The Table of Less Valued Knights (12 page)

I could start a new fashion. Call it the Edwin
. Edwin tugged one of his eyebrows downwards and tried to figure out how long it was. It was useless. Barely made it to the top of his eyeball. Maybe he could get some kind of eyebrow wig crafted out of horsehair? Or, forget the eyebrows, perhaps men could start wearing veils, like women? No, that was ridiculous.

‘Those boyhood days,’ the Archbishop was saying. ‘I remember them well. The boy who would be archbishop and the boy who would be king. Playing together, like ordinary boys, though only one of us had divine right. As the Bible says,
All your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children
. Isaiah 54:13. Although we were taught by Master Kenwood, or was it Ken Wood? Can you believe it, I don’t recall! But he had a frightful temper and just the one eye, and the only peace we knew was pudding. By which I mean pease pudding. A pun, you know? A ha. A ha ha. Ah, me. Those boyhood days. We never did actually eat pease pudding.’

In a minute
, thought Edwin,
even the corpse is going to be so bored it’ll get up out of the casket and walk off in its winding sheet
.

‘As we grew into young men,’ the Archbishop droned on, ‘I became accustomed to living in Peter’s glorious shadow, or rather the shadow of his glory, a shadow, by definition, not being glorious. Although, of course, all things of the King are covered in glory, and therefore his shadow was, indeed, glorious. Peter had all of the women – the girls who would be queen – and I less so, which prompted Peter, immortally, if that isn’t a tactless
word to use under the circumstances, although he lives on in the immortality of God, glory be to God, to say, “Have you ever thought about making a virtue of necessity and taking a vow of chastity?” And thus began my path to the priesthood. I owe him so much. Oh, those young manhood days.’

My God, will this funeral never end?

Edwin missed home. He missed his own young manhood days. He even missed Leo, in a way. Leo’s purpose in life was to make Edwin feel small. But that meant Edwin’s purpose in life was to prove himself to Leo, and without Leo there to watch him, everything he did felt a bit pointless. So, for example, if Leo had met Martha, he’d have been all, ‘I don’t fancy yours much,’ and Edwin would have been, like, ‘She may not be all that to look at, but she goes like a mule,’ and Leo would have been, ‘Have you shagged a lot of mules then?’ and Edwin would have been, like, ‘Get lost, Leo.’ Where was he going to get that sort of quality banter round here? He wondered what Leo was doing right now. He wouldn’t be at a bloody not-very-fun-eral, that’s for sure. He’d be giving a wench a good seeing to, probably, or down in the dungeon tormenting the man in the iron mask.

Maybe there was a man in an iron mask at this castle he could torment? That would pass the time.

‘Martha,’ he whispered, ‘do you have a man in an iron mask in your dungeon?’

But Martha didn’t respond. Lord, she was nearly as dull as this funeral. Though nothing was as dull. Nothing!

At least the Archbishop was finally winding up. ‘And now he has once again beaten me, this time to the grave. But I’m sure I will see him again in Heaven, where, perhaps, I will finally be in charge. Thanks be to God. Now I’d like to invite the dear departed King’s daughter Martha to say a few words.’

Martha jumped in her seat as if she had been bitten by a rat. Maybe she’d been asleep, or maybe she’d actually been bitten by a rat! That would liven things up.

‘Martha?’ said the Archbishop.

Martha shook her head vigorously.

Sir John, who was sitting on the other side of her, leaned in and said quietly, ‘Your Majesty, as Queen, and the daughter of the deceased, it behoves you to …’

At this, Martha got up and ran from the chapel.

Brilliant
, thought Edwin,
why didn’t I think of that? Oh, hang on
–

‘I must see to my wife,’ he said, and ran out of the chapel after her.

She was fast. It took Edwin a while to catch up with her. She’d only slowed down for a moment by the servants’ staircase, pausing before heading up the main stairs and into their bedchamber. When Edwin arrived, she was sitting on the bed with her arms wrapped around herself, shaking.

‘Good idea, running out like that,’ he said. ‘That funeral was deathly. I mean, obviously it was. What I actually mean is deathly as a metaphor for boring.’

Martha didn’t say anything. Maybe she was upset. Fantastic! Now he could comfort her.

He sat down on the bed beside her.

‘Don’t be sad,’ he said. ‘If your father wasn’t dead, you wouldn’t be queen, and we wouldn’t be married.’

She still didn’t say anything. He put an arm around her.
This is it, he thought. This is the perfect time for us to bonk. Because I will be doing it in a caring way, and she will be grateful, and maybe let me do more
. He reached to pull her veil off.

‘Stop!’ she said, in a strange voice.

‘I love you,’ he said, which was the sort of thing husbands said, and went on tugging at the veil. She pushed his hands away.

‘I’m not her,’ she said. ‘I’m not Martha.’

She took the veil off herself. It was Martha’s servant, the skinny one – well, obviously. Edwin felt panic pouring into him. Where was his wife? What was this bitch doing in her clothes?
One thing was certain, he had to get rid of her before anybody else found out. He grabbed the girl around the neck and started to squeeze. She struggled against him, clawing at his hands to try to make him let go.

‘She made me do it!’ the girl hissed with all the air she had left. ‘She made me dress in her clothes and told me to be silent so that she’d get a head start before you found out!’

That stopped him. ‘Found out what?’ he said. The girl was turning blue so he loosened his grip slightly.

‘That she ran away.’

‘She ran away?’

Edwin let go of the girl and she fell back on the bed, gasping. It was probably a bad idea to kill her, he’d have to get rid of the body and he didn’t know the castle well enough yet to hide a corpse. And this place was so insular and parochial that people might notice if a servant was missing.

‘Where did she go?’ Edwin asked.

‘I don’t know.’ The girl started to cry. ‘If I knew I would tell you. It’s true. She knows I can’t keep my mouth shut, that’s why she didn’t tell me.’

‘Listen to me,’ said Edwin. ‘She didn’t run away. She was kidnapped. And if you tell anybody that she wasn’t, I will kill you. You will tell everyone that it was her captors who made you impersonate her. If you say otherwise, I will accuse you of conspiring with them and you will be burned at the stake, a death so agonising you will wish I had strangled you.’

The girl nodded frantically. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ Edwin corrected her.

But he wasn’t Your Majesty, not yet. He hadn’t been crowned. And if anyone found out that the marriage hadn’t been consummated, he’d have no legitimacy at all.

He thought fast, as fast as he was capable of. He had to get Martha back and a crown on his head or there’d be pretenders to the throne coming out of the woodwork faster than termites.
That he’d be consummating the marriage went without saying. Even if he didn’t need to do it for legitimacy, he was determined to teach her a lesson about what happens to girls who misbehave. Besides, he needed an heir. But as soon as she had a child, his child, she was disposable. Find her, sprog her up, then kill her. That was the plan.

But how was he going to find her? He’d send the army on her trail, but they were loyal to Puddock, not to him, and if push came to shove, he was the one who would get shoved. He’d have to call in assistance from elsewhere. But where? Turning to Leo was out of the question. If he found out that Edwin’s wife had run away from him, Edwin would never live it down.

There was only one place he could go to for help: Camelot.

Martha decided to ride south as far as she could, then board a boat to France. Once there she could take the universal panacea and resume her life as a woman. She’d be far enough away that nobody would know her for the missing Queen of Puddock, or even if they did, they wouldn’t care. Sir John had made France sound nice. She had never been, had never even seen the sea before, although she spoke fluent French, alongside Latin, Greek and Castilian. These were some of the pointless accomplishments of being a princess.

It took her a while to get used to riding like a man, with one leg on either side of the horse, but once she’d got the hang of it she found it much better than side-saddle. It didn’t hurt her back, for starters, now she didn’t have to twist around to see forward. Having the sock between her legs was maybe the strangest part, but the way the movement of the horse made it rub against her was far more pleasant than the closest equivalent she could think of, which was the chafing of a new boot on her heel. No, it was definitely nicer than that. The unexpectedly exciting feeling of the sock added to the thrill of being out in the open, the wind in what was left of her hair, alone (most of the time)! Free (almost)! And with each passing day, heading away from the castle, and Edwin, and responsibility (definitely)!

The money thing turned out to be easier than she’d anticipated. It seemed a gold coin would pay for most things, although some of the tradesmen looked at it strangely before accepting
it. A few even gave her some money in return, which made very little sense, but she didn’t want to show herself up by querying this. Maybe they felt sorry for her because she looked so young and lost.

The innkeepers certainly didn’t feel sorry for her, though; she rather wished that they did. She was appalled to discover that not only did most inns have no such thing as a private room, they had no such thing as a private bed. She had never so much as shared a room with another person before, let alone got into bed with a smelly, snorting, flea-ridden member of the general public. Side by side on a lumpy mattress with a hairy, flatulent stranger – and this stranger would be a man, as often as not – she would lie, sleepless, staring at the ceiling and wondering how long it would be before she was murdered, and how often they washed the sheets. She wasn’t sure which train of thought led to the more horrifying destination. The only advantage of the situation was that whenever an innkeeper crept up to her bed to try to rob her, as they so often did, she was invariably awake and able to chase him off. She didn’t know why the innkeepers always seemed to target her. Every one of the people in the room must have been travelling with their own bag of gold, so why couldn’t they try to steal someone else’s money once in a while?

Daytime was better. She hadn’t realised how different life was for men. They looked her straight in the eye when they spoke, asking her questions and listening to her answers, treating her with the easy, casual respect of equals. She liked it, but she was thrown by the expectation that she would have something to contribute to conversation. The frustration that she had felt as a girl her entire life – that nobody believed her to be competent at anything – was replaced by the terror that her competence was now assumed. Either way, her actual abilities didn’t seem to come into it.

She found herself walking differently, taking wider steps
in her comfortable britches and boots, standing up straighter now that she no longer had to bow her head to avoid accidentally making eye contact with anyone. And whether because she was now a man or because she was now a commoner, nobody guarded their speech or conduct around her. Despite what she had been told, men gossiped just as much as women. In the inns where she slept and taverns where she ate, the big rumour was that La Beale Isoud had been spotted bathing in her chemise in the Cornish sea. Did this mean that love was restored between her and Tristan, and if so was this a good thing? (General opinion: true love will out, and they’d give her one themselves if they had the chance.) The other story, inevitably, was that the Queen of Puddock had been kidnapped (not run away, Martha noted), and that the King (ha! Was that how he was styling himself now?) was heading to Camelot to enlist the Round Table in a quest to find her. When people asked her opinion of that, she just shrugged.

In fact she shrugged as much as possible when asked about anything, because, like the apple without the core, Martha discovered that she and Nancy (mainly Nancy) had forgotten something important: she still had a woman’s voice. She worried that her feminine intonation would alert everyone to the fact that she wasn’t the man she was pretending to be. But after a while she realised that her high voice, combined with her slight build and dubious facial hair, served to reinforce the perception that she was very young. Given her evident naivity, this was in fact to her benefit.

So on the whole her escape plan appeared to be working. Indeed, when from time to time she forgot entirely that she was meant to be male and said things like, ‘What lovely earrings, are those amethysts?’ to some barmaid or other, rather than taking her for the impostor she was, the ladies fairly melted. Even though she had no interest in soliciting the
attentions of women, she felt flattered and a little smug. It seemed that, in some ways, she was better at being a man than men were themselves.

Then, as things are frustratingly accustomed to do, everything changed.

She had stopped for lunch in a pleasant spot by the shores of a millpond, at the bottom of a gentle slope, surrounded by a copse of trees. Before unpacking the pheasant pie she had bought from the inn where she had stayed the night before, she led Silver down to the shores of the pond to drink. She left the horse at the edge of the water, then took a few paces back, because the ground was boggy and she didn’t want to get her feet wet. She looked up at the clouds and wondered whether it was going to rain later.

‘Martha,’ said a voice.

‘Yes?’ said Martha, without thinking. And then – too late – ‘I mean, no. Sorry. I thought you said – something else.’

‘Martha,’ said the voice again. It was a woman’s voice, sonorous and clear, and it appeared to be coming from across the pond. Martha tugged at Silver’s reins to try to drag him away, but he refused to lift his head out of the water.