After five trips up and down the steps there is no space left on the lines in the dorter and after more pottage and bread and ale, Sister Matilda quickly shunts her through the door to her cell and pulls the bar across and she is condemned to her darkness once again. But now her heart is beating fast and her breathing is unsteady as she waits the length of time it would take to say the Ave Maria, then she unrolls her mattress and hauls out the damp, heavy jack. She tries it on. Its weight drags across her shoulders, as heavy as a child, she thinks, and its hem reaches her knees and she has to roll each sleeve back halfway so as to be able to use her hands. With a belt around her waist she persuades herself that she will not look too much the fugitive.
But how to make use of it? It is no good to her while she is locked in her cell. She has paced the floors and knocked on the walls and tried to scratch away the mortar between the stones, but nothing gives. Then she has an idea. She takes off the jack and turns it open. Working in the dark, she rips open a seam under what she imagines is the arm and she feels the strips of steel within the padding. Each plate is rough edged, too stiff to bend, and punctured in the middle so that it can be stitched in place. She chooses one, and twists it until the linen threads snap and it comes loose. It is a piece as long as her hand, two fingers wide. It is perfect.
She returns the jack to its hiding place under the mattress and fumbles her way over to the door. It is so dark that she cannot see her hand in front of her face but she feels her way up the door jamb until she comes to the stone into which the bar is set. She wonders whether she can scrape out the cement around the stone, then she wonders if she can’t just work the drawbar back? She slides the strip into the gap between the door and the stone and lifts it until it meets the bar. There is perhaps the width of a coin in which to work. She presses the steel into the wood and moves it from left to right. She does this slowly, time and time again, and she presses her eye to the crack in the door, imagining that if someone came, they would bring a light, and she would see that before they saw the bar move in its tiny increments.
She keeps at it and is so long doing it that her hands ache. And then she sees the throb of light through the gap between door and jamb, a tiny muted line, and hears footsteps as someone comes. She throws herself on her mattress and forces the plate under it, and then feigns sleep as the drawbar is pulled back and the door is opened and she will never know how far she managed to work the bar back before it was pulled all the way. Not enough to arouse suspicion anyway. Sister Matilda is there with the rush lamp.
‘Come,’ she says. Her face is flat and blank with fatigue and she drags her feet in front of Katherine as they descend to the cloister and along its spotless wings to the nave of the church where they stand and listen to the lector read the observances. When it is over and she is returned to her cell Katherine resolves to try the door again. She finds the metal plate under her mattress, though this time instead of going straight at the door, she spends time sharpening the end of the plate against the stone jamb, slowly grinding an edge.
She falls asleep while she is doing it, still kneeling on the stone floor, her head against the door, and is only woken by the sound of clogs outside. She is quick to secrete the plate in the sleeve of her cassock and she walks to the nave holding both elbows.
‘What’s wrong with your head?’ Matilda asks. ‘It is all striped.’
After the observance she is too tired to start again with the plate or the door, and she collapses on her mattress and sleeps as if dead until she is roused with a kick at dawn for Prime. She is nervous all day, suffering from a gnawing anxiety that infects everything she does. Any alteration imposed on her routine takes on a sinister potential, but the day passes unchecked. That night she starts to work on the drawbar again, slipping it back a sliver at a time. She moves faster now, conscious that she has only three hours before she is to be woken again to attend Prime, conscious that she has no way beyond instinct to measure this span of time.
On she goes, until her hand aches with cramp and her vision swims. Finally the door’s bar leaves its housing with a slight sigh and the door slumps on its hinges with an unoiled creak. Her heart beats faster, but she remains motionless in the silence. Then she pulls the door open. It is almost as black without as within her cell, and she remains kneeling with the plate stretched before her like a knife, waiting, knowing that if someone comes now she will have to kill them.
There is nothing. Not a movement. After a long moment she returns to her mattress, fumbling with it to pull out the still-damp jack. She twists out of her cassock, so that she is wearing her linen slip like a shirt, and her braies. She slips the jack over her shoulders. It is very heavy. She wonders if it will be so much of a help in the long run. The hose are trickier. She pulls them on, still wet, struggling in the darkness, and hoists them up her legs and rolls the hem in a thick coil around her waist. She wishes she had a doublet to keep them up. Then she slips the metal plate back in its slot under her arm and returns to the door. She lifts it as high as she is able so that it does not strain on the hinges and creak as it opens and she steps out into the corridor. She closes the door and slides the bar across. To the left is the way up to the sisters’ dorter, to the right the stairs down to the yard.
Cold air pushes up from that way and she turns and feels her way down, letting her hand slide on the stones until she feels the breeze coming from below. She is at the top of the stairs. Then she steps down, slowly, carefully, the stone cold through the soles of her hose. At the bottom the door is barred. She feels for it and slides it back from its housing and then is out into the yard. A moon is up, somewhere behind a gauzy veil of cloud, casting an uncertain light that comes and goes.
She crosses the yard to the beggars’ gate. She pulls the drawbar back into its housing and pulls. It stays in place. She pulls again but it does not move. Dear God. She has forgotten the new lock. It is unbreakable. She steps back. The wall is too tall. Then she remembers Thomas and his escape from this same spot, the very first time she saw him. She crosses to the wood stack and hauls herself over its eave. The tiles here are slippery but her wet hose help. She scrambles across them and then catches the parapet and pulls herself up and on to it. It is easy, she thinks. But then she looks down. It is the churchyard where the canons and the sisters are buried. She slips her legs over and then lowers herself down, the rough stone edges biting her palms. She has still a fall to make, and she drops, lands heavily and rolls in the earth. She gets up, hobbles a moment, and then waits for the moonlight to come. The graves are marked with dark stones, each laid flat, simply carved with the name of the dead person. In this light they look like shafts down into the graves. She shudders. Joan must be here, and Alice.
She needs to keep moving. There is a gate on the far side of the graveyard. It must give on to something. She circles around, one hand on the rough-dressed stones of the wall, and when she is at the gate she finds that locked too. But it is low, wooden, and she can clamber over. She pulls herself up and peers over. Beyond is a small yard. She waits a moment. All is still. Crossing it will put her in the canons’ cloister and she is aware as she scrambles over the gate that what she is doing, she cannot now undo.
She drops quietly into the mud and straw of the yard and moves across to the shadowy space that she supposes must mark the opening to the garth. She skirts the cloisters, keeping her hand on the balustrade, and then finds herself lost. Where is the beggars’ gate? She passes from the garth into the yard and there, in the fleeting moonlight, she stops for a long moment. To the right is the turning house, the other side of the great turning wheel through which all the laundry passes from one cloister to the other, then the almonry, then the chapter house. Ahead is the gate, and to the left are the stables and the buttery and pantry, and then the frater house and the canons’ dorter above. She cleaves to the moon shadows and crosses swiftly to the gate. The locking bar is huge, a trimmed tree trunk, normally moved by two men.
She tries, though, try
ing to inch it back when – footsteps. A canon is awake, walking slowly through the first yard. He is carrying a watchman’s lantern. A door is opened. A brief kindling of light, then a voice. Then the door shuts. Then there is only darkness again and silence. She is shaking in her damp clothes and she looks up at the clouds skimming across the moon’s face, and there is a wind, and suddenly she is terrified, not of being caught, but of being out in the dark. After her cell, everything is so huge, so open; she is exposed and vulnerable, the prey of any and every thing.
And now she does not know what to do. The walls are all too tall for her to climb, and there is someone awake in the cloister, so that she cannot return the way she has come. She is trapped.
Then the door opens again, a patch of light somewhere in the bowels of the first yard. The door closes but the light stays, flickering as if moving. Two lamps now, and two voices. Men talking, and coming quickly. She runs to the stables. Christ. The door is barred. She slides it open and steps in. There is no comforting snuffle from any horse or mule, only silence within. She is relieved. She pulls the door to and steps into the darkness beside it. Her heart is hammering over the sound of her breathing and there is a rushing in her ears. She sees the light through the crack between door and jamb falling on the straw, and the voices are coming nearer.
By Christ, she thinks. They cannot have seen her. She was too quick. Nevertheless she fumbles for the sharpened plate under her arm and takes it out with trembling fingers. She holds it out in front of her and readies herself to kill whoever comes.
They are coming. Or one of them is, grumbling about something. He does not sound as if he is suspicious or even vaguely alarmed. He sounds more annoyed. She holds her breath. The door is banged against its frame as if to check it and then it is opened. Light splashes across the straw on the ground.
Katherine squeezes back into the darkness.
The man stands outside the door, one hand on the frame. He is very close. She could touch him. He holds the lamp up and a long oblong of light fills the stable. But there is a slice of darkness where Katherine is pressed to the wall.
The man grunts something, some vaguely relieved noise, and then he steps back and closes the door. The drawbar is pulled across and rammed home.
‘Some bloody fool forgot the bar,’ he calls, his voice muffled, and across the yard the other man grunts something to suggest he is familiar with such incompetence.
‘Is he there?’ he calls.
‘He’s all right.’
There is another grunt, and they continue on with their round, the sound of their voices dying with the light until Katherine is left in the absolute darkness, but she does not move. She stays pressed to the wall. The sharpened plate is held before her, shaking. She can scarcely breathe with the fear of it.
Because there is a man in the stable with her.
7
THOMAS BLINKS. HE wonders if he is imagining it: a brief glimpse, in the glow of the watchman’s lamp, but the details remain vivid even after the man has gone and silence is returned. A boy in a long coat, with strange patchy hair, as quick and quiet as an eel. Thomas shakes his head. He has not imagined it. Such things – you don’t just imagine them. He doesn’t move. He listens and hears the boy breathing.
‘Who are you?’ he asks. He keeps his voice quiet. Conspiratorial. His enemy’s enemy must be his friend. But there is no answer. So he asks again. Still no answer.
‘I know you are there,’ he says, but now, suddenly, he is not sure. By Christ, he thinks, I am going mad again. They are right to keep me in here. Strange shapes swirl in the darkness before him. He begins to sweat. He starts the paternoster, silently, and then he hears something again.
‘What do you want?’ he asks. ‘Tell me. Who are you?’
Again there is nothing but the slight sigh of breath being drawn.
But perhaps his enemy’s enemy is also his enemy?
‘If you do not say something, I will shout,’ he says. ‘Then the canons will come running.’
He feels stupid even saying this. Imagine someone hearing him. The boy still says nothing. There is a long moment. Then Thomas decides something. He slips his blanket aside and rolls off his mattress, and he moves slowly, his eyes fixed on that spot by the door. He controls his breath and takes a step. His vision conjures up strange shapes again. Still, he takes another pace through the straw, stroking the air before him. A third step, then he stops. Shapes uncoil in the darkness. He pinches his eyes closed.
Then he takes another step.
‘Get back!’ the boy snarls. ‘I have a knife.’
Thomas leaps back. He imagines a movement in the dark, a swinging arm, the burn of the blade passing through his flesh.
‘By Christ,’ he whispers. ‘I do not wish to hurt you.’
‘Do not say anything more,’ the boy says. ‘If you call out I will kill you before the brothers can come.’
Thomas wonders if the boy can see him. He can’t see the boy, despite the sliver of moonlight. He realises he is standing in it, that the boy can see him, so he steps aside into the darkness. He hears an indrawn breath. Good, he thinks.
‘Who are you?’ he asks. ‘If we are going to share a cell, we should be acquainted.’
The boy does not want to talk. Thomas takes a few steps back. He stretches for his mug on the floor where he knows it to be. It is leather, not quite heavy, but will do as distraction.
‘Are you some sort of oblate?’ he asks. ‘Is that why you are running? Or what? A thief? If so you have picked the wrong door, Brother, for there is nothing of value here, and no way out either. They have taken everything I ever had, even the clothes I stood in.’
Still silence. Thomas listens. He is so familiar with the cell that he knows exactly where to throw the mug, and so he readies himself, hitching the skirts of his cassock around his waist. He plants his feet. Then he draws back the mug. Drops of ale fall down his sleeve, cold in his armpit. Then he throws. And at the same time he springs across the length of the stable and he crashes into the boy. He feels a small hard body in his hands, a wiry shoulder. He strikes down, catches the arm and knocks it away. The boy cries out and something flies out of his hand and hits Thomas’s foot. Thomas runs his hand back over the body, feeling the stiffness of the metal plates of the jack, and then has both the boy’s arms clamped tight in his.
That is when the boy knees him in the testicles.
For a moment it hurts no more than any other blow to any other part of the body, but then a great green sickness billows up within him. He expels a cough and lets the boy go. He reels away and falls to his knees and then he crawls, scrabbling in the straw, into the corner from where he has come. He wants to die. He vomits softly, a dense bubble of half-digested bread and gravy.
Thomas can hear the boy patting the ground, looking for his knife. He would be happy to have his throat cut, he thinks, happy to die, for it to be over with. He lies on his side with his legs curled up and he gags and swallows. He hardly tries to move his face away from the scalding slick of vomit that smells so bad. The sickness only seems to swell, taking over his whole body.
‘God damn you,’ he moans, ‘God damn you.’
Still the boy says nothing. Thomas lies there so long that eventually he is granted the blessed relief of sleep. The sickness wavers, relents, and he slips into unconsciousness.
When he wakes the bell is ringing and dawn has come. He opens his eyes. Grey light fills the stable. He remains absolutely still, moving only his eyes. He is lying on his side with his knees drawn up, his hands tucked between his legs. There is vomit everywhere. The events of the night before return to him, unreal, and yet there is that hollowness in his gut and sharp stink from the pile of grey stodge in the straw. Once the bell has ceased its toll, he listens and there is a thin buzz, regular and easy. He strains his neck, lifts his head, and peers around. He can see nothing of the boy. Then he uncoils slowly and rolls over.
The boy is asleep, head bowed, slumped in th
e corner, his legs outstretched and the blade on his lap in loosely curled hands. He is snoring gently. Thomas sees he is wearing a jack such as he himself owns, or used to own, and hose too, identical to his, and that both are too big for the boy by some margin. He stretches his legs, then raises himself, not taking his gaze off the boy until he is crouching. Then he gets to his feet and takes the few swift steps across the stable; he dips and snatches the knife away.
The boy wakes.
Thomas holds the knife out.
The boy looks up.
They stare at one another.
Thomas drops the knife.
Katherine’s eyes open wide, then her mouth drops open, and her eyes screw up again. Thomas drops to his knees. Her hands come up. For a moment they cup his beard.
‘Thomas,’ she says. ‘Oh, Thomas.’
And they look at each other for a long while.
‘Katherine.’
She takes her hands away and she shakes her head. She closes her eyes, as if she does not believe what she is seeing.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It cannot be.’
Thomas cannot speak. He feels his hair standing on end, all over his body a great rippling, like grass in the wind. He opens his mouth to say something, but can’t find any words.
‘Where have you been?’ she asks. ‘For the love of Jesus! Where have you been?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know.’
He puts his arms out to take her in them, to gather her to him, as he wishes to, but she shies away. He hardly knows who she is, only that he is filled with elation at seeing her.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 11