Terrified, they huddled behind the hangings of the great bed, certain that once the mob had done with their murdering and looting they would return to rape them.
Shouts and clattering footsteps sounded in some distant part of the palace before, horrifyingly, drawing closer to the chamber where the women cowered. There was a scuffle outside the door and then the sound of fighting—a cacophony of clashing steel, shouts, curses and the grunts of the combatants. It went on for what seemed like hours, but which was probably only minutes, before there came a nightmarish scream of splintering wood as, Margaret supposed, the great wooden dresser containing pewter plate and stoneware standing against the outer wall of their chamber crashed to the floor. A man shrieked, his cry dying to a horrifying gargle, which was abruptly cut off, and then the noise of the fighting faded as both intruders and defenders moved further into the palace.
Unsure if Lancaster and his men had managed to repel the mob, or had been repelled themselves, Margaret, Mary and Agnes nevertheless breathed a little easier. At least they were safe for the moment from the savage anger of the invaders.
But as they relaxed away from their fright, a more terrifying ordeal began. Somewhere in the palace a fire had taken hold, and now smoke trickled under the doorway in an ever-increasing thick blanket. Once under the door, the smoke rose, as if under the guidance of some evil enchantment, toward the low ceiling of the chamber. In its own quiet, silent way, the smoke was far more terrifying—and far more lethal—than the previous clash of steel beyond the chamber. No cloth placed against the crack between door and floor was able to prevent its insidious entrance—smoke filtered through every joint and minute crack between the door and its frame, and within minutes the three women and the child were coughing and hacking in the fumes.
There was no escape. More scared of choking to death than of encountering the mob, Margaret and Agnes tried to open the door so they could escape. But it was outward opening, and now would not budge—the ruins of the dresser had clearly fallen directly across the doorway.
They beat against the door with their fists, screaming (amid their choking) for aid … but the only reassurance that reached them was the growing sound of crackling flames, and a spreading heat across the wooden panels of the door. They retreated to attack the window, but the glass was heavy and thick and the leading old and rigid, and in any case, the windows had never been designed to be opened.
There was nowhere for the smoke to go, but to roil in ever-crazier eddies about the chamber, and there was no escape for the four trapped within the chamber.
Eventually Margaret and Agnes, coughing and choking, rejoined Mary and Rosalind, huddling in the farthest corner of their chamber in a futile effort to escape the effects of the smoke.
Margaret touched Mary’s cheek in ineffectual reassurance, and took Rosalind into her arms, hugging the sobbing child tight against her breast.
The sound of the spreading, roaring fire and of the cracking timbers in the massive roof above them deepened their dread with every moment that passed.
How soon before the roof collapsed?
No longer did they fear that the mob might return to rape them—at this point the women would have welcomed the return of anyone. All they cared about were their lives, and the lives of their children—Rosalind, and the unborn children that both Margaret and Mary were carrying. All they wanted to do was to escape, to live, but they did not know how they might manage it.
Suddenly there was a massive explosion, and all three of the women cried out. The great window in the chamber had shattered in the heat, discharging shards of glass throughout the room.
Both Agnes and Margaret felt splinters slice into their scalps, but the wounds were flesh-hurt only, and they brushed the glass away with shaking hands, drawing in great gulps of the fresh air that rushed through the broken panes.
“Can we escape—?” Agnes began, coughing a little.
“No,” Margaret said. “There is nothing but a drop of thirty feet or more outside that window.”
“Then thank Jesu that at least we have air to breathe,” Mary said in a low voice. “Aye,”
Margaret said, “but that will be of no comfort to us if we cannot escape the flames.”
She was about to say more, but at that moment the smoke thickened as it rushed toward the opening in the window, and all the woman found themselves choking anew. Margaret clutched the material of her shawl to her nose and mouth in a futile effort to breathe a little easier, then dropped the material as she realized that Rosalind was coughing badly.
She leaned over her daughter, thinking to lift her up toward the window, when there was a sudden screech beyond the door as someone dragged heavy wood aside. Margaret froze, half sitting, half standing, and Rosalind cried out. Margaret hushed her, then strained her stinging, watering eyes in the direction of the door.
She heard a harsh scraping as someone pushed the door open, and then the sound of a footfall, and of a man coughing as smoke poured through the doorway and into the chamber before rushing toward the shattered window. “My lady? Margaret?”
Margaret opened her mouth to speak, but she was so relieved to hear Courtenay’s familiar, trusted voice in the midst of this nightmare that she found herself crying instead, unable to form words in her throat and mouth. “My lady?”
It was Rosalind who raised her voice—a desperate, gagging cry that brought Courte-nay at a half run across the chamber.
He had a damp linen wrapped about his face, and Margaret sank to her knees in flight, even though she had recognized his voice.
“My lady,” Courtenay rasped, and grabbed at Margaret’s arm. “You must get out of here, now!”
He dragged Margaret to her feet, then reached down for Mary. Agnes was already standing and dragging at Mary by the thin material of her nightgown.
Courtenay cursed, not caring that Mary whimpered at the sound, and aided by Agnes, pushed the other two toward the door. Both Margaret and Mary came to their senses almost immediately, clashing through the dim outline of the door which suddenly loomed before them and into the corridor that led to the main stairwell of the palace and the courtyard.
“Bolingbroke?” Margaret said as she felt Courtenay take her arm and pull her along the corridor.
“I don’t know,” Courtenay said. “There’s been righting… I broke away… ran to find you …”
Mary whimpered, and Agnes wrapped an arm about the woman’s shoulders, urging her forward.
“Outside, away from the fire,” she said, “and then we shall see to your husband.” The corridor was empty save for the smoke, and they reached the stairwell relatively easily and fumbled their way down, leaning on the walls for guidance as the smoke thickened.
The walls were almost too hot to touch.
Margaret began to cry. Now that they were close to escape she began to fear that they would not reach it after all; that the smoke would choke them, or the flames would finally consume them. Rosalind was writhing so violently in her arms that she did not think she would be able
to hold on to her for much longer. The child within her was wriggling desperately as well, twisting her off-balance as she fought her way down the stairs.
Between the two, and her own terror, Margaret suddenly believed that she was going to die, that everything was in vain, that the entire world was dying, and that the angels even now were reaching out to judge her.
Her foot missed a step, slipped, and suddenly Margaret was falling. She had no time nor breath to scream, merely to register the thought that she was, finally, going to die, and take Rosalind with her into that dying, when a dark shadow rose before her, and she fell, not to dash herself against the flagstones, but into the arms of a man crying out her name. It was so unexpected that she could not for the moment comprehend what had happened. She thought the man spoke with Tom’s voice, but how could that be, for was he not stilled locked up in Thorseby’s black house of God?
“Margaret,” the man said, and Margaret realized that, indeed, it was Tom, and she collapsed against him, crying and sobbing his name, and thinking that she would never, never again as long as she lived love him as much as she did that moment.
He swept her and their daughter into his arms, and she was safe … safe … safe and being carried out of this burning hell into the courtyard where the smoke still swirled, but not with the viciousness that it had inside.