Kingdom Come Read online

  When Flood sees Thomas he beams and strides towards him.

  ‘By all the saints, Thomas Everingham!’

  He throws his arms around him and pounds Thomas’s back with pleasure, and then steps back with a puckered frown.

  ‘You are well accoutred, sir?’

  He gestures at Thomas’s brigandine and sword, though he himself is wonderfully dressed in a silken livery jacket quartered in the royal colours and an arrangement of fat pearls hanging from his hat, a sword at his hip, and riding boots with toes like chisels and spurs as long as a man’s hand.

  ‘I’ve come from Ranby Hawe,’ Thomas tells him.

  ‘Ah! You are not some rebel, are you?’ Flood laughs, but there is a gleam of something new and hard in his eye.

  ‘You know they are gathering?’

  ‘A steward of Lord Cromwell has sent word from Tattershall Castle. He says there are as many as twenty thousand men already gathered, with as many as a hundred thousand more coming from the north. ’

  ‘A hundred thousand!’

  Yet Flood remains happy and relaxed.

  ‘We are sceptical, of course, but King Edward has already sent out his Commissions of Array and we’ve near enough that number promised to us, including the household troops of my lords of Warwick and of Clarence.’

  ‘Clarence? Clarence?’

  Flood is suddenly concerned. His eyes stray around the yard, at the servants, porters and ostlers.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I know, but he’s not that bad.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Thomas tells him. ‘The men in Ranby Hawe, they were all cheering for him. Cheering for Clarence.’

  Flood’s expression narrows.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ Thomas tells him. ‘You cannot rely on Clarence. He is with Warwick behind Welles, I am sure of it. They put Welles up to it, to attacking Burgh’s house.’

  ‘But King Edward has pardoned Lord Welles already,’ Flood points out.

  ‘But this is Lord Welles’s son – this is Sir Robert Welles. He has appointed himself Great Captain of the Commons.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. And he is Clarence’s man. Or he has Clarence’s men with him at Ranby Hawe. We were there. We saw them. We heard them shouting for him.’

  Flood will not believe it.

  ‘But you did not see the Duke of Clarence himself, did you?’ he asks. ‘No. Because, do you know why? Because Clarence was with King Edward. They have been together in London these past days, and Clarence even rode with us on the way here, as far as Waltham Abbey where he left the King on excellent terms, armed with those Commissions of Array so that he and my lord of Warwick are able to raise troops to help suppress this Great Captain of the Commons and his rabble.’

  Thomas stops with his mouth open. He can think of nothing to say. He looks at his boot caps. At Flood’s boot points. He shakes his head.

  ‘Thomas,’ Flood says, dropping his voice. ‘You’d best not – best not say anything more on this. You know how King Edward hates to hear of treachery. And especially about his brother. You remember him last year? When you told him that Warwick was behind Redesdale? Did he not threaten to castrate you or something?’

  ‘But I was right, wasn’t I?’ Thomas asks.

  There’s a moment’s silence. Thomas can feel Flood looking at Jack for support, just as if Thomas were a stubborn child.

  ‘You were, Thomas,’ Flood sighs at last. ‘Yes. But that was then. This is now and you are talking of King Edward’s brother, for the love of God. However fond of you he may be, and I believe he is, King Edward is fonder yet of his brother, and if he hears of you talking of him this way, then this time he will have first your balls, and then your head.’

  ‘But I am right, still,’ Thomas says. ‘And the King must know. If he’s sent out Commissions of Array to Clarence, or Warwick, he must reverse them.’

  ‘Thomas!’ Flood says. ‘If you say another word, I will have you taken away myself. I would never rest easy knowing your wife might blame me for letting you talk yourself into an untimely death. So now come, let us put Lenten restrictions aside and have wine, and I have goose pie, for we need to keep our strength up, and let us, for the love of all that is holy, talk no more of this.’

  There is nothing more to be said now anyway, or not to Flood. So Thomas and Jack go with him and they talk of the past few months since last they saw one another, and it transpires that Flood is become a widower.

  ‘Childbed fever,’ he says, his face expressionless, his grief masked.

  Thomas remembers Flood’s wife: a beautiful girl whom they were forced to leave when they rode to find the Earl of Pembroke, days before the battle of Edgecote. Flood would not have seen her again for many months.

  ‘She left me a strapping son,’ Flood tells them, ‘whom I have named Edward for King Edward.’

  When they have finished the pie and drunk the wine, watched with envy by those less insouciant of the Church’s prohibitions, Flood leaves to find the best bed in town, and organise the town’s guildsmen and aldermen to be ready to receive the King.

  ‘He will be here by nightfall,’ Flood tells them as he is leaving the inn. ‘But please, Thomas, if King Edward summons you, do not say anything about his brother. There is a reason we call him our most dread liege.’

  4

  ‘When will Father be back?’ Rufus asks.

  ‘Soon,’ Katherine says. ‘Soon.’

  She has tried to keep the boy busy since Thomas left, and this afternoon he has dug out the handful of oak galls that he and Thomas collected before Christmas last, and now he is keen to make ink to show Thomas when he returns. So they set about grinding them with a pestle, and heating them up in a little dish over the fire, mixing the dust with soot and honey and egg white. When it is done Rufus looks very doubtful.

  ‘Will it work?’ he asks.

  ‘We can only try,’ Katherine says. They find one of Thomas’s reeds, cut it afresh and then look around for a piece of paper on which to test their product. They find the message from Thomas, telling them of the Duke of Clarence, and how he has taken Jack and gone to find William Hastings in London. It says he will be back within the week, ‘come what may’.

  She watches Rufus for a moment as he bends over the paper, the tiny tip of his tongue between his lips as he carefully marks the unfolded sheet. He is so grave, she thinks, so studious. Does that come from her? Or from Thomas? She has so few memories of herself as a child Rufus’s age. Nothing more than those of being in the priory. Dear Christ. How did she ever survive that? Remembering it now, even while sitting here by the fireside with her child next to her, warm in her own house, it still sends a shiver down her spine. Even her memories of the place have different colours: white, grey, black. The colours of ice. While of here they are red, green, golden.

  The only recollection she has of her early life that is at all different from this is the glimpse she once had of a fire in a stone fireplace, and of a window glazed with coloured glass, something she recognises she must have seen before she became an oblate, for she never knowingly saw such a thing while she was cloistered. But she has returned to this memory so often it’s become like a coin worn to a slip by the rub of many fingers over the years, and she wonders if it is not now a mere memory of a memory, rather than a memory itself? It is like the other one she has: of being invited to hand over a heavy purse and some letters to a kindly-faced old woman in black, after which she senses a parting, and then the gates seem to swing shut behind her, and then the Life began. She supposes she might have imagined this too; might have created it as a myth to cling to, except odd new details sometimes spring to mind when she least expects, adding to the scene. Now she thinks there was another woman in the background, sobbing, and she wonders again at Isabella’s words, spoken in this very room, the summer before: whoever put Katherine in the priory must have had connections and money to pay the order to break the Church’s law against oblates. So they must
have been somebody. But who? This has never interested Katherine because she has always known that she would never find out who it was, and she never believed it mattered. She has refused to know, wilfully blocked her ears to Thomas’s speculations, because how could it help achieve anything but further unhappiness? It is better not to care.

  But now, when she looks at Rufus and sees little of Thomas in the boy save his reddish hair, she feels a creeping sense of unease. Who is he? Really? He is so slight, so sombre. He starts at any noise. He refuses to eat meat. He sometimes moves as if he is frightened of the world around him, as if he feels himself made of glass.

  And what of the baby that is to come?

  She shifts uncomfortably and then stitches on, passing the needle through the loose weave of linen, joining sleeve to body, finding not one whit of satisfaction in her skill. She glances over at Nettie, who slumps exhausted, asleep with her own baby at her breast. They call the baby Kate. She only ever sleeps, eats or cries. Sometimes all three at once. Nearby John Stumps sits with his eyes closed but he is chewing something slowly, like an old ram, so she knows he is awake. John Who-Was-Stabbed-by-His-Priest stands at the window, staring out at the rain, and Katherine can hear and smell John’s wife and children in the buttery where they are talking quietly while they’re crushing violet petals for oil.

  Another stitch.

  When will Thomas come back? He says a week, but she remembers him vanishing for the best part of two years after the battle of Towton. She remembers last year, when he rode to tell King Edward about Robin of Redesdale and was gone for months on end, and nearly came back not at all, since King Edward wanted him hanged for bringing unwelcome news. She wonders if he will be more circumspect this time? She prays he will not believe King Edward has learned all his lessons from last year, and that he will know to tell the news of Clarence’s treachery first to William Hastings. She wishes she were there instead of Jack. She wishes he would just come home.

  With Thomas gone, Katherine feels herself more than ever responsible for the safety of the other people in the hall, especially as now it is known she was right about the attack on Burgh’s house being not the work of a band of robbers but some new strife inspired by the Earl of Warwick. That bloody man. Has he nothing better to do? No, she thinks. He has nothing better to do. He has all this immense power, this immense wealth, an apparatus designed for and pointed at fighting the French, but with no Frenchmen to fight, what is he to do with it? She almost laughs aloud, seeing this. It is true of all of them; yes, all of them. The dukes. The earls. The lords. They are trained to fight, and they train others to fight, and then, once they have done that, what else is there to do but fight?

  Another stitch.

  And she thinks which of these lords she’d prefer to come for the ledger first: the Earl of Warwick’s man, whoever he may be, or William Hastings’s bloodhound, whoever he may be? She thinks perhaps the former, for there is a chance, if they hand it over to him straight away, that he will not have them all killed, and they might be left to live with their consciences for what they’ll have done to King Edward and William Hastings. But if it is Hastings’s man, this bloodhound, then, dear God, there will be no short end to their torments.

  She thinks that tomorrow she will dig the book out, up from under Nettie’s floor, and she’ll place it back in the coffer at the foot of her bed, the selfsame one in which Sir John kept it all those years. It will be to hand then. Yes. That is what she’ll do.

  She looks up from her sewing to watch Rufus a little longer, his head still bent over the paper, and she can hear the scratch of his reed; then he senses he is being looked at, and he glances up and their eyes meet, and they smile at one another, and he returns to his scratchings, and she to her stitching, and she thinks about Thomas out there, somewhere; they sit like that as the daylight dies, half listening to the baby’s waking murmurings, the ticks and clicks of the fire, and the very faint moan of the wind in the chimney top.

  The night passes slowly, but peacefully, and the next morning after prayers Katherine remembers her intent to dig up the ledger. She sends Foulmouth John for a mattock and gets him to attack the floor of Nettie’s house while Nettie looks on with the baby in her arms and the baby is, for once, quiet, as if soothed by Foulmouth John’s bizarre act of violence. The floor is crumbly and damp under its top layer, but the ledger, in its tight-stitched sleeve of waxed linen, has survived its months of incarceration.

  When he sees what she is about, John Stumps gives her a narrow look.

  ‘So,’ he says.

  He lost his second arm because of this book, and he has as much right to a say in its fate as anyone. They leave Foulmouth John to repair the damage to Nettie’s floor as best he can, and they take the ledger into the hall, deserted with everyone at their tasks, and she finds a properly sharp knife to snip the stitching. She tries to keep calm, yet her fingers are trembling as she slides the thing out of its case and places it on the table.

  The book is dry, and entirely unchanged, though perhaps the leather is crazed slightly, and one of the seals crumbles under her touch like an oatmeal biscuit. She opens it. The pages are crisper and louder to turn than she remembers, but the ink within is as clear – or not – as it ever was. Long lists of soldiers’ names; when and where they were in France nearly thirty years ago. Taken all together, it means little or nothing, but in among it all are the details of Richard of York’s absence from his wife for nearly seven months before she gave birth to her son Edward, who has since become King of England based on a claim passed down from three months this same absent, cuckolded father, this Richard of York.

  ‘So where does it say that – that he’s as he is?’ John asks. Even he cannot bring himself to say that King Edward – a man whom he likes – might be a bastard. Katherine goes through the pages until she sees the little rose of York in the margin, to mark the boy’s birth, and she works back from there to the entry describing the Duke of York’s journey to the town of Pontours.

  ‘There,’ she says. ‘That is it.’

  John peers close, reverent before the word, as if before a bible that once belonged to – a saint, say.

  ‘Just that word?’ he breathes.

  She nods.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Pontours,’ she says.

  ‘Pontours,’ he repeats. ‘And that is enough to condemn a man? Enough to change his life? Make him not the king when he is the King?’

  It does seem absurd.

  ‘If it had been destroyed,’ John starts, ‘the King would still be the king?’

  ‘Yes,’ she tells him. She supposes it would.

  ‘So why do we not destroy it now?’

  She sighs.

  ‘We could do, but then what if the next men up the track are not Thomas and Jack, but someone such as Edmund Riven, may God curse his soul, or worse, come from the Earl of Warwick? They would never believe we have hidden it and … well.’

  She trails off with a shrug. John has been tortured before, by Edmund Riven, who burned his hand off, and even now she cannot help but glance at his right stump. She imagines he might rub it if he had a left hand to do so.

  ‘But you don’t think he can still be looking for it?’ John asks.

  Katherine blows out air.

  ‘He knows it exists,’ she tells him, ‘and if what Thomas says about the Duke of Clarence is true, then Warwick will want it more than ever he did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it proves that the Duke of Clarence should be king.’

  It’s hard to know how much of this John Stumps grasps.

  ‘So what are you going to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. If he knows we have it, and he comes … well. I am not going to let him hurt any of you. I will – just give it to him.’

  John Stumps is alarmed.

  ‘And see King Edward unthroned?’

  She forgets in what high esteem they hold King Edward.

  ‘I’d rather
see that than …’ She trails off. She has a sudden image of a knife cutting Rufus’s skin. ‘I’d rather see that than anyone – you, or Rufus – be hurt.’

  John Stumps nods. He can see that, too.

  ‘He’s been ever like a wolf, that one, hasn’t he?’ John says. ‘The Earl of Warwick and his red-coated devils. Just circling and circling, getting closer. I’d like to send a bolt through his bloody eye, that I would.’

  The means for doing this are at hand, propped against each door, and she knows how John feels. The thought that out there, at any time – in the night, even, when it falls – the men of the Earl of Warwick will circle the house like wolves.

  Christ, she wishes Thomas were back.

  At that moment Rufus comes and sits with them. For some reason she withdraws the ledger from him, hiding it in its sleeve as if it might contaminate him. He picks up his pot of drying ink and sniffs it. His nails are gnawed to the quick. He finds the reed and dips it in the pot. The ink is dry. He splashes a tiny drop of ale in and then strokes the reed around the bottom of the jar. Now Rufus wants for paper, so Katherine looks at the ledger, and thinks: Why not? What harm can it bring? She removes the ledger from its sleeve and opens it to find a patch of paper that is blank towards the back. She passes it to him, and he settles down to draw a dog, and a man with a stick. They are nicely done. A pigeon, maybe, too.

  ‘Your mam says your letters are coming on, Rufus?’ John asks. It is a nice thing for John to say, she knows, and her heart goes out to him, because Rufus’s letters, to be truthful, are not yet good, and the boy knows it too, and he smiles and passes her the reed and asks her to show him a word. She writes ‘Rufus’ under his pictures.