The Invention of Fire (40 page)

A
N ALE WAGON HAD CAPSIZED
outside Ludgate, throwing full casks to burst open on the pavers, making of the forecourt a slippery mess, with a dozen men arguing loudly over cause and culpability. We went up to Newgate with no happier result, as the Riding would be coming through shortly and no admittances were permitted until after the procession. Finally, as I started to give up hope, the guards at Aldersgate allowed us entry. We quickly made our way past the Goldsmiths Hall, then around St. Lawrence Jewry, ending up on Cat Street, thick with Londoners waiting upon the new mayor. Exton had taken his oath outside the hall the day before, with Brembre handing over the sword and doing his part to reinforce the illusion of a transfer of power.

The Riding procession had just started to move out from Guildhall Yard. Nicholas Exton was mounted on a tall charger, the sword of the city borne proudly before him as Brembre, the aldermen, and other civic officials fell in behind. Ralph Strode was there, heavy in his saddle, as were the sheriffs, the beadles, and the masters of London’s numerous livery companies, all sporting the colors of their guilds.

Everything was as it should be—with one terrible difference. At the front of the procession rode the higher nobles, all there at the invitation of the mayor to precede him to Westminster. I counted ten lords, among them Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick; Richard
FitzAlan, the new chancellor and Earl of Arundel and Surrey; and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester: the three lords at the head of the appellant faction, their banners borne by heralds arrayed before them. In a rising panic, I thought through the next quarter hour, wondering where the massacre would take place, casting about for any means of stopping it. From the Guildhall the procession would ride down to Cheap, bound for Newgate to avoid St. Paul’s. Once beyond the walls the riders would descend to Fleet Street, and from thence to Westminster along the Strand.

The procession pushed past St. Lawrence Jewry to the clatter of the crowd, the singing and playing of the minstrels, the resounding trumpets, the thudding drums, cheers both wild and constrained as the city greeted its new overlord. The press was too thick to penetrate. There was no way to reach Brembre, who was already on the far side of the yard from my position. The lords had disappeared beyond the church.

I hurried along Cheapside on foot, with Jack at my heels and the mayor’s guards on either side, the four of us mingling unnoticed among the throng, allowing me to assess the likelihood of an assault on the magnates. The entire entourage was well armed, the lords heavily guarded in front and back. An attack from the sides would be ineffective, as there was too little distance between the procession and the streetside buildings to allow for anything but a minor disruption.

We had reached the wide space before Newgate. I moved to one side, flattening myself against a wall to allow the procession to pass. A few knights, then the earls with the Duke of Gloucester, soon to be safely out of the city. Any attack would have to come outside the walls. Unless—

I looked up.

Tra-DOOM.

An enormous explosion, from just within the gate. Splinters of wood flew in every direction. A horse reared and shrieked, its rider hurled from its back to crash down upon the stones.

As the ringing in my ears started to fade I heard screams of fright and pain, shouted orders, the clash of bared swords. Lords and knights
sliding from their mounts, leading the animals along as shields against an unknown foe.

Then the handgonnes.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

A multitude of shots, too many to count. I threw myself beneath the wooden awning of a baker’s shop, clutching at my knees, making myself as small as possible while waiting for a ball to strike my chest or neck.

Crack.

Crack.

I had lost sight of Jack. Then I saw him, darting between the wheels of two carts on Cheap. The mayor’s guards had fled in the opposite direction. I was alone.

Crack.

Crack.

Now the screams. As hundreds of Londoners fell to the ground Iseult’s story of the massacre at Desurennes flashed through my mind. Ripped chests, shattered skulls, torn necks.

Crack.

I had a vision of the men in the St. Bartholomew’s grave, children bleeding and ravaged on the ground. Around me others were scattering or ducking behind and beneath whatever they could find. Even Woodstock himself cowered between the wheels of a water wagon, his shoulders hunched against the violence from above.

Crack.

Crack.

More screams, a panic of men and women fleeing from the center of the square.

Crack.

“Aieee!!!”

A howl of pain, distant not near. I risked a look out toward the gate. All was turmoil, the mayor’s Riding dissolved into a chaotic melee of humans and horses, hands and feet. Yet despite the shots and screams I saw no dead in the gateyard, no spills of blood and brains as I had expected.

Crack.

“My eyes! Douse my eyes!” someone shouted high above.

“Leave off! Leave off!” ordered another.

“Down the guns! Down the guns!”

Crack.

“Jesu’s blood. Put it out!”

“M’shirt’s aflame!”

“Down the guns!”

Crack.

“Douse my eyes, for Christ’s mercy!”

I looked up cautiously, still half cowering beneath the baker’s awning. A group of men, yelling back and forth along the walls. Yet these particular screams, I soon realized, had come not from the scattered crowd of lords and citizens in the gateyard. The screams of anguish were sounding from overhead.

Crack.

“AAARRR!”

A flash of powder over the gate parapet.

Crack.

Another, and a gun exploded in a soldier’s hands. The flame leapt at his face. He slapped at his singed brow.

Crack.

This one to the left of him, the tower parapet above. Another misfire. The soldier threw the gun away from himself, shaking his burned hands and clapping them against his hauberk. The weapon spun in the air, hit the awning, then clattered to the street not ten feet from where I crouched. Looking left and right, I crawled out through the fleeing crowd, seized the gun, and returned to my position.

A barrel, a stock, a snake. The gun, I saw, was identical in all respects to the one Simon had given me in Calais.

The shots ceased. By this time a number of the lords’ guards had recovered their wits. Arrows were flying up to the ramparts, shot by a cluster of archers, several of whom held shields overhead to guard their fellow bowmen. I heard shouts from the direction of St. Paul’s. Soon the archers were joined by the mayor’s own swordsmen, a large company from the city guard. Blades were drawn, and other guards were now sprinting for the gate stairs to ascend the walls.

Brembre’s men had arrived too late. If the guns had fired successfully, the cream of English chivalry would have lain slaughtered in the yard. Yet the weapons had misfired—all of them. Could it be—

“Drop it, on your life.”

A sword at my neck. I swallowed slowly.

In the examining then of your counselor be not blind.
Slowly I looked up into the cruel glare of Edmund Rune.

R
ISE.”

I looked down at the familiar gun in my hands, no help against the sharp sword in Rune’s. I dropped the useless weapon on the stones as I stood.

“Through there.” He pointed to a passage between the baker’s and a vintner’s shop next door. The gateyard was still a melee. The clatter and whistle of arrows and bolts, shouts and threats flying up and down from the walls. One man holding a blade to the chest of another would hardly be noticed in the chaos.

“
Now!
” Rune commanded.

I obeyed, backing down the passage with his sword still at my chest. With my final glimpse of Cheap I saw a pale face and earless head against the scattering crowd. Jack Norris, staring after me. Then he was gone.

Rune backed me through the alley to a darkened and empty seld, roughly roofed and open at four sides. Through the narrow gap at the opposite end I could see the rush of citizens along Thames Street, hear their distant shouts as news spread of the incident at the gate.

Rune dropped his sword to his side, though I had no doubt it would pierce my heart should I seek to escape or scream for help. My feeling as I stood there was something like the sensation I had experienced in the surgeon’s chair, donning spectacles for the first time,
the blurred made clear, the dulled edges of things newly sharp and precise, as everything I had seen in those weeks assembled itself with a startling clarity.

“Why, Rune?” I asked him as I waited bleakly to die. “All of this, merely to incriminate Woodstock?” Still a guess, but one that had been creeping up on me over the last two days. The one answer that made sense of it all.

“It was the only way,” said Rune, his jaw tensed in fury. “Gloucester is the leader of the appellant lords, and they do his bidding in all things. They must be turned against him.”

“The gunpowder,” I said. Ships unloading at Dunkirk, a bend conveniently lost in a fight on the quay. “Convince the Lords and Commons that Gloucester is dealing arms to Burgundy and France. That he is a traitor, and therefore unfit to lead an appeal against the king.”

“Treason comes in many forms,” said Rune. “Gloucester is a traitor of the worst kind, disguising his betrayals under a cloak of devotion to the realm. Think of how he must appear to King Richard and his fellow lords about now! Murdering the king’s prisoners, without the process of law, and casting the bodies in the mayor’s own sewers. Massacring townspeople in the Pale, without leave of the captain of Calais. Worst of all, peddling guns and gunpowder to our enemy. A duke acting rashly on his own, without consulting the lords or his sovereign, risking the safety of the realm.”

Rune’s plan had a sickening brilliance.

“You sought to isolate Gloucester,” I said. “Leave the duke weakened and alone, a cowering traitor exposed even as he preens over his parliamentary move against His Royal Highness—and your lord the earl.”

He beamed. “And secure a useful alliance in the event of a French conquest of our fair isle. A likely conquest, the admirals are telling us.”

“You forged the duke’s badge.”

“Many times over. A few embroideresses, a few baubles as reward, a few dozen badges to sew into bends. The simplest part of the entire enterprise.”

Simple, perhaps, yet audacious in its violation of the mores of heraldry.
Dozens of false bends and badges, circling the arms of Rune’s men as they did their foul work in Kent, in London, in the Pale.

I asked him, “How did you connive Snell into your plan? He is the king’s own armorer, appointed from Gloucester’s own household.”

“Snell is a craftsman in body, and a visionary in soul. His ambitions defeat his loyalty, and he bears none toward Gloucester. We both needed a particularly malleable assortment of men and material to do what needed to be done. I provided prisoners to him, he provided guns to me.”

“What about the soldiers?”

“Snell hired men willing to be employed in the ways we both required.”

“They were not Tower men?”

“Mercenaries,” said Rune. “Englishmen all, but hired from a foreign source.” His head tilted to the side as he regarded me in my new bewilderment.

I spoke the name. “Hawkwood.”

“With Simon Gower as his willing agent.”

I turned away from him, my eyes closed against the truth.

“Sir John’s most bloody-minded men,” Rune went on in a smooth voice, taking a sharp pleasure in what he was telling me. “Twenty of them, English men all, shipped up months ago for special missions on behalf of the Tower. In matters such as these it’s best to have native men operating on native soil, able to mask themselves according to the needs of the day. Men without faction or favorites. Men like yourself, Gower. And your cooperative son, who arranged for the hire of Hawkwood’s men.”

My eyes came open, cast to the ground. A shudder ran from my heart to the extremities of my limbs. Rune, then, had known of Simon’s involvement in hiring the mercenary company when he sent me over to Calais and the Pale—perhaps even earlier.

I looked up at the treacherous man, my vision cloudy and faint, and only then did I comprehend the depth of it.

He had already read my darkest thoughts. “That was
my
notion, you know, to bring you into this from the start,” he said. “Ralph Strode
is a cooperative fellow, with a bushel of wisdom, and equal faith in the goodness of the crown. He took my suggestion, didn’t he? And you have been quite useful, Gower, snouting up all the dungpiles I’ve left for you along the way. Swans, powder, badges, banners, guns—even a feigned attempt on your life in Calais to convince you of the urgency of the matter. How fitting, to have the father of my intermediary with these mercenaries, looking into the very deaths they brought about!”

His laughter rang thinly through the seld as I swallowed these bitter truths. I thought of Strode’s sober words in the St. Bart’s churchyard all those weeks ago, the sixteen bodies in a morbid line—and John Gower summoned there to perform a role already scripted by the man responsible.

There was a clamor from Cheap. We would not be alone for long. Rune stepped toward me, ready to plunge his sword into my chest. But I had to know. I struggled over a bench, flattening myself against the back wall of a closed shop. “Did Simon know the attempt on me was a ruse?” Did he think he was saving my life?

Rune smiled. “Some secrets are best left unrevealed, Gower. As you know very well.”

Whatever the truth, Simon, once again, had played both sides, following Rune’s orders while just as blind as his father to their full motivation—or so I had to hope. My son’s endless capacity to deceive roused me to wonder.

“The shootings in the woods,” I said, stepping to the side, playing for more time, following Rune’s chain of revelations. “It was a test, an assay. Snell was testing guns.”

“Not only guns,” said Rune. “People.”

“People? Yet how—”

“These handgonnes are new to our world, Gower. They require new strategies, new tactics of war.” He waved his sword through the air, distracted for a saving moment by his pride. “We know how longbowmen will react in the heat of battle. How speedily a great archer can nock an arrow, how many bowmen to send along an enemy’s flank. Yet we know very little about small guns, how they’ll fare in the bloody milieu of battle and siege. The element of terror and noise they
might provoke in a village or city. Their degree of accuracy on a target relative to distance and quality of powder. Even how quickly they can be loaded and fired by one man. Or one woman.”

“So you tested them.” I felt sickened.

“Lions, prisoners, a pile of scrap lumber,” said Rune. “A target is a target as far as Snell is concerned. Now, as for your role in—”

A flash of metal from the north side of the seld. “Drop your sword, Rune.”

I looked left. Nicholas Brembre, blade drawn, four archers at his side. Behind them cowered Jack Norris. His eyes were wide as ale-jars, his face red beneath his uncapped head, his stubs ugly and aflame with exertion, yet I had never beheld a more welcome sight.

Now a movement to my right. Thomas of Woodstock, his sword drawn, and two of his own men armed with long knives. They had entered the seld from the south, the direction of Warwick Street. The two great men stood opposed, Rune and I the third point in a triangle.

“And yours, Sir Nick,” said the duke, though it was all bluster on his part. Brembre had four nocked arrows in his corner of the seld. Two were pointed at Rune, two at the duke and his men.

“You are mayor for but another hour, Nicholas,” said Rune, a pleading note in his voice. “We are king’s men both. Take the duke’s life, not mine, and this whole affair will be behind us.”

I watched Rune’s eyes, their frantic shifts from side to side. The earl’s counselor was attempting to get Brembre on his side against Gloucester, the king’s chief opponent. If the duke were killed in the day’s civic melee, the mayor’s principal enemy in the realm would be eliminated, with no one the wiser. Brembre hesitated, the calculation visible in his narrowed eyes.

Then Brembre made his decision. He shook his head just slightly. Rune saw the refusal in his gesture as the four archers all took aim. He leapt, his sword tracing an arc from my chest to Brembre’s. Two arrows took Rune in the throat, another in the left eye. The fourth clattered harmlessly on the wall behind me. Rune fell, his sword dropping from his hand as he clutched at his face and neck, his life leaking out around the shafts.

Brembre squatted over the man’s body. He looked up at Gloucester, who gestured for his men to lower their weapons.

“Dead, or soon to be,” Brembre said.

“I am surprised, Lord Mayor,” said the duke as the standoff ended, weapons sheathed and quivered. “Your man had me at the end of his arrow, helpless as a doe. Why would you spare me?”

Brembre considered his response. “You are guilty of many things, Your Grace. Treason is not one of them.”

The duke’s face showed surprise. He inclined his head.

“And I trust you will recall my forbearance in the coming months,” said Brembre. “His Highness the king requires our loyalty and commands our restraint. I for one intend to grant him mine.” And he returned Gloucester’s nod.

I looked at the duke, saw Rykener’s confession and the evidence of Brembre’s vice swirling in his calculating eyes.

It was a remarkable moment. Nicholas Brembre’s third term as mayor was to expire officially later that morning, when Exton presented himself at Westminster. Yet in that final hour he had committed the most selfless act of his rule: sparing the life of the magnate who most fervently wished him dead, and thereby preventing heightened strife between the lords and the king, a civil war, perhaps even a royal deposition. Years later, in thinking back on the events of that autumn, I would marvel at how differently King Richard’s reign might have turned out had Brembre’s arrows flown.

“You have shown yourself worthy of your title, Lord Mayor,” said the duke.

“Staying my hand was hardly an act of nobility, Woodstock.” Brembre’s nose rang out a final mayoral sniff. “Civil war is always bad for trade.”