Kingmaker: Broken Faith (45 page)

King Henry puts his new cloak on and straightens it, and in it he looks properly ordinary, a humble dredge, a cleric perhaps, and he has the face of a man you’d never want to ask a question for fear of him answering it. Thomas helps him up into his saddle. He is frail, narrow-shouldered, brittle as a bird and just as light. He smells odd, Thomas thinks. Fungal.

‘Remember, sirs, we are merely going for a ride,’ Thomas reminds them as he swings himself up into the saddle.

‘What should we do?’ the one who’d wanted to attack Riven’s men asks. ‘We do not want to fall into Lord Montagu’s hands any more than you or the King.’

Thomas looks down at their upturned faces, all screwed up and wan and anxious, and he tells them to be seen to be going to the chapel to pray, and then to leave through the sacristy door, and make their way upriver a little while where they will find the town of Corbridge.

‘Cross the river there and then when you are on the other side, go west. Make for Hexham. It is not far. An hour’s walk perhaps. The Duke of Somerset’s army is camped a mile south. You will not miss it.’

It does not seem much of a plan, not to him, not to any of them, but it is no worse than his own to smuggle King Henry away by dressing him as another man, and, in fact, rather better, and he wonders for a moment if they should all do that? But Jack is unable to walk, and Katherine is like to expire, and everything is better if you have a horse. There are some grumbles, some mouths opened to voice complaint, but Riven’s men are beginning to move.

‘We must go,’ Thomas says.

And the King, a terrible horseman, lets Thomas take a lead rein and he sits there in his saddle, nervously pretending to be someone else, and they set their horses along the track, reins not quite slack in their thumbs, away from the castle gate, expecting at any moment a shout from behind and the rumble of pursuing hooves.

‘Be ready,’ Thomas says.

But nothing comes. They ride out, following the track through the gate of the hazel palisade and into the rough pasture, and still nothing. Then they pass behind a thin screen of new-budding aspens, and then they reach the road and nothing has come and it seems they have done it.

‘You may take off the scarf now, your grace,’ Payne tells him. But King Henry wears it as a badge of humility, like the poorest pilgrim, and they ride on, and Thomas has rarely seen anyone so uncomfortable in a saddle: he sits on his horse as if at stool, as they retrace their steps of yesterday back towards the town of Corbridge, picking their way over loose cobbles as fast as they dare, looking back over their shoulders for signs of pursuit. Thomas cannot help but smile. Taking King Henry from under Riven’s nose is a small victory in his campaign against him, but it is something, and he tries to imagine the scene when Montagu arrives to find him gone.

But where to take him?

‘We cannot go back to Bamburgh,’ he tells Katherine. ‘That will be to present him to Giles Riven just as if it were his saint’s day.’

‘But there is nowhere else to go, save the Duke of Somerset,’ she says.

A couple of townsmen have come out of their houses and are watching. So too are faces in windows and there is a piebald goat atop a red-hooped barrel standing nearby which also regards them through golden devil’s eyes. King Henry does not like to be looked at by goats, and he begins a whispery prayer, and still Thomas is left to decide what to do.

‘There is no one else to oppose Riven now,’ Katherine murmurs. ‘No one else but Somerset. He is our only hope.’

And she looks so forlorn, he could weep. But Thomas thinks, yes, there is – there is me. I can do what I set out to do all those years ago. I can kill Riven myself. I will perhaps be able to start with the son.

Then the goat on the barrel lifts its bearded chin and looks into the distance, as if sniffing the wind, and after a moment, it jumps down and with a patter of hooves it is gone, and the horses swing their heads and stop chewing and are still, and then a cloud of birds flies overhead, choughs perhaps, and a bell rings to the east, and yet what is the hour?

‘It must be them,’ he supposes aloud. Imagining Edmund Riven and his stinking eye riding up to Bywell, certain of victory, only to find his prey gone, and there is in that, to Thomas, a sombre note of quiet satisfaction.

‘Come on,’ he says, and turns his horse southwards, and kicks it on, riding down through the town towards the bridge, towing King Henry behind him. He pays pontage for them all with the last of his coins and as he rides on across the bridge, Thomas looks over his left shoulder, along the bank toward Bywell, but there is nothing to be seen, and soon they are off the bridge and on to the road south, retracing their path through the pastures of the southern bank. When they reach Somerset’s makeshift encampment, they are met by a patrol. The riders are suspicious, and they need persuading that King Henry really is the King, but seeing his rings, and a curious red stone he wears as a pendant, they see he must be someone, and they agree to take them to find Horner, at least, who will vouch for them, and they find him sitting upstream, fishing.

‘All day and not a bite,’ he says. Then he sees the King, and he stands.

‘Your grace,’ he bows, and then he sees Katherine, and his focus sharpens.

‘But you’ve had more luck,’ he breathes with his mouth open, staring as she dismounts. And now King Henry turns to her, and finally sees he has been travelling with a woman.

‘Oh,’ he says.

Katherine stands there before them in that dress. She touches the sleeve of her left arm. She is feeling better, certainly looking less waxen, and she looks to Thomas to explain, and so does Horner, and Payne, and even King Henry in his absent way, and Thomas feels as if his head is filled with tow, almost to bursting point, and he wonders why he has not thought up something in advance, but he can think of nothing, and so he says only the very first words that come into his mouth.

‘This is my wife,’ he says and despite it all, despite everything, he cannot help his eyes misting over and he feels very much consoled by that thought, as if it is somehow enough, or will do for them all as well as it does for him, but Horner can only stare.

‘Your
wife
?’ he asks. ‘But she is – she is— Where is Kit?’

And now Thomas feels he might as well tell them, have done with it, for he can still devise of nothing, but now Katherine enters with a lie that makes him stop and smile again, despite everything.

‘My brother has stayed in Bywell,’ she says.

‘Your
brother
?’

Jack starts coughing. Katherine says nothing. Horner stares at her. She stares back until he shuts his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.

‘By all the saints,’ he says. ‘You do look – similar.’

She says nothing.

‘Are you as good a surgeon as he?’ he asks.

‘Twice as good,’ she says.

Horner looks over to Payne, who shrugs.

‘So she says,’ he mutters.

‘You did not tell us that Kit was your wife’s brother?’

‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘You did not ask.’

‘But all this time?’

‘What can I say?’

‘You can tell us why have you brought her here now?’ Horner asks.

‘Montagu is coming,’ Thomas says, not answering the question. ‘Today. He has ridden from Newcastle.’

Katherine is forgotten. So too is the King.

‘We must tell Somerset,’ Horner says. ‘Come with me.’

Thomas nods. They turn their back on King Henry and walk through the camp together. Thomas explains Riven’s ruse. Horner seems at a loss for words. He does not believe him. Nor does the Duke of Somerset. He makes them stand at the opening of his tent while he eats some sort of fowl, roasted. Grey is within, sitting on a folding stool, and Tailboys, too, likewise seated, and behind them there are others, the Lords Hungerford and Roos. All have suffered the privations of the past months: they are poorly shaved, baggy-eyed, in dirt-smutted clothes, and the tip of one of Tailboys’s piked shoes is broken and turned down. The tent smells of cold river water, and of mildew and unwashed bodies. Not even the Duke’s supper smells good.

‘Oh, good Christ,’ Somerset says. ‘How could he, you fool? Riven’s been face down for three years, enduring half hell’s agonies, not sending missives to his son or making pacts with the King’s enemies. Dear God.’

And he should know, Thomas thinks, and yet …

‘Where is King Henry now?’ Tailboys asks, looking over their shoulders for his dread sovereign, and the way he says it, King Henry is obviously a burden they can do without.

‘He is with Master Payne,’ Horner tells them. ‘At prayer.’

‘He must be gone,’ Somerset says. ‘We must get him away, tonight, back to Bamburgh. If we lose him, then we are left with nothing.’

Sir Ralph Grey is sober this morning and beats Tailboys to the punch.

‘I will provide an escort,’ he says. ‘I will go myself. Take twenty men.’

The others regard him.

‘You do not relish the prospect of an encounter with Lord Montagu?’ Tailboys asks.

‘I merely offer, is all,’ Grey counters. ‘We cannot send King Henry alone. He is the King of England, after all, and should travel accompanied and in some style.’

‘I should take him,’ Tailboys objects.

Grey snorts.

Somerset brings the discussion to an end.

‘I will let you know who is to escort him,’ he says. ‘We can spare only very few men, and none of any use. Cripples and so forth. And we must accomplish it with no fuss. His presence here is a boon to the men, and his loss will be felt. So not another word.’

Thomas is bundled out.

From then on the camp is busy. Men are at their weapons and armour as usual, tightening, loosening, polishing and sharpening. Fires have been lit. Pots steam, and the women are washing clothes in the river and the trees and bushes are spread with clothe Thomas cannot imagine ever drying before they will need to be packed away. A blacksmith is shoeing a horse, and a grinder has set up his wheel and sparks are flying, but here there is a man – one of Lord Roos’s – trying to sell a kestrel, and another his tent. They are hoping to reduce their baggage, so that if they have to run for it, they can. Thomas is tempted to buy the tent, not the bird, for Katherine, but then he too would be encumbered with it and just like these men, they must travel light, he thinks, if they are to get away. Already his mind is turning to flight.

So now he looks around, tries to see where they will run when it comes to it. They are camped on a flat plain, in a loop of the river, at the bottom of the valley, just south of the road and its bridge across the river they are calling the Devil’s Water, which flushes over a rocky bed on its way to join the Tyne to the north. In addition to the bridge there are a couple of fords along its length where the water is about hock deep, he supposes, but elsewhere it is much deeper, and the flow, after the rains, is powerful enough to create a churning cloud of mist above the low waterfall upstream. Across the river, to the west, the road cuts up a steep, heavily wooded hill on its way back to Hexham, and to the east the road from Corbridge snakes southwards until it reaches a crossroads: the west road comes across around another hill, mostly of rough moorland, just like at Hedgeley, which the men call Swallowship Hill. If Somerset were to set himself up there, Thomas thinks, on the hill’s crest, then he might have a chance, but down here? He is a duck on water.

‘Your wife?’

It is John Stump. Christ! He had forgotten about John Stump. Now John nudges him with his remaining elbow, and grins a very particular grin, and despite his distractions, Thomas cannot help but smile back.

‘What of her?’ he asks.

‘Come on,’ John says. ‘I’ve been watching those hands at work all these weeks. That isn’t anyone other than Kit.’

Thomas is alarmed. He opens his mouth to say something, but what?

‘You crafty devil!’ John goes on. ‘Having her here all the time. Right under our noses. But listen. Don’t you find it a bit odd? You know. How she looks so like Kit? Must be funny, when you’re face to face, like?’

Thomas does not know exactly what John Stump means, but he can guess.

‘Anyway,’ John says, ‘Horner’s looking for you.’

When they find him Horner is helping one of the others brush down the stolen horses. He seems cheerful and even optimistic.

‘Somerset doesn’t believe Montagu knows where we are,’ he says, ‘and is probably fixed on taking Hexham, and so tomorrow we will take the crest of the hill there –’ he points over to Swallowship Hill – ‘and catch him while he is on the move, and with God’s blessing, this time we will score such a victory as to set the whole country ablaze for King Henry.’

Thomas wonders if he should ask about the last time they caught Montagu’s army on the move – through Hedgeley Moor – but he does not want to upset or disappoint Horner, so he keeps his mouth shut.

‘Thomas,’ Horner goes on, ‘you are to take the archers to the front as before.’

‘We have very few arrows,’ Thomas warns. ‘Barely twelve apiece.’

Horner is surprised, caught out. He obviously had no idea things were that bad.

‘Nevertheless,’ he says after a moment of anxiety, ‘loose them and then retire. It is the Duke’s plan.’

Then it is a foolish plan, Thomas thinks, which does not address the realities of the situation, but that is typical of Somerset, Thomas supposes, and he is pleased, for it is as he’d hoped. He will do what he must, but he can be expected to do no more.

He goes now to find Katherine. It is curious, he thinks as he passes through the camp, that now she is dressed as a woman, he must fret about her more, or be seen to fret about her more, than when she was a boy, although in fact she is in far less danger now. He has never forgotten that the French witch Joan was burned for dressing as a man.

He finds her standing face to face with Sir Ralph Grey. Sir Ralph is absolutely sober. He has his hands on his hips and is leaning forward to peer very closely at her. He is incredulous.

‘His brother, you say?’

Katherine nods. She is enduring his inspection tolerantly, which Thomas thinks she would not do if she did not already know Grey to be mostly harmless. Still, though. Perhaps that is best.