Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  23

  It is a distance of perhaps three miles to the horse lines, but before Thomas can dismount and prepare himself for what is to come, Hastings calls him to his side. It is still early, a beautiful day, and their shadows are long on the dew-soaked grass. Men are standing talking and laughing too loudly. Movements are jerky and unnatural.

  ‘King Edward has asked for a plump of lances to be set up on that hill,’ Hastings tells him. He points westwards to a tree-lined hillock. ‘In case of ambush, such as that which nearly did for us at Towton. I have volunteered Sir John Flood, and I’d like you to be by his side.’

  Thomas thanks him earnestly, and he thanks God, too, that he will not have to endure the lines again, to fight blind in that terrible helmet. By Christ, he has acquired a new respect for those who do.

  ‘And John Wilkes will be alongside you,’ Hastings adds, and there is something catching about the way in which he says this, a slight hitch in his voice and eyebrow.

  Thomas thanks him again for the favour, and he wonders if Katherine is not right: Hastings does looks less exalted than usual. Can King Edward really blame him for what happened at Barnet? He was put in an impossible position. But his men did turn and run. Thomas sees there is a curious tension about them now, a self-consciousness, a quietness, as if they know they are the subject of speculation, and today they must prove themselves above all others.

  Thomas leaves them with a few shaken hands and a grumble at his great good luck, and he exchanges wishes that God will go with them all, and he rides back behind the lines, past the backs of King Edward’s men and the backs of the men of the Duke of Gloucester’s battle on the left flank, to find Flood with what might be another ten or so men on horses, all milling around below where the ground rises in a gentle slope up to a thicket of poplars. Flood has a long spear in his hand, twice or three times his height, and he is gazing up at its point with something like wonder.

  ‘This is more like it, eh, Thomas?’ he says.

  Thomas agrees that it is probably so. Beyond Flood, not yet wearing his helmet, is Wilkes. He is standing up in his stirrups and, like the rest of them, has no spurs. They do not intend to fight on horseback. He has on a dark blue brigandine, leg and arm plate, and a visored sallet similar to the one on Thomas’s saddle, which he wants to delay putting on until the very last moment, and he is peering north over the heads of the men in Gloucester’s battle towards the square bulk of the abbey. He does not seem very encouraged. Flood asks him why he has such a sour face, and Wilkes looks at Flood as if he is a child.

  ‘There are more of them than us,’ Wilkes tells him. ‘And there’s rough ground between us, tracks and so on, cutting across. And look – there’s a house in the way. That is no good for horses.’

  Flood is dismissive.

  ‘We are to be up on that hill,’ he says, pointing over the small stream and up at the thicket.

  ‘That’s perhaps where we’ll start,’ Wilkes explains. ‘But we will end up either here. Or, all going well, over there.’

  He points to the west, where the rivers are. Flood knows Wilkes is right, but still pulls a face to suggest he is being an old woman.

  Wilkes has a horseman’s hammer that looks to be of more use to a man in a saddle than the pollaxe that Thomas has strapped to the back of his saddle, along with the bow he still carries, and the sheath of arrows. Thomas loosens the blade of his sword in its sheath.

  ‘We’d best get out of sight,’ Wilkes says, and he spurs his horse up to the copse of poplars. Thomas and Flood follow. Flood is a very good horseman, or his horse is very good, and he leaps the stream from steep-sided bank to steep-sided bank while Thomas’s horse steps carefully down into its muddied depths. They ride up the slope and into the shade under the canopy of fresh green leaves, where there are already a fair number of men and horses waiting. One or two have long lances, but most have horseman’s picks, or flails. They study Thomas and Wilkes unsmilingly, but they greet Flood warmly, and detain him with questions about his harness and his choice of the lance. These men are excited and look as if they do this sort of thing every other day.

  ‘Have you ever been in such a situation before?’ Thomas asks Wilkes.

  ‘It is no different from hunting stag,’ Wilkes says.

  So they do do it more or less every other day, Thomas thinks.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Wilkes says. ‘Trust in God and your own right hand. Or something.’ He shoots his eyebrows. He has put his helmet on now but even with its cheek pieces pinching him from all sides, he has an extraordinarily expressive face.

  From here they can see Queen Margaret’s army. At its nearest point, it is about six hundred paces away, drawn up in what is, Thomas has come to see, the usual formation: in three clumped blocks gathered around numerous flags and banners to their fore, and if Katherine were here she would tell him to whom each flag and banner belonged, and therefore who they were.

  ‘That is Somerset on the left, Prince Edward’s – of Westminster – in the centre, and on the right, facing Lord Hastings’s men, Devon,’ Wilkes tells him.

  It is somehow typical of the man that he has good eyesight.

  They make their way around the back of the horsemen to the far side of the copse, on the west, where the moss is thick on the trunks and from where they can see the dark gleam of the water in the Severn, the river the Queen’s troops have been trying to get across, and another river to the north, that Wilkes tells him is the Avon. Neither is as wide as the Trent at Marton, but there is no way to get across them unless by bridge or ferry or perhaps by ford. Thomas cannot help but stare at the abbey, though. There is something about it that chimes with him.

  He supposes he must have seen it before, but when? Perhaps they came this way when he and Katherine and the other men whose names he has forgotten came to Wales? He thinks yes, that is it. By barge. Down the river. That one. The Avon, Wilkes has just called it. And he remembers the strangest thing: that he got lost. He was diverted around the meadow there because it was, in winter, too marshy to cross dry-shod, and so, seeking to come back to the town a different way, he’d followed a track that led him back towards the ice-rimed fishponds where he saw a boy kill a heron with a stone flung from his shepherd’s crook. How strange that this is the only thing he can remember from the whole episode. No! He came back to an inn when it was already dark, and they thought he had been murdered or something.

  Now when he looks over towards the abbey from this little hill instead of that scene of winter chill he can see Queen Margaret’s right battle, the one led by the false Duke of Somerset. It’s facing King Edward’s left battle, the one led by the Duke of Gloucester, and its flank is hard against that steep-banked little stream.

  ‘The enemy are in a good position,’ is Wilkes’s opinion. ‘There will be no flanking them this time, as at Barnet.’

  ‘You were there? I didn’t see you.’

  Wilkes shakes his head.

  ‘I was in Dorset. Keeping watch for the Queen’s fleet.’ He nods at the ranks of the Queen’s army. ‘I brought her the news of the victory at Barnet,’ he says. ‘Or the loss, as she saw it. I thought I was overdoing it. I told her that it had been a massacre, and that Montagu and Warwick had been killed, and she was so scared of losing her darling boy that she was on the very brink of stepping back into the ships for France, but by the time she looked up, the French fleet had sailed off. They hated Warwick, you see? They always believed what they wanted to believe about him, and they believed he was a bad commander, because, do you remember, she’d beaten him at St Albans that time? So they thought anyone could have beaten him at Barnet. They underestimated him, just as they underestimate King Edward, and so here they are.’ He shakes his head. He seems sad.

  ‘You think it will be easily won?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Oh no,’ Wilkes says.

  ‘But it can be won?’

  ‘Oh yes. Much depends on how Somerset and the young Prince communicate. Or who is commanding
alongside the boy. And how we – or they – deal with that rough ground. Look at those hedges. What do you think they hide?’

  Wilkes is studying the difficult terrain between the two armies, the few hundred paces of country that are fissured with hedges, a copse or two, and what looks like a sunken lane cutting across the lines. It is where Thomas got lost that time, but even though it was so long ago, he can imagine what it would be like if the two armies met in such a tight space as that lane.

  Their horses crop the long grasses, and are thankful for a moment’s rest. Flood lingers a few paces away with the others, and has set aside his lance in favour of a flail that he is comparing to another man’s hammer.

  There is a moment’s silence that Wilkes breaks as if he has something to say.

  ‘So,’ he says. ‘Quite a year?’

  Thomas looks at him. There’s something confiding about the tone of his voice that is at odds with this apparently banal opening.

  ‘Yes,’ Thomas supposes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘For you, I mean?’

  Wilkes is looking off into the distance, at the marshy meadow ground that lies between them and the two rivers. Thomas grunts. He doesn’t know what Wilkes means.

  Wilkes sucks his teeth.

  ‘That bit,’ he says, pointing. ‘The meadow there.’

  Thomas says nothing. It looks innocuous enough. It needs draining, but the meadow is low and probably floods every winter. Maybe it wouldn’t be worth trying to drain it. Maybe rushes would be—

  ‘I was in Lincoln,’ Wilkes says, having reverted to the previous subject. ‘After I saw you at Marton Hall. After Mistress Everingham’s waters broke.’

  Thomas can scarcely believe his ears. He is being taken back to Marton, back to the summer before Alice was born. Does he want to talk about this now? He can feel his face reddening.

  ‘I was going on to Lincoln, after that,’ Wilkes goes on. ‘D’you remember?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘And you remember why? Why I was going to Lincoln? I know Lord Hastings has taken you into his confidence, and has spoken to you about the ledger. I know that finding it was part of your – your task in taking over the manor of Senning in the north.’

  Thomas feels his head growing hot. The ledger! He has not thought of the ledger since – since – for months. Christ! The ledger. Here. Now. In a wood while he waits to gallop down a hill and attack men armed with bills and bows and God knows what else.

  ‘So what?’ he manages to ask. ‘What of it now?’

  ‘Well,’ Wilkes goes on, ‘I have likewise been looking for the same ledger for Lord Hastings. Perhaps he mentioned that?’

  Thomas knows enough not to say too much.

  ‘I know you do these sorts of things for him.’

  Just then there is a ripple of pops from beyond the brow of the hill. Wilkes stretches to peer over. There is nothing to be seen.

  ‘The Flemings are trying to goad Somerset into attack,’ he supposes.

  ‘Is there something – we should do?’

  ‘All in good time, I think, Master Everingham.’

  There is something so close about Wilkes’s attention that it is almost suffocating. It is as if this whole thing – this unfolding battle – is there just so that Wilkes can get him alone for a moment.

  ‘And I believed,’ Wilkes goes on, ‘when I was on my way to Lincoln, that I had found a connection – the connection – between Rouen, from where the ledger had been stolen, and this country. I believed I’d made a connection between a man who works for the King of France, and the man who had bought it off the man who stole it when the garrison was abandoned to the French in 1449.’

  ‘And did you?’ Thomas knows he must pretend.

  ‘Did I?’ Wilkes asks himself ‘Did I? Yes. I believe I did.’

  The popping continues, a ragged prickle like rain starting or finishing on hard earth. Wilkes’s horse snorts and tosses his head. It is not enjoying it. But Thomas knows that the Queen’s men, who have fewer guns themselves, will be enjoying it less.

  ‘Well,’ Thomas says, ‘that is good, isn’t it?’

  ‘In a way it was better than that. Because, you see, we found the ledger itself.’

  ‘The ledger itself? You found it? Praise Jesus!’

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ Wilkes agrees. ‘Astonishing. A miracle. And, as you say, praise Jesus. It was hidden under a larger book, a psalter if I remember, in a widow of the parish’s house.’

  ‘Ha!’ Thomas says. ‘In Lincoln? All that time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Thomas tries a laugh, but it’s too dry, and he knows that is not the end of it. Now there are louder booms coming from behind the trees. Culverins, he thinks, the wheeled field guns they’ve brought from Windsor. Wilkes’s horse continues its stamping. They can smell gun smoke, bitter as alum, drifting in the sky from the lines like fine dark dust.

  ‘Yes,’ Wilkes goes on, ‘and when I was actually holding it, the ledger, in my hand, I was – you can imagine, I was pleased. I had found what I’d been looking for, for so many years, and I’d stopped the Earl of Warwick finding it, too, so I sent word to Lord Hastings and then – then I walked around holding the thing in both hands, just looking at it. And I looked at all the other books too, and how well preserved they were, but this one – well, it had a great hole punched in it, as if someone had taken a pick to it, and every edge was curled and flared, and it was so grubby, and fingered, and I thought, well, it was a ledger in a garrison, not a psalter in a church, so surely it should be like that, and surely it would be scribbled over, and have things drawn in it by a bored scribe.

  ‘But even so, there seemed something odd about it. It was as if it was hot, while all the other books were cold. Alive, while they were dead. I know, I know it sounds strange, but that is how it felt. And I started thinking about it, and it was only after a while doing that, that – that I asked myself how came it to be that if it had been here, tucked away out of sight all these years, that I knew about it in the first place?’

  Thomas is silent for a moment. His mind is still.

  ‘How you knew about the book?’ he asks after a moment. ‘About the ledger?’

  ‘Yes,’ Wilkes says. ‘You see, I saw then I had made a mistake. In my search for it, I had begun from one end of the trail, from where it started, if you like, but the only reason I knew it existed is because of a man named Sir Ralph Grey, who briefly had the book with him when he had been governor of Bamburgh Castle back in ’64, and who tried to use it to buy his pardon for treason from the Earl of Warwick. So it occurred to me – while I was actually holding it, you understand? – it occurred to me that if he had it, and I am certain he did have it, then how did he come to have it in the first place, and why – or how – came it to be back there, where it came from, in Widow Daud’s collection of books?’

  Thomas does not know what to do. He can feel his mouth open and the spit drying. The ground seems to shrink under him. Christ. Christ. Christ. How could they have got it so wrong? Why did he not think of this?

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know.’ His voice is creaky, dust dry. It is the smoke from the guns, of course. Wilkes smiles a little smile and exhales through his nose.

  ‘No?’ he says. ‘No?’

  Christ, Thomas thinks. Just how much does Wilkes know?

  At that moment there is the sound of a horn from the Queen’s lines. It is the signal that King Edward’s Flems’ handguns, his culverins and his bowmen have done their job, and they’ve provoked one of the Queen’s commanders – Somerset probably – into attacking across that rough ground.

  And Thomas knows that that is what he must do. He must attack.

  ‘Tell me, Wilkes,’ he says. ‘You know that coffer? The one you found after the rout at Losecoat? The one containing those marvellous papers that proved the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence got the boy – that Great Captain of the Commons – what was his name?’

  ‘Robert Welles.’
<
br />   ‘Robert Welles. Him – to rebel. Did you really find any of those letters?’

  ‘I may have done.’ Wilkes smiles. Thomas sees he’s enjoying this.

  ‘You forced his hand, didn’t you? He was never – I saw him – he was never going to rise up against King Edward, was he? If it wasn’t for that friar, sending all those messages and raising the country—’

  And then it strikes him.

  ‘God in heaven! That was you! You were the friar!’

  Wilkes cannot help but grin. He is proud if it. Proud of his deception.

  ‘Christ,’ Thomas says. ‘You provoked the whole thing. You used Lord Welles’s attack on Burgh’s house as the bait to … Wait.’

  The internal mechanism of Thomas’s mind spins, locks, spins and locks again. Wilkes stares at him with a sort of light in his eyes, waiting for him to see what is plain.

  ‘Jesus,’ Thomas says. ‘You – It was you. You even got Lord Welles to attack Burgh’s house, didn’t you?’

  Wilkes smiles and says nothing, and suddenly Thomas does not like Wilkes. Doesn’t like that smile.

  ‘You – you used Mostyn, didn’t you? You – He was your man. He told you when to get Welles to attack. That day, when Burgh was away, you wanted to cause offence but nothing more.’

  And then his thoughts come to rest at the end of the chain of deduction.

  ‘And then you killed him, didn’t you? It wasn’t the bloody Jews. It was you. You killed Mostyn because he – what? He knew none of it was true? Or no! It was the keystone, wasn’t it? He knew the thing on which this scheme was founded wasn’t true.’

  And now, like a sword clicking into its oiled scabbard, he remembers where he first saw Wilkes.

  ‘You were up that bloody tree! It was you! Pruning those apple trees!’