Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  ‘Do you know this – this Welles?’

  ‘In passing,’ Watkins admits.

  ‘You’d point him out?’

  ‘If I see him.’

  Watkins slides off his horse and Thomas does likewise and they find a boy running a business to tether them, and then they set off, Watkins looking for a familiar face, Thomas for anything to suggest the Earl of Warwick might be behind any of this. Watkins stops to look over men’s heads and shoulders at the final moments of a close-fought cock fight, which he seems to enjoy, but the adamantine mood at these things reminds Thomas of the beheadings he has seen.

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ Watkins cries as one bird is wounded and falls to its side, scuttling mad circles in the mud. ‘Look at that!’

  The other bird seems to hang his head in bloody shame, Thomas thinks, but half the crowd cheer, and the other half groan. Another bird is brought forward and Watkins is pulling another man’s sleeve and there’s a coin between his fingers and they’ll obviously be here for a while.

  ‘Where will I find Robert Welles?’ Thomas shouts in Watkins’s ear.

  Watkins wafts a hand.

  ‘By the crossroads perhaps,’ he says. ‘You’ll not miss him.’

  Watkins has outgrown his use, so Thomas seeks out Welles on his own. He passes men in every shade of coat. There are hundreds of badges he does not recognise, and banners too: the small square ones, suggesting knights rather than lords. But though there are plenty of men in red, they wear different devices, and Thomas can find no sign of that bear, or of the tree stump, or the club. There is nothing to say that any of these men owe their loyalty to the Earl of Warwick. Nor is there anything to suggest that these men are grimly fixated on fighting, or the coming of King Edward. Instead they are pleasure bent, enjoying the day.

  He finds Robert Welles a little further on, sitting on horseback, fist on hip, a nervous boy despite his dark brigandine and fine leg plates, surrounded by a handful of his own servants and men-at-arms, dressed similarly, none of whom seem to know what they should be doing. He’s so young, this Great Captain of the Commons, that Thomas can’t believe he hasn’t been put up to this; he looks self-conscious, and is forever touching his face, and smiling suddenly and shyly as if astonished to be the centre of attention amidst the numbers swelling before him.

  Thomas watches him a while, but still can’t be certain that this is the man he saw directing those soldiers – some of whom are probably here today – in the ripping apart of Burgh’s house. That man seemed more resolute than this boy, who appears so young. Thomas turns his attention to the boy’s retainers, who he supposes will be a handful of men with whom this Sir Robert grew up and some older, possibly wiser men of his father’s generation, and mostly he’s right, but there is something else that is odd: their bodies are not angled towards Robert Welles; rather all of them are turned towards another man, who is crouching, and it is only when Thomas edges forward that he sees him, trying to write something on a scrap of paper, resting on a low coffer.

  Of course it is a friar. He’s a Franciscan, with his face hidden under his hood and one grease-matted sleeve rolled back to reveal a muscular forearm, writing in a rough-and-ready hand that must have earned him many a stripe in the friary.

  Thomas sidles closer. The friar finishes his writing and stands. He looks at the others gathered around him with an economically dismissive glance that sweeps past Thomas, flicks back to him, and then slides on. There is not much to be seen of him under the hood that hangs down and the beard that rises up to cover most of his face, but he carries himself lightly, as if he may be called to fight or fly at any moment.

  ‘Where’s Boyce?’ he asks.

  ‘Here, sir.’

  Thomas is sure the friar flinches in irritation as a whip-thin man in already mud-spattered riding clothes steps forward. The friar gestures for him to come close and speaks quickly and quietly into his ear. The messenger nods, takes the folded note and secretes it in his coat, and turns to go.

  Thomas steps back, easing his way through the men who’ve gathered behind, and he circles around, his eye on the thin back of the messenger, Boyce, who is quick into his saddle, and who turns the horse about and sets off, nudging through the fraying edge of the crowd. He is riding westwards, back towards Lincoln.

  To whom is he taking the message?

  Thomas hurries down the track towards the horses, but now where is Jack? Where is the idiot? Thomas cannot leave him. He searches the crowds at the stalls and the cockfights, but there is no sign of him. He curses him. They’ll have to ride like madmen to catch up with Boyce now.

  Thomas eventually finds Jack, inevitably in the last place he looks: at the edge of the village where it gives up its fight against the saltings and sinks back into the mud and water. He sees many of the men have drifted away from the stalls and cockfights and are lined shoulder to shoulder on a low bank, staring eastwards as if expecting the Second Coming. Thomas joins them up on a dyke above a stretch of foul mud, bordered by a looping river a hundred paces beyond. The men are ale-softened, waiting in rowdy, excited anticipation of some entertainment.

  Thomas fillets the crowd for Jack, but he is not there among the spectators; then Thomas hears a shout and he turns and looks out across the muddy stretch, and there is Jack, up to his knees, waving and grinning at him from among the thirty or so men gathered in the mud beyond, each stripped to his braies and shirt, each with a great drunken smile on his face.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Thomas murmurs.

  Everyone around him is laughing in anticipation, the atmosphere ringing and bright, and a fat, older man with a beard – the only one still in his clothes – has the ball under his arm, and he is just now shouting something, and everyone’s laughing at what he’s saying, and then some of the men on the bank are shouting things such as ‘get on with it!’

  The ball is made of leather, forcefully filled with air from a smith’s bellows, and the man in the beard throws it high above his head and then the naked men start running as best they can through the mud towards it as he – the bearded man – makes his awkward getaway to the safety of the dry bank where he pushes the others aside to make himself a space to turn and watch. There is a general roar of encouragement. The ball lands in the mud. The men converge. And then there is a simple, furious, grappling fist fight between all the men in the mud. There is no order to it. They just throw themselves at one another. At first there are a lot of separate fights. Men are downed in the mud and let go again to emerge blinking. The ball lies untouched on the surface of the mud for a long while, and every time any man flounders his way near it, another seems to materialise from the mud to knock him down. Other men on the bank are untying their pourpoints and hose and throwing themselves into the fray, their linens swiftly turned brown.

  Thomas loses sight of Jack. Or can no longer identify him in the mud. Gradually some sort of order emerges. The ball is collected by a big man – an archer, obviously, with heaving plates of muscle in his chest and great cords of it along his arms. He has calf muscles the size of an ordinary man’s head, and a head the size of one of the balls they blasted at Bamburgh Castle. He reminds Thomas uncomfortably of the giant, that servant of Edmund Riven’s, but his hair under his hat is ruddy and gingerish, and his eyes – he is one of the few yet to be brought down – are lively as he tucks the ball under his arm and starts moving from right to left. Someone tries to stop him but is smashed into the mud. Two more fight themselves free of their own attackers and, coordinated, they hurl themselves at those massive legs, and then another man clambers on to his back. All three are rebuffed and the man marches on. More men discard their clothes and come running to help or hinder.

  ‘Who the fuck is he?’ Thomas’s neighbour asks. ‘Fucking unstoppable!’

  The big man continues marching the ball towards a line of trees on a dyke that marks the end of the marsh and the beginning of some drained furlongs, but now someone is organising the other men to stop him, just as men on his own s
ide seem to be gathering in support of him. And there are signs of organisation among the spectators too. The sounds, which have until now been mostly random bellows of rabblish support, and groans as one man seemed to have his arm broken, are now beginning to settle into regular pulses of sound, coming from the end of the stretch of fen towards which the big man is wading, still knocking all attackers aside.

  Then his neighbour joins in the cry.

  ‘A Clarence!’ he bellows, hands cupped around his mouth. ‘A Clarence!’

  And that is what the rest of them are chanting as the big man at last kicks the ball through the mud and into the trees, with four other men clinging to him like dogs after a bear, and then he falls backwards, exhausted, into the deep mud, taking the men with him, and the crowd continue to cheer him and shout the same thing: ‘A Clarence! A Clarence!’

  The man next to Thomas with a ruddy drinker’s face, an oft-broken nose and very blue eyes is suddenly grabbing Thomas’s brigandine with both hands and his face is in Thomas’s and he’s roaring something, and Thomas is readying himself for a butt, when the man thrusts himself away, fists clenched, roaring still, the veins on his face like worms under his skin, and he’s just celebrating the goal.

  Thomas wipes the spit from his face. The whole crowd is now chanting, ‘A Clarence! A Clarence!’ as the big man who last kicked the ball is hauled back out of the mud and helped to his feet and has his arms held aloft in triumph, and even though there are fights still ongoing in various parts of the bog, it seems the men on the right-hand side – Jack’s side – have won the game.

  Jack comes wading towards Thomas. He is laughing and his eyes and teeth are unnaturally white against the mud and blood. He doesn’t seem to care or understand what he’s hearing and when someone offers Jack a mug of foaming ale he reaches for it, until Thomas grabs his wrist.

  ‘Get your bloody clothes,’ he says.

  ‘But we won!’

  ‘Get your bloody clothes! Now.’

  They ride hard after the messenger, along the tracks and dykes back towards Lincoln, trying to imagine which way he might have gone, but it is hopeless. Once they reach Lincoln, he might have gone any which way, so Thomas and Jack pull up their sweating horses at an inn outside the city walls to let them rest and eat and drink.

  ‘How many men do you suppose were there?’

  ‘I can never tell. Thousands.’

  Thomas writes Katherine a message and thinks about sending Jack back home with it and riding to find Hastings alone, but whatever else he might be, Jack is handy with a bow and two men are more than twice as good than one if there is any kind of trouble.

  ‘Are we going to London?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Or Westminster.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘Three days, then however long it takes to see Lord Hastings, then three back.’

  ‘A week?’

  Thomas nods. Jack smiles at the thought.

  ‘Be able to get some sleep away from the baby,’ he says. ‘And I’ve never been to London.’

  When the horses are refreshed a little, Thomas pays a boy to take the message to Katherine, and they ride up into the city, through the gate where the Watch is much reduced, past the cathedral and down past the pardoner’s house. He cannot help but study it as they go by. It is looking shabby, he thinks. Uncared for. He wonders if the man’s widow still lives, and he wishes he could recall the pardoner, whom Katherine said Thomas had very much liked, and the attempt he and Katherine had made to return the ledger to the old man’s widow, but that was before Towtonfield, before his memory was sent awry by the blow that has left a divot in the side of his skull from which his ordinarily dark red hair grows white. That was before they discovered the ledger’s value, of course. He wonders if they could take it back now. Would that change anything?

  When they are out from under Saltergate and across the river they start kicking the horses on, setting them to trot across the old road where the water still laps and there is the suspicion of a furze of new grass growth stippling its oozy surface.

  Once again, Jack tells Thomas that he did not hear the men shouting for Clarence.

  ‘You had your ears blocked with mud, you fool.’

  ‘But were they really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not for Warwick? You didn’t hear any cries for Warwick?’

  ‘No, they were the Duke of Clarence’s men. Not all of them. Just the side you were playing for.’

  ‘But they were all right.’

  Thomas nods. ‘Everyone’s all right,’ he says. He thinks it’s probably true.

  Jack mulls this for a while.

  ‘And you’re sure the Duke of Clarence and the Earl of Warwick are – together in this?’

  Thomas isn’t, but they were last year. He remembers the Duke of Clarence married the Earl of Warwick’s daughter against the expressed wishes of King Edward, and he remembers the way the men at Middleham used to talk about Clarence just as if he were Warwick’s plaything. So it is at least plausible Warwick is using Clarence again, using his troops against King Edward.

  But William Hastings will know better. He will know how it lies.

  ‘This is bad news for King Edward, isn’t it?’ Jack asks.

  ‘I don’t suppose he’ll be too pleased to have his brother go against him,’ Thomas agrees.

  ‘Hmmm,’ Jack says, with a point to suggest. ‘And we’re riding down to find him to tell him this.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And didn’t you say the last time you brought King Edward bad news, he nearly had you hanged?’

  Thomas grunts.

  ‘But remember what he said? That he always learned his lessons? I reckon he’s learned that one, too, don’t you?’ Jack looks askance.

  Thomas kicks his horse and wishes he had brought the spurs he bought in Ripon.

  ‘We’ll ride until nightfall,’ he says. ‘Or until the horses are done in.’

  Night falls first, and they stop at an inn in a town called Sleaford, where everyone is becoming drunk and the board is covered in empty dishes, crusts, rinds and cracked bones, and afterwards they share a bed. Jack falls asleep first, still in his filthy linens, still stinking of mud, and he snores resonantly and resists being woken, and Thomas wonders at poor Nettie’s life, caught between Jack and the baby.

  In the morning it is Ash Wednesday, and Lent, and the air is filled with the smell of boiling herring.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Jack murmurs.

  With dry mouths and curdling stomachs, they hear Mass at St Dennis’s, and kneel before a white-haired priest with foul breath to be blessed and have crosses smeared on their heads before they are sent on their way south. The land around here is endlessly flat and sodden, more lake than land, and echoingly familiar to Thomas.

  ‘Will it be like this all the way?’ Jack asks. ‘Horses’ hooves’ll rot off before we get to London.’ His face is peppered with spray from Thomas’s horse.

  ‘At least it is flat,’ Thomas says. ‘And at least it’s not raining.’

  Just then the road rises and it starts spitting. Thomas laughs. It reminds him of something. Sometime. Someone. This sort of thing is happening to him more often these days: strange lancing shafts of memory that seem to cut through time, so that he can see himself doing something like this – riding in the rain the moment after someone has said at least it is not raining. Fleeting glimpses of another life lived. Strange but lucid dreams. History opening up.

  They ride all morning not saying much, and stop to feed and water the horses around noon. Thomas frets over of the safety of Katherine, and of Rufus, left alone with only John Stumps and the men from the village to keep them safe, but at least now he can be certain there is no roving band of thieves in the county, as he had once hoped, and such threats as exist, well, they have always done so, haven’t they? And they will do so as long as men such as Earl of Warwick are left to breathe.

  They reach Peterborough at dusk and find rooms
and stables at an inn hard by the cathedral cloister, where the bantams roosting in the rafters above erupt in squawks and cackles every time the bells ring, so dawn comes early, grey, miserable, shit-pattered, with little to look forward to but another hard and hungry day in the saddle.

  ‘Even the horses eat better than us,’ Jack mumbles.

  They are gone by first light and through the throng of carts and barrows edging out of the gates. On the road south toward Huntingdon the pace of traffic is steady but purposeful; there is no evidence of any shock or alarm, and all seems as it should do, on a dank first Thursday in Lent.

  They don’t hear the news until that evening when they are in the town of Huntingdon, some miles to the south, having ridden all day again.

  ‘King Edward is coming with all his household men,’ a leather merchant tells them. ‘Bloody lucky to get past them where the road goes through that heath, just north of Waltham Abbey. Never seen so many men in all my life, I swear. Road’s backed up five miles in front and behind. Chaos.’

  He sells Thomas a pair of very fine gloves, and they decide they cannot go on, but must wait for King Edward to reach them.

  ‘So it was true, that rumour of King Edward coming with a mighty power?’ Jack says.

  Thomas nods. Christ, he would like some proper food, he thinks. His stomach roils and cramps. He is simultaneously listless and restless and his mouth itches for ale. Once again he thinks back on what Jack said about bringing King Edward bad news. Then again, the prospect of being hanged might be preferable to another night with him snoring, and with the prospect of neither meat nor ale in the morning.

  The night is just as bad as he’d anticipated, worse indeed for there being another man in the bed with them, and a dog, too. But at least there is nothing much to be done the next morning while they wait for King Edward to come, so Thomas sits in the hall of the inn and tries to keep warm and preserve energy.

  King Edward’s outriders arrive just after midday. They are the usual sort: hard-bitten, self-reliant men with little time for niceties. They get the innkeeper to clear everyone from every room in the inn and they requisition the stables. Thomas tells them he needs to see Lord Hastings, and has information about the rebels. They call their captain, who looks him over, and then they let him and Jack remain, for a bit anyway. An hour or so later, a herald arrives on a beautiful grey palfrey and attracts a crowd of servants in the yard. He swings his leg down and stands in the courtyard, as if waiting to be congratulated. It takes Thomas a moment to believe what he is seeing, for the man is Sir John Flood, last seen with King Edward in the Northern Parts, and a stranger to him since.