Katherine turns on him.
‘Why are you back here, Eelby?’ she asks. ‘And where is everybody? Where’s my husband?’
Eelby stops and waves his hand airily and talks through pursed lips.
‘His lordship is gone to London,’ he says in a voice not his own, ‘accompanied by his personal surgeon in search of their old friend the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hastings, in the hope that he will look kindly on your ladyship’s plight and bring his influence to bear in the matter of my murdered wife.’
He snarls the last words, and Katherine sighs loudly, as if they have been through this before.
‘What about John?’ she asks, ignoring his attack. ‘What of your son? Where is he? What of the others?’
Eelby does not answer. His face creases, and he folds his hands under his stained armpits and begins to pretend to find something very funny.
‘You don’t know!’ he snickers. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’
‘I’ve no time for this,’ she mutters.
‘No,’ he says. ‘No. You’ve no time for anything now.’
Thomas can see that Eelby means something, but Katherine turns her back on him. The man continues his laughing, closing his eyes, his whole body shaking with this false laughter, and Thomas senses trouble, but he is too late. Katherine takes a few quick steps, and she has the beetle swinging through the air before Eelby opens his eyes again, but he is also too late. He manages to raise his arm and the blow lands with a crack that makes the dogs jump and begin their barking again. Eelby screams and clutches his arm and Katherine raises the beetle again, but Thomas steps in, and Eelby looks at her with piteous fear. Then he turns and runs.
For a fat man with an injured arm he is startlingly fast. He is across the yard, past the dogs and scuttling up the stone steps to a doorway in the tower before Katherine can set off after him. Thomas runs to catch up.
‘Wait,’ he shouts. But she is gone, slipping through the doorway and up some winding steps after Eelby. Thomas follows. He hears scuffling footsteps on the turning stone steps above, then a rough-edged bellow. A door crashes open and light spills down. He runs, turning up the steps until he reaches a door out on to the daylight of the tower’s enclosed rooftop.
It is a small square, ten paces across, stone-flagged, framed by regular merlons, with an iron brazier rusted vivid orange to one side. Katherine has the man pinned in a corner. His face is pink, sweating, and he is clutching his arm before him, which Thomas can see is bent, as if it were trying to turn a corner without him. Katherine has the beetle raised, but neither is looking at the other: both have their heads turned and are staring through the stonework to the countryside beyond.
Thomas peers over. Men on horseback. Soldiers. He recognises their type instantly, though from where he cannot say. They are in a column, two abreast, winding down the road that passes the priory. With bows across their saddles and many with those long lances stood in their stirrups. There must be fifty or more. A long line of laden carts follows, pulled by pairs of oxen.
‘Who are they?’ Katherine asks.
At first it seems Eelby is wheezing sibilantly through his teeth, suffering with the pain, but in fact he is trying to laugh again. Despite the pain he is enjoying this moment. Katherine raises the beetle ready to strike.
‘Who are they?’ she demands.
But now Eelby is braver.
‘You have such good eyes, my lady,’ he says. ‘You tell me.’
Katherine peers into the distance. Then she lowers the beetle and grips the stone merlon.
‘Merciful Christ,’ she breathes. ‘It cannot be.’
Eelby tries to laugh again but his face is wiped blank with fresh pain and his eyes roll in their sockets. He blubbers through thick lips, and the fingertips of his broken arm have turned blue.
‘Who are they?’ Thomas asks.
She looks at him over her shoulder.
‘It is Riven,’ she tells him.
‘Riven?’ he repeats. ‘Giles Riven?’
She nods.
‘Barnaby said he was dead,’ Thomas says.
Eelby is laughing. Katherine turns on him.
‘Why is he here?’ she shouts. ‘Why is he here? He’s dead!’
‘It’s not him! It’s Edmund. The son. Look for yourself. Here he comes to claim what’s his.’
‘But it is not his,’ Katherine snaps.
‘Try telling him that,’ Eelby says, raising his head and nodding at the soldiers. ‘Your father tried that once, didn’t he? And look what happened to him.’
Instead of hitting him, Katherine meets his gaze and then looks back out at the men.
‘What shall we do?’ she asks Thomas, who is also peering over the walls at the advancing column.
‘Close the gate,’ he suggests. ‘This is a castle after all.’
‘Gate’s broken,’ Eelby says. ‘Wouldn’t stop a house cat. No, my lady and whoever you are, you’d best be gone ’fore they catch you.’
He is beginning to laugh again.
‘Where have the others gone?’ she asks. ‘Where’s the baby?’
Pain makes Eelby gulp. He is very pale and sweat sheens his fat, green-tinged face. When he has recovered he answers.
‘They went with that fool the eel catcher, back up north. He can spend his coin to fill their bellies.’
‘You let your son go to another man?’
‘Why not? He can have the boy till I need him.’
Katherine lifts the beetle again.
‘Katherine,’ Thomas says. ‘We must go.’
He places a hand on her arm.
‘Why do you call her that?’ Eelby asks.
‘Shut up,’ Katherine tells him. ‘Do not even talk.’
‘Come,’ Thomas says. ‘Before it is too late.’
Katherine threatens Eelby one last time, for the pleasure of watching him flinch, and then they leave him.
‘Farewell, my lady,’ he calls, reverting to the high-pitched, twisted voice of before. Katherine almost returns to hit him again, but Thomas takes her arm and drags her through the small doorway and down the winding steps. In the yard the dogs come crashing at them again, forcing them to one side, and Katherine threatens them, but then they are out through the gatehouse and across the first and second bridges. The soldiers are still a good bowshot away along the causeway, but near enough now for Thomas to see the black badge on the breasts of their white jackets. They are led by a man with what looks like a bandage across his face.
He stops to stare, Katherine at his shoulder.
Then they hear Eelby shouting from the battlements. The horsemen slow to hear him, but they cannot, nor can he point for clutching his broken arm, so by the time the men know where to look, it is too late. Thomas and Katherine are gone.
9
WHEN THEY REACH the ferryman’s punt they find the red-bearded canon studying it as if it has somehow come up short.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Thomas says when he sees him. ‘Pass me that.’
Katherine hands him the beetle. The canon looks up at them, then at the beetle. He remains calm.
‘Thought it might be you,’ he says.
‘Leave us,’ Thomas says, ‘and there will be none of this.’
He lifts the beetle.
‘I do not want to stop you,’ the canon says.
Thomas lowers the beetle.
‘What then?’
‘Take me with you.’
‘You don’t know where we are going,’ Katherine says.
‘Nor do you,’ the canon says.
Thomas looks at her.
‘No,’ she has to admit. ‘That is true.’
‘And I have food,’ the canon says. He opens his bag to show a quarter loaf of brown bread, and he has a large costrel of ale. Katherine cannot stop herself: she steps forward to take the bread, breaks it into chunks and bites. The bread is gritty with salt. She chews until her jaws ache, and then guzzles the ale, swallow after swallow. Thomas holds his chunk an
d looks back over the rushes to the distant trees. They should be gone, she can see him thinking. He comes to a decision, and passes her his bread.
‘Help me, then,’ he tells the canon, and together they shove the punt through the reeds and back into the river’s tugging brown waters. Katherine takes the canon’s knife and cuts off the feet of her hose and as she is about to throw them away, he takes the woollen socks and puts them in his bag. Then he hitches his cassock, takes off his clogs and throws them into the punt, and steps into the mud to hold it while Katherine climbs aboard.
‘Well done, son,’ he says.
She hesitates, unsure, and looks at him. He avoids her gaze and waits for Thomas. No one says anything. Does he really not know who she is? He gives no indication either way, just holds the boat fast as Thomas climbs aboard. Then he takes the pole, steps aboard himself, and shoves them off. Thomas is for a moment at a loss as to what to do.
‘Where are we going?’ the canon asks.
And she thinks. Downstream is Boston. But what help might she expect there? None, really. She knows no one save Widow Beaufoy, and she is not like to get help from her. No. There is only one place, really.
‘Across,’ she says, and she points over the river, to the rough sedge on the other side.
The canon grunts and steers the punt out into the current. He’s a big man, solid and strong, with square feet and mud-rimed toes that seem to grip the thwart’s edge. He guides the punt expertly through the water, as if he has been doing this all his life, but after a moment he looks down and catches Thomas’s stare.
‘What he did to you was unchristian,’ he says. ‘That is what I think Father Barnaby can be – unchristian.’
Thomas lifts an acknowledging hand from the gunwale.
‘What is your name?’ Katherine asks.
‘Robert,’ he says.
Then there is a pause.
‘And yours, son?’ he asks. Katherine squints up at him again. Is he playing with her or does he honestly not know who she is? She cannot tell. He stands there, patient, silent, steering the punt, and the need for an answer becomes pressing. She looks at Thomas for guidance but he does not seem to know either and then, finally, she says: ‘Kit. My name is Kit.’
‘Kit,’ Robert murmurs. ‘After the travellers’ saint. Well, that is us, I suppose.’
And once again, in a moment, it is decided: she is to be Kit. Nothing more is said. There is only the noise of Robert’s pole and the faint throng of the water against the side of the punt and after a while he manages to find a tongue of solid ground among the eastern bank’s marshes and they climb out and haul the punt up out of the water to hide it among a stand of rushes.
‘Just in case,’ Robert says.
And they turn and set off through the marshland, ever careful of the green-crusted mud, and there are insects thick in the air, and strange red-beaked birds scuttle away before them.
‘Edmund Riven,’ she says. ‘Edmund bloody Riven.’
‘That was him?’ Thomas asks. ‘The man with the bandage?’
She growls an affirmative.
‘How can he be here?’ she demands of herself. ‘His family is attainted! I was there in Westminster the day it was done! Richard said it marked the legal death of that family, of every Riven that was ever alive or lived still, or will ever live in the future.’
Neither Thomas nor Robert says a thing. Why should either know?
She will have to ask Sir John Fakenham, she thinks, that is all there is for it, for he is the only man who would ever tell her how it had come to pass, but now she thinks of him, and of Marton Hall, and she feels a roiling mixture of guilt, fear and shame. She thinks how she treated him: how she lied to him from the very start, how she passed herself off as someone else, and how she married the man’s son while pretending she was someone else again. And all he ever showed for her – in any of her guises – was charity.
But there is one crumb of something, she thinks, something approaching comfort, or hope at least, and she thinks again of the day of the fight at Towton, when she was Margaret Cornford and she was tending to Sir John after he’d been brought down off the field, out of his wits with his head stove in. No one thought he would live, and they’d lain him on the ground and he’d clutched her hand and called her Kit. He’d even thanked the Lord that she – he – was there. And when she had corrected him, told him she was Lady Margaret Cornford, he had said that he knew what he knew, and that she should not be wasting her time with him, but she should go to find Thomas. Go out and be with Thomas, is what he’d said. She did not understand it at the time, or understand what he knew or how he knew, but she went to find Thomas, and it was only later that she tried to divine a deeper meaning in the old man’s words. Did they mean he’d known from the very off that she was a girl pretending to be a boy, and that at that moment in the hospital she was the same girl, only now pretending to be a different girl? Or perhaps he thought she was, and always had been, Margaret Cornford, and that she’d pretended to be Kit to get away from Wales? She had struggled with this all that summer after Thomas was dead, endlessly going over it, again and again, watching Sir John’s expression for any further clue, but the matter was never raised again, and she had never struck on a happy answer, not even at the altar, when she swore oaths before God and Man, and took Sir John’s son as her husband.
So now she nods, and says: ‘Marton Hall, in Marton, that’s where we must go,’ for, anyway, after all that, what else is there? Sir John is all that remains to them. They must seek him out and throw themselves on his kindness. It is their last – their only – recourse.
They pass the first night in a barn where a miller lets them sleep on a platform, reached by a ladder, on which straw is piled on a cradle of hawthorns, above two strong-smelling oxen. In amongst the straw are a few thick-skinned apples that they eat quickly, guiltily, greedily. A moment later and Robert is asleep in his wet clothes, snoring loudly, seemingly spread across the whole space so that wherever they move they must touch him.
Katherine and Thomas sit together, with their backs to a beam, legs hanging from the platform. She has taken off her jack and they can hear it dripping in the darkness.
‘It will be cold tonight,’ he says.
‘We’ve known worse,’ she tells him, and she reminds him of the night on the Welsh mountains, in the snow, the night that the real Margaret Cornford coughed herself to death.
He is pleased he cannot remember it.
‘What was she like?’
‘Oh, she was very young,’ Katherine tells him. ‘With much to learn. But that was another strange thing.’
‘What?’
‘Eelby still thought I was Lady Margaret, didn’t he? You would think, wouldn’t you, that the Prior would let it be known I was not?’
‘Perhaps it is because they do not know who you really are?’ Thomas asks, and she grunts. She cannot see how that would affect anything.
Thomas is silent in the darkness. She cannot see him, but she thinks about waking up to find him in the dawn that morning, in the stable, his expression so naked and confused. She’d thought she was dreaming still, of course, and she’d thought this was just another, stubbornly persistent one, from which she could not wake, and she thought for a moment perhaps she must be ill or mad, as they said she was, but then when she’d felt the soft bristle of his beard, she’d thought, no, by God, this is it, he is here, alive, and she had almost wept not with happiness, or relief, as she might once have done, but with the mad confusion of it all.
With this she thinks of Richard, her husband, and she wonders where he is and what he is doing. She thinks of him wandering around in London with Mayhew, shy, anxious Mayhew, frightened by men with power, men with velvet gowns and riding boots, men with retinues and weapons, and she wonders how that will turn out, but already their story feels distant, and their fate, somehow, not her concern.
‘So will you continue as Lady Margaret for now?’ he asks.
‘
It is the easiest,’ she supposes, and he grunts his agreement.
‘We would have to tell Robert here,’ he says.
‘That is nothing,’ she tells him.
‘But then,’ he says, ‘would Edmund Riven not try to kill you, just as he tried to kill the real Margaret Cornford?’
And she thinks about this for a moment, and sees that Thomas is right. Edmund Riven followed them to Wales to do just that.
‘But what then?’
‘Well, you are dressed as Kit. Robert here knows you as Kit.’
‘Kit then?’
‘I don’t know.’
Thomas has lain down and in a moment he is breathing evenly, asleep. She lies next to him, as she was once used to, and she can smell him, and she means to offer up a prayer of thanksgiving, the Te Deum perhaps, but she does not. Then in the early hours of the morning, when it is darkest and they should be at Matins, she is woken by the unfamiliar, and she feels that Thomas has an arm around her as, again, he once used to. It is comforting, but later in the night, she is woken by something else: an unfamiliar pressure in her tailbone, and she feels him pressing against her. He is still asleep and when she whispers his name, why she does not know, he removes his arm, withdraws his body, and his dream, whatever it was, diverts elsewhere. She is left with only the impression of him, and she does not move until she is woken by the sound of the barn door on its hinges and the shouts of the boy leading the oxen from their pens below.
They walk through the morning under a pale sky, the breeze at their backs pressing the cold cloth to flesh, and they meet not a soul. Before midday they see the spire of Lincoln cathedral and the castle on their hill above the haze, and now she knows she can postpone answering the crucial question no longer: what is she to tell Sir John?
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 13