‘Spikes up their backsides, so they are pinned there still in all probability.’
‘Crucified Christ,’ Jack mutters. ‘What kind of Englishman does that?’
But that’s not the point of the story, Katherine thinks. The point is that the Earl of Warwick is alive, and that he is still at liberty with a fleet of ships, and so she reminds them how popular he is among the men of Kent, who hold him dear for keeping the seas free of pirates, and who will help him if he needs put in. And of course there is still Calais.
Then there comes another period of time in which they hear nothing from the outside world, no news at all, and that is spent finishing the ploughing and harrowing the fields. It is back-breaking work, since the oxen are new this year, and not yet used to working in pairs or following the donkey, so they need much muscular attention. Katherine watches the men – particularly Thomas – throw themselves into the work with a strange zeal that at first she thinks is similar to the manner in which she takes joy in her work, making cheese and butter and combing through the garden to separate the useful from the useless. But after a while she sees he is not doing it out of pleasure but from a desire to exhaust himself, so that he does not have to think about Wymmys, whom she imagines working away in the dark, like some pale-fleshed maggot feeding on carrion; or about Wilkes, whom she imagines as the sort of man they employ to strangle women at crossroads; or about Lord Hastings, whom she knows to possess a ruthless streak wider than the River Trent.
She goes out to the field with the pretence of taking him one of the straw hats and she asks him if he has decided what to do about the three men. He scratches his bristling chin and looks wary. He is not such a fool as to think her question casual.
‘What can I do?’ he asks.
She thinks about this.
‘Perhaps go and see Hastings?’
‘And leave you here if Wymmys comes? Or, God forbid, Wilkes?’
He has a point.
‘Besides,’ he says, ‘Hastings will have been busy chasing the Earl of Warwick all over the country. That is why he has not sent word.’
Thomas goes back to the oxen, but that evening he makes the men finish their work early, and he takes them to the butts behind the church in the village, and when they come back two hours later they are red-faced, and stinking, and Thomas looks worried enough so that they are up and at it again the next morning, groaning about their stiff muscles. This goes on all week, and into the next, until finally Thomas seems happier and it is only then, of course, in the third week after Easter, that word comes from Lord Hastings.
A single messenger on a good horse arrives from his master, who is in York and the Northern Parts, where King Edward still has not been able to exert total authority, despite reinstating Percy as Earl of Northumberland.
‘Whatever happened to the old one? To Lord Montagu?’ Thomas asks.
The messenger shrugs. ‘Given some lands in Devon, I believe.’
He takes another mug of ale and then splashes water over his sunburned face while the horse drinks from the trough. They all have cause to think of Lord Montagu in their different ways, because it was his men who shot the arrow through Jack’s leg, and it was his men who chased them from the fields of Hedgeley and Hexham.
‘Montagu is the Earl of Warwick’s brother, of course,’ the messenger goes on, ‘and so not likely to be foremost in King Edward’s mind when it comes to favours.’
He speaks absently as he rummages in his bag to find the square of paper for Thomas. Katherine watches while Thomas breaks it open and reads.
‘But Montagu was always loyal to King Edward,’ Katherine says, her eyes never leaving Thomas. ‘Even last year he did not join the insurrection.’
‘Well,’ the messengers supposes, ‘after what his brother is up to, Montagu is lucky to be given anything.’
Thomas finishes the message and looks solemn; she sees a flicker in his eye. It’s something bad. He shakes his head minutely. Whatever it is will have to wait until the messenger is gone.
‘You have news of the Earl of Warwick?’ she asks the messenger instead.
He looks slyly about him, as if about to impart an indiscretion that will be overheard; then he talks quietly and seriously, telling them what they want to know: that when Warwick and Clarence approached Calais in their little fleet, the guns and bombards in the fort that guards the harbour fired on them, and a great chain of iron links was raised up across the harbour mouth, so they could progress no further.
‘But what of the Duchess?’ Katherine asks. ‘We heard she was with child.’
The messenger, seeing both Katherine’s concern and swollen belly, is hesitant. ‘It is feared that she lost the child, mistress,’ he says, ‘while her husband’s ship was stood off at sea.’
Katherine feels the sun go behind a cloud. It is as if sorrow is a cold shroud placed over her shoulders. The poor woman, she thinks. Poor woman. Thomas places a hand on her arm.
‘All will be well,’ he soothes. ‘We will make an offering to St Margaret, and you still have your girdle?’
She smiles as well as she’s able, but says nothing of her supposition that the Duchess of Clarence may have had a girdle, too, and probably paid a hundred priests to pray to St Margaret. Thomas is doing his best, but when it comes to childing, it is a journey every woman must take alone, and it is dismaying to hear news that one of their number has not reached the far shore, and that a life has ended in a hasty baptism and a shroud-wrapped corpse dropped with a small splash into the sea.
‘So where has he gone?’ Katherine forces herself to ask the carrier, just as if that did not matter.
‘Oh, it is thought he is sheltering with the King of France,’ he says. ‘Or maybe the Duke of Brittany, though I do not know for sure.’
‘Lord Hastings always said Warwick was too close to the French King,’ Thomas adds, pleased to be on firmer ground.
‘Well, there you are then,’ the messenger says, now anxious to be off. He asks if Thomas has an answer for Lord Hastings that he might give another messenger riding north should he meet one, or take himself when he returns there in a few days’ time. Thomas has none for the moment, and the man swings back up into his saddle and leaves them to expectant silence.
‘Well?’ Katherine demands.
‘Lord Hastings is coming himself,’ Thomas says. ‘To Lincoln on his way south.’
‘To Lincoln? Why?’ Jack asks. ‘What’s he want in Lincoln?’
‘He doesn’t say. But he comes with Master Wilkes.’
‘Oh Christ.’
‘When?’
‘As soon as he is able.’
They slowly absorb what is threatened.
‘How does he sound?’ Katherine asks.
Thomas frowns.
‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘I don’t think he even knew I’d gone?’
‘So you need not have made that excuse as to my health?’
He shakes his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and he is, she can tell. ‘But at least we still have his goodlordship.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘There is that.’
And it is true: they are, for now, tethered in the world’s order, made safe from the buffeting winds of men such as Wymmys.
Which is as well, for Wymmys returns as promised, sometime in the middle of the following week, the second before Ascension, when the bees are swarming. He comes hobbling up the track on his halt mare in rusting breast- and back plates he has borrowed from someone and a sallet that sits on his head like a fire cover, but this time he has fifteen men to back him up. Most of them are, like him, poorly armed, though, with bills, and blades made by clumsy smiths. Only one has a longbow, and that unnocked. Some of them Thomas recognises from the Watch at Gainsborough, and when he sees them, his mouth goes dry. Have they come about Mostyn? Or this dispensation from the Pope?
‘We should fucking kill him now,’ is Foulmouth John’s view, but Thomas gestures to restrain him.
‘Let’s just see what he has to say,’ Thomas tells him. ‘Besides, you can’t just go killing bailiffs.’
‘I’m not even sure he is a bailiff,’ Foulmouth John says. ‘Look at him. Mad, capering fucker.’
Thomas has summoned all the men, and the boys, too, though not the skinny boy, who seems to have gone missing, which is perhaps why Foulmouth John is so foul-tempered. One or two of Wymmys’s men are alert to the fact that though they are not outnumbered, they are very exposed sitting up in the saddle. The sensible ones dismount, and stand very close to their horses.
Thomas finds Wymmys just as Katherine described: it seems as if he has taken everything he wears from a number of recently dead men and that waxen nose of his is beaded with sweat, like a cooking egg, as if he is very ill. Nevertheless, there is something almost impressive about him, Thomas thinks, because he is so obviously frightened and is overcoming his fear.
‘Are you Thomas Everingham?’ Wymmys asks, still from his saddle, his voice reedy with anxiety.
Thomas tells him he is and he wishes God give him a good day.
‘Aha, I hope He shall. Yes. I hope He shall. But I am afraid He will not give you such a good day.’
‘No? Even though He is all mighty?’
‘Well, He moves in mysterious ways, as is well known, and sometimes it must suit Him not to give someone – any fellow, say – a day that is not so good as the day of another fellow.’
Thomas supposes this to be true.
Wymmys wants his horse to stand like some stallion, but it is not that sort of horse, and Wymmys’s helmet keeps tipping forward over his eyes, so that he must hold it in place. Thomas, who like most men does not enjoy being spoken to by anyone on a horse, or down the length of their nose, wonders whether he might just pull him from his saddle and threaten him with a fist. Surely that would solve it?
He starts to talk about the dispensation Thomas must surely have, when Thomas interrupts him to ask how he thinks he knows all this.
‘It is as I told your – wife,’ Wymmys says, with just enough of a hesitation on the word wife to cast doubt on its truth. ‘All the records of the Priory of St Mary at Haverhurst are gathered in Canterbury, and there is named within one Thomas Everingham, a canon of the Order of St Gilbert, of Derbyshire.’
‘It is a common enough name.’
‘But your accent,’ Wymmys says. ‘It is of the north?’
‘Which is where most men called Thomas Everingham come from.’
Wymmys smiles.
‘Well, that is for the courts to decide,’ he says.
Thomas is puzzled. Has Wymmys found some new lord to lend weight to his case?
‘Well,’ he says, ’I wish you luck with that.’
Wymmys looks sly.
‘I think that I shall not need mere luck. Not when I have the King’s blessing.’
Thomas stops.
‘The King’s blessing?’
His thoughts churn and grind. Can Wymmys really have King Edward’s blessing? If so then they may as well clear their possessions now.
‘In his trust of me as his officer of the law.’
Relief sweeps through Thomas.
‘Oh. The office of bailiff?’
Wymmys nods.
‘It is all I shall need,’ he says.
‘But I can count on the goodlordship of Lord Hastings. He is Lord Chamberlain.’
‘Ah! But do you? Do you have his goodlordship?’
Wymmys seems to know something Thomas doesn’t.
‘I do,’ Thomas tells him.
Now Wymmys is puzzled.
‘But—?’ he says, and he starts looking around, at Jack and at Bald John, and at Robert and John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest, but he is looking beyond them. Then he reverts to Thomas. ‘But you have lost it. It is well known,’ he blusters. ‘You left his side before he permitted it, and – and – you told him she was sick.’ He points to Katherine.
Thomas is alarmed again. How does Wymmys know such a thing?
‘Where did you hear that rubbish?’ Katherine calls over. She is laughing. Not wholly convincingly, but Wymmys appears fooled.
‘I also have the backing of the Earl of Warwick,’ he tells them.
Now Thomas laughs. He is on safer ground with this.
‘A fat lot of good that will do you,’ he says.
‘He will soon mend fences with King Edward,’ Wymmys tells him, ‘and be back in his accustomed position by the King’s right side, and from there—’
‘He’ll do all this from France?’ Thomas asks.
‘France?’
‘You do not know, do you?’
Wymmys has no idea about Warwick’s failed entry to Calais. He shifts in his saddle as Thomas tells him. His whole body turns as if it wants to be elsewhere.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he forces himself to say. ‘Everyone knows the Earl of Warwick is well loved in Calais.’
Thomas shrugs.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘it seems King Edward is loved more.’
Wymmys bites his lip and gestures to his men.
‘I have fifteen,’ he says hopefully.
Thomas laughs. Even Wymmys can see his men are underpowered. They are mostly old men or young boys with bills and pikes and short swords that are of no use against arrows loosed from fifty paces. Those still in their saddles sit looking straight ahead, clinging to the shreds of their dignity, aware they are being studied and found wanting.
‘No,’ Thomas tells Wymmys. ‘If you want to evict me from what is legally mine, then you will have to bring an awful lot more men than this.’
Wymmys cannot deny it.
‘Very well,’ he says. ‘Very well.’
He gives one last long look about the place, as if for someone or something, and then pulls his weary horse around. His better men climb into their saddles.
‘I shall do that, Brother Thomas,’ he says. ‘Yes. I shall do that, and when I do – it will be you slinking away like this.’
Later, when Wymmys has gone and they are alone, Katherine brings up Canterbury again.
‘It is odd,’ she begins, ‘the power of words in a book. There in the coffer is the ledger with details of King Edward’s father, damning the boy as a bastard, and down in Canterbury there is a record to show you were once a canon in the Order of St Gilbert.’
‘Yes,’ he says warily. ‘And you of course. Your name.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
He feels resistant to her wish, but he does not know why. Perhaps it is because the last time he had any dealings with the Order of Gilbert he ended up locked in a stable.
‘Perhaps that is something for the future?’ he asks. ‘When times are less scrambled?’
She supposes he is right, but then she reminds him that Mostyn is dead; Wymmys has been sent packing; the Earl of Warwick is in exile across the Narrow Sea; and they may rely now on Lord Hastings’s goodlordship once again.
‘So it is as quiet as it is ever likely to be,’ she tells him.
‘There is still Wilkes,’ he says. ‘He will be here soon.’
‘But when?’
Thomas cannot say, of course. But for the moment she is silenced. He rolls over and tries to find sleep, but he can feel her still awake, taut and preoccupied by something that won’t let her drop off.
‘What if we make the journey after the baby is born? After you are churched? We might go then.’
He wonders how long that will be. A good while. Two months? Three? Anything might happen in the meantime.
She murmurs some agreement.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘perhaps that is best.’
But she still will not sleep. He can feel her mind spinning.
‘What is it?’ he asks.
‘Still Wilkes,’ she says.
‘There is nothing we can do about him now,’ he says.
‘No,’ she agrees, ‘but the thing is that we want him to find the ledger now, don’t we? Now we want him to find it before he finds us.’
‘We’ve been through all this before,’ Thomas reminds her. ‘We can’t let Hastings get hold of it, because he’d destroy it without telling anyone about it, and so if Warwick sends someone for it, as one day he surely will, now that he has the Duke of Clarence on his side, we’ll have nothing to give him, and he’ll torture us all to death!’
‘But …’ Katherine starts, and he can almost feel her mind whirring, ‘now that the ledger is harmless, now that it no longer proves King Edward is a bastard, then surely, if he had it, Hastings would let everyone know – I mean specifically the Earl of Warwick, of course, mostly – that it no longer proved what they once thought it did?’
There is silence while Thomas thinks about this. He turns to face her.
‘I suppose he might,’ he says. ‘If he had it. But he doesn’t.’
‘But that’s it!’ she says. ‘We have to get it to Hastings! We have to let your man Wilkes find it.’
‘But – how?’
‘Last year Hastings told us his man – Wilkes, if you are right – was working back along the list of people who had it, from whoever stole it from the garrison in Rouen to whoever sold it to the pardoner, yes?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘So we need to interrupt the chain. We need to break it somewhere, and place the amended ledger where Wilkes will find it. Once he’s found it, he will look no further down the chain, will he? Because – because why would he? He has what he wants, and more besides, since it proves the rumours are without foundation.’
They can hear the barn owl calling outside. Some people think they are unlucky birds, owls, but Thomas finds the noise strangely comforting.
‘But how will we do that?’ he asks.
‘We must give it back to the pardoner,’ she tells him.
‘But the pardoner is dead,’ Thomas reminds her.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But his widow is not.’
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