Divided Souls

by Toby Clements

  Liz watches a moment and then turns and Katherine knows she is getting ale and bread from the cart. Isabella mutters something. It takes some gentle persuasion to get her to repeat it so Katherine can hear.

  ‘I am so ashamed,’ she whispers.

  Katherine has to blink away her tears.

  ‘Why?’ she asks. ‘Whatever has happened?’

  Katherine crouches next to the old lady, who is tormenting a string of dark rosary beads in her lap with fingers gnarled as roots while tears splash on the dusty dark stuff of her dress, and Katherine knows whom to blame.

  ‘Where are they?’ she asks. ‘Where are William and Robert? Where have they gone?’

  This sets off a fresh bout of sobs. The story emerges slowly over the next few hours. Once Thomas had gone, his knowledge of the land went with him, or his ease with it, and his ease with the tenants, too, and he had been replaced by the houndsman Borthwick, of all men, whom they recalled but was not equipped to act as reeve in any form. Then it transpired that her sons had already pre-sold parcels of Sir John’s acreage and some – many – all of his interests, too, including the windmill, the stock ponds, the oxen, and so when St John’s Day came, there were barely any rents to be gathered in, for the boys had sold much of the land, and whatever money was gathered turned out to be owed elsewhere, for falcons, and finery, and to men in London for things about which Isabella could only guess.

  Her sons had made all sorts of further demands on her purse, which she had met, but when she asked about the pea crop, and about the haymaking, they shouted at her that it was none of her business.

  ‘They are like locusts,’ Isabella says. ‘A plague. They have taken everything they can and sold it for fine clothing, and armour. Armour! What do they think they will need it for? I don’t know. I never thought they were those sorts of boys. They, well . . . And all Sir John’s work, and all your work! All of it just—Nothing left save his house and his gardens now.’

  Isabella is not so sad about the loss of those scattered furlongs and properties that Sir John had collected throughout his lifetime, since they were merely revenue, but she is ashamed of the way the tenants have been treated and of how she – Katherine – and Thomas were ejected, for which she blames herself, and she is humiliated by her sons’ careless treatment of her own self. Her sons’ behaviour has shattered every view she held dear, she tells them, and she weeps constantly, and the rosary beads that she ceaselessly turns serve as more of a comfort than a prayer cycle.

  Her eyesight has deteriorated, too, and it seems the cataracts are now like dots of milk within the eyes, placed there by an unnecessarily cruel God.

  ‘I can still see a bit,’ Isabella says, ‘and I do not mind it so if it will spare me further suffering in purgatory. It is only that I miss seeing the host lifted at Mass, and I miss looking on the painting of St Christopher that we had done in the church.’

  And yet, what else has she missed? The hall is filthy, which is one thing, but the other is that under the aged skin of Isabella’s hands, and specifically her wrists, blue and green bruises flourish. She keeps knocking into things, she says, but Liz shakes her head when she sees them. She tells Katherine they are thumbprints, where Isabella has been grabbed, and she shows her one on her own wrist, from when she was taken by Riven, fading now.

  Katherine wonders if there is anything to be done, other than pay close attention to the old lady’s movements. She remembers Mayhew telling her about how one might couch a cataract, but she did not pay much attention since at the time they were engaged in removing arrows from the wounded, and he said that the cutting cured blindness only twice in ten.

  Still, though.

  Isabella asks about Thomas and why they have returned. She claps both hands to her cheeks to think of Jack and John Stump taken in the night, but most especially of Nettie, of course, who will soon be on her childbed. She has heard of Edmund Riven, but never spoken of him since Sir John would not allow it.

  ‘What can we do?’ she asks.

  Katherine tells her about Thomas and his mission.

  Isabella is not convinced, but she is so diminished she can only mew sorrowfully and regret that she should live long enough to see such things. After a moment, though, she has a better idea.

  ‘I will send message to my cousin,’ she says at last. ‘Well, he is my cousin’s husband, Baron Willoughby. He is an adherant of the Earl of Warwick, and I will press him for information about them. I am sure he will help, if he can.’

  So together they draft a letter to this Baron Willoughby of Tattershall Castle in the County of Lincoln, but with no one to send it personally when it is finished, Katherine must go to the road south, and see if anyone is going that way and whether or not they will take a message. It is fraught with uncertainty, but short of taking it themselves, there is no alternative. Katherine waits, letting a group of soldiers pass, before battening on a sumpter man with a long line of mules and donkeys carrying God knows what. She’s seen the man before, on these roads, and assumes she might again. He reluctantly agrees to take the message, and supposes it will be three days before he can get it to Tattershall ‘on account of the roads, which are wet down there’.

  Over the following days Katherine and Liz set to work on the hall, restoring it to order, partly because it needs be done, partly to keep themselves occupied, though during the works Katherine cannot help but break off and ride down the track to the road to wait for Thomas, and to ambush travellers for news from the south or from this baron of Isabella’s; but on these daily trips she sees neither Thomas nor the sumpter man, and nor does she hear anything of what is happening elsewhere in the country. At prayer times, Thomas’s name is never far from their lips, and whenever there is a noise without, she feels a spike of hope that it is he come back to find them all, or at least the sumpter man with news.

  After a few days, they have the hall as Katherine remembers it. She and Liz have got the walking wheel working again, and they sit in the sun trying to spin some yarn, though it is hopeless for the wool is mostly kemp. Isabella sits in her accustomed seat in the shade. They have been talking – again – about her two sons, William and Robert, and how Isabella thinks their father, who’d been killed fighting for King Henry at that first battle of St Albans, was at fault for their want of kindness.

  ‘He was a fierce man,’ she says. ‘Wrathful if he could not understand something, and proud of being good at only one thing, which was fighting.’

  ‘And he weren’t much good at that, was he?’ Liz says. ‘If he got himself killed.’

  There is a moment’s silence while they check the wool.

  Then Liz tells them about her family: how her mother died in her childbed, and how her father never remarried because he said he had enough women in his life with four daughters, though one of them died too, when they had a bad year and the rye got wet in the barn and her leg fell off. She is fond of her father, still; it is obvious.

  ‘Do you have a family, Katherine?’ Isabella asks.

  Katherine is caught out. She had not foreseen this.

  ‘I have Thomas, and Rufus,’ she tells her.

  ‘No,’ Isabella presses. ‘I mean your people. Your parents? Where did you come up?’

  Katherine tells her she does not know. As she does so, she feels a sort of rushing in her ears, a build-up of pressure within, which in the long silence that follows increases to almost a roar, and she feels she may scream or fall over, just to stop the flow of this conversation. She knows what is coming. She has felt this before – with Thomas, hinting, probing, wondering, suggesting she find her family – and she would rather be anywhere right now but here, only she cannot leave. It is not that she is holding the yarn (though she is), it is that Isabella is so fragile, so like to break at any harsh word, particularly from her, Katherine, who has become almost all Isabella has in the world right now.

  And now here is Isabella, looking at her with those terrible sad eyes, and Katherine knows that Isabella is
going to say something wise. She is going to relay something she’s learned from hard-won experience, and Katherine knows she will probably be right but she cannot stand to hear it if it is about her own family, of whom she still dreams when she is at her most exhausted: that same, damned, recurring dream that gets her nowhere, of the stone fireplace and the glazed window, and then of the handing over of a bag of letters and a purse of money to an old woman in black who she knows must have been the Prioress before her prioress, who’d seemed fretful but kindly, and who had taken her in and then . . . nothing, only terrible, absent blankness.

  So she feels a sort of horror when Isabella keeps looking at her and Liz chips in to tell them that she believes a woman must know her own mother if she is not to repeat the same stupid mistakes the woman made, and marry a man with a concave chest like her father, and Katherine hopes this is enough to break the tension she feels. But it is not. Isabella continues looking at her with those eyes and Katherine can stand it no longer.

  ‘I was brought up an oblate,’ she says. ‘I never knew my mother or father.’

  There. She has told them. Told someone. And for a few beats of the heart she is free. This thing she has hidden so long is out of its cover, and it means nothing. This great secret shame that has pressed down on her, that she has hidden from herself as well as others, all its power is gone. She is like anyone else. Anyone else.

  But Isabella leans forward and whispers:

  ‘You poor child.’

  And Katherine cannot bear it. She flings the wool from her and stalks off through the yard, leaving the spool on the ground and the two women in silence. She walks to the house she and Thomas built, empty now, though sound and dry within, and she shunts open the door and is alone with her thoughts and the dust and spiders and dried leaves that have blown in, and she is there for the rest of the day until she hears the Angelus bell, tinny and distant, when Liz comes to find her.

  She does not mention what has passed, and together they find Rufus watching some red butterflies on the lower branches of a shiny-leafed flowering bush, and he tells Katherine that they have been to the village to buy ale, but that the usual woman is dead, so they must learn to make it themselves and until then they must drink water.

  ‘It is not so bad,’ he says.

  But there is wine with the pottage that night, some that Sir John had left tucked away where Isabella’s sons did not find it, almost as if he knew a night like this would come, and they light candles and sit and eat and drink and Katherine is at ease for a while, but then she starts to feel the slow accretion of those little pauses, those little awkwardnesses as the wine makes Isabella and Liz no longer care to cover up their thinking about what happened today and finally the silence that falls is too deep to be overlooked.

  ‘Well,’ Liz says.

  Katherine knows she should apologise and explain, but she is not going to. It is something she will not talk about. Only Liz does not see it like that.

  ‘What made you run off like that?’ she goes on. ‘Have you got some secret past or something? You the daughter of a priest? Is that it? A priest and a nun? Though looking at you, I’d say a bishop and an abbess. But they are at it all the time, too, since they’ve no proper work with which to occupy their hands and minds.’

  Isabella feigns shock, but cannot help a slight smile.

  Katherine says nothing. She feels penned in, pressed back against a wall.

  ‘Please,’ she begins, but Isabella does not see her expression, of course, and she continues.

  ‘It is rare,’ she says, ‘in this day, for a child to be avowed to a monastery.’

  ‘Why’d anyone do it?’ Liz asks. ‘Imagine sending Rufus away now, to be looked after by such as them.’

  ‘It is done only in exceptional circumstances,’ Isabella tells them.

  ‘Like what?’ Liz asks.

  And now Isabella is reluctant to speculate, for such speculation is almost an accusation.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It might be that a child is born and is not wanted?’

  ‘But plenty are bastard born,’ Liz says. ‘That hardly matters.’

  ‘No,’ Isabella says. ‘It hardly matters in some places, in some parts. But in others it does. But it might not be that. It might be that a child is simple, or the thought of another girl is too much, or perhaps the mother died in childbed. It might be anything.’

  Katherine is not interested. The block she has placed on her thoughts about who she is, and why she is as she is, and why she is where she is, is far too stubborn to be moved by a conversation over wine between a couple of women.

  ‘Are you not interested, even for the sake of Rufus?’ Isabella asks.

  Katherine has not thought of that. She puts it aside for now, but will return to it later, she thinks, perhaps when Thomas is back. If he comes back.

  ‘Do you know if Kate’s even your real name, Kate?’ Liz asks.

  ‘Please,’ Katherine says. ‘I don’t want to think about this. Not now.’

  ‘So you don’t?’ Liz goes on.

  ‘They used to give the child the mother’s name,’ Isabella tells Liz just as if Katherine were not there.

  ‘And is Katherine a common name among such as them?’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Them what can afford to send a child off to a nunnery like that. You have to pay for it, am I right?’

  ‘That is true. I hadn’t thought of that,’ Isabella says. ‘Only the very wealthiest might afford it, and since the practice is so disapproved of by the Church, they must have had influence with whoever took you in, whoever they were.’

  ‘Quite exciting, really,’ Liz says. ‘Where was you put, Kate?’

  The two women are looking at Katherine, waiting, Liz with her sharp gaze, Isabella peering through the clouds in her eyes, listening more than looking.

  Katherine says nothing. She feels only a curious emptiness.

  ‘You going to tell us,’ Liz asks, ‘or what?’

  Katherine takes a deep breath.

  ‘It was the Priory of St Mary, at Haverhurst.’

  Liz shakes her head, pursing her lips.

  ‘Never heard of it,’ she says, as if this is Katherine’s fault.

  But Isabella has.

  ‘Great God above,’ she breathes. ‘If they had wanted to put you in a more dismal spot they could not have found one. Even the Cistercians fled from there.’

  ‘How did you get away?’ Liz asks.

  ‘I ran,’ Katherine tells them. She does not tell them how, or why. She has never spoken of it, never shared it, and now it is as if access to the memories of those times has calcified, or grown over, or rusted shut, and all she can do is shake her head when they try to press her further. Then Liz and Isabella become aware she is crying, and no more is said of it.

  That night Katherine dreams of the priory again. It is not the first time she has done so since she left for the second time, but this night the dreams are more vivid, and set earlier, back when she was a child, and it is as if she is now granted a clearer view of those times, and she sees herself being delivered and she sees what she is wearing, and she sees the letters passed and many incidental details, and in the morning when she wakes, she remembers not one thing.

  When she sees Isabella she wonders why they have not heard back from her cousin, the supposedly close ally of the Earl of Warwick.

  ‘Why don’t we go to see this fine gentleman,’ Liz suggests, ‘so we can tell him ourselves?’

  ‘Oh, but he lives south of Lincoln,’ Isabella says, as if that does for the scheme.

  ‘But we have a horse and cart,’ Liz tells her. ‘We could take you.’

  Katherine looks at Liz. She is an astonishing girl, in some ways.

  ‘But what about the roads? There is supposed to be trouble.’

  ‘We’ve got John’s crossbow,’ Liz says. ‘Takes a bit of strength, but once it’s spanned it can send a bolt through a tree. Wave that about and no one’ll come within fift
y paces.’

  ‘But my eyes,’ Isabella says.

  ‘You’ll not need to steer the cart or shoot the bolt.’

  ‘We must do something for Jack and John and Nettie,’ Katherine tells her. ‘Imagine if all we’ve heard of Riven is true?’

  ‘And it is, Kate, so come on,’ Liz says. ‘What’ll we lose but time?’

  At length Isabella agrees to the idea of the trip, and they leave the next morning: a grey day, with spitty rain from the east that they hope will clear by noon. Isabella sits in the cart on Sir John’s old trunk and together all three women eye John’s crossbow as they might a coiled snake; it is spanned and ready, with the goat’s foot mechanism and a bag of bolts nearby.

  ‘We will be in Lincoln by noon,’ Katherine tells them, and they roll back down the road, and she half hopes to meet Thomas coming their way, but they don’t. They see the spires of the cathedral and the castle’s tower just as the sext bell rings and they pass under the Newport arch where Isabella must pay the murrage to a tiny old man with one tooth in his gums, witnessed by a group of men with rust-hazed sallets and bills who constitute the Watch. Then as they pass along the bustling bailgate they meet five men in green livery, one carrying a flag, who are clearing the way for a canopied coach to pass.

  ‘Make way,’ they shout, and they expect to be obeyed, not merely because they have horses and sharp steel, but because everybody usually does. For a moment Katherine thinks Liz will not, that she will assert some equal or prior right to passage, but no, after a moment Liz steers the cart to one side, shouting at a barrow boy to move himself if he does not want to be tramped flat, and they watch the soldiers and the coach’s iron rims grind past. The coach is freshly painted in green and yellow, and the canopy is of pale gauzy material that billows and riffles like silk. Within are three women, perhaps just like she, Liz and Isabella, travelling the other way, and behind another five men on horseback and another cart, pulled by four horses.