“You will be, my lady,” David said, and grabbed the reins of her horse.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Rain pounded, blurring the way ahead, closing the night with ice. With David’s firm hand to her horse’s bridle, she rode up Hart Street, passing the old Crouched Friars’ Priory, and into the narrow alleys beyond4. He was running, the horse’s hooves fast and heavy in the puddles as Emeline held to pommel and mane. Both out of breath, both soaked, in minutes they passed Seethinge Lane and turned quickly right. Little more than a rutted track, but now a row of three tenements blocked the alleyway, all lightless as the shadows seemed darker than black and the high walls seemed to shiver with water. No braziers or lit torches hung from the doorways. No candlelight flickered within the windows.
“Here, hurry, my lady.”
Emeline was frightened, and nearly as angry. “Where on earth have you brought me? And why? I insist on staying –”
“My lady.” He was apologetic. “It was his lordship’s orders. And the faster you settle here, the quicker I can return to help him. The attack was planned, and they outnumber us. Traitors, French backed. The constable has been called, though he may not be at home. I’ve alerted others. But Lord Nicholas thought only of you –”
Emeline slumped, catching her breath. She did not realise at first that she was crying. “Settle me, if settling me is so important, hiding me away where I can do nothing to help, but only sit alone in misery.” She stared at the looming many storeyed building and its rough buttressed and ramshackle walls. “Where is this? It looks like a gaol.”
She dismounted and David tied the wet and tired horse to the long hooked rail at the tenement’s rear. He unlocked the outer door. Inside it was just as wet. No central ceiling closed in the stairs. Metal rungs, soaked wood, the clang and clank as they hurried up and the rain poured down. Only one upward climb to each storey, but the steps were narrow and steep. David, still running, supported the lady’s elbow as she pattered, clutching at her sodden skirts, trying to keep up. “It’s my old family home, my lady, once belonging to my father and now to me. I meant to sell after my parents were gone, but it’s worth nothing in coin yet has had its uses over the years. Whenever his lordship, with Alan and I, came to London incognito or intending to keep out of sight, we came here. The place has been used – oh, many times. But it’s not comfortable, my lady. Serviceable for an hour or two, no more.”
The rain poured past the interminable stairs and there remained no solid balustrade to cling to. There was noise, half drowned by pelting rain, but constant as breath; a low buzzing hive of complaint and argument, creaking timbers as pliable as a ship’s hull in the ocean, the persistent shuffle and rattle within a black background. At every stop where a corridor led off from the steps to the dwellings, there were curtains and old rags hanging from wooden rails, or leather flaps nailed over openings. Few doors, only doorways.
Emeline stared. “You were born here?”
“Yes, my lady. Here.” He led her along a passage past other shaded entrances. Then there was a door, low framed but almost solid, with a water butt outside. David unlocked it and stooped to enter. “Mind your head, my lady. Now – there are candles on the shelf, and stools below it. I can build a small fire.”
She flopped down on the stool he brought, tired from stairs and even more tired from fear and desperation. “I can find the candles and light the fire myself. Take the horse. Get back to Nicholas. Tell him I’m safe, and go and save his life.”
“I’ll not argue with that, my lady.” His face was white and worn. “It’s his lordship means more to me than anything – his life more important than my life –” David turned and ran. The door swung and slammed behind him. The walls shook.
Emeline sat alone for what seemed a long time. A mournful hopelessness leaked through the gloom. Gradually she could see, though there was little enough for notice. The tiny chamber was dusty but the streaming cobwebs hung almost invisible within the relentless shadows. Eventually she found a small scattered pile of faggots and a tinderbox beside the little hearth. She lit a fire. The flames leapt, showing her nothing but it warmed her fingers and the soaked toes of her shoes. Beyond the thin walls the continuous noises reverberated. The murmur of belch, complaint and objection, the stirring of a wooden spoon in a metal pot, deep snoring, coughing and then someone was hitting someone else, and the someone else shouted and cursed. Many were words Emeline had never heard before. Then suddenly she sat up and stopped crying.
A galloping race of thoughts had interrupted the misery. Approaching the trembling planks of the wall that separated the Witton chamber from the one next door, Emeline tapped politely. There was no response. She banged louder.
“Oo’s that?” demanded a woman’s voice, as the other sounds quietened.
“My name,” said Emeline, “is Emma, and I’m a – friend – of the Wittons. I wonder if I could – speak to someone – in fact to everyone – about something terribly, terribly important?” She told them everything at once, and she listened to a great deal in return. But there was little time for explanations. “My friends are outnumbered,” she said, a little desperate. “Brave, but already wounded. Help is needed at once – or it will all be lost.”
“There’ll be naught lost with me at your back, lady.”
“’Tis time to help our friends.”
“Bugger the friends. Let’s go have some fun.”
It was still raining, even harder now, as they crept from the tenement, hurrying down the stairs and out into the storm. There was little wind but the sleet was persistent, closing the night into moonlessness.
Emeline led the group of David Witton’s tenement neighbours from Seethinge Lane back down towards Harp and Water Lanes. Cautious, keeping low and careful not to arouse the Watch or other passers-by, they turned each corner, huddled together, coming closer. With Emeline came twelve men, eight women and one following child with his thumb in his mouth. Muttering turned to whispers, then sank to silence except for the pelt of rain. Then finally noise began echoing back.
The fighting had stopped but it had clearly not finished as Emeline had hoped. As those from the tenement crept forwards, Emeline halted abruptly and peered around the final sharp street corner. Beyond it was narrow and little could be seen, but the sound of voices carried, even through the rain.
It was through the rain that Emeline stared, the others grouped tight at her back. She had seen Nicholas. He stood, unsteady and wavering, leaning back against the long brick wall of the storehouse behind. The overhang of the upper storey sheltered him, but he could barely stand. His forehead was once more bleeding heavily and the blood and the rain streaked his face in persistent stripes. It was Adrian he faced. Behind Adrian were eight men, none of whom Emeline recognised. Beside Nicholas stood David. She could not see either Jerrid or Alan. Adrian was speaking softly, half obscured by the rain which sluiced over his oiled cape and pounded on the ground around. He was unhooded, his hat was drenched and his boots squelched. But he was smiling.
“It is a pleasant change, Nicholas,” Adrian said, “to see you humiliated, while I stand proud. You appreciate, I hope, the justice.”
Nicholas wiped bloody streaks from his eyes. “I’m as uninterested in my supposed embarrassments as I am in yours, Adrian. You’ve finally won a battle of sorts here, though a battle of shame with louts, foreigners and traitors, and your own arrival coming only after the fight was safely over. Now it’s the consequences which interest me. Do you have some plan or ambition? Or are you as caught in this trap as I have been?”
“Trap, Nicholas?” Adrian scowled. “You persistently imagine traps, like a mange ridden fox in a snare. There’s been no trap. Only of your own making.”
“Then you’re a simpleton, cousin.” His legs were sliding a little down, unable to hold him. Emeline understood his exhaustion. But she realised something else. He was playing for time. She thought she knew why, and held her own people back. “The men you suppose loyal t
o you,” Nicholas continued, “made sure your message was misdirected. I was purposefully brought here, and ambushed. Twice. A trap then. Can you be sure you’re not equally trapped?”
One of the men at his side growled something Emeline could not hear. David reached out, steadying his master, but remained silent. Adrian sneered, “There’s only the result of your own arrogance. I’ve loathed you, your vile brother and that drunken sot my Uncle Symond since I was a ten year child. None of you ever gave a thought to me and my sister, though we were the penniless orphans in a family of wealth and greed.”
“Self pity again, Adrian?”
“Once I thought you a cringing coward,” Adrian said between his teeth. “Perhaps I was wrong in that. But I’m not wrong about your stupidity, Nicholas, nor your arrogance. Obnoxious avarice, brutality, conceit, and blind insistence on everything to your own benefit, even when those gains were my losses. Selfish to the end, like all your family.”
“What has that to do with treason and loyalty to your country?” Nicholas straightened himself against the wall, strengthening his knees. “You have no Lancastrian sympathies. You’ve no friendship with Tudor nor his mother. Your parents proclaimed no loyalty to any foreign cause before they died. You’ve no genuine grudge against the House of York, nor against the king who knighted you on the Scottish Marches, much to your own pride. So your treason is simply a coward’s revenge against your own family.” Nicholas spoke slowly, both through weakness and a need to slow time. Again Emeline beckoned to the group behind her, her finger to her lips, asking them to wait.
“You know nothing of me,” Adrian glowered. “Long years of ignorance, uncaring arrogance and playing the clown. You’ve no concept of my suffering.”
“You join a treacherous cause simply because you’re envious of your rich cousins?” Nicholas sighed, again wiping the blood from his eyes. “You’ll back a cold hard man without a drop of royal blood in his veins, simply to reject whatever cause I support? Even if it means your own country destroyed? Heaven help us from English bitterness and French spite.” He was slipping again, his knees buckling. “I despise you, Adrian,” he said faintly. “Now do whatever you will.”
“Kill you?” Adrian sniggered. “Too easy, cousin.”
“You killed my brother. Why stop now?”
Adrian paused. He shook his head. “I loathe you all. I loathed Peter more than anyone else, with his claws into my poor sister and his filthy prick eager to escape its codpiece at any paltry opportunity. But I never killed Peter.” He shook his head with a whirl of flying raindrops. “I know full well you killed him yourself, and probably your father-in-law as well. Yet your wretched luck continues. You married a woman who despised you just as she should have. Yet the witless girl has grown to love you, so I’m told. But your undeserved luck ends here, cousin.”
Nicholas was too weak. David was trying to hold him up but he was bleeding copiously. Emeline thought he would fall. Whatever he needed to wait for, no longer mattered. She raised her hand, picked up her skirts and ran forwards as fast as she could. The crowd followed her, splashing through mud and puddles. Sudden shouts, a rush of shadows and shapes, stones thrown and the flash of steel through the streaming waters. Nicholas and David had been disarmed but Adrian’s men, their swords raised, whirled, disorientated and alarmed, not knowing whether they faced the law, guards, or untold assailants. The crowd from the tenement carried cudgels and old bent arrows, honed kitchen knives and skillets, pots and steel butchers’ hooks. Emeline held an iron poker. Adrian and his men were outnumbered four to one. Adrian stared, and dropped his sword.
Sudden and unexpected, the rush overpowered almost at once. Adrian toppled, down to his knees in the slush. One of his men disappeared beneath five flailing sticks, and roared once before he slumped unconscious, skull cracked. Another of Adrian’s men faced three women, one with her carving knife in his face. It was thrust to the hilt into his mouth, through his tongue and down his throat. He gargled torn flesh and fell. A third man stumbled and went down, four pairs of large hands squeezing around his neck, strangling him into silence as an iron hook pierced one ear. Emeline wielded the poker, heavy as a blade, and smashed it over one man’s head. Then she ran to Nicholas.
It had taken only moments. Nicholas also fell, but he fell into his wife’s arms. Emeline kissed his blood streaked cheeks and held him tight. They sat together in the mud as the noise and violence spun around them, kicking legs, dancing skirts, wooden clogs, grappling hands and the wavering reins of one confused horse.
“Don’t kill Adrian,” whispered Nicholas, and fainted.
One last flash and crackle of lightening, a roll of thunder less distinct and more distant, and abruptly the rain began to ease.
The people crowded round. “Was that it, then mistress?”
“A fine tangle, lady, but not as profitable as we’d hoped. Eight miserable dolts and one fine gennelman without purse nor rings, what we can’t even finish off.” Then the man saw David and recognised him. “It’s Witton, lads. Look. The little bugger from next door is here after all.”
“I’m off back to own my little lad,” one woman said, shaking her head. “Ain’t no more fun to be had here and I were never no friend o’ Howard Witton, nasty bugger he were, and Liz not much better.”
“The son ain’t like the father. David’s a good boy, and a clever one.”
“No matter,” the woman said, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m off. I ain’t waiting round here ‘till the law turns up.”
“True, true.” Some of the crowd drifted away, looking back only briefly. “So you look after yourself now, lady. Reckon we’re not needed no more and will be gone afore the Watch comes this way.”
“The Watch? Of course.” It was what Nicholas had been waiting for. Emeline nodded, and without rising she thanked her new friends. “I hope no one is hurt?”
“A bruise, missus, no more.”
“There’s plenty of them other buggers hurt, and that’s what was asked of us.” David Witton’s neighbour grinned. “But I reckoned on seeing them Bambrigg boys. Good boys they are, and useful in a brawl.”
David was clasping hands, thanking and praising, knowing every soul who had come at Emeline’s request. “The Bambriggs work for my lord now,” he told them. “But both Harry and Rob are off on another errand. They’d have been helpful indeed, but when they were instructed to stay behind elsewhere, we had no way of knowing this would happen. We expected no organised attack.” He smiled. “Didn’t expect all of you to come either.”
“Thanks to the lady,” he was told. “Poor lass was in a right spin and said she needed help. Gave your name. So we come for you.”
“Besides,” added another, “we’s always ready for a good fight.”
Finally, David returned to his master’s side. Nicholas was still only half conscious, blur eyed and dizzy. “It is hard,” he murmured very softly, “to believe what I’ve just seen.”
“All true, my lord. We’ve been saved by the ruffians from the tenement, roused and brought to our aid by your ingenious lady wife herself” And David knelt in the mud, his hands carefully testing where Nicholas had been wounded. As he examined, he began to explain what had happened at the end. “We thought we had beaten them, my lady,” he informed Emeline. “After I returned here, riding your horse as you graciously instructed, I found the fight almost won. We finished them off quickly, my lord and I, and the locals who’d come to our aid thought matters done with, and left. Our attackers were fair beaten and those not hurt set off running. Two dead, but their companions carted them away. To the river maybe, being the best place for traitors. We thought ourselves free, and hoped for the Watch to come by at last, since it’s close to their usual patrol. But both my Lord Nicholas and Lord Jerrid were badly wounded.”
The rain was just a chilly silver trickle now, puddling deeper into the mud beneath them. Emeline sighed. “What happened to Jerrid?”
“We believed we needed only to return
home as quickly as possible, and summon the medick. It was too late to return to the Tower, so Alan Venter took the wounded Lord Jerrid up before him, riding west. He hoped to alert the Watch on his way, but Lord Jerrid was near fainting, so they set off at a gallop. My lord and I intended the same, and I was helping him mount his own mare, when we were ambushed.”
Emeline shivered, trying to adjust the soaked bandage falling from head to eyes across Nicholas’s brows. “Adrian?”
“Indeed, my lady. There was just his lordship and myself left alone, when along comes Sir Adrian and a clutch of louts. It seems those that ran from us before had run only to call for help, and waited, I believe, to see Alan and Lord Jerrid leave so we’d be without hope of defending ourselves. And the Watch didn’t come. We were hopelessly outnumbered, nine against two, and my lord barely able to stand.”
Nicholas pushed David’s administering hands away. “How is Adrian?”
Adrian sat alone, watching them. He seemed bemused and unable or unwilling to rise. He made no attempt to escape, and sat cradling his shoulder. His doublet was cut across the chest, its ribbons dangling beneath his cloak, but there was no sign of bleeding. Of his backers, three were dead, another dying. Two were badly injured and trying to stagger away from further retribution. The others had disappeared.
David murmured, “My lord, after this – the ruin – the treason – Sir Adrian cannot be left alive. He can never return home. To the sheriff, then? Or we wait a little longer for the Watch? Or I drag the constable from his bed?”
Nicholas murmured, “Let him go.”
Emeline whispered, turning from Nicholas to Adrian, and then again to Nicholas, “But what if he calls for help as before? What if he attacks another time? You can’t fight any longer, my love.”
“Nor can he.” Nicholas nodded towards Adrian. He held Emeline’s hand but was looking beyond her. “Give me a moment more, my sweet, and then help me to my feet. We’ve still one horse left between us, and David will see us back to the Strand. I don’t care where Adrian goes.”
The Flame Eater Page 55