Kingmaker: Broken Faith (21 page)

And with that he tidies the chess pieces away, and curfew is called.

THE HAYMAKING INVOLVES
eight of them, working with whetted scythes in a staggered line across the field. Thomas is strongest, and goes first, on the right-hand end of the line, then Robert, to the left, and a little behind him. Katherine starts on the extreme left of the line, since it is thought she is the slightest of them all, but she is faster and stronger than she looks, thanks to her months with the washing beetle, and as the morning progresses, she is moved up the line, until she is to the left of Robert. When the first field is done, they sit in the shade of an ash tree on fat stooks and drink ale, and Robert tells them they must stretch or they will be stiff from the unusual strain that the scythes put on a man’s muscles.

Later she walks with Thomas down to the river, and they follow a stony path worn by horses along the river’s bank, and she thinks they have some of their old ease back again, and are walking as they did before that last terrible winter. Thomas seems less fraught than he was, she thinks, less pent up. Perhaps it is something seasonal? She wonders at him though. The way he gets up in the middle of the night and returns chilled to the bone. If she is awake she will ask him where he has been and he will tell her he has been outside, but his voice will be whispery, as if he is sad, and he will turn his back on her and that will be that. She remembers him pressing himself against her that night in the barn, and once when he got up in the night, she rose and followed him, thinking perhaps he was going to see one of Sir John’s serving girls, and she felt a terrible stab of jealousy, and she thought she might scream if it were true, but no. It was not that. Instead he stood under the eaves in the moonlight, so tense and still it was as if he were waiting for a fox to pass. She supposes it is something to do with his memories fleeting, returning to him in dreams, and sometimes she tries to calm him with a touch, but that only seems to make things worse, and she can feel him lying there like a strung bow, vibrating and so hot under her fingertips she has to withdraw her hand. Though it will be useful in the winter, she supposes.

‘Richard will come from London soon,’ he says.

She supposes he is right, but she does not want to think about Richard. She is just enjoying being with Thomas, when he is happy, and she had supposed he was enjoying it too.

‘What will you do then?’ he presses. ‘When he comes? Will you go to him?’

She sighs. She has been putting off thinking about this for as long as possible, but now Thomas seems determined to be unhappy, and to make her so too.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You know that. I suppose – I suppose I will have to go. I cannot stay and be his wife again.’

‘Sir John says Richard is still smitten with you.’

‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘but he is smitten with Margaret Cornford, who was his wife, not with me.’

‘But you are his wife,’ he says.

‘Am I?’ she asks. ‘Yes. I suppose I am. But Thomas, it is as I say – I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. None of this was— Well, I did not plan it.’

She sighs. She knows flight is the only option. To this end she has been saving money, tiny amounts, a halfpenny here and a halfpenny there, driving a harder bargain at the market than needs be, accepting second best from the stallholder and keeping the difference. Isabella has noticed something is not right in the balance of accounts, she is sure of that, but she has said nothing as yet.

She wonders whether Thomas will come with her when she leaves. Or whether he will stay with Sir John who loves him as a son, and where he is warm and well fed and – except for these odd moods of his – happy.

Suddenly she has to know.

‘If I go,’ she begins, ‘will you come with me?’

He turns on her. He looks haunted by something. Not his usual self.

‘Where?’ he asks.

‘Where? I don’t know.’

She can feel herself breathing quickly. She feels hot and very anxious. He takes a solemn step but he says nothing.

‘You don’t have to,’ she says. ‘I am sure you have a life planned for yourself here. Without – without all these complications.’

He stops and squints at her.

‘What do you mean?’

He is being evasive, deliberately obtuse.

‘Forget it,’ she says, and she walks on.

He catches her arm. She tears it away.

‘Wait!’ he says.

‘Look, Thomas,’ she says, turning back on him. She has no idea what she is going to say. The words tumble out. ‘I know I have brought you nothing but trouble. I know without me you would be a – a – a canon, still, happily embellishing your psalter, but I – I – oh, God!’

And now God damn them, the tears fill her eyes and she finds she can hardly breathe and she feels a great heat glowing within her. She cannot bring herself to say that she cannot contemplate life without him by her side. But can she ask him to come with her, to look after her, to keep her from danger as he always has, and in return for what?

He once told her he loved her, but that was then, and this is now, and he is he, and she is she. And that is the problem. She is she.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, sniffing and drawing her sleeve across her mouth.

But now he is looking at her as if she is mad and he steps towards her and envelops her in his arms and she wraps hers around him and she presses her face to his chest and she inhales that dusty smell of his and she can feel his lips pressing on the crown of her cap, and she wishes he would – and then she feels it: the hard knot of him pressing against her and she catches her breath.

She has lain with Richard Fakenham on numerous occasions since the night of their marriage, when she knew what must come, and so forced herself to drink too much wine, and William Hastings was there, among others, and everything seemed preordained. It is to be done like this! Then this will happen, then this. Then the sheet was spread on a broad, feather-filled bed in a private room, something she had never slept in before, and it was sprinkled with holy water and then she was instructed to formally guide Richard to it, but he had had too much wine, too, which one of Hastings’s men said was bad for a blind man, especially on his wedding night, and he had made odd, confusing gestures with his hands and fingers, right before her husband’s face, so she had closed the door on him and heard him laugh beyond.

What happened then was not as humiliating or unpleasant as she had feared it might be. She undressed and then helped him. He smelled loamy and acidic; not very pleasant, but she imagined she smelled the same. He asked if she wanted to blow out the candle and she did, but not before she had seen his penis protruding from its nest of hair, and seeing it, she had felt not the shrieking revulsion she had thought she might, but the onset of a laugh. So this was what those nuns had spoken about with more reverence and veneration almost than the consecrated body of Christ? This thing?

Richard almost knew what to do. He lay beside her and placed his hand on her pubis, in the wrong place, and then he felt cautiously between her legs. She lay still, her eyes seeing strange shapes in the dark, and he was not so much gentle as tentative and though it was never as pleasurable as Sister Joan suggested it might be, it was not an ordeal. Then when he felt he had done something, or enough of something, though she knew not what, he had clambered on top of her, pressing her into the sheets, his hipbones and frail wand of a penis digging into her body. Then he took some weight on his elbows and he placed his mouth over hers and kept it there, hot and sour, again for what seemed like a pre-planned and requisite length of time – as long as it took to say the Hail Mary, perhaps – and she was sure then that Richard was new to this too, following instructions, or a set of them, as planned as the Mass itself, given to him, she had to assume, by William Hastings. Strange to have him in the room, she thought, almost peering over Richard’s shoulder.

Then he shunted her legs apart and after a moment of fumbling – and she unexpectedly knowing to raise her hips and part her knees – there was a sharp jolt of pain, nothing she would care to experience again, but equally, not as painful as a thousand things she had endured, before or since, and he pressed himself into her further, a strange, continually sore experience, a chafing probing sensation, and she felt him breathing very fast and then there was a moment of great tension in the air just above her face, and a grunt and a vast gust of exhaled breath. A moment later his head was on her shoulder and he was murmuring the name Margaret over and over while she laboured to breathe until he rolled off, leaving her with an unknown mess between her legs.

And that was that. Until the next time, the next evening, when the whole thing happened again, though without the solemnity.

It became marginally more enjoyable with the passing of time, but it was never anything akin to the delights the sisters had suggested while they were whispering in the dorter at the priory. It happened quite regularly, and sometimes she looked forward to it, but eventually, after six, seven months perhaps, of him trying to get her with child and her flowering the next month, Richard seemed to turn in on himself, and would rather be left to drink wine than come to bed, and that was the beginning of his decline, and, before all this, she used to worry that it was her fault; that there was something she was not doing, which is why they were not blessed with a child.

Now though, here is Thomas.

She looks up at him through the circle of his arms.

‘Thomas?’

And he pulls away, awkwardly with his hips, and drops his arms, and now it is his turn to apologise.

‘I am so sorry,’ he says. ‘I cannot help it. It just happens.’

He is blushing a wonderful colour.

‘It is all right, Thomas,’ she says. ‘I understand.’

‘It is just—’

But she does not let go of him. And after a moment, he stoops to kiss her lips. The kiss lasts a moment longer than it might were they friends, and then, finally, an understanding is reached and their hands are on one another and they are pulling at each other’s points and laces, while all the time their lips are locked, and both have their eyes open and he is moving her off the path and into the longer grass when the sensation of being touched there by another, sympathetic, hand is too much for him. She sees his eyes widen and roll and he breaks away, gasping as if he is being strangled.

‘Thomas!’ she says. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

He is shuddering, hardly able to stand upright.

‘What is wrong? Christ! Shall I get help?’

‘No!’ he says. ‘No! Just. Just. A moment.’

There is a pause. Then she realises.

‘Oh,’ she says, and she cannot help but laugh, but she is also, unexpectedly, furious.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Sorry. I – well, I am not used to it.’

‘I thought you were dying. I thought you had stood on a blade, or one of those caltrops.’

He laughs.

‘No, no,’ he says. ‘It was – God.’

‘Let us sit,’ she says. She begins to retie her points, hoiking the hose up to lace them to her pourpoint. He does the same. When it is done, she sits on the bank, with her shoes above the sliding brown waters, and she feels a twinge of sorrow. She hardly knows what to say. But he does not seem sad. He sits next to her, closer than he might usually, with his shoulder against hers. She smiles at him. He puts his arm around her. Well, that is nice, she thinks. He laughs.

‘Is it always like that?’ he asks. ‘I mean, does that happen all the time?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘But perhaps everyone is different?’

He sighs.

‘Did you – did you ever … with Richard?’ he asks.

And she is silent for a moment, sad.

‘I did,’ she says, after a while. ‘I was married to him, so of course we had to.’

‘But you never had a child?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘No. I used to wonder why. I used to tell myself that it was because, because it was not right. Because I was not who I said I was, and so God did not smile on us, Richard or me, or bless the union. I did not mind. Really. Though I sometimes thought, I thought it would be nice. To have a child. I would have called him Thomas.’

He grips her to him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

‘Mmmm,’ she agrees.

Birds call, a single woodpigeon, and the water flows by, and she is not sure if she understands this thing that she is feeling – this intense emotional sickness – as if her heart is swooping and falling, swelling and shrinking, but she knows it is to do with Thomas.

‘But I am glad, too,’ he says.

‘Why?’ she asks.

He looks at her, puzzled.

‘Because – because don’t you know?’

But she does, really, and she sees that his hose is bulging, and she feels she too would like to press against something, and she places her hand on his thigh, and stretches to kiss him again and then once again they are in a rush to get their laces untied, and as she is hopping to remove one shoe, and pull her hose and braies off, he says something about how it would be easier if she were dressed as a girl, and then she is on her back and he is on top of her and this time it is better, and she cannot help gasping with the pleasure of it, and while it lasts it is golden, but it does not last long and he cries her name out as he shudders, and afterwards, while he is lying on her so heavily that she can hardly breathe, she cannot help smiling as she sees a flying wedge of geese pass high overhead, and she feels not just the great warmth of what they have done, but an absence of coldness, and despite his weight pressing her down, she feels lifted up, and that she might like to do that again, very soon.

But then they hear a cry from the river, and he lifts his shoulders and turns, and now she can see a sail on the water, and Thomas is about to leap up and run, but she holds him tight with her arms and legs, and she looks into his eyes where the sunlight catches them, and she keeps him there, and he smiles down at her and then bends to kiss her and – my God! – they ignore the boatmen who sail by with shouts and jeers and there is something thrown, and he keeps at it and a moment later she feels she might burst with it all.