Kingmaker: Broken Faith

by Toby Clements

  The tower top is small around, only a few paces across, its walls thick stone, its merlons high. It is a good little gatehouse, Thomas supposes. He stands there, and he feels that his socks are gritty and he wonders when he last removed his ill-fitting boots, and when he last changed his linen, and he knows that he needs a wash, too, by God, and a shave and a long sleep in a bed of hay, and he feels the need for something good to happen to him today, but he cannot for the life of him think what. Then there is something else niggling him.

  ‘Who’ve not been sighted yet?’ he asks, realising that what the boy’s said still hangs between them like an unanswered question, and that this is what’s bothering him.

  ‘Edmund’s men,’ the boy says.

  ‘Edmund’s men?’

  ‘Aye. They’s expected before sundown.’

  Who in God’s name is Edmund? Thomas wonders. The boy is looking at him as if he may be simple.

  ‘They’ll be wearing our livery,’ the boy goes on, tugging on the cloth of his own tabard. ‘Where is yourn?’

  ‘Below,’ Thomas says. He looks away, across the river to the trees beyond. There is something wrong here, he can feel. Edmund. It is not a name such as Everingham, but a given name. Edmund. In Riven’s livery. Christ. It can only mean one thing. Edmund Riven. Here. Or on his way.

  ‘What do you think they will do when they get here?’ he asks the boy, and again the boy looks at him as if he is stupid.

  ‘Well, they will take King Henry – him down there – won’t they?’

  ‘And where will they take him?’

  Back to Bamburgh, he supposes, but the boy scoffs.

  ‘Not bloody likely,’ he says. ‘Not after all this. No. They’ll take him to Newcastle, and then down to London, I daresay.’

  It is as if the flagstones under his feet are shifting and switching places. He knows he will expose himself but he cannot help it. He must know for sure.

  ‘Edmund Riven is coming here to take King Henry to Newcastle, to hand him to Montagu as prisoner?’

  The boy is as proud of the scheme as if he devised it himself. He has evil teeth.

  ‘They say Edmund Riven’s wound reeks enough to make sheep barren?’ the boy says. ‘Though I do not believe that, mind.’

  ‘And is that the way they’ll come?’ Thomas asks, coming to join him, standing at his shoulder, staring down the river.

  ‘Aye,’ he says. ‘From Newcastle.’

  Thomas needs to reassure the boy, but he also needs time to think. To think what this means. And then something occurs to him.

  ‘You are Sir Giles’s man, aren’t you?’ Thomas goes on. ‘And were at Hedgeley Moor?’

  The boy allows it. ‘Funny, running like that, weren’t it?’ he says. ‘All the stuff you’re told about never running, about never turning your back. And all the stuff they say about Towton, I mean, and then us, off like rabbits as soon as the first shafts were loosed, and everyone coming after us. Worked though, didn’t it?’

  Thomas nods and joins the boy in laughing. So, he thinks, it was as Roos’s men said: Riven’s men broke first, and took the whole line with them. They must have been on Montagu’s side from the beginning, Thomas sees, but then why did they not join Montagu’s men and turn on Roos and Hungerford’s men? Because they were outnumbered? Can that have been it? No, Thomas thinks, it was not because they were outnumbered, or, rather, it was not only because they were outnumbered. It was because that was merely the first part of Riven’s scheme. His men did not want to turn on Roos and Hungerford’s men because there was still something else yet to do, some second part of the scheme, that required them to appear to be loyal to King Henry and his cause.

  And that second part is being played out right now, before his eyes: the betrayal and capture of King Henry himself.

  Dear God! Thomas wonders what price Riven has extracted for this, or what advantage he will expect, and from whom? One thing is certain; it must be more than merely the retention of Cornford Castle.

  The boy finally reads his expression correctly.

  ‘Who did you say you was?’ he asks, and now he knows he has made a mistake, but it is too late. Thomas should kill him, but he is not able. He turns and steps through the door and draws its locking bar across into the stone holding. He hears the boy’s footsteps and then his shouting and thumping on the door’s thick boards. Thomas hesitates, then slides the locking bar back and steps aside to let the door open. It flies open to crash against the jamb and the boy is suddenly tipping forward. All Thomas has to do is help him past. The boy shouts as he goes sprawling down the winding steps. He cries out in rage and he only stops on the second landing, where he lies stunned, but he is a boy, of course: they can fall down steps. Thomas hauls him up by the tabard and shoves him down the next set of steps. The boy hits his head on the underside of the descending flight with a hollow tonk and his legs fly out from under him and he falls on the next flight down like a dropped sack.

  Payne opens the door and looks down at the boy, then up at Thomas coming down the steps.

  ‘What is wrong?’ he asks.

  ‘Riven is coming,’ Thomas tells him. ‘Both of them. Father and son. We must go.’

  ‘Wait,’ Payne says. ‘A moment.’

  He will not let Thomas pass into the room.

  Then he does.

  Thomas pushes open the door, then stops.

  Katherine stands by the cold fireplace. She is staring at him, half-anxious, half-challenging, but that is not what it is about her that stops him dead. She is in a dress. It has a blue body and blue skirts with black sleeves and she wears a red belt and laces of the same at the front. She has a long white cloth wrapped around her head and it is almost impossible to see the boy who was Kit. Thomas is suddenly robbed of words. She is beautiful. He stares for a long moment. She stares back. She tilts her chin defiantly.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  He collects himself.

  ‘Riven is coming,’ he tells them. ‘Giles Riven has betrayed King Henry, and all of us, and sold him to Montagu.’

  There is a moment of silence. Katherine stares at him.

  ‘You have to tell him,’ Payne says. ‘You cannot let him fall into Montagu’s hands. He will kill him.’

  Thomas looks at Payne. He is genuinely upset.

  ‘You tell him,’ Thomas says. ‘You take him. I am done with this.’

  ‘What about Jack?’ Katherine asks. ‘We can’t leave him. They will kill him too.’

  Thomas looks over at Jack. He does not look so bad, he thinks.

  ‘Then he must be got ready to ride,’ Thomas tells her. ‘Master Payne can give him some of that medicine, too, and you both can ride.’

  Jack slowly rights himself and rolls to his knee and then, still keeping that leg straight, to his feet. He breathes out, swearing in one long incoherent breath. Katherine comes to his side. He is utterly still in her presence, waiting for her to go.

  ‘It is still only me, Jack,’ she tells him, and though he is thrown by the fact that she is now a proper woman, he yields and lets her help him up. When he is upright, he stands, and she steps away from him and straightens her unfamiliar dress, and Thomas cannot help but let his gaze wander over her, and he sees she now fills it where it should be filled.

  ‘Wherever did you get that?’ he asks.

  ‘It was Cecily’s,’ she tells him. ‘Master Payne’s patient.’

  Another dead girl’s dress.

  ‘Can you catch the pissing evil from – from a victim’s clothes?’ he asks.

  Payne tilts his head.

  ‘Not so far as we know.’

  Not so far as we know. Christ.

  ‘And so, who are you now?’ Thomas asks, suddenly angry again. ‘You cannot pass yourself off as another dead girl, can you?’

  ‘No,’ she says, dropping her gaze. ‘I am Katherine.’

  There is a long moment. Payne and Jack are silent, watching.

  ‘Katherine who?’ he asks.


  ‘I am Katherine Everingham,’ she says, looking up. ‘I am your wife.’

  And he stops, heart-stilled, and they look at one another, and she seems timid, and in search of his favour, as if she thinks he might not give it. And in an instant his world turns again, and he regrets every harsh word, every uncharitable thought, and he thinks he has never loved so much as now.

  Then she turns a curious shade. Her cheeks puff, and she hunches and vomits thin grey gruel on to her skirts.

  23

  KING HENRY DOES not believe them at first. He comes from prayers with his gentlemen, looking unusually regal in a blue velvet cloak against the cool of the morning, and he asks questions in that querulous voice, and all illusion of royalty is lost. Details and minor points. He misses the thrust of what Payne is saying, and his men keep interrupting, barking across him, demanding answers of Payne and Thomas, then having to apologise to King Henry for their impropriety. Most think Payne is lying. Only one wants to attack Riven’s men where they stand.

  ‘We should kill them all now,’ he says.

  ‘Please, sirs,’ Thomas tells them, ‘we are outnumbered many times over. If we wish to extricate ourselves, we will need guile and speed.’

  Thomas cannot help but glance at King Henry. He embodies neither.

  ‘You have picked that one out for me?’ King Henry asks, indicating the horse Thomas has found for him. ‘He looks larger than – than I am used to, and I was never much of a horseman.’

  ‘Nor has his grace ever done such a thing as take a ride before,’ one of his men says. ‘Why should he start now?’

  ‘And if he is such a danger to us, why then is that man wearing Sir Giles’s colours?’ another asks, indicating Jack, who is wearing the tabard of the boy Thomas threw down the steps. He is clutching the reins of his own pony for support while behind him Katherine is already up on a brown mare, her hitched skirts hidden under a long travel coat, and she is hunched over a fistful of herbs that Payne has given against the horse’s smell.

  ‘My Lord Montagu is a Christian,’ one of them says. ‘He would not dare offend the King’s person. Never in a thousand years.’

  Thomas is beginning to lose his patience. He is beginning to think it might be better if Montagu were to take the King, and these men, too, and do with them all as he wished. Drown them like cats.

  ‘And whither would we go?’ another asks. ‘We are not arrayed for travel. His grace the King will—’

  ‘His grace the King will no longer be his grace the King if he is still here when Montagu’s men arrive,’ Thomas says, ‘so if his grace the King wishes to stay his grace the King, then he had better get on this horse and ride out of here just as fast as he is able. Begging your pardon, your grace.’

  There is a moment’s silence. The men behave as if they should have a monopoly on rudeness to the King, but King Henry is less worried about that.

  ‘I must fetch my other psalter,’ he bleats. ‘It is within.’

  He indicates the small keep.

  ‘As is the king’s bycoket!’ another exclaims. ‘It is all we have left that is of any value.’

  Thomas remembers those jewels on the king’s helmet. Can they get it back? He looks around at the castle gate. Riven’s men are gathering on the steps. About ten of them. One is pointing. A man is being sent to fetch someone else. They have realised something is up.

  ‘We must leave it,’ Thomas says. ‘And go. Now.’

  King Henry is persuaded.

  ‘My Lord of Montagu was always very – abrupt,’ he trembles. ‘I should not like to fall into his hands and be forced to rely on him for Christian succour.’

  It comes to Thomas that he has seen King Henry before, long ago, before all this, and he wonders where, and then he remembers and can even name the place. At Northampton. Before a tent. Thomas was bleeding, in pain. His shoulder. And there were dead men at his feet, a pile of them in bloodied plate, cracked, dented, broken, and more were dragging themselves away into the shadows to die in peace, while others raged about the place with hammers and knives and there was a tremendous din. It seems an age away, yet also, only yesterday.

  ‘Everingham? Are you all right?’

  It is Payne, frowning. Thomas shakes himself awake. They must move fast.

  ‘May I swap cloaks, sir?’ he asks. ‘Yours for – his?’

  He picks a man among them who is the same height and build as the King, wearing a russet cloak and a scarf.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ King Henry says. He seems to want to rid himself of the blue cloak and take up the humbler russet one. Payne steps behind him and unclasps the brooch and then removes the King’s cloak. One of the men is angry because that should have been his job. The man in russet is quick to take the King’s cloak. It is lined, not just edged, with soft fur. He swings it to get it to spread in a circle as he puts it over his shoulders. So much for guile.

  King Henry puts his new cloak on and straightens it, and in it he looks properly ordinary, a humble dredge, a cleric perhaps, and he has the face of a man you’d never want to ask a question for fear of him answering it. Thomas helps him up into his saddle. He is frail, narrow-shouldered, brittle as a bird and just as light. He smells odd, Thomas thinks. Fungal.

  ‘Remember, sirs, we are merely going for a ride,’ Thomas reminds them as he swings himself up into the saddle.

  ‘What should we do?’ the one who’d wanted to attack Riven’s men asks. ‘We do not want to fall into Lord Montagu’s hands any more than you or the King.’

  Thomas looks down at their upturned faces, all screwed up and wan and anxious, and he tells them to be seen to be going to the chapel to pray, and then to leave through the sacristy door, and make their way upriver a little while where they will find the town of Corbridge.

  ‘Cross the river there and then when you are on the other side, go west. Make for Hexham. It is not far. An hour’s walk perhaps. The Duke of Somerset’s army is camped a mile south. You will not miss it.’

  It does not seem much of a plan, not to him, not to any of them, but it is no worse than his own to smuggle King Henry away by dressing him as another man, and, in fact, rather better, and he wonders for a moment if they should all do that? But Jack is unable to walk, and Katherine is like to expire, and everything is better if you have a horse. There are some grumbles, some mouths opened to voice complaint, but Riven’s men are beginning to move.

  ‘We must go,’ Thomas says.

  And the King, a terrible horseman, lets Thomas take a lead rein and he sits there in his saddle, nervously pretending to be someone else, and they set their horses along the track, reins not quite slack in their thumbs, away from the castle gate, expecting at any moment a shout from behind and the rumble of pursuing hooves.

  ‘Be ready,’ Thomas says.

  But nothing comes. They ride out, following the track through the gate of the hazel palisade and into the rough pasture, and still nothing. Then they pass behind a thin screen of new-budding aspens, and then they reach the road and nothing has come and it seems they have done it.

  ‘You may take off the scarf now, your grace,’ Payne tells him. But King Henry wears it as a badge of humility, like the poorest pilgrim, and they ride on, and Thomas has rarely seen anyone so uncomfortable in a saddle: he sits on his horse as if at stool, as they retrace their steps of yesterday back towards the town of Corbridge, picking their way over loose cobbles as fast as they dare, looking back over their shoulders for signs of pursuit. Thomas cannot help but smile. Taking King Henry from under Riven’s nose is a small victory in his campaign against him, but it is something, and he tries to imagine the scene when Montagu arrives to find him gone.

  But where to take him?

  ‘We cannot go back to Bamburgh,’ he tells Katherine. ‘That will be to present him to Giles Riven just as if it were his saint’s day.’

  ‘But there is nowhere else to go, save the Duke of Somerset,’ she says.

  A couple of townsmen have come out of their houses an
d are watching. So too are faces in windows and there is a piebald goat atop a red-hooped barrel standing nearby which also regards them through golden devil’s eyes. King Henry does not like to be looked at by goats, and he begins a whispery prayer, and still Thomas is left to decide what to do.

  ‘There is no one else to oppose Riven now,’ Katherine murmurs. ‘No one else but Somerset. He is our only hope.’

  And she looks so forlorn, he could weep. But Thomas thinks, yes, there is – there is me. I can do what I set out to do all those years ago. I can kill Riven myself. I will perhaps be able to start with the son.

  Then the goat on the barrel lifts its bearded chin and looks into the distance, as if sniffing the wind, and after a moment, it jumps down and with a patter of hooves it is gone, and the horses swing their heads and stop chewing and are still, and then a cloud of birds flies overhead, choughs perhaps, and a bell rings to the east, and yet what is the hour?

  ‘It must be them,’ he supposes aloud. Imagining Edmund Riven and his stinking eye riding up to Bywell, certain of victory, only to find his prey gone, and there is in that, to Thomas, a sombre note of quiet satisfaction.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, and turns his horse southwards, and kicks it on, riding down through the town towards the bridge, towing King Henry behind him. He pays pontage for them all with the last of his coins and as he rides on across the bridge, Thomas looks over his left shoulder, along the bank toward Bywell, but there is nothing to be seen, and soon they are off the bridge and on to the road south, retracing their path through the pastures of the southern bank. When they reach Somerset’s makeshift encampment, they are met by a patrol. The riders are suspicious, and they need persuading that King Henry really is the King, but seeing his rings, and a curious red stone he wears as a pendant, they see he must be someone, and they agree to take them to find Horner, at least, who will vouch for them, and they find him sitting upstream, fishing.