Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  There was nothing for it but to finish our dinner; I cannot remember ever having less appetite. Richard had disappeared somewhere within the castle, none daring to follow him; no orders had been given for my detention, though several, I’m sure, were itching to give them. As for me, the one thought in my mind was to escape from Nottingham, before the situation grew worse. Once my father knew the tenor of Richard’s mind, he might feel driven to declare outright for Tudor. Richard could well seal his own fate by threats to our family. Given a chance, he’d break my father’s power, and that of others like him, for ever. I honestly admit, I’d see him dead before I gave him that chance. Kings may turn their anger against over-mighty subjects, but an over-mighty King will ruin us all!

  My effort to abscond from Nottingham proved a dismal failure. To be brief, I took myself off to my own apartments as fast as was discreet, changed gear with my father’s servant who had brought the letters earlier in the day, and rode out of the castle gates, mercifully unchallenged, and hell for leather on to the Derby road. I’d got no further than Lenton when I saw them, mounted armed men, ranged solidly across the road. The captain who stopped me wore the device of the Earl of Lincoln. I might have guessed he’d give orders without consulting his uncle. There’s another peremptory bastard for you! Nothing for it but surrender without argument and hope that Richard had cooled his temper and was disposed to mercy. Seeing me chary of trouble, they spared me the indignity of handcuffs, and of having my feet tied to the stirrups.

  I was brought before the King as he came from chapel, preceded by his confessor, his chaplains, priests and singing boys. Clammy-handed, I stood there, between two men-at-arms, caught dressed as a servant in my father’s green livery, only too conscious of the eagle’s claw worked in gold thread on my sleeve. My face must have drained itself white as the choirboys’ surplices. Richard looked me up and down without emotion. An interview being impossible in the corridor or chapel, it took place in the Chamber of Presence, he and I alone but for the armed guard who escorted me.

  Richard sat in the King’s chair, behind the long council table, like a judge upon the Bench. Being already half guilty of the capital offence of treason, I took no comfort from his reputation for just sentences. Reluctant to meet his eyes, I fixed my gaze upon his hands, those slim, rather beautiful hands, lying quietly on the chair arms, the fine bones, veins and tendons clearly defined from wrist to knuckle. On his right thumb he wore a mourning ring, which winked its ruby death’s-head eye at me, as an ominous reminder of its detachment from a body. In my knees and thighs, the muscles seemed taken with a trembling twitch; my tongue stuck to my jaws like paper. I had never been more conscious of Richard’s power.

  I knelt, unable to support myself in the face of his regality, shifting my gaze to the shining black folds of silk at his feet. I heard his voice, and its tone, quite without menace, mild almost, did nothing to reassure me. Damn him, he had the dignity of his own Chief Justice — anger I could have taken; any attack would have brought me out in less of a coward’s sweat than this quietness.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you had better tell me how the Stanley family has allied itself.’ I made an effort to push my tongue about my mouth, but no words formed round it. ‘Well?’ he said, still very quiet. The only possible tactic was to disarm him with a flood of honesty.

  I looked up. He’d leant his head against the tall chair-back. On the wall behind him, reaching from ceiling to floor was a great tapestry woven with the Judgement of Paris. An odd subject for a background to this judgement of life or death, the voluptuous curves of naked women. On either side, branched silver wall-sconces blazed with candles, very bright after the shadows on the floor. In a few hours, strain had aged him ten years; the bones projected as if scraped of flesh, the eyes sunken yet enlarged, as with the fevered. His mouth was shut tight as a trap. Two lines, little noticeable in daylight, ran from nostril to corner of mouth as if gouged out by hammer and chisel. A muscle fluttered like midges’ wings in one cheek.

  ‘Your Grace,’ I said, in a hoarse rush, ‘I am at your mercy. You ask me how my family allies itself — believe me, they do not see fit to inform me. My father keeps his intentions close to his chest. I can offer your Grace no more than my own estimation — that he intends no overt treason. When in his life has he ever declared himself?’

  ‘Never, to my knowledge. I’ll accept your word on that. What of your uncle, Sir William Stanley?’

  ‘I believe that he is a traitor already, and expecting to be rewarded for it.’

  ‘Rewarded?’ Over his quiet, Richard was beginning to sound a little savage. ‘He and your father have been glutted with rewards. You mean he said old Dick was becoming close-fisted and he’d look elsewhere for his rewards. I know he’s after the Earldom of Chester, has been for years. Well, codfish might sow corn.’

  This, if anything, increased my fears. He had my uncle William’s ambitions only too clearly summed up, even knew what he was called behind his back. He’d become sourly contemptuous too, sounding more like some dour, blunt-spoken Yorkshireman with every sentence.

  ‘Who else?’

  Startled, I answered with honesty, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You could try a guess. I can. The City of Chester?’

  ‘In Chester,’ I said slowly, ‘Sir John Savage and his nine sons have sworn to support my uncle in all he does.’ Both of us knew that in January, Richard had written to the burgesses of Chester, including that family, urging just this obedience.

  He went on, impatient. ‘I have news for you. Rhys ap Thomas came to Tudor at Newtown in Montgomery with his men of Pembroke and Carmarthen, well armed. I might have guessed that too. How could the rebel have reached the Severn, unless Rhys had broken his oath to me…flat as his fat belly allows on the ground, no doubt, with Tudor astride him! And what was he offered? The Lieutenancy of Wales, no less.’

  I mumbled, ‘Tudor will be laying out half Wales in promises.’

  ‘That are worthless pledges. I have laid out half England and received only broken promises in return. Wales is not yet his to bestow. Rhys should set little store by words. He is perjured.’ There was nothing I could say, no escape; he had me pinioned, though at the moment I felt more like a meshed sparrow than heir to the Eagle.

  ‘What else do you know of this mare’s nest of treachery?’ He spoke as if not caring what reply was given. Nevertheless, Richard is not a man you lie to, even at more favourable times.

  ‘My father is wary of committing his schemes to paper. He wished me to join him at Derby. I have his letter.’ I fumbled for it, held it out, but he ignored it.

  ‘Let me be straight with you.’ He leaned forward abruptly, laying his hands palm downward on the table, as if cards were shuffled and ready for dealing. ‘If your father joins my enemy, or if I discover evidence of any dealings with him, then you will be held culpable as he. You will pay the penalty for treason. Now, sit down here and write to your father. State your case plainly. We can do no more to influence him.’ That he had at last put into words what had been tacit knowledge between us for weeks, did not lessen the harshness of the sentence.

  I somehow got up from my trembling knees, took a chair opposite him. I wrote a letter to my father, very brief, the pen scoring the paper, blotting the signature. I felt like a schoolboy writing out a punishment, and he read through the letter as if its quality alone could save me from the birch. Then he folded it in four, running his thumb sharply over the creases.

  ‘This shall be sent to your father by my servant. Have you some token to accompany it, that he may know it is untampered with?’ I took off a gold signet-ring I wore, engraved with an eagle. He snapped his fingers, and a guard came forward, lit a taper at one of the candles, and held it while I melted wax in the flame, dribbled it on to the letter, pressed my signet into the wax. Impotent rage against my father, and at my present grovelling situation boiled in me.

  ‘This is unjust!’ I burst out. ‘I have no part in any plot. I
am betrayed by my own father!’ I’d chosen the right word there. Richard would stand almost any accusation other than that of injustice. He leaned back in his chair again, running his hands repeatedly over his face, pushing the fingers deep into the eye sockets. But I was wrong to expect a softening. His answer was terrible in its depth of bitterness.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’re right. Lately I’ve taken lessons in injustice from too many tutors, that won’t be unlearnt.’ He went on rather wearily, ‘I will not persecute you prematurely, until we know which way the Eagle strikes. It is sufficient that you remain with me, as before. Tomorrow we’ll go to Bestwood again. There’s more waiting to suffer yet. Tudor marches slowly. A warning though — no escapes. There are those who try to wring mercy out of me twice. That’s past. This stone has no more blood in it.’ I didn’t doubt the truth of this, nor that I would be well watched. He has good servants — too good.

  By now, Richard’s face had begun to resemble a sick, colourless replica of his death’s-head ring, which he turned slowly, moving it up and down on the joint of his thumb. The anger had drained from him, taking with it all his blood, like that proverbial stone. ‘Leave me,’ he said, in the manner of one immeasurably tired. He’d closed his eyes, as if no longer wishing to look upon me.

  I backed from his presence, was escorted to my rooms. They might have been the lodgings of a condemned prisoner. On the wall over the prie-dieu hung a Nottingham alabaster, carved with the head of St John the Baptist. His brown locks floated nastily in a sea of red, upon a gilded dish, his mouth gaped realistically. I’d get no lordly dish, only a block, and straw or sawdust.

  Richard, I think, was more hopeful of forcing my father’s hand by threatening my life than I. Why should I be cursed with such a man for father? Lord-two-faces-in-a-hood! Let him take comfort in his old age from other sons, he’ll get none from me. I was trapped in the snare of his treachery, and I was not alone. Richard, for all that he was still King, had become as much a prisoner as I at Nottingham, locked within his Castle of Care. Only one of us would end a free man.

  August 1485

  12

  To Make An End

  Told by Francis, Viscount Lovell

  The report is that King Richard might have sought to save himself by flight, but he is said to have answered that that very day he would make an end either of war or of life, such great fierceness and such huge force of mind he had; wherefore…he came to the field with a crown upon his head, that thereby he might either make a beginning or end of his reign.

  Polydore Vergil, English History

  I left the King’s ships riding at anchor on the Hamble river, near Southampton; the Governor, the Grace Dieu, the Martin Garsia were as useless now as a fleet of sieves. Stores had run low, coffers were almost empty, so I sent the crews packing. It was a relief to set out for Nottingham. For just over three months I’d sat in Southampton Water like a bung in the neck of a bottle. We cruised up and down past the Isle of Wight and out into the Channel, but never set eyes on a French ship.

  My captain remarked gloomily that one might as well try luring the Welshman over from France by toasting up a hunk or two of Suffolk cheese from the ship’s stores. A Welshman’s passion for toasted cheese is a hoary old jest. It’s said that Welsh midwives only have to set about toasting cheese at a confinement, as they do their work, to bring infant leek-eaters popping into the world quickly as greased piglets. Some fools tried it; the charred and rancid reek nearly choked us, even out-stank the bilges. The stuff was too hard to toast — they say in Suffolk that cheese is used for gate-posts! So the sailors rudely lifted two fingers into the wind and sang:

  ‘Hail and ho we! Rumbylowe!

  Steer well the good ship and let the wind blow!

  Here comes the Prior of Prickingham and his convent…’

  As each verse announced the arrival of Tudor and his various supporters, this became an extremely long and offensive ditty.

  I was no success as guardian of the Channel. The coast beacons were never lit that summer. Henry Tudor, spurious Earl of Richmond, escaped me. He headed for the Pembroke coast of Wales. There, during the first week of August, he impudently landed, like a dung-fly homing, borne on the wings of his ambition. The news reached me almost as soon as it did Richard.

  I took my failure back with me to Nottingham. Fearful that the insolent Welshman might emerge from Wales and fight before I got there, I pushed my men hard on the journey; they got no rest even on the feast of the Assumption.

  Richard had gone to Bestwood for a few days. This surprised me, as I had imagined that by the sixteenth, an army would be mustering in Nottingham. True, some men trickled in, like the levies I had met at Banbury, but no one knew when we would march, though Tudor had apparently reached the neighbourhood of Stafford.

  I found the King out in the forest standing among a group of his falconers, a young peregrine perched upon his gloved fist, while he gentled her sleek feathers with his fingers. She looked at me suspiciously, being unhooded, and moved from foot to foot, blinking her raisin eyes. Soothed by the stroking, she settled plumage still babyishly splattered treacle-brown on cream, and became still. When he turned round, I caught my breath, for he looked so ill. Not, admittedly, as bad as when I had said farewell to him in London in May, but his face had a queer, drained-out look, the eyes deep-ringed with shadows like old bruises. Though the sun had not touched his face at all, his hands against the white wrist-bands of the shirt were nearly as brown as my own, from the days spent outdoors in Sherwood Forest.

  On seeing me, he smiled with more pleasure than I had expected or hoped for. He came to me and kissed my cheek. ‘Francis,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you’re back. You look well — you’ve caught the sun.’ My face was as dark as a Turk’s from the time at sea. But I must have looked as dismal as a man who drops a gold noble and finds a groat. I couldn’t forgive myself for failing him, though it was hard to see how in the circumstances I could have done otherwise.

  Richard looked at me for a moment, a little sideways under his brows. He must have known my mind; he is sensitive to people’s moods. He said, ‘You’ve got a face like a long plank. Remember, I sent you to Southampton. It seems we’ve both been chasing a wild goose.’ He handed the peregrine to a falconer, and gave me the glove he wore. He managed a ghost of a smile; a mere tightening of the lines round his eyes into deeper creases. ‘Come,’ he said, with a rather forced attempt at cheer, ‘fly her. She looks better in the sky than herring gulls in the Channel — the only good thing to come out of Wales in the last three months.’

  That evening, we sat and played cards. Richard did not mention the impending war, but he could not concentrate sufficiently upon the game to finish it. In the end he laid down his hand, and began to wander about the room, picking things up and putting them down again. He stared out of the windows as if caged, fondled the hounds that padded round with him, and finally went out with half a dozen of them bounding ahead. Eilidh the great deerhound followed at heel in her slow, prancing gait, her nose at his elbow. I’d have gone with him, but he seemed not to invite company. According to Rob, he often went out in the evenings at Bestwood, alone with his dogs, the servants hovering at a distance and wondering. He would walk across the park as far as the deer-leap or the paling fences, then come slowly back; he looked like a prisoner walking the walls of his gaol.

  Salazar the Spaniard, who I also thought was prowling about, chafing at the slow, quiet passing of time, leaned his elbows on the window-sill beside me and stared out to where Richard had disappeared among the trees. He scratched his bluish chin thoughtfully. His face would serve for Mars, roughcast in bronze, and he wore gold ear-rings, like a Barbary corsair. ‘Hombre!’ he said suddenly, ‘this situation I do not like. The King, he is not ready for war.’

  ‘Captain Salazar, all possible measures have been taken,’ I pointed out. ‘We are as prepared as anyone could be.’

  ‘You mistake me, my Lord Lovell,’ he said with a sour smi
le. ‘I mean that he is not prepared for war inside himself. I know, I know…’ He ignored my protests. ‘He is famous in war, but it is not his meat and drink. Me, I eat war, drink it as a man who thirsts; it is my trade, and without it I do not live. I fight with anyone I am paid to fight — and Dios mio! I fight to kill!

  ‘I am a brave man, am I not? One time I spend six days in the camp of the enemy because my friends think I do not dare, that I am manso perdito, the coward bull who will not fight. I prove them wrong! But if I were as your King is, among enemies and traitors… I too have smelt their stink. Your King is a man of courage, but I fear for him. I serve many men, who go to war in different ways. Duke Charles of Burgundy, he go into battle furioso, like a mad bull, stupid and blind with rage. Your King is not stupid — he think too much.’

  I began to understand what he was driving at. I blurted out the first thought that came into my mind. ‘He is heart-sick, not himself.’

  ‘Sí, sí, sí!’ Salazar waved his hands and nodded to emphasize his agreement. This tough mercenary soldier, struggling to put his unease into English words, is no fool — he knows a man’s strength and weakness in war.