Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (33 page)

Thomas manages to sit up. Owen presses more ale on him.

‘What happens now?’ Thomas asks.

‘We drink more ale!’

Owen pours it till it runs down his cheeks, leaving pink smears in his ash-smutted face.

‘The Earl of March’s gone down on his knee to the King, hasn’t he?’ Dafydd says. ‘But we all know who’s in charge now. There he is: the Earl of Warwick. Look at him.’

Thomas’s eyes ache as he inches his gaze across the clearing. A gap in the ranks has appeared and there is the Earl of March, huge in his steel plate, on one knee before the King, the whey-faced, boneless man whom Thomas saw the moment before he passed out. The King looks stricken, mortified. He doesn’t seem to know what to do, what to say to this bloodied giant kneeling before him. Thomas can almost smile. He wishes Katherine were there. It would make her laugh and mutter something. Behind the two but standing apart from a mob of other men in harness is the Earl of Warwick.

It does not look as if he has exerted himself in the battle. He is still smiling as he looks up and around the gathering, and then his smile broadens in welcome. He raises his gloved hand and a man on a grey horse slides across Thomas’s vision, blocking it for a moment, so that all he can see are the man’s cuisses, his greaves and his sabatons. And then the man gets down from the horse and the horse is led away and Thomas sees the man in full for the first time and he recognises him as being the visitor from the night before, who came to see the Earl of Warwick.

It is Ruthyn’s man, he who organised the arrangement, and Warwick is turning to him with that smile, crossing the clearing to greet him, and while every other man is now cheering at what is happening, and while Warwick’s and March’s and Fauconberg’s men are celebrating their famous victory at this field outside the town of Northampton, Thomas is gripped by a new spasm, and is spewing such ale as he has drunk in a hot stinging torrent for now he recognises the man.

Riven.

It is Giles Riven, his hands still clasped in the Earl of Warwick’s, and there in the background, holding that grey mare, is the giant, and his naked feet are the last thing Thomas sees as the pain swells in his limbs, and once again he passes into a void of echoing whiteness.

IT IS LATE
summer and the air is pungent with ripe fruit and turned earth. Slender stooks of oats are piled by the barn and an old man and his boy are guiding two oxen and a plough across their furlong of rain-blackened soil. Katherine, for want of anything else to do, is helping an old woman comb the brambles for blackberries and she has almost filled her basket when they hear the steady clop of hooves. A horseman coming from the village – a visitor with news of the outside world perhaps. When they see it is only Thomas, the old woman goes back to work.

‘You look the part,’ Katherine says when he pulls the horse up beside her. He is wearing a travelling cloak and a velvet hat, and he seems even taller and broader on the back of a horse; had she not known him she knows she would have cowered from him. Now he swings his leg over the saddle and drops easily to the ground, just as if he had been riding the horse all his life. His wound bothers him less now, two months after it was inflicted, but his face is still drawn, and there are smudges under his blue eyes. He takes off his hat and runs a hand through his reddish hair, and smiles.

‘Would you like a turn?’ he asks, offering her the reins.

Katherine shakes her head.

‘I can hardly stay on a pony,’ she says, ‘let alone that thing.’

They both step back to admire the horse. It is a fine animal, a palfrey. It once belonged to the Earl of Shrewsbury, and had been found tethered to the rear of the tents at Northampton, its groom dead or long since fled, and after a pause while lesser lords coveted it, the Earl of March had awarded it – and Shrewsbury’s dented armour – to the man who’d killed him: Thomas Everingham, an unknown archer from the county of Lincoln, of the retinue of Sir John Fakenham.

‘What are you doing out?’ he asks.

‘Fournier is coming to bleed Sir John today,’ she says.

Thomas laughs.

‘So you’ve been sent away?’

‘No,’ Katherine begins. ‘Well. Yes. Anyway he has written to say that he is coming, and that the bleeding is in accordance with the movement of the heavenly bodies, or some such, though it is more likely he’s run out of money for wine.’

‘How’s Sir John?’ Thomas asks.

She thinks about it for a moment.

‘Low,’ she says.

Thomas grunts. They turn to watch a flock of starlings behind the plough. A wood pigeon is calling in the trees.

‘And you?’ she asks.

He raises his arm above his head to show that all is well, but says nothing.

‘I wasn’t thinking of your wound,’ she says. ‘I was thinking about – about this.’

She gestures at the soggy fields, the clutch of rough houses under the church’s tower and behind them Marton Hall, Sir John Fakenham’s manor.

‘I don’t know,’ Thomas admits. ‘I am grateful for all Sir John has done for us, and for this life, but—’ He shrugs.

It has been hard for him, Katherine knows. She has heard him grinding his teeth in the night. This anguish has delayed his recovery, she thinks, and she is sure he would be healed already if only he did not believe that God had deserted him on the field of Northampton in favour of Giles Riven.

‘But you will get your chance again,’ she says. ‘I am certain of it. God wills it.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘There will be no more battles in England. The country is at peace now, or so Richard says. When the Duke of York comes from Ireland, he will take up his rightful position on the council, and that will be that.’

‘No? What of the Queen? What of her? And what of the sons of all those men killed at Northampton? What of all those who took to their heels that day? Surely they will not let this rest?’

‘No one even knows where the Queen is. And she’s a woman. She has no power. No say.’

She stares at him. Is he joking? Apparently not.

‘But she has a son, doesn’t she?’ she perseveres. ‘She must hope to see him on the throne one day?’

‘And she will,’ Thomas goes on as if it is she who is the fool. ‘When our present king Henry dies. Besides. You miss the point. Riven is on our side now. If Sir John goes to war again, so will he, and I shall be standing shoulder to shoulder with him.’

‘As if that matters,’ she counters. ‘You heard Richard’s story of the knight called William Lucy? Who hurried to the field outside Northampton too late to aid the King, only be struck down by one of the King’s men who had an interest in his wife?’

Thomas thinks back to the battle and wonders how many such incidents there were that day. He can recall pieces of it, distant fractured moments, fleetingly glimpsed. After the fighting was done they had helped dispose of the bodies, throwing some in the river to join those already drowned, dragging others to a pit dug by a farmer and his boys and burying them there. They returned those of the nobles – their weight lightened by thieving hands – to their heralds. A Mass was heard in the nearby abbey, for some show of sorrow was necessary when among the defeated dead were the victors’ cousins, uncles, brothers-in-law and nephews.

‘This is how it goes,’ Sir John had said. ‘War: cruel and sharp.’

They’d found Red John lying on his back. Rainwater was cupped in his eye sockets, his helmet tipped from his head and his russet hair washed back in waves. His alabaster skin was cold to the touch, his freckles somehow pale, and when they turned him over they found he was lying on one of the barbed traps used to cripple horses. They’d had to pull hard to remove it from his spine and in the end they couldn’t, so they buried him with the caltrop in place in a good deep hole of his own, quite near the abbey where King Henry and the Earls of Warwick and March were saying their prayers. It was not consecrated ground, but it would have to do. Thomas had watched from the back of a cart with tears in his eyes.

When they’d finished they set off back towards London with King Henry treated as he should be, riding at the front of the column, attended by Warwick and March, the Archbishop, the Legate, and even Henry, the archer from Kent, who smiled all the way home.

It was then, on the road south, camped by a crooked cross where two old roads met, that Warwick had decided in Riven’s favour. He had given him the right to Cornford Castle and all its lands, and the wardship of Lord Cornford’s daughter until she came of age. Sir John had argued that the girl was engaged to Richard, his own son, whom Warwick had nearly killed in a hunting accident, and that Cornford was his cousin, and that he was due the castle and its estates. But Warwick was blithe. In return for the castle, Riven was to give up Marton Hall, the house he had forcefully occupied the year before, and gift Sir John a sum of money in recompense.

‘It is because of Riven’s part in Ruthyn’s defection,’ Geoffrey said, ‘and the fact he has a hundred mounted archers to call his own.’

It had been a depressing lesson in the power of power.

The journey from there to Marton had taken four days and in all that time Sir John said not one word. He’d sat on the cushion on his trunk in the cart and stared at his feet, a hiss of drawn breath whenever they hit a pothole. Not even the sight of Richard recovering from his wound and able to ride a horse again cheered him that much, and when they stopped in front of Marton Hall all he could do was look at it with tears in his eyes. It was not the sort of homecoming any of them had imagined.

In his absence the hall had been sorely treated. The windows were gone. A wall was broken down so that the joists of the upper floor splayed in mid-air like spread fingers and the roof sagged. Broken tiles lay scattered about the yard and a sheep’s carcass poisoned the well. The lead on the outhouse roof had been taken, and there was a pile of shit below the privy that must have been there six months or more.

‘Bastard,’ was all Sir John had muttered when he saw the bed upstairs had also been stolen. ‘Bastard.’

In the weeks that followed Richard set about restoring the old house to a fit state, and now, two months later, a fire burns in the hall and Sir John can lie upstairs in a new-made bed, protected from the draughts by woollen blankets and the yards of blue damask that hang all around.

His archers from the Hundred have returned to their homes, rich men for a few months, while those with nowhere to go have stayed at Marton, helping in the fields when they are not helping repair the house. Thanks to the pardoner’s salve and Katherine’s attentions, Thomas’s arm has slowly healed, and while he is still not able to draw a bow, he has spent his time learning to ride his new horse.

Katherine has been warm and dry for as long as she can remember, and she cannot recall the last time she went without food for more than a day. Marton Hall has become home to her, and the habits of the priory, ingrained like dirt into her skin, have slowly come loose.

But now Thomas is restive.

‘If it is not God’s intention that I find Riven,’ he tells her, ‘then I should go back to the Prior of All. I should rejoin the order. I made my vows.’

He is confused, wretched even.

‘I can’t live like this,’ he says. ‘Look.’ He shows her his hands. There are small wounds in the palms where his nails have dug in. ‘I do it at night,’ he says. ‘I can’t help myself.’

They walk on. She understands Thomas and the way he feels about this: if God wishes him to be His instrument of vengeance, then it will come to pass, and he will find Riven and kill him, but if He does not, then it will not come to pass; and with every flitting day, while Thomas stays in Marton and there is no chance of coming across Riven in battle, this last scenario seems the most likely.

She wants to tell Thomas that if he wants to find Riven, all he need do is seek him out, that it need not be by chance, that it need not be on the field of battle. He, Thomas, must act for himself, not wait on God’s whim.

She opens her mouth to tell him this, but caution keeps her quiet. She is learning lessons, she thinks, however frustrating they might be. Instead she says:

‘Look around you, Thomas. Look at this place. Take strength from it. Your chance will come again, I know it.’

They are near the village now, down by the piggery, and she finds a stick and leans over the fence to scratch a pig between its russet shoulders.

‘And what about you?’ he asks. ‘We are a day’s ride from the priory.’

She is silent for a moment, watching the pig’s pleasure. Thomas means for her to return not to rejoin the order, but to discover who left her there as an oblate. She has been worrying over this ever since that day in the dunes below Sangatte when he told her someone must have been paying her way.

‘But how can I do it?’ she asks. ‘I cannot go as I am, for no boy would be permitted into the cloister, and if I were to go as myself, well, you cannot have forgotten I am wanted as a murderer.’

She has dreamed about her arrival at the priory with a particular intensity in the last months. In them she’s seen the letters on the paper, felt its texture under her fingertips. There is the hint of a seal at the bottom of the page. She can hear the dull clack of coins in the oiled leather pouch, and can feel her wrist aching from its heft.

‘Perhaps you might return as a woman?’ Thomas asks. ‘Not a sister, but a normal sort of woman, such as Liz?’

Liz is Geoffrey’s daughter. She is Katherine’s own age perhaps and helps her mother and father around the hall where she is the subject of much speculation among the remaining archers. Katherine has found herself watching Liz closely, studying the way she moves, her ease in society, her clothes. Liz has caught her gaze more than once, and each time Katherine has looked away as she’s felt the heat in her cheeks. Liz has smiled knowingly. She tries to imagine herself as Liz, but cannot, though the thought remains vibrating in her mind like a strummed thread.

Now she shakes her head and they leave the pig to its own rooting.