Kingmaker: Broken Faith (19 page)

Now Robert nods approvingly.

‘So I am not going to prove myself the saint. I am not going to endure. I am going to get up. I am going to rise up, and crush his serpent’s head under my heel, do you hear? I will crush every member of his family, so that the name Riven is extinguished throughout all eternity. Do you hear?’

THOMAS DOES NOT
know what is wrong with him. He does not know what has happened. He sometimes looks at her and he feels the blood rise to his cheeks, his chest tighten and, worse, most shaming, he gets erections to fill his codpiece and force him to sit for a while. They come all the time, triggered by anything: the sound of her voice, a glimpse of her skin, her smell, her smile. It is worst at night, of course, when she sleeps next to him by the ticking dome of the fire cover, and the sound of her breathing can be drowned out by the noise of his heart beating in his ears.

He cannot recall if it was always like this, if he felt these things before he went away. He thinks not. He thinks back to the moment he saw her in the stable that night and he remembers his feeling for her was – what? Whatever it was, it was not this. It did not involve his loins. It involved his heart.

And now this. If she touches him, however slightly, however accidentally, her heel slipping from one mattress to cross to touch his shin, say, he experiences a jolt through his body that will keep him awake for hours. He cannot help but sigh then, and, turning on his mattress and sighing again and again, he will not rest until she is finally woken, and she will sometimes ask him what’s wrong, and he will tell her that nothing’s wrong, and sometimes she will murmur something and extend what she supposes is a comforting hand and place it on his shoulder, say, and he will lie with his breath stilled and his heart booming in the darkness, willing her to move her hand and place it elsewhere on his body. Eventually his stirrings will disturb her so much and she will remove her hand and then in an ecstasy of frustration, he will get up and go out into the yard, ignoring the yapping of Isabella’s terrier in the room upstairs, ignoring the dark, and he will stand as still as he can and let the night’s cold seep into his bones and he will try to reconstruct exactly what the Prior used to say when he lectured the novices about the fruitless spilling of seed.

But by Christ, it is difficult.

He wonders if it would be easier if Katherine were known to be a woman? Would he simply do as he supposes other men do, and ask her to come and lie with him in the woods? He thinks about his brother and his Elizabeth, since that is the only example of courtship he has known unfold. How did his brother get her to marry him? He asked her, he supposes, or perhaps their parents asked hers, before their fathers went off to France, and then, when they were man and wife – well, those two boys, Adam and William, they had to come from somewhere, didn’t they?

He cannot ask Katherine to marry him. And by Christ! Even if he could, even if it could be known that she was not Kit but Katherine, and even if she would ever want to marry him in return, she would have to say no, because she was already married. To Richard Fakenham.

He sometimes groans so loudly, standing there under the eaves of the hall, that the dog wakes again and takes up his yapping and in the morning Sir John is bad-tempered and worries about intruders in the night and he suggests posting a nightwatchman and getting in geese, even though he hates them, though they do taste good, and the fat is useful for salves and what-have-you, but do they really need one?

He and Katherine have been at Marton Hall for three months and now it is the week after the Assumption, in the middle of August. In that time they have been fed and reclothed, and they have helped harvest the pea crop, wash and shear the sheep, even start on a new, larger sty for the greater number of pigs that have been bred. Katherine has had to tell the story of her missing months three or four times, each version closely questioned by Isabella, who has also inspected Thomas’s own wound as if she does not believe it to be real.

Sir John has been preoccupied. He has sent messages to Richard in London and he has received some back, written by Mayhew, and each time he receives one he reads it aloud and it puts him in such a foul temper that Isabella must spirit him away upstairs and he will only emerge the next day, or the one after that.

‘It is because there is nothing he can do,’ Katherine says. ‘He feels impotent.’

And Thomas strangles a laugh.

When they have not been earning their keep on the farm, he has been practising with a bow, trying to build up those lost muscles, rediscover that technique, but he is also trying to tire himself out.

‘Have to get you a proper bow,’ Sir John says. ‘You can let Robert have that one.’

Then we will have a company of two, Thomas thinks. Since the night he proclaimed his desire to kill Edmund Riven, Sir John has apparently heeded Isabella’s caution against action, but the old man is impatient for news, and every day he is out there, glumly pacing the boundary, ready to intercept any message that comes from his son Richard in London. What piece of information is he waiting for? Thomas wonders. He cannot decide whether Isabella is being cautious because she doesn’t want Sir John to stick his staff in a wasps’ nest, or whether she is more sophisticated than that, as Katherine suggests, and knows there is more than one way to skin a cat.

And in the meantime he and Katherine have made journeys through the country around Marton Hall, looking for Stephen, the eel catcher.

‘Why are you so keen to track him down?’ Thomas asks, and as the words come out of his mouth he thinks they sound churlish, and he worries that she will think him jealous, and then he thinks how foolish that is because she does not know how he feels about her, so why would she possibly think him jealous? She might just as well think him hungry, or tired.

‘It is not Stephen,’ she tells him. ‘Or perhaps it is, a little, since he was a good worker, but it is the baby, really.’

He tries to imagine what it must have been like, cutting open the woman’s belly and plucking out the child. He cannot. Or not accurately. And he is relieved.

They try other villages, in case any there have heard of Stephen, and discover nothing, and then they try further afield, and on these trips Thomas’s mind is at its most active, as if the sights he sees set his mind refilling with memories of his childhood and of his brother, and his father going off to France. He recalls his first days at the priory; a year when the waters were so high the crypt flooded to the brim and the coffins rose and tapped against the floor of the nave above. He recalls his early lessons in dull lettering and subsequent discovery of his gift for embellishing the plain page with painted images of animals, plants and even insects. He remembers taking up the feather and he looks at his hands sometimes, half-expecting to see them inkor paint-stained and is sometimes mystified to find them so broad, calloused and thick with muscle. He buys some paper from a man in Gainsborough and some thin oak-gall ink from a couple of boys who’d made it themselves and weren’t very good at it yet, and he cuts himself a simple feather brush, and he begins the faint design of a snail with a striking shell. He tries to hide it when Katherine sees it, he does not know why, but when she does, she smiles at him and he feels the familiar lurch.

It is on their way back from one of their ventures north that they walk through a hamlet Thomas thinks perhaps is familiar.

‘This is where Little John Willingham lived,’ she tells him. ‘He is the only one of Sir John’s company that I do not know for certain to be dead.’

And sure enough, there he is, Little John Willingham, outside his family’s cot, clutching a bill, back from laying a hedge perhaps, arguing with an old lady who can only be his mother, and when he sees Thomas and Katherine, he flinches and crosses himself as if they might be ghosts, but then when he has accepted that they are mortals, and still alive, and when he has greeted them with a shout of laughter, there is something odd about him. He is thin-faced and pale, with purple-shaded half-circles cupping his eyes. He is twitchy and restless but when they tell him they are looking for a fellow called Stephen, he is grateful, relieved.

‘I thought it was because of what’d happened up north,’ Little John admits. ‘When you came along the road and I saw you, I thought, here we go, they’ve heard, and they’ve come for me.’

Neither Katherine nor Thomas knows what he means.

‘Perhaps that is just as well,’ he says, but she can see he wants to tell them, to confess something.

‘What? What is just as well?’

‘It is just that I was – I was at Towton Field,’ he mutters.

‘You were? But with who? Whose company?’

There is a long pause. Little John looks left and right, up and down, but there is no escape. He is skewered.

‘Giles Riven,’ he admits.

Now neither Thomas nor Katherine knows what to say.

‘It was – it was after. Well, I thought Sir John was dead. I thought you were all dead. It is what I’d heard. What they told me. They said he was dead and so was everyone else.’

‘So you thought you’d join them?’ Katherine asks.

‘It wasn’t like that. I – it was because I’d been with Sir John in the summer, hadn’t I? The wheat here was all rotted – it wasn’t brought in properly. The barley was damp, the hay was damp. The ox died too. Everything was fucked.’

He jerks his thumb over his shoulder at his mother, smaller than him, with a bent back, in ragged skirts and bare feet.

‘So Giles Riven needed more men,’ Little John is saying, ‘and was offering sixpence a day for archers who’d wear his livery. He needed to replace some who’d been killed. I thought at Wakefield, but it was all over the place, it turned out, and some of them by Sir John. Anyway. He needed more if he was to meet his obligation to the Duke of Somerset, who was his lord. You know how it is. So I went along. I could hardly say no. I’d no money, no food, and ten or fifteen men with swords and sallets, standing where the mint grows.’

He nods to the front of the cot.

‘I had to go,’ he assures himself. ‘They’d have killed me if not.’

Katherine and Thomas both nod.

‘What was it like?’ Thomas asks.

‘It was – well, we went north from here, over to Doncaster, you know, then south. It was mad. All sorts of us, not all there for the fighting. Scotsmen, some of them. The sort to steal what they could and murder them who’d lost it. Riven’s company were better than most. Englishmen, in the main, though they had that Irish giant who was no better than an animal. A dog. Slept where he fell, took food from other men’s bowls. Least I think he was Irish. He said nothing ever, and – he carried your pollaxe, Thomas. That was why I thought you were dead. Knew you’d never give that up if you weren’t.’

Thomas knows nothing of any pollaxe.

‘Anyway. Riven didn’t want any of us going off with what we’d found or stolen, and he didn’t want anyone to get themselves killed over a pig or what-have-you, so that he’d have to come to the Duke short-handed, so he kept us tight. Kept us in food. Firewood. Women, even. Well, one.’

He winces with remorse, remembering her.

‘And so we went down towards London all together, but the Earl of Warwick, you remember him? He came out and lined his men up against us. Outside a place called St Albans, just a bit away from London. Well, it was madness. No one knew what was going on. We thought the bastard was luring us into a trap, and that he had some secret force hidden away in a wood like, and that he was a genius, but it wasn’t that. It was – he was – he was just looking the wrong way, wasn’t he? And all his archers were in one place, the wrong place as it turned out, and all his men at arms were in another, likewise wrong. Anyway. Anyway. Each time I loosed an arrow I said to myself, that’s for Kit’s ear, you bastards.’

He smiles uncertainly, and he wants to please, but it grates a bit, Thomas thinks.

‘And after that – well. We sent them packing. Bloody hell. It was – odd. They ran. Thousands of ’em, and they left the King – King Henry I should say – just sitting there, under a tree. So we all thought, well, that’s that then. We can go to London and have a fine old time. Only of course they wouldn’t open the gates, would they? So we hung around for a while, but we were running out of food, and all the Scots had pissed off with what they’d manage to thieve, so we came back. Up here. We had to move pretty quick because there was nothing left to eat by now and the land we were going through was the same as what we’d come through, so it was – you know.’

He gestures to show it was hopeless. Katherine nods. Little John’s dark eyes are more evasive than ever now and he swallows hard and rubs his bristled jaw and looks around as if for something to drink.

‘And then that day outside Towton,’ he says.

‘We were there,’ Katherine says. ‘Though Thomas can recall nothing of it.’

‘Oh,’ Little John says. ‘Why is that?’

Thomas removes his cap and indicates the white fob of hair at his temple.

‘I was knocked out of my wits,’ he tells Little John.

‘And you remember nothing of it? By Christ, Thomas, you are a lucky man. What I would give to forget that day. By all the saints and martyrs, yes. I would give anything.’

There is a long pause. Little John looks harrowed.

‘How did you live through it?’ Katherine asks.

He shrugs.

‘God knows,’ he says, and he seems to want to leave it at that, but Katherine presses. Little John relents.

‘We were in the front,’ he says, ‘lined up and ready, forty-eight arrows apiece, in formation, ready to do our worst, only then the wind changed, didn’t it? And your volleys hit us first, carried by the wind, and before I’d loosed one shaft, I got hit, on the sallet.’

He bangs his fingertips on his cap.

‘It knocked me right over. Not like you, Thomas, not so that I forgot everything, but I was flat on my back in the snow, blood streaming down my face and then the next moment some great big bastard fell on me with an arrow in his face. He’d been standing in front, and the arrow turned him right around, span him, bang, just like that.’