Kingmaker: Broken Faith

by Toby Clements

  ‘Yes, yes, but Windsor is a castle. The Tower is a castle. What is it like? My father said it was well set up, though cold, and there are two moats?’

  ‘There are moats,’ she’d agreed. ‘Yes. Yes. That is right. Moats.’

  Although she’d thought, why have more than one?

  ‘And who will be there?’ he’d pressed. ‘The steward and the reeve, of course, but do you remember them? Or I suppose it is too long ago?’

  She’d agreed again.

  ‘And anything might have happened to the place,’ she’d cautioned. ‘Or to them.’

  In truth she’d had no idea what sort of welcome to expect. For the first few days after their arrival she had looked in the village for anyone so old they might have been able to recall Margaret Cornford as a girl, but there was no one above ground to do so. The longer she remained, the more confident she became.

  And so now she takes Richard’s arm and leads him to face northward. They say nothing for a while. She watches the river, a snaking grey ribbon among the reeds. It is motionless and looks broken too.

  ‘Do you miss Marton Hall?’ she asks.

  He cocks his ear, his way of glancing at her.

  ‘Marton Hall?’ he says. ‘No. Or not exactly. I miss – I miss the people. I miss my father, of course. And Geoffrey Popham, the steward, and his wife. They were – well. There was Thomas, of course. You met him. And the others. Do you remember Walter? He was a brute, wasn’t he? But by great God above, he was – anyway … and Kit, of course. I think about him sometimes. I don’t remember where he came from. I think we found him on a ship, can you believe it? But do you know he cured my father’s fistula? He was no more than a boy, but he cut him, like a surgeon, and we all stood by and we knew it was the right thing to do. By all the saints, when I think of it now. That summer. Everything rang with life.’

  She thinks back to Marton Hall and remembers the long summer she spent there pretending to be a boy, answering to the name of Kit. No one – not Richard, not Sir John, nor any of the others – had suspected she was anyone other than who she claimed to be, as why should they? And so later, when she needed to, she was able to return in another borrowed guise, that of Lady Margaret Cornford. The summer is a happy memory, dominated in the main by Thomas, of course, but it is inevitably spoiled by the thought of the winter that followed. Since then she has learned not to sniff when the tears come, and so she can weep silently.

  ‘But,’ Richard continues quickly, just as if he knows, ‘they’re all gone now. And anyway, why have a hall when you can have a castle?’

  He is half in jest. He gestures, little knowing he is opening his arms to a vista of burdensome and ruined countryside, peopled by worrying responsibilities and petty shames. She twists the ring on her forefinger and together they pace along the tower’s walkway to where she stops and forces herself to stare westwards, across the fens to the huddle of grey stone buildings scarcely visible in the distance.

  It is the Priory of St Mary at Haverhurst. In the year she has been in Cornford she has never been along the causeway that leads to its gates, never even left the castle in that direction. All she can manage is to make herself look at it at least once a day and every time she does so she still feels a hot flare of panic. Looking at it now, she can see there is almost nothing to the place – a church, a few low buildings encircled by that wall – and it seems absurd that for the larger part of her life it encompassed her entire world. She wonders what they are doing there now, and knows instinctively it is the hour of None and the sisters will be gathering in observance.

  She is relieved when there is a flurry of barking from below and she can look away. Eelby’s wife is down there, feeding the dogs God knows what. The head of the cat perhaps.

  ‘It is Eelby’s wife,’ she tells Richard. He grunts. Katherine wonders again how many days she can have left. She has asked Eelby about her lying in, but Eelby laughed in her face and told her that women such as his wife did not lie in. He told her that it was not her concern anyway, and he told her that he had delivered cows of their calves and ewes of their lambs and that there was nothing very special about delivering a woman of her baby.

  Katherine had then tried to talk to Eelby’s wife, to avoid the forestaller as it were, but the woman had been fearful and backed away, shaking her head as if she did not want to hear what was being said, and Katherine could not tell if it was the prospect of the birth that frightened her most, or the prospect of her husband. Katherine asked if there was a woman in the village who attended births.

  ‘There was,’ Eelby’s wife said, ‘but she is in the churchyard since St Agnes’s last year and her daughter alongside her, so now there is no one.’

  From her vantage point at the top of the tower Katherine watches Eelby’s wife and wonders how she can work on like that. She must be due any day. She may even be overdue. She imagines her fear. What must it be like to know what is coming? She has seen men’s faces as they troop to battle, the grim set of their mouths, their distant gazes, their skin the colour of goose fat and trembling hands that can only be stilled by wine or ale. But what about women as they prepare for childbirth? Their chance of death is the greater, and terrible pain a certainty.

  ‘We must do something for Eelby’s wife,’ she tells Richard. ‘And soon.’

  Richard grunts again.

  ‘Perhaps we should send for the infirmarian at the priory?’ she asks.

  Even as she says the words she feels that familiar flutter in her chest; her breath comes a little faster and she feels unsteady.

  But Richard is dismissive.

  ‘St Mary’s is a Gilbertine priory, remember?’ he tells her. ‘An enclosed order. The women are only supposed to see the outside world through an aperture that must be no thicker than a thumb, no taller than a finger. Did you know? It is supposed to be brassbound, too. To prevent the sisters enlarging it over time. So their infirmarian could not come out even if it were worth her while because, after all, what experience can she have in childbirth? Among those women who have not seen a man in – ever?’

  Richard knows little of the sisters in the priory, she thinks, but he is not really thinking about them: he is thinking of himself and her, and once again the subject of their own lack of offspring is between them, dark and heavy. It is not as if she has not tried. They were married in the first month after King Edward’s coronation, when she had given Thomas Everingham up for dead, and since then they have lain together as man and wife on occasion. She does not care to recall those first encounters, but since then they have reached not so much an understanding as a way of doing things.

  Yet still there is no child, and she feels there is none on the way either, and so she wonders if their way of doing things is the right way after all, or if such a union, forged in hidden sorrow, will ever be blessed.

  Eelby’s wife has now fed the dogs and is retreating slowly towards the kitchen.

  ‘I could find some woman myself?’ Katherine suggests. ‘Have her here when the baby comes.’

  ‘Is there someone in the village?’ Richard asks.

  ‘No,’ she admits. ‘But at one of the other villages? Or I might go as far as Boston? I need to sell such russet as we have left. You could come with me?’

  Richard nods but they both know he will not come.

  The next morning it is Eelby who waits alone for her across the first bridge with two horses in the falling rain. He makes her walk through the courtyard, past the dogs, quietened now with a bone apiece, and the kitchen door where his wife leans against the wall. When Katherine sees her she is brought up short. The woman’s skin is taut and her eyes bulge almost grotesquely. She is breathing noisily, too, almost panting, and when she raises her hand Katherine can see it is horribly swollen.

  ‘Good day to you, Goodwife Eelby,’ Katherine calls. ‘We will be back as soon as we can. Rest until we return. Do nothing, do you hear?’

  Eelby’s wife does not speak, but nods stiffly, as if she cannot mov
e her head for the swelling in her neck. She looks terrified, Katherine thinks, and she hurries out through the gatehouse and across the first bridge to where Eelby looks unhappy in his wet straw hat.

  ‘Your wife—’ Katherine starts.

  ‘Will be all right,’ he interrupts.

  She makes up her mind. She will find someone in Boston. She pulls herself up into the saddle and settles herself. Then they ride out across the second bridge to the causeway.

  ‘Needs mending,’ she says.

  There is a pause.

  ‘Hard to mend a bridge when you’ve no wood,’ he says. ‘Or nails. Or a hammer. Or anyone to use it to drive them in.’

  ‘Is there really no one?’

  He lifts his hands off his reins and gestures at the houses along the road ahead. There are five or six of them, low and dark, with rotting, green slicked daub, and further on is a boy, the oldest in the hamlet yet still beardless, wrestling a pig into a pen while his sisters look on. The detritus of rush weaving is in a pile all around their ankles, and baskets and mattresses are heaped and hooked on the fences. The boy is smacking the pig with a stout stick now, and if the pig turns on him, they will have one fewer hand.

  ‘Help him, Eelby,’ Katherine says.

  Eelby slouches from his saddle and joins the boy. Together they kick and hit the pig until it retreats into its pen.

  ‘Thank you, lady,’ the boy says. He is breathless. Then he adds a thank-you for Eelby but there is some side there, and Katherine notes it.

  Eelby mounts up and she says goodbye to the children and they kick their horses on. Further along the causeway a skinny-looking mother – their mother? – with a bald-headed newborn sits in her open doorway and stares at them as they pass. Katherine smiles but receives nothing in return. She wonders who delivered the child.

  ‘My wife did it,’ Eelby tells her when they are out of earshot.

  Eelby rides with his head down, hunched under his hat, letting the horse lead the way. She imagines he is probably thinking of all the men who used to live in the hamlet, the men who did all the work and kept the place alive. She supposes they must have been at the shambles on the fields of Towton, and she shies away from recalling the day, from her memories of it, but even here they come back, almost crushing her.

  She cannot stop herself remembering going up to the plateau with Richard and the surgeon’s assistant whose name she cannot recall, just after she’d heard news of Thomas, and she remembers how in the light of the looters’ torches she’d seen the valley so choked with corpses that the river was dammed with them and water frothed through the bodies. She remembers the piles of dead men all around, four, five, six bodies high. She remembers that the ground under her feet was glutinous with blood and melted snow and God knew what else. She remembers the smell and the sound of the wounded still crying, trapped under the weight of the dead above them, and even then, as if there had not been enough killed, there were still more men being put to death, even in the night. Their bellows and shouts were cut off with clumsy flurries of hammer blows and everybody was terrified, even the men with the hammers. It was the evening of the day on which God and his saints had slept.

  She remembers when she thought she’d found him, Thomas, only for it to be some other man, a Welshman who also answered to the name of Thomas and thought it was his wife calling for him. That was when the tears really began, that was when the misery of it settled in her guts with the weight of a stone, and even now, months later, she feels herself skinless against the pain of it, and she thanks the rain for hiding her tears and giving her reason to hunch and shudder on the back of her horse.

  She supposes that any hope that the men of the villages would return slowly withered over the summer, as hers did for Thomas. She had cleaved to William Hastings all those months, hoping that Thomas would know to find her in his household, but her position there was uncertain, and there was gossip, even though she had given them no evidence to assume she was Hastings’s mistress. She did not know how to enforce her own claims for Cornford Castle either, nor, really, what she should do with herself during that febrile time when new masters were sweeping into new properties and new positions all over the country, and the old King’s men were being attainted and exiled and all that had been theirs was suddenly there for any well-placed man to take.

  She had been utterly stilled with grief during those months, and as the days passed the complex mutual responsibilities between her and Richard Fakenham hardened into dependence. As the days turned to weeks, and Thomas did not appear, the more obvious it became that she would have to marry Richard, and go with him and such household as they had to Cornford.

  The rain is persistent now, sharp and fine from a dingy wind-blown sky wherein pigeons and gulls are bundled in the gusts, and a little later they meet a friar sheltering under a tree by a crossroads. When she sees him, Katherine can’t seem to find the right words in greeting, so Eelby says something and the friar has a soft, wet cough that she does not like the sound of and he tells them he is on his way to Lincoln, intending to stay the night at St Mary’s Priory at Haverhurst if they will have him.

  They wish him a safe journey and ride on.

  ‘Bad luck to meet a friar on the road,’ Eelby says after an interval. She tells him that is superstitious nonsense and on they go.

  She has been this far east of the castle since, to the town of Boston, but every time she travels the road, she remembers the first time she was ever in the town, two years previously, and she looks again for the wood in which she and Thomas spent their first night as apostates, sleeping in the mud with the pardoner. There are some trees clumped on the horizon that may do, but elsewhere there is nothing to guide her, only the road on its dyke among the wet sedge of the fenland. She imagines that the river down which they floated might be a little way to the north. Further on a heron is hunched over a pool and she knows that Richard might once have tried to hit it with an arrow, or set a hawk at it, but Eelby is not like that, and so the bird sits and hardly bothers to watch them as they pass.

  Soon they come to a stretch of dry land, tilled and divvied into neat furlongs and beyond is Boston under its halo of coal smoke and pale winged gulls. She sees the tree wherein the thief’s dead body hung, now empty, and ahead is the bridge where the pardoner was made to pay extra pontage for his mule.

  She tries to imagine herself as she was then. How things have changed and yet how they have also remained the same. She was in rags the last time she was here, a barefoot apostate in terror of everything around her, and now here she is again, in a cloak trimmed with fox’s fur and a dress of Kendal green given to her by the greatest lord in the land, riding a horse with a servant trailing behind. Yet she feels almost exactly the same gnawing anxiety, still the same dread that someone will recognise her for who she really is and call her out on it, and then where will she be?

  She steels herself and rides on to the bridge. At the end is a guard, waiting in his hut to collect pontage, and it could be the same man. They always look the same anyway. She digs out the coin and pays him without getting down from her saddle and he nods and lets her pass with no more than the speculative appraisal she has come to expect from any man, and she leads Eelby off the bridge and on into the marketplace.

  It is perhaps her imagination, but every time she visits, the town seems less busy than last time, or perhaps having seen more of the world she is less impressed by it. The familiars are all there, including the hunched fripperer, though the sad-faced bear has gone. They have made progress with the church tower, she notes, and the scaffold looms ever more perilously over the river’s bank.

  She wonders how to set about finding a midwife. The church, she knows, regulates their practice fiercely. This is because the priests are frightened of anyone with knowledge of matters to which they themselves are not privy. And naturally if it is something within a woman’s realm, if it is something a man cannot control, then it is stigmatised and she has heard men mutter darkly that th
e better the witch, the better the midwife.

  She decides to give Eelby one more chance.

  ‘While we are here,’ she says, ‘I shall ask the friars if they know of anyone who might assist at your wife’s lying-in.’

  He glowers at her. His cheeks are wind-mottled, purple-veined, his eyes small and watery blue.

  ‘She doesn’t need any help,’ he says. ‘Least none from some old witch.’

  ‘But the swelling. You saw her hands? Her face?’

  ‘It’s natural,’ he says. Then: ‘By Christ, I should have seen the Cunning Woman when she came. She has a tincture, you know, that she can give a woman? Raspberry leaves and a root of something? It smothers the baby before it grows, like a stillborn lamb.’

  Katherine does not even want to think about what Eelby has just said.

  She realises she needs a different tactic.

  ‘Very well,’ she says. ‘I will sell the cloth now.’

  He nods and now that she looks to have backed down, he is scornful, as if this sign of weakness is his permission to dismiss her concerns. She is weary of him, but says nothing further and only turns and he follows her with the bolt of cloth folded over his shoulder to where she stops before the window of a tailor’s shop and begins the bargaining process. The tailor has a lively eye, and from his hatch, he enjoys the process as much as she, and she remembers with pleasure all the lessons in bartering that she learned from Geoffrey during their time in Calais. The cloth is good and the price is fair. Eelby looks on.

  When she puts the coins in her purse and straps it closed, she asks if he knows any people here. He shakes his head. He has been to Boston before, twice he thinks, though it is hardly any distance from Cornford. It is then that she sees the woman coming from the market. She is a merchant’s wife, Katherine supposes, in a good coat and stout wooden pattens, and though she is conventional in that she is hardly broadcasting the fact that she is pregnant, it is clear that she is pleased with her state, and happy to let the world know it.