The Vanishing Witch (45 page)

‘With whom holds you?’ the Londoners roared.

Thousands of Essex men bellowed back, ‘With King Richard and the True Commons.’

‘The watch have fled,’ the Londoners shouted. ‘Gone running home to
hide behind their sisters’ skirts.’

They turned and lumbered back inside. The Essex men, with whoops of delight, raced after them. Hankin found himself in the middle of a crowd running through the streets. He hardly had time to take in what he was passing. High walls hid the buildings behind them. Here and there, he glimpsed priests and others running down alleys to escape from the mob surging
towards them. One man, plainly terrified, was hammering on a gate set into a wall begging to be let in, but Hankin never discovered if the gate was opened for he was swept past on a human tide and lost sight of it.

Soon the streets became narrower, and the houses and shops on either side had no protective walls round them. The pace slowed as the men were funnelled through smaller gaps. Hankin
was breathing hard and glad to slow to a walking pace. He looked around for Giles and thought he glimpsed him ahead in the distance, but there were too many people between them to reach him.

The men were splintering off, smashing their way into lawyers’ offices and running out with armfuls of documents, which they burned in the street. Others were carrying out silver goblets and richly embroidered
clothes and throwing those on the fires. Some of the owners were fighting back. Others were cowering and pleading, trying to cover their heads. Wailing women fled with children howling in their arms. The Corpus Christi roses, which had decorated every door, lay trampled underfoot, as if their petals had been strewn on the ground for a king to walk upon.

One old woman was leaping and dancing round
the flames of a bonfire, cackling, ‘Away with the learning of clerks. Away with the learning of clerks.’

She laughed delightedly as the parchments crackled and blazed. A man staggered towards her under the weight of a chest of scrolls, but she ran and snatched it from his arms as if it weighed no more than a baby, tipping the whole lot onto the blaze. The wax seals bubbled, sending black smoke
into the sky.

Hankin was too bemused to do anything except follow the men in front. He’d no idea where they were going or what they were going to do when they got there. He was sure that any minute someone was going to rush out and stop them. But no one did. Instead, as the men tried to kick down the door of a wine merchant, the watchman inside opened it and thrust his keys into their hands.
He even helped them to roll the barrels into the street, where they used spears and rusty swords to broach them. As the dark red wine splashed out, they pushed their open mouths into the streams or slurped the wine from their cupped hands before hastening on. Hankin cupped a handful of the wine himself, but spat the sour liquid out at once. He’d never tasted wine before, and if that was what it was
like, he’d no wish to do so again.

Then he caught the smell of Heaven itself. Hot meat pies! His stomach growled with hunger. He followed his nose to a little side alley ahead of him. The shutter over the open window, which could be lowered to form the counter of the tiny shop, had been hastily raised, but the fragrant steam of rich gravy, hot goose meat and freshly baked pastry wafted out of
the crack.

Hankin tried to pull the shutter down, but it was bolted from the inside. He ran back to the street and stared around, searching for anything he could use to prise it loose. The door to a nearby house lay open, hanging from its broken hinges. The room immediately behind it had been ransacked, but a fire iron still lay on the floor. Hankin snatched it up and ran back to the shop.

He wriggled the end into the small gap between the ill-fitting shutter and the wall and pushed with all his strength. The wood splintered and fell away. He threw the iron aside, reached in and gathered up as many of the warm pies as he could.

He was about to make off with his prize when he heard a little cry and, peering through the hole he’d made, saw a man staring out at him, his arms tightly
wrapped around a woman, shielding her head with his hand. For a moment man and boy stared at each other, the man’s eyes wide with fear. A giddy exhilaration bubbled up inside Hankin and he laughed. This man was afraid of him. A man twice his size was terrified he was going to hurt him. Hankin stuck out his tongue at the man, then stuffed a pie into his mouth and ran off.

He ambled along, guzzling
the pies, until he had almost made himself sick. And he still had two left. He was about to thrust them into his scrip when he saw a priest standing in front of the door of a tiny chapel, begging the rebels not to enter. Without thinking, Hankin took aim. The first pie landed on the priest’s chest, but the second caught him squarely in the face. The men rocked with laughter as the gravy dripped
from the cleric’s chin and the broken pastry slid down his long nose. They came over to Hankin, grinning and slapping him on the back. ‘Come with us, lad. They say the Great Bridge of London has fallen to the Kentish men. They’re in the city. Rumour has it they’ve taken John of Gaunt’s palace. Let’s see what the thieving rat’s been hiding in there, shall we? I reckon that must be it burning yonder.’
He pointed.

‘That’s the houses of the lawyers, that is,’ said another.

They ran on down the street, smashing in those doors that hadn’t already been broken down, jeering and thumbing their noses at those who stood huddled at upper casements peering fearfully into the destruction below. Hankin joined in their laughter. He could do anything he pleased and no one dared stop him.

He felt the sudden
gust of a damp breeze on his face, like the wind at home that came off the Braytheforde. They must be getting close to the big river of London. He was straining for a glimpse of it when he saw in front of him a great crowd of men pouring through the gates in a wall. The men he was with quickened their pace.

‘That’s it.’ One nudged his fellows. ‘That must be the Savoy Palace. John of Gaunt’s own
house. We shall have some rare sport this day.’

They ran forward through the gap in the wall. Hankin followed them. Then he stopped and stared. He’d helped his father deliver goods to a monastery before, and thought that huge, but this was vast. A gigantic sprawling building stretched out before him, bigger even than Lincoln Cathedral. And clustered round it was an array of smaller, thatched
buildings, like mice around a great sack of grain. Was all this for just one man? Not even a king would need such a vast palace.

The roses and knot gardens in front of it had been trampled into the earth as if a herd of wild boar had been driven through them. The huge doors stood wide open and smoke was rising into the molten blue sky. Men were running in and out or lumbering down the staircases
on the outside of the walls, their arms full of mirrors, robes, pots and urns, which they hurled into the fish ponds. Some had clambered onto the roof and were stripping off the tiles and hurling them into the courtyard below. A group of women were rolling barrels of silver plates and goblets out into the road, where men waited with hammers and stones to smash the precious objects to pieces.

Hankin dodged across the garden and in through the door. The vast hall, which stretched away in front of him, was the biggest room he’d ever been in. Long battle swords and hunting trophies hung from walls painted with gardens and forests, beasts and flowers, knights and maidens. But Hankin caught only the glitter of gold leaf between the billows of thick black smoke that rose up into the rafters,
for a great fire had been lit in the centre of the hall. Men were stoking it with heavy tapestries, bed-hangings, rolls of parchment and leather-bound books. Others were beating plates and jewels, gilded goblets and ornate boxes with axes and hammers, before tossing them onto the blaze.

One man thrust a black fur robe into Hankin’s arms. ‘When we’ve done, Gaunt’ll not even have a piss-pot to
call his own. Burn it, boy, burn every single thing that that devil has stolen from us.’

Hankin heard his mother’s sobs.
They took the lantern. They even took the
lantern
. Rage boiled in him. He tossed the fur robe into the leaping flames and galloped up the stairs, looking for anything else he could destroy.

But the first chamber he entered was almost bare save for a table too big to get down
the stairs. He pushed open the door of another and found a carved footstool, which had been kicked into the corner. It wasn’t valuable, but it would help the fire to burn. He stumbled back down the stairs with it, coughing against the thick smoke that was beginning to fill the upper rooms.

But the people below had stopped hammering and smashing. They’d all turned towards the open door, staring
at someone struggling in the grip of three men. Hankin, whose eyes were watering in the stinging smoke, could only make out the dark outlines of the men framed against the dazzling sunlight streaming through the door.

‘We caught him running off with a plate,’ one of the men was shouting. ‘Tyler’s orders. “No looting,” he said.’

‘No one’s to take anything from the devil’s house,’ another shouted.
‘It’s tainted with the blood of honest Englishmen. Everything must be destroyed.’

‘And any man who dishonours our cause must be destroyed along with it.’

‘Burn him! Burn him!’

They were pulling their prisoner towards the fire. He was fighting for his life, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘I wasn’t going to keep it! I swear on the Holy Virgin – taking it to be smashed in the street with the
other silver! Listen to me! I beg you.’

But they ignored him. Several men darted forward to help drag the prisoner towards the blazing fire. As they passed the foot of the stairs, Hankin, rubbing the smoke from his eyes, found himself staring up into the terrified face of Giles as he struggled to break free.

For a moment he was paralysed with horror, then raced forward, kicking and tugging at
the men who were holding Giles. ‘No! He’s one of us! Stop! Please stop! Let him go!’

Giles was still howling, ‘With King Richard . . . and the True Commons,’ as they hoisted him into the air by his arms and legs. As if he was a battering ram, they swung him forwards, backwards and forwards again, then let go. Giles landed in the middle of the bonfire. It collapsed under him, sending flames shooting
out at the sides and roaring up around him.

Hankin had never in his life heard a man scream in such agony. The boy found himself running out of the door and was halfway across the courtyard before his legs gave way beneath him. He collapsed onto the ground and vomited every mouthful of the pies he had stolen. He knelt there among the trampled roses, too weak to move, stuffing his fingers into
his ears to try to block out the terrible shrieks that split his whole being in two.

Suddenly there was a huge bang. He felt an agonising blow on his back as if he’d been tossed on the horns of a charging bull. He was thrown forwards into the dirt and all turned black.

A houseleek grown on thatch or roof tiles will protect the house from lightning and catching fire.

Gunter stared at the muddy-grey river they called the Thames. He’d thought the Witham broad where it splayed out into the great port at Boston but had never imagined that any river, bounded on both sides by land, could be so wide. It was crammed with boats. Brown cargo wherries
and little rowing boats buzzed in and out of the moorings, like flies on a midden heap, dodging between elegant longboats propelled by banks of oarsmen. Those craft were not made of plain brown wood and blackened with tar, like the ones on the Witham, but were richly carved and painted in shining red, blue, green and gold and hung with coloured pennants that streamed out behind them, like smoke from
blazing torches.

Most of these ornate boats were heading out of the city, many piled high with chests, beds and other furnishings, as well as terrified families, who clung to one another. The helmsmen fought the swift-moving currents and tried to guide their masters’ vessels out of range of the people on the bank who were hurling threats, dung, stones and rubbish at them. But that wasn’t the
only hazard the helmsmen had to cope with. Barrels, tables, books and objects smashed beyond all recognition bobbed in the water. It took Gunter a few moments to realise that the pale things drifting between the flotsam were corpses, some with their heads smashed to a pulp, others headless or naked with their bellies slashed open. A few, even in death, still clung to a wooden chest or a sodden bundle.

A little way beyond where Gunter stood was the vast span of London Bridge, with two great watchtowers, nineteen archways and even waterwheels to power the mills that jostled alongside the shops and houses that had once lined the span. But now the buildings lay in ruins, smoke still drifting up from them.

Gunter wrenched his gaze back from the river to scan the crowd. He’d guessed where the boy
had gone as soon as he’d woken that morning to find his own stave and scrip missing. His only thought had been to bring Hankin safely home. Nonie, tearful, had urged him to hurry. The boy could have been gone only a few hours. Gunter could soon catch up with him. But it had not proved as easy as that.

Gunter had been lucky at first. A river-man who knew the boy had spotted him and had remembered
in which direction he was heading. Carters had given Gunter lifts in exchange for him helping to load or unload their wagons. But between rides, he was forced to walk and, with his wooden leg, he couldn’t match the lad’s pace. Having to stop and ask in the villages if anyone remembered seeing the boy had slowed him still further.

Then he’d heard rumours that the rebels were marching on London.
He could see for himself they were true for the villages were empty of men and of the fitter women too. Anyone who was able to walk, he was told, was on their way to see the King.

Gunter was as certain as any father could be of where his son was bound. What lad wouldn’t have wanted to join that army? So he’d walked through the night, snatching an hour or two of sleep whenever he could stumble
no further, then forcing himself awake to carry on.