The Rose of York (21 page)

At last the final banquet was over. With relief Richard retired to his cloistered room off the quiet courtyard, hoping for sleep, but the old dragon of his childhood nightmares kept him tossing fitfully. In the morning, as orange dawn streaked the sky, he embraced his sister on the wharf at Margate. “May God in His Heaven watch over you always, dear Dickon,” Meg whispered, tears sparkling in her eyes as she gently smoothed his hair.

He watched her board the ship that would carry her from England forever. She cast back one last, lingering look. Then she was gone. Horses whinnied as the royal retinue and the knights departed for the castle, laughing. The wharf grew quiet. He stood alone, watching her ship until it was a speck of black against the dawn. It took all his will to crush the sob in his throat. Around him the cry of the gulls rose to an unbearable crescendo in his ears and the salt smell of the sea assailed his nostrils, threatening to choke off his breath.

As soon as he returned to Westminster, he begged Edward’s permission to accompany Warwick to Middleham. He desperately needed to see Anne and to breathe the fresh air of Yorkshire.

~*~

Autumn came early, drenching the North in reds and golds, and the sun shone in Middleham more brightly than ever before in Richard’s memory. But on this first October morning, Richard thought its peculiar brilliance foreboded rain, noting that a cloud had appeared in the far distance, marring the perfect blueness of the skies. The larks didn’t seem to care, however, and sang with exceptional sweetness. The squirrels, too, were in a playful mood as they chased one another through meadows covered with purple heather. So were the hounds that bounded up the slope behind the castle, yapping as they followed. He hung his head, unsure if he were angry with himself, or with the Woodvilles—or with life. He was surrounded by beauty. He was with Anne. And he wasn’t happy.

“The realm is uneasy, Anne,” he said, picking up a stick and throwing it for the dogs to retrieve. “Holy Harry’s Welsh half-brother, Jasper Tudor, landed in Wales and burned Denbigh. He’s been driven out, but I fear it’s just the beginning. Now that Louis of France has been spurned, there’s nothing to stop him from aiding the Lancastrian cause and fomenting trouble in England.”

“And Marguerite d’Anjou?” Anne queried with a tremor. “Do you think she’ll return?” She smoothed her skirts and sat down in the heather. Richard joined her.

“There’s always the chance. Her son, Edouard, is only a year younger than I. Soon he’ll be of an age to rule. I fear he won’t sit quietly in France. They say he’s a beastly boy who thinks only of chopping off heads. I suppose it’s because his mother had him watch executions since he was a babe.”

Anne felt suddenly hot. Her stomach churned and the bitter taste of bile flooded her mouth. She leaned forward and retched.

“Anne, are you all right! Shall I send for wine…?”

Anne shook her head and swallowed back the nausea that had come so suddenly. To allay his fears, she said, “I’m fine, Richard—it was nothing. I was sick while you were gone, is all.” Her stomach was still clenched tight and her head pounded, but she forced a smile as she looked at him. And for the first time in her young life she noticed the finely etched lines, lines that had no place in a face so young. His eyes, too, were different: darker grey, and sadder than she remembered.

“There’s something else you must tell me, isn’t there, Richard? You’re going away again, aren’t you?”

He nodded dully. He’d been at Middleham only three weeks before the queen managed to stir up more trouble. Edward had summoned him back to London. Even if he hadn’t, Richard knew he had to leave. Warwick had made it clear that he was no longer welcome.

“Sir Thomas Cook has been charged with treason again and thrown back into prison. The queen’s father, Earl Rivers, ransacked his house, and the tapestry has disappeared. There’s to be a second trial for poor Cook. Edward wants me at his side.”

Anne didn’t know what to say. She only knew there was evil lurking in the world. Lurking, and reaching out for them. Richard’s expression was one of mute wretchedness, and there was no comfort to offer, nothing she could do at all.

~*~

From the window in the Keep, the Countess of Warwick watched Richard and Anne as they sat among the purple heather. She turned back to her visitor.

“My heart twists so when I look at him. He seems so wounded.”

While old Rufus kept careful watch, John Neville moved over to the window in time to see Richard gently place his arms around Anne’s shoulders. He reflected a moment before he spoke. “They are both wounded, my lady, but they have youth on their side and, pray God, time to heal each other.”

The Countess’s eyes fixed on him in surprise. “Why, my fair brother of Northumberland, I didn’t know you were a scholar of men.”

“Nay, lady, merely a simple soldier. I only know the battlefields of life.” Softly he added, “Sometimes ’tis on the ground we fight, and sometimes in the heart.”

The Countess looked sharply at his face. Misery and despair lay naked in his dark blue eyes. Her heart squeezed in anguish and she reached out and touched his hand. “Aye, John,” she said on a breath.

Together they turned their gaze from the young ones sitting among the heather, to the sky beyond where thunderous dark clouds hung on the horizon, immobile, waiting.

~ * * * ~

“…My knights are sworn to vows

Of utter faithfulness in love,

And utter obedience to the King.”

The year of 1469 began with sinister portents of disaster. A shower of blood stained grass in Bedfordshire, and elsewhere a horseman and men in arms were seen rushing through the air. In the county of Huntingdon, a certain woman who was with child and near the time of her delivery, to her horror felt the unborn in her womb weep and utter a sobbing noise. And in the early spring, England heard about the first trouble, a rising in Yorkshire led by someone calling himself Robin of Redesdale, citing as grievances heavy taxes, injustice in the courts and the rapacious Woodvilles whose greed and impudence, they said, outraged honest men. No sooner did John put this down than a second arose in East Riding, led by a Robin of Holderness who called for the restoration of Henry Percy as Earl of Northumberland. John crushed it promptly and executed its leaders.

“I’ve earned my earldom, Isobel, and been a good lord to them,” he told his countess. “Why should they call for Percy— what have the Percys ever done for them?”

From her window seat in her private solar at Alnwick, where she sat embroidering a green square of silk with John’s emblem
of the gold griffin, Isobel regarded her husband. In a fur-edged velvet tunic of her favourite emerald, his faithful hound curled up at his feet, John sat at an oak-carved table, writing a private missive to the King, which he didn’t wish to dictate to a clerk. Her heart ached for him. She knew that the executions troubled him, that what he was really asking was whether he’d been justified.

Aye, he didn’t deserve such ingratitude. Though he hadn’t the means of his brother Warwick, his kitchens never turned away a hungry mouth and his door was never closed to those in need of his help. He had in truth done many a noble deed. What Percy had ever sent firewood to the prisons or wine to the prisoners? What lord thought to do it in summer so men wouldn’t have to cart the heavy loads through the bitter chill of winter? Such kindness was a rare thing, but John cared so for everyone: his soldiers, his servants, his family. His King.

She stretched out her hand and he came to her. She lifted her eyes to his handsome face.
Dear God, so much change
. His decision to support the King against his brothers came to him at fearsome cost. No longer did he sleep at night, or have heart for amusement. How different was this careworn face from the glorious countenance she had first fallen in love with! Grey dusted the tawny hair at the temples and deep furrows marred the once-smooth brow. From the nostrils of the fine straight nose, two lines ran down to the generous mouth, now grim-set and drooping at the corners, and a fresh scar cut through the left eyebrow over the deep blue eyes which had lost their twinkling light. She thought of the happy, dauntless youth he had been when she’d first met him, and her heart squeezed with anguish.

“Do not fault yourself, my dear lord. Robin of Holderness had no right to call for Percy’s reinstatement… And Robin of Redesdale? Is he also against you?”

John turned. With a gesture of the hand he dismissed the servants. The minstrel hushed his harp in the corner of the room and rose from his stool. Isobel’s tiring-woman, who had been moving quietly about her duties emptying chests and hanging clothes in the garderobe, set a hand basin of perfumed water down on a bedside table and withdrew.

John’s eyes took on a pained expression as he met Isobel’s questioning gaze. “I fear Robin of Redesdale is none other than our cousin, William Conyers.”

Isobel gave a sharp gasp. With a rustle of silk, she rose from her place at the window. “Oh, my dear lord…” So the nightmare had already begun. So soon! She took his sun-bronzed hand into her own. Such a strong, fine hand. She pressed kisses to the long fingers.

John wrapped his arms around her and looked down at the full red mouth, straight little nose and honey-coloured eyes, luminous below their thick black lashes. In spite of his troubles, warmth flooded him. Thirteen years they’d been married and time had only ripened her beauty. She moved a little in his arms and he caught the flowery scent of her body. He pulled her tightly to him, marvelling that his passion for her was still unspent. Resting his cheek against her fragrant chestnut hair, he watched swans glide on the River Aln and sheep graze on the placid hills.

“Sunshine is always brighter when I’m with you, and birdsong sweeter, Isobel. You make me forget what the world is really like.” It was the truth. At this moment, the stench of bloody battlefields and rotting human flesh, the shrieks of the wounded and the cawing of vultures, had surrendered their reality, along with the gales and the fogs, and the sighs of cold, weary men trudging over frozen earth.

Isobel snuggled closer in the warmth of his embrace. “And I, my beloved lord, feel the same now as when I first fell in love with you… I still remember the frightful days when you were taken prisoner by the Percys at Blore Heath and I thought I might lose you… Never would I relive them for all the earldoms in England.” She pulled away and looked up at his face. “To think it was all so needless! You were taken prisoner after a battle you’d won only because you recklessly pursued the Cheshiremen into their own territory.” She smiled at the image of John that came into her mind: a dashing Neville chasing a hated Percy with all the wild abandon of youth. “What were you thinking, my love?”

John grinned suddenly. “I wasn’t thinking. That was the problem.”

How good it felt to see him smile again; how long it had been since she’d seen those dimples she so loved! Isobel watched John’s eyes go back to the window, the smile fixed on his lips. She turned in the circle of his arms and followed his gaze to the walled garden below, where their three-year-old son had suddenly appeared, romping and screeching with delight as his sisters made a game of chasing him around the hedges. After five daughters, God had granted them a son; George had been born on the feast of St. Peter’s Chair, the twenty-second of February, nine months after John had won his earldom. She blushed, remembering that night in York. John had galloped back to their Abbey lodgings after the ceremony and, wild with happiness, they’d made love in the fierce heat of passion, known an ecstasy that can come but once.

“You’ve given me everything that’s beautiful,” Isobel whispered, her eyes returning to the children in the garden below. “Everything I cherish on this earth.”

John tightened his hold around her waist. “One day our son will inherit my earldom. I’m thankful I have that to leave him.”

Aye
, Isobel thought,
the earldom with its annual income of a thousand pounds would greatly ease George’s path
. Had his proposed marriage to the daughter of the Duchess of Exeter not been snatched away by the Woodville queen for her son, little George would one day have been one of the richest magnates in the land. She banished the thought. They still had many blessings. At least George would not have to take out debts in order to last the year, as they’d been obliged to do. And worse— far worse—carve his livelihood through bloody battlefields, like his father. John had sacrificed much for the earldom. He’d devoted his life to the King’s business. Whether it was fighting battles or negotiating truces, the earldom of Northumberland had been hard earned. No one had a right to take it away.

“You are a good lord and the King’s truest subject. Edward knows that, John, how can he not? As for me, I am the most fortunate of women to call you husband.”

“And I, my lady, am the most fortunate of men to have an angel as my lady wife.” A beautiful smile played on her lips, the same smile she’d worn the first time he’d seen her. How strange that he should remember it so vividly after all these years. He could still smell the air, feel the breeze on his cheek, see the Lincolnshire hills and sharp outlines of Lord Cromwell’s castle…