The Poison Maiden

Chapter 1

Winter’s spite was spent. Candlemas had come and gone in a glow of light through dark sanctuaries, chancels and chantry chapels. Edward of England had scarcely been crowned a month, yet already the Great Lords, as they called themselves — Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke; Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln; Bohun of Hereford; Beauchamp of Warwick; and de Clare of Gloucester — were mustering for war. The roads and lanes into London surged with fighting men of every description. Archers dressed in quilted jerkins over homespun shirts, around their waists leather belts with scabbards for sword and dagger, their green serge leggings and crude oxhide boots caked in mud. Their helmets and neck cloths glistened in the sheen of the spring rain, and against their shoulders were longbow staves, the precious twine concealed in a leather sleeve to protect it against the wet. Behind these marched masses of foot in their leather jerkins, heads and faces concealed by conical helmets with broad nose guards. Crossbowmen followed armoured in kettle hats and hauberks; men-at-arms marched in leather jacks and quilted gambesons, coats of scaled armour, the iron skullcaps on their heads laced beneath the chin. They all carried round shields or targes, in their belts shafted axes, clubs and daggers. All these troops streamed towards Westminster, the retinues of the lords who hoped to unfold their war banners in a blaze of arms: dragons, castles, chevrons, martlets, griffins, bears and lions of every colour. The troops mustered in the fields and wastelands around Westminster, impatient for their masters, conventicled in nearby St Peter’s Abbey, to issue their defiance of the Crown.

Across the narrow road, protected by fortified gates and crenellated walls, lurked their intended victim: Edward of England, with his golden hair and olive skin, two yards in height, a prince of striking appearance. His finely etched face was made all the more remarkable by a straight nose, full lips and a generous mouth, and his slightly drooping right eye, a legacy from his father, gave him an enigmatic, mysterious look, as if he was constantly weighing what he saw and heard. As well he might. The Great Lords were demanding the arrest and trial of Edward’s favourite, the man he called his bosom friend, his dear brother, a new Jonathan to his David, the Gascon, Peter Gaveston. The Lords thought different. In their eyes Gaveston was the alleged offspring of a witch, a commoner unjustly exalted by the king to the earldom of Cornwall, a premier lordship of the kingdom, a public display that the favourite was the king’s heart and soul. Gaveston had also been given in marriage Margaret de Clare, the king’s own niece. He was allowed to display extravagant arms dominated by a gold-scarlet eagle. In the eyes of the Great Ones, Gaveston, despite his dark hair and splendid physique, adorned by costly robes of silk, velvet and damascene, was a cockatrice. He was compared to that fabulous two-legged dragon with a cock’s head and face whose stare and breath were fatal to all it glared at. In a word, Gaveston was a blight on the kingdom. He was that mysterious, fabulous beast, with the head of a man and the body of a lion protected by porcupine quills and a scaly tail, which roamed the land dealing out death and devastation. He was a marined, a merman, neither one thing nor the other. The Lords wanted him dead. Resentful at his hold over the king, his elevation to power, his marriage, his wealth, his wit, not to mention his skill at arms, they were truly jealous of Gaveston. They wanted him gone and had come fully armed to the Parliament at Westminster to achieve that.

To strengthen their case, the Lords had summoned old Robert Winchelsea, Archbishop of Canterbury, back from exile to sanctify their proceedings. The leading earls met the archbishop in the hallowed precincts of the abbey. They muttered behind their hands how this was God’s work, that Gaveston was not only the offspring of a witch but a badling, a sodomite who had captivated the king’s heart and trapped his body in sinful, unnatural lusts. Satan, they argued, lurked in the shadow of the Crown. Winchelsea, with his scrawny hair, bony face and eyes all animate ready to fight, was only too eager to play the role of the ‘Prophet of Wrath in Israel’. He had swept into London, which he dismissed as ‘a city without grace, having men without faith and women without honour’, a veiled warning to the capital not to support their king.

Edward and Gaveston laughed when they heard that, but sobered swiftly enough. Winchelsea, exiled by the old king for his meddling ways, proclaimed himself ready for martyrdom, eager to follow in the steps of Becket, to be the vox populi, if not the vox dei — the mouthpiece of righteousness come to judgement. In the end, however, denunciation was one thing, war was another. No one dared draw the sword. If Edward unfolded his standard displaying the royal arms, to go to war against him was high treason to be adjudged immediately. So the Lords hesitated. What was to be done next? Edward and Gaveston retreated deep into the Palace of Westminster. A host of retainers and servants, whitesmiths, blacksmiths, coopers, jewellers, masons, tilers and craftsmen followed. These were joined by petty clerks of the household, those of the pantry, buttery and kitchen, not to mention the royal clerks of the wardrobe, exchequer and chancery as well as those from the courts of king’s bench and common pleas. A packed throng of liveried royal servants protected by the Kernia, Gaveston’s wild Irish mercenaries, together with royal troops, knight bannerets and a host of Welsh archers. All these took up close guard along the walls of the palace, at King’s Bridge and Queen’s Steps, as well as the Great Gate and the postern doors to the royal quarters. The abbey scaffold in nearby Gallows Lane became busy, swiftly adorned with the corpses of malefactors, footpads and foists who’d dared to creep close to the royal household eager for rich pickings. The king had vented his rage and frustration on such lawbreakers, whose corpses froze, drying hard in the cold spring air.

I have read the chronicle accounts for those opening months of Edward’s reign. They all depict it as a time of bloody change. Philip IV ruled France. Pope Clement V sheltered in his palace at Avignon, feasting himself and his court of cardinals on swans, peacocks and boar meat, guzzling like parched men on the rich wines of the south. A time of change also. Death and Destruction, those two gaunt riders on their pale skeletal horses, were already emerging from the boiling mists of time. Death, as one chronicle declared, was a knight on horseback carrying a square shield, in the first quarter of which was depicted a grinning ape, indicating how, after his death, a man’s executors laughed at him and spent his goods. In the second quartering was a lion, symbolising the ferocity of death. In the third, an archer signified its swiftness, and in the fourth was a scribe writing down all the sins to be judged before God’s tribunal. Flood and foul weather blighted lives; Pride and Pestilence prepared their ambush. One monkish chronicle declared: ‘God is angry. He will no longer hear us and, for our guilt, grinds even good men to dust.’ According to another writer, the times were so dreadful, Antichrist himself was already born and had reached his tenth year, a boy of great beauty. Grisly, mysterious incidents were carefully recorded. The earth turned barren due to blood being spilt. Trees creaked after they had been used as gallows. Cliff-faces were scored with the claw-marks of Satan. There were storms and floods. Eclipses, shooting stars and signs in the heavens. Monstrous births and violent visitations. People ate the bread of sorrow and drank the waters of distress. Looking back, all I can say is that the preachers and the prophets of doom had it wrong. Matters were to turn much worse! Evil was burgeoning like a plum ripe to rottenness, and as with all mayhem, once released, it followed its own destructive course.

Edward and his lords were bent on confrontation. The king withdrew into the spacious grounds of the palace at Westminster, where he had built a splendid hall that he nicknamed ‘Burgundy’, laughingly calling himself the King of Burgundy, and recreating there his favourite childhood residence: those chambers above the gatehouse at King’s Langley. Burgundy Hall was a stately, majestic manor house of costly stone and timber with a slate-tiled roof. It was built round a quadrangle and boasted a long hall with chambers above, and alongside, half-timbered, half-stone extensions above a maze of cellars. It was a veritable jewel with its oaken framework, the elaborately carved verge boards of the gables, the vein-like tracery of the windows, the slender pinnacle buttresses. It was as if the king wished to create his own make-believe world and hide from the rage seething around him. He, Gaveston, the queen and a shrunken group of royal supporters, led by the old king’s general Hugh de Spencer of Glamorgan, sheltered there.

Edward and Gaveston played and waited, ignoring the gathering furies. In Scotland, Bruce threatened his northern shires. From Avignon, Clement V fulminated how the English king should harass the Order of the Temple to destruction as Philip of France had. Close by, a mere arrow shot away, the Lords decided to stay and take up residence in the sacred precincts of Westminster Abbey. Philip, scenting victory, the opportunity to turn Edward into his minion, re-entered the melee, dispatching his own envoys to England. They arrived mouthing peace but planning for war. A vicious brood: the Abbot of St Germain, a pompous nonentity, together with the French king’s evil familiars, Guillaume de Nogaret, Guillaume de Plaisans and, prince amongst those serpents, Enguerrand de Marigny. These three demons, at their master’s behest, had destroyed the Templars, browbeaten the papacy and were now determined to bring Edward of England under the ban. In the king’s palace itself, hiding in the shadows, was Isabella la Belle, not yet fourteen, but still possessed with the mind of a veteran intriguer. A true daughter of her father, nevertheless Isabella hated him as the cause of her own mother Jeanne de Navarre’s sudden and mysterious death, as well as for the abuse perpetrated on Isabella by her three brothers, those scions of Satan: Louis, Philippe and Charles. In public, she played of the role of her husband’s enemy, united with her father in his dreams of a Capetian hegemony, of bringing all Europe and its rulers under his iron sceptre. She was publicly aggrieved at her husband, deeply resentful of Gaveston. Ah well, that was how the tongues wagged. In private, Isabella plotted her own path with me in her shadow, like an archer notches his bow as he hides behind the shield of another.

I was close to both queen and king. In truth, I had no choice. Both my mistress and I were of the king’s mesnie, his household, members of his own private chamber. There was one other. The beat of my heart, the light of my life, the passion of my soul, Bertrand Demontaigu, his black hair lined with grey, his sallow face redeemed by the most beautiful eyes and courteous ways. A Templar priest, the son of a French knight and an English mother, Demontaigu, after the sudden, brutal destruction of his order, had also hidden away in the shadow of the queen’s retinue, acting as one of her household clerks. His previous role as a messenger of the Temple had saved him from being marked and hunted down by Alexander of Lisbon and his Noctales. These were ferocious bounty-hunters dispatched through Europe by Philip of France and Clement V to pursue, capture and kill any surviving Templars. Demontaigu! Even now the very thought of him sends my blood fluttering. He made me feel whole and good. Above all he made me laugh, saying our relationship was one of autumn and spring, for he had reached his thirtieth summer whilst I was just past my twentieth. He and Isabella brought purpose to my life. I repaid both with undying loyalty, whatever their sins, whatever their faults. Yet that is what love does, surely? Blinds us only to the good.

The spring of 1308 was a time of acute danger, made even more so when the Poison Maiden emerged to make her sinister presence felt. How did it begin? Let me tell you as I would describe two knights preparing for the joust. They mount, armed and helmeted, their destriers paw the earth and snort, the tourney ground falls silent except for the jingle of mail and the clatter of arms. The trumpets shrill. The red cloth falls. The knights lower their visors, couch their lances and raise their shields. The warhorses move in an ominous rumble. The charge begins, slowly at first, then the heart quickens as the earth shakes and the combatants bear down on each other in a fight to the finish. So it was. I can only recall what is important, what pricks my memory. Think of walking down a dark passageway, stone-walled, hollow-sounding. You pause and look back. You see the darkness but your eye is drawn to the flickering torches, the glow of light they throw — so it was with my life, my time. Danger did not threaten at every heartbeat. I was usually immersed in a tedious list of mundane tasks: supervising the pantry, ensuring the cooks and fleshers bought good meat and fresh fish. I went down to the slaughterhouse to check that the quails, partridges and pheasants were properly prepared and cured. I ensured old rushes were burnt and the freshly cut sprinkled with herbs. The laundry room was also my responsibility: how the linen of both wardrobe and bedchamber was washed to freshness and properly stored in aumbries, coffers and chests. I dealt with petitions, a licence for a man to crenellate the walls of his manor house, protection for a merchant going abroad, pardons to outlaws who had committed crimes and were now willing to purge themselves by military service in Scotland, the grant of offices and benefices, safe conducts for alien merchants to travel safely from Dover. I managed the spicery accounts as well as those of both the buttery and pantry. Above all I dealt with a myriad of ailments, including those of my mistress, whose monthly courses always brought her pain and discomfort. I treated these with great burnet, marjoram and camomile. She also suffered from rashes, a legacy of upset humours when she was a child. I soothed these with soap water and special potions distilled from herbs. I also dealt with the ailments of others: catarrh, stomach cramps, cuts, bruises and injuries. In the most serious cases, or when in doubt, I would recommend a visit to the physicians at St Bartholomew’s or St Mary’s Bethlehem. I acted as Isabella’s clerk in the queen’s secret chancery, my quill pen cut to my liking; or, escorted by Demontaigu, as her confidential messenger to various parts of the city. I loved such occasions, sitting cowled and hooded in some London tavern, be it the Swan in Splendour, the Honeycorn, or the Bell of Jerusalem. I would chatter to Demontaigu like a child. He would listen carefully. Sometimes he would touch me lightly. I would respond. He rarely talked of his priesthood. Occasionally he mentioned his hunger for silence, for a normal, restful life away from the hurly-burly of court life. People took him to be what he was, a clerk in priestly orders. He would discreetly celebrate his Jesus or morrow mass just after daybreak, when the bells of the palace and the abbey were clanging. I would kneel at a prie-dieu and stare at those hands grasping the singing bread or the sacred goblet. I’d bow my head and blush at my waking dreams of the night before. Deus meus! Tears sting my eyes. My heart grieves at the sheer loss, the thought of such bittersweet memories.

Nonetheless, the tourney was about to begin. The lists were ready, the knights emerging from the shadows, the cut and thrust of secret, bloody battle almost imminent. So it was that on the Eve of the Annunciation in the Year of Our Lord 1308, deep in the royal enclosure at Westminster Palace, murderous mayhem emerged on to the field of life. (I will not hurry, but describe it as it was.) On that bleak, cold day, Isabella and I were cloistered with the Queen Dowager Margaret, Isabella’s aunt, sister of Philip IV, widow of Edward I of England. Margaret had been married to that great warlord for eight or nine years and borne him four children. The eldest of these would die most violently at Isabella’s hands outside the gates of Winchester, squatting, chained like a dog, until a condemned felon, in return for a pardon, struck off his head. Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, the most handsome man in England, half-brother to a king, uncle to another, a prince of the blood, son of the great Edward and saintly Margaret, slaughtered like a pig! Who says the Furies do not pursue or that the sins of the father, or the mother, are not visited upon the next generation? Yet that was the path I was about to follow, blood-soaked and violent. Others walked with me: great lords, princes of the royal house, bishops and ladies, knights and generals, all brought down, lower than hell. But that was for the future.

On that Annunciation Eve, Isabella and I had to while away the hours as well as flatter the queen dowager. We sat on faldstools round the great-mantled hearth of the queen dowager’s solar near the Painted Chamber in the Old Palace of Westminster. A harsh, cold day even though spring was three days old. A fire roared in the dark, vaulted hearth. The logs crackled red in the heat. The herbal pouches split to give off puffs of summer smells and drive away the iron-cold feel of winter. We shared a jug of hippocras, heating it with a fiery iron and mixing in nutmeg, whilst we plucked at crushed honey-coated sweetmeats from a mazer fashioned out of vine root which, the queen dowager had solemnly assured us, came from the Holy Land. I remember that mazer well: gilded with silver and displaying the Five Wounds of Christ against the IHS insignia. I sat staring at it whilst the flames roared, the charcoal braziers crackled and the torches, candles and lantern horns sent the shadows dancing, a fitting prologue to the horrid murders about to slip like a horde of ghosts into our lives.

At the time my mistress and I were utterly bored, though Isabella schooled her lovely features like a novice. She crouched, head slightly down, the folds of her gauze veil hiding her lustrous hair, her fur cloak, still clasped about her, slightly opened in the front to reveal a woollen dress of dark blue, its lace fringes resting on the fur-lined buskins protecting her feet. Next to her, Margaret, the queen dowager, was garbed like a nun in dark robes, her face and head framed by a pure white wimple. Around her gloved fingers were a pair of ave beads with gorget of silver and a gold cross. A serene face, cold as clay; those heavy-lidded eyes, square chin and bloodless lips recalled the stony features of Margaret’s redoubtable brother. I always considered her face to be chiselled out of marble, and even then I wondered if her soul reflected her features. Margaret, the devout, the holy one! Even her drinking cup depicted scenes from the passion of Thomas a Becket. Around the rim, as Margaret had tediously told me on at least three occasions, were the pious words: Of God’s Blessed hand be He that taketh this cup and drinketh to me. On the wall behind her was painted: God who died upon the Rood. He bought us with His Blessed Blood upon that hardy tree.

Oh yes, Margaret, the saint, the bore, the empty head. Ah well, I should have been more prudent and reflected on the adage: Cacullus non facit monachum: ‘the cowl doesn’t make the monk’. Or in her case, the wimple the nun! On a stool at the far side of Margaret sat the queen dowager’s constant companion and kindred spirit, Margaret de Clare, sister of Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester, and wife to Peter Gaveston. An ill-matched pair surely, or, perhaps, one fashioned in heaven, for de Clare did not interfere in Gaveston’s affairs. She was whey-faced, redeemed only by expressive eyes and an ever-petulant mouth. De Clare adored the queen dowager, and imitated her in every way, particularly her piety and her public passion for relics and pilgrimages. I deemed both of them pious simpletons, but then I was green in matters of the heart, whilst experience is the harshest teacher. Isabella secretly dubbed them ‘the great Margaret and the lesser’ or ‘the Holy Margaret and the even holier’. She could mimic both to perfection: their sanctimonious expressions, dull looks and monotonous gabbling about the sanctity of a shard of shin bone.

On that particular day, despite her innocent looks and questioning blue eyes, Isabella had been teasing them both about the so-called glories of Glastonbury Abbey, where the bodies of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere had allegedly been found during the late king’s reign, together with the magical sword Excalibur and the mystical Grail Cup of Christ. The two saintly Margarets (and I write as I saw at that moment of time) warbled like songbirds about visiting Glastonbury later in the spring and wondered if her grace would like to join them. My mistress, as she later informed me, bit back her screamed reply. Due to the Lords, she could scarcely leave Westminster whilst her household exchequer was empty; she simply lacked the silver to travel. Of course, as always, she behaved herself, winked at me and innocently asked if the revenues of the good abbey had greatly increased due to their miraculous discoveries. The queen dowager was on the verge of a new homily about the mystical rose bush at the abbey, a sprig she claimed sprouted from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, when Guido the Psalter intervened. He and Agnes d’Albret were also of the queen dowager’s entourage and were usually present whenever we met her. From the start I was wary of Agnes, a young woman just past her twentieth summer, tall and slim, a mop of fiery red hair framing a peaked white face with slanted green eyes and a pert, mischievous mouth. She was dressed in a high-collared tight-fitting kirtle of tawny sarcanet, and sat throughout the dowager’s sermon studying me carefully, as well she might. She was a kinswoman of both the Abbot of St Germain and Marigny, who had just arrived in England and were lodged elsewhere in the abbey precincts. She seemed friendly enough, though she must have known about the deep rancour between myself and the French court.

Guido the Psalter acted differently. An apothecary, a leech, his real name was Pierre Bernard, a Parisian who’d allegedly left France due to an unfortunate incident at the Sorbonne when a magister was stabbed during a tavern brawl. Guido had fled for sanctuary to England, where he successfully petitioned the queen dowager for protection against her brother’s law officers and won a place in her household. A most resourceful man, he was both minstrel and jongleur; Guido was also skilled in leechcraft, an apothecary learned in matters of physic. I had met him quite frequently since his arrival in England after the coronation of Isabella. He seemed a lively, merry soul, with his sensitive, smooth features and close-cropped black hair. I was fascinated by his long fingers, white as lily stalks. Guido claimed he could feel pain from a patient merely by pressing his fingertips against the flesh. I did not believe him. Yet he was no jackanapes or counterfeit man. He openly mocked superstitions such as the power of the emerald being such a protection against poison that if a toad looked at it, its eyes would crack. He also quietly confessed that the queen dowager’s interest in relics and elaborate pilgrimages were tedious in the extreme. Oh yes he did, clever man! Ah well, the scriptures rightly say, ‘Judge not and ye shall not be judged.’ I say, judge and he shall be truly surprised! On that day Guido caught my eye, winked, and when his mistress paused in her description of the mystical rose of Glastonbury, swiftly intervened.

‘I have an even more wondrous story,’ he declared, ‘about a land inhabited by pickled fish-men, an eel-faced, beetle-browed race, very warlike, who live on raw flesh. They are opposed by mermen stoats, who, in their upper parts, resemble men, and in their lower, weasels-’

Abruptly the door was flung open, and Edward and Gaveston, swathed in heavy cloaks, swept into the chamber, furred hoods pulled back, their hair laced with rain. Both strode across, pushing their way through to the fire. They were followed by Hugh de Spencer of Glamorgan, a strange-looking individual with his receding hair tied in a queue at the nape of his neck, his ruddy face unshaven, his deep-set eyes glaring furiously around, mouth all aggressive as if expecting to confront the king’s enemies there and then. Old de Spencer! I was there when they hacked his body to bits outside Bristol and fed it to starving dogs. Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the king’s cousin, followed, silent like a shadow, his pinched face tense under tangled hair. When Lancaster was taken out to execution, little boys threw snowballs at him. However, that was all for the future. I promised to tell the story as it unfolded from start to finish. I suppose it all began then, when the king strode into that chamber. We rose to greet him. He unbuckled his cloak, let it fall to the ground and thrust his backside towards the fire.

‘The royal arse,’ he declared, bowing at both the queen dowager and Isabella, ‘is frozen as hard as a bishop’s heart!’

Gaveston slipped quietly on to the vacated stool next to his wife, his beautiful face wreathed in that infectious smile. Gaveston was truly handsome, his hair neatly cut, his face oiled and sensitive. He was graceful in all his gestures. He also bowed at the two queens and impishly blew a kiss in my direction before seizing his wife’s silk-mittened fingers and lifting them to his lips even as he patted her affectionately on the thigh. Agnes, Guido and myself immediately withdrew from the circle but the king, still rubbing his backside, beckoned imperiously at us.

‘No, no, Mathilde, and you, Guido. My ladies.’ He bowed once again at the two queens, who sat staring up at him. I caught the questioning look of adoration in Margaret’s eyes, as if completely bemused by her royal stepson. Edward sniffed noisily. ‘Guido, Mathilde, I have need of you. Langton is in the Tower, he has an ulcerated leg. He mistrusts the leeches and once again has asked for you, Master Guido. I have agreed, but,’ he continued, right eye almost closed, ‘to show my deep concern, Mathilde will also attend on him. Thus my Lord Walter Langton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, cannot whine to his fellow bishops that he has been ill treated.’

A short while later myself, Guido and Bertrand Demontaigu left King’s Steps aboard a royal barge pulled by eight liveried oarsmen. A page stood in the prow tending the lantern horn and blowing noisily on a trumpet to warn off other craft. We sat in the stern shielded by a canopy emblazoned with the royal arms. Above us a blue, scarlet and gold pennant snapped in the breeze, proclaiming that this barge was on royal service. Demontaigu sat muffled in his cloak. He kept his distance as if he was a relative stranger, the royal household clerk he pretended to be, acting as if resentful at being plucked from his comfortable chancery chamber for this cold journey along a mist-hung Thames. He was armed with sword and dagger. These he placed across his knees, grasping them close, then glanced quickly at me, those lustrous dark eyes full of merriment. He murmured that famous prayer of travellers and pilgrims:

‘Jesus welcome you be,

In form of bread as I see thee,

Jesus’ holy name.

Protect us this journey.

From sin and shame.’

Guido heard this and laughed softly. He said he feared neither God nor man. On reflection, he was telling the truth. He was certainly dressed for that journey like a popinjay, in a puffed jacket and a richly embroidered cloak, gifts from the queen dowager, who appeared to have more than a tender regard for him. Demontaigu, as if tired of listening to Guido’s praise of his mistress, asked about Langton and why he was imprisoned in the Tower.

‘Hatred,’ Guido replied. ‘Walter Langton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, was the old king’s treasurer. Time and again he tried to rein in the spending of Edward when he was Prince of Wales. He often had violent confrontations with the prince over his lavish expenditure as well as his friendship with Gaveston. When the old king died,’ Guido pulled a face, ‘Langton fell.’

‘Even though he is a bishop?’ Demontaigu asked.

‘He could be pope of the whole world!’ Guido replied drily.

‘The new king hates him. Langton was stripped of dignity, wealth and office and committed to the Tower.’

‘Why?’ I asked, staring into the bank of mist that swirled like a host of ghosts across our barge.

‘The king regards him as a meddler who will side with the Lords. Langton is fiercely opposed to Gaveston.’

‘But so are others.’ I wiped the river spray from my face.

‘True.’ Guido nodded. ‘The other reason is treasure. The king’s exchequer is empty. Rumour has it that Langton owns over fifty thousand pounds of silver, besides a hoard of gold and precious jewels. Some of it is Templar treasure, lodged with him by the order before it fell. The king has asked for this. Langton claims such wealth is a myth, that he is poor as a friar. Searchers from the royal exchequer have ransacked his properties but cannot find any trace. Hence my lord Langton stays in the Tower until he remembers where he has put his money.’

Guido leaned forward and shouted at the captain of the guard to make more speed. I stared across the water. The Thames ran dark and strong; a sharp, biting wind forced my head down but it also stirred the mist to break and reveal the other craft along that busy river. Oystercatchers, fishing smacks, barges and boats full of produce thronged the waterways as they headed for the wharves of Queenshithe, Garlickhithe and Timberhithe. Cogs from Bordeaux, sails furled, manoeuvred to dock at the wine wharf, whilst a flotilla of powerful war cogs, flying the colours of the Hanse, made their way up to the German enclosure at the Steelyard. The air reeked of oil, fish, tar and spice. These odours mingled with the stench from the great loads of refuse, excrement, offal, dead animals and rotting food disgorged into the Thames by the gong barges as well as the city rivers of the Fleet and Walbrook. Now and again the dangers of the time manifested themselves. Great high-sided war barges flying the various-coloured pennants of the Lords and packed with men-at-arms and archers, made their way ominously down to Westminster.

‘God preserve us,’ whispered Guido, gesturing at them. ‘Lincoln, Pembroke, Winchelsea and the rest are determined on Gaveston’s trial. My mistress has interceded, mediated, pleaded.’ He sighed noisily. ‘It is of little use.’