‘You understand enough.’
She supposes she does. She reads a few lines aloud – about a goddess placing romantic love in every creature then alive so that they are smitten with the urge to reproduce – and looks up and raises her eyebrows.
‘Well.’ He shrugs. ‘I suppose it must start somewhere.’
She goes back to it and reads on and he is content to walk behind, thinking now of how to find pieces of plate that will be of more use than sabatons. Perhaps he could swap them with someone? Thomas looks around at the clustered Englishmen, exiles tramping along behind them in the hope of a return, and he detects uneasiness, an anxiety that he does not think comes from fear of danger, but rather a fear of failure. They come from all over England, and they are perhaps of the lower order of landowner: men like himself who once had a few acres, but have them no more.
King Edward takes to a barge, and they follow him along the canal path to the big sea docks opposite Flushing, where the ships wait to take them to England, and many more men are gathered behind the levees in their linen tents. There are three hundred gunners sent by the Duke of Burgundy from parts of these Low Countries, too, in tight-fitting helmets, smutted with soot and their clothes singed in parts from their morning’s practice.
It takes another week before all the men that are likely to come do so, though, and when they do, there are not enough ships assembled to take them over the sea, so these must be found, hired and brought to Flushing. When they are ready, Rufus counts thirty-six ships in all, of very varying size, perhaps just enough to take fifteen hundred men. He tells Thomas that only one or two seem very fine, and Thomas thinks that if they could, they should board one of these two, perhaps with King Edward or with the Duke of Gloucester, who has the look of a man to be trusted to know what to do and do it, in almost any given situation.
At length the ships are made ready and the troops are loaded aboard. Two ships are set aside for horses, and those that cannot fit are left behind to be sold, and every man must carry all his belongings up the gangplank, or get his servants to do it for him. Much materiel is left behind, to be sent on later, perhaps, or left in payment of debts accrued.
Thomas and Katherine and Rufus are encumbered only with those bits and pieces of Thomas’s armour, and Hastings intervenes to allocate Thomas – or, really, Katherine and Rufus – space below deck on King Edward’s ship, the Antony. The two women from The Hague come to wish King Edward farewell and he is pleased, because just then the wind drops, and so, with nothing to do but wait on board their ships in case it should suddenly change, he invites them to cross the gangplank.
‘Almost as if he’d arranged it,’ a man mutters.
They wait nine days on board until the wind picks up. Conditions could descend into the hellish, but are carefully controlled. The master of the Antony tells them that they are to treat his ship as if it were a church, so there is no littering and no despoiling and no defaulting (as the King puts it) on deck, save by his two dogs, after whom he appoints a man to clear up. Rufus sleeps wrapped up in his down jacket, and Katherine earns money stitching new badges for the men who wish for the badge of a sunburst, to remind them of the time they fought at Mortimer’s Cross, a little over ten years ago now.
One man refuses to pay for her work, saying it looks like beams of light streaming not from a sun, but a star, such as the Earl of Oxford’s emblem. She tells him she does not have a good pair of scissors to cut the cloth, and that he still owes her his money. The man relents and pays the price before a fight breaks out.
At last the wind changes, and there is a great cheer from among the men, though not from the King’s women who are suddenly put off, and not from the merchants that have been clustering around the dock, who see their market vanishing across the grey-green waters under a press of sail bowed by an easterly wind.
As they set off, Thomas finds himself standing with Katherine on the stern deck, near the master, watching the Low Countries slip away off the horizon, and he feels a tremendous weight of sorrow, and realises that Katherine does too, as they leave the body of their daughter buried there, across the sea, in that hard frozen ground. He puts his arm around her shoulder and squeezes her tight. There is nothing to say. They are companions in this grief, and it is best unspoken.
18
‘No fleet to chase us today,’ Hastings says.
He joins Thomas and Katherine as they stand in the stern of the boat, with Rufus peering over the rail back at the low tongue of Flanders that dissolves into the mist behind them.
Thomas asks where the English fleet is.
‘South of Brittany,’ he tells them, just as if he had arranged it himself. ‘Miles from here.’
‘What are they doing there?’ Katherine asks. It is the first time she has shown any interest in anything beyond Rufus for many a month.
Hastings pulls an odd face and drops his voice, as if imparting a nugget of unfavourable news.
‘They are waiting to escort Margaret of Anjou and her son across the Narrow Sea,’ he says.
‘So they are coming?’
‘Yes,’ Hastings says. ‘It makes it easier for us if they delay, though. If we can come to grips with Warwick before he joins forces with the Queen and her army – well. You can see that might make it a bit easier.’
‘She has an army?’
‘She will do, when she lands.’ He looks regretful, as if he himself were guilty of an oversight.
They sail all through the night and the next morning, blessed with a favourable wind at last, and when the slim profile of England appears on the horizon everyone cheers, even the Flemings. When they are still a little off the shore, they drop anchor and ride at ease while it is decided what to do. Eventually a smaller boat with rust-red sails is manned and sent ahead.
‘To enquire as to the disposition of the people,’ Hastings explains. He shoots his eyebrows up and down a couple of times.
After an hour or so the boat is rowed back with a glum-looking crew.
King Edward’s messenger swings aboard the rope ladder and makes his way to the King’s cabin with his news, but everybody guesses what it is because he orders the boat pulled out of the water, and swung back on to the deck.
A little later the master emerges to talk to his mate, who issues orders to the sailors, and all the other ships follow on the northerly course, sailing into the late afternoon.
‘Not very friendly,’ Hastings murmurs. He looks shaken. ‘Bloody Warwick. He has all our friends under lock and key, and all others are made to pay surety against aiding us. By Christ, he is a busy little bastard.’
He spits over the ship’s edge. The waters are swill brown and unlovely.
One of Chamberlain’s men comes to the deck.
‘They are spring-heeled,’ he says. ‘We will have a job finding anywhere to land that is not crawling with the Earl of Oxford’s men.’
Thomas thinks of Brougham. He looked an efficient sort.
His eye is caught by some dense cloud building in the east. The sea is picking up, and the wind too, whipping the foam off the top of the churning swell and sending the Antony bobbing.
The master tells Hastings there is going to be some rough weather.
‘Best batten down,’ he says.
They sail northwards, along the coastline, across the great yawn in the land wherein Thomas imagines that eel-trapper lives, with that simple boy of his, on their desolate island. The wind is strong now, and waves boom against the bobbing boats, their spray drenching the men on the deck. The master and his crew have waxed linen coats. Thomas goes down the ladder to the hold where the air is thick with smells, new and old, and it is dark and not even that dry. He finds Katherine and Rufus cramped at an angle. Seawater beads the joins between the planks and they look frightened, as well they might.
He stays with them, crouched there, foul water slopping between the ship’s ribs with each roll and turn, and a priest begins chanting the rosary and men join in, murmuring the respons
es until the morning, when they emerge to find themselves utterly alone at sea. The storm is rumbling now, a deep, low-pitched grinding as if from below the earth’s surface. The waves are like rolling marble dunes, the wind still shrieks in the shrouds and the sails are reefed right down.
‘Where are the others?’ Rufus asks.
No one says a thing. Some are scouring the horizon for signs of other ships, others for signs of wreckage or dead men. King Edward is there on the aft deck. He stares out to sea, shattered, ruined, as bad as he was when they left the country. Hastings, too, looks tense. You can see his jaw muscles clenching with anxiety. Can it end like this? Is this what God wished? That his fleet be scattered? That his men – including his brother Richard – be drowned?
There is nothing anyone can say, save the alchemist, who now claims he can predict the future.
‘I knew this would happen,’ he says.
‘Shut up,’ someone advises.
King Edward mutters something and Hastings comes over.
‘Where is that priest?’
The priest comes, but you can see in his face that he knows this is beyond him. He can no more explain it than he might the rising of the sun, or the death of babies. But King Edward looks to him for answers. Why has God forsaken him?
The priest, florid, settling into roundness, rubs his forehead with dirty fingers. You can almost smell his wine-laden sweat. The boat heels. King Edward staggers.
There’s a shout from the crow’s nest. Land is seen to the west.
King Edward glances over. That is something, at least. Then another shout. A boat. Two boats. Three. They are in all directions, but heading westward too, to that dark sliver of land. The priest is forgotten and the master tweaks the tiller. There is nothing to do but limp towards the land, and see what or where it is. After a while they see the crooked spire of a church, and the Antony’s master comes to a conclusion.
‘It is Ravenspur,’ he tells them. ‘Not much of a place.’
‘But we can dock?’
‘If you want.’
They do. Every man, woman and child wants to be off this boat, and the wind seems to be gathering force again. So they make for Ravenspur, driven by the freshening wind across the estuary of the River Humber to its northern bank. They might have been able to sail up the river a bit, to Hull, the master says, if the tide were in their favour, but it is not, and by now no man wishes to be at sea a moment longer, so they make for the spire in the hope there will be a dock on to which they might disembark without drowning.
The other ships follow them across the estuary, about ten of them now, but there is still no sign of King Edward’s brother, nor of Earl Rivers and his men.
‘Take me back to Bruges,’ the alchemist says when they are docked and he steps off the gangplank on to dryish land. He collects up a fistful of the oozing gritty mud and tastes it for something and then spits it out. Thomas tries to imagine ever finding a soil that you wouldn’t spit out.
The rain comes down, fierce and cold, and they huddle there, bent-backed, while Hastings and King Edward look about them. It is decided to send a party of fore-riders first to Hull, to see if the gates there are open to King Edward, and in the meantime to find somewhere to shelter for the night, and so eventually they march off, a line of straggling refugees rather than a conquering army, up a muddy road, towards that hipped church spire.
The village is deserted save for an elderly woman out of her wits, left there to die by the looks of things, and they find shelter in the church that night, sodden and miserable; and because the crypt is flooded up to the top steps, and coffin lids bang on the joists of the nave, they think the souls of the departed are returned to haunt them.
King Edward demands the alchemist make them manna, and ale, and the fat priest suggests that such work is best left to God and there follows a pointless argument that dwindles into careless silence.
After a while the alchemist speaks.
‘Do you know who landed in Ravenspur also?’ he asks.
No one does. He thinks this proves his point that manna might be something man should try to make, if he could, because he says it helps if you know your history. Hastings is about to tell him to be quiet, but then the alchemist tells them that King Henry IV landed in Ravenspur when he came back from the exile into which King Edward’s cousin had sent him.
‘And look what he achieved!’ the alchemist says.
‘What?’ someone asks. ‘He was a usurping bastard!’
‘Well,’ the alchemist says. ‘He was not a bastard, but yes, I agree, he was a usurper.’
King Edward is listening intently now as the alchemist goes on to remind them that the first Lancastrian king, Henry Bolingbroke, Edward’s great enemy’s grandfather, had likewise landed here, taking advantage of King Richard II’s absence in Ireland to return from exile to claim – he had said – only what was his by right: the duchy of Lancaster, which King Richard had illegally taken from him. With such modest aims, no one had thought to stop him, and it was only later, when he had seized power and put King Richard in the dungeons of Pontefract Castle, that they realised he was, in fact, already king.
‘By which time it was too late to raise any objection,’ he goes on, but by now everyone has stopped listening.
In the morning there are more of King Edward’s ships standing off Ravenspur, and by the afternoon, with the storm abated, there are more yet. There is still no sign of King Edward’s brother or of Earl Rivers, but then they turn up in the afternoon with their full complement of men, and with their arrival there is a general rise in the temper of the makeshift camp. The sun even comes out for a moment, a little glimpse in the otherwise flat grey skies of March, and as the evening falls, the only ship that has not yet come ashore is one of those carrying the horses.
While they are eating, the fore-riders return from Hull with bad news. The mayor and aldermen will not open the gates to Edward and his band. Worse, they have seen men gathering to block his path.
‘The country has been turned against you, sir,’ their captain tells King Edward.
And it is true. None of the locals have come out in favour of King Edward, or yet tried to join his little army, and without the men to join him, King Edward stands no chance in taking back the crown, so that night, their second in the church of the nameless little village, there is a council of all King Edward’s advisers while everyone else waits outside in the dark.
When it is over, Hastings emerges.
‘His grace the King – that is his grace the Duke of York – is intent only on reclaiming his right to his duchy,’ he says. ‘It was his father’s before him, and it only reverted to the Crown while he was king, and since he is no longer the king, and has no intention to be so – so that is all our ambition’s summit. Yes?’
Men nod and murmur yes in the dawn but they see this for what it is: desperation. Clinging on. And it is further decided that instead of taking to the boats again, which will look too much like a retreat, they will march not southwards to London, but northwards, to York, where King Edward is supposedly held in some affection and which is, after all, the seat of his duchy.
That evening Thomas manages to buy a pair of matching greaves cheap from a man who looks as if he believes – or hopes – he will not be called upon to need them. They sit nicely on Thomas’s sabatons and he stares at his feet, and flexes his toes. Katherine looks up from the pamphlet he bought her, in which she has had her nose for the last weeks, and nods. She knows what he is doing, he feels sure.
‘How is it?’ he asks.
‘Mars is lying with his head in Venus’s lap,’ she tells him. ‘He is suffering from a “never-healing wound of love”.’
Thomas laughs.
‘Stop that,’ someone calls.
The next morning they set off towards the town of Beverley and they reach it late in the afternoon, and they refresh themselves in the narrow streets, the Flemings in particular terrifying the black and grey friars and their natur
al prey the pilgrims that cluster in the shadow of the great minster. While they are drinking the town dry, horses are bought and wagons with teams of oxen for their equipment, and Hastings ensures Katherine has a pony at least, and then says that Thomas must have one too, and what is found for him is a foul-tempered white stallion that snaps at all he sees and should have been put down long ago.
Then a hide merchant comes from York to tell them that there are two large groups of men – archers in the main – setting themselves up on the York road; there, they say, to stop King Henry’s great rebel Edward of March reaching the town. The hide merchant is taken to King Edward who, recognising perhaps that with so few archers of their own they would never prevail against such an ambush, decides they must go around the block, and reach York by way of a dogleg.
They leave Beverley on the north road, though some wish to stay in the town for it is already late and the weather is still very uncertain, and sure enough they have been on the road for no more than an hour before it begins to rain very heavily, dunning on their hats and travelling capes, rusting their harness, turning their jacks to lead.
‘We must find shelter!’ someone bleats.
Ahead, across a ford, is a village with a church tower of modest ambition, but surely it will do? They turn towards it and find it before the village: a priory, walled in with grey stone walls, and there is something horribly familiar about their closed-off, secretive nature that makes Thomas instantly alert and uncomfortable.
It is like Haverhurst, he thinks and he tells Katherine and she too nods.
‘What is the name of this place?’ she asks.
‘Watton,’ he says. ‘Watton.’
And he sees her gasp.
19
Watton.
The name alone makes Katherine’s stomach churn.
It is where the nun in the Prioress’s story came from, the last one Katherine ever heard her tell before she ran. The nun – the sister of Watton – had been an oblate at the priory here, but she had fornicated with a lay brother, and conceived a child. When the other nuns found out, they manacled her wrists to a wall and chained her ankles to a yew log that was hung out of a window, and then when she lost the baby they forced her to castrate the man with whom she had fornicated.
Kingdom Come Page 29