‘He must have some aim?’ Thomas says.
‘I expect he is aiming to mend fences with King Edward,’ Jack says.
Jack has found a woman – Jane – from haymaking to come and look after the baby Kate, and neither Anne nor Joana bothers to resist speculating on the nature of their growing relationship.
And then, when it is done, at last, Lord Hastings comes. It is in the middle of July, just after the octave of the Visitation of Our Lady, when Katherine carries her belly so far before her she can hardly encompass it with her arms. First a troop of his outriders comes trotting up the track, perhaps twenty of them, riding ahead to forewarn them of his coming. Katherine sends Joana to blow on the horn, and she tries, but, red-faced and round-cheeked, she manages to coax only a parp from it, and they are still trying to get more out of it when the men draw up before them, all beautifully dressed in Hastings’s bull’s-head livery, carrying his standard and mounted on horses of the best sort.
‘May I, mistress?’ the man who leads them asks, so Joana passes him the horn and he holds it to his lips and sounds a rippling summons. He slides from his saddle, returns the horn and introduces himself. ‘John Wilkes, mistress.’
Katherine’s heart stops.
Wilkes smiles at her.
‘Ah. Your husband has mentioned me, I see?’
Now her mouth is dry.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘He has.’
She feels very vulnerable, caught out alone without Thomas’s protection, but Wilkes is entirely affable, and though obviously alert he hardly seems the menace Thomas and Jack have described – but then again, there is something about him that makes her believe he is only showing a tiny part of himself.
‘I was sorry to hear of your scare,’ he tells her. He holds up a piece of paper on which she recognises Thomas’s hand. The message he sent Hastings. ‘But I see all is well now, and so I was right not to pass this on to Lord Hastings. I thought he did not need to know, and there is no sense tempting fate, is there?’
He returns the message with another smile. My God, she thinks, Thomas and Jack are right: he is – extraordinary.
‘Thank you,’ she murmurs, and she puts it in her sleeve. The message doesn’t even look as if it has been unfolded.
‘So this is Marton Hall,’ he says, looking past her at the buildings, and at John Stumps and Joana. ‘It is very pleasing to the eye. I am not surprised Master Everingham cherishes his time here. And with you too, of course, mistress.’
Katherine finds herself blushing.
‘Though you have had a fire?’
She nods. She doesn’t know what to tell him.
‘Will you take ale, sir? We have some made fresh.’
He does, with pleasure. She finds herself awkward with him, though she does not know why. Something about the way he looks as if he knows what she is about to say, as if he can almost see through things and possibly into the future. She must keep reminding herself that the ledger is not on the property now, and she has no need for fear of its discovery. But good God it is hard.
‘What are you doing in these – these parts?’ she asks.
‘We have come down from beyond York,’ he tells her, ‘where there’s been more of the usual trouble.’
‘Not again? I thought that with the Earl of Warwick over the sea …?’
‘It is a cousin of his, another one this time: Fitzhugh. It is not much to worry about, but after last year, and what happened here, King Edward is taking any rebellion very seriously. My lord Hastings has tried to use his influence with Fitzhugh, since their wives are sisters, but …’ He shrugs to suggest that this was worth a try, though it has come to nothing. ‘Anyway,’ he goes on, ‘other events have become more pressing, and we are bound for London, but not before – not before I complete a few tasks up here.’
Wilkes smiles. He means to suggest she knows what he means, and that it is something of which they both know he cannot speak.
‘In Lincoln?’ she probes.
He says nothing, but stares at her, still maintaining that smile. She feels she has fluttered slightly too close to the flame.
‘Has anything else been heard of the Earl of Warwick?’ she asks, changing the subject.
‘There have been developments,’ he admits.
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, it is all rumours. But look, here comes your husband, and here, too, my lord Hastings.’
The two men arrive together: one summoned from the fields by the horn, hurrying, accompanied by a handful of men in ordinary workaday clothes clutching bills and bows; the other from the road at the head of a small party of very finely turned-out horsemen.
She does not know what to expect from Hastings. He has always been a puzzle. How much does he know about her? How many of her secrets has he guessed? She first met him in Calais when, disguised as Kit, she’d borrowed his knife to remove an arrow from Richard Fakenham’s shoulder. The next time, still as Kit, he’d saved her from being hanged for looting an apple when she deserted from the Earl of Warwick’s army outside Canterbury, and he stood witness to Thomas clipping her ear with red-hot blacksmith’s clippers.
After that, he’d met her when she was pretending to be Lady Margaret Cornford, and during that dark time, his constant knowing smile had half enraged her, half cheered her. It had been as if he had been laughing up his sleeve at her pretence, and in doing so, showed her that her pretence had not placed her beyond redemption.
Since then they have encountered one another fairly often, she always as Thomas’s wife, whom he might call Goodwife Everingham, but whom he chooses to honour with the title mistress, and she still does not know what he knows about her, or who he thinks she really is, but it is surely telling that in all that time he has never asked as to the whereabouts of the boy they used to call Kit.
Now she is standing before him, and Lord Hastings is as polite as he ever was, swinging his fine booted leg from the fine saddle on his fine horse and removing his fine hat to show his fine receding hair before taking her in his arms and kissing her on her mouth.
Then he turns to Thomas and he is no less genial, even embracing him, and congratulating him on the happy news of the coming child; then he turns back to her and asks after her health, and tells her he will pray for her, and he asks them to let him know when the child is to be christened so that he may send a gift, and in the background she is conscious of the faint smile that floats on Wilkes’s face.
Thomas asks after Lord Hastings’s own health and he says it is rude, given what has happened in the last few months, and he confirms that there has been some trouble in the Northern Parts, but he is pleased to be riding back to London on some business to do with minting coins, among other things, but Master Wilkes had some businesses to attend to in Gainsborough and Lincoln, so they have come by this road, and stopped by, as he said he might, and if they will adjure it, just as he used to when Sir John Fakenham was alive, and just as he did for Sir John’s Month’s Mind to see how goes their occupation of the old man’s hall.
They look around at one another, smiling. Hastings rubs his gloved fingers together. He has a fine emerald ring on one, and two golden loops on another. Katherine cannot help speculate on their worth. Probably as much as Marton itself.
‘You came through Gainsborough?’ Katherine asks.
‘Yes. Yes. Wilkes has some business with Thomas Burgh.’
Wilkes coughs. Hastings glances at him, frowns and then changes the subject.
‘Are you strong enough to walk, Mistress Everingham?’ he asks. ‘To show me the property again? To show me such improvements as you’ve made?’
Despite herself, she laughs. She has always found his interest in their land endearing. He tells them again that he is looking for ideas, and he has great hopes of building a place of his own, which he says will be a castle, but more comfortable. He is not quite certain how it will be, but he knows how it will not be.
‘Not like Bamburgh! Do you remember that place? Ooof. No
.’ He mimes a shiver.
They walk through the garden where Anne and Joana are still at work with the weeds, and they bob as he passes and he smiles at them and asks how they do, and Katherine walks with her hands pressed into the small of her back, almost breathless with the effort, and she does not think she can keep going like this for very much longer.
‘Is there somewhere we might sit, Master Everingham?’ he asks. ‘I believe Mistress Everingham is in need of rest.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ she pants.
They return to sit in the yard on the logs that serve as stools, where Sir John Fakenham used to sit on summers’ days in the past and play chess, and, not wishing to put them to any undue trouble, Hastings has one of his servants bring wine in pewter cups and very fine white bread.
‘It is better to eat here than in any inn or abbey,’ he tells them, ‘where one cannot choose the company.’
Hastings eats just as if he were in camp and while they do so, but before they come to the meat of the reason for his visit, he brings specific tidings of the Earl of Warwick.
‘After Rivers saw him off in Southampton, he went on to Calais, as we knew he might, but that old fraud Lord Wenlock raised the chain across the harbour and fired the bombards from Risban, driving his ships off and out to sea. So then he went south, and now his fleet – not a big one – is anchored off Honfleur, where he’s living off piracy and trying to blackmail France.’
‘Can you not send King Edward’s ships to attack him?’ Thomas asks.
‘He has France’s protection, for the moment. He was always very close with that bloody spider Louis, if you recall?’
Katherine smiles again. Hastings always credits everyone with far more knowledge than they might ordinarily have, as if Thomas knows the first thing about how well the King of France got on with the Earl of Warwick. Nevertheless, Thomas has become quite pink with the flattery.
‘In this he is at odds with Edward – his grace the King – and most Englishmen,’ Hastings goes on, ‘who rightly hate the French, of course, and who favour an alliance with my lord of Burgundy and his Flemish weavers who do so love our good English wool.’
Again Thomas nods as if he knew this.
‘So you might think that in opting for help from France, my lord of Warwick has made a mistake and is not likely to be welcomed back in England any time,’ Hastings says. ‘But …’
‘But?’
‘But Wilkes has just returned from Normandy, from Honfleur itself, off which my lord of Warwick’s fleet is, for the time being, anchored.’
She cannot help herself glancing at Wilkes.
‘I thought he was up in York?’
Hastings laughs.
‘He gets around quickly, that is true.’
They all look over at Wilkes, who is listening to Jack tell him something – archery, by Jack’s miming – but she can see he’s not paying Jack much attention and instead is watching not Hastings, as she might have thought, but Rufus, who is sitting with his pens and ink in the bright sunshine, scraping clean a shapeless piece of vellum Thomas has given him.
‘And’, Hastings is saying, ‘he has brought back a rumour that he – France – has set in motion a plan that will unite the cause of Warwick with that of Lancaster.’
It takes a moment for this to sink in.
‘What? Warwick with Lancaster? Warwick with old King Henry?’
‘Well,’ Hastings says. ‘Not exactly with him. With his queen. With Margaret of Anjou, and her son, Edward, whom we describe as being of Westminster, since that is where he was born, though Lord knows where he was conceived.’
Hastings is making a joke neither Thomas nor Katherine pretend to understand. She cannot yet believe what he had said. The Earl of Warwick and Margaret of Anjou? ‘But they are – sworn enemies?’ she says. ‘How can they—?’
Hastings holds up his jewelled hand. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘It beggars belief.’
‘But when you think of the damage they have inflicted on one another. All those – those battles. And all those men killed! And it is just – forgotten?’
‘Well, it is yet just a rumour,’ Hastings tells them. ‘But Wilkes says Queen Margaret has left her father’s castle in the east and is making her way to Picardy, where the Earl awaits.’
‘They mean to raise an army? To come back?’
‘And more besides, if what Wilkes says is right.’
‘What was Wilkes doing in Normandy?’ Katherine asks before she can stop herself.
Hastings again glances over at Wilkes, almost, she thinks, as if seeking his permission, before he tells them, his voice hushed:
‘He was there to find out what my lord of Warwick is up to, naturally, but he was also there on that other matter. The ledger we were talking about last year, before the business with that one-eyed sodomite Edmund Riven, up in Middleham?’
Katherine looks over at Wilkes now, very obviously.
‘He knows about it?’ she asks.
Hastings nods.
‘He is the man – the man I believe I called my bloodhound. Do you remember? I told you about him last year. That he has been tracing the ledger’s disappearance from Rouen back to its reappearance over here.’
‘Has he had any luck?’ Thomas asks.
Hastings smiles.
‘Well, we have had a new name come up,’ he says. He leans back, and neither she nor Thomas can breathe.
‘Who?’ Thomas asks. His voice is thick and wooden. So this is it, she thinks. Her hands are shaking and her heart is thundering. But Hastings does not look confrontational. He sits quite calmly, eating some dried fruit, washing it down with something from his cup, and he could be talking over a matter of interest with some old friends.
‘Well, I cannot say for certain,’ he says, ‘but Wilkes has arrived at the name slightly arse about face, and by what sounds suspiciously like luck, because instead of finding the man who sold it on from whoever stole it from the garrison in Rouen, he’s found a man who was trying to buy it in the hope of selling it on to the old King of France. He’s a pardoner’s sundriesman in Paris, the sort who trades in the finger bones of saints and the teeth of martyrs and so on, who heard that an Englishman – a pardoner, presumably – had it for sale, along with what he called a horn-cheeked crossbow he claimed belonged to the French witch Joan. The only problem is that this was ten years ago, and the sundriesman did not remember his name, and did not buy either the bow or the book, because the pardoner never turned up with the goods.
‘But the sundriesman did remember that this pardoner – our pardoner – suffered the King’s Evil, if you would believe it? And part of the bargain they’d struck was that he would be granted the right to receive the touch of King Charles, who was then King of France.’
‘But why would he go all the way to France when we have a king of our own?’ Thomas asks. He is either genuinely caught up in the story, or he has greater powers of pretence than she has ever credited.
Hastings laughs.
‘Our question exactly! Why? So we reasoned that he must have tried old King Henry first, but perhaps that failed? So Wilkes has been going through the old court records of the old King, in Westminster. There were quite a few years missing from the records, though, and there were also quite a few years when the old King was not up to the job of touching anyone, let alone a diseased pardoner. But one name did come up. A man named John Daud, of the county of Lincoln.’
‘Lincoln?’
‘That is all we knew. So Wilkes turned his attention to Church records, and the obvious place to start was with the cathedral. And lucky he did because just after Christmastide, in the year 1460, a certain John Daud, of the city of Lincoln, paid for the bells to be rung a hundred times a day to ensure the success of a trip he was making to France.’
Katherine can think of nothing to say. Nor can Thomas. Just the thought of that cunning, and how thorough Wilkes must be, makes Katherine feel naked.
Hastings smiles.
‘I told you he was a genius.’
‘But have you – where is he now? Is he still alive?’
‘Ah. No. We think not.’
‘So …?’
Hastings holds up a finger.
‘But wait,’ he says. ‘Last year we took in an old stationer – this was when we thought whoever had bought the ledger must have been in that business, you see? – also from Lincoln, who told us all he knew about the book-buying trade, its main dealers and so on. It led us nowhere, apparently, but Wilkes’s men kept a record of what was said, and now, now that we have the name Daud, we went back to the record, and discovered that there was a dealer by the name of Daud, too, who was both a pardoner and a book-dealer, and though our stationer thought he might be dead, he told us that his widow is still alive – or she was then – and that she never dispersed his collection of books, which he had kept pristine.’
Thomas frowns.
‘So what are you hoping for?’
Hastings sits back. He looks less triumphant now, more rueful.
‘A clue as to who Daud sold it to instead of the French sundriesman, I suppose. If that’s what happened. But I don’t know, Thomas, to tell you the truth. Wilkes suggests that if he kept his collection pristine, he would have kept a record of everything he bought and sold. Such men do, I understand. God and Profit and all that. But we shall see. We are on our way there now to see if we can speak to his widow, and to see what joy we may extract from either her or his records.’
Katherine’s mouth is very dry. Thomas is likewise silent.
Hastings sighs and goes on. ‘I don’t hold out much hope,’ he says, ‘but I’ve spent more than five years searching for it, and even though it has now become of little or no interest to the Earl of Warwick, I’d still like to get my hands on it. See it destroyed or—’
‘What?’ Thomas interjects. ‘Why is the Earl of Warwick no longer interested in it?’
‘Oh, I don’t suppose he’s given up on it entirely,’ Hastings says. ‘He’d still give his left arm for it, but perhaps not his right.’
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