Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (16 page)

As they near the shore Katherine smells the tang of coal smoke and human excrement. The archers are crowded at the ship’s rail peering over the waters towards the coast where a wavering smoke stack rises above a town.

‘Calais,’ Walter spits. ‘The last piece of France we have to call ours.’

‘Looks like a bit of a shithole,’ Dafydd says.

‘You could say that,’ Walter agrees, ‘but it’s our shithole. Or at least, it’s the Earl of Warwick’s.’

This gets a laugh. The remaining sailors start to reduce sail. They can hear the waves on the shore and the ship begins to slow.

‘That’s Fort Risban.’ Walter points, nodding across the water at a castle looming on the end of a long low spit that curves around the port. It is a squalid building, salt-stained where it is not caked in gull shit, and from its lower walls protrude three squat black barrels. There are soldiers on the castle battlements and behind them a fire is sending up smoke, as if the wood they are burning is green.

Lysson gives an order the sailors have been waiting on. A rope is thrown out to a smaller boat with oars, and the carrack is towed along a green-watered reach between Fort Risban on one side and Calais Castle on the other.

Beyond the castles the town sits behind its limestone walls, a jumble of church steeples and the gabled roofs. Along the quay is a broad skirt of lean-to shacks and fish-hangers where women and children are gutting fish and mending nets while men hurry past pushing carts laden with bales, bundles, caskets and barrels.

The
Mary
is brought into the murky waters of the crowded harbour beyond, finishing her voyage by grating against the weed-slimed timbers of the quay. While the sailors tie her up, the gangplank is run out and dropped with a bang. Sir John Fakenham emerges from the cabin. He looks grey, more ill now than he had when he boarded the ship, and he hangs from Geoffrey’s thick arm.

‘Let us thank St Nicholas for a safe voyage,’ he says, and then he catches sight of Thomas and Katherine and stops. ‘Though I know that not all would see it in that way,’ he admits.

Simon and Red John are lugging Sir John’s chest out on deck and Richard emerges from the cabin behind his father. He turns to Thomas and Katherine.

‘What about this?’ he asks. He holds up the pardoner’s pack, the one he had valued so highly. It is stained now, but it has been carefully tied so that its contents look to have survived the journey. She sees Thomas about to speak.

‘It is his,’ she interrupts, nodding at Thomas. Thomas glances at her, then nods and stretches his hand to take it. Richard hardly cares one way or the other, and tosses Thomas the pack. Thomas slings it over his back, and together they step up on to the gangplank. She follows him across, trying to imagine what the pack might hold that the pardoner valued above all his other possessions.

THOMAS SITS NEXT
to Katherine on a millstone on the quayside. She is staring at the grit beneath her boot soles.

‘Did you ever think you’d come to France?’ he asks.

He stamps on the ground, as if to make sure it is real. This is the land where his father died, but it is also the land apart, where Englishmen come to make their names and their fortunes. Despite himself, he feels a slight thrill, as if the earth is communicating something to him. Katherine is less excited.

‘I did not ever think I’d leave the priory,’ she says.

He is quiet after that and together they watch Geoffrey haggling with a traventer over the cost of hiring an ox and cart to take the company to find lodgings in the Pale.

‘You’ll find no room in the town,’ the traventer says. ‘Every man in England who owes his living to the Earl of Warwick is here. More attainted traitors than you’d dare shake a fist at.’

He is an old soldier with a worm of pink scar tissue crawling across his nose. His mate, who holds the ox’s ring, is drunk and grins distantly while the archers pile their equipment into the cart. It takes five minutes. Thomas carries an iron cauldron that leaves his hands covered in black grease while Katherine has a leather bucket crammed with wooden spoons, plates and mugs, and a set of leather bellows. There is a grindstone and a massive roll of canvas that the Welsh brothers carry between them as if it is a dead body. There are tent poles, a lance, another bucket of broken arrows, a pile of grubby sheepskins imperfectly cured and there are more boxes and bales and lengths of canvas and some spare bows and some bags of arrows, a number of bills with rusted heads, three dented breastplates, a kettle helmet, a roll of rondel daggers and a falchion, as well as a collection of lead mauls kept in a broken barrel. Lastly the archers throw their own bags up.

‘Right, boys,’ Geoffrey calls, ‘that’s the lot.’

The carter lashes the ox and they pull off across the wharves towards Calais’s Seaward Gate. Thomas and Katherine walk shoulder to shoulder behind it, hanging back from the other men; the pardoner’s pack is heavy on his back. They cross the drawbridge and go through the fortified towers in a crush with the porters hurrying under the spikes of the portcullis. The Stand Watch are there in quilted, buff-coloured jacks, each man with a cross of St George on his chest, a polished sallet on his head and a bill in his hand.

‘Ordinaries,’ Walter states, gesturing at the soldiers as they crowd under the gates. ‘Posted to the garrison here. Can’t do a day’s work on the land and shoot an arrow afterwards like us.’

‘Walter,’ Geoffrey cautions.

‘I’m just saying,’ Walter replies, spreading his hands, all false innocence. ‘And anyway, even if they can do all that, they can’t be expected to remember on which side they’re meant to be fighting.’

His voice rises as he speaks. A heavyset soldier’s hand goes to his sword. Two more shift their bills.

The Watch Captain appears.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘All right. Calm down. Let’s move it along there.’

Walter smirks.

‘Say anything like that again though,’ the officer says as he passes, ‘and I’ll prick you myself, you little shit.’

Walter laughs. They follow the cart out along a narrow street towards the marketplace, its wheels grinding on the cobbles. All around them are wool-houses, great blank-sided stone buildings where the merchants store their sarplers.

‘What was all that about?’ Thomas asks Geoffrey. Geoffrey glances at him with a mixture of irritation and surprise.

‘Don’t you two know anything?’ he asks.

Thomas shakes his head.

‘It was their mates who swapped sides at Ludford Bridge last year,’ Geoffrey says. ‘Went over to the Queen. The King, I should say. Their captain was the Master Porter of this place, bloke called Trollope. Andrew Trollope, a northerner. Meant to be a good friend to the Earl of Warwick, only when it came to it, he wasn’t.’

‘So what happened?’ Thomas asks. ‘Were you there?’

‘Me and Walter were. We were with Lord Cornford’s men, in the Duke of York’s battle. We had the men of Calais with us, and the Earl of Warwick in command, and though the King had three times the numbers, we were in a good spot, with a fortified wall and even some bombards and guns. And no one thought much of the King’s troops. They were northerners, see? Rather steal a candlestick from a nun than go toe to toe with a man.

‘So on the night before the battles were supposed to meet, we said our prayers and slept in the field where we were. Next morning, even before Mass, it was clear everyone’d left. Turned out that the Calais men had gone over to the King in the night. And so, seeing as he knew our disposition, and how the enemy now had four times as many men as us, the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick gave up hope, and to spare the bloodshed of the commons, or so they said, they fought with their heels.’

The traventers lead them into the marketplace, where the gabled houses seem to take a step back from the cobbled streets and there is glass in every window. Above them the towers of St Mary’s and St Nicholas’s rub shoulders with the Staple Inn, the stone-built hall where the Captain of Calais conducts his business. Even here Thomas can smell rotting meat.

‘God’s blood!’ Katherine mutters next to him. ‘Another one.’

She has her hand over her mouth and turns her head from the sight, but Thomas cannot help himself. Four mottled quarters of meat hang on grimy ropes from a stone cross: a man’s arm and his legs, covered in fat black flies, and the rack of his ribs where the executioner’s axe has passed.

‘Wonder where his head is?’ Dafydd asks.

They walk on, leaving the market square for a street full of taverns and cookshops, bath houses and a cock pit.

‘What I wouldn’t give for a drink,’ Walter mutters.

A woman without a headdress watches them pass from the door of an inn. Then another, from a window above, who stares down at them in a manner Thomas knows to be brazen. Walter licks his lips.

‘A harlot,’ he says, addressing Katherine, who has been pretending not to see them. ‘Better not let Sir John find you with one of them though, Girly, or you’ll lose a month’s pay.’

‘And the wench’ll have her arm broken for her troubles,’ Geoffrey adds.

Katherine moves closer to Thomas. He finds he likes it when she does that, but her proximity confuses him, muddles his mind, makes him uncertain what to do with his hands. He glances down at her. She is not looking his way. They walk on, she in his shadow.

The alleyways between the houses are dark and noisome, little better than blocked sewers. Some are choked waist-high with every kind of refuse and worse, leaving only narrow slips at the centre for men and animals to pass. Here there are stables and sties, tanneries and pelterers’ workshops, each adding their signatures to the stink and noise of the streets.

‘Gah,’ Geoffrey exclaims as they pass a dyer’s yard where a great vat of urine and dog shit simmers. ‘Right strong, isn’t it?’

Worst are the shambles, where butchers bleed their animals and leave offal to rot in the streets. Here is a pile of rotting cows’ hooves.

Another Watch guards the fortified Boulogne Gate, but this afternoon they are more interested in throwing stones at a man hanging in a basket suspended from the castle walls.

‘Get on with it!’ one of them shouts as he launches a half-brick over the moat.

‘Cut the rope, you dozy bastard,’ another bellows. ‘Then we can all go home.’

‘What’s he doing up there?’ Dafydd asks.

‘Don’t you worry about him,’ the soldier laughs.

The moat’s waters are turbid with all kinds of rubbish, and rats compete with seabirds for scraps. Two soldiers are stationed in a boat below the man in the basket though whether they are there to drown him when he falls or pull him out it is impossible to tell.

Beyond the gate sprawls a vast village of rain-damp canvas shelters in a broad sea of pale mud that stretches as far as the eye can see. The roads are raised on dykes over drainage ditches and the water in the canals reflects the dull skies above. It reminds Thomas of the marshes around the priory, and he feels a leaden depression settle on him.

‘Welcome to the parish of St Anne’s,’ Walter spits. ‘What we call the Scunnage.’

Wordlessly they follow the cart up an avenue between the tents. Some are grander than others, with standards hung from long lances thrust into the mud, and within them it is possible to see chunky sheepskin beds where the better class of captain sleep. From other tents bored men stare at them. They are not precisely friendly, not precisely hostile, and there is nowhere for anyone to sit.

Everywhere is crowded with rough-looking women and boys acting as porters, carrying jugs of ale and water, armfuls of pimps and faggots for the cooking fires. The boys are filthy and malnourished, and more than one is missing an ear. Beyond are more women, eyeing them with weary speculation. Walter waves to them, all false jocularity.

‘Whores,’ he mutters.

They move on.

‘I always hate this bit,’ Geoffrey mutters. ‘Looking for the best place to set up and everyone looking at you like you’ve got the pox.’

‘And you always end up exactly where everybody’s been shitting since a month back,’ Walter adds.

They move on through the camp until they come to its edges. Sure enough a shallow scoop has been gouged in the earth and the stench of human waste is almost unbearable. Chickens and geese and pigs are everywhere.

Then there is a priest on a grey donkey.

When he sees him, something in Thomas lurches. He has been so long at sea that he has almost forgotten his state as an apostate. Now it comes back to him. He ducks his head and hurries to the other side of the cart. Katherine is already there, her eyes wide with anxiety. Her hands still shake long after the priest has gone.

The sooner they see the Prior of All, he thinks, the happier she will be.

‘I think we’ll head around there,’ Geoffrey says and urges the carters off the road and across a sodden compression towards where the armourers and arrow-makers have set up their stalls. The acrid smoke from their fires does something to mask the smell of the camp, but the din of their hammers is insistent.

‘You’ll soon get used to that right enough,’ Walter says, ‘and, anyway, they can’t work after sunset.’

There are long hovels where the horses, oxen and asses are kept and there are more boys in cast-off clothes bringing hay from the barns. There are pens for geese and sheep and sties for pigs and efforts have been made to make a road using willow hurdles laid across the mud. Some boys are piling up slender logs for the fires and thick-armed women are trying to wash clothes in water that has never been clean. Every now and then a Watch rides past, back from one of the other castles in the Pale, their horses’ hocks yellow with mud.

‘Not much of a place,’ the other Thomas points out, shaking his head so that the line of water drips scatters from the fringe of his cap. He is a quietly spoken boy, about Thomas’s age.

‘It’ll be better when we’ve had something to eat,’ Geoffrey asserts. The rest of the men begin unloading the wagon while the carters look on and Geoffrey shows them how to set the battens and canvas and tie the loops off to keep the tents upright. They use broken arrows as tent pegs, hammering them into the mud with mauls that might properly have been used to stave in a man’s skull.