Kingmaker: Broken Faith (26 page)

‘Hold it, will you?’

Horner looks at her.

‘I’m not touching that.’

‘Just stand on it.’

He does so, gingerly, and when he steps on the hand watery pus bubbles through the broken and blackened skin. The smell is very strong, almost overpowering, and Horner gags and retches. She lets the saw run. It cuts on the pull. She goes quickly. The boy is awake again, screaming, bucking against Thomas and Jack. It takes about ten saw cuts before she is through, and the limb is detached into a shallow pool of dark blood. Something steams on the saw teeth.

‘Get rid of it, will you?’

Horner kicks it scuffling across the grass, the fingers flapping. Some in the audience laugh but others groan. She takes the urine and pours it over the stump from which blood is running freely. She balls some linen against it. How did Mayhew do this? How? With the knife blade.

‘Bring the candle!’ she calls. ‘Hold it above. Tip it now, so it drips.’

The wax drips onto the side of the knife where she holds it under the bone. It is burning fast, the wax dripping quickly. When enough wax has built up and it is beginning to harden, she presses it into the marrow and then presses the linen back over the hole.

‘Carry on,’ she says.

It takes four goes of pressing the wax into the bone before it begins to clog among the filaments of marrow. She stares at it another long moment before she exhales. It has stopped bleeding.

‘Fuck me,’ one of the men mutters. ‘Bloody well fuck me sideways.’

But it is not over yet. She tells Thomas to untie the bowstring. He does so. She stares at the wound for the length of time it might take to recite the Credo and she waits a moment longer too before she nods. He removes the bowstring entirely. Jack takes the spoon. Katherine is sick with nerves. She fumbles for more horsehair and the needle again, and then she pulls down the flaps of his skin and folds them over, and then she begins to stitch them together. Before she finishes sealing the wound she stops.

‘Blow it out,’ she says, nodding at the candle. Horner does so and is about to tuck it in his purse.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I need the wick.’

He grumbles but breaks the candle for her, and he holds the two pieces apart so that she can tug it out. She folds the wick and places the folded end into the wound. This is something she saw Mayhew do. It is supposed to draw out any malignant humours. She places a final stitch in the skin to hold the wick in place and she gives it the gentlest tug. It gives grudgingly. Perfect, she thinks.

Then she forces some linen into the jug of urine, soaking it up. This she presses to the wound. A dribble of pink fluid fills the waxy wick, and drips to the ground. But there is no blood.

The boy strains still.

‘Not dead yet,’ Thomas encourages.

She wads up more linen and presses it to the wound. She remembers the chaos of Towton, and the day before the battle, when she removed an arrow from the Earl of Warwick’s thigh, and thought she had cut the main blood vessel. Mayhew had stood by her, his hand on her shoulder it felt like, until the blood had ceased and they knew the Earl would at least not bleed to death on the beaten earth of the barn floor. She wonders what those standing around now would think if she told them she’d had the Earl’s life in her hands, and had saved it.

Some of the other boys are playing with the limb, now. They’ve dragged it off and are hitting it with sticks and screaming with delight. Then a dog comes and seizes the arm and drags it away with the boys cursing after him, but before they can retrieve it more dogs come, and there is so much snarling and snapping, the boys forget it, and come back to watch.

She stands there, her hands covered in dried blood and fat, and she looks around at the men who are ringed about her and the wounded boy. Grey is still at his window, a candle lit behind him, throwing his shape against the glass. She watches him raise his hand and take a drink.

‘Bloody hell,’ Horner says. ‘I’d’ve never believed it if I hadn’t seen it.’

‘Told you,’ Thomas says. ‘Kit’s a surgeon. Best surgeon.’

‘Let’s get him in,’ she says, nodding at the boy. He is deathly pale, his hair sodden with sweat, his breathing lively and irregular. His eyes are pressed closed.

‘Bit lighter than he was,’ Jack notes as they pick him up.

The guerite chamber still smells of rot, but they are permitted a few rush lamps and soon the smell is mixed with tallow.

‘Even worse,’ Thomas says. ‘Are there any herbs we can burn?’

‘Herbs?’ Horner laughs. ‘This is Northumberland. Listen. Sir Ralph wants you guarded day and night, and so I will leave Jack here with you. You can talk about old times. How you killed one another’s family.’

When he has gone, Jack asks if the boy will live.

She doesn’t know.

‘Well, he’s not dead yet,’ Thomas says.

‘Not yet,’ Jack agrees, ‘but how many days until All Saints?’

THE FIRST FEW
days after the operation are the worst. Katherine and Thomas are confined to the chamber of the guerite, and must take turns sitting up with the boy. She sniffs the wound almost hourly and removes the dressing every day to tease the dribbling wick from the sutured skin in tiny increments, letting the wound heal behind it. The boy is in pain all the time, delirious with it, screeching with it, writhing with it, and there is nothing they can do except hold him down, stop him wrenching at the dressing, and try to force some of Sir Ralph’s spirit into him. If they can get enough of it down, it seems to place him somewhere between life and death.

‘Is he in purgatory?’ Jack whispers.

And Katherine places a hand on the boy’s neck to feel something, then shakes her head.

‘Not yet,’ she says.

Jack is still with them, and she has been surprised to find she does not mind, or fear his company as much as she’d think. He has even been protective of them, sending others away, including one man who wanted her to come with him to cure his brother who has leprosy. He is cheerful, usually, and if there is anything to be overcome, he always knows of somewhere it is worse.

‘Scotland!’ he’ll say. ‘Oh, Christ! You should see the women there,’ or ‘Scotland! They eat bats there. Bats!’

When they need something – more of the distillation – or they get hungry, they send Jack to find Horner and Horner might come to check on the boy, bringing a hard loaf of bread and some watery ale, and he usually has some new tale to tell about Grey:

‘He wants me to find him a woman,’ he tells them. ‘Not just any woman – a negress.’ Or: ‘He wants green ink.’ ‘A live turtle.’ ‘Someone to teach him Genoese.’

And they’ll shake their heads and sympathise. Sometimes they hear Grey shouting in the night. He goes up to the battlements at the top of the keep with a flask and his hawk and he rants all sorts of comical obscenities, usually about the Earl of Warwick, or the Earl of March, sometimes about Horner, often about someone called Ashley. And the next morning a pallid Horner will appear with rings under his eyes.

‘What’s it like in Bamburgh?’ Thomas asks.

‘Better,’ Horner admits.

One morning, when it is cooler and looks set to rain, Grey makes his way across the bailey, unconvincingly steady on his feet, a feverish rosiness in his cheeks, smelling of his distillation and with Horner trailing in his wake. It is the first time they have seen him since the cutting, and he has come to see the boy, who lies on his damp bed in the gloom, having taken a turn for the worse. Grey prods him with a toe.

‘Looks like I shall win my wager,’ he tells them. ‘Though by the Mass you do put on a fine show. If you’re alive at the end of all this, do you know I’ve half a mind to make you my own? How would you like that, eh, boy? Surgeon to the most powerful man in the whole of the Northern Marches and beyond? It could happen, you know? Hmmm? It could.’

And Horner closes his eyes and Katherine looks over at Thomas and Thomas knows just what she is thinking: they really cannot show Grey the ledger. He will lose it, burn it, drop it down the chute in the garderobe. Or, worse, he will fumblingly understand it for what it is and take it to King Henry himself and claim some advantage for himself alone, forgetting Katherine and Thomas and Sir John Fakenham, if ever the scheme to proclaim Edward illegit-imate were to come good.

‘My confessor tells me today it is the feast of St Luke,’ Grey continues, clapping his gloved hands together. ‘So we have but two weeks until the big day, after which we will learn if Horner will owe me a noble, or I him, and whether or not you two shall be hanged for spies.’

The next day all are there to see the boy open his eyes, and hear his few stammered words. He swears and bucks with the pain, pulling at the stump as if he means to tear it off, and Thomas and Jack are quick to throw themselves on him, pinning him down while Katherine forces him to drink some of Grey’s spirit.

When he is sufficiently stupefied, they relax.

‘He will live,’ she announces.

‘My God!’ Thomas says. ‘You are a miracle worker.’

He cannot help beaming at her, and Jack looks unsure, as if he is intruding on something, and he leaves them to it.

She has missed being alone with Thomas, but though Devon John is unconscious, she still feels anxious when he wraps his arms around her.

‘If anyone should catch us, Thomas …’ she says.

‘I cannot help it,’ he says.

And she tries to imagine what would happen then. She is certain that the gibbet would come as a mercy.

He lets her go and steps away to pace awkwardly.

‘We did not come here for this,’ he says. ‘We didn’t come to rot here with Grey. We must get out. Find King Henry.’

She nods.

‘But how?’ she asks, looking around them at the damp curtain walls. ‘It seems as easy to break out of a castle as to break into it.’

The gatehouse is always closed and guards armed with nocked bows patrol walkways, there to deter deserters as much as intruders. Their only hope is to be sent on a patrol with Horner, and attempt to slip away as opportunity affords, but so far they have not been permitted out of the castle’s great encircling wall.

‘And even if we managed it, we should have to go to Scotland.’

Scotland sounds horrible, and impossibly far.

But just then the church bells start ringing and Horner approaches, striding across the bailey, looking purposeful and pleased.

‘Finally,’ he calls from some distance. ‘Finally! King Henry is coming to Bamburgh.’

They look at one another. It is uncanny.

‘Why?’ she asks.

Horner is nonplussed, because why wouldn’t King Henry come to Bamburgh? But Katherine wonders if it means the Scots have ejected him, as was threatened, and so there will be no more help for Henry’s cause from that source, and what few supplies they have, well, they will soon be used up, won’t they? And after they are, what then? But Horner is not interested in that.

‘Now all we need is one spark!’ he says. ‘Just one little thing to set the country alight, to get it to rise up behind King Henry and oust this usurper Edward of March.’

There is a moment of silence. Thomas cannot help but glance at the pillow on which the boy is out cold. Horner looks down too.

‘Christ, he looks drunk,’ he says. ‘Will he live?’

‘I believe so,’ Katherine says.

‘Sir Ralph will be pleased,’ Horner says.

‘Why? I thought he was looking forward to hanging us as spies.’

‘That’s all changed now,’ he says. ‘One of King Henry’s gentlemen of the bedchamber is carrying a wound that has so far defied his physician, and Sir Ralph has been boasting you are a miracle worker, and can cure him.’

Katherine is instantly nervous.

‘Me?’ she asks. ‘I cannot just—’

Horner laughs at her predicament, then leaves them.

And Katherine sits suddenly, exhausted, there on the foot of the pile of filthy straw, her slight frame hidden in overlarge hose and pourpoint, an old-fashioned linen cap covering her ears, her fine fingers on the tip of her pointed chin, deep in anxious thought.

‘At least we will be near King Henry,’ he says.

And she looks at him and at that moment she is caught in a waft of the thin autumn light from the door, and she is so ethereally, delicately beautiful, to his mind, that he almost laughs.

‘But Thomas,’ she says. ‘Should we still give King Henry the ledger?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because – because if this place is anything by which to judge the health of his cause, then I cannot imagine him ever prevailing against King Edward. You have forgotten, but I will never forget that army coming up the road to Towton. It took a day to ride from one end to the other, you know? And look at what Sir Ralph Grey has here. Two hundred men? Three hundred?’

‘But King Henry might have a great power in Bamburgh?’

‘Yes,’ she says sadly. ‘He might.’

There is a long silence.

‘Well, let us see,’ Thomas says. ‘See what manner of army he has, then decide.’

She nods.

‘And in the meantime,’ she says, ‘we have this wounded gentleman of the King’s bedchamber.’

‘He might prove a more reliable conduit to King Henry than Sir Ralph,’ Thomas supposes. ‘We might show it to him, and he in his turn might show it to King Henry, and then that’s Horner’s spark, the one that will light up the country in favour of Lancaster.’

He says it to reassure himself, but she nods.

‘He could not be worse,’ she says.

And then it is, finally, All Saints.

They have found some fresh straw and a clean blanket, and after Mass, Devon John, the boy, is sitting up, shirtless, waiting for Grey to come and pass him as alive. He is unable to stop looking at his stump, which he holds up like a fish’s flipper, but he is definitely, defiantly still alive. He is swearing almost constantly – about the stump, about the pain he still feels, about the man who hit him with the billhook – in an accent you only hear in parts around London, and he keeps demanding more of Grey’s distillation, on which he has developed a reliance.

Eventually Grey comes, approximately sober, and he peers at Devon John’s stump and closes his eyes and mimes a shudder of revulsion.