Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (22 page)

Thomas shrugs.

‘That is Edward Plantagenet, the Earl of March. He’s the Duke of York’s son. He’s the King’s cousin. He’s – oh for God’s sake.’

THE EARL OF
Warwick’s fleet puts in to harbour five weeks later. It is a fine early summer’s day and they see his ships’ masts break the horizon just after dawn. When the news spreads, every bell in the Scunnage rings out. What it must have meant for the Duke of Somerset’s men, beleaguered and decimated in their castle at Guisnes, Katherine can only guess, but for Sir John Fakenham and his company of archers it is reason enough to rejoice.

‘Soon be home now, Owen,’ Dafydd says, thumping his brother on the back.

‘Home,’ Owen choruses.

Instead of any celebration though, Walter makes them work harder, as if punishing them for something they haven’t done. They spend every daylight hour practising in the butts. He picks on Thomas especially, so that almost all Katherine sees of him is as a lone figure in the distance, constantly running the length of the clearing to collect arrows, bring them back, loosing them, and running to collect them again.

The Earl’s return brings with it an increase in the number of tents outside the town walls and an increase in the level of noise across the Pale.

‘Very keen on guns, the Earl of Warwick, isn’t he?’ Dafydd moots, his hands over his ears.

‘Big ones, little ones, you name it,’ Geoffrey agrees. ‘Keen on anything new, he is.’

They are taking a rare break, gathered on the walkway of the fort, leaning against the battlements. They are staring out across the Pale towards the town, where rolling puffs of grey smoke erupt from the butts. Burgundian handgunners are down there and the air crackles with the reports of their guns. Twice that first morning they hear an unusual crump as one of the bronze-barrelled weapons bursts.

‘Don’t see what’s so great about them,’ Simon says. ‘Rather use a bow any day. Least when they break they don’t kill no one.’

‘You ever face gunfire, boy?’ Walter asks him.

Simon shakes his head.

‘Well, wait till you have before you say anything so bloody stupid again.’

Walter is still sour-tempered. He’s been thus ever since the skirmish at Newnham. The others are happier, especially with rumours of their return to England circulating.

‘Must be soon, eh? Did you see how many ships they’ve got in the harbour?’

‘I can’t bloody wait,’ Dafydd says. ‘You know what I’m going to do when I get there? I’m going to find a rich knight – you know, someone in the Duke of bloody Somerset’s affinity – and I’m going to kill him, and take everything he has, I am. I’m going to take his lands, his horse, his armour, his squire, his missus and his dogs, everything, even his chickens, aren’t I? Then I’m going to ride back home to Kidwelly with Owen here, both of us fully armoured up, see? And we’re going to kick that no-good fucker Will Dwnn right into the bloody sea.’

‘Who’s Will Dwnn?’ Red John asks.

‘Will bloody Dwnn? Don’t you know Will Dwnn? He’s the fucker who’s supposed to marry Gwen, isn’t he?’

‘Gwen,’ Owen says. His voice is deep and so larded with affection that everybody stops and looks at him.

‘Is Gwen your sweetheart, Owen?’

‘Gwen’s not his sweetheart!’ Dafydd says as if everyone should already know. ‘Gwen’s our sister.’

Walter cackles.

‘Heard about you Welshmen and your sisters.’

Before a fight can start, Walter holds out a hand. He’s pointing at the woods.

‘Now who the fuck’s this?’ he asks. A man in green is casting about in the scrub. He has a short-legged dog on a lead.

‘Richard says he is a huntsman,’ Katherine tells them. ‘He had a boy with him earlier, but he sent him off back to town.’

‘Must have found a scent,’ Geoffrey guesses. ‘The boy’ll have gone to fetch the hunting party.’

Later that morning they watch a party of horsemen on the road to Newnham. There must be a dozen or so. Those at the rear are carrying flags and around the horses’ legs run the tiny dots of dogs.

‘A hunting party,’ Walter says. ‘All we bloody need.’

‘You recognise any of the flags, Kit?’

‘There is the red saltire,’ she says.

‘The Earl of Warwick,’ Geoffrey says. ‘Coming this way.’

‘Better let Richard know.’

Geoffrey goes to find Richard. Katherine watches the party crossing the bridge. The riders stop at the fort and then emerge from behind the castle and ride through the village and start up the road towards them, along the road where they fought on St George’s Day. The bodies are gone now, some buried behind the church in a piggery, some thrown in the river. The dead horses have been dragged away by a tanner and butcher.

By the time the horsemen come over the crest of the hill, Richard and Geoffrey are in the courtyard. There are about fifteen in the hunting party, including the standard-bearers, various grooms and servants. Trotting alongside are five or six greyhounds. One of the riders is a bishop in purple. He is swarthy-faced, wearing a long fur-lined cloak. It seems almost comical that he should be there. Katherine finds herself staring at him, ignoring the man in black behind him, a cleric of some sort, ill-at-ease on horseback, and the other huntsmen, each dressed in high boots and thick coats, each with a bow and a bag of arrows.

She remembers the nerves the sisters all felt when the Bishop of Lincoln paid the priory a visit. They had scrubbed their half of the priory for weeks beforehand, and each had washed their cassocks and their bodies so that nothing might offend him. And all the while they had known he would never see them, just as they would never see him.

Richard starts out as the riders draw up.

‘My lord of Warwick,’ he calls. ‘Good day to you, sir, and may God guide you safe.’

The man at the front of the party raises his hand in salute. The clouds of yellow dust the horses kick up slowly settle. His is a black horse, ostentatiously beautiful.

‘You are Richard Fakenham?’ he asks.

‘I am, my lord.’

‘Then let me shake you by the hand,’ Warwick says, swinging his leg forward over his horse and descending lightly to the ground. ‘I have heard of your actions from my cousin the Earl of March.’

‘It was no more than my duty, my lord,’ Richard counters, shaking his hand.

‘Nonsense, nonsense. You and your men are the talk of the town. I have brought his grace Bishop Coppini all the way from Milan to meet you.’

Richard kisses the Bishop’s hand, who ignores him and keeps up a lively stream of chatter aimed at the large snowy-haired fat man sitting on the horse next to him. At first Katherine thinks this might be Sir John Fakenham come to see them from Calais, but where Sir John Fakenham’s face is open and cheerful despite his pain, this old man looks sour-tempered.

‘That’s the Earl of Salisbury,’ Walter mutters. ‘Warwick’s father. Right bastard.’

Salisbury takes Richard’s proffered hand in a half-hearted squeeze and drops it quickly. Warwick ostentatiously steps back to stand with his hands on his hips and survey the fort and the men who are gathered at its battlements. He pretends it is a fine sight.

‘So that is the famous Earl of Warwick, is it?’ Dafydd asks, staring back down.

‘Quite small, isn’t he?’ Red John says.

‘No, he’s not,’ Little John Willingham snaps. A couple of them laugh.

‘They say he never sleeps, you know? Not ever.’

‘They say he never sits down, either.’

‘And that he has his hair cut three times a week.’

‘A peacock,’ Owen says in his thick voice. Warwick is dressed in a deep purple, extravagantly puffed hunting coat that stops at his waist. His hose are lapis and his boots so pointed in the toe so that it is a wonder he can ride in them at all.

‘To think he’s our only chance of getting out of this shithole and going home.’

Warwick is asking something of Richard, who gestures to the other side of the fort where the huntsman with his dog paces impatiently through the long grass. A third man, whom none of them recognises, leans forward, both hands cupped on his saddle. Katherine thinks he looks slightly out of place, but she cannot say why.

‘Who is that?’ she asks.

‘Hastings,’ Walter says.

‘Lord Hastings?’

‘No. Just Hastings. William Hastings.’

‘Stupid name if you aren’t lord of the manor.’

‘Supposed to be a good man, though. Good to his men and so on. Their wives.’

Katherine cannot tell what he means. She can see Richard is smiling at something this Hastings has said, nodding his head and then hurrying back through the gate.

‘Geoffrey! Geoffrey there!’

Geoffrey has the horse saddled already. Richard is quickly on to it and he joins the party as they ride around the fort to find the huntsman.

‘He loves his hunting, doesn’t he?’ Walter says. ‘Misses those hawks of his.’

The archers in the top of the fort walk around to watch them taking the huntsman’s directions and disappear under the canopy of the branches. Soon a trumpet is blown.

‘All right, into the butts,’ Walter says. ‘Make it look good for when they come back. Northern Thomas, you stay here. They might stop and talk to us, and the last bloody thing I want is to hear you telling them cutting across the marsh like that was your idea, understand?’

Thomas knows better than to argue, and anyway he values any time away from archery practice.

When the others have gone Thomas sits in the sunshine and oils his new bow. His old one eventually broke in his hands, just as he always said it would, and from his own money Richard bought him a new one from a bowyer in Calais. It was meant as a reward for his part in the skirmish on St George’s Day and, for a day or two, Thomas hid it from Katherine because he was anxious she would take offence at him being credited with the plan. She’d laughed when she found out.

She watches him for a moment, the way his new muscles move as he works. He is much bigger now than he was. It is all that food, and all the work in the butts. He looks like a soldier, almost like one of those hard-faced men who made up the Calais Watch, and he has taken to carrying the pollaxe around with him all the time, hanging it around his shoulders on a long leather strap pinned to the wood. She often sees him staring at the palms of his hands, frowning at them. She wonders what he is thinking when he does so.

Now, though, he looks happy, or at least content, carrying out a soothing task in the sunshine. She smiles to herself and carries on pacing. She has spent more hours on the walkways of Sangatte Fort than she cares to think about, and knows the land all about intimately. From up there she has watched spring give way to summer, watched the woods around them take on a green haze of new leaves, then spread into full dark leaf. She’s also watched the daily skirmishes unfold on the Boulogne road as the Duke of Somerset’s men continue to harass the Staple. She’s seen the carts bringing back the bodies of men killed and wounded.

After a moment she turns and stares across the sea.

‘What do you think he’s doing now?’ she asks.

‘Who?’

‘Riven.’

Thomas looks up.

‘I suppose he is waiting to see what happens next,’ he tells her. He is not good at imagining things.

She nods.

‘I imagine him in that castle Geoffrey is always talking about,’ she says. ‘Cornford. With his son married to that girl whose father he killed. I can almost hear her screams in the corridors, can’t you? And everyone looking away.’

Thomas looks anxious. He nods uncertainly.

‘We will have justice when we see the Prior,’ he says, missing the point. ‘When we get to Canterbury.’

Canterbury. She opens her mouth and then shuts it again. It is so pleasant to be up here in the spring sunshine. And there is always some awkwardness about Thomas whenever they approach the subject of returning to Canterbury and the Prior of All. In another person she might think his evasions are a sign of duplicity, but this is Thomas. She assumes he becomes flustered because he is anxious at the prospect of appealing to the Prior.

He has moved on to the bowstrings now, pulling them between his waxed thumb and forefinger.

‘There were no men like Riven in the priory,’ he says. ‘Or so it seemed, but out here in the world, you know, it’s as if everyone is using one another for some gain, something they do not deserve.’

She feels her mood darken. Does he mean her?

‘And yet, how much happier you seem to have left the priory so far behind,’ she says.

Thomas stops his work.

‘It seems distant now, doesn’t it?’ he says.

She nods again, but says nothing. The priory does not seem distant to her. She thinks about it almost every moment of every day: of Sister Alice and Sister Joan; of the Prioress. And all this: the plentiful food, the conversation, the days going by without the hours spent on her knees in the nave, sitting in the sun with a man in his shirt – it seems unreal, a dream, and there is a greater part of her feels the world of the priory, with its black and white certainties,
that
was the real world.

She has removed her hood, as she sometimes does when they are alone, and she is enjoying the sun on her face.

‘Your hair needs cutting again,’ he says, resuming his work.

‘Perhaps you can do it when you have finished that?’ She nods at the strings and the little flask of oil for the wood of his bow. He puts them aside and takes out his knife.

‘What did you make of the Earl of Warwick?’ she asks as he takes her hair in his hand.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Everybody speaks so highly of him. Men seem to love him.’ He slices through a hank of hair and drops it over the edge of the wall to scatter in the breeze.

‘But that is not to say he is a good man, is it?’

‘No. That is true,’ he agrees.

‘Everything I hear of him makes me think he is no better than a man like Riven. Perhaps worse even, because his power is so much the greater.’

Thomas grunts.

But she does not want to think about the Earl of Warwick. It is a pleasure to be with Thomas, to have him touch her hair. She recalls the time he cut it on the shore at Boston, when it was so cold and she was ill with fright. Now she feels herself soften, relax. She hums with pleasure. She feels as if she should take his hand and hold its palm to her cheek. It is the sun, the warmth, the food, the lack of care.