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 sm
oky 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.
"Joanna!" Graeham screamed from the top of the stairs, then lapsed into a fit of coughing.
He barely heard her through the roar of the flames and the closed door. "Graeham?"
"Oh, God, Joanna!" She was alive!
"Graeham, go! You can’t help us."
"No! I’m not leaving you there. I’m coming in."
Another ceiling beam crashed down in front of them; sparks exploded; thatch rained down in burning clumps. Graeham backed up a step, flinching from the heat of the flames and the knowledge of what he had to do.
He had to clear a path into the solar and get them out.
There were three fallen beams blocking the way, and that door—closed, but, pray God, unlocked. And, of course, the flames that licked the floor, the walls, those beams...
If he made it through to the solar at all, he’d be massively burned.
"You’ll die," Thomas said.
"Most likely." But Joanna would live. Ada, too, but Graeham had fixed his thoughts on Joanna as a way of getting through this. He could do this. He would do this, for her.
Graeham sucked in a deep, steadying breath, but that only made him choke.
"You’ll never make it," Thomas said. "The pain will get to you."
"I’ve got to try!" he screamed. "Joanna’s in there!"
"I know." Thomas took off his straw hat and threw it down the stairs. He faced the burning landing with a look of determination, pulled the hood of his cloak down over his face.
Graeham grabbed the leper’s shoulder. "What are you—"
"I don’t feel pain—not in my arms and legs."
"But, Thomas—"
"I’m going blind, Graeham," he said, so quietly Graeham almost didn’t hear him.
"Thomas...Christ."
The leper smiled. "Wish me Godspeed."
Graeham squeezed Thomas’s shoulder and released it. "Godspeed, friend."
Thomas hesitated only momentarily before plunging into the flames and the smoke.
Graeham couldn’t watch; he closed his eyes, crossed himself. He heard a thud and a hiss of sparks. Opening his eyes, he saw Thomas moving through the flames like a dark ghost, having shoved the first burning beam out of the way. He grabbed the second with—
"Jesu! Thomas!"
— with his bare hands, his cloak on fire now—
"Thomas!"
— flames crawling up his legs, flickering over him as he threw the beam to the floor and seized the third—
Graeham muttered a prayer as Thomas, his cloak falling away in burning shreds, yanked on the door—
It opened. Thomas lurched into the solar, a living torch, and shrugged off the remains of his flaming cloak, but the rest of his clothes were on fire now, too, and his hair...
A woman screamed, and Graeham saw them through the curtain of flames on the landing, two dark forms on the floor amid the burning thatch and embers drifting down from above. They had a blanket over them. As Graeham watched, Joanna rose and threw the blanket over Thomas as he crumpled to the floor.
Graeham drew in a smoky lungful of air and held it, shielded his face with both arms and hobbled across the burning landing, wishing to God he could run. He felt the scorching heat of the flames, hot stings on his arms and back; by the time he entered the solar, his shirt was on fire. He whipped it off and threw it aside, grateful that his heavier braies were spared.
"Graeham, your hair!" Joanna whipped off her veil as she leapt to her feet and patted Graeham’s head with it.
There came a groan of splitting wood, followed by a thunderous crack as first one rafter, then another, came smashing down at the rear of the solar in a spray of sparks. A red hot ember landed on his bare shoulder; he flinched
"We’ve got to get out of here!" Looking around wildly, Graeham saw that the narrow bed against the wall was untouched by flames. Limping over to it, he hauled the mattress off, dragging it through the doorway and onto the landing. "Come on! We haven’t got long."
"Thomas can’t walk!" Joanna said. "Neither can Ada."
"I can make it," Ada said weakly, struggling to her feet. She looked so young, so frail, but very determined.
"Joanna, you help Ada," Graeham gasped out as he wrapped the listless Thomas in the blanket. "I’ll take care of Thomas."
"Leave me," Thomas moaned. His face was charred and blistered, his hair burned off.
"I can’t do that, friend." Hauling Thomas onto his shoulder, Graeham herded Joanna and Ada through the doorway, over the mattress and down the stairs, following with halting steps. From behind came a deafening crash, and another, as the roof of the solar caved in.
As they stumbled down the two flights of stairs, Graeham heard voices and the splashing of water. At the bottom, he found the front door open, and some of the neighborhood men throwing buckets of water on the fire.
The men helped them into the street, where they collapsed on the crumbling paving stones, gulping lungfuls of fresh air. Ada lay curled on her side, her eyes squeezed shut, coughing raggedly. Thomas lay still as death except for his chest, which rose and fell with every rattling breath.
Amid the mayhem of men running with buckets and shouting to each other, Graeham gathered Joanna in his arms, trembling in the wake of a tide of feeling that squeezed his throat until he could barely speak. "I was so afraid for you," he whispered into her hair, his voice hoarse, his heart pounding. "Oh, God, I..."
He mustn’t tell her, he knew, mustn’t give voice to that which he had no right to feel. He could offer her nothing, promise her nothing. To declare his feelings under the circumstances would be a cruel self-indulgence that would only end up hurting them both.
The knowledge that she had a right to the truth about Phillipa and Oxfordshire, that he was honor-bound to tell her, weighed heavily on him. He should tell her to her face, but he doubted he’d be able to summon the strength for that. The less painful—albeit more shameful— option would be to write her after he returned to Normandy.
She whispered something against his shoulder that he could barely hear over the chaos surrounding them. "I love you." Was that what she said, or was it merely what he wanted her to say, despite his better judgment?
He didn’t answer her, just held her tight, wishing he never had to let her go.
***
ROLF LE FEVER, strolling through the central aisle of the cavernous silk traders’ market hall, deserted for the midday dinner hour, thought he smelled smoke.
It was a common enough smell in London, what with the close-packed dwellings roofed in straw and reeds and lit with open flames. And if the weather was dry and the wind strong, a fire that might otherwise have consumed but one or two houses could sweep through the city with demonic speed, destroying whole wards before it was brought under control.
Rolf had been five years old the last time London had been ravaged by such a fire. For the next decade, his family had lived in the undercroft beneath the charred remains of what had once been one of the finest homes in London while his father worked at rebuilding his silk business—for every last bolt of his stock had burned up with the house. To be reduced to living in a cellar after knowing such prosperity had deeply shamed his parents, and the shame had rubbed off on him. As a boy, he used to dream of riches and respectability, of the grand life he would enjoy when he grew up and became a mercer himself—the fine house, the elegant clothes, the jeweled saddles and furnishings, and most important, the right kind of wife, a girl of noble blood.
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