‘No,’ she says. ‘No. Tell me. Tell me where you have been.’
He lets his hands drop to his sides.
‘I don’t know,’ he repeats.
‘We thought you were dead.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Or not yet anyway.’
She stares at him, examining him while he examines her.
‘What is that?’
She points to the white hair at his temple. He tells her. She places her fingers against it. He explains. Katherine nods.
‘But why are you here? Here in the priory again?’
‘I came back,’ he says.
‘Why?’
He shrugs.
‘I had to start somewhere. I remembered here. My brother said I was like a bird returning in the summer: I could not describe where I needed to go, but I knew it when I saw it.’
‘Yes,’ she supposes.
‘Why are you here?’ he asks her. She looks at him for a long time, as if wondering where to begin, before admitting that it is a long story.
‘But you are not—? You were hiding from the watchmen, last night?’
She nods and shrugs.
‘As I say,’ she says. ‘A long story.’
‘And why are you wearing my clothes?’ he asks.
‘These are yours?’ she says with a laugh. She pulls on the cloth of the jack.
He sees she is missing the tip of her ear and he asks her about it.
‘You did that,’ she says with a smirk, and he denies it, but she tells him how he was made to do it by the Earl of Warwick and just as he is about to deny it again, he stops.
‘Shhhhh,’ he says suddenly. He holds out a hand. There are footsteps hurrying without. Then someone shouts quickly, a list of instructions. A bell rings, sharp and clear, summoning the lay brethren from their fields and granges. The sun is above the roofline, throwing a barred square of very faint light on the opposite wall of the stable.
‘You cannot stay here,’ he says. ‘They will come to fetch me soon enough.’
He looks around the stable. It isn’t the first time he’s sought a means of escape, of course, but as with all his other searches, this one yields nothing. Katherine takes the blade from him and approaches the door. She slides the blade into the crack and is about to lift it to the door bar when there are voices without. She withdraws the knife and ducks back into her corner. She clutches the blade by her thigh. She looks ready to use it. But the noise is in the next-door stable, where Thomas’s horse is kept. A door bangs and men start calling urgently. Someone coaxes his horse out into the yard and then there are more men coming. Thomas recognises Blethyn’s voice.
‘She will have gone east,’ he is telling the others. ‘Towards Cornford. Check every ditch. Every bush. Everything.’
They wait in silence as the horse is ridden out of the yard and with it the men’s voices fade.
‘You?’ he asks.
She nods.
‘I hoped I’d be at Cornford by now,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t get out of the sisters’ cloister. They have a lock on the door now.’
Thomas peers through the gap between door and jamb. After a while he turns to her.
‘They have forgotten about me,’ he says. She is still staring at him, as if unable to believe he is back, and still holds the makeshift blade by her hip.
‘Will it work?’ he asks, nodding at it.
‘Try,’ she says, offering it to him. He stands listening, his eye back at the sliver of light between door and jamb, then, after a moment, he slips the blade in, just as she had done, and lifts. The stable drawbar is even easier, for the door fits less well, and there is at least the width of a finger with which to work. He moves the bar back, then forward.
‘Hah,’ he says. ‘I could have done that with almost anything.’
Then he looks around. There is nothing.
‘It will soon be the chapter meeting,’ he tells her. ‘We will go then.’
She nods. That makes sense, it seems.
‘Why do they keep you here like this?’ she asks. Thomas shrugs.
‘They say I am an apostate,’ he says. ‘And Barnaby wants to show someone – the Prior of All, I think – that I am safely back in cloister, not out in the world bringing shame on myself and on them.’
Again she nods.
‘And they want me to finish a psalter I once worked on,’ he continues, holding up an inked finger. ‘Though they do not trust me with it yet. I think they fear I will rip it to pieces, so they give me endless scripture to practise my pricking out and lettering instead.’
She scoffs.
‘I have been washing linen since Candlemas,’ she tells him, holding up her own hands. They are red-skinned, her fingers almost claws. Then, while they wait, she tells him everything. She tells him about how they met, how Barnaby’s Giles Riven attacked her, and how he – Thomas – saved her, and she says that he once told her he fought a duel with the man, though she did not see it herself, and then how they escaped the giant on the ferryman’s punt, and how they met the pardoner, and then took a ship to Canterbury to find the Prior of All to explain their case, only to be diverted when their ship was captured by Sir John Fakenham and then sailed to Calais, ‘which lies over the Narrow Sea, in France’.
Then she tells him they came back and came to live in Marton Hall with Richard Fakenham, the knight from Barnaby’s story, and she tells him they were happy, then, and she tells him of a journey to Wales that they made, and how their friends were killed, one by one, by a giant and the son of Giles Riven, and then she tells him how Margaret Cornford died in the snow one night, and how she became Margaret Cornford in her place.
And he is astonished, but thinks, this could be a story from the Old Testament, from the Book of Kings, perhaps, for all the names and the places she mentions are as distant to him as is Jerusalem.
She goes on, and tells him how Richard Fakenham came to be blinded, and how they went north together, all of them, with a hammer, intending to find and kill this Giant, and Giles Riven, and even his son if they could and he almost laughs. Then she tells him how it was for her during the battle, about how she removed an arrow from the Earl of Warwick’s thigh, and then about the days and months after it.
‘I thought you were dead,’ she says. ‘We all thought you were dead. We looked for you. Richard and Mayhew and I. All that night. There were so many of them dead. All those men. You must have seen. And it just became …’
She shakes her head. She cannot describe what she saw. The act of remembering almost chokes her and for a moment she cannot continue. He reaches out to touch her, but she pushes his fingers away. Then she gathers herself.
‘We thought we’d found you,’ she says. ‘Someone called out my name. Katherine. It turned out – it turned out it was a Welshman, likewise called Thomas, married to a woman called Katherine too. Richard and Mayhew were confused. Why would I answer to a man calling out Katherine when they knew me to be Margaret? But, that night, they were confused as to why we were there in the first place, to tell the truth. I told them you had saved me from certain death, and it was my chance to do the same for you.
‘So we stayed with William Hastings,’ she goes on. ‘In his household in London and I waited, but all the time I thought, what are the chances? If Thomas is gone this long, then he is gone. Otherwise he would be here by now.’
Then she tells him how she came to marry Richard Fakenham, because how could she not? And then how Richard insisted they take Cornford, since that was what it was all about, and that was what his father wanted, though she seems unsure of this. Then she describes how they left Hastings’s household in London and with a few men and a cart full of wedding gifts, they had come east to Cornford.
‘And Richard Fakenham thought all this time you were Margaret Cornford? He did not know you were – you?’
She shakes her head in sorrow.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I was caught in the trap of the initial lie, and every moment it bound me tighter.�
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Then she describes the day she killed Agnes Eelby.
‘I have wondered so often what else I could have done, if I had my time again. Of course I would have gone to find that midwife sooner. I would have sought some advice, but if it was only the day on which it actually happened, then as all the saints are my witness, I would have done the same thing again.’
She says this as if he might doubt it, but he does not, for he can see she believes she did the right thing. Afterwards they both look at different parts of the stable floor. Then, when the bell for the chapter meeting rings, they gather shoulder to shoulder by the door in silence, Thomas’s eye at the crack, waiting. He can see the canons making their way to the chapter house, and at length the sounds of hurrying footsteps pass and, except for the sound of the chickens, silence descends.
They are silent for as long as it might take to say the rosary, and all through it, Thomas wants to take her in his arms, but he fears she would try to kill him if he tried, and then he wonders if he can stand it a moment longer, but instead of trying, he takes the knife and uses it to slide the bar back and he gently pushes the door open. The yard is deserted. Even the chickens are elsewhere. They are about to leave when Thomas returns to the mattress and collects the leather bag containing the pardoner’s ledger.
‘Ha!’ she says, pleased to see it. ‘Thank God you have it still. They took it from me when they brought me back here and I thought I had lost it for ever.’
Thomas passes her the bag while he slides the gate’s huge drawbar back in its brackets. She holds it, and then he takes the bag back and slings it over his shoulder, just as she has seen him do a hundred times, and then he opens one half of the gate and then, like that, they are out of the priory and into the world.
PART THREE
Toward Marton Hall, Marton, County of Lincoln, End of May 1463
8
‘RUN NOW,’ HE says, and they do, as fast as they can in their bare feet, along the dusty, rutted and pocked road for a hundred paces or so, down to the mill by the newly built bridge, where the waterwheel has been jammed to stop it turning and water flushes loudly through the rill. The miller is absent, as is the ferryman.
‘Looking for you, I suppose,’ Thomas says.
It is warm. The sun is on their faces, there are towering thunderheads to the east, and the colours of the fens seem unnaturally vivid. There will be a storm soon, he thinks. He is wearing almost precisely what he was wearing last time he was here, but what is different about him is that this time he is so much stronger; he can flip the ferryman’s punt with one hand, despite it being newly made and heavier, and while she fetches the boat pole, he slides the punt down to the river’s edge. He stops it there and stands and looks about, as though caught by a thought. She watches him for the briefest moment.
‘This is where that giant had you,’ she tells him, and she touches her right eyelid. ‘I knocked him out, with something like this,’ she says, passing him the pole, ‘and we should have killed him then and there. We know better now.’
She climbs into the punt and settles herself. He launches it out on to the water and clambers in after her, and once again he stands at the back with the pole and he pushes off, swinging the craft out into the current.
Then they hear the cry.
‘Dear God,’ she says, pointing. ‘It’s them.’
Three lay sisters are running down from the priory, across the furrows of the rye field. They are carrying beetles and their skirts are flying. They come fast and the first one hits the water without a pause and is up to her waist before she realises it is deeper here than she is used to, and she cannot swim. The other two plough into the water just as readily, but neither can they swim, and they stop alongside the first. The water stains their cassocks at their waists and together they start shouting at Katherine, demanding she return. Threatening to kill her if she does not.
‘Leave me be,’ Katherine shouts. ‘Go home and leave me be!’
One of them throws her beetle at Thomas. It misses him and hits the far edge of the punt with a dense ring. Katherine stops it going overboard and holds it up in ironic salute. The sisters realise they are losing and they turn and forge back through the waters and up the bank. They are sodden, their skirts heavy, their bare feet brown with sucking mud. The younger one is fringed in dripping bright green weed. After a brief argument she is sent running back to the priory for help while the other two shadow Thomas and Katherine along the river’s bank.
‘They will not catch us,’ Katherine tells Thomas, seeking reassurance. ‘We came this way before, chased by the giant, you remember?’
Thomas nods, though he does not, not really.
‘Where are we going?’ he asks.
‘Cornford,’ she tells him.
Cornford, he thinks. The castle. After that she is silent, lost in thought. The sisters are still there on the bank, just as the giant was. They have stopped their threats and now are merely calling on Christ and the martyrs to assist them as they clamber over the willow fences and wade through the ditches that drain the fields. Katherine’s head is turned and she looks the other away, across the fens towards her castle, and there is a moment of sunlight and in it Thomas sees how pale she is, as a daisy petal, and how sharp and fierce she looks, with that frown and the pointed nose. It makes him smile for some reason, and he feels for a moment fiercely protective.
They come to the place where the riverbanks veer apart and before them is the larger body of water, smooth, brown and even faster flowing, and the punt is dragged away by the stronger current.
‘I shall not miss them,’ Katherine says, without a backward glance. She pulls her knees closer to her chest, and stares south. Thomas watches her sitting there, the beetle across her shins, and he can see her clipped ear and how fretful she is, but she does not look sorry for herself, which, he thinks, if he were her, he might. After a while they pass a village and Katherine points to a spot on the bank a little further down.
‘This is the end of the Cold Half-Hundred drain,’ she says. ‘We can walk from here.’
Thomas digs the pole into the waters and the punt yaws towards the bank and after a moment they come nudging into a stand of reeds and Katherine crouches in the punt’s bow and leaps ashore, conscious now of the value of keeping her hose dry, and then she turns to haul the boat out of the water. Thomas joins her and they haul it through the reeds and leave it with its pole for the ferryman to find. He scrambles up the man-made barrow and at the top finds himself the object of scrutiny of some sheep that stir in among the reeds. They are ugly, muddied things with sad faces and matted fleeces the colour of snow clouds.
She stands looking about them, regaining her breath.
‘What are you looking for?’ he asks.
‘Rabbits,’ she says. Then she asks if he has anything to eat. He shakes his head. She hisses a laugh.
‘It is always the same, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Nothing changes.’
They set off, Thomas slinging the ledger over his shoulder as feels comfortable, and they follow the rough track raised on the bank. On one side: the ooze of the marshes, shimmering in the sun, and on the other: the quicker, weed-speckled waters of the drain. Gulls wheel above, and the air smells of mud and rotting things. She walks ahead, huddled into her metal-lined coat, wrapping the still-damp folds about her narrow frame.
‘How far is the castle?’ he asks.
‘Beyond those trees there,’ she says, pointing ahead over a stretch of boggy ground that looks impassable, to a broad copse of sappy willows above which he can now see the dark details of a stone tower. Katherine is looking around, frowning at the stretches of reeds and rushes, at the pools of black mud through which long-legged wading birds strut, dipping after worms and things. There is a broken sluice gate letting the water from the drain gurgle into a field of liquid mud.
And she sets off, picking up her pace, slapping the beetle into the mud with every stride, doing it to reassure herself as she guid
es them through the marsh, her hose becoming heavy and sodden so that he thinks she ought to go bare-legged, but they walk on, keeping the drain on their right, following it to a long stretch of reed-stippled water where there is another silver-timbered punt pulled up on a bank on which sits a duck. He wishes he had a bow with an arrow. They skirt the pool where there is a broken jetty for a fisherman, and they follow a path up through some more greenery to a broad causeway where some houses line a road. As they approach they see none of the comforting sights you might expect, such as hearth smoke, children, dogs, women at work.
‘Where are they all?’ she wonders aloud.
‘Looking for you?’ Thomas suggests.
‘No,’ she says. ‘They are my people. Something is wrong.’
Thomas follows Katherine up on to the road, where they have a view of the castle. Thomas waits while Katherine stoops to look inside a cottage by the roadside. There is nothing much to see, no sign that anyone lives there. The next is the same. She looks at him, seeking reassurance. He can only shrug. She hurries on. Her eye is fixed now on the castle roofline, above which there is the suggestion of smoke, as if it, at least, is occupied. Thomas follows. They emerge into a clearing and he sees that the castle is on an island, reached by a bridge first to one island on which there are what look to be stables, then another bridge, turned at a right angle, to the castle’s gatehouse. They cross the first bridge together over the still, black waters of the moat and find the stable empty, and there is only old cow dung underfoot, none fresh. They cross the second bridge, a drawbridge, and enter the cold damp shadow of the small gatehouse where the gates hang open, one of them broken, and they come into the courtyard where there is an eruption of barking, and two dogs fly at them, scrabbling and baring their teeth. Their chains bang taut bringing them up short but Thomas and Katherine leap back.
‘By Christ!’
The dogs stand on their chains, growling and snapping, saliva spraying, ugly, broad-jawed, wall-eyed, the sort to bait bears, their smell enough to make a dyer flinch. Behind them a man appears in a doorway in the yard. He is barrel-bellied and furtive, a piece of cooked meat in his hand, grease in the greying bristles on his fat, wind-mottled face. He is at first cautious, but when he recognises Katherine he is startled, then seems to recover himself. He takes a clumsy step down, and throws the meat between the dogs, who begin to fight.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 12
