‘You are on his side,’ she says, gesturing at Thomas.
‘Beth,’ John mutters. ‘Not now. It is not about that.’
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she says, stepping away from John. ‘Don’t speak to me. You know nothing. You stand there while them that murdered my boy still live! And while the man who caused it all stops me from exacting justice. An eye for an eye, the priest says, and he – the simpleton! – he stops you!’
‘By the Mass, woman, you have gone too far now.’
‘Yes?’ she says, turning her livid gaze on him. ‘What will you do? What you always do. Drink ale by the fire.’
Now John strikes her. A backhanded blow to the face that sends her staggering. Neither Thomas nor Adam moves. The crack of the blow fades.
‘Get back in the house,’ John tells her. He rubs his knuckles and she her face. Seeing her expression, Thomas steps on the knife, pressing it flat into the grass. But she goes, and when she has gone, John is chastened.
‘I am sorry,’ he says. Thomas shakes his head. He is not sure what John is sorry for: his wife’s remarks, or for hitting her, or both.
‘We’d best get on,’ Thomas says.
‘Aye,’ John says. They summon the two boys to move the dead men, but while Thomas is washing himself he begins to feel dizzy. Pain shoots through his head, bad enough to make him clap his hands to his temples. He has to sit at the river’s bank for a long moment. He watches the boys carrying out the bodies and laying them next to one another on the grass. The boys are both snivelling, and he wonders absently about their relationships with the dead men. Sons? Brothers?
His head swims. He wonders if he will vomit. He gets up, reaches his arms deep into the river, deeper than his elbows, then he splashes water on his face, down his neck. After a moment he feels better and he sits again on the bank and watches the river slide past over the rocks. He looks around him. He sees things afresh, as if for the first time, and he wonders why he is here. He stares at his hands. They are broad and calloused, square-palmed and ingrained with dirt. Questions occur to him. What is he doing here? How long has he been here? Why is he not in Holy Orders?
‘Good question,’ his brother agrees when Thomas asks him. ‘Why aren’t you?’
Thomas just cannot remember. He feels leaden, weighed down. He can hardly open his mouth to speak such thoughts that come sluggishly to mind.
‘Last I knew of it,’ John tells him, ‘that is where you were bound. Made yourself unwelcome hereabouts, if you remember, like Adam here, always starting fights, and old Father Dominic thought you might be good for a friar, if I paid him.’
Thomas asks him where that was.
‘Lincoln way,’ John says. ‘Some priory run by canons. He said it’d keep you out of mischief.’
The boys have laid the dead bodies next to one another, still warm, and now Adam is stripping them, taking anything of value. The dead men have come like windfalls, and Thomas’s brother is suddenly rich, with horses to sell, clothes and boots to wear, coin to spend. There are bows and arrow shafts, swords, knives, steel helmets and pieces of plate, too.
They set the two boys to digging the grave under the aspens on the edge of the pasture, well below the farm. The ground here is rocky and full of roots and the boys make heavy work of it.
Beth comes out again. She is still pinched with anger.
‘We should make them dig room for two more,’ she says. ‘Three, even.’
John pretends he does not hear. He turns to Thomas.
‘What I want to know,’ he starts, ‘is how you learned to do all that.’
He mimics the action of drawing a bow.
‘You were always good with a bow, I’ll grant you that, but to kill men, like that?’
He blows out.
‘And it looked like you’ve done it before,’ he goes on, ‘and all those cuts and scrapes and what-have-yous, all over your body when you turned up. And that dint.’
He taps his temple.
‘You don’t get those writing up the gospels.’
Thomas can tell John nothing. They are silent for a long while, watching the boys dig. Adam climbs into the pit with them to help. The day wears on. When the boys have dug so deep into the earth they are up to their thighs, John stops them. He gets them to roll the dead men – naked now save for their braies – into their grave and then to shovel the black earth in on top. No one is sure about leaving any cross to mark it.
‘Plenty of people’d have just swung them in the river,’ John says. ‘Or dragged them into the next Hundred. Let those bastards over there take care of the coroner. Least we buried them. Will you say a few words, brother? Save us paying the priest.’
Thomas is lost for a moment. He stands over the raised mole of earth and is struck by the sense of having done this before. He asks the Lord to look down favourably on the men they are burying and to forgive them for what they have done, and for any other sins they may have committed in this life and then he asks for their time in purgatory to be appropriate and that when they are cleansed of sin, that the saints and martyrs will be on hand to receive them in heaven and guide them to the new Jerusalem. He crosses himself, and the others except for Elizabeth do likewise, and the crows in the trees above caw loudly as sunset comes.
‘Now what are we going to do with these two?’ John asks.
The two boys stand in their shirts and hose and linen caps and again Thomas is tugged at from within. Of what do they remind him? Of whom do they remind him? He cannot say, only that while Elizabeth wants them dead and John wants them gone, he feels some sort of responsibility for them.
‘If you put them out, then you put me out too,’ Thomas says.
There is a silence. Thomas sees John glance at Elizabeth.
‘Good riddance,’ she says.
John looks at her.
‘Let them stay tonight, if they wish,’ he says. ‘Then tomorrow, we’ll see.’
That night Thomas does not have nightmares, but the pain in his head wakes him before dawn, before the others are awake. One of the two boys is whimpering in his sleep, having a bad dream, and Thomas nudges him with his boot. The boy shifts, seems to wake, then slips back into sleep.
Thomas goes outside to wash his face in the stream. He comes to a decision, and returns to the farmhouse and shakes the first boy awake.
‘Come,’ he says, ‘gather your stuff.’
Then he wakes the other boy and he, too, gets his coat and as they are leaving, Thomas turns and sees that Adam is awake and watching. He raises his hand and Adam nods and then Thomas takes the two boys to the stable where they saddle their horses.
‘Where are we going?’ the younger of the two asks.
Thomas doesn’t reply.
‘Can we take our bows?’ the older boy asks. He gestures towards the pile of stuff Adam stripped from the dead men: their clothing, boots, various knives, swords, the seven bows, ten arrow bags, some pieces of armour and an unsteady tower of helmets.
Thomas shakes his head and the boys accept it. They are waiting to be killed, he thinks. They think I will kill them, and perhaps I should. But then he does not, and while they watch he takes a jack from the pile and holds it up only to discover that it is no ordinary jack. Within its usual flax and linen padding are strips of metal. He cannot help but smile: they might not turn an arrow or a point, but they’d stop a blade. He tries the jack on and finds it tight. Still, though. Next he wraps one of the men’s bows in oiled cloth and takes that, along with a bag of arrow shafts. Then he picks a sword – rejecting the first, choosing a second – which he unsheathes and taps on a rail in the stable to check its resonance. It is good. Then he takes a riding cloak, a cloth cap greasy with wear and the largest of the sallets, which he ties to the chosen saddle of his chosen horse.
‘That is my father’s horse,’ the younger boy says.
Thomas looks at him, then the horse. The older boy looks on. He must be a nephew or something, Thomas thinks.
‘Do you
want it?’ he asks.
The boy nods. Thomas shrugs and picks another horse. The younger boy takes his father’s horse and saddle, and Thomas and the two boys lead their horses out of the stable. Thomas adjusts his stirrups and when they are ready, John appears, sleep-tousled and malodorous. He has a flask and a loaf of bread from yesterday. He hands it to Thomas.
‘You’ll come back one day?’ he asks.
Thomas nods. They embrace. Then when he is in his saddle his brother looks up.
‘Thomas,’ he says, ‘answer me this before you go. It’s been nagging away at us all. That name you kept calling. When you are having your dreams. What is it?’
Thomas looks down at him. He can feel his eyebrow cocked. He has no memories of any dreams.
‘A name?’
‘Aye. It sounded like that.’
Thomas looks down into his brother’s hopeful eyes. Then he shakes his head and he is about to say no, when something wells up within him, closing his throat, and he can only nod at his brother. His brother nods back, relieved to have got that clear, and then he says goodbye again, and Thomas turns his horse and he leads the two boys off along the path, heading east. Before he has gone very far, he finds that he is weeping so the tears drip from his chin.
4
THE CORONER’S CLERK is bent-backed in his dark coat, a drop of clear liquid quivering on the tip of his long nose, and whenever he fetches ink from his pot he looks up at them over the top of his temporary desk, and Katherine, standing next to the Widow Beaufoy, shivers. It is not just the cold, though that is bad enough to make her ear ache, it is that she feels feared for, just as she used to feel in the chapter house at the priory, when she was made to stand and suffer the inspection of the other sisters while she waited for the Prioress to deliver the inevitable guilty verdict.
‘Get on with it,’ one of the jurymen shouts. ‘We’ll catch our deaths out here.’
He is right. It is the second day after the feast of St Agatha, virgin and martyr, and winter still has its hold. They should be up above in the hall of the Guild of the Blessed Virgin, where inquests might ordinarily take place, but the Guild members will not allow Eelby’s wife’s body to be taken up, and no one really blames them, for she has lain buried in the ground these past weeks, and the rot has taken hold despite the cold. Before the inquest there was talk of leaving her buried, but the coroner says the law is the law; and that he must see the body, or the men of the Hundred must pay a fine additional to all the others they will already incur for having a murder committed in their parish. So this morning, before dawn, Agnes Eelby was disinterred by a couple of men with linen cloths bound around their faces, and now here she is: set out in the open, a little way off, downwind of the Guild house, on a plank and a pair of trestles. A boy stands by with a shepherd’s crook, ready to keep the birds off.
The coroner – a foursquare man with a close-cropped, reddish beard and cheeks mottled in the cold – stands with his back turned on the corpse, not wishing to look on the stained and corrupted shroud, and he addresses the jury.
‘Fellows,’ he says. ‘Fellows. We are here to decide if Agnes Eelby, God rest her soul, late of this Hundred, is dead by natural causes, or by misadventure, or by reason of a felony in her own case, or by murder.’
As he speaks, there is a general grumble from the jury. It is a reluctant crowd, about thirty strong, every man over the age of twelve, from the nearest four villages, ordered from their fields and their trades to hear yet another inquest into yet another woman dead in childbirth, and they are not happy. They give off a vapour, like a herd of bulls in the cold, and one of them has brought a dog that whines and strains on its plaited rope leash. Standing in a ring about them are the grey shapes of women and children, spectating, the smog of their breath like pale scarves around their heads.
Finishing his preamble, the coroner turns to address Eelby, who is standing apart from the jury with his brown cloth cap clutched in his knuckly hands and his unshaven cheeks blue with the cold. Katherine thinks he looks unusually meek before the coroner, as if he were afraid of authority, and yet she knows he is not. She wonders what he is up to, and supposes she will find out soon enough.
‘And you are first finder?’ the coroner asks. Eelby nods.
‘I am,’ he says.
‘Name?’
‘John Eelby, of Cornford, of this Hundred.’
At his desk, the clerk records this.
‘And the dead woman?’ the coroner goes on. ‘Is your wife?’
‘Was, yes.’
‘May God rest her soul. Tell us what you found.’
Eelby swallows and begins.
‘I heard them calling,’ he says, ‘and I was worried about my wife, so I came running. They was in the kitchen up at the castle. I found her, with blood all over her dress.’
He points at Katherine. There is a murmuring among the jury.
‘And my woman was lain out on the table, all cut. Across here.’
Now he points on his own body, showing a slash from left to right, just above his pubis, though Katherine remembers the cut as being vertical. It is the longest speech she has ever heard him make.
‘And when was this?’
‘In the week before All Saints, this last year,’ he says.
‘And you raised the hue and cry?’
Eelby allows that he did, though in fact there was little need since there was no felon to chase down. After he had come into the kitchen, Katherine and Widow Beaufoy and the widow’s maid had stood there, gathered around the baby, Eelby’s son, whom they had miraculously saved.
‘Did the members of the nearest four households come running?’ the coroner presses.
‘Yes,’ Eelby lies. ‘Yes, they did.’
‘You will name them to my clerk at the end of the proceedings,’ the coroner instructs.
Eelby nods.
‘And then you called the bailiff?’ the coroner continues. He is eager to find any breach of the complex laws that surround any sudden or unexpected death, since any infraction will allow him to impose a fine on the Hundred or on Eelby himself, and so boost his own income.
‘I did,’ Eelby says, nodding at the bailiff, who gives his name, and the clerk makes another entry in his roll.
‘Only he wasn’t needed,’ Eelby goes on. ‘Because them who cut my woman open stood there just as if it right pleased the Lord.’
‘And these are they?’ the coroner asks, turning back to Katherine and Widow Beaufoy.
Eelby nods and the coroner studies the two women again. Katherine tries to see them as he must. She imagines he sees them in good, but old dresses, one, the widow, taller and broader than the other, while next to her she, Katherine, looks if she has been denied her portion of milk and butter over the long winter.
‘And which one made the cut?’ the coroner asks.
Eelby indicates Katherine.
‘It was her,’ he says. ‘Lady Margaret.’
The coroner reminds the clerk of Katherine’s name, and he nods as he writes it.
‘Why do you think Margaret, Lady Cornford, cut her?’
Eelby shifts from foot to foot now. There is a pause, almost as if he is coming to a decision, as if he were choosing which path to take in a wood, and the coroner frowns, waiting, until Eelby makes his choice and says: ‘Lady Margaret never liked her. Never liked my woman.’
There is an outlet of breath. Men in the jury start murmuring. The coroner raises his eyebrows.
‘Lady Margaret cut your wife – killed her – because she never liked her?’
There is some muffled disturbance at the back and the coroner looks up, and then over at his clerk who has also looked up, and the two exchange an unspoken sign. Katherine can make no sense of it, but when she looks to Widow Beaufoy for guidance, Widow Beaufoy is determinedly absent, staring away from her, and away from the disturbance, as if it does not concern her. Something is up, but what? After a moment there is silence.
‘Go on,’ the coroner
says.
‘She hated her,’ Eelby reinforces. ‘As is well known.’
He raises his voice, calling on someone at the back of the jury, and someone answers, shouting out: ‘That’s right! She hated her!’
And, from a different part of the crowd, someone else shouts that Katherine wanted Eelby’s wife dead, and now those at the front of the jury are turning around, craning their necks to see, and everyone is murmuring and staring and the clerk has put down his pen and turned and all at once everyone realises that something is up. The jury has been packed, or bribed, just as Richard and Mayhew had warned it might be, and Katherine feels first the flare of panic and then the grim slump of acceptance. They had told her she needed powerful friends in a moment such as this, and suggested she seek help from Lord Hastings.
‘Someone might bribe the coroner,’ Mayhew had explained, ‘or pack the jury. Anything can go wrong. And if the coroner finds the death unnatural, then he will have to record it as murder.’
‘But it was not murder,’ Katherine had said. ‘I did what I had to do to save the boy. The woman was dead! Or so close to it, it hardly mattered.’
Mayhew had been patient.
‘It doesn’t matter what really happened,’ he’d said. ‘All that matters is what people say happened.’
‘But why would anyone say different?’
Richard had mewed like a cat, or an old woman, and Mayhew had shaken his head.
‘Please,’ he’d said. ‘Please just go to Lord Hastings. Or the Earl of Warwick. He owes you his life. Or his leg at the very least. Send a letter. I’ll take it if you like. Explain what has happened and ask them to advise you.’
But Katherine had not. She’d refused. She was certain that if she could see that what she had done was the right thing to do – the only thing to do – then others would too. Others would see that she’d had to act, to do something terrible in order to avert something worse. That was all. So she had ignored the advice of her husband and Mayhew and instead she’d thrown herself into restoring the estate, and she’d known that the two things – the saving of the child and the saving of the estate – would soon come to be seen as one and the same thing.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 6