The Woodville Connection

by K. E. Martin

  “Yet for all this, I would not trouble you on my account alone but do so for the sake of one who has risked her own safety to help me. I am driven nigh beyond reason knowing the woman I cherish more dear than my own life may be in dire peril and is surely even now paying a severe penalty for aiding my escape. I will not be easy until I know that she is safe.”

  I rolled my eyes at this melodrama but not so Gloucester, who looked hard at the man, as if to gauge the sincerity with which he spoke. As he gazed upon the awful, mutilated features of the stranger, something flickered momentarily behind my lord’s grave eyes and then was gone. I knew not what he had seen in the man’s face but resolved to put all thoughts of Margaret aside and pay closer heed to the proceedings. Dickon would sign to me when he wished me to start scribing and I had better hold myself in readiness.

  “Come, friend, give me your name,” the Duke murmured, an unaccustomed note of hesitancy causing his voice to falter.

  The fellow nodded his head slowly, as if satisfied with the progress he was making. As he did so I discerned that there was something reminiscent of a wolf in his appearance, not a young and powerful wolf, proud and dominant in his bestial glory but rather a lean and mangy elder of the pack, a battered and canny survivor of many cruel seasons.

  “I’m mostly known these days as Pretty Will,” he replied after a short delay, rubbing thoughtfully at his wounded face. “‘Tis meant most likely as a jest,” he added unnecessarily. “You, my lord Duke, once knew me by a different name and for all that you were naught but a frightened child at the time, yet with God’s good grace I believe that you shall remember me now and help me in my hour of need.”

  I noticed with some alarm that Gloucester’s pallid face had become more ashen than usual; he trembled as he rose from his chair and moved uncertainly towards the stranger.

  “Can it truly be you? We thought you dead. And yet I see it is you,” he continued, delighted astonishment blazing brightly in his eyes. “My dear old friend, Will Fielding!”

  Unmindful of his ducal dignity, my lord leapt at Fielding like a boisterous pup and clasped the man in a close embrace. As for me, at last daylight flooded my fuddled brain, chasing away the murky shadows that had thus far kept my wits in darkness.

  I now understood that this unprepossessing person could only be the soldier hired by John Skelton many years ago to help spirit Dickon and George out of the country following the tragedy that had befallen their family at the battle of Wakefield. I well recalled the confusion and anxiety that had permeated the York’s house in London at that time; naturally, being of no political importance I had been left behind in the care of the Duchess Cecily when they fled. Kind lady, though she feared for the safety of her youngest boys and wept for the husband and son she had but lately lost in battle, yet still she found time to share words of consolation with me whenever I showed signs of loneliness or fright.

  Master Skelton, I knew, had been well-rewarded for his services, the King having granted him the lucrative office of Surveyor of the Port of London. Fielding, however, had disappeared without trace. It was said that the Duchess had offered a handsome purse in exchange for news of the tough soldier’s whereabouts as she had sworn to reward him for saving her children’s lives. Years had passed without any news and still the good Duchess remembered her vow and strove to find him. She had long since abandoned any real hope of discovering his whereabouts when a Burgundian cloth merchant arrived at Court with tidings that saddened her heart.

  Fielding, the merchant reported, had perished in a drunken brawl in an Antwerp tavern several years since. The clothier had no further details to offer, having gleaned this information through his young ’prentice who frequented the hostelry in question, but the Duchess accepted the veracity of the story and was particularly impressed when the merchant refused to accept the gold she offered him. Small wonder, then, that my lord of Gloucester had turned white as the rose of York when he finally recognised his old protector. I have heard tell of corpses rising from the grave to return and haunt the living but it was plain enough that Fielding was no ghost. Alas for my delicate nostrils, his pungent odour was very much a reality, one which would have shamed the most demonic, hell-spawned entity. How my noble friend could bring himself to embrace the man I was scarcely able to comprehend.

  When the first rapture of the reunion had abated somewhat, my lord regained his composure sufficiently to demand of Fielding an account of his life from the time of their parting to the present day, that he might better comprehend the need in which Fielding now approached him. I recount here the gist of what Fielding told us that day in the Duke of Gloucester’s privy chamber. The tale was long in the telling and parts of it strained my credulity, not to mention my poor wrist as I struggled to write it all down. My lord of Gloucester, however, listened most attentively to the testimony of his old protector and appeared to give credence to every word that he heard.

  Chapter 2

  An Old Friend Tells His Tale

  “My lord Duke,” Fielding began, “when you and your brother returned in triumph to London, I confess that I missed your young company most grievously. Your oldest brother was become King and you had no further need of my protection. Aye, though I rejoiced for the victory your family had sustained, still I nursed a soreness in my heart that you were no longer under my protection.

  “Your brother George was a cheery young lad and I liked him well enough but it was you that I missed the most. ’Til knowing you, my life had been rough and empty; I knew only how to fill my days with drinking and cursing and fornication unless I was engaged in battle. This was the time I liked the best, when I could fill up my chest with bloodlust and charge into the fray with no thought but to slay as many foe as possible. I say without false pride that I was known as a fearsome fighter and many brave men were loath to meet me in battle. Master Skelton chose me for his mission for this very reason. I was not a bad man but in battle I had no conscience.

  “And then I met you and your brother. The days I was privileged to spend with you taught me that there could be a place for tenderness in my life. I found a new way; serving you gave my life a better, more honest meaning. I learned ‘twas more rewarding to the soul to comfort and care for a frightened child than to make empty sport with a lusty trollop or run a foe through on my sword.

  “My lord, you were such a fragile child, ailing and ever in the hands of God and yet you were so brave and trusting. Do you recall the name it pleased you to give me? Wolfman it was, and I swear I guarded you and George as fiercely as any she-wolf guards her cubs. Then you left, and with you gone I took leave of my senses for a while and fell in with dissolute company. I returned to my former ways and stayed intoxicated for nigh on half a year.

  “With my corrupt companions I caroused by night and slept by day but there was naught of merriment in our proceedings. I drank to fill the aching void in my soul, to drown the desperate sense of worthlessness that assailed me whenever I was sober. Why my companions behaved as they did I cannot say but I know that all men must wrestle with their demons before they can be saved. I was saved at the last, roused from the sodden pit of despondency into which I had sunk by the accident that gave me this cursed scar.

  “It happened like this. My fellows and I were drinking in a tavern in Antwerp, soaking up the roughest brews unfit for even swine to drink. After a flask or two of this liquor had burned its way down our throats, we started to sing a bawdy song that heaped insult on the locals. Of course, offence was taken as had been our intention and a bloody fracas ensued. I entered into the mêlée with gusto, banging heads together so hard that the teeth were knocked out of my victims’ mouths.

  “It was a good fight and would most likely have ended amicably enough, had not one touchy fellow with a split lip and blackened eye come raging toward me with a burning torch which he thrust hard into my face. I made to dodge the blow and caught the full impact on my left cheek, as you can see. The scorching of my flesh was more pain than I
had ever known and mercifully I lost consciousness but not before I had struck wildly at my assailant with my dagger. I cut him deep in the shoulder and he fell flailing to the ground, dropping the torch as he hit the floor. In all the mayhem nobody noticed at first when the flames started to lick the ragged arras hanging from the wall. Then, as the fire took hold and the heat became intense, the assembled company was either too intoxicated or too indifferent to organise a fire party. I was told that the tavern went up like a tinderbox. Several men perished in the flames but I was more fortunate. Some worthy soul, I know not whom, saw me lying senseless and dragged me from the building, thus saving me from a fiery death.

  “When I came to I was in the home of a cloth merchant, a man I had encountered several times before when buying broadcloth for you and your brother, my lord. This man had discovered me in a ditch by the roadside and had sent his men to put me on a litter and carry me back to his house. I still wore the livery of the House of York and it was this that had prompted him to help me, for my face he surely did not recognise. My countenance at this time was more than sensitive folk could stomach to gaze upon, so terribly disfigured had I been by the burning brand.

  “The merchant’s good lady cared for my injury and nursed me back to health, enduring without complaint the filthy imprecations that I hurled at her every time she changed the herbal poultices on the wound. At one time, I became fevered and weak as a hatchling but with good food and kind attention I gradually regained both my strength and my dignity. The incident in the tavern had left me full of remorse for my drunken practices and I took a solemn vow to reform my unruly ways. From that moment onwards, it has been my practice to be abstemious in all my habits and I have remained sober ever since.

  “When I had fully recovered from my injury the merchant offered me employment in his service, protecting his wagons and mules from the ruthless outlaws that lie in wait upon the trade routes. The work suited my abilities and was very much to my liking. I travelled throughout the Low Countries and beyond, to Paris, Lyon and Venice. The searing pain in my scorched face gradually lessened to a dull ache to which I became accustomed, and I found that the new savageness of my appearance served to discourage the more faint-hearted bandits from making free with my employer’s precious trade goods. I never once forgot the debt I owed this generous fellow and I worked hard to repay his goodness. He and his wife became my family and I knew a certain contentment in their company.

  “In time, my lord, a rumour reached us that your good lady mother was seeking for me, in order to bestow upon me some kind of reward for my past services. My kind benefactor was much pleased for me and urged me to set out for London at once but I recoiled in horror at the suggestion. With all my sins upon me, to present myself before the gracious Duchess in order to receive her blessings and bounty was more than I could bear. Even the thought of it made my heart churn up in shame. I cannot explain, except to say that I felt as if the excesses of my drinking and whoring days still clung to my presence like an evil toxin which would befoul the purity of your noble mother.

  “And I thought also of seeing you, my lord, the little lord Dickon who had so favoured me with his boyish affection. I knew I had never been a handsome man but neither had I looked a monster, a nightmarish creature like to terrify children. The thought of you looking upon my ruined face and turning your head in revulsion brought tears of self-pity to my eyes. I explained all this to my employer and although he did not fully understand my reasoning, after much argument and with sympathetic encouragement from his lady he finally agreed to journey to London in my stead.

  “He presented himself to your noble mother at Court and gave her the story that the man she sought had perished in an inferno at a tavern in Antwerp several years since. In truth, the virtuous man misliked lying on my behalf but saw for himself how tortured I became at the thought of facing you again, so I beseech you not to think ill of him for his deception. Having completed his mission to my satisfaction, my master returned home and I remained happy in his service until his untimely death of the sweating fever some two years since.

  “I had been thinking for some time of returning to my homeland and the demise of my erstwhile employer brought my hankerings to a head. His widowed lady retired to the cloisters and the business passed into the hands of their daughter’s husband, a surly brute who disliked me and lost no time in dispensing with my services. Much to my surprise and gratitude, I found that my master had willed me a modest legacy, small enough to escape resentful notice from his foremost heir but adequate enough, if used sparingly, to support me for the remainder of my days.

  “Possessed now of the means to feed my body, I searched about for ways to feed my soul. I needed a purpose, someone in trouble to protect, as you had once been, my lord, or else someone kind and worthy of my service, as the merchant and his wife had been. Returning to England in 1470, it did not take me long to find such a one.

  “I had been staying in Lincoln but a sennight, passing myself off as Will Yorke in order to conceal my true identity, enquiring in kitchen and in tavern for news of any likely employment, when word reached me of a young lordling in need of a new body servant. The story went that this poor lad was naught but a cripple, fortunate in being lord of a rich and fertile manor at the tender age of twelve, cursed in the infirmities that denied him any pleasure in his inheritance.

  “My informant told me that the boy was weak and ailing, his limbs as crooked as a Venetian moneylender’s reckoning. This unhappy lad, one Geoffrey Plaincourt, was not expected to survive to manhood and on his death his estates would pass to his late father’s younger brother, the comely and elegant Sir Stephen Plaincourt. Sir Stephen had inherited from his father the smaller, neighbouring manor of Ringthorpe and was thereby adequately provided for but he was said to spend all his days at Plaincourt, tending to his nephew’s grander affairs with a diligence born of greedy anticipation. It was he that sought a new body servant for Geoffrey and so I rode out at once for Plaincourt in order to present myself to Sir Stephen.

  “On my arrival at the fair manor of Plaincourt I quickly deduced how the land lay for young Geoffrey and my heart ached with pity for the sorry lad. I discovered that the boy was kept to his chamber all day, denied fresh air and daylight on the grounds that being abroad too much would overtax his feeble strength. No person, excepting the meanest servant, was allowed to visit him without the consent of his uncle, Sir Stephen, who put it about that company over-excited the lad and brought on one of his plaintive fevers. Sir Stephen was a smooth and plausible liar but I have met his type before and I guessed at once his unkind purpose.

  “By keeping his nephew a prisoner in his own manor, he thought to drive him to despair and from thence to an earlier death than nature intended, whereupon he would become lord of Plaincourt in title as well as in fact. There was no-one at Plaincourt with the inclination or the means to stand as friend to poor Geoffrey. Sir Stephen was the boy’s legal guardian until he came of age and as such was within his rights to impose his own rule over the manor. Although I saw all this for myself in a very short time, I kept my own counsel and worked hard to ingratiate myself with Sir Stephen in the hope that he would hire me to tend to the boy.

  “As it turned out, I need not have tried so hard for the black-hearted villain took one look at me and resolved at once to make me his nephew’s keeper. Guessing his true character as I did, this was not hard for me to comprehend. My face is the stuff of boyish nightmares and the rest of my appearance so unappealing, so coarsened by dissipation it disgusts even myself. The rude manner of my speaking is the only language I know. Every callus on my hands, every crease upon my brow holds witness to the brutal life I have led up to now. Oh yes, I could see why the treacherous serpent would think me the perfect tormentor for young Geoffrey. I would be wielded by Plaincourt as an odious tool, one that with careful management would topple his nephew over the edge of despair and into a lonely, premature grave.

  “It was well for Geoffrey
and myself that Sir Stephen was a poor judge of men, yet it cannot be denied that the boy’s initial encounter with me was all that Sir Stephen had hoped for. He introduced me to the child as ‘Pretty’ Will Yorke, telling him with calculated cruelty that I had been selected as his special servant on account of my reputation for dealing with fractious children. Geoffrey shrank from me in terror but I treated him gently and it was not long before I had won for myself his affection and his trust. Indeed, ‘twas easily enough accomplished, for the ill-kept child had been so starved of softness that the simplest act of kindness brought him wonder.

  “Ah, poor Geoffrey! He was a right pitiful sight to behold with his bony, wasted frame, darkly shadowed eyes and cheeks hollow as caves in his sad, colourless face. Both his parents had died of a fever when he was but a year old and since then he had been at the mercy of his grasping uncle. The wretched lad had never known tenderness and as he was wholly untutored, he was an ignorant and oft-times bothersome lad but I grew to love him nonetheless. He had real need of me, you understand, and I gladly did what little I could to ease his suffering.

  “I spent the best part of eighteen months with him, for much of that time confined to a fetid chamber with only the boy and some mice for companionship. I had my liberty to roam the manor, of course, but I cared not to leave Geoffrey on his own for too long lest he take fright and fall into a fit in my absence. The other servants at the manor shunned me for the most part, wanting no truck with Sir Stephen’s hired ruffian which was what they truly took me for.

  “The thrice-cursed cowardly hypocrites! Not a one of them, save mayhap the dull-witted oaf who turned the spit, would piss in the wind to aid the boy yet they held themselves better than I! Until I arrived, there was no more pathetic and lonely a soul than Geoffrey Plaincourt in the whole of Christendom but I was able to change that. I loved him as my son and he cared for me as the father he never knew. I was there to hold his head when he puked and see to his soiled linen but more important than this, I gave him laughter and a reason to fight his illness. If he could make it through to manhood, how different then his life would be. May God forgive me, I taught the poor lad to hope.