"We go to Bolingbroke," said Ellis crowding up repressively, "and must be on our way, good sir."
"Why, we go there too!" cried the second merchant. "Best that you stay with us, there are outlaws in the forests on the wold."
"I've heard of none," said Ellis stiffly, "and I know well enough how to protect my lady. Allow us to pass."
"Wait, Ellis, we'll ride with them a little." Katherine had talked to no one outside of Kettlethorpe for so long, and Ellis was so dull a companion that she longed for novelty. "Do you also go to see the Duchess, sir?" she asked.
"Ay," he nodded and his smooth pink face grew as gloomy as the other merchant's had, "to ask her help, though we're bound later," he said with sudden force, "for that thrice-cursed town of Boston, may the foul fiend snatch it!"
"And what has Boston done?" said Katherine, trying not to laugh. She glanced at the third horseman, who was dressed in cleric's robes; his face sunk beneath his black and purple twisted hood, was dismal and long-mouthed as were his fellow travellers'.
"But we are Lincoln men! We are the Suttons, lady," cried the young merchant, "so you need not ask what Boston has done."
"Indeed, sir, forgive me, but I do not know."
"Why, they've stolen our staple! The stinking whoresons, vilely wheedling and lying, they've persuaded the King - or more like they've bribed that infamous concubine of his - to wrest the staple from Lincoln and set it up for themselves."
"Ah, to be sure," said Katherine. Hugh had indeed mentioned that the King had moved the staple from Lincoln to Boston and that it meant grave loss for Lincoln. No longer would all the wool and hides and tin of the country pass through Lincoln for export, no longer could she be the premier cloth town of the north-east, nor its commercial centre. By royal command, she had been debased. Katherine, knowing that this year at Kettlethorpe they would have trouble enough to support themselves and no surplus whatsoever to sell, had thought little of the news. But she looked sympathetically at the three gloomy men and said, "Do you think the Duchess can help you, sir?"
The young merchant hunched his shoulders. "We can but try. The Duke is our friend, we know him well. We hold manors under him near Norfolk and he has often dined at our house outside Lincoln."
Katherine considered this with interest. Mention of the Duke ever gave her a warm and trustful feeling since the day of Blanchette's birth, though he seemed to her incalculably remote. It was a little like the way one felt about God, a being all-powerful, stern but merciful (if one could catch his ear), yet naturally so engaged in vast enterprises that one would never dare to intrude one's self.
The Suttons were wealthy burgesses and one of Lincoln's most prominent families. Master John, the older one, was the father, these the two sons, Robert, and Thomas the clerk. Master John had been Mayor of Lincoln last year and now held a seat in Parliament. They belonged to a class she had never met, landholders, civic dignitaries and prosperous merchants, entirely pleased with themselves and their station, and yet neither noble nor knighted. They did homage and paid fees for the lands they held under the Duchy of Lancaster but otherwise they were toughly independent, awed by nothing, and Katherine was startled by the way Master Robert spoke of the King. "Taxes, taxes, taxes so the old dotard may satisfy his leman, or satisfy his itch to rule in France, as though we hadn't enough to do at home. First, it's a tax in wool, and then it's a tax on wool, and who's to pay the piper but us woolmen? Though never fear, we're not so dull as not to get round that a bit - eh, father?" He nudged master John, who grunted morosely.
"How may that be?" asked Katherine;
Robert Sutton was delighted with so attentive and pretty a listener. He winked at her and chuckled. "Why, pass the tax on, as it were. Lower the price we pay for the wool. Our tax goes up? Then the price we pay the peasants goes down and down and down."
"Yes, I see," said Katherine thoughtfully, "but couldn't they refuse to sell to you?"
"No other way to sell! We woolmen stick together, and with the staple, all wool must come to Lincoln - but we've lost the staple, curse it, unless the gracious Duchess can change the King's mind. Why do you go to Bolingbroke, lady?"
For the same reason you do, I suppose, to get something from the Duchess, Katherine thought with sudden shame. And yet that was not wholly true.
"I go to pay my loving homage," she said slowly. "Sir Hugh Swynford, my husband, is the Duke's man."
"Oh ay?" said Master Robert, "Swynford - of Coleby and Kettlethorpe? Have you much pasture? I don't seem to remember any lots of your wool."
"We seldom have surplus, and this year none at all. Most of our sheep were drowned in the flood. Nor had we many."
It was scarcely past midday and the sun had been glowing fitfully from behind dark-massing clouds. Now wisps and curls of mist began to float by and lie white in the hollows. On the wooded upland of the wolds the tree-tops reared above a bank of lemon-grey vapour.
"Yon's an uncanny light ahead," said the young cleric, speaking for the first time. "Fog looks yellow as saffron, and I ne'er saw fog at midday so far inland." He pulled his silver beads tip from his girdle and fingered them uneasily.
"Nay, Thomas!" cried his elder brother, laughing. "For you've seen little of the world at all. All things amaze you. My brother," he said to Katherine, "is but just come home from Oxford where I'll vow he never stuck his long nose outside Merton close, so bookish is he."
Katherine smiled but she too felt a mounting discomfort. The air was thick and still as though it held thunder, and when they reached the wolds and began to climb through heavy yellow mist, they heard the long-drawn hooting of an owl in the unseen forest.
"What can that be that hoots by day, except a soul in purgatory?" said Thomas, and he crossed himself. One by one the others followed suit, but Robert said, " 'Tis only that the fog has fooled the bird to thinking it is night."
They walked the horses along in silence after that, all of them watching the rutted way, for they could see ahead but a few feet. They mounted higher and the mist cleared, though they saw that it lay thick as tawny wool below them across the fens to the south-east and in the cup where Bolingbroke must lie.
When they began the descent, at once they plunged back into the fog. The shouts of the oxherds behind them grew muffled and distorted and seemed to come from all directions. Otherwise there was an eerie stillness until Master John broke it. "I smell smoke," he said. He drew off his embroidered gauntlets and nervously chafed his gouty fingers.
They all sniffed the thick unmoving air. Yes, there was smoke, but in the faint pungency Katherine caught a trace of another odour, a fetid sickening fume that touched in her some uneasy memory.
"I smell nothing but the fog - Christ's maledictions on it," said Robert. " 'Twill be luck an' we can keep the road."
They plodded on in the still, yellow half-world - trees loomed up of a sudden on either side of them and as suddenly disappeared. It grew warmer and the strange stench grew stronger until they all felt it sting their nostrils. Then through the fog appeared an orange glow and they heard the crackle and hiss of flames and came upon a bonfire in the centre of the road. The fire burned off some of the fog. They could see no one about, but small houses and an alestake showed that they had entered Bolingbroke village. The fumes came from the fire; its oily suffocating smoke writhed upward and drifted through the air.
"It smells of brimstone," cried John button, pulling up his horse and coughing. "Why do they build this here! God's body, but this stink may harm my wool."
"There's another fire down over there," said Katherine, "by the castle wall, I think." She too coughed, her eyes watered. The horses snorted and, tossing their heads, began to trot, trying to rid themselves of the discomfort. No other living thing moved in the village street and, held by dazed uncertainty, they let the horses have their will. The road led around the castle walls and the dry moat. They reached the barbican and saw the great wooden drawbridge was raised flat against the portcullis. The air was clearer here, the horses stopped, and their riders stood staring up at the looming mass of wall when suddenly the mist lifted.