Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  He was already awake; pushed his long hair out of his eyes and smiled drowsily at the groom, who said in a hushed voice:

  “Your Grace is served.”

  “Good,” said the Duke.

  He sat up, naked, the linen sheets dropping down his spare, youthful body to the waist. His skin was almost dazzlingly white and hairless. There was no fat on him, and the narrowness of his hips made his chest, by comparison, startlingly broad. It was noticeable that his right arm — the arm with which he plied the battle-axe — was more developed than his left, so that its greater weight of muscle seemed to have dragged the shoulder down a little. The groom swaddled him in a loose heavy bedgown of squirrel’s fur reversed with miniver and turned the’ cloth-of-gold counterpane and linen sheets back. Duke Richard smiled again, swung his slim boy’s legs out of the bed and suffered a page to put his feet in slippers. The second groom served him, kneeling, with his morning draught of small beer in which rosemary, thyme, borrage, hyssop and vervain had been bruised. He drank about a third of it and crossed to the cushioned stool that had been set for him. The elder page presented his ewer of scented water and the younger towels, sponge and Castille soap. The Duke washed his head and body and wiped himself down while a groom rubbed his hair dry. The early light shone, as on ivory, on the separate points of his spine and the bosses of his shoulders. The second ewer was presented, with clean napkins and a silver-gilt box containing a powder of lye, borax and pumice. Dipping a napkin first in the water and then in the powder, the Duke cleaned his teeth, spat vigorously and took another pull from the tankard. His silk shirt was now put on him and laced to the throat. The pages drew his plain green hose over his legs, pulling and stroking so that not a wrinkle showed. There was a discreet tapping at the door and a groom let in the barber. The Duke’s beard was of the slightest, hardly more than a boy’s down. The barber left his face glass-smooth; trimmed the hair at the nape of his neck with a great pair of shears; scented, combed and brushed his long, straight locks; bowed himself out. A green doublet with silver ouches in the form of boars, tall yellow leather boots and a yellow leather baldric with a long hunting-dagger finished the toilet. The senior groom unlocked a small nail-studded coffer and produced a tray of rings. The Duke chose seven of them and was ready for Mass.

  His quick feet sounded along the hautpace, the wooden bridge that joined the bedchamber and the keep. Its unglazed windows let in the sun and morning air, and the little Duke paused halfway across to take a breath or two; then went briskly into the Chamber of Presence, where the gentlemen of his household were assembled. He met them with his coldly charming smile, talked for a moment with his Secretary, Mr. John Kendal, a blue-eyed Yorkshireman with a mouth like a trap; and on the first clang of the bell led them through the Great Hall into the small second-floor Chapel, where the candles burned and the chaplain and his acolyte were robed and ready.

  The sacrifice was conducted with neither unseemly haste nor drawling slowness. There was no shuffling and whispering among those who watched it. It was a known fact that the Duke actually regarded an impertinence to God as seriously as an impertinence to himself. On “Ita, missa est,” he led them out again. Breakfast was served in the Great Hall; but Duke Richard, attended by one groom and one page, took his in the Privy Chamber. A sparing eater, he was content with a pint of small beer, demain bread, a cold game pie and a fistful of cherries. He did not speak once during the meal and, the moment it was over, muttered a short grace and retired across the West hautpace to the Garderobe Tower. No one followed him.

  Meanwhile, the Chamber of Presence was filling up again. The Auditor had his weekly accounts to present. The Secretary had letters for signature. A tagrag of people had petitions and reports. The Chamber of Presence had been glorified throughout by the Earl of Warwick only a year or so before his end. Each joist of the high ceiling terminated in a bear clutching a ragged staff with one paw and supporting with the other an escutcheon of one of his innumerable quarterings: the Neville saltire, the Newburgh chevron, the Montacute lozenges, the Beauchamp fess, repeated in order down either side of the long hall. The walls were not hung, but panelled, each panel carved and painted with a device: bear, eagle, ragged staff, pied bull, dun cow. For some reason, Duke Richard had made no move to replace all these with Yorkish bearings, but took his seat each day under the copious blazonry of the man his troops had killed in last year’s fog at Barnet.

  A door clicked. The gentlemen who had been sitting about the long, carved table on the dais came to their feet. The commoners standing below uncovered. Duke Richard walked quickly to his chair; sat down and at once beckoned to his head verderer. He meant to kill some driven deer that morning. The man reported three good harts in Sunskew Park. Duke Richard glanced up at the painted Flemish clock on the wall.

  “Three hours from now,” he said curtly and invited the steward of the household to report on the final preparations for that night’s banquet. Noble guests were coming: the great Northumberland on his way back from London to his own marches, the Lords Howard and Lovel, two young men of whom the Duke thought highly, Sir William Parr and Sir James Harrington, Lord Scrope of Bolton, the Duke’s next neighbour, and his brother-in-law, Sir Richard Ratcliffe. The steward had a great deal to say for himself. The eels which he had ordered specially from York had not arrived yet. Could a man be sent out along the York road to meet the carrier? Yes. Would my Lord Scrope and Sir Richard Ratcliffe require a bath when they arrived — there were hardly enough bath-tubs? Then they must go without. How many followers would his Grace of Northumberland bring with him? At least a hundred.

  “Then I must have another ox killed,” said the steward dolefully.

  “Do not let that stern necessity weigh too heavily on you,” said the Duke, with one of his quick smiles, “and give them plenty of ale. But on no account let any of our servants be drunk till after supper. Have you more?”

  “No, your Grace.”

  “You are excused.”

  The steward made way for the master of the pages, asking leave to whip a page who had made up a most offensive rhyme about him. What was the rhyme? The master hesitated; hemmed; repeated it in a low voice, his eyes on the floor. Mr. Kendal, the Secretary, suddenly bit his pen, and the Duke passed a ringed hand over his mouth. Then he turned his curious pale eyes on the man and said gently:

  “If we punish such little taunts, we acknowledge that they hurt us. It would not go with your dignity to whip the boy. You are excused.”

  The master bowed and went out, not looking pleased. An old woman from Middleham village took his place. She was very dirty, very shaky, very frightened of everything around her; curtsied several times; muttered. The Duke leaned forward.

  “Louder, mother,” he said, “I must hear you if I am to help you.”

  The tale came out under his prompting. She had borrowed a mark. She had borrowed it in desperate need from Mr. Raglan, one of the Duke’s stable-grooms, who was a warm man. That was a year ago. Now Mr. Raglan told her that her debt, with interest, was two marks, and if she did not pay by Sunday he would ask leave of the Duke to throw her into the road and take her cottage and her two speckeldy hens and her goat. Christ knew she had no two marks, and she was an old woman. The Duke played with his ring until she had finished and was crying. Then he said simply:

  “Call James Ragland.”

  Mr. Kendal and the Auditor exchanged looks. Unseen by the Duke, Mr. Kendal pulled the corners of his mouth down and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. A red-faced fellow with bow-legs came in, pulling his cap off his head and bowing. The Duke’s voice was as remote and gentle as wind murmuring in a cave.

  “James, what does a servant deserve who has disgraced his master?”

  James looked simple.

  “Your Grace?”

  “Do you know that woman?”

  “What, her? Why, your Grace, has she been so brazen … ?”

  “Mr. Auditor, pay this man one mark and let the steward see that he is out
of the Castle before nightfall. Mother, if you will go to my almoner he shall give you something. Next time you are in need, come to me, who am your natural Lord, and not to some cruel man.”

  James Raglan was on his knees.

  “For God’s sake have pity on a poor man, my Lord. I’ve been a good servant to you these many …”

  “Be silent.”

  The Duke spoke, though still in a low voice, with such violence that those near him started. He raised his face and voice a little and went on:

  “Listen, all of you. There is one sin that Holy Church detests above all; and it shall never be suffered where I am master. Usury is hateful to God. Look at this whore’s bastard who would stretch out one miserable mark into two even if he had to break a poor woman’s heart with it. Now he will pay for it with his place. Get out, man. Do not let me see you again, or I shall take order with you.”

  James Raglan rose from his knees and went like a man who has been struck dumb. His fellow-servants made way for him. The Duke signed to a page to lead out the old woman, who was sobbing again and blessing him by many saints. He bowed to her as gravely as if she had been a nun, and was listening, before she was well out of the room, to a man who wanted compensation for damage done to his garden by the deer. Mr. Kendal pointed out sharply that his garden had no business to have spread itself out into Westwood, which was Castle property, though the Rector of Middleham had rights of pasturage in it.

  “If a man steals meat from my spit,” said the Duke gently, “I do not compensate him for his burnt fingers. Be on your way, my friend. That cock won’t fight.”

  The village ale-taster presented a list of four names of men who had brewed ale without payment of their proper dues. He was told to raise the matter at the next Court Baron. Then came a dispute. Thomas Oakroyd had sold a goose to Edmund Taylor for a shilling on the feast of St. Thomas Martyr, and the money had been paid him across the tomb of St. Alkelda in Middleham Church. It had been further agreed between them that he should have a sitting of eggs from this goose before the last day of August. But now the goose was dead, and Edmund Taylor hung back from the bargain, saying the bird must have been sick before he bought it and Thomas Oakroyd had deceived him. Let the Duke judge between them.

  The Duke heard the quarrel out for twenty minutes by the clock on the wall, his face lowered over his joined hands whilst he slid a ring up and down one finger. Then he asked when the goose died. Last Wednesday, if it pleased him, it had been found in the morning, stiff and stark without a wound on its body: most unnatural. The Duke looked at sweating and earnest Edmund Taylor and asked how many geese he had kept in his time.

  “Never one before this, your good Grace, and may St. Anthony’s fire burn me if ever I keep another. Of all wanchancy fowl that …”

  “Then I judge the bird miscarried by your ignorance in tending it. Thomas Oakroyd deserves his eggs. Pay him the market price of a sitting across St. Alkelda’s tomb and keep hens for the future: and Thomas, see you buy a gallon of ale for you and Edmund out of the money he gives you, so that you part friends.”

  The two cottagers pulled their forelocks and bumbled out, disputing the number of eggs to a sitting in strong whispers. The Duke leaned back in his big chair and sighed. His pale face was corpse-like, without a vestige of expression, so that it was impossible to tell whether his morning’s work intrigued or bored him.

  The knot below the daïs had shrunk. The Duke accepted with a smile and a polite word a seigneural tribute of two capons from a married couple who had settled on his land, and declined briskly to give judgment in a case of assault which ought to come before the Court Baron. Then the servants stood back and he attended to his letters. There was a dull screed from Thomas Rotherham, the new Bishop of Lincoln. It was concerned with a fine point of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and written, for reasons known only to the Bishop, his secretary and his God, in Latin. Duke Richard, when Mr. Kendal began the introduction: “Carissimo in Christo filio nostro, illustrissimo principi Richardo duci Gloucestrie, Thomas, permissione divina … ,” held up his hand asked for an abstract of the rest. Having had it, he required Mr. Kendal to look up the law of the matter and draft a suitable answer. “In English,” he added. A letter from the steward of Pontefract Castle reporting an outbreak of mange among the hounds there made the Duke frown and pull his lip. There were three letters for his signature: a request to the Mayor and Aldermen of York to investigate a complaint of selling cloth by short measure that had reached Duke Richard’s ears, a promise to a small knight of Derbyshire, Sir Richard Revell, to find his son a place at Court if it were possible, and a formal report to King Edward on the state of the municipal artillery of the City of York. They were signed and sealed, and for the next hour the Duke played with his dagger and listened to the Secretary, the Chaplain and the Auditor wrangling over the weekly accounts. A mysterious entry, “to rabbits for the Chaplain, 2/4,” threatened to cause friction at one point, the Chaplain, who was also the almoner, explaining that he was not consuming these in secret but distributing them, on the Duke’s orders, to needy men. “Rabbits for God’s poor,” he said, would have been a more seemly choice of phrase.

  Outside the Keep, the business of making ready for the guests went on. New arras was hung and, despite the clear autumn sunshine, perfumed fires were lighted in bedchambers some of which had been unused since Kingmaker’s day. Bath-tubs, freshly scrubbed, were fitted with new silk curtains. Hens skirled deliriously in the East Ward as the poulterer waded among them, wringing neck upon neck. The eels arrived, and the master-cook, who had already lost his temper for the day, left off work for five minutes to tell the carrier who his father and mother had been. The chief butler was fidgeting on the stair of the Keep, waiting to get the key of the gold-plate chest from Mr. Kendal. In the whole Castle no one was quiet or at ease, and down the sloping village street heads popped from doors at every footstep in hopes of seeing a fine company go by.

  The first guests actually arrived well before noon. They were Lord Scrope and his brother-in-law, who had ridden over accompanied only by one squire. Lord Scrope was a dark, cumbrously-built man, just middle-aged. Sir Richard Ratcliffe, rather younger, was red-haired, hard-jawed, blue-eyed, with a bleak look and a rough manner; did not talk much. Both wore plain hunting-dress. Servants took their horses and others ran up the stairs into the Keep to warn the Duke. He met them in the Great Hall; gave his cheek to Lord Scrope, who was his cousin, and his hand to Ratcliffe; guided them into the Chamber of Presence; called for wine, demain bread and sweetmeats. He had meant to hunt shortly, he explained, but they would perhaps like longer to refresh themselves. Both shook their heads, tossing down malmsey; were ready when he was. They were short-spoken men and looked very rough and large beside him.

  The hunt clattered out under the Gate-Tower and swung round below the Castle walls. The brown water of the moat was smeared with blue reflections, and a pair of swans moved proudly and slowly on it. Another, standing on the bank, hobbled with black feet, arching its wings and bending its neck, as the horses passed it. The Duke pointed out to Ratcliffe the mass of the round Drum Tower at the Southwest angle of the building, asking what he thought of it.

  “Fine strong place,” said the guest; “take a deal of winning.”

  The Duke shook his head.

  “Not now,” he said, “not with artillery: I tell you, Sir Richard, the day of strong castles is over. I would rather camp in an open field with two great guns than be besieged in the stoutest castle of England.”

  “Earl of Oxford doesn’t think so,” grunted Ratcliffe.

  That Earl, who had blundered into disaster at Barnet, had since turned pirate and recently seized the strong fort of St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, from which King Edward’s soldiers had not yet dislodged him.

  Duke Richard smiled.

  “Give me the guns I had the ordering of at Tewkesbury, and in three days I would not leave John Vere three courses of stone to hide his head behind.”


  “Then I wish you might have them, your Grace. It would be a better world for us with Oxford out of it.”

  “I see no great harm in the man. He is alone; can do nothing but make a little feeble trouble somewhere on the coast.”

  “He can join with Henry Tydder in Brittany.”

  The Duke put back his head and laughed.

  “This whispering of the name of Henry Tydder: a bastard not twelve years old and descended by double adultery! I shall never fathom it. Why, there are a good half-dozen English noblemen of our own party who have a better claim to the crown.”

  “The Welch would follow him,” observed Lord Scrope.

  “To destruction: my Lord, can you conceive that a Welchman would ever be permitted to hold sway in England?”

  They had come to the green place where the deer would be driven out. The Duke had no time that day for a full hunt to hounds, but the prickers and beaters had been at work since before dawn, edging the quarry up into a moderate-sized copse, where they were now surrounded. The huntsmen with their leashes of hounds, the two or three mounted gentlemen, the Duke and his guests spread themselves in a semi-circle. Squires handed round the splendid six-foot yew-wood bows and long hunting-arrows. The Duke, Lord Scrope and Sir Richard Ratcliffe dismounted.

  From beyond the copse rose suddenly the shrill babble of those driving the game. The Duke strung his bow with a quick jerk. It was more than a foot taller than himself and made him look vaguely absurd. He tried the wind with a damp finger and waited. There was a crashing and plunging in the copse. A hound gave excited tongue that ended in a yelp as the whip stung it. The crashing stopped; began again. Suddenly, a hart was out of the bracken and bounding diagonally across their view. Lord Scrope, a passionate archer, like all Yorkshiremen, drew his arrow to the head. But before he had loosed it he heard the sharp plunk of Duke Richard’s bow. The hart leapt with all four feet from the ground and crashed sideways. There was no need to loose the hounds at it. Its legs shivered once and it lay perfectly still. Lord Scrope opened his mouth, but before he had time to speak his congratulations another hart was in view. He sighted, loosed and saw the beast stagger and run on with his arrow in its haunch. He cursed: