Warwick stood up then, angry with himself for letting slip the snippet of information to the king, who sat with his mouth open. It had all been guesswork and supposition before, but now Edward knew there truly was unrest over his capture.
‘Set me free, Richard!’ he shouted, raising his clenched fists.
‘I cannot!’ Warwick snapped.
He left the room and as Edward surged to his feet, his path was blocked by the two soldiers, glaring and pressing hands against his chest. For a moment, Edward considered knocking them aside, though they carried iron thumpers to addle his brains if he tried – and there were other guards below.
‘I am the king!’ Edward bellowed, at such a volume that both his guards flinched. ‘Set me free!’
Warwick left him roaring as he reached the sunshine and mounted his horse to ride back to London, his face as grim as winter.
The heart of the Tower of London was its oldest part, a tower of white Caen stone that was higher than the outer walls, so gave a view of the city and the Thames running alongside. In the night, Elizabeth had climbed up through a tiny hatch, to emerge on a roof of ancient tiles, bird nests and lichen. From the first moment, her hair and clothes had been tugged by the wind as she looked over the dark city. The moon gave the barest of sheens to some of the houses and the river itself, but the only other light came from the torches of rioters, marching all night, for she had heard the tramp of their feet even in restless dreams. They roared for Neville blood and they hunted Neville men, that was the satisfaction and the terror of it.
She had known her husband was loved and held in awe, of course. Elizabeth had gained some inkling that England’s merchants and knights and noble lords had all shown joy in Edward winning through, banishing the scholar king to a cell and allowing his French wife to run home to her father. Even then, she had not appreciated the degree of their loyalty, the extent of their outrage at his capture.
The news had spread on the angry words of town gatherings, all shouting and smashing down the doors of official houses, looting the most valuable items and then setting fires to conceal their crimes. As each town or village heard, they sent runners to the next and the next, until there were great marches of ten thousand, bearing torches and billhooks. Orators and captains who had stood at Towton all called for Neville traitors to be hunted down.
Elizabeth’s lips pulled away from her teeth, though it was an expression of pain more than satisfaction. The wind filled her, making her feel light as the freezing air. The only bridge across the river was not far from the Tower. From where she stood, she could see a line of torches coming over it from Southwark, cheering, savage men coming back to their homes – and in the distance over the river, a dim glow against the darkness as some great house burned in its grounds.
Elizabeth had summoned loyal lords and called for vengeance, hot-eyed and empty of tears. The Nevilles had begun the fires and they would grow now to a conflagration that would consume them all. She panted in the wind, feeling its touch like cold hands pressing into her.
She had known from the beginning how deeply the Nevilles had eaten their way into the country, like worms in an apple. She had found more and more evidence wherever she looked. Her dear trusting husband had been blind to it all. It had been the merest sense to try to break their grip before they ruined him.
‘I was right,’ she whispered into the wind, taking comfort as the words were spoken and immediately lost in the air. ‘I saw it, but they were stronger than I knew, and more cruel.’
Her tears were blown back into her hair as the wind increased, moaning as if it suffered the same wrenching pain. Her father and her brother had been murdered by Nevilles. There would be no mercy for them after that. They had drawn a line in her family’s blood and she would not rest until they were smears of ash.
There were some who had called her a witch over the first years of her marriage, for how well she had snared her husband and the court. It was no more than the malice of womanly men and manly women. Yet in that gale, she wished it were true. In that moment, she would have given her immortal soul for the power to seek out her enemies and dash out their brains upon stone. Her father had not deserved his fate. She had brought him to court and it had cost him his life. She clenched her fists, feeling the nails dig in to her palms.
‘Let them all die now,’ she whispered. ‘Let the Nevilles suffer as I have suffered, as they deserve. If God and the saints will not answer me, O spirits of darkness, hear my words. Bring them down. Return my husband to me and let them all burn.’
31
They came after sunset, marching along empty country tracks in single file. They appeared in taverns to wash away the dust of miles on the road, making themselves known to those they trusted. When the night came, they tied cloth around their faces and they carried oil and dark lanterns, shuttered against the wind.
Sometimes the servants ran and were allowed to escape. Others chose to stay, to warn the household after years of loyalty. They were not spared then, the families or those who served them. Fire destroyed them all.
They called themselves ‘Burners’ and their dark business showed on their skin. They were always red-faced and stained with old soot, their inflamed eyes making them fearsome to look upon. They lit their torches and set the horses free to run, then burned the stables. When those inside rushed out, they found a ring of men with cudgels or billhooks, their faces covered against being recognized. They battered any man who came out, sometimes past healing with a broken pate. The burning went on then, building by building, barn by barn, until the whole countryside was lit by the red-gold flicker and the cold air was made into a warm breeze carrying the smell of char and destruction. By the time local farmers and the bailiffs came riding up, the fires had too much of a hold to be brought under control. Ancient manors were reduced to black timbers, burning for days and nights. Then, forty or eighty miles away, the Burners would appear again out of the night, standing in their ring with torches crackling.
There had been uprisings before, great and small, against cruel treatment, or for a hundred reasons. The people of England had always been slow to rouse, in part for fear of what they felt within them. They had endured cruelty and poverty in sullen anger, drinking hard and spending their resentment in bloody sports or boxing. They had suffered taxmen taking their coins, though Christ knew they were the lowest of all sinners. They had felt the lash of laws that left them swinging in the breeze – and those who had loved them had gone out to burn and murder in revenge. Some were always caught and hanged each generation, as a warning to anyone else who might think of grabbing the stick that struck them down. It was the normal, ancient way of things, and the deep countryside was far darker in some ways than city streets. There were villages that were places of silence and sin, with simmering rage amidst the cattle and the peace. Hard lives bred hard men and women, who could carry a torch or a blade when they saw the need. After all, they cut and killed and worked themselves to the bone just to live.
That year was different. The Burners came to places that had never known them before. They grew more cruel as well, as the months passed with King Edward still held by traitors. Manor houses went up in flames with the doors nailed shut by great spikes. The screams went unheeded. Castles of stone were set afire by their own servants, with noble families murdered by their retainers, loyal for a lifetime, until they were not.
There were exceptions, as villages older than Christ took advantage of the unrest to settle old scores. There were new bodies in every street and every village square, and some of them were just grudge killings or drunken murders, with the men of the law shivering in their homes, waiting for the hard knock. The rest, though, the greatest portion of the destruction, was all of one clan, one family – in particular, the holdings of one man. Neville herds were slaughtered. Warwickshire coal mines were set ablaze. Neville ships were burned at their moorings and the great houses of Richard Neville made ash and bitter char, with blackened bodies burned to t
he bones.
As the months wore on without news of King Edward’s release, the attacks and the burnings became ever more open. Men kicked in the doors of Warwickshire taverns and shouted questions. When the answers were not the right ones, they threw in pots of oil and lit torches, standing outside with pitchforks to keep them in. The Burners had their leaders, three separate, killing men, all known as Robin of Redesdale. Between them, they were the voice of the soldiers at Towton. They were the voice of the king in captivity, crying out on his behalf.
As the summer fled, the harvest was poorly taken, for fear of full barns attracting the Burners, and also because workers stayed away from the Neville estates to avoid being beaten on their way home. Crops rotted in the fields and entire herds were made to vanish or, worse, found with their throats cut. The coal mines could not be put out and smoked a funeral pyre into the air that could be seen right across the county and might burn until the end of time, the flames reaching deep into the bones of the land to seethe on, hidden.
Fauconberg pressed two hard fingers into his stomach, making himself grunt in pain. He sat in the kitchens of Middleham Castle, with all the staff dismissed so as not to view his humiliation. The chair Warwick had ordered brought down for him was padded and soft, but the elderly earl could not find a comfortable position.
‘It grows worse, Richard,’ he said, putting down a bowl that swam with swirls of milky vomit. ‘I hardly eat now – and when I do, it all comes back. I cannot believe I have much longer.’
Warwick leaned against a huge wooden table with legs thicker than his own. He tried not to show his shock at how much weight his uncle had lost. Fauconberg had never been a large man, but his bones were clearly visible in the dark planes of his face, and his legs and arms had grown frail-looking. Even his hair had thinned, so that it hung in wisps around his shoulders. Something was eating him from the inside and Warwick agreed with the assessment, though he would not say so.
‘And who will advise me when you are not here? Eh, Uncle? Come on, old man, I need you. It’s not as if I have shown such great wisdom or cunning in my choices recently.’
Fauconberg tried to chuckle, though the movement hurt him and made him gasp. Putting the bowl down with its noisome contents, he pressed his hand into his side again, finding some relief.
‘You will find a way through, Richard, for the family. God knows we have struggled past thorns before.’ Even in his pain, Fauconberg glanced at his nephew, wondering how to persuade him. ‘I suspect you know the best choice even now, if your pride would let you say it aloud.’
‘You’d counsel me to release Edward?’ Warwick asked glumly. ‘If I could go back and make a different decision, I tell you I would. I did not understand then what would happen when I put the king behind bars and oak.’ Warwick grimaced to himself in bitter memory. ‘You know, Uncle, he even said it to me. Edward, when I visited him. He said I had seen Henry captured and failed to understand that he was not loved, that he was a weak king. And he was right, though it burns me. I thought I could push them like pieces across the board. I never saw that the entire game could be kicked over if I touched the wrong king.’
Fauconberg did not respond. His own estates were north of the city of York and even he had suffered barn burnings and the murder of a local judge, far away from the cities and the riots. Each month had brought worse news and the fire still seemed to be spreading. He thought his nephew had only one choice, but Fauconberg knew he would not live to see it. His stomach held a hard ball of some ridged foulness, like a creature that lived off him. He had seen such things when livestock had been slaughtered in the past, brought to him as curiosities. Whatever it was, it had curdled his blood. His largest veins had grown dark with the thing’s poisons and he knew he would not survive it. All he could hope was that Warwick would keep the family safe. It was hard not to tell him what he had to do.
‘What were your true hopes, though, Richard? I was there while we planned it, but all the talk was of how we might get Edward into the north with only a few men, or of how you would go to France with his brother and your daughter. You were busy with the excitement of a thousand little details, but there was not so much talk of what came after that.’
‘There should have been more,’ Warwick admitted. ‘Yet I was so angry I thought only of showing Edward how badly he had treated his most loyal men. I still saw him as the boy I helped train in Calais. Not as a king, Uncle, not really. Of all men in the country, I was the only one who was blind to what he had become. I was the one who misunderstood.’
Fauconberg shrugged.
‘You were not alone. Your brothers thought the same, as I recall.’
‘We all saw the wilful boy, though I fought at his side at Towton. We saw the man, not the king. Either way, the decision was mine. I could have told John and George to endure and be still.’
‘John? There is so much anger in him, I think it would have spilled. He might have been hanged by now, or lost his head for some rash act.’
Warwick sighed, reaching for a jug of wine to pour two cups.
‘Can you hold wine down?’ he asked.
‘If you bring me my bowl, I will try,’ Fauconberg replied.
Hiding his disgust, Warwick emptied the vomit bowl into a slops bucket and wiped it out with a clean cloth before handing it over with a cup of claret. With a wry expression, Fauconberg raised it in toast to him.
‘May we see this only once,’ he said, and drank, smacking his lips. ‘And I think his wife’s family played their part in rousing the country. Some of our troubles were bought with her coin, Richard. Those damned “Burners”. I’d wager her purse jingles behind every barn or house in flames.’
‘I thought perhaps I would offer the throne to Clarence. I say this to you knowing you will take it to the grave, Uncle. Yet to do it, I would have to have Edward killed, not just held. I am not even sure I can hold him as a prisoner for much longer. There are too many calling for his release, and if he escaped …’ He broke off, imagining the great wolf, enraged and free. Warwick shuddered. ‘He is the king, Uncle. That is the strangest thing. I see it now and I am filled with fear for the mistake of capturing him. All I want is to find a way to put him back on his throne that will not mean the immediate destruction and attainder of every Neville house.’
‘That might have been a thought before John executed the queen’s father and brother,’ Fauconberg croaked.
His throat was pulsing and as Warwick watched, he held the bowl to his mouth and dribbled a stream of milky red into it. Warwick looked away rather than witness his discomfort. He waited until the sounds had come to an end and glanced over to see his uncle pale and wiping sweat from his face.
‘Not so very pleasant,’ Fauconberg whispered. ‘As I am dying anyway, perhaps I should take an axe to the king’s neck as my last act. You could blame the whole plot on me and recover some honour with Clarence.’
‘And see your name trampled in the mud?’ Warwick said. ‘No, Uncle. He told me I would hold back from murders and he was right. Killing him would call for another and a dozen after that. I will not go so deep into blood. No. Anyway, as things stand, we would not survive the fires lit for Edward’s death!’
‘There is no one else,’ Fauconberg replied, his voice strengthening. ‘Neither of the king’s brothers would trust the man who killed Edward! If you raise Clarence or Gloucester, you will be putting your own head on the block. No, you must make peace with the king. It is the only thing left.’
‘I have thought of it; did you think I would not? You have not been to see him, Uncle. He is insane with anger. Three months in a cell and he has broken through the door twice and killed one of the guards. I had to have the doors repaired while he stood and lunged at bare swords, just daring me to kill him. On other days, he sits and eats and calmly tells me what I should be doing in the realm. He is bored and angry and vengeful, and you would have me turn him out? I wish I could.’
‘If it were not for the Woodville dead,
I would say yes, you can release him. I have never known Edward break an oath, not once. He has a code, from his father or perhaps from you, I don’t know. You keep saying he is no longer the boy you knew, that he is a king. Well, trust in that! Have Edward sign an amnesty for all your crimes, a protection from the law and all retribution, sworn on his immortal soul, on the lives of his children, whatever you would ask!’
‘You think I can trust his word? Truly?’ Warwick asked, his desperation showing in the strain on his face.
‘I think if the rest of the world went up in flames, you would still be able to trust his word, yes.’
‘The rest of the world is going up in flames! What about John’s title?’ Warwick said.
Fauconberg shook his head.
‘I would not reach too far, Richard. It was Edward’s gift to take back. If you can see another way, I would be delighted to hear it, perhaps before my pain grows much greater.’
‘I am sorry, Uncle,’ Warwick said, slumping in defeat. ‘Very well. Edward is king. I will have him sign an amnesty and pardons. He is not the angry boy I knew, not any longer. I have to believe in his sworn oath. I don’t have any other choice at all.’
32
Richard Neville reined in at the massive gatehouse of Warwick Castle. He held a lance up over his head, with his banner of a bear and staff embroidered into the cloth that hung from it. A light drizzle dampened his spirits further, making him cold and weary. He was three days out from London, though it might as well have been another country. It was a miserable day in the middle of England and the place looked about as bleak and sullen as he had come to expect.
At least the Burners had not spread their whispers there. As the attacks had grown in number and savagery around the country, Warwick had ordered this most vital stronghold shut tight, going to shifts and siege orders. No one entered or left and there was no contact at all with the local population. Warwick had given clear commands to show crossbows to man or woman approaching the walls, with an order to fire on anyone who did not retreat.
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