A Burnable Book (27 page)

“Again, sire, I thank you for your courtesy,” I said. “I shall be happy to attend.”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” said the king. A gentle impact, ropes pulled to, the clank of metal on tack and stomps of hooves as knights led their mounts to the quay and up to the high road in the direction of Westminster and London. I waved off the offer of a horse. The storm had blown over, and though dusk approached, I would easily make it on foot to the gates by sunset, then home on a wherry.

Bolingbroke gave his horse a final turn back toward the river, waiting for his cousin with the rear guard behind him. Four knights, still against the sky. The king spurred the charger ahead, the guard falling in behind. “Until St. Dunstan’s Day, then,” King Richard called back to me.

As the company receded into the distance, I puzzled over the whole exchange, my pulse calming as I began the walk toward Westminster. Since reading the book in Oxford I had known when King Richard was to meet his fate by the terms of the prophecy.
On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom
. Now, thanks to the king, I knew where the assassination was to take place.

By bank of a bishop shall butchers abide . . .

In palace of prelate with pearls all appointed.

The “bank of a bishop”: the precincts of Winchester Palace, the Southwark home of William Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, one of the great prelates in the realm. On the Thames adjacent to St. Mary Overey, the palace was as familiar to me as St. Paul’s or Westminster, even more so: the priory and the palace shared the same span of wharfage, and Wykeham’s episcopal offices at the palace had long served as the administrative hub of Southwark.

I thought it through.
Pearls all appointed.
The phrase had to refer to the oyster-and-pearl reliefs that Wykeham had commissioned during a past expansion of the great hall. The Blessed Virgin is like unto an oyster, he would say in his pretentious homilies: the Christ child is the precious pearl of her womb, created miraculously within, as a pearl within its shell. Matching his treasure to his theology, the bishop had commissioned a team of masons—led by Mark Blythe, still imprisoned at Ludgate—to craft stone chains of oyster and pearl along the inner walls of the hall. The carvings had been duplicated by Blythe and others on the palace’s main outer wall facing New Rents, lined with subtle reliefs in the same pattern, mortared to the wall’s uppermost span on either side of the gate. The
De Mortibus
even predicted the very moment of the attempt on the king’s life: the killers would spring forth “at spiritus sung”—a phrase that had to be a reference to “
Ave Dunstane, praesulum
,” a popular carol proper to St. Dunstan’s feast day.

King Richard’s death, then, was to take place at Wykeham’s palace, during the episcopal feast on Dunstan’s Day, at the procession preceding mass. The prophecy put the plot squarely on Gaunt’s shoulders, identifying “long castle” as the traitor casting out the
cor
: deposing the king. Yet who was the “kingmaker,” and who precisely would attempt the murder of Richard? How would it happen? Who were these “butchers,” and what role would the cards—the Prince of Plums, the Half-ten of Hawks—play in the unfolding of the plot?

In the wherry the story of Lancelot came to me, in the form of King Richard’s memories of Arthurian tales. My mind resounded with the questions he had posed on the ferry. Are you loyal to those you love, loyal to the point of humiliation? Or are you feckless in your love, unwilling to risk the shame that lies in blatant self-sacrifice? Are you Lancelot, or are you Gawain?

Neither, I told myself with a creeping sense of my own blindness—yet knowing the answer was almost within my grasp. You are, in fact, the dwarf.

In the service of Sir John Hawkwood, the knight settled with his daughter into a life as stable as any she had known since childhood. In those years, as now, Hawkwood shifted his alliances like a ram changes mates—by summer he might be found fighting for Florence, by fall for Milan, in winter for the pope, in spring for the antipope. Despite all the political turbulence around them, though, the girl was provided for by her father in every way.

The knight chose a new wife, a kind woman from Hawkwood’s homeland who took her in hand and reshaped her from the wild rodent she had become into a lady fit for an earl’s table. Where this girl’s father had taught her mannish things, her stepmother instructed her in the domestic graces of femininity: the correct way to do her devotions, the virtues of the wardrobe, the proper running of a household. She hired a tutor, as the wealthier families do, to instruct her stepdaughter in the reading and writing of Latin and the vulgar tongues, especially her own.

Her stepmother took particular pride in the girl’s skills with the needle. You are a natural embroideress, she told the younger woman. Your handiwork will yield things of great beauty, perhaps help win you a husband.

One of the most artful items crafted by the girl—a buddin
g
young lady of sixteen now—was a needlework depiction of her most vivid and horrendous memory. She started it the very morning her father told her the news: Prince Edward of England, her mother’s ravisher and the father of her brother, had met his end. A sickness, it was said, of mind and body both.

The tidings of the prince’s death brought back images of her mother, brutalized by an honored guest. Of the prince, in all his naked cruelty. Of his brother the Duke of Lancaster, saving her life and her mother’s with a blade held to the prince’s throat.

With this last scene newly alive in her mind, she resolved to embroider it. Two lords, clad in simple tunics and hose, their arms pointed out on shields poised above their heads, details of livery and falconry added as she pleased: three ostrich feathers around the prince’s shield, five hawks around the duke’s. She used the false hood of an old priest’s silk cope as her base. Already bordered with ornate vines, leaves, and flowers embroidered by a more skillful hand, the cope made the perfect ground for the play of her memory. When she had finished her work, she snipped away the embroidered square and loosely pinned it to a large tapestry of a merchant’s festival at the Tribunale, hanging in her father’s gallery. There it remained for years, a constant reminder of the cruel lusts of men and the nature of true nobility.

Such reminders were useful in Ser Giovanni’s circles. Hawkwood had a reputation as a singularly brutal man. There were numerous stories of his cruelty. Some shrivel the ears.

Two of his men, having sacked an abbey, stood arguing over the flesh of a young nun found cowering in the dormitory. The matter was about to come to blows when Hawkwood strode up and demanded an explanation.

“She is mine,” said one, “and I shall have her.”

“Nay, I shall have her,” said the other.

Hawkwood drew his sword. “You will each have half.” He cut the nun in two, leaving her body divided on the tiles.

Such stories put the lie to chivalry, a myth she had seen violated so many times she could scarcely credit anyone still believed in it. Even her father, so noble in her sight, turned a blind eye to Hawkwood’s ways. “War is war,” he would say after hearing of some new atrocity. Hers was a world defined by men and their means, vicious spirals of brutality in which the flesh of a woman was utterly expendable, as cheap as pigshit on a paver.

She had suitors, of course. Though none of them interested her, her father pushed her toward a match. A gentleman of London, as her stepmother described the smooth young man. Suitable in every way.

He was a minor clerk in Hawkwood’s chancery. Il Critto, they called him, a sobriquet reflecting his facility with numbers and ciphers. He served the great condottiero as a cryptographer, he boastingly confided to her when they met, dedicated to unraveling secret codes of all kinds, whether the signals of an approaching army or the rhythms of a lady’s batting eyes.

Il Critto was young, handsome, quite obviously brilliant. She liked him enough at first, and the more time he spent in her father’s house, seeking her company in the gallery, the closer she came to accepting the inevitability of a married life. He was tormented with love for her, or so he claimed.

Smitten. Tortured. Goaded. Martyred. Oppressed. Not a wordsmith like you, I am afraid, though the poor man tried.

Yet there was about him a certain blankness, some quality of sincerity or directness that seemed to be lacking, no matter how earnestly he spoke, and that caused her to question inwardly the wisdom of the desired union.

Nevertheless, he spoke well, and flattered her father with gifts and kind words. It is likely she would have been betrothed to him within a month’s time—had not her world changed in an instant.

Part iii

Half-ten of Hawks

DAY VIII BEFORE IDES OF MAY TO NONES OF JUNE, 8 RICHARD II

(8 MAY–5 JUNE, 1385)

Chapter xxxviii

Priory of St. Leonard’s Bromley

T
o save our king.

The words of Agnes rang in Millicent’s ears as she stood before the gate, the abbey’s door to the secular world. A bored-looking porter leaned on the walls. These were now gap-toothed in places, collapsed into piles of rubble. Millicent had heard about floods doing some damage to St. Leonard’s properties, though she had had no real comprehension of the extent of the devastation. Several dykes along the Lea were collapsed, as were a few of the lesser structures on the outer grounds. The malting shack still stood, and the woodhouse, though the big barn’s thatched roof was sinking in places. A pair of carpenters were at work up by the old manor house, their labors desultory, as if done in their sleep—an attitude shared by two men in the near field leading skinanchors of fuel, brought from woods that had receded a shocking distance from the walls. It seemed half the forest of Essex had been denuded, still another sign of how much had changed since Millicent’s departure on the arm of Sir Humphrey ap-Roger.

She slipped a coin to the surprised porter and passed through the priory’s main gate, each structure and passage laden with memories. The porch of the Lady Chapel, where the nuns performed the mystery play on Innocents’ Day solely to themselves. The narrow cloister, through which the mass priest, chaplain, and acolytes would pass on their way to the common room, bearing small ale past the mincing sisters. The scriptorium, where Millicent had acquired the gift of reading over long months with Isabel, now prioress—the nun whose withering attention she would soon endure.

“Millicent?”

She turned. Sister Heda stared in bewilderment. Millicent embraced the nun. Beneath its wimple the narrow disc of Heda’s face possessed the same sweet clarity she remembered, if lined with passing years, and the abbey’s recent troubles. Millicent pulled her around the corner of the dormitory. “Where is the prioress today, Heda?”

“The prioress?” Heda’s eyes widened still further. “You wish to see the reverend mother?”

“Right away, my dear.”

“She is in her chambers today,” said Heda. “The bishop has a visitation scheduled for next week. I’ve been appointed cellaress, you know, and there being so few of us now and it being so close there seems little we can do, so . . .” She looked around in near despair. St. Leonard’s was in no state for one of the occasional rounds of official visits from its presiding bishop, Robert Braybrooke of London. Heda and her fellow officers of the house would be hard-pressed to make the place presentable in the coming days.

“Will you lead me there, Heda?” Millicent pleaded. “I won’t be stopped if you guide me.”

Heda hesitated, eyes shifting toward the gate. Then the nun silently turned and led her straight past the refectory, where the day’s loaves lay stacked on the tables between meals. Left through the kitchen passage, redolent with river eel. Another left across the herbal, its springtime offerings of sage, thyme, and dill. Down a gentle stair into a low, cold building of riverstone. The chapterhouse, the heart of St. Leonard’s, with
voussures
of banded fleurs-de-lis tracing high arcs along the vaulted entryway. The chamber was empty at that hour, though it would soon fill with the rustle of habits and the singing of Tierce.

Outside the prioress’s private apartments stood a young novice. Millicent didn’t know the girl, though her face was vaguely familiar. The girl started at the sight of an unknown laywoman in St. Leonard’s inner sanctum. Heda gave the novice Millicent’s name and requested an audience.

“Your business with the prioress?” The novice’s voice, like her face, betrayed nothing.

“She must see me,” Millicent said. “It’s a matter of grave importance for Bromley, and for the realm.”

The girl’s smile was—bemused? Cruel? Just throw me to the she-wolf, was Millicent’s impatient thought.

The novice held up a finger, then pushed open the door to the prioress’s parlor. Heda backed away, her brow showing a single worried line beneath her habit, then disappeared around the corner. Millicent heard a few mumbles. A piercing
Who?
The outraged ejaculations of a voice she knew all too well. The novice returned, pale-faced, saying nothing as she held the door.

The prioress’s parlor was a lushly furnished space with three glazed windows, a writing desk, and a rug of lush wool thrown over paving tiles bearing the Syward arms. Dame Isabel Syward, the prioress of St. Leonard’s Bromley, gazed down from her raised chair with an air of taut disdain. Millicent lowered herself, remaining still until the leader saw fit to speak.

“You have—” Isabel’s voice was gravelly with bile. “You have come home at last, my dearest daughter.”

Millicent looked up in surprise, but the prioress’s expression belied her welcoming words.

“And what a glorious homecoming it is,” Isabel continued. “Perhaps you’ve reconsidered the wicked ways that led to your expulsion. Perhaps you’ve decided to be grateful for the gifts this house gave you. Food, shelter, rescue from a life of raw swyving, how to rap your Ave Maria on your knuckles. And reading. Oh! I taught you myself, didn’t I? Every letter, holding your hand as your fingertips traced patterns in the letterbook. For hours, for weeks, for
three years,
Millicent, I taught you how to read, how to think, how to pray, how to
live
.”

The prioress put a hand to her mouth and sat back, seeming shocked at her own outburst. There was a glistening in the corners of the great woman’s eyes. She wiped them and went on.

“Yet you threw it all away. And for what? A fat old January! At least you could have fallen for a squire, strong of arm and stiff of cock. Now
that
would have been understandable, given our sisters something worthy to aspire to, an actual challenge. Instead, what do you do? Why, you settle for the first easy target that comes along, making
yourself
easy in the process, then
off
you go, abandoning the community that opened itself to you. Now you expect the same openness from Bromley? You think you can simply show up, demand an audience with the prioress, get a handout?
Bah!
”

The prioress spat. Millicent lay crumpled on the floor, stilled with the truth of all the woman had said to her, and with wrenching sorrow at the loss of this place from her life.

She squeezed her eyes shut. What could she say that might rein in Isabel’s contempt, at least long enough for her to appeal for the help she sought? “Reverend Mother,” she began, “if you please—”

“But I know you, Millicent Fonteyn.” Isabel’s voice was flat now, devoid of passion. “I know you to be the most calculating, self-interested woman in all England, a woman who would spare no thought to betraying friend and family alike. It is simply who you are, my dear.”

Millicent thought of Agnes. The prioress could not know the horrible accuracy of her judgment.

“So I suppose you would not have the spine to show yourself here if you didn’t have good reason, and I suppose I am bound to hear it. ‘A matter of grave importance for Bromley, and for the realm.’ How grand. Tell us. Then get out.”

Millicent left nothing out, and when she was done, the prioress studied her with an intensity she remembered. “I’m very sorry about your sister, Millicent,” she said with lowered voice. “Such a loss is difficult, even in these times when we lose so many to war and pestilence. To know that your own greed murdered her—that doubles the guilt, and triples the pain. May Agnes be at rest in God’s hands, her sins washed away in the waters of purgation.”

“Thank you, Reverend Mother. Your words are kind.”

Isabel stood with a sigh. She walked to the window looking up to the manor house. “I have heard of this book from other sources in recent weeks. It is the talk of our order. The bishop has made inquiries about it to the houses in his diocese. A burnable book, Braybrooke calls it. The timing could not be worse, with Pope Urban’s delegation set to arrive from Rome before Trinity Sunday.” She turned, her look incredulous. “Yet you, Millicent Fonteyn, of all people, have read this book?”

“I have, Prioress. Several times.”
Trinity Sunday.
Pope Urban.
Millicent thought, with a fleeting confusion, of her sister’s death, and the words she had scribbled in coal inside the book.
The crochet . . . father, son, and ghost . . . city’s blade . . . doovay leebro.
Why were these phrases coming to her now? She had assumed that Agnes, in her own throes, was echoing the last words of the girl in the Moorfields, the couplet thrown into the night sky while Agnes watched from the shrubbery. For weeks she had dismissed Agnes’s recounting of the doomed girl’s dying utterance. The book and the cloth: these could be sold, after all, while words were just words, and there seemed little reason to credit the girl’s final call as anything more than a cry of dread as the hammer fell. Yet now she caught herself wondering if there was something to these words after all, even if Agnes herself had never discovered their meaning. The Holy Trinity, a city’s blade—but what was it?

“This house is in enough peril already,” the prioress was saying. “Our fortunes the property of the manor, our income shrunk to two hundred marks in the year. We’ve been forced to enclose the park, and lost a thousand acres in Dagenham. And here you are, slinking back like one of King Edward’s dogs, with this news. I’d be within my rights to have you cast in the brew cellar, and the key thrown in the Lea. If our cellaress hadn’t lost the damned key,” she muttered.

“I would have thought,” Millicent began, “that the reverend mother’s close relation to the crown—”

“Oh, yes, of course. We’ve had the corpse of Elizabeth of Hainault moldering in our chapel for ten years. Why, we could sell it for relics! Why hadn’t I thought of that? St. Leonard’s piss is liquid gold!” Her hands dropped to her sides. “I’m afraid we’re no more protected from the threat of ruination than the shrinking forest around us.”

“Prioress—”

“Show me the cloth.”

Millicent reached within her skirts and pulled out the folded embroidery. Isabel spread it in her lap. She ran her fingers along the sides, where the thistleflowers, hawks, plums, and swords were arrayed in numbered sets. She stroked the heraldry arrayed against the king’s arms.

“You say Pinchbeak has the book?”

“I handed it to Robert Dawson, his man. Pinchbeak wasn’t there.”

The prioress put a slender finger to her lips. “So we have this book of prophecies, one of them auguring the death of our king and pointing a finger at his uncle. We have the cloth, identifying the chief conspirator beyond doubt as Lancaster. And we have mere days until the feast of St. Dunstan.”

“Yes, Reverend Mother.” Millicent watched the prioress’s eyes, felt the shrewd calculations taking place behind them.

“I’m told you’ve been living up Cornhull.”

“Yes, Prioress.”

“I assume you’ve kept up your embroidery, then, given the neighborhood.”

“Well, I can’t say that I—”

“An orphrey of fine needlework is what we need, and the most ingenious we have ever made.” She stretched the cloth to its full width. “It must be identical in every respect to this vivid sample, with one difference—well, two.” She pointed to the coat of arms emblazoned on the figure attacking the boy king. “Do you see these colors, just here?”

The Duke of Lancaster’s. They were nearly identical to the king’s, the only difference being the ermine label above. “Yes, Prioress.”

Isabel squinted at it. “Hand me that glass.” The prioress pointed to a low table in the corner. Millicent walked over and lifted a triangular magnifying glass, set in a bone frame with a wooden handle below. Isabel took it from her and scrutinized the cloth further.

“The brick stitch around the border is remarkable, as is the infilled foliage. And the waffling is superior, must have taken weeks.
Look
at that work. The ground is Italian, or I’m a pregnant goat. But in the middle, the figures of the duke and the king are—well, they’re nicely done, but their quality doesn’t come close to what I am seeing in the base. And these smaller emblems—the thistleflowers and hawks and so on—wouldn’t pass a seamstress’s eye in Cornhull, let alone at court.”

Millicent came to the prioress’s side, catching a faint waft of rosy perfume from the older woman’s neck. Not all luxuries had been abandoned in Bromley, it seemed. She leaned over the prioress’s shoulder and peered through the glass at the cloth. She saw immediately what Isabel’s expert eye had discerned. At the edges of the cloth the stitching was tight and uniform, the product of a practiced embroideress working slowly and patiently to embellish the borders with an elaborate pattern of vines and flowers. The figures of Lancaster and King Richard, as well as their arms, had been pointed into the cloth in an entirely different style. Looser stitches, higher loops. Skillful and not incompetent, not by a long stretch, but—
youthful
was the word that came to her mind. Finally, the figures of thistleflowers, hawks, swords, and plums surrounding the central figures had been done hastily, with inferior threads and with no regard for the surrounding ground. Three hands, then, working at different times, with different materials, and with varying degrees of competence.

The prioress leaned back. “This cloth is clearly a fake,” she said, “cooked up to point a finger at the duke. Besides, Lancaster wouldn’t come near a book of the sort you describe. The man eats self-preservation for supper. So who would create such a thing to wrap around a manuscript of prophecies, implicating him as a conspirator against the king?”

Isabel stared at the wall for a moment, then shook her head. “Well, of course. Who else?” She took up the cloth, picked at some threads. “This work is too tight to unravel without damaging the ground. You, Millicent, will create a new shield for this fellow here, with new arms altogether. In the first quarter, we must have a silver mullet borne upon a field gules.”

Millicent’s eyes widened. “Do you mean—”