Authors: Jennifer Blake
“A king? You mean…”
“Edward IV, he was, though he’s dead now, has been these many years. Oh, aye, and the sweet Lady Eleanor, as well. They sent her away afterward, you know. I heard it was to the convent at Norwich. Aye, and heard, too, she died there of the shame and heartbreak.” The
elderly nun’s unseeing gaze wandered to the window while her pale, bloodless fingers still turned the black beads, like some kind of flower seeds, in her hands. The soft clicking was like music in the somnolent quiet. “I sometimes wonder if she was not helped to her death.”
“Because of the marriage, you mean.” Marguerite took a slow, deep breath, aware of Oliver and Astrid exchanging a grim look behind her back.
“And the marriage lines, yes. Poor lamb, to be enticed into indiscretion with her betrothed, a man all saw as her husband, only to be put aside when Edward lusted after the Woodville woman. Secret, it was, his marriage to that witch, because he feared Lady Eleanor would cry out against it. As if she would have, ever. She’d too much pride, you know, even if her family had not received royal favor to see to it she was put away.”
Astrid, at Marguerite’s side, looked up at her with wide eyes. She doubtless remembered when much of this was brought out as Richard III became king. He had used the tale to have parliament declare Edward’s children by Elizabeth Woodville illegitimate, a first step in taking over his brother’s throne. It was not long afterward that his two young nephews, Edward’s sons, were noticed playing outside their Tower chamber a last time, and then were seen no more.
It seemed apiece with everything else that Lady Eleanor Butler had conveniently died while shut up in her convent. But it had little bearing on why Marguerite had come.
“What about the baby?” she asked, raising her voice a little to bring the nun’s thoughts back from the past. “Was it a boy? And if so, what became of him?”
“A boy child, yes, and so beautiful with soft gorse-yellow curls and blue eyes. I was there when he was born. I helped him into the world, helped him take his first breath, though I misdoubt it was a good deed.”
A frown knotted Marguerite’s forehead. “Why would you say that?”
“What? Oh, his father was there to see him born, you know. He named him Edward after himself. Then he took him away and had his mark put upon him. How the dear little mite cried, such agony it was to me to hear it. Aye, and why should he not cry when he was greeted with pain the moment he arrived in the world? And because it was his own father who ordered that great ugly burn, ordered it for his own glory.”
Oliver whispered an oath. Astrid clapped her hands to her mouth as if to stifle a cry or contain sickness.
Marguerite’s heart ached at the tale, as it had twisted with anguish for the brand burned into David’s skin. At the same time, she was gripped by febrile excitement. A mark, a burn ordered by a Plantagenet king. She had been right to follow the trail left by it. She had been right to come here.
“Edward did that?” she asked, her tongue almost too stiff to form the words. “But why? Why?”
The rosary beads moved faster, a sign of the elderly woman’s disturbance of mind. “The baby was a son, you see. Edward had married the Woodville woman by then, but she had not conceived. He thought to mark the babe so he might know him again if he had no other sons. Arrogant, selfish man, to use a child so. He was well paid that his sons born of Elizabeth Woodville did not long survive him.”
“You mean… You are thinking of the princes in the Tower?”
“Are they not in the thoughts of all who have lived through these terrible times? Pity those young boys, their lives cut short for so base a reason.” Tears rose, glimmering in the nun’s fine old eyes, pooling in her eye sockets. “What do children care for crowns? They should have been permitted to laugh and play without care. But no, that they had been born made them pawns, and so they died from the ambition of another king.”
“And the branded babe, what became of him?” Marguerite held her breath as she waited for the answer. So much depended upon it, so very much.
A fretful look came into the ancient face. She turned her head back and forth upon her thin pillow. “Ah, the poor wee thing. He was sent away after a few years, though I know not where. Some place close by the king, ’twas said, where he might be brought forth at need.”
The convent where Braesford had discovered David was a mere stone’s throw from the back gate of Westminster Palace. That was close indeed, most conveniently close.
Even as Marguerite realized it, Astrid caught her sleeve and gave it a tug. She drew her down and whispered a suggestion in her ear.
Marguerite gave a single nod and straightened again, clasping her fingers tightly together at her waist. “Mayhap you tended the burn you mentioned as it healed? You saw where it was and how it appeared, the size and shape of it?”
Sister Beatrice turned even more fretful. “’Twas the size of my palm, and large on that tiny shoulder, mon
strous raw on his sweet skin. The look of it? Some heretic’s symbol, a few circles with a straight mark under them, such as a child might draw for a tree and its trunk. I could hardly bear to look upon such a mark of the devil. Besides, only holding and walking the babe made him stop crying.”
“Dio,”
Oliver breathed. “Ah,
Dio
.”
Marguerite could only echo the sentiment. What the nun had just described was the brand on David’s shoulder. Though it might have been large once, David had grown so it was now much smaller by comparison. It was still the same, however, still exactly the same.
It also meant he was not Edward V whom everyone said had died in the Tower. He had never been that vanished boy king.
No, he was better. If Edward IV’s sons by Elizabeth Woodville were illegitimate, as claimed by his brother Richard III, then the marriage to Lady Eleanor Talbot Butler was legal and binding. The child of that marriage was his only legitimate offspring. David was, then, the true and rightful heir to the throne of England.
Marguerite cleared her throat of a sudden tightness. “I am glad, so very glad Edward’s son had someone to hold him when he cried.”
Tears glazed the milky eyes of the old nun. “Such a sweet mite, so sweet,” she said, stumbling over the words while her fingers worked feverishly at her beads. “I’ve wondered often what became of him, if he lived and where he is now. He would be a man grown, and should have been a king. My conscience smites me often that I did nothing when his father died. I should have, I know I should.”
“If Richard III had learned of the boy, he might have eliminated him as he did the others,” Marguerite said in soothing reason.
The elderly woman turned her head back and forth on the pillow. “So I tell myself, but would he? Did he take the throne from ambition to wear a crown or because he thought it right? Too late to know, too late. I let that dear child be shunted away and forgotten. Edward IV died, and his sons afterward, and that was that. The little one was robbed of his birthright because I would not speak.”
“If you had tried, you might easily have been silenced.”
“Aye, and so I let fear make me a coward. Now I will die in spite of it. We should not live our lives in fear of death, for there are things far worse.”
What was there to say to that? All Marguerite could offer for comfort was the truth. “Mayhap it makes no difference,” she said, reaching out to still the fingers turning the rosary beads, giving them a gentle squeeze. “It’s possible he would rather not be a king.”
The woman’s lips twisted a little as she managed a watery smile. “What manner of man would turn away from it? Who would not accept a crown if all he had to do was reach out his hand? No, no, I failed. The babe was a fine, braw boy, but may have been too weak to hold it. Still, he should have had his chance. Yes, he should.” She let her eyes close as if suddenly too weary to hold them open. “I have confessed my sin and done penance for it. It lies heavy in my heart still, but I am ready to go to my maker. The rest, I must leave it to you.”
Standing there, Marguerite was suddenly aware of the terrible responsibility that went with what she had just learned. People had died for such knowledge, had been killed in battle, been executed or quietly smothered in the night. If the truth had become known after Edward died, then David might easily have been among the victims, just as she had said.
He could become one still.
What would he do if presented with what she had learned here? Would he shrug it off and continue as he was, keeping to the letter of the agreement he had forged with Henry? Or would he use the forces that were even now gathering around him to strike at the man holding the crown that was his by right?
Most men would choose the latter course. And who could blame them when a kingdom with its power and riches was at stake?
Henry Tudor had won his crown in battle at Bosworth Field. He had risked everything for it, including his life, and would not give it up without a fight. To him, as a Lancastrian king, Edward IV had been a usurper who had stolen the crown from his uncle, Henry VI. Who Edward’s son might or might not be mattered little, as he had no real right to be king in Henry’s view. Such had been the reasoning behind the vicious battles of the War of the Roses, and so it remained.
What would Henry do, then, if suddenly presented with David as the rightful Plantagenet king? Would he dissolve the agreement between them, call David away from his role as a false pretender and allow him to leave the country? Or would he simply have him killed and so end the threat at the source?
What had she done? Dear God, what had she done?
Henry was not the only one who must make a life-or-death decision. She must somehow make up her mind what she was going to do now.
Should she tell David what she had discovered and leave what he would do with it to him? Or should she forget she had ever made this journey and keep the knowledge of his birth from him forever?
Should she remain loyal to Henry VII who had done so much for her and her sisters, placing the facts before him that he might act upon them as he saw fit? Or should she transfer her loyalty to David while knowing she must lose him, that if he became king he would be consumed by royal obligations, among them the need for a dynastic marriage to some foreign princess?
What choices, each more terrible than the last.
It was then, there in that nun’s small cell, that Marguerite knew she loved David beyond all reason. She knew because the dearest wish of her heart was to let this bitter cup pass her by while she made no decision at all. She longed to have everything as it was before, that she might have the joy of being near him in whatever manner honor allowed. If his being a king meant she could never again taste his kiss, feel his arms around her, watch him smile, then she wanted him to be just a man.
“Milady? Lady Marguerite?”
A shudder moved over her as she roused from her inspection of the bleak gray landscape of her heart. Turning toward Oliver, she raised her brow in inquiry.
“The old woman sleeps. What would you now?”
“Let us go back,” she said, “back to the keep.”
“And when we get there?”
“Imbecile,” Astrid said with tears in her voice. “How can she know the answer to that? Or knowing, how can she say it?”
How indeed, Marguerite asked herself. But she had the whole long ride back to make up her mind.
M
arguerite was not at the keep. She had not been there for many days.
David, receiving the news from the captain who had been left in charge of the keep’s guard, felt the blood in his veins turn to winter’s black ice.
Lady Marguerite had ridden out with a complement of men-at-arms not quite two weeks ago. No one knew her destination. None could say when she would return.
None knew if she intended to return.
David stood in the great hall with his white-faced and stoic guard captain in front of him. He removed his gauntlets with slow care and dropped them on the table beside him as he fought to restrain his temper. Unclenching his teeth, he asked the question that concerned him most.
“Who rode out with her?”
“Her little serving woman and your squire, with a complement of six men-at-arms.”
“Only six.”
“Aye, sir.”
The captain, his gaze wary, shut his lips on anything more he might have added. It was just as well, as David
might otherwise have decided to take his head off. That Oliver was with Marguerite should have allowed him to breathe again, but his Italian squire had a soft spot for the lady, as well as for her small henchwoman. He could be depended upon to trade his life for hers if need be, but he would also be a willing slave in whatever mad undertaking Marguerite required.
“No other?” David demanded. “No one was sent from the king to fetch her? No one arrived from Braesford?”
“No one, Sir David.”
“She received no noble visitor?” He scowled in sudden dread. “Lord Halliwell’s son was not here?”
“No, sir.”
David cursed under his breath, flinging away from the man. Striding away a few steps, he stopped, whipped around and came back again. “What went forward in my absence?”
“Sir?”
“What did my lady—Lady Marguerite—do in the days before she left here? Did she turn ill again? Did she embroider, walk into the countryside, ride? What?”
“She mostly penned letters, sir, and sent them far and wide.”
A tingle of foreboding prickled over his scalp. “Had she answers to these messages?”
“Aye, sir, one or two.”
When prompted, the captain expanded upon that news, saying who had been her messenger, also what the man had said in the great hall about where he had been and who he had seen. David’s heartbeat slowed as
he began to see what Marguerite might be about, but his anger burned hotter.
He had been away too long. Knowing he might be, he’d tried to guard against this pass. It had not sufficed.
His instructions for Lady Marguerite, left with Oliver, were that she was to remain near the keep, if not inside it. She had ignored that order. In willful disobedience of his provisions for her safety, she had put herself in danger.
What in the name of heaven possessed her to ride out? She had not been in any shape for it when he left. Had her wound healed in his absence, or was it still raw so it might turn putrid from the dirt of travel? What if she lost her arm? What if she died?
God in heaven.
Anything could happen to her upon the road, especially with the bands of men moving here and there, some for York, some for Lancaster, and some for no one and nothing except their personal gain, personal pleasure. It could have happened already with him none the wiser. She could be lying somewhere beaten and raped. She could be dead and the crows feasting upon her lovely brown eyes.
David’s gut twisted. He slung his head from side to side to rid his brain of the images he could not bear. The need to see her, touch her, hold her was an ache of such desperate, raking necessity that it threatened his sanity.
“Pass the order to mount up,” he said, his voice rasping in his throat.
“Sir?”
Incredulity was in the captain’s voice. His men had been riding for days, had done little else for weeks as
they gathered followers to the erstwhile cause of Edward V, or rather to Henry’s. They were tired, hungry, gritty with the dirt of the road and rank with the smells of sweat, horse, campfire smoke, bad ale, bad food and boots and mail worn too long without airing. Every mother’s son of them wanted nothing more than a bath, a hot meal and somewhere to sleep from sundown to sunrise.
David wanted the same, with the addition of Marguerite beside him.
None of it mattered.
“You heard me.” He scooped up his gauntlets, began to pull them on again. “We go!”
It was less than two hours away from the keep that the dust cloud was spied.
Topping a hill that gave a spreading view of fen and dale, they saw it floating, drifting above the winding roadway. Beneath it bobbed the moving shapes of horsemen riding hard, while behind pounded a troop twice their number, giving chase. The second mass of horsemen flashed with armor and bristled with lances.
David halted with his men behind him. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make out the figures that fled ahead of their pursuers. They leaned too low over the necks of their mounts for certain identification, but he thought one, at least, perched upon a sidesaddle.
Beside him, a man reached out to touch his arm while staring at the head of the column. “Your pennon, sir.”
His pennon?
David rode under it of course, that blue banner with its stylized circle representing a crown of leaves. He and his men carried it, but no other.
No other except, just possibly…
David shouted an order, though what it was he could not have said. He spurred into a gallop, thundering down off the hill while asking for every ounce of power his destrier yet possessed. His men drummed after him, shouting, cursing as they threw themselves into the race.
His heart battered against the wall of his chest. His skin felt on fire beneath his mail. He could hear the harsh whistle of his every breath, feel them searing his throat. The wind of his passage made his eyes water until he could barely see. And though he knew he was closing the gap between that small group ahead and his own, it seemed that the world slowed, that trees and rocky outcroppings and bracken-strewn slopes moved past at the speed of an old man hobbling.
Every leaf, every rock and wildflower was startling clear. Every hazard was seen and avoided with ease and no help from his mind. His concentration was upon the lady, his lady, Lady Marguerite who was riding toward him with her veil streaming behind her and grim purpose in her face. His lady who rode under his banner.
Another snapped order, and his column opened down the center. The men swerved wide in a double line, one half pounding along the right while the other held to the left. The oncoming troop of nine riders, two women among them, did not slacken. They plowed forward, their faces red, their mouth set in grim lines while their mounts strained, wide-eyed and splattering lather. They drew nearer, gaining, gaining, gaining.
They flashed through the middle of David’s troop with elbows flying and hooves flinging up grit. David had a glimpse of Marguerite’s pale face with
the wings of her veil flapping behind her, Oliver’s dust-mustachioed grin, Astrid’s face screwed up with terrified rage. Then they were past.
His men closed the lane behind them. Marguerite’s troop galloped on without slowing, certainly without stopping, making for the keep as if the devil himself was after them.
He would be, and soon, David swore. He would personally be on their heels.
“Halt!” he called, throwing up a hand.
His men grunted, swearing as they drew rein and clattered to a jarring stop behind him. David swung his destrier broadside to the road and drew his sword. Easing his weight in the saddle, he sat in grim anticipation. A goodly exchange of hacking, slicing combat would suit his mood exactly. He needed it, wanted it, prayed for it.
It was not to be.
The horsemen ahead slowed to a prancing walk. A distant order rang out. The column wheeled in formation and rode back the way they had come.
The need to chase after them was a roaring fire in David’s chest. He burned to know who led them, who had ordered them out and what they wanted with Lady Marguerite. He needed, still, to be rid of the rage that throbbed in his head, needed to vent it on an enemy who could fight back blow for blow.
He couldn’t ride after them. The company was as large as his own. If he should be defeated, should be killed or taken, they might yet ride down and capture Marguerite. The risk was too great.
David’s mouth set in a straight line. He wheeled his
destrier and made for the keep with his men straggling along behind him.
Marguerite was waiting for him in the great hall. He saluted her courage, but derided her common sense. Far better if she had retired to the solar, thrown off her clothing and awaited him naked in his bed. It might have at least given a different direction to his rage. To see her travel-weary and begrimed, with half a dozen men-at-arms at her back like an armed guard, only added to its burn.
“My lady,” he said as he strode toward her, sweeping off cloak and helm as he walked and sending them flying into the arms of a servant. “How kind of you to rejoin us. Of course, you almost brought half of Warbeck’s army with you, but what of it? A fast clash of arms before supper would have whetted our appetites right well.”
Her lips had curved in a smile of joyous welcome, but it faded at the harshness of his voice. Her chin came up. Shock and resentment chased the warmth from her eyes. “Warbeck’s army? Was that who they were?”
For an instant, David regretted her distress, also the loss of her smile. It couldn’t be helped. She needed to understand what was at stake.
“You didn’t tarry to be introduced? Wise, I would imagine, for I misdoubt you would have liked their manner of greeting. Too rough, by half, for a lady, though only to be expected
if you will not do as you are bid
.”
Her chin came up and gold fire flashed in the brown depths of her eyes. “Bid by whom, sir? I am not yours to command. But never mind that. I wanted to express
my gratitude for your timely arrival, and my gladness that you were not required to fight your way free after our rescue.”
“Gratitude would not have been necessary if you had remained where you belong,” he declared in grating condemnation. “This isn’t a May game, Lady Marguerite. This is bloody war, with no quarter asked or given. The men trying to ride you down weren’t about to kiss your fingertips. They would as soon tumble you in a ditch as look at you, and leave you lying there bleeding and broken. If you haven’t the wit to know it, then you need someone to command you.”
Astrid, frowning at him from where she stood half-obscured by the drape of her mistress’s cloak, stepped forward. “You forget yourself, Sir David. Milady is weary, for she has ridden far on your behalf…”
Oliver gasped, and stepped forward, pulling the serving woman against his thigh. “Astrid, my sweet little love, have done. Can you not see you’ll make matters worse, that he’s beside himself with all the horrors that could have happened to her?”
His friend and squire’s words were for him as well, David knew, but he was past heeding. They only made him turn upon the Italian.
“How could you let her go?” he demanded in growling ire. “Or if you could not stop her headstrong flight, could you not have sent word of what she was doing and where she was going so I could do it?”
Oliver laughed without mirth. “You could have tried.”
“Oliver said everything you could wish in warning,”
Marguerite declared, cutting across their exchange. “Not that it was necessary, being that I am no idiot. Some things are simply more important.”
“Are they now?” David said, his voice dropping to a softer note. “And what would they be?”
She gave him stare for stare, as proud as any princess and twice as chilly as she looked down her nose at him. “I will discuss it with you when you are in a more reasonable frame of mind,” she said with honed steel in her voice. “For now, I bid you good night.”
She was turning away. She had dismissed him and meant to leave him standing there like the near-servant he had always been in her brother-in-law’s house. She refused to see that he was past that, could not acknowledge how far he had come since the days when they had frolicked together. Faster than thought, he reached out and seized her arm, swinging her back to him.
A cry of anguish left her and she swayed toward him, all boneless grace and failing strength. The shock of what he had done, the instant recognition that his hard, calloused fingers gripped her injured arm, robbed him of agility. He let her go as if he had touched an open flame. Before he could move to catch her, she was at his feet in a travesty of a curtsy, kneeling in the spreading pool of her cloak and skirts.
“God, Marguerite, no,” he whispered.
Astrid screamed and began to beat on his hip with her small fists. David barely felt it. Nor did he feel the glares, the angry stares directed at him in the sudden silence. In some still, dark fastness of his mind, shame lashed at him, but he could no more heed it than any of the rest.
Bending with desperate strength, he slid an arm behind Marguerite’s back and one under her knees and lifted her against him. Her head fell forward to rest against his chest, and he pressed his beard-rough cheek against her forehead for a fleeting moment. Turning then, he went swiftly to the steps that led to the solar.
Somewhere behind him, a man muttered in a salacious aside. Another guffawed. David spun around, snapped an order to the captain of his guard that wiped the snide smiles from a score of faces.
The silence took on a different timbre, one freighted with the dread that underpins respect among men. In it, he turned again and climbed the stone steps with hard and steady purpose. Nor did he stop until he was in the solar with the door closed behind him.
He paused, then wavered in the middle of the cramped room. There was really only one thing to do, one place to put her down.
He didn’t want to do it. She felt so right in his arms, so soft against him, yet with innate strength that showed she was his match in all the ways that mattered. She was his match, had been in those days when she emerged from childhood, was even more so now. She was his friend, the mate to his soul, and he might have lost her.