Divided Souls

by Toby Clements

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and that is that.

  They part ways with the salt merchant outside York, after which the journey becomes fraught with disaster. The cart breaks a wheel. A horse goes lame. Nettie is plagued with agues and shakes and Katherine says they must stop at a friary, which presents its own problems, since she will not cross the threshold for some misplaced fear of discovery, despite being much changed from the girl who absconded from the Priory at Haverhurst nearly ten years ago. So Jack must present Nettie to the friars, and offer them money to take her into their hospital while the rest of them take rooms in a roadside inn, a rough-made place scarcely a day’s walk from York that is overwhelmed with huge but docile dogs. John and Thomas take turns staying up each night with an eye on the contents of the cart they feel every man in the county will want to steal.

  When Nettie is deemed recovered enough to travel the friars tell Jack that she is lucky to be alive, and that all through her delirium she called out for a woman named Katherine, and that he would have been better to find this Katherine than to leave his wife with them, especially if he intends to travel along this road, for the next hospital that he will find along the road’s length is for the treatment of lepers.

  Hearing this Nettie goes into a decline, and they must stay longer.

  But now here they are, having ridden past the leper hospital in silence, enjoying warmer, longer days, rolling north again, and having crossed some low hills they are come down on to broad flatlands where the wind is less sharp and the way dotted with numerous monasteries and villages where they are able to ask directions. Few know of Senning exactly. They ride on. Ahead is a crest of dark hills, and above it boil piles of thick white clouds with broad blue bases, and so even if the rooks were not circling above, they would know it is about to rain.

  ‘How much further?’ John Stump shouts from the cart again.

  They arrive in Senning three hours later in a heavy, blinding downpour loud enough to muffle your hearing, and William Hastings is right: the inn – another White Hart – is well placed on the road, next to a stone bridge under which seethes brown water running off the hillside behind. On the other side of the river a small herd of cows stand steaming, gazing up from under shaggy fringes, watched over by a child in a coat and hood the colour of turned earth. He sits under the scant shelter of a budding apple tree, unmoving.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Jack asks, and John calls to him, and the boy raises his head to look at them but not his hand in answer to their wave.

  ‘Cheerful little fucker, isn’t he?’ John says.

  In the yard, the inn’s ostler is quick to come, and the place is as Thomas had hoped: the walls whitewashed, the roofs sound and clean-thatched and the floor swept and dry. The ostler’s two boys come running bare-footed through the bouncing rain to take the horses for rubbing down and drying off while another draws the cart under cover, and then another man comes in a long coat of oilcloth and a cone of the same material on his head, and he shouts for someone to come and help, and three girls in clean aprons appear at the doorway and make themselves useful while bags are passed to them, and one takes to Rufus, and he to her, and she shows him she has the same coloured hair as he, and Thomas cannot help but smile with the blooming gleamings of delight. They will do well here, he thinks. They will do well. It will be all right.

  In the hall there is a well-fed fire warming perhaps twenty souls, who sit on benches around boards, and the smell is familiar and comforting: unwashed bodies, singeing wool, mutton fat, and there is a black and white shepherd’s dog curled yet watchful by the fire. The thrum of conversation sinks when Thomas leads his party in, and faces turn his way, but once greetings are exchanged and blessings offered, the noise picks up again and now the innkeeper appears to show them to a long board from which he cheerfully evicts a dozing friar.

  ‘We expected you weeks ago!’ he tells them.

  ‘It has been a long old journey,’ Thomas admits.

  ‘You are here now,’ the man says. ‘Come, rest yourselves by the fire.’

  He is Campbell: a wizened little man with dark, glossy eyes that never settle and gingerish hair that lies clapped to his narrow head.

  Jack laughs.

  ‘Like an otter in a hat.’

  They sit for a moment and let the water drip from their clothes on to the rippled flagstones below and Thomas looks at the others in the room, hoping for – what? He does not know. They are merchants, mostly, with their servants and guards; there are two friars, one grey, the other brown, and three pilgrims on their way somewhere – York perhaps? There is no one, as far as he can see, who seems to offer any threat of being anything other than absolutely ordinary. There is no one to question. No one to arouse suspicion.

  It is no time before the aproned girls are back – one is very pretty – with jugs of ale, bowls of soup, broad trenchers of rye bread. The ale is sweet and powerful, the bread mostly free of grit, and the soup is thick, salty, and spiced with something, and there are chunks of good fatty pork in it, too.

  ‘God in heaven,’ Jack says. ‘This is perfect.’

  Even John Stump smiles.

  ‘Not bad,’ he says. ‘Not bad.’

  Campbell returns and sits with them a moment, glad to take the weight off his feet.

  ‘You will rest here tonight?’ he asks. ‘The house has been empty since Candlemas, and needs fettling, I dare say, and warming. You might light a fire tomorrow and air the place.’

  Thomas asks about the estate.

  ‘We are two hundred-odd souls,’ Campbell tells him. ‘And we thank God for his blessings.’

  At curfew Campbell leads them with a rush lamp held aloft up the steps to their rooms in the roof where the rafters cut through the space at waist height. The beds are dry, the sheets are clean, and they need only share the space with one other, who is already asleep in a whorl of blankets on his own mattress, and a black cat with a white chin, there to keep the mice at bay, who when Rufus approaches slinks further into her kingdom of shadows where the roof sinks to meet the floor.

  Thomas lies next to Rufus and is lulled into a deep sleep by the sound of the rain on the thatch, and at cockcrow the church bell wakes him. He lies for a moment, getting used to the dark, listening to the birdsong now that the rain has stopped, enjoying the warmth of the soft woollen blankets. Rufus lies on his back, mouth open, snoring gently, his nightcap lost. Katherine lies on her side, frowning in her sleep. He lifts his head. Jack and Nettie are beyond, and John too, though he has rolled clear of the blankets, and he is waggling the pink stump of his arm in the air as if to scratch some itch that he’ll never reach.

  Thomas lies happy for a long moment, consciously not thinking about Isabella’s two sons, or about Lurcher, but then, when he is on his feet, tying his points, he thinks: Has someone been through this bag? It seems rummaged, probed. He feels for the purse of coins that Hastings’s messenger brought them for the journey and any necessary expenses, and there it is: unstolen.

  He supposes it was dark the night before, and so anything might have happened while they found their beds and so on, and he regrets his suspicion.

  In the hall there is ale and warm bread, and much movement of men, and banging of doors as they come and go. Thomas and the others reclaim their board and watch as the merchants rouse themselves and their servants, settle their bills and leave with blessings upon Campbell and his girls. When the rush has died down Campbell comes over and tells them that Evans the reeve will meet them at their new house whenever they are ready.

  When they leave the inn it is a bright, northern morning, with a pinch in the air and quick-moving clouds overhead. The boy is still there, under his tree, across the rushing river.

  ‘Definitely dead this time,’ Jack says.

  ‘He’s not the same one as yesterday,’ Katherine says. ‘That one had a brown coat.’

  At Jack’s shout, the boy’s head swivels to watch them again, and this time he raises his hand in return.

 
; ‘That’s better,’ John says.

  But Thomas watches him a moment longer. He could almost be a friar at prayer, sitting hunched under his tree, but there is something odd about him, Thomas thinks. No one else sees anything unusual though, so, after a moment, they move on, following the river up towards the grey stub of the church tower, and Thomas forgets the cowherd when they hear the rhythmic tink of the smith at work, and they smell his work’s sharp fumes, and they walk up past his yard, and hear the whoof of his bellows, and then they are met by angry geese being driven down the track by a wide-eyed girl with yellow hair, wielding a long switch and shouting cheerful, godless obscenities at her charges. She is mortified to be caught at it. Then there are pigs and goats: some loose, nurdling among the tufts of grass at the wayside; others penned in, devil-eyed, behind hazel hurdles. Underfoot the soil is dark and rich, and everything is verdant and promising, and soon they come to the river’s bank where, again, they hear the women before they see them: the smack of the washing beetle, the burble of conversation that flares into a moment’s raucous laughter. There are five of them: three in the water, skirts rolled up, thick legs mottled with the water’s cold, beetles hefted in powerful arms; two on the bank, one wringing her linen on the trunk of a willow where the bark has been smoothed by generations of women doing exactly that, the other pinning clothes on the spikes of the hawthorns. The conversation ceases as Thomas and the others approach.

  Cautious greetings are exchanged.

  ‘Where are your husbands, goodwives?’ John asks. His question is understood as being not without motive, and the women laugh and John is reduced to blushing and blustering then one points a hefty arm up and behind, to where the sun shines on many sheep scattered grazing over the hillside’s soft undulations. The sight stirs such a pleasant sensation in Thomas that he nearly walks on up through the village, past the house and the church and the furlongs that he has really come to see, just to be up there, on the hills, with them himself.

  Jack laughs.

  ‘Look at you,’ he says. But he too is beaming with pleasure at all this, their new home, and for a moment Thomas feels like the prophet who led his people from the wilderness into the Promised Land, the New Jerusalem; he turns to Katherine, who walks with Rufus – their son is absorbed in the mallards on the river – and in the cool clear light her skin is pale, and in her blue dress and pale linen headdress she looks ethereal, and for a moment he catches his breath, and he feels he should not be looking at her like this, that to do so is somehow sacrilege, but then she turns on him, and she smiles at him, for him, and the light catches in her eyes and he feels almost dizzy with love for her, dizzy with happiness. He has done it. They have done it. Together.

  They walk on, light-stepped, past rows of low, well-thatched, stone-built houses, their yards already a riot of freshening greenery, pale smoke wafting from holes in the eaves. Everywhere are dogs, cats, goats, pigs, children. The village is teeming with life, boisterous and rude, and he can smell it, just as it should be: fresh and dirty and green.

  And when they reach the house, it is even better: a copy of Marton Hall but in stone, and there is even, already, a chimney from which now swirls a column of white smoke. Bees flit in the low sun through the shoots in the garden and swallows wheel above. They stand before the house, on the track’s side of a low stone wall, and each can see that this place, it exceeds any wild hope.

  ‘We will live here?’ Nettie asks, incredulous.

  Jack puts an arm around her.

  ‘Our boy will be born here,’ he says.

  Even John wipes a tear from his eye.

  The door – new oak planks – opens and a man as broad as deep emerges, wearing an old russet jacket that reaches down to his knees, and a suspicious look that only vanishes when greetings are exchanged. This is Evans, the reeve. He carries a staff as if of office, they think, and he has much to say as he points out the buttery, the pantry, the cupboards, the storerooms, the fire dogs, the steps up to the two bedrooms where the strings in the bed frames are still taut. He is bemused by their pleasure in all that he shows them, since he has lived with this all his life. Then he takes them out and shows them the outbuildings, the wood stack, the privy, built near the stream.

  ‘Above the village?’

  He laughs.

  ‘Better than below it.’

  Evans has a small dog that yaps, tied it to a post that marks some boundary.

  ‘You’ll want to see the church,’ he says, and they do, sort of.

  The priest is of the muscular sort, up a ladder, doing something with a delicate hammer to the broad stretch of leaded windowpanes. When he climbs down he proffers a hand as big as a plate, as thick as a trencher of bread, and even Jack winces from his squeeze. When he looks at Katherine, and then at Nettie, he becomes confused, tongue-tied, and he crosses himself twice and mutters something about the Lord above. He dusts himself down and leads them into the church where they kneel and pray, and Thomas takes a moment to look at the mural that portrays Adam and Eve’s departure from Eden, with the figures writhing and leaping across the rendered, whitewashed walls, and they seem fresh and almost alive.

  Thomas squeezes his eyes shut. He gives thanks to the Lord so heartfelt he feels he may faint.

  When it is over the priest waves them on their way, and returns up his ladder.

  ‘Jacob’s,’ he says with a laugh.

  And they walk back down through the village the other way, to find the bake oven, where they buy bread from a girl in a blue dress and bare feet, and then the brewster, where they each buy a mug of ale that is so fresh it tastes of almost nothing, and then they meet an old man who sells them apples with skins as wrinkled as his own that he has overwintered in his loft, and then they walk up the dale, with Rufus on Thomas’s shoulders again, up into the high pasture where the wind blows slightly chilly and level and the sheep – brown-faced things with curled horns and dense wool – are wonderfully numerous. They hear the whistles of the shepherds and meet a boy with a crook aiming deadly accurate stones at the trunk of a wind-stunted hawthorn. They sit on a pile of stones and eat and drink and study the village below and Thomas laughs when he thinks of it as his new kingdom.

  ‘Got everything,’ John has to admit.

  Thomas’s eye follows the line of the river, past the hall, through the village and on to the inn on the road. He can see the cowherd’s field, and it is only now, from up here, that he sees what was odd about him.

  ‘Where are the cows?’ he asks.

  And it is true: they are not there now, nor were they this morning. Why is the boy still there?

  They come down off the hill, merely puzzled at this stage, and Thomas wonders if he will be there still; and sure enough he is: keeping watch over an empty stretch of pasture.

  Thomas and Katherine leave the others at the inn, and they cross the bridge to talk to him. The boy is about ten, squatting there, unmoving as they approach. He clutches his withy with one bare, bony fist, and they see his rough woven coat is sodden, as if he has been out in all weathers for some time, and as they come he hardly glances their way, and it is only when they stand between him and the road that he looks at them properly again.

  ‘Christ,’ Thomas says.

  His waxy skin is the colour of wet linen, and there is a dark smudge under each dark eye.

  ‘I’ve not taken my eyes off it,’ he blurts before either Thomas or Katherine can say more. ‘Not all week. And there’s been nothing save that soap merchant what I sent John to tell him about. And now you. And I sent John for that too. And there’s been nothing new since. No one new. Honest to God. Nothing. No one has come past. Not a one. I’ve not taken me eyes off it. Like he said. Not for one blink. Ask my father. He will tell you. Honest, as I swear in God’s name.’

  Thomas and Katherine exchange a glance. Thomas moves to stand behind the boy: to see what he sees. The boy does not even flinch. He is so tired that if Thomas were to cuff him, he would not bother to fight back. He�
��s watching the road, nothing else, a hundred paces away. He has a good view of it, from the east to the west, possibly three or four miles in either direction.

  ‘Who set you to watch?’ Katherine asks.

  The boy hesitates, now seeing he has mistaken them for someone else.

  ‘Himself,’ the boy says. ‘Himself, of course. No one else. Who would it be?’

  They look at the boy for a moment. He is so terrified of being seen to disobey ‘himself’ that he is bending around them to look at the road, so he cannot be accused of not doing so. Whoever himself is, he has instilled a fear as great as that of God into the boy.

  ‘Who is himself?’ Katherine asks.

  Now the boy does chance another glance up at them. He shakes his head as if to say the name might be bad luck.

  ‘Go on, son,’ Thomas says. ‘We just want to know. We are not here to hurt you. We’ll fetch you bread if you want? Pottage? Some ale?’

  The boy’s eyes change shape, soften.

  ‘Well?’ Thomas asks.

  Still he hesitates, but then he lets go of his jacket, lets it fall open, and with his one long, thin bony finger touches the cheek under his right eye, and he murmurs a name neither hears.

  ‘Again?’

  ‘It is Riven,’ he whispers. ‘Edmund Riven.’

  6

  Edmund Riven.

  It is a name from a nightmare, the very last they wish to hear spoken. Katherine is suddenly cold, and the sun is no longer enough to warm her bones. Next to her, Thomas looks gut-struck and pale. He has removed his cap, and she can see his hair is glossy with sweat. It is like hearing the plague has come.

  ‘Christ,’ is all he says. ‘Christ.’

  They get no more from the boy, and so leave him and struggle back to the inn.

  Edmund Riven is here in the north.

  ‘Why?’ Thomas keeps repeating. ‘Why?’

  The inn is busy. Campbell is seeing to a horse merchant who is buying rather than selling and wants to look in the stables, the aproned girls bring bowls and trenchers to a host of merchantmen on their ways here and there. The fire is lit and men are already drinking. Jack sits in the hall at their by now usual board. Jack is teaching Rufus a dice game.