Kingmaker: Broken Faith

by Toby Clements

  ‘Ah,’ Payne says, ‘so here he is – the famous barber surgeon of the outward postern gate.’

  Katherine says nothing, but she cannot help smiling slightly. Thomas frowns. Grey likewise, and he is probably about to say something when he hears the servant addressing Riven as if he were deaf, or stupid.

  ‘Sir Giles?’ the servant says. ‘Sir Giles? King Henry has sent his surgeon.’

  So now Grey turns on him. ‘His surgeon?’ he shouts. ‘His surgeon? He is my bloody surgeon! D’you hear? God damn it, man! What’s your name? He is my surgeon. He belongs to me. To Sir Ralph Grey of Heaton. D’you hear? I will not tolerate this a moment longer. By all saints! I am overlooked at every turn! Wherever I go.’

  The servant waits for the storm to pass, with one eye on Grey’s belt where his knife hangs, though Grey is more a shouter than a stabber, but the outburst has woken Riven, who slowly turns his head. Katherine’s heart beats in her throat and she cannot take her gaze from him, though she knows she will give herself away, and now she sees his face and she cannot help but gasp. It is almost exactly as she imagined it would be: skeletal, drawn, his lips peeled back, teeth clenched through long-endured misery. He does not even look at her. Nor Thomas. He looks only at Grey through half-closed eyes.

  ‘Grey,’ he whispers. ‘Grey.’

  Sir Ralph is taking a breath to continue shouting, so he hears the quiet voice, and he stops, looks down at the bed.

  ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘Shut up,’ Riven says. Then he turns back to the wall, presenting his skull. There is a moment’s silence while Grey grows scarlet and comes to the boil.

  ‘You!’ he shouts. ‘You! You goddamned whoreson! You goddamned turncoat! You don’t tell me what to do. You don’t tell Sir Ralph Grey of Castle Heaton what to do. No one – no one tells a Grey of Castle Heaton what to do. Do you hear me, turncoat?’

  Riven is still. The only sound is Grey’s breathing, the faint creak of Payne’s boot sole, a distant bell. After a moment, Grey looks up. He catches her eye and she sees the doubt in his. He does not know what to do. So he turns and marches out of the chamber, leaving them in silence, listening to his departing footsteps, a scuffle, some muttering, and then a slammed door. A drop of water drips behind another smaller door that leads to the garderobe. The servant coughs.

  ‘You may leave us now,’ Payne tells him and when he is gone, after raising his eyebrows once or twice at them, Payne says he supposes she would like to see what there is to be seen of the wound, and when she nods, still unable to speak, he bends and folds back the sheets that cover Riven. She can see the muscles of his back flex as he breathes. His skin looks too big for him, as if he has withered from within, but there is the wound, a whorl of thickened skin, as if someone has taken a stick and stirred a hole in his back, as big across as the mouth of a drinking cup.

  ‘There it is,’ he says, gesturing with an open hand. ‘Do what you will.’

  And she stands there next to Thomas and they continue to stare. Do what you will. Do what you will! How many times has she wished she could do exactly that? When she thought about Walter, Dafydd, Owen, Geoffrey. When she thought about Goodwife Popham and her daughter Elizabeth. When she thought about poor blind Richard. When she thought about Riven attacking her that time, all those months ago, outside the priory in the snow. When she thought about Alice.

  But still she stands, her hands trembling at her sides, and she closes her eyes and lets out a deep breath and she knows that it is already too late. She cannot do it. She opens her eyes and turns to Thomas. He is pale, aghast, his hand over his jaw, and it looks as if he might cry, and she knows that he too has discovered he cannot just kill a man lying in his bed.

  They should have done it in a rush, she sees. They should have come straight in, closed the door behind them, and stabbed him then. Cut his throat. Put the blade between the ribs. There would have been a fight with Payne. They would have had to kill him, perhaps, and Christ, the others too: Horner, Grey and that guard. And then they could have covered Riven’s body with the blanket and left, telling anyone they met that he slept, and then – well, they would have been caught and hanged, but at least they would have done it, at least they would have done it! And the future be damned.

  ‘Well?’ Payne says. She takes a breath, swallows, steps towards Riven. Her nerves are stripped and raw. She can feel everything. She can see her hands shaking. She bends to touch him, touch his naked skin, something she never thought to do with anything other than a length of steel, but now here she is. He is cold under her fingertips, and she pulls back. He is part corpse already, she thinks, and she remembers how Richard changed shape after he had given up all that sword practice, how the muscle had withered and he had become padded with fat, cold to the touch just like Riven, until that had melted away for lack of vittles.

  Payne says nothing. He is staring at her.

  ‘Is this the wound?’ she asks. Her voice rises and cracks. Payne merely stares at her. It is obviously the wound. And then Riven turns his face on the sheet again, and he looks at her through those half-closed lids as if he is interested in anyone so stupid as to ask such a question, and she cannot meet his gaze, and finds herself looking away, down at the floor, back at his wound, then quickly back in his eyes and then away again.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asks. His voice is softer, and weaker of course, than she remembers it that one time she heard it, but there is something about it, some grim power that makes her feel she must meet his gaze.

  ‘My name is Kit,’ she answers. ‘I have had experiences of wounds such as this. I have cut men, saved their lives. King Henry asked me—’

  ‘Kit what?’ Riven asks.

  She falters, and says nothing, for she does not know. She has no surname. She looks around for inspiration. The room is bare save for a coffer on which sit various dishes, two or three stoppered pots, a knife for the bleeding and a spray of dried herbs she does not recognise. There is a bag on the floor – Payne’s instruments, she supposes – and a rolled-up mattress where perhaps Payne sleeps. Through another door she imagines the garderobe, with its hole down to the cesspit, and Riven’s and perhaps Payne’s all-too-immaculate clothes on their pegs.

  ‘Kit what?’ Riven repeats, and she turns to look down at him, and as she does so, she almost misses it. But no. There it is, too distinct a thing to overlook or ignore. She jerks her head back and is fixated by it, propped in the rounded corner of the room, a thing of singular purpose and value, if not beauty, and despite his gaze on her, she gasps when she sees it and she cannot help clap her hand to her mouth. My God, she thinks. My God.

  It is Thomas’s pollaxe. She shivers to see it, the steel beak; the hammer, the spike on the poll. She remembers it so clearly, how it always seemed to have a life of its own, she thinks, some force within it, and she remembers the men Thomas killed on that boat, almost as if he did not want to, as if it had done it itself, and she remembers levelling it at the other physician, at Fournier.

  Riven follows her eyes.

  ‘You like the pollaxe?’ he asks her. ‘How strange. There is a story behind it, you know? I lost it, once, but it came back to me. Things. They have a habit of coming back to me. People, too—’

  ‘Where did you find it?’ Thomas interrupts. He is also staring at it, confused. He will remember it better if he picks it up, she supposes. She hopes he doesn’t, or not for the moment. Riven switches his gaze to Thomas, and Thomas looks back and there is a long moment as they hold one another’s stare, until Riven blinks.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Thomas Everingham.’

  ‘Thomas Everingham? Hmmm. No. I do not know that name, but I do know you. But where from, Thomas Everingham?’

  Thomas cannot help glancing at her before answering. Riven lies there, looking Thomas up and down, measuring his precise worth and station.

  ‘You do not,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Oh, but I do,’ he says. ‘Yes. And someone such as you would
remember someone such as me, so you obviously do not want me to remember you. So. What can that mean?’

  Thomas says nothing.

  ‘You have changed, haven’t you?’ Riven goes on. ‘Yes. That is it. I knew you as someone else, perhaps? Who, though? Or – more like – what? No. But it will come to me. It will come to me. By and by.’

  And then he closes his eyes and he turns to face the wall again. Thomas looks down at her. What should he do? He stands there with his hands at his sides. All the advantages he has over Riven are gone, precisely because he has so many, and so will not use them. This is the difference, she thinks, between a man like Riven and a man like Thomas. A sudden image comes to her: of how it would be if it were the other way around and Thomas was lying there, and Riven had come to kill him. She can see it eerily clearly: Riven walking fast, on light feet, Thomas not given a moment to cry out before a knife comes down. Or he would have that pollaxe. Dear God. She can so easily imagine the noise that would make, and the blood on the sheets and the walls perhaps. She clenches her eyes shut.

  ‘What are your thoughts?’ Payne asks, nodding at the forgotten wound. She starts and looks down at it again.

  ‘An arrow wound,’ she says.

  ‘Never?’ Payne laughs.

  ‘But it is not diseased?’

  ‘Ah, no,’ he says. ‘No gangrene. That is a miserable death, and afterwards, did you know, when the patient is dead, you can remove his liver – which will be quite black also – and place it on marble, and it will seethe, like a wet cloth being wrung?’

  She cannot believe what he is saying.

  ‘You have – cut open a man to look at his liver?’ she asks.

  ‘In Cambridge,’ Payne says, quite as if everybody has done this. ‘And then again in Bologna.’

  She rubs her chin, looks at the wound again, and then glances back at Payne. He is boasting, or lying. The Church would not allow such things, surely? And what or where is Bologna? She dare not ask. There is something very unusual about Payne, she thinks. It is as if he has some other life, a parallel life of which she knows nothing.

  ‘But is there nothing you can do for him?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, I keep his humours balanced,’ Payne tells her, gesturing with the flask of murky liquid at the bleeding bowl on the coffer and at the dried greenery, ‘and King Henry has ordered Mass to be said, twice daily.’

  ‘Mass,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ Payne replies, turning with a questioning smirk. ‘Prayer is most efficacious, don’t you find? Our Lord Jesus is the heavenly leech. He can cure all and with enough prayer I am certain the arrowhead will free itself.’

  ‘Have you ever known this to happen?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ he allows. ‘But that is not to say that it will not happen in the future.’

  ‘Then why cut a man open to see how he is constructed, if faith is all that is required?’ she asks.

  ‘Indeed,’ he says. ‘But let us talk of that later. We must discuss this patient. King Henry has been swayed by Sir Ralph Grey’s unusual eloquence, and has ordered me to assist you in what he believes will be the removal of the arrowhead and the restoration of Sir Giles to bodily if not spiritual health. He expects you to succeed. He has been promised you will.’

  ‘Have you examined the arrowhead?’ she asks.

  Payne shakes his head.

  ‘The wound was healed before he came under my hands,’ he says, coming around, unable to resist flaunting his knowledge. ‘It is an interesting case, however. The arrowhead is still within his flesh, caught in the bone, perhaps. I believe it was bent when it was loosed, reused perhaps, or is of some curious design, or was perhaps loosed at great range, and so instead of killing the patient, as the bowman might have wished, it broke the scapula – here.’

  He places his hands on Riven’s back. He has long elegant fingers, tapering to fine, spotless fingernails.

  ‘I suppose if Sir Giles had chosen to seek help then, from a surgeon, perhaps he might have had the arrow removed with little anxiety, but things being as they were, he could not, and since then the bone has, I believe, absorbed the arrow. It is as if it has grown back, and healed around it, do you see? Or perhaps the arrow skipped across the bone, and is dug in below or even above it, or perhaps to one side, or perhaps to the other. I can’t tell. Wherever it is, it has pinned his limb in this position – look, he cannot move it, or at least not without great pain.’

  He tweaks the joint and Riven stiffens. After a moment he lets out a long sigh and relaxes.

  ‘To remove it now might require the breaking of the bone, which is not within my purlieu as a physician, but then again the arrow’s head may be lodged perilously close to the blood vessels that congregate near the lungs or even the heart? Were you to cut those, the patient would bleed to death in mere moments and it would all be over.’

  She listens carefully. Such things are beyond her, she knows that, but then when she looks at the wound, looks at the flesh below it, she can almost sense the arrowhead, see it in its pouch of scarred flesh, and she can imagine slicing the skin and extracting it, and proving to those bastards in the hall, the men who’d almost jeered at her, that she could perform what is, or will be anyway, a miracle.

  ‘With your assistance, Master Payne,’ she says, ‘I should like to try to remove the arrow.’

  Payne blinks.

  ‘I did not think you had any choice,’ he says.

  16

  THE OPERATION IS set for the second week after All Saints, when Payne tells them the planets’ positions will be most propitious for an operation that may touch on the heart and the lungs.

  ‘But it is Giles Riven,’ Thomas repeats. ‘Giles Riven! All the time we’ve wanted nothing but his death and the moment we have the perfect chance, we falter, and worse. You must now save his life or lose yours in the trying!’

  ‘I know,’ Katherine says. ‘I know.’

  They are back in the tower, staring across the bailey to the keep.

  ‘He would have done it like that!’ Thomas says, and he snaps his fingers. ‘If it had been me or you on the bed, and Riven had meant to kill us, he would have come in, and simply—’

  He mimes a stabbing.

  ‘But we are not murderers,’ she says almost sadly. ‘Besides, we would have been killed had you even tried. You saw the guard. Master Payne says he is there day and night to prevent any man whose father or son died at Northampton coming for vengeance.’

  But still Thomas is disgusted with himself and so the next day, while Katherine is closeted with Master Payne, he goes to the beach with Jack and the rest of Grey’s men and he takes his turn to send sheaf after sheaf of arrows across the dunes, thumping them into the mounded sand butts two, three, four hundred paces away. Bows have not been easy to come by, and those they have are not good quality. More than one cracks and breaks in the cold, setting everyone, especially Thomas, on edge, but they carry on. He has discovered that most of Grey’s men are poor archers, able to loose a bow, but unable to gauge distance, and so they cannot land their shafts in groups such as archers from the other companies do. Horner maintains a cheerful disposition, but he is too kindly, or his expectations are too low, and Thomas finds himself shouting at the other men, making them loose their arrows all day, and sending the slowest to run through the sand to collect the shafts and then run back.

  He hears them grumbling about him, wishing he’d never come, but he does not care. He feels a peculiar ferocity. He wants to work himself into exhaustion so that he does not have to think about the cruel trick God has played upon him and Katherine, so in the morning after a sleepless night of near fruitless speculation, they are at it again, in the rain, the same thing, and by the next day improvements are noticeable despite the blustering wind. Horner has yielded command of training to him completely now, and on the third day, to his order they can land their shafts in a neat line a hundred paces away, then a hundred and fifty paces, then two hundred paces, and the first time they d
o it in sequence, they are delighted with themselves, and Thomas runs to collect their arrows as a reward. Then they do it again. And again. And when the evening bell is rung Horner comes down from the gatehouse with three loaves of rye bread and a bucket of stew he claims Grey has given him to distribute among the men.

  Horner walks back to the outward postern gate with him. They see Katherine in the tower, watching over them. Horner waves. She waves back.

  ‘Small, isn’t he? Kit?’ Horner starts.

  Thomas mumbles his agreement.

  ‘Still, though,’ Horner says, ‘if we carry on like this, we’ll make such a company of archers that we will be in London before Christmastide.’

  Thomas says nothing. Their boots are loud on the sandy soil.

  ‘All we need is one spark, Thomas,’ Horner goes on. ‘One spark! And I truly believe we can return King Henry to the throne. We can drive out those bloodsucking Yorkist fleas and restore the rightful king.’

  But Horner does not know where this spark will come from and Thomas thinks of the ledger, lying up there, rolled in among the straw of his mattress, and it strikes him that he must find a better place to hide it until they can find some way of showing it to King Henry, and they must find someone to help them bring it before him. Payne is a possibility, it suddenly strikes him. Perhaps if they showed it first to Payne, and explained it, he might be the one to effect the connection? Thomas becomes more buoyant. There is a way to do this, after all.

  But Horner has dropped his voice, and is confiding now.

  ‘The thing is, Thomas,’ he says. ‘The thing is we lack a natural leader. King Henry is – well. You have seen. He is – we need someone more martial for what is involved in this. The others, Lord Hungerford and Lord Roos, they are – well. I don’t know. They lack the vital spark. And I do not wish to speak ill of Sir Ralph Percy, or our own Sir Ralph Grey, it is only that – well. I should say no more. It is only I wish we had men such as they.’