Bruce Holsinger - The Invention of Fire

“Though surely His Highness values your safety and wisdom,” I said, trying to mask my rising impatience. “Has he summoned you to an audience since the bill of impeachment was raised?”

He shook his head sadly. “He was at Eltham to receive Gloucester and the others, all demanding my head. Then Richard rode up here to Westminster at Gloucester’s bidding to dismiss me and the treasurer. He remains there now, awaiting Exton, though without his most loyal counselor.”

“And your own counselor?” I ventured.

He sighed. “A good man.”

“Where has Rune gone, your lordship?”

The earl gave a melancholy shrug. “He makes plans for my removal from Lintner. Edmund assures me this deposition is temporary, that we will reassume our high position in a matter of days. When the smoke clears, he says.”

We, I noted with a chill, and almost smelled the smoke. “Has he said how soon?”

“More or less.”

“Tell me his exact words to you, my lord. They are urgently important.”

Finally the earl turned his head to regard me full-on. He frowned. “He said to me, ‘If you are not restored to the chancellorship by the close of Hallowtide, your lordship, I will cast myself from the highest parapet in Westminster.’ Now there’s an ardent counselor, eh, Gower? He’d give his life just to make his lord believe in himself again. And perhaps Edmund’s staunch hope will win the day after all.” As he laughed his eyes flashed with their old hale gleam, and for a moment I too wanted to credit Rune’s reckless prediction, which he had surely uttered to his lord with all the confidence of a cornered snake.

“Yes, your lordship,” I said instead. “Perhaps it will.”

The earl turned from me. By the close of Hallowtide, Edmund Rune had proclaimed. All Hallows’ was now three days away, with the completion of All Hallowtide in four. What would it take, I thought with a cold dread, to reinstate a deposed chancellor in the space of merely four days?

A distant king, one able to wash his hands of the matter.

A decapitated Parliament, frightened enough to remove the new chancellor and restore Michael de la Pole to his position.

Above all it would require a pile of dead nobles. Gloucester, Arundel, Warwick, perhaps Mowbray: the magnates arrayed against Michael de la Pole and King Richard at Westminster. Four assassinations, all in the coming days.

Or one massacre.

I left the summer hall briskly, making my way to the house’s back garden and exiting with Jack and the mayor’s guards onto the Strand. As the alley door closed behind us I saw a familiar figure approaching from the direction of Fleet Street. It was Edmund Rune.

His head was down, his brow furrowed in thought. Grabbing Jack roughly by his arm, I turned away and pretended to examine some pelts displayed by the furrier’s door.

Jack, however, was frozen in place, staring at Rune as the earl’s counselor approached us.

“Jack,” I whispered, gesturing for the guards to obstruct his view up the street. They started to move. “Not now, Jack.”

He would not listen. The boy’s face had gone white, and as Rune neared the gate Jack’s arm rose slowly, his finger pointing unmistakably at Rune’s face.

“Master Gower, that’s-”

I moved forward and clapped a hand over the boy’s mouth. I forced his arm down to his side, spinning him away just as Rune reached the gate.

Rune saw me. His mouth gaped.

“Gower,” he said, recovering with a feigned smile. The guards stepped aside as Rune paused with the gate door open. “What brings you to the earl’s-”

Then he saw Jack, peeking out from beneath my arm. Rune’s eyes widened, then slowly rose to meet my own. His lips quivered before curling up into the slightest of smiles.

TataTOOM-taTOOM-taTOOM. The clarion trumpets of the city heralds echoed distantly from the walls, enlivening the air around us. I looked down Fleet Street, then back at Rune. His eyes, a cold and metal grey, flickered with pride. He blinked.

“You are too late, Gower.”

The door closed behind him, and he was gone.

The pain starts as a dream. Blood, a great puddle of it, spreads across a tiled floor. An unseen woman bends over the flowing mass. She holds a heavy rag in her hands. She goes to her knees. The rag moves across the crimson pool, sucking the puddle up in places, broadening it in others. Each time the rag is soaked through, the woman’s hands lift and squeeze the saturated cloth. The blood leaves the rag in short, rhythmic bursts at first, then there is one long gush that thickens and spreads the puddle and the floor becomes a pond, slick and messed with wet. Now the blood is water, a blooming gush between her legs. And the rag, Hawisia realized on waking, was her own flesh.

Her middle seized up for a moment, then released her. The next thing she felt was the wetness, a sensation of spreading and flux. Then another wrack of pain as her insides twisted first one way, then the other. It seemed as if everything within her was tugging at everything else. The pain spread to her back, flared there, girdled her middle, tightened, and finally released.

She staggered to her feet, bent over, sucking breath, shocked at how quickly it was all happening. “Bella!” She called for her servant. “Bella!” It was dawn. The girl should have been awake.

She shook her head, furious at her thickness. No, not dawn, not dawn. She’d already been awake for an hour at the least before going up for a small nap in the midmorning-

Another seizing. She grunted through the pain, writhed against the wall, sank to the floor. When her cheek touched the rough rushes she knew she was still alive.

The seizing passed. She half stood and threw open the shutter onto the yard. She wanted a guildsman, an apprentice, a yard boy, someone to run for Rose Lipton.

Empty. Where was everyone? Of all the times to-

She remembered. Nicholas Exton, the new lord mayor, the Riding to Westminster and the throne of King Richard. All of London would be lined up around the Guildhall Yard and along Cheapside.

And all of London meant all of Stone’s foundry. Four apprentices, two guildsmen, two house servants, two yard workers, ten in all, not counting Stephen Marsh and herself, not a one of them about but Hawisia. She listened.

The neighing of an old goat, a crow’s random caw. Hardly a sound in all the parish. Only a distant human clamor from the direction of St. Paul’s and the Guildhall. But not up here, in the far corner of the ward. Here all was silence. And silence, on that day, meant death.

She endured the next seizure with Rose Lipton’s child-proud face at the front of her mind, the focus of her pain and hate. The hurt ripped her middle and left her gasping for breath.

There was no stool for the birthing. Merely a straw pallet, and herself. Hawisia gritted her teeth, pushed herself up, and sprawled on the bed just as the next seizing shook her from within.

His guns and his snakes, all of them, were now being doled out among this band of thirty men in the Tower yard. Stephen watched from afar as each of the infantrymen received three of his creations, bundled in cloth and slung over a shoulder for the march to their destination, wherever that might be. He did not recognize this company from his time within the walls. They were not Tower men, nor did they show any lord’s livery on their arms or chests, neither bends nor badges. The men were ranked in no particular order he could see, though what they lacked in discipline they made up in brashness and spit. Hard, seasoned men, with little patience for lordly niceties or royal pomp.

Another man had joined Snell at the foot of the Wardrobe Tower, where they stood before the assembly of soldiers. He was tall, brown-haired and bearded, with an air of command. The two seemed to be arguing about something; the subject could not be heard, though this must have been the same man he had overheard speaking with Snell the week before. After giving an order to the leader of the company, Snell and his companion walked toward the Lion Tower and the city gate. The company remained in the yard until the next bell sounded from the king’s chapel, then began walking toward the south part of the complex.