The Invention of Fire

Like pouring out the sun. For that was how his master Robert Stone always liked to describe it, this mysterious shaping of earth’s metal into God’s music. Pouring out the sun – until the sun withered and killed him.

With the cauldron locked and pinned, Stephen wiped his brow and dismissed the two apprentices. He looked over toward the door to the yard, where the sour-faced priest stood with crossed arms, watching the founders at work.

‘Two bells formed like this one, Father,’ Stephen said, removing his gloves as he walked toward the foundry’s newest customer. The parson of St Paulinus Crayford, a parish to the southeast of London, here at the beck of the churchwardens about a commission for the new belfry. ‘The first tuned at ut, the second at re. I sound them myself after the moulding, and I have the ear of Pythagoras, so you needn’t worry about a symphonious match. If our bells are not well sounding and of good accord for a year and a day, why we’ll cart them back here to the city, melt them down from waist to mouth, and cart the new ones to you out at Crayford. All at Stone’s own expense, and all inside a month.’

The parson looked sceptical. ‘And reinstall them in the belfry?’

‘Aye, and reinstall them in the belfry, hiring it out to the carpenters ourselves,’ said Stephen. He removed his apron, a heavy length of boiled leather, and hung it on its posthook. ‘I poured side-by-side for five years with the master, bless his memory, and now am chief founder and smith retained at the widow’s will and pleasure. Your wardens shall be satisfied, I promise you that.’

The parson asked a few more questions then Stephen took him up front to the display room to settle sums. An advance of two pounds on six and thirteen, with the balance due upon delivery to Crayford, where the bells would arrive before the kalends of—

‘And installation,’ said the parson, raising his chin, clearly fashioning himself a shrewd businessman.

Stephen nodded briskly. ‘And installation, Father, with clapper and carpentry entire. Clean-up as well, and Stone’s will be pleased to throw in a cask of strong ale for the company.’ The parson’s eyes twinkled at this. Stephen had seen it before, the way that last, trivial detail worked on the pastoral mind. How pleased my flock will be with their good parson, for getting them an extra day’s work and a free drink in the bargain!

The note was signed, the deal waxed, sealed with Stone’s lozenge stamp. Stephen was watching the parson leave the shop, preening over his bit of successfully transacted London business, when Hawisia Stone came in from the house passage. She stood there in her frozen widow’s way, her mouth a flat line on the hard rock of her face. She had thick, muscular hands for a woman her age, which was a year shy of thirty, or so Stephen thought, and her swollen middle mounded out obscenely beneath her bulky blacks. No confinement for Hawisia Stone, no feminine modesty for this steely widow, convention be damned.

‘Mistress Stone,’ he said, and never knew what to say next. How does the good widow fare this day, Mistress Stone? What thousand tasks do you wish me to perform in the smithy today, Mistress Stone? And what new curses have you called down upon your servant’s murderous blood, Mistress Stone?

‘The parson’s to buy, then?’ she rasped.

‘He will,’ said Stephen. He nodded at the note and coin on the board counter. ‘A solid commission.’

‘Fine.’ She went to the ledger and tucked the note into the book’s back lining. The coin went in her purse.

He stood there, acting the thrashed whelp, Hawisia the grey bitch of the place. In the months since Robert’s death he had become newly familiar with her little noises, all those telling grunts he’d once been happy to ignore. Disapproving murmurs, low growls of contempt, long-suffering sighs in place of words withheld.

‘You’ve work to do?’ she asked him without looking up from the ledger.

‘Aye.’

‘Go then.’

Stephen backed and turned, slinking through the door to the foundry yard. He kicked a bucket, scaring off a yard dog, his gut clutched with all that might have been, and all that might still be.

Only six months ago Stephen had been looking ahead to a full and verdant future. Robert Stone was on the verge of making him partner in the foundry and smithy, giving him his daughter’s hand to bind it all tight as you could like. Stephen’s master had worried often about losing him to a house of his own, where he could keep a greater share of his made coin. Why, if we lose our Stephen, he’d say to his wife, half our men’re like to go with him to start up a rival shop. We need him here, Hawisia, with all his cunning and craft. She had agreed.

For Stone’s was a sprawling operation: a foundry, a smithy, an ironmonger all in one, and though Robert Stone had been its rightful master, it was Stephen Marsh at the artful centre of this world of metal, bending, twisting, tapping, his adept hands shaping bronze and lead with the delicacy of a king’s silversmith, finding ways to swirl the hardest irons into the most intricate forms and configurations. ‘There is surely something of the devil in you, Stephen Marsh,’ Robert Stone would say, always with a smile, and Stephen would smile with him, even as he inwardly spurned such talk of demons. His skill was inborn, a thing of kind wit, the work of Lady Nature at her forge, as much a part of him as his very tongue; the devil had naught to do with it.

By his nineteenth year Stephen Marsh had won a reputation as the fellow to see for the subtlest metalwork to be had between Bishopsgate and the river. Magnates’ men would come to Stone’s to commission new armorial bearings for a bishop’s door, or to repair the hinges on an earl’s ewer, and Stephen would take up every job with a swiftness to match his skill. With the coming arrangement Stephen could keep his mind on his craft without a care for the management or upkeep of the shop, leaving these to Robert, who was more skilled at such things as recording accounts and filling supplies, or maintaining good relations with the guilds and the parish. God’s grace, the curate would say, grazing in the fields of our hearts.

Then he dies, and everything changes. Hawisia Stone inherits the foundry and cruelly weds Robert’s daughter off to a vintner’s son, while Stephen is bound with ten full years of servitude to Stone’s, and all for an errant cauldron. A large job, a rushed pour, Robert’s arm aflame like a torch as he holds it aloft and screams those terrible screams.

Now Stephen was bound to the place like a wheel to a mill, his labour and his hand the due property of Hawisia Stone.

Ten more years of service to the widow and her shop: such was the sentence of the wardmoot after the incident, the result of Robert’s exhaustion and Stephen’s impatience – though was it simply haste? Or something malign, a demon’s breath on his hand, tipping the cauldron too early, bringing a death some dark part of him desired, despite everything his master promised him?

For it often seemed that Robert Stone still haunted the foundry, as if part of his soul inhered in each cast, his deep voice moaning from the hollows of every founded bell, calling out Stephen’s blame, a worm feeding at his conscience.

‘Fill the cooling troughs, and quick,’ he ordered an apprentice. The boy scurried off, two buckets yoked over his narrow shoulders.

Stephen went to the central forge, slipped on an apron, stomped the bellows, took up a steel bar. These days he found his sole consolation in his craft, the strength and spirit of the metals. If his fortunes wheeled from high to low these things of the earth would remain ever the same, constant and receptive in their beautiful predictability. Good Sussex iron, smelted in the furnaces of the Weald. The dearer Spanish ore, purer and more responsive to hammer and heat. Cornish tin and Welsh copper, the prices argued back and forth with the crown’s stannaries. Lead from the Mendip Hills. All of it ripped and drowned and raped from the bowels of the world, and now stacked here, some of it dull, some of it bright, all of it solid and silent, ready to do the bidding of his hands. He grasped his hammer and tongs, and soon enough was lost in the burning engine of his craft.

Later, as dusk closed around the streets of Aldgate Ward, Stephen wandered up through the parish of St Katharine Cree to the Slit Pig, an undercroft ale-hole against the walls and the evening haunt of London’s best metalmen. Low-ceilinged and poorly lit, heavy with hearth-smoke and the breaths of tired men, and soon Stephen Marsh was in the loud thick of it, taking strong beer with his fellows at the central board, slapping backs, trading lies. Every man could sense the approach of the curfew bell, like a pious curate chasing whores from the stews, and all did their best to drink their fill before it sounded. The cask boys were kept busy.

The talk of the evening was guns. Several of the city’s founders and smiths were boasting of their lucrative new commissions, having recently been recruited to assist the king’s works in the manufacture of artillery. Cannon, culverins, ribalds and bombards: a mass of powder-fired heavy arms, much of it hammer-welded and smithed, some founded from bronze, all of it for the defence of the Tower and the city when the French invasion came – quite soon, if the talk was to be believed.

Stephen listened to their exchange with a mounting scorn, and an itching envy. At one point, as the talk ebbed, he said, ‘A gun is but a bell turned on its side and poorly sounded.’

Two dozen eyes now on him. ‘Why, at Stone’s we could fashion twenty, thirty cannon in the coming months,’ he went on. ‘And with a quality of craft and precision you will be hard pressed to find at the Tower.’ A boast but a true one. He was pleased to see some nods, along with a few scowls.

‘Could you now?’ said one of the scowlers. Tom Hales, the aged master of a venerable smithy well across town off Ironmongers Lane.

‘That’s right, Hales. Power, precision, speed. You’d be hard pressed to find a better gun than a Stone’s gun.’

‘All three of them,’ Hales scoffed.

‘Give me a large enough commission and I shall line the walls of London.’

‘If the good widow allows it,’ said Hales.

A few rough laughs, a low whistle. This was another of his mistress’s small cruelties. While Robert had taken several gun commissions before his death, Hawisia soon curtailed any of Stephen’s ambitions in that direction. Together Robert and Stephen had poured just five large bombards, designed to fire the heavy bolts favoured by the Tower. Though they were adequate devices, Robert’s death had prevented Stephen from making further assays into the fashioning of guns.

‘That may be,’ Stephen went on, undaunted. He was too respected in the trades to be cowed by an old hammer man. ‘Yet at Stone’s I could bronze out a bombard to shoot twice as fast and thrice as long as any in the Duke of Burgundy’s army, or the devil take my body and bread!’

More laughs, some cruel, though soon enough the talk moved on to other subjects – the new scarcity of tin, the demands of young wives – and as the men settled back into their ales Stephen’s gaze wandered over to the far end of the undercroft.

In the south corner a man stood alone, looking straight at Stephen over the mingled crowd. Not a tall man but broad of shoulder, confident in his demeanour despite his solitude within the crowded space. He wore a short courtepy of dusky green, a hat fringed in black over dark hair falling in loose ringlets around a neatly trimmed beard and a thick neck. Stephen didn’t know the fellow, the Slit Pig tending to draw only men in the trades, and he thought little of the stranger’s presence until he came down from a piss to find the man waiting for him by the tavern door.

‘Depardieux, my good brother,’ said the man with a pleasant enough smile.

‘And fair evening to you.’ Stephen looked carefully at the stranger’s face. ‘We have met?’

He shook his head, the ringlets bouncing at his neck. ‘I am unknown in this parish and your own, though I should like to make your acquaintance very much, Stephen Marsh. Have you a span to spare? Your next jar will be mine to coin.’ He jangled a purse.

They found a place away from the benches, where a high stew table stood against the wall flanked by five empty casks ready for hauling up the cellar stairs to the street above.

‘What are you called?’ Stephen asked when they had settled.

‘I am called many things,’ said the man with a faint smile. ‘Though you may call me William.’

‘And why have you come for me here?’

‘I am come for your skills, Stephen. Your metalling, a subject of great renown.’

Stephen dipped his head to acknowledge the compliment. Nothing odd about a man coming around to sniff out his art, though it didn’t ordinarily happen in a tavern. ‘Very well. And what is your business?’

‘My business.’ He took a long slow draught of his ale, narrowed his eyes. ‘My business is guns.’

Stephen frowned. ‘What of them?’

‘Just now you were speaking to your fellows over there about your bronzecraft.’ He nodded toward the board. ‘About Burgundy’s bombards.’

‘Aye,’ said Stephen. He stole a look over to the benches. One of the apprentices from Stone’s, almost old enough to be counted a guildsman and get his key, caught him looking and gave him a friendly nod before turning back to the cheer. ‘The Duke of Burgundy’s said to have the cleverest cannon this side of Jerusalem. Bombards, culverins, your ribalds and pots-de-fer.’ He sipped then shrugged. ‘I was merely jawing.’

‘And you believe you could surpass Burgundy’s guns or – how did you speak your oath – “the devil take my body and bread”?’

‘Well now, as to that—’ He grimaced. ‘I’ve never put my hands on ’em. But the Tower’s bombards are unsound, I will tell you truly, cast in haste and unworthy of war. I have seen them tested along the Thames, watched more than a few of them crack with the powder and shot. A weak alloy, a bad pour. Stone’s could do better, is all I meant to say.’

‘A bad pour,’ the man mused. ‘Something you would know all about, aye? And how is the Widow Stone faring, Marsh?’

‘Well now,’ Stephen snarled. He reared back and stood. ‘Who are you, to enter this parish and bring such knifing words with you?’

The man’s eyes had gone cold, metallic. He remained seated and still. ‘I am William Snell, chief armourer to His Royal Highness the king.’

Stephen felt the blood rush from his head. William Snell, a name whispered with equal reverence and fear among the founders and smiths of London. A fierce, demanding master, with countless arms at his beck and command, charged with the very life of London in the event of war – and Stephen had just insulted his guns.

‘A fair welcome to our humble alehouse, Master Snell,’ said Stephen weakly. He retook his seat.

Snell considered him for a while. Then he leaned forward, his voice lowering as the tavern din reached a peak. ‘Here is why I have come, Marsh.’ He pushed a chunk of wood and metal across the board then emptied his jar in one long swallow. Stephen hefted the object. It was heavy in his hand, a darkened length of iron between fixed bands, a stubbed tube sawed from a longer rod. The wooden piece resembled a barrel stave, though it was the length of a forearm rather than the height of a boy. Stephen brought the object to his nose, catching the distinctive whiff of sulphur. He stroked the wrought metal, then turned the object over in his palm.

He set it back on the stew table. ‘What is this?’

‘A chamber, stock, and firing hole, hacked from one of our small guns,’ said Snell, leaving the thing in front of Marsh. ‘It’s an ugly thing, inefficient and clumsy. I would like you to design and fashion a better one, with more reliable results. These keep misfiring, or worse, exploding on my men.’

Stephen looked down at the piece and ran his finger along the seam. ‘A better hammer weld would improve it, I’d think. Hot work, but not complicated.’

‘We need these devices to be lightweight, and made to survive a dozen rounds at the least,’ said Snell. ‘Uniform in their shape, so they can be moved down a line from hand to hand. Cast of bronze, perhaps. Strength, yes, but also flexibility.’

Stephen thought about it. ‘Why not keep this in the Tower? You have your own metallers over there: Michael Colle, Herman Newport. I’ve trained some of those fellows myself, apprenticed with them before I got my guild key.’ Along with its outside commissions, the royal armoury had long employed its own smiths and founders and farriers, lines of men whose days were given over to the forging and pounding of guns and shot, boltheads and engines of war, infantry plate and helms and horses’ shoes.

Snell lifted then dropped the awkward lump of metal and wood. It hit the scarred surface of the table with a dull thud and took a half roll. ‘This is a special job, Marsh. A particular job, you see. I am concerned about the privity of the armoury. I want to have this done outside, and discreetly, so as not to arouse suspicions.’

‘Whose suspicions?’

‘None of your concern.’

‘With respect, Master Snell, I am not a fool,’ Stephen said, leaning in. ‘You are asking me to risk my position at the foundry, my guild key, my livelihood. I would have to make these devices right beneath the widow’s nose yet behind her back.’ He thought of Hawisia, the glimmer of suspicion in her eyes whenever she looked at him. ‘Stone’s is her foundry, the whole of it. Every hammer, every awl and anvil, every ingot of tin, every barrel of wax, every mound of clay. I cannot risk my position there, nor earn more of her fury than I have these four months since the master’s death.’

‘Your devotion to the widow is admirable,’ said Snell with a mocked sincerity. ‘Yet there are higher purposes than loyalty to a craft. There is your nation to think of, and your king. We are after something new at the Tower, Marsh. Something …’ The armourer’s eyes narrowed as his tongue sought out the hard spots on his upper lip. ‘Something more efficient. A maximum of delivery with a minimum of effort. Do you see?’

Stephen frowned. ‘Larger guns, then?’

Snell’s nose twitched, and a corner of his mouth turned up. ‘It’s smaller guns we are after. Smaller, quicker to load, more portable, more …’ He squinted, as if looking across a great distance. ‘More deadly. And thus more efficient.’

‘Efficient?’

‘Efficient,’ said Snell with a tight smile. ‘It’s the common word of the season at the Tower and among the king’s familia, from top to bottom. After what happened in Edinburgh last year, who could wonder that the king’s army is looking for better ways to fight, and happier machines of war? We chased the Scots from town to town and pile to pile but they wouldn’t engage, nor was our army swift enough to split up and catch them, what with all the equipment and baggage in tow. So now here we are, looking our own invasion in the nose, and the talk is all of effectiveness of operation. Do more killing, we tell the cavalry and infantry alike, but with fewer men, fewer arrows, fewer bolts. More slaughter, we tell them, but with less treasure, less shot, less powder.’

‘And less gun,’ Stephen mused.

‘And less gun,’ said Snell, his voice lowering to a gritty whisper. ‘Now you are seeing it, as I rightly knew you would. You are a man of solutions, Marsh. If we can find the right alchemist with his tinctures or the right priest with his sacraments, why, we should be able to shrink a gun to the size of a ram’s cock. I am not concerned with the look of these weapons, you understand. They needn’t be beautiful things, like your hinges and such. Deadly efficiency is what we are after here.’

Stephen stared at the wall behind Snell, and a procession of guns marched across his inner sight, great cannon leading the small, the pots-de-fer before the bombards before the ribalds before the culverins, throwing their balls and bolts to every side. Less gun. A stirring goal; an attainable one. He knew little of gunpowder and shot aside from the pieces he’d seen wheeled to the gates and stationed beneath a few sentry towers along the walls, and his sole work on artillery was represented in the few large guns founded for the Tower before the passing of Master Stone.

Yet Stephen could already imagine ways that might be discovered to render such devices more efficient, to constrict their girths, lessen their lengths, improve their firing, and now that the notion had entered his mind he yearned to get his hands on one of them and apply his own skills to the problem, to gauge for himself the intricate balances of weight and mass, force and propulsion guiding these wondrous instruments slowly multiplying across the battlefields of the world.

Stephen sat up straighter, feeling a need to impress the armourer. ‘Efficiency and beauty are hardly natural enemies,’ he said, ‘and weight can be compensated for by other means.’

Snell raised his heavy brow. ‘Go on.’

‘A simple solution to an unknown problem. A gun is no different from a hinge. The sorts of things I found and smith and repair at Stone’s – hinges, buckles, coffers, gates, bells, to say nothing of clocks and the like – they are the fittingest prologue one could imagine to the new guns your men are smelting and forging behind those walls. And no one in London melts and bends and tinkers as I do, or the devil take my—’

‘Body and bread,’ Snell completed the thought. ‘You make quite free with such oaths, Marsh. Are they sincere? Is this your earnest will, to know the privity of the armoury?’

Stephen took a large mouthful of ale and drew a sleeve across his lips. ‘Let me at your guns, Master Snell. Let me understand the tooling and mechanics of it all. By God’s bones you won’t be sorry.’

Snell studied him, fingers playing at his beard. ‘I hope not, Marsh. For your sake, and the sake of your craftsman’s soul.’

‘Aye,’ said Stephen confidently, and Snell seemed to coil up on himself as he reached for his jar. Stephen shivered, despite the tavern’s warmth.

‘You will come to the Tower in the coming days, then,’ said the armourer. ‘Give your name at the east barbican. One of my men will fetch you down to the yard.’

‘Very well, Master Snell,’ said Stephen, working to hide his pleasure, an anticipation something like lust. It was a too easy thing, in that flush of ale and ambition, to excuse the minor swell of vanity that had held him there talking to the king’s armourer, despite the sentence that kept him so tightly bound to Stone’s. For if Stephen’s heart lingered always at the foundry and forge, his pride looked now to the Tower, and the machines of a coming war.

Snell slipped out the cellar door as the taverner rang the closing bell. Stephen stood and mingled with the crowd of men staggering out to the lane. He crossed back over Aldgate Street as the first stroke of curfew rang from St Martin-le-Grand, and as he entered his own parish along Bellyeter Lane his pace quickened with his craftsman’s pulse, all his mind on the making of guns.

FOUR

‘I should feel worse,’ Hawisia Stone said.

‘And you don’t?’ Rose Lipton, midwife of Fenchurch Street, tapped at the sides of Hawisia’s belly, then bent to put an ear to her tightened skin.

‘The babe is less after prodding my bile this time. Haven’t coughed up a caudle in weeks.’

‘Nor would you, not at this stage,’ said Rose with a sniff. ‘You’re not longer than six weeks from birth, mistress. Now it’s all sore muscles and devil’s air, isn’t it?’

‘Aye, it is,’ said Hawisia ruefully.

‘And will only worsen these last weeks.’

Rose adjusted the poultice, an evil-smelling mixture of jasmine, roots, dung and St Loy knew what else, all gathered in a sack at the top of Hawisia’s bare belly, right below her breasts. Hawisia suspected the midwife reused her herbs and roots for her concoctions though didn’t want to say anything for fear of putting the woman off. It was hard enough keeping Rose Lipton happy and working as she should be. Often as not it felt as if Hawisia were the one hired to serve Rose rather than the reverse, despite the good coin the midwife took away after each visit.