Tombland

We left after taking a glass of wine and began the walk back to camp. As we passed through Tombland, I saw a familiar couple walking past the cathedral – Gawen Reynolds and his wife, Jane. He walked slowly, bent over his stick, she with an arm through his, white bandages on her hands. I hesitated; surely if anyone had a right to know what had happened to Edith it was her parents.

‘Leave them,’ Nicholas said warningly.

‘That poor woman at least should know.’

‘Then try and get her on her own again, as you did before.’

‘That was a piece of uncommon luck, unlikely to be repeated.’

As we stood there a boy in his teens, in a tattered wadmol jacket and cheap hose, came up to within a yard of Reynolds, and called out, ‘Greedy old snudge, you should be in Guildhall prison!’ then bent and bared his arse at the old man. Reynolds, crying ‘Rebel filth!’, raised his stick to bring it down on the boy’s head. The lad was too quick, though, jumping away, causing Reynolds to overbalance and fall to the ground, the stick rolling away. The boy yelled with laughter, and the men guarding the cathedral gates smiled. Reynolds, his thin face red with fury, tried to rise but could not. ‘Help me, you stupid old bitch!’ he shouted at his wife. The moment the boy bared his arse she had done something I had never seen before – smiled, just for a moment. Now she looked down at her furious husband. ‘I can’t, Gawen, my hands –’

‘Bugger your hands, help me up!’

With a sigh, I crossed the street to them, Nicholas following. Reynolds did not at first see who we were, and as we helped him to his feet and returned his stick he gasped, ‘Thank you!’ Then he recognized us and his face darkened again. ‘You!’ he snarled. ‘I need your help no more than that time in the Market Square. Why do you haunt me like a pair of devils!’ He lashed out at us with his stick, catching me a blow on the shoulder. Nicholas wrenched it from his hands.

‘Have you no gratitude, sir?’ he asked hotly.

‘Give me my stick, you carrot-haired cunt!’ Reynolds shrieked. ‘You pair of traitors! Do you know where I have just been? To the Guildhall prison, to visit a supplier of mine shut up in there, a vile, dark, underground place stinking of damp. He can no longer run his business, and I have contracts with him! You rebel filth will destroy this city! You two gentlemen are in league with these scabby renegade apes! We’ll hang you in the end – hang you, hunchback!’ His tirade ended in a fit of coughing, which was just as well as a grinning crowd was gathering. Jane Reynolds leaned against the wall of Augustine Steward’s courtyard, now looking at her husband with disgust. I motioned Nicholas to step back. As we walked away, though, I still wished I had been able to tell old Jane her daughter had enjoyed at least some years of happiness before her terrible death.

Chapter Seventy-one

During those middle days of August, it seemed that only bad news arrived from the messengers who came to St Michael’s Chapel. Everywhere in the south-east the smaller camps were going down; there were threats of force combined with promises of pardon to all except the leaders, and offers of money – £67 in Suffolk, more than £100 to the camp outside Canterbury. Those sums were big, though dwarfed by the £500 given Kett by Southwell – but Mousehold was by far the biggest camp. From the West Country came news of a major military defeat of the rebels there. And on the seventeenth of August, the first essay having been rebuffed, a large expedition sent from Mousehold to take Great Yarmouth failed, with thirty rebels and six cannon captured. It seemed all hope of taking Yarmouth was lost, for afterwards a number of poorer Yarmouth citizens, some with their wives, arrived in camp, adding to the refugees from the Suffolk and Essex camps.

There was, though, news of a small uprising in Lincolnshire, and another in Warwickshire. But already, on the eighth of August, France had declared war on England. This had long been in prospect, for French assistance to the Scots was growing, and it was said that, hopefully, the Protector’s forces would now be gathered for yet another attack on Scotland. But, two days later, it was announced publicly in London that a new army was to be sent against us. First it was said the Protector himself would lead it, then it was confirmed that the commander would be the Earl of Warwick, an experienced soldier on land and sea. And for all the size of the camp, and its control of Norwich, it began increasingly to seem like an island in a hostile sea.