Kingmaker: Broken Faith (18 page)

At last Sir John pulls away. He holds her by the shoulders at arm’s length and looks down at her and he is snivelling, but then a frown flickers across his brow.

‘What in God’s name is this?’

He slaps her chest with the back of his fingers. She flinches and now, dear God, she feels as if she might burn up with shame, but then Sir John’s face wrinkles into a laugh.

‘A brigandine!’ he shouts. ‘A brigandine! Great suffering Christ, boy! You’ve still no beard yet here you are strutting around like a fighting cock!’

Sir John looks over at the woman who stands with her hands clasped at her broad waist, a rosary looped over her belt, and a length of linen wound around her head to form a headdress.

‘Isabella!’ he calls. ‘Isabella! This is Kit, this little one here, and this is Thomas, this big lunk here.’

He thumps Thomas on the shoulder and then frowns again.

‘Who are you?’

Thomas introduces Robert.

‘May God bring you joy, sir,’ Robert says.

‘He already has!’ Sir John says with a great, shining smile. ‘Look! This is my wife. Isabella. My
wife
, do you hear?’

He beams at her, and then at them, plump with pride, and she is smiling patiently at him. She is uncertain of their social rank, and so smiles at them all but makes no move toward them, and why should she, since they appear as beggars, and it is only because of her husband’s reaction to their presence that she looks at them twice.

‘I have told you about them!’ Sir John presses on. ‘Do you recall? About our time in Calais? How this one saved first young Richard when he was caught by an arrow, and then how he cut me? I have even tried to show you the – but anyway! Here they are. Alive. Solid in flesh, though dear God, look at them! In parlous circumstance, just as ever they were. Look at you. Filthy as crows. And what in God’s name has happened to your hair? Did you cut it yourself? By Christ, I shall love to hear how it has come to pass this time!’

‘Sir John,’ Katherine says, ‘we are mortally hungry. Is there anything we might eat before we tell all?’

Sir John defers to Isabella. She smiles.

‘We have some capons,’ she says, ‘and some pike. Peasecod too. Plenty of ale still, and even some red wine from Gascony.’

‘From Gascony!’ Sir John echoes, sitting back on his log, rubbing his hands and rolling his eyes. Katherine’s mouth floods at the thought of meat. Isabella then retreats to the house, calling for someone as she goes.

‘Is she not wonderful?’ Sir John says, watching her back as she departs. Then he lowers his voice. ‘She is old Freylin’s widow, you know. We were married after the Annunciation this last year – sudden you might call it, yes, but I tell you. It was meant to be. And she is rich! As Croesus! Freylin left her manors all over the county – and look.’

He holds out his legs to show them his fine shoes, wiggling their strikingly long toes and laughing delightedly.

‘Nor,’ he adds conspiratorially, grinning and shooting his eyebrows up and down a couple of times, ‘is she unduly observant of feast days after curfew!’

It is astonishingly good to see the old man so happy and well, and the wine is brought by a girl whom Sir John calls Meg and they sit and drink while Sir John laughs and promises them he has had Mass said for their mortal souls, pointlessly as it turns out, and how he has given some of Isabella’s money for the painting of a figure of St Christopher in the church and how he and Isabella often walk down there to look at it for luck and he burbles on about the estate and how if it were not for having to keep terriers rather than decent dogs, such as the talbots he loved so, then he might come to believe that he was living in an earthly paradise.

‘But sir,’ Katherine says, ‘what of Richard? Where is he? We had hoped to find him here.’

Sir John stops his laughter and stares at her. Thomas shakes his head minutely, regretfully, as if he already knows more than her, and she wonders what she has done wrong.

‘You never did like passing time much, did you, Kit?’ Sir John says.

She thinks that if that is all it is, changing the tenor of an evening, then she does not mind so very much, but now Sir John hunches forward, spreading his legs and peering at the ground between his feet.

‘Richard is in London,’ he says. ‘With his surgeon, named Mayhew. They are seeking help in the matter of his wife – you remember her, don’t you? Margaret? Whom you brought back from Wales? Well, she has got herself caught up in – in something. She is something of a leech, this Margaret. A surgeon more like, with a gift almost as great as yours, Kit. She even saved my life after Towton Field.’

He removes his cap, and points to a bald patch the size of a crab apple within which sits a circular worm of livid scar tissue. Katherine cannot help her hands coming up as if to touch it. She resists.

‘A tonsure almost as good as yours, eh, Canon?’ Sir John laughs before restoring the cap. Robert smiles, but says nothing. He is a comforting presence, like a large dog, happy to sit and listen, just to be with them.

‘Anyway,’ Sir John continues. ‘This last year Margaret cut a woman who was dying in childbed. She saved the child, something of a miracle apparently, but not the woman. So there had to be an inquest, of course. We told her she must seek someone of influence to let the coroner know where his best interests lay, but she is stubborn, this Margaret – even Richard says as much, though he is still so smitten with the girl to find it charming. Anyway, she did not follow our advice. And Richard could do nothing since he is a blind man. Did you know?’

Katherine nods.

‘Yes,’ Sir John continues. ‘So the inquest came and she was caught out. Some other fellow swayed the jury. Packed it, or bribed it, I don’t know. So the coroner found the thing – the intervention, the what-have-you, the cutting – to be murder and so they bound her over. She’s languishing in some closed convent, some blessed hole in that part of the county, waiting on the King’s Justices to troop along and try her case.’

‘And who is Richard petitioning for her release?’ she asks.

‘William Hastings. You remember him? He saved you being hanged that time, the time you had your ear clipped. A good man, Hastings, but busy. He has gone up in the world, like the lark, by God, almost beyond measure. He is Chamberlain to the King, can you believe it?’

At that moment Thomas looks up and glances beyond Katherine.

‘Tell us about it again, Kit,’ he says, a little too loudly. ‘Tell us how it came about,’ and she glances around, sees Isabella standing staring at her, and understands, and she tells them the story of how she tried to run from the Earl of Warwick’s camp that time they came from Calais, and how the Earl’s men caught her and how the Earl wanted her hanged as an example to others thinking of deserting.

‘That’s right!’ Sir John laughs. ‘And Lord Hastings – as he is now – he saved the day! Got the sentence changed to the clipping of Kit’s ear, and no one wanted to do it, so Tom here, he did it. With hot shears! I remember. Ooof.’

Thomas rolls his eyes and shrugs as if to say, well, any man would do the same, and then Katherine brushes her hair back to reveal what remains of her upper ear.

‘That was a close shave!’ Sir John barks. ‘Too close. Ha ha! Bella, my love, come. Come. Did you hear that? A joke!’

Isabella’s gaze remains fixed on Katherine. This is it, Katherine thinks. This is the woman who will find me out. See my secret.

‘May I?’ Isabella asks. She has a soft, husked voice that is kindly, and she is like someone who laughs a lot, but she is no fool. Katherine can only shrug, and Isabella bends over her, and Katherine can smell the same sweet herbs that perfume Sir John, and she can see the knobbly texture of the linen of Isabella’s dress and apron and Katherine’s body shrieks and shrinks as Isabella raises her hand and touches her fingers to her ear’s tip, but she allows it.

‘Does it hurt?’ Isabella asks.

‘It aches in the cold,’ Katherine mutters, brusque with nerves.

‘We all ache in the cold!’ Sir John laughs. Then: ‘Stop fussing, Bella,’ he says, ‘and have some more wine. Kit and Thomas can tell us all.’

Isabella will not sit with them, despite Sir John’s entreaties, and she leaves them to it, and Katherine is relieved, and now she is able to steer the conversation away from her made-up story – that she was on a boat that got lost at sea, trying to get back from Pembroke, and they sailed to Ireland, where again she became lost – without any difficulty.

‘But has Richard sent any news from London?’ she asks.

Sir John actually growls.

‘By Christ,’ he mutters. ‘Richard wrote – or rather his man Mayhew did – a few weeks ago to say that the Duke of Somerset is back in the King’s grace. Can you believe it? King Edward has
forgiven
the man who killed his father! He has forgiven the man who killed his brother! The man who put their heads on spikes on the gatehouse in York! The Duke of Somerset led King Henry’s forces at Northampton, do you remember? And we beat him then, and he led them again at Towton Field, and we beat him then too, but, by God, only just.

‘And each time he slipped away. And now the bastard’s done it again. He got caught in one of those castles up north, some hole from which not even a practised rat such as he could escape, so he surrendered. And King Edward accepted! If old Warwick had been there, or Montagu, God forbid, or anyone else for that matter, anyone. They’d have chopped his bloody head off. Right there and then.’

He makes a dusty-sounding chopping motion with his hands and imitates the head bouncing twice. ‘Bonk bonk.’

He gulps his wine, bangs the cup down, pours more. Thomas fiddles with a chess piece, doesn’t look up. Katherine is suddenly certain Sir John knows nothing of the return of Edmund Riven.

‘But not King Edward,’ Sir John resumes. ‘No. In fact, not only has he reversed the death sentence he passed on the Duke of Somerset, not only has he restored all his divers lands and titles, he’s even – and you will not credit this – he’s even taken him as a gentleman of the bedchamber!’

Thomas and Robert look blank. Katherine is likewise in the dark.

‘He sleeps with him in the same bed!’ Sir John tells them. ‘In the same bloody bed! Naked! With neither knife nor sword! King Edward and the Duke of Somerset! King Edward’s father killed the Duke’s father, and the Duke killed King Edward’s father, and now they lie, like that!’

Isabella returns, moving quick and soft. She sits beside Sir John and places a soothing hand on his forearm, and he places his hand on hers.

‘He who covers over a transgression seeks only love,’ Robert says.

There is general silence for a moment. Sir John looks at him balefully, but Isabella smiles.

‘Amen,’ she says.

‘I know,’ Sir John says. ‘I know. I know. I know you are right. But I lost friends, and men I admired, and men whose families needed them. Don’t you see? All this – this – this pissing about that men such as Edward of York and the Duke of bloody Somerset do – it doesn’t affect them as it affects the rest of us.’

Having explained himself, he is calmer, but Katherine needs to know:

‘Richard has said nothing of – nothing of Edmund Riven?’

Isabella is suddenly still, wholly alert, head cocked, eyes as wide as pennies: a deer sensing a hunter.

‘Dear God,’ Sir John whispers, ‘that is a name I hoped never again to hear at this table.’

There is a long moment of silence, then:

‘What of him?’ Sir John asks.

‘We heard that he too is – he is back,’ Thomas says.

‘Back?’ Sir John asks. ‘Back from where? The dead? Giles Riven is dead. His family is attainted. There is no way back for him, unless – what do you know? Why do you say that?’

Katherine hesitates a moment.

Then she says: ‘It is Edmund Riven The son. He has come back with the Duke of Somerset. He has taken the castle at Cornford.’

For a moment Sir John is silent and still. Then he erupts. With a sweep of his arm, he clears the board of chess pieces and mugs and the ewer, sending them bouncing over the ground. The little dog that had settled by his wife’s feet is up and yapping and now all are standing and Sir John is bawling and Isabella is trying to calm him until Robert steps in and takes Sir John by the shoulders and holds him steady and starts talking softly to him. After a few long moments when it seems Sir John remains looking for something to kill, he calms slightly, and is left breathing heavily, his eyes rolling and flecks of foam around his mouth.

Isabella takes him in her arms and guides him inside.

Thomas and Katherine bend to pick up the mugs and the chess pieces. For a moment they cannot find the black king, but then there it is, lying on its side.

Later, when they are in the hall by the fire, and the bones of the birds and the fish lie picked on the board, Sir John comes down again, this time without Isabella, and he sits where he always used to sit. He looks much older than when they saw him first that afternoon, she thinks, and he has lost something too; that sheen of new-found happiness, and she feels shame, and wonders if he’d have preferred to live in ignorance. Then again, though, someone would have told him. The old man does not say anything for a moment, but sits and stares into the flames. Then he stretches a hand to pick up one of the chess pieces they’ve brought in: it is the white king. He begins in a low voice:

‘I don’t mind that they did this to me,’ he says, pointing at his head. ‘I don’t mind that they took the castle that should have been my son’s. I don’t mind that I have spent my dotage flogging around the country looking for him so that I could see justice done. I really don’t. But what I do mind, though, what I really do mind, is that he stole my house. What I really do mind is that he killed so many of those for whom I cared, and what I really, really do mind is that he blinded my son. My only son! That I do mind. That I do mind, do you hear?’

Thomas and Katherine can only nod. It hardly matters that it was the father not the son who blinded Richard.

‘So I cannot let this lie,’ Sir John continues. ‘I cannot just lie back and assume this is some piece of divine providence. My wife says that those whom He loves, He first purifies in the flames of suffering, and I have to allow that this may or may not be true, but I am not so vain as to believe it is all done for me, do you see? I cannot believe that bastard Riven, or his whelp, is God’s chosen instrument. I can’t believe that family were sent here just to test me and mine, to forge us like bloody arrowheads in the fire, just to make sure we are worthy of our place in the Kingdom of Heaven. I do not think it is like that.’