Fortune's Wheel Page 6

  Richard tore the letter into shreds. Soon the whole realm would know the terrible rivalry between his brothers. The King had said that he was well provided with men, and that his army was able to meet whoever challenged it. Nevertheless, Richard’s services were needed urgently: he must make for York in all haste to meet his brother. York! That was more than two hundred miles away, across the mountains. Fears for his brother’s safety made him drive his men, and himself, harder than he had ever done before in his life. Though the roads — such as they were — mostly followed the river valleys, the going was rough, and the weather worse. The snow on the mountains had not begun to melt. They rode late each night until the dark made it too dangerous, and set out in the morning just before dawn.

  By the time they crossed the Border and were travelling north across Cheshire,. Richard had heard that the King had arrived at York, and was preparing to march in pursuit of Warwick and Clarence and, if need be, to bring them to battle.

  Beyond the flat Cheshire plain, they began to climb the familiar Pennine hills and to experience familiar Pennine weather. The cold rain came down in bucketfuls, and the countryside had not yet stirred even into signs of spring. They could see some distance ahead in this bleak landscape and thus spotted a body of men on the same road, moving towards them. Not enough men for an army, perhaps, but certainly a force of alarming size.

  Richard halted. Whoever was moving a force this large was an important lord, and the fact that he was coming southwards meant that he was not going to the aid of the King. Richard suspected his identity before his drenched banners even became visible. When they did — the gold eagle’s foot, the blue and white arms with three stag’s heads — he knew that he had guessed rightly. Lord Stanley, the greatest lord in Lancashire and Cheshire, was Warwick’s brother-in-law. The only explanation of his movements must be that he had decided to join the Earl. He would have to be stopped, though God knew how, when he had ten times the men Richard had.

  Richard said to one of his older companions, ‘Will he stand and fight, and kill us all?’

  ‘From what I know of him, he won’t. Not against you, your Grace. Too wary of the trouble it might land him in if your brother the King catches up with him.’

  Richard, hoping this estimation of Lord Stanley was correct, urged his men onward. With growing dismay, he watched Stanley’s reaction to his move. The troops were being ranged up across the road in a truculent manner. The rain blew across the half mile or so between them like a flimsy barrier of collapsed cloud. Stanley must by now have realized who was approaching him. Soon, he sent forward a herald, resplendent but wet, in green. This was a remarkable showing for a mere baron.

  Richard, desperate, and ignoring the cautions spoken by his companions, went forward himself to meet Stanley’s man, wondering if the devious lord was watching him undertake foolhardy actions.

  He wasted no time in parley with the herald. ‘Go back to my lord Stanley, and tell him I’ll have a word with him, here. Tell him I act on the King’s behalf.’ He wondered whether Stanley would come alone, or if this sharp summons might bring a couple of thousand Stanley retainers thundering down upon himself.

  Lord Stanley came. Not alone, it was true, but with only two six-foot-tall men-at-arms accompanying him. As he rode, hunched up in his collar in the rain, he had the aggrieved air of a bird disturbed in its private roost.

  If he asks me what I am doing near Manchester… Richard thought, tensing himself and trying to stop shivering. He was aware that he must make an unimpressive figure, looking more like a drowned rat than anything else. Lord Stanley either had a more water-resistant cloak than he had, or had been out in the rain for a shorter time.

  ‘I go to my brother the King, my lord. I believe that you do not. Nevertheless, I wish to use this road unmolested. Will you let me pass?’

  Lord Stanley’s eyes popped. The King’s very young brother had spoken to him as if he were, well, anyone. There were ways of talking oneself out of these undesirable encounters. The peremptoriness of this youth was not at all what he liked to deal with.

  ‘I don’t know what your Grace intends to do if I will not…’ Lord Stanley began blustering. Rain was running from the brim of his hat like small waterfalls.

  ‘My lord, if you do not move your army aside within the count of ten, I shall ride straight through it.’ Richard held up his hands, ten fingers and thumbs. He clenched first one finger, then another. Lord Stanley stared, aghast. The boy had the nerve of all the devils in Hell.

  ‘I have nothing against your Grace. You cannot intend to…’

  ‘My intention is to bring the King’s rebels, whoever they are, to heel.’

  With this parting shot, Richard rode past the spluttering lord, signalling for his men to do the same. The discomfited Stanley glared in rage at being so outfaced, but made no move to oppose the young Duke. A policy of wait and see was best pursued. Warwick and Clarence were marching north, expecting Stanley to join them. But King Edward was this time acting with energy and decision against his enemies, and Lord Stanley had changed his mind about being caught in their company. Judging from the haste in which the young Constable rode to his brother, his total disregard of danger, the proper forms of address and of reasonable explanations, the King was remarkably well served.

  4

  Lucifer Unwise

  April – July 1470

  Almighty Jhesu was disobeied,

  First by Adam and Eve in paradise,

  Thurgh the fals devel to theim conveiede,

  And in hevyn by lucifer unwise,

  And in erthe bi Iudas in his false guyse.

  Have not ye now nede aboute you to loke?

  Sith God was deceyvede by wiles croke.

  …And be ye ware of the Reconsiled

  That hathe deserved to be reviled.

  George Ashby, Active Policy of a Prince (c. 1470)

  4

  ‘A four and a five!’ said Isabel triumphantly.

  The dice rattled, clicked and flipped out onto the board.

  ‘Four and three.’ At only eight moves into the game, Anne was in a position of retrenchment. She slid an ebony man on to her sister’s three-point, and another on to her own nine. While Isabel cast the next die. Anne leaned sideways to sniff at a vaseful of white narcissus. Flowers which meant the end of winter always gave her special pleasure.

  ‘You’re dreaming today, Anne,’ Isabel said, ‘I shall win.’ She piled the coins into a little stack, which collapsed. They were only allowed to play for halfpennies; Warwick did not permit his daughters to gamble, and himself never played for high stakes. The Countess rarely played at all and had never been able to master the skill of backgammon.

  As Anne tumbled the dice in the cup, the door of the room opened, the arras twitched aside and her mother came in, letting through with her a blast of cold air. Anne’s throw jerked across the board and rolled to rest against its rim.

  ‘We have just received urgent orders from your father. We must be packed and ready to leave Warwick the instant he reaches here. We are going to Calais.’ The Countess was dreadfully flustered and could not meet the startled eyes of her elder daughter.

  Isabel stood up, awkwardly. ‘To Calais!’ She stared at her mother. ‘But how can I go to Calais, like this?’ This was her first pregnancy, now almost into its eighth month. She had been sitting with it wedged under the edge of the backgammon board. Now that she was upright, it stuck out alarmingly, so that she seemed to have to lean backwards to prevent herself being overweighted and falling on her nose.

  ‘How can I travel in this state?’ said Isabel again, shrilly. ‘Where’s my husband? He won’t let me go.’

  ‘He has no option,’ her mother returned, for her rather tartly. ‘The alternative is to give himself up to his brother the King and hope for mercy. You must go where your father wishes.’

  ‘Oh-h!’ Isabel burst into noisy tears.

  ‘Hush.’ Her mother enfolded her in her arms and petted her, an
d made her sit down again.

  ‘If I could,’ the Countess said helplessly, ‘I would keep you here. But sometimes women must obey their husband’s wishes, whatever the difficulties involved.’

  ‘Why?’ Isabel wailed. ‘What has happened that we are to be chased from England, when my father swore to see Clarence crowned before midsummer?’

  ‘I cannot tell you anything, except that King Edward has somehow gained an advantage. Your father’s supporters in Lincolnshire have failed him; his brother John has deserted him.

  ‘Anne, stop sitting there with eyes like saucers. Your father is coming from the north in great haste; he will be here by tomorrow.’

  Late that night, when Isabel was already in bed, and the Countess, Anne and all the women preparing to retire, the Earl came home. It was the night of the first of April but blustering and cold as if March objected to relinquishing its hold. They arrived in a squall of sheeting rain, by a moon that showed by fits and starts, as clouds raced one on each other’s heels across its face. The great courtyard of the castle was filled with sudden noise, clattering of hooves on the cobbles, grinding of wheels, dozens of men shouting all at once. Then above all the din, very near the door, came Warwick’s voice, hard and cutting as the crack of a lash, ordering his men to dry and rest first the horses, then themselves, and to be ready to be on the road again at first light.

  Anne managed to catch a glimpse of her father as he came into the bright light within doors. She had seen him come home in anger and adversity a good many times recently but never, never, as grim as this. He came scattering rain drops from the hem of his cloak, his clothes and high boots all black and water sodden. On his face, though, the rain drops ran off as from stone. Because torchlight dappled the rain and the flecks of mud, it resembled not just stone, but the hard and impervious granite. He brushed aside his frightened wife and did not even notice Anne watching him. He could have been blind and deaf, so inflexibly was he committed to his inner purpose. He was like a man who had looked on Medusa.

  Clarence, who came in behind him, ignored by him as was everyone else, had a face like a proclamation shouted aloud. His sullen anger and high-strung fear were made entirely public. His servants and Warwick’s kept to separate groups, though they seemed to be milling about in equal numbers. Because her husband had not heeded her, the Countess seized upon her son-in-law. Given this opportunity to relate his woes, Clarence began in the manner of a river in flood.

  ‘To Calais! Tomorrow! My brother is after us! We are in flight, my lady mother, running like curs, while Edward cracks the whip!’ His voice, normally mellifluous, rose in a tottering octave like an unsound bell. ‘My wife will be in danger of her life — who has thought of that…? I am being taken to France to be the bootboy who grovels to that hellcat Margaret of Anjou, to help my father Warwick to ally with her and resurrect that raving old lunatic King Henry VI! He’s remaking a king who has been as good as dead these nine years, and destroying my inheritance. I’d sooner see my brother wearing his crown with fifty Woodvilles worshipping it, than have the resuscitated corpse of Lancaster propped in the throne!’

  ‘Stop!’ Warwick’s voice cut across Clarence’s tirade like the breaking off of an icicle. ‘May I remind you, my lord of Clarence, that your brother has proclaimed you a rebel and traitor just as he has me, and that you need me to get you out of England to save your skin. While in my house, before my wife, control your tongue!’

  The Earl had the effect upon Clarence of a tyrannical schoolmaster, though in his youth George had usually been the one to tyrannize those who taught him. He did not dare to say more.

  Anne stared at the trio of faces, her father’s more granite cold than ever, Clarence’s unhandsome with rage, her mother’s pale and shivering as a will o’ the wisp. She thought at first that Clarence had gone clean mad, then realized that her father though in full flight from England, had new plans to unseat King Edward, and that George of Clarence had no part in them. What connection these plans could have with Margaret of Anjou, the deposed Lancastrian Queen, and with France, was completely bewildering.

  A week later, on the town quay at Exeter, Anne sat amid chaos on an enormous leather coffer containing her mother’s clothes, and wished that she did not have to leave England. The servants, helped by quay labourers, were going up the gangplank at a trot, chests on shoulders, bundles on heads. There were only a few hours in which to stow the baggage on the carvel of Exeter her father had commandeered to take his family to Calais. They had fled from Warwick Castle, travelling night and day, with the King in pursuit, only four days behind them.

  In the shade of a large building which Anne knew was the customs house, from the royal arms over the door and the coming and going of many merchants and clerks, her father and Clarence stood talking to the master of the ship that they were to travel in. A very worried-looking man who was the Mayor of Exeter had joined them, together with several sea captains who would make up their fleet. The Mayor must by now have received the King’s letters naming her father a traitor and rebel, but he had not dared to keep the Earl out of the city. Being a rebel seemed to make very little difference to the way in which Warwick was welcomed in a sea port, and if it were not for all the frenzied haste and her mother’s near panic, it would have seemed like any other time they had taken ship for Calais.

  Anne now had full knowledge of her father’s plans, and the unrelenting fact that she played a part in them. She was being taken to France to be given to Queen Margaret’s son in marriage, so that her father might be reconciled with the House of Lancaster, and King Henry might be restored to his throne. It was too monstrous for her to believe. Her newly intended husband had always been referred to by her father as the Duke of Somerset’s bastard! Her father, marrying her to the French Queen’s bastard! At first she had watched him closely to see if he had gone suddenly mad. Her father, who had risked his life Heaven knew how many times for the House of York, after more than twenty years of loyalty, would embrace his deadliest enemies and kill his friends. That was what it meant now: the deaths of King Edward and his brother Richard. King Edward, whose mentor from childhood Warwick had been; Richard, who had lived with them as a son, as her brother. Richard was seventeen. She did not want to imagine his death. She could not understand how her father might live within the carcase of his old self, doing as he did. To Anne the whole business seemed so unreal. Her father’s fool got up to antics less strange.

  There was nothing real beyond Exeter quay, and the sun falling on her face. It felt warm as summer. She supposed that she might get freckles from sitting in it. Not many, just a dusting over her nose like pollen. Until forced to join in the encroaching muddle, she wanted to stay in the sun. It lulled her further into the feeling that all this was happening to someone else.

  It was the tenth of April, and the west country wallowed in spring as in a bath of warm, scented water. The town gardens were crowded with flourishing, colourful flowers, the orchards canopied with blossom of apple, pear, plum, medlar and cherry. Under the sagging, frothy branches the citizens had set out their hives, and the bees were at work everywhere, even straying down to the harbour. Anne squinted as one skimmed past the end of her nose. The quay stank of old fish baskets, tar and pumped-out bilges, with now and then a charnel reek from raw hides or wool fells. There was a ship flying pennants with the castle emblem of Castile, loading bales of Devon cloth. A crane dumped chests of something very heavy in its hold, probably tin ingots. Great earthen jars of Spanish salad oil stood awaiting collection by the Exeter grocers, side by side with hogsheads of wine, like groups of big-bellied friars. Over on the far bank of the river, repairs to the quayside were going on. The dull thudding of a beetle driving piles dominated all the other hubbub. Men were working in the water without their hose, their pink bottoms sticking up in the air. The buildings in the harbour, the warehouses, were of glowing rust-coloured stone. The colours in the west country were warm, like the climate. Anne had been surprised to see fields
so green so early in the year; in the north things never looked really green until the end of May. The pastures near Exeter were a luscious green, like brand new silk velvet, fold upon fold, a draper’s dream. The cattle were plump already; no winter-starved beasts here. In the sweeps of ploughland, in the town fields, the earth was an extraordinary colour, red as a new crock. The sprouting corn grew like cress on red-wrinkled cloth.

  A whistle shrilled nearby and Anne jumped. She would have to go on board soon. The ship, a fast low-built carvel, newly fitted out for the Earl of Warwick’s fleet, waited with furled sails, gulls perching in the rigging or diving for the rubbish the sailors slung overboard. There was a man up in the crow’s nest, shouting across to one of the other ships. A great many people all around were shouting. As if from a distance, she heard her mother calling her name, and she got dazedly to her feet.

  The carvel sailed on the outgoing tide at about four o’clock. Luckily the wind favoured them, a deceptively soft and coaxing springtime wind. As the ship left the river Exe, darkness was falling and the sun melted away in yellow lines like liquid butter into slices of grey cloud. They followed the coast down to Dartmouth, because Warwick refused to leave his ships of war that were berthed there, for King Edward to appropriate for his own use.