Bruce Holsinger - The Invention of Fire

Ten days had passed since the joining of the two companies. They had merged comfortably, though Margery still worried about the widow and what she might gossip on her way south. Robert was worried, too, she could tell, though he said little about the matter. It was late on market day in Aldwick, a welcome relief from the drudgery of the road, and several stalls were still open as dusk approached. They ate pies of seasoned fish before the church and were now strolling along the short length of the high street, imagining themselves safe and content. She found it more than pleasant to mingle in a larger crowd and take in the noises, smells, and tastes of a northern town. The bread up here was darker, the ale sweeter on the tongue, the smoke sharper in the nose, the children merrier and freer than the straitened youths of Kent.

The market noise also allowed them to speak quietly without fear of an eavesdropper.

“You treat me as if I be the sire of some great manor,” he was saying. “Yet I’m a poacher and a common laborer, Elizabeth. A cook by trade, as the good mistress Mariota told you. My father was a cook before me, his father before him, and every other father back to the time of King Cnut, and I’ve the smoke of the kitchen in my blood and the stink of the pot in my seed-” He stopped himself, shook his head. “Forgive my common talk.”

“There is naught to forgive, Antony.” She edged closer to him. “Nor is your talk rough by any measure I can hear. You have learned to speak like a Sussex gentleman. A born esquire, a man of means and position.”

“Not born, but feigned .” She heard the exasperation in his lowered voice. “For you this be all according to kind, on pilgrimage as a gentlewoman. But for me the feigning is weary work, Elizabeth. Makes a week at the ovens feel like a swim in a pond,” he muttered.

“Psst,” she said, dismissing his needless doubts. “There are wealthy merchants in Durham and York with no more high blood than the shoes you are wearing or the horse you’ve ridden for the last week. Yet you think you are unworthy of a gentleman’s life? Why, the lord mayor of London himself- Sir Nicholas Brembre, mind-comes from common stock, yet he rules the city as its very king, his wife as queen.”

“Faulks’re hardly suited to the office of mayor, nor even beadle. And we are quit of London forever, I am afraid. I sh’ll never be a wealthy lord of the Strand, despite your great work upon me.” He smiled kindly at her.

“‘ When Adam delf and Eve span, who then was the gentleman? ’” she whispered, the treacherous rhyme trilling from her tongue.

His eyes flashed a warning. “You’d turn me to one of Wat Tyler’s rebels, would you? Defying my station, crying for the heads of chancellors and archbishops.”

“Better their heads than ours.” She turned slightly, stared boldly into his eyes, reading his fiery thoughts. You say I have changed, Margery. That I have grown from a common cook into this convincing semblance of a gentleman, like a rough length of iron beaten into a charger’s shoe. Yet you are the one upon whom this flight and this journey have wrought the deeper change. You were a meek mistress in your former life, of gentle birth and tender disposition, worn down by a cruel husband who sought to beat you into a submissive pulp of fear and passivity. Now you have been reforged in the flames of hardship and need, fired by the bellows of death gusting at our heels. And I, Robert Faulk, I have cooked you.

Well-she shook her head, smiled at her overly colorful thoughts. Perhaps they were hers after all. Yet in his burning gaze upon her form and her face she could feel a new assurance, something like a lesson in how to love. How to begin again, and to endure.

“Where are we going, Margery?”

They had reached the downwind edge of the market, where pungent crates of fresh river fish and dried cod were spaced around the fishmongers’ stools. It was the first time he had asked her this so directly, despite their weeks together. She had hinted around at the subject, keeping vague with him. We are going to the north country, was all she had said, and the Durham pilgrimage had seemed a blessing. Now she felt she owed him the truth.

“I have relations in Scotland,” she said, her voice low and careful. “My father’s niece on his mother’s side. I last had news of them two years ago, when affairs between England and Scotland were more at peace.”

“Marcher family, are they?” he asked.

“Far from it. They live to the north, along the coast. Her husband is steward for the bishop at Kilrymont. She had a letter sent after her second child’s birth. She will surely take us in, if we can just reach her.”

“Still there then, she and her husband?”

They have to be, she thought. And what if they are not? “Yes. Of course they are still there.”

“How are we to get there from Durham? Neville and Clifford are the fellest of northguards, it is said.” Sir Thomas Neville and Sir Lewis Clifford, the lords of the east and west marches, the hardened protectors of England from invasion by the Scots-and soon enough, if the rumors held, the French. “Border’s carefully watched, and we’ve no passes or patents to get us through.”

His worries annoyed her. “We have information. About these new hand cannon, how they use them, what they intend to do with them, and how their armies and towns might prepare.” The men who had taken the prisoners from the Portbridge gaol had been overly free with their talk, thinking their captives as good as dead. “This is information we can sell to the Scots, and with it buy our way beyond the border.”

“Now you’d render me worse than Wat Tyler.” A low growl. “The Scots are allied with the French. You’d make us traitors, Elizabeth.” His face had reddened, and she feared pushing him too hard.

“The men who shot the prisoners in those woods, they were the true traitors to the king, and to justice,” she pressed on, willing him to see. “It was wanton slaughter. I wish no part of a king whose associates would commit such villainy. You do, Robert?”

He shook his head. “We cannot know those were the king’s men, and even so, to sell the secrets of the realm to the cursed enemy? That be not right, Elizabeth-not for me, not for you.”

She tossed her head. “If that sharp cook’s mind of yours has a more sensible plan, please share it with me, my dear husband and spouse.”

He turned away angrily. She closed her eyes, disgusted with herself, terrified he would break with her. They completed the circle of the market with her gentle apologies and soothings bouncing off his broad back. He said little the balance of that day. His pride was wounded, she could see, and that would not do. She needed him strong, capable, resolute, and confident in his role.

That night she came to him on the floor. Their quarrel, still unresolved, shot through the quiet urgency of their first coupling. His hands seemed to know her as her husband’s never had, teased at her most secret of places and most private of wants. He took his time with her, playing her body as a harpist plucks his strings of flesh, and only then did he enter her, and she marveled at the strength and girth of him, at her own wanton pleasure in this utter, shameless sin.

Afterwards, as she coiled against his nakedness, she spoke softly of their plight. “I am an Englishwoman, Robert, but I am also a Scot.”

He was silent, pushing a finger between the knobs of her spine, moving upward to her neck.

“There are sound reasons for this flight. Stay with me, Robert. Protect me. If we can run or buy our way past the English border guard we will be safely abroad, and then . . .”

“And then?” he whispered in her ear. Her hair was loose. He toothed it, lipped it.