Katherine (58 page)

The other servants stayed in their hall, crouching, waiting, some laughing hysterically as they heard the battle rage outside. Like the gate-ward and his helpers who had raised the portcullis, they gibbered with triumphant excitement and chanted, "Jack Milner is grinding small, small, small - John Ball hath now y-rung the bell!"

The Grey Friar and his two charges stood flattened, petrified, across the sunlit court against the plaster wall of the falcon mew. The mob did not notice them. Leaping and shouting, it pounded past the chapel towards the Inner Ward, and above their head the tall friar saw a fountain-spurt of blood spray the buttress of the gatehouse. He saw the sword knocked from the sergeant's hand and another flash of steel as Leach's helmet, was sent spinning from his head. He saw the sergeant's body spitted high in the air on a spear, and twirling before it fell to the paving-stones, where it was trampled by the insurging rabble.

Three of the men-at-arms fought on against some of the London prentices, but the mob - now near a thousand strong - streamed past them indifferently to plunge into the Great Hall, into the chancery, to batter on the Treasure Chamber.

"Christus!"
cried the friar, grabbing the two women's arms. "Back! We must get back upstairs!" No hope now of escape by barge. The water gates were closed and there was none to help. He thrust the women behind him towards the little hidden door, and as they stumbled panting into the arch, a sandy shock-haired man in leather helm and breastplate veered away from the main stream of the mob.

It was Jack Maudelyn who had special knowledge of the Savoy and greater personal hate than any of the rebels. His sharp questing eyes had seen the friar and recognised him. Jack charged down the courtyard, flourishing his pike. "Ho!" he shouted, his yellow teeth bared in a wolf grin, his freckled face twisted like a devil mask. "Oh, 'tis the puling friar what sucks gold from the paps o' Lancaster and licks the arses o' the rich! But I'll mend your ways for ye!" He raised his pike.

The unarmed friar stood rigid, barring the archway, where behind him Katherine gasped, fumbling frantically at the door-latch.

"What's that!" cried Jack, catching the shadow of movement behind Brother William. The weaver shoved the friar violently aside and, peering into the archway, cried, "By God, 'tis John o' Gaunt's whore! Here men - -" he yelled, whirling back into the courtyard. "Here's merry sport. Here, here to me!" His cry ended in a grunt.

The friar's great bony fist had shot out and landed full centre of the weaver's face. Jack staggered and lunged forward with his pike. The lance-shaped point slashed down across the friar's chest, it tore through his habit and pierced deep beside the breastbone. The friar's fist hammered out again and caught the weaver on the left corner of his jaw. Jack reeled, spitting out a tooth, and fell down. Bunching his habit with one hand against the welling blood from his torn chest, the friar picked up Jack's pike.

Still the Londoners and Essex men rampaged through the gate following the others. None had heard Jack's cry. The friar turned and ran into the archway, where Katherine had got the door opened at last. They shut and locked it behind them, and stumbled up the privy stairs back to the Avalon Chamber. It was Katherine who from instinct led them back there where she felt safest. The friar and Blanchette followed.

Brother William helped Katherine shoot the great iron bars through the hasps on the oaken door that led to the Presence Chamber. They locked the small door to the Duchess's bower where Blanchette had slept, and pushed the massive table up against it.

"Now we're secure. They can't get in here," whispered Katherine foolishly. She knew not what she said, nor understood quite what had happened. From the shadow of the arch she had seen what a multitude had thundered through the wards.

Blanchette sank down into a chair, dazed and shivering. Katherine poured ale from the silver flagon and gave her some, then turning to the friar she started and cried, "Jesu, Brother - you're hurt!"

The friar swallowed. He stood hunched and doubled over, holding his hands to his breast, while scarlet oozed down the grey habit. "Ay," he said in a far-off voice, "ay."

She ran to him and pulled him to the bed. He lay down without resistance. "Staunch it," he said. "A clean cloth." There were towels in the garde-robe but that was barred from her now. She pulled a corner of the sheet from under the friar and wadded it into the gaping wound, pressing it down as he told her.

" 'Twill serve a while," he said. His cavernous eyes opened wide. He looked up at her as she bent over him. He saw the lovely, pitying, frightened face of his dream.

A moment he gazed upward before he turned his head and shut his eyes. "Disaster," he whispered. "The ill-starred day has come that I saw long ago. I shall die," he said with dull certainty. "No matter."

Beneath the torn cassock and the bloody wad of sheet, his emaciated chest heaved painfully; he struggled to his elbow and looked at her again. "But first you shall hear the truth at last!"

"Brother - good Brother - I beg you to lie quiet," said Katherine, pushing him gently down on to the bed. "You won't die. For sure 'tis not so deep a wound as that."

He lay quiet again beneath her soft hand, his lips moved in the
Miserere,
though he scarcely knew it.

Katherine started up crying. "Blessed Jesu!" For suddenly the tumult outside grew louder, though yet distant. There were shouts and shrieks and a muffled sinister thumping. "Oh, that my dear lord were here!" she cried. "My dearest love - to protect us-" She clenched her hands staring into the Avalon tapestry, as though it might channel the force of her desperation and summon him.

The friar made a sharp motion with his arm. Strength flowed into him. He shoved her aside and rose from the bed. He clutched at his crucifix and cried to Katherine fiercely, "So now, graceless woman, you call out for your paramour! Fool, fool - don't you yet see that it is because of your sin - and his - that this disaster comes?"

"Nay, Brother," she murmured wearily. Surely in this time of danger she might be spared castigations.

"Do you know what they write of you in the abbeys?" he cried. "That you have bewitched the Duke to sodden lechery with your enchantments! And 'tis for this he suffers the hate of all men."

"That is false!" She coloured hot, and anger choked her. She forgot, as he had, the shoutings of the mob. She forgot Blanchette, who stiffened in her chair. "How dare you speak to me like that! I've never done him harm. I love him."

The
friar drew a rasping breath while red froth bubbled in the corners of his mouth, yet he went on inflexibly, as though she had not spoken.

"Ay - they write of your lechery, these Benedictine monks. They little know that they might also write of
murder!"

A convulsive shiver shook his lean body. He raised the crucifix and stared down into the woman's white uncomprehending face.

"Katherine Swynford, your husband was murdered. Ay - and in God's sight, you and the Duke murdered Hugh Swynford in Bordeaux as truly as though you had yourselves procured the poison that killed him."

"You're mad," she whispered, gazing at him in horror. "Brother William, your wound has made you mad."

From behind them in the chair there came a stifled sound. They did not hear it.

"Nay, not mad but dying," the friar said solemnly. "May God forgive me that I break the vow of the confessional - but I'll not die with the vile secret on my soul, nor shall you lack chance for repentance."

Katherine drew back from him, slowly, until her shoulders pressed against the gilded bedpost. "I don't understand," she whispered. "Hugh died of dysentery. You were there."

"Ay - fool that I was. T'was Nirac de Bayonne who put the poison in Sir Hugh's cup, this he confessed to me on his deathbed, but 'twas you gave your husband the draught to drink."

"The cup- -" she said. Her mind swam in a heavy blackness. She looked down at her hand and saw in it the shape of the little clay cup of medicine that she had held to Hugh's mouth. She dragged her eyes up to the friar. "But I didn't know! Before God, I didn't know!"

"You didn't know! Nor did the Duke, who cast his poor tool aside when it had blindly committed the foulest of all crimes for him. But can you take this crucifix and kiss it, while swearing that you did not long for your husband's death? Nor rejoicing in your secret heart when it had happened?
Can you'"

She did not move.

The friar's body blotted out a burst of sunlight through the window behind. He held the crucifix towards her with a shaking hand. Dark and terrible as a wall painting of God's judgment wrath he stood over her, then another shudder seized him. The crucifix rattled down the length of its beads beside the knotted scourge.

He slumped forward and stumbled to the ivory prie-dieu. He knelt on the white satin cushion which crimsoned with a spreading stain. He clasped his hands together, and raising his face to the golden images of Christ and St. John the Baptist in the niche above, he began to chant,
"Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordiam tuam - -"

Katherine sank slowly to her knees beside the bedpost. Her wide straining eyes fixed themselves on the round white disc of the friar's tonsure; her lips moved in mindless echo of his prayers.

Blanchette was huddled in the chair, her face sunk on her breast. She did not stir, she made no sound, but deep in her brain a voice cried on two notes senselessly like the cuckoo. It said, "Murder - murder - murder," and sometimes it changed its cry and said, "She gave poison to your father - father - father."

Below in the Outer Ward the Kentish rebels had arrived with Wat the tiler at their head, though the exhausted priest John Ball remained behind in a friendly alderman's house to regain his forces. Wat saw by the raised portcullis and the swarming figures near the chancery building and the Great Hall that his men had been forestalled. '

But he cared little for that, the more there were to help, the quicker would be the act of vengeance and destruction. He knew by now that the Duke had escaped them, but they would wreak what vengeance they could on his possessions, as they had on those of other traitors.

Already on the way here they had torn open the Fleet prison. And they had fired the Temple, burning the legal roles and records on which the cursed ink strokes gave leave to strangle all the rights of common man. A detachment of Wat's force remained there now to watch the razing of the Inns of Court, to see that no vestige remained of that Temple of Iniquity.

Here at the Savoy, Wat saw that his predecessors had achieved but little yet. The Essex peasants had broken into the famous cellars and broached the vintage tons and vats. They gulped and sloshed the wine, wandering stupidly and singing, bemused by the feel of this rich liquid in their gullets that had never known anything but small ale.

Wat took command at once. Some of the Londoners still pounded at the iron-bound Treasure Chamber door. Wat and his men added their strength to the timber battering-ram, until the hinges burst, and they were free of Lancaster's treasure. They dragged out coffers full of gold and silver and piled them unopened in the Great Hall. They took the coronets, the jewelled chains, the diamond-crusted scabbards and broke them up in the courtyard, then ground the jewels to powder beneath great paving-stones.

"We be not thieves!" roared Wat, as he spied a lad who stuffed a silver goblet in his jerkin. He killed the lad with a thrust of his sword and threw the goblet on the mangled pile that grew in the centre of the Great Hall. Some of them, as the frenzy grew, ran into the gardens trampling on the flowers, uprooting the rose bushes. The place was accursed, no part of it should remain.

When Wat seized a torch and set fire to the Hall, they roared with joy. It burned but slowly at first, and they threw in the records of the chancery and pieces of furniture that they brought from more distant rooms. They scattered to the outer buildings. Someone fired the Monmouth Wing, another threw his flaming torch into the Beaufort Tower.

They turned to the Duke's privy suite. They had left it to the last for it was nearer to the Outer Ward and gate where they must leave in safety themselves. The fires smouldered behind them, licking at the massive timbers of the floors and vaultings, daunted for a while by thickness of stone wall and coldness of tile.

Wat stayed by the Great Hall to see to the burning of its massed treasure.

It was a slobbering whey-faced Londoner who led a band up the great State Staircase. A weaver by the badge of trade on his arm, his nose was smashed, his jaw had been knocked awry and stuck out comically beneath his left ear, so that they could understand little of his furious gabbling; but they followed him gladly for he seemed to know the way.

A short and meagre little man in tattered leather jerkin went in this band too, his flaxen poll was matted thick with sweat and dirt. A branded F was on his cheek, half-hidden by grime. He was one of the outlaws who had crept down from the north and joined the Essex men.

They swarmed up to the Presence Chamber, hacked at the furnishings, flung silver sconces and candlesticks out of the window. They found the Duke's garde-robe where some of his surcotes hung from the perches. Jack Maudelyn grabbed one down, a cloth-of-gold cote, emblazoned with the Duke's arms. They stuffed it out with folded cloths, they set it on the Duke's throne in the Presence Chamber, and put a silver basin, on its head for a crown. They fired arrows at it, they spat on it. They shouted that here was a fine king called John. The weaver danced and jibbered round the effigy, and the little outlaw from the north emitted a burst of shrill excited laughter.

Tiring of that, they slashed the surcote into shreds and stuffed the tatters down the open hole of the latrine, where they fell into the Thames below.

And still Jack urged them on with gestures. They swarmed down a passage past a shut door to a suite of empty rooms where they destroyed the furnishings, but the weaver was not satisfied, he pointed back and made them see that they must get inside the shut door they had passed.