Dark Fire

  ‘Ay,’ Barak answered cheerfully. ‘His lordship set me to see what sort of case you were in, whether you might stand up to this job. I told him you had a determined look about you.’

  ‘Did you? And have you worked for the earl a long time?’

  ‘Oh, ay. My father came from Putney, where the earl’s father kept his tavern. When he died I was asked to enter Lord Cromwell’s service. I had my own contacts round London then, doing this and that’ - he raised an eyebrow and gave that cynical smile again—’nd he’s found me useful enough.’

  ‘What did your father do?’

  ‘He was a gong-screwer, cleaned out people’s cesspits. Silly old arsehole, he fell into one of the pits he was digging out and drowned.’ Despite the lightness of his tone a brief shadow passed across his face.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘I’ve no family now,’ Barak said cheerfully. ‘Free of all ties. What about you?’

  ‘My father is still alive. He has a farm in Lichfield, in the Midlands.’ My conscience pricked me. He was getting old, but I had not been back to see him in a year.

  ‘Son of carrot crunchers, eh? Where did you get your education? Do they have schools up there?’

  ‘They do. I went to Lichfield cathedral school.’

  ‘I’ve an education too,’ Barak replied. ‘Know some Latin.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I went to St Paul’s school, got a scholarship for a clever lad, but I had to fend for myself after my father died.’ Again that brief shadow of sadness, or was it anger? He tapped his satchel. ‘Those Latin papers my master gave me for you, I can read them. Well, just about.’

  As we turned in at my gate Barak studied my house; I could see he was impressed by the mullioned windows and tall chimneys. He turned to me, raising that eyebrow again. ‘Fine place.’

  ‘Now we are here,’ I said, ‘we had better have our story clear. I suggest we tell my servants you are the agent of a client and are helping me on a case.’

  He nodded. ‘All right. What servants have you?’

  ‘My housekeeper, Joan Woode, and a boy.’ I gave him a fixed stare. ‘You should also look to how you address me. Given our respective stations, “sir” would be appropriate; “Master Shardlake” would at least be civil. All the way here it has been “you” as though I were your brother or your dog. That will not do.’

  ‘Right you are.’ He grinned cheekily. ‘Need a hand down, sit?’

  ‘I can manage.’

  As we dismounted, the boy Simon appeared from behind the house. He stared at Barak’s mare in admiration.

  ‘That’s Sukey,’ Barak told him. ‘Look after her well and there’ll be something for you.’ He winked. ‘She likes a carrot now and then.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Simon bowed and led the horses away. Barak watched him go.

  ‘Shouldn’t he have shoes? He’ll be cutting his feet on ruts and stones this dry weather.’

  ‘He won’t wear them. Joan and I have tried.’

  Barak nodded. ‘Ay, shoes are uncomfortable at first. They rub on your calluses.’

  Joan appeared in the doorway. She gave Barak a look of surprise. ‘Good afternoon, sir. May I ask how it went at the court?’

  ‘We’ve got twelve days’ grace for Elizabeth,’ I said. ‘Joan, this is Master Jack. He will be staying with us a short while, to help me with a new matter on behalf of his master. Could you make a room ready for him?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Barak bowed and gave her a smile, as charming as his earlier ones had been mocking. ‘Master Shardlake did not tell me his housekeeper was so attractive.’

  Joan’s plump face reddened and she pushed some greying hairs under her cap. ‘Oh, please, sir—’

  I stared, surprised my sensible housekeeper should fall for such nonsense, but she was still red-faced as she led Barak in. I supposed women would find him good-looking if they were susceptible to rough charm. She led him upstairs. ‘The room hasn’t been slept in for a while, sir,’ she said, ‘but it’s clean.’

  I went into my parlour. Joan had opened the window and the tapestry on the wall showing the story of Joseph and his brothers stirred in the warm breeze. There was new rush matting on the floor, giving off the harsh tang of the wormwood Joan put on it to discourage fleas.

  I remembered I must write to Joseph arranging to meet. I climbed the stairs to my study. As I passed Barak’s room I heard my housekeeper clucking like an old hen about the state of the blankets. That room, I remembered, had once belonged to my former assistant, Mark. I shook my head in puzzlement at how the wheel of fortune turned.

  JOAN PREPARED an early supper. It was a fish day so we had trout and afterwards a bowl of strawberries. The good weather that spring had brought them on early. Barak joined me at table, and I said grace, though I no longer did that when I was alone. ‘For the food the Lord has provided, let us be thankful. Amen.’ Barak closed his eyes and bowed his head, raising it as soon as I had finished intoning. He tucked happily into his fish, lifting his food to his mouth with his knife in an ill-bred way. I wondered what his religious views were, if any.

  He interrupted my train of thought. ‘I’ll give you those books and papers later,’ he said. ‘By Jesu, they’re strange reading.’

  I nodded. ‘And I should consider how to proceed.’ It was time to try and stamp my authority on the matter. ‘Let me get it right. The first person involved in point of time was the friar, the librarian.’ I ticked names off on my fingers. ‘Then the Gristwoods went to Bealknap and he went to Marchamount. Marchamount told Lady Honor, who told Cromwell. Three of them, then. We can discount the friar as the moving force behind this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because someone hired two ruthless rogues to kill the Gristwoods. I can’t see Lady Honor or either of the lawyers charging in there with an axe, can you? But any of those three could have afforded to hire killers, though it would cost much more than a pensioned-off friar could raise. I still want to talk to him - he saw the stuff discovered. I’ll see Bealknap and Marchamount tomorrow at Lincoln’s Inn; there’s a lunch in hall. For the Duke of Norfolk,’ I added.

  He screwed up his face in distaste. ‘That arsehole. How he hates my master.’

  ‘I know. We can use tomorrow morning to go to the jetty where you saw that ship burned up, and I’ll try to see Joseph then too. We can also go to Augmentations—they’re so busy these days they keep open on Sundays. I can miss church for once. What about you?’

  ‘My parish in Cheapside is so full of people coming and going the vicar scarce keeps note of who’s there or not.’

  Pleased at the brisk way I had formulated my plan of action, I gave Barak a satirical half-smite to match his own. ‘You don’t feel the need to humble yourself before God then, ask forgiveness of your sins?’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘I serve the king’s vicar-general and the king is God’s anointed representative on earth. If I am on his business, how can I be doing other than God’s will?’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  He gave his mocking grin ‘About as much as you do.’

  I took some strawberries and passed the bowl to Barak. He spooned half the dish onto his plate and added cream. ‘Then there is Lady Honor,’ I continued.

  He nodded. ‘She usually has these sugar banquets of hers on a Tuesday. If you haven’t heard by Monday morning I’ll ask his lordship to give her a nudge.’

  I looked at him levelly. ‘Doing what you can do to assist, eh?’

  ‘Ay.’

  ‘And is that what you are? My assistant?’

  ‘Assist and facilitate,’ he replied briskly. ‘That’s what his lordship asked me to do. I know what I’m about. Don’t mind that fussy old arsehole Grey; he doesn’t like my rough ways. He thinks he knows my master’s business better than my master, but he doesn’t. Sniffling old pen gent.’

  I would not be diverted. ‘You started as my watcher.’

  He changed the subject. ‘That Wentwor
th case - there’s more to it than meets the eye, if you ask me. That girl in court, y’know what she reminded me of? John Lambert’s burning. Remember that?’

  I remembered only too well. Lambert was the first Protestant preacher to go too far for the king. Eighteen months earlier he had been tried for the heresy of denying transubstantiation, before the king himself as head of the Church, judge and inquisitor, dressed in the white robes of theological purity. It had been the first major reversal for reform. ‘That was a cruel burning,’ I said, looking at him sharply.

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘No. I avoid these spectacles.’

  ‘My master likes his people to go, show loyalty to the king.’

  ‘I remember. He made me go to Anne Boleyn’s execution.’ I closed my eyes for a moment against that memory.

  ‘It was a slow burning, the fire fairly sweated the blood out of him.’

  I was relieved to see a look of distaste cross Barak’s face. Burning was a terrible death, and in those days of accusation and counter-accusation it was the one everyone feared. I shuddered, passing my hand across my brow. It felt red and sore, I had a touch of the sun.

  Barak leaned his elbows on the table. ‘The way Lambert walked to the stake with head bowed, refusing to answer the taunts of the crowd, that was what reminded me of the girl. His demeanour. Later, of course, he was screaming.’

  ‘You think Elizabeth seemed like a martyr, then?’

  Barak nodded. ‘Ay, a martyr. That’s the word.’

  ‘But for what?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who can say? But you’re right to talk to the family; I’ll warrant the answer’s there.’

  The idea of Elizabeth’s manner as martyrlike had not occurred to me, but it rang true. I looked again at Barak. Whatever else he was, he was no fool. ‘I’ve sent Simon with a note asking Joseph to call here tomorrow at twelve.’ I got up. ‘We can go to the jetty first thing, we should start early. Where is it exactly?’

  ‘Downriver, out beyond Deptford.’

  ‘And now I should look at these papers of yours. Could you bring them to me?’

  ‘Ay.’ As he got up he nodded. ‘You’re getting to grips with the matter, I see. Planning everything out. My master said you were like that, didn’t let go once you were started.’

  THE SUN WAS BEGINNING to set as I took Barak’s satchel out into the garden. I had had much work done there these last two years and often sat outside enjoying its calm and fine scents. Its design was simple; squares of flower beds divided by trellised paths shaded by climbing roses. No knot gardens with complex designs in the form of puzzles for me; there were puzzles in my work and my garden was a place of quiet order. Once I had thought reform might similarly order the world, but that hope was long gone. More recently I had hoped that the peace of my garden might be a foretaste of a quiet life away from London, but that too now seemed very far off. I sat on a bench, glad simply to be alone at last, and opened the satchel.

  I sat reading for two hours as the sun sank gradually and the first moths appeared, flickering towards the candles Simon lit in the house. I turned first to the papers Michael Gristwood had brought from the monastery. There were four or five illustrated manuscripts written by old monastic writers, giving vivid descriptions of the use of Greek Fire. Sometimes they called it Flying Fire, sometimes the devil’s tears, fire from the dragon’s mouth, Dark Fire: I puzzled over that last name. How could fire be dark? An odd image came into my head of black flames rising from black coals. It was absurd.

  There was a page in Greek torn from the biography of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I who reigned four hundred years ago.

  Each of the Byzantine galleys was fitted in the prow with a tube ending with the head of a lion made of brass, and gilded, frightful to behold, through the open mouth of which it was arranged that fire should be projected by the soldiers through a flexible apparatus. The Pisans fled, having no previous experience of this device and wondering that fire, which usually burns upwards, could be so directed downward or towards either side according to the will of the engineer who discharges it.

  I laid down the paper. What happened to the apparatus? I wondered. Had that been taken from Wolf’s Lane too? If it was metal it would be heavy. Had the killers brought a cart there? I turned to another account, of a giant Arab fleet sent to invade Constantinople and utterly destroyed by flying fire in AD 678, fire that burned even on the very surface of the sea. I stared out over the lawn. Fire that burned downwards, that could burn on water itself? I knew nothing about the mysteries of alchemy, but surely such things were impossible?

  I turned next to the only paper in the collection in English. It was written in a round, clumsy hand.

  1, Alan St John, late soldier of the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos of Byzantium, do make this testament in the hospital of St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield, this eleventh day of March 1454.

  The year after Constantinople fell to the Turks, I remembered.

  I am told I am like to die and have confessed my sins, for I followed the rough ways of a soldier of fortune all my life. The friars of this blessed place have treated and comforted me these last months since I returned from the fall of Constantinople sore wounded, which wounds grow infected again. The friars’ care is proof of the love of God, and to them I leave my papers, that tell of the old secret of Greek Fire the Byzantines knew, that was passed down secretly from emperor to emperor and lost at last, together with the last barrel of distilled Greek Fire itself, that I brought back from the East. The secret was found by a librarian of Constantinople as he cleared the library to rescue the books from the approaching Turks, and he gave the papers and the barrel into my care before we fled the city in the ships the Venetians sent. I do not understand the Greek and Latin and meant to consult with alchemists in England, but then my illness disabled me. May God forgive me: I meant to make a profit from this thing, but no money can aid me now. The friars say it is God’s will, for this is a terrible secret that could bring much ruin and bloodshed to unhappy humanity. It is no surprise they called the principal element in Greek Fire Dark Fire. I leave it all to the friars to do with as they will, for they are close to the Grace of God.

  I put it down. So the friars had hidden the papers, and the barrel, away, realizing the potential for danger and destruction they had in their hands: not knowing that ninety years later King Henry and Cromwell would come and clear them all out. As I sat there, I had a vision of the fall of Constantinople, that great tragedy of our age; soldiers and officials and citizens fleeing the doomed city, making for the dock and the boats to Venice to the sound of booming artillery and the roars of the Turks outside.

  I picked the paper up again, and sniffed it. It had a faint scent, pleasant and musky. I turned to the remaining papers, the same odour lingered on some of the others. I frowned; the smell was nothing like incense: surely it had not come from a monastery cellar. I had never smelt anything like it before. I laid the papers down again, then started as a moth flew into my face. The sun was touching the top of the trees over in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and cows were lowing in the distance. I turned to the books.

  These were mostly Latin and Greek works that told stories of Greek Fire. I read old Athenian legends of magic garments that could burst into fire when worn, read Pliny’s description of pools by the Euphrates that discharged inflammable mud. It was clear the writers were merely repeating stories, with no real idea of how Greek Fire was actually made. There were also a couple of alchemical works, which discussed the matter in terms of the philosopher’s stone, the precepts of Hermes Trismegistus, and analogies between metals, stars and living things. Like the book I had taken from Sepultus’s workshop, I found them incomprehensible.

  I turned back finally to the old parchment Cromwell had shown me in his room, the picture of the ship spouting Greek Fire, with the top part torn off. I ran my fingers along the torn edge. That act had cost Michael Gristwood his life.

  ‘Better the monks had destroyed ev
erything,’ I whispered aloud.

  I heard footsteps and looked up to see Barak approaching. He glanced over the flower beds.

  ‘This is a fine-smelling place.’ He nodded at the documents surrounding me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what d’you make of it all?’

  ‘Not much. For all this great jangle of words no one seems to have any clue what Greek Fire really was. As for the alchemical works, they are incomprehensible riddles and obscure words.’

  Barak grinned. ‘I tried to read a law book once, it made me feel like that.’

  ‘Guy may be able to make some sense of them.’

  ‘That old black monk of yours? He’s well known round where I lodge. By God, he’s a strange-looking one.’

  ‘He’s a very knowledgeable man.’

  ‘Ay, so they say round the Old Barge.’

  ‘That is where you live?’ I remembered those shutters closing.

  ‘Ay, it’s not a fine place like this but it’s in the middle of London - useful as my business takes me all over the City.’ He sat beside me and gave me a sharp look. ‘You’re to say as little as possible to the black monk, remember.’

  ‘I’ll ask him to elucidate these alchemy books, say it’s something I’ve to look into for a client. He won’t press me more than that, he knows I have to keep clients’ confidences.’

  ‘Guy Malton, the black apothecary calls himself,’ Barak said thoughtfully. ‘I’ll wager that’s not the name he was born with.’

  ‘No, he was born Mohammed Elakbar; his parents converted to Christianity after the fall of Granada. Your own name’s unusual, come to that. Barak, it is like Baruch, one of the Old Testament names reformers are giving their children now. But you’re too old for that.’

  He laughed and stretched long legs in front of him. ‘You’re a scholar, aren’t you? My father’s family was descended from Jews who converted to Christianity in old times. Before they were all kicked out of England. I think of it whenever I have to visit my master at the Domus. So maybe it was Baruch once. I’ve a funny little gold box my father left me that he said had been passed down from those days. It was all he had to leave me, poor old arsehole.’ Again that sombre look passed quickly across his face. He shrugged. ‘Anything else those old papers reveal?’