Free Kingmaker: Broken Faith by Toby Clements

coroner frowns, waiting, until Eelby makes his choice and says: ‘Lady Margaret never liked her. Never liked my woman.’
    There is an outlet of breath. Men in the jury start murmuring. The coroner raises his eyebrows.
    ‘Lady Margaret cut your wife – killed her – because she never
liked
her?’
    There is some muffled disturbance at the back and the coroner looks up, and then over at his clerk who has also looked up, and the two exchange an unspoken sign. Katherine can make no sense of it, but when she looks to Widow Beaufoy for guidance, Widow Beaufoy is determinedly absent, staring away from her, and away from the disturbance, as if it does not concern her. Something is up, but what? After a moment there is silence.
    ‘Go on,’ the coroner says.
    ‘She hated her,’ Eelby reinforces. ‘As is well known.’
    He raises his voice, calling on someone at the back of the jury, and someone answers, shouting out: ‘That’s right! She hated her!’
    And, from a different part of the crowd, someone else shouts that Katherine wanted Eelby’s wife dead, and now those at the front of the jury are turning around, craning their necks to see, and everyone is murmuring and staring and the clerk has put down his pen and turned and all at once everyone realises that something is up. The jury has been packed, or bribed, just as Richard and Mayhew had warned it might be, and Katherine feels first the flare of panic and then the grim slump of acceptance. They had told her she needed powerful friends in a moment such as this, and suggested she seek help from Lord Hastings.
    ‘Someone might bribe the coroner,’ Mayhew had explained, ‘or pack the jury. Anything can go wrong. And if the coroner finds the death unnatural, then he will have to record it as murder.’
    ‘But it was not murder,’ Katherine had said. ‘I did what I had to do to save the boy. The woman was dead! Or so close to it, it hardly mattered.’
    Mayhew had been patient.
    ‘It doesn’t matter what really happened,’ he’d said. ‘All that matters is what people say happened.’
    ‘But why would anyone say different?’
    Richard had mewed like a cat, or an old woman, and Mayhew had shaken his head.
    ‘Please,’ he’d said. ‘Please just go to Lord Hastings. Or the Earl of Warwick. He owes you his life. Or his leg at the very least. Send a letter. I’ll take it if you like. Explain what has happened and ask them to advise you.’
    But Katherine had not. She’d refused. She was certain that if she could see that what she had done was the right thing to do – the
only
thing to do – then others would too. Others would see that she’d had to act, to do something terrible in order to avert something worse. That was all. So she had ignored the advice of her husband and Mayhew and instead she’d thrown herself into restoring the estate, and she’d known that the two things – the saving of the child and the saving of the estate – would soon come to be seen as one and the same thing.
    So now the watermill has been repaired by a carpenter from Boston, who’s been induced to bring his family and his apprentices, and to pay his rent on one of the houses along the causeway. Others have come, too: a man from Lincoln, two more from Boston, a fourth, an eel trapper called Stephen – a wiry man with wild hair and a prominent tooth – from Gainsborough. Since their arrival fences have been repaired, hedges relaid, hovels and outhouses rebuilt. The sluice gates have been made to work again and water has been diverted, corralled. The fields are drying and there is every chance of a pea and a rye crop in the coming year. There are geese and chickens and piglets in their pens and sties, and there are five cows on the island, and a pair of glossy brown oxen to pull the plough. The punt has been made water-worthy as well, and while one of the new men reaps the broad ribbon of teasels that grow to the west of the castle, the eel catcher Stephen sits with one eye