Divided Souls

by Toby Clements

  But this is grim.

  There is an edge to the air and, even though it is late summer, a blustery rain-filled wind blows from the west. There are perhaps five hundred of Warwick’s men set about, all in his colours, all well harnessed, standing in ranks to leave three sides of a square around King Edward and the scaffold. Behind is a great crowd of the commons, craning necks to watch. There are five drummers over there who have been beating a slow thud for the past while now and King Edward is made to stand alone and wait.

  Hastings mutters something about getting on with it, and at last there is some movement: the execution party, led by two priests, one swinging a censer, and six men-at-arms, coming from the chapel behind. The drummers pick up their rhythm. Behind the six men-at-arms come two hatless men wearing only well-cut pourpoints, fine hose and what look like other men’s shoes.

  ‘Dear God,’ Hastings breathes.

  King Edward turns. He opens his mouth and closes his eyes, as if he cannot believe what he is seeing. Then he opens his eyes and closes his mouth into a hard, tight little line. His fists turn to hammers. The soldiers nearest him – the most finely dressed in polished plate under their livery coats – move slightly, the merest shifts of balance. They are carrying pollaxes, of course. King Edward is in linen, and unarmed.

  The two men are brought past Thomas and then Hastings and then King Edward. One is elderly, big-bellied, a man who has lived well. The other is about Thomas’s age, only with his hair in that warlike crop. There is a family resemblance. They might be father and son. Each of them looks at King Edward as he passes. You can see their Adam’s apples bob as they swallow, and they nod to him, and after a moment’s hesitation he nods back. His entire face is clenched. His jaw muscles flex under the blanched skin.

  Behind the two condemned men comes the headsman: a big fellow with long arms that reach his knees and on the end the hands of a wrestler. He too wears only his pourpoint but he has a pair of fine leather riding boots that he must have swapped with one of the two men he is following. Behind him come more men-at-arms, all in Warwick’s colours.

  ‘Who are they?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Earl Rivers is the old one,’ Hastings tells him. ‘John Woodville the younger. The Queen’s father and brother, respectively.’

  Thomas watches as the two men are led to the foot of the scaffold where a log is laid as a step. The men-at-arms step aside to form a narrow passage through which the two men must walk. There is a moment when both stop. The father turns to the son. They hold one another, chest to chest, then by the arms, and there are tears in both sets of eyes as they step apart. The father goes first: no man could stand to see his son die like that. There is a moment, after he stops looking at his son, and after he has stepped up on to the scaffold, when he is not of this world, though he is still on it.

  He keeps his gaze fixed on the block and approaches it aslant, and then he looks up at the headsman and almost seems to ask him permission to approach, raising his eyebrow and nodding at the block. The headsman nods too. Earl Rivers stands above it, looking down at it as might a man about to jump from a height, and takes a deep breath; he looks up, and around at everyone gathered. His expression is free of meaning. He allows the priest to approach and he kneels before him, suddenly very brusque, and he accepts benediction from the cleric, whose muffled chant is barely audible above the shift of men’s feet and the gusting wind. Unseen by him the headsman has stepped back and picked up the axe from under the straw where it lay hidden.

  When the priest makes the sign of the cross over him, Earl Rivers crosses himself likewise, and then he settles himself on the log, turning his head slightly for comfort, so that he is looking away from King Edward. The priest steps back and away, and then the headsman moves fast; with three quick steps, he dances across the straw and swings the axe. There is a crump and a wash of blood on the straw, and a collective drawing in of breath by the crowd, but the old man’s head is still attached to his neck by a taut, pinkish fatty braid of something. The headsman chops through it with a second short blow and the head thumps on the platform below. The body slides back with a brief judder and blood continues to gutter on the straw.

  There is a moment of unrehearsed confusion before the six men-at-arms climb up on to the platform, leaving the son alone, and they pick up the body by its clothes and take it to one side. Under the scaffold is a simple wooden coffin. One of them drags it out and they roll Earl Rivers’s body off the platform edge and in. They fold his arms within, and one of them collects the head by the red-sodden white hair and puts it in with the body and they close the lid. There are red fingerprints all over the pale wood of the coffin, and blood beads at a seam between two planks.

  Seeing what he has seen, the son is now less cooperative and he has to be manhandled up the steps. More straw is laid down but the smell of the boy’s father’s gore is strong, and John Woodville is rearing back and turning his head away from it. They’ve tied his hands. Perhaps they always knew whoever was going to go second would react like this? He is digging his heels in, but the platform is slick with blood-wet straw, and his shoes slide before him as two men-at-arms shove him forward. They stand him over the block and they have to force him down and on to it. He resists until the moment he is pressed into his father’s blood, and that it seems is what is bothering him most, for when it is done, and his shirt front and pourpoint are smeared with it, he stops struggling and instead becomes almost too cooperative; he lays his head at an angle just as his father did and he sobs, great fat tears sliding from his eyes, and he ignores the priest, who stands and prays over him before stepping back to let the headsman take a very deliberate aim. The executioner’s hands are wide on the axe shaft, but close together as he swings the weapon high and hard down through the neck and into the log, letting a great flood of blood splash him all over his new boots, and the head rolls clear with a bounce, and the body jerks three or four times. Blood pumps from the stump against the buried axe head, and it sprays back and sideways and all the men-at-arms and even the priests are marked with it.

  ‘Christ,’ Hastings mutters.

  When the bodies are cleared away, King Edward’s party, which includes the Duke of Gloucester, is escorted in silence back to their horses. This is where Thomas supposes he will be able to say goodbye to Hastings, and begin the journey for Marton, for of those left alive, it is only King Edward whom the Earl of Warwick insists on keeping hostage.

  But Hastings remains reluctant to let him go.

  ‘The King wants you by his side,’ Hastings tells him.

  ‘But I have a wife, and a son,’ Thomas says.

  ‘So do I,’ Hastings says. ‘So does he – well, a wife, anyway, but look, Thomas, Edward is the King. Everybody gives him what he wants, save obviously the Earl of Warwick, who has other ideas, and that is just how it is arranged. He wants you with him. So – you are with him. He says you bring him good luck.’

  Thomas half laughs. He has brought King Edward nothing but bad luck so far.

  ‘It is Fortune’s Wheel, isn’t it?’ Hastings goes on. ‘You were there when he was on the up, weren’t you? At Newnham, he says, and then at Northampton and then at Mortimer’s Cross when you saved the day again. He says if he keeps you with him now, while he is at the bottom of the turn, then the rise will be all the faster.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Do you want to tell him that yourself? He has taken those deaths hard. He was fond of Earl Rivers, and now he’ll have to tell the Queen – and her mother, dear God – that the Earl of Warwick has had her father and brother murdered. They won’t like that.’

  ‘But I left my wife in – in uncertainties,’ Thomas tells Hastings.

  ‘Uncertainties! Come, Thomas, Goodwife Everingham is not the one to be daunted by a little uncertainty, is she?’

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  ‘But think of the hunting! My lord of Gloucester says Middleham has the best in country!’

&
nbsp; ‘I don’t hunt like you—What was that you said? Where are we being taken?’

  ‘My lord of Warwick does not trust us to remain under his roof down here,’ Hastings tells him, ‘so he is taking the King to his northern fastness at Middleham, from which there is no escape, and from which none of King Edward’s friends will be able to conspire to break him free.’

  Everything Hastings says has a little twinkle of sarcasm, Thomas thinks. It is as if none of this is serious. Yet they have just seen two men have their heads struck off.

  ‘So King Edward will actually be in Middleham Castle?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Hastings says. ‘Do you know it? You have been my lord of Warwick’s guest there? Taken supper in the great chamber of which he boasts? Heard Mass in the new chapel? Or sat on one of his many, many latrines?’

  Hastings is smirking. Then he stops.

  ‘Thomas,’ he says, ‘are you quite well? You are flushed. An imbalance of humours?’

  Middleham. Where Jack and Nettie and John Stump are either still imprisoned, or where they have been murdered. Dear God. What should he do? If he goes . . . But he can’t. He must find Katherine and Rufus. But then if he does not go and the others are still alive and then they are later killed – how will he live with himself then? How would he be able to forgive himself? And Katherine, what would she think if he had come home to her rather than gone to find those friends who sacrificed themselves for him?

  And Riven will be there, too. Edmund Riven.

  Thomas feels himself burning with something. He is feverish with it. His fingers are tingling. He transmits his nerves to the horse, which skitters on the road beside him, hauling on the bridle.

  ‘I will come with you,’ Thomas tells him.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Hastings says, but then he looks ashamed, ‘only I won’t be there.’

  Thomas is incredulous. How quickly he has come to rely on Hastings!

  ‘Warwick is not holding you?’

  ‘No,’ Hastings says. ‘Nor Gloucester. We are as surprised as you. I think my lord of Warwick has been caught out by events. By Robin of Redesdale moving so fast and then destroying Pembroke in the field. He had not prepared for such success, you see? And the truth is: he rather likes me. I can tell. He wants me on his side. Same with Gloucester. Likes him too. Wants to stay his friend. He is not a fool, old Warwick, even if he has acted like one with this.’

  And now Hastings leans in and once more becomes confidential, and Thomas is instantly made anxious again.

  ‘And also, look,’ Hastings murmurs, ‘I have heard news from that agent in France. Who was looking out for the record, do you recall? He says the trail is shortening. He has narrowed down the names of this dealer to five or six, and I need to be there when the moment comes, you see? This has to be wrapped up as if we are a townsman drowning kittens. Not a peep must escape.’

  Thomas can say nothing.

  ‘Don’t look like that, Thomas, please. It will not be long, and I am sending Flood with you.’

  ‘Flood?’

  Thomas is fond of Flood, of course, but he is a responsibility rather than a boon.

  ‘Yes,’ Hastings says. ‘We need to get him away from home. He will be distressed, but he too has formed an attachment to you. Says you saved his life? So there you are. You’ll never do that again, will you?’

  Thomas probably won’t, he thinks.

  ‘So now,’ Hastings goes on, ‘King Edward. He is headstrong, of course, but he is no fool. If – if he develops any scheme to evade Warwick’s clutches, be in accord with him, yes? He will push the bounds wherever he can, I know, but he is the King, and so have faith in him, and serve him well.’

  Thomas watches Hastings kiss King Edward farewell, with some whispered words of encouragement, and then he rides off with his own men with the look of a man whom the devil has released back to life.

  They ride all that day. Fifty or so of Warwick’s men on the road ahead, and fifty behind, and, caught between them, King Edward’s party, led by King Edward himself on a bay gelding, accompanied by a lord and various sirs who are there to deliver him safe to Middleham, and a chinless priest he has been sent by the Archbishop of York. Thomas and Flood ride side by side, and behind them the few servants Warwick has permitted him.

  ‘At least we will not have to dress him, or pass him the wiping cloth,’ Thomas tells Flood, who looks at him as if this is something to be regretted.

  It takes four long days of steady riding before they reach the Earl of Warwick’s castle in the north, and in all that time King Edward hardly speaks. He does not call for company or raise his gaze from his horse’s withers. He has asked by what right the Earl of Warwick ordered the deaths of Earl Rivers and John Woodville, but no one has an answer much beyond there is nothing to be done about it now, anyway, and so his humiliation has been complete and he rides with his chin sunk on his chest, just as old King Henry might have done after his first and second captures, though King Edward has not sought solace in prayer and fasting, but rather has been drinking very heavily since Olney, and now his eyes are slow, and underswagged with puffed mauve bruises.

  The country along the way is familiar to Thomas from having been there with Katherine, and she is in his mind almost all the time when he is not trying to imagine what he will find when he gets to Middleham Castle. Hastings has paid for him to send messages to Marton Hall, to tell her he is alive and well, and to tell her where he is, and where he is bound; he has sent her money, too, that Hastings has given him. He is a generous man, Hastings, but seems always surprised that Thomas has no money of his own, or has no access to it.

  They stay not at inns, or monasteries, or at the sides of roads as Thomas has done when travelling in the past, but at great stone castles along the way. It is astonishing to travel this way, without the hardships and uncertainties of earlier journeys, but each castle holds some odd memory or meaning for King Edward, some good, some bad – especially at Sandal, where his father was killed – and then at York, and at each place Thomas is expected to sleep with Flood and the chinless priest in the rooms immediately outside that taken by King Edward, who rightly evicts his host to take the best bed in the best room of each castle. Young women are sometimes ushered in and out by a chamberlain, and there is much to be eaten and drunk, but it seems King Edward only drinks, usually alone, and often late into the night.

  ‘At least they are treating him like a king,’ Flood says. ‘And this weather is treating us kindly as well.’

  They ride up back through the Vale of Mowbray, following the same roads Thomas rode with Katherine and Horner. He wonders what’s happened to Horner. He wishes him well, whatever it is. If he thinks on the promise he made not to fight against Horner, it is with a rueful shrug, because, after all, here Thomas is, separated from his wife and child, riding north, as a prisoner of the man whom Horner served.

  They come to Middleham at dusk on that fourth day. All are tired from being in the saddle for four days, but Thomas is riding stiff-backed, his heart is booming and he is dry-mouthed, and he constantly pats the saddle behind, as if he will find the pollaxe, his pollaxe, and every time he does so he misses it, and feels the swoop of anxious loss when he remembers it is not there. One of the Archbishop of York’s retinue prised it from his fingers with the threat of force, and there is no chance he will see it again, not a second time. But now – when he is just about to find and face Edmund Riven – is when he needs it most, and what has he in its place? Nothing but a blunt eating knife.

  But as they swing up the slope towards the town and above it the castle, its tower tops showing pinpricks of lantern light in the late-evening gloom, Thomas sees King Edward, too, sitting agitated and ready, with shoulders stiff, jaw set, reins gripped in clenched fists. He, too, is ready for his confrontation with his one-time ally and now over-mighty enemy.

  The streets of Warwick’s northern town are thronged with people waiting to see the humiliated King come, and a gusting noise rises fr
om them as King Edward’s party rides up the hill. Thomas wonders if they will shout and jeer, throw insults, dung, bricks, but the atmosphere is not so much rowdy as uncertain, and while some seem to enjoy the sight of their vanquished enemy, others cry out to King Edward, blessing him in the name of God, and there are faces puzzled to see him apparently so reduced when last they saw him standing under his banner, in his blood-glazed harness perhaps, after the great battle at Towton. Is it a right and proper thing to have God’s anointed King of England under one’s lock? Is it right and proper to now have two of them?

  They go on through the town and up to the castle, where the bridge is down over the ditch, and the divers gates in the corner tower are open, and a reception party of perhaps another fifty men in various shades of red livery coats waits for them with lanterns lit. Some of them, at the back, carry billhooks also, like the guards in the Tower in London.

  Thomas leans forward in his saddle and fillets the crowd, looking for the man with a weeping eye.

  At first he does not see him and he feels himself sink, half in relief, half in disappointment.

  But then comes a sudden spike of fear, mixed with dry-mouthed excitement, for there – there he is.