Kingmaker: Broken Faith (9 page)

‘That is not true,’ she shouts. ‘I wished her only well. Otherwise I would not have fetched Widow Beaufoy or paid for her services out of my own purse.’

Next to her, Widow Beaufoy has taken another distancing step.

‘Is that true?’ the coroner asks Widow Beaufoy. ‘Did she?’

‘She did,’ she agrees, reluctantly. ‘But I would have come anyway.’

‘Course she would!’ one of the hecklers shouts.

The coroner cocks an eyebrow at Widow Beaufoy and Katherine sees he has understood something, and she feels her own ignorance as a sharp if familiar pain. The coroner nods and turns back to Katherine, and it is as if he has forgotten where he was, or perhaps, no. He has not forgotten. It is something else.

‘So,’ he asks. ‘Why did you hate the dead woman?’

The question makes Katherine feel closed in upon, hemmed, surrounded.

‘I did not hate her,’ she spits. ‘I hardly knew her.’

‘But …?’ the coroner begins, gesturing to the jury, as if they are proof of the opposite.

Katherine has had enough.

‘I do not know any of these men other than by sight,’ she counters, ‘and I am certain the same is true in reverse.’

‘Yet there seems to be some doubt?’ the coroner persists.

‘Oh, there’s doubt all right,’ the first heckler shouts and before the coroner can silence him, the second chimes in:

‘Yes,’ he calls. ‘If you hardly knew her, why’d you fetch Widow Beaufoy there? Why’d you pay for her services, eh? For someone you hardly knew?’

‘Doesn’t seem likely, does it!’ shouts the first.

This second man is in the shadows but she thinks he is the one with the tall reddish hat. She does not think she has seen him before.

‘I knew her well enough to do my Christian duty,’ she states.

‘Did you?’ the first heckler replies. ‘Cutting her open? I’d hardly call that your Christian duty!’

This gets a low laugh. The coroner is content to let the exchange run.

‘I did it to save the baby,’ Katherine shouts above the noise. ‘Is he not alive now, because of what we did?’

‘You only saved the baby because you wanted him for yourself!’

This is too much.

‘Who are you?’ Katherine calls. ‘What village do you come from?’

‘Never you mind,’ he calls back.

She takes a step towards the men. She can feel that roaring in her ears. She wishes she had a knife now, for someone needs to shut this man up.

‘That’s enough,’ the coroner shouts at last. He turns to Katherine.

‘Tell us what happened,’ he instructs.

She tries to calm herself. She can feel her face flushed and her heartbeat in her teeth. She takes a deep breath. She can smell her sweat rising from the stained wool of her dress.

‘Come on!’ one of the jurors calls. ‘Get on with it.’

‘Swarm of lies it’ll be anyway!’

‘Let her speak,’ the coroner demands and Katherine begins.

‘The baby was stuck in Eelby’s wife,’ she says. ‘He would not come out in the normal fashion. He was turned, or the womb had moved. Or something. So we cut— No. I cut, with Widow Beaufoy’s instruction, I cut Eelby’s wife to save the baby.’

‘And this is the knife used?’ the coroner asks. He is on safer ground here, and he holds up Widow Beaufoy’s beautiful knife, and there is a murmur of appreciation. Eelby confirms that it is the knife and the coroner places it next to his clerk’s inkstand. It is deodand now, forfeit to the Crown, unless Katherine is willing to pay for it a second time. She glances at Widow Beaufoy, who is turned from her.

‘Go on,’ the coroner instructs. ‘What happened after you cut her?’

‘She bled. A lot. We could not staunch the flow of blood. And then she died.’

‘There, you see!’ one of the hecklers shouts. ‘Told you she killed her!’

‘I admit she died because of what I did,’ Katherine replies. ‘But by then she was already dead in all but name. I shortened her life by as long as it might take to say the prayers of the rosary.’

There is silence for a moment, as if this is reasonable, then one of the men shouts: ‘That is time she will never have back.’

There is a grumble of assent.

‘No one regrets that as much as me,’ Katherine says. ‘But you did not see her. She was dying anyway, and the baby was too. We wanted to baptise him.’

‘You wanted her dead so you could have the baby for yourself!’ comes the first heckler.

‘That is not true!’ Katherine hears herself shrieking. ‘That is not true.’

‘Then why’d you kill her?’ demands the second.

‘I didn’t!’

‘Yes, you did!’ the other one shouts. ‘Said it yourself!’

The coroner has lost control of the inquest. Katherine looks to him and, for a moment, he seems to be considering trying to recover it, but then he decides against it. After all, it is not his task to get to the truth of the matter. His task is to fine the Hundred for the breach of as many rules as possible, and to establish if it is worth the King’s Justices pursuing the case to trial, given that should the perpetrator of the crime be found guilty at that trial, then all their property will come to the King. In this case they all know that Margaret, Lady Cornford’s property is extensive, even if it is run-down, and even if it is in the name of her blind husband, so it is certainly worth the Justices’ while to hear the trial when they are next in Boston. More than that, though, the presence of the hecklers means that someone, somewhere, is taking an interest in the case, and someone, somewhere, wants it to go to trial, and so it is useless the coroner trying to stop it.

The coroner turns to them and Katherine can see him looking at her with that mixture of pity and scorn, and she can guess what he is thinking: that her husband is blind, and that she is a woman, and so it is not only natural that she is separated from her property, it is inevitable. He is probably wondering, indeed, why it has taken someone so long to take it from her.

So, finally, the coroner gathers himself and holds up a hand.

‘Fellows!’ he calls. ‘I believe there is doubt enough in the circumstances of Agnes Eelby’s death to admit the possibility of a felony. So I order the binding over of Margaret, Lady Cornford, to await the imminence of the King’s Justices.’

There is an eruption of cheering and of stamping of feet in parts of the crowd, but puzzlement in others, and the midwife takes one further step from Katherine.

‘I find further that Widow Beaufoy is innocent of any involvement in this felony, and that she is therefore free to go, though I demand of you in the King’s name that you fulfil your duty to God and Man and make yourself available to the said Justices when they should come into the county.’

Widow Beaufoy nods, sombre as nightfall.

‘Wait!’ Katherine shouts.

‘Bailiff?’ the coroner says.

The bailiff moves quickly on his spindly legs. He places himself before Katherine and Widow Beaufoy and he has a short sword on his belt, which he touches emphatically. Katherine retreats a step. She will be no trouble. When he is sure of her, he asks the coroner what he wants done with her.

‘The gaol?’ the coroner suggests as if it were obvious.

The bailiff draws air hissing through the gaps in his teeth.

‘Is under water,’ he says, spitting. ‘Been so these five months past.’

‘What have you done with other prisoners?’ the coroner asks.

‘We have shown them the gaol and one look and they’ve paid a fine or forfeited some part of themselves.’

The coroner tugs on the short hairs of his beard. His glance travels over her and Katherine feels herself withering within. She cannot help unconsciously covering the blade of her clipped ear, hidden under the felt of her hat, with her fingers.

‘Is there nowhere?’ the coroner asks the bailiff. ‘Some convent perhaps?’

The bailiff shakes his head.

‘There is one,’ Widow Beaufoy volunteers, ‘one that might have her.’

And she looks at Katherine for a long moment, as if she knows, and Katherine feels a terrible crushing weight on her bones.

‘St Mary’s,’ Widow Beaufoy says. ‘The Gilbertine Priory at Haverhurst.’

THOMAS EVERINGHAM PAYS
the ferryman a small silver coin to cross the river on Lady Day, 25 March, the first day of the New Year, and then rides south and east through thin drizzle, following a track that he is told will lead him – ‘by and by’ – to another that will take him south to Lincoln. He rides all morning, stopping only to let his horse graze, at about midday, while he drinks from his costrel under a tree. Afterwards he follows the track through shaded woodlands where pale moths each the size of a child’s fingernail rise up at him from the undergrowth.

As he rides, his mind starts playing curious tricks on him, tripping from one thought to the next without ever settling, and as they come, each successive thought or observation feels more significant than its forebear, until that one is itself replaced by another that feels yet more important, vital even, until that too is replaced by another, even more important thought. He sees even the most common object – a pile of rocks acting as a way marker, a winding post by shallow-banked washing pool, a stand of elms – and at first each seems to reveal within itself some previously hidden significance that leads to another and on to another. Each time he is struck by these thoughts he is relieved to have remembered it, but then he realises – these thoughts, they mean nothing. They are irrelevant.

At first the sensation is pleasant, but soon it becomes confusing, then wearying and finally irritating. He starts to ride with his eyes shut, and distracts himself by wondering what will happen to the two boys he left on the west bank of the river. He supposes they will return home to wherever it is they come from and he tries to imagine what sort of homecoming that might be.

In the late afternoon he reaches a crossroads as predicted and he turns his horse south and once again he is assailed by thoughts he cannot control. Only this time, instead of those fruitless associations he experienced in the morning, these insights ring true. They are proper memories: hazy-edged and cacophonous, peopled with faceless men and women, but simple and even sensible: here he once stopped in the dark to let drunk men piss. Here he rode one autumn day with – with – with who? A boy? A boy. No. Not a boy, not a boy like Adam or John, but … He feels odd. A warmth fills him, fills his chest, makes his shoulders glow, and again the tears come. Why? He wipes them away with a knuckle.

He shakes his head and rides on. But the memories continue, ambushing him as he comes out of the woods and into the fields from where he can see the great cathedral of Lincoln. He stops for a moment, ignoring the spire, and looks back along the length of the road he has just travelled. He is gripped by the certainty that he is riding away from something, rather than towards it. He turns his horse and it waits patiently while he studies the road that disappears into the gloom of the trees. After a long moment the horse snorts and Thomas shakes his head and turns and rides the last few furlongs to Lincoln just as the purple-edged dusk arrives and parish bells ring out. Lights appear on the city walls, like stars, and at the gatehouse the men of the Watch are suspicious around their brazier.

‘Come far?’ they ask and laugh when he admits he has, yet he does not know where he has come from, only it has been ‘that way’. They direct him to the friary of the Austin Friars by the Newport gate, and he follows his feet, his mind still crowded with memories and associations, so that when he gets there, and after the friars have given him soup and bread, they leave him alone, thinking he might be touched.

In the morning he is up and gone before the bell for Prime, when it is still dark, and he walks his horse out past the cathedral close and down a steep hill where his mind erupts again and he is afraid he is going mad, and he finds his feet tangling as he passes a well-made, jettied house on a steep hill, and he almost falls to his knees. He remembers sunlight and the sound of horses’ hooves on the cobbles, and something calamitous, but what? He cannot say. He recalls a woman, but so ghostly is the impression that— No. There is nothing there. Nothing to hold on to. He feels he could bang his head against the ground to clear it of these flickering shades, and he turns with his eyes half-closed and he stumbles on down the hill like a drunk, hanging on his horse’s reins while the animal’s hooves skitter on the rain-slicked cobbles and the slough of wet straw and dung. At last he is out, through the Broadgate and across the bridge over the turbid waters and he is away, into the flat farmland to the south of the city.

Here the sensations let up, soften, become less urgent, and he climbs up into the saddle as the sun rises and he rides east with the sun before him, a pink orb, flat gold rays filling the mist-softened lands. He seems to know where he is going, but he does not, really, until he finds a crossroads and a man in a rough woven reed hat to tell him that this road leads east, and eventually to Boston.

‘After which you will go no further,’ he says in a familiar accent, ‘on account of there being no further to go.’

Thomas thanks him and rides on, now with his face into the wind, until by midday he sees what it seems he has been looking for, and again, here comes the turbulent riot of uninvited thoughts. He stops his horse and swings from the saddle and drops to the road’s muddy surface. He falls to his knees and presses his forehead into the black grit at the side of the track. After a while, his heart slows, his mind ceases its lurching, and he stands and shields his eyes and stares across the wet lands and it is just as he has remembered it: the grey clutch of slate-roofed buildings gathered behind their wall in the shadow of the square-towered church. Nothing has changed. The reeds that fringe the road and the waters’ edges are vivid green and lustrous with spring growth, and there is still that smell in the air, of mud and rot, and the sky seems vast, from horizon to horizon, and above float pale winged gulls in the clear grey sky, and that is it. Nothing else.