Kingmaker: Broken Faith (52 page)

But when they get there, Katherine is in her blue dress, and has her head dressed in linen, and she is unsteady on her feet after so long in bed, and she is plainly scared. Payne is with her, his arms filled with his things. Around them Grey’s servants are bustling about collecting books and ewers and a plate of pewter, and tossing them in wicker chests.

‘We’re moving to the northward gate,’ she says.

There is another great crack from across the fields and the servants duck. The stone hits the wall below and a candleholder jumps on a coffer.

‘By all the saints,’ one of them says. ‘That is another head!’

‘Why is he doing it?’ Katherine says. ‘Warwick is mad. All he had to do was tell Grey he would be spared. He could have lied. He could have avoided all this.’

He takes her hand just as another stone clips the battlements of the southern wall with a spray of rubble, and thick dust drifts in the air like a heavy rain. Someone starts screaming.

‘Should we help?’ Katherine asks.

‘There is nothing to be done,’ Payne tells her.

Grey comes up the steps. He is red-faced with drink, back to his furious best, railing against Riven who will not let them move to the keep.

‘Dear God!’ he says. ‘He was much more tolerable when he was sweating with pain in his stinking little chamber. Now he is strong enough to practise his swordplay, have you seen him? Out in the bailey with a hand-and-a-half, or that bloody pollaxe of his, making all these grotesque moves as if he were a German dance master.’

‘Is he out there now?’

‘Not if you did not see him. The bastard. He is probably ear deep in a suckling pig. I have to say – he is the only reason I am hanging on here now. If every one of these bloody stones means one of his men gets the chop, so be it! Eventually we will get to him!’

He stops a servant and rummages in one of the wicker trunks and pulls out a large costrel.

‘Blow me! I am almost to my last bottle.’

He unstoppers it and they smell his distillation.

Another boulder crumps against the walls. Dust drifts from the ceiling.

‘Close,’ Grey says. ‘I think that was one of the big chaps – “Newcastle”, perhaps, or “London”. Next one’ll be “Dijon”, I’d wager.’

There is sand in Thomas’s mouth.

‘We can’t just stand here,’ Payne says. He is deathly pale, shaking.

Grey takes a long swig, almost emptying the bottle. He gasps afterwards and shudders. His eyes are instantly bright and his outlook, too.

Another stone.

‘
Jesu!
’ Payne cries. He is weeping now.

‘Pull yourself together, man,’ Grey says. ‘Have some of this.’

He passes the bottle to Payne, who holds it to his pursed lips and takes a sip that makes him cough and his eyes water. He passes the costrel to Thomas.

‘We should arm ourselves,’ Grey declares. ‘Put on harness and sally out. We could do battle with them in a place of our own choosing. Not be stuck here like voles in a bucket.’

Thomas drinks and is forced to gasp.

‘Good, isn’t it?’ Grey says. ‘D’you know, if I get out of this alive, I might go into trade. Set a son up, perhaps, or a daughter, and sell this stuff for proper coin. A groat a go. As was drunk by St Christopher himself. Why not?’

Another crash makes them all jump. Grey shakes the costrel. It is empty.

‘You bugger!’ he says to Thomas. ‘Finishing my supplies! Lucky I’ve another. Ahah.’

And he turns just as two more servants pass with another hinged coffer, and he stops them and opens it and fishes out a bag. It is a long-strapped bag, shiny with wear, with a mended hole in its side. Katherine gasps, and Thomas finds too late that he has taken a stride forward and has snatched the bag from Grey’s hands.

‘What the—? You!’ And Grey is reaching for his knife, but Thomas ignores him. His heart is thundering but as he unties the points he already knows it is not the ledger within, from the weight and shape of the thing, and sure enough, it is a leather bottle, a costrel of Grey’s distillation. Grey makes no move, but stands clutching the knife and glaring at Thomas with his nostrils flared and the blade shaking in his hand.

Thomas hands the bag and bottle back. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘I thought—’

‘What did you think, you little weasel? Snatching it from me like that. I was going to offer you some, as a Christian gentleman, but I do not think I will now.’

‘Do you mind telling us where you acquired the bag?’ Katherine asks.

Grey is calmed by her politeness.

‘This? Why?’

Another stone hits the castle, close enough to make the table jump, and Thomas thinks he can hear the stones of the wall and ceiling grind against one another like loose teeth. Grit falls from the rafters. Payne begins a prayer.

‘It contained something that we lost,’ Katherine tells Grey, straightening up from where she had ducked. ‘Something we held dear.’

‘Something
you
held dear?’

‘It was ours,’ Thomas says, too quickly.

Grey looks at him through compressed eyes.

‘I got it from Giles Riven,’ he says.

‘He stole it from us.’

‘Did he? Did he now?’

He stares at them. He is trying to make up his mind about something.

‘It is just a book,’ Thomas says.

Grey scoffs.

‘Is it?’ he says. ‘Just a book? Where did you come by it?’

Thomas and Katherine look to one another. Can it be that Grey knows its value?

‘We were given it,’ Katherine tells him.

‘Given it! Given it! By? A man? A man you met? In an inn?’

Neither says a word.

‘But do you know what it is? What it shows?’

Again, neither answers.

‘Dear God,’ he says. ‘You know! You brought it here, and you – dear God. So it is true. It took me a while to see what it is, d’you know? But I knew what to look for, didn’t I? The moment I saw it, I thought, ahhhh! Sir Ralph, this is it. This is it. Now you can check, see if that fucking Frenchman was telling the truth.’

He lets the bag drop by his feet and as he unstoppers the bottle he watches them with glassy eyes, his Adam’s apple bobbing twice, three times. Christ, Thomas thinks, how can he stand it? When he finishes he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘You know what he told me?’ he says. ‘That Frenchman? Billbourne? Blayburgh? Name like that. He told me something I’ll never forget. Thought he was lying at the time. Nearly killed him for it, though by Christ he was a big fellow. I thought, no. He is a liar. Not Proud Cis. He means some other lord’s lady. She would not lie with an animal such as this. Not a French animal such as him. Blaybourne?’

He looks at the bottle again. He smiles at it. Then up at them.

‘Do you think the Earl of Warwick will let me live? I was thinking. If I gave him this book. I’ve got it here somewhere.’

He looks around. There are fewer and fewer places it could be. Another stone. A sprinkling of dust from shifting rafters.

‘Where is it?’ Thomas asks.

Grey’s head seems to wobble. He grins. He is wholly drunk again. He waves his arm to indicate the room. A servant returns, crouched over. He is about to take a coffer.

‘Don’t take that!’ Grey says. ‘I need it. I need it to just …’

And he sits on it with a gusty sigh and looks up at them, pleased with himself.

Thomas and Katherine stare at one another. She nods. He starts to walk toward Grey, and he means to help him to his feet, so that she can retrieve the ledger from the coffer beneath, when there is a huge din and suddenly the room makes no sense. The floor seems to have been whipped from under him. It yaws and he finds himself staggering as the planks fall away. There is a tremendous noise and the wall comes billowing in toward him. It is almost as if liquid. Until he smacks against it and his cry for Katherine is not even half-formed before it is cut off. He is thrown back and out and down and out into the darkness. He can feel booming pain in his arms and his legs and his chest and his face and he cannot breathe and then – nothing.

THOMAS WAKES IN
total darkness. He cannot move. Not even his eyelids. He does not know if they are open or closed. He is being pressed from all directions, lain upon, flattened, pushed, pulled. Pain throbs and flares in every part of his body. With each beat of his heart it seems to course up and down his limbs. Boom boom. Boom boom. But he is alive, at least, he thinks, though for how long and to what purpose, he cannot say. He is conscious though. He can feel grit between his teeth. He spits. The spit does not come back on him. He is lying face down. Well, that is something. He moves the fingers of his right hand. It is by his right hip. Dust and dirt. The same with the left hand, though they are flung out behind him on the left. They feel as if they are moving. Then he moves his hands. They flap as they should. He draws his left hand towards himself. It is blocked by something hard and angular. A block of dressed stone, a rafter, something like that. He tries to roll on to one side. He can. He is not trapped. It is only that – by Christ it hurts. Now he can see daylight. It is grey, swirling, and it stings his eyes. It settles on him like grit. It is grit. He spits again. And again. He is on his right side now. He lifts his head. He can hear voices. They are very vague. Not distant. Just muffled. Then there are hands. A man in hose and short boots, russet doublet under a russet jack. Thomas feels himself explored, felt for handholds. Strong hands under his arm, and then another one cradling his head. He is being pulled out. Dragged out. He feels plucked from something, though not so cleanly.

‘You lucky bastard!’ the man is saying. ‘Look at that!’

Thomas is held up. More hands. Someone slapping his chest.

‘Give him some water.’

‘Sit him down. Careful!’

He has to cough. It is burning and hacking.

‘That’s right, get it out. By the Mass, you’ve eaten a bloody brick.’

Thomas feels the water turning all the dust into mud in his mouth.

‘Steady!’

He opens his eyes fully. Looks up. Closes them again. Opens one. It is less gritty than the other. He aches all over.

‘Katherine,’ he says.

‘What? What’s he saying?’

‘Katherine?’

He stands.

‘Whoa! Sit down, boy. You’re bleeding from every bit of your body!’

‘Katherine!’

He is standing outside, behind where the eastward gatehouse used to be. Its wreckage is all around him, a slew of masonry and stone and spars and rafters. There are tiles. Broad sheets of slate. Tiles. Plaster dust. Lengths of splintered wood. The gatehouse has lost its top storey and is a stump, a gap in the already pocked wall. He can see a booted leg. He clambers toward it and then stops. He does not want to tread on anyone. The three men with him look uncertain.

‘How many of you were there?’ one asks.

Thomas tries to think.

‘Five,’ he says. ‘No. Six. No. Five.’

He looks around. For a few moments the world is swimming, floating; up is down and down is up. It slips and spins. He is dizzy.

‘Katherine!’

There is nothing. Thomas picks his way to the booted leg. He knows it is Payne.

‘Help me,’ he says and after a moment they do. They come awkwardly over the blocks and rubble and they help him with a long beam that they shift away to expose Payne below. He is dead, bleeding from his nose and his ears. Even his eyes.

Thomas feels grief welling within him like an illness. It is not for Payne, though. It is for himself and for what he knows he will find when he lifts the next stone, or the one after that.

‘Katherine! Katherine!’

He starts pulling at stones, hurling them behind him. He hefts a rafter and levers it away. The three men are impressed.

‘Must be an archer,’ one mutters.

‘Handy for this sort of thing,’ the other says.

‘Let’s give him a hand. Who’re we looking for?’

‘Stupid question.’

They begin, all four of them, to work from one edge toward the gatehouse. Some pieces are too big to move.

‘Least there’s no one under that one.’

They leave Payne undisturbed.

He calls her name constantly. His hands and shoes are torn and they were right: he is bleeding from every inch. He leaves smears of blood, and dust turns to thick mud.

‘Katherine!’

He finds the stone Warwick’s gunners used. It is a rough ball, chipped by many hammers, and it is cracked, and has fallen apart into two almost perfect half-spheres. But Katherine is not there.

He stops and looks up. The men are puzzled.

‘You sure, mate? Five of you?’

Could they be on the first floor? Still in the solar? He scrambles up the pile of broken building and on to the first floor. He sees Grey straight away. On his back. Half in, half out of the blocks, a rafter across his belly, mouth open, dust so thick on his face – even on his tongue – that he might be an unpolished statue. He is still clutching the costrel of spirit. Thomas feels a moment of savagery. You brought this on yourself, he wants to shout. You brought this on yourself. He clenches his eyes but cannot stop the tears squeezing out. If only you had died sooner, he thinks.

He stands. He takes the costrel from Grey’s not quite limp grasp, wipes the top, takes a long pull. Christ, it is strong. It burns all the way to his stomach. One of the other men has climbed up to join him. Thomas offers him the drink and the man doesn’t mind if he does. But before he drinks, he stops, and gestures with his hand. Pointing. There. Thomas looks. And oh, Christ. There she is. Her feet, in her grey woollen socks. Her shoes have gone. She is face down, under a pile of slates and beams. Thomas scrambles over. He starts tearing at the slates, sending them slipping away. They slide down the staircase to the floor below.

There is a shout.

‘For the love of God! Thomas!’

It is Jack, alive, knocked down the steps.

‘Help!’ Thomas shouts at him. ‘Help me. She’s trapped.’

And Jack comes slowly scrambling up the steps on all fours. He is bleeding from a cut on his forehead, and his eyes are bloodshot, and his left hand does not seem to be working so he is like a limping dog as he comes. When he is there, he helps as best he can, dragging stones away one-handed, splintered beams and a piece of broken rafter.