George was staring at him with eyes full of hatred. He drew a labored breath and then said bitterly, “Happy birthday, Dickon.”
8
Westminster
October 1471
Cecily Neville gave her son a sympathetic look. He’d not said anything, but she knew him well enough to read the signs of his pain.
“Your tooth does still bother you? Ah, Edward, I do understand why you be so loathe to have it pulled, but I fear you do only delay the inevitable.”
“I fear so, too, Ma Mère. It’s been nigh on a week since my barber did fill up the hole with gold shavings and I’ve yet to feel the relief he promised. He says worms too small for the naked eye to see do bore into the tooth and cause the pain, and by sealing them off from the air with the gold, they die and the hurting stops. Except that it hasn’t.”
“Nor will it as long as the tooth does remain in your mouth.” She smiled faintly. “Your father was much the same as you, would face any horror known to man or God before he’d submit himself to the barber’s pincers!”
“Little wonder…. The last time I did have a tooth pulled, I vowed never again; it must have been rooted as far down as my gut!” Edward grimaced. “Nor do I care to end my days as do most who make old bones, so toothless that they must sup on porridges and gruels. My people are trying to tell me that a false tooth can be made from ox bone, but Will says he knows a man who had such a tooth fashioned and it came loose and he swallowed the damned thing, came right close to choking to death!”
He stretched his legs toward the hearth, using a dozing complacent mastiff as a footstool, and said broodingly, “It seems to me that it has begun to ache even more since we’ve begun talking of it. Tell me more of your meeting with George, Ma Mère. So he still does swear to be innocent, still denies that Anne’s disappearance is his doing?”
She nodded, said with a bitter, weary smile, “To hear him tell it, Anne did of a sudden take it into her head to vanish alone into the very heart of London! And of course he can offer no explanation as to why she should have done so mad a thing! And this he swears upon all the saints, upon God the Father and the Blessed Cross, even upon the souls of your father and Edmund.”
Edward’s mouth quirked. “That from one who blasphemes as easily as other men do breathe!” he said caustically. “More fool I for even hoping it could be otherwise. But I thought that if there was one who might get the truth from him, it would be you, Ma Mère. With me he blusters, and with Dickon he rants. He denies all and spews forth venom the likes of which I’ve never heard and I’m becoming increasingly hard put to keep Dickon from killing him…or from murdering him myself! Dickon thinks he’s mad and I’m coming to believe he may well be right.”
“Almost, I could hope he was,” Cecily said softly.
It was not often she dropped her defenses like this, let the pain show so nakedly. Edward, who’d been a frustrated witness to his brother’s suffering these ten days past, saw now that she, too, was paying the price George had chosen to exact from Richard. Knowing she’d have scorned pity, he offered distraction, instead, by saying, “I gather you do approve of Dickon’s intent to wed the lass?”
“Most assuredly. I think she’d be good for Richard; I know he’d be good for her. All in all, it would be a most suitable match. They do care for one another, and if she’s not the heiress she once was, given George’s greed and her father’s treason, I doubt that Richard will be bothered unduly by that lack. Moreover, she’s Neville and Beauchamp and there’s no better blood in England than that.”
He slanted a sharp look toward her at that last. He knew all too well her opinion of his wife’s lineage, her scorn for the Woodville blood that ran in Elizabeth’s veins. Even the passage of seven years and the births of four grandchildren had done little to reconcile her to the woman he’d chosen as his Queen. In her eyes, he knew, Elizabeth had been weighed and found forever wanting and nothing was likely to change or soften that icy implacable judgment.
“I remember the night I did take Richard and George down to the wharves to see them on board ship for Burgundy…. I came back to Baynard’s Castle to find Anne huddled in the boys’ bedchamber. Like a little lost bird, she was…. I fear for her, Edward, I fear for her very much.”
“So do I, Ma Mère,” he said grimly. Coming to his feet, he moved to the window, stared down into the inner gardens. Autumn flowers flaunted brilliant flashes of color under a vivid October sky. He forgot and touched his tongue to his ailing tooth; the sudden pain only served to further sour his mood. Christ, what a tangled coil! What a bloody quagmire, and they were all entrapped in it up to their knees and sinking fast.
“I’d have clapped George in the Tower a week ago if I thought it would make him yield up Anne. Yes, I do know your thoughts on that, Ma Mère. And I’ll concede there’s no evidence that he did, indeed, abduct the girl. But I might be forced to it yet, and I want you to be aware of that.”
“I would hope it’ll not come to that. What will you do now?”
“Well, I’m seeing Dickon in the morning. I’ll find out then if he’s had any luck in tracing the lass since I last spoke to him. I fear all he’s managing to do is deny himself sleep.”
“George gave Richard no trouble about admitting men onto his lands?”
“No, but we never expected her to be found in one of George’s manors. Even he is not such a fool as to hold her on his own lands. There’d be no need to take such a risk, not when there’s never a lack of men to sell their services or their souls if the price be high enough.”
He turned away from the window. “I gave the order this afternoon to have George’s servants taken to the Tower. Dickon questioned them before, of course, says they be blind, deaf, and dumb, the lot of them. I thought, however, that it could do no harm to question them again. But this time I shall be the one to pose the questions.”
Cecily nodded approvingly. “Do you think they know anything?”
“I’ve no idea,” he admitted, “but at this point, I’m willing to try anything. Afterwards, I mean to order George before me again. I dare not let Dickon confront him alone; not after ten days such as he’s just passed through…. First unwilling to leave Baynard’s Castle for even an hour in fear that it would be then that she’d send word, and now chasing down every accursed rumor that comes his way as to her whereabouts, insisting himself upon checking the hospitals, the sanctuaries, the prisons, old retainers of Warwick’s, nunneries. Tuesday he even went so far as to go himself to Bedlam! I’ve tried to tell him he’s tormenting himself for naught, that the chances of Anne being on her own in London are so scant as to be well nigh nonexistent. I suppose, though, that he feels he has to do something, however futile….”
He shook his head, looking down at his mother with somber eyes and a flickering crooked smile.
“I tell you, Ma Mère, I’ve none too sanguine hopes as to what’s to come of all this…. The greatest achievement of my reign may well be that I did keep one of my brothers from killing the other, and I’m nowhere near sure that I’ll be able to do that much!” The smile vanished. “I do know that I’m less and less inclined to try.”
“There you do have it, Dickon, all I was told. Anne did disappear from the Herber that Sunday while George was at Mass, and the French girl with her.”
“Are you saying, Ned, that you now believe Anne did run away?”
“Well, I confess it no longer seems as unlikely as it once did. I am convinced that George’s servants spoke the truth, or as much of it as they knew. It may well be that he was more clever about this than we would have expected, that he did deliberately arrange to have her taken while he was conspicuously absent from the Herber. But there’s something else…. I’ve been advised that George’s men are making inquiries for Anne all over London, have been for the past three weeks. Here again he may be engaging in a game of bluff and double bluff. He’d hardly be searching for her if he were holding her as we charged…or so we’d naturally conclude! But
to tell you true, Dickon, I don’t think him clever enough to think of that.”
Richard rose abruptly, moved to the window. The world below looked to be an entirely different place, to have been stripped under cover of night of the last mellow touches of October gold; the sky was leaden, and a chill stinging rain had been falling since midmorning. The gardens looked desolate, the flowers beaten down into the sodden earth; what color there was looked garish, unnatural.
“Dickon, I did send to the Herber for George. You’re welcome to remain while I do speak with him if you so choose. But I’d rather you didn’t, given the nature of your feelings right now. George is…well, I know him to be as provoking as any fiend ever whelped, but it serves for naught to let him fire your temper…and gives him far too much satisfaction!”
Richard had no chance to reply. A Yorkist retainer was hastening into the room, and not waiting to be announced, right on the man’s heels came George.
“You did order my chamberlain and steward and even my body squires to the Tower! You had no right, Ned! No right!”
“No?” Edward said coolly. “You should have remembered, Brother George, what I did tell you at Coventry. That you’d like it little if I should have to lesson you in what I can and cannot do.”
For a heartbeat, unguarded hatred smoldered openly in George’s eyes. And then they clouded over with caution, and he said, with self-conscious defiance, “So you did take my people to the Tower. What of it? They could tell you only what you already do know, that Anne ran away. And if they say otherwise, they lie! Or were so intimidated that they’d swear black was white to please you! And what would that prove? You need only show most men a mere glimpse of the rack and you’ll have them tripping over their own tongues in their haste to say what they think you want to hear!”
“I had no need to resort to such drastic means of extracting the truth, George,” Edward said, unmoved. “They were quite eager, in fact, to share all they knew with me. I suspect that, being men of common sense, they did see how thin my patience has stretched, did see how very little it would take to provoke my displeasure. Most men be rather leery of incurring my displeasure, George.”
No matter how often George told himself that he didn’t fear his brother, he still found himself beginning to sweat, found his mouth drying when confronted with Edward’s anger. He swallowed, shot Richard a look of pure venom. This was Dickon’s doing, all of it. He’d gotten Ned to do this, to humiliate him by arresting his own servants…and God knows what they’d managed to get out of them by now! He knew there wasn’t a one of them he could trust. There were times when he thought there was no one in all of Christendom he could truly trust. Even Bella was suspect. Even Bella.
“I should think that now would be the time for you both to tender your apologies! You’ve done nothing but make accusations of the most scurrilous sort for the past eleven days. Yet you do know now that I was speaking the truth. I had no part in Anne’s disappearance and my servants had to tell you that. Oh, I’m sure they were only too eager to muddy the waters, to babble on about that scene in the solar, and to dredge up gossip of every squabble that did ever take place under my roof! But they still had to confirm what I’ve been say—”
“What scene in the solar?” Richard cut in sharply.
George blinked and looked from one to the other, seeing it then, but seeing it too late. Ned knew. Ned knew but he hadn’t told Dickon. Fool that he was, he’d had to do that himself!
“What scene in the solar, George?”
“Nothing!” he said hastily. “Nothing at all! I came here to talk to Ned, not to you, Dickon. In fact, it does surprise me to find you here at all, what with Crosby scouring all Westminster for you!”
The response was all he could have hoped for; he saw Richard stiffen, say tensely, “Crosby? John Crosby…the sheriff?”
George feigned interest in the glittering rings that adorned his fingers. “Yes. He be looking all over for you. He thinks he may have found Anne for you,” he said, and smiled as Richard spun around to retrieve his cloak, started for the door.
“I’d not be in such a hurry if I were you, Dickon. He does want you to look at a body. They found a girl floating in the Thames this morning. About fifteen or sixteen, a little bit of a thing, with bright chestnut hair. Crosby says she was strangled and then dumped in the river. He thinks you should have a look at her…Little Brother.”
George laughed outright then, for his brother looked suddenly sick with fear. Edward caught up with Richard at the door and they exchanged a few words, too softly for George to hear.
He didn’t much care; what mattered it what Ned chose to say to Dickon? This did, he decided, come quite close to evening the score with Dickon. It almost did pay him back for the unforgivable, for that madness taunt he’d dared make on the day of his birthday, the day he’d come to the Herber. Almost, but not quite.
Dickon would have some bad moments, though, before he finally found Crosby. As soon as Crosby described the girl for him, he’d realize it couldn’t be Anne; a tall robust lass, she was, Crosby had said, and Anne was a mere finger or two above five feet, if even that. But who knows? Dickon might not think to question Crosby all that closely, as shaken as he was, might not know for sure till he did lay eyes upon the girl’s body.
“If that girl be Anne Neville, I do mean to hold you to account for her murder.”
George was so taken aback that he gaped wordlessly at his brother for the space of several seconds. He’d been so thoroughly taken up with Richard’s reaction that he’d not even given a thought to Edward’s. He saw now that had been a mistake, a great mistake. He opened his mouth to assure Edward that the girl wasn’t Anne, caught himself just in time.
“Jesus God, Ned! That girl was raped and strangled! You cannot think any of my men would have done that!”
“No, I don’t think even you’d have gone as far as that, George. But I didn’t say I’d hold you to blame if you were guilty; I said I’d hold you to blame if the girl be Anne.”
George was stunned. “You cannot mean that! That you would blame me for any harm that comes to Anne, whether it be my doing or not!”
“I do mean exactly that, George. If the girl dies, I don’t much care how it did happen. I hold you responsible. Even if she does catch a chill and it proves mortal, I shall see that as murder, too.”
“Ned, no! I cannot be blamed if some evil did befall her after she ran away! You’d never get away with such an outrage! I’d be entitled to be charged, to be tried by my peers, to—”
“Oh, I’d give you a trial, George. I daresay I’d even produce a confession.”
For a moment, George found himself unable to believe that he’d heard Edward correctly, unable to believe Edward could ever have said that. There rose before his eyes the dark specter of the Tower. All night he’d been haunted by the worst that an uneasy imagination could devise. He’d seen his servants held within cells where light never shone, where the walls were always damp to the touch, foul with the smells rising up from the river, with the stench of unwashed bodies and vomit and fear. He’d seen his men lying atremble in the dark, awaiting that summons to the underground chamber in the White Tower that had in it all the horrors of Hell.
Now he was the one in the Tower torture chamber, he was the one being strapped down to the rack, being pressed with heavy weights and prodded with hot iron, and he stared at Edward with the dazed disbelief of one finding himself in a nightmare suddenly become reality. Even in his most panicky moments, as he’d lain awake in those grey hours till dawn and persuaded himself that he dare not let Anne tell her story to Dickon, George had never envisioned a threat like this. Until now, he’d taken it for granted that his blood would always exempt him from the horrors that might imperil other men.
“Ned, you cannot…. My God, I’m your brother!”
“My brother, are you? That’s almost laughable, coming from you, George!”
Edward reached down, entangled his fingers in the h
eavy gold pendant chain George wore around his neck; their faces were now very close.
“Do you think it to be a relationship born of your convenience, to be called upon when it does suit you and ignored when it does not? What have you ever done to make me think of you as a brother? Did you truly think that because we did share the same womb, you’d be forever spared a reckoning, that you’d never be held to account for your crimes, your sins, your betrayals?”
Edward twisted the chain sharply. George flinched and the muscles then clenched along his jaw, but he offered no resistance. Edward yanked suddenly; the clasp gave way and the pendant came loose in his hand. It was engraved with the White Rose of York. Edward gazed down at it and then straightened up, said in measured tones that George found more frightening than unbridled rage, “I want the girl, George.”
“Ned, I swear…I swear by the very Blood of Jesus that I don’t have her! I don’t! God’s truth, I don’t!”
“Well then, you’d best find her…hadn’t you? I do know you’ve men out seeking to do just that. It did cross my mind that you might not be searching for her on Dickon’s behalf. Oh, yes, that crossed my mind! But I am telling you now, that you’d best forget any desperate schemes you may have had of finding her first and sealing her mouth with sea water or dirt. There’s but one thing standing between you and the block on Tower Green, the thin thread of Anne Neville’s life. You’d best pray very hard that it does not break, George.”
Edward looked down again at the pendant he held in his hand, at the Yorkist White Rose, and then flung it at George’s feet.
“Now take that bauble with the cognizance you’ve no right to claim, and get out of here. The very sight of you does sicken me. Go home and light candles and entreat God that it wasn’t Anne you did so gleefully send Dickon to look upon. If not, you do have a tomorrow. But not many of them, George. Not unless Anne be found alive and unharmed. That I do promise you.”
The Sunne In Splendour: A Novel of Richard III Page 62
