Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  ‘How far is it?’ he asks.

  ‘A day?’ Geoffrey guesses. ‘Not far.’

  Rain sets in. They retreat into the tent and stand peering out as the fires hiss and are slowly extinguished.

  It doesn’t stop for the next two days, and by the third the camp is a stinking quagmire. Men slip and fall; horses slip and fall. Armour and weapons rust; Thomas’s jack doubles its weight. Men relieve themselves from the earthwork walls.

  They are waiting on the Earl of Warwick, still in Calais.

  ‘Why doesn’t he just hurry up?’ Dafydd asks. ‘Seems I’ve spent half my life waiting for the bloody Earl of Warwick and a favourable bloody wind.’

  ‘Favourable wind,’ Owen repeats, rolling on to one buttock and farting.

  It is still raining the next morning when the ships come in. Thomas is drinking ale with Geoffrey under the sodden straw awning of an alewife’s house. She is looking at them because together they take up most of the space and there is little room for any other customers. They are talking about Hugh.

  ‘He’s a boy,’ Thomas is saying. ‘He should still be at home. Not seeing all this.’ He gestures at the marketplace where now the rain has washed the blood from the cobbles, and all that remains of the fight are broken windows, starred stonework, arrows stuck in thatched roofs like pins in a cushion. One wall is still sooty and pocked where the gun exploded.

  Geoffrey laughs.

  ‘Listen to you, Thomas. Ha. Like the old soldier all of a sudden.’

  Thomas thinks for a moment. Christ. Geoffrey is right. All the things he’s done. The men he’s killed.

  Look at his hands! Blood in the creases. Dear God.

  ‘And plenty been to fight younger’n Hugh,’ Geoffrey is saying. ‘I was in France when I was his age. And Walter? Well, how old was he when he first went to the wars? Three? Four?’ The ale leaves a wet crescent on Geoffrey’s upper lip.

  ‘But Hugh feels things,’ Thomas goes on. ‘Did you see him after we’d landed? He’d vomited on himself and soiled his hose. He’d not loosed an arrow.’

  Geoffrey looks away, as if it is somehow his fault.

  ‘I’ll make sure he has more ale next time.’

  ‘It is not want of pluck, I think.’

  Geoffrey shrugs.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he says. ‘Perhaps he shouldn’t be here. Perhaps he should be in a monastery.’

  Thomas opens and shuts his mouth. A boy comes through the harbour gate where the portcullis has been broken down and already taken away by a smith.

  ‘The Earl of Warwick is come!’ he shouts, and they begin drinking up. By the time Warwick has disembarked, word has got out. Men and women and children are ignoring the rain and have come to watch.

  Warwick rides the same beautiful black horse he rode hunting that day, and he is wearing a travelling cloak with a cross of St George on a tabard underneath. It is a gesture to please the common soldier and to let the people know he has not come to make war on their king. As he passes, the crowd shout their greetings and thank him for coming. Men bless him.

  ‘A Warwick!’ they cry. ‘A Warwick!’

  ‘Why do they love him so?’ Thomas asks. He remembers seeing Warwick after the hunt. Hastings would not be drawn on what had happened in the forest, but it was the Earl who shot Richard, and the Earl who rode away in haste.

  ‘You can’t blame them, Thomas,’ Geoffrey is telling him. ‘He’s kept the Narrow Sea free of pirates these past years, free of Frenchmen. More than the King could ever do.’

  They stand at the side of the road that leads up to Fauconberg’s camp and as Warwick rides past them, his glance falls on them and his face twitches with recognition. His smile clouds; his eyes snap to the front. He rides on, his fist clenched by his hip.

  ‘But he is a bastard,’ Geoffrey says quietly. ‘That much I will say.’

  The Duke of York’s son the Earl of March is next, much the bigger man, on a beautiful grey destrier. Thomas last saw him after the skirmish at Newnham. He is smiling and waving and laughing, and even from where Thomas stands he can see why. A little farther along the street is a tall young woman in a dark green kirtle. Her hat is high on her head and her chest is plump. One glance at her makes the spit in Thomas’s mouth dry. As the Earl of March rides past her, he makes his horse skitter on the cobbles. Sparks fly. He makes a show of soothing the horse, patting its neck; then when the horse is calmed, he takes off his hat and speaks to the woman, who blushes, and all the while her husband stands at her shoulder smiling fatly. After a minute the Earl of March rides on with a long backward glance.

  Next comes Warwick’s father, the Earl of Salisbury, slumped in his saddle, glaring from under the brim of his hat where raindrops are gathered in a line. He looks at the people as if they are in his way, and somehow responsible for the rain; as he passes, the little crowd falls silent. Behind him, by some distance, comes Sir John Fakenham, his small pony being led by William Hastings. Hastings’s face is green, as if he has not enjoyed the passage and does not trust himself swaying on the back of a horse. A lad wearing his black bull badge is leading Hastings’s horse a few yards behind, and even the horse looks ill.

  Sir John sees Geoffrey and Thomas and waves them over. They greet one another with handshakes.

  ‘Thanks be that you are still with us. I hear they put up a fight?’

  Geoffrey nods.

  ‘And what’s the reckoning?’ Sir John asks.

  ‘Two dead,’ Geoffrey says. ‘Two boys from home.’

  Sir John pulls a face.

  ‘If you give me their names? Though I know not how I’ll ever get word to their families. By all the saints, this is a bloody business. Englishmen killing Englishmen.’

  ‘And what of Richard, Sir John?’ Geoffrey asks.

  Sir John’s face puckers.

  ‘He’s with Kit, aboard some damned carrack that has been cruelly knocked up, with that old pirate as a master, but she sailed on the same tide and should be off the coast now. That friend of yours is a born surgeon, Thomas, but my lord of Warwick is sending his own man over, a physician, and just as soon as Richard is settled, he shall have the best attention money can buy.’

  Thomas smiles to think of Katherine. He glances down towards the dock where her ship should be arriving. There are more horsemen coming up from the ships now and it takes him a moment to realise he is looking at a man in a bishop’s headgear among them. When he sees him Thomas instantly turns his back on Sir John and disappears into the crowds.

  ‘Thomas?’ he hears Geoffrey call. ‘Where are you going?’

  It is not the Bishop he fears, but the man riding the pony behind him: the cleric Lamn.

  15

  KATHERINE IS STANDING at the ship’s rail when the Mary nudges against the dock at Sandwich for the second time in four days. The ship is now patched with bloodstained sailcloth and her timbers are scorched and studded with broken arrows.

  ‘Stand by,’ her master calls, and the Genoese cook, now promoted to sailor, throws a line for the boys on the dockside. Katherine returns to the waist where Richard lies face down, loosely tied to a softwood plank. He is asleep.

  When she peers up over the ship’s rail she sees Thomas and Geoffrey waiting on the dockside, and she feels the warmth of relief. Both are alive. The state of the carrack had given her cause to fear the worst, but now here they are, shoulders hunched against the rain, waiting with a carter and an ox.

  Thomas looks older, strained somehow, and she sees the burned houses, the smashed windows, the pitted stones.

  ‘Was it bad?’ she asks when she is ashore.

  ‘Nothing we haven’t seen before,’ Geoffrey answers for him. ‘Though we missed you. Johnson’s gone, dead, and the other Thomas, too, God keep their souls. The rest are fine though. How’s himself?’ He nods at Richard.

  ‘I think he is through the worst of it,’ she says. Richard still looks terrible. His face is fallen in and his skin tinged with a feverish rosiness aroun
d his eyes and mouth. She doesn’t tell them how bad it has been, how close she’s come to calling a priest.

  They lift him up on his plank and together they carry him down the gangway on to the dockside. He groans as they load him on to the cart. Geoffrey sits with the carter while Thomas and Katherine walk behind.

  ‘Lamn is here,’ he tells her.

  ‘I know. He sailed on the ship before mine. I thought I was unlucky not to be sailing with Sir John, who would at least have insisted Richard have some ale, but we were delayed and then the Bishop and his retinue joined Sir John’s ship. After that I was glad.’

  ‘And he’s still said nothing?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  When he had accosted her by the trough at the fort, after Richard had been wounded, she had denied his accusation. Thomas had heard her voice raised and had loomed over the cleric and, with Geoffrey behind him, and the rest of the men returning from the butts just then, Lamn backed away and pretended to have made a mistake. He’d said no more and once they had carried Richard inside, Lamn had ridden away with William Hastings without a backward glance. As soon as he was gone Katherine had hurried up the steps to where they slept and had starting gathering her things.

  ‘He will be back tomorrow,’ she’d said. ‘With the friars.’

  Thomas tried to persuade her that no one in Calais was going to listen to Lamn.

  ‘Warwick needs every soldier he can keep,’ he’d said. ‘No one will care if we are apostate.’

  She’d known then that she must tell him she was more than an apostate, but still something held her back, and now here they are back in England with Canterbury only a day’s march away.

  ‘But who is he?’ Thomas wants to know. ‘The Bishop, I mean?’

  ‘His name is Coppini. Sir John says he is a Frenchy from somewhere called Italy. He comes straight from the Pope himself.’

  Thomas laughs.

  ‘The Pope?’

  She smiles too. Even the word Pope feels foolish on her lips. It reminds her of the night they met the pardoner in the woods and they found themselves talking about the King. Such people weren’t for them to discuss.

  The cart rumbles on through the town until they reach the camp. Here the mud has become thick and pale, the sort to pull a man’s boot off, and the rain doesn’t look like stopping soon – if ever. When they unload Richard from the cart he wakes.

  ‘How was it?’ he croaks. His lips are cracked and his breath foul. He cannot open his eyes properly.

  ‘You didn’t miss a thing,’ Geoffrey soothes. ‘They turned tail as soon as they saw us.’

  ‘There was no fight?’

  Geoffrey shakes his head.

  Richard closes his eyes.

  ‘Is Kit here?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m here,’ she answers. Richard is relieved and drifts off again.

  They take him into the tent where Sir John is already sitting on his cushion on his chest. After he has bent and kissed his son he turns to Katherine.

  ‘I have good news, Kit,’ he says. ‘My lord the Earl of Warwick is sending his physician over this morning. A fellow called Fournier. He has a great reputation.’

  Katherine can think of nothing to say.

  ‘It is no reflection on your care,’ he goes on. ‘No man can have wished for a more attentive nurse and Hastings has been boasting of your skills with the knife far and wide.’

  ‘He’s a kind man, William Hastings,’ she says.

  Sir John agrees.

  After Sir John leaves she crouches in the tent next to Richard and tries to make sense of it all. She still has no idea what to do. She will have to leave soon, before Thomas can take her before the Prior of All, but she cannot simply abandon Richard. Perhaps this physician will reassure her.

  But when Fournier turns up, she is still unsure.

  ‘Master Dominic Fournier,’ his servant announces, holding open the tent flap as the physician steps in. He is wearing a velvet cloak, greasy at the worn lapels, and a sagging fur hat sprouting an array of damp goose feathers. He is poorly shaved and his dark eyebrows meet in the middle. He looks anxious, as if he might be unmasked at any moment.

  ‘Do you have wine?’ he asks. ‘Any will do?’

  ‘None,’ she says.

  He nods.

  ‘Very well. Then let us make this short. Boy, expose the wound.’

  The boy looks at Katherine for permission. He is grey-faced with a clipped right ear from which for a moment Katherine cannot take her gaze. She wonders absently how strange it is that one rarely sees men with clipped ears. What happens to the boys? Do only a few live long enough to become men?

  She does not want the boy to touch the wound, so she bends and peels back the dressing herself. She hears Fournier suck his teeth. Then sniff the air. The wound is black-lipped, and slightly puckered, the skin around it rosy and delicate, fine as silk. Something glistens between its lips. Katherine knows that the wound is healing and she is pleased – no, astonished by what she has managed.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Fournier says. ‘It is as I feared. The wound has cured from the outside in. It has sealed in the hot wet humour. It needs cauterising. We’ll need a fire.’

  Katherine stands.

  ‘You are going to burn him?’ Panic makes her voice high.

  ‘It is the only way,’ Fournier says. ‘We must clean the wound from within, with fire, then we shall bleed him. Such a wound, particularly in such a place, unbalances the humours. We need to make a small incision between the fingers, there.’ He points at Richard’s limp hand with the long point of his patten. ‘It is connected to the functions of the liver. And the moon is in an auspicious quarter for cutting.’

  He gestures upwards. Katherine stares at him a moment. Something begins growing within her, a physical force that shakes her narrow frame, fills her skin. It is always this way when she puts herself in harm’s way. The Prioress once suggested it was the presence of the devil within her, and beat her for it, as if that might expel the demon.

  Now she crosses to where Thomas has left the giant’s pollaxe against one of the tent bracers. It is lighter than she remembers, but the weight of its head gives it fearsome impetus, and when she picks it up, it levels itself at Fournier’s belly.

  He steps back.

  ‘If you so much as touch him,’ she says, ‘I will run you through.’

  Katherine has never been more certain of anything, and yet – what is she doing? She is threatening the Earl of Warwick’s personal physician with a pollaxe. Fournier takes another step back. Spots of high colour have come into his cheeks and his mouth quavers. He slips off his pattens as they catch in the mud.

  ‘You are mad!’ he squeaks.

  She jabs the axe at him.

  ‘Out,’ she says. ‘Get out.’

  ‘You have not heard the last of this,’ Fournier cries as he backs through the tent flaps. ‘You have not heard – d’you hear?’

  He is away before she can think of anything to say. His boy stoops to collect his pattens and runs out after him.

  When Geoffrey comes to find her, Richard is asleep under a rug, breathing steadily.

  They say nothing for a moment, but it is clear Geoffrey is exasperated.

  ‘Sir John is upset,’ he says.

  Katherine says nothing. She does not know what to say. The shame weighs on her.

  ‘Whatever were you thinking?’ he goes on. ‘He is the Earl of Warwick’s personal physician!’

  She shakes her head and closes her eyes to stop the tears. She can still think of nothing to say. Why can she not be content to let things pass? But then – he was going to burn Richard. That cannot be a right thing to do.

  ‘You’re an odd one, Kit, and no mistake. If you haven’t been looking after Richard so well, then – well, I don’t know. You’d’ve had your ear clipped long ago.’

  She thinks of Fournier’s grubby boy and nods tightly. She swallows.

  ‘As it is,’ Geoffrey goes on, ‘keep out of his way f
or a day or two.’

  Later that day the order comes to break camp.

  ‘Thank the Lord for that,’ Thomas says, but if he thinks breaking camp will mean getting away from Fournier, or Lamn, he is mistaken, for the news comes down that the Bishop is to travel with them.

  ‘Warwick hopes to persuade him to excommunicate the King’s army,’ Sir John laughs while he watches them start clearing their tents in the rain. When they have the cart loaded, they leave the town of Sandwich and begin up the Roman road towards Canterbury, a thousand years old and still mostly passable. In the fields either side of them water lies in the hollows and anyone who leaves the road comes back with mud up to his knees.

  ‘Never seen it rain so,’ one of them says.

  ‘Wheat’ll rot if it goes on like this.’

  ‘Everything’ll bloody rot if it goes on like this. We’ll bloody rot.’

  They cross a river that has broken its banks. Swans sail on the fields. Still the rain comes down. But still men join them. Soon the towers of the cathedral break the skyline ahead.

  Katherine is walking next to Hugh just behind the cart. Every step towards the city pains her, but she cannot think what to do. Panic has reduced her to indecision.

  ‘I can’t stand it again,’ Hugh whispers to her.

  She looks up.

  ‘Stand what?’

  Hugh looks about them, down the column, seeing if it is safe to speak. He sees something or someone and shakes his head. They walk on in silence until he stops again. Here the trees have closed in on the road, the bushes are thick with leaf. An archer is squatting over a ditch.

  ‘Goodbye, Kit,’ Hugh says and he holds out a slim hand. Katherine takes it. It is cool, like holding a fish.

  ‘You’re going?’ she asks.

  He nods.

  ‘I am not strong enough,’ he says. Then he steps off the road on to the grass verge. A moment later he is gone.

  Katherine opens her mouth to call after him, to tell him to stop, to come back or to wait for her. She does not know which.

  ‘Come on. Come on,’ Dafydd says as he and Thomas push up against her from behind, and she turns again and walks on. Ahead of them the banners are hanging in damp folds. Men huddle within their cloaks.