BOLINGBROKE WAS frantic, and it showed in every nuance of voice and body. “You must get away from the Savoy, away from London!”
Lancaster turned away from his son and walked slowly to the window that overlooked the Strand.
People seethed up and down its entire length.
“Even had I wished to,” he said, turning back to look at his son, “I could not now escape past those below.”
“The Thames—”
“Is as crowded now as the Strand,” Lancaster said.
“Sweet Jesu,” Bolingbroke said, trying one last time. “The mob will shout your name, father.
They will take this approaching rabble as an excuse to commit whatever mischief they have dreamed about for years!”
“And my name—or the extinction of it—is at the top of this list?”
Bolingbroke’s face worked, and he half raised a hand, but he knew it was no good. Lancaster was right, it was too late to move now. “We can get you to the Tower,” he said.
Lancaster laughed. “You would shut me up with Richard? What better way to accomplish my murder, Hal?”
Bolingbroke looked distraught and Lancaster was instantly contrite. “Ah, lad, I am sorry. It is best this way. I would prefer to take my chances with the London mob any day. Besides, all this may blow over. By this time tomorrow, everyone may well be back in their homes and no harm done.”
“Not with a hundred thousand marching on the city,” Bolingbroke said. Not with Wat marching at their head. Damn him for what he had done!
“We have men here, Hal, and we are surrounded with good, solid walls.” It was Raby, walking forward from the corner where he’d been watching the other two silently. “And unless Richard’s advisers have completely lost their heads”—he faltered, nonplussed by his unconscious choice of such unfortunate words—”then they will have sent for aid from the Earl of Surrey, and others within a day or two’s march from London. Men who can raise a force sufficient to bring London back to its senses.”
“But until aid does arrive, London is so vulnerable,” Lancaster whispered, looking out the window again. “So vulnerable …”
He sighed, suddenly very tired and sad. “The world is turning upside down,” he said, “and I confess to not liking the change. Who would have thought the commons could so rise, or demand such freedoms?”
“It is foolish,” Bolingbroke said softly, “for they can never win. Change must be seduced, not
forced.”
Lancaster frowned at Bolingbroke, not understanding him. “Mary?” he said eventually. “And Margaret? What of them?”
Bolingbroke made a gesture of helplessness. “I tried to persuade them to leave when reports of the peasant uprising first came in. Mary refused, as did Margaret. She said that she would not leave Tom.”
“Then we must do what we can for them,” Lancaster said, and Raby murmured agreement.
“Sweet Jesu, Hal,” Lancaster continued, “I am so glad that Katherine still resides in the north—but, God, I wish I could see her one last time!”
Completely shocked, Bolingbroke stared at Lancaster. Until this moment he hadn’t realized his father was utterly resigned to his death at the hands of the mob.
He glanced at Raby, and saw that he also was staring in horror at the duke.
LATER, WHEN he’d left Lancaster, Bolingbroke spoke quietly to Robert Courtenay in the stables of the Savoy. They passed quick, urgent words before Bolingbroke took a ring from his finger and gave it to Courtenay.
“Show that,” he said. “They will let you past.”
“Christ Savior, I hope so,” Courtenay mumbled, looking at the ring with its distinctive Bolingbroke emblem of the head of a helmeted and visored knight.
“Remember the name,” Bolingbroke said.
“Yes. Wat Tyler. I know him, my lord. You need not keep reminding me.”
“Wat Tyler and his rebels are Tom’s only hope, Robert.”
“Aye, I know.” Courtenay looked at Bolingbroke with sympathy. The man had done everything he could to get Neville freed over these past two months; if he had not succeeded, then it was not through a lack of effort.
Bolingbroke clapped his hand on Courtenay’s shoulder. “Then go, man. Go!”
“Look after the Lady Margaret,” Courtenay said.
“Yes. Go!”
Courtenay stared at Bolingbroke for one moment longer, then he turned and vaulted onto the stallion behind him and gathered up the reins.
In the blink of an eye he was gone into the night.
CHAPTER VI
The Feast of St. Nicomedes
In the second year of the reign of Richard II
(Friday 1st June 1380)
— II —
COURTENAY RODE as fast as he dared through the press of people in the streets; the curfew bells had rung hours ago, but few had heeded them. The mayor of London would have some explaining to do, thought Courtenay as he urged his stallion past the crowds milling on Fleet Bridge, for once all this is done, Richard will surely demand the reasons why Wadsworth hadn’t done more the keep the Londoners under control He didn’t envy William Wadsworth one bit.
His horse’s hooves clattered and echoed as he passed under the great archway of Ludgate.
Once he was through, Courtenay glanced to his right where Blackfriars rose m a series of dark mounds humped against the night sky. He wondered what Tom was doing, if he had heard any of the news that had swept through London in the past day, or if he was staring out his tiny window across the Thames to the fields of Southwark, wondering at the number of boats plying their way downriver and the groups of people that must even now be congregating on the south bank of the Thames.
Courtenay had heard—along with everyone else—that the peasant bands which had converged on London had consolidated into two huge gatherings. The first group of some
forty thousand men, mostly from Essex, had descended on the city from the northeast and were camping in a restless mass in the fields of Mile End beyond Aldgate.
But Mile End was not where Courtenay was headed. He turned off the main streets where the crowds were thickest and rode south to Thames Street, which ran parallel with the river. From here he could find his way to the bridge and—assuming he could cross— to Southwark. From there it was a three mile ride east to where the sixty thousand-strong band of Kentish men had congregated: Blackheath.
And there, Courtenay hoped, he would be able to find Wat Tyler.
The crowds were thick and unruly even on Thames Street. Men and women milled the length of the street, carrying pikes, shovels or whatever other implements had come to hand. Most carried smoking torches, and their sputtering, leaping light shadowing across the high walls of the warehouses and shops gave the street a diabolical air, as if it was only waiting for that one, secret word before it exploded into murderous violence. Courtenay hoped those merchants who lived above their warehouses—mostly foreigners—had already made their escape.
On five or six occasions men reached out to grab at the bridle of Courtenay’s horse. Each time, they let his horse go when he shouted out Hal Bolingbroke’s name. Courtenay had taken the precaution of riding garbed in Bolingbroke’s livery and that, combined with the Bolingbroke name, proved enough to grant him safe passage—he did not have to produce Bolingbroke’s ring. The mob might murmur about the nobles in general, but Bolingbroke’s name still possessed its magic.
Courtenay knew his life depended on it continuing to do so.
London Bridge was a massive construction: nineteen stone arches resting on massive gravel-filled piers spanned the Thames River and its mudflats. Five- and six-story tenement buildings, warehouses, churches and shops completely covered the bridge’s surface, reducing passage across to a narrow tunnel that wound under and between the buildings and that even at noon had to be lit by torches. Courtenay could see now that lights and shouting people dangled from every window and foothold on the bridge and its supporting piers. It could have been a carnival scene had it not been for the dangerous undercurrents which roiled under the words of every man, woman and child.
A well-armed man stopped Courtenay at the entrance to the bridge, taking a firm hold on the bridle of Courtenay’s horse. At first glance, Courtenay thought him merely a member of one of the city’s watches, but, at second glance, realized he had an air of authority about him that spoke of greater things. Courtenay studied him more closely. The man was big, bulky with muscle, and wore a sword and several knives over his leather tunic. Underneath unruly gray-streaked hair his face was hard-angled and planed, his mouth narrow and uncompromising.
The man’s eyes slid over Bolingbroke’s livery, then up to Courtenay’s face.
“Why are you wearing Bolingbroke’s badge?” said the watchman.
“I am come on Bolingbroke’s business,” Courtenay said, and waited for the man’s hand to drop from his horse’s bridle.
If anything, the hand clenched tighter, and, uneasy, Courtenay’s stallion sidled a little.