‘Looks like snow,’ the captain of guard says. He is the same man who was first so interested in Devon John’s stump, and he is there again, stamping his boots, rubbing his hands, looking up and inhaling deeply, and she tells him she does not doubt it, and he steps aside to let her through and she carries on up the steps, through the doors and along the various passageways she’s come to know reasonably well since she started treating Riven. As she passes the second guard in the passageway, he greets her and asks if she has any news of the outside world.
‘Looks like snow,’ she repeats, and he sucks his teeth.
‘Poor bugger,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t like to be travelling in that.’
‘No,’ she agrees, not quite understanding his point, and she opens the door. It scrapes on the stones and the room echoes unfamiliarly, hollow and empty. Payne is there, standing in his riding boots and a travelling coat. He is very tight about the face, and she knows he is angry about something.
‘There you are,’ he says.
She thinks she might be late for an appointment but she does not think they have made one. Behind Payne his various things – his dishes, herbs, bags, his jars and ewers, his roll of knives – are packed away and his two coffers are one atop the other. There are some large bags, too.
‘You are going somewhere?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Somewhere my skills are appreciated and my belongings not searched and objects stolen.’
He gestures at Riven, asleep in his bed, face turned to the wall. His dressing needs changing.
‘What has been stolen?’ she asks.
‘That hardly matters,’ he says. ‘It is the fact of it.’
Then it hits her. The ledger.
‘A moment,’ she says.
She opens the door of the garderobe, and it too scrapes too loudly on the stone-flagged floor. His clothes are all taken down and the row of pegs on which they used to hang to take advantage of the ammoniac stink is empty. The ledger is gone.
She goes back into Riven’s chamber. Riven has turned over, but his eyes are still closed.
‘Have you seen a book?’ she asks Payne.
‘A book? I have two.’
‘A particular book. Hung on a peg in there. It was in a bag with a hole in?’
Payne shakes his head. No.
‘Are you sure? It was about this size.’
Again, he shakes his head.
‘I’m sure I would remember seeing that. What was it a book of?’
‘Of – well, it did not have a title. It was a – a list of things. Names mostly. But it had a hole in it. That is what you would remember most.’
She cannot help but glance at the pollaxe in its corner as she says this. She wonders, bets, imagines, knows for certain, that the pick of the axe made the hole.
‘The book had a hole? Or the bag?’
‘Both.’
Payne pulls a face.
‘And you left it here? Why?’
‘For – for safekeeping,’ she says.
‘Ha,’ he says. ‘More fool you. I have lost a cup – of silver – and a knife that I was given by the Duke of Devonshire, as well as a cap lined with marten fur, and – and – and other, divers items the whereabouts of which this villain is unable to pinpoint, despite lying here when the thefts occurred.’
But why the ledger?
And, Christ! What will Thomas say? She feels sick with it. Faint. As if she might fall over at any time. First Payne is going, and now the ledger is gone! The ledger. Oh, dear Christ. She tries to concentrate. Think about Payne.
‘Where are you going?’ she asks.
‘South,’ he tells her. ‘To Bywell in Tynedale. A case of the pissing evil.’
‘The pissing evil? Is that serious?’ she asks. It sounds it.
‘Of course.’
‘Will you come back?’
‘When the illness has run its course, and if King Henry wills it, yes, but not if it is to treat this man.’
He curls his lips at Riven. And now she looks over at Riven, only to see him not looking at Payne, who has just insulted him, but at her, and she knows – she knows – he has the ledger.
Payne says his farewells. Two of the King’s men come for his coffers and bags and there is some good-natured badinage between them and Riven’s guard. When they have gone, and she has said goodbye and thanked Payne for all he has shown her, and he has clasped her to him in a moment of strained emotion, she returns to change Riven’s dressing. His eyes are shut again. She works quickly, tugging the wick a little further from the wound. Her hands are shaking.
‘A book, hmmm?’ he asks.
She pauses for a moment.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Do you know where it is?’
He says nothing. She exposes the wound to the air. It is healing nicely, she thinks, and the wick is drawing clear. She rests her thumbnail on the flesh where it is rosy, and she wonders, for a moment, for a moment, if she could just – cause him pain? Get him to talk that way? But no. She remembers how he faced the pain when she cut him. And besides – it would be pointless. He is lying with his arms by his sides today. They moved the limb down in the week after they had made the cut, and since it had been positioned such for so long, it hurt him enough to make him faint, but he never cried out, except once, to emit a tiny squeak, like fresh rush under foot.
‘What do you want with a book?’ he asks.
‘It is – it belonged to my father.’
‘Your father?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘He is dead.’
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Your father is dead. What was he? A barber surgeon likewise?’
And she is briefly caught out. She has never even wondered what he might have been and done.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Likewise.’
‘And how did this book come by its hole?’
She claims not to know.
‘Have you seen it?’ she asks. ‘Have you taken it?’
Riven sighs.
‘It is as I told that bore, Master Payne,’ he says. ‘I sleep. I do not notice men coming and going. And if they take things to sell to buy food—’
‘But you have a guard!’
‘He, too, must eat.’
‘But why a book? Why take that? It is of no value.’
‘Yet you seem exercised by its absence?’
‘It is as I say,’ she tells him. ‘It was my father’s.’
‘Odd,’ he says. ‘I wonder if my son would be so sentimental about such a trifle were it mine?’
‘Your son?’
‘I have one.’
She hardly knows what to say.
‘Tell me,’ Riven goes on, ‘your assistant. Was he ever a monk? A friar or some such?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not one of them. Now, listen. For all I have done for you. Where is that ledger?’
‘A ledger, is it?’ Riven says, but in doing so, he closes his eyes and turns his head away, and just then, as if summoned by a secret signal, the guard shunts open the door and waits for her to leave. He is a very big man, she sees. An archer, probably, with those wrists. She can only obey him, but when she has left the room and the door is shut behind her, she asks him about the thefts. He feigns ignorance, but they both know.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘I do not care about the knife and goblet or whatever, I am only concerned for a book.’
But now he is genuinely puzzled. He really knows nothing about it.
‘And has – has Sir Giles been out of bed?’ she asks. ‘Walking and so on?’
‘Oh, yes,’ the guard says. ‘You cannot keep a Riven down, is what he says. He does not go far, mind. I see to that.’
She finds Thomas standing lookout on the tower’s top again. He has his cap pulled very low over his eyes and he is almost shapeless with the clothes he wears under his cloak.
When she tells him, he is unable to believe it.
‘Riven has it? Are you certain?’
‘I am sure.’
He ru
bs his jaw and looks away into the distance. She cannot hear his palm against the bristles because of the wind and the seagulls that shriek while they play in it.
‘Christ,’ he says. ‘Christ.’
‘I know.’
‘What will he do with it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she tells him. ‘I think he only knows that it is of value to me, so far, and he’ll not necessarily discover its significance, will he? Because – because, well, why would he? He thinks it belonged to my father, which is why I want it back.’
Thomas nods. His eyes are watering in the cold wind.
‘How do we get it back?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘It was not there in the chamber, so I cannot simply take it when he’s asleep. And if I show him how much I want it, it will only make him more determined that I shouldn’t have it. He is like that.’
‘But we must find it. Can you imagine what Sir John would say if we were to turn up having lost the ledger, and saved Giles Riven’s life?’
And she looks at him, distraught, since she can see that it is all her fault.
And then he starts to laugh, and he puts his hand over hers.
‘It will be all right,’ he says. ‘Put your trust in me, says the Lord. It will not be what we want, or think we want, but it will be all right.’
And now hearing him talk such reassuring nonsense makes her want to cry.
‘God’s plan?’ she asks.
He smiles again, more broadly still, a row of white teeth in his dark beard, and puts his arm around her shoulder and he pulls her to him, and though at that precise moment snowflakes drift to settle around them, she feels, my God, he may just be right.
The snow does not settle, and the next week it is the feast of St Thomas, when the day is shortest in all the year, and most of those in the castle not called John are celebrating their name day. Horner allows Thomas to come with him and a few of the others and they go out of the walls and after a day searching the countryside they drag in a man-high, man-wide length of green log. They shove it in the bread oven, but they cannot get it to burn, or to give off any heat, and it smoulders wetly, hissing for three days and nights until they finally give up on it, and drag it out and chop it up and burn it with some beams they’ve stolen from a cottage in the village.
‘You all right, Thomas?’ Horner asks as they are sitting by the flames. ‘Only you look – haunted. Like someone is out to kill you?’
‘Well, they are,’ he says. ‘All of Lord Montagu’s men. Christ. Most of England.’
‘Yes, yes, but we’re safe behind these walls,’ Horner reassures him. ‘Unless someone within them is trying to kill you?’
Thomas shakes his head, but Katherine thinks of the two that are after him to split him gut to gizzard. They are the reason he has not been down to the main gatehouse, where Riven’s men are posted, to see if there is any sniff of the ledger.
‘Unless it is burned, used as a splint to start a fire, then that is the only place it can be,’ he has told her.
But as the week goes on, and there is no sign of it, and Thomas isn’t able to go to the gatehouse to find it, the strain begins to tell, not helped by the privations of the Advent fast during which they have lived on briny soup and almost equally briny ale. The thought of its end, and of Christmas itself, is almost too much to bear and when they wake on the morning itself, it is to discover that the first heavy snowfall of the winter is in the process of settling outside, sealing them into their already shrunken world. Nevertheless, despite its flurries, the men and few women of the castle gather in the bailey after the first Mass of the day to watch the candles lit, and their light shine through the chapel’s windows and they are there to cheer King Henry when he grants them licence to go out and hunt the migrant swans that have settled on the mere below the castle walls, and any other fish, or fowl, they can find besides.
‘I’ve been eyeing them all month,’ Jack says. ‘Watching them get fatter by the day while we wither to nowt on this stinking fish stew not worth a louse.’
But neither Thomas nor Katherine nor Jack is among the appointed hunters. Horner commands them to keep watch from the top of the outward postern gate, where one of the men has entwined ivy through the merlons, while seemingly every other man in the garrison is out roaming the country below.
Thomas takes the chance to approach the main gatehouse, and she watches him sidle away through the bailey, keeping to its edges, and already he looks suspicious, like a thief, and she wonders if he ought not to go straight at the steps as if he belongs there. She waits, her gaze fixed on the gatehouse, and she finds herself shivering as she mumbles the prayers for his safe return. At the end of the afternoon, he comes, empty-handed, just as the hunters troop back on new-made paths embroidered in the snowfields, converging on the gate with their haul: most of the swans, all sorts of duck and goose, a fox, three herons, a string of puffins, and even a bulbous seal Tailboys’s men killed among the rocks on the headland to the north. They carry this oddity slung from a long pike held on their shoulders and everybody reacts to it in their own way.
That night they sing songs and their bellies are filled with rough meaty pottage and sour beer made with what tastes like nettles brought by an Easterling ship, sent from some French duke somewhere that also brought with it iron bars for the smiths, wheat and salt for the King’s bakers. One of the boats unloading the ship sank in the choppy waters while laden, taking with it its oarsmen, and it is not known for sure what it was carrying, though some say malt.
Katherine continues to tend to Giles Riven all through Christmastide. King Henry, through Sir Ralph Grey, has provided her with more linen, wine and rose oil; urine, of course, she can get almost anywhere. The scar is healing, though she still does not know whether he will be able to move his arm.
One morning he is asleep when she goes in, and she believes he remains that way, so she looks again under the frame of his bed, where Payne used to store his mattress, but the ledger is not there, and when she looks up, he is awake, staring at her.
‘Where is it?’ she asks.
But he wants a different conversation.
‘You have not brought your assistant,’ he tells her.
‘Nor will I,’ she says, ‘until you return my book.’
He scoffs.
‘You know where I know him from, don’t you?’ he asks. ‘But you won’t tell me.’
On the morning of the Epiphany she goes to see him again, and she is surprised to find his guard absent, and she opens the door with care to find him standing in the middle of his chamber, wearing only his braies, waiting for her. He is very, very pale, a great rack of ribs and a tilting pelvis, with his belly sunk in, and his skin loose, and swagged like cloth, and his limbs, especially the right arm, withered to sticks, to twigs. He grimaces at her with his brown teeth and his face is waxy and beaded with sweat. His brown hair is damp with it.
‘What do you think?’ he gasps through the pain. ‘You cannot keep a Riven down.’
His guard is within, it turns out, behind the door, waiting to catch him should he fall.
‘You look like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ she says.
He hisses a laugh. She can smell his breath. How coffins must be, she thinks.
‘Am I Famine?’ he asks. ‘Or War? Or am I just Death?’
‘It hardly matters,’ she says, because, after all, he is not one of them. She will not show fright. She will not.
‘Tell your assistant that I am nearly ready,’ he says. ‘Tell him I am no fan of mummery, that I am not misled by disguises. Tell him I will soon remember.’
Katherine ignores him. She is all business, and asks to see the scar, but he will not turn, wisely since he is so unsteady on his newborn colt’s legs, and so instead she must go in and stand behind him. Her hands are shaking. It is seeing him upright, she thinks, that brings his presence home. She removes the linen. It is dry, and the skin is pink, puckered and silky. She knows there is no nee
d for her to look at it ever again.
‘Cold hands you have,’ Riven says.
‘It is snowing,’ she says.
He says nothing, but after a long moment lets out a sad sigh, and she can only guess his thoughts. He says no more until she is finished with the dressing and is about to go.
‘Leave the door,’ he says.
But she does not. She closes him in, and she hurries away, and she will not come back.
The snow lasts all month, falling, melting, freezing, falling again, night after night, day after day, and the icicles that hang fast under the drains in the castle walls and from the mouths of the gargoyles in the keep become steadily more grotesque. The walkways and tower tops are scattered with sand from the beach, and the whiteness of snow serves to emphasise the filth that accrues under the castle walls.
‘Why you need a moat,’ Horner supposes.
All around the castle walls the few patrolling sentries move like heaps of clothing under their heavy cloaks and worsted hats that soon become solid with damp. Below them the bailey is deserted save for the sheep in their folds, eating rationed hay and turnip tops, and bleating constantly through the short grey days.
And there is still no sign of the ledger, or of Edmund Riven.
‘He will wait until the spring, surely?’ Katherine says. She remembers Sir John Fakenham refusing a summons to spend the winter in Sandal Castle years earlier, a decision that saved his life, as it happened. Why would a man want to come and freeze to death in an ill-provisioned castle in such a bleak spot when he could be at home by his own hearthside?
Thomas agrees that is probable, but still. It would be better to know for sure, one way or the other, and in the meantime, they are stuck in the castle, and nerves and tempers begin to fray all around them.
‘How long is this going to last?’ Jack asks. ‘Herding sheep is more fun.’
He has managed to persuade a woman in the tents below to knit him an oily scarf that smells more of goat than sheep, and it has brought him out in a rash under his chin that he keeps scratching. Katherine is with him now, staring south, over the bailey, over their little world, watching the armed shepherds huddle in their tent trying unsuccessfully to burn dung, and beyond, the ghostly lights in the keep windows, where she imagines the ledger is even now.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 28
