‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
‘I will cut her,’ Katherine says.
Widow Beaufoy nods.
‘Very well,’ she says, ‘but do not use any of those knives. Use one of your own.’
Katherine looks at the kitchen knives on the far table. Both are fat-bladed, clumsily wrought, probably blunt.
‘I have none other that is suitable. Come on, we must hurry.’
Widow Beaufoy is anxious. She fiddles in the roll and passes a small blade to Katherine.
‘This will never do,’ Katherine says. ‘Pass me that one.’
Widow Beaufoy is reluctant.
‘That knife is the dearer,’ the girl suggests.
‘I will pay you for it,’ Katherine says. Widow Beaufoy nods and suggests a price to which Katherine agrees, but only because time is fleeting. The knife is very fine: eight inches long, perhaps, with a short, ornamented blade so sharp she can almost already see it parting the layers of taut skin that cover Eelby’s wife’s belly. This thought frightens her, but she remembers how she cut Sir John’s fistula, and how she could see herself doing that before she actually did it. In the moments after the operation, when she knew Sir John would live, she had wondered to herself if her hand had not been guided by God. And now here she is, having those same feelings again.
‘Will you help?’
‘I will call the priest first, yes, then I will be there to keep the blood from your eyes.’
‘Would you show me where to cut?’
‘It hardly matters where you cut since you will kill her wherever you do it.’
Katherine looks at Eelby’s wife. Her breathing is quick, her skin waxy and she is sweating heavily. The soporific must be strong.
‘But she will die anyway?’
Widow Beaufoy nods.
‘She is almost there now.’
‘Then fetch the priest,’ Katherine says, and she steps back, into the shadowy pantry where the dry goods are kept. She does not want to be seen, even though she knows the priest will not recognise her. Widow Beaufoy draws Eelby’s wife’s dress down, pushes her knees and ankles together and then calls the priest.
When he comes in he is not the snow-haired old man of whom Thomas used to speak, whose voice she had so often heard floating over the wall at Mass through her youth, but a much younger man, her own age perhaps. He is wearing a pale cloak over his cassock and when he removes his worsted cap, his fringe of hair is nondescript brown.
Harrington calls him Father Barnaby.
Katherine stares at the priest from the shadows. Can this be the same Barnaby whom Thomas mentioned as his friend in the priory? It must be. Distractedly she wants to reach out and touch him, to retrieve some notion of Thomas.
But he is mumbling to Widow Beaufoy, who gives him the correct responses to his questions, before he turns and retrieves a phial of liquid from his purse; he moves to stand over Eelby’s wife, at her head, and he begins chanting some words. He shakes the phial, speckling her with water, before anointing her with some chrism and making the sign of the cross over her body. When the ceremony is over, with Eelby’s wife all the time unconscious, Widow Beaufoy hurries the priest from the kitchen and calls for the girl.
‘Get as many cloths as you can,’ she says. ‘Take them from anywhere, from the table, from the cupboard in the solar. And Harrington, we need more water, plenty of it.’
She returns and throws more wood on the fire, and something else, some herb or other, that fills the room with an acrid smell. As Katherine steps out of the pantry, Widow Beaufoy is scattering wands of the herb into the puddles on the floor and on the table around Eelby’s dying wife.
‘It helps keep the miasma away,’ she says.
Katherine’s hands are trembling. She feels jittery, as if she has not eaten for a day. She tries to calm herself, to remember the hospital in Towton. The surgeon’s assistant’s name was Matthew Mayhew. She remembers Sir John and his soporific.
‘Will she feel anything?’ she asks Widow Beaufoy.
‘No,’ Widow Beaufoy tells her. ‘She is still alive, but I have given her a sedative to put her beyond the realm of suffering.’
Dear God, she thinks. Dear God.
But she takes the knife and places its point just below the belly button.
‘Lower, I think,’ Widow Beaufoy says.
The line on Eelby’s wife’s belly is the line that Katherine will follow. She presses in the tip and produces a bead of blood that slips down the oiled skin. She edges the blade down, from the belly button towards the pubis, hardly scratching the surface, but the skin parts under its tension. Blood runs, following the point of the knife, but there is nothing like the amount Widow Beaufoy predicted.
‘You have only parted the skin,’ Widow Beaufoy tells her. ‘Now you must part the flesh.’
The flesh is harder to cut. It is tense and sprung, and as Katherine cuts through it so the blood begins to pour from the wound. It seethes out, and covers her hands and arms, and is all over her dress, the one that Hastings gave her, and the knife is slippery with it. Blood washes across the table. It gurgles in the wound from where it runs to the stone floor. It keeps coming. It is like a bowl that fills from below, like a spring, a rising head of a conduit, filling up. They could spoon it out of her.
‘Dear God.’
‘Keep going,’ Widow Beaufoy says. ‘Another pass.’
Katherine slices again. There is so much blood she can see nothing of the wound, almost nothing at all. The texture, though, is softer, as if she is into a different layer. Something like thickened water, as warm as a bath, spreads from the heel of the wound, across the table. She can feel it on her knees, filling her boots. Eelby’s wife seems to have deflated. Her skin is wrinkling, and the belly that a moment ago had been ripe has now gone over.
‘There,’ Widow Beaufoy says and she points at something within the lips of the cut. Katherine drops the knife on the table. Widow Beaufoy shoulders her aside. She slides her hand into the wound. She is frowning. But then her eyes go wide. They are very white against the blood on her cheeks. She looks at Katherine, then at the girl, and she nods at her. The girl breaks into a smile and scrabbles in the bag once more.
Now Widow Beaufoy is gentle.
‘Here we are,’ she says. ‘Here we are. Great God above. It has caught my finger!’
She is beaming. Her hands are in the wound, now up to her wrists. Blood is everywhere, her clothing drenched. Widow Beaufoy stretches, then pulls, just as if she were harvesting something from the garden. After a brief tug of resistance, she has it out, feet first, through the lips of the cut and out into the blood-scented air.
‘A boy!’
It is disgusting, repellently ugly, blue almost, coated with blood and a thick layer of bloodied fat. A grey tube connects it to the wound.
‘Take it,’ Widow Beaufoy says. She passes the baby to Katherine, who is half-laughing, half-crying. She holds a life, small, but miraculously there, scorching and stinking, in her bloody palms. And now Widow Beaufoy is quick and deft. She ties something around the cord three or four times, finishing it with a quick knot and then, collecting Katherine’s new knife from the table, she slices it through. The cord falls loose, looping from the wound, tied off at its end.
Katherine cannot stop staring at the baby. It is moving gently in her cupped hands, hot and restless, terrifying. Then the girl steps over, quickly taking it from her. She wraps him in a piece of cloth and takes him away to rub him with wine and butter. Katherine is left empty-handed, with nothing now to do. She is wet with blood, every inch of her skin beaded with it, her dress heavy with it. She can taste slate in her mouth.
She looks around the kitchen. Widow Beaufoy stands at the far end of the table, and she closes Eelby’s wife’s eyes with a bloody palm.
Then it breaks on Katherine what she has done.
She has killed another woman.
Lying on the table is Eelby’s wife, gutted and splayed, just as the cat had
been the day before. She is a puddle of deflated flesh, an empty bucket. Her dress is pulled up around her ribcage and her legs apart either side of the table, and there is nowhere that is not blood-soaked, even the rough beams of the roof. The kitchen reeks. It steams.
Katherine takes a step back, the hem of her dress in the blood on the floor.
It is dark outside now.
‘We had better get the husband in,’ Widow Beaufoy says, and the dogs that have been quiet all this time, start howling again.
3
THOMAS EVERINGHAM SLEEPS in the hall with his brother, his brother’s wife, their two boys, three dogs and a cat that shits in the corner where the rushes are oldest. Of them all Thomas is held in the least regard. His brother’s wife, Elizabeth, calls him a simpleton and shouts at him.
‘Do this, simpleton!’ she says, or ‘Do that, simpleton!’
And her husband John watches with tired eyes as his younger brother stiffens, then shuffles to do what she has ordered in that slow, tripping manner of his. Thomas has been on the farm since he turned up last spring, when the weather had just turned, some time after Eastertide, and though he has made himself useful in the year that has passed, Elizabeth wants him gone.
‘We did not expect the idiot to appear,’ she tells John, ‘so we will not miss him when he has gone.’
‘He is my brother,’ John tells Elizabeth, and they look over the fire at Thomas and he looks back, but his eyes are as blank as a mule’s. They have learned he understands almost nothing they say, or at least reacts to none of it, unless it is one of the Elizabeth’s orders.
‘Strange,’ John says, watching him. ‘Strange that he only knows the things he knew as a boy here.’
Elizabeth mutters something under her breath. John ignores her.
‘Though I suppose anyone’d forget a thing or two if they’d been walloped like that,’ he concludes.
When Thomas arrived at the farm the year before it had been the time for lambing and his hair had been matted with blood and there was a wound on the side of his head into which Elizabeth thought she might be able to slide her finger to touch his brain. She did not, though, and as the summer passed the wound had healed itself; now, a year later, the hair over the scar has grown back in a silver streak.
‘Let’s make up the bed,’ John says, for it is nearly dark.
‘Idiot!’ Elizabeth calls. ‘Idiot!’
John tuts but Thomas looks up.
‘Fetch the mattress.’
Thomas gets to his feet and shuffles to where the mattress is stored rolled on long pegs hammered in under the eaves. He brings it to the firelight, stepping over the boys and a dog where they lie, and he unrolls it for John and Elizabeth. He himself sleeps further from the fire, beyond the dogs, in a dip in the hard earth floor that he has worn with all the twitches and jerks that wrack his body when he sleeps.
In the mornings he is always awake first and he leaves the rest of the family bundled together by the fire’s covered ashes while he goes out into the yard and through the stock fence to relieve himself in the privy. Every time he does this he pauses a moment. He stops and looks around him with narrowed eyes, as if remembering some long-forgotten time, but after a moment he looks up at the pale sky and seems to forget what it was that he’s remembered, and he presses on, scattering the pigeons that peck at the straw by the cow’s byre. He feeds the sheep hay from the rick and then collects a crooked armful of the logs he chopped in the autumn, takes them in, lays the fire and then returns to milk the cow.
His days continue like this; small tasks punctuated by bread and ale first and last thing, and at dinner some meat in a sauce with root vegetables. When it is very cold the red wheals on his hip and across his shoulder ache, and he limps, but otherwise he seems mostly content to do what is he is told, and to do it until he is told to stop.
And at least he is warmly dressed. They have given him a woollen coat and a sheepskin hat, and his boots do not let in, though the soles are without a heel, so that he sometimes slips, and when he does, and falls in the shit, John’s boys laugh out just as if they have engineered the accident themselves.
He does not speak and so he cannot tell them if he remembers arriving at the farm, or how he found his way there from wherever he came, though Elizabeth will tell anyone who will listen that when he first appeared he was more like an animal than a Christian, and that his clothes were stiff with blood and worse, and that if John had not recognised him, she would have set the dogs on him and got the boys to drive him away with shots from their practice bows.
They would not let him in the house for those first months and all summer he slept with the sheep on the hills above the farm. After a while he began to bring water in unasked and John remembered that this had been Thomas’s task when he was a boy, before their father went off to the wars in France, before their mother died. Day by day they got him to do more. Soon he was looking after the cow and then helping the shearers when they came to do the sheep. He helped John take the wool to the market and the grain to the windmill. He dug over the vegetable plot, guided the oxen across the rye field and broadcast the seeds.
When Thomas had first arrived, people – especially those who knew him as a boy – were interested in him. After Mass they would look at him as he stood waiting outside the church and they would ask him questions, but he would never say anything, just gaze back at them, sometimes smiling, sometimes more fearful, and soon it was known he was an idiot, and it was only the boys from the other farms who followed him around and threw things at him, though that stopped after the elder of John’s two boys – Adam – fought one of them almost to the death, and would have gone beyond had not Thomas been there to pull them apart. He’d held each boy up in the air, at arm’s length, their toes straining to touch the ground like men being hanged, and when he dropped them they scrabbled away in silence, their eyes fixed on his pale face.
Adam’s brother William is the gentler soul, with red hair and the palest blue eyes that come down from his mother, and he can happily sit in the yard helping her spin yarn on the wheel while Adam roams restless about the woods looking for things to kill. William is generous to Thomas, and gives him things Elizabeth would not want him to have: a pair of fulled socks, a salve for his hands made from honey and sage leaves, a shepherd’s cow-horn crook he has made himself.
John let him sleep in the hall when the weather turned at the end of autumn, at about the time they cut and butchered the pigs and the air was filled with the smell of burning hair, and that was when they discovered that he had terrible nightmares, and that he could speak after all, for he would call out in the dark, crying out to the Lord and to someone else whose name they can never agree on.
‘Who was it last night?’ they’d ask in the morning.
‘Dick,’ Adam would say.
‘Azrin,’ William would say.
‘That’s not a word,’ Adam would counter.
‘Doesn’t need to be,’ William would say and Elizabeth would agree with John and Adam would be sent to see if the geese had laid any eggs, or if the malt in the malthouse was likely to sprout that day. After a month or so the family came to accept Thomas sleeping in the house. They came to understand that when he shouted out in the dark and when he screamed and when he was rigid with what John said was terror, it would soon pass. They covered their ears and waited until he slipped back into burbling slumber, only occasionally interrupted by twitches and writhings. John said this was even a comforting sound, better at least than the sound of the mice or the cat chasing them, better than the sound of Adam farting.
As autumn gave way to winter, the soldiers started coming through the valley. They came up from the west and the south, small companies making their ways to join the road that led northwards to the castles in the East March, castles such as Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh, those that were still holding out for the old King. Sometimes they were organised and led by well-dressed men on good horses, with gloves and rings on their fingers, and
baggage mules; others were in worse straits, down to their last loaf, horses in need of shoeing. Both sorts and all those between were fugitives, though, always careful about where they went, what they said, and to whom they said it. Some did stop and talk though, in return for bread and ale and hay for their horses.
‘Put off my land,’ one of them told John. ‘His grace’s been attainted and some new man’s arrived, some connection of the Earl of Warwick. Met me with the offer of serving him, or shifting for myself. So.’
The soldier shrugged his big, archer’s shoulders and adjusted his straw hat over his ruddy face. He eyed Thomas, recognising something in him perhaps, and nodded slowly, his hand resting on the hilt of a big knife stuck in his belt.
‘But why don’t you serve this new man?’ John asked.
‘Thought of that,’ the soldier said. ‘But what happens when his grace gets back? He’ll have something to say then, won’t he? That’s for sure.’
‘Will he get back?’
‘Course he will. Can’t keep someone like the Duke of Somerset down.’
‘The Duke of Somerset? You served him?’
‘Aye,’ the man said proudly. ‘And his father before.’
John nodded.
‘So where is he now? The Duke?’
‘Alnwick?’ the man says. ‘Or Bamburgh? Or the other one. There are three of them up there. Three or four. Dirty great big castles, each held against this new King and the Earl of fucking Warwick.’
The man spat but John was surprised.
‘Are there many of the old King’s men left?’
‘Not so many as there were,’ the soldier admitted. ‘Not after Towton Field. But there are some and they’re all making their ways to the castles up there to wait until the Queen comes with her men, from France, you know, or maybe Scotland, and old Tudor comes with his Welshmen, and then we’ll see a clean pair of heels from the Earl of Warwick and this new King of his making.’
‘You mean there’ll be more fighting?’ John asked.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 4
