Of course Thomas has no idea.
‘He has cost us sorely.’ Sir John goes on. ‘Sorely. But we have taxed him too. His men came to surround the house, you know, to drive us out. As soon as we heard the news from Sandal, we knew those northern bastards’d be coming our way, so we were ready, we thought. Then they went through Newark instead, and they were so keen on plundering the south they didn’t bother to ford the river. We thought we were safe. Life was getting back to normal, or as normal as it could be.
‘And then they came. They caught Goodwife Popham. Down in the village.
‘Geoffrey and Brampton John and Little John were here in the hall, and Elizabeth, you remember her, Thomas? Geoffrey’s daughter. She came running to fetch help. I reckon now that they’d let her go just to come and get us. We snatched up whatever we could, thinking it was just a party of latecomers gone wild on their way south.
‘We didn’t bother with harness or anything, and Geoffrey, well, of course he was worried. It was his wife they had. So we ran down to the village. We could hear her screaming in one of the cottages, but there wasn’t anybody about, so, well, I suppose we should have seen it for what it was. The first arrow knocked Brampton John off his feet. The second went straight through Geoffrey’s eye. Dropped him just like a bull. Christ. He’d been with me forever, you know? And they killed him, just like that.’ He snaps his fingers. ‘Bastards,’ he says.
There is a long silence. Katherine wipes away a tear. She knows she is not supposed to know these people Sir John speaks about, but she cannot help herself.
‘I killed one,’ Sir John goes on. ‘The bowman, thank Christ, before he could loose another arrow. And Richard got another. The others rode away. Richard took the bowman’s horse, Little John the other horse. They went after them. Then I thought, too late: My God, it’s a trap. To get us out of the house. I ran back. Fast as I could.’ Sir John’s face is grey with shame and regret. ‘I got back just in time to see them riding off with Liz over a saddle. They’d set a fire in the roof and one in the stables and the horses were screaming. I had to make a choice.’
There is silence in the room. A log on the fire lets out a long sigh.
‘I have that girl’s life on my conscience,’ Sir John says. ‘And God will be my judge in the next world.’
Both murmur amen.
‘I let the horses go, and I put out the fire. Then I waited. I thought when Richard and John got back I could send one of them to Lincoln to raise some more men. I heard horses in the yard and I ran out. But it wasn’t them. Or rather, it was. It was Riven’s men. They dropped Richard in the muck and rode away laughing. He was screaming and kicking and there was blood in his eyes, and I knew straight away what they’d done.’
There is a long silence. Sir John pinches the bridge of his nose.
‘But what about the dead men outside?’ Thomas asks.
Sir John seems to brighten.
‘Them? Riven’s scouts. They were taunting us, shouting the foulest things. About the things they’d done to young Liz, and to Richard. Thank God for that crossbow. D’you remember Kit left it when he went? He said I’d need it before he did, or something. The boy was usually right, wasn’t he, Thomas? Anyway, I wounded one or two more over the course of the next day and by Christ I hope they died miserable deaths. Then they said they’d just wait. Starve us out. But their hearts weren’t in it. I think once they’d done that to Richard they knew they needn’t worry any more.’
It made sense, Katherine supposes. Once Riven heard he’d missed the chance to take Margaret Cornford in Wales, he must have changed tactics. He must have thought she’d never marry Richard if he was blind. She wants to ask why Riven had not simply killed Richard, but she cannot betray her knowledge. She wishes Thomas would ask, but perhaps he is too sensible to ask a father why his son hasn’t been killed, only blinded.
Sir John turns to address her.
‘I’m sorry you find us this way, my lady. I’m sorry my boy is the way he is now. He was a wonderful young man before this. A wonderful swordsman, wasn’t he, Thomas? And a fine huntsman. He had such a love of life. To know him was to love him. I know every father says that, but . . . Had you met him properly, I am sure you would have admired him. He was kind, too, of course, wasn’t he, Thomas? Hmmm?’
Thomas nods but cannot lift his gaze from the table.
‘Will he not join us?’ Katherine asks.
Sir John shakes his head. They are silent for a long time. Katherine is aware of Sir John’s gaze on her, but when she looks up he is smiling with tears in his eyes.
‘Where is Riven now, d’you know?’ Thomas asks. His voice has taken on that hard flat tone. Sir John shakes his head.
‘He has not bothered us for days. Weeks even.’
‘Then he must be with the Queen’s army,’ Thomas says.
Sir John nods as if to allow it.
‘Then this time I’ll not fail,’ Thomas says. ‘This time I’ll go and find him and I’ll put an end to it. Put an end to him. He cannot be left to live after this, not now, and we cannot go on living like this either.’
Katherine wonders if anything is ever that simple.
She sleeps that night in Sir John’s bed, Sir John sharing with Richard on the smaller truckle bed by her side, Thomas downstairs by the covered fire, keeping watch. The sheets are filthy and there is dog hair everywhere. She’s forgotten the dogs. Talbots, they were, absurd-looking things. She supposes them dead now. At some point Richard gets up in the night and fumbles his way downstairs.
What must it be like, to be blind? she wonders. To be constantly in the dark? She tries to imagine what Richard must be feeling, even apart from being left blind. She recalls Thomas’s face the moment the giant pressed his thumb into his eye on the ferryman’s skiff. It had been filled with naked terror, a sensation that surely no man would ever forget. And for someone like Richard, who thought himself a soldier, it must be doubly difficult.
Would it have been better for Richard to have been killed? Probably, she thinks. Which is why the giant didn’t do it.
Dear God! Thomas has talked of the mistake of sparing Riven’s life, but what of the giant? Even at the time she’d known they should have killed him, when he was lying stunned by the boat that morning, but they’d never have been able to do it. They were too innocent then. Now, though, she would happily crash that pollaxe into the giant’s face, happily cut his throat. For a moment her body is thronging with energy.
She feels the constriction of her shift, wrapped tight around her legs and her waist, and she wishes she were wearing a shirt and braies as she used to when she was Kit. She thinks of Thomas downstairs by the fire, wrapped in solitude, and she feels a flare of anger. He is a stubborn fool, she thinks. If he’d said just one thing, or if he’d tried for a single moment to dissuade her from pretending to be Margaret Cornford, then she would have thrown off her cloak and swapped it for some ragged boy’s clothing, and she would have resumed the life of Kit in an instant.
But now it is too late.
And the tears come, silently sliding down to her temples, when she thinks about how they are betraying Sir John and Richard, people who have only ever offered them kindness, and she curses herself for ever thinking to remain Margaret Cornford.
And so what is to become of her? she wonders. To what life has she condemned herself? A life that serves as its own penance? A better life than she might have expected at the priory, perhaps, but one shot through with deception and heartbreak, one in which anything she does to serve herself will wound those whom she most loves.
And it is just as she is drifting off, gripped by the sorrow of these thoughts, that her eyes fly open and she is suddenly wide awake.
She thinks she can see the way out of this. She thinks there is a way.
The next morning they are up before cockcrow. Thomas is away all morning, burying Geoffrey’s body in the churchyard, dragging the others away from the house, and it falls to Katherine to resuscitate the f
ire and to make soup with such supplies as remain. She knows her way around the buttery and the kitchen and she knows how to haul the bucket up from the well. She is about to start shovelling the excrement from the back, just as she used to when she was Kit, when she sees Sir John squinting at her, and she leaves the shovel where it is, and she wipes her hands on her skirts and comes to sit at the board where Richard is grinding his fists into his eye sockets.
‘Do they hurt?’ she asks.
Richard grunts.
‘Let me see,’ she says. His bandages are grubby and stained and since the bleeding must have stopped, she wonders what they are really for? She moves close. Richard stiffens but she places a hand on his shoulder and a moment later he relaxes. She is conscious that Sir John is watching as she unwinds the filthy linen.
‘Tied it myself,’ he says. ‘I wished we’d had Kit with us still. He was – well, he had a gift that one, didn’t he, Richard?’
Richard grunts.
‘He cut me,’ Sir John continues, addressing Katherine now. ‘This last autumn. Before all this. I had a fistula. You know what that is, hmmm? Nasty, anyway. Could hardly walk for the pain of the thing. Anyway. Kit learned to read, can you believe? Only a boy, but he learned to read, and then got hold of some old leech’s instructions about how to cut out a fistula, and he cut mine out. Simple as that. Bloody miracle it was, wasn’t it? Richard? A bloody miracle.’
Katherine blinks away the tears that gather in her lashes. Richard says nothing. She peels away the last wrap of linen and there are his eyelids, sunken and gummed together, crusted with what looks like sand and blood. A smell rises from them, a sort of sweet fug.
Sir John sucks his teeth.
Katherine fetches the last of the wine and some fresh linen from the coffer in the room above and she washes Richard’s eyes, wiping away the crust and the traces of blood with a good pad of the material so that she does not have to feel the emptiness. When she has finished she sees that there is no real need to cover his eyes, except that it is such a terrible shock to see the empty sockets. So she cuts some dry linen with her knife and reties it around his head. She can smell Richard now and she thinks how he needs a wash, and she wonders whether it will be her task to insist on this kind of thing in the future.
‘Where did you learn your skills, my lady?’ Sir John asks.
She does not answer. She does not understand that Sir John is talking to her.
‘There,’ she says. ‘Better, I think.’
And now Sir John is looking at her through narrowed eyes, but then Thomas returns with some wood for the fire and the body of a heavy duck with a limp neck. Sir John cackles and they set to work gutting and plucking it.
‘Your swineherd is back,’ Thomas tells them. ‘And he says the others will be back soon.’
Sir John nods.
‘To my shame I sent them to Lincoln,’ he says, ‘since I could not guarantee their safety with Riven and his men in the Hundred.’
The next day Katherine catches the scent of wood smoke in the air and there are some women bent-backed in the fields and a sense that everything might return to the way it was. She gets Thomas to carry the linen up the old lane to the river, where she rolls up her skirts and sets about the washing. It is so cold she can stand it for no more than a few minutes at a time and is pleased when one of the women from the village finds her way to the riverbank and agrees to help for a cost Katherine would gladly double. At the end of the day they wring out the not very much cleaner linen and spread it on the hawthorn branches and when Katherine returns to the hall exhausted, there is soup and ale and news from the south.
The Queen’s army has not taken London, but has turned and is making its way back up north, to York, just as William Hastings had hoped.
‘Praise Jesus,’ Sir John says, ‘thought we had better ready ourselves lest they come this way.’
‘Won’t they take the shortest route?’ Thomas asks.
Sir John grunts to admit the possibility but the following days are spent anxiously. They have hoarded as much food as they can buy: apples, smoked mutton, dried peas and beans, three barrels of ale. Thomas has his new bow and two more sheaves of arrows and he has collected up the quarrels and the crossbow stands by the door, ready for use.
Then they wait by the damped fire and hope the smoke does not broadcast their presence and Katherine sleeps, and thinks, and prepares herself.
As the days pass, the tension slowly tightens, and they take turns at the windows and one of them is always awake through the night, but then there comes a point when nothing has happened and they begin to believe the Queen’s army has passed them by, and then, the next week, when it snows again, there is a day afterwards when the sky is clear and blue, and they gather outside to listen to distant bells, from as far away as Lincoln perhaps, sounding in the icy air.
‘Is it a warning?’ Thomas asks, his breath fogging his face.
‘Too fast,’ Richard says. It is good to hear him have an opinion on something. He looks better now that he is shaved and washed and his eyes trouble him less since Katherine washed them, and while the others cover their eyes from the sun on the snow, he stands perfectly still and faces south.
‘I think they must be to celebrate something,’ he says.
‘But what?’ Sir John asks.
They must wait until the next day to find out. It is another friar, in grey this time, garrulous and travelling south, who has met a man travelling north, a Scot, who robbed him.
‘I thank St Matthew that he did not take my beads,’ the friar says, touching the loop at his belt. ‘Though he took all I had to eat and shared my fire to cook it over.’
In exchange for the food the Scot had shared his news though, and once they set beans and ale before the friar, he divulges it as if it were worth gold.
‘Only that in London Edward of March has been proclaimed king!’
Sir John whistles.
‘Edward of March is king!’ he says. ‘So that is what the bells were for.’
‘Aye,’ the friar agrees. ‘They did not ring them sooner for fear of attracting the attention of the Queen’s army.
There is a long moment while they consider this. Katherine remembers the lanky boy with the big feet and the strange leer she could not understand at the time. What has God seen in him that he should be king? Something that Henry lacked, she supposes: some vigour, some youth. A fresh start perhaps, a new green shoot in the garden, but then what about the old growths? What will happen to all those dukes and earls and lords that fought for Henry in the past?
‘And what about King Henry?’ Sir John asks. ‘What will become of him?’
‘King Edward’s affinity says that King Henry broke some Act of Parliament, and that because he’s done so, he is rightly deposed, and that from now on we are to call him just Henry of Lancaster.’
‘Henry of Lancaster,’ Sir John repeats, his voice soft with regret. ‘Don’t suppose he’ll like that. Still less his queen.’
The friar nods.
‘No,’ he says. ‘The Scotsman says the Queen has retired to York and has gathered a power of nobles such as has never been seen in England, and that she means to smash this new king Edward, and put his head up on a spike along with his father’s and brother’s.’
‘And what is King Edward doing?’ Katherine asks.
There is a moment’s silence while the friar eats another spoonful.
‘Oh,’ he says, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, ‘he is at the head of his own army, marching north to meet Henry of Lancaster in a battle he says will prove God’s will once and for all.’
Katherine notices Thomas is gripping his cup too hard and that his face has grown pale, but it is only the next morning, as they are walking to the churchyard to say prayers over Geoffrey’s new-dug grave, that they have a moment alone together.
‘Did you know this would happen?’ she asks.
He nods.
‘And I must go,’ he says.
S
he stops. It is the most senseless thing she has ever heard.
‘Go?’ she repeats. ‘Go back to the fighting? No. No. You cannot. Thomas. You cannot.’
‘I must,’ he says, and looks away, suddenly evasive. ‘William Hastings—’ he starts. ‘William Hastings has asked me to take command of some men. Some archers. A hundred of them. And I said I would. I gave my word. It was why he let us leave Hereford and ride up here to find Sir John. And Richard.’
She is aghast. She nearly grabs his jacket.
‘Dear God, Thomas,’ she says. ‘You cannot go. You will be killed.’
‘Don’t say it, Katherine.’
‘No. You are right. I will not. But— But what about us? You cannot leave us here. If Riven knew we were here—? What then?’
Thomas sighs lengthily. His feet are heavy on the snow.
‘What would you have me do?’ he asks, just as if he has already discarded all other options. ‘What else can I do?’
‘Stay,’ she says. ‘Stay here. Where you are needed most. You can see: Sir John, Richard, me. We need you. As Hastings and March and Warwick do not.’
‘Riven is with the Queen’s army,’ he says. ‘I will find him this time. Put an end to all this. Finally. For good. Then I will come back. We will plant the fields or whatever it is you want me to do then.’
They are at the churchyard now, and Geoffrey’s grave is below a yew by the gate. Katherine wonders where Goodwife Popham is buried, and Liz, but there is nothing to be gained from thinking that way, she knows, and so she closes her eyes and kneels next to Thomas on the icy earth and while he repeats the prayers for the dead, just as he did over Margaret Cornford’s body in the hills in Wales, all she can do is pray that he will not leave her.
When they get back to the hall, Sir John is sharpening his sword on the same step that Walter used.
‘I am coming with you, Thomas,’ he says. ‘Or rather, you are coming with me.’
Thomas frowns.
Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims Page 44
