He took the stool and battered at the door, but the stool splintered and crumpled into useless fragments of wood while the door remained intact.
Then he pounded at the door with his fists, screaming for someone to come to his aid.
But no one replied.
He stepped back, staring at the door, his shoulders heaving with the effort he’d put into his pounding and screaming.
“Curse you,” he whispered, and he did not truly know to whom or at what he cursed.
Then, just as he drew breath to renew his shouting, he heard a great crash on the floor above him. Neville’s eyes jerked up. The timber ceiling of his cell was still trembling with the force of whatever had been pushed over.
Then his eyes moved back to the door: men, many men, were pounding along the corridor outside. There were shouts and curses, screams and pleas, and Neville took a step backward and armed himself with one of the shattered legs of the stool.
Something banged violently into the door, and then the sounds of a man pleading—
screaming—for mercy. There were some grunts, and again the man was pounded against the door.
Neville had now backed up to the rear wall of his cell, his eyes riveted on the door.
The man pinned to the door shrieked, a thin animal sound of pure terror, and Neville heard the unmistakable sound of a knife being plunged again and again into flesh.
Every time it plunged through its victim’s body it scraped against the door.
Neville’s face hardened into the expressionless mask of the battle-hardened warrior. His eyes became flinty, his mouth thinned, and his hand hefted the jagged-edged leg of the stool.
He was not afraid, only angry at his helplessness.
Blood was now seeping under the door … and still the man shrieked, if more breathlessly than previously.
Some part of Neville’s mind registered that the man had been gut-stuck only: he was going to die, but he would be some time in the doing.
There were more footsteps, then voices—calmer than previously.
A jangling of keys, the sound of the dying, shrieking man being dragged to one side, and then the turning of a lock.
The door slowly swung open, and Neville raised his piece of wood.
And then lowered it, shocked.
Wat Tyler stood there, several men behind him. Tyler was marked with soot, and he had a shallow cut across his forehead.
His blue eyes burned brightly in a face tight with what Neville thought was fanaticism.
“Sweet Jesu, Wat,” Neville said in an almost whisper. “What do you here?”
“Saving you,” said Tyler, and then turned to take something from one of the men behind him—a peasant, Neville saw.
“Put this on,” Tyler said, and he handed Neville a roughly woven peasant’s cloak. “If you wander the streets wrapped in those fine clothes I cannot guarantee your life.”
Slowly, Neville reached out and took the cloak.
His eyes slid past Tyler to the Dominican friar slumped against the far wall of the corridor, his shrieks now reduced to a horrid wheezing. The man’s hands were clutched about his belly—
uselessly, for blood was pouring out—and Neville could see the ropes of bowel that bulged between the man’s fingers.
Tyler stepped forward and grabbed Neville by the arm, distracting him from the dying Dominican’s agony.
“The Savoy,” Tyler said.
“Margaret!” Neville said.
IN A distant part of the Blackfriars complex, a man dressed in a peasant’s tunic and cloak slipped quietly from a side door and, slowly and carefully, made his way to the outskirts of
London and the road north.
Two miles along the road, and at the top of a small hillock, Prior General Thorseby paused to look back on London.
Smoke rose in columns from the city, and even from this distance the glow of the fires showed clearly over the city walls.
“For the moment you might be safe, Neville,” Thorseby whispered, “and think yourself escaped from justice … but there is no escape from the justice of God!”
And with that he turned and strode northward toward safer lodgings.
CHAPTER VIII
Tern, on the Saturday within
the Octave of Corpus Christi
In the second year of the reign of Richard II
(9 a.m. 2nd June 1380)
— II —
“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” Neville asked Tyler as they ran through the corridors of Blackfriars.
Men—both rural peasants and Londoners—seethed through the buildings of the friary; Neville counted at least eight bodies of friars before they ran into the courtyard of the complex, and ten or twelve more lying blood-drenched outside. Smoke was wafting through the air, and as Neville glanced over his shoulder at the main huddle of buildings within Blackfriars he could see that many of them were ablaze.
“Judgment Day come early for these carrion,” Tyler said. They were now jogging along the lane that led north to Fleet Street.
“Tyler?” Neville said, almost growling. “What is happening?”
“Revolution, rebellion, freedom struggling out of the grave where your precious Church and fellow nobles have had it pinned for too many centuries,” Tyler replied. “Call it what you will, for I no longer care.”
“This is your fault!”
Tyler halted and whipped about to face Neville. “This is not my fault. It is the fault of all those who thought the good men and women of England should have been so ground into the mud.
My ‘fault’ has only been to speak the words that have raised men from their servitude in order to fight for their freedom.”
“God help you,” Neville whispered.
Tyler gave a bitter laugh. “God will never help such as me. Now, come, I want none of your prating about rights and wrongs while the Savoy burns about your wife’s ears!”
“Jesu! The Savoy is burning?” Neville pushed past Tyler and ran with all his strength toward Fleet Street, Tyler only a step behind him.
The streets were crowded with city-folk and peasants alike, and once Neville and Tyler turned westward along Fleet Street they were reduced to pushing and shoving and cursing in order to make their way through. Smoke and ash from scores of fires—all warehouses, palaces or monasteries—had settled in a gray, choking cloud over the city, and Neville had to pull the hood of his cloak close about his face so he could breathe. Even so, his breath was more a choking and sobbing than anything else.
Every few steps Tyler gave him an impatient shove in his back, and Neville realized that Tyler was as desperate to get to the Savoy as he was himself.
They should have been able to cover the distance along Fleet Street, through Ludgate, and then southwest along the Strand to the Savoy in ten minutes at the longest at a run… but they could not run, not in this city choking with rioters and smoke and fire and fear.
“We should have taken the river!” Neville shouted as they battled their way across the Fleet River bridge. Before them, on their left, many of the buildings within the Temple complex were burning fiercely.
Tyler shrugged, and pushed Neville forward yet again.
The sight and smell of the destruction left Neville dry-mouthed with fear for Margaret. The mob was venting its anger on anything and anyone who they thought had hurt them… and if
there was one noble the commons hated more than any other it was Lancaster, who they mistakenly believed had always conspired against Edward III and the Black Prince.
The Savoy, and any in it, were now about to pay the price for the malicious and ill-founded rumors about Lancaster.
“Why can’t you stop them?” Neville screamed as they finally gained the Strand.
“Not even God Himself could have stopped this lot,” Tyler said, finally managing to move abreast of Neville.
At that instant, both men caught sight of the Savoy, still some hundred paces away.
It was wreathed in thick, black smoke, and tongues of blue and orange flames flickered out of its windows.
“See the bastard Lancaster burn!” screamed a gap-toothed and filthy man to Neville’s right, and without even thinking, Neville smashed his fist into the man’s face.
He gave a grunt of surprise and crashed to the ground where he vanished almost in-stantly among the feet of the mob about him.
No one took any notice of Neville’s actions. This was a day to indulge in violence, after all.
Tyler wasted no time in words or recriminations. He grabbed Neville and pulled him down a laneway leading to a narrow path along the riverbank.
The press of bodies, if not of smoke and ash, cleared almost immediately, and both men broke into a run, dashing down the laneway then turning to their right to run along the path beside the Thames.
MARY HAD spent the previous night with Margaret and Agnes while Bolingbroke watched, with Lancaster’s men, from the parapets. While all three women had gone to bed concerned about the unrest, none of them had ever imagined that violence would have enveloped them so quickly or with such murderous intent. They’d been drifting out of a fitful sleep in the hour after dawn when there had sounded the sudden noise of voices and feet in the street. The women had barely managed to rise and wrap themselves in shawls and cloaks before the mob had invaded the Savoy.