Divided Souls

by Toby Clements

  ‘Must we go?’ she asks.

  He nods sadly.

  ‘But where?’ she asks. ‘Where can we go?’

  ‘What about Marton?’ Thomas asks. ‘Could we go back there? Would Isabella have us?’

  She has not had a moment to tell him about cutting Isabella’s cataract without asking her first, and then being caught at it by those two sons. Thomas will not want to hear of that now, so she shakes her head.

  ‘It would not do us any good, anyway,’ she says. ‘Even though Riven’s dead, if Warwick wants the ledger he will find Liz, and Liz knows where to find Marton, and so if we went there, he will find us in a trice.’

  He nods.

  ‘So,’ he says. ‘Somewhere else.’

  ‘But where?’

  In the event they do not have to think very fast, because King Edward will not permit them to leave him, and so they must sweat out that August in Middleham, waking each day and coming to Mass to hear Bellman admit that the Earl of Warwick has sent message to say he is delayed, and is not yet ready to join his king.

  ‘So we may go to him?’ King Edward asks.

  ‘Ah, no, your grace, he bids you rest at peace here until he comes.’

  And both men laugh at the situation and at Bellman’s discomfort, for the King has found the pace of life at Middleham to his taste: he insists on hunting every day save Sunday, when he joins Thomas and the men of the castle and the village in the butts south of the Earl’s formal gardens. He is not the worst bowman there, Thomas tells Katherine, but he is far from being the best. He is slow, for one, and clumsy at nocking, and though he is reasonably accurate in the butts when he can see how far he must shoot, when it comes to shooting on the rove, when they all walk around the parkland shooting three arrows apiece at specific marks, he spends more time looking for his arrows than anyone else, for they are often spread far and wide, and usually short.

  Still, he is relentlessly cheerful and easy among his subjects, and he mocks himself and his own inadequacy before any man can say a word; and anyway, everyone there knows that shooting arrows is not everything. They have seen him ride with the hounds, and throw a spear, and some men there saw him at Towton, and no man doubts him.

  There remains no sign of the Earl of Warwick, which King Edward puts down to cowardice, but Flood tells them that the Earl is occupied trying to coerce parliament to meet – or not meet – to do his business and there is a trouble everywhere, in every part of the country, with everyone taking advantage of King Edward’s absence to pursue their own claims to their neighbours’ property.

  ‘My lord of Warwick is not the King. That’s the thing, you see?’ Flood explains.

  Flood also says that King Edward thinks the people do not understand why, having risen in support of Warwick’s ousting of King Edward’s infamous and unpopular favourites, and this having been achieved, with them – the favourites – being dead or exiled, King Edward remains a captive. It makes King Edward laugh.

  ‘Bloody Warwick. See how he likes ruling a kingdom filled with bastards,’ he says.

  Meanwhile Nettie has regained her strength and Katherine is slowly reducing the amount of the dwale that John Stumps is allowed. He sits up now, pale but with no sign of the fever that nearly killed him the first time she cut an arm off, and he can touch his stumps together.

  ‘You are like a seal,’ Jack tells him, and he barks like those they used to see below Bamburgh. John says nothing, because King Edward laughs.

  Being there with King Edward has, Thomas tells Katherine, been odd. For a while he had no name for the sensation he was feeling as they rode up into the hills behind the castle and hunted various animals with various other animals, until one day, when they were riding back after a long hunt, trailing behind them a line of horses over which were heaped the corpses of a number of deer, wild boar and badger, Flood turned to him and said the day had been fun.

  ‘Fun?’ Thomas had repeated.

  ‘Ha!’ Flood had laughed. ‘You say it as if you have never heard the word!’

  But there was more to it than just fun. Every day he has seen Katherine and Rufus resting and recovering from the rigours and uncertainties of their recent travels. They have eaten well and slept well and there were no chores to do, so that the two of them spent their time with Nettie and her baby, walking in the Earl’s garden, playing gently, their idleness enforced by a guilty Bellman not certain of their social status. After a week, Thomas overhears Rufus speaking very quietly to Katherine, though he had still not said a word to anyone else.

  But these days, when it is believed that kingfishers might roost on calm seas, cannot last, of course. Messengers come and go, clattering across the bridge with missives for King Edward and for the constable. There are too many tensions pulling at King Edward, pulling at one another, unseen forces working from as far away as Rome, London, Calais, and even back in the north where a name from the past, Sir Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth – the man whom everyone hated in Bamburgh Castle when it was besieged – has risen again in support of old King Henry.

  This is a rebellion the Earl of Warwick cannot suppress without the King’s moral authority and so he sends word for the constable, and Bellman comes to tell King Edward that it has been decided he is free to go about his business, though could he first please issue these commissions of array, so that troops may be raised in the Midlands to come north to quell Humphrey Neville and his rebels?

  ‘And in all this time, he’s never come to meet my eye!’ King Edward scoffs of the Earl of Warwick. ‘In all this time!’

  ‘Soon be home, I reckon,’ Flood says. ‘By Christ, I cannot wait to see my wife.’

  Thomas nods. He hopes it will be a happy reunion. He himself hardly knows where he should go next.

  ‘Could we go back to Marton?’ Jack asks.

  And Katherine shakes her head, and they all want to know why not, and so now she must tell them. They listen in silence, even when she describes cutting the eye, and when it is over, Jack starts laughing sibilantly.

  ‘Mother of God, Katherine,’ he says. ‘This gift of yours! It is a double-edged blade!’

  Katherine can hardly look at them for shame.

  ‘Mother did right,’ they hear a voice say. ‘She only wanted Isabella to be able to see.’

  It takes a moment to realise it is Rufus who speaks. He looks up at each of them in the eye, almost one by one. He is not shy, and nor is he challenging. He is just very clear about this. There are indigo circles under his dark eyes, and he looks elfin and otherworldly, and Thomas is half-proud of his son, half-frightened of him and for him.

  The mood changes.

  Jack says that he will take Nettie and his daughter back to Nettie’s father and mother, who farm strips of land in a village near Marton, and he supposes he will stay there and help work the furlongs until something comes up.

  ‘Perhaps I will go across the Narrow Sea and fight with that Duke of yours, John,’ he says.

  John says he thinks there will be plenty of fighting in this country, if that is what he wants.

  ‘No,’ Nettie says. ‘That is not what he wants.’

  She is holding their little pip of a daughter and Jack cannot but smile and agree.

  ‘And what about you, Thomas?’ John Stumps asks. ‘What’ll you do now?’

  ‘We will go with Jack and Nettie as far as Lincoln,’ Thomas tells him, ‘but from there – well. I don’t know. We must throw ourselves on the goodlordship of William Hastings, I suppose. What about you?’

  And he thinks again what it will be like for John Stumps, with no arms.

  ‘I could become a monk,’ John says. ‘The sort that only pray. You do not absolutely need hands to pray.’

  ‘Can you read?’

  ‘Letters? Words? No.’

  There is a long silence, and Thomas sees John does not trust himself to speak.

  ‘Come with us,’ he says. ‘I do not know where we are going, or what we’re to do, but stay with us. We wi
ll see to you. Take care of you.’

  23

  It is only on the day before they are to leave for Lincoln that Thomas receives an answer to the letter he sent to Katherine at Marton Hall just before she came to the castle, which he had entrusted to Flood, and had then forgotten about. When Katherine sees him being handed it by the boy, she flushes red. He breaks the dab of wax holding the edge and unfolds it.

  It is from Isabella.

  ‘Is it in her hand?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ he tells her, for he recognises her shapely letter Ts, and Katherine sits back, lets her shoulders droop and squeezes her eyes tight shut.

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ she murmurs. ‘What does it say?’

  Thomas reads. Isabella first commends herself to him with all her heart and trusts that God keeps him well. She tells him his letter arrived at Marton in the second week after the Assumption, and that she was pleased to receive it brought by a cloth merchant, from whom she bought a length of finest scarlet in addition to a half-pound of best pins. She has been pleased to hear that God has spared Thomas the divers hazards that may be encountered on any field of war, with which she has some intimacy, having buried two husbands who were not so blessed. She was pleased to hear that Thomas is with his grace King Edward, who has likewise avoided such torments, and that his grace King Edward now does well under the care of his lordship the Earl of Warwick. She is sending this letter with the self-same merchant in the hope that it might reach him at Middleham at speed.

  ‘Is that it?’ Katherine asks. She takes it from him. She looks at it closely, then at Thomas. She is disappointed.

  ‘She is alive at least,’ Thomas says. ‘That is something. You are not a murderer. Or not of Isabella, at least. Not yet.’

  Katherine does not smile.

  ‘And look,’ he goes on. ‘She can see well enough to write, so your cutting must have worked.’

  ‘But why has she said nothing about us? About me? About her eyes? About Marton?’

  ‘Perhaps there is another message to come?’

  And there is. It arrives the next day, at dawn, brought by the white monk on a pony from Jervaulx, along with many others for King Edward sealed with chunky coins of wax. This one is much longer, and time has been taken, so Thomas imagines she sent this the next day.

  Again Isabella recommends herself to Thomas with all her heart, and trusts that God continues to keep him safe. She then tells him that his wife – may God also keep her safe – has left Marton Hall, with a job only half done, and should it be within his powers to find said wife, she would be forever in his debt if he might persuade her to return to Marton to do whatever she did to the one eye, to the other. And, she writes, though she has no right to ask such a thing, and though she has prayed to God to forgive her for not having done as well by Thomas and Katherine as she might have hoped, she says this last favour is a matter that might be best resolved before Martinmas, since, she writes, that is when she will be quitting Marton Hall.

  ‘She is leaving Marton!’ Thomas tells the others as they gather in the bailey before the northeast gate.

  There are gasps, and claims of incredulity.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why?’

  Thomas reads on. Isabella is doing so because, despite her sins of neglect in regard Thomas and his family, she has been truly blessed by God: she intends to renounce her state of avowal and to marry again – for the last time, she sincerely hopes. This time her husband is a knight with property in the south. She trusts Thomas will bless her in this union, and, though she knows it will bear no fruit, she avers that her new husband is an upright and Christian soul, beloved of God, and she welcomes the prospect of his consoling presence, since, she writes, she found the divers privations of widowhood burdensome beyond all anticipation.

  ‘She is getting married!’ Thomas tells them all. ‘To a Sir John Ffytche, of the County of Dorset.’

  Again there is astonishment, but Katherine had expected such. Thomas tells them what Isabella says of him.

  ‘It sounds as if it has worked nicely for her,’ Katherine says. ‘And at least she will be away from those sons of hers.’

  ‘And she will make no mistake when she murmurs his name,’ Jack laughs.

  ‘But I wonder how it came about? And what is in the bargain for this Sir John Ffytche? Taking on an elderly widow?’

  No one knows, but Thomas feels the loss of Marton as a physical blow, a scooping out of something from within him. He is not alone. Every mouth is downturned. It has been their home for many years. In Katherine’s case, her only home. That it was already lost to them seems not to matter. They wanted Isabella to be there, at the very least. They wanted to know that whatever happened to them, some things carried on the same. But no. It is not to be. Someone else will be sleeping in their houses, tilling their fields, gathering around that chimney.

  ‘So that is that,’ he says.

  ‘We should buy it,’ Jack says. ‘Gather all our money together and just buy it.’

  He shows them that he has a silver groat.

  ‘We’d need a bit more than that,’ John says.

  ‘We will need at least five hundred marks,’ Jack says. ‘That is what one of those boys of hers reckoned they might get for it.’

  Thomas feels sick.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘how long would it take you to earn that on your shilling a day from the Duke of Burgundy, John?’

  John looks bleak, but Katherine laughs.

  ‘Some come back from war as rich men,’ she says.

  ‘Not us,’ Thomas says. ‘And not in England.’

  ‘No,’ she agrees, ‘but remember John Watkins’s story?’

  Thomas doesn’t even remember John Watkins.

  ‘The man who let us stay in his hall after you were out of your wits with the sun that day in the hills.’

  ‘What was the story?’ Thomas asks.

  And then she tells them all of how John Watkins and a few of Lord Montagu’s men had found Sir William Tailboys hiding with old King Henry’s coin in a coal mine after the battle of Hexham, and as she speaks, Thomas hears a pounding in his ears. He feels burning heat throughout his body, and Jack is likewise staring at her, open-mouthed and flushed, as if he has some sickness.

  ‘Say that again,’ he says, and so she does.

  When she has finished, he is staring at her, his eyes round, his cheeks red.

  ‘Why didn’t you – tell me before?’ he asks.

  ‘I did not want to upset you,’ she says.

  In fact she feels guilty that she has shared it with him now, since no good can come of envy.

  ‘But we saw them,’ Thomas says. ‘We saw Tailboys and his men after Hexham. In the woods. They rode past while we were in that hovel. At dawn. Do you not remember?’

  She shakes her head. She does not recall. Of course not, otherwise she would have said something. But why is he so excited?

  ‘Because one of the mules slipped and fell down a mine hole! Right where we were! And Tailboys nearly killed the man responsible. One of the mules carrying the money! It will be down there still!’

  They ride out of Middleham behind King Edward, watched by the townspeople just as they had when Thomas and the King arrived a month earlier. Their attempts to exert any independence of their own have been quashed by King Edward, who insists they stay with him.

  ‘You will be paid, I’m sure,’ he tells them, ‘and we all want to see our wives and dogs and so on, but the commonweal must be tidied up, eh? And I am keen to show bloody old Warwick that I can do what he cannot, for all his ability to shuffle dockets.’

  King Edward has already sent for his brother Gloucester, his brother-in-law Suffolk, and his various earls and barons, including Arundel, Northumberland, Essex and Mountjoy, and, of course, William Hastings. He is keen to show that he is not going against this rebellion underpowered as he did the last.

  ‘They are bringing their men to York,’ he tells them as they ride. ‘I will show that
smiling shit-snake my lord of Warwick that King Edward of England is not too grand to learn his lessons in the hope that he bloody well learns his.’

  All the uncertainty has flown from him. His shoulders are back; his smile is wide. Perhaps this captivity has actually been good for him, Thomas thinks. Not everyone is comfortable being in his company though. John seems to freeze when he speaks, because he was not there with King Edward as the others were when his arm was being cut off, and so not did not bond with him as a brother in that peculiar adversity; while Jack tries to make King Edward laugh with jokes that fall flat for being too familiar. Katherine stiffens and exudes doubt and suspicion whenever he comes close, but, far from being offended, he seems to understand, sympathise even, and after a few moments in his company she too relaxes, so after a while it comes to be normal that they are talking to King Edward of England.

  He turns and addresses them now, twisted in the saddle of his prancing white stallion.

  ‘Sirs,’ he says. ‘There is nothing so poor in all the world as a king who is on his own, and so I wish you fellows to be my fellows. You will forever have a place at my side, Thomas Everingham, for you bring me great luck, through every grind of Fortune’s Wheel. And I require especially you, Goodwife Everingham, for your skill as a surgeon is enough to shame the great Galen himself. And you, Jack Whatever-your-name-is, I have seen pull a bowstring back further than your ear, so you are most welcome on my flank. And John Stumps, do not despair. I need a new jester. You would have your work cut out, it is true, since you are a stranger to merriment as such, but that is perhaps understandable, given your situation, and there cannot be a man in all England – in all Christendom – to match your impersonation of a seal.’

  So they must ride with King Edward, back to York again, east and then south on that road, and then east again, with the river on their left. There is no choice.