‘Have you found it?’ John calls.
‘Is it there?’ Jack shouts again. ‘Is it?’
Thomas bends over the skull and estimates where the bags – if they are here – might be. There is a thick scum gathered at the water’s edge around the bones, and the smell is cold and rich at the same time. He rolls up his sleeve and dips in his hand. He feels slime-covered things that part before his fingertips. He does not want to think what it might be. Flesh? Or rotten leather? Odd how one would be foul, while the other fine, when they are one and the same, only treated differently after death. He feels nothing more until he scrapes against something hard. A series of bars. The animal’s ribs. At least he knows where he is now. The mule must have broken its neck in the fall. He feels carefully. His hands begin to numb to the wrists. The smell has changed, and the surface of the water is muddier where he has stirred things up. He takes his hands out and shakes the warmth back into them.
‘What’ve you found? What’s down there?’
He does not answer. He puts his hands back and starts sweeping forward. What is he feeling for? He doesn’t quite know. How are coins carried? In small bags? A large bag? Loose? He feels something soft. A pile of matter. Do not think about it. He trawls his fingers through. He is sure he can taste rotten mule in the air. Everything down here is in the process of breaking down, of being temporary, of returning to the earth.
And then, there, is the first feeling he has of something that is not natural, something that is solid and heavy, something that is not returning to the earth. His fingertips brush unyielding rough edges. He stops. Goes back. Picks at the thing. Isolates a seam and then tweaks it with his thumbnail and plucks it and it is—He holds it in his palm. Black. Diseased, somehow. Black and round as an old bloodstain, but heavy.
He rinses it in the dirty water. Scratches it with his thumb. His heart is thundering. It is a coin. He cannot tell from where it comes – if it is French or English – but when he runs his thumbnail over the black, it leaves a scrape of burnished gold.
‘Ha!’ he yells.
‘What is it? What is it?’ they all shout back. ‘What’ve you found?’
‘A coin,’ he calls up. ‘I’ve found a coin.’
There is a moment’s pause.
‘Only one?’ comes Jack’s disappointed voice.
‘No,’ Thomas says, more to himself. ‘No. My God. There are hundreds of them. Hundreds and hundreds.’
24
It is just before noon on a day during the week after Christmas, and Katherine Everingham, with a new woollen cloak and a scarf at her throat, stands in the yard with her hand placed on her turbulent belly and watches Thomas and Rufus walking back up the road from the butts in the village. They are carrying their unnocked bows over their shoulders, a bag of arrows apiece, and two grey lurchers are trotting ahead with their noses pressed to the track.
She is wondering what her husband and son are talking about until she sees Thomas pointing at something in an oak tree before making a curious motion with his hands that she recognises as being the grinding of a pestle in its mortar. They are talking about oak galls and ink-making, she thinks, which pleases her: Rufus has not the makings of a bowman, even Thomas acknowledges that, so it is good to see him enquiring of his father after more scholarly subjects, such as letters and illuminations, at which she fondly imagines he will prosper.
She tightens the scarf around her throat and settles the cloak over her shoulders, and while she waits, she cannot stop her gaze drifting over the sawn ends of the wood in the stack, still well over half-full despite it beyond the year’s turn. Each piece is a testament to their labour since coming back from the Northern Parts, rich beyond the dreams of avarice with all that gold.
To begin with none of them could believe it, since these things did not happen to people such as them. On that first day, after they’d found it, Thomas had climbed out of the mine shaft in the ground and – after some argument – they’d decided to leave the coins where they were, undisturbed under the blanket of murk, and they’d spent the night – once more – in the hut in which they’d once sheltered after the battle of Hexham. The next morning she and Jack had ridden back to the town and, with that single coin Thomas had brought up, bought all they needed and more besides: bags, rope, a new saddle, an extra mule. They returned to the forest to find the others gathered around the rim of the mine, and the next day Thomas and Jack went back down into the hole, and they began hauling up the crusted piles of filthy black coins and piling them in the leaves by its side. At first they danced with joy. Then, as the piles mounted, they stared at them with incredulity, and eventually they became uncomfortable as a subtle, deep fear took hold of each of them.
‘Someone will rob us,’ John said.
But no one did. They spent two days there while Thomas and Jack raked their fingers through the rich black waters to get every last coin, and then when at last they were bagged up and the mules were loaded, they rode south, cagey as cats, careful to appear not worth robbing. They travelled with pilgrims wherever possible, down through the Vale of Mowbray again where the Duke of Gloucester’s men were busy, to York and then on to Gainsborough where they crossed the river, and thence finally to Marton.
Isabella had been waiting for them, having received Thomas’s message, with her new husband at her side, and a patch over one blind eye. Katherine had thrown herself on her knees before Isabella and begged forgiveness for what she had done, but Isabella had lifted her up and kissed her and told her there was nothing to forgive.
‘The sight in this eye comes from you, and from God,’ she said, pointing to it, but despite the success of the cutting, she had become determined not to ask Katherine to cut the other eye, for just as the sight in the first was sent by God, so the blindness in the second was likewise His gift. She repeated that it was a penance for some sin of which she did not wish to speak, and she was certain that suffering blindness now would only shorten her time in purgatory, and so hasten her progress to a seat at the Lord’s right hand. Katherine was grateful.
‘I do not think I could do it again,’ she later told Thomas. ‘Or not successfully.’
It had always struck her that taking the pale disc of the cataract from the ball of the eye would have left a space within which any manner of humour might take residence and lead to permanent blindness. She was lucky, she thinks, that a good humour must have filled Isabella’s, though she still has problems seeing clearly, she says.
When it came to dealing with Isabella’s estate, Sir John Ffytche had been naturally suspicious at first, as of course anyone would be when a man such as Thomas produces such an amount of money, but William Hastings had vouched for him, and that – along with the lure of taking the money for himself – was reassurance enough for Ffytche. Before the lawyers’ seals were dry, the coins had vanished into his own coffers to be transported south by a troop of heavily armed men in his livery.
With Isabella packed and gone, Marton Hall and its remaining estate was theirs at last. Jack and Nettie took over the old house that Thomas and Katherine had built, while John stayed in the hall with them and three servant girls that came up from the village, and it still comes as a shock to Katherine to wake every morning to find that she has the help of three women at her command. And they have needed their help. The work needed to restore the estate to what it once was has been hard and long, and it is yet unfinished. Dykes have had to be repaired, and furlongs have had to be drained again, and left to dry before they can be ploughed; woods have been coppiced for firewood, and for the poles they need to make the pens for the geese and the seven pigs they’ve bought and are keeping through the winter, and for the hovels they’ve started rebuilding with mud and straw dredged from the wet fields. Sheep have been bought in – the sort with forelocks and long wool – and the cow and two oxen and a donkey to lead them, as well as two ponies. They have restored the malt house and the dairy, and they have planted the garden with everything they will need for th
e year ahead.
Katherine has bought bolts of bright-dyed cloth from Lincoln, and clothes are made: jackets for Thomas and Rufus, a curious half-sleeved pourpoint for John, who complains that his stumps get cold, even in the mildest of weather, and dresses for the girls. She has made shoes, stitching the leather with a curved needle as well as any cordwainer, and her family and servants now stand like soldiers, and all memories of the time when they walked with only the skin-thin soles of their boots between them and the bare earth are banished.
And in all that time they have heard nothing of King Edward, or of Lord Hastings, or, more crucially still, despite every great fear, the Earl of Warwick himself. It is as if she and Thomas have been forgotten, or have slipped off the end of the world into the Lincolnshire mud, taking with them all rumour of the ledger. With each day the silence lasts, the more hopeful she becomes that it will last forever: that the days will become weeks, will become months, then years, and that she and Thomas will be permitted to live this life. That they’ll be permitted to plan in advance, battling only the seasons and acts of God, rather than the random whims of madmen who will send them to fight again, in one guise or another.
It came as a shock to find herself here at last, with Thomas and Rufus, with a home of their own, of which no man may legally deprive them, on land of their own, from which no man may legally drive them. Every morning she is surprised to wake with the prospect of a day ahead furthering her own interests, rather than of seven, eight, nine, ten hours spent grinding for another man’s profit, with the only reward at the end of it enough food to survive to do it all again the next day.
On top of all that, she is now with child again. An extra blessing from God.
And now Thomas and Rufus are in the yard, their faces pink with exercise and the cold, but they are well wrapped against it, and happy.
‘Come in,’ she tells them. ‘You must be frozen through.’
Thomas asks how she is feeling and she rolls her eyes and pulls a face.
‘Nettie is cooking,’ she says, for she is unable to stand the smell of stewing meat, and has for the last two weeks lived on nothing but rye bread and ale. She lets them past, and turns and watches with an almost overwhelming sense of fraudulence – as if she does not deserve this happiness – her husband and her son hang up their coats and jackets, and unwrap the scarves, and hurry to crouch by the fire, shoulder to shoulder, to extend their palms to the flames. Thomas asks Nettie how Kate her baby is and Nettie groans and gives the contents of the pot a firm stab with the long stick. It is stewed rabbit they are served, with good fresh bread and ale, and more of the apples with withered skins they gathered in the autumn, and soon there will even be medlars.
After they have eaten Thomas and Katherine and Rufus go out into the yard where Jack has pulled down the tangles of pea haulm from the stables’ rafters and they sit there on the logs, just where Sir John used to sit, and despite the cold they are content, all three of them in the low sunlight, going through the dried stalks, pulling out the peas for spring planting. When that batch is done, they walk with the dogs to the field under the poplars, carrying armfuls of the discard for the two ponies and the conker-brown cow. The animals come over to eat from Rufus’s hands through the fence; he likes them very much, and he talks to them in his own language, and Katherine feels her heart overgrown in her chest, and she thinks that perhaps he has forgotten all the things he has seen in the last year, and that he will miraculously be left undamaged.
When they have fed the ponies and the cow, they walk along to find the sheep where they are nuzzling the new furze of grass in one of the higher fields. Thomas tells her he will have to get Jack to help him trim their nails, for they need that, this breed, but he says they are handsome sheep, and that their wool should fetch a decent sum at market, and so it will be worth it. And they stand awhile, the three of them, close enough to touch one another, their shadows very long on the mud beneath their boots, and she lifts her head to look around at what they have done, what they have made for themselves, and she feels solid, undentable, undimmable contentment.
But then Rufus cocks his head and looks over the heads of the sheep.
‘Who’s that?’ he asks.
He points to the trees, and there, in among the trunks, two hundred paces hence, is a man on a horse, very still, just watching them, and when he sees they have seen him, he turns and slowly rides away.
And in an instant that contentment vanishes like mist under the sun, just as if it had never been.
A Note from the Author
Divided Souls is set in 1469, one of the more complex and peculiar years in English history, during which an Earl simultaneously had two Kings under lock and key, but about which such chronicles as survive are patchy and, even by the usual standards, comically confusing. So, to make any sense of the events, I’ve had to make a couple of bold assertions that may have struck you as improbable, or even ludicrous, and which I should explain.
The first real oddity occurs in the run up to the battle of Edgecote, in July, when Robin of Redesdale came surging down from the North. Why did King Edward dawdle so? No one really knows the answer to this, but though it is possible that he was led astray and given reports that underestimated the threat Robin of Redesdale posed, he seems to me to have been the sort of man who might be prey – up to that point at least – to overconfidence. And so I have imagined him not really bothering to send out scouts, and not really taking too much interest, always sure that when push came to shove – literally – he could beat any rebel army in battle. After all, was he not the victor of Towton?
The second inexplicable oddity occurs the night before the battle itself, when the Earls of Pembroke and Devon argued. It is known they did, but not precisely why. Some chroniclers suggest it was over a woman, and others that it was over accommodation. Now, since this is not what my novel is about, I have gone for the simplest explanation. As a keen camper I know how prized a flat pitch is, and so that is what I went for, since it made me smile. If at some point in the future we discover either of the Earls’ diaries, though, and their explanation is wholly other, then I apologise in advance.
In my defence, the chroniclers at the time were far from certain of events themselves: ‘Hearne’s Fragment’ in Chronicles of the White Rose of York suggests that Edward himself sent the army that defeated the Earl of Pembroke, while Polydore Vergil doesn’t mention the Earl of Devon at all, but has two battles – one between Pembroke and Redesdale, and then another between Pembroke and the joint forces of Warwick and Clarence. Waurin places the battle in Tewkesbury.
Another unknown is under what constraints the Earl of Warwick held King Edward in Middleham in the summer of 1469, and, subsequently to that, under what conditions he let him go. I’ve imagined it as I have, since he was certainly not held as old King Henry VI was – in the Tower – and nor was there any sense that King Edward was not still the King, so he must have been treated as such and held in pretty good condition in what was, by the standards of the day, an extremely luxurious castle. Was it then just understood that he had to stay in Middleham? But that he could not summon his lords – men such as Lord Hastings, and his youngest brother the Duke of Gloucester – until the Earl of Warwick permitted him to do so? Again, my character Thomas would not have been privy to – or necessarily interested in – the arrangements, and since this book is about Thomas, not Edward, then I have simply gone for a largely unspoken understanding between King and Earl.
And as for King Edward’s release, that too is speculation. Some say the Earl of Warwick needed King Edward’s authority to help to suppress the rebellion of Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth, but can that really be true? The Earl of Northumberland could easily have crushed it, I am certain. Indeed, what was the Earl of Northumberland doing at the time? Keeping out of it? No one is quite sure of that either.
I have had to devise likely scenarios for the above so as not to hinder the flow of the novel, since these events are the backdrop
– albeit an extraordinarily colourful one – to Thomas and Katherine’s continuing adventures. However, I have not tweaked known fact (as far as I know) and my suggestions are at least possible, if not – now that I really think about the camping site argument – probable.
What I have glossed over is the debate about exactly who Robin of Redesdale really was, since his identity is unknown. I chose to do this for clarity’s sake, and because to most men fighting, and to all the camp followers, and again, to Thomas and Katherine, I am sure it would not have made much practical difference. For what it is worth, most chroniclers think he was either John Conyers of Hornby, or his son, also, inevitably, John, or his brother, William, of Marske.
I also ought to explain the presence in Divided Souls of no-armed John Stumps, a character who might be presumed to cause more narrative problems than he solves, but who is an homage to a man called Tom Stumps, a faithful servant of the Paston family in their hour of crisis in 1469 when the Duke of Norfolk was besieging Caister Castle, and who claimed, despite his disability, to still be able to use a crossbow. How? Very well, thank you very much.
Another thing that might raise eyebrows is the idea of the Trent being tidal all the way to Nottingham. Sadly I have misplaced the reference to this, but it was, apparently, so. With fewer bridges the tide came all that way. Amazing.
Divided Souls leaves Thomas and Katherine in a moment of calm, though one that cannot last, and I imagine this is what England must have been like at the time. Having the Earl of Warwick as an enemy cannot have been a comfortable position for anyone. And on top of this, King Edward had troubles with his restive brother George, Duke of Clarence, as well as, across the sea, with his old enemy Margaret of Anjou and her son – the warlike Edward of Westminster – who were waiting, constantly nagging anyone with any money to finance an invasion of England.
Divided Souls Page 35
