The hall erupted with applause and drunken shouts of ‘Huzzah!’ and ‘King Richard!’ rang through the air.
I dropped the lance, smirking, and staggered back to my seat, where I swiftly downed another goblet of wine—to kill the ache from top to bottom of my back. Von Poppelau ordered the lance hauled back to his quarters and resumed his position beside me at the high table. “That was well done indeed! I will wager you must fight like a lion in battle, Lord King.”
I was on yet another goblet of wine. “You may call me Richard. Or Dickon.”
He looked most overawed that I was allowing him this informality. “You are too kind, your Grace…my lord Richard.”
“And what can I call you? Nick? Nicol?”
He beamed with pleasure. “My friends call me…Popi.”
“Popi, it is then!” I laughed. “You have brought me cheer, Popi, at a time when my heart is sore. “ (I still had not told him why; I could speak about it to no one. No one.) “I want to give you a gift as a token of my esteem.”
“You are too kind, Lord.”
I glanced around the chamber, bleary eyes trying to focus through the smoke from the torches and candles. What could I give the man?
Something gold and glittery caught my attention. A great collar of gold, worth a fortune, speckled with tiny rubies. It would make a perfect gift for my guest.
The trouble was that it hung around the neck of Thomas Stanley.
Rising, I swayed towards Stanley who was deep in conversation with some lesser nobles. “Lord Thomas,” I cried cheerfully, as he realised I was behind him and turned in a low bow. “Just the man I wanted to see!”
“I am, your Grace?” His deep, wet eyes looked mildly surprised. And maybe a bit alarmed. Perhaps he thought I would accuse him of scheming or worse.
“Yes!” I reached out, touched the collar; he flinched as if he thought I might strike him. “Take it off, Thomas!”
“Your Grace?”
“The collar, man! Quick now.”
Bemused, he removed the collar with much struggling and handed it to me. “Is there something amiss, your Grace?”
“Not at all,” I slurred. “I just fancied it might be a fine gift for Sir Nicolas. You will be handsomely compensated, fear not. I trust that is satisfactory, Lord Stanley?”
Dumbstruck, he just gawped at me.
I hastened back to the table and ceremoniously fastened the gold collar around the Silesian knight’s thick bull-neck.
As I glanced back, I could see Stanley glowering, one hand at his bare throat, the other fingering his devil-beard in supreme agitation.
Before I departed York, orders were given for the foundation of a giant chantry at the Minster. One hundred priests would say prayers daily for the souls of the King, the Queen and the poor lost Prince of Wales. Money was also distributed for necessary strengthening of the city defences; by my order, a new level was built above Bootham Bar to help protect and guard that section of the city.
York’s citizens came out to cheer me; I left the people happy, throwing flowers before the feet of my destrier. I was not happy. I did not know if I would ever be truly happy again.
Von Poppelau rode with me, joining my household for a full ten days till his journeys called him elsewhere, but as we rode down into Uredale I could not even tolerate the distraction of jolly Silesian knight’s idle chat, and asked him for silence.
For I knew what awaited me there, in Middleham.
I had striven to show no weakness to my people, to foreigners. To be a true King. Inside, I was just a man.
And inside those castle walls that I had loved, my boyhood sojourn, my home as Duke, my only legitimate son lay dead, waiting for me. Waiting for burial.
We had not decided what would be the most fitting course for Edward. Anne and I could still scarce speak of his loss. My ministers, even Frank, had tried to bring up the subject of interment; I had sent them away and the look on my face was so terrible they almost ran.
In my heart, it was my wish Edward would lie for eternity in the chantry I proposed at York Minster, since York was where he was made prince of Wales, where he had stepped, small and trembling, with his golden circlet and rod, to the applause of many, but it would be years before it was ready to house his mortal remains. I had considered re-using another royal Plantagenet tomb in the Minster, that of Prince William of Hatfield, who had also died young, but Anne had wept and said she wanted our child ‘near to home,’ near to Middleham, at least for the present.
Jervaulx was suggested as another potential resting place, but Coverham was the closest religious house of all, being just over the hill from the castle. Edward had visited the monastery many times, had dutifully given the brothers coinage in his role as Prince of Wales. Neville ancestors already lay within the abbey church, clustered in the quire, their effigies lying in repose under the light shining through the painted glass windows. Its quiet sanctity could surely hold my child’s bones until a huge tomb could be crafted, a vault with gilt pillars and weepers and carven saints, where men would come and marvel and say, ‘That Prince was King Richard’s much-beloved son.’
But until then, little Ned’s burial would remain silent, secret. What came over Anne and me in regards to his interment I do not know; perhaps we were still mad, still in shock over his loss. We eschewed the expected pomp and ceremony, we did not want mourners, we did not follow the usual protocol of royal decease…We wanted him to be just ours, protected from the world in death as we could not protect him in life.
Entering the Great Hall of Middleham Castle was strange. Outside the sun was shining, and it blared through the windows I’d had enlarged, yet the Hall seemed dim, cold and unwelcoming, as it never had before in all the years of my tenancy. A stillness and a sense of unreality hung over the castle; I stood there, Anne at my side like a pale statue, as the household, some still with tear-red eyes, bowed and curtseyed, fully expecting the next moment to see my boy running towards me, being chased and scolded by Jane Collins or Isabel Burgh.
He would never run to me. Never again.
The Countess of Warwick entered the Hall, walked slowly towards us, her gait the halting limp of an old, injured woman. She wore a black, gown, headdress, and veil; in her hands, she clasped jet rosary beads. Her face was washed of colour, had grown lined and yellow, like old parchment; she had loved her grandson too, and as resident of the castle had tended her grandson more than most ladies of her stature were able to do. Wordlessly, she sank in the low curtsey before Anne and me—so low, I feared she might fall over.
“Your Grace, King Richard,” she murmured. Her voice trembled. “Your Grace, Queen Anne.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at my wife. All her colour had vanished. Her rigid posture had disappeared, and she shook like a leaf in a gale beneath her finery, her furred travelling cloak. “Madame…mother…tell me,” she whispered.
Anne Beauchamp raised her head; her gaze met her daughter’s, her eyes shimmering wetly, despairing. “Not here, your Grace. Not before all, I beg you. For your own well-being, Anne, let it be away from all others.”
I nodded. “Yes, we will go to my private closet. It is more fitting.”
We went to my private chamber, where as Duke of Gloucester I had sat so many nights by candlelight, dictating letters and documents relating to government, sealing them with red wax that dripped like blood. When I could, I would dismiss my squires and, goblet in hand, put my feet on a stool and read a book or two before the fireplace, sometimes falling asleep before the brazier until Anne’s servants came to find me.
It had seemed such a warm, cosy enclave, smelling of tallow and wax…No more. Now it was a cold place, the fire long unlit, ash grey on the hearth, the candles burnt out with wax puddles at their bases.
I took a deep breath; my chest felt tight, hurt. Everything hurt.
“So…my Lady…you were there?”
Anne Beauchamp nodded, gripping her rosary beads all the tighter. I though
t the string might snap and all the beads scatter to be lost forever. “When they realised it was serious, the physic called me. I stayed with Edward…till the end.”
I gulped another breath. “Was it…a good death?” My tongue hung thick in my mouth, making my words slur as if I were drunk.
“No,” said Anne Beauchamp sharply, and a tear ran from the corner of her eyes. Anne made a whimpering noise, pressed her hand to her mouth.
“Jesu.” I hung my head. “I do not wish to know but yet I must. Tell me.” She was silent. “I command you to tell me!”
“It was not his usual malady…the wheezing cough that plagued him since he was small. He was fine, I swear it, fine—playing in the bailey with his wooden sword. Suddenly, after dinner, he began to complain of a pain. In his side. It was thought he had merely eaten something too rich for his digestion, and Mistress Idley declared he was to be sent to bed at once. By the time midnight came, he was feverish…” She paused, dabbed at her eyes. “The physician was called. He could do nothing except order a draught for the pain. Then they called me from my chambers…” Her head fell forward, his face crumpling. “I held his hand, his hot burning hand…Richard…” she had lost all formality, titles meant nothing here, in the death of this child, “he called for you, and for you, Anne.”
Anne sank to the floor, a wave of wild weeping washing over her. Anne Beauchamp approached her daughter, placed her arms around her shoulders. “I go to my only living daughter, to comfort her as best I may. Your Grace…you must go to your son, as you could not do when he yet lived and you were far away.”
The halls to the chapel were lit by pale, fluttering torchlight. I went alone. The chaplain greeted me: “Would you have me with you, Your Grace?”
“No…no,” I insisted. “I must be alone. Alone, do you hear me?” I sounded fiercer than I had intended and the man scuttled away down the hall, his robes swishing against the floor.
I entered. The small chapel was illumed by great tall candles…tall as boys. Incense hung heavy in the air. But that was not all; beneath the scent of tallow and strong acrid scent of the incense was another tang, sweet but insidious. The scent of decaying flesh.
Edward lay upon a bier before the high altar, hundreds of candles around him forming a great circle of light. He was like a wax doll, looking smaller than I remembered. They had dressed him in a long blue velvet robe; his head lay on a satin pillow and his hair, a dirty blond just beginning to darken as mine had at his age, lay out like a halo, neatly and lovingly combed. I could see his feet, pointed toward me as I drew near; he wore his best shoes, brought for his investment in York. I remember they had buckles made of pure gold and I had chided him for dirtying them when he stepped in dung whilst petting a horse he admired. Oh, would that he could live again to commit such childish folly…
But the dead do not live again; the miracle of Lazarus happened only once, and my boy would not rise again until Judgment Day.
Full of dread, I approached the bier. The embalmers had done their job as best they could. Close, I could scent the myrrh, cloves, rosemary and lavender that had been rubbed upon him, mingling with that awful telltale sickly sweetness of death.
Almost against my will, my shaking hand reached out, to touch that tiny still cold foot, encased its polished, gold buckled shoe.
And my heart was torn asunder once again. I thought I had come to accept his death, as one must, but no, no…the pain was renewed, the wound ripped open to bleed anew.
Yes, Anne and I were as mad creatures at Nottingham, struck by the news as if by lightning, but at least Edward’s body was not before our eyes, we had not seen death where there had been life; and although we knew the messengers spoke true, a sense of unreality, of waking nightmare, hung over us then and for the weeks that followed as we fared north. Now, with little Ned lying before me, cold and embalmed, the true reality of his loss struck home, felled me as an oak is felled by the axe.
“Christ! Christ! Why have you taken him?” I cried out and I fell upon my son’s body, burying my face against the stiff, lifeless legs. I wept like a woman, uncontrolled, a gaping crater of emptiness yawning beneath my breast. I thought my heart would burst; it felt as though a hand reached inside me, grasping my innards and twisting, strangling them. No battle wound ever hurt so much…
My knees began to grow weak. Stumbling away from Edward’s bier, I collapsed on the floor before the high altar. The Rood rose before me, towering above me; Christ upon the Cross, His face half swathed in shadow, half limned in light, the wound in his side bleeding as my heart bled inside.
“It is my fault, isn’t it?” I cried, the image blurring with my tears. “The deeds I have committed….I thought I was acting upon God’s will. But it was my own pride, and I have been punished for it! I have lost my son…Edward…”
I flung myself face-down on the freezing floor before the Rood, my arms spread out as if I too was crucified. The cold sliced into my body, groping upwards with bitter fingers. I almost willed it to take me then, to draw me down into death where I would be forever with my lost boy. Images of the past tumbled through my mind; the night he was born after Anne’s long travail, my fear that both he and Anne were dead. And then the joy, the joy and the love; a kind of love I had not felt for anyone or anything before or since.
And now he was gone.
I lay for an indeterminate time spread-eagled on the floor. If the priest looked in, he was too terrified to approach. At last, I heard soft shuffling, and then felt a gentle hand upon my shoulder. I shifted, glanced up. Anne had joined me. She had changed her gown and now wore stark white, the colour of compassion, and in France, mourning. With her face so bloodless beneath her headdress, she almost looked a ghost, and her feet had been so quiet upon the floor I wondered for one terrible moment if Anne had died, her heart broken by grief, and it was her spirit that sought me there in final farewell.
But then her warm breath brushed my cheek, and suddenly, miraculously she was the strong one, not I. “Rise up, my love, my lord,” she implored, trying to lift me. “I would not lose my husband as well as my babe. You must rise. You are the King.”
“I am nothing,” I gasped. “I have destroyed all that is dear to me in my folly.”
“You are a good King. You will continue to be a good King. Edward had gone to the light of Christ now; it is God’s will.”
I was surprised to see her so calm after her wild mourning at Nottingham and even her weeping in the Hall. She must have noted my surprise for she looked at me sadly and shook her head. “I expected I would fall to the ground and die the moment I saw Edward. But I…I am strangely comforted. What lies here on the bier is but a shell, empty. It is only the image of our son. It is not our son. He is far away. He is safe.”
“Anne…” I murmured, unable to meet her eyes, unable to glance at that small, motionless form upon the bier.
We sat there, Anne holding me with her white-clad arms, in silent vigil throughout the long torment of the night.
The cortege departed the castle at dusk. Edward’s bier was carried by a handful of trusted men who had long been in my service and who had looked after my son in the last year of his life whenever he travelled by carriage. Vaughn, Metcalfe, Camer, Peacock, and the young Marlar brothers—the bright garments worn in the service of their prince had now been exchanged for rough mourning garb. Anne was not with me—she remained in Middleham, deep in prayer with the Countess—so I followed the cortege alone, wearing a dark cloak with hood cast over my face to hide myself: it was not usual for Kings to attend the funerals of their children. Torches burned about us, casting sparse light into the gathering darkness. Almost no one came to look as we took the road out of Middleham; only a few locals knew what was going on, and those who did stayed respectfully within their cottages and did not gawp.
As I travelled that short but bitter road, the night birds were singing in the trees—melancholy, a song of loneliness. Wind was rushing, sighing, coming in cold from the dale’s
side; the air was filled a scent I loathed, the flowering May bushes that had reminded me of decaying flesh at Tewkesbury long ago.
Passing over the brow of the hill, Coverham Abbey lay in the hollow far below, its arches rising like the denuded bones of some great hump-backed beast. The thin rind of a crescent moon hung behind the tower of the abbey church, drifting away into a sea of thin cloud; its wan light shimmered off the surface of the monks’ fishponds and the distant river.
Making its way down the hillside, the cortege approached the abbey gatehouse with its carvings of angels and saints. The Abbot waited by the ancient, brass- bound door, his head bowed and doleful of countenance, ready with the fourteen brothers under his rule to usher us inside.
The sound of my boots upon the cold tiles of the abbey cloister sounded as loud as the crack of artillery in my ears as I strode towards the church, following the bier of my dead child to his final rest.
In the church, the candles were burning, hundreds upon hundreds of them, some standing free in the nave, the choir, upon the windowsills, while others flared upon massive iron candelabra. Frankincense hung in the air, scent mingling with that of sweet, running tallow. Encroaching night had blackened the windows where faces of saints gazed mournfully out, but the candlelight illumed the effigies and tombs in the nave and chancel—the simple memorial of the abbey’s foundress, Lady Helewisa; two knights—perhaps Neville ancestors, in gambesons and mail, one with three dogs clustered around him; a long coffin marked with a chalice and a cross that housed the bones of some unknown abbot from the elder days.
In the floor before the high altar, the monks had been hard at work. A grave pit yawned, waiting… so small. So very small.
It seemed so dark, gaping like a hungry mouth amidst all that forced light. Waiting.
I went to the bier and kissed my son upon his cold brow and even colder lips.
My last farewell.
I did not tarry longer to hear the words said or see the dark earth take him. Already this burial was unusual in its circumstance and secrecy. I did not want men to talk. I did not want them to come here. I wanted them to forget.
I, Richard Plantagenet: Book Two: Loyaulte Me Lie Page 23
