He bent and wrung out a cloth in the hot water, and scrubbed at his face. “Ah, Lord Jesus Christ, that is good!”
Courtenay took another cloth in hand, wet it and soaped it well, and washed down Neville’s back and legs. “At least you have not succumbed to an infestation of lice, my lord.”
“Hush, Robert. If Thorseby hears of my escape he shall send a pailful of them down!”
Courtenay laughed, and for a few minutes neither spoke as they washed away the grime of Neville’s two months incarceration. Then Neville sat on a stool and allowed Courtenay to take the razor and cut his hair, and trim his beard back close to his cheeks and chin.
“Robert,” he said quietly, catching Courtenay’s eye and then looking to where the shadow still shifted beyond the door. “What news? I am as starved of news as I am of fresh air and my wife’s love.”
“My lord, where to start?”
“At home, Robert, then move outward.”
“Aye, my lord. Well…” Courtenay paused as he clipped away carefully at Neville’s chin, “my Lady Margaret tells me that my Lady of Hereford is with child.”
“Mary? Ah, that is news that will gladden Hal’s heart.”
Courtenay shrugged. Bolingbroke had been smiles and cheer when Courtenay had heard him discuss Mary’s pregnancy, but Courtenay had thought there was something artificial about Bolingbroke’s cheerfulness. Ah well, who was he, a bachelor, to judge the words of a husband?
“Lancaster has been ill with a late-winter chill,” Courtenay said, turning his mind from Bolingbroke, “and with missing his lady wife.”
“{Catherine still lingers in the north?”
“Aye. Raby also has spent some five weeks in the north seeing to his affairs.” Courtenay grinned. “He is back in London now … and it is said that his wife Joan again grows big with child.”
Neville laughed. “Poor Joan!” Then he sobered. “But Lancaster …” “It is only a chill, my lord,
and he recovers well.” “Good. And Bolingbroke?”
“Missing you sorely, my lord, and has been beyond grief that he cannot save you.” Courtenay hesitated, and Neville waited.
“Bolingbroke has spent hours haunting Richard’s court,” Courtenay finally continued,
“begging and threatening whoever he is able to come to your aid.” “He has not put himself in danger with Richard, surely.” “He would have done so, my lord, save that Lancaster sent Raby to forcibly return Bolingbroke to the Savoy. My lord, be sure that if there was a way you might have been freed, then Bolingbroke would have found it.”
Neville nodded, thinking of all that Courtenay was not saying. Bolingbroke would have ranted and raved, and only Lancaster’s cautious hand would have kept him from storming Blackfriars to release Neville.
And Richard’s ill-will would have stayed Bolingbroke’s hand in every other way. Neville sighed. Bolingbroke would be frantic with both worry and frustration, knowing that if he so much as looked at Blackfriars when riding by it might give Richard the excuse he needed to accuse Bolingbroke of treason.
And I must be more than careful what I say when brought before Thorseby, Neville thought as he tilted his head to one side to allow Courtenay to chip away at his left jaw, for everything that comes from my mouth will be reported to Richard who will try and trap Bolingbroke through my words.
“There was a great celebration held on May Day,” Courtenay continued, “when our blessed king rode in state through the streets.”
Neville caught Courtenay’s eye and grinned—”our blessed king” indeed! “I heard,” Neville said, “although I could not see. This window overlooks nothing but a bare patch of the Thames.”
“There has been news from France,” Courtenay said. “Aye?”
“Hotspur has closed the pincers of his army about Orleans, and some say he will take it for Richard within the month.” “What have the French done?”
“Little, my lord. There have been rumors that the maid Joan has been urging Charles to march south, but that the man has found a thousand different reasons to delay thus far.”
Neville grunted. God Himself would have trouble frightening Charles into action. “And there have been troubling reports from Essex and Kent, my lord.” Neville’s eyes jerked upward.
“What reports?”
Courtenay’s eyes flickered to the doorway, and Neville barely managed to keep his frustration under control. Damn these listening ears.
“London is abuzz with rumor,” Courtenay said, finally wiping clean the razor and packing it away: he would have to show it to the guards on his way out to prove he hadn’t left a potential weapon with Neville. “Rumors of what?”
“Of bands of angry men, talking strange words of freedom from servility.” Neville waited as Courtenay searched for the right and careful combination of words.
“It is said,” Courtenay said, handing Neville his clean underclothes, “that these men speak of marching on London to present their grievances to good King Richard.”
Neville stared at his squire, understanding the words, but not knowing the deeper meaning that Courtenay wanted to convey.
His squire returned Neville’s stare in full measure. “Many good folk are terrified,” Courtenay said carefully, “of the inevitable chaos of looting and burning should the mob invade London.
My lord Bolingbroke is very concerned about the traitors and the murderers that might be set free.”
Neville nodded, slowly drawing on his underclothes while he thought. If this mob did come to London, then the opportunity would be there for every scoundrel to use the ensuing chaos to garner for himself what he would.
And Neville had no doubt that Blackfriars would be one of the first places attacked.
By the most friendly of scoundrels, of course.
He almost smiled, then thought of the greater implications and jerked to his feet. “Sweet Jesus, Robert! Get Margaret and Rosalind out of the city! If this is as bad as you suggest, then—”
“I will do my best, my lord, but your lady wife will probably refuse to leave without you.”
Neville grabbed Courtenay by the shoulders. “Robert—”
“I will do my best, my lord!”
And with that Neville nodded, trying to put out of his mind a vision of Margaret and Rosalind being trampled under the pounding feet of an out-of-control mob, or burning to death as the rebels set fire to the city.
“Enlist the aid of Bolingbroke,” Neville said. “If Bolingbroke can’t get Margaret to leave, then
no one can.”
Now Courtenay nodded, and held out Neville’s tunic. “Come, my lord, you cannot go to meet your accusers dressed only in your underpants.”
Neville did not manage to raise even the smallest of smiles.
CHAPTER III
The Tuesday and Wednesday within
the Octave of Corpus Christi
In the second year of the reign of Richard II
(29th and 30th May 1380)
THE MOOD OF rural England was grim but still, barely, controllable.Tyler thought it like a dark lake with seething undercurrents—apparently calm, but likely to explode into uncontrollable fury at any moment.
He, as all of his, had been laying the seeds for this uprising for years, but Tyler had never thought the uprising might grow beyond his control… and that thought terrified him.
Since he’d arrived in Barming some nine days ago events had moved swiftly. From Barming, men and whispers had spread like twisting carp through the still waters of peasant England.
The whispers, the call to action, had rippled out from other villages, too, for many of Tyler’s cousins and kin had been waiting for the mind-thought from him, and were ready to agitate the waters.
The two tax collectors who arrived in Barming seven days ago had not left. Their corpses were even now feeding the fishes in their breeding ponds.
They were not the only two to die. Other tax collectors lay rotting in field and furrow across Essex, Surrey, Sussex and Suffolk.
Peasant men began to band together into their tens, then their scores, and then their hundreds. At first they milled about their home fields, then, as their numbers grew, moved more purposefully toward major towns and cities.
Where lay more tax collectors, and the men who directed them.
As men banded together both their sense of resentment and their sense of purpose grew stronger. The poll tax had been the final burden—the indignity that would set the dark waters rolling out of the lake in a great, destructive tidal wave—but it was not the only grievance. The commons of England realized that this might be their only chance to force their overlords to grant them the same rights and freedoms under law that the nobles and clerics enjoyed.
So, as these growing bands of pike- and stave-wielding men murmured and rumbled their ways down the lanes and roads of the home counties, they added other objectives to the initial intention to voice their grievance about the poll tax. They remembered the deeds and documents stored in courts and manor houses by which their overlords claimed the legal right to bond them to the soil. They remembered the weeks and months they had to spend working their lords’ lands when they could more profitably have been working their own.