He was strong-willed, her son. Let others whisper of the boy’s lack of discipline; she didn’t care. The fools, they didn’t understand. How could they?
She was thirty-one years old, and never in her life had she met a more patient, pious soul than the man asleep in the adjoining bedchamber. Even in his worst fits of madness, her husband still clung to remembered vestiges of bygone courtesies. Nothing disturbed him more than what he felt to be unseemly displays of lewdness or public nudity; and yet, when once he’d been mortally offended by the scanty costumes of a troupe of dancers performing at their Christmas court, he fled the scene himself rather than order the women from his presence. That was many years ago, but Marguerite had not forgotten.
Another memory came to her now, one far more recent but no more pleasant to recall. Upon their triumphant return to York, the citizenry had turned out again in heartening welcome. A welcome that had been marred for Marguerite by her husband’s bizarre behavior at Micklegate Bar. He’d taken great pains not to glance up, kept his eyes averted from the sight of the Yorkist heads high above him, and in his haste to enter through the gate barbican, he’d dropped first his reins and then his hat.
There’d been some snickering among the spectators at that, and Marguerite had burned with the familiar frustration, the impotent anger that always seemed to accompany her husband’s public appearances. Henri was, after all, an anointed King; to mock him was to mock God. But in her seventeen years in England, she’d come to expect little better from the English. They were not her people, would never be her people. But they were her subjects, hers and Henri’s, and she’d never yield them up to that wretched boy, that swaggering youth who dared now to proclaim himself as His Sovereign Grace, King Edward, fourth of that name since the Conquest.
She reached down, smoothed the coverlets over her son. There was a scattering of crumbs about his mouth, and she smiled at the sight, knowing that if she touched him, her fingers would find his cheek sticky with the marzipan he’d insisted upon taking to bed with him. He knew what he wanted, did her Édouard, and even at seven years of age, he understood, as Henri never had, that he must reach out for what he did want. Nothing came to the weak. Not in this world. Let others be content to wait for the rewards of the Hereafter. She was not one of them. And by the grace of God and her own resolve, Édouard would not be one either.
In the bedchamber yielded up to them by Abbot Cottingham, her husband slept. She could hear the gentle, rhythmic snore. As if there were not a battle taking place just twelve miles to the south of York, a battle that meant all.
Just three months since Sandal Castle. How had York managed to turn fortune’s wheel in so brief a time? The day she’d reined in her mare before Micklegate Bar, she’d truly believed that she had, in Clifford’s words, won her war. Yet not two months later, Edward of York had contrived to have the crown offered to him by a rebellious London mob and a handful of disloyal nobles, and he was now challenging her army at Towton in what Somerset had called the final throw of the dice. It was not a phrase Marguerite relished; she had never liked to gamble.
She knew now that she’d blundered in yielding London so easily to Edward of York. Her face grew warm every time she thought of the tumultuous welcome he’d been given, for all the world as if he’d just liberated Jerusalem from the infidels. Trust Londoners to confuse the entry into London of a nineteen-year-old rakehell with the Second Coming of the Lord Christ. London canaille! There were times when she thought all her troubles with her English subjects were London-bred.
It was said more than four thousand people gathered in the cold of St John’s Field that Sunday. Warwick’s glib-tongued brother, the Bishop of Exeter, had incited the crowd with the ease of an accomplished orator; he’d soon had them screaming assent that Lancaster had broken the Act of Accord by the violence done at Sandal Castle, that no man had a better right to the crown than Edward of York, England’s true King and the man who’d delivered London from the perils of fire and sword. Marguerite marveled that he’d overlooked flood and famine, wondered cynically how many Warwick retainers had been strategically positioned throughout the crowd to stoke audience enthusiasm.
Two days later, Warwick led a delegation of nobles and clergy to Baynard’s Castle to formally entreat Edward of York to accept the crown of England. Within hours, he was being acclaimed in Westminster Hall, where not five months before, his father had stood and advanced a like claim, to embarrassing silence.
And that was the dangerous difference between them, Marguerite thought grimly. The reason why the son was proving to be a greater threat than ever the father had. The Duke of York had not been a man to strike passion in his followers, to evoke any emotion more intense than admiration. However upright his nature, or perhaps because of it, he had not the force of personality to captivate a city as his son Edward had captivated London.
How ironic it was that the very factor she’d weighed so heavily against Edward should have been turned by him to such telling advantage…his youth. She’d seen him, at first, as an appendage of Warwick’s body, an arm to be lopped off before it could strike a lucky blow; sure that, if Warwick fell, so, too, would Edward, no more able to survive independently of Warwick than the arm could exist without the body.
Yet the victory at Mortimer’s Cross had gone to Edward, not to Warwick. Theirs was an age in which all men of their class studied the arts of war from early boyhood; it was to be expected that some men would prove to be more apt pupils than others. It was her accursed ill luck that Edward of York had now shown himself to be such a man, one with a natural affinity for command and the ways of war.
But what disturbed Marguerite the most about the young Yorkist Duke now calling himself King was that he was seducer as well as soldier. He’d won London with his smile as much as with his sword…as his father could never have done.
Somerset conceded that Edward would be a dangerous foe to face across a battlefield. But he remained convinced that in political matters, Edward was Warwick’s cat’s-paw, and content to be so, the pleasure-seeking puppet of his power-seeking cousin. As he reminded Marguerite more than once, Warwick himself had few peers in the game of crowd seduction. The Nevilles were all infuriatingly adroit at playing upon the emotions of the simple and the trusting, and this Edward of York was half Neville, after all. Why, then, should Madame be surprised that he now showed himself to be as skilled as they in the dubious maneuvers of rabble-rousing?
Recollection of Somerset’s scorn brought a smile to Marguerite’s mouth; it hovered but did not linger. She was trying to remember the last time she’d met Edward of York, face-to-face. It was, she decided, upon that notorious farce called the “Love-Day” three years ago, when at the urging of Henri and the Commons, the Yorkists and Lancastrians had gathered to hear a solemn Mass of reconciliation at St Paul’s. Edward had then been…she calculated rapidly…sixteen, already taller than most men grown and very conscious of his own charm. A handsome boy.
Marguerite bit her lip, chewed away the last of her ocher lip rouge. Yes, put him astride a white stallion, in plate armor that shone like polished pier glass and the far more potent armor of youth and health, and she could well understand how he must have dazzled the London multitudes. They were accustomed, after all, to her Henri.
Henri, who insisted upon wearing shapeless long gowns, eschewed the fashionable pointed-toe shoes, wore his hair clipped short like a peasant. What a bitter jest of God, she thought, that the only time in his life when Henri looked like a King had been during those terrifying months, eighteen in all, when he’d lapsed into a trance like one bewitched, unable to speak or feed himself, and therefore, unable, too, to select his own clothing!
Henri, who was so poor a horseman he must be provided with mild-tempered geldings and never seemed to feel the humiliation in having such unmanly mounts. Henri, who wore hair shirts and forbade profanity in his hearing and once had ridden all the way from the Tower to Westminster with an empty scabbard at his hip becau
se he’d forgotten his sword and none of his attendants had thought to remind him of it.
It had not happened again; Marguerite had seen to that. But she could not blot from mind or memory the laughter of the London rabble, the sly innuendoes of the Yorkist sympathizers—and Jesú did know there were plenty such in London—the jests that she knew to be swapped in alehouse and tavern about the King’s lack of a sword and whether he did feel the lack most on the battlefield or in the bedchamber.
But there was no need to dwell upon Henri’s failings. Somerset had more than forty thousand men under his command; numerical superiority lay decidedly with Lancaster. Somerset also had seasoned battle captains in Clifford, Northumberland, and Trollope. By this time tomorrow, there’d be new Yorkist heads for Micklegate Bar…and one of the first would be John Neville, she vowed silently.
Warwick’s brother was being held within York Castle, where he’d been incarcerated since their arrival in York. That Neville still lived, that he had not gone to the block immediately upon his capture at St Albans last month was due entirely to Somerset and the misfortunes of Somerset’s younger brother. Edmund Beaufort had recently fallen into Yorkist hands at Calais, a city that had always been staunchly Neville in its loyalties. Somerset feared, quite understandably, that if he executed John Neville, his own brother Edmund would then be the one to feel the edge of Neville vengeance. Marguerite had reluctantly agreed with him. The common sense of it could hardly be denied; moreover, she was rather fond of Edmund Beaufort. So John Neville still lived, but she promised herself that once Warwick’s power was broken, the reprieve would come to the most abrupt end possible.
No, she had reason and more for optimism. She had what must surely be the largest army ever gathered in England. She’d made Edward and Warwick come to her, to fight in territory traditionally hostile to the House of York. She had faith in Somerset, in Clifford, and Northumberland. Only…only why had she not heard by now? The battle was expected to have been joined at dawn and it was now well past dark. The battle should have been over hours ago. Why had she not heard?
Marguerite did not even try to sleep. She sat, instead, with a Book of Hours open on her lap, not registering any of the prayers engraved upon the page she was turning with fingers increasingly and infuriatingly clumsy, unable to perform the most simple of tasks. After splashing hot wax upon her hand and wine upon the sleeve of her gown, she swore, first in French and then in English, and calling for her cloak, escaped the Abbot’s lodging, out into the abbey garth.
The snow had stopped at last, but all about her was evidence of a storm of unseasonal savagery, even for Yorkshire; it was, after all, Palm Sunday, with April but two days hence. An eerie stillness enveloped the monastery, intensified by the heavy drifts of snow that lay between her and the distant gatehouse. She could barely discern the shape of the abbey walls. Although St Mary’s was not within the city walls, she had no qualms for her safety, for the monastery walls were no less formidable, securely sealing off the religious community from the rest of the world. Jésus et Marie, how dark it was! Almost, she could believe herself alone in the world, a world suddenly bereft of all other people. No sounds of life. No light. No movement beyond the ghostly swirling of the shadows, which had always harbored a multitude of demons for a fanciful child. Until she’d learned that demons were to be confronted.
To her left lay the great abbey church and some yards beyond, the gatehouse, made invisible by dark and distance. It was the only entrance into the abbey grounds, and she briefly considered waiting there to intercept Somerset’s messenger. But to reach it, she’d have to struggle through knee-deep snow. And it was bitterly cold; patches of ice glinted ominously where the light of her torch struck. By morning, a thick crust of ice would have glazed over all open ground within the monastery, would have transformed it into a glacial hell for the sandal-shod monks.
And what sights would morning bring to the fields beyond the village of Towton? Bodies upon bodies, in the rigid ungainly sprawl of death, limbs twisted grotesquely in postures no living man could emulate, blood frozen solid beneath layers of discolored dark ice, to soak the ground with a ghastly flow of gore at the first thaw. Marguerite knew what she could expect to find; she’d seen battlefields before. But whose bodies? Whose blood?
She saw that some of the monks had been busy with salt and shovel; a narrow path beckoned through the drifts. Perhaps if she went up into Marygate Tower, she might be able to keep watch.
She was in sight of the abbey walls bordering onto Bootham when she first heard the shout. Stopping so precipitously that she had to grab her servant for support, she listened. The shout came again, seemed to come from the north…from the gatehouse.
Marguerite’s heart skipped, took up an uneven rapid rhythm. Panting, cursing herself for attempting this fool’s trek into the dark, she hastened to retrace her steps. At last her eyes caught movement, flickering light. Figures were emerging from the Abbot’s lodging.
“Signal with your torch,” she told her servant. “Yes…they see us now.”
As they came nearer, she recognized the Abbot. He held a lantern aloft, and had the look of one bringing word of sudden death to unsuspecting kin.
“Madame,” he said.
Marguerite stared past him, at the soldier. At the bloody brigandine, leather ripped away to show metal plate beneath. At the Portcullis badge worn on his breast, the Beaufort cognizance. At the blood-caked welt that gaped open and ugly from temple to cheekbone. At the left eye, swollen to the merest of slits, surrounded by puffy discolored tissue that contrasted queasily with the rest of his face, made raw by windburn and the first thawing of frostbite. His uninjured eye was what held her, however, was an uncommonly vivid shade of green, was utterly out of place in so young a face.
“Your Grace…”he began, and seemed about to kneel before her. Instead, he slid to the snow at her feet.
It was Marguerite who now knelt, grasping his hand between her own. “Tell me,” she said harshly. “Hold nothing back.”
“All is lost. The victory has gone to York.”
It was what she’d known he would say. And yet the impact was no less brutal. She gasped, drew icy air into lungs suddenly constricted, unable to function, and cried, “How? We had the greater army…. How?”
She was as skilled a strategist as any man, knew how to wage war as other women knew how to manage households. She knew battles were not decided by numbers alone. Yet now she found herself repeating numbly, “How could we lose? Ours was the larger force!”
“That did favor us at first, Madame. In the early stages of the battle, the Yorkists did give ground…. But York was all over the field, in the thick of the fighting and he held them, Madame. All day we fought, hacked at each other like madmen, and the dead…Oh, my God, Madame, the dead! So many bodies there were that we had to climb over our own dead to reach the Yorkists…only to find they, too, were walled in by the bodies of the dead and dying. Never have I seen—”
“What of Somerset? Does he still live?”
He seemed unnerved by her interruption. “Yes,” he said doubtfully. “That is, I do believe so, Madame. We were able to escape the field at the last, when we saw all hope had gone…when the Yorkist reserves did suddenly appear upon our right flank. The Duke of Norfolk it was, Madame; I saw his standard. We did fight on, but the battle was lost with his arrival, all did know it. We were pushed back toward the Cocke, into the marsh…and then our line broke, then the slaughter truly began!” He shuddered, not from cold, and then said bleakly, “My lord Somerset did charge me to give you word of our defeat, to warn you away from here. My lord Somerset said…said you must flee into Scotland, Madame. He said you must not let yourself or the King fall into the hands of the Yorkist usurper.”
“What of the other lords? Northumberland? Trollope? Exeter and Clifford? Surely they cannot all be dead!”
“We did hear the Earl of Northumberland was struck down in the fighting. Trollope, I do know to be dead. I kno
w nothing of Exeter. It was a slaughter, Madame. Thousands must be dead…. We did give the command before the battle that no quarter be shown and York was said to have done the same. For ten hours, Madame, the battle did last…ten hours! With the wind coming from the south and blowing the snow back into our faces till men found their eyes sealed shut with ice and our arrows were falling short and they gathered them up and used them against us…and the river…Oh, Jesus, the river! So many men drowned that a bridge of bodies formed for the living and it ran red for miles, like no water I’ve ever seen….”
He was losing himself in his recital of horrors, reliving it in the retelling, and Marguerite dug her nails sharply into the palm of his hand to staunch the flow of words.
“Enough!” she cried fiercely. “There’s no time! Not now! What of Clifford? Is he dead, too?”
“Clifford?” The green eye widened; so close she was to him that she actually saw the pupil contract. “Jesú, Madame, do you not know? Clifford died yesterday noon, at the Ferrybridge crossing for the River Aire some nine or ten miles below Towton.”
Marguerite made a small sound. If Somerset was her rock, Clifford had been her sword. “How?” she said, so stiffly that she was forced to repeat herself.
“The Yorkists sent out a party to repair the Ferrybridge crossing, for we’d burned the bridge behind us. Lord Clifford knew they’d try to mend the bridge; he did take them by surprise and many died. Warwick himself was there, Madame. But Edward of York had sent a second party to ford the river further upstream. They crossed at Castleford and we knew it not until they hit hard at Lord Clifford’s right flank. In the retreat that followed, most of his men were killed; I think but three did escape. Clifford fell prey to a freak arrow shot. It somehow did pierce his gorget, lodged in his throat.
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