Part 38 (1/2)

'My lord?'

'The battle at Najera, with Prince Edward and Lancaster, all those years ago.'

'You were in Edward's household,' I recalled, prompting a nod. 'During the Castile campaign for Pedro.'

'I wouldn't have been with them at that woman's castle. I was with the Gascon encampment at Burgos during those weeks. But I remember Edward's illness after the battle, the fevers and the raging, this sense that the man was ... detaching from himself, that his mind had bent somehow. Everyone agreed afterwards that Spain was the sad beginning of a long end for the prince. Seguina's mother wasn't the first woman he brutalized in those years, nor the last.'

We stood for a while longer, listening to the hurried murmurs of a priest from one of the chantries before the south porch. I think we both sensed a circle closing, though the machinations that had brought us here were clearly the beginning of something much larger. I thought of Hawkwood, spinning his sticky webs in Tuscany. Of Simon, fled for who knew where. Of Sarah, who had died knowing nothing of her son's chosen profession; a minor blessing.

'So what next?' I eventually asked him. 'Will you return the favour, have Hawkwood snipped?'

The chancellor let out a sigh, a slow wind of realism. 'We need Hawkwood, Gower, even more than Hawkwood needs England. I see a long war ahead of us. There's no reason to go stirring the pot over an unfortunate incident easily gotten past. This is how it works in the end. We pardon our second-worst enemies, make treaties with our former slaughterers. Overlook treason to win a battle.'

I told him I understood. He would get no objections from John Gower for choosing political expediency over moral purity. 'And Simon?' I asked neutrally. 'Will you pursue him further?'

'I will leave that in your hands.' He gave me a baronial look. 'The realm owes you a great debt, Gower. G.o.d knows your talents can create some peculiar twists. In this case, though, they've won the day.'

There was a rather uncomfortable pause. I knew what the chancellor expected me to say. He stood there, waiting for my demands. The Exchequer's books, a bishop's house on the Strand. Even a knighting by the king was not out of the question.

I surprised myself by not asking for a single s.h.i.+lling.

The next morning, after one of the soundest sleeps of my life, I left the priory grounds on foot, crossing the bridge and walking beneath the outer arches of the St Thomas Chapel as the first glimmer of sun broke through low morning clouds. Once on the north bank I descended to the wharf.a.ge and the offices of the wool custom. Chaucer, so a clerk at the customhouse told me, was out of town. A difficulty at Hythe, rumours of illegal wool.

The clerk stepped out for a moment, giving me the opportunity to take a glimpse at Chaucer's desk. On it sat a small quire, weighted open to a page nearly empty of content: pen trials, a few doodles, some couplets. I leaned over and read.

Befell that in that season, on a day, In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay Ready to ride forth on my pilgrimage To Canterbury with full devout courage, At night was come into that hostelry Well nine and twenty in a company Of sundry folk, by adventure fallen In fellows.h.i.+p, and pilgrims were they all, That toward Canterbury would ride.

I had to read the lines again. In Southwark? Chaucer was a London man, through and through, and as far as I knew had never gone on pilgrimage to Becket's shrine, or anywhere else, for that matter. If he travelled to Canterbury it would be for business or pleasure, not for faith. False prophecies, false pilgrimages: all the same to my slippery friend.

Outside the customhouse I stood on the wharf.a.ge, watching the slow, careful movement of the Goose as it craned a pile of wool from the dock. On the decks of the trading vessels workers toiled at the crates and barrels of goods brought to London from around the earth, from the looms of Lyon, the vineyards of Alsace and Tuscany, the olive groves of al-Andalus, and there, on the river's edge of London, with the low bulk of Southwark rising before me, with the dense span of the bridge against the sky, I felt the unboundedness of it all. A history I would never fully understand had pa.s.sed me by, these great machinations linking Florence, London, the marches of Aragon and Castile and the narrow lanes of Southwark, and a dead woman on the moor.

We live in an immense world, whole universes of taste and touch and scent, of voices commingling in the light, and dying away with the common dread that stands at every man's door. Yet we perceive and remember this world only as it creates those single fragments of experience: moments of everyday kindness, or self-sacrificing love, or unthinkable brutality. I angled my face to the sun and blinked away a spot, then another, these dark blemishes floating in my sight, mottling my vision, more of them by the day. Yet behind and beyond them I could imagine, for a moment, the holy sheen of Sarah's skin, the faces of our children, the intricate gloss of some forgotten book, and I thought how simple it should be, to know and cherish the proper objects of our lives.

On the near end of the bridge I bought a bird pie. The pigeon was bad, I realized after the first bite though thankfully before swallowing. I spat it out. I thought about returning to the pieman's booth though I would have to push back through the crowd, which had thickened with the unwelcome intrusion of aristocracy. A lower knight, mounted and shouting for s.p.a.ce, pa.s.sing over from the bankside. Then the catcalls, some trash dropped from the houses above, a few small missiles thrown, all done with that urban mix of defiance and cheer, the common resonance of this angry city I bafflingly loved.

It came to me then, the source of Chaucer's folly. A hostelry at night, a diverse company of pilgrims, a tale of fellows.h.i.+p and adventure, all beginning at the Tabard, of all places. A book for England's sake: stories within stories, and the stuff of life, encompa.s.sed by the one great story we all must share yet none of us will ever get to read. At the foot of the bridge I stumbled on a loose paver but recovered my footing as a flock of starlings whorled above, as the way widened into the teeming breadth of Southwark, like a narrow river finding the sea.

A Note to the Reader.

One of the strange pleasures of writing A Burnable Book has been the discovery and partial correction of my own ignorance about much of medieval life. After half a career spent studying and teaching the literature of the Middle Ages, it came as a rude awakening to realize I couldn't answer a simple question posed by my younger son: 'Did they have forks?' (Yes, Malcolm, after a fas.h.i.+on, though not many of them, and mostly for serving, not eating.) Though I have drawn on many of the same sorts of sources I regularly consult in my academic work, fiction requires a more eclectic approach to research guided by the idiosyncrasies of story and character. As often as I have read around in the latest scholars.h.i.+p on aristocratic politics during the reign of Richard II, I have found myself consulting the work of nineteenth-century antiquarians on gutters and drainage in the Southwark stews.