A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

by Edith Pargeter

  He had now only one comfort, but one so great and grateful that it filled his heart to the exclusion of all fear and regret. To Harry, battle was a natural state, governed by generous rules as absolute as life and death, and altogether free from malice or hatred. There they could meet without shame or constraint, and without fear of misunderstanding. To kill each other would be a minor thing, a human grief to be endured; to fail in chivalry or mutual respect would be an alienation for ever. But from that they were safe, now and always, living or dying.

  The remembered voice was always with him now, all the more clearly heard in the night’s stillness and his own loneliness, saying for him all that needed to be said: “We have both things to do that we must do. What I do, I do because I cannot do otherwise…Nothing I do can change the love and honour in which I bear you.”

  * * *

  In the first light of dawn they heard mass in the chapel, and then they mustered their men by companies, the whole unwieldy army but for a strong castle garrison, and marched them out by the barbican, the king’s sixteen thousand leading, to make a good advance to the north-east before the prince’s probing force was reported to Hotspur in his camp; then the remaining nine thousand or so, wheeling to the left in the foregate, to circle the curves of the river by the closest way, and come upon the quarry from the south-west. It was a glorious morning, the grass moist with dew, the meadow-sweet along the water-fields heady with fragrance, and such singing of birds that even the marching of an army twenty-five-thousand-strong was drowned in the ecstatic din.

  The chaplain and furnishings of the king’s chapel went with him to the fight. So did Thomas Prestbury, abbot of Shrewsbury, praying heartily for a compounded peace, and John Prophet, dean of St. Chad’s, the king’s secretary, sometime a clerk of the privy seal, and some day to be keeper of that same invaluable symbol of office. He prayed single-heartedly for his master’s victory, for he was one of those who, throughout a long life of service, never fell away from the house of Lancaster.

  Once they were well launched into that methodical advance through the summer fields of Severn, the prince set his standard well forward to be seen from afar, so that his friend, who was now formally his enemy, might be assured upon sight that the foe who came to confront him came with no deception and no unchivalrous proposals, but challenging openly to a clean collision upon the field of honour.

  He believed then that he might well be going to his death at Hotspur’s hands, and that he did not grudge. But he knew with certainty that if God designed that he should survive, it was to be king of England, both serviceable and glorious.

  * * *

  The sentries who had been posted on the most remote edge of the camp territory, still within clear sight of the town gate, and with their horses grazing close by ready for action, saw the bright, pin-cushion glitter of lances and pennants and standards burst out of the gates, and as soon as they had assured themselves of the magnitude of this exodus, mounted and rode in to the next line of outposts, to pass the word on through the perimeter of the camp to the centre, and the general himself. They lighted down again there to watch for the next sighting, and thence relayed news of the arms they first observed, chief among them those of the prince of Wales.

  Hotspur had barely walked back into the camp from the river meadows when they came running to him with the news.

  “Not Lancaster?” he said sharply.

  “No, my lord! The prince’s standard leads all. He is in command.”

  He thought for no more than seconds, braced and still.

  “Ah, no, my sweet Hal!” he said. “Not today, and not with you!” And he laughed, quite softly, and the next moment sprang into the violent life to which they were accustomed in him. “We move out! Eastwards out of reach, as far as we must, but no farther! Uncle, you know the route, get your vanguard moving. Sound the muster! Let’s have no man in doubt, and camp struck as fast as may be.” Worcester had the eastern approaches, and that way they must go to avoid being pinned down to an encounter before it suited them. “Archie, I leave you the rearguard. But hold off unless he prick you home, for I doubt this is no more than a probe to test how wide-awake we are. I’ll not touch a man of them on those terms. They must withdraw. They have nowhere to go but back into Shrewsbury. And if they quit it, by God, I’ll pick it up and be glad. I have scores to pay there, and once Owen is with us, we’ll find Lancaster wherever he may go.”

  “And if he come first to you?” said Douglas, looking back over his shoulder.

  “Then I’ll meet him the more gladly, for he’s more than I thought him.”

  And he was away at a striding run, like an athlete of eighteen, easy of breath and sure of foot, to where he had slept the night with the Welsh girl in his arms. Julian was gone, pray God, into relative safety. He never so much as glanced at the nest of grass from which he had lifted his cloak at dawn, and shaken it free from clinging seeds, for the grasses were ripe and in fruit. He was met on the spot by one of his squires with his horse ready in hand, and was in the saddle and weaving away among the scattered stations of the camp in a moment, checking on the loading here, issuing an order there, running a practised eye over all, and ending in a long ride along the southern perimeter as the whole camp broke into ordered motion. The sun was just picking out the distant points of lance and pennon, like exotic flowers flaunting out of the long grass.

  “No, not today, not if I may avoid. Two days more, and please God I shall be done with waiting. But forehead to forehead with you, my heart—no, never, God forbid!”

  * * *

  Julian watched them go, from the hatch of the loft above Walter’s holding. She saw the full light come, and the camp swarm suddenly like an ant heap disturbed, as fiercely and as purposefully. There was no disorder. Men moved as though thrust into motion by a spirit beyond their own impulses, assembling everything they had disposed about them, scouring the heath clean of their presence, cohering into their fore-ordained masses, and withdrawing from the river flats towards the east. Only the trampled and flattened grass and heather, the bruised harebells, the rutted turf, showed where they had been. They had created a desolation; but only when they were gone was it seen to be desolate. And in a few days, and especially after the first rain, the grass would have sprung upright again, the flattened heather have revived, and new flowers burst out of the earth to supply the loss. In a week no one would know there had ever been some fourteen thousand men encamped here, unless by chance he still came on the faded traces of their fires, or the trimmings of feathers where the fletchers had re-flighted arrows, or thought to wonder at the number of horse-droppings disintegrating into the turf. When they were all gone, she caught, distantly and fleetingly, the glitter of lances and banners approaching from Shrewsbury, though they did not come near, and remained for a while as a shimmer and a dazzle in the air, before they, too, moved away eastwards.

  After that, everything was quiet. She came down from her loft, and walked slowly back across the deserted fields, and through the abandoned camp, until she found the place where her bed of heather and grass was made. The cloak that had wrapped them was gone with the man who had spread it for her, the circle of the fire’s ashes was white within and black without, but not yet quite cold. There was a little clump of starry centaury flattened under the place where they had lain together. She stooped to pluck it, faintly sticky to her fingers, and fragrant, and the sun flashed a little spike of light in her eyes from the hilt of Hotspur’s sword, laid gently aside in the roots of the heather, and hidden by the clustering, wiry stems.

  She took it up in both hands and held it before her. His talisman and his luck he had called it, and summoned it to serve them as a charm in the night; and here he had let it lie forgotten in the haste of his withdrawal, leaving it to his baggage squire to gather up everything he left behind him. But God had willed rather that it should lie here until she came to find it.

  She accepted the omen with a surge of confidence and joy, for it seemed th
at after all there was a role for her, and she was permitted a share in whatever this day held for Hotspur. She had been the means of the sword’s loss, and she must be the means of its restoration.

  She turned her face to the east, towards the sun, and began to cross the deserted camp-ground, following the tracks the army had left in their withdrawal. And as she went she became aware that on her right, between her and Shrewsbury, the shimmer of lances and standards kept pace with her, step for step, all the way.

  15

  Throughout the two miles of that march they had been well aware that the force from Shrewsbury was shadowing them on a parallel course, and at some little distance behind, out of reach, and unable to reach them, but holding station there on their quarter with obstinate precision. Between them and Shrewsbury, between them and the river now, but never pressing to close the distance, though with the town as their base they travelled lighter than their opponents.

  “I mislike this,” said Worcester, in the van, and sent a squire on a fast horse far ahead even of the out-riders he already had in station. They were crossing the broad, rich, open fields of the plain, with only minor undulations to break its level, but ahead there was a low rise from which a somewhat wider view ahead might be possible. The young man spurred eagerly, overtook his fellow who scouted before them on the left flank, and the two rode on together to patrol the crest and view the ground beyond it. Worcester waved the column to a halt, and presently Hotspur rode up from the centre to join him.

  “This is not to my liking, either. They cling to us, yet not close. They have a part to play, but I think, by God, not alone.”

  The squire wheeled his horse, and came back to them at a gallop, staring consternation.

  “My lord, they’re between us and the road—the king’s whole host. Less than a mile beyond the crest! I guess at some fifteen thousand men or more. There are riders keeping liaison between them and the prince’s force…”

  Uncle and nephew looked at each other with the same thought in both minds. “He reads too fluently,” said Hotspur, without anger or resentment. “He knew how to move me out of too secure a station. If he had come himself I would have had at him there by the Severn, Owen or no Owen.”

  “So we may here,” said Worcester grimly. “So we must if we cannot reach the road. North we could turn, and still avoid, but to what end?”

  To what end indeed! I am sick at running even so far, and I’ll run no farther. Henry I wanted, and here he is before me, why should I go elsewhere? If I must fight at disadvantage, I’ll choose my ground and stake out my defences, and not be hunted in flight, like a hare. Follow on slowly, while I go and look over what choice of ground I have.”

  He spurred ahead, and before the column came up with him he had ridden the ridge from end to end. It was no more than a mole-hill in the lush green and striped gold and silver of the fields, but it afforded him all the view that was possible here, and it was enough. Deployed along the summer land, far beyond arrow range but clear and sparkling in the morning air and the early sunlight, the chivalry and men-at-arms and bowmen of the royal army barred all approaches to the roads drawing off to the north-east. The plain glittered and fluttered with their lances and standards. Between him and them there were a few scattered trees, a hamlet lying away to the left, and a shallow glint of water, three little, linked ponds in a hollow under this gradual slope, the drainage of the fields that ringed it. Along the headlands between the fields, which were large and ripening here in pied and generous crops, poppies flaunted, and the grass was high, with some scrub trees and bushes here and there. He thought coolly, we might do worse. There’s cover for archers, and rising ground, if the rise is but small, and the mud of the pools to clog the hooves of his cavalry. Having brought me here, he must attack now, he has no choice if he is to keep his face, and his face, so often bruised, is nonetheless dear to him.

  On the near side of the bowl where the ponds lay like three small mirrors, the slope carried a great field of peas, well-grown after the earlier rains, standing high and paling into ripeness. On either side of it the headlands were banked high, good barriers, and crowned here and there with bushes. He marked it, and knew that it would serve.

  He rode back the little way he had to go to meet his army, and halted them there, still out of sight of the king’s forces, though no doubt somewhere a hovering scout took note of all he did. These men who had followed him from the north or rallied to him in Cheshire had a right to know what was asked of them now, and against what odds they contended. He stood up in his stirrups and told them truth as he knew it, hurling his voice like a lance; and those within earshot passed back what he said to those who caught but the half. Never, in such a case, did the impediment in his throat dare to trip him; that same constricted instrument became a brazen trumpet.

  “Here we must let fall all thought of avoidance, and stand to meet in arms those who come against us. Even if we so wished, there is no time left us to take passage from this fight. The royal banner is there before us—we make that our aim! Stand your ground here like heroes, as I know you will, and this day shall see us the conquerors, and glorious, or delivered from the sway of this usurper if we fall. Better to die in battle for a cause we believe in, than after battle at our enemy’s pleasure. As for me, I have come this far, and now I will go on to the end, whatever that end be, and I will carry it as far as I may, God helping me. If you are with me, say it, and I’m content!”

  The roar that answered him came like a gathering wave, first from close before him, then the lingering surges from far back along the column came swooping in like the force of a driving tide, washing about him in eddy after eddy. He was never given to long talking or much ceremony in appealing to those who followed him. He sat back in the saddle, wheeled his horse, and waved them after him to the site he had chosen; and they followed him in high heart. That blithe acceptance wrung his spirit and troubled his conscience momentarily, but he had no time to indulge even that sensitivity.

  He was well aware that as soon as his foremost line rose clear of the mild curve of the crest, he was seen and his every move noted. It seemed to him that a curious, rippling shiver passed along the line of lances below, and the whole host wavered, between eagerness and tension, a few paces closer, before the ranks again halted and dressed their array. This was the strangest moment in any pitched battle, when the two armies deployed in full view of each other, achingly watched, and in this crystal air blindingly seen, but out of range of voice or arrow, like a page at exercise in front of a mirror for want of a partner. Hotspur had lived the same ghostly experience many times. This courtly, methodical, formalised preparation for execution in the sight of the condemned was more wonderful and terrible than any surprise assault. When he led his men down into the orderly husbandry of the pease-field and the headlands, the scrub bushes at the near edge of the drainage bowl, and the scattered clumps of trees at the corners of the long field, it was like a dance, elaborate, civilised and aloof.

  “Buy a little time,” counselled Worcester in his ear. “Send a pair of your squires to deliver him our manifesto in person, that he may not be able to say he never had any formal complaint or gage from you. It will hardly soften him, but it may distract others—and who knows, it may even upset his judgment and make him cast astray when it comes to the assault.”

  “Well thought of, so we will.”

  The document was, in substance, the same they had issued abroad in their journey south, with the whole catalogue of their charges against Henry furiously set forth therein. Its content the king already knew; but the manner of its wording was here particularly judged to offend and scarify, fuller of implacable anger than of grievance seeking redress. Worcester had compiled it, yet rather as looking through his nephew’s eyes. It could not have come from either of them, composing alone; but from the one striking hard for love of the other it had issued like an effusion of blood. And it spoke, for the first time openly and savagely, of murder.

  �
��Also we set, say and intend to prove, that whereas thou didst swear at that same time and place, that King Richard, our lord and thine, should reign during his life in his royal prerogative, thou didst the same our and thy lord and king traitorously, in thy castle of Pontefract, without his consent or the judgment of the lords of the realm, for fifteen days and nights, which is horrible to be heard among Christian men, by hunger, thirst and cold, cause to be slain and murdered: whereupon thou art perjured and false.”

  All the other charges against the king were there expressed just as forcibly, the levying of unlawful taxation, the manipulation of the constitution of parliament, the malignant desertion of Mortimer; but this was the kernel of all. Let it be said, formally to his face. Hotspur knew, better than any, that it contained the final rupture between them; once it was delivered, those two could not both continue to live in the realm of England. But he said, “Well thought of, so we will.”

  Two of his squires, young, trusted and well-schooled, Knayton and Salvayn, carried the cartel. They set forth round the headland, skirting the ponds, riding stirrup to stirrup at a decorous, dancing walk, to prolong the respite and make it clear to the enemy force they approached that they came as envoys, with a right to be respected. The horses and the boys who rode them were matched as if for a pageant. Hotspur watched them until they dwindled into figures in the foreground of a green, spangled tapestry. Then he turned to work.