shall this matter be adjudicated?’
A movement to my left. Pinchbeak had summoned two pursuivants.
‘More central to our purposes this evening, though,’ FitzWilliams continued, ‘shall be the nature of the crime: how are we to determine whether we are facing a killing ex malicia praecogitata, or an accidental death? Was she killed with a club to the skull? Or’ – he held up a knife, then placed the blade against his chest – ‘with a steely thrust to her heart?’ At this last word FitzWilliams plunged the knife into his chest and doubled over.
A few shouts of alarm from the more gullible and drunk, but mostly laughter as he withdrew the wooden blade. For me the moot had lost all its humour.
‘Ah, but wait!’ The murmurs died down. ‘We must now reveal the identity of the accused.’ He dug a hand into a pocket. ‘Why, what’s this?’ He pulled out a parchment, waved it before the room. ‘The indictment, honourable gentlemen! Inscribed by His Honour himself, Justice Beelzebub Barnes of Brixton!’ He stood at the top of the aisle between the rows of tables. ‘In this document,’ he shouted, ‘is written the very name of the accused!’
‘Huzzah! Huzzah!’
‘As well as his profession, our next matter for rumination. And what is the profession of our accused, you may ask? A moment …’ He held the document up to the lamplight. ‘Our alleged killer is – a highwayman?’
‘No!’
‘A street vagrant, then?’
‘Nay!’
‘How about – how about a friar?’
‘The friar! The friar!’
FitzWilliams shook his head, shining an exaggerated sadness around the great hall. ‘Incorrect, gentlemen of the bar, the killer is not a friar!’
General laughter, and as it crested, then ebbed, I noticed a small stir from afar, rendered peculiar only by its timing. In the hall’s north corner Chaucer rose from his seat, nodded an apology to his benchmates, and ducked through the low doorway leading to the buttery. As the door closed to on his back FitzWilliams adopted a more serious look. ‘Our alleged murderer is not a priest, nor a bishop, nor a cardinal. He is neither a cooper nor a cordwainer, neither a mercer nor a shipwright, neither a pinner nor a—’
‘Let’s just have it, then, Fitzy!’ someone shouted from the back.
FitzWilliams looked up, affecting offence. More titters. I sat forward, confused by Chaucer’s departure at the height of the apprentice’s spectacle. With a flourish, FitzWilliams gazed across the crowd. ‘Have it we shall. Our murderer is, rather, a p—’
‘Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!’
Loud shouts, drowning out FitzWilliams’s revelation with the force of a gale. The serjeants-at-law, twenty strong and with Thomas Pinchbeak hobbling in the lead, rushed the pageant wagon as a single dark-robed mass, their gowns spread above their heads like bat wings as they mobbed the players. Three of the younger serjeants climbed on the wheels and proceeded to demolish the set, kicking apart the flimsy rails, ripping the robes from the judges, releasing the accused from his bonds. Two others grappled the ‘victim’ off the side platform and stripped the costume from his flesh, leaving him only in his braies, then sent him into the crowd with a jar of wine over his head.
Utter pandemonium: screams of delight and alarm; cups, jars, and flagons flying overhead, to shatter against the walls; serjeants and apprentices alike screaming to the rafters, some enjoying the skirmish, others frightened nearly for their lives; the wagon overturned on the floor, its spoked wheels and siderails broken on impact; the melee thrown in long shadows by hooped candelabra casting pantomimes of disorder against every surface.
Even the wildest revels must end, however, and eventually, as the tumult subsided and the barristers and apprentices surveyed the results, there was a general quieting through the hall, an almost embarrassed assessment of the state of things. I watched and listened to the reactions. Many held that the disruption had been coordinated between the utter barristers and the serjeants, perhaps as a staged commentary on the poor quality of the recent moots. Others avowed that the serjeants saw murder as inappropriate for mooting, and broke the spectacle up accordingly. There were still others who had observed what I had during the lead-up to the interruption: the anger of the serjeants-at-law, the whispered conferrals among England’s most powerful lawmen, the decision taken to rush the players before their moot had even begun.
Yet there was something more that had disturbed me about the spectacle, something I would scarcely admit to myself as I lingered in the great hall. I sat at my bench for a long while, watching the overturned wagon as the space emptied of barristers, of serjeants, of apprentices and guests, until only the servers were left. Around me they swept up broken bits of glass and clay, gathered the leavings of the students’ extravagance into buckets that would now feed pigs, dogs, their children in the tenements. As the hall emptied my certainty deepened, and a tingling of unease began at the bottom of my spine, moved up my back, and settled into my heart as a coiled suspicion.
My memory replayed the course of the abbreviated moot: the introduction of the case, the gaudy spectacle of the victim, Chaucer’s unexplained departure through the kitchen door – and finally, the naming of the accused. In that moment before the serjeants shouted him down, I could swear with a near certainty that one final word had escaped FitzWilliams’s mouth. Our murderer is, rather, a p—
It seemed unlikely in the extreme that the man had suggested such a thing. Yet I had heard it from his lips, was sure of it: the one word that could most have affected me as I took in the lewd spectacle of a young woman’s violent death. Our murderer is, rather, a p—
One word: poet.
Worshipful Sir, and Our Most Intimate Friend,
Your muse finds herself in peril. Upon your return from Rome you will fondle not her supple skin but this rough parchment. Here on the banks of the Arno it will await you, just as my flesh awaits reunion with your own.
Those pleasures must be delayed, for in the morning I leave our Tuscan Eden for the coast. From there I shall arrange passage to that faraway island our histories call Albion, and you call home.
You are a lover of stories. Stories of love, lust, and loss. Of wars, rivalry, and revenge. Of the commonplace and the unlikely. The story I must now tell you is woven of all these threads, and more besides.
You know its characters, some better than others, though you cannot know, as I do, the depths of their perfidy and the heights of their nobility. Even to commit this tale to writing is to subject you, its reader, to the same peril that stalks me now. For Hawkwood’s talons are sharp, his vision is keen, and his enemies tend to die young.
I can delay no longer. Time is short, and there is much to relate.
Here, my only heart, is the story.
Once, along the Castilian marches, beyond the Crown of Aragon, there lived a knight. Not a great knight; no one would have mistaken him for a Lancelot, a Gawain, a Roland, though where he fell short of these famed knights in ferocity, he matched every one of them in honour. To his lord he was a model of duty. To his own men he was the very mirror of chivalry: swift of sword, moderate in judgment. Toward his people he acted fairly and wisely in all things.
Our knight kept a castle. Not a great castle; no one would have mistaken it for the alcázar of Pedro the Cruel, nor for Avignon’s papal palace, nor England’s palace of Westminster. Yet its walls of broad stone and heavy mortar kept our marcher lord well defended from the occasional marauder.
Our knight had a wife. A beautiful wife indeed, so beautiful one might well have mistaken her for Helen, or Guinevere, or