A Burnable Book. Bruce Holsinger

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СКАЧАТЬ managed to see him nearly every month as they grew up. Finally, at his eleventh birthday, the office of the common serjeant arranged for his apprenticeship to a freeman of London and master butcher, and all appeared set.

      Then, not six months after his apprenticeship began, the city passed the butchery laws, and Gerald’s master moved his shop across the river to Southwark to avoid the fines and fees. There not only butchers but guardians operated on their own authority, with little legal oversight from the town, and no common serjeant to take the orphans’ part. ‘Never heard no law against a butcher moving shop to Southwark,’ Grimes had said when Eleanor confronted him. He turned instantly cruel upon the move across the Thames: Gerald was on his own there, surrounded by meat yet starved for bread, beaten regularly and with no recourse. Eleanor had tried to intervene, but the laws of London, it was said, have no house in Southwark.

      Soon enough Gerald was turning into one of them, these Southwark meaters, a nasty bunch of Cutter Lane thugs without guild or code, sneaking rotten flesh into the markets and shops across the river. The Worshipful Company of Butchers, London’s legitimate craft, had been trying for years to quash the flow of bad flesh into the city to no avail, and now that Gerald had been caught up in their illegal trade he, too, was slipping down the path to a hanging. It often seemed to Eleanor that Gerald’s entire self had changed, as if the Holy Ghost had sucked out his soul and the devil had blown in another.

      ‘Best be off,’ she said. He shrugged indifferently. From behind her, a whisper of straw. A pig, she thought. Gerald’s back was to her as he scraped at a pile of hardened dung. ‘May be a stretch before I can get out here again.’ She recalled the beadle’s questions, the threats, and thought of Agnes. Two sparrows perched on the side of the stall flitted off. Gerald started to turn. ‘There’s been some trouble on the lane, and I might have to be—’ He faced her now. His eyes widened.

      Eleanor’s neck snapped back, her hood wrenched violently downward by an unseen hand. She was spun around into the face of Nathan Grimes, taking in his ale-breath. ‘Trouble on Gropecunt Lane? For a lovely boy-princess like yourself?’

      ‘You let my brother go, now!’ Gerald screamed, backing away. ‘You just let him go, Master Grimes!’

      Grimes was a stout, boar-like man, with well-muscled arms that flexed as he held her. ‘I’ll let it go all right.’ With a hard push against her head, he shoved Eleanor to the stall floor. She backed up against the boards, then came to her feet, her breath shallow.

      Grimes gestured toward Gerald. ‘Get inside, boy.’ Gerald stayed where he was. Grimes raised a hand. ‘Inside, boy.’ Gerald looked at Eleanor. She gave him a reassuring nod. He backed away, pushed open the pen gate, and walked reluctantly toward the house. The butcher leaned over Eleanor, toying with Gerald’s knives.

      ‘I know what you be, Edgar Rykener,’ said Grimes, with a small lift of his chin. ‘No place for swervers in a respectable butcher’s shop, now. Let your brother learn his craft in peace.’

      ‘Peace?’ said Eleanor under her breath; then, more loudly, ‘He getting any peace by your hand?’

      ‘Getting fed, isn’t he?’ Grimes retorted. ‘Getting schooled in hogs and calves, learning the way of the blade, got some thatch over his head. More’n you can say for lots of boys his age, in London or not.’

      ‘And getting a mallet to the skull in the bargain.’

      Grimes spat in the dirt. ‘Boy needs to learn respect he wants to be a freeman like me.’

      ‘You took an oath, Master Grimes,’ she seethed. ‘In the mayor’s presence himself you swore to God you’d protect my brother, keep him from harm. Now you’d as lief kill him.’

      Grimes lifted a cleaver, fingered its edge. ‘Never cut up a maudlyn in all my day.’ He looked over at the beef carcass. ‘Can’t imagine there’s much trouble to it, though.’ He smiled. ‘Now get back to London, sweetmeats.’

      She edged out of the stall with a final glance at Gerald. He stood in the doorway to the apprentices’ shack, his face so much older than it should have looked. Once she was gone Grimes would paint it good. The burden of it all settled on her: a murder, a missing friend, a brother liable to be brained at any moment and clearly troubled by something he wouldn’t reveal.

      Yet there was one man who might be capable of putting things right for Gerald, Eleanor speculated as she walked up toward the bridge, get him out of all of this. A kind man, from all she’d heard. A man with the authority to remove her brother from his Southwark dungeon and put him with a kinder master in London. As she passed back over the bridge she thought about this man, knowing, at least, where to find him; trusting, for she had to, in his kindness.

       THIRTEEN

       St Mary Overey, Southwark

      On the morning after Low Sunday I rose early, awakened by the buzz of the priory bell, cracked and unreplaced since the belfry fire two years before. My appointment with Braybrooke would not be for hours, but I left the house anyway, absorbing the quiet din of these Southwark streets at dawn, already alive with the work that sustained the greater city over the river. Here the trades commingled with none of London’s attempt at logic, the shops of haberdashers and carpenters, tanners and tawyers, fishmongers and smiths, coopers and brewers all side by side, spewing smells and sounds and petty rivalries even as small creeks of rubbish spilled out of alleys between them. I stepped into a baker’s shop and purchased two sweetbuns for the trip. At the river landing I paid my pennies and hopped on a common wherry, joining a few others westward bound.

      I found a seat for the float to Fulham, and as the wherry passed St Bride’s on the north bank I squinted across the wide span at a group of young men in skiffs. They were tilting, I realized, their target a square of beaten tin suspended from the lampstick of an anchored barge. Four oarsmen per skiff made wide circles around the craft, the lanceman at the bow, loose on his knees; then, a speedy approach, the lance held at the shoulder, the skiff keeping steady over the rises; and finally impact, as the dulled point of the lance struck the tin, the noise carrying over the water. An awkward game, yet several of the young men were quite skilful with their lances, taking the applause of their mates with exaggerated pride.

      These, I thought with a shudder, would be the first Englishmen killed were a French invasion force to sail up the Thames from Gravesend and destroy the bridge. How would these boys spend their final moments? Would they turn tail, ditching their skiffs on the bank, fleeing through the streets? Or would they stand and fight, tilting at warships in a futile attempt to save London?

      At the quay of Patrisey I changed wherries and thought ahead to my appointment with the bishop. Knowing Braybrooke as I did, I could expect a meeting full of venom and insinuation, of parries and feints. Tread softly, I warned myself.

      With a slow turn toward the north bank, we passed lines of oak and elm towering over the terraced lawns leading up to the bishop’s great house, which commanded an enviable position over the river. Above the dock was a pavilion trimmed in banners of silk, cloth of gold, and sable, displaying Braybrooke’s mascles over his personal barge.

      As the bank came into view I saw not only Braybrooke’s colours, but the Earl of Oxford’s as well. The wherry bumped in just up-river from Braybrooke’s barge, and as I stepped up the bank I saw Robert de Vere striding across the lower terrace. Normally Oxford moved about СКАЧАТЬ