Tombland

MORE HOURS PASSED . At one point, through sheer exhaustion, I fell asleep. Then the door crashed open again and the same officer entered, this time accompanied by a dozen soldiers, all young and strong, swords at their waists. ‘On your feet!’ he shouted. ‘Time to go!’ He nodded, and one of his men unlocked the padlock securing the chain to the wall beside Nicholas, wrapping the chain firmly round his wrist. Another soldier did the same at the other end of the room where the old man was. The soldiers took positions along the line. Their captain said, ‘You go to Dussindale now.’ As I stood up painfully I looked from the window; the fire seemed to be dying now. The sky was a little less dark; soon it would be dawn. The captain said, ‘Mind your feet outside. Anyone tries to escape, they’ll be gutted on the spot. Now, out.’ The guard at the opposite end of the room pulled on the chain. The old man swayed slightly, then found his feet and staggered out of the room, the rest of us following in a macabre procession behind him.

Outside in the Great Hall another twenty or so ragged, chained gentlemen prisoners had been taken from other rooms. A further group of a dozen was being led down the stairs, slowly lest they slip. At the bottom their chain was secured to the end of the one holding the other group, then to ours, with heavy padlocks. Nicholas deliberately hung back so that he, Boleyn and I were right at the end of the long line of about fifty haggard, frightened men. Another young captain walked along the line, checking each man’s padlock was secure. One gentleman began pleading frantically for his life, saying he had money hidden. He was ignored. The doors of Surrey Place were thrown open, grey smoke billowing in.

‘Now, gentlemen,’ the captain said, ‘make a line and start walking outside. Slowly, don’t anyone dare trip.’ We began to move, the long chain rattling and clanking as the first men shuffled outside.

The courtyard was empty, the tents and other supplies stored there gone. The gates were open, and we were led outside. There, the smoke was thicker, and through it I could see countless huts glowing red. One collapsed, then another, sending showers of fiery sparks into the slowly lightening sky. Patches of grass had caught and sent their own billows of smoke skyward. I thought of our hut, the Swardeston people who had welcomed us, poor dead Hector Johnson and Simon, and of Natty and Barak. Had they survived the fighting in Norwich? It suddenly occurred to me that I had never asked Natty what his last name was.

It was a long, slow, horrible march. The guards on each side of us carried horn-lamps, but the light which they and the burning camp provided was obscured by the smoke. We were led past St Michael’s Chapel, which was deserted but had not been set alight, then some way uphill and along trackways between the dying fires of the huts. We looked down at our feet as we walked, but even so some men stumbled and fell, risking the balance of the whole line; the fallen prisoners were hauled roughly to their feet.

Oddly, the man next to Boleyn, a middle-aged fellow with greying hair, took to treating our terrible situation with humour. He said his name was Dale, and he owned a couple of manors in the south of the county. ‘All I did was put one of them to sheep, I would have compensated the tenants, but I don’t live there and my bailiff got together with a local lawyer and turned the tenants out, saying their leases were at the landlord’s will. I remember you were at my trial, sir, you said the steward should be brought as a witness, without him everything he was supposed to have said was hearsay. You tried to get the trial postponed till he was found, and I am grateful for that, but my tenants said he had fled, which I imagine he has, so it fell back on me. Now he’ll be living somewhere quiet, on my money, while you and I face being killed by our own side. What a jest and confusion life is, hardly worth the trouble in the end.’

‘Keep quiet,’ Boleyn said roughly. ‘Concentrate on keeping your balance.’

We turned northward, walking roughly parallel to the bend of the river, then west, now in a line close to the city’s northern walls. We were moving slowly downhill. Many campfires burned on the open ground in the northern part of the city; Warwick’s army.

At length we passed the northern perimeter of the camp, beyond the smoke from the huts. We began to encounter groups of camp-men, walking purposefully westward, all carrying weapons; halberds and spears, twelve-foot-long pikes, sharpened pitchforks, scythes fixed to the end of long poles, and a great number of archers carrying longbows. All looked at us with contempt, some spitting on the ground as we passed. We heard snatches of conversation:

‘They say an adder jumped out of a rotten tree into Mistress Kett’s bosom; some take it as a bad omen, but it didn’t bite her –’

‘There’s some deserted in the night –’