The Sunne in Splendour: A Novel of Richard III (11 page)

into the sky from a dozen different directions, knowing that meant the jubilant Londoners were burning bonfires in the streets as if this were the June Feast Day of St John the Baptist, Cecily breathed a brief prayer that God might mercifully spare the city from fire this noon, for there was no way the fire bells could ever be heard or heeded.
The volume of noise was increasing; she'd not have thought it possible. The shouts were audible now, shouts of "York" and "Warwick." But overriding all, one name, again and again, a hoarse chant that sent shivers of emotion up Cecily's spine . . . Edward! Edward! Until the entire city echoed with the sound, with the name of her son.
Cecily swallowed, saw her daughter was brushing the back of her hand against her cheek. Impulsively, she reached out, squeezed the girl's hand, and Margaret turned a radiant face toward her, leaned up to shout against Cecily's ear.
"They've passed through Newgate by now! Soon, Ma Mere, soon!"
Incredibly, the noise of the crowd intensified. A wave of cheering broke over the churchyard, sweeping in from the street in a roar so deafening that Cecily knew it could have but one meaning, that Edward and
Warwick had reached the cathedral grounds. There was a sudden swirl of movement across the yard;
people were grudgingly giving way, retreating back in the direction of Paul's Cross. Slowly a path was being cleared before Little Gate, the entrance onto Cheapside; riders were coming through. Soldiers, who laughed and bantered with the crowd yielding so reluctantly before them, their faces flushed with this extraordinary acclaim, the manes of their skittish mounts incongruously bedecked with bright hair ribbons given in tribute by giggling girls. People were reaching up to share swallows from flasks of ale, to make extravagant offers of meals and lodgings as if they were welcoming blood kin home from the wars, and now, much to the delight of the crowd, one young soldier leaned recklessly from the saddle, claimed a kiss from a girl with Yorkist paper roses festooned in masses of bright blonde hair.
Cecily couldn't believe it, had never seen anything like this, never. She watched in disbelief, and then
Margaret cried out, gestured eagerly, and she saw the Earl of Warwick.
He was at once engulfed by well-wishers. Attempting to muscle his mount through the crush, laughing, shrugging off the hands that reached upward to him, keeping a tight rein under the sudden flurry of scarves waving the Neville red. Cecily swiftly bent down, lifted Anne up so that the child could see. As she did, another outburst of cheering rocked the churchyard, eclipsing all that had gone before, and she knew even as she straightened up that her son had ridden through the gateway.
He was astride a magnificent pale-white stallion with a silvery tail that trailed almost to the ground, and he seemed to be enveloped in light,

with the sun directly over his head, gilding his armor to silver, tawny hair to gold.
"Oh, Ma Mere!" Margaret gasped, in a voice that was strangely uncertain, unexpectedly awed. "He does look like a King!"
"Yes, he does," Cecily said softly, forgetting that she had to shout to make herself heard. "He does, indeed."
He held his helmet in the crook of his arm, and as she watched, he reached into it and scattered a handful of coins into the crowd. In the scramble that ensued, a young girl darted forward and thrust an object upward. From the corner of his eye, Edward saw and reached down. For an instant, their fingers touched and then he held her gift aloft a scarf of bright bold colors, upon which had been stitched, with incredible patience and perseverance, a blazing sun on a field of white roses. Edward now brandished the scarf for all to see, and then, to the wild cheering of the crowd, he knotted it about his throat so that it caught the breeze, fluttered out jauntily behind him. "That was nicely done," a voice murmured at Cecily's ear, and she gave a start; so intent had she been upon Edward's approach that she not realized Warwick now stood at her side. Greetings exchanged, he nodded again toward her son, who was making little headway through the crowd.
"A pretty gesture, that," he remarked complacently. The sort of thing sure to win favor with the people."
There was in his voice the satisfaction of a master for an apt pupil, and Cecily turned thoughtful eyes upon him, said nothing.
Unable to extricate his mount from the press of bodies that walled him in on all sides, Edward now rose in his saddle, raised his voice in a command for silence that, rather remarkably, was obeyed.
"Good people, I'm most eager to greet my lady mother and sister! If you'll but clear the way for me?" he queried with a grin, and suddenly, magically, a path had opened before him.
Cecily came forward as he dismounted. She held out her hand and he brought it to his mouth, said, "Madame," with flawless formality. And then he laughed, and she found herself enfolded within a boyish, exuberant embrace, from which she emerged bruised and breathless. He turned then to Margaret, catching her as she flung her arms around his neck and swinging her up off the ground in a swirl of silk.
As an exercise in crowd-pleasing, it was masterful; the level of noise reached physically painful proportions.
Cecily clutched at her composure, smiled at her son. Never have I seen such a welcome, Edward . . .
never in my lifetime!"
"Welcome, Ma Mere?" he echoed and kissed her lightly on both

cheeks so that his voice reached her ear alone. "I rather thought it to be a coronation!"
For a moment, their eyes held, smoke-grey into the most vivid of blues. And then Cecily nodded slowly and Edward turned back to face the crowds thronging the churchyard, raising his hand in careless salute of the continuing cheers. She watched, the faintest of smiles curving the corners of her mouth.
CITY OF York
March 1461
Marguerite d'Anjou tilted her candle at an angle so that no wax might splatter upon her son. Her strained nerves eased somewhat, as always, at sight of the sleep-smudged little profile, feathery golden lashes alighting upon skin as soft to the touch as it was flawless to the eye. She leaned forward, intending to brush her lips to his hair, too lightly to disturb the delicate fabric of his sleep. But the lashes stirred, seemed about to take flight, and she reluctantly abandoned the caress. Once awakened, he'd be up and eager to leave the bed; so fiercely did he resist bedtime that, more than once, Marguerite found herself countermanding his nurse, making him a gift of the hours in dispute.
He was strong-willed, her son. Let others whisper of the boy's lack of discipline; she didn't care. The fools, they didn't understand. How could they?
She was thirty-one years old, and never in her life had she met a more patient, pious soul than the man asleep in the adjoining bedchamber. Even in his worst fits of madness, her husband still clung to remembered vestiges of bygone courtesies. Nothing disturbed him more than what he felt to be unseemly displays of lewdness or public nudity; and yet, when once he'd been mortally offended by the scanty costumes of a troupe of dancers performing at their Christmas court, he fled the scene

himself rather than order the women from his presence. That was many years ago, but Marguerite had not forgotten.
Another memory came to her now, one far more recent but no more pleasant to recall. Upon their triumphant return to York, the citizenry had turned out again in heartening welcome. A welcome that had been marred for Marguerite by her husband's bizarre behavior at Micklegate Bar. He'd taken great pains not to glance up, kept his eyes averted from the sight of the Yorkist heads high above him, and in his haste to enter through the gate barbican, he'd dropped first his reins and then his hat.
There'd been some snickering among the spectators at that, and Marguerite had burned with the familiar frustration, the impotent anger that always seemed to accompany her husband's public appearances.
Henri was, after all, an anointed King; to mock him was to mock God. But in her seventeen years in
England, she'd come to expect little better from the English. They were not her people, would never be her people. But they were her subjects, hers and Henri's, and she'd never yield them up to that wretched boy, that swaggering youth who dared now to proclaim himself as His Sovereign Grace, King Edward, fourth of that name since the Conquest.
She reached down, smoothed the coverlets over her son. There was a scattering of crumbs about his mouth, and she smiled at the sight, knowing that if she touched him, her fingers would find his cheek sticky with the marzipan he'd insisted upon taking to bed with him. He knew what he wanted, did her
Edouard, and even at seven years of age, he understood, as Henri never had, that he must reach out for what he did want. Nothing came to the weak. Not in this world. Let others be content to wait for the rewards of the Hereafter. She was not one of them. And by the grace of God and her own resolve, Edouard would not be one either. In the bedchamber yielded up to them by Abbot Cottingham, her husband slept. She could hear the gentle, rhythmic snore. As if there were not a battle taking place just twelve miles to the south of York, a battle that meant all.
Just three months since Sandal Castle. How had York managed to turn fortune's wheel in so brief a time?
The day she'd reined in her mare before Micklegate Bar, she'd truly believed that she had, in Clifford's words, won her war. Yet not two months later, Edward of York had contrived to have the crown offered to him by a rebellious London mob and a handful of disloyal nobles, and he was now challenging her army at Towton in what Somerset had called the final throw of the dice. It was not a phrase
Marguerite relished; she had never liked to gamble.
She knew now that she'd blundered in yielding London so easily to Edward of York. Her face grew warm every time she thought of the tumultuous welcome he'd been given, for all the world as if he'd just liberated

Jerusalem from the infidels. Trust Londoners to confuse the entry into London of a nineteen-year-old rakehell with the Second Coming of the Lord Christ. London canaille! There were times when she thought all her troubles with her English subjects were London-bred.
It was said more than four thousand people gathered in the cold of St John's Field that Sunday.
Warwick's glib-tongued brother, the Bishop of Exeter, had incited the crowd with the ease of an accomplished orator; he'd soon had them screaming assent that Lancaster had broken the Act of Accord by the violence done at Sandal Castle, that no man had a better right to the crown than Edward of York, England's true King and the man who'd delivered London from the perils of fire and sword. Marguerite marveled that he'd overlooked flood and famine, wondered cynically how many Warwick retainers had been strategically positioned throughout the crowd to stoke audience enthusiasm.
Two days later, Warwick led a delegation of nobles and clergy to Baynard's Castle to formally entreat
Edward of York to accept the crown of England. Within hours, he was being acclaimed in Westminster
Hall, where not five months before, his father had stood and advanced a like claim, to embarrassing silence.
And that was the dangerous difference between them, Marguerite thought grimly. The reason why the son was proving to be a greater threat than ever the father had. The Duke of York had not been a man to strike passion in his followers, to evoke any emotion more intense than admiration. However upright his nature, or perhaps because of it, he had not the force of personality to captivate a city as his son Edward had captivated London.
How ironic it was that the very factor she'd weighed so heavily against Edward should have been turned by him to such telling advantage ... his youth. She'd seen him, at first, as an appendage of Warwick's body, an arm to be lopped off before it could strike a lucky blow; sure that, if Warwick fell, so, too, would Edward, no more able to survive independently of Warwick than the arm could exist without the body.
Yet the victory at Mortimer's Cross had gone to Edward, not to Warwick. Theirs was an age in which all men of their class studied the arts of war from early boyhood; it was to be expected that some men would prove to be more apt pupils than others. It was her accursed ill luck that Edward of York had now shown himself to be such a man, one with a natural affinity for command and the ways of war.
But what disturbed Marguerite the most about the young Yorkist Duke now calling himself King was that he was seducer as well as soldier. He'd won London with his smile as much as with his sword ... as his father could never have done.

Somerset conceded that Edward would be a dangerous foe to face across a battlefield. But he remained convinced that in political matters, Edward was Warwick's cat's-paw, and content to be so the pleasure-seeking puppet of his power-seeking cousin. As he reminded Marguerite more than once, Warwick himself had few peers in the game of crowd seduction. The Nevilles were all infuriatingly adroit at playing upon the emotions of the simple and the trusting, and this Edward of York was half Neville, after all. Why, then, should Madame be surprised that he now showed himself to be as skilled as they in the dubious maneuvers of rabble-rousing?
Recollection of Somerset's scorn brought a smile to Marguerite s mouth; it hovered but did not linger.
She was trying to remember the last time she'd met Edward of York, face-to-face. It was, she decided, upon that notorious farce called the "Love-Day" three years ago, when at the urging of Henri and the
Commons, the Yorkists and Lancastrians had gathered to hear a solemn Mass of reconciliation at St
Paul's. Edward had then been. . . she calculated rapidly . . . sixteen, already taller than most men grown and very conscious of his own charm. A handsome boy.
Marguerite bit her lip, chewed away the last of her ocher lip rouge. Yes put him astride a white stallion, in plate armor that shone like polished pier glass and the far more potent armor of youth and health, and she could well understand how he must have dazzled the London multitudes. They were accustomed, after all, to her Henri.
Henri who insisted upon wearing shapeless long gowns, eschewed the fashionable pointed-toe shoes, wore his hair clipped short like a peasant. What a bitter jest of God, she thought, that the only time in his life when Henri looked like a King had been during those terrifying months, eighteen in all, when he'd lapsed into a trance like one bewitched, unable to speak or feed himself, and therefore, unable, too, to select his own clothing!
Henri who was so poor a horseman he must be provided with mild-tempered geldings and never seemed to feel the humiliation in having such unmanly mounts. Henri, who wore hair shirts and forbade profanity in his hearing and once had ridden all the way from the Tower to Westminster with an empty scabbard at his hip because he'd forgotten his sword and none of his attendants had thought to remind him of it.
It had not happened again; Marguerite had seen to that. But she could not blot from mind or memory the laughter of the London rabble, the sly innuendoes of the Yorkist sympathizers-and Jesu did know there were plenty such in London-the jests that she knew to be swapped in alehouse and tavern about the
King's lack of a sword and whether he did feel the lack most on the battlefield or in the bedchamber.
But there was no need to dwell upon Henri's failings. Somerset had