Kingmaker: Broken Faith (2 page)

She had not thought it would be like this. Nor had Richard.

They had come up from London with some of William Hastings’s men, ten of them, keeping guard over them and a wagon loaded with wedding gifts which they’d received, mostly from the newly ennobled Lord Hastings: two feather pillows, a bolster, a standing coffer, two small chests of oak, a hundred carpet hooks, three pounds of wire, and a hemp sack of shoe nails. There had been two gowns of Kendal green, one of damask, a bolt of russet and a pair of stockings. For Richard there was a velvet jacket and a doublet, a horse’s harness and a short-bladed sword. Not much, Hastings had admitted, but what else do you give a blind man?

They had come along the same road they had travelled with Sir John and the others the summer of the year before, and to console themselves for their losses and for the absence of men they loved, they had tried to imagine what they would find when they got to Cornford: something sound and well-founded, with slate roofs, stout walls and three glazed windows in the solar. They’d pictured a reeve out collecting dues. They’d imagined beehives, orchards full of geese and chickens, fat pigeons in the dovecotes, a watermill chuntering away, a saw pit perhaps, and a priest at the door of his church. There would be breweries, a baker, a smithy and an inn. There would be men to keep the oxen straight and to shear the sheep. There would be boys to fetch in wood from the forest and girls to mind the goats. There would be women in woollen dresses with babies on their hips and barrels of ale fermenting in the cellar’s cool.

But it was not like that. Instead there were only widows and orphans. The mill wheel was broken, the priest unpaid and gone, and such crops as had been planted before the men had left for the north now lay rotting in the sodden fields. Katherine had thought at the time that perhaps Richard was lucky not to be able to see it.

And now, a year later, here she is, standing in the kitchen with the body of a cat in her hand and a mere twine of smoke from the twigs that make up the fire in the hearth. She looks down at the little body and thinks of asking to see its head, to see its fur and feet, but she has too often demeaned herself with Eelby in the past, sinking to his level and later finding herself begging him to accept her apology so that there is food on the table for Richard to eat. She has promised herself she will not do it again and so she won’t now, and besides, what is so bad about eating a cat?

She places the body back on the table and leaves Eelby and his wife there, closing the door behind her. Outside it is cold, the first hint of the winter to come perhaps, and her ear begins to throb as she hurries across to the keep and ascends the stairs to the solar where Richard is sitting just as she left him, on a bench by the piled ashes of a cooling fire. He seldom leaves this spot. He is too anxious to venture out these days, too scared of the unfamiliar, but in place of his absent sight, his other senses have sharpened.

‘Is he trying some fresh fraud?’ he asks.

‘How did you guess?’

‘Your gait. You walk as if you are angry.’

She laughs quietly and crosses the threshes to touch his shoulder. He turns his face to her, smiles blankly, puts out a hand.

‘Margaret,’ he says.

Katherine knows she must take his hand. She does so, looking down on her husband. She wants to change his dressing; the linen is grubby and there are sooty finger marks where he has adjusted it after fiddling with the fire. He pulls her to him, puts his arm around her waist. It is always like this. He cannot just – be. He has to clutch at her, paw at her. Even now his palm drifts from her waist to her hip and she cannot help but stiffen, and he feels it, and his already absent smile slips and he lets his hand drop. He is like a whipped dog.

He has declined sharply over the past year, lost the muscle he’d acquired from all that fighting practice he used to do, all that riding with the hounds and going out with the hawks. It turned to fat in those first few months, but now the fat is gone too, and his skin hangs from his bones. There is no one to shave him, no one to comb his hair, so Katherine has learned how.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ she asks.

He sighs.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Take me somewhere high from where I may slip and fall to my death.’

‘Come on,’ she says. She takes his arms and he needs hauling to his feet.

She indulges him and leads him out of the solar and stumbling up the circling stone steps to the top of the tower. On the way up there is an unglazed window through which she can see the castle’s one remaining touch of ornament: a gargoyle in the shape of a lion’s face, dripping water into the courtyard below. Everything else of value is gone, stripped and sold, and she supposes that the gargoyle remains only because it is too difficult to reach. It is not clear whether it was Riven’s men who carried everything else away before they left for the north, or if it is Eelby and his wife who have been slowly stripping the place and selling it bit by bit.

When they emerge on to the walkway at the top of the tower she guides Richard across the treacherous flagstones to stand facing into the brisk east wind in which she imagines she can taste salt from the sea that lies just beyond the horizon. It is cold enough to bring tears to her eyes, but not his. He stands and grips the edge of the stone merlon and rocks himself backward and forward, backward and forward. He is like a simpleton in his misery.

She looks away and watches the land beyond the castle, seeing all the things that require attention: the silted moats and flooded furlongs, the sagging fences, the fruit trees in need of pruning, the hazels in need of coppicing, the willows in need of pollarding. Nearby, across the first bridge, the roofs of the cattle shed and the hayloft are sunk in and green, and beyond them the wheel of the mill remains jammed while water flares through the broken dyke below. There are a few houses by the causeway, some of them occupied, their roof lines softened by a haze of pale woodsmoke, but there are others there too, abandoned, and their rooflines are softened by their neighbours having pilfered their beams for firewood.

‘Soon be winter,’ Richard says.

She wonders what in God’s name they will do then.

‘How does it look?’ he asks.

‘Sad,’ she says.

He tries to encourage her.

‘We’ve no men to work the place,’ he says. ‘And Eelby – if I had eyes in my head I would kill him now.’

‘Then we’d have one fewer,’ she sighs, ‘and be in an even worse state.’

She remembers again his high hopes as they’d ridden here. Richard had asked her what they might find, since she was supposed to have passed her youth in the castle, but she told him she could remember almost nothing of it.

‘It is a castle,’ she’d said.

‘Yes, yes, but Windsor is a castle. The Tower is a castle. What is it like? My father said it was well set up, though cold, and there are two moats?’

‘There are moats,’ she’d agreed. ‘Yes. Yes. That is right. Moats.’

Although she’d thought, why have more than one?

‘And who will be there?’ he’d pressed. ‘The steward and the reeve, of course, but do you remember them? Or I suppose it is too long ago?’

She’d agreed again.

‘And anything might have happened to the place,’ she’d cautioned. ‘Or to them.’

In truth she’d had no idea what sort of welcome to expect. For the first few days after their arrival she had looked in the village for anyone so old they might have been able to recall Margaret Cornford as a girl, but there was no one above ground to do so. The longer she remained, the more confident she became.

And so now she takes Richard’s arm and leads him to face northward. They say nothing for a while. She watches the river, a snaking grey ribbon among the reeds. It is motionless and looks broken too.

‘Do you miss Marton Hall?’ she asks.

He cocks his ear, his way of glancing at her.

‘Marton Hall?’ he says. ‘No. Or not exactly. I miss – I miss the people. I miss my father, of course. And Geoffrey Popham, the steward, and his wife. They were – well. There was Thomas, of course. You met him. And the others. Do you remember Walter? He was a brute, wasn’t he? But by great God above, he was – anyway … and Kit, of course. I think about him sometimes. I don’t remember where he came from. I think we found him on a ship, can you believe it? But do you know he cured my father’s fistula? He was no more than a boy, but he cut him, like a surgeon, and we all stood by and we knew it was the right thing to do. By all the saints, when I think of it now. That summer. Everything rang with life.’

She thinks back to Marton Hall and remembers the long summer she spent there pretending to be a boy, answering to the name of Kit. No one – not Richard, not Sir John, nor any of the others – had suspected she was anyone other than who she claimed to be, as why should they? And so later, when she needed to, she was able to return in another borrowed guise, that of Lady Margaret Cornford. The summer is a happy memory, dominated in the main by Thomas, of course, but it is inevitably spoiled by the thought of the winter that followed. Since then she has learned not to sniff when the tears come, and so she can weep silently.

‘But,’ Richard continues quickly, just as if he knows, ‘they’re all gone now. And anyway, why have a hall when you can have a castle?’

He is half in jest. He gestures, little knowing he is opening his arms to a vista of burdensome and ruined countryside, peopled by worrying responsibilities and petty shames. She twists the ring on her forefinger and together they pace along the tower’s walkway to where she stops and forces herself to stare westwards, across the fens to the huddle of grey stone buildings scarcely visible in the distance.

It is the Priory of St Mary at Haverhurst. In the year she has been in Cornford she has never been along the causeway that leads to its gates, never even left the castle in that direction. All she can manage is to make herself look at it at least once a day and every time she does so she still feels a hot flare of panic. Looking at it now, she can see there is almost nothing to the place – a church, a few low buildings encircled by that wall – and it seems absurd that for the larger part of her life it encompassed her entire world. She wonders what they are doing there now, and knows instinctively it is the hour of None and the sisters will be gathering in observance.

She is relieved when there is a flurry of barking from below and she can look away. Eelby’s wife is down there, feeding the dogs God knows what. The head of the cat perhaps.

‘It is Eelby’s wife,’ she tells Richard. He grunts. Katherine wonders again how many days she can have left. She has asked Eelby about her lying in, but Eelby laughed in her face and told her that women such as his wife did not lie in. He told her that it was not her concern anyway, and he told her that he had delivered cows of their calves and ewes of their lambs and that there was nothing very special about delivering a woman of her baby.

Katherine had then tried to talk to Eelby’s wife, to avoid the forestaller as it were, but the woman had been fearful and backed away, shaking her head as if she did not want to hear what was being said, and Katherine could not tell if it was the prospect of the birth that frightened her most, or the prospect of her husband. Katherine asked if there was a woman in the village who attended births.

‘There was,’ Eelby’s wife said, ‘but she is in the churchyard since St Agnes’s last year and her daughter alongside her, so now there is no one.’

From her vantage point at the top of the tower Katherine watches Eelby’s wife and wonders how she can work on like that. She must be due any day. She may even be overdue. She imagines her fear. What must it be like to know what is coming? She has seen men’s faces as they troop to battle, the grim set of their mouths, their distant gazes, their skin the colour of goose fat and trembling hands that can only be stilled by wine or ale. But what about women as they prepare for childbirth? Their chance of death is the greater, and terrible pain a certainty.

‘We must do something for Eelby’s wife,’ she tells Richard. ‘And soon.’

Richard grunts again.

‘Perhaps we should send for the infirmarian at the priory?’ she asks.

Even as she says the words she feels that familiar flutter in her chest; her breath comes a little faster and she feels unsteady.

But Richard is dismissive.

‘St Mary’s is a Gilbertine priory, remember?’ he tells her. ‘An enclosed order. The women are only supposed to see the outside world through an aperture that must be no thicker than a thumb, no taller than a finger. Did you know? It is supposed to be brassbound, too. To prevent the sisters enlarging it over time. So their infirmarian could not come out even if it were worth her while because, after all, what experience can she have in childbirth? Among those women who have not seen a man in – ever?’

Richard knows little of the sisters in the priory, she thinks, but he is not really thinking about them: he is thinking of himself and her, and once again the subject of their own lack of offspring is between them, dark and heavy. It is not as if she has not tried. They were married in the first month after King Edward’s coronation, when she had given Thomas Everingham up for dead, and since then they have lain together as man and wife on occasion. She does not care to recall those first encounters, but since then they have reached not so much an understanding as a way of doing things.

Yet still there is no child, and she feels there is none on the way either, and so she wonders if their way of doing things is the right way after all, or if such a union, forged in hidden sorrow, will ever be blessed.

Eelby’s wife has now fed the dogs and is retreating slowly towards the kitchen.

‘I could find some woman myself?’ Katherine suggests. ‘Have her here when the baby comes.’

‘Is there someone in the village?’ Richard asks.

‘No,’ she admits. ‘But at one of the other villages? Or I might go as far as Boston? I need to sell such russet as we have left. You could come with me?’

Richard nods but they both know he will not come.