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that there are not many so powerful yet so willing to sacrifice their ambition. You would agree?”
    “The Duke of Lancaster’s modesty is universally admired, my lady.”
    She spun on me, eyes darkened. “Watch yourself, Gower. The ears of Westminster are as plentiful as scales on a herring.”
    “Yes, Countess,” I said, chastened.
    She stared at the lines of barges plying the Thames in the distance. “My son has many enemies. Enemies who openly question his legitimacy.”
    She paused with the ruffle of curtains. In the open doorway to the upper gallery stood Swynford, the gauze draped across a bare shoulder. One of her sons had wandered to the terraces, it seemed, his gaze now following a bird. Gaunt’s youngest child, a girl they had perversely named Joan, she held by the hand. Seven and counting, some Gaunt’s, others her late husband’s—the entangled promises of a future none could yet foresee.
    Swynford, after an amused glance between the countess and me, whisked her children away. The countess watched the curtains flutter in their wake.
    “Be inventive with your next work, John Gower,” she murmured as the curtains stilled. “To see my son stand before Parliament, with his slutting uncle at his side? A spectacle worthy of the mysteries.” With that she left me.
    In the distance the river was a plane of drifting pieces. Barges, wherries, a raft of sawed logs soon to be swallowed by the city below. To my weakening eyes they appeared as so many living forces, moving against one another in ways I could then only dimly understand: an enigma in motion, like Swynford’s foreign deck of cards. I stared at the water with a growing unease, thinking of a dead girl and a missing book, wondering what strange burden Chaucer had laid on my shoulders.

Chapter iv
    Cornhull, Ward of Broad Street
    P lease put it on my tally, Master Talbot.” Millicent Fonteyn nodded at the spicerer, willing him to wrap her purchases before his wife came to the shopfront. Between them sat four equal measures of prunes, almonds, currants, and dates. “Oh, and a measure of the apricots,” she said, unable to stop herself.
    George Lawler reached for the jar, shook his head as he tonged them out. He twined the lot together. “Last time, Mistress Fonteyn.”
    “You’re kind, Master Lawler. We’ll settle after Easter, if that suits. Now—”
    “Oh, that suits us fine, m’lady, just fine.” Jane Lawler pushed through the alley door. She was a spindly woman, with dark brows set close and a small nose she fingered at will. “Fine to settle after Michaelmas, fine to settle after All Saints, and, by Loy’s bones, it’ll be fine to settle after Easter. Why, it’s only coin, isn’t that right, Georgie? And if we lose it all, why, we’ll get the Worshipful Company of Grocers to provide out of the common money, aye?”
    Lawler sheepishly handed Millicent the bundle.
    “Why, that’s it, George!” his wife went on. “Let’s pack up some raisins for her ladyship. Saffron, too, cypress root, nutmeg—why, let’s crate it all for the virtuous madam and have done with our livelihood.”
    Millicent, shamefaced, turned to leave, Mistress Lawler tagging her heels. “After Easter, she says. After Easter!”
    Millicent was on the street.
    “As if the Resurrection of our Lord’ll be enough to put a single farthing in her graspy little palm.” Millicent took a sharp right out of the shop, her shoulders stooped with humiliation. “You walk ’neath this eave to pay your debt, Millicent Fonteyn, nor never walk ’neath it again, nor any grocer’s eave of Cornhull!”
    Londoners turned their heads, cruel questions in their glances. Millicent kicked through a cluster of hens by the well before St. Benet Fink, fluff and feathers scattering with her haste. She stopped on Broad Street, calming herself with her back on the rough wood of a horsepost. The damp air settled around her, drawing the moisture from her skin. By the time she pushed