Kingmaker: Broken Faith (51 page)

She nods. She notices he does not use the word ‘home’ again. But still the question of what happens then looms between them, and she knows instinctively that in the time since last they spoke of this Thomas has come up with no plan further than ‘it will be all right’. She watches him studying the view through the window, and she sees how bright his eyes are, and she imagines what he can see, and she supposes it is the Earl of Warwick’s army, and she is taken back to an earlier summer, a happy and now seemingly carefree time when they were with Sir John Fakenham’s company and everything seemed so simple. She recalls the busy little Earl of Warwick with a tinge of distaste, but then she remembers the boy who has since become King Edward, and she remembers a lanky youth with a glint in his eye. Everything seemed a laugh to him, she thought, until it wasn’t, and then it was in deadly earnest. He had valued Thomas, she remembers, and she wonders if Thomas is thinking about him now, and she supposes he must wish he were not stuck here, with her, when he could be out there.

‘Have you any tidings of the ledger?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says, dropping his gaze. ‘Even though King Henry has gone, the keep is still guarded, and if I go up there, the captain will recognise me. The last time I saw him I was stained with blood from the men who attacked us in the outward postern gate tower.’

She can remember virtually nothing of the fight, and he shows her the scar on his arm as proof it happened.

‘And Jack is unharmed?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ Thomas says. ‘We have been hunting together, one of us on the lookout for something to shoot, the other for any of Riven’s men come looking for us.’

‘Do they know you killed those three men?’

‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘Riven has accused Grey of ordering it, which Grey has denied of course, but he has hardly tried to discover the truth of it. He also saw us that night, with their blood on us, but he was drunk, and cannot recall, or has chosen not to, so all we have had to do is avoid the captain of the guard of the keep—’

‘—which has meant you have not been into the keep to see if there is any sign of the ledger.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I know Riven has it,’ she says. ‘I just know it. I don’t know why, but I just do.’

He tells her about the knife they took from Riven’s men being the one stolen from Master Payne. She nods. It is as they suspected. Riven’s men were given free access to Master Payne’s goods, and took what they wanted.

‘But why the ledger? It looked valueless, and there were all Master Payne’s clothes hanging there. His cloaks. His shirts. Everything. All of it so much more covetable than a battered old book.’

Thomas shrugs.

‘They must have taken it for fire splints,’ he says again.

She shakes her head.

‘There was something he said,’ she says.

‘But if he has it,’ Thomas says, ‘he cannot have grasped its significance. If he had done so, he would have already taken it to King Henry, surely? And now he’s gone, so …?’

He shrugs.

‘What would he do now,’ she begins, ‘if he realised its significance? Riven.’

They are silent for a moment, thinking, and she supposes that with King Henry’s power so diminished there is no one to make use of the ledger’s secret.

‘He should destroy it,’ Thomas says. ‘If he has not already done so. He will not want King Edward to find that he knows such a secret as that.’

She nods, remembering the threats of tongue-tearing and foot-burning, and she sees this makes sense, but – but now that his other schemes have come to nothing and Riven has neither the King nor Bamburgh in his hands – might he not cling to this last weapon? Might he not secrete it somewhere, storing it against the uncertainty of the future? After all, there is no telling where King Henry has gone. It might be across the sea to find allies in France or Burgundy, it might be to Scotland. And there is no guarantee that Horner’s much longed-for rising across the country will not come to pass, especially if it can be proved that King Edward is not his father’s son, and should not occupy the throne. And if it were widely known, how then would the Earl of Warwick feel about supporting a king with no right to his crown? If the ledger’s secret were to surface, might that not drive a wedge between King Edward and his mighty subject?

‘So he is sitting in the keep,’ Thomas says, ‘just keeping out of trouble until Grey capitulates to the Earl of Warwick, and then he will march out with us, only he will be greeted by his son, and he will be honoured and rewarded for at least trying to hand King Henry over, and at least trying to take Bamburgh for them.’

‘And his reward will be Cornford Castle.’

‘It is not so great a reward as he was hoping, perhaps, but it is enough.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I suppose it is, but where does it leave us?’

Thomas shrugs.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘but it will be all right. I know it.’

She looks at him, then out at the guns and all the many thousands of men and their banners that snap in the breeze of the sea. Christ, she thinks. Christ. I hope you are right.

‘I think I shall have to lie down now,’ she says, and he leads her back to her mattress and he pulls up the blanket.

‘And you are really certain the guns will not be fired?’ she asks and he smiles down at her in a manner she knows is intended to be reassuring, and then he bends and kisses her forehead and he tells her he is absolutely certain the guns will not be fired, and she smiles, for she trusts him in this at least, and she places her hand on her belly, closes her eyes and goes to sleep.

The first stone is fired just before midday on the following day. The noise of the explosion in the gun rolls over them like thunder that seems to come and go, lasting unnaturally long, setting the seagulls wheeling and screaming above the heads of the men who are clutching their ears. It falls just short of its target, but it is not a complete waste, for the stone – black and round and large enough that only a tall man might get both his arms around it – skips across the ground between the meres and hits the footings of the southward curtain wall with a sharp crack and enough force to send a shower of dust and stones higher than the battlements above. The shock of its impact ripples through the castle with a clink of loosened masonry and a falling cloud of dust. The first smell is of hot, chipped stone but that is replaced by a sulphurous stink that makes them all think of hell itself.

‘Haha!’ Grey roars. ‘Haha! They’ve not the elevation!’

‘That is one head gone,’ a man beside him mutters.

Grey turns on him. ‘Shut up!’ Grey shouts. ‘Damn you! Shut up!’

The next shot, from the second of the two big guns, is louder than the first, and this time the charge is perfected, or the angle is made right, and the ball thrums as it comes. It hits the southern curtain wall halfway up, a hundred paces to their right, and there is an instant burst of dust and the air is filled with fizzing missiles – chunks of fractured stone and cement – and the castle walls tremble, and then there is a slide of clinking stones from the spot where the stone collided, and the larger blocks fall to land with a thud Thomas can feel through his boot soles.

‘Two heads,’ another mutters.

‘God damn you!’ Grey roars. ‘I will have the next man’s head myself!’

Thomas and Jack are already wondering if they want to remain on the tower’s top when a third gun is fired. This is smaller, and it throws a lighter stone which they hear throbbing through the air, passing over their heads, and they spin around to see it hit an inner wall with another boiling swirl of dust and stone. No one is injured, for there is no one nearby, but when the dust clears, the crater in the wall is as round as a man is tall, of very pale stone, and after a moment the line of masonry above it slumps, and its dressed blocks slide forward and the wall collapses along its length.

‘God’s holy wounds,’ someone murmurs. They look at one another. Then at Grey, who is still there, waving his gloved fist at the guns, bellowing some incoherent defiance. None of the other men join him, and after a moment, one by one, they begin stepping through the door to the steps that will take them down from the tower’s top and to the safety of below. Thomas and Jack join them.

‘Could pray for rain, I suppose,’ a man mutters.

‘Or for a lucky shot to carry Sir Ralph away,’ another says.

‘By Christ,’ yet another adds, ‘it should never have come to this.’

And he is right.

When Warwick’s herald rode across from camp to castle, the day before, Thomas had been behind the battlements of the main gatehouse, with Sir Ralph Grey and the man he’d made his deputy in Riven’s place: Sir Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth, who had come to the castle late and was blamed for the early botched ambush of Montagu before the battle on Hedgeley Moor. They were both drinking Grey’s distillation and they were already quite drunk as they watched the heralds coming up the track, led by a man with the Earl of Warwick’s coat of arms on his tabard, and another carrying his lord’s banner.

Grey would not let the men into the castle, lest they see how poorly provisioned they were in both men and material, and so Warwick’s herald pulled his horse up below the main gatehouse, and craned his neck up to the battlements. His coat was blazingly ornate, a composition of past coats of arms that served as a testament to his lord’s ancestry, and he was finely harnessed, though he carried no weapons, and he was escorted by ten other men in Warwick’s simple red livery, equally well arrayed in plate, equally unarmed, but on good roan horses. The matching horses was a typical Warwick touch, Thomas thought, until Grey arrived with a few of his gentlemen, and he was shunted aside to make way for better men to have better views. He went to sit with Katherine, and so listened to the negotiations unfold sitting on her mattress, his hand on her ankle.

Grey and the herald were previously known to one another, and so they began with a strained exchange of formal pleasantries that stuck in both their craws. Then Warwick’s herald asked for the keys of the castle in the name of his dread sovereign Edward, rightful King of these Isles and this Commonwealth, and Grey, not quite yet eloquent with drink, had called down to him that he could not understand a word he was saying for he had a turd in his teeth. Warwick’s herald then asked if Henry of Lancaster, late king of the realm, was within. Again Grey claimed to be unable to make sense of what the man was saying.

Warwick’s herald retained his patience. He’d pointed to the line of Warwick’s men and the guns that were being sighted and he’d reminded Grey of their power. Grey had laughed and asked what such a power might do to walls this thick, and then he’d boasted that he had many thousands of men and provisions enough to endure a siege indefinitely.

‘I am not sent to argue with you,’ the herald had called up. ‘I am here to relay the King’s offer.’

‘Very well,’ Grey had called down, feigning boredom. ‘Which is what?’

‘That in return for the keys to the gatehouse, his most gracious sovereign Edward will grant life and liberty to all men who lay down their arms and seek his merciful grace.’

There was a pause during which Sir Humphrey Neville said ‘Ha!’ and he and Grey both breathed a stifled gasp of relief.

But Warwick’s herald was not finished.

‘Save,’ he’d gone on with sombre relish, ‘save the persons of Sir Ralph Grey and Sir Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth, who will remain out of King Edward’s favour and without redemption.’

Both Grey and Neville had looked at one another. They were both very pale, but small florid patches enlivened Grey’s sunken cheeks, and then both men went for the jug at the same time, and each yielded to the other, as if a show of kindness now might somehow redeem them. Once Grey had drunk, he steeled himself, and he gripped the window’s frame, and extended his head to shout all the more loudly at the herald.

‘Damn your Earl of Warwick! Curse him! A thousand bloody damnations on his bloody head!’ he bellowed at the herald. ‘Do you hear me? I wish him dead. I wish him every hell! I will see him rot! I will see him strangled in the goddamned marketplace! I will see his corpse mauled by dogs in four corners of the kingdom! Let him come! Let him try to get us! By Christ! By Christ! By Christ!’

‘You will not yield then?’

‘No!’ Gray shouted back. ‘You do your worst, you dog! You jumped-up little bastard son of a whore! You treacherous coward! You do your worst. My men are loyal and my walls stronger yet. So, no! I do not yield.’

‘Very well,’ the herald called, and he rode a few paces from the castle walls and then turned his horse back, as if to address everyone within.

‘Then hear this!’ he’d shouted. ‘All of you. Every man. Listen to this, for it applies to you all. Because we stand so near our ancient enemy Scotland, our most dread sovereign lord King Edward especially desires to have this jewel of a castle kept whole and unbroken.’

He’d gestured behind him at the guns.

‘If you are cause of our guns being fired against these walls, then for every strike, one of you will have your head struck from his shoulders. None exempted. From castellan to spit boy!’

There was a bleak silence. Even the birds were quiet. And every man there watched Warwick’s herald turn, finished, and ride back to his camp with his escort, and there was not one of them who did not wish he were among them.

So now the fourth stone comes. This one flubbers across the meres. It does not even hit the slope but sends a great slough of water up and once again the birds take wing and wheel about, screaming in the sky.

‘That doesn’t count,’ Jack says.

But the fifth cracks into the south-eastern wall again, and this time Thomas feels it in his teeth.

‘Christ,’ he says, and then there is a cascade of stonework, and a gap appears in the wall through which they can see the beach. Across the meres there is a billow of black smoke drifting slowly above the troops.

‘Katherine!’ Thomas says.

And he and Jack set off down the winding steps.

‘We can move her up to the keep,’ Jack says.

Thomas thinks of Riven, lurking there like a spider.