by Robyn Young
Early that morning, he’d been given paper and quill to write three letters. His hand, to his satisfaction, remained steady in the writing. As he wrote, he thought of his son, Harry, and daughter, Ann, born to his wife, Eleanor, who had died when they were children. These past few years, Harry had become angry and bitter. Vaughan guessed his son resented him for the role he had played in Prince Edward’s life, a role that had taken him away for much of Harry’s adolescence. He had left it to another man – an old knight he respected – to train his son and prepare him for manhood, but it hadn’t been enough. He wished he had done more to guide and steer him on his path. Now, he was leaving him and his sister orphaned. His regret was a sore inside him, painful and raw. He thought of Sarah, for whom the flame he held had never dimmed, even though they were both now greying and long past the days when their passion had been unquenchable.
But most of all he thought of James, whom he had sent away without explanation, without telling him the danger he was courting when he took that scroll case. The young man had gone willingly, trustingly, desperate as ever to prove himself. His had been the hardest letter; Vaughan knowing the words he wanted to say, but could not use. For years, he had dangled the prospect of a knighthood, of legitimacy, in front of James, fostering the young man’s loyalty, benefiting from it. He had always intended to make good on that promise. Now, the chance was gone. He could only pray Stephen had delivered the message and James was now halfway to Florence and the answers he deserved. But he hadn’t been able to push from his mind the image of that figure in blue riding away down the alley of the Rose and Crown in Stephen’s wake. That image had burned a hole in him in the endless darkness of his cell.
Through the crowd waiting in the courtyard for the spectacle of his death, he caught sight of Anthony Woodville and Richard Grey – the queen’s brother and son – walking ahead on their own last marches. The three of them had been kept apart since their arrests. There had been no chance for Vaughan to ask Rivers, his friend, if he was the one who had betrayed him; who had sent the watchers to Sarah’s house and searched his dwellings, causing him to send his son away. For months, he had feared this, but had been unable to find proof, leaving him to wonder if the threat to their plans lay elsewhere. Someone in court? Or, God forbid, the Huntsman himself? He should have gone to Florence months ago, even though he didn’t have all the answers. He should have warned them. Another regret.
As Vaughan stumbled, his knee giving way, one of Northumberland’s men righted him. Ahead, across the windswept courtyard, the scaffold loomed. At the sight of the ropes dangling there, Vaughan felt the breath snatched from him. There was a sour taste in his mouth: fear and bitterness. It was hard to countenance that Richard, whom he had known since birth and whose brother he’d served for decades, could do this. There was still part of him that wondered if Gloucester somehow knew the truth: if his true purpose in the king’s household had been discovered and this was why he was facing the noose. But he knew, inside he knew, he was dying today for another man’s cause. Not his own. He had underestimated Richard’s ambition. All this time he had been looking to the danger around him and threats from abroad. He had never seen the threat in the north.
Approaching the gallows through the watching crowd, Vaughan fixed on the noose, looped like a snake eating itself. Behind his back, his finger rubbed the place where his gold ring had left its mark. As above, so below. Never before had those words meant so much. But the Gathering must now be left to other men and New Eden was not his to seek. A greater mystery awaited him – beyond rope and breathlessness, beyond the agony and the disappearing.
Earl Rivers and Richard Grey were being hooded, but as the executioner went to blindfold him, Vaughan jerked away. He would see the last of this doomed world he had tried to save. The rope grazed his cheek as it was slid over his head. The knot was tightened at the base of his skull. With luck, his neck would snap with the drop, sparing him the twenty or more minutes he had seen men take to die. His hands, bound behind his back, could do nothing, even though they strained to be free, instinct driving him despite his will to remain calm. Northumberland’s men helped him up, on to the block. The executioner moved into position.
Vaughan drank in the cold summer breeze. One last breath.
As above, so below.
Chapter 8
Jack kept his eyes on the line of hills, now filling his view ahead. With each mile, feeling every stone through the worn soles of his boots, the broad slopes of the Downs came closer. The road, white with broken shards of chalk, carved its way towards them, surrounded by meadows and pastures, studded with trees. Trapped in the sun-baked streets of Seville, he had forgotten just how green England was.
Insects swarmed, thickening the air. Taking off his cloak, Jack slung it over the bag he carried on his shoulder. The road was empty; no one to see the broadsword hanging at his hip, its silver disc pommel with its glossy ruby protruding from the rags in which he’d swaddled the blade in place of a scabbard. He had carried the sword many times when he was a page in his father’s household, its weight on his back as he followed the men on their palfreys. Ned Draper and some of the other men had laughed at the careful way he had whetted and cleaned it, saying he looked after it as tenderly as a mother with a newborn. But he knew how important the blade was to Vaughan.
He had kept it hidden on the journey from London, not wanting to be taken for one of the footpads that lurked in the woods around the roads out of the capital. He knew how conspicuous he appeared: dark as a Turk with the look of a vagabond, bearing a sword fit for a prince. His father’s blade was his only weapon since he’d been forced to sell his own sword in exchange for passage home.
After jumping from the window of the Seven Stars, Jack had hidden on the docks, hunkered down behind the rotting hull of a fishing boat. He waited there, Gregory’s blood starting to stink on his clothes, until Queen Isabella’s men moved on in their search for Estevan Carrillo’s murderer. At dawn, a crewman on one of the English ships accepted the sword and smuggled him into the hold. There had begun one of the most miserable journeys of his life. Stuck beneath the rolling decks living on sour meat and stale water, he’d had all too much time to think; plagued by Antonio’s dying scream and Jacob’s blame, assailed by questions about the importance of the burden he carried in that scroll case and by Gregory’s last words.
They will come for you.
Jack had no idea whether he was right to be bringing the case back, or indeed whether anything Gregory had said was true, but he had no other choice. He was a wanted man in Seville and only England offered answers. He had hoped to find at least some of those answers in London, but when the three ships had docked on the Thames and he emerged from the hold, weak and disorientated, what scant information he had been able to glean had only conjured more questions.
The port of London, teeming with sailors and foreign merchants, overshadowed by huge warehouses and towering cranes, had been alive with wild rumour and speculation, flitting from dockside to tavern in a bewildering cacophony of tongues and dialects. Those Jack understood spoke of a great army marching on the city from the north. Some claimed they were coming to keep the peace for the Duke of Gloucester, more that they were going to enforce it. He had seen merchants grease the palm of the customs officer to hasten their cargoes in or out, so they could leave before the storm broke. There were rumours Edward Woodville was to return at the head of a fleet to take the capital. Lord Hastings, he heard, had been executed at the Tower on the orders of Gloucester, whose soldiers had surrounded Westminster Abbey where the queen-dowager had claimed sanctuary with her children.
In a tavern on the docks, where barrels were tables and rats scurried among the feet of the patrons, Jack found two timber merchants, lips loose with ale and only too eager to turn the rumour mill. Arguing over the details, they told him Gloucester had tricked the queen into giving up her youngest son, Richard of York, and that the boy was now in the Tower with his brother, whose corona
tion had since been suspended. One of the men spoke of seeing Gloucester riding through Cheapside accompanied by an army of attendants. He said the Protector no longer wore mourning black for his dead brother, but was clad in robes of purple.
When questioning them on the fate of the king’s chamberlain, however, Jack was frustrated to discover the men knew little about events beyond the city walls. The innkeeper, overhearing their conversation, had pitched in saying a sermon was due to be delivered the following day at St Paul’s Cross on the subject of the young king. Hoping this might offer him something more tangible, Jack had left the men hot with drink and speculation and headed into the seething heart of the capital, where he exchanged his shabby velvet doublet for a jug of ale, some food and a lice-infested pallet in an inn off Gutter Lane.
The next day, which dawned dank and dreary, he joined the vast crowds in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral, the spire of which soared so high it seemed to prick the clouds. Rain spewed from the gaping mouths of gargoyles that leered from the arches and doused the stone heads of the saints. The mass of traders, labourers, alewives and shopkeepers clustered around the outdoor pulpit were abuzz with a new and shocking rumour: that King Edward had been married in secret many years before he had wed Elizabeth Woodville. This marriage, presided over by the Bishop of Bath and Wells, meant his union with the queen was false and her sons – one of whom was now their king – were illegitimate. Jack, hood up against the rain, his bag with its precious contents clutched tight to his side against pickpockets, had listened to the Londoners’ frenetic hum, thinking how much shock sounded like excitement.
The crowd had quietened into an expectant hush as the clergy, swathed in ermine-trimmed cloaks and jewelled collars, filed out of the cathedral, led by the bishop, who ascended the covered pulpit and introduced Dr Ralph Shaw, esteemed theologian and brother of the Lord Mayor of London. Protected from the downpour, which had turned the churchyard to a bog, the doctor preached to the waiting crowd on the subject of legitimacy.
His voice had risen as he reached the climax of his sermon, his fist banging down on the lectern, hammering home his words. ‘In the face of common decency, the progeny of deceit must be removed from power!’
No one listening was under any illusion as to whom Shaw was referring. His declaration was met with troubled murmurings and calls of concern, but after a few scattered shouts of agreement the applause began, rippling slowly through the uneasy crowd.
‘Bastard slips shall not, must not take root! Not in our kingdom! Not in the face of God!’
As the calls of approval swelled, Jack felt his cheeks grow hot despite the rain’s chill. He saw the faces of those around him filling with disgust and outrage. Bad blood was a stain upon society wherever it pooled: tarnishing the blessed union of marriage, making a mockery of family and lineage, defiling the natural order of things. In the sacred ranks of royalty such a stain was untenable.
Knowing he would find no real answers there, Jack had pushed his way through the press of bodies and, leaving Shaw’s damning invective to fade behind him, made his way back towards London Bridge and the road south, out of the city.
Now, as he headed for the cleft in the Downs where the road curved towards Lewes, words from that sermon echoed in his mind.
Bastard slips shall not take root!
Jack had never met Prince Edward and despite the fact they had both been brought up by the same man, he had never felt any affinity towards the heir to England’s throne. Until now.
He knew well what it was to be outcast by reason of blood, himself the product of a union between a man who had been unmarried at the time and a woman who had been wed to another. Ex damnato coitu the Church called it, a prohibited union that rendered his birth unnatural and him spurious. Fit for nothing. The worst kind of bastard. Jack wondered whether Thomas Vaughan, wherever he was, had heard the claim that had now been delivered to the masses from the pulpit of St Paul’s. Whether he knew that he may have raised two bastards?
As the walls of Lewes came gradually into view and the road ahead filled with cattle, a cowherd driving the animals to slaughter, Jack drew on his cloak to conceal his sword. He glimpsed the ruins of the castle on its motte standing above the houses that tumbled into the valley cut by the River Ouse. The sight gave him an old, familiar feeling of heaviness, deep down inside. Lewes may have been his home, but it had also been his prison. It was a place of waiting and dreams unfulfilled, of days spent watching the road for his father and sleepless nights with only memories for company, his own journey ended and a sense of the world outside continuing without him.
It was just past midsummer and blackened circles in the outlying fields showed where the bone-fires would have ushered in the feast of St John the Baptist. Entering the town to take the short cut up the main street, Jack saw many doors still garlanded with flowers, wilting in the sun. He passed the inn where he’d been born and where he lived with his mother until the spite of her neighbours forced her beyond the walls, where she had gradually been forgotten. There were a few people moving about the streets or talking in doorways, hiding from the heat. They stopped and stared as he passed and Jack saw the eyes of a few widen in recognition. Hands covered mouths as people whispered. He was used to it, growing up as a target for scandalmongers, but after months living in anonymity in Seville the sudden attention was unnerving. Pulling up his hood, he ducked into the back alleys, moving past gardens and rotting midden heaps.
At the top of the town, Jack headed out through the gates. Here, the houses thinned, replaced by thickets of trees and paddocks where horses grazed. He passed a line of ruined barns where he had played as a child and the dilapidated cottage of the old cobbler, John Browe, then walked the dusty uphill track towards home, the Downs rising ahead once more. A great battle had been fought on those scarred ridges over two hundred years ago, between the king and the rebellious Earl of Leicester. Setting snares for rabbits, Jack had found countless rusted spurs and bleached bones buried in the chalk.
He quickened his pace, smiling as he thought of his mother’s surprise at his homecoming. He caught a faint odour of smoke and guessed she would have lit her own fire for the feast day. Sarah would probably be tending to her crops. She would turn at his call and her laugh would fill the garden. The trees were thick with summer growth, hiding the little house until the last moment. Jack emerged from their shade, a broad grin on his face.
The house was gone.
A charred carcass was all that remained, blackened timbers rising like jagged ribs from a pile of ash and debris. Jack stood staring, the sweat turning cold on his skin. Slowly, he began to walk towards the burned-out ruin that had once been his home. The grass around the building was blackened where the flames had fanned out, burning fiercely through the wooden structure. He thought of the bone-fires of St John. Was this an accident? Had his mother built her pyre too close to the house?
Jack raced into the faintly smoking wreckage, shouting his mother’s name. Things that were once furniture and cherished keepsakes crunched under his boots. Finding his way deeper into the house barred by the wreckage of the roof, he backed out, his mouth and nose filled with stale, acrid smoke. The sunlight blinded him. He closed his eyes, his heart thudding. Thoughts and questions tumbled over one another in his mind. Was this something to do with Vaughan? Had his arrest on Gloucester’s orders precipitated this? Was his mother also imprisoned? Or was this something to do with Gregory? That threat of his. Jack dug his fingers into the soft leather of the bag.
What have you done, Father?
He heard a crunch behind him and whirled round, fist raised to strike. There was a startled cry. Jack saw a young woman, eyes flooding with fear, hands rising. He halted abruptly, her face making sense in his mind. It was a face he knew well. A face he had loved.
‘Grace?’
The woman let out a breath as he lowered his fist, her hand pressed to her chest. ‘Alice said you had returned. That she had seen you. I couldn’t beli
eve it.’
Jack had forgotten how fast word travelled here. ‘What happened, Grace? Where is my mother?’
The relief faded from the woman’s face, but her hazel eyes remained fixed on his, bright with sadness. Jack read the answer in them. He began to shake his head, not wanting her to say the words.
‘I’m sorry, James.’
Chapter 9
‘Drink this.’
Jack raised his head at the soft command. Grace was standing in front of him, holding out a pewter tankard. Beyond, in the doorway of the parlour, he caught a glimpse of a child’s face, before it disappeared with a muffled burst of giggles. As he took the tankard, Grace crossed to the door.
‘Away outside with you both. Go on now.’
More giggles and running footsteps faded down the passage.
‘Martha, can you watch them?’
‘Yes, mistress,’ came a voice from another room.
Jack drank, his mouth filling with warm ale. He felt strangely detached from the room and his own body, as if he were already viewing the world through the numb eyes of the drunk. God, would that he were.
When he had drained the tankard, Grace took it from him and poured more from a flagon. Handing it to him, she drew up a stool and sat before him, the skirts of her navy gown crimpling around her legs. The dress was finely stitched and laced up the sides with pale blue ribbons, but she had rolled the flared sleeves up to her elbows and there were smudges of dirt on the bodice. She wore her chestnut hair uncovered, plaited up on her head. A few loose strands drifted around her face, curling damp at her temples. Jack had a flash of memory: pulling a stalk of corn from those locks, her laughter as she clutched him and fell back, him sinking down to kiss her mouth, dust from the scythed cornfield blowing over them.
