‘You are busy?’ Thomas asks, nodding at the stilled workers.
‘The Prior of All is coming,’ the boy says, as if this explains everything. Thomas nods, but it means not much to him. He is distracted by raised voices, one concerned, the other irritated, and then the first canon reappears, leading another man, who frowns at Thomas for a long moment, and Thomas stares back and he thinks he might have known this man, that there might be something there, and then the other man starts with recognition. He gapes and flushes, and lifts a hand, half in greeting, half in repulsion, and it is impossible to read the expressions as they flit across his face, each replaced by the next so fast that Thomas cannot divine whether this man is pleased or horrified to see him.
‘It is me,’ he ventures. ‘Thomas Everingham. Do you remember?’
And then the man decides he must smile, and he does so, and broadly, but there is a note of something else there, Thomas thinks, a flicker of some other emotion, though what he cannot say.
‘By Holy Mary and her seven sorrows!’ the man cries, and then he bundles forward and throws his arms about Thomas and he presses himself into Thomas’s chest and pulls him tight and he smells reassuringly of wine and stockfish and musty cloth.
‘I do not believe it!’ he continues. ‘I do not believe it! It is Canon Thomas, back, back from the dead, and with us here, by the grace of God!’
‘Brother Barnaby,’ Thomas says, the words coming unexpectedly, as a surprise.
Barnaby pushes him away, holding him at arm’s length and looks at him archly.
‘Father Barnaby,’ he says. ‘Father Barnaby.’
There are filaments of iron grey in his fringe, but his cheeks are still full and ruddy and he looks prosperous, fat even. He takes a step back, allowing the other man, the first canon, who is standing uncertainly by, into the circle.
‘Brother Blethyn,’ Barnaby says, ‘this is Thomas Everingham, our infamous apostate, returned to the fold at last! And Thomas, this is Brother Blethyn, our Dean and infirmarian. We give the good Lord our thanks for his continued presence among us.’
Barnaby is grinning, but he is shifting from foot to foot, and Blethyn stands not facing Thomas, as perhaps he should, but looking at Barnaby, taking his lead from his newly made Prior.
‘Peace be upon you, Canon Thomas,’ Blethyn says, only his eyes turning to Thomas, ‘and may God give you good guidance.’
‘And you also, Brother,’ Thomas replies.
‘Oh, come,’ Barnaby says. ‘Enough of this. We have wine, and we have some fresh cheese. And a soup.’
Barnaby places a hand between Thomas’s shoulder bones and guides him across the yard toward the almonry, but Blethyn knows he is not included, and he remains motionless. When Thomas glances he is watching them, his face pinched.
‘Great God above,’ Barnaby is telling Thomas. ‘You have been playing the archer? You are all thick, here, like some robber, or man of war! I confess, if I saw you on the road I should be terrified.’
Barnaby guides him, ducking under the lintel and into the gloom of the almonry where sensations press in on him from the shadows, but when he tries to reclaim them, to think them into being, they are gone, slipping away to become peripheral again. Barnaby has delayed by the door, and is talking quietly to someone beyond and then when he comes in, he shuts the door and launches into telling Thomas of the winter they have had to endure, of the privations they have accepted, the test the good Lord has sent them.
A boy comes in and sets to work lighting the peat fire with a steel and after a moment thick brown smoke rises in a column from the sod’s edge to spread across the blackened ceiling of the room. Then the boy whom Thomas saw with the rake comes in with a pewter jug, the contents of which steam in the cool of the almonry, and two earthenware cups on a wooden tray.
‘From the kitchen,’ he says, his gaze fixed on Thomas.
‘Thank you, John,’ Barnaby says. ‘Now, away with you!’
When he is gone, Father Barnaby smiles.
‘You will have to get used to that sort of thing,’ he says when the door is shut. ‘You are famous with the brothers hereabouts.’
‘Why?’ Thomas asks.
Barnaby guffaws.
‘Why? he says! Ha!’
He gestures at the bench while he turns to the tray of wine. Thomas sits while Barnaby pours the wine and passes him a cup.
‘Feel,’ he says. ‘It is warm! God is bountiful! And wants us to drink to your safe return.’
Barnaby takes a small sip, and then sits back just as if he is a man at ease, taking wine over a fire, but his eyes are never still, and he is pent up and restless.
‘So,’ he says. ‘Tell me! Tell me all.’
And now Thomas has to shrug. ‘I have nothing to tell you,’ he confesses.
Barnaby laughs: he still thinks Thomas is joking.
‘Nothing?’ he says. ‘Nothing? When the last we saw of you was your legs as you slid over the wall and out into the world?’
‘I have had an injury,’ Thomas explains, ‘and I can remember nothing, or almost nothing. My brother puts it down to this, to being hit on the head.’
He removes his cap and shows Barnaby the fob of silver hair above his temple. Barnaby stands and comes to investigate.
‘May I?’
Thomas nods. Barnaby presses his fingers into the well. Thomas can hear them above his ear just as if they were inside his head.
‘Jesu! What a dint!’ Barnaby says, sitting down. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Thomas says. ‘I am only now trying to discover its hows and whys.’
Barnaby looks at him very closely, very seriously, with narrowed eyes.
‘So what do you remember?’ he asks.
‘I remember here,’ Thomas tells him, looking about the room. ‘And when I saw this place from the road, I knew that it meant something to me, though not what, or how long I was here, or, what I did while I was here. And as for how I left …’
He waves his hands in the air and recognises with a mild start that he has made the sign to indicate smoke dissipating above an open fire. Barnaby smiles.
‘You remember that at least,’ he says. ‘But do you honestly remember nothing of your departure? You don’t remember the giant? No? Well, perhaps that’s just as well. He would only give you nightmares. What about Giles Riven? Do you remember him? No? The name means nothing to you?’
‘It sounds – known, I suppose, yes,’ Thomas admits. He feels discomfort, a sense of fright even. ‘But who is he?’
So Father Barnaby tells him how this Sir Giles Riven, who used to occupy a nearby castle, once accused Thomas of attacking him and his son beyond the priory’s walls, and Thomas can feel himself pulling a doubting face.
‘I cannot believe it,’ he says. ‘I attacked a man?’
‘So Riven said,’ Barnaby tells him. ‘But it gets better. Or worse, depending on your view of the matter. He challenged you to trial by combat, and you fought him – a knight – in the garth! Out there. You can’t have forgotten that? Surely. Dear God! How unfair. Had I done that, I would never have forgotten it, never have tired of telling the story! You fought him with a quarterstaff, and you beat him. You had him laid out on the ground. You had him there! He was practically a dead man! We all thought you would kill him for what he had done to you, but no. You spared him.’
‘I remember – a stick?’ Thomas tries.
He thinks he can feel it in his hands. Light, paltry, missing some weight, and now he remembers fragments of a fight, in the snow, bloodstained, strong-smelling, hard work and painful, a man hitting him with that stick; and then he recalls a cry, or an echo of one, like the alarm of a crow, and he touches his scalp and looks at the fingers, half-expecting blood.
‘That’s it!’ Barnaby cries. ‘It was God’s judgement, of course, but when you downed him Riven was not happy. His men – the giant. You really don’t remember him? Jesu Christu! We could not decide if he was Gog or Magog!’<
br />
When Barnaby mentions the giant this time there is something, some outline of a memory, something distant in the landscape of his mind; there is also a sort of vast lurking terror, but it will not form, it will not come to life, and Thomas is relieved.
‘But then they killed Brother Stephen,’ Barnaby goes on, his tone sobering. ‘Or that giant did. He nearly chopped him in half. Great God above. I will never forget that. And then they came for you, all of them, and, as I would testify to St Peter at the very gates, you did the right thing. You threw down your stick and you climbed on to the roof of the cloister and then over the wall and then – well. That was the last we saw of you.’
It is like hearing a story about another man.
‘And then afterwards,’ Barnaby continues, ‘Giles Riven and his men came back from the river swearing to do terrible things if ever they found you. Blind you. That was the one thing, because of what they said you’d done to his son, who had his eye out. Then they were going to cut off your stones and put them in your empty sockets – just like that – and set you free to wander the world.’
Barnaby mimes the action. Thomas is aghast.
‘Dear God,’ he says.
‘Oh, there is nothing to fear now,’ Barnaby assures him. ‘Riven went north to join old King Henry’s power when our new King Edward – may God bless his soul – challenged for the kingdom. It was two years ago now, ancient history if you like, but there was a great slaughter, up there, in the north, near York, with so many men dead in the field in that one day, that the angels did not know whether to laugh or cry.’
He takes a drink.
‘And among the dead was Giles Riven, for since then we have never seen or heard of him or his giant. None of his other men came back either, not a one, and the estate – the castle, the farms, the manors, the what-have-yous – well, they have not prospered. He should not have taken the serfs and the churls, we all said that, but he did. He needed the numbers, they said, to fulfil an indenture, and so the bodies of the men who once worked the land hereabouts now serve to fortify some field in the north rather than their own, down here.’
Barnaby likes his joke, but when he tails off to watch the flames among the peat on the hearthstone, he does not do so with a softened focus as a man might ordinarily stare into a fire, but he blinks rapidly, and he nibbles the inside of his lower lip, and Thomas sees he is thinking carefully about something, and that he is prey to nerves, or guilt, or something. But what? After a moment he looks up, his eyes bright with some purpose, as if he has come to a decision, or seen the solution to some awkward problem.
‘And now Cornford,’ he says, ‘this castle that was once Riven’s, and its estates, has gone back to its original owner, or at least to the man who married the original owner’s daughter.’
Barnaby waits looking at him, as if for some reaction, but none of this means a thing, and Thomas can only remain blank-faced. After a moment Barnaby goes on, cautiously, like a man picking his way through a fen, testing the mud before him.
‘The original owner’s daughter’s name is Margaret Cornford,’ he enunciates. ‘Does this mean anything to you, Thomas? Lady Margaret Cornford?’
Thomas feels a significance, a weight, a resonance, but there is no detail, and no image of a face to fit the name. He feels a quickening of his heart, a tightening of his chest, and he feels he is on the verge of something, but after a moment it stops and so he shakes his head. It is hopeless.
‘If I saw her,’ he supposes.
Barnaby stares at him over steepled fingers, and then seems to change the subject.
‘Do you remember taking the ferryman’s punt that day, Thomas? After you absconded?’
Thomas shakes his head again.
‘It is as I say,’ he says. ‘I remember nothing.’
‘It was winter,’ Barnaby prompts. ‘Around Candlemas, while there was still ice on the river.’
He leans forward, waiting, intent. There is a moment’s silence, in which they can hear only the flutter of the flames in the peat. And then from nowhere tears well in Thomas’s eyes. They brim the lids and plash his cheeks. He wipes them with his palms and his wrists but they keep coming.
‘What is wrong with me?’ he mutters. ‘What is wrong with me? I am weeping like a novice.’
‘Let them come,’ Barnaby advises. ‘Let them come. They will help you remember.’
And as the tears flow, Thomas feels a great stone of misery rising to fill his throat.
‘There was a woman,’ he says. But how he knows this he cannot say.
‘A woman,’ Barnaby presses. ‘Yes. Do you remember anything of her? At all?’
‘Oh, by Christ,’ Thomas sobs. ‘I don’t know. I can’t even— Yes. Yes. Or. Oh, by Christ. But. But who is she? Who is she? Is she this Margaret? This Margaret Cornford?’
And now Barnaby sits back, satisfied by something, relieved even, his hands on his knees. He takes a long breath, a sigh almost, and he seems to be playing a different part – older, wiser, sadder – and Thomas feels he has ceded him some power he did not know he had.
‘It is a long, confusing story,’ Barnaby tells him, settling into it, and his role, ‘and I am as yet unsure of all the details, or of the order in which to relate them, but to make sense of it I must begin with Lord Cornford, who was Margaret Cornford’s father, and who was killed in some scuffle, five or six years ago now. He had no issue save this girl, this Margaret, who was betrothed to a cousin, a man called Richard Fakenham. Does that name mean anything? No? They are a small family from the north of here?’
Barnaby gestures and Thomas shakes his head, though the name does perhaps set off a distant peal of recognition.
‘No? Well,’ Barnaby goes on, ‘when Lord Cornford was killed, our Giles Riven seized the castle. I don’t know by what right he did so, though no doubt deception and violence played their part, but at the time, Richard Fakenham – who might perhaps have been expected to take it by right of being betrothed to Margaret – was the Duke of York’s indentured man, and just then that Duke and all his retinue were outside the King’s grace, do you see? But Giles Riven was firmly with King Henry, who was then in the ascendant, so whatever the divers rights and wrongs of the matter, Fakenham was unable to unseat Riven, and the bastard was left to sink his roots into the estate.’
Barnaby wets his throat before going on.
‘Of course, that was before the great reversal,’ he continues, ‘before King Edward drove King Henry from the field at Towton, in the process of which, as I say, Giles Riven met his end, and so now, with him gone, Richard Fakenham is in the ascendant, is he not? The loyal Yorkist, there to receive his reward, through his betrothed wife, of an estate worth, when old Cornford had it and ran it properly, more than two hundred pounds a year.’
Thomas says nothing.
‘Yes,’ Barnaby says, ‘an enormous sum, a great fortune. So this newly minted Richard Fakenham and his wife Lady Margaret arrive – two summers past, it was now – with a retinue of borrowed soldiers and they took the castle, and all the lands, though in parlous state by now, as if by right. And if it had ended there, then that would have been its end. Obviously.’
‘But?’
‘But at around All Souls this last year, the reeve of the castle, a man named Eelby, who is a drunk and a thief actually, and who in quieter times might have long since expected to find himself dangling at the end of a rope, had a wife heavy with child. Now, as from cloth comes the moth, so from womankind comes wickedness, as it is written, and as you know, and it has always been, since Eve first corrupted Adam, but still – but what follows, I confess, shocked me. For it transpired that Lady Margaret, the childing woman’s mistress don’t forget, was herself barren, being married and still without child, and so, filled with such hatred and envy as is unique to her sex, she cut open the reeve’s wife to reveal the child within.’
The fire’s flames have matured, throwing out more heat than smoke, and the bell rings in its tower and Barna
by glances up, and Thomas knows instinctively what time it is and what the bell means, and part of him is pleased he does.
‘So there was an inquest,’ Barnaby continues, ‘as was right, just this last month, and ordinarily a man such as Fakenham would have packed the inquest’s jury with his own men, or he would have paid the coroner some sum, and fixed it that way, so that it was found that there was no felony, and that would have been that. But I have not told you the crucial thing about Richard Fakenham, have I?’
Thomas shakes his head. He supposes not.
‘The crucial thing about Richard Fakenham is that he is blind,’ Barnaby says. ‘Blind, not from birth, nor from cataracts nor any other disease, you understand, but from having had both orbs put out, some time during the recent wars.’
‘Do you suppose he ever encountered your Giles Riven and his giant?’ Thomas asks.
‘I have wondered that,’ Barnaby admits, ‘but whatever its cause, his blindness undid him, for unable to see, he was forced to leave it to his wife, this Margaret, to fix things, and she – well. She either did not know what to do, or she was unable to do it. She being, of course, a woman.’
‘So she was found guilty?’
Barnaby holds up a finger.
‘Not quite,’ he says. ‘It has not progressed that far, if it ever will, because, you see, when this Lady Margaret was brought here, under constraint, in a cart, with no maid or servant, it was discovered a most surprising thing. Can you guess? No? Well, it was discovered that she was not Lady Margaret at all, but another girl entirely, someone else altogether.’
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 8
