The Invention of Fire. Bruce Holsinger

      Sitting before me that September morning was my dead wife’s father. A mess of a man, skin a waxy pale, his clothing as unkempt as his accounting. Ambrose Birch: a weeping miser, and a waste of fine teeth.

      ‘For— for her sake, John.’ He thumbed his moistening eyes and looked up into the timbers, darkened with years of smoke from an unruly hearth. My reading room, a low, close space lit only by a narrow slip of light from a glazed window onto the priory yard.

      ‘Her sake,’ I said. His daughter dead for nearly two years, and still the dull pieties. I stared through him, this cruellest of fathers, cruel in ways even I had never learned, despite all that Sarah once told me. Sarah, a soul always ready to give more than necessary. She had absolved him long before her death, and wished me to do the same.

      Something I had noticed previously but never put into words was that peculiar way Birch had with his chin, rather a large one considering his smallness of face. When he said my name his chin bobbed, always twice, and his voice lowered and rasped, as if throwing out each John while a hoof pressed his throat.

      ‘How did you get it?’ Birch whispered. ‘I cannot – who sold it to you, John?’

      His fortune and reputation hanging by this thread on my desk, and he is curious about a sale.

      ‘That should be your last concern, Ambrose,’ I gently told him. ‘The prickly question is, who will John Gower sell it to?’

      ‘How dare you threaten me, you milk-blood coward!’ His lips quivered, the upper one raised in a weak snarl. ‘Here you sit in your little hole, bent over your inky creations, your twisted mind working itself in knots to spit out more of this—what?’ He turned to look at the orderly rows and stacks of quires and books around the room, many of them lined with my own verse. Back at me.

      ‘She pitied you, John.’

      I scoffed.

      ‘Ah, but it’s true,’ he said, warming to it. ‘She talked about it with her mother. What a burden it was getting to be, your trade in threats and little scandals. How it pushed away your friends and relations, reduced everything to the latest gossip or bribe. How sad it was to see you waste your life, your mind, your spirit.’ He paused, then, with meaning, ‘Your eyes.’

      I flinched, blinked against the blur.

      ‘Just as I thought. You believe a husband’s growing blindness can be hidden from a wife, a wife as perceptive as our late Sarah? And do you think for a moment, John, that your position will not weaken once news of this affliction gets out? Imagine a blind man trying to peddle secrets at the Guildhall or Westminster. They’ll all be slipping you snipped nobles, laughing in your face, cheering behind your back. The mighty John Gower, lord of extraction, brought down by the most just act of God imaginable. A spy who cannot see, a writer who cannot read.’

      I lifted a corner of the document. ‘I have no difficulty reading this, Birch.’

      With a scowl he said, ‘For now, perhaps. For now. But in future you would be advised to remember that I have as much information on you as you have on me. Of course, I am a temperate man.’ He jerked at his coat, remembering why he was there. ‘Given the – the more immediate matter before us, I suppose there is room for a negotiation. But don’t expect to come back to me with additional demands, John. A man can only last so long doing what you do.’

      We settled on three pounds. A minor fortune to Ambrose Birch, if a mouse’s meal to his son-in-law. The money, of course, was beside the point. It was the information that bore the value. Each new fragment of knowledge a seed, to be sown in London’s verdant soil and spring yet another flower for my use.

      I gave him the usual warnings. I’ve made arrangements with a clerk across the river … In the event of my passing … And should there be another incident … Birch, still ignorant, left the house through the priory yard, the clever forgery he had just purchased curled in his moistened palm.

      Will Cooper, my servant, bobbed in the doorway. Kind-faced, impossibly thin but well jowled, with the crinkled eyes of the ageing man he was. ‘Master Gower?’

      ‘Yes, Will?’

      ‘Boy for you, sir. From the Guildhall.’

      Behind him stood a liveried page from the mayor’s retinue. I gestured him in. ‘Speak,’ I said.

      ‘I come from Master Ralph Strode, good sir,’ the boy said stiffly. ‘Master Strode kindly requests the presence of Master John Gower at Master John Gower’s earliest.’

      ‘The Guildhall then?’ Ralph Strode had recently stepped down from his long-time position as the city’s common serjeant, though the mayor had arranged an annuity to retain him for less formal duties.

      ‘Nay, sir. St Bart’s Smithfield.’

      ‘St Bart’s?’ I frowned at him, already dreading it. ‘Why would Ralph want me to meet him in Smithfield?’ Located outside the walls, the hospital at St Bartholomew tended to the poorest of the city’s souls, its precincts a stew of livestock markets and old slaughterbarns, many of them abandoned since the pestilence. Not the sort of place to which Strode would normally summon a friend.

      ‘Don’t know, sir,’ said the boy with a little shrug. ‘Myself, I came across from Basinghall Street, as Master Strode was leaving for St Bart’s.’

      ‘Very well.’ I dismissed him with a coin. Will gave me an inquisitive look as the boy left. My turn to shrug.

      I had eaten little that morning so stood in the kitchen as Bet Cooper, Will’s wife, young and plump to his old and lean, bustled about preparing me a plate of greens with cut lamb. A few swallows of cider and my stomach was content. At Winchester’s wharf I boarded a wherry for the London bankside below Ludgate at the mouth of the Fleet. A moderate walk from the quay took me across Fleet Street then up along the ditch to the hospital.

      St Bartholomew’s, though an Augustinian house like St Mary Overey, rarely merited a visit given the unpleasant location, easily avoidable on a ride from the city walls to Westminster. The hospital precinct comprised three buildings, a lesser chapel and greater church as well as the hospital itself, branched from the chapel along a low cloister. An approach from the south brought visitors to the lesser church first, which I reached as the St Bart’s bell tolled for Sext. I circled around the south porch toward the hospital gates, where the porter shared his suspicions about my business. They were softened with a few groats.

      The churchyard, rutted and pocked, made a skewed shape of drying mud, tufted grass, and leaning stone, all centred on the larger church within the hospital grounds. Not a single shrub or tree interrupted the morbid rubble. Shallow burials were always a problem at St Bart’s. Carrion birds hooking along, small demons feeding on the dead. Though the air was dry the soil was moist and the earth churned underfoot, alive with the small gluttonies of worms.

      Three men stood along the south wall gazing down into a wide trench. Ralph Strode, the widest, raised his head and turned to me as I walked across, his prominent jowls swaying beneath a nose broken years before in an Oxford brawl, and never entirely healed. His eyes, sombre and heavy, were coloured a deep amber pouched within folds of rheumy skin.

      ‘Gower,’ he said.

      I opened my mouth to speak, closed it against a gathering stench, and then I saw the dead. A line of corpses, arrayed in the trench like fish on an earl’s platter. All were men, all were stripped bare, only loose braies or rags wrapping their middles. Their skin was flecked with what looked like mud but smelled like shit, and gouged with wounds large and small. At least five of them bore circular marks around their necks in dull red; from hanging, I guessed. My eyes moved