A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 34

The victim?

England's young king.

The chief conspirator?

The king's uncle. The duke who saved my mother's life, and my own.

In the prophecy Lancaster is marked by his livery and his name, both disguised as they were in another poem you once shared with me. You called it an elegy, and you wrote it for the duke himself, on the death of his first wife. I can still recall the line, the company riding toward 'a long castle with white walls' as they pursue a white hart.

Lancaster, the White Hart: here again Il Critto chose carefully. His prophecy imputes the regicide to this same 'long castle,' a magnate and kingmaker whose ident.i.ty the verses barely conceal. Still less do they disguise the alleged victim, young Richard, whose badge bears the white hart.

Nor do they obscure the ident.i.ty of the author, despite your amusing effort to credit the work to your invented Lollius. Anyone familiar with your Book of the d.u.c.h.ess would easily detect your handiwork.

This, I believe, was Simon's hope. A master of deception, he used old parchment and disguised his hand to make the book take on greater antiquity. He then decorated the margins with plain but skilful drawings of the thistleflowers, plums, hawks, and swords that answered to the playing cards evoked in the prophecies.

Now it needed a final touch. Simon paid me a last visit on Epiphany Sunday, soon after your departure for Rome. Gone was the cavilling bitterness he had shown while the two of you were tilting for my attention. Instead he was all smiles and warmth. He expressed regret for his earlier behaviour, and we parted on the most pleasant terms.

The sole purpose of his visit, I know now, was to pilfer the cloth. He must have unpinned it from the tapestry while my attention was diverted, stuffed it away even as he lisped his pleasantries. It was then an easy matter to commission the embroidery of those simple shapes from Hawkwood's playing cards: plums, thistleflowers, hawks, and swords, surrounding the royal livery, tying the cloth inextricably to the book.

Now all that remained was to get the book into the hands of his master. 'By kingmaker's cunning a king to unking.' Simon wrote that line for Hawkwood. He knew this man, his grandiose designs, his thirst for new legitimacy in his homeland. To imagine himself as the kingmaker would feed his ambition and stoke his pride.

Yet to present the book directly to the great condottiero would have been unwise. Hawkwood is known to be changeable, and he might well have suspected a trap. So Simon arranged to have the prophecies made known to Hawkwood, dangled in front of the man like a riverbug before a pike.

Hawkwood, as Il Critto knew he would, bit.

You are asking yourself how I know all of this, by what means I gleaned this foul grain. There is a man in Hawkwood's inner circle, another Englishman. His name is Adam Scarlett. Though he has a less turbulent soul than his master's, his name is as respected as Hawkwood's, and nearly as feared.

Two evenings ago, a week after Simon's departure for England, Scarlett came to see my father. I heard their voices and walked over to the far north corner of the gallery, where there is a squint down to the hall below. He was asking about Simon.

'Il Critto spent much time in this house,' said Scarlett. 'Tell me all you know about him.'

My father replied that he knew nothing of Simon's doings beyond the failed courts.h.i.+p of his daughter. Why, what else was there to know?

'Master Gower's departure was somewhat abrupt,' Scarlett explained. 'Ser Giovanni sees no cause for concern in the matter. I am sure he is correct. But I am a thorough man.'

They went on like this for a while, as Scarlett plumbed my father's mind but found nothing. Then he asked a final question. 'Did Il Critto ever mention a book?'

'A book?'

Scarlett described the work to my father, explaining how it would abet Hawkwood's larger aims aims for which we are all labouring, as he put it and every word he spoke was a poisoned dart shot from his lips.

Prophecies.

The Duke of Lancaster.

The Earl of Oxford.

Sir Stephen Weldon.

St Dunstan's Day.

Treason.

Execution.

Rome.

France.

It was as if the thousand pieces of a shattered window rea.s.sembled themselves in an instant, and I saw it before me, in all its grim totality. Hawkwood, Scarlett, Simon, even my father: all of them in cruel confederation, striving for destruction. An intricate plot to destroy a duke, a king an entire realm.

I dashed to the gallery. The cloth was gone. On the bench below the tapestry I saw Il Critto, or rather my memory of him. His eyes wide as he gaped at the cloth, his long limbs coiled tensely as he gazed with jealousy on our swelling love. I knew everything, and the knowledge boiled me with terror. For your life, for the life of the duke, for the blood of all England.

Now it is clear what must be done. Simon has been gone for over a week. Your prophetic book precedes him, augmented with his final prophecy and even now making its way overland to London, by the Rhineland roads. When you return to Florence in another fortnight, you shall find only these parchments waiting for you, sealed with my ring, and a very wet kiss the only kiss you will receive for many months. For by then your bitter orange shall be gone.

Worry not for her safety, my poetical prince. There is still something of La Comadrejita in her, after all. She knows how to steal, how to stab, how to darn a gentleman's hose, wash a lord's pot, peel an earl's root. How to ask for a meal in a dozen tongues, yet garb herself as a peasant. How to barter like a tradesman's wife, yet mewl like a lady of the court. How to slit a man's throat. I dare say her life has equipped her for such a journey better than most.

She will act alone, her quest to find the book herself and prevent the fulfilment of Hawkwood's true aims. To find the book or die trying. A long journey to England, then, by land and by sea. And when she finds the book, when this accursed volume is in her hands at last, she will burn it to finest ash.

I leave you with one last enigma, my only heart, in the spirit of our games of love and verse. May it goad and p.r.i.c.k your mind as you follow our course to England.

Though faun escape the falcon's claws and crochet cut its snare, When father, son, and ghost we sing, of city's blade beware.

I shall gloss it for you when our lips finally touch and the danger is well past, though I suspect you will have puzzled it out for yourself by then.

Until that blessed moment, I remain yours most faithfully- Written at the Via dei Calzaiuoli,

by the Misericordia,

the Thursday next after Epiphany Sunday, by Seguina d'Orange

FIFTY-FOUR.

St Mary Overey, Southwark On the third day following the deaths of Sir Stephen Weldon and the butchers, as I dozed in the back garden, Will Cooper appeared at my side. 'Master Chaucer for you, sir.'

We drank small ale beneath the arbour, with the heavy scent of thirsty roses filling the air. Our talk was amiable, though he sensed my reserve. He would hardly meet my eyes, and he fidgeted on his chair.

'What's tickling your thoughts, Geoffrey?' I finally asked, wanting to get to it.

Chaucer let out a breath. 'I have been avoiding this conversation, frankly.'

'I should think so,' I replied indifferently, though over the following hours this indifference would yield by turns to wonder, then outrage, then gnawing doubt.

He started with his arrival in Italy, and his introduction to Seguina d'Orange. Simon had been courting her and was obviously in love, yet she used him to meet Chaucer. They developed a quick intimacy and a ready attraction, meeting frequently as they moved among the English residents of Florence.

'When you are newly in town, of course, everyone wants to hear about doings at Westminster,' Chaucer said. 'The king's new wife, the buzz around Lancaster and the rivalries for the crown. Seguina's stepmother was an Englishwoman a Londoner, in fact, the widow of one of Hawkwood's men. She had books and books of English romances, and Seguina herself spoke our language like a native. Her interest seemed only natural.'

He stared off over the priory walls, the line of his lips unbending. I stared at him in turn, wondering why I felt surprised at yet another example of Chaucer's baffling selfishness. A married man attempting to seduce a young woman nearly betrothed to the son of his closest friend.

'Seguina was a great story-teller,' he went on. 'The two of us swapped tales and enigmas like children trade river stones. Hers were fantastical, full of beasts and magic, caliphs and flying carpets, boiling oil, thieves visiting at night.'

'And the prophecies?'

'It started as a wager, really, a bit of a dare. I'll write a new work, I told her. Not my usual fare. Something darker, but tuned to the ears of the gullible. When I finished it I planned to read it to her. I showed up at her father's house, the draft in hand, quite pleased with myself.' He turned to me. 'Simon was there that morning, John. Come to pay a call, he said. Seguina invited him in, and together they listened to the prophecies as I read them aloud in the gallery.' Chaucer was measuring his words, trying to soften a coming blow. 'I suppose it was then that Simon saw his chance.'

'His chance? What are you talking about?'

He swallowed drily, his slender neck bobbing with the effort. 'A few weeks before my return to England I had to make a long-scheduled trip to Rome. I would be gone a month, perhaps more, before returning to Florence. The day before my departure, as I was packing my things, I realized it was missing.'

'What?'

'My little book.'

My little book. Chaucer's phrase for the leathern bifold he kept with him at all times, replacing the inner quire as needed. I recalled our meeting at the customhouse, the new red cover such a surprising replacement for the hand-worn skin he had carried for so many years.

Nothing here made sense. 'So you lose a book in Florence, and you ask me to find it in London?'

'Hardly,' he said, still hesitating. 'The book you were looking for was a copy of my own, made by ... it was it was Simon who stole my book-'

'As I suspected.'

'-who stole my book, copied out the De Mortibus word for word, line for line, and then-'

He stopped, a hand at his mouth as he looked sidelong at me.

'Then what, Geoffrey?'

'Then he added a final prophecy of his own.'

My vision blackened entirely, though only for a moment, and afterwards I felt a clarifying and melancholy sadness. Simon's involvement explained so much, and about everything. His return to England, his eagerness to mingle with the chancellor and official Westminster, that peculiar scene with Chaucer at Windsor. It was as if a piece of gauze had been torn suddenly from my lame and weakened eyes, even as a new weight settled around my heart. I wondered if anything Simon had said to me, anything at all, were true: his longing for home, his desire for a new intimacy with his father, his need to hear of Sarah's last days. All of it feigned?

'Simon wrote the thirteenth prophecy,' was all I could say.

'Out of spite, and simple jealousy,' said Chaucer. 'The jilted lover, revenging himself on the man who stole his lady's heart. One of the oldest stories there is, though in this case augmented by a reckless disregard for all the other lives affected, even the safety of the realm. With my little book in hand he would have indisputable proof that I was involved in the De Mortibus, along with a host of other information he could peddle back in Westminster.'

'Information?'

'That quire was dangerous, true, but not only because of the prophecies, which, you must remember, I still regarded as nothing at the time. The book, you see, had all my jottings about what I had learned of Hawkwood's plans over my months in Italy. Troop movements, financing through bankers in Venice, plans for garrisoning and travel. While Simon was copying the prophecies he saw what was in front of him, and recognized it for what it was.'

'So why didn't you tell me all this earlier, Geoffrey? When we first spoke about it, or that day in the customhouse? Think of the time and trouble you might have spared me, and yourself.'

'Well, in my defence, I was almost as ignorant as you when we met at Monksblood's. I had suspected Simon of lifting my book but had no proof, nor even certain knowledge that he had returned to England. Then, once he showed himself, it became ... personal, I suppose. I could see that you were taken with him, that the two of you were starting to reconcile after so many years.' He stopped, closing his eyes. 'And I have only just confirmed that Simon wrote the final prophecy.'

There was a large rose bush climbing an old trellis on the priory edge of the garden. My eyes had fixed on one stem heavy with newly opened buds, and as Chaucer pressed on I watched spots swimming in a field of cloying pink.

'It was Simon's peculiar mind that conjured the details that made the thing so d.a.m.ned convincing,' he said, as much to himself as to me. 'Wykeham has always had a feast on St Dunstan's Day, and Simon used to speak with such admiration about those pearls. You would show them to him when he was young, while Mark Blythe was carving them over the gates.'

Sunday strolls along the palace walls, admiring looks up at the reliefs. I recalled my visit to Newgate so many weeks ago, the feel of the mason's hands, rough with his labour. And of course the heraldry, the bit about the 'pearls all appointed', even the word spiritus from the processional, which Simon would have remembered from his years as a boy chorister.

'He made a fair copy of the prophecies, including his new verse, but used old parchment, masking the whole thing as an ancient ma.n.u.script written in the days of King William. He also drew thistleflowers, hawks, plums, and swords along the borders, to correspond to the symbols I had written into the prophecies.'

'From the cards,' I said, making another connection.

'Hawkwood had given me several decks as a gift my last time in Italy. I gave one of the decks to Swynford, simply as an amus.e.m.e.nt. But that was years ago, well before any of this. As for the verse, all that letter rhythm and so on?' He smiled, almost bashfully. 'I was amusing myself by writing in the rough style of other makers, like this William Langland or the poet of the green knight. Rum, ram, ruf, that dross. It was a simple thing to mimic, or misinterpret, as the case may be.' He hesitated. 'As was the heraldry on the cloth.'

'Not Simon's work, surely?'

The smile faded. 'Seguina's.'

'Peculiar,' I said, trying to make this piece fit. 'Why would Seguina partic.i.p.ate in Simon's plan?'

'The cloth had nothing to do with the prophecies, not originally. Seguina had embroidered a cloth years before with the arms of Prince Edward and the Duke of Lancaster.'

'And Edward's arms pa.s.sed to his son, now our king.'

'Precisely.'

'But how on earth did Seguina come to embroider the arms of Gaunt and Prince Edward?' The question, I would now learn, at the centre of it all.

Chaucer looked at me, his eyes lined with a sadness that, for as long as he lived, would never entirely disappear. Over the following hours, as afternoon turned to dusk and dusk to evening, I listened to the saddest story I had ever heard. A story of Castile and Aragon, of Spain and Italy, of Moors and Christians. A story of two Spanish brothers, Pedro the Cruel and Henry of Trastamara, divided against themselves in war, and of Pedro's English allies: Prince Edward, eldest son of King Edward, and his brother, John of Gaunt, fighting on his behalf in Spain.

Yet most of all it was the story of a young woman. A daughter, a sister, a witness, a survivor, a beautiful girl who had seen her mother raped, her brother die, her n.o.ble father humiliated into the life of a mercenary. From the Castilian marches she had made her way to Lombardy and Milan, where her father hired himself and his men out to the great English condottiero. There, still a child, she learned to get by in the many languages spoken by Hawkwood's mercenary melange: French, Italian, English, a smattering of Moorish, even Hebrew, all added to her native Castilian tongue. As she grew into a young woman, she learned to defend herself with fist, tooth, and knife, though she was saved from a life of savagery by her stepmother, a London gentlewoman living among the small English communities in Milan, then Florence. A skilful embroideress, her stepmother taught her this and other arts of womanhood: how to dress and care for her body, how to gesture and stand, how to feign interest in the conversation of men. She might be a lady herself someday, her stepmother told her, and it's best to be prepared. Yet through it all Seguina d'Orange never forgot the scene of her mother's violation, nor the English duke who had saved both their lives.

From the oratory came the distant drone of the office, the voices of the Austin canons carrying through the churchyard.

'Prince Edward, then,' I said into the cooling night. 'Edward was-'

'Her mother's ravisher. Picture our good Prince Edward, heir to the English throne, abiding with Lancaster in Castile, waiting for Pedro the Cruel to pay his war debts. He never did. So Edward took it upon himself to extract them from the countryside and its people on his way back to Aquitaine. He was already falling ill, you know, and there were hints of concern about his mind. He'd learned his tactics from Pedro, and from his own long experience in the wars. He taught his men in turn to burn and rape their way through the land. He took what he wanted.'

'Prince Edward,' I whispered, my memories of the man already distant and opaque.

'The blackest prince who ever lived,' said Chaucer. 'They descended on the marches after the war, when her father was still absent, cleaning up with Pedro. She remembered the arms of her mother's rapist and her own saviour-'