For three years its worth remained a mystery until with the help of Sir John Fakenham they had divined its secret, and hence its value, and when they had done so, they had sat back in silence and Katherine will still swear that she could see the hair on the old man’s head standing on end. The simple, dangerous truth that the ledger contains is that nine months before King Edward was born in 1442, his mother Cecily was in Rouen, in the north, while his father, Richard, Duke of York, was in a place called Pontours, in distant Aquitaine, in the south, and they were separated from one another by a journey of at least six weeks.
So the Duke of York cannot be King Edward’s father, and since it is from the Duke that King Edward inherits his claim to the throne of England, his claim to it is as illegitimate as he is himself. But just thinking this, Sir John had told them, was enough to have them each hanged and then drawn twice over. ‘If this should get out,’ he’d said, ‘if it should be learned that we know of it, then we, and everyone we know, and everyone they know, will be rounded up to be split from bollocks to chops, to have our guts pulled from us and wound around a winding wheel while we watch on.’
So they had hidden the ledger from sight, and if only they had left it so, wrapped in its length of moth-eaten kersey at the bottom of an elm coffer at the foot of Sir John’s bed, then it would now be just as if the thing had never existed.
But they had made a mistake: when Fortune’s Wheel had turned against them, and when they were at their most desperate, they had unearthed the ledger. They had taken it north to use it to try and buy the favour of the old King – Henry of Lancaster as he is known now – who was then still holding out in one of those northern castles. With the ledger in his possession, old King Henry might have been able to persuade the nobility of England to rally to his banner once more, and help restore him to his usurped throne.
But their scheme failed, and King Henry failed, and for that they later gave thanks to God, but while they were with him in the castle, at Bamburgh, the ledger had been stolen. They had recovered it soon after, but not before Sir Ralph Grey, the castle’s governor, had stumbled upon it and, though mostly drunk and incapable, had somehow discerned its secret. When the castle fell and he was captured, he had passed his knowledge of the thing on to the Earl of Warwick in the hope of a pardon for holding out against King Edward. Perhaps this might have saved him, if only he had had the ledger to go with it, but by that time Thomas had reclaimed it and spirited it away, and so Grey – still unsteady from the falling masonry that had knocked him senseless at the end of the siege – went to the block cursing his fate.
Of course the Earl of Warwick began looking for the ledger as soon as Grey was rolled in his pit, but Grey’s grip on the thing had only ever been fleeting, and by then all trace of it seemed to have vanished. In addition, at that time the Earl of Warwick was still King Edward’s closest ally, his bosom companion, so his search was fuelled only by the desire to suppress its secret, rather than anything more sinister; and though he recognised its threat sufficiently to enrol the help of King Edward’s Chamberlain, William Hastings, in finding it, neither pressed hard, and neither had any luck, and so the matter was allowed to lie, and the ledger lay buried under the hearthstone of the new house Thomas built over it.
But a few years later, King Edward and the Earl of Warwick fell out, and the Earl began seeking both cause and manner with which to displace his ingrate protégé, and he remembered the ledger. He started searching for it again, only this time with all his mighty intent, employing Edmund Riven to break bones and burn flesh in its pursuit.
Naturally enough, though, news of his frantic search reached King Edward’s Chamberlain, Lord Hastings, who had stayed loyal to King Edward, and, realising the Earl’s design, he too began looking for the ledger with equal urgency. He sent a man – a cleric, he said, but with a wink – whom he called his bloodhound across the Narrow Sea, to Rouen, to try to trace the ledger’s disappearance from that end.
But then, suddenly, thankfully, before Michaelmas last, King Edward and the Earl of Warwick seemed to settle their differences. They made up, and peace broke out up and down the country. And if the two men were never quite such friends as they had once been in the past, it had seemed they were at least united in the desire to keep this peace. With this in mind, Katherine and Thomas have been able to rest more easily, trusting that if the Earl of Warwick no longer seeks the ledger so pressingly as once he did, then neither does Lord Hastings.
But what if the peace does not last? Katherine now thinks. What if the attack on Burgh’s house is the first move in some new war between the Earl and the King? This is the question that most preoccupies her that afternoon as they ride back up the track to Marton Hall: what does all this mean for them?
3
‘So what are you going to do?’ Jack asks.
They are walking past the church, back from the butts with the other men ahead, all of them steaming like cows in the cold from the exercise.
‘I don’t know,’ Thomas admits. ‘All I’ve been thinking about is this.’ He gestures at the hall, and the fields around them. ‘Trying to get it right, so that when I get to heaven, and when I meet Sir John – God bless him – I can look him in the eye, you know, and I can shake him by the hand, just as we used to, and he’d tell me that I’d done right by him and right by those he loved.’
‘And you’ve done so, Thomas,’ Jack says. ‘By God. Look at the place.’
‘But it’s not enough, is it, Jack? It’s not enough. When Katherine killed Edmund Riven, and when we found all that money, I thought that was it, we could come back here and bide to ourselves. I thought we could make everything better, little by little, if we just stuck to it, and that if we did that none of us’d ever again find ourselves standing starving by the side of the road with only one shoe; none of us’d ever again have to go off to fight for someone in whom he did not believe, for something he didn’t believe; none of us’d have our bloody arms cut off, and none of our women’d ever have to give birth to a child while they’re chained to a wall.’
Jack waits. These are more words than Thomas has spoken for a good few days.
‘You will say it is pride, Jack,’ he goes on. ‘I know, but once the Rivens were dead, and once we were all back here, then I honestly thought that so long as I was diligent, and so long as I observed God’s ways in all things, then He would afford us peace.’
Jack nods, though it is not clear he completely understands. Thomas is not sure he does either.
‘But now,’ he goes on, ‘now it seems it’s not ended. We’ve seen those two Rivens sent to hell, and yet, if Katherine’s right, and I suppose she must be, then it will still go on. More of the same. More and more. And the worst of it is that every blessing that God has given me only means I’ve more to lose.’
He thinks about Rufus, and about the child in Katherine’s belly, and he looks at the fields and woods and the orchard and the mill, and he looks at the chimney of the hall he can see above the trees, and he thinks about the men who troop along behind him, and of Nettie and the squalling baby, and of poor crippled John Stumps, and he tries to remember the words of the Evangelist who claimed that those whom God loved, He first tested in the fire. And Thomas cannot help wonder if this latest development is God testing him further, afresh, yet again.
‘When I was a lad,’ Jack says, ‘my mam used to tell me a story that she said was passed down from the old days, when the Danes were here, mouth to mouth on Twelfth Night and so on. Least that’s what she said. It was about a man – Wolf, I think it was – who comes to live in a village terrorised by some sort of flying dragon.’
‘St George,’ Thomas tells him.
‘No. Not him. This Wolf wasn’t a Christian. Anyway. Wolf decides one day he can’t go on like this, with the people he loves being snatched away and his home being set on fire every night, so he decides he must kill this dragon. So he gets his sword and shield and out he goes, and after a fight that lasts three weeks or s
omething, he does. He kills the dragon.’
Thomas feels deflated. He had hoped Jack would have a solution.
‘But the problem was,’ Jack goes on, ‘the problem was that this dragon, well, he had a mother, didn’t he? A dragon mother who when she heard her boy was dead, came roaring out to find this Wolf, and she was much, much bigger’n her son, wasn’t she? And she was really fierce, and really angry at this Wolf, and so she came for him, and this time he had to fight her for five weeks.’
Jack feels he’s made his point, and they walk in silence for a short while. Thomas is not certain he has.
‘Five weeks?’ he asks.
‘Something like that. Anyway, what I mean is that – that this Wolf is like you, isn’t he? Like us. And the dragon: she’s like Riven.’
‘But both Rivens are dead,’ Thomas tells him.
‘Yes,’ Jack says. ‘And now there is an even bigger dragon in their place.’
‘So … you are saying there will always be someone – a dragon – coming between us and – and peace?’
Jack nods. They walk on in silence for a moment. It is a good story, Thomas thinks, and he imagines he’d’ve liked to have heard it told properly.
‘What happened in the end?’ Thomas asks.
‘Of the story? She always changed it. Sometimes the man’d win, sometimes the dragon.’
He pauses.
‘That’s in the nature of these tales,’ he says eventually.
Thomas wonders if that’s true.
Early on the next day it is decided for him, and it comes almost as a mercy: a messenger with a blob of lead fashioned in the rough shape of a bull’s head pinned to his coat. He hands Thomas a sealed letter. Thomas reads it.
‘Well?’ Katherine asks. She has a fist on her hip and looks sceptical. She has never quite trusted William Hastings, or Thomas’s devotion to him, though why, Thomas still does not know.
‘Lord Hastings sends his blessing to us all and asks for me to go to Ranby Hawe to ascertain for myself and with my own eyes the temper of the King’s people there. And then I am to come to him wherever he may be.’
She looks pinched to hear him say it.
‘What about us?’ she says. ‘What will we do?’
Thomas bites his lip.
‘Well, perhaps you are right?’ he says after a moment. ‘Perhaps there is no gang of thieves in the county?’
She cocks an eyebrow at him. After the arguments they’ve had.
The messenger finishes his mug of ale. He’s waiting for a reply.
All three of them know Thomas must go.
Thomas takes the paper and writes a few words on the back. He has no seal of his own, and anyway, the letter is of no interest to anyone other than Hastings, and so the messenger tucks it back in his bag and clambers back up into his saddle. They watch him touch his heels to the horse’s flanks and turn and go.
‘I am sorry,’ Thomas says. ‘He – We need him, so I must do as he bids.’
She knows this. They all know that they rely on Hastings’s goodlordship. Without his backing – in any court case, or in a fight – they would be prey to any passing speculator with an eye to their property or even their lives.
‘Well,’ Katherine says with a smile haunting her lips and eyes, ‘perhaps you may do him good service? Perhaps you can tell him that I was right and that you were wrong, and that the Earl of Warwick is behind the attack on Burgh’s house, and that even now he is setting King Edward a trap?’
Thomas smiles back at her. She is very clever, he thinks.
‘It may come to nothing,’ he says.
‘With God’s grace,’ Katherine tells him, serious again.
When he is ready to go he takes her in his arms and plants a kiss on her mouth. He feels her arms around his waist and they hold one another, his cheek on her crown, her face pressed into the hollow of his neck, and he feels the simple comfort of her touch.
When they break apart, and he swings himself up into the saddle, and he and Jack ride in silence, Thomas thinks that it is strange God should reveal his design through a pagan tale told to a small boy, and now only half remembered, but then again, he supposes, the Lord is well known to work in curious, roundabout ways. So here he is, on a good horse, with a good man at his side and a good sword at his hip. He wears a stout padded jack under a brigandine of very dark blue linen, studded with tin-coated rivets and lined with steel, and he has his tight-fitting archer’s sallet bouncing from his saddle behind. His bow and two sheaves of arrows are strapped across the horse’s withers, along with a bag of his other possessions, including some parchment and an ink pot and pen-quill case so that he may write to Katherine if needs be. All he misses is the pollaxe. He wonders who holds it now? Christ, it was a fearsome thing.
Ordinarily Ranby Hawe might be hard to find. No one they know to ask has heard of it, and so Thomas and Jack ride out in hope rather than expectation of discovering it, well laden with bread and ale, anticipating a few days in the saddle asking questions of pedlars, travelling merchants, carriers, pilgrims and friars. In the event it is easy to find, though, impossible to miss even, for the roads to the north and east of Lincoln are busy with the companies of men strung out seeking the same destination. There is a celebratory mood in the air, with many men calling out to one another, and the drumming and piping of the boys is as cheerful as on St John’s in June. Thomas and Jack pull up their horses and sit forward to watch the procession.
Thomas does not now know what he hoped to find, but he sees none of the Earl of Warwick’s red livery among the men.
‘Ranby Hawe is five miles hence,’ one horseman tells them, indicating eastwards. He is in a travelling cloak, but it cannot disguise the bulk of the thick archer’s jack below, and his man rides behind, smiling vacantly as if slightly drunk and leading a mule stacked with the tell-tale rolls of arrows in their sheaths of oiled cloth and numerous long tubes that can only be bows. Behind him follow five more men, nondescript.
Thomas offers him ale from his costrel, and probes his loyalties.
‘I am Guy Watkins,’ the man tells him, guileless as the day is long. ‘Of Langton, in this county, and I owe my service to Sir John Pyble, who in turn owes his to Sir Robert Welles. Which is why I am answering the summons.’
Thomas is confused.
‘Lord Welles?’ he prompts. Lord Welles was the man whom King Edward summoned to London.
‘Ha!’ The man laughs. ‘No doubt he will be one day, but while his father lives, he remains Sir Robert.’
‘And he – this son of Lord Welles – he is this – this Great Captain of the Commons?’
‘In deed and thought!’
Thomas does not know what to think. He had supposed the Earl of Warwick might reveal himself as the Great Captain of the Commons, and finding this is not so, a small spark of hope is ignited in his breast: perhaps after all Warwick has nothing to do with this? Perhaps it is as the carrier said: a local feud? One family against another? Perhaps now Thomas will be allowed to turn and ride back home after all? But then – why are all these men gathering?
‘May we ride with you?’ Thomas asks, offering him some of his ale.
‘It would be my honour,’ Watkins tells them.
‘We came as soon as we heard the summons,’ Thomas begins his falsehood.
‘You did well. We must be strong to resist King Edward in this.’
‘Do you have particular reason to fear him?’
‘Of course! He is coming to punish us for what we did last year. I know he has issued a general pardon, but how much is that worth when he is coming up here with such a great power of men?’
‘But did you yourself go over to the Earl of Warwick last year?’ Thomas persists.
‘I think all in the county did,’ Watkins says.
But there is a frown gathering and he’s stiffened in his saddle, bristling slightly at Thomas’s intrusive line of questions.
‘But are we doing so now? Is the Earl behind this summon
s?’
‘The Earl?’
‘Of Warwick?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I hoped it were so,’ Thomas lies.
Watkins is perplexed, and after a moment shakes his head and then they ride on in silence.
Ranby Hawe is not much more than a few houses around a crossroads in a broad stretch of wet saltings, ordinarily nowhere anyone would wish to spend any time they need not, but today it is almost hidden under the number of men and horses thronging its narrow muddy tracks, in a gathering that is more like a fair than a muster, with the drummer boys and pipe-players competing, and loud cheers from the men, mostly older than Thomas had expected, who are standing ruddy-faced in groups, garrulously comparing horses, harness, weapons and the usual things, just as if this were any normal Shrove Tuesday.
Stalls are set up in houses and yards, and under ash-poled canvas awnings along the roadsides, selling everything a man might need, from bits of old meat to steel-ribbed gauntlets. There are the usual itinerant smiths, bowyers, stringfellows and arrow-makers hard at it, with boys and women shouting out the value and virtue of their wares in competition with similar shouts from bakers’ boys and brewsters and piemen, and over everything, above the smell of horses and men and even the bitter bite of the smith’s fumes, washes the smell of roasting meat.
‘This should be fun,’ Jack says, and he pushes his horse ahead, eager to be among crowds of men, eager to put domestic dreariness behind him and embrace the chance to throw stones at a tethered cockerel. Within moments he has ale in his hand, and has found a crowd to laugh at one of his jokes. Thomas looks at Watkins, who is also very bright-eyed. Thomas tries one more time.
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