Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  This time Hastings is delighted. He claps his hands together and shuffles the steps of a jig.

  ‘I know you do not mean to, my lady,’ he says, laughing, ‘but you have cheered me immeasurably. Until we coincided here, I had imagined the debacle at St Albans exactly that, a debacle. Now though? Now I see it as a shining victory.’

  She cannot stop herself smiling at his pleasure.

  ‘All you need do now is proclaim Edward as king,’ she says, ‘and all will be well. Save, of course, the small matter of the Queen’s army.’

  Hastings’s smile fades. He pulls on the tip of his nose.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘There is that.’

  They walk in silence for a few more paces.

  ‘And what of you?’ he asks as they near the castle drawbridge.

  Katherine does not know.

  ‘It is the lot of women’, he says sadly, ‘to depend on men.’

  On that note she asks him about Thomas. She does not quite know how to couch the question, since she is unsure how to express the relationship she has with Thomas. Is he her servant, bringing her back to the man to whom she is betrothed? She supposes he is.

  ‘Everingham?’ Hastings says. ‘I’ve not seen him. I have offered him a place with me, but I understand he has obligations to you and of course to Sir John Fakenham. We are all concerned for Sir John. I have sent for news, you know? But so far, none.’

  Katherine says nothing. They walk a few paces further.

  ‘Everingham tells me you are betrothed to Sir John’s son, Richard?’ Hastings continues.

  She feels a jolt of pain, as if someone has pressed on a bruise, but she is surprised to hear Thomas has lied to Hastings about her, in support of her claim to be Margaret Cornford. And at some cost to himself, she realises.

  ‘I am,’ she says.

  ‘Then I wish you joy of it,’ Hastings says. ‘I can only hope the boy is alive. I heard he was summoned along with his father to Sandal, before the old Duke of York was killed, but there is now some doubt about him ever arriving.’

  ‘I have heard nothing,’ she says. ‘But I should dearly love to know.’

  ‘I think we all would,’ Hastings agrees. There is something unsettling in his manner, as if he is after the same thing, but for a different reason. She thinks again of Grylle and the attentions he has been paying her.

  ‘I should like to ride to Marton Hall and see for myself,’ she says.

  Hastings looks at her.

  ‘Strange,’ he says. ‘Thomas Everingham asked the exact same thing.’

  She is surprised again. Thomas has been busy on her behalf.

  ‘But I cannot spare him,’ Hastings says. ‘He is too useful, and Edward – who will soon be crowned king, you know? He has come to think of your Thomas Everingham as some sort of charm. A talisman.’

  Katherine bites her tongue to prevent herself saying what she thinks of this.

  ‘You are of course free to go wherever you please,’ Hastings goes on, ‘but I should counsel against it. This rabble the Queen has gathered, they are as vicious a crowd you are likely to meet this side of the gates of hell itself. And, for the meantime, they own the land north of London, including your land at Cornford.’

  He adds this almost as an afterthought, and then he trails off. She can see him looking at her, calculating quickly, that spark in his eye replaced by something altogether more serious, and she realises with a jolt what he is doing. He is calculating her worth. Why has she not thought this through? As Margaret Cornford she has now become an extravagantly attractive proposition.

  In fact, she now realises, Thomas is right. She is just the sort of proposition that men might kill to possess. She recalls Lord Cornford, her supposed father, stabbed in the eye for the ownership of the castle and its manors, and now here she is, heir to that burden.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘I must go.’

  ‘God give you prosperity!’ Hastings calls after her, and she does not know if he is laughing at her. She hurries back to the inn, suddenly and completely terrified, so that even the sight of four canons rushing to compline unsettles her, and she arrives back at the inn folded in on herself and consumed with dread.

  But where is Thomas?

  As night falls her panic only increases. She sits on a chest and waits. She eats supper alone at the end of the table. Hours pass. The innkeeper, gaunt as a gallows, comes to cover the fire and Thomas is still not back. She sits for a while in the bloom of a spitting tallow candle and she hears without listening to them the fearful conversations of those at the table where all the talk is of the viciousness of the Queen’s Scottish troops.

  ‘She cannot afford to pay them in anything but booty,’ one man says.

  Eventually the innkeeper draws the bar across the door and she retires upstairs to the room she’s shared with two others, a married couple who sometimes sigh in the night and do so that night while she lies there, listening to the ropes of their bed strain like the timbers of a ship at sea. She misses the heft of Thomas, his curious dusty smell and his arm across her in the night, and she wishes she were plain Kit again, and able to sleep with the others by the fire in the hall.

  The next morning he is still not back. She eats in silence, aware of the grey-faced innkeeper studying her from under his heavy brows. Nor is he alone. It seems women do not travel unaccompanied, even in such strange times. She wonders if Thomas will ever come back and for a moment she has another long pang of panic.

  What if something has happened to him, some stupid accident? Or can it be something worse? Can Riven or the giant have slipped into town and seen him before he saw them? Can he now be lying in a midden somewhere with his throat cut? His head smashed in? She puts on her cloak and cap and hurries back out into the town. It has started snowing again, heavy flakes from a scudding grey sky that melt on her face, and the streets are full of men in their travelling cloaks, grim-faced, gathered huddled at street corners with weapons over their shoulders and heavy canvas bags on the ground by their feet. Finally the army is on the move. Teams of oxen are being lashed towards the east gate through the mash of straw and dung that covers the road, each pair hauling a high-sided cart loaded with barrels and sacks of beans, spoiling in the snow. Stone-faced men on horseback ride in troops and everywhere they have put on their livery coats and helmets.

  But where in all this is Thomas? Katherine dodges through the crowds, a single woman with no maid, attracting stares from the men and comments she cannot even begin to understand. A moment later she is lost. She’s taken a wrong turn and is now in a narrowing lane, the way ahead blocked with all manner of foul-smelling filth, the upper storeys closing in on one another so that the occupants of one house could lean out of their windows and comfortably shake the hand of their neighbour. Two dogs and a pig compete for some stinking gobbet on the steps of one of the houses and as she passes the door of another it is slammed shut by an unseen hand.

  The snow has turned to sleet, and the air is full of ashes, and someone pours a bucket of something from a window up ahead. She hears a laugh, bitter and humourless, and she picks up her hem and steps around a bloody hank of hair attached to a fragment of pale bone as rats slide away into the shadows. Coal smoke washes down the alleyway, catching her throat.

  She turns up another alley and shadows move quickly towards her. She reverses to continue down the first alleyway. Dear God, she wishes Thomas were with her now. She stops. Ahead is a broad ditch, steaming and repugnant, a sewer where not even pigs venture.

  Behind her a man is moving, two of them, emerging from the alleyway, one dragging his foot. They call to her and she feels her guts heave. She starts running, her pattens slipping in the filth, her new headdress slipping around her neck. She fumbles for the knife at her waist and draws it now, taking a crumb of comfort in its worn wooden handle. She jags past the dogs and the pig, and then hears one howl as it is kicked aside behind her.

  ‘Come here, missus!’

  ‘We only want
to talk!’

  She leaps up on to the walkway, slipping on the wet wood, catches a pillar, hauls herself up and runs on. She can feel their feet behind her. She throws herself out into the road, East Street, leading down past a friary to a little church and on through the east gate. A man on horseback has paused by the junction; wrapped in his cloak, a cap pulled down over his eyes, he is watching the processing carts. Katherine grasps his stirrup strap and turns to face her attackers.

  He looks down.

  ‘Kit,’ he says.

  It is Thomas.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she says. ‘Thank God it is you.’

  The relief overcomes her and she remains gripping his stirrup. He gets down and comes around from the other side of the horse.

  ‘I have been looking for you,’ he says. ‘I went back to the inn. The innkeeper said you had gone.’

  She flings her arms around him and presses her face into his neck. He is awkward, but his arms come around her at last, though there is little succour in his embrace, not as she has experienced before.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asks.

  ‘Thomas,’ she says. ‘I’ve missed you. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘I have been busy,’ he says. ‘Getting provisions.’

  She sees he has a new bow and a sheaf of arrows and that there are stout leather panniers on his saddle.

  ‘We are going to ride to Marton,’ he says. ‘To see how it is. To see if – if they still live.’

  ‘What about Hastings?’ she asks. ‘Has he let you go?’

  Thomas evades her gaze.

  ‘I have come to an arrangement with him,’ he says.

  She sees he wants her to ask no more.

  PART SIX

  To Marton Hall, County of

  Lincoln, February 1461

  32

  THOMAS AND KATHERINE leave the White Hart at dawn the next day and are at the city’s east gate before daybell. Thomas bribes the Watch to let them through and Katherine laughs.

  ‘How we’ve changed,’ she says.

  Thomas says nothing and they ride out through the common land deserted at this time of day save for pigs and goats among the wringing posts and tenter frames, and they follow the road that will take them to the east, to the city of Worcester. As the morning wears on they pass men and carts coming the other way, bringing barrels and sacks, and stacks of new bows and sheaves of arrows to Hereford, to provision the new Duke of York’s army, and Katherine tries to make conversation.

  ‘It is good to travel so warmly,’ she tries, gesturing at his new travelling cloak. She too is wearing a new one, dark red with a fur collar and a deep hood and Thomas can see that she looks beautiful: her sharp features framed by the trim, the cold reddening her cheek and lending a spark to her eyes. Even her cracked lips do not detract. Men stare at her as they pass, some opening their mouths to greet her with a suggestive remark, perhaps, but the joke always dies on their tongues when they see Thomas’s expression.

  ‘And will we find an inn in this town Worcester?’ she asks. ‘There seem to be so many on the road.’

  He grunts. He cannot stop looking at her, though God knows he does not want to. He knows he is doing the proper thing in taking her to Marton Hall, taking her to Richard Fakenham, but he can do no more than that. He cannot be as he has always been, because she is no longer as she was. She has left him, taken a different path, and, try as he might, he cannot force his features into his accustomed smile and cheer to see her go.

  Even this bare minimum is hard.

  He wonders if he should say something: tell her that though the thought of her becoming Margaret Cornford is bad enough, the thought of her becoming Richard Fakenham’s wife makes him feel sick. He does not care about the lies he has already told to William Hastings and to the Earl of March; he does not care about keeping the dead girl’s name alive; he doesn’t care about Sir John’s plans for Cornford Castle: all he wants is for everything to return to the way it was.

  They find an inn at Worcester, near the cathedral, but he cannot share the bed the innkeeper offers her, and instead he sleeps by the hearth in the hall where the stones in the floor retain the fire’s heat. He watches her take the bed, hesitantly, confused by the way he is behaving, and he wishes he could behave as he has always done, or that she would insist he comes with her, or she with him, but she does not, and he turns and feels his spirits twist into a savage little knot.

  The next day is better and though they hardly speak, their silence is almost companionable, and they ride to another inn in another town where they must sleep in the hall, and they do so, her back to his chest, though Thomas will not touch her. The next morning he finds he has wrapped his arms around her, and her linen-capped head is just below his nose. He gets up before she wakes and hurries to wash in the well outside while rain falls from a leaden sky.

  That day they find the road the locals call Rikeneld Street, where they turn north, and the next day they come across the first signs of the Queen’s army’s passing: a village where the houses are missing roofs and walls are broken down or burned black. Fences have been pulled apart, hovels destroyed, ovens dug up and windows carried off. The land lies in ruins, and smells of rot and spoil.

  So Thomas stops to strap on his leg armour and the plate gauntlets, things he’s bought in Hereford, probably looted from the field above Mortimer’s Cross, but good enough. The helmet is gouged and the chinstrap stained and when Katherine sees it she wonders aloud what Richard Fakenham would have said if she’d ever have let his plate get so rusty when it was in her care in Sangatte. Thomas says nothing. It is too painful to think of that happy time. After a while he unstraps his bow and warns her to keep her little knife to hand. She does so, and they ride on.

  The terrible sights continue as they go north: a convent stripped of everything; a line of new graves under the snow in a churchyard; an ugly man’s head perched on a stone wall; three babies in the bottom of a well. Near Lichfield they see a body thrown high in the trees and Katherine asks how he thinks it came to be there. He doesn’t know.

  And now everyone they meet has a story of the northerners’ cruelty, each worse than the last, each defying belief, and hatred of the Queen and her adherents is everywhere.

  He wonders how the canons would have survived the Queen’s northerners. He imagines them ringing that bell, and then what? They’d probably have opened the gates just as they had with Riven. And the northerners would have come in and smashed everything, stolen what they could, burned everything else. They’d’ve burned his psalter, he supposes. Or stolen it. He hardly cares. Bloody thing. All that time he’d spent on it. He’d probably have done the same thing. He can picture his table chopped and burned for firewood. And what about the sisters? What would the northerners have made of them?

  He can easily imagine.

  It grows cold again. The rain turns to sleet and then snow, spindling down from a grey sky, and Katherine pulls the cloak up around her ears. They cross the River Trent at Newark where they had stayed on their way down to Wales, and from the river’s east bank they see no more burned buildings, but men still peer at them from their cottages, and everyone is armed with something, and everyone is afraid.

  Lincoln has been spared, but the Watch is alert, gathered around their braziers, and when they stop Thomas and Katherine they ask questions about what the Earl of March is doing, what the Earl of Warwick is doing, and the whereabouts of the King and the Queen. Thomas and Katherine can tell them little, other than of what happened at Mortimer’s Cross, and second-hand reports of this latest fight at St Albans, which saw Warwick’s men scattered and the person of the King returned to the Queen.

  ‘We heard that the Queen’s army means to take London,’ one of the men says, half asking, half telling. ‘But that the city will not open her gates, and we heard the Earl of March who is now the Duke of York is hurrying from the west with his army to relieve the city?’

  Thomas nods. That is most likely what is happening,
he supposes.

  ‘Will the Queen make a fight of it down south?’ one of them asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Thomas says. ‘Her army is without supplies or friends down there, and, as you can see, it is cold. If the city aldermen do not open the gates, she might retire northwards, back to York, to make the Earl of March come to fight her up there.’

  This is how he has heard it from William Hastings, and the men of the Lincoln Watch think that fair enough, and they let Thomas and Katherine through to the city. Thomas and Katherine walk their horses up the hill past the pardoner’s house, still silent and ghostly, and up past the cathedral where the stationers have cleared their stalls and the doors are barred from within. They pass out through Bailgate and under the old arch on to the Roman road that cuts north. They climb up into their saddles again, and as they leave the city behind, there are crows cawing and loose balls of mistletoe in the trees and old snow on the fields.

  They have travelled this road many times, often in happier circumstances, and once more he asks himself the same question he has been asking for the last four days: why? Why are they doing this? Of course he wants to find Sir John and Geoffrey, to find the others, to see if they are still alive, and of course he needs to tell them about Dafydd and Owen and Walter, and if that was all they were doing, then that would be bad enough, but Thomas must also lie to Sir John and Richard, tell them that Kit is dead, and that here is Lady Margaret Cornford to marry Richard. He can imagine Richard’s face when he sees her. How pleased he will be that she is not plain, but in her own way beautiful . . .

  And he – Thomas – will have to lie again, and again, and again. Forever.

  ‘We should have brought an escort,’ she says. ‘Some men from Lincoln at least. What if there are still some of the northerners about?’

  Thomas drops from the saddle and nocks the string of his new bow and then sticks some arrow shafts in his boot, in the style of Walter. He can feel the steel bodkin heads against his ankle and he wishes he still had the pollaxe. He mounts up again and they ride on, Katherine with her cloak around her ears so that all he can see of her is her red-tipped nose, sharp, like a beak.