Within the Hollow Crown (11 page)

   In spite of themselves the others looked relieved. "Quite right, Walworth—quite right!" approved Warwick. A tradesman could do that sort of thing, of course, and it would save men of noble blood from demeaning themselves. "And what did they say?"

   Walworth got up and looked with respectful diffidence towards the raised window embrasure where Richard was standing. "They refused to treat with us at all, but only with the King. They want to tell
him
their grievances. They seem to think that he—"

   Whatever more he said was momentarily drowned in indignant shouts of "Monstrous!" and "Impossible!" Only when his listeners had spent their indignation were his concluding words audible. "They want him to go to Blackheath."

   The words came to Richard as a shock. They wanted
him t
o go—not all these warlike adults arguing around his table. The thought of going back to Blackheath—to a Blackheath no longer ominously orderly but swarming with wild beasts who burned down palaces and killed prostitutes like helpless sheep in the streets—was a far more terrifying challenge than any he was ever likely to encounter in the lists. Across the heads of the rest he met William Walworth's steady gaze, and it was as if the man had thrown down a gage. A gage for which the prize was London. Only instead of cantering across some flag-decked lists he would have to ride out from these strong encircling walls into a hostile world where violence and class hatred ruled. Into a strange, inverted world where, like Gloucester and the rest, he didn't know the first thing about the rules. He felt miserably inadequate, but something in him—some heritage stronger than himself—made him nod assent to the inquiry in Walworth's honest eyes.

   "Is it necessary for
anyone
to go?" asked his elder half-brother, anxious for his safety. "After all, bread doesn't grow on Highgate or Blackheath. Tyler and Straw can order their men about but they can't feed them. Not all those thousands."

   "Keep them out of London for another twenty-four hours and their empty bellies will tell them to go home," agreed the Lord Lieutenant.

   Walworth and his sheriff exchanged uneasy glances. "If we can," they muttered in unison.

   But Gloucester had evidently been turning over some new project in his mind. "I don't see why the King shouldn't go out to them," he said unexpectedly. It was his first contribution to the discussion for some time.

   "My dear Duke, consider the boy's age!" protested the Archbishop. And Salisbury backed him up with the very objection which Gloucester had been swift enough to mention when the rebels had waylaid the King's mother. "Doesn't it occur to any of you that they may keep his Grace as a hostage?"

   "And then they might demand
anything
!" spluttered the Prior, well aware that his own head would be one of the first things they would want.

   In response to his mother's imploring gaze Richard had returned to the table and was standing by her chair, but evidently he was not giving in to her arguments. "If he goes, I shall go with him!" she declared. "When my father was Duke of Kent he made most of his serfs free. For the love they bear him and the Black Prince and myself they will do us no harm."

   "Then we will all ride with you, madam!" cried Standish and several others, stirred by her courage and trusting rather bleakly in her optimism.

   They were almost all on their feet now, arguing more fiercely than ever. Richard was grateful to Bolingbroke for ending it. "Listen, milords!" he called out, rapping the table with the quillons of his sword to make himself heard. "There's no need to ride anywhere. Why can't Richard go by barge? Down the river to Rotherhithe or somewhere. He can summon the leaders to the bank and hear what they have to say from midstream. Then there will be no danger of hostages or trickery."

   Old soldiers like Warwick and Salisbury were half ashamed of themselves for not thinking of so simple a solution. This son of Gaunt's was a likely looking lad, mature for his age and quick to seize an advantage. And—much as they hated to admit it—new situations called for adaptable young minds.

   "An excellent idea, Harry!" approved Richard, and sent for his bargemaster before the others could think up some argument against it. "We'll go this afternoon."

   John Holland, not to be outdone, sprang up with such clumsy haste that he upset his stool with a bang. "Why not now—this morning?" he demanded pugnaciously.

   Richard and Henry were bending over a map of the Thames valley which Standish had had the forethought to bring along and which he had just unrolled across the table before them. For once these two grandsons of Edward the Third were in absorbed accord, fair head and dark almost touching. "Because this morning, my dear John," explained Richard without even looking up, "my watermen would have to pull back up-river against the tide. Whereas this afternoon the tide will be on the turn and we can come back quickly—if we should need to."

Richard had told Ralph Standish to wake him early on Corpus Christi day so that he might attend Mass. But he had slept badly and lay still in his bed for a while, thinking over all the disturbing events of the previous day. After dinner they had gone down the river in the state barge as Henry had suggested. The meadows at Rotherhithe, usually so lush and green, had been black with insurgents, and the royal party had stayed off shore for a little while talking with their leaders. A very little while it seemed, looking back upon those confused and nervous moments. And then they had taken advantage of the turning tide, just as he himself had shocked John Holland by suggesting, to row back a great deal quicker than they had come. Because they were afraid. They—the supposed cream of English nobility—afraid of that ill-fed, ill-armed rabble on the bank.

   Richard Plantagenet groaned with shame at the thought of it, turning closer into the blessed privacy of his tapestry bed hangings.

   Even now he could scarcely believe that they had behaved so cravenly, and was prey to a tantalizing conviction that if only they might go again they would do better. What had happened to all the inherent dominance of the ruling classes—to all their warlike training and lessons in high chivalry? What must these serfs and labourers, whom they had ordered about all their lives, have thought of them? And—above all—how could they themselves go on respecting each other? Once back in the Tower they had avoided each other's eyes. But the fact remained that not even the bravest of them, tried on many a battlefield, had had any idea that a mob, once free from their crushing heel and aware of its own power, could look—and sound—so alarming.

   Richard's waking senses became aware of sounds unusual to the hour. Surely the same sounds as at Rotherhithe—that murmuring of innumerable voices and shuffling of innumerable ill-shod feet? But that was impossible, with the width of the Thames between. It must be some horrid trick of memory born of a sleepless night. He knew that he would be late for Mass, yet burrowed a rumpled bronze head deeper into the softness of the pillows. But it was all of no avail. The mob really
was howlin
g beneath his windows. He sat up starkly and called for Standish to pull back the tapestry curtains.

   "What is it, Ralph?" he asked, and knew the answer before his squire spoke.

   Standish was white beneath his healthy summer tan, but he began laying out his master's shirt and hose with steady, accustomed hands. "The rebels have been pouring into the City all night," he said.

   Richard's blue eyes were points of demanding intelligence in the disordered wideness of the bed. "You mean they rushed the Bridge?"

   "It is thought to have been treachery, sir." Standish guessed that the King had slept but little and tried to curb his own rising panic. "One of those accursed aldermen went across to talk with them and told them the bridge was held by friends. And all the unruly prentices and some malcontents already planted in the City made sure that it was so. They either persuaded or overcame Sybyle's guards."

   "But I sent a messenger to say that the charters I promised at Rotherhithe would be ready for them this morning—so that they can go away. As you know, I took a clerk with me in the barge specially to write down their main grievances, and after supper we all composed a sort of free pardon embodying most of the things they asked. Some fool started writing it out in Latin, but I turned it into plain English for them myself and told those idle clerks of Sudbury's to sit up all night making copies of it."

   The King slid his legs over the side of the bed and hastily pulled on his hose. "It appears, sir," said Standish, stooping to smooth out the slightest suggestion of a wrinkle from ankle to thigh, "that this treacherous Alderman Horn borrowed a City banner from the Town Clerk to give him the semblance of authority and forestalled your messenger."

   "God damn his insolence! I'll see that Walworth has him hanged for it!" Richard sprang up and ran shoeless to the window. All he could see was his privy garden spread out like a neatly patterned coloured kerchief. The dew on the grass was not yet dry and cobwebs glistened like glass lace across the rose bushes. But with such tumult going on outside the walls it seemed incongruous that roses should bloom at all.

   "Some of us have been to the top of the Keep. You can see everything from there," Standish was saying excitedly. "As soon as the drawbridge was down on the Southwark side the devils began coming across in little companies and you could see their friends on this side giving them food. But now hundreds of them are ransacking the Vintry and private houses in Thames Street. And whole gangs of them were rushing shouting along the Strand."

   "But that howling noise is coming from the opposite direction."

   "St. Catherine's hill. If you come to this side of the window, sir, you can see a bit of it behind the wharf. Tyler's got his main forces assembled there. And they're yelling for blood!"

   Richard leaned out and listened, trying to recognize the words they were shouting. It was the most terrifying sound he had ever heard. The pleasant open space, so often thronged with Londoners taking their evening stroll, was now packed with an angry, surging mass of labourers shaking fists and home-made weapons at the fortress wall which baulked them of their prey; for now it was not charters they were asking for, but lives. When Richard drew his head back into the room he, too, was white. "They sound like wild beasts!" he said.

   Standish returned his horrified gaze. For the moment they were no longer King and squire, but a very young man and a boy facing up to a common danger. "It's the poor Archbishop they want. And Prior Hales, of course. And Legge."

   "I know. They sent a deputation about them almost as soon as I got here, and my uncle would have turned them out to their fate." Richard began pacing restlessly back and forth. "I don't mind what happens to that rat Legge. By all accounts he started most of the trouble. It wasn't only the accursed tax. It was the way it was collected. You saw what happened in that forge." Fetching up before the empty hearth, he sighed and stretched, graceful as a girl in his silken underwear. "Lord, how long ago that seems!"

   "It's a mercy the Duke's in Scotland," said Standish, clapping for the pages and making an effort to resume his normal duties.

   Richard knew, of course, that when anyone said just "the Duke" like that, that they were referring to his eldest uncle. Back at the window, again, with all his attention centred on a fresh cloud of smoke, he caught at his squire's arm as he brought him his fashionably pointed shoes. "Look, Ralph! You said they rushed shouting down the Strand. Surely that's the Savoy palace burning now?"

   Ralph looked, and an awed silence fell upon them. "The Londoners almost burned it before—when the Duke tried to take the City government from the Mayor and Corporation. At the time of Wycliffe's trial. Do you remember?" Ralph whispered, above the scurrying of the frightened pages.

   Richard nodded. "The beloved Bishop of London intervened. But what's to prevent them from destroying Uncle John's palace now?" he asked bitterly.

   Yesterday he had watched several houses burn, but somehow it was different when it was a home belonging to a member of one's own family. A place where one had gone in and out familiarly, eaten meals, had favourite rooms, and petted dogs. Perhaps he should have been glad—all cock-a-hoop because the people hated his haughty uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. One of the uncles who had kept him in leading strings. But the times were too critical for that; and Richard was not naturally revengeful. Besides, oddly enough, of all three uncles he disliked least the one whom rumour persistently represented as his rival.

   Apparently other occupants of the Tower had been astir early at their windows, for Richard was still in shirt and hose when his halfbrothers and a posse of excited hangers-on invaded his bedroom. They seemed on the verge of panic. "The fiends really
have fire
d the Savoy!" shouted the younger Holland.

   "And Hales' Priory at Clerkenwell," added the elder. "So it's no longer a question of the rebels being starved out. It's we who are being besieged." He stopped gloomily before the open psalter on his brother's
prie-dieu
. "And it's Friday the thirteenth," he added, with all the pessimism of a man sickening for something.

   Pages coming from the kitchen with hot water were too scared to hold their ewers steadily. They slopped it over people's feet and were cuffed by their overwrought betters; but Richard thought they were scarcely to be blamed, considering the poor example they had been set. He coaxed and rated them into dressing him somehow and was thankful to hurry down to the courtyard and betake himself to the bare old chapel in the Keep. Glad, too, to find Archbishop Sudbury waiting to celebrate. Here, at least, where his ancestors had worshipped, there was peace. The thickness of the Conqueror's walls shut out the murderous howling of a crazy new world, and between massive pillars of Caen stone it was easy to slip back into a familiar age when feudalism was unquestioned and secure. Watching the Archbishop move serenely before the altar, it seemed absurd to think that the old man's life was in danger. All the crescendo of ugly scenes which had filled the last few days were muted to a dream so that Richard, on rising from his knees, could almost imagine it was any ordinary day and that he was free to go hunting at Sheen or Windsor.