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Authors: Joanna Hickson

Tags: #Historical Fiction

Red Rose, White Rose

BOOK: Red Rose, White Rose
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Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper 2014

Copyright © Joanna Hickson 2014

Joanna Hickson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007447015

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007447022

Version: 2015-07-25

Dedication

For my intrepid and lovely sister Sue

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Family Trees

Map

Prologue

Part One: County Durham, England

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part Two: France

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part Three: Fotheringhay Castle Northamptonshire, Coldharbour Inn & Westminster Palace, London

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Part Four: Ireland & Northern England

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Part Five: Lincolnshire & Yorkshire

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Part Six: The Drums of War

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Keep Reading –
THE AGINCOURT BRIDE

Keep Reading –
THE TUDOR BRIDE

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Provins, County of Champagne,
France, 1275

A
t first there was only a subtle hint of fragrance borne on the breeze, an exquisite teasing of the senses. To the knight on his weary warhorse it was like the breath of God, lifting the hairs on the back of his neck and stirring the golden leopards on his banner.

‘It is the scent of roses!’ he cried to his companions. ‘In the Holy Land we called it God’s Incense.’

When the cavalcade breasted the hill ahead he reined in his horse with a gasp of wonder. All over the wide plain below stretched a carpet of red roses, covering the earth as far as the eye could see, as if a celestial gardener had scattered divine seed. The knight gazed in silent awe, struck by the power of the symbolism laid before him; that the single rose, an object of beauty and simplicity could, when massed with a myriad others, become a potent force, a source of mystery and strength. The words of a hymn sprang into his mind, which he had heard sung in the dust and heat of the Holy Land by choristers in his crusading army.

There is no rose of such vertue

As is the rose that bore Jesu,

For in this rose contained was

Heaven and earth in a little space.

‘If there is a heaven on earth,’ he declared, ‘it is surely here.’

The knight was Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, crusader brother to Edward I, King of England and known throughout Christendom as Edmund ‘Crouchback’ or ‘The Cross-Bearer’. Returning through France from his crusade, he was making a mercy mission to Provins where the Count of Champagne had recently died, leaving his young widow and their baby son vulnerable to abduction by neighbouring barons, eager to acquire access to the great wealth generated by the famous rose fields.

Grown from a single root brought back from Damascus by an earlier crusader, the precious roses were not just objects of beauty, they were an industry. Their dried petals became shards of perfumed sunshine to freshen the rushes on a rich man’s floor; their floral essence could be distilled into attar of roses to perfume a lady’s breast or diluted into rosewater for bathing and cooking; rose leaves were pounded into healing poultices and even the prunings, with their long, sharp thorns could be woven into fences for protecting flocks and crops.

But it was the rose of
‘vertue’
that Edmund held in his mind when he first encountered Blanche, the lady in distress. Wearing white robes of mourning, she held her baby in her arms and her face was sweet and troubled. ‘The Blessed Virgin has answered my prayers,’ she sighed as he kissed her hand. By the next rose harvest Edmund and Blanche were married and the red Damask rose became for him a talisman, a badge of honour which he bore on his shield and gave to his favoured followers; the Red Rose of Lancaster.

A hundred years later another Edmund, younger brother to the great John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was created Duke of York by their father, King Edward III. This Edmund aimed to better his brother in all things, including the heraldic symbol of his dukedom. He could not have the red rose so he chose the white, the lovely wild rose of England with its five creamy petals and fierce, hooked thorns. He declared the white rose superior to the red because it was native to the soil it grew in, spreading over the hills and valleys of England in great tangled brakes, delighting all with its airy fragrance and spangled masses of blooms but repelling any who tried to seize it. Edmund had his minstrels compose a song in praise of the white rose:

Of a rose, a lovely rose

Of a rose I sing a song.

Lyth and lysten, both old and younge

How the white rose becomen sprong,

A fairer rose to oure leking

Sprong there never in kynges lond.

During the next century, in the battle for supremacy between Lancaster and York, the red rose and the white were to scratch a bloody trail across the ‘kynges lond’, leaving England blighted and bleeding.

BOOK: Red Rose, White Rose
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