The Exiled (46 page)

And she knew he’d have God’s trouble getting off that horse and that pleased her mightily.

‘Mistress, mistress, can you hear me? You must come back. Come back to us.’

But it took a long time for Anne to hear Master Cohen and return from the world of pain. And when, finally, this other world, that of the present, began to make sense once more, it came with terrible loss.

Benjamin Cohen was very frightened. This odd young woman was a messenger, he was sure of it, a messenger of disaster to his house. Why else had she had the strange fit when he spoke of the Jews of York? She had screamed and screamed. Sobbing, crying, she’d spoke of burning, of people dying, dying in the cellar! For his people, the passed-down knowledge of long centuries ago was pitiful, too terrible to speak of. The sadness compounded also of disgust and rage: so many had died in York, and one of the worst of the pogroms had caught his people, innocent families, as they sought shelter in the cellar of a Christian church. And this girl had known; she’d seen it. It was an omen, a most terrible omen. Perhaps the pogroms would start again?

Hephzibah was as terrified as he was and so was his wife, Rachael. But his wife was a sensible woman, she was wiping the stranger’s face with dampened linen, wiping the tears.

‘Yes, Master Cohen, I can hear you.’ Anne’s voice was a reedy whisper as she left the horror slowly, obedient to the urgency of his words.

‘You see, I have weighed and assayed both the stones.’ Better not to say the words he so wanted to say, better not to ask her how she knew. ‘As you said, each is very fine. I will buy the diamond for five angels. It is the most I can afford.’

Five angels, that was enough — more than enough. It would buy her passage, and clothes, and take her back to Brugge. Anne felt energy return as the thought warmed her being. She would go home! She would begin again, she would find them, the people she loved. She didn’t care about anything else, the money, the possessions: they alone would be enough.

Waving to his wife and daughter to leave them, the Jew went to a curtained cupboard at the back of his work room and extracted an iron-bound box. Carefully he unlocked the three locks with three different keys and pulled out a tray of coins, bright gold.

‘See now, five angels, we agreed.’

He was counting the coins out into her palm with shaking fingers when she stopped him. ‘I will need change, Master Cohen. Please give me the worth of two angels in pennies, farthings and groats, I think. And a bag, or a belt. A money belt?’

She spoke hurriedly for urgency was driving them both now. They were both fearful of something close, something coming.

Liam had a warm feeling in his gut as he headed towards Silver Lane. He’d persuaded the baron — happily ensconced in the tap-room of ‘The White Boar’ eating fish pie and drinking tolerable new ale, brewed by Mary herself — to let him seek out more information about the girl. His local knowledge and contacts might serve to shorten the time they would have to spend in Whitby. Or that was how he sold it, anyway.

He had no conscience of course, about slipping off to see his old ma first. She was local and her sources of good gossip had always been impeccable, hadn’t they? Then he heard the noise before he saw the source. Men yelling and a woman shouting.

‘Away! Leave me!’

He rounded the corner into the familiar old street, Silver Lane, at something of a run because he had an instinct, and saw them!

Henry Hardwell was pulling a dark-haired girl onto his horse, and she was resisting: scratching, biting, screaming! Around Henry milled his men, swords drawn, bellowing, filling the dark little street with booming sound. Fear and chaos!

His old ma was standing in her doorway, transfixed, because on her doorstep, just beside the dancing hooves of the horses, lay the body of an old man, grey hair stuck to his face with blood.

‘Stop!’ but it was too late, too late.

Henry Hardwell was charging back down the street towards Liam with his sword held high as the son ran towards his mother. A well-timed slashing blow from the berserk knight caught Liam in passing, and gashed his chest deeply so that bright blood sprang out, splashing to the cobbles, the black, pounded earth.

Before the world went black, all Liam heard was shouting and screaming, and the endless, anguished cries of women; and he was puzzled, very puzzled — why would Henry Harding want to kill him for helping his old mum? But then he smelt the burning.

Burning ice was lodged in Anne’s throat, but all she felt was red rage.

Henry Hardwell himself had shattered the Jew’s front door with his iron-spiked cudgel, then burst through, surrounded by his thugs, all braying like hunting dogs, and screaming insults at the old man and herself as they were dragged out to the street.

Now she had a rope around her throat, the ends in Henry Hardwell’s mailed fist. He’d sliced under her chin too in the mad mêlée he caused, so that blood flowed down and stained the bodice of the old blue dress.

The rest was blur and fury as Henry charged out of the lane, screaming like an eagle, she lying winded across his saddle bow, followed by his yelling men all hopped up on the smell of blood and burning — one of them had tried to torch Master Cohen’s house, throwing the Jew’s own lighted candles into the heavy curtains lining the windows of his workroom.

Panic followed them like companions of war as the armed, mailed men galloped down the steep shopping streets of the town, scattering the market-day crowd, before bursting out into the square itself, yelling like ravaging Norsemen as they spurred their horses, iron-shod hooves striking sparks from the cobbles as the people ran, snatching screaming children as they fled from the armed terror suddenly amongst them.

Some things never go, and memory stored in muscle is one of them.

Years and years of practice with a sword slumbered in Stephen Hardwell’s biceps, knees and thighs; it was long indeed since they’d been used to fight, but as the noise of the screaming, outraged crowd grew closer and closer to ‘The White Boar’ — old instincts stirred.

Before he understood it, the baron was on his feet and shouting too, yelling for his men, and his sword was in his hand without thought. Many things Stephen Hardwell had been accused of in a long life, but cowardice was not one of them.

It was chaos in the market square as the baron ran outside, searching for the attacker. There must be an attacker — people only yelled that loud from terror or invasion.

He was right! There they were!

‘Yaaaaaaaaagh!’ The knight braced himself, roaring defiance, and swung his sword high to the right and above his head, but there was little time to find a proper stance as the mailed man on the destrier bore down on him. The baron was in his way!

At the last moment Stephen saw the body of the woman slung over the saddle boy. Rapine! But a knight never struck a woman — so with long and painfully learned dexterity, the baron pivoted neatly to one side and swung the sword in a long graceful arc as the mail-clad rider galloped past.

The sword caught the armed man on the shoulder, just enough to unhorse him as the panicked destrier tried to blunder on. The rider hit the ground hard, and the girl, suddenly unbraced, fell down from the saddle bow too, hitting her head on the cobbles as the riderless horse cannoned off into the screaming, milling crowd.

It was over quickly once Baron Hardwell ran to the downed man, sword high and ready for the
coup de grace.
Then, unbelievably, he saw his own son’s unconscious face; saw the blood, his own son’s blood. And understood.

Instantly he spewed into the gutter in the centre of the carnage; and as he turned away, shaking, to wipe his mouth, there was the girl he sought, lying amongst all the mire of the marketplace, the girl from the sea. Wonderingly, before he vomited again, he saw that she had a rope around her throat, a rope which had nearly strangled her as she fell from the horse, and someone had slashed her throat: but she was alive, her chest rising and and falling. Joy warred with shame and terror for what he had done.

He had nearly killed his son, his own son, and now he didn’t care.

‘H
e’s leaving? What do you mean? Where will he go?’ Elisabeth, Queen of England was very, very frightened.

The dark-skinned woman pointed to two of the large, crudely coloured cards and shrugged nervously. ‘I do not know, Your Majesty, but it is true. See, here; this card. The King of Cups. And here, the journey card beside it. The king will leave York very soon.’

Fearfully she flicked a glance towards the queen as Elisabeth paced the dark little room. Irina had not wanted to come to the palace — it was too dangerous, too many people knew of her visits, but she had not been given a choice.

‘More. Tell me more.’

Irina was silent. ‘Speak, woman. What do you see!’ Suddenly the queen was towering over the girl, the words delivered in a venomous whisper. The two women were hidden away in a part of the Palace of Westminster which was virtually ruinous, a warren of little, shadowed rooms, but it was necessary to be careful.

‘There is a woman; and a child. They are important to the future of your house.’ Irina tried to be cheerful as she said it, but dread crawled up her spine as she said the words.

‘A child. Is the woman me?’

‘No.’ Irina could barely breathe the word, but it was true. The woman she saw in the cards was not the queen.

Red rage flooded the body of the queen — of course, there was always someone else! Even now,
especially
now, that Edward was away in the north without her.

‘Who? Tell me who?’

Irina felt sudden peace surround her, against all likelihood; she had never asked for this gift, but she knew that what she said was the truth. She did not flinch, this time, when she looked up into the face of the queen.

‘I cannot tell you her name, but she has hair the colour of bronze and eyes like sea topaz.’

Elisabeth Wydeville felt the gorge rise in her throat. Of all that she thought, of all that she believed, surely this could not be true.

‘This woman. Is she the mother of the child you see?’

Deliberately, slowly, Irina re-shuffled the thick pieces of paste-board and laid them out in the pattern of a six-pointed star, with one card placed in the middle. She was relaxed now, no longer afraid. One by one, she turned each card over as she spoke.

‘Here we have the Queen of Cups above, and here, at the bottom, the Page of Cups. Yes, she is the mother of the boy. This is not your child.’

Elisabeth gasped. Queen and Page: mother and son. Anne, this was about Anne. Her nemesis. But surely the slut was fittingly swallowed up in the slave markets of the Barbary Coast by now?

‘Do you see my child — my son?’

Irina shook her head ‘No, great queen. There is no son of yours here, in these cards, but here,’ Irina hurried on, fearful of the effect of her words as turned over each of the remaining cards, ‘God in his heaven; and the devil.’ The girl’s voice faltered as she said the last word.

‘Go on, tell me.
What do you see
?’ Elisabeth had to know, had to. Why else risk scandal, and much more than scandal, if the church ever found out, by bringing this woman to the palace?

Irina was still, head bowed, as if she prayed, and she did not answer immediately. In a monotone, finally, she said, ‘I must turn the other cards, then I can tell you.’ She shivered as she looked up, but it was not at the queen she gazed. No, she was looking past the queen into the darkness behind her.

The queen looked over her shoulder fearfully. Then she shook herself: there was little time now, she must return to her rooms to dress for the evening.

‘Quickly then, do it quickly!’

One by one, stoically, Irina turned the cards. A ragged man, hurrying away from a castle, a thunderbolt splitting a great tower so that it shattered and fell, and then the final card in the centre of the star. Death: a dancing skeleton with a scythe.

Elisabeth was not without courage. She forced calm into her voice. ‘Therefore, tell me. What do the cards mean?’

Irina tried hard to swallow the fear which had returned, but she would not lie, could not lie. That would be a betrayal of herself and her people, the little dark people whose land this once had been, or so their songs said.

‘Great queen, there is great loss and there is lust. And the avenging hand of God in these cards.’ Against her will, Elisabeth’s eyes found their way to the image of God, implacable on His throne.

‘Great wrong has been done, and it must be paid for, atoned for, or much will be lost.’ Irina pointed at the man hurrying away from the castle, the sores of poverty on his face, his thin arms and naked feet, his rags all telling the same story of destitution.

‘God on His throne tells me this, and here,’ she tapped the card of the tower crumbling into the sea. ‘This card warns me that everything you know, everything you take as yours, may be broken and destroyed. You are in peril. And if this card,’ now she had picked up the grinning devil, gazed at it with a sigh and then carefully put it back in its original place in the spread, ‘is ignored, the jeopardy is further increased. You must not ignore the devil. He does not like it. He means lust, the flesh, all that is treacherous and mean-spirited in each one of us. He would like to see the tower fall; he would enjoy that.’

‘And this?’ Elisabeth could not bring herself to say the name, she would not speak of Death.

‘Change. He means change but, allied with these others.’ Irina couldn’t help it, she shook her head.

There was silence in the room now as the women gazed at the cards. Irina had done her best, she had spoken the truth, but perhaps not all of it. No, perhaps there was more, but she would not speak unless questioned directly.

‘One last card?’ In the past, in times when Irina had read cards which seemed more hopeful, Elisabeth had always enjoyed pulling one final card from the pack. So often they’d portended luck — the Ten of Cups, the Nine of Cups — happy cards, prosperous cards.

Irina nodded, there was no choice if she wanted this to end. Ever since this morning, even before she’d received the summons to come to the palace, she’d been oppressed with a gloom so palpable it was like a dress laced too tight across her chest. She ached as a woman does whose breasts are full of milk for the child she has lost.