We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (5 page)

Kneeling beside him, I remembered more. I had thought it prudent to offer the damsel my arm, as she struggled through the trailing briars. Her hand on mine was like a small smooth flame. She stopped suddenly when we had gone a few steps and turned to look back.

‘Ah Jesu!’ she whispered. ‘How he shines!’

I fixed my sight upon the pale Duke, bringing him near in the lanternlight. A moth flew round his face and he lifted his hand to brush it away. The maiden smiled, in tears.

‘There is a light... a light,’ she sighed.

‘What then, mistress?’

She had looked up at me from the cavern of her hood. ‘A light about him not of this world,’ she said.

I could see naught but the fen-fires, burning malefically.

We were at supper when I had my first sight of Lord Hastings. We were still immured at Nottingham, our leaders sorrowfully depleted. I gnawed on a leg of spiced heron and wondered with anxiety how Lord Anthony Woodville was faring; whether that handsome and cultured nobleman had reached his Lynn estates still owning a head; likewise Sir John Fogge, and the Queen’s father, and her arrogant young brother. Yet we still had Louis de Bretaylle, and Sir Edward Brampton, so swarthy and black-browed, and torturing the English tongue with what sounded like ‘Heesoo Kristo’ for the Holy Name. Richard told me that he was the King’s godson, had forsaken Judaism for the True Faith, was a brave warrior and a seaman of renown. Brampton was also an astute trader and useful in the concourse with Flanders, having many kinfolk there—including a Mademoiselle Warbecque, who was said to have great beauty.

The King was eating heartily, tearing at choice meats with purpose, dabbling his fingers into scented water as if to wash off treachery, when the door of the hall crashed open, to shiver the silver goblets with its din, bring the dogs roaring out from beneath the trestles, and admit the Lord Chamberlain.

I summoned Lord Hastings’s face clear into the matrix of my sight: fair like the King’s but narrower; the mouth somewhat over-fleshed; the eyes crowned with a hard glitter. His gait along the hall bore the stiffness of fierce riding.

The King got up and the prone servers raised themselves from the floor to make way for Hastings. Looking at Richard, I saw the lightening of his countenance. Another trusted one here, I thought; another beloved; and I determined to eschew all criticism of this great lord.

The King and Hastings embraced briefly.

‘What news?’ Edward asked.

‘Good and ill,’ answered Hastings, and in that moment I, too, shivered under the chill of Nottingham Castle, which had bred sleeplack in Richard and in me.

Hastings announced that we were cut off from London by Robin of Redesdale—he had skirted Nottingham to the west.

‘Pembroke?’ asked the King, wiping his hands on a napkin.

‘He leads but a small force of Welsh pikemen, hastening north-east to aid your Grace.’

‘The Earl of Devon?’

‘Likewise, with his West Country archers, but Warwick himself rides hard to forestall them both,’ said Hastings.

‘Eat, my lord,’ said Edward, thinking hard. The servers ringed Lord Hastings with laden salvers.

‘Your brother Clarence is married,’ said the Lord Chamberlain, biting into a roast. I caught a gasp from Richard, drowned by the angry thunder of Edward’s fist on the board.

‘He bribed your Grace’s own agent at the Papal court so as to wed Warwick’s Isabella,’ remarked Hastings coolly.

‘Mother of God!’ said the King. His angry eye fell upon Richard, and softened. ‘Jesu be thanked that I have one loyal brother remaining.’

‘We are all loyal, your Grace,’ said Hastings, downing a void of wine in one draught. ‘Yet I fear that the Queen’s kinfolk may be the butt of Lord Warwick’s wrath.’ He did not sound displeased at the thought, his tone being neither black nor white, but full of grey shadows.

Edward was controlling his anger. ‘We will tarry three days,’ he announced, and I thought, yet more waiting! I caught Richard’s face in my eye, knowing that he could not see me as well, being low down the hall as I was, yet noting the sadness and the impatience which chased across his brow.

On the third day we rose from the little death of impotence and took horse in the direction of Buckingham Shire. And Richard had eyes for two now; his brother, on whom he looked with loving care, and Hastings, upon whom he cast the glances of a trustful son.

‘Thank Christ there are those still loyal,’ he repeated again and yet again, and, God forgive me, I sighed a little within me at times, and dreamed of Toxophilus, my leman. But at Olney, it was I who first saw the distant cloud—a little greyish brown haze, swirling like smoke, growing into the shapes of sweat-slimed horses and weary men who gave tongue, as they rode, of fear and the sword, too close for safety. Blood on their hands, their harness, some wound-weak, they came upon us at a fair wallop, singing of danger. I recall a dying man who spoke of great peril; how he vomited blood while crying: ‘The hosts of Warwick and Clarence are at our heels! The Herberts slain—Lord Pembroke—Sir John Woodville—her Grace’s father... fly, O King!’ And with the bright red life bursting from him, rolled from his horse and into a ditch, still and suddenly dead. I recall how Edward turned to his dwindling army, bidding them act as the stiffening fellow under the hedge had advised; and how swiftly they spurred their horses’ sides—passing in a cloud of shouting dust—gone.

My sorrel shifted under me at the ambience of fear. I watched Richard, who sat his horse like a stone statue; Hastings too, grim and still. And coming nearer, a vast party of mounted men, their harness splattered with triumphant blood. It was the Church that came to take the King; the Archbishop of York, Earl Warwick’s brother. Edward rode up to greet him.

‘So you are come, my lord, from your Manor of the Moor,’ he said quietly. ‘I had hoped that the rumour did not run as I had heard, but it seems—by God’s Blessed Lady—that even Kings can be led astray.’ He looked around at us, the score or so of men who remained behind him. ‘Well, my lord,’ he continued, ‘will you at least spare these men, who ride under my standard of their own volition?’

The Archbishop smiled nastily. ‘Is it not your own prerogative, your Grace, to cry: “Kill the Lords! Disregard the commons!”? Pembroke died bravely,’ he added.

King Edward’s tone was like ice. ‘Where is your noble brother Northumberland, my lord?’ An unwilling flush ran up under the Archbishop’s stout steel helm.

‘Sir John is so blinded by folly he will not join us in this enterprise,’ he replied.

‘This treason,’ said the King, still marvellously sweet. ‘Or should it be considered a Holy War?’

The Archbishop swung his horse about and came up close to Edward. Foam gathered at his lips. ‘Yea, your Grace. A purge of this realm, levied upon upstart knaves who lead a King into the paths of wantonness.
Succubi
,’ he said, clutching at his dangling crucifix as if it were a Woodville throat—‘
succubi
that drain your Grace’s strength and treasure.’

Somewhere in the royal ranks sounded the hiss of a slow-drawn sword. Instantly a knot of the Archbishop’s armed men surrounded the King.

‘I am ready,’ said Edward pleasantly. ‘Whither do we ride? To Pontefract? A fitting manor for the murder of Kings, if memory of Lancastrian treachery serves.’

The Archbishop looked ill at ease. ‘I wear the cloth of Holy Church,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘We have no hand in such devilish work, any more, Sir King, than you have choice but to do my lord of Warwick’s bidding.’

Smiling still, Edward drove spurs inward and moved up. ‘I had hoped,’ he said, ‘that my kinsman was not so ill-disposed as it might seem. But I would meet with your Robin of Redesdale. Perchance I can best him at the pricks, for I too am a fair archer, my lord.’ To Hastings he said quietly: ‘Disperse your men.’ Richard’s horse reared up, fretted by its rider’s nerve-tense hand. The King looked at him, as if for the first time.

‘And my brother Gloucester?’ he asked the Archbishop, maid-meek. ‘I fear you will find him more difficult to seduce than fickle Clarence. Mayhap my lord of Warwick has forgot he is no longer a child—he is a fierce young man. Do you not fear him?’

The Archbishop Neville disregarded this irony. ‘Come, your Grace,’ he said firmly. ‘It was only your royal person that was desired.’ His captains formed up their spearmen in a solid line.

‘I am ready,’ said the King again, rosy mouth smiling. ‘I trust I shall be housed and fed better than poor Dickon of Bordeaux. For you have enjoyed in plenty my hospitality at one time.’ Then he was gone, close guarded, riding along the dusty June road, taller by a head than the rest; full as a ripe cherry with the juice of wit and courage. And we were left, with one accord turning to the Lord Chamberlain for succour, for the reshaping of our life’s pattern, now that the King was taken. And Richard of Gloucester spurred up close to his King’s best friend, and looked with trust into his face. Our worst fears realized, our first campaign brought to a startling climax, I sheered away from the forecast of a madman: ‘The foot that strikes the stone shall turn into a head—and the bones cast on a dunghill for ever;’ but in Richard’s late nameless fears I did believe, and for a short while I too thought on Nottingham as a care-ridden place. I feared for the King.

Edward Brampton spoke. ‘I guess zey vill take him north,’ he said.

The north. The unenvisaged north. A vast cache of secrets: wild, dangerous, adjoining the fearsome borderers’ domain. The north by day, lonesomely lit by plover-cries and the grave-song of wolf; peopled with cloaked assassins and sombre, holy men. God there in the north, but fiends also. A place for swift riding, back-looking. The north by night—Jesu preserve all who travel in that direction! The north a refuge also; to glean safety from its solitude, to bite through danger with the sword of determination. The north, hiding-hole for captives, for those whose presence is an embarrassment; for those in peril from their enemies. Just as a sanctuary can be a prison, so is a northern fortress likewise a place of safekeeping. The north. A stout chalice for the old royal blood.

And they took the King north, under cover of dark, although we did not learn of this until the moon had waxed fat and thinned, and again grown heavy with the child of night, during which time we remained together. We rode quietly, a small company cleaving to the hidden pathways, every so often one of us detaching himself from the rest and riding for a night or a day to return laden with whispers. The King was at Coventry, and had been stabbed in a quarrel with his brother Clarence. Nay, the King was at Warwick, sound and hearty. The King lay at Pomfret, in chains. I began to think that Hogan was not so mad after all, only armed with a foul and peculiar intelligence. Then one day we met on the road a merchant, fleeing from London with his wife and two young daughters, and servants with fear-green faces. Lord Hastings stepped out to meet them.

‘We ride to my kinsman at Sawley Abbey, my lord,’ gasped the merchant. He eyed our harness, the teeth of our lances and seemed minded to die of fright. His wife, contrarily, bestrode her great dappled horse like a soldier. Her curling red smile hid scorn.

‘Fool and husband, be at peace,’ she said sharply, and I wondered if my Margetta would turn out to be a scold, fine dowry or not. ‘These are King’s men. He is sick, my lord,’ she explained. ‘London is a city gone mad. Our premises among many have been despoiled. There is fighting in every ward.’

‘Yet the people love Warwick,’ I heard Robert Percy say.

‘Certes, sir,’ she answered, with a wit like crackling leaves. ‘That’s why they brawl so fiercely over the King’s capture.’ The two little maids peeped out from their litter. One was black-browed and swart as Brampton. The other owned a head like a golden angel—the kind men trade secrets for.

‘What is the talk in London?’ asked Sir Thomas Parr.

‘There is a Parliament of sorts,’ she said, to a withering shrug. ‘A pretty gathering, with none willing to bend the knee to any noble earl while his Grace’s fate is shaped by a scaffold. We love our King,’ she said, sad-proud, and the tiny maid, crooning to a baby-doll, leaned from the litter, Plantagenet fair.

Lord Hastings motioned the men aside. ‘God speed you, dame,’ he said. ‘May you find redress, once this mischief is at an end.’

‘Pray Jesu this is soon,’ she replied, and led the husband, head-hanging, forward and through our lines, halting for a brief instant before my lord of Gloucester, who sat his horse close by me.

‘Your Grace,’ she murmured, inclining her head. ‘Good lordship, give us back our King, soon. Oft-times he spoke of his sweet Richard,’ she said with the honey reserved for royal blood in the dark hours when all are equal.

‘Madame, our pledge,’ said Richard, spear-stiff. The bold lady then passed on; a queenly quean.

‘They will take him northward,’ said Lord Hastings, and Sir Edward Brampton sighed, a little, patient, alien sigh. Then Hastings said: ‘Or will they?’

Richard spoke slowly. ‘If London is divided, the Nevilles will not risk disaffection. My Lord Chamberlain, what say you-?’ Hastings sat silent, full lips sucked thoughtfully in.

‘Who knows my lord of Warwick best?’ asked Robert Percy. He looked at Richard, smiling, smiling. I too stared, and thought, if Gloucester waxes any whiter he will vanish from the sight of man; and my mind asked me: Jesu, has he ever known any happiness? I mused on my own careless life, and thought: it is hard to be the brother of a King.

Richard set his mailed hand upon the Lord Chamberlain’s arm.

‘Lead us, my lord,’ he said simply. ‘Lead us to my brother—or to death. We are ready.’

Upon the road behind there was the thundering of many horse.

‘God’s Passion!’ said Robert Percy with a laugh. ‘’Tis a Neville. Can you believe that the sight of such warms my heart!’

Northumberland drew up his horse so sharply that its hind legs slithered on the road, and the score of men behind him merged into a wheeling coil of bright armour, pennons, flying tails and plumes. Fire leaped from the steel-smitten ground.

‘Gather a force, my lord,’ said John of Northumberland without ceremony. ‘The King lies at Pomfret. In my brother’s keeping. None will strike a blow for Earl Warwick until the King’s person is revealed unharmed. My agents have laboured well. The time is now.’