Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (28 page)

She stiffens and thrashes, kicking his shins, but does not scream. Geoffrey holds her tight. Thomas’s nostrils are filled with the smell of burning flesh and hair. He drops the shears and turns away. Walter stoops and tosses the piece of ear on to the flames then kicks the shears out of sight. Geoffrey holds Katherine to him, soothing her, stroking the back of her head.

‘It’s all right lad,’ he says. ‘It’s all right. It’s all over now. The pain’ll soon go.’ He winks at Thomas. ‘Well done,’ he mouths.

‘All right! All right!’ Walter bellows. ‘Show’s over. Piss off, all of you.’

The men and boys drift away. Thomas applies the linen swabs to her wound. It is not bleeding as much as he’d have thought, and he wonders if perhaps Walter was right about the heated blades. Katherine is grey-faced where she is not gummy with her own blood.

‘We’ll stay here tonight, Geoffrey,’ Sir John is saying. ‘Give them time to get over all this. Let’s turn in early, though, and only small beer, you understand?’

Geoffrey nods. A strange atmosphere lingers.

‘We can hear Mass in the cathedral tomorrow,’ Geoffrey says. ‘Thank the Lord for small mercies.’

Thomas helps Katherine back to Richard’s tent. He is asleep on good thick sheepskin now, bought from the sale of his horse, and Katherine lies down on his old mattress next to him. Thomas brings a bowl of water and some linen and he begins washing her face.

‘Can I bring you ale?’ he asks. ‘It might numb the pain.’

She nods with her eyes only.

‘Thomas,’ she says. ‘You know – you know—’

She stops. She glances at Richard where he lies in feverish sleep. Thomas thinks she is about to tell him why she has run.

‘What?’ he asks.

‘You know I can never return to the priory now.’

He sits back on his haunches. Dear God! He has not thought of that. Then he dips the linen into the water and wipes away more blood under her neck. He needs time to think.

‘By the saints, Katherine. I am sorry.’

She smiles.

‘No,’ she says. ‘No. It is a good thing.’

He pauses.

‘How can that be? Do you not want to go back to the priory?’

She places her hand on the bandage over her ear.

He feels a fool. Of course she does not want to go back the priory.

‘But what will you do?’

‘It seems I have no choice,’ she tells him. ‘Even if I had anywhere else to go, the Earl of Warwick wants me to stay.’

She smiles again. He smiles too and is silent for a while. She closes her eyes as pain grips her. She relaxes when it has passed.

‘So you will stay?’ he asks.

She opens her eyes.

‘If you do, yes.’

A great weight is lifted.

‘The wheel of fortune.’ He laughs. ‘Just when you think you are down, you are up.’

She opens her eyes and looks at him for a long moment.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but then again, just when you think you are up, you are down.’

He grips her hand. She smiles once more, then turns over on to her side, her back to him, and goes to sleep.

The tears course down his face, and he wipes them with the back of his wrist.

‘Bloody hell, Kit,’ he says, ‘bloody hell.’

THE NEXT MORNING
they break camp and cross the water meadows and enter Canterbury through the gatehouse. The bells are ringing and people call out to them as they pass, wishing them luck in the name of St James. Thomas walks with Katherine. She takes short shuffling steps, gingerly, and leans against him now and then. She’s pulled her hood up to cover her ear and face, and walks looking down at her feet rather than up at the cathedral. In the suddenly cramped confines of the town they are hemmed in by friars of every hue.

‘I would like to go to Mass again,’ she admits, her gaze rising quickly to the cathedral windows. ‘I have not made my confession since we left the priory.’

Thomas hangs his head.

‘And we have much to confess,’ he says.

Katherine says nothing. They walk on.

‘Will you confess to apostasy?’ he asks.

‘I have thought about it,’ she says, ‘and the truth is that I will not.’

‘Then you will die unshriven? You’d be damned for eternal life.’

Katherine shakes her head.

‘I don’t believe leaving the priory was a sin. The Prioress used to beat me with a hawthorn broom. She used to starve me. She chained me to a log and stretched me for a night and the Lord knows what she had in mind for me had I stayed. Have you ever heard of a sister from a place in the north called Watton?’

Thomas is staring at her.

‘No,’ he says. She cannot tell if he believes her, but there is a curious, almost tender look in his eye. He raises his hand as if to touch her, then drops it. He shakes his head.

‘Well, count yourself lucky,’ Katherine tells him, ‘in more ways than one.’

The crowds pat them as they pass, and wine flows and everywhere men and women are laughing. Thomas stops to buy some reeds and ink from an inkseller. She tells him he has paid too much, but what does either of them know? Then they are through the city gates again and out across the fields. The old road is dead straight, heading west where clouds threaten more rain. News spreads up and down the column that the Archbishop of Canterbury has thrown his lot in with the Earls of March and Warwick, and that he will be riding with them.

‘Coppini says it is all his doing,’ Sir John laughs from the back of his cart. ‘Typical bloody Frenchy.’

Richard is sitting up. He is pale, very thin, still not talking much, just staring back at the cathedral’s spires as the town drops away behind them. There are dark circles under his eyes and his skin is like that of a drowned man, but he no longer smells of contagion, or of the grave, and Katherine is sure he is on the mend. For his sake later that morning they let Katherine ride with them, but she is conscious that she remains under a shadow. Sir John ignores her, though she sometimes catches him staring at her with an expression she cannot read. Is it regret? Anxiety? Now and again he leans forward to try to see her wound, but she has it well hidden under her cap.

The cart creaks along, its wheels spinning through the long troughs of mud, jarring over the loose stones. Here and there the road has slipped away into the verge and the men behind must steady it as she rolls, or they must put their shoulders to the wheels when it becomes stuck. The threatened rain begins to fall. She covers Richard in a travelling cloak and places a straw hat on his head and after a while she is sure he is asleep and she watches out for Thomas, walking behind with the others, a head taller than most of them. He smiles at her and rolls his eyes, and a smile breaks her own lips, and she feels a small thrill alike to that one feels with the first scent of spring.

Men are still joining the column as it marches west, and each evening the scurriers return with the news that such and such a place has declared for the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick instead of King Henry. Soon the men no longer cheer as one after another the towns and villages along their way send archers and billmen to join them, each contingent led by mounted men-at-arms under a new flag, a new banner. Even those men raised by order of the King join them, and the army drifts along the road like a flock of sheep, numbering many thousands.

As the numbers grow, food becomes steadily more scarce. Despite the wealth of the land about them, ale isn’t to be had. Not even in Rochester itself, where they camp under the stern walls of the castle before crossing the river. By then the column stretches for more than ten miles, and those at the back have less of everything than those at the front; everything, that is, except mud and shit, both horse and human.

Every night the column stops and a camp is built, earthworks and staves enclosing a town of tents. At the camp’s centre a watch fire is lit and the lords compete to have their tents erected as close by it as they can. The camp is divided into four quarters by two roads that intersect in the centre by the fire, and these roads quickly become impassable because of mud and drifting soldiery. In the morning the camp is struck. Tents packed up, staves collected, fires doused and everything thrown into carts and off they move, leaving the earthen walls and ditches, soot-blackened fire pits and a telltale cross of mud to mark their passage.

And every day it rains.

On Sunday they say Mass in the open air outside Gravesend and the priest calls on the Lord to send them a let-up in the weather. It rains all that day, too, but the next day is bright, and they take this as an omen, and by evening they wind their way through the hills above Southwark and in the fading light, they see London for the first time.

The city is dominated by the spire of the Cathedral of St Paul, finer than an arrow’s bodkin head, and so high Katherine thinks it must be a trick of the light. It is such a sight that the rest of the men line the hill and stare in silence for a while. The usual pall of wood and coal smoke hangs above the city, and the river is busy with all manner of boats, toing and froing on its dimpled surface or moored against the wharves that line both banks. Downstream on the other side is the Tower, a massive complex behind its serried walls and moats.

But Katherine is more concerned with the churches. The skyline is crowded with spires and steeples, and there are more in the fields and villages beyond the walls. There is even one balancing on the bridge below them that looks as if it might topple one way or the other any moment.

‘The place will be overrun with friars and priests,’ Katherine tells Thomas. ‘The sooner we are gone from here the better.’

Thomas ignores her.

‘Geoffrey says the main body of the King’s army is in the north,’ he says. ‘Somewhere near Coventry.’

‘Coventry?’

Thomas nods.

‘Where Riven was bound?’

‘Yes,’ Thomas says. ‘The King thinks the Duke of York will come that way, when he comes from Ireland, so he is there to meet him.’

‘But now we are here, behind him. He will have to do something about that, won’t he?’

‘I suppose so,’ Thomas admits.

Katherine pulls a face. It is the thought of much more travel.

‘Will we go to them, d’you think, or will they come to us?’ she asks.

Thomas doesn’t know.

‘Perhaps we’ll meet halfway?’ he says. ‘It is all supposed to depend on tomorrow, and that if the aldermen of London close their gates to us, then we are sunk. Geoffrey says Warwick and March won’t be able to borrow any money from the merchants there to buy us food or pay their liege men to keep in the field any longer.’

The following day men on horseback ride constantly through the camp, coming up from London with messages from the Mayor and the aldermen of the city, taking them back from the Earls of Warwick and March. By the next morning something has been settled, and the Earls appear at daybreak wearing their finest clothes, and they make ready to lead the army across the bridge into London.

The sense of relief is everywhere.

‘The townspeople have welcomed us,’ Sir John explains as they roll down the hill. ‘But by Christ it was a close-run thing.’

‘And what about the King’s men?’ Katherine wonders. ‘Surely they must fight?’

‘There are few enough of them left, and those that remain are expected to run, save perhaps Lord Scales, who has retreated to the Tower.’

Even as they pass through the fields outside Southwark they hear a distinct crack in the distance. Everybody flinches. After their experience at Sandwich, the men all fear the sound of guns, even Simon the braggart. A tiny finger of smoke erupts from the battlements above the donjon of the White Tower away down the river.

‘What is that?’

‘Lord Scales is firing on the city,’ Sir John says. ‘He always was mad.’

Even Walter is shocked.

‘That’s not right,’ he says. ‘He’ll be made to pay for that.’

Those at the head of the column are met by cheering crowds as they enter Southwark. Men and women and children and pigs and dogs stream out to greet the Earls who are riding with the Archbishop and the Legate, but by the time Thomas and Katherine file between the lines of inns two hours later, boredom has set in and only the pigs remain.

They buy ale from a woman who lives next to an inn called the Tabard.

‘Normally sell it to folk heading east,’ she says. ‘Pilgrims and that.’

They follow the cart across the drawbridge and on to the bridge itself, packing together to pass through the gatehouse, a squeeze so tight they are thrust together and men are injured. All eyes are involuntarily drawn to the grisly lumps on poles that line the battlements.

‘Expect we knew half of ’em,’ Walter says.

Birds mob the heads, pulling at what soft flesh they can find under the tar in which they are dipped. Farther along Walter points to the beams of the houses that are scorched and the stonework marked with the distinct pits left by arrows.

‘From Jack Cade’s time,’ Walter mutters.

And Katherine sees that among the crowd there are some serious expressions, and that not everybody is pleased at the thought of having an army of Kentishmen march through the city. Once across the bridge the crowds thicken again. They are all so strange, these Londoners, not just to her, but to one another, from the finest merchants in their budge-lined cloaks on fine palfreys, right down to the roughest gong farmers with shit-caked feet. There are so many foreigners, too, terrifying men with dark skins and outlandish clothes who may not even be Christians, and men with pale skins, dark clothes and odd hats, watching them from narrow-set eyes as they follow the street up towards the spire of St Paul’s.

Hereabouts the friars stand in groups: their grey, black, brown and white cloaks signalling their orders. Katherine seeks the shelter of Thomas’s arm and she huddles in her cloak.

‘It is all right, Kit,’ he says. ‘They are only friars. You are a soldier.’

Behind the crowds all manner of shops are shuttered against temptation, and every few paces a vintenar in Warwick’s red livery stands looking grim. Each carries a pollaxe or a hammer or a sword, making sure the various companies keep their hands to themselves.