Within the Hollow Crown (42 page)

   "Oh, much as he deserved," answered Richard lightly. But he started more than a guiltless man should when Ralph Standish happened to appear at that moment at his elbow.

   "Well, what is it?" he asked sharply.

   "Your Grace's Councillors—Bushey, Baggot and Green, sir. They've ridden from London. It's urgent, sir, or I wouldn't intrude."

   Richard was not sorry for Isabel's sake that their adieux should be cut short. "You see, my little one, how they plague me even when I am by my own fireside with you!" he complained jestingly. He kissed her good night, bade her maids put her to bed, and promised to come again soon.

   Standish loitered a little in opening the door for him. "It is bad news, I fear," he warned.

   Richard laid a friendly hand on his shoulder. The hours spent with Isabel had lowered the guard of his loneliness. "What else has life trained me to expect, Ralph?" he countered.

   So often he had been called from happiness to sudden deputations such as this. But instead of the three distinctive Plantagenet uncles who had awaited him in the past, he now found three respectful, ineffective knights.

   "Well, my friends?" he asked, disliking their nondescript faces.

   "Roger Mortimer, Earl of March—" began Bushey.

   "Your heir, sir—" added Baggot, trying to underline his colleague's preface with unnecessary information.

   "Well?" snapped Richard a second time, supposing that another worrying letter had arrived.

   "He has been ambushed by the Irish, and killed," concluded Green.

Jehan Froissart came to England just as the whole nation was

clamouring for reprisals against Ireland, and for once in his life Richard was too busy to show suitable hospitality and appreciation of the arts. He had been obliged to receive the celebrated French chronicler hurriedly, having his beautifully bound gift of love poems carried to his bedroom that he might scan it before sleeping, and then turning his guest over to the care of a kindly old knight while he himself prepared to lead the expedition to Ireland. There had been no chance to enjoy long, leisurely talks with one of the best informed men of the day, nor to glean some of those revealing little stories about his parents' youth which do not enliven official recordings. He would always regret that Froissart could not have come a few years earlier and seen England in the heyday of her peaceful culture which was his achievement—and above all that he should not have seen Anne!

   And now, just as everybody was busy with levies and shipping and victualling, Geoffrey Chaucer must needs be affected by the same spring urge, and choose this moment to send his latest crop of verses to his royal patron! The best thing to do, Richard supposed, would be to put the two men of letters together while he got on with the war.

   "Read the new poem aloud while I look through this armour," he bade Medford, loath as he was to forgo the first joyful impact of Chaucer's golden words.

   He went on indicating to a brace of squires which pieces of personal equipment he would take. But after a minute or two it dawned upon his absorption that nobody was reading anything. And, glancing up, he noticed that his secretary was staring at the unrolled parchment, looking very red about the tonsure and very white about the gills.

   "What has struck you so dumb, Medford?" he demanded, pausing with a pair of spurs in one hand and a jupon bedizened with leopards dangling from the other.

   "It's—it's not the sort of verse Master Chaucer usually writes," stammered the embarrassed bishop, whose Court life had accustomed him to flattery rather than frankness.

   Richard looked round the crowded room with irritation. York, who was sitting near him, was lamentably wheezy; and his son, young Edward of Aumerle, read verse with about as much expression as if he were crying the curfew. "Here, give the thing to me," he said, bundling spurs and jupon into the arms of his new French squire, Creton, who had come back with him from St. Omer.

   Richard took the verses to the window, beginning to scan them over as he mounted the shallow steps. Brief and pointful as they were, he found the subject matter scarcely credible. Forgetful of the roomful of people watching him, he read them over twice. And as he read his face flamed with anger—and with the tardy shame which the author must have meant to stir in him. Having yielded to temptation and seized John of Gaunt's estates instead of handing them over to Henry, he had tried to stifle his conscience with plausible excuses and think no more about it. And here was a mere vintner's son daring to criticize!

   Reading such blunt reproof from so unexpected a quarter, Richard felt much as he had done years ago on receiving a wellearned thwack from the quintain.

   No wonder Chaucer hadn't waited upon him in person! From what source had he drawn courage to write the impertinent stuff at all? Recalling his other poems written on happier themes, one could not but realize how deeply they were imbued with the very essence of England. Had he not braved exotic ideas of culture by making a medium of his own tongue? Richard had the grace to be glad that there would always be Englishmen to take up pen or sword, not only against danger from abroad, but against tyranny at home. And that it would always be the gentle, law-abiding citizens who would be the first to fight.

   But that touched his conscience all the more. For he himself had been that kind of man. He crumpled the parchment in his hand and let it fall to the floor. Chaucer was only putting into telling words what a lot of shrewd Londoners said of him. Yet what did they know, any of them, about the difficulties that beset a king?

   "Desire to be honourable…" How could one deal honourably with men like Gloucester? Or lead an expedition to Ireland without money? And mightn't his pledged word have applied only to Henry's Hereford and Derby estates, which were all he had at the time of exile? It was all very well for shopkeepers with no knowledge of statecraft to condemn him as if he had robbed their idol of his money like a common thief; but it was more a question of power. How could a sovereign rule England while a third of it belonged to someone else? Lancaster had had the power, but had used it to feed his ambition in Spain. With Henry there was no knowing. One remembered only which side he had been on at Radcot Bridge…

   And then again—"hate extorcion." That would be a dig at fines levied on counties for half-forgotten risings, and for the promises of blank loans he had forced his wealthier subjects to sign. Of course, it had all looked very high-handed. But he had no intention of making his people pay up, any more than he had insisted upon the sheriffs reporting their grumbles. Couldn't the fools see that? When had he ever been ungenerous, or ground down his subjects? It was only that he wanted to hold the whole land in leash—particularly now that he was going away. So that as long as he lived there should be but one ruler—a benevolent one who saw to it that they had peace and prosperity—instead of a hydra-headed growth of self-seekers who would waste their substance in violence.

   Back and forth swayed Richard's thoughts, like the good and the bad wrestling within him. In spite of all his plausible reasoning, he knew that he had been behaving outrageously. The ill-controlled forces of his baser self had been gathering momentum with the mounting sum of his misfortunes. A man needs love and laughter to keep him sane. And he had only to love a thing, it seemed, to have it taken from him.

   Even the love of his people was rapidly turning into fear. Well, let them whine like whipped dogs, fearing and mistrusting him, if they wanted to! Hadn't he himself been bludgeoned into subjection as a boy? There were times when all that was bad in him took a savage delight in being feared.

   But fear makes men do strange things. And it was this unrest against which Chaucer was presuming to warn him. "Wed thy folk again to stedfastnesse," he had implored, evidently torn between anxiety for him and for England. Presumably, the man man knew himself safe from royal displeasure because the same pen had written such lovely things about Anne. Perhaps he was saying things now, in the only way he knew,
for
Anne. If Anne were here she, too, would say "Love truth and worthiness, dear Richard." And perhaps one wasn't being too truthful, even with oneself…But then, of course, if Anne were here everything would be different.

   Richard stooped to pick up the crumpled ball of parchment, absently smoothing it out as he came down slowly from the window seat. Not one of the men in the room so busily engaged in preparations for battle had any idea that a spiritual skirmish, far more important to their future, had already been fought silently in their midst—and partially lost.

   "What a mercy the King signed a long-term peace with France before all this trouble started in Ireland!" the Duke of York was saying to nobody in particular. Poor York! Trying, as ever, to gloss over some passionate complexity in a nephew he couldn't even begin to understand.

   "So people are just beginning to realize it!" remarked Richard caustically, coming to join him.

   "Now you've to go and avenge Roger they must be thankful you're not leaving our shores open to a threat of invasion," minced Edward of Aumerle.

   But fear of a very different kind of invasion lurked at the back of Richard's mind. Charles of Valois was sound enough, with his daughter Queen of England. But the whole coast lay open to Henry. And Henry was a potential danger now, with only Roger's youngster balking his way to the succession. Probably the Yorks were too stupid to think of that. Or were they? Richard's gaze dwelt appraisingly on his cousin, while he himself did some quick thinking. He wasn't yearning for Edward's company in Ireland, but there was plenty of mischief a conceited young scion of the family might get up to in England…

   "I shall want you to act as Regent for me while I'm gone," he told his uncle. "I will see to it officially tomorrow."

   York rose formally. "I will do my best, Richard, since you so honour me. But I am getting to be an old man—"

   "And never amounted to much anyway!" thought Richard. But there was no one else of sufficient standing whom he could trust, except perhaps the able Bishop of Carlisle. And one couldn't very well pass over an uncle. He turned with intentional abruptness to Aumerle. "You, Edward, will come with me," he ordered.

   Aumerle's effeminate features flustered with confusion, and in that moment Richard was sure that his command had clashed inconveniently with some previous plan. Though probably the foppish sycophant wouldn't be much of an asset to any party. Replicas of trusty leaders like Knollys and Stafford weren't two a groat nowadays.

   "And Bolingbroke's young son, Harry, can come along too," he added, looking with disconcerting directness into Aumerle's startled eyes. "It'll be useful experience for his future wars with France, if his father should ever succeed me."

   "My dear Richard!" protested Edmund of York. "Everyone says he is a promising, upstanding boy—but surely too young to fight!"

   To his uncle's annoyance Richard burst out laughing. "Funny, how familiar that sounds! Burley used to say those very words, surely? When you and the other uncles were trying to hound him into sending me on some campaign before I could couch a lance. And do you remember how shocked your bloodthirsty brother Thomas was because the Black Prince's son had never even seen a man killed? Well, he's seen plenty now! The trouble is that so few of the decent ones are left alive." Richard broke off in mid-tirade. Now that he was a widower, laughter so often degenerated into bitterness. "Oh, don't worry," he soothed, seeing that York's affronted face had taken on a yet more florid hue. "There will be no need for young Harry to fight. He may come in quite useful in other ways."

   Aumerle said nothing. He knew well enough that Richard wanted Henry's son as a hostage. Richard was so damnably clever like that. You thought you'd got him in check, and he was always a move ahead of you. Life seemed to have taught him more expediency in thirty-three years than most greybeards assimilate in a lifetime. "This expedition is going to cost coffers of money," he grumbled, picking up a long list of levies.

   "Yes," agreed Richard, returning briskly to the work in hand. "And without the Lancaster estates we couldn't restore law and order in Ireland at all."

   York had been too profoundly shocked by their seizure to discuss the matter. "If you were to call a Parliament I am sure they wouldn't be unreasonable about a grant," he suggested, without much conviction.

   But to reassemble Parliament was to hand over the power when Richard wanted it most. Better to gamble with the pieces one held and get this necessary Irish business over and done with, and return to England as soon as possible. "There isn't time, Uncle. When I come back," he evaded, making a note to send for Henry's son before Edward could spirit him away.

   Later in the day, when York and Aumerle had gone back to Langley, Richard had the royal coffers opened. Something furtive in his cousin's manner had made him decide to take all his plate and money with him. And—more important still, perhaps—the crown. Holding the hollow, shining thing in his hands, he thought back upon the long train of his ancestors who had worn it, and wondered who would wear it next. "If one of my cousins had to be murdered, why couldn't it have been Henry Bolingbroke and not Roger Mortimer?" he wondered, for the hundredth time.