“Jesus, my lord, his hands be bound!” a soldier was crying, as if this had somehow escaped Clifford and needed only be called to his notice.
Held immobile by men who looked scarcely less horror-struck than he did, Rob jerked wildly at his ropes, shouted at Clifford, “Think, man, think! He’s a Prince’s son, will do you more good alive than dead!”
Clifford’s eyes flicked briefly to Rob. “He’s York’s son, and by God, I’ll have vengeance!”
With that, he swung around upon the stunned boy. Rob wrenched free, flung himself forward. Someone grabbed for him, missed; other hands caught his leg, jerked with such force that he sprawled heavily upon the ground. Spitting out his own blood, he struggled to rise, and now no one hindered him. He was permitted to crawl the few feet that lay between him and Edmund.
Kneeling by the dying boy, he tried to cradle Edmund against him, tried to staunch Edmund’s blood with his own hands, kept on trying long after he knew Edmund was dead.
His anguished sobbing was all that echoed upon the bridge. Clifford was being watched in absolute silence, watched with revulsion. He sensed it, saw it on the faces of the men, soldiers, who nonetheless made certain distinctions between killings. In their eyes, this had been no battlefield death, had been cold-blooded murder. One, moreover, that had deprived them of a goodly ransom.
“York bore the blame for the death of my father,” Clifford said loudly. “I had the right to kill the son!”
No one spoke. Rob held Edmund and wept. He looked up at last, to turn upon Clifford so burning a stare that one of the Lancastrian soldiers was moved to lay a restraining hand upon his shoulder.
“Easy, man,” he cautioned softly. “It was a bloody piece of work, I grant you. But it’s done, and you’ll not be changing that by throwing your own life away.”
“Done?” Rob echoed, his voice raw, incredulous. “Done, you say? Jesus God! After today, it is just beginning.”
As Marguerite d’Anjou rode through the Yorkshire countryside toward the city of York, snow-blanketed fields glistened with a crystalline brilliance that blinded the eye, and the sky over her head was the deep vivid blue more common to July than January.
Her journey up into the rugged terrain of western Scotland had proven to be a fruitful one. At Lincluden Abbey just north of Dumfries, she’d met with the Scottish Queen-regent and a bargain had been struck, sealed with the intended marriage of their respective children. In return for Marguerite’s promise to surrender to Scotland the border fortress of Berwick-upon-Tweed, Marguerite was to be provided with a Scottish army with which to march upon London. She was at Carlisle when word reached her of the slaughter at Sandal Castle, and as she neared the town of Ripon on her way south toward York, she was met by the Duke of Somerset and the Earl of Northumberland, and there given the full and gratifying details of her enemy’s destruction.
Ahead rose the white limestone city walls of York. The massive twin turreted towers and barbican of Micklegate Bar marked the chief gateway into York, guarding the Ermine Way which led south, led to London. As Marguerite was approaching from the northwest, however, she thought to enter the city by way of Bootham Bar. Somewhat to her surprise, Somerset insisted they bypass Bootham, take the longer route through Micklegate.
She now saw why, saw that a crowd had gathered before the city gate, ready to welcome her into York. The Lord Mayor was clad in his best blue, as were the city aldermen, while the sheriffs wore red. There were certain conspicuous absences, for there were some in the city who’d come under the magnetic influence of the Earl of Warwick, whose favorite residence lay some forty-five miles northwest of the city at Middleham. But all in all, it was an impressive turnout, gave proof once again that the city of York held fast for the House of Lancaster.
The honor of greeting the Queen had been conceded to Lord Clifford, who was not a man to be denied much. Marguerite smiled down at him as he knelt before her, smiled again as she gave him her hand to kiss. He was smiling, too, in admiring tribute both to her beauty and her Scots triumph.
“My lord Clifford, I shall not forget the service you’ve done me and my son. I shall never forget Sandal Castle.”
“Madame, your war is done.” He stepped back, and then gestured upward, toward the city gates high above their heads. “Here I bring you your King’s ransom.”
Marguerite followed the direction of his outflung arm, stared up at Micklegate Bar, and saw for the first time that it was crowned with a grisly cluster of human heads, set upon pikes.
“York?” she said at last. When Clifford nodded grimly, she looked upward in silence for some moments and then said, “A pity you didn’t face his head cityward, my lord Clifford. Then York could look out over York,” and all within earshot laughed.
“Maman?” The beautiful child who rode his pony at Marguerite’s stirrup now drew closer, staring like the adults, up at Micklegate Bar. Marguerite turned at once, gazed down fondly at her son, and waved a graceful hand in the air.
“They are our enemies, bien-aimé, and now no more. For which we may thank the lords of Somerset and Clifford.”
“All our enemies?” the child asked, already losing interest in the unsightly trophies so far above his own eye level.
“All save one, Édouard,” Marguerite said softly. “All save Warwick.”
“Edward of March, too, Madame,” Somerset reminded her. “York’s eldest son wasn’t at Sandal Castle, was off at Ludlow.”
“A pity,” she said succinctly and then shrugged. “But he’s no threat in his own right, only eighteen or thereabouts as I recall. Warwick…Warwick is the enemy.” The dark eyes glittered. “I’d give fully half of all I own to see his head, too, on Micklegate Bar.”
“Madame, I did leave space for two more heads.” Clifford gestured upward again. “Between York and Rutland…for Warwick and York’s other son.”
At mention of the name of Edmund of Rutland, a derisive smile twisted Somerset’s mouth. “I was surprised, my lord Clifford, that you chose to mount Rutland’s head here in York. I thought, perhaps, you’d want to see it above the gateway of your own Skipton Castle…to remind you of a valiant deed well done.”
Clifford flushed a dark, dangerous shade of red, and the nervous rustle of laughter that had swept the bystanders was abruptly stilled.
“What of Salisbury?” His voice was thick, roughened with the embittered outrage of a man who feels himself unjustly accused but can find few to champion his cause. “When he was taken captive hours after the battle, you and Northumberland debated all night whether to accept the extravagant sum he offered up for his life and then sent him to the block the next morning after Northumberland decided he’d rather have his head than his gold. How is Salisbury’s death any different from Rutland’s, I do ask you?”
“If I need explain it to you, my lord, you’d not understand it,” Somerset said with a sneer, and Clifford’s hand dropped to the hilt of his sword.
Marguerite spurred her mount forward, between them. “My lords, that will do! I need you both; I’ll not have you falling out amongst yourselves, not while Warwick still draws breath. As for this stupid squabbling over Rutland, what does matter is that he is dead, not how he happened to die.”
Her son reached up at that, snatched at the reins of her horse, so abruptly that her startled mare shied, careened into Somerset’s stallion.
“Maman, can we not go into the city now? I’m hungry.”
Marguerite had some difficulty in soothing her mount, but if she was irritated by her child’s inopportune interruption, it showed neither in her face nor her voice.
“Mais oui, Édouard. We shall go at once.” She tilted her head up, took one final look at the heads upon Micklegate Bar.
“York sought a crown; I would see that he has it. Have one made of straw, my lord Clifford, and crown him with it.”
4
London
February 1461
Kneeling alone before the candlelit altar in the Lady Chapel of
St Paul’s Cathedral, Cecily Neville made the sign of the cross and then she dropped her face into her hands and wept.
Her attendants waited without in the choir to escort her safely back to Baynard’s Castle, the Yorkist palace just southwest of the cathedral, on the River Thames. She had come to St Paul’s from the wharves, where she’d seen her two youngest sons safely aboard a ship bound for the realm of Burgundy. The boys had been bewildered, fresh from their bed at Baynard’s Castle, but voiced no protests; in the seven weeks since Sandal Castle, the fear had never ceased to haunt both children, that one day the Lancastrians would come for them, too. Now, it had happened. They did not need to be told their mother feared for their lives, knew no lesser fear could have compelled her to send them from England.
Cecily had been driven to so desperate a measure by the news that the city council had voted that afternoon to open the city gates to the approaching army of Lancaster. But in truth, she’d known for four days that it would come to this, to the little boys and a trusted squire sailing with the tide for refuge in Burgundy. She’d known there was no other course of action open to her ever since word reached London of Warwick’s defeat at the battle of St Albans just twenty miles north of the city.
The city of London had been plunged into panic. All knew the tales of the brutal deeds done by Marguerite’s marauding army of border mercenaries and Scots. She’d promised plunder in lieu of pay, and once south of the River Trent, her men had taken her at her word, with a resulting savagery not known within living memory of the English. As her troops advanced southward, they left a trail of devastation fully thirty miles wide, and the sacking of Ludlow paled before the fall of Grantham, Stamford, Peterborough, Huntingdon, Royston.
The list of towns taken seemed endless, and always farther south, closer still to London. To the terrified people in the Lancastrian army’s path, it seemed as if half of England was in flames, and all had atrocity stories to share of villages burned, churches looted, women raped and men murdered, stories that were enhanced and embellished upon with each telling until Londoners were convinced they faced a fate not to be equalled in horror since Rome had been threatened by the Huns.
London had not thought Warwick would lose. He’d always commanded a large following in the city, and he was, at thirty-two, a soldier of renown, friend to foreign Kings, a man surrounded by splendor even a monarch might envy. The city had sighed with relief as he marched north with an army of nine thousand and the puppet King, Harry of Lancaster.
And then, four days ago, Yorkist fugitives fled back into the city with a garbled tale of a battle fought at St Albans, that unlucky village that had been the site of a Yorkist-Lancastrian clash just five years ago. Warwick, it seemed, had been taken by surprise, had fallen victim to an extraordinary night march and flank attack by Marguerite’s army.
From all accounts, Warwick himself had managed to escape, although his present whereabouts were unknown, were cause for the utmost conjecture. His brother, John Neville, had been captured, however, and, given the gory example set at Sandal Castle, few would lay odds on his long surviving the battle.
Harry of Lancaster was now a recovered pawn, had been found sitting under a tree near the battlefield, and a chilling story began to be circulated, that the Yorkist knights who’d stayed to safeguard the King upon his promise of a pardon were then taken to Marguerite and beheaded before the eyes of her seven-year-old son. None could say with certainty if this was true or not, but the mood of the city was such that it was widely credited.
With Warwick’s defeat, only Edward, Earl of March, and now titled Duke of York, was free to offer a last challenge to Lancaster. Edward was thought to be in Wales; in mid-February, reports had reached London of a battle fought to the west, between the Lancastrian Jasper Tudor, a half brother of King Harry, and the youthful Duke of York. Accounts were still sketchy, but it seemed the victory had gone to Edward. Nothing else was known, however, and all else was then eclipsed by the devastating word of the Shrove Tuesday battle at St Albans.
Now the fear-stricken city awaited the coming of Marguerite d’Anjou, and Cecily dared delay no longer. She’d awakened Richard and George, conveyed them to the wharves, and now she wept, with a desolation she’d not known since that January day when her nephew, the Earl of Warwick, had come to her with word of the battle fought at Sandal Castle, the battle that had taken from her a husband, son, brother, and nephew.
In those first stunned days, she’d turned to Warwick for support, as her only adult male kinsman, and for a time, tried to forget the opinion she’d long ago formed of her celebrated nephew, that he did remind her of the trick ebony wood boxes she’d seen sold at faires, glossy and eye-catching boxes painted in dazzling patterns of gold and vermilion, which, upon closer inspection, were found to be sealed shut, never meant to be opened at all.
As great as her need was, she could not long deceive herself. Her nephew gave off all the glittering brilliance of a sky full of stars, and as much warmth and heat. There was no true surprise then, the day she’d stood in the great hall of the Herber, his London manor, and heard him dictate a letter to the Vatican, a letter in praise of the services of a papal legate who’d since become a convert to the Yorkist cause, a letter in which he referred to the destruction of some of his kinsmen at Sandal Castle ten days past. Cecily had stared at him. “…the destruction of some of my kinsmen.” His father, brother, uncle, and cousin! And then she’d called for her cloak, forgotten her gloves, and returned through the snow to Baynard’s Castle.
By a twist of irony, that was the day she heard from Edward. That afternoon, in the gathering dusk that foretold still more snow, the letters came. Dispatched by special courier from the city of Gloucester, from Edward. Cecily had, until then, permitted herself the balm of tears only in the privacy of her chamber, alone at night. But as she read her eldest son’s letter, she broke down at last and wept without restraint, while Warwick’s flustered wife fluttered about her, like a moth maimed and yet unable to alight.
Edward’s letter was the first flare of light in the dark that had descended upon Cecily with word of the killings at Sandal Castle. It was a beautiful letter, not one she’d have expected to receive from a boy of his years, and Cecily, who was almost totally without sentimentality, found herself performing the most unlikely of acts, folding the letter into a small square and tucking it into the bodice of her gown; keeping it there in the days to come, in a film of thin silk against her skin, counteracting the more familiar chill of her crucifix chain.
She was moved, but not surprised, to find Edward had thought to write to the children as well. Edmund had been the more responsible of the two boys, but it was Edward who’d always found the time for his little brothers and sisters. In that, she’d never faulted him, knew how deep his family loyalties ran.
Now, in the anguished aftermath of Sandal Castle, she had only Edward. A boy not yet nineteen, confronted with burdens few grown men could have shouldered.
Her fear was not only for Edward, though. She was frantic with fear for her younger sons, when once she’d been serenely sure that none would harm a child. Gone were the comforting certainties of constraints dictated by decency, of limits imposed by honor. She no longer believed what had, until Sandal Castle, been a tenet of absolute faith, that there were acts men would not do. The murder of a dazed and defenseless seventeen-year-old boy. The mutilation of the bodies of men who’d died honorably in battle. She knew now the nature of her enemy, knew she could count on neither rank nor innocence to spare her children, and she was frightened for them as she’d never before been frightened in her life.
She was frightened not only for their physical safety, but for their emotional well-being, too. Cecily was haunted at night by the imagery of her children’s stricken eyes. Even her irrepressible George seemed to have been rendered mute. As for her youngest, Richard was beyond reach, had retreated into a silence that bore no relationship to childhood. In despair, Cecily found herself almost wishing t
hat Richard could suffer the same terrifying nightmares that had begun to tear George’s sleep asunder.
Several times a week now, she found herself sitting on the edge of George’s bed, pressing a wet cloth to his sweat-drenched temples and listening to the halting voice speak of bloody snow and headless bodies and horrors beyond imagining. Perhaps, if Richard had been racked with such nightmares, too, she could then have given him the comfort, the solace she was able to give to George. But Richard guarded even his sleep, made no comments upon his brother’s nightmares, voiced no complaints at having his own sleep so rudely disrupted night after night, and watched her in silence as she sat on the bed and stroked George’s matted blond hair, watched with opaque blue-grey eyes that never failed to tear at her heart, Edmund’s eyes.
Day after day, she watched her son withdraw further and further from the world around him, and she didn’t know how to help him. She knew only too well the morbid horrors that can inhabit the mind of a child, knew Richard had always been a child with an uncommonly rich imagination. She bitterly regretted that she had not spent more time with her youngest son when he was still young enough for her to have won his confidence, bitterly regretted that he did not seem able to share his grief with her.
If only he were as easy to reach as George! George had always come to her, always ready to confide, to carry tales, and infrequently, to confess. Strange, how very different her sons were in that respect. Richard suffered in silence, Edward didn’t appear to suffer at all, George shared more than she truly cared to know, and Edmund…
At that, she stumbled to her feet, fled to the prie-dieu in her bedchamber, to drop down on her knees and try to seek respite from pain in prayer. She spent hours praying for her husband and son in those numbing January days. It was all she knew to do. But for the first time in her life, prayer availed her little.
It was not as if she were unfamiliar with death. She’d borne twelve children, seen five die swaddled in baby linens, stood dry-eyed and grieving as the tiny coffins were lowered into the ground under pitifully sparse tombstones that gave only the dates of their meager lifespans and the names, the names she repeated each day as she repeated her rosary: Henry, William, John, Thomas, Ursula.
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