A Burnable Book. Bruce Holsinger
usually is, in my experience.’
‘Tyle himself held the inquest?’
He nodded.
‘Bit unusual.’
Symkok shrugged. ‘Though not unprecedented. When an earl dies on us, or a knight—’
‘A nameless girl, stripped to the smooth? Hardly an earl, Nick.’
He wouldn’t meet my gaze.
‘Tell me, Nick.’
He straightened his back, his chin high. ‘Nothing more to tell, Gower.’
We stood for a time, Symkok squirming in his discomfort.
‘Do some digging, then,’ I quietly said. A cart passed behind him, a low groan from its wheels. ‘I need to know why Tyle took this one. Who told him to do the inquest himself rather than fob it off, like he usually does? And what did he find?’
He swallowed, his lined neck rippling with the effort.
‘Be discreet about it, Nick.’
He swallowed again. ‘Always am, Gower, at least where you’re concerned.’
I left him there, gnawing at his past.
Back at St Mary Overey a letter awaited me in the hall. I took it up from the tray where Will Cooper would leave all my correspondence, expecting a bill from a local merchant, or a report from the bailiff of one of my estates. I was surprised at the letter’s weight until I turned it over and saw the heavy seal. The wax bore the impress of Robert Braybrooke, Bishop of London.
Rather unusual, to send a sealed missive across the river when the bishop’s messenger could have said a simple word to my servant. After a moment’s hesitation I broke the wax. The note was short and to the point, and in his chief secretary’s hand. The Lord Bishop of London requested my presence at Fulham Palace this Monday, at the hour of Tierce, upon his return from a visitation up north. The letter left the subject of the appointment unmentioned. London and I had had our moments, though all of that was far in the past, and I wondered what the bishop could possibly want with me. I thought about it for a while, ticking off a mental list of current complexities but coming up with nothing aside from Katherine Swynford’s brief mention of Braybrooke at La Neyte, and his distress over the book sought by Chaucer.
Whatever its subject, the bishop’s was an invitation I was in no position to decline. In my study I scribbled a reply at the foot of the letter, melted some wax, and left the missive in the tray for Will, who would arrange its delivery for that afternoon. Five days, then I would know more.
Cutter Lane, Southwark
The knife landed in muscle with a wet spit. A second blade quickly followed, nearly touching the first. The carcass swayed, and Gerald Rykener clapped his hands roughly on his tunic. ‘Have that, Tom.’
The other apprentice stepped up to the line, a blade pressed between his fingers. His wrist bent, his arm rose, and with a flash of metal the knife was buried in the flank just inches from Gerald’s. The second landed a half foot higher on the beef, missing its target. ‘Damn it to queynting hell,’ he said, then with a scowl handed Gerald a coin.
Eleanor watched her brother pocket it, and for a moment the simple joy of victory on his face turned him back into the sweet boy she remembered. Then Gerald saw her.
‘Ah, by St George. Swerving again,’ he muttered to his companion, his contempt for her undisguised.
The other apprentice looked over to where she stood by the fence. ‘What do you think, Gerald? Your brother a mare or a gelding?’
‘A mare with a cock?’ Gerald taunted. ‘A gelding with a queynt?’
‘Either way she-he’s got enough riders to keep him-her filled with oats ’n’ mash till the trumpet sounds, from what I hear.’
‘Aye that,’ said Gerald, ignoring her as his fellow turned for the barn. Gerald wiped a long crimson smear across his cheek, then from beneath the carcass removed a bucket of blood. He took it to a heated cauldron at the far end of the yard. Gerald was fourteen, yet already moved with a tradesman’s confidence that would have been endearing if he hadn’t turned so foul. His apron was cut small in the style of the craft. We butchers pride ourselves on leaving our aprons white, he’d explained in those days when he cared. Now it was stained a brownish red, his loose breeches slimed with gore.
When he returned to the fence she saw the latest bruises had faded. His lip, too, had mostly healed. He was close so she went for his neck, the line of faded scar tissue running from his jaw to his nape. He knocked her hand back but she reached for his head and felt a new knot. Size of a peach pit. ‘What’s that about?’
He ducked away. ‘He swings the mallet around, you know, got those teeth on it. It’s wood, though, so. But Grimes’d never hit me with the metal one. Not ever.’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘And when he does you’ll be dead as that beef side hanging behind you.’ Why Gerald took his master’s part so often she couldn’t reckon, though Nathan Grimes had been his effective father for going on three years, and children could develop peculiar loyalties.
He looked at her purse. She handed him the coins she’d come to deliver. ‘It’s hardly much. A shilling and five. Keep it somewhere, use it only in your most needful moments. Not for candied gingers on the bridge, now.’ She half-turned to go, but something in his eyes held her back. ‘What is it?’ Trying to sound impatient: she needed to be tough with him, tough as he was with her, or he’d never make it to his majority. ‘What is it, Gerald?’
He snarled and spat in the filthy straw. ‘No matter. Go away, Edgar.’
As her brother returned to his work Eleanor watched him sadly, marvelling at how much the boy had changed. They had been separated since their mother’s death, when Gerald was seven, Eleanor thirteen and starting to discover her second life. A man in body, but in soul a man and a woman both, a predicament that made her wardship a domestic hell: a wife who tormented her with the hardest household labour, a husband who wouldn’t leave her alone once he found out what she was. She had taken to the streets at sixteen. Gerald, though, had seemed to be getting by, floating from guardian to guardian, some good, some bad, yet all carefully regulated by the city, with appearances before the mayor himself once a year. Eleanor managed to see him nearly every month as they grew up. Finally, at his eleventh birthday, the office of the common serjeant arranged for his apprenticeship to a freeman of London and master butcher, and all appeared set.
Then, not six months after his apprenticeship began, the city passed the butchery laws, and Gerald’s master moved his shop across the river to Southwark to avoid the fines and fees. There not only butchers but guardians operated on their own authority, with little legal oversight from the town, and no common serjeant to take the orphans’ part. ‘Never heard no law against a butcher moving shop to Southwark,’ Grimes had said when Eleanor confronted him. He turned instantly cruel upon the move across the Thames: Gerald was on his own there, surrounded by meat yet starved for bread, beaten regularly and with no recourse. Eleanor had tried to intervene, but the laws of London, it was said, have no house in Southwark.
Soon enough Gerald was turning into one of them, these Southwark meaters, a nasty bunch of Cutter Lane thugs without guild or code, sneaking rotten flesh into the markets and shops across the river. The Worshipful Company of Butchers, London’s legitimate craft, had been trying for years to quash the flow of bad flesh into the city to no avail, and now that Gerald had been caught up in their illegal trade he, too, was slipping down the path to