The Lady of the Rivers (68 page)

We take the great north road to York, certain that the queen’s army will be marching down to London, and we will meet them on the way. At every stop during the cold days, at every night in inns or abbeys, or the great houses, people are talking about the queen’s army as if it were an invading force of foreigners, as if it were a source of terror. They say that she has soldiers from Scotland and that they march barefoot over stones, their chests naked even in the worst of weather. They are afraid of nothing and they eat their meat raw, they will run down the cattle in the fields and gouge flesh from their flanks with their bare hands. She has no money to pay them and she has promised them that they can have anything they can carry if they will take her to London and rip out the heart of the Earl of Warwick.

They say that she has given the country to the King of France in return for his support. He will sail his fleet up the Thames and lay waste to London, he will claim every port on the south coast. She has already signed over Calais to him, she has sold Berwick and Carlisle to the Scots queen. Newcastle will be the new line of the frontier, the north is lost to us forever and Cecily Neville, the Yorkchingow, will be a Scots peasant.

There is no point trying to argue with this mixture of terror and truth. The queen, a woman in armour, leading her own army, with a son conceived by a sleeping husband, a woman who uses alchemy and possibly the dark arts, a French princess in alliance with our enemies, has become an object of utter horror to the people of her country. With the Scots behind her, she has become a winter queen, one who comes out of the darkness of the north like a wolf.

We stop for two nights at Groby Hall to see Elizabeth and meet with her husband, Sir John Grey, who has mustered his men and will march north with us. Elizabeth is strained and unhappy.

‘I can’t bear waiting for news,’ she says. ‘Send to me as soon as you can. I can’t bear the waiting. I wish you didn’t have to go out again.’

‘I wish it too,’ I say softly to her. ‘I’ve never ridden out with such a heavy heart. I am tired of war.’

‘Can’t you refuse to go?’

I shake my head. ‘She is my queen, and she is my friend. If I did not go for duty I would go for love of her. But what about you, Elizabeth? Do you want to go and stay with the children at Grafton while we are away?’

She makes a little grimace. ‘My place is here,’ she says. ‘And Lady Grey would not like me to be away. I am just so fearful for John.’

I put my hand on her restless fingers. ‘You have to be calm. I know it is difficult, but you have to be calm and hope for the best. Your father has been out to battle a dozen times and each time it is as bad as the first – but each time he has come home to me.’

She catches my hand. ‘What do you see?’ she asks me very quietly. ‘What do you see for John? It is him I fear for, much more even than Anthony or Father.’

I shake my head. ‘I can’t foretell,’ I say. ‘I feel as if I am waiting for a sign, as if we all are. Who would have thought that we brought Margaret of Anjou, that pretty girl, to England for this?’

ON THE MARCH, SPRING 1461

We ride as a small troop, my son-in-law John, Richard, Anthony and me at the head of our tenants and household men. We can go no faster than their marching pace and the road is flooded in some parts and as we get further and further north it starts to snow. I think of the signs that my lord John Duke of Bedford asked me to see; I remember a vision of a battle in snow, that ended in blood, and I wonder if we are riding towards it.

Finally, on the third day, the scout that Richard has sent ahead comes cantering back and says that all the country people have bolted their doors and shutters because they believe that the queen’s army is a day’s march away. Richard calls a halt and we go to a manor farm to ask for a bed for the night and a barn where our men can sleep. The place is deserted, they have locked the door and abandoned the house. They would rather take to the hills than welcome the true Queen of England. We break in, and forage for food, light the fire, and order the men to stay in the barn and the yard and to steal nothing. But everything valuable has been taken away and hidden already. Whoever lived here feared the queen as a thief in the night. They left nothing for the queen and her army, they would certainly never fight for her. She has become an enemy to her own people.

At dawn the next day, we understand why. There is a great hammering on the front door and as I get out of bed there is a wild face glowering at the window, and in a moment the little pane of glass is smashed and a man is in the room, another coming through the window behind him, a knife in his teeth. I scream ‘Richard!’ and snatch up my knife and face them. ‘I am the Duchess of Bedford, friend to the queen,’ I shout.

The man says something in reply, I cannot understand a word of it. ‘I am of the House of Lancaster!’ I say again. I try in French: ‘
Je suis la duchesse de Bedford
.’

‘Get ready to stand aside,’ Richard says quietly behind me. ‘Jump to your right when I say . . . Now.’

I fling myself to the right as he lunges forwards and the man folds over Richard’s sword with a terrible gurgle. Blood gushes from his mouth, he staggers, hands out towards me, as he falls to the floor, groaning terribly. Richard puts his booted foot on the man’s belly and pulls out his sword; there is a flood of scarlet blood and the man screams in pain. His comrade disappears out through the window as Richard bends down with his dagger and quickly cuts the man’s throat as he would slaughter a pig.

There is a silence.

‘Are you all right?’ Richard asks, wiping his sword and dagger on the curtains of the bed.

I feel the vomit rising in my throat. I gag, and I put my hand over my mouth and run to the door.

‘Do it there,’ Richard says, pointing to the fireplace. ‘I don’t know if the house is safe.’

I retch into the fireplace, the smell of my vomit mingling with the smell of hot blood, and Richard pats my back. ‘I’ve got to see what’s happening outside. Lock yourself in here, and bolt the shutters. I’ll send a man to guard the door.’

He is gone before I can protest. I go to the window to swing the shutter closed. Outside in the winter darkness I can see a couple of torches around the barn but I cannot tell if they are our men or the Scots. I bolt the shutters. The room is pitch black now but I can smell the dead man’s blood oozing slowly from his wounds, and I feel for the bed and step around him. I am so afraid that he will reach out from hell and grasp my ankle that I can hardly get to the door and then I bolt it as Richard ordered, and, horribly, the fresh corpse and I are locked in together.

There is shouting outside and the sudden terrifying blast of a trumpet, and then I hear Richard outside the door. ‘You can come out now, the queen is arriving, and they have the men back in ranks. Those were her scouts, apparently. They were on our side.’

My hands are shaking as I unbolt the door and throw it open. Richard has a torch and in its flickering light his face is grim. ‘Get your cape and your gloves,’ he says. ‘We’re falling in.’

I have to go back into the room past the dead man to get my cape, which was spread over the bed for warmth. I don’t look at him, and we leave him there, unshriven, dead in his own blood with his throat cut.

‘Jacquetta!’ she says.

‘Margaret.’ We hold each other, arms wrapped around each other, cheeks warm one to the other. I feel the energy of her joy and optimism coursing through her slight body. I smell the perfume in her hair and her fur collar tickles my chin.

‘I have had such adventures! You will never believe the journeys I have made. Are you safe?’

I can feel myself still trembling with shock from the violence in the bedroom. ‘Richard had to kill one of your men,’ I say. ‘He came in my bedroom window.’

She shakes her head disapprovingly, as at a minor foible. ‘Oh! They are hopeless! Good for nothing but killing people. But you must see our prince,’ she says. ‘He is a young man born to be king. He has been so brave. We had to ride to Wales and then take ship to Scotland. We were robbed and wrecked! You’ll never believe it.’

‘Margaret, the people are terrified of your army.’

‘Yes, I know. They are tremendous. You will see, we have such plans!’

She is radiant, she is a woman in her power, free at last to take her power. ‘I have the lords of Somerset, Exeter and Northumberland,’ she says. ‘The north of England is ours. We will march south and when Warwick comes out to defend London we will crush him.’

‘He will be able to raise London against you,’ I warn her. ‘And the country is terrified of your army, not welcoming at all.’

She laughs aloud. ‘I have raised the Scots and the north against him,’ she says. ‘They will be too afraid even to lift a weapon. I am coming like a wolf into England, Jacquetta, with an army of wolves. I am at the very height of the wheel of fortune, this is an unbeatable army because nobody will dare to take the field against them. People run from us before we even arrive, I have become a bad queen to my people, a scourge in the land, and they will be sorry that they ever raised a sword or a pitchfork against me.’

We ride south with the queen’s army, the royal party at the head of the marching men, the pillaging, looting and terror going on behind us in a broad swathe that we know about, but ignore. Some of the men ride off from the main column to forage for food, breaking into barns, raiding shops and isolated little farms, demanding a levy from villages; but others are madmen, men from the north like Vikings going berserk, killing for the sake of it, stealing from churches, raping women. We bring terror to England, we are like a plague on our own people. Richard and some of the lords are deeply shamed and do what they can to impose some order on the army, controlling their own levies, demanding that the Scots fall in and march. But some of the other lords, the queen herself, and even her little boy, seem to revel in punishing the country that rejected them. Margaret is like a woman released from the bonds of honour, she is free to be anything she likes for the first time in her life, she is free of her husband, she is free of the constraints of the court, she is free of the careful manners of a French princess, she is free, at last, to be wicked.

On the second day of our march, the four of us riding at the head of the army see a lone horseman, standing by the roadsideof iting for us to come up. Richard nods to Anthony and John. ‘Go and see who that is,’ he says. ‘Take care. I don’t want to find that he’s a scout and Warwick is the other side of the hill.’

My two boys canter slowly towards the man, holding the reins in their left hands, their right hands held down, outspread, to show they are holding no weapon. The man trots towards them, making the same gesture. They halt to speak briefly then all three turn and ride towards us.

The stranger is filthy from the mud of the road and his horse’s coat is matted with sweat. He is unarmed, he has a scabbard at his side but he has lost his sword.

‘A messenger,’ Anthony says with a nod to the queen who has pulled up her horse and is waiting. ‘Bad news, I am afraid, Your Grace.’

She waits, impassively, as a queen should wait for bad news.

‘Edward of March has come out of Wales like a sun in winter,’ the man says. ‘I was there. Jasper Tudor sent me to tell you to beware the sun in splendour.’

‘He never did,’ my husband interrupts. ‘Jasper Tudor never sent such a message in his life. Tell us what you were ordered to say, fool, and don’t embroider.’

Corrected, the man straightens in his saddle. ‘Tudor told me to say this: that his army is defeated and that he is in hiding. We met the York force and we lost. Sir William Herbert led the Yorks against us; Edward of March was at his side. They broke the Welsh line and rode right through us, Jasper sent me to you to warn you. He was on his way to join you when Edward blocked our path.’

The queen nods. ‘Will Jasper Tudor come on to join us?’

‘Half his army is dead. The Yorks are everywhere. I doubt he’ll get through. He might be dead now.’

She takes a breath but says nothing.