Katherine vaguely remembers the name. He was always the aloof one in camp, wasn’t he? The one with the best tents; the one whom all the others resented. Her only memories of the time are of ailing, of vomiting, and of wanting to sleep all the hours through. Any other recollections are fogged, or glossed, or made mad with the rage of it all.
And now Watkins is going on about how they decided they would not kill this Tailboys, but they’d ransom him and fill their purses with the proceeds, even though the thought of ransoming an Englishman stuck in their craws.
‘But it was not to be,’ he says almost sadly, ‘because the Earl of Warwick was inclined to chop his head off, so we would never have got our money anyway, but by then we didn’t care about any share in any piddling little ransom, did we?’
Watkins is looking at her beady-eyed now, as if he has been very clever.
‘No?’ Katherine asks.
‘No,’ he says. ‘No, we did not. Because do you know what was on those mules?’
Despite herself she is caught up in the story now.
‘Tell me,’ she says.
And Watkins leans forward out of his chair, and he holds her gaze, and he says: ‘Three thousand marks!’
Katherine is momentarily at a loss. Three thousand marks. Such a sum is impossible to grasp. Is there that much money in all the world?
‘Three thousand marks?’ she checks. ‘Three thousand marks?’
Watkins cackles.
‘Wherever – wherever did it come from?’ she asks.
‘It was old King Henry’s war chest, wasn’t it? Tailboys had loaded it up on to them mules after the rout at Hexham and dragged it off into the woods so it wouldn’t fall into our hands, hadn’t he? I don’t know if he’d meant to hide it in the mine all along, and come back for it God knows when, but if so, we stopped that, didn’t we?’
‘And – and whatever did you do with so much money?’
Watkins looks upwards into the dark beams of the hall and gestures in a circular wave to take in the rest of the hall to signify: This.
‘We shared it out among us, and old Lord Montagu, as he was then, stood by and said it was a salve for our troubles. He’s a good man, like I say. Like Carlisle. So each of us got enough, some to live out our days in comfort, others to drink themselves to an early grave. But everything you see here: this board, these dishes, this salt pot, these clothes, even, they all come from that one day. It changed my life. Made me what I am today, and it is why I will never go back to soldiering. I’ll never beat them days. Never.’
It is late, and the fire has died down. The candles have winked themselves to death, and Goodwife Watkins snores gently, her head resting on plump arms folded on the board, peaceful in the low amber light. Watkins finishes his wine, bangs his mug to stir her, and then the servants come to prepare the master and mistress for bed, and the two of them make their way up to their room at the top of the steps, and then the servants roll out the mattresses, and at last the cloche is put on the embers and darkness falls.
Katherine lies awake, bending her thoughts to the road that Jack and John Stump and Nettie have taken, and she prays for them, and hopes they are already in York, or perhaps at an inn along the way; but it is not long before she starts thinking about luck, and how some have it and others don’t, and she is not so good a soul that she does not resent Fortune’s Wheel forever turning against her while turning in favour of a man such as Watkins. She tries to imagine what it would be like to find three thousand marks in a hole in the ground in the woods, but she cannot, and she falls asleep wondering if she ought to repeat Watkins’s story to Thomas or not, and then deciding probably not: he is sore about money at the moment and it would only make him more so, and above all else she wants him to be happy – in so far as that is ever possible.
8
Thomas wakes at dawn with a start. Where is he? Katherine is with him, Rufus too, both safe and sound, but he has no idea where he is or how he got here. He recalls the day before, but not how it ended. He rouses Katherine. She sits up. Explains. He lies back again and presses his hands to his face.
‘Dear God,’ he says.
They rise and say their prayers and dress, and then Katherine dresses Rufus while all around the Watkins household gets ready for the new day, and after breakfast of bread and ale, they are on their way, with an extra flagon of ale from Goodwife Watkins and a gruff apology from Watkins himself.
‘Sorry for talking so last night,’ he tells Katherine. ‘The wife has already given me an earful.’
‘No.’ She laughs. Thomas wonders what they are talking about, and asks after they have said their thanks and farewells.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she tells him. ‘He was talking about his days in Lord Montagu’s army. He was at Hedgeley Moor and Hexham, you know? Not an archer though, so he cannot be blamed for Jack’s leg.’
They ride on for a bit.
‘It is odd, isn’t it?’ Thomas says. ‘That he feeds us and gives us ale and lets us sleep by his fire, when only a short time ago we were trying to kill one another.’
‘Would you rather he were consistent?’ she asks.
Thomas supposes not. He feels rueful and thoughtful this morning after his sickness the day before. It is going to be another hot day and already their shadows are sharp on the road’s sheep-cropped verge. Thomas is anxious, but at the outskirts of the village they find a red-headed girl sitting in the shade of a house, who is able, there and then, to twist the rushes between her clever fingers to make broad-brimmed hats to fit their heads, each one taking her no longer than it might to say a decade of the rosary. While they wait, the church bell rings out, setting doves flapping, and the girl tells them they are ringing for SS Peter and Paul, whose day it is today.
‘Time passes, eh?’ she says. ‘Nights’ll soon be drawing in.’
In this heat it is impossible to imagine what the winters might be like up here.
When the girl has finished and placed Rufus’s hat upon his head, she tickles him under the chin and they ride on westwards, shaded by their new headgear, following the road as it snakes through the valley towards a gap between the distant hills.
They ride all that morning, and he is aware that Katherine is keeping an eye on him, and to tell the truth he does not feel well, and the horse is so hot, but on they go. By noon they come up and over the most westerly pass of the moors, and below, where the hills shelve away, is the broad cloth of the plain stretching for many miles toward a distant line of blue shaded hills. Above the plain, seemingly at Thomas’s eye level, are white balls of cloud that move sedately southwards on a gentle breeze.
‘Like sheep through a gate,’ Thomas notes.
They linger a while, watching the shadows of the clouds as they move over the gentle countryside below. It is very green down there, mostly wooded save for a distant smudge of smoke over a spider-shaped fretwork of roads and tracks that come together in what must be a town. There might be a river a little way beyond, and two or three smaller villages on its course. Elsewhere the pattern of woods and furlongs, fields and pens – it looks familiar, comprehensible, heartening.
But he can see no sign of an army sheltering in its folds, no columns of smoke, no rows of tents, no lines of horses or columns of trudging men. There are no carts, no crowds of camp followers filling the roads as they would, were they there.
‘Are you sure Redesdale is down there?’ she asks.
‘Unless he has already moved on? Or we are lost?’
‘What about Riven?’ she asks. ‘Will he be down there?’
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ he tells her.
He swings his leg off his horse, leaving Rufus perched in the saddle, and he loosens the ties on the pollaxe, and he takes his bow out and bends it around his body and grunts with the effort of nocking the bowstring. The illness, whatever it was, has left him weak. He hopes he does not have to use the thing in anger. He has not drawn it in weeks, but now, nocked, it is alive in hand again,
thrumming with that potent energy, and he wonders whether he dare loose an arrow, and lose it, just for the pleasure of it? Then he remembers the cost of each arrow, and the threat of Riven. Imagine if he needed just one more?
Katherine is watching him with one eyebrow cocked.
So he slides the bow back on the saddle, near at hand, and with as strong a pace as possible he sets off, Katherine following, likewise dismounted, down into the cooling shadows of the valley, where God alone knows what awaits.
When the ground levels, they mount up and find a track that fords the stream, and they ride splashing through the water and Rufus gurgles with pleasure; and then they are into thick woods where they can smell charcoal burners at work, but there is no one to be seen. After a while Thomas stops and they stare down the length of the tree-pressed track, where the shade is dappled and birds chatter but otherwise all is silent.
They look at one another, and shrug, and kick on. After a while the track brings them to a road laid with old stones, running north to south through the vale, empty. Thomas is about to ride out on to it, when he sees something, down there, among the grit. He pulls on his reins. The horse steps back. He dismounts. Under his feet, in the dust and dirt of the road, are many hoof prints, all heading south, and each planted recently. Among them, too, are the long snaking lines of wheel rims, and then there are two wide grooves of shuffled footprints. Together they mean only one thing: men moving as an army.
He looks at her, she at him.
‘How many?’ she asks.
‘Hundreds?’ he supposes.
‘Is it Robin of Redesdale?’
‘I’d thought there might be more,’ he admits.
Part of Thomas feels deflation. Hastings will not be overly interested to hear they have found an army that numbers in its hundreds. That number rode with him when he came to Marton, and that was for a ride in the countryside. No. It is clear that if this is Redesdale’s army, then he is no threat to the realm.
‘Well,’ Thomas says. ‘Perhaps Hastings will welcome good news?’
Katherine nods and gives him a tight half-smile.
‘Come on, then,’ he says. ‘We’d best be off. Go and find Jack and John.’
He is about to step up into the stirrup again when Rufus says: ‘Listen.’ They look up at him and he has an eager little smile on his face, and so they listen.
‘Now it is drums,’ he says.
And they are dead still, bolt upright, straining to hear, and now there it is, coming on the wind: a tuneless ripple of sticks on skin. A drum. More than one. From the north. Katherine turns to Thomas, wide-eyed. They know what it means: troops. They are the only people who follow drums like that. Men under orders.
Thomas swings up into his saddle and kicks his horse around and they ride back splashing through the ford and then up along the track, keeping as low as they can, noses pressed to the horses’ withers, until they reach the trees where the charcoalers are at work. He slides from his saddle and leads the horse off the road, ducking under the low fronds of a laurel tree, along a dark path twisting into the green heart of the wood.
They follow it to the charcoalers’ camp: a large stump in which a hatchet is buried, a few blackened pots and a pile of stuff under a spread of sooty linen, cleaner and neater than he’d imagined from the tales people told about charcoal burners – and the two men who are standing there with their blades drawn look nothing like the figures from the horror stories you hear in inns. They are skinny, wraithlike, with jug ears, and far more frightened than frightening. One of them is wearing only a soldier’s jack that hangs to his enormous, naked knees, the other a pair of hose that are rolled up at the ankles.
There is a tense moment.
‘God give you good blessing,’ Thomas says.
The drum is beating still. Growing louder. Coming closer.
The charcoalers hear it too, and are equally concerned, their gazes flicking to one another, their weapons – such as they are – clutched tighter. Thomas gestures, asking to go through their camp. They just stare. He assumes permission, and leads his horse towards the far side of the wood, where he hopes he’ll find a view of the road and the men upon it. Katherine follows him past piles of already charcoaled branches, past the great smoking dome of their underground oven and then out under clearer skies towards the southern edge of the wood, where the trees have been coppiced. The stream loops around this edge, enclosing it nicely, and two children are fishing in the turbid waters, both naked and smudged and sooted with charcoal. Their bellies bulge and their legs are crooked, and they look up with big eyes, and say not a word.
Thomas looks over their heads, west, to the road that cuts south. The drum is still beating, and they can hear more than one, more than two, and there’re pipes too, likewise more than two. A pale cloud of dust writhes through the afternoon sky.
And then he sees them. A whole column of men and horses.
‘By Christ,’ he breathes. ‘Look at them. There must be a thousand.’
‘Where have they come from?’ she asks.
He doesn’t know.
‘Can you see who they are?’
Katherine has better eyes than him.
‘Red,’ she says. ‘White. Bits of it. Blue, too, but – they are mostly – you know. A mix. Russet. Linen. Nothing really. No flags. They are just . . .’ She shrugs.
‘Who are they then? They can’t be Warwick’s? No. No. His men – well, they are proper soldiers. Montagu’s too, surely? D’you remember them? They – they must be Redesdale’s.’
They watch the men filing along the road, sunlight catching on a helmet here, a bill there. He can imagine them, imagine how mixed their feelings are and how that will affect the way they stride out. A man will swagger, caught up in it, or he will shuffle, wondering just what in the name of God he has got himself into.
‘But Watkins said Redesdale would never take the field, that he was doing all this to make Northumberland jump one way or the other.’
‘Well, Christ, look at them. They mean business. Look at those carts. They’re loaded up with God knows what.’
He can imagine iron ingots, sharpening stones, arrowheads, hides, wheat, ale. All sorts of things. Guns, even. They watch for a long while, standing in the gloom with the children watching them, and as the men on the road trudge past, and the drums rattle, Thomas becomes no longer frightened, only taken over by a strange sadness. Katherine too.
‘So it is starting all over again,’ he says.
She puts a hand on his shoulder.
‘You won’t have to be there,’ she says eventually.
He feels – what? Sadness at all this, but also relief. He has something for Hastings now.
‘Hastings,’ he says. ‘We must tell him about this.’
‘We’ll have to get past them,’ she says, nodding at the road. ‘You know how they are, these armies? You remember when Queen Margaret came down to London? The time she beat Warwick on the field? Her army pillaged everything fifteen miles each side of the road.’
‘How then?’
‘Perhaps – perhaps we could join them?’
She points to the camp followers that have stumbled into view on the road, struggling to keep up along with their oxen and carts, dragging the tents, the pots, the bags of oatmeal. Along with the wives and children, there’ll be bakers and butchers and brewers, bowyers, fletchers and stringfellows. There will be chancers and thieves, priests, pardoners and purse-cutters. There will be the whole soup of human life into which a man and his wife and child might easily melt, if only that man wore a suitable livery coat, or was with friends to vouch for him.
But even a column such as this will have prickers riding to and fro, each of them hefting the long lance from which they get their names, and if they do not think he is some interloping spy, they will press him into their own company, and he has spent long enough in that situation.
He is thinking how to get by when there is a disturbance on the road: a shrill trumpet, har
d blown. A standard is carried aloft. Some noble it is, trying to get up the road in a hurry, with half his retinue to clear the way, the other half to trail in his wake. ‘Can you see the colours?’ Thomas asks.
‘Blue background,’ she says, ‘with a few yellow curls like this.’
She draws a shape in the air. It means nothing to him either.
The column winds on past. By now the charcoalers’ children have come back across the stream to climb the bank and disappear back into the trees. Thomas’s horse defecates fragrantly. Katherine hears the clatter of a pot back in the charcoalers’ camp. Rufus says he is hungry. She is suddenly fiercely hungry too.
‘Is there another road south?’ she asks. ‘A path or something?’
‘Perhaps these people will know?’ Thomas asks, gesturing at the charcoal burners. ‘Some secret path?’
He asks. The charcoalers do not appear to speak English, or only a strange form of it. There is much pointing but if they do know of another road south, they are unable to say where it might be. It is hopeless.
‘God give you good day,’ Thomas says, anxious to be away. There is a smell in the air that catches his throat and makes him feel sick, but Katherine’s attention has been caught: the children from the stream are back under the linen shelter. You couldn’t call it a tent: it is too basic for that. They are bent over something on the ground, some lump, and their posture is supplicatory and fretful, as if they are concerned for something, or someone. They are offering something, holding it out. Could it be one of the fish they’ve just caught? And could it be that – someone else is there? Then he thinks: The mother. Where is she?
Katherine walks over to the children to see what they are doing. The two charcoalers follow her with their eyes. There is a stream of talk. One is agitated, the other calming. Thomas cannot decide how dangerous they are. Of greater concern is Katherine. He turns and he almost groans. She has found someone who needs her help. Christ. What is it this time? He walks over, one eye on the two charcoalers, the other on Katherine.
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