Kingmaker: Broken Faith (55 page)

The silence is awkward for a long moment, broken eventually by Mayhew.

‘I do not expect you to tell me,’ he says. ‘But others will wish to know.’

Thomas allows himself a glance at Mayhew. When he looks back, she is still alive.

‘It is not an easy story to tell,’ he admits.

‘No,’ Mayhew supposes.

And Thomas leans against the bed, with a hand on Katherine’s arm, and he intends to start to try and tell her story, in the manner of a confession, to expiate his sin, to make a downpayment on the sum he would willingly pay to have her live, but fatigue overtakes him. His eyes close, and a moment later his chin is against his chest, and he is asleep.

He wakes at Matins when it is still dark and he touches her hand.

It is still warm.

He wakes again at Prime, and her arm is yet warm.

He is woken some time in the morning by Mayhew’s servant.

She is still alive.

Mayhew is there. He is looking serious.

‘She is still bleeding,’ he says.

Thomas holds her hand, and he is certain she knows it is him, and that she squeezes his fingers.

‘You must keep up your own strength,’ Mayhew says. He offers him ale. It is very good.

‘There is someone waiting to see you,’ Mayhew tells him.

And Thomas knows that this is it. This is where he must explain to Richard Fakenham why he has brought the woman who was once his wife, whom he thought dead, back to him, half-alive, and with child. He takes another series of swallows of the ale. Mayhew is right. He must have some strength for this.

He hears voices without. Long and grumbling. Then the flap opens and Mayhew brings in Thomas’s visitor. Old, almost as round as tall, a swag of white hair under a dark cloth cap he has bent to one side, he is in very sombre clothes, as if in mourning, and unsteady on his feet.

‘Thomas!’ he cries. ‘By all that is holy! Is that you?’

It is Sir John Fakenham. He is peering at him through his eyeglasses.

Thomas cannot speak for a long moment. Something is blocking his throat.

‘Sir John,’ he manages. ‘Sir John.’

‘Let me have a look at you, Thomas,’ Sir John says. ‘Let me rest my eyes on you again, though for the love of God I can hardly see a thing these days. And these bloody things only seem to make things worse.’

Thomas stands before him while Sir John peers long and hard at him. His eyes are very vague, milky even, and his eyeglasses so scratched and chipped it is a wonder anyone can see a thing through them. He has aged sharply this last year.

‘Ha!’ he says. ‘Still got that red hair!’

‘As if he should not?’ Mayhew chides.

‘Hush, Mayhew,’ Sir John says. He takes a drink from him with clumsy, grasping fingers and then Mayhew guides him to a chair and helps him sit. He does so with a heavy sigh and then looks over at the pile that bears Katherine, pale and still as a marble effigy.

‘And Christ, this is her, is it?’

Neither Thomas nor Mayhew says a word. Thomas holds his breath.

‘I am sorry for your pains, my boy,’ Sir John says. ‘And hers. She looks like a pretty girl. Only you could have plucked such a jewel from out of so miserable a place as this, Thomas. My congratulations, boy!’

He raises his cup and drinks again. Thomas does too. He sees that Sir John has reached that age when nothing now bothers him much, and it is as if he is meeting someone he knows he will never come to know very well, so why become involved? Thomas feels the warmth of relief at having an obstacle removed, but it is tempered by the thought that none of these obstacles matters if Katherine is dead.

‘But tell me,’ Sir John goes on. ‘Tell me, my boy, what you have been up to? What news of Kit? Where is he?’

Thomas is struck silent for a moment. Kit! Dear God.

‘Kit returned home,’ he mumbles. Sir John raises an eyebrow.

‘Home, eh?’ he says, and once again Thomas is left wondering what that means. How much does Sir John know? He cannot tell.

‘I have the ledger,’ he says, to change the subject.

Sir John is instantly still, his face a passive mask.

‘The ledger, my boy? The ledger? What is this ledger?’

‘There,’ he says, pointing to it where it sits behind Katherine’s head on the board.

Sir John does not even bother to look. He could have his fingers in his ears. It is an act.

‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘I know of no ledger.’

Thomas sees what he is saying, and he might almost laugh. The trouble it has caused, the dangers it has led them to, the price it has cost; and now it lies there, something to be ignored. He might throw it on the fire, were there one alight.

‘And Giles Riven is dead,’ he says. ‘By my own hand.’

And now Sir John looks truly alarmed. He holds out his hands and hisses at Thomas.

‘Shush! Shush! Christ! Keep your voice down. Dear God! If any should hear you saying something like that it will be straight back to that bastard Edmund Riven, and he will send his murderers and assassins and what-have-you and that will be that. I will be in mourning for another six months.’

Thomas says nothing. Mourning? For whom?

‘But great God in heaven, boy, I am glad to hear that. It is bad enough that that little shit Edmund Riven is alive, even with us in the camp, can you believe it, though the Earl of Warwick will not tolerate him at council for the fearful stink of his eye – but he is still here! Still alive, and as far as I know – well, he has Cornford still, and had been aiming for greater things yet, with all his schemes. I am glad to hear his father is dead and gone to hell as he deserves. Was it a painful one? God’s bones, I have imagined it so often over the years.’

Thomas tells him how it happened.

‘But it was not before he kicked Katherine,’ he says.

Sir John nods sadly.

‘The trouble that man has caused. Makes you wonder why God allows it, sometimes, doesn’t it? My wife Isabella says these troubles are God-sent to harden us, to prove us, as a swordsmith might a blade, but she is increasingly devout thanks to that infernal canon you left with us, and I think I don’t know what to think.’

So he is not mourning for Isabella, Thomas thinks.

And now Mayhew glances over at Katherine and he frowns and comes quickly to her side. He presses a point on her neck and then shouts for his servant.

‘She is bleeding again, from within,’ he says. ‘We have applied a coagulant. There is only so much we can do.’

‘Just your best, Mayhew,’ Sir John says. ‘No man can ask for more.’

Thomas crouches next to her. She is very pale now, very drawn, the bones of her cheeks sharp, the skin drawn tight, her lips bloodless.

The servant comes. Sir John is moved. He sits next to Thomas while Katherine’s skirts are raised. There is more linen, spools of it, more urine. The faint smell of rose oil and something else that is pungent and bitter and catches at your throat. The servant mumbles prayers. He raises the crucifix in one hand and the candle in the other. Mayhew is quick, working frantically. Katherine twitches as if she were dreaming and her breath is very shallow and fast. Mayhew curses. Then he does something and he is still, applying some pressure. He looks at them both significantly, and Thomas knows this is it, the last chance. If this does not work, nothing will. A priest will need to be summoned.

Time ekes past. The light fades. The tent linen closes in on them. The servant lights another candle from the stub of the first. Mayhew is still there, pressing. Sir John slips in and out of sleep. His snoring is a light buzz. Katherine’s breathing has slowed. He can see the dark trace of her blood vessels through her pale skin. One is jumping rhythmically. A tiny beat. Then it is too dark to see that. No one says anything. A little later the other servant brings bread and soup and ale, sent by Lord Hastings. Mayhew does not move, or even look up.

Sir John wakes and mumbles something. The servant pours him ale.

‘Still with us, is she?’ Sir John asks. ‘Good. I have been praying for her. And Mayhew, he knows his stuff.’

Thomas can stand it no longer.

‘Sir,’ he asks. ‘Whom is it that you mourn?’

Sir John looks at him over the rim of his mug, and the candlelight glints in his rheumy eye, but for the first time Thomas thinks the old man has really focused on him, is really seeing him.

‘Tcha,’ he says, putting aside the mug, and looking suddenly very powdery and older yet. ‘You have been away for almost a year, haven’t you? You will not have heard. Richard. My boy. My only boy, you know. He died. Late last year. Just before Christmas. I used to love Christmas, you know? But no more shall I. It was – oh, it was always going to happen, that I knew. Once his Margaret died he was bound to follow. Still though. It was a blow. A great blow.’

Thomas returns to Katherine, and he presses her hand in his own, and relief, hope, guilt and regret plait together and coil through him. Richard Fakenham is dead. Dear God. Suddenly a vast obstacle is removed, like an old man’s stone, he thinks, and he begins to think that there is hope for them – until he remembers that nothing matters if Katherine is not there with him.

And then Mayhew makes a subtle move, a slight relaxing of his shoulders, and afterward, he is stopped still for a long moment, head bent, crouched, staring at something, and then he looks up and allows Thomas to catch his eye, and his expression, bone weary, is just about readable and he nods his head very slightly, and behind him the servant begins the Te Deum, a prayer of thanksgiving, and Thomas feels tears welling in his eyes again, and he turns to look at her, and he thinks for a moment that she has her eyes open.

‘Katherine,’ he says. ‘All is well. All is well.’

At that moment there is a booming ruffle of the heavy linen walls of the tent as the east wind off the North Sea picks up, and the candle flame wavers on its wick, and Sir John wakes with a start, and all the men look up fearfully as if something is passing overhead, and the servant crosses himself twice.

The great castles at Alnwick, Dunstanborough and Bamburgh are perhaps the mightiest of the castles in Northumberland, but they are just three of the many that stud what was in the fifteenth century known as the East March, each constructed during the early Middle Ages to protect England from the marauding Scots, and – to be fair – to serve as bases for marauding Englishmen heading the other way.

Many of them still stand – rebuilt, buffed-up, Victorianised in the case of Alnwick and Bamburgh, preserved as an austere ruin in the case of Dunstanborough – and today they, and many of the others, can be visited following a well-signposted castle route running from Warkworth in the south to Norham in the north. In the twenty-first century they are almost serene; cool and mossy and damp, often hard by meandering rivers below, romantic monuments to a distant past, but it does not take too great an imaginative leap to see them as they might have been 500 years ago, absolutely dominating the landscape as cathedrals did further south, each one a complex, whirring hub at the centre of an extensive eco-system sucking in men and materiel, food and fodder, animals and wood to burn, from miles around, and they would have been busy, loud and smelly places.

It was to these castles that, after their power was very nearly destroyed at the battle of Towton in 1461 (the subject of the first in the Kingmaker Trilogy,
Winter Pilgrims
), such Lancastrian forces as survived the rout withdrew, and it was among them that the next phase of the conflict we have come to know as the Wars of the Roses played itself out.

As with the longer span of the wars, the history of these next few years – from 1461 to 1464 – is often confusing, occasionally nonsensical, sometimes comical. Everybody changes sides at least once, usually twice, there are two kings, and everybody else is called Richard or John.

Before Thomas and Katherine arrive in the autumn of 1463, each of the three castles had been besieged by the Yorkists and taken from the Lancastrians at least once already, only for the wrong man – from the Yorkist point of view – to be given the keys afterwards. Each newly appointed castellan almost instantly reverted to the Lancastrian cause and it was from the chilly confines of these borrowed castles that the adherents of Henry VI holed up, in some discomfort and almost powerless to influence events while they waited for help from France or Burgundy or Scotland or, in fact, from more or less anyone with ‘
un peu d’argent
’. Meanwhile in London the Yorkists under Edward IV scrambled to secure their grip on the throne, and to cut off any chance of outside aid coming to those men in the castles.

Life must have been very bleak.

Options began running out very quickly, and Henry VI – not the leader his father had been, nor in fact the leader his wife, Margaret of Anjou, was – was not the man to bring the Lancastrians out of their bind, so one can imagine the excitement the beleaguered garrisons must have felt when the Duke of Somerset reverted to Henry’s cause and turned up on the drawbridge, under-equipped for the weather at that time of year having had to leap out through the window of an inn to escape Lord Montagu’s men.

Although not a markedly successful general – he led the Lancastrian army unsuccessfully at Northampton and Towton – he was full of vim, a very fine jouster, and it must have been wonderful for Henry’s men to be away from the castles for a while as he led them in search of Lord Montagu’s men, though I do not suppose many would have appreciated the rugged beauty of the Northumbrian countryside as we do today. I have looked for any mention being made of Hadrian’s Wall, incidentally, but have found none, and so I still wonder what they would have made of it. To many Englishmen of the time, any foreigner was a ‘Frenchy’ so what they would have thought of it, built by the despised Frenchies so long ago, is anyone’s guess.

The two battles described in this book – Hedgeley Moor and Hexham – were small-scale affairs, and somewhat frustrating after the incredible rigours of Towton, but they are intriguing in many ways. Very little is known of them, and such accounts as exist are, again, and as is usual, contradictory, and do not fit with the topography or military probability. Legend has grown up around Percy’s Leap at Hedgeley Moor, but did it really happen? At Hexham I have placed Somerset’s men atop Swallowship Hill facing north, which seems to me to make the most sense, but others may disagree, and be proved right, and if that is the case, then I can only admit that my guess will have turned out to be incorrect.