Читать книгу A Burnable Book - Bruce Holsinger - Страница 20

‘A nun and a maud, and here we are together again.’

Millicent looked at her sister, huddled in the darkness. Agnes had stayed in the Cornhull house that morning while Millicent went out to sell the bracelet her sister had found on the body in the Moorfields. The tiny piece had fetched a few shillings on Silver Street, enough to keep them fed for a week or two, though what they would do after that was a mystery. She sighed. ‘I was hardly a nun, Agnes.’

‘Well, you lived among them out at St Leonard’s Bromley. Got their speech, learned to read like a master.’

‘Not quite,’ said Millicent. ‘But I darned their robes, smoothed their wimples.’ She stared at the book, wondering at the peculiar motivations of its maker. ‘Then Sir Humphrey ap-Roger came along, and they put me out as a concubine.’

‘Girl who lives as a nun is a nun, leastwise in my book. Not that this is my book now, by the cross.’

Millicent had just struggled through a second reading of this dark work: a difficult book, filled with words and turns of phrase the Bromley sisters had never taught her. An educated laity is our order’s highest aspiration, Millicent, Prioress Isabel had reminded her many times. To know that God’s teachings are well water to the thirstful – this is one of the central works of our contemplative life. Millicent had cut her teeth on the devotional texts made available to her by the Bromley sisters, though she had never read anything like this. The verse was bumpy, like her heartbeat, with repeated letters throughout and four hammering thumps to each line. Like a minstrel’s romance, sung in the halls of lords.

The bone that he breaketh be baleful of harm,

Nor treachery’s toll with treason within …

A woman with womb that woes him to wander

For love of his lemman, his life worth a leaf …

Such lines, as she murmured them to her sister, carried dire threats, each one of them tuned to the fate of an English king. Yet much of the work remained obscure, its lines heavy with symbols she couldn’t decipher. Hawks, swords, thistles, and much else.

‘So what’s it all mean, Mil?’

Millicent thought for a while. ‘Twelve prophecies, and I think I’ve undressed most of them. From the songs the minstrels sing, the plays they put on at Bromley Manor, St Paul’s, everywhere.’ The sisters knew these stories well, as did all Londoners: lays of olden kings, ballads of Harold and William the Conqueror, the story of the Lionheart, dying in his mother’s arms. ‘Twelve kings of England, Ag, all dead in the very way the minstrels say they went. Age, battle, disease, a poker in the arse.’

‘Kings can die a lot of ways, eh?’ Agnes shook her head.

‘The great question, though, is, what will be the next way?’ Millicent found the passage on the final pages that most concerned her: twelve lines of verse, speaking with a terrifying force of her own moment.

Agnes looked confused, so Millicent read through several of the prophecies and glossed along the way. ‘I hardly know all our kings, Ag, but as for the ones I do know, the book seems to have it about right. And now we have here, in these last lines, the thirteenth prophecy.’

‘The thirteenth prophecy?’

‘The death of King Richard himself.’ Millicent recited the most baleful passage in the work.

‘At Prince of Plums shall prelate oppose

A faun of three feathers with flaunting of fur,

Long castle will collar and cast out the core,

His reign to fall ruin, mors regis to roar.

By bank of a bishop shall butchers abide,

To nest, by God’s name, with knives in hand,

Then springen in service at spiritus sung.

In palace of prelate with pearls all appointed,

By kingmaker’s cunning a king to unking,

A magnate whose majesty mingles with mort.

By Half-ten of Hawks might shender be shown.

On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.’

‘There it is then,’ said Agnes, her face brightening.

‘There what is?’

‘It lays out the place of the killing, doesn’t it? “In palace of prelate” and “by bank of a bishop”. A palace by a river. A bishop’s palace.’

‘Braybrooke?’ Millicent remembered a float with Sir Humphrey to the Bishop of London’s riverside residence.

‘Or our own Wykeham,’ said Agnes. William Wykeham, the Bishop of Winchester, whose palace in Southwark stretched along a fair span of the Thames. ‘Then it gives the killer’s method, aye? Nesting with knives in hand, then springing forth—’

‘“At spiritus sung”,’ Millicent finished for her. ‘What’s that mean, then?’

Agnes shrugged. ‘Prayer, could be, ending in spiritus. Like a signal.’

‘A signal.’

‘’Cause they’ll have help, won’t they?’

‘From a “kingmaker”,’ said Millicent. ‘A magnate whose majesty is mingled with mort.’

‘Who’s this Mort?’

‘Not who but what, dearheart,’ Millicent said gently, stifling a laugh. ‘Mort is France’s word for death.’

‘Ah.’ Agnes frowned. ‘But the book tells who wants the king dead, or at least how to know them for what they be. The shenders’ll show themselves by “Half-ten of Hawks”, whatever that might betoken.’

‘Five hawks, then,’ Millicent said.

Agnes frowned. ‘Why not say five?’

‘Half-ten. Hawks.’ Millicent emphasized the common first letter of each word. ‘It’s the verse.’

‘So the killer of our king will be carrying five hawks on his arm?’

‘That’s a lot of hawks for one arm,’ Millicent mused.

Agnes crawled forward on the rushes, took the cloth that had covered the book in hand, and spread it over the floor. ‘Five hawks, the book says, and there they are, clustered around the shield. Now I see it, Mil!’ She turned round to her sister. ‘It’s like wool and a spinning wheel.’

Millicent squatted by the cloth.

‘Without the wheel, the wool is just wool.’ Agnes cradled an imagined basket. ‘What good be a basket of wool if you haven’t made it into thread yet? But once you’ve wound it on the spindle, started turning your wheel’ – her hands spun the air – ‘why, the wool starts to twist itself together, and soon you got so long a length of thread as you like.’

‘I don’t see it.’

‘It’s all on the cloth, isn’t it?’

Millicent had thought little of the piece of embroidery apart from the shilling or so it would fetch on Cornhull. Yes, it was an extraordinary sample. But what did it have to do with the book?

She surveyed it now, looking more closely at the marks of livery embroidered across its span. She had noted them earlier, when Agnes first unwrapped the book for her, yet now their significance hit her with real force. Around one of the shields had been embroidered a careful pattern – a circle of five hawks – while the other sat in the midst of a triangle formed by three delicate white feathers. The cloth, she realized, told a story, a story whose main characters were embodied by the livery set between its edges. And what a story it was!

If she had learned her reading from Isabel of Barking, Millicent had learned her heraldry on the lap of Sir Humphrey ap-Roger, who had loved to point out the subtle variations signifying relations of rank, status, and depth of lineage: fields and divisions, charges and crests, beasts rampant and supine. In the difference between a blue lion on an argent field and an argent lion on a blue field lay whole histories of conquest and submission, Sir Humphrey taught her; learn these histories and the livery that tells them, Millie darling, and you’ll go far. Yet the heraldry on this cloth required no great knowledge, for she recognized most of it instantly. The colours of the king and his uncle were depicted in a battle of some kind, with swords, knives, and arrows surrounding their emblems and supporters.

Millicent clasped her sister’s hands. ‘Without the wheel, then, the wool is just wool.’

Agnes nodded. ‘And without the cloth,’ she said, continuing the thought, ‘the book is just …’

They said it together: ‘A book.’

There was one final piece. Millicent read the last line of the prophecy to her sister. ‘“On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.”’

‘Dunstan’s Day,’ said Agnes. ‘Nineteen May, or I’m a fool.’

Millicent calculated on her fingers. ‘Six weeks, Ag,’ she said into the darkness, the meaning of the prophecy chilling her limbs. ‘Our king has but six weeks to live.’

They had sat in silence for a while, absorbing the prophecy’s dire meaning, when Millicent saw a flicker of something cross her sister’s face. ‘What is it, Ag?’

‘The faun,’ she said, a faraway look in her eyes.

‘What about it?’

‘Right before that man killed her. She looked up at the sky, and she cried it out. A rhyme. ‘Though faun escape the falcon’s claws and crochet cut its snare, when father, son, and ghost we sing, of city’s blade beware!’ I remember it like my Ave Maria, her voice was so clear. It felt like she was screaming it to me, to me, while she’s kneeling there, waiting to die. It’s been stuck in my head since, just like that man’s doovay leebro, doovay leebro. So what’s it mean?’

‘Say it again.’

As Agnes repeated the rhyme, Millicent scratched it on to the last page of the manuscript with a nub of coal in her unpractised, spidery script. The words did nothing to clarify the rest of the prophecy, but writing them down seemed to calm Agnes somewhat.

‘Whatever it means it’s only words, Ag. And we can’t eat words.’ Millicent stood, the manuscript falling from her lap. ‘Nor a cloth, nor a damned book.’ She slammed the chamber door behind her, clomping down the outer stairs, her hopelessness rising with each descending step. Her sister in her bed, the two of them together for the first time in years, yet Millicent felt more alone than ever. City’s blade indeed.