Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  ‘But, sir! It is my son! Not me.’

  ‘So you know of it?’

  Welles and Dimmock look at one another. What they are about to say requires courage.

  ‘We – we are the very provokers of it,’ Welles says.

  King Edward seems astonished. He says nothing for a moment. He turns on his chair and looks up at the glazed window through which the southern light falls.

  ‘The very provokers of it,’ he repeats, his voice low. ‘You are not shielding the involvement of my brother, are you?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Dimmock finally manages to speak, his voice contrastingly high. There is a murmur of laughter in the room.

  King Edward turns back to Welles.

  ‘So your son, Sir Robert Welles …’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘He is acting so under your orders?’

  ‘He is acting so because he is concerned for my safety, sir.’

  ‘Your safety? Even though he must know I pardoned you this weekend last for your attack on Sir Thomas Burgh’s house?’

  ‘Yet you still keep me close, sir.’

  King Edward breaks off to gaze at the window again. He holds his hand up and admires the way the window filters the light that falls on the four rows of pearls that adorn his sleeve.

  ‘He is a good son, sir,’ Dimmock adds.

  King Edward nods. He has no son of his own, everyone remembers.

  ‘And he is doing all this for your sake, not at the behest of my brother of Clarence? Not at the behest of that slithering shitsnake, my lord of Warwick? He’s not raised half the fucking county against me on their behalf?’

  ‘No, sir. It is on my behalf only, I am sure of it. He only wishes me well, and you too, sir. He only wishes you well.’

  ‘Does he now? Does he now?’ King Edward twitches his mouth in a play of thought. ‘Right,’ he says, coming to a decision. ‘Pen, paper.’

  He clicks his fingers. A jar of quills, a pot of ink and a quire of vellum are slid on to the table before him. He shoves the vellum across the board towards Welles.

  ‘Write to him. Write to him and tell him that unless he comes before me, on bended fucking knee, within two days I will chop your bloody head off. Tell him that. His too.’

  He nods at Dimmock, and Dimmock swallows, and then he and Welles look at one another and, without another word, Welles takes a pace across the room to begin writing the letter.

  ‘Tell him,’ King Edward says, ‘tell him I shall be in Fotheringhay the day after this next and if I hear he has not disbanded his troops, and that he isn’t on his way to beg another pardon, which I may or may not grant, then I shall be sending your head to his mother. Tell him I shall send your other parts elsewhere. Yes. A leg to Exeter. An arm to Cardiff. The usual sort of thing. The rest of you, do you know what I’ll do with it? I won’t even bother to do anything with it. I’ll just have it chucked in the castle privy and the bloody pigs can make of it as they will. Are you getting all this down?’

  Welles’s letters are probably not good even at the best of times, but writing this letter on a flat surface, with an unfamiliar quill that looks small in his clumsy hand, and standing before King Edward and his household men while his life is being so explicitly threatened, his words are scarcely legible for shakes and blots of ink. Behind him Dimmock is rose-faced, and sweating like cheese rind on a hot day. King Edward smiles at him falsely.

  ‘You trust the boy to do as his father commands?’ he asks as if Welles were not there. Dimmock tugs at his shirt collar and tries to say something that does not come out.

  ‘I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding,’ King Edward reassures him over Welles’s bent back, just as if all this were perfectly normal, ‘and when the boy gets his father’s letter, he will realise his mistake, and where his best interests lie, and he will send his men away and he will come crawling to us, and all order shall be restored.’

  It is obvious King Edward thinks nothing of the sort, but Dimmock nods. He thinks he sees an escape route.

  ‘Unless,’ King Edward goes on, ‘unless you think he might not know his best interests lie with me?’

  Now Dimmock shakes his head. Then nods. He doesn’t know the answer. His hair is glossy with sweat. Sodden with it. It is very warm in the room all of a sudden, even though there is no fire. Welles finishes the letter and King Edward reads it before passing it back to be sealed and an imprint of Welles’s ring is pressed into the wax and attached. Welles steps back with an anxious glance at Dimmock. Both already look like hanged men.

  ‘So how do we get our message to him, this son of yours?’ King Edward muses. ‘Once again, it seems I must turn to my much-abused friend Master Thomas Everingham here, who seems to know the back roads of this county better than most.’

  Hastings rolls his eyes with relief.

  Thomas is forgiven, and has been found useful.

  Thomas finds Jack in the same inn in which he’d left him the day before. He is sitting by the fire with a mug of ale, and does not see him come in, he is so busy discussing something with a group of men in loosened field armour.

  ‘Of course,’ he is telling them, ‘everyone knows a harnessed man’s weak spots. The face, the armpits, the elbows, the groin and the backs of the knees. Everyone thinking of going into a fight always says: Yes, yes, if I was fighting such a man, I’d stick my bill in here, or here, or there.’

  He still does not see Thomas as he points out the body parts.

  ‘But the thing is,’ he goes on, ‘the thing is that the man in full harness, he also knows his weak points, doesn’t he? He knows you’ll want to jab him in the armpit. So this is my point: he won’t let you. He won’t show you his armpit. He won’t lift his arms like this’ – he lifts them as a headsman might, showing both sweat-stained pits – ‘will he? He’ll come at you like this, everything covered up, and just you try to get through that—’

  He sees Thomas and stands, looking furtive for moment, caught boasting about something he knows nothing of, but the admiring crowd part to let him through, watching him as he makes his way around to clasp Thomas in a hug. He laughs.

  ‘Knew you’d be fine!’

  It almost seems as if he did. Thomas tells him they have a task.

  ‘We found them easily enough last time,’ Jack supposes. ‘And maybe there’ll be another game of football.’

  As they find their horses, a general order is given. King Edward is to leave Huntingdon this morning, and move on northwards to Fotheringhay, where he hopes to receive Lord Welles’s son Robert as a penitent.

  ‘D’you think he’ll come?’ Jack asks.

  ‘What would you do?’ Thomas asks. ‘If King Edward told you he was going to chop your old man’s head off if you did not come and beg his pardon?’

  ‘He’d be welcome to my old man’s head. Long since mouldered in the grave.’

  ‘Try to imagine it, for the love of God.’

  ‘Well. I would go and beg his pardon, wouldn’t I? Unless … unless I didn’t much care for the old bastard, or if I had an army at my back that I’d raised against the King, and with which I fancied I might beat him.’

  ‘He must know he’d never beat King Edward’s army. You saw them. They were pig-gelders and hedge-layers.’

  ‘Some of them looked useful. You saw Clarence’s men.’

  Thomas supposes that’s true.

  ‘That’s the point, though, isn’t it? They’re Clarence’s men. What if Katherine is right, and this rabble of Robert Welles’s is just a lure to bring King Edward’s army up here? What if Clarence, and – God forbid – the Earl of Warwick are secretly meeting up and they’re going to come up behind us with a hundred thousand men they’ve managed to raise while King Edward was concentrating on Welles?’

  Jack looks at him blankly.

  ‘You think too much, Thomas,’ he tells him. ‘All we have to do is what King Edward’s asked of you. Take that letter to Robert Welles, and then we can go home to Nettie and Katherine.’
>
  ‘We have to bring back any reply,’ Thomas reminds him.

  Jack sighs.

  ‘Well, once we’ve done that.’

  Thomas hopes he’s right.

  ‘All right, then,’ he says. ‘Let’s go. Welles is supposed to be on the road west of Lincoln.’

  ‘Do you know the way?’ Jack asks.

  ‘I don’t, but John Flood does. We are taking him.’

  Jack groans, because of course John Flood will know nothing of the roads, but he likes Flood, and at least it means they will have the best provisions wherever they stop, and riding with King Edward’s herald in his livery is enough to make any man feel important. They meet Flood and another man, John Wilkes, who actually does seem to know the roads, at the stables of the White Hart, where they leave their own horses with King Edward’s ostlers and take two fine palfreys to match the two that Flood and Wilkes take, all well saddled. Flood looks good, even in a red bonnet with a bouncing tail from the crown, and Wilkes seems quiet enough – almost invisible, in fact – and it is only when you look at him closely that you see there is something odd about him, something extra, as if he knows something no one else does, and Thomas feels that old feeling, and wonders if they might have met before he lost his wits at Towton?

  ‘Perhaps,’ Wilkes allows. ‘I’ve been in my lord Hastings’s household since before Towton. But I do not usually forget a face, and I think I should recall yours.’

  He wears soft, easy travelling clothes, blue and russet, of the sort you see every day on every road, though he has a good sword around his waist, and polished boots. His forehead and cheeks are ruddy from riding in all weathers, but the rest of his face is smooth and pale, as if he always wears a bevor.

  They ride fast all that day up the crowded North Road, under cool grey skies, through countryside that is more stock pond than pasture or wood, stopping only once to rest the horses, and finding nothing to eat themselves but boiled fish and greens. Thomas is constantly struck by Wilkes. Where has he met him before? The priory perhaps? Christ, he wishes Katherine were here. She would know his type instantly and even if she had not met him, she would be able to tell Thomas where he had.

  They cross the river at Stamford in the early afternoon and stop at an inn beyond the church where the innkeeper knows of the movements of this Great Captain of the Commons of Lincoln.

  ‘He’s moving south from Grantham. His scouts have been in, trying to get us to yield all we have left in our storerooms on promise of payment from the Duke of Clarence.’

  ‘The Duke of Clarence?’ Flood demands. ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Aye.’

  They wonder if they ought to send one of their number back to tell King Edward this further confirmation, but they decide it will wait, and they change horses, and ride on, armed with the news that Welles’s army is somewhere on the road south of Grantham, to the northeast of Melton Mowbray. They ride the rest of that afternoon, and finally see the army camp as dark is falling: a great spread of light where watch and cooking fires are lit, and something about the sight triggers in Thomas a strange sliding sense of the familiar. It is something he’s seen before, and he thinks of the time he and Katherine and Rufus stumbled on the camp of Robin of Redesdale.

  They approach the camp up a much-chewed trackway, expecting to be hailed by pickets at every moment. Instead of the usual tense stand-off with men who might be expected to inspect Flood’s ornate livery coat so closely that their torches nearly set him alight, they find themselves almost into the camp before someone thinks to stop them.

  He’s a fat man with a beard down to his nipples and a hedgelayer’s bill and when Flood shows him the letter for Sir Robert Welles, sealed with his father’s sign, the man admits to having no letters, so they are permitted to lead their horses into the camp, past the cooking fires, through crowds of tired, bored and anxious men. Christ, Thomas thinks, these are not soldiers: they are just like any number of men he knows, only older. The camp has the atmosphere of the night before a fair rather than a soldier’s camp. He feels fraudulent walking among such men wearing his jack and carrying a sword. It is as if he is somehow taking advantage of their good nature.

  ‘Not having so much fun, are they, now?’ Jack mutters.

  Thomas turns and sees Wilkes seems to have shrunk back into himself, just as he did when they first met, so that an observer’s eye tends to pass him by. It is an odd trick. A sort of assumed humbleness.

  Welles’s tent is reasonably grand, with red-painted details on the seams and a canopy under which a small fire flickers cheerfully enough. Five or six men in long boots are gathered about, wearied from their day in the saddle, watching a bent-backed old woman fuss with the contents of a pot hanging from a tripod.

  Thomas thinks about when he saw Welles last, in Ranby Hawe, with that friar. Where is he now? he wonders.

  ‘Which of you is Robert Welles?’ Flood demands as they approach.

  Welles raises his hand. He is still the youngest of the lot, Thomas notes, and the freshest faced, apparently unstrained by the weight of his newfound responsibilities as Great Captain of the Commons. He is sitting on a low coffer, boots turned down, brigandine open. He makes no move to get up, even when Flood tells him he is in the presence of the King, for he represents King Edward himself, and is to be treated as such. Another man tells Flood to fuck off and another supposes he must be joking.

  Flood turns on him and is about to say something, and his gloved hand is not far from his sword grip when Wilkes makes a slight movement and Flood hesitates and realises, perhaps, where he is. He settles on asking the man’s name.

  ‘Sir Thomas de la Lande,’ the man says, as if everyone in Christendom should be familiar with this name. Flood pulls an elaborately bemused face. Thomas likes Flood more with every passing moment.

  ‘What do you even want?’ Welles asks.

  ‘I’ve a letter for you, from your father,’ Thomas tells him, ‘written in the presence of King Edward, signed and sealed with your father’s ring. See.’

  He passes him the letter, and Welles rights himself, stretches a hand for it, takes it, inspects the seal, then breaks it and, holding the square of parchment to the light of the fire, he squints at it and reads with his lips moving, mumbling the words. In this light it is hard to make out his exact expression, but Thomas is struck by just how much the boy resembles the father. His mannerisms are identical, down to the way the eyes move around, as if seeking advice from some bystander, and Thomas wonders if he is looking for that friar?

  ‘What is it?’ one of the seated men asks.

  ‘King Edward threatens to send my father to the headsman if I do not yield,’ he says, without thought of keeping this news to himself. The men are now leaning forward on their stools. Eyes are suddenly bright, faces attentive.

  There is a long moment of silence as the news settles.

  ‘We knew he would do something,’ one of them says dismissively.

  ‘But not that,’ an older, bearded man with a missing tooth interjects.

  ‘By what right can the King even threaten it?’ a soft-faced, fair-haired boy asks. ‘He has already issued your father a pardon! He cannot execute your father for what you have done.’

  ‘It is a bluff!’ the first man laughs. ‘King Edward would never dare!’

  ‘He is trying to frighten us. It just shows how desperate he is!’ the fair-headed boy is certain.

  These two men might be brothers, Thomas thinks. Both are young, tall, handsome, broad-shouldered youths, with the same large noses and fringes of blond hair that each keeps brushing back under his hat.

  ‘We should turn on him,’ the first youth suggests. ‘Wheel our army on his. Imagine his ugly old face if we marched against him now!’

  ‘We’d catch him on the road – it’d be a rout! We would avenge our father. Our fathers, I mean. We would be famed for ever as the men who avenged Towton!’

  ‘No!’ the bearded man barks. ‘We must press on to Leicester. We�
�ve no chance on our own.’

  Thomas sees Wilkes’s eyebrow notch upwards. Leicester?

  ‘Pshaw! You are too pessimistic, sir.’

  ‘We must keep our pledge!’

  ‘Our pledge did not involve the threatened execution of Lord Welles. Of Sir Robert’s father. An innocent man!’

  Or a pardoned one, at any rate, Thomas thinks.

  He watches on as they discuss it for a moment further, and Robert Welles says nothing. He follows the conversation, just as Thomas does, nodding slightly as if he agrees with each man as they contribute. Jesus, Thomas thinks, he will do as the last person he’s met tells him. He has no idea of his own. No plan at all. Where is that friar? He was the one with the plan. Where is he? Thomas looks around. He sees that Wilkes has also slipped away.

  Then Welles’s men seem to recall that King Edward’s herald stands listening to their babble. They become ashamed of themselves for gabbling, they now become generous and hospitable. Welles himself gets up and opens the coffer on which he’s been sitting and he digs out a pie and a bottle of what looks like wine from among the jumble of cloth and plate within, and there’s even a salt cellar in there, and a boot that does not look to have a partner. Another brings bread, and they are anxious to find the King’s men a space to sleep for the night, and someone to rub down and feed their horses. A tent is emptied of its occupiers the other side of the watch fire, and Thomas, Jack and Flood are shown to it, and brought stale bread and pissy ale.

  ‘The best on offer,’ the servant says.

  The three of them sit in the mud outside their tent on the other side of the fire, and over the meagre flames and curtain of wet-wood smoke they watch Sir Robert Welles’s council of war as its members continue to discuss their options.

  ‘What would you do?’ Jack asks Flood.

  ‘Knowing King Edward’s threat is serious, and knowing the extent of his army as I do, I would bend my knee. But Welles may believe King Edward is exaggerating, and perhaps he has no idea of his forces? So – he may not.’