Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  ‘Jack?’

  His voice sounds small in the larger space. He puts a foot on the step. There is a sharp bang in the room upstairs, and a flurry of action that suddenly stops. He hears something else. A thud maybe. From elsewhere. He swallows. He takes the stairs steadily one by one, everything in him telling him to turn back. To run. His hair prickles.

  ‘Mostyn?’

  He reaches the second-to-top step and pushes the door open, again with the tip of the sword. He glimpses a window-lit interior before a draught closes the door. The wash of cooler air also smells of blood. Thomas pushes the door open again. The window shutter is dropped, the lifting rope bumping in the breeze that blows through. He steps up the last step and into the room.

  It’s empty. Or almost empty. Mostyn is spreadeagled on the bed, fully dressed save for his boots. He’s in yellow felted hose, dark green pourpoint and there is a hole in his sock from which his big toe sticks. He’s dead. There is a particularly shocking stillness about a corpse, even one so recently dead as Mostyn. His pourpoint is a sodden, glistening mess, but through it you can see the rippled lips of the cut in the cloth and the flesh opened in just the same way as the woman’s down the steps. His eyes are clenched, and his mouth is folded in a tight flap, as if he has just tasted something sour. But apart from the fact that he is dead, and he lies on a stain of blood, he looks almost unmolested. His purse is not even opened, and on his belt his two knives stiffen their sheaths. The room is in more disarray, though: boxes of papers have been thrown about and the contents lie scattered like bones on every surface – the bed, the floor, in the thrown-back coffer lid, in the gulley under the writing board. There are drifts of them uncurled against the walls, as if they’ve been discarded.

  Thomas takes a step forward to look more closely at Mostyn’s body. The blood is still very fresh in the wound, winking as if it were still flowing, and Thomas would swear he can feel the heat of the body still, warm as a fire. He steps back. The board creaks under his foot. He turns and looks at the open window. It is small, of course, but too small? He sticks his head out. Below is a herb garden with fresh-dug beds and, under the window, twelve feet down, two deep indents of heels in the earth among a patch of flattened pea shoots.

  Beyond a rough line of sedge at the end of the garden the land gives way to ploughed furlongs and then a fringe of alder trees. There’re a couple of men ploughing with donkey and ox, but no sign of anyone running, or them behaving as if they’ve seen anyone running. Thomas cranes his neck. There. Just as he stretches furthest, he sees a man go dipping around a corner. Russet coat, black hat. Heavy set? Maybe. But – Jack? He is not sure. In truth, it did not look like Jack.

  But then …

  He turns back to Mostyn.

  ‘Christ, Jack,’ he says aloud. ‘What have you done?’

  Why? Would he run? Why would he do it like this? Why would he kill the servant or whoever she was down in the buttery?

  He slides his sword into its scabbard with an oily click and picks up the nearest tube of paper. It is some deed or other with its chunky disc of wax. It is what they all are, mostly. Here is a letter from someone Thomas has never heard of, dabbed with a thumbprint of blood. And here is another, likewise smirched.

  Jack must have started looking at the papers after he’d killed Mostyn, but why?

  At that moment he hears a crash on the door from below. He jumps in the air and scrabbles for his sword handle again. The door to the road is hammered back against the wall.

  ‘Mostyn!’ a man shouts. ‘Where are you, Mostyn?’

  There is another crash. Pottery breaks. Something splinters.

  ‘Where are you, Mostyn you bastard?’

  Thomas recognises the voice. Jack. He opens the door and steps out. Jack is coming up the steps with his dagger drawn.

  ‘Jack!’ Thomas shouts.

  Jack stops below, staring up. He is sodden through and covered with wet mud and weeds as if he has swum here. In the gloom his eyes seem to roll.

  ‘Thomas,’ he says. ‘What? What?’

  They stare at one another.

  ‘What have you done, Jack?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve done nothing. I just – I’ve done nothing.’

  ‘Then why’ve you come back?’ Thomas demands.

  ‘What d’you mean? I’ve not come back. I’ve come to kill Mostyn!’

  ‘He’s already dead,’ Thomas tells him.

  ‘What? You killed him?’

  Thomas shakes his head.

  ‘I came to stop you, Jack. I thought you were going to kill him.‘

  ‘I am. I bloody well am.’

  Thomas steps back into the room. Jack follows him in and looks down at Mostyn for a long moment.

  ‘No! No. No,’ he murmurs.

  Jack is no dissembler. This is as much a surprise to him as it was to Thomas. He looks at Thomas.

  ‘Why? Why did you do it?’

  ‘I found him like this. It was someone else. Look. They jumped out of the window when they heard me come in.’

  He tries to show Jack the view through the window, so he can see the dents in the ground where someone has jumped, but Jack is not interested. He stands there, sodden and stinking of mud and water, with mill-weed specks all over his coat. His boots leak water. He is breathing heavily.

  ‘Why are you so wet?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Bloody road was flooded,’ Jack answers without taking his eyes off the corpse.

  So he came the wrong way to Gainsborough. That is why Thomas did not catch him.

  ‘But if you didn’t kill him, who did?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Someone was up here when I came in. Whoever killed him, and the woman downstairs. I thought it was you, so I called out. I thought you were up here. They must have heard me, and jumped from the window.’

  ‘Did you see them?’

  Thomas shakes his head.

  ‘We’d best be gone, Jack,’ Thomas tells him. ‘We’ve let just about everyone know we’re here, and we must be gone before they raise the hue and cry.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Come on, Jack. There’s no point in this. He’s dead.’

  Jack nods but does not take his gaze off Mostyn. While they’ve been standing here, Mostyn’s expression has softened; his mouth is slightly open to form a sort of beak. Jack walks around to look at him very closely.

  ‘I hope you burn in hell, you black-souled bastard,’ he says.

  ‘Come on,’ Thomas tells him. ‘Where did you leave your horse?’

  ‘By the church,’ Jack tells him. ‘Didn’t want everyone seeing me.’

  ‘No. Well. Let’s be gone then, shall we?’

  They leave dead Mostyn without another glance and clatter back down the steps. The door to the road is still open, throwing a rectangle of grey light into the hall. Beyond is the road. Thomas looks out. There’s no one out there the way they want to go, south back into town, but the woman with the goose’s wing is standing further up the road, talking to a man with a mule. She has her back to them. There’s nothing for it. Thomas leads the way, pulling the door to behind them, and they walk back towards the church, their shoulders hunched, heads bent.

  ‘So if it wasn’t you, then who?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Bloody hell, Jack, I don’t know. I was so sure it was you. I rode here to try to stop you.’

  ‘So you were one of them who’d been to Burgh’s house to find him?’

  ‘You did that too?’

  Jack nods.

  ‘I asked the watchman,’ he says. ‘He said two men had been asking after him already that day and that he should charge a fee.’

  ‘I was the second,’ Thomas says. ‘I thought you’d been the first.’

  ‘But who was the first? We should ask the watchman, shouldn’t we? Tell him what we’ve found?’

  ‘We could do. But then – Christ. Remember what Katherine says about inquests?’

  Jack nods. They know the story about the inquest into the death of Welb
y’s wife and how the jury was packed, so Katherine had been accused of murder when all she’d done was save a child’s life. Whenever anyone mentions the word bailiff, or inquest, or coroner, they must spit. And any dealings with the law will be especially dangerous since Thomas and Jack know so few people in Gainsborough – indeed, no one other than the watchman – who might vouch for them in any inquest. If they were to be accused, Thomas thinks, then the only thing that would save them from being hanged for Mostyn’s murder would be the goodlordship of someone with powerful levers, someone such as Lord Hastings.

  When he thinks what he’s given up, Thomas suppresses a shiver.

  ‘Let’s just get out of here,’ he says.

  PART TWO

  Marton Hall, Marton, County of Lincoln, Before Lady Day, 1470

  10

  It is mid March. The elder trees are in full leaf now, and the ground is beginning to dry. Katherine spends the hours with Thomas, up in the top pasture, where they keep the ewes that have still not lambed. She’s no match in strength for the sheep, especially in her condition, but she’s able to calm them, and she wonders if they can tell that she too is approaching her time? Probably not. But lambing is more or less the only thing she takes any pleasure in at the moment, because doing any work on the estate now seems only for the benefit of those who would seek to take it from her, one way or another.

  ‘What will you do when he comes?’ she asks Thomas. She means the bailiff, that serpent with the waxen nose.

  Thomas stops what he’s doing and looks up. A thin wind is blowing.

  ‘I could always try to kill him too?’

  He is only half joking. She does not suppose it would be wise to kill the bailiff, though God knows she would if she could.

  ‘He’ll come with twenty men this time,’ she says.

  ‘We don’t even know if the bodies have been found yet,’ Thomas tells her.

  ‘I could ride into Gainsborough to hear word?’ she asks, forcing the question.

  He shakes his head. ‘Not like that,’ he says, indicating her belly.

  ‘I am not so far gone,’ she tells him. She thinks she might be five months pregnant.

  ‘I was waiting for that carrier to come by,’ Thomas tells her. ‘He’ll know, for the price of some ale, and there will be no need to risk it.’

  She nods and he returns to the sheep, checking their feet. He has barely slept since he came back from Gainsborough. He’s been lying awake, trying to work out who murdered Mostyn and his servant. He had even asked her in the night if she thought Jack might have done it, and be playing a strange game on him.

  ‘You should have seen how wet he was,’ he’d told her. ‘As if he’d been washing the mud of the garden from his clothes. And he came in just a few moments after whoever murdered them jumped from the window.’

  But Katherine knows Jack is not like that, and that his desire for revenge was as forceful and direct as a bull at a gate. Since he’s been back he has carried the baby Kate around with him wherever he has been, only passing her over to relieve himself. He even eats with her on his lap. She sometimes catches him staring at the wound on the baby’s throat, his rough fingers prising away her linens to look at it. She can’t tell if he’s happy or sad about what happened, but at least the girl is alive, and at least she has stopped crying all the time. It was as if she needed the cutting, Katherine thinks, although surely to God that cannot be true.

  ‘But they must have found the bodies by now,’ she tells Thomas. ‘You said yourself his door was broken in, and he has neighbours who will wonder where he is. The woman – may God assoil her – she will be missed by her family, surely?’

  Thomas nods.

  ‘Then where is he? Why haven’t they come for me? For Jack?’

  ‘But you said the watchman was not sure he recognised you. And you had your beard?’

  Thomas nods and stares at the road. He’s shaved it off now, and cut his hair, and he is washed and dressed for the fields, not the road, in short boots, russet hose, a much-stained green jacket and a dark felted cap, brim turned up around his head. He looks every inch the farmer, not the soldier.

  ‘And the town is always busy with the ferry,’ she tells him. ‘People coming and going, passing through, dressed for the road, dressed for God knows what. No one looks at anyone they don’t know for fear of inviting trouble. And, Thomas, I do not like to say it, but you do not look the sort of man anyone in their wits would wish to cross.’

  It is she who first sees the sly-eyed carrier, not Thomas. It is the following day, while she and one of the girls, Joana, are out on their own together, gathering ransoms on the track’s verge. With this exact possibility in mind, Katherine has taken the precaution of bringing a large costrel of ale, and the carrier, this time accompanied by only one guard, since the temper of the county is calmer, pulls his mule up and greets her with a toe-to-top inspection, just as if she is there to entrap men such as him. When he recognises her, he focuses his leer on Joana at her side.

  Katherine asks for news of Gainsborough and waits for him to ask for the ale. He does so, and she obliges. When he has drunk deep, he relishes telling her that there have been not one but three murders in the town, just in this last week, and each of them more gruesome than the last. Katherine imagines this news will terrify Joana, but it is the reverse: the girl demands to hear the details with an almost unchristian delight.

  The first is a baby found drowned in the town ditch.

  ‘A baby?’

  ‘Though that is not so unusual.’

  The second and third, though, are Mostyn and his servant, a woman with no children, who used to be a common strumpet, admittedly, which Mostyn did not know when he took her on.

  ‘Do they know who did it?’ Joana asks.

  ‘It was Jews,’ the carrier says, stretching the word into a whistling sigh.

  ‘Jews?’ Katherine says. ‘There have been no Jews in England since …’ She stops, uncertain.

  The carrier touches his nose and winks at her as if they both know the truth, but must say this for form’s sake.

  ‘So you say,’ he says. ‘It’s what they’d have you believe.’

  Joana is round-eyed with delicious fear. Katherine opens her mouth to tell her not to listen to a word the carrier says, and that there are no Jews in England, so it cannot have been Jews, but then she hesitates. It suits her, of course, that the townspeople are blaming the Jews, and were the Jews not famous for using Christian blood in their rituals? She has visited the shrine of Little St Hugh in Lincoln, seen the crowds there on his day in July, and now, despite herself, she feels a damp shiver of unease at the thought there might be Jews in the county.

  ‘How do they know it is – it is Jews?’ she asks.

  ‘A man was asking after the victim,’ the carrier is saying, wiping his mouth. ‘Before the murder. And he was ever so dark and saturnine.’

  Saturnine is a word Katherine’s never heard before, but its similarities to another word are impossible to ignore. Still, it is the other word that interests her most.

  ‘Dark?’

  ‘As the night. With a black hat and a hooked nose, like this.’ He gestures.

  ‘A foreigner?’

  ‘I should say so, yes, wouldn’t you?’

  She can almost not stop herself smiling. That does not sound like Thomas at all, or Jack.

  ‘Whatever did he do to them?’ Joana asks.

  ‘Divers things that would make your hair curl, missy,’ the carrier tells her.

  Joana shudders with pleasure. They are of a pair, these two.

  ‘And what does the bailiff say?’ Katherine asks.

  The carrier shrugs.

  ‘He has been busy elsewhere, and besides, he can do nothing. It is reckoned the Jew arrived by boat in the night, and left the very day he committed the deed, by means of the same. He will be back in his own godforsaken country by now.’

  ‘So there is nothing? Nothing he can do?’

  �
�Not at the moment, anyhow,’ the carrier tells her more seriously. ‘No one has time for chasing Jews when the Earl of Warwick is at bay.’

  ‘At bay?

  Katherine presses him on this and after another long suck on the costrel he tells her the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence are refusing King Edward’s summons, and that as a consequence King Edward is taking his army up north in pursuit of them.

  ‘They will come to him though, one way or the other,’ is his opinion, ‘but in the meantime it is causing some consternation among the seamstresses of the county, I can tell you, for they are having to stitch and unpick and then stitch afresh many a livery coat as their lord’s allegiance switches back and forth twice in as many weeks.’

  The carrier laughs. His teeth are flared and brown, his tongue mossy, and he returns the empty costrel and leaves them with an unstifled burp.

  They return to the ransoms.

  ‘Jews!’ Joana breathes.

  Katherine starts laughing, and can’t stop. Tears streak her cheeks.

  ‘What’s wrong, mistress?’

  Katherine waves away her concerns.

  ‘Jews!’ she says, and then: ‘Come. Let’s get back and tell Thomas.’

  ‘Whyever do you think the Jews chose to kill such a man as him?’ Joana asks, and no one has a good answer.

  ‘Handy, though, eh?’ John Stumps mutters.

  The skinny boy, who had seen Thomas and Jack ride out, and whose nose has healed without a kink and who is now permitted to sleep in the same bed as Foulmouth John, keeps silent, and, watching him at dinnertimes scooping soup into his already full mouth, Katherine has come to respect his knack for self-preservation.

  On Sunday at Mass, the second in Lent, the priest confirms the murders in Gainsborough were the work of Jews, and he warns his congregation to be ever vigilant because the Godless stalk the land, and he reminds them who were responsible for Christ’s killing, and the death of Little St Hugh, and Katherine can see from the expression on his face that Thomas feels he has much to be thankful for.

  ‘Can the townsfolk really be right, though?’ he asks. ‘Can it really have been Jews?’

  They are replacing the fences down by the sties, a job that must be done at this time of year, when the wood is still supple enough to weave. Jack is hammering in posts with a mallet while Thomas splits poles with a hatchet. The thinner poles she can weave through the posts, but the thicker ones she must leave to the men.