Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (34 page)

‘There must be another way,’ she says.

They walk down past the church, both keeping an eye out for the sexton, a busy man, who’s had nothing to say to Sir John since their return. There are chickens everywhere, a dog sleeping in the road and across the way a woman is sealing up a bread oven. Katherine and Thomas are familiar figures now, and the woman raises a hand in greeting, as does a swineherd, with no pigs in tow, who turns and points back down the road towards Lincoln.

Three horsemen appear at the end of the village. Thomas instantly stiffens. She lays a hand on his arm.

‘Fournier,’ she says.

They watch the riders come on.

‘Good day to you, Master Fournier,’ Thomas calls out.

‘God speed you, sir,’ Fournier replies, taking off his hat. ‘And to you, young man. Not armed today, are you?’

Katherine shakes her head. Fournier can be very disarming, she has to admit.

‘You are sent to guide me to Marton Hall?’ Fournier asks.

They are not, but it hardly matters. Fournier is wearing a new cloak the colour of Gascony wine, and his tight-fitting cap is lined with fur. He looks to have prospered since Katherine saw him last, and he has acquired a new assistant, another gangling lad with skinny shanks but one with his ears intact. She tugs her own cap down over her ear.

The third in the party is a grim-faced bodyguard, slouched in his saddle, who rolls his eyes as they start the ride back up the road to Sir John’s house and Fournier continues a lecture she imagines must have begun in Lincoln.

‘The objective of the patient is to be cured, yes? And to that end he will agree to anything. Once cured, though, his thoughts turn elsewhere and, like as not, he will forget his obligation to pay. The object of the physician, on the other hand, is to obtain his money, so he should insist on taking the money in advance. He must never be satisfied with a promise or a pledge from the patient before the cure is effected. D’you see?’

As they pass the field, the man and his boy are still at work, their plough turning neat lines of glossy black turves, but now seagulls the size of cats have chased away the starlings and they screech like the souls of the damned. On the road ahead the old woman is walking home with her basket of blackberries.

‘Are these all Sir John Fakenham’s lands?’ Fournier asks.

Thomas nods.

‘As far as the eye can see,’ he tells them.

That’ll increase Fournier’s price fivefold, she thinks, and she marvels again how naïve Thomas can be.

In the courtyard Walter is sharpening his knife on a step. He looks up, sees them, and then goes back to his task, saying nothing more.

‘Yes, well,’ Fournier says. ‘Good day to you.’

Geoffrey’s wife, Goodwife Popham, meets them at the door and Fournier asks her to warm some wine.

‘To drink or to use to cleanse your instruments?’ Katherine asks.

Fournier ignores her and she leads the way up the stairs to find Sir John in his chamber lying in the bed, drinking wine from a pewter cup. Two white hounds lie alongside him, ugly animals too, and all three look up at Fournier with fearful, bloodshot eyes.

‘Good day to you, Master Physician,’ Sir John murmurs, his pale lips hardly moving. ‘Has the time come already?’

His face is powdery, and he looks closer to death than life. When he tries to sit up and put the cup aside, the pain is too much, and he subsides.

‘It has, Sir John,’ Fournier answers, sitting on the bed and taking the cup from his fingers. ‘How is the fistula?’

Sir John squeezes his eyes shut. A tear escapes.

‘I cannot walk,’ he says. ‘I cannot shit. I cannot even cough for the pain of it.’

Fournier nods.

‘It is as I thought,’ he says. ‘Your humours are out of balance.’

Katherine groans. Fournier turns on her.

‘You have some new thing to say?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Only that what ails Sir John is not some misalignment of his humours. It is a sore in his backside.’

Fournier stands.

‘Are we to have this again?’

He touches the handle of the knife in his belt. Brave this time, she thinks, but then again the last time she was carrying the pollaxe. Sir John wafts a hand and lets it fall on the sheets.

‘Leave us, Kit,’ he murmurs. ‘Let the physician go about his work.’

Katherine gives Fournier one last look and then leaves the room and rejoins Thomas in the courtyard below.

‘This bleeding is barbaric,’ she says. ‘It is as bad as putting faith in bits of old bone such as the pardoner used to sell.’

‘I have been thinking about the pardoner,’ Thomas says. ‘And the ledger. Do you think his people will know why he valued it so? He had a son, he mentioned, who died, but is his wife still alive, I wonder?’

They hear a stifled cry through the window above them. Both look up to the eaves.

‘How long will he be here?’ Thomas asks.

‘A week?’ Katherine guesses. ‘He must see his patient survives, if only to collect his due.’

‘So perhaps we might journey to Lincoln, if only to avoid his company?’

She laughs. His duplicity is charming in its simplicity.

‘You imagine meeting Riven in the marketplace? In the churchyard? At a tavern perhaps?’

He looks askance. Then he too smiles and they find themselves grinning at one another and a moment later both look away. The next morning they set out at the pink-fretted dawn, Thomas on his palfrey, his axe over his saddle, Katherine on a little brown pony. She is not a natural horseman – there is something about the position, with the legs apart, that she finds to be wrong – and she knows that alongside him she looks more like his servant than his equal. But the pony is fair-tempered and often anticipates her commands, and she is fond of it.

When they emerge into the sunlight, Lincoln lies ahead, the spire of the cathedral all the taller for the flat fenland around. They ride on and all morning the sun shines in their faces, and as they pass under the castle’s pale stone walls and through the old arch, the cathedral bell rings sext.

They stop to stare at the cathedral. It is so huge as to be unearthly, beyond their understanding, and there is even something frightening about it. Eventually they can stand it no longer and they turn their backs on it and tie up their horses, handing a boy a coin to water them. Then they stop in the shade for some ale – tasting of hedgerows and bramble plants, and with a deep head – and a dish of hot buttered peascod in one of the lanes by the cathedral yard. Insects hum in air as thick as honey. Nearby a stationer is selling books and Thomas cannot resist.

The stationer, snowy-haired and bearded, is dressed in accordance with the sumptuary laws, the tie strings of his cap hanging down to his chest; he begins showing Thomas his cheaper wares, holding them out and declaiming the virtue of the limning. Thomas’s fingers stray to the leather surface of one and when he prises it open, the stationer exhales approvingly.

‘
Problemata Aristotelis
,’ he nods. ‘In French. You know quality when you see it, young man.’

There is a suggestion of a question mark at the end of his sentence. He eyes Thomas’s rough-made boots and homespun clothing.

‘Do you know who made this?’ Thomas asks.

‘Sadly no,’ the stationer admits. ‘Only that it is from a workshop in Bruges. Copied from an original there, I dare say.’

‘You’ve been to Bruges?’ Thomas asks.

‘Many times. A most beautiful city. Though the damp penetrates old bones like mine.’

‘Many of the best designs come from Bruges,’ Thomas tells Katherine, turning the book over in his hands. ‘One day, I should like to go. Though it means crossing the sea again.’

When Thomas is excited about something he looks like a boy. He looks at the other books and keeps testing the textures of the leathers, stroking the surfaces of the paper and the stationer lets him place the pad of his finger on one very fine gesso-backed gold-leafed initial letter L.

‘A fine piece of work,’ Thomas acknowledges.

The stationer is half smiling, but his gaze flicks from Thomas to Katherine and back again and Katherine feels the familiar twist of anxiety twist in her guts. She has never forgotten what the pardoner had said about travelling among strangers, and now she tugs her hat down over her half-ear again. They should never have come. She brings the conversation to an end by asking of the pardoner.

‘Old Master Daud?’ the stationer says, softening a little. ‘I know of him. A fine man and a serious collector. He has been gone these past months, has he not? Abroad, I hear, though the priests still say Mass and ring a bell for his safe return. He has a house on Steep Hill, down near the Jew’s.’

A thought seems to strike Thomas.

‘Have you seen anything like this before?’ he asks, unslinging his pack and unwrapping the ledger. The stationer takes and opens it and studies it for a moment.

‘I dare say I have,’ he says, ‘though I’d not bother to look at such a thing twice. It is an official document: a list of soldiers and their movements in France, is it? Yes. Perhaps of value for scrap? Ah. Though that I like.’

He is pointing at Thomas’s copy of the round window of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Thomas has added some colours since: reds and blues and yellows, and the design glows. The stationer offers some money for it, but Thomas shakes his head, and the old man hands the book back and they leave him just as the bells chime the half-hour.

Master Daud’s house is down the hill on the right. It looks shuttered and empty, but after Thomas pounds on the door, a blank-faced girl in a kirtle and a cloth cap opens up.

‘Is Mistress Daud at home?’ Katherine asks. Without a word the girl holds open the door and with quick glances at one another they go in. She shows them across a rush-strewn hall and into a wooden panelled parlour where the shuttered windows let in only a little light. There is a long table against one wall, and cushions on the window seats and tapestries of scenes she does not recognise on the walls. There are even silk rugs under their feet, but it is the books on tables all around the room that draw the eye, for they show up the worst of the dust. It lies everywhere, a pale coating half of an inch thick. It is as if no one has been in the room for weeks, maybe months, possibly years.

‘She always said you’d come one day,’ the maid says.

‘Who?’

‘Mistress Daud.’

‘But you don’t know who we are.’

The girl nods and withdraws.

‘Strange,’ Thomas says, his eyes on the books.

Katherine thinks for a moment. Then it hits her.

‘She doesn’t know he is dead.’

It has occurred to neither. Thomas starts shifting his feet and is tugging at his collar when the door opens again and a woman enters. She is tall and slight, with a high forehead, as if her hair is plucked, and skin pale as ivory. She wears a dress dyed the colour of old sage leaves, with sleeves that droop to the floor, and once inside she stands unnaturally still, her only movement from her elbow as she gestures to the maid to offer the wine she has brought in on a silver tray.

‘Good day, Mistress Daud,’ Katherine begins. Her voice sounds loud in her own ears.

‘Good day to you,’ Mistress Daud whispers. Her eyes are fixed on Katherine’s. They are almost as pale as her face, tinged yellow. For a moment Katherine does not know how to start. Mistress Daud remains immobile while her girl passes them each a silver cup.

‘He is dead, isn’t he?’ the woman says.

After a moment Katherine nods. Mistress Daud closes her eyes. When she opens them such light as was there has faded further.

‘It is as I feared,’ she says. ‘God has not looked kindly on me.’

God has not looked kindly on the pardoner, either, Katherine thinks.

‘He had said his prayers,’ Katherine lies, ‘and was given absolution by a priest.’

Again the woman nods.

‘I thank you for bringing the news,’ she says. ‘If there is something . . .?’

Katherine feels the blood rise to her cheeks.

‘No, no,’ she says. ‘We are in search of no reward. It is no more than our Christian duty. But – he left only this.’

She gestures to Thomas, who hurriedly removes the ledger and offers it to her. Mistress Daud makes no move to take it.

‘A book,’ she sighs.

‘He seemed to think it was of great value,’ Katherine says.

Mistress Daud gestures to those stacked on the tables.

‘He thought all books were of great value.’

There is a long silence. A cart rumbles by outside: the cry of the carter, the plod of his horse’s hooves.

‘It is a book of names,’ Katherine goes on. ‘No more than a list, really.’

‘Keep it then,’ Mistress Daud says. ‘I have no use for it. Master Daud never taught me to read.’

There is another long silence.

‘You do not even recognise it?’ Thomas asks.

She shrugs.

‘He was going to France, he said, to sell something of great value to the King there. At least that is what he told us. But he was always planning to sell things of great value. He had three crossbows belonging to the witch Joan.’

More silence.

‘But these books—’ Thomas begins, gesturing.

‘Are nothing to me. They serve to remind me of my late husband and that is all.’

‘May I look at them?’ Thomas asks.

‘I am your servant,’ Mistress Daud says. ‘They will all be gone soon. I will have to marry again, and my husband-to-be is no lover of books. Maria will show you out.’

With that she turns and leaves the room. Maria follows. Katherine glances at Thomas. He puts his empty cup of wine on the tray, pours himself another, drinks it, and then starts wiping the dust from the bindings of the books. Katherine says nothing. She realises how cold the room is, even on a warm day.

‘Thomas,’ she says. ‘Let’s go.’

‘He has everything here,’ Thomas says. ‘Look.’ He holds up a book. ‘A psalter,’ he tells her.

‘As fine as yours?’

‘It is a copy of the Utrecht Psalter, you see? Illuminated by a genius. Look. Beautiful. And here, a Life of Julius Caesar.’

He opens the front, made of some hardwood and decorated with gold lace. He sniffs, inhaling the mixed smells of leather, wood, vellum and glue. He turns a page.