Divided Souls

by Toby Clements

  ‘Besides,’ Thomas tells them, ‘Brancepeth lies between here and Hexham, so we would have to get past the rebels anyway. At least this way we march with an army, and thus in safety, and we will be paid for our time. Sixpence a day, since we are on horses.’

  But they are no longer interested in sixpences.

  ‘By Christ, Thomas, what do you think the chances are?’

  Every time he is reminded of it, he feels a constriction or a flutter in his chest. Already his fingertips are fizzing, and he can hardly sit in his saddle.

  ‘We can only hope,’ he says.

  ‘And are you sure the mule had money in its sacks?’

  He cannot say for sure, but he remembers Tailboys’s fury as the mule went down the hole.

  ‘Look,’ he tells Jack. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know, do I? It is more than five years ago. Someone might have started work in the mine at any time.’

  ‘How likely is that?’ Jack asks.

  ‘I don’t know! I have never mined coal. I do not know anyone who has.’

  ‘Do you think you will be able to find it again? Do you remember that forest? It was vast.’

  ‘We can only try,’ Thomas says. ‘We can only try.’

  ‘But what are the chances?’

  ‘Oh, for the love of God.’

  They see the minster and the spires of York’s other churches as it grows dark, but King Edward is expected, and the men of the Watch have braziers and torches lit, and the gates stand open, and there are crowds along the road’s side to cheer him as he rides through the city and across the bridge to the outer bailey of the castle. And at the foot of the great mound of Clifford’s Tower, there are all King Edward’s nobles, including his youngest brother, and even William Hastings, and King Edward spurs his horse forward and jumps from the saddle to embrace them; and Thomas and Katherine and Jack and Nettie and John are left with Flood, hungry and saddle-weary, sitting in the darkness as the pool of light that ever surrounds King Edward withdraws and follows him up the steps, in through the great doors in the castle gatehouse, and is then gone.

  ‘Well,’ Thomas says. ‘Here we are again.’

  They find stables for their horses and board within the castle, and the next days are passed watching messengers come and go, and waiting to be allowed to go north. Hastings summons Thomas on the second day, and Thomas is fearful this will be about the ledger.

  ‘He will have spoken to King Edward,’ Thomas says. ‘King Edward will have told him about that night, and he will want to know why Riven was questioning Jack and John.’

  ‘What will you say?’ Katherine asks.

  ‘I had hoped you’d tell me,’ he says. He is serious.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘You could tell him that Riven took them because they were asking the same sort of questions he was. You could suggest that he thought they might be after the ledger too, and that he wanted to know on whose behalf they searched.’

  He nods.

  ‘You’d best let me take it then,’ she says.

  She holds her hands out for the ledger and he takes it off his shoulder and passes it over. He feels reluctant. Now that he has been reconciled with it, it is comforting on his back again. But he does so, and he takes Jack with him, just in case – though in case of what, he does not know.

  In the event, Hastings is pleased to see him, and greets him like an old friend. First he apologises that they are unable to return to Senning.

  ‘As soon as he could, my lord of Warwick confirmed the attainder had been reversed. There was nothing I could do or say.’

  Thomas is so relieved Hastings does not want to talk about the ledger, or the events of the night in the southeastern tower, that he waves aside Hastings’s apology, and when Hastings goes on to ask him to take command of more than a hundred of his men, should they need to take the field, he is pleased to comply.

  ‘We should not see too much of the rebels,’ Hastings says. ‘King Edward has issued a general pardon for all commotions, save the leaders, so they will melt away, by and by. You may reassure Goodwife Everingham on that score.’

  He always mentions Katherine, whenever they speak, and it unsettles Thomas. It is as if Hastings knows something about her that he does not. And her attitude to him is odd, too. Still. Hastings gives him a heavy purse of silver coins with which to buy such accoutrements of war as might be needed, and once again there are livery vests to be worn, and once again Katherine becomes beady-eyed at the sight of the black boar’s head on Thomas’s chest.

  ‘It was the only way,’ he tells her.

  They ride out three days later, in companies, in a long column of men belonging to King Edward’s brother Gloucester and the other nobles who’ve gathered in York, on roads that have by now become wearyingly familiar. Katherine rides with Rufus on the saddle before her, and Thomas rides with John’s horse on a lead rein. John is humiliated, and has to work hard to stay upright, but there is nothing else for it unless he wants to walk.

  ‘How many times have we been up here?’ Thomas asks Katherine.

  She hardly knows, of course. She is too worried about Rufus, who seems to have retreated within again. He moves flightily, as if under threat, and when he walks he is on tiptoes, and she is freighted with guilt for having let him see all that he has seen, but Thomas tells her there are plenty his age who are already drummer boys, and who carry arrows to bowmen in battles.

  ‘Imagine the things they have seen,’ he says. He does not add that they are usually half-wild things, undernourished and sickly, and most times short-lived.

  They move up into the Vale of Mowbray, past the fields in which they met Horner again, wearing the livery jacket they were given by the charcoalers, and then past the exact wood where the charcoalers must still be at work, silent, secret save for the pale smoke of their underground fires, and Thomas asks Katherine if she would like to visit them, see if they have any more teeth they need pulling?

  ‘It seems an age ago, doesn’t it?’

  At nights they hobble their horses and sleep by the sides of the tents that those who can afford them have brought, and King Edward’s brother Gloucester organises the pickets. There is plenty of bread and ale at this time of year, and the days are still warm, if the nights are less so, and in the morning they wake wet with dew. The second day, they smell bitter smoke of burning rushes and wattle and daub, and suppose this to be the southern limit of the rebellion. There are fresh-dug graves and a definite change of atmosphere as wary women and children watch them ride by. Their men are elsewhere.

  ‘Feels like we’re invading their lands, doesn’t it?’ Jack asks.

  They see five bodies hanging from a roadside oak. One of them is Taplow, wearing only his braies, recognisable because of his oddly cut hair. Flies hum in the air. Thomas stops to consider him. He is covered in nicks and scars, the story of a lifetime of trouble there to be read in his skin. His face is blown up, purpled, and his tongue is out. The man with the cobble nose is there, too, next to him, pigeon-toed, his skin drooping like lard in sunshine.

  Katherine clutches Rufus to her so that he cannot see the corpses, and they ride by.

  ‘It was a matter of when, not if, I suppose,’ Thomas supposes.

  Men start to join them, in dribs and drabs, standing at the roadside, waiting permission. None wear livery. They are obviously Sir Humphrey’s men, deserting in numbers now, and no one is surprised, or even holds their sins against them.

  ‘I suppose we have all been there before,’ Jack says.

  Sir Humphrey Neville and his brother Charles soon see the way this is going, and they desert their remaining men and try to escape to Scotland, but they are as unpopular in their own lands as they were in Bamburgh and they are betrayed before they get ten miles from their abandoned camp. Brought before King Edward in Darlington – the town that Liz would never visit – he has them executed after hearing Mass together at St Cuthbert’s, and men think that only fair.

  Thomas and Katherine take Rufus
elsewhere, walking against the crowds who flock to see it done, and afterwards William Hastings calls for him, worried they have already gone back south now that the rebellion has been crushed so easily, and Thomas finds him alone in a chamber in the White Hart on the road south. He looks sombre, despite everything, and it is obvious he has now heard King Edward’s story of the night they delivered the baby and cut John’s remaining arm off.

  ‘It is a pity your Sir Edmund Riven is dead, Thomas,’ Hastings begins.

  Thomas shrugs.

  ‘No,’ Hastings agrees. ‘Well. Not a pity. But I should have liked the chance to ask him a question or two. Did you know what he was doing in Middleham?’

  ‘He was looking for the same thing as you asked us to find. A book. That is why he took Jack and John and questioned them, because he heard we were asking the same questions, looking for the same thing.’

  Hastings looks at Thomas. Can he tell he is lying? Thomas cannot be sure.

  ‘What did they tell him?’ Hastings asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ Thomas says. ‘They had nothing to tell him. Which is why one of them has lost his remaining arm, and the other’s wife was delivered of a baby while she was in chains.’

  Not that the last is quite true, but Hastings is abashed. He is a good man, after all.

  ‘I am sorry for their troubles,’ he says. ‘I will make it up to them, insofar as I am able.’

  Thomas does not ask about Hastings’s bloodhound, the one coming after the ledger from the other end, and nor does Hastings mention him either, and Thomas prays that with Riven gone, the matter of the ledger is dead. Hastings thanks Thomas for his service, and releases him from it for the time being, and reassures him of his own goodlordship, and Thomas is so mightily relieved he is grinning as he pumps Hastings’s hand, and he promises he will be there for him whenever he should need.

  ‘Let us pray it will not be for some time,’ Hastings says, extracting his hand from Thomas’s palm.

  Thomas is exultant. Now that there is peace between King Edward and the Earl of Warwick, Hastings has let the search for the ledger drop. Thomas breathes deeply, and feels wonderfully unencumbered. Does it mean they are finally free of it? That they might even return to Marton, to return the ledger to its place and leave it there undisturbed, to be forgotten?

  When he returns to his inn to find Katherine, Jack has everyone mounted up and ready to ride. They are itching with excitement to be gone in search of the dead mule in the forests of Tynedale.

  ‘Come on,’ Jack calls. ‘Come on!’

  They heave John into his saddle and leave Darlington, which really wasn’t so bad, and they follow a path that hugs the feet of the hills to the west. They ride for the rest of the day. The countryside is bitter barren up here, with berms of spoil from coal mines like the burial mounds of the ancients, and the heather in the hills is fading from purple to ochre. In the late afternoon there is something in the light that makes them know they are into autumn. Still though, they have much to look forward to, literally, and Jack rides at the front with his wife and daughter with him on his horse, peering ahead, itching for the forest to blot the skyline.

  That happens on the second day’s ride, after another night in the open, when they are told by some friars that the town on the ridge ahead is indeed Hexham.

  ‘Odd, being here again,’ Jack says.

  They ride past the old battlefield, from where Thomas ran, and then cross the bridge, which they’d last seen jammed with troops fleeing the rout, and the water below is quite low at this time of year, and then they are in among the trees on the road that leads up the hill towards the town. Ahead the gates are open and there is a wary Watch who want to know their identities, loyalties and purpose. It is assumed they are rebels, but their accents, from the south, betray them, and there is some suspicion and confusion, though they hardly look threatening: two men capable of bearing arms, perhaps, a man with no arms, two women, a child and a baby. Eventually the story of their travelling to Alnwick in search of a man who owes them money is believed.

  ‘But we must go careful,’ Katherine says. ‘If anyone takes it into their head to accuse us of anything, we are done for.’

  They spend the night in an inn below the abbey and while Thomas thinks of Horner watching the Duke of Somerset having his head chopped off in the market square beyond, Jack and John bicker good-naturedly about the money they think they will find the next day, and they start in with the questions he – Thomas – cannot possibly answer, such as how much he thinks will be there, and whether it will be in gold nobles or silver groats.

  The next morning they are up before dawn, ready to ride out at first light, and are across the bridge and into the forest beyond almost before Rufus knows he is awake. Thomas scans the side of the road, trying to remember where the path diverged.

  In the pell mell of the scattering of Somerset’s men after the rout of Hexham, they’d come hurtling across the bridge, terrified they’d be skewered by Montagu’s prickers, who’d been let loose to do their worst on their fleeing enemy. He and Jack and John Stumps had led a woozily pregnant Katherine along this road northwards until they’d decided to get off the road, and they’d seen a path through the woods that looked unpromising, the sort no one would think of using, and they’d taken it.

  So now they are looking for it again. Is it that one? John shakes his head. Then that one, a little further on? Or that one? There is almost any number of paths and tracks leading off this road.

  They stop. They argue about it. John’s memory is so skewed he thinks the track led off the road to the east. Jack thinks this one ahead might be it. Thomas feels sure it was in a gulley. It is difficult in early autumn to see what was there in late spring, when the leaves were so vivid green. They decide this one might be the track, and venture down it, only to lose heart as the trees close in and it dwindles to nothing, and they must retrace their steps.

  ‘At least no one’s been down here,’ John says, nodding at the unbroken cloth of leaves, disturbed only by deer and perhaps boar, but not man or horse. They regain the road north and ride up it over a hill and then down into a shallow valley through which a small stream runs.

  ‘This is it,’ Thomas and John say at once.

  Now Jack is doubtful.

  ‘Thought you said it was on the other side?’

  ‘I’m sure now,’ John says. Thomas is, too.

  ‘But we left it, do you remember? To find somewhere to shelter for the night. So we have to keep a lookout for that too, even supposing this is the right one.’

  Katherine sighs.

  ‘I wish I had gone south now,’ she says, ‘or stayed in Hexham.’

  They misadventure twice, coming to two dead ends. Along the third path they do at least find a coal mine, but it is not the right one. It is getting on towards the end of the afternoon when they find what they think they are looking for. There is a small trickling stream, and the path is quite steep, through dense foliage. Thomas feels his blood warm. This is it, he is certain. He swings his leg off his horse and the others do likewise, except Nettie, who clings to her baby as it suckles, and Jack leads them up the track behind.

  ‘This is it! This is it!’ John is suddenly sure, too.

  They follow him, shouting and babbling with excitement, and they come to a clearing, wherein is a dark circle of a deep pit. The leaves form a dense layer, undisturbed for many a month at least, and beyond is the hovel in which they sheltered. This is it, all right.

  They hobble their horses and both Jack and John rush to the mine’s edge. They peer down.

  ‘Well?

  ‘I can’t see anything.’

  Jack lies on his belly, with his head and shoulders over the edge of the hole.

  ‘Be careful!’ Nettie calls.

  Thomas looks down into the hole, too. He can remember it all so clearly. The mules being driven by, with Tailboys screaming at his men, before hearing Montagu’s soldiers on the track below. He wonders about Tailboys’s
men now. How did they ever think they would evade capture? Their tracks were like way markers. It was almost as if they wanted to be caught.

  He can hardly make out anything down there in the hole, where the soil and rocks are very black. How far is it down? He plucks a stone from its damp berth and drops it. Thirty feet? How are they to get down there? Of course they have not brought a rope.

  In the end they use a tree: a beech that they finally bring down just before dark, hacking away at it with various blades and pushing it from its roots. Thomas and Jack drag it back down the slope and drop it down. It is just long enough, its bushy top above the lip of the hole.

  Jack suggests they send Rufus down first, but Katherine will not have it, and once they have said not Rufus, they cannot say Jack, so it is up to Thomas. He climbs down backwards. The tree slips first, a jolt that nearly throws him. The sides of the shaft are crumbling black stones and soil. The tree bends under his weight. Without taking a step he is below the lip already. How will he ever get back up? We should have got a rope, he tells himself again. He lets his feet slide down the trunk to the next branch, and then the one after that. Some branches break and the tree lurches.

  Jack tells him to hang on.

  The darkness closes in on him, the walls seeming to circle around. He looks up. Three heads break the circle of light above, peering down at him. Various odd smells rise up. Something has died down here, he can tell, but how long ago? When he reaches the trunk of the tree he has to grip it with his legs and shuffle lower. If he looks down he can see the circle of light reflected in black pools of water. They can’t be too deep since they are small, like fragments of glass in the bottom of a well. He slides off the tree and lands with both feet on a rough pile of something he hopes is dry. It is not. Thick green mud grips his boots.

  ‘Can you see it?’

  ‘Is it there?’

  He takes up a slick black stick that stands clear of the water and stirs the murk. The base of the hole is perhaps five paces across, roughly round, thirty-five feet deep. Roots of trees protrude from the sides and its bottom is filled with all sorts of God knows what. Thomas pokes around in the muck. Nothing looks promising until he sees a smooth stretch of what he knows without knowing is green bone, just above the waterline. He looks closer: a skull, an eye socket. The mule. He plucks a boot from the muck and steps into deeper water. It is sharply cold, for being ever out of the sun, and it fills his boot and comes up to his knees, then his thighs. He wades three steps through the water. It is still and black and somehow denser than normal water, like a soup.