Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (25 page)

Walter returns with Geoffrey.

‘Back to the ship, you lot,’ Geoffrey calls. ‘Fetch the stuff up. We need to get moving if we’re to find somewhere dry to sleep tonight.’

They pick their way back across the market square, but have to wait by the town gate while prisoners are led down to the harbour. One of them is wearing fine armour, the bevor broken, obviously high-born.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Fuck knows,’ Walter says. ‘Taking him back to Calais, anyway, so that’s where he’ll get his.’

He chops one hand on to the palm of his other to make the noise of an axe falling on a wooden block. The knight hesitates mid-step – he’s no more than a boy really, with clear skin and big frightened eyes – but then an unshaven soldier in Fauconberg’s livery pushes him from behind and on he goes.

By the time they are back aboard the carrack, Johnson is dead. He lies in a pool of blood to one side, the arrow still in his thigh, his head thrown back, lips blue, face as colourless as the moon.

‘Saw he was still moving,’ the master says with a shrug. ‘Thought he was just wounded.’

They gather their gear and between them they carry Johnson’s body in a hammock down the makeshift gangplank. They load it on to a cart. There are no oxen to be had so they have to wheel it themselves through the town. Once they are through they find a burial party at work with spades and mattocks in a field. Three priests and two heralds are counting the bodies. They unload Johnson, distribute his valuables, and swing him into the trench.

Beyond the graveyard is the common ground where Fauconberg is making camp. More men with shovels are throwing up earthworks while others cut stakes from the nearby woods. A fire is being lit near a red bell-shaped tent with yellow trim, and a man is erecting Fauconberg’s banner on a spear. Others in unfamiliar liveries are milling about, each waiting to speak to his heralds.

‘See?’ Simon says. ‘Men’re flocking to our colours now.’

They put up the tent in a corner of the camp and then scavenge some wood from a barn for their fire. They sit on their helmets by the flames and watch as men queue to join Fauconberg’s army. There is every sort of soldier, from swineherds with rough iron bills and glaives all the way up to knights with liveried retinues. Some of the soldiers they’ve been fighting only that day are returning to join up. Companies and contingents bring with them carts laden with barrels and sacks and their women and children, and as evening descends the army has already doubled its size.

‘Be invincible soon,’ Dafydd laughs.

‘Wait till we get to Canterbury before you say that,’ Walter says. ‘That’s the first real test.’

Canterbury. Even mention of it hurts Thomas. He looks around for Katherine, but then remembers.

‘How far is it?’ he asks.

‘A day?’ Geoffrey guesses. ‘Not far.’

Rain sets in. They retreat into the tent and stand peering out as the fires hiss and are slowly extinguished.

It doesn’t stop for the next two days, and by the third the camp is a stinking quagmire. Men slip and fall; horses slip and fall. Armour and weapons rust; Thomas’s jack doubles its weight. Men relieve themselves from the earthwork walls.

They are waiting on the Earl of Warwick, still in Calais.

‘Why doesn’t he just hurry up?’ Dafydd asks. ‘Seems I’ve spent half my life waiting for the bloody Earl of Warwick and a favourable bloody wind.’

‘Favourable wind,’ Owen repeats, rolling on to one buttock and farting.

It is still raining the next morning when the ships come in. Thomas is drinking ale with Geoffrey under the sodden straw awning of an alewife’s house. She is looking at them because together they take up most of the space and there is little room for any other customers. They are talking about Hugh.

‘He’s a boy,’ Thomas is saying. ‘He should still be at home. Not seeing all this.’ He gestures at the marketplace where now the rain has washed the blood from the cobbles, and all that remains of the fight are broken windows, starred stonework, arrows stuck in thatched roofs like pins in a cushion. One wall is still sooty and pocked where the gun exploded.

Geoffrey laughs.

‘Listen to you, Thomas. Ha. Like the old soldier all of a sudden.’

Thomas thinks for a moment. Christ. Geoffrey is right. All the things he’s done. The men he’s killed.

Look at his hands! Blood in the creases. Dear God.

‘And plenty been to fight younger’n Hugh,’ Geoffrey is saying. ‘I was in France when I was his age. And Walter? Well, how old was he when he first went to the wars? Three? Four?’ The ale leaves a wet crescent on Geoffrey’s upper lip.

‘But Hugh feels things,’ Thomas goes on. ‘Did you see him after we’d landed? He’d vomited on himself and soiled his hose. He’d not loosed an arrow.’

Geoffrey looks away, as if it is somehow his fault.

‘I’ll make sure he has more ale next time.’

‘It is not want of pluck, I think.’

Geoffrey shrugs.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he says. ‘Perhaps he shouldn’t be here. Perhaps he should be in a monastery.’

Thomas opens and shuts his mouth. A boy comes through the harbour gate where the portcullis has been broken down and already taken away by a smith.

‘The Earl of Warwick is come!’ he shouts, and they begin drinking up. By the time Warwick has disembarked, word has got out. Men and women and children are ignoring the rain and have come to watch.

Warwick rides the same beautiful black horse he rode hunting that day, and he is wearing a travelling cloak with a cross of St George on a tabard underneath. It is a gesture to please the common soldier and to let the people know he has not come to make war on their king. As he passes, the crowd shout their greetings and thank him for coming. Men bless him.

‘A Warwick!’ they cry. ‘A Warwick!’

‘Why do they love him so?’ Thomas asks. He remembers seeing Warwick after the hunt. Hastings would not be drawn on what had happened in the forest, but it was the Earl who shot Richard, and the Earl who rode away in haste.

‘You can’t blame them, Thomas,’ Geoffrey is telling him. ‘He’s kept the Narrow Sea free of pirates these past years, free of Frenchmen. More than the King could ever do.’

They stand at the side of the road that leads up to Fauconberg’s camp and as Warwick rides past them, his glance falls on them and his face twitches with recognition. His smile clouds; his eyes snap to the front. He rides on, his fist clenched by his hip.

‘But he is a bastard,’ Geoffrey says quietly. ‘That much I will say.’

The Duke of York’s son the Earl of March is next, much the bigger man, on a beautiful grey destrier. Thomas last saw him after the skirmish at Newnham. He is smiling and waving and laughing, and even from where Thomas stands he can see why. A little farther along the street is a tall young woman in a dark green kirtle. Her hat is high on her head and her chest is plump. One glance at her makes the spit in Thomas’s mouth dry. As the Earl of March rides past her, he makes his horse skitter on the cobbles. Sparks fly. He makes a show of soothing the horse, patting its neck; then when the horse is calmed, he takes off his hat and speaks to the woman, who blushes, and all the while her husband stands at her shoulder smiling fatly. After a minute the Earl of March rides on with a long backward glance.

Next comes Warwick’s father, the Earl of Salisbury, slumped in his saddle, glaring from under the brim of his hat where raindrops are gathered in a line. He looks at the people as if they are in his way, and somehow responsible for the rain; as he passes, the little crowd falls silent. Behind him, by some distance, comes Sir John Fakenham, his small pony being led by William Hastings. Hastings’s face is green, as if he has not enjoyed the passage and does not trust himself swaying on the back of a horse. A lad wearing his black bull badge is leading Hastings’s horse a few yards behind, and even the horse looks ill.

Sir John sees Geoffrey and Thomas and waves them over. They greet one another with handshakes.

‘Thanks be that you are still with us. I hear they put up a fight?’

Geoffrey nods.

‘And what’s the reckoning?’ Sir John asks.

‘Two dead,’ Geoffrey says. ‘Two boys from home.’

Sir John pulls a face.

‘If you give me their names? Though I know not how I’ll ever get word to their families. By all the saints, this is a bloody business. Englishmen killing Englishmen.’

‘And what of Richard, Sir John?’ Geoffrey asks.

Sir John’s face puckers.

‘He’s with Kit, aboard some damned carrack that has been cruelly knocked up, with that old pirate as a master, but she sailed on the same tide and should be off the coast now. That friend of yours is a born surgeon, Thomas, but my lord of Warwick is sending his own man over, a physician, and just as soon as Richard is settled, he shall have the best attention money can buy.’

Thomas smiles to think of Katherine. He glances down towards the dock where her ship should be arriving. There are more horsemen coming up from the ships now and it takes him a moment to realise he is looking at a man in a bishop’s headgear among them. When he sees him Thomas instantly turns his back on Sir John and disappears into the crowds.

‘Thomas?’ he hears Geoffrey call. ‘Where are you going?’

It is not the Bishop he fears, but the man riding the pony behind him: the cleric Lamn.

KATHERINE IS STANDING
at the ship’s rail when the
Mary
nudges against the dock at Sandwich for the second time in four days. The ship is now patched with bloodstained sailcloth and her timbers are scorched and studded with broken arrows.

‘Stand by,’ her master calls, and the Genoese cook, now promoted to sailor, throws a line for the boys on the dockside. Katherine returns to the waist where Richard lies face down, loosely tied to a softwood plank. He is asleep.

When she peers up over the ship’s rail she sees Thomas and Geoffrey waiting on the dockside, and she feels the warmth of relief. Both are alive. The state of the carrack had given her cause to fear the worst, but now here they are, shoulders hunched against the rain, waiting with a carter and an ox.

Thomas looks older, strained somehow, and she sees the burned houses, the smashed windows, the pitted stones.

‘Was it bad?’ she asks when she is ashore.

‘Nothing we haven’t seen before,’ Geoffrey answers for him. ‘Though we missed you. Johnson’s gone, dead, and the other Thomas, too, God keep their souls. The rest are fine though. How’s himself?’ He nods at Richard.

‘I think he is through the worst of it,’ she says. Richard still looks terrible. His face is fallen in and his skin tinged with a feverish rosiness around his eyes and mouth. She doesn’t tell them how bad it has been, how close she’s come to calling a priest.

They lift him up on his plank and together they carry him down the gangway on to the dockside. He groans as they load him on to the cart. Geoffrey sits with the carter while Thomas and Katherine walk behind.

‘Lamn is here,’ he tells her.

‘I know. He sailed on the ship before mine. I thought I was unlucky not to be sailing with Sir John, who would at least have insisted Richard have some ale, but we were delayed and then the Bishop and his retinue joined Sir John’s ship. After that I was glad.’

‘And he’s still said nothing?’

‘Not so far.’

When he had accosted her by the trough at the fort, after Richard had been wounded, she had denied his accusation. Thomas had heard her voice raised and had loomed over the cleric and, with Geoffrey behind him, and the rest of the men returning from the butts just then, Lamn backed away and pretended to have made a mistake. He’d said no more and once they had carried Richard inside, Lamn had ridden away with William Hastings without a backward glance. As soon as he was gone Katherine had hurried up the steps to where they slept and had starting gathering her things.

‘He will be back tomorrow,’ she’d said. ‘With the friars.’

Thomas tried to persuade her that no one in Calais was going to listen to Lamn.

‘Warwick needs every soldier he can keep,’ he’d said. ‘No one will care if we are apostate.’

She’d known then that she must tell him she was more than an apostate, but still something held her back, and now here they are back in England with Canterbury only a day’s march away.

‘But who is he?’ Thomas wants to know. ‘The Bishop, I mean?’

‘His name is Coppini. Sir John says he is a Frenchy from somewhere called Italy. He comes straight from the Pope himself.’

Thomas laughs.

‘The Pope?’

She smiles too. Even the word Pope feels foolish on her lips. It reminds her of the night they met the pardoner in the woods and they found themselves talking about the King. Such people weren’t for them to discuss.

The cart rumbles on through the town until they reach the camp. Here the mud has become thick and pale, the sort to pull a man’s boot off, and the rain doesn’t look like stopping soon – if ever. When they unload Richard from the cart he wakes.

‘How was it?’ he croaks. His lips are cracked and his breath foul. He cannot open his eyes properly.

‘You didn’t miss a thing,’ Geoffrey soothes. ‘They turned tail as soon as they saw us.’

‘There was no fight?’

Geoffrey shakes his head.

Richard closes his eyes.

‘Is Kit here?’ he asks.

‘I’m here,’ she answers. Richard is relieved and drifts off again.

They take him into the tent where Sir John is already sitting on his cushion on his chest. After he has bent and kissed his son he turns to Katherine.

‘I have good news, Kit,’ he says. ‘My lord the Earl of Warwick is sending his physician over this morning. A fellow called Fournier. He has a great reputation.’

Katherine can think of nothing to say.

‘It is no reflection on your care,’ he goes on. ‘No man can have wished for a more attentive nurse and Hastings has been boasting of your skills with the knife far and wide.’

‘He’s a kind man, William Hastings,’ she says.

Sir John agrees.

After Sir John leaves she crouches in the tent next to Richard and tries to make sense of it all. She still has no idea what to do. She will have to leave soon, before Thomas can take her before the Prior of All, but she cannot simply abandon Richard. Perhaps this physician will reassure her.