Divided Souls

by Toby Clements

  ‘No, no.’ Jack laughs. ‘You must not tell the truth.’ Then he sees their faces. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Thomas takes a long drink of ale before he replies.

  ‘Edmund Riven,’ he says. ‘He’s here.’

  There is an intake of breath.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘In the county.’

  ‘Why? Why is he here?’ Jack asks.

  It is a good question. What is Riven doing here? And why has he set that boy to watch the road?

  One of the aproned girls comes with more ale.

  They are silent while she pours.

  ‘Very quiet today?’ she says.

  Katherine asks if she knows Edmund Riven.

  The stream of ale wavers, spilling over the mazer’s edge. The girl looks around as if they are like to be overheard and then back at Katherine.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ she asks, her lips barely moving, her voice hardly audible. She mops the ale with her apron.

  ‘He’s an old friend,’ Katherine tells her.

  The girl’s eyes flatten.

  ‘Edmund Riven is a friend of yours?’

  She makes it sound as if they are companions of the devil.

  Just then Campbell comes, looking anxious.

  ‘Mary?’ he asks the girl, and she gives them a significant look before she turns to slip away behind the screen to the buttery. Campbell is suspicious.

  ‘Can’t have you upsetting my girls,’ he says.

  ‘We asked her about Edmund Riven,’ Thomas tells him.

  Campbell starts and sucks his teeth.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Why has he set a boy to watch the road?’

  Campbell looks down at Thomas, and Katherine can see it cross his mind to place him as just a big lunk with strong arms but little brain. She has seen men underestimate him like that before. Lucky for Campbell he does not.

  ‘He wants to know who comes. Who goes. Their names. Their business.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? It is his position, of course,’ Campbell says.

  Thomas keeps on:

  ‘But what is this position?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘He tells us he is my lord of Warwick’s Bearer of the Dog Whipper’s Rod, but that is his joke. He is more a – questioner, perhaps?’

  Katherine feels the skin on her cheeks crawl, her hair prickle. She turns to Thomas.

  ‘Riven is in the household of the Earl of Warwick,’ she tells him. ‘He is his man.’ Now Thomas sees it too.

  ‘He is Warwick’s man?’ he blurts. ‘The one Hastings was talking about?’

  They stare at one another.

  Campbell seems surprised at the strength of their reactions.

  ‘Of course he is,’ Campbell says. ‘As are most in these parts, one way or another, now that Lord Hungerford is dead and his family attainted.’

  ‘Does he know we’re here?’ she asks.

  Campbell opens his mouth, hesitates, and perhaps wishes he had not spoken up, but he’s caught, and after a moment he nods.

  ‘You sent someone?’ she presses.

  ‘The lad’s brother,’ he admits, rising on to his toes and lifting his eyebrows in the direction of the unseen cowherd. ‘If I hadn’t, Riven would’ve found out anyway, and then blamed the boy and—’

  Campbell makes the sound everyone recognises as that of a neck being wrung to breaking point. Can he mean it literally? Surely not. But now Campbell seems ashamed of his betrayal, the dereliction of his duty as a host, and he is becoming nervous, speaking quickly and shifting from foot to foot, because, after all, Thomas and Jack, and even John, they are formidable, and not the sort to anger unnecessarily.

  ‘Can I get you anything else? More ale?’ he asks.

  Katherine ignores him.

  ‘Will Riven come himself?’ she continues, and Campbell sees he cannot wriggle free.

  ‘He may do,’ he supposes. ‘He is unpredictable, Sir Edmund.’

  ‘How long until he gets here?’ Thomas asks. Campbell shrugs, and opens his mouth to speak; but then there is a sudden sharpening in his gaze, as if a thought has occurred to him, and he says something else.

  ‘Look,’ he says. ‘He may not even be in the county for all I know.’

  ‘But if he is?

  ‘Well, if he is at Middleham, which is where I sent the boy, then – then perhaps the day after the morrow? Yes. It is a day’s ride, and so – yes – then. The day after the morrow. Ah. And now I can smell your dinner burning.’

  He turns and makes for the screen. But Thomas leans forward, catches his arm.

  ‘Are there many men such as Riven out asking questions on the Earl of Warwick’s behalf?’ he asks.

  Campbell thinks for a quick moment and then agrees that this is possible, though he knows of none for sure, and with a sweep of his free arm he indicates the impossibility of certainty in the breadth of the outside world, and then the urgency of saving their dinner.

  ‘What kind of questions does he ask?’ Thomas demands.

  ‘Hold fast.’ Campbell tries to laugh, his gaze sliding to the hand on his wrist. ‘Now you sound just like him.’

  ‘But what kind of questions?’ Thomas presses.

  ‘Just – just – questions,’ he stammers. ‘Who’s been where, and why, and so on. Ordinary questions, in the main. Can I go now? Your dinner, it is—?’

  He hopes he is done, but Thomas has one last question.

  ‘And was it on his behalf you went through our bags last night?’

  And here Campbell is skewered. He denies it happened, but the denial is so lame, it comes as an admission.

  ‘What were you looking for?’ Thomas goes on.

  ‘Nothing,’ Campbell says. ‘Nothing. In particular.’

  ‘Not a book?’

  Campbell opens and closes his mouth.

  ‘Your dinner,’ he blurts. ‘It is burning.’

  And with all pretence at normality gone, he wrenches his arm free, turns and runs and is gone. Katherine sits back and tries to think, but just then Rufus climbs into her lap; she takes him and presses her nose to his linen cap and inhales his sweet, slightly-in-need-of-a-wash odour and she tries to think about the ledger, and if Campbell was looking for it in their bags, and if so whether he did this with all his guests, but she cannot.

  Edmund Riven. She has not heard his name said aloud for two or three years now, because whenever it was mentioned, Sir John would surge into an overheated rage that only Isabella could soothe with long hours of low murmurings and perhaps a gallon of spiced wine, but it has never been far from her thoughts. Edmund Riven. She thinks back to the first time she saw him, or he her, in the rye field the lay brothers had reclaimed from the wetlands before the sisters’ beggars’ gate of the Priory of St Mary at Haverhurst. She had been coming back from the privy with Sister Alice – may God keep her soul – when a party of horsemen had come off the road, yelling as if hunting after boar. She has since wondered what their intentions were, since for God’s sake, they cannot really have meant to rape them, can they? Not there and then. But they were the first men she had ever seen, and in her fright, she, Katherine, a sister of the Gilbertine Order, had thrown the bucket she was then carrying in the face of the first rider, knocking him off his horse, taking his eye out, and in that irrevocable moment, she had changed the course of all their lives.

  She’d seen him again in Wales, coming back from Kidwelly, when she had been harrowed with guilt and sorrow at the death of Margaret Cornford, at the deaths of Walter, of Dafydd and of Owen, and she had wanted to kill him then, for he was responsible for them all, in one way or another, but she was powerless, of course, and it was only by the grace of God – and the help of William Hastings – that she, and Thomas, had lived to escape him.

  Sir Edmund and his father. They were like buboes, erupting with implacable, dismaying malice: to blind Richard Fakenham; to kill Liz Popham; to pack a jury and have her accused of murder; and then finally, that day in Ba
mburgh, to cause the death of Rufus’s twin sister, when Giles Riven had kicked her in her belly as she lay on the ground, forcing her to miscarry the girl child whom she had never held in her hands, whom she had been too sick to mourn. Thomas had killed him, then, with his own pollaxe, and when she had heard of this, later, when she was still in her childbed, she had felt a deep sense of release, as if she were being lifted up from under a press of weight. But now, it seems, his son is back.

  All this time Jack and John Stump have been watching, not really understanding. They know of Edmund Riven, of course, and they know a little of the ledger, but neither understand yet that the former is now seeking the latter. Thomas tells them in a quick whisper.

  When he hears, Jack is aghast. He sends the dice skittling down the board and over the end into the rushes.

  ‘Not the bloody ledger again? I thought you burned it or something. You said you would, Thomas, remember?’

  Thomas nods again. A flicker of guilt.

  ‘It wouldn’t have helped,’ Katherine tells him. ‘It would still be known that we once had it, and that we once knew its secret. Just knowing it existed, and what it proves – that is enough.’

  John sits back.

  ‘I told you,’ he says. ‘Five years. That is all you get.’

  Rufus leaves Katherine and goes to join Nettie where she sits at the other end of the board, eating bread. He loves Nettie; he is fascinated by her swelling belly, wherein he believes a playmate is plotting to emerge.

  ‘Edmund Riven must have been with Warwick since Bamburgh fell,’ she supposes. ‘He was with him while his father was with old King Henry, remember, so that the family would not lose, whichever side won.’

  ‘Will he recognise us? If he comes?’ Jack asks.

  That is a good question.

  ‘It would not take him a moment to know who we are,’ Katherine supposes. ‘And where we’ve come from. And once he discovers that . . . Well. There is no telling what he may do. You see how scared he has made everyone up here? They go in mortal dread of him.’

  The second aproned sister appears, the ugliest of the three according to John Stump. She is furtive, anxious someone – her father? – will see her.

  ‘You know Edmund Riven?’ she asks.

  ‘From a long time ago,’ Katherine tells her.

  ‘You have reasons to fear him?’

  They all look at one another before agreeing.

  ‘Then you must go,’ she tells them. She is furiously urgent, snapping out her warning. ‘Ignore my father. He wishes to keep you here for – for him. For Riven.’

  Her anxious gaze slides to Rufus. It is possible to see her imagining him being burned.

  ‘You must go!’ she repeats. ‘He is the devil. Or made by the devil. He always takes two. He tells us so. Boasts of it. A husband and wife. Or mother and son.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To burn one, right in front of the other. He takes a glowing coal and lays it on the skin of the first, and the second spills his secrets out of love for the first, or out of fear of being burned hisself.’

  ‘Jane!’

  It is Campbell at the screen. The conversation in the hall lulls. Jane turns with an entreating look and is gone. Campbell scowls as if it is they who have done the wrong; then he turns and follows her behind the screen. Conversation in the hall resumes.

  ‘Bloody Riven,’ Jack says. He can see that this is not where his son will be born after all.

  ‘Does he know you killed his old man with that axe of yours, Thomas?’ John asks.

  Thomas shakes his head.

  ‘He’d’ve come for me at Marton if he knew that. Surely?’

  There is a long thoughtful silence.

  Then Jack asks if Riven knows they have it.

  ‘I mean, you’ve not – you have not brought it with you, have you?’

  Thomas shakes his head again.

  Katherine thinks of it, buried safe under the hearth in their house in Marton.

  ‘Well, thank fuck for that at least,’ John mutters. ‘But for the love of God, Thomas, why’d’you bring us here? Of all places? We thought you were like that Jew bringing us out of the fucking wilderness to the Holy Land, but you’re not. You’re bloody Daniel, aren’t you? Leading us into the lions’ den!’

  It is, perhaps, intended as a bleak joke.

  ‘It was not my choice,’ Thomas tells him. ‘Lord Hastings wants us to look for the ledger too.’

  ‘But you know where it is!’ John says, banging a fist.

  ‘Hastings doesn’t know that!’ Thomas says. ‘And we can’t tell him, because then he’d know we knew of the ledger, and if he knew we knew . . .’

  Thomas tails off with a repeat of Campbell’s neck-breaking noise. John takes a drink.

  ‘Why does Hastings want it?’ he asks when he’s put the mug down.

  ‘He wants to stop Warwick getting it.’

  ‘Warwick wants it?’ Jack asks. ‘Oh Christ. Of course he does.’

  Now they understand. John rubs his stump.

  ‘God’s bollocks, Thomas,’ he says. ‘You are caught, aren’t you? Caught between those two? The devil and the sea? A rock and a hard place? Dear God! That does not even begin to cover it. You are – we are – fucked.’

  After a moment, Thomas nods.

  ‘Jesus,’ John goes on. ‘Isn’t it always the way? Always. We are caught between two fuckers with more time and money than sense, with the power to order us about, to send other fuckers after us, to chase us from pillar to fucking post. It is always the fucking same.’

  There is a truth in what he’s saying, but it does not help in the immediate term.

  ‘So what can we do?’ Jack asks. ‘Wait for him to come?’

  Katherine thinks on what the second aproned girl said. Riven takes two. A husband and wife. Or a mother and a son. She will not be taken, nor will she let Rufus be taken.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘He must not find us.’

  Thomas looks at her levelly. No. He agrees.

  And Katherine’s spirits sink. She looks around her at the hall of the inn, and she thinks of the village up the hill and of the house in which she hoped Rufus would grow, would be protected from men exactly such as Riven, and now here he is. The worst possible person. Worse than the snake in the Garden of Eden. Riven. Here.

  ‘Lucky we did not unpack, I suppose,’ Jack says.

  They look at one another and Thomas hangs his head. He too had pinned his hopes on this place, Katherine knows, and now the road is all that awaits them. She stretches a hand to touch the back of his.

  ‘It will be all right,’ she says.

  He looks up at her.

  ‘In the morning, yes? At dawn?’

  They each nod.

  Campbell returns and looms over them, watching, suspicious, knowing.

  ‘You are not leaving?’

  ‘We must,’ Thomas tells him.

  ‘My daughters,’ he says, waving towards the kitchen and buttery where they are at work, ‘they exaggerate. Edmund Riven – he is not a bad man. He is nothing like they say.’

  Thomas shakes his head.

  ‘We have a history with Edmund Riven,’ he tells Campbell.

  ‘A history? You are old friends!’

  ‘Not quite,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Oh, I am sure you have nothing to fear from him,’ Campbell tells them.

  ‘It is not just him,’ Jack says. ‘It’s the half-dozen men with whom he’ll arrive.’

  It will be more like two dozen, now, Katherine thinks, and once Campbell tells Riven more about them, and the existence of a connection, it will be more like five dozen.

  ‘Well, if you must,’ Campbell says. ‘I will make sure you have a fine last day at any rate. I have some pork that has been pickling since last year.’

  ‘We will leave at first light tomorrow,’ Thomas says.

  ‘First light? No, no, no. There is no need for that, surely? Riven cannot be here until late afternoon even if he rides al
l night.’

  ‘We have a long journey ahead of us,’ Thomas says.

  ‘But there is a haze over the moon, did you see?’ Campbell tries. ‘It will be raining through the morning.’

  Katherine knows there is no haze. When they came in, the sky was clear, with the stars around a bitten sliver of the moon like headscurf on blue velvet shoulders. If anything there will be a frost.

  ‘And one of the horses, the gelding, is lame,’ Campbell goes on, now with a kind of comic desperation. ‘I can see to that in the morning. We have oil for it. The smith can make a new shoe. And wherever will you go? Back south? To Lincoln?’

  ‘North,’ Thomas lies. ‘We have well-willers in the Northern Parts. Near Newcastle.’

  Campbell nods. He is thinking fast. His eyes move fast, and he is chewing his lips.

  ‘Newcastle, eh?’ he says. ‘Then you must take the east road. It is the safer way.’

  ‘Safer?’

  ‘Yes. There are rumours of trouble up north. Along the western road.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Someone is mustering men under the banner of King Henry. King Henry as was, that is.’

  Thomas glances at Katherine. This is the sort of thing Hastings wishes to know.

  ‘Who is he? This someone?’

  ‘He calls himself Robin of Redesdale,’ Campbell tells them, pleased to have something to delay their departure, even by a moment or two. ‘And there’s a rumour – only a rumour mind – that he’s related to none other than the Earl of Warwick himself.’

  There is a moment’s silence, but then Katherine says:

  ‘Everyone is related to the Earl of Warwick.’

  ‘Not everyone,’ Campbell counters. ‘Robin of Holderness wasn’t, was he? He raised his banner too, last year, just like Redesdale, but because he wasn’t related to Warwick, he didn’t have his backing, so the Earl of Northumberland chopped his head off.’

  ‘Would Northumberland have moved against this first Robin if he’d had Warwick’s backing?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Campbell says. ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘But this Robin of Redesdale is related to Warwick, and so Northumberland won’t move against him? Won’t chop his head off?’