Love's Will (29 page)

If you enjoyed
Love’s Will
you might be interested in
Treason
by Meredith Whitford
,
also published by Endeavour Press Ltd.

Extract from
Treason by Meredith Whitford

Prolog
ue

1505, the twenty-second day of August.

Edinburgh

Twenty years ago tonight I was riding for my life through England. Riding blind, most of the time, from the head wound I’d taken in the battle, and only Lovell’s hand on the bridle kept me going. Riding to tell York’s Duchess that the last of her sons was dead. The last true King of England.

I still keep the anniversary of his death. It is one of the few times I attend Mass, for I no longer believe, except when I pray for my dead. When we returned from the chapel tonight I fell into maudlin mood, drinking too much of what passes for wine here in Edinburgh. (To think I’ve ended my days in Scotland – twenty years ago I helped conquer the place.) My wife offered to sit up with me, but she was heavy-eyed with her own memories and I sent her up to bed. My children too offered to keep me company, but they have heard all my stories and they have no wish to live in the past. It was my daughter-in-law Mary who asked, why do I not write my story down? The others agreed with suspicious readiness; anything to save listening to another repetition, no doubt.

But I shall do it. I’m fifty-three, but with luck I’ve a few years left, and I need a pastime. Perhaps my writings will amuse my grandchildren, should they ever read them. I daresay I’ll prove no author, not like Thomas Malory with his glamorous tales of King Arthur, but it seems important to record my story. Perhaps my mark on history is small, but I am at least an honest man, which in the company of monarchs has the charm of rarity. All I can tell is my own story, and there is much I never knew – but I was there, I saw it all, the quarter-century that changed England and the world forever. And, after all, it’s not everyone who can say he grew up with two kings.

PART I

O
ne

1461

There being nothing duller than the tale of someone’s happy childhood, I shall start with the day that childhood ended. The day the Lancastrians came. January, 1461. I was eight.

I had been at the priest’s house in the village for my Latin lesson. Snow had fallen in the night, but the day was sparklingly clear and the air so crisp that despite the cold I dawdled on my way home. In the next year I would go to some nobleman’s household for my knight’s training, and I was wondering if the country would come to peace in time for me to go to the Duke of York – or, even better, his son Edward, Earl of March. Mother had written letters about the matter, but we could expect no answers until summer. So, with my mind a whirl of plans and the Latin subjunctive, I pottered home.

As I crested the hill I had a clear view of our manor. The courtyard was full of horsemen. My father was back! Whooping with delight, I ran the rest of the way.

But these were not our men. Too late I saw that they wore the Queen’s livery badge. There were a dozen or more of them, and they were loading their packhorses with our barrels of wine and salted meat. One was stuffing our precious silver plate into his baggage roll. I looked frantically around for my mother, and saw two men bundling her into the house. Her gown was torn right down the front and there was blood on her face.

She saw me and screamed to me to run. Perhaps I would have obeyed, perhaps I would have tried to fight the men, but as I started instinctively towards her I tripped over something. It was one of our dogs. Its throat had been cut. As I stumbled one of the men grabbed me and twisted my arms up behind my back, jerking me off the ground. I squealed with the pain of it, and my mother broke loose and brought her knee hard up between one man’s legs and hit the other in the face with her fists. It was useless, of course, she was a small woman, and there were too many of them. My mother went very still then. She said, ‘Let the boy go.’

‘Who is he? Your son?’

‘No. A servant’s child. He is no one. Let him go.’

The man holding me wrenched my arms until I thought my joints would rend apart. ‘Who are you, boy? What’s your name?’

Mother’s eyes fixed wide and hard on mine. ‘I’m the steward’s son,’ I said, and somehow I found the wit to use the local accent I picked up from the village boys. ‘I work for my lady.’

‘This is the Robsart manor. Robsart has a son. Where is he?’

It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention; well, terror makes a kindly stepmother. ‘Master Martin’s away at school. At King Henry’s new school near Windsor. Who are you? Where’s Sir Martin?’

‘Dead and carrion, like his master York and the rest of the traitors.’

I heard the words, but they meant nothing. My mother gave one breathless sob, and the men holding her shoved her down onto the ground. She said quietly, ‘Not in front of the boy. Please,’ and, laughing, they hauled her up again and into the house. I heard her scream a few times, then there was no more sound.

I don’t know how long it was before another man came, a man on horseback, in better clothes than the others. Dismounting, he kicked idly at a lump in the snow. Blood trickled out, and I saw that the lump was our steward, Robert, his eyes open and with a great wound in his head. A sword lay by his hand – he had done his best for us.

‘Find anything?’ the newcomer asked.

‘Meat and wine, a few beasts. They’ve got the women inside. If you’re quick you can join the queue to have your sport with Robsart’s wife.’

With a flick of his eyebrow the newcomer went into the house. He came back in a moment, shaking his head. ‘I’ve no stomach for this work. Who’s this boy?’

‘The steward’s son.’

The new man looked me over, and I knew he recognised that my clothes were too fine for a servant. But he had more Christian feeling than his fellows, for he said, ‘Let him go.’ My captor protested, but this new man had authority. ‘Go,’ he told me. ‘Get out while you can,’ and he gave me a slap on the backside that sent me stumbling forward. He shouted again, and I ran for my life. As I reached the top of the hill I saw smoke rising from our house.

The village was deserted, silent, every door shut. Not a dog barked as I stumbled by. Obeying some age-old impulse I ran for the church. As I wrenched hopelessly at the latch the door opened a crack and a masculine arm snatched me inside. I screamed, then the smell of incense and unclean flesh told me it was Father Anselm who held me.

‘We saw the soldiers come – Martin, what’s happened?’

‘They’re the Queen’s men, they’re hurting my mother, the house is burning, please help, make them stop, go and help my mother!’

I got that much out, then the smith’s wife swept me up in her arms. Most of the villagers were there, huddled down by the altar. Vaguely I heard the gabble of voices and saw Father Anselm and the smith leave the church.

~~~

Memory erects its own defences, and I remember almost nothing of the next few days. Were I an artist I could draw every vein, every age-spot, every swollen joint of the priest’s hands clasped in his lap as he told me that my mother was dead and my home destroyed, but I can’t remember the words he used. Nor do I remember Mother’s funeral.

I suppose a full week had passed when Father Anselm sat me down in his parlour and asked what to do with me.

‘For you’ve no kin nearby, if I remember rightly?’

‘None, Father Anselm. My father had a brother but he died when I was little. Mother was an only child and her parents are dead.’

He stared worriedly at me, biting his lip. ‘Not so much as a cousin?’

The word broke through my apathy. ‘Yes!’ I cried. ‘Cousins! The Duchess of York is – was mother’s kinswoman; I used to live at Fotheringhay. The Duchess is in London, I’ll go to her!’

Of course I had no idea what I was asking. It was the dead of winter and we were at least four days’ ride from London. There was no one to escort me. The Queen’s army was on the rampage, looting and burning its way south through England; that much news had made its way to us. The country was virtually at war. However, when it was put to an impromptu village parliament the smith said that a man what’d brought a horse for shoeing had said as how the Earl of March, young Edward of York, had his army not far away, two days’ ride at most; why shouldn’t Master Martin go there? Father Anselm could go with him, not even the Lancastrians would harm a priest. The little lad’s dad was one of the Duke of York’s men, it was right he should go to my lord.

So it was decided. That night, as I snuggled into my makeshift bed in the priest’s house, some of my shock began to lift. Grief for my parents still gripped me, but there was hope now, and the prospect of comfort. The Duchess of York awed me less than she did the rest of the world because I’d grown up in her household. I had the right to call her cousin, for she and my mother were connected through two marriages. Mother had been lady governess to the Yorks’ daughters Elizabeth and Margaret; that was how she met my father, accompanying the Duchess and her children when the Queen exiled the Duke to Ireland back in ’49. So yes, there was comfort in the thought of the Duchess – and in the thought of seeing Richard again. He was the Yorks’ youngest son, and my own age to within three months; his mother had helped deliver me, and mine had helped deliver him. I remembered him well, because it was not two years since my grandparents’ death had meant my mother had to leave Fotheringhay to manage our family manor. I liked Margaret and George, Richard’s next oldest brother, but Richard and I had grown up like twins. He had written to me once after we left Fotheringhay, carefully penning a postscriptum to his mother’s letter. Since then he had gone to Ludlow, the Duke’s castle over in the west, and met his elder brothers Edmund and Edward. He too had suffered from the Lancastrian outrages, for the Duke had been betrayed, men had gone over to Queen Margaret, and the Duke had had to disperse his army and flee for Ireland. My father had gone with him. The Duchess and her children had been taken prisoner. They’d only recently been safely released; my father had brought that news when he and the Duke returned from Ireland three months ago.

Remembering my father like that made me cry, and I pulled the meagre blankets over my head so as not to awaken Father Anselm. A soldier’s son sees his father rarely, but I had loved him. He’d been as handsome as my mother was pretty, and his visits had meant fun, merrymaking, with Mother in her best clothes and happy. When he came back from Ireland Father had ridden in unannounced, a troop of men-at-arms at his back – for he was on his way to Yorkshire with the Duke – and when I forgot my manners and ran to hug him he swept me up in his arms and held me for a long time. That night, the only night he could stop with us, he told us of the flight from Ludlow, the urgent conferences as they decided that Edward and his uncle and cousin should go to Calais while the Duke and Edmund made for Ireland. To me it had been an adventure more exciting than any legend, and I’d been disappointed when the talk became serious and my father spoke of the Duke claiming the throne. Evidently that was a shocking matter, for my mother made a dubious mouth and spoke of the Duke’s loyalty to King Henry. Father had said, Yes, but... and went on to speak of the King’s unfitness to rule while his wife led the country to ruin.  ‘... after all,’ he had said, ‘York has the right by descent.’ It was dull stuff to me, and I fell asleep on my father’s lap while they were arguing.

Remembering that little domestic scene made me sharply aware, as if for the first time, that the world I’d known had ended. My parents were dead. My home was destroyed. All because Queen Margaret was a vindictive, foolish woman who’d made an enemy of the Duke of York. Quite how or why she had done so was beyond me. It was simply knowledge I had absorbed with my wet-nurse’s milk. Queen Margaret had come here from France sixteen years ago to marry our king and, ignorant of England, had made friends with the wrong people. The Duke of York was the king’s cousin and the mainstay of the crown, yet the Queen had feared and hated him from the outset. He had been a kind man, and now he was dead. And, with him gone, Queen Margaret was laying her adopted country waste.

But Edward would stop her. He had already won a battle against her army, back in July, at Northampton. He was eighteen, and although I had never seen him I knew he was tall, and clever, and a brilliant soldier, a hero like – like – I groped sleepily for the tales my mother used to tell me – like Alexander, or Sir Galahad, or... In a confused blur of armoured figures I fell asleep.

~~~

Well, on the next day a horse was found – perhaps better not ask where from – the villagers lent a few coins, and we set out the following morning. Down the road I asked Father Anselm to stop at our manor. He said we should not, that it would distress me, but I insisted.

There is nothing so sad as a burnt-out house. It had been a snug manor, not large or particularly grand, but handsome enough. It had been built some hundred years before, laid out on the usual plan: hall and stillroom, a solar, kitchen and buttery behind, and four rooms above. My mother had put glass in the front windows, made a knot-garden, added the luxury of a stool-room. All gone, now. The main walls still stood, and the chimneystack and the central beam of seasoned oak, but the roof and staircase had burnt away; only a shell was left. The outbuildings and stables had been of wattle and daub, and must have burnt like tinder. Of course our horses had gone, and the house cow, and Mother’s hens and the pigs.

Passing through what had been the front door, I shuffled through the ashes to the chimneypiece. There I moved a certain brick, and saw with a surge of triumph that the Lancastrians hadn’t found this hiding place. The little coffer was intact. Inside were a bundle of letters, my father’s emerald ring, my mother’s jewels and a purse holding five gold nobles and a handful of silver coins; finally, in a paper: a curl of fine baby hair which must have been my own. My inheritance.

I tugged the lacing cord from my shirt, threaded it through Father’s ring, and hung it around my neck. Then I hitched the coffer under my arm and let Father Anselm help me back onto the horse. I didn’t look back as we rode away.

~~~

Being on the road to Edward cheered me, for I had no idea how foolhardy the scheme was. Only a child and a naive country priest could have tried it, or had the blind luck to succeed.

But succeed we did. By evening of the second day our tired horse shambled into the outskirts of a market town, and it was clear that we’d found Edward’s army. The streets were full of men-at-arms in the Falcon and Fetterlock badge of York, or Edward’s Sun in Splendour. I’d never heard such noise: men shouting, horses whinnying, townsfolk crying their wares, bedraggled children screaming with laughter as they got underfoot, a man in half-armour swearing as he detailed a group of archers. There were a lot of pretty ladies about, and although my mother had worn a little face-paint on grand occasions I’d never seen such rouged lips or darkened eyes, or such vivid shades of blonde or red hair. One lady, sidling past in a gust of violet scent and bouncing bosoms, winked and said something about
Half price for the Church, big boy.
I thought it a very kind offer, whatever she was selling, but the back of Father Anselm’s neck went scarlet and he spurred the poor horse quickly on.