CHAPTER 31

THE ASSASSIN

 

 

 

Ut sementem feceris ita metes

 

As you sow so will you reap

 

 

 

“You have seen nothing?”

“No, my lord, but I have seen his retainers; the two that stand by and another two out of their liveries, garbed as farriers, near the king’s stabling tents.”

Pacificus peers round the corner from the stabling yard to the tilt yard, where Sir Robert Aeyns is making a clean sweep of the knights of the shire. Crunch; the splinters of white ash spin in the sky, and the clattering thud of yet another noble backside on the sand brings Sir Robert yet closer to facing the king. “Could you not arrest him?”

“What, without evidence, and while he carries all before him?” Cromwell pushes the beret up on his brow, revealing a red line beaded with sweat. “There would be an outcry, and the king would have my guts too, if we found nothing substantial.” He will not tell this monk, but it is not Aeyns he worries about so much as the duke and the bishop. They might be in this together. An arm’s length assassination perhaps, then placing papist Mary on the throne with Norfolk as regent, and Rugge as… hmmm… archbishop? Yes, he’d like nothing better than to knock Cranmer off his perch, restore the old superstition, have both our heads on Tower Bridge. Perhaps this Sir Hugh Erpingham is in it with him? Yet he did not hide his concern from me; there are wheels within wheels here. Wish I had more of my own men with me.

“Do one thing for me, monk, for I see the king is leaving the box for his armour and horse – set those Fentons to watch this stable yard, and you the king’s tent, for surely I will be suspected if I am seen near either. I’ll wait in the royal box; from there I can see both gates. If you or they signal to me, I can dispatch the master-at-arms forthwith. Keep faith with me in this and it shall go well with you and them. Anon!”

 

All is arranged. Hobbs, Richard and Piers watch Sir Robert come and go from his various victories, but so far he appears to have nothing other than the tournament on his mind. He is greeted and served between bouts by one of his two retainers, one acting as squire, the other hovering near the gate. They are the men Pacificus saw earlier at the palace. Pacificus surveys the situation carefully. He can feel danger, but he wills himself to breathe calmly, to moisten his mouth, to stop his heart from breaking through his ribs. What, when, how, who? God, I wish I had more time, more men!

He walks swiftly towards the other end of the tournament ground where the royal tents are situated, adorned in crimson, yellow and gold trim. The king has already left; he waits, mounted, ready to enter the lists, yet the farriers have not moved. The applause is almost deafening, even from here. Pacificus is nervous at leaving the others so near Aeyns and his men; he has a bad feeling of unpreparedness amidst multiple traps. It is not how he has ever liked to work. He stands by a cook tent admiring the meats and fowl that hang on iron racks, keeping a close eye on the two farriers from that vantage point. What have they got in that tool box, or under those thick leather aprons? He can imagine all sorts of scenarios, but assassination is the only option that meets all the facts.

For a moment he is taken aback by the bishop’s audacity – staggered even. It is a bold hand to play even in this day and age. The thought flickers in the recesses of his mind, like the final guttering of a spent candle, that perhaps the king’s death would end all this bloodshed, let the traditions of peace return. Had he not thought of killing him himself in those dark days after Robert Aske’s death? But no sooner does its pale flare illuminate his imagination than he applies his fingers to the wick. For in the same way as he knows it has been right to help these Fentons, so also he knows it would be gross sin to murder a king – or stand back and let others do the dirty work. If God allows Henry’s reign to blunder on even after eighty thousand men could not change the royal mind, then murder would be insurrection against some hidden plan of the Almighty. He’ll have no part in that.

But – he brings his mind back to the scene his eyes are watching – why the two locations? Are there multiple targets, or multiple sites offering opportunity? Unlikely with so few men, and besides, if the king falls that is enough to achieve the bishop’s aims; who else would matter after that? Pacificus quickly assesses what Cromwell must have seen twenty minutes before: one target, two kill sites; one primary, one secondary. But which is which? He looks steadily at the farriers, remembering them as monks in his own cloister – dear God, what a world! They are feigning laughter and jollity but their hands and the tension in their bodies betray severe strain and anxiety. He thinks of them in comparison to Aeyns, and the retainers he met earlier outside Rugge’s smoky room. Think, man. What would you do if you were Aeyns? Might he let these two carry out the deed instead of himself? No, not he; it would run counter to the cogs in that bold Norman forehead of his. These farriers must be the fall-back; he’s the goose, by God. In the arena: that’s how he’ll do it, in front of them all. But how?

Pacificus cannot see the means, not in his mind, nor in his experience. A matchlock, a wheellock, a crossbow, a tipped lance? The tilt yard is too uncertain a place, surely. Perhaps easier if you wanted to die in the act as a martyr yourself, but if you would live? Aeyns does not seem the sacrificial sort, too full of himself to contemplate defeat at any level – no, he’s no martyr, that one. No, he’ll do it and expect to walk away, but how? How, damn it, how?

He feels his pulse quicken, the blood course hot in his veins. The time for thinking is past. It no longer matters how. The thing is, and is now, happening at this moment – the trumpets are sounding for the king to ride. Two sharp breaths through flared nostrils. Go, GO! Pacificus moves out from behind the meat stand as if to go towards the gate, and the farriers recognise him at once. Their faces drop like stones – they have been warned about him – and now they look at each other with uncertainty. The thinner of the two goes not for the box, but the hessian matting at his side. They are thirty feet away and evidently determined not to let Pacificus reach the gate. There is no more time. He roars out to the hascals standing sentry on the king’s tent, “A plot! A plot! Look to it! Assassins! Look to the king!”

These two men, midway between Pacificus and the farriers, call out and raise their matchlocks, but before either can fire they feel the swift punch of crossbow bolts in their chests. Their weapons fall, one going off with a plume of smoke. The king’s retinue, some thirty of them, scatter for their tents or any other cover. The assassins are reloading and looking as sharp as foxes at the clearing smoke, as well they might for the monk will waste no time. They see him amidst the haze of smoke, going for the fallen matchlock, but are not prepared for the almost immediate yellow flash and the thud of a matchlock ball on bone. One assassin, the one Pacificus judged more able to make a swift shot, feels the ball shatter his upper ribs and enter his lung. It is like having a lead stake driven through him at one blow. He will rise no more. John Blount, captain of the bodyguard, has drilled his hascals to always double-powder the shot, calls it his crowd stopper. The assassin crumples, gasping on the ground as the breath leaves his body, looking up like a lamb as Pacificus rushes his fellow conspirator and dashes his brains across the yard with the matchlock butt. Not that the monk even stops to see the effect of the second blow, for anyone can recognise the sound of a broken skull, the hollow thud giving way to gore. Pacificus is already running towards the gate, yelling like a madman, “A plot! Stop the joust!”

John Blount has not heard the shots amid the roar of the crowds, but recognises the bishop’s aide running and shouting in his direction, the skirts of his habit whirling and the dust flying in clouds from the beat of his sandals.

“Let him through! Let him through!” he bellows at the hascals blocking his way. “What is it? What ails thee, man?”

“There’s a plot,” Pacificus urges him breathlessly. “For God’s sake, man, the king must not ride!”

But the king is already halfway down the yard, a shimmering mass of speeding steel, juddering in his saddle like so many lead-filled cooking pots. Aeyns is out to meet him too, lance angled and sure, and behind him at the yard gate, his other two retainers – watched carefully by Hobbs, Richard and Piers. Sir John, a veteran of Bosworth, who has now served the Tudors for the greater part of his own three score years and ten, does not even ask for details, nor flinch from the shock. He motions to Cromwell, who is standing like a sentinel in the royal box. Cromwell does not return the nod, but goes straight to barking at others.

“It’s the lance, my lord, the lance – ” Pacificus gabbles as the moment of impact approaches, but the old eagle is not listening.

“Secure the gates!” he bellows at his son, Sir George, who, unlike his father, is velveted and feathered like a man who has grown up in court, as indeed he has. But even despite the foppish affectations, the young man obeys without question, starting with three hascals round the back of the main stand.

In frozen horror Sir John and Pacificus watch the titans clash in the arena to a near deafening eruption from the crowd. They see Sir Robert’s lance glancing from the king’s oversized besagew, the extra steel originally intended to cover the platelets between shoulder and chest, but in Henry’s case enlarged to shield half his left chest – and a good thing too, on this occasion. Pacificus sees Aeyns’s lance bend and flex as it glances; it does not splinter. Thoughts spring to his mind like a volley of matchlock fire. It is the lance, it is! See how even a brute like Aeyns struggles to hold it straight; the thing is heavy, maybe twice the weight of an ash lance – perhaps green oak, yes that would do it, strength with flex. And the crown? He can’t see, for the end of the lance is still shaking as Aeyns thunders towards them. But when he does see it, Pacificus grasps Sir John’s wrist. “Look you! The crown is clay, with steel beneath!”

Sir John orders his men to prime their matchlocks but Aeyns sees Pacificus and the commotion at the gate, and so wheels his horse and makes to charge the king once more. Two matchlocks discharge to their left, but at fifty or so yards the effect is uncertain; one enters through the steel into his riding arm, the other merely glances off the thick plate on his back.

There is no time, Pacificus thinks; there is no time. He dashes into the arena before Aeyns can spur his horse to speed. What is he going to do? He hardly knows himself. He only knows that the power to act brings responsibility. All those years, trying to forget, to let the world pass by his abbey, his church, his rood screen – his cave. It was Rugge who first dragged him back into the world of incarnate action – or was it the Fentons? – he can hardly tell now. But he has seen the indifference of passivity and the evil that always floods in to fill that vacuum, and he’ll not be party to it any more.

Before he knows it, he’s level with Aeyns’s ankles and just in time to jump and take hold of the saddle horn before the destrier has taken stride. Through his helmet holes Aeyns does not at first see what has happened, only he feels the pull at the saddle. But once he realises, his steel gauntlet is hammering on Pacificus’s head, face and shoulder. As they gain pace, the monk’s feet start to drag on the ground, terrifyingly close to the thundering hooves. They gather momentum towards the returning king, who, because of the barrier and his high visor, has not noticed anything amiss. Aeyns still has his lance arm free and can easily make a pass with or without a monk clinging on to his side. This time he’ll aim away from that reinforced besagew – he need only make a flesh wound for, as Pacificus suspects, the steel tip is poisoned too. And the monk? Crushed between the Antichrist and a true soldier of Christ, a fitting end. Aeyns digs his spurs without mercy into the horse, closing the gap. Once his feet are gone, Pacificus finds it impossible to do anything but hang on and use his free hand to fend off such blows as he can. But after only a few yards his left hand is losing grip, his fingers feel brittle under the relentless pounding of hooves and fists. His right arm is vainly grabbing at Aeyns’s arm; if he could just grab it, grab something to pull on, but it’s no use, and even if he could get a grip he’d not be able to affect the position of the lance. Aeyns is a machine, right arm fixed like a siege ram, and it is only moments before impact that he stops spreading Pacificus’s nose across his face, and sets his reins for impact. Pacificus sees through the blood that he’s damned whichever way this goes; crushed between them if he holds on, or crushed underfoot if he lets go. It’s only now, just before impact, that his right hand slips onto Aeyns’s foot, and he remembers the berserkers of old who disembowelled knights’ horses. Fixing his fist round Aeyns’s heel, he drives his spur into the flank of his horse; screwing the spikes until they rip the flesh ragged in the tender parts. Blood and warm flesh cover his hands, until the animal can stand it no longer, and out of sheer fight-or-flight takes to the air; bucking and kicking out like a thing possessed. Pacificus is thrown like a mannequin into the path of the king’s horse, but rolls free before its arrival. Aeyns is nearly thrown, but by some magic of his own maintains the saddle, though dropping the lance in so doing. He looks behind but the king’s men are in pursuit now, and the king is safely behind him. For a fantastic, breathless moment, the man raises his visor and makes his calculations. Pacificus wipes the blood and sand from his eyes enough to see the tri-part deliberation of his enemy – the king, the monk, his escape? Aeyns’s face is boiling with rage, his right hand now brandishing a long cavalry wheellock that he had kept concealed in his saddle, and his eyes dart between the gate, the king and the monk. The king is lost to him and the sensation of obdurate failure is something so new, so intolerable that he growls like a mad dog, eventually fixing his gaze on the monk. He levels the wheellock and would dearly love to use it now for the rage in his heart, but he knows better than to waste his only shot. He spurs the horse towards the far gate, evading the grasp of the king’s men.

At about the moment of the matchlock shots, Hobbs and Richard go to the aid of two of Cromwell’s men in their attempt to subdue Aeyns’s retainers. At first the men appear to put up no resistance, but that is a ruse to lure the guards closer. Once within range, they seize the matchlock barrels of their opponents and with concealed knives open the throats of both guards. It happens so quickly that Richard and Piers have hardly moved before the corpses fall and Aeyns’s men are retrieving their weaponry. The initial blood from their arteries has projected nearly fifteen feet, splattering some merchants who have paid extra for front seats. There is shrieking and stampeding as the stands continue to empty. Hobbs, however, piles in like the bulldog he is, closing on them with sword and buckler, wounding one of the men within his opening strokes. Richard and Piers are soon at his side, Richard with his father’s sword, Piers with a pikestaff grabbed from the stable yard.

“Stay behind me!” Richard says.

“I will not,” replies Piers, who is at his brother’s side and now waving the staff in the direction of the grim-faced assassin holding Hobbs off with his rapier and long basilard with its swept hilt.

Hobbs gestures for them to spread out, and tries to shout as much with the half of the tongue left in his head. “Spread out! Watch him – HIM!”

It’s too late. These men know what they’re about, and at that moment Hobbs’s guard is lifted by one and breached by the other. The steel enters his gut and kidneys like a cold cramp. The wounded assassin goes for a kill stroke while Hobbs is doubling, but Richard smashes his blade away and up-cuts with such a stroke across the man’s face that he doesn’t even cry out before death finds him. The second man would have had Piers if it were not for the approach of his master, wheellock in hand. Richard and Piers dive for cover. The assassin is on his own horse before they are back on their feet. They give chase but Richard is too slow in armour and Piers, having just seen the sharp end of a sword an inch from his own head, knows he cannot face this man alone, or at least not with nothing but a sharpened pole. They return to find Hobbs failing fast. He cups Piers’s chin tenderly when he kneels down and bends over him, to say a whole stream of incomprehensible things.

“Good boy,” Piers makes out, over and over, as the pallor of his face turns that ephemeral grey that Piers remembers in baby Samuel’s as they laid him in the coffin.

Richard kneels beside them and raises Hobbs’s head. He doesn’t know what to say; this is beyond words. He tries to lay his hand on the wound to stem the flow, but Hobbs catches it and shakes his head, gesturing the futility.

“No!” Richard grips Hobbs’s hand. “No! No!”

“Shhh.” Hobbs momentarily closes his eyes with the pain, cheeks smarting, but when he opens them they are like the sun bursting through the clouds in the middle of an autumn shower. “A knight,” he says firmly, “a knight.” Hobbs brings Richard’s hand to his lips and kisses it.

“Hobbs! Hobbs! Oh, good God, no!” It is the moment when Sir Geoffrey arrives. “Oh man, oh no, no, man; have they done for thee too!” And then shouting into the arena, “A surgeon! Bring me a surgeon! Oh Hobbs, dear God, not thee, not thee!” He falls on him as an equal, a son even. There are tears a-plenty but no surgeon, and no priest either, for all focus is on the king, who is quite unscathed. Pacificus arrives to see Sir Geoffrey saying the Paternoster over the dying man. He completes the circle gladly, and it does not seem a hard thing for Hobbs to give in to the weakness and tiredness that now sweep over him like a damp January draft. He’d never had a family of his own to speak of, but to die surrounded by men he esteems, who love him more than he knows, is enough for him, and more than most men could claim after longer lives. His last word is “happy”. After that it seems that he breathes to take a breath that never comes. Pacificus stoops and closes the man’s eyes, as he has done for many other fallen men he’d called brothers.

 

“Follow me; the king is asking for you.” Cromwell is the first to find Pacificus at the yard.

“Did they stop Aeyns?”

“No.” Cromwell screws up his lips and nose, as he always does when he’s chewing on a hard matter. “The dullards on the gates were too slow, and two of my men are dead. It’s a mess.”

“Yes, and Lord Hastings has lost his man at arms – ”

“Never mind that now; the king would speak with you. Can you do something with your face?”

“My face?”

“Clean it up, man. You are to stand before His Majesty.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I came for you myself in case you – perhaps after all this – would consider revealing yourself.” Cromwell tilts his head to better read the monk. “Opportunities like this rarely come; he will raise you this day if you tell him, I know it. England stagnates to putrefaction for want of a noble that the people could look to, a general against our enemies – ”

“My lord, you forget I am a Benedictine, pledged to serve Christ.” Pacificus looks at him, incredulous. Does this man never stop? “I desire naught from any prince in Europe, let alone the one who has hounded and slain my brethren, and taken from the poor their last hope in the bitter winters ahead.”

Cromwell is trying to interrupt with his usual diatribe against the corrupt clergy, but Pacificus isn’t done. His blood’s up now. “So there were some monks and abbots worse than their profession, but would you argue that the guilds and the nobility will somehow be better than theirs? God’s oath, they live for filthy lucre, almost to a man. I will see the king, yes. I will see him, but I want nothing, nor any more talk of who I was. That man is long dead.”

 

“Ah now, Tom, is this the monk?” The king is sitting in his tent on a French couchette of red silk. Norfolk and Rugge are barred entry, which has put Cromwell in high spirits. Sir Thomas Heneage is fluttering about talking to people who appear in the tent doorway. Charles Brandon sits on a separate couch with a blonde courtesan rubbing his shoulders.

“Yes, Majesty; Brother Pacificus of Saint Benet’s Abbey.”

He bows low, and Pacificus’s back stiffens in spasm. “Highness.”

“Well, brother, you acquitted yourself this day like a man. I am told you felled two more papist conspirators outside this very tent. Brandon here thinks you must be a saint – or else a knight.” He’s jesting.

“Just a lowly brother and loyal subject, Majesty.” He does not look up for fear his back will seize up altogether.

“Ha – Majesty!” It’s Brandon with more than a little stiffness in his own back from the tumble he took. “He’s got more about him than most knights in this realm. Raise him, Henry, and give him the garter, like I said.”

“It is in my gift…” The king offers the words tentatively, as on a golden platter, gauging what he assumes is his suppliant.

“Your Majesty is very generous, but I have taken vows – ”

“Vows? Come, man, I am your sovereign.”

“But my vows were to God.” This he says a little too quickly, so he adds tactfully, “I desire no more than that Your Majesty be in health, and do the will of God.”

Brandon slaps his knee with that. “Oh, fortiter in re, suaviter in modo!⁴³ We have a rare one here, Henry! What’s to be done?” What, indeed?

 

As it turns out there is quite a lot the king will do, for it is a matter on which he mulls a good part of the night. The day following he appears before his retinue and tells them what he intends. He will not stay in Norwich for the week as planned, but return that very day to Newmarket and thence to London. He has heard that Lady Erpingham’s champion and his garrulous page hazarded their lives for his safety, and that Lord Hastings lost a man in the fray. They will all, including the monk, escort the king on horseback beyond the city gates. Cromwell sees good publicity, Sir John Blount sees dangers, but is satisfied if the king will wear a breastplate under his robes. They depart the bishop’s palace after taking wine on the terrace. The bishop is there to bid them adieu. Cromwell has been to speak to him, let him know who pulls the strings. Reforms will be swifter from now on in Norfolk, that is for sure. The Duke of Norfolk rides with the royal cavalcade, but behind the Erpinghams – a humiliation he bears manfully. Lady Elizabeth wears emerald green velvet and is adorned with every pearl that Lady Maria can find. “I would have worn these myself,” says she, “but I shall be behind with Uncle, and – well, you shall be next to the king not I, and I won’t have him going back to London thinking we in the provinces have no style. Yes, yes dear, you can keep your blessed kirtle how you will. You’ll never die a widow now you have the king’s attention – might even be queen.”

Beth accepts the pearls. “A queen! Why Maria, what an imagination you have. The king could have but one use for me, and that he shall not have.”

“Then see to it that you receive no money, only small gifts and those only through others. And, remove no item of clothing in his presence, nay not so much as a hairpin – oh, how jealous I shall be; you at court and I languishing in Norfolk.”

She rides on the king’s left, Richard flanking her with the bloodied Erpingham standard flying freely above their heads alongside the king’s Beaufort standard. Richard is sober in countenance; the blood-letting and cauterising of the shoulder wound have taken their toll. He feels as though he could sleep until Saint Crispin’s day, but holds his head high, even so. To the king’s right rides Pacificus and beside him Piers, grinning ear to ear. Ahead of them and on every side ride the king’s hascals, stern as stone.

When they pass under the palace gates, the king points up to the statue of Sir Thomas. “See, my lady – your ancestor smiles today, methinks.” From this point on the streets down towards the castle are thronged with people of every rank, all wild with glee to see the king’s champions. Cromwell is right; in one afternoon these Erpinghams have near saved the monarchy from all the unpopularity of three years of reforms. The king waves and makes pleasantries to Lady Elizabeth in between his casual gestures to the crowd. He wants to know whether she could get used to this. She says no. He laughs it off – mind, today he’d laugh anything off, except perhaps a matchlock ball. For that, Pacificus is looking at every open window, every balcony, every turret. It would be so easy, he thinks, and yet for all his searching, the demoniac face of Robert Aeyns is nowhere to be seen. Cromwell, who observes the monk’s tight vigil, shouts forward above the din: “I have looked him up.”

“Who?”

“Aeyns, of course. His mother was from Livonia. He was a Teutonic knight on her account, and very effective from what I’m told. Went missing after their grandmaster Albert of Brandenburg turned Lutheran, and exchanged the order’s Prussian possessions for a duchy under his uncle, King Sigismund of Poland.”

“And the knights?” Pacificus knows them by reputation; every man of them thought himself equal to a prince – and a cruel one at that.

“The Livonian knights took it wrathfully, as you could imagine, and swore a terrible revenge on the Lutheran princes, and – as they put it – on all other Antichrists.”

“You knew all this yesterday, didn’t you?”

“I know all sorts of things, but look to yourself, man. You have bruised his heel. I warrant he shall bruise your head ’ere long. If we don’t get him first.”

“Tom!” The king has left off his attentions towards Lady Elizabeth. “You and your schemes! Let the man alone while he rides at my side. For it is soon time that we shall be parted from them.” And then leaning back in his saddle, he jests, “Spend a little more time wooing and waving to the crowd – you have need of friends down here.”

They finally pass through Saint Stephen’s gate where a halt is called and the crowds fall silent, expectantly. Under the shade of the gate the king presents a gold and sapphire brooch to Beth, a gilt dagger to Piers and a German rapier with swept hilt to Richard. He says he looks forward to seeing them again soon after Michaelmas, under a better star. They are all still mounted. The Fentons smile, nod, and bow their heads. Even Piers is unsure if he should speak. There is an awkward pause where the king arranges his gloves and nods one last time to Beth. “But what,” he says then, “shall be done for the man whom the king delights to honour?” He asks this looking at the Fentons, and repeats it under the damp echo of the flint and mortar of the gate. He twists his velvet bulk the other way and catches Norfolk and Cromwell’s eye. “What shall be done, eh?”

The duke looks as if he has a suggestion, but Brandon shouts, “What, Majesty? Tell us.”

The king turns back to Pacificus. “I tell you, that man shall wear the king’s own ring, a life for a life, so all the realm may know that in Norfolk the king has loyal subjects that love not their lives unto the death, but serve and protect their anointed king.”

Henry removes his glove in full view of them all and prises a gold and ruby ring from his index finger. This he gives to the monk with a straight look, closing his fingers over it. “For thy troth and valour. You may send it back if you ever hath need of my help.”

Cromwell observes them, thumbing an almost identical ring that the king gave him the year before. He thinks Thomas More may have had one, Wolsey too for that matter. Didn’t do him much good in the end though.

The king’s gaze falls upon the slums beyond the city gate and he moves the conversation on accordingly. “Now monk, Baron Cromwell here tells me that in Geneva there are no poor beyond the walls, but that all their ilk are lodged in garrets at the centre of the city; he thinks we should do better than all this.” He waves a hand in indication of the squalor of ragged shacks, torn coverings, the thin columns of smoke barely struggling above the stench. He has spoken without much thought, though he has phrased it as if he expects a reply.

Pacificus remembers Brother William Beccles, almoner of Saint Benet’s, and all his woe of recent years. He remembers the blue fingers, the black mouths, the biting cold, fresh graves of young and old, the haunt of crows pecking at the fresh soil all through early spring. “Well he might, Majesty, for winter approaches and without the monasteries – ” Cromwell is scowling at Pacificus so much that he catches himself and stops mid-sentence.

The king is not after advice; he brushes Pacificus away with, “Yes, but the poor ye shall always have with you.” And then, blithely, “Did not Our Lord say as much – but tell the bishop to see these people fed this winter; do something useful.”

With this they take leave for Newmarket, the cavalcade of well-wishers returning to the city.