Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

  She does not care if it was the Jews who killed Mostyn or not, only that it’s as if they’d been granted their prayers, without ever having had to pray in the first instance.

  ‘But if you’d seen the dead bodies,’ Thomas goes on. ‘Each one of them, stabbed, just so, both in the same place: just here. It was nothing like you’d imagine Jews to do.’

  She has no idea what kind of things he imagines Jews to do, but did they not torture Little St Hugh to death and then try to bury him?

  ‘Perhaps your coming stopped them?’

  ‘There was only one of them, I am certain, and if I did stop them, I didn’t stop them from doing anything other than examining all his papers.’

  ‘Whyever would Jews examine his papers?’

  ‘Exactly. Why?’ He lets out a long sigh. Jack reminds them that he is glad Mostyn is dead, but he wishes he had been the one to kill him.

  Just then the skinny boy arrives from the coppice wood with more posts for the fence. Jack is holding the mallet, and he eyes the boy, wondering if killing him would make him feel better, but he satisfies himself with snatching a post from his arms and setting it in the hole he’s dug, ready to drive it in.

  ‘Hold it for me,’ he tells the boy. The boy does so.

  ‘But why?’ Thomas asks again. ‘Why would they do it?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Jack replies again, raising the mallet above his head. ‘But I wish I’d done it myself.’ He smacks it down on the post top. Smack. The skinny boy flinches. His hands will be broken if Jack misses. John Stumps, enjoying the thin sunshine on his face and watching from nearby, laughs.

  ‘Well,’ Thomas says, ‘God or the devil, I don’t know, but I give them my thanks anyway.’

  It sounds as if he thinks everything will be all right.

  Jack swings the mallet. Smack.

  ‘But remember the bailiff?’ Katherine cautions. ‘Remember Wymmys? He still believes you are ecclesiastic. And you can’t rely on the Jews to kill him.’

  Smack.

  ‘No, damn them.’ Thomas sighs. ‘But Wymmys looks to the Earl of Warwick for goodlordship, doesn’t he? And while the Earl is estranged from King Edward, there’s nothing he can do against me.’

  That is true, Katherine supposes. She watches the skinny boy gripping the post with both his eyes shut. Jack brings the mallet down again. Smack.

  ‘But only so long as the Earl is estranged from King Edward,’ she says, ‘and how long will that be? Even after last year, when King Edward was his prisoner, it was only a matter of weeks before all was back to normal. And even then, we are safe only so long as Wymmys thinks you have the goodlordship of William Hastings.’

  Thomas nods and pulls a particular face, and splits a pole with a single cut.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks.

  ‘I sent word to Lord Hastings,’ he tells her after a while. ‘I sent it with the carrier. He’s always been reliable in the past, but …’ He tails off.

  ‘But you’ve heard no answer?’

  He shakes his head. He selects a new pole to split and stands it on its end.

  ‘It has only been a week,’ he says. ‘And who knows where he is?’

  ‘What did you say?’ she asks.

  He chops another pole and starts the split.

  ‘That I was sorry. That I had to see you, my wife. I thought he would understand. That he would sympathise. He was there when you nearly died with the last child.’

  Katherine feels cold all the way down her spine. Jack looks up at Thomas as if he is mad. Even the skinny boy looks unsettled.

  ‘You did not tell him that there was something wrong with me?’ Katherine asks Thomas. ‘You did not tell him there was some kind of a fright with the child?’

  He looks up but cannot hold her eye. ‘I told him the midwife had summoned me.’

  ‘Oh, Thomas!’ She feels breathless. Everyone knows if you ever use an illness as an excuse for something, as sure as night follows day you will be struck with that illness.

  ‘It was all I could think of,’ he says. ‘All that I believed he’d understand. I could not tell him – I could not tell him the truth.’

  ‘But what of this Wilkes?’ John Stumps asks. ‘You come tearing home in a hurry, casting aside Lord Hastings’s goodlordship just when you need it most and then – nothing.’

  What John Stumps says is true. It’s been a week since Thomas has returned and they’ve heard nothing of Wilkes, only of Mostyn.

  Thomas and Jack look at one another.

  ‘Perhaps – perhaps he had other business to attend to?’ Thomas admits.

  Katherine can see he feels foolish.

  ‘Did you really think he was coming here to find the ledger?’ John Stumps goes on. ‘But why would Lord Hastings be interested in the ledger when he has the Earl of Warwick on the run?’

  ‘He’d know that the Earl would be after it now more than ever,’ Thomas says, angry now.

  ‘And why is that?’ John Stumps presses, trying to make some point.

  ‘Because,’ Thomas enunciates very clearly, ‘the ledger proves that King Edward is a bastard, and that the Duke of Clarence is the rightful king.’

  ‘Shhhhh! For the love of God!’ Jack hisses.

  They all look around. The skinny boy stands holding a post, stone still.

  ‘Go away,’ Jack tells him. ‘Go and help them.’ He nods at the others who are weeding the pea crop, a hundred feet away.

  The skinny boy slinks away.

  ‘Christ,’ Thomas says. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Anyway,’ John Stumps says, equally chastened. ‘It doesn’t now.’

  Thomas stops.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh God!’ Katherine blurts. She stiffens and claps her hands to her face. With everything that had happened since, she’d set the ledger to the back of her mind, and because she has acquired the habit of secrecy, of never mentioning the thing unless she has to, she has not even told Thomas what she has done.

  ‘What is wrong?’ Thomas demands.

  ‘Thomas,’ she begins, and the whole thing sounds so stupid she barely knows where to start, but she must. She owes an explanation to Jack, too, who’s suffered for that book as much as any of them.

  Both men stop working to listen to her, and she wishes she could just show them, so they’d understand, and she can hear her voice becoming higher-pitched as she tells them about Rufus’s ink, about Pontoise and Pontours, and when she’s done, no one says a word. Thomas gathers up the tools – the mallet and the hatchet – and starts back towards the hall. It is hard to read his expression.

  When she catches him up, he has already brought the ledger down from the coffer in the bedchamber, and is at the table in the hall, sliding it out of its covering. His hands are still muddy, and for some reason she takes this as a good sign. It is her turn to be silent now, and she watches him bend his head over the alterations, studying them with his poor eyes, and she cannot help but wonder again if it was wise to alter the text. She is thinking of what to say, of ways to excuse herself, when Jack comes in, carrying the baby.

  Thomas looks up at him and starts laughing. It is a slow sibilant chug to begin with, which grows until it becomes a cough, and he cannot stop himself. Tears pour from his eyes and he rocks back and forth. He slaps his chest with one hand and the ledger with the other.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he breathes. ‘Oh Christ. After all that. Oh Christ.’

  Rufus comes in from the pea field and stares at him, huge black eyes blinking in the semi-dark.

  ‘Sorry,’ Thomas says, waving through his laughter. ‘Sorry.’

  He recovers and he sits there for a long while, drumming his nails on the book’s covers.

  ‘It was Rufus’s ink that did it,’ Katherine tells him.

  The boy smiles his hesitant smile.

  ‘If only you’d made ink years ago, eh, Rufus?’ Thomas asks. ‘We could’ve handed this over, and – and how different everything would be.’

 
; It is an interesting point.

  ‘You’d still have one arm, at least,’ Jack tells John Stumps.

  It is supposed to be a joke, and John Stumps opens his mouth, perhaps to make some remark about Nettie giving birth in chains, though he stops himself in time, but still the mood becomes sombre. Thomas stands and looks down at it lying on the table. It seems to have lost all its power.

  ‘By Christ.’

  Bitter-sweet. Rueful. Katherine wonders what he really thinks about what she’s done. This book – this ledger – it has been with them for so long, influencing their course in so many of the things they’ve done and had done to them, and now, thanks to a quick alteration, it has reverted from having the same power as a saint’s bone, say, to a simple, ugly lump of paper and leather.

  The various marks it has acquired – the great divot is just the largest example – serve as a reminder of their progress through life since they were left it, in a manner of speaking, by the pardoner. She remembers their first fumbling attempts to understand its value, after they had snipped through its canvas covering on the walkways at the top of the castle outside Calais, when they were so young; and then how Thomas slept on it, and took it with him everywhere, even on to the field at Towton, and how the man who’d looted it brought it to her and tried to pay her with it to treat him, even though there was nothing she could do for him. She remembers the day the book’s secret made itself apparent. She remembers Sir John’s terror when he realised what that secret was, and how it might be used to their advantage, or disadvantage, right there in the yard. She remembers taking it up to Bamburgh to try to sell it to old King Henry and his allies, and then how it was stolen, only to turn up in the possession of Ralph Grey, who, despite being a sot, recognised it for what it was, only to be knocked senseless the moment he revealed himself. Then she remembers a darker time, when Edmund Riven sought it, and took Jack and Nettie and poor John Stumps in his efforts to find it.

  And now here it is, sitting on the table in the hall, and it seems to have lost some of its weight and power.

  ‘But you still have to show it to Warwick,’ Jack says. ‘We still have to let him know it’s got no value, or he’ll still send someone like Riven to burn the rest of the place down.’

  That is a point. The ledger is only declawed when it is known to be declawed.

  ‘But we cannot take it to him now, can we, surely?’ Katherine asks. She feels panicked at the thought. ‘We don’t even know where he is.’

  Thomas shakes his head. ‘We can only wait,’ he says. ‘We can only wait for him to come.’

  But in the next week, when they are collecting the quarterly rents after Lady Day, they hear from the miller that in the aftermath of the scattering of the Great Commons at Losecoat Field, instead of obeying King Edward’s summons to his side, the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence have taken to their heels, and are running with their families and just a very few hundred men, first north, then west, then finally south, towards Bristol.

  ‘All over the realm, and no one can say for why,’ the miller tells them.

  ‘But by Our Lady,’ Jack laughs later when they are home, ‘it is typical that just when we finally want Warwick to come for the ledger, he can’t.’

  Katherine sees the irony, but surely the Earl will yield to King Edward at some point, and once peace is achieved, he will resume his behindwards scheming, and come for it by and by.

  In the meantime, though, the threat looms from elsewhere.

  ‘So it is just Hastings’s bloodhound we need fear for now, is it?’ John Stumps barks. ‘Him with the powers of the Holy Spirit, may God forgive me, able to move heaven and earth just as he pleases.’

  Thomas looks uncertain, and that night, in her second sleep, Katherine is tormented by vivid dreams of this Wilkes, her mind’s eye seeing him as a stocky man with powerful hunched shoulders, heavy black eyebrows and a nose like a goshawk. He sits on a perch and watches, and then bunches to strike, and she wakes with a yammering heart. In the morning she puts her dreams down to excessive heat from the child in her womb, and she forgets them.

  11

  Two weeks pass. Nothing happens. Mostyn’s murder seems to have been forgotten, and there is no sighting of Wilkes. Katherine talks to Thomas of going to Canterbury, and of somehow gaining access to the archive of records. He agrees, but he is distracted, perhaps put off by the difficulty in doing so, perhaps by something else, and she finds it odd to think that it is now she who is pushing to find out who her family is, whereas once it was he, though he cannot remember doing so.

  Then it is Palm Sunday and John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest is chosen to dress as John the Baptist, with a flowing beard of sheep’s wool and an eight-foot cross, and he leads them around the parish with the priest bearing the monstrance behind.

  Afterwards, Katherine stands back and watches the others throw discs of unleavened bread at one another, and she thinks of Thomas’s description of the football match, and especially so when Foulmouth John nearly breaks Robert’s arm in retaliation for his hitting the skinny boy in the face with a piece of bread. Then, when they are eating a late dinner of smoked haddock and the saved and clean pieces of bread, the priest tells them he has further news of the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence: not only have they refused to bend their knee to King Edward, as everyone thought they must, they have evaded King Edward and made their way from Bristol southwards to seize some ships in the port of Plymouth in the west of the country, and they have taken to the seas just before they were caught, trusting more in God’s mercy than King Edward’s.

  ‘And the Duke of Clarence’s wife is expected to be in childbed right soon, too,’ he tells them.

  Katherine can hardly believe it. She has seen Warwick’s power: his great castles – in Warwick itself, and in Middleham – and she knows there were others besides, all over the country. She’s seen the Earl’s men in their red coats, how they had seemed to course through the country’s roads like its lifeblood. Sir John Fakenham had been fond of the idea of Fortune’s Wheel, she remembers, but this was too quick a turn, surely? From exaltation to catastrophe in but a moment.

  ‘Where do you suppose he will have gone?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Calais,’ she tells them, suddenly certain it cannot be over for such a man as the Earl of Warwick. ‘He has always been strong there.’

  She is the only one among them who remembers being in Calais when the Earl and King Edward – then the Earl of March – were exiled there, nearly ten years ago now. She remembers how together the two men had gathered a small army of exiled York adherents and invaded England, claiming they were coming to rid old King Henry of his corrupt advisers, and how that was, to begin with, all they wanted to do. But after a while they had to change their tactics and, eventually, King Edward took the throne.

  ‘If he tried it once, he will do so again,’ she warns.

  ‘But he did try, didn’t he?’ Jack supposes. ‘With the Duke of Clarence and this latest rebellion?’

  She thinks about Thomas’s theory of how Wilkes tricked Welles and made him tip the Earl of Warwick into over-hasty action, so that he snatched at the opportunity and scotched it.

  ‘But they always said he was fucking good with his men,’ Foulmouth John is telling them all. ‘Gave them stuff and that. Ale whenever they pleased. And he had a feast once where he roasted a thousand beeves and gave every man as much meat as he could carry on the point of his dagger. Imagine that! I’d’ve brought one of them two-handed swords. Put a whole ox on it and walked off and we’d’ve lived on beef and liver till the end of our days.’

  He is smiling at the skinny boy. There is something sweet about it.

  And so they enter the last week of Lent with the storeroom almost bare, and this is the time of year that everyone is usually shortest-tempered, but in the days that follow, the mood in Marton Hall is odd, unreal, shifting and impermanent.

  ‘It is as if we have lived all our lives in the Earl of Warwick’s sha
dow, isn’t it?’ Thomas says. ‘He’s been like an oak tree over a house, always providing shelter and wood and acorns for the pigs, but also always threatening to fall on it and destroy it, and kill everyone inside. And now he’s gone and there’s sunshine and air where there used to be shadow, and it catches you by surprise.’

  ‘It’ll take some getting used to,’ Jack agrees.

  Slowly, though, the realisation seeps into their bones that the Earl of Warwick is gone, and the weight of the uncertainty and fear that had been pressing down on them, like the heavy limbs of Thomas’s louring oak tree, is replaced with an astonishing lightness of heart that Katherine can barely contain. It is as if they have been labouring up a hill for the last ten years, pushing a cart before them, and now they have reached the hill’s crest, and the cart rolls under its own weight, and everything she does now is a pleasure, for she feels as if it is for their benefit, for their future, and for Rufus and this unborn child in her womb.

  ‘But Warwick’s not dead,’ she has to keep telling herself. ‘He’s not gone completely.’

  And she becomes feverish for news of him, though for a long while there is none. It is as if he has vanished off the face of the earth, which perhaps he has, though they all must know it is merely the fitful nature of tidings. Still, though, the longer the silence goes on, the more convinced they become that perhaps he is lost at sea, which is, God knows, hardly uncommon.

  ‘Plenty of men get drowned,’ Jack reminds them.

  But it cannot last, and in the week that follows Eastertide, late this year, when cherry blossom has replaced hawthorn and the first swallows are seen overhead they learn from a man who heard it from a grey friar for whom he could vouch that the Earl of Warwick had sailed along the coast from Plymouth and attempted to seize some ships from a port in the south of the country. This time the sailors were ready for him, though, and they fought him off and even managed to capture some of his own sailors. Each man’s eyes go round when they hear that the Earl of Worcester – at the mention of whom Thomas cannot suppress a groan – that the Earl of Worcester had these traitors hanged on the quayside and then impaled on stakes.