Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (47 page)

They ride hard, following the path alongside a river brimming in its banks until they join a proper road. It takes them through some roughly marked furlongs and stone pens where sheep bleat in the settling gloom. The horses are tired though, and cannot run for long. When the road fords the river, Thomas reins in.

‘Christ,’ he says.

They stare at the river’s roiling black surface. Across it they can hear the bells in the town ringing for compline. Thomas turns. Along the road are five Welshmen.

‘If I had my bow,’ Thomas says, ‘even with just those five arrows I could stop this.’

He sees another man join them with a bow and an arrow already nocked. He watches him draw and for a moment cannot believe it. The arrow hums past, its fletch buzzing where it has not been properly set. It disappears into the water beyond with a loud plock.

‘Quick,’ he says, and he hauls the reins of his horse around and down the cobbles into the river. The water is numbingly cold, deep and fast-flowing. He feels his horse lose purchase on the stones of the riverbed before it starts to swim.

‘Come!’ he calls to Katherine. Katherine kicks her pony down the bank into the icy current.

Thomas is across quickly, his boots full and his hose wet. The horse exhales loudly, shuddering. He looks back for Katherine. Her pony is struggling to swim, but makes it to the other side, only to stumble as it climbs the riverbank.

‘Katherine!’

She falls and is under the water and he thinks she has been hit by an arrow. But no, she clings with both hands to the reins and the pony ploughs on and she is dragged out. Water pours from her and she loses her hat. Her pony scrabbles up the bank on slipping hooves. Thomas leaps down to help her. Over the other side of the river the Welshmen are still coming.

‘Quick,’ Thomas breathes. He bundles her upright and they turn and run, ducking through the trees towards the town, leading the horses behind them. An arrow skips in the mud behind them, but it is a parting shot, and soon they are weaving their way among the hurdles and pens where geese hiss at them in the gloom. If they can only now find an inn in the town, they’ll be safe.

They find one below the castle motte, with a stable lad the innkeeper has to wake with a kick, and the promise of ale to go with a stew of pork and beans and more roasted cheese. The innkeeper speaks English and they tell him how they’ve been attacked on the road.

‘Like that everywhere these days, isn’t it,’ he says without much concern. ‘Everyone’s taking advantage of it.’

‘Taking advantage of what?’ Katherine asks. Her voice is oddly slurred.

‘Tudor’s coming, did you know? Coming this way with an army of French and Irishmen, and the men of Pembroke of course. Strong arms they’ve got on them. They’re on their way to meet the Queen’s army somewhere up north, aren’t they? Ha! I fancy they’ll knock old Warwick and March and whatever’s left of the rest of them back into the sea for good this time.’

He is about to say more, but notices Katherine shivering.

‘Like a greyhound, aren’t you, hey? You want to get out of those clothes, you do, lad.’

Katherine sits on Margaret’s bag, holding her hands over the slowly resuscitating coal fire in the middle of the hall. The innkeeper steps behind the screen and begins shouting at someone in his own language. Thomas meanwhile begins rummaging through Katherine’s bag. There is a stained white shirt, a pair of braies, a length of cloth, two old-fashioned woollen hoods and a leather strap, but it has been so cold she’s been wearing everything else she owns, and now all that is sodden, clinging to her.

Thomas’s eye falls on Margaret’s bag. In it are the blue cloak, those dresses, the linen underthings, the fine-gauge hose. A thought strikes him.

‘Kit,’ he says, half from habit now, even though they are alone. ‘You’ll have to become a girl again.’

She looks at him and he sees her eyes are bright and feverish.

Dear God, he thinks, she cannot die on me too. Not Katherine. Not her.

‘Come on,’ he says, and he takes her by the hand and leads her to a corner of the hall where the fire is yet to cast much light, and he begins taking off her clothes. She starts to struggle, pulling away from him, but he is too strong, she too weak.

‘Come on, Kit,’ he murmurs. ‘Come on. It’s all right. It is just me. It’s Thomas. I’m helping you. You have to get out of these wet clothes. We have to get you dry. Come on.’

He coaxes her out of her wet jack, her woollen pilch, her rosary, Alice’s rosary, her linen shirt. Her breasts are no bigger than kneecaps, and she is so thin he could have played a tune on her ribs, but dear God! What is this?

All over her back is a fretwork of tiny scars from her shoulder to the hollows above her waist. He stares at it, horrified, then rubs the thickened skin gently with the dry cloth, trying to work some life back into flesh as pallid as goose fat. Next he rummages in Margaret’s bags and finds a shift of thick linen. He spreads it out and pulls it over her head. It falls to her knees. Then he bends and yanks off her hose and her braies, which gather in rolls around her sodden boots. He lifts one skinny shank and hoicks the roll of cloth down around her ankle, removing the boot with a sucking sound and the smell of river water. Then the other boot.

Katherine stands half comprehending, half helpful, mute. He finds a pair of braies in Margaret’s bag and lays them on the floor for Katherine to step into. When she’s done so, he pulls them up and ties them as best he can under the linen shift.

He rubs his chin. What next? He rummages in the bag, his blunt fingers among the fine-spun wool. A coif. He places it over her head, then rolls back the seams in imitation of women he’s seen. He finds a heavy linen kirtle, dull brown, that he drops over her head and laces up at the front. He ties off the strings just above her breast and then steps back. The effect is eerie, but not yet right. She still looks half dressed. What is missing? A proper dress. He finds the pale blue one Margaret had been wearing the day they first saw her, slips it over Katherine’s head, pulls it down and then thrusts her arms into the narrow sleeves.

All the while he talks to her, his voice low and reassuring. She sways when he is not holding her, but otherwise cooperates willingly enough. He wonders if it is the effect of the cold. He’s never known her so biddable.

He finds a long leather belt in Margaret’s bag and wraps it twice around Katherine’s waist. Then he finds a hood with a long tail that he places over her head and tucks into the belt. All that remains are the hose and the shoes, which have never been worn outside, let alone seen mud. He bends and picks up Katherine’s foot and slips a leg of hose up over her calf. It reaches mid-thigh and hangs loose and there does not seem any way to stop it falling straight back down around her ankle again. It will have to do. He does the same with the other one, and then slips her bony feet into the leather shoes, fastening the buckle just as the innkeeper returns.

The man stops still, a ewer of ale in his hand.

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Well I never. I took you for a boy, mistress.’

She is – there is no other word for it – striking.

Still Katherine says nothing. She looks at the way the cloth grips her forearms and then she pulls at the coif against her neck. She runs fingers down to the front of her dress, feeling the lacings, which he now sees he’s tied poorly, and then she runs both hands down her hips and Thomas can feel his face flush. He does not know where to look and is reminded in a flash of what he had felt the previous night, before Margaret had died.

‘So strange,’ Katherine says at last. ‘So strange.’

The innkeeper pours them ale and leaves the stew on the board by the fire and Thomas watches as Katherine sits and drinks some warm ale and pushes the food away. Now she is dressed as a girl, she drinks more delicately, so whereas Kit made a conscious effort to guzzle ale and then wipe her mouth on her sleeve, here she is, sipping at the cup as might a female. He feels suddenly very anxious in her company, as if she is a stranger, and he does not know what to do when she puts the cup down and leans against the table, holding her head.

‘We are the only people staying?’ Thomas asks the innkeeper when he brings the straw for their beds.

‘No one’s about this time of year generally, and with Tudor coming, well . . . Are you quite well, mistress?’

Katherine’s eyes are glassy and she sways where she sits at the board.

‘Tudor is coming here?’ she asks.

‘So they say. Coming up from Pembroke around the hills, he is, with six thousand men. Soon set that Earl of Warwick back on his heels, won’t he, eh?’

Neither Thomas nor Katherine say a word while the innkeeper takes their bowls and puts them on the floor for a short-legged dog to lick.

‘And where are you from?’ he asks, turning to Thomas. ‘You don’t sound to be from these parts.’

‘We are from Lincoln,’ Thomas stammers. Is it bad to admit they are from Lincoln? He has no idea. The innkeeper brightens.

‘Then you’ll have further news of the battle?’ he asks.

‘Battle?’ Thomas asks.

‘A friar brought news only yesterday,’ the innkeeper says. ‘There has been a great battle outside the castle of Sandal, somewhere up, you know, north? Near York. It was fought on the eve of the New Year, and Richard of York is killed! Aye, and the Earl of Salisbury too! Have you not heard? The whole of the Duke’s army were cut down, to a man, and now the north country lies in the Queen’s hands, and all of England soon, too, so they say.’

SHE IS WOKEN
by the sound of horses on the road outside. It is still dark and though she recognises the noise of men in harness she cannot stop herself slipping back into sleep. When she wakes again her body is heavy, and she peers through her half-opened eyelids to see Thomas in his linen shirt feeding slips of wood into the flames of the fire.

He glances over, sensing a change in her, and opens his mouth and says something, but she cannot understand him, and she drifts back to sleep. She has been dreaming curious swirling dreams, intensely vivid yet bewilderingly vague, and through them all flicker the shadows of the dead: Walter, Dafydd, Owen and especially Margaret. Margaret is there often. At times she is no more substantial than a wisp of river mist at dawn, at others she acquires flesh and becomes all too real.

‘She is unwell?’ she hears the innkeeper ask Thomas.

‘A fever,’ Thomas says. ‘Nothing more. She was caught in the cold on the hills.’

The innkeeper grunts something about a nunnery being more suitable than his hall and Katherine stares past Thomas up into the roof, at the tiles and the soot-blackened rafters. She tries to stay awake, but drifts back into sleep where the shades of the dead gather about her once more.

How long she is like this she cannot say. When she is awake it is as if everything is at a remove. She sees Thomas, his face swimming towards her, sometimes obscenely large, sometimes in miniature; and she hears his voice, sometimes loud in her ears and then sometimes as a distant rattle. She knows he is asking a question, or offering help, but nothing she hears or sees has anything to do with her. It feels as if someone else is lying there drifting through consciousness.

On one of the days – she knows it is day because the shutters are open and a breeze stirs the wood smoke – she sees Thomas eating something. Every now and then a servant – a sullen, chunky girl, slow-moving, who’d never have survived long in the priory – comes in to look at her and her possessions, and Thomas looks up from his scribbling. He has placed Margaret’s bag where he can see it.

Later Katherine looks down and sees her arms encased not in the mossy, malodorous woollen jacket she’s become used to, but in fine linen, and she is surprised to find that she is dressed as Margaret Cornford now. She falls asleep again, and when she wakes it is dark and she is certain she is now Margaret, but once more she drifts off into padded slumber.

It is daylight when she opens her eyes the next time, woken by hunger. Thomas is sitting at a bench, making marks in the pardoner’s ledger. He looks careworn and sorrowful. She thinks of him when she first saw him, running in the snow beyond the priory’s walls, and then his face with the sun falling on it when they were in Calais, and now this. She finds tears in her eyes. He is such a good soul, she thinks, and has suffered so for the sake of others. Now he turns and is looking at her, with a smile breaking through the worry. It is like the onset of spring, or the sun breaking through clouds.

‘Katherine?’ he says, his voice cracking. ‘You are with us. Praise the Lord!’

He swings his feet and comes to her. She says nothing. Her mouth is foul and her head aches almost as badly as her stomach. He helps her to sit up and she drinks the ale from a slimy leather cup.

‘How long have I been like this?’ she croaks.

‘Days,’ he says. ‘A week even.’ He too has lost track of time.

A moment later the innkeeper comes in with wood for the fire.

‘God’s grace!’ he exclaims. ‘She lives.’

The lumpen servant girl appears over his shoulder and looks disappointed. When they have gone Katherine turns to Thomas again.

‘Did I dream the news that Richard of York is dead?’

Thomas shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘And further confirmation has come.’

He tells her how he has heard that Richard of York and his army had emerged from Sandal Castle only to be engulfed by a much larger force led by the Queen’s favourite, the Duke of Somerset, and Andrew Trollope, the man who had led the Calais force that switched sides the year before. He describes how the innkeeper laughed as he told him the battle lasted mere minutes and that the Duke of York had his head knocked from his shoulders and set on a pike and carried to York where it is set on the gatehouse.

‘“So York can overlook York!” he said.’

They’d even put a paper crown on his head as well, so he looked the part, the innkeeper said. The Earl of Salisbury had been executed the following day and the Duke of York’s younger son, the Earl of Rutland, whom they’d seen arguing with the Earl of Warwick in Westminster that summer, was murdered after the battle, and now all three heads were on pikes together. Heralds have named the battle after the nearby town of Wakefield.