She hears a noise. Something man-made above the soughing of the branches.
‘Come,’ she says, whispering, and she hurries through the gate and guides him through into the darkness of the churchyard where gravestones lie in the long grass pale as ghosts. The path is stone-flagged to the church’s south door. She hopes it will be unlocked. If not she is prepared to break a window. She will send Rufus through the narrow aperture like a common thief, and he can open the door for her. This way at least they will be dry, and in the morning when the priest comes, she will do as the man who accosted Isabella that time in Lincoln had done, and claim sanctuary.
But then she sees a light within, through those parti-coloured windows. Someone is there. Pray God, it is the priest. She leads Rufus quickly to the door and tries it. It is locked. She knocks as loudly as she dares, a series of muffled thumps with the underside of her fist. A moment later there is a bead of light between the door and the stone floor. Someone is coming.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ a voice calls from within.
She hesitates. If she shouts she’ll be heard. They’ll know she’s here. So she says nothing and she just bangs again. After a moment she hears the bolts drawn. The door opens a crack and a slice of yellow lantern light falls out. A man presses his eye to the gap and studies her. She pushes Rufus forward, to show she means no harm. The man’s eye – dark – flickers down to him and the door opens a fraction wider.
‘What do you want?’ he asks.
‘Refuge,’ she says. ‘For the night. There are some men – We – we are being pursued.’
Even so he does not seem willing to open the door further.
‘Go to the castle,’ he says. ‘The constable is a good man.’
‘Please,’ she says. ‘For the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In his name. Charity. If not for me, then my son.’
The man hesitates still, so she forces the door and is across the threshold before he can shut it in her face. He is a priest, in a dark robe long enough to reach the ground.
‘Thank you, Father,’ she says as the priest dithers at the door. ‘Lock it,’ she says. ‘Please. You must lock it. There are men out there. Thieves.’
‘Thieves!’ he cries, his voice high-pitched with fret. ‘You’ve brought thieves to my door?’
‘Not if you shut it,’ she tells him. ‘They will not violate the sanctity of the church.’
The priest has no choice. He shuts it behind her and shoots the bolts, top and bottom, and then drops the drawbar. When he has straightened he holds his lantern up to inspect her more closely and reveals himself as being in his middle years and hatless, with his dark hair disarrayed. It seems he is angry with her.
‘Why are you abroad at this hour?’ he demands.
‘It is not by my choice,’ she says. ‘We’ve travelled from – from York. Some men on the roads took our bags, and so we are left without money for an inn.’ She pulls Rufus to her. She does not want him telling the truth.
‘But you can’t stay here,’ he says. ‘Not now. Not tonight.’
His eyes flick to the darkness of the nave and back.
‘You would not send us out into the dark?’ she asks.
He is awkward. She can see him trying to think of a reason to eject her. She turns from him, and sets Rufus down on the floor with his back against a pillar and strokes his cheek.
‘It will be all right,’ she soothes. ‘This nice priest will let us stay.’
When she stands up, the priest is still shifting and undecided. It is as if she has caught him out in something.
‘You say you’ve no money?’ he checks.
She shakes her head.
‘All was taken. On a horse.’
‘What’s in there?’ he asks and leans close to her to touch the ledger’s bag.
‘A book,’ she says, pulling back. She smells wine on his breath.
‘Who are these men?’ he asks at length.
She tells him she doesn’t know, and leaves it to his imagination. She can feel his gaze ranging over her, taking her in. She imagines he does not think she looks worth raping.
‘Are they outside now?’ he asks.
She nods. Now she just wants to be left alone, but the priest won’t. He keeps asking questions. What did they look like? How were they dressed? When did you first see them? When did you last see them? How did you get away?
As he goes on, she can feel herself losing the strength to confect or fabricate. She feels stripped naked, so sickened with her self-sorrow that surely her shame must be obvious to anyone with eyes to see.
‘I will go myself and fetch the Watch from the castle,’ he volunteers.
‘No!’
He stops, turns back to her.
‘No? Is it the Watch you are seeking to avoid?’ he asks.
‘No. It is that I don’t want to make nuisance.’
‘Well,’ he says. ‘You’ve already done that.’
‘More nuisance,’ she clarifies.
There is another long silence.
‘Please,’ she says. ‘Just for tonight. Let me sit with my son and in the morning, we’ll be gone.’ She is too tired to talk about sanctuary tonight. She will claim it in the morning. After a moment he says:
‘Very well.’
And he turns his back on her and walks away, taking the light with him. She slumps next to Rufus, back against the pillar, boots out before her. She has not wondered what the priest is doing in the church alone at night, but now she looks up when she hears him whispering. There is someone else there, a woman, in the glow of the lamp. Can it be that she and Rufus have disturbed some tryst? She shuts her eyes and rests her head against the stone behind, and she wonders that such things still go on, while God seems bent on testing her and her alone.
She wishes they would blow out the flame in the lamp, and she thinks about Edmund Riven and that giant being out there now, in the dark, and she wonders what he would have said and done when he arrived at the White Swan to find her gone. She imagines the search he will be carrying out. Every room in the place to begin with, and then every nearby house, and then what? Would he think she’s taken the road or made for the hills? She is at least lucky darkness is complete, she supposes. At least now he is faced with an array of possibilities he’ll have to take his time to investigate.
It is as she is thinking this that the first bang on the door resounds around the nave. There is a shout from without. The priest stands up. There is scurrying as the woman removes herself.
‘You’ve brought them here,’ the priest accuses.
‘No,’ she says. ‘You mustn’t let them in.’
‘But who are they to disturb the House of God?’ he asks himself. He is sidling towards the door with the lamp in his hand, incredulous, when the door is simply knocked in with a splintering crash. The priest screams and jumps back. Next to Katherine, Rufus flexes like a fish on a riverbank and is on his feet before the second blow on the door sends it smashing from its hinges to screech across the stone-flagged floor. Light from lanterns beams across the darkened nave.
It is the giant, of course, who comes first, ducking through the door, blocking the light behind for the moment, but still caught in the priest’s lantern; he is grinning at what he’s done, and more men crowd in after him, lanterns held high, likewise admiring his strength. They are laughing at it.
The priest quails.
‘What do you want?’
The giant says nothing. His face is huge, his brow so low and heavy it almost meets his jutting jaw.
‘Where is she?’ one of the other men asks.
The priest’s mouth is open as he backs away from the advancing giant. He stammers something and then holds the lantern high, and in its pool of light he points across to Katherine. One of the men has a bull’s-eye lamp, and he swings the beam flashing across the pillars to catch her.
Someone laughs.
‘Well well!’
She can’t move. It is as if the light has tr
ansfixed her. The giant moves swiftly and she feels her bowels melt. She grips Rufus and pulls him to her. The giant laughs too now and bends; with one hand he picks her up by the gathering of her cloak at the throat, and with the other picks up Rufus likewise, and he straightens and pulls them apart just as if he were yanking the head off a chicken. He holds them up, arms extended, so that Rufus is dangling a foot off the ground. The giant’s laugh is like rolling thunder. He smells of kennels, and bear gardens, and strong wine.
Katherine swears at him. She tells him he is damned by God. Each time he laughs. She aims a kick at his groin and he stops laughing; he growls instead, and his lip curls, and she imagines he will drop her and pummel her to death, but he simply hoiks Rufus higher, and the boy slips in his collar and he starts to choke.
The other men come clustering down the nave to meet them, with their billhooks and lanterns, and they are still laughing too.
‘That weren’t so difficult,’ they say.
‘Please,’ Katherine implores. ‘He’s hurting the boy.’
But they seem to have incomplete control over him, or are afraid to exercise it, and their grins become fixed and anxious.
‘Let him go,’ she shouts. ‘Let him go!’
The giant just begins laughing again and twists his fist, tightening the ligature around Rufus’s slim little neck as if he means to hang him.
‘Let him go!’ she shrieks again.
And this time her words are echoed by a voice from the door of the church and the giant stops laughing and looks around. He lowers Rufus, who gasps for air when his toes touch the ground. Katherine strains for him and the giant, uncertain, relents and she gathers Rufus to her. He is tearing at his clothes to loosen them from his neck and his breathing is reedy. His little tongue sticks out and his eyes bulge.
Holding him to her, she cannot stem the flow of tears. That she has led him here, to this end. May God forgive her.
The men around them – in Warwick’s red – step back to allow the man from the door to approach.
‘So here we are at last,’ Edmund Riven says. His voice is just as she’d imagined: clipped yet sneering. He strolls towards them, but even with that wad of linen pressed to his face, and even with the giant there, she flinches when she smells him, turning her face from him, but not before she sees how angry her reaction makes him.
‘Where is it?’ he asks. ‘Is that it?’
He gestures at the bag and indicates a man should take it from her. One steps forward and pulls it from her, tugging it over her head. He passes it over. Riven looks inside at the battered old book, but he doesn’t take it out. He is not a child that he needs to see its contents right here, right now. He nods and slings the bag over his own shoulder, turning for the door.
‘Take that other bag from her too,’ he tells them. ‘And search her person. She’ll have some knife about her somewhere.’
‘But we are in a church,’ she says. ‘We claim sanctuary.’
Riven pauses; then he starts to laugh.
‘Sanctuary? Sanctuary? You want sanctuary!’
His laugh takes root, surprisingly high-pitched. Katherine is left there clutching Rufus while the other men laugh uneasily along with him. Riven even co-opts the priest to join in, and he does so. Then Riven stops his laughter and checks his stained linen pad, as if moving so might cause the wound to weep more copiously. The other men fall silent as soon as he does. In the shadows, the priest’s woman suppresses a sob.
The giant looms over her and closes his fist on her cloak again, and he lifts her off her toes, while another man takes her knife and lets his hands wander over her at his leisure – her breasts and between her legs – and when she lashes out, the giant twists her neck and she must endure or choke.
‘Sure you’ve not got another one, hidden up there?’
He lifts her skirt. She kicks him and he laughs again. She almost spits at him. She wishes she did have another knife.
‘Come on,’ Riven says. ‘There will be time enough for that, you heathen brute.’
It is a fond compliment and the man laughs.
‘Hear that?’ he jeers.
‘Bring them,’ Riven calls, and the giant picks them both up again.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I will come. Let me carry my boy.’
Riven is impatient.
‘If it will speed us along,’ he allows, and after a moment of slow thought the giant releases them from the great shovels of his hands and pushes them staggering forward, out through the splintered door frame and away from any idea of sanctuary she ever had, into Riven’s care, and she thinks what a fool she has been.
‘You’ve got what you want!’ she calls to Riven as he swings himself up into his saddle. ‘Let us go. We cannot harm you.’
Riven glances at her.
‘Could you ever?’ he asks.
He has turned his horse and is trotting on ahead now. Seeing him up there, triumphant, she loses her temper. She cannot stop herself.
‘I did once, do you remember?’
He gestures to imply she is deranged.
‘Well?’ she goes on. ‘D’you remember?’
She is almost jeering at him. It is because she is so powerless. She gives in to her rage, and she wants him to know what she has done to him, and what she is to him. She wants to remind him of the harm she has done him. None of this is logical. She is not thinking. She is not thinking of limiting the damage, of communicating anything, of her future at all. She wants only to show she is not this woman they are dragging back to their castle fastness, this woman whom they have beaten.
‘Your face,’ she calls. ‘I did that. With a bucket! Remember?’
Riven’s shoulders hike. The horse walks on.
‘Outside the priory at Haverhurst! You and your accursed father. I was the nun you thought to attack that day.’
And now Riven does twist in his saddle and he stares at her with his one furious eye. She can see him trying to reimagine that morning so long ago, when she hit him with the bucket, but after a moment he turns away again, and it is as if, for the moment perhaps, the effort of remembering is too great. He kicks his horse on, but his back is stiff and his shoulders raised, and the guards riding by her side know this is a bad omen.
‘Christ, woman,’ one whispers, ‘why did you tell him such a thing? He will only have us go at you all the more now.’
And she sees what she’s done, and she feels her guts give with fear and self-loathing. She has fallen down into a hell of her own device and, worse, she has dragged Rufus with her. Now all she sees are burning coals pressed on soft skin, and the boy is weeping in her arms, and the air is filled with that strange gammy stench of Riven’s face. There is no longer any point in asking him to let them go. He’ll never do that now. Oh Christ, she thinks, as the tears spill from her lids. Oh Christ.
But now they come through the castle gatehouse, and every man of the Watch stands back to let them pass, faces falling, conversations withering, and it is as if she is being marched to the headsman’s block – only this is worse, for there is no promise of the axe blade’s swift release into the afterlife, only that of much pain.
Once they are through, they can hear music from the bright-lit windows of the keep, and the thought that something so everyday should continue while she and Rufus are dragged away only makes it worse. Riven dismounts and a boy appears to take his horse away to the stables and Riven walks ahead, stiff-backed still, and the giant pushes them to follow him, towards a passageway under what must be a chapel, where the coloured windows are also illuminated – for an evening service, perhaps? – and then Riven stops. He turns and manages a grimace; then he indicates with a flick of his hand and there in the shadows is Liz, standing to one side, head hanging low.
Katherine’s vision narrows when she sees her, and all she wants to do is throttle Liz, to drive the life out of her, to squeeze her neck so hard the fingertips of her right hand will press against the fingertips of her left hand. She strains agai
nst the giant’s grip on her collar.
‘How could you?’ she snarls. ‘How could you?’
Liz looks up. She’s been crying, perhaps, but she is no longer.
‘He had my sisters,’ she says, indicating Riven, who stands watching. ‘Both of ’em. Told me if he didn’t get what he wanted, then he’d let that’ – she points to the giant – ‘get what he wants. With them.’
‘You could have just taken it!’
‘I tried! I thought you had it in the bloody cart! In your bloody coffer!’
‘So you gave him Jack and Nettie? And John? You sold them all!’
‘What else could I have done? What would you have done?’
‘I don’t know! I don’t know! But not this! Not to – not to Rufus! Not when I could have done anything else!’
‘But he wanted you,’ Liz says. ‘Riven. He wanted to know how you’d come by it. Everything. And I could not – I could not separate you.’ She chokes on her own misery for a moment, and can’t speak, but then she wails: ‘Don’t blame me! Don’t blame me!’
At this Katherine feels a rushing of undimmed rage. She lunges at her again but the giant’s grip does not slacken, and she almost loses her footing. Liz draws back.
‘Katherine,’ she says. ‘Please forgive me!’
‘I’ll never forgive you! D’you hear! Never. I’ll curse you to hell! I’ll – I’ll – Damn you!’
But Liz is determined and she comes towards Katherine with her arms outstretched, imploring, and there are tears pouring down her face. The giant is laughing at the women’s pain, and Riven too is watching with bright eyes as Liz puts her arms around Katherine. Katherine tries to fend her off but she cannot hold Rufus and push Liz away, and Liz grips her and she is sobbing and begging Katherine to please, please forgive her, and Katherine is still fighting her when she feels her slide something into the laces of her dress. The object stays there, and then Liz breaks away and looks at her, hard, and Katherine is momentarily silenced, trying to think what in God’s name she’s doing when Liz steps further back. Riven grows bored of it.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘If you are not going to fight one another . . .’ He jerks his head and the giant pushes Katherine past Liz, sending her staggering down the passageway, forgetting that Rufus is there for the moment, watching all this.
Divided Souls Page 30
