Chapter 36: The King’s Highway

The snow had stopped by the time they reached the Roman road, but the cold had settled into the bones of the land like a judgment. Tom walked with his hood pulled low, a staff in his hand that was more for balance than defense, and beside him Joan moved with the quiet certainty of a woman who had walked these miles in worse seasons. Behind them, the village of Wykeham had shrunk to a smudge of smoke against the grey horizon, and with it the weight of Sir Hugh’s gaze, the bishop’s questions, the fevered woman’s whispered treason.

“You walk like a man going to his own hanging,” Joan said.

Tom glanced at her. The wind had reddened her cheeks, and she wore a woolen cloak that had once belonged to her husband, patched at the shoulder with a different shade of grey. She carried a small satchel of dried herbs and a knife at her belt, and she looked less like a widow on an errand of mercy than a soldier on a march.

“I’ve never been to London,” he said. “I’ve read about it. I’ve seen—I’ve heard stories. But I don’t know what I’m walking into.”

“No one does,” she said. “That is why we walk anyway.”

They passed a cart overturned in the ditch, its wheels stripped, its load of turnips scattered and rotting. The plague had done that, or the fear of it. Men had fled their fields and left their harvest to the crows. Tom had seen the emptiness in the villages they had passed, the shuttered windows, the unanswered doors. The Black Death had not yet reached its full fury, but it was coming, and the land already felt it.

“The King is at Westminster,” Joan said. “Or he was, when I last heard word. He keeps court there in winter, when he is not in France.”

“And if he’s not there?”

“Then we wait. Or we follow.” She shrugged. “A king is not hard to find when he is the most hunted man in Christendom.”

Tom thought about that. Edward III was hunted, yes—by the French, by his creditors, by the debts of a war that had gone on longer than any man had expected. But he was also the most powerful man in England, and he had made himself the center of a cult of chivalry that stretched from the Low Countries to the Pyrenees. Tom had read about him in history books, knew the dates and the battles, knew that Crécy had been won and that Poitiers would be won and that the war would drag on for a hundred years more. What the books did not tell him was what he would say to the man himself.

“What do I offer him?” Tom said aloud.

“The truth,” Joan said. “The truth about Hugh. And the truth about what you can do.”

“He’ll think I’m a warlock.”

“He’ll think you’re useful,” she said. “And useful is safer than holy, in a king’s court.”

They walked on. The road curved through a copse of bare oaks, their branches black against the white sky, and then opened onto a stretch of open ground where the wind bit hard and the snow had drifted into ridges. Tom’s boots were wet through, his toes numb, and he knew Joan was suffering the same. But she did not complain, and neither did he. Complaints were for men with options.

They reached a crossroads at midday, marked by a stone cross worn smooth by centuries of weather. A signpost pointed north to Oxford and south to Winchester, and a third direction, less clear, toward the coast. Tom stopped and looked at the stones, imagining the feet that had passed this way before him—pilgrims, soldiers, merchants, kings. He was part of that procession now, whether he liked it or not.

“We should rest,” Joan said. “There is a barn ahead, if the crows have not taken it.”

She pointed to a low structure set back from the road, its thatch sagging, its door hanging on one hinge. Tom nodded and followed her, and they made camp in the straw that had been left behind, eating bread and cheese from Joan’s satchel, drinking water from a skin that tasted of leather and iron.

“What will you do,” Joan asked, “if the King asks you to prove what you can do?”

Tom considered the question. The warehouse was too far away, and the battery was dying. He could not bring the King to the barn and show him the steel ploughshares or the veterinary books. He had only what he carried, and what he remembered.

“I’ll tell him about turnips,” he said. “About feeding more people on less land. About draining the fens and rotating the crops. About the things that made my world rich enough to feed a million people in one city.”

“He will not believe you.”

“He doesn’t have to,” Tom said. “He just has to pay me to try. And if it works, he’ll want more.”

Joan was silent for a moment. Then she smiled, a thin and knowing thing. “You have learned to think like a king.”

“I’ve learned to think like a merchant,” Tom said. “It’s the same thing, with better clothes.”

They rested until the light began to fade, and then they walked on, because the cold was a worse enemy than the dark. The road ran through more open country now, the fields stripped bare, the villages few and far between. Twice they saw riders in the distance, but neither approached, and Tom kept his hood up and his hand on his staff.

It was near dusk when they saw the inn ahead, a low building of stone and timber with a painted sign that creaked in the wind. The sign showed a crowned hart, and Tom felt a small measure of relief. An inn meant warmth, food, news. It also meant questions, and he was not sure which was more dangerous.

“We go in together,” Joan said. “We are man and wife, traveling to see her sister in Oxford. You are a wool merchant, and you have a gift for numbers. Say little, and let me do the talking.”

Tom nodded. He had learned to trust her judgment in the weeks since she had appeared in his life, as strange and fierce as a winter hawk. He followed her through the door into the heat and noise of the common room, and the smell of woodsmoke and ale washed over him like a blessing.

A man at the bar turned to look at them—a thin man with a clerk’s face and a priest’s collar, and behind him, two men in the livery of the bishop’s household. Tom felt his blood run cold.

Joan did not falter. She walked to the bar, smiled at the innkeeper, and ordered two pots of ale. Tom followed, keeping his face still, his eyes on the fire.

The clerk was watching him. Tom felt the weight of that gaze like a hand on his shoulder.

“A cold night for traveling,” the clerk said.

“A cold night for everything,” Joan replied. “My husband and I were hoping for a room.”

The clerk nodded slowly, and Tom saw something flicker in his eyes—not suspicion, not yet, but the beginnings of a question.

“There is room,” the clerk said. “The plague has emptied half the beds in England.”

Tom said nothing. He took the ale from Joan, drank, and let the warmth spread through his chest. Outside, the wind rose, and the snow began to fall again, and he knew that the road ahead was longer than he had thought, and that the questions would not stop at the bishop’s gate.