Kingmaker: Broken Faith (17 page)

‘Well done, son,’ he says.

She hesitates, unsure, and looks at him. He avoids her gaze and waits for Thomas. No one says anything. Does he really
not
know who she is? He gives no indication either way, just holds the boat fast as Thomas climbs aboard. Then he takes the pole, steps aboard himself, and shoves them off. Thomas is for a moment at a loss as to what to do.

‘Where are we going?’ the canon asks.

And she thinks. Downstream is Boston. But what help might she expect there? None, really. She knows no one save Widow Beaufoy, and she is not like to get help from her. No. There is only one place, really.

‘Across,’ she says, and she points over the river, to the rough sedge on the other side.

The canon grunts and steers the punt out into the current. He’s a big man, solid and strong, with square feet and mud-rimed toes that seem to grip the thwart’s edge. He guides the punt expertly through the water, as if he has been doing this all his life, but after a moment he looks down and catches Thomas’s stare.

‘What he did to you was unchristian,’ he says. ‘That is what I think Father Barnaby can be – unchristian.’

Thomas lifts an acknowledging hand from the gunwale.

‘What is your name?’ Katherine asks.

‘Robert,’ he says.

Then there is a pause.

‘And yours, son?’ he asks. Katherine squints up at him again. Is he playing with her or does he honestly not know who she is? She cannot tell. He stands there, patient, silent, steering the punt, and the need for an answer becomes pressing. She looks at Thomas for guidance but he does not seem to know either and then, finally, she says: ‘Kit. My name is Kit.’

‘Kit,’ Robert murmurs. ‘After the travellers’ saint. Well, that is us, I suppose.’

And once again, in a moment, it is decided: she is to be Kit. Nothing more is said. There is only the noise of Robert’s pole and the faint throng of the water against the side of the punt and after a while he manages to find a tongue of solid ground among the eastern bank’s marshes and they climb out and haul the punt up out of the water to hide it among a stand of rushes.

‘Just in case,’ Robert says.

And they turn and set off through the marshland, ever careful of the green-crusted mud, and there are insects thick in the air, and strange red-beaked birds scuttle away before them.

‘Edmund Riven,’ she says. ‘Edmund bloody Riven.’

‘That was him?’ Thomas asks. ‘The man with the bandage?’

She growls an affirmative.

‘How can he be here?’ she demands of herself. ‘His family is attainted! I was there in Westminster the day it was done! Richard said it marked the legal death of that family, of every Riven that was ever alive or lived still, or will ever live in the future.’

Neither Thomas nor Robert says a thing. Why should either know?

She will have to ask Sir John Fakenham, she thinks, that is all there is for it, for he is the only man who would ever tell her how it had come to pass, but now she thinks of him, and of Marton Hall, and she feels a roiling mixture of guilt, fear and shame. She thinks how she treated him: how she lied to him from the very start, how she passed herself off as someone else, and how she married the man’s son while pretending she was someone else again. And all he ever showed for her – in any of her guises – was charity.

But there is one crumb of something, she thinks, something approaching comfort, or hope at least, and she thinks again of the day of the fight at Towton, when she was Margaret Cornford and she was tending to Sir John after he’d been brought down off the field, out of his wits with his head stove in. No one thought he would live, and they’d lain him on the ground and he’d clutched her hand and called her Kit. He’d even thanked the Lord that she – he – was there. And when she had corrected him, told him she was Lady Margaret Cornford, he had said that he knew what he knew, and that she should not be wasting her time with him, but she should go to find Thomas. Go out and be with Thomas, is what he’d said. She did not understand it at the time, or understand what he knew or how he knew, but she went to find Thomas, and it was only later that she tried to divine a deeper meaning in the old man’s words. Did they mean he’d known from the very off that she was a girl pretending to be a boy, and that at that moment in the hospital she was the same girl, only now pretending to be a different girl? Or perhaps he thought she was, and always had been, Margaret Cornford, and that she’d pretended to be Kit to get away from Wales? She had struggled with this all that summer after Thomas was dead, endlessly going over it, again and again, watching Sir John’s expression for any further clue, but the matter was never raised again, and she had never struck on a happy answer, not even at the altar, when she swore oaths before God and Man, and took Sir John’s son as her husband.

So now she nods, and says: ‘Marton Hall, in Marton, that’s where we must go,’ for, anyway, after all that, what else is there? Sir John is all that remains to them. They must seek him out and throw themselves on his kindness. It is their last – their only – recourse.

They pass the first night in a barn where a miller lets them sleep on a platform, reached by a ladder, on which straw is piled on a cradle of hawthorns, above two strong-smelling oxen. In amongst the straw are a few thick-skinned apples that they eat quickly, guiltily, greedily. A moment later and Robert is asleep in his wet clothes, snoring loudly, seemingly spread across the whole space so that wherever they move they must touch him.

Katherine and Thomas sit together, with their backs to a beam, legs hanging from the platform. She has taken off her jack and they can hear it dripping in the darkness.

‘It will be cold tonight,’ he says.

‘We’ve known worse,’ she tells him, and she reminds him of the night on the Welsh mountains, in the snow, the night that the real Margaret Cornford coughed herself to death.

He is pleased he cannot remember it.

‘What was she like?’

‘Oh, she was very young,’ Katherine tells him. ‘With much to learn. But that was another strange thing.’

‘What?’

‘Eelby still thought I was Lady Margaret, didn’t he? You would think, wouldn’t you, that the Prior would let it be known I was not?’

‘Perhaps it is because they do not know who you really are?’ Thomas asks, and she grunts. She cannot see how that would affect anything.

Thomas is silent in the darkness. She cannot see him, but she thinks about waking up to find him in the dawn that morning, in the stable, his expression so naked and confused. She’d thought she was dreaming still, of course, and she’d thought this was just another, stubbornly persistent one, from which she could not wake, and she thought for a moment perhaps she must be ill or mad, as they said she was, but then when she’d felt the soft bristle of his beard, she’d thought, no, by God, this is it, he is here, alive, and she had almost wept not with happiness, or relief, as she might once have done, but with the mad confusion of it all.

With this she thinks of Richard, her husband, and she wonders where he is and what he is doing. She thinks of him wandering around in London with Mayhew, shy, anxious Mayhew, frightened by men with power, men with velvet gowns and riding boots, men with retinues and weapons, and she wonders how that will turn out, but already their story feels distant, and their fate, somehow, not her concern.

‘So will you continue as Lady Margaret for now?’ he asks.

‘It is the easiest,’ she supposes, and he grunts his agreement.

‘We would have to tell Robert here,’ he says.

‘That is nothing,’ she tells him.

‘But then,’ he says, ‘would Edmund Riven not try to kill you, just as he tried to kill the real Margaret Cornford?’

And she thinks about this for a moment, and sees that Thomas is right. Edmund Riven followed them to Wales to do just that.

‘But what then?’

‘Well, you are dressed as Kit. Robert here knows you as Kit.’

‘Kit then?’

‘I don’t know.’

Thomas has lain down and in a moment he is breathing evenly, asleep. She lies next to him, as she was once used to, and she can smell him, and she means to offer up a prayer of thanksgiving, the Te Deum perhaps, but she does not. Then in the early hours of the morning, when it is darkest and they should be at Matins, she is woken by the unfamiliar, and she feels that Thomas has an arm around her as, again, he once used to. It is comforting, but later in the night, she is woken by something else: an unfamiliar pressure in her tailbone, and she feels him pressing against her. He is still asleep and when she whispers his name, why she does not know, he removes his arm, withdraws his body, and his dream, whatever it was, diverts elsewhere. She is left with only the impression of him, and she does not move until she is woken by the sound of the barn door on its hinges and the shouts of the boy leading the oxen from their pens below.

They walk through the morning under a pale sky, the breeze at their backs pressing the cold cloth to flesh, and they meet not a soul. Before midday they see the spire of Lincoln cathedral and the castle on their hill above the haze, and now she knows she can postpone answering the crucial question no longer: what is she to tell Sir John?

Can she really be Kit again? Will Sir John accept the boy back? All she can cling to is the strange hope that he already knows she is not who she says she is, and that he does not – what? Care? Think it matters? Or is he too playing some unknown game, some sophisticated scheme, the advantages to which she is yet blind?

She almost cries out with the frustration of it. Perhaps she ought not to have escaped the priory in the first place? Perhaps she should have stayed to face the Prior of All, to hang for the murder of Sister Joan? Then at least she would not be bringing her lies into the lives of others.

But then she remembers the Prioress. The beatings. The cruelties. She remembers gentle Alice, first raped, then left for dead, then murdered in her bed by those sworn to protect her. She remembers Giles Riven, his viciousness both casual and calculated. She remembers that giant who wanted to put Thomas’s eye out, who blinded Richard, murdered Geoffrey. She remembers the boy Edmund who had once hunted her for pleasure, then in earnest. She thinks of Eelby, and his smirking greasy face, triumphant as she was expelled from the world because she tried to save his baby when he himself had not lifted a finger for his wife. And when she thinks of these people, when she thinks of the harm they’ve done, she finds she is so angry that she has overtaken both Robert and Thomas on the road, and that she is banging her beetle on the ground with every step and that her body throngs with pent-up fury and the desire to live, to survive, to thrive, if only to beat them, destroy them, and finally see them all dead. By Christ! She will do anything to see that.

When they arrive at the village it is late afternoon. There are pigs and goats in their pens, a few geese, and a boy with a shepherd’s crook is slinging stones at blackbirds in a furlong by the churchyard.

‘Who is it going to be?’ Thomas asks quietly.

She pauses for a final second, then: ‘Kit,’ she says.

And it is decided.

The last time they surprised Sir John he was barricaded behind his door with a crossbow ready to kill the next man he saw. He was in a foul state, Katherine recalls, smelling like a badger, and the estate was despoiled and Geoffrey lay dead in a field. Already this is better, and as they approach, she sees – with an appreciative eye for having tried it herself – that fences are mended, hedges laid and there is the makings of a new hovel not yet finished among the recently coppiced hazel wood. She smells plum-wood hearth smoke and hears a peal of laughter: a woman’s.

As they approach a dog yaps. It is not the full-throated bark of the talbots that used to run here, but something smaller and a moment later a terrier comes racing through the gateway to the yard and stands before them, yapping fiercely, tongue very pink, eyes very black. Robert swings his stick good-naturedly at the dog and mutters some soothing words. A moment later she hears Sir John’s voice raised in question. Thomas gives her one last nod as she swallows, pulls her brigandine down and her hose up, exaggerating the empty codpiece, and steps forward.

Sir John is sitting in the last golden beam of the afternoon sunlight, on a log by the step on which they used to sharpen knives. Opposite is a woman in a green dress, likewise on a log, and they are both drinking from mugs and looking up from a chessboard. There is a long moment of silence while the old man holds Katherine’s gaze. She feels her bowels liquefy, and tears spring in her eyes. She wants to turn and run. This was a mistake.

‘John,’ the woman says, ‘who are these men?’

Sir John’s mouth opens slack, his face is wiped clean, all expression erased by shock. For a moment he says and does nothing, then he whispers: ‘By all the saints.’

‘Sir John,’ Katherine starts, a lump in her throat, tears in her eyes. ‘I am sorry—’

‘By all the saints,’ he repeats. ‘It is you. And you. Dear God. Kit. Thomas. I— Dear God.’

He stands. He seems uncertain on his feet, lost, clumsy, like her idea of a bear. His teary gaze is fixed on her, then switches to Thomas, then comes back, and she in her turn shifts from foot to foot, and she wishes she could turn and run, but equally she cannot help but grin, and tears tremble on her lids, then spill down her cheeks and then Sir John gives a whoop of delight.

‘Dear God,’ he calls. ‘Dear Blessed God above! It is you. You! Back from the dead! Dear God. And Thomas! Oh, my boys. I never thought – oh, to see you again. I thought they’d rolled you in some hole in Wales, with Walter and those Welsh lads. And you! We were sure you were dead at Towton!’

Tears leak into the deep creases in his face and drops gather in his newly trimmed beard and now he stumbles forward and envelops Katherine in his right arm and Thomas in his left and he pulls them as tight as an old man can and he smells of some sweet herb and now all three have their arms around one another and all three are weeping uncontrollably.