‘I confess to the hope that he’s back away to France again,’ he’d muttered.
‘France?’
Flood had mumbled something about that being where Wilkes has been for the past few months. ‘On some errand of Lord Hastings’s,’ he’d said, and with that he’d wandered off after some business of his own.
But then something had occurred to Thomas and for a moment it seemed the ground was turning under his feet and he might fall.
Christ. Christ!
‘Jack,’ he’d said. ‘We need to go. Home. Back to Katherine. Back to Nettie.’
‘Now?’ Jack had asked. ‘What about Lord Hastings? What about what Flood just said?’
‘We’ve – we’ve done enough for him,’ Thomas had told him. ‘We need to leave.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Jack had asked. ‘You look – out of your wits?’
‘It is Wilkes,’ he’d said.
‘Wilkes?’
‘Wilkes is – I think – I think Wilkes is Hastings’s man. The bloodhound.’
Still Jack was blank.
‘The one after the ledger.’
Then Jack had seen it.
‘Oh Christ Jesus, Thomas,’ he’d said. ‘You’re right. We need to go!’
They ride that day, north along the old road through the familiar fenland again. Everyone coming south stops them for news of the engagement by Empringham, and everyone is sensible enough to seem pleased to hear King Edward’s men prevailed, but probably what cheers them most is the news that there were so few of their relatives and friends killed.
The great lump of Lincoln looms on the horizon from just after noon, and when they reach the city they dismount and walk up through its streets. In late afternoon it is much quieter than the last time they were there: all battened down and shut up, with just a few people on the streets moving quickly as if expecting rain. The pardoner’s widow’s house looks just as it ever did.
‘Something wrong with that one,’ Jack says.
Thomas tells him what he knows about it, but that is little enough.
‘Ask Katherine,’ he goes on. ‘We went there once, before Towton, and saw his collection of books. She says he must have had a hundred.’
Jack whistles.
‘But the widow – she was out of her wits even then and that was ten years ago.’
‘She must be dead, surely?’
Thomas tells him that every time he’s been past, there’s been a face at the window. ‘She steps back every time she sees me.’
They look up now, just as they are approaching the house, and there’s the pale disc of a face in the green glass windowpanes. It looks like a drowned woman.
Jack gasps.
‘Blood of Christ,’ he whispers.
‘You see?’ Thomas says.
Jack is about to cross himself but he blends the move into a touch of his cap as, up there in the window, the face slowly sinks back into nothingness. Jack shivers as if he were wearing a damp shirt.
‘Saints, Thomas!’ he breathes.
‘Come on,’ Thomas says, and they carry on up the street and cross the precinct between castle and cathedral. The stationers are absent, though there is a man selling oysters and golden-skinned smoked eels. They buy a half dozen of the former, and one of the latter, which Jack takes bites from, just as if it were a carrot.
‘Why did you go there?’ Jack asks, spitting out a chunk of bone that might have been a tooth. ‘To see the widow, I mean.’
‘To give her back the ledger. We thought we should since it was hers, or maybe it was to find out if she knew why it was so valuable, I can’t remember, but she didn’t want it.’
‘Wish to heaven she had,’ Jack says. ‘Would’ve saved us a lot of trouble.’
‘But that’s the problem with the bloody thing,’ Thomas tells him. ‘So far as William Hastings is concerned, it hardly matters whether we have it now or not: it is that we had it at all, and didn’t tell him, and have kept it hidden from him when we know he is looking for it.’
Jack nods.
‘But who knows that you had it at all? That you know its secret?’
Thomas exhales.
‘Well, she does, for one.’ He indicates the house they’ve passed.
‘But she’s the only one who’d be able to link you to the pardoner who you got it off?’
Thomas thinks for a bit.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘No one else who knew is alive.’
‘So say Hastings’s bloodhound – Wilkes, if it is Wilkes – has caught scent of the ledger in France or wherever, and followed it back to your pardoner here in Lincoln, then to her in the house back there, she is – what? The last link to you?’
Thomas nods. Jack is right. It is now only her. Such a weak link.
‘So you’re hoping she’ll die before Wilkes finds her, so she’ll not be able to tell him where she saw it last?’
Thomas says nothing. He supposes that is what he had been hoping. It certainly is now that Jack has put it into words. Jack finishes the eel and throws the head and spine to one side.
‘Well,’ he says, wiping his fingers on his jack. ‘Why don’t you just – kill her?’ They both know these are just words. But then Thomas thinks of Giles Riven, and then of Edmund Riven, and he supposes that is what they would have done. That is what any normal man might do, in this day and age.
‘I’m not a murderer, Jack,’ he says.
‘No. I suppose not,’ Jack admits. ‘And anyway, it is not as if it’s she who threatens you.’
Thomas thinks: Who does threaten me?
Wilkes.
‘You want me to kill Wilkes?’
‘You could try.’ Jack laughs. ‘I remember you trying to kill Giles Riven. Took you a few goes, that, didn’t it?’
They walk on a bit and then they mount up.
‘You know,’ Thomas says, ‘I keep half expecting to see him around every corner now, don’t you? Wilkes, I mean.’
Jack nods.
‘He looked to be going south, I thought,’ Jack says.
Why he thinks this, he can’t say, and without discussing it much further, and with their minds occupied by thoughts of home, they pick up their pace, until, as they approach Marton, Jack starts laughing again.
‘Bloody hell, Thomas,’ he says. ‘We only went out for the afternoon and we’ve been away a week, nearly been all the way to London, only just avoided getting ourselves hanged, been in a football game, and won a battle!’
‘Yes,’ Thomas says. ‘It’s been good.’ He is only half joking.
‘Still,’ Jack muses, ‘it’ll be good to be back. See my Nettie. That bloody baby. I’ve been praying to Our Lady that her teeth have come through.’
‘It hasn’t been so bad,’ Thomas lies, and they both smile and they ride on, expecting to be welcomed with a shout at any moment, but as they come through the village there is only one woman about, carrying a basket of linen, who ducks her head when she sees them, and slips away between the houses so as not to have to confront them.
‘Thought we were a couple of villains,’ Jack says. ‘We do look pretty rough.’
He’s right about that, Thomas thinks. Their clothes are filthy and his beard has become bushy.
There is something about the silence that reminds Thomas of another time he’s done this: when he’s ridden back to Marton to find corpses in the fields and the place ravaged. It sends a dank feeling up his back and through his chest. Wariness replaces excitement and a moment later, as they pass the churchyard, his eye is caught by a slim cross of whitened sticks, there in the shade of the yew tree, and his heart starts a nauseating slide. Jack does not notice anything, and Thomas says nothing, and they ride on, and ahead through the fresh-leafed trees he can see there’s something odd about the hall. It looks different. Its weight has changed: it seems unbalanced; and it takes him a moment to realise that the roofline is changed, and that his old house, now Jack’s, is gone.
‘What the—?’ Jack murmurs.
>
They ride up to the yard and dismount. Jack draws his short, battered little sword and Thomas’s hands itch to hold his pollaxe again. When they see the burned house they stop and then they run forward together.
‘Nettie!’
‘Katherine!’
There is movement within the house and a shutter comes down.
‘It’s fucking well Thomas and Jack!’
The drawbar is lifted and the door flung open and Katherine comes out. She is so pale she is almost translucent. The weight has left her face, too, and she is drawn and pinched. He feels a weight of sorrow and shame press him down.
‘Katherine,’ he says, ‘what has happened? By all the saints! I am so sorry! I should never have—’
But her gaze slips past him and fixes on Jack.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Her voice breaks.
‘Nettie?’ he asks. ‘My Nettie?’
She nods, and Thomas turns to Jack as the others come filing out of the hall, one by one, and Katherine moves past Thomas to take him in her arms, but he is that much bigger than her, and it looks as if she is latching on to him, and anyway, it is too early for anything like an attempt at consolation. Jack steps back.
‘What happened? Where is she?’
‘We were attacked.’
‘The baby?’
‘Is well. Not even – look.’
Rufus emerges with the baby. She is sleeping, her face squashed against his narrow shoulder. Rufus looks at his mother, and Thomas sees her shake her head slightly, and he knows something else has happened but that it will wait.
Jack does not know where to begin, which questions to ask. He knocks his cap from his head and holds a clump of his greasy black hair.
‘Oh good Christ,’ he says. ‘Oh good Christ.’
When they’ve told Jack everything, or almost everything, they have to stop him finding and killing the boy who’d been looking after the horses.
‘What made them do it?’ he keeps demanding. ‘Who told them that? Why? Why?’
No one has any answers for him so they sit and watch him drink strong March ale until he can hardly stand to relieve himself. He eats nothing. He just drinks until there is no more of the ale, and Thomas sends Foulmouth John to fetch more from a woman in the village, and it is not until it has long been dark, and Jack is lying unconscious by the fireside, snoring like a tree saw, and all the others have gone to bed, that Thomas and Katherine can look one another in the eye.
‘I am sorry,’ Thomas begins.
She swats aside his apology.
‘We missed you, is all,’ she says.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I – We … well. We missed you.’
It is pathetic.
‘Hmmm,’ she says, nodding. ‘We got your messages. About the King?’
Anything she hears now will only make things worse.
‘I should never have left,’ he says. ‘And I’m sorry for it.’
‘Well,’ she says, ‘it is not me you should say sorry to, is it?’
He opens his mouth and shuts it again. She’s right, of course.
The fire is low. He should put the cover on it and they should go to bed, but he can smell the burning house in his nostrils, the bitter stench of failure, and however tired he is, he knows there will be no rest for either of them when they are like this.
‘The Earl of Warwick is in open rebellion,’ he tells her, imagining for a moment this will change the subject.
‘Is he?’ she asks, her voice flat.
‘Yes,’ Thomas goes on. ‘King Edward is pursuing him and the Duke of Clarence back to Coventry.’
‘I am surprised you are not with them? With King Edward, I mean, and William Hastings, no doubt.’
‘I came back to be back with you.’
She murmurs something and looks away.
‘Katherine,’ he says. ‘I am sorry. Sorry for leaving you, and for being so long.’
‘As I say—’
‘No. I am saying sorry to you. I will do what I can to expiate my guilt as to Jack, but that is between him and me. What I need to apologise for is for leaving you, and for Mostyn.’
Now he has said something she did not expect to hear. She rounds on him.
‘Mostyn? Why do you need to apologise for him?’
‘Because it was me. I told him. I told him I used to be an ecclesiastic.’
Katherine stares at him, her eyes lost in the shadows of her cheekbones. She is absolutely still for a moment.
‘You did – that?’ she asks.
He nods.
‘Mostyn is – was? – Burgh’s man of business,’ he tells her. ‘I dealt with him when I bought those acres in January. It was a stupid thing to do. I knew it as I said it. I told him I’d been in a priory, which was why my letters were finer than his when we were signing the contracts. It was all I said. I never expected him to – to follow it up. To find out who I was. But I should have known. I should have said something.’
Katherine closes her eyes and nods minutely, as if she’d always supposed something like this might happen. That knowledge of their past would leak out into the world. Perhaps she is right? Perhaps it was inevitable, and they had – he had – become distracted by the here and now, and they’d been looking one way when the real enemy lay in another?
‘Well,’ she says after a long moment. ‘At least now we know who he is. This Mostyn. And where to find him. ’
There is a long silence. Thomas knows she means more than she says, that she means for Thomas to kill Mostyn. But he thinks of his words with Jack, earlier that day. I am no murderer. She reads his mind perfectly.
‘He killed Nettie,’ she says. ‘If he did not shoot the bolt that took her, he sent the men to do it.’
Thomas says nothing. He has conspired to kill a man – men – before, but he has never succeeded in doing so unless provoked beyond tolerance. Even in battle – at Edgecote when he had the chance to pick and choose his targets – he felt sick with the responsibility of killing this man, say, and not that man. That power – of life and death – made him bilious with guilty shame, but now he sees that too many men and women have suffered for his squeamishness. He looks at John Stumps. He would still have an arm if Thomas had been able to bring himself to kill Edmund Riven when he should have.
So now he knows what he must do.
‘I will do it,’ he says. ‘I will go and find him. Tomorrow. At first light. He will still be at Burgh’s house. Or someone there will know his whereabouts.’
She nods, sombre in the gloom.
‘Don’t take Jack,’ she tells him.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he will kill Mostyn.’
Thomas opens his mouth to suggest that surely that might be a good thing, but then sees what she means: if Jack kills Mostyn, then he will be the murderer, and he will take the blame for – and pay the price for – something Thomas must do alone.
‘The bailiff,’ Katherine says. ‘He told us Mostyn was able to count on the Earl of Warwick for his goodlordship?’
‘Well,’ Thomas says. ‘The Earl of Warwick is in no position to help him this time.’
She nods again.
‘Well, that is something,’ she says. ‘But what about you? What about us? If you have left William Hastings’s service—?’
Thomas knows what she means. Now he has no lord. No one to protect him from the importunities of men such as Mostyn, who might come at them bearing writs and so on, or men such as Riven, who will come at them with pollaxes and flaming arrows. Anyone could now come and muscle them from Marton Hall and no man in the land would lift a finger to help. By leaving Hastings’s side without his permission, and risking his goodlordship, Thomas has thrown the estate into jeopardy again.
‘Hastings will understand,’ he says.
‘Will he? That you felt you needed to come home, just at the moment when he needed you most, perhaps, because you were worried his agent might be closing in on the one
thing he seeks above all else, and which you have kept hidden from him for the last ten years?’
‘But if you’d seen Wilkes at work, you would have done the same! He – he is terrifying. You should have seen how he made the boy – Robert Welles – he moved him just as if he were a child’s puppet, from one moment taking his men to meet the Earl of Warwick at Leicester, to the next when they were taking the field against King Edward. He said that it would save lives that way, and I believe him, but then, afterwards, everyone was talking of a coffer found on the battlefield that was filled with many marvellous papers implicating the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence in the rising. The thing is, no one ever saw these papers, but I saw what had been in that coffer before the battle – at Robert Welles’s camp. It was the usual stuff that such men take with them when they go to war: silver plate and a salt cellar, some linens and woollens, an apple his wife had given him.’
Katherine raises one eyebrow. ‘You think neither Warwick nor Clarence had anything to do with it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Thomas admits. ‘Would they really have written letters to Welles, telling him they planned to remove King Edward? And you should have seen Welles! He was a boy. You’d hardly write to tell him a thing. Certainly not that you planned treason!’
‘But what about the attack on Burgh’s house? What was that?’
Thomas tries to think. There is something that sticks in his mind: some oddity.
‘I don’t know,’ he admits again. ‘But I am certain that it wasn’t the Earl of Warwick’s doing.’
‘But Welles’s father – the old man who lost his head – didn’t he admit responsibility for the attack?’
Thomas tells her about the interview between King Edward and Welles, and how Welles had been confused, as if he genuinely could not remember why he’d attacked Burgh’s house in the first place.
‘And the attack – it was not very committed. The men – Welles’s men – they just let Burgh’s people go. Mostyn included, may God take him, and they ran off with their arms full of stuff and there was not one single arrow loosed.’
‘So what are you saying?’
Thomas holds up his hands.
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