Knollys took a light and went above to a little room under the tiles, where Fulk was lodged now that Richard the King was King again. Isoult slept with the Princess’s women.
Knollys had to hammer lustily on the door, before Fulk, wrapped in his surcoat, let him in.
“You sleep as well as you face a mob, my son. Shut the door. I have much to say.”
“More rebels to fool?”
“No, a much grimmer business. The King’s Council has most solemnly decreed that you shall grow a beard.”
CHAPTER XXVII
It was a grey dawn, because of the mist on the river, with a promise of heat and of a cloudless sky. On London Bridge the houses looked as though they were smothered in white smoke, and the river went gliding stealthily with hardly a ripple against the piers. A great, straw-coloured sun hung blurred in the east, and when some bell tolled the sound was heavy and distant.
Grey, too, was the friar who sat on a wooden bench against the wall of a house and waited for the gate of the bridge to open. The friar’s cowl was drawn down over his face; his beads hung in a brown loop, and his hands played with them restlessly—hands with big knuckles, and black hair spreading from the wrists.
Sometimes he threw his head back and looked at the battlements of the Bridge Gate. There were two heads up yonder, stuck upon spikes, and Merlin had seen them outlined against the sky when the dawn was breaking—two round, black shapes, sinister and stiff. And now that the day had dawned, he looked up at the two heads, with their ragged necks, the heads of John Ball and of Jack Straw.
Merlin’s eyes were red, but not with weeping. A ferocious, grinning scorn betrayed itself as he stared at the head of the Priest of Kent. He had not loved John Ball, because John Ball had been too much loved by the people.