Kingmaker: Broken Faith (25 page)

‘Kit is not a spy,’ Thomas says. ‘For the love of God. We came here to help.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Grey says. ‘Of course you would say that.
I’d
say the same, in your place. If I was standing here. Any Christian man would, wouldn’t he? But look. Forget all that. Go on, Horner, make the wager. We said a noble, didn’t we? Even if nothing comes of it, eh? It’ll be a little fun, won’t it? You and me? A wager? Why not? It’ll be fun. And – and don’t we, you know, don’t we
need
a little of that? Around here? Now? We do. We do. Don’t we?’

He screws up his face, looks imploring. Then he takes another drink.

‘Let’s say, if the boy lives to see what? All Saints? Or wait! All Souls? No. You’re right. All Saints it is. If he is alive for All Saints then we’ll assume you know what you’re doing, that you’re a surgeon, as you claim, and I shall give you, Horner, a noble. How does that do? Eh? Seems fair, doesn’t it? More than fair, that, I’d say.’

Horner nods. His face is a mask.

‘Go on then,’ Grey says. ‘Scuttle off. Scuttle off and do whatever it is you do.’

They leave the keep and recross the outer bailey, along muddy paths between the sheep pens, past the hawk mews, which smells grim, toward an isolated guerite in the northern wall.

‘Is he serious?’ Thomas asks.

‘Well, he has a point,’ Horner says. ‘You have turned up as if from nowhere. And he likes a wager, too.’

He indicates the gibbet to one side of the bailey.

The door to the stubby stone-built tower is heavy on its hinges, and within it is dark, but there it is again: that stench. It seems to slide out, cold and pungent and thick enough to coat your tongue, so they all three take a step back, and they all clap their hands across their faces.

‘By Christ!’

‘He’s started to smell a bit strong,’ Horner admits.

A guard laughs from the parapet above.

‘Won’t be long now, poor old bugger.’

The guerite is one room, square, about ten paces wide, with no windows, but a wooden ladder leading up through a hatch into another identical room on top, save this one has two arrow loops on the hugely thick outer wall, and two doors on either side opening on to the parapet walkway of the crenellated curtain wall. There are four or five of these towers on the walls here, each placed between the corner towers, in which guards might shelter in very poor weather.

This John of Devon has the whole of the lower room to himself. When her eyes become used to the dark Katherine sees, in the light from the door, that he is on a pile of straw and, despite the cold, he is wearing only his braies and yet his skin is dewed with sweat. He has a linen sheet bunched over his face, and by his side his left arm lies as if it is not his, but the property of someone else. The wound – just above the wrist – is tied with a bandage crusted black with dried blood, but above it, the boy’s arm is swollen, the skin tense, and it is dark red, almost black. It extends to the elbow.

Oh Christ, she thinks, I will have to cut it off.

‘What do you think?’ Horner asks from the doorway.

Katherine says nothing. She holds her breath and touches the arm. It is scalding to the touch. She lifts it. The boy moans. There is a connective string of something between it and the stained linen sheet below, and a thin gruel of watery pus dribbles on to her wrists. She lets it down. She hurries to the door and pushes past and vomits on the grass. She hears men laughing as she retches. After five or six heaves, the retches turn dry and painful. Jack arrives and offers her some ale from his bottle.

‘I’ll need more light,’ Katherine announces. ‘And air. We’d better bring him out.’

‘Should we not wait until tomorrow?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘It must be soon, if we are to save him. This evening.’

Thomas and Jack exchange a look, then they wrap cloths around their mouths and go back in. They bring him out. Jack has his ankles and Thomas his armpits. The boy’s arm lies across his pale belly. They lay him on the patchy grass. The sheep watch in silence. The boy is breathing very quickly. She bites her lip and returns to the wound. Using her own knife she lifts the bandage. It is a gash, black now, drying at the edges, something wet within. It hardly matters what that is like though, for now she sees the swelling has extended beyond the elbow. She will need a saw.

‘When did it happen?’ she asks.

‘Three mornings ago,’ Horner says. ‘It was one of those things. Montagu’s men. They were too far north. We were too far south …’

He shrugs.

‘It will have to be cut off,’ Katherine tells them. ‘Here.’

She points to the upper arm, a finger’s length above the tidemark of the discoloration. She lifts the sheet off the boy’s face. He looks half dead already. Men are gathering on the parapet above.

‘Kill him now,’ one of them calls. ‘You’d be doing him a kindness.’

‘Do you have any tools?’ she asks Horner. ‘A knife. A saw. A needle. A curved needle if you have it, and a good length of horse’s tail. And I’ll need plenty of linen. Clean, mind, and a good new bowstring. And wine. And urine, fresh.’

‘I absolutely know we have no wine,’ Horner says. ‘That was all drunk months ago, but we have some of Sir Ralph’s spirit. The friars at Hulne make it for him. As for urine, you can have any amount of that. Right now, if you please.’

She recalls Mayhew cutting a bone after Towton.

‘And I’ll need a beeswax candle. It must be beeswax. And a fire in a brazier.’

Horner nods.

‘Very well. Let us try the kitchen first.’

He guides her down to the keep’s kitchens. It is gloomy down there, with high windows letting in a little light and air, and it smells strongly of mutton grease, but at least it is warm and Katherine finds what she is looking for: a sharp-enough knife, though without the curved blade, and even a butcher’s saw. There is a pair of powerful scissors, blunt enough for her purpose, and she takes a stirring spoon. She waits for some water to boil on the fire. A large-eyed boy – an underemployed spit turner – watches her glumly from the shadows until the water is frothing and she is about to plunge the implements in the pot when Horner asks why she’s washing them.

‘They’re only going to get dirty again,’ he says.

She looks, puzzled, at the blue-black blade, the crusted snags of the saw’s teeth. Why does she clean them? She really doesn’t know. It just seems right. She plunges them and swirls them around, then wraps them in clean linen. She takes a small iron poker by the fire’s side, too. Meanwhile Horner organises the urine.

‘Come on, everyone! Into the pot.’

He collects half a gallon in a green glazed jug.

‘Not bad,’ he says, holding it up and shaking his other hand dry.

They go up and out into the thin autumnal sunshine to where the boy is laid out. She glances up at the keep to see the blurred shape of Grey at his window, and sees clouds in the reflection, scudding fast, west to east, and the sun goes in again.

Thomas is looking at her.

‘How do you feel?’

She is not sure. She doesn’t have that feeling she once had – of certainty. She holds up her pale hands. They are still, but feel heavy, as if – dead. For a moment she doubts herself.

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

‘Will it hurt?’ Jack asks.

‘Course it will, boy,’ Horner says. ‘Though we might first stun him with a cup of Sir Ralph’s distillation?’

He holds up an earthenware flask. Thomas takes it, removes the stopper, breathes it and coughs. His eyes water.

‘Strong stuff,’ Horner laughs. ‘Shall I send for more? Or a priest? Or both?’

‘No,’ Thomas says, stoppering the flask. ‘He won’t need a priest. He’ll live.’

Thomas smiles at her. He is proud of her. Christ, she thinks, I hope this goes well.

‘Come on then,’ Horner says.

Men are gathering round, joining those on the parapet above, though some drift away again when they catch the stench of the arm. It has a coating miasma.

‘Don’t breathe it in,’ one of them says. ‘It’ll kill you as sure as a headsman’s axe.’

One of Horner’s men brings a small perforated brazier in his cloak-wrapped hands. It lights up his face as he places it down next to her, and for a moment the smell of the burning coal masks that of the boy’s rotting arm. She passes him the poker.

‘Get it good and hot,’ she says and he slides it in among the coals and starts blowing on them. Sparks rise.

Now that she has started, Katherine finds herself doing things without thinking. She first lets Thomas pour some of the distillation between the boy’s cracked lips. It makes him cough, but they hold him down, and they give him more. And more still. She wishes she had some of the dwale that she had for operating on Sir John, or some of that midwife’s soporific, but this will have to do. Besides, she is becoming sure that speed is of the essence here. She kneels next to him on the grass and she sees at once that the skin above the blackened swelling is gaining a rosy hue, and she imagines it a harbinger of the blackness, as if it is spreading up the limb from the wound. She wonders what it is that will finally kill the boy. Does the infection get into the blood and from there to the heart? Is that it? Does the heart then turn black like the swelling limb? Either way, she knows she must cut the arm well above the rosy fringes of the swelling if she is to prevent the boy’s death, and she must do it quickly.

After a while the boy seems unconscious again. He begins long racking snores. Good, she thinks. She first loops the bowstring around the arm, above the bulge of his muscle. It goes around three times and then she ties it off and inserts the spoon under it and twists it within the bowstring, tightening it so that it bites into the flesh. Then she stops and feels the arm. She knows she must first find the artery. That is the biggest blood vessel. She has seen that cut and blood leap from the wound to splatter the ceiling. She presses her fingers into the muscle. There. She feels the throb of it. Good.

‘Thomas,’ she says. ‘Twist the spoon.’

Thomas leans forward and does so. She keeps her fingers on the artery.

‘Again,’ she says. ‘And again.’

The jump of the boy’s pulse lessens, its kick diminishing. Finally it stops.

Thomas is watching her closely.

‘All right?’

She nods. She reaches for the knife and she makes an incision, shallow, cutting the skin above the elbow, above the blackness. It is below the heft of his arm, where the muscle is biggest. She cuts right the way around and thinks, this is why Mayhew’s knives are curved. Then she cuts upwards, towards his armpit. The boy writhes.

‘It is all right,’ Thomas says.

‘Don’t let go of that spoon!’ she snaps.

He returns to his duty.

Now she peels the skin from the flesh of his arm and the boy really bucks.

‘You aren’t supposed to flay him,’ Horner says.

‘Give him something to bite on,’ Jack says. ‘Can we use this?’

He has the strap of the bag holding the ledger.

Thomas shrugs. Why not?

‘Give him some of this first,’ Horner suggests, and he tilts the bottle so that the boy must swallow another slug of the liquor or drown.

When it is swallowed and the boy is slack again, Jack places the leather strap between the boy’s teeth.

Katherine is unaware of anything else now going on around about. It is just her and the boy under her knife. She pours some urine into the wound, rinsing away the blood. She saw Mayhew do this after Towton. She is looking for the artery, the thick one that carries the blood under pressure. She cuts down, very slowly. Slice by slice, pass by delicate pass, the blade’s edge sliding through the meat of his arm. And now there it is, the artery, limp now. Next to it, nestled in the pink flesh of the muscle, is the other vessel still plump with blood. It is springy under her fingertip.

‘Undo the spoon, one turn,’ she says, and Thomas slackens the noose. Immediately the fat artery swells, and there is blood in the wound. Good, she thinks.

‘Tighten it again,’ she says. Thomas does so. The artery subsides.

Now she gets the curved needle Horner took from the saddler. She passes it behind the artery and makes a tight loop around it. She ties it off, then does the same thing again, a finger’s width lower. She does the same with the thick blue vein next to it. Those are the two you must watch for, she thinks.

‘See?’ Thomas asks Horner. ‘He really knows what he’s doing.’

Horner grunts.

She takes the knife and slices the flesh around the vein and the artery. The boy is rigid with pain. Now she bites her lip. This is it. She cuts in two swift tugs up through both vessels, between the knots. There is a thimbleful of blood from each, but no more. She stares. Thanks be to God.

‘Urine,’ she says, and she slops more into the wound. Now she cuts quickly, through the muscle and the hard white ligaments, right down to the bone. There is more blood. Too much? She does not know. The smaller vessels need to be sealed.

‘Pass the poker,’ she says, and the man by the fire does so. It is a gleaming red tip. She takes it and presses it to the flesh. There is a hiss and a meaty smell. They lean back to let a curl of smoke rise up and vanish in the sky.

‘Bacon!’ someone says.

‘Shut up,’ another mutters.

She reheats the poker and passes it over the pink flesh again, turning it grey and brown. The smell is now disgusting.

‘Loosen it,’ she tells Thomas. He untwists it one turn. There is still blood from one or two of the vessels. She takes the blunt scissors, and she teases them out and then ties them off with the horsehair. It is tricky, fiddly, with the blood and the urine.

‘Need three hands for this job,’ Jack mutters. He is stroking the boy’s head, absent-mindedly keeping him calm, not realising that he has already fainted.

More urine.

The flesh is cut all the way through now, and all that remains is the bone.

‘Where is the candle?’ she asks. Horner holds it up.

‘The last good one,’ he says.

‘Light it, will you?’ she tells him. He puts it to the brazier.

And now, here is the saw: a long blade with a curved wooden handle. She moves the arm so that it is at full angle from his body.