The servant leads the way, out of the hall and up the tight circle of stone steps that twists up one of the towers in the corner of the castle. Master Payne helps Thomas with Jack, while Katherine follows behind. When they reach the next floor, the servant opens a heavy door with a loud locking mechanism and guides them into a solar. He crosses the rushless floor to light a candle and the smell of tallow hits her and she gags, and she has to beg him to blow it out, and Payne looks at her in the glow of the single rush lamp and she sees his eyebrows rise. The servant finds another rush lamp and lights that, and she can see from this that they are in a solar, with a hearth in the middle of the floor, its fire unlit, and in the corner, a pile of straw mattresses on which two black cats are curled, watching, and it reminds her of Cornford and she could weep.
‘I have no chamber of my own,’ Payne says with a shrug. ‘King Henry sleeps above with his gentlemen, and – well.’
He tails off. Thomas clears the cats and pulls a mattress down and flops it next to the fire. They settle Jack on it. Payne gets Thomas to hold up the lamp and he pries open one of Jack’s eyes, then smells his breath and wrinkles his nose.
‘Do you have a sample?’ he asks, nodding at Jack’s nethers.
She shakes her head.
‘We can get some in the morning,’ Payne supposes. ‘Meanwhile I have something for him, I think, and perhaps for you too.’
He takes the lamp and crosses to his coffer and takes out some things – his bleeding bowls, his roll of knives, his urine jar. The physician finds a clay bottle of something and brings it over. He returns the lamp to Thomas and in its light he lets a few drops fall into a bowl that he then tops up with the wine. He tells her it is meadowsweet and fennel and some other things.
He holds Jack up and gets him to sip the concoction. When he has done so, they lay the boy down. They watch him for a while.
‘He will be fine, I think,’ Payne says. ‘He needs food. Better than he has been getting. Wheat bread is best for this sort of thing. And capons. Meadow birds, too, of the sort with narrow beaks, rather than ducks, though duck eggs would be good. Boiled in their shells. And he needs rest. He needs to stay still for a few days. Not be carted around the countryside.’
Then Payne sits back. He looks at her.
‘So,’ he says, ‘what do you want to do?’
‘About what?’ she wonders.
‘About you,’ he says.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘It is just one of those things. A fever. Something I have eaten, perhaps.’
She has lied like this a thousand times, but this time she feels awkward, and she blurts the words, and when she looks up, he is staring at her very carefully.
‘Nevertheless,’ he says, quite slowly, very carefully. ‘I should like to see your urine.’
She makes some dismissive movement, but he is insistent.
‘In fact,’ he says, ‘I should like to see you urinate into this jar. To watch you do it.’
He returns to his coffer, finds his famous urine jar and offers it to her. Thomas is standing on tiptoe, neck craned to look into the box, hoping to see the ledger, she supposes, and he does not see what is going on.
‘Come,’ Payne says. ‘Come.’
But now Thomas hears and he turns sharply, and Payne is staring at her, challenging her to lie again. He gestures with the jar. She hears her heart beating very loudly and she feels too tall to stand, and she thinks she might faint. Payne holds the jar out, one eyebrow raised, waiting.
She tells him she has just passed water and has none to offer. He sighs as if he has heard this sort of thing before. He puts the jar back on top of the coffer. He cannot make her piss in the jar, they all know that. But now there is a long silence. And she knows, suddenly, but with absolute certainty, that this is it. Her time is up. Her race is run.
She looks at Payne and Payne looks back.
And then he asks, very quietly, a direct question.
‘So who are you?’ he asks. ‘I mean, really?’
Thomas coughs. He starts to say something, something he hopes might distract Payne, but Payne does not take his gaze from her. She sighs. She knows, and has done for some while, that he has divined her sex.
‘My name is Katherine,’ she says.
Jack grunts on the mattress. They all glance at him. He is like a dog chasing rabbits in his dream. Payne returns to her.
‘And?’ he asks.
‘I am – well, I am not a man, obviously. You have divined that.’
‘From the moment I saw you, I believe,’ he tells her.
‘Then why did you not say anything?’ Thomas asks.
Payne glances over at him, then looks back to Katherine.
‘We all have things to hide,’ he says. ‘All of us.’
She does not try to imagine what he means, though she can see it counts a great deal to him. She is wondering whether she feels relief to have told someone, but she doesn’t, not especially.
‘So what will you do?’ she asks. ‘Will you tell the King?’
‘Why should I? He won’t care. He won’t even— But tell me. Why? Why are you going around like this? Are you in some danger? Is that it? Are you – what? Being sought by someone? Do you have a husband? Well. I can see you have. That much is obvious. But why did you ever come to Bamburgh, passing yourself off as a man?’
‘It is a long story,’ she says.
‘What is it?’ Jack mutters from his mattress. ‘Tell us.’
‘Yes,’ Payne says. ‘Come. Tell us.’
But now she is bone weary. Too tired to care very much, and all she wants is to sleep, to be away from these men.
‘Sit,’ Payne says and he drags a stool from the shadows and places it against the wall next to the chimney. She sits with her back to the stone and wishes she had some ale, or even just water.
‘Will you tell them, Thomas?’ she asks.
And Thomas scratches his head.
‘Christ,’ he says, ‘where does a man begin?’
Payne looks at him.
‘And who are you in all this?’ he asks, and then his face clears.
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Of course. You are the father.’
22
THOMAS DOES NOT sleep that night. Nor, he thinks, does she, though he cannot be sure, because she lies with her back to him.
‘Thomas?’ Jack whispers.
It is a surprise to hear his voice after all this time, and he takes it as proof of Payne’s skill.
‘What?’ Thomas asks.
‘Is that all true?’
He sighs.
‘Most of it, I think,’ he says.
But he does not want to talk about it any more. He has talked all night, and so he turns over, the straw sighing under him, and he sees in the cold light of the moon that strikes through the half-open shutters that Payne is awake too, looking at him as if he has done something wrong. Thomas sighs and turns to lie on his back, and he looks up into the night and wonders what in God’s name he is supposed to do now.
He thinks about being a father. Men usually give good cheer when they hear another is to have a son for the first time, but that is when they have a name and something to pass on, and that is when they have a wife who wears their ring and lives under their roof, but what, of these, has Thomas? None. Instead, he has what? A woman – an apostate – who is married to another man, albeit under a different name, disguised as a boy who is, Payne has guessed, three months pregnant. She is accused of murder, though she says that is unjust. She has had her ear clipped for desertion, though that hardly matters. They have a very few silver pennies in their purses, and they are conscripted in an army that is already half-beaten, and is about to be completely so, but from which they have not been able to extricate themselves, and now, even if they could be gone, there is nowhere left for them to go, since they have consistently lied to the only people who were ever welcoming to them, and, more than that, it is to one of these people to whom she – Katherine – whose family name no one
knows, was fraudulently married while pretending to be a woman for the death of whom he cannot help but feel partially – wholly? – responsible.
When he puts it like that, when he recounts each stroke of his chance-inspired ill fortune, instead of weeping, he finds a slow smile spreading across his cheeks and a deep, chugging laugh beginning to build in his chest and it emerges in a series of sobbing and sighs and then gradually becomes loud enough so that he has to cover his face with his blanket.
It is absurd. Absurd.
At length he stops laughing, and now he finds that he is weeping.
Oh Christ, he thinks, what in God’s name am I to do?
When morning comes, slow and seeping, loud with birdsong, he still has no answer, and Katherine is sick again and can hardly move. He is reminded of a far-off time, in Wales he supposes, since that is what she has told him, when he sat over her in an inn for a week or more while she slowly knit herself back together, and he prepares to do so again, to sit there and wait, watching over her while she groans in her bed and the servant ambles about the solar collecting up the sheets and the other mattresses. He will use the time wisely, he thinks, and come up with something. Some plan.
Payne returns from the kitchen with more wine to mix with his tincture and he makes both Katherine and Jack take some, and later Thomas thinks she smells peculiar but she sleeps at least, and seems at peace, and Payne says that there is nothing more he may do for her until later, and so, when the bells ring for Mass, he goes with Payne to the church, walking twenty paces or so behind the narrow back of King Henry and his small retinue of gentlemen.
‘How is the expectant father this day?’ Payne asks with a smirk.
And Thomas looks at him, and he wonders if, instead of shame, he should feel pride in what he has done? Perhaps if he were Jack, say, and Jack were him, then he might feel some envy for the boy? That he might even see something to be admired in what he had done? That he alone had had a woman in the castle with him all this time, right under their noses, while the others were suffering their pangs of discomfort or, worse, visiting the whore in the village? He holds that thought, but he knows the truth of it, and it is nothing so simple.
When they return from Mass, Katherine is sitting up, feeling better, she says, but still tentative, moving as if bruised, and for a short while they are shy with one another, and their conversation is formal and stilted.
‘Will you take ale?’
‘A little, please. Thank you.’
Thomas asks Payne what he will do now and Payne tells them that he is bound to King Henry, and that he will go wherever he goes.
‘Over the sea?’ Thomas asks.
‘You do not place much faith in the Duke of Somerset to defeat Lord Montagu and lead King Henry to London in triumph?’
Thomas hardly cares what happens to King Henry and the Duke of Somerset. He can only think about what he and Katherine can do now.
‘And what about you?’ Payne continues. ‘What will the proud new mother and father do now?’
Thomas glances at Katherine. She looks interested in his answer.
‘I don’t know,’ Thomas admits.
‘Do you have any money?’ Payne asks.
Thomas shakes his head.
‘Nothing of value?’
‘Only the ledger, which we no longer have anyway.’
‘The stolen book? Hmm. What about this Sir John Fakenham character? Would he take you back?’
Thomas and Katherine look at one another for a moment.
‘Probably not,’ she says.
‘So?’
‘So we must find that ledger,’ Thomas says. ‘That is all that remains to us. Our only option.’
Among the many shocks Payne has to suffer in the telling of their tale the night before, this was the most dangerous.
‘But Riven has it,’ Katherine says, ‘of that I am sure.’
‘Then we must find him. Find where he has gone. Retrieve it, if he has not burned it, and then–’
The argument that follows comes very quickly, suddenly blowing up as if from nowhere.
‘And if that happens,’ Katherine asks, ‘what then?’
‘We find the ledger, and show it to King Henry!’
‘If we can find it,’ Katherine says. ‘And if we can somehow get it to King Henry. Which we have not managed yet, even when we had the thing in our hands!’ ‘And even then, it is only of value if – if – King Henry’s cause is still valid!’
‘There is still hope,’ Thomas says. ‘And we may–’
‘No!’ Katherine shouts. ‘Thomas. This – it can’t last! We cannot live like this! Don’t you understand? Do you not remember I know what happens in childing? I do not want to do that. I do not want to do that, to do that, on my own. To be at the mercy of a midwife who places her faith in stones and bones and pardoners’ scrips.’
‘I have delivered many a lamb,’ he says, and for a moment she looks so wild he thinks she will try to stab him, and he takes a step back.
‘That is what Eelby said about his wife,’ she spits.
He holds up his hands.
‘Forgive me!’ he says. ‘I did not mean to—’
‘What else could you mean?’
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’
And the heat goes out of it just as suddenly.
‘So you want to go back to Bamburgh?’ he asks.
‘I want to be near Master Payne,’ she says.
He looks at Master Payne who is looking oddly inscrutable.
‘And where will you be?’ he asks.
‘I am bound to King Henry,’ he repeats, ‘so if God forbid York beats Lancaster in the field, then it must be to Bamburgh, I suppose, since that is all that will be left to us, but if Lancaster beats York, imagine! Then he might go anywhere. To Coventry. Eltham. Windsor. Westminster.’
He smiles at the thought, as if already feeling the southern sun on his cheeks, but Thomas has the strong sense that the physician’s next journey will most likely be north, to Bamburgh. At least then there is a fleetingly slim chance they might find the ledger, he supposes. They can sell it, and with the money— He stops. It is a flight of fancy, he knows that, in his heart. But what else? What else is there? Christ, if only they had some money! If only they were not reliant on the charity of others.
Payne looks to be thinking hard and then he speaks, slowly, revealing some new horror.
‘But should York beat Lancaster in the field,’ he says, ‘he will pursue the King to Bamburgh, will he not? And should Bamburgh fall, as it must, then you’d best pray to your lucky saints that your ledger is no longer there. That it is burned, which is most likely, or written over.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Why? Because if it is in Bamburgh, as you suppose, then sooner or later it will fall into King Edward’s hands, won’t it? And if King Edward finds the book, if it is shown him, then he’ll want to know how it came to be where it is, and he’ll soon be rounding up anyone and everyone who knows what it is about. Including us.’
He points to everyone in the room. Jack starts coughing. Katherine is pale again, and she turns to Thomas, round-eyed.
‘Remember what Sir John said,’ Katherine says. ‘That if it were discovered that we knew what it proved, we would have our feet burned and then be hanged and gralloched as a hunter guts a deer, and everyone we knew would have the same done to them!’
‘He is right,’ Payne says. ‘He is right!’
‘But King Edward will not know it was us who brought it?’ Thomas says.
She turns to him aghast.
‘Your name is in the ledger!’ she tells him. ‘It is there, written under the picture of the rose window you once drew. You were pleased with the picture, and wrote “Thomas Everingham fecit” below.’
He stares at her. Christ, he thinks, could she not have mentioned that before?
‘I am sorry,’ she says. Her eyes are downturned and she looks miserable with guilt.
‘So,’
he says. ‘Whatever happens, we must return to Bamburgh? We must now find that ledger!’
‘But how can I go back?’ she asks, placing her hand over her tummy, which Thomas swears was not so round a moment ago. ‘It is all right now, perhaps, but soon I will be a surgeon who is five or six months pregnant. I cannot do it! I cannot go back and give birth to a child in the outward postern gate! I will not!’
Thomas does not know what to do or say, but Payne is looking at her carefully, then he turns to Thomas.
‘Thomas,’ he says. ‘Will you leave us a moment?’
And Thomas, who can feel the weight of it all pressing down on him, stopping him thinking, is pleased to do so.
He leaves them, and follows the flight of winding steps up into the dark until he sees the limned outline of a small door that will lead him out on to the tower’s top. He will be alone there, he thinks, and will have space to breathe and to think. He emerges out in the spring day, where cool sunlight shines and the birds are loud. There is a guard, though, a boy, in Riven’s colours, bright and new-made, with a fringe that half-covers his eyes and a prick-shaft bow that will not loose an arrow a hundred paces.
‘Who are you?’ the boy asks.
‘Thomas Everingham.’
It means nothing to him. Why should it? Thomas does not ask the boy’s name in return. He doesn’t care and he doesn’t want to know.
‘What do you want?’ the boy asks.
‘Honestly? For you to be quiet.’
The boy raises his eyebrows and mutters a profanity that might in some circumstances have got him killed, but Thomas is not in the mood for that, and anyway, the boy is just a boy. He seems excited and after a while, he must speak.
‘They have not been sighted yet,’ he says.
‘No,’ Thomas agrees. He looks out across the valley. The mist has lifted and the river’s water slides brown through the funnel of its green-swathed banks. Where the banks are shallow cows have been down to muddy the water, but there are none there now. He looks south, to the little church in its yard, the mounds of graves, the old yew that must have been there two or three hundred years. He wonders if King Henry is back in there, on his knees before the altar. For all his praying, Thomas thinks, this king does not seem to have much luck.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 34
