Kingmaker: Broken Faith (46 page)

‘You are that boy’s sister?’ he goes on.

‘Yes,’ she says, her face blank.

‘And you are married to that archer who assists him in his – his – whatever it is he does?’

‘Yes.’

Grey leans back. ‘Well,’ he says, as if he has heard everything now.

He senses Thomas looming up and turns to him.

‘This is your wife?’

‘Yes,’ Thomas says.

‘But how in God’s name do you tell them apart in the dark?’

Just as with John Stump, Thomas is not sure what Grey means. He finds himself on shifting ground.

‘The need has never arisen,’ he says.

No one says anything for a moment. Grey stares at them, looking from one to the other. He knows something is wrong, and that they are waiting for him to leave before he divines it.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I hope you are as skilled with the knife as your brother. We will have need of a surgeon or two tomorrow, I should think.’

THE SICKNESS WAKES
her when it is still absolutely dark. Thomas is next to her, and she can smell him, and what was once pleasantly dusty has become less so, and she rolls to the other side, but here is Jack, breathing a rhythmic gale in her face, and she has noticed that when a man has not had enough to eat, as Jack has not, his breath is very bad, as Jack’s is now. So she turns back and looks up at the underside of the cart and she tries to pretend that if she does not move, she will not vomit, and this works, and the nausea subsides. She lies still for a moment, her hands across her belly, letting her eyes become accustomed to the dark. Most men are scared of it, thinking it a presence, rather than an absence, but she has never felt so, and she used to scorn the sisters at the priory who turned their clogs over during the night for fear they would fill with darkness and so become evil.

The baby will come in September, she supposes, and she thinks then of Eelby’s wife, and how she must have lain like this at one time, perhaps next to that snoring boar of her husband, and she wonders with a start what has happened to the son, the miraculous baby? She has not thought about him since they were sent north, since coming to Alnwick. Dear God. She feels she has somehow betrayed the boy, now, by having her own, and before she ever managed to find him in those trackless green wastes into which the eel catcher had disappeared. She wonders what the boy would be like now. Walking perhaps? Learning his first word? ‘Eel’, probably.

She will find him, she thinks, when this is over. Next year perhaps. When her own baby is born. She will show them one another. Or is that vanity? And anyway, where will she be? She simply cannot guess. She cannot even guess where she will be next week, since anything might happen today, tomorrow, the day after.

So she must come up with something. But what? Her mind does not seem so sharp as it once was, she has noticed, and she thinks it might be the sleeping rough with so little food that has done it. It is why she was so pleased to announce that she was Kit’s sister, though she thinks how odd that was: the words were out of her mouth before she thought them through.

When he’d heard, Master Payne had just shaken his head, half in sorrow, half in admiration. She thinks about him now, and she prays he will stay with Somersets’ army, stay with her, but she knows he is King Henry’s man, and must go where the king goes. She wishes she and Thomas could go with him to Bamburgh, perhaps, however uncertain that future might seem, and that he would be by her side when her time came.

He would not wish it, of course, and would claim ignorance of her woman’s body, but how could that be so, she thinks now, when he spotted her condition before she did? In one glance? He is a very fine physician, she thinks, and perhaps there is something to his theories about the planets and their position in the sky, for after all, what does she know? She has picked things up as she has gone along, from old ladies and Mayhew, while Master Payne has been to far-off countries where Christian men gather together to pursue knowledge, to dissect corpses in order to understand how they worked when they were alive. Such depth of learning is – is something.

The camp awakens around her, coming to while it is no longer night, but not quite day, and there is a curious gentleness in the soft morning air. Voices are muted, consideration and accommodation informs every dealing as lines of men and women make their way between the damp canvases of the tents down to the river, there to conduct their ablutions with a semblance of privacy. The lull of early morning lasts only until the arrival of bread and ale, brought down the hill by carts from Hexham, and a mad scramble follows during which every man must exert himself to get what he needs.

Thomas returns with a great pitcher of ale and the upper crust of a loaf that must once have been the size of a man’s body. He divides it unequally in her favour, and Jack laughs. He is looking very much better. She wonders what it was that ailed him. Some miasma from the river? He is not mobile enough to fight yet, and he and John Stump both refused to leave with King Henry and Sir Ralph Grey the evening before, and so they are to stay in the camp, to keep such a baggage train as they possess, and she is pleased. They will be with her. She has volunteered for surgery, but there is even less with which to work than there ever was at Hedgeley Moor, and she wonders what she might usefully do, except sit with her hand on a man’s brow while he dies, and even that worries her.

After he has eaten Jack hobbles away and Thomas watches him go with a nod that strikes her as more calculated than heartfelt, and she wonders what Thomas is up to, but then Horner comes with others in Grey’s livery trailing behind. He is in rust-spotted harness that he has had little help putting on; in one hand he clutches a pollaxe Katherine has never seen before, and with the other he holds his helmet against his chest. Others are coming past, spilling out of the camp in their companies: Hungerford and Roos’s men, still not trusted after last time, have the furthest to go, since they are to take the right flank, facing north towards Corbridge, while Somerset’s men are to dominate the centre.

‘We are to take the left, Thomas,’ Horner says, ‘with Neville of Brancepeth and Tailboys’s men. We are to drive Montagu’s flank back into the river.’

Thomas just nods. The way Horner says it, it is as if he believes it is possible, though in the very next minute he reminds John Stump to look to the baggage and the followers.

‘In case Montagu sends prickers around,’ he says, ‘but he won’t.’

John Stump nods cheerfully enough.

‘Nice to have something to do,’ he says.

‘Where is Jack?’ Horner asks. John Stump shrugs and mutters that he is about, and not likely to go far, not with that leg.

Then, in the distance there is a bugle blown. Men stop and stare quizzically at one another.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘An alarm.’

‘Can they –? Can Montagu be here already?’

The alarm continues, is taken up by nearer trumpets.

‘By Christ! It must be them!’

The camp erupts into a frenzy of movement. A drum starts. Then another. Then another. They are coming closer. So too are the alarms as the tidings spread. Lord Montagu and at least five thousand of his men are across the Tyne at Corbridge and are moving south and west in good order. And now every man is hurrying, some are running with others still tying their points, and there is a great confusing struggle as they rush to get up the hill before Montagu can beat them to it.

‘I will see you after it,’ Thomas tells John Stump as he forces his helmet on. John nods.

‘We’ll be here,’ he says. ‘Me and Jack. Couple of cripples as may be, but we’ll look after her all right.’

And Thomas can only nod and then he turns to her, and for the first time he is allowed to kiss her with all these other men about, and he opens his arms to envelop her, to really say goodbye properly, but she has to force herself to allow it, because he smells of sweat and horses and rust and now her insides are rebelling and so this first kiss goodbye is perfunctory, snatched, and she knows she will regret it later, if, God forbid, anything were to happen to either of them.

‘Go with God, Thomas,’ she says.

She realises she is crying, and she wishes she weren’t, and she wishes she did not feel so sick, and she wishes she could see him off as he deserves, and as she would wish to, but she cannot help herself. And then the boy with the drum comes out from the trees and he stands by them, his sticks thundering away, and he grins at them and she thinks he might be mad, or simple, and after a moment Horner taps Thomas on the shoulder with his pollaxe, and he mouths something and gestures uphill with its point, and Thomas takes his meaning, and he turns, and so they part, for the first time as man and wife, he going one way to fight with all the other men who are trudging past up the hill, while she and John Stump go the other way, walking against the tide, back down into the trees towards the river and the camp.

When they get there Tailboys’s men are busy loading his baggage on to mules. Heavy bags that set the animals staggering. Everyone else – all the women and the children and the cripples and the old men – is pressing along the river downstream, following its turns, a thousand paces or so, hurrying to where the trees thin and the ground rises, and there is a view of the hill to the east where the men will be. When she is there, she climbs up on a tree stump, awkward in her skirts, with John readying his arm to catch her should she fall, and she shields her eyes against the rising sun and watches the figures of men hurrying up the slope to the crest. After a moment John Stump climbs up beside her. More of the women from the camp join them, craning their necks. What can she see? What can she see? There are hundreds of men struggling in a swarm like ants up a hill. There is little sign of any organisation, but there are banners and standards and there are groups of men in similar livery gathering across a front that runs away from her where she stands.

While they wait, she wonders if there is any woman to ask for advice about her sickness. Behind them, along the river a little way, is a chapel attached to a small gatehouse or castle, not unlike Bywell, she thinks, only even smaller, with one small turret, filled just then with a crowd of men and women watching, just as if they were at an entertainment.

‘By God, look,’ John shouts, pointing. ‘He’s bloody well done it!’

And there is a burble of approval and admiration. Somerset and his men have made it to the top of the hill. There are still plenty hurrying to join them, but enough have made it up and now their banners and flags are raised on its crown, and she can hear the drummers and the trumpeters are up there too, going at it, and now, at the foot of the slope, she can just see more flags coming into view, and she supposes this must be Montagu and his men, though for the moment they are hidden behind the rise.

She remembers the only other battle she has watched like this – outside Northampton, standing with all the women and that Italian bishop, by the stone cross in the rain – and she sees there is a rhythm to these things. Once the men are placed, there is a pause for prayers and then a moment for something else. Reflection? Reconsideration? Regret? What? She does not know. Then when that is over, the commander might say something to encourage the men and instil within them a certainty as to the justice of their cause and that God is on their side and that He will look over them. Then the archers will stride forward and the battle will commence.

She thinks of Thomas up there, and how he must be feeling, and she prays without praying for him. Around her all the women seem to know which flags the knights carry, and they are collected in groups themselves, so that all Tailboys’s men’s women stand together, and all Roos’s men’s women stand together, and they seem knowledgeable about almost every aspect of what is to come: dispositions and wind direction, vantage points, where the pressure will first be felt, then where it will most be felt. They have a low opinion of Roos and Hungerford’s men – despite the presence of their women – and are unrestrained in voicing it.

‘Cowards,’ one of them says. ‘They’ll break today, that is for sure.’

‘Let’s hope they run the other way this time.’

And heads are turned and there is some ill feeling.

She is surprised to find they are not especially concerned for the safety of their men. Or perhaps they do not talk of it? But they are on tiptoes, faces craned, like children watching a mummers’ play, and then one of them says: ‘Here we go’ and there is a collective drawing in of breath, and after that there is total silence as they watch the arrows fly. From this distance the shafts merely smudge the distant sky, an impression, like smoke in autumn, but the women know how crucial these moments are, and Katherine remembers Walter – was it? – telling her that any battle was decided in these first moments. If everything else was the same, he said, whoever loosed the most the fastest would win.

Today those loosing downhill with the sun behind them, and even – is it possible? – the slightest wind, might be expected to prevail, to inflict such damage on those coming at them up the slope from below that the battle will end almost before it has begun, and one of the women, an old one – stained apron, green dress, sleeves rolled up to reveal arms like legs, and a great wrap of linen tucked in tight around her face – says you always know who will win the day about now, and she snaps her fingers, and though John Stump says that is rubbish, Katherine watches the woman’s expression, and sees her wrinkles deepen as she frowns at what she’s seeing, and then as she comes to understand it, she shakes her head and sucks her remaining teeth.

‘Run out of arrows,’ she says.

And she says no more. Everybody understands. Somerset’s archers have loosed all they have – too few – and they have let Montagu’s men off the hook, and now it is Montagu’s men who keep up their attack, and it easy to imagine what that will do to Somerset’s archers. There are groans among the women. Wailing too.

‘We should be ready,’ the old woman says. ‘There will be plenty of wounded.’