Part 18 (2/2)
Quincey walked to a trunk against the far wall and came back with a moderate volume opened to a middle folio. With a growing excitement, I moved to a position near the door and sat on a trunk to read the Horace as Quincey puttered around the chamber, dusting the empty shelves, straightening the trunks, fooling with the latches. Lollius, I discerned from the ode's first lines, was evidently a judge, consul, and well-regarded public figure in Rome. Horace had written the ode as a kind of promise to save the man's memory from oblivion. The lines were also a paean to good and virtuous service for the state: Horace praised Lollius for his keen sense of ethics in his work, bending decisions to the right, turning away from bribes, facing down death while spurning the rewards of wealth.
I turned the page and frowned. Where I had expected more lines to Lollius, a new poem began, this one the epistle to the same man, which the scribe had inserted between the two Horatian odes. I read it quickly. It largely duplicated the content of the first ode; the second was addressed to another man altogether.
Neither the epistle nor the ode said anything about Britain, nor kings, nor cards; not a word about prophecies, nor a.s.sa.s.sinations, nor conspirators. Horace's Lollius, as I should have realized when Quincey first mentioned him, could not possibly be the same man who allegedly auth.o.r.ed the Liber de Mortibus Regum Anglorum. The Roman poet was writing during the lifetime of Christ Himself, fully a thousand years prior to the demise of the Conqueror, the first kingly death prophesied in the De Mortibus.
No cause for despair, though. I had been in Angervyle's library all of a quarter hour and had already acquired a significant bit of information. I looked over at Quincey, who was inspecting a binding. 'Do you know of this Lollius's poems?'
He shook his head. 'Only his memory, and only in that Horatian ode and letter.'
'No other Lollius, then? An English one, perhaps?'
'Doesn't clap a bell, I'm afraid.'
'Though perhaps his works are mentioned elsewhere in Angervyle's library.'
'Anything is possible, Master Gower.' With this enigmatic reply Quincey set the volume back in its trunk and rose, brisk and businesslike. 'In any case, you're free to inspect the collection at your will.' He pointed to two trunks near my knee. 'These crates contain all the bishop's holdings in historia. Chronicles of England, of times past, and the writings of the ancient historians of Rome, Lucan and such. And here we have books of science.' Four trunks, arrayed against the western wall. 'Aristotle's Physics, treatises of Galen and Hippocrates, even the works of al-Kindi on astronomy and cryptography, translated from the Arabic.'
'Cryptography?'
Quincey gave me a queer look, his left brow edging up his broad forehead. 'The art of secret writing, Master Gower. Transpositions, ciphers. Such techniques are employed mainly by alchemists, dabblers in magic, that sort. And spies, of course.'
I felt a quiet thrill. Tom Tugg at Newgate, Ralph Strode at the Guildhall, and now Peter de Quincey here in Oxford, all quick to invoke the shadow of spies, unnumbered and anonymous, spectres of treachery and deceit in a time of war. I thought of the dead girl in the Moorfields a French spy, according to Strode and again I had the sense of a connection unmade, of knowledge hidden beneath veils I could not part.
Quincey soon left me alone in the chamber as alone as I could be with hundreds of books around me. I decided to begin with the histories, selecting four volumes from the first trunk and taking them to the reading desk. Settling on the stool and adjusting the candles, I arrayed the four ma.n.u.scripts before me, admiring the unique embossments tooled on covers of various shades.
No time for pleasure, I reminded myself. My king prophesied to die, and here I sit, plucking at chronicles. Secret writing indeed. First the Bede no, Geoffrey of Monmouth. With a sigh and a squint at the crabbed script, I read, my vision, for once, unclouded.
The strangers had arrived on the day of St Dominic. They departed on the Sat.u.r.day following the Feast of the a.s.sumption of the Blessed Virgin.
At first the lady would not admit the truth to herself, and in the early weeks it was easy enough to ignore her condition. The first time she missed her menses she put it off to the trauma of her rape, the evil humours the foreign prince had left within her. After the second time she examined her frame in a gla.s.s. Her belly was undeniably growing.
The daughter watched as her mother cursed her fortune, tore her hair, beat at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She swallowed anise, birthwort, chamomile by the mouthful, hoping with these herbs to abort the child. At one moment she reached for a knife, planning to tear out this foul life. At another she vowed to throw herself off a chalk cliff. Yet each time she would relent, unable to abandon her daughter.
Soon enough it became impossible to hide her condition. The lady sensed her people turning on her. Oh, they would still serve her, carry out her commands in their dutiful way. Yet she had lost their goodwill.
A lady in these times, bearing the child of a lord not her own? Unthinkable, and yet there she was.
With her sixth month came new tidings of the war. A miserable defeat for her lord's king, and as this bleakness descended the lady gave in fully to her despair. On the morning chosen for her death, she sat for a while in the outer courtyard, dandling her daughter one last time. The girl knew something was awry. Yet even as they kissed their farewells, they saw in the distance a cloud of dust, smaller than the last, moving slowly across the marches. The lady squinted against the scorching sun. Bevelled or and sable, six hawks argent ascending the middle rank.
The livery of her lord and husband.
The lady locked herself in her apartments and for two days would not see him, despite his pleas. Nor would his men nor his servants tell him what they knew, though in their averted eyes he read a calamity.
Had she been ill, with pestilence or some other malady? Was she sick even now, afraid to pa.s.s on a mortal blight to her lord? Was she disfigured?
Yes, the lady thought. Disfigured. She stripped to her thin s.h.i.+ft and threw open the door, awaiting the sword.
Call to mind, my heart, the story of Joseph's trouble about Mary. It is not a story to be found in the Gospels, where Joseph thinks for a mere verse about divorce but then accepts the truth of the incarnation. I speak of the Father Joseph we see in the minstrels' pageants. This is the Joseph our knight knew best: the foolish Joseph, the husband convinced his pregnant wife has sinned with another man.
An angel came to you? Is that your claim? Ha! A man in the likeness of an angel, say I, come to cuckold me in sight of my relations and you, my fresh wife, claim to be carrying the Messiah, though still a virgin?
Yet even in this Joseph finally relents, his anger calmed by the angel into a cool acceptance of his fate as the earthly husband of the mother of our Lord.
The mores of the time dictated that the knight should have cast her out of his home, exiled her as a harlot and a wh.o.r.e. Instead he listened to his lady's account of her attack by this foreign prince. Though her swollen body was there for all to see, the knight would not put his wife away, as even Joseph was tempted at first to do. Wondrously, he wept with her instead, promising her his enduring love and protection.
It was not to be. On the Tuesday after Pentecost, in the last year of Pedro the Cruel's reign, G.o.d poured spirit into the body of an infant boy, and extracted it from the flesh of his mother. The little girl would hear her mother's death-screams for years to come.
The new child looked so much like his mother and, the girl could plainly see, his malevolent father. Yet from the moment of the boy's birth the knight took him as his own. One of the most self-sacrificing, self-denying loves in all history was this lord's for a son not his own. They made a strange family, these three, yet there was a certain n.o.bility to their devotion that inspired awe from more charitable souls.
Love can be sustaining even in the worst of circ.u.mstances. Bare life, though, can be pa.s.sing hard to endure. As the infant grew into a boy, the people started to look upon their lord with ill will. Betrayed by a strumpet of Mahound! And this b.a.s.t.a.r.d will be our lord's heir, and thus our own future lord?
No longer did they treat the knight with such solicitous fealty. There were whispers of insubordination, and gossip in the town.
The situation could not stand. So the knight gathered his most loyal men, no more than thirty in number, and with his children left their home. This best of lords gave up his castle to become a wanderer, a knight errant served only by the few dozen men who would join him on the road.
Though weakened in spirit, our knight was still strong in body, more than capable of leading a company of men in battle. He could sell these skills. He became a knight for hire, peddling the might of his men in the wars of that era, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the ports of Ma.r.s.eille and Toulon, adding other wayfaring men to his company as they went.
The knight taught his daughter well in the course of their wanderings: how to butcher a hart, how to fight with her fists and teeth, how to ward off brigands with a knife. By the age of twelve she was a fierce, rodent-like thing, unrecognizable as the daughter of a wealthy lord.
La Comadrejita: the Little Weasel, as she was known among the camp women. Small, lithe, quick on her feet, always sneaking up on the warriors and their women, dodging grasps and slaps, lifting coins and s.h.i.+ny objects from pouches and shelves. These she would give to her brother as tokens of their love, extracting solemn promises from the little boy that he would do her bidding in all things.
From her father's men his growing daughter learned the many tongues spoken around the great inland sea not only French and Italian but the languages of the Jews and the Moors, and the mixed tongue of sailors. She took a new name, too, after an old Roman town in the Dauphine where her father's company wintered one year, and after the orange scarf she wore in her hair.
For eight long years she roamed with her father's company among the hills and rivers of many lands. If not the happiest of girls, she was content, though the memory of her mother's ravishment stayed with her always, like an aching tooth too frequently tongued.
Sorrow comes in waves, it is said. In her sixteenth year the girl fell ill along with her father, her brother, and many of their company. The fever slew the weakest among them: a half-dozen ageing soldiers, two camp women heavy with child and her brother. He was buried on a high cliff above the sea, with no priest to say Ma.s.s. So she said it herself for this sweetest of boys, murmuring through narrowed lips those rote s.n.a.t.c.hes of unknown Latin heard so often in her life.
In his bleakness at the loss of his son, and seeing his daughter's devastation, her father made a decision. His child needed a home, a chance at a life worth living.
He had heard tidings of a large company of mercenaries serving the signore of Milan, a much larger a.s.semblage than his own, well managed and organized. So the knight travelled with his diminished company to Lombardy. There he sold himself and his men to this company, a wealthy band of mercenaries hiring their might to the most powerful magnates in the land: kings, dukes, popes.
The leader of this company was a fearsome lord, tall, haughty, quick of wit and quicker of cruelty. Yet he was revered by his subordinates, and feared by those who hired his engines and his men.
His name was Ser Giovanni Acuto. In your tongue, my sweet, Sir John Hawkwood.
TWENTY-NINE.
San Donato a Torre, near Florence 'It's remarkable, Sir John,' said Adam Scarlett. 'And alarming.'
Hawkwood, fresh from his weekly bath, had thrown on a loose robe. He peered into the mottled gla.s.s, shaving his neck. 'Perhaps it's nothing,' he said.
That morning a servingwoman and her husband had been cleaning one of the smaller villette to make room for an envoy from Rome. Four of the chancellor's clerks had vacated the week before, having made a mess of the outbuilding, and it needed a top-to-bottom scrubbing. Her husband had been shovelling old coals from the main hearth when he came across a half-burned quire behind the grate. The edges were badly charred, several pages rendered unreadable. Yet there were at least a dozen nearly full sheets with legible letters and mysterious signs scribbled across both sides. The man had promptly brought the quire to the condottiero.
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