He turned away from the disaster and saw his nephew watching with no trace of emotion. Henry Tudor had not lost that peculiar detachment that had dismayed his uncle from their first meeting. It was not that he felt nothing, though he could be cold when he chose to be. To Jasper’s eye, it was more that the young man lacked some deep connection with other men. He was subtly different from them, though he had learned to hide that difference wondrous well. In all the usual patterns of life, a stranger could not have told Henry from any other young knight or lord. Yet there were times when he was not completely sure how a man might be expected to act, times when he looked completely lost.
He did so then, staring blank-faced as one ship mounted another in terrifying union and both were torn open and went down. Heads bobbed on the water and some of the men waved, though there was no hope for them. God only knew where the coast lay, even for those few who could swim. They would be as likely to head out into the North Sea
as towards any hope of shelter. There was no chance of rescue. The rest of the fleet were too intent on their own survival even to think of anyone else. Each ship had nailed wooden battens on to their hatches, preventing the breaking waves from filling the hold and dragging them all to the bottom.
For those in the water, the cold would reach into them soon enough. Either that or they would be killed by the sheer battering of waves rising and falling like ships themselves, such leviathans as to make all men no more than broken reeds and flotsam.
Jasper saw the captain yelling new orders and two of his sailors leaning their weight on to the steering bars, calling more over to fight the waves. On one side of the ship, crewmen heaved on a rope to turn the yard above. More men waited there, clinging on for their lives in the gale that plucked at them or froze them where they gripped on.
‘We’re going back!’ Jasper shouted to his nephew. He was only surprised they had gone as far as they had. The storm had come up so quickly it had smashed their fleet in all directions, racing in from the east as if it had funnelled and increased its speed all the way along the Channel coasts. Jasper only hoped they could limp to the French ports. He dreaded what he would see. King Louis had given them eighteen ships and twelve hundred men. The intention had been to land in Wales and join Buckingham’s rebellion. Jasper could only shake his head in frustration. The storm even seemed to be lessening, so he could hear the sailors above yelling to each other over the wind’s howl and the crack and slap of wet ropes against wood. It was as if they had been driven off and the storm would ease with each mile further away from the coast of Wales.
‘We’re going back to France,’ Jasper said again. ‘The storm was … well, we could not anchor or find our safe harbour,
not in this. Is it easing, do you think?’ He closed his eyes and touched a cross hanging at his throat, praying for all the crews and ships that had dared the open sea in the season of storms. For those on land, he imagined it had meant a downpour, perhaps a few tiles dislodged from their roofs. Out on the grey deep, it had been one of the most frightening experiences of his life.
‘When can we try again?’ Henry shouted in his ear. Jasper Tudor looked at the younger man, knowing he was as intelligent as anyone he had met, but still at times, so cold as to appear unbearably cruel. Jasper was exhausted and half frozen. He had seen hundreds of men drown and for all he knew, theirs was the last bark afloat on that hissing, spiteful sea. He could not think of trying again, or even if King Louis would replace all the ships and men they had lost and think it worth the cost. Yet his nephew stared at him, waiting for an answer.
‘Soon, Harry,’ his uncle said, giving up in exasperation. ‘Let’s get back to land first and then we’ll see. Not today.’
‘Be of good cheer, Uncle,’ Henry said, smiling at him. ‘We are alive – and we are the last of Lancaster. We should show a brave face to the storm, I think.’
Jasper wiped seawater from his wide eyes and his hair, where it streamed still.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ll do my best.’
In the marketplace at Salisbury, Richard looked in distaste at the young fool who had brought himself to such a point. The block lay waiting, and the executioner stood ready with a wide axe. Though the sun was barely above the eastern hills, the town had turned out to witness the death of a duke. They stood in wide-eyed fascination, watching and listening to every aspect.
Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, was still Richard’s Constable of England, a man trusted with great power – and the authority to command others to come to a field of battle. Many in that crowd would take a small satisfaction from seeing a man of such estate brought low. It showed that the law applied to all, to the sheriffs and the mayors and the aldermen as well as poor and common folk brought before the king’s judges.
King Richard stood on one side of the market square, watching the proceedings. Young Buckingham had squandered his trust, and yet there was something unbearably foolish about his pitiful rebellion. Richard sighed to himself and rubbed the stubble along his jaw. His back was hurting once again. There was no help for it. Buckingham would not grow old and wise to regret his youthful foolishness. There would be no second chance for him.
Richard made his voice ring across the square.
‘It is my belief, my lord Buckingham, that you are Bishop Morton’s fool, more than the author of your own destruction. I have reports of him – and of ships sighted from the coast and forced to turn back. Your patrons will not escape my hunters, my lord, be sure of it. Yet I must punish you for your treason. You have cost me more than …’ He forced himself to stop, rather than begin to complain. The duke regarded him with an intent expression, not yet hopeless in his bonds.
‘If you truly believe that, Your Highness, then please, forgive me. Mercy is in your gift. Say one word and this fellow will cut these ropes and set me free. I would live to serve you once more.’
‘I know, my lord. What you say is true. I choose not to set a traitor free. You chose this fate when you took arms against your king. Gentlemen, carry on.’
Buckingham struggled, but he was lowered on to the block by two strong men who then stood back to give the axeman room. He was a local man, sweating with the need to make a perfect blow while everyone he knew looked on. He cut a huge arc in the air and Buckingham gave a groan of fear that ended in an instant, leaving silence behind it.
Middleham Castle had been Earl Warwick’s home, and his father’s before that. It had been the very hearthstone of the Neville clan. That was part of the reason Richard had made it his own, when his brother George could no longer make a claim. He had spent years of his own youth at Middleham and it had many happy memories for him. His son had been born there, when his marriage had been happier and full of laughter. Further north than the city of York, it was true that Middleham was a bleak place in winter, but when spring returned, the rambling estate could be found in green fields, streams and orchards, an Eden of the dales.
He had been king almost a year, Richard thought, as he dressed himself once more. His ritual of the heated bath by the fire in the late morning had become more a part of his normal life with each passing month. He kept each step of it the same, so that he could know on the instant when something had gone awry. His back and shoulders were a mass of ridges. On damp days, he could feel the bones twisting. He woke sometimes in darkness, convinced by some spike of pain that something had broken. It passed, so that he slipped back to dozing once again, but it came more and more often.
He hissed as some ill-judged movement sent pain through his upper body to the point of making him pant. Anger helped, always, though his growling and swearing were best kept private. He was forced to show another face to the world, then kick a gauntlet across the room when he was
alone. He left the rest of his tunic fastenings untied and went out into the sun.
A suit of armour waited on his pleasure, tied and braced in leather to a pole of iron about the height of a tall man. Richard glared balefully at the thing. He practised on such a device whenever he could. Each stroke he landed sent a jolt through him, burning and stabbing at his spine and shoulders. Yet he needed the strength it lent him, when the sweat had dried and his servants had oiled his muscles like the old senators of Rome, working back and forth with strigils of brass or ivory. He had a grip to crush another’s hand, if he chose to. He could not afford to be weak, of all men.
He stood before the armour, seeing its strengths and where to put a blade. The battlefield was the only true test, of course, where an enemy would be moving and countering. Yet it helped to know where plates were weak, where a stab might break through under a raised arm, say.
The household seneschal at Middleham said nothing as he handed over Richard’s sword, gripping the scabbard to retain it as Richard pulled the blade. The old man stood respectfully to one side then, though Richard knew he would watch every stroke.
‘Go inside, sir. I would be alone today,’ he said suddenly. The seneschal bowed and moved swiftly away so that Richard was left to turn slowly in place, looking around him at the wooden balcony above and the open square below. There were no other faces peering down, no one standing in the shadows to stare at him. He was alone and he found he could not breathe.
He tore open his tunic and dropped it almost in two halves on the ground, kicking it away. Being bare-chested usually deprived him of some feeling of support so that he could not revel in it. Yet on that day, he felt choked, confined. He
looked through the walls of the upper floor, beyond, to where his son lay still. The Prince of Wales had coughed and coughed while his lungs filled with blood and dark phlegm.
Richard turned to stare at the armour, an iron knight standing brokenly before him, mocking him. He attacked, landing blow after blow, left three times, then right three. Each one made him gasp as the pain built, but he kept on. It felt as if someone had pressed a burning brand into his bones and he welcomed it, telling himself in his stinging sweat that if he could only bear it, perhaps his son would be alive when he went back in. Perhaps the fever would have broken and the chamber pot of red urine that looked so much like a bowl of blood would have been healthy and yellow once more.
He stabbed, though the armour resisted the full range of his thrust. Once, twice, thrice, then up into a butcher’s cut, then backhand against the armoured throat. He swore under his breath as something shifted during the swing, so that the blow was an inch off as it landed. It happened at times and he could not predict the jarring clunk of his bones before it occurred. Instead of smashing through the throat, his sword skipped off the helmet, breaking the visor hinge. It would have left a man reeling with blood on his face even so, Richard thought. He was still strong, still fast.
The boy’s mother sat with little Ned in that other room, washing his son’s chest and arms. He had become so thin over the previous months. Ann had placed a bowl of water on the bedclothes and dipped a cloth into it. Richard had stood in grief as she smoothed wide circles over her son’s flesh, already growing cold under her hand.
In the yard, he began to weep as he continued his labour, spinning on his heel and crashing the blade against the other hinge, so that the helmet visor fell to the dust and left an open darkness. He stabbed into it immediately, gashing the
iron, wanting to kill, wanting the pain to end that stung his eyes and made his back such an agony he could not breathe. It had begun to feel as if one of his ribs had speared a lung, so that every breath pushed a knife deeper into him. He stopped, panting, crying, watching drops of sweat fall to the dust.
Ann hadn’t seemed to hear him when he’d tried to call her away. She’d sat like a corpse herself, about as pale as his son. His only boy, who had been the one living thing he loved in all the world. The lad whom Richard had watched as he’d swung and clambered in a willow tree, just a little distance from where he stood. It did not seem right to have such a child of laughter and noise grow cold in silence, or with just Ann’s soft coughing as she leaned over him in that room.
Ten years old was the wrong age to die. It was better when they went very young, so Richard’s mother had always said, before they were much more than a name and a squalling face. When they had years in them and memories of a thousand nights talking and carrying them around on your shoulders, well, it was a hard winter in Richard, though the spring had come outside.
He would see the boy again, he told himself. Ann would see him first though, he knew that. He had been staring at her, unsure how to deal with her grief; she would not weep and would not leave. He had seen the cloth crumpled in her hand and the great red wetness clutched within it.
He struck the throat-piece of the armour more cleanly the second time. It broke the joints and the entire helmet went whirling across the yard, bouncing and scraping until it was still. He looked up at the pole and its collection of battered bits of metal, but there was no enemy there any longer, no threat. It was just an old suit of armour and he was tired and in so much pain he wanted to cry out until he had no breath
in him. He tossed the sword away then and sank to his knees, staring at the dust.
He had thought for a time that he would ask Ann for another child, but he knew then she would not live long enough to bear one. He would be alone. His brothers were gone. He would be without a wife, without sons and daughters. He would have no one at all, with all the empty years of his rule stretching ahead of him.
After a time, as the household servants began to bustle around on the balconies, peeping over at the king who knelt motionless, Richard came to himself. He sensed their eyes on the ridges of his back and it was that which returned him to awareness. He stood and gathered up his sword, seeing how the edge had been ruined beyond the skill of any craftsman to grind out. His muscles had stiffened as he had knelt there and he grunted as he put his tunic on, though it was a more ordinary pain.
Standing, he looked up at the open windows that led through to the rooms where his son had breathed out and grown still. Richard did not need to see the boy again. He did not think he could bear it. Instead, he filled his lungs with spring air and thought of London and the laws he would pass that year. He thought of Elizabeth Woodville, who lurked even then in Sanctuary, almost as an insult to him. As if he threatened her still. What could he offer, to tempt her out of that damp little place?
It helped just a little to concentrate his energies on the statutes and laws. Men could not be free, he knew. They had to be constrained in fine nets of threads. None of it mattered much, not compared to what he had lost. He just wished his brother Edward could have been there. Edward would have understood.
Richard had not entered Sanctuary before. Archbishop Bourchier had lectured him for an age on the rules of the place, granting the blessing of the Church only when Richard allowed a man-at-arms to search him for any weapon. It was a dance, a game, and he went about it with a lighter heart than had been his more recent practice.
Richard acknowledged the monk of the doorway as he entered. The man did not introduce himself and though he bowed, he spoke not a word. Richard saw a sort of sneering spite in his expression that made him want to kick the monk ahead of him down the corridor. He recalled his brother Edward had knocked a young one out when he’d come to Sanctuary for his wife. Richard hoped it was the same fellow.
He followed, but a little too fast so that the monk had to trot to stay ahead of him and announce his presence. It was petty, but Richard enjoyed irritating those who thought they might sit in judgement upon him.
He came when he was called and swept into a finely panelled room that was much better appointed than he had been imagining. Richard had expected rough monks’ cells of stone, not a warm study with lamps and rugs and stuffed cushions on the chairs.
Elizabeth Woodville came to her feet as he entered, dropping deeply into a curtsey. He bowed in return and took her hand. He had executed her brother Lord Rivers, and he could see an awareness of that in her eyes, or so he told himself. Yet he had come to leave such things in the past, with an offer of peace between them. She had allowed him to enter, after all.
‘My lady, I came to you because your daughters must surely be stifled in this tiny place.’
‘They are comfortable enough,’ Elizabeth said warily.
‘Though they have wronged no one and deserve the freedom of their estate. Their father was king, after all.’
‘Of course,’ Richard agreed. ‘And it is my intention to bring them out into the city once more, if you will permit it. I have arranged for a fine estate to be signed over to you in retirement, with a pension of seven hundred a year. I have brought with me a document to be copied and made public – on every street corner if you wish. It holds my promise to make good matches for your daughters, for their benefit and England’s. I would bring any enmity between us to an end, my lady. Having you and your daughters in this cold place shames me.’
Elizabeth looked into the eyes of the younger man who ruled in place of her husband. Richard had overseen the passage in Parliament of a document declaring her marriage null and void, her children made bastards. She was not certain even then if it had been a lie or some old foolishness of her husband. Both were possible. Yet a day in Sanctuary was like a month in the outside world. The stillness seeped in, over time. Even the breath of fresh air Richard had brought on his clothes made her ache. He may have been the devil himself, but she was not sure – and she could not throw his offer in his face. For her daughters, she kept peace. Her girls would be found some quiet earls or barons Richard wished to please and flatter. They would be left to grow in winters and summers, to have families and find paths of their own.
It was not such a terrible vision, Elizabeth thought. Neither was the prospect of a fine country estate and a very generous sum each year to manage it. Compared to the shuffling, whispering presence of monks, it was almost a vision of heaven. Yet there was a bone in her throat that she could not shift. She saw no guilt or shame in the man facing her, but the question was there even so to choke each breath. She could not let him go without asking it.
‘And my sons?’ She cleared her throat and tried again more firmly. ‘What of them?’
‘I am sorry, my lady,’ Richard said, shaking his head. ‘I do not know for certain, though I believe it was Buckingham. He was Constable of England and always in and out of the Tower. No door could be closed to him. Perhaps he thought he served me, or Lancaster, I don’t know. I do know I failed to protect them and now my own son is in the ground.’ He broke off for a moment as his voice thickened. ‘I do not doubt they are at peace, all three of them. There is great cruelty in life, more than I ever knew when I was young.’
Elizabeth raised her hand and curled the fingers over her mouth, holding her lips and chin as her hand shook. She made no sound, but closed her eyes on tears, unsure whether it was better to know than not. For a long time, she could not speak and Richard did not disturb her. She did not sob or weep beyond the brightness under her lids. She had years ahead for that. At last, when she could trust herself to speak, she nodded to him, making her decision. She could not go back.
‘I will come out of this place, Richard, if you will have your promises read on the streets of London. I would like to see a golden harvest once more, with apples ripe on the trees. I would like to know peace, for my daughters and myself.’
‘And you deserve it and so you shall,’ Richard said, his eyes dark. ‘And I am sorry for all you have suffered. You know I speak the truth when I say I loved your husband. Edward saw the best of me and I was always true to him. Always.’
The new French king had abandoned the Tudors, Jasper was certain of it. If Louis had lived a year longer, he thought the little man would have shrugged off their losses and tried
again. Louis’s son Charles was only thirteen when his father collapsed in the middle of a great speech to his lords. The new king’s advisers were clearly of a cautious sort and would not agree to the appalling costs in men and ships and gold that they needed.
It was true the Tudors had lost half a fleet in the storm. More than six hundred French soldiers had gone to the green depths in a single night. From that moment, as King Louis’s health began to fail, Henry and his uncle had been abandoned in Brittany once more, their letters unanswered. Some ninety men of England had made their way to the city of Rennes to join them. Most were those who had escaped after Buckingham’s failed rebellion, or men and women who still hoped for some restoration of their families they could never find under York. They came for old glories and took rooms around Jasper and Henry’s modest lodgings. Whatever they had expected was not there. Instead, they found poverty and debtors gathering outside the Tudor house, waving papers for the interest they were owed.