The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III (40 page)

Katherine had summoned as many sisters as she could to the York Motherlodge. Any sister of Auset could do this when the need was great enough; but it was the first time Kate had exercised the right herself. The responsibility made her apprehensive. Suddenly she had power, and wasn’t sure what to do with it.

Entering the sanctum, she was startled to see how many sisters had come. There were women of every rank; wives of barons and of merchants, their serving women, a great many nuns, and ladies she’d never expected to see at the lodge. Remarkable, since she’d told no one the purpose of the gathering. Pleasure warmed her. As Mother Marl said, she thought, I have much to learn.

Eleanor was there, and greeted Kate warmly. Power thrummed in the air, even before they began their working.

“Since you called the circle, you are Mater Superior for the ritual,” said Eleanor, kissing her cheek. “What do you intend?”

“I’ll explain once the circle is cast.” Kate swallowed. Her mouth was dry.

Patiently she attended the women as they threw off their cloaks and shoes and unbound their hair. Here they were all equal. She greeted them all with a kiss and the blessing of Auset; then she anointed each one in turn with oil: their feet with a crescent moon, their foreheads with a solar disc.

The women formed a circle three deep, with Kate in the centre. She called down the blessing of the goddess, summoned the elementals of wind and fog, of water and earth, of fire and stone, to weave spheres of protection about the chamber. The women responded eagerly, chanting the summonses, their voices low and eerie like those of monks. The atmosphere bristled. Incense billowed around them. Kate lifted her face to the heavens, her hair flowing down her back, feeling her own voice vibrate through her body, strong and clear.

For the first time in her life, she felt like a true priestess.

When the circle was cast, Kate paused, and looked round at their intent faces. Plain, comely, young, old, rich or poor; all looked radiant.

“Our beloved King Richard, best appointed and approved by the sisterhood of Auset, is threatened by many enemies,” she said. “I’ve asked you here to summon the powers of the Serpent Mother, to aid Richard and confound his foes. By the love of Auset I adjure you to help me. You are bound to the temple and cannot turn back. Let us rouse the wrath of Auset from the depths!”

The women looked nervously at each other. What they were about to do was strictly forbidden in the outer world. Yet no one quailed. The air burned with excitement and they were wholly with her.

In the centre of the sanctum stood a large stone bowl of brine, containing the black eel sacred to Auset. Its long thick body circled the bowl. Kate looked down at its hideous upturned face, its gaping jaws filled with rows of razor teeth. Legend told that it had been drawn from the depths of the ocean, as wondrous as the horns of unicorns that sailors brought from far-off lands. It glared at her, and she felt a thrill of fear.

“I want you to envisage that which we desire. As you tread the circle to raise the power of Auset, keep the intent in your mind, as if it has already come to pass. Richard’s enemies confounded. The king safe. As we will, so must it be!”

Kate began the chant and the women joined in. They began a slow dance, bare feet slapping on the flagstones. The chill air grew clammy with their heat. The drumbeat of feet and voices sank them deep into trance. Kate saw energy coming from them like a scarlet mist, made from millions of tiny flames, each an elemental born of their inner fire.

In the bowl, the eel rose from the bottom and began to circle, faster and faster.

Kate lowered her voice and let them speak on without her. The chant was unstoppable, like low rhythmic thunder. She raised her hands, holding in the right an athame, a ritual knife with a twisted snake for a hilt. She pressed the blade to her left wrist and let her blood dribble into the water.

The serpent thrashed madly. The water boiled. Even through the droning chant, she heard soft gasps.

The first woman she called into the centre, beckoning her with a blood-streaked hand, was Eleanor. Kate let a little of her mother’s blood into the bowl, sent her back and called the next.

Faster and faster the water whirled in the bowl. The serpent opened its jaws wide to sift the blood from the brine. Kate focused all her attention upon the water until it became the world. The cauldron was the land, the spiralling vortex of water the sky, the eel the raging power of Auset. She gathered all the throbbing, frantic energy of her sisters into a single spear of intent with her hands and her whole being, and hurled the blazing spear of Auset’s rage into the heart of the Earth.

###

The signs began gently, ominously. A thread of icy wind lifted off the marshes of Kent, sighed down the flanks of the Welsh mountains, ruffled the grey waves of the Channel. Soldiers looked up and shivered. Clouds began to congest the sky, purple and storm-swollen. All turned black, and the wind rose.

Gales swept through towns and villages, tearing roofs to tatters, sweeping masses of leaves from the trees like a lethal hail of arrows. Rain dropped in a relentless, iron-heavy curtains. Roads turned to streams, meadows to quagmires. Streams branched and joined into single vast sheets of water. Rivers rose like the mounded backs of turtles, filled the fields, swept bridges away.

In the West Country, rebel soldiers closed their eyes against the savage wind, turned their backs and gave up. In Wales, Harry Buckingham urged his soaked and wretched troops onwards to cross the river Severn before it was too late. Henry Tudor’s fleet defied the storms in the Channel, only to be tossed back by the peaks and chasms of a raging sea. The sky drenched their tiny ships with its thundering displeasure. And since the Creator favoured their cause, it could only be the Devil who sent this deluge.

In castles, manors and cottages all across the kingdom, people sat close to their hearths, starting at each slamming door or moan of wind. Outside, in the storm, they could hear elementals rioting, demons flapping their leathery wings; all the denizens of the otherworld emerging to claim the night.

The cauldron of blood and water whirled. Boundaries dissolved. Hidden and outer worlds became one. Rising, the Dark Mother unleashed long-suppressed passion; the ice of her breath and the downpour of her tears. In the flickering storm, she danced.

As Buckingham’s hopes of crossing the Severn leeched away into the swelling mud-brown plain of water, so his troops melted back into the Welsh hills, disheartened and grumbling. Rain was all it took to dissolve their faint commitment to a lord they’d never loved.

The worst storm in living memory held the land hostage for days, sucked the rebellion into its brown floods and swept it away.

###

Harry Buckingham looked out through a small window at the Forest of Dean. Massed trees were all he could see. Great trunks like pillars, branches still thick with leaves in defiance of autumn gales. Russet and bronze were the trees, still green in places. Leaves lay in wet layers on the grass. He could taste the season in the air; woodsmoke and decay.

His greatest pride, his buttery hair, hung in waxy strings. He was alone; deserted, frightened, hiding in this cottage like a toad beneath a stone. His protector was one of his own tenants. He’d never seen eye to eye with the man but was forced to trust him. He chewed at his lip, bitter with humiliation.

It had seemed a bold and faultless scheme, the purging of all his frustration. Bishop Morton, when Buckingham had finally broken down and confessed his confused feelings towards Richard, could not have been kinder. Harry remembered his shining, smiling face, the gentle shake of his head, the plump hands lifting him up. Absolution; that was what Morton had given him. Then hours of kindly concern, showing him the way to salvation. And – for Harry now hated Richard as violently as he had once loved him – a means to exorcise the demon.

Morton’s conviction that Richard was of the Devil’s party, while his protege Henry Tudor was divinely marked for kingship, was a firm, practical blend of religious conviction and worldly ambition. Harry appreciated his view, but didn’t share it. His main concern was to punish Richard. To do so without losing everything; that was the trick. To take the risk and gain everything.

What a fool he’d been, ever to think it was possible.

He should have realised that no one would support his own claim to the throne; but those silver-tongued ambassadors, Morton and Margaret Beaufort and the skull-faced whispering Fautherer, had promised him the world if he threw himself in with Richmond’s divine cause. How easily they had seduced him.

Buckingham had always been a Lancastrian at heart. He was only returning to his true self, he told himself, to the Lancastrians’ austere piety and fire, to the cause of a king who would be Henry the Fifth reincarnate: not Tudor, but himself. Anyone could make a mistake, and fall. He’d made an appalling mistake in supporting Richard, but he would atone for it by unseating the usurper. Yes, God would raise him up again and forgive him. Rebellion was the right choice, God’s will, so he had felt.

Until the storm from hell struck.

Buckingham sat staring into the forest. His mouth was dust and his right knee bounced under his elbow with a violent tremor. All those he’d planned to fight for – Richmond, Morton, even the Woodvilles – were gone from his mind like phantoms. All he could think about was Richard.

Such was the great, turning wheel of fortune. One moment, hand-in-glove with a king. The next, a fugitive among peasants.

Buckingham pushed his hands through his unwashed hair.

“Creator, why was I such a fool!” he said aloud.

A shadow, seen from the corner of his eye, made him start. Richard was in the corner of the room, magnificent in black, like an executioner. He looked tranquil with his hands folded and his dark hair falling about him, an angel of judgement.

The perfect lips moved. “Why, Harry?”

Buckingham fell to his knees. “Richard, please. Forgive me. I meant none of it. It was all a misunderstanding. Please. I love you.”

“Too late.”

“No.” He looked up. There was no one there. He was pleading with shadows and cobwebs.

Rushing to the window again, he saw movement between the trees. Soldiers in silver, red and blue. King Richard’s livery. He leapt up in panic but there was no escape; they were all around the cottage.

For the delicious reward of one thousand pounds, his tenant had betrayed him.

###

Salisbury. A plain under a grey and black sky, a circle of tall solid stones that had stood since times unknown. Here they brought Buckingham to be executed.

He’d caught a single glimpse of Richard before they cast him into his prison. From a distance, Harry saw him entering the town with a grim but victorious retinue. The king was aloof upon a pure white horse; unreachable.

“I must see him.” Buckingham was imperious with his gaolers, confident at first. When they only sneered, he grew angry. “The king will see me. We were friends. Ask him for the sake of the deep love we bore each other, that he graciously grant me an audience. Tell him – tell him it was all a misunderstanding, I am no traitor!”

They went away to ask. Buckingham sat in the straw, chewing at loose skin on his thumbnail until it bled. All day they had heaped foul news like ordure upon his head. His estates had been confiscated. Bishop Morton had vanished. His tenant had handed him over to the king for a disgustingly large reward. Tudor had fled back to Brittany. The rebellion was an utter failure.

All of this news was nothing against Buckingham’s terror of his own fate.

Richard would come. He would stand there dark and majestic, lift him up and forgive him. There would be angry words, but he would soften. Buckingham knew he had a gentler nature than most gave him credit for. They would embrace, reconcile… and if not…

Buckingham felt the shape of the hunting knife concealed in his sleeve. His mind was a blur. He didn’t know what he wanted, except that it must be extreme. Richard must love him: if not, he must die.

A key rattled, and his door swung open. Buckingham shot to his feet. A man came in between the gaolers; not Richard but his coarse, unsmiling henchman, Ratcliffe.

“He won’t see you.”

Buckingham fell apart. He pleaded, yelled, abased himself. Ratcliffe was unmoved.

“Tomorrow you die as a traitor,” Ratcliffe said quietly. “Your fair golden head will fall into the dust, like that of any common rebel. The king has nothing to say to you.”

Buckingham’s legs gave way. He fell into the straw, giggling, not caring that Ratcliffe stared down in disgust.

“I won, then. Read the bitter hurt in those words – that he refuses to see me. I cut him to the core.”

###

Katherine trod the long corridors of the palace of Westminster, walking very fast, head up, with all the dignity she could muster. She was in her finest gown of dark blue, black and silver, completed by a hennin of indigo tissue scattered with silver stars. The king had summoned her.

The gallery thronged with petitioners: lords and commoners who were there to plead their cases, seeking reward or pardon for their part in the rebellion. She eased her way between them, trying to ignore their stares. There were murmurs as Raphael appeared to escort her to the throne room. He looked wondrous in brand new court livery. They exchanged a tentative smile.