The Crippled Angel

“Then I will save you,” the young girl said with such a determined air that Emma almost believed her.

With the utmost effort, Emma raised a shaking hand and touched her child’s cheek. “You are so beautiful,” she said.

V Friday 24th May 1381 —i—

Mary leaned forward very slightly, just enough to touch Neville’s arm to stop him, then stared about in horror.

They’d entered London across the bridge a few minutes ago after a careful two-day journey from Windsor. The journey had not tired Mary as she’d feared it would. Men rather than horses had carried her litter, and they were as gentle as might be. Her physician, Nicholas Culpeper, travelled with her entourage, and made sure that she took regular doses of monkshood and opium poppy. The strength of the mixture should have fogged her mind, but Mary was so overwrought with the horror she knew had descended on London that she managed to remain both relatively pain-free and clear-headed, something for which she thanked sweet Jesu many times daily.

They’d set out from Windsor at daybreak on Wednesday. Thomas Neville led the entourage, which consisted of Mary herself, Margaret Neville, one other noblewoman, Lady Alicia Lynley (Mary’s other ladies were so terrified at the thought of returning to a pestilence-ridden London that Mary had bid them from her service), Neville’s squire Sir Robert Courtenay, Nicholas Culpeper, two of his apprentices, and an escort of fifty armed men-at-arms.

They had approached London from Southwark. Here Mary had excused from her company the greater number of her men-at-arms, Lady Alicia Lynley, and Culpeper’s two apprentices. They would journey on to the Tower by boat to apprise the king of her arrival in London.

Here also Mary had alighted from her litter, saying only that she felt well enough to ride something small and manageable, and the litter would be too cumbersome to negotiate the twisted, narrow streets of London with ease.

At this Neville had argued vehemently with Mary, saying she could do little within the ravaged city, that it was suicide to even think of entering, and that she would be vastly better off going straight to the Tower and to Bolingbroke, both of which were, at the least, pestilence-free.

Mary had listened to him with the utmost courtesy, saying once he had paused to draw an indignant breath that if he and Margaret did not fear for their lives then neither should she. Besides, she would do more good for the Londoners in London than walled within the safety of the Tower, would she not?

Neville, as Margaret, tried for another hour to persuade Mary not to enter London. In the end, Mary had been forced to command them to allow her. She was queen, and as queen she was going to enter London to do what she might.

And so they went, everyone walking save Mary who sat atop a sweet-tempered pale cream donkey that Neville had found for her in the stables of one of the Southwark inns.

Its owner was long dead, and the donkey seemed pleased at being pressed once more into service. It appeared also instinctively to know Mary’s frailty, for it stepped slow and sweetly, gently easing down each hoof so that Mary might not be jolted.

And thus, Neville leading Mary’s donkey, Courtenay and Margaret walking on the other side, and Culpeper bringing up the rear with the remaining ten men-at-arms, they crossed London Bridge.

Armed men had stopped them halfway across at the drawbridge, but had let them through the instant they recognised Mary. When the party gained the intersection of New Fish Street and Thames Street on the city end of the bridge, they all stood still, slowly coming to terms with the horror that had enveloped London.

Evening had fallen, but it did little to hide the hellish streetscape. Red, noxious smoke billowed everywhere. Fires sparked and roared in the intersections ahead. People, little more than huddled humps, scuttled from doorway to doorway. A cart, overloaded with corpses and drawn by an emaciated limping horse, emerged momentarily from the roiling smoke, rattling slowly down the cobbled surface of New Fish Street. A grotesquely cloaked and masked shadowed figure tugged at the horse by its bridle, and, even after the cart had vanished back within the smoke, Mary and her escort could hear the man cursing at the poor beast, trying to make it hobble faster.

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