Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  Jack gallows-laughs.

  ‘Saints,’ he says. ‘I would not wish to be in their shoes.’

  Katherine nods, but Thomas can see she is concentrating on something beyond the thought of men hanging from trees, and that bird-like ferocity is back.

  ‘But that’s the point,’ she tells them. ‘Whoever did this, they did it knowing King Edward will react that way.’

  Thomas is sceptical.

  ‘How would they know that?’

  She is becoming impatient.

  ‘It is such an obvious affront,’ she says. ‘To pick out King Edward’s man above all else. A provocation.’

  There is a long moment’s silence while they try to think what this might mean. The light is fading. A new log on the fire would be welcome.

  ‘But why?’ Thomas asks. ‘Who would do such a thing?’

  ‘Only someone who feels himself as powerful as the King,’ Katherine tells them.

  Thomas looks at her. He feels as if something is being spoiled. It’s like finding the season’s first lamb is stillborn.

  ‘You can’t mean the Earl of Warwick?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh Christ, not him again!’ Jack moans, putting both hands to his face.

  ‘But why would he do such a thing?’ Thomas presses.

  Katherine sighs.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘He might want King Edward to come up here. So he can cause trouble in London. Or wherever he is. Or there might be something else. I don’t know.’

  The thought that the strife is reawakened and might come again is too much to bear. He will not believe it.

  ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘All that is over now. The two men are reconciled. Surely?’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ is all Katherine says, but she’s looking at Rufus, their son, who sits dark-eyed by the fire, playing a complicated game of his own device with some blocks and a cloth doll. Thomas sees she has a discreet hand on her belly and her own eyes seem to have deepened in the shadows of her brow, and she looks, for the first time in a while, fearful.

  So he repeats that the robbers were simply robbers, and that the wars will not come again, because did not the King prove to the Earl that only a king can rule the country? But Thomas finds himself less certain with each passing moment, and then John Stumps, who has been uncharacteristically quiet all this while, wades in with one of his predictions:

  ‘It is well known,’ he says, ‘that if January the first is a Monday, as it was this year, remember, then sheep will die, and grain’ll rot, and those of us that are not killed fighting in the field will die of sore throats.’

  ‘Of sore throats?’

  ‘Of sore throats.’

  This might be a joke, but John Stumps doesn’t joke. So Thomas tries to stop himself thinking about what will happen if Katherine is right, and the wars do come again, but he cannot. It is all he can think about, and so it is that he forgets the business of the day, and the attorney Mostyn.

  2

  In the night it snows again, a heavy dusting, and the next morning Katherine is out before daybreak, standing alone in the yard where the cold bites her to the bone. She stands for a long while, alone at the head of the track with the wind stirring her hems, her thick cloak clutched to her throat, keeping watch over the dark line of bare-limbed trees that mark the road. As dawn comes they begin to take on fantastical, cruel shapes, and they appear to stir of their own accord, and to convene and suddenly thicken, as if welling with a host of men, only to part again, and reveal themselves as they really are.

  She waits until sunrise, then she turns suddenly and goes back into the hall to rouse her sleeping household, and by the time they’ve said their prayers, eaten their bread and drunk their ale, Thomas’s new-purchased acres are forgotten, as he and Jack and the other men from the village set to work preparing the house in case the men who attacked Burgh’s house should come calling on their own.

  ‘So that is it?’ she asks.

  Thomas nods. He is evasive, refusing to catch her eye, and so she determines he has chosen to believe this one thing – the wrong thing, she is certain of it – over the other, right thing, and that for some reason he is sticking with his choice. She wonders what she can do about it. Nothing, of course, for the moment, and so while they all wait to see what will happen – if the men who attacked Burgh’s house were robbers or not – she must lend her hand to the general effort.

  Marton Hall is not any kind of castle. It is not made of stone and iron, with a moat, and a drawbridge, but Sir John Fakenham once single-handedly held off Giles Riven’s attack for three days, killing most of his men with crossbow bolts shot from the windows, and even if there is no drawbridge, watchtower, moat or curtain wall, there are things that have been done to make the place less attractive to passing thieves: stout oak bars span the windows, and both doors, front and back, are four inches of solid oak, with two drawbars, also of oak, that can be dropped in place so that only a battering ram could open them.

  Thomas summons everyone up from the village, in part, he says, for their own protection, but they are also useful with the work, and they gather in the yard with their families – thick-armed wives with children like grey mice, most of them – and bundles of their few possessions. Apart from John, who left his parish in Kent because his priest tried to kill him, and who towers head and shoulders over all save Thomas, the new men all look oddly similar, as if they might be the sons of the same fat-necked, deep-chested, short-legged father. If they are so, then he was a man with no great skill at anything in particular, save an ability to put his brawn to blunt use, and to travel widely too, for they’ve come to Marton from divers parts of England: Kent and Essex, mostly, but Robert is from a village in Devon where every man, woman and child died of plague while he was at sea, and there is a Bald John from Droitwich, who claims to be a reaper, whose wife it was who died, leaving him in sole charge of his son, the foulmouthed boy. More than that, the mythical common father must have been catholic in his tastes, for these men’s eyes are blue and brown, and their hair is not only brown, but black, blond, non-existent and even (twice) red. They wear mostly patched russet and, observed from a distance, they seem to blend into the land, as if they are an elemental part of it, timeless as the soil they tramp.

  Seeing them all together in the yard, they remind Katherine of the men of Sir John Fakenham’s little company, most of them christened John, clucked over by Geoffrey, barked at by Walter, made to laugh by Dafydd and Owen – and all dead now. Thomas now has eight men, excluding John Stumps, who live on his land and who rely on him, just as those others used to rely on Sir John Fakenham, and over the last few months he has made them join him with their bows in the butts, where he and Jack have shouted at them and made them run to and fro, just as Thomas was made to do all those years ago by Walter in Calais. When Thomas comes in after one of these days, his voice is always hoarse from all the shouting, and he tells her they are improving, but they have a long way to go before – before what? Whenever he reaches this point in his account of his day’s activities, he stops, and shrugs, and takes a drink of ale.

  This morning Thomas has set two of the men to bring up water from the well to fill every barrel in the buttery that is not already filled with ale, not just to drink, he says, should they be forced to endure any kind of siege, but against the threat of fire started by arrows dipped in oil and then lit. A trench is dug through the yard, though why Katherine is not sure, and armless John Stumps is set to oversee the women and children bringing in the dried apples and the smoked meat and the salted fish from the barns, and to ensure the supplies are stacked or hung in the buttery or from the beams above the hall itself where she knows the fat will drip on those gathered below. When any complain of the weight they are carrying, John Stumps will tell them that he used to be able to carry a full-grown pig under each arm and still jump a fence.

  Wood is brought in from the stack and arranged against the north wall. Logs are split end to end to provide ext
ra planks to reinforce the window shutters. They bring in the cheese from the dairy and children are sent to harvest the medlars, even though they are not yet ripe. The few remaining pigs are penned close by, and the goats too, so that the geese have the run of the yard, and the sheep are put in the close fold, and the smell is rasping.

  After dinner Katherine asks some of the women and children who have come up from the village if they saw the men ride through the day before, but none is able to identify them.

  ‘They weren’t overly friendly, like,’ one says.

  ‘Their horses were fine, though,’ another tells her.

  ‘They were all in green.’

  ‘Red and blue.’

  ‘Black.’

  Thomas and Jack count their stocks of arrows and check the fat bellies of the various bows for cracking, and extra strings are wrapped around wrists. Knives and billhooks are sharpened on the wheel in the yard. A pile of hammers is made and then distributed around the doors and windows. Each man’s protection is seen to, and the women are set the task of stuffing old jacks with tow and patching worn sleeves. Jack and one of the others ride with instructions for the blacksmith in the village a little further to the south, a man who can also do finer work including rough field harness, and while he is gone Thomas paces nervously, his bow nocked, ten or fifteen arrows in his belt.

  ‘He will forget everything I’ve told him,’ Thomas swears. ‘Or they will be offered ale and that will be that: we’ll not see them until after Easter.’

  It is true that Jack is like to leave anything he has once held behind him in a trail to mark where he has been, but he says this helps him find his way back to collect what he has dropped, and it is true that since his wife Nettie gave birth to their daughter with her lungs like bellows Jack has taken wherever possible to ale and the company of strangers. But in the event the two men ride in, sober, just as it is getting dark, stiff with cold. They’ve brought back three dozen bolts and a new goat’s-foot winding mechanism for the third crossbow, and they swear the helmets and breastplates Thomas has ordered will be ready before Candlemas.

  ‘How long does it take to make ten helmets?’ Thomas asks. ‘And we’ll have no call for them if our heads are already stove in.’

  Behind his back, John Stumps barks a sour little laugh, and says he thinks Thomas will soon be ordering them livery jackets.

  ‘Building up a little affinity of his own, isn’t he? Just as if he were a knight of the shire! Just like old Sir John!’

  Thomas overhears him and flushes and Katherine realises this is probably not the first time Thomas has thought this, and she feels a curiously warm sense of satisfaction and even pride in her husband. If only he would listen to reason.

  Now with these men up in the hall, and their families too, the smell of unwashed bodies mixed with dogs, wet wool and wood smoke becomes a powerful brew in so small a confine, as for the next few days they are compelled to remain shut up, never straying farther than the privy, where they go armed, and all are nervous, pacing, watchful, fingers plucking taut bowstrings, even Foulmouth John who is forever goddamning everything, worse than any of the older men, just as if he were an old soldier in France, and he seems to find the fact of animals covering one another almost endlessly entertaining.

  But nothing happens that first day after the attack on Burgh’s house, nor the second, nor the third. On the morning of the fourth day Thomas and Jack ride a circle of the estate and come back having seen nothing worth mentioning. Candlemas comes and they leave Jack at the hall while they go quickly to Mass as a household. The men keep their weapons close, even through the sacrament, and the priest is brisk. They take the candles with them back to the hall and then Jack rides over to collect the helmets and breastplates from the blacksmith.

  ‘I feel immortal when I’ve got this sort of thing on,’ Jack tells Katherine when he comes back wearing one. He raps the plate with his knuckles. ‘Like no one can stop me.’

  The following week passes slowly, and the men wait at the windows, if only to justify the wearing of their few pieces of plate, which they seem to love. Katherine sees Thomas actually wants these bandits to come, to be proven right, for he is still convinced the attack on Burgh’s house was the work of outlaws.

  It snows again, and thaws, and then there’s a hard frost, and icicles hang from the hall’s eaves like sword blades. Seeing this from the warmth of within, for a while each man and woman is pleased to have reason not to go out, but to remain gathered together about the fire in the hall, and at night the household sleeps around it as they used to when Sir John was alive.

  By the end of the next week, it is felt they need no longer double up as night watchmen, and they need no longer put the dogs out when it falls dark, or constantly stand by the windows during the daylight hours, and still nothing happens. As the days eke past, the pleasure of idleness ebbs just as the earlier tension had, and the enforced stillness begins to rankle. Jack twitches and bounces and itches to be gone, out with the lurchers in the wood, or down at the butts, or anywhere away from his wife and noisy baby. Tempers begin to unravel at the close confinement and the lack of exercise, especially as the weather turns properly mild during that third week, and Thomas stands at the window, looking not at the road, as might be supposed, but at the fields they might usefully be ploughing and sowing with seed.

  Katherine has not minded the time so much as the others, for she has been feeling the weight of the baby in her womb, but she has resented the isolation from the greater world beyond more keenly than them. It is the lack of news, the not knowing, that bothers her. And as every day passes without sight or sound of this band of robbers, she has itched to find some new proof that it was a deliberate affront to King Edward, a provocation, only for none to come – save, at least, that there has been no attack on the hall, about which she is obviously pleased. Thomas, though, far from being happy not to have been attacked, has been the most mulish, distracted and bitter-tempered of them all, quick to snap, even at Rufus. It is as if he is struggling to keep down an emetic, she thinks, and she cannot help wonder if he would not be happier if he could let it out.

  And because they have not worked themselves to the bone, as they are used to, they all find it hard to sleep, and so the house is in constant chaos, with men and women and children on the move throughout the long and short hours. And who are they? Katherine knows most by name, and a little about each, but they are still strangers to her, taken in as tenants, their stories mostly unknown, but now they have moved in under her roof. They are friends of friends, or known to friends, or friends of people Thomas knows. She might see a shadow loom in the night, and have no idea who it really is. And they are also eating too much, using up valuable resources because they are so bored, and she thinks of the Lent to come, and then how hard Easter will be if they go on like this.

  By the fourth week arguments blow up, and it is clear that John Stumps would gladly pull a knife on Jack if he but could, and soon every man, woman and child among them yearns to return to their old ways.

  ‘Can’t fucking stand it no more,’ Foulmouth John says, and he just walks out of the door, leaving it open, and is gone. His father hardly looks up from his clumsy stitching of a flap-soled boot.

  And that is the end of it. Thomas, still sticking to his theory that it was a rogue band of robbers, decides the danger must have passed them by.

  ‘They must have left the county,’ he says. ‘We should ride to Lincoln and pay the choir to sing a Te Deum.’

  He is only half joking, Katherine thinks. But the next morning, a Sunday, under a pale sky that might clear by midday, they saddle their horses in anxious excitement at the thought of being away from the hall, and at the thought of seeing new people, and hearing new things, and there is nothing that will stop Jack coming with them, ‘just for the sight of something new’. They bring two other men, John, who was once stabbed by his priest, and Bald John, who is the father of Foulmouth John, and who looks as if he has spent th
e previous few nights drinking wine and has yet to go to bed, for his cheeks are slack, and the whites of his flaccid eyes are the colour of morning urine.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Thomas asks quietly.

  She doesn’t know.

  It is like coming out of winter’s sleep, she thinks, and when they reach the road, they are all of them hesitant, and she is overtaken by anxiety, like a mouse poking her head from her hole in spring, and she half expects – what? A cat? A band of outlaws? In the end there is nothing save the sedge-lined length of the old road, running straight, pitted and muddy, south to Lincoln, and the call of a wood pigeon.

  Thomas leads the way in his best coat with Rufus on his lap, then Katherine, then Jack and the other two men. The men are armed with nocked bows, and Thomas has a sword at his hip, sheathed in red leather that is beautifully worked with tabs of what look like silver, and which she has not seen before. She cannot help wonder what the blade must be like, and where and when he acquired it, and for how much?

  They ride in speculative silence for a bit. Katherine’s bay pony is even-gaited and fitted with the side-saddle Thomas gave her for the year’s turn: in the same beautiful red leather as his sword sheath, skilfully stitched, and padded where you would wish it to be padded; and Katherine wears the conker-brown riding boots the cordwainer made for her after taking the shape of her foot and sculpting a wooden replica, just as if she would be returning time and time again to have a hundred pairs of shoes made, and she cannot help admire the way the boots fit her ankles crossed as she rides. She is in her blue rabbit-trimmed winter cloak, too, which she had made overlarge, for precisely a moment like this, and of course, her best dress – of fine blue kersey, which she paid a woman in Lincoln to make for her. She will have to let it out again soon, she thinks.

  Being with child this time has not been half as bad as the first, with Rufus, when she was half-dead with the sickness most of the time, and there are times when she feels the grip of fear that perhaps the baby is dead within her womb, but then there is that curious internal wriggle, an elbow scraped across her gut only from within, like a reordering, as the baby turns and settles, and she feels warm relief. She has already lost too many to be sure of this one.