The Invention of Fire

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John Feel headed up a foundry in Tower Ward. A rival to Stone’s, known for good, solid work. ‘If you have Feel’s with you, why do you need Stone’s?’

Snell tilted his head. ‘It is not Stone’s I need, Marsh. It is you. Your mind, your skills. Your magic with the metals.’

Stephen breathed deeply, feeling a nice surge of pride.

‘The Tower has become a teeming bitch of cannon, Marsh. It is a – why, it is a womb of guns.’ The armourer turned and fixed Stephen with iron eyes. ‘And I want you to train up a new litter for us. A secret litter of guns, fashioned outside these walls.’

Stephen looked at the etched calfskins on the wall, the immense sprawl of the royal hold. ‘Such a prospect would be welcomed by my mistress,’ he said cautiously. ‘With my master’s death, a royal commission would make all the difference for the stability of the foundry.’

Snell barked a short laugh. ‘Don’t play the knave with me, Marsh. This is not a commission to Stone’s, for entry in the good widow’s ledgers, or prattling among the parish gossips. This is an individual assignment, to you and you alone. Hawisia Stone is to know nothing of it.’

Stephen fought against a frown, mindful of Hawisia’s sullen mistrust. ‘If this is to be done at Stone’s I’ll be forced to fire and forge behind her back yet under the widow’s nose. I fear she will catch me out at it, and drag me to the wardmoot or the Guildhall. My sentence is already enough of a burden.’ Ten years. Ten years.

‘Fear is a distraction, Marsh. One I don’t covet this season. I ask you to remember that I am giving you an opportunity here. A chance to serve your king and your country, in an hour of great need.’ Snell leaned forward to place a hand on the younger man’s knee. ‘We are facing war. The French are massing at Sluys once more, Lancaster is abroad in Castile. Men of talent must band together, give their best to the realm.’ He smiled broadly. ‘Besides, everyone knows you are the muscle and mind of that operation. Why you never struck out on your own while you had the chance is a mystery, at least to those I know in your craft. Surely you will find a way to work around her suspicions.’

Stephen felt himself nod, his confidence returning. ‘Aye, Master Snell. I surely will. I will, or the Devil take my body and bread.’

‘Another oath!’ Snell’s eyes flashed a greyish-red in the streaming light. ‘Good fellow.’ The armourer patted Stephen’s leg again. ‘You’ll learn that I am a hungry man, Marsh. Hungry for progress, for innovation.’

‘What sort of innovation?’

‘You will be working on a new kind of gun, Stephen, and in the process helping me solve a problem that has been perplexing me for some months. A problem of efficiency that only you can solve. It will take many tries, many failures, yet I am confident your mind and hands will find the answer for us.’

Stephen reached for one last objection. ‘Cannon are hard to hide in a foundry, Master Snell, even one as large as Stone’s.’

He shook his head. ‘You needn’t worry about concealment. You won’t be making cannon for us. Nothing as large as a bombard.’

‘What, then?’ Stephen asked.

A long silence followed. Through the window came the blare of a trumpet, the muffled calls of the captains out in the yard, a lion’s roar from the menagerie.

‘Handgonnes, Marsh,’ Snell finally said, a finger clawed over his lip. ‘The future of war. The future of death itself, perhaps.’

Handgonnes. A word delicious on the tongue, though coming from the armourer’s mouth it rang with the virtues of his office and the guiding spirit of the Tower itself.

Efficiency.

Precision.

Less powder.

Less gun.

Handgonnes.

‘Last month I had a vision,’ said Snell, rising at last from his chair. Stephen was able to breathe again, though he also felt a keen longing to remain with the man in the confines of the Tower, to do this work here, with the fine tools and hot forges of the crown, rather than return to the bleak drudgery of Stone’s foundry.

Snell had gone to the window and now looked out on the width of the Tower yard. ‘I saw a city on a plain, ringed with fire and belching smoke. A battle, one conscripting every man, every woman, every child within its walls to join the great fight. Every last soul.’

His voice softened, and he spoke the next words as if recounting a saint’s miracle witnessed with his own eyes. ‘And they all had guns, Marsh. The women, the boys, even the littlest of girls.’ Now a whisper, a soft breath of wonder. ‘They all had guns.’

There was a low aperture beneath the eaves of the building, above the window now filled with the armourer’s sturdy frame. Through this upper opening came a hazy gleam, the late hour of a dwindling day. Snell’s head appeared to Stephen’s eyes within a blazing circle of fire as the armourer began to expound this new world of guns and shot.

‘Let me tell you my dream …’

NINE (#ulink_d22d3715-c2e9-56b7-8114-5053018004e6)

Poison, gallows, sword, hammer, faggot, gun, knife, arrow, tub, cross; berries, wood, hemp, iron, sulphur, river; earth, air, fire, water: man, it seems, is capable of fashioning nearly anything into an instrument of death. Four tired nags too old to plough a field can pull a living man apart. Samson slew an army with the jawbone of an ass. The earth is a verdant field of weapons.

Michaelmas, and as a small goose roasted in the kitchen I spent that morning in my study, sifting through what Chaucer had sent me from his house and offices in Greenwich. The package had reached me by means of a parliamentary messenger riding from Kent on his way to Westminster, stopping off in Southwark to deliver a letter and its accompanying matter. A leather packet, thonged and sealed. Recognizing the impression, I broke the wax and unstrung the parchment threading. Always an ambivalent pleasure, our trade in poetry, and I was in no mood for the frivolous or the bawdy.

I needn’t have worried. Inside was a thin quire of eight folios, covered by a brief letter from Chaucer.

To the worthy and right worshipful sir, John Gower of St Mary Overey in Southwark

Worshipful sir, I commend to you this humble quire, inked with sixteen tragedies that we hope will be pleasing to your ears, if not your eyes – for which I daily pray, old friend. Send us your own offerings when committed to sheepskin. We also appeal to your great courtesy in asking that you delayno longer in visiting us in Greenwich, home to many a shrew, and scoundrels aplenty. A man of your habits and skills would feel quite at home in these village precincts.

Leave aside your dark matter for a few days, John. London can surely spare your lurking presence.

Your prideful servant,

Geoffrey Chaucer

The invitation worked at my conscience, and I recalled our last exchange at Aldgate before Chaucer’s final departure from London. For months I had been meaning to take a horse or a walk to the Thames-side village, a short distance from Southwark. Chaucer had vacated the city so thoroughly since the last autumn that it could often seem as if he had never lived here at all.

At least I had his verse. I sat to read, adjusting a candle at each side of the quire, lined with one of the tales that would go into this pilgrimage collection he was sketching out. I had read several others in the past two years, every one of them peculiar, distinctive, uniquely his own. Romances, fabliaux, moral fables, tedious sermons, lives of the saints: he was building a strange mélange of stories, to no purpose I could yet discern.

This tale, to be told by a monk, sang more darkly than his usual fare, whispering of the many dead. It had been divided into a series of smaller parables, all concerning great men who suffer a hard and inevitable fall. Chaucer had written it in eight-line stanzas, ten syllables to the line.

I would bewail in manner of tragedy

The harm of them who stood in high degree

And fell so far, there was no remedy

To rescue them from their adversity.

For know this: when Fortune wishes to flee,

No man may her delay, nor fate withhold;

Let no man trust in blind prosperity.

Beware of these examples, true and old!

A monkish sentiment. Even the highest men must drop like stones, to settle in the mud. What followed were brief accounts of sixteen men who met their deaths in some form of misery: exile, murder, deposition. Chaucer included among the monk’s examples both the ancient and biblical – Adam, Samson, Hercules, Caesar – as well as contemporary greats only recently deceased. Pedro of Castile, Hugh of Pisa, even Bernabò Visconti, the lord of Milan who had passed away in December.

We know we are writing tragedy, I once heard Chaucer say, when our verses weep for Fortune’s assault upon the proud. Chaucer, one of the most blindly vain men I knew, loved nothing more than attacking the vice of pride in his own verse, yet beneath the particoloured skein of this monk’s stories I discerned a subtle warning to certain magnates of the realm. King’s favourites all, and Richard kept them in subsidies and baubles, created them earls and dukes with no counsel from the wise. Men whose hold on power seemed always on the edge of collapse, yet who managed to survive the various turns in royal favour.

Nor was I alone in sensing a quick and lethal shift afoot in the realm, its traces winding stealthily through Chaucer’s pretty tales. Whispers of discontent, of angry lords and weakening wills, of a sinking softness at the top. The tense truce between King Richard and the Duke of Lancaster had held for several years, notwithstanding some notable gaps. Yet Lancaster was in Spain that fall and would remain there for many months, leaving behind a void that other magnates seemed only too eager to fill with their grudges and cavillings.

A monk’s warnings are not to be taken lightly, even if voiced by a poet toying with his oldest friend. Sixteen deaths indeed, I thought grimly. Watch yourselves, my lords, this monk’s tale warned the realm, or you too shall suffer a long fall, and meet your end in a sewer.

‘Another messenger, Master Gower.’ Will Cooper, appearing in mid-stanza. ‘This one from Heath, concerning a new prisoner.’

Lewis Heath, a beadle of Lime Street Ward. I had several men there, as I did in most of the wards, paid to bring me news as it arose. Anyone above a common labourer brought into the city gaols and I would likely hear about it.

‘It is Peter Norris,’ Will continued, his voice somewhat strained. ‘He has been taken for theft, and jailed at the Counter.’ One of the city’s three busier gaols, holding pens for criminals of all varieties.

‘Which?’

‘In the Poultry,’ said Will. ‘He is to go before the Mayor’s Court Tuesday morning.’

The news came as little surprise. For a habitual thief like Norris there was a short ladder from the stocks to the gallows, despite his former prominence in the city government.

‘Will?’

‘Yes, Master Gower?’

‘Did you learn what he stole?’

He hesitated, knowing the implications. ‘Gold wares, Master Gower. A cup, I am told, and a girdle of purses. He had them in hand when taken.’

I sighed. Steal a pair of breeches and Peter Norris might have returned to the stocks, perhaps lost a foot. But pinching items like this meant he would need some extraordinary luck not to hang.

On the Tuesday I went across the river for Norris’s trial, with the likely futile aim of learning the name of his witness. The Guildhall always stank on court days. Though the building’s large main chamber normally felt airy and spacious, the ritual of gaol delivery would empty the city’s prisons, their inhabitants led over to be crammed into the northeast corner, screened off from the trestle tables at either end that served as the mayor’s and sheriffs’ benches for the twice-weekly sessions of the city courts. There they would stand until their matter was called, a thicket of dirt and fleas, the itchy scent filling the hall, with no breeze to mitigate the foul air. Some of these poor souls had lain in the Counter or Newgate for weeks, fed little more than crumbs, and showing it: gaunt faces, thinned limbs, bones protruding from shoulders and cheeks.

On that day a dozen prisoners awaited their turn before the city court. The accused were mostly men, though a few women were mixed in, all of them visibly aware of the sad spectacle they had become. They were a striking contrast to those at the Guildhall on civil matters, which would be heard before the common council. All men, most with self-important airs about them, seated in a double row around the open square of tables formed by the mayor and aldermen, awaiting their moment. One of Brembre’s recent and more controversial innovations, this allowance for spectators at the city courts seemed to me little more than a show of power, of a piece with the man’s preference for elaborate and expensive ceremony at every opportunity. I found a seat along the low cabinets by the Guildhall’s northern wall, allowing me to watch the proceedings at the bench while keeping an eye on the prisoners.