Mistress Bailly came by the man’s table and refilled his cup from a flagon of claret. Then she waited while he downed it in a single draught and filled it again.
‘I heard about Mistress Curtis,’ she told him. ‘I’m truly sorry. She was a fine young woman.’
‘Aye.’ The man’s voice was cracked with grief.
‘They say the pestilence is a punishment for our sins, but if it can carry off one such as Mistress Curtis, then I for one cannot accept that. A more blameless woman has not trod the earth since the Assumption of the Lady Mary.’
The man managed a wan smile. ‘Quem di diligunt adolescens moritur,’ he said.
Mistress Bailly nodded sagely. She was used to Curtis spouting Latin. ‘John Chaucer’s bodyguard has got it now, too. I saw him fall right before my very eyes, even as he was talking to another one of my customers.’ She sighed again and crossed herself.
Curtis looked up sharply. ‘Martin Kemp has caught the pestilence?’
‘Aye. Though at the speed at which it works, I dare say he is dead already…’ She broke off and turned to stare at Beaumont, who had leapt to his feet as if his stool had suddenly become red-hot.
‘You know Martin Kemp? Martin Kemp of Knighton?’ the knight asked.
‘And if I do, what of it?’ snapped Curtis. ‘My remarks were not addressed to you, sir.’
Beaumont grabbed Curtis by the collar of his chemise and hauled him roughly from his stool, dragging him halfway across the table and upsetting the flagon so the wine splashed across the table and dripped on to the floor to stain the pale rushes red. ‘Where can I find him?’ he demanded.
‘Unhand me! You may be a nobleman, sir, but that does not give you the right to assault me so!’
‘I asked you a question, damn you!’
‘Damn you!’ retorted Curtis, catching Beaumont on the underside of his jaw with a right uppercut. Caught off-guard, the knight released Curtis and staggered back. Curtis straightened, and began to dust himself down. ‘Count yourself lucky, sir knight,’ he sneered. ‘I’ll not report this to the constable, but in future I advise you to bear in mind that the people of this city are not your villeins, who may be used and abused at your will. We are free citizens…’
Beaumont seized Curtis by the scruff of the neck and slammed him against a wall with all his might. ‘Where can I find Martin Kemp?’ His voice was a menacing growl.
‘Go to hell.’ Curtis’s voice was slurred with pain, but still full of defiance.
Beaumont clenched his fist, and drove it into one of Curtis’s kidneys. As his opponent doubled up, Beaumont lifted his knee into his face. Curtis sprawled on his back amongst the rushes, his face covered in his own blood. Beaumont grabbed a fistful of the front of his chemise, and pulled him a few feet off the ground. ‘I’ll ask you one last time, scum: where can I find Martin Kemp?’
‘Let him alone!’ screamed Mistress Bailly. ‘Can’t you see he’s had enough?’
Beaumont shook his head. ‘There’s plenty of fight left in this one, unless I’m very much mistaken.’
‘Go… to… hell,’ Curtis repeated thickly.
Beaumont raised his left fist to smash it into Curtis’s face, but Mistress Bailly grabbed him by the wrist, hanging from it in her effort to hold back the blow. ‘For Saint Paul’s love, Jack, tell him. Kemp’s no doubt beyond any harm this whoreson can do him,’ she sobbed.
Beaumont dropped Curtis to the flagstone floor and turned his attention to the landlady. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He doesn’t know where Martin is; I do. He was taken to the hospital attached to the Priory of Saint Bartholomew in Smithfield.’ Beaumont shook his head. ‘If only you had told me that sooner, you could have saved your friend a great deal of unpleasantness,’ he said, as he turned towards the door.
‘If you’re going to see Kemp, I should hurry,’ Mistress Bailly called after him. ‘By now he’s probably already beyond your reach.’
‘I doubt it. My reach is long.’
‘Does it reach as far as heaven?’
Beaumont laughed harshly. ‘If Kemp is dead, that would be the last place I should seek him.’
* * *
The knight crossed the bridge and made his way through London, asking the way to Saint Bartholomew’s Priory. He was directed through Newgate to Smithfield, where he found the hospital attached to the priory. As he approached the door, he encountered a physician, recognisable from the red gown and furred hood he wore.
The man moved to block Beaumont’s path. ‘Are you ill?’
‘No.’
‘Then I should not enter this house of death, unless you wish to be.’
‘I’m looking for Martin Kemp of Knighton.’
‘Are you a relative?’
‘I’m his master!’ protested Beaumont, growing impatient at being questioned like this.
‘Then he can serve you no longer. Master Kemp is yet another victim of the pestilence.’
‘What is this pestilence of which everyone talks?’
The physician stared at him incredulously. ‘Are you a hermit, that your life is so secluded you have not yet encountered its horror? The black swellings which indicate that death can be no more than days away at most, perhaps even hours?’
‘It is fatal?’
‘It is beyond the power of my art to cure it.’
‘And you say Kemp suffers from this malady?’
The physician nodded. ‘There is naught you can do for him. Only a priest can save him now, and then only his soul. His body is corrupted beyond all hope of redemption.’
‘I must see for myself,’ said Beaumont. He pushed past the physician and entered the hospital.
The foetid stench hit him at once, a smell foul beyond description, the stink of death intensified a thousand times. Beaumont found himself retching instantly, uncontrollably. It took all of his concentration to keep his supper down, so he was only dimly aware of the Austin monks in their brown habits who moved amongst the beds of the dead and dying. He glanced at the huddled form on the nearest bed, and saw a face that was riddled with livid carbuncles and blood-black blisters that wept pus in sluggish streams across the cheeks. Huge black-swellings distorted the man’s neck.
One of the monks suddenly collapsed. Two of his brothers hurriedly crossed to where he lay and examined him, presently announcing that the pestilence had claimed another victim.
Meanwhile one of the patients levered himself off his bed, and began fumbling his way towards the door. He was naked except for a foully soiled breech-cloth, and his whole emaciated white body was covered with carbuncles. Dark swellings glistened in his armpits and on his thighs close to his groin.
‘Air! Air! For the love of God, I must have more air!’ he screamed in a despairing and high-pitched voice.
Two of the monks seized him by the arms and wrestled the man back to his bed. As they did so, one of the swellings in his armpits burst, splashing black pus on to the already soiled bed-linen.
Beaumont could take no more of this vision of hell. Feeling the bile rise to his gorge, he rushed out of the hospital, vomiting uncontrollably even as he stumbled over the threshold. Outside, he pressed his forehead against the cold stonework of the hospital wall and gasped for breath. After a few moments, the cold night air began to revive him. He smiled. Such a death was far worse than anything he could wish on Kemp.
* * *
Lying on a pallet in one corner of the main room, Kemp had been too far gone even to be aware of Beaumont’s visit. He was hardly aware of anything any more. Only the occasional moment of lucidity, in which he was conscious of little more than the fiery pain of the swellings on his neck and under his arms, would sweep over him, quickly to be replaced with yet another bout of fever. Those moments of his life he would most like to have forgotten were replayed before his eyes in a series of visions that were neither nightmares nor hallucinations, but something in between. He was in the cells at Leicester gaol again, lying in complete darkness in a pool
of his own vomit, awaiting execution. Then the dim light of a torch appeared, revealing a black-clad priest holding a small, leather-bound Bible. With his pale, cadaverous features in the shadow of his cowl, he looked like the Angel of Death.
‘I have come to hear your confession,’ said the priest.
‘Go to hell,’ Kemp told him bitterly. ‘I’ve not done owt wrong.’
‘Would you go to your grave with your sins unpurged?’
‘I’ve not committed any sins, yet I’m to die for a crime which I didn’t do. I’ve prayed to God for salvation, but he has forsaken me. Now I’d make a pact with the Devil himself, if it would free me from this unjust fate,’ spat Kemp.
‘Blasphemous wretch! Would you burn in the fires of hell for eternity?’
‘For a full span of life? Aye.’
The priest snapped his Bible shut. ‘There is nothing I can do for this one,’ he announced. ‘He has chosen his path.’
Then the darkness of the gaol melted away, leaving bright sunlight, and Kemp was standing on a road somewhere in Normandy. He saw an armoured figure riding a courser, wearing the arms of Sir John Beaumont. A young man who had once been in Kemp’s platoon, Piers Edritch, was also standing on the road, seemingly oblivious to Kemp’s presence, even though he was staring straight at him. Standing stock still as if frozen in time, Edritch had his back to the rider, and the courser’s hooves were eerily silent on the road. The rider removed his helmet and revealed not Beaumont’s face, but the face of his daughter, Beatrice. Laughing, she swung at Edritch’s neck with a broadsword. Edritch’s head was lopped from his shoulders, and rolled down the road until it came to rest at Kemp’s feet. He glanced down at the disembodied head, but instead of seeing Edritch’s face he saw his own, laughing up at him. He tried to scream, but no sound would come out.
The countryside seemed to boil away, and he found himself floating in a purple haze. Faces swum out of the mist at him: his brother Nicholas, Sir Thomas Holland, Wat Preston, John Chaucer. He saw de Chargny staring at him with those gimlet eyes, like a hawk studying some kind of insect it had not encountered before and wondering if it were good to eat. Then the French knight’s features melted into those of a priest, and Kemp could hear a distant voice droning the last rites. He watched his own hand reach up and grab a fistful of the priest’s black robes, pulling him down so that his ear was close to Kemp’s mouth.
‘No, priest!’ he snarled. ‘I’m not dead yet!’
Then the priest was gone, to be replaced by more faces: John Conyers, Jack Curtis, Hodge Rudcock wide-eyed with surprise as he stared down at the haft of the dagger that had been thrust into his chest.
There were voices, too. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ A woman’s voice, terse and angry.
‘The swellings must be lanced! It’s his only chance for survival!’ The voice was vaguely familiar, but Kemp could not place it.
‘And who are you?’
‘A friend.’
‘A physician?’
There was a pause. ‘Not exactly. But I did train briefly as a barber-surgeon…’
‘Get away from him! Master Aderne, do something to stop this man. He’s interfering with one of the patients.’
‘Are you bleeding him?’
‘I’m lancing the swellings prior to applying an ointment made from Armenian clay. It’s a technique described to me by a Saracen physician…’
‘Get away! I’ll have no paynim magic here!’ the woman’s voice screeched. ‘This is supposed to be a house of God!’
‘It’s not magic, you stupid old… It’s medicine. It hardly ever works, I’ll admit, but at least it works sometimes, which is more often than anything else anyone has tried…’
‘You’ll kill him!’
‘So what? He’s going to die anyway…’
Sheets of fire exploded through Kemp’s torso, burning the voices away. Darkness settled over him, but its coolness was refreshing after the flames. He felt himself floating.
He was standing in a room that was strangely familiar but distorted, the posts of the four-poster bed defying all the laws of perspective, as did the walls and the ceiling. A sword was in his hand and it felt comfortable there.
Two large blue eyes peered at him over the edge of the bed.
‘Come out from behind there,’ he heard a voice order. It was his own. ‘Show yourself.’
She rose trembling to her feet: a young woman, with a pale face and red hair. He walked around to the other side of the bed to face her. She shrank away from him, but he caught her around the waist, pulling her against him. She cried out, but he pressed his lips against hers, forcing his tongue between her clenched teeth. She tried to push him away. Laughing, he grabbed the front of her dress and ripped it open. She gasped in horror and tried to break away from him, but he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her, throwing her against the wall. He slapped her back-handed across the face, drawing blood from the corner of her mouth, then tore the rest of her clothes from her body and held her: one hand on her throat, the other fumbling with the hem of his tunic. He pushed his breech-cloth down over his hips, and forced himself into her.
Suddenly her arms were enfolding him, her moans no longer of pain but of pleasure. Her embrace grew tight around his body, squeezing the breath from his lungs. He looked at her, and his stomach churned with revulsion and terror. Her skin had grown leathery and turned as dark as clotted blood. Filled with horror, he tried to pull away. Even as he watched, her features changed, forming into a grotesque snout, with tusks protruding from the corners of a mouth full of jagged teeth. The thing threw back its head and laughed, and Kemp found himself falling. He landed in a sea of fire, and then the thing was standing over him, its forked tail twitching with pleasure, its goat-legs bestriding Kemp, as tall as the steeple of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Gnarled horns twisted out of its head, and a white eye patch incongruously covered one eye. The Devil pointed one of its talons down at Kemp.
‘Your soul is mine! Your soul is mine!’
‘Yes!’ Kemp was sobbing now. ‘Yes! I never denied it! You can have it, and you’re welcome to it! Only release me from this pain! I can’t take any more of this pain…!’
A great gout of fire exploded upwards, engulfing Kemp, the Devil, everything, leaving only blackness in its wake. Blackness, and a strange kind of peace. The peace of oblivion.
* * *
‘Jacques! Fetch two casks of wine from the buttery. Sir Geoffroi’s finest Burgundy, mark you! Jeanne, take down Sir Geoffroi’s finest plate and make sure it is properly polished. Henri – are the rushes in the great hall clean? Good – then get the fire going here, and then see to the one in the hall. Robert – fetch the biggest pig from the sty and start roasting it, quickly!’
‘Not the fat sow!’ protested Robert, the cook. ‘We were saving that for Christmas.’
‘We’ll have to find another one for Christmas, Robert,’ replied the steward. ‘Today we must prepare a feast fit for a king – for it is the king we serve! Where is Typhaine?’
Typhaine stepped forward and curtseyed. Below stairs, the steward was a king in his own domain, and to be obeyed without question. De Chargny’s steward could be sharp-tongued when he was impatient, but he was a fair man, and had been patient with Typhaine from the first day she started working at the castle.
‘Here, maître.'
‘Did you make up the guest bedchamber?’
‘Yes, maître.’
‘Can you pour wine, girl?’
‘Of course!’
‘Good. Louis is ill, so you’ll have to do it.’
‘Me? Pour wine for the king?’ she stammered.
‘Jacques will decant it, so you don’t have to worry about that. Fetch Sir Geoffroi’s best goblets from the garret.’
Typhaine made her way to fetch the goblets in a daze. In the few weeks she had been at the castle, she had quickly grown used to her new life. At first everything seemed to happen in a whirl, and it was as if she were sleep-walking. Whe
n she woke up, she found herself so used to the strictly regulated daily routine that the chaos and uncertainty of her previous life already seemed like a dim and distant memory.
News of de Chargny’s unexpected return from Paris – with the king and several senior knights of his court – had already spread through the castle at Saint-Omer, and now everyone was in a panic to make sure a proper feast was prepared. If the king was not pleased by the banquet, de Chargny would see to it his staff suffered for their incompetence.
Typhaine was carrying the salver of gem-encrusted goblets along the gallery leading to the main bechambers when she met one of de Chargny’s men-at-arms coming in the opposite direction.
Arnault was a squat, broad-shouldered man with a face that must have been ugly even before it was grotesquely disfigured by a multitude of scars. Seeing her, he grinned and, as he passed, knocked the salver from her hands, sending the goblets clattering noisily to the floor.
‘Now look what you’ve done, you clumsy oaf!’ she snapped. As she bent down to retrieve the goblets, he slapped her on the rump. She straightened at once to strike him across the cheek, but he caught her by the wrist, twisting her arm.
‘Come on, then!’ he jeered. ‘How’s about a kiss?’
‘Let go of me, you pig!’ she hissed, struggling to keep herself from crying out in pain.
A hand tapped Arnault on the shoulder, and he released her at once, turning. A massive fist slammed into his face, hurling him against the wall. He glanced up to find Sir Eustache de Ribeaumont, one of the knights Valois had brought with him, standing over him. De Ribeaumont was a massively built man, and not all of it muscle. His lank blond hair fell to his shoulders, and his nose was over-large, but there was something handsome about him nonetheless. He glared down at Arnault.
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