Liz laughs.
‘Could be your sisters.’
Katherine says nothing. They pull back on to the road, and continue between the crowding buildings to the precinct between castle and cathedral, where Liz is properly astonished, even frightened, as her gaze moves from the cathedral’s broad base right up the full height of the looming spires, so tall their vanes are lost in cloud. Around them the streets are busy with friars and priests, but Isabella is determined to say her prayers in the cathedral, and to light a candle each for Thomas, for Jack and Nettie and for John Stump.
So they leave the cart with a mildly trustworthy-looking boy, and they go through the precinct and up the steps through the west door into the vast scented gloom of the nave where hundreds of men in black and grey and white come and go. Liz and Rufus stand in their scudding midst as if lost, stunned by the light falling through the rose windows, Liz’s mouth open like some simple pilgrim from afar.
After a moment a man approaches Isabella and takes off his hat and tries to engage her in conversation, and Liz is shaken from her torpor by the man’s smell, which is bad, for he does not look to have washed in a month; Liz turns on him and whispers something fierce in his face, and he stumbles back like a whipped dog, vanishing into the shadows.
‘Who was that?’ Katherine asks.
‘Someone who should by rights be hanged,’ Liz tells her.
‘You know him?’
‘His kind. He’s claiming sanctuary from his debts, most like, by the look of him.’
They find a side chapel where Isabella buys four overpriced tallow candles that they light from a bank of the same, already lit, and they place them before the little altar and the statue of Our Lady, and then kneel, watched over by a monk, and each prays for their missing husband, father, friends.
They see no more of the sanctuary-seeker, and when they are done, they come out in the precinct again and Katherine remembers when she first came here, how she was still terrified of the clerics, imagining they could see through her shabby disguise. She remembers the stationers’ stalls set up against the wall, and sees that they are still there, busier than ever perhaps, with new trades – ink-sellers, pen merchants – strolling with their trays, calling out their wares. They are in the same spot where Thomas once bought a book from an old stationer who dealt in books from Bruges, she recalls, and who sniffed when they showed him the ledger and pronounced it trash, but he had tried to buy Thomas’s drawing of the rose window in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and she welcomes this revisit as a slim link in the long chain to her absent husband.
She leaves Rufus with Liz and guides Isabella over to the stall to see if the man is there, but he is not, only a much younger fellow, dressed in a poorly dyed black coat that shows green in parts. His stock is just as varied though: he has one or two fine-tooled covers, a few books of simpler design, and many stitch-bound pamphlets. She has ever been drawn to the unfinished nature of these sorts of thing, which to her mind seem part of an ongoing conversation, whereas if a man binds a book, claps it in hard covers, it is as if he is saying: Here, this is my final word on the matter, and I am right. Whereas, Katherine finds, the things you read in such bound books are so often wrong.
‘Ah!’ the stationer says, seeing them dither over his table. ‘Yes. I see you have good taste.’
The stationer tells them what he has, and what they might like, starting naturally with the second most expensive book – a copy of a book of hours done in the Flemish style – and descending to the rougher texts, merely paper-bound in what looks like bowstring, all the while leaving the finest and most expensive book unmentioned, lying there resting on a nest of dark velvet, and with each passing moment it assumes a greater significance, and Isabella is trying to make it out, peering very closely, then askance, at it, trying to see around the wretched discs of horn in her own eyes. The stationer talks and talks. New methods of production. Trips to Bruges. The improved quality of paper – as they can see from his stock – and the scarcity of good vellum these days. None of this Isabella hears. At last she asks what that book is, and the stationer cannot suppress a smile.
‘Didn’t I say it when I first saw you?’ he asks. ‘You have excellent taste.’
He takes it down with exaggerated care. It is a breviary. Smaller than the first, the size of a woman’s hand, it is elm bound, with ornate hinges and clips of polished silver. Within, the paper is very fine, and the colours vivid, the scenes beautifully painted, the lettering regular, precise, fluid.
‘A thing of beauty, is it not?’ the stationer asks.
But Katherine can see Isabella is stricken.
‘What is it?’ Katherine asks.
‘It is mine,’ Isabella sobs. ‘Sir John – he gave it to me when we were married. I thought I had hidden it safe.’
The book seems to vanish into the air and the stationer’s expression has closed like a fold.
‘What are you talking about, you blind old hag? Are you calling me a thief?’
Isabella is half-collapsed. Katherine must hold her up.
‘It was one of the boys,’ Isabella moans. ‘They will have stolen it and sold it for their – their dicing debts or their falcons.’
The stationer, seeing he is no longer the accused, opens up again.
‘It was a young man with a half-beard,’ he says, indicating his chin. ‘Dressed like a princeling or a doge.’
And Isabella sobs again.
‘How could he? It was a wedding present.’
‘I paid a fair price for it,’ the stationer tells them.
And they cannot afford to buy it back, even though he offers it to them at the price he bought it.
‘Keep it for us,’ Katherine says.
He says he will, for two weeks – until the Feast of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, at the end of the month.
‘I must make a fair living.’
They are leaving when he calls Katherine back.
‘I have something that might interest you in the meantime,’ he says, and he gives her a handful of rough-tied sheets of sawn-edged paper covered with tiny letters from the very top of the first page, to the very bottom of the last, save for, on the fifth or sixth spread, a drawing of the eye of a man, or perhaps it is even a goat – it is not very clear – and the man/goat has what looks like a devil’s tongue, but what is of interest is that all around the eye are various labelled circles.
‘A treatise on complaints of the eye,’ he tells her.
Isabella stands mute, still too shocked to engage with anything said, let alone to speak. Katherine looks from the paper to Isabella’s eyes, those opaque discs, and then back again.
‘How much?’ she asks.
He names a price. Katherine feels a gathering of purpose, of intent, of excitement even. She pays the man half what he asks and he accepts, and then the hour bell rings in the towers and a thousand pigeons erupt into the sky and she guides Isabella back to the cart where Liz is waiting, already mounted. She helps the old lady up, and they are about to kick the horse on when Katherine is struck by a thought. She returns to the bookseller.
‘I’ll not take it back,’ he says.
She does not want him to. She wants to know about the old stationer, who used to be here.
‘My father,’ the man says. ‘I am glad you remember him. He has a very fine eye for a book.’
‘Is he still with us?’
The stationer smiles.
‘Indeed he is. He is across the Narrow Sea, in a town named Strasbourg, at the book fair.’
‘When will he return, do you think? I should like to speak to him about a matter.’
‘A matter to buy or sell?’
‘Neither. An old matter.’
The stationer is disappointed.
‘My mother prays he will be back before Michaelmas, and that he will not have to travel in winter.’
‘I will come back then,’ Katherine tells him.
‘Who should I say was asking after him?’
‘He will not remember me,’ she says.
‘I will keep your breviary,’ he tells her. ‘Until you can afford it.’
She thanks him, and leaves him with the hope that his father’s trip is blessed by God, and so is the rest of his day.
When she gets back to the cart, Liz is worrying about Isabella.
‘And what’ve you done to her, Kate?’
Isabella is mute with misery, her mouth curved down like a cordwainer’s needle, her hands fluttering and flattening the linen of her dress because she has left her rosary beads behind. Katherine tells Liz about the two sons and Liz opens her mouth to insult them, but every insult that comes to mind – bastard, perhaps, or whoreson – rebounds on Isabella, so she is left to grind her teeth and growl.
‘You’d not treat your old ma like that, would you, Rufus my boy?’ Liz is asking, and Rufus is shaking his head, though Katherine is not sure how much he understands.
‘Where are we bound?’ she asks Isabella, who manages to point south down the hill as she continues weeping. Katherine wonders if the tears might wash away the cataracts, and she finds she is still clutching the pamphlet the stationer sold her and so she pushes it into her bag, and checks Rufus is safe on the cart and then she and Liz lead the horse across the precinct and on, down the steep cobbled street that will take them to the river and the city gates.
She has walked this street before, of course, with Thomas, many times, but the first was nearly ten years ago, when she stood just here, and he stood just there, and a messenger came barrelling up the hill from the south, careless of the cobbles, coming to tell the Bishop or someone that Richard of York had landed in England, come to try to kick the old King off the throne and take it for himself. They’d looked at one another, and she’d known the wars would come again, though he did not believe her. And now here they are, ten years later, and the wars are come again, again.
Down here is the pardoner’s house where she went that day with Thomas to return the ledger. Dear God. If only the old man’s widow had taken it! How much trouble would they now be spared? They would not have Edmund Riven burning their friends on one side, nor this bloodhound of Hastings closing in on them from the other. How easy their lives might be then!
The old house is unchanged: the whitewash more streaked green perhaps, and the lower-storey windows more firmly grimed with dust and cobwebs, and perhaps the woodwork has peeled back a little more. Could his widow still be there? Katherine steps off the road and looks at the house’s upper storey, jutting out a little above, and her heart suddenly fills her throat. There at the window is the widow, looking down, just as if she’d been expecting Katherine for the last ten years, her face as pale as ever. And then, suddenly, she is gone. But it is not as if she has taken a step back. She is just – gone. Melted as if she were never there.
Katherine cannot suppress a shiver. She feels it ripple across her back, up her neck, into her scalp. She crosses herself twice and begs the Lord to save her. By Christ! Was it her imagination? She ought to bang on the door, demand an explanation, but – but she is too scared. There is something about that house. She turns and hurries after the cart where Isabella is still weeping silently and Rufus is stroking her arm and telling her not to cry and that they will soon be home.
Once through the gate across the high bridge they all climb back up on to the cart and they travel south through land that is very wet this year, and even though it is July, the mud on the road is thick, and there are long stretches where it is only a suggestion through swathes of rushes under a choppy soup of muddy water. Carts coming the other way are splashed and sodden, and anyone walking north is wet up to the knees, and looking forward to reaching the city’s heights. King Edward is blamed for much of the flooding, but no one reports any trouble further south, and for that they must thank God.
‘Where to now?’ Liz asks.
And Isabella at last wakes to the world.
‘To the manor of Tattershall,’ she says. ‘It is east of here. There is a turning up ahead somewhere. A few miles yet, I believe, and then there will be a marker stone. You will have to look out for it with all this water.’
‘Have you been there before?’ Katherine asks.
‘Many years ago,’ she says. ‘My family – We are connected to the Willoughbys and I was with Joan Willoughby for a while, before I went to my first husband’s household. She is dead now, but her husband Baron Willoughby lives on, and has the ear of the Earl of Warwick.’
‘The ear of the Earl of Warwick,’ Liz repeats. ‘I’d not mind that. I’d screw it in a little ball and chuck it to the pigs.’
They travel on into the pale sun-inflected sky, through a mile of rushes that will soon be harvested, and Katherine thinks of the eel-trapper she once took in when she was in Cornford, who took with him Eelby’s baby. She wonders what has happened to him. She descends into a kind of reverie, remembering those days at Cornford, and she looks up just as Liz turns the cart off the road and on to the track leading east.
And she suddenly knows where they are going.
‘No!’ she says. She stands in the cart, nearly falling.
‘Sit down, you daft woman,’ Liz says. ‘You’ll frighten the horse. By Our Lady.’
‘This track,’ she says. ‘It leads past – it leads past the priory. I’ll not take it.’
Liz brings the horse to a stop. There is only a low marsh of brackish water to be seen around here, and in among it a few islets of feather-topped, vivid green rushes. It is impossible to stay here.
‘We are not going into the priory, Katherine,’ Isabella tells her. ‘But this is the only road to Tattershall, and so must pass it.’
‘D’you imagine the Prioress is still out and about looking for you, Kate? Is that it? That she’ll be in the rushes there with an army of angry nuns waiting to spring out with their washing beetles and drag you back in for the shame you’ve brought on them?’
Liz is laughing. Isabella is trying to look sympathetic. Katherine wants to tell Liz that she has no idea what it was like, but Liz has been through worse, surely, and the words sound so foolish in her teeth that she swallows them. She turns from the women and from Rufus, who is more confused than ever, pulls her cloak around her and stares south as Liz kicks the horse on. They follow the track east and she can feel the priory coming nearer, as if she herself is being stalked, and she feels it as a kind of clamour, a tumult within her, until at last she can stand it no longer. She is about to throw off her cloak and run, run up the track through the lapping waters and back to Lincoln, when Liz says:
‘Blood of Christ, look at that.’
13
Thomas is in the butts when the summons comes. He is sitting on a log, well polished by a thousand buttocks over the years, down by the river, outside the city of Nottingham, watching men in blue and murrey livery send shaft after shaft booming from their bows to thump into the dampened earth mounds two hundred paces beyond. The air is filled with the noise of clean strings and fierce swearing. He is with William Hastings’s men, Rufus’s godfather John Brunt among them, and they have already had their turn, and now are stripped to their hose and pourpoints, still flushed from their exertions, taking bread and ale and watching King Edward’s men do their best.
‘Not too bad,’ Brunt thinks.
The messenger who comes is a young lad, not fifteen, with plump ruby cheeks and an almost impenetrable accent. He tells Thomas that Lord Hastings has sent for him and he is to make his way to the castle keep with all despatch. Thomas gathers his jacket and bow.
‘Good luck, Thomas,’ Brunt tells him, ‘and may God go with you.’
Brunt and the others know Thomas has been petitioning William Hastings to let him return to Katherine, but Hastings has been closeted with King Edward and others in the castle these last days, and has had little time except to tell him that King Edward is not disposed to let any of his men leave at this hour. No one is surprised by this, because it is now well known that the Ear
l of Warwick and King Edward’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, have returned from Calais and, as feared, have raised the commons of Kent in rebellion against King Edward.
So now, Thomas can see, there are no fewer than five armies abroad in the land, convening who knows where. One is led by the Earl of Pembroke, him with the beard and the extravagant promise of many troops, and this army reputedly numbers three thousand trained fighting men-at-arms, loyal to King Edward. Another, of a similar number of bowmen, marches under the banner of Humphrey Stafford, the dapper little Earl of Devon, likewise loyal to King Edward. A third – an unknown number of men under Robin of Redesdale – comes from the north with the express intention of unseating King Edward; while the fourth, under King Edward’s old ally, the Earl of Warwick, converges from the southeast, and is like to be large enough to vanquish the few troops King Edward has with him in Nottingham, which make up an army of perhaps fifteen hundred.
Knowing all this, there has been a heightened atmosphere in the city as the days have passed. Everyone from king to knave is waiting to hear news from elsewhere that will inform their lives, one way or the other, and all are distracting themselves as best they can. Butchers, wine merchants and plump young women who look as if they’ve never done a day’s work in their lives have been busy satisfying King Edward’s orders in the castle, while men such as Thomas have been in the butts, or out on the furlongs fighting with padded weapons. The din of the smiths is constant, and the air is filled with acrid smoke and the smell of metal on stone, of burning charcoal, of sweat, human waste, blood and guts of animals and new-brewed ale. Boys run everywhere. Carts and wagons are at standstill for lack of space in the city, and messengers must force their ways to and fro. Companies of men in livery arrive, but never in large numbers, and though tents are erected around the city walls like mushrooms in autumn, news of Devon’s men and Pembroke’s men is not to be had, and in its place, rumour is rife.
‘They are a day’s march away.’
‘They have fallen on one another and all are dead.’
Divided Souls Page 18
