Chapter 37: The Road Through the Pale

The inn’s common room was a cavern of smoke and muttering. Men in damp wool hunched over their ale, their faces hollowed by the year’s grief, and the fire at the hearth spat and hissed as if it, too, had heard too many confessions. Tom sat with his back to the wall, Joan beside him, and the weight of the bishop’s seal pressed against his chest like a second heart.

The clerk had given them a room—a narrow chamber above the stables, where the straw was fresh and the wind did not reach—but Tom had not slept. He had lain awake, listening to the horses shift below, and to Joan’s breathing, steady and trusting, and to the voice in his head that kept repeating the words he had spoken to the woman in the linen: *He has been selling grain to the French.*

Treason. The word was a noose. It tightened around every bushel he had counted, every furrow he had ploughed, every hour he had spent making Sir Hugh’s land bear more than it had ever borne. The grain he had grown had crossed the Channel. The gold it had bought was in Hugh’s coffers. And Tom, who had thought himself a thief for stealing a tithe-collector’s satchel, was now complicit in the darkest crime a subject of Edward III could commit.

Joan stirred beside him. Her hand found his in the dark. “You have not slept,” she said.

“The road,” he said. “It does not forgive.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “The clerk said the bishop’s steward is at Salisbury. We will reach him by noon if the snow holds.”

Tom said nothing. The snow would not hold. He could feel it in the ache of his bones, the way the wind had shifted before they had even reached the inn. The storm was coming, and it would not be kind.

They broke their fast in the common room, on bread that was more chaff than flour and ale that tasted of peat. The clerk hovered near the door, and Tom saw the question in his eyes again—the same question that had been there when they had arrived, the question that followed him from manor to manor, village to village, like a hound on a scent.

*Who are you, and why do you carry a bishop’s seal?*

Tom had an answer for that. He had rehearsed it a hundred times on the road, in the dark, in the rain, in the frost. He was a merchant, come to petition the King on behalf of his guild. The seal was a letter of introduction from a bishop who owed him a debt. It was a lie, and it was a good one, but lies had a way of fraying at the edges.

They rode out before the bells rang for terce. The snow had begun again, thin and spiteful, and the road stretched ahead of them like a scar across the land. The fields were bare, stripped of their harvest, and the villages they passed were quiet in a way that had nothing to do with peace. The plague had been here. Tom could see it in the empty cottages, the overgrown gardens, the crosses painted on the doors.

Joan rode beside him, her hood pulled low, her eyes scanning the road ahead. She had not spoken since they had left the inn, and Tom knew she was thinking of the woman in the linen, of the words that had sent them on this journey. *He is not merely in debt, Tom Ashwick. He is in treason.*

“What will you say to him?” Joan asked at last. “The bishop’s steward. What will you say?”

Tom considered the question. He had been considering it for three days, through the snow and the mud and the long, cold nights. The steward was a man of the Church, and the Church was a machine that ground slowly but did not stop. If Tom told him the truth—that Sir Hugh had been selling grain to the French—the steward would want proof. And the only proof Tom had was the word of a woman who had died of the fever, and a satchel of stolen records that could hang him as a thief.

“I will tell him what I know,” Tom said. “And I will let him decide what to believe.”

Joan looked at him, and he saw the doubt in her eyes. “He will not believe you,” she said. “He will ask how you know. He will ask who you are. He will ask why you carry a bishop’s seal that was never given to you.”

Tom said nothing. She was right, and he knew it. The steward would not believe him. The steward would ask questions, and the questions would lead to the warehouse, and the warehouse would lead to the pyre.

“Then I will make him believe me,” Tom said. “Or I will make him afraid not to.”

The snow grew heavier as the morning wore on. The road rose and fell through low, rolling hills, and the trees that lined it wore white like penitents. They passed a cart that had broken down, its driver dead in the ditch beside it, and Tom did not stop. There was nothing he could do. The man was frozen, his face a mask of surprise, and the crows were already gathering.

They reached Salisbury as the bells were ringing for noon. The cathedral rose out of the snow like a ship from a storm, its spire a needle against the grey sky, and the town that huddled beneath it was a warren of timber and stone, smoke curling from a hundred chimneys. The bishop’s palace stood on the far side of the close, its walls high and its gates shut.

Tom reined his horse before the gate. A guard in the bishop’s livery stepped forward, his spear barred across the road.

“State your business,” the guard said.

Tom reached into his tunic and drew out the seal. It was heavy in his hand, cold as the snow, and the wax gleamed like blood. “I have come to see the bishop’s steward,” he said. “I have news that will not wait.”

The guard looked at the seal, then at Tom, then at Joan. His eyes were flat, unreadable. “The steward is not here,” he said. “He left for London yesterday. The King has summoned the bishops to counsel.”

Tom felt the ground shift beneath him. London. The road he had planned to take, the petition he had meant to make, the protection he had hoped to buy—all of it was slipping away.

“When will he return?” Joan asked.

The guard shrugged. “When the King lets him. The realm is at war, mistress. The Church does not set its own hours.”

Tom looked past the guard, at the palace walls, at the windows that stared out over the close like blind eyes. The bishop’s steward was gone. The King was in London. And the snow was falling faster, burying the road behind them and the road ahead.

“Then we go to London,” Tom said.

The guard laughed. “London is a hundred miles away, friend. You will not make it before the snows close the passes.”

Tom turned his horse. He did not look back. He could feel Joan’s gaze on him, and the guard’s, and the weight of the seal against his chest, 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.

They rode out of Salisbury as the bells rang for none, and the snow followed them like a patient hunter.