Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  Rufus is reluctant, but they return the few steps to the yard where someone has overturned the fat man, who has lost his hat in the process of being killed, and his hair is blond and shaggy, his lips full and sloppy, each arm like a suckling pig. He’d been carrying a hefty-bladed falchion, rusted, chipped and blunt.

  ‘Fat fucker,’ Foulmouth John says, giving him a kick with the side of his foot.

  ‘Leave him,’ she says. ‘And all of you, bring water. We need to put this fire out.’

  They start bringing buckets and jugs from the barrels that Thomas had them fill before all this started and they set up a chain, passing from one to the other, stepping around the dead body in the yard, with Bald John from Droitwich at the front, taking the buckets as they come and flinging their contents on to the flames. After just a few moments his head is slick and his clothes are wringing wet with sweat and rainwater. It takes them most of the morning to extinguish the fire, but by noon it is a steaming frame of charred oak beams, like a gallows for a mass hanging, and each man, woman and child is black with stinking wet soot. Except the baby, who cries and cries, and whom only Rufus seems to be able to soothe.

  Katherine stands shoulder to shoulder with John Stumps and she looks through the gap where the doorway once was and the floor within is filled with the steaming, twisted wreckage of Jack and Nettie’s life, all the sooty shards of furniture, the clothing, the bedding and everything they ever had and held dear.

  ‘Food,’ she says. ‘We must all have something to eat.’

  ‘You should wash first,’ John says.

  Nettie’s blood has smeared all over Katherine’s wet clothes and it is beginning to gum: she can smell it now. She nods and goes to the well; Bald John is there and he hauls up a big bucket for her and helps her pour it over herself. The cold is intense and painful. She makes him do it again. And again until she is sodden through but clean, and then she lifts her skirts and walks with squelching boots back to the house to strip off her apron and gown and then her kirtle and shirt and her hose, all of which are now smutted with ashes and stained pink with blood. She dresses herself again and ties her girdle around her grown waist and then she carries the sodden clothes back down the steps. Joana can wash them later.

  Smoked hams are brought down from the beams of the hall, the last of yesterday’s bread is broken into the thin pottage and there is the first of the March ale that they water down. When they’ve finished this, they turn to the bodies, dragging them from their various places of death, to lay them out on the track below the hall. When it’s done, they gather to look down at the five corpses, speculating on the causes of their deaths, and the types of men they might have been while they were alive.

  There is the fat blond one whom Foulmouth John killed in the yard: a thinner man – whom Katherine killed – with a lolling head, fleshy lips and strikingly large ears, ‘like best back bacon,’ one of the women says. The third is short, with very wide-set eyes and a down-turned mouth from which his tongue lolls. Bald John hit him, pinning him through a drinking costrel that has leaked and made the blood thin. The fourth has a scrubby white beard and wears an ancient moth-pitted hood of a style no one has seen for twenty years or more. The fifth – the one who killed Nettie and was also shot by Foulmouth John – is sunburned even in this season, with white hair and a much-broken nose. He lies on his back and, apart from the quarrel buried in his breast, he could be sleeping. He does not deserve to look so peaceful. She wishes Foulmouth would kick him.

  ‘Who the bloody hell are they?’ Robert asks. ‘And what were they doing coming up on us like that?’

  They do not seem an obvious band, and their clothes give little away. A bit worn perhaps, but nothing to suggest desperation, and only the bearded man looks as if he needs a wash. There is nothing obvious to unite them. John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest has gathered their weapons in a jumble by their sides. Knives, bows, the falchion and two billhooks, one repurposed with a long handle for fighting, the other just a tool for laying hedges.

  They can’t be the Earl of Warwick’s men, of that Katherine is certain. Bald John undoes the fat blond man’s belt to tug off his flaccid purse. There are a few coins within and a set of good beads.

  ‘They must have horses,’ John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest supposes, and they look up and around, but can see none, so he and Bald John set off down the track to see if they can find them.

  ‘Careful, now,’ one of them tells the other.

  ‘We’d best fetch the priest,’ Robert supposes. ‘And the bailiff.’

  Katherine feels a stab of something like panic. The bailiff? Christ. She has such pungently foul memories of the bailiff they’d called when Eelby’s wife died that she has a profound distrust of anyone who goes by the title.

  A moment later Bald John returns leading five poor-looking horses by their fraying reins, and John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest brings a skinny boy, held by the ear.

  ‘Down by the crook in the road, they were,’ he says. ‘Being looked after by this ’un.’

  The boy is lifted off the ground, and John drops him in front of Katherine. The boy falls scrabbling in the mud, a tangle of spindly limbs. He is in a sleeveless leather jerkin, his arms like sticks and his hair scissored short. His face is so filthy that his eyes, which settle on the dead bodies, appear huge and round and white with fear.

  ‘Who are you?’ Katherine asks.

  ‘No one,’ he moans. ‘No one.’

  ‘You must have a name?’

  He shakes his head. You can see every rope of muscle move below his skin. He’s shivering.

  ‘Like a fucking greyhound,’ Foulmouth John sneers.

  ‘Who are they?’ Katherine indicates the dead men.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

  ‘You must,’ Katherine tells him. ‘You were looking after their horses.’

  The boy shakes his head once more.

  ‘Do ’im! Let’s just fucking do ’im.’

  ‘Shut up, John,’ Katherine tells him. His father belts him around the back of the head so that he staggers forward.

  ‘So who were they?’ she asks again.

  The boy buries his head in his hands and begins to weep.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘God’s honest, I don’t. They promised me goods is all. They said I’d get a house and a furlong of my own if I looked out for them!’

  ‘But why did they come here? Why did they choose this place?’

  ‘They said that you’d taken land what didn’t belong to you. They said you was churchmen.’

  ‘Churchmen?’ Bald John scoffs. ‘What do you mean “churchmen”?’

  ‘They said you was clerical. Monks and so on what couldn’t own land. Weren’t allowed to.’

  There’s a rushing in Katherine‘s ears and her heart pounds in her throat.

  ‘So they wanted to kick us out,’ Foulmouth John says, ‘because – because we’re supposed to be fucking monks?’

  The others laugh but Katherine keeps her eyes on the boy. Her mind is buzzing but no conclusions emerge, only questions: Can it be that someone knows? After all these years? Jesus God!

  ‘What did they say about us being monks?’ she asks.

  Now the boy looks more frightened than ever.

  ‘It weren’t any of them,’ he says, indicating the row of corpses. ‘It was the other one.’

  The others are suddenly quiet.

  ‘There’s another?’

  ‘He was the leader,’ the boy says. ‘What told them what to do.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  The boy gestures into the distance.

  ‘He said he would come this morning. When it was done.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He’s a man of the law, he says.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Katherine asks.

  ‘Mostyn,’ the boy says. ‘John Mostyn.’

  5

  It is evening, and Thomas and Jack are in the town’s guildhall, a good-sized so
lar, with glazed windows and red-painted pillars and beams, together with such local dignitaries as Huntingdon can muster, many in fur-trimmed cloaks of scarlet or blue, standing in the round because King Edward is at their centre, sitting at a board, his feet outstretched so that Thomas can see the long shoes tenting the cloth below. Thomas also sees King Edward is shamelessly forgoing the privations of Lent and has a leg of cinnamon-roasted fowl in each hand. Light from the table’s candles – and the grip of anger – pucker his face, softened now by recent over-indulgences.

  ‘I only tell you what I saw, sir,’ Thomas tells him again.

  William Hastings is also at the board and although when he had first seen Thomas he too had embraced him, he now regards him with regret, as if the sight of him hurts his eyes. Flood stands just behind Hastings, wincing and shaking his head slightly. Behind them are more men-at-arms, just a fraction of those who have arrived throughout the day.

  King Edward is still staring at Thomas.

  ‘You are brought before me to speak of the rebels gathering under this so-called Captain of the Commons, and yet I find you speaking of my brother of Clarence? With whom I have just passed four happy days, refreshing the bonds of brotherhood, enjoying conversation with our mother, riding abroad and seeing the people of our dear city of London and in the country south of here? My lord of Clarence whom I sent on his way with a fraternal kiss and a ring pulled from my own finger here, to see his wife in the West Country, and armed with Commissions of Array to raise troops for my disposal against our enemies? My lord of Clarence from whom only yesterday I received this – this! – pleasant letter to tell me that he is making his way to Leicester, with as many men as he can muster, there to meet my cousin of Warwick? And you tell me – you come here – and stand before me, again, and tell me that you believe that he – he – my own brother – is behind this – this upstart Great Captain of the Commons of Lincolnshire? Is that it? Is that what you are telling me?’

  Thomas has been here before and heard these sorts of words. Even so, he can hardly move his tongue or swallow for fear of this man and the knowledge of what he might very well have done to him. You would think he would have learned. You would think he had not been warned. But no. As soon as King Edward had overcome his delight at seeing Thomas, and had recounted for the pleasure of the assembled riders who’d come in with him the story of the night Edmund Riven was killed and Katherine cut off John Stumps’s remaining arm while also delivering Nettie of her child, Thomas had blurted out what he knew: that King Edward’s brother was a traitor.

  ‘It is what I saw, sir.’

  ‘It is what I saw, sir. It is what I saw, sir. By the blood of Christ, Master Everingham, if I did not hold your wife in such high esteem I would – I would hand you over to my lord of Worcester right now. You do know that?’

  The Earl of Worcester – in deep blue velvets and a dark cap – is back at King Edward’s other side; the candlelight throws strange emphasising shadows across his aquiline nose, and the way he turns his head to acknowledge his king with those expressionless black eyes only makes him look more like a goshawk than ever. He even has a scrap of what might be chicken liver on his knife.

  King Edward tosses both chicken legs on his plate and sits back. He glares at Thomas. His eyes seem very small in so large a face, and they are calculating and shrewd, yes, but are they also cruel? Would he enjoy seeing a man hang or endure whatever cruelties the Earl of Worcester might dream up? Thomas cannot decide. He can only breathe very shallow breaths for the weight on his chest.

  William Hastings leans over to whisper to King Edward, and King Edward, who in other moments might have bent his neck to hear his old friend more clearly, does not, and it is clear that Hastings is a supplicant. Hastings speaks quietly for a few moments while King Edward listens. King Edward’s gaze flickers over Thomas. His lip remains curled. Silence elsewhere in the room. The air is thick. Everyone itches to know how King Edward will punish Thomas and most are thanking God they are not him, or in his place.

  When Hastings finishes, he leans slowly back, his eyes on Thomas, and King Edward grunts. Hastings takes a drink from his cup and wets his lips. His expression is almost unreadable, but not quite: I have done my best, he seems to be saying, and I can do no more. Next to him King Edward drums his ringed fingers on the snowy cloth of the board.

  ‘Is Lord Welles here yet?’ he asks, angling his face so that his voice carries over his exuberantly padded shoulder to a secretary, or steward, standing behind. ‘And that other one. Dimmock. Is he here?’

  There is a moment’s sending back and forth, during which King Edward picks up one of the chicken legs again and takes a bite, his eyes still on Thomas, until the answer comes back from a steward.

  ‘They are expected tomorrow, my lord king.’

  Again he grunts.

  ‘Very well,’ he says at length. ‘I will further speak to them tomorrow. In the meantime, have this one … I don’t know … incarcerated. Somewhere uncomfortable. Do you have such a place, alderman?’

  The alderman, one of the men in red, nods enthusiastically. King Edward raises his eyebrows as a signal, and Thomas feels a beefy hand slide under each arm; he turns to see two men larger than he, in King Edward’s livery, who walk him away back down the room to the door to the steps beyond.

  That is his first interview with King Edward on the first Friday in Lent, in the tenth year of his reign.

  His second takes place late the next day, when he is brought into another, smaller room in the guildhall, this time crowded only with King Edward’s household men all in livery jackets or badges of allegiance. There’s no fire lit, and the room smells of vinegar and sweat and resounds to the creak of leather. Lord Hastings is there, looking harassed, and John Flood too, but the centre of attention is not King Edward – he is not come yet – but two men standing with their backs to the hearth, facing the empty chair behind an unadorned table set before the window. The attention is not of an amicable nature, and there is already animosity in the air.

  When Thomas is brought in Flood steps forward, nodding at the guards, who relinquish his person and step back and out through the door.

  ‘Sleep well?’ Flood asks. He knows Thomas cannot have slept a moment, even had he been in the town’s most comfortable bed. Thomas takes his sardonic smirk as a reason for cheer.

  ‘Who are they?’ he asks.

  ‘The one on the left is Welles. The other’s Dimmock.’

  Thomas sees Welles look over at him, and his expression, which was anxious before, becomes more so. He’s a tall, spare, elderly man, in his forties at least, with a fine fan of wrinkles around his mouth and eyebrows like horns. He does not, Thomas thinks, look entirely resolute. He looks as though he is caught up in something that is beyond his control, such as stubble burning that has spread beyond his own furlongs. Dimmock is younger and fatter in the face, and he stands turned slightly to Welles: the follower of the two. It seems Welles is going to say something to Thomas, but just as he opens his mouth, King Edward comes in and there is a flurry of caps being removed.

  King Edward looks ruddy-faced, as if he’s just come from exercise, and maybe he has. He sits heavily and takes the proffered mug of something and drinks. A single drip snakes down his chin and throat and when he lowers the mug with a sated gasp, he stretches his neck to allow a servant to dab at the offending snake of ale. A servant does so.

  ‘So,’ he says, addressing Welles. ‘You say one thing, he says another.’ He indicates Thomas.

  ‘Who is he, sir, to contradict me?’ Welles begins.

  ‘This is my good and faithful servant, Thomas Everingham, in whom I place almost every trust.’

  Welles sees he has got off to the wrong start, and recalculates his approach.

  ‘I am certain it is a mistake, sir. Perhaps he misheard?’

  ‘What of it, Everingham? Could you have made a mistake?’

  ‘If I’d heard it once, sir, then I’d say perhaps, but I heard them s
hout for Clarence – for his grace – twenty times or more.’

  King Edward turns back to Welles. He smiles.

  ‘What do you think of that, my lord Welles?’ he asks. ‘Do you think Master Everingham here could have made the same mistake twenty times over?’

  Welles tries another approach.

  ‘Which of us has not done exactly that, sir?’ he chuckles, citing human foibles. But he has misjudged it again. King Edward rears to his feet. He hammers his fist on the table to make the mug and jug jump and everyone in the room flinch, and he glares at Welles. Thomas feels his core turn hot and liquid, even though King Edward is not even looking at him, and suddenly no one can forget this was the man who fought all day at Towton, and who gave the orders that none, none should be spared.

  ‘I know you have!’ he bellows.

  His face is purpled. Hastings cocks an alarmed eyebrow and begins to murmur something soothing. King Edward thrashes a gesture at him and Hastings slinks back. Welles too.

  ‘And I know I have,’ King Edward goes on. ‘Jesus. Yes. I have made the same bloody mistake countless times! Countless times! With you and your bloody family. First your father, then you, and now your accursed bloody son. Defying my word, raising men against me, flouting my laws, and attacking my own man in Gainsborough! The fucking Sheriff of Lincoln!’

  ‘But, sir – that attack! It was never meant in any way seriously!’

  ‘So you keep saying! So you keep saying. But the fact of the matter is that you did attack Burgh’s house!’

  ‘But it was not meant – it was not intended—’

  ‘It was not aimed at me? Is that it? It was not aimed at me? You attack my own man, my sheriff in the county, but it was not aimed at me?’

  Welles is confused. For a moment, he seems to be searching his memory for the answer. It is as if he does not know why he did it. But then, why do it?

  But King Edward is not interested in the finer points of Welles’s motivation.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he goes on, ‘I still issue you with a pardon, since you seem a decent sort of chap, only when I suggest I might come up to Lincoln to see for myself how my subjects fare, this happens! A full-scale bloody rebellion!’