‘Intimate,’ is how Wilkes describes it.
‘Select,’ Hastings concedes.
They ask the boatman what lies south. After a long pause he says:
‘Lynn.’
‘Lynn?’
‘Aye. South. Across the Wash, though. Dangerous. Less you know what you’re doing. Where you’re going. Tides and that.’
Thomas sees King Edward and Hastings consult with the Earl of Worcester, whose gaze is yet to seek him out, and with a few of the other lords. They look anxious, harried, scared even, and some men – ten or more perhaps – take their leave, but what choice do King Edward and his closest advisers have? They cannot go back, or westwards for fear of Montagu, so southwards to the Wash and Lynn it is.
Thomas wonders if they should abandon King Edward too, but for what?
‘Dry land?’ Katherine says.
She has a point.
But they press on with Hastings, and Hastings seems pleased.
‘We’ll come through this, Mistress Everingham, and I am sure the Duke of Norfolk will have new linen for Alice. In fact, it shall be my priority to see it done. Wilkes will remind me.’
Wilkes smiles his enigmatic little smile.
The land is now very wet and fissured with streams that slow and divert them, and they often come to dead ends and must retrace their steps. It takes all afternoon, and it is only getting muddier and wetter with each stride, until at last they are in a shimmering mud flat that stretches as far as the eye can see.
‘The Wash,’ someone says.
‘We must stop,’ another says. ‘My horse is done in.’
‘But we can’t stop here,’ one of them says. ‘Look: the tide’s coming in.’
They all look around. There is nowhere dry, as where to rest the horses.
‘There will be something, surely? Over there.’ The man points. ‘There’ is on the horizon, many miles hence but what choice do they have?
‘I hope my lord of Norfolk has baths for us all,’ one man says.
They have been slipping in and out of the mud and the water all day, picking their way through deep sloughs of stinking salty ooze. The mud stinks and seagulls shriek. The way is getting wetter, the mud sloppier, and they are beginning to sink deeper. They dismount to spare the horses. Every step is an effort. One of the horses goes down and they cannot get it up. It is panicking and lashing out. A man nocks his bow, and then an arrow, and he passes it to the mud-covered horse’s owner to shoot. It is a waste of an arrow, but it is better than seeing such an animal drown in mud.
‘Sorry,’ his owner says, standing apart, tears in his pale-lashed eyes.
On they go. They are knee-deep now. The water shimmers as it moves and rises. The evening is undeniable now.
‘What about over there?’ Katherine says. She has always had good eyes, Katherine, and she has seen some kind of hut, or shack, on the gentlest rise of an islet. They surge towards it, dragging their horses.
Another one goes down, its owner wailing with pity.
Then it is a man. He slips and splashes in the dark water, and his harness takes him down with only a murky swirl in the oily waters to mark his passing.
Everyone stops.
‘Can anyone swim?’
None can.
After a while King Edward crosses himself. The others do likewise. They turn and wade on through the churning slop until at length they are at the island, mud up to their thighs, the horses really suffering, and it is only now they see they’ve made a mistake. There are two islands, and the hut – perhaps an eel-trapper’s – is on the second island, across a swiftly growing sea. They cannot cross. They see the eel farmer or whatever he is has pulled up his boats – two punts, one larger than the other – on to the shore under his shack, by which is a huge pile of eel traps. Smoke drifts from the seams of the hut.
They shout for the man to come out. There are only the screams of the gulls in response. They shout again.
At last the eel-trapper comes out. He has a boy with him. He is startled and suspicious, and Thomas hopes he does not have a bow with which to chase them away, though of course he must, somewhere.
He shouts to asks what they want. The man the others call Chamberlain tells him. No one is very hopeful this will work, but no one has an alternative solution. Eventually the eel farmer agrees to come over with his boy and ferry them to his island, where at least it is dry. He unties his punt and pushes off with a pole, and Thomas is taken by strange swirling memories that make him shiver with fear.
The eel farmer stares from his boat as it noses through the slop.
‘Gentles,’ he says, and Thomas cannot guess if he is noting them as such, or addressing them, but Hastings now steps forward past King Edward, who is standing with his fists balled on his hips, staring at a subject who for now is richer than him. Hastings greets the man respectfully and explains their need to cross this inland sea, and their need of shelter. He indicates the hut.
‘There is not nearly room enough for you,’ the eel farmer tells them. His life does not require the exchange of many words, Thomas supposes, and he is hard to understand.
‘That needn’t matter,’ Hastings says, ‘so long as we are out of the actual water.’ He lifts a boot from the mud that pours brown water from its seam.
They spend the time until it is finally too dark to see ferrying King Edward and the others across to the island, but they must leave the horses amid much fretting as to their hooves and general health on this low island. The punts are surprisingly large, but sit low in the water because they are for carrying eel traps and rushes, not men.
When they are on the island itself, Thomas sees how small the hut is. It is made with only two or perhaps three people in mind, with a broad step around it, like a jetty, and inside he sees that perhaps a hundred gold-skinned eels hang from its rafters slowly turning in smoke rising from the smouldering fire below. The whole hut is a smokery, he sees, and this is where the man sleeps. Christ, what a life. No wonder he has no wife. He looks at him again, closely, and he even looks like an eel, with a broad slash of a downturned mouth and – can it be? – sharp teeth. His skin is smoked too, though it has not turned the beautiful gold of the eels.
King Edward and the nobles sleep within, packed in alongside the eel farmer and his boy while the rest of them sleep on the rough boards of the jetty outside. Thomas sees the whole building is made from driftwood, taken from wrecked ships perhaps, and lashed together with oddments of rope, likewise sourced.
He helps Katherine over with Alice, while he carries Rufus. Katherine falls asleep that night with Alice wrapped in her travelling cloak, in Thomas’s arms, while Rufus leans against him as if he were a tree. He is grateful to be so tired his mind does not continue churning through the events of the last few days, and they wake shivering at dawn. As the mist lifts none of them have ever seen a sunrise like it and they stand and gape and they take it as proof of the power of the Almighty.
As the light grows, though, and the others emerge from the hut, they see what has happened: the sea has retreated beyond the horizon and they are surrounded by a sea of foul grey mud that stretches as far as the eye can see.
‘Christ!’ is all King Edward can say when he sees it and the others just stand in a line and stare out southwards across the sea of mud. Alice is shrieking with the need to change her linen, and Katherine tries to clean her in a bucket of chilly brackish water, which only makes her scream the more.
‘Do you think he will take us to the shore when the sea comes in?’ Hastings wonders. ‘His boats are – not really sea-worthy?’
The eel-trapper is sitting eating – something – in his punt, a little way off. He is shaken, perhaps, by having so many people invade his island, and perhaps by having seen the man appointed by God to rule over the country taking a shit from the end of his jetty.
Thomas asks him what the distant band of land that crowns that horizon is.
‘Castle Rising,’ he says.
�
��Castle Rising!’ Hastings says. ‘I have hunted there. My God. We are so close and yet …’ He looks around him. ‘This is like exile. Standing up to our nethers in tidal waters, waiting for a lift.’
‘Master,’ Thomas calls to the eel man, ‘when the tide is in, would you take us there? In your boats?’
The eel-trapper is alarmed.
‘How could I manage that? I have only two, and there is only the boy and me. And you are fifty, say, with horses.’
‘Forty,’ Hastings calls. ‘And we would give you our horses.’
‘No we bloody wouldn’t,’ one of them snarls.
‘Shut up, Say,’ King Edward tells him. ‘You can have them all.’
‘What would I want with so many horses?’
‘Each one is worth more than – than anything and everything you can see from here.’
The eel man takes his time to think.
‘It’ll not be easy,’ he says.
‘No,’ Hastings says. ‘But think of the profit. A day’s work. It will set you up for life and beyond.’
‘I don’t know.’
They all know to be quiet now. Thomas watches the man’s eyes widen as he calculates the profit.
‘I’ll do it,’ he says. ‘I want the saddles too, though.’
King Edward wafts his hand. It is done. If the eel man can get the horses off the island, and to a market, before they die, he will be wealthy beyond his wildest imaginings, but the men are naturally reluctant to lose their horses.
‘Can we not just ride out?’ one asks. ‘There must be a causeway. I heard there was a causeway. Where is the causeway?’
The eel-trapper looks at this one – again, it is Lord Say – and tells him there is a causeway, about five bowshots that way. He is welcome to try to get there, but ought to know that once he is caught in the mud, there is no way to save him from drowning in it.
‘So we are stuck here? Until when?’
‘The tide comes in.’
‘How long will that be?’
‘Noon, I’d say.’
King Edward goes down to the muddy rim and faces the sea. He holds his arms aloft and shouts at the sea, ordering it to come in. He has forgotten the name of the Danish King who tried to stop it doing just that, though, and has to explain it to Lord Say, so his joke is not so funny as it might have been.
‘Cnut,’ Wilkes murmurs. Hastings laughs.
‘I heard that,’ Say says.
Wilkes says nothing.
One of the others wonders that King Edward can make a joke at a time like this, ‘when everything is in ruins’.
The morning wears on. The mist rises so that there is a band of something else between the clouds and the horizon. Gulls call. Everyone is cold and wet and hungry.
‘Have an eel,’ someone says.
‘Not exactly moreish, are they?’ a man they call Rivers volunteers.
The brooding King returns to the mud’s edge in silence, and every man there descends into gloom, staring at the mud between his feet. The hobbled horses shiver and snort on the far island. They must be starving, Thomas thinks, and they look done in.
At last, when it might or might not be noon, the gorges in the mud start to fill and the surface seems to liquefy and unset and then at last the nose of the punt lifts from the bed. King Edward goes in the first boat, with Worcester, Hastings, Say and four others. Others in another boat. Between the eel farmer in his punt and his boy in his, they can take fifteen. Each trip takes as long as a sung Mass, well over an hour. At last Thomas and Katherine carry Rufus and Alice aboard the boy’s boat with Wilkes and two or three others, one of whom tells him he is an alchemist, of all the things they need right now. Thomas volunteers to relieve the boy of his punting, and so he stands up there on the back and is assailed by strange sensations and looks to Katherine for confirmation that he has done this before. She is asleep.
They do not appear to be making much progress as they meander across the choppy brew of the shallow water, roughly southward, but after a while ships’ masts can be seen ahead, and then their hulls. Merchants’ cogs and carracks, gathered against unseen quays, or slipping from the shore out to sea, or coming in from the east with sails dropped.
‘A channel,’ the alchemist says as if he has divined a secret.
Thomas thinks he might be simple, but then the boy tells them they ought not get caught in the channel’s current or it will take them out to sea to drown.
Alice wakes with a cry and Katherine tries to feed her and the alchemist makes some comments about transformation of one body to another, and he tries not to look as she arranges herself, and at last they come in to the port of Lynn, where the bulbous merchantmen are tethered to the stone and wood staithes, being loaded and unloaded by hurrying porters and swinging cranes. Once they have found a place to land, they are greeted with some concern by the porters on the stone-built quayside, who sense a profit to be made from sodden, mud-stained gentles coming in on eel-trappers’ punts. Soon sodden silks are swapped for dry russets.
The eel man is there, and tells them it has already taken them too long, and the tide is on the turn, and that if they want to get out of the harbour before noon the next day then they’d best find a boat and pay its captain to set his sails now.
‘What about the others?’ Hastings gestures at the island.
‘Too late for them tonight,’ the eel man says. ‘Have to bring ’em over tomorrow.’
‘But you’ve another three hours before the tide goes out,’ Thomas reminds him.
‘I can’t leave my horses there, can I?’
‘A man has to look after his investments,’ Wilkes agrees, and the thought of those ten lords left out there for another night obviously pleases him. It means the King’s party is down to barely thirty now. He’d not even have gone hawking with so few men in the past.
They thank the eel man, and wish him and his boy luck, and they watch them push off, out across the wind-dimpled waters, rich beyond imagination, if they can only get the horses to land.
Hastings has found a boat willing to give them passage: a hulk, with a single mast that has been oft-repaired, and an Easterling for a master who is as lean as a blade and speaks in a strong accent that no Englishmen could ever understand.
‘It is the best we could find,‘ Hastings tells Thomas. The other shipmasters are busy, either loading or unloading their cargoes, or overseeing repairs or haggling with a sailmaker, or their ships are already full of sarplers of sheep wool or broadcloths they are taking down to Calais or across to the ports of Flanders. None are in a hurry to set sail.
‘They say there are pirates,’ Rivers says, ‘and a fleet from the Hanse who do not love our King Edward.’
The Easterling master is taking wool and cloth over to somewhere no one quite catches, but he has agreed to fit a few of them aboard, so long as it is understood that quarters are tight, and that the money needs to be good. It is. Some coins are dug out from somewhere, but they are not enough, and at length men must twist rings off their fingers.
‘A man must make a living,’ the master says with a shrug.
Thomas sees that Katherine is hollowed out with all this, but she tells him it is Alice who is not well; her linen was filled with something green this morning, she says, and its smell was fishy.
‘Should we take a crossing? With her so ill?’
They look around.
‘What else can we do? What else is there?’
They walk down the staithe together, to where the gangplank is lowered. The master is up by the tiller of his boat, gesturing for them to hurry so that he can catch the ebbing tide. They climb aboard, Thomas carrying Rufus, and they find the master has provided them with food, though they must pay for it, of course.
It is a small ship, with a crew of five, and its open hold is packed with huge sausages in skins of waxed linen under layers of tarred canvas that the master is taking back to a place that he calls Damme. King Edward knows of it, and approves. Meanwhile the
townsmen and -women have come out to see the sight of King Edward quitting his realm and at first there is much confusion, incredulity and surprise on the dockside, but that gives way to some grumbled complaints and even jeering. It is only the presence of Earl Rivers, of whom this crowd seems to know, that keeps things from being thrown and the situation deteriorating into the sort of violence that leaves men with no fingers or noses.
It is decided that the Earl of Worcester will not come with them, but will ride with two of the other men to his properties in Huntingdon to see if he might raise troops, perhaps, and so their number dwindles further.
‘Thanks be to God,’ Thomas says.
Wilkes gives him a small smile. It is hard to tell what he’s thinking, but it’s definitely something.
The boat is untied, heavy ropes thrown aboard and coiled and then the crew push off with poles, and a boat full of oarsmen takes them out into the main channel of current-slicked brown water, where the ship’s yard is raised and the sailors clamber along it to drop the sail. It hangs limply for a good long while, and then fattens with a ruffling thump, and the ship quickens underfoot.
The land begins to slide by, and soon the flat shoulders of sand and scrub on either side part further, and they beat out across the darkening sea. Every man gathers at the stern with the master at his tiller, and they watch England slip behind and there is silence on board, save for the piteous wail of Alice in Katherine’s arms, and soon that noise is lost among the slap of the waves against the hull and the grinding creak that the various ropes and stays give off as they plunge through the roughening sea.
When England is gone beyond the horizon, men turn and find such corners as there are to be found in a boat, in which to sleep as best they can. King Edward offers Katherine his cloak and she is reluctant to take it for it is incomparably fine, and she knows she will ruin it, but he smiles and says the sumptuary laws do not apply at sea, and so after a moment she accepts it on Rufus’s and Alice’s behalf.
‘You must return it though,’ he says with a smile, ‘for it is all I own. All that’s left of my kingdom.’
Kingdom Come Page 26
