Bruce Holsinger - A Burnable Book

It ended quickly. By the time the king and the cardinal bothered to glance over their shoulders the threat had been neutralized, the friar sliced to a bleeding mess. The principals exchanged a few words with the abbot, received the blessings, and pressed forward through the doors, the seemingly minor nuisance behind them. Only the bishops looked somewhat flustered. Braybrooke, two ranks behind the king, gave me a dark look, which I returned with a low bow and a hidden smile.

The crowd surged against the abbey’s west facade, all craning for a last glimpse of the king. The pursuivants dragged the friar against the tide of the commons, and few bothered to glance at them. Soon they had him hoisted on their shoulders, a trail of blood spattering the pavers in their wake. Walking behind the chancellor, Edward More turned to look back at me from the abbey’s northwest corner. He gave me a small nod. The pursuivants, with the dying assassin, disappeared. More followed them.

Two groats to the abbey guard got me into the nave, where I watched the procession conclude before the altar. All was calm, disconcertingly normal after the madness outside. St Peter’s nave glistened, gem-like, the clerestory windows casting mottled sun on a large crowd of nobles and clerics of all orders finding their places. The grand service began, an elaborate introit in five voices echoing to the vaults.

Not feeling prayerful I decided not to stay for Mass, angling instead up the nave and into the south transept along the narrow passage past the chapterhouse. There I paused for a moment before a painting of St Thomas I had always loved. Not St Thomas Becket, nor St Thomas Aquinas the philosopher, but St Thomas the Apostle. The great doubter, his unbelief perpetually etched in his face at that precise moment before he touches Jesus’s side: his gaze cast down, his finger bent over his savior’s open wound. This Thomas, I think, has always been my favourite occupant of the canon of saints. The patron saint of doubt and suspicion, of verifiable information, in whatever form it comes.

Priory of St Leonard’s Bromley

‘Prioress Isabel has asked me to remain at St Leonard’s,’ Millicent Fonteyn said to Eleanor Rykener. The sky was clear that afternoon, awash in a blue deeper than any in Millicent’s memory. They sat in the small herb garden off the almonry, a promise of summer in the piney waft of rosemary from behind the bench. ‘Says she’ll take me in again as a laysister.’

Eleanor had begged a slab of tar from a ditcher along the walls. She had her shoe off, patching the leather. ‘Will you stay, do you suppose?’

Millicent nodded. ‘Not a sole doubt in my mind. Though maybe one small regret.’

‘What’s that?’ Eleanor rubbed dirt over the tar, smoothing the patch with her palm.

Millicent smiled, thinking of John Gower. Widowed, tall, rich. ‘Can I live my life without the touch of another man?’

Eleanor snorted. ‘I’m touched by another man six, seven times a day. Can’t say it’s much to miss.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Millicent with a sigh. ‘Though I’ll miss my figs.’

‘No figs at St Leonard’s?’

‘No figs, no money, no men.’

Eleanor slipped her shoe on. ‘Nothing wrong with going figless, Millicent. Nor penniless, nor even cockless.’

‘Millicent the Cockless,’ she mused. ‘I like it. And as Agnes used to goad me, I’ve always wanted a title.’

‘Agnes,’ said Eleanor wistfully.

Millicent regarded Eleanor Rykener with a stab of shame. Millicent had spent just a few years in her mother’s service at the Bishop before seizing the opportunity to flee to St Leonard’s and a new life. Eleanor Rykener had lived nearly ten years now on her stomach, enduring the gropes of monks, squires, and franklins, and all without a trace of the bitter self-pity that Millicent spoke like a second tongue.

She thought of the saints, that litany of suffering women whose works and lives the nuns of St Leonard’s would intone in their offices. Of St Margaret, swallowed by the dragon, then standing triumphantly on its back. Of St Cecilia, her virtue threatened by a Roman despot, suffering three sword-strokes to her neck. Of the Blessed Maudlyn herself, lifted by Jesu from the bowels of the swyve. And here was Eleanor Rykener, enduring more trials of the flesh than all these sainted women put together. Yet no one would think to write Eleanor’s life for an Austin canon to include in the legendum . No one would compose St Edgar Rykener a hymn, nor sing a collect in praise of St Eleanor the Swerver.

She had a sudden thought. ‘Would you take up other work, do you suppose, if the opportunity came?’

Eleanor waved away a fly. Shrugged. ‘Seems God suited me for swyving. There’s not another line of work would let me be true to my mannish side, least that I can tell.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Imagine I’ll keep with it till Gerald reaches his majority. Then we’ll see.’

The next day Millicent visited the prioress in her apartments. All was arranged with a few words to Isabel.

‘Your timing is propitious, Millicent,’ the prioress told her. ‘Bromley has received a generous endowment, in the neighbourhood of twenty pounds.’

‘Twenty pounds?’ Millicent marvelled at the sum. ‘Who established this endowment, Reverend Mother?’

‘Our benefactor has asked not to be named, though I can tell you he’s a Southwark man. But the funds are not given freely.’ She said this with a trace of disapproval. ‘The endowment’s terms are quite clear. It is to be employed in perpetuity for the benefit of the maudlyns of Southwark and London, with Bromley required to come to their aid and succour whenever possible. So it won’t be difficult to budget ten shill a year for your Eleanor Rykener. Scullery work?’

Millicent nodded, delighted with the prioress’s response. ‘Or the animals, Reverend Mother. Whichever you think best.’

‘She’ll be your charge, Millicent, not mine,’ said the prioress. ‘But don’t let me catch you running a flock of whores out of the gatehouse.’ She went back to her book.

‘No, Reverend Mother,’ said Millicent with a hidden smile. She started to back out of the parlour.

‘And, Millicent?’

She looked up. ‘Yes, Reverend Mother?’

‘Will Tewes, our yeoman cook, grows old,’ said the prioress, her gaze still on the page. ‘He’s in need of a cutter, a young man good with a knife. See that one is found for him.’

San Donato a Torre

A knock at his opened door, then a boy’s voice. ‘Ser Giovanni invites you to dine with him, Master Scarlett.’

Adam Scarlett, annoyed at the interruption, turned from his desk with a frown. Not even a page at the door, but a boy from the villa’s kitchens. He sighed, set down his pen, and closed the ledger. He followed the boy from his rooms and through the labyrinth of low hedges leading to the side door.

In the hall Hawkwood was bent over the central table, concentrating on a mess of papers. Two of his dogs, hunting hounds, all nose and tongue, were curled around his feet. The closer one licked Scarlett’s hand as he sat.

A servant set a goblet of wine between them and a thick soup at Scarlett’s place. At Hawkwood’s inviting gesture he sipped contentedly until the condottiero looked up and joined him in the meal. Scarlett told him the news of the day — another letter from Carlo Visconti, a herd of poached sheep lost in transit from near Poggibonsi. Hawkwood nodded at the right places, asked a few questions; all seemed perfectly normal. Yet Scarlett could sense a certain tension in the air. There was a stiffness to Hawkwood’s manner, a formality he rarely saw in the man when they were alone.