Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (35 page)

‘Look at that,’ he says, gesturing to an ornately designed letter Q in the loop of which men in madder cloaks are harvesting plump grapes with golden knives.

‘It is finer than our ledger,’ Katherine agrees.

‘I wish Mistress Daud had given us this instead,’ Thomas says. ‘It is exquisite. Almost beyond belief.’

He lays it down gently and begins moving the books, revealing those that lie beneath, sighing as he does so. She leaves him to it and finds the maid standing in the hallway, staring in silence at the cobwebs that festoon the lamps above her head. The candles are so old they are almost orange. Mistress Daud has disappeared. Katherine opens her mouth to say something but faced by such blankness, she can think of nothing. Thomas has to be called away from the books.

When they leave the maid closes the door on them, and they stand on the steps frowning at one another.

‘Something awry, there,’ Thomas suggests.

He is right, but what is it? They stop in the sunlit street, the cobbles warm under their feet, the smell of fresh horse dung in the air. Flies and bees drone, catching the sun. Katherine turns and looks up at the windows of the jettied storeys of the house. Mistress Daud is there, staring down at them through a thick pane. After a moment she steps back into the gloom, her face rippling through the glass, and is gone.

They stand in the road a moment longer. Thomas is staring south to where the flat lands that lie beyond the walls dissolve in the summer’s haze.

‘The priory is a day’s ride from here,’ he says.

She looks at him.

‘And so is Cornford Castle,’ she says.

Before he can say more they hear a horse clattering up the road towards them. The rider is standing in the stirrups, lashing at its rump. They step off the road to let it pass. Its flanks are white with sweat.

‘In a hurry,’ Thomas says.

By the time they reach the crown of the hill a crowd of people is gathered by the cathedral gate. Someone is shouting something. A bell begins ringing.

‘What is it?’

The stationer is packing away his wares. He turns to them.

‘Have you heard?’ he asks. ‘Richard of York has come from Ireland. He has landed in Chester this last week and is making his way to London. The rider says he has a man walking before him carrying his sword of state, and it is upright.’

‘What does that mean?’ Katherine asks.

‘Only kings progress in such a fashion.’

‘So?’

‘The Duke means to claim the throne.’

They turn to one another.

‘You see,’ she says. ‘I told you the fighting isn’t done yet.’

THE NEXT MORNING,
when Sir John emerges from his drink-induced slumber, they tell him of Richard, Duke of York’s arrival in England.

‘I must get up,’ he says. ‘We must get to London. We must see him. He will reverse Warwick’s decision in the matter of Cornford Castle. I am certain of it.’

Thomas sees Katherine shut her eyes, as if the mere mention of Cornford Castle depresses or bores her, but when Fournier hears that Sir John enjoys a connection to the highest in the land, his eyes brighten.

‘However will you get to see him?’ he asks.

‘Through the Duke’s son, the Earl of March,’ Sir John says. ‘He is in our debt. Come, Kit, help me up. Richard my boy, take Walter and Thomas and summon the men. See if there are any newcomers who might swell our ranks. Goodwife Popham, we need more of the red cloth for our jacks. I do not want to turn up in London with this lot in rags.’

‘What’s he like, the Duke of York?’ Thomas asks Richard as they saddle up.

‘I don’t know,’ Richard sighs. ‘But I’ve heard things. Men say he’s gone mad since he’s been in Ireland.’

‘Mad? How so?’

‘He is supposed to be the premier lord of the land after King Henry, and has been regent while the King was inane, but now, instead of taking his counsel, the Queen favours self-interested graspers such as the Dukes of Buckingham and Somerset. It has gone hard for him, but in Ireland, with no one to tell him otherwise, they say he has been acting as if he is King of England in King Henry’s place, as if King Henry does not exist.’

Thomas is sent first to Brampton to find Brampton John. Brampton John lives with his mother and three goats in a windowless cot under a thatched roof where two paths cross. Brampton John is pleased to be recalled to join Sir John’s service, having had enough of the farming life for the summer, and they celebrate with a pot of his mother’s ale.

‘Why don’t you put some windows in here?’ Thomas asks, coughing from the smoky interior of Brampton John’s cot.

‘Windows? What for?’

‘So you can see.’

‘Windows won’t help. Even if I was ever in here when there’s daylight, which I’m not, the last thing I want to see is that bloody field. Spend all my time there, digging, sowing, cutting.’

The next morning they go north to find Little John Willingham.

‘You’ll not guess who I saw the other day,’ Little John says as they begin walking back towards Marton, bows over their shoulders. ‘Edmund Riven. The boy with the eye.’

He gestures to his right eyeball.

‘Son of that bastard what stole the castle from Sir John. And well, it wasn’t me who saw him, it was my ma. Said he was there with ten of his men. Riding north, they were. They stopped and bought ale and asked if she knew everyone in the hundred, and when she says she did by sight, they asks if she’d seen any strangers hereabouts, particularly a girl. She says no and then they asks who owns the land. She told them to clear off as they should know perfectly well who owned it, seeing as how they’d been living on it for the last year or so.’

‘And they rode north?’

‘Up towards Gainsborough. With a baggage wagon. Only reason she didn’t shut the door in their faces is she wanted to sell them her rotten old ale. Disgusting stuff.’

Thomas means to remind Little John to tell Richard or Sir John what his mother has seen but when they reach Marton Hall a cart and two oxen stand in the yard, and Geoffrey and Richard and Brampton John are carrying Sir John down the stairs on his mattress. Thomas and Katherine hurry to help them lay the old man in the bed of the cart while Fournier watches, a cup of wine in his hand, and Goodwife Popham fusses.

‘How long will you be?’ she asks. Richard shrugs. No one has any idea. Goodbyes are said and the carter cracks his switch and the beasts take the strain.

‘Thank God for that,’ Walter says, hauling himself up in his saddle. ‘Spent far too long here, hanging about, doing nothing, getting fat.’

Thomas shares Walter’s feelings, Katherine knows.

‘Is it wise to leave Fournier there, though?’ she asks. ‘He’ll drink every last drop of wine and all the ale.’

She is sitting up next to Geoffrey in the cart. The others follow behind, Walter on the pony, Thomas and Richard on their horses, the reins slack in their fingers. They pass through Lincoln where the stationer has moved his stall and then down the hill past the pardoner’s old house. Thomas looks up and fancies he sees a movement at the window, and imagines the widow standing there in silence, watching.

As they travel south they collect more news of Richard of York’s progress through England. They hear that his wife, the Duchess of York, has travelled from London to meet him in a litter hung with blue velvet drapes and drawn by four pairs of white horses. The next day it is five pairs and curtains of cloth of gold. Whatever the slight variation in detail, it looks as if the stationer heard correctly. Richard, Duke of York, is coming south in royal dignity.

Sir John is troubled.

‘It changes everything,’ he says. ‘Up until now we’ve been fighting to rid ourselves of the bloodsucking leeches that hang around the court, the sort of men who let us down in France. Men like Buckingham and Somerset; men like goddamned Giles Riven. Thieves, murderers, swindlers and the like. We were trying to restore good governance and the rule of law, weren’t we? So that a man might walk the roads without fear of being robbed, or that he might go to law without the fear of being manhandled by his opponents, or that he might leave his own household to go over the sea to fight for his bloody country and come back to find it still his.’

‘And we were right to do so,’ Richard says. ‘Everyone can see the country was in a parlous state and that the wars in France have ended in defeat and shame.’

‘Yes. Yes,’ Sir John agrees, flapping his hand. ‘But that’s all changed now, don’t you see? If what we hear about York is right, it will seem that we have been fighting to get rid of the King. To depose him. And replace him. With the Duke of York. I did not answer old Fauconberg’s call to do that, and I do not imagine that many others did either.’ He shakes his head. ‘Worst of it is that it will come as a rallying cry to the lords in the north. We’ve had a peaceful summer of it, haven’t we? Fixed the roof, got the harvest in, got a few girls pregnant too, I dare say, but that’s only because young Warwick knows he hasn’t the power to interfere with what goes on up north, so he hasn’t tried. He’s been in Calais, for the love of all that’s holy! And that’s suited all those northern bastards – begging your pardon, Thomas. They don’t mind one way or another what Warwick does in Kent and London, so long as he doesn’t bother them. But now York arrives and he wants to be king? They’ll be up in arms.’

Richard looks thoughtful. They travel on.

‘Do you suppose’, he says at length, ‘that Riven has heard the news?’

‘About York? Of course.’

‘I wonder what he will make of it.’

It is Sir John’s turn to look thoughtful.

‘He will weigh up where his advantage lies,’ he eventually says, ‘and jump accordingly.’

Richard nods.

‘As should we, surely?’

Sir John looks at his son for a long moment, then shoos a fly from his face and turns away.

The road is crowded with carts banked with produce for the London markets and the word of the Duke of York’s coming passes up and down between travellers, and with each telling it is given a new twist, so that by the time they enter London through Bishopsgate just before curfew on the evening of their fourth day on the road, they don’t know whether they’ll find the city in flames, or with celebratory wine flowing in her fountains.

In the event the city seems to be in the same quandary. It is tensed for something, but no one seems to know what. They pass through all the tenter frames and the washing posts on the greens by the roadside and they find space for the cart and horses in the yard of the Bull Inn where the ostler, a fat man with a stained leather apron, tells them the Duke of York is in Abingdon, two days’ march from Westminster, and that he has trumpeters to sound fanfares wherever he goes.

When Thomas relates this to Sir John he groans.

‘To think of all the trouble taken after Northampton!’ he says. ‘How we let everyone know the King is still the King, how we bent our necks and renewed our oaths of allegiance. And now this!’

It is to get worse. After a night tormented by the inn’s sour beer and then fleas in the straw, the next day they hear from a cookshop owner who’d heard it from a boatman who’d just come from Westminster that all the talk there is of the Duke of York marching with eight hundred men under the banner of the royal arms of England, undifferenced by the strap of white that had marked his own banner from that of the King.

‘That’s it,’ the cookshop owner says. ‘When they find out he wants to be king, we’ll have those northern bastards rampaging down here again before St Martin’s, pissed as voles, nicking everything they can get their bloody hands on.’

They return to the inn.

‘Our journey has been wasted before it has reached its point,’ Sir John admits. ‘The Duke won’t spare the time to see us now, let alone hear our case.’

They order beer and drink it at the table by the fire.

‘Still,’ he goes on, ‘we’ve come this far, let us take a barge to the palace at Westminster and see what there is to be seen. If nothing else we will have something to talk about on the way home. Geoffrey, make sure the boys are cleaned up, will you? New livery coats, and as much plate as we possess, shared out, so that we look the part, eh?’

After the battle of Northampton, when the Earl of March had awarded Thomas the Earl of Shrewsbury’s armour, Thomas had sold it to Richard and the price had included Richard’s old cuisses, greaves and sabatons, and these he now straps on, covering his legs from toe to thigh. Thomas cannot help smiling at the sight of his legs encased in steel, the neat rows of bands that taper across each foot to form a point over his toes. They are almost tolerable to walk in.

After hearing Mass in St Botolph’s next to the priory opposite, Geoffrey hires a litter to carry Sir John down to the bridge, five archers ahead, five behind. Katherine runs alongside, her cap pulled low to hide her ear. They find a barge willing to take them up to Westminster and climb aboard and spread themselves out on the broad planks that span the boat, and they prop their weapons on the gunwale. The oarsmen, half-naked and too old for this sort of thing, take up their oars and the master hauls up his patched ochre sail and sets the craft out into the middle of the river.

There is a light breeze. The sun comes out. The water is green. Thomas and Katherine sit together on the last thwart in the stern and stare back through the arches under the bridge where the water roars, to where the Tower’s battlements are softened by coal smoke.

The oarsmen row against the current up past the wharves, each one backed by a church or a priory or a friary, and Thomas cannot help but recall the pardoner’s words. The church is indeed rich. They row past the square bulk of Baynard’s Castle, dour and uninviting, its water gate firmly boarded, and then on past the city walls, following the river as it meanders past Charing, until before them stands the King’s palace and St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster.

‘Busy day,’ the barge’s pilot grunts.

The oarsmen lean on their oars and take them upriver while they wait for space on the jetty. A barge pulls away, then another, both heading downstream to London. Thomas thinks he recognises the white-haired old man in the first one, grandly turned out, with a small retinue in red livery. Is it the Earl of Salisbury? Warwick’s father?