‘I’m not going to compline,’ she told him with her hand on the latch. ‘You can have the evening off.’ Turning firmly she made her way inside.
Alone in her chamber she took off the familiar unbleached habit of her Order, and with a feeling that she might never be justified in putting it on again, threw it onto the bed. Removing her boots and the rest of her clothes she washed again. Twice in three days. After drying herself and patting rose water into her skin, she slipped into a clean shift and pulled on a plain woollen houpelande she carried as a spare. It fell to the ground in even pleats and she buttoned it up to her neck.
Instead of a wimple she unpacked a square of linen, rolled one corner to make a pad and fitted it over her brow. Then she tied the two corners in a knot at the back of her head, brought them round underneath her chin to be tucked in on both sides like a gorget, tucking the fourth corner inside the neck of the houpelande.
Over all this she donned a grey cloak, fastened it with a pin and pulled up the hood. Buckling on her leather belt with its attached scrip and a new knife to replace the one she had lost, she went barefoot to where her boots stood by the door. Thrusting her feet into them she tightened the laces and stood up.
He had warned her not to draw attention to herself. Now she looked like any other townswoman and not a nun at all.
With a swift glance round the chamber she descended the stairs, and with a furiously beating heart, stepped out into the mauve light of the October evening.
He is not here.
Her heart lurched. The landing stage was bereft of life. The broad stretch of the Thames held the light long after it had faded from the land. It was like a sheet of gold foil stretching from one side of the river to the other. A few craft dotted the surface in midstream. The wind was still strong and came whining through the struts of the jetty, abrading the surface of the water and sending line after line of wavelets galloping onto the shore.
Unsure what to do she jumped down, her boots crunching in the shingle, but had taken only a couple of paces when a voice called softly, ‘Hildi! Over here!’
Turning, she saw a movement a little way along the beach. A distance of three or four yards separated them. It was a yawning gap. A space they simultaneously hastened to bridge and then they were in each other’s arms, his mouth hot against her own. ‘It’s been an age. I thought you’d changed your mind,’ he murmured.
‘I thought
you
had.’
They were lying on the couch in his chamber again, with only the glow from a cresset outside the window to cast light over their entwined limbs. The street singer was back, ignoring curfew like everyone else on this night of premonitions and change. Meteors had been seen, confirming the invasion and the dangerous brink on which England stood. The sweet and plaintive voice carried up to where they lay and gave expression to all the longing one human being can feel for another.
When he stopped Rivera opened the casement, throwing out some coins and calling down, ‘Play on!’ The music started again.
Rivera was encouraged to talk more intimately than usual, telling her things he wanted her to know about himself. ‘We have so little time.’ He lifted her hair, planting kisses on her hot skin. ‘We have to leave for the Tower soon.’ He looked tenderly into her face. ‘Whatever happens, this is true, isn’t it?’
She reached up to touch his lips with her fingers. ‘Yes, this – whatever it is.’
‘To be drawn down into the flames together.’
‘Regrets?’
‘None.’
‘Nor me. But I feel there’s something …’ she glanced round his room ‘ … there’s something in the air tonight …’
‘The invasion? Or are we back to the exalted spirit and the sinful flesh?’ He looked at her with the sort of expression that made her heart turn over.
Nothing will happen to him, she thought, shivering with revulsion against Medford and Slake and the rest of the Signet clerks, the shadowy figures whose function was to further only the wishes of the King.
He rested her palm against his cheek. ‘The poet tells us there is no greater woe than to remember past bliss in times of distress. May your woes be small, Hildi. Soon I shall have to take you into a place of evil. You know it.’
‘Believe in your saint. He’ll protect us.’ When he smiled with a glinting irony, she asked, ‘Who is he, St Serapion?’
‘He was a Castilian. He offered himself as ransom for the release of a friend during the wars with the Moors. They took him in exchange, then tortured him to death as he knew they would. An uncle of mine, my father’s brother, was one of his followers. He offered himself in
the same way in a time of war. He was my hero when I was a boy.’
‘Did you live in Castile?’
‘I was born here. My father was an ambassador for King Pedro and married an English woman in the household of the Duke of Lancaster.’
‘Was this when he was negotiating for the hand of Pedro’s daughter, Constanza?’
‘Yes, the second Duchess. When my mother died and my father decided to go back to Castile the Duke made me his ward. He promised me to the Benedictines but afterwards I asked him to allow me to leave them to establish a shrine in honour of St Serapion.’
‘You owe the Duke a lot.’
‘The Duke, yes. Pray he does become King of Castile and end our war with Spain.’ He lifted his head towards the rattling casement. ‘Still the wind blows …’
He took her in his arms and held her as fiercely as if the army was already at the gates. His voice was no more than a whisper. ‘I have certain information that the French will sail this night. Their prophets say the wind will drop. Then nothing will stop them.’
His words sent a chill through her.
‘It makes it more urgent than ever to find out who Brembre visits in the Tower and whether he’s a traitor to the King. Or,’ he added, ‘whether the King is a traitor to his people.’
They had a strategy worked out so that when they arrived at the ward bridge they would do so separately. ‘I have free access here,’ Rivera told her superfluously
as they approached the grim walls of the Tower’s outer defences. ‘You have a prisoner to visit. Go and ask for him. I’ll meet you at the Salt Tower when the vigil bell sounds.’ He gave her a small push in the direction of the guardhouse.
Before she left she asked, ‘Are you armed?’
He gave her a slanting smile. ‘Are you?’
When she spoke to the custody serjeant he frowned. Beckoning, he led her outside into the great yard on the other side of the bridge and with nobody to overhear him asked, peering into her face, ‘Didn’t anybody tell you he’s been moved?’
‘Where to?’
The man gazed worriedly off across the yard. ‘All I know is, after his interrogation, they come in, they move him, they tell nobody what they’re going to do with him.’
‘Interrogation?’ Her breath was held until he gave her a bleak look that said everything. As if to confirm it he nodded towards the distant figure that was crossing the bridge. It was Rivera.
‘Who moved him?’ she managed to ask.
He scratched his head. ‘You might go to a private chamber in the White Tower. Tell the guards there I sent you. Here,’ he rooted in his coat for something and handed her a well-thumbed pass. ‘Show them this.’ Before he turned away he said softly, ‘I only do this because you folk do good.’ He looked her up and down in her commonplace disguise. ‘You Cistercians,’ he added, to make it plain, ‘as I know you to be.’ He crossed himself.
Rivera was to meet her outside the tower closest to
the river where the aldermen made their visits. Deciding to try to seek out the prisoner after they had done their task with regard to the mayor she set off towards it under a sinister cloud of ravens that fed on the severed heads of the condemned.
‘Moved him?’ Rivera’s face turned cold.
‘Didn’t you know?’ She searched his face for the truth.
He was shaking his head.
‘Why would they do that, Rivera?’
‘There’s only one reason. But I told them they’d get nothing more from him. There was nothing more to give.’
He gripped her fiercely by the shoulder in the shadow of the tower. ‘He was Swynford’s prisoner, acting for Bolingbroke. I told Swynford he had nothing for us.’
‘Is he … did they rack him?’
Rivera turned away. ‘We can’t stay here all night. Let’s do what we have to do.’ He turned back. ‘Or would you rather keep out of it?’
‘I’ll come with you.’
He looked surprised but simply turned on his heel and went in through a small unguarded door that led into a corridor. Hildegard followed. By the time she reached the end, the one guard, who had apparently been half asleep when Rivera burst in, was groaning with a bruised jaw while his arms were being trussed. Rivera did a professional search for all the keys, found them with no difficulty, then locked the man inside his own cell.
‘Come on.’ He led the way to a set of narrow stairs that spiralled up round the inner wall of the tower. On the first level the stone gave way to wood and they trod
more cautiously over the boards until they reached a stop at a locked door. Rivera tried various keys until he found one to fit. Before shouldering it open, he whispered, ‘We don’t know who or what’s on the other side. If necessary I’ll give you time to get back down below. Don’t argue.’
He inched the door open without a sound. A bright glow of light issued from the chamber beyond. It was brilliant, like sunlight, unearthly after the darkness of the stairs.
Rivera stepped through the door onto a gangway that ran round the inside of the tower. Hildegard followed then stopped with a gasp. There was no chamber beyond. Instead there was a yawning pit.
They were staring down several floors to ground level where a massive furnace belched out tongues of flame and a dozen men stripped to the waist were feeding it with fuel, wielding bellows and pouring molten metal down a gully into a series of moulds. The heat, even from the height of the gangway where they stood, was intense. It was like a scene from hell: the heat, the flames, the clanging of metal, the raucous shouts in some foreign tongue from the sweating labourers.
The closer she looked, the more she noticed. A dozen men were dousing the hot metal with cold water from a massive barrel. Steam rose up, hissing and spitting. Others broke metal pipes from the moulds and stacked them in orderly rows, others wrapped sacking round the finished objects in a further part of the arena.
Rivera turned to her. ‘Not
who
but
what
! He’s making weapons.’
‘What are they?’ she whispered.
‘Firing machines of some sort.’ He peered over the edge again. ‘They must be what the French used when they attacked Southampton decades ago. “Ribauldequins” they called them. I thought they’d given up on the idea. It didn’t work.’
‘I heard some mercenaries talk about this sort of thing when I was travelling in Italy.’
He gave her a sharp glance.
‘They thought the problems could be surmounted. It was to do with the explosive they have to use. Sulphur, saltpetre …’ she remembered the mercenary, Jack Black ‘ … and the charcoal to ignite it. Once they get the proportions right they can project a bolt further than a longbow. Or so they expect.’
‘There’s also the problem of how to hit a target with any accuracy. The French failed to solve it.’
‘Do you think these men have found a way round it?’
He gazed down at the arena below. ‘If they have done, they’ll be invincible.’
She drew in a breath.
In her interest in the scene she had temporarily forgotten that Bolingbroke would delight in having discovered the secret of the Tower. Now, even if he didn’t know already, he soon would because Rivera would inform him of the fact.
‘I think,’ Rivera broke into her thoughts, ‘those iron workers down there must be Bohemians. I know they’ve been working on the idea in Prague for some time. The Castilians are still working on it as well. So far nobody seems to have solved the problems. Eventually, I suppose,
they will do so. Men are always trying to invent the ultimate weapon of destruction.’
She stepped back from the immense heat that was rising from the furnace. ‘I can see how Mayor Brembre got involved – the Powder Makers’ Guild must supply the gunpowder. They’re one of the guilds he supports.’
‘So much for the so-called fish wars. They’re not fighting over fish at all.’
‘I suppose now we’ve learnt the secret, we part,’ she said in a clipped tone. ‘You to inform your Master Swynford, lackey to the Earl of Derby, and—’
He gripped her by the shoulders to make her stop but before he could speak there was a commotion down below and when they peered over the rail of the gangway a group of men were entering the workshop through the doors immediately below.
Brembre himself, his blue hood pushed down round his shoulders, his cap deferentially held in one hand, was immediately recognisable. He was pointing out the various aspects of the works to someone as he came into view and a crowd of people were jostling in behind him. At the appearance of the visitors, the labourers stopped what they were doing and stood mopping their brows. The ironmaster ordered the metal gate on the furnace closed. Cressets were brought in to light the sudden darkness.