Blanchette sank down into a chair, dazed and shivering. Katherine poured ale from the silver flagon and gave her some, then turning to the friar she started and cried, "Jesu, Brother - you're hurt!"
The friar swallowed. He stood hunched and doubled over, holding his hands to his breast, while scarlet oozed down the grey habit. "Ay," he said in a far-off voice, "ay."
She ran to him and pulled him to the bed. He lay down without resistance. "Staunch it," he said. "A clean cloth." There were towels in the garde-robe but that was barred from her now. She pulled a corner of the sheet from under the friar and wadded it into the gaping wound, pressing it down as he told her.
" 'Twill serve a while," he said. His cavernous eyes opened wide. He looked up at her as she bent over him. He saw the lovely, pitying, frightened face of his dream.
A moment he gazed upward before he turned his head and shut his eyes. "Disaster," he whispered. "The ill-starred day has come that I saw long ago. I shall die," he said with dull certainty. "No matter."
Beneath the torn cassock and the bloody wad of sheet, his emaciated chest heaved painfully; he struggled to his elbow and looked at her again. "But first you shall hear the truth at last!"
"Brother - good Brother - I beg you to lie quiet," said Katherine, pushing him gently down on to the bed. "You won't die. For sure 'tis not so deep a wound as that."
He lay quiet again beneath her soft hand, his lips moved in the Miserere, though he scarcely knew it.
Katherine started up crying. "Blessed Jesu!" For suddenly the tumult outside grew louder, though yet distant. There were shouts and shrieks and a muffled sinister thumping. "Oh, that my dear lord were here!" she cried. "My dearest love - to protect us-" She clenched her hands staring into the Avalon tapestry, as though it might channel the force of her desperation and summon him.
The friar made a sharp motion with his arm. Strength flowed into him. He shoved her aside and rose from the bed. He clutched at his crucifix and cried to Katherine fiercely, "So now, graceless woman, you call out for your paramour! Fool, fool - don't you yet see that it is because of your sin - and his - that this disaster comes?"
"Nay, Brother," she murmured wearily. Surely in this time of danger she might be spared castigations.
"Do you know what they write of you in the abbeys?" he cried. "That you have bewitched the Duke to sodden lechery with your enchantments! And 'tis for this he suffers the hate of all men."
"That is false!" She coloured hot, and anger choked her. She forgot, as he had, the shoutings of the mob. She forgot Blanchette, who stiffened in her chair. "How dare you speak to me like that! I've never done him harm. I love him."
The friar drew a rasping breath while red froth bubbled in the corners of his mouth, yet he went on inflexibly, as though she had not spoken.
"Ay - they write of your lechery, these Benedictine monks. They little know that they might also write of murder!"
A convulsive shiver shook his lean body. He raised the crucifix and stared down into the woman's white uncomprehending face.
"Katherine Swynford, your husband was murdered. Ay - and in God's sight, you and the Duke murdered Hugh Swynford in Bordeaux as truly as though you had yourselves procured the poison that killed him."
"You're mad," she whispered, gazing at him in horror. "Brother William, your wound has made you mad."
From behind them in the chair there came a stifled sound. They did not hear it.
"Nay, not mad but dying," the friar said solemnly. "May God forgive me that I break the vow of the confessional - but I'll not die with the vile secret on my soul, nor shall you lack chance for repentance."
Katherine drew back from him, slowly, until her shoulders pressed against the gilded bedpost. "I don't understand," she whispered. "Hugh died of dysentery. You were there."
"Ay - fool that I was. T'was Nirac de Bayonne who put the poison in Sir Hugh's cup, this he confessed to me on his deathbed, but 'twas you gave your husband the draught to drink."
"The cup- -" she said. Her mind swam in a heavy blackness. She looked down at her hand and saw in it the shape of the little clay cup of medicine that she had held to Hugh's mouth. She dragged her eyes up to the friar. "But I didn't know! Before God, I didn't know!"
"You didn't know! Nor did the Duke, who cast his poor tool aside when it had blindly committed the foulest of all crimes for him. But can you take this crucifix and kiss it, while swearing that you did not long for your husband's death? Nor rejoicing in your secret heart when it had happened? Can you'"
She did not move.
The friar's body blotted out a burst of sunlight through the window behind. He held the crucifix towards her with a shaking hand. Dark and terrible as a wall painting of God's judgment wrath he stood over her, then another shudder seized him. The crucifix rattled down the length of its beads beside the knotted scourge.
He slumped forward and stumbled to the ivory prie-dieu. He knelt on the white satin cushion which crimsoned with a spreading stain. He clasped his hands together, and raising his face to the golden images of Christ and St. John the Baptist in the niche above, he began to chant, "Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordiam tuam - -"
Katherine sank slowly to her knees beside the bedpost. Her wide straining eyes fixed themselves on the round white disc of the friar's tonsure; her lips moved in mindless echo of his prayers.
Blanchette was huddled in the chair, her face sunk on her breast. She did not stir, she made no sound, but deep in her brain a voice cried on two notes senselessly like the cuckoo. It said, "Murder - murder - murder," and sometimes it changed its cry and said, "She gave poison to your father - father - father."
Below in the Outer Ward the Kentish rebels had arrived with Wat the tiler at their head, though the exhausted priest John Ball remained behind in a friendly alderman's house to regain his forces. Wat saw by the raised portcullis and the swarming figures near the chancery building and the Great Hall that his men had been forestalled. '
But he cared little for that, the more there were to help, the quicker would be the act of vengeance and destruction. He knew by now that the Duke had escaped them, but they would wreak what vengeance they could on his possessions, as they had on those of other traitors.
Already on the way here they had torn open the Fleet prison. And they had fired the Temple, burning the legal roles and records on which the cursed ink strokes gave leave to strangle all the rights of common man. A detachment of Wat's force remained there now to watch the razing of the Inns of Court, to see that no vestige remained of that Temple of Iniquity.
Here at the Savoy, Wat saw that his predecessors had achieved but little yet. The Essex peasants had broken into the famous cellars and broached the vintage tons and vats. They gulped and sloshed the wine, wandering stupidly and singing, bemused by the feel of this rich liquid in their gullets that had never known anything but small ale.
Wat took command at once. Some of the Londoners still pounded at the iron-bound Treasure Chamber door. Wat and his men added their strength to the timber battering-ram, until the hinges burst, and they were free of Lancaster's treasure. They dragged out coffers full of gold and silver and piled them unopened in the Great Hall. They took the coronets, the jewelled chains, the diamond-crusted scabbards and broke them up in the courtyard, then ground the jewels to powder beneath great paving-stones.
"We be not thieves!" roared Wat, as he spied a lad who stuffed a silver goblet in his jerkin. He killed the lad with a thrust of his sword and threw the goblet on the mangled pile that grew in the centre of the Great Hall. Some of them, as the frenzy grew, ran into the gardens trampling on the flowers, uprooting the rose bushes. The place was accursed, no part of it should remain.