Excerpt from The Invention of Fire by Bruce Holsinger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I said nothing.

"There is a medical man newly in town, a great surgeon-physician. He is an Englishman, but trained in Bologna."

"Thomas Baker."

"You know him?"

"We've recently met," I said, recalling the man's fingers digging in a corpse. "He seems bright enough."

"More than bright," said Chaucer. "He was in my company on the return from Italy last year, and I got to know him quite well. Familiar with all the new techniques, unafraid to wield the knife when it's needed. He is lodging in Cornhill for now, above the shop of a grocer named Lawler. Do you know the place?"

"I do."

"I suggest you make an appointment to see him." Then, less formally, his voice lowered, "Surely it's worth a visit, John, even if nothing comes of it. You have only two eyes. You'll never get a third no matter whom you extort."

Matthew Bagnall arrived at the door. Squat, thick necked, official, looking eager to get back to the gatehouse. Chaucer offered him drink. Bagnall declined, nor would he seat himself.

"Mustn't stay up here above my men for too long, Master Chaucer," Bagnall said, as if Chaucer's house rested on an eagle's aerie or some grand mountaintop in the Alps. He wore a cap that fitted tightly over a low forehead, covering what looked like a permanent frown.

Chaucer explained why I was there, then nodded at me to begin.

"Fair thanks, Bagnall, for the trudge up the stairs." I handed him a few pennies.

He took the coins silently, glancing at them before slipping them into a pouch at his side.

"The Guildhall is seeking information on a company recently arrived in London, and now deceased."

His eyes widened slightly.

"Violently deceased," I said.

"Killed, you mean."

"It appears so. They were a group of men, a large group. Not freemen of the city. Outsiders of some kind."

"Frenchmen or Flemings, then?" "I think not," I said, recalling the stolid, rural look of the bodies, their rough hands, the dirt caked in their nails. "These were Englishmen, or I'm a bishop."

"Not soldiers—cavalrymen, say?" I thought of those iron balls lodged in the victims' chests. The gun wounds could have been inflicted in a battle, some factional conflict on the highway. Yet the fact that the men had been killed with bullets argued against the mess and melee of actual combat. "They might have been conscripts, I suppose, but recent ones if so. These men worked with their hands. Plowmen, some of them, used to harrowing and manuring their fields."

"Dead when they got here, or killed within the walls?"

"You ask sound questions, Bagnall. I don't know."

He considered me, hand at his thick chin. "You're looking after that mess up at the Long Dropper."

I allowed my silence to answer him.

"Gongfarmers're all jawing about it, the rakers and sweepers as well," he went on, loosening up. "It's the gab of London. Fifty men, thrown in the sewers to drown and rot."

"An exaggeration," I said breezily. "Sixteen victims, all happily dead before they were tossed in the privy."

"That may be," he said, his black look making me regret my light and careless tone. "Yet treated no better than shit from a friar's arse. Denied the ground, and a Mass, and a proper burial. Whoever's done it had best keep his murdering nose free of Aldgate, or he's in for a rough time of it from the guard, that's certain."

"To be clear, Bagnall, you know nothing about these men?"

"Aldgate hasn't heard a whisper about this matter, Master Gower." He tugged at his cap. "I'll own we're a busy gate, what with all the Colchester traffic, marches out to Mile End. But a company of sixteen, riding or walking in from outside? Even the sleepiest of my men would take notice, and a pile of corpses would fare no better. Wherever those poor carls came in, they didn't come in through Aldgate, nor the Tower postern, or I would have heard about it." The postern was a small entrance along the wall north of the Tower. Not a full-fledged gate but a heavy door, though just as carefully watched.

Excerpted from The Invention of Fire by Bruce Holsinger. Copyright © 2015 by Bruce Holsinger. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.