Katherine says it is desolation. She says that it is the absence of hope. She says it must be endured unto death, and that there is almost nothing profitable to say about it.
But she is not quite right about that, Thomas thinks, for news of England reaches them occasionally, through the man they call Groot-hoose, of the Earl of Warwick falling on his knees before the old King Henry to beg forgiveness for past sins, and then leading King Henry from the Tower in London to St Paul’s. He’d been got up in a blue velvet cape, though it was said the rest of him had not been cared for as well as a king might expect.
‘They say he needed a wash,’ Groot-hoose had said reproachfully.
But why could he not wash himself? Thomas had wondered. Is he become simple again? Either way, Henry was not expected to, or expecting to, rule the country and the Earl of Warwick was governing it through him as he had once hoped to govern through King Edward that summer when he had him in Middleham. And meanwhile the old King’s wife, Queen Margaret, is in France, waiting to cross the Narrow Sea and resume her place by her husband’s side. The prospect of how she would get on with the Earl of Warwick is the only thing that makes any of King Edward’s threadbare circle smile.
Otherwise there was nothing else to smile about, except, perhaps, the charms of those two ladies from the province of Holland, but those smiles were reserved for King Edward and Hastings, while the others have to use their imaginations. Earl Rivers spends time writing verse that he will show no one, and the alchemist spends his time digging around in the sand, looking for something he says will help him with his search for some stone or other.
And every day King Edward’s letters to the Duke of Burgundy go evaded, unanswered, for despite Edward’s claim on him – the Duke is married to his sister – the Duke is too afeared to be seen to help his brother-in-law of York lest it provoke an invasion from Warwick and England, whom the Flems dread above all persons and things.
‘Duke Charles is having built a fort on an island in Veere with a gate they are calling the Warwick Gate,’ Groot-hoose has told them with an anxious laugh.
Duke Charles has let it be known that his alliance is with the King of England, whosoever that may be, and that he is happy with whomsoever the English want as their king, and is he not, after all, related to King Henry through his mother?
But King Edward is not without hope. Something will change, because something has to. And it is well known that the Earl of Warwick, in order to secure the King of France’s help in reconciling with the Lancastrians and their Queen Margaret of Anjou, has promised an alliance with France against the Duke of Burgundy, whom the King of France wants, above all things, to drive from his lands.
Hastings has suggested that were the Earl of Warwick to ally with the King of France in an attack on Burgundian lands, then it would make perfect sense for the Duke of Burgundy to finally meet King Edward, and give him the money, the men and the ships he needs to return to England to unseat Warwick and reclaim his kingdom.
But so far nothing has happened.
At length Thomas gets up from the sand and he starts to drag his treetop home to the house of Groot-hoose. He thinks the wood is not too damp, and that if he is careful, and nurtures the flame, it might give them enough heat through the night so that when they wake in the morning, they will be able to wash in the bucket without needing to break the ice.
He arrives at the house just as it is getting dark, and King Edward’s chambers are lit with candles and a fire, and there is music of a cheerful kind. Thomas stands without, looking at the glazed windows where shadows pass. He thinks of those two Dutchwomen.
He looks up to his chamber above, where he sees the disc of Katherine’s face looking down at him. The glass is too thick to determine her expression, but he knows what it is. He continues around the back and up the steps with the wood, and he carries it up to Katherine and Rufus.
There are only three of them now. Alice died not too long after they landed. They had no name for what was wrong with her, and it would not have mattered if they had. He and Katherine and a priest buried her in the yard of a small church on the island of Texel, and King Edward and Hastings and all the others came to stand with them and the rain washed the tears from Thomas’s cheeks.
That had been the first day of winter.
‘How is he?’ Thomas asks as he enters the room.
‘He does fair enough,’ she says, and she mops the boy’s forehead again as they settle down and wait for the night to pass.
The music that Thomas heard that evening was being played in a rare celebration of good news: the Duke of Burgundy has ordered the Hanse towns to cease trading with France and England. It does not mean much, put like that, Thomas thinks, but Hastings tells him it is the start of things.
‘We will have money, soon,’ he says.
Thomas doesn’t believe him, but he is proved wrong, for the money does come.
‘Twenty thousand pounds!’ Hastings shouts. ‘Twenty thousand blessed pounds! Do you know what this means?’
Thomas shakes his head. He is so used to disappointment that he thinks it could mean Hastings and King Edward might find themselves another Dutchwoman to make it three.
But Hastings is adamant.
‘It means we will be back home, Thomas. Think of that! Home!’
Thomas thinks of Marton Hall.
‘Yes, well,’ Hastings says. ‘There is plenty to do, that I will not deny. But none of it will happen while we are rotting here. I know you have had your sorrows, but you now must gather yourself up, and do the Lord’s work.’
He goes on to remind Thomas that the Lord is testing him, and that his time in Purgatory will be as a moment in summer, and that he is become the Lord’s instrument of vengeance on earth.
The next day he sees Hastings in new hose, pourpoint and jacket. It is the same with King Edward, who has regained some of his regal polish.
‘Wilkes writes to say the King will meet the Duke of Burgundy tomorrow,’ Hastings announces, ‘and we are to move to Bruges!’
‘Bruges,’ Thomas repeats. He has always wished to go to Bruges, to see the bookbinders, the illuminators, the press that they say is there that will save the monks their lifetime of labour. He had always imagined his visit in better times, though, with money in his purse and time at his disposal. Instead he is still living on burned scraps and handouts from Hastings, who still does not really seem to accept that Thomas has nothing beyond that which he is given, and that his remaining child is sick, his wife worn through.
Hastings finds them a cart on which to travel; they are wrapped in blankets and there is even a feather-stuffed quilted jacket to put around Rufus, who is shrunk and wizened with his illness so that he looks ever more like a little old man, and he smiles when he is settled in it, and remains carefully cheerful, smiling tolerantly when he is awake and not in pain from whatever it is that seems to be eating him up.
‘He just needs rest,’ Katherine says.
She is reduced to skin and bone with the worry and the constant caring, her skin like parchment. If Rufus dies, Thomas knows the boy will take Katherine with him to the grave.
They roll the few miles eastward from the hard little town on the sea, inland, the never-ceasing wind at their backs, in the week after the Epiphany, to Bruges, and to the upper floors of another, even finer, house of Groot-hoose. It starts to snow when they arrive but Groot-hoose’s servants are numerous and bustling, and they are helped up to their chamber, a broadly square room, with glazed windows on two sides, where a fire is already lit and the bed is aired and there are sweet herbs in the mattress and among the rushes on the floor. Thomas places Rufus in bed, his body merely a burning hot wisp, and he stares at him for a long moment, and he thinks that is it. It has been too much for him.
Despite Katherine’s feeble protests, he sends the servant, Niklaas, who can speak sailor’s English, to get a physician from the Hospital of St John.
‘All the other gentlemen have sent for g
irls,’ Niklaas tells them.
The physician comes and he speaks no English but his alarm at Rufus’s condition is obvious. He takes samples of the boy’s urine and consults an almanac; then he sends out for herbs that he crumbles and steeps in wine, for powders that he grinds finer yet before stirring into curiously sharp-smelling liquids which he then warms in a copper dish on the embers of the fire. He binds these together to make pastes, draughts and poultices. He says prayers. He anoints with oils blessed by various bishops. He takes blood from between Rufus’s second and third fingers. He calls for white bread and ale from a particular brewster that Niklaas tells Thomas and Katherine has beneficial yeasts.
Outside it is snowing, bitter little dots and dashes of ice that swirl in the wind and sting your face like sand, and underfoot it settles in a thin shell across the town. The canals freeze. No one ventures abroad save Thomas, who walks through the clean-swept streets, crossing hump-backed bridges under which swans and ducks huddle. It is utterly silent and the sky is a perfect scrim of grey glimpsed between tall houses that seem like gully depths. In this way Bruges reveals its restrained beauty in glimpses.
The days are short and even the bells in St Saviour’s are muffled in the cold. The crisis comes during their second week, and the physician stays for it, kneeling alongside Thomas and Katherine, and by the end of it, he too is dish-eyed with fatigue, his beaky little face sharpened further still, down on his black-hosed knees praying for divine intercession.
‘Your boy – his soul – it is in the Lord’s hands,’ Niklaas translates.
A priest is called; a taper is lit and placed in Rufus’s fingers. Hastings insists on silence in the house, and King Edward sends up nightcaps of ginger syrup.
Thomas goes down on his knees with the rest of them and prays using the God-given formulas. He prays to the saints and martyrs for intercession on Rufus’s behalf, and he prays to the spirits of the dead for their help also: Nettie, Alice, Sir John Fakenham and his son Richard, too, though he hardly knew him. He prays for intercession to those men he cannot remember, but about whom Katherine has spoken: Walter, and Geoffrey and Dafydd and his brother Owen.
And as he enunciates this list of the dead, as their numbered souls parade before him, it is as if he passes out of the state of heart-blindness, out of that distant muffled time of grief after Alice’s death, and his thoughts become clear, his sight sharpens, his hearing returns, and he sees he is asking them to intercede for his son, and that they are asking him to do something in return. He knows that the time has come. He must do their bidding.
He must now, simply, avenge them.
This is the bargain that is struck here while he is on his knees in this upper room of Groot-hoose’s house in Bruges: if Rufus lives, Thomas will dedicate his life to the destruction and death of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.
It is about then that the physician starts to look up from his prayers not for the boy’s death, but for signs of some improvement.
And so it happens.
Rufus comes back from the brink.
He will live.
After two days they open the shutters and let in the light.
After three Rufus is drinking the ale and food does not pass through him as if through a pipe. He takes in some of its goodness before it is shat out. Light returns to his eye. Colour to his cheek. His flesh will reacquire its youthful spring.
The physician laughs and says something Niklaas translates.
‘He says he is stubborn, your boy. He says he refuses to die. Refuses to lie down. He is like you, he thinks.’
Thomas shakes his head.
‘That is his mother,’ he says.
After four days, Thomas ventures out to find the snow is melted and the town is filled with Englishmen. Big, rough, desperate Englishmen. Swaggering bands of them, all armed, most with bits and pieces of harness that look scavenged, or grabbed on the way out, or handed down, or the only piece they’d been left with after a run-in with men keen to take it from them. They carry swords or rough pole weapons and they seem to think it will be soon, whatever it is.
Thomas goes to find Hastings, who, when he sees him, thinks his son must have died. Both their eyes become glassy with tears when Thomas tells him the boy is spared.
‘For great things, Thomas, I feel certain of it.’
‘When are we to return to England?’
‘Money is coming in steadily,’ Hastings says, ‘from the provinces here, and from Calais, and from the aldermen of London. We have ships, too, moored in Flushing, and men are gathering in the streets, did you see?’
Thomas nods.
‘It will not be long,’ Hastings says. ‘We will miss you.’
‘Miss me?’
‘I had not thought you would come? With Mistress Everingham being so ill, and your boy?’
‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘I will be with you. And Mistress – Mistress Everingham. We will come. We have nothing here.’
He does not add that he has nothing there either. But Hastings is pleased.
‘I did not want to force it, Thomas. But you will have to spend the next months in the butts.’ Hastings pats Thomas’s shoulder, which is no longer as bulky as it was, for lack of food and lack of time spent drawing his bow.
‘I do not wish to be considered as an archer any more,’ Thomas tells him. He does not know why he says this; it is not something he had planned. But he has been an archer before, and there is nothing to be gained from it if you wish to find a man and try to kill him.
‘A man-at-arms?’
‘I wondered if I might – take up a lance?’
Hastings smiles.
‘A lance? Have you a horse?’
Thomas shakes his head.
‘Well, we must find you one,’ Hastings says, but he pauses and looks Thomas in the eye. ‘But, Thomas,’ he says. ‘It is not a simple thing, taking up a lance. Have you ever ridden a horse at a man? Have you ever held a lance? Run someone through with it?’
Thomas admits that he has not.
‘These men,’ Hastings goes on, ‘they practise doing it in the tiltyard. And besides, we need archers. We are short of good men such as you. Please. You can lead them when we have recruited them. You can be a master of bowmen and show the vintenars what is to be done.’
Thomas understands what Hastings is offering. A fixed position. Income. He knows that most men are puzzled by his – and Katherine’s – station for he wears no badge, no emblem of any guild or craft, and there is nothing to give away his position in the social scale; he is not obviously this or that. Just who is he? No one really knows, and he can see how unsettling this is to most men. Were he to join Hastings’s retinue as a master of archers, then he would have some heft in life.
Thomas thanks Hastings, but that is not his plan. He needs to close with the enemy, not just send arrow shafts into the sky in the hope they will kill a distant man in plate.
Hastings seems to understand and the next day a servant brings Thomas some money for his purse and a pair of very stiff sabatons in black painted steel that come to a nice point over Thomas’s toes.
‘It is a start,’ he tells Katherine.
When it is at last the appointed day, he still cannot believe it, but they leave Bruges by the St Katherine Gate through large crowds, and King Edward does not board his barge but walks so that people may admire him, and there is no one finer with a crowd of so many people. He is so tall and strapping, and these last few months have chiselled any complacency from his face, so that he looks everyone’s idea of the perfect warrior king, and women, particularly, throw short-stemmed flowers at him.
They walk along the canal to another of the beautiful brick-built cities that proliferate in these parts and at their approach various townsmen and clerics come out to meet King Edward, and they offer him the town cross to kneel before in veneration while they sprinkle him with holy water, and then he is taken to Mass where the Te Deum is sung while his men cluster in the church precincts, but Tho
mas goes in search of an armourer, only to find the town has only one, and he is sold out of everything he has ever made, and is sitting at his table dead-eyed, massaging the palms of his hands.
On his way back, nearer the church, are the stationers’ stalls, far finer than any he has seen in England, and so Thomas stops to look at their wares. He knows King Edward has been buying many beautiful books in Bruges, exquisitely illuminated volumes of Josephus and Livy, and on the Trojan Wars and the life of Alexander, and though these here in Damme are not so astonishing as those, there is still much at which to marvel.
But he wants to buy something for Katherine, and he knows she is less impressed by the appearance of a book than by what it has to say for itself. By what it can tell her. He imagines a book such as a physician might consult, of the sort that Master Payne had in Bamburgh, and there are some wonderfully authoritative-looking texts. One – badly faded now – has a chart of what the various colours of urine might mean; another how to bore a hole in a man’s head for reasons that make no sense to him, but might to her. All these, though, are too expensive, and he remembers how she prefers unbound pages, which she says seem more mutable, more in the way of a proposal than a laying down of the law. There are some, in a wooden box, but those he looks at first are to do with jurisprudence, something that will be of no interest to her.
The bells in the church ring out above his head to mark the end of the service, and the pigeons take to the sky in a flurry of beating wings when Thomas finally finds something that is not on Church law: it is what looks like a poem, copied out in an old-fashioned hand, with the title which he translates as being On the Nature of Things by a Latin named Lucretius. It is cheap enough so Thomas buys it and he folds it into his purse and hurries back to join Katherine and Rufus, who are sitting at the back of the bed of the cart with colour in both their cheeks, and eyes that are white. He gives her the poem and she looks at it closely.
‘Latin,’ she says.
Kingdom Come Page 28
