Kingmaker: Broken Faith (13 page)

She was there three days. By the fourth she was nearer death than life, and she was better off that way, for at least then they would not drag her out and hang her from some tree. Her waking hours were tormented by thoughts of Sister Joan, writhing under her, her dove-white throat soft under the thumbs, then the thick blood – the colour of damson juice – spluttering to her lips, and then the Prioress’s bellows. So when the door was opened on that fourth day, she thought to herself, this is it.

She had faced death before, of course: when the Earl of Warwick had wanted her hanged for running from his army outside Canterbury; when they were caught in the storm off the coast of Wales; when she fell from the horse outside Brecon with the arrow shafts flitting over their heads; and then just before the rout by Wigmore Castle, when the giant and Riven’s boy caught them in the trees. And really, what had she left to live for? Almost everyone she’d ever loved, or even known, was dead. Her one regret was Richard, Richard and the boy John whom she’d saved. So she’d stood up. She’d said her prayers, such as they were. She was ready.

But when the door opened it was a bowl of soup, some ale, a piece of bread and a worn linen shift. Then the door was closed again.

‘Wait,’ she’d cried and she’d run at the door in the darkness and beat on its planks. At that moment anything would have been better than a return to the darkness and silence of her own mind. But no one returned for a day, and when they did it was with the same thing: a bowl of soup, bread, and some ale, and that was it.

More days passed. She lived like a dog, shivering. The cell stank. She stank. Were they going to keep her here for ever? Until she died? But if so, then why feed her? Why not let her die?

This was a question that became more unanswerable by the day. Why had they not hanged her for Sister Joan’s murder? Why had she not been taken out and hanged from a tree as she had imagined they might? Then it occurred to her that they were waiting for a judge to oversee the trial. Someone more senior in the Church’s hierarchy than the Prior. A bishop perhaps? That would be it.

Eventually they let her out. It was Sister Matilda again, accompanied by three curious lay sisters who wrinkled their noses when the door was opened and one even retched. Each sister carried a washing beetle, a three-foot length of whittled oak with a bulbous hammer-like end, and they escorted her down to the stream she would come to know so well and they stood closely by and watched while she tore her clothes off and threw herself into the water and scrubbed at herself with a handful of bunched linen dipped in lye soap. Then they stood watching her put on clean linen and a lay sister’s smock.

‘’S happened t’your ear, Sister? Never known a girl to have her ear clipped.’

In a moment of weakness she told them.

‘I ran away from the Earl of Warwick’s army,’ she said. They were unimpressed.

‘Always runnin’ from some place, aren’t you?’ one of them said. ‘If it’s not this, it’s that.’

The first time she was set to work, she ran straight away. She lifted her cassock skirts and waded across the freezing stream. She was trying to loop back around the priory to find the road to Cornford, but the lay sisters caught up with her easily enough. She turned and lashed out at the first one, a woman with a near-constantly dismayed expression, but the woman was fast, and had been beating laundry all her life. She stepped back to let the beetle swing past, then she struck. She caught Katherine on the ball of the shoulder, knocking her staggering and then sprawling in the mud. The pain was intense, disorientating. It made her helpless and when the other sisters came they did not need to hit her any more. They picked her up under her arms and had to keep her upright on the way back. Then they put her in the cell and that night she had a powerful pain in her head, as if it might split, and she was constantly thirsty.

The next day she tried to run again. This time the sisters were ready for her. They merely held up their beetles and Katherine could hardly run let alone take the pain a second time. She turned and they pushed her back to the washing and they stood on the bank while she stood in the water.

‘Why?’ she’d muttered. ‘Why?’

She had supposed they’d be on her side.

‘What do you think’ll happen to us if you run?’

Katherine shrugged. There was blood in her nose.

‘We’ll be beaten black and bloody blue for one thing.’

‘And we’ll have to do the linen again, is the other. So.’

Katherine understood. She picked up her own beetle and a shirt and began the work, and every day since it has been more or less the same. Now, though, it is the week before Easter, spring, when the water around her knees has lost its iron bite and the hawthorn wands along the far bank are in flower. The working day is longer, and the mist appears later, and at the end of it, Katherine is bone tired. Today she drags her feet and her basket up to the beggars’ gate where Sister Matilda is waiting, this time shifting from foot to foot with impatience.

‘Quick, quick,’ she says. ‘Take the baskets up to the dorter. The dorter now. Not the cloister. The dorter.’

Katherine sees there is something up. The yard has been swept and there is meat cooking, despite it being Lent. In the cloister two sisters are at work with brooms while another has an old goose wing and is removing the swallows’ nests and spiders’ webs from among the eaves, and a fourth is taking down the drying lines. The bustle reminds her of the time the Bishop of Lincoln was due, when they cleaned the priory from dorter to dishpan, all the time knowing that he would never witness their endeavour, and still being disappointed when he did not come to the priory at all, not even to see the Prior over the other side of the wall.

And then it strikes her. If the Bishop is coming, it must be to oversee her trial for Joan’s murder. There can be no other explanation. That night she hardly sleeps despite the tiredness. She wonders when he will come. If they are cleaning up that day, then possibly he will come the next? He will arrive late in the afternoon, before Vespers, and having ridden down, or been carried down in his litter more likely, and he will not want to conduct any business that day, but will wish to start the next, surely?

She starts to imagine how any trial might be conducted. In the nave of the church, perhaps? The Bishop might call his questions over the wall, or write them down and pass them through the turning window? But then how will she answer? By passing her replies back through the turning window? Or will she be able to speak in the church as no sister has ever done before? Or will the trial be held elsewhere? But if that is the case, then why is she still here? Why has she been held here when surely the Bishop would have summoned her to Lincoln? Unless he cannot because he needs the infirmarian and the Prioress to act as witnesses to what happened, and he cannot call them out of cloister.

Unless, of course, it is not the Bishop who is coming.

But then, who?

Katherine begins her next day carrying the baskets down to the hovel where she keeps the barrel of lye soap. In a curious way she enjoys the process, since she knows this will be the last time she does it, and that this time tomorrow her life will be shaken out of this routine to hang in the balance once more.

One of the baskets is unusually heavy, as if someone has hidden stone within, and she begins to sort through its linens with a frown. They are from the canons’ cloister, and when she lifts a shirt her eye is instantly drawn to the oddity: some odd-coloured cloth, russet, unusual here where every other garment is black or white. She hauls it out and is further surprised by its bulk and weight. It is a man’s jack, only so heavy. Then she discovers its surprise. There are metal plates sewn into the lining. A soldier’s coat. The faint tang of the metal within the padding, and a pleasant dusty smell. It smells of men, she thinks.

One of the lay sisters – the dismayed one, standing on the same bank as Katherine – has come to see what it is. Having spent so many years washing clothes herself, she too is an expert in linen, and any oddity is bound to be of interest. They hold the jack up together. It is large, with cloth enough for both to make a coat each and more to spare.

‘Ain’t it heavy?’ she says. ‘It must belong to him what’s touched.’

‘Him what’s touched?’ Katherine asks. ‘Who’s touched?’

‘Him,’ the lay sister says, nodding towards the canons’ cloister. ‘What they’re saying all the masses for. What blew in on a horse and is proper frothing.’

Being apostate Katherine is not permitted to attend Mass, so she does not know they are praying for anyone in particular. Studying the jack, though, she feels a chance coming, and her heart beats a little faster.

‘How long will he be here?’ she asks.

The lay sister shrugs and drops her side of the jack.

‘Till he’s dead, I ’spect.’

She is about to retire to sit on the old stump when Katherine asks if that is why they are cleaning the cloister.

‘No,’ the woman says, ‘it’s not for him, you daft bitch. It’s for the Prior of All, isn’t it? First time he’s been here since any of us’ve been born.’

Katherine feels a lurch, as if the ground has tilted, and her head feels suddenly full. So that is it. The Prior of All.

‘When is he coming?’ she asks. But the lay sister shrugs and walks away. Katherine returns to the jack and part of her is able to wonder at the irony of it all. She escaped the priory and spent all those months pretending to be on her way to see the Prior of All to appeal against her unjust expulsion from the cloister, and now here he is, coming to try her for murder.

‘Get on with it,’ the lay sister calls.

But the jack has given her an idea. A glimpse of something, anyway. She glances quickly at the lay sister, then returns to the jack, examining it for stains; she dips the cuffs and the undersides of the sleeves in the urine and pours some more on the shoulder where the strap of a bag has worn and stained the cloth, and then she puts it aside for that to work while she continues with the rest of the basket. There is nothing odd in here until she gets to the bottom and finds a pair of men’s hose, of blue wool. They are badly stained where the man has sat astride a saddled horse, and there is crusted mud on the knees. She plunges them in the lye with everything else and then agitates the brew with her beetle.

It is late morning, nearly time for Sext, and there is watery sunshine and a breeze from the east, so when she has washed and pulverised the laundry, including the jack and the hose, she wrings it hard as she can on the post – awkward with the metal plates – and then pins it on the hawthorns.

Towards the end of the afternoon Katherine finally stops her beating, ostensibly to rest her back. The sunshine has gone and the sky from where the wind blows is grey, louring, and she knows it will rain soon. Good, she thinks, and she begins thumping the other linens, one strong slap after the next. When the rain comes the lay sisters shout at her and she sets aside her beetle and hurries to take down the still-damp laundry. The lay sisters watch her for a moment, then turn and huddle against the rain. Now she moves quickly, practised hands secreting the jack and the hose between various braies and shifts. When she has finished neither can be seen.

Then she returns to the stream and carries on as the rain prickles her back and pebbles the water around her. That day the night bell rings before the mist starts to rise from the stream and as it rings Katherine carries the basket wherein the jack and hose are hidden back up to the priory. Sister Matilda is at the gate, key in hand, shifting from foot to foot, impatient.

There is still more work to be done, which means the Dean of All has not yet arrived. It is a stay of execution, but only until tomorrow. Her heart is quick as she hurries up the steps and as she passes her cell she stumbles and puts her basket down and clutches her back. No one is looking. No one would care anyway. She snatches the jack and the hose from under the pile and dips into the darkness of her cell. She unrolls the straw mat on which she sleeps and rolls it up again with the clothes inside. Then she is out again and carrying the basket across the yard and up the steps. No one has seen her.

After five trips up and down the steps there is no space left on the lines in the dorter and after more pottage and bread and ale, Sister Matilda quickly shunts her through the door to her cell and pulls the bar across and she is condemned to her darkness once again. But now her heart is beating fast and her breathing is unsteady as she waits the length of time it would take to say the Ave Maria, then she unrolls her mattress and hauls out the damp, heavy jack. She tries it on. Its weight drags across her shoulders, as heavy as a child, she thinks, and its hem reaches her knees and she has to roll each sleeve back halfway so as to be able to use her hands. With a belt around her waist she persuades herself that she will not look too much the fugitive.

But how to make use of it? It is no good to her while she is locked in her cell. She has paced the floors and knocked on the walls and tried to scratch away the mortar between the stones, but nothing gives. Then she has an idea. She takes off the jack and turns it open. Working in the dark, she rips open a seam under what she imagines is the arm and she feels the strips of steel within the padding. Each plate is rough edged, too stiff to bend, and punctured in the middle so that it can be stitched in place. She chooses one, and twists it until the linen threads snap and it comes loose. It is a piece as long as her hand, two fingers wide. It is perfect.

She returns the jack to its hiding place under the mattress and fumbles her way over to the door. It is so dark that she cannot see her hand in front of her face but she feels her way up the door jamb until she comes to the stone into which the bar is set. She wonders whether she can scrape out the cement around the stone, then she wonders if she can’t just work the drawbar back? She slides the strip into the gap between the door and the stone and lifts it until it meets the bar. There is perhaps the width of a coin in which to work. She presses the steel into the wood and moves it from left to right. She does this slowly, time and time again, and she presses her eye to the crack in the door, imagining that if someone came, they would bring a light, and she would see that before they saw the bar move in its tiny increments.