Ravenspur: Rise of the Tudors (28 page)

‘Ah,
madame
, he was a fine, brave boy. I asked for him to be sent to me here for burial, but they would not. I am so sorry. Your husband too. It is a tragedy. You deserved more, Margaret, truly. Yet you are home now. You are safe and you do not ever have to leave again.’

He kissed her on both cheeks and Margaret pressed a hand to her mouth and nodded, unable to speak as he led her away. Her bags were taken up by others, but her shoulders were bowed and her beauty had gone. No one who had seen her then would have known her for the girl who crossed to England in joy and anticipation, with William de la Pole at her side and her first glimpse of England still ahead.

Edward knew he drank more when he was maudlin. He’d heard an archer refer once to the ‘bowstrings of a man’ – the strands that made him who he was. Edward shared at least one of his strands with a certain type of Northman, prone to melancholy. The darkest moods drove him to the jug – and the jug made them worse. Sorrows could not be drowned. They swam.

The music did not touch him. Dancers swept by his table as he stared out, unseeing. On a raised dais, Edward sat on a high-backed chair of velvet and oak and propped his chin on a hand. A jug of clear spirit lay by his side and a servant stood behind him to judge the perfect moment to refill his goblet. Both of them had lost count of how many times the cup had been emptied.

The Christmas celebrations at Westminster were a feast of light and music, of gifts to the poor and banqueting tables set for hundreds. Lit by candles, the crowds were entertained by troupes of musicians, conjurers, knife-throwers and two acrobats wearing spotted furs, who seemed to have skin made of night. The evening had started well and grown ever more raucous as the drink flowed.

The old men and women had long retired and the night had worn into the small hours. The sun would rise again – and only that reappearance would call an end to the revels, with all the scars, scratches and scuffs revealed once more. Candles suited them all, while the drums rattled and the pipes played another reel.

Edward watched three of his daughters dance together, all awake when they should have been in bed hours before. His eldest, Elizabeth, was swan-necked and red-haired, with a fine, upright carriage. The sight of her happiness could pierce Edward’s gloom as nothing else. Seeing her gathering the others and calling a measure to the musicians had their drunken father beaming at them.

Her sister Mary had died earlier that year, fifteen and headstrong. The children had wept piteously when she was found and for weeks afterwards. Edward had only winced at the keening sounds they made. His own brother had been killed at seventeen. Death was a part of life, he’d told them. His wife had called him heartless.

Edward had seen more of death than she ever would, he thought grimly. He had brought a great deal of it into the world that would not have come without his call. Perhaps it was fitting that it reached then for his own children. God knew, he had enough of them, if he included those of his mistresses. He sometimes thought he had won the throne only as a way of securing livelihoods for all his get and kin.

Young Elizabeth should have been married by then, of course. The French king had reneged on that little arrangement, blaming his son’s illness. Edward’s head sank a little further at the memory of his one campaign season in France. He had landed from Calais and by God, if Burgundy had supported him properly from the first, they’d still have been ruling France together. Richard had put it best: not bleeding
téméraire
at all, not when it mattered. Poor bastard. They called Louis the Spider, Edward recalled, or some such name. In just a dozen years, the man had unified France and taken back all the lands of Burgundy.

Edward felt a surly anger come upon him at the thought, somehow made worse by the sight of so many young men
and women laughing and singing and dancing together, without cares. At such times, he had to struggle against a desire to spring up and scatter them, to remind them to whom they owed their lives and livelihoods. They never remembered. They went on with their lives and there was disdain or resentment in their eyes when they looked at him.

He saw a sparkle of new love or something more roguish between young ladies of the court and their admirers, bowing to one another and holding hands as they danced. They flirted and preened and Edward watched them all and lifted his goblet of pale-blue glass, blown in swirls to represent the ocean. Case after case of the glass cups had been brought in by ship, commissioned for that night’s occasion. Every one of the guests would take a goblet home to treasure as a reminder. It was the sort of extravagant detail Edward demanded from his seneschal, backed by his silver flowing like a river. They would know a royal feast from any other by the time they went home! The tables groaned with hams and poultry and every manner of thing that flew or swam or grazed. Yet they were not grateful. They bowed and kissed his hand, but the moment he looked away, he knew they had forgotten him.

Edward emptied his cup in a great gulp and put it down, belching and wincing at the rise of acid in his gut. It was his proud boast that he never drank water, that he considered it a poison. Water could spoil and carry some taint that would have him marooned in a royal privy for a day, groaning. That had happened far too many times and he had learned to blame the water he had sipped with his meal. Wine and small beer seemed to have no similar effect, though they could not make him drunk any longer. For that, he had grain whisky, or on this night, French Armagnac brandy.

His children came past once more, laughing and shrieking
as they wove through the dancers. Elizabeth with her red hair in a plait down her back. God, he loved her, more than he had ever expected. More perhaps since Mary had gone into the tomb, her own hair of gold brushed a thousand times, as bright in death as it had been in life. Edward felt his eyes sting as he glared at the crowd. The dancers seemed to sense his darkening mood, so that they swung a little further away from him, as geese will make a path for a farmer’s tread.

Edward’s sons expected rough humour from him, if anything at all. He could not find an ease of manner with them, coming it always too loud or too clumsy. Prince Edward was still too slim at twelve, his father thought. The boy was taller than the sons of other men, but all elbows and thin arms. It made him wonder what Lord Rivers was feeding the boy on the borders. The prince certainly wasn’t thriving on it.

By all accounts, Prince Edward did as he was told, whether it was learning his declensions or his sword work, or the command of a trained warhorse. Yet he seemed not to have an urge to
succeed
that his father might have understood. Edward looked for it in both his sons, but they were too meek. He did not want to break their will with hardship, but it seemed to the king that he had been a big, rough brawler by the time he was twelve. Edward recalled betting on himself in light-hearted wrestling contests against men of the Calais garrison. Those bouts had been brutal, with few rules. Though he had lost against the regular soldiers, they’d put him up then against the French dockmen and merchants. He’d surprised one or two and won enough to get truly drunk for the first time. He shook his head at that, lost in fumes of spirits and memory. The people in those halls knew nothing of such things. They ate his food and drank his beer and lived lives of softness and ease.

Edward raised his hands suddenly, looking at the thick
fingers. Two were crooked from old breaks. His palms were thick slabs of callus. A knuckle had been pushed back in on his left hand, from some blow he could not remember, so that it lay smooth. They were a warrior’s hands and they ached most days, in a way that made him think he would not see an end to the pain. He clenched his right fist and heard a clink as the servant refilled the blue glass cup. Edward sighed and picked it up as he leaned back, raising it to his eye so that he bathed the dancers in the colour of the sea.

He felt a pressure then, so wrong on the instant that he was suddenly afraid, though it came without warning and passed just as quickly. He closed one eye over a sharp discomfort, more a sense of falling than an actual headache. It had come and gone so fast he could not even be sure it had happened, but it had unsettled him. He put the cup down on the small table at his side, frowning at a tremble in his fingers.

He did not know if he had been a good king. He had been a good son, first. He had avenged his father and that was something that either didn’t matter at all, or it mattered a great deal. He smiled at that, an old phrase that he had come to appreciate. It didn’t matter at all, or it meant the world.

He had been a good brother, though to Richard more than George of Clarence. Poor George had kept a foolish spite and sense of injury alive for far too long, as if he was owed something by the realm, as if he had some special claim on King Edward. George had sent fools into Parliament even, to claim he had been treated poorly and illegally. Edward had warned him then, for the last time. He would not allow his brother to humiliate him in public.

‘Be warned,’ Edward had said to him, but George had not understood. The source and root of law lay on the field of
battle. The rest was just fine dreams for the years between, too good for an age of feud and bloody vengeance, perhaps.

Edward had given Clarence a chance to leave the court, to leave London, to just live quietly with his wife and his children on their estates. Perhaps the death of his wife had driven him mad, as some said. George had accused almost everyone, including her maids. In the end, it had been like putting down a mad dog, more a mercy than a cruelty. That was what Richard had said.

They’d left George of Clarence uncut at least, unmarked for a Christian burial. Richard’s men had drowned him in a vat of Malmsey wine and it had been quick enough. In the end, George of Clarence had been his own executioner, no matter who had tipped him in. The poor fool just could not find peace.

Edward felt again a strange pressure that made him grip the arm of his chair. This time he could not seem to take a proper hold, so that his right hand slipped and curled in on itself. What was
wrong
with him? He had not drunk as much as the evening before, even. He should not have been leaning and mumbling words, with vomit rising in his throat. God, he should stand up before he was sick. It had been a long time since he had drunk so much as to fall down. His muscles were cramping and he leaned back, looking up at the ceiling and closing his eyes.

In Scotland, one son had ruled while the fellow’s brother, Alexander of Albany, had turned against him, like Cain and Abel. That younger brother had brought a dozen bottles of some fine liquor down to London and when they’d seen it was not poisoned, Edward and Richard had matched him cup for cup over three days until it was all gone. They’d never been so ill before or since. In their drunkenness, they’d promised to support him. Edward was proud of Richard as
he recalled those days. Alexander, Duke of Albany, brother to the king of Scotland. Edward had liked him in drink, though not sober, not as well. The Scot had promised he would be a vassal to England if they won him the throne. Edward had shaken his hand and solemnly given his word.

Richard had taken Edinburgh, Edward remembered. God, they’d said he would never manage it, but he had. He’d held the Scottish king prisoner and waited for Albany.

Edward twitched his hand, though he thought he had waved away a bad memory. The fellow had let them down, of course, too meek at the end to do what had to be done. Richard had freed the king to exact his own vengeance, taking his army south once again. He’d left a garrison at Berwick and that at least would remain England. It was only fair, for the expense they’d undertaken. Edward wished George of Clarence could have been alive then, so he could have pointed to Berwick-upon-Tweed, a city that had been English and Scottish and was English once again. Where was the law for such a thing, if not in the power to hold it? Where would his brother have looked for his fine sentiments, his rights and wrongs, if not in the swords of hard and cruel men, ready to fight for it?

The king was leaning sideways in the chair. His manservant hovered nervously behind as two legs of oak came an inch away from the floor. The chair was heavy, but so was the man in it, even without his armour. Edward wore a doublet tunic of gold velvet and white silk over hose. It was a bright creation that cost as much as most of his knights would see in a year. It was almost certain Edward would wear it once and not again, but still he would be angry if it was stained, when he woke the next morning.

The serving lad tried to rest his weight on the chair arm unobtrusively, rather than let his master topple right over in
front of hundreds. The king would not remember his small act of kindness, but he did it anyway.

Standing closer, the young man saw that the king’s brandy had not been emptied. It was an unusual sight and he blinked and hesitated.

‘If the brandy is poor, would His Highness prefer wine, or ale?’ he asked, expecting a rebuke. Edward did not reply and he edged closer and further around the chair.

‘Your Highness?’ he asked, then stood very still as he saw the king’s face had twisted and reddened in an apoplexy, sagging on one side so that his mouth hung open and made odd, choking sounds. The music played on behind and no one else seemed to have seen it. One of Edward’s eyes had closed, while the other swivelled in panic, unable to understand what was happening or why his serving man was peering at him and mouthing words. Edward gave a great lurch then, kicking out so that the servant went flying and the chair fell, spilling the king on to the wooden dais with a great groan that went on and on.

Edward sat up in bed, his legs hidden by a vast coverlet of purple and gold. His face had recovered its usual shape, though his right arm was still no stronger than a child’s and caused him great distress. If he had lost the left, it would have been much easier to bear. His right arm had carried him through the great trials of his life and he hated the way it curled and lay limp. The royal physicians said there was hope of regaining some movement in it. One of them had disagreed and offered only to cut it cleanly. That one had been dismissed from service.

The king lay in the royal rooms at Westminster, in the bed where he had once seen Henry of Lancaster. Yet Edward spent time each morning clenching and unclenching his
right fist. He thought he was improving, that he could hold it closed for longer and longer. He had not told the physicians, not yet. He wanted those doubting bastards to see him hold a sword again.

‘Very well, I am ready,’ Edward called to the master of the bedchamber. The man bowed low and disappeared to call his guest from outside. Edward grumbled that Alfred Noyes fussed over him, but he was secretly relieved to have the man tut and bother those who came to see the king. Since his collapse, Edward tired easily and he did not like to admit it.