Bruce Holsinger - A Burnable Book

‘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-’

‘Gaunt.’

‘-and pointed both of them into the cloth. When Simon saw it in her gallery it fired a connection in his mind with the prophecies I was reading them. The rest you already know.’

‘Hawkwood must have been singing like a lark,’ I said. ‘Just as he’s plotting a return to England, this falls into his lap, and gives him a covert means to get Lancaster out of the way.’

‘I would put nothing past Hawkwood.’ Chaucer sounded almost admiring of the man. ‘He wears loyalty like a snake wears skin.’

‘And Oxford?’

‘Hawkwood’s family has deep connections to the de Veres going back generations. John de Vere, the seventh earl, fought with Hawkwood’s father in France.’ He sighed. ‘It was an ingenious plan, and might well have worked. Put the English king and his uncle at one another’s throats, and bring down the House of Lancaster months before your own arrival with the French. Hawkwood values friendship and loyalty only when it suits his own purposes.’

I looked askance at him, incredulous at his lack of self-knowledge. He caught my glance and visibly winced.

‘I know, I know. But put yourself in my place, John. You come home after a long absence, terrified for your lover, only to hear lines of your own poetry being whispered at court, along with rumours of a seditious prophecy on the death of King Richard. I suspected Simon was involved but had no idea how. That’s why I had to meet with you as soon as I returned from Italy, and that’s why I set you on the trail. I needed to find out what Simon knew, and where all of this was coming from.’

I recalled Chaucer’s early suspicions at Monksblood’s, testing my knowledge, more curious than concerned — then his shock when I confronted him at the customhouse.

‘And I know you, John,’ he continued, picking at a snag in his hose. ‘Once you learned the nature of this book you would stop at nothing until you had it. What I didn’t know, of course, was that there were two books all along.’

‘Three, actually,’ I said, thinking of Clanvowe’s copy, now stowed with Oxford’s manuscript in the wall of my house.

‘And more, for all we know, given how quickly everyone seemed to be quoting from it.’

‘Even Braybrooke’s friars.’

‘Yes. And it was Oxford, I gather, who started the ingenious rumours of interest in the prophecies among Wycliffe’s followers. Then the book itself, with the cloth, was planted at La Neyte, and its contents hinted to a number of hermits in Gaunt’s dependency, one of whom let it slip to me. The intention was to have it “discovered” at La Neyte by the king’s guard, and Lancaster hauled away for conspiring treason well before St Dunstan’s Day. The butchers, the card game, Oxford’s speech at the bishop’s palace — that all came later, once the book went missing.’

I frowned. ‘So who stole the book from La Neyte?’

Chaucer said nothing, the moist curves of his eyes reflecting the low moon.

‘Seguina d’Orange,’ I said at last, as the chill of certainty swept my limbs. ‘She was the girl murdered on the Moorfields.’

‘She has to be one of the most resourceful women who has ever lived,’ he said, his eyes flashing with admiration. ‘When I learned she had left Florence I discovered that she used my contacts from the wool trade to arrange passage on a ship from Pisa, with a company of Genoese bankers bound for England. When she came to London, her aim was to find the book and the cloth. She had met Weldon in Florence and knew he was the go-between to Oxford. Once in London she must have followed him, learned the location of the book, recovered it, and fled with it through the city-’

‘Pursued by Weldon-’

‘Who caught her in the Moorfields-’

‘After she handed the book to a maudlyn. After she handed the book to a maudlyn,’ I said, filling in what he didn’t know. I told him the rest: about Millicent Fonteyn, the murder of Bess Waller, the death of Sir Stephen Weldon. It was the knight’s violent death that brought us back to Seguina’s.

‘That’s how I see it.’

‘But why?’ I said. ‘What motivated her to make such an impossible journey to England? Was it — was it merely love, a desire to protect Geoffrey Chaucer, her adulterous suitor, from bodily harm?’

‘I think not,’ Chaucer said wryly. ‘That sort of sacrifice would have been predictable. Seguina was too great a woman for such a thing. Love was part of her motivation, I suppose. But remember, her life and her mother’s had been saved by Lancaster — and it was Lancaster whose life she came here to save. I was incidental in the end. She wrote me a long letter explaining it all, then ordered a servant to deliver it to me upon my return from Rome.’ He absently patted his breast. ‘A story, really, and one for the ages.’

I looked at him, then guessed. ‘You never found it.’

‘Her servant would have been terrified of being found out by one of Hawkwood’s men. I went to visit Seguina when I returned, only to learn she had left Florence a week before, ostensibly to visit a cousin of her mother’s. I distinctly recall the servant meeting me at the door, taking my bag while I waited for an audience with Seguina’s father. The servant hid the letter in my bag, assuming I would find it in the folds of my little book. This one, in fact, which I had commissioned from a leatherworker in Rome.’

He tossed it to me, and I examined the construction. Aside from the colour and feel of the leather, it was an identical bifold to his old one, with matching vertical pockets on each inner cover, allowing the first and last folios of each new quire to be tucked inside. ‘I found her letter two days ago. The morning after you confronted me at my Aldgate house, in fact. I was switching out quires, and there it was. The letter confirmed everything I had suspected but never knew — including Simon’s authorship of the thirteenth prophecy.’

I thought for a moment. ‘So you had Seguina’s letter with you that day at Monksblood’s?’

‘But without knowing it.’

‘Extraordinary.’ I handed back his book, moved and shaken by the knowledge that Chaucer had just shared. The entire story of the last several months, carried on my old friend’s person the entire time.

‘When did Simon tell you of his involvement?’ I asked him.

‘At the St George’s morrow feast at Windsor. That was the first time I had seen him since Florence, and he both admitted to stealing the book and confirmed Seguina’s presence in England, though he swore he knew nothing about the last prophecy. Seguina had been dead for weeks by that point, and I was furious at him for all he had done — but also terrified of the implications. I thought he might well have killed her himself.’

‘Was that you at the river inn that night, after the Garter feast?’ A dog’s bark, and Simon pissing from the landing, lying about his trip to the privy after that whispered encounter in the courtyard.

He looked confused.

‘Simon told me he and Seguina were betrothed, you know,’ I said quickly.

A bitter laugh. ‘Another lie. A way of finding out if you knew anything about her.’

‘Which I did not.’ I recalled the look on Philippa Chaucer’s face, the flash in Katherine Swynford’s eyes at the mention of Seguina d’Orange. ‘But Philippa did.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘I wrote a ballade on her name, before I knew she had died. “To Seguina, My Orange, Wherever She May Dwell.” Scribbled it on a scrap of banker’s paper in our household account book. Philippa saw it when she was at our Aldgate house, and knew I had taken a lover in Italy.’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid, I know, to leave something like that lying around. But there it is.’