Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (29 page)

Walking underneath the steeple of St Paul’s, she looks up, still scarcely believing anything can be so tall, or that the vast rose window set in the eastern end of the church can be so lavish. Thomas stares open-mouthed, tripping himself on the road. But soon they turn and pass along a street where the smell of rotten meat rises from the stones and the friars give way to butchers’ boys and husbandmen. They queue again to pass through the Newgate, and then they are outside the city walls again, among priories and abbeys and smallholdings as they follow the road up the hill past various inns. The smell of cows is everywhere and the road is thick with their dung.

Soon they reach some worn-out pasture around a pond where once again they set up camp among the pigs and dogs and piles of every kind of filth. Geoffrey has to buy the wood for their fire from a local farmer and they eke it out with discarded rushes that burn without a flame or heat and send a column of dense grey smoke into the damp afternoon air.

‘What a shithole,’ Dafydd says.

Thomas finds his reed and a bottle of ink, and then unstraps the pardoner’s ledger and begins copying the design of the rose window of St Paul’s from memory in a margin. Katherine sits and watches. It is mesmerising, seeing his reed shape and shade the paper.

After a moment Red John joins them and is alarmed.

‘What’re they?’ he asks, pointing at the names. He looks at them as if the words may have magical powers, as if they are a chant, or are somehow threatening.

‘The names of Englishmen stationed in Rouen in 1441,’ Thomas tells him, and he runs his finger along the crudely rendered letters. ‘Look. There is the Duke of York mentioned, and his retinue.’

Red John is amazed.

‘I thought it was just the Bible in words,’ he says.

‘No,’ Thomas tells him. ‘It is a record of men and their movements in France. It says the Duke spent the summer of 1441 in a place called Pontoise.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Red John points to another column.

‘And what are they?’

‘The names of men who stayed in Rouen that year.’

‘Read them out.’

‘William Hyde. Hugh Smyth. John Rygelyn. William Darset. Robert Philip. Nicholas Blaybourne.’

The list is long. Who are these men? Katherine wonders again. Thomas has said they are long-dead soldiers, so why was the record of their movement important to the pardoner?

‘Can you write as well?’ Red John asks.

Thomas nods, and he writes two words.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘That is your name.’

He writes Katherine’s name too, and she smiles and tries to remember the letter K so that she will know it when she sees it again. Red John settles himself next to her and they watch while Thomas finishes the window’s design. When it is done he nods with real pleasure.

‘Very fair, Thomas,’ Red John says. ‘Very fair. But I still don’t know why you’ve all them names writ in a book?’

Thomas shrugs.

‘I don’t know either. They were there when I got it. The book is supposed to be very valuable, though I cannot say why.’

Red John squints at him as if he is daft.

‘And it isn’t because – what? – it’s made of gold or something?’

Thomas holds up the plain old binding, the rough-edged paper.

‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not that.’

‘So it must be what is written in it that makes it worth something?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And it’s just a list of who was where when? Nothing more?’

‘No.’

Red John thinks for a while.

‘Then it means someone whose name is writ in there as being in one place should have been somewhere else. Or he shouldn’t have been where he was, when it says he was. D’you see? It’s got to be one or the other.’

Thomas laughs.

‘But there are thousands of names.’

‘True. True,’ Red John admits. ‘So what you have to do is find out who it’s valuable to. Who wants it, I mean. Sell it to them, then you’ll not have to follow the Earl of Warwick about the place for the rest of your life.’

With that he gets up and leaves them and they watch him walk away with something like awe.

‘Wrap it up well, Thomas,’ she tells him, and watches while he does so.

Later that day a long line of carts comes out from London loaded with beans and peas and dried fish. There is ale, wine, bread and even bacon. There are pimps and faggots and great logs of ash. They eat well that night, gathered together around their fire, drinking ale, singing songs and watching the sparks fly up into the dark. They drink so much that most are unsteady on their feet, Thomas among them. Katherine has enjoyed the beer and drunk more than usual and now she feels warm and full and generous.

Thomas sits beside her and is silent for a moment as they watch Dafydd and one of the Johns enact a strange dance with one another while the tabor man taps the skin of his instrument at the speed of heavy rain. When it is over, everybody cheers and then there is a moment when people are smiling and laughing, and the evening could go in one of many ways.

‘How is your ear?’ Thomas asks. He is watching her in a way that unsettles her, but she is pleased by. She touches her cap that hides the missing tip. It still aches.

‘I think this helps,’ she says, raising her mug of ale.

They smile and drink and there is a comfortable moment between them, when they are alone despite the crowd.

‘Why did you run, Kit?’ he asks in a low voice.

She looks at him quickly, and she can see he fears he has spoiled the mood, but then she lets out a quick sigh and settles back. She stares into the flames for a moment, then comes to her decision.

‘Thomas,’ she starts. ‘I should have told you this when we first left the priory. I kept meaning to, but – I was too ashamed of myself. I was frightened about what you would think of me, what you would do when you heard.’

‘Heard what?’

‘When I was at the priory, there was a nun there. Sister Joan. She was older than me, and a great favourite of the Prioress. It was she who used to hold me down when the Prioress beat me. She looked after the keys. That sort of thing.’

Thomas nods, but his mood has sobered.

‘When I left – just before I left – we were in the infirmary. With Alice, do you remember? Well, I pushed her. Joan, I mean. On to a mattress.’

Thomas is puzzled.

‘So?’ he asks. ‘It sounds as if she deserved it.’

‘Yes. Yes. She did. But I’d left a bottle on the mattress. Or a jar. I can’t remember now. It was made of glass.’

Thomas understands what she is saying.

‘And she fell on it?’

Katherine nods.

‘The bottle broke. The glass. The shards – they went into her back. Into Joan’s back, do you see?’

‘Was she hurt?’

Katherine nods.

‘I threw myself on top of her. I did not know about the glass, but I was pressing her down on to it. I wanted to kill her, I admit, but didn’t think I could. And then there was blood in her mouth.’

‘Her mouth?’ Thomas asks. ‘You mean? The glass went through her . . .?’

He gestures towards his back. Katherine nods. She is shaking a little.

‘Did you save her?’ he asks.

Now she shakes her head.

‘I did not even try. Did not know how, even if I’d wanted to.’

Thomas looks into the fire.

‘So that is why – why the friars were so busy when we left Boston? Because they were looking for you?’

‘The girl who killed Sister Joan, yes.’

There is a silence. Thomas takes a long draught from his mug.

‘Dear God,’ he says when he has swallowed the ale and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘No wonder you did not want to see the Prior of All. No wonder you ran. But – Jesu! – I wish you had told me.’

She nods again and looks at her hands.

‘I wish I had too,’ she says, ‘but I thought you might turn away from me, to leave me to fend for myself. And I cannot – I just cannot go on, not without your help. Look what happens when I try.’

She touches her ear again. He nods again, but his face has softened. His gaze travels across her, from her broken boots, up her baggy hose, across the jack that is too big for her, to her hat that hangs over her eyes, and she can see that he is consumed with the same tenderness he showed on the shoreline that day in Sangatte, and for a moment she wishes he would lean forward and put his arms around her as he had tried to do that day.

Instead he asks a question.

‘Do you remember that first day?’ he asks. ‘After the giant came after us and the boat sank?’

She does, but not exactly. A tear has found its way from her eye, and she wipes her nose with the back of her hand.

‘“Two are better than one . . .”’ he quotes. ‘“For if they fall—”’

‘“—the one will lift up his fellow,”’ she completes.

Katherine catches his hand in hers, and blinks away her tears. Thomas returns her grip. They let go at the same time.

‘So,’ he says. ‘If you will not go back, what will you do?’

She looks around. The pipe and tabor are playing a new tune now, a slower one, and the men around her have become introspective, and it is possible to imagine them thinking about absent loves, or missed opportunities, or past regrets.

‘I don’t know,’ she tells him. ‘I just don’t know. Whatever the Lord has in store for me is what the Lord has in store for me.’

IT IS PAST
dusk and the rain is still beating on the canopy of leaves above their heads. Thomas huddles next to the tree, listening to Dafydd moaning in the dark.

‘I can’t believe this,’ Dafydd says. ‘We’ve been traipsing all over England for two weeks solid, in the pouring bloody rain, and now we’ve got here, we’ve got to stand picket?’

‘Just give it a rest, will you, Dafydd?’ Henry the new archer says. ‘You talk so much. I don’t know what you’re like quiet.’

Henry is from Kent. He joined them in London, just as they lost Simon the braggart, who slipped off unmissed in the night. Henry is broad-shouldered and a fine archer, but his mouth pulls down at each corner and he glowers at the world from under heavy brows.

Nevertheless what he says is true: Dafydd has not stopped moaning since they left London. First they had marched north up the Cambridge road, following Lord Fauconberg in search of King Henry and his army that were rumoured to be making for the Isle of Ely in the fenlands. After two days’ travel, never moving faster than the slowest cart, it was discovered that the rumour was false and so Fauconberg stopped them and they waited in the fields by the roadside for news as to where they should go next. Then they’d broken camp and made their way westwards on terrible roads towards the town of Dunstable, in Bedfordshire. Here at least Geoffrey found a new ox for their cart but there was no sign of the King’s army. After another delay while messengers were sent and received, they moved northwards again, up along the old Roman road towards Coventry, but on the way they heard that the King was moving down from Coventry to meet them.

So now they are camped on a rise just off the old road to the south of the town of Northampton, and the Earls of Warwick and March have brought their troops up from London and Kent to join Fauconberg’s, and at last they are ready to meet King Henry’s troops.

‘Settle this thing for once and for all,’ Dafydd says, ‘then we can piss off home, can’t we?’

‘Why are you here at all, Dafydd?’ Thomas asks. ‘I know you’re after a fine suit of armour and that, but how did you come to fall in with Sir John?’

Dafydd tells him how he fought for Lord Cornford, who had land near their home in Wales, but when Cornford was killed at Ludford Bridge, rather than go home to face some trouble he does not want to specify, he joined Sir John Fakenham’s company, also of Cornford’s retinue.

‘Happenstance, see?’

Thomas grunts. Happenstance. That was the force which seemed to guide them all: him, Katherine, the pardoner, Sir John, Dafydd. All of them save the Earl of Warwick, who seemed to bend the forces of destiny to his own will.

Time passes. The rain continues and in the camp someone throws more wood on a fire and sparks rise above the pointed roofs of the tents. Walter arrives through the darkness with a fresh tallow lantern. He is bristling with anger.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Come on, you idle bastards, up! Up you get! Come on. We’ve rounds to make.’

The men get to their feet and find their spears wet in the grass. They follow Walter swinging his light, Dafydd bringing up the rear with his own. Henry’s greaves squeak as he walks.

‘Get some bloody oil on them, will you?’ Walter grumbles. ‘That noise goes right through me.’

They tramp around the earthworks. Men are gathered in groups at the entrances to their tents, quietly sharing ale and stories around their fires when they should be sleeping.

‘Funny to think some of them’ll be dead tomorrow, isn’t it?’ Dafydd starts.

‘I hope to bloody God one of them’s you, Dafydd,’ Walter snaps.

Since they heard the news the scurriers brought back with them that afternoon, Walter has been in a savage temper. The scouts had met the enemy in the fields just this side of Northampton. Two of them had been killed outright, another wounded and expected to die in the morning, but able to bring back the news that the King’s men are encamped before the town with a river protecting their flanks; that there must be nearly ten thousand of them; that they are hard at work throwing up a defensive rampart, and that they have more cannons and bombards than either of the two survivors have seen in their lives.

It is this last piece of news that has made Walter so foul-tempered.

They walk on towards the road where Geoffrey and the other men are waiting by a hissing fire, their eyes sore with the smoke.

‘Anything?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Waste of bloody time, this,’ Walter says. ‘We should be getting our heads down, not on guard duty. I bet they’re all fast asleep behind their walls right now.’

‘Nothing’s going to happen tonight, that’s for sure,’ Geoffrey agrees. He holds his hand out to cup some of the rain. It has picked up again, drumming on their helmets and running into their eyes. A moment later the rushlight dies on them.