The Invention of Fire. Bruce Holsinger
‘A fool’s errand, I would call it. Aldgate seemed as good a place as any to begin.’ I gave him the bones of it, as the discovery of corpses in the privy was being bandied through the streets already. I kept quiet about the victims’ peculiar means of death, nor did I hint at the mayor’s apparent attempt to scuttle an inquiry. Chaucer had worked under Brembre in the customs office for several years, and the two remained close. ‘So today I troll the gates,’ I said, ‘hoping to scare up anything I can find about these men.’
His reaction was muted. ‘A dozen a day die in this city. Women, the elderly, children. Mass graves surround us on every side. What makes these unnamed men worthy of your time, John?’
The question surprised me. ‘Sixteen at once, thrown in the Walbrook? Curiosity, I suppose. And a fair measure of fear. No mayor wants to give death free rein in his city. The crown will use any excuse to tighten its chokehold on London. This is just the sort of thing to attract the worst kind of scrutiny from the king’s men.’
‘Now you sound like Strode himself,’ said Chaucer with his curling smile.
‘The freer the city the looser its purse.’
Chaucer moved to an east-facing window and glanced at the turret clock on St Botolph’s. ‘I’m due at Westminster shortly, you know, otherwise I would accompany you. I would welcome a break from all this.’ He looked around, gesturing to his crates and trunks. ‘But let me hail Bagnall up.’
‘Who?’
Chaucer walked to his door. ‘Matthew Bagnall,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘The warden of the gate. A man who knows more about the doings in and around Aldgate than all our ward-rats put together. I’ll get him up here.’ He stepped out to the rickety landing and called down to the foregate yard. ‘You there! Is Bagnall about?’
A faint reply floated up from street level.
‘Well send him up, will you? Master Chaucer has a question for him!’
He turned back and flattened himself against the wall. The servants slid around us bearing a large chest between them, which jostled and bumped along the railings as they descended the street-side stairs. When they were gone he looked at me, gestured at his eyes.
‘The same?’
‘No worse, at least,’ I lied, blinking away a spot. ‘Some days I scarcely notice, others …’
‘Ah,’ he said, his hands clasped. He tilted his head. ‘You know, John, there may be other remedies than resignation and despair.’
I said nothing.
‘There is a medical man newly in town, a great surgeon-physician. He is an Englishman, but trained in Bologna.’
‘Thomas Baker.’
‘You know him?’
‘We’ve recently met,’ I said, recalling the man’s fingers digging in a corpse. ‘He seems bright enough.’
‘More than bright,’ said Chaucer. ‘He was in my company on the return from Italy last year, and I got to know him quite well. Familiar with all the new techniques, unafraid to wield the knife when it’s needed. He is lodging in Cornhill for now, above the shop of a grocer named Lawler. Do you know the place?’
‘I do.’
‘I suggest you make an appointment to see him.’ Then, less formally, his voice lowered, ‘Surely it’s worth a visit, John, even if nothing comes of it. You have only two eyes. You’ll never get a third, no matter whom you extort.’
Matthew Bagnall arrived at the door. Squat, thick-necked, official, looking eager to get back to the gatehouse. Chaucer offered him drink. Bagnall declined, nor would he seat himself.
‘Mustn’t stay up here above my men for too long, Master Chaucer,’ Bagnall said, as if Chaucer’s house rested on an eagle’s eyrie, or some grand mountaintop in the Alps. He wore a cap that fitted tightly over a low forehead, covering what looked like a permanent frown.
Chaucer explained why I was there, then nodded at me to begin.
‘Fair thanks, Bagnall, for the trudge up the stairs.’ I handed him a few pennies.
He took the coins silently, glancing at them before slipping them into a pouch at his side.
‘The Guildhall is seeking information on a company recently arrived in London, and now deceased.’
His eyes widened slightly.
‘Violently deceased,’ I said.
‘Killed, you mean.’
‘It appears so. They were a group of men, a large group. Not freemen of the city. Outsiders of some kind.’
‘Frenchmen, or Flemings then?’
‘I think not,’ I said, recalling the stolid, rural look of the bodies, their rough hands, the dirt caked in their nails. ‘These were Englishmen, or I’m a bishop.’
‘Not soldiers – cavalrymen, say?’
I thought of those iron balls lodged in the victims’ chests. The gun wounds could have been inflicted in a battle, some factional conflict on the highway. Yet the fact that the men had been killed with small guns argued against the mess and melee of actual combat. ‘They might have been conscripts, I suppose, but recent ones if so. These men worked with their hands. Ploughmen, some of them, used to harrowing and manuring their fields.’
‘Dead when they got here, or killed within the walls?’
‘You ask sound questions, Bagnall. I don’t know.’
He considered me, hand at his thick chin. ‘You’re looking after that mess up at the Long Dropper.’
I allowed my silence to answer him.
‘Gongfarmers’re all jawing about it, the rakers and sweepers as well,’ he went on, loosening up. ‘It’s the gab of London. Fifty men, thrown in the sewers to drown and rot.’
‘An exaggeration,’ I said breezily. ‘Sixteen victims, all happily dead before they were tossed in the privy.’
‘That may be,’ he said, his black look making me regret my light and careless tone. ‘Yet treated no better than shit from a friar’s arse. Denied the ground, and a Mass, and a proper burial. Whoever’s done it had best keep his murdering nose free of Aldgate, or he’s in for a rough time of it from the guard, that’s certain.’
‘To be clear, Bagnall, you know nothing about these men?’
‘Aldgate hasn’t heard a whisper about this matter, Master Gower.’ He tugged at his cap. ‘I’ll own we’re a busy gate, what with all the Colchester traffic, marches out to Mile End. But a company of sixteen, riding or walking in from outside? Even the sleepiest of my men would take notice, and a pile of corpses would fare no better. Wherever those poor carls came in, they didn’t come in through Aldgate, nor the Tower postern, or I would have heard about it.’ The postern was a small entrance along the wall north of the Tower. Not a full-fledged gate but a heavy door, though just as carefully watched.
Bagnall left us with a curt nod. Chaucer stared after him as the old stairs protested his descent with a groan of loose nails. ‘Blunt man. Always has been.’
‘Bluntness has its place,’ I said. ‘Though I’ll need such frankness from more than your gateman if I’m to learn who these poor fellows were, and where they came from.’
Chaucer pressed my arm as he walked me to his Aldgate door for the last time. ‘I shall be back for Parliament soon. You will be in town?’
‘Do I ever leave?’
‘You’ve not come out to Greenwich yet, John. I have plenty of room for visitors – more than I ever had in this place.’ He looked around, his bright eyes mellowed with regret at leaving a city so much a part of his