Kingmaker: Broken Faith (41 page)

‘Will he be all right?’ Thomas asks.

‘I think so,’ Katherine says. ‘He was lucky. Does it hurt?’

Jack is surprised.

‘Not really,’ he says.

‘It will,’ she tells him.

‘That was – incredible,’ Thomas says.

‘I have done it before,’ she says. ‘To the Earl of Warwick.’

‘No,’ they all say.

And she cannot help smile.

‘What now?’ John Stump asks.

They look around. The fighting continues sporadically in the open, but in the woods, there are many shadows moving in its depths. Men are returning shamefaced, and now Thomas sees they have an audience. Some of Grey’s men have crept back, as well as Tailboys’s. There is even one who has thrown away his livery, but is wearing Hungerford’s badge. None of Riven’s.

‘Why hasn’t Montagu come after us?’ one of them asks. ‘Don’t make no sense.’

‘They come chasing after us,’ another, older, man answers, ‘and they’ll be all over Northumberland then, won’t they? Never get to Scotland like that. It is good discipline, that is.’

They are impressed now, and they watch in silence as Montagu’s men round on Percy’s division and they pity him and his men then, and each man there feels he has cause to look shamed.

‘It was those bastards in white who started it,’ one of them mutters. ‘With the crows. Who are they? They ran as soon as the arrows came. As if they’d bloody planned it.’

‘Riven,’ another spits. ‘Never bloody trust them. Never. I was at Northampton. He turned his coat then. Probably did the same thing now.’

It does not last long. Montagu’s army swamps Percy’s little force – all that is left of Somerset’s larger army – and though a few men can be seen running from its rear, and there are horses being brought up to help the escape, there can be only one outcome.

‘Christ,’ one of them breathes and then there is a restless silence in the woods that will only end when the last man offering any resistance is killed in the field, or the last man has run. No one among the trees can see who it is. Katherine, who has good eyes, does not want to watch. She has seen this before. And she is with Jack, who is very pale now, as if he has faded, and he wants to sleep. She is keeping him warm with all their cloaks and she has given him the last of their ale and she is trying to keep him awake. Still he shivers.

‘Are you sure he will live?’ Thomas asks.

‘I think so,’ she says, ‘but he cannot ride. He is not strong enough.’

And Thomas nods. He feels sick. He extends a hand and squeezes Katherine’s shoulder and she shrugs and turns back to Jack and so after a moment Thomas returns to the end of the wood where men are still gathered, watching, and the rattle of the fighting diminishes, then becomes inconstant, and oddly all the more terrible for that, for it is possible to pick out a single particular noise – of a hammer falling, say – and imagine the ferocity behind the blow, its intent, and what it does to the man below. A father, a son, a brother, a husband. Eventually it stops.

‘We’d best be off,’ an archer says. ‘Look.’

He points to where Montagu’s squires and boys are bringing up their masters’ horses.

‘Once they get on them, they’ll be after us.’

But they stay to watch a moment or two longer as Montagu’s camp followers arrive on the field from the road south and begin scavenging among the dead, and Thomas supposes there must be scant pickings today, since so few of Hungerford and Roos’s men stayed to be killed, nor did Somerset’s command acquit themselves as they might have wished, and he imagines that apart from Percy’s dead, most of the few bodies left on the field must be those of unlucky archers, with little on them of much value beyond their bows.

‘Where are the nobles?’ Thomas asks. ‘Where is Grey? Where is Somerset? Did anyone see them go?’

‘They ran just as quickly as us,’ one of the men mutters says, ‘and further too.’

‘They’d’ve only stopped to collect their gear and to give King Henry the glad tidings.’

‘He will be sore depressed,’ another says.

‘If there was ever a man used to being told that kind of thing,’ John Stump says, ‘then that man is King Henry.’

And they gather what they can in the falling gloom, and they help Jack to his feet, and they creep away, darting across the track and into the trees on the other side as best they can. They carry him almost a mile, following the tracks they made that morning, unmolested by any of Montagu’s prickers, until they are met in a dip by a picket of Roos’s men, and there is some ill feeling and some muttered accusations, but there is nothing anyone can do, and a fight, they all know, will just be a fight.

‘There was nothing we could do,’ one of them says. ‘It was those bastards in white, with the bloody crows. As soon as the first arrow landed they just – they just packed up and ran. All that bloody training they did, d’you remember? This and that. Ooof. But when it came to it, they just fucked off, left us dangling on the flank, and we just – well.’

He ends with a shrug.

They enter King Henry’s camp from the west, and must make their way past Riven’s men, who it seems have had the time to hunt a deer, and they are roasting it on a spit over a bed of flames, and the smell is heavenly, and there are ale mugs in their hands and though they are silent, the men seem not as abashed as Thomas supposed those who have broken and fled from a battlefield might. They look like men who have completed something together: the shearing of a flock, say, or the building of a wall.

‘Bastards,’ one of Roos’s men mutters, but very quietly.

They find Horner, sitting on their cart, looking very sad in the light of a low fire. He has discarded his harness and is more familiar in riding boots and travelling coat. He is pleased to see them.

‘Is there any news?’ Thomas asks.

Horner shrugs.

‘It was not a complete disaster,’ he lies. ‘We still hope to have enough men to catch Montagu and his Scots on their way south back to Newcastle.’

‘What about Percy?’ someone asks.

Horner tilts his head.

‘There was nothing we could do,’ he says, repeating what he has obviously been told. ‘And besides, if anything, his death will stir up the North.’

THERE ARE SOME
wounded to tend the next day: men who have limped into King Henry’s camp, or been carried in by their friends, and if they have lived this long, then there is a chance they will live longer. And so Katherine is busy during the morning with the needle she has learned to sharpen, and the tow from another jack she has had to cut up, but there is not very much she can do for their wounds other than clean them and get the men to keep them clean and get them to pray they do not start giving off that foul smell or weeping the watery pus. She finds tears in her eyes when one boy dies of a stab in the stomach, some time before noon, though the end is a mercy really, and a friar has come and he is able to offer some spiritual consolation, for what that is worth.

By the end of it, she thinks Grey has lost five men dead and if the black pestilence does not strike those she has stitched up, then that will be all.

‘Not too bad,’ Horner says.

‘Will we go back to Alnwick?’ she asks him, ‘or Bamburgh?’

‘Neither,’ Horner admits. ‘We are to keep moving.’

She is disappointed. She has become bone weary of sleeping on the ground, of waking with aches and pains beyond the usual stiffness, to begin again the daily competition to find enough to eat before nightfall. And though every day they send out patrols of scurriers to find fresh supplies of bread and ale and oatcakes, they have scoured the land of more or less anything edible, and it is only the sea that provides sustenance now: endless fish soup which they must reinforce with handfuls of alexanders and nettles, and it tastes so bad she can hardly hold it down, though the others manage, and laugh at her, telling her she is as fussy as a merchant with a choice of meats on his board, but really: the stuff makes her gag. One advantage of this poor diet is that her monthly flowering has stopped again, and she is grateful. A rough camp such as this is no place for the subterfuge needed to hide that.

The scurriers must also keep a lookout for Montagu and his army, which will soon be coming back from Scotland with the Scottish negotiators, though she cannot imagine what they will do if they manage to find them, since King Henry’s army is now much dwindled after that day in the field at Hedgeley Moor, with some men being, as John Stump puts it, ‘too dead to fight’, while others have managed what they could not, and have melted away in the course of the nights that followed the day. King Henry has left the camp, of course, though is said to be close by, and Somerset has taken the precaution of sending the rest of Riven’s men away to join him wherever he is, so they do not fight with the rest of the men who think they are cowards for running at Hedgeley Moor and blame them for its loss.

The Duke of Somerset has stayed in camp though, and the others who were gathered around the board at Bamburgh, whom she supposes now have nothing left to lose, including Lords Roos and Hungerford and their men who spend so much of their time blaming Giles Riven for their having run at Hedgeley Moor. Tailboys is there, too, though he has a tent of his own, and he keeps his own company close by.

The others huddle on sawn logs around the charred circles of last night’s fires, and since they are unused to sleeping on the ground, even in late spring, and they suffer and have become beleaguered and discouraged. The lower orders, the humbler men-at-arms, the archers, the billmen and the women and children who service them, seem to fare better, for they are used to this sort of hardship, having spent long weeks in the open, and rather than merely trying to remain still until time has passed, they confront the misery as if it does not exist.

Even so though, they are all waiting, waiting for something.

Thomas is waiting for Jack.

‘When will he be strong enough to ride?’ he asks her.

And she can only say she does not know. The boy is still not right. He is still hot to the touch and sometimes he lapses into garbling.

‘Montagu will come back soon,’ Thomas says, ‘and there will be another attack.’

‘Can we not put him on a cart? Take that?’

‘We would get no further than the top of the hill before the prickers came for us,’ he tells her, gesturing to its brow where two men wait on horseback, sentries looking both ways.

‘Others manage it,’ she says.

‘Not on a cart.’

So she looks down at Jack, who lies under their cart, covered by a mound of cloaks, with his head resting on a log, his skin dewed with his own sweat, and she shakes her head.

‘We can’t leave him,’ she says.

‘No,’ Thomas agrees, though it is through set teeth.

She wishes she knew what was wrong with him. She wishes the physician Payne were here. He would know what to do.

Three days later, on the day when the bearded priest appears among them to lead a celebration to commemorate the finding of the True Cross, when Jack is no better but no worse, Montagu’s army makes its reappearance, just as Thomas had predicted. It is some of Roos’s men – led by Roos’s own brother – who discover it, or traces of it: a great furrow of hoofand footprints in the mud on the road, and the marks left by wheel rims. But by the time word is sent back to Somerset, Montagu and his army and his Scotsmen are gone, disappeared south, down to Newcastle to meet King Edward’s negotiators. It is easy to imagine them laughing as they go.

Some pretend Montagu’s unimpeded passage is a bitter blow, and they talk of rueing their missed chance, but Katherine is becoming certain it is only the Duke of Somerset who really wants to fight Montagu’s men again, and if the others were truthful, they would admit to wanting to make peace with him, and to seeking King Edward’s grace, and to giving up on all this, and to wishing they were able to go home again.

Home, she thinks. And she thinks of nothing. She has no home, she remembers, and nothing to tether her, and she discerns a flicker of regret for the second passing of Lady Margaret Cornford.

Thomas comes back from the makeshift stabling. He looks grimly purposeful.

‘We are moving,’ he says. ‘South.’

Moving south means that they will try to bring Montagu to the field again, and so the next morning, the mood in the camp is odd, shifting, uncertain. It will be good to be away from here, Katherine supposes, where they have been too long, licking their wounds like dogs, and where morale has withered to nothing, but knowing they are going south to fight an enemy that seems unbeatable means that she, along with many of the other men, lacks the energy to go about the business of breaking camp with any real enthusiasm, and it only gets worse when later that morning Thomas returns, looking grimmer than ever, with the news just brought by messenger that King Edward is moving up from London with a huge army and what he calls ‘ordnance’.

‘Ordnance? What is that?’

‘Guns,’ he says. ‘Huge guns on wheels. He is bringing them up from the Tower of London.’

Then at least it will take him weeks to come, she thinks.

‘The Earl of Warwick is coming, too,’ he goes on, ‘and William Hastings.’

William Hastings. That is a name she has not heard in a long while. She feels another twinge of sorrow, of mourning for something gone.

With men like that coming, she thinks, it means this will have to end, one way or another, and looking at the men around her, she knows that it will really only be one way, and not the other. It is curiously depressing. All these men, she thinks, will be dead soon, and in the most terrible ways, unless they do something about it. She has been so long with them, they have become so familiar, they have become her family, but now that she can feel the world closing in on them, now that she can feel it all coming to an end, she feels a pitiful nostalgia for these weeks gone by.

She gets Thomas to help load Jack on to the cart.

‘How long will we be?’ she wonders. She does not want Jack to have to jounce over the roads for many days. Three days, he supposes, and she cannot help but worry. The carters have only one ox left, the other in the team having been killed in circumstances that are both mysterious and obvious, and the remaining ox is pining for its teammate, and it has ceased to eat and has lost patches of hair on its hide. Nevertheless they whip it until it takes the strain of the cart and begins to tow it, grinding along the track toward the road that cuts across Hedgeley Moor. They find this, and the site on which they mostly ran from Montagu’s men, and they walk south all day. The road is smooth but at every hole or shifted flagstone, the cart throws Jack in the air and he groans and shudders. Katherine walks by its side, with her hand on his shoulder.