancaster!’

Swynford gasped, staring in hatred at her lover’s sister-in-law.

The countess gestured with her chin and turned away. Chaucer’s book forgotten, my head swimming with the rare flattery, I followed her through the gauze curtains and out on to the small terrace.

‘I am too hard on Lancaster, you know,’ she said as we circled. ‘It was a unique humiliation for a man like Gaunt, to bounce his king on his knee.’ She walked along the parapet, pausing to pick dead leaves out of a pot. ‘Though it has to be said that there are not many so powerful yet so willing to sacrifice their ambition. You would agree?’

‘The Duke of Lancaster’s modesty is universally admired, my lady.’

She spun on me, eyes darkened. ‘Watch yourself, Gower. The ears of Westminster are as plentiful as scales on a herring.’

‘Yes, Countess,’ I said, chastened.

She stared at the lines of barges plying the Thames in the distance. ‘My son has many enemies. Enemies who openly question his legitimacy.’

She paused with the ruffle of curtains. In the open doorway to the upper gallery stood Swynford, the gauze draped across a bare shoulder. One of her sons had wandered to the terraces, it seemed, his gaze now following a bird. Gaunt’s youngest child, a girl they had perversely named Joan, she held by the hand. Seven and counting, some Gaunt’s, others her late husband’s – the entangled promises of a future none could yet foresee.

Swynford, after an amused glance between the countess and me, whisked her children away. The countess watched the curtains flutter in their wake.

‘Be inventive with your next work, John Gower,’ she murmured as the curtains stilled. ‘To see my son stand before Parliament, with his slutting uncle at his side? A spectacle worthy of the mysteries.’ With that she left me.

In the distance the river was a plane of drifting pieces. Barges, wherries, a raft of sawed logs soon to be swallowed by the city below. To my weakening eyes they appeared as so many living forces, moving against each other in ways I could then only dimly understand: an enigma in motion, like Swynford’s foreign deck of cards. I stared at the water with a growing unease, thinking of a dead girl and a missing book, wondering what strange burden Chaucer had laid on my shoulders.

FOUR (#ulink_b48d98b9-dddf-543e-8c59-7b38fc7456e2)

Cornhull, Ward of Broad Street

‘Please put it on my tally, Master Talbot.’ Millicent Fonteyn nodded at the spicerer, willing him to wrap her purchases before his wife came to the shopfront. Between them sat four equal measures of prunes, almonds, currants, and dates. ‘Oh, and a measure of the apricots,’ she said, unable to stop herself.

George Lawler reached for the jar, shook his head as he tonged them out. He twined the lot together. ‘Last time, Mistress Fonteyn.’

‘You’re kind, Master Lawler. We’ll settle after Easter, if that suits. Now—’

‘Oh, that suits us fine, m’lady, just fine.’ Jane Lawler pushed through the alley door. She was a spindly woman, with dark brows set close and a small nose she fingered at will. ‘Fine to settle after Michaelmas, fine to settle after All Saints, and, by Loy’s bones, it’ll be fine to settle after Easter. Why, it’s only coin, isn’t that right, Georgie? And if we lose it all, why, we’ll get the Worshipful Company of Grocers to provide out of the common money, aye?’

Lawler sheepishly handed Millicent the bundle.

‘Why, that’s it, George!’ his wife went on. ‘Let’s pack up some raisins for her ladyship. Saffron, too, cypress root, nutmeg – why, let’s crate it all for the virtuous madam and have done with our livelihood.’

Millicent, shamefaced, turned to leave, Mistress Lawler tagging her heels. ‘After Easter, she says. After Easter!’

Millicent was on the street.

‘As if the Resurrection of our Lord’ll be enough to put a single farthing in her graspy little palm.’ Millicent took a sharp right out of the shop, her shoulders stooped with humiliation. ‘You walk ’neath this eave to pay your debt, Millicent Fonteyn, nor never walk ’neath it again, nor any grocer’s eave of Cornhull!’

Londoners turned their heads, cruel questions in their glances. Millicent kicked through a cluster of hens by the well before St Benet Fink, fluff and feathers scattering with her haste. She stopped on Broad Street, calming herself with her back on the rough wood of a horsepost. The damp air settled around her, drawing the moisture from her skin. By the time she pushed herself off the post her dress was soaked through, with dark stains at her middle and beneath her arms.

Millicent’s house fronted the longest row of tailors’ shops in London. For two years now the Cornhull house had been hers, the annual lease financed by Sir Humphrey’s lust and largesse, and the dwelling had matched her aspirations in every detail: a keyed door, two floors, a glazed window at the front. She loved the walk along West Cheap and through the Poultry, her back to St Paul’s as she strolled along the widest street in London, with its double gutters and raked pavers. A singlewoman without profession, kept by a wealthy man for his weekly dalliances. There were far worse fates for the elder daughter of a Southwark maudlyn.

Or so she had once thought. Two pounds five was the happy sum she had possessed on the day of Sir Humphrey ap-Roger’s death. Now it was nearly gone, with no provision made in the knight’s will for her keep. His homely widow had got every penny of his fortune and every hand’s width of his lands, leaving nothing to keep the woman he had truly loved free of penury. Millicent picked a spiced apricot out of the grocer’s package, chewing but not tasting it as she approached her home. She removed the chained key from her neck.