Kingmaker: Broken Faith (22 page)

When it is over, finally, and they are retying their hose, she asks if he remembers that first time they stood on a riverbank and he smiles.

‘“Two are better than one,”’ he quotes, ‘“because they have a good reward for their labour for if they fall the one will lift up his fellow.”’

‘“But woe to him who is alone when he falls,”’ he carries on, ‘“for he has not another to lift him up.”’

Then they turn and they walk together, never not touching one another, and he has a fat smile on his face and she feels that they should have done that long, long ago, and she feels simultaneously full and empty, and for a few blissful moments she does not care who she is and where they are, and what is to come. It is enough that they are with one another and that at last she has made Thomas happy.

Richard’s second letter arrives a few weeks later, when the hay has been taken in, and there is the first hint of autumn in the air. Sir John stands in the yard with a cup of warmed wine. He is wearing a jacket over his doublet and he has given up the extravagantly piked shoes in favour of polished riding boots, which he wears turned down to the knee, and he is now never without his eyeglasses.

‘What have we here, eh?’ he asks, breaking the seal and unfolding the letter. It is short, though not written in any haste from London, but rather composed, considered, and contains three pieces of news: the first of which makes Sir John laugh until tears meet his beard, the second that makes him bellow with rage, and the third that creases his face in grief.

‘The people of Northampton rose up and tried to hang the Duke of Somerset!’ he laughs. ‘Dear God! They have not forgotten what he and his men did before the battle there that summer! Do you remember? They fired the place! Just as if it was France! Their own town! Well, I suppose some of them were Scots, so they can hardly be blamed, but oh, my Lord!

‘Apparently the townsmen were only persuaded to desist from hanging the bastard by some soothing words from King Edward himself, and a cask of wine opened in the marketplace! Now Somerset has been sent to some castle in Wales where King Edward hopes he will be safe. I hope he’s wrong! You can at least trust a Welshman to do that properly!’

The second piece of news contained in the letter is the one they have been waiting for, and it is as bad as they feared: Lord Hastings’s final attempt to have ownership of Cornford Castle revert to Richard has failed. Edmund Riven, his family’s attainder reversed, is now free to enjoy the right and title of the said estate, unentailed, and is at liberty to assign it to the heirs of his body or anyone else he chooses.

Sir John puts the letter on the log where the chessboard is carved and he removes his eyepieces and rubs his face with both hands.

‘So,’ he says. ‘It is over. We have been royally fucked. I mean that, Isabella, and I want your girls to hear me say it. We have been royally fucked. Fucked by a royal. Do you see? A royal has fucked us. For his own narrow self-interest, King Edward has gifted our property –
our
property – to that conniving, murdering, treacherous little shit Edmund bloody Riven.’

He gestures at the chessboard, recalling their earlier conversation, though today the pieces are put away.

Isabella sighs.

‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘We do not need the castle.’

Sir John is angry.

‘It is not about the goddamned castle,’ he says. Then he apologises and admits that it is about the castle. Isabella forgives him and asks what else the letter says.

Sir John picks it up. He adjusts his eyeglasses.

‘Let’s see, let’s see. Oh, dear God. Listen. This is Mayhew writing on his own behalf. “I have saved the worst news for last,” he writes. ‘Our dear Margaret Cornford is dead. The Prior of St Mary’s has sent message to say she was killed trying to abscond from the priory and that the boat she had stolen was later found drifting, empty, on the river as it runs through the town of Boston in the county of Lincolnshire. He enclosed a bill for the costs incurred housing her, for food and other divers needs, and for the search subsequent to her departure. Richard is inconsolable, and mourns her more than he mourns the loss of Cornford. I am keeping him under close watch, for he is more miserable than a worm, and right likely to take up weapons against one and all, including his own body.”’

Sir John lowers the letter. He is weeping openly, and Katherine too cannot stop the tears filling her eyes when she thinks of the harm she has caused, and she feels guilt press down on her shoulders like a physical weight. Any happiness she had been feeling dwindles into nothing.

They sit in silence for a while.

‘So what will Richard do now?’ Thomas cannot help asking.

‘Come home, I suppose,’ Sir John says. ‘Christ. It will be good to see the boy, but I wish it were in other circumstances. I wish – well, Isabella is right. There is no point going over all this again. It is as it is. There is nothing we can do, nothing we can bring to bear on the situation, so.’

At that moment Robert returns from the woods where he has been walking. His tonsure has grown out and he has settled into Sir John’s household without a ripple. He is wearing russet from top to toe, and he is carrying a stick and a bag slung over his shoulder. He takes the bag off and opens it to show them a haul of glossy chestnuts within, but Thomas is on his feet instantly.

‘Why have you taken my bag?’ he asks. ‘And what have you done with the ledger?’

Robert is surprised, but then he remembers Thomas’s attachment to the thing.

‘I am sorry, Brother Thomas,’ he says. ‘I did not think you would mind me borrowing the bag. I put your book quite safe on the coffer within, where the dogs cannot get at it. I needed a bag, is all.’

Sir John snorts.

‘You didn’t touch his sacred ledger, did you, Robert? He won’t like that.’

‘It is safe and sound,’ Robert protests.

‘Good thing, too,’ Sir Johns says. ‘He was never separated from it, were you, Thomas? Took it into battle at Towton, didn’t you, though why I never knew.’

Thomas has no proper idea why either. Robert takes the chestnuts to the kitchen and returns with the empty bag and the ledger. He fits the one inside the other and passes it to Thomas. It sits between them and Sir John frowns at it.

‘It was your old master’s, wasn’t it? Old Dowd the pardoner? And he felt it valuable?’

‘He hoped to sell it for a fortune in France,’ Katherine says. ‘Though we never knew who to, or why anyone would pay for it.’

‘A mystery then? May I?’

Thomas lets him. He takes the ledger and opens it. He holds it up to the fading afternoon light and peers at it through his eyeglasses.

‘It is just a list of names?’ he says. ‘Men who served in France. Some I know. Yes. Yes. Hmmm. Yes. All their movements for those years. But why should it be of any value to anyone at all?’

‘We don’t know,’ Katherine admits with a shrug. ‘Red John once said it must prove someone was somewhere they shouldn’t have been, or wasn’t somewhere they should’ve.’

Sir John looks beady. It is the first time he has ever been interested in the ledger. Perhaps because there is almost nothing else left in which to take an interest.

‘But you said old Dowd thought it would make him a fortune, didn’t you? So, think on it. There will be nothing of any value in finding that, say, this fellow – Thomas de Hookton – was here, say, rather than there, will it? No one would pay a farthing to discover the whereabouts of a simple archer from Hampshire.’

Katherine groans. It is so obvious. Of course it could only be someone of wealth! She feels utterly foolish.

‘The Duke of York,’ she says. ‘King Edward’s father. He is mentioned.’

Sir John nods.

‘Well,’ he says, wrinkling his nose, ‘he is dead, of course, so your book may be of little or no value now, but let us have a look anyway.’

And he starts the book at the beginning.

‘So where was he then, that he should not have been? Or where was he not that he should have been. Let us begin at the beginning, St Edward’s Day—’

‘That is the eighteenth day of the month of March,’ Robert intones.

They all look at him. He smiles slightly.

‘Father Barnaby made us learn them,’ he says. ‘“Knowledge of the lives of the saints and martyrs is what separates us from the pagans and the beasts in the fields.”’

They stare at him a moment, wondering if this is true. Then after a while Sir John continues.

‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘St Edward’s Day, of the nineteenth year of old King Henry’s reign. So, now, what is our old friend the Duke up to then, hey?’

He reads, moving his lips, but in unnerving silence, and Thomas’s shoulder touches hers and she nudges him back.

‘Aha,’ Sir John says after a moment. ‘Here he is. It says the Duke is in the garrison at Rouen, with Sir Henry Cuthbert of Gwent, three companies of men-at-arms and four of archers from Cheshire and other divers parts of the realm. He celebrates Mass with Cecily, Duchess of York.’

He turns the page and reads its reverse.

‘And he is in Rouen until – yes. Here he is there all that month, until here – on the first Thursday after St George’s Day.’

‘Which is the twenty-third day of April,’ Robert says.

‘Yes, yes,’ Sir John agrees, slightly impatient now, ‘when the Duke leaves for La Roche-Guyon – I remember La Roche! Anyway, he doesn’t stay long, because he’s back in Rouen for Mass to mark the Finding of the True Cross—’

‘Which is the second day of June.’

‘—at the cathedral, again with the Duchess, and he’s still there until – until here, the last week before the Feast of St Peter and St Paul?’

‘The twenty-ninth day of June.’

‘After which he goes to a place called Pontours, is it? Yes. Pontours. That is in Aquitaine, I think, quite small. Never went there myself. But the Duke is there, why? Ah. “To resist the King’s enemies”, or as we call it, fighting the French. Anyway, he is there in the company of Gui de Something – can’t read that word – a gentleman of Gascony, with one incomplete company of men-at-arms and two likewise of archers, and he’s gone until …’

Sir John turns some pages and then adjusts his brass-cupped eyeglasses.

‘Until here,’ he says. ‘The week following the feast of the Assumption.’

‘That is the fifteenth day of August.’

‘When he is back in Rouen five days later, bringing with him, “by the grace of Almighty God, two thousand four hundred best arrows, twenty-two men-at-arms and forty-three of the King’s best archers”.’

He turns the pages and continues to describe the Duke’s movements all that year. He returns to Rouen on St Luke’s Day (‘the eighteenth day of October,’ Robert says), and remains there for most of it, sallying out now and then, but seemingly without much incident, and he is mostly within the castle walls throughout Advent into Christmastide until he leaves for England after Candlemas (‘the second day of February’), ‘“trusting himself with God’s blessing, to the dread perils of the Narrow Sea at his port of Honfleur, or thereabouts”.’

‘He returns three weeks later,’ Sir John goes on, ‘and he is back in Rouen for the start of Lent and, yes, look here. In April, a rose, in the margin – white, of course – to celebrate the birth of his son on St Vitalis’s day.’

Thomas leans forward to look at the rose and is unimpressed by its quality.

‘That is King Edward?’ Katherine asks.

‘Edward? Yes,’ Sir John says. ‘I remember he was so sickly when he was born they didn’t think he’d make it through the night, so they baptised him at a rush in one of the side chapels of the cath-edral. My God! You’d never think it to look at him now, would you?’

Sir John laughs. Katherine remembers Edward: a great giant of a man, taller and broader even than Thomas, bulky with muscles from the training ground, but with the sort of skin you kept only if you were lucky enough to be able to take shelter when it rained.

‘Anyway,’ Sir John says. ‘The Duke is there for a month. He’s present for the Duchess’s churching, then he is off again, with all these men, look at them, returning to …’ He frowns again at the page before saying: ‘Pontours again. Quite a trip. Must say I don’t remember there being so much action down that end of the country, not then anyway, but it was a while ago now.’

After that the list runs on. The Duke was active in those months, ranging over English France, seldom in one place for more than a week at a time.

‘And that is it,’ Sir John says, closing the ledger on itself. He looks around at their blank faces and sighs.

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

There is a long pause. How can any of that be of value? she thinks. Yet there must be something in it. She tries to look at it the same way Sir John had: who is the wealthiest person mentioned therein? The Duke of York. What would matter most to him?

Katherine asks to see the ledger again. She can feel a rushing thrill. She knows what it is. She knows it now.

‘Edward was born in April,’ she says, pointing to the white rose in the margin. ‘St Vitalis’s Day.’

‘The twenty-eighth of April,’ Robert reminds them.

She turns the pages back to the beginning of the ledger. Her hands shake, and the others lean in, waiting.

‘Where is Pontours?’ she asks, pointing at the ledger.

‘Aquitaine,’ Sir John says. ‘As I say.’

‘Is that far from Rouen?’

He looks at her, having forgotten that she knows almost nothing.

‘Two weeks?’ he supposes.

‘So the Duke is there from the end of June – and he is not back in Rouen until the week following the Assumption, so about the twentieth, let us say, of August.’

Sir John agrees.

‘And where was the Duchess all this time?’ Katherine asks.

Sir John looks as if this might be a trick question.

‘I don’t know,’ he mutters. ‘She must have been in Rouen. She would not have risked travelling to Pontours with him, however many men he took. By road would be awful and by boat, well, that coast was infested with pirates, always has been.’

‘Could it be proved she stayed in Rouen?’ Katherine asks.

Sir John shrugs.

‘I dare say,’ he says. ‘There will be household accounts.’