Kingmaker: Broken Faith (48 page)

‘How do you feel?’ Thomas asks.

‘Better.’

‘We will have to sleep out tonight,’ he tells her, ‘but tomorrow we can turn north, and there will be a day or so more before we reach the castle.’

‘So we really are going back to Bamburgh?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I thought that was where you wanted to be. With Master Payne?’

And she nods again, because that is right. The thought of a few days in the saddle, though … Jack meanwhile has found a coal pit, disused. He drops a stone down it. It must be thirty foot deep. Beyond is a tiny hovel, dry-stone built, its roof fallen in, but better than nothing. Probably the old miners’ quarters, abandoned at the same time as the mine.

‘Thomas,’ she says. ‘I do not think I can ride any further.’

Thomas is anxious.

‘What do you think, Jack? John? Are we far enough?’

They are doubtful, but they too are tired, and the hovel is filled with dried leaves and though it smells of fox, they can each imagine lying down for the night, and they agree Montagu’s men will probably not be out in the woods looking for men such as them, but will be searching the road’s length, or celebrating their victory and savouring the delights of Hexham.

‘Come on, then,’ he says and they hobble their horses behind the hovel where there is a scattering of mossy bones of God knows which animals, and the men join Jack by the coal pit throwing sticks down it until the air grows cooler still as dusk leaches away to night, and then they join Katherine in the hovel, all of them with their feet intertwined, and they finish the bread and the water, and Thomas tells them about his role in the battle they witnessed: how he loosed half his arrows, always with one eye on what was going on behind him this time, and then he felt something, some lack of resolve in the others, and then there was daylight behind him, and so he turned and ran, and it was Horner who stood aside for him, and he does not know what would have happened to him, he just knew he wanted to be gone. And so he ran.

‘Do you think anyone like Somerset will have got off the field?’

‘Not in full harness, I don’t suppose.’

‘Perhaps he yielded? Went to Montagu on bended knee, after the King’s grace again?’

‘I tell you,’ John Stump warns, ‘Montagu’s not one to make friends.’

‘What about all the others?’

‘I expect we’ll see some of them back in Bamburgh.’

‘If we ever make it.’

She falls asleep first, wrapped in her travelling cloak and leaning against Thomas, his arm around her shoulder, the back of his hand in her lap.

IT RAINS HEAVILY
that night, and Thomas is awake just before dawn, lying damp in a pool. Katherine still sleeps on dry leaves next to him, just a bundle of clothes, and John Stump and Jack are huddled together for warmth on the other side of the low-walled hut. They too are dry. Thomas gets up and goes to the rivulet and thanks the Lord for his deliverance the day before, and he says a prayer for the souls of John Horner in particular, and the others in Grey’s company in general.

His thoughts turn again to Giles Riven. Can the man really have manoeuvred himself so cleverly? To have taken King Henry from the side of his closest supporters and placed him in a trap to be sprung by his own son, without anyone even suspecting, and all this from his sickbed? Or perhaps he was never as injured as he feigned? Perhaps he lingered there to avoid King Henry’s court, or to avoid being sent on any pointless sorties during which he or his men might be injured. Perhaps that was it? And when King Edward has King Henry safe in his dungeon, what will he do to reward the man who helped put him there? Cornford Castle will be the very least of it, that much is obvious.

And meanwhile, Thomas thinks, look at me. I am squatting here by a murky stream in sodden clothes with not a penny in my purse, and a woman whom I cannot marry and who is expecting a child by me in a few months. I have no prospect of putting a roof over her head, let alone the child’s, let alone mine. I am harried by men determined to kill me, and my only recourse is to return to a castle that is surely about to have to endure a siege, and in which I must serve a mad lord who drinks too much, and who in turn serves a king and a cause in which I have no interest, no stake.

Just then Katherine wakes. She comes down to the stream, and she looks pallid, green even, and she falls on her hands and knees and retches. He kneels next to her, and cups water for her and strokes her back and holds her hair, and eventually she shudders.

‘It is a punishment,’ she says after rinsing her mouth in the water. ‘Because of what I have done. With you.’

He stands, rocking slightly.

‘No,’ he says. But he can’t think of anything else to add and she looks at him. Now she has been sick, she is very pale, almost translucent, and she looks very fragile.

‘I am married,’ she says. ‘In the eyes of God and Man, I am married to Richard Fakenham, and so I am to be punished for my sins.’

‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘Margaret Cornford is dead. Dead! You understand? She died twice, once more than anyone I know, and so she can never now come back.’

She looks at him levelly.

‘Well, that is nice,’ she says.

He sighs.

‘I only meant—’ he says, and he shrugs. ‘Sorry. I don’t know what to say. You know I will do anything and everything for you. You just need to tell me what.’

‘I should like a bed,’ she says, ‘in which to lie.’

And he feels worse than ever.

‘We shall go to find Master Payne,’ he tells her, ‘and you shall have a bed, and a roof over your head even.’

He remembers Sir John mentioning that those whom the Lord loves he first tempers in the flames. Well, he thinks, the Lord must love him and Katherine abundantly, for He is testing them sorely, while He must loathe the Riven family, for He gives them everything in His power. For a brief moment, Thomas wonders if it might not be better to be loved by the Lord just a little less.

And Katherine looks at him and tears fill her eyes and he realises that she is terrified. Terrified of everything. And he steps forward and he puts his arms around her and he pulls her tight and she is stiff and unyielding and he says over and over again: ‘It will be all right. It will be all right.’

And he is holding her just like this, and she is beginning to soften in his arms, to come to him, when they hear shouting on the track below.

He lets her go.

‘Quick,’ he says, and together they run crouching back to the hovel. Jack and John are half-asleep still. He hushes them. He pulls his sword from the sheath and Jack does likewise and they wait in silence, their eyes big and white in the gloom.

The shouting continues. Someone is urging someone else on. Shouting out to get the bloody things moving for the love of Christ. The shouts are getting closer, more distinct.

What is going on? Thomas watches over the wall.

Christ!

There are men down there, coming up the track. More than a handful. He makes a sign to John and Jack: down now. They look at one another and raise quizzical eyebrows, and then he peers back over the broken-down wall.

They are much closer and, oh, dear God! It is Tailboys! Tailboys and his men. They are coming up the track toward them, labouring with their mules. Why are they here? Where are they going? Thomas has no idea. Tailboys is still shouting.

‘Come on!’ he screams at his men. ‘Come on!’

Thomas looks over at their own horses. They are tired, cold, thirsty probably. Could they outstrip Tailboys on his mules? Perhaps. If they ran for it now. And if Tailboys has no archers with him. But Thomas is pretty certain the track ahead leads only to another coal mine. Could they hide in there? Perhaps. But not with the horses, and anyway, no, look, it is too late. Tailboys is there, on his own horse.

‘Use the stick!’ he is shouting at a man slapping a mule. ‘Come on!’

And the rain begins pattering among the leaves on the canopy above, then silver in the air around them, and the men behind the mules are urging their animals on, beating their hindquarters with sticks and even the flats of their swords, and others are hauling on the ropes around the animals’ necks, but the mules are panicking. Men are slipping in the leaves, cursing the animals, swearing at them, but they cannot go any faster because they are laden with hugely heavy bags, and they are obviously exhausted, and yet Tailboys is still screaming at the men to keep them coming.

Jack is shaking his head in bewilderment and Thomas knows just as little.

Tailboys’s men move up the path. There are four mules being manhandled by eight men, with Tailboys on his horse at the front. Lagging behind are two more men, their necks craned, staring backward as if they are being followed. They have nocked bows and a bag of arrows apiece.

Tailboys calls over the muleteers’ heads.

‘Any sign?’

And one of the two men at the back tells him there is none so far, and Tailboys shouts again at the muleteers and now the procession is just past the hovel, when one of the mules, the one at the back, seems to stagger, just as if it has been worked to death, and it stumbles, and its forelegs go from under it. The man with the rope tries to haul it up, but it is no good and the mule keels to one side, and then the ground seems to give way from under it, for the next moment it is slipping sideways in a tangle of hooves and the man on the rope leaps back and lets it go sliding through his hands and the mule has gone, slipping, sliding, falling with a dull fumble into the depths of the coal mine.

Tailboys turns and emits a roar of such rage that Thomas flinches.

‘Get it!’ he shouts. ‘Get down there and fucking well get it!’

But then the man at the back hisses for all to be quiet and though Tailboys is purple with rage, and spitting, he can say nothing. He jumps from his horse and stalks through the leaves back to where the mule has slipped from sight. He peers down. He looks at the men who let the animal go, and it seems for a moment that he is going to push one or both in after the animal, but sense prevails, and he glances at the other men looming over him and they do look as murderous as John suggested, and so Tailboys has to say nothing. He turns and walks back to his horse. He climbs up into the saddle and jerks his hand forward and the little party set out after him as best they can.

A long moment later and they are gone along the track, dipping into the trees, and there is complete silence in the ravine.

‘Christ,’ Jack mutters.

He begins to rise, but then drops back down again.

‘Christ Christ Christ,’ he says.

‘What is it?’

And Thomas peers over, and from the track below a party of horsemen come picking their way up through the trees. They are in red livery, in helmets and matching harness, all carrying lances, moving silently. They are Montagu’s prickers, and they are tracking Tailboys and his men.

No one breathes.

Thomas watches them come into view. They are grim-faced, hard-bitten and implacable, with faces like anvils, and of course they know what they are about, but because of the rain in the night, Thomas and Katherine and Jack and John Stumps’s tracks have softened and leaves have folded over their prints, so the hovel attracts hardly a glance, and with their horses hidden behind, all Thomas can do is pray they are silent for the moment, and thank God they are, and then after a momentary pause when it is almost possible to feel Montagu’s men looking at the hovel, the soldiers turn and continue on their way up along the tracks left by Tailboys and his men. One of them stops and looks at the scrapings on the side of the mine shaft, but he says nothing, and can see nothing down there from the saddle of his horse, and after a long moment they are gone, disappeared among the ash trees.

‘Quick,’ Thomas tells the others. ‘We have to go. More will come. Or they will come back.’

They run around the back for their horses. He helps Katherine up into her saddle.

‘What were they doing?’ she asks.

‘God knows,’ Thomas admits, ‘but good riddence to them all. Come! Quick.’

They strike north as soon as they find a path, and it leads up over ridge after ridge of rough moorland, all the way to the wall the Romans built. They cross this, and they camp against it that first night, never agreeing which side of it is the best to sit against to avoid the wind. In the morning it rains briefly, then the sun shines, and then it rains again, and then the sun shines again. It is like this all day. The wind is constant.

That day they see men on horses moving through the unfurling bracken. They are too far away for their livery to be seen, but they are riding in a solid block, unhurriedly, and they can only be Montagu’s men. They stop and watch under the cover of some trees until the riders have disappeared, blending into the distant countryside.

‘I suppose they are moving up to Alnwick,’ Thomas says. ‘Perhaps King Edward’s army has already already arrived with all its guns.’

They ride all that day and the next. They see more of Montagu’s men, and to avoid them they are forced to ride in a wide loop that means they cannot use a bridge but must ford a river, becoming soaked again in the process, and they must spend an extra night in the open, but they also find some men who, after a tense moment, admit to being in the retinue of Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth. They agree to travel together.

‘I think Sir Humphrey got away,’ one of them says, ‘but we lost him in the aftermath. It was chaos. Montagu’s men were in Hexham before the morning was out, and there were parties of them riding through the country, just – all over the place.’

He is coated with shame, and can barely look Thomas in the eye, but the others are fascinated by Katherine, of course, and they come riding close in an attempt to engage her in conversation, only for Jack and John Stump, who know these sorts of men, to cut them off and send them scuttling.

On the evening of the fourth day, they see the castle at last.

‘There she is,’ John Stump says, pointing to Bamburgh’s stark stone lines. ‘Looks a bit better in the spring, doesn’t she? Bit more inviting.’