Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (54 page)

This is how he has heard it from William Hastings, and the men of the Lincoln Watch think that fair enough, and they let Thomas and Katherine through to the city. Thomas and Katherine walk their horses up the hill past the pardoner’s house, still silent and ghostly, and up past the cathedral where the stationers have cleared their stalls and the doors are barred from within. They pass out through Bailgate and under the old arch on to the Roman road that cuts north. They climb up into their saddles again, and as they leave the city behind, there are crows cawing and loose balls of mistletoe in the trees and old snow on the fields.

They have travelled this road many times, often in happier circumstances, and once more he asks himself the same question he has been asking for the last four days: why? Why are they doing this? Of course he wants to find Sir John and Geoffrey, to find the others, to see if they are still alive, and of course he needs to tell them about Dafydd and Owen and Walter, and if that was all they were doing, then that would be bad enough, but Thomas must also lie to Sir John and Richard, tell them that Kit is dead, and that here is Lady Margaret Cornford to marry Richard. He can imagine Richard’s face when he sees her. How pleased he will be that she is not plain, but in her own way beautiful . . .

And he – Thomas – will have to lie again, and again, and again. Forever.

‘We should have brought an escort,’ she says. ‘Some men from Lincoln at least. What if there are still some of the northerners about?’

Thomas drops from the saddle and nocks the string of his new bow and then sticks some arrow shafts in his boot, in the style of Walter. He can feel the steel bodkin heads against his ankle and he wishes he still had the pollaxe. He mounts up again and they ride on, Katherine with her cloak around her ears so that all he can see of her is her red-tipped nose, sharp, like a beak.

Eventually they reach the turning and she stops her pony.

‘Thomas,’ she asks. ‘What are you hoping for?’

He looks blank, as if he has no idea, but she does not believe him.

‘I don’t know,’ he answers after a while. ‘I want the hall to be exactly as we left it. I want Sir John to be sitting by the fire, with Geoffrey on hand, and Goodwife Popham still fussing about her daughter’s marriage. I want to smell apple-wood smoke and that mix of roasting pork and baking bread and those herbs she used to put in the bed upstairs. I want, I suppose, everything to be the same. Something calm and orderly amidst all this. All the things we’ve seen. Everything that’s happened.’

Still he cannot tell her what he really wants.

She smiles weakly.

‘It has become what people call home, hasn’t it?’ she says.

He nods.

After a moment she asks the question he has been avoiding all through the journey.

‘And what of Richard?’ she asks. ‘What of him?’

He kicks the horse on and they ride for a moment before he feels he can control his voice.

‘I imagine him out riding,’ he says, at length. ‘I imagine him out riding with a hawk on his fist. A hobby hawk or something.’

He tries a smile too, but feels it’s more like a grimace, in keeping with the wintry landscape. He will stop at the gate, he thinks. That is what he will do. He will stop at the gate and turn and ride away, back to Hastings and the Earl of March who appreciate him, who would not expect him to stand and watch while a lie is practised.

‘They will see through me in an instant, won’t they?’ Katherine says. ‘They will see me as merely Kit in a dress.’

‘No,’ Thomas says, and he is right, for she no longer looks like Kit in a dress. She looks beautiful, and not merely to him. He saw the way other men reacted to her on the road, and in the inns. Yet half of him is hoping Sir John and Richard will see through her, and will think she is someone other than Lady Margaret Cornford, and will therefore not risk the marriage, lest someone else discovers the truth.

‘How do I look, Thomas?’ she asks. ‘Tell me.’

He looks at her again. His eyes are slow, as if he has a cold, and he cannot mask his misery.

‘You look like a lady,’ he says. ‘He will not think you are Kit in a dress. Only—’ He stops.

‘Only what?’

He takes a deep breath.

‘Only I will think that,’ he says. ‘I will think it for however long that lasts.’

She does not answer for a moment. He thinks he has said too much, or perhaps too little. Then she turns and there are tears in her eyes and she looks more awkward and more beautiful than ever and he feels his heart gripped with pain.

‘I am sorry, Thomas,’ she says. Her face has softened. Her eyes are wet with tears. ‘May God forgive me but I am sorry. Sorry that it is like this, and not as it should be. I wish we had done things differently. But we have – We have to, don’t we? For her sake. It is my – our – a – penance, I think? For all that we have done.’

‘A penance,’ he repeats. And suddenly he sees it
is
a penance. But it is not a penance for the death of Margaret, but for the death of the nun in the priory, the one with glass in her back, the one whom Katherine pressed down and killed; and that because of this nun’s death, Katherine has endured everything, and she will go on enduring whatever may come at her until her end.

He wants to tell her not to marry Richard, and that he does not know how he will live without her, and that God would not want her to suffer any more, nor make him suffer any more, but he finds he cannot. He cannot find the right formulation, cannot think of all the things he wants to tell her, and so instead he looks away to hide the tears that prick his own eyes, and he says:

‘The village is ahead.’

And they ride on towards a sky white with the threat of more snow, and soon they will be at the hall and then it will all start.

Only there is something wrong. Thomas pulls up his horse. There is no smoke above the village, nothing to show that anyone lives there.

Katherine feels it too.

‘Where is everyone?’ she asks.

There are no prints in the snow, as if no one has passed this way since the last fall. Thomas slips quickly from his saddle and nocks an arrow, taps his sword hilt. He passes Katherine his horse’s reins and then skirts up the road towards the butter cross. The church is intact, its windows in place, its door sound and shut, but again, there are no tracks on the steps. Where is its sexton? A cottage ahead is likewise undamaged, likewise deserted. She watches Thomas duck past the tiled bakery. He can smell something claggy and cold. A dead body. Man or animal? One or two? He follows the road up past the pen where Katherine used to stop to scratch the pigs’ backs. Empty. Still no tracks.

He crosses to another line of cottages, pushes a door open. Inside it is dark. He bends over the fire. The ashes are cold, even the earth below is cold. No one has been here for days.

Katherine is outside, holding the horses. She looks at him. He shakes his head. They both know what this means.

They carry on up the road until they find the first body in the furlong beyond the apple trees. It is being bothered by five or six crows. Thomas steps across the ditch into the field, stops, takes aim with the bow and sends an arrow humming across the furrows to knock one of the birds cartwheeling. The others clap their wings and take flight, off across the fields.

The body is lying face down, a substantial mound, covered in a thick crust of old snow. The man had been wearing a jack, faded red, much repaired, the elbows patched with more red cloth. Green stitches. His fingertips are eaten down to the bone. Thomas squats and studies the body without touching it. The crows have found their way in above the kidneys and the smell is strong, the sort to coat the tongue.

He can feel tears prick his eyes and he feels a sense of desolation. He stands, steps back, crosses himself, murmurs a prayer. It is short, for he intends to return to bury the body himself, properly in the churchyard, and then he finds the dead bird and pulls it from his arrow with the sole of his boot, wiping the arrowhead in the snow.

He walks slowly back to Katherine.

‘Who is it?’ she calls.

He can tell she knows. It is just that she does not want to be right.

‘Geoffrey,’ he says when he is near, and he can hear her draw breath.

‘Oh dear God,’ she says and she squeezes her eyes shut. ‘He was – Oh God.’

He almost takes her in his arms, but dares not. Instead he nods and walks past her and she follows him silently up along the road through the orchard to the little copse where they hobble the horses. Here they find the second body, leaning with his back to a tree trunk under the naked wands of the coppiced willow. He has his hands clapped around a crossbow quarrel lodged in his cheek. His fingers are swollen; the flesh is blue and mottled, streaky with dark blood. Snow caps his helmet in a point, too, and it has mixed with the blood on his livery coat to turn it rose. Thomas bends and brushes the snow away with the back of his fingers. Above the man’s heart, picked out in felt and clumsy stitches, is a badge. A raven.

They stare at it for a moment.

‘One of Riven’s.’

They stop in the trees to watch the back of Marton Hall. One end of the roof is scorched and blackened, just as Dafydd’s little house had been, and the yard smells of soot and human waste. The shutters are up, and there are no prints in the snow. It looks deserted. They walk behind the outbuildings and the woven fence until they are at the front of the house. An arrow is buried in the daub by the door. Below it, another body is stretched out in the mud, his feet facing the house, as if thrown from the doorway. His helmet lies some way away and something thick and stubby sticks from his throat. Another crossbow quarrel.

Thomas is about to step out of the trees when she stops him with a hand.

‘Wait,’ she says. She is studying the hall’s rush roof, which is clear of snow, and from which water drips. ‘It means it is warm,’ she says.

Nothing moves, though, and after a moment Thomas gets up again and is about to cross the yard when a shutter in the house drops with a crash and there is a shout. Thomas jumps, throws himself back. A quarrel zips past, catching his sleeve with a bang that almost pulls his arm off. He scrambles back behind a trunk. Katherine is crouched staring at him, her eyes wide.

‘Christ’s sake!’ he breathes, rubbing the wrist. The sleeve is torn to shreds. The crossbow quarrel lies in the snow. ‘Who’s in there?’ he calls. ‘Who are you?’

There is no reply.

‘We come here in peace,’ Thomas shouts again. ‘We are looking for Sir John Fakenham.’

There is the slightest movement in the house. Someone is being cautious.

‘What do you want with him?’ someone shouts from within.

‘We are friends of his,’ Thomas shouts back. ‘We are of his household.’

There is a long silence. Then someone calls:

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Thomas Everingham,’ he shouts. ‘Thomas Everingham and – and Lady Margaret Cornford. I used to live here. We are looking for Sir John Fakenham. Or Richard Fakenham. Or anyone who might know their whereabouts.’

There is another crash. Another shutter slides down.

‘Thomas Everingham?’

The voice is louder now and there is a face between the bars in the upstairs window: white-haired, flabby, red.

‘Sir John?’

‘My boy!’

Sir John disappears. Thomas glances at Katherine. From the house comes a grate as something is dragged across stone flooring and then a deep thunk as the drawbar is slid back. Then the door opens on unoiled hinges and Sir John stands in the shadows, still cautious.

Thomas crosses the yard.

‘Dear God,’ Sir John cries. ‘It really is you.’

He is looking hellish. He’s grown a beard, and is unwashed and filthy, like the lowest sort of villager, but Thomas hurries the last few steps and throws his arms around the old man. They pound one another on their backs, pulling each other close.

‘Great God above, it is more than wonderful to see you,’ Sir John cries. He leaves off the hugging to hold Thomas at arm’s length. Then he embraces him again. Tears are flooding down his grimy cheeks.

‘What news?’ he asks. ‘What news of Walter? Of Dafydd? And where’s Kit?’

He peers over Thomas’s shoulder but Katherine has stepped back into the shadow of the trees and is waiting, watching.

Thomas shakes his head. He is crying too now.

‘Dead,’ he says. ‘They were killed in Wales. We were trying to get back, back to you, to this house, but— It was – It was Riven. Riven’s boy. And that giant.’

Sir John makes a noise somewhere between a groan and a scream.

‘Oh dear Christ!’ he says. ‘Oh dear Christ!’

‘Riven’s men followed us to Wales,’ Thomas goes on.

Sir John pulls his ears. ‘Oh God!’ he whispers. ‘Oh God!’

‘And you?’ Thomas asks. ‘How have you fared? Where is everybody else?’

‘Us? Christ above. We have – Well, you see for yourself. We have had quite a time of it and have had to withstand Riven’s attentions as well. I thought you might be one of his men, back for more. But, Thomas, who is with you? Did you say Lady Margaret Cornford?’

Thomas can feel his pulse in his ears. He is about to try to gull Sir John, to defraud him. Dear God, what if he just laughs when he sees Katherine? What if he just says, ‘That’s not Margaret, that’s Kit’?

He opens his mouth to stop all this, to say no, that is not Lady Margaret, that is Kit in a dress, when Katherine emerges from the trees in the corner of his vision. She has taken off her cloak, so that it might be more easily seen that she is wearing a dress, so it might be more easily seen she is a woman, and she has plumped up her linen headdress. Despite everything, despite her thinness, her grubby clothes, her worn shoes, or even because of these, she looks, to Thomas’s eye at least, wholly beautiful.

Sir John stares. Katherine falters. She glances at Thomas, seeking reassurance. There is a long tense moment.

Sir John seems dumbfounded. Then he recalls himself.

‘My lady,’ he says. ‘Welcome to our house.’ And he steps towards her and takes her hand and kisses her, a frown flickering across his brow, perhaps because she is wearing no gloves or rings and her hands are still dirty from the road, and despite himself, Thomas is relieved.