Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  Afterwards they walk back up to the hall together, just as they have done a hundred times before, but this time everything is changed, and Nettie’s inconsolable baby is on Katherine’s hip, and Rufus is ahead with Joana, walking with that strange springy stride of his, stooping now and then as he is distracted by something in the grass. They pause for a moment to see the way things have changed with the absence of Jack’s house.

  ‘We can always rebuild it, I suppose,’ John Stumps says. It’s more or less the first thing he’s said since they found he’d shot that dog during the attack. It didn’t matter that it was a good shot, or that the bolt had killed the dog instantly. He’d wanted to show he could still kill a man, still make himself useful.

  ‘Is there any point?’ Katherine wonders. ‘If we don’t know who this Mostyn is?’ Since they first heard his name a few days before, Mostyn has become like the first symptom of a canker. A black spot on a petal, a red spot on skin. How serious is it underneath? How far gone is the plant or patient? Will he pass by in the night? Or is he embedded? How many men has he, and who is supporting him? To whom does he look up and who is his goodlord? All these are unknowns that will, by the by, make themselves known, Katherine supposes, but most mysterious is how he – this Mostyn –knows that Thomas was ever a cleric?

  She hefts the baby to her other hip as Kate continues her crying, and she and John Stumps look at one another over the child’s head, and there is not much either can say that is not obvious to all. The baby is always grabbing at things to relieve the pain in her gums and now she catches Katherine’s hand and gnaws on a knuckle and Katherine can feel the sharpness of her teeth. Perhaps a fob of leather would help? She’ll see what she can find.

  Rufus comes back and takes the baby, and he and one of the older girls wander off around the other side of the house, where the smell and taste of the ashes in the air don’t make you want to spit. Ahead, Foulmouth is cuffing the new boy, the skinny one left over from the night of the attack. Bald John shouts at him, and Foulmouth John slinks away, and the skinny boy settles on the step, cowering like a starving dog.

  ‘Well, at least we know it wasn’t the Earl of Warwick come for the ledger,’ John Stumps says, gesturing at him. ‘More likely to have been sent by the Three Wise Men than by the Earl of Warwick.’

  Katherine agrees. The morning after they’d been attacked, and the house burned down, they’d stood in wait till noon, tense again, crossbows spanned, waiting for this John Mostyn to make his appearance, ready to shoot him dead, but he never did come.

  ‘But who can he be?’ she’d asked the others as they waited. ‘Have any of you ever heard of him?’

  ‘He’ll be some little – I don’t know,’ John Stumps had said. ‘You’ve heard of it happening, haven’t you? Some fucker comes up with an excuse and just – nips in there, while backs are turned, and takes the place over. Happened to Sir John, didn’t it, when he was away in France that time?’

  ‘But he said we were clerics,’ Katherine had repeated herself.

  ‘If that’s true,’ Bald John had supposed, ‘then that’ll be the last we see of him.’

  But Katherine had not been so sure. She’d wondered if any of them knew that Thomas was once a canon of the Order of St Gilbert, and that he’d spent his youth in the Priory of St Mary in Haverhurst? She had supposed they might not, for why would Thomas ever have told anyone? But then how would this Mostyn know? Or was he merely using it as an excuse to get those other dead men to attack the house for him?

  So they’d gone back to the shivering boy, to find him being watched over by Foulmouth John with a long knife in his hand.

  ‘So where did you meet them?’ she’d asked the boy.

  ‘I met Johnson in the Tun,’ the boy had told her. ‘In London.’

  The Tun is a jail in London, renowned even as far north as Lincoln.

  ‘Johnson?’

  ‘The big one.’ He’d puffed out his cheeks to mime being fat.

  ‘And he knew Mostyn?’

  ‘Not very well,’ the boy had said. ‘No love lost between them.’

  ‘Did they meet in the Tun, too?’

  ‘Mostyn isn’t the sort you find there,’ he’d said. ‘It’s all nightwalkers and common strumpets in the Tun.’

  ‘So where and how did you meet Mostyn?’

  ‘On the road,’ the boy had said with a gesture of his wrist to indicate the land beyond the distant trees, the realm of elsewhere, the space of the ceaseless toing and froing of nameless men on nameless roads between nameless places.

  ‘And did he ever say how he knew – why he thought we were clerics?’ Katherine had asked.

  The boy had shaken his head. Of course he wasn’t interested in the whys and wherefores.

  ‘Just said you were, like.’

  He’d looked so miserable that no one, not even Foulmouth John, could wish him further harm so they kept him with them, as a witness for when the bailiff turned up, as surely he would, and the next day they’d made him bury his dead companions together, naked save their braies, behind the church, where the land is sunken and smells of sewage, and after a few careless words from the priest, they’d thrown wet mud over their upturned faces while rooks cawed in the treetops.

  The rest of that day, and the next, there had been bright, thin sunshine, and an east wind in which clothes dried stiff and would have smelt of iodine if they had not stunk of the ashes that swirled up from Jack and Nettie’s house. There were leaves in bud on the hawthorns and cuckoo song in the air. They heard nothing from Thomas or Jack, and still they had to keep watch for men sent by the Earl of Warwick, or for William Hastings’s bloodhound, or for Mostyn, or for Wymmys to come riding back. All eyes were strained with tears for Nettie and her baby, and yet there was no time for mourning, but all had to take their turns, crossbows spanned, waiting at doors and windows, ever vigilant.

  They are barely back inside the hall after burying Nettie when the bailiff finally comes, accompanied by two men with halberds. Katherine’s heart beats almost out of her chest when she’s told, and she thinks about running, taking to the woods until he is gone, but no, she will face him. She gathers herself and she goes down the track to meet him, to try to keep him from the house. Each pace seems to set her body burning.

  He is a slim little man in elegant clothes with a tall red bonnet on his head, though his horse’s ribs are as prominent as knuckles and, close by, the impression of elegance is spoiled by his nose, which is pale and boneless, as if made from a different substance than the rest of his face.

  ‘Good day to you, mistress,’ he greets her, his gaze flitting from her face to her belly, back again, and then over to the burned-out stump of Jack and Nettie’s house. He removes his hat and dismounts to give her an unnerving bow. He is not so bad, Katherine thinks. He is a worm, and he provokes none of the terrors she had feared. Still, though, her body is quivering and her voice is pitched higher in her ears than ordinarily.

  ‘We expected you days ago,’ she tells him.

  ‘I have been busy, mistress, with the affairs of men.’

  She wishes Thomas were here to deal with this. Already she can feel sweat on her forehead.

  ‘Well,’ she starts. ‘We have buried Nettie, and the five men. So we shall have to have them disinterred.’

  ‘Oh, I have not come to see you about that matter.’

  She is surprised.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. In such scrambled times as these, such things – they seem to matter less. And the quality of the men … was not high, was it?’

  She is still for a moment. He knows about the attack, and he knows about the men who carried it out. How? He laughs nervously, and something in his manner makes her call for John Stumps, who comes running. Seeing him, the bailiff laughs more nervously still at his ungainly run, for without his arms John seems more fish than man, though he still wears his sword as a badge of pride.

  ‘So?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh,’ the bailiff e
xplains, ‘I am sent here to enquire after your husband, Thomas Everingham.’

  ‘Thomas? What of him? Why do you wish to see him?’

  ‘Ah. Well. It is not him I wish to see, but a document I am confident he possesses.’

  Her heart makes a great drop. Then picks up with a charge. Jesus! The ledger. Her ears fill with the sound of waves on shingle. She feels scorching hot, then freezing cold. She puts her hands behind her back to hide their tremble. This is Warwick’s man? This?

  ‘Tell me who you are again?’ she asks.

  ‘I am John Wymmys,’ he says. ‘County bailiff.’

  This she knew. But she had heard he was connected to Thomas Burgh of Gainsborough, the man whose house Thomas saw attacked. Can he be after the ledger on Burgh’s behalf? Surely not.

  ‘What – manner of document?’ John Stumps asks. He too has made the connection.

  The bailiff correctly judges John not to be the sort to concern himself overly with documents.

  ‘Oh, it is a small thing,’ Wymmys says. ‘But important, for it is a dispensation from the Pope in Rome.’

  For a moment Katherine is lost for words. Does she laugh? Cry? Hit Wymmys? Hug John?

  ‘A dispensation from the Pope in Rome?’ John Stumps repeats. Wymmys smiles unpleasantly. His nose is sweating.

  ‘A dispensation from what? Or for what?’ Katherine asks, certain that this is a mistake that can still be cleared up. But Wymmys has the look about him now of a ferret with a rabbit in sight.

  ‘Why, the dispensation from Thomas Everingham’s vows as a canon of the Gilbertine Order,’ Wymmys says. ‘He cannot own property, having taken those vows, and I have checked to see if his name is on the deed to this estate, and it is, but there is no mention of the dispensation. An oversight, I am sure.’

  Katherine hears that distant rushing in her ears swelling again.

  ‘What?’ she asks again, but Wymmys just smiles. John Stumps looks at her for clarification.

  ‘Thomas?’ he asks. ‘He was a canon?’

  She shakes her head, more to clear its clutter than to deny the accusation.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Wymmys says. ‘I heard it as a rumour first, and scarce believed it myself, but a certain man of the law courts asked me to press for information, since he claims certain enfeoffments are made on this land, and the hall there.’

  He indicates. Katherine knows enough to know that an enfeoffment on the land is a bad thing, like a claim on it, though how and why such a thing might arise, she cannot say.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ John Stumps says. ‘Where was he a canon then?’

  ‘At the Priory of St Mary,’ Wymmys tells them. ‘In Haverhurst. Just south of Lincoln.’

  ‘But that is burned down!’ Katherine says.

  ‘Ah!’ Wymmys muses. ‘So you know it?’

  ‘I know – of it. I know it burned down.’

  ‘Just so,’ Wymmys agrees, ‘but before it burned down there was one of those scandals that often devil such places, and its running was taken back by the order’s Prior of All.’

  Katherine finds herself mouthing the words ‘Prior of All’. She has not heard them spoken aloud for ten years. Now here they are, heavy as stones. She sees that John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest and Robert From-the-Plague-Village, and now Bald John and Foulmouth John are making their way down from the hall. She turns back to Wymmys, who is going on.

  ‘And it so happens that I have a cousin who is a clerk in Canterbury,’ he says, ‘who was able to make enquiries among his peers, and he tells me that all the papers relating to that priory were gathered in Canterbury before the fire, and so are extant still.’

  ‘What are you taking about?’ John Stumps asks.

  ‘The archive is extensive’ – Wymmys ignores him – ‘and well kept, and it stretches back beyond the very first years of the last King Henry’s reign. Following my suggestion, my cousin’s contact discovered that there was at one time a certain Thomas Everingham, of Derbyshire, taken in as a canon at the Priory of St Mary, who did abscond not merely the once, but the twice. First in the last year of King Henry’s reign, and then again in the third of Edward’s.’

  ‘Who are you? Who has put you up to this?’ Katherine finds herself hissing.

  He throws his hands up and feigns shock. ‘Mistress,’ he says.

  ‘Who is this – this lawyer?’ she demands. She can see his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallows. His hair is greasy with sweat too.

  ‘His name is John Mostyn,’ he says.

  ‘Ha!’ Katherine cries.

  ‘He is an attorney in the law courts. And has the protection of my lord of Warwick.’

  Katherine is speechless again. So this is it, she thinks. She looks around, anywhere other than at Wymmys. She feels that curious force within her, as if her body is glowing. The noise in her ears is swelling too, and she feels if she does not act she will be crushed, or she will extrude heart’s blood from every pore. She reaches across John and pulls out the sword at his hip. She turns on Wymmys.

  ‘Go!’ she shouts, waving the short blade at him. ‘Get away! Take your horse and your men and get off this land. Go back to your snivelling Mostyn and tell him – tell him—’

  ‘Tell him to fuck off,’ Foulmouth John jeers.

  Wymmys keeps his gaze on her as he backtracks to find his horse. His two men watch on, placid as cows, careless of their master’s trouble, and Katherine recognises them as the sort who are hired for the day on the understanding they’ll need do nothing. Wymmys turns and scrambles up into his saddle, even his slight weight nearly pulling the poor horse over, but even up there he cannot intimidate her.

  ‘We have a case!’ he bleats. ‘We have a case! We will see you at the assize!’

  She raises the sword. The two men with Wymmys now start to look anxious. That Bald John and Robert and John Who-Was-Stabbed each have a bow has not escaped their attention.

  ‘Come, sir,’ one mutters.

  ‘Please, mistress,’ the other says. ‘We are away.’

  And the first of them takes Wymmys’s dusty horse by the reins and tugs it around and they set off, the second man giving an ironic bow, half-turned on the back of his horse. She watches them until they are lost in the line of trees on the road, and no one says anything, but when she turns back to the others, they are all watching her, waiting.

  She shakes her head, returns the blade to John’s scabbard and walks past them, back, alone, to the hall.

  Dear God, she misses Thomas, but she dare not go out on to the road to ask for news of the world for fear any one of her potential aggressors will take advantage of her absence, or perhaps even simply take her.

  And by the Blood of Christ she feels so damned weary. She sits on the bed and her shoulders and arms weigh her down.

  She lets her eye fall on the ledger, still atop the coffer at the foot of her bed, yet to be hidden away within, and she thinks about how a single detail in a ledger can damn a man as a bastard, or mark him as being unable to own property. She imagines how this ledger and the one in the archive in Canterbury might be similar: dry lists of names, dates, places, each entry in a different hand in fading inks, on assorted, rough-bound papers, though she supposes a ledger of the Gilbertine must necessarily have fewer movements, and fewer arrows, and be written in a finer hand.

  She laughs when she sees the irony. Here they have been with a ledger that damned one man, while somewhere else someone has a ledger damning them. It is perfect justice.

  But … if she altered the one to render it powerless, then why not the other?

  The thought makes her stiffen and sit up.

  Why not? Why not?

  A moment later, her shoulders are slumped again, for she knows this sort of solution is beyond her compass. It is one that requires different skills, different connections, and besides, it is probably too late for that.

  But still, she imagines Thomas’s name written twice in this faroff ledger, and she tries to imagine how she’d
alter it. It hardly matters, though, does it? It just needs to be destroyed, for then what proof is there?

  What other information about him is written there? she wonders. The name of his village? The name of his family? She supposes it must be.

  And then she realises with a start that, of course, if his name is down there, and the name of his village and his family, then so too must be her own name, and the name of her village, and the name of her family.

  Dear God.

  She stands upright. The thought – and the strength of feeling that follows – catches her by surprise, and all the other thoughts, theories, fears and frights that have been churning in her mind – about Thomas, about Rufus, about the childbed that awaits, about the death of Nettie, and about this Mostyn and this Wymmys – they are gone, like spiders’ webs in the wind, and the fatigue drops from her shoulders and she feels feverish heat radiate within her.

  Somewhere in Canterbury there is information relating to her. To her parents. It was not all burned up with the priory. It was not only reposited in the black heart of the Prioress.

  She forces herself to try to collect up the yarns of those earliest memories that have only ever come to her in dreams, or unexpectedly, set off by a sight or a sound or a smell: a glazed window with coloured glass, and a stone hearth wherein a fire burns. Then a horseman in a cloak, lined with marten fur, she thinks, and a letter, a heavy purse. A transaction with an old lady in black. Then there is a gate in a stone wall. Closing. And that is it. She knows now she was the object of that bargain, and she feels nothing when she thinks about that. No rancour. No rage. It is just as it was.

  She stands to look out over the gap in the shuttered window into the night, and she continues to think of the priory, forcing herself to remember the deprivation and cruelty that were so much a part of daily life it once seemed the way things ought to be. She thinks of the matt of fine scars on her back and the dull aches that grip her knees in winter, and she wonders, for the first time ever perhaps: Why? Why her? What did she do to earn such wrath, such malevolence? Was the Prioress somehow out of her wits? Or was all that malice levelled at her for some other reason, some external reason not connected with her, so much as who her parents are or were? Could that be it?