A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

by Edith Pargeter

  Over his tensed shoulder the two elders looked at each other, and recognised each his own thought in the other’s face: It has happened, he is awake. Now it will be like holding unbroken horses. Others can note and reason, calculate and bide their time. Not this one! The only other name he knows for dissimulation is dishonour.

  “He will not touch the children,” said Worcester with considered emphasis. “There is no need, since they are in his care, as you say. And whatever fears and doubts he may have, he is not the man to take kindly to murder, or use it unless he feels himself forced.”

  “He was not such a man. He is now. Not kindly, no, that’s true, it will be utterly against his nature, but he is already twisted into conflict against his nature, the battle is lost and won. He cannot go back to the Henry I knew. And yet,” he burt out helplessly, drumming his fists down hard against the arm of his chair, “I saw Richard’s body! There was not a mark of violence on him. Not one!”

  “There are precedents,” said Northumberland, with half-contemptuous bluntness. “They showed Edward’s body, too, in my father’s time, after Berkeley. Much can be done with a body, once it ceases to make any resistance.”

  “But everything appeared as they claimed—he was whole, but emaciated—they swore he’d refused food in his despair…”

  Northumberland uttered a brief, hard bark of laughter at such innocence, and swung away impatiently to pace the room again.

  “And did you ever know Richard persist in either elation or despair for more than three days?” asked Worcester, ruefully viewing his nephew’s shocked unhappiness. “More often he scaled the one and plumbed the other in the same day. If he had resolved on death in the morning, he would have recovered hope of rescue and restoration before night. Only those very resolute in despair carry it to the death. It was another resolution, not his own, withheld food from Richard.”

  “Like Rothesay, this very spring at Falkland,” said Northumberland. “Albany was resolute, and Rothesay is dead. It’s an old way enough of getting rid of the inconvenient.”

  Hotspur looked slowly from his father’s face to his uncle’s, and back again. “You have known this all along!”

  “We knew and we know no more than you,” said his father brusquely.

  “But you believed it! While I shrugged off all the whispers. There are always whispers. No such death can ever happen without someone saying: Murder! You went into it with your eyes open.”

  “And so did you!” snapped Northumberland.

  He opened his lips to protest fiercely that it was not true, and was brought up short against the inescapable image of his own guilt. What evidence had they had, that he had not had? Of course he had heard all the rumours that passed in secret about the city and the countryside, but he had taken them for granted as inevitable in any such situation, a part of the common-place of crisis and upheaval. Because he had known Henry, or thought he knew him, as he knew his own heart. All men were fallible, that he knew, all men could, when pressed, do terrible things; yet he had believed himself capable of judging what Henry would and would not do, and never for a moment had he entertained it as a possibility that, however pressed, he would put Richard to death. Was it arrogance to make such passionate judgments, to be so sure of one’s friends as to come near to blindness? All his life he had taken men as he found them, and staked fearlessly on his estimates of them, and all his life remaining he must do the same, he could live no other way. Yet in his wrong judgments he was guilty.

  But his guilt went back still further. It had begun in very natural and not ungenerous resentment of Richard’s high-handed dealings, and hot sympathy with Henry in his unjust banishment, and even more in the expropriation of his estates, flagrant, bare-faced robbery. No doubt where the right lay in such a case. And who had been the hottest of the Percies then to ride to meet the returning duke at Doncaster, and support his claims to his own? These two had followed more prudently, weighing the consequences, perhaps even foreseeing much of what was to follow, but he had plunged into the adventure in heat, as he did everything, never looking beyond the immediate issue.

  “It is true,” he said, stricken. “I have been to blame. It is no excuse for me that I could not or would not see. I went in to it with my eyes open.”

  “And when you were in,” Northumberland pressed mercilessly, “do you think your responsibility stopped there? Whose fire was it set light to this Henry of yours, slow-burning stuff as he is, and drove him on headlong through his own rights to grasp at more, and more, until he had little choice but to grasp at the crown itself, where he had no rights? Do you think you can start a mountain sliding, and then halt it when you will?”

  “It is truth,” he said again, but more calmly now, with a grave, uncharacteristic quietness, for he had already accepted his own role and Henry’s. There was a logic in events, once they were set in motion, that had left neither of them much choice. He recalled the oath with which they had begun, at Doncaster, asserting only their just and limited demands. Had Henry been a hypocrite then, tongue in cheek? No, surely not. He had meant what he swore as fervently as had Hotspur, and they had both broke their troth. For the tide into which they had waded so singlemindedly had swept them and their oath away. He remembered the succession of parliamentary orders and contrivances to which he, like the others, had assented, every one of them whittling away a fragment of the justice of their cause, almost unnoticed, almost in innocence. But not quite! The order decreeing Richard’s perpetual imprisonment—Yes, Hal had signed that, too, Hal who had loved Richard, but as a boy of twelve, dazzled, disorientated, anxious to be loyal to his father. For Hotspur there could be no such excuse. And yet at the moment there had seemed to be no alternative. And at every succeeding moment of pressure, none. And so they were come in the end to this, to today.

  Only the death…In the death he had never believed. Richard’s despairing withdrawal had come almost as a deliverance from an intolerable situation. Now it was the rock on which he had come to wreck. For the tide no longer carried him.

  “Very well,” he said slowly, and his voice was harsh and distant, arguing, from somewhere deep within his own conscience, with the God who judged him, and wanting to evade nothing, to excuse nothing, which belonged to him by right. “I have been to blame. I did what I did, and I did wrongly. But I can go no farther along this road, now that I have seen where it leads. For my misjudgments I must answer, and I will answer, whenever account is demanded. But there are others. And now I want Edmund out of danger, and the two little boys and their sister, and by God, my own Harry, too, for through his mother he’s nearer the crown, even he, than this Bolingbroke king we’ve set up between us. I would not trust him now with any one of them. And they, at least, have done no wrong.”

  His elders exchanged glances, and as one man drew nearer to him, but with careful gentleness. Worcester took him by the shoulders, and turned him to face him.

  “Harry, it’s for their sakes that you must practise caution and pliancy and patience, all that comes hard to you. Do you not see the peril in which you place them if you make one wrong move now? For Edmund we can deal ourselves. But for him, for us, for Elizabeth and your son, and Roger’s children, everything depends on you. Unless you cover them with your compliance and moderation, they may fail into the very pit you’ve imagined for them. You must master yourself if you’re to deliver them. You must come back to court, to parliament, to your proper place, and keep your countenance and your patience. Until,” he said, very softly, “the favourable hour comes. We cannot make it overnight because you have seen visions.”

  “The favourable hour,” Hotspur repeated to himself, and the inward stare of his eyes turned outwards shrewdly enough for a moment, to consider their watchful, appraising faces. “Favourable for what enterprise? The removal of the children out of his hand?” But he knew better than that. There was that in the very tone of their approaches now that went beyond the condition of Roger’s orphaned brood.

  “
Not, perhaps, of the children,” said Worcester softly.

  “Do you think,” said Northumberland, low-voiced, “that we are any happier than you with the state of our affairs? Or England’s affairs? Or the monster we’ve created?”

  They drew in on him with careful gentleness, one from either side, not hurrying him, not even pressing upon him too fiercely what they had never even said to each other until now, scarcely even thought in any formulated terms. They were speaking to each other and to themselves as surely as to him; for if he had suddenly achieved this prodigy of recognition, then the time was come to speak, and if he had reached the point of absolute severance with the past—and for him nothing less was now possible—then it was high time to think of the future. For he was a natural force that could not be contained for long.

  “What we did we did for the best,” said his father, “but the worst has come out of it. And a situation that cannot be borne can always be changed.”

  “It would not displease us,” said Worcester, “to unking this king we made. And we have a close and recent precedent, have we not? Kings can be unmade. If Richard, with his God-given right, then why not this Bolingbroke, so lightly rooted, with so little right? He has shown us the way himself, and what has been done once can more easily be done the second time.”

  “But not yet. There’s no virtue in plunging blindly into such an enterprise. You must come back to parliament and to court, meet him halfway if he offers it, patch up this untimely quarrel…”

  He let them talk, persuasively, fervently, discovering for the first time the depth and bitterness of their resentment and disillusionment. He himself said little; his mind was on something else, something to him more immediate, while he listened and noted, missing nothing.

  By the time they left him he had grown so thoughtful, and so apparently docile, that they were encouraged to believe he had resigned himself to the necessity of dissembling, and would consent to a meeting with the king, if one were offered. They withdrew with their eyes still on him to the last, distrustful of this uncharacteristic quietness, but assured that he had given up all thought of precipitate action.

  When they were gone, he turned to what was more urgent in his eyes. There was no longer any help for Edmund in the king, no deliverance to be hoped for from him, nor any security in his vicinity even if deliverance were possible. What mattered most at this moment was that Mortimer should know how the land lay, and take thought for his own future. He was a man, what right had any other man, even one that loved him, to do his thinking for him?

  * * *

  On his knees beside his father’s chair, the prince clung to the cold, rigid hands that hardly acknowledged his touch, and argued, pleaded, reminded, cajoled, until his eyes filled with tears of pure exhaustion from so much outpouring of love where he could not be sure he felt any. Once Norbury had ventured to open the door and look into the room, and it had been the prince, not the king, who had turned fiercely and waved him away, scrambling up from his knees to secure the latch after him, before he returned to his place.

  “Father, don’t press him, wait, let him rest. You took him too fiercely on a point of honour—you know him, if he gave his word he will die before he breaks it, even for you, though for you he would do more than for any other man.” Was that even true? He could not be sure. He knew only that three times at least Hotspur had sensed some want of filial love in the son, and spoken out for the father as no other man would have done, “Is not that the best of reasons for valuing him? Do you think such a man would ever break his troth to you! What use to you is a vassal who takes back his faith upon orders? Don’t follow this quarrel, let it lie, let it sleep until it can be mended, or you will have lost the best man you have, the best you will ever have. As you know!…As you know better than any!”

  He did not know this wisdom for folly, being sure in his own mind that he mattered too little to his father, in any personal sense, to allow of any jealousy; but his fervour and praise were at once bitter and sweet.

  “Was he not one of the first to ride to join you? Did he wait then to see which way the wind of success would blow? You know he did not. He came on the instant, and he and his forces were your mainstay. And how has he failed you since? Sir, you were too hurtful pricking him so sharply on the very occasion of his greatest gift to you. Was Homildon a small thing? Had he not a right to be proud? And it is no falsehood that he needs money for his men, and ready money now, and surely he welcomed and was glad of this means to furnish it. If you must have his submission, you could have asked for it in private, man to man, and not so matched one provocation with another.”

  Try as he would, he was dismayed to find his tone veering towards blame upon the one part and excuse upon the other, and he was wise enough to know that for folly. He laid his cheek against his father’s knee, for no better reason than to hide his face a moment and draw breath, but the gesture reached a heart at which, just then, he had not even been aiming. One of the king’s hands drew itself out of the boy’s clasp and was laid, almost gingerly, upon his head. A moment it lay stiffly still, and then warmed and curved, inexpertly caressing the bright brown cap of hair. And suddenly Hal’s tears gushed over the one hand he still held.

  “The man loves you!” he sobbed, blurting out what he had always known as truth. It was not his fault that he uttered it too late for truth. “If you knew, if you knew, how he has always spoken of you to me! And not of design! He does nothing of design. He says what is on his heart. You have not a truer lover in this land than Hotspur.”

  The king’s hand, which had lain in his as inert as marble, stirred into tentative life, opened and shifted, and closed about one of the slender hands that cradled it.

  “I drew on him,” said the king’s voice, helplessly grieving. And the prisoned hand tightened and quivered, and the boy clasped it gratefully, his long lashes brushing the backs of the strong fingers with the soft, rapid friction of a butterfly’s wings.

  “He won’t hold it against you.”

  “But he defied me! He denied me!”

  “You pressed him too hard—and too rashly…”

  “How could this happen? I cannot understand! I never wanted this, I never meant this…”

  “Nor did he,” said the prince, trembling under the hand that stroked him in so moving and timorous a manner, as though nothing but Hotspur’s thunderbolt could have brought about this scene of clumsy and terrifying tenderness. “He never wanted it, either. Oh, why, why did you force it on him?”

  There again came the partisan note that he most wanted to avoid, and he wept over it like a distressed child even as he plotted his way round it like a general, and a hardened one, too. “If he had not been so dearly your friend, he would not have felt your orders as such a slight. You have hurt him as he has hurt you, and needless.”

  “It was not my intention,” said the king heavily.

  “He knows that, now he’s had time to cool. Nor was it his intent to affront you, sir, I swear it. You have driven each other, and that was wasteful.”

  He was not yet old enough and practised enough to measure the personal griefs and problems of the father who had engendered him; it would have taken a greater effrontery than he possessed, to make the leap into understanding. He experienced, but could not yet comprehend, the loneliness of the spirit that cannot express its feelings or show its affections openly; and he was moved to a compassion he did not know how to employ. He fumbled as best he could for a rational means of using it for good.

  “Let me go to him! Let me bring him to you! He’ll come for me.”

  The king heard that, and his caressing hand halted and stiffened on his son’s brown hair.

  “He knows the value you and I set on each other,” said the boy. “He would not come for an official messenger.” He was learning fast, with every breath, but the process was painful. He looked up, his face now under firm control. “Make your peace with him! You know you desire it. And so does he. Only your enemies and his r
ejoice to see you estranged, do not give them that comfort.”

  The hand lingered, inexpressibly timid and fond and irresolute. The boy held his breath.

  “Bring him,” said the king, with dread and constraint. “Ask him to come to me, of his kindness.”

  * * *

  The prince, again a prince to view, armed against any resistance, did the errand himself. He was in some embarrassment, unwilling to leave his father to other care in his absence, but even more unwilling to trust the mission to another. In the event, he closed the door very gently on the king, leaving him solitary, and himself chose a mount from the stables, saddled him, and rode to Bishopsgate Street. For tonight’s mood, thus softened and vulnerable, would not endure long, and he could not afford to lose the tide while it lasted.

  Even so, he was late. At Sir Henry Percy’s house the steward informed him that his lord had taken horse and ridden forth half an hour earlier.

  “To what destination? Did he say?”

  “No, your Grace. He left us no word, except that he said he might be away for four or five days.”

  “And he took no escort with him?” asked the prince, in consternation.

  “No, your Grace, not even a groom. His lordship rode alone.”

  To the steward it was not so strange. Hotspur rode as he pleased, and often alone. But Hal went back reluctantly and anxiously to the palace of Westminster, his hands empty, his heart uneasy, and his mouth barren of reassurance.