A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

by Edith Pargeter

  So though they fought on, they fought every man in a circle, to destroy whatever foe came within reach, no longer as an army with an end in view. They fought with weapons, and hands, and teeth, but no longer with heart or mind. And when the darkness came down, and no man could distinguish friend from enemy, they broke away and took to flight. Some had kin close by who hid them and helped them away, some trusted and were betrayed, some made their own way back to the north, having discarded their arms, and came safely to bereaved Northumbria at last. They would have been secure enough as prisoners, since theirs was not a case of treason, their fealty being to their lord. But they preferred to adventure their lives still in freedom.

  As long as there was light to see by, the pursuit went on, in every corner of the field, until Henry withdrew into the town with his battered host, his silent son, his noble dead and wounded, and his prisoners. Worcester had brought his cavalry down to his nephew’s aid in time to see him die, and after that, so said those who had surrounded, disarmed and captured him, had fought like a man dazed, weighted down by the languor of dreadful dreams. Sir Richard Venables and Sir Richard Vernon had fought with their knights and pikemen until they were broken and overrun by sheer numbers. Douglas in his reckless battle fit had done great slaughter until in the failing light he chose rather to absent himself than to run, and his horse had been brought down by a wounded man-at-arms of the king’s company, and the earl himself surrounded by some half-dozen mounted knights, of whom he slew two and wounded a third before they stunned and secured him. But Douglas was not, like his friends, in peril of a charge of treason, for Douglas was a Scot in justifiable arms against the English king, and owed allegiance to none but his own king in Scotland. He was an honourable prisoner of war; at Henry’s disposal at last, over Hotspur’s dead body.

  The night came, incredibly lofty and mild and starry above, and hideous in wreckage and waste below, three miles and more of once flourishing fields trampled and harrowed and littered with dead and dying, cast weapons and bloodied armour and the rags of horses and men. A field where the past had just received another mortal blow in its drawn-out death, and the future had cast its forward shadow long and stark, the chilling image of battle after battle, treason after treason, change piled upon change, interminably reeling to and fro across the ruined crops and desolated hopes of peasant cultivators and tenant farmers, stamping their ripening peas and small human aspirations into the ground.

  With the night, after the fragments of armies had limped away into the shelter of the town, the small and secret people came out from their hiding-places, and shadows began to roam the darkness, searching among the fallen. Some stole out from the holes where outlaws and cutpurses lurk by day, to rob the dead and carry away what loot they could find, clothes, armour, weapons, rings, even an occasional wretched, wandering horse, dazed but undamaged. They said afterwards that sixteen hundred good fighting men died in that field, on both parts, and some three thousand more were left badly wounded to lie overnight, and there died even more miserably of their wounds, or at the hands of cut-throats too cautious to leave alive the helpless victims they robbed. And some of the local peasant farmers crept out to lament over the despoiling of all their year’s labour, and avenge themselves by picking up something of value from the spoilers to compensate. They, too, put a knife into a throat here and there, where they happened upon some local lordling to whom they owed a grudge. So death did as brisk a business in the night as in the day.

  And some of the silent shadows supping from corpse to corpse in the starlight had come out, from both village and town, searching for the bodies of their kinsfolk, to take them away for decent burial. The dead were so many, and scattered wantonly over so vast a ground, that it was a search that went on until morning, and found no surcease.

  Julian came out; like the other shadows, with the dusk. For a while she hovered in the clump of thorn bushes where she had waited out the day, until the confused alarms and desultory slaughters had faded into the terrible silence. Though why she should hide or take thought, who had nothing now but a life to lose, was more than she could determine. Ask for a horse, he had told her, and one shall be found for you. But she had not asked for anything, nor promised him obedience, nor gone farther from him than the closest cover she could find. If she had had any skills that could have been profitable to him she would not have withdrawn from him even so far; but she was a charge upon his mind if she stayed, and all her will had been to lift every weight from him, so this weight she had lifted in her own despite.

  Nevertheless, he was gone, he the brightness and the savour and the sense, the whole valour and value of living was gone. She came out of her thorny solitude, and at the very edge of the headland the endless dying began; for there was a leather-clad archer dangling in the branches of the best-grown thorn tree, with his bow idly swaying across his breast, and another man’s shaft through his throat. She had flattened herself in the grass all that day, like a hare in her form, beneath many such shafts flying loose at any mark. She had heard this man shifting in his prickly perch, and from the time that he had made his stealthy way to this tree, she had crept as far from him as she might without being detected, for he was the enemy. Now she looked upon him, mute and inoffensive in the faint starlight, and felt pity, for he was young and comely, and wasted like the rest, like the best.

  She did not know, as she passed him by and went down the slope of the headland into the field, that he had been Hotspur’s death before he himself died, and that this death had been his pride and hope of advancement. No one was ever going to identify, praise and reward the man who had won the battle for the king; a king he had never even seen but as a casque beneath a banner in the far distance.

  Julian had fixed her sights by headland, tree and copse before the light died in the death of all things here. She walked forward steadily, not even knowing, not even wondering, what she was going to do when she found what she was seeking. How could she get him hence? She had neither horse nor litter, no means of carrying him away. She knew only that she must find him, and do what service she might for him, if need be keep watch through the night until God saw fit to send her help in his honour, since not even God could choose but do him honour. And as she went, first walking freely, unafraid of darkness or of those who skulked in the dark, she addressed him silently, with moving lips, like a pilgrim in ecstasy advancing upon her saint:

  “My sweet lord, my loved lord, my phoenix of most worship, my prince, my companion, my most dear friend, you who did me such honour and whom I honour so much, you my life’s crown, my love’s laurel…”

  Then she came among the spoils and the spoilers, and the dead who cared for neither, and felt her way step by step, her eyes still fixed ahead to maintain her course midway between tree and copse, where she had seen that everlasting fall, and heard that terrible cry of grief. And she spoke to him no more in words, even silently, but only within, while she kept one hand ready with her dagger in it, and her eyes upon her mark, and went without fear, like a ghost who cannot be halted by mortal means.

  Distant Shrewsbury lay beyond her mark, a faint glow upon the darkness. The bells would be rung in the churches there tomorrow for this victory, the priests would offer thanks for deliverance, and yet there would be many hearts, perhaps most, that would turn in revolt to take the opposing side, and remember rather the dead man than the living, and deny a triumph to the victor, in favour of passionate lament for the vanquished. But silently, like her, in the fortress of the heart. Even those who had run wild in the town killing and despoiling the Welsh. Even they! Men are strange creatures. They spurn the careful, deserving, husbanding victors, and remember always, with epic songs and legends, the heroic dead who spent everything to buy a future, and bought instead an eternal reputation.

  She came to the place she had noted, and halted there to breathe the night, and get her bearings among so many dead. For here had been the centre of that struggle for the standard and the king. She looke
d to the right and to the left, turning her head slowly, scenting the air like an animal. Somewhere within a circle of a dozen yards from her he must be, and at this close remove she could not be unaware of him.

  Something shadowy and deformed started up before her out of the ground, and hovered, uncertain whether to menace or avoid. She tilted the long dagger in her hand, faint light flowing down it to the point, and said without fear or animosity: “Get out of my way!” and the furtive thing slid sidelong and scuttled away from her. There were dogs, too, among the discarded bodies, snuffling and licking inquisitively at blood, for it was summer, and they were well-fed, feeling no compelling hunger. To them she paid no attention, but began to search in a narrow circle about the approximate spot she had marked out as the place of her irremediable loss. And not ten yards from this centre she found him.

  He lay as he had fallen, never trampled nor troubled since, half on his back and half on his right side, his cheek against the turf, his limbs spread abroad like a man large and easy in sleep. She went on her knees beside him, cut off the shaft of the arrow close to his breast, and with careful hands began to attempt the straightening of those discarded members into the order of death, but his stiffening arms resisted her. She would have to watch with him until the rigour passed. Yet she might still do him service, in easing him of the weight of part of this harness that pinned him to the earth. She drew off, with some trouble but infinite patience, the gauntlets that cased his hands, and by touch in the darkness unfastened his plumed salade from the mentonnière of steel cupping his chin, and laid bare to the cool of the night the proud and passionate face, unmarked and unastonished, confronting death with the wide, fearless stare of a princely equal. His head yielded to her hands a little, allowing itself to be turned up to the starlight. Reverently she closed the arched eyelids, and with her fingers held them closed until they consented to this formal sleep. And finding under his side the fallen sword that had lain between them in the night, she drew it forth, and unbuckling the scabbard from his belt, restored the blade to it, and laid it like a cross along his body. Rigidly held by the chin-piece of his helm, his jaw had not fallen, and his lips were closed and calm, firmly folded for ever upon the utterance that sometimes, in most need, played him false. He had the eloquence of eternity now.

  She stooped to him gently, and kissed him upon the cold, smooth brow and the silent lips. Her mouth was on his when she heard the two voices drawing near out of the night, a mere murmur, yet not so furtive as the movements of thieves and scavengers. Silently she sank into the grass beside her lord, and for the second time lay with him in the night, her lips against his hair, her arm spread over him to hold the sword in place, and the dagger ready in her hand. She held her breath, listening, waiting for the searchers to pass by. Doubtless they had dead here, too. The voices were low, constrained and sad.

  “Somewhere here…I do remember those trees in line with the place.”

  “Here is plate-armour like his…No, this is not he. This is a Massey by his arms.”

  “Then we must be close. Sir John Massey was among the guard then, and I know he was not with us when we drew off.”

  “My lord, you’re shivering. You should not have come, hurt as you are, it’s too easy to take fever. At dawn we shall have light enough…”

  “Dawn might be too late,” said the first voice, with still, contained bitterness. “Who knows what jackals might be at him before then? And my father could change his mind and withdraw his grace as suddenly as he gave it. No, we must find him and have him away now!”

  Then she knew this one for the prince, and knew beyond doubt for whose body he was searching, and for what purpose. With his father’s leave, but expecting that leave to be as capriciously cancelled if tonight was lost. She raised her head, and saw that they had passed by at some yards’ distance, and were moving slowly away from her. Softly she rose out of the grass, and called after them clearly: “Your Grace is looking for Sir Henry Percy? You have found him. He is here.”

  To whom else could she confide him, and to whom better? Exhausted as he was, and wounded, or so this second man said, the boy had cared enough to beg respect for the dead, and come out in the night to see his rest assured. He would not baulk at having the prince for his priest.

  They had both whipped round upon her, startled, and came peering doubtfully through the dark. She stood to be examined, an unkempt country boy with a thin, beautiful face silvered into stillness under the stars. He would not know her; he had good eyes, but they were not Hotspur’s eyes. He was very young, greatly torn and troubled, and so tired and sick that he went with exaggerated care on his long legs, like a man too full of wine. No, he would not know her.

  “He is here,” she said again, faintly smiling to see them both lay hand to hilt, though both of them relaxed and loosed the grip as quickly. They looked down at the figure on the ground, blessed from the riven breast downwards by the cross of his own sword, and drew breath in a deep sigh before they looked again at her, and intently.

  “You know me?” said the prince.

  “Who does not?”

  “You have so served, so laid him? Why? For what cause?” But his voice was gentle and warm in its bewilderment.

  “Sir, for he was my lord, and I was his man, and I had good cause to love him.”

  “You do well,” he said, “and for his sake I thank you. But will you now yield him to us to care for? For this is his kinsman, Lord Furnival, and there is a chapel of his kin at Whitchurch where Sir Henry Percy can lie in peace and honour, with all the rites due him.”

  “I will,” she said, “with gratitude, for I could not get him hence alone, and I have no one to help me. But to you, your Grace, I trust him with all my heart.”

  They had horses hobbled close to the copse which had been their landmark. They took up the body between them to carry it to the place, and the sword making their task difficult, she took it and bore it after them. So it came that she was still holding it when they had swathed the dead in a cloak and bound him carefully on the back of the third horse they had brought for him, and turned, still in some awe and wonder at her composure and fearlessness in this deathly place, to say their farewell.

  “No!” she said, when the prince would have taken the sword from her. “Let me keep it for my peace through this world and into the grave.”

  “You did indeed love him,” he said slowly, and let his hand fall empty at his side. She saw him lean closer, searching her face.

  “Have you not been in his retinue in Chester or Shrewsbury once, boy? For it seems to me that I should know your face, and yet I cannot place you.”

  “You may well have seen me before, your Grace. I have been sometime in Shrewsbury.”

  “Come back there with me now,” said the prince earnestly, “and I will see you are not molested. Come into my service. There is a place near me for any man who served Sir Henry Percy faithfully, and now is left bereaved.”

  “There are many who will say yes to that, and thank your Grace, and so would I if I could. But I shall never have another lord to my life’s end.”

  He drew back from her then, not understanding, but asking no further questions. She watched him mount, and look back yet once more, one hand stretched to the bridle of the third horse.

  “God be with you, boy, wheresoever you go, and keep you from harm.”

  “And with your Grace, for this great goodness in you.” She watched them go, the three horses picking their way fastidiously until they vanished into the dark. And that was her last glimpse of the prince of Wales and of Hotspur.

  * * *

  Once in the night, wandering without purpose, almost without awareness, she drew the sword, and set the hilt between her feet and steadied the point with both hands against her breast, and so leaned, wondering why it should seem hard to do, when she felt no fear, and expected no joy. Yet she knew that she could not do it. She despised it as he would have despised it, as a trivial course in a world made for grea
t courses. Nor would she for any cause have so misused his sword.

  She was walking away from the field towards the west, turning by instinct to the river, when the first pale grey of dawn lightened the sky behind her, and after a while, for she took no account of time, she began to cast a long shadow, and realised that the sun was rising. Thus with eyes fixed on the darkened part of her spirit gliding before her, she saw it meet and blend with the darkness under a holly tree, and through this darkness a man burst suddenly to be gilded by the sun. She raised her eyes to him, and looked into the narrow, burning face and frantic sapphire eyes of Iago Vaughan.

  He had ridden without rest most of the night and all the previous day, to bring word that came too late. By the dawn of Monday the Lord Owen would be here on the border in accordance with his pledged word, only to find the battle fought and lost. Iago knew it. He had been in the town, he had seen the dead lying, he saw now this calm, chill stranger walking away from the end of her world with a sword in her hands for a remembrance of things lost. She saw the dust and weariness upon him, and the blanched intensity of his face.

  “I have been looking for you,” he said, his voice low and wary. “In Shrewsbury, and at the holding.”

  “You have found me,” she said. “And I am all you will find. He is dead.” She did not mean her father.

  “I know it.” He was gone who had linked them rather than separating them, and yet had been always immense and impenetrable between them. Armed as she was, she could have died if she had been so minded, but she had not died, and she would not die. And he could wait for his hour. “I heard it in the town. Your part is done. There is nothing now to keep you here.”

  She was studying his face with fixed, attentive eyes, as though she saw him now all the more clearly because Hotspur had commended her to him in his farewell. As the prince in his misery reached a hand rashly to every liegeman who had served Hotspur loyally, so she remembered the many journeys, the messages carried, even the music of the little harp that hung behind Iago’s shoulder. Every creature who had been in that service shared in its lustre, and confided a little of its warmth. Until he came she had been cold as death, even in the dawn.