A Burnable Book. Bruce Holsinger
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Название: A Burnable Book
Автор: Bruce Holsinger
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007493319
isbn:
Strange, too, that she’d said nothing to Eleanor about her plans, for the two maudlyns had long been intimate, swapping jakes, lending a coin here and there, looking out for one another in their carnal trade, and always mindful of the situations that had led them to it: Eleanor, an orphan, her younger brother apprenticed to a Southwark butcher who beat him mercilessly; Agnes Fonteyn, who had fled her mother’s bawdy house in the stews for a higher cut of her skincoin. Tightest yoke a’ mauds you’ll ever see, Joan Rugg liked to say, and it was true.
Once past Cripplegate they skirted the northern wall past the bricked-up postern at the foot of the causeway and soon came to the edge of an overgrown orchard. Here the lane opened out into the broad expanse of the Moorfields, a linked series of marshy heaths that formed London’s nearest hunting grounds, mostly deer and fowl. A few drier, higher bits could handle cows at pasture, though for the most part the whole area was a fen. That late afternoon Eleanor and Mary saw no one moving among the high tufts of moorgrass.
The first path off the causeway led to a spot beneath a large, lone oak. From there a smaller path branched off to the east. Ahead loomed the mass of Bethlem Priory, its walls heightened and buttressed since the order started taking in lunatics the year before. Eleanor recalled her last visit to Agnes’s lair, the mix of routine coupling and utter terror. The desperate gropings of an ageing squire, the loose spread of his gut on her back like a jelly blanket – then a sound that shrivelled the squire’s cock, and her own as well: a lunatic’s scream, echoing from the Bethlem walls. Since that night Eleanor had heard similar accounts of the priory’s madmen, fighting their chains as the canons extended their charity to the wrong of mind.
Eleanor saw the white rock that marked the final turn. They pushed through the heavy foliage until they reached a high wall of hawthorn. A strong scent of primrose masked a sweeter, sicker smell beneath. Mary touched her arm. Eleanor held her breath and stepped into the dense brush. A flash of bare skin on the ground, glistening, moist. Eleanor pushed aside the last branches. They saw the body.
She was face down in the wetness, naked, her skin marbled with mud and rain. Her hair, caked in soil, had spread into three slicked highways from the crown of her crushed head, opened to the vermin. Beside her left hand lay a shoeing hammer, its handle resting carelessly over a root. Eleanor, in a daze, picked it up, felt its killing weight. As she stood feeble guard, Mary, with a heavy sigh, squatted in the mud beside the body. ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said. ‘Oh, Agnes you were so lovely, oh my beautiful.’
‘Turn her over then, get her face out of the peat,’ said Eleanor, hammer still at the ready. Something didn’t make sense. Agnes’s hair—
Mary pulled at the girl’s shoulders. With a suck of mud she came free. Once she was flipped Mary used her hem to wipe the dark patches from the girl’s ruined face.
They stared down at her, at first disbelieving what they saw. Eleanor glanced into the hunter’s blind. A pile of women’s finery thrown over a stump: an ivory busk, a taffeta cape trimmed with fur, more silk than she and her fellow maudlyns could ever hope to afford, all in a style that Eleanor – who had a poor girl’s eye for new jet, could tell you who in town sold the latest dresses from Ghent and Bruges – had rarely seen in London. She looked back at the face.
This dead girl was indeed lovely. She was not Agnes Fonteyn.
La Neyte, Westminster
Wat Tyler. Jack Straw. The city as powerless as a widow, Troy without its Hector, the commons running like barnyard animals through her streets, taking her bridges, torching her greatest houses, storming the Tower and murdering the lord chancellor and the lord treasurer. Though it had been four years since the Rising swept through London, the memories still haunted our great but tired city, pooling beneath the eaves, drifting along narrow alleys with the continuing threat of revolt.
No one had been more affected by the events of those grim weeks than John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. After stealing everything worth taking, Tyler and his gang burned Gaunt’s Thames-side palace to the ground, and the ruins of the Savoy would sit along the Strand for years: a charred reminder of the brute power of the commons, and the constant threat embodied by the city’s aggrieved poor.
Now the duke avoided London as much as possible, centring his life and his business around the castle of Kenilworth far to the north. When his presence was required in the city Gaunt would appear for a few days or a week at a time, the grudged guest of those magnates willing to tolerate his household, and betting on his survival. Often he would lodge at Tottenham, though that Lent he was residing at La Neyte, the Abbot of Westminster’s moated grange a mile up-river from the abbey, and it was there I would be granted an audience with his sometime mistress, arranged the day before.
The duke himself was just leaving the abbot’s house as I arrived in the upper gateyard, his retainers gosling along behind him. He half-turned to me, his brow knit in fury as he acknowledged my bent knee with a curt nod. Those around him knew better than to speak, as did I.
In the summer hall I moved slowly along the wall, mingling with the line of bored servants as thick hangings brushed my cheek. The chamber teemed with lords of various ranks who had been seeking a word with the duke before his abrupt departure, and I tried to go unremarked by those remaining. My eyes, uncooperative, failed to spy a drip bucket, full of rainwater from the porous ceiling. It surrendered its contents to my left foot, then clattered across the floor. There was a hush. It was Michael de la Pole who broke it in his graceful way. ‘Not to worry. The abbot has ordered some silken buckets,’ said the lord chancellor into the silence, giving me a slight nod. Laughter, though not at my expense, filled that portion of the hall, and the baron resumed his conversation.
Standing behind the baron, shifting a little as the hubbub returned, Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, gave me an ugly look. I glanced away, though not before noting his discomfort. De Vere had likely been the target of Gaunt’s ire, and now here’s John Gower, come to brew more trouble, as if the particular group of magnates clustered in the hall at La Neyte that day did not promise enough. A duke, an earl, and a baron, a tensile triangle of mutual suspicion and dependence. Gaunt was still furious at de Vere for turning the king against him at the February tournament at Westminster, where a plot against the duke’s life was only narrowly averted – and this after all the business the year before at the Salisbury Parliament, where Gaunt’s supposed plot against his royal nephew nearly led to the duke’s hanging on the spot. The plot was spun of gossamer, of course, the invention of a Carmelite friar who was afterwards seized on the way to his cell and tortured to death. One year, two imaginary plots, and great trouble for the realm. De Vere, the young king’s current favourite and a notorious flatterer, was taking every advantage he could of the widening rift between the king and the duke, gathering nobles to his side in an open attempt to wrest power from the much older Lancaster. Caught in the middle of it all was the Baron de la Pole, chief financier to old King Edward and now lord chancellor, determined to keep the peace at all costs – and, it appeared to me, losing ground by the day.
Oxford had now turned his back on de la Pole, suggesting that he had taken the chancellor’s kind gesture toward me as an insult to him. Sir Stephen Weldon, chief knight of the earl’s household, noticed his lord’s vexation and excused himself. I set my face for the encounter. This took some effort, for Weldon’s СКАЧАТЬ