London - Edward Rutherfurd [224]
But one thing he did know: he had given his word. “I said I’d help her,” he muttered. And that was enough. He would try. And the only course left now, that he could see, offered only a slim chance. “He can hang last,” the justice had told him. “I will give you one hour.”
He was going to try for a royal pardon. The Warden of London might give it him. And he was at the Parliament.
The great Palace of Westminster was thronged with people when he arrived. Magnates and lesser barons in sumptuous robes, knights and stout burgesses like himself in heavy cloaks and furs. No one stopped the doughty merchant as he strode in.
He had no plan. There was no time. “I must find the Warden of London,” he cried. “Does anyone know where he is?”
Several minutes passed as he made his way through knots of men before someone helpfully pointed to a place at one end of the palace, where a small dais had been erected, covered with a purple cloth. And there Bull saw the warden, talking to the king. “Oh well,” Bull grimaced to himself. “In for a penny . . .”
King Edward I of England gazed impassively as the large and flustered merchant stated his case to the warden, whose conversation with the monarch he had dared to interrupt. A possible miscarriage of justice. A pardon begged. Such things did happen. The fellow at the gallows now. No wonder the man was sweating. The condemned a poor man, no relation of this solid London patrician, who was prepared to pay. Most unusual.
“Well?” King Edward intervened. “Do we grant it or not?”
“We could, sire,” said the warden, doubtfully. He knew he had the king’s confidence, and did not much care for the patrician Londoner. “But the man robbed was a Lombard. He’s very angry, too.”
“A Lombard?” King Edward turned his eyes full upon Bull. They glowered so that even that powerful man blanched slightly. Then he delivered his crushing judgment. “I will not have my foreign merchants bothered. No pardon.” And he waved Bull away.
“He’s one of the patricians you wanted to break,” the warden told him as Bull withdrew. “A wise decision.”
It was no good then. With a sense of failure, and of sorrow for the girl and her luckless lover, Bull rode slowly back towards the city. He passed Charing Cross, and turned west along the lane. He hated to give up, but he could not see what else he could do. Had he been a praying man, he would have prayed for inspiration.
It was just as he reached the Aldwych that he saw the company of riders. Upon the site where his ancestors’ homestead had once stood, there was now a fine new complex of buildings. In the previous reign it had been given to the king’s uncle, the Italian Count of Savoy, and so this sprawling aristocratic residence was generally referred to as the palace of Savoy. In front of the Savoy the riders had momentarily paused to greet some others. They were, Bull saw at once, a group of London aldermen, going to the Parliament. Just those very fellows who had supplanted him and his friends. Another cruel reminder, he realized, of his impotence.
“If one of these damned people had pleaded for that boy to the warden,” he muttered, “I dare say they’d have succeeded.” He was just about to wheel his horse to avoid them, when in their midst he observed the hated Barnikel himself. “He even saw the king,” he cursed, thinking of the day before. “He could probably get anything he wanted.”
Then it struck him. There was, after all, one remote chance for Martin Fleming. One man who just might change the monarch’s mind.
“Oh damn,” he said. “Oh damn and a thousand curses.” This was going to hurt. “But a life’s a life,” he comforted himself, and humbly rode towards the fishmonger.
“Another fellow begging for this boy?” the king stared at the fishmonger in astonishment. “Who is he to have such friends?”
But Barnikel did not flinch. Though he had no particular