As they move towards the door, Thomas asks once again if she will be all right.
‘I cannot say, Thomas,’ Payne tells him. ‘But she is with child, and whereas she should be living carefully, nursing her strength for what is to come, she’s been living badly these last few months. These last years even. Have you seen the scars on her back? No. Well. Anyway. She is strong in spirit, we have all seen that, but she is much depleted in body, and she needs to regain her strength. She needs ale, and bread, and meat. Things to nourish her. We will not find them here.’
‘I will do what I can,’ Thomas says, and Payne nods.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Good.’
But Thomas can see he is doubtful.
‘Come back in the morning,’ he says, and they look at one another, and Thomas remembers what Payne said, that everyone has something to hide, and he nods and he walks away, trusting Master Payne in all matters.
26
SHE RECALLS ALMOST nothing of how she comes to be under a blanket in linen sheets under the smooth white plaster of a curving ceiling, and it is only when she sees Thomas standing at the tall narrow window, looking southwards, the sun on his face, dark red hair with its white patch, freshly shaved, in cleanish clothes he might have borrowed from another man, that she remembers much of anything at all.
She says nothing. She wants to lie still and watch him, to remember him like this, remember him calm, and apparently at peace. He is watching something with interest. Time passes. She can hear birds, and men chattering not too far away, and then the slow shush of the sea against the beach. There is a gentle breeze through the window, and the sun slants down across the floor to light a slice of one of Payne’s coffers and on it is a mug and a spray of dried herbs bound at the stems by another stem. She wonders what they are, but only vaguely.
‘What is happening without?’ she asks. Her voice slips and slides. It has not been used in an age.
He turns to her with a great smile.
‘You are awake,’ he says, smiling at the stupidity of the comment.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Fooof. How long have I slept?’
‘A while,’ he says.
‘I am hungry,’ she tells him.
‘We have fed you ale only,’ he says. ‘Nothing solid.’
She tries to remember. She sees only vague interludes, peopled by vague shades, Payne and Thomas, perhaps, pushing her, pulling her, lifting, lowering, a low susurrus of deep voices and always, until now, warm release back into deepest slumber.
He comes and brings her some ale and there is also bread.
‘No wonder then,’ she says, tearing a piece off. Her fingers feel weak, and her teeth loose. She lets the ale soften the bread before swallowing. Thomas beams at her still, but there is a noise beyond the window and his eye is drawn that way.
‘What is happening without?’ she asks.
He stands and crosses back to the narrow window.
‘The Earl of Warwick is positioning his guns, I believe.’
‘The Earl of Warwick? He is here already? With his guns?’
She tries to sit up but she’s too weak. How long have I been here?
‘He has been bringing them up all this morning,’ Thomas tells her. ‘But stay. Master Payne insists. I will describe them to you. There are two very big ones, monsters, each needing three teams of oxen if they are to be moved, and there are many more besides, smaller but just as long, and like to throw a ball further, I believe. There must be twenty in total, I suppose. And there are many thousand men, and horses, too.’
‘Dear God!’
‘Oh, do not fret,’ he says. ‘They will not be fired. They are here for show. To prove Warwick means business. He will now offer terms, and Sir Ralph Grey will accept them, for he has no choice, and he will be afforded the King Edward’s grace, as will we all, and then the gates will be thrown open, and we can leave this place at last. We can all go home.’
Home. Where is that? She closes her eyes again for a moment. She does not want to think about that.
‘What about King Henry?’ she asks. ‘What will happen to him?’
‘He has already left us,’ Thomas says with a shrug. ‘Three days since. After Dunstanburgh capitulated. Grey insisted he would be safer elsewhere, so he rode away in the night with just a handful of his gentlemen, and those two priests. No one is saying where, but there can’t be many places, can there, in this country anyway, or across the Narrow Sea?’
She is silent for a while, thinking. Trying to imagine the scene.
‘What did Riven say to that?’
‘There was nothing he could do,’ Thomas tells her. ‘He was outnumbered two to one, and King Henry himself – he wanted to go. Riven lacked the strength to be seen to harm him or his interests, so he stood with clenched teeth and watched it happen. The sight of that has sustained me, I can tell you.’
She manages a sibilant chuckle. Thomas returns to looking out of the window. She holds up her arms. They are encased in linen. For a moment she does not know if she is a man or a woman.
‘What day is it?’ she asks.
‘Yesterday was the feast of St John,’ he says.
She cannot believe it has been so long.
‘What have you been doing in the meantime?’ she asks. He is looking well, she thinks, as if he has been eating enough for once.
‘I have been hunting every day, even the Sabbath. Payne has ordered it and Grey lets me, knowing you are here, and that I won’t try to ride south. It has let me avoid Riven, and his men, too.’
‘But the siege? Warwick’s men?’
‘They have just gathered these last days. They have been at Dunstanburgh, and now it is our turn. It is – civilised.’
‘That is a relief. And what of Master Payne? How is he?’
‘He is well. He has been here every day. Tended to you in person.’
She sees, and feels vaguely ashamed. She lets her hand rest on her tummy. It is rounded a little bit, and she who knows her own body best, feels other subtle changes too. Either that or she has been fed March ale for a month. She had thought for a moment, on waking, that perhaps she was not pregnant after all, or that perhaps she had lost the baby, or any number of alternatives, but when they were dismissed, one by one, and she was left with the knowledge that the baby was still there, she felt, for the first time probably, a sense of satisfaction and even pleasure.
She tries to get up again, and Thomas comes to her side and helps her and this time she makes it. She hobbles to the window; her body feels soft and boneless. She rests on the stone of the window ledge and looks out.
‘Good Lord,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he agrees. ‘There are a lot of them.’
Through the stone arch, two bowshots away, is a sea of men, a tide of them swirling around the rocks of those great guns, and their tents, hundreds of them, stretching almost as far as she can see. At their fore edge are the long bodies of five or six guns, but two are much larger than the others, and they are being canted around by slow-plodding wheeling teams of oxen, and she wonders if she can hear the carters’ whips from here. Men are digging the guns’ rears in, lowering their hindquarters and piling the rock and earth in front, raising their forequarters above breastwork of woven hazel. Soon she will be staring at the guns’ big black mouths.
‘So you see, we are surrounded,’ Thomas says. ‘They even have ships out at sea.’
‘But you say I am not to fret?’
‘Grey says King Edward will not want this castle harmed in any way. He says it is too near Scotland for that, and it is necessary for the defence of the realm, so—’
Thomas shrugs.
‘It is just something they have to do, he says. He says they – the Earl of Warwick and King Edward – will offer terms, just as they have done at all the other castles – Alnwick and Dunstanburgh over there, which have already opened their gates to King Edward – and now King Henry is gone, Grey will accept them. He admits he more or less has to, whatever
they are, and then we will have to lay down our weapons, open the gates and walk out, and Warwick’s soldiers will be there to mock us and so on, but after that we will be free.’
She nods. She notices he does not use the word ‘home’ again. But still the question of what happens then looms between them, and she knows instinctively that in the time since last they spoke of this Thomas has come up with no plan further than ‘it will be all right’. She watches him studying the view through the window, and she sees how bright his eyes are, and she imagines what he can see, and she supposes it is the Earl of Warwick’s army, and she is taken back to an earlier summer, a happy and now seemingly carefree time when they were with Sir John Fakenham’s company and everything seemed so simple. She recalls the busy little Earl of Warwick with a tinge of distaste, but then she remembers the boy who has since become King Edward, and she remembers a lanky youth with a glint in his eye. Everything seemed a laugh to him, she thought, until it wasn’t, and then it was in deadly earnest. He had valued Thomas, she remembers, and she wonders if Thomas is thinking about him now, and she supposes he must wish he were not stuck here, with her, when he could be out there.
‘Have you any tidings of the ledger?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he says, dropping his gaze. ‘Even though King Henry has gone, the keep is still guarded, and if I go up there, the captain will recognise me. The last time I saw him I was stained with blood from the men who attacked us in the outward postern gate tower.’
She can remember virtually nothing of the fight, and he shows her the scar on his arm as proof it happened.
‘And Jack is unharmed?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ Thomas says. ‘We have been hunting together, one of us on the lookout for something to shoot, the other for any of Riven’s men come looking for us.’
‘Do they know you killed those three men?’
‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘Riven has accused Grey of ordering it, which Grey has denied of course, but he has hardly tried to discover the truth of it. He also saw us that night, with their blood on us, but he was drunk, and cannot recall, or has chosen not to, so all we have had to do is avoid the captain of the guard of the keep—’
‘—which has meant you have not been into the keep to see if there is any sign of the ledger.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I know Riven has it,’ she says. ‘I just know it. I don’t know why, but I just do.’
He tells her about the knife they took from Riven’s men being the one stolen from Master Payne. She nods. It is as they suspected. Riven’s men were given free access to Master Payne’s goods, and took what they wanted.
‘But why the ledger? It looked valueless, and there were all Master Payne’s clothes hanging there. His cloaks. His shirts. Everything. All of it so much more covetable than a battered old book.’
Thomas shrugs.
‘They must have taken it for fire splints,’ he says again.
She shakes her head.
‘There was something he said,’ she says.
‘But if he has it,’ Thomas says, ‘he cannot have grasped its significance. If he had done so, he would have already taken it to King Henry, surely? And now he’s gone, so …?’
He shrugs.
‘What would he do now,’ she begins, ‘if he realised its significance? Riven.’
They are silent for a moment, thinking, and she supposes that with King Henry’s power so diminished there is no one to make use of the ledger’s secret.
‘He should destroy it,’ Thomas says. ‘If he has not already done so. He will not want King Edward to find that he knows such a secret as that.’
She nods, remembering the threats of tongue-tearing and foot-burning, and she sees this makes sense, but – but now that his other schemes have come to nothing and Riven has neither the King nor Bamburgh in his hands – might he not cling to this last weapon? Might he not secrete it somewhere, storing it against the uncertainty of the future? After all, there is no telling where King Henry has gone. It might be across the sea to find allies in France or Burgundy, it might be to Scotland. And there is no guarantee that Horner’s much longed-for rising across the country will not come to pass, especially if it can be proved that King Edward is not his father’s son, and should not occupy the throne. And if it were widely known, how then would the Earl of Warwick feel about supporting a king with no right to his crown? If the ledger’s secret were to surface, might that not drive a wedge between King Edward and his mighty subject?
‘So he is sitting in the keep,’ Thomas says, ‘just keeping out of trouble until Grey capitulates to the Earl of Warwick, and then he will march out with us, only he will be greeted by his son, and he will be honoured and rewarded for at least trying to hand King Henry over, and at least trying to take Bamburgh for them.’
‘And his reward will be Cornford Castle.’
‘It is not so great a reward as he was hoping, perhaps, but it is enough.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I suppose it is, but where does it leave us?’
Thomas shrugs.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘but it will be all right. I know it.’
She looks at him, then out at the guns and all the many thousands of men and their banners that snap in the breeze of the sea. Christ, she thinks. Christ. I hope you are right.
‘I think I shall have to lie down now,’ she says, and he leads her back to her mattress and he pulls up the blanket.
‘And you are really certain the guns will not be fired?’ she asks and he smiles down at her in a manner she knows is intended to be reassuring, and then he bends and kisses her forehead and he tells her he is absolutely certain the guns will not be fired, and she smiles, for she trusts him in this at least, and she places her hand on her belly, closes her eyes and goes to sleep.
The first stone is fired just before midday on the following day. The noise of the explosion in the gun rolls over them like thunder that seems to come and go, lasting unnaturally long, setting the seagulls wheeling and screaming above the heads of the men who are clutching their ears. It falls just short of its target, but it is not a complete waste, for the stone – black and round and large enough that only a tall man might get both his arms around it – skips across the ground between the meres and hits the footings of the southward curtain wall with a sharp crack and enough force to send a shower of dust and stones higher than the battlements above. The shock of its impact ripples through the castle with a clink of loosened masonry and a falling cloud of dust. The first smell is of hot, chipped stone but that is replaced by a sulphurous stink that makes them all think of hell itself.
‘Haha!’ Grey roars. ‘Haha! They’ve not the elevation!’
‘That is one head gone,’ a man beside him mutters.
Grey turns on him. ‘Shut up!’ Grey shouts. ‘Damn you! Shut up!’
The next shot, from the second of the two big guns, is louder than the first, and this time the charge is perfected, or the angle is made right, and the ball thrums as it comes. It hits the southern curtain wall halfway up, a hundred paces to their right, and there is an instant burst of dust and the air is filled with fizzing missiles – chunks of fractured stone and cement – and the castle walls tremble, and then there is a slide of clinking stones from the spot where the stone collided, and the larger blocks fall to land with a thud Thomas can feel through his boot soles.
‘Two heads,’ another mutters.
‘God damn you!’ Grey roars. ‘I will have the next man’s head myself!’
Thomas and Jack are already wondering if they want to remain on the tower’s top when a third gun is fired. This is smaller, and it throws a lighter stone which they hear throbbing through the air, passing over their heads, and they spin around to see it hit an inner wall with another boiling swirl of dust and stone. No one is injured, for there is no one nearby, but when the dust clears, the crater in the wall is as round as a man is tall, of very pale stone, and after a moment the line of masonry above it slumps, and it
s dressed blocks slide forward and the wall collapses along its length.
‘God’s holy wounds,’ someone murmurs. They look at one another. Then at Grey, who is still there, waving his gloved fist at the guns, bellowing some incoherent defiance. None of the other men join him, and after a moment, one by one, they begin stepping through the door to the steps that will take them down from the tower’s top and to the safety of below. Thomas and Jack join them.
‘Could pray for rain, I suppose,’ a man mutters.
‘Or for a lucky shot to carry Sir Ralph away,’ another says.
‘By Christ,’ yet another adds, ‘it should never have come to this.’
And he is right.
When Warwick’s herald rode across from camp to castle, the day before, Thomas had been behind the battlements of the main gatehouse, with Sir Ralph Grey and the man he’d made his deputy in Riven’s place: Sir Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth, who had come to the castle late and was blamed for the early botched ambush of Montagu before the battle on Hedgeley Moor. They were both drinking Grey’s distillation and they were already quite drunk as they watched the heralds coming up the track, led by a man with the Earl of Warwick’s coat of arms on his tabard, and another carrying his lord’s banner.
Grey would not let the men into the castle, lest they see how poorly provisioned they were in both men and material, and so Warwick’s herald pulled his horse up below the main gatehouse, and craned his neck up to the battlements. His coat was blazingly ornate, a composition of past coats of arms that served as a testament to his lord’s ancestry, and he was finely harnessed, though he carried no weapons, and he was escorted by ten other men in Warwick’s simple red livery, equally well arrayed in plate, equally unarmed, but on good roan horses. The matching horses was a typical Warwick touch, Thomas thought, until Grey arrived with a few of his gentlemen, and he was shunted aside to make way for better men to have better views. He went to sit with Katherine, and so listened to the negotiations unfold sitting on her mattress, his hand on her ankle.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 40