Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  But Katherine feels a flush of warmth. A realisation.

  ‘It’s because – because he is making overtures to the old Queen and old King Henry, isn’t it? It means he has abandoned the Duke of Clarence’s claim to the throne, so the ledger is now only of interest to him if he wished to contest the right to the dukedom of York, which he does not.’

  Hastings starts to chuckle.

  ‘You are altogether too quick, Mistress Everingham! I have always said so, have I not, Thomas? Too quick! Too quick!’

  Thomas smiles uncomprehendingly, then he sees it.

  ‘So Warwick has abandoned The House of York entirely?’

  Hastings nods.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘that is one way to see it. I think of it as The House of York having abandoned Warwick.’

  ‘I suppose it makes things clearer,’ Thomas says.

  Hastings agrees.

  ‘There is no backsliding now,’ he says. ‘Especially if what Wilkes says is true: that the French King Louis is trying to persuade the Queen Margaret to let her son marry Warwick’s daughter.’

  The thought is too odd to keep in your head. Warwick’s daughter marry King Henry’s son? No. No. It is just … No.

  ‘I thought she was married to the Duke of Clarence?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘The other daughter,’ Hastings says. ‘The younger one.’ He takes a drink. ‘Either way,’ he muses, ‘I should not like to be in old Warwick’s shoes now. Nor Clarence’s really, in all honesty.’

  ‘What chance has he of – of uniting their forces?’ she asks.

  ‘Uniting Warwick and Lancaster? Who knows? Warwick has a great power of his own, of course, and there are still many who would side with old King Henry against King Edward, but then again Warwick has done them such damage in the past.’ He laughs ruefully. ‘Still, it may not come to pass. Queen Margaret was ever a law unto herself and it may be that she will demand too high a price of Warwick, or it may be that Warwick will come to his senses and seek the King’s grace again.’

  There is some sense that the conversational part of the exchange is over, and she sees Wilkes get up from where he has been watching Rufus draw. Hastings flits his gaze his way, and recalls the reason for his visit.

  ‘But, Thomas,’ he begins, ‘as you know, I have just come down from the Northern Parts where there is the usual trouble, this time among adherents of Lord Fitzhugh, who, as it happens, is married to Alice, who is the sister both of my wife, and none other than Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Now I am not saying he is a fool or a dupe, or easily led, but – Dear God! Mistress Everingham! Are you all right?’

  There is a sudden scalding heat from between Katherine’s legs, and what feels like boiling water soaks through her braies and down her calves. She jumps to her feet.

  ‘Anne!’ Thomas calls. ‘Anne!’

  The baby takes two days to come. Katherine feels her hip bones being unknit, being forced apart and into different shapes, her flesh being stretched so that her fibres part, and her skin splitting with a pain that is needle sharp. Anne is there, able to follow instructions as she gasps and pants and pushes to get the baby out.

  The men wait downstairs.

  Night, dawn, day, dusk: all are as one in the shuttered room, in the shrouded bed where Sir John breathed his last. In between the contractions she stares at the beams and the daub where it is cracked and she hears the mice and vermin within and she thinks if she lives, she will move the bed to a different position and fill a new mattress with meadowsweet and so on.

  She hears the priest downstairs on the second day, when she is too tired to drink ale, and the pain has gone on so long, and Jack has sent in a small disc of jet that belonged to Nettie and Anne has said all the prayers to St Margaret as she can, and is now so tired herself she can almost sleep through Katherine’s cries, which she tries to muffle so as not to alarm Rufus. Katherine does not know if the priest is there for her, or for the baby, should it ever come. Then she thinks that there is no one present able to judge better than her if she is going to live or die, and so she determines that she will live, and that the priest is there to baptise the baby.

  And so it proves. On the evening of the second day, she finally gives birth. She watches Anne’s eyes widen in amazement through her own tear-filled clenched lids as finally the pressure-pain is relieved below and there is just a rush of sliding flesh through her nethers. Anne takes up the slippery, basted thing and looks into its face and she looks anxious, helpless, and Katherine’s heart is crushed in a powerful grip of misery. The baby is stillborn.

  But then there is a limited cough. A tiny thing, strong within its own terms, and Anne starts to half laugh, half weep as the child’s limbs flail, and then there is a piercing cry of rage.

  ‘A girl!’ Anne says. ‘A girl.’

  Katherine can only gesture with her fingers. She wants to feel the child’s weight on her. She wants comfort with contact. She cannot wait for Anne to clean her up.

  ‘Wrap her in linen,’ she whispers, and Anne does so, a quick, practised fold, and she places the parcel on Katherine’s breast. It is almost no weight. Less than a plucked chicken. A rabbit. Katherine’s arms feel heavier than the baby. She picks them up and places them over the child, and the child’s face is blue and livid, squished and smeared with blood and mucus, and her eyes do not open but she is alive, and vital, and hers, and Katherine is filled with golden yellow summer’s warmth.

  In this haze of happiness she instructs Anne in the cutting of the cord, which is taken to be burned in the fire below, and in the disposal of the sheets and straw and the other mess, and then hot water is brought up by Joana and the baby shouts and bawls and her face softens while she is being washed.

  By the time Anne is finished and the baby is carefully swaddled, and the shutters are let down and the summer air billows through, Katherine is asleep. When she wakes, except for a persistent ache, she has almost forgotten the pain of the last couple of days, and she wants Thomas and Rufus to see this astonishing, miraculous thing she has produced.

  The men gather in the courtyard outside and shoot an arrow into the sky to signify the child’s escape from the womb to life, and then they come stumping up the steps to see them both. Thomas is quick but careful to come across the room to embrace her, and he is happy to see the girl whom they will call Alice, but Rufus stands back and watches, and when she sees his face, immobile as ever, she feels as if her heart were being squeezed in someone’s palm. He does not want to hold the baby, or touch anything. He is too frightened

  ‘Rufus, my love, come.’

  The men stand aside to let the boy approach the bed. He is pale with anxiety. He shakes his head and keeps his hands by his side.

  ‘Come on, Rufus,’ Thomas says.

  He is more brusque than he would be if he had been there the night of the oak gall. She beckons Rufus closer and shows him his sister’s face. It is impossible not to smile at such a thing. He lifts his hand to stroke her cheek with the back of his finger. She can almost feel his bones melting. She moves to place the baby in his arms and when he takes her, his tears fall thick and fast. She finds tears in her own eyes too. Rufus mumbles to the girl. Some sort of promise of his own. She does not intrude. After a while he gives up the baby, but remains sitting next to her with one haunch on the side of her bed, watching, keeping close guard. She squeezes his pale hand.

  Thomas has found her a gold ring in which is set a tiny red pebble of jasper.

  ‘I bought it from a man in Lincoln,’ he tells her.

  ‘Tell me you haggled,’ she says.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And all the widow’s books are taken away by order of the Lord Chamberlain!’

  She smiles.

  ‘So he has found it?’

  ‘He must have. He must have. You heard how thorough he is? He will have checked every book himself.’

  She feels her eyes closing and
a great smile spreading, and she sinks into the depths of the bed.

  ‘Praise Jesus,’ she says.

  ‘No, praise you,’ Thomas says.

  Even as she is talking her eyes are closing, and she feels herself sliding into delicious sleep, only to be woken what seems a moment later with Anne and Thomas holding the squalling baby.

  ‘She’s hungry,’ they say.

  And this is how it is for a month. Thomas and Rufus bring Alice to her and she feeds her while they relate the happenings downstairs, what they have been doing in the furlongs and woods, and so on, and what news they have heard from afar.

  ‘The Earl of Warwick is still in France,’ Thomas tells her.

  ‘But what about Queen Margaret?’

  ‘She is still there as far as I know.’

  ‘And have their son and daughter married yet?’

  He doesn’t know, but he finds out the next day.

  ‘Not yet,’ he says.

  And she is silent for a bit, trying to think about that.

  ‘So what next?’

  ‘They say Warwick is trying to raise an army of Frenchmen to come and take the throne on behalf of old King Henry.’

  ‘An army of Frenchmen?’

  And Thomas shrugs as if to agree with her. It is a mad thought.

  The next day he comes back with news that there is still rebellion in the north, and she asks after the new Earl of Northumberland – ‘What is he doing about it?’ – and Thomas tells her he has heard nothing of him doing anything; then she asks about Lord Montagu and whether Thomas thinks King Edward was right to deprive him of the earldom of Northumberland, which was all he ever wanted, wasn’t it? And if Edward was right to give him not much in return, despite his loyalty, and surely he is a force in the north?

  ‘You remember his men at Hexham? In their red coats? They were proper soldiers.’

  When Thomas agrees she turns back to Alice, who tugs away at her nipple; and when she finishes, and goes slack, her dark eyes remain fixed on Katherine’s as if the girl is trying to fix her image in her mind, and Katherine smiles down at her daughter and thinks: Well, there it is, and I do not care too much about what goes on in the Northern Parts.

  Time passes. She hears them go out in the morning and she hears Nettie’s Kate crying and Anne walking her up and down in the yard below her window soothing her, and Anne sings a simple little song to a tune that worms its way into Katherine’s ear, and after a while she becomes so bored she gets up and walks about her room, creeping so as not to wake Alice, who lies in a cot that Thomas has fashioned with aspen planks and clinched nails, and that now sits on the coffer wherein they used to keep the ledger. Sometimes Anne or Joana or Thomas will take Alice, so that Katherine may rest peacefully, and when this happens, Katherine likes it for a bit but then finds she wants the girl back in her room, or on her breast.

  When she hears the men come back, she is almost be able to feel how tired they are, and how sore they are from their days in the baking sun, and occasionally there is more news, depending on whom they have met that day, and Thomas brings it up and it is usually wearyingly familiar: there is still trouble in the Northern Parts, or there is new trouble in the Northern Parts, but once there comes the intelligence that King Edward is going up to suppress it himself, because in fact she was right and it seems he trusts neither this new Earl of Northumberland, nor the newly demoted Lord Montagu, to suppress it for him.

  ‘So he has gone himself?’ she asks, to make certain. And Thomas nods and reminds her of that thing that King Edward once said about learning lessons.

  ‘I don’t suppose the King wants another Robin of Redesdale on his hands,’ he says. ‘If he is ever captured again, there’ll not be too much hunting or any fine dinners this time.’

  He adds as an afterthought that while he is up north, King Edward has entrusted his wife, Elizabeth – who is pregnant, it turns out – to the safety of the Tower in London. Katherine asks him where he gets his news now, and he tells her messengers are riding up and down the road all the time. It is as if the whole country is getting ready for something.

  But at Marton Hall they must prepare too, and it is easy to forget the affairs of men in far-off places, for it is now the second week before the Assumption, in early August, when the sun seems at its hottest, and she hears the men sharpening the sickles and she doesn’t envy them the coming days, for she knows from bitter experience the toll that harvesting wheat extracts.

  Then, when that is done, within the week she hears them sharpening the scythes for harvesting the rye, and then the barley, and then the oats, and again she does not envy them, for a scythe too brings its own particular pain. Then it is the pea crop that must be brought in and stored out of reach of mice and rats on a bed of hawthorn branches in the loft above the malthouse.

  And then, finally, it is the Sunday of her churching, the end of Thomas’s gander month, when he has had to act as husband and wife, mother and father, and Katherine is so impatient to be out in the sunshine that she is up before anyone and downstairs and tottering about on weak legs with Alice wrapped and tied to her, and the girl is so incredibly hot! Everyone knows it is her special day, and everyone makes particular efforts to clean themselves and wear their best clothes, and all faces turn to her and she shows them Alice and everyone is so smitten with the little pink bun and they are so kind to her, and she is so pleased to see them and to be out of that room. The sun is shining as they walk together down the track and into the cool shade of the little church where they stand and wait outside while she makes her confession, telling the priest that she has not confessed for some time, and then at Mass Thomas stands next to her so that he is touching her and he is in his best hose, new, with a broadcloth jacket and a hat with a pearl or something on the crown, and she feels so full of emotion, so over-brimming with it, that she doesn’t know from one moment to the next if she should laugh or cry. And Rufus is there too and he looks happier than she has seen him, and he keeps a hold of his sister’s little foot.

  Afterwards they go back up to the hall where there is white bread, beef pottage, tongue in butter, an eel they’ve smoked that is as long as an arm, and an omelette made of no fewer than eighteen eggs, enforced with strips of smoked bacon. There is a little wine and some good strong ale, and they sit outside in the August sunshine, and they eat and drink and then Rufus plays a tune on his pipes to which Jack and Jane dance a curious jig and everyone claps and Alice is not disturbed, and during it all Katherine occasionally presses her nose to the fluff of hair that covers her girl’s scalp and smells the new-horn baby smell.

  Thomas drinks too much ale and tells her how much he loves her, and how the future will be filled with nothing but rosy happiness for they have their son and their daughter and one another, and all their monsters are vanquished one way or another, do you see? And she laughs, and kisses him, though she is less pleased when he snores all through the night and first wakes and then keeps awake the baby.

  On it goes as the weeks of late summer pass, and Katherine helps where she can, but she is still so weak, and Alice needs her more than do the fields. So she passes long stretches of the day feeding the baby, which she does not recall ever doing with Rufus, with only Anne for company. But at last everything is brought in and dried, pickled, smoked or salted against the winter to come, and when it is done, when the storerooms are packed and the lofts are groaning, there is a moment when she sits in the shade, and she sees the boughs of the apple tree are heavy with ripening fruit, and she thinks to herself, yes, this is as it should be.

  She even starts to think again about going to Canterbury again. To find out who her parents are.

  And that is the day that Thomas comes back from the mill looking perturbed.

  ‘King Edward has scattered the rebels in the north,’ he tells her. ‘He’s sent Fitzhugh packing for Scotland.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But Warwick and Clarence have landed with an
army of Frenchmen in the southwest.’

  14

  They are back in the butts, all the men, including Foulmouth John, but not the skinny boy, who has vanished, and Thomas is making them shoot and run, shoot and run. They do not enjoy it, because no man enjoys shooting in a jack and a sallet all day, but they are good at it now. They’ve had a few days at this, and together the six of them can lay down 150-odd arrows in a patch of grass no bigger than a stock fisherman’s net, two hundred paces away, in less time than it takes to say the paternoster. More than that, when they are on the rove, each man can drop his arrow within two paces of marks that they could hardly have made out earlier in the year.

  ‘Fucking invincible, we are!’ Foulmouth John says. ‘When the Earl of Warwick’s men arrive, we’ll fucking show them.’

  But Thomas knows there are only six of them, and six is not enough because this time when Wymmys comes, at first light, a few days later, he comes on a new horse, in new plate that fits him, and at the head of a column of more than fifty men in pale livery, each with a big yellow device on his chest.

  ‘Who the fuck are they?’ breathes Foulmouth John.

  The household is gathered in the courtyard after prayers.

  ‘Someone’s retained men,’ Thomas knows, but not whose.

  ‘They’re King Edward’s,’ Jack says. ‘Look, they’re wearing that streaming-sun sign.’

  Thomas cannot tell. Then Katherine is at his shoulder.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘it is a star.’

  ‘A star? Who is that? Anyone know?’

  There are shrugs all around.

  ‘There’s no point trying to fight them,’ Jacks says. ‘Just look at ’em.’

  Each of the horsemen carries a lance or a spear, a bill or a pollaxe resting in his stirrup, and they are all well harnessed, in plate and with sallets. Worse, though, in a way, is the sight of five friars riding along with the soldiers, halfway along the column, wrapped in cloaks against the first fine mists of the season, but unmistakable all the same. At the very back of the line are Wymmys’s original fifteen, one of them on Wymmys’s old horse. It’s the skinny boy, of course.