Kingmaker: Broken Faith (33 page)

The cutting of Sir Giles Riven takes place just after the angelus bell, when it is scarcely light, and while Riven’s now crowded chamber is still thick with night-time effluvium and the stench from the garderobe blows strong from under its door in the corner. Servants with candles stand by and the room quickly warms with their heat and mingled breath. Payne is here, and Grey too, who has yet to go to bed, and another man, William Tailboys, with whom Grey has made his bet. There is no sign of King Henry. Katherine has hidden the ledger in the garderobe, on a peg under some of Payne’s many hanging clothes.

‘It is the perfect place,’ she says.

But now here is Grey, pushing his way to the front.

‘Will he live? Will he live?’ he bleats. ‘To hell with you! Why won’t you answer me! Should’ve hanged you the moment I saw you. I knew it! Look at you! Can’t even grow a proper beard, let alone cut a man. Will he live?’

Katherine ignores him, and turns to Tailboys, who is sleek in very dark wool, almost black, unstained and obviously finely cut. He is freshly shaved, fragrant of some herb or other, with a faint and complicit smile haunting his eyes.

‘Barber surgeon, hey?’ he asks.

‘Not a barber,’ she replies.

Riven is where he always is, face down on the bed, utterly still, apparently careless of all the people in his room. She can’t help her gaze being drawn to the scar on his back. Payne’s servant has washed him, and the sheets are stained and ripe with fresh urine. They have also pulled up the coffer next to the bed, and filled the jug with more urine collected that morning, to which she gleefully contributed. There are dishes with warm wine provided by King Henry from the last of his stocks, egg whites and rose water. There is a selection of horsehair and human hair, a long iron probe, three silver needles, one of them curved, and also a curved blade such as she wishes she’d had when cutting Devon John, and two straight razors wrapped in fine linen, of which there is also a large supply. There are scissors and a pair of blacksmith’s pliers.

‘That is all?’ Payne asks. ‘You need no salve? No dwale?’

She hesitates.

‘You have a dwale?’

‘No,’ he says. And that is that.

She looks at Riven.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘So long as I can have another to hold him down?’

Payne raises his eyebrows to indicate one of King Henry’s men, an archer by the looks of him, stripped, like Thomas, to his pourpoint and hose. Both men have their sleeves rolled up to their elbows and their heads bare, just as if they are going into a bout of wrestling. To one side is the bearded priest. He has sprinkled holy water over Riven’s back, and the tools she is about to use, and over the backs of her hands, and he has anointed Riven’s temples with a sharp-smelling chrism, and the paternoster has been said, and is still being said outside by the beardless priest, sent and paid for by King Henry, and now there really is nothing left to delay her.

But still, she does not feel right about it. Perhaps it is Payne’s presence, in blue velvet, and of all things, a woman’s apron of sacking backed with fine linen. She has been with him for the last five days, trying to draw information from him of the sort he has been unwilling to divulge, on matters such as his dissections of the human body, on the spread of gangrene, on the movement of the womb of a woman, while he has concentrated on batting away her questions with long explanations as to the movement of the stars and the influence they bring to bear on the various organs of the body, and on how best to balance the humours with bleeding and the application of poultices, and on the properties of the various herbs and spices of which she has never heard, such as cumin and sandalwood. He claims that a brown bark called cinnamon floats down the river from the Garden of Eden.

‘Do you believe this?’ she’d asked, and he’d smiled at her.

‘But of course,’ he’d said, feigning shock, and she’d begun to see that perhaps he believed in nothing of the sort.

After that glimpse though, he diverted her to talk about something else, mostly in Latin, a language she recognises but does not understand, before going on to explain the efficacy of certain prayer cycles for certain complaints: the Ave Maria for this, the paternoster for that. At length though, glancing around as if to check he was not being overheard, he began to share his knowledge of the body’s internal organs, of how they are arranged, and of the theories as to each one’s purpose. And once he started, once he had given in to it, he spoke with an urgent desire to share his knowledge until she asked about women, and about how they differed from men, and then he became agitated, and when she returned to the subject of the womb, and tried to draw him on childbirth, and in particular the cutting of poor Agnes Eelby, it had been too much. He’d gathered his books and stood and left the room, and Riven, whom they had ignored but who had been listening all this time, turned his head and looked at her in that slow way of his, and she’d forced herself to stare back at him until he’d closed his eyes and turned back to the wall, saying nothing.

And then for the first time, though she could hear his guard shuffling his feet and hawking on the floor outside the door, she was alone with him. It was almost as if he were presenting her his back, naked, pink, mottled, there to be stabbed, almost as if to say, here, kill me now if you have the stomach for it. And she’d begun pacing to and fro, up and down the chamber, plucking up the courage to do just that. Payne’s bag was on the floor. She could pick up the razor and cut Riven’s throat, or she could merely walk the few steps, take up the pollaxe and bring it down on the back of his head, just as she’d seen men do on the fields at Towton. She could imagine the pollaxe in her hand, its smooth shaft in her palm, that weight that seems to pull its spiked head where it ought not go. Just the thought of it had made her heart jump and she could feel the blood frothing in her ears. Do it, she said to herself, do it. Think of all the things he has done. All she’d need to do was drop it on him, just place it by him and stand back, let it fall and kill him. And she was going to do it. She was.

But then Riven let out a long sigh in the bed. It was one of such pitiable loss and resignation that he was instantly human again, a thing of flesh, and she’d had to close her eyes, stay her hand, and walk away.

And so now, here they are.

‘Get on with it,’ Grey calls. And there is nothing for it. She crosses herself as they expect her to, and then takes the proffered knife: a bone-handled thing, well-balanced, with a tapering blade so sharp it sings in her hand, and she dips it in the warm wine and she nods to Thomas and the wrestler who stand by to throw themselves on Riven, and she approaches that stretch of bared and washed skin. The priest begins his prayers. Suddenly there is incense in the air, and through its whorls, Grey smirks at her.

‘A failsafe,’ he says, with a leer at Tailboys, who is disapproving. She places the knife above the wound, and Riven stiffens. A drop of wine fills the dip it makes in his skin, and then she presses. Riven flinches. Blood wells before the blade’s stroke. Riven’s head comes up, unused muscles ripple under the skin of his back. He grips the sheets but does not cry out. She continues with the slicing, willing herself to think of poor dead Alice, of poor blind Richard, of Geoffrey Popham, of Elizabeth Popham, but it is hard not to concentrate on what she is doing. When she reaches it, the scar tissue is tougher; more like thin leather after the easy give of the skin above.

Riven is arching his back, and the wrestlers stand by to press him down and keep him still, but he straightens himself and returns to lying flat, merely gripping the sheet again. He is breathing very fast, and a clammy shimmer blots his skin.

‘Linen,’ she says, and Payne is there with a swab of the stuff, first rinsed in – and then squeezed dry of – wine. She mops the blood away and in the moment before it comes back she can see the second pale layer of fat beneath the skin, though the latter is twisted and folded and then hardened like a knot in wood below the scar. She passes the blade through it again, moving slowly this time, and at any moment she expects to feel the tink of the blade against the arrowhead. It does not come. She must cut deeper. She damps the blood away again and looks up to the wrestlers, who await their orders. She nods. They lean in, ready. She cuts. Riven stiffens but makes no further move. There is still no sign of the arrowhead.

Payne is peering over her hands. They exchange a glance. He is worried too.

‘It should be there,’ he says.

She will do one more pass. Blood is flowing freely now. She asks for some urine.

‘Quickly now,’ she says.

It washes the blood away, turns the sheets pink. This time she imagines she will see the dark plug of the arrowhead sticking from the bone, but again, it is not there. She cuts again, deeper, and Riven lets out the slightest noise. By now it is a large wound, and there is a lot of blood.

‘What are you doing?’ Grey asks. ‘It’s only a bloody arrowhead, the size of my bloody thumb. Not a – not a – what? A foot? By the Mass!’

‘Sir,’ Payne says.

‘Oh, it’s like that, is it? Tell me what to say to my own surgeon? Damned piss sniffer. Good mind to piss on you now, see how you like that.’

But he is silent after this.

Payne leans over.

‘Deeper?’ he asks. ‘You’ll be on the bone. It cannot be deeper than that, surely?’

She nods. She wishes she could scratch her nose but her hands are slick with blood, right up to her wrists. Riven is thrumming like a bowstring but he is still, has made no sound, and the wrestlers are impressed.

She cuts again. This time into the pink meat, running the end of the knife against the flat bone that backs it. She feels faint ridges and nodules interrupting the blade’s otherwise smooth passage, but nothing like an arrowhead. She stops.

‘Pass me that, will you?’

Payne hands her the probe. She washes it and then uses it to examine the cut she’s made. There are some of those hard white cords running crosswise. She does not cut them. Riven is pouring with sweat now, his brown hair sodden black, his neck red and engorged with the effort of not screaming. How does he do it? How can he stand the pain? She should be taking some pleasure from this, she knows, but she is not. Instead she is working as fast as she can.

It is not there. There is no sign of the arrowhead.

‘Well, then – where is it?’ Payne asks, peering forward. His eyes are round, peering in, genuinely concerned, genuinely puzzled.

‘Are you sure it was ever there?’ she asks. ‘That it was not some other kind of wound?’

‘He told me –’ Payne straightens to tell the room. ‘He told me it was after the disaster at Towton. He said he’d managed to cross that river as the rout began, and then he was knocked down by an arrow loosed from the scarp above. He said he managed to break the arrow shaft himself. But he could not get the head out, and then he could not find any physician or doctor or even a barber to treat him, not until he got to Scotland, by which time the wound had healed, and he did not trust any of those ginger-haired butchers to open him up.’

‘But where is it now?’ she asks, almost rhetorically. ‘Could it have hit the bone and not broken it? Could it have slid off?’

She pours more urine over the wound, washing it clean so that she can see the grain of the meat. There is nothing singular, no one divot or dent in the bone’s pink surface to suggest it has been marked by an arrow’s passing. Riven is breathing heavily.

‘Just find it,’ he says. ‘Just find it, and get on your way.’

The spectators are crowding around her, fascinated. She imagined some of them would find this sickening, but then they have all lived lives, some of them have fought in battles. They will have seen worse.

‘Cut across?’ Payne suggests.

And she looks up at him. She remembers cutting across Eelby’s wife. She remembers how that ended. But if she lingers, hesitates, then Riven will die. And Grey is looking at her as if he will hang her himself, so she does. She cuts across, firmer now, slicing through the fat and meat in one slice. She makes a cross. With that, Riven, at last, faints, and only the panting, the constant flex of his back, the push and pull of muscles under his bloody, urine-soaked skin tell her that he is alive.

‘More urine,’ she tells Payne, who splashes it into the wound.

For a moment she thinks it is there, a dark roundel of metal snagged in red flesh, but no. It is something else, a clot of something that is washed away by the urine. The arrowhead is not there. Payne is wrong, or lying. She is sweating now. It is too hot in the room.

‘This boy’s no more a surgeon than I am,’ Tailboys announces. ‘Grey, old man, let me tell you – I think you shall end the day losing your money!’

‘If I lose my money then this boy’ll lose his bloody head, let me tell you that!’

Tailboys laughs a sort of hoohoohoo laugh, like an owl, but she looks up and she can see Grey means it. His little face is sheened with sweat and clenched and she wonders how much money he has put on her doing this. But she is at a loss. She cannot cut the whole back open, can she? Or can she? She has already cut a large cross in his skin and peeled back the flaps, exposing almost the whole shoulder blade. She supposes the arrowhead might have skidded off this bone, and gone around it, further into the body, and that it is now lodged somewhere in the muscles that—

That is not the way to do it. So the arrow must have gone deeper, that is the only possibility. But where? Can she just cut away until she finds it? No. That would be to cut through all the bonds that hold this part of him together.

And now Payne is stepping back. He is stroking his beard, aligning its filaments, and when he catches her gaze, he cocks an eyebrow. Has he given up hope? It makes her more determined. Right, she thinks, I will show you. But by Christ, it is hot in here. She wishes she were wearing just a shirt and no pourpoint, though then her hose would fall around her ankles, but she can loosen her collar. She dips her fingers in the wine, then dries them on a clean piece of linen and opens her collar. Her fingers touch the leather strap of her lodestone.