Georgette Heyer (24 page)

That awakened memory; it seemed strangely remote. Not satin for gitons did Father now require of Master Whittington, but money for his sore needs. It was common knowledge that he had borrowed largely from Richard Whittington. Harry, who was nursing one ankle on his knee, the long, dagged sleeves of his pourpoint touching the floor, must have been thinking of this, for he said: ‘I wish you would lend money to me!’

Master Whittington said, with a twinkle: ‘Why, so I will, sir, if I like the security!’

That made them laugh, for they all knew that Harry had been forced to sell his plate to pay his soldiers.

‘You will lend me some one day!’ Harry said, with the flash of a confident smile.

‘Affirmably, my lord,’ Whittington said, bowing. He was watching Harry, as though he tried to read his mind, but Harry met his look softly, betraying nothing.

‘Wars!’ said Humfrey. ‘When I borrow money it will be to buy me such books as this of yours.’

Harry picked up Dame Alice’s gitern, and began to play a Welsh air. He neither looked at Humfrey nor spoke to him; it was John who said: ‘The Welsh troubles will be ended before Master Whittington will lend livelihood to Harry.’

He and Thomas, and perhaps Whittington too, knew that Humfrey had not the Welsh rebellion in mind when he uttered his careless speech. Humfrey raised his eyes from the book on his knee, in a wide look, half of innocence, half of contrition. It would be useless, John knew, to rebuke him presently. He was incapable of perceiving his errors; and although he was always sorry to have offended anyone you could place no reliance on his refraining in future. He would commit the most astonishing treacheries, sometimes to gain a private end, sometimes from lightness of mind, when it seemed to him impossible that anyone should be angry with him for doing so understandable a thing. The odd part of it was that no one, not even hot-tempered Thomas, ever was angry with him for more than a few exasperated minutes. He was so bewildered, if set upon the hone, so contrite, and so unhappy to find himself in disgrace, that he always won forgiveness. His brothers knew that he would lightly betray a confidence, but their old love for him endured. Their love was protective: he was such a young and beautiful creature, graceful and immature, and with the most engaging manners. Women adored him, and said that his oddly crooked eye would crack many poor hearts. Harry thought he was overly fond of being petted in bowers, and told him that he was growing too old to cling to petticoats; but Thomas said in John’s ear that Harry was out for once: it was Thomas’s belief that Humfrey was more precocious than Harry guessed.

He glanced deprecatingly at Harry now, but read no message in his face, either of blame or of pardon. Harry had become suddenly remote, enclosed within his mysterious citadel. Humfrey’s sensitive mouth quivered, and drooped. It was Whittington who intervened, giving all their thoughts a lighter turn by asking demurely if the noble princes had had any more poems written in their honour since the ballad composed by their old tutor, Master Scogan, and presented to them at a supper at Lewis John’s house. That drew a laugh from Harry, for the ballad had been a gentle exhortation to the princes to conduct themselves in sadder wise. Humfrey looked relieved, and hoped that his lapse would be forgotten, and that Harry would perhaps let him join his night revels. Harry always said that he would do so in time coming, not choosing to tell him that at thirteen he was far too young to company with his eldest brother’s friends.

These, the men who came with Harry from Wales, were nearly all older than he, but they were very ready to play with him. He surprised those, like Gilbert Talbot, who knew him hitherto only as a stern young commander, but he enchanted them too, so that they did the craziest things at his bidding, and thought afterwards that they must have been cup-shotten, or bewitched. Only the Earl of Warwick held aloof from the night junketings. Richard Beauchamp was as little lief as the Archbishop to rub shoulders with common folk. He had, besides, a young wife, and a reputation to maintain. The usual Christmas jousts were being held at Smithfield, and more than one foreign knight was coming to England under safe-conduct to break a lance with him. Richard seemed to be determined to make his name as famous in the lists as ever the King’s had been, and nothing, he austerely informed Harry, could more surely impair judgment of eye than night roistering.

Another whose attendance on Harry was fitful was Jack Oldcastle, a strange, intemperate man, swinging between heights of riotous hilarity and depths of troubled soul-searching. Harry held him in great affection, laughed him out of his moods of gloomy thought, soothed him when his passionate beliefs made him ready to come to blows with any who argued too shrewdly against him, and respected him always as the bravest of his companions in arms.

But Harry’s closest friend was a man of a different kidney, ten years his senior, easy with his fellow-men, full of laughter, and subtle in his ways. He was Henry Scrope of Masham, a nephew of the Archbishop of York. Harry gave more of his confidence to Henry Scrope than to any man other than John. He had shared his bed with him during their hard campaigning; he would often thrust a hand in his arm; and he never stiffened against his touch. This was a rare thing in Harry, aloof even when most approachable. Women – even the doxies whom he took for his fleeting pleasure – found this elusiveness more alluring than his fine, taut body, or his handsome face. He was a tantalising lover: urgent and tender, fierce and unexpectedly gentle, impossible to know or to hold. No one would ever know Harry, John thought, a little jealously, watching Henry Scrope coax him out of an elfin humour. Harry leaned his head back on Scrope’s shoulder, mischief in his eyes, outrageous schemes for the night’s entertainment dropping from a honey-tongue. ‘My dearworth, you are quite drunk, you know,’ Scrope said caressingly.

‘Oh, no, do you think so?’ Harry murmured.

‘Drunk or brainsick,’ Scrope said, not believing it, for Harry was no love-pot. ‘You will end in the Clink this gait, my lord, and your poor servants with you. Grace!’

‘Very well. I am very treatable,’ Harry sighed, meek as a nun’s hen.

John wondered if this was something Scrope did believe. He had a little influence over Harry; cajoled him often enough in small matters to think, perhaps, that he would one day cajole him in greater ones.

3

Early in February the Queen received a visit from her second son, Arthur. He came to England to do homage for the Earldom of Richmond, relinquished to him by his brother, the Duke of Brittany, whose scruples forbade him to swear fealty to an English monarch. Arthur was not yet eleven years of age, but he seemed an intelligent boy, quick to learn, and well grown for his years. The Queen hung upon him with doting tenderness, but he was always escaping from her bower to run after his stepbrothers. They were quite kind to him, but they did not encourage him to follow them, because he was too young, and spoke very little English. All the princes could speak Norman-French, but they never did so from choice, using the language only for such official letters as they were obliged to write. The three elders were agreed that Humfrey was the one to entertain Arthur; but since Humfrey repulsed the suggestion with indignation, and Arthur thought him a tame substitute for Harry, nothing came of it.

Parliament had assembled in January, but Northumberland was not brought before his peers until the following month. Henry Beaufort was still Chancellor; and the faithful Commons for the second time chose Sir Arnold Savage to be their Speaker. It was generally thought that this election showed that the session was not going to be pleasing to the King. Savage was one of his sternest critics; a witty man, and an indefatigable orator.

It was, in fact, the most displeasant Parliament which had yet troubled King Henry’s peace. The King wanted money, and the three estates were at one in withstanding his demands. Bishop Beaufort was a wittier man than Savage, but although the Welsh were in revolt, the Bretons plundering the southern shore, and the French hovering on the brink of open war, the Commons would lend no ear to his warnings of foreign perils. What they wished to discuss, and did discuss, most apertly, was domestic mismanagement. They grutched at the lavish grants the King had made to his supporters; at the enormous costage of his court; at the abuse of liveries; and most of all they grutched at the continued presence in England of the Queen’s Breton servants. As for foreign perils, the King had been granted the Customs, and the wardships of the nobles, and he had the revenues of the house of Lancaster at his command. King Henry replied acidly that he did not mean to leave his house impoverished; but he refrained from reminding the Commons that the Queen whom they so bitterly disliked had not yet received from England her full dowry. She was, of course, very wealthy, which they would no doubt have pointed out to him; and she was drawing a thousand pounds a year from the Lancaster revenues, besides the income from the many manors, castles, parks, and estates which he had bestowed upon her. The Queen’s beauty was unfortunately equalled by her rapacity, and she was very beautiful. She was also tantalising. Not even the King’s sister Bess could deny her virtue; but Bess declared that she kept poor Henry lusting after her by the arts of a common ramp. Bess said that she should be called the Bitch Queen. Her horrified lord told her that such talk would place them both in jeopardy, but Bess only laughed, and said that the redeless Commons spoke of the Queen more despitefully still.

This was not strictly true, for the redeless Commons knew nothing of what went on within the King’s palaces. They could see that the King was asotted of his consort, and they called her the Witch Queen; but their real objection to her was that she was an expensive encumbrance. Before they could be brought to consider other matters, they would have all the followers of the Anti-Pope, saving only the Queen and her two daughters, and two attendants, banished from the realm. King Henry, who had tried often to persuade the Queen to dismiss her Breton court, was never more glad to be enforced. He returned an answer so gracious that the Commons were surprised into modifying their demands. If the King would consent to the reform of his household, the Queen might retain ten of her foreign servants.

In the middle of all this, the Earl of Northumberland was brought to his assize. He made an impressive appearance, stately, venerable, and nobly sorrowful. He answered his accusers mildly, and with such cunning that by the time he had finished his defence no one could be sure whether he had been betrayed into treason by his son; driven into it by the unworthy suspicions of the King’s Council, which had made him believe that he stood in peril of life and livelihood; forced into it by the need to succour his unhappy son; or even whether he had been marching to join the King, not Hotspur, and had been foiled by the malice of Westmoreland. He spoke so movingly of his loyalty to the house of Lancaster, and of the immense sums he had expended on its support, that several of his bemused peers began to think that it was he and not the King who was the injured party. He said that the King was much deceived in thinking that sixty thousand pounds had been paid to him, for no such sum had ever reached him. He was unable to recall how much money he had received, but he was sure that twenty thousand pounds were still owed to him, besides the ransoms of the Scottish earls taken prisoners at the Red Rigs. He was an old and a childless man, full of bale and weariness; and he was being pursued during his last years on middle earth, he said, weeping, by the spite of Ralph Neville.

After a great deal of argument, his peers decided that he had been guilty only of trespass, and should be fined, not headed. The manifesto to which he had set his name was forgotten; and the mustering of his levies was treated as the outcome of a private quarrel with Westmoreland. The two Earls were prayed to be reconciled; Northumberland begged to be allowed to swear an oath of fealty to King Henry on the Cross of the Blessed St Thomas; he was restored to his possessions, if not to all his dignities; and the King forgave him the fine.

Those who were best acquainted with the Lord John expected from him an explosion of wrath. It did not come. He had understood the message of this Parliament; and had seen, for the first time, the price his father paid, and would always pay, for the Crown.

Harry too was aware of it, and in the silent meeting of eyes these two shared the understanding, and put it aside. John knew that it was a thing Harry could not bear to discuss; and Harry knew himself safe in John’s hands.

Thomas was not aware of it, but only angry. He had never doubted that Northumberland would lose his head. He saw in the barons’ leniency woodhead, but not hostility; and in the demand for the reform of the Royal Household a punishable insolence. ‘And the King returned them a fair answer!’ he raged to John. ‘Why, it is a thing unprecedented! God’s Heart, Sir Thomas Erpingham has been telling me that when some fellow dared to propose it to King Richard he would have been hanged only that he was a clerk, and saved by Holy Church! No other Parliament ever demanded such a thing of Cousin Richard!’

‘No,’ John answered. ‘But no Parliament set Cousin Richard upon this throne, brother!’

Four

Heavy Cheer

1

God have you in His keeping!’ Harry said, at parting, holding John’s hands in his strong clasp. ‘I wish Percy were in ward – or you otherwise – or that I might go with you!’

‘Gramercy, brother! I had as lief do my own endeavour!’

‘Oh, I cry the Lord Warden’s pardon!’ Harry said, smiling. ‘I took you for a nurseling!’

‘Neither a nurseling nor a recreant.’

‘No. But I think they may make you heavy cheer in the North.’

‘Well I know it,’ said John. ‘What cheer will they make you in the West?’

‘Very hot cheer, but I shan’t find privy malice there, as you may. Go charily – and, for my love’s sake, John, keep only those about you whom you know you may trust!’

Harry told Thomas that with Percy at large his task was too dangerful for such a youngling as John, but Thomas said cheerfully: ‘Oh, I don’t fear for John!’ He thought he read reproof in Harry’s eye, and the jealousy which ran like a discordant thread through his nature made him add with hostility flickering in his voice: ‘You need not look as if I had said a sturdy thing! I love John as much as you do!’

‘Dreadless,’ Harry said gently.

Thomas was as quickly smoothed as he was angered. ‘Well, I only meant that he’s no rash-head. I think he has more wit than any of us too, even Humfrey. He won’t tread overthwart the Fox: I warned him to take keep of that.’

‘No, he won’t do that. But he is in the same case as I am, and has no remedy. The King must send him money!’

But all the money the King could find to send to John was sixty pounds, because although he had persuaded Parliament to vote a new land-tax for the defence of the realm its enactment had been postponed until the meeting of the next Parliament.

For John there was no help but in his own endeavour. With the return of Northumberland to his domains a new spirit was awake on the Border. Where John had before encountered tolerance he found hostility, which grew more overt as the long-overdue wages of his lieutenants and his men mounted. Northumberland was living in seclusion at Warkworth, but his presence in the district hung over John like a menace. His own presence was felt by Neville and Umfraville to be a heavy charge: from the teeth outward Northumberland was benign and mannerly, and Neville, who had exchanged the kiss of peace with him at Westminster, believed him to be at his most perilous in such a mood. He would not apertly instigate rebellion, but his adherents were many of them savage men, and what they might take it into their lawless heads to do to avenge his wrongs Neville thought he would not hinder. Neville would have been glad to have kept the Lord Warden at Raby, but he did not find the Lord Warden as treatable as he had hoped. There was work for John in his own territory, and thither he went, in spite of all Ralph’s objections. ‘I will not be Warden only in name!’ he said.

‘Yes, but the times are very sickly,’ argued Ralph. ‘There are those who would be blithe to do you some mischief: I dare not say how many! You know, you stand in my charge. I am your borrow, as it were – and you haven’t fifteen years yet in your dish!’

‘Then the King my father had best find him a new Warden!’ said John, with a flash of Harry in his eye.

He rode north to Berwick. Ralph Neville could do no more than strengthen his escort with men who wore the Bull of Raby on their sleeves, and send a warning to Sir Robert Umfraville.

Sir Robert met John in Berwick. He knew that John had passed through a hostile country, but John said nothing of this. He did not seem to be nervous, but there was a watchful look in his eyes, and a stiffening in his bearing. The boy, thought Sir Robert, would soon be left behind. Already he had a man’s inches, and it was plain that he meant to play a man’s part. He smiled at Sir Robert, as he gripped his hands, and said: ‘My heart’s welcome to you, Robin! Did Ralph send you to bear me in hand?’

‘To do your will, my lord,’ replied Sir Robert.

‘To give me good rede, I hope,’ John said, embracing Gilbert. ‘I promise you, I’m not so indurate as he says I am! But he has got to thinking himself my serf-borrow, and no man is that, nor shall ever be!’

Ralph Neville had indeed told Sir Robert that the Lord John was both indurate and rash, but Sir Robert found him neither. It was certainly hard to turn him from his will, but he did not form this impetuously; and while he faced unflinchingly any necessary danger he took no needless risks, or ever forgot that it behoved him to tread warily.

There was great need to be ware. On the one hand he had disaffected troops; on the other the Scots were ravaging the Border. With no money to pay his men or to provision them for war there was little he could do to check Scotch bobance. To make his position the more uneasy he knew that upon his departure for London, two of Northumberland’s kinsmen, and Clifford, Constable of Berwick Castle, had called together a host of men, arraying them in the livery of the Percy Crescent, and swearing to hold Berwick, Warkworth, and Alnwick in King Henry’s teeth. Upon their liege-lord’s enlargement they had disbanded this force: John knew not how many of the sullen men under his command had lately put off the Crescent.

While he remained on the Eastern Marches Gilbert Umfraville was never absent from his side. Sir Robert, holding the Middle March against invasion, left his nephew with John. If Percy was a name beloved in the North so too was Umfraville. ‘Look you, Gib!’ he said, laying a hand on Gilbert’s shoulder. ‘If I could stay beside the Lord John I would not, for he has a high stomach, and he would not thole it! But you may stay for fellowship, and be some small shield to him, as I think.’

‘With all my heart!’ Gilbert responded. ‘But how may I shield him? He will go where he lists, and I can’t stop him.’

‘You can go with him,’ Sir Robert said. ‘These people of ours will be masterless indeed when they do mischief to an Umfraville!’ He smiled at the flush of pride which rushed to Gilbert’s cheeks, and pulled his ear. ‘They reck little of the King’s vengeance, for they don’t know him; but me they do know, Master Greenhead, and so you may both be safe!’

2

John accepted Gilbert’s companionship gladly, and gave no sign that he recognised it to be a safeguard. Gilbert brought with him a small company of his retainers, and in some ways they served John better than his own retinue, too many of whom bristled with mistrust of the northerners who gave their lord such bleak looks. His meiny was a small one, no regular household having been appointed; but besides his confessor, his steward, his grooms and clerks, a few squires were attached to his train, and a dozen men-at-arms. Several garboils sprang up between these and the Percy adherents; and once John heard a man snarl: ‘Thousands for a Percy!’ and swung round to see the flash of steel, and a squire of his at death-grips with a man in russet livery. At his furious command his own man released his hold, and fell back. The other sprang after, and was sent hurtling to the ground by a wrathful prince who was not used to have his orders disregarded. ‘No cries in my presence but
St George
, and
Forth to the Field
, bratchet!’ John said fiercely.

There was a red light in the eyes that stared up at him, but it faded. He had used a north-country word of contempt, and he had spoken the war-cry of all the Border lords, and such simple things pleased rude men. An Ogle confided to a Grey that all would be well for the Lord John if he could but pay his men their dues.

He could not, and all was ill for him, and made worse by loneliness. He came to an impossible task straight from the governance of his tutors, handicapped by youth and inexperience, and obliged to dwell in his own strength. He could seek counsel of his elders, but not even to Ralph Neville might the King’s son give his whole confidence. No one knew what he suffered during that time: the anxiety to prove himself worthy of his trust; the greater anxiety for the safety of his house; the doubts of himself, and of his lieutenants; the anguish of impotence; and the bitterness of humiliation. These were things of which he never spoke; and so rigid a guard did he set on his face and his demeanour that only Robin Umfraville, more perceivant than Ralph Neville, guessed some part of what he endured. He was a child sent to rule a turbulent land without the means to enforce his decrees, or even to repel the enemy who ravaged his Border. His troops were mutinous; he met with threatening looks when he went amongst them; and knew that one false step would be enough to bring discontent to a flaming head. More than once he stood in danger of his life; and for every confessed foe to his house amongst the lesser Border lords there might, for anything he knew, be three who hid hostility under civil fronts. His servants begged him not to expose his person, and tried, whenever he rode out, to bunch themselves about him. One of his squires had been wounded by an arrow, loosed from what ambush only the devil knew, which had missed its true mark. So narrow an escape might well have broken a stripling’s hardihood; it stiffened the Lord John’s resolve never to betray a sign of fear or of weakening. He repelled his servants, and went about his business with an unmoved countenance, sometimes with no other companion than Gilbert, who would not be repelled. He did not know how much reluctant respect he won: he only knew that he was a King’s son, and must not flinch.

Matters were not improved by the rumours that were flying about the country that springtide. Men said that King Richard was alive, sheltering at the Court of Scotland. Spies reported that this pretender was none other than the Court fool, who bore a resemblance to the dead King; but the rumour had brought to Scotland from France, whither he had fled upon King Henry’s accession, one of the grooms of Richard’s chamber, who saw a profit in the imposture, and upheld it. The groom was that William Serle who was believed to have been implicated in Thomas of Gloucester’s murder. He sent a secret messenger to Richard’s old friends, and had actually counterfeited Richard’s privy seal. John forwarded to the Council such reports as he was able to collect, and learned presently that the messenger, caught in Essex, had been constrained to give up the names of the people he had visited in England. All over the North the rumour was being whispered. It was just the sort of thing rude men liked to talk about, not troubling their heads over probabilities, but accepting any ferly tale for the truth. An air of expectancy hung over the land: King Richard was going to reappear amongst his loving lieges, and down would tumble the whole house of Lancaster. It seemed as though it had always been King Richard whom the people had loved, and never Henry of Bolingbroke; but Sir Robert Umfraville told a troubled Warden that so it was ever with borel-folk. ‘They are never apaid, and they bear nothing in mind above a hand-while,’ he said. ‘No, not even that King Richard promised the villeins they should go free, and was mainsworn the instant he was delivered from the peril that dragged that vow from his lips!’

‘But did they love King Richard?’ John asked.

‘Nay, how should they love him, or any other great one?’ replied Sir Robert. ‘Sely men love their bellies, John.’

‘Your villeins love you,’ John said.

‘Sickerly! An Umfraville has always kept their bellies filled!’

John knew that this was something his father was finding it impossible to do, and was not cheered.

But in June he was gladdened by the arrival of a letter from Harry. One of his squires brought it all the way from Wales; its tidings were not comfortable; but the sight of that angular writing seemed to bring him before John; and the thought that in the middle of his crowding dangers Harry had remembered his promise to send a letter north warmed his heart.

Harry was at Worcester; and in worse straits than ever. He knew not where to turn for money, and had told the Council that unless provision was made for his troops on the Welsh Marches they would be forced to retire, and leave the country to be destroyed. Edward of York had pledged his estates in Yorkshire; the rebels were laying the better part of Herefordshire waste; and Warwick’s uncle, the Lord of Bergavenny, must be shent if not speedily relieved. Without the means to maintain more than a tiny force, Henry had sent to summon Richard of Warwick to him, and Richard had responded to the call, joining him at Worcester with a large retinue, at his own costage. He was sending Richard to check the rebels in Herefordshire; the Archdeacon of Worcester, a person well liked by the King, was writing to him in stringent terms, urging the need of support; he had himself written yet again to the Council.

There was nothing in all this to raise the spirits, but John found it invigorating. Harry might tell the Council that he expected to be destroyed, but every line of his letter to John breathed confidence. The letter reached him at Norham, strongest of all the royal holds along the Border, and was brought to him on the northern ramparts, where he had been standing staring across the Tweed, his fingers drumming on the parapet, his mind abstracted. Behind him the great red sandstone keep reared its bulk; and far below, at the foot of the rock on which the castle had been built, the river ran sapphire blue in the sunlight. The day was hot, and there was barely enough breeze to stir the leaves of the trees which grew thickly on the farther bank. Somewhere a laverock was trilling in a cloudless sky, and about the battlements flitted two butterflies. It was a smiling scene, but John had come to it to inspect the repairs to the defences, and the thought uppermost in his head was that it would be a fine night for raiding. He was looking grim; but when he saw what had been brought to him his expression changed. He sat down in one of the embrasures, and as he read the letter a smile began to play round the corners of his mouth. From the scrawled pages Harry spoke to him: he could almost hear his voice, and feel his confidence. John knew that he had no intention of abandoning a seemingly hopeless task. He was grappling it, hammering the Council with his letters, sending for Richard Beauchamp to lend him aid. Of course Richard had responded: men would always respond to Harry’s call, always gain heart from his strength, always follow where he led. His magic even reached out to a young brother at his wits’ end, and made the world seem suddenly not so bleak.