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Authors: Cassandra Clark

BOOK: A Parliament of Spies
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‘A little,’ she admitted, startled by his sudden change of topic. Then she heard a noise outside.
His expression had not altered. ‘There’s a curious
garden outside the city walls at a vill called Stepney. You may care to visit it while we’re down there. See if you can find a cure for my arthritis.’
He raised his voice a fraction and now she glimpsed a shadow behind the swinging flap at the entrance.
‘They say the Dominican who runs it grows over two hundred different kinds of herbs,’ he continued smoothly. ‘I can imagine he supplies most of the city’s apothecaries with cures and the necromancers too. An extraordinary idea, don’t you think, to grow plants for the purpose of commerce – oh, there you are, my dear brother. My thanks.’
He reached for the flagon Thomas was holding out, refilled all their goblets despite the lurching of the char and raised his own. ‘The King!’
So I’m to be his spy at Westminster, Hildegard said to herself. What an unexpected commission. There was a lot more she needed to know before she would be content with the situation.
They were in Lincolnshire now with many miles still to go.
 
Thomas sounded as puzzled as everyone else. ‘They’re still wondering how Martin got himself into the vat of ale,’ he told her, having just come from a walk around the wagons when they stopped beside the road.
Hildegard had heard them talk too. ‘He had had no reason to be there in the brewhouse. It wasn’t his job to interfere with the work of the brewers. That little pot boy shouldn’t have been there, either. What was he up to?’
‘Kicking a pig’s bladder around. Those lads are always
being chased out of there, I’m told. They say it’s the only level floor.’
‘Presumably he thought he’d have a scoop of ale while his elders were out of the way.’
‘He won’t be doing that again in a hurry.’
‘As for Martin,’ she continued, as he’d raised the subject, ‘what do they say he was up to?’
‘No ideas. They can’t make it out.’
‘He must have been leaning over the side of the vat and lost his balance. I still don’t understand what he would be doing in there. It makes no sense. Not when we were just about to set off.’
There was a lot to see that was new on the journey down into the southern shires. It pushed to one side fruitless speculation about the activities of one unlucky kitchener.
 
On the road. Evening. A woodland clearing.
The wagons drew up in a circle away from overhanging branches and a cooking fire was built in the middle. Fulford had his chair brought out so he could preside over the preparations. Tonight they were roasting a hind. It was skewered on a spit. The flames sizzled over the dripping meat sending the smell of burning flesh into the air. Sparks flew up and fell back like dying stars. The sky darkened.
The men, their faces glowing in the firelight, seemed to edge closer together as if threatened by something unknown beyond the perimeter of light.
Usually when they stopped to rest and the men went off into the woods for a piss they would return with whatever they could forage. Some were coming back
now, breaking into the circle of light, throwing down their findings – toadstools, crisp and sweet, thrown into the pot; a rabbit, quickly gutted, thrown in after them. One man had an arm full of herbs and threw those down but Fulford stopped them from going in before he had had a proper look at them.
‘What’s that, rat fodder?’ somebody quipped.
‘Piss off,’ the man said good-humouredly to a few cackles from the rest of them. He walked with a kind of swagger to where the falconers were sitting. They made room for him without comment.
Forty people fed. Forty-one including the archbishop, who sat alone on the running board of his char, deep in thought, wearing his black wool night-cloak. His page sat cross-legged on the ground in his own little cloak, a wooden bowl filled for a third time on his lap.
The men. Eating like wolves. Made ravenous by the long miles.
Everything soon done. Ale finished. A song or two bawled into the night.
The others were getting up, like Hildegard, to make for their own private sleeping corners. Under a wagon. Inside a wagon if they were lucky. As they went, somebody happened to mention Martin again.
It was almost too soon to reminisce. She guessed they were still coming to terms with his death and after the first bout of questions there was a strange kind of silence over the matter. They were too shocked, she supposed. Later they would start to question again the how and the why such an accident could occur.
One of the falconers left the group and went over to
the caged hawks. She heard Fulford ask, ‘Is he all right?’
‘Leave him, master.’
‘It’s this talk about Martin that’s getting to him,’ somebody explained.
‘He’s hit hard.’
‘They were mates.’
‘Always ready for a laugh, was Martin.’
‘Not recently. He must have had a premonition. Remember that time he could only throw “ones” and somebody said “your luck’s gone, fella”, and he nearly throttled him?’
Hildegard said her goodnights then went over to climb into her sleeping space in one of the small baggage wagons. She was just drifting off to sleep when she heard a group of men walking slowly past. Voices clear on the still night air. Conversation had turned to London. It was the first time down there for most of them. They had no idea what to expect.
‘They say the streets are paved with gold, don’t they? Do you believe it?’
‘Nah, paved might be true. With gold? Never.’
‘Maybe one or two, outside the palaces?’
‘Outside the Duke of Lancaster’s, maybe.’
‘I bet King Dickon walks on gold.’
She heard a third voice. ‘Aye, at our expense.’
‘You don’t like Dickon, do you, Jarrold?’
‘Why should I? What’s he ever done for me?’
‘He’s well enough.’
‘God save him, say I.’
Murmurs of agreement followed. Their voices faded.
After that Hildegard drifted off to the sound of distant
snores, the clink of metal as the guard shifted at his post, and that strange wrenching sound as horses crop grass.
 
By now they were travelling through a landscape that was flat and bleak, a no man’s land, with mile after mile of nothing but scrubland, the straight Roman road cutting through it, and a huge sky full of curlews.
The huntsmen began to grumble. They wanted to bring down some game. The archers strung their bows. They wanted wolves.
The skin of the one shot before they left Holderness was dry now. It hung from its pole and the head, boiled in cummin as a favour by Master Fulford, gazed sightlessly towards their destination. The drivers geed their horses and made the wagons bounce on the track in their eagerness to reach somewhere more interesting.
‘Woodland up ahead,’ somebody muttered at last, staring hard at the skyline to the south after a few more uneventful miles. ‘We’ll get sport there, enough at least to fill our bellies.’ There were grunts of agreement. Somebody peeled off to the wagon carrying the sheaves of arrows to prepare to bring them out.
The dogs in their wicker cage whined with frustration.
The woods were a dark blur from one side of the road to the other and there was a cheer when the chamberlain called a halt.
Holding up his white stick so everybody could see he had something to say, he bellowed, ‘It’s not for your benefit. His Grace wishes to stretch his legs!’ He turned to the kennelman. ‘Might as well get a brace of those dogs out, see if you can raise a few rabbits?’
‘We flying the hawks, sire?’
The chamberlain shook his head. ‘Not unless you want to follow on foot to Lincoln. This is a short stop. We aim to be there before nightfall.’
The long line of wagons squeezed up one by one as the command to halt was passed down the line and eventually, with a creaking of harness, the whole convoy groaned to a stop. Several people jumped down at once, following the archbishop’s example, and walked about, stretching their legs and trying to ease the aches out of bruised joints, while others leant wearily against the wheels of the carts they had been forced to run alongside. Someone produced a reed pipe and struck up a tune, bringing several cheerful souls to stamp their feet in a rough-and-ready jig.
A couple of huntsmen whistled up the dogs as they were released from their cage and led them purposefully towards the woods.
The archbishop looked round for his master of horse. ‘Bring Pegasus up, will you? I’ll ride into Lincoln. It’s not far now.’
While he waited he glanced up at the sky as if checking for rain. It was awash with flat grey cloud from one side of the horizon to the other, but with a fresh wind from the coast that had been blowing for several days now, keeping the rain off.
Hildegard saw him scrutinise the convoy spread back along the narrow road. There was a ditch on one side full of water, a clump of trees, then miles of empty moorland. His cook, from the canopied comfort of his wagon, was ordering parcels of bread and cheese from the vittling
cart behind and a few servants were scurrying along handing it out to a forest of eager hands.
Hildegard watched all this with a mind as empty as the sky, thinking, Lord I’m tired, I wish we were there. Munching on her own portion of bread and cheese, she wandered over to have a look at the hounds. Her own two, Duchess and Bermonda, too old to travel, had been left behind in the kennels at Meaux. She ruffled the heads poking between the bars. ‘Is anybody going to let the rest of them have a run?’ she asked the kennelman.
‘We’re not stopping long. Chamberlain says it’s only to give the lads a chance to raise a few rabbits while His Grace stretches his legs. ’
Hildegard was about to return some bantering remark when there was a shout up ahead followed by more shouts from the tail end of the line. An oath followed and some further altercation that ended in a howl of pain. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the cook, Master Fulford, rise magnificently to his feet on the running board of his char only to sink down again as an arrow winged past his head.
A voice somewhere in the thick of the commotion shouted, ‘Nobody move unless you want your throat slit. This won’t take long.’
There was a jangling of chain mail, more cries, stifled this time, and then a sudden ominous silence over the entire convoy as three crossbowmen rose from the ditch beside the road followed by two foot soldiers in chain mail.
Hildegard, caught between the dog cart and the one next to it, craned her neck to see what was happening. Word was filtering back that the wagons were being searched.
‘By whom?’ she asked a man standing next to her.
‘Dunno. Some armed band it looks like.’
‘Whose insignia do they wear?’
‘None so far as I can see.’
The man climbed onto the running-board of the wagon loaded with arrow sheaves and peered back down the line. ‘They’re chucking things out onto the road,’ he reported. ‘They seem to be looking for something.’
Just then Hildegard turned her head and to her astonishment saw the archbishop being helped into the saddle by his groom. He was carrying a leather bag under one arm and as she watched he kicked his horse on and vanished soundlessly into a brake beside the track. No one else seemed to have noticed.
Meanwhile the wagons were being searched one by one, all the carefully packed stores hurled out, the chamberlain wringing his hands and making polite protests, the master cook growing redder in the face and saying nothing. The chamberlain turned to the members of his household. ‘I advise everyone to do as we’re told until we find out what these fellows want.’
His surprising lack of resistance was the result of having a crossbowman aiming an arrow straight at him from a hand’s breadth away.
There was a subdued grumbling, but with another couple of bowmen coming into view, it was enough to make everybody do as he suggested.
‘What are the archbishop’s bodyguard doing?’ Hildegard whispered to the man on the running-board beside her.
‘Bugger all,’ he growled.
She noticed the hunting bow slung across his chest and indicated the sheaves of arrows in the wagon. ‘Can
we work our way round behind their line without being seen?’
He showed his teeth in a grin. ‘We’ll have a bloody good try.’ He slipped quietly down off the wagon. ‘I’ll get a couple of the lads.’
No one was paying any attention to the middle of the convoy, cowed into submission by the one bowman. The looters, with short swords raised, and protected by the other bows, were laboriously working their way towards the centre while their commander, his face concealed by the nosepiece of his helmet, sat astride a grey destrier and looked on.
Hildegard reached for one of the bows used by the pages. They were shorter than the hunting bows the bodyguards carried. There was no way she would have been able to draw one of those. She found the strings and took one out and, snatching up a few arrows from the sheaf, strung the bow as she followed three archers into the gully beside the road. They began to work their way behind the line of wagons. Once under the cover of the trees, the men spread out.

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