‘Should we not shoot them or hurl boiling pitch on their heads or something?’ Catherine demanded as the acting constable arrived red-faced to join them.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he panted. ‘It is the Vaughans, madam. They have just delivered a message demanding the garrison surrenders you and the children, or they will bombard us. They have requested your person too, Lady Rushden.’
‘Jesu!’ muttered Catherine, flouncing swiftly downstairs out of arrow range and mustering the few officers left to her in the great hall. On a head count, they had more musicians and children than soldiers.
‘Sirs, how many of you could handle a bow?’ Heloise asked, and when all the musicians cheerfully raised their hands, she had to explain that it was longbows she had in mind.
‘I hardly think a few shawm players and a couple of lutanists are going to be much use,’ she fumed to the despairing Constable. ‘We could garb everyone in the discarded livery and spare helmets. They might think we still have a reasonable garrison.’
The garrison commander’s messenger to the duke, dispatched to advise him of their plight, had already been apprehended and displayed by his captors from across the moat as a wriggling tangle of thrashing legs. And Buckingham’s army was marching further from them with every hour.
‘My lady,’ the Constable muttered, drawing Heloise aside some half hour later, ‘her grace is talking of surrender. It is important that Lord Stafford does not fall into their hands. King Richard, as you know, is a man for hostages. We must hold out as long as we can.’
‘He would not harm the child.’
‘No, he would not, but the Vaughans nourish a bitter hatred of our duke and the child may suffer for it.’ She tried not to think of such horrid possibilities. ‘I also mislike it that their request includes you, my lady.’
‘I think you had better see this message. Someone sent it to me last night as a warning.’ Heloise watched the commander’s growing concern.
‘Christ have mercy, virtue! They will rape you, madam.’ A reprisal against y Cysgod.
‘How long can we hold out, then?’ She tried not to show her fear; it was necessary to be practical.
‘A day or so, perhaps longer, with God’s grace. A week if their bombards are ineffectual, and providing no one within the castle betrays us.’
‘If … if we could light a huge bonfire on Pen-y-Fan, would his grace see it, do you think?’
‘If our forces are still in the vale, he might, but the mist is too heavy.’ His tired smile was polite. ‘But, my lady, can you imagine the likelihood of getting a man out of the castle alive, let alone heaving timber up to the beacons and keeping it dry in this deluge? Or that the duke could even send sufficient men back to investigate? He will have enough labour to make Hereford, let alone return here.’
‘So we need some means of sending Lord Stafford to safety before the castle is taken. What if we were to disguise one of the other children in his clothes and let him be seen with her grace upon the battlements, and meanwhile smuggle him out to his father? I have horses stabled at the priory.’
‘Yes.’ He rubbed his fingers across his upper lip. ‘That notion has merit. I will think on’t.’
*
Miles sheltered in the porch of St Andrew’s at Bredwardine and felt sick to the bone. Behind him in the church resting their sodden feet, his men’s faces showed it too – water-soaked brigandines wrapping rusting metal around hearts engrained with mould. Courage there might be still, but it would go puff like toadstools leaving flabby shells of emptiness. Was it only on Harry that God was pouring out his wrath? Was the sun shining on Tudor’s sails out in the Channel or on Woodville blades taken down from the walls at Ightham or Maidstone? You could not hurry through mud. What if the fleet were becalmed; what if …
‘A word with you, Miles.’ Knyvett set an urgent hand to his shoulder, drawing him down to the churchyard gate. ‘Bad news. A messenger has come from the prior at Brecknock. The Vaughans have looted the castle in the king’s name and taken her grace and the children prisoner.’
‘Godsakes!’ Death scraped his fingernail down Miles’s spine. ‘My wife, is she—’
‘The fellow did not know, Miles. Rest easy, the duchess will let no harm befall her.’
‘Cat could not defend a sandcastle!’ Miles slammed his right fist against his palm. ‘Heloise is … is vulnerable.’ Vulnerable enough to be hauled to the stake. ‘They know how to hurt her.’ He angrily shook off the older man’s restraining hand. ‘I must go back.’
‘Oh no, you shall not!’ Knyvett spun him back to face him. ‘By Christ, man, if you leave, the entire army will desert.’
‘Maybe they should!’
‘Miles, Miles,’ Knyvett shook him. ‘Wait until you know more, eh? You always had a cool head. Don’t lose it now. That is better. Now, listen to me! It sounds as though the Vaughans were all ready to lay siege the instant we were two days’ march away. By St George, we are in dung to our necks! Do you see, if King Richard has knowledge of our plans, he must know about the rising in the south. Now come and hear the messenger for yourself.’
God ha’ mercy! Dung indeed! One of the duke’s scouts had already brought warning that Sir Humphrey Stafford, the king’s man, was felling trees along the road to Hereford and setting bowmen to hold the bridges. A second scout had reported back that Hereford had shut its gates and the king had issued a proclamation of a pardon to all deserters and a reward of one thousand pounds for Harry’s capture.
Harry was still interrogating the elderly messenger from Brecknock.
‘Trapped!’ growled the duke. ‘Humphrey Stafford’s men have been stalking us, picking off the slow ones. Sweet Christ, if this news from Brecknock leaks out, we shall lose the rest of them!’ He hit his mailed fist against the tree. ‘They knew! The Vaughans knew! Was this your wife’s doing?’
Miles gulped at the sudden accusation. Heloise could be straddled by some vicious whoreson or left for dead among the smouldering ruins and Harry had the gall to …
‘No!’ Miles turned his back, his fists clenched. The leash of service around his neck was straining fit to break.
‘No?’ sneered the duke. ‘If they can set a leech beneath my underbelly, why not yours?’
‘Are you demented, my lord?’ Miles swung round, the training of years harnessing his icy rage. ‘King Richard only needed to set watch on the Beaufort woman’s messengers to know something was afoot. A rising planned from Wales to Kent?’ His tone grew scathing. ‘Christ Almighty, it has more holes than a pauper’s stocking.’
‘It could have even been you!’
Miles’s hands slammed against Harry’s chest, sending him crashing back into the tree trunk. The ducal armour jarred against the lichened, pillar-thick trunk and his grace of Buckingham slithered downwards to land in a painful straddle across the roots. The kernel of the old Harry showed in a brief crinkle of a grin as Miles pulled him up.
‘Perhaps you had better hang me,’ Miles suggested dryly, brushing the leaves from the skirt of Harry’s hauberk. ‘It might be more convenient than being ripped apart at Smithfield. Is there a map to hand, friends?’ He jerked his head round at de la Bere and Sir Nicholas Latimer who had come instantly to intervene. There was appreciation in the younger man’s expression.
‘Of course, Miles.’ De la Bere drew a leather-wrapped package from his breast. ‘Shall we return to the shelter of the porch, your grace?’
His grace, jarred in the place where Satan would fasten a tail on him, was sulky and, for once, silent.
‘What the men need is action, food and a place to dry out, not necessarily in that order,’ observed Miles.
‘Or pay.’ The smooth voice of Morton insinuated itself into their midst. ‘I have just been doing a count. Buckingham, the men are falling out like the hairs in your comb.’
*
On Friday eve, with Ned – disguised as a girl in coif and skirts – huddled against her back like a baby creature clinging to its moth
er’s fur, Heloise hit her crop on a broad front door and hoped she had reached the village of Weobley. It was not worth dismounting to shelter beneath the overstorey; the entire road in front of the house was sheeted with water and Cloud’s hooves were awash. Bess backed her horse away, staring up at the carved gables. ‘I saw a movement up there at the side window. Smite again!’ But it was Benet who slithered off from riding pillion with Bess and splashed stolidly across to hammer his fist upon the shutters.
‘We are seeking the castle,’ Heloise told the hard-faced creature who tardily came. Beyond the narrow crack of the door, she could smell griddlecakes and the steamy warmth of a kitchen.
‘Up there, past the Salutation,’ muttered the woman cryptically, abruptly closing the door on them.
Around the next bend, they found a prosperous village of half-timbered houses, but only the smoke, curling from each chimney pot, moved in the drizzle. At the end of the street squatted a tavern displaying a scarlet lion below its dripping garland, and beyond the next corner, candles flickered behind the shuttered windows of a cidermaker’s with a unicorn sign, but there were no army wagons crowding the side lane.
In her male garments, Heloise had no heart to brave either establishment nor dared she send slow-witted Benet. She urged Ned to scramble across to Bess’s arms and, dismounting, let herself into one of the tiny gardens. The indifferent cottager gave them directions; the castle lay beyond the alehouse. Instinct told her that this was not the answer, yet she dared not let Bess know that it was not just the highway, churned by an army’s tramping feet, nor any villager’s counsel that had led them to Weobley, but her own fey instincts seeking out Miles.
The path turned out to be only bridle-width and little used, but they kept going for a hundred paces more to discover only tumbled stones. Naught but nettles and hawthorn reigned here now.
‘Oh mercy,’ exclaimed Bess, close to weeping. ‘We shall be benighted soon.’
Heloise clambered up the grassy mound. Mayhap she might see some campfires; though weather like this could swallow up an army.
‘Let us go to the church as we arranged and see if Martin is come with any news.’
At least there would be some brief refuge from the rain, Heloise sighed, as they led their horses past the preaching cross and drew them beneath the shelter of the church’s southern porch. Bess set Ned to count the flowered panels above her head, while Heloise ventured in. The doorlatch echoed loudly in the semi-darkness. A light moving to the left of the chancel behind the rood screen glimmered palely on a knightly tomb.
‘Martin?’ she called as she drew a cross of water on her dripping forehead and distractedly genuflected. Her voice sounded feeble in the eerie, pillared gloom.
The voice that answered came from above and she nearly swooned with the shock of it. A taper flared; a thin parson stood upon the rood screen beneath the great wooden cross, his intimidating flare of nostril and eye sockets lit from below. Heloise rallied; out came the gasping half-lie of Brecknock’s farms and castle being torched and the need to seek the child’s father who was with the duke’s retinue.
But it seemed they had found help. St Miles, the patron saint of lost armies and other movables, had answered her prayers. The priest, now he could see she was no pilfering soldier, came down from his refuge. Yes, he told them, an army had entered the village and then gone east to seize the empty manorhouse belonging to Lord Ferrers, a Yorkist lord. Perhaps they would like him to guide them there before nightfall? Hungry, shivering in their wet clothes after a day spent searching, all the while anxious to safeguard Ned’s health and freedom, the two young women and Benet were at the end of their strength, but what was half a mile or so more? At a side altar, Heloise lit all the prayer candles so Ned might warm his cold little hands while they waited for the parson to bridle his mule.
Perhaps the saints were warmed by the child’s courage also, for Martin arrived back from his scouting, red-mired and sodden. The news was bad: the high road to Hereford was held by King Richard’s men.
‘But be of good heart, my lady. They have insufficient numbers for a battle yet.’
*
Woonton Devereux was hardly the jewel of Lord Ferrers’s barony. The outline in the gloom was of an unembellished building in a sloping field flanked like a mother pig by a progeny of byres and barns. Judging by the noise and flickering lights, it was populated by more than oxen. They had found someone’s army.
‘Who comes?’ Pikes challenged them.
It was then Ned inconveniently asserted himself: ‘I am here to speak with my father, his grace of Buckingham,’ he announced, snatching off his shameful female cap and veil before Heloise could stop him. ‘Go and announce me, sirrah. Straightway, if you please!’ It was such wondrous mimicry of his father that one of the sentries saluted.
Green timber was smoking Ferrers’s hall. Heloise wiped her stinging eyes and gaped. It was like stepping through some hunting pique-nique held in Hell. Scores of half-clad men crammed tight as flagstones lay amidst a mess of drying jackets and prostrate weaponry. The offensive stink of the overused garderobe fermented in air already musty, and the vapour from a hundred breaths oozed down the bare, speckled walls. Some knave whistled and poor, tired Bess found herself whooped at on all sides with bored hands tweaking her hem. The furore grew and the women almost tumbled through the solar door that Sir William Knyvett flung open to investigate the hubbub. The noise died in an instant.
‘The Vaughans have taken Brecknock, my lord father,’ exclaimed Ned in his piping voice and was snatched inside by his father like a pipit seized by a sparrowhawk.
‘Did you have to let him blurt that out in front of them?’ exclaimed Buckingham, shoving his son to dry before the blazing fire, and then he realised who else stood behind the tall, hunched parson.
Another time Heloise might have succumbed to crazed laughter for against a firescreen of glistening hauberks and steaming quilted jackets, the duke, stripped down to a rust-stained shirt, was fish-eyed with astonishment. He did not recognise her. She stood smiling foolishly at her husband, her muddy hose crusted with mud, perspiring profusely into Miles’s third best shirt in the steamy heat, with her dyed, hacked hair dripping onto spreading stains across her padded shoulders. There had been little point in changing into the simple robe she had brought with her.
‘Oh my God!’ said a beloved voice, disturbing the good parson’s equanimity and Miles’s arms lifted her shoulder high as though she had won a tourney, his shining hair tossed back, his cheeks dark with the growth of beard, his eyes ecstatic.
Bess, however, was eyeing the empty platters. ‘Would it be possible to feed Lord Stafford?’ she asked, conscientious to her fingertips and with a little self-interest too.
‘Yes.’ Buckingham’s voice emerged in a strangled squeak; he had noted his son was shorn of curls and wearing skirts. ‘Yes, yes, Pershall, see to it.’
‘Come to the fire, Elizabeth.’ De la Bere conducted the bedraggled young woman to the hearth as though he were a Westminster courtier escorting a foreign princess.
‘I do so enjoy a family gathering,’ observed the Bishop of Ely, his cathedral voice unpleasingly acrid. ‘A pity that it will be over so soon.’
Chapter 27
‘Trust Harry’s rebellion to meet with the worst floods in the Marches in living memory!’ Miles muttered wearily to de la Bere as they stood side by side glaring at the perpetual rain. Noah would have been sympathetic; bridges broken, villages destroyed, beasts carried away and one carter swore he had seen a wooden cradle in the midst of the Severn torrent and heard the babe within it mewling piteously.
For nigh a week, Harry’s dwindling army had played at dice, consuming all Lord Ferrers’s fowls and oxen and then high-handedly demanding food from the nearby farms, their presence becoming as loathsome as the morning smell of a fox in a fowl yard. As for Harry, cut off from the other rebel leaders, and with Brecknock looted by the rabble he despised, he left Miles to deal with the complai
nts and, like an oppressed crustacean, withdrew into a shell of self-hatred.
‘Aye, matters could not be much worse,’ replied de la Bere.
Miles hazarded the instant the rivers were passable, the king’s supporters would send a force to take them and every man in Herefordshire and Powys, let alone their own men, would be out duke-hunting. Thank God their soldiers did not know yet that they could earn land valued at a hundred pounds or else a thousand pounds in coin as a reward for Harry’s capture.
And the surly, restless army was no place for the women. Miles longed to keep Heloise beside him, but it was wiser to lodge her with Bess and Ned at the closest religious house with a detachment of reliable soldiers camped at a discreet distance. But how long could he keep any of them safe?
It was on Tuesday, as the funeral bell of St Peter’s tolled across the stubbled cornfields, that the wind changed from south to west; God drew the clouds back like a curtain to the east and the rain ceased. Harry – whether he liked it or not – Miles decided, had to be pricked out of his downward spiral for some unpleasant decisions. He took it on himself to fetch Ned and the two women back to the farmhouse early next morning. They deserved a say in their future and there was not much time.
He returned to the farm with the child before him on Traveller to find Harry had been roused by the arrival of another fugitive from Brecknock. Sir Thomas Limerick had materialised as a tonsured cleric, complete with ass, upon their doorstep. He had escaped to the priory during the looting.
Miles listened to his report in the solar with a heavy heart. At least Morton was not in the chamber to hear the catalogue of woes. The Vaughans and the vengeful Welsh had been through Brecknock castle like an attack of dragons. They had set fire to chancery and counting rooms. The rent rolls, tally sticks, register of writs, the inquisitions and the rest were all ashes, and it would take years to re-establish the accounting, let alone justify the collection of any rent.
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