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

No pity for me, then. Save your compassion and your prayers for the starving, the maimed, the murdered. They need them far more than I do, and in the weeks that concern me here pity was in especially short supply. It was instead malevolence that overflowed the city's casks that autumn, treachery that stalked laborer and lord alike up the alleys, along the walls, through the selds of Cheapside and the churchyards of Cornhill. And if the blind must founder in the face of monstrosity, perhaps a man clinging to his last glimpses of the visible world may prove its most discerning foe.


SITTING BEFORE ME THAT SEPTEMBER morning was my dead wife's father. A mess of a man, skin a waxy pale, his clothing as unkempt as his accounting. Ambrose Birch: a weeping miser, and a waste of fine teeth.

"For—for her sake, John." He thumbed his moistening eyes and looked up into the timbers, darkened with years of smoke from an unruly hearth. My reading room, a low, close space lit only by a narrow slip of light from a glazed window onto the priory yard.

"Her sake," I said. His daughter dead for nearly two years, and still the dull pieties. I stared through him, this cruelest of fathers, cruel in ways even I had never learned, despite all that Sarah once told me. Sarah, a soul always ready to give more than necessary. She had absolved him long before her death, and wished me to do the same.

Something I had noticed previously but never put into words was that peculiar way Birch had with his chin, rather a large one considering his smallness of face. When he said my name his chin bobbed, always twice, and his voice lowered and rasped, as if throwing out each John while a hoof pressed his throat.

"How did you get it?" Birch whispered. "I cannot—who sold it to you, John?"

His fortune and reputation hanging by this thread on my desk, and he is curious about a sale.

"That should be your last concern, Ambrose," I gently told him. "The prickly question is, who will John Gower sell it to?"

"How dare you threaten me, you milk-blood coward!" His lips quivered, the upper one raised in a weak snarl. "Here you sit in your little hole, bent over your inky creations, your twisted mind working itself in knots to spit out more of this—what?" He turned to look at the orderly rows and stacks of quires and books around the room, many of them lined with my own verse. Back at me.

"She pitied you, John."

I scoffed.

"Ah, but it's true," he said, warming to it. "She talked about it with her mother. What a burden it was getting to be, your trade in threats and little scandals. How it pushed away your friends and relations, reduced everything to the latest gossip or bribe. How sad it was to see you waste your life, your mind, your spirit." He paused, then, with meaning, "Your eyes."

I flinched, blinked against the blur.

"Just as I thought. You believe a husband's growing blindness can be hidden from a wife, a wife as perceptive as our late Sarah? And do you think for a moment, John, that your position will not weaken once news of this affliction gets out? Imagine a blind man trying to peddle secrets at the Guildhall or Westminster. They'll all be slipping you snipped nobles, laughing in your face, cheering behind your back. The mighty John Gower, lord of extraction, brought down by the most just act of God imaginable. A spy who cannot see, a writer who cannot read."

I lifted a corner of the document. "I have no difficulty reading this, Birch."

With a scowl he said, "For now, perhaps. For now. But in future you would be advised to remember that I have as much information on you as you have on me. Of course, I am a temperate man." He jerked at his coat, remembering why he was there. "Given the—the more immediate matter before us, I suppose there is room for a negotiation. But don't expect to come back to me with additional demands, John. A man can last only so long doing what you do."

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.