‘All day and not a bite,’ he says. Then he sees the King, and he stands.
‘Your grace,’ he bows, and then he sees Katherine, and his focus sharpens.
‘But you’ve had more luck,’ he breathes with his mouth open, staring as she dismounts. And now King Henry turns to her, and finally sees he has been travelling with a woman.
‘Oh,’ he says.
Katherine stands there before them in that dress. She touches the sleeve of her left arm. She is feeling better, certainly looking less waxen, and she looks to Thomas to explain, and so does Horner, and Payne, and even King Henry in his absent way, and Thomas feels as if his head is filled with tow, almost to bursting point, and he wonders why he has not thought up something in advance, but he can think of nothing, and so he says only the very first words that come into his mouth.
‘This is my wife,’ he says and despite it all, despite everything, he cannot help his eyes misting over and he feels very much consoled by that thought, as if it is somehow enough, or will do for them all as well as it does for him, but Horner can only stare.
‘Your wife?’ he asks. ‘But she is – she is— Where is Kit?’
And now Thomas feels he might as well tell them, have done with it, for he can still devise of nothing, but now Katherine enters with a lie that makes him stop and smile again, despite everything.
‘My brother has stayed in Bywell,’ she says.
‘Your brother?’
Jack starts coughing. Katherine says nothing. Horner stares at her. She stares back until he shuts his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.
‘By all the saints,’ he says. ‘You do look – similar.’
She says nothing.
‘Are you as good a surgeon as he?’ he asks.
‘Twice as good,’ she says.
Horner looks over to Payne, who shrugs.
‘So she says,’ he mutters.
‘You did not tell us that Kit was your wife’s brother?’
‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘You did not ask.’
‘But all this time?’
‘What can I say?’
‘You can tell us why have you brought her here now?’ Horner asks.
‘Montagu is coming,’ Thomas says, not answering the question. ‘Today. He has ridden from Newcastle.’
Katherine is forgotten. So too is the King.
‘We must tell Somerset,’ Horner says. ‘Come with me.’
Thomas nods. They turn their back on King Henry and walk through the camp together. Thomas explains Riven’s ruse. Horner seems at a loss for words. He does not believe him. Nor does the Duke of Somerset. He makes them stand at the opening of his tent while he eats some sort of fowl, roasted. Grey is within, sitting on a folding stool, and Tailboys, too, likewise seated, and behind them there are others, the Lords Hungerford and Roos. All have suffered the privations of the past months: they are poorly shaved, baggy-eyed, in dirt-smutted clothes, and the tip of one of Tailboys’s piked shoes is broken and turned down. The tent smells of cold river water, and of mildew and unwashed bodies. Not even the Duke’s supper smells good.
‘Oh, good Christ,’ Somerset says. ‘How could he, you fool? Riven’s been face down for three years, enduring half hell’s agonies, not sending missives to his son or making pacts with the King’s enemies. Dear God.’
And he should know, Thomas thinks, and yet …
‘Where is King Henry now?’ Tailboys asks, looking over their shoulders for his dread sovereign, and the way he says it, King Henry is obviously a burden they can do without.
‘He is with Master Payne,’ Horner tells them. ‘At prayer.’
‘He must be gone,’ Somerset says. ‘We must get him away, tonight, back to Bamburgh. If we lose him, then we are left with nothing.’
Sir Ralph Grey is sober this morning and beats Tailboys to the punch.
‘I will provide an escort,’ he says. ‘I will go myself. Take twenty men.’
The others regard him.
‘You do not relish the prospect of an encounter with Lord Montagu?’ Tailboys asks.
‘I merely offer, is all,’ Grey counters. ‘We cannot send King Henry alone. He is the King of England, after all, and should travel accompanied and in some style.’
‘I should take him,’ Tailboys objects.
Grey snorts.
Somerset brings the discussion to an end.
‘I will let you know who is to escort him,’ he says. ‘We can spare only very few men, and none of any use. Cripples and so forth. And we must accomplish it with no fuss. His presence here is a boon to the men, and his loss will be felt. So not another word.’
Thomas is bundled out.
From then on the camp is busy. Men are at their weapons and armour as usual, tightening, loosening, polishing and sharpening. Fires have been lit. Pots steam, and the women are washing clothes in the river and the trees and bushes are spread with clothe Thomas cannot imagine ever drying before they will need to be packed away. A blacksmith is shoeing a horse, and a grinder has set up his wheel and sparks are flying, but here there is a man – one of Lord Roos’s – trying to sell a kestrel, and another his tent. They are hoping to reduce their baggage, so that if they have to run for it, they can. Thomas is tempted to buy the tent, not the bird, for Katherine, but then he too would be encumbered with it and just like these men, they must travel light, he thinks, if they are to get away. Already his mind is turning to flight.
So now he looks around, tries to see where they will run when it comes to it. They are camped on a flat plain, in a loop of the river, at the bottom of the valley, just south of the road and its bridge across the river they are calling the Devil’s Water, which flushes over a rocky bed on its way to join the Tyne to the north. In addition to the bridge there are a couple of fords along its length where the water is about hock deep, he supposes, but elsewhere it is much deeper, and the flow, after the rains, is powerful enough to create a churning cloud of mist above the low waterfall upstream. Across the river, to the west, the road cuts up a steep, heavily wooded hill on its way back to Hexham, and to the east the road from Corbridge snakes southwards until it reaches a crossroads: the west road comes across around another hill, mostly of rough moorland, just like at Hedgeley, which the men call Swallowship Hill. If Somerset were to set himself up there, Thomas thinks, on the hill’s crest, then he might have a chance, but down here? He is a duck on water.
‘Your wife?’
It is John Stump. Christ! He had forgotten about John Stump. Now John nudges him with his remaining elbow, and grins a very particular grin, and despite his distractions, Thomas cannot help but smile back.
‘What of her?’ he asks.
‘Come on,’ John says. ‘I’ve been watching those hands at work all these weeks. That isn’t anyone other than Kit.’
Thomas is alarmed. He opens his mouth to say something, but what?
‘You crafty devil!’ John goes on. ‘Having her here all the time. Right under our noses. But listen. Don’t you find it a bit odd? You know. How she looks so like Kit? Must be funny, when you’re face to face, like?’
Thomas does not know exactly what John Stump means, but he can guess.
‘Anyway,’ John says, ‘Horner’s looking for you.’
When they find him Horner is helping one of the others brush down the stolen horses. He seems cheerful and even optimistic.
‘Somerset doesn’t believe Montagu knows where we are,’ he says, ‘and is probably fixed on taking Hexham, and so tomorrow we will take the crest of the hill there –’ he points over to Swallowship Hill – ‘and catch him while he is on the move, and with God’s blessing, this time we will score such a victory as to set the whole country ablaze for King Henry.’
Thomas wonders if he should ask about the last time they caught Montagu’s army on the move – through Hedgeley Moor – but he does not want to upset or disappoint Horner, so he keeps his mouth shut.
‘Thomas,’ Horner goes on, ‘you are to take the a
rchers to the front as before.’
‘We have very few arrows,’ Thomas warns. ‘Barely twelve apiece.’
Horner is surprised, caught out. He obviously had no idea things were that bad.
‘Nevertheless,’ he says after a moment of anxiety, ‘loose them and then retire. It is the Duke’s plan.’
Then it is a foolish plan, Thomas thinks, which does not address the realities of the situation, but that is typical of Somerset, Thomas supposes, and he is pleased, for it is as he’d hoped. He will do what he must, but he can be expected to do no more.
He goes now to find Katherine. It is curious, he thinks as he passes through the camp, that now she is dressed as a woman, he must fret about her more, or be seen to fret about her more, than when she was a boy, although in fact she is in far less danger now. He has never forgotten that the French witch Joan was burned for dressing as a man.
He finds her standing face to face with Sir Ralph Grey. Sir Ralph is absolutely sober. He has his hands on his hips and is leaning forward to peer very closely at her. He is incredulous.
‘His brother, you say?’
Katherine nods. She is enduring his inspection tolerantly, which Thomas thinks she would not do if she did not already know Grey to be mostly harmless. Still, though. Perhaps that is best.
‘You are that boy’s sister?’ he goes on.
‘Yes,’ she says, her face blank.
‘And you are married to that archer who assists him in his – his – whatever it is he does?’
‘Yes.’
Grey leans back. ‘Well,’ he says, as if he has heard everything now.
He senses Thomas looming up and turns to him.
‘This is your wife?’
‘Yes,’ Thomas says.
‘But how in God’s name do you tell them apart in the dark?’
Just as with John Stump, Thomas is not sure what Grey means. He finds himself on shifting ground.
‘The need has never arisen,’ he says.
No one says anything for a moment. Grey stares at them, looking from one to the other. He knows something is wrong, and that they are waiting for him to leave before he divines it.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I hope you are as skilled with the knife as your brother. We will have need of a surgeon or two tomorrow, I should think.’
24
THE SICKNESS WAKES her when it is still absolutely dark. Thomas is next to her, and she can smell him, and what was once pleasantly dusty has become less so, and she rolls to the other side, but here is Jack, breathing a rhythmic gale in her face, and she has noticed that when a man has not had enough to eat, as Jack has not, his breath is very bad, as Jack’s is now. So she turns back and looks up at the underside of the cart and she tries to pretend that if she does not move, she will not vomit, and this works, and the nausea subsides. She lies still for a moment, her hands across her belly, letting her eyes become accustomed to the dark. Most men are scared of it, thinking it a presence, rather than an absence, but she has never felt so, and she used to scorn the sisters at the priory who turned their clogs over during the night for fear they would fill with darkness and so become evil.
The baby will come in September, she supposes, and she thinks then of Eelby’s wife, and how she must have lain like this at one time, perhaps next to that snoring boar of her husband, and she wonders with a start what has happened to the son, the miraculous baby? She has not thought about him since they were sent north, since coming to Alnwick. Dear God. She feels she has somehow betrayed the boy, now, by having her own, and before she ever managed to find him in those trackless green wastes into which the eel catcher had disappeared. She wonders what the boy would be like now. Walking perhaps? Learning his first word? ‘Eel’, probably.
She will find him, she thinks, when this is over. Next year perhaps. When her own baby is born. She will show them one another. Or is that vanity? And anyway, where will she be? She simply cannot guess. She cannot even guess where she will be next week, since anything might happen today, tomorrow, the day after.
So she must come up with something. But what? Her mind does not seem so sharp as it once was, she has noticed, and she thinks it might be the sleeping rough with so little food that has done it. It is why she was so pleased to announce that she was Kit’s sister, though she thinks how odd that was: the words were out of her mouth before she thought them through.
When he’d heard, Master Payne had just shaken his head, half in sorrow, half in admiration. She thinks about him now, and she prays he will stay with Somersets’ army, stay with her, but she knows he is King Henry’s man, and must go where the king goes. She wishes she and Thomas could go with him to Bamburgh, perhaps, however uncertain that future might seem, and that he would be by her side when her time came.
He would not wish it, of course, and would claim ignorance of her woman’s body, but how could that be so, she thinks now, when he spotted her condition before she did? In one glance? He is a very fine physician, she thinks, and perhaps there is something to his theories about the planets and their position in the sky, for after all, what does she know? She has picked things up as she has gone along, from old ladies and Mayhew, while Master Payne has been to far-off countries where Christian men gather together to pursue knowledge, to dissect corpses in order to understand how they worked when they were alive. Such depth of learning is – is something.
The camp awakens around her, coming to while it is no longer night, but not quite day, and there is a curious gentleness in the soft morning air. Voices are muted, consideration and accommodation informs every dealing as lines of men and women make their way between the damp canvases of the tents down to the river, there to conduct their ablutions with a semblance of privacy. The lull of early morning lasts only until the arrival of bread and ale, brought down the hill by carts from Hexham, and a mad scramble follows during which every man must exert himself to get what he needs.
Thomas returns with a great pitcher of ale and the upper crust of a loaf that must once have been the size of a man’s body. He divides it unequally in her favour, and Jack laughs. He is looking very much better. She wonders what it was that ailed him. Some miasma from the river? He is not mobile enough to fight yet, and he and John Stump both refused to leave with King Henry and Sir Ralph Grey the evening before, and so they are to stay in the camp, to keep such a baggage train as they possess, and she is pleased. They will be with her. She has volunteered for surgery, but there is even less with which to work than there ever was at Hedgeley Moor, and she wonders what she might usefully do, except sit with her hand on a man’s brow while he dies, and even that worries her.
After he has eaten Jack hobbles away and Thomas watches him go with a nod that strikes her as more calculated than heartfelt, and she wonders what Thomas is up to, but then Horner comes with others in Grey’s livery trailing behind. He is in rust-spotted harness that he has had little help putting on; in one hand he clutches a pollaxe Katherine has never seen before, and with the other he holds his helmet against his chest. Others are coming past, spilling out of the camp in their companies: Hungerford and Roos’s men, still not trusted after last time, have the furthest to go, since they are to take the right flank, facing north towards Corbridge, while Somerset’s men are to dominate the centre.
‘We are to take the left, Thomas,’ Horner says, ‘with Neville of Brancepeth and Tailboys’s men. We are to drive Montagu’s flank back into the river.’
Thomas just nods. The way Horner says it, it is as if he believes it is possible, though in the very next minute he reminds John Stump to look to the baggage and the followers.
‘In case Montagu sends prickers around,’ he says, ‘but he won’t.’
John Stump nods cheerfully enough.
‘Nice to have something to do,’ he says.
‘Where is Jack?’ Horner asks. John Stump shrugs and mutters that he is about, and not likely to go far, not with that leg.
Then, in the distance there is a bugle blown. Me
n stop and stare quizzically at one another.
‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘An alarm.’
‘Can they –? Can Montagu be here already?’
The alarm continues, is taken up by nearer trumpets.
‘By Christ! It must be them!’
The camp erupts into a frenzy of movement. A drum starts. Then another. Then another. They are coming closer. So too are the alarms as the tidings spread. Lord Montagu and at least five thousand of his men are across the Tyne at Corbridge and are moving south and west in good order. And now every man is hurrying, some are running with others still tying their points, and there is a great confusing struggle as they rush to get up the hill before Montagu can beat them to it.
‘I will see you after it,’ Thomas tells John Stump as he forces his helmet on. John nods.
‘We’ll be here,’ he says. ‘Me and Jack. Couple of cripples as may be, but we’ll look after her all right.’
And Thomas can only nod and then he turns to her, and for the first time he is allowed to kiss her with all these other men about, and he opens his arms to envelop her, to really say goodbye properly, but she has to force herself to allow it, because he smells of sweat and horses and rust and now her insides are rebelling and so this first kiss goodbye is perfunctory, snatched, and she knows she will regret it later, if, God forbid, anything were to happen to either of them.
‘Go with God, Thomas,’ she says.
She realises she is crying, and she wishes she weren’t, and she wishes she did not feel so sick, and she wishes she could see him off as he deserves, and as she would wish to, but she cannot help herself. And then the boy with the drum comes out from the trees and he stands by them, his sticks thundering away, and he grins at them and she thinks he might be mad, or simple, and after a moment Horner taps Thomas on the shoulder with his pollaxe, and he mouths something and gestures uphill with its point, and Thomas takes his meaning, and he turns, and so they part, for the first time as man and wife, he going one way to fight with all the other men who are trudging past up the hill, while she and John Stump go the other way, walking against the tide, back down into the trees towards the river and the camp.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 36