Kingmaker: Broken Faith (23 page)

‘Then that is it.’

The men are blank.

‘It is not about the Duke of York,’ she tells them. ‘It is about the Duchess. You have to count the months, you see? Look. Backwards, from April, when Edward was born. Nine months, which is how long a woman is reckoned to carry her child, and so you come to July the year before.’

Still the men are blank. They look at her, waiting.

‘It means,’ she says, ‘that Edward was conceived in July. But where was the Duke in July?’

‘Pontours.’

‘And where was the Duchess?’

‘Rouen.’

They look at one another in the gloom. Sir John is aghast. Thomas places his hand over his mouth.

‘Merciful Christ!’ Sir John breathes, his eyes round with astonishment. ‘The boy’s a bastard.’

THE PATH RISES
steeply at their feet, over rough sheep-cropped grass and through bent and broken bracken, where the wind is loud in Thomas’s ears and pulls at his flapping cloak. Blue-black clouds race from west to east, low enough to touch, and the rain stings and claps his cheeks.

‘How much further?’ Katherine shouts from behind.

Her hair is loose on her forehead under her cap, and raindrops cling to her eyebrows and the tip of her nose.

‘To the top,’ he calls. ‘Then over, and down.’

He points. Each movement allows the rainwater into the warmth of his skin.

‘And then over and down again?’ she calls back, and he has to nod.

They are five days’ walk from Marton Hall, and they have still as many to go before Thomas imagines they will be anywhere near the castles wherein they hope to find anyone who might bring them before King Henry so they may show him the ledger. Five days’ walking, from dawn to dusk, through five days’ solid rain, but at least they have been alone, unwatched by Canon Robert, or Isabella, or even Sir John, and on the first day they even found an inn wherein they were given a bed to themselves, in a room to themselves. To begin with they were shy, but by the morning, waking up with their skin pressed together, they wished they might stay another two, three, four nights.

‘We should have asked for a kirtle and smock,’ he’d said, watching her lace her hose to her pourpoint. ‘Then we might travel as man and wife at least.’

She had agreed.

‘But whatever would we have told Sir John and Isabella? That we’d wasted their money on women’s cloth instead of these things, and that I was really called Katherine?’

‘We must tell them one day,’ he’d said.

‘I know,’ she’d mumbled. ‘I know.’

Thomas prayed they would find another inn that night with a similarly empty bed, but it was not to be. After another ten hours trudging north, they arrived in the dark at the Friary of St Nicholas, by a bridge over a broad river, and they’d slept in a cold dorter with five or six other travellers, every one of whom snored. In the morning, when they were woken for Prime and were guided along the cloister to the door of the chapel, more memories had returned to Thomas, and he’d found himself gripping Katherine, almost crushing her wrist.

‘More,’ he’d told her, with his gaze fixed on the grass. ‘I remember more. I remember the fighting now. Christ. A man with a stick. Christ. He had some rosary beads. And he’d done something to – was it you? Or? No. It was another sister. Dear God. He’d killed her. Yes. I remember him. Was that Riven?’

Afterwards they had followed the road north, toward Towton, retracing their steps of nearly three years previously, neither speaking a word. Thomas had been aware that Katherine was watching to see if he recalled anything more, but for a while nothing came to him other than an intense sadness that seemed to leach into his new-found happiness. He does not want any more grim memories to stain the delight he feels just walking with her, without really having to pretend anything to anyone.

Then the memories begin to return. When they’d crossed a bridge among some willow trees, they’d stopped and said their prayers at a little chantry chapel that was pitted with the distinctive marks of arrowheads, and Thomas had found himself shuddering and moved to tears he could not explain when he looked down into the frothing waters below the spans.

They’d passed Towton Field a little after noon. The autumnal sun threw their shadows very far before them and there had been little there to remind him of what he had done, and what had been done to him. Some rough heathland, a tree on the skyline. They’d stopped and stared but nothing had come.

‘Perhaps it is for your soul’s protection?’ she’d wondered.

York Minster had broken the horizon a little after that and they’d passed through the city gates and under its castles’ walls in a deepening gloom, but they’d been brought up short when they’d seen the minster in the full, and had stood in silence, stilled, not just at the building itself, or the windows then being lit from within by a hundred candles, but at the number of people abroad. They could see more in one glance in one street than they might in a whole month at Marton. Then they’d been accosted by a boy who wanted to show them the new crop of heads on the Micklegate Bar for the price of a farthing, but they did not take him up on it, and that night they had to share a bed with a lead dealer from Gloucester. When they woke up, Thomas and Katherine had become intertwined where she had turned to him in the night, and the lead dealer gave them a curious look, and they hurried away through the town’s North Gate without breakfast.

Since then they have seen Durham with its cathedral and castle raised up so prominent and uncompromising it could only inspire awe, and then reached Newcastle, where it was easy to believe the walls and gates had been built by giants, as men said, and they’d stood rooted, staring so long that the men of the city Watch began to take notice. They were hard-looking men, Thomas thought, old soldiers, in red-and-black livery coats with what looked like a winged dog for a badge.

‘Lord Montagu’s men,’ someone had told him. ‘Best make yourself scarce.’

The same sort had been there the next morning, on the West Gate, warming their hands over a brazier filled with glowing coals. Archers, Thomas had guessed.

‘Where are you going?’ one of them had asked, and Thomas knew to tell him Carlisle, and not Alnwick or Bamburgh. The man had grunted and said no more.

The rain set in just as they left Newcastle and it followed them as they double backed east, to find the road that would take them up to their destination, and now here they are, with the land rising before them, and every heavy step taking them nearer winter. Thomas is pleased Sir John has provided them with new clothes – bought with Isabella’s money from a tailor in Lincoln – and boots that fit and are oiled against the rain. He also bought them a sword each – ‘A falchion, Thomas. A proper archer’s sword’ – and Thomas walks with a quarterstaff.

They also have ale and bread, and in the shelter of a small wood through which an old stone wall runs, Thomas unstoppers the bottle and passes it to Katherine. When she has finished and has wiped her mouth she asks him, as if it has only just occurred to her, how he intends to even get an audience with King Henry.

He shrugs.

‘Surely he will want to see us when he knows we have something so valuable to his cause?’

He pats the ledger. She supposes this is so.

‘But you cannot just talk to a king, can you? Even if he is in exile. We’ll need to go through all sorts of retainers and courtiers, surely? And they will try to steal the ledger from us. Make it seem it is their find.’

This had not occurred to him. It had not been mentioned when the plan was first devised, that evening after Richard’s letter had come from London to break the tidings that King Edward had sided against them. It was just after this terrible moment that they divined the ledger’s secret, and as soon as he breathed the words, Sir John had slammed the book shut and hurriedly put it back in its bag.

‘Christ, boy!’ he’d said. ‘You’ve been carrying that around with you all this time? Showing it to people?’

Thomas had nodded.

‘Is it really that dangerous?’ he’d asked, though he must have known the answer: just to think King Edward might be illegitimate was treason.

Sir John had leaned forward on one elbow and kept his voice low.

‘If it is known we have it,’ he’d explained, ‘they will burn our feet until we tell them where we got it, and who else knows about it. Then, when we have given them any and every name we can think of, they will round them up and burn their feet, and get everyone they know, and do the same to them. Then we will all meet up again on the scaffold where we will be half-hanged, choked almost to death, you understand, but just before we die, they’ll let us down, and then they’ll cut our bellies open, and our guts will be pulled out and burned before our eyes, or wound around a sharpening wheel until we swallow our own tongues, and then, and only then, will we be chopped into pieces with a blunt axe, and we’ll have those parts of us doused in hot tar and sent to Devon and York and Kent and bloody Wales to be hung on gates to remind others not to even think such thoughts, so yes, you could, young Thomas,
you could
say it is pretty dangerous.’

They’d sat around the fire in the gloom, and they’d drunk more wine while the dogs chased rabbits in their sleep. All were silent for a while, each with their own thoughts, Sir John drinking with quick hands. Frowning, Isabella told them she was going to bed.

‘But first I will pray for Richard,’ she’d said, ‘and I suggest you do the same. Prayer and faith in the Lord led to all being well with my boys, and I am sure it will be the same with yours.’

Sir John stood to kiss her, but she turned from him, and after a moment’s hesitation he wafted his hand, and sat down with a heavy sigh. He took another long drink of wine, and all the time his eyes above his cup were fixed on the ledger. Then he banged the cup down.

‘I am sick of it,’ he’d begun. ‘I’m sick of it, d’you hear? I’m sick of seeing others prosper at our expense. It is not just Riven, it is the whole crowd of them. The Earl of Warwick, the Duke of Somerset, all of them, all scheming, all getting ahead, rubbing two coins to make three. By Christ! They said King Henry and his advisers were like fleas on a traveller’s buttocks, sucking the weal for all its goodness, but I tell you, these new men are worse, for they are the hungrier for being the emptier. By Christ, when I think of the blood we have spilled for them, and for what? For nothing. No. It is men like us who have suffered, and I say we have suffered enough. It is time we shifted for ourselves, since no one else will do it for us.’

‘So what to do?’ Thomas had asked.

And Sir John had gestured at the chessboard, brought in from the yard, and had the pieces not been put away, he might have moved the white knight back across the board to the black king and his two black rooks, and he might have turned the knight’s horse so that its teeth were bared at the white king.

‘Providence has placed a powerful weapon in our hands,’ he’d said. ‘If it is known that King Edward is a bastard, no man in the realm will stand by him. All his earls and dukes and lords of this and that, they will turn on him and drive him from his palace, where he would no doubt be in bed with some guildsman’s wife anyway, and they’ll take his crown and sceptre and that will be the end of Edward Plantagenet, so you take King Henry your ledger, Thomas. Take it up to Alnwick or Bamburgh or wherever he is. Show it to him and I imagine even he will be able to do something with it. If not, the Queen will. But by God, this time we will see to it that no service of ours goes unpaid, d’you hear? This time we will not be scorned!’

And so, leaving Robert with Sir John for mutual safekeeping, Thomas and Katherine set off almost that next day, first to Lincoln, where they bought these new clothes, and then up the road north, and now here they are, in the wind and rain, somewhere, he believes, in Northumberland, sodden through, dog-tired, too lightly armed to fight off a badger, should one come calling.

More than that though, they do not know precisely how to do it.

‘We must wait to see who is whom before we offer the ledger to just anyone,’ she says.

‘They will wonder why we are coming to join them, though,’ Thomas tells her.

‘We could say we are coming to join the rightful King, like those men who attacked your farm?’

He nods.

‘We’d best buy a pie, then,’ he says and she looks at him anxiously, as if he might be mad. He does not explain. They walk on. After noon the rain passes east and the sky turns pale and they find the north road running through deserted furlongs and over gentle countryside, and they walk until Katherine’s hands and feet are numb from the cold, and gradually the day fades and the moon rises, a perfect star-bright crescent in the violet-tinged evening, and they come to a village where a blacksmith is prepared to let them stay for a price. They sleep together with him and his boys in his workshop, huddled against the stones for warmth, and in the morning they wake up observed by three goats, a dog and a cat, there for the same reason.

The smith says they are a day from Alnwick, where the castle is.

‘I’ll not ask your business,’ he says, and his dark-eyed boy watches them leave, pumping his bellows without a word. They walk all morning, until a little after noon, when they find a brewster with her broom set out to proclaim she has ale, and she finds some bread too, and she tells them there are no men left in the village.

‘All gone,’ she says.

‘Where?’

She points upwards.

‘You two should stay,’ she says. ‘Many a young widow aching for a man.’

But they carry on, along the road, over another series of ridges and valleys, until they find their way blocked by a looping river flowing east, its current so sluggish in parts that its brown water might be ale in a barrel. Unable to cross they turn upriver, and follow it until they find a ford where the water froths amid jumbled rocks. They remove their boots and roll up their hose and he helps her across, hopping from rock to rock. Then when they are dressed again, on the northern bank, they follow the track until they find a deserted hamlet where the houses have been ransacked and pulled apart for firewood.