The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III (18 page)

RICHARD

I cannot tell; the world is grown so bad

That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch

Since every Jack became a gentleman

There’s many a gentle person made a Jack.

Richard III Act I scene 3

London broke upon Raphael like some crazed demonic carnival out of a fog. Houses stood crammed together and teetering, with the signs of merchants and alehouses like a morass of banners jutting into the steamy air. The streets glistened like streambeds. Pointed roofs ran with sunlight. And the crowds along the streets; never in his life had Raphael seen such an array of folk, such wealth and exuberance. Their clothes were like jewels, blue and red and green, their headgear fashioned in ostentatious imitation of royalty; plump velvet cushions crowning the men, gossamer drapery flowing over the women’s hair. Gold glinted upon their hands as they waved. Their cheers deafened and thrilled him like the blare of battle horns.

They roared for King Edward, throwing white roses across his path all along streets that had been swept clean for his arrival. Raphael remembered how it felt to watch such a procession pass by. He saw the same open-mouthed wonder in the children who were shouting and leaping through the crowds. Now he was part of it. Richard of Gloucester led the victory march and Raphael rode proudly in his retinue, only a few horses behind the duke himself. Will Shaw rode in happy bemusement at his elbow: his esquire. Richard’s friends were around him and Raphael was counted one of them. It was the most precious feeling. The whole day was a swelling wave of joy. He wanted to capture the moment for eternity as a painting: the dark shine of Gloucester’s armour and hair, the proud gleam of his livery on him and on his followers, ruby and azure, and the white boar ramping on every surcoat.

Raphael, with others, had been knighted after Tewkesbury.

The streets grew broader, the houses greater, showing high walls to the street and shining roofs in the oriental style. The sun burned mists from the Isis to make the air soft and mysterious. Suddenly Raphael could smell the river; a green miasma of cold, fishy rot: rank yet evocative. It thrilled him like the scent of the ocean.

“Have you never been to London before?” asked Francis, Lord Lovell beside him. “Your head’s swivelling about like an owl’s.”

“Never,” said Raphael. He couldn’t stop smiling. Francis grinned back. He was Richard’s closest friend and he’d ridden at Raphael’s side all the way, taking him under his wing. Raphael trusted him without a qualm; an affable man with light gold-brown hair, a soft-skinned pleasant face, and hazel eyes that looked directly and honestly at everyone.

“Ah, then you’re in for fair times,” he said confidentially. “The sumptuousness of Edward’s court is like the lushest honeyed wine that could ever trickle over your tongue. Too much of it will make you sick.”

He laughed at Raphael’s expression. “I’m not one to gorge myself,” Raphael said, shaking his head.

“Some find it all too easy to slip into the habit, that’s the trouble. I only advise that you keep close to our good Duke of Gloucester’s side, and say nothing. Don’t be dragged into arguments. It’s safer that way.”

“I’ll do as you do.”

“And keep your thoughts to the one you can trust; that is, yourself.”

Raphael stared at him. “Stark advice.”

Francis raised an eyebrow, cynical but serious. “D’you have a loved one to send letters to? Mother, sister, paramour?”

Heat suffused his face. “There is someone… a friend. She’s in the Duchess of Clarence’s service.”

Lovell clapped his hand to his forehead. “Clarence! Agh.” He whispered, “Be careful anyway, but in that particular case be as close-lipped as a stone effigy upon a tomb. Never write a word that you wouldn’t be happy for every single person at court to read, and especially Duke George himself.”

“Are you saying that someone might open my letters?”

“Spies within the court?” His tone was low and amused. “Heaven forbid. What do you think? Everyone has a dagger out for everyone else; it’s part of the fun.”

A stone was forming in Raphael’s throat. He swallowed it away. “I don’t want to make enemies.”

“My dear, you already have them, by wearing the white boar upon your heart. So don’t bother trying to ingratiate yourself with anyone. Whatever you do, you’ll be painted as black as the rest of us.”

Raphael looked quizzically at Lord Lovell, who described a circle on the air with his finger, taking in Richard and his retinue. “Dickon doesn’t subscribe to the fawning, flattering manners at court. Some admire him for it, and some hate him. King Edward adores him, but that’s another reason for certain parties to resent him bitterly. You’ll see; but we have that to look forward to. Tonight we lodge at the Tower, dour old grandfather of a place.”

The Tower of London was a square, turreted mountain against the sky, grim and magnificent. The sheer walls were grey, mottled with a dark sheen of silver and scarred in places with cannon-shot. The scars were no more than flea-bites upon its tough hide. Its towers rose, shadowy, into the river mist.

Raising his head, Francis said, “Old Henry’s up there somewhere.”

Raphael looked up at the blind slits of windows. It was less a palace than a fortress. He hadn’t thought of the Lancastrian king for a long time, not even to wonder if he still lived. Weird and shocking, to realise that he was still alive, Edward’s prisoner.

“Poor wretch. What will become of him?”

“He’ll remain King Edward’s guest for the rest of his life. Harry should have been a monk, not a king; and how much happier for the rest of us if he had been. That was the cause of all our troubles; a child king with quarrelsome uncles. I wonder if monarchs shouldn’t be appointed with some degree of merit alongside the blood royal?”

“You’re close to speaking treason,” Raphael said with a grin.

“Well, we have both in Edward, and praise the Creator for it,” Lovell answered. “Henry, they say, is happier in his cell than ever he was on the throne, and doesn’t know much difference.” His tone was off-hand.

“I feel sorry for him,” said Raphael.

“So do we all, but don’t shed too many tears over him. Saint or holy idiot, he’s still dangerous. As long as he lives, there’ll be those who’ll use him as a figurehead for another bloody rebellion, a puppet to get Lancaster back in the ascendant.”

Francis Lovell went quiet suddenly, the warm light leaving his eyes.

“What is it?” Raphael asked. He was unsure yet whether Francis trusted him enough to give an answer, but after a moment he spoke.

“I’m just praying that Henry’s wretched twig of a son didn’t get poor Anne Neville with child before he died. Christ knows, she doesn’t deserve that.”

###

The great hall where they supped that night was more colourful than Raphael had expected, yet sombre; a great pillared space with the walls painted blue and decorations of subdued silver. The yellow flare of fire and candlelight washed a greenish cast over the blue, giving the hall the feel of a drowned sepulchre. Banners floated from the ceiling like waving seaweed.

The House of Lancaster was dead, finished. The triumphant Yorkists were loud with joy, reliving their battles with extravagant drama. To Raphael, though, it seemed as if the celebrations were muted under bubbling water. Lancaster was dead… except for the ghosts still haunting the tower rooms above them.

He was beginning to recognise Edward’s circle now. Anthony Woodville, the most celebrated of the queen’s brothers: handsome, smooth-mannered and exquisitely dressed. The Duke of Clarence, loud, flamboyant and sometimes desperate in his attempts to outshine Woodville. William Hastings: a broad dark man, solid and affable, who moved stiffly as if age or battle had got the better of him.

Later, all the lords – Edward and his brothers of Clarence and Gloucester, Anthony Woodville, and a number of others – left the feast and closeted themselves in a private meeting. Their knights and servants feasted riotously enough without them. Raphael wanted to join in but something held him back: a sense of oppression in the green, sinister light of the hall. Unused to anything stronger than ale, he tasted for the first time the peppery fire of hippocras, and got drunk so fast the whole evening rolled into unreality. There was a throb of voices, the endless sway and flutter of figures; faces lurching in and out of his vision, some smiling, some yelling in song. At one stage a woman was whirling him round and round in a dance; at another, Francis’s face loomed flushed and sweaty in front of him, asking him with laughter if he was celebrating hard enough.

He had no memory of going to bed, but there he was, on a pallet in a dark room, vaguely aware of other sleeping shapes around him. All was sooty gloom. Tapestries flapped above in him a ghostly draught, seeming to rise forever into the dark. He felt ice-cold sober with no trace of a hangover.

Something moved, making him jump.

Richard was bending over him, his face lit from beneath by the candle he carried, and as pale as its flame. His hair winged around him, black like the fathomless centre of his pupils.

“Get up,” he whispered, so faintly Raphael could hardly hear him. “An enterprise of the deepest dye, not for the faint-hearted…”

Raphael rose, and walked in silence beside his master, down stone staircases that folded round upon themselves. Outside, the bailey was cat-grey in a shimmer of starlight. The Tower stood solid all around them, its walls fading upwards into the night. He felt they were moving through water; he could hear nothing, not even their footsteps as they crossed to the Wakefield Tower. He worried that Richard was speaking and he couldn’t hear what was being said. But when he looked, Richard’s lips were tightly closed in a face of carved limestone.

Queen Marguerite had been brought here and imprisoned after Tewkesbury, though kept apart from her husband. The thought of her presence was terrifying. They said she wailed like a bain sidhe for the loss of her son Edouard. The whole Tower was a casket of skeletons, spiders and horrors that would spring out at the touch of a lock.

They went in through the door of the tower and there were other shapes waiting in the shadows; faces he recognised but tried not to see, lest they murder him to keep his silence. Anthony Woodville. Sir John Fogge. Other close followers of the king. Edward himself was absent.

Raphael could smell their soft-breathing excitement as they climbed the stairs, their fear; but Richard was black ice, as he’d been in Tewkesbury market place.

They found Henry VI, king no longer, sitting at a small table in the centre of his cell. He wore a plain blue robe, worn and faded almost to grey. The room smelled of damp, of crushed reeds and candle fat. His hair and face, caught in the circle of candlelight, were the colour of bleached straw. A book shone, bright with pigment between his hands, as if it had sucked all colour into itself, a casket of blue, red and gold. Henry was reading, his lips moving as he mouthed the text. The long curve of his skull and neck had a shapely nobility to them. He wasn’t the shambling wreck Raphael had envisioned, nor did he look old. He was a man who could be imagined on the throne, even with his colourless eyes, his trembling chin. High on the wall behind him was a plaster Christ Iesu on the cross, with the slaughtered Lamb across his feet to symbolise his sacrifice.

Raphael pressed himself back against a wall, a horrified observer. None of the others spoke to him; he might have been invisible.

Henry looked up, mild and friendly.

“Gentlemen, you are kind to visit me.” He looked about vaguely. “I would offer you wine, but… the servants are gone. I never know where they are. Is my wife come to see me?”

“No, your Grace, she is not,” said Anthony Woodville. Henry’s head dipped in plain relief.

“Must I be moved again?” His eyes, innocent and pleading, betrayed no understanding of where he was. Pain dragged at Raphael’s throat and he saw the others glancing at each other with hesitant, reluctant expressions. All but Richard, who looked straight ahead with a calm, almost gentle expression.

“No, your Grace, we are not here to move you,” said Woodville, his voice breaking.

Sir James Fogge broke across him, hoarse and rapid,

“Oh, for God’s sake do it!”

“Who are you?”

“Friends,” said Richard, “come to shrive you. You have nothing to fear. You will surely feel as great a rapture to stand before your Creator as will He to receive you.” And he drew a long Italian dagger of silver and gold, and held it up as if it were a cross.

The thin, limp mouth dropped. A flash of understanding passed through the vague eyes. Raphael tried to cry, “Don’t!” but no sound came from his throat.

“Yes,” whispered Henry. “I see, and I forgive you. May Almighty God do the same, when you stand before Him on the final day; but first, pray with me. Let us pray for our souls, before you dispatch mine to heaven; for you are more in need of it than I.”

He rose, his stool scraping on the floor. Perhaps prayer would have averted his fate. All the men looked sick and shaken now, and Richard was white. As the old king rose, Fogge gave an animal cry, and lunged at him.

He missed. Henry lurched forward in acute terror. Stumbling, he fell over the corner of the table. Fogge grabbed his hair as he went down, so that Henry finished up on his knees, head back, mouth gaping, thin chest rising and falling. Then Woodville grabbed his wrists and held them behind him, making him gasp. His chin wobbled as prayers spilled from his lips.