Revenge (25 page)

Henry’s soft little mouth dipped into a frown. “And now he is dead,” he said.

“Yes. But he died bravely. When he was brought out into Hereford market-place, to be shown the axe and block, he announced cheerfully that his head had preferred to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap. So he knelt, and took his leave from this world. A madwoman stuck his head on the top step of the market cross, and insisted on washing the blood away and combing his hair.”

“Poor Owen,” Henry said sadly. “He was always kind to me. He once stopped one of my tutors from beating me, and took the birch to the tutor instead. Still, he has gone to a better place, and can spend eternity with God and his eldest son.”

He picked up the poker, and prodded absent-mindedly at the fire. “So many have died in recent times. I have begged God to know why they are taken, when I am condemned to remain. I should very much like to be translated to Heaven and take my place among the choir of angels.”

Warwick’s fingers brushed the grip of his dagger. It was tempting. One swift strike would release Henry from the world, and his kingdom from the burden of his presence.

He cast the evil thought aside. Before leaving London for his last campaign, York had commissioned Warwick to guard the person of the King. Not murder him.

He rubbed his face. The interview was proving even more difficult than he thought. Warwick lacked the strength for it. Since hearing the news of Wakefield he had lost an alarming amount of weight, and was still not eating properly. The shades of his slaughtered kin haunted his dreams. In his waking hours he thought he could sense them dogging his footsteps.

“The deaths are no accident, Majesty,” he said, rallying, “but the result of the disasters that have engulfed the realm. The nobles of England, robbed of employment in France, have started to turn inward and slaughter each other.”

Warwick stared at the palms of his hands. “We have to fight,” he said, more to himself than Henry. “That is what we are raised to do, is it not? These hands of mine are redder than most. My father’s hands. My father.”

The shades of the dead were all around him. Warwick thought he could feel their icy presence and hear their whispering voices. He covered his face.

“My dear fellow,” Henry said gently, “you have my sympathy. It must have been dreadful for you, to lose so many of your family at once.”

Warwick was suddenly furious. “I don’t want your sympathy!” he roared. “We are enemies, you lackwit, mortal enemies! The Duke of York disinherited your own son, for God’s sake!”

“For which I thank him,” said Henry, unaffected by Warwick’s outburst. “He gave my son the best chance of happiness. I say that as one who has worn the crown for almost forty years, and detested every moment of it.”

Warwick scraped back his bench and stood up. He had heard enough. “Your wife is of a different opinion.” he said. “Even now she is marching on London with a great horde of Scottish and French mercenaries, Welshmen, and the scum of Northumberland and Lancashire. They are pillaging and destroying everything in their path. Grantham, Stamford, Peterborough, and Huntingdon have all been sacked, and God knows how many innocents murdered or turned out of their homes.”

Henry gave a low whistle. “My poor Madge,” he said, shaking his head. “She always did have a sharp temper.”

Warwick stared at him, wondering for the first time how much of Henry’s madness was an act. There was nothing to be gleaned from studying those placid blue eyes. Somewhere in there, Warwick suspected, Henry’s inner self was looking out and laughing at the world.

“I have dispatched the Duke of Norfolk to raise men in East Anglia,” he said, “and Lord Bonville and Viscount Bourchier to the south to do the same. Great numbers of armed men are already pouring into London to join my army. Word of the Queen’s coming, and the barbarians she brings with her, have stirred the people to act. In a few days I will leave the city and go north to face the enemy.”

He pointed at the King. “I am taking you with me, to stiffen the morale of our soldiers.”

Henry clapped his hands. “That is clear, decisive and worthy of such a great man as you, Richard. Shall we confess our sins before we depart?”

Warwick, caught off-balance again, gaped at him. “What?”

“I thought we could play-act, you and me,” Henry said happily. “Let us pretend for a moment that we are both ordinary men of humble estate. I shall play the role of a confessor, and you a penitent. Droll, is it not?”

“Majesty,” said Warwick, mastering his temper with difficulty, “have you listened to a word I just said? I am taking you north with me, to the final battle against your wife and son.”

It was no use. Henry was already on his knees on the bare flagstones, closing his eyes and making the sign of the cross as he mumbled prayers.

Warwick gave up and left the king to his devotions.

22.

Saint Albans, 17
th
February 1461

The early morning sun cast a pale and sickly light on a world of ghosts and creeping fears. Damp mists wafted across the road that led west out of Saint Albans and eventually to Dunstable. A fine rain was falling – the kind of steady, whispering English drizzle that can persist for days, adding to the miseries of the three thousand Yorkist soldiers garrisoned inside the town. They had arrived at Saint Albans the previous evening.

After receiving confused reports of the Lancastrian movements, Warwick had ordered his men to stand to arms all night in case of a sudden attack. Most of the people of the town had fled east into the woods, not caring to stay to witness a battle or their homes being plundered by the soldiers.

Sir Geoffrey Malvern stood sheltering under the eaves of a deserted butcher’s shop on George Street, trying to force a cold breakfast of bread and cheese down his throat. He was as dog-weary as any of his comrades, but terror kept him wide awake. Terror was the private malady that gnawed at his bowels whenever danger threatened. As yet no-one else knew he suffered from it.

Geoffrey’s easy charm, boyish good looks and generosity with money (mostly his uncle’s) had endeared him to the nobles in the Yorkist camp, and made him a popular figure among the common soldiers.

His cowardice at the Battle of Northampton, where he had hid under a gun-carriage until the fighting was over, had fortunately gone unnoticed. He had emerged in time to dirty his sword, smear his face and hands with blood, and stagger into Warwick’s pavilion looking like the last survivor of Thermopylae. A consummate play-actor, Geoffrey claimed to have slain no less than six Lancastrian knights in single combat. Such was his bluff, unassuming manner that Warwick and Lord Fauconberg had taken him at his word.

In the months since Northampton, Geoffrey had enjoyed the fruits of favour and popularity, shamelessly abusing both to enrich himself and seduce a number of high-born ladies into his bed. Not that they needed much seducing. Geoffrey was a darkly handsome, well-made youth, and possessed of considerable wit. His reputation for valour did the rest.

He had managed to avoid any more military service, and took care to lay low for several days in a Cheapside bordello when York was recruiting men for his ill-fated Wakefield campaign.

However, he had failed to avoid the most recent summons. Warwick had flooded London with propaganda, calling every able-bodied man in the city to arms to repel Queen Margaret and her rampaging horde of northern barbarians. Warwick’s propaganda, coupled with lurid stories filtering into the capital of the atrocities committed by Margaret’s troops, had proved hugely effective. Military fervour swept the city, and every able-bodied man was expected to join Warwick’s army. Geoffrey was even refused access to the bordello he liked to use as a hiding-place.

“Go and act like a man out of bed, as well as in!” the whores had yelled at him. They laughed at his curses and threats, so in the end he sloped off to do his loathsome duty.

“What was that?” hissed a man sitting on the steps of the shop below Geoffrey. Like most of the soldiers garrisoned inside the town, he was an archer. All were under the command of one of Warwick’s brothers, the newly-made Lord Montagu.

“What was what?” demanded Geoffrey. His nerves were fragile enough already without some jumpy peasant giving them a shake.

“I don’t know, lord, I thought I heard something, that’s all,” stammered the archer. “My apologies.”

Nevertheless, he got up and went to speak to a couple of his comrades further up the street. Geoffrey watched them balefully. The Lancastrians were out there somewhere in the fog and rain, but no-one in the Yorkist camp knew where precisely.

Warwick had decided to deploy his army, some twenty-five thousand men, along a two-mile front in a bid to cover all the main roads leading south. Lord Montagu’s command was split in two, with the archers in the town on the extreme left of the Yorkist position, and his knights and men-at-arms on Barnard’s Heath, north of Saint Albans.

Geoffrey should have been with the latter, but had crept off in the early hours of the morning, thinking that the town offered better sanctuary. Warwick himself, with the centre and reserve, was to the north of Barnard’s Heath at a place with the ominous name of No Man’s Land, while his right flank, positioned beyond the town of Sandridge, was held by the invalid Duke of Norfolk.

Geoffrey’s hope was that most of the fighting, if fighting there must be, would take place well to the north of Saint Albans. He knew the Yorkists had an outpost at Dunstable, two hundred men under the command of Edward Poynings. They provided a comforting buffer against any Lancastrian advance on the town from the west.

The archers were still talking agitatedly. One of them ran off to the far end of the street and vanished in the mist.

Geoffrey swallowed the last of his breakfast and brushed crumbs from his neat black moustache. “What is happening?” he shouted. “Why are you men looking so excited?”

“We can hear something, lord,” was the reply. “Stephen has gone to check with the sentries on the gate.”

“You’re a pack of old women,” Geoffrey said contemptuously. “The Lancastrians are miles away, getting lost in the dark.”

His bowels gave a twinge as he remembered that the gates at the end of George Street had not been closed. Montagu hadn’t deemed it necessary, since the Lancastrians were thought to be marching straight down the Great North Road. The notion that they might swing west to approach from Dunstable was considered far-fetched.

Shouts echoed through the murk, coupled with the sound of running feet. Geoffrey strained to listen.

There were a great number of feet, more than could possibly be owned by the few sentries posted at the gate.

Geoffrey felt the familiar swelling of terror inside his gut, like a sudden attack of wind. He turned to his destrier. She was tethered to the wooden rail beside the butcher’s shop, and his fingers shook as he struggled to untie the reins.

The archer, Stephen, came sprinting back down the road, followed by others. “Lancaster is coming!” he yelled. “They are advancing down the Dunstable road!”

Lancaster is coming.
The words should have sounded like a trumpet-blast in Geoffrey’s ears, rousing his spirit to action, and indeed they did. Gulping down a scream, he climbed aboard his horse.

“You men hold here,” he ordered, drawing his sword and brandishing it vaguely at the handful of archers in the street, “while I go and inform Lord Montagu.”

Now the sound of hundreds of men running in his direction had been joined by the clatter of harnesses and the hammering of drums. He took one terrified look to the west and saw death approaching in the form of a column of men-at-arms. They carried halberds and wore badges displaying three white stags against a green field. They were led by a short, broad-shouldered bull of a man in full knightly gear, carrying a battle-axe and wearing the same badge on his tunic.

Sir Andrew Trollope. Geoffrey would no more willingly engage him in combat than the Devil. He turned his horse about and galloped down the street towards the marketplace. The archers also fled, disregarding his orders to hold their ground.

Most of the Yorkist garrison was stationed in the marketplace, where Lord Montagu had requisitioned a tavern for his headquarters. The soldiers parted to allow Geoffrey through as he galloped across the green.

Montagu was standing outside, in full harness and surrounded by his officers.  “I’m told we have company,” he said as Geoffrey reined in. “Is it true?”

Montagu was a stocky young man, about thirty, with the same soft brown hair and eyes as his brother Warwick. He seemed a capable and assured sort, not easily flustered, and the opposite of Geoffrey in a crisis.

“It is, lord,” said Geoffrey, fighting to keep the panic out of his voice. “Andrew Trollope and his division are advancing down George Street – Christ! They are here!”

Steel-clad bodies were charging into the marketplace with Trollope at their head, wielding his battle-axe. Montagu’s archers sprang to life, fired by the shouts of their captains and hatred of the Queen’s northerners. Some of them stood back and shot at the Lancastrians, while others snatched up mauls and hatchets and charged fearlessly into combat.

“There can be no retreat from here,” Montagu declared to his officers. “We must hold the town; otherwise Lancaster will roll up our flank.”

He turned back to Geoffrey. “My apologies, Geoffrey. I know you must be keen to get stuck into the fray. But I have other work for you.”

Geoffrey uttered a credible sigh and slapped his sword in feigned frustration. “What would you have me do, lord?”

“Ride to Barnard’s Heath, and look for Captain Lovelace. Tell him we are hard-pressed here, and need a few hundred of his Kentishmen to bolster our strength. We cannot hold for long, so be quick about it.”

Geoffrey saluted, masked his pathetic gratitude with a frown, and sped away north, cruelly slashing his destrier’s flanks in his eagerness to get away from danger. He heard Montagu shouting orders behind him, but cared little.

He galloped up the steadily narrowing street. Saint Peter’s church flashed past to his right, and then he was through the town gate with the road leading to Barnard’s Heath stretching down over the steep slope ahead. The land was still shrouded in rain and drifting banks of fog, and he couldn’t see much beyond a few feet either side of the road. He squinted to his left, imagining endless legions of Lancastrians streaming across the fields somewhere in that direction, but saw and heard nothing.

Montagu’s banners soon rose before him.  He stood up in his stirrups and hailed the first men-at-arms that came in sight. “Captain Lovelace!” he shouted. “I have a message for Captain Lovelace!”

He slowed his destrier and ignored the stares of the billmen and halberdiers drawn up in dense ranks on the heath. Captain Lovelace appeared, striding towards him from the rear of the Yorkist position.