They went at a snail’s pace over the bridge. The roadway between the houses with their painted signs and plaster work and their carved, overhanging gables, shook with the tramp of feet. The bowmen put their caps on their bows and shouted together, and from the boats on the river came the braying of trumpets and the beating of drums. Isoult’s heart was out of the crowd. She was conscious of scorn, of an utter lack of kinship with these rustics who crowded in their thousands over the bridge. The walls of the White Tower rose against the blue, speaking to the pride in her, a pride that had blood in the mortar between its stones. Yet she owned to a vague curiosity, a desire to foresee the end of all this storm and bluster. Was it possible that her own perverse but discarded dreams were to come true, that she was to behold King Jack crowned and throned on the seats of the mighty? She felt someone nudging her, and found the swashbuckler thrusting at her with the handle of his poleaxe. “Look alive, wife; grin at them, bob your head. By cock, we are very great people, you and I!” Certainly his greatness had expanded. His eyes flared, and his beard looked even redder than usual. The allegory had got into his head. “You are fine enough to serve for both!” “What, no heart for adventure? We are great people, I say. Listen to the bells, and the drums, and the fine bellowing voices.” “They bellow loud enough, even for your fancy.” “Well, Queen Jill, I shall sit in the King’s chair at Westminster. But spur and saddle’s the word, when we have done with all this mummery. We’ll show these lordings how to handle a spear.” Isoult returned to her own mute inner self, and left this stuffed figure and the crowd on the far edge of her consciousness. She saw things without seeing them, heard sounds without hearing them. Her thoughts were back in the forest with its green and secret ways, in the wild fern, in the singing of birds at dawn, in the smell of the torn blossom, in the strong arms of a man. She was weary of being tossed along on the foam of this mill-race. It would carry her under the wheel, no doubt, and leave her broken in the still waters of the days beyond. She tried to keep in the past and not to think of the future. What did anything matter, unless the strangest of strange things happened? The day’s happenings were to be spread out before her like some pageant or wild miracle play, for the wagon went with the multitude, carried along by it like a barge on a muddy stream. The peasants poured through the city, past Paul’s, and through Ludgate towards John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy. This great and noble house was the first thing to feel the mob’s wrath, and since they could not lay hands on the master, they were determined to wreck his house instead.