A Burnable Book Read Online Free

Geoff? What does it look like? What’s in it?”
    His gaze was unfocused and vague. “To be honest with you, John, I don’t know. What I do know is that this book could hurt me.” He blinked and looked at some spot on the wattle behind me. Then, in a last whisper of French, “It could cost me my life.”
    Our eyes locked, and I wondered in that instant, as I would so often in the weeks to come, what price such a book might extract from my oldest friend. He broke the tension with one of his elvish smiles. “If you can do this for me, John, get me this book, I’ll be greatly in your debt.”
    As you are so deeply in mine, he did not say; nor did he need to, and in his position neither would I have. I left Monksblood’s that morning bound to perform this “small favor,” as Chaucer had called it, for the one man in all the world I could never refuse. The man who knew my own darkest song.

Chapter ii
    Gropecunt Lane, Ward of Cheap
    E leanor Rykener grunted, spat, wiped her lips. The friar covered his shriveled knob. Wouldn’t meet her eyes, of course. Franciscans, they never liked to look. He dropped his groats on the straw. “Why thank you, Brother Michael,” she said, her voice a sullen nip. The friar stared coldly at some spot on her neck, then shrugged on his cowl, edged around the old mare, and left the stall.
    When she had dressed Eleanor stepped out into the light rain, looking down toward the stone cross before St. Pancras. The friar wouldn’t give that a glance either as he slunk around the corner of the churchyard toward Soper Lane. She raised her face to the sky, cleansing his piety from her tongue.
    “Regular as these little oinkers here.” Mary Potts leaned against a post, gesturing to a dozen pigs nosing street muck.
    Eleanor tossed her gossip a tired smile. “And never has the good grace to render me confession after I grant him service.”
    They stood in silence for a while, watching the flow of late-afternoon traffic up along Cheapside, the creak of old wheels, the low calls of sheep, the urgings of hucksters, though the din seemed always distant from the ladies of Gropecunt Lane, a quiet byway of leased horsestalls and abandoned shopfronts that absorbed sound the way a dry rag absorbs ale, and as central as St. Paul’s to the human business of London. Every now and then this business would be theirs, as some desiring man, face to the ground, mind on slit, would make the turn and find a maudlyn to take his groats and squirt. Despite the lane’s reputation, the girls kept things tidy, raking the dirt and pavers themselves, cleaning up after animal and man alike. It was their own small piece of the city, where jakes plucked coin from their purses and maudlyns tucked it into theirs, the ordinances be damned. A simple thing.
    “Afternoon, m’pretties!”
    Eleanor turned. Joan Rugg lifted her skirts as she hopped from stone to stone in a vain attempt to avoid the mud.
    “What now what now what now,” Mary Potts murmured.
    With a final grunt, Joan heaved herself onto the pavers fronting the stalls and straightened her dress, a shapeless thing of stained wool. The Dun Bell, Joan’s girls called their bawd, with three chins stacked against her neck, lips full and always moist, beady eyes that moved more quickly than any other part of her, and a mass of matted hair entwined through the band of a wide hat she never removed. This, a splendid circle of leather and wool adorned with flowers of faded silk, had been given to her by a lover in her youth, she liked to recall. On that misty day its perch lent her large form an air of botanical mystery, as if the viewer were approaching a mountaintop garden above the clouds, or some strange, Edenic island in the sea. “You ladies seen our Agnes?” she asked.
    “Not today,” said Mary Potts.
    “Thought you sent her up Westminster on Tuesday,” said Eleanor, suddenly concerned. As far as she knew Agnes Fonteyn had been consorting with one of the king’s