Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Toby Clements
Title Page
Dedication
Family Tree
Factions in the Wars of the Roses, November 1463.
Prologue
Part One: Cornford Castle, Cornford, County of Lincoln, England, After Michaelmas 1462
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two: The Priory of St Mary’s Haverhurst, County of Lincoln, Lent, 1463
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Three: Toward Marton Hall, Marton, County of Lincoln, End of May 1463
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Four: The North, After Michaelmas 1463
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Five: South, to Tynedale, Northumberland, Before Easter 1464
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
England: October, 1463.
The great slaughter of the battle of Towton is two years past, but England is still not at peace. The Northern Parts of the land remain in the hands of the Lancastrian king, while in the south, the princes of the house of York prepare for war.
Uneasy alliances are forged and just as quickly broken: a friend one day might be your enemy the next, and through this land, pursued by the Church and the Law, a young man, Thomas, and a young woman, Katherine, must make their way, bearing proof of a secret both sides would kill to learn.
Bent on revenge for a past outrage, Thomas and Katherine must turn their backs on their friends and journey to the mighty castle of Bamburgh, there to join a weakened king as he marshals his army to take up arms in one of the most savage civil wars in history: the Wars of the Roses.
About the Author
Toby Clements was inspired to write the Kingmaker series having first become obsessed by the Wars of the Roses after a school trip to Tewkesbury Abbey, on the steps of which the Lancastrian claim to the English throne was extinguished in a welter of blood in 1471.
Since then he has read everything he can get his hands on and spent long weekends at re-enactment fairs. He has learned to use the longbow and how to fight with the poll axe, how to start a fire with a flint and steel and a shred of baked linen. He has even helped tan a piece of leather (a disgusting experience involving lots of urine and dog faeces). Little by little he became less interested in the dealings of the high and mighty, however colourful and amazing they might have been, and more fascinated by the common folk of the 15th Century: how they lived, loved, fought and died. How tough they were, how resourceful, resilient and clever. As much as anything this book is a hymn to them.
He lives in London with his wife and three children. This is his second novel.
Also by Toby Clements
Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims
Kingmaker: Broken Faith
Toby Clements
For Alex, Isabel, Justin and Matt (1967 and 1968–1989), still with us every day, in heart and mind.
Though the Lancastrian Claim comes from Edward III’s THIRD son, it relies on a) possession and b) that the crown can not pass through a woman – Philippa Mortimer – so must fall to the next male in line. The Yorkist Claim relies on their descent from Edward III’s SECOND son, and says it can pass through Philippa. The Tudor Claim ignores the fact of passing through a woman – Lady Margaret Beaufort – or that John, Earl of Somerset, was born illegimate.
Factions in the Wars of the Roses, November 1463.
HOUSE OF YORK
King Edward IV:
victor of the battle of Towton, crowned king in 1461.
Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick:
architect of the Yorkist victory, later known as the Kingmaker.
John Neville, Lord Montagu:
younger brother of the Earl of Warwick, warden of the East March, commander of Yorkist forces in the north. Tough, resourceful, pitiless.
Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset
defeated leader of the Lancastrian faction at the battle of Towton, attainted but then received into King Edward’s grace in 1463 and made Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber, to everyone’s disgust.
HOUSE OF LANCASTER
King Henry VI
Deposed king, in exile in Scotland, returned to England in 1463. His strong labour’d wife Margaret of Anjou is in exile in France.
Ralph Percy
Brother of the Earl of Northumberland, commander of Bamburgh Castle
Lords Roos and Hungerford
Northern lords, with unreliable retinues
Sir Ralph Grey
Castellan of Alnwick Castle. There is no evidence of him being a drunk.
Prologue
The Battle of Towton, fought in driving snow on Palm Sunday 1461, saw twenty thousand Englishmen killed, more in one day than ever before or ever since. Although Edward of York carried the day, and was afterwards crowned Edward IV, his victory was only by the narrowest of margins, and it did not mark the end of the Wars.
The old King, Henry VI, of Lancaster, and his indomitable French Queen Margaret, escaped and fled north, to Scotland, where they tried to lure the Scots and the French into attacking newly-crowned King Edward’s much-weakened England. But despite promises of help, neither the Scots nor the French were to be drawn in, and after two years all that was left to the dethroned Henry’s cause were a few castles in Northumberland, mere toeholds in his vanished kingdom.
These castles – Dunstanburgh, Bamburgh, Alnwick – became beacons of hope, attracting the dispossessed, the attainted, and those whose loyalty to the old Lancastrian King could not be bought off with the promise of titles and positions from the new Yorkist one. Among such men were the Dukes of Somerset and Exeter and the Lords Hungerford and Roos, and from these castles they kept the last flames of Lancastrian hope guttering.
But life in these mighty castles on their bleak North Sea shores was far from comfortable. And now the Earl of Warwick, King Edward’s mighty ally, is marching north with ordnance enough to batter down the thickest walls, and with an army at his back bigger than was ever gathered at Towton. So while some pray the castles’ fall will mark the end of a sorrowful chapter in the nation’s story, others pray that some miracle will avert disaster, and that the old King will survive and thrive and return to right the wrongs of the last few years …
PART ONE
Cornford Castle, Cornford, County of Lincoln, England, After Michaelmas 1462
1
IT IS THE hour before noon on the second day after St Luke’s, late in the month of October, and in the grey light slanting through the castle’s kitchen doorway, Katherine inspects the small, skinned body of an animal lying on the scrubbed oak table. The animal is gutted, headless and footless.
‘Rabbit, my lady,’ Eelby’s wife tells her. ‘Husband caught it this morning. Out near the Cold Half-Hundred drain.’
Katherine knows the Cold Half-Hundred drain, and she knows Eelby, who sits with his broad back turned on her, eating his bread so that she can hear him chewing. He says nothing, doesn’t even grunt, but his brawny shoulders are up a
nd she can see he is waiting for something, so she prises open the narrow trap of the animal’s ribs and counts. She makes it thirteen pairs.
‘Not a rabbit,’ she says. ‘A cat.’
Eelby stops his chewing. His wife holds Katherine’s stare for a moment, then drops her gaze to the rushes and rubs her swollen belly. She must be nearly ready now, Katherine thinks, and she must be frightened of what is to come. Her husband swallows his bread.
‘It’s a rabbit,’ he says without turning his head. There are creases of pale skin in the dirty fat of his neck. ‘As wife told you. Killed it meself.’
Katherine knows she still seems odd to them – an interloper in a good dress, small, thin, with her hat pulled down to hide her ear and her already sharp features honed by sorrow and privation – but it has been like this ever since she arrived at Cornford Castle more than a year before, since the first time she led Richard Fakenham on his horse over the two bridges and in through the gatehouse to take possession of her late supposed father’s property.
The curtain walls had seemed taller then, rough grey stone, stained with damp even in the summer months, weeds growing from every crevice and all sorts of filth underfoot. Eelby’s wife stood on an unswept step of the kitchen, washing beetle in hand, while unfed dogs snarled on chains and the air was sour with the smell of their waste.
‘What is it?’ Richard had asked, wrinkling his nose. Eelby’s wife had stared at his bandaged eyes and then looked away, quickly crossing herself and whispering some prayer.
‘A welcome,’ Katherine had told him. ‘Of sorts.’
‘Where is everyone?’ he’d asked.
‘Dead,’ someone had answered. This had been Eelby, the castle’s reeve, emerging from the lower door of the gatehouse from where he’d been watching them cross the fen. She’d disliked him from the moment she saw him – broad and squat, with fleshy ears and small, mean eyes – and neither did he like her.
‘Dead?’ she’d asked.
‘Aye,’ Eelby had said. ‘Every man save meself went north with Sir Giles Riven and we’ve given up on ’em coming home now.’
Eelby had said this as if it were somehow her fault, as if she, Katherine, had been responsible for their deaths, but she had ignored him and had taken a moment to look around at the castle, to note the accretion of filth, the dilapidation of the stone, the rot in the wood. There were jackdaws in the roof, and a bush of some sort springing from between the stones up by the crenellations. Apart from the new stone badge of Riven’s crows that had been put in place of the old Cornford arms, she supposed, the castle looked to have been falling to pieces for some time. It was strange to see how little it had been valued by Riven while Sir John Fakenham and his son Richard had spent so much time, energy and blood to acquire it.
She had not thought it would be like this. Nor had Richard.
They had come up from London with some of William Hastings’s men, ten of them, keeping guard over them and a wagon loaded with wedding gifts which they’d received, mostly from the newly ennobled Lord Hastings: two feather pillows, a bolster, a standing coffer, two small chests of oak, a hundred carpet hooks, three pounds of wire, and a hemp sack of shoe nails. There had been two gowns of Kendal green, one of damask, a bolt of russet and a pair of stockings. For Richard there was a velvet jacket and a doublet, a horse’s harness and a short-bladed sword. Not much, Hastings had admitted, but what else do you give a blind man?
They had come along the same road they had travelled with Sir John and the others the summer of the year before, and to console themselves for their losses and for the absence of men they loved, they had tried to imagine what they would find when they got to Cornford: something sound and well-founded, with slate roofs, stout walls and three glazed windows in the solar. They’d pictured a reeve out collecting dues. They’d imagined beehives, orchards full of geese and chickens, fat pigeons in the dovecotes, a watermill chuntering away, a saw pit perhaps, and a priest at the door of his church. There would be breweries, a baker, a smithy and an inn. There would be men to keep the oxen straight and to shear the sheep. There would be boys to fetch in wood from the forest and girls to mind the goats. There would be women in woollen dresses with babies on their hips and barrels of ale fermenting in the cellar’s cool.
But it was not like that. Instead there were only widows and orphans. The mill wheel was broken, the priest unpaid and gone, and such crops as had been planted before the men had left for the north now lay rotting in the sodden fields. Katherine had thought at the time that perhaps Richard was lucky not to be able to see it.
And now, a year later, here she is, standing in the kitchen with the body of a cat in her hand and a mere twine of smoke from the twigs that make up the fire in the hearth. She looks down at the little body and thinks of asking to see its head, to see its fur and feet, but she has too often demeaned herself with Eelby in the past, sinking to his level and later finding herself begging him to accept her apology so that there is food on the table for Richard to eat. She has promised herself she will not do it again and so she won’t now, and besides, what is so bad about eating a cat?
She places the body back on the table and leaves Eelby and his wife there, closing the door behind her. Outside it is cold, the first hint of the winter to come perhaps, and her ear begins to throb as she hurries across to the keep and ascends the stairs to the solar where Richard is sitting just as she left him, on a bench by the piled ashes of a cooling fire. He seldom leaves this spot. He is too anxious to venture out these days, too scared of the unfamiliar, but in place of his absent sight, his other senses have sharpened.
‘Is he trying some fresh fraud?’ he asks.
‘How did you guess?’
‘Your gait. You walk as if you are angry.’
She laughs quietly and crosses the threshes to touch his shoulder. He turns his face to her, smiles blankly, puts out a hand.
‘Margaret,’ he says.
Katherine knows she must take his hand. She does so, looking down on her husband. She wants to change his dressing; the linen is grubby and there are sooty finger marks where he has adjusted it after fiddling with the fire. He pulls her to him, puts his arm around her waist. It is always like this. He cannot just – be. He has to clutch at her, paw at her. Even now his palm drifts from her waist to her hip and she cannot help but stiffen, and he feels it, and his already absent smile slips and he lets his hand drop. He is like a whipped dog.
He has declined sharply over the past year, lost the muscle he’d acquired from all that fighting practice he used to do, all that riding with the hounds and going out with the hawks. It turned to fat in those first few months, but now the fat is gone too, and his skin hangs from his bones. There is no one to shave him, no one to comb his hair, so Katherine has learned how.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ she asks.
He sighs.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Take me somewhere high from where I may slip and fall to my death.’
‘Come on,’ she says. She takes his arms and he needs hauling to his feet.
She indulges him and leads him out of the solar and stumbling up the circling stone steps to the top of the tower. On the way up there is an unglazed window through which she can see the castle’s one remaining touch of ornament: a gargoyle in the shape of a lion’s face, dripping water into the courtyard below. Everything else of value is gone, stripped and sold, and she supposes that the gargoyle remains only because it is too difficult to reach. It is not clear whether it was Riven’s men who carried everything else away before they left for the north, or if it is Eelby and his wife who have been slowly stripping the place and selling it bit by bit.
When they emerge on to the walkway at the top of the tower she guides Richard across the treacherous flagstones to stand facing into the brisk east wind in which she imagines she can taste salt from the sea that lies just beyond the horizon. It is cold enough to bring tears to her eyes, but not his. He stands and grips the edge of the stone merlon and rock
s himself backward and forward, backward and forward. He is like a simpleton in his misery.
She looks away and watches the land beyond the castle, seeing all the things that require attention: the silted moats and flooded furlongs, the sagging fences, the fruit trees in need of pruning, the hazels in need of coppicing, the willows in need of pollarding. Nearby, across the first bridge, the roofs of the cattle shed and the hayloft are sunk in and green, and beyond them the wheel of the mill remains jammed while water flares through the broken dyke below. There are a few houses by the causeway, some of them occupied, their roof lines softened by a haze of pale woodsmoke, but there are others there too, abandoned, and their rooflines are softened by their neighbours having pilfered their beams for firewood.
‘Soon be winter,’ Richard says.
She wonders what in God’s name they will do then.
‘How does it look?’ he asks.
‘Sad,’ she says.
He tries to encourage her.
‘We’ve no men to work the place,’ he says. ‘And Eelby – if I had eyes in my head I would kill him now.’
‘Then we’d have one fewer,’ she sighs, ‘and be in an even worse state.’
She remembers again his high hopes as they’d ridden here. Richard had asked her what they might find, since she was supposed to have passed her youth in the castle, but she told him she could remember almost nothing of it.
‘It is a castle,’ she’d said.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 1