The servants seemed to treasure this bit of comforting information as they mounted. If Stephen and Nancy are impressed by that, so be it, Mary told herself. It sounded like pure foolhardiness to her. Surely there were a lot of things she would learn about William Stafford that would make it easier not to adore him.
There were abandoned carts in the streets of Southwark as they passed, and pigs rooted and chickens scratched unhampered. The central gutters of the narrow streets were a stench of rotting vegetables and human wastes which steamed in the sun. As they rode swiftly by, huge Southwark Cathedral stood silent sentinel to the devastation. Crude wooden coffins piled for burial in the already-crowded and walled graveyard huddled against the church’s outer walls. Tears bit at Mary’s eyelids at the sight of the stacks of human sorrow. At least they had buried Will right away. Staff was crazy to bring them so near to unburied plague bodies. They would all catch the sweat and be dead before they even reached Hever. There was nothing he could do to her to make her stay with him in some little inn in tiny Banstead. She would insist on riding on with the Carey servants.
Southwark was a terrible part of town and she had never seen it so close, for usually traveling parties of noblemen skirted far around its worst haunts. The dingy bawdy houses and taverns which sailors of the merchant vessels and king’s fleet visited were crammed together. No doubt the sweat ate its gluttonous fill here, for people were so packed in that but a few dead would mean destruction for all. Bloody colored crosses stained the dirty wooden doorways here and there. It was like a ghost town with only a few stragglers or faces peering curiously from a second-or third-storey window. Ordinarily, there would be a vast bustling swell of traffic into the city on this highway to the south, but there was almost none. They rode on at a steady clip and their horses’ hoofs echoed off the nearly abandoned streets.
Soon, but not too soon, the city was behind them, hovering above the fields with the hazy sun on it like some giant pall. The gardens and apple and peach orchards of Kent stretched ahead of them. Mary took deep, free breaths now, for she had tried to breathe shallowly with her hand over her mouth in the reaches of the city. Let him smirk at her if he thought she was foolish.
“I am not laughing at you, Mary. I was only thinking you make the best damned looking boy I have ever seen and, unlike some of His Grace’s fine courtiers, I do not usually find young boys at all entrancing.”
She could not help smiling back at him. He had not spoken since they had left the barge and his voice was somehow comforting. “Then I see no need of your spending a day and night with a boy at Banstead,” she threw at him. He raised one rakish eyebrow but turned his face to the road again.
As they got farther out, they passed occasional drover’s carts, farm wains, or painted chars, and Mary relaxed as the scene became more normal. Mother and Semmonet would be pleased to see her despite her tragic news. And little Catherine would squeal and throw herself into her mother’s arms as she always did, even when they had been parted but a little while.
They were nearly to Croydon before their hard taskmaster let them dismount under huge oaks along a stream. “I would love to lie here on the bank and sleep,” Mary said wistfully, stretching her cramped muscles. Her thighs ached terribly and the sword was always in her way. She had never ridden so far astride before. It must take some getting used to and she could tell poor Nancy was suffering as she moved her legs awkwardly and leaned wearily against the trunk of a massive oak.
“Sore, sweet?” Staff asked as he offered her another swig from their wine canteen.
“Not so bad that I shall not make it clear to Hever today, my lord,” she returned tartly. The wine was warm but good on a dust-caked throat.
“If you tried to make it clear to Hever today, lass, you would not walk for a week. As it is, you will be most comfortable resting on your back and not walking about somewhere.”
She turned her head to give him a pointed stare at his gibe, but he was looking away straight-faced and evidently meant nothing by it.
“I am thinking of keeping Nancy and Stephen in Banstead, too. The lad would make it well enough to Edenbridge by night but not the girl.” He rose, evidently not expecting her to have any part of the decision about where her servants stayed or went. It irked her, but she let him help her mount. It would help if Nancy were about if she were forced to stay at Banstead the night with him. That way she could insist the girl sleep with her.
Orchards and wheat fields gave way to patches of beech and elm, and Mary began to sense the look of home. Then the single stands of trees became the deep blue-green forests of the Kent she knew, and she relaxed until her eye caught the weather-beaten sign pointing its ragged finger to the west off the Kent Road—to Banstead, it said. Staff reined in his wheezing stallion and the others halted their horses around him in a tight circle.
“How do you feel, Mistress Nancy?” he inquired jauntily as though they were out for an afternoon’s ride at Greenwich.