“I have only this to say to you. With Sir William Stanley and Lord le Strange, since their treason has stopped short of battle, I shall deal with a certain mercy when this is over. For the rest, I require no prisoners. The Welchman and his five thousand are to be destroyed. We outnumber them by more than four to one. See you to it. These shameless foreigners and the unnatural Englishmen who are with them have brought civil war into my country again. For that, every mother’s son of them is to die. Kill without quarter. Every one of Henry Tydder’s part-takers whom I find alive after the field will be hanged and drawn. I shall give a reward for the head or body of Henry Tydder, or for Jaspar Tydder or John Vere or Gilbert Talbot. For the Frenchman, de Shaundé, I offer nothing. If he leaves the field, he cannot leave England. Repeat all these orders to your men. Has any of you anything to urge?”
“Aye.” Sir Richard Ratcliffe took a pace forward, his bull’s head of reddish-yellow curls down and his jaw fixed.
“I am listening.”
“You trust the Stanleys too far, your Grace.”
“I do not think so. Even in England a man thinks twice of a treachery that will cost him his son’s head; and no word was ever said against Lord Thomas. I have made him Constable of England and spared him his wife’s estates. Also he knows that if he does fail me I shall root his house out to the ninth generation and divide his lands from Lancaster to Shrewsbury.”
“And if your Grace miscarried by his treachery, d’you not think he’d count it worth his while to lose a son if he could have a stepson a King? By Christ, I do. Remember Henry Stafford, your Grace.”
“Henry Stafford was mad.”
“Your Grace, we know Sir William Stanley meant to turn on us. How can we trust any one of them?”
It was the Earl of Northumberland who spoke now. His meagre face was more anxious even than before and he gesticulated like a Jew, hunching his shoulders.
“We have a hostage. We have Lord Thomas’ assurance.”
“Then by St. Cuthbert, why isn’t Lord Thomas with us now instead of camping hip-to-haunch with his brother who’s a proved traitor?”
“He is of more use to us where he is.”
“Your Grace, as the blessed Trinity looks on me, I don’t like it. I don’t like these four camps scattered over half the county. Wherever we turn there will be someone who might fall on us. It’s poxily unsafe. I’m for retreat until Stanley’s proved his word and joined forces with us.”
“You are for what?” asked the King tonelessly.
“I’m for withdrawing from this trap until we know who are our friends.”
“My Lord of Northumberland,” said the King without any change of voice, “if you are afraid you may leave us. When you are back in the North, tell the common people there that you deserted King Richard. They will rise in a mob and hang you. I know who are my friends.”
“I’m not afraid, your Grace, indeed not: no, by God.” The man’s face was white, Lord Lovel noticed. I would not give him a ward to command, he thought, if I had my way.
“I am glad to hear it. It would be a new thing in the history of the Percys. We do not withdraw. Listen. Stanleys or no Stanleys, the Welchman cannot hold the field against us for half-an-hour. This is our opportunity to do England the greatest service that King or nobles ever did her: clean her for ever of civil war. All the disturbers of our peace — the old Lancastrians, the Welch partisans of the house of Tydder, the lice who clung to the hem of the Wydvylles’ gown — are gathered together in one heap at White Moors to-night. To-morrow, we and every one of them, fall back, fall edge. A new England will begin to-morrow.”
England, thought Lord Lovel, you plague-stricken old bitch who’ll bite your master’s hand, when were you worthy to have that said of you? Why should we risk a single honest life for you? We do, for all that. He says it, and we obey.
“Does anyone else wish to speak? Then good-night to you, gentlemen: get your rest. We shall be busy tomorrow.”
He stood up, a black little figure like a page in mourning or a scholar who has puzzled over his books too long, and they left him.
There were two straw pallets in the outer compartment of the royal tent. Someone had put a jug of wine and two cups beside a lantern on the table. Alone together, Lord Lovel and Sir Richard Ratcliffe looked at them and at each other; nodded; filled; drank without saying anything. The wine was Beaune, and very good. The moon was up outside and they could hear stamping and, once or twice, a long, shaking whinny from the horse-lines. It was a feverish night: the air warm and thick like a cat’s fur. At Market Bosworth, over there in the dark now, Sir William Stanley would be breathing this same air and praying that, since he was to hold his hand to-morrow, the pale-faced King would hold his afterward and not visit his treachery too heavily on him. Beyond, in the Deer-Park, Lord Thomas Stanley must be cursing the wickedness of his wife and brother that had endangered his own honour and his son’s head: and westward from them, not dreaming the prop in which they trusted had been struck from under them, the yellow-haired Welchman and his tagrag of renegades were lying close, waiting uncertainly for a dangerous morning: treachery and counter-treachery scattered in arms over the miles of English innocent countryside, and above it all the insensible thick miasma of pestilence.
Sir Richard Ratcliffe stretched himself. Lord Lovel could hear the muscles in his big arms crack. Then he whispered:
“Be hot to-morrow.”
“To-morrow, yes, to-morrow should be a strange day on all counts.”
“I could wish for rain. Foul weather’s York weather: snow at Towton, fog at Barnet, storms before Tewkesbury, Buckingham’s Water.”
“We shall do the work whatever the weather is.”
“I wish I were a little surer of the Stanleys.”
“Ah God, man, d’you think anyone would send his own son to the block for the sake of making a fresh King?”
“In England, yes I do think it. See what’s happened in England before. Edward of Rouen killed his own brother. Someone else killed Edward of Rouen’s two …”
“It’s better not to say it, Ratcliffe.”
“Happen it is: but the sister of those two was ready to commit incest with the one who killed them, if only he’d put a crown on her head. That’s what can happen in England when it’s a matter of Kings and Queens.”
“Aye.”
“All because they want something for themselves: an office, a castle, money, a grant of land, just a name sometimes: that’s what they want power for.”
“And the man who has the power wants nothing whatever for himself. That is why he will keep it.”
“You’re in the right of it, my Lord Viscount. Aye, Christ yes, you’re in the right of it there: Stanleys or no Stanleys. I wish I may get a cut at Henry Tydder tomorrow. His head would be worth money.”
“It’s only three miles to his camp. Don’t wait for tomorrow. Go out and take his head now.”
“Only three miles: blessed St. Peter, think of him saying his prayers over there in the dark, wishing to God he’d stopped in Brittany and damning his mother for having fetched him here. He’ll be sweating as if he’d the plague.”
“He couldn’t die much sooner if he had. There’ll be some hangings in Wales too when this is done.”
“I’d string up every whorson jenkin from Flint to Cardiff if I’d my own way. Our master won’t.”
“I think this time he will.”
“Maybe, but look at the plague of mercy we had after Henry Stafford’s garboyle two years ago.”
“He is different now.”
“God have pity on us all. He’s different. You know, I’ve been thinking a crowd of odd things these last months.”
“I suppose we all have.”
“And I’ve been thinking about the chronicles will come to be written after we’ve gone, a hundred years from now and more. We’ll be in them: what we did for King Richard, how we helped break the Wydvylles and the Tydders. They’ll say I was a rough make of a fello
w who did the King’s butchery for him. Good luck to them: it’s what they’ll say about him puzzles me. They’ll say he was a man with no blood in him, nothing of what you’d call humanity, a cold man that went his own road.”
“They’ll say that.”
“Aye, but the devil fly off with it, they’ll be wrong. They’ll not know what he was like before the little Prince and our dear Lady — God rest them both, amen — were taken away. They’ll not know the truth about him. They’ll be talking common lies.”
“They will.”
“Do you suppose all the chroniclers are liars, then? D’you think the tales we hear tell of Harry of Monmouth and Edward of Windsor are lies too?”
“I see no cause why they shouldn’t be. Look you, Ratcliffe, we’ve a piece of work on hand to-morrow for them to tell lies about when the time comes. Let’s get our rest for it.”
“We’ll be best to.”
It was barely cocklight when Lord Lovel woke again. He did so sharply, with the awareness that something had been moving in the tent. The beginning of morning showed Richard Ratcliffe asleep face-downward, his head in the curve of his arm like a child’s. He had not shifted. It was someone else. The gold hangings spangled with silver fleurs-de-lys looked grey now; were not stirring. Have we had ghosts with us to-night, Lord Lovel wondered. Have all the multitude of dead come to watch the end of the troubles; Kingmaker and Somerset and Holy Harry come to see the last battle and the stopping of the wheel’s that went over them all? Something has been through here. He got up; went to the tent opening in his shirt and hose; looked out. The sentry was there, the early light sliding coldly over his steel jack and sallet, his pike held stiffly.
“Has anyone passed?”
The man twitched a frightened country face with a rough fuzz of beard round to him; pointed; did not say anything. The camp was as quiet as a cemetery; big round tents asleep like tombstones, guards standing as dull as monuments. There was no smell of smoke yet. The morning was clean, not hot and brooding as the day would be, but full of a kind of joyful and silent life. Among the pale lumps of the tents, as a child might walk among bushes in an orchard, a small black figure was twining, stopping now and then as though to take a breath of the coolness, sometimes peering at a tent or a stack of arms. Except that it left a black spoor of footprints in the grey of the dew, it might have been a homing goblin.
“Holy Jesus,” said Lord Francis, “it’s not right he should be wandering by himself.” He took his sword from beside his pallet and strapped it on. “Tell Sir Richard Ratcliffe when he wakes,” he told the sentry, and began to walk over the dew.
He did not at first try to overtake the King; allowed him fifty yards’ law and kept his eyes on him. He moved slowly, for all the world like a country gentleman taking a morning stroll in his orchard, looking up now and again at the sky, which was turning from white to blue. They walked through the whole camp; halted at the brown welt the road made over the grass. The King had his hand at his side, and Lord Lovel knew he was playing his familiar trick with his dagger. Thinking of what: of the new day this was going to be for England, of the Stanleys, of his dead? No one, thought Francis Lovel, has ever known what King Richard thinks. But whatever he is studying over now will come to pass as he wants it. I have known just one man in my life from whom fate took orders. You Welch fool over there at White Moors, wishing to God you were a hundred miles away, what madness brought you out of your hole to try conclusions with a man nothing can hurt? If I were a Lancastrian I could believe the old fairy-tale that the devil fights for York. Buckingham lifts himself against King Richard and the very rivers turn on him. Lady Margaret plots, and her husband’s son tumbles into our hands for a hostage. Doubtless a thunderbolt will drop out of a clear sky and split Henry Tydder’s head for him. At this moment, the King turned round and they were looking at one another.
Lord Lovel spoke first.
“God give your Grace good morning.”
“Good morning, Frank.”
It was almost the old voice, soft and encouraging like the voice of a man speaking to an animal. The King’s face was as it had been the day before, but there was a kind of calmness about him as though he had been soothed, purged of something. His next words were a surprise.
“I could not sleep. I was dreaming of devils.”
“Devils?”
King Richard nodded, beckoning Lord Francis nearer to him. They stood together looking into the rutted brown of the road as though into a stream.
“Devils, Frank, all the devils pulling and haling me from side to side so that I couldn’t rest. They had the faces of people I knew. One of them was the Wydvylle woman and another was her daughter, my niece, who wished to seduce me into incest with her; and one of them was Henry Stafford.”
Lord Francis crossed himself.
“No, Frank, I do not think it was an omen.”
“God forbid.”
“I think it was a parable.”
“A parable?”
“Why, yes, of all my life: devils have been pulling me from side to side ever since I can remember. I have not had much rest.”
God knows you have not, thought Lord Francis. Ah, Dickon, what has come back to you this important morning? You have been a shell or a corpse these months back, like a ghost watching us and giving us orders. You have not called me Frank for a long while: but talking to you now is like being at Middleham in the good days. “No, you have had little of that, your Grace.”
“It was Edward’s fault, God pardon him,” said King Richard simply: “Edward, who cared more for men’s ordinary pleasures than for his kingdom. He should not have done that. It is not allowed a King. I was only eighteen when Kingmaker quarrelled with him over the Wydvylle woman, and I have been doing penance for his sins ever after that. I’m thirty-three now. It’s a long while. Thank God it’s over.”
“Over, Dickon — your Grace?”
“Call me Dickon if you wish. I almost am Dickon of Gloucester again. Perhaps after to-day I shall be.”
“God knows, my dearest friend as well as my King, you have been to me always.”
“I have not been to myself lately, Francis. I loved her, you see; and our son. He would have been such a fine lad, and I killed him. That killed her. It was a large price to pay.”
“What are you saying? You mustn’t say such things.”
“It is true. I can talk to you this morning because it all belongs to another age now; is not part of us. God has been very merciful. Listen, Frank. You heard that good faithful Ratcliffe of ours preach and preach Henry Stafford’s sermon to me, how there is no honesty in England. He thinks I do not know. I knew it as soon as Henry Stafford did. That was the England Edward left me: all perjured, all rotten, as unstable as sand. What else would it be when its King sold it to that abominable woman who sold it over again to the French? Edward made England what it is, and as soon as Bishop Stillington told me the truth, I knew my duty: to make it honest again. My God, it has been like walking in a swamp. Hastings betrayed me. I would have trusted him with my soul twice over. Henry Stafford betrayed me. He had most cause to be true. When I found that devil Morton has corrupted him I knew what sort of an England it really was. Then I was tempted. I saw the only hope for it was to take every occasion of falsehood away, as one puts knives and razors out of a child’s reach. There would have been another rising in favour of those Wydvylle bastards in the Tower. I knew that; and I remembered something that had been told me that Edward said before he died. His conscience troubled him because he had corrupted everything he touched. He said in the end that it would be the less loss if they died than if there were a fresh war on their account. I am assured of those words. So I killed them.
“Don’t look so startled, Frank. You know it. All England knows it. I was wrong. It is folly to be unjust for the sake of justice. Now men will always use my name as an example of cruelty, as they use Edward’s as an example of lying.
“God has been very good to me, Frank. He
has punished me terribly: my son first, and then my dear, dear Anne. I bore it, but I was so afraid. If I’ve seemed strange these months past, it’s not been only grief. I was terrified beyond all words of what the rest of my punishment was to be. I was afraid God would punish me by the ruin of England. The plague made me think that. Perhaps he meant to take everything away from me: my work too. People hate me. They have a murderer to rule over them. I thought I had forgone my right to build England up again.
“How can we ever find words for the mercy of God? He has punished me in all my affections so that my soul bleeds day and night. I think of her so often at night. He has broken my heart so that I may continue King and do my work. You see there is no more punishment now. England is not to be taken from me. Henry Tydder is the last of all those devils I dreamed about last night, and he is helplessly in our hands. We break him, and then I can go on. Do you remember those verses Anthony Wydvylle made before I headed him?
My life was lent
Me to one intent …
I know my life and intent are spared. Nothing else matters.”
Behind them, suddenly, like a cock crowing, the morning trumpets began to blow.
The marshalling of the troops was a quick business that morning. The smell of frying and boiling had not cleared from round the tents before they began it. Lord Lovel walked down the line of his division, looking at jacks and bows, scolding a man with a rusty sallet, joking with an archer whose leaden mall looked almost too heavy to lift. The man was a smith by trade and grinned when his Lord felt his arm-muscles and said: “I renounce Mahomet, but I believe it’s not too much for you after all. If you meet one of the rebel captains, be sure you do not beat his head so flat that it won’t be known or you’ll lose your guerdon.”
Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III Page 51
