So he is not mourning for Isabella, Thomas thinks.
And now Mayhew glances over at Katherine and he frowns and comes quickly to her side. He presses a point on her neck and then shouts for his servant.
‘She is bleeding again, from within,’ he says. ‘We have applied a coagulant. There is only so much we can do.’
‘Just your best, Mayhew,’ Sir John says. ‘No man can ask for more.’
Thomas crouches next to her. She is very pale now, very drawn, the bones of her cheeks sharp, the skin drawn tight, her lips bloodless.
The servant comes. Sir John is moved. He sits next to Thomas while Katherine’s skirts are raised. There is more linen, spools of it, more urine. The faint smell of rose oil and something else that is pungent and bitter and catches at your throat. The servant mumbles prayers. He raises the crucifix in one hand and the candle in the other. Mayhew is quick, working frantically. Katherine twitches as if she were dreaming and her breath is very shallow and fast. Mayhew curses. Then he does something and he is still, applying some pressure. He looks at them both significantly, and Thomas knows this is it, the last chance. If this does not work, nothing will. A priest will need to be summoned.
Time ekes past. The light fades. The tent linen closes in on them. The servant lights another candle from the stub of the first. Mayhew is still there, pressing. Sir John slips in and out of sleep. His snoring is a light buzz. Katherine’s breathing has slowed. He can see the dark trace of her blood vessels through her pale skin. One is jumping rhythmically. A tiny beat. Then it is too dark to see that. No one says anything. A little later the other servant brings bread and soup and ale, sent by Lord Hastings. Mayhew does not move, or even look up.
Sir John wakes and mumbles something. The servant pours him ale.
‘Still with us, is she?’ Sir John asks. ‘Good. I have been praying for her. And Mayhew, he knows his stuff.’
Thomas can stand it no longer.
‘Sir,’ he asks. ‘Whom is it that you mourn?’
Sir John looks at him over the rim of his mug, and the candlelight glints in his rheumy eye, but for the first time Thomas thinks the old man has really focused on him, is really seeing him.
‘Tcha,’ he says, putting aside the mug, and looking suddenly very powdery and older yet. ‘You have been away for almost a year, haven’t you? You will not have heard. Richard. My boy. My only boy, you know. He died. Late last year. Just before Christmas. I used to love Christmas, you know? But no more shall I. It was – oh, it was always going to happen, that I knew. Once his Margaret died he was bound to follow. Still though. It was a blow. A great blow.’
Thomas returns to Katherine, and he presses her hand in his own, and relief, hope, guilt and regret plait together and coil through him. Richard Fakenham is dead. Dear God. Suddenly a vast obstacle is removed, like an old man’s stone, he thinks, and he begins to think that there is hope for them – until he remembers that nothing matters if Katherine is not there with him.
And then Mayhew makes a subtle move, a slight relaxing of his shoulders, and afterward, he is stopped still for a long moment, head bent, crouched, staring at something, and then he looks up and allows Thomas to catch his eye, and his expression, bone weary, is just about readable and he nods his head very slightly, and behind him the servant begins the Te Deum, a prayer of thanksgiving, and Thomas feels tears welling in his eyes again, and he turns to look at her, and he thinks for a moment that she has her eyes open.
‘Katherine,’ he says. ‘All is well. All is well.’
At that moment there is a booming ruffle of the heavy linen walls of the tent as the east wind off the North Sea picks up, and the candle flame wavers on its wick, and Sir John wakes with a start, and all the men look up fearfully as if something is passing overhead, and the servant crosses himself twice.
A Note from the Author
The great castles at Alnwick, Dunstanborough and Bamburgh are perhaps the mightiest of the castles in Northumberland, but they are just three of the many that stud what was in the fifteenth century known as the East March, each constructed during the early Middle Ages to protect England from the marauding Scots, and – to be fair – to serve as bases for marauding Englishmen heading the other way.
Many of them still stand – rebuilt, buffed-up, Victorianised in the case of Alnwick and Bamburgh, preserved as an austere ruin in the case of Dunstanborough – and today they, and many of the others, can be visited following a well-signposted castle route running from Warkworth in the south to Norham in the north. In the twenty-first century they are almost serene; cool and mossy and damp, often hard by meandering rivers below, romantic monuments to a distant past, but it does not take too great an imaginative leap to see them as they might have been 500 years ago, absolutely dominating the landscape as cathedrals did further south, each one a complex, whirring hub at the centre of an extensive eco-system sucking in men and materiel, food and fodder, animals and wood to burn, from miles around, and they would have been busy, loud and smelly places.
It was to these castles that, after their power was very nearly destroyed at the battle of Towton in 1461 (the subject of the first in the Kingmaker Trilogy, Winter Pilgrims), such Lancastrian forces as survived the rout withdrew, and it was among them that the next phase of the conflict we have come to know as the Wars of the Roses played itself out.
As with the longer span of the wars, the history of these next few years – from 1461 to 1464 – is often confusing, occasionally nonsensical, sometimes comical. Everybody changes sides at least once, usually twice, there are two kings, and everybody else is called Richard or John.
Before Thomas and Katherine arrive in the autumn of 1463, each of the three castles had been besieged by the Yorkists and taken from the Lancastrians at least once already, only for the wrong man – from the Yorkist point of view – to be given the keys afterwards. Each newly appointed castellan almost instantly reverted to the Lancastrian cause and it was from the chilly confines of these borrowed castles that the adherents of Henry VI holed up, in some discomfort and almost powerless to influence events while they waited for help from France or Burgundy or Scotland or, in fact, from more or less anyone with ‘un peu d’argent’. Meanwhile in London the Yorkists under Edward IV scrambled to secure their grip on the throne, and to cut off any chance of outside aid coming to those men in the castles.
Life must have been very bleak.
Options began running out very quickly, and Henry VI – not the leader his father had been, nor in fact the leader his wife, Margaret of Anjou, was – was not the man to bring the Lancastrians out of their bind, so one can imagine the excitement the beleaguered garrisons must have felt when the Duke of Somerset reverted to Henry’s cause and turned up on the drawbridge, under-equipped for the weather at that time of year having had to leap out through the window of an inn to escape Lord Montagu’s men.
Although not a markedly successful general – he led the Lancastrian army unsuccessfully at Northampton and Towton – he was full of vim, a very fine jouster, and it must have been wonderful for Henry’s men to be away from the castles for a while as he led them in search of Lord Montagu’s men, though I do not suppose many would have appreciated the rugged beauty of the Northumbrian countryside as we do today. I have looked for any mention being made of Hadrian’s Wall, incidentally, but have found none, and so I still wonder what they would have made of it. To many Englishmen of the time, any foreigner was a ‘Frenchy’ so what they would have thought of it, built by the despised Frenchies so long ago, is anyone’s guess.
The two battles described in this book – Hedgeley Moor and Hexham – were small-scale affairs, and somewhat frustrating after the incredible rigours of Towton, but they are intriguing in many ways. Very little is known of them, and such accounts as exist are, again, and as is usual, contradictory, and do not fit with the topography or military probability. Legend has grown up around Percy’s Leap at Hedgeley Moor, but did it really happen? At Hexham I have placed
Somerset’s men atop Swallowship Hill facing north, which seems to me to make the most sense, but others may disagree, and be proved right, and if that is the case, then I can only admit that my guess will have turned out to be incorrect.
In both cases I have tried to understand why the men belonging to Lord Hungerford and Lord Roos capitulated apparently so speedily, and have advanced a theory that, since it is predicated on the existence of a fictional character, cannot possibly be the real one, but there may have been some other similar forces at work on those days. Whatever the cause of their running, it saved lives in the end, and perhaps that was reason enough? The men in both camps would have been very similar types, from adjacent neighbourhoods, and perhaps their hearts weren’t really in it? Perhaps they remembered the trauma of Towton too clearly, and this was an outbreak of genuinely civil civil war?
As for William Tailboys and his mules carrying what remained of King Henry’s war chest, that is true. He was captured after the battle hiding in a coal mine with an unknown but large sum of money, quickly distributed among Lord Montagu’s men, and was executed in Newcastle in July that year, two months after the battle. Quite what he had been doing in the meantime is one of the gaps in our knowledge wherein fiction writers thrive.
Meanwhile, though, poor old Henry VI continued to evade capture until 1465, when he was finally caught and taken to the Tower of London. In some ways he was probably better suited to captivity than kingship, since he was a simple soul, given to prayer, and he was to spend the next five years there until he was winkled out to play one last, fateful role in the continuing story of Katherine and Thomas …
Acknowledgements
While I was trying to finish this novel, I was convinced my slog was solitary, but since looking up from it I have seen that it would have been much less fun, and much harder work, without the support and friendship of a hundred different people, some of whom I’d like to thank by name.
First, I’d like to thank those of you who were so encouraging about my first novel, Winter Pilgrims. Without Ben Kane and Manda Scott’s kind words, and Hilary Mantel’s unexpected endorsement, this second one might have been a trial of endurance, but your very generous encouragement really gave me wings, as did that of Robin Carter and Kate Atherton, who were so kind about me in their excellent blogs: Parmenion Books and For Winter Nights. I can’t tell you how cheering your comments have been, so thanks very much, guys.
Second, thanks are due to my lovely agent Charlotte Robertson, who has been wonderfully positive and calm in all things, as well as my editors Selina Walker and Francesca Pathak, who have tolerated my endless deadline dodges. I’d very much like to thank the amazingly patient Mary Chamberlain for applying her eagle eye on matters of plot and plausibility, as well as Tim Byard-Jones for his terrifically astute nit-picking on matters concerning the fifteenth century. Thank you too, David Allison, for all your brilliant suggestions. Without your help, this book would not be half the book it is, while at the same time baeing double its length.
Next, my thanks are owed to Johnny Villeneau and Leslie Bookless for putting me up and putting up with me, and to Jacko for being such an easy and enthusiastic audience. Thank you, also, Kate Summerscale and Sinclair McKay, for your continued support – you know what I mean – as well as, all too familiarly, Anna and John Clements, for, again, you know what. I’d also like to thank Nick and Lilian Philips, who have been models of generous support and very tolerant friendship. I could not have finished this without you.
Most of all, though, I’d especially like to thank Kazza and Martha and Tom and Max, too, for continuing to make it all the subject of high comedy.
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Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 44