After them come Isabella’s personal maids, three girls who work within, including Nettie, who is married to Jack, and who bears her swollen belly before her like the bow of a merchantman’s cog. She is a pretty girl, by far the prettiest of the three, and Jack is lucky to have her, Thomas thinks, for she is capable, and quick, with a smile never too far from her eyes and lips, though it is distant today, and her eyes are smudged with tears for the dead man.
Behind them, at a discreet distance, come Isabella’s two sons, walking with their eyes fixed on the backsides of the girls in front. They have been keeping themselves apart, these two, both tall, straight-backed, boys really, not yet twenty, dressed in velvets and silks with marten trims, and one of them has small vents cut in the purple broadcloth of his jacket sleeves through which scarlet can be glimpsed. Both have dark curling hair, each cut in a bowl as if they were on campaign in Gascony or some such, but while one has a gauzy beard on his chin, with his cheeks clean-shaven, the other is wholly clean-shaven, showing a cleft in his pink chin. Beard and Non-beard. Both wear swords. Thomas wonders who wears a sword to a funeral. Everyone who can, he supposes.
They ignore Thomas, glance at his dog, and they walk past now with their sleek heads tipped towards one another, talking in low voices, and for a moment it looks as if they are still speculating on the shapes of the girls under their dresses, but then one – Beard – points out the windmill that sits on a rise above the river to the west, built two years previously, and he murmurs something appreciative, and the other grunts something less so. Thomas feels a let-down, and understands then that John is probably right about these two, and that they are not here at their stepfather’s funeral for their mother’s sake, or to look at serving girls, but for another, more obvious, age-old reason.
They are from the real world, these two, Thomas sees, from the world those at Marton Hall have tried to exclude these last years. They are harbingers of harsh reality – like crows or rooks – and he knows John Stump is not out of his wits, as he might have hoped, but that he is probably right, and that all this last five years’ peaceful certainty: it is come to an end.
Behind Isabella’s sons, though, lingering further back still, come those for whom Thomas is really waiting, and those who might yet have the power to cheer him: his wife, Katherine, in dark blue, with a dark headdress, a red belt around her narrow middle, a purse and her knife sheathed in the same leather. No rosary. She is still thin, but no longer painfully so, and in the last two or three years she has lost that haunted look, and her face, once as sharp as a beak, has softened, and she is, to all eyes, not just his own, a beautiful woman.
She is holding the upstretched hand of a small boy, also in a blue gown of the same material, with russet hose and baggy brown boots that Thomas made himself. He is their son, named John after his godfather, and after Sir John, and also after any number of Johns whom they have met in the years past, but everyone calls him Rufus for the wayward plug of wavy russet hair that crowns his head, its colour inherited from his father, yet somehow enhanced and exaggerated, as vivid as a conker, and so springy it cannot be kept down by his linen cap, however tight they tie the strings under his chin.
Thomas stands watching, saying nothing, just relieved to see them come. They stop for a moment with Rufus distracted by two plump doves bending the slim wands of the hawthorn above his head. He is a solemn little boy at the best of times, preferring the company of his mother rather than his father, and he is more often diverted by the behaviour of birds and animals than by humans, but there are times when he will stop and reach for Thomas as if he needs him in the same way he might a drink, and he will let himself be taken up and placed on his father’s shoulders, and this moment is one of them. The boy is still easy enough to lift, being not quite five, and after he has been swung up there and settled, Thomas walks listening to the boy’s strained breathing, feeling his delicate little fingers exploring the dent in the side of his father’s head.
They all know the story of how Thomas had been hit by something, perhaps on Towton Field, nearly ten years ago now, but no one knows with what.
‘Did you cry?’ the boy asks again.
And Thomas laughs again.
‘A bit,’ he admits, though he does not know this for sure, and he feels the boy’s hand, slightly sticky, stroke his ear to try to comfort him, and he cannot help but be consoled, and he smiles down at Katherine; but she is looking away, distracted, and he wonders if she has spoken to John Stump. However, she says nothing, and so they carry on up the track behind the others, walking in silence, until Thomas puts his arm out and rests his palm on her shoulder and she comes a little closer and lets out a long sigh.
‘It might be all right,’ he says.
But she says nothing in reply.
And he thinks, Oh Christ, it isn’t going to be all right.
It is the week following St George’s Day in the year 1469, the eighth in the reign of King Edward IV.
2
Isabella’s sister leaves Marton Hall after the funeral, but her sons stay. Thomas and Katherine and the others wait for them to go, and for things to settle, but they do not. While Isabella remains cloistered with her confessor, the two boys take their horses out every day, and they tramp every inch of the estate, noting things that have been done well, noting things that need be done better, noting things that are yet to be done at all. And they go through everything. Every room, every cupboard, every coffer. They weigh lengths of material in their hands, count cups, bowls, pins, an axe head. They check the horses’ tack, the blade of a plough, each chicken.
‘Taking an inventory,’ John says. ‘Totting it up. Noting it down. Then they’ll be off to London with an asking price against which to borrow, so they can live like earls till they’ve pissed it all away.’
But later a wagon arrives with things sent up from London: the boys’ hawks and a man to look after them, and a pack of three squat alaunt hounds, with short white coats and drooling jaws strong enough to drag a bear to its death. The two sons seem to love these dogs, however ugly they are to Thomas’s eye, and there is a man to look after them, too, who even looks and smells like a bear, and is just as incompetent, and who throws up his fat arms when the hounds run wild and laughs as if they are as harmless as rabbits. The hounds send Thomas’s lurcher whimpering away with his tail curled under him, and they remind Katherine of the dogs the steward Eelby kept in the castle at Cornford.
‘They’ll kill one of us, I know it,’ she says.
In the week before Ascension Isabella lets it be known she has made her decision as to their futures. She gathers them all – every man, woman and child who works on the estate, from Thomas down to the boy who collects twigs and mushrooms when they are in season – to the hall first to kneel with her in prayer and then to stand while she steps up on to the raised dais that has been installed for the coming ceremony of Sir John’s Month’s Mind, and alongside her stand her two boys, dressed more modestly today, and in a voice that rises and shakes with emotion, she breaks the news.
Her intention, she says, is not to take a husband, for how could she allow the blessed memory of Sir John, whom she loved most in all the world – even more, it seems, than her own sons’ father – to be dimmed? Nor will she sell or lease the estate, either. She is instead to become an avowess. She will take a solemn vow before the priest and she will withdraw from the world, accepting no man’s proposal of marriage, intending to live out the rest of her life in quiet prayer, the life of a nun, though uncloistered, and free to enjoy the comforts of her own estate.
When they hear the news, her household – men and women and even children, who have scant grip on what it might mean – first gasp and then clap with relief and pleasure. Hugs are exchanged. Feet are stamped. Thomas is exalted. He feels relieved of a great weight. He finds tears in his eyes. He thinks life will go on for the foreseeable future much as it has up to now, and he will be able to provide the same roof for Katherine and Rufus that he has for
these last five years, and all the stuff that John Stump said, well, he was wrong. Around him the crowd of servants are smiling and nodding at one another, and even the mushroom boy has a girl in russet in his arms.
So Thomas turns to Katherine and Rufus, and he wants to gather each up in his arms and hug them to him and murmur sweet blessed relief, but Rufus is bemused and Katherine says nothing. She does not smile, and her stare is fixed on Isabella and her sons, who flank their mother; and when Thomas turns to look at them, too, he sees each is standing with a smile fixed in place and their dark eyes moving so fast they seem to be glittering, registering the reaction their mother’s words have brought, but taking no pleasure in it; in fact, disliking it.
That is when Isabella calls for silence, and admits how pleased she is that everyone is so happy, and then she tells them that her boys – William and Robert – are to live with her and to manage the estate.
And the noise dies down, and the pleasure dissipates like steam vapour.
Isabella tells them that the next day she intends to go on pilgrimage, to Fotheringhay, to give thanks to the Lord on the day of his Ascension. She will take Jack, as a guard, and two of the girls, though not pregnant Nettie, and both her boys, and their servants of the body, and they will be gone a week, perhaps, until it is time to return to Marton to oversee the final preparations for the service for Sir John’s Month’s Mind.
Afterwards, as the household returns to its work, Thomas has time to say something to Katherine.
‘The boys,’ he says. ‘They will not be too bad? They will – let us go on as before? They are not interested in – in making fences? Draining orchards? Building hovels? You’ve seen them! With their shoes piked? They are not farmers.’
‘No,’ she agrees. ‘They are not farmers.’
Later that afternoon, while the others are called to help prepare for the pilgrimage, Thomas avoids the company of John Stump, knowing he will only feel the worse for hearing his views on what has happened, and he sits in the small yard of his own house, feeding his lurcher some scrapes of dark meat from the shinbone of a deer that has been hanging since before Sir John died. He is a good dog, the lurcher, dark grey, marked with white here and there about the forepaws, with long hair like soft wire, and, until he sees something to kill, his big round black eyes make him appear eager to oblige, though of course he is not, or not especially, and he is often to be found other than where he should be, but after these incidences, he looks so guilty it is impossible not to laugh at him, and forgive him almost anything.
Thomas is watching his dog absently as it now gnaws on the shinbone and the dog watches him back, an eyebrow raised, apparently perplexed that Thomas does not wish to join him in his feast, when one of Isabella’s sons – William, it is, with the beard – comes into the yard, carrying on his fist a great grey goshawk in her decorated leather hood. Thomas has always hated such birds. They are worse than foxes in their appetite for killing things.
Thomas greets him. William ignores him, and looks at Lurcher with his shinbone.
‘Your dog has been in the wood again,’ he says.
Thomas nods in agreement, though he is unsure if it has anything to do with William where Lurcher has or has not been.
‘He has brought down another deer?’ William goes on.
‘He has, yes, of course,’ Thomas says.
‘But those are not your deer to hunt.’
Thomas is nonplussed.
‘But we’ve always hunted them,’ he says, but now he can see where this is going, and he wishes he were standing up.
‘You will no longer,’ William says. ‘If we find your dog out there, we will set the alaunts on it, and if we see it has brought down anything else we will have the houndsman clip his foreclaws.’
Thomas cannot help but glance down at the dog’s white paws that are stretched forward, either side of the bone. Clipping his foreclaws would cripple him.
‘You cannot do that,’ he says.
‘No? And why not? This is our mother’s land you are on. We’d have a right to do much more than that.’
‘But Isabella—’ Thomas starts.
‘She is not Isabella to you. She is Lady Fakenham. Sir John Fakenham was out of his wits the way he let you talk to her – to him – like that. He was too lax. Too lax with you. Too lax with everything.’
Thomas cannot think of anything to say to that, and he looks down at Lurcher, who is watching the exchange as if he understands some hope is being dashed. After a moment William nods, satisfied with his work, and turns back to his hawk, still perched there on his gloved fist, whose head turns in short sharp movements, blindly searching for something. Weight gathers in William’s lips, as if he is about to kiss the bird, but he does not.
‘We are not unreasonable men,’ William says. ‘We only wish to see things done properly. With regard to – to proper ways.’
When he has gone, Thomas rubs Lurcher’s bony skull and wonders how any of them will bear it.
When the family leave on their pilgrimage, those remaining at the hall form two distinct factions, and they turn away from one another, and both sides know this is how it will be from now on. The houndsman – Borthwick – brings his alaunts into the hall in the evenings, and Thomas’s terrified lurcher presses himself against Thomas’s legs, his black eyes huge and round and glistening and his shaggy grey ribs quivering. The alaunts lie watching everything through their blank pink eyes, panting horribly with tongues like raw meat, and there is something demonic about their stupidity.
‘It will all be over when Isabella returns,’ Thomas tells Katherine the next morning as they sit together in the yard, washing Rufus by the well.
‘One way or the other,’ she agrees.
The next morning Borthwick makes some remark to Nettie, or offers her something that is thought inappropriate, and, since Jack is away, it is John Stump whom Thomas must stop trying to kill the man. Borthwick laughs as if he is used to such threats, and Thomas can easily imagine Borthwick killing John with the dagger he carries in his belt, or the one he’s probably got hidden elsewhere on his person. Nettie weeps for the rest of the day, her hand splayed over her belly, and will not tell them what was said, but from then on Borthwick – whom Sir John would never have allowed on to his lands, let alone sleep in his hall – makes a curious slopping sound with his tongue whenever he looks at her.
‘Make that noise once more,’ Katherine tells him, ‘and I will gut you myself, from bollocks to chops.’
Borthwick laughs again.
‘A chit of a thing,’ he says, waving his fat, dirty little fingers.
Oh Christ, you fool, Thomas thinks, because he knows she means it.
Nothing happens until the next evening, at the time that Sir John used to call the balance of the day, when the bell has sounded compline, but it is not time to cover the fire, and they are gathered in the hall and the first rush lamp is lit, and in the past Sir John might have called for a song, and laughed when it was not forthcoming, and then there would have been ale or wine, and a game of chess until another lamp needed to be lit, and it would be if Sir John was winning, but not if he was not, and then there would have been some discussion of the outside world, or perhaps a story from his days in captivity in France. But now there is no Sir John, and Borthwick is sprawled in the settle where Sir John used to sit in his last days, and his legs are spread, his codpiece rising greasy and grotesque, and those hounds of his lie scattered around like pale barrels of fat and fur, looking around the room so dimwittedly that Thomas has come to hate them. Lurcher is pressed to his ankles, as is now become usual, paws either side of his lowered head; he is staring up, frowning slightly, his black eyes, each lit by a single white fleck, fathomless in the gloom.
Katherine sits across from Thomas, stiff on a stool with Rufus sitting beside her, in her shadow, away from the dogs, two corn dolls in his hands. He is whispering something, a game, and is seemingly content, but Katherine is unsettled, on edge, and Thomas sup
poses she likes what has happened here even less than any of them, because this is the only home she has ever known. Yet there must be something else bothering her, for she is the very picture of frozen watchfulness.
Thomas wonders what they can possibly do. If they cannot live here, then where? He thinks about his brother’s farm, in the hills to the west of Sheffield. Could they live there with his brother’s widow? He has not thought of her for five years, since he heard his brother had died, and he can only hope that she has not thought of him for the same, since her thoughts . . . well, they are probably not Christian. And Jack, of course, would never be permitted back, for the last time he was there he sent an arrow through the daub and killed Thomas’s nephew. Unintended – he was aiming at Thomas at the time – but nonetheless.
What about Katherine’s family? Where are they? He tries to imagine who they might be, to have sent their daughter away as a four- or five-year-old into a priory such as St Mary’s at Haverhurst. No ordinary family would now do such a thing, surely? And that dream Katherine sometimes has – or once had, at any rate – of a fire in a stone chimneybreast suggests something more besides. She will not return to the priory, of course, for reasons even one of Borthwick’s hounds might understand, but even if she did, to ask that Prioress about her family, there is not a chance the Prioress would oblige her.
Nettie comes back in from the buttery, drying her hands on her apron, and Thomas sees Borthwick has been waiting for just this; Nettie stops a moment as if she expected no one to be in the room, and she makes the mistake of looking over at him, and he makes that sound again, the sucking noise.
Divided Souls Page 2