Divided Souls

by Toby Clements

  Rufus has become almost mute again, asking only after Thomas, as if she has betrayed him and he no longer trusts her. He has barely said a word since Isabella’s sons returned to find his mother stooped over their bloody-faced, unconscious mother with a knife and needle in her hands.

  She has tried to explain what she was doing, just as she tried to explain to William and Robert, but like them the boy does not seem to have understood. Isabella’s sons wanted Katherine dead, and when she thinks about it now, she still trembles with the fear of it. Had not Liz been there, and had she not seemed to know almost precisely what was going to happen before it did, and have to hand that crossbow, spanned and fitted with a bolt, then the moment might have passed very differently.

  When Isabella’s sons stood there, staring, she had been taken back to when she had cut open Eelby’s wife, and Eelby had come in and seen the blood everywhere, and she had felt not guilt, as you might expect, or not then at least, but caught out. Found out. Disturbed. She had felt angry that she had not managed to finish what she had started. She had felt that if they had just stayed away until nightfall, then – well, there might have been a chance that no one but she, Liz and Rufus would have ever known what had happened.

  Isabella might have been in some discomfort for a few days – Katherine had been prepared for that – but she would surely have overlooked it and put her restored sight down to a miracle sent by God. Katherine had even been prepared to find some amusement in this – she might have been able to smile at Isabella’s pious delight – and for this to become a secret joke between her and Liz. She had even half imagined a moment when they would see her at prayer, thanking the Lord for the miracle of her restored sight, and that they would exchange just one knowing look and then never mention it again.

  But that was then, and now, after seemingly endless nights spent wrapped in their cloaks by the roadside, she has come to see these thoughts as being shameful, and as evidence of an extreme form of pride, and she knows now that this uncertain tramping of the roads of England is punishment for that. The fact that Rufus is suffering too – that he has been made homeless and is now stumping alongside her – well, that is sent only to make her punishment greater.

  And still she does not know how she will ever find Thomas again.

  ‘He will be with William Hastings,’ she tells Liz. ‘Once we have released Jack and Nettie, then we may go and find Hastings, who will be easier to find than Thomas, that is certain, and if we find him, we’ll find Thomas.’

  ‘What if this Hastings fellow is one of those that had their heads removed?’ Liz asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Katherine admits.

  When they are in sight of York Liz asks about Isabella and her eyesight.

  ‘It was as the book said,’ Katherine tells her. ‘I cut the covering, and there was the disc, and I pushed that down just as suggested.’

  ‘But you can’t be sure it worked?’

  ‘Not until she wakes.’

  ‘She’ll be awake now,’ Liz says.

  ‘Yes,’ Katherine supposes, and she cannot help look behind again in case Isabella’s sons have sent Borthwick or the falconer after her to call her back to cut the other eye, if the first has been successful, or to ride her down if it has not. But there is nothing odd to be seen, nothing more than the slow grind of men and carts returning north. This unknowing is just as unsettling as not knowing where Thomas might be, or what she will do when she reaches this Middleham Castle where Liz says Jack and Nettie are held.

  They pass the spot they met that day only weeks before, just south of the Micklegate Bar in York, and Katherine sees there are some new heads on the spikes above, though she does not want to ask the Watch to whom they belonged for fear of attracting attention, and that night they stay in an unwelcoming inn without the city walls, where they are given beds in the eaves, and yet still the whole building shakes when the city’s church bells ring at daybreak.

  After they have eaten a meagre breakfast, they step out and walk through the city and as they approach the minster, Katherine half expects Liz to leave her, for she knows the road to Liz’s home is northwards, through Monkgate, whereas hers, to Middleham, takes her through the other one, Bootham Bar, northwestwards and across the Vale of Mowbray.

  But Liz is still intent.

  ‘It is as I told you,’ she says. ‘I’m waiting to see what you do next.’

  Katherine thanks her, and together they follow the road along the south bank of the river, heading west, which they are told will take them to Harrogate, only if they have gone that far, then they are lost, for they need to take the north road that will lead them up to Richmond and Darlington.

  ‘I’m not going there, that much I will tell you,’ Liz says.

  It takes two days to walk to the Earl of Warwick’s castle at Middleham, to the west of the north road, nestled into a fold in those hills. The houses along the way are of solid grey stone, square built and grimly defensive.

  ‘It’s the Scots, isn’t it?’ Liz tells her. ‘They come down here and try to steal what they can. They take our pigs for their wives.’

  They walk all day, and they take it in turns to carry Rufus when he can go no further himself. The pain of his weight burns their shoulders and backs but they do not stop. A flax merchant offers the boy a lift on his cart, and they walk alongside him for a few miles, heading towards a town where the man means to stop and sell his goods.

  He knows Liz’s father’s inn, for his trade route takes him up to Scarborough to the fair there, and Liz asks after her father.

  ‘He has two boys working for him now,’ the man says.

  Liz tells him that her sisters – the other two aproned girls – have been sent away, ‘for their own safety’.

  ‘Your father was not pleased,’ the merchant says. ‘But at least the manor house is to be occupied once more.’

  Katherine feels a sore twinge in her spirits. She has loved the thought of that manor house.

  ‘Who has occupied it?’ she asks.

  ‘Some connection of the Earl of Warwick,’ the merchant tells her. ‘Well. That is what Master Campbell told me, though how he is expected to know, I can’t say.’

  ‘You hear all sorts, in an inn,’ Liz says.

  When the merchant leaves them he promises to pass on Liz’s greetings, and reassure her father that she does well.

  ‘A pity,’ Katherine says. ‘About the manor.’

  Liz grunts non-committally.

  ‘There were always folk after living there,’ she says.

  Katherine supposes Hastings might have sent someone else, or perhaps the Earl of Warwick has taken it from him? She will only know when they find Thomas.

  As they walk, they talk, and at length Liz changes the subject to one that seems to have been on her mind since first she heard of it.

  ‘So this Prioress . . .’ she begins.

  A month ago such a phrase might have made Katherine feel sick with nerves, but the death of the priory has changed her, just a little, and now she feels only a constriction in her throat and a desire to change the subject.

  ‘I can’t think about her,’ she tells Liz. ‘All I can think of is Thomas, and whether he came through the battle of which these men speak, or about Nettie giving birth to a child in the dark on stinking straw, with only Jack to stand by.’

  Liz acknowledges these are serious concerns, but she is relentless.

  ‘Do you know anything of her?’ she goes on. ‘I mean, she must have gone somewhere. What sort of accent did she have? Was she local to Lincoln, or of the Northern Parts, say? Did she ever talk about home?’

  ‘She spoke only of a place named Watton,’ Katherine admits grudgingly.

  ‘Watton? I know of Watton. That is east of here. Between here and the sea. Not much of a place.’

  Katherine cannot say if that is where the Prioress came from, but she remembers why the name stuck in her mind: the story of a sister of the priory – an oblate, like herself – who
fell pregnant and who was tortured half to death by the other sisters before she was made to castrate the lay brother who had put her in that state. That she had lost her child was regarded as a miracle.

  ‘I’ve no special desire to see it,’ she tells Liz.

  ‘Not even if you were to find out who your people are?’

  ‘Why would she know?’

  Liz shrugs.

  ‘She may not, but she’s the only person like to know now, isn’t she? You have to start somewhere.’

  ‘But I may not want to start at all.’

  ‘Not even for the boy’s sake?’ Liz asks, nodding at Rufus, who sits in silence on the cart, his anxious gaze never leaving Katherine. ‘Not even if there’s money in it?’

  ‘No,’ Katherine says, ‘and anyway, there is no saying she came from Watton.’

  ‘Well, why did she talk about it then?

  She tells Liz the story of the nun of Watton.

  ‘Bloody hell fires,’ Liz says. ‘But have you ever heard that story elsewhere?’

  Katherine hasn’t.

  ‘So,’ Liz says. ‘She must be from them parts.’

  On the second day out of York, it rains softly as they trace the western hills, and they walk all day in it, until it stops towards late afternoon and the sun comes out to steam the rainfall away. They follow a winding road with the setting sun in their faces, passing rich parkland and an abbey, and then at last they see the castle from some miles away, sitting above its tenant lands that in winter must teem with sheep, but are now just golden straw stubble. There are one or two women finishing their day’s work, making their way back towards the town that hugs the skirts of the castle, but the paucity of men is expected: they must all be south, Katherine supposes, with the Earl of Warwick, or Robin of Redesdale, up to no good. They walk on, and as they approach the castle none take their gaze from it, even Rufus; it is as if it is somehow drawing them on.

  It is a great square of the grey stone, planted there, and the rise and fall of its turrets and its curtain walls is oddly pleasing; but as they come closer, Katherine cannot stop herself thinking that Edmund Riven must be within, perhaps in that tower there, or that one, and she is coming to him, bringing him what he most wants, and she is unarmed, unprotected and without Thomas, and she cannot suppress a shiver. It is as if she is entering Riven’s world, a world of night, and that is when she has the sudden and terrifying idea that he knows she is coming. He knows she is bringing him the ledger. The thought leaves her breathless.

  Looking at the castle as they close on it, seeing its towers, its walls, its guard-kept crenellations, she starts to hope Jack and Nettie and John Stump are being kept elsewhere. She has been in this position before of course, when they were trying to bring the ledger to the attention of the old King Henry, lodged in a castle like this, though that time they wanted credit and acknowledgement for bringing it to him, whereas this time she wants to leave it – anonymously – for Riven to find.

  Rufus is exhausted now, half-hanging from her hand, done in, and he’s still hardly said a word since they left Marton except to ask for Thomas. He stands with his face blank, somehow closed off, but his eyes are darting around the countryside, seeking what? Threats, she supposes.

  And the first of these emerges very soon after they enter the town, from an inn, just beyond the first house they come to. Two men in red, with that white tree stump and bear stitched on to their livery cloths, emerge unsteady with drink, and while one stops to urinate at the side of the road, the other grins at them and asks what have we here.

  Thank God Liz is there to call him a sweating barrel of fat and the son of a prostitute. He is momentarily silenced, and she and Katherine know not to stay in that inn, so they walk on past the two men as swiftly as Rufus will let them to another – the White Swan – further on, beyond the butter cross, with Warwick’s badge made in stone above the door. Even here, though, the atmosphere in the candlelit hall is raucous, celebratory, with every man, woman and even child glazed with drink, and the innkeeper, a red-faced lump with a gingerish beard in sweaty pourpoint, is slack-lipped with it too.

  ‘You are all drunkards,’ Liz tells him when he has found them a place to sit and brought them each a bowl of pottage and a mug of ale. The innkeeper takes no offence, but beams at her.

  ‘As we have good reason, surely?’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘Our earl!’ he says. ‘He has bearded another king!’

  ‘He – has bearded another king?’

  ‘Yes! He has him under lock and key, just like the old one!’

  There is a roar among the throng gathered around the fire – someone has done something funny such as spilled a drink on a dog or something – and Katherine is finding it hard to concentrate.

  ‘Say that again,’ she tells the man.

  He looks at her oddly, slightly put off by her accent perhaps, which is not local. He clams up a little, but Katherine presses him and he confirms the tidings of the battle in the south during which Robin of Redesdale’s men saw off the Earl of Pembroke’s men, and the Earl of Pembroke, who was among King Edward’s most covetous and greedy advisers, and a traitor to the people of England and most especially an ill-willer to the Earl of Warwick, had his head chopped off in Coventry, and the other one – the Earl of Devon – was later caught and hanged somewhere in the West Country, and so now the Earl of Warwick, long may he live, and may God bless him, is restored to his place at King Edward’s side, and as a consequence of this, the commonweal is likewise restored to health, wealth and happiness.

  ‘And isn’t that good?’

  Liz nods, though she is oddly restrained, and suffers the man to put his arm around her shoulders and press himself to her.

  ‘Though Warwick’s not really restored to King Edward’s side, is he?’ Katherine says. ‘If he has him in a dungeon?’

  ‘Oh, he is not in any dungeon,’ the man tells her. ‘No! No! He is right here, in the finest chamber in the castle.’

  He indicates across the yard to the castle they have come to find. Katherine assumes he is mad, or joking, or a liar.

  ‘But it’s true!’ he says. ‘King Edward’s here! We have seen him come through the town on his way to the castle, stripped of them what live their lives at the expense of others, and now that he is in our care, and not that of the Queen and her family, we may be certain he will mend his manners, and return to the pattern of the old days.’

  There is another roar from the crowd by the fire, and the innkeeper excuses himself and hurries away to repress their raucousness – or to join them – and Katherine and Liz are left face to face, with Rufus half-asleep, his head on Katherine’s lap.

  This is a shock. If the Earl of Warwick has King Edward at his command, then will he still be seeking the ledger? Katherine stretches her hand down and feels it in its bag.

  ‘Still there,’ Liz notes dryly.

  Katherine cannot make any sense of this. Has it, at this stroke, lost its value to the Earl? Will he feel he no longer needs it, and have given up looking for it? And if he has given up looking for it, is there any further point in him keeping Jack and Nettie and John Stump? Surely he will release them? She is pleased at the thought.

  ‘What?’ Liz asks.

  ‘It may be that we will not have to give Riven this,’ she says, and again she reaches down to touch the ledger.

  Liz cocks an eyebrow.

  ‘Come all this way’, she says after a moment, ‘for nowt?’

  ‘Not for nothing,’ Katherine says. ‘For Jack and Nettie and John.’

  Liz is puzzled. Katherine tells her what Edward’s captivity means.

  ‘They could be released any moment,’ Katherine says.

  Liz looks to be thinking fast; her dark eyes dart in the firelight.

  ‘They might already have been,’ she supposes.

  Katherine has not thought of that.

  ‘How will we ever learn?’ she wonders aloud.

  ‘We could as
k,’ Liz says.

  ‘Who, without implicating ourselves as interested?’

  ‘Might have to go back to that other inn, the one with the fatty and his mate, pissing in the road. Ask them about it.’

  Katherine sees what she is suggesting, and sits back.

  ‘They would want something in return,’ she says.

  ‘Pshaw,’ Liz says. ‘We can duck away before then. They are men. Simple as muck, them sort.’

  But by Christ Katherine does not want to do this, and Liz understands.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she says. ‘You stay here. Look after Rufus.’

  There is something about Liz now, in this light, in this place, that is unusually brilliant. There is a steel to her, a flint-like hardness. Katherine tells her she need not, and that she must not go alone, but Liz sees through that.

  ‘Who else is going to come with me?’ She drains her drink and stands up, the quicker to get it over and done with. Then she bends over and strokes Rufus’s hair. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she says. There are almost tears in her eyes.

  ‘Oh, Liz,’ Katherine says. ‘You do not have to do it.’

  But Liz does.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes I do.’ She loosens at the laces on her shirt, gives Katherine one last grimace, and she is gone.

  Katherine sits in the gloom with Rufus still sleeping on her lap. She does her best to be inconspicuous and not to think about what Liz is enduring for her sake. She strokes Rufus’s hair. He is a good boy, she thinks, yes, Liz is right. To have put up with so much. To have walked so far on such short legs. Thomas will be proud of him.

  She watches the men and women in the inn, celebrating their lord’s victory, and she tries to imagine what it must be like to find that your town is suddenly at the centre of the world. To know that the whole country is being governed from a mere hundred paces away. They must be proud of their earl, she supposes. Proud to know he has raised himself above all else, and that every time a messenger clatters through the streets, his missives for their lord come from the highest in all the land, the highest in Christendom, even.