Divided Souls

by Toby Clements

  Then she tries to imagine what it would be like were Jack and Nettie and John to come through the door right now, freed from Riven’s clutches. If they did that, she thinks she might throw the ledger on the fire, this instant, and be done with it. Instead her hand slides to it once more, and she thinks to herself that this is just as it was when she and Thomas first took the damned thing to Bamburgh! First they must give it to King Henry, and then they must not.

  And so she starts to wonder what she and Liz will do if Jack and Nettie and John are not freed? What will they do if Riven is still after the ledger? Because, after all, why would the Earl of Warwick give up looking for it, just because he has King Edward under lock and key? Would it not be better – from Warwick’s point of view – to have both King Edward and the ledger? That way Warwick would have the King’s body and the King’s mind in his hands.

  In which case, the Earl of Warwick will be keener than ever to find the ledger, so that no one else can gain control of his prisoner, or – worse! – prove his prisoner is not fit to be king, and therefore, in fact, worth nothing. So not only will Riven be keeping Jack and Nettie and John Stump wherever he has them, he will have been bending every sinew in his body to get hold of the ledger, and he will go on doing so until he has his hands on it. My God, she thinks, he will be astonished to learn that she and Liz have brought it to him.

  He could not, in all truth, have planned it better if he had tried.

  Just then someone comes into the hall – a young woman – and there is a cheer of welcome and Katherine thinks of Liz, and murmurs a prayer for her safety as she reminds herself what an astonishing girl she is to have done all she has for her and Thomas and little Rufus: how she brought them the cart, took her south, and stuck with her as she has come back north. And now this: going off on her own to mingle with exactly the same sort of men who raped her at the side of the road outside Senning, and to risk all that again! What must she be made of?

  But as she thinks this, she feels a sort of dizziness. New thoughts slot into unfamiliar places, old ideas reorder themselves, fresh doubts emerge and she finds herself saying it again: Riven could not have planned it better if he had tried.

  And then she thinks: What if he did plan it this way? And what actually did happen to Liz on the side of that road beyond Senning?

  19

  Thomas stands there in the cool of the morning, watching the comings and goings, and trying to think his way around the impossibility of breaking three people out of a tower, in a castle in which you are held, in a country you do not know and wherein you might find no succour. He has no luck. There is no way, of course, which is why they are in the tower, and he is in the castle, and the castle is where it is.

  At length three men in red arrive and they hammer on the door and some time passes before it is unbolted from within. The men troop in. A moment later, some others troop out. It is a changing of the guard, Thomas supposes, for this second lot look done in. They stumble off to their beds, and Thomas is left wondering if it would not be better to discover as soon as possible whether or not Jack and Nettie and John are in the tower, and to try to do so before his face becomes well known around the castle? Now that Riven has seen him, he will remember him. And so it must be now, he thinks, suddenly gripped by the idea, while he – and that giant – are at Mass.

  He steels himself, straightens his pourpoint and strides to the door to the southeast tower, climbs the steps and hammers on its planks. He waits, trying to look bored, and then after a moment he hears scuffling on the steps beyond and the bar is lifted. A face appears and looks blank. Thomas says nothing. He angles his body to come in and after a moment the man opens the door wider. Thomas steps in. Silence is the thing, he thinks. Silence and presumption.

  ‘What is it?’ the man asks. He too is only in a pourpoint and hose. His sleeves are rolled up and there is a smear of something – blood? Shit? – on his pale inner arm.

  ‘Edmund Riven said to meet him here,’ Thomas tells the man, moving past him and starting up the circular steps. This is much easier than he’d thought.

  This is the old bit of the castle and, going up, it is low overhead and uneven underfoot. But as he walks he is overcome with something else: the smell. It is alarming at first, a hint of what is to come, and he almost trips.

  ‘By God!’

  Thomas grips his nose, tries not to breathe. The smell is like a species of slime coating his mouth, his tongue, his throat, his lungs.

  ‘Bad, isn’t it?’ the man behind says. ‘We keep the poor fucker out on the walkway.’

  But this is not the smell of Edmund Riven and his milk-curdling eye. This is an older smell, and fouler still. It is the sweet, sickly stench of the black rot and just the faintest trace of it takes Thomas back to another castle, a guerite, in Alnwick Castle, where they once found John Stump on his death bed, his right arm consumed by this same stinking black rot after he’d been wounded in a fight with some of Lord Montagu’s men.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ the man says. ‘Be a blessing for him, poor old sod.’

  The steps circle past one closed door and on up into a third storey, and the smell gets thicker until it is almost impossible to breathe. He can hear men calling to one another in muffled voices.

  ‘What happened?’ Thomas asks the man following.

  ‘Sir Edmund burned him. His other arm. A glowing coal. Just to see. Fucker never said a word, but he shat hisself. So either he doesn’t know the whereabouts of whatever it is that Sir Edmund seeks, or – he’s got the bollocks of a donkey.’

  Thomas feels each word like a blow. John Stump, burned. And for why? Because of them. He turns to the man and holds his gaze. He does not know what he expected a torturer to look like, but this one does not look out of the ordinary, and yet here he is talking of this as if it were nothing more than a discussion about pig-gelding.

  When they reach the third storey there is no door to close, only the whitewashed and vaulted chamber itself, where there are chains set in the wall and a large table – like a butchers’ block – in the middle of the straw-strewn floor.

  Thomas says nothing when he sees them. He can’t speak.

  Jack is still alive, though, Christ, he looks terrible. He is slumped against the wall, his wrists chained together above his shoulder. He does not look up when Thomas comes in. He is half-starved though, and his filthy clothes hang off him. Nettie is next to him, likewise chained, though she is allowed a stool, and Thomas does not know whether he is relieved or not to see that she is still with child. There are two men, sitting on stools, not doing very much. One is using a knife to clean something that looks like the goat’s foot mechanism for a crossbow. They look up at Thomas.

  ‘Who’re you?’

  Thomas doesn’t know what to say and can hardly speak anyway.

  The door to the south wall hangs open. Through it he can see John Stump lying on the walkway, thrown out as if for a dung-collector and left to die.

  ‘I’m the surgeon,’ Thomas says. It is all he can think of.

  ‘You don’t look like one,’ the first guard says.

  ‘No,’ Thomas agrees. He pushes the door open and goes out on the south wall walkway. He looks down at John. He has seen him like this before, of course, five years ago. Despite the wind that comes down off the hills behind, the smell is enough to make anyone gag. John is huddled in a corner, his remaining arm like a branch, held away from him as if he too feels disgust. It is wrapped with stained linen, an old pair of braies perhaps. He is sweating heavily, but his teeth are chattering although it is another warmish day. Thomas folds his arm over his mouth and he squats next to John.

  ‘John,’ he says. ‘John.’

  John’s eyes are flickering under their lids. It is impossible to know if he can hear, or if he knows what is being said. Thomas touches his good shoulder and says his name again. This time the eyelids flutter and the dust and detritus that has built up there from his crying and sweating over the last days crumb
les and John blinks ten, twenty, thirty times. His teeth rattle.

  ‘Thomas?’ he says, his breath foul and his tongue thick.

  ‘It is me,’ Thomas tells him.

  ‘Katherine? Where is she? Where is Kit?’

  Thomas does not know what to say.

  ‘Coming,’ he says.

  ‘Will she – she be able to—?’

  ‘She will,’ Thomas lies.

  John gestures with his stump. Thomas knows that if John had a hand he would clutch Thomas.

  ‘Praise Jesu,’ John says.

  ‘Amen,’ Thomas says.

  John slips back into his delirium. Thomas stands and watches him a moment. He thinks back to the time in the guerite in Alnwick. Katherine had said they needed to cut him straight away if they were to save his life. She had not even waited for food before she had done it. He looks down at his own hands – at his lumpen fingers, his calloused palms. There is no way he will be able to cut John, even if he could recall how she had done it. He remembered a knife, a saw, a candle. What else? Rose oil, linen thread, urine. Plenty of that, he supposes, what with Warwick’s new-built latrines.

  But no. He cannot do it. He needs Katherine. Christ. Where is she? Could he send a message? Could she get here in time? He peers at the rotting limb. The rosy glow is creeping up towards the elbow. How long has John to live? he wonders. Katherine told him that Payne had told her the black rot gets into the blood and it goes to the liver, and when a man dies of this, if you cut him open after he has gone, then his liver seethes and bubbles.

  The sun is shining now, throwing deep shadows on the walkway. There is a guard down the other end, stripped down to his pourpoint, leaning against the stonework, his helmet and bill on the ground next to him. Thomas wonders how long it is until the first leaves will fall. A month perhaps? Will John live long enough to see them drop? No. There is no chance, unless Thomas can do something.

  He turns and goes back into the tower.

  Jack is awake. His fierce blue eyes are slow-moving in his battered and bruised face, as they might be were he ill with those winter agues, but when he looks up and sees Thomas, they crease with incredulity and he opens his mouth to say something, but the guard is in there first.

  ‘Tell us again who you are?’ he asks.

  Thomas has almost forgotten what he said. Nettie is weeping to see him.

  ‘You’d let a woman child in chains?’ he asks. ‘With no care of a midwife?’

  The two men look at one another and there is a momentary pause to suggest that they, too, have reservations. Then one of them – the man who let him in – shrugs.

  ‘It is Sir Edmund’s doing,’ he says. ‘He is determined. He thinks he is close to what he seeks and this man’ – he aims a kick at Jack – ‘and this woman, he thinks they know its whereabouts.’

  ‘What has he done to them so far?’

  Again, that pause of shame.

  ‘Nothing, as yet,’ the second man says. ‘He is waiting.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For – for the child to come.’

  ‘And then what?’

  Neither will answer.

  ‘You cannot mean to burn – to burn an infant?’

  The men – they might even be fathers themselves – look helpless. It is not a goat’s foot bracer the man is cleaning, but something else that Thomas does not recognise, though it has a blade.

  ‘You don’t know him,’ one says. ‘You don’t know that giant he has. He laughs at this sort of thing. He wanted us to – to rape her. He said if we did not, then the giant would.’

  Thomas looks at Nettie. She is looking away, her eyes screwed shut. Tears welling from them. Jack is likewise warped with shame and pain.

  ‘Did you?’ Thomas asks.

  He thinks he might kill them if they say yes. The elder of the two guards shakes his head.

  ‘The constable’s wife, she heard her screams from the chapel, and so the constable came running on her command and forbade we touch her. Sir Edmund has sent message to the Earl of Warwick to make sure it is known he is able to overrule Bellman on this and such matters. We are awaiting the reply.’

  Both men look sick. If they could have run from their duties, they would. Thomas goes over to Nettie and squats by her, just as he did with John. She looks at him fearfully.

  ‘How long do you think you have, Nettie?’ he whispers.

  She shrugs.

  Katherine would know at a glance, he thinks.

  He stands. He hardly has a plan, but he thinks he has already been here too long.

  ‘I will be back,’ he tells the guards. ‘Feed them, and water them, and find them fresh linens. And stop cleaning that thing, whatever it is, and look to your duties. Christ! They are still Englishmen, and still King Edward’s subjects, whatever it is that Edmund Riven wishes to extract from them.’

  Both Nettie and Jack twist in their chains as if they could somehow come with him. He nods at the shamefaced guards and hurries down the steps. When he comes through the door and into the clean air again, he breathes deeply until he looks to the right, and through the passage that runs under the chapel he sees the giant come looming. He sets off in the other direction, and comes around the keep; he is at the foot of the steps up to his own chamber when Flood appears. He is holding two thin bows and two bags of arrows, and looks pleased about something.

  ‘King Edward wants to go hunting,’ he says. He shows Thomas the arrowheads that are like crescent moons. ‘We are to meet him in the stables to find horses.’

  Hunting! Christ, that is not what he needs to be doing now. But he turns and looks over his shoulder and there, looming around the corner, is that giant.

  ‘Come on then,’ he says, and he is quick to take Flood by the shoulder and guide him away. ‘I have something I must ask of the King.’

  The stables are through the east gate, across a bridge and into a secondary bailey, wherein are conducted the malodorous activities that are so vital for the smooth running of the castle: the smithy, the tannery, the butcher’s, where even now an ox is strung up by its hooves, its belly cut from top to tail so that its entrails flop glistening pink and grey into a vat below. Beyond the greyhounds are snapping and the horses stamping, and the marshal is shouting at the slaughterman and everyone else is laughing, and the air is filled with the smell of blood and fat slow-moving flies.

  But King Edward is already outside the gates, holding a fine-looking courser, and there are stable boys with two more horses for Flood and Thomas, and the chinless priest is there also, and another couple of men too, but they are already mounted and watching closely, and neither carries a bow. Thomas wonders what promises King Edward had to make to the constable to be allowed out like this? What is to stop him riding out, all the way to York perhaps?

  King Edward seems entirely changed when they are close enough to see his expression. He seems carefree, relieved of a burden. He greets them happily, without constraint or formality, as if they were Hastings himself, rather than his representatives.

  ‘Sir John,’ he greets Flood, and then: ‘Master Everingham.’

  Thomas copies Flood as he removes his hat and clutches it to his chest, just so.

  King Edward laughs.

  ‘Look what the huntsman has shown us!’

  In his hand he has a cone of leaves wherein lie a pile of small black turds. Flood looks excited. Thomas is left unmoved.

  ‘Come on! Mount! Let’s ride. The huntsman says we should be in position.’

  What follows is both confusing and simple. One of Warwick’s men – though he is not in the red livery but russets and browns and green – leads them southwards from the castle, through parks and walled gardens, an orchard, then a rabbit warren, until they pass an old motte and he turns westwards, up towards a flat-topped hill. King Edward is delighted with the man’s lack of respect, and he keeps turning to Thomas and to Flood and rolling his eyes; he behaves for all the world as if is he is some novice, teasing a short-temper
ed prior. After some riding they are brought to a shallow depression, and the huntsman tells them to dismount but stay with their horses. He sizes them up and guides them to certain spots overlooking the bracken-filled expanse. Thomas is on the extreme right, King Edward in the middle, the chinless priest next, then Flood on the extreme left. The bow Thomas has been given is a slender thing, the sort a youth might use, made, he thinks, of holly, and he knows he could bend it in a circle with no trouble whatsoever. He watches the others nock their bows and he does likewise. They stay very close to their horses, using them, Thomas supposes, to shield their smell or their shape.

  It is turning into a beautiful day.

  Thomas waits, but Jack and Nettie and John are much in his mind, and he cannot stop himself approaching King Edward, though Flood has told him he must not speak to him until after the unmaking, which is apparently one of the many unspoken rules of the hunt he should already know. Thomas takes a step towards the King and opens his mouth to say something, but Flood shoots him a look, and in this instance Thomas can only trust him. Nevertheless, there follows a good interval in which nothing happens, except that he hears dogs barking and the sound of a huntsman’s horn in the distance.

  ‘Here they come!’ King Edward half whispers, half shouts.

  And Thomas sees eight or nine brown stags, their antlers many-pointed, come bobbing quickly down the hill through the bracken, as if on springs. King Edward laughs with glee. In a moment the animals are on them, bouncing with astonishing speed. Thomas nocks one of the curious-shaped arrows. He imagines King Edward must loose first and waits. Sure enough, so do the others. King Edward draws, looses, misses. It must be dangerous for those following on behind, Thomas cannot help but think as he draws his own bow and looses an arrow that thumps into the throat of a great hart while it is thirty paces away. It havers, but then comes charging past. It is startlingly large, like a barrel planted with a tree. The arrow has vanished into its chest. The others loose too. One of the deer goes down instantly. Then the others come bounding past, so close Thomas might almost reach out and touch one. King Edward is trying to nock another arrow, but it is too late. In the time it takes him, they are gone. Thomas watches his own stag veer to the right, and then, a hundred paces further on, it slows, its legs tangle, and then collapses in the heather.