Heartstone Read Online Free Page B

young gelding then, now he was a mature, peaceful animal. I looked down at Timothy. ‘You have been mixing those herbs with his fodder as I asked?’
    â€˜Yes, sir. He likes them.’
    Seeing Timothy’s smiling, gap-toothed face, I felt a clutch at my heart. He was an orphan, with no one in the world outside my household, and I knew he felt Joan’s loss deeply. I nodded, then said gently, ‘Timothy, if Master Coldiron sets you and Simon to play at soldiers again, you are to tell him I said no, do you understand?’
    The boy looked worried, shifted from foot to foot. ‘He says it’s important for us to learn, sir.’
    â€˜Well, I say you are too young. Now, fetch the mounting block, there’s a good lad.’ I said to myself, that man will go.

    I RODE DOWN Holborn Hill and through the gate in the city wall at Newgate, the grim, smoke-blackened stone of the jail hard by. Outside the entrance to the old Christ’s Hospital two halberdiers stood to attention. I had heard it was being used, like other former monastic properties, to store the King’s weapons and banners. I thought again of my friend Roger’s plans for the Inns of Court to found a new hospital for the poor. I had tried to carry on his work after his death, but the weight of taxation for the wars was such that everyone was pinching and sparing.
    As I passed the Shambles a blizzard of small goose feathers swept out from under a yard door, causing Genesis to stir anxiously. Blood, too, was seeping into the street. The war meant a huge demand for arrows for the King’s armouries, and I guessed they were killing geese for the primary feathers the fletchers would use. I thought of the View of Arms I had witnessed the previous day. Fifteen hundred men had already been recruited from London and sent south, a large contingent from the sixty thousand souls in the city. And the same thing was going on all over the country; I hoped that hard-faced officer would forget about Barak.
    I rode on into the broad thoroughfare of Cheapside, lined with shops and public buildings and prosperous merchants’ houses. A preacher, his grey beard worn long in the fashion now favoured by Protestants, stood on the steps of Cheapside Cross, declaiming in a loud voice. ‘God must favour our arms, for the French and Scots are naught but the Pope’s shavelings, instruments of the devil in his war against true Bible faith!’ He was probably an unlicensed radical preacher, of the sort who two years ago would have been arrested and thrown in prison, but encouraged now for their hot favouring of the war. City constables in red uniforms, staffs over their shoulders, patrolled up and down. Only the older constables were left now, the younger ones gone to war. They looked constantly over the crowd, as though their rheumy eyes could spot a French or Scottish spy about to - what, poison the food on the stalls? There was little enough of that, for as Barak said much had been requisitioned for the army, and last year’s harvest had been poor. One stall, however, was filled with what to my astonished eyes looked like a heap of sheep droppings until, riding closer, I saw they were prunes. Since the King had legalized piracy against the French and Scots all sorts of strange goods from impounded ships had turned up on the stalls. I remembered the celebrations in the spring when the pirate Robert Renegar had brought a Spanish treasure ship up the Thames, full of gold from the Indies. Despite Spanish fury he had been feted at court as a hero.
    There was an angry tone, different from the usual haggling, in the many arguments going on up and down the market. At a vegetable stall a fat, red-faced woman stood waving one of the testoons in the stallholder’s face, the white wings of her coif shaking with anger.
    â€˜It’s a shilling!’ she yelled. ‘It’s got the King’s majesty’s head on it!’
    The