Within the Hollow Crown (7 page)

   She went outside the shop and held them up to a coarse-looking ruffian who had the moneybags tied to his saddle. The rain had almost stopped and a shaft of watery sunlight breaking from the bondage of two clouds caught at the lights in her pale gold hair. Her uplifted face was sweet with innocence. Richard saw the man's brutish face as he looked down at her, and it spoiled the sunlight. Saw him hold on to her hand as well as the money and presently heave his bulk from the saddle and stand over her, pawing her bare white shoulder. Here was no young man's harmless ogling, of which he himself had been half envious; but the calculating lasciviousness of middle-age. Involuntarily, he glanced back at her father to see if he had noticed.

   But Hilliard had other preoccupations at the moment. The officious clerk was not satisfied. "I see it is written here that John Hilliard had but one son who survived the wars and the Black Death," he observed, running a stubby finger down his records. "And that son was at one time apprenticed to a tyler in Essex."

   Bolingbroke's horse stamped his newly shod hoof on the ground and was released with a friendly pat. "I am Wat the Tyler, if that's what you mean, Master Lawyer," answered the smith, turning at his leisure to face the assertion. "But my family was large and my wages small. So when news came that my father was like to die and no son to carry on, I came home to Kent."

   The Earl of Arundel's minion pursed his thin lips disapprovingly. "You could have been branded for that, you know, my good man," he alleged, in pompous imitation of his master, "taking advantage of the shortage of able-bodied men to sell your labour from place to place."

   "There've been Hilliards working this forge since Doomsday," the smith barked back at him. "And like enough they'll go on working it in spite of sharp-nosed busybodies like you!"

   A new voice joined in the wrangle. "Since when are the highways of England free only for upstart lawyers and idle popinjays with decked-up horses to move from place to place?" the aggravating Lollard wanted to know.

   Arundel's man ignored him. The crowd behind him had drawn unpleasantly close; but the courage of the obstinate was his. He had been trained to pry, and he went on prying. "I take it you paid your heriot dues to the Lord of the Manor here when you came back and took over your inheritance?" he inquired, determined to catch out this insolent giant.

   But Wat Hilliard wasn't even looking at him. Having finished his shoeing job, he was free to observe what was going on. Particularly the press of labourers behind his tormentor and their menacing attitude. Some of them were neighbours he had known all his life, and some he had never seen before. But they were all on his side. His hardships and injustices belonged to each of them. And the tall, prisonbird of a priest, without an ounce of muscle to his arm, had dared to bait these well-fed Parliamentary scavengers in his defence. Wat was usually a peaceable man. But for the first time it dawned on him that he wasn't just one man protecting his own private affairs—that the comic ploughshare swords hidden away under his corn sacks might come to mean more to him than just an ill-paid job done out of neighbourliness. When he turned again to confront the lawyer's clerk his actions were more self-conscious and he raised his voice so that his defiance would be heard by all down the road, "What is it to do with you whether I paid heriot or not?" he demanded. "You were sent here to collect the King's taxes, weren't you? And you've got your filthy money, haven't you? Poll tax for two—which is about as much as I earn in a month!"

   A titter ran through the crowd, brittle and ominious as flames crackling before the wind through dried bracken on a common. And still the official seemed unaware of the fire he was starting, and the underling in charge of the moneybags chose that moment to come swaggering into the forge dragging the girl. There were no blushes on Rose's cheeks now. Innocent as she might be, she knew evil when she met it, and she struggled at every step. "He's still cheating you, master," the ruffian laughed boisterously. "Don't tell me this tall, bed-ripe lass isn't sixteen!"

   The smith swung round and saw his daughter with mute terror in her eyes. "Lay your foul hands off her, or by the Mass I'll kill you!" he shouted, in a voice so terrible that the very tools seemed to jangle on their hooks and the royal party, preparing to mount, stopped in their tracks.

   But the man was either a born fool or drunk. Lust so licked him that he paid no heed even when one of his fellows warned him that up in Essex a bawdy tax collector had been stoned. Standing in the middle of the workshop, full in the brightening sunlight, he jerked the girl to him so that her clean, childish body merged obscenely with his own. "If you dodge the poll tax, friend smith, you can pay leyr-wite on her instead," he crowed, dragging the fresh linen from her shoulder to cup her tender breast in the grossness of his hand. And in spite of their sour-faced chiefs disapproval, his mates laughed coarsely. For even the youngest page present knew that whereas merchet was money a villein had to pay to his overlord when his daughter married, leyr-wite was what he paid for her shame if she merely became pregnant.

   Richard sprang to his feet, caution burned up in a sudden gust of impersonal anger. But men's eyes were on stark drama and there was no need for speech. Wat Hilliard, tyler turned smith, had already— with the patience of his kind—suffered much. Provocation had at last produced a leader for the people who paid. His muscles were like whipcord and the hammer still in his hand. He swung it high above his head and it came down like God's vengeance out of the unsuspected shadows and split the tax collector's skull. Brains and blood spattered against the blackened post where de Vere had so lately lolled, and the ugly body slumped with no sound but a dull thud among the discarded horseshoes on the ground. Rose Hilliard would have gone down too in the ghastly embrace had not de Vere caught her as he was moving away towards his horse. He set her gently on a stool where she sat staring dazedly at a great splash of blood crimsoning the front of her bodice.

   Silence held the forge, so recently alive with the clang of iron and warm, human voices. The immobility of actors in some
tableau
vivant
held all present, arrested in whatever they were doing. The hirsute smith glaring without remorse at his victim; Henry Bolingbroke staring down with mildly surprised eyes at the lumpish thing which had so recently been a man; and Tom Mowbray, loosened from the last leading strings of childhood, trying not to avert his eyes from the first really toughening lesson of his manhood.

   Holland, inured to such scenes of violence, glanced across at his half-brother with concern. He hoped to God the pampered youngster wouldn't faint or become hysterical like some of those idiot pages whimpering in the background. Even in the red glow from the embers Richard's face showed white, and he moved aside fastidiously so that the sickening stream of blood should not touch his shoe. But he stood erect and gave no sign of what he felt. "He's gamer than I supposed," thought Holland, forcing himself out of the tenseness of the moment to take some sort of command.

   "Your cursed horse is ready at last," he snapped at Bolingbroke, "so let's get out of here before there's a riot."

   Before leaving, Henry Bolingbroke slipped a gold florin into the smith's slack hand. Wat's gaze shifted slowly to stare at it. It was payment enough to keep his family for months, but obviously he took in nothing of its value. His mind was still a consuming fire fed with the freshly perceived wrongs of his kind.

   Drawn by a sense of catastrophe, the crowd had come closer and were craning over each other's shoulders to see what people were looking at on the ground. Something gruesome enough to divert their interest from a party of gentry resuming a journey. Particularly as their men-at-arms seemed far more anxious to get on their way than to mix themselves up with a local brawl. Let them depart to their fine houses in London or wherever they were going. And to ultimate perdition, no doubt...For had not John Ball just told them, with an inconsistency they were incapable of appreciating, that riches were a burden? "For verily I say unto you, it is as easy for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle." They'd never seen a camel but no animal they
had seen could do that—and it was written
, he said, in the Holy Book. And if John Wycliffe got his way and had a printed Bible put in every church, anyone who knew how to read could see it for himself. As it was, of course, the priests read out only what suited them. And many of the priests were rich men themselves. Why, even the Archbishop of Canterbury had allowed himself to be made Chancellor, and the Prior of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem was Treasurer of England and had their hardearned savings in his hands…

   Their simple heads were full of these things and of this new sensation created in their own village by Wat Tyler—as they had always called him to differentiate between him and his brothers— that they even made way obligingly for the noble party to depart. And the lawyer's clerk was quick to see that it would be safest to ride in company, particularly as they would be without the brawny keeper of the moneybags. "This will mean the gallows for you!" he called back to Hilliard, putting the final touch to his morning's work by making a desperate man of him. But he dared not lay hands on him then. "Put your mate's body across his horse," he ordered his men hurriedly, "so that we may take it back to Dartford as proof and give him decent burial."

   A page who looked as if he might be sick at any moment was holding Blanchette at the door and, at a nudge from de Vere, Richard pulled himself together and went out. As he passed Rose Hilliard he thought that she kissed his trailing over-sleeve. She was sobbing quietly and Wat's huge hand lay in awkward compassion on her shoulder. The hand of a man with natural affections who had been provoked to murder.

   As he took the reins of his horse, Richard came face to face with the Dartford men bearing their gruesome burden. He found himself shaking with ungovernable Plantagenet rage. "Throw that dog's body into the nearest ditch!" he called savagely. "And when you collect this cursed tax call it the Commons—or Arundel's if you like—but not the King's!"

   He was aware that Wat the Tyler was staring after him, that some of the more intelligent labourers were whispering together and that his half-brother was hurrying him away. As he cantered up the London road ahead of the rest he realized that he had spoken ill-advisedly. That the Council, if they came to hear of it, would be furious. But something warm and exciting glowed within him, displacing his disgust and sudden anger, because he had found that when he spoke like that people obeyed him. Neither Thomas nor the tax gatherers had dared to gainsay him, young Mowbray regarded him with ludicrous awe and even that bombastic Lancastrian cousin of his followed at his heels like a chastened cur.

It took only that journey from Canterbury to London to convince even the most sceptical of the King's friends that the revolt of the peasants was a reality. Not one of them but was thankful to lie safely in the Tower that night.

   Naturally, Richard had been disappointed at not returning to Westminster, but he knew that Thomas's decision was right. If the royal apartments lacked the spaciousness of a modern palace, at least the Conqueror's great white Keep looked impregnable and Richard Coeur de Lion had known what he was about when he encircled the whole area with strong walls. Whatever happened outside in the streets, no danger could possibly penetrate such defences.

   After supper the young king climbed out on to the leads of the Lantern Tower. The wind took away his breath for a moment as he emerged from the dark, winding stair and stirred his hair beneath its slender gold circlet. By craning over the parapet he could see a corner of the privy garden, peaceful and pleasant in the evening light. But all around him were towers and battlements and the whirring of ravens' wings, and below him the dark waters of the moat. Here and there about the sprawling mass of buildings the setting sun reflected on steel, picking out a sentry standing motionless in the shadow of some arch. Beyond the Byward Tower the drawbridge had been raised before curfew as a precaution, and beneath the wide arch of the water gate the ugly teeth of a porticullis shut out all unauthorized craft from the wharf. When Richard had lodged in the Tower before his coronation he had taken these things for granted as part of the grim atmosphere of the place; but now he reviewed them with a more calculating eye.

   Across on the Surrey shore the Marshalsea prison stood up gaunt and grim beside the road to Eltham. Only that forenoon he had passed beside it on his way across Blackheath. Seen from the Tower of London the heath was merely a strip of blue distance, of course; but he could remember only too well how it had looked a few hours ago, with little groups of men camping on either side of the road among the flaming gorse. They had not seemed out of hand like the peasants he had encountered during the thunderstorm, nor even particularly antagonistic; but there had been something far more ominous about them for the very reason that they were organized. There had been men of better type among them—tenant farmers and tradesmen and here and there a parish priest—lending a more serious aspect to the uprising. And as Henry Bolingbroke had pointed out, many of them were obviously old soldiers, trained for the French wars in the levies of the masters they had risen against or in the "hue and cry" bands of town sheriffs. One could see it in the way they handled a bow and made camp. And judging by their confident and unhurried movements, they awaited reinforcements. It was as if all the wild protests which had been disturbing the various counties for weeks had crystallized into action here on the outskirts of the capital, and the whole green and gold heath had put off her holiday mood to await the issue.