Kingmaker: Broken Faith (32 page)

Riven follows her eyes.

‘You like the pollaxe?’ he asks her. ‘How strange. There is a story behind it, you know? I lost it, once, but it came back to me. Things. They have a habit of coming back to me. People, too—’

‘Where did you find it?’ Thomas interrupts. He is also staring at it, confused. He will remember it better if he picks it up, she supposes. She hopes he doesn’t, or not for the moment. Riven switches his gaze to Thomas, and Thomas looks back and there is a long moment as they hold one another’s stare, until Riven blinks.

‘Who are you?’

‘Thomas Everingham.’

‘Thomas Everingham? Hmmm. No. I do not know that name, but I do know you. But where from, Thomas Everingham?’

Thomas cannot help glancing at her before answering. Riven lies there, looking Thomas up and down, measuring his precise worth and station.

‘You do not,’ Thomas says.

‘Oh, but I do,’ he says. ‘Yes. And someone such as you would remember someone such as me, so you obviously do not want me to remember you. So. What can that mean?’

Thomas says nothing.

‘You have changed, haven’t you?’ Riven goes on. ‘Yes. That is it. I knew you as someone else, perhaps? Who, though? Or – more like – what? No. But it will come to me. It will come to me. By and by.’

And then he closes his eyes and he turns to face the wall again. Thomas looks down at her. What should he do? He stands there with his hands at his sides. All the advantages he has over Riven are gone, precisely because he has so many, and so will not use them. This is the difference, she thinks, between a man like Riven and a man like Thomas. A sudden image comes to her: of how it would be if it were the other way around and Thomas was lying there, and Riven had come to kill him. She can see it eerily clearly: Riven walking fast, on light feet, Thomas not given a moment to cry out before a knife comes down. Or he would have that pollaxe. Dear God. She can so easily imagine the noise that would make, and the blood on the sheets and the walls perhaps. She clenches her eyes shut.

‘What are your thoughts?’ Payne asks, nodding at the forgotten wound. She starts and looks down at it again.

‘An arrow wound,’ she says.

‘Never?’ Payne laughs.

‘But it is not diseased?’

‘Ah, no,’ he says. ‘No gangrene. That is a miserable death, and afterwards, did you know, when the patient is dead, you can remove his liver – which will be quite black also – and place it on marble, and it will seethe, like a wet cloth being wrung?’

She cannot believe what he is saying.

‘You have – cut open a man to look at his liver?’ she asks.

‘In Cambridge,’ Payne says, quite as if everybody has done this. ‘And then again in Bologna.’

She rubs her chin, looks at the wound again, and then glances back at Payne. He is boasting, or lying. The Church would not allow such things, surely? And what or where is Bologna? She dare not ask. There is something very unusual about Payne, she thinks. It is as if he has some other life, a parallel life of which she knows nothing.

‘But is there nothing you can do for him?’ she asks.

‘Oh, I keep his humours balanced,’ Payne tells her, gesturing with the flask of murky liquid at the bleeding bowl on the coffer and at the dried greenery, ‘and King Henry has ordered Mass to be said, twice daily.’

‘Mass,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ Payne replies, turning with a questioning smirk. ‘Prayer is most efficacious, don’t you find? Our Lord Jesus is the heavenly leech. He can cure all and with enough prayer I am certain the arrowhead will free itself.’

‘Have you ever known this to happen?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he allows. ‘But that is not to say that it will not happen in the future.’

‘Then why cut a man open to see how he is constructed, if faith is all that is required?’ she asks.

‘Indeed,’ he says. ‘But let us talk of that later. We must discuss this patient. King Henry has been swayed by Sir Ralph Grey’s unusual eloquence, and has ordered me to assist you in what he believes will be the removal of the arrowhead and the restoration of Sir Giles to bodily if not spiritual health. He expects you to succeed. He has been promised you will.’

‘Have you examined the arrowhead?’ she asks.

Payne shakes his head.

‘The wound was healed before he came under my hands,’ he says, coming around, unable to resist flaunting his knowledge. ‘It is an interesting case, however. The arrowhead is still within his flesh, caught in the bone, perhaps. I believe it was bent when it was loosed, reused perhaps, or is of some curious design, or was perhaps loosed at great range, and so instead of killing the patient, as the bowman might have wished, it broke the scapula – here.’

He places his hands on Riven’s back. He has long elegant fingers, tapering to fine, spotless fingernails.

‘I suppose if Sir Giles had chosen to seek help then, from a surgeon, perhaps he might have had the arrow removed with little anxiety, but things being as they were, he could not, and since then the bone has, I believe, absorbed the arrow. It is as if it has grown back, and healed around it, do you see? Or perhaps the arrow skipped across the bone, and is dug in below or even above it, or perhaps to one side, or perhaps to the other. I can’t tell. Wherever it is, it has pinned his limb in this position – look, he cannot move it, or at least not without great pain.’

He tweaks the joint and Riven stiffens. After a moment he lets out a long sigh and relaxes.

‘To remove it now might require the breaking of the bone, which is not within my purlieu as a physician, but then again the arrow’s head may be lodged perilously close to the blood vessels that congregate near the lungs or even the heart? Were you to cut those, the patient would bleed to death in mere moments and it would all be over.’

She listens carefully. Such things are beyond her, she knows that, but then when she looks at the wound, looks at the flesh below it, she can almost sense the arrowhead, see it in its pouch of scarred flesh, and she can imagine slicing the skin and extracting it, and proving to those bastards in the hall, the men who’d almost jeered at her, that she could perform what is, or will be anyway, a miracle.

‘With your assistance, Master Payne,’ she says, ‘I should like to try to remove the arrow.’

Payne blinks.

‘I did not think you had any choice,’ he says.

THE OPERATION IS
set for the second week after All Saints, when Payne tells them the planets’ positions will be most propitious for an operation that may touch on the heart and the lungs.

‘But it is Giles Riven,’ Thomas repeats. ‘Giles Riven! All the time we’ve wanted nothing but his death and the moment we have the perfect chance, we falter, and worse. You must now save his life or lose yours in the trying!’

‘I know,’ Katherine says. ‘I know.’

They are back in the tower, staring across the bailey to the keep.

‘He would have done it like that!’ Thomas says, and he snaps his fingers. ‘If it had been me or you on the bed, and Riven had meant to kill us, he would have come in, and simply—’

He mimes a stabbing.

‘But we are not murderers,’ she says almost sadly. ‘Besides, we would have been killed had you even tried. You saw the guard. Master Payne says he is there day and night to prevent any man whose father or son died at Northampton coming for vengeance.’

But still Thomas is disgusted with himself and so the next day, while Katherine is closeted with Master Payne, he goes to the beach with Jack and the rest of Grey’s men and he takes his turn to send sheaf after sheaf of arrows across the dunes, thumping them into the mounded sand butts two, three, four hundred paces away. Bows have not been easy to come by, and those they have are not good quality. More than one cracks and breaks in the cold, setting everyone, especially Thomas, on edge, but they carry on. He has discovered that most of Grey’s men are poor archers, able to loose a bow, but unable to gauge distance, and so they cannot land their shafts in groups such as archers from the other companies do. Horner maintains a cheerful disposition, but he is too kindly, or his expectations are too low, and Thomas finds himself shouting at the other men, making them loose their arrows all day, and sending the slowest to run through the sand to collect the shafts and then run back.

He hears them grumbling about him, wishing he’d never come, but he does not care. He feels a peculiar ferocity. He wants to work himself into exhaustion so that he does not have to think about the cruel trick God has played upon him and Katherine, so in the morning after a sleepless night of near fruitless speculation, they are at it again, in the rain, the same thing, and by the next day improvements are noticeable despite the blustering wind. Horner has yielded command of training to him completely now, and on the third day, to his order they can land their shafts in a neat line a hundred paces away, then a hundred and fifty paces, then two hundred paces, and the first time they do it in sequence, they are delighted with themselves, and Thomas runs to collect their arrows as a reward. Then they do it again. And again. And when the evening bell is rung Horner comes down from the gatehouse with three loaves of rye bread and a bucket of stew he claims Grey has given him to distribute among the men.

Horner walks back to the outward postern gate with him. They see Katherine in the tower, watching over them. Horner waves. She waves back.

‘Small, isn’t he? Kit?’ Horner starts.

Thomas mumbles his agreement.

‘Still, though,’ Horner says, ‘if we carry on like this, we’ll make such a company of archers that we will be in London before Christmastide.’

Thomas says nothing. Their boots are loud on the sandy soil.

‘All we need is one spark, Thomas,’ Horner goes on. ‘One spark! And I truly believe we can return King Henry to the throne. We can drive out those bloodsucking Yorkist fleas and restore the rightful king.’

But Horner does not know where this spark will come from and Thomas thinks of the ledger, lying up there, rolled in among the straw of his mattress, and it strikes him that he must find a better place to hide it until they can find some way of showing it to King Henry, and they must find someone to help them bring it before him. Payne is a possibility, it suddenly strikes him. Perhaps if they showed it first to Payne, and explained it, he might be the one to effect the connection? Thomas becomes more buoyant. There is a way to do this, after all.

But Horner has dropped his voice, and is confiding now.

‘The thing is, Thomas,’ he says. ‘The thing is we lack a natural leader. King Henry is – well. You have seen. He is – we need someone more martial for what is involved in this. The others, Lord Hungerford and Lord Roos, they are – well. I don’t know. They lack the vital spark. And I do not wish to speak ill of Sir Ralph Percy, or our own Sir Ralph Grey, it is only that – well. I should say no more. It is only I wish we had men such as they.’

‘They?’

‘The Yorkists. They have an embarrassment of leaders. King Edward himself, of course. He has led men in battle, and has won them too. And if he weren’t enough, they have the Earl of Warwick.’

Thomas remembers the Earl of Warwick, a little bit.

‘And then if
he
weren’t enough,’ Horner goes on, ‘they have Lord Montagu.’

‘Lord Montagu keeps Newcastle, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Horner agrees, ‘for King Edward. He is the Earl of Warwick’s brother. Mean as a marten, and his men tougher than boiled leather.’

Thomas remembers the Watch outside the gate at Newcastle. Proper soldiers, they were.

‘And that the Duke of Somerset has also joined their ranks is just yet more salt in the wound. He was once a fast ally of King Henry, you know, and a fine leader of men, but now – pfft. He is become King Edward’s gentleman of the bedchamber. They sleep together, in the same bed, naked as the day they were born, but he still hasn’t bothered to kill him.’

Thomas grunts.

‘No, the truth is, Thomas,’ Horner continues, ‘we need someone to take this – us – by the scruff of the neck, to take what men we have and do something with us. But where will that man come from? Around here?’

He holds his arms out and turns on the spot so that his heels dig into the sand. Seagulls wheel overhead in the pale grey sky. There is nothing for miles.

In the gatehouse chamber, Thomas is peculiarly and unexpectedly relieved to find the ledger where he left it: in its greasy leather bag hidden in the rolled straw of his mattress. He takes it out and slings it around his shoulder. He wonders where Katherine is, and then hears Devon John coming quickly up the steps. The others have changed Devon John’s name, since it turns out he has never been to Devon, but comes from Essex, and now they call him John Stump. He is breathing hard and carrying a pot pressed to his chest with his one good arm, and from it comes the smell of cooked pork, and something else exotic and sweet that Thomas has never smelled before.

‘Wherever did you get that?’ Thomas asks.

‘It was just lying around,’ John Stump says with a grin, and he slops the pot forward to reveal a stew that glistens with oil. ‘I got it for Kit. Thought he looked a bit peaky. You too, if you’ve a mind?’

‘Christ, yes,’ Thomas says. Devon John places the pot on the oven’s ledge. A wisp of steam rises.

‘And it is still hot,’ he says. Then he winces and flaps at his missing arm.

‘Christ!’ he says. ‘I can feel my arm.’

‘But that is impossible,’ Thomas tells him.

‘Nevertheless,’ John Stump says, ‘I can feel it. I can feel my bracer is pointed too tight. It aches.’

He moves his stump as he would to hold out his arm to show Thomas where the strap of leather intended to protect his wrist from the bowstring’s slap would be. He thinks Thomas will see what he means.

‘Let us take this up to Kit,’ he suggests. ‘He is on watch.’

‘Again?’ John Stump says. ‘You two are always on watch together. Don’t know how you stand it, nights.’

Thomas hides his blush, but he is pleased no one suspects them of anything, pleased that no one imagines them wrapped together in their cloaks, sleeping alongside one another, or lying atop one another, his feet against the door’s planks so that it cannot be opened. These moments alone are stolen and intimate, terrifyingly risky, but – what else can they do?