To the Tower Born - Robin Maxwell (33 page)

“Show us the way out,” Brampton demanded.

“Have you enough pitch to burn the manor house too?” One of the men shook his head.

“Come with me, then. I’ll show you where ours is kept.” He turned and started down the dungeon tunnel, but everyone held their ground.

“Do we trust him, Nell?” Brampton whispered. “Or has he laid a trap for us? Reggie Bray may be waiting at the top of the stairs. Perhaps ’twould be safer if we killed him.” Nell’s mind clicked off the logic of known facts. The steward had been part of the boys’ heinous captivity. Anyone could concoct a story that his partner in crime was solely culpable, and that his own family had been threatened. All Nell had to support 
the steward’s innocence was knowledge that Lady Margaret was indeed capable of making and carrying out such threats . . . and an instinct that the steward was telling the truth. And memory of that one instant when joy at hearing of the princes’ rescue washed over his face. It had been only a fleeting moment, but she had believed it sincere then. Could she trust her intuition when so much hung in the balance?

“You must come with me quickly!” the steward called from the far end of the dreadful corridor.

“What do you say?” Brampton urged.

“Nelll. . .” It was Bessie, who’d come up behind and placed a soft hand on her shoulder. She offered no advice nor demanded an answer. She simply stood at her back, a pillar of strength and confidence.

“Follow him,” Nell said.

Brampton whispered a few instructions to two of his men, and they strode down the tunnel, then followed the steward up the stairs into Lady Margaret’s offices.

Brampton was thinking on his feet. “John,” he said, “take Dickon. Nell, pull the door closed. Bessie, the blankets.” Everyone did as they were told, Bessie pulling thick wool blankets from the sack she’d carried off the barge. These they wrapped round Edward and Dickon. Brampton himself threw the tools into one crate and pushed both of them into the nearest barred cell. The near-empty cans of pitch he threw in after them. As gently as he was able, he lifted the emaciated boy who had been king into his arms.

“Take the torches,” he directed Nell and Bessie, “and set it ablaze. Start in the boys’ room, then follow us down the hall.” He looked Nell up and down. “Mind your skirts do not catch fire.”

“Let me have your smallsword,” she said.

“In my belt,” he directed her, and lifted Edward’s body clear of his waist.

Nell snatched the blade and began ripping away her skirts to reveal the woolen breeches underneath. She grinned at Bessie.

“A couple of proper young gentlemen,” she said. “Go on, then,” she added to Brampton and John, who had picked up the still-delirious young Duke of York. “We’ll catch you up in a moment.”

The two men with their precious cargo started down the long tunnel. Nell and Bessie each grabbed a lit torch from the sconces. Together they entered the boys’ prison and discovered the scene set by Brampton. Dickon’s double was propped in a macabre parody of the prince, at the bedside of his elder brother.

Bessie, her lovely face contorted with fury, lowered her torch to the pitch-smeared blanket that covered Edward’s double.

“Wait!” Nell cried. She stooped and retrieved the boys’ well-worn volume of Jason and the Argonauts from under the head of the straw pallet. Dickon had, perhaps, read to his brother of courage and the hope of one day returning home, to keep him alive. “Now,” she said to Bessie.

Both cots, the walls, and the straw on the floor were set ablaze. Heat seared and singed the girls as they hurried out, closing the door behind, then set it alight as well.

As they ran down the tunnel they touched their torches to the pitch-daubed walls and the straw in the dungeons. Choking smoke was quickly obliterating the corridor.

“This way!” Nell heard Brampton call. The men were at the base of the curved stairs, but when Nell started up them, Brampton stopped her. “No, we go back the way we came!” In case my instinct was wrong, she thought, but did not argue.

The two men carrying the princes, followed closely by Nell and Bessie, stepped through the doorway near the stairs and made their way back through the silt-filled passages, the great Roman hall, and up the stairs to the castle’s outer east wall.

John and Brampton laid the boys on the ground whilst the four of them struggled, heaving and grunting, to replace the heavy grate in its place. Hopefully fire would obliterate evidence of their deception, but this was a clue that, to a discerning eye, might spark suspicion.

They ran to the river and splashed through the hundred yards of reedy marsh to the barge. They would wait for the others to return.

The boys were taken to makeshift but comfortable beds that had been readied for them. Bessie, tears coursing down her cheeks, silently held the comatose Edward’s hand, and Nell sat with Dickon tucked under her arm, rocking him gently, letting him babble, only occasionally whispering comfortable words in his ear.

It was taking too long for Brampton’s men to return, Nell thought.

Perhaps the steward had betrayed them. Perhaps even now Reggie Bray was setting the dogs on them. Yet no one said a word.

Only the river rushing by and the sung words of Dickon’s mad ditties unlaced the silence.

“Look.” It was John, and he was pointing in the direction of Barkley Manor. An orange glow could be seen above the trees.

An explosion rocked the night and a flame—one that had to be a hundred feet high—shot skyward.

A moment later they heard splashing in the reeds. One of Brampton’s men, smelling of pitch and smoke, climbed aboard.

When he’d caught his breath he told of the steward’s energetic assistance. He had considered setting the house ablaze and leaving 
the cook inside to burn alive—“a fitting end for so vile a creature as she,” he’d said. Finally the steward relented, worrying that to his considerable sins, for which he expected to suffer great tor-ments, would be added murder. He instructed Brampton’s men as to which chambers upstairs to first set ablaze, leaving him time to fetch the cook and himself to safety, and give the men opportunity to escape unseen by her.

Quickly ascending the central stairs, one had taken the east wing and the other the west wing of the manor to douse it with pitch and oil, and decided to make their way back to the barge separately.

By the time Brampton’s man had done his job above and below and was running from the front door, he could hear the cook shrieking with terror. She and the steward descended the stairs, he shouting at her to unhand him, that they would better escape each on their own two feet.

By the time Brampton’s man had turned the corner, heading for the river, the house was a raging inferno, flames shooting out windows, the half-timbered walls and chimneys beginning to crumble. He worried that his cousin was not yet back, and requested to return to find him. But a moment later the same splashing was heard in the reeds and the second panting and exhausted fire-starter was hauled aboard. His long hair, eyebrows, and lashes were altogether singed from his body, and his hands were badly burned, his face beginning to blister.

Agonized with pain, he was yet eager to make his report.

He’d been forced to delay coming down the stairs until the cook and steward had escaped. By the time it was safe, the staircase was littered with fallen hangings and portraits. He ran up again to find a long-enough staff to clear the steps, as he and his cousin had set fire to all the others in the house. He’d only 
been able to find a broom, the straw already ablaze. He’d stomped it out and, returning to the stairs, used the broom handle to push debris out of his path. Halfway down, a large burning tapestry had fallen on his head. He’d managed to push it off him, but this was how he’d received his wounds and lost his hair.

His listeners bade him lie down and allow his burns to be tended, but there was more to report, he said. As planned, the steward was keeping the cook from facing the door from which Brampton’s men were to escape the house. But as he emerged, a lone man on horseback galloped up and began shouting at the steward. Hiding behind a pillar and wishing desperately to be gone, but worried that he would be spotted and the whole operation exposed, he stayed, trying to get the steward’s attention, but avoiding the cook and the man who’d just ridden in.

The rider was angrily demanding an explanation for the fire, and the steward bravely took responsibility, saying that he’d gone to the kitchen for something to soothe a bellyache, and had accidentally set some cooking oill on fire, cooking oil, he said with some glee, that the slovenly cook had let spill all over the floor. The fire had spread with amazing swiftness. He’d just been able to save “the old bat” when the rider arrived, but there’d been no time, he added pointedly, to get to the basement.

Just then the steward had spotted Brampton’s man peeking out from behind the pillar and skillfully turned the rider away from the house for the moment needed for the fire-starter to make a run for it.

“I’ll see to it that the steward is well taken care of,” said Brampton, leading his brave servant to a makeshift bed that his 
cousin had made for him next to the princes. “He’ll no doubt be terminated from Lady Margaret’s service.”

“I should think we will all be terminated from her service,” said Nell, “if she is to be arrested for treason. I, for one, will be most happy to be gone from the woman’s presence.”

With a modicum of peace restored to the rescuers and rescued, Bessie had taken a place between her brothers—both of them now asleep—to keep vigil. Nell came and sat beside her on the deck.

There was a silence between them, rare for two girls who, in each other’s company, were never short of conversation. Bessie thought Nell had the strangest look on her face. Shy, shamed, and proud.

“Can you forgive me?” Nell finally said.

“For refusing to believe my uncle Richard innocent? For believing my brothers dead?” Bessie smiled at her friend. “Had I been you, I would not have believed me either. All that I held was illogical in the extreme. ’Twas only what my heart was telling me. And for all my surety in Richard’s innocence, I would not in a thousand years have guessed the true villain was Margaret Beaufort.” She took Nell’s hand in hers and kissed it.

“So yes, friend, I most assuredly forgive you. And I thank you with all my heart. My mother thanks you. England thanks you.”

“The Fates had a hand in it too,” said Nell. “The storm. John the driver stopping us for the night at Barkley.” She paused, tears welling in her eyes. “A dream that woke me.”

“Your father’s plan was brilliant,” said Bessie. “Rose and Lily.
 
Your intelligence ‘web.’ Jan de Worde. Master Brampton.

These two brave cousins. And my aunt Maggie, of course.”

“Is that where Edward and Dickon will go? To Burgundy?”

“ ’Tis unclear. For now, they will be taken to her London house on the river. When they’re well enough, they’ll be smuggled out of England. More than that I do not know. But they are alive, Nell. Kings or no, they’ll grow up to be men. You should be very, very proud.”

“What about your part in it?” Nell insisted. “ ’Tis not every princess that will trade places with a whore, put on a pair of breeches, and set fire to cadavers and a wicked woman’s manor house to save her brothers.”

Bessie considered Nell’s words carefully, as though for the first time. Indeed, since Rose and Lily’s visit to the Sanctuary Tower, she’d not had a moment to spare for thought or reflection. She had not been asked, nor required, to take part in the rescue, but her fury had driven her to action. Once her mind had been set—and to the extreme displeasure of her mother—

Bessie had set out for the adventure. That her part in it had proven important and its outcome successful was, with Nell’s assurances, only now occurring to her.

She looked again at the sleeping princes. “I am proud of my myself,” she said, “but I’m prouder still to have you as my friend.”

“Look ahead!” cried the forward bargeman. “There be the lights of London!”

nd so they were,” Queen Bessie told her son. “We had Aarrived safely home, and no one was the wiser of our adventure.”

“If the little princes—my uncles—were not killed by my 
great-uncle Richard,” said Harry, “then why is it always said that they were? Why did James Tyrell confess to being King Richard’s henchman?”

“ ’Tis my guess,” said Nell, “that many of the couriers Margaret Beaufort sent out into England and abroad before Richard’s soldiers came to arrest her were meant especially to perpetuate that story. She was bound and determined to weaken and undermine her son’s rival, and what could be more damag-ing than for a man to be known as a murderer of children, indeed his own nephews?”

“Then my grandmother Margaret believed the ruse? That the two bodies found in the dungeon were Edward and Dickon?” Nell and Bessie smiled at each other.

“Well, Harry,” his mother said, “we did our job so well, and Barkley Manor burned so fiercely, that it collapsed in on itself and the Roman ruins below. There was nothing left but a pile of charred rubble. By that time Lady Margaret—”

“My grandmother!” Harry cried incredulously.

“Your grandmother had been arrested for her part in the invasion conspiracy, her titles and all her properties stripped from her. She was placed under house arrest at Woking, and all her servants were taken. By Reggie Bray’s report, the boys were surely dead, and the manor was simply plowed over. Last I heard ’twas pastureland.”

“But Grandmother was not executed, as all traitors are,” Harry reasoned.

“Do you remember,” Nell asked him, “the day she learned that her son’s invasion had failed? How she said that Lord Stanley’s loyalty to King Richard would save her?” Harry nodded eagerly.