Katherine (59 page)

They began to batter at the door, but they had scant room to exert leverage in the passage and the door held firm. The weaver beckoned again and they ran into the Duchess' bower and heaved against the small door with the massive headboard of the bed.

Inside the Avalon Chamber, the friar prayed on, through the pounding and the shouts outside the doors, but Katherine rose from her knees, pulling herself up by the bed curtains. She saw the little door begin to give and that the table that was shoved against it, quivered.

She walked to Blanchette and put her arm around the huddled shoulders. "Don't be afraid, darling," she whispered. Blanchette started and recoiled. She twisted out from under her mother's arm and sprang back, in her eyes there was a look that caused Katherine to cry out in anguish.

The table rocked and slid. The small door burst open and a huge red-bearded Kentish peasant stepped in first, brandishing a sickle, which he lowered in confusion when he saw the two women and a praying friar. "Cock's bones," he muttered, but the other men shoved past him, Jack and the outlaw and twenty more.

The friar heaved himself to his feet, and grabbing the pike he had taken from the weaver, he backed tottering against the fireplace.

"Kill! Kill!" Jack screamed in a voice they all understood. He rushed forward with his sword. The friar parried the thrust feebly with the pike, which dropped from his hand. Jack raised his sword again, and the friar stood motionless. He looked past the weaver.

"God in his mercy help you Katherine!" he cried.

The sword swished like the spitting of a cat, came down with a dull thud. Blood and brains spurted high, then spattered on the marble and on Blanchette's skirt. The friar gasped once, fell down upon the tiles, and was still.

Again Jack lifted his sword; this Lancastrian friar's head would be carried on a pike to London Bridge with those of the other traitors. The men had held back watching silently, but now the outlaw ran forward and held Jack's arm. "Not in here," he said, "not afore
them"
He jerked his chin towards Katherine and Blanchette, who stood transfixed against the wall on either side of the fireplace.

Jack furiously shrugged off the restraining hand, but the huge red-bearded peasant seized the friar's feet, the outlaw shot back the bolts on the big door, and they dragged Brother William's body out into the passage.

Katherine did not look at what they dragged, she gazed at the flaxen-polled little outlaw. 'Tis Cob o' Fenton, she thought, my runaway serf. Soon he'll kill us too if Jack Maudelyn does not first. It seemed to her strange that Cob should be there, when she had last seen him in the village stocks at Kettlethorpe. It seemed to her almost ludicrous - cause for gigantic laughter. She felt the laughter swelling, choking in her chest. It rose into her mouth and she leaned over and vomited.

The men cast sideways glances at the two women but did not molest them. They set to work, running around the room, flinging open the hutches and cupboards, following the system which they had used in all the other buildings. They found the saints' figurines, and the lute and the gittern and game boards, and cast them into the river. They found the two hanaps,

Blanchette's and Joli-coeur. They shattered them with axes. Joli-coeur's crystal splinters gleamed like diamonds in the pool of jellied blood on the hearth, its garnet heart rolled loose into a comer.

Some chopped up the sandalwood chairs, some the gilded table. The ivory prie-dieu gave them more trouble, but they wrenched it apart and piled it in the centre of the floor with the rugs and the ruby velvet bed hangings and the wooden portions of the bed. They pulled down the Avalon tapestry and hacked it into strips for easier burning.

Soon the bearded Kentish peasant came back into the room with Cob, leaving Jack in the passage to finish with Brother William's body, The man from Kent seized the pike the friar had tried to use and amused himself with shattering each of the tinted windowpanes, one after the other, proudly counting as he did so, "Oon, twa, tree, four - -" He had learned no higher than ten, so he started over again.

He had still two panes left when they heard the shouts of their leader from the passage and Wat Tyler strode into the chamber crying "Come, lads, come. Get on wi' it. What's keeping ye so long?" The acrid smell of smoke came with him, charred grey flakes had floated from the fires and settled on his sweat-stained jerkin.

Jack Maudelyn slithered in behind the tiler, mumbling something through his broken jaw. He pointed to Katherine.

"Women?" said the tiler scowling. "What do they here? Who are they?" Not servants by their clothes, he thought, nor noble ladies neither.

Jack's uncouth noises rose to frenzy as he tried to tell who they were. "Kill - -" he gobbled again and he raised his sword.

"Nay, weaver - by the rood - ye've gone daft!" Wat gave him a great shove that sent him spinning. "I carina get a word this broke-jaw says."

"Who are ye then?" He turned impatiently to Katherine. The fires were catching fast in the buildings behind them, they must finish this business up, then on to Westminster, and after, hurry back to their camp by the Tower, where surely there would be word from the King.

Katherine could not answer. Her tongue was swollen thick in her mouth. The tiler's form blocked out the sunlight as the friar's had an hour ago. She stared down at the pile of broken furniture on the floor, the strips of the Avalon tapestry, the bed hangings, no redder than the blood pools on the tiles.

Cob will tell him who we are, she thought. And that will be the end. But the little flaxen-headed outlaw did not speak. He cast a slanting look at Katherine, and busied himself with chopping off the carved emblems on the mantel.

"You then!" The tiler rounded on Blanchette, and drew back startled. Almost he made the sign of the cross, the crop-haired girl had so strange a look.

She had lifted a fold of her skirt and dabbled with her fingers in the stains made by the friar's blood, and she was smiling. Smiling as one who knows a sly secret that will confuse the hearer.

"Who are ye, child?" shouted Wat, but more gently.

Blanchette raised her head and gazed behind the tiler towards the shattered window, where drifts of smoke and flying sparks blew past.

"Who am I?" she said in a high, sweet, questioning tone. "Nay, that, good sir, I must not tell you."

Her eyes moved unseeing over the faces of the other men, who had turned to watch. "But I can tell you who I'll
be"
She nodded three times slowly, and she laughed low in her throat.

Wat swallowed. The men behind did not stir, their mouths dropped open and a shivering unease held them.

"Why, I shall be a whore - good sir," cried Blanchette in a loud voice, "like my mother. A
murdering
whore - mayhap too - like my mother!"

She gathered up her skirts in either hand as though she would make them all a curtsy. The men gaped at her. Like quicksilver she whirled and ran out of the chamber. She stumbled on the friar's dismembered headless body in the passage, then sped on swift as light to the Great Stairs.

"Stop her!" screamed Katherine, dashing forward with her arms outstretched. "Blanchette!"

Jack Maudelyn snatched out his hand and grabbed Katherine by the flying end of her coif. He jerked her back so violently that she fell. Her head hit the tiles. A thousand lights exploded behind her eyes; then there was darkness.

The tiler stared down at the woman who lay crumpled, barely breathing, on the tiles. He stared at the door through which the girl had fled. He looked at the weaver's wry-jawed face. And he shrugged.

"By the rood, I vow they've all gone mad here in this accursed place," he said. "Well - come, lads. Get on wi' it. Where's a torch? Someone carry the woman out. Who'er she be, I'll not leave her here to be roasted."

Across the Strand from the Savoy's gatehouse, there lay an open field that was part of the convent garden belonging to Westminster Abbey. Two of Wat Tyler's men carried Katherine there and dumped her on a grassy bank near a little brook, before dashing off to join their fellows who were streaming out of the burning Savoy, some heading for Westminster, where they would break open the Abbey prison, and many back towards the City.

Cob o' Fenton had followed the men who bore Katherine out of the Savoy and watched from afar as they laid her down. After they ran off, he stood irresolute by the roadside, tugging on his lank tow-coloured forelock. He glanced to his left where Katherine's skirt showed as a splotch of darker green against the grass; his eyes shifted to the disappearing bands of rebels.

The Lady of Kettlethorpe was mayhap dying there in the field. Well, let her then! Cob thought with sudden vigour.

What if it was her negligent order that had freed him from the stocks and given him back his croft? What good was that when her steward still exacted the heriot fine overdue from Cob's father's death? - the one ox he owned, and was fond of; company for him that ox had been, since his wife had died in childbed. Then there were the other fines - no end to them: no merchet, leyrewite; tithes to the church, "love-work" - and now the poll tax.

"Phuah!" said Cob and spat. He fingered the branded F on his cheek - fugitive, runaway serf, outlaw. Ay, and if he could escape recapture by his own manor lord for a year, he would be legally free. But she could still catch him. Cob glanced again towards Katherine. She could have him dragged back to the manor, and the punishment this time would be far worse than stocks and branding. Cob's watery, white-lashed eyes stared down at the Strand paving-stones, he gnawed at an itching fleabite on his finger, when suddenly he jumped and gasped, jerking his head up to look at the Savoy.

An explosion had thundered off behind the walls. A sheet of flame shot up as high as the spire on the Monmouth Tower, where the Duke's pennant still fluttered. The Outer Ward was not yet all afire.

Cob ran back off the road and clapped his hands to his ears, while another explosion rocked the Savoy, and another. A zigzag crack shot down the Monmouth Tower like black lightning. The tower wavered, seeming to dance and sway like a sapling in the wind, it buckled in the middle, and fell with the rumble of an earthquake, in great white clouds of dust and flying stone. Half of the Savoy Strand wall caved in beneath the fallen tower, and the gap filled in at once with raging fire.

Cob ran farther back into the field and, stumbling, fell to his knees. Above the roar and crackle of the fire he heard muffled shrieks, demon-like wails for help, different from the screaming whinnies of the terrified horses in the stables.

It was some thirty of the Essex men who shrieked. They had escaped Wat's eye and returned to the cellars and the wine casks, having found a tunnel to the Outer Ward and being sure that they had time to reach it before the fires got too hot. But Wat's men had flung into the Great Hall the three barrels of gunpowder, and the falling of the tower had trapped the rioters in the cellars beneath. It would take long before the fire ate downward to them through the stone roofing of the cellars, but there was now no way out.

"God's passion," whispered Cob, crossing himself as a deluge of flying sparks fell on him. He scrambled up and took to his heels across the field. He had quite forgotten Katherine, but she lay across his path.

He stopped, and seeing that sparks had fallen on her wool gown and were charring round smoking holes, he reached down and brushed them off. She lay on her back, her face like the marble effigies he had seen in Lincoln Cathedral. But she breathed. He saw her breasts move up and down.

And Cob, pinching out a spark that still smouldered, saw at her girdle the purse with her blazon. Through Cob's uncertain heart there struck a strange feeling. He stared down at the Swynford arms - three yellow boars' heads on the black chevron. These arms meant home. They were fastened on the manor gate, they swung on the alehouse sign. They meant the fealty that his father had loyally given to Sir Hugh Swynford, and to Sir Thomas before that. They meant the warm smell of earth and ox in his little hut, they meant the mists off the Trent, the candles in the church on holy days. They meant the companionable grumbles of his fellow villeins in the alehouse on the green, and they meant the old stone manor where he himself had done homage to Swynfords - homage to this very woman who lay flat and helpless on the grass.

"Lady!" Cob cried, slapping at her cheeks and shaking Katherine. "Lady, for the love o' God, awake!"

Still she lay limp, and her head fell back when he released her. She was tall, and he undersized and puny. He could not carry her. He took her by the feet and dragged her towards the brook, then, cupping his hands, dashed her face with water, crying, "Lady, wake, wake!" pleading with her. "Lady, I must leave ye here an ye not wake soon. For sure ye must know that? Ye'd hardly think I'd cause to burn up wi' ye, now would ye? Tis far from Kettlethorpe we are, lady, and I've all but won my freedom. Ye must know that don't ye?"

She did not move. Cob in desperation pulled at her until she rolled into the little brook. He held her head just above the water, and nearly sobbed with relief as she opened her eyes and shuddered. "'Tis cold," she whispered. "What's so cold?" She moved her hands in the flowing water, lifted them and stared at their wetness.

"Get up, lady! Up! We must hasten or I vow 'tis not
cold
ye'll be." He hoisted her by the armpits and Katherine slowly rose, dripping, from the brook and stood on the bank, swaying, while Cob held her. She looked down at his matted flaxen hair and the F brand on his cheek, but she did not quite remember him - someone from Kettlethorpe. She turned and stared at the immense roaring furnace across the Strand. A puzzling sight.

"Come! Can't ye walk?" cried Cob impatiently, propelling her along the field. She moved her feet forward, leaning on him heavily. Cob saw that her wet robe clung to her legs and impeded her. He drew his knife from its sheath and cut her skirt off just below the knee. She watched him in vague surprise, then, bothered by her wet hair that flowed loose, she wrung the water out of it and started to braid it.

"No time for that!" cried Cob. "Hurry!"

The flames now licked through the gatehouse; the lower prongs of the raised portcullis began to smoulder. The wind blew towards them and bore charring embers with the smoke.

"Where are we going?" Katherine said, while obediently she tried to hurry. The sick giddiness behind her eyes was passing, though her head ached.

"Into town," said Cob, though he didn't know what he was going to do with her. As soon as he had got her beyond the reach of the fire, he could dump her on some convent, of course, but he knew little about London.

"Oh," said Katherine. "I've good friends in town. The Pessoners in Billingsgate. Master Guy came yesterday to tell me about the rebels. Are we going to the Pessoners?"

"Might as well," said Cob, relieved.

He dragged her along until they came to St. Clement Danes. The Temple was burning on the Strand ahead of them. He had forgotten that. "Have to go up there, I think." He pointed up the hill towards Holborn, and turned up the footpath through Fickett's field. "Road's blocked here."

"More fire?" she said, looking at the smoking Temple. "How strange!" The sunny green fields, the fires, the little church were all to her like scenes woven upon a tapestry.

Cob slackened pace, rubbed his sweating face on his sleeve and looked up at her curiously. "Ye don't remember nothing o' this morning, do ye?"

"Why yes," she said courteously. "When I got up and looked out of the window, there were fires on the Surrey bank. I was quite frightened. That was at dawn." She stopped and, frowning, glanced back at the sun. Through the smoke haze it shone high above and a little towards the west. But it's afternoon now, she thought in confusion. What happened to the morning? She tried to pierce through the blankness, and gave it up. "Is the peasant army still at Blackheath waiting for the King?" she said.

Cob shrugged and did not answer. A head blow often wiped out memory of all that had gone before it - for a time. And just as well, poor lady. He wondered what had happened to the Damoiselle Blanchette. A fearful thing the little wench had cried out about her mother, but then the lass had gone mad from horror when the Grey Friar's blood spattered on her and knew not what she said. There had been no sign of her when they carried Lady Swynford out, though Cob had looked. It seemed likely that in her madness the girl had been trapped somewhere back in the Savoy, like those whose screams he had heard. God rest her soul, he thought - she had been a fair sweet little maid once, some ten years ago, at Kettlethorpe.

He and Katherine plodded north through the field and reached Holborn street, where a hundred of the rebels came marching four abreast and singing "Jack Milner."

A fellow outlaw whom Cob had known in the Essex camp spied him and called out, "By God's belly - ye little Lincoln cock! What be ye doing wi' a woman? 'Tis no time for sport!"

"Nay - true," Cob shouted back, grinning. " 'Tis a poor affrighted country serving-wench has got lost, I but take her to the City; Then I'll join ye. Where are ye bound?"

Several of the rebels answered him at once. They were off to burn all Robert Hales' property, his priory at Clerkenwell, his manor at Highbury. Though the base treasurer himself still lurked in the Tower, protected by the King.

The rebels veered off to the left on the lane for Clerkenwell, and Katherine started walking again when Cob did. They entered the City at Newgate, which was open and unguarded. They walked down the shambles past the slaughterhouse with their stench of offal, and on West Chepe came to the edge of a tremendous crowd who were watching what took place on a block in the centre of the crossways.

Some forty Flemings had been rounded up along with two richer prizes, the detested merchant Richard Lyons, who had escaped the justice of the Good Parliament, and a sneaking informer that the mob had dragged from sanctuary in St. Martin's. They were all tied arm to arm in a line that had reached way down the Chepe, but was now diminished as one after the other was dragged forward and flung to his knees beside the block. A man stood there with an axe, and he worked fast. Already a dozen heads had rolled into the central gutter, which ran crimson. Vultures and kites perched high above on the house gables, watching as intently as the crowd did.

Cob shrank. "We must get out o' here," he whispered, grabbing Katherine's arm. He shoved her down an alley until they reached Watling Street, which was near deserted. Peaceable citizens were all at home behind barred doors.

"Lady," cried Cob, "where is this Billingsgate to which ye'd go?"

Katherine stopped and stared about her. Those crosskeys on a tavern sign, that bakeshop on the corner of Bread Street, the small squeezed-in Church of All Hallows, all were familiar to her. She had passed through here before, running with someone, running from something, from a great roaring mob. Riots in St. Paul's - the Duke in danger. Danger. That day long past slid into now. The two states intermingled, shifting.

"Where's Billingsgate?" repeated Cob, and now his urgency touched her with fear.

"There!" she cried, pointing towards the river. "There's rioting again. That crowd on the Chepe. Warn the Duke! We must warn him - run to the Pessoners', Dame Emma'll help!" She seized Cob's hand as once she had seized Robin's, and began to run - around the corner and down Bread Street, beneath the dark overhanging gables.

As they passed through the Vintry they saw three hacked and still-bleeding corpses on the steps of St. Martin's. "Sweet Jesus," Katherine gasped, "why does the whole world smell of blood and fire? Why?"

Cob said nothing. He hurried her on. They were not molested again. In Billingsgate she saw near St. Magnus' church the half-timbered house and the gilded fish that flapped from a pole over the shop. " 'Tis here," she said with a deep sigh of relief and pulled the door-knocker. There was no answer.

Katherine leaned against the oaken door-jamb, and pressed her hand to her head. Cob reached up and banged the knocker again.

The wooden peephole opened and a wrinkle-lidded frightened eye looked out. "What is't?" quavered an old man's creaking voice. "There's no one here. Go 'way."

"Dame Emma!" cried Katherine. "Where's Dame Emma? Tell her Lady Swynford's here, and I've need of her."

"The mistress's not here - no more the master," said the voice. "Be off wi' ye!" The shutter began to slide across the peephole.

"Stop!" Cob rammed his knife between the shutter and its frame. "Nay, don't squeal like that in there, I'll not harm ye. But ye must open the door and let us in!"

"I'll not, nor can ye force me to - the door's iron-barred," the old voice rose high and shrill.

Cob cursed roundly while he thought. His lady looked near to fainting, but that was by no means his chief concern. In this prosperous house there would be far better fare than at the rebel camp they had all been told to rejoin in its new position near the Tower. No doubt tomorrow his lust for revenge and rioting would revive, but for now, he'd had his bellyful of wandering the bloody streets.

Then an idea struck him. "Wait, old gaffer!" he cried as he heard shuffling footsteps retreating. "Wait!" He grabbed Katherine's purse, yanking it from her girdle, and opening it breathed "Holy saints!" as he saw jewels and gold. He fished out a gold noble and waved it through the peephole, snatching it back as a hand reached for it.

" 'Tis yours an ye let us in!" Cob shouted. "I'll get it again for ye later," he whispered to Katherine.

"No," she said faintly, "it doesn't matter."

The door opened. Cob shoved it wider, and palling Katherine with him walked in. Cob shut and barred the door. "Here ye are then," he said roughly, dropping the noble in the old man's shaking outstretched bind.'

The old man was called Elias, and usually he worked around the fishhouse as night-watch. He had been left here alone this afternoon to guard the house, for Master Guy had gone to an emergency meeting in Fishmongers' Hall called by Walworth the mayor, who was also a fishmonger and who had hurried from the King in the Tower to confer with his fellows on the rebel crisis which was getting more serious each moment.