The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III

by Freda Warrington

  Raising his head, Francis said, “Old Henry’s up there somewhere.”

  Raphael looked up at the blind slits of windows. It was less a palace than a fortress. He hadn’t thought of the Lancastrian king for a long time, not even to wonder if he still lived. Weird and shocking, to realise that he was still alive, Edward’s prisoner.

  “Poor wretch. What will become of him?”

  “He’ll remain King Edward’s guest for the rest of his life. Harry should have been a monk, not a king; and how much happier for the rest of us if he had been. That was the cause of all our troubles; a child king with quarrelsome uncles. I wonder if monarchs shouldn’t be appointed with some degree of merit alongside the blood royal?”

  “You’re close to speaking treason,” Raphael said with a grin.

  “Well, we have both in Edward, and praise the Creator for it,” Lovell answered. “Henry, they say, is happier in his cell than ever he was on the throne, and doesn’t know much difference.” His tone was off-hand.

  “I feel sorry for him,” said Raphael.

  “So do we all, but don’t shed too many tears over him. Saint or holy idiot, he’s still dangerous. As long as he lives, there’ll be those who’ll use him as a figurehead for another bloody rebellion, a puppet to get Lancaster back in the ascendant.”

  Francis Lovell went quiet suddenly, the warm light leaving his eyes.

  “What is it?” Raphael asked. He was unsure yet whether Francis trusted him enough to give an answer, but after a moment he spoke.

  “I’m just praying that Henry’s wretched twig of a son didn’t get poor Anne Neville with child before he died. Christ knows, she doesn’t deserve that.”

  ###

  The great hall where they supped that night was more colourful than Raphael had expected, yet sombre; a great pillared space with the walls painted blue and decorations of subdued silver. The yellow flare of fire and candlelight washed a greenish cast over the blue, giving the hall the feel of a drowned sepulchre. Banners floated from the ceiling like waving seaweed.

  The House of Lancaster was dead, finished. The triumphant Yorkists were loud with joy, reliving their battles with extravagant drama. To Raphael, though, it seemed as if the celebrations were muted under bubbling water. Lancaster was dead… except for the ghosts still haunting the tower rooms above them.

  He was beginning to recognise Edward’s circle now. Anthony Woodville, the most celebrated of the queen’s brothers: handsome, smooth-mannered and exquisitely dressed. The Duke of Clarence, loud, flamboyant and sometimes desperate in his attempts to outshine Woodville. William Hastings: a broad dark man, solid and affable, who moved stiffly as if age or battle had got the better of him.

  Later, all the lords – Edward and his brothers of Clarence and Gloucester, Anthony Woodville, and a number of others – left the feast and closeted themselves in a private meeting. Their knights and servants feasted riotously enough without them. Raphael wanted to join in but something held him back: a sense of oppression in the green, sinister light of the hall. Unused to anything stronger than ale, he tasted for the first time the peppery fire of hippocras, and got drunk so fast the whole evening rolled into unreality. There was a throb of voices, the endless sway and flutter of figures; faces lurching in and out of his vision, some smiling, some yelling in song. At one stage a woman was whirling him round and round in a dance; at another, Francis’s face loomed flushed and sweaty in front of him, asking him with laughter if he was celebrating hard enough.

  He had no memory of going to bed, but there he was, on a pallet in a dark room, vaguely aware of other sleeping shapes around him. All was sooty gloom. Tapestries flapped above in him a ghostly draught, seeming to rise forever into the dark. He felt ice-cold sober with no trace of a hangover.

  Something moved, making him jump.

  Richard was bending over him, his face lit from beneath by the candle he carried, and as pale as its flame. His hair winged around him, black like the fathomless centre of his pupils.

  “Get up,” he whispered, so faintly Raphael could hardly hear him. “An enterprise of the deepest dye, not for the faint-hearted…”

  Raphael rose, and walked in silence beside his master, down stone staircases that folded round upon themselves. Outside, the bailey was cat-grey in a shimmer of starlight. The Tower stood solid all around them, its walls fading upwards into the night. He felt they were moving through water; he could hear nothing, not even their footsteps as they crossed to the Wakefield Tower. He worried that Richard was speaking and he couldn’t hear what was being said. But when he looked, Richard’s lips were tightly closed in a face of carved limestone.

  Queen Marguerite had been brought here and imprisoned after Tewkesbury, though kept apart from her husband. The thought of her presence was terrifying. They said she wailed like a bain sidhe for the loss of her son Edouard. The whole Tower was a casket of skeletons, spiders and horrors that would spring out at the touch of a lock.

  They went in through the door of the tower and there were other shapes waiting in the shadows; faces he recognised but tried not to see, lest they murder him to keep his silence. Anthony Woodville. Sir John Fogge. Other close followers of the king. Edward himself was absent.

  Raphael could smell their soft-breathing excitement as they climbed the stairs, their fear; but Richard was black ice, as he’d been in Tewkesbury market place.

  They found Henry VI, king no longer, sitting at a small table in the centre of his cell. He wore a plain blue robe, worn and faded almost to grey. The room smelled of damp, of crushed reeds and candle fat. His hair and face, caught in the circle of candlelight, were the colour of bleached straw. A book shone, bright with pigment between his hands, as if it had sucked all colour into itself, a casket of blue, red and gold. Henry was reading, his lips moving as he mouthed the text. The long curve of his skull and neck had a shapely nobility to them. He wasn’t the shambling wreck Raphael had envisioned, nor did he look old. He was a man who could be imagined on the throne, even with his colourless eyes, his trembling chin. High on the wall behind him was a plaster Christ Iesu on the cross, with the slaughtered Lamb across his feet to symbolise his sacrifice.

  Raphael pressed himself back against a wall, a horrified observer. None of the others spoke to him; he might have been invisible.

  Henry looked up, mild and friendly.

  “Gentlemen, you are kind to visit me.” He looked about vaguely. “I would offer you wine, but… the servants are gone. I never know where they are. Is my wife come to see me?”

  “No, your Grace, she is not,” said Anthony Woodville. Henry’s head dipped in plain relief.

  “Must I be moved again?” His eyes, innocent and pleading, betrayed no understanding of where he was. Pain dragged at Raphael’s throat and he saw the others glancing at each other with hesitant, reluctant expressions. All but Richard, who looked straight ahead with a calm, almost gentle expression.

  “No, your Grace, we are not here to move you,” said Woodville, his voice breaking.

  Sir James Fogge broke across him, hoarse and rapid,

  “Oh, for God’s sake do it!”

  “Who are you?”

  “Friends,” said Richard, “come to shrive you. You have nothing to fear. You will surely feel as great a rapture to stand before your Creator as will He to receive you.” And he drew a long Italian dagger of silver and gold, and held it up as if it were a cross.

  The thin, limp mouth dropped. A flash of understanding passed through the vague eyes. Raphael tried to cry, “Don’t!” but no sound came from his throat.

  “Yes,” whispered Henry. “I see, and I forgive you. May Almighty God do the same, when you stand before Him on the final day; but first, pray with me. Let us pray for our souls, before you dispatch mine to heaven; for you are more in need of it than I.”

  He rose, his stool scraping on the floor. Perhaps prayer would have averted his fate. All the men looked sick and shaken now, and Richard was white. As the old king rose, Fogg
e gave an animal cry, and lunged at him.

  He missed. Henry lurched forward in acute terror. Stumbling, he fell over the corner of the table. Fogge grabbed his hair as he went down, so that Henry finished up on his knees, head back, mouth gaping, thin chest rising and falling. Then Woodville grabbed his wrists and held them behind him, making him gasp. His chin wobbled as prayers spilled from his lips.

  “A discreet wound,” said Richard, “that will not be noticed when he lies in state.”

  It was Richard himself who knelt in front of Henry, as if to pray with him; then in one minimal gesture, with no effort at all, he slipped the long Italian dagger under Henry’s breastbone and up to the very hilt in his heart.

  Blood gushed after the blade as Richard withdrew it, a red river flowing over his hands. Henry stared up as if in surprise. With his lips still moving he twitched, turned grey and was dead in seconds.

  ###

  “What’s wrong, man?”

  Raphael struggled out of sleep that held him like a quagmire. He couldn’t understand how he came to be in bed, or asleep. The walls of the chamber moved like spectral curtains.

  “Iesu’s blood, you look deathly,” said Francis. “You were writhing like a beetle on its back. Wake up, Raphael, tell me what the matter is.”

  “Terrible,” he whispered.

  “Has this happened to him before?” Francis said, and Raphael realised Will Shaw was there too, looking blearily over Francis’s shoulder.

  “Not as far I’ve noticed; but I sleep like the dead, anyway,” said Will. “What’s up, Raffel, a bad dream?”

  A dream, Raphael thought. “No, no, it was real, I was there…”

  Even as the denial came out, reality shifted, and he perceived the scene as a separate entity, real yet unreal, like a play. Too vivid for a dream… but what else could explain it? Vaguely, as if it happened a year ago, he could remember falling drunkenly into his bed. The scene itself had had no context. Yet it was so powerful he couldn’t shake himself free.

  “Where?” said Will. “You’ve not moved from that mattress, unless you walked in your sleep.”

  “It was terrible – so real – I dreamed they murdered poor Henry in the Tower.”

  Francis Lovell frowned. All mirth fled his face. “Who murdered him?”

  Raphael named them.

  Francis was silent for long moments, lacing and unlacing his fingers. Eventually he said in a cramped tone, “Poor Henry, may the Lamb acquit him, did die last night. I heard it myself, only this hour past.” Raphael realised that dawn was flushing the window, and that Francis was dressed. He added, “But he died of sickness; of melancholy.”

  “But I saw…”

  Lovell was shaking his head. He looked so aghast that Raphael feared he’d lost his friendship, almost before it began. “Never speak those names again in connection with murder. It didn’t happen. You had a nightmare.”

  “Were you there?” Raphael spoke sharply, sitting up.

  Another long silence. Francis swallowed.

  “No. It was a nightmare, Raphael! Your dream, not reality. Some foggy humour in the air must have afflicted your mind.”

  Raphael could feel the nauseous headache of too much drink. He was heavy with sleep, dazed by the apparent reality of what he’d seen, not only sights but smells too. The fall of light on Henry’s upper lip as he prayed, the feel of rushes under Raphael’s feet – he couldn’t shake it off. And yet, the clues were there. The clothes they wore and the way they spoke had been subtly wrong, in the way of dreams. And the very fact that Raphael had been there, an invisible witness to whom no one spoke, proved it could not have been real.

  “They say that foggy spirits gather around the dying, and enter the thoughts of sleepers,” Raphael murmured. “Yet it was so vivid, Francis! Are you sure–?”

  Lovell’s mouth was thin with annoyance. “How the devil could you even imagine that our Dickon would murder a king, a deposed king, in cold blood? He’d never do such a thing. Other of Edward’s hangers-on might contemplate such an unchivalrous, bloody deed, but not Richard!”

  “No,” said Raphael, ashamed of himself and trying to blink away the images. “No, he wouldn’t.”

  Will put his big fists on his hips. “I warned you to keep off the hippocras. I tell you, Lord Lovell, one pint of ale and he falls over. I never could toughen him up.”

  “Warned me?” Raphael gasped. “You were the one pouring it down my throat!”

  “For our Lady’s sake,” Lovell said softly, “I’ve seen some bad mornings after a night before, but this caps it all. Take more water with it next time, eh?”

  “It wasn’t the drink,” he said, sitting up, trying to pull himself out of the vision’s sticky web. Pain lurched about like a cannon ball in his skull. He groaned.

  “Whatever it was, it’s over,” Francis said gently. “Put it out of your mind. Don’t speak of this to anyone, whatever you do, or you’ll set them thinking you’re possessed. My lips are sealed.”

  ###

  The palace of Westminster was the antithesis of the Tower: an edifice of glowing creamy stone. Leaping animals surmounted the buttresses; pard, gryphon, bear, graylix. The planes of the roofs were tiled as if with butterfly scales, a dozen subtle tints of ruby and rose, cream, lilac, amethyst, leaf-green; the overall effect a glimmering rainbow. Gilded suns encircling silver roses studded the walls. Workmen were on scaffolding, painstakingly brushing silver leaf onto the mouldings.

  Here Raphael had his first taste of life at court, luscious as cream but tainted with rancidity, as Lovell had warned. Even so, it was unutterably exciting to be here, in a vast hall of polished pale gold marble, looking out at trestle upon trestle of fabulously garbed lords and ladies, bishops, knights and courtiers.

  It was hard to imagine that, only days ago, many of them had reeled bloody and fatigued from the battlefield of Tewkesbury. The air bristled with near-hysterical joy.

  A piercing blast of trumpets announced the entrance of the king and queen. Edward was magnificent in golden velvet slashed with blue. Over it, he wore a cloak of azure cloth-of-gold, sewn with silver suns, lined with white damask and edged with a wondrous golden-ochre fur, tipped with black. His slippers were fashioned from the iridescent skin of the horned toad.

  Queen Elizabeth was like an empress gliding beside him, her hand balanced imperiously on his. She threatened to eclipse her husband. From her towering yet gossamer-light headdress, swathes of silver tissue cascaded down her back with her hair. She was in leaf-green, the shimmering silky velvet scattered with pearls. The skirts were gathered back to frame a central panel, a window into a courtly myth. Salukis chased a hart across a field of green strewn with heraldic lilies. Raphael gaped at the illusion. By a shift of light he saw that the picture was embroidered from thousands of tiny beads, each bead a precious stone.

  Her face was flawless, with long green eyes. As her cool gaze slid over the scene, the court went down in a rippling motion of obeisance. The perfect eyes narrowed with pleasure.

  With loud laughter and many embraces, King Edward greeted dozens of finely dressed men and women, as fair as the queen and very nearly as beautiful.

  “Her brothers and sisters,” Francis Lovell was whispering in Raphael’s ear. “Anthony you’ve seen. That’s Edward Woodville, and the bishop there is Lionel. I always mix up the women, there are so many of them. Those two young bucks are her sons, Thomas and Richard Grey, from her first marriage. Edward adores the whole clan, so no one dares say anything against them.”

  “Edward loves everyone, apparently.” said Raphael.

  “And often people he really shouldn’t.” Lovell, taking a drink from a large goblet of Roman glass, raised an eyebrow at him.

  “I shouldn’t like to make enemies of them.”

  “Unfortunately, not everyone’s as wise as you.”

  Raphael followed his gaze to the Duke of Clarence, who was standing to one side of Edward’s dais and talking loudly to Gloucester, William Has
tings and a handful of others. Clarence was as fabulously dressed as the king, in white and gold, blatant in his efforts to outshine the Woodvilles. He looked edgy and full of bluster.

  “Clarence loathes the Woodvilles and hasn’t the wit to conceal it,” Francis whispered, carefully positioning the goblet to conceal his lips. “He was nearly as furious as Warwick when he found out Edward had married Dame Grey. Richard has the sense to keep quiet, but Clarence never had, then or now. The feeling is mutual. They say the queen tried to persuade Edward to execute him.”

  “For siding with Warwick?” said Raphael.

  “Quite. For plotting to dethrone her husband, not to mention the part he played in killing her father Sir Richard and her brother John during that episode.”

  “Then she has a point. I’m amazed Edward’s so forgiving.”

  “Not as amazed as she is; but that’s Edward. He loves his brothers. He knows Clarence is an idiot, and forgives him; but the queen and her family never will.”

  Servants were hurrying among the tables. Dish after spectacular dish was carried in to dazzle the gathering. Banners dripped from the high, gilded ceiling. Musicians played. Psalteries, reed pipes, drums and sweet human voices floated over the roar of the gathering.

  There was so much to look at that Raphael forgot to eat. The men wore slim-fitting trousers of fabric matching their doublets, laced all down the outer side to make the legs look long and lean, the effect completed by soft boots with long, pointed toes. The doublets were stiff with boning, the shoulders sculpted into swept-up shapes over full, slashed sleeves, fabric falling from the waist into curved points over the thighs. The women’s dresses had the same sculptural shoulders, long sleeves drooping almost to floor, boned and laced waists to give an exquisite shape. Their full skirts shimmered, inset with panels of beaded heraldry or mythic scenes; the queen herself had started this fashion, it was said. Their hennins were delicate cages draped with the finest voile, through which the full glory of their hair could be seen. Jewel colours were in abundance, encrusted with gold or misted with silver, and much black, popular because it was the most expensive and difficult dye of all.