Silken Threads (40 page)

Thomas looked heavenward with his good eye,
amused and touched by her efforts to make her charity seem like
anything but. “I suppose I could help you out by eating a bowl of
it, mistress.”

As she was fetching his porridge, the back
door of the blue and red house opened again. This time it was the
guildmaster himself who stepped out, adorned as usual in his
peacock-hued finery. Graeham ducked behind a corner of the kitchen
and watched him closely as he walked toward Milk Street.

“Don’t want to be seen?” Thomas asked.

“Not by him.”

Something about the serjant’s grim
expression discouraged Thomas from asking any more questions.

The door opened yet again, as soon as the
guildmaster was out of sight. Another plump, aproned woman emerged,
the pink-cheeked wench Thomas sometimes saw chopping and singing at
the kitchen window. She untied her coverchief, revealing brown hair
braided and coiled around her head, which she patted. With a glance
to make sure the money changer’s wife had her back turned, she
darted across the yard, around the pile of filthy straw Byram had
raked onto the ground and into the stable.

“They should find a more discreet place to
tup,” Graeham said. “They’re bound to get caught one of these
days.”

“According to Publilius Syrus,” Thomas said,
“God Himself decreed love and wisdom antithetical to each
other.”

“All too true, I’m afraid,” said Graeham,
suddenly melancholy.

“What’s all too true?” Joanna asked as she
stepped out of the kitchen with a ladle full of porridge.

Seemingly unsettled for some reason, Graeham
said, “Thomas told me I looked exhausted, and I said ‘twas all too
true.”

“You should take a nap if you can,” she said
through another yawn as she poured the porridge into Thomas’s bowl.
“I’d do the same, but Mistress Ada is expecting me to come back and
sit with her, and I think it’s best if I do.” She touched Graeham’s
hand. “Try to get some sleep.”

He brushed his knuckles across her cheek.
“You’re as tired as I am. I can see it in your eyes.”

Joanna smiled. “I’ll sleep after
—
”
her gaze flicked toward Thomas and away “
—
after
everything’s settled.”

“I don’t like you being over there, with
things as they are,” Graeham said.

“Le Fever’s not even home.”

“Still...you’d best keep your wits about
you.”

“You worry too much.” She returned the ladle
to the kitchen, filled a bucket with fresh water for Thomas, and
took her leave, crossing the guildmaster’s stable yard and entering
the house without knock¬ing.

“If I weren’t so hungry,” Thomas said,
groping about in his pouch for his spoon, “I’d have about a hundred
questions I’d be pestering you with right now.”

“Then I’m glad you’re hungry.” With a smile
and a wave, Graeham turned and hobbled into the house on his
crutch.

Thomas finished the porridge slowly,
savoring it as he used to savor fourteen-course feasts. He drank
some of the water from the bucket and used the rest to wash his
bowl and spoon. When there was nothing more for him to do, he sat
and did nothing, gratified simply to be off his feet. One of the
worst aspects of this cursed malady was that it had made idleness a
way of life.

Finally, when the sitting still got to be
too much even for him, he rose awkwardly and crossed to the window
at the back of the house to say good-bye to Graeham. At first he
thought the storeroom was empty, but then he saw the young man
lying on his back on the little cot, still fully dressed in shirt,
braies and boots, but fast asleep.

“Enjoy your dreams, serjant.” Thomas
shuffled across the croft and into the alley, but stumbled back as
someone
—
a woman
—
walked by without looking.

She brushed against him as she passed.
Thomas’s heart seized up; this was what he dreaded more than
anything, that someone would touch him accidentally and he would be
called to task for it.

But the woman didn’t even seem to notice the
contact, so single-mindedly did she stalk past. She had a ragged
mane of red hair, he saw as she veered out of the alley and across
the croft; not slightly rusty, like Graeham Fox’s hair, but vibrant
copper turning to gray. A wineskin was slung crosswise over her
back, and she held a twig broom with the sweeping end up, rather
importantly, like a scepter. That was odd, but not as odd as how
she was dressed
—
or rather, not dressed. For it seemed to
Thomas that the woman’s kirtle wasn’t a kirtle at all, but...

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 smoky 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?”