Kingmaker: Broken Faith

by Toby Clements

  When they need something – more of the distillation – or they get hungry, they send Jack to find Horner and Horner might come to check on the boy, bringing a hard loaf of bread and some watery ale, and he usually has some new tale to tell about Grey:

  ‘He wants me to find him a woman,’ he tells them. ‘Not just any woman – a negress.’ Or: ‘He wants green ink.’ ‘A live turtle.’ ‘Someone to teach him Genoese.’

  And they’ll shake their heads and sympathise. Sometimes they hear Grey shouting in the night. He goes up to the battlements at the top of the keep with a flask and his hawk and he rants all sorts of comical obscenities, usually about the Earl of Warwick, or the Earl of March, sometimes about Horner, often about someone called Ashley. And the next morning a pallid Horner will appear with rings under his eyes.

  ‘What’s it like in Bamburgh?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Better,’ Horner admits.

  One morning, when it is cooler and looks set to rain, Grey makes his way across the bailey, unconvincingly steady on his feet, a feverish rosiness in his cheeks, smelling of his distillation and with Horner trailing in his wake. It is the first time they have seen him since the cutting, and he has come to see the boy, who lies on his damp bed in the gloom, having taken a turn for the worse. Grey prods him with a toe.

  ‘Looks like I shall win my wager,’ he tells them. ‘Though by the Mass you do put on a fine show. If you’re alive at the end of all this, do you know I’ve half a mind to make you my own? How would you like that, eh, boy? Surgeon to the most powerful man in the whole of the Northern Marches and beyond? It could happen, you know? Hmmm? It could.’

  And Horner closes his eyes and Katherine looks over at Thomas and Thomas knows just what she is thinking: they really cannot show Grey the ledger. He will lose it, burn it, drop it down the chute in the garderobe. Or, worse, he will fumblingly understand it for what it is and take it to King Henry himself and claim some advantage for himself alone, forgetting Katherine and Thomas and Sir John Fakenham, if ever the scheme to proclaim Edward illegit-imate were to come good.

  ‘My confessor tells me today it is the feast of St Luke,’ Grey continues, clapping his gloved hands together. ‘So we have but two weeks until the big day, after which we will learn if Horner will owe me a noble, or I him, and whether or not you two shall be hanged for spies.’

  The next day all are there to see the boy open his eyes, and hear his few stammered words. He swears and bucks with the pain, pulling at the stump as if he means to tear it off, and Thomas and Jack are quick to throw themselves on him, pinning him down while Katherine forces him to drink some of Grey’s spirit.

  When he is sufficiently stupefied, they relax.

  ‘He will live,’ she announces.

  ‘My God!’ Thomas says. ‘You are a miracle worker.’

  He cannot help beaming at her, and Jack looks unsure, as if he is intruding on something, and he leaves them to it.

  She has missed being alone with Thomas, but though Devon John is unconscious, she still feels anxious when he wraps his arms around her.

  ‘If anyone should catch us, Thomas …’ she says.

  ‘I cannot help it,’ he says.

  And she tries to imagine what would happen then. She is certain that the gibbet would come as a mercy.

  He lets her go and steps away to pace awkwardly.

  ‘We did not come here for this,’ he says. ‘We didn’t come to rot here with Grey. We must get out. Find King Henry.’

  She nods.

  ‘But how?’ she asks, looking around them at the damp curtain walls. ‘It seems as easy to break out of a castle as to break into it.’

  The gatehouse is always closed and guards armed with nocked bows patrol walkways, there to deter deserters as much as intruders. Their only hope is to be sent on a patrol with Horner, and attempt to slip away as opportunity affords, but so far they have not been permitted out of the castle’s great encircling wall.

  ‘And even if we managed it, we should have to go to Scotland.’

  Scotland sounds horrible, and impossibly far.

  But just then the church bells start ringing and Horner approaches, striding across the bailey, looking purposeful and pleased.

  ‘Finally,’ he calls from some distance. ‘Finally! King Henry is coming to Bamburgh.’

  They look at one another. It is uncanny.

  ‘Why?’ she asks.

  Horner is nonplussed, because why wouldn’t King Henry come to Bamburgh? But Katherine wonders if it means the Scots have ejected him, as was threatened, and so there will be no more help for Henry’s cause from that source, and what few supplies they have, well, they will soon be used up, won’t they? And after they are, what then? But Horner is not interested in that.

  ‘Now all we need is one spark!’ he says. ‘Just one little thing to set the country alight, to get it to rise up behind King Henry and oust this usurper Edward of March.’

  There is a moment of silence. Thomas cannot help but glance at the pillow on which the boy is out cold. Horner looks down too.

  ‘Christ, he looks drunk,’ he says. ‘Will he live?’

  ‘I believe so,’ Katherine says.

  ‘Sir Ralph will be pleased,’ Horner says.

  ‘Why? I thought he was looking forward to hanging us as spies.’

  ‘That’s all changed now,’ he says. ‘One of King Henry’s gentlemen of the bedchamber is carrying a wound that has so far defied his physician, and Sir Ralph has been boasting you are a miracle worker, and can cure him.’

  Katherine is instantly nervous.

  ‘Me?’ she asks. ‘I cannot just—’

  Horner laughs at her predicament, then leaves them.

  And Katherine sits suddenly, exhausted, there on the foot of the pile of filthy straw, her slight frame hidden in overlarge hose and pourpoint, an old-fashioned linen cap covering her ears, her fine fingers on the tip of her pointed chin, deep in anxious thought.

  ‘At least we will be near King Henry,’ he says.

  And she looks at him and at that moment she is caught in a waft of the thin autumn light from the door, and she is so ethereally, delicately beautiful, to his mind, that he almost laughs.

  ‘But Thomas,’ she says. ‘Should we still give King Henry the ledger?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because – because if this place is anything by which to judge the health of his cause, then I cannot imagine him ever prevailing against King Edward. You have forgotten, but I will never forget that army coming up the road to Towton. It took a day to ride from one end to the other, you know? And look at what Sir Ralph Grey has here. Two hundred men? Three hundred?’

  ‘But King Henry might have a great power in Bamburgh?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says sadly. ‘He might.’

  There is a long silence.

  ‘Well, let us see,’ Thomas says. ‘See what manner of army he has, then decide.’

  She nods.

  ‘And in the meantime,’ she says, ‘we have this wounded gentleman of the King’s bedchamber.’

  ‘He might prove a more reliable conduit to King Henry than Sir Ralph,’ Thomas supposes. ‘We might show it to him, and he in his turn might show it to King Henry, and then that’s Horner’s spark, the one that will light up the country in favour of Lancaster.’

  He says it to reassure himself, but she nods.

  ‘He could not be worse,’ she says.

  And then it is, finally, All Saints.

  They have found some fresh straw and a clean blanket, and after Mass, Devon John, the boy, is sitting up, shirtless, waiting for Grey to come and pass him as alive. He is unable to stop looking at his stump, which he holds up like a fish’s flipper, but he is definitely, defiantly still alive. He is swearing almost constantly – about the stump, about the pain he still feels, about the man who hit him with the billhook – in an accent you only hear in parts around London, and he keeps demanding more of Grey’s distillation, on which he has developed a reliance
.

  Eventually Grey comes, approximately sober, and he peers at Devon John’s stump and closes his eyes and mimes a shudder of revulsion.

  ‘Dear God,’ he says. ‘Nevertheless, it is as fine as anything King Henry will have seen in Scotland these past months, of that you may be sure. So. Get him up, dressed and ready to ride before midday.’

  ‘Today?’ Katherine says.

  ‘Yes,’ Grey answers. ‘Today. This morning. King Henry commands it. And you are to come too. And you, whatever your name is. And you too. Help make up the numbers.’

  ‘He is not yet strong enough to walk much further than the privy. How will he cope with a ride in the rain?’

  But Grey has turned and he waves his arm airily as he stalks away, just as the chapel bell is ringing again.

  It is only a few hours later, just after noon, that they ride out on borrowed horses, under a scudding slate-grey sky. Devon John is slumped on a sag-backed pony between Thomas and Jack, his face the colour of goose fat, and Katherine watches him anxiously. He is well topped up with Sir Ralph’s distillation, but even so, a trip like this could be the end of him.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Doesn’t matter anyway,’ Jack calls. ‘It’s past All Saints. You’ve won your bet.’

  They ride out through the barbican’s mossy walls and over the bridge and below them the moat is stippled with raindrops and a boy is trying to fish for something in the pungent waters. Before they have ridden a bowshot, Grey stops the party while he uncorks his costrel and takes a nip of the spirit. Is it Thomas’s imagination, but does the air waver over the bottle when it is uncorked? It seems so. They ride on, three abreast. Despite himself Thomas finds there is something special about riding in a party like this. He feels watched, feared, and very serious. He finds that his jaw is set and his gaze fixed in the distance. He supposes he would soon get used to it though, and come to find it boring.

  The sea appears again at their right hand, restless and grey and scored with heavy foam-frilled waves, and that’s where they first see Dunstanburgh Castle, sited above the sea on a skirt of black cliffs around which gulls wheel.

  ‘D’you ever see such a spot?’ Horner mutters. ‘Wouldn’t want to be there when the wind blows, mind.’

  Thomas has never seen anything quite like it before. On one side is the sea, beating against vertical black stone cliffs, while on the other is a long slope down to three or four broad lakes through which a narrow road must twist to arrive at the turreted barbican. It must be impregnable.

  They ride past and then come down through scattered black boulders on to a beech of fine sand where the waves thunder and throw up clouds of spray. They follow that, curving around, blown by sea spray, and then up again through broken dunes, and in the distance is another great pile of turrets and a square tower behind curtain walls.

  ‘Bamburgh,’ Horner tells them. He is just as proud of it as if he had built it himself, and it is possible to see why. Hard by the seashore it is a perfect succession of stone battlements topped by the massive tower of the keep. It seems huge when they first see it, and it takes the rest of the afternoon to reach it.

  By the time they are there, it is late evening, time for Vespers, and Devon John is practically dead. Whether it is the cold or the lingering shocks of the amputation, Katherine does not know. Grey is quite drunk, too, chattering incessantly, and he sends a rider ahead to announce his arrival. As they come under the castle’s lower barbican, the gates open and they process as usual into its court, and the gate is dropped with a boom behind them, and they are kept trapped in the dank yard while many eyes assess them. Thomas always hates this bit: sitting there, scrutinised, waiting not to be killed.

  ‘Get on with it,’ one of Horner’s men calls, and after a pause the chains start their slow grind as the inner portcullis is raised and after a moment the huge gates beyond are drawn open. Thomas kicks his horse on, past some steps up to the keep, and into the inner bailey, sunk in gloom now, but crowded with men about the business of getting bread and ale, and finding themselves somewhere warm and dry for the night.

  No one pays them much attention. They ride up to the great door of the keep where lanterns illuminate a knot of guards gathered on the steps, and Grey dismounts successfully, clings to his saddle a moment longer than he ought, then rights himself and sets off up the steps very deliberately. After a moment he stops and waits for Horner, who has removed his cloak to show his colours, to catch up. Thomas can hear the challenge, the reply, the muttered conversation that follows. He hears a note of peevishness from Grey, then a deep authoritative murmur. A message is sent. There is a moment of waiting. More men come from the doorway. A slim figure appears in better clothes than the others, and they step back respectfully. Explanations are offered, a misunderstanding cleared up.

  Meanwhile Katherine swings off her horse, and Jack too, and they help Devon John down from his saddle. He is mute and limp, his face very white in the gloom, his eyes fast shut.

  ‘We need a fire,’ she says. ‘Somewhere to warm him.’

  Horner comes down the steps alone. King Henry will not see Grey today, but he is to be found space on a mattress in the keep, and is invited to dine in the same room as the King, if not at the same board. His men meanwhile are to be billeted in somewhere called the great outward postern gate, just about as far from the keep as they can be while remaining in the confines of the castle, and they will have to find food for themselves. There is a long moment while Grey’s baggage is extracted from the mules, and then they remount, and ride down through the bailey again, following a slow-walking steward in pale livery who guides them to the inner postern gate, and then through it and into the outer bailey where now there are sheep – guarded especially at night by men with bills and bowmen – as well as the ruins of hovels and stables, pulled down for hearth wood. It is a bad sign.

  ‘And we are to be given duties,’ Horner admits. He is depressed. He had hoped for a flourishing garrison, ready to sally out to retake England for Henry of Lancaster. Not this.

  The outward postern gate is shut and barred and there is no one in the lower guardrooms, where there are puddles and rotting straw on the flagstones and the walls are glossy and green with running water. Horner wrinkles his nose. It is like a cave, Thomas thinks. Up the circling steps there is the mechanism of the portcullis winch, two great piles of rusting chain links and a long iron bar with hand spikes. The wind whistles constantly in the murder holes. Up the next set of steps and the reason for the abandonment of the lower storeys is clear: there is a broad circular bread oven that dominates the room, of the sort in which a man might easily fit, three men even, and there are that number sitting on a ledge around it, with their backs against it now, legs outstretched, ankles crossed, one of them asleep, the others playing a form of dice. Their weapons – a billhook, three unnocked bows, a sheaf of arrows, and a short tapering sword – are a long hand-stretch away.

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ one of the dice men says when they tell him he is relieved of his post, and he wakes his companion. ‘Come on, John,’ he says. ‘We’re set free.’

  While one goes up the steps to break the news to their colleague in the tower’s top, the others pack up their few belongings, taking their weapons, their mugs and bowls, a sheet of waxed linen, and slinging the rough rolls of their mattresses over their shoulders.

  ‘God’s blessing on you,’ the returning sentinel says. He is sodden through, his face as pale as parchment, and he stops to press his palms against the declining warmth of the oven’s stones. ‘You’ll need it, here,’ he adds.

  When he is gone, Thomas and Jack help Katherine bring Devon John up the awkward steps and lean him against the oven, just where the other men were slumped. Thomas unblocks the door of the oven. Inside it is deep with grey ash, winking embers and the bones of yesterday’s fire. There’s no bread, that’s for sure.

  ‘Well,’ Horner says, and he holds out his hands over the non-existent fire.
Thomas already misses the guerite at Alnwick.

  At dawn the next morning it is Thomas’s watch, so he wakes and rises and climbs the steps up and pushes open the iron-bound door against the wind, and emerges on to the long rectangular space, with the wind fresh in his face, and he claps his hat to his head and looks about. Horner is there, looking tired. He turns and studies Thomas over his shoulder for a second, grunts something and then turns back. The stones of the wall are green with moss and lichen and caked in seagull shit. Underfoot, men have also relieved themselves in a gutter and despite the wind, the smell is clammy and strong. Beyond the wall, where the wind is coming from, is the broad ribbon of dunes and then the beach of white sand, leading to the sea, grey-green now, mist-shrouded and rising and falling as if it is breathing. There are seagulls everywhere, shrieking, floating in the air, their din louder than any clapped bell. To the north is the dwindling stretch of unworkable moorland, and to the west, more or less the same thing, save for a small village hard by the castle walls among the blackened ruins of a larger one in which at least the church tower has been spared. Funny to look down on it, he thinks.

  Horner joins him, his fingertips green with lichen from the stones.

  ‘Scots did that last year,’ he says, indicating the burned walls of the old village. ‘Or maybe it was the Earl of March and his men the year before?’

  ‘Pity,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Yes,’ Horner mutters. ‘Christ. What a place. I’d imagined, you know – more, more men. Less, less shit.’

  ‘Yes,’ Thomas says.

  It starts raining. Both adjust their cloaks.

  ‘We could find some wood?’ Thomas suggests.

  ‘I’ll send some of the men out,’ Horner moans, ‘but the place has been gone over a thousand times already.’

  ‘Why don’t I take Jack and see if we can’t find anything in the way of bread and ale?’ he suggests.

  ‘You can try,’ Horner agrees, ‘and get bread if you can. Not oatcakes. D’you hear? If we’re on oatcakes already then you know things are worse than we thought.’