Bruce Holsinger - The Invention of Fire

Meanwhile Pinkhurst had fingered open the purse. He spilled the silver and gold out on his palm, mouthing the count.

“Is the mayor within?”

“Exton?” he said, not looking up.

“Brembre.”

“Cleaning out, I believe. Reluctantly.”

“Very well.”

Without a glance at me he turned and disappeared back inside. I stood in the shade and looked down at the document in my hand, still weighing its fate. A threat or a gift? It would serve well as either one, and given the names it contained I could harvest sweet-smelling buds for years from its florid branches. Yet in this case, I decided in the end, prudence must win out over ambition. Though Brembre would no longer be mayor two days from now, he would remain a man of immense power, and as I have learned through long experience, the fruit of favors owed will often taste sweeter than the ripest threats.

Court was off at the Guildhall and had been for two weeks, with all the attention of official London on the doings of Parliament up the river. It took whispers, coins, and several guards to get from the yard into the northwest corner of the building, where the mayor held private audiences behind two movable partitions that would be stacked along the walls on court days.

He was standing when I stepped within the chamber, looking down at a mess of documents spread before him on a trestle table. A fire crackled in the hearth behind him. From midway up the opposite wall rose a high window, once clear and clean, looking out on the yard, yet which Brembre had replaced with an unglazed substitute to ensure privacy but maintain light. Now the opaque surface created a dappled sheen along the floor, and a gleam of suspicion in the mayor’s eyes when he glanced briefly at me before returning to his work.

“Gower,” he said.

“Lord Mayor.”

“It’s a busy day at the Guildhall. Exton’s swearing-in is tomorrow, his Riding the day following. What brings you here?”

Watching him closely, I said, “The confession of a swerver.”

His hands froze. His face remained undisturbed. “What confession is that?”

“This one.” I held out the document.

His head turned slowly toward me. “But-but I took-”

“You seized a copy, Lord Mayor, made by Adam Pinkhurst. This is the original, affixed with your recorder’s seal. Your wife’s letter does not appear on the back.”

He stood and walked around the table, approaching me with an attitude stiff and almost submissive. The mayor took the document, set it on the table, and pulled a candle near. He murmured his way through the opening clauses, then scanned down the document and fingered the seal. I heard the brush of his fingertip over the swerver’s mark at the base of the parchment. He turned to the overleaf and stood staring at the blank surface.

“Gloucester,” he said softly.

“Possesses a good forgery, with Idonia’s letter on the overleaf,” I said. “And perhaps knows it, but also knows you believe he has the original.” A pause. “You are free of the duke’s web, Lord Mayor.”

As I watched Brembre absorb this change I saw his shoulders relax, though cautiously, as if the most crushing part of a great weight had been lifted from his back yet might return at any moment. He looked askance at me. “Surely you didn’t come here to peddle this sheepskin, Gower. I have a dozen armed men just outside this chamber. You haven’t even a sword at your side.”

“It is a gift, Lord Mayor.”

Brembre barked a laugh. “A gift? John Gower doesn’t give gifts. That would ruin his reputation! Why, in addition to me this confession names two lords, a bishop, and a prior among this swerver’s arse-swyving jakes. Why are you not using it against them, and against me?”

“You cannot use it either, Sir Nicholas, for obvious reasons.”

A weak, grudging smile.

“The confession is not given freely,” I said. “It comes with a request.”

“What do you want?”

“Several things. First, protection.”

“Protection. From what?”

“From Gloucester and his men,” I said. “One of the duke’s agents in Calais attempted to murder me days ago.”

“Protection, then,” Brembre said, taking this in. “Guards at the priory?”

“Two for now, until this is resolved,” I said. “And the same to accompany me around the city. Not as grand as your entourage, though enough to keep me alive for another fortnight.”

“Very well.” He flicked a hand. “I will have it done this hour.”

“And you will now move on Gloucester?”

“A mayor doesn’t simply move on a duke, Gower,” Brembre mused, a hand rubbing at his chin. “Gloucester is a powerful force. His allies have played this Parliament like a chessboard, and even freed from this . . . encumbrance, I can see no easy means to bag the man for these killings.”

“There may be a way,” I said.

“Oh?”

“The duke has committed treason, Lord Mayor. He is selling gunpowder to the Duke of Burgundy.”

His hand ceased its motion. “Quite a serious accusation, Gower. What proof do you have?”

I pulled out the heraldic bend that Simon had given me in Calais and placed it on the table. “This fell from the arm of one of Gloucester’s men on the quay at Dunkirk. It appears the duke has been selling saltpetre to the French along the Flemish coast, with the aid of William Snell, king’s armorer. I believe as well that Snell has commissioned a new sort of handgonne with the same purpose in mind. The duke’s men are responsible for another massacre in the Pale. Desurennes, a market town. They used small guns.” I told him what I had learned from Simon about the gunpowder smuggling, and what the girl Iseult had said to me in Desurennes. Remember the swans.

“Why are you bringing this to me?” Brembre said. The mayor examined the bend, fingering the duke’s embroidered badge.

A question I had expected. “I intended to bring it to Edmund Rune and the chancellor, though with the recent impeachment the earl is no longer in power-and I don’t imagine the new chancellor would look kindly on an accusation of this sort against his chief supporter among the lords. But you are now one of the king’s most powerful allies in the realm, Lord Mayor. You alone have the means of bringing this before the king and forcing his hand against Gloucester.”

“Perhaps,” said Brembre, sounding dubious. “Yet Gloucester and his allies want war, and soon. The duke knows my counsel and the chancellor’s has been against his own. And he’s punishing me for it, the wily hare. My men beaten and harassed, my merchant ships and warehouses torched to the ground”-here he gestured to Rykener’s confession-“my letters and muniments intercepted and stolen. And the greatest insult of all: a pile of bodies in my privy channels, shot up with these handgonnes or hacked to death. Gloucester has been acting with impunity in London, and believes I will do nothing to stop him, not with this whore’s interrogation in his hands. So he lords it about the city as if he, Thomas of Woodstock, were the mayor rather than Nicholas Brembre.”

Or Nicholas Exton, I silently reminded him-though everyone believed Exton’s mayoralty would be a continuation of Brembre’s, with a transition in name only.

“The Duke of Gloucester, leaving his spoor everywhere he goes,” I said.

Brembre looked up, his eyes darkened. “I will have Gloucester’s men rounded up, then, as many as we can find within the walls.”

“There may be a better way, Lord Mayor,” I said.

He waited.

“I have found Peter Norris’s witness.”

He sniffed.

“The witness whose identity you refused to learn before putting Norris to death,” I said. “It is Norris’s son, Lord Mayor.”