A Burnable Book Read Online Free Page B

stews for a higher cut of her skincoin. Tightest yoke a’ mauds you’ll ever see, Joan Rugg liked to say, and it was true.
    Once past Cripplegate they skirted the northern wall past the bricked-up postern at the foot of the causeway and soon came to the edge of an overgrown orchard. Here the lane opened out into the broad expanse of the Moorfields, a linked series of marshy heaths that formed London’s nearest hunting grounds, mostly deer and fowl. A few drier, higher bits could handle cows at pasture, though for the most part the whole area was a fen. That late afternoon Eleanor and Mary saw no one moving among the high tufts of moorgrass.
    The first path off the causeway led to a spot beneath a large, lone oak. From there a smaller path branched off to the east. Ahead loomed the mass of Bethlem Priory, its walls heightened and buttressed since the order started taking in lunatics the year before. Eleanor recalled her last visit to Agnes’s lair, the mix of routine coupling and utter terror. The desperate gropings of an aging squire, the loose spread of his gut on her back like a jelly blanket—then a sound that shriveled the squire’s cock, and her own as well: a lunatic’s scream, echoing from the Bethlem walls. Since that night Eleanor had heard similar accounts of the priory’s madmen, fighting their chains as the canons extended their charity to the wrong of mind.
    Eleanor saw the white rock that marked the final turn. They pushed through the heavy foliage until they reached a high wall of hawthorn. A strong scent of primrose masked a sweeter, sicker smell beneath. Mary touched her arm. Eleanor held her breath and stepped into the dense brush. A flash of bare skin on the ground, glistening, moist. Eleanor pushed aside the last branches. They saw the body.
    She was facedown in the wetness, naked, her skin marbled with mud and rain. Her hair, caked in soil, had spread into three slicked highways from the crown of her crushed head, opened to the vermin. Beside her left hand lay a shoeing hammer, its handle resting carelessly over a root. Eleanor, in a daze, picked it up, felt its killing weight. As she stood feeble guard, Mary, with a heavy sigh, squatted in the mud beside the body. “Oh, you poor thing,” she said. “Oh, Agnes, you were so lovely, oh, my beautiful.”
    “Turn her over then, get her face out of the peat,” said Eleanor, hammer still at the ready. Something didn’t make sense. Agnes’s hair—
    Mary pulled at the girl’s shoulders. With a suck of mud she came free. Once she was flipped Mary used her hem to wipe the dark patches from the girl’s ruined face.
    They stared down at her, at first disbelieving what they saw. Eleanor glanced into the hunter’s blind. A pile of women’s finery thrown over a stump: an ivory busk, a taffeta cape trimmed with fur, more silk than she and her fellow maudlyns could ever hope to afford, all in a style that Eleanor—who had a poor girl’s eye for new jet, could tell you who in town sold the latest dresses from Ghent and Bruges—had rarely seen in London. She looked back at the face.
    This dead girl was indeed lovely. She was not Agnes Fonteyn.

Chapter iii
    La Neyte, Westminster
    W at Tyler. Jack Straw. The city as powerless as a widow, Troy without its Hector, the commons running like barnyard animals through her streets, taking her bridges, torching her greatest houses, storming the Tower and murdering the lord chancellor and the lord treasurer. Though it had been four years since the Rising swept through London, the memories still haunted our great but tired city, pooling beneath the eaves, drifting along narrow alleys with the continuing threat of revolt.
    No one had been more affected by the events of those grim weeks than John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. After stealing everything worth taking, Tyler and his gang burned Gaunt’s Thames-side palace to the ground, and the ruins of the Savoy would sit along the Strand for years: a charred reminder