Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  “You’re a true, honest white rose man, I see,” his companion said ingratiatingly.

  William Colyngbourne took trouble to appear so. His real thoughts about the wars of York and Lancaster were his own business these days. He nodded earnestly.

  “By the Mass, yes: d’you know I was in this very tavern, drinking with the loyal men-at-arms, when our Lord Edward had come into his own again last year, and a fellow ran to the door to tell us Kingmaker was lying at Barnet Heath with thirty thousand. That was a night.”

  “Kingmaker: we shan’t see his like again, the great Earl.”

  “A proud nobleman, too proud for this world.”

  “A proud house, the Nevilles; and now they’re broken as small as chaff: Kingmaker and Montacute dead and rotten, the Countess in hiding, and the Archbishop shut up in Guisnes in a prison where he can see neither sun nor moon, because he tried to serve two masters.”

  William Colyngbourne did not answer. The fall of the Archbishop had been unpleasant news to him. It was contrived, they said, by Dr. Morton, once a close councillor of Queen Marguerite and her dead son, and now so fatly in favour with the Yorkist Court that he was made Master of the Rolls. If Dr. Morton, the traitor who lined his nest by selling his old friends to new ones, was acquainted with the secret dealings between George Neville and John Vere, then how many other secret dealings could he put a name to? How many more Lancastrians now sitting still and thinking their own thoughts in England could he uncover and throw into the hands of Edward’s gaolers and executioners? William Colyngbourne reviewed his past and thought of horrible things: a sledge bumping behind a horse’s heels to Tyburne, a rope that choked one, but not to death, a cold knife on one’s belly. I’ll have no more truck with politics, he told himself.

  “It was strange,” the Londoner went on, looking sideways at him, “how Holy Harry died when he did — of pure displeasure and melancholy, they say.”

  William Colyngbourne met that gambit without blinking. He was as certain that Holy Harry had been murdered as he was that there was ale in his mazer; but he was by no means going to lay himself open to an accusation of treason by saying so.

  “No doubt it was the news of his son’s death at Tewkesbury field.”

  “No doubt.”

  There was a silence. The Londoner broke it in a way that sent the blood to Mr. Colyngbourne’s heart with a dreadful rush.

  “I have wanted for a long while to have some talk with you, Mr. Colyngbourne. I am one of Dr. Morton’s household.”

  The mazer in William Colyngbourne’s hand tipped so that the ale splashed out of it. His throat clicked.

  “Dr. Morton?”

  “The Master of the Rolls: he sent me to-night to find you and ask for a little of your company.”

  “What have I to do with him? I never saw him in all my life.”

  The Londoner had dipped his finger in the spilt ale and was amusing himself by drawing lines along the table-top. He did not look up.

  “He knows your name. He — we — heard that you had come to London, and I was ordered to bring you to him privately. To-night is a good time. He is lodging at Dean’s Yard.”

  “What the devil madness is this? What can Dr. Morton want with me?”

  “He would be glad to tell you that himself.”

  “I won’t come. How do I know you’re not a thief or a Bedlamite? I’ll go and wait on him in the morning, if it must be, but by God I’ll not budge a foot with you at this hour.”

  “I think you should come.”

  “That I will not.”

  Dr. Morton’s servant smudged out the pattern he had drawn on the table-top and looked thoughtfully at him.

  “That is what George Neville said.”

  William Colyngbourne’s stomach seemed to contract as though it had been hit. His lips felt swollen and there was a rushing noise inside his head. He stood up.

  “I’ll come.”

  There was a tickling, heavy mist in Dean’s Yard. Somewhere above it, hidden now, the spire of St. Paul’s climbed up five hundred feet into the autumn air. Lights behind windows were rare and faint, fog-yellowed. Mr. Colyngbourne’s guide knocked on a door and it was opened.

  “Go up the stairs,” he said.

  Mr. Colyngbourne went up, feeling as though he left his life behind him in the damp fog.

  “In there,” his guide told him, a hand on his elbow, and pushed a second door ajar.

  The room they went into was not sinister; was not even seemly for an official of the King’s Court. Its unplastered beams were low overhead. Its hangings were the cheapest kind of painted canvas. William Colyngbourne noticed a truckle bed, a couple of old chairs, many chests heaped with swags of paper and parchment, two rushlights on a table and a man writing. The man looked up as they came in, showing them a priest’s face, round, smooth, secret, with considering eyes and a close mouth.

  “Mr. Colyngbourne of Lydyard,” said the servant, and went out.

  The priest stood up. He was short and middle-aged, with a certain comfortable plumpness of presence. His robes were black and grey satin and struck the only note of spruceness and newness in the room.

  “Be seated, sir.”

  William Colyngbourne found a chair and sat in it. The sinews at the back of his knees were jerking. Dr. Morton came round the end of the table, moving discreetly and softly like a cat, and sat opposite to him. His pale, plump face was benevolent and he twined his short fingers together in his lap.

  “Mr. Colyngbourne, I have sent for you on a matter that concerns your well-being.”

  “I do not know what that can be, sir. I do not know what I have to do with you.”

  Dr. Morton protruded the tip of his tongue between his lips. The effect of this was only to emphasise the shut, secret expression of the whole mouth. He rubbed his broad nose with his forefinger and then twined his hands again. His dark eyes captured Mr. Colyngbourne’s.

  “Mr. Colyngbourne, you formerly had the honour to be a servant of the King’s Grace in the office of Serjeant of the Pantry.”

  His voice was low-pitched and insinuating, the voice of a friend offering sensible advice.

  Mr. Colyngbourne nodded.

  “At the readeption of the late King Henry VI, two years ago, you nevertheless protested to many persons that you were devoted in all things to the cause of the unfortunate house of Lancaster, urging as a proof of this that you had been ready to bear arms on behalf of the Earl of Warwick when he revolted against our Lord King Edward.”

  “Sir, I never...”

  Dr. Morton lifted his hand and went on:

  “When Queen Marguerite landed in the West Country, you left London to go to your place at Lydyard, saying to many of your friends that you would arm your servants and support her: and indeed you had set out to do so when you heard the news of the Bloody Meadow and the destruction of the Queen’s party there.”

  “As God sees me, since that day I have never spoken nor taken on hand anything against King Edward.”

  “You openly protested your loyalty to him as soon as he arrived in London. But in private and among your friends you have accused him of necromancy, witchcraft, adultery and other vile crimes. You have drunk to the success of John Vere of Oxford in his invasion of Cornwall. You have spoke defamatorily of the King’s brothers, the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, calling the one a turncoat and a false Duke who betrayed the Earl of Warwick, and the other a misshapen dwarf. You have said that the old Duke of York was a common rebel with no more right to the crown of England than to your doublet, and that even if his right had been ten times better than it was, it could not avail King Edward, for King Edward was no son of his, but the bastard of a Scots archer called Blackburn with whom the Duchess of York committed adultery. You have said this last even whilst you were seeking employment from the Duchess about her lands in Wiltshire.”

  Terror swooped like a demented bat about the confusion of William Colyngbourne’s mind. He had said all these things that stoo
d up in front of him now like a row of pikes laid at his chest. A clear, dreadful picture was shaping in his imagination. A crowd stood round a gallows with a ladder set to it. There was a fire lighted and a knife and an axe put ready on a block. He could feel the rope biting his neck, the crash of his fall as it was cut to keep him alive, hands dragging his clothes off, the steel in his guts. Dr. Morton’s cat-face wavered and went black before him.

  “These … lies …” he whispered, putting a finger between his neck and his collar.

  “I can prove them all.” Dr. Morton made a slight controlled gesture toward a paper on his table. “Mr. Colyngbourne, I know enough about you to send you to Tyburne.”

  “Dr. Morton, for Christ’s sake, I meant no harm. I talked. I was loyal to King Henry in his lifetime, but I meant nothing against King Edward. I swear it on the cross of Christ.”

  “You told your friend John Turburvyle of Dorset that if the Earls of Pembroke and Richmond would but land in Wales, you and he might strike a blow for the true blood even yet.”

  William Colyngbourne wiped the spittle from his chin and stared in creeping horror that was not only horror of the gallows at Dr. Morton.

  “Are you a devil?” he asked in a dried whisper.

  “That is scarcely a fit question to ask a priest of Holy Church,” said the Master of the Rolls primly, “and in all events it is I who will ask you a question, Mr. Colyngbourne. What are you, who call yourself a loyal Yorkist nowadays? I will tell you what you are, sir. You are, and you have always been, whatever offices you held or lip-service you paid, as rank a Lancastrian as, let us say, myself.”

  William Colyngbourne was beyond surprise; was almost beyond fear. He shook his head like a bear in a cage and did not speak. The large, dark eyes, priest’s eyes, of Dr. Morton kept their hold upon his own. The full, close lips moved precisely, shaping and arranging words.

  “As rank a Lancastrian as myself, Mr. Colyngbourne, and I think one who, also like myself, knows that in these unhappy times he can best serve the true blood by seeming to serve its enemies: that is the man I take you for.”

  “But you: it was you who destroyed George Neville.”

  “Certainly I did, Mr. Colyngbourne, because George Neville was of no more avail to us and because I knew that in every case the King intended his destruction. Necesse est, Mr. Colyngbourne, quod unus pro populo mori, which is in English: needs must that one should die for the folk. I sacrificed George Neville, and I stand so high by his sacrifice that no man now dares impugn my loyalty to the adulterous usurper who calls himself Edward of England. That is more matter than whether that hotheaded blunderer Oxford should have been helped to hold St. Michael’s Mount a few days longer. Put such foolish schemes as his out of your mind, my friend, and learn to take a long view of our case as I do.”

  “Why have you sent for me: and how am I to know you are not laying me a trap?”

  “If you are not hanged within a month for the treasons that I can prove against you already, you will know that I play fair, will you not? Let me, in my turn, warn you that if ever one word of what I say to-night passes your lips, you shall hang as duly as the sun rises.”

  “Why have you sent for me, in God’s name?”

  “Be easy, sir. I have sent for many part-takers of the house of Lancaster in these last months. I think I may say that there is no Lancastrian of standing in this realm or in Brittany whose name and something of his conditions I do not know. Go into Kent one day and ask the Gilfords or the Romneys — both names should be familiar to you — whether I am the traitor to the red rose that I seem to be. There are lists of names here — I may give you a sight of them presently, if we are agreed together — that you would find very muster-rolls of Lancaster.”

  “Why do you make them? Why do you talk to me? Is there something afoot, an enterprise?”

  Dr. Morton lifted his hand and spoke with the first shade of emphasis that had coloured his smooth voice since the beginning.

  “Mr. Colyngbourne, there is nothing afoot, nothing, nothing, nothing. I have told you that I sacrificed George Neville and stirred not so much as a finger to help John Vere, because these petty enterprises, these snatchings of castles and raisings of riots, can do the cause and quarrel of Lancaster no good, but only an infinity of harm. We must face what is, Mr. Colyngbourne. The house of Lancaster bled almost to death at Tewkesbury last year. That blood-drained body of our hopes needs physic and a long rest to recover strength again. There will be no sudden changing of the world for us: hut nonetheless, I would see us prepared and ready when the time comes, which, in my true opinion, will not be for these ten years.”

  “Ten years?”

  “Until our last hope, Henry Earl of Richmond, now a child in Brittany, shall be a man and capable of leading armies. We cannot try to set a child upon the throne of England. But when he is mature to claim his own we must strike, not feebly and separately, but as one arm dealing one blow.”

  “But in ten years the power of Edward will be so rooted into the land that we can never move it.”

  “Will it so? I am not a devil, as you so uncourteously hinted not long ago, and I have no great gift of prophecy: but I will cite to you one or two things that might befall, ten years from now, and that we might turn to our advantage.”

  He leaned forward slightly in his chair, his plump, white hands slipping over one another as if they were two pale, swollen fish in a small bowl. For the next half-hour he spoke softly and deliberately, and Mr. Colyngbourne listened.

  *

  The Widow Wrangwysh opened her eyes and was instantly aware that she had a headache. Her whole fat body was in discomfort. Her back was stiff and her tongue dry. Her brother-in-law Thomas from York, up in London along with the city’s two burgesses for Parliament, had supped with her the night before. She had called in the chantry-priest to make an evening of it, and she had only a dim idea of how she eventually got to bed. She fancied Anne had helped her there. Sun was glinting unkindly through the shutters now and iron-shod cart-wheels made an ear-filling clatter in the cobbled street. The widow swore and shut her eyes again. The earlier part of the evening was pretty clearly memorable. Brother Tom had been full of the doings of the Duke of Gloucester, with whom he was to have an audience at Baynard’s Castle in the morning. He was the most courteous great nobleman, he said, that ever was in Yorkshire. He had been surprised how much his sister-in-law knew about the Duke, and the widow had to explain how she had heard it all from her little cookmaid who was once in service — she hoped she had not been moved to put it more explicitly than that — in Kingmaker’s household and the Duke of Clarence’s. After that, they had all been very merry together, and she distinctly recalled singing Dieu vous sauve, Dame Emme, a song popular in her girlhood, and emptying the dregs of her cup down the priest’s neck.

  “Holy Mary,” murmured the Widow Wrangwysh aloud, “I’m getting old.”

  The noise of the carts went marching through her head like an army with siege-artillery, and she felt as though the devil were in her mouth. Grunting and exhaling, she heaved herself over in the sordid tangle of bedclothes, spat on the floor and sat up. Whoever put her to bed had had the sense to pull her outer clothes off, she observed, and lay them neatly on a chair. That would be Anne, no doubt. The cook and the two scullery-wenches would never in this world of God have taken the trouble. With a final groan she pushed the coverings away and got on her feet. Dressed only in her kirtle and shift, with her hair over her eyes and her face yellow and blue, she was a sight to rebuke sin, and knew it. She tottered to the window and slammed the shutters back. Cold autumn sun and air struck her in the face like a reproach, and from immediately beneath her the piercing voice of a hawker’s boy squalled:

  “Hot pies, hot!”

  The startling noise, coupled with the bare notion of a hot pie, undid her altogether. She sank back, sitting, onto the bed and banged a chair on the floor, hoping it might fetch someone. Bet, the younger scullery-wench, presently looked in
.

  “Get me a pint of small ale quickly.”

  “Yes, mistress.”

  “And send Anne up here, and hurry, pox take you.”

  It was Anne herself, meek and almost ghostly, who brought the drink. The widow mumbled at her:

  “Did you lay me away last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s o’clock?”

  “It’s past nine.”

  “Oh Lord.”

  The widow drank, spat and drank again; felt not much better.

  “I’m ill, wench. I’m sick.”

  “You ought to drink no ale, then.”

  “No ale? What the devil do you know about it? Ale’s what I want.”

  “You had too much last night.”

  “And that’s why I must have some more this morning. You get me another pint, and none of your damned back-answers. Jesus, what’s that?”

  There was a loud, imperative knocking on the front-door of the house. The widow put her hands to her head.

  “Oh, God’s blessed Lady, what’s this tormenting garboyle? St. Anthony’s fire roast them, do they want to deafen a woman? Who are they? I’ll heave a bucket of slops on them in a minute. Go to the window, can’t you, and see who it is? Oh God, my ears!”

  Anne crossed to the window. The knocking was maintained, burst after threatening burst of blows.

  “Oh!”

  The cry was so small and desolate, so thin with despair, that even in her peevish stupor the widow jerked her head round. Anne was leaning against the wall, twisting her hands together. Her eyes were enormous, like two skullholes in the white of her face.

  “What is it, girl alive?”

  “Men-at-arms.”

  Anne’s voice was tiny. She coughed on the words as though they hurt her throat.