She tries to imagine how that might come about, and remembers the moment the father and son attacked her, in the snow, years ago now, and she thinks that such men might easily fall out with one another and if they did, daggers would soon be drawn. Perhaps Thomas is right?
‘We will hear when Jack gets back,’ she says.
She looks down now and watches Horner crossing the bailey, leaving a track in the dew. He is leading Jack and another man carrying the ale bucket and the bread bag towards the kitchens. They no longer trust Thomas to get the right thing without causing a fight. Thomas meanwhile is staring out to sea, from where the rhythmic thump of the waves rises, and he is lost in thought, introvert and distant again. Every moment they have alone together is precious, so this time feels wasted. She joins him at the wall, and puts a hand on his shoulder, conscious that someone – anyone – might see them. He slides a hand around her waist.
‘Even when he is not here, even when he is dead, or might be dead, he ruins things for us,’ Thomas says.
They stand for a long moment. She rests her head on his shoulder. Despite it all she feels soothed, warmed by him, and she breaks away only very reluctantly, very late, when Jack comes up the steps with a costrel of ale and some oatcakes.
‘Well?’ Thomas asks.
Jack nods.
‘They are with this Giles Riven fellow,’ he says, ‘as you supposed. They are not rightly amicable company, either, I have to say, but listen, Thomas, those two you crossed in the yard – they are out for you, the others said, meaning to cut you from groin to gizzard, so do not wander off down there in search of a game of chess or chequers.’
And though the confirmation comes as no surprise, Katherine feels a heavy press of sorrow and hopelessness. She closes her eyes momentarily, and turns away.
‘Where are they billeted?’ she hears Thomas ask Jack.
‘In the main gatehouse,’ Jack tells them, gesturing up the hill. ‘But he is not with them. He is with King Henry and the other nobs in the keep. His company are mostly Scots, in it for the money, of course, some Lincolnshire men and a few Frenchies, too, with guns.’
Jack takes a bite of his oatcake and a long drink of ale. Then he leaves them, going back down the steps and off to watch the exercises in the inner bailey, hoping some of the Burgundian gunners will be there to give a demonstration, and Katherine and Thomas linger, since they have nowhere else to go.
‘By Christ,’ she murmurs. ‘It never gets much better, does it?’
Thomas says nothing and after a while she puts her hand on his arm, just as she has seen Isabella do with Sir John, and he places his palm over it, just as Sir John did with Isabella, and for a moment they are both still, and she feels a curious melancholic contentment, a curious return to how it was. They watch Jack walk back up to the inner bailey.
‘I will have to find him and fight him again,’ Thomas says. ‘Riven, I mean, and this time, by Christ, I will – I will kill him.’
‘But how?’ she asks. ‘He will be surrounded by his men, or if not his men, then King Henry’s. You will never get close.’
She tries to imagine Thomas challenging him to some sort of trial by combat, or sticking him with a knife while they are out walking, but he will never get close enough to do that, not with Riven in the keep up on the hill, and besides, she can’t imagine it. That is not Thomas. He is not a murderer.
‘If I see him with his men, in the bailey say, I might knock him down with an arrow?’ Thomas suggests, miming the action of loosing a bowstring, though only half-heartedly, knowing he never could.
There is that, she supposes, but again, no.
‘There must be a way,’ he says, though he is at a loss.
‘It will come,’ she says. ‘It must.’
There is a long silence. They watch the comings and goings in the outer bailey. There is a strange atmosphere in this castle, she thinks, and wonders whether it is usual of all castles or unique to this one. Despite it not being under attack or under siege, it feels beleaguered, parlous, and even the men practising their fighting, she sees now, seem to be going through their motions with little conviction. And how many men are here? Hundreds? Thousands, perhaps. But how many thousands? One? Two? There are others in the other castles, of course, but enough to make an army? And what of all the others needed to people an army? The cooks and brewers to keep the men alive, the ostlers for the horses, and all those others? The smiths, the armourers, the bowyers, the fletchers and the stringfellows? What about them?
‘It is not how I imagined it when we thought of handing King Henry the ledger,’ she says. ‘I thought he would have a proper army, something with which to challenge Edward.’
Thomas grunts.
‘Yes, but you know what this means now, don’t you?’ he asks. ‘With Giles Riven here, on King Henry’s side, anything we do to benefit King Henry benefits him. While anything we don’t do – if we don’t give King Henry the ledger – that benefits the son.’
Their thoughts are circular, repetitive, always coming back to the same thing.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Either way, we lose.’
He sighs again, and so does she.
‘They have a foot in each camp,’ he says, ‘waiting to see which way the wind blows.’
They are silent for a while, each wrapped in the same thoughts.
‘But – but what if,’ she begins, ‘what if we could provoke them to remove a foot? Get one of them to jump into the other camp?’
‘How?’ he asks. ‘And which camp do we want them both in?’
‘The ledger,’ she says. ‘It is all we have. And it only weakens King Edward, and strengthens King Henry, so we must use it to lure Edmund Riven to join his father.’
‘Here?’
They look around. It is not encouraging.
‘Yes,’ she says, almost despite herself. ‘The ledger will turn the tide, Thomas. You’ll see. It will attract new men. That is all that is missing. It is as Horner says.’
‘And once Edmund Riven thinks King Henry will win, he will jump into his camp?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘And then we hope both Rivens take the field with King Henry, and then King Edward beats them, as he did at Towton?’
‘Yes,’ she supposes. ‘But if he does not, and if King Henry wins, he will naturally reward us for providing him with the ledger.’
‘With Cornford?’
‘At the very least,’ she says.
She thinks of all the men who will lose their lives if this scheme comes to fruition. She thinks of another battle of Towton. Dear God, she thinks. Dear God.
Now they hear Horner’s feet hurrying up the steps.
‘There you are,’ he says. ‘Sir Ralph’s been boasting to King Henry about you, Kit, and about Devon John’s arm, and so now King Henry wants to see it. Or what’s left of it. So clean him up, will you? A clean shirt, at least, and we’re to present him to King Henry in the great hall before the bell is rung for Sext. They’ll have a decent fire going there, at any rate, and we might find something to eat.’
So they wash themselves in water that is painfully cold to the touch, and then Horner gives them each a tabard coat of Sir Ralph’s livery, never before worn, and saved for a moment such as this. They pull on the woollen cloths and tie them at their waists. It is pleasing to be wearing something, to touch something, that is actually new and unworn. She is happy to see hers is too long, and hangs below her crotch.
‘You do not need to shave, Kit?’ Horner says. It is half-question, half-observation.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Or not often. We don’t, in my family.’
‘Lucky,’ Horner grunts. Nothing more is said.
‘Well, come on, then,’ he says, and he turns, but now there is a moment’s pause.
Katherine feels her heart beating, and she is aware of the import of the moment. Thomas looks at her, and she looks at Thomas. Will they do it? Will they take the ledger to King Henry? Will they cast the dice? Set t
he ball rolling?
She opens her mouth to say something – she is not sure what – but Thomas has already bent and collected the ledger in its bag, and he has slipped it over his head so that it hangs, as usual, between his shoulder blades. And then they take an armpit each and they haul Devon John to his feet. His legs are very weak.
‘Ha!’ Horner laughs. ‘He’s like a foal.’
But they get him down the winding steps and support him all the way up through the inner postern gate and up past the men who are back in the inner bailey, back at their fighting practice, the rippling clang of their muffled instruments competing with the shouted instructions from the vintenars and captains and the thick twang of bowstrings. Katherine sees no men in Riven’s livery until they reach the kitchens, though, where four of them are menacing a boy over the price of a pig with bristles as red as a squirrel. She feels herself breathing more quickly in their presence, as if she is somehow there to be found out.
‘What will you do if he is there in the room?’ she asks Thomas quietly. ‘If he is sitting at the board with King Henry?’
‘I don’t know,’ Thomas admits. He looks anxious. She tries again to imagine Thomas killing a man as he sits at his dinner board, but she cannot. Thomas is not that sort of man. Riven would have to attack him first, and then she thinks, my God, what if Riven recognises Thomas? He would attack him, surely? Riven is just that sort of man.
‘I don’t know if he would,’ Thomas hazards. ‘He last saw me five years ago, when I was a canon with a tonsure—’
‘Still, though,’ she says. ‘You fought him, didn’t you? You were eye to eye. And you let him live. That will – he will never have been able to forget that.’
‘In that case …’ Thomas says, and he opens his brigandine to remove her the blade she herself sharpened while she was in the priory, tucked into the wadding under his armpit. She exhales. Christ, she thinks, if Riven recognises Thomas, and that is all he has, then we are all dead, one way or another.
‘We are like Daniel,’ she says, and he nods.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘though these lions are armed with swords.’
The walk up to the great hall becomes a sombre affair, more like the approach to the headsman’s block, and Horner asks why they are so glum. They don’t answer. Thomas is stern and mute, his face clenched, supporting waxy-faced Devon John who is silent, concentrating on not falling, or not being sick, it is hard to tell. At the steps up to the hall, the captain of the Watch stops them. Having heard of Devon John’s cutting, he is as interested in the wound as might be any man with cause to fear the same fate.
‘Did it hurt?’ he asks before he will let them pass. Devon John admits he does not remember anything of it. He has a low burr that makes him seem a simple soul, but Katherine has heard him swear and burble in his sleep and call out for someone called Meg, and also for someone called Liz, and she knows there is more to him than he lets on. Devon John shows the guard his stump, which both delights and repulses him. He leans forward to prod it with an extended forefinger.
‘By the rood, man! That is disgusting. Put it away. And come on. You’re late. King Henry will be at prayer before long.’
He turns and leads them hurrying up the steps, along a dark passageway, and through a side door where they are faced with a broad stretch of some blank cloth on a wooden frame. A musician in green sits on a stool in the shadows, glumly chewing a crust with his instrument propped against his knee. He watches with a puzzled frown as Thomas reaches over and gives Katherine’s shoulder what is meant as a reassuring squeeze, and then, without a moment to hesitate, Horner shunts them from the darkness behind the screen and into the space of the hall itself, where their shuffling appearance silences the whispered conversations, and the hurrying servants are stilled, and twenty pairs of bored eyes turn their way.
She searches quickly. Where is he? Where is Riven? Which one is he? Will she recognise him? Or will he recognise her first? Her gaze flicks from face to face. She knows what he will look like, she is sure of it, but no. None match, and beside her, Thomas, who perhaps will recognise the face of the man he once fought almost to the death, sighs a long plume of relief. Riven is not here. Thank Christ in His heaven. She breathes, and sees Thomas pull his coat together to secrete the unwanted blade more thoroughly.
The boards are arranged in a horseshoe, and down each length the men stare at Katherine and Thomas and Horner and Devon John with careless hostility. They are mostly men of a certain age, though there are one or two youths among them, and they are mostly of a certain type – pursed mouths in the broad unchapped cheeks of those who need not spend their days beyond the threshold – and, save for the priests, they are dressed alike in elaborate hats, and their shoulders are extended by the padded cut of their gowns.
And sitting raised on a dais, half-hidden behind a golden salt cellar the size of a child’s head, is the man who should be the centre of it all: King Henry. But of all present, including the two priests at his sides, he is the least impressive. The face above his supine shoulders is soft and long, and he appears tentative, as if he feels he need seek permission to do this or that, and he is never still, but he fiddles with the rings on his fingers, with his linen cloth, with the collar of his simple linen shirt, even the gold circle in his hair.
The great hall is enormously high-roofed, elaborately beamed, with vast woollen tapestries on all four walls and tapering windows, fully glazed, above. There is place for a fire as big as some houses she knows, and in its depths the flames sullenly consume an unseasoned log that hisses and steams, but throws out no heat. The boards along each wall are covered in very white cloths that hang low, and on them are various pots and dishes and trenchers piled with pastries and greenery, and what look like small loaves.
Sir Ralph Grey is at the end of the left-hand board, ruby-cheeked with drink, and now he leaps up and prances into the space between the two table wings with his skinny shanks and his belly that bulges above his belt like a cooking pot. He bows low to King Henry, who smiles uncertainly back.
‘Your grace!’ he begins. ‘Sirs! Allow me to share with you this marvel of the surgeon’s craft!’
He introduces Devon John, or rather Devon John’s stump, since Devon John himself is of no interest to the assembled company, and then he goes on to make extravagant claims as to his role in the cutting. Then he demands that Devon John exhibit his stump, and Devon John does so, pulling up his sleeve to expose it like the crowning head of a baby. There is a clatter of knives and spoons and a pushing away of bowls and trenchers and the man nearest the stump mutters something about the love of God. But King Henry is interested.
‘May we see?’ he asks. He looks around, as if seeking permission from the priests and the courtiers, and Grey pushes Devon John toward King Henry. Devon John walks the few paces, his stump leading the way. King Henry’s expression over Devon John’s head is hard to interpret. If he weren’t the king, Katherine might think he was trying to empathise with Devon John, trying to imagine what it might be like to lose a limb. After a moment, he speaks.
‘We have a physician,’ he says in a fluttering voice, ‘who knows the movement of the planets, and can tell the balance of our humours by the smell of our urine alone.’
The priest with no beard claps encouragingly and smiles at King Henry as if owning such a thing is a great accomplishment. The others on the boards are silent.
‘We have been ill,’ King Henry continues, confiding in Devon John now. ‘They tell us that we did not move a muscle for a year. As if we were made of stone, they said, like the carved image of a saint or a martyr in one of our cathedrals. Except we were soft. Our wife, the queen, may God keep her safe, prayed for us, and we came back to her, and to our miraculous son Edward, may God also cherish him. But they are in France now, do you know? Undertaking their great task. We wish we were with them. Or they with us. Or we all in Windsor, together.’
The beardless priest is delighted by this eloquence. Elsewhere the
silence persists.
‘Would you like to meet my physician?’ King Henry asks Devon John. ‘His name is Master Payne. A good name for a physician, don’t you think?’
Devon John turns for guidance to Grey, who clenches his stained teeth and nods enough so that the tassel on his soft cap dances long after he is still again. Devon John says he would. King Henry raises his eyes to a nearby servant as if they hurt him, as if he has the ’flu, and the servant departs. King Henry returns his gaze to Devon John. He smiles almost apologetically, but says nothing, and the silence persists. Not even Grey says anything.
After a while there is a shuffling, the noise of a musical instrument hitting the ground, and then, from behind the tapestry from which they themselves entered earlier, comes a tall man in a soft blue gown, slightly patterned, with a grey-furred collar. He is tall, broad-shouldered, with a close-trimmed beard that suits him, and a lively ‘what now?’ expression on his handsome features. His cap, a tall red thing, obviously expensive, probably a gift, is perched just so on his fine black hair that hangs longer than the other men wear theirs, almost to the fur collar, and he moves quickly, unencumbered by harness, or the weapons that seem to weigh other men down. The wool of his hose is very fine-spun, and his shoes are wonderfully piked, and have never met mud.
‘I am sorry, your grace,’ Payne says. ‘I was attending to the patient.’
He has a fine voice, carefully enunciated, and King Henry beams at him forgivingly, but there is a stiffening of spines around the table, as if these men approve of neither the patient nor the physician.
‘How fares he today?’ King Henry asks, blind to their reaction. ‘Is he in good spirits?’
There is a moment’s hesitation before Payne replies:
‘Thanks to your prayers, your grace, and God’s ever-continuing mercy, of course, he is tolerably comfortable.’
King Henry bows his head to accept the praise. It is not, Katherine thinks, intended as pure praise, but, rather, has a weariness about it.
‘You are too modest, Master Payne,’ he says. ‘It is in part your skill that keeps him with us, of that I am sure, and with God’s great blessings he will make a recovery, and return to us ever more determined to serve. But, as we speak of wounds, pray take a look at this. A stump, where this man’s arm once was. I know nothing of these things, but they tell me it is cunningly done?’
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 23
