‘I have fought in winter before, Richard. In snow,’ Edward said after a time. He raised the great mass of locks that framed his skull then, tying them into a tail with a leather thong. When he looked up once more, his eyes were clearer.
‘A trip to the privy will settle my seething guts. A few hours of hard riding will blow away these pains that make my head knock and thump. We’ll visit a few villages, you and I, yes? We’ll raise ’em up for the white rose. As they fought for me before.’
Richard saw the need for reassurance in his brother. He wanted more than anything to agree and clap him on the shoulder and ride out, but at the last moment, he found he could not.
‘Brother, Towton was not so long ago. What is it, ten years now? But thirty thousand men died. A generation lost their husbands and brothers and sons …’
‘And those who were boys of twelve then are twenty-two now – and in their prime! The land gives us crops of wheat and hops – and
men
, Brother. Never fear for that.’
Richard felt his brother’s gaze. Edward was hugely overweight and so unfit that merely mounting his warhorse could leave him gasping. The truth of it was that the king was a deeply unhappy man, his marriage cold and empty and heirless. Hunting was the only pleasure he retained. It was no accident that had him far away from Elizabeth as she approached the end of her term. The king spent hardly any time at all in her presence.
Yet in that gaze still lay the extraordinary persuasive power of him. Richard did not want to disappoint his older brother. It would somehow cause Richard pain to see the smile fade from Edward’s wide face.
He summoned his will to be cruel, to tell Edward they had no choice but to run, that they were in the wrong place, in the wrong season and that Warwick had already won … but he did not. Instead, Richard clung to the straws that won Edward all his battles. Men believed in him – and he proved them right to believe. Richard hid his fears and his dismay and he smiled tightly.
‘Very well, Edward. I will ride with you, one more time.’
The monks who kept the book and administered Sanctuary were nowhere to be seen, of course. As well as the midwife, Elizabeth herself and her mother, two other serving women scurried around the small room, warming bowls of water on a brazier that would reduce the birth cord and caul to ashes, preventing its use in dark magics.
Elizabeth was calm enough and spoke to reassure them all, even as the midwife rubbed her thighs, easing taut muscles.
‘I have borne three healthy daughters and two sons before for my first husband. I will shell another like a pea, I tell you.’ She paused, feeling the rising tension that was a spasm of birth. For a time, there was no sound in the room except the
swishing of the hands rubbing rose oil into her. The midwife said a prayer to St Margaret, patroness of childbirth. Almost shyly, the woman pressed a stone of polished red jasper into Elizabeth’s right hand. She felt the warmth of it and nodded her thanks though she could not speak.
‘I see a head,’ the serving girl said excitedly. The midwife moved her out of the way and dipped her entire hand into the jar of oil. She waited patiently for the spasm to end before reaching between Elizabeth’s legs. Elizabeth looked up at the ceiling while the older woman nodded to herself.
‘Head down, squirming. Good. The umbilicus is clear and loose. My lady, it is coming now. Push, dear. Push down as hard as you can.’
Another hour passed and the candles burned down before the child came out in a rush, red and opening its mouth to squall with no sound.
‘It is a boy, my lady!’ the midwife said. Even for one so experienced, she was delighted to bring an heir to the throne into the world – despite the odd circumstances. A husband driven into exile. The house of Lancaster calling its old claim to the throne. A boy born on sacred ground.
‘Edward! I will name him for his father. One day, he will be king,’ Elizabeth said proudly, wiping a strand of hair away from her cheek. She was panting lightly, but the relief showed even more strongly in her. Her three girls had not secured her husband’s throne. Just one son would.
The midwife bit through the cord to free the child, then licked the boy’s face clean and wrapped him in bands of clean cloth before passing him back to Elizabeth. One of the serving girls opened her chemise to reveal a full breast, the young woman’s eyes bright with tears for the baby she had lost just days before. The midwife frowned.
‘The Holy Virgin suckled her only son, my lady. You know
the Church does not approve the use of wet nurses. Perhaps as we are on consecrated land … ?’
‘No, dear,’ Elizabeth said firmly. ‘My husband is hunted, while I cannot set one foot outside these stone rooms without being made a prisoner. I have such anger in me that my milk would make the child a bloody tyrant. Let him be – and let my teats dry.’ She took the woman’s hand and passed back the stone of jasper, warmed by her skin. Elizabeth’s eyes remained on the child as he was wrapped. Her son. Edward’s son, at last.
Lincoln was a fairly bleak place to lose a crown, Richard thought. Rainwater streamed down his face, disappearing under his mail and tunic and making his cloak feel like a sheet of lead. He did not mind the actual cold, but there was something about damp that hurt his back and made rising each day even more of a misery. He had taken against Lincoln, he decided, though it could have been the company of those riding with him, with their bowed heads and air of defeat. As he rode over the crest of a field and through a small copse of oaks, each panting breath felt like warmth stolen away. Such a rise in the land thereabouts was rare enough, which was why King Edward had pointed it out and driven his ragged band towards it.
The forests and fields of Lincoln could be places of drowsy beauty. The summer was not so far back and to those who recalled long hot days, it felt as if they might see the sun once again, at any moment. Yet the rain continued and the clouds remained unbroken. Country paths once polished to hard clod by cattle became sucking quagmires, mud almost too deep for a man on foot so that he had to plunge and rear. Spots of it were flung up as they rode, until they were all as speckled as blackbird eggs – and almost as blue around the lips.
Richard could see Edward’s back hunched just ahead of him, his brother locked into place on the saddle and trotting as if he would go on for ever, making for the hilltop. Every yard of height revealed more of the land around them.
Richard smiled at the idea. A man climbed – and was rewarded with far sight. Those who refused to climb would always live in the shadow of others, and see not much at all.
He could sense his brother’s humiliation and seething anger still, in the dipped head and the glower. Edward had cast away his helmet in a temper the night before. When the king had turned his mount, Richard had nodded to a servant to fetch it for the baggage. God knew, they might need it yet.
Three days had passed since the London herald had reached the tavern by York. Each morning had begun in disappointment and seen even flickering hopes fade by the time the sun darkened the western sky once more. Richard could still hardly believe how they had been caught. His brother raged about it when he didn’t care who heard him, saying a king should not have to search his whores for knives, or his towns for traitors, or have his food tasted for poisons like some oriental khan. Richard had borne the brunt of such tirades, all the while thinking that perhaps a king should. Perhaps that was what being a king meant. At least for a king who had won his crown on the battlefield.
Richard blew his heat away in a hiss of anger that came upon him like a twitch of sore muscles. There was more than one kind of battle, that was the truth of it. The moment they realized the cause of Lancaster had gained a foothold in the towns once again, the very instant they understood a campaign had been whispered for weeks or months, they should have run to safer ground. When a king of England cannot ride into a town and gather young men to his service, it is time to collect a few bags, coins and jewels and just race for the coast.
They had found empty villages on the first morning, bringing old fears of the Black Death that had left entire communities growing grass in their corpses. Yet there were
no bodies in the ditches. Word of the royal hunt had been carried ahead and the people had just gone, slinking away into the deep woods and the high crags of the Yorkshire moors, places so dark and green they had never known the footfall of men before. Richard’s face tightened in the cold, feeling it lance into the greater cold within. A king could not rule those who refused to be ruled, that was the secret. All of it, all the sheriffs and bailiffs and judges and lords depended on quiet and enduring obedience, given in exchange for peace. He remembered the stories of Jack Cade coming into London, breaching the Tower. If the people refused to follow, there could be no king.
Of course, Edward had burned the empty villages, riding from house to house himself with a flaming brand. Some of those with him were the sort of men who delighted in destruction, like Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers. The queen’s brother had laughed to see the flames spread, the more so when cats or dogs came scrambling out with fur scorching.
On the second day, they had burned an old man alive in his house. The scrawny old devil had shown himself as they rode past, shaking a fist and cursing Edward for a Yorkist traitor. Rivers had nailed his door shut and they had waited for the old man to try and pull it open once again. The handle hadn’t even rattled as the fire spread. The ancient had sat inside without a single cry until the smoke and heat took him.
Word had gone out. From those they met who were still loyal, they heard that men had come into the villages, telling them that Lancaster would rise once more. Letters were left at night, held to the doors of courts and tally-houses by fine daggers. No one saw them placed there, or heard the hammer strike, so it was said. They told of such things almost in holy awe, as if there were dark spirits of vengeance abroad rather than just a campaign by clever men, of letters and
bribes and whispers. Each murmuring mouth, each scrawled paper said that King Henry was restored and that Edward was no more than a scabrous whoreson who could not hold what he had stolen. The lies were ugly, simple things. Richard of Gloucester sensed in them the touch of a hand he knew, at least by reputation. Derry Brewer, the Lancaster spymaster. His work.
Richard thought it no coincidence that the letters handed nervously to him were all signed ‘Reynard’. In France, the name meant a cunning little fox, who defeated far stronger animals with his wits. Over the cold salt channel between the two nations, Margaret of Anjou and King Henry had an heir, a prince over the water, even a court of sorts, all paid for by the French king, Louis, her cousin. It seemed they had not lost hope in their exile, though they had lost all else.
Edward reined in and Richard looked up once again, seeing a landscape of grey rain threads, stretching into the dim haze. There was morning mist still visible, gathered around the smoking chimneys of houses in a tiny village they could see at a junction of paths in the distance, like a crease in a withered cheek, not more than a dozen homes and a mill race on a fast-flowing stream. The white fog clung to those who lived there, while the king’s hunt looked on not a mile away, standing high on the hill and unseen. Not every peasant had run. Not every knight had turned away, in cowardice or ingratitude, from the king who had won at Towton. The royal hunt had gathered almost eight hundred fighting men to its ranks. Amongst those and giving Richard slender hope were forty archers. It was true they were men with too many years gone to their bellies instead of their arms. Still, they could all bend a bow once.
The rain began again, filling the air with wet and the noise that always made Richard think of dried peas poured on to a
tin tray. Men in armour under a downpour. Miserable, cold and hungry, he stared into the distance and decided to dismount.
The copse of oaks on the hilltop was young, the trees still slender. He could stare between them even though the leaves still hung gold and red on their boughs. No doubt they had been planted by some farmer who still thought of the pagan ways, before Christians had ever come to the tin islands bound by white cliffs. Richard blinked at the names and old books swimming into his imagination. This cold, wet land had been Cassiterides to the Greeks, Albion and Britannia to Rome. Planting trees in high places was a sign of the old ways, one that Richard recognized. He touched his forelock in respect as he swung to dismount, acknowledging the spirits of the land. He would not be proud, not now he and the king were hunted.
‘
There
, to the west,’ one of the men shouted, pointing. Richard turned to look over his left shoulder, his heart sinking. They had almost been caught on the second day, lost in their arrogance, going from village to village. He shuddered at the closeness of it and how blind he had been, blaming himself as much as his brother for leaving them so exposed.
Warwick and Derry Brewer had paid men to creep up to village halls and pin vile treasons to oaken doors, but they had also found the time to gather soldiers in the north, ready to sweep down on the king’s party. Yet King Edward had moved first, springing the trap early that would have caught him neatly between two armies.
Richard shook his head in anger. In all the mists and endless rain, they still did not know the numbers of those driving them down through the country. More than they could stop and tear into bloody rags, of a certainty. The king’s hunt could not break the noose – and every day that they moved
south brought Warwick closer, marching up the London road. It was a pincer’s grip, Richard thought, prepared by men who knew his brother’s strengths and weaknesses. No French tyrant could ever have managed it, not on English soil. That was the very heart of the simmering fury that kept Richard warm in the rain, that only English traitors could have conspired so well, with such a result. In just a few crucial days, Edward had gone from careless revelry to being driven like a stag before hounds. It was a cruel reverse.
In the distance, the fields seemed to move. Three columns of sodden soldiers trudged like spilled oil along the flat land towards them. They were two miles away at most, surely no more in the drizzle and damp. Richard wondered if those ahorse and those marching along with nodding heads would see the king’s hunt on the hill. Edward’s banners still flew: the white rose and the sun in flames, the three lions of the crown of England. His pride would not allow him to have them furled, though they hung so limp in the rain it was almost the same.
Richard did not think Edward’s followers would look too fearsome. The king’s hunt was just a smudge on a hill, stretching into a tail of weary, shivering men, sheltering from the wind behind their mounts.
‘Walk on, then,’ Edward called. ‘East again. Look to that small road there. Make for that and hope for stone and gravel over this sucking mud.’
As if in answer, the rain doubled in weight and power, forcing them to bow over their saddles while they remounted, blinded by it, drummed by it, exhausted. There was no exhilaration in having become prey.
Richard looked behind as they reached the flat ground once again, his brother’s men a bedraggled column, filing out of the field. The Earl of Worcester had fallen back, he
saw, the man so ill with fever and damp that he could not keep up with the rest. Mastiffs and greyhounds lurched along beside and amongst them, muzzled so their barking would not draw in their enemies. Richard shook his head, feeling despair grow in him. The rain had thickened the mists so that he could see no sign of their pursuers. He clenched his jaw and rode on. There were nets out for them to the north, Warwick to the south. All they could do was run east and he knew Edward would be thinking of the Norfolk ports.
The idea was shameful, that the king of England, the victor of Towton, could be made to run, to take ship. Richard considered his own future with increasing bitterness. He would not turn from his brother, that was certain. Yet it would cost him all. If Warwick restored Lancaster, the sons of York would be named traitors and attainted.
Richard shrugged under the weight of mail and his wet cloak. He had no wife or children. All his honour rode with his brother, that enormous great drunkard. Yet he would not abandon Edward, even if they had to leave the land that had fed and grown their bloodline since the oldest times. To his surprise, he found the very idea caused him pain, making his stomach clench. He did not want to be driven away from his home. It was in the bones of him.
Richard had been asleep as he rode, he realized, coming awake with a start and looking all around to see if any of the others had noticed. The rain had returned in sheets, chilling him to wakefulness. Edward still rode slightly ahead, slumped and nodding, as if he were already a prisoner. Richard frowned, wanting to call to his brother to put on a better show. He felt his anger return a little warmth to his frozen hands. Dawn was just a cruel time of day, when all flaws are revealed. With a chance to sober up and a week to send out
trusted men, Edward might have had his army. Young men hungry for advancement and glory had always sought him out – knights or lords who enjoyed having a strong king on the throne and cared nothing for the sick line of Lancaster. Yet their enemies had caught Edward in a perfect snare, snapping at his heels in such numbers that he could not gather enough men to stand his ground. Like a bear pursued by dogs, he had not been allowed a chance to rest, but had to endure the nips and lunges pressing him on through the rain.
On impulse, Richard dug in his heels, though he was numb with tiredness, his thoughts leaden. His mount had walked all night through mud and drifts of leaves in the darkness. He assumed he had dozed, but could not remember it. His back was the only hot part of him, so sharpened by lack of sleep that when the horse lurched he had to bite his lip rather than cry out.
As he came abreast of Edward, Richard reached to clap his brother on the shoulder. Edward swayed away from the touch, half aware and as pale as Richard had ever seen him. His face had been leaner once, that was true. The flesh had grown over the ten years since Towton, pink and soft like a cloak to hide the harder man he had once been.
‘They will bring me to bay, Richard,’ Edward said softly, his voice barely a breath. ‘If that is what they want. They will run me down and force me to turn and fight and there will be too many. They will force an ending on me. Perhaps you should leave. Warwick has no cause for anger with you. Let me go. Let me stand. I cannot leave England like a thief.’
Edward shook his head, lost in self-pity that was as irritating to Richard as the armies hunting them down. He clenched his jaw as the pain under his shoulder blade flared and the damned thing started to wing and press against his armour. There would be no ease for it then, he knew. It would be
weeks before he could sit comfortably once more. He ground his teeth together and found his tongue working at a small piece of one where it had broken free.