Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (23 page)

‘There,’ he says. ‘It is quite straight.’

She smiles at him.

‘Thank you Thomas,’ she says.

He smiles uncertainly back, hesitates as if he does not know what to do with his hands, then goes and sits with his bow again, but she can see him fiddling pointlessly. Her own heart is beating erratically and her limbs tingle. She feels dizzy. The feeling makes her anxious. She gets up, walks to the wall, places her hands on the warm powdery stone, tries to breathe slowly.

Eventually the feeling passes.

She watches the others in the butts below for a few moments. It is always Hugh who is last. He is not strong enough for the bow. She hears Walter barking at the boy as he is sent up the butts again and she turns and crosses to the other side, to look out over the woods to the Pale beyond.

Suddenly a scattering of birds take flight from the canopy of the trees with shrill calls of alarm. There is a drumming of hooves below and some shouting from the woods. Something is wrong.

‘Thomas!’ she calls.

The hunting party is back but they ride urgently, with the dogs at their hooves, heads down, riding fast, the horses white with sweat. They flash from the tree line and for a moment it looks as if they will not stop at the fort gatehouse.

Geoffrey is out to greet them straight away and Thomas and Katherine hurry down. Warwick is at the head of the little party as they pull up by the drawbridge to the fort. He looks grim, his mouth a downturned slash, all that morning’s pomp gone. Next to him the Legate, Coppini, looks frightened and is having trouble keeping his horse in check. The Earl of Salisbury’s face is mottled and clenched with anger. None of the hunting party gets down from their saddles, and Warwick’s horse, caked in mud, bucks and prances, sensing its rider’s desire to be gone.

‘There has been an accident,’ Warwick says. ‘Richard Fakenham has taken an arrow in his back. He is coming in now.’

‘He lives?’ Geoffrey asks.

Warwick shoots a glance back towards the woods.

‘Just,’ he says.

‘How did it happen?’

Close to, Warwick is clean-shaven with a long face, a wide jaw and eyes like polished brown pebbles. There is just one deep line down the side of his thin mouth, the work of nature rather than a wound, and there is no spare flesh on him at all, so that they can see every muscle at work below the thin skin of his face, trying to control his expression, and failing.

‘Hastings brings him now,’ he says. ‘He can tell you. The hart got away, that I can say.’

He turns his horse.

‘Are you not staying to see him home?’ Thomas asks. He speaks before he has thought it through. Warwick turns his horse with a savage yank. He stares at Thomas. His lip is curled and his eyes have deepened in his head. He spurs his horse towards him. Thomas steps back.

‘Who are you?’ Warwick spits. ‘Who are you to presume anything?’

Geoffrey intervenes, stepping between them. Thank the Lord he is so fat.

‘Sorry, my lord,’ he says. ‘He forgets himself.’

‘We will look to him,’ Katherine says, meaning Richard, distracting the Earl. Warwick glances her way.

‘Do so, will you?’ He turns to the other men. ‘Come, we have wasted enough time here.’

He makes it sound as if it is someone else’s fault he’s been hunting. He turns his horse, and with one last look at Thomas, he jags his spurs into the animal’s belly and canters off, leading the party away over the crest without a backward glance.

‘Bastard,’ Geoffrey says.

Thomas and Katherine follow him around to the other side of the fort, over the earthworks and along a shaded track through the woods. A horse appears at the end of the charcoalers’ track. Then two more. The first is ridden by the man Walter called Hastings. It was he who invited Richard to join the hunt and here he comes back, leading the second horse on a long rein; Richard is slumped over the horse’s withers, his arms either side of the horse’s neck, his face waxy and lifeless. Next to him trots the hunter with the short-legged dog. Behind comes the third horse, ridden by the cleric in black.

Despite her anxiety for Richard, when Katherine sees the cleric, she catches her breath. All the old anxieties grip her, and she hangs her head. The cleric ignores her, and rides by in silence. They lead the horses into the yard where Hastings slides from the saddle to help Geoffrey and Thomas ease Richard down and carry him to a grassy bank. They lay him face first on the turf. The arrow is buried deep in the muscles that divide his back. He is alive, but his eyes are closed and his face is sheened with sweat. He is breathing very quickly.

‘Who shot the arrow?’ Geoffrey asks.

‘My lord the Earl of Warwick,’ Hastings says. ‘It is a broadhead, I’m afraid. I have mine made by the same man.’

He pulls an arrow from his bag to show them. It is a typical hunting arrow, with a chested shaft and a flat head that ends in two barbs, each about a finger’s tip long and the same again wide.

‘How did it happen?’ Katherine asks.

‘I cannot say,’ Hastings says. ‘I was looking elsewhere. I was . . . distracted.’

‘We should send for a surgeon,’ the cleric tells them. He has one of those voices she’s heard countless times, floating over the wall of the nave back at the priory.

‘A surgeon?’ Hastings says, standing. ‘Saints. That will certainly do for him.’

‘His father, then,’ Geoffrey says, ‘for there is nothing we can do for him here. If we try to extract it, it will only take more flesh. It will kill him.’

‘And yet we cannot leave it in.’

Geoffrey takes his knife out and slices through the jerkin and then the blood-soaked wool of Richard’s coat and his linen around the wound. Richard’s flesh is pale, mottled, like stained marble, and the flesh around the arrow is already turning purple.

‘We can cut it out,’ Katherine says. ‘Find out which way the barbs are, and then slice the flesh ourselves, so that it does not tear.’

Hastings looks doubtful but Katherine feels a curious certainty. It takes her by surprise.

‘I have heard of this thing done,’ the cleric says. ‘But with forceps. You have nothing like that here, do you?’

Geoffrey shakes his head.

‘How can we tell where the barbs are?’ Thomas asks.

‘We can feel,’ she tells them.

Hastings shakes his head.

‘It is a hunting arrow,’ he says. ‘The barbs run along the line of the notch. Look.’ He points to the fletched end of the arrow, carved across with the notch for the bow’s string. ‘A war arrow’s notch runs the other way, across the barb.’ He shrugs. ‘Each is designed to slip through the target’s ribs, you see. A huntsman is after a stag, an archer after a man. It is the way it is.’

There is a beautiful sense to that.

‘I will do it,’ Katherine says. She bends over Richard’s body. There is a long strand of material embedded in the wound. She tugs it. Richard stirs.

‘Might be better done quickly, you know?’ Hastings offers. ‘Men asleep after a fall in the tilt yard feel no pain until they wake up.’

Geoffrey passes her his knife. She still feels entirely calm. Of course she will do it. She takes the knife. It is big, and dirty. She looks at it doubtfully.

‘Here,’ Hastings says. ‘Use mine.’

Hastings’s knife is beautifully wrought and perhaps twice as sharp as Geoffrey’s. She puts the back of the blade against the arrow. The wound is bleeding freely now. She blows the hair from her eyes, then slowly forces the knife down into Richard’s flesh. Blood wells from the wound and pools against the torn cloth of Richard’s shirt. The meat under the blade is resilient. She imagined it might part easily, but no. Richard shudders.

‘Hold him still,’ she says.

The four men press down on Richard, pinning him to the grass. He moans. She feels the knife tip touch against the barb.

‘It’s there,’ she says. She cuts away from the arrow a few tugs of the blade; the grain of Richard’s flesh parts a little with each pass.

When she has repeated the process on the other side of the shaft she hands the knife back to Hastings, who takes it gingerly and goes to wash it in the trough.

‘Shall I pull?’ she asks. Geoffrey nods. She takes the arrow with both hands, gripping it just below its feathered fletch, then slowly eases it out. Blood fills the wound, dark and free-flowing.

‘I pray the head does not come away from the shaft,’ Geoffrey says.

‘These are well-made arrows,’ Hastings objects.

The arrow comes free with a tiny suck and a well of blood.

‘We must stop the bleeding,’ she says. ‘Cut his shirt into strips, will you?’

While Geoffrey cuts the cloth, Thomas takes the arrow and joins Hastings at the trough. It can still be used.

‘Thomas,’ she calls. ‘Fetch the salve.’

He turns and looks at her blankly. She is about to remind him it is in the pardoner’s pack when she recalls that it is supposed to be his pack. She gives him the monastic sign for an old man, and then the sign for bag. She notices the prick of interest in the cleric, who leans forward to look at her more closely, and she feels her stomach turn. She flushes and busies herself by pressing one of the linen pads against the puckered mouth of Richard’s wound.

He stiffens under the pressure and gasps with the pain. He is coming to. She presses gently down. The linen soaks up the blood quickly. She puts another fold of it over the first and holds it down again. She will not look at the cleric.

When Thomas returns she spreads some of the gritty salve over a clean pad and begins blotting the wound.

‘What is that?’ the cleric asked.

‘A salve,’ she says as if she knows, roughening and deepening her voice.

‘And what is its purpose?’

‘It is to prevent putrefaction.’

‘And does it work?’

‘I hope so.’

The cleric grunts.

‘Is he still alive?’ Hastings asks. ‘Is he still breathing?’

‘I don’t know.’

She stops the pressure and blood fills the wound in small rises. She presses the linen back.

‘Hold it in place,’ she instructs Thomas. ‘Press down.’

She moves and kneels beside Richard’s head and holds her blood-wet fingers to his lips. She feels the faintest coolness. She nods.

‘He’s breathing.’

When she looks up, the men are staring at her.

‘Saints,’ Hastings says. ‘That was neatly done.’

‘Almost as if you’ve done it before,’ the cleric says. ‘Have you worked in a hospital?’

He is looking at her very closely. He has a long pale face and – visible now that he has removed his hat – sleek dark hair that lies flat on his pin head as if oiled or wet.

‘No,’ she stammers and pulls her hood over her head. Perhaps it is that exact action which confirms the cleric’s suspicions, for then when she goes to the trough to wash, plunging her arms into the cold water up to the elbows and watching the blood float off her skin in delicate skeins, he comes to stand behind her.

‘Sister,’ he says.

She turns. Her heart is thumping, her throat blocked. She can feel the heat in her face.

‘What do you want? Why’re you calling me that?’

‘I wanted to make sure,’ he says.

‘Sure of what? Who are you?’

‘Sure of who you are,’ he says. ‘My name is Stephen Lamn. I am secretary to his grace Bishop Coppini. But I am a Lincoln man, you see? Of the Gilbertine Order.’

THOMAS GROANS WHEN
he sees the carrack
Mary
again. He’d hoped he’d seen the last of her, and her little master whose name he’s forgotten, but as they trudge through the Seaward Gate and out on to the wharf, there she is, lying low in the water, and there he is, one tooth still in his head, standing at the tiller with his hands on his hips. As they come aboard he stares at them with undisguised contempt, not recognising them, quite as if he has come by ownership of the carrack through some proper process, and is now her legitimate master.

‘Come on,’ he caws, ‘get yerselves set down. Tide’s changing and we’ll lose the wind if you don’t get a move on.’

Thomas wishes Katherine were there to see him. It would have made her laugh. But Sir John Fakenham has asked her to stay and care for his son, and so she will be sailing later and for that he is glad. What could she have done anyway, if it came to fighting?

The archers meanwhile have climbed down into the ship’s hold and now spread themselves in the waist. More archers come aboard, men in blue and white with Fauconberg’s fish-hook badge over their hearts. Thomas’s eye is drawn to the spot where he killed Cobham and Saxby and the other men. The arrow shafts have been broken off and adzed flat in the deck, like knots in the planks.

As soon as it is agreed they can fit no more men aboard, the sailors take in the gangplank and cast off. Two barges take up the hawsers’ slack and their crews haul on their oars and the carrack labours out into the channel. Once she is in the deeper water, the barges let go and the carrack’s new crew set a sail that fills with a crump. After a moment’s hesitation,
Mary
gathers herself, quickens and surges out to sea on a skirt of milky froth to join the rest of the small fleet waiting to cross the channel, each tub filled with men in harness and helmets.

‘Soon be there,’ Geoffrey says.

‘I’ve heard that one before,’ Thomas tells him.

But they are. They are soon out on the green sea, butting through the choppy waters, a constant wind behind them. The sun shines on their backs and seagulls cry in their wake. They are one ship of six, each packed with Fauconberg’s archers and men-at-arms: a fine sight.

Soon they can see the low line of England in the haze and then, not much later, even the chalk cliffs above Dover.

The thought of crossing the Narrow Sea again has so preoccupied Thomas these last few days that he has not given much thought to the fighting that lies ahead, but as they close with the coast of Kent, the mood on board changes. Fear makes one or two men more vocal others become quieter, mumbling their prayers, crossing themselves. Others fiddle with their weapons, retie bracers, stretch gloves, check arrows for trueness. One or two yawn uncontrollably. Dafydd whistles through his teeth. Thomas’s mouth is dry, and his hands are trembling. He wishes for ale.