A Burnable Book (30 page)

“Well, if it’s any comfort, you may be the only one looking for it.”

“Where should I begin?”

“Gropecunt Lane, I imagine. Or Southwark. Perhaps Rose Alley, in your own neighborhood.”

“And how does one go about prying cloth from maudlyns, in your expert opinion?”

Chaucer turned to me, his brow a world-weary arch. “Drag a sack of silver through the stews and there’s no telling what you might find.”

He said it lightly, provoking me with a familiar humor that obscured those deeper truths he still had not revealed.

You will remember, my soul, that Dante Alighieri, the great poet of Florence, first saw Beatrice at a feast. He was only nine at the time, as was she, yet even then the arrows of Amor penetrated him deeply, inspiring wild thrums and tremblings and pulsations in his heart despite its tender age.

Our young lady was fully a woman when she first saw her love, though the effects on her soul were no less childish, no less urgent for her greater maturity.

It was an autumn evening on the feast of St. Luke, just after the procession of the physicians along the square before San Simpliciano. The last company had passed by, the raucous shouts of the children following in their wake, the oily whiff of torches in the air. As the final cluster of drunk doctors walked past she looked across the open space to the opposite rank of spectators—and there he was, in the smoky light: a fair-haired man, twenty years her elder, she guessed, broad of chest, long of leg, a face that brightened the air as if some new Apollo had deigned to troll the streets of Florence.

The man spared her no glance, turning from the procession and walking along the edge of the crowd.

She saw him again the next week, at the Broletto, pausing at a tinker’s table while she examined silks. That day he wore a loose shirt of thin wool, a rough thing hardly fit for a clerk. As she passed behind him she glanced at his hands, those long fingers stained with gall. A man given to writing, despite his unslouched back and clear-eyed gaze at everything around him. He smelled of balsam, of honey mixed with ale.

How she pined for him! How she ached to feel his touch, to guide his blotchy fingers in making of her very skin his vellum and his books.

Then, as she watched him stroll across the market street, he was stopped and embraced warmly by a man she knew quite well.

Il Critto! They were countrymen, of course, though there were so many Englishmen in Florence that she had not thought to ask her suitor about the one she most desired.

“Who was that old fellow I saw you with at the Broletto?” she casually asked him the next morning. They were in the upper gallery, finally usable after a months-long repair to the flooring, seated on the long bench beneath the Tribunale tapestry. Her stepmother sat with several visitors at a proper distance. Embroidery and gossip.

“An envoy from Westminster, and an intimate friend of my father’s,” he said, suspecting nothing. “He arranged my current position with Hawkwood, in fact. I owe him a great deal.” He was proud of his knowledge of Hawkwood’s relations with the English envoy, whom he seemed to admire tremendously. He told her a bit about the man’s employment (royal customs official), purpose on the peninsula (some discreet diplomacy), obsession (poetry), and wife (estranged).

With a frown and a strange tilt of his head, he pointed over her shoulder. “Why, look there! Those are the arms of his greatest supporter.”

She turned, her gaze falling on the old cloth embroidered with the opposed livery of the foreign duke and prince. She felt it: the breath of Fate on her neck. To learn that the man she desired was in favor with the duke who had saved her life so long ago—this was a destined match. Everything else would naturally follow.

So she dropped a hint, a mild suggestion, and the next day Il Critto (poor fool, she thought) dutifully brought the older man with him to her father’s house.

It was a simple matter to put her ambitions in play. A half-hidden smile here, a dropped kerchief there. The Little Weasel no more, she had developed into a captivating beauty, one of the true gems among the ladies of the commune. Soon enough his visits became the most longed-for part of her day.

They discovered in each other a mutual love of stories and poems. His verses were artful and urbane, pleasuring some hidden part of her with their depth of knowledge and craft. He whispered, too, from some of his more lecherous lays, comparing his desire to a written map of the world, himself to a cold fish marinated in the spicy sauce of her favor. She became an avid listener to this Narcissus of the North, his impenetrable self-regard only warming her further.

The ambassador wrote his poems not on wax but in little books, parchment quires folded within a worn cover of faded leather. Each time he filled one of these booklets with his notes and drafts he would remove it from its cover and place a new quire within. He wrote constantly, rejecting nine out of ten of his own crafted lines. She marveled at how one man could waste so many words.

Her own stories she spun from the tales of the Moors remembered from her mother. She was his Sherzade, filling her accounts with flying horses and evil viziers, moaning ghouls and poisoned fountains. The only tale she never told him was the story of her life.

One of their favorite entertainments was trading in riddles. Enigmas, he called them, word puzzles in which simple truths are disguised and things are never what they seem. He would slip them to her on torn lengths of wastepaper, and she would have to guess their solution before his next appearance.

Some were trivial, riddles about roofless houses and eggs, or chairs and silent goats.

Others were obscene, written to raise a blush on her fair skin.

I am a long rod swinging by a man’s leg. He likes to shove me into familiar holes. Who am I? No, not that. A key.

Between two curved legs I quiver, a twist of eager flesh, singing sweetly when fingered. Who am I? No, not that. A harpstring.

The one that most provoked her was an enigma of the moon. He slipped it to her on the second Sunday in Advent, during a procession outside San Lorenzo.

Whisper the middle of a moon,

Think the wheel of a wagon,

Trace the beginning of a king,

And mine own shall be yours.

For a full week she puzzled over its meaning, parsing each syllable, looking for that hidden kernel. And on the eighth night, as she slept, a wagon wheel spinning in her dreams—

—she awoke, and she had it. A wheel? The letter
O.
The “beginning of a king”? “King” is “rex” in Latin. The letter
R.
And the “middle of a moon”? A half moon, of course. The letter
C.

“Cor.” Latin for “heart.” And mine yours, she silently promised him as she drifted back to sleep, and my flesh as well.

Stories, riddles, sin: her father and stepmother were hardly pleased. Florence was starting to whisper, and consorting with this Englishman would only sully her reputation. Il Critto is the son of a landed gentryman, her stepmother scolded her, an upper esquire. This man you favor is merely an esquire en service, with no lands or rents to his name—and married!

Il Critto, too, took notice of her growing attachment to the older man, coming around less frequently and casting dark looks on the two of them from afar. She ignored them all.

Though she recognized the older man’s poetical genius (as, indeed, what living man or woman could not? you are surely thinking), some of his making struck her as facile and unserious. She coyly told him so, infuriating and delighting him at once. He told her of his plan for a greater work, a collection of tales in the manner of Boccaccio.

“Though this work, unlike the
Decameron
, shall be framed not with pestilence but with pilgrimage,” he said. “The pilgrims shall all tell their own tales as they travel from city to town. Two stories each on the journey out, two on the way home. The narrator will be a pilgrim as well, his feeble talents serving to convince us that the whole compilation bears the ring of truth.”

She taunted him: “Your readers must be gullible indeed, to fall for such poetical tricks.”

He waved a hand. “In this land poets are considered akin to prophets. Look at Florence’s own Dante, writing of a journey to hell and back, telling us plainly it is all a lie even as he inks his tercets at his desk. And yet the people credit him as a true visitor to the underworld! Readers will believe anything they are told to believe.”

She looked at him, a provocation in her gaze. “And you would be the new Dante? Spouting visions and prophecies with the ease of a sibyl?”

“Prophecy is a game like any other, no more complex than our exchanges of riddles and enigmas,” he said. “Show me a lunatic with a quill and I will show you a prophet.”

“Prove it,” she said.

“I shall rise to your impertinent challenge,” he vowed, and began a work that promised to redeem his talents in her eyes, and win her to his bed. “It shall be a book of kings,” he told her. “A book of kings, and their deaths. Once I have completed it, you must quite me with a work of your own. For then it will be your turn to write for the gullible.”

Less than a week had passed when, on a bright winter morning, the ambassador appeared at her door.

“The work is done,” he told her, pleased with himself. He pulled out his current booklet, which he had filled to the last folio with a rough copy of his creation. “Take me within, muse, and I shall read it to you.”

Just then his young rival appeared at the end of the street. Il Critto’s eyes darkened as he strode forward, his jaw a hard knot of envy. But her love put a kindly arm around the younger man’s shoulders and drew him into her father’s house, as if nothing was amiss. The three of them went up to the gallery, and it was there that she heard the prophecies.

As her lover recited his tuneful lines, she listened with a thrilled amusement to these beguiling prognostications of royal deaths. How he laughed over his own audacity! The work was an amusement to him, its mortal prophecies cast in the gentle light of his wit.

He had even thought to include an actual game in his prophecies: the thistleflowers, hawks, swords, and plums painted on the oval playing cards he often brought with him to her father’s house. Yet to anyone else hearing the work, these prophecies would appear genuine, the true products of some latter-day Jeremiah foretelling the deaths of twelve kings, from King William to the late King Edward.

Il Critto laughed with them, his boyish grin easing their concerns that—

Ah, but I must drop the pretense of story, my heart. As I think back on that fateful morning, all I see now are Il Critto’s owl eyes gazing over my shoulder at the cloth, those mole’s ears resounding with your baleful verse. The eyes and ears of Simon Gower, a serpent coiled in envy and plotting his revenge.

Chapter xlii

Gropecunt Lane

Y
ears ago, soon after the deaths of my elder children, I once followed the bishop of Ely up Soper Lane, watched him hand a few coins to a maudlyn, and waited as he disappeared into a stall. I confronted him that same afternoon with the evidence of his sin: a copy of the whore’s confession, purchased from a clerk at the sheriff’s court after her arranged arrest. For a pound it can all be forgotten, I said. The archbishop won’t have to know.

I’ll never forget the look he gave me, half scornful, half amused, as he leaned against a column in the west end of St. Paul’s.
Know what, Gower? That I just swyved his favorite whore?

What I learned that day was that episcopal visitations with whores were not only not off-limits but commonplace. Unusable. I never again bothered with maudlyns.

So despite my easy familiarity with the underside of London, I felt a bit awkward as I stood at the foot of Gropecunt Lane that afternoon, wondering how it all worked. I did not have to speculate for long. Fewer than five steps into the lane I was confronted by an aggressive young woman who stepped from the shadows of a horsestall. “Fancy a bit, good sir?” Her hair, unhooded and wild, swept from her brow in a tempestuous wave. Her eye sockets had been blackened with coal or pitch: a Gorgon, her cheeks painted in a red shade rubbed into pink circles. I shook my head tightly and walked on.

Several more maudlyns accosted me on my way up the lane, chirping of their smooth skin, their fair breasts, their shapely buttocks, ripe for you, sir, ripe for you. Near the end of the lane one final woman stepped forward. Her hair had a reddish sheen and she was small, delicate. She put her arms around me, pushing her lithe form against mine. “I’ve a young body for your use, good sir,” she said. “Youngest you’ll find on this stretch, sure.”

I gently removed myself. “Fourpence to talk.”

“Talk?” She pulled away. “Want to talk to me that way, do you? Price be the same, though.”

“Not that kind of talk. I need to ask some questions.”

“Like them constables?”

“I’m not an arm of the law. Not even a finger.”

She squinted up at me, scrutinizing my intentions. “You’ll want me bawd,” she said softly, putting a hand on my chest, and I felt in the lingering pressure a gentle warning as she hurried down toward St. Pancras. She returned with a large, triple-chinned woman wearing a dun dress of shapeless wool and a hat covered in embroidered flowers, all faded with the years.

“This be Joan Rugg, sir.”

I nodded my thanks, then half-bowed to the bawd. “Mistress Rugg.”

She beamed. “Your first time on Gropecunt Lane?”

“It is,” I admitted, strangely abashed, as if I should have been expected to possess more experience of whoring.

“Well,” she huffed. “We’re a mite careful up this way with strangers.”

“I understand.”

“Your purpose?”

“I seek a young woman.”

“Queynt?”

“Questions. It will be worth her while to meet with me.” I jangled my purse.

Joan Rugg eyed it. “What sort of questions?”

I took a risk; time was short. “Questions about a book. And a cloth.”

Her eyes narrowed into doughy crescents. “We’re not much for books up this way.”

“I don’t imagine you are,” I said, watching her. “Though this book is a special case.”

She considered this. “You’re not the only one asking questions about such matters.”

“Oh?” I said, acting surprised.

“We’ve had constables, beadles, brigands of a sort.” She was boasting about it. “Busted us up something good, shut us down for a bit—though the well be full again already, appetites of cock being what they are.”

“Your maudlyns are in danger, Mistress Rugg.”

She put a hand to her chins. “You puts me in mind of Master Gartner, good sir, the great lover of me youth. Been departed this earth these many year, though not a bell tolls without his face comes to my imagining. Knew the ways of queynt, Master Gartner did. Played me jolly body like a sautrie, and the pole on him would do Gawain’s charger proud.”

She took my stunned silence as an invitation to continue.

“It was Master Gartner purchased me this hat by Haberdasher’s Hall.” Fingering it. “Bands of silk, leather for the brim, the most curious flowers here, and here”—her wide arms rose together as she pointed at the faded buds—“and all for his ladylove. This hat, for all its beauty, Master Gartner says, be the unworthy gloss of your own beauty, Joan Rugg. Let it ever rest upon your fair head as testament of our cherishing. Let it have humble place there, Joan Rugg, its role ever to shade thy fair skin from the ravages of sun and rain. And ever there it has sat, good sir, nigh on twenty year, and there it will sit even to me grave.”

She stared off in a silent reverie that I ended with a gentle cough. The bawd snapped her head around and saw the quarter noble between my fingers. She snatched it. “Didn’t tell them any of it, nor did my girls breathe a word.”

“Tell them what?”

“But I suppose I’ll tell you who might tell you who has it. Or tell you who might tell you who might tell you who has it, as the case might be.”

Patiently I said, “And who would that be?”

“Bess Waller,” she whispered. “Queen whore of Southwark. Sign of the Pricking Bishop, Rose Alley.”

Rose Alley. The bishop of Winchester’s liberties, up the bankside from St. Mary Overey. Joan Rugg had named a bawdy house not a hundred steps from my own front door.

I arrived within the hour to find the narrow lane nearly deserted. Grateful for the lack of idle eyes, I approached the Pricking Bishop and gave a nod to the old woman seated in the low stone entryway. Her skin, pitted with pox and age, twisted into a quizzical frown when I announced myself.

“Gower, flower, hour, power—your name makes no difference to me,” she wheezed. “Now, coin? That’ll open St. Cath’s ear, sure as a morning stiffie opens her legs.”

I tossed her a groat, then stepped into an empty front room, the only furnishings a low table swirled with old candle wax, a rough bench against the far wall. A narrow door gave onto the next room, where a young woman wearing only a shift lay on a pallet, snoring loudly. Despite the open window the space reeked of couplings. The maudlyn’s eyes fluttered open, then narrowed as she put on an alluring smile and, keeping her gaze locked onto mine, rolled onto her back and raised her shift.

I looked away. “Cover yourself.”

“As you please,” she said, coming to her knees. “Most like to start right off, but I don’t mind the wait.”

“Is your proprietress about?” he asked.

“Eh?”

“Bess Waller?”

She fixed me with a cold stare, then got to her feet and put her head out the window. “
Besswaller!
” One animal-like burst of sound, then another: “
Gen’manforyou!
” With that she stalked out of the room, leaving me alone. I paced the width of the chamber, trying to ignore my surroundings.

“Sir.”

I turned. In the doorway stood a woman of uncommon beauty despite her age. Her hair fell loosely about her shoulders in ringlets that clung to a long neck rising from a yellow dress. This was faded, austere, but shaped closely to her slim form.

“Mistress Waller?”

“The same.” A sharp, inquisitive voice; no need for niceties here.

“I’ve come to make a purchase from you.” I held out a purse; thirty shillings, more or less.

She looked at it with some irritation, then back at me. “Want a girl to carry along, take home to bed? That’s not my trade, sir, not been these five year. The law of the bishop’s stews makes plain: swyving permitted in his houses only, not yours.”

“It’s not flesh I’m after. It’s a cloth.”

She started, tried to hide it. Turning away, she went to the window and laid her hand on the sill. “Yet you come here unarmed.” She gave me a wistful smile. “Joan Rugg sent you, I’ll be bound.” Her voice had dulled, tinged with sorrow.

“She did.”

“All my slits been chased from this house on account of that damned book. Constables, king’s men—St. Loy knows what they were.”

“A cloth?” I prompted. She said nothing, and still looked suspicious. “We’re fellow parishioners, Mistress Waller. I let a house from St. Mary Overey, and have for some ten years.” Though I had never seen the bawd at the priory, parish identity is nearly as strong as blood. We are neighbors, I was telling her; you can trust me.

She sighed. “You’ll be wanting my daughter.”

“Your daughter.”

“Millicent,” she said. “Millicent Fonteyn. Got herself in a muck of trouble, she did, and my Ag as well. My younger. Buried her in Spitalfields, poor little maudlyn as she was.” Her eyes teared.

I waited a suitable interval. “Was your daughter the woman slain in the Moorfields this March?”

She shook her head. “But Ag’s the one saw that girl die, sure as light from lamps.”

I recalled the barristers’ play at Temple Hall: the wig, the paint, the furor of the serjeants. “Where is Millicent now?”

“Not up Cornhull, that’s sure.”

I shook the purse. “Where is she?”

She looked down at the purse, then into my eyes. She exhaled. “St. Leonard’s Bromley.” Bess Waller turned and departed the chamber, leaving the purse in my hand.