‘Your father taught me,’ she tells him.
She has a very clear memory of Thomas teaching her to read. It is about ten years since, she supposes. He bought a treatise on cutting fistulae from a stationer in Westminster, and set her trying to pick out the letters in that. The writing came later, when they were together in the castle up north, and in times between.
She sits next to Rufus and opens another page at random, and tells Rufus to show her any Rs he can find. He mixes up R and P, as is easy to do.
‘P for – what is that word?’
‘Paris. That is a city in France.’
‘Oooh, you don’t want to go there, Rufus,’ John says. ‘Full of Frenchmen.’
Rufus smiles.
‘What about that one?’ she asks him, opening it on a new page. ‘That has a P and an O.’
‘Not Paris?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘That is P for Pontours.’
She sees she has opened the ledger on the fatal report: the one that describes the Duke of York’s absence from his wife at the very time King Edward was conceived. He tries another.
‘What about another? Here.’
She opens another page and lets her finger wander through the words and letters until she finds a P.
‘Pontours!’ Rufus says.
‘He’s quick, this one,’ John Stumps says.
But he’s not right. It is not Pontours.
‘Nearly,’ she says. ‘It is a place – maybe? – called Pontoise.’
John Stumps peers over.
‘Looks the same to me,’ he says.
She reads the full sentence aloud.
‘“Sir John Cheney and ten men from Rouen to Pontoise on first day after Ascension.”’
‘Do all French towns sound the same?’ John asks. ‘Paris. Pontours. Pontoise.’
‘There is Calais,’ Katherine supposes.
‘That is English,’ John tells her.
She mumbles agreement, but her mind has detached from the conversation’s flow. Something is bothering her. Paris. Pontours. Pontoise. Can those last two be different spellings of one and the same place? she wonders.
‘Just a moment, Rufus,’ she says and takes the ledger and folds the pages back to find the incriminating page. She checks the spelling again, holding it up to the light. It is definitely Pontours. Surely place names would be something a man must get right, especially in a ledger such as this, otherwise what is its point? She passes the book back to Rufus, still wondering, and he finds his place again.
‘There is another P,’ Rufus says. ‘Is it Pontoise once more?’
She leans forward and looks at it, then at him.
‘You tell me,’ she says.
‘It is’ – he checks against what has gone before – ‘Pontoise.’
She reads the sentence.
‘“Sir John Cheney” – him again! – “and ten men of Essex to Pontoise with four score of best arrows on fourth day after Ascension.”’
That doesn’t make sense. They can’t have gone twice.
‘What would Thomas say if he comes back to find you can read?’ John Stumps asks Rufus as he watches the nub of the boy’s finger travel along the dates, names and places.
‘There,’ Rufus says. ‘Another P.’
She looks.
‘That is P for Pryse. Good.’
Rufus likes Ps. He finds another.
‘Pontoise?’
Again he is right, and she looks again and this sentence details another troop movement from Rouen to Pontoise, this time twenty men of Hereford, but their return is recorded, too: they are back after only three days. She turns the pages. Men are always coming and going to Pontoise. Only sometimes are they recorded as coming back, but when they are, it is often as little as a day later that they return.
‘I wonder where it is?’ she says to herself. ‘It cannot be far from Rouen.’
Rufus has lost interest, and she is about to slide the book back into its sleeve when she remembers she must remove his name from the page; she opens it where she wrote his name and takes out her knife to cut away the paper. Already the ink has faded: it looks almost as old as the original letters below. She excises the word Rufus, and is about to do the same to the dog and the man with a stick when she hesitates. Thomas will like to see these, she thinks, so she leaves them, and she puts the ledger away.
But then she gets it back out again; her mind is slipping and racing, as if she has been given a glimpse of something like an insight, or a sign, the sense of which dangles beyond her reach, and she looks at Rufus’s drawing, and that is when she sees what she’s been overlooking all along.
She feels a great surge of excitement up and down her body.
‘Rufus,’ she says. ‘Your reed. Lend me it.’
He glances up at her and then looks alarmed.
‘Are you well?’ he asks.
‘I am,’ she says. ‘Oh, I am.’
She takes the reed and its pot and she finds the page in the ledger that lists the Duke of York’s movements during July in the year before King Edward’s birth. She looks at it for a long moment. Is this the right thing to do? How will it affect anything? She feels she is on an edge, peering down, and everything she has ever known is dizzyingly far below, and she must make a leap. She is gripped by a strange rushing sensation, the sort of feeling that might make a man claim to hear the voice of God, and she dips the reed into the ink and, careful to hold the pen upright as Thomas has instructed, she changes the word Pontours to Pontoise, twice.
When she’s finished she looks up. Rufus watches her placidly.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘I don’t know.’
She feels she has lost something, something huge. A burden, yes, but also a benefit. She feels she has destroyed something. Brought it down. The sound in her ears seems to stop and she is surprised now not to hear a great crumbling noise, as if a tower of a castle were collapsing into rubble. She has breached the walls of Jericho. And yet there is nothing. Not a single thing has changed. Only those two little words.
‘But what has that done?’ John asks when he sees it.
‘It means – it means it is no longer proof of anything.’
John thinks about this for a while.
‘So if the wolves come, we may give them this in all good conscience?’
Katherine nods.
‘And why did we not do it sooner?’ he asks.
She stares at him, and he at her, and she feels the blood rush to her face because, of course, had they done so, he would still have at least one arm.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispers. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Something wakes her in the night. She does not know what it is but, from being fast asleep, she is wide-awake, rigid. She does not move but lies there, hearing only the pulse in her ears, and Rufus snuffling in his sleep beside her.
The wind is up outside. Then she hears what must have woken her. A dog, barking in the distance. One of theirs? She cannot tell. Her heart is thrumming again; her throat’s constricted and her breath hard won. She lifts back the sheets and blankets and swings her bare toes through the curtain and out over the edge of the bed.
‘Mama?’
‘Shhhh, go back to sleep. It is nothing.’
Katherine feels her way across to the shutter, finds the rope from months of doing the same thing every cockcrow and lifts it off its hook to let the shutter drop and a finger’s width of moonlight slice through the room. She stoops to look, but from here can see only the privy and the stream where the wringing post throws a long sharp shadow in the cold blue wash of moon light. She stays there in the cold, her face pressed to the shutter, her heart racing at every imagined movement. The trees shift in the wind, the shadows sway and thin clouds scud across the moon. She feels alone and vulnerable, and the dog keeps barking.
After a long moment she lifts the shutter back and hooks the rope, and hurries across the dark to where the steps
creak and the air is warmer and scented with fish from dinner.
‘John?’ she whispers. ‘John?’
‘Mistress.’
Both Johns are awake already, John Stumps because he never sleeps and John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest because he’s also heard the dog, and they move through the low light of the now uncovered fire where flames flutter on splints of hawthorn. John Stumps is at the door to the yard, his eyes very white in the gloom. John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest is by the back door, still in his braies and shirt, crossbow in hand.
‘What’ve you seen?’ she asks.
‘Nothing.’
The baby wakes and Nettie hushes her with a nipple, but now everyone else is up, fumbling to set aside children and blankets, rolling to their feet to reach for their weapons and responsibilities. Bald John joins John Stumps at the front door, John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest and Robert From-the-Plague-Village are either side of the back door, and there is a woman or a boy or girl peering out at each window. One of the boys is stroking the two lurchers, trying to calm them, but the lurchers are all stiff-furred, straight-legged, tails-up, waiting by the door, each eyeball a dark glossy orb flecked with light.
All have shrugged on their heavy jacks and the helmets Thomas bought them, even the women, and they catch the low firelight, giving the impression each has his or her head aflame. John Stumps has even had someone buckle a sword around his waist, though how he’d ever use it in anger, let alone draw it, is a mystery known only unto God. All this is done in silence and low light. Katherine can hear everyone breathing very quickly. She’s sure she can even hear their heartbeats.
‘It’s them, I swear,’ John Stumps mutters. ‘Just come on.’
His teeth are clenched around the trigger loop of the crossbow he’s had whittled for himself, and he stands ready to kill the first man who comes through the door. It is what he has been dreaming of ever since he worked out that with a few modifications – leather ties and loops – he could still shoot the bow. She’d thought it strange beyond belief that killing a man was how he wanted to prove himself, but now she’s glad. She hears Foulmouth John stalking up the steps to the room above, complaining that he’s been woken for no good reason.
The dog is no longer barking.
This is how it always happens.
It means they are close, whoever they are.
‘We just need to wait,’ John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest whispers. ‘Wait for them to come into the yard, that’s what Thomas said.’
They respect Thomas for having been at Towton, though none of them know he cannot recall a thing about it, or that since then he has been on the losing side in each of the three battles he has fought. She feels curiously blank about Thomas at the moment. She supposes she might have reason to be angry with him for leaving them to fend for themselves like this, but for now she only wishes he were here to help. Rufus has appeared by her side, still in his nightshirt and cap, his eye pressed to the gap at the top of the shutter. He is shivering with the cold.
‘Go up,’ she tells him, but he shakes his head, determined. She places a hand on his bony shoulder. After a moment, he places his on hers.
‘Anyone see anything?’ John Stumps asks.
No one says anything.
‘Who the hell are they?’ Bald John wonders. ‘Only owls supposed to be out and about this time of night.’
He speaks in quick, swooping sentences, as does everyone in Droitwich, he tells them, and it’s a good question. Who is it out there? She’d never imagined that either the Earl of Warwick or Lord Hastings’s men would come for them like this, like thieves in the night. She’d imagined they would arrive on a wet morning, backed by a long line of soldiers in travelling cloaks carrying flags, winding up the road to the hall as if on official business, or in a funeral cortège, and everything would be sombre and tinged with regret at the inevitability of what was about to happen.
But then, perhaps – perhaps they are mere thieves in the night? Perhaps Thomas was right? Robert seems to think so.
‘So Thomas was right,’ he says. ‘bloody thieves. We’ll bloody show them.’
Once more she wishes Thomas were here. All this standing at the windows, this was his plan. His and Jack’s. Fine in daylight, she thinks, not so in the dark. She lowers the shutter of her window half a finger’s width. From here she can see into the yard and across to the stables and beyond to Jack and Nettie’s house. The yard is deep in moon shadow, its edges crisp one moment, gauzy the next as the clouds ease across the moon. Nothing else moves, but still she catches her breath when she thinks it does. They wait in silence. The fire picks up. She glances over her shoulder to see the circle of women’s faces, pinched in the light of the flames, waiting for what is to come. It is the lot of women, she thinks, to wait like this, and she remembers the time she waited with Alice in the church of St Mary’s Priory, while the bell rang its alarms, and outside the walls rode Giles Riven and his foul son Edmund. She’d prayed then, little knowing just how much her life was about to change, but she does not pray now. Instead she grips the smooth length of the crossbow she’s taken, all oddly balanced, and she peers out of the window, willing someone to dare to try so that she can pull the lever and send a bolt spitting across space. Compared to a longbow arrow, a crossbow bolt looks like an ugly, flightless bird, but by God it is vicious.
How long they wait no one can be sure. At one point Robert settles himself more comfortably by the back door, and someone lets out a long sigh. Katherine pinches the bridge of her nose and shakes her head. She is starting to see floating, sinking circles in the dark. Bald John’s daughter brings her a mug of ale, even though Lent is begun and one for Rufus, too.
Slowly the tension seeps out of the room, and it seems to Katherine that this must have been a false alarm.
‘Well—’ John starts, levering out the bolt from his bow.
But just then there’s scratching at the door. Everyone stiffens. The dogs are up, growling. Katherine’s whole body burns; her hair crawls. John replaces the bolt. Christ! There is someone without. John Stumps fumbles with his crossbow. She can see him trying to catch the trigger loop between his teeth.
‘Steady,’ she urges. ‘Steady.’
Though – heavens – she does not feel that herself. One of the girls puts the cover back on the fire and the room is plunged into darkness. Then Rufus gasps next to her and presses his face against the shutter, his eye to the gap.
‘There’s someone,’ he whispers. ‘By the stable door. Look.’
He points. She puts her own eye to the crack. She sees something. Someone. A length of leg. A man is waiting at the corner. Yes. He’s there. Then one of the girls upstairs – Joana – hisses something. She’s seen someone too. Around the back of the house. Katherine hears Foulmouth John crossing the boards above to join the girl at the window. They all look up, waiting, hoping he’ll not do anything stupid, hoping that he’ll wait for Katherine’s signal.
Suddenly there is a rattle of a shutter falling above, and the bang of a crossbow.
‘You little fucker!’ Foulmouth John shouts gleefully.
Upstairs Joana screams. Her mother – Anne – abandons her post by the back window and runs up the steps to see if she is all right. They can hear Foulmouth John is laughing.
‘Do it!’ John Stumps growls, his teeth clamped to the leather strap. ‘Do it!’
The boy by the door looks once to Katherine and, when she nods, he throws up the drawbar and yanks the door open. John Stumps jerks his head back. His crossbow twangs.
Rufus drops the shutter in front of Katherine. She lifts her bow to her cheek and pulls the lever, aiming into the darkness above that leg. The bolt snaps away. There’s a cry from without. Rufus hauls the shutter back up.
‘Quick! Quick! Quick!’ John Stumps is growling through his clenched teeth. He wants another bolt loaded but the boy who must load his crossbow is closing the door.
Katherine engages the string to the hook on her belt,
bends to puts her foot through the hoop and then straightens to cock the crossbow. Rufus places the quarrel in the slot. She is ready for the next shot. She looks around at the others. All the doors are closed and the shutters up. Everyone is reloading. No one is hurt.
‘Ready?’
‘Ready!’
She can hear wailing outside.
‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’
She hesitates.
‘You little fucker!’ Foulmouth John shouts from above, and his crossbow bangs again; there’s a half-gasp, half-cry from outside and then silence. They hear Foulmouth John laughing again. She waits. They are all primed, ready to do it again. She glances at Rufus. He has his eye back on the shutter.
‘Come on,’ John Stumps growls around his strap. ‘Come on.’
He’s not talking to her, but to them, whoever they are, out there. The next moments are fraught. They’ve betrayed their strength. Given themselves away. Now they can expect the worse. Now the rest of them will come.
‘Anyone see anything?’
There are grumbles of denial.
‘Can’t see no one,’ someone mutters.
‘Where in the name of Holy Mary are they?’
Time inches past. But they do not come.
‘Keep watch,’ Katherine tells Rufus. She climbs the steps to the bedroom. Foulmouth John stands beside the window overlooking the courtyard, shutter down, crossbow cocked. He’s peering out. She joins him at his shoulder. He laughs his horrible wheeze.
‘Look at that fucker,’ he says.
He indicates the dead man in the yard, and before she can stop him he sends another quarrel whipping down, jerking the already dead man’s head in a grim little bounce. He laughs and respans the bow. She puts her hand on his arm.
‘Don’t waste them,’ she tells him and she crosses back to the window on the other side of the room, where Joana still peers out over the shutter.
‘I think he’s dead, mistress,’ she says. There’s another splayed corpse below, half on the track, half in the herbs. Probably shot by Bald John from the back door below.
Kingdom Come Page 8