Kingmaker: Broken Faith (12 page)

He cannot stand it. He needs to be free, out in the open, away from here. He stumbles and catches against the cupboard. A plate slides, the chalice jumps, the monstrance in its velvet hood falls with a bang and the host of paper tubes that fill the lower shelves come unbound and slither across the floor.

‘Blethyn!’ Barnaby is shouting. ‘Blethyn! Call Robert. Get the lay brothers.’

He barges past the two men and starts running. His boots slip in the grass and he goes down but he is up and quickly across the garth. He swings the bag around his shoulders, just as he has many times before, and takes hold of the post and hauls himself up on to the low wall and is about to launch himself on to the roofs again when the canon with the red beard appears. He is carrying, of all things, a quarterstaff and he uses it to knock Thomas’s legs, and Thomas scrambles and then falls. The bag catches, rips, and the book spills free and thumps to the ground next to him. Thomas gropes for it but the red-bearded canon is quickly across and plants a clog – a great wooden thing made with leather and nails – across Thomas’s wrist, pinning him to the ground.

‘Now then,’ he says, and he holds the staff over Thomas’s head and looks him in the eye, unhurried and calm. His beard is thrust forward, like a challenge. Thomas subsides. Whatever took hold of him has passed. He breathes out. He stares at the mud and then inches his gaze across to the book where it lies, roughly bound and carelessly cut, with a dent in it as if it has been stabbed by a madman.

‘He is possessed!’ Barnaby repeats. ‘He is fallen out of his wits!’

Now two more of the lay brethren are in the garth and stand confused to see the new arrival held to the grass.

‘We must keep him away from the brothers,’ Blethyn says.

‘What shall we do with him?’

‘Bind him, for his own safety, and ours. You, fetch the ostler. And bring straps.’

One of the lay brothers hurries off. Thomas says nothing. There are tears in his eyes again. By Christ, when will this stop? He does not know how he came to be here. He hears Barnaby and Blethyn talking and then sees their toecaps under their cassocks.

‘It is a humoral imbalance,’ Blethyn diagnoses, ‘brought on by a pernicious enthralment to sin. It is what drove him from us in the first instance, and since then it will only have become worse with temptation.’

Now the ostler is back and he helps the canon and two lay brothers bind Thomas – ankles, then wrists – with leather straps from the stables. They are strong men, particularly the red-bearded canon, and Thomas’s struggles only present them with a challenge to which they rise.

‘Feel him,’ Blethyn tells Barnaby and they crouch next to Thomas and press the backs of their cold fingers to his forehead.

‘Saints, he is hot!’

‘As I suspected,’ Blethyn says. ‘The devil finds it easy to take a soul already weakened by sin.’

‘He seeks our care,’ Barnaby explains. ‘He wants our prayers. For a cure. Take him to the stable.’

‘The ledger,’ Thomas mutters. ‘Let me have it.’

The ostler and the canon and the lay brothers hesitate as Barnaby crosses to the ledger and picks it up. He wipes the mud off its surface and holds it open and puzzles over it, just as he must have before.

‘Why?’ he asks. ‘What is it about this book?’

‘It is mine,’ Thomas says. ‘It’s mine.’

‘Yours?’

He looks back at it again, turning it in his hands. He stares at it and then after a moment he gives up and shakes his head and moves to put it back in its ripped leather bag, and so they pick Thomas up, one at each corner, and carry him across the garth and out into the yard just as if they were bringing in a yule log at Christmastide. Ahead of them the ostler’s boy leads Thomas’s horse out of the stable and they carry him in and deposit him face down in the horse-pissy straw.

‘The ledger!’ Thomas calls. ‘The ledger.’

Father Barnaby is standing at the door, looking disappointed in something, as if Thomas has not lived up to his expectations.

‘Oh, let him have it,’ he says and Blethyn, who has taken the book, looks at it in its bag one more time, then swings it by the strap, releasing it into the stable where it lands next to Thomas’s head and skids across to thump against the wall.

IT IS SISTER
Katherine’s task to wash the clothes. Not only those of the sisters, but also those of the lay sisters, and the brothers,
and
the lay brothers. She has replaced the three lay sisters who might ordinarily have completed the task in two days, and it takes her seven, so that by the time she has finished her week’s work, the cycle begins again.

She does this in the stream, to the west of the sister’s beggars’ gate, where the banks have been worn shallow by generations of washerwomen, and there are planted three wringing posts, though of course she only uses one. The bed of the river is stony here, hard on the soles of her bare feet, and she sometimes wishes for the soft welcome of mud between her toes, but the water is so cold that soon her legs are numb anyway, so after a while it matters little.

All day she works, watched by the three lay sisters whom she relieved of the task. One stands on the bank nearest the priory, the other two on the far bank, making sure she does not bolt again, and now, two months later, they are yet to be bored of the task, and watch her every movement. They even watch which way her eyes look, and if she stares at something too long, a tree in the distance, say, or the ferryman on his punt, then one of them will get up and come and stand in front of it and tell her that she must not dawdle.

And so now here she is, her nails bleeding from the lye, her hands slippery on the beetle, up to her knees in cold, dark water, beating a pile of ragged linen with a stick, forcing the water through the weave in the hope that it will carry away the dirt as it goes. She has a rhythm, steady and unchanging, and she pounds away until she thinks that the shirt is clean enough to pass inspection. Then she stops beating it and throws it into one rush basket and collects the next dirty shirt from another rush bucket where it has been soaking in the lye that she has made herself from the ashes of the kitchen fire. Then she pounds that. ‘She doesn’t half hit the thing,’ one of the lay sisters calls across to the other two.

And she does. She goes at it with all her strength, all day, every day, and when the tears come, when she remembers what she has lost, and the wrongs that have been done her, she hits all the harder.

‘She’ll work herself to death,’ one of them says.

‘Or she’ll break the stick,’ the other laughs. ‘Then she’ll catch it from the Prioress.’

But she carries on, just as she has done for two months, beating away so that now her back is corded almost like an archer’s and her shoulders are rounded with muscle. They feed her more often than she believed they would, with soup and bread and ale, and they leave it on a rock and step back to watch her eat. They are contemptuous of her, and she is glad, because she could not stand to be shown any kindness, and she knows that if she is not to die here in the priory, she will have to hurt these women, one day, maybe soon.

Each evening, when the mist begins to rise from the water, and the night bell rings, the lay sisters call her in and she climbs wearily from the stream and gathers her baskets and together they trudge back up to the beggars’ gate. They wait while Sister Matilda comes and unlocks the gate that she once slammed in the giant’s face. Then Sister Matilda admits her, takes her to her cell, pushes her in, and draws the bar of the door behind her.

Sleep always comes quickly. But every night she is woken with the other sisters and is led down the stone steps and across the yard and around the wings of the cloister to the nave, where she joins the community to observe the hour. She stands there with the junior nuns, dizzy with fatigue, listening to the lector read the psalms from the other side of the wall, and if she were not so tired, if she had not worked herself half to death to avoid just this situation, this would be the time she feared most, for this is when she must face the Prioress.

And there she stands, the Prioress, across the tiles from Katherine, a head above the next tallest sister, or she kneels at her prie-dieu with her huge hands clasped tight in that simulacrum of prayer, with that heavy brow lowered and her eyes tight shut, and whenever Katherine glances at her she cannot help but shudder. It is a mixture of fear and revulsion, very powerful, that sometimes makes her gag.

And the Prioress knows it. She plays on it. Sometimes she will ignore Katherine, and pursue this pretence of prayer; then at other times Katherine’s gaze will be drawn to her, and she will find herself staring into those eyes that carry such a charge of hatred that Katherine will almost cry out.

On the first day she was brought back to the priory, death would have been preferable. It was the only thing on her mind, but seeing her reaction, they had trussed her hand and foot, and she had been rolled in the back of a wagon like a corpse on her way to the churchyard, lacking the chance to have herself killed. She’d railed and spat at the bailiff and his men. She’d called them everything foul that she could think of. She’d drawn on her time around soldiers’ campfires, where ale uncurbed the tongue, and at the cutting table, where pain did the same, and the bailiff’s men had been shocked at first to hear such words in a lady’s mouth, and one had been provoked as she hoped they all might, with drawn knives, but the other two calmed him and soon indignation gave way to marvel, and they began to laugh at her as she lay there so powerless.

When the cart had trundled past the castle, they had stopped and allowed Mayhew to guide Richard across the newly repaired bridge to say goodbye. He was carrying the baby John, and held him up for her to see, and she had wept then, for him, and for Richard, since he could not, but she would not weep for herself. Then the baby started to cry, raucous, and the girl came and she wept too. Richard had put a hand on her ankle and promised that he and Mayhew would ride to London to find William Hastings, that he would have her freed within the week, the month, and then he had given her the pardoner’s ledger, telling her that he knew the consolation it gave her.

When the oxen had pulled on, leaving Richard and Mayhew and the baby behind, the bailiff took the ledger and opened the bag and laughed.

‘Thinks it’s a book of hours, does he? A romance? Fuck me! It is just a list of fucking names.’

The other men had laughed too, though she was sure they could not read, but they whistled when they saw the hole in its face, and speculated on the cause and then, after a moment, the bailiff had returned the pardoner’s ledger to the bag but soon lost interest in it, and had thrown it down next to her, so close she could almost touch it. She focused on it as the cart moved along the potted causeway to the priory. The men had begun talking in that desultory way about Agnes Eelby, and their lack of envy for those who’d had to dig her up and now rebury her. Then they’d moved on to the men who’d appeared out of nowhere to sway the jury. Neither knew them personally.

‘But you know who sent ’em, don’t you?’ one of them had said. There was a silence then, filled with meaning, and she looked up to see the bailiff glance down at her.

‘Who?’ she’d asked.

There was no reply.

‘Who? For the love of God who sent them?’

But the men felt they had said enough, and they turned their backs on her while the bailiff rode ahead to arrange the detention with the Prior of Haverhurst. The wagon lurched and she angled herself so as not to be thrown off and she stared up into a sky that was sallow with the threat of more snow. When they got to the priory the pardoner’s ledger was taken from her by two of the lay brothers and a lay sister whom she did not know, and they were apologetic, and promised the book would be kept safe and returned when she left the confines of the community.

Then she was taken through the yard and up the back steps to a cell she had never seen before, and had not known existed. It was large, whitewashed, with fresh rushes on the floor and a raised palliasse, filled with fresh hay that smelled of hyssop, and there were linen sheets and a blanket. There was a window with a shutter to block the night air and a small crucifix in a sconce on the wall with a beeswax candle, and the lay sister was apologetic, saying the Prioress would be with her as soon as the lessons were read. Katherine had sat on a stool and shook, and prayed that the Prioress whom she had known was dead, and that this might be some new incarnation.

But the moment she heard the heavy tread on the steps she knew it would be the Prioress, her Prioress, and so it proved. When Katherine had seen that great prow of a face enter the room and those small eyes turn on her and the realisation dawn, they had simply stood staring at one another. The Prioress had her mouth open ready to deliver some simpering greeting reserved for Lady Margaret, daughter of Lord Cornford. Katherine was trembling, and crumbling from the inside.

What happened then happened as if in a trance. The Prioress shouted something, and advanced towards her with those beefy arms outstretched. Katherine felt herself caught, lifted off the ground. Her legs swung, her feet in mid-air. Then she was pressed against the wall. The Prioress’s face was huge, blotchy, her eyes screwed in knots, her teeth bared, spittle everywhere. Her hands were around Katherine’s throat and she could feel the pulse booming in her ears. The pain grew. Vision wavered. She grabbed the meaty wrists, could not even get her hands around. Then the other sister was there, pulling the Prioress back by the shoulders. Another joined them, also pulling. A third. There was screaming and shouting, dull in her ears. Until the Prioress had to let her drop. She fell gasping. Her throat burned, every breath a torture.

The Prioress was like a bull, her great jaw thrust out, her body straining at the door, just held back by three sisters.

‘I will kill you!’ she’d bellowed. ‘I don’t care who you are, I will kill you this time!’

The three sisters pushed and shoved the Prioress from the room, holding her back as she surged forward, finally getting her out. Katherine was left alone. Then another sister came and Katherine thought it was Sister Joan, back from the dead, but it was not, it was some copy of her, and Katherine felt hands on her, pulling at her limbs and her clothes and even her precious rosary beads and she allowed it to happen and then she was hauled naked from the room and pushed and shoved down the stairs and out into the yard and across it and she was made to stand by the well while her hair was hacked to her scalp, and it fell on her ivory white feet in pale hanks and she was shivering and weeping, but they held her up while the scissors ground through her tresses. She stood there and wept and she had never felt so alone and abandoned as she had then, and in her pain she damned everyone who had abandoned her, everyone who had left her, the dead and the quick. And one of the sisters told her to cease her blubbering mouth for she was cursing aloud, and then the sister cutting her hair nicked her scalp. After that she was put back into the cell in which she had been stretched the night after she had been seen with Thomas. The door was shut and the bar was drawn and she was alone in the dark.