Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  There is a small crump as the balinger hits the side of the carrack, out of sight below the ship’s rail, and a moment later two more men come springing over the ship’s side. They have swords in their hands, steel helmets on their heads and heavy padded coats. The first is tall, and moves lightly on to the deck in high leather boots more suited to a horse than a ship. The second is small, wiry, like a terrier, with ginger whiskers and a big nose, often broken. Both wear red tabard coats, sweat-ringed and salt-rimed.

  They stop and look around.

  ‘Fuck me!’ the second one says. ‘Looks like we’re late for the harvest.’

  The first of the two, taller by a head, sheathes his sword and takes off his helmet.

  ‘Saints,’ he says, disappointed. ‘What’s gone on here?’

  He has dark hair cropped short above the ears, like Riven, but he is younger, with an open, handsome face, the sort Thomas trusts. Three more men join them, clambering slowly over the carrack’s sides. They do not look at ease with the swell of the sea, and Thomas recognises their sort from home, long ago: beefy, well-fed, deep-chested boys with backs warped by work in the fields and butts. Each carries a short sword, except for one, who carries a longbow and a bag of arrow shafts. They wear the same red livery coat as the first two, with a small star marked in white cloth on the right side of the chest. When they see the dead bodies each crosses himself.

  The first man runs a hand through his hair.

  ‘My name is Richard Fakenham,’ he announces to the sailors, ‘of Marton Hall in Lincolnshire, and on behalf of my lord the Earl of Warwick, the Captain of Calais who is entrusted to keep the seas, I am claiming this boat for his purposes.’

  ‘You are not pirates?’ the Genoese cook asks.

  Fakenham looks insulted.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘We are soldiers. Now, which one of you’s the master?’

  One of the surviving sailors – the ferrety-looking one with a widow’s tooth, older than the others – points to Cobham’s body.

  Fakenham grunts. ‘His mate?’

  The man points again. This time at Saxby.

  ‘All right,’ Fakenham says. ‘Which of you knows how to sail this thing?’

  Again the older man volunteers.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Lysson,’ he says. ‘John Lysson. Of Falmouth.’

  ‘All right, John Lysson of Falmouth, can you sail us to Calais? Across the Narrow Sea?’

  After a moment’s hesitation Lysson nods.

  ‘Get to it then.’

  Lysson looks at the other sailors, as if for permission, then clambers up the ladder to take control of the tiller. He shouts an order that the other two sailors and the Genoese cook start to obey. As they pass the smaller of the two soldiers, the second man aboard, he bares his teeth and growls at them like a dog.

  ‘Don’t kill any of them unless you absolutely have to, Walter,’ Richard Fakenham calls. ‘We need them to help sail this damned thing.’

  Then he turns to his own men.

  ‘You lot,’ he says, ‘tie the other boat alongside and when that’s done, let’s get my father aboard.’

  One of them shouts down into the other boat and a rope is thrown up and caught. Fakenham looks around as if he has forgotten something. Then he sees Thomas sitting and Katherine standing among the bodies.

  ‘What’s gone on here?’ he asks.

  Thomas swallows. He can say nothing. He knows if he tries, he will start to weep again.

  Katherine answers for him.

  ‘They threw our master overboard,’ she says, gesturing towards the ship’s stern. ‘And then they tried to kill us.’

  ‘So you killed them?’

  Katherine nods.

  Fakenham raises his eyebrows.

  ‘But who are you?’ he asks. ‘Why are you on board at all? You aren’t with them, are you?’ He indicates the sailors.

  ‘No,’ Katherine says. ‘We were his servants.’

  ‘The dead man’s? Who was he?’

  ‘His name was Robert Daud. He was a pardoner. Of Lincoln.’

  ‘Of Lincoln? Wonder if I met him? We’re from Lincoln way. Walter? Did you know a Robert Daud? A pardoner? From home?’

  There is an impatient grumble of denial.

  ‘Well, I’ll ask my father. Though he has no time for such things. Indulgences and so on.’

  Fakenham notices the giant’s pollaxe, lying where Thomas has dropped it, glazed with blood. He bends to pick it up.

  ‘Is this yours?’

  Thomas can nod.

  ‘Nice,’ Fakenham says, and he swings it, checking the balance. ‘Very nice.’

  ‘We are going to Canterbury,’ Thomas says, as if that explains everything.

  Fakenham hardly hears him.

  ‘Have someone’s eye out with that,’ the man he has called Walter says, appearing at Fakenham’s shoulder and regarding Thomas carefully. He rubs his bristles on his chin and frowns. Then his eyes travel up and down Katherine for longer than is comfortable. There is something about her he does not seem to like.

  ‘Get shot of these will you, Walter?’ Fakenham asks, indicating the dead bodies. ‘Overboard. And clean the place up a bit, too. Then let’s have some action. We need to get to Calais without attracting any more attention.’

  Walter crouches over the dead sailors and begins going through their clothes. He is mumbling to himself, a disappointed burr. There are some coins in a pouch around Cobham’s neck that he keeps for himself, three knives of inferior quality that he leaves on the deck for anyone to take, which Katherine does, and a pouch in which one of the men kept the wooden beads of his rosary. Thomas watches in silence.

  He has killed a man. More than one. He understands he has done it to save himself, and Katherine, but he can smell their blood on his hands, and on his boots, like a stain on his soul.

  ‘You there, servant! Lend a hand here.’

  Walter is standing holding Saxby’s heels. He wants Thomas to take the shoulders. Thomas stands and grasps the mate’s leather jerkin and lifts, and together they swing the body towards the side.

  ‘Should we not say the viaticum?’ Thomas asks. The thought of even a man like Saxby going to heaven or hell without some blessing and prayers is shocking. When a canon or a sister died, the prayers lasted three days.

  Walter looks at him as if he is a simpleton.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  And that is that. They swing Saxby over and let him go. Thomas watches his body splash into the sea. Then Walter calls and Thomas returns to collect the others and together they bundle their corpses over the ship’s rail. Thomas murmurs a blessing each time, and as the men go over they are just meat, more solid in death than they had been in life. One of the remaining sailors climbs the ratlines to the mast. A moment later the boy’s loose-limbed body tumbles down, catches on the stays with a fumbling bounce, and then goes over the side with a small splash.

  ‘Only a lad,’ Fakenham says, peering after him. ‘Shame.’

  The sailors start hauling in the flapping sails and the ship stiffens under them and begins to make headway. The horizon steadies. Two more men from the balinger climb aboard and begin helping an older man up over the ship’s side. He is red-faced and snowy-haired, with a long grey feather in his blue velvet cap. He wears a fur-trimmed coat and on his feet very fine, muddy leather boots, which might once have been the colour of a polished conker. When he reaches the deck, he hobbles, as if in pain.

  ‘God’s nails,’ he mutters. There are tears in his pale blue eyes and he stands for a moment, swaying, as if he knows his next step will hurt, and he looks for the shortest route towards somewhere to sit.

  ‘Can you get my chest, my boy?’ he asks Fakenham, who crosses the deck and shouts down to the boat below. A moment later two more men bring up a chest – a fine red leather brass-bound trunk – and put it against the cabin wall. One of them is fat, fatter than any man Thomas can recall ever seeing, but he has powerful arms, each o
ne like a shaved piglet, and he is as broad across as a church door. While the older man waits, breathing heavily, Richard Fakenham opens the trunk, removes a large red cushion, and shuts it again. He places the cushion carefully on the trunk and helps the old man lower himself on to it.

  ‘There you are, Father,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you, my boy,’ the old man says. ‘Thank you. What would I do without you, hmmm?’

  When he is settled and has set his cap in a particular angle, the elder Fakenham looks about.

  ‘Not a bad little ship,’ he approves. ‘Young Warwick’ll be pleased.’

  His eye falls on Thomas and Katherine, standing there.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asks.

  ‘We are servants, sir,’ Thomas begins. ‘Of Robert Daud, a pardoner, lately of Lincoln.’

  ‘Not old Master Daud?’ the old man says, brightening at the mention of a familiar name. He turns to his son. ‘Once tried to sell me a chrism for my ’plaint, you know? Often wondered if I should have paid its price, but when his boy died a year or so back, I thought, well, if he can’t cure that with his toe bone of St Cecilia or his scapula of whomsoever, then what chance has he of curing me?’

  ‘Here, Father.’

  Richard Fakenham hands him a beaker that he drinks with a shudder.

  ‘So where is he? Master Daud?’ he asks, dabbing his mouth with a cloth.

  Thomas tells him.

  ‘Drowned? Is he now? Poor old bugger.’

  Sir John pauses a moment and looks up, his eye drifting across Thomas’s bloodied clothing.

  ‘But you would not go so quietly, hmm?’

  ‘They killed five of them,’ the younger Fakenham says, showing his father the giant’s pollaxe. ‘Five and half if you include that one.’

  He nods at the sailor with the wound in his belly, still alive in the shadow of the ship’s rail.

  ‘Lord, Richard,’ the old man says, whistling at the axe. ‘Look at it. Lovely piece of work. I’d not like to be on the receiving end of that. Who are you?’

  ‘I am Thomas Everingham of— I am . . . a servant.’

  There is a moment’s silence while the old man looks at them both thoughtfully.

  ‘A servant, eh? And yet how many men have you killed this morning? And not a scratch on you. It is almost, what? Miraculous? Don’t you think it miraculous, Richard? Geoffrey?’

  He is addressing his son and the fat man. Neither says anything, but both allow for the possibility.

  ‘Perhaps the good Lord is keeping an eye on them, eh? Perhaps He has some special purpose in mind? Some higher calling?’ He is joking, and he turns back to Thomas. ‘You are a big lad, aren’t you?’ he says. ‘Not much muscle, but . . . You ever shoot an arrow?’

  ‘Not for a few years,’ Thomas calculates. ‘I lost the practice after my father went to France.’

  ‘Ah. France, eh? And he did not return?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  The deck pitches under their feet and the old man is distracted by pain for a moment. His eyes water, but he recovers and takes another drink.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I am indentured to provide my lord Fauconberg with fifteen archers. I had fifteen until one of them ran back to his fields the moment he saw the sea, and so I am short by one man.’

  ‘They say they are on their way to Canterbury,’ Richard puts in.

  ‘Well, that is another happy coincidence. So are we, just as soon as we are able.’

  ‘You will take us to Canterbury?’ Thomas asks.

  He can hardly believe his luck.

  Sir John laughs.

  ‘We are not hauliers or carters, man,’ he says, ‘but if you are prepared to join my company as an archer then I will see you to Canterbury, and beyond.’

  He glances at his son as he says this. Richard smiles slightly.

  ‘But—’ Thomas begins. He is about to tell them of his vows. Katherine shakes her head slightly. The old man misinterprets.

  ‘You don’t fancy it?’ he asks. ‘Then we’ll have to see if the Lord really does have a special purpose in mind, won’t we, for you’ll have to swim ashore, here and now. I will not take you to Calais only to see you run off and join the Duke of Somerset in his stinking castle. You are altogether too able with that pollaxe of yours, and I should not like to find myself facing you across some sodden field in the future, regretting that I did not have you killed while I had the chance.’

  Thomas turns to Katherine. What choice do they have anyway?

  ‘We will do our best,’ he says.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ Fakenham says. Then he turns to Katherine. ‘And how old are you, boy? Fourteen? Fifteen? Ever shoot a bow? Not by the look of you. Well, I dare say we can use you for something. Until you acquire a bit of muscle, that is. Perhaps you might act as a squire for my son? Richard? What do you think?’

  Richard nods. He seems pleased at the thought. Katherine says nothing.

  ‘I cannot afford to pay you the same as one of my archers, but I can promise you four marks a year, better cloth than you are wearing now, food most days, and the chance of a share in whatever might come our way. What do you say?’

  They can but nod, and so it is agreed.

  8

  FOR THREE DAYS and nights the carrack Mary stands off the coast of Kent, pinned back by an unflinching wind that comes up the Narrow Sea. On the cliffs to the north they can make out the two towers of the shrine of Our Lady, but no amount of prayer brings a let-up in the weather and by the third day every man watches with a tinge of envy as the sailor whom Thomas wounded finally dies.

  ‘All right, Thomas,’ Walter says, ‘another notch on that axe of yours. Chuck him over and then help these others with the sail. And you! Girly! Clean all this up.’

  At the sound of the word ‘Girly’ Katherine stiffens. She turns away, hiding her face in the loose folds of her hood, feeling her cheeks flush and her heart hammer. The fat man Geoffrey touches her arm.

  ‘Don’t mind him, Kit,’ he murmurs. ‘He’s got a vile tongue, but he’s kind at heart.’

  She nods, grateful for the big man’s compassion, but she cannot meet his eye. She ducks away and begins sluicing seawater over the dead sailor’s blood, conscious of Walter’s boot caps as he stands watching her work. Afterwards she helps Geoffrey bring the sick men mugs of rainwater, just as the ship’s boy had done, until at last on the fourth day the wind backs around and releases them. The sailors reset the mainsail and the ship begins to forge across the heavy waters.

  The fat man, Geoffrey, is, as far as she can tell, the one who makes sure the men are fed and clothed, the one who worries about where they will sleep the coming night. The other one, Walter, is the man who organises the fighting, who enforces the discipline. Old Sir John is happy to leave them to it, while his son Richard is more concerned with his own affairs, and says little. Unlike Geoffrey, who is disposed to talk, and speaks quickly and quietly; in this way she learns something about Sir John Fakenham and his company.

  The story, as far as she is able to pick up and later relay to Thomas, is that Sir John has been to the wars in France. He’s fought at the siege of some town the name of which she forgets even before Geoffrey has finished telling her the tale, but while he was there, the army was ravaged by a sickness Geoffrey calls the bloody flux, which in the end took the King Henry, the fifth, too, and this seems to have marked a turning point in the fighting.

  The names of the battles that follow are lost on her but Sir John survived them all, though only just, and was captured and ransomed at one, where the French used cannons and someone of whom Katherine pretends to have heard was killed and beaten so badly with an axe handle while he lay trapped under his horse that his herald only recognised his body from a distinctive gap between his teeth.

  After that the impoverished Sir John had returned home to England to find his manor house near Lincoln seized by a local knight, who claimed some legal right to it, but in reality had none save he knew he could count on
the support of the Duke of Somerset should Sir John try to reclaim it.

  ‘Sir John appealed to his cousin, who was Lord Cornford, wasn’t he? He hoped he might do something for him at court, seeing as Sir John’d managed to betroth young Richard there to Lord Cornford’s daughter. But there wasn’t much Cornford could do for him while the Duke of Somerset was so strong at court, was there? And then any hope was lost when old Cornford found himself on the wrong end of dagger at Ludford Bridge last year. Stabbed in the eye, he was, poor old bastard, and after the battle, such as it was, was ended.’

  The coincidence is impossible.

  ‘Who stabbed him?’ Katherine asks, though she knows the answer.

  ‘The self-same man who stole Marton Hall. A man called Riven. Sir Giles Riven, though no one knows when he became a knight. If you’re from Lincoln, you’ll know of him.’

  Katherine nods.

  ‘Notorious throughout Lincolnshire, Riven is,’ Geoffrey goes on, ‘and beyond now, since he’s not only managed to get himself into Lord Cornford’s castle at Cornford, but he’s gone and made Cornford’s daughter his ward.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Geoffrey is puzzled by how little she knows.

  ‘Only that he has broken off the planned marriage between Richard and the girl!’

  Katherine is little the wiser.

  ‘Which means old Sir John’s lost his manor, and young Richard doesn’t get his hands on Cornford Castle.’

  Geoffrey spits in disgust.

  ‘And so there is Giles bloody Riven,’ he goes on, ‘sitting in the castle, in the lap of bloody luxury, with an army of archers, kept warm by the thought that his son will inherit the place with an income forever, while here we are, sick as pigs out on the Narrow Sea, just fifteen of us, attainted and stripped of everything we own, including our names, and me with my wife and daughter still at home.’

  Katherine goes to stand next to Thomas where he is bent over the ship’s rail, peering back at the coast of England hidden somewhere in the sea mist. He’s wrapped a piece of sailcloth around his shoulders and his eyes are red-rimmed with lack of sleep. The souls of those dead men lie heavy on his conscience, she supposes, and he has spent the last few days sitting by the dying sailor, wringing his hands and praying for his life.