A Burnable Book. Bruce Holsinger

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       ONE

       Newgate, Ward of Farringdon

      If you build your own life around the secret lives of others, if you erect your house on the corrupt foundations of theirs, you soon come to regard all useful knowledge as your due. Information becomes your entitlement. You pay handsomely for it; you use it selectively and well. If you are not exactly trusted in certain circles, you are respected, and your name carries a certain weight. You are rarely surprised, and never deceived.

      Yet there may come a time when your knowledge will betray you. A time when you will find even the brightest certainties – of friendship, of family, even of faith – dimming into shadows of bewilderment. When the light fails and belief fades into nothingness, and the season of your darkest ignorance begins.

      Mine fell in the eighth year of Richard’s reign, over that span of weeks separating the sobriety of Lent from the revelry of St Dunstan’s Day. London often treats the passing of winter into spring with cold indifference. That year was no different. February had been an unforgiving month, March worse, and as the city scraped along toward April the air seemed to grow only more bitter, the sky more grey, the rain more penetrating as it lifted every hint of warmth from surfaces of timber and stone.

      So too with the jail at Newgate: a stink in the air, a coating on the tongue. I had come over the bridge that leaden morning to speak with Mark Blythe, jailed on the death of his apprentice. I had come, too, as a small favour to the prior of St Mary Overey, the Southwark parish that Blythe once served as head mason. For years I had let a house along the priory’s south wall, and knew Blythe’s family well.

      We had been chewing for a while on the subject of the coming trial, and whether I might help him avoid it. No fire in the musty side-chamber. I was losing my patience, and more of my vision than usual. ‘You have no choice, unless you want to hang, or worse,’ I told him. ‘And there is worse, Mark. I’ve seen it. I’ve smelled it.’

      ‘It was an accident, Master Gower.’

      ‘So you’ve said, Mark. How could you have known the axle would break?’ Despite the prison chill a bead of moisture, thick as wheel oil, cleared a path down his cheek. Blythe had lost three fingers, two from his left hand as well as his right thumb, his body marked with the perils of his craft, and Newgate’s heavy irons had scored his forearms. I softened my voice. ‘But the axle did break. The stones, half a ton of them, did spill out and crush that boy’s legs. Your apprentice did die, Mark. And the soundness of that cart was your responsibility.’

      ‘Not’s how I saw it, and as for the axle …’ His voice trailed off.

      I heard a sigh, realized it was my own. ‘The problem, Mark, is that the law sees different kinds of accidents. You can’t claim accidental injury when your own negligence – when your carelessness has been taken as the cause of death.’

      Blythe’s hands dropped to the table.

      ‘Please don’t make me tell your wife you’ve just put your life in the hands of a petty jury.’

      His eyes widened. ‘But you’d stand for me, wouldn’t you then, Master Gower?’

      ‘I’m not an advocate, Mark. What I have are connections. And money. I can put those at your service. But not before a jury.’ Poor timing, I didn’t say. Before the crackdown last year I could have bribed any jury in the realm.

      His shoulders slumped. ‘No trial, then. How quick to get me out?’

      I hesitated. ‘You’ll be here until next delivery. June, I would think.’

      ‘More time, sir? In here?’ He shook his head. ‘They’ll send me down, sir, down to the Bocardo. They press them down there, it’s said. Sticks them with nails like Jesu himself, do abominations each to the other. Don’t want the Bocardo, Master Gower, not by the blood.’

      My hands settled on Blythe’s mangled fingers, stilling them against the wood. Mutilated, cracked, darkened with years of stonework, these fingers had shaped their share of useful beauty over the years: a lintel, a buttress, the pearled spans of a bishop’s palace, the mortaring so precise you would never know from beyond a few feet that what you saw was not a single stone. ‘Mark, I will do what I can to—’

      ‘Have an end!’

      I flinched at the yawn of old hinges and half-turned to the door. Tom Tugg, keeper of Newgate, a cock in the yard. He swung a ring of keys, each a gnarled foot of iron. ‘Fees to be tallied and collected presently,’ he crooned, and two turnkeys did their work. Blythe moaned, the irons biting his swollen wrists.

      It took a moment, but finally Tugg saw my face. Even in the scant light of three candles I caught his gape.

      ‘Whatsit – who let this fiend speak to my prisoner?’ He spun on his men. ‘Who put them in here?’

      Your deputy. A small threat for a small thing. The turnkeys just shrugged.

      ‘Take him back,’ Tugg ordered, a spit of disgust. He looked at me, and got my heartiest smile. He licked his lips. ‘Come along, then.’

      I gave Blythe’s broad back a pat before he was pulled in the opposite direction. Tugg led me along the passage to the outer gatehouse. A fight had broken out in the women’s chamber, a crowd cheering the crunch of bone on the stone floor. At the gatehouse door Tugg turned on me. ‘Well?’ His chin was pocked, unshaved.

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ