“My lord,” said the confessor, with silken urgency, “you will rest the better if you make an act of contrition now, and then sleep.”
He did not want to flagellate his memory, but he tried, whispering his shortcomings wearily, his eyes now upon the cross his confessor held before him, now upon the crown, now upon the young, mature, unsmiling, unfrowning, utterly detached face that regarded him across the cushion where the crown lay.
“I have sinned—in impatience, ingratitude, despondency—I have complained…”
“My liege, think on your end, and repent your share in the death of Archbishop Scrope—and your usurpation of the crown.”
“As to the first, I have already received absolution from the Holy Father himself…”
Yet he had killed an archbishop, brought him to a traitor’s death, along with other, lesser souls, for one more conspiracy only two years after Shrewsbury, one more attempt to spirit away the Mortimer children and set the elder on the throne. And absolution from the pope, though it might hold good in heaven, was distant, and York was near, and there had been miracles at Scrope’s tomb, and fingers pointed at the king who had killed a man of God. The sudden ugly rash that had broken again on his face they had called leprosy, the chastisement of God. One conspiracy after another, one rebellion after another, Scrope dead, Northumberland dead, Bardolf dead, the earl Marshal dead, Mortimer dead of a wasting sickness during the siege of Harlech—one long litany of deaths, ending now in mine! Only the old Welsh wizard, he thought, though his wife and daughters and grandchildren may be taken and his chief strongholds razed painfully one by one, still goes free and hale, and however many of his branches we lop off still he grows new. He will never die, only vanish.
“As to the second,” he said, labouring, “as to the crown, my sons will never permit me to make that restitution.” And he smiled, if that contortion of the querulous, neurotic mouth was indeed a smile, however laced with wormwood, and not a new disability of the muscles. For his face was fallen and flabby, and every movement of tongue or throat was hard exertion. He made his act of contrition patiently and humbly, and was blessed to God.
The king closed his eyes, desirous not of sleep but of respite from all company, from the exhaustion of justifying himself and the empty labour of being regal. He heard the door close softly upon John Tille, his confessor. The two of them were left together, the worn-out wreck of a man, old at forty-six, and the cold, capable, guarded young man of twenty-five, fully awake to his own powers, and well aware that for some years now the populace had looked to him as king rather than to his father. The house at Coldharbour had become a court in every sense, the order of England went better when it reverted to his hands by reason of his father’s ill-health; and his father’s recovery regularly meant the prince’s relegation to the background, a banishment jealously decreed and coldly accepted, where he amused himself after his own imperious fashion, asking no man’s leave, caring nothing for any man’s disapprobation, but always ready to emerge again when the need arose. Need? Or opportunity? Do him justice, he had never shown any sign of impatience with the long duration of his apprenticeship. Yet surely his wings were aching and his heart fretted, like a hawk mewed too long.
The king opened his eyes, and the young hazel eyes were upon him, and did not avoid. On its cushion between them the crown lay dulled in shadow. It was the 20th day of March, and a dim and dismal afternoon, on the edge of frost.
Only too clear, the tired man thought, for which of these two brows that circlet is more fitly designed. No wonder he watches it, between his moments of watching me, as a lover watches the bride.
“How can you assert any right to it,” he asked clearly, “seeing I had none?”
The prince was not disconcerted by any sudden flight of thought, now or ever. His face did not change, and his voice was mild and low. There was no way in to him, circle him as you would.
“Sir, what you took with the sword I may very well make shift to keep with the sword, and will, as long as I live.”
“I know,” said his father, “that you always desired it.”
“Yes, since I was taught that it was my inheritance.”
“As it was not mine!” said the dying man bitterly. “You think to escape with the prize and slough the guilt upon me. You think to have no blame. But in truth you will have no choice—no more than I had when first I came to it.”
He wasted his time, he knew, for he was speaking to a stern, decisive creature who found a choice everywhere, and took his course fearlessly and ruthlessly, rigid in honour but absolute of will, despising the feeble excuse that there could be any situation in which a man had no choice. Yet there can be no restoration of a crown to a deposed king, or of life to a dead man—no restoration of a dismembered and rotted body to its wholeness in a quiet grave. He knew well who the two men were who stood invisibly but implacably between his son and himself. And he knew, even as his vision began to fail and his son’s face to fade, that they were still there, watching him through those hazel eyes that burned upon him like two green flames.
“Do me this justice,” he said in a whisper, “it cannot all have been ill-done…”
It was not the sudden descent into entreaty that shook the prince out of his ten-years frost, but the unexpected echo of another voice. He leaned forward, and caught and clasped his father’s wandering hand between both his own, the first spontaneous motion of warmth, and the last. “Some of us,” said the voice in his pricked and quivering memory, “will stand in great need of advocates before we come to our life’s end. By your judgment I will gladly abide, and whatever dues you charge me with, I will pay with a good grace.” Even this one impulse of pity and affection had to be Hotspur’s gift.
He found some words of his own to say, unfamiliar, not even completely true, hard to formulate and harder to utter, and yet they eased him. For his life, too, would end some day, that was just gloriously coming to flower; and in his life, too, not all would be done well, and there would be need of advocates. Of late he had become a stranger to humility, but he rediscovered it now within his heart, and was astonished and chastened. So much so, that he sat gently cradling his father’s hand for a long time, even after he had run out of words.
Only when the silence began to seem greater than natural did he realise that the hand in his was already growing a little colder than life, and the king had ceased to breathe. And even then he remained quiet in his place until they came again to enquire, and could not for his life determine whether it was the vanquished who had spoken up for the victor, or the victor for the vanquished.
About the Author
Edith Pargeter (1913–1995) has gained worldwide praise and recognition for her historical fiction and historical mysteries, including The Brothers of Gwynedd and A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury. She also wrote several novels of crime fiction as Ellis Peters. She was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire).
Back Cover
A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury Page 37
