He sees they are gathered around the head of what turns out to be a supine woman, who is so motionless she could be dead. The children hold out their fish, silvery in the dark, but they look up at Katherine. The smell under the awning makes Thomas flinch: rotting flesh and excrement on excrement. The children retreat, pushing themselves back with their heels. They are both still naked. A bluebottle buffets his lips before he can clamp a palm over his mouth.
He watches Katherine with a sinking sensation as she crouches next to the woman. The woman moves at last, retracting her toes with a whimper. Not dead then. She is lying on her side. Her clothes are black. Her skin is black.
‘What is it?’ Katherine asks her.
It takes Thomas a moment to see the woman is cupping her filthy cheek with both hands. The cheek is bulbous, so swollen it fills both palms and closes her eye above, from which the tears have washed tracks in the soot. The other eye is open, blue as sky, glaring furiously. Katherine makes to move the hands, but the woman hisses something and swings her elbow. Katherine glances up at the children. They stare white- and wide-eyed. No one has ever tried to touch their mother.
Katherine tries again.
‘I can help,’ she says.
But again the woman’s elbow comes up.
Suddenly one of the charcoalers is there under the tent. Thomas grabs his knife, but the man is no threat. He is bent, looking at Katherine quizzically. His jack flaps open and – Christ! – he too is naked. It is grotesque. Katherine ignores this, and makes slow gestures.
‘I can help,’ she says. ‘I have medicines. Medicines?’
If the man does not understand exactly, he understands enough. He says something to the woman. She moans a protest. He is sharp with her. He leans forward, takes her elbows and pulls them away. The woman wails in pain and it seems the man might hit her at any moment. Katherine says something soothing and the man holds the woman’s hands, and then kneels on them, and grabs her face, turning it to Katherine. He slides his black fingers into her mouth and forces it open. The woman bites down. They are fighting, without moving. Every muscle of each body is tensed against the other.
Katherine peers in. Even Thomas can see that the woman’s teeth are terrible, the gums black and engorged. He cannot help murmur an expression of disgust.
‘Katherine,’ he says. ‘Can we not just—?’
‘She is in pain, Thomas,’ Katherine tells him.
‘I can see that,’ he says. ‘But you are not a tooth-puller and we—’
‘I have salve,’ she says. ‘And dwale.’
‘You do?’
‘From an apothecary in Lincoln. Isabella paid for it, when she knew we were going. In a roll in the bag on my horse.’
The roll, within the saddle bag, is new made, in calfskin. Within are five small bottles with wooden stoppers held in place with leather straps, and there are also some cloth packets of various powders and two knives, sheathed in leather. The smell is sharp and cleansing.
The woman is struggling.
‘I wish I had some – some tools. Pliers. Something like that. I could remove the tooth. Clean the wound.’
‘We do not have time for this,’ he tells her.
Thomas cannot stand to be under the linen a moment longer, with the bumbling flies, the struggling man and woman, the stench from the woman’s mouth. He cannot understand how Katherine can bear it.
‘Christ,’ he says and he turns to find Rufus standing on tiptoes, trying to see in to the woman’s mouth. ‘Not you, too,’ he mutters.
He wonders what Katherine knows about tooth pulling. What is there to know? Nothing. You just pull the tooth. But she cannot seem to get hold of it. Her fingers are not strong enough. He thinks for a moment if he has anything like a pair of pliers. Of course not. What else then? He remembers extracting a tree stump with Jack. They used a rope and an ox. Pulled it out that way. One of them dug around it, loosened it, while the other drove the ox. Took a morning perhaps. He saunters back towards the stream again, where the column still marches. How long now? he wonders. The sun is still high. Two hours? They are moving slowly. He remembers Katherine telling him that it took a day to ride from end to end of the column of men and wagons moving up to fight at Towton.
Katherine comes to him and clambers down to wash the blood from her hands. She is flushed and angry.
‘What is the cure?’ Thomas asks. He is being patient.
She sighs.
‘I have given her some henbane, and some poppy seed. But she has some hole at the base of a tooth. That or a worm.’
‘So what next?’
‘An iron nail, engraved with the words Agla Sabaoth Athanatos, placed under the tooth.’
‘What good will that do?’ Thomas wonders.
‘Nothing, until it is hammered into an oak tree, and a prayer is said.’
‘Do you have an iron nail?’
‘No. Nor do I have a tree frog, which might also work.’
‘A tree frog? We could find one. I bet the charcoalers make soup of them.’
She waves her hand.
‘I don’t believe these things work. Well. Perhaps the tree frog has some unknown quantity that will balance her humours, but I cannot get at the tooth to remove it.’
He tells her about the tree stump and ox.
‘We don’t have a rope. Or an ox,’ she tells him.
‘I’ve a bowstring,’ he says.
And she stops her rinsing and looks at him. He unwraps one from his right wrist and passes it over. She takes it, twists it, makes a loop, and then returns to the tent. Thomas follows. He watches her crouch, bend her back, fiddle in the woman’s mouth, curse twice, place a knee on the woman’s chest, and then haul back. He hears the noise, and then the woman screams and thrashes, but a black gobbet spins through the air and Katherine is bobbing away. The woman kicks her legs and shouts and screams a little more, but by now the henbane and the poppy-seed juice have worked a little.
Thomas returns to watching the road. He feels safe leaving her in the company of the charcoal burners now. They are like woodland animals, he thinks: squirrels, which they are supposed to eat, or badgers. Perhaps it is the white eyes in the midst of their sharp, black faces? And as they go about their business, they make curious communicative noises to one another, more like those woodland creatures than men. Jesus, they are odd. Katherine sits by the woman and the children offer her that fish, which she cannot accept, but then one of the men brings her something in a dish she thinks they are suggesting she eats. There is some for Thomas, too: a wodge of something dense and cold, smelling faintly fungal, but they eat it like bread, so Thomas does too, breaking it apart along woody grains with his fingers, and it is some sort of fungus after all.
By the time they are finished, the woman is sitting up, and the column of troops and camp followers has passed.
‘Well,’ Thomas says. ‘That is that.’
He feels a curious despair.
‘We can always catch them up,’ she says.
She gathers Rufus to her, and they make to leave the charcoalers’ camp, but one of them – the one with the jack – is now on his feet. He is rummaging for something among their few possessions. What is it? It is as if he wants to give them a gift, something to thank her for his wife’s recovery. He finds what he is looking for, there among his things, and he holds it out reverentially, as if to him it is utterly precious. She can see why. In a world of black things, here is something red. A fold of dark red linen, kept that way, Katherine imagines, since he first acquired it. He holds it out, his black thumbs smudging it, and he lets it drop so that it hangs from his outstretched hands: it is a livery coat, a simple tabard, two pieces of cloth stitched together at the hips and shoulders, big enough for Thomas to wear. It has, though, a patch of white cloth sewn on to its breast: a tree stump. The badge of the Earl of Warwick.
She looks at Thomas, and Thomas at her. He smiles.
‘That should help,’ he says.
There is
the inevitable bloodstain on the back, and the hole around which it clings is ragged and round: an arrow that caught the man perhaps a little to the right of his spine. She wonders how the charcoaler came upon it. Did he find the body and strip it? If so, an odd thing to keep when you think of all the other things he must have been wearing. Then she realises. This is the livery jacket that went over the soldier’s jack that the man is wearing now. When she puts her finger through the hole and gestures at his jack, he grins toothlessly and turns, and there, sure enough, among the black is a deeper patch of black around a rip in the linen from which tufts of tow spew. Then he points and says something to suggest it happened a long way from here and that it was nothing to do with them, they only found the body, and perhaps they even buried it.
‘Bet they ate him,’ Thomas supposes.
He thanks the man and takes the livery coat. The man nods vigorously and grins. Dust rises from his fringe and his gums around his rotten teeth are very pink.
‘We can pretend I am carrying messages,’ Thomas tells her. ‘They will yield the road for a messenger, surely?’
He shrugs himself into the tabard. It fits him loosely, since he is not wearing an archer’s padded jack, and he looks nothing like he imagines a messenger of the Earl of Warwick might look. He leads the horses away from the charcoalers – the woman is on her feet now, grinning sloppily, the drool and blood having cleaned her chin – who follow them up to the fringes of the wood from where they watch Thomas heft Rufus into the saddle and then swing up after him. Thomas and Katherine pause for a moment to thank the charcoalers but it is difficult to see them in the gloom of the trees at the end of this sunlit afternoon.
They retrace their steps down the track and across the ford to the road where the tracks are dug deeper with the passing of the army and its followers. Then they turn south, following them down the old road.
‘We must aim to pass them just as they have found a place for the night,’ Thomas tells her. ‘That way we might slide by unchallenged.’
It seems a forlorn hope, for no messenger of the Earl of Warwick would ride with his wife and child, and at the first question asked, the falsehood will be apparent, but that is almost all they can do: hope.
As the afternoon shades to evening, they come to a long, dead-straight stretch of the road; they see in the distance that it is blocked by the backs of the camp followers, but they are lucky, for the followers are engaged in some sort of activity, and Thomas thinks it can only mean they have found the right spot in which to camp. So he and Katherine dismount and wait a few moments to let the horses crop the verge in the shadow of a large chestnut. They watch as the carts and wagons are shunted to one side, canvas and cooking pots unloaded. This is the time when everyone there will be squabbling for space, squabbling to be near the watch tent, near the central fire, squabbling not to be too near the place where men will most likely relieve themselves all night and in the morning.
Any moment now there will be a lull between when the prickers come in and before the pickets are sent out – the hour between dog and wolf – and that will be the time to pass by on the road as if on urgent business.
‘Well,’ Thomas says, tightening himself for it. ‘Here we go.’
She places a hand on his arm and speaks so that Rufus cannot hear or be spooked.
‘Thomas,’ she says. ‘You know the risks you run?’
He pulls on the red cloth of the tabard.
‘This?’
She nods.
‘They will know you are not Warwick’s man and hang you for a spy.’
‘What else is there?’ he asks her. ‘We have been given this as – as a gift from God. It is like being given a pass. We must use it.’
‘Since when were charcoal burners agents of God?’
‘It will go well,’ he says. ‘All will be well.’
She nods again, and he places his arms around her and pulls her to him, and they are like that for a long moment before she tells him she cannot breathe.
He lets her go and they climb into their saddles.
‘Shall I take you?’ Katherine asks Rufus, and then to Thomas: ‘It will look more – seemly?’
Thomas nods.
‘You go with your mother,’ he tells the boy. ‘And watch me send these men scattering.’
He passes Rufus over and she settles him on her saddle. He smiles at her.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Now is the time. I have an urgent message to deliver on behalf of that bastard the Earl of Warwick, whose word must never be delayed.’
She laughs to humour him.
‘So steady now,’ he tells her, ‘but fast, yes? We are not aiming to tire the horses, only get to the next inn – or stables, better yet – before nightfall.’
He pushes Rufus’s rush hat back and rubs the boy’s head, then he replaces the hat. He smiles once more, and catches her eye, and then he turns and, just before they set off up the road at a reasonable, confident pace, he crosses himself and Katherine does likewise.
He rides, Katherine and Rufus trailing and a little to one side, just off from the line of sight. Despite being on the move most of the day the horses are still fresh and they enjoy the canter. As they approach he sees across the hedgerows and laid hedges that the men are clustered across a few furlongs: some are putting up their tents; smoke rises where others have already got their fires under way; while yet others are beginning to pull down a hovel for its firewood. His gaze flits over the scene. It is familiar to him, but there is nothing he recognises: no colour of livery or flash of banner or flag.
There are still some men on the road, scattered around, watching while others see to the last oxen as they are cleared off it for the night; they turn and face Thomas and his companions and there is a confused hesitation, each man looking at his neighbour for a steer, and this is it: this is when it will go either one way or the other, and all it will take is some bald-headed terrier of a man who will want to interfere out of bloody-mindedness, and who will barrel up to the challenge and stand in the middle of the road with his legs apart and his hands outstretched, daring Thomas to ride over him, and he’ll shout something, and all the others will come and stand alongside, and then – it will be over.
‘Stand aside!’ Thomas shouts when they are twenty paces from the nearest, who still hesitates; Thomas gesticulates, waving them aside. ‘Stand aside! I’ve a message from the Earl of Warwick!’
There is a long moment when the turned men watch, unmoving, peering to see what he is wearing, and he thinks: They’ll not see I am wearing Warwick’s badge because it’ll be hidden by the horse’s head. So he starts riding aslant the road, puffing out his chest to let them glimpse his livery coat and badge, and it seems there is no one among them who wants to stop him for the sake of it for they part before him, and as they pass the men there recognise the badge and they shout, ‘A Warwick!’ ‘A Warwick!’ – it has been some time since he heard that – and then some whistle at Katherine and Thomas thinks: For Christ’s sake, she has a child here.
But they are through the knot of men. They keep going, as they must, and only Rufus turns to look back, because Katherine and Thomas know they must not.
They ride on. Thomas is laughing.
‘Did you see their faces?’
‘And at least we can be sure they count Warwick among their friends,’ she calls.
But then the elation fades, for from nowhere – a clump of oaks and three small houses – comes a mounted picket. The road ahead is blocked and there’s no way forward, and there’s no way back.
9
There are six. Two remain ahead, two ride behind, and two dismount. They have done this before, Katherine thinks. The dismounted pair – one tall, the other short – walk with that slow bowl of men who know they have the whip hand. To begin with Thomas keeps his nerve, playing his part as well as any mummer. He tells them he has an urgent message from the Earl of Warwick, but the taller of the two, who has a fleshless hatchet face, just laughs.
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‘Personal message, is it? Come fresh from Middleham, have you?’
Thomas does not see the trap.
‘Yes,’ he says.
And the man laughs again. So do the others.
‘It’s funny that the Earl of Warwick isn’t at Middleham, isn’t it, eh? Funny he’s in France.’
Thomas backtracks.
‘A message on his behalf,’ he says.
‘No, no,’ the other one says, turning to his shorter companion, ‘you heard him, didn’t you, John? Said he’d come straight from the bedside of the Earl himself. Get him off his fucking horse.’
And the other man, the shorter one with one hooked eyebrow and a nose broken and healed like a cobblestone, seizes Thomas’s arm. Thomas pulls free, and instantly there’s a sword blade against his face. Thomas is still for a long moment, and Katherine can see him wondering if he can do it: fight and break free; and she looks at the face of the man holding the blade and she knows his sort, and she knows there is almost nothing he would like more than to slash it across Thomas’s face, and she thinks: Good God, no, Thomas, please, because you can’t beat men like this. You are the rabbit, the bear, and they are the ferrets and the dogs.
Thomas makes the right choice.
‘I will get off myself,’ he tells them.
The first man turns to Katherine.
‘You too, mistress,’ he says. ‘Off your horse.’
She can hardly move. She cannot let Rufus go.
‘What do they want?’ Rufus asks her.
The man leers at the boy.
‘What do we want?’ the man mimics. ‘I’ll tell you what we want. We want to know what it is your father and mother are doing charging around the countryside dressed in one thing when I believe they are another.’
‘The black men gave my father the red jacket,’ Rufus tells him.
Katherine feels her heart sink. No, Rufus, you are supposed to lie.
‘Is that so?’ The man laughs. ‘The black men, eh?’
Divided Souls Page 11