Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  And as the night wears on Katherine becomes gripped with an odd sense of purpose that has nothing to do with Marton Hall, but elsewhere, and even if she wanted to, if she’d been permitted to, she’d never be able to sleep for the excitement that heats her body like an imbalance of the humours. She wants to go to Canterbury, to find this Prior of All and his archive, and discover who she was and why she was treated so cruelly.

  The next morning, bone-tired, she sleeps unknowingly past dawn and wakes to find the light streaming through the gaps around the shutter and Rufus calling out for her in a piteous wail from the hall below.

  She is off the bed and down the steps before she stops to think.

  Rufus is alone down there, on the floor behind the board where he’s been making more ink and he’s bleating like a lamb, and she rushes over and sees he’s with the baby Kate, and he is struggling with her, just as if he is fighting her.

  ‘Rufus!’

  He looks up. Tears and snot smudge his face.

  ‘She was – she was—’ he manages. ‘She was coughing. Coughing.’

  She’s making a high-pitched crowing sound as she struggles for air, and it is the oddest and most alarming thing Katherine has ever heard. It is as if the baby is not human.

  ‘Let me see,’ she says. Kate is in the grip of spasms just as her mother was before she died, but her lips are turning a shade of blue and her eyes are about to burst from their sockets.

  ‘She’s choking,’ Katherine says.

  She comes around and picks up the baby. Her limbs are rigid, but she’s scalding hot, and juddering. It reminds Katherine too much of her mother. She tries not to panic. This time things will be different. She lays the girl on her back. There’s drool over her chin, and her lips are drawn back. The tiny little seeds of her teeth in her gums scrape Katherine’s fingers as she tries to find if there’s anything stuck in her mouth. She can’t imagine what it might be. The cave of the baby’s mouth is a hot socket around her finger but she cannot feel anything that should not be there. Everything within is stiff, though – the cheeks, the lips, the tongue – as if they all are made of something else.

  The wheezing croak is setting Katherine’s hair on end.

  What else? She must bang her on her shoulders. She gathers the girl up and carries her to a chair where she sits and puts her on her knees, sitting up. She bangs her back. Once, twice, three times. Between the shoulder blades. Each blow becomes successively harder. The girl bounces and flinches. Bang. Bang.

  Nothing.

  The lips are getting bluer. The crowing continues, but it is so weak now, barely a croak.

  Christ.

  She now lies the girl across her knees, face down, and she thumps her back. She prays she’ll hear a clunk as whatever it is in there drops to the rushes and the girl can get some air into her.

  ‘Please – Mother!’

  She bangs again. A proper thump with the flat of her hand. Nothing. She does it with the base of her fist this time. Nothing. Again. Still nothing. She can feel the sweat in her own eyes. Oh Jesus. One more time.

  Nothing. But the crowing has stopped, and with the next thump, the baby reacts not as a live thing, but as a lump of flesh. She could be hitting a slaughtered piglet! Jesus.

  The girl’s not breathing. She turns her over.

  ‘Kate!’ she shouts at the girl an inch from her face, as if this will help. She starts to shake her.

  ‘Kate!’

  Her face is almost all blue now, spreading from those taut lips. It is terrifying.

  She turns her over on her chest again, her arms now flopping down and she thumps her back.

  ‘It’s no good, Rufus! It’s no good!’

  She is crying. Rufus is crying.

  John Stumps comes in.

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘She’s not breathing!’

  ‘Bang her back!’

  ‘What do you bloody think I’m doing?’

  She bangs again. And again. It is still like hitting meat. More so.

  ‘Oh Jesus! Something must be caught. She must have swallowed something!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter!’ She’s thinking hard, fast. Air goes down a pipe. Block that and a man will suffocate. That is how men die on the gallows with the rope against their windpipe. If Kate has swallowed something that is blocking her windpipe then – what about – trying to get her to breathe below the blockage?

  ‘We have to get her breathing again. We have to – we have to bypass it.’

  ‘By – what?’

  She does not know, but she will find out, she thinks, and now she feels she’s into her stride again. Suddenly the panic is gone. She knows what to do. On the table are Rufus’s drawing things, including his penknife and some reeds.

  ‘Rufus! Get the honey from the buttery! Rose oil!’

  It all comes to her. She remembers those books the physician Payne showed her while they were in Bamburgh Castle. An operation on a man’s throat. That is what must be done, but by God, it must be done fast! Fast!

  ‘John! Get some piss!’

  ‘I have just pissed outside.’

  ‘Oh Christ! Hold her.’

  She passes her over. He gathers her in his flippers.

  She lifts her skirts and holds the jug under her. It is a good thing about being with child, this constant need to piss. She fills the jug halfway and puts it on the table. She moves faster than she ever has before. She takes Rufus’s penknife – a small, dark little thing with a point, a present from Thomas – and she swirls it in the urine, warms up her fingers.

  ‘Come on, Rufus!’

  He trots in with the honey. She snatches the jar from his hands. He steps back. She’s no time to smile at him. She smears the knife in the honey. And drops it on the table. She takes the baby from John Stumps and lays her on her back.

  She doesn’t even have time to roll up her sleeves. Her hands have stopped fluttering. She is swift and purposeful and she knows what she’s about to do. She takes a reed from Rufus’s collection – the stiffest she can find – and swirls its thickest end in the honey, and then in the urine to remove any globs of it. She cuts it with Rufus’s penknife, on the slant, making a thick nib such as no clerk would accept. Then she cuts it off further up, a short finger’s length. She sets it to one side, and takes the penknife and bends with it over the baby.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Shhh.’

  She tips the baby’s chin back so that her throat is exposed and elongated. She thinks it is the most intensely vulnerable thing she has ever seen, a tiny throat. Oh God. She can’t. She can’t do it! She feels as Abraham must have felt. But the baby will die if she does not act, and act fast.

  Bald John has come in to watch too. John Stumps tells him what’s happened. He crosses himself.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ John Stumps says.

  ‘Say a prayer,’ she tells them and they start the paternoster.

  ‘Bless me, Father, for what I am about to do,’ Katherine whispers to herself and to God. ‘Guide my hand and my heart. Watch over baby Kate as you would your own son, and deliver her unto us safe.’

  She feels down below the chin, pinching the tiny windpipe. She feels the ripple of the baby’s Adam’s apple, and knows she must do it – there! She drops the blade of the knife into the infant’s throat, right in the middle, just below her tiny Adam’s apple, a finger’s width below the soft curve of her chin. There is a slight bounce. She brings just the weight of her hand to bear and there is blood as the skin breaks, but that is fine. A little blood is fine. A little blood is fine. She presses the knife further, a whisker further, down through the tougher tube wall of the windpipe. Instantly she knows she’s through. Her knife is in the empty tube of the airway. The baby coughs and splutters, and there is a bubble of air in the blood. Perfect. She has sweat in her eyes. She mops it with her sleeve. She looks at the cut. Another bubble. Right. Right. She removes the knife, and takes
up the fibrous tube of the reed’s end and she slides it down between the lips of the wound. The fit is tight. It is held firm.

  Nothing happens. She had hoped … not for this.

  ‘Guide me, God,’ she mutters. ‘Guide me. What now?’

  She is lost. She had hoped the breathing would start but why would it?

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘She’s still not breathing!’

  She puts her hands on the girl’s chest. It is a gesture of despair. But there is a thin whistle from the reed. She is startled. She presses down again. Another whistle.

  ‘Sometimes, with a lamb,’ Bald John says, ‘you need to blow into it. Give it life.’

  Katherine waits not a moment.

  She purses her lips over the reed and tastes the blood. She would have thought infants’ blood would taste sweet, but it is hard and coppery. She blows. Baby Kate’s chest rises. Katherine takes her lips away. The chest slowly falls.

  ‘Do it again!’ Bald John encourages.

  She does.

  The chest rises. Falls. She is about to blow again when there is a clogged little whistle in the reed and the chest creeps up of its own choice.

  Katherine’s hair riffles across her scalp.

  The baby is breathing through the tube. She’s done it. Christ.

  ‘Thanks be to God!’ John Stumps whispers.

  The baby lies there, unconscious still, but breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The little heart is going fast as a drummer boy’s sticks.

  She stands up.

  They all look at her.

  ‘What’s she going to do with a tube in her neck all her life?’ John Stumps asks.

  Katherine had not thought of that. All she’d thought of was the breathing.

  ‘I suppose – I suppose I could …’

  She thinks: I can push whatever it is that is choking her up from below, into her mouth. She could do that. Yes. She has an idea. It is a leftover from when she cut Sir John Fakenham’s fistula. She’d best do that while the baby is asleep like this.

  ‘Rufus! Fetch a skewer.’

  He hurries back with one, and after she has checked to see it is not too sharp, she swirls that through the urine. Then, after a long moment, when she’s certain the baby’s breathing is an established, regular suck and drawl, she grips the reed in her forefingers and tilts it down, so that it points up towards the baby’s head. Instantly the child’s breathing becomes strained. She twitches and heaves. Katherine presses her down with an elbow and then slides the skewer into the reed and then through its length. She’s as quick as she can be, but she does not want to cause damage, or force anything, so she slides the skewer slowly up the baby’s windpipe. Sweat stings her eyes and drips from the tip of her nose. It is hard to know if she is pushing flesh out of the way or puncturing it. She moves minutely, applying gentle pressure, but with every hair’s breadth she moves forward, she fears she is stabbing the baby through the roof of her mouth.

  And then she feels it. A tap. Against something hard and foreign, transmitted down the length of the skewer. It is the blockage. She nudges it. It is gripped and doesn’t want to yield. Christ. Could it be a tooth? Something like that? She thinks not. She turns the baby’s head so that whatever the blockage is, or was, Kate does not swallow it again, and she gives it a slow pressing shunt. The blockage resists, but then yields. She feels a great rush of relief. She withdraws the skewer. She makes sure to keep the baby’s head on its side, and she opens the mouth and slides her finger in, and she cannot miss it now. A hard, dark thing. She hooks it out and it spills into her palm with a lot of bloody spit. She looks at it for a long moment, and then closes her hand around it.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She’s alive,’ Katherine tells them.

  They all breathe out their own pent breath.

  ‘What is it?’ John Stumps asks, nodding at her closed hand. She tries to shake her head, to warn them off asking, but they are all peering, waiting, eyes bright. She should throw it on the fire, she knows, but it has gone out. She cannot do anything else but hold out her hand. When Rufus sees what’s in it, he simply turns and runs from the house.

  ‘Rufus!’ she calls. ‘Come back!’

  But he’s gone.

  ‘What’s got into him?’ John Stumps asks.

  She holds out her hand and shows him what is in the palm.

  It is one of the oak galls that Rufus uses for ink.

  8

  Sir Robert Welles is caught the day after the battle, riding westwards along the old road towards Leicester. He has two men with him, one of the brothers from the camp and another man, and, outnumbered, they surrender without fighting. Sir Robert is brought before King Edward at Stamford Castle, to whom he admits on his knees that the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence were behind the rebellion. He tells the court that they had caused it with the specific intent of removing King Edward from the throne, and replacing him with the Duke of Clarence.

  ‘King George?’ King Edward says, trying it for sound. Men shake their heads to display their disgust at words only he is permitted even to think, let alone speak, without being hanged, drawn and quartered for the pleasure. After a moment, King Edward closes his eyes and rests his head against the back of the chair. He sighs deeply and pinches the bridge of his nose. Hastings, who knows him so well, reads the signs, steps forward and tells everyone, including Thomas and Flood, to leave the room, and they do so, in barely broken silence. A moment later Hastings has to call the guards back in to lift Welles from his knees and drag him out, too.

  Thomas and Jack had returned to Stamford the night before, after the rout in the fields by Empringham, hoping to find King Edward or Hastings in the sort of mood to allow them freedom to return to Marton Hall. But by the time they had gained entrance to the solar, both King Edward and his lords had been in a different sort of mood, and those three rough girls were back, among many others, and the two were intent on celebrating their almost bloodless victory; it had been impossible to approach them, or even to hear oneself speak, for the music and the shouting and the drunken capering. Fairly soon Jack was in the same mood too, and so Thomas took a drink, even though it was Lent, and the opportunity to ask for leave to return to Katherine, for that night at least, slipped away.

  The next morning they’d woken to a stream of King Edward’s men coming into town from the field of battle carrying such things as they’d managed to take away with them, trying to sell them on. It was mostly livery coats, Thomas saw. Hundreds of them, and all in Clarence’s colours, and for that day at least the price in Stamford for blue- or murrey-dyed sackcloth fell very low.

  ‘They tore them off as they ran,’ Flood had told Thomas as they watched on, ‘so we are calling it Losecoat Field.’

  As a herald, Flood had the right and duty to name the battlefield, and this joke pleased him a little, but he was disappointed, as were all those men who’d not fought on fields such as Towton, and who had hoped for some battle more worthy of the name. But the previous evening’s engagement with Welles’s Lincolnshire commons could hardly even be called a rout, since after that first salvo of gun ball and arrow shaft, the enemy had fought with their heels, and with such success that by the time King Edward’s men had reached their lines, all that remained of them were the dead and wounded, piles of discarded hedging bills and, strewn in the wake of the fleeing commons, all these damning livery jackets.

  ‘Will Lord Hastings see us now?’ Thomas had asked.

  Flood had been unsure.

  ‘He is not in the best of tempers,’ he’d advised them. ‘And anyway King Edward will not let a single man go now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’ve found that casket. D’you remember it? Welles was sitting on it when he would not make the proper obeisance to King Edward’s herald—’

  ‘He kept a pie in there, didn’t he?’ Jack had laughed.

  ‘Some billmen found it in a bush, and Wilkes has been going through it,’ Flood had gone on.r />
  ‘What for? More pie?’

  Flood had not smiled. He’d seemed much older that morning. He had lowered his voice.

  ‘It was filled with letters from my lords of Warwick and Clarence, revealing the true extent of their plan to subvert the King and the country.’

  Flood had held Thomas’s gaze.

  ‘But that is …’ Then Thomas saw it. ‘Wilkes’s doing?’

  ‘Yes.’ Flood had nodded. ‘A man of many parts. Anyway, because of it, King Edward needs men more than ever if he is to declaw either of those two. We may have scattered Welles and his rabble, but Warwick and Clarence are in Coventry, and just now making for Leicester, with more troops than we can think of raising in so short a time, and their men are not likely to run at the first sight of the black powder, are they?’

  ‘So – so this is it? The Earl of Warwick is now out in total rebellion?’

  Flood had nodded.

  ‘This is not like last year, when no one knew what he was doing, least of all the Earl himself. This time he’s really done it. And King Edward is determined that there will be no quarter. No fudge of circumstances, no slipping back to the way it was.’

  Flood’s fists had bunched and his jaw had hardened. He was picturing martial glory again, Thomas saw, and he resisted reminding him of the last time he’d experienced that, at the bottom of the hill at Edgecote, when he had needed to be dragged unconscious from the carnage, and Thomas had had to carry him insensible over his shoulder for a day. If Flood had been able to see what had happened to his servants – Brunt and Caldwell – who were cut down by horsemen while they tried to cross a field in the aftermath, he might not have had that faraway starlit cast in his eye.

  At that moment Wilkes had appeared as if he had heard them talking about him. He had been dressed in a long brown coat, and he had nodded to them, but hardly broken stride, and was just as quickly gone, ducking purposefully through the yard and on towards the stables. Thomas has never seen Flood look anything other than sunny – except when unconscious – but as he had watched Wilkes go a cloud had fixed itself over his face.