Divided Souls

by Toby Clements

  ‘So you will cut his arm off?’ King Edward wants to know.

  Katherine nods. She adjusts the candles and then wraps the lower, blackened part of John’s remaining arm in a blanket, so that the smell is to some degree contained, and she gets one of the guards to sharpen the knives while she soaks the bowstring in the wine. She is thinking that it is too dark for this, and that she will not be able to stitch those little tubes of blood. She asks someone to fetch a poker or some such and King Edward volunteers.

  ‘But you will not start without me?’

  He is enjoying this, Katherine realises. It is so peculiar. King Edward of England, on an errand for her. But she has no real time to think about this. The guard has sharpened both knives, and the wine is warmed in its ewer. The constable’s wife has sent a silver needle and she even has lengths of silk thread that have never been used. These Katherine puts in the warm wine.

  The noise that Nettie is making is regular now, becoming an almost uninterrupted scream. So Katherine puts the knives back in the ewer of wine and returns to check on her. She slicks her hands with the oil of roses, and she recalls her time with the midwife Beaufoy, and she slides her hands up under Nettie’s sodden skirts along her parted thighs to her nethers and then she feels something she thinks perhaps should not be there. It is hard. She is tempted to knock on it, with her knuckles. Her fingers cannot get around it. Nettie is thrashing. The noise is extraordinary in the room, bouncing off the walls. It is a kind of hell. Jack is in tears now. He is holding Nettie’s shoulders and caught between trying to calm her and begging Katherine to do something – but what can she do? This must take its course. But what is it that she can feel? It is smooth. It is not the elbow, or the leg. Nothing like that. Christ! She smiles at Jack. It is the baby’s head. Thanks be to Jesus for that.

  And then the giant wakes with a great roaring cough. He lies there in the bloody straw for a moment, staring up at his hands, which are chained to the wall, as if trying to piece the past together.

  She and Jack exchange a look.

  ‘Thomas!’ she shouts.

  Then the giant pulls on the chains. The links clang taut. He pulls them again. Harder. Still they clang taut. He does the same thing again. And again. On it goes.

  ‘Stop it, you bloody simpleton!’ Jack calls.

  Thomas comes in and sees the giant is awake. He looks unsure what to do, and hesitates before reaching for one of the staffs propped against the wall by the chamber doorway: it seems Thomas cannot hit a chained man. But Jack has no qualm. He has a score to settle and he lowers Nettie still screaming to the ground and then takes the heavy staff from Thomas’s grip and begins hitting the giant as if he were chopping wood. The blows are crisp, well timed, and they crack against the giant’s arms, and the giant is driven back into the corner and withdraws into as small a ball he can manage, which only seems to anger Jack even more – and anyway he is getting his revenge for some terrible things done to him, because now he just hammers blows down on the giant’s body, hitting him anywhere, a flurry of clumsy smacks that resound through the room until he catches the wall above the giant’s head and the staff springs from his hands and clatters to the floor. Then Jack starts kicking him. The giant is curled up with his back to the wall, his arms across his face and head. He is unmoving. At length Jack stops. He’s red-faced, and his breathing is ragged.

  Nettie is managing to laugh despite her own pain.

  ‘He is a devil,’ Jack says.

  Then Nettie shrieks again and all attention returns to her. Jack slides down beside her and cushions her again. Katherine covers her legs and then returns to John. The wind is got up and King Edward is back with what she sent him for.

  ‘Light the candles,’ she says. ‘Get the fire really going.’

  She washes her hands in the warm wine, and then she starts by tying John’s arm off. She wraps the bowstring just above the muscle three times, inserts a piece of wood in the loop and twists to tighten it. The string bites into the flesh. She twists four times, and then stops to watch. John Stump moves in his drugged sleep.

  ‘Be ready with it,’ she tells Thomas, but he already knows what to do.

  She watches the arm below the string and sure enough it starts to fatten and turn rosy. She does not want that. It means the blood is still pumping into the limb, but not flowing out. She quickly untwists the length of wood and slackens the ligature. The arm subsides. She twists again. Six turns this time, quickly. Then waits. She can hear the men breathing as they watch. Now she has it right. The arm stays slim, and white. The blood is stopped both ways. Good. She checks her knives, saws, needle and thread once more, and asks Thomas to soften the beeswax candle.

  She is ready.

  ‘Hold it,’ she tells the handsome youth. ‘Like this.’ She bends the arm. The smell escapes in a gust. Someone retches beyond the circle of light and there is some laughter.

  The handsome youth – she learns his name is Flood – crouches next to her and holds the arm up, wrapped in its grey woollen blanket sleeve, and she begins the cut above the elbow, below the ligature. The knives – the Earl of Warwick’s knives – are sharp and slice through the skin and muscle of John’s arm easily enough, now that the muscle is slack. When the thick tough band is sawn through, the arm flops. Flood lets it lie. There is a splurge of blood: half a jugful perhaps. She wonders if she should tie the blood vessels before she cuts the bone, but decides to get rid of the arm because the stink is turning her stomach.

  Nettie is shouting now.

  Katherine takes up the butchers’ saw. It needs cleaning, she thinks.

  ‘Who has the urine?’ she asks.

  No one. She had forgotten the need.

  ‘Can anyone – piss on this? To clean it? I need the blade at least rinsed in urine.’

  The gathered men must defer to King Edward. He shrugs.

  ‘I am sure I can help,’ he says, and he takes the saw and steps away and they sit and stand there, in their circle of wavering candlelight, listening to King Edward pissing on a saw.

  ‘There,’ he says, bringing it back and proffering the dry handle. She takes it and sets its teeth into the pink bone.

  ‘Are you ready with the wax?’ she asks.

  Thomas nods, and she starts to saw. It does not take long. Perhaps fifteen cuts forward and backward. Blood gurgles in the plughole of the bone. Then she is through. She pushes the lump of lower arm away from the cut with the flat of the saw blade.

  ‘Take it,’ she tells Flood, who gathers it in its blanket and steals away towards the battlements.

  ‘Wax,’ she says, and Thomas passes the dish in which the wax is hardening again around the strip of its wick. She washes her hands in rose oil and then scoops up a few fingerfuls and moulds a ball around the wick that will prove a plug for the hole. She stoppers the bone with the long wick hanging out, and then she fishes in the ewer for the thread and the silver needle.

  The noise from Nettie in the tower is now a constant bellow of effort. It is like listening to a man hauling an ox from a ditch.

  ‘Is the poker hot?’

  One of the men takes it from the brazier. It is dull red. Not as hot as a smith might wish, but it will do for this. She tells him to leave it, and another man to bring the candle closer, and in its uncertain light she concentrates on stitching off the fatter tubes that lie around the chunk of John’s muscle.

  ‘Poker,’ she says, and there is a moment’s confusion as the man holding it cannot pass it to her because she would burn herself, and nor can he pass her the cooler end because then he would burn himself. It is solved by moving the brazier nearer, which sends sparks up into the night air to be plucked away by the gusting breeze, and the constable tells a man to watch them. In the brazier’s orange light, John is still slack-faced. The dwale is very, very potent, she thinks.

  She takes the poker with a linen cloth and then bends over the stump and dabs at it, cauterising the smaller tubes, sealing them up with a hiss of meaty steam. It
is a curiously intimate feeling, inhaling a man’s burning flesh, and the men around her lean back to let the vapour escape without touching them. She has to reheat the poker twice before she is satisfied there is crust enough.

  Then she pulls down the wrinkled sock of skin so that it hangs below the stump. She gives it a few careful turns around the candle wick, taking care not to unseat it from the bone plug; then she fishes out the needle and thread again and puts a few running stitches into the twist of skin before folding it over and adding more stitches, so that when it is done it looks very neat, with only the wick hanging free of the stitched flaps of the stump.

  ‘By God,’ someone breathes. ‘And that is it?’

  ‘Practice makes perfect,’ she says, pleased with herself and the outcome. It ends almost logically, halfway between shoulder and elbow.

  ‘Though, my God, what will it be like for him now?’

  ‘He will fall off his horse, that is for sure.’

  ‘He’ll have to wipe his arse with his teeth.’

  ‘Is that even possible?’

  Katherine stands. Her knees are sore, her skirts bloody.

  Jack calls urgently. He stands at the door of the tower chamber.

  The men watch her stand, straighten her back, and then go to attend to Nettie.

  No one says another word.

  It is as if they are witnessing a miracle.

  The baby is born in a welter of fluids and odd, fatty pastes that coat its slick little body. It is tinged blue for a bit, but it – she – has such a set of lungs on her that they are never worried that this means anything other than that the baby is merely tinged a bit blue. Katherine remembers the midwife tying off the cord, and she does so herself, and cuts it between the two ligatures as if the cord were a hank of linen, and then she wipes the baby with the rose oil from top to toe, cleaning her of all that basting. Then she wraps her in a length of clean linen and places her in Nettie’s arms.

  Nettie is tearful, fearful, sweaty and filthy, and exhausted by the labour, but she looks down and sees her tiny daughter’s pickled face, and she smiles the sort of smile that brings tears to your eyes, and Jack is still holding her, and he too is smiling as if the girl (‘We will call her Katherine’) is also a miracle.

  Nettie makes to get up, but it becomes clear that she is not finished yet, and Katherine must return to her skirts to deliver the rest of the matter that comes with childbirth. When that is finally done, and she has gathered everything up in a great blood-sodden pile of linen and straw and whatever else it is, she washes Nettie with rose oil – she is running very low – and waits to see if there will be any unwarranted bleeding.

  There is none.

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ she says.

  ‘Amen.’

  She goes to see John Stumps. He is still insensible but someone – King Edward? – has made him comfortable: he lies under a blue cloak with white fur under his chin that moves with his breath, so that she can see instantly that he lives. Thomas is there, in a ring of men by King Edward’s side, just as if they were equals of long standing, and King Edward is making light and easy talk with them and she sees they have all become friends through this long night. They turn to her and King Edward says:

  ‘Here she is!’

  And then he shouts down into the yard for warm wine and fresh rolls to be brought this instant, by God.

  PART FIVE

  Before the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Late Summer, 1469

  22

  ‘To think of it here,’ Thomas says. ‘Right under King Edward’s nose.’ He swings the bag in which the ledger is kept from his shoulder and pats it.

  ‘And you are certain he does not know?’

  Thomas is not sure.

  ‘I think he knows something is going on, but also knows enough not to enquire too deeply.’

  ‘He might have heard rumours?’ Katherine supposes.

  She is lying in the bed that Thomas had, until she arrived, shared with Flood. Flood has been evicted and sent to another room in another part of the west range. She has had a bath, with hot water and soap. Thomas insisted on it, not because she was particularly filthy (though she was) but because – well, once she was in, it was obvious. She had never had a hot bath, ever.

  ‘To think King Edward has one of these every day,’ she had whispered.

  After that she had slept for more or less two days. A priest had come – King Edward’s chinless confessor – to satisfy himself that she was not some devil incarnate, and she had thought he had come to reclaim her for the priory. She had shouted at him that it was no longer there, that it had burned down and everyone was dead, and the Prioress had fled in pursuit of the devil. Thomas had had to usher the priest out while she ‘collected herself’, which meant she fell back into dreamless sleep for another day.

  ‘Where is Rufus?’ she’d asked when she woke that second time. And Rufus had come padding silently into the room and they had wrapped their arms around one another and stayed like that for what seemed an age. She’d asked him if he too had had a bath and he’d nodded solemnly and Thomas had made a face behind his back to indicate that he had not spoken for all that time.

  ‘And Nettie does well?’ she had asked, and Thomas had told her she was already up and walking.

  ‘She did not want to stay in that chamber a moment longer than need be. And the baby – she is well, too. Very loud.’

  Katherine had nodded.

  ‘And John?’

  ‘I am giving him the dwale,’ Thomas had told her, ‘and inching out the wick, as before, and he is bearing the pain better than last time. You remember how he cried out for that spirit of Ralph Grey’s?’

  And mention of Sir Ralph Grey, the long-dead constable of Bamburgh Castle, is what has brought them on to the subject of the ledger that now sits between them again: a resurfaced problem that won’t go away.

  ‘What shall we do with it now?’ he wonders. ‘Can we just – burn it? Get rid of the bloody thing?’

  She has been thinking about this.

  ‘Riven will have told the Earl of Warwick about it, won’t he? That he has scent of it?’

  Thomas sighs wearily.

  ‘Probably,’ he says. ‘Probably.’

  ‘So the Earl of Warwick will come for it, won’t he?’ Katherine goes on. ‘He will have heard of Riven’s death and might suppose someone – King Edward – murdered him to keep him quiet. Which will only confirm the ledger’s power, confirm its strength in his mind. It will make him mad for it.’

  ‘But he can hardly ask King Edward for it? Can he?’ Thomas asks. ‘If he thinks King Edward has it?’

  That is a good point.

  ‘But so many people know of it now,’ she says. She is thinking aloud. ‘And they are all his, aren’t they? They may have hated Edmund Riven, but they do still love the Earl of Warwick, and they know King Edward doesn’t have the ledger, don’t they? So the Earl might come to believe that both he and the King are looking for it. And that it is here somewhere. And so he will come for it himself.’

  ‘True.’ Thomas sighs. He is looking very well, she thinks: clean, well fed, fresh-faced, but now unhappy at what this must mean: leaving this place. He sits on the edge of her bed and pinches his nose between his eyes.

  ‘So?’ she asks.

  ‘So we must be gone before the Earl comes,’ he confirms.

  ‘When is he due?’

  ‘I will find out,’ he says. ‘Bellman will tell us. He is a good man.’

  ‘Then we will have some notice at least.’

  ‘Yes,’ he supposes.

  The thought of taking to the roads again so soon, and after such glimpses of comfort and ease as they have had, is too much. She shuts her eyes to keep back the tears.

  Later he comes back without Rufus.

  ‘I still cannot believe he is dead,’ she says before he can say anything. ‘And that I killed him.’

  Thomas looks at her very seriously, as if she might be feeling g
uilty.

  ‘He deserved it a thousand times over.’

  He does not need to remind her that Riven was also about to gut him.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know, but still. It is unbelievable that he is gone, that he menaces us no more.’

  It is like a great weight lifted from her. She can breathe.

  ‘What happened to Liz?’ Thomas asks.

  She gives him a few details, but she has not thought about Liz since the girl gave her the knife with which to kill Riven. Now that she does, she still cannot decide what she feels about her. She betrayed them, and Rufus, but she had her reasons, and when she agreed to do it, she had no knowledge of them; and her tears that night when she had given her the knife were, surely, genuine enough.

  ‘So she is gone back to her father and sisters at Senning?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Then he asks about the priory’s destruction, and he is incredulous.

  ‘So it is true? What you said? They are dead? Every one of them?’

  ‘Not the Prioress. She fled.’

  He smiles.

  ‘In pursuit of the devil, you said?’

  ‘Did I? I have been having some strange dreams.’

  ‘But if they are all dead, and the place is burned to the ground, then you will never – never find out who you are.’

  Not this again, she thinks.

  ‘I know who I am.’

  ‘Well, yes, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘There is still the Prioress. She lived through it, they said, and was sent home, or to some other priory. Wherever she came from. If anyone still knows, it is her. But perhaps I was never meant to know, not even for Rufus’s sake.’

  Thomas shakes his head. He has never truly been able to accept she does not care, but she really does not. It is unfathomable to her why anyone would care about something that would never make a difference. It is all in the past. To cleave to it would be to give something else – someone else, perhaps – power over your person they do not deserve.