The Queen of Last Hopes (21 page)

Was he about to kiss me? I stepped sharply back. “I must leave now.”

Somerset half suppressed a sigh. He took my arm almost roughly to guide me toward the steps, then stopped and took the cloak off his back and gently draped it over me. “Wear this. You’re shivering, your grace.”

***

The lords and I met the next morning. Hal and I sat far apart and acted so jumpy whenever we came within two feet of each other that the others must surely have thought that we were guilty of the sin we had managed not to commit—if that was indeed what we had been on the verge of doing. Was I misreading Hal’s actions, perhaps? The casual flirtations that were part of some other courts had never been a part of Henry’s, and my youth and rank had sheltered me from such attentions when I was at my father’s court. Had Somerset’s behavior been no more than the innocent gallantry of a young man toward his queen?

I had more pressing matters to occupy my mind, however, than my encounter with Hal: our course of action following our victory. My men and I decided to waste no time in marching southward to London. This time, I did not stay behind. Instead, Edward and I rode at the front of our army, flanked by the Duke of Somerset on one side and the Duke of Exeter on the other. All of the leaders, including me, wore the badge of my son the Prince of Wales: a bend of crimson and black with ostrich feathers. There were twenty thousand men with me—and with Henry in spirit, even though he was in the hands of his enemies, being marched north by them even as we were marching south.

A swarm of locusts, a band of savages, a pack of demons—those were the names that the Yorkists have used to describe the brave men who made up my army. They are said to have snatched nuns from their prayers in order to rape them and pregnant women from their childbed in order to rob them, to have slaughtered monks and priests who tried to protect their abbeys and churches and chapels. What lies the House of York tells! Of course the men helped themselves to food and drink; they had to in order to eat as they moved south in the freezing winter. But to think that I would countenance the dishonor of my sister women, or that I would dare to affront the Lord when I needed his help most, is to paint me not only as heartless but as quite stupid. If I was that, it was in showing too much mercy when—But I anticipate myself.

I slept in abbeys when I could during our march; when I could not, I slept in a tent, accompanied only by the Countess of Devon, who was my bastard cousin Marie—pregnant Katherine had stayed behind in Scotland—and a couple of servants. It hardly mattered where I lay at night: after hours in the saddle, with my face being buffeted by the winds for hours on end, I slept like the dead when I at last took to my cot.

“Your grace? Forgive us for intruding, but you must hear this.”

I blinked foggily and gathered my blankets closer around me as the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of Exeter, scarcely less presentable than I, barged into my tent just after dawn one February morning. “What is it?”

“Bad news, your grace,” said Exeter. “The Earl of March encountered the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Wiltshire in Wales, at a place called Mortimer’s Cross, and was victorious.”

“That boy?” The Earl of March, York’s heir, was not yet nineteen.

Somerset nodded grimly. “Either he’s damn lucky or damn skilled. I’d like to think it was the former, but it might be the latter. Anyway, Pembroke and Wiltshire escaped, but old Owen Tudor was executed at Hereford on March’s orders.”

I gasped. Owen Tudor had been Queen Katherine of Valois’s second husband; he was Henry’s stepfather, of whom Henry was fond. To execute him instead of simply imprisoning him could be nothing more than an act of spite directed at Henry himself. “The whoreson!”

“That’s the politest thing I can think to say about him,” said Somerset.

“Poor Tudor thought until the last moment that he would be spared, being so closely connected to the king,” Exeter added. “When they ripped off his collar to bare his neck for the ax, they said that he looked shocked. But he plucked up his spirit and said that the head that was to lie on the stock had once lain on Queen Catherine’s lap, and then he said his prayers as calmly as if he were in his own chapel. It was a gallant death.”

“And a gallant life,” I said. “How many miles did we cover yesterday?”

“Thirty or so.”

“Let us do better today, in brave Owen Tudor’s memory. Come, gentlemen. Leave so I can dress.”

***

With the shameful act of Owen Tudor’s execution spurring us on, we continued to push southward. Warwick, we heard, had stationed himself—irony of ironies—at St. Albans, while the Earl of March appeared to still be in Wales. Why he tarried there, I have no idea; perhaps Warwick in his arrogance assumed that the young earl would not be needed.

At Dunstable, we handily overcame a few hundred men who had been posted there by Warwick. Most, fortunately for their own sakes, simply ran off, terrified by our sheer numbers. Our only casualty was a fine gilt-painted swan badge that Trollope wore; during the pursuit it fell off, never to be seen again.

We rested for a couple of hours at Dunstable, then pushed on to St. Albans via the old Roman road of Watling Street, the moon lighting our way through the darkness. It was our hope to arrive by the city late at night and to take Warwick’s men by surprise at dawn. Tired as I was, I was in no danger of falling asleep: the wind biting into my cheeks and making my eyes tear kept me wide awake.

Somerset, riding beside me and clearly preoccupied with his own thoughts, roused himself to look at me as I drew my cloak closer around me in a vain attempt to warm myself. “We can get you into the litter beside the Prince of Wales, your grace,” he said in the excessively formal way we had spoken to each other since our encounter at York. “You’d be a little warmer that way.”

“I am fine,” I said, willing my teeth not to chatter.

“You look utterly frozen. I wish you had taken our advice and stayed at Dunstable.”

“But I did not want to take your advice,” I said frostily—aptly enough under the circumstances. “I told you, I want Henry to know that Edward and I are there waiting for him, and to know that we are fighting for him.”

“I would think you have proven that quite adequately.” Somerset glanced at Trollope, who was in conversation with Lord Clifford, and at Exeter, who was talking to his bastard brothers. Satisfied that he would not be overheard, he said, “Your grace, is it my folly the other night that is driving you to forsake a comfortable, safe place to stay in order to prove your devotion to your husband? For if it is, please allow me to have you escorted back to Dunstable. You are guiltless and have nothing to atone for by putting yourself at risk.”

So I had not misinterpreted Hal’s behavior. I laughed nervously. “Men, always thinking their breeches are the center of the universe! No, it is not that foolishness. I simply want to be there with my husband, as I could not be at Northampton. And if the worst happens, I want to know about it on the spot, and not be left waiting in agony a dozen miles off.”

“We’ll do our best to make sure it doesn’t come to that,” Hal said a little touchily. “But since you
are
accompanying us, really against all reason in my opinion, let me stress again that you must obey our orders. We can’t have you and the prince falling into the hands of Warwick.”

“I will not wander into the town to look at the shops or out into the field picking posies, if that is what you are worried about.”

“No. More about you picking up a sword and following us into battle. You’re tough, madam.”

“I think I can count on you without my aid for this particular battle,” I said gently, having guessed the primary reason for Hal’s preoccupation.

Somerset nodded. “Yes. I’d like to fell Warwick where he felled Father. But I’d settle for simply having him dead. And then I can stand in front of Father’s tomb at last and tell him that he has been avenged.”

He lapsed into silence again and we rode on into the night, the men around me ever alert for signs of an attack by Warwick’s men. There was no sign of them whatsoever, though our scouts had assured us that they were camped in the town and had devoted the last several days to preparing their defenses. They even had handguns, brought by some of the mercenaries Warwick had recruited in Burgundy.

And they had Henry. What if they had somehow enticed him into putting on armor and riding at their head? My men could happily fight Warwick to the death, but would they attack their anointed king? And what must Henry be thinking, to be arrayed against an army that wore the badge of his seven-year-old son?

The sighting of the dawn breaking over the River Ver, which ordinarily would have been simply a lovely sight, brought me out of my reverie. Over the bridge lay St. Albans, and it was in those city streets that the future of England might be decided. My men conferred with a forerunner for a few minutes, and then Somerset turned to me. “Your grace, you and the Prince of Wales shall stay at St. Michael’s. Remain there until you are sent for.”

His voice brooked no argument, and I made none. “God keep you and lead you to victory,” I said as a group of heavily armed men led me and Edward away. Not having a sword, I raised my fist. “For our king! For the Prince of Wales!”

“For our king! For our Prince of Wales!” The men’s cries echoed as we went our separate directions, and my eyes filled with tears as I thought of the possibility of not seeing some of them again.

The church’s priest had been informed of our coming and opened the door to us with the air of one who expected to be massacred for his pains—like everyone else in the South, I was soon to find, he had been convinced by Warwick’s fear-mongering that my army intended nothing less than the destruction of the entire region and its people. Finding that my own pillaging did not extend further than asking him for some bread and ale with which Edward and I could break our fast, he brought us the food and then went out to reconnoiter with the neighbors and, no doubt, recount his narrow escape from certain death at my hands.

There was nothing to do but to wait, my apprehension not much eased by the painting of the Last Judgment that hung inside the church. I saw with my own eyes that our vanguard had to fall back to the area surrounding the church—the Yorkists, I learned later, had gained word of our presence just in time to bring their archers into the streets—but my men soon rallied and found another gap in Warwick’s defenses to penetrate. After that I could hear only the distant sounds of battle in the center of town, near the abbey, and as the hours wore on I could not hear even that. I paced up and down outside the church, watching for our returning men, and when I grew tired from pacing, I prayed.

And then, at last, I saw several horsemen galloping toward St. Michael’s. Could it be…? “Henry!” I shouted, almost throwing myself into the horses’ path.

Henry dismounted and wrapped his arms around me as I flung myself against him. “I feel as if I were dreaming,” he said wonderingly. “I thought they had taken you away from me forever, my love.”

“No, no, they could never do that,” I said in between my sobs.

We pulled apart at last and gazed at each other. Only in the other’s eyes could either of us have been a pleasant sight. Henry looked gaunt and ten years older than when I had seen him before Northampton, and I, wearing the simplest of headdresses and dressed in a gown that was none too fresh, looked scarcely less grimy than my foot soldiers. “Is the fighting over?”

“Almost.” Henry nodded at the men, who wore Somerset’s portcullis badge. “They brought me here. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then we shan’t,” I said soothingly.

Henry turned his attention to Edward, who had been playing football with some of our men. One day, I knew, Edward would awake to the fact that his father was not quite the same as other men, but that day had not come yet. “I missed you, my son,” Henry said as they embraced. “Have you been a good boy?”

“Oh, yes!” Edward pulled back and began chattering. “We got robbed!” he announced cheerfully. “And we went to Scotland, and then we fought a battle at Wakefield, and we won! And we chopped the Duke of York’s head off, and the Earl of Salisbury’s, and the Earl of Rutland’s…”

As Edward regaled his father with our adventures, I took the opportunity to turn to Somerset’s men. “We’ve all but run them off, your grace—just mopping up now, really. The Duke of Somerset told us to seize King Henry and bring him here when the time looked right, and so we did. We captured two of the men who were holding him against us, Lord Bonville and Thomas Kyriell.”

I frowned at their names. These men had once been in Henry’s household, and had fought for him and been favored by him, but Warwick had lured them to his side the previous year with the Order of the Garter. “They should lose their heads for their disloyalty. Is Warwick taken?”

“No, but his younger brother John, Lord Montagu, has been seized. We’ve only lost one man of quality,” Somerset’s man added, anticipating my next question. “Sir John Grey fell, fighting most valiantly.”

“Sir John Grey of Groby? The one who’s married to the Duchess of Bedford’s oldest daughter?”

“I am afraid so, my lady.”

I sighed, thinking of the pretty girl who had watched the Loveday jousts, now a widow with two young sons. Then Somerset himself rode up, followed by a multitude of men. Dismounting, he knelt beside Henry. “Your grace, the victory has gone to us.”

“God be thanked,” Henry said. He raised Hal and embraced him, then beckoned the rest of the lords and knights toward him. “You have restored my son to his rightful place as my heir and protected my most gracious lady, and for that I am grateful. I should like to knight my son and to then have him knight the most deserving.”

“Your grace, I must first ask you what is to be done with our prisoners. I would ask that the life of Lord Montagu be spared and he be imprisoned, as my own younger brother is in Warwick’s custody. For the same reason I would ask that Lord Berners, as the brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury, be spared and imprisoned.”

“So be it, my lord.”