The others huddle on sawn logs around the charred circles of last night’s fires, and since they are unused to sleeping on the ground, even in late spring, and they suffer and have become beleaguered and discouraged. The lower orders, the humbler men-at-arms, the archers, the billmen and the women and children who service them, seem to fare better, for they are used to this sort of hardship, having spent long weeks in the open, and rather than merely trying to remain still until time has passed, they confront the misery as if it does not exist.
Even so though, they are all waiting, waiting for something.
Thomas is waiting for Jack.
‘When will he be strong enough to ride?’ he asks her.
And she can only say she does not know. The boy is still not right. He is still hot to the touch and sometimes he lapses into garbling.
‘Montagu will come back soon,’ Thomas says, ‘and there will be another attack.’
‘Can we not put him on a cart? Take that?’
‘We would get no further than the top of the hill before the prickers came for us,’ he tells her, gesturing to its brow where two men wait on horseback, sentries looking both ways.
‘Others manage it,’ she says.
‘Not on a cart.’
So she looks down at Jack, who lies under their cart, covered by a mound of cloaks, with his head resting on a log, his skin dewed with his own sweat, and she shakes her head.
‘We can’t leave him,’ she says.
‘No,’ Thomas agrees, though it is through set teeth.
She wishes she knew what was wrong with him. She wishes the physician Payne were here. He would know what to do.
Three days later, on the day when the bearded priest appears among them to lead a celebration to commemorate the finding of the True Cross, when Jack is no better but no worse, Montagu’s army makes its reappearance, just as Thomas had predicted. It is some of Roos’s men – led by Roos’s own brother – who discover it, or traces of it: a great furrow of hoofand footprints in the mud on the road, and the marks left by wheel rims. But by the time word is sent back to Somerset, Montagu and his army and his Scotsmen are gone, disappeared south, down to Newcastle to meet King Edward’s negotiators. It is easy to imagine them laughing as they go.
Some pretend Montagu’s unimpeded passage is a bitter blow, and they talk of rueing their missed chance, but Katherine is becoming certain it is only the Duke of Somerset who really wants to fight Montagu’s men again, and if the others were truthful, they would admit to wanting to make peace with him, and to seeking King Edward’s grace, and to giving up on all this, and to wishing they were able to go home again.
Home, she thinks. And she thinks of nothing. She has no home, she remembers, and nothing to tether her, and she discerns a flicker of regret for the second passing of Lady Margaret Cornford.
Thomas comes back from the makeshift stabling. He looks grimly purposeful.
‘We are moving,’ he says. ‘South.’
Moving south means that they will try to bring Montagu to the field again, and so the next morning, the mood in the camp is odd, shifting, uncertain. It will be good to be away from here, Katherine supposes, where they have been too long, licking their wounds like dogs, and where morale has withered to nothing, but knowing they are going south to fight an enemy that seems unbeatable means that she, along with many of the other men, lacks the energy to go about the business of breaking camp with any real enthusiasm, and it only gets worse when later that morning Thomas returns, looking grimmer than ever, with the news just brought by messenger that King Edward is moving up from London with a huge army and what he calls ‘ordnance’.
‘Ordnance? What is that?’
‘Guns,’ he says. ‘Huge guns on wheels. He is bringing them up from the Tower of London.’
Then at least it will take him weeks to come, she thinks.
‘The Earl of Warwick is coming, too,’ he goes on, ‘and William Hastings.’
William Hastings. That is a name she has not heard in a long while. She feels another twinge of sorrow, of mourning for something gone.
With men like that coming, she thinks, it means this will have to end, one way or another, and looking at the men around her, she knows that it will really only be one way, and not the other. It is curiously depressing. All these men, she thinks, will be dead soon, and in the most terrible ways, unless they do something about it. She has been so long with them, they have become so familiar, they have become her family, but now that she can feel the world closing in on them, now that she can feel it all coming to an end, she feels a pitiful nostalgia for these weeks gone by.
She gets Thomas to help load Jack on to the cart.
‘How long will we be?’ she wonders. She does not want Jack to have to jounce over the roads for many days. Three days, he supposes, and she cannot help but worry. The carters have only one ox left, the other in the team having been killed in circumstances that are both mysterious and obvious, and the remaining ox is pining for its teammate, and it has ceased to eat and has lost patches of hair on its hide. Nevertheless they whip it until it takes the strain of the cart and begins to tow it, grinding along the track toward the road that cuts across Hedgeley Moor. They find this, and the site on which they mostly ran from Montagu’s men, and they walk south all day. The road is smooth but at every hole or shifted flagstone, the cart throws Jack in the air and he groans and shudders. Katherine walks by its side, with her hand on his shoulder.
Horner comes to announce that they have found somewhere to camp for the night. He seems quite excited at something, and is about to tell her what it is when he sees Jack and he looks very doubtful.
‘Will he live?’
She nods.
‘Good,’ he breathes. ‘Good. We’ll need him. There have been risings in Tynedale. The people there. They are with us.’
‘Tynedale?’ The word is familiar. ‘That is where Bywell is, isn’t it?
‘Do you know it? Not much of a place, is it? Half-built. And damp?’
‘It is where Master Payne was sent.’
She explains about wishing that Jack might see Payne. Horner looks at Jack in his cloak.
‘All this marching around,’ she says. ‘It is not good for him.’
‘It is not good for anyone,’ Horner says, ‘but we cannot spare either of you, for we will be busy, if what we hear is true.’
It isn’t true, of course. It takes them three days to get there – first down that road south, then west along another drovers’ track, and then south again, on one more of those old Roman roads, grinding along over the dressed stones until they meet another one to take them westwards again.
But the fact of it is that when they arrive at the grey stone-walled town of Hexham, where they are promised they will find bread and ale and possibly a great force of Scotsmen come to help them against Lord Montagu, it is to be told that there are none of these things, and that in addition, any small rebellions that may have flared up in favour of King Henry have been quietly put aside in the face of the news of King Edward and his nobles and guns coming north, tidings that have been enough to send most men back to their halls and fields, and it is instantly apparent that the townspeople are merely waiting for them to go, so that they might resume their normal lives.
‘By all His saints,’ Horner says.
But there is nothing to be done, so they wind past the abbey and out through the east gate and down the hill and across the bridge to set up camp on the far side of the fierce little river the men call the Devil’s Water, though none there knows why, and so, as evening falls and the mist rises, they resume their habits of before.
The next day is the feast of the Ascension, and Katherine wakes feeling nauseous. She is sick. Brown vomit. A small puddle. She has a headache, too, and is bone weary.
Thomas is frightened. He finds her some ale.
‘Is it something you have taken from Jack?’ he asks.
She doesn’t know, but Christ, she feels rotten. Sh
e throws the ale back up, cursing its waste. All she wants to do is lie down and shut her eyes. She is at sea again. Swirling, tipping, swooping. Thomas holds the mug of ale to her mouth. It smells of old leather, unwashed, and it tastes slimy. She pushes it away and dry retches a few times. He sits beside her and tells her things. She wishes he would not. She wonders if her humours are imbalanced. The bells in the abbey are ringing and men are going up the hill for Mass.
‘Will Jack be all right?’ Thomas asks. ‘He doesn’t look too good.’
She looks over at the boy. He is pale, almost blue. Christ, she thinks. What is wrong with him?
‘We must see Payne,’ she says.
Thomas is happy to be given something to do.
‘Could I fetch him? Bywell is not far, Horner says. And we could take you to him? Why ever did he go there, anyway?’
‘He was to see to a girl with the pissing evil.’
The pale light is falling slantwise through the haze of fresh green buds on the leaves, striking Thomas in the face where his beard is getting fuller by the day. It is a very dark red, she thinks, like a squirrel’s tail. She is grateful he is there, grateful for his protection again, and wishes she might show him some of the same care herself, but this is no place for that, and the soft comings and goings, the little considerations a man might show his wife, and vice versa, they are for another time, another place, and she feels, perhaps, possibly, even other people. Besides, if she moves she will vomit.
A little later she is sick again anyway.
That decides him. He gets to his feet.
‘I will ask Horner,’ he says. ‘That is it.’
She rolls on to her side in the long, wet grass and half-hopes to die. When Thomas returns he is pleased with himself.
‘I told him you might both have leprosy,’ he says.
She does not react.
‘So he has told me to take you away, both of you, to find Payne. We are to go now. He says Bywell is but half a day’s ride downriver. We are to see Payne, take his advice, and then ride back. He says we are not to be gone more than a day. And if we are, then I am to ride back alone.’
‘What about Jack?’ she murmurs. ‘He cannot ride.’
‘It is the best I could do. Tailboys won’t even spare a mule.’
Is it worth the risk? She cannot say.
Jack is silent when Thomas and John Stump gather him up.
‘It is all right, Jack,’ Thomas soothes. ‘Come on, I’ll walk beside you.’
And, watched from a safe distance by Horner and the rest of the men, they ease Jack up into the saddle of Horner’s horse, and they tie his good foot to a stirrup and his bad leg, held out straight, is lashed to the straps of his saddle.
‘I will hold him,’ she says.
‘Good job you’re so small, Kit,’ John Stump offers as he helps her up into the saddle behind him, but the horse smells very, very strong and she cannot stand it and she slides back down and vomits bile on her own bootcaps. The others watch in alarmed silence. After she wipes her mouth, she says goodbye, and they leave the camp following the road east and then turn left at the crossroads and walk north towards the town of Corbridge. Thomas leads Jack ahead, she follows behind. It is sunny, coming on to noon though early in the year, so their shadows fall long ahead, and as the day wears on, she starts to feel a bit better. Perhaps it is the walking? Perhaps it is being out of the camp? Away from Grey and Horner and the others?
They pass through common land at the road’s side, rough pasture where there are a few fat sheep with oily coats and crooked faces, and there are many plump rabbits. The gentle hills are capped in trees, the valleys tilled in parts, red earth hazed in green shoots of a pea or rye crop, and there are a few boys out, keeping the rabbits off with shepherd’s crooks, and in the distance, there are smoke-softened houses and farms and it all serves to remind her of Cornford, and she feels a spurt of anger and loss, and she finds her fingers have tightened on the reins.
They find the bridge where Horner had suggested it might be, and they do not stop to say a prayer in the chantry chapel at the southern end, but press on over its flagged spans towards the little town at its far end where they are made to pay pontage by a man in a greasy linen apron who smells like a tanner but has a bill and a sword and a hammer and two daggers and a decent-looking bow with a sheaf of arrows with him in the small wooden shelter in which he stands.
‘You are well arrayed?’ Thomas comments, and the man grunts. Beyond him, the little town of Corbridge is well shuttered up and every house looks like a tiny castle. They buy some ale from a man who serves them through a small aperture in the thick wall of his house at the crossroads, but there is no one to sell them bread, so they drink their ale and find the mugs are filled with tar or wax at the bottom and they have been given half-measures, but there is something about the place that deters them from complaining.
‘Is Bywell Castle far?’ Thomas asks.
‘Follow that road,’ the man says, pointing east, and so they do, leaving the town on another of the old roads, through common land where there are more sheep cropping the spring grass and the sky is filled with clacking jackdaws until they see what they think must be it: a grey, foursquare stone tower that might once have been intended as a gatehouse, if the builder had only gone on to build the thing it was supposed to be the gate to. Instead it is left, standing isolated like a tree’s stump, hard by the river.
‘Strange,’ Thomas says. ‘I expected it to be half-deserted.’
There is a knot of men at the gate and two or three in each turret. And there’s a flag in one, tied to the weathervane, lifting and falling in the wind. It looks like King Henry’s.
‘Can he be here?’ she wonders.
‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ Thomas says as two horsemen come riding out towards them.
‘Oh, dear God,’ she says. ‘Look.’
They are Riven’s men.
‘What in the name of God are they doing here?’
The men are in helmets and bits and pieces of plate, as if they expect something to happen soon, or fear it might, and they come well armed, with swords at their hips, hammers and bows across the backs of their saddles, and their livery coats are fresh and clean, so that it is easy to see the rising ravens against the white cloth. The contrast with Somerset’s grey-faced, down-at-heel divisions is stark. The two horsemen come to a stop with a rattle of harnesses. One gets off. The other stays in the saddle. They are pretty typical: big, blunt-faced men, of the sort to frequent inns looking for fights or women or work, or just something to do. One of them has the flattened nose of a man who has spent too many mornings in the stocks. They recognise her, but not Thomas.
‘God give you good day, Master Surgeon,’ the one on the horse says. ‘What brings you here?’
She indicates Jack, who is slumped in his saddle, and explains what they have come for.
‘Master Payne is with King Henry at Mass,’ the horseman says, gesturing south to a square tower of a church among the bulbous treetops.
‘King Henry is here?’
The horseman nods.
‘Aye,’ he says.
‘And is Sir Giles Riven here?’ Thomas asks.
‘No,’ the one on foot says, ‘he is moved on.’
‘Where? Do you know?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ he says. But she is sure he does.
‘Still,’ he says. ‘Your physician will be pleased you’ve arrived with a new patient. His last one died not two weeks ago.’
Katherine asks to be directed to a fireside unless they would like the blood of Jack on their hands, and though they don’t seem to care about that, they lead Jack’s horse across the cobbles and into the yard where another of Riven’s men emerges from the stables to help Thomas with Jack, while yet another emerges to take the horse away to be brushed and fed. It is better here than out in the camp.
Together with the other man, Thomas helps Jack up the steps and into the hall where there is a
fire newly lit in the hearth, though the room is not yet warm. A servant is placing dishes on the boards in readiness for the King’s return from Mass, while another lights candles against the gloom, and there are smells emerging from behind the screen that make her gag. The worst is the smell of the tallow candle, though. She seems to vomit air deep in her throat when she catches its smell and every man in the room turns to look at her.
‘Christ, boy!’ one of them says. ‘You are green.’
She slumps on the bench next to where they have lowered Jack, and she sits with her arms across her knees and stares at the ground between her feet and thinks if she is utterly still, she will not vomit again. But when they hear King Henry returning through the doors and into the hall, Katherine knows she must rise and wait for an audience at the dark, cold end of the hall, and she can barely stand. He comes in, looking well, she has to admit, even if he still does not look regal, or even anything much more than clerical in his brown robes. Behind him come some men she recognises from the hall at Bamburgh, various attendants of the bedchamber, she supposes, as well as the beardless priest. Payne is there, too, in his blue jacket, very tight woollen hose and tapering shoes, and when he sees her he starts, and he diverts his steps toward her, careless of protocol.
‘Master,’ he says.
‘No,’ she says, shaking her finger. She means for him to understand that she thinks he is the master, not she. He is the one who has been to Bologna.
‘But you look terrible,’ he says.
He sits her down. He touches her forehead, murmurs something. He smells clean.
‘It is not me,’ she says. ‘It is Jack.’
Payne looks Jack over, and taps the binding on his leg to see if he reacts, and then he frowns when Jack does not, but now King Henry is showing concern and he calls Payne in his quavering voice and Payne approaches the board where King Henry now sits, and he explains, and asks to be excused. King Henry is gracious, and sends them away with a servant carrying a rush lamp and a ewer of warm wine, which Payne says they will need for the patient.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 33
