A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger Page B

stride stiffened a bit, a hint of trouble in his eyes. “Especially this Bethlem mess.”
    “Oh?” He was turned away and didn’t see my reaction.
    “The killing up there,” he went on. “Quite a foul business.”
    “So I understand.”
    “Didn’t help to have the whole thing played by those student hoodlums the other night. For days I’ve heard clusters of barristers bragging on the affair: the first moot ever busted up by the serjeants! The mayor’s courts at the Guildhall are buzzing with it, then I come out here and the murder and its mooting are the talk of Westminster.”
    There did seem to be a certain thickness in the air, several animated conversations nearby clearly occupied with more than the usual legal matter. Michael de la Pole, whom I had last seen at La Neyte, stood in the middle of one of them. The chancellor gave me a slight nod when I caught his eye. “Has the killer been apprehended?” I asked Strode.
    “No, nor the victim’s identity discovered. No name, no associates, no claimant to her body.” His voice lowered to a near-whisper. “She was last seen alive at La Neyte. Now it’s rumored she was an agent of Valois.”
    “A spy? Here in England?” I thought back to that moment with Tugg at Newgate, which was supposedly filled with French spies.
    “So it seems.”
    “Why do they think she’s French?”
    He shrugged. “Her clothing, for one. And those who heard her speak claimed her accent smacked of Provence. Avignon, perhaps.” A word with grim associations: the schism of the church, a holy empire divided against itself, and France’s ally against the true pope in Rome.
    Our circles had brought us through each arcade twice, and we now approached the opened doors to the north porch, looking out on the yard. Strode gazed across the line of tents pitched along the hedges. “War’s coming, John. You can see it in the king’s face. All this business with the Scots, the truce nearly at an end.” The royal delegation had recently left for negotiations to extend the peace, though no one expected anything to come of them. “Imagine a French fleet, an invasion force, pulling its way up the Thames.” He looked over the shapeless mound of his nose and across the space. “Ten thousand Frenchmen set on revenging their countrymen starved at Calais, or slaughtered at Crécy. What would such a host do to Westminster, to our children?” He leaned over a balustrade, elbows on the stone. “To have their spies infiltrate London itself? Unthinkable.”
    I needed more. “And the girl?”
    Strode shrugged his heavy shoulders. “At La Neyte she was flitting from room to room, admired but unremarked. She was there a whole day, pretending to be a lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Bethune, one of Gaunt’s guests. Bethune and the countess had already left for Kenilworth, you see, so no one was there to discredit her. And her story was unassailable. She stayed behind, she told everyone who asked, in order to procure a particular variety of Flemish cloth desired by the countess. At last, by asking the right questions of the right people, the girl found what she was looking for. She stole it and fled, presumably to hand it over to another spy. No one knows whether she succeeded.” He licked his lips. “Then she was killed.”
    “In the Moorfields.”
    “Yes.”
    “Who found her body?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Who examined it, attempted an identification?”
    His nostrils flared. “Tyle.” The coroner of London, Thomas Tyle, a man Strode had long despised. Lazy, incompetent, sloppy in his record keeping, Tyle was an intimate of the king’s chamberlain, and let everyone within hearing know it at every opportunity.
    “Strange,” I said into the clamor of starlings angling toward the riverbank. “A murder in the Moorfields? That’s outside the walls. Not Tyle’s jurisdiction.” Ralph knew this as well as I did, and as I studied his face I could tell the irregularity had been gnawing at