“I am sworn to heal the sick,” Shingleton said. Under Henry’s black stare, he was starting to look a little sweaty. “That is my calling.”
“You do not want to get into battles,” Henry said.
Shingleton shook his head. “No, my lord.”
“But you are the King’s surgeon. The King must always risk battles.”
Shingleton looked back at him. “I never travelled with an army.”
“Do you treat children?”
Shingleton looked startled at the change of tack. “My lord?”
“You speak to me as if I were a child.”
“Excuse me, my lord.”
“I am not condemning you, I wish to know. Do you treat many children? What do you do when you do not wait on the King?”
Shingleton swallowed; the sound was loud in the closed room. “I have a hospital for idiots, my lord. But I do not think you are one.”
Henry let the man sweat another moment before giving him a smile. “No. I am not. But I hear the King’s son is. My friend John says so. Is he right?”
Shingleton drew a breath.
“Shingleton, you can say so in this room,” Henry said impatiently. “The King will not hear you.”
“Yes,” Shingleton said. “He is an idiot. Her Majesty Erzebet is not, but she will not bear him children. Her two daughters are young. I do not wish to see blood, and I fear for the throne. That is the truth, my lord Henry.”
This was good news to hear from an outsider, a man unprompted by Allard or Claybrook. Henry nodded. “So you will not tell the King of me?”
Shingleton shook his head. “It will come to a contest for the throne. Now, or later. I thought before today the threat would come from Spain, or from France. Not from our own shores.”
“I am not a threat to anyone but the King,” Henry said. “And he is old, and his son is an idiot. If you will be good to me now I will be good to you later.”
Shingleton nodded. “Can I ask a favour, my lord?” he said.
“Yes.” Henry did not wish to be friends with this man, but he had decided to think well of him. He was not a soldier, but would be of use if he wasn’t pushed.
“May I examine you?”
“I am not sick,” Henry said. “I am never sick.”
Shingleton looked almost hopeful. “That is good news indeed, my lord. But I would like to learn. The house of Delamere—cousins have married cousins for generations.” Delamere was the King’s family name, Henry remembered. Maybe he could take it for himself later; it was better than Allard. “You are newly out of the sea, my lord, you are healthy. I would like to learn what a healthy King should be, in body.” His eyes were bright.
“If you like,” Henry said. “But do not touch me. I do not like to be touched.”
Shingleton examined Henry, studied him with care and interest. By the time he was finished, the child-idiot tone was gone from his voice. He spoke to Henry the way Allard spoke to Claybrook: with deference.
The following week, Shingleton visited again to check on Margaret Allard, who was beginning to recover. He also came to see Henry. When he appeared before Henry, he did something no one had done before: hingeing his straight landsman’s back and legs, he lowered his head and bowed. The sweep of it brought his head almost level with Henry’s.
SEVENTEEN
WHILE HE KNEW that they would need soldiers, for a time Henry was happy playing with John. As they grew older, though, his friend was called away to court more often. These absences, which could last months, left Henry bored and angry, difficult to please and, in the privacy of his own mind, sad. There were too many adults towering over him, and all of them put demands on him. No one was any fun.
Thomas Markeley, his old arms instructor, took John’s place as a sparring partner during the lonely weeks when John was away. Henry liked Markeley well enough: a man of few words who tended to handle Henry much as he handled a horse, with brief instructions, pointing him in the right direction and giving him the occasional pat. Markeley was easy to understand. He had also been a soldier, and Henry studied him, trying to learn what he needed to know about such creatures.
John said that most people—”the people” was the phrase he used, an awkward concept to understand, as unlike the concept of a tribe, “the people” did not seem to include all the people in England—were more like Markeley than like anyone else Henry knew, but that most were not soldiers. They grew things, dug the earth and planted seeds (John having planted some in a patch of earth to prove to Henry that this was how plants came about, a little patch of greenery Henry sometimes visited when there was no one to play with). They kept animals captive and slaughtered them when it was time to eat. They made things. From this, Henry had formed an impression of the people of England as hungry and frightened. They kept their prey close to them where it couldn’t escape, but if the prey took sick and died, they couldn’t swim across the miles to find more. They stayed on little patches of ground, facing starvation if the ground didn’t yield food. They were forbidden to gather what they needed: it was called stealing and ended with a rope choking the life out of them. The king led them and told them what to do, but they couldn’t see or hear him. He was out of their reach, experienced only by report—but they must all know that he was old, that he had no good sons. Somehow he managed to keep away kings from other tribes, but Henry was certain of something, even though Markeley always changed the subject back to weapons when asked directly: the people needed their king to be strong, and he wasn’t. They would be frightened of other kings, and, more importantly, they would be ashamed.
This could be used to his advantage, Henry thought. People would want a strong king. If he managed it properly, offered them what they lacked, they ought to be pleased about it.
He would have liked to share the thought with John, but John was away.
Boredom was not something Henry had ever had to deal with in the sea. Every moment was a hunt, shoals of silver food bristling before him, dolphins crackling their threats across the leagues of water, avoiding the pinching fingers of the other children, questing across blue, empty deserts to find the currents that would take the tribe to its next destination. He had been active, frightened, alert, every waking moment. Taken into Allard’s house, he had remained frightened. But the years had passed and no one threatened him; the soldiers he heard so much about remained distant, unseen. He had learned, studied—at least with weapons—because he hadn’t known any other kind of life. John had introduced him to the idea of company. Left alone, he found the practice a little wearisome. He persevered, hefting his axe day after day, because there was nothing else to do. Sometimes, when the weather was too hot, he kept to his room, staring out of the window, one hand idly turning the crown Allard had given him when he was small.
The occasions John returned, Henry was too happy to see him to complain about his absence. He knew that John had to go to the court to learn about it. When he was sixteen, though, and beginning to chafe at this round of coming and going, training and promises with no sign of progress, another absence was called for, one that was neither welcome nor expected.
“John should go,” was the first Henry heard about it. Claybrook was already discussing the topic with Allard and John when Henry, who had heard rapid hoofbeats from across the estate and ridden back from his explorations to meet them, made an awkward entrance into the room.
Allard looked even more nervous than usual; Henry could hear his breath scraping in his throat. “Will you not go too?” he said.
“Yes, I must.” Claybrook gave an impatient wave. “But separately. I will have to join his Majesty’s party. And I will have to return to court afterwards. Philip takes more and more care, and her Majesty is less and less willing to help. I could not ride back to tell you about it. John will be free to return. He can go on his own: he would be in the way if I was caring for Philip. It would be natural enough to send him home after such a sight anyway.”
“What is to happen?�
�� Henry broke in. John was sitting in a corner, looking smaller than usual. The sight made Henry angry and anxious.
“Henry.” Allard turned to him, reached out a hand and then thought better of it. “There is news from court. There may be no need for us to be alarmed, but it is most serious.”
“What?” Henry didn’t want preamble; in the time it took Allard to talk about the news, he could simply have said it and spared Henry some frightened seconds.
“It may not be—”
“John, what has happened?” Henry gave up on Allard, who after eleven years still would not learn that he should give straight answers.
John shrugged unhappily. “They say someone has found a bastard, and they are going to burn him.” Henry froze. “Not you, we think. In Cornwall, far south of here. They say he is young, only four years old or so. And they have caught him. But it will stir the country up. People are talking about whether they will really burn the child or kill him first, give him an easier death. But we do not think they will. Princess Erzebet is looking very fierce about it.”
Henry shook his head, urgency swamping him. “Do we have soldiers now? We could stop them, could we not?”
“Henry, we cannot.” Allard sounded almost as unhappy as John.
Henry turned on Claybrook. “You talk of soldiers. Why have I seen none? We could go to Cornwall and stop them doing this.”
Claybrook gave a polite smile. In this conversation, it looked utterly wrong, and Henry glowered. “We are not yet ready, my lord.”
“He may be right, sir,” John said to his father. “I do not think the people will wish to see a child burn. Henry and I are well grown now. Maybe this would be a good moment to strike.”
“Not unless we wish to put this child on the throne,” Claybrook said, a sharp edge in his voice. “And it is Henry we wish to crown, not this Cornwall infant.”
“He could be my son,” Henry said. “You say that the King is weak because he has not enough sons. This boy could be mine.”
“You are too young to be his father, my lord,” Claybrook said, as if correcting a mistake.
“I am not a fool, I know this,” Henry snapped. “But if we could take the throne, then I could say he was my son and that would make him so. You say England needs deepsmen boys. There would be two of us.” In fact, Henry had ill memories of deepsmen boys, but this child was smaller than him, weaker, and could not hurt him. With Henry’s dominance assured, the infant might be useful. And whether or not he would like the child, Henry could not stand the thought of a burning. If England could burn one bastard, it could burn another, and the child’s death would bring him a long step closer to the scorching pyre.
“This boy would be a threat to you, my lord.” Henry noticed with anger that Claybrook’s voice, so biting when speaking to his son, had turned back to courtesy and calm when addressing Henry.
“I could settle such a threat if it happened,” Henry said. “But it is not coming from him now.”
“This is useless talk, my lord,” Claybrook said. “It cannot be done.”
“Why do you not want to save the child?” Henry demanded.
Claybrook gave him a politic smile. “England would accept one bastard on the throne, my lord. England would become used to him in time, if he could hold it. But England would never accept two bastards at once. One bastard would become a king, if he were strong enough. But the king is king by birth. Two bastards together would destroy the very notion of kingship.”
“England would accept a king that ruled,” Henry said, his voice unfamiliarly choked as fury made it harder to speak. “You are—are talking songs. These are thoughts, not real things.” His vocabulary was beginning to desert him in the cold haze of his anger.
“My lord,” Claybrook said firmly, “we have not the soldiers.”
“Then what have you been doing for eight years?” Henry looked over and saw John sitting silent in his chair, gnawing his knuckles as Henry shouted at his father. Henry drew a breath, held it, held it, let the seconds stretch as his lungs settled around their hoard of air.
A silence hung in the room.
Henry let the breath out of his lungs, drew another. “John, could we raise soldiers?” he said.
John swallowed, avoiding his father’s eyes. “Probably not fast enough,” he said. “And possibly not many enough. The burning will happen soon. It takes many days to bring an army together. Weeks, usually.”
“Could it be done?”
“Possibly.” John looked at Henry, his shoulders hunched as if to hide him from the adults staring at him. “But probably it would fail. And then we would go on the pyre together.”
Henry looked at John for a moment, refusing to drop his gaze. The air in the room was too thick, too windless for comfort. He lowered his voice, sitting down on the floor. “Can you go to this burning?”
“My lord …” Claybrook began.
“I do not speak to you.” Henry did not shout, but his words rang around the room, resonant as a cry in the sea, and everyone flinched at the sound.
John shrugged. “If I must. You will wish for news straight away, yes?”
“Will you stay awhile after you come back?”
John nodded. “Yes, I can do that.”
“Then you should go. Go alone. Do not bring a servant, no one who will make a noise or want to talk to you while you are there. Listen to what the people say, and tell me about it.”
“I will do that.” John’s face, normally pink of cheek and bright of eye, was dull in the half-lit room.
“You do not look well,” Henry said. “Will it make you ill to see it?”
John straightened up, shook his head rapidly, his curls flying about his face. “It will not kill me,” he said. There was a moment when his face struggled for composure, but then his old grin was back, almost as wide as before. “I shall be as brave as a soldier about it, Henry. It may do me good to see what we face, make me cautious.”
“If you cannot watch it, you should tell me so,” Henry said.
John shook his head again. “No,” he said. “We will see more deaths than this before we get to the throne.” He smiled again. Henry could see that the smile was forced, but he was not going to hurt his friend’s pride by pointing it out. “After all, it will not be you on the pyre.”
John rode away that night. Henry had insisted on accompanying him to the edge of the estate, and with Claybrook already gone to catch the royal party, Allard made no objection; his face was sad and frightened, but he knew better than to quarrel with Henry in his current mood. Henry and John rode quietly together, no sound but the hooves of their horses drumming against the damp earth. The air was cool on Henry’s skin, damp and pleasant, and the moon cut a sharp slice of light in the black sky above. It was a bright night, easily bright enough to ride by.
At the edge of the grounds, Henry patted the neck of John’s horse and said, “I will see you soon.” John looked at him and nodded, his mouth pinched shut, his face grey in the moonlight. He turned his face without speaking and, after a moment, kicked his horse to a trot and set off.
Henry sat by himself, listening to the sound of the hooves as it faded in the distance. In the still, moist air, sound carried far, and he could hear great distances: owls hooting from miles away, the rush of a river, the scuttle of mice in the underbrush. In that great quiet, John’s horse was the loudest thing for miles.
After a few minutes, when he was sure that he was out of John’s earshot, he followed.
John was easy to track. His horse pattered along, a steady, sustainable pace: John had never liked to press his animals too hard. Neither did he like to be alone; Henry could hear him whispering under his breath: “Good beast. On we go …” He sang songs to keep himself company, talked to his horse, clattered his teeth together to make noise to go along with him. The sound of his loneliness made Henry sorry that he was trailing so far behind, but irritated him a little as well. Henry knew about hunting at night. If this were in the sea,
with all the noise John was making, a shark would have taken him in the first ten minutes.
Hour after hour they kept on. He did not know where the burning was to be held, but the distances were still greater than Henry, used to cantering in circles within a few miles of land, had ever ridden in his life. The trees did not change, the earth smelled fresh and black and the wind parted before him as it always did, but despite the danger of the journey, the openness, the wild risk of discovery, something in Henry relaxed. After years imprisoned, he was travelling the miles again.
The thought of the bastard had driven him almost mad when he had first resolved to follow John. Henry was too old to think he could somehow rescue the poor landed brat, but he had to go anyway. They were going to burn him. Were it not for Allard—it was a thought that had never spurred him to gratitude before, but he felt a surprising stirring of it now—that would have been him. This child, his kinsman, was headed for the pyre, and Henry had to see it. Even if the boy didn’t know he was there, Henry had to be near him. Whether he was destined for the throne or the fire, Henry didn’t know, but the flames were something he needed to see. The thought of them made his heart pound so loud in his chest he could hear it over the noise of John’s horse, and that made him angry. He was going to face the flames, match his courage against them and stare them down.
It was early the next morning, grey dawn seeping through the sky, that Henry finally decided he had hidden long enough. John’s horse stopped pacing in the distance and Henry heard a slithering dismount, the familiar voice saying, “Good girl. Just a little rest and we will go on …” It was time to make his approach. As the sky whitened, Henry could feel his chest constrict; a dark sky was like a dark sea overhead, soft and expansive, deep enough to hide in, but with light capping the day he was beginning to feel exposed. They were on a dirt road, tufts of long grass straggling at the sides and brambles leaning toothed, drunken legs this way and that, and Henry didn’t like it. He’d never seen this place before.
In Great Waters Page 18