Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  ‘War?’ Thomas asks. He thinks of the Dean’s stories of sieges, of slaughter and rape. But that was in France. He cannot imagine it in England.

  ‘There has been war, yes,’ the pardoner answers. ‘And there will be again. For while the King was shy of his wits, two factions have arisen at court, you see? One is led by the Queen, a she-wolf called Margaret from Anjou in France – a Frenchwoman! – and the other by the Duke of York, a cousin to the King.’

  It is easy to see where his sympathies lie.

  ‘And who is winning this war?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘The Queen is in the ascendant, for the moment. Her army routed that of the Duke of York outside the gates of Ludlow last St Edward’s Day. This time the King was present at the fight, and a faction of the Duke of York’s men would not take up arms against his royal standard, however ill gotten the gain. Rex non potest peccare, you see? The King can do no wrong. Even though he is a usurper, the King is still the king.’

  ‘Strange,’ Katherine says.

  ‘Indeed,’ the pardoner agrees. ‘And the people of Ludlow paid dearly for the principle that day, let me tell you, for after York’s soldiers had lain down their arms and slipped away, the Queen let her own troops into the town. It is said they broke every hogshead of wine they could find and by the eve they were so sodden with drink they would only drop what they’d stolen to rape the women. It is in this confusion that Lord Cornford was killed, by your man Giles Riven himself.’

  He takes a sip of ale and stares into the fire again. The pot is steaming, the water plicking around the greens.

  ‘But Queen Margaret is queen of the realm,’ Thomas begins. ‘Why would she let her subjects suffer so?’

  ‘She is French for a start,’ the pardoner says, ‘and furthermore she has no money so must pay her troops with promises of plunder. Besides, many of them are from the north: wild uncultivated brutes, almost as bad as the Scots, and their love of plunder is second to none.’

  ‘And so where is this Duke of York now?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘He is in Ireland, attainted and called a traitor, while his great well-wisher the Earl of Warwick is in Calais, across the Narrow Sea, and likewise condemned.’

  The pardoner’s voice has changed now, and he looks up from the fire as if inspired by some memory.

  ‘He will be back though,’ he carries on, ‘for never was there such a man as the Earl of Warwick.’

  Thomas thinks the pardoner speaks the Earl of Warwick’s name as if it has holy weight to it, like that of a saint, or one of the martyrs. He drains the cup.

  ‘But until he returns,’ the pardoner continues, ‘we have those of the Queen’s affinity peeling us for what little we have and disinheriting rightful heirs of what’s theirs. Your Giles Riven, for instance. He is of the new Duke of Somerset’s affinity, you see? Able to provide him upward of a hundred mounted archers, I dare say, fifty billmen and a handful of men-at-arms. And so long as he continues to do that, the new Duke will back him in any dispute, and who now in the county would go against the Duke? Not a man.’

  There is a moment’s silence.

  ‘Riven said he was moving south,’ Thomas says. ‘To join the Queen.’

  The pardoner nods.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The Queen is summoning her army. It will be spring soon, unbelievable as that now seems, and with the spring comes the campaigning season, and with the campaigning season comes the Earl of Warwick, back from France, and I believe he will want more than merely his rightful place in the King’s council.’

  He unhooks the pot from the stand and sets it by Thomas’s feet. He passes him a carved wooden spoon. Thomas murmurs his thanks and then a prayer before eating. The pottage burns his lips and tongue but he carries on, scooping in the leaves and the slippery fish and beans. When he has half finished the bowl he passes it to Katherine, who takes it and eats in quick suspicious spoonfuls.

  While she eats, the pardoner relieves himself in the dark. Thomas puts another branch on the fire. It is a luxury of which he has long dreamed, being able to sit by a fire with his hands so close that the flames can scorch his palms.

  When Katherine has finished she murmurs a quick thanks be to God, sets aside the bowl and retreats under her blanket. She says no more. The silence is not oppressive. Neither is used to speaking more than fifty words of their own device in a day, and silence, when not interrupted by prayer, is their natural state. Yet he is conscious of her, and finds his gaze drawn to her.

  After the pardoner returns Thomas finishes his interrupted account of Riven’s false accusation. When he describes the fight in the garth the pardoner can scarce contain his glee.

  ‘By the saints! You fought Giles Riven with a staff?’

  Thomas nods.

  ‘And won?’

  Again Thomas nods.

  ‘I suppose,’ he says. Though it had not felt that way.

  ‘By the death of Him who died for us!’ the pardoner laughs, ‘there is either more to you than meets the eye, Brother Thomas, or you talk of a miracle!’

  He pours more ale and passes it over. Thomas drinks it at once. Then Katherine follows with a curt description of being accused of harbouring him in the cloister, and of the imprisonment that followed, before touching on Alice’s death.

  ‘Perhaps Riven and that giant of his did the damage,’ she says, ‘but it was the Prioress and Sister Joan who together choked the life out of her, to that I will swear an oath on all that is holy.’

  The pardoner is watching her closely.

  ‘What happened then?’ he asks.

  Katherine shakes her head and says nothing. She pulls the blanket up around her face and a long silence follows. After a moment, she settles herself more comfortably, and, then, despite the cold, she begins to snore softly.

  ‘The ale is strong,’ the pardoner observes.

  He leans forward and tugs the blanket over Katherine’s ravaged foot, and then he pours the last of the ale to share. He sits back, turns to Thomas, and speaks confidentially.

  ‘How long do you think it will be before it is known that you are apostate?’ he asks.

  ‘But we are not apostate!’ Thomas says.

  The pardoner waves his hand.

  ‘I know that now,’ he says. ‘But when first I saw you, I naturally assumed you had fled your priory for the love of one another. It is what everyone will think.’

  Thomas cannot help glancing at Katherine. Despite her snores he is certain she is listening.

  ‘But—’ he begins.

  ‘But nothing. A monk and a nun. The moment your flight is known, you are excommunicated. Your sin will be broadcast abroad, even in Boston by tomorrow if you are unlucky, and then no one will help you. All are forbidden to do so, and who would willingly offend the Church? No man. The friars will start looking for you first, and then the Justices will come after you with their writs of apostata capiendo.’

  ‘But the worst they can do is take us back to the priory, surely?’

  ‘But you left the priory accused of common assault, and now, no doubt, the charges will be magnified a hundredfold. And your prior will only hand you over to Riven again, and this time he will take no chances. He will kill you. And her.’

  This is a bitter truth. Thomas feels his spirit, so cheered by drink, curdle.

  ‘We are making our way to Canterbury,’ he tells the pardoner. ‘The Dean of the Priory says our only chance is to find a sympathetic audience with the Prior of All, the head of our order. He will hear us and give us justice.’

  ‘And you hope this Prior of All will go against a man like Riven?’

  Thomas has not thought of it like that.

  ‘I suppose not,’ he says, thinking on what the pardoner has said about the Duke of Somerset. ‘Yet what else can we do?’

  ‘Remember Deuteronomy,’ the pardoner tells him. ‘An eye for an eye.’

  Thomas feels something stir in his chest: a flutter of excitement. The offer of some alien freedom.

 
‘You cannot mean me to find Riven myself?’

  The pardoner shrugs.

  ‘Why not? You have shown how capable you are.’

  It does not bother Thomas that the pardoner has suggested the opposite only a moment earlier.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I cannot. I am a canon of the Order of Gilbert of Sempringham. I shall seek justice with the Prior of All. I shall put my faith in the Lord for as St Paul tells the Romans: Do not take revenge, but leave room for God’s wrath. It is His to avenge. He will repay.’

  The pardoner raises his eyebrows slightly.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he says. ‘I am sure you are right to do so.’

  There is a pause. Thomas feels foolish quoting the Bible to a man so learned, but the pardoner does not seem to mind.

  After a pause the pardoner asks, ‘Tell me: how did you hope to get to Canterbury?’

  Thomas hesitates.

  ‘I had not thought that far,’ he admits.

  The pardoner’s eyes stray to Thomas’s feet.

  ‘The best way to Canterbury from here would be by ship,’ he says. ‘From Boston. You might pay a ship’s master to take you to Sandwich, on the Kent coast. Were he on his way to Calais, I mean. It is not so great a diversion.’

  ‘We have no money,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Listen to me, Brother Thomas,’ the pardoner is saying. ‘I have paid for bells to be rung in the cathedral at Lincoln, and I have offered up prayers to St Nicholas for the success of my venture, but what if I now pay for you to get to Canterbury? If I provide you with clothes and shoes? If I pay for your food?’

  ‘Why ever would you do such a thing?’

  The pardoner says nothing for a moment. It is as if he is framing his argument.

  ‘We are all three pilgrims,’ he says at length, ‘in our way. Pilgrims help one another. They help one another to help themselves, so yes, helping you helps me. Do you see?’

  Thomas can think of nothing to say. The reality of walking any distance with no shoes or clothes or money has suddenly become fearsome.

  ‘I would thank you for your offer, sir, with all my heart.’

  The pardoner nods as if this is happily agreed. He sits back. Thomas has another, final draught of ale. The hem of his cassock lets slip tendrils of steam in the warmth of the fire and his feet are chilblained and sore, but the ale is now so soothing he hardly cares.

  ‘But you know,’ the pardoner goes, his eye ranging over Katherine’s sleeping form, ‘if you are being sought by the friars, it might be as well to disguise yourselves. They will be after a man and a woman. I wonder if we might find some clothes for you and Sister Katherine here that disguise first your calling, and then her womanhood. She is a skinny thing, with not a curve in sight. I feel sure she might pass as a boy.’

  6

  KATHERINE WAKES BEFORE dawn. Her limbs ache from her beatings over the previous days and the cold that has crept into her bones in the night. Before she can stand she has to kneel and then sit on one of the pardoner’s bales to let the pain pass. She finds herself in a small clearing in some woods, with a mule and two men gathered around a small circle of ashes where the fire has burned out. The mule regards her charitably, while the men, the canon Thomas and the pardoner, lie wrapped together in the mud under a grey travelling blanket.

  This is her chance. She must get away from this canon Thomas. She can never go to Canterbury. She can never see this Prior of All, for what justice could he be expected to give to someone who has broken the fifth commandment? When she shuts her eyes Katherine sees Sister Joan in her last moments and she knows that every step she takes towards the Prior of All is a step nearer the gallows.

  She stands. Her knees are agony, her feet like blocks of wood. But she must move. She can leave now, walk back the way they came. The canon will never follow her, not that way. She stretches her hands out to gather her possessions, but then realises that she has none, and that already it is too late.

  Thomas is waking. He opens his eyes and looks up into the canopy of the trees, and then at her, and then he closes them again and shakes his head.

  She sits back down. She will have to wait, she thinks, to seek the right moment.

  ‘Good morning, Sister,’ he says.

  ‘Good morning,’ she answers.

  She takes a moment to look at him, to see the difference between him and the pardoner. Thomas is tall, broad in the shoulder and long in the arm and leg. His hands and feet seem enormous, too, and he reminds her of a young dog, a puppy, in whom one can see the size of the adult to come. Next to Thomas the pardoner, waking now, is a pinched and dried old thing, all his colours faded, his skin creased and worn.

  ‘God in heaven,’ the pardoner says, and he clambers slowly to his feet, huffing in the cold morning air. When they have said their prayers, they eat the last of the pottage and load the pardoner’s bales on to his mule. The pardoner notices the blood clotted in the hair above Thomas’s ear.

  ‘I have a salve,’ he says and he digs in his bags to produce a clay jar. He unstoppers it and the glade is filled with the scent of the infirmary. She thinks of Sister Joan and the thin blood on her downy chin. The pardoner smears a dab of the contents on Thomas’s wound, making him flinch, but after a moment Thomas says it feels numb, then warm. She watches the way the pardoner applies the salve, the way he strokes it along the wound.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks.

  He is pleased by her interest.

  ‘A mixture of thirteen herbs,’ he says, ‘mixed with pig fat and elder buds.’

  He holds the jar for her to see the dark paste within.

  ‘It cools wounds and cures almost everything,’ he says.

  Then he tucks it away in a leather pack, and sets the leather pack inside another one, and this he places very carefully on the mule’s pack, as if it is valuable. Thomas stands with the giant’s pollaxe, looking uncertain what to do with it. Does he carry it? Or put it on the mule? Eventually they decide on the mule and they set out, following a path where the wood thins and out on to a broad expanse of fog-haunted marshes.

  ‘By the blood of Mary,’ the pardoner laughs as they walk. ‘Will you look at us? Two thieves ripe for the hanging and the third a victim of the plague. Thank the Lord for this mist or they’d have raised the cry and chased us away by now.’

  To Katherine’s eye the pardoner’s clothes appear garish. He wears a long russet habit, not unlike Thomas’s, but over it a blue fur-trimmed cloak with a tightly fitting hood that has been dyed bright green. A low-crowned round hat of black-fringed felt holds the hood in place and she can see that between his hat, hood and beard, it is almost impossible to see the whorls on his neck.

  Next to him Thomas looks like a crow, but she knows she is the worst: her patched cassock is crusted with mud; she has only one clog and no headgear, not even a cloth to cover her hair. She looks the sort of beggar the Prioress would turn away from the gate.

  ‘I will lend you my hat,’ the pardoner says, passing it to her. ‘And there’ll be a fripperer at the market from whom we might buy something more suitable. It should not be too far now.’

  Ahead of them they hear the steady din of bells, and she can smell coal smoke. They join a road and as they walk, its surface improves. Stone replaces mud, and other travellers pass with loaded mules and curious looks.

  ‘Sir, by the grace of God, good day to you,’ the pardoner sings out each time he feels their glances settle too heavily on one or other of them, and each time the traveller nods and returns the greeting and moves on with a blessing, as if all were well.

  Katherine stares back at them resentfully, and after a time the pardoner touches her elbow.

  ‘We’re strangers here, Sister,’ he says. ‘If someone takes against us, they will denounce us for some crime, and without our friends to vouch for our good name, we will end up like this poor fellow.’

  He gestures towards a tree where a crowd of birds mob something hanging from the branches. It is a man’s body, hanging near
naked, mottled and erupting with decay, his braided guts spilling out like fistfuls of grey string. A bird with glossy feathers clings to its face and with each peck the corpse twitches on its rope. The smell of rotting meat is thick and sweet.

  ‘Been there about ten days,’ the pardoner guesses.

  ‘But why doesn’t someone bury him?’ Katherine asks through her fingers.

  ‘He’s posted as a warning to others.’ The pardoner shrugs. ‘Were it a witch they would just strangle her at the roadside and leave her for the dogs. In the south when they catch a thief they nail his ear to a post and give him a knife to cut himself free.’

  They walk on through mist that is shrinking towards the river, leaving a sodden, level landscape interrupted by meagre stands of trees, a low-beamed cottage and a herd of oily sheep. Ahead the town is a gathering of church spires and roofs under a pall of dark smoke.

  ‘The town of Boston,’ the pardoner says. ‘Home to a thousand or so souls. We must get through it to reach the harbour.’

  She hesitates.

  ‘Come on,’ the pardoner encourages. ‘Walk on the far side of the mule, so the captain of the gate can’t see you. And hold its rope, so that if he does, he’ll think it belongs to you, and that you’re worth something after all.’

  They join the other travellers queuing behind a carter trying to get his oxen on to the bridge.

  ‘Hoc opus, hic labor est,’ the pardoner mutters. He is looking anxious.

  At the far end of the bridge a fat man in a stained leather jerkin and an iron helmet stands under a wooden awning, while another with a bill takes coins from those crossing the bridge.

  ‘Good day to you, sir!’ the pardoner calls when they reach the second man, and he presses a coin into the outstretched hand. The man says nothing but frowns and shows the coin to the first man. The first man holds up his arm to stop the flow.