Hastings stops.
‘I am interested in any sign,’ he says. ‘Anything not of the ordinary: men with too much baggage and no business being on the road; or any wagonload of goose feathers being taken north.’
‘North?’
Hastings looks discomfited.
‘To Lord Montagu,’ he says. ‘My lord of Warwick’s brother. We need to know which way he will go, when next he is tempted by his brother’s siren call.’
There is a long pause. It does not sound too difficult, this task, but there is still something else, she thinks, something Hastings is not yet telling them.
‘So what do you say?’ Hastings asks.
‘Well, what can we say?’ Thomas says. ‘But yes and thank you for this chance?’
Hastings looks at them and smiles. He is a good man after all is said and done, Katherine thinks, and really, Thomas is right: what choice do they have? But still some vague suspicion, some reservation lodges itself in the back of her mind: that is not all he wants them to do.
‘Well,’ Hastings says, ‘that will be a weight off Lady Fakenham’s mind. And my own, too, of course. I will be in touch. Look for my messenger.’
He shakes Thomas’s hand, and he kisses Katherine’s cheeks, each one twice, as if she were a kinswoman, and he is just turning away when he stops, and does that thing, just as if he has just thought of something, and Katherine cannot help but arch her own eyebrow, because, of course, just as she thought, he is not quite done yet.
‘Ah yes,’ he says, as if he has just remembered something. ‘There is one other matter.’
PART TWO
After Trinity, Early Summer, 1469
4
When they leave Marton, two weeks later, they leave quickly, with hobbled, awkward farewells, and for that first morning they ride mostly in silence, north again, old heads bent, Thomas with his cap pulled low, Katherine with her cloak’s hood up around her ears, each wrapped in their own thoughts. At Doncaster, they join up with an anxious merchant from the brine wells at Droitwich who is bringing his blocks of salt up to the herring fishermen on the east coast, but he has only three men with him to act as guard, and Thomas sees they are of the sort that specialise in low-level pushing and shoving, the sort who will run at the first sight of any real trouble, and the salt merchant knows it, too, and so once he is sure of Thomas and Jack, and half-reassured by John, he is pleased to have them travelling alongside.
‘It is getting just as bad as it ever was,’ he moans. ‘So that a man cannot make an honest penny for fear of having it prised from his purse on the way home. And it is not just in the Northern Parts, oh no: the same ungodly strife has taken root everywhere in the land. In every town and village. It is the same everywhere. Everywhere you go. Everywhere you look.’
And he is right. Despite the sunshine and the light breeze at their backs, there is grit in the air. Something is going on, and as they pass through the towns and villages of the Midlands, busy men and women and children are quick to look up from what they are doing to watch them go, and for an instant everything is still and silent, and everyone is assessing everyone else, and wondering which way this will go, and then it is up to Thomas to show they mean no harm; and once reassured, the men and women and children go back to their work, but they remain wary, and Thomas has the sense they know trouble is coming, and they are hurrying to finish whatever it is they’re doing, just as they might do under the threat from rainclouds.
They roll northwards with the salt merchant always talking, Jack and John taking turns on the wagon horse, with Nettie and Rufus in the bed of the wagon, wherein they sit on three coffers filled with clothes, dishes, shoes, spoons, bedding, a small block of hard black Castilian soap as a present from Isabella, and a double-wrapped sack of dried peas they will scatter in Senning to get them going. Thomas is pleased to see that as they go, they seem to be going back in season, to spring, when the elm buds are not yet out, and it will not be too late to scatter the peas. Wrapped in oiled cloth are their bows – including Rufus’s, and John Stump’s crossbow – and the pollaxe, with a bag of its own over that fearsome head, so as not to frighten anyone who sees it passing.
‘Cold,’ Rufus says.
‘It is that,’ Nettie agrees.
Nettie has become uncomfortably pregnant and is unhappy to be moving away from Marton Hall and all she has ever known, but Jack has resigned her to it, and she is reassured by Katherine’s presence, who she believes will be able to deliver her baby when the time comes. Katherine has not the heart to tell her what happened the last time she tried to deliver a baby.
Jack and John take turns imagining how Senning will be. They have imagined a paradise: a paradise with a beautiful, plump brewster for John, all dimples and dark eyes.
John smirks.
‘I am imagining straining laces.’
‘I hope for your sake she is not too fussy,’ Jack says.
Sometimes Rufus sits alongside them on the wagon, and other times he rides perched on Thomas’s saddle. It is not comfortable, but Thomas likes the weight of the boy against him, and Rufus has started talking again, if only in a whisper so far, and so Thomas is pleased to be distracted by Rufus’s excitement whenever he sees a windmill with its sails in flight, or when they meet a party of mummers who are accompanied by an obliging juggler.
It never takes long though, for Thomas’s thoughts to return – tongue-tip to tooth socket – to the thing that preoccupies him above all else: the ledger. It is back, resurrected in a single word from William Hastings, and at its mention, on the day of Sir John’s Month’s Mind, Thomas had felt the sweat prickle his forehead and the gorge rise to stop his breathing. Oh Christ, he’d thought, not again. Not still.
The ledger has been interred for four years, bound in oiled cloth, buried – but never forgotten – beneath the hearthstone of his home, almost as if Thomas built the house as a mausoleum for it. It has not been mentioned since it was laid there, though he has sometimes stood over the flames as they have died down at the end of day, with the clay bell of the fire’s cover in his hand, and he has stared down at the rough hearthstone as if he could look through it and see the ledger below, with the hole in its pages left by a pollaxe pick, the grubby stitches puncturing its hard leather spine, its stiffened, rough-edged pages crackling with flaking gall-oak ink. He can almost see those names, long lists of men and the towns they’d garrisoned in France, and his eye is drawn to those pages on which a younger version of himself had drawn perfect marginal additions, such as Abraham reaching through the letter O to harvest plump damsons that would have been grapes had he ever seen any growing, with a sickle that would be gold had he ever had the money for gold leaf. Katherine once told him this version of Abraham is modelled on the man who left them the ledger, a man who died long ago, to whom they owe their lives.
Thomas cannot remember any details of this man, but Katherine has told him he was a pardoner who’d saved them from starving or freezing to death on the first day of their apostasy by letting them share his fire in some woods, and then fed them, bought them clothing and took them with him – as Thomas had hoped – to Canterbury, to appeal to the Prior of All their order to prove they were not apostates. She’d told him about the men who murdered the pardoner at sea on the way there, about how they’d thrown him overboard to drown, and then about how their lives were altered forever by the intervention of Sir John Fakenham and his men, who seized the boat and took it – and them – not to Canterbury, but to Calais.
When they’d landed in France, they found all that was left behind on board of the pardoner’s possessions was this book, a ledger of names and places, which he’d earlier claimed was worth a fortune to the right men, though he’d never said why it was so valuable, or who these right men might be. It had taken them five years to divine its secret and when they did, they’d crossed themselves and prayed to God, for just knowing this secret was treasonous enough to place a man in mortal danger of an excruciating death; in there,
buried among the details of the many and various toings and froings of the English garrisons in France in the 1440s, was a detail to show that in the month his mother conceived him, King Edward’s father, Richard, Duke of York, was in a small town called Pontours, in the south-west of France, while she – his mother – was in Rouen, in Normandy, more than two weeks’ travel apart. The ledger proves that King Edward is not his father’s son, but is a bastard, with no right to the throne of England. Even to consider whether this might be true or not is to commit treason, and Sir John Fakenham had been vivid in his description of the fate of men found guilty of such a crime.
They’d believed they’d hidden it safely. He’d thought he had, but then had come William Hastings, holding up his hand to stay his men and taking Thomas and Katherine back aside one last time to explain an extra errand they might do for him: find this same, goddamned ledger.
‘Sir Ralph Grey knew of it,’ Hastings had told them. ‘Before the axeman got him after the fall of Bamburgh, he told his priest about a bound record that had come into his hands, detailing the movements of the army in France at the time Richard, Duke of York, was Lieutenant over there.’
‘That does not sound – valuable?’ Katherine had said and Thomas had wondered at her, but then saw it would have looked peculiar not to have even asked. Hastings had, of course, then become deliberately opaque. He did not – could not – say what was so important about this book, or why he wanted it, only that he wanted it very badly.
‘And where do we even start?’ Katherine had asked. ‘The road is easy enough to watch, I suppose, but to find a book in a – a whole country? And in a place we do not know?’
‘Well, we have at least a scent to follow,’ Hastings had said. ‘After Bamburgh fell and he was captured, Sir Ralph Grey told his confessor about the record, about its importance, and his priest – being Warwick’s man, of course, and careless of his vows – went straight to Warwick with it. When Warwick heard about it, you can imagine: he came running.
‘But then Grey told him he had lost the ledger! To begin with I believe Warwick thought Grey was playing for something grander than a mere pardon, but you know what Warwick is like: no one says no to him. So Grey lost his head. Thinking on it now, though, I don’t think Grey was playing at all. I think he had, genuinely, lost it, this ledger, otherwise . . . well. Surely, when you’re on the block, you know? You give up your secrets, don’t you? I know I would.’
He’d stretched his neck out then, as if on the block himself, and mimed creeping his hands forward to signal to the headsman that he was ready for the blow. Then he’d snatched them back.
‘That does not seem a very strong scent for us to follow,’ Katherine had said.
‘Sir Ralph Grey lost the record when Bamburgh fell,’ Hastings had gone on. ‘So if it still exists, it will have been gathered up by someone who was in the castle at the time, wouldn’t it?’
Katherine had agreed.
‘But if it is as undistinguished as you say, whoever took it, well, would they not have used it to light fires?’
Hastings had had to admit that was possible.
‘But we must be sure,’ he’d said. ‘We can’t leave this to chance.’
‘So we must find out who was with Grey when the castle fell?’ Katherine had asked.
It had taken all Thomas’s strength not to look at her then. He could feel a noose tightening.
‘But it was chaos,’ he had said.
Hastings had agreed.
‘The men within were understandably quick to lay down their arms and slip away,’ he’d said, ‘but they were mostly the rump of Lords Roos and Hungerford’s retinue, weren’t they? Men who’d fled the field at Hexham and had made their way back there.’
And then Katherine had barked a short laugh, and Hastings had smirked at her, because she had seen it, seen Hastings’s design, and a moment later Thomas had seen it, too.
‘And this manor,’ he’d begun, ‘this Senning – our new home – once belonged to a man who followed Lord Hungerford?’
Hastings had had the decency to look abashed, but he was pleased with the scheme, and he was pleased they had divined it before it needed explaining.
‘Why yes it did,’ he’d said. ‘Yes. Indeed.’
‘And is it that he drew his men from the surrounding area?’
‘I believe that is the case, yes.’
‘And so we would be ideally placed to watch the road for Warwick’s messengers, to watch the country for any sign of tumult among the populace, to keep a weather eye on the temper of Lord Montagu, who is now made the Earl of Northumberland, and we are to search among them for any sign of this – this record?’
‘And pay your rent,’ Hastings had added.
And so that was it. It was ingenious, even Katherine had had to admit.
‘What should we do if we find this record of yours?’ Thomas had asked.
Hastings had paused and then said: ‘Nothing. Just send word. Whoever has this record, they must be taken. Completely. Do you understand? As you might a – a dandelion: whole, with no trace of root or seed left behind. We need to know how they came by it, and what they know of it. We need to know everything about them. We need to know everything – and everyone – they know. We need to know everything – and everyone – everyone they know knows, too. Do you see? It is that important.’
The easy manners had dropped away, and Hastings had become more skull than skin, more iron than flesh, and Thomas had seen then how he could have become King Edward’s Chamberlain, how he could have fought alongside King Edward at Towton.
But then he had gone on, intending perhaps to reassure them, but in practice doing the exact opposite, making something they thought could hardly have been worse far more so, as he revealed the all-encompassing extent of their bind.
‘But you are not setting about this alone,’ he had said. ‘I have another working for me, a friar who can speak eight languages. He is in France, trying to find out how the ledger came to be stolen after Rouen fell, where it went and which serpentine paths brought it to Grey’s attention. He has sent a message to say he is on the trail of a dealer who specialised in – in such things – but who resists discovery just as if he has vanished under the water. But my man is good. He is like a bloodhound, you know? He will winkle him out, and then we shall see.’
Thomas had not been able to help glancing at Katherine then. He’d seen her swallow as she realised what this meant: soon someone would find the pardoner. Soon someone would find them. It was the worst possible news.
Yet Hastings still had one last blow to deliver.
‘So don’t despair,’ he’d gone on. ‘If the record is not there, then it is somewhere else; and, as God is my witness, I shall find it before that bastard Warwick makes use of it.’
‘What do you mean, “make use of it”?’ Katherine had asked, and Hastings had looked caught out again, guiltily laying one more obligation on their shoulders.
‘I should have said before,’ he’d admitted. ‘Warwick already has a man up there. He is asking all sorts of questions, and has a reputation for uncovering what was once covered through the most pitiless means.’
‘Pitiless?’
Hastings had shrugged.
‘I don’t know,’ he’d said. ‘You hear things, don’t you? He is much feared, at any rate.’
Hastings had let out a long, dispirited sigh, and then he’d looked up at the sky. It was bruising over and, despite the visit to the painting of St Christopher, it did not seem he and his party would make it dry-shod to Doncaster.
‘So we are agreed?’ he’d said.
And they’d nodded, for what else could they do?
And he’d been pleased.
‘When can you start out?’ he’d asked.
And they’d looked at one another, and then at the vista of Isabella’s two sons, waiting with ill-concealed dislike, and Thomas had said: ‘Soon?’
And with that, Hastings had climbed up into his sadd
le and looked down at them and said: ‘Good. Soonest is best, for if this record, this ledger, falls into my lord of Warwick’s hands, then we will all be queuing for the headsman’s block come Michaelmas.’
5
‘We should have destroyed it when we had the chance,’ Thomas tells Katherine and she agrees, again, for this is the fifth or sixth time they have had this conversation since they set out from Marton.
‘We should have burned it,’ he cannot stop himself going on, ‘or thrown it into the sea. Anything.’
‘But that would still not save us,’ Katherine repeats. ‘Once Hastings knows we know what is in it, even what was in it, we are dead.’
‘We should have told Hastings we had it,’ he says, ignoring her. ‘Straight away, in all innocence, to show him we had no knowledge of its significance, or admitted that we knew of it, but we’d used it for splints, ignorant of its value.’
‘Yes,’ Katherine supposes, tiring of this conversation. ‘That would have been best.’
‘But we can’t say anything now, can we? It just—’ Thomas stops and blows out through pursed lips. ‘By God. It is never easy, is it?’
She laughs dryly.
‘You’ve heard John,’ she says, nodding at the cart where he sits with his crossbow across his knees. ‘We’ve had five good years. And we have Rufus. Perhaps that is all the happiness you can expect in one lifetime?’
Thomas can only grunt. Christ, he wonders, is that it?
‘Senning will be all we hope for,’ he tells her. ‘I am sure of it.’
‘I remember riding to Cornford with Richard, sharing the same hopes,’ she says. She does not need to finish the sentence. He knows how that turned out.
‘It will be better this time,’ he says. ‘You heard Hastings. There will be a house waiting us, with everything we could need. A smith! A carpenter! A brewster! A pea crop to plant! And sheep. And hills,’ he said. ‘I missed the hills when we were in Marton. It was so flat.’
Divided Souls Page 5