Kingmaker: Broken Faith (8 page)

Then he wakes the other boy and he, too, gets his coat and as they are leaving, Thomas turns and sees that Adam is awake and watching. He raises his hand and Adam nods and then Thomas takes the two boys to the stable where they saddle their horses.

‘Where are we going?’ the younger of the two asks.

Thomas doesn’t reply.

‘Can we take our bows?’ the older boy asks. He gestures towards the pile of stuff Adam stripped from the dead men: their clothing, boots, various knives, swords, the seven bows, ten arrow bags, some pieces of armour and an unsteady tower of helmets.

Thomas shakes his head and the boys accept it. They are waiting to be killed, he thinks. They think I will kill them, and perhaps I should. But then he does not, and while they watch he takes a jack from the pile and holds it up only to discover that it is no ordinary jack. Within its usual flax and linen padding are strips of metal. He cannot help but smile: they might not turn an arrow or a point, but they’d stop a blade. He tries the jack on and finds it tight. Still, though. Next he wraps one of the men’s bows in oiled cloth and takes that, along with a bag of arrow shafts. Then he picks a sword – rejecting the first, choosing a second – which he unsheathes and taps on a rail in the stable to check its resonance. It is good. Then he takes a riding cloak, a cloth cap greasy with wear and the largest of the sallets, which he ties to the chosen saddle of his chosen horse.

‘That is my father’s horse,’ the younger boy says.

Thomas looks at him, then the horse. The older boy looks on. He must be a nephew or something, Thomas thinks.

‘Do you want it?’ he asks.

The boy nods. Thomas shrugs and picks another horse. The younger boy takes his father’s horse and saddle, and Thomas and the two boys lead their horses out of the stable. Thomas adjusts his stirrups and when they are ready, John appears, sleep-tousled and malodorous. He has a flask and a loaf of bread from yesterday. He hands it to Thomas.

‘You’ll come back one day?’ he asks.

Thomas nods. They embrace. Then when he is in his saddle his brother looks up.

‘Thomas,’ he says, ‘answer me this before you go. It’s been nagging away at us all. That name you kept calling. When you are having your dreams. What is it?’

Thomas looks down at him. He can feel his eyebrow cocked. He has no memories of any dreams.

‘A name?’

‘Aye. It sounded like that.’

Thomas looks down into his brother’s hopeful eyes. Then he shakes his head and he is about to say no, when something wells up within him, closing his throat, and he can only nod at his brother. His brother nods back, relieved to have got that clear, and then he says goodbye again, and Thomas turns his horse and he leads the two boys off along the path, heading east. Before he has gone very far, he finds that he is weeping so the tears drip from his chin.

THE CORONER’S CLERK
is bent-backed in his dark coat, a drop of clear liquid quivering on the tip of his long nose, and whenever he fetches ink from his pot he looks up at them over the top of his temporary desk, and Katherine, standing next to the Widow Beaufoy, shivers. It is not just the cold, though that is bad enough to make her ear ache, it is that she feels feared for, just as she used to feel in the chapter house at the priory, when she was made to stand and suffer the inspection of the other sisters while she waited for the Prioress to deliver the inevitable guilty verdict.

‘Get on with it,’ one of the jurymen shouts. ‘We’ll catch our deaths out here.’

He is right. It is the second day after the feast of St Agatha, virgin and martyr, and winter still has its hold. They should be up above in the hall of the Guild of the Blessed Virgin, where inquests might ordinarily take place, but the Guild members will not allow Eelby’s wife’s body to be taken up, and no one really blames them, for she has lain buried in the ground these past weeks, and the rot has taken hold despite the cold. Before the inquest there was talk of leaving her buried, but the coroner says the law is the law; and that he must see the body, or the men of the Hundred must pay a fine additional to all the others they will already incur for having a murder committed in their parish. So this morning, before dawn, Agnes Eelby was disinterred by a couple of men with linen cloths bound around their faces, and now here she is: set out in the open, a little way off, downwind of the Guild house, on a plank and a pair of trestles. A boy stands by with a shepherd’s crook, ready to keep the birds off.

The coroner – a foursquare man with a close-cropped, reddish beard and cheeks mottled in the cold – stands with his back turned on the corpse, not wishing to look on the stained and corrupted shroud, and he addresses the jury.

‘Fellows,’ he says. ‘Fellows. We are here to decide if Agnes Eelby, God rest her soul, late of this Hundred, is dead by natural causes, or by misadventure, or by reason of a felony in her own case, or by murder.’

As he speaks, there is a general grumble from the jury. It is a reluctant crowd, about thirty strong, every man over the age of twelve, from the nearest four villages, ordered from their fields and their trades to hear yet another inquest into yet another woman dead in childbirth, and they are not happy. They give off a vapour, like a herd of bulls in the cold, and one of them has brought a dog that whines and strains on its plaited rope leash. Standing in a ring about them are the grey shapes of women and children, spectating, the smog of their breath like pale scarves around their heads.

Finishing his preamble, the coroner turns to address Eelby, who is standing apart from the jury with his brown cloth cap clutched in his knuckly hands and his unshaven cheeks blue with the cold. Katherine thinks he looks unusually meek before the coroner, as if he were afraid of authority, and yet she knows he is not. She wonders what he is up to, and supposes she will find out soon enough.

‘And you are first finder?’ the coroner asks. Eelby nods.

‘I am,’ he says.

‘Name?’

‘John Eelby, of Cornford, of this Hundred.’

At his desk, the clerk records this.

‘And the dead woman?’ the coroner goes on. ‘Is your wife?’

‘Was, yes.’

‘May God rest her soul. Tell us what you found.’

Eelby swallows and begins.

‘I heard them calling,’ he says, ‘and I was worried about my wife, so I came running. They was in the kitchen up at the castle. I found her, with blood all over her dress.’

He points at Katherine. There is a murmuring among the jury.

‘And my woman was lain out on the table, all cut. Across here.’

Now he points on his own body, showing a slash from left to right, just above his pubis, though Katherine remembers the cut as being vertical. It is the longest speech she has ever heard him make.

‘And when was this?’

‘In the week before All Saints, this last year,’ he says.

‘And you raised the hue and cry?’

Eelby allows that he did, though in fact there was little need since there was no felon to chase down. After he had come into the kitchen, Katherine and Widow Beaufoy and the widow’s maid had stood there, gathered around the baby, Eelby’s son, whom they had miraculously saved.

‘Did the members of the nearest four households come running?’ the coroner presses.

‘Yes,’ Eelby lies. ‘Yes, they did.’

‘You will name them to my clerk at the end of the proceedings,’ the coroner instructs.

Eelby nods.

‘And then you called the bailiff?’ the coroner continues. He is eager to find any breach of the complex laws that surround any sudden or unexpected death, since any infraction will allow him to impose a fine on the Hundred or on Eelby himself, and so boost his own income.

‘I did,’ Eelby says, nodding at the bailiff, who gives his name, and the clerk makes another entry in his roll.

‘Only he wasn’t needed,’ Eelby goes on. ‘Because them who cut my woman open stood there just as if it right pleased the Lord.’

‘And these are they?’ the coroner asks, turning back to Katherine and Widow Beaufoy.

Eelby nods and the coroner studies the two women again. Katherine tries to see them as he must. She imagines he sees them in good, but old dresses, one, the widow, taller and broader than the other, while next to her she, Katherine, looks if she has been denied her portion of milk and butter over the long winter.

‘And which one made the cut?’ the coroner asks.

Eelby indicates Katherine.

‘It was her,’ he says. ‘Lady Margaret.’

The coroner reminds the clerk of Katherine’s name, and he nods as he writes it.

‘Why do you think Margaret, Lady Cornford, cut her?’

Eelby shifts from foot to foot now. There is a pause, almost as if he is coming to a decision, as if he were choosing which path to take in a wood, and the coroner frowns, waiting, until Eelby makes his choice and says: ‘Lady Margaret never liked her. Never liked my woman.’

There is an outlet of breath. Men in the jury start murmuring. The coroner raises his eyebrows.

‘Lady Margaret cut your wife – killed her – because she never
liked
her?’

There is some muffled disturbance at the back and the coroner looks up, and then over at his clerk who has also looked up, and the two exchange an unspoken sign. Katherine can make no sense of it, but when she looks to Widow Beaufoy for guidance, Widow Beaufoy is determinedly absent, staring away from her, and away from the disturbance, as if it does not concern her. Something is up, but what? After a moment there is silence.

‘Go on,’ the coroner says.

‘She hated her,’ Eelby reinforces. ‘As is well known.’

He raises his voice, calling on someone at the back of the jury, and someone answers, shouting out: ‘That’s right! She hated her!’

And, from a different part of the crowd, someone else shouts that Katherine wanted Eelby’s wife dead, and now those at the front of the jury are turning around, craning their necks to see, and everyone is murmuring and staring and the clerk has put down his pen and turned and all at once everyone realises that something is up. The jury has been packed, or bribed, just as Richard and Mayhew had warned it might be, and Katherine feels first the flare of panic and then the grim slump of acceptance. They had told her she needed powerful friends in a moment such as this, and suggested she seek help from Lord Hastings.

‘Someone might bribe the coroner,’ Mayhew had explained, ‘or pack the jury. Anything can go wrong. And if the coroner finds the death unnatural, then he will have to record it as murder.’

‘But it was not murder,’ Katherine had said. ‘I did what I had to do to save the boy. The woman was dead! Or so close to it, it hardly mattered.’

Mayhew had been patient.

‘It doesn’t matter what really happened,’ he’d said. ‘All that matters is what people say happened.’

‘But why would anyone say different?’

Richard had mewed like a cat, or an old woman, and Mayhew had shaken his head.

‘Please,’ he’d said. ‘Please just go to Lord Hastings. Or the Earl of Warwick. He owes you his life. Or his leg at the very least. Send a letter. I’ll take it if you like. Explain what has happened and ask them to advise you.’

But Katherine had not. She’d refused. She was certain that if she could see that what she had done was the right thing to do – the
only
thing to do – then others would too. Others would see that she’d had to act, to do something terrible in order to avert something worse. That was all. So she had ignored the advice of her husband and Mayhew and instead she’d thrown herself into restoring the estate, and she’d known that the two things – the saving of the child and the saving of the estate – would soon come to be seen as one and the same thing.

So now the watermill has been repaired by a carpenter from Boston, who’s been induced to bring his family and his apprentices, and to pay his rent on one of the houses along the causeway. Others have come, too: a man from Lincoln, two more from Boston, a fourth, an eel trapper called Stephen – a wiry man with wild hair and a prominent tooth – from Gainsborough. Since their arrival fences have been repaired, hedges relaid, hovels and outhouses rebuilt. The sluice gates have been made to work again and water has been diverted, corralled. The fields are drying and there is every chance of a pea and a rye crop in the coming year. There are geese and chickens and piglets in their pens and sties, and there are five cows on the island, and a pair of glossy brown oxen to pull the plough. The punt has been made water-worthy as well, and while one of the new men reaps the broad ribbon of teasels that grow to the west of the castle, the eel catcher Stephen sits with one eye on the weather, and daily adds to the pile of eel traps that he is building up around his house.

More than that, the barber surgeon’s assistant, Matthew Mayhew, had arrived after Christmastide, having left the Earl of Warwick’s household after a disagreement with the Earl’s physician, Fournier.

At the heart of it all though, has been the thought of the boy, Eelby’s miraculous son John, named after his father and his father’s father, who is still alive against all expectation. He has been the rhythm and the reason for all this: the inspiration and the seed of hope that something is possible. When Katherine thinks of him, her heart feels full, and she smiles. And to think that after the boy’s mother had died – after Katherine had killed her – Widow Beaufoy had given him no chance.

‘However will you feed him?’ she’d asked scornfully.

But Katherine had remembered the newborn in the village, and so she had paid that child’s mother to act as the orphan boy’s nurse. She had then spent many precious coins buying the woman mutton and beef and butter and ale from the markets, just to keep her fat and healthy, and so far her milk has kept the boy alive.

And the longer he lived, and the stronger he grew, the more certain she became that the death of Agnes Eelby was tragic, but it was not an act of her doing. Rather it was an act of God’s. And with every week that had passed the more surely she placed her trust in others to come to the self-same conclusion.

But now, in this inquest, she can see that she was wrong, that they have ascribed her far darker motives – that she disliked Agnes Eelby, or was jealous of her – and so at last she must react.