“I want this town to learn what befalls those who give support to traitors. See to it, my lord Somerset,” she said shortly, and not waiting for his response, brought her riding crop down again upon her mare’s flanks, wheeling it about in an eye-catching display of showy horsemanship and then swinging back down Broad Street, at a pace to send soldiers scattering from her path.
A girl was screaming. The sound washed over Richard in chilling waves, set him to trembling. There was so much terror in her cries that he felt a, sick relief when the screams became muffled, more indistinct, and at last, ceased altogether. He swallowed, kept his eyes averted from the direction of the churchyard, where the girl’s screams came from.
The wind shifted suddenly, brought to him the acrid odor of burning flesh. More and more houses were being put to the torch, and the flames had spread to an adjoining pigsty, trapping several of the unfortunate animals within. Mercifully, the cries of the dying pigs could no longer be heard, for the agonized squealing of the doomed creatures had sickened him. He’d seen animals butchered for beef, had once even been taken by Edward and Edmund on a September stag hunt. But this was different; this was a world gone mad.
A world in which men were prodded up the streets like cattle, hemp ropes dangling about their necks. A world in which soldiers stripped looted shops for timber to erect a gallows before the guild hall. A world in which the younger son of the town clerk had been clubbed and left for dead in the middle of Broad Street. From the cross, Richard could still see the body. He tried not to look at it; the clerk’s son had helped him to trap the fox cub he’d discovered that memorable summer morning in Dinham meadow.
Turning his eyes resolutely from the body of the boy he’d known and liked, Richard found himself staring at a queer reddish stain that was spreading into the dust at the base of the cross, rivulets of red seeping off into the gutters. He watched for several moments, and then realization struck him and he recoiled abruptly.
“George, look!” Pointing in fascinated horror. “Blood!”
George stared and then squatted down and stirred up ripples with an experimental finger.
“No,” he pronounced finally. “Wine…from over there, see?” Gesturing toward the corner, where several huge hogshead wine butts had been dragged from a plundered tavern and spilled open into the center gutter.
George and Richard turned to watch as a bull galloped past, cheered on by the bored soldiers Somerset had charged to guard them. Richard was ill at ease with his guards; while they had so far acted to keep the Duchess of York and her sons from being molested by the soldiers reeling about the cross, it was apparent that they were none too happy with this duty. They’d been watching glumly as their comrades shared the plunder of the looted town, and Richard felt sure most would have been quite willing to heed his mother’s insistent urgings that they be taken to the King’s camp. One man remained adamant, however, that they could not act without orders from His Grace the Duke of Somerset, and as the authority was his, none could leave the precarious sanctuary of the cross, neither captives nor their reluctant captors.
The Duchess of York suddenly cried out. A man was limping down High Street, moving slowly, without direction or purpose. Foundering like a ship without a rudder, he seemed oblivious of the soldiers who jostled against him, arms full of booty from the castle, by now stripped to the walls, rising above the hapless village like the exposed skeletal remains of some past, predatory kill. Now, as he trod upon the heels of a plunder-laden soldier, he was roundly cursed, elbowed aside. Other hands, however, reached out to break his fall, even acted to clear his way; men fresh from rape and the makeshift gallows who, nonetheless, scrupled to do violence to a priest.
His habit and cowl proclaimed him to be one of the Carmelite brothers of St Mary White Friars, but the once immaculate white was liberally streaked with soot, even a splattering of blood. As he drew nearer, they saw he wore but one sandal, yet plunged unheedingly into the mud churned up in the street, into the murky wine that now stood ankle-deep in the gutters around the cross. At the sound of his name, he paused, blinking about him blindly. The Duchess of York called out again to him and this time he saw her.
The guards made no attempt to stop him as he clambered up the steps of the cross, looking on indifferently as Cecily moved to grasp his outstretched hand between her own. Her eyes flickered over the stained habit, back to the blanched, begrimed face.
“Be you hurt?”
He shook his head dully. “No…. They slaughtered our livestock. The milk cows, the ewes…. The stables are befouled with blood….”
His voice trailed off, his eyes seemed to cloud over, and only when she repeated his name did he rouse himself, focus once more upon her and the two children staring at him in wonderment. He looked like no friar they had ever seen, as bedraggled and unkempt as the poorest beggar, with the glazed eyes and slack mouth of one deep in his cups.
“Madame…. They sacked the friary. They took all, Madame, all. Then they burned the buildings. The buttery, the brewhouse, even the infirmary and the almshouse. They stripped the church…. Even the pyx and chalices, Madame, the chalices…”
“Listen to me,” she demanded. “Listen, for God’s sake!”
At last her urgency communicated itself to him and he fell silent, staring at her.
“You must go to the castle. Find the Duke of Somerset. Tell him he must give orders to take my sons to the King’s camp.” She glanced down at the children, dropped her voice still lower, said fiercely, “Before it is too late. Do you understand? Go now, and go quickly! The soldiers will not harm a priest; they’ll let you pass. If Somerset is not at the castle, seek him at the guild hall. They are making use of it as a prison and he may be there. But find him….” Her voice was no more now than a whisper. “For the love of Jesus, the Only-begotten Son, find him.”
The friar nodded, seared by her intensity. “I will, Madame,” he vowed. “I’ll not fail you.”
George had understood enough of this exchange to feel a thrill of fear, and now he moved closer to his mother as she watched the friar hasten back up High Street, the once-white habit soon swallowed up amongst the looting soldiers.
“Do you not trust our guards, Ma Mère?” he whispered.
She turned toward him; he was the fairest of all her children, as blond as Richard was dark, and now she let her hand linger on the soft sunlit hair that fell across his forehead. After hesitating, she temporized with a half-truth.
“Yes, George, I trust them. But there are evils happening here neither you nor Richard should see. That is why I want you taken to the King at Leominster. You must—Richard!”
With a cry, she grabbed for her youngest son, caught him just in time to prevent him from plunging down the steps of the cross. Kneeling, she pulled him to her, to berate him in a voice made rough by fright. He endured her rebuke in silence, and when she released him, slumped down on the steps and locked his arms around his drawn-up knees in a futile attempt to check the tremors that shook the thin little body. Cecily did not know what he had seen to give him such grief; nor did she wait to find out. She spun about, turning upon her guards with such fury that the men recoiled.
“I’ll not have my sons kept here to watch Ludlow’s death throes! You send a man to Somerset! Now, damn you, now!”
The men wilted under her wrath, shifted about in instinctive unease; she was still of the class they’d been indoctrinated since birth to obey. But George saw at once that she raged in vain; she’d not be heeded. He watched awhile and then lowered himself onto the steps beside Richard.
“Dickon? What did you see?”
Richard raised his head. His eyes were blind, were queerly dark, all blue eclipsed by the shock-dilated pupils.
“Well?” George demanded. “Tell me what you did see! What could be as bad as all that?”
“I saw the girl,” Richard said at last. “The girl the soldiers dragged into the churchyard.”
Even now, George could not resi
st an opportunity to display his worldly understanding. “The one the soldiers had their way with?” he said knowingly.
His words meant nothing to Richard. He scarcely heard them.
“It was Joan! She was over there—” He gestured off to his right. “—in Butcher’s Row. She kept stumbling and then fell down in the street and lay there. Her gown was all torn and there was blood…” He shuddered convulsively and continued only under George’s insistent prodding.
“A soldier came from the church. He…he knotted his hand in her hair and pulled her to her feet. Then he took her back inside.” And with that, he drew a strangled breath that threatened to become a sob, but somehow he fought it back, stared at George.
“George…it was Joan!” he repeated, almost as if he expected George to contradict him, to assure him he was wrong, that the girl he’d seen could not possibly have been Joan.
He held his breath, awaiting George’s response. He soon saw George was not going to reassure him, not going to make any consoling denials. He had never seen George at a loss for words before; nor had George ever looked at him as he did now. There was unmistakable pity in the older boy’s eyes and Richard knew suddenly that whatever had befallen Joan was far worse than the ugliness he’d just witnessed in Butcher’s Row.
A soldier ran by, yelling and brandishing a wine flask. It was uncorked and wine was spraying out in his wake, dousing all who came within range. Richard had leaned forward, dropping his head back into his arms. He looked up abruptly, though, as the man passed, hearing enough for alarm.
“George? Are men being hanged?”
George nodded. “Be thankful, Dickon, that our father is safe away from Ludlow,” he said soberly. “Had he or our brothers fallen into the Queen’s hands, she’d have struck their heads above the town gates, and as likely as not, forced us to watch as it was done.”
Richard looked at him with horror and then jumped to his feet as a woman’s scream echoed across the market square. George was on his feet, too, catching Richard roughly by the shoulders.
“It wasn’t Joan, Dickon,” he said hastily. “That scream didn’t come from the church. It wasn’t Joan.”
Richard stopped struggling, stared at him. “Be you sure?” he whispered, but as George nodded, the woman screamed again. That was too much for Richard. He jerked from George’s grasp with such violence that he lost his balance and fell forward down the steps of the market cross, into the path of a horse and rider just turning the corner of Broad Street.
Richard wasn’t hurt; the ground was too soft for that. But the impact of his fall had driven all the air from his lungs, and suddenly the sky above his head was filled with flying forelegs and down-plunging hooves. When he dared open his eyes again, his mother was kneeling in the mud by his side and the stallion had been reined in scant feet from where he lay.
Cecily’s hands were shaking so badly that she was forced to lace her fingers together to steady herself. Leaning forward, she began to wipe the mud from her child’s face with the sleeve of her gown.
“Jesus wept! Madame, why are you still here?”
She raised her head sharply, to look up into a face that was young and frowning and vaguely familiar. She fumbled for recognition and then it came. The knight who’d come so close to trampling her son beneath his stallion was Edmund Beaufort, younger brother of the Duke of Somerset.
“In the name of God,” she said desperately, “see my sons safe from here!”
He stared down at her, and then swung from the saddle to stand beside her in the street.
“Why were you not taken at once to the camp of the King at Leominster?” He sounded angry and incredulous. “My brother will have someone flayed alive for this. Lancaster does not make war on women and children.”
Cecily said nothing, merely looked at him and saw color burn across his cheekbones. He turned away abruptly and began to give directives to the men who’d ridden into Ludlow under his command. With deep-felt relief, she saw that they all were sober.
“My men will escort you to the royal encampment, Madame.”
She nodded and watched tensely while he dismissed her guards, found horses for them, and with a disgusted oath, swung with the flat of his sword at the more drunken of the soldiers squabbling over spoils of victory. Even now, with deliverance seemingly at hand, she breathed no easier, would not until she saw her sons safely on the road that led from Ludlow. And then, as she led the boys forward to their waiting mounts, Richard suddenly balked. At that, she gave way at last to the strains of the past twenty-four hours and slapped him across the face. He gasped but accepted the punishment without outcry or protest. The objection came from George, who moved swiftly to his brother’s side.
“Don’t blame Dickon, Ma Mère,” he entreated. “He saw her, you see. He saw Joan.” Seeing her lack of comprehension, he pointed toward the parish church. “The girl in the churchyard. It was Joan.”
Cecily looked down at her youngest son and then knelt and drew him gently to her. She saw the tears on his lashes and the imprint of her slap on his cheek.
“Oh, Richard,” she whispered, “why did you not say so?”
As they’d awaited the coming of the Lancastrian army that morning, she’d taken pains to impress both boys with the urgency of their need for control. Now, however, she no longer cared about pride or honor or anything but the pain in her child’s eyes, pain that should have been forever alien to childhood.
It was then that Edmund Beaufort performed the act of kindness she would never forget, would not have dared expect. As she gazed up at him, framing an appeal she thought to be futile, he said before she could speak, “I’ll send some of my men into the churchyard to see to the girl. I’ll have her taken to you at Leominster. Unless she…” He hesitated, looking down at the little boy she was cradling, and concluded neutrally, “Whatever must be done will be, Madame. Now, I would suggest that we not tarry here any longer.”
She nodded numbly. He was holding out his hand; she reached up, let him raise her to her feet. He was, she now saw, very young, no more than four or five years older than her own Edmund. Very young and none too happy by what he’d found in Ludlow and perceptive enough to realize that she did not want Richard to be present when Joan was found.
“I shall not forget your kindness, my lord,” she said softly, and with far more warmth than she would ever have expected to feel for a member of the Beaufort family.
“In war, Madame, there are always…excesses,” he said, very low, and then the strange flicker of empathy that had passed between them was gone. He stepped back, issued a few terse commands. Men moved across the square, toward the churchyard. Others waited to escort the Duchess of York and her sons to the royal camp at Leominster. Edmund Beaufort nodded, gave the order to move out. Cecily reined her mount in before him.
“Thank you, my lord.”
His eyes were guarded, shadowed by the uneasy suspicions of a man who’d surprised himself by his own candor and now wondered if he’d compromised himself by that candor.
“Do not mistake me, Madame. I have full faith in my brother’s judgment. He did what he had to do. It was necessary that a lesson be learned here this day, one not to be soon forgotten.”
Cecily stared down at him. “You needn’t fear, my lord,” she said bitterly. “Ludlow will not be forgotten.”
3
Sandal Castle Yorkshire
December 1460
The Duke of York’s second son was sitting cross-legged in the oriel window seat of the West Tower, watching with disbelief as his cousin, Thomas Neville, devoured a heaping plateful of cold roast capon and pompron buried in butter. As Thomas signaled to a page for a third refill of his ale tankard, Edmund could restrain himself no longer.
“Don’t stint yourself, Cousin. After all, it’s been two full hours since our noonday dinner…with four hours yet to go till supper.”
Thomas glanced up with a grin, proving himself once again to be totally impervious to sarcasm, a
nd speared a large piece of capon meat. Edmund suppressed a sigh, yearning for the cut-and-thrust parries that had spiced his conversations with Edward. The problem, as he saw it, was that Thomas was too good-hearted to dislike, yet after ten days with him in the solitude of Sandal Castle, his unfailing cheer and relentless optimism were rubbing raw against Edmund’s nerves.
Watching Thomas eat and acknowledging glumly that his boredom would drag him down to new depths if he could think of no better way to pass the time, Edmund found himself marveling anew how four brothers could be as unlike as his four Neville cousins.
His cousin Warwick was assured, arrogant, audacious, and yet with an undeniable charm about him, withal. Edmund was nowhere near as taken with Warwick as Edward was, but even he was not immune to the force of his flamboyant cousin’s personality. He had a deeper fondness, however, for Warwick’s younger brother Johnny, reserved and gravely deliberate, possessed of a wry Yorkshire wit and a sense of duty that was as unwavering as it was instinctive. He had no liking at all, though, for the third Neville brother, named George like Edmund’s own eleven-year-old brother. George Neville was a priest, but only because it was traditional for one son of a great family to enter the Church; he was the most worldly man Edmund had ever encountered, and one of the most ambitious, already Bishop of Exeter although still only in his twenties.
And then there was Thomas, the youngest. Thomas, who might have been a changeling, so little did he resemble his siblings. Fair when they were dark, as tall even as Edward, though easily twenty-five pounds the heavier, with milk-blue eyes so serene that Edmund was given to sardonic speculation whether Thomas shared the same world as they did; a stranger to spite and, seemingly, to stress; as utterly courageous as the enormous mastiffs bred for bear-baiting, and in Edmund’s considered judgment, with a good deal less imagination.
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