The Invention of Fire (30 page)

“They like the forest,” I said, almost to myself.

“What’s that?” he said sharply.

“They have done this before, my lord.” I described the discovery in the Walbrook, though left the connection with Gloucester and the Tower unmentioned.

He in turn told me what he knew about the killings at Desurennes and the progress of his sheriffs’ investigation. “You will want to begin with Pierre Longel, a witness. The old man was selling cheeses that morning up against the walls. He was not injured, though he saw several next to him killed and maimed—including his grown son. He was a soldier upon a time, and I’m told he has good information about the nature of these weapons and the tactics of the offending squad.”

“Very well,” I said, and thanked Beauchamp for his assistance. I had just turned at the door to his chamber when I was seized with a strange and sudden desire. “I have one last question, your lordship. Or rather a request.”

“What is that?” said Beauchamp.

“I see that your defenses include large cannon. Bombards, culverins, and the like.”

“What of them?”

“Do you keep handgonnes in your arsenal?”

He moved slightly, then pawed a cheek. “Are you suggesting that the Calais garrison was responsible for this massacre?”

“Not at all, my lord.”

“Then what do you want with our hand cannon?”

“With your permission, I would like to see one fired.”

“A singular request.”

I inclined my head. “It is that, my lord.” I asked more out of curiosity than necessity, having developed a keen interest in the workings of the handgonnes. For weeks I had been tracking down the men who had employed the newfangled weapons against the victims found in the sewer channels, and now, it seemed, against the market crowd on this side of the sea. I had yet to hold one of these weapons myself, or witness one employed in firing.

“I see no virtue in these weapons,” Beauchamp mused. “Clumsy, loud, the opposite of stealth. They take an eternity to reload, cannot be aimed with any reliability, and are as likely to explode in a man’s face as kill his enemy. Their only use, as far as I can see it, is to awe our enemy into submission with their noise and fire.”

“Surely they are being refined by His Highness’s armorers.”

“Not that I have witnessed, though there are rumors.”

“Rumors, your lordship?”

“There is talk of clever inventions, unforeseen developments at the Tower. One of my lieutenants has heard whispers of a new gun they have called ‘the Snake.’ A more lethal weapon than our rough tubes, and more efficient, or so it is claimed.”

“The Snake,” I said, intrigued by the designation. “What distinguishes them from the guns you have here?”

“That is unknown to me.” He stood. “I see no reason not to honor your wish, given the distance you’ve come and the task you’ve set yourself. Let me see what we can prepare in short order.”

“I thank you, my lord.”

“It’s less than nothing.” He led me out into the gallery, where he summoned one of the guards waiting against the doors into the upper hall. “Smithson,” he called, snapping his fingers.

“Yes, my lord?” said the guard, head high.

“Take Master Gower here down into the yard and have Usk ready one or two of the small guns for him.”

“The handgonnes, sire?”

“Yes, from that store in the west keep.”

“Aye, sire.”

Beauchamp nodded a curt farewell and spun on his heel, heading back to the captain’s quarters. The guard led me down to the yard, where he spoke to a man named Usk, who looked me over with that soldier’s tired disdain for the noncombatant. After ordering out a few of the small guns, he took me to a corner of the castle yard in which a large quantity of wood had been piled to nearly my height: splintered boards, broken beams, the remnants of a shack. I would be shooting into the pile, he told me, and the boards would prevent the shot from caroming off the stone walls. Nearby a cook and his boy had set a meal for the soldiers on a log-and-board table, a fire crackling and smoking behind them.

Another soldier arrived with the guns. He had four of them, simple-looking devices consisting of tubes of bronze bolted to wooden helves, each weapon no more than four feet in length. Along the barrels were fastened several metal rings, giving the guns a ridged appearance. We each took one in hand.

“First pour a quantity of powder down the barrel, just so.” He demonstrated on his weapon, taking a pre-measured flask of grained powder and tipping it into the barrel. I followed his example on my own handgonne.

“Now the patch and pellets. We use these.” He handed me a small wad of parchment that cupped a handful of pebbles mixed with metal shavings.

“Not a single ball?”

“Not in these guns.” He shook his head grimly. “Tried it on the first of them, but the thing exploded in our man’s hands and took two fingers clean off. Smaller shot means less pressure, the smiths tell us. So. Smaller shot.”

He twisted the parchment over the pellets and placed the wad on the end of the barrel. Then, using the rounded end of a rod—a drivel, he called it—he rammed the wad home so that it was lodged between the powder and the mouth of the barrel. I copied his movements.

Once the gun was loaded I examined the barrel, which appeared to be fashioned of iron staves.

“Hammer-forged and welded, not cast,” he said, tracing a finger
along the barrel of his weapon. “The seams are beveled and welded, and the whole kept together with these rings along the barrel.”

“I see.”

“Firing pan is here, touchhole here.” His finger brushed a round indentation near the stock. In the middle of it was a small hole drilled into the barrel. “That’s where your powder sits when you ignite, and the spark passes through the touchhole. Wait a moment.”

He walked over to the cook’s hearth and took a coal from the fire, returning with a glowing stick. He handed it to me and prepared himself to fire at the pile.

“When I give you the nod, you lower this into the pan. Very simple, just a quick touch, then move your hand away, see?”

As I watched he raised the gun to his armpit, pointed the mouth of the barrel slightly upward, and nodded. I lowered the glowing stick into the pan, heard a brief fizzle, then—

Crack
.

A stunningly loud report as the powder ignited and the gun fired, singeing the hairs near my knuckle.

Usk laughed as I shook out my hand in the air. “Your turn.”

He helped me position the gun beneath my arm. “Now point the barrel toward the target, just . . . there.”

I did as he told me.

“Keep the stock snug, as if you’re couching a lance, though not too tight.”

I had never held a couched lance, though I knew what he meant. I positioned the end of the helve between my arm and chest, applying as much pressure as I thought would keep the gun in place.

“One final instruction. You will want to close your eyes at the moment I touch the coal to the powder, or you may end up blinded. We have had men lose both eyes at once firing these guns.”

How rich that would be, I thought, to be blinded by a handgonne rather than waiting for Lady Nature to take her course with my eyes. I briefly considered putting on my spectacles for protection, though I wanted to see the effects of the shot and the impact of the pellets.

“Are you ready?”

I nodded. Usk blew on the stick, creating an inch of orange, then brought the glowing coal toward the pan. I tensed, squeezed the stock beneath my arm, and readied for the touch.

Crack.

An ear-splitting report. The gun erupted in my arms, the acrid smell of burned powder rising to my nose. I had blinked, of course, and seen only a split moment of the flash, though the stock had remained steady beneath my arm. Before me a curl of smoke ascended from the woodpile. With my skull ringing like a belfry I handed the gun to Usk and approached the pile.

In the middle of a large sawed beam I found the peppered holes created by the projectiles hurled from my weapon. The wood still smoldered along the edges, the handgonne having wrought considerable destruction for such a small weapon.

I asked to fire again. He handed me a slightly different weapon this time, with a longer barrel but no stock. This one I was told to put over my shoulder. It used more powder and fired a larger scatter of stones. After I loaded and tamped he fastened a rag about my head.

“To save your ears,” he said wryly as he knotted it in back.

The concussive force of the second gun nearly knocked me to the ground, though I managed to stay on my feet while the smoke wafted and cleared. A board at the front of the pile had shattered with the impact, throwing splinters of wood in every direction. I thought of a shield, and what such a weapon would do to the unarmored body of a man.

Beauchamp was correct in part. These handgonnes were awkward and inelegant weapons. The assistance of another man was required to ignite the powder, and they seemed quite perilous to those firing them. Attempts to hit a target from beyond forty or fifty feet would be futile, rendering the guns largely useless for precision combat from any great distance.

Yet what struck me most forcefully was how simple the weapons were relative to the terror and awe they inspired. No real skill, no dexterity, no sense of aim was necessary for their use, merely the correct sequence of powder, shot, and flame. I knew from youthful experience
how difficult it could be to launch an arrow effectively from a bow, how many months were required to hone such skills before an archer could hope to shoot with any accuracy or speed. With these handgonnes, by contrast, a man needed only the small measure of strength necessary to lift the barrel or stock to the armpit or shoulder, and with it a soldier of no skill or brawn would become instantly capable of killing a man, woman, or child.

The garrison’s guns had thrilled me with their terrible potency, their muscular allure. I was both smitten and repulsed, seduced by the simple power of the guns yet troubled by the new modes of violence they threatened. I thought of Prometheus, stealing the first flaming brand from the gods and bringing it triumphantly to man. The invention of fire gave us warmth, even as it cursed us with myriad new ways to suffer and die.

T
HE ROADS WERE CROWDED
that afternoon with groups of merchants and many others making their way south from York, the last large town before the Palatinate of Durham. The pilgrims were still two leagues from Doncaster, where, they were told by a passing trio of riders, they would find lodgings scarce indeed for their large company. At the advice of a local carter they decided to push several miles on to Aldwick le Street, a market town where the carter’s brother worked for a keeper. Upon arrival in the village they found a commodious inn with a comfortable barn, a wide hall, even private rooms for the gentles.

Ten days had passed since the joining of the two companies. They had merged comfortably, though Margery still worried about the widow and what she might gossip on her way south. Robert was worried, too, she could tell, though he said little about the matter. It was late on market day in Aldwick, a welcome relief from the drudgery of the road, and several stalls were still open as dusk approached. They ate pies of seasoned fish before the church and were now strolling along the short length of the high street, imagining themselves safe and content. She found it more than pleasant to mingle in a larger crowd and take in the noises, smells, and tastes of a northern town. The bread up here was darker, the ale sweeter on the tongue, the smoke sharper in the nose, the children merrier and freer than the straitened youths of Kent.

The market noise also allowed them to speak quietly without fear of an eavesdropper.

“You treat me as if I be the sire of some great manor,” he was saying. “Yet I’m a poacher and a common laborer, Elizabeth. A cook by trade, as the good mistress Mariota told you. My father was a cook before me, his father before him, and every other father back to the time of King Cnut, and I’ve the smoke of the kitchen in my blood and the stink of the pot in my seed—” He stopped himself, shook his head. “Forgive my common talk.”

“There is naught to forgive, Antony.” She edged closer to him. “Nor is your talk rough by any measure I can hear. You have learned to speak like a Sussex gentleman. A born esquire, a man of means and position.”

“Not born, but
feigned
.” She heard the exasperation in his lowered voice. “For you this be all according to kind, on pilgrimage as a gentlewoman. But for me the feigning is weary work, Elizabeth. Makes a week at the ovens feel like a swim in a pond,” he muttered.

“Psst,” she said, dismissing his needless doubts. “There are wealthy merchants in Durham and York with no more high blood than the shoes you are wearing or the horse you’ve ridden for the last week. Yet you think you are unworthy of a gentleman’s life? Why, the lord mayor of London himself—
Sir
Nicholas Brembre, mind—comes from common stock, yet he rules the city as its very king, his wife as queen.”

“Faulks’re hardly suited to the office of mayor, nor even beadle. And we are quit of London forever, I am afraid. I sh’ll never be a wealthy lord of the Strand, despite your great work upon me.” He smiled kindly at her.

“‘
When Adam delf and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?
’” she whispered, the treacherous rhyme trilling from her tongue.

His eyes flashed a warning. “You’d turn me to one of Wat Tyler’s rebels, would you? Defying my station, crying for the heads of chancellors and archbishops.”

“Better their heads than ours.” She turned slightly, stared boldly into his eyes, reading his fiery thoughts. You say I have changed, Margery.
That I have grown from a common cook into this convincing semblance of a gentleman, like a rough length of iron beaten into a charger’s shoe. Yet you are the one upon whom this flight and this journey have wrought the deeper change. You were a meek mistress in your former life, of gentle birth and tender disposition, worn down by a cruel husband who sought to beat you into a submissive pulp of fear and passivity. Now you have been reforged in the flames of hardship and need, fired by the bellows of death gusting at our heels. And I, Robert Faulk, I have cooked you.

Well—she shook her head, smiled at her overly colorful thoughts. Perhaps they were hers after all. Yet in his burning gaze upon her form and her face she could feel a new assurance, something like a lesson in how to love. How to begin again, and to endure.

“Where are we going, Margery?”

They had reached the downwind edge of the market, where pungent crates of fresh river fish and dried cod were spaced around the fishmongers’ stools. It was the first time he had asked her this so directly, despite their weeks together. She had hinted around at the subject, keeping vague with him.
We are going to the north country,
was all she had said, and the Durham pilgrimage had seemed a blessing. Now she felt she owed him the truth.

“I have relations in Scotland,” she said, her voice low and careful. “My father’s niece on his mother’s side. I last had news of them two years ago, when affairs between England and Scotland were more at peace.”

“Marcher family, are they?” he asked.

“Far from it. They live to the north, along the coast. Her husband is steward for the bishop at Kilrymont. She had a letter sent after her second child’s birth. She will surely take us in, if we can just reach her.”

“Still there then, she and her husband?”

They have to be, she thought. And what if they are not? “Yes. Of course they are still there.”

“How are we to get there from Durham? Neville and Clifford are the fellest of northguards, it is said.” Sir Thomas Neville and Sir
Lewis Clifford, the lords of the east and west marches, the hardened protectors of England from invasion by the Scots—and soon enough, if the rumors held, the French. “Border’s carefully watched, and we’ve no passes or patents to get us through.”

His worries annoyed her. “We have information. About these new hand cannon, how they use them, what they intend to do with them, and how their armies and towns might prepare.” The men who had taken the prisoners from the Portbridge gaol had been overly free with their talk, thinking their captives as good as dead. “This is information we can sell to the Scots, and with it buy our way beyond the border.”

“Now you’d render me
worse
than Wat Tyler.” A low growl. “The Scots are allied with the French. You’d make us traitors, Elizabeth.” His face had reddened, and she feared pushing him too hard.

“The men who shot the prisoners in those woods, they were the true traitors to the king, and to justice,” she pressed on, willing him to see. “It was wanton slaughter. I wish no part of a king whose associates would commit such villainy. You do, Robert?”

He shook his head. “We cannot know those were the king’s men, and even so, to sell the secrets of the realm to the cursed enemy? That be not right, Elizabeth—not for me, not for you.”

She tossed her head. “If that sharp cook’s mind of yours has a more sensible plan, please share it with me, my dear husband and spouse.”

He turned away angrily. She closed her eyes, disgusted with herself, terrified he would break with her. They completed the circle of the market with her gentle apologies and soothings bouncing off his broad back. He said little the balance of that day. His pride was wounded, she could see, and that would not do. She needed him strong, capable, resolute, and confident in his role.

That night she came to him on the floor. Their quarrel, still unresolved, shot through the quiet urgency of their first coupling. His hands seemed to know her as her husband’s never had, teased at her most secret of places and most private of wants. He took his time with her, playing her body as a harpist plucks his strings of flesh, and only then did he enter her, and she marveled at the strength and girth of him, at her own wanton pleasure in this utter, shameless sin.

Afterwards, as she coiled against his nakedness, she spoke softly of their plight. “I am an Englishwoman, Robert, but I am also a Scot.”

He was silent, pushing a finger between the knobs of her spine, moving upward to her neck.

“There are sound reasons for this flight. Stay with me, Robert. Protect me. If we can run or buy our way past the English border guard we will be safely abroad, and then . . .”

“And then?” he whispered in her ear. Her hair was loose. He toothed it, lipped it.

That was the question, though to her a less pressing one than the journey itself and the peril they still faced.

They came together again in the morning, and spent the first part of that day aglow on their saddles, horses drifting together, then apart, lost in the dangerous wonder of it, their rancor forgotten.

AT THE FIRST CROSSING NORTH
of Aldwick two Yorkshire sheriffs waited upon the travelers. The sheriffs had dismounted, tied their horses to nearby trees, and now stood in the middle of the junction, their palms toward the company.

“Where do you hail from, good gentles?”

“We are of Essex, London, and Kent,” said their leader, “and are now bound for Durham and St. Cuthbert’s shrine.” He related the joining of the two groups, their progress along the road, the stop in Aldwick the night before.

“We are devoted pilgrims, good sire,” said Constance, jangling her coat, which was festooned with saintly trappings of every color, shape, and substance.

“Truly we are,” Catherine added as she touched a relic pinned to her girdle.

“Show your badges, if you please.” The sheriffs started mingling with the company, inspecting wares, asking soft questions, looking carefully at faces.

The pilgrims busied themselves with their various badges from journeys past, some leather or cloth patches sewn onto their garments,
others medallions or brooches of pewter, lead, and even silver bought at sacred sites.

Margery had none, nor did Robert. Constance, she noted, was proudly showing four badges of Becket, all of hammered tin, each purchased for a penny or two in Canterbury in years past. Eventually a sheriff reached them.

“It is our first pilgrimage,” Margery said, trying to sound bashful.

“At my insistence, and our parson’s.” Robert put a hand on her arm.

“We are not seasoned travelers like the others.” She glanced aside at Constance, who was watching the exchange intently.

“Yet you chose Durham for your first voyage?” The sheriff’s eyes were on his face, not hers.

“It was thought—,” she began.

“Sir?” the sheriff cut her off, still focused on him. “A long journey for a first, and with such a young wife to saddle along the way.”

His companion laughed. The pilgrims had gone silent, watching the exchange.

“Why Durham, if you please?”

Robert stared down at the sheriff. Her heart sped. She willed him to answer.

“It was the dun cow,” he finally said, looking off at a distant hill.

“The dun cow, you say?” said the sheriff.

Titters from the pilgrims. He seemed to be losing all his sense.

“The dun cow,” he repeated. “It was always my favorite story of St. Cuthbert, that dun cow, and my parson’s as well. Upon a time, you see, a group of monks went looking for a final resting place for the body of the saint. The abbot had a vision, and in that vision the blessed Cuthbert demanded that his body be taken to a place called Dunholme. No one had ever heard of this Dunholme, nor knew where it might be, and the monks were in a kind of despair. Eventually the company came upon a milkmaid searching out a cow. And what sort of cow? A dun cow, she said. As they stood in the road another milkmaid came by, and the first asked the second if she’d seen a dun cow go by. ‘Why yes,’ said the second maid. ‘It went up that path just there,
toward Dunholme.’ The monks took the body of St. Cuthbert along up that path, following the milkmaid all the way, and there, at the end of the path, they found the dun cow chewing at the grass in her favorite spot. Dunholme, now Durham, of course, and there Cuthbert’s shrine was built and his body laid, and soon enough the church and the town were built around it. And so as we pilgrims walk the road to Durham, we follow in the steps of that humble dun cow, as I have wished to follow its steps since I was a child. At the end of that path we shall graze in the lord’s mercy and grace, God willing—and sheriffs willing.”

It thrilled her to hear the laughter and admiring murmurs prompted by his story, from both the pilgrims and the sheriffs, whose small suspicions were quickly allayed. Soon their talk turned to the purpose of their vigilance.

“A French ship has been found shored up above Bridlington,” said one of them. “Out from Sluys, most like, and set to keep a mustard eye on our preparations in the northern shires.” He went on to describe some of the crown’s efforts against the French in the area, the merciless hunt for agents of their allies the Scots.

“You’ll see two cursed Scots dangling from the gibbet as you ride into York, you will,” said a sheriff with a satisfied nod. He looked around at them. “Any of you met or heard of such vagrants and spies, consorting with Scotsmen in these parts?”

Headshakes and sober denials all around. Soon the company was on its way with the sheriffs’ blessings.

They rode in silence for the rest of that day, as words could do little to convey what they felt within. He looked over at her several times, and when she met his gaze she smiled grimly at him, as they shared their newfound lust and the certain knowledge of their peril. They sensed a world closing in around them.