The Invention of Fire. Bruce Holsinger
the boy started to eat Norris made an effort to turn his head, angling his gaze up to meet my own.
‘Spit that out, Jack!’ Norris commanded weakly when he saw me. The boy stopped chewing, his eyes gone wide. ‘John Gower here’s like to poison you dead, without a thought for your boy’s soul.’
I sniffed. ‘Not today, Norris.’
I glanced at his son. The boy, twig thin, wore a woollen cap, his golden hair stuffed beneath the narrow brim. The cap had ridden up slightly, exposing ugly stumps where his outer ears had once been. A cutpurse, then, caught knifing and sliced for his crime. He took a few coins from my hand and wandered off toward the gate, both pies already gone.
Norris looked after his son as long as he could, neck straining against the skin-slicked wood. ‘That boy, he’s a loyal one he is. He’s got as much rot thrown in the face this week as his father, with no fuss about it, and sits here with me all through the day. “The Earl of Earless” they taunt him on account of his stubs. Worse things, too.’ He shook his head.
‘Can he hear it all?’ I asked, curious about the boy’s affliction, thinking of my own.
‘Oh, young Jack hears what he wants to hear, as all boys do.’ He laughed fondly.
Norris, I realized as I followed the boy’s progress, had a perfect angle on the traffic into the city from Ludgate. Beyond the imposing façade lay the legal precincts and the royal capital. An important city entrance, bringing visitors and goods from Temple Bar, the inns, and finally Westminster a good walk up the Strand.
‘How long have you been at the pillory, Norris?’ I held the cup for him.
He took a slow sip of ale, smacked his lips. ‘Since the dawn bell,’ he murmured. Another sip. ‘But an hour and a bite and I’m free, for all that’s worth.’
‘This is the last day of your sentence?’
‘Aye.’
‘And the rest of it?’
‘Ten hours in a day right through a week, as was my sentence at the Guildhall, and all for a festering brace of pigeons swiped and sold to a pieman! Constable wouldn’t have taken me in at all, if an alderman’s daughter hadn’t happened to stomach one and empty her guts.’ He looked out at one hand, then the other. ‘Give me Jesu’s cross over the pillory. A man’s not meant to stand bent this long.’
He was right about that. Though the punished generally stood at the stocks for no more than an hour at a time, the longer sentences could lead to permanent disfigurement: pillory back, its sufferers easily identifiable by their crooked spines and frequent grunts of pain as they hobbled through the streets.
After a few pitying murmurs I began gently, asking Norris whether he had noticed any unusual activity at the gate in recent days, particularly involving a large company of men.
‘Not Londoners, but a company from outside the city,’ I said. ‘Sixteen of them. All dead now, thrown in the privy ditch beneath the Long Dropper. They were walked in sometime in the last week – or carried, I suppose. Does anything come to mind?’
Norris thought for a moment, then looked up and surprised me. ‘Welshmen, I’ll be bound,’ he said.
I felt a satisfied warmth. ‘What do you know of Welshmen, Norris?’
‘The first day of my sentence. A Wednesday it was,’ he said. ‘Caught a little glimpse of them skirting along the yard, just there.’ He nodded toward the mouth of Bower Row. ‘Only reason I remember it is, those Welsh carls gave us a nice respite.’
‘How is that?’
‘My first day in the stocks. Seemed half of London was out hurling eggs, cabbages, dungstraw at me and my boy, anything they could lift. But then those strangers come by, and all at once every man of them leaves off and starts tossing his rot at the poor Welshers instead.’ He laughed weakly. ‘Should have heard them, Gower, our good freemen. “Savages!” “Sodomites!” “Child burners!” “Leap off the walls, you filthy Welshers!” Those sorts of roses, is what they shouted. And so it went until the strangers were beyond the bar.’
‘What were they doing at Ludgate?’
‘Wouldn’t know. Couldn’t hear a thing of them.’
Young Jack had returned and took his place to the right of his father’s protruding head and hands. He had purchased himself an oatloaf and nibbled at it slowly.
‘You didn’t see who was leading them through?’ I asked.
He sniffed and spat. ‘What I’ve seen a lot of is my feet, and little Jack’s fair nose. Hard to look at Welshmen when your face is forced to the ground.’
He bent his straitened neck upward into an awkward angle, grunted from the effort and relaxed, his frame sagging with the work. I wetted his lips again, then held the last pie below his mouth. He took a small nibble, a larger bite.
‘Tell me about your witness.’
His jaw stopped, his eyes shifting to the side, away from me. ‘Ah. No act of charity, these pies and ale?’
‘You know me better than that, Norris. Who is it? What did he see?’
A heavy gust spiralled a pile of leaves into the air above the pillory platform. ‘Why should I tell you? You’ll go and sell what I say to the Guildhall, and then where will Peter Norris be?’
I shook my head. ‘The Guildhall is not disposed to believe anything you say. No buyers there, as you well know.’
His eyes closed. He sighed. ‘Perhaps. Though I shall bide my time, Gower. My witness is quite convincing, and my sentence ends at the next bell. The right moment will come, I trust.’
Was he lying, or simply a fool? Either way I could get nothing more out of the man despite my offer of considerable coin. I turned to leave him, and his earless son gave me a hateful and piercing look, as if my hand had been one of the many hurling filth at the boy and his father. I walked away and toward the gate.
The guards and tollkeeper at Ludgate were forthcoming but unhelpful, none of them recalling the Welsh company, though promising to ask about. It was now past four. I hesitated just outside the walls, knowing I should walk back up through Cripplegate to see Gil Cheddar, the acolyte at St Giles. Yet the occasional gaps in my vision had returned, as they often did with the fatigue of a long day and a late afternoon. The wind had moistened somewhat, too, and a distant rumble of thunder threatened a city storm. I would visit St Giles the following morning, I resolved, and call on Cheddar then. It was one of several mistakes I made that day along the walls of London, hearing only what I wanted to hear, deaf to what mattered most.
Like pouring out the sun. A lethal river of metal flowed from the cauldron, killing the thickness with a long hiss, filling the space between the clay moulds. A heavy steam rose from the melting wax. Stephen Marsh, his gloved hands gripping the cauldron’s edge, an apprentice at each side for balance, tipped the last of the molten alloy into the small hole at the top of the mantle. Iron bars, tin ingots, a touch each of copper and lead, all melted together and skimmed for impurities before the pour. Soon enough the liquid bronze would cool into a bell duly stamped with the lozenge of Stone’s foundry. Then trim, sound, file, and polish until the instrument achieved its final shape and tone, made fit for a high tower across the river.
Like pouring out the sun. For that was how his master Robert Stone always liked to describe it, this mysterious shaping of earth’s metal into God’s music. Pouring out the sun – until the sun withered and killed him.
With the cauldron locked and pinned, Stephen wiped his brow and