The King's Grey Mare (35 page)

‘I come to reclaim my kingdom!’
declared the King.
‘Ah, thanks be to Jesu for the love of English folk, for the generosity of the Seigneur de la Gruythuyse, my mentor in Bruges.
Good people, I am once more equipped to crush my foes!’

They had landed at Ravenspur, said the King, with their small army.
York had opened to them.
Laughing, he said: ‘I mounted the plumes of Henry of Lancaster and swore that I came only to regain my Duchy of York!
Then southward … they flocked to my standard.
We shall conquer.’

‘Amen,’ said Richard of Gloucester softly.

Edward, snatched up a cup of the Abbot’s flat brewing.
He called for a toast – to Burgundy – to all Flemings who now formed part of his army.
To his brother Richard who had upheld him, to his brother-in-law Anthony Woodville who had advised him – and to the blessed return to his side of George, his brother of Clarence.

She could scarcely believe it.
Clarence, murderer of her father and young brother, again forgiven?
Yes, there he was, the black-heart, the ill-omened knave.
Having the wisdom to stand a little contritely apart.
Armour bright, cheeks pink, helm beneath his arm.
And Richard of Gloucester had been, once more, the peacemaker.
The blood surged in her temples, throbbing, threatening.
The King was relating how Richard had drawn his brother over from Lancaster; George would be welcome back at court.
Her court!
housing murder, treachery.
In that moment she desired most fervently Clarence’s death.

Edward took them all from Sanctuary within the hour.
She rested easily in the barge, the little prince’s cradle close to her feet.
She smiled deliciously, her eyes upon Anthony; her beloved brother, whose charm offset the irritating presence of Gloucester, and the insult of Clarence’s nearness.
The forbidding spires of the Abbey faded behind them.
The river was excitable with March tides, the air fragrant with the promise of blown buds.
To Baynard’s Castle on the Thames they rowed, past the cluttered wharves.
Swans skimmed upwards before the craft, and on the banks the fishing-nets dropped jewels.

She lay one night with Edward before he left to gather more men.
He was jubilant; the Archbishop of Canterbury had once again touched the crown to his King’s brow in Westminster.
Yet there was a volatile nervousness about Edward, a creeping doubt.
In her arms, he asked if she thought it were sin to do battle at Eastertide.

Have you forgotten Towton?’
she said gently.
Eleven years ago, when I was enmeshed in sorrow
.
‘It was Palm Sunday when you vanquished Lancaster.’
I remember that winter well; the snow covering Bradgate, the racking grief; the coming of the Fiend
.

‘So it was.’
Edward sounded relieved.
‘A good augury.
We put Margaret to flight, then.’

‘Now you give battle to … Warwick.’

‘Yes, who has joined with Margaret … for that boy whom he once called bastard … Edward, Prince of Wales!’
He laughed angrily.
‘Our own prince Edward is Prince of Wales, and none other!’
He was silent for a moment, then said uncertainly.
‘Yet I wonder … did Holy Harry breed that boy, or did he not?’

She said slowly: ‘Marguerite’s son
is
bastard.
It is no lie.’

He raised himself in the bed to stare at her.

‘To fight a traitor,’ she continued urgently, ‘I would myself do battle on any day.
Easter is no sin, if the day falls then.
As for Marguerite …’

She told him.
Of the days and nights, the tall figure passing ghostlike to Marguerite’s chamber.
Her own silent vigilance.

‘What?
You were there?’

‘Yes, Ned.
Night after night the Queen took Beaufort of Somerset to her bed.
She grieved outrageously when he was slain.’

‘So!’
Laughing with relief, with mocking triumph, he began to call Margaret whore with doubled venom.
He seized and kissed Elizabeth, who, in the darkness lay and thought of Marguerite, who had called her Isabella and been kind.
It was all a lost, gone, far-off thing.
The vital issue was that Edward should win this battle, that the Fiend should be vanquished.
Now that Edward of Lancaster’s bastardy was sure in the King’s mind, he would go into combat like a lion, certain of God and the right.
She had given him this confidence.
If only there were some way to ensure his victory!
Her head throbbed painfully, her rushing blood made the sound of distant seas.
If only the Duchess were still her prop and adviser, instead of the empty husk she had become.
Edward was already asleep; she breathed this powerful warmth.
Above the coverlet she brought her slender hands together, lay stiffly, entombed in thought.

Her mouth moved in a secret prayer; her ears strained for a silent voice.
Within her mind, a swirling mist arose.

Warwick could see nothing.
A giant white hand, ghostridden, clustered in blinding pockets about him.
It clung to his armour, settled and dripped like tears.
He was bleeding where a poignard had pierced his hand.
Behind him somewhere in the treacherous whiteness lay the St.
Albans road.
To his left was the hollow called Dead Man’s Bottom, and all around him men fought and swore and struck wildly.
He could hear the spectral clangour of their steel.
He guessed that the King was in the heart of the affray, and half-knew that his own men and those of the Earl of Exeter were working across to the hollow on the lip of which Richard of Gloucester’s vanguard struggled.
In the endless unnatural whiteness his own esquire appeared like a spirit wielding an axe, cried briefly on the saints and disappeared again in the chilling milk.

White as a woman’s body, white as a funeral candle, mist surged and eddied and closed upon him lovingly.
Far behind as through a tunnel, he heard cries, screams, curses.
The terrified neigh of horses, the long grunting anguish of a man spitted through the bowels.
Easter Sunday.
Half past five in the morning when He who died on Tree came again to his fellows.
Eleven years ago, when that same Lord had passed through into Jerusalem, Warwick had fought – also in whiteness, the purity of snow.
Shoulder to shoulder with Ned of England.
As they should be fighting now, were it not for the Woodville – the witch.
Fog filled his nose and eyes, fog imbued with silent mocking life, and he knew that his naming of her was correct.
In his mind, her sinuousness, smooth forehead and red lips flitted ahead, wreathed by the smoke-like mist, beckoning him to death.

Somewhere, nearer now, fighting desperately against the assaults of Warwick’s reserve and Exeter’s men, was Richard of Gloucester.
Dickon, with whom he had sat for so many hours before the great fire at Middleham; talking of everything under heaven; of love, war, Christ and philosophy, while the charitable flames fell smoothly on the faces of Earl and boy.
Dickon, to whom he had, taught every nuance of battle, was holding out against the foe, and had asked for no reinforcements yet.
Warwick knew this by the gasped messages from his own scouts.
In all his dismay he felt a fierce and searing pride.
The curling whiteness swooped to kiss his cheek, like the salute of a corpse.
He thought briefly of Anne, his daughter, wedded in her heart to Gloucester, wedded on True Cross to the Frenchwoman’s son.
His lips curled bitterly.
Margaret had not even allowed that son to join the battle, and was keeping him safe at Cerne Abbey.
She was only waiting to see whether Warwick kept his pledge.
And here he was, staggering in mist, while his armies, selected from the hosts of Lancaster and the adherents of Neville, plunged about him, as lost as he.
His esquire emerged again from the chilling blindness.

‘What passes?’
cried Warwick.

‘My lord … Oxford’s men were defecting!
They rode south to Barnet, to loot and pillage.
The mist has made them mad!’

‘And Sir John, my, brother?’

‘Lord Montagu makes for Edward’s troops – he attacks them from the rear.
The Earl of Oxford is driving his men back from the town … but their defection has cost us sore …’

‘Fools, traitors,’ muttered Warwick.
We need more men, he thought, and bitterly: would that I had Clarence’s sumptuous force with me.
But Clarence is once again the King’s sworn man, and is he any less for that?
Would I be less were I to surrender, now, this minute?
The fog swung about him in coils, stinging his eyes.
The groans of dying men assailed him.
No, no.
My followers would have perished for nothing.

He looked wildly about.
‘The reserve!
Bid them advance to my standard!’

‘My lord, my lord,’ answered the esquire.
The white blanket wrapped him, so that a disembodied voice spoke to Warwick.
‘We cannot – they can see no standard clearly.’

Lord Jesus, what a day!’

‘The day is witched,’ said Warwick softly.
Even as he spoke, the mist suddenly rolled back, like a bland tapestry rising.
It faded; gold threads of sunlight pierced the last smoky wisps.
There was the fierce bray of trumpets, the grunt and thud and steel-swish of combat.
Then from the south, a great crying: ‘Treason!
treason!
treason!’
The Earl wheeled, sword in hand.
Now he could see – grey armour patterned with red, spouting wounds, a carpet of dead men on the periphery of his vision.
There was the broken line of Hastings’s vanguard reforming, and dangerously close, the great fiery blossom of the King’s standard.
A courier ran up, his face full of terror.

‘My lord, all is lost!
In the mist, Lord Montagu’s men mistook the standards – they thought that Oxford’s Star was the Sun in Splendour …’

‘So they are butchering each other,’ said Warwick bitterly, listening to the screams.

‘Twas this cursed fog,’ said the courier, weeping with fright.
Then, half-turning, he gave a shriek: ‘Oh, God protect us!’

A solid phalanx of armed men – the Sun flaunting above them in the haze – was bearing down on Warwick’s contingent.
Struggling out of Dead Man’s Bottom was Richard of Gloucester’s force, depleted but swearing, and armed like a host of bloodstained killing insects swarming up the slope.
The Earl cast a glance around him.
While his own armies fought among themselves, while the last flicker of grave-cold mist tongued his neck, he knew defeat.
Throwing off as much of his harness as possible, he followed his fleeing force.
Dodging a knife-thrust here, and there the swing of a redclotted axe, hearing the deathly thrum and swish of a close arrow, he ran.
He, whom they had once named ‘
le conduiseur du royaume
’, fled, towards the dawn-blue shadows of Wrotham Wood.
Some half a mile ahead it loomed; dense forest, a sanctuary.
Behind him, Ned’s armies roared, roared as he had taught them so many years ago.
And Dickon of Gloucester came upon him from the right flank, in tight and orderly mesh, his archers firing from behind, his infantry hacking from before.
As Warwick had taught him, too, at Middleham.

As he ran, another patch of mist like a low-flying ghoul enveloped him so that he stumbled, his hands thrown out; so that he cried upon the Virgin, and upon his wife, and lastly for mercy upon his King.
That the King’s hand should be the one to take his life away.
For they were upon him from behind, faceless shapes in the solitary swirl of white.
He felt a gush of fire in his side, a lancing blow in his loins.
He looked down, amazed, at the steel protruding from his belly.
Right through his coat of mail; a weakened rivet, he thought foolishly.
And yet how strange!
Right through his vitals, where that ancient pain had been.
He was falling.
He saw her then.
Trying to rise in the shadow of Wrotham Wood, so far, so near, hands slipping in the mud, he saw her.
The silent winding-sheet had a face and coiled about him.
The red lips smiled.

Edward of England stood upon a little knoll.
The sun had conquered and the damp meadow sprang to greenness in the growing gold.
The King lifted his sword high.