Kingmaker: Broken Faith

by Toby Clements

  She clenches her eyes and tries to still her hand. She holds the stone a finger’s width above the spread flesh of the wound, and she concentrates. There is a warm thick silence in the room as every man bends in, or stands on toes to see over shoulders. Christ, she thinks, will this work? She has no idea. She holds the lace still, allows the stone to settle. It takes a long moment and then it is utterly still. There is nothing. She breathes slowly. There is sweat in her eyes.

  She can hear Tailboys laugh sibilantly, and Grey tuts loudly.

  She lowers the stone, so it is almost touching the skin. Still nothing. She holds her wrist in her other hand to steady it. Still nothing. A faint wobble perhaps. A slow rotation. Then it settles again. She moves the stone to cover a different spot, lower down his back and – what was that? Was there something? She does not know. She would not be able to describe it, but there was some unnatural tweak on her fingers. Very slight. She moves the stone away. There. This time. A definite tug.

  There is absolute silence in the room now. She can hear Payne breathing. Hear Riven breathing. She moves the stone. Again. The string seems to straighten. The stone is pulling over to one side. She moves it to the other side, nearer his armpit. The stone pulls back. She moves it down. The stone swings in a tight circle and stops unnaturally fast, as if it is straining towards something. It is below the cut she has made.

  Payne lets out a low gasp of amazement.

  ‘Jesu Maria,’ he whispers.

  He is the only one who really understands what has happened. He passes her the longest of the needles. She stabs it into Riven’s skin below the wound she has made. A bead of blood appears. She presses the needle in, through fibrous flesh, with her heart loud in her ears and sweat stinging her eyes, and nothing happens, until – yes. There it is: a dull, buried chime.

  ‘Great God above,’ Grey says. ‘He’s actually found it.’

  And she has. She cannot help glancing up at Payne, who seems ashamed of himself, but he was right, in what he had said, that Riven must have been standing upright when the arrow was loosed, and that he must have been at the very end of its arc. It would have hit him as it was coming down, and its momentum would have taken it skidding off the bone. It would have embedded itself in the tangle of muscles below.

  And here it is. Just there.

  She puts aside the lodestone and takes the knife. She extends the cut, then she slices another cross in the meat under the skin’s fat, and she slides the iron probe to part the muscle fibres, separating them one from the other, and she finally sees it, a dark twist of iron, embedded deep. She takes the pliers, dips them in the wine, inserts them into the small cavity and clamps their jaws into the dark plug of the arrow’s end; she spreads them so they hold, and she eases the arrowhead free. Riven stiffens, even in his sleep. Out it comes with a final reluctant plop. She holds it up for all to see. It is a finger-long spike, two barbs like the wings of a diving seabird. She drops it in a dish and tosses the pliers aside. Blood comes thickly behind it, as if the arrowhead had been acting as a block in some vessel. This is not over yet.

  ‘Linen!’ she says.

  And this time Payne is fast. He passes her a wad, and she presses down on the source of the blood. It soaks through the first and the second and the third wadding, but by the fourth, it has slowed. She gets Payne to hold it down while she pours more urine on to the cloth and again Riven stiffens. The linen turns pink. Payne frowns.

  ‘Keep pressing,’ she says.

  And he does, and some time later she lets him lighten the pressure, and then, later still, she begins to stitch the wound back together again. She splits a candle lengthways to extract the wick, and leaves that like a mouse’s tail, trailing from the row of stitches. When it is done, she looks up. Most of the men have gone, and it is just Payne, and Thomas, and the other wrestler, and King Henry’s priest. The guard is by the door. The others have left.

  ‘Will he live?’ the priest asks.

  She looks down at him again, lying there among his foul sheets, at the double cross of her neat stitching that stars his back, at his purple-edged and already bruising flesh, and she thinks that, yes, barring the vapours, barring that creeping, swelling blackness of the flesh, he will live. She has saved his life. Saved Giles Riven’s life, and now it is late afternoon, and the thin winter sunlight sifts through the aperture and falls in a lopsided cross on the chamber’s far wall, reflecting the one on Riven’s back, and she wonders again just what it is that she has done.

  17

  ‘WE HAVE BEEN stuck here for weeks on end,’ Thomas tells Katherine, ‘and we are no nearer our aim. Further, if anything.’

  A week has passed since the cutting and they are in the tower’s battlements again, looking across the bailey at the keep. It is perishingly cold. Ice glisters on the black stones and their breathing creates clouds before their faces. Beyond the walls, all is still, frost-bound, and the mist rises early in the pink-skied evenings.

  ‘King Henry has not been to see Riven,’ she soothes him, ‘that is all. The moment he does, I will show him the ledger.’

  ‘But what about Payne?’

  ‘I have not told him,’ she admits. ‘It is not that I do not trust him, or think he would not help. It is that he is just another person to overcome and, anyway, he himself cannot speak to the King without first going through an intermediary such as Grey or Tailboys.

  ‘So where is it?’ Thomas looks panicked. He did not want to give it to her in the first place.

  ‘I have hung it on a peg in the garderobe, secreted under his clothes.’

  ‘And that will suffice?’

  She nods. He is still unsure.

  ‘I promise,’ she says, and she smiles and she slides her hand under his arm and they are very, daringly close to one another.

  ‘Please,’ he says, suddenly crooked with anxiety. ‘If someone should come …’

  She laughs.

  A bell sounds, tinny and distant.

  ‘I must go and change his dressing,’ Katherine tells him.

  ‘Can’t Master Payne do that?’

  ‘He can, but he won’t, because he is a physician, and besides, he says King Henry may come today.’

  ‘Today? Should I come? Should I be there?’

  ‘Do you not worry Riven will recognise you?’

  ‘It would force the point, at least. It would be done, then, one way or the other.’

  Most likely the other, he knows, but still.

  ‘But we are close, Thomas,’ she tells him. ‘All I need do is see King Henry, and then …’

  She shrugs. He knows she is right. But saints, it is difficult. All day long in this castle, hemmed in by towering granite walls, never out of their shadow or the sight of other men, all the time knowing the chances of Katherine being discovered as a woman increase daily. Soon it will be inevitable. One little slip. Christ!

  ‘What will you tell him?’ he asks.

  ‘King Henry? It is still as we have agreed. I will only tell him we have something that proves King Edward is illegitimate. Then when he asks to see it, I will tell him you have it hidden, and that we must be promised reward, and recompense for our losses.’

  Thomas nods sharply.

  ‘Still,’ he says. ‘I wish I could be there.’

  ‘I know,’ she says, ‘but with Riven there too?’

  And once more he imagines himself a cornered rat with Riven’s men coming at him and he can almost feel the burn of their knives in his belly.

  ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘we must go. Mass is over, and King Henry may come straight away.’

  So they leave the tower’s walkway and descend the winding steps.

  ‘Does Riven talk?’ he asks.

  ‘A little, but he is still in pain.’

  ‘Good.’

  He leaves her at the steps of the keep and then makes his way down to the stables. There are some of Riven’s men there, and he cannot help but stiffen when he sees them, and he stands and watches them, wait
ing to see if the two who offered to cut him from groin to gizzard are there, but he is in luck, they are not, and he slides past with a ducked head to find Horner, who is already mounted alongside Jack and three other men of Grey’s company.

  ‘Thomas!’ Jack calls. ‘Thomas! We are allowed out. Come. We are riding a picket, just as if we are prickers.’

  Jack is wearing a long coat and scarf and a hat that he has pulled down over his ears, so all that can be seen of him are his eyes, which are bright with excitement at the thought of being out from under the castle walls. Horner next to him makes an impatient gesture and Thomas is given his own horse, a pony with a shaggy coat. They ride out, through the main gatehouse, and south, towards Dunstanburgh. The horses steam in the frigid air and the meres are hard frozen and a man might perhaps skate on them. No one says a thing. They ride for an hour. No one sees anything. Christ, it is good to be away from the castle, from its smell and anxious jostle and the constant fear of discovery. Thomas breathes deeply until he sees the others looking at him strangely.

  They are about to turn around, half-dead with cold and hunger, when they see three men on horses. Two bowshots’ distance.

  Horner holds up a hand. The men are only half-dressed, unarmed. They look desperate.

  ‘Christ,’ he says. ‘Just what we need. Another lot of beggars.’

  ‘Should we just leave them?’ one of the others asks.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Horner says. ‘Look at that one. Shouting at us. By the Mass, we should just run them down.’

  The man at the front looks barelegged. He is certainly bareheaded, and he is waving and gesticulating, and kicking his horse on just as quickly as the knackered old thing can manage.

  ‘He will want to sell us something,’ Horner says. ‘But what? What can he have? He does not look overly encumbered.’

  They do not even bother to draw their swords. The man is still shouting at them as he comes, and he is laughing, too. He is delighted to see them. They see from a distance that he has a rough blanket over his shoulders, and his legs and feet are swagged in cloth, but as he approaches there is something about him that tells them he is no mere beggar.

  ‘Sirs! Sirs!’ he calls. ‘By the grace of God and happenstance! Thanks be that you are come.’

  And there is something about the man’s voice, Thomas thinks, that confirms the impression he is not a beggar. It is sharp and clear and commanding. And the way the man’s companions look to him makes it clear who leads whom. Horner does not smile.

  ‘God keep you this day,’ he says, addressing the leader. ‘You seem ill-prepared for this weather?’

  The man barks a laugh and turns to his two companions.

  ‘Ha! That is funny! Ill-prepared! Ill-prepared!’

  They laugh too. They are only marginally better dressed than he.

  ‘Is that – a nightshirt you are wearing?’ Horner goes on.

  ‘This? Indeed it is. Finest lawn. It was all that I had on when I was woken in the night and forced to flee the inn where I was staying. I had to leave through the window.’

  ‘You could not pay your bill?’

  Again the laughter.

  ‘It was not that, though that is true – I could not pay. No. It was that a company of archers belonging to my Lord Montagu had come from Newcastle to arrest me and take me before their lord who would in all probability have had no hesitation in separating my head from my shoulders.’

  More laughter. Horner is impressively impassive.

  ‘Why would he do that?’ he asks.

  ‘Why? Why? Dear God, man! I have just realised. I have not introduced myself, have I? Nor asked your name. I shall go first, and then you shall follow.’

  His companions are very pleased at something, and the man opens his mouth as if he is about to begin to say something wonderful and then shuts it again and looks at them and they snigger and smirk obediently, and Thomas wonders if they have time for this, when the man finally tells them who he is.

  ‘I,’ he says. ‘I am Henry Beaufort. I am Henry Beaufort, Earl of Dorset, Duke of Somerset. I am a man who once betrayed his king, but shall do so not one moment more, and now, for the love of the great Lord above, who are you? And do you have anything a man might reasonably eat?’

  They do not believe him at first. Knowing what they know, they cannot believe that the Duke of Somerset would give up the comforts of King Edward’s court in favour of the bleak prospects held out by King Henry. They do not believe that a man’s conscience would trouble him so, and it takes long moments before Horner is satisfied, but when he is, he leaps from his horse to clutch the Duke’s hand and he gives him his own coat, which the Duke happily accepts, and his hat and scarf, which the Duke likewise is pleased to slide on.

  Then they turn for home, Horner pushing his horse in a frisking trot. He wants to be the first to tell King Henry that the Duke of Somerset is here, repented of his dalliance with the House of York, come on bended knee to seek the grace of his dread sovereign anointed by God, come to lead them out of their castle and take them south, back down to London to eject that usurper the Earl of March. And the Duke wants to evade Montagu’s men, too, of course, whom he supposes might have ridden this far north in search of such an astonishingly valuable prize, and he wants to be somewhere with a roof over his head, a fire at his feet and wine in his belly before the snow that threatens falls.

  ‘It is the Duke of Somerset!’ Horner whispers to Thomas as they ride. ‘It is the very thing we need. The very thing to light up the country and help us out of here. By this time next year King Henry will be in Westminster, and the bloody old Earl of March will be dead, or rotting in the Tower, and all his men will be there with him. Vanquished! By us! And all those who perished at Towton Field will be avenged and we will be back in our solars, rich men, with rich wives.’

  They pass Dunstanburgh, and then see Bamburgh in the distance.

  ‘Horner! Horner, there!’ Somerset calls, and Horner is plump with pleasure as he slows his horse to interpose himself between Somerset and his two silent companions, one of whom is a servant, and who has the better clothes for having been sleeping in them when they were disturbed at the inn, and the other, perhaps a lesser knight, a gangling, serious youth with a Welsh accent. Thomas slows his own horse, and is there a pace or so in front of Horner when Somerset asks after the disposition of King Henry’s forces, the provisions of the castles, and the morale of the troops. Horner lies fluently and Somerset is delighted.

  ‘And I have the assurances of twenty of the chief men in Wales that they will rise up against the false king,’ he says, ‘and there are others in the south and the west who are with us, too. And Bellingham will come, he says, and Neville of Brancepeth, of course, though his presence is more penance than providence. Oh, it is all wonderfully hopeful. If only we can now get support from elsewhere – from France or Burgundy or even those bastards in Brittany, and I have not yet given up on Scotland yet – then we will have them still, tcha!’

  Thomas cannot take his gaze from the man. He is dark-haired, broad-faced, with quick blue eyes, and he’s very muscular across the chest, and very abrupt, just as if he is going to be called upon to fight, or perform a tumble, or to leap on to the back of a horse.

  But what has he just said? There is something in there that alerts Thomas. That is it. Others in the south and the west. Men who would rise up against King Edward. Dear God! Edmund Riven would be among them, surely? If the Duke of Somerset has changed his allegiance, then surely Edmund Riven will change his too. His loyalty was never to King Edward, only to Somerset. If that is the case, then he will have already jumped from one camp to the other. They no longer need show Henry the Ledger. In fact, dear God, they must not on any account show Henry the ledger! To do so now would only be to help the Rivens, and secure them in their prestige.

  ‘And once the commons see this,’ Somerset is saying, ‘they will rise up across the country, d’you hear? They will rise up as one to drive out the f
alse king and restore the House of Lancaster.’

  He bangs his fist on his saddle and his horse increases its pace up the hill.

  ‘Not a bad little horse, this,’ he says.

  Can Thomas ask Somerset? He cannot see a reason why not.

  ‘Edmund Riven?’ Somerset says. ‘You want to know if Edmund Riven is among those who would now stand for King Henry against the false King Edward? Can you think of a reason why he might not?’

  That hardly answers the question, Thomas thinks, but before he can press, Somerset has turned back to Horner and is telling him of his scheme to attack King Edward at both ends of the kingdom at once: here in Northumberland and also in Pembroke.

  And again he bangs his saddle and is delighted that the horse can still trot.

  ‘Ha!’ he says.

  They reach Bamburgh just as the curfew bell is rung, but on hearing Horner is without, and that he has the Duke of Somerset with him, they drop the drawbridge and throw open the gates, and the garrison breathes life into the covered fires, and word is passed back that the Duke of Somerset is here, come to lead them out of the north; the chapel bells are set ringing again, and men line the walls to look down on them as they wait to be let through the gates, and everybody is laughing and waving and shouting: ‘A Somerset!’ and ‘A Beaufort!’ and then they are let through into the bailey which is crowded with more men waving their arms and shouting the Duke’s name, and Somerset gets his horse to stagger and prance, then he brings it under control again and he stands in the stirrups and bows and then he rides on up the hill toward the keep, touching men’s outstretched hands as he passes and Horner looks on with a smile as if he is witnessing – or even responsible for – some great thing.

  ‘He is our spark, Thomas, our spark!’

  He is like the Messiah, Thomas thinks, come to lead them to the Promised Land.

  18

  DESPITE PAYNE’S PROMISE, King Henry has not come to see his gentleman of the bedchamber, though Payne supposes he might the next day, and so the next day Katherine arrives at the keep just as the bell is ringing for Sext, with one thing on her mind: the recovery of the ledger.