Georgette Heyer (31 page)

King Henry had sent him word that he would march north immediately, and so indeed he did, taking the road to Boroughbridge. The next tidings John received came from Ripon, and were brought to him by a scared groom of the chamber, who seemed to think that some danger lurked behind his shoulder. He shivered a good deal, and kept on looking round, and signing himself when he thought John was not watching him. No, he said, the King’s grace had not reached Boroughbridge. They had encountered wild weather: a buffeting wind, and rain driven in their faces till they were blinded by it: a ferly thing to happen at this season!

‘William Thorpe, a sudden storm is not a ferly thing, even at midsummer,’ John said. ‘If you are trying to tell me that the King caught cold upon his ride, do so, and leave signing yourself !’

The man coloured, and looked away, but said in an uncertain tone: ‘It was not that, my lord. They say – they say the King is sick of the Great Malady!’

‘The Great Malady! Liar, and son of a liar!’

‘My lord, my lord!’ Thorpe stammered, cringing from the very real menace that loomed suddenly before him. ‘The white-leprey – the serpent-leprey – they say!’

‘Who says?’

Thorpe winced, as though the words had been hammer-blows, and shook his head, quaking.

‘Scullions’ talk!’ John said. ‘Get up off your knees and tell me the whole!’

‘Someone struck the King!’ Thorpe said, his tongue stumbling. ‘Riding across the moor, in the rain – a great blow, he said!’

‘Someone struck the King?’ John repeated frowning down into the pallid face. ‘Who dared do such a thing? Do you mean that he was wounded?’

‘Nay, lord, nay! How might that be? There was only Sir Peter Buckton riding beside him. But the King cried out that someone had dealt him a buffet!’

‘For Christ’s sweet Tree, will you stop shaking and maffling like the nithing you are?’ John said wrathfully. ‘A squall of wind, and the King thought he had been buffeted! Yea, I too have ridden the moors in stormy weather! What then? Did the King fall into an accesse – like you?’

‘No, lord,’ Thorpe muttered. ‘But the storm not abating we drew rein at Green Hammerton, and there rested for the night.’ He paused, but upon being told sharply to continue, said in a voice which he tried to make matter-of-fact: ‘At nightertale, at two of the bell, the King awoke, crying that he was being consumed by fire.’

‘A wan-dream!’ John said, himself rather pale.

Thorpe passed his tongue between his lips. ‘So we thought, my lord, but could not soothe him. My lord, my lord, the King writhed in great anguish, crying all the time, “I burn, I burn!” Wilkin, who slept that night at his door, fetched Master Grisby to him, and he gave him to drink of some dwale, and presently he slept again. In the morning it was seen that he was sore-stricken, but he would mount him, and press on. We led him to Ripon, lord, and there he lies, sick unto death!’ He covered his face with his hands, and broke into weeping, squatting on his haunches, and rocking himself to and fro, uttering disjointedly: ‘Botches and whelks! On his cheeks! Such grisly sores as – Ah, Jesu, mercy! My most dear master! They are saying – they are saying the Archbishop’s bane has fallen upon him!’

There was a creeping horror in the room. John’s hand went to his breast, as though he too would have signed himself to avert the evil, but it clenched suddenly, and fell again to his side. It was a moment or two before he could trust his voice, but when at last he spoke it was calmly, even coldly. ‘Up!’ he commanded. ‘The King has suffered this ill once and twice before. When you reach Ripon again you will find him amended. Look on my face! Do you see a whelk or a push there? Answer!’

‘No, lord, no!’

‘You will see none on my lord of Westmoreland’s face either! If any should speak to you of the Archbishop’s bane, tell them that we, on whom his death lies heaviest, are clean of flesh and hale of body! Go now! Eat and rest! I will give you letters presently to take to the King’s grace. But I think I shall kiss his hand ere many days.’

3

He spoke the words boldly, but with doubt in his heart, yet they proved true words. For seven days the King lay at Ripon, while his physicians wrought and quarrelled over his suffering body, but it was seen that he was not so ill that he could not manage his affairs. Commands reached the Sheriff of Yorkshire to assemble his levies, and to await the King at Newcastle; and hardly had they been quartered in and about the town than a thousand Kentish archers were reported to be within a day’s march of the Tyne. These picked men, despising everything and everyone encountered north of Thames, grinned cheerfully upon the Lord John’s officers, grutched unstintingly at their rations, their quarters, and the officers who had brought them by forced marches the length of the country; and squared up like gamecocks at every northerner hardy enough to approach them. They were full of japes and bobance, quarrelsome, impudent, and wholly to be trusted. They had orders for Berwick, and the sooner they seized that town, wherever it might be, the sooner they would return to their civilised south country. They were quite unimpressed by the Archbishop’s bane. The only Archbishop they cared about was Arundel, and no one had headed him. As for the King’s sickness, who could wonder that he should fall ill in this meedless land of dennocks and drammocks? Anyone knew what all this nasty oatmeal would do to a man: without guess the King was sick of a ventosity, or even, perhaps, the flux. Let them give him wholesome food, and he would soon be amended!

Whatever had been the cause of the King’s illness, his recovery was rapid. By the 19th of June he was at Durham; and two days later he rode into Newcastle. He received a great welcome there, for one of his first acts as King had been to raise the town to the level of London, and York, and Bristol, and his citizens had not swerved in their loyalty to him. He looked worn, and there were a few lingering scabs to be seen on his face, but he seemed to be in good spirits, and full of his old energy.

He told John that his physicians believed that the eruptions which had broken out over his body were due to a thickening of the blood. He was being careful not to eat any of the things which were known to thicken the blood, particularly cabbage, a melancholy vegetable. Of his terrible dream he spoke not at all, nor did John question him. It was thrust aside, with that strange visitation. ‘I have no time to cosset myself,’ the King said.

He thought that the Welsh danger was averted, but not ended. They would not move in force against him until their French allies came to join them, but he believed that the French fleet must set sail before the summer waned. A rapid campaign in the North was all that he could allow himself before returning to the West. ‘The chief holds I will reduce, and the rest I must leave to you, John,’ he said.

‘With what troops, and with what provisions, sir?’

‘I will do what I may. If it is not much you must contrive! Percy’s lands, and Bardolph’s too, I have confiscated, and I shall bestow the grants on you, for your maintenance. It is of no avail to ask me for money! This garboil has plunged me deep in debt already, and there is still the Welsh campaign to be paid for.’

‘And the Scots?’ asked John. ‘Are they to be permitted to make Berwick their own, and to lay waste all the country within its reach?’

‘No, no, why ask such a witless question?’ the King said testily. ‘They must be driven out, and taught a lesson they will remember! Harry shall attend to that: it is the sort of work he likes. He does it very well. Of course, he has had experience of such warfare.’

4

It was not until July that Harry reached Northumberland, and by that time John was engaged on the first of the tasks at which, all his life, he was to excel: the pacification and the government of a troubled land. Perceiving in his third son this talent for administration, King Henry had bestowed wide powers on him, leaving it to him to seize recalcitrant peles, punish transgressors, pardon penitents, appoint new officers, and negotiate truces. John would have preferred to have gone with the royal army to besiege Berwick, but he knew that he was of more worth to his father in another capacity than that of a soldier in the field. Someone must bring order to this disturbed country, and no one was so fit to do this as himself. He accepted the commission without demur, installed himself at Prudhoe, and from that base swept up the southern and western parts of Northumberland. He demanded Gilbert Umfraville for his lieutenant, picked up a steward for his household in one place, a marshal in another; stuffed the castle with clerks and secretaries to deal with the mass of documents which began to accumulate, and grappled with labour that might well have appalled him. North-eastward, Warkworth, which had capitulated after the seventh shot from King Henry’s great gun, was under his general jurisdiction, but had been given into the particular care of Sir Robert Umfraville, who had installed as his lieutenant one of his most devoted servants. The choice was a happy one. John Hardyng was not only a witty, lettered man: he had been bred up in Hotspur’s household, and was wise in the Percy way of government. He could be counted on to tread on no man’s corns unwarely. He had already discovered much treasonable matter hidden away in the castle, and had sent it off to the King, encamped before Berwick. He told John that there was enough in the bundle to send Northumberland to the long-going, but it seemed as unlikely as ever that Northumberland would so end his days. At the King’s approach, he and Bardolph had fled into Scotland. He left to the King’s mercy, besides his lieges, a host of remote kinsmen, and a grandson, the sole offspring of his dead son Thomas. This hapless young man was under orders to hold Alnwick against the King, but whether he would make the attempt was as yet unknown, and might depend, John thought, on the conduct of Sir William Clifford, under similar orders in Berwick Castle. It seemed unlikely that Clifford would make more than a token resistance, for the Scots, before following Northumberland across the Border, had fired the town, and the feeling of the citizens would not give the Captain of the castle encouragement to uphold Percy’s cause.

Meanwhile, at Prudhoe, John was making steady, unspectacular progress in the work which Gilbert, hankering after deeds of glory, thought importably tedious. He was winning worship too, for it was soon seen that although he was determined to bring a rugged people under rule his disposition was not vengeable. Those who sued for pardon received it; and the penalties he imposed were seldom heavy ones. The hard apprenticeship he had served had given him strength and authority; there was no mistaking him for other than he was: a King’s son, and a ruler; but he had an endearing way of seeming to know who quite insignificant persons were, where they came from, and to whom they were related. Often he did know, for he never forgot a name or a face; and more than one country squire, meeting him for the first time, was surprised and gratified to hear his name repeated, and the Lord John say: ‘I should know that name! You wore my elder-father’s livery, I think.’

More and more persons, coming to swear renewed fealty, or to transact business, climbed the long paved passage from the outer gate to the main gatehouse of little Prudhoe, perched like an eagle’s eyrie on a steep promontory. Everyone told John that the castle was not large enough for his growing needs, but he liked it, and would not willingly leave it for the more modern and far more commodious castle of Warkworth. To the north it looked across the Tyne, sixty feet below the escarpment, to the arable lands on the farther bank; to the south and east it was separated from woodland by a deep ravine; and within its walls there was a turreted keep, one or two smaller towers, and an orchard. There was a tiny chapel, approached by an outer stair which gave access also to the rooms John appropriated to his own use. Father Matthew was much pleased with this. It had a small oriel window – quite the oldest in the country, he thought – projecting on corbels. He was for ever asking Gilbert questions about the castle, because, until it passed through marriage into Percy hands, it had been an important Umfraville hold. But all Gilbert knew about it was that in older and rougher times they used to incarcerate prisoners in its dungeon, because it was a stronger place than Harbottle.

‘And you are right welcome to it!’ he told John. ‘I would live at Warkworth, if I were you. Every time it rains here you have to void your horse at the outer gate for fear he should come down with you on those slippery stones in the passage! Besides, it’s too small, and old-fashioned: you couldn’t entertain persons of worship in it!’

But within a day of this pronouncement John was entertaining a person of great worship, who arrived unexpectedly, clattered up the paved and embattled slope to the main gatehouse at the head of a small escort, and threw the household into a flutter of excitement.

John was dictating a letter to one of his secretaries in the solar. He heard the sounds of an arrival, but paid no heed to it until the noise of some unusual bustle below in the bailey made him break off in the middle of a sentence, and say angrily: ‘A’God’s half, why all this garboil?’

‘The Fierce Fenwicks are upon us, no charge!’ Gilbert said, sprawling amongst the rushes with the dog Butcher, whom he was lazily teasing.

Then there was a springing step on the stair, and Gilbert turned his head to see on the threshold a young man in a stained leather jerkin, and dusty buskins. John gave a great shout, and strode forward. ‘Harry!’

‘I might have known you would choose an eyrie to live in!’ Harry said, gripping John’s shoulders, and kissing his cheek.

Butcher, unused to such a sight, lunged to his master’s rescue. Gilbert had scrambled to his feet, and caught him, but pandemonium at once broke out, for although the dog could be held he could not for several moments be cuffed and cursed into silence.