There is a shout.
‘For the love of God! Thomas!’
It is Jack, alive, knocked down the steps.
‘Help!’ Thomas shouts at him. ‘Help me. She’s trapped.’
And Jack comes slowly scrambling up the steps on all fours. He is bleeding from a cut on his forehead, and his eyes are bloodshot, and his left hand does not seem to be working so he is like a limping dog as he comes. When he is there, he helps as best he can, dragging stones away one-handed, splintered beams and a piece of broken rafter.
‘Careful,’ Thomas says. ‘Careful.’
After a moment she is clear. There is nothing across her, unlike the other two. He stands and he does not know what to do. Dust crumbles from her dress.
Oh, thank God. She is breathing. She is alive.
‘Katherine?’
He bends so that he is by her face.
‘Katherine?’
Her eyes flicker. She is definitely alive. He can hear the soft whistle of her breath. Her spit darkens the dust on her skin.
‘Help me,’ he tells Jack, but the other man steps in.
‘Let me,’ he says. ‘You look – like you’ve seen better days, mate, that arm of yours?’
They both look to see a long splinter sticking from the meat of Jack’s arm. It goes right the way through and out the other side.
‘Don’t take it out,’ Thomas says. He has learned something, he thinks.
One of the others is on the first floor now, picking his way through the debris toward them.
‘A woman?’ he asks.
‘His wife,’ Jack says.
‘Oh.’
‘We need a plank,’ Thomas tells them. He has seen this done before. They find a bench, the seat of which will do, and the legs are already broken off. They place it next to her and lift her up and on to it as gently as the four of them are able. It is not easy work. The rubble is thigh high, and it slips and falls away down the steps and over the side of the wall. When they have her on the bench they carry that.
‘Which way?’
They go down the outside of the gatehouse, stepping on the slew of the broken building, passing her down. She slips and they should have tied her to the bench but they save her from falling again, and they carry her away from all the rubble and they lay her on the worn grass of the inner bailey.
‘Where’s Master Payne?’ Jack asks.
Thomas shakes his head.
‘Pity,’ Jack says.
You could say that, Thomas thinks.
‘So what d’you want to do with her?’ one of the men asks. ‘Can’t leave her out here.’
As he says that, there is another crack and then the distant rippling boom of a gun.
‘Newcastle,’ the man says. ‘Third time today, that is.’
‘We should lay her on her side,’ Thomas says, ‘so she can breathe.’
‘All right.’
They roll her over.
‘Use this,’ the man says, and he pulls out a fat book from a shattered coffer. The ledger. He brushes the dirt and dust from it, and he slides it under her head. A gift from the Pardoner.
‘Made for the job,’ he says.
Katherine is very pale. Very still. But she is breathing. Shallow little gasps. As if to breathe in deeply is too painful.
‘What d’you reckon?’ one of them asks. ‘She going to pull through?’
No one has an answer.
Thomas cannot stop himself weeping so he stands and moves away from them, walking around in a circle, tears dripping, mouth loose and square, snot in his beard. He can’t help but gesticulate his hopelessness and he starts talking, beginning one word before finishing another, a series of questions. Self-sorrow, despair, grief, but at least he feels no physical pain. He can sense the others watching him. He knows he could go mad now, and fall to beating the ground and wailing. He could tear his clothes, such as they are, or the skin of his cheeks. He could beat his chest until that bled. And all these things seem sensible. But after a while spent tripping around crying out, nothing has changed and he begins to slide the other way.
‘D’you have a surgeon?’ he asks the men staring at him.
They shake their heads.
‘Ralph Grey’s got two,’ one says. ‘A physician and a surgeon. Though maybe the surgeon went away.’
Jack is looking at Katherine closely.
‘If we could find one,’ he says, very carefully, ‘that would be good.’
‘But where? Where? Has Riven got one?’
Thomas knows he hasn’t. That is why he used Payne and Katherine.
‘Old Warwick’ll have one,’ one of them says. ‘Probably have hundreds.’
Jack turns on him.
‘What the fuck use is that?’
But he’s right, Thomas thinks. Of course the Earl of Warwick will have a surgeon. They must get her to the Earl of Warwick.
‘Shouldn’t be impossible,’ Jack says, ‘now Grey’s dead.’
But then, suddenly, Grey isn’t dead. Suddenly there is a commotion on the floor above. A sneezing and then a truncated cry.
‘Christ!’
Thomas thinks he might climb up there now and kill him. But he does not. He lets the others scramble up and they stand around Grey’s prone body for a while without doing much, while Thomas just sits in the mud and holds Katherine’s hand.
‘He’s alive, all right,’ one of them calls down. ‘But he isn’t none too clever.’
They shift the beam across him and let it slide down the rubble. Grey is groaning. He sits up and rubs his head. He looks utterly lost and stares around him terrified. He says nothing. They help him to his feet. He needs support. He grimaces and clutches his head, then slips into blankness.
‘He’s out of his wits.’
‘Let’s get him down,’ one of them says, and they help him negotiate the ramp of shattered masonry and they sit him down next to Katherine and after a moment he lies down and looks up at the seagulls and there is not a scratch on him.
They stand in silence for a moment.
‘We need a horse. Two horses.’
Jack says he will get them.
‘Be in the stables,’ he says. ‘I’ll bring them up.’
Thomas sits and watches Katherine sipping the air. He listens to the ringing in his ears and there is an occasional crump of a distant gun, but perhaps the big ones are too hot now, and cannot be safely used, for there have been no big stones for a long while, only the little ones, and though he hears them land, he never sees them, so supposes Warwick is using them to pick holes in the curtain walls. He uses Payne’s knife to cut some of Grey’s linen into long strips and while Grey sits there in silence, alternately grimacing and blank as a pebble, Thomas shuffles over and ties his wrists together. Thomas ties him tight, wrist to wrist. Grey does not move, but he blinks, and a frown appears.
A little while later Jack brings two horses, both saddled, clopping up the track from the stables below. You can see their ribs, and they look half-dead, except their eyes roll and their ears are flattened and they snap their teeth and wave their heads on spindly necks.
‘What are you going to do?’ Jack asks.
‘I am going to trade Grey for a doctor,’ Thomas tells him.
Now Jack is looking at him oddly.
‘It is all I can do,’ Thomas says. ‘I will not let her die.’
But Jack’s gaze is not on Thomas. It slides past him and over his shoulder. Thomas turns.
It is Riven, of course.
He stands there, and he is in a broad-shouldered velvet gown of very deep red, and he wears hose of deepest blue, and his riding boots are turned down at the knee. Strapped to his belt are a sheathed dagger and a heavy purse. On his head is a broad black cap, sewn with tiny pearls, and on his breast, a white circle in the centre of which flies a delicately stitched raven. He is carrying a pair of gloves. Behind him are three of his men in their usual livery, and one of them is carrying a long sword in a leather scabbard, while t
he other is carrying the pollaxe.
Seeing it again chills Thomas. It is so lethal, so purposeful and so bent on just one object: the death of a man. It seems to have a personality and presence of its own, and it draws the eye.
Riven stops at the steps and he looks down at Thomas for a long time.
Thomas can think of nothing to say. He is unmoving under the gaze.
‘Well, well,’ Riven says, with a smile forming. ‘Well, well. How you’ve changed, Brother Monk. How you’ve changed. That’s why it took me so long to work it out, to remember where I saw you last.’
‘And have you now?’
‘Shall I tell you what annoys me most, Brother Monk? Shall I? It is that I won’t hear the story – from you – of how you came to be here after all these years. I won’t find out your real name, nor where you went after—’
And now he stops.
‘What in God’s name are you doing with Grey there?’
He looks at the bindings and the horse and he concludes correctly.
‘Well, well,’ he says, with a regretful admiration. ‘You have got there before me, and for once, you have done me a favour. I was just on my way to collar the fool, but what is—’
And he cranes his neck to see who is lying with her back to him on the plank.
‘A woman? Here? Who is she?’
‘Said it was his wife,’ one of the men answers.
‘His wife?’
Riven steps around Thomas with a humourless smile. He walks over to Katherine. He walks beyond her, and bends and stares at her. Then he is startled, unable to believe what he is seeing, and he crouches before her and tilts his head to see her properly. After a moment, he rights himself. He is wild and wide-eyed. He looks at Thomas. Then back at her. Then back at Thomas.
‘By Christ,’ he breathes. ‘By Christ. What has gone on here?’
And Thomas says nothing and now Katherine wakes, with the gentlest, most puzzled mewing sound.
‘Is this? Is this? Is this who I think it is? Is this Sister Nun? Is that it? Is that what this is?’
And Katherine, hardly moving her head, looks up at him and they look at one another and she tries to say no, perhaps, but it doesn’t matter, because he knows the truth of it, if not the why and the how of it, and he says:
‘Do you know I promised my son I would do this if I ever saw you again?’
And he kicks her, once, very hard, in her guts.
Thomas has killed the man even before the pain in Katherine’s belly subsides. She does not see it, not exactly how it happens, but it isn’t difficult to imagine. He moves very fast. He snatches the pollaxe from the startled liveryman’s hands, and he is on Sir Giles Riven before Riven can even move. He is just stepping back, and later she will wonder if he was going to take another kick at her, when Thomas comes. She cannot say which part of the pollaxe he uses to hit him first, but she supposes that any part of it, swung with that ferocity, would have killed him.
Riven is thrown to the ground by her feet. His head is absolutely caved in. It is like a rotten apple left to the wasps, except more so. The pollaxe is driven through his head and into the top of his throat. It almost passes through him and comes out above his hip. It bursts his head and rips a great piece off him. It cores him, guts him, brains him, all at once and all in an instant, and it turns him from a human being into just a pile of meat, and if a man found this on the side of the road, or washed up on a beach, a man might think it had been shovelled there, and was part of something else, an offcut of something.
The pollaxe is embedded beyond its langets and it stays that way, sticking up, while blood spreads sluggishly on the ground around the twitching pile of flesh.
No one moves.
Thomas is standing with legs spread wide and there is a great spray of fresh blood across his face, chest and arms.
Riven’s men are staring open-mouthed.
‘By God,’ one of them says. ‘You fucking killed him.’
And then the one who lost the pollaxe starts an incredulous laugh.
‘Wish someone’d done that five years ago.’
Thomas comes and bends over Katherine. His eyes are very white against the blood that marks his face.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
She feels as if something inside has been torn, and that if she moves she will only tear it further. And she feels such a depth of sadness that she can hardly look at him. So she nods her head and closes her eyes, and she hopes no tears will come, and she wonders why she is on a plank.
Then she hears another man come. She hears him shouting from a distance, asking questions in one of those voices, and then she hears him bark with incredulity and then he’s silent. He swears once, and then stops. He talks to Grey, asks him questions, slaps him, and seems to get the answer he wants. Thomas tells him something. Then the man goes away and they stand there a moment longer and Thomas drapes a cloak over her, and he says something about it being all right and that it is over now, and that they will take her to a physician and she knows Payne must be dead or else where is he?
Then she hears the axe being removed from Riven and she opens her eyes to see his body slump further, and then she watches two men she does not know helping Sir Ralph Grey on to one of the horses, and he seems very confused, she thinks, and he is looking around as if he is not sure he was ever supposed to be here. And then they lead the horse away and Thomas comes back with some ale for her and she is thirsty and hungry too, so she drinks and she spills some and she says she is sorry and he tells her of course it does not matter and she realises she is resting her head on the ledger, and she also realises he has done it: he has found the ledger and he has killed Riven, and she says: ‘Well done, Thomas,’ but she cannot have said it very loudly for he has to bend in close to hear.
Then she tries to say goodbye, and to tell him that she loves him, because suddenly, she is certain she is dying.
28
‘SIRS!’ THOMAS SHOUTS. ‘Sirs! For the love of God! Please be out of the way!’
He and Jack and John Stump are carrying Katherine on the same bench seat they used to lower her from the wreckage of the great eastward gatehouse, and they are trying to push past men in various liveries who are flooding out of the main gate of the castle, men who have been permitted to leave her walls for the first time in three months, on condition that they lay down their arms and make a solemn oath never to take them up, or make fences against the King’s majesty, ever again. This they have gladly done, and now they must endure a lengthy and humiliating walk through the ranks of Warwick’s men, who mob the roadside, and jeer at them as they pass.
‘Please, sirs!’ Thomas calls. ‘Make way.’
He has no idea where he must go first, but he knows there will be a physician or a surgeon somewhere in the camp ahead. So he makes his way with the flow, but men are reluctant to let him and Jack past them for fear it will slow them up and mean they have to endure more mockery from the Earl of Warwick’s troops for longer. When they reach the camp, when they pass under the snouts of the great guns that are raised up above them, and where the air smells contaminated by the smell of burned powder, the press becomes even worse since now they must go against its flow, and they have no hands with which to bat men away, but must endure collision and subsequent derision. Men laugh and shout, and it feels very dangerous, as if anything could go wrong at any moment for any number of reasons, and the result would be fatal.
‘Please, sirs,’ Thomas keeps saying. At one point he has to stop. He nearly turns and runs. Ahead are five men in the pale livery of Edmund Riven. They have their heads craned, looking for someone. He ducks his head and he can only pray it is not him they seek, but others in their livery, and that they do not yet know what has happened to Giles Riven. When they are past the five men, Jack calls out.
‘See them, Thomas?’ he says. ‘They’ll soon be looking for you, won’t they? Edmund Riven won’t be happy when he finds out what you’ve just done to his father.’
/>
The pollaxe, roughly cleaned now, wiped on a dry bit of Riven’s cloak, is lying by Katherine’s side, its business end by her feet. She is asleep, deathly pale. He is too frightened to check if she is still alive.
‘Only take him a day or two to find out who you are,’ Jack goes on. ‘A couple of questions in the right place. He could even ask Grey, couldn’t he? If Warwick lets him live long enough, that is. And Grey’s no reason to thank you, has he? Not after you tied him up and turned him over to that Neville of wherever it is to exchange with Warwick for his life and liberty.’
Thomas feels the truth of this settle on him like rainwater.
‘Jack,’ he says over his shoulder, ‘Jack, please, just stop. Please. For the love of God.’
‘All right,’ Jack says, ‘but if I were you, I’d be thinking of – well – elsewhere.’
‘I am bloody thinking of elsewhere!’ Thomas says. ‘It is all that’s bloody left to me now.’
Eventually the crowd thins. Then, ahead, are the canvas avenues of tents belonging to the nobility of the Earl of Warwick’s army with their banners and flags. If he is to find a physician, this is where they will be. He meets two men who will not let him pass until they have had their moment of fun with him. One of them is horribly scarred down one cheek; a great pock of flesh is missing, with a tail of hardened skin that slides into the collar of his jack. An old arrow wound.
‘What you got there?’ he asks, as if suspicious they may be looting something before he has first rejected it himself.
‘My wife,’ Thomas tells them and he turns his head to indicate Katherine on the makeshift stretcher. ‘She needs help. A surgeon.’
‘A surgeon, is it?’
‘Yes. It is urgent.’
‘Got any money? No point asking if you haven’t.’
Christ, Thomas thinks, Christ! Of course he doesn’t have any bloody money.
‘No?’ the soldier says with a shake of his head. ‘Well, then you had better take her to the friars over yon. They might do for her. And if not, then you’ll not have far to carry her when it is all over, will you?’
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 42
