As the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow rang terce, the back door of the guildmaster’s blue and red house opened and a fleshy maidservant emerged with a marketing basket over her arm. She exchanged a cheery “Good morrow” with the manservant mucking out the stable and left.
It was much later than Thomas usually broke his fast, and hunger ground away at his belly. He was sorely tempted to just walk into the kitchen and dish himself up a bowlful of porridge. Joanna wouldn’t mind; like most learned people, she knew his malady to be less contagious than was generally believed. But if he was seen by one of the neighbors—such as the money lender’s wife, casting him looks of abhorrence as she tended to her garden—he’d be put to death.
A gust of laughter wheezed up out of Thomas’s chest. Ironic that a pathetic creature such as he should fear death. For what was he but the walking dead, a gradually crumbling thing that used to be a man. He’d managed on his own well enough until now, despite the deadening of his face and arms and legs, but soon he would lose the last vestiges of his precious independence, for the thing he’d dreaded for years was at last beginning to happen. He was going blind in his one good eye. The vision that used to be crisp as a hawk’s was gradually, inexorably, growing cloudy around the edges. Soon the murkiness would shroud everything he saw, and then his world would be one of darkness and shadow.
He’d be blind and numb. Wherefore should he fear death?
Disgusted by his lapse into self-pity, Thomas closed his eyes and conjured up the image of the woman he’d loved and cast aside when he was young and healthy and foolish, the woman who still had the power to soothe and comfort him, even in his imagination. Thomas, my love, Bertrada used to whisper as she caressed his brow, kissed his cheek, took him in her arms. I’m here for you. I’ll always be here for you. And I’ll always love you...always...
“Thomas.”
He opened his eyes to find Joanna Chapman and Graeham Fox standing before him, and made himself smile. “Mistress,” he said with a nod. “Graeham. I think this is the first time I’ve seen you out of doors, serjant. Didn’t realize your hair had quite so much red in it.”
“So it does.” Joanna trailed her fingers through Graeham’s hair. “It’s lovely in the sunlight.”
Graeham exchanged a smile with her that was so warm and intimate, Thomas felt like a voyeur having witnessed it. Interesting.
“How do you fare today, Thomas?” asked Graeham.
Thomas smiled. “Never better. Well, perhaps that’s overstating it a bit.”
Graeham’s chuckle was weary, a little pained. He yawned. Joanna yawned, too.
“You two look tired,” Thomas observed.
Graeham smiled at Joanna, who blushed and looked away. Very interesting.
“My porridge smells as if it’s burned to the pot,” said Mistress Joanna, entering the kitchen. “I’ll have to throw it out, but it’s a shame to waste the good part on top. Will you have some of it, Thomas?”
Thomas looked heavenward with his good eye, amused and touched by her efforts to make her charity seem like anything but. “I suppose I could help you out by eating a bowl of it, mistress.”
As she was fetching his porridge, the back door of the blue and red house opened again. This time it was the guildmaster himself who stepped out, adorned as usual in his peacock-hued finery. Graeham ducked behind a corner of the kitchen and watched him closely as he walked toward Milk Street.
“Don’t want to be seen?” Thomas asked.
“Not by him.”
Something about the serjant’s grim expression discouraged Thomas from asking any more questions.
The door opened yet again, as soon as the guildmaster was out of sight. Another plump, aproned woman emerged, the pink-cheeked wench Thomas sometimes saw chopping and singing at the kitchen window. She untied her coverchief, revealing brown hair braided and coiled around her head, which she patted. With a glance to make sure the money changer’s wife had her back turned, she darted across the yard, around the pile of filthy straw Byram had raked onto the ground and into the stable.
“They should find a more discreet place to tup,” Graeham said. “They’re bound to get caught one of these days.”
“According to Publilius Syrus,” Thomas said, “God Himself decreed love and wisdom antithetical to each other.”
“All too true, I’m afraid,” said Graeham, suddenly melancholy.
“What’s all too true?” Joanna asked as she stepped out of the kitchen with a ladle full of porridge.
Seemingly unsettled for some reason, Graeham said, “Thomas told me I looked exhausted, and I said ‘twas all too true.”
“You should take a nap if you can,” she said through another yawn as she poured the porridge into Thomas’s bowl. “I’d do the same, but Mistress Ada is expecting me to come back and sit with her, and I think it’s best if I do.” She touched Graeham’s hand. “Try to get some sleep.”
He brushed his knuckles across her cheek. “You’re as tired as I am. I can see it in your eyes.”
Joanna smiled. “I’ll sleep after—” her gaze flicked toward Thomas and away “—after everything’s settled.”
“I don’t like you being over there, with things as they are,” Graeham said.
“Le Fever’s not even home.”
“Still...you’d best keep your wits about you.”
“You worry too much.” She returned the ladle to the kitchen, filled a bucket with fresh water for Thomas, and took her leave, crossing the guildmaster’s stable yard and entering the house without knock¬ing.
“If I weren’t so hungry,” Thomas said, groping about in his pouch for his spoon, “I’d have about a hundred questions I’d be pestering you with right now.”
“Then I’m glad you’re hungry.” With a smile and a wave, Graeham turned and hobbled into the house on his crutch.
Thomas finished the porridge slowly, savoring it as he used to savor fourteen-course feasts. He drank some of the water from the bucket and used the rest to wash his bowl and spoon. When there was nothing more for him to do, he sat and did nothing, gratified simply to be off his feet. One of the worst aspects of this cursed malady was that it had made idleness a way of life.
Finally, when the sitting still got to be too much even for him, he rose awkwardly and crossed to the window at the back of the house to say good-bye to Graeham. At first he thought the storeroom was empty, but then he saw the young man lying on his back on the little cot, still fully dressed in shirt, braies and boots, but fast asleep.
“Enjoy your dreams, serjant.” Thomas shuffled across the croft and into the alley, but stumbled back as someone—a woman—walked by without looking.
She brushed against him as she passed. Thomas’s heart seized up; this was what he dreaded more than anything, that someone would touch him accidentally and he would be called to task for it.
But the woman didn’t even seem to notice the contact, so single-mindedly did she stalk past. She had a ragged mane of red hair, he saw as she veered out of the alley and across the croft; not slightly rusty, like Graeham Fox’s hair, but vibrant copper turning to gray. A wineskin was slung crosswise over her back, and she held a twig broom with the sweeping end up, rather importantly, like a scepter. That was odd, but not as odd as how she was dressed—or rather, not dressed. For it seemed to Thomas that the woman’s kirtle wasn’t a kirtle at all, but...
Nay, it couldn’t be. An undershift, or possibly a sleeping shift, and none too clean. The hem and sleeves were tattered and grimy, the flimsy linen so dirt-smudged that it looked more gray than white. And she was barefoot, her feet crusted with dirt.
He watched her walk purposefully up to the gate in the stone fence enclosing Rolf le Fever’s stable yard, open it and pass through. She was halfway across the yard when she paused and looked around, as if searching for something. Her gaze lit on the stable and she made for it.
* * *
Straw. She needed straw.
Elswyth saw a heap of it on the
ground outside the stable and bent to collect some, but its acrid stink assaulted her nostrils and she recoiled. She swung open the door of the stable and found a wonderful great pile of fresh straw right in the middle of the aisle, a rake resting against it. As she gathered it up, she heard something like dogs panting in the heat, and turned to see a man and a woman in the stall across the aisle, he lying between her bare legs, his braies around his ankles, rutting away.Elswyth thought of Olive and Rolf le Fever doing that—perhaps in this very place—and the rage seethed boiling hot in her...but just for a moment, before she banished it with a reminder to herself that the time for rage was over. She knew what had to be done now.
Elswyth must have nudged the rake, because it fell to the ground with a thump.
The woman gasped. “Byram! Byram! Someone’s in here.”
“What?”
With a mass of straw bundled under one arm, Elswyth walked out of the stable, swung the door closed, and shoved the iron bolt across with a rusty grind.
“Hey!” the man shouted from inside. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Come back here!”
Elswyth carried her straw to the red and blue house, aware now that two people were watching her openly—the leper and the money changer’s wife. Other than them, she saw no one.
She opened the back door and entered the house, dark and cool. The kitchen was to her right, empty save for a lively fire in the hearth. A good omen, that no one was home to interfere with her. It meant God was smiling on her plan.
Standing well back from the hearth because of the straw tucked under her arm, she held the broom head in the flames until the twigs caught fire. Leaving the kitchen, the burning broom held aloft, she went into the buttery. She dropped some of the straw onto the wooden floor at the base of the service stairwell and touched her improvised torch to it; it ignited in a crackle of flames.
With an exquisite, clear-headed calm, she walked down the hallway to the front of the house, turned and climbed the stairs to the third level on her bare, silent feet. Standing outside the closed door to the solar, she heard a woman’s voice—that of Joanna Chapman—reciting something soft and singsongy that sounded like gibberish at first, until Elswyth realized she was speaking Latin: “No one who practices deceit shall remain in my house. No one who utters lies shall continue in my presence.”
Recognizing the Psalm, Elswyth smiled. How perfectly it captured what was in her heart. Another good omen!
“Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land, cutting off all evildoers from the city of the Lord.”
Elswyth dumped some more straw in front of the door and lit it, thus ensuring that both exits from the solar would be blocked by fire, then raised her makeshift torch to the thatch between the ceiling rafters. The broom’s twigs were burned almost all the way down, but the thatch caught instantly; nothing burned like thatch, especially dry old reed thatch like this.
Within minutes, the fire would have consumed the entire roof; the house would fill with smoke; burning thatch would fall into the solar; red-hot timbers would come crashing down; there would be screams and weeping from within the blazing hellfire. Elswyth wished she could wait around to witness it, but her plan didn’t allow for that.
Padding swiftly downstairs, Elswyth laid the rest of the straw at the foot of the stairs and set the burning broom on top of it, noting with satisfaction that smoke was already beginning to drift through the rear of the house.
She left by the front door, dusted off her hands, and, ignoring the stares of passersby, headed for Newgate Street and the market hall.
* * *
Graeham did enjoy his dream, for in it, Joanna was his wife. Not only that, but her belly was growing great with his child, their child. He’d never been happier.
They lived here in her house in West Cheap, or so it seemed in the beginning, but when Graeham opened the front door, expecting to confront the chaos of Wood Street, he instead found himself gazing upon the undulating landscape of Oxfordshire. The hills were a rich, damp green as far as his eyes could see, the sky so vibrantly blue that it made tears prick his eyes.
“Graeham!” came the distant, gravelly voice of a man.
Shielding his eyes, Graeham saw Lord Gui walking toward him, which surprised him at first until he realized—or remembered, because he must have known it, yes of course he knew it—that Joanna was the baron’s daughter, and with her hand in marriage he gained the Oxfordshire estate. He’d forgotten that, but it made everything so perfect, so wonderful. He needn’t settle for Phillipa; he could have Joanna instead.
“Graeham, it’s le Fever’s house,” Lord Gui said excitedly.
“Nonsense, it’s mine.” Graeham turned to admire his new manor house, dismayed to find it painted a garish red and blue. Still, although it might look like le Fever’s, it wasn’t; it was Graeham’s. Smoke plumed from the chimney—his chimney—staining the sky and stinging his nostrils. Manfrid was there, on the thatched roof. He was yowling, which he never did.
“Graeham!” cried Lord Gui in his strange, thick voice, farther away now. “Graeham, come quick!”
But he didn’t want to leave; he wanted to stay here with Joanna. They were lying together now, in bed, a feather mattress beneath them, white curtains enclosing them, adrift on gentle waves, blissfully naked. She kissed him, rolled him onto his back, sat over him, reached for him...
Yes.
Something landed on his chest, tickled his cheek, nudged his face with a cold, wet nose.
“Manfrid...Jesus, go away.” He slitted his eyes open, swatted groggily at the cat. Don’t wake me up...not now.
Manfrid butted him on his chin with his head, yowled in his ear.
“Manfrid, for pity’s sake.” Graeham sat up, grabbed the big tom by the scruff of his neck and tossed him off the bed.
Unusually bold, the cat jumped right back up, and then onto the windowsill, which was probably how he’d gotten in. “Now.”
Graeham raked his hair out of his face, vexed to have been awakened when his dream was taking such a promising turn. He reached for the window shutters to lock the cat out, and stilled.
Smoke. He smelled it, he saw it. Not woodsmoke, from a chimney, but...
“Jesus!” Smoke rose from the roof of Rolf le Fever’s house; flames ate away at the thatch. Oh, God, Joanna was in there. “No!”
He grabbed his crutch, vaulted out of bed, down the hall, through the back door. The crutch slowed him down. He hurled it aside and sprinted clumsily across the croft and into le Fever’s stable yard, his splinted leg throbbing with each step. Rose Oxwyke, standing in her garden, frantically crossed herself, over and over, as she gaped at the burning house.
Flames leapt in the solar; smoke poured from the window. “Joanna!” Graeham screamed.
“Graeham! Thank God.” Thomas, almost unrecognizable for the soot that coated him, appeared in the back door with an empty bucket, which he refilled from le Fever’s private well; his walking staff lay forgotten on the ground nearby. “They’re trapped up there. Both staircases are on fire and the roof’s giving way. They can’t even get to the windows.”
Oh, God. “Joanna!”
A furious pounding commenced from within the stable. “Let us out!”
Graeham snatched the bucket of water from Thomas and ran into the house, yelling, “Open the stable door. Byram can help.”
“Don’t go in there!” screamed Rose Oxwyke as Graeham hobbled into the smoky inferno. “You can’t help them. You’ll die, too.”
Panic seized Graeham as he stumbled, half-blind, into what seemed to be a hallway. “Joanna!” he screamed, choking on the smoke that issued from both the front and back of the house. It was thickest in back, where it billowed from the open door of a small room that was consumed in hellish flames, so he limped toward the front.
There was a staircase facing the front door; the bottom half of it and the floor beneath it were on fire. He doused the flames with water; they leapt back up. Dropping
the bucket, he cursed and stomped on them with his wooden-soled boots.
“Graeham!” Thomas called from behind.
“Here, by the front door!” Peering through the smoke, Graeham saw a leather curtain hanging in a doorway off the hall. He tore it down and threw it over the flames at the bottom of the stairs, but it wasn’t big enough or heavy enough to extinguish them. “Where’s Byram?”
“He wouldn’t come in.” Thomas coughed hoarsely. “Said it was suicide.”
“Damn!” A leper and a cripple trying to fight a raging house fire. “Is there another stairway?”
“Aye, I saw it earlier, but it’s in that room that’s on fire.”
“These stairs are our only hope, then.” Graeham returned to the room from which he’d stripped away the leather curtain. He squinted through the smoke, trying to determine whether he was seeing what he thought he’d seen.
Yes. The walls were lined with shelves, the shelves stacked with innumerable bolts of colorful silks. Graeham hefted an armload and carried them to the stairs.
“What are you doing?” Thomas asked as he stamped on the flames eating through the leather curtain. The rags wrapped around his feet were smoldering.
“Jesus, Thomas, get away from there! Your feet are on fire.”
“I can’t feel it,” the leper said with strange detachment.
“Here.” Graeham set the bolts of silk on the burning floor and the bottom few steps and headed back for more. “Help me. We need to smother the flames.”
Thomas saw what he was doing and helped, although he could only carry one bolt at a time. Laid on the burning steps, the densely wound bolts stifled the flames enough so that the two men could walk on them.
Graeham cursed his broken leg as he climbed the stairs, with Thomas right behind him, both struggling against their infirmities.
Graeham swore rawly when they got to the third level. The entire landing and the thatched roof above were on fire. In the midst of the flames, two blackened ceiling beams rested diagonally in front of the closed door, where they had fallen, further barring the way. Black smoke roiled overhead.
Lords of Conquest Boxed Set Page 30