by H. M. Castor
I approach hesitantly, fidgeting with my belt-buckle, my dagger-hilt, scrunching my toes inside my shoes. The fire hisses and cracks. The figures carved on the ornate fireplace, lit from below, seem to grin demonically. My mother doesn’t move – I wonder if she is asleep.
Moving round the chair to stand before her, I see that her eyes are open, but she stirs and looks confused for a moment, as if I’ve woken her from a dream. “Mama!” I blurt. I probably look crazy – bright-eyed and barely able to stand still. “You don’t have to worry, I’ve realised what they meant!”
“What, sweetheart?” With an obvious effort, she is smiling at me, trying to look interested.
“Those prophecies from the City.” The smile is gone: my mother is instantly alert, aghast. I hurry on. “I was hiding in the room. I know I shouldn’t have been, I’m sorry – I just happened to be there. Anyway, York will be king – it’s not him, the one they call the Pretender. It’s me. Mama – aren’t I Duke of York too? Aren’t I the proper one? It’s me who will be king!”
The blow reaches me before I know what is happening. Her left hand, ringed and surprisingly heavy, slams across my face with the force of a leather strap. I find myself twisted round, looking suddenly at the floor.
There is a moment of silence.
One of the tiny claws holding the stone of her ring has caught the skin below my right eye. My fingers drift up to it, absently – I look at my hand and see blood.
The next moment she has bundled me to her. I am pressed, too hard, into her bodice, my cheek rammed against the jewelled border of her neckline, so that the stones make painful pits in my skin.
She is weeping – huge shuddering sobs. I think: I have made her weep. And she is rocking me. “Hush, hush,” she says at last, when her breathing has steadied. “Hush… hush.” But I am making no noise.
At last she puts me at arm’s length, her hands on my shoulders. Her face is blotched, her eyes puffy. “You must never say such a thing again, Hal,” she says, shaking me slightly. “Understand?”
I am the one crying now. I nod, gulping.
“Those prophecies were complete nonsense. The ravings of charlatans, agitators, enemies of the crown. They’ve been burned. Your father is king and – God willing – your brother will one day succeed him. Listen carefully.” I can’t bear the way she’s looking at me: it’s ferocious, piercing – like nothing I’ve seen before. “Never mention those prophecies to anyone. Lives depend on it. My life. Maybe yours too. This is a time of danger: rebels are approaching London; your father is leading an army to meet them; foreign rulers are trying to stir up trouble… Ridiculous prophecies are always circulated when there is unrest like this. Do you understand?”
I nod energetically, and press my knuckles against my eyes. I can’t speak.
“If ever you do mention the prophecies – to anyone – I will deny all knowledge of them. I will say you have made them up. And you will be flogged for it. Understand?”
I nod a second time.
“Don’t spy on me ever again, will you? Will you?” She peels my hands from my eyes – makes me meet her gaze.
I shake my head miserably. My cheek is throbbing now where she hit me. I want to run away.
“Oh God, look at you. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m sorry.” She searches in her purse for her handkerchief, wets it on her tongue and wipes the blood from my cheek. “There. Better now. Aren’t we?” And she smiles at me valiantly. It is so vulnerable, that smile. It makes my heart lurch inside my ribcage, like I’ve missed a tread on the stairs.
So I mumble, “Yes,” and do my best to smile back.
The jewels round my mother’s neck wink in the firelight as she takes a deep breath and opens her eyes wide. “Oh! Aren’t we silly sometimes?” She is brushing herself down now, finding a clean corner of handkerchief to blot her eyes. I know what she is thinking – that if my grandmother sees her, she must not look as if she has been crying.
That night in bed I hide under the covers, clutching Raggy tightly. I feel that the world has jumbled itself up: shattered into pieces and reformed, like a broken jug that’s been mended. And though on the surface it looks as it always did, I know that underneath everything has changed.
Sometimes – I have learned – appearances are no more than masks. And that knowledge terrifies me as much as anything I have seen here at the Tower.
♦ ♦ ♦ IX ♦ ♦ ♦
The following day – the day after my mother hits me for announcing my glorious future – five hundred of my father’s best spearmen, commanded by Lord Daubeney, meet the rebel army at Gill Down and drive them into retreat. The rebels regroup and make camp by Deptford Bridge, near the River Ravensbourne. Three days later, my father’s army attacks at dawn, taking the rebels by surprise.
By two o’clock that afternoon, my father is entering the City of London on a magnificent war horse, a livid scar showing fresh on his cheek and one of the rebel leaders lying, shackled, over the saddle of a horse led behind him. Unlike the thousands of dead even now being dragged from the field, this man has been saved for a slower and more public end.
A battle is a test of God’s favour – I know that. A battle proves who is the rightful king. So, now, God has shown His favour, not to the rebels, or the Pretender – whoever he might really be – but to my father.
That same afternoon, as my father parades through the City streets in triumph, I suddenly turn hot and shivery. My joints ache and my legs feel like jelly and the women servants put me to bed. I stay in bed for days and days – I have no idea how long. And when my mother leaves the Tower to join my father for the thanksgiving at Westminster, I have to stay behind. I’m in a cocoon of sickness. If my mother comes to say goodbye, I’m too ill to know.
♦ ♦ ♦
During those feverish days in the Tower I have an odd dream.
In the dream, I am lying in the dark, underneath something – it is like lying under the covers in bed. Except that I am cold. I don’t mind. It’s restful. Perhaps I am asleep. And then it occurs to me: I’m not sleeping, I am dead. Covered by a layer of earth. Of course! How silly that I didn’t notice it before.
And I am just thinking: so this is what it is like and it’s quite all right really, why do people worry about dying so much? – I must tell my mother when I see her – when a black dot appears in the darkness. Or rather, a black dot that has light all around it.
And the dot rises up and gets bigger as I watch it, until it’s as big as a sun, and the light from it is beaming down like strange sunlight on a clear day.
And at first I think there’s just the dot, and something about the dot is moving, but then I see that the moving thing is a little boy, coming down the beams towards me, walking on the light as if it is a road. He gets nearer and nearer.
As the boy draws close to me, I see that he is very pale, with a halo of straw-coloured hair; he looks like the Christ child in an old painting, except that his eyes are so deep-set they’re completely hidden in shadow. It looks as if he has strange dark hollows instead of eyes. And the golden hair and the shadow-eyes make a contrast of light and dark like the brilliant black sun, and I am chilled and I shiver.
The boy stretches out his hands to me – pudgy hands, the hands of a toddler – but when I put my own hands in his, the grip is strong, like a grown-up’s.
And the moment he touches me, being dead isn’t restful any more. I’m drenched in terror, and I grip the boy desperately, as if he can keep me safe.
All at once, too, we’re no longer in darkness. I see that we’re in a field on the edge of a gorge. The spot where I’ve been lying is right by the drop. Somewhere far below I can hear rushing water.
The boy pulls me to my feet. He’s smaller than I am, and dressed in a coarse gown like a poor man’s child, but there’s something fierce and powerful about him.
At that moment I hear a terrible noise from the gorge. I turn to see a huge serpent hauling itself up over the cliff-edge. Its legs are sh
ort and muscular, and from its back vast wings unfold, with skin stretched across them like a bat’s. Its eyes are red, its nostrils wide; with a terrible swinging motion of its head it seems to be searching for something, roaring in pain and rage. The smell from its open jaws is rank – of rotting flesh. Step by relentless step it comes, dark water sliding off its scales.
The boy tugs me sharply, pulling me away. He breaks into a run and I stumble after. Up ahead, a horse appears. The boy must somehow have grown taller, because it’s a large horse and he mounts it with no problem, and hauls me up in front of him into the saddle, just as the serpent’s teeth snap the air where I stood. However close I am to the boy, still I can’t see his eyes.
His arms reach round me as he holds the reins and spurs the horse into a gallop. I grip the front of the saddle; against my back I think I can feel the sliding metal of a mail-coat, as if the boy is wearing armour under his peasant’s gown.
Away we speed through open country, across scrubby moorland, fields and ditches, so fast that we lose the serpent; there is no sign of it following. Soon the great dark mass of a forest looms before us. As the horse slows to a trot, we dip under a canopy of low branches, immersing ourselves in the cool, moss-green light. Far above us, brighter light shines in a dappled, broken pattern – beneath, I hear the horse’s hooves crushing soft bracken underfoot.
The cool of the forest, the dark green shadows, the welcoming, delicious safety; how I would love to lose myself in here.
I wake with such happiness. Somehow, days have passed. The fever is lifting.
PART TWO:
Acts Will Smooth Your Way
♦ ♦ ♦ I ♦ ♦ ♦
Four years later
“Tell the boy to move, Elizabeth. He’s blocking the view.”
My mother’s fingers press my shoulder. She’s behind me but she must be leaning forward; her voice is right in my ear. “Hal. Sweetheart. Your father wants you to move along.”
I get up. On the sand-strewn floor of the vast hall in front of us, youths clad in various quantities of half-armour and leather padding are grunting and sweating, slicing and chopping at each other with blunt-edged swords.
“Go and sit over there. Next to Meg.”
I edge along, holding the sword that’s slung on my belt upright, so it doesn’t poke anyone, and excusing myself as people are forced to stand up to let me pass.
“Relegated to sitting with the girls,” says my elder sister Meg when I arrive. She speaks sideways out of her mouth; her jewel-encrusted hood is heavy, and I’m not worth the effort of a direct look. “What have you done?” She is sitting poised, straight-backed, speckled with rubies and pearls the size of bilberries. Beyond her my little sister Mary, who is five, is sitting similarly ramrod straight, confined by a tight-laced bodice and the beady-eyed supervision of her nurse.
“Done?” I whisper back. “Only worn a hat with a feather when sitting in front of the Spanish ambassador.” I settle into my seat. “I wish Father would tell me himself. To get out of the way.”
Meg gives a tight smile. “He hasn’t said one word to me since I arrived.”
We are in Westminster Hall. It makes me think of a cathedral: it’s a huge cavern of cool, echoing stone. The windows – arched, churchy ones – are set high in the walls. When I look up, there’s an entire world of sunbeams and dust motes up there, swirling about. Beyond that – way, way up – the roof is an amazing construction: wooden, ribbed like the hull of an upside-down ship, and decorated with carved angels.
Above us, then: the angels. Below, on the hall floor: the fighters, working like devils. One of them is my elder brother Arthur. We, meanwhile, are suspended in between, sitting on a raised and canopied platform along with half the Court and a party of Spanish envoys.
The envoys have come to London to negotiate a treaty between England and Spain. To seal the deal my father wants a marriage: the groom will be my brother Arthur, his bride a Spanish princess. It’s a prize my father has been trying to secure for years, I know: the Spanish royal dynasty is ancient and powerful. By comparison we Tudors are puny newcomers; we need to convince the King and Queen of Spain that their precious princess will be in safe hands. Arthur’s fighting display is intended to prove, physically at least, that we are built to last.
Which would be fine if he were any good with a sword.
“Block! Block!” I mutter now, my eyes on the fighting. My shoulder twitches, wanting to join in.
It’s Charles Brandon that Arthur’s grappling with, a youth my father shows much favour to, since Brandon’s father was his standard-bearer, and died in the battle that made my father king.
Brandon is seventeen and big and beefy; it’s like watching a tree in combat. Arthur, two years younger, is slight. If he trained hard enough he would be all sinew and gristle, like Father. As it is, he prefers to spend time bent over his desk, his soft white hands pressing open the pages of books. And it shows.
“A gap! Urgh, why didn’t he attack?”
“Shh! Try to sit still,” hisses Meg.
She’s on my left; to my right, a little further away, there’s a Spaniard – one of the more junior members of the embassy. I lean forward to see past him, pretending to watch the fighters at the other end of the hall, but really I’m looking along the row of spectators to catch my father’s reaction. Arthur is his favourite; usually Arthur can do no wrong. But surely he’s noticed that Arthur’s a complete donkey when it comes to fighting with a broadsword?
Sitting at the centre of the platform, next to the Spanish ambassador De Puebla, my father has his public face on: it is warm, it smiles, it laughs. But the eyes – I think the eyes always give him away. They are small and sharp, very bright. Not warm at all. Watchful. I can see he is observing everything – everything on the hall floor, everything up here on the platform – and even as he laughs he is not missing a thing.
He must be ashamed, I think. Secretly, he must wish Arthur could give better proof that we are a family of strong warriors, fit to dominate our people and crush all challenges to our power.
I sit back again and find my Spanish neighbour looking at me. I smile politely. It occurs to me that I probably ought to be making conversation.
“Do you have a handgun?”
The Spaniard looks mildly startled. “No, my lord. Only this.” He pats the hilt of the sword at his hip.
“I mean at home.”
The envoy shakes his head.
“I’d like to fire one. Some day.”
I turn to watch the fighting again. There are oohs and aahs and ripples of polite applause; down in the hall, thuds and scuffles and violent exhalations. The fighters step in, step out again to dodge; lock together; pause as a mortal strike (placed but not, of course, driven home) is acknowledged; disengage.
“I think you would like to be down there with your brother, hm?” says the envoy.
“He should have used true gardant just then.”
“I’m sorry. My English isn’t good enough to understand this word.”
“True gardant. It’s a defence position. Like this.” I raise my right arm in front of my face, hand angled down to show the direction the sword’s blade follows. “Then if your opponent tries an overhead blow you only have to straighten your arm to block it. He doesn’t anticipate that move very well. In a battle someone could come in and split his head straight down the middle.”
“Yes, I see.”
“That’s the trouble with practice like this. Brandon’s not going to do that…”
“Not split his head down the middle, no.”
“… So he can carry on making the same mistake, not learning – oh, nice hit.”
I can sense that the Spaniard is studying me now, rather than the fighting. He says, “I should like to see you fight, my lord.”
I glance at him to see if he’s joking, but he seems to be in earnest. I look back to the fight again and say, “I’m good. Broadsword, backsword, sword and buckler. I’m going to start w
ith two blades soon. I do longbow shooting, too. Hit the mark pretty much every time. I’m better than all my friends.”
On my other side, Meg clears her throat pointedly.
The envoy says, “You must be very accomplished, my lord.”
“And I’ve just started with the quarterstaff.”
“So young? That’s impressive.”
The Spaniard turns to speak to his neighbour on the other side.
“Hal, stop showing off,” Meg says in a low tone.
I whisper into the side of the jewelled hood, about where I imagine her ear must be: “I’m not. I just think it would help if they knew there was someone in this family who knows how to handle a weapon. Don’t you?”
But before she can reply, the Spaniard leans across to me again. “With your leave, my lord, my colleague here will ask your father’s permission for you to fight a bout for us.”
“What, now? I’d be delighted.”
I hear a groan from Meg; I ignore it, watching instead as a servant relays the request to my father. He reacts with surprise. I can see him shrugging, spreading his hands, indicating that there is no need. But beside him Ambassador De Puebla is delighted with the proposal and presses his fingers on my father’s sleeve, and I see my father give in with good grace. Of course. Of course you must see my beloved younger son too. What a marvellous idea.
A herald approaches and bends to me gracefully. “At the request of our honoured guests, His Grace the King invites you to fight a bout, my lord. Is there harness for you?”
“Compton will find it.” I’m on my feet so fast I’ve almost collided with the herald, and now I set off, picking my way through the crowd, brushing past velvet skirts and slashed sleeves, trying not to tread on silk slippers or furred hems or trip over exquisitely expensive scabbards. I can feel my cheeks burning – I’m eager, excited, terrified.
