Chapter Eighteen
The snow had continued to bleed from the clouds, a wafting and wavering whiteness that swallowed sound and blurred sight, smothering even smell and sense. Mounted and swathed within their cloaks, Richard and Thomas rode into the twilit mists as they headed for the Ludgate and into the city. Late on a Thursday afternoon and bleak with midwinter on the snow-swept doorstep of Christmas Eve, there was little life in the streets and those few souls wading the banked ice, were scurrying homewards. The cathedral bells chimed five, each note falling flat, muffled by snowfall. Richard and Thomas rode slow, their horses skidding on the icy cobbles as they kept close to the curve of the river. At the Bridge, empty of traffic with the shops along the roadside closed, candlelight just a faint flicker behind the upper windows.
Riding, heads lowered, beneath the portcullis, they crossed into Southwark and headed due east. Through the narrow lanes lined with brothels, bear pits, taverns and inns there was more noise and more celebration, men raising their cups to the king’s health and the hope of a Christmas blessing, The bear pits were closed and empty but the taverns were squashed, wall to wall, and in spite of the freeze, every alehouse door was open. A hundred voices singing, and not one in tune. The clank of cup to cup and the stamp of feet on floorboards, and then on wet cobbles. Someone falling, and another blast of raucous laughter. Finally the singing turned to shouting and the lanterns blazed high behind each door. But Richard and Thomas kept riding. They spoke little, for the wind blasted their faces and filled their eyes and mouths. Once Richard called, “We stop at Eltham.”
“You know an inn?” Thomas called back. “I’d choose to avoid the palace.”
“The Fighting Cock, on the road up to Bexley Heath,” Richard answered. “Another few miles, but we’ll be there before midnight.”
“Black Heath first,” shouted Thomas over the wind. “Dangerous enough in this dark storm.”
It was now a winter’s pitch with the stars a reminder of half-forgotten beauty behind the clouds and the squall. “Black heath won’t trouble us. We ride fast and stop for nothing,” Richard told him. “Once over the heath, the inn is the first lantern light bringing us back to warm beds, spiced wine and a fire. Tomorrow we face Bexley Heath in full daylight.”
Tangled bush, thorn, gorse along the ridges of tumbling slopes faded into dark shapelessness beneath the galloping hooves as the men avoided the wide road leading to Eltham Palace. “Let our good king enjoy his grand Christmas planning vengeance on the wife he now believes trapped and tricked him,” Richard told the stars. “But he can mutter and plead his own innocence to someone else and not to me this night.”
Yet once the Fighting Cock, its chimney spitting dark smoke against the white flurries, rose up on the horizon, both men slowed, reigned in their horses and clattered into the well swept courtyard of the largest inn between the heaths and Dover.
Thomas stamped snow from his boots as he hurried into the bright warmth within. “Thank the Lord,” he said under his breath. “Food. Bed. Dreams of summer and a girl in my arms.”
“We eat first and straight to bed,” Richard answered. “Sleep deep, then a call at dawn. Break fast and directly onto the road heading southeast.”
“Delicious,” Thomas said, pressing closer to the fire. “I might have known we’d be up before the first cock crow.”
“Does any cockerel have the effrontery to crow in this weather?” He smiled faintly. “I doubt even owls fly on such a night.”
Thomas sighed. “I do sometimes wonder, Richard, if you are quite insane.”
Richard ordered spiced wine, cold meats, cheese, bread and hot pies if any were left that late in the kitchens. He turned, smiling suddenly, to Thomas. “I think it likely,” he said. “Inherited from my wretched father, perhaps. A condition which is certainly deteriorating. You have, I presumed, noticed the full moon tonight.”
“What little can be seen behind thick clouds and this blasted storm.”
“It spies on us, blizzard or none, my friend. The night of the full moon is when the lunatic is smitten by luna-blaze.”
“The only thing blazing this night is, hopefully, the fire in our bedchamber,” said Thomas, reaching for the bread and cheese. With elbows and a dusting of snow from shoulders and boots, they had secured a small table and stools by the hearth. “And tomorrow I look forward to a cross-country chase in the depths of the nastiest Christmas weather for years. We hardly needed the Bridge in London for the river was well-nigh solid ice.”
“You can go skating for Epiphany, my friend.” Richard nodded to the man who brought the jug of spiced wine, holding up his cup. “In the meantime, we’ve a long journey in the opposite direction.”
“Because,” sighed Thomas, hands to his aching back, “everything must be exactly as you plan it, Dickon.”
Richard raised an eyebrow. “Naturally. Had you doubted it? Do you object?”
Thomas shook his head, his mouth full of crumbs. “Never. So take me to bed, and then you can dream of the girl you’re chasing, and wish you had between the sheets instead of me.” He thought of something else, swallowed and added, “And tomorrow is Christmas Eve, I believe. What a time to be scouring the dales and heaths. I should be before the alter at St. Paul’s, taking Mass.”
“Succumbed to Protestantism at last, Tom?”
Thomas looked around and lowered his voice. “On the surface, yes. Why not? I’ve no wish to end my life in the fire. And the damned king didn’t invent the Protestant religion, it’s been around in Belgium, Flanders and Germany for long enough. The king’s version is simply Catholicism with himself as Pope.”
“The queen,” Richard murmured into his cup, ‘knows more of religion than her charming husband. He, as you say, changed only what could bring him the wealth of the monasteries tumbling into his coffers.”
“So you’ll wait while I take Christmas Eve Mass somewhere along the route tomorrow night?”
Richard shrugged. “Am I such a tyrant that you doubt me? But by then we may have caught up with our quarry, and much will depend on what we find.”
The best bedchamber, empty on a day of little passing custom, was quickly claimed, a small fire to be lit and a hot brick placed beneath the blankets. It was already a snug sizzle when the two men undressed, throwing their clothes to the floor before the hearth, and their boots placed out in the corridor for the boot-boy to dry and clean. Richard turned his back, stretched, and closed his eyes. His voice was soft in the shadows as the fire’s dying embers sparked and the last ripple of flame shrank, turning the inside of his eyelids from golden to black.
“We are only one day behind,” he said to the darkness. “She may ride well, but they must assuredly travel slower. They must stop for the night sooner, they must pay for her separate chamber alone and not in their company, and they must therefore rise later. If I ride faster, stop later and rise earlier, then by tonight I shall join their troop, and that will be long before they reach the danger of whoever waits at Dover.”
Thomas mumbled, half asleep. “Had you told her of your feelings before, my sweet foolish friend, then she might not have leapt alone into such danger.”
“To suddenly discover her father, whom, strangely, it appears she loves, is alive when she thought him long dead? A woman of courage, accustomed to travel without support or entourage, would ride out directly without waiting for a man she hardly knows.”
“She’d have brought the message immediately to you.”
“You do not know her, Tom,” Richard replied, his voice sinking further into the silence. “Jemima has led a life of consistent and involuntary change, a series of mothers who disappeared as soon as she learns to love them, a father named pirate and villain by the world and rarely at home, a cousin she dislikes and distrusts and no other soul to trust except her nurse.” His eyes suddenly flicked open. “The Nurse Katherine,” he murmured. “Now, I wonder if I should have brought her with us after all.”
Daylight did not bring
the clarity they had hoped for and the two men waited only for a simple breakfast before apologising to their reluctant mounts, and riding once again into the whistle of the storm.
Hoods down, heads almost to their horses’ manes, they rode into the white swirl and the howl of the wind. Little could be seen beyond the bluster. Bexley Heath was a wild blur, white against white and the slash of battering gales. Because of the slashing ice in their faces and the glowering clouds obscuring light, it was only with watering eyes beneath their hoods that they found the road to follow. And so it was as they crossed the heath, faces cutting through the snow, unspeaking and unaware, that they did not immediately see the small group of men waiting behind the trees.
It was movement which alerted him. Richard slowed, staring, eyes narrowed, through the shadows. For one moment of hope, he thought it a small herd of deer searching for shelter, but immediately he knew it was not. The group moved again, and this time it was heading fast and directly for them. The snow reflected on steel.
Richard yelled, “Stop, turn,” and wheeled his horse around. Thomas, bewildered, obeyed. The horses skidded on ice. Richard had drawn his sword and rode directly for the shadows. But the oncoming line split, dividing, until each individual darkness became a galloping man hurtling from the trees.
Ten men against two. “Damnation,” Richard yelled. “There’re on us. Too late to escape. Tom, by me. We have to fight.”
His mount wheeled, a bow wave of snow scattering upwards into the oncoming faces. Steel on steel and a flash of sudden reflection, snow-white dazzle, sword thrust, parried and thrust again. Richard heard Thomas shouting, saw nothing but the man snarling into his face, and spun once more, turning his horse and slashing sideways with a circular sweep of one blade against four. The snarling man screamed and tumbled from his horse. It twisted, confused and frightened, snorting the misting steam of its breath as it dragged its dead rider, caught by the stirrup, head bouncing and then trampled.
Three other riders closed in to the right and left. Richard felt the weight of blows on his shoulder and his arm but stood upright in the stirrups, bent forwards and angled his own blows, turning defence to attack. He saw another man fall, his sword through the eye. His horse squealed and reared, then crashed back to earth and snow, hooves heavy on the dying man’s chest and groin. This was a horse once trained to battle. As Richard’s sword sang, the horse bit. The third man swayed, lost the saddle, and tipped, rolling first before lying bloodied and still.
There was no time to count the numbers in the skirmish, and no time to look for Thomas. Another man fell. Not Thomas. He saw that. Richard swung his sword again and then again, never still, never safe, parrying the blades he could see and those he only imagined. Speed blinded blade. For a moment he thought he heard a woman’s voice and stared behind. The sword came from the other side, from low and thrusting up, cutting immediately through cloak, coat, doublet, shirt and undershirt, slicing between his ribs. Giddy and nauseas, Richard sliced back with the full force of a well-trained shoulder and saw the awkward tumble, legs askew, mouth wide and coughing blood, the steel between the panting lips, crushing teeth and puncturing the throat.
Richard swung away. He yelled for Thomas and there was no reply beyond the relentless noise of chaos and battle. But he saw another dark shadowed body slump from the horse’s back to the ground and lie still. Someone else had killed and there was only Thomas to have done it. So Richard spurred again into the great black muddle of crashing, skidding man and horse, and thrust his sword straight before him. His steel slid through flesh and grated on bone. He kicked, felt his boot hard against another leg, and heard the groan. Lurching, he ducked, avoiding the sudden blade from his left, turned and glimpsed the other blade from his right.
He felt nothing at first and did not know he had been cut. Then the sounds began to fade around him, a strangely disembodied gurgling which might, he thought, have been his own. He heard the hoarse cursing of someone nearby. Then even the sounds of hooves, the breathless gasping, the clash and thud, drifted into the clouds as though they were all echoes from the past. Hot blood on ice sizzled suddenly like a boiling kettle. Then as Richard hovered between reality and dream, the pain began to seep back and he realised, as if from a distance, that he was hurt. It seemed a shame, momentarily, to die when the journey had only just begun. But he knew himself absurdly outnumbered. He simply wished that Thomas would somehow survive.
The pain crept deeper. The whiteness turned to blackness and the dark became darker. The turmoil of attack drifted into insignificance, and then there was nothing at all. The snow received him.
He woke to silence. The hush of emptiness and the blanketing snow surrounded him, with only the rustle of a low wind in the branches above. No visible sun nor rising moon whispered at how long it was before he woke. Lying face down in ice with snow in his mouth and pain leaping through his body, he rolled over, and gazed into the soft steam from his horse’s nostrils, nudging gently at the side of his face, wet nibbles to wake him with the concern of a parent for its child. Richard grunted into the horse’s hot breath, and grabbing at its bridle, hauled himself up. He was entirely alone. An empty sky through a tangle of bare black lace branches seemed to have swallowed the world and only he and his horse remained.
Ignoring the dizzy scramble in his head, Richard staggered up and set off, half stumbling and clutching his horse’s reins, to search for Thomas and some sign of what had happened. He explored the surrounding copse, the perimeters of the field, and what he could see of road and hedge beneath crusted white banks. Each movement brought pain, warning him of whatever wounds, as yet unknown, he had sustained, but the search for Thomas, and for understanding, came first.
Spread in dark silhouette across the muddied wastes, bodies lay abandoned. Thomas was not one of them. The dead were all unknown to him, although he assumed he had killed half of them himself. Churned, rutted and scuffed by feet and hooves, the ground beneath the sprawled corpses told its story of fight and escape. One horse wandered, ambling lost between the far trees. Its shadow lingered, but it was not Thomas’s horse. Richard’s own horse trotted peacefully at his side. Its saddle bags were untouched and it was unscathed. Then he began the other exploration, this time for his own injuries.
He felt the scab of frozen blood just above his waist where a sword had gouged between his ribs, the weeping pain at the base of his jaw where the edge of a knife had sliced through flesh, leaving an open wound, and a crushing pain at the back of his head which he imagined was the blow that had unhorsed and concussed him. In the shadows, he had then been unseen, hidden by tree stumps and the milling horses. He was therefore both alive and free but he could find no trace of what had happened to Thomas.
The seven bodies of the slain thieves had been rifled, their boots taken and any swords, knives and other weapons they had carried, but no one had bothered to dig in frozen ground to bury their companions, and the remains were left for badgers, foxes and birds to scavenge, a welcome feast in the depths of winter. Richard turned away. The day, he thought, was ebbing into early evening. Not night yet, but many hours lost. The cold brought a numb easing of his injuries and the echoes returned of what he had heard as he lost consciousness many hours before. He leaned against his horse’s flanks and let those words drift back into his memory.
They had been voices both recognisable, and unknown.
“Your name?” someone had growled.
Someone else, “What difference?”
The first voice again. “You seen his fancy clothes? This is some wealthy bugger worth a ransom, and I mean to claim it. He’s not got nothing on him worth more than a few sovereigns. I could claim a hundred pound on a ransom.”
“And end up in Newgate.”
“The bastards have killed six of ours.” A woman’s voice, though gruff and hoarse. “And his partner’s got away. Kill the prick.”
“No.” The sound of a blow. “Quick, fool. What’s your name?”
It wa
s Thomas’s voice which had whispered, “Tom Dunn. A lawyer. Nobody.”
A thump, as of kicking, and Thomas grunting. The first voice again, “You lie to me, you bastard, and I’ll flay you alive and boil what’s left for supper. So talk. If you’re not worth a ransom, you’ll die now.”
And finally Thomas, half groan, “I’m Richard. Richard Wolfdon.”
“Never heard of you. What’s your kin?”
The last words faded out. “Dickon the Bastard. Everyone’s heard of me.”
The words wheeled like eagles over a battlefield. Now Richard sighed, swung around, thrust one aching leg over his horse’s back and tumbled into the saddle. Most of all he knew he now needed a doctor, food and a warm bed, but what interested him most was the discovery of his friend and the continuance of his journey.
His jaw hurt like hell, but he smiled as he trotted through the snow slush and down to the road again. All his life, he acknowledged silently, he had been a man of pragmatic consideration. He lost nothing, not even an argument. He knew everything for he did nothing without knowing first. He managed kings and soothed queens. He had outlived a father he had loathed and a mother he had despised. He had more wealth than he could ever possibly enjoy and never blinked over the minor irritations which faced every man, young, old, rich or poor. Since life was morbidly contrived to be tedious in the extreme, he had managed his own diversions and followed the paths of investigation that might offer less boring occupation. He gave to charity. He helped others. But he did not suffer for their sufferings or care for their cares. Living in an age of injustice and danger, he sought relief from tedium, but not from the danger itself. And now, in all the absurdity of a passion he had considered beyond him, he had brought injury to himself and possibly far greater danger to his friend, because of loving a woman who did not bother a fig nor a feather for him, and was more likely to make friends with an owl.
But, whether through his own foolishness or his own courage, adventure had now entered his life and he had two people to follow, discover, and rescue.
The Deception of Consequences Page 20
