Even in the drizzle, or maybe particularly in the drizzle, the evil, the repression, the bizarre twisted cruelty of the place just seeps out of its stones like mist rising in the sun after rain. It infects things like a poisonous miasma, and she is half minded to clamp her hand over Rufus’s face and take him away so that he does not breathe it in.
But it is more than that.
It is something that Katherine’s friend Liz had asked her two years before, when they were walking north to Middleham Castle, to take the ledger to the Earl of Warwick. Katherine had told her the story of the nun: ‘Where did you hear that?’ And Katherine had told her about the Prioress, and about how she had told the story to stir up the sisters against Katherine when she had been seen with Thomas in the cloister at Haverhurst. Liz had said the woman was a bitch but she had been interested in the Prioress, mainly because she thought she might be the only way Katherine would ever find out how she had ended up as an oblate in the priory. Liz had said that a story like the nun of Watton was the sort of story people told only locally, and that Watton was most likely the place the Prioress would call home.
Could this really be the Prioress’s home? Katherine wonders. Could this be the hearth to which she returned after her expulsion from the priory at Haverhurst? Could she be here now–somewhere in there village perhaps? Or would they have let her remain a sister? Might she, in fact, be in this priory right now?
Katherine rides with the reins slack between her thumbs, peering around, starting at anything, and she feels overcome with a swimming dizziness. Some things seem further than they are, some closer. Everything is at once so familiar, yet never before seen, every detail recognised but jarred just slightly out of kilter: the jumble of roofs above their grey stone walls, the fields, fishponds, orchards, sties and granges. There is the malthouse, the tilery, the water mill and, upstream, behind the sisters’ cloister under some new-budding elms, the grassless patch around three winding posts where there will be steps down into the river in which the sisters stand knee-deep in all weathers to wash the clothes of the community, as Katherine herself once had to do for all those winter months.
And yes, even now, even in this quickly picking-up rain, there is a sister out there up to her thighs in the river’s rain-dimpled water, and Katherine can hear that wet slap of her beetle against a pile of sodden linens. It makes her feel exhausted just to hear it, and there is a familiar bone-deep weariness in the rhythm of this woman’s beating. Crack. Crack. Crack. It’s as if she has been doing this all her life, and knows she’ll be doing it for the rest of it too, which, Katherine thinks, may well be the case.
The column of men are spread out on the road behind, seeking the shelter of the trees but looking for all the world as if they are trying to conceal themselves. When the fore-riders hammer on the priory gate, rather than it swinging open, the bell in the tower is jerked into urgent summons, and she imagines the sisters gathering on their side of the nave, praying for delivery, one way or perhaps the other. She feels their nerves, their fright. She can almost smell their fear.
And still the woman in the water beats on. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Will they be let in? King Edward and Gloucester and the other gentles, perhaps, but why would anyone let more than a thousand men in anywhere? And even if they were let in, she will not be. She will have to spend the night with the sisters. And this she will not do.
She turns to Thomas, who she notes is now wearing leg armour up to his hips, and she suggests they find their own shelter for the night.
‘There’ll be a hay barn,’ she says, though at this time of year it will be nearly empty. He nods. They kick their horses on, past the crowd at the gatehouse where the Prior will be panicking, and there sure enough are the lay brothers’ granges, and the postern gates for both cloisters, each locked and barred no doubt, and across a narrow bridge over the river are the sties and the goose pens. A pair of mottled oxen glare at them as if the rain were their idea.
The bell stops its ringing and in the silence Katherine can still hear it: crack. Crack. Crack.
The hay barn is cavernous for being largely empty, and once they hobble their horses, and once Thomas has carefully removed his leg armour, they sit and watch the rain falling on the black slate roofs of the priory through the open barn doors; and then Rufus sneezes and they both become alarmed for him, but he seems fine, so they break some bread and sip at their costrels of ale. They are in silent contemplation of their pasts when perhaps fifty sootstained Burgundian gunners come and join them with their wagon of guns and powder. They are friendly enough – they rub Rufus’s hair – and they smell of saltpetre and, soon, of bean soup, which they warm over a fire made of a bit of wood they break off from the barn wall.
As night falls Katherine goes to relieve herself in the river, and sees the sister has finally taken in her washing.
That night she dreams a variant of that same old dream, the one in which she is an infant being left at the almonry door with the old Prioress, and the dream makes perfect sense, of course, because it is cobbled together with the suggestions people have made about the scene since, which she has sewn together in her mind and which obscure the truth of that original dream. So there is a letter with a seal on it, big as a slice of apple, and there is the old Prioress reading the letter and there she is bobbing a bow to whoever is leaving the abandoned younger version of herself, and it all seems very clear.
By morning the dream is muddled and already half-forgotten, and when the barn doors are pushed open, it is cold and grey outside, but the rain has stopped and the bell in the tower is ringing and there is a lay brother with fresh baked maslin and a barrel of ale for the Burgundians that they do not seem to appreciate.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The woman is already at work.
They are ready to ride on to York before it is fully light, and the Burgundians load up their wagon and roll it out on to the road. Katherine and Thomas follow on behind. Rufus is on her lap.
She feels almost queasy with the feeling of a lost opportunity. She knows she must make an enquiry, but of whom and about whom? She cannot merely go to the sisters’ almoner and explain what she wants and why. They would first take her as an apostate, and if that did not work, for here is her child, they would then seize her for the murder of Sister Joan, whom in another lifetime she pressed down on a shard of glass so hard that blood came out of her mouth.
They ride past the front gate, which hangs open, and three or four black-cassocked brothers stand watch in the courtyard, silver-haired, senior, and when they see Katherine is a woman they turn their faces away. She almost makes one of those gestures that she’s seen men make, and she wonders what Liz would have had to say to them.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
They ride down the road, and she still feels jittery with nerves. Something is happening. A door is closing; an opportunity is being lost.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
She stops.
‘Thomas,’ she says. ‘Wait here for me. Don’t come unless I call.’
And she pulls her pony around and sets it trotting back up the road, and then off, down to the riverbank where the woman is at work. Katherine does not dismount, because, by now, she knows. She pulls up by the winding posts and sees at the river’s bank there are three baskets of linen and a bucket of ash soap.
Rufus is restless on her lap.
‘What are we doing?’ he asks.
But before Katherine can answer the woman looks up over her wet shoulder, with the beetle raised to pound the pile of linen on the rock before her. Although Katherine already knows who she is, she cannot prepare for this, and when their eyes meet, she cannot help but look away, just as she had done all her young life. Even then the woman’s gaze had been so hate-filled that to meet it was to be sullied, violated – and also to be complicit in that violation.
Now she stands in the water with her skirts bunched, the beetle held high, in the same pose you might catch someone splittin
g a log, and she is unmoving. Katherine takes a deep breath, feels Rufus’s warmth and looks at her. Her limbs are tingling and there is a painful lump in her throat, but her eyes are not misting over and she feels her strength. They stare at one another. Again, after all these years, so much has changed, and they both know it. This time it is the Prioress who looks away.
Crack.
‘So,’ the Prioress says. ‘You’ve come. I always knew you would.’
Katherine is confused. All her life, it seems, has led to this and now she does not know what to say, or where to begin.
Crack.
She had often imagined killing the Prioress. She had believed that she should, and so would. She did not know how it would be done, and had always assumed God would guide her hand. But now she looks at this woman, who has withered in the years since last she saw her, and she wonders where is God’s guidance? She feels not one jolt of impulsion to get off her horse and wade out into the river and kill her.
Crack.
‘Why?’ Katherine asks.
‘Why what?’
‘Why were you so – why did you beat me? Why did you treat me so badly?’
Crack.
‘I treated you the same as anyone else,’ the Prioress says.
‘That is not true.’
‘Yes it is. You always thought you were special. A chosen one. Better than everyone else. You haven’t changed.’
‘What about all the beatings? The starvings?’
‘You still think you should have been allowed to get away with all them things you did? On account of thinking yourself better than the rest of us?’
‘Better? You think I thought I was better than you, so you beat me? You locked me up! You made me take your shit out to the river!’
Crack.
‘You made me do the washing for six months because you thought I believed myself better than you?’
Crack.
‘That your boy now, is it?’ the woman asks. ‘Does he know his mother’s a murderer?’
Katherine regrets Rufus’s presence now, but she is pleased that the Prioress has registered him, has seen that she at least has found something in her life.
‘A murderer?’ Katherine repeats. ‘I’m no murderer. I killed a woman who attacked me, and so as to save her baby I shortened the life of another who was going to die anyway. But what about you? All those women you locked in the Priory? Alice? Whom you suffocated under a bolster? Their blood is on your hands, and you know it, and however long you stand out here in this river, its waters shall not wash them clean.’
Crack.
‘But as for me,’ Katherine goes on, ‘I forgive you all you did to me. I may not have forgotten it, but I have forgiven it, every foul little deed.’
‘You came so far out of your way to tell me that?’
‘Do you know how far out of my way I came? From the track there. To here.’
‘Well, nothing is stopping you going back that way, is there?’
Crack.
Katherine tugs on the rein in her left hand. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You are good at that, by the way. Praise where praise is due. You have a nice easy action. It should stand you in good stead over the next twenty years.’
Crack.
She turns her pony and she begins to ride away. She expects to hear the crack of the beetle but the Prioress has stopped her washing.
‘Don’t you want to know who you are?’ she calls after her.
But Katherine has raised the back of her hand, and she has ridden on. She does not need the Prioress to tell her who she is, and so the woman has lost the last shred of power she ever had over her and so, for that moment at least, Katherine feels a deep sense of calm.
She rides past Thomas, who is sitting on his horse, waiting, his head cocked to one side, his eyes flattened.
‘Who was that?’ he asks.
‘One of the sisters,’ Katherine tells him.
She sees he has his leg armour on again, and that he has somehow acquired knee joints with pieces that stick out like an Irishman’s ears. He watches her closely as she rides by.
20
The column winds its slow way along, up and over a ridge of hills where they get their first glimpse of distant York, and Katherine is grateful to be mounted when those around her are wearing through boot leather. Soon, though, they come to a slow stop. The fore-riders have returned from York with a man she is told is Thomas Conyers the Recorder of the City, which sounds important enough.
The recorder tells Edward that he must not even approach York for fear he will be attacked and all he had hoped for would be lost to him; hearing this, Edward is disconsolate, and he stands at the side of the track muttering to Hastings. Conyers stands a little apart with his body shaped in a position designed to persuade them all that he has nothing to gain by all this, and perhaps that is so, but the name Conyers is hardly trusted among Edward’s ranks and surely not by Edward himself.
But, really, what else can they do? They cannot go back to Hull; they cannot go across the sea, and nor can they go north to Scotland. They can only carry on to York. Edward sets his jaw. Conyers and his advice are put aside, and they press on through the luscious green-grassed farmland where sheep outnumber men by perhaps a hundred to one.
Eventually Thomas comes back to her. He is subdued, serious, disturbed by what he has seen.
‘Is the whole country going to be against King Edward?’ she asks.
He shrugs and doesn’t answer, and Katherine sees his boots are wet from the rain and already the rust is hazing that fine leg armour.
Before they reach York they are met by a small troop of horsemen. Their leaders bear more encouraging news – that Edward will be permitted within the city gates, but only as the Duke of York – and with only a small party, not his army, which must wait on the fields hereabouts. After a hurried conference with Hastings and Gloucester, King Edward agrees to their terms. Hastings sends for Thomas again and when he refuses to come with them on account of Katherine and Rufus, the only two in their entire party who are not in any way men, or soldiers, Hastings assigns Katherine two men – one fat, called John Pentecost, another thin, his son, also called John Pentecost – and so Thomas has no excuse. He rides out with Hastings, who has given him a very fine livery tabard, and Katherine and Rufus watch them move off up the road behind the first troop of horsemen.
Father Pentecost barks orders, while Son Pentecost scurries about organising bread, ale, pottage and a portion of a tent so that she and Rufus will have somewhere to sleep for the night, but in the gloaming Thomas returns. He is more cheerful, and tells them they are all to be allowed to pass through York this night.
‘You should have seen the King,’ he says. ‘The mayor and aldermen made him address the townspeople from the steps of the minster. He told them – you will never believe it – he told them that not only does he not want to recover the throne, he told them he never wanted to be king, ever, and it was the Earl of Warwick who made him.’
Katherine laughs.
‘He even ended by shouting “A King Henry!” and “A Prince Edward!” and he waved an ostrich feather in the air!’
‘Why?’ she asks.
‘Because that is the livery symbol of Prince Edward, King Henry’s son, isn’t it? The one they hate, and the one whom Hastings says is devoted to the sin of Onan.’
Katherine has not heard of Onan.
‘Never mind,’ Thomas says. She will come back to that later, she thinks.
‘So are we on the move then, sir?’ Father Pentecost asks, vaguely plaintive, as if what has happened in York is only important in so far as it affects him and his labours, and this change of plan is somehow Thomas’s fault.
‘Yes,’ Thomas tells him. ‘To York. Or through it at any rate.’
They find space in the same inn where she once shared a room with Liz and, once they have overseen the stabling of the horses and ensured that Rufus is fed, she walks up those steps to the bedchamber and is briefly im
mersed in memories of the woman who once saved her, then led her on, and then betrayed her. But Liz does not dally long in her mind, because she returns to the Prioress, and she feels a lurch of fear, and then incredulity; as her fingers trace the fringes of that weave of scars that covers her back she thinks of the woman condemned to wash linen for the rest of her life, all day, every day. Is that penance enough? Perhaps. Perhaps something will carry her off before she is too old to carry on. And that will be that.
She thinks again of the manuscript that Thomas bought her. In it the man Lucretius argued that there is no soul, only matter that can be made and unmade, recycled, turned over, and that this earth is all there is for humankind. A man should not live his life with the afterlife in mind, Lucretius wrote, but should accept that everything – every single thing – is transitory, and it should be enjoyed for what it is, not given some extra significance.
She sleeps deeply, dreamlessly, and the next morning they are up before dawn, and after Mass they set out, every man in harness now, and the laughter that accompanied King Edward’s cajoling of the people of York is replaced by tension and even fear.
‘We are coming towards Pontefract,’ Thomas tells her.
‘Who is at Pontefract?’
He looks embarrassed to say it.
‘Lord Montagu.’
‘Oh Christ,’ she says. ‘Him.’
Thomas nods.
‘Won’t he attack us as he did last year, when he drove King Edward out?’
‘Maybe,’ Thomas says, ‘but that was when King Edward was the king. This time he is merely the Duke of York. And Montagu – well. You remember him? He always – well, almost always – did the right thing. He has no reason – or right – to attack the King – the Duke that is. The Duke of York.’
‘He’d be mad not to,’ is Katherine’s first thought.
‘Yes,’ Thomas agrees.
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