Authors: Meredith Whitford
‘Don’t chatter so, Dickon.’ George gave me a manly buffet on the shoulder. He was eleven now, plumper than I remembered, and his pale hair had darkened to honey-colour. ‘Welcome, Martin. My condolences on your parents’ death. I suppose you’ve heard what happened? About our father?’
I said yes, and that I was sorry, and Margaret guided me gently over to the fair lady. ‘Cousin Nan, may I present our kinsman Martin Robsart? Martin – our cousin’s wife, the Countess of Warwick.’
I bowed, murmuring the right things. Smiling, the Countess said that in fact we had met – ‘Though you won’t remember, Martin, for you were only three at the time. You have all my sympathy, my dear. Now, this is my elder daughter, Isabel, who is a year older than you and Richard. And this is Anne, our baby.’
‘I’m not a baby!’ The younger girl bounced furiously up, her stubby plaits flying. ‘I’m four, Mother, I’ll be five in summer, I’m not a baby, I can play chess and everything!’
‘Moving the pieces to make pretty patterns isn’t playing,’ George said. ‘And you’re the littlest, you are the baby. You haven’t even greeted Martin.’ With a mutinous shrug she rattled off a greeting, caught her mother’s eye and did it again properly, and this time shot me a sweet, sunny smile.
‘You’re not a baby, Anne,’ Richard said, ‘but they’ll go on calling you that because you’re the youngest. They call me the baby of the family, and it’s worse because I’ve got so many brothers and sisters. And don’t call me Dickon, George, you know I hate it. Come on, Martin, I’ll show you our room, there’s just time before supper. If you will excuse us, Mother, Madam?’ The ladies nodded. Seizing my hand, Richard raced me out and up a flight of stairs and along two galleries.
‘You’ll soon learn your way about. That’s the garde-robe, by the way. And here we are.’
The room was full of shifting light reflected up from the river. There were two beds, their woollen curtains striped in the York colours of blue and murrey. The only other furniture was a washstand and three clothes chests, one of which was placed under the windows with cushions to make a seat. A tiny sea-coal fire sulked in the hearth. (It wasn’t that the Duchess was mean with coals, but she’d grown up in the far north, at Raby, and thought anywhere south of York a paradise of Mediterranean heat. Lady Warwick must have been responsible for the warmth of the solar.)
‘That’s my bed,’ said Richard, ‘and I’ll be glad to have you to share it, I get awfully cold. George has become very grand now he’s eleven, insists on his own bed.’ He perched up on the chest under the window, wrapping his arms round his knees. I joined him. ‘I like our room being on the river side, I like to watch the boats. Look, if you lean right over and peer sideways you can see London Bridge.’
I took an unenthusiastic look, for how interesting could a bridge be? Then I was transfixed, staring with delight.
The whole world knows of the glory that is London’s bridge. Nineteen stone arches span the Thames, the greatest thirty feet high. Shops and houses crowd its length yet leave room to hold a joust, so broad is it. St Thomas’s chapel clings to one of the piers, only just above the water. I shouted aloud when I saw the drawbridge being raised to let a ship through into the Pool of London, and I nearly fell off the chest trying to watch the barges and count the ships.
Steadying me, Richard said, ‘Martin, I’m very sorry about your mother, I liked her so much. And your father. Everything’s horrible now.’
‘Yes.’ Shying away from the subject I asked him about Ludlow. ‘For we had your mother’s letter saying you were going there, then no news till my father wrote from Ireland. What happened?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we went there, summer of the year before last – often it seems no time ago, often years and years. I liked it, it’s beautiful. It was a military camp when we got there, for Father mustered his army there, the soldiers’ camp filled all the meadows around the castle. We used to watch the men drill and often I would go to watch the fletcher making arrows, and the armourer... And there were Edward and Edmund... It was a wonderful summer.’
As he turned to me I saw tears shining in his slate-blue eyes. ‘I loved Edmund. He was – was kind. Merry. Rather quiet, but fun. The day we arrived he said, “Oh, hooray, another dark one, you’re like Father and me.”’ He ran his hand through his dark reddish-brown hair. ‘It was true, Edmund and I take – took after Father. My sister Anne does too, I think, but I can’t remember her, she got married before I was born and I’ve only seen her twice.’
I had no interest in the Duchess of Exeter. ‘Remember how we used to talk about Edward? Richard, he was so kind to me and he’s as wonderful as we used to imagine.’
‘Yes, he is.’ Richard smiled, his face glowing with hero-worship. ‘That first day he lifted me up onto his shoulders, and he said, ‘How odd to have a brother one has never met.’ He and Edmund are – were both soldiers, of course, they were preparing to lead troops for Father, so they were busy, but most afternoons they gave time to me and George and Margaret. They took us riding and fishing, and taught us to shoot, to arm a knight for battle, oh, all sorts of things. And chess and tables and tennis.’ I felt a pang of envy, for this was what I had dreamed of when I heard he was going to Ludlow. ‘And most days if it was fine we’d go down by the river and Edmund and Edward told us stories or read to us from books, Chaucer and Xenophon and Caesar, or they’d tell us about battles, real ones, I mean – Henry the Fifth, and the great Edwards. My ancestors. I suppose yours all fought in those battles too. And there was this one old fellow there, Old Pete they called him, and he had fought at Agincourt!’
‘Truly?’
‘Oh yes. And he would talk to us about it. Actually, he said it rained most of the time and what he best remembered is mud. He said it’s very bad terrain for battle, around the River Somme. But he talked of the battle, and when he told us of the speech the King made his voice would change and suddenly we were listening to Henry the Fifth himself! It was wonderful.’ His voice flattened. ‘But then it all changed, of course. My uncle Salisbury was bringing his troops to my father, and the Queen sent a wing of her army to intercept him and there was a battle at Blore Heath. My uncle won, and he came on safe to Ludlow. But that made it real to me, if you understand? Seeing the wagons full of dead and injured men, hearing them... seeing my mother and Margaret help the surgeons... It’s as if it had been a game before that, and then suddenly it was real. Father and Edward and Edmund were going to have to fight and they might be killed or might come home like those wounded men in the wagons.’
As his voice died away a bell sounded distantly. On its echo a manservant bustled in with hot water and towels. ‘Supper time,’ said Richard, and we were both glad of the interruption. Feelings are hard to talk about when you’re eight.
The Earl of Warwick had arrived while we were upstairs. Warwick is very important to my story, so it is a pity I cannot now remember my first, unbiased impression of him. I suppose he dazzled me as he did most people, for although he lacked the imperious Neville height he was a stocky, well-made man, and the blue Neville eyes gleamed in a handsome face. He wore black for his father and brother, but it was elaborate, perfectly tailored black, with a quiet embroidery of pearls here and there, and jewelled spurs to his boots. He was England’s richest man, a famous sea captain, head now of the great Neville clan; authority and self-confidence shone from him. He also had the charm of all that family. Later I knew him for a man of great pride, arrogance if you like; one who could never be in the wrong. But that first time, I suppose, I took him at his own evaluation.
The Duchess must have told him about me, for he embraced me and spoke very kindly, with great tact, about my parents. He had known my mother well, he said, speaking of her as Cousin Dorothy. ‘And of course I met your father at Ludlow; a fine man from a fine family. The fact that our fathers died together for our cause makes us more than kinsmen, Martin.’ He smiled at me, and I decided I admired him almost as much as I did Edward and my father.