Kingmaker: Broken Faith (36 page)

‘You all right, Thomas?’ Horner asks as they are sitting by the flames. ‘Only you look – haunted. Like someone is out to kill you?’

‘Well, they are,’ he says. ‘All of Lord Montagu’s men. Christ. Most of England.’

‘Yes, yes, but we’re safe behind these walls,’ Horner reassures him. ‘Unless someone within them is trying to kill you?’

Thomas shakes his head, but Katherine thinks of the two that are after him to split him gut to gizzard. They are the reason he has not been down to the main gatehouse, where Riven’s men are posted, to see if there is any sniff of the ledger.

‘Unless it is burned, used as a splint to start a fire, then that is the only place it can be,’ he has told her.

But as the week goes on, and there is no sign of it, and Thomas isn’t able to go to the gatehouse to find it, the strain begins to tell, not helped by the privations of the Advent fast during which they have lived on briny soup and almost equally briny ale. The thought of its end, and of Christmas itself, is almost too much to bear and when they wake on the morning itself, it is to discover that the first heavy snowfall of the winter is in the process of settling outside, sealing them into their already shrunken world. Nevertheless, despite its flurries, the men and few women of the castle gather in the bailey after the first Mass of the day to watch the candles lit, and their light shine through the chapel’s windows and they are there to cheer King Henry when he grants them licence to go out and hunt the migrant swans that have settled on the mere below the castle walls, and any other fish, or fowl, they can find besides.

‘I’ve been eyeing them all month,’ Jack says. ‘Watching them get fatter by the day while we wither to nowt on this stinking fish stew not worth a louse.’

But neither Thomas nor Katherine nor Jack is among the appointed hunters. Horner commands them to keep watch from the top of the outward postern gate, where one of the men has entwined ivy through the merlons, while seemingly every other man in the garrison is out roaming the country below.

Thomas takes the chance to approach the main gatehouse, and she watches him sidle away through the bailey, keeping to its edges, and already he looks suspicious, like a thief, and she wonders if he ought not to go straight at the steps as if he belongs there. She waits, her gaze fixed on the gatehouse, and she finds herself shivering as she mumbles the prayers for his safe return. At the end of the afternoon, he comes, empty-handed, just as the hunters troop back on new-made paths embroidered in the snowfields, converging on the gate with their haul: most of the swans, all sorts of duck and goose, a fox, three herons, a string of puffins, and even a bulbous seal Tailboys’s men killed among the rocks on the headland to the north. They carry this oddity slung from a long pike held on their shoulders and everybody reacts to it in their own way.

That night they sing songs and their bellies are filled with rough meaty pottage and sour beer made with what tastes like nettles brought by an Easterling ship, sent from some French duke somewhere that also brought with it iron bars for the smiths, wheat and salt for the King’s bakers. One of the boats unloading the ship sank in the choppy waters while laden, taking with it its oarsmen, and it is not known for sure what it was carrying, though some say malt.

Katherine continues to tend to Giles Riven all through Christmastide. King Henry, through Sir Ralph Grey, has provided her with more linen, wine and rose oil; urine, of course, she can get almost anywhere. The scar is healing, though she still does not know whether he will be able to move his arm.

One morning he is asleep when she goes in, and she believes he remains that way, so she looks again under the frame of his bed, where Payne used to store his mattress, but the ledger is not there, and when she looks up, he is awake, staring at her.

‘Where is it?’ she asks.

But he wants a different conversation.

‘You have not brought your assistant,’ he tells her.

‘Nor will I,’ she says, ‘until you return my book.’

He scoffs.

‘You know where I know him from, don’t you?’ he asks. ‘But you won’t tell me.’

On the morning of the Epiphany she goes to see him again, and she is surprised to find his guard absent, and she opens the door with care to find him standing in the middle of his chamber, wearing only his braies, waiting for her. He is very, very pale, a great rack of ribs and a tilting pelvis, with his belly sunk in, and his skin loose, and swagged like cloth, and his limbs, especially the right arm, withered to sticks, to twigs. He grimaces at her with his brown teeth and his face is waxy and beaded with sweat. His brown hair is damp with it.

‘What do you think?’ he gasps through the pain. ‘You cannot keep a Riven down.’

His guard is within, it turns out, behind the door, waiting to catch him should he fall.

‘You look like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ she says.

He hisses a laugh. She can smell his breath. How coffins must be, she thinks.

‘Am I Famine?’ he asks. ‘Or War? Or am I just Death?’

‘It hardly matters,’ she says, because, after all, he is not one of them. She will not show fright. She will not.

‘Tell your assistant that I am nearly ready,’ he says. ‘Tell him I am no fan of mummery, that I am not misled by disguises. Tell him I will soon remember.’

Katherine ignores him. She is all business, and asks to see the scar, but he will not turn, wisely since he is so unsteady on his newborn colt’s legs, and so instead she must go in and stand behind him. Her hands are shaking. It is seeing him upright, she thinks, that brings his presence home. She removes the linen. It is dry, and the skin is pink, puckered and silky. She knows there is no need for her to look at it ever again.

‘Cold hands you have,’ Riven says.

‘It is snowing,’ she says.

He says nothing, but after a long moment lets out a sad sigh, and she can only guess his thoughts. He says no more until she is finished with the dressing and is about to go.

‘Leave the door,’ he says.

But she does not. She closes him in, and she hurries away, and she will not come back.

The snow lasts all month, falling, melting, freezing, falling again, night after night, day after day, and the icicles that hang fast under the drains in the castle walls and from the mouths of the gargoyles in the keep become steadily more grotesque. The walkways and tower tops are scattered with sand from the beach, and the whiteness of snow serves to emphasise the filth that accrues under the castle walls.

‘Why you need a moat,’ Horner supposes.

All around the castle walls the few patrolling sentries move like heaps of clothing under their heavy cloaks and worsted hats that soon become solid with damp. Below them the bailey is deserted save for the sheep in their folds, eating rationed hay and turnip tops, and bleating constantly through the short grey days.

And there is still no sign of the ledger, or of Edmund Riven.

‘He will wait until the spring, surely?’ Katherine says. She remembers Sir John Fakenham refusing a summons to spend the winter in Sandal Castle years earlier, a decision that saved his life, as it happened. Why would a man want to come and freeze to death in an ill-provisioned castle in such a bleak spot when he could be at home by his own hearthside?

Thomas agrees that is probable, but still. It would be better to know for sure, one way or the other, and in the meantime, they are stuck in the castle, and nerves and tempers begin to fray all around them.

‘How long is this going to last?’ Jack asks. ‘Herding sheep is more fun.’

He has managed to persuade a woman in the tents below to knit him an oily scarf that smells more of goat than sheep, and it has brought him out in a rash under his chin that he keeps scratching. Katherine is with him now, staring south, over the bailey, over their little world, watching the armed shepherds huddle in their tent trying unsuccessfully to burn dung, and beyond, the ghostly lights in the keep windows, where she imagines the ledger is even now.

‘It all depends,’ Horner tells them, ‘on whether the Scots treat with the false King Edward. If they do, then we’ll have them coming at our backs from the north, and Lord Montagu coming at us from the south. We’ll be caught, you see?’

He demonstrates by scraping a gloved finger in the ice. It is perfectly obvious.

‘I thought the Scots and King Edward had already made a treaty, which is why King Henry had to leave there, and come here?’

‘Yes,’ Horner admits, vaguely, since his information is patchy and his understanding thin at its fringes. ‘But that was just to get them to eject King Henry from Scotland. This treaty is to get them – those Scots – to join Montagu in hounding us.’

‘So what to do?’ she asks.

Horner tells them that the Duke of Somerset has decided the only way to stop a treaty between the Scots and the Earl of March is to ensure their negotiators never meet, and that he is trying to discover the negotiators’ whereabouts, so that he can capture them, or kill them, no one knows quite which.

‘Would it be a good idea to kill the Scots?’ Thomas ventures. ‘Won’t they then become your enemies?’

‘Our enemies,’ Horner corrects, but agrees.

Patrols are sent out into the snow. Sir Ralph Grey does not volunteer his men.

‘Pointless exercise,’ he says. ‘We aren’t going to just bump into the bastards, are we?’

But information is acquired and tidings come back. The Scots are sending their negotiators south from their capital to wait for an escort of Montagu’s men at a place called Norham, on the River Tweed. It is a castle to the north of Bamburgh, held by men loyal to King Edward. Lord Montagu is to ride north from Newcastle, through this area controlled, although only loosely, by King Henry, to collect the Scottish negotiators and bring them back down to Newcastle, through the same lands again, to negotiate with King Edward’s negotiators who in their turn are coming up from London to meet them there.

Meanwhile, worse tidings are confirmed: King Edward is also treating with the French and the Burgundians, who in the past have been friends of King Henry, and if he manages that, then it is all over: all hope is lost to Lancaster. It is not just a question of the long-term promises on which they have banked these past months, years even, that they will lose: it will be the day-to-day necessities – wheat, oats, ale – and without them … Well, as for the men of Bamburgh and Alnwick, of Dunstanburgh and the many little fortresses that litter the Northern Marches – not even toads and bats will sustain them. They will have to give up their resistance and make terms with the same Yorkists who killed their fathers and their brothers at Towton. Knowing this, King Henry sends out letters and messages to his wife, his wife’s father, the same Duke who sent the supplies at Christmas, to the King of France, to the Duke of Burgundy, to anyone who will accept his letters and might have ‘
un peu d’argent’
to spare, imploring them not to treat with the House of York, not to abandon the House of Lancaster. It is, more or less, all he can do.

And instead of the rush of men hurrying to join King Henry’s side that Somerset had promised, if anything the number has dwindled. Two or three a day, and none of them with many in their retinue, and the longer it goes on, past Candlemas and into February, the more certain Katherine becomes that Edmund Riven will not join his father, but will remain at liberty, enjoying King Edward’s grace. Knowing the parlous state of King Henry’s world, it is the only thing a sane man might do.

When the newly arrived see what it is they have come to join, their faces fall, and she can see them itching to back out, to return to wherever and whatever it is they’ve left, but the Duke of Somerset, a terrific escapee himself, has tightened the security, and now all the old soldiers who’ve been loyal to King Henry in exile, men who have nothing left to lose, stand gaolers over the newcomers.

‘By all the saints,’ Jack says, banging his fist against the wet stonework. ‘When? When? Fuck me! We’ll never get out of this bloody place!’

THE COMPANY VINTENARS
are with their men in the butts, and out in the dunes, morning till night, come rain or shine, and in the bailey there is always shouting, and the constant ripple of men practising with bills and hammers. Thomas watches them for a while, and sees how quick and supple the best are, constantly twisting one another’s wrists, changing their angles of attack, using their weapons in unexpected ways, and getting through their enemies’ blades to strike them. Now that they have shed their coats, it is possible to see their livery colours, and Riven’s men are among them, Thomas sees, and their comings-together – ‘fights’ is too grand a word for such swift couplings – are models of brutality and merciless economy: one man thrusts, the other evades, twists, turns and brings his hammer’s fluke around to ring against the first man’s helmet. It might just as easily have been in his eye.

‘They don’t hang about, do they?’ Jack volunteers.

‘Hmmm,’ Thomas agrees, ‘but who are all these others?’

‘Those in the red and green are Lord Hungerford’s,’ Jack tells him, ‘and those in the blue and yellow are Roos’s. They should be all right, though? Surely? Don’t look too bad?’

Thomas is not so sure. He shrugs.

‘I suppose there is still time.’

But there isn’t. Or not much. Word goes out that Sir Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth is to lead a party down south, to try to intercept Lord Montagu as Montagu rides north on his way to collect the Scottish negotiators. Humphrey Neville’s lands are to the south of Newcastle, and it is supposed he knows them, so that is where he intends to spring the trap, and he and his men take as many arrows and as much of the remaining oats as they can to keep themselves alive in the field.

‘What a relief he’s gone,’ Horner tells them, ‘for he makes Sir Ralph seem moderate in his whims.’

Meanwhile the rest of the garrison, along with almost every other man in the north who is still loyal to King Henry, are to be gathered in Bamburgh, ready to sally out in support of the many small uprisings that are reported all over the land. Horner is delighted.