He pulls her out into the next courtyard, and that is when she gets the first scent of the black rot, even above the stench that Riven trails like a vixen in heat, and she thinks back to the first time she smelled John Stump’s wound in the guerite at Alnwick and she knows it is him. Somehow she is sure of it. It is the sort of thing Edmund Riven would do.
But now Riven is disconcerted by something, and the giant, too, is puzzled and brings her up short. She tries to twist free of his grip while they watch Riven walk quickly to a tower and up the few steps to where the door hangs open, and from where, Katherine supposes, the stink must be billowing.
‘Bring her,’ Riven says.
He disappears within. The giant pushes her on, stumbling up the steps. Rufus begins to gag at the smell that seeps down and she has to pick him up and carry him. He wriggles and kicks and she has to catch him and catch him again as he struggles to escape, and she half hopes she’ll be able to do the same, but the giant is there, pushing her forward even though she is already moving upward, and she turns on him and shouts at his vast, stupid, clueless bloody face. She tells him that he is no better than an animal, and that he is the devil made flesh, and that she hopes he will spend eternity roasting in hell’s fires, and everything else that she can think of, but he remains unprovoked and just continues to prod her with fingers that are as big around as her wrist.
‘Shut her up,’ Riven says over his shoulder.
Katherine tries to kick and elbow him but it is hard when she is carrying Rufus and the giant seems impervious to pain. Then she hears a howl of agony from above that sets her hair on end, and then Riven mutters something and the giant shoves her hard so that she nearly falls, and Rufus is still thrashing to try to get away, and so she does not see exactly what happens when Riven enters the room before the giant knocks her aside. She rights herself and checks Rufus is all right. He is gagging with the reek of the black rot. It is all he can think about. He scrabbles away from her towards a doorway that must lead out on to the walkway, from where there is a supply of fresh air: he is like a drowning man given a chance of life, and she cannot stop him.
‘Rufus!’
But he’s gone, and then she hears Riven shouting in the chamber.
‘What in the name of God is happening here? Who are you?’
And she looks into the room, past the great bulk of the giant, and there is a man standing up and turning to face Riven, and she sees it is of all men, of all things, Thomas.
21
No one has time to say a word.
Riven turns on the guard, who looks as if he might void himself.
‘Shut her up!’ he shouts.
He’s pointing at Nettie, who’s growling deeply, her face a livid sheen, her clothes and all the straw around her wet and stained pink with blood and her waters. Any moment and she will start screaming again, for that is how it comes, the pain of childing, in waves.
When the guard does not move, the giant strides around the table and slaps the guard with the back of his hand, sending him crashing against the wall and to the floor under the window. He seems about to do the same to Nettie, when Thomas stands in his way. By Christ, he looks so small. The giant is confused for a moment, that someone should stand up to him, and then he raises his hand to hit Thomas, but Thomas is fast, and he is very strong from pulling that bow, and he punches the giant first. He hits him not in the face, which is perhaps what he was aiming for, but misses, and buries his fist in the softer regions of the man’s neck, around his throat. Katherine does not know if it is a lucky punch or not, but the giant staggers back and crashes into the table and then to the floor in a sprawl of dead-weighted limbs, his trunk like a dropped sack.
There is a moment of startled silence.
Then Nettie growls again and Jack lunges to help her, only for his chains to pull him back with a taut clang. Roaring with pain and frustration he turns and begins aiming kicks at Riven, but Riven is likewise out of his reach, and he ignores Jack. He seems momentarily stunned by what has happened to his giant, who may be dead; he’s staring at the broad spread of the man’s body with his pad of pus held in mid-air and Katherine cannot stop her eye being drawn to the pink wet wreckage of his face, but after a moment he claps the pad over his wounds again, and now she sees his gaze rise to Thomas, and his focus sharpen. His face hardens, and he has a drawn blade in his hand, a short, broad thing, perfect for a confined space like this, and his knuckles whiten as he begins to circle the table and she knows he will kill Thomas unless Thomas runs.
But then, suddenly, there are more men coming up the steps. They are running and shouting. And then there are more on the walkway beyond, coming through the open door, and they too are sprinting. The first one into the room is an astonishingly handsome youth. He carries a bucket of steaming water. The second one is – can it be? – King Edward. He carries a great pile of linen sheets. The men on the walkway are in Warwick’s livery, led by an oldish man and, astonishingly, a woman in a fine blue dress.
They all arrive at the same time and force their ways into the chamber; Riven hesitates, but then resumes his intent. He steps over the body of the giant and swipes the blade at Thomas. Thomas leaps back, wild-eyed with fear. He knows this is it. He knows he will be killed. He retreats. Riven has him in a corner.
Men are shouting. Telling Riven to stop, for the love of God, but he ignores them. He has only one thing on his mind now, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop him as he takes another step towards Thomas and stabs the sword towards his guts. Thomas presses himself against the wall. The next thrust will be the last.
Men watch with open mouths, frozen by the intensity of the violence in such close quarters.
Katherine feels her head pounding. Sounds come and go like waves on shingle. Colours warp. Shapes twist. The air seems to become heavy. She starts to move in slow motion. She reaches under her coat for the knife that Liz slid into her laces, and her fingers close on its stubby handle, and she realises this is exactly why Liz gave it to her; she draws it out, and feels from its balance that it’s a clumsy little thing, and none too sharp, but it will do its task.
She knows now that this is the moment that has been coming for so many months – years even – and noise roars in her ears, and she knows this is wrong, and that there are good reasons this has not been done before, but she knows too that it is the only thing she can do. She throws herself forward across the room, and she claps her left hand on Riven’s shoulder, and she drives the short fat blade into the soft of his back, just above his hip, to the right of his spine, and she punches it so hard she thinks it must come out the other side.
Riven takes three tripping steps forward, but he is already keeling backwards under pressure of her left hand, and the sword that was about to cut Thomas wavers and is then thrown aside as he tries to pluck at the knife in his back. But she just keeps pushing. And now Thomas raises his hands to Riven’s chest and shoves him back. Riven is bent at the knees and is gasping as if he’s choking on his own blood. She lets go of the knife and hauls his shoulders back and down and steps back to let him fall to the flagstones on to the knife, and when he does fall on it, it is driven in deeper yet, and the point does come out of his belly, but instead of cutting his pourpoint it sticks up under it, forming a tiny bloodstained pyramid.
He does not lie dead, but thrashes and twists between the table and chair leg and the giant’s naked feet, and his blood is everywhere in the straw mixing with Nettie’s waters, and everyone else stands immobile with their features pulled and their eyes fixed on him as he shouts imploring half-words and beseeching half-phrases, but no one here will help him and the pain is so great he cannot call on God to accept his soul or forgive any of his sins. After a long, long moment he stops his twitchings and lies still, his arms sinking slowly to his sides, and stinking pus weeps from the pink gash in his face, like foul yellow seed pearls, and at last she has killed him and at last she is exultant.
There is silence in the room.
She looks up at Thomas at the same time as he looks up at her and there are tears in his eyes as there are in hers. They throw themselves at one another and he folds her in his arms and she feels as if in a vice and she grips him tighter yet, and they stand like that and no one else exists: not the two dead bodies, not the gasping Nettie, not the silenced crowd who watch in silence – not even Rufus, who she prays has seen nothing. If she presses her face into the cloth of Thomas’s pourpoint she can almost mask the stench of Riven and the reek blowing through the door, and she finds that he smells unaccountably clean, of good soap, and it is this that strikes her as most odd, but of course she has no time to discover why this should be, because, after he has folded her in his arms for this lasting moment, they part because, she can tell, she is needed as never before.
The guard who’d been knocked to the floor is rousing himself while the other is quick to try to redeem himself: he stoops to cut the key from Riven’s purse and unlocks first Nettie and then Jack. Jack shucks off his chains and ignores the pain to crawl to Nettie’s side.
Katherine calls for Rufus.
‘Where is he? Where is he?’
Thomas comes with her out on to the walkway where John Stump lies, alive at least, but perhaps only just, and she has to look past him, to the walkway’s far end, where, in a huddle in the shadows beside the steps up to another open doorway, she and Thomas see the slight figure of their son, curled with his arms clamped across his legs. They approach and crouch next to him.
‘Rufus?’
He says nothing. They look at one another. She feels almost crushed by shame and guilt. All the febrile elation she had felt in killing Riven, and in it being so easy that surely God must have ordained it, has gone.
Thomas puts his hand on the boy’s arm.
‘Rufus?’ he says. ‘Rufus, all is well now. We are here, together. It is all over. There is nothing to mind now. Come.’
Still Rufus is silent. After a moment the woman in the blue dress appears in the circle of their lamplight. She is the constable’s wife, her face as round and wrinkled and kindly as a bun.
‘I will mind him, if you like?’ she offers. ‘I have boys of my own and we will get along very nicely and when all this is clear, and you are cleaned of – of – of stains, we will start afresh, like a new day, and put this by, eh?’
She has a wonderfully calming voice, and she sits on the step next to Rufus and she smiles at Katherine and Katherine is about to tell her thank you but no, when there is a great shout from within the tower at the other end of the walkway, and it seems Nettie must be approaching her moment of crisis, and so, with sundered feelings, Katherine accepts the woman’s offer.
Katherine returns to the light of the tower, where the giant has been dragged across and shackled in the chains that so recently housed Jack, and the constable is stroking his whiskered jaw over the corpse of Edmund Riven.
‘He was the Earl of Warwick’s man,’ he tells them. ‘I was waiting word on which between us had lordship over the other, and now this. The Earl will think I had him murdered.’
King Edward, who seems cheered by all he’s seen and heard, tells the constable to assume that it was he who did it.
‘Warwick will understand,’ he says. ‘Tell him it was an accident. Tell him I slipped. Which is more than he will ever be able to say about the loss of the heads of my father-in-law and his son.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ the constable says. ‘If you are quite sure?’
King Edward waves him away, and the constable nods to the two guards waiting to carry Riven’s corpse away.
‘What about him?’ the King asks, nodding at the giant. ‘Shall we just – kill him too? While we are about it?’
The constable is tempted, but wonders if this is not going too far.
‘He’s chained, isn’t he?’
King Edward seems disappointed.
‘If he moves, I shall kill him,’ Jack says.
The King laughs.
‘Another accident waiting to happen,’ he says.
Then he turns to Katherine.
‘Speak,’ he says. ‘We are at your command.’
She takes a moment, then calls for a fire to be lit, more lights brought, more wine, too, and more hot water. She calls for a broom to clear the bloodstained rushes and for someone to find her bag that the giant took from her. When it is found at the foot of the steps and brought to her, she takes out her dwale and mixes it up with such wine as is on the table and she gets Thomas to go on to the walkway and force John Stump to drink it.
There is not much she can do for Nettie now, other than make her comfortable. She cannot even ask the men to leave the room, but must deliver the baby as it comes, for she doubts Jack will ever leave Nettie’s side again; even now, while she is scarlet-faced and strong-smelling, he crouches by her head and holds her hand as her growling becomes screaming. The handsome youth is there, too, keeping an eye on the still-inert giant, though he clearly wishes he were elsewhere. Katherine sets about cleaning Nettie up as the candles arrive, and the broom, brought by women from the kitchen, who set to work on the sodden rushes, and after a moment the room becomes less a charnel house and more like a birthing chamber.
Then she goes out on to the walkway to check on John Stump and she calls for more candles to be held up around his wounded limb by men with masks of cloth over their noses. The smell is choking. The constable’s wife comes over to say she is taking Rufus to her chamber where she will put him in her bed, and send her women with herbs to burn.
‘He is as silent as a stone,’ she says, ‘but sleep will knit him up.’
Katherine and Thomas thank her, but she will not hear of it.
‘It is the least we can do, when we see what has been happening in our house, in our name.’
When she is gone Katherine stoops to look at John’s remaining arm in the uncertain light, and she can see the dark tidemark has reached the elbow. She thinks this is very close to being fatal, but there is just a chance. She must cut him a hand’s span above the elbow: that is the logical place.
John is very feverish, neither asleep nor awake.
‘He drank the dwale?’ she asks Thomas.
‘All of it.’
She looks at John again.
‘What do you think?’ Thomas asks.
‘We can only try.’
Thomas smiles.
‘John Stumps is a better name.’
‘You can tell him that when it is done.’
‘It need be tonight?’ he asks.
‘Now,’ she says.
Inside Nettie is yowling.
‘And how much longer for Nettie?’
‘I don’t know. I have never been at a childing.’
‘But I have,’ he says. He means Rufus’s.
‘Well then?’
‘Soon. I think.’
That is not as useful as it could be.
‘Tell me when the dwale has worked,’ she says, nodding at John. ‘He needs to be almost – almost but not quite dead.’
He holds her eye a moment longer.
‘Thanks be to God you are here,’ he says. ‘It is . . . unbelievable.’
‘You likewise,’ she says, ‘though – why are you here?’
‘It is a long story,’ he says.
Nettie bellows. They clench hands and then she turns back into the chamber where the screaming is becoming screeching now, and Nettie is sodden with sweat and more fluids wash on the floor. King Edward and the constable have gone – to get more water, the handsome youth says – but he is still here with Jack, who looks terrified, and both are at Nettie’s head, holding her hands, for neither wants to see what is below her skirts. This is Katherine’s task.
Until now, she has been so pleased by Thomas’s certainty that she can save both Nettie, the baby and John Stump that she has not stopped to think what it is she is doing, but when she crouches at Nettie’s ankles and pushes back the hot wet weight of her skirts, she is taken back to the
moment she helped the midwife with Eelby’s wife, and where that got them. But needs must, she thinks, needs must. She has rose oil. She anoints her hands with it, and then she shuffles forward, recalling the midwife’s attempts to deliver Eelby’s wife’s baby before they abandoned her to her fate and Katherine took the knife and cut the baby out.
She senses that Nettie is approaching her time, and though there is nothing she can do, she cannot leave her to suffer with only men to attend her, and she wishes some of the women had stayed. Perhaps they will return? They must return.
So she stays and tells Nettie that the baby will come and that very soon this pain will be over and it will have been worth every moment of it, for then she will have a son. And Nettie nods and blows air hard and furiously, but there is nothing of the swelling and the colour changes that attended Eelby’s wife when she was in labour, and so Katherine can tell Nettie that all goes well, and that she is not to mind the pain, and so on and so on. The intensity and frequency of Nettie’s cries increase.
Thomas comes to tell her that John is insensible. She tells him what to fetch from the kitchens: more water, more wine; two knives, one large, one small; a whetstone; a fresh candle of the best quality; a metal dish; a butchers’ saw, if there is one to be had; a length of clean linen thread; clean linen cloth; a bowstring; and some charcoal. While he is gone, she leaves Jack to reassure Nettie and she checks on John. He is, as Thomas says, insensible, but for how long? What if she starts the cut and then the baby comes? And yet she can see in the light of the braziers and the candles with which the men have now surrounded him that the black rot is seeping up the limb. If she leaves it until morning, then it will be too late to save John’s life.
She must do it now.
Thomas returns bringing with him all the things she’s requested, including a new saw, because of course the Earl of Warwick has a butcher of his own, and King Edward is there, too, with a sack of charcoal under one arm, a long length of linen rolled under the other, and the constable in tow with something he says will sweeten the air. They turn their eyes from Nettie and they proceed out on to the walkway, where it is now quite dark, and the constable scatters bunches of dried leaves on the braziers that crackle and flare and make the air smell better.
Divided Souls Page 31
