The Invention of Fire. Bruce Holsinger

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СКАЧАТЬ send him up, will you? Master Chaucer has a question for him!’

      He turned back and flattened himself against the wall. The servants slid around us bearing a large chest between them, which jostled and bumped along the railings as they descended the street-side stairs. When they were gone he looked at me, gestured at his eyes.

      ‘The same?’

      ‘No worse, at least,’ I lied, blinking away a spot. ‘Some days I scarcely notice, others …’

      ‘Ah,’ he said, his hands clasped. He tilted his head. ‘You know, John, there may be other remedies than resignation and despair.’

      I said nothing.

      ‘There is a medical man newly in town, a great surgeon-physician. He is an Englishman, but trained in Bologna.’

      ‘Thomas Baker.’

      ‘You know him?’

      ‘We’ve recently met,’ I said, recalling the man’s fingers digging in a corpse. ‘He seems bright enough.’

      ‘More than bright,’ said Chaucer. ‘He was in my company on the return from Italy last year, and I got to know him quite well. Familiar with all the new techniques, unafraid to wield the knife when it’s needed. He is lodging in Cornhill for now, above the shop of a grocer named Lawler. Do you know the place?’

      ‘I do.’

      ‘I suggest you make an appointment to see him.’ Then, less formally, his voice lowered, ‘Surely it’s worth a visit, John, even if nothing comes of it. You have only two eyes. You’ll never get a third, no matter whom you extort.’

      Matthew Bagnall arrived at the door. Squat, thick-necked, official, looking eager to get back to the gatehouse. Chaucer offered him drink. Bagnall declined, nor would he seat himself.

      ‘Mustn’t stay up here above my men for too long, Master Chaucer,’ Bagnall said, as if Chaucer’s house rested on an eagle’s eyrie, or some grand mountaintop in the Alps. He wore a cap that fitted tightly over a low forehead, covering what looked like a permanent frown.

      Chaucer explained why I was there, then nodded at me to begin.

      ‘Fair thanks, Bagnall, for the trudge up the stairs.’ I handed him a few pennies.

      He took the coins silently, glancing at them before slipping them into a pouch at his side.

      ‘The Guildhall is seeking information on a company recently arrived in London, and now deceased.’

      His eyes widened slightly.

      ‘Violently deceased,’ I said.

      ‘Killed, you mean.’

      ‘It appears so. They were a group of men, a large group. Not freemen of the city. Outsiders of some kind.’

      ‘Frenchmen, or Flemings then?’

      ‘I think not,’ I said, recalling the stolid, rural look of the bodies, their rough hands, the dirt caked in their nails. ‘These were Englishmen, or I’m a bishop.’

      ‘Not soldiers – cavalrymen, say?’

      I thought of those iron balls lodged in the victims’ chests. The gun wounds could have been inflicted in a battle, some factional conflict on the highway. Yet the fact that the men had been killed with small guns argued against the mess and melee of actual combat. ‘They might have been conscripts, I suppose, but recent ones if so. These men worked with their hands. Ploughmen, some of them, used to harrowing and manuring their fields.’

      ‘Dead when they got here, or killed within the walls?’

      ‘You ask sound questions, Bagnall. I don’t know.’

      He considered me, hand at his thick chin. ‘You’re looking after that mess up at the Long Dropper.’

      I allowed my silence to answer him.

      ‘Gongfarmers’re all jawing about it, the rakers and sweepers as well,’ he went on, loosening up. ‘It’s the gab of London. Fifty men, thrown in the sewers to drown and rot.’

      ‘An exaggeration,’ I said breezily. ‘Sixteen victims, all happily dead before they were tossed in the privy.’

      ‘That may be,’ he said, his black look making me regret my light and careless tone. ‘Yet treated no better than shit from a friar’s arse. Denied the ground, and a Mass, and a proper burial. Whoever’s done it had best keep his murdering nose free of Aldgate, or he’s in for a rough time of it from the guard, that’s certain.’

      ‘To be clear, Bagnall, you know nothing about these men?’

      ‘Aldgate hasn’t heard a whisper about this matter, Master Gower.’ He tugged at his cap. ‘I’ll own we’re a busy gate, what with all the Colchester traffic, marches out to Mile End. But a company of sixteen, riding or walking in from outside? Even the sleepiest of my men would take notice, and a pile of corpses would fare no better. Wherever those poor carls came in, they didn’t come in through Aldgate, nor the Tower postern, or I would have heard about it.’ The postern was a small entrance along the wall north of the Tower. Not a full-fledged gate but a heavy door, though just as carefully watched.

      Bagnall left us with a curt nod. Chaucer stared after him as the old stairs protested his descent with a groan of loose nails. ‘Blunt man. Always has been.’

      ‘Bluntness has its place,’ I said. ‘Though I’ll need such frankness from more than your gateman if I’m to learn who these poor fellows were, and where they came from.’

      Chaucer pressed my arm as he walked me to his Aldgate door for the last time. ‘I shall be back for Parliament soon. You will be in town?’

      ‘Do I ever leave?’

      ‘You’ve not come out to Greenwich yet, John. I have plenty of room for visitors – more than I ever had in this place.’ He looked around, his bright eyes mellowed with regret at leaving a city so much a part of his blood. Like his father, a London vintner, Chaucer had been born and would surely die within these walls, which he had always regarded as a sort of outer skin. I thought of him strolling through the countryside, waking to roosters instead of bells, attending Mass at the tiny church in Greenwich rather than at the urban parish that had been his devotional home for so many years.

      He caught my sad smile, and at the door he turned his full attention on me. Ours was a unique friendship, its complexity never more deeply felt than at those moments of farewell, all too frequent in recent years.

      ‘Be careful with yourself, John, and mind your back.’ His palm was on my wrist. ‘Whoever threw those bodies in the Walbrook knew they would be found.’ He looked out along the rooftops of the inner ward. His grip tightened. ‘And didn’t much care.’

      From the narrow passage before Chaucer’s house I walked north through the boundaries of the parish of St Botolph, lingering at each tower to dispense coins and questions. СКАЧАТЬ