Divided Souls Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Toby Clements

  Map

  Genealogical Table

  Cast of Historical Figures

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Four

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Five

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Lent, 1469

  The recent wars between the House of York and the House of Lancaster seem to be over. The Yorkist King Edward sits on his throne in Westminster, while the Lancastrian claimants are in exile or under lock and key in the Tower.

  But within the family of York there is discord. The Earl of Warwick conspires against his King, and while to one another’s faces they are all smiles, their household men speak in lies and whispers.

  No man comes to court unarmed.

  Thomas and Katherine have returned to Marton Hall, the only home they know.

  But what lies buried in the past cannot remain so for long, and soon they are forced to take up arms once more in one of the most savage wars in history.

  The Wars of the Roses . . .

  About the Author

  ‘I have been obsessed with the fifteenth century and the Wars of the Roses since childhood.

  I have read everything on the subject I can get hold of, learned to use a longbow and to fight with a pollaxe, how to start a fire with a flint and steel, and even how to tan a piece of leather (a truly disgusting process which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone). However, as time went on, and my research of the period grew deeper, I found I was becoming less taken by the dealings of the high and mighty and more interested in the common folk of the fifteenth century: how they lived, loved, fought and died. The Kingmaker series is as much as anything a hymn to their courage and resilience.

  I am currently working on my fourth novel, the final in the Kingmaker series.’

  Also by Toby Clements

  Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

  Kingmaker: Broken Faith

  Cast of historical figures Easter, 1469

  KING EDWARD IV:

  The victor of the battle of Towton, crowned king in 1461, been on throne for eight years, but yet to achieve real peace or fulfil his promises.

  GEORGE, DUKE OF CLARENCE:

  King Edward’s younger brother, willingly used as a pawn by those seeking an alternative king.

  RICHARD, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER:

  King Edward’s youngest brother. As staunch, loyal and honest as the day is long – for the moment.

  RICHARD NEVILLE, EARL OF WARWICK:

  Architect of the first Yorkist victory, later known as the Kingmaker, now not happy with his lot and happy to make use of Duke of Clarence to unseat his former protégé, the King.

  WILLIAM HERBERT, EARL OF PEMBROKE:

  Chief beneficiary of the King’s policy in Wales. Fiery-tempered. Much disliked by the Earl of Warwick.

  EARL OF DEVON:

  Another of the King’s favourites.

  EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND:

  Younger brother of the Earl of Warwick, used to be Lord Montagu, promoted for services to the House of York. Strangely inactive in 1469.

  WILLIAM HASTINGS:

  Ennobled after Towton and still King Edward’s chamberlain and procurer, now with a substantial power base of his own.

  BARON WILLOUGHBY:

  Minor lord, chancer who comes out in favour of the Earl of Warwick, the owner of Tattershall castle.

  EARL RIVERS:

  The Queen’s father, of whom the King was fond, but the Earl of Warwick less so.

  JOHN WOODVILLE:

  The Queen’s brother, again liked by King Edward, and disliked by the Earl of Warwick.

  ROBIN OF REDESDALE:

  Mysterious figure put up, perhaps, by the Earl of Warwick to press King Edward into yielding to his – Warwick’s – demands. He was almost too successful, which led to King Edward’s capture.

  GEORGE NEVILLE:

  Another of the Earl of Warwick’s brothers, who was Archbishop of York and Chancellor of England, and was responsible for capturing King Edward at Olney.

  More or less everyone else in Divided Souls is fictitious and not intended, with the exception perhaps of John Stumps, to represent anyone.

  For Anna Clements, my mum, and a very fine person, (all three one and the same, btw) with much love, from TC.

  Prologue

  In July of the year 1465 – scarce twelvemonth after the great castle at Bamburgh had fallen to his Yorkist enemies – King Henry VI was captured hiding in some woods in Yorkshire and taken to the Tower in London, and with this it was widely supposed that any remaining hopes left to the House of Lancaster were lost forever.

  But in the moment of his triumph, the Yorkist King Edward IV revealed within himself a simple, fatal, human flaw: a weakness for a pretty face. For in the very same year, on his way north to see for himself the disposition of his people, he met and married – in strained and secretive circumstances – a woman named Elizabeth Grey, a commoner, a mother of two, and the widow of a knight who had been killed in service to the old King.

  It was not only that with this marriage King Edward had undone years of diplomatic negotiation conducted with the French King on his behalf by his chief ally, the Earl of Warwick – to whom many believed he owed his throne in the first instance – it was that this Elizabeth, née Woodville, was from a large family of ambitious siblings, and their need for posts at court, and for suitable marriage partners, would bring them – and their new brother-in-law, King Edward – into conflict with the self-same Earl of Warwick, and the high ambitions he held for his own dynasty.

  And so now, four years later, while to one another’s faces King Edward and the Earl are all smiles, rumours abound that their household men speak a different kind of language, and no man comes to court alone or unarmed. Letters have flown to the arch-meddlers from overseas, the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, to advise them that the sun no longer shines on the House of York quite as brightly as once it did, and that conversely the prospects for the House of Lancaster are not so occluded as had seemed, and that there might, indeed, after all, be a chance for King Henry and his strong-willed queen, who waits, plotting, across the sea in France . . .

  PART ONE

  After Easter, 1469

  1

  In the week after Easter, in the middle of a spell of unseasonably mild weather, Thomas Everingham, John Stump and Jack Bradford began building a chimney in the hall of Sir John Fakenham’s property at Marton, in the County of Lincoln. They made it with blocks of pale stone that Sir John had bought the year before from a quarryman in Ancaster, and it took them a week to build, from hearth to cap, complete with a cross of St Andrew that Thomas carved into the chimney’s breast as a hex against witches flying down its flue, and in all that time, it did not rain once.

  ‘You see?’ Jack said. ‘Told you we were blessed.’

  But
in the week that followed, Sir John Fakenham took to his bed, and in the week after that, he died, and so they came to rue his words.

  ‘By Our Lady, you are a bloody fool, Jack,’ John Stump told him.

  Sir John gave up his soul as he would have wished, though, as they all might wish: lying in his own bed, a lit taper in his hands to guide his soul from body, a whispering priest at his head. He had his wife on one side, his friends on the other and by his feet, a newly given Talbot puppy, which was, until the moment of his master’s passing, happy with a length of deer horn.

  The dog stopped its gnawing when Sir John went and it started to howl, and so they chucked it out of the room, and then down the steps, and the rest of the household came up and stood around the bed like a curtain of living flesh to shield the old man’s body from the fenland draughts, and they remained like that all night, praying for his soul with tears in their eyes; and at his funeral, a few days later, the church bell tolled from dawn to dusk, and so many candles were lit within that when it was over the priest had to remove the frames of the windows to let the smell of tallow clear.

  ‘Well,’ John Stump says on the way back from the church. ‘That’s that. We’d best gather our things and be on our way.’

  There is a moment of puzzled silence, broken only by the sound of the bell still tolling in the church tower behind and their steps on the damp, dark earth of the track.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘Well, we can’t stay here, can we?’ John says, gesturing with his half-arm at the fields around. ‘Not now Sir John’s gone. Isabella’ll need a new husband, won’t she? Someone to keep her. Someone who’ll not want us around.’

  ‘She might not need to marry,’ Jack says. ‘Her sons. They might stay?’

  John Stump spits.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘They’ll not linger. They’re here to fix a price for the place – you’ll see. And anyway, even if they did, would you want their goodlordship? Would you trust it?’

  Jack is hesitant.

  ‘Well—’ he begins.

  ‘No,’ John interrupts. ‘So there we are. We’ve had our span. Five years. It’s all a man can hope for before some twat with a title comes to send him where he’d never thought of going for hisself.’

  Thomas and Jack exchange a glance. John Stump has become a brackish little man, as if he no longer enjoys the extra span of years bought at the expense of his left arm, but today, with all this going on, his words send a creeping chill through Thomas, because perhaps, after all, he is right? Perhaps five years’ peace is all a man may reasonably expect?

  They walk on in ruminative silence and Thomas cannot help but look up and around at what John says they will soon be forced to leave: at the furlongs alive with a pale green furze of pea seedlings; at the stock ponds in which fat brown trout stir slow-spreading circles; at the sties wherein banks of ruddy-backed piglets suckle at their mothers’ teats; at the two pairs of nut-brown oxen bending their powerful necks to graze the lush winter grass underhoof; and then beyond, to the solid bulk of the hall ahead, with its grey stone chimney now letting slip a scarf of pale smoke into the sky, like some lord’s battle banner.

  And beyond that, nestling among the poplars, is his own house, made over these last three years, piece by piece, gathered and shaped to fit together, the floor packed hard with clay and sour milk, a stone hearth in the middle of the room, stools he’s bodged to stand around it, a board he split himself and on which he eats with his wife and his child.

  And with every step Thomas feels the thick slice of cured leather under his sole, the soft cling of the fine-spun russet woollen hose warming his legs, and the snug compass of his felted pourpoint. He is conscious of the heft of his thick jacket with its purse-weighted belt around his waist, and of his worsted cap lined with fine linen, and he thinks of how it was before that, what they were doing, and how they did it, and he knows he will do anything – anything – to avoid a return to that.

  Eventually Jack breaks the silence with a question.

  ‘What do you mean, send us somewhere we’d have no thought to go ourselves?’

  ‘Up north, I bet. That’s where it all starts.’

  ‘What starts?’

  ‘The fighting,’ John says, miming the drawing of a bow and the loosing of an arrow as best he can with his half-arm.

  ‘But all that’s over,’ Thomas tells him. ‘King Henry’s in the Tower, isn’t he? Safe at prayer under lock and key, and Christ above! Aren’t his adherents all dead? We saw most of them killed with our own eyes.’

  ‘There’s his son, isn’t there?’ John counters. ‘What about him? He’s still alive.’

  ‘But barely,’ Thomas says. ‘And he’s in France with his mother, with no two bits to rub the one against the other.’

  John snorts.

  ‘You heard what that old needle merchant said,’ he tells them. ‘How everyone across the realm is up in arms about something or other, with every lord mustering men and passing out helmets and bills and what have you? Why is that?’

  Thomas sighs.

  ‘Christ, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I thought he was telling stories so you’d pour him more ale. And anyway, even if they are, what of it? What’s it to do with us? We’ve no cause to join them.’

  John stops and looks at him.

  ‘What about Edmund Riven?’ he asks. ‘He’s still alive, too, isn’t he? And wasn’t he the reason you were caught up with the fighting in the first place? To dislodge him and – and his father – from – from that castle? From Cornford?’

  Thomas stares at John Stump in silence. He would never have dared mention Edmund Riven’s name while Sir John was alive. The name went unsaid, like that of a dead child, never quite forgotten, however bright the day, but never, ever mentioned. Hearing it now, bandied about like this, it makes Thomas’s chest lurch, and he looks around as if some refectory rule is being transgressed.

  ‘Don’t talk of him, John,’ Thomas says. ‘There’s no profit in thinking about him or Cornford, and besides . . .’

  He tails off. Besides what? He does not know, only that he remembers killing Edmund Riven’s father and he feels perhaps he has done enough to settle his own score with that family.

  ‘So what then, John?’ Jack persists. ‘What do you suggest?’

  John has obviously been giving this some private thought.

  ‘We should go to France,’ he proposes. ‘Across the Narrow Sea. We could join the Duke of Burgundy. He has need of bowmen, it’s said. Proper English bowmen. Pays a shilling a day. Imagine that.’

  Jack laughs.

  ‘John,’ he says. ‘You can scarcely manage a crossbow.’

  ‘I’m a better shot with one hand than you’ll ever be with two,’ John tells him.

  Thomas interrupts.

  ‘But, John,’ he says. ‘You want to go to France? You want to go to France and fight?’

  ‘For a shilling a fucking day? I’d go anywhere and fight any man.’

  ‘Have you forgotten what fighting is like?’ Thomas asks. ‘By Christ! Look at us!’

  He gestures to the side of his head, where his hair has grown white over an old divot caused by some blow that – by the mercy of God – he is unable to recall. He gestures at John Stump’s missing arm which Katherine was forced to amputate to prevent the black rot spreading after he was wounded in a fight, and then at Jack’s leg, which even now still drags at an angle from an arrow that nearly killed him on Hedgeley Moor.

  ‘You’re proud, Thomas,’ John says, as if this has nothing to do with it. ‘And rightly so. Look at this place. You’ve made it through your hard work. You’ve made a life here, a home, but it is not yours, is it? It doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to someone else and now they want it back. So it is over, our time here, your time here, and now you – me – him – her even – we must all shift for ourselves.’

  Thomas shakes his head. He refuses to believe what he is hearing.

  ‘No,’ he sa
ys, but Jack has turned and is walking on in hard, silent thought, as if he has remembered he has things that need doing, and John is looking at Thomas as if to say ‘you’ll see’, and now Thomas does not want to be with him any more, so he stops to let him follow Jack up the track to the hall, and he turns, and he must shield his eyes against the low spring sun so that he can watch the others come up between the green verges of the track from the church, walking at the pace of the slowest in the party.

  First comes Isabella, Sir John’s widow, still beautiful despite her milky eyes, her down-softened face made fragile by sorrow, her skin like old paper which has been thinned by the rub of so many thumbs that the sunlight seems almost to pass through it, and when she can finally see him, she smiles to find him waiting there with his dog, a comforting reminder of recent happiness, perhaps, and Thomas stands aside and nods as she passes, and his lurcher seems to dip his head as well, and Isabella smiles at that, too.

  He tries to read her expression, to divine from it a crumb of optimism, but there is nothing there. It is too early for her to be thinking of such things. There are no tearstains on her cheeks, and Thomas is reminded that Sir John is – what? The third – fourth – husband she has buried? So perhaps, he thinks, she should be used to it by now? But then again, perhaps it does not work quite like that? Perhaps such sorrows are cumulative, and they build up, over time, like the strokes of a whip?

  Next comes her sister, a widow also, though only twice over, of similar build to Isabella – though she walks the earth with heavy, splayed feet – who was sent for when it was obvious there was nothing Katherine could do for Sir John, and he had but little time left in this life. She walks with her two maids; likewise sisters perhaps, with corn-yellow hair under their caps, each as broad as a heifer. Jack says they are from Viking stock, and Thomas believes him.

  Behind them come three more girls, distant relations to Isabella. Thomas is not quite sure of their relative positions. They are well-dressed women, he can see that, in silks, and on high pattens, and each is married or betrothed to a husband too busy to be here for Sir John’s funeral, but who will come for his Month’s Mind, perhaps, especially as it is known the King’s Chamberlain is likely to attend, and each woman is trailed by two maids of her own, and as they pass in a group, the ladies study Thomas from under lowered lashes, and he finds himself warming under the examination.