And now, because Harry’s dark moods had to be endured else the entire household would feel the brunt, Miles patiently leaned his chin upon his ringed hand and waited. It was a small satisfaction that the duke’s confidences lent him power. But he had no wish to abuse Harry’s friendship, nor was he himself easily manipulated to exploit it. There were just a few in the household who could understand the bitterness that, from time to time, rose up in the duke like a poisoned, flooded well. The Duke of Buckingham’s hatred of Elizabeth Woodville was like a constant open sore. The rift with the queen had begun when Harry, at ten years old, had openly declared his boyish fury at being made to wed not just a girl, but worse – the queen’s eight-year-old sister. The queen and her brothers had never forgiven him.
‘I have more royal blood in my little finger than the plaguey Woodvilles can muster in the whole of their ancestry,’ grumbled his grace, ‘but I will wager Lord Rivers and the queen’s other brothers were invited to Westminster to keep Christmas with the king.’
Miles refilled the duke’s goblet. ‘No, your grace. Lord Rivers kept Christmas with the Prince of Wales at Ludlow.’
Harry looked sulky at the reminder. Establishing the twelve-year-old heir to the throne at Ludlow with the queen’s eldest brother, Lord Rivers, as tutor, had been calculated to keep not only the Welsh to heel, but his grace of Buckingham too. For King Edward, having deposed the House of Lancaster and established the Yorkist dynasty, was fearful that if ever his enemies gathered strength again, they would seek out Harry for their rallying point. Harry was a Plantagenet and the last legitimate heir of Lancaster, which was why Miles was safeguarding him. All of Miles’s future lay in the value of Harry’s birthright and one day, God willing, if ever there was a division in the House of York, Miles would exploit it to the full.
‘Oh, Christ, Miles, mayhap you should go and join my cousin of Gloucester’s retinue at Middleham. It might bring you more fortune than rotting here in cursed Brecknock.’
‘What and break tradition? The Rushdens have always served the Staffords.’ Some day, Miles vowed, he would repair the Rushden fortunes. One day the wheel of destiny would shift again and he would help Harry topple the Yorkist–Woodville alliance. ‘Be of comfort, my lord, it will not always be thus. The queen may die before new year – in childbed.’ It was spoken softly, lest passing servants pass the treason on, like a contagion.
‘Pah, and I can travel to the moon,’ muttered the Duke of Buckingham, and he kicked the embroidered Woodville arms right out of the window.
*
There seemed to be a minor battle going on, observed Miles, reining his horse, Traveller, to a halt on a rise two weeks later, and staring in fascination at the full-blooded anarchy that was taking place in the snow down the road. He did not know this part of Somerset.
‘That Bramley village, eh?’ muttered Dobbe, his manservant, unimpressed. They had passed a castle of rather modest proportions about a quarter of a mile back. Because it had been decorated with a sickening superfluity of scarlet and azure pennons, they knew they had reached their destination, a demesne still usurped by Sir Dudley Ballaster.
The March wind was biting and Miles edged his horse into the shelter of a laneway to their left. His servant and the two men-at-arms he had brought for escort followed.
‘Do you think someone has forgotten to tell them that we have had peace in England for the past twelve years?’ he muttered and sprang to the snowy ground, thrusting back his fur-lined hood and rubbing leather-clad fingers over his darkening chin. He had been looking forward to a shave and a bath, not a skirmish. It was irksome to be summoned to Bramley by his father when he had intended spending the rest of his leave at the family home further south in Dorset.
One of his companions chortled. ‘Well, this is Somerset, ain’t it, sir? I am a Hereford man, m’self.’
So this was Bramley, formerly his great uncle’s little kingdom. The village looked prosperous enough; its church was steepled, the snow-dappled roof in good repair, and the gardens of the thatched dwellings, which fringed the king’s highway, were fenced and planted. The alehouse’s summer garland was withered and frosted, but its doors and windows, broad and candlelit in the afternoon gloom, beckoned him like a friendly whore, for it had been a tedious, cold journey.
‘Just like Wales. We might ha’ saved ourselves the journey.’ Dobbe mopped his dripping nose with his cuff as he gauged the fighting on the road ahead. The thwack of quarterstaves on shins, and the grunts as fists met jaws, carried clearly in the cold, still air. The knot of villagers, watching from a sensible distance, added rude yells to the battle cries. ‘You goin’ down there, sir? Show ’em how ’tis properly done?’
His master frowned, slowly making sense of the scene. Jesu mercy, it was his worthy father down there bellowing at a little man with a thatched roof head – or was it the huge, armoured fellow he was roaring at? ‘Well, well,’ he muttered appreciatively.
Feuds still happened in parts of England. Some were local squabbles that had begun during the lawless years of King Henry VI; others were disputes over land ownership, exacerbated by the wars between the great families of York and Lancaster when lands had been confiscated for treason and dealt out to loyalists by the victors. Miles knew exactly what the skirmish was about but he had hoped his father would have settled the quarrel by now. He had already glimpsed the bone of the dogfight: Bramley castle – a square Norman tower and renovated hall boasting scarlet shutters and two chimneys, an encircling wall, a moat with a mill race hard by, a further scatter of dwellings and a dozen adjacent fields complete with last year’s scarecrows. The cosy little fortification had been bought with ransom money earned bloodily by his great uncle during the French wars of the 1440s and passed down to his second cousin, who had died pickled and heirless, bequeathing Bramley not to his heir, Lord Phillip Rushden, Miles’s noble sire, but to a friend, Sir Dudley Ballaster. Presumably it was Ballaster who sported the unpleasant haircut and was now shouting retaliatory abuse at Miles’s father.
Perhaps it was time to make his presence known. With a lopsided smile at his parent’s rumbustious behaviour, Miles gave Traveller’s neck a rewarding pat and slid once more into the saddle.
‘Looks like ’tis over for the day, sir.’
In a matter of minutes it was. A score of the combatants were noisily making their way towards the alehouse, but Sir Dudley Ballaster had swung himself onto his horse and, with several henchman and two hounds in his wake, was thundering up the road and passed Miles’s party without a second glance at the hooded travellers hunched against the wind.
‘Friendly, ain’t they?’ muttered Dobbe.
His father’s contingent was dealing with several bloodied noses, each dripping impressively onto the much abused snow, but it was hard to tell, from Miles’s distant position, what other damage had been done.
Miles swung round on his men-at-arms. ‘When Dobbe and I are out of sight, go to the alehouse. Pretend you are but travellers. See what you can find out.’ He kneed his horse to a gallop down the road. ‘Not pitchforks, my lord?’ he exclaimed in loud disdain as he drew rein. ‘How very primitive.’
‘What the—’ His father strode heavily forward, scarlet-visaged and fists raised, the sable serpents on his breast heaving mightily. ‘By Our Lady! Miles!’ he wheezed in astonished delight as his son dismounted. ‘I was not expecting you until morning.’
‘It seems I should have brought my full armour, my lord. I had thought to find Bramley already in your hands.’
‘Ha, we almost had ’em, my young hawk.’ The older man’s embrace was still vigorous but he seemed more stooped than when they had parted last summer. The dark, once-lustrous hair was liberally flecked with silver and, though the strength was still there in the aquiline nose and determined mouth, the older man’s chin was dewlapped from feasting too richly. More disturbing was the laboured breathing that betided weakening health.
‘Did you note Ballaster?’ Lord Rushden sniffed,
and glared disgustedly up the street. ‘Rode past you. Strutting little cock! Carpet knight!’ He spat, and added in the hushed growl he always used when criticising the House of York, ‘Got his tap on the shoulder for supplying old King Ned with arms and a loan during Warwick’s rebellion back in ’71. Godsakes, Ballaster’s father was a crossbow merchant in Bristol.’
‘And does Ballaster play the shopkeeper?’
His father sneezed. ‘Aye, when he is not playing at being a nobleman. ’Pon my soul, lad, you should have seen this swaggering varmint sticking his chest out like a pigeon and proclaiming: “Ooohh, he had supped with the king and my lord Hastings”. Should be a law against wretches with no breeding acquiring land. Next thing we shall have ploughmen representing the shire in Parliament.’ He sniffed again, rubbing at his moustache with his forefinger. ‘Mark my words, we shall have a hard time getting Bramley from this dog’s arse. Tie us up in the courts for years, if we let him. You might have a word with Buckingham, Miles. See if Duke Harry can do anything to resolve matters in our favour.’
‘I suppose the place is worth it,’ muttered Miles, anticipating a pile of lawyers’ bills. His family’s fortified manor house was much more to his taste, and he wished he were there now instead of standing on an icy sward in cursed Bramley. His father already had two castles and both needed repairs. Why did he want this one? Miles glanced towards the retainers his father had led up from Dorset. Most of them were stamping and blowing on their fingers to keep the blood flowing. Miles was not feeling warm either, and his father sneezed again, a hand to his throat as if it irked him. ‘So where do we honourably retreat to, my lord?’
‘Retreat? Watch your language, lad. I seized one of the outlying manors yesterday. Gives us a base at any rate. I daresay you are hungry.’ Lord Rushden whistled for his esquire to bring his horse. ‘I think I am coming down with an ague, lad. My throat’s as rough as a carpenter’s file.’
‘And when is the next battle?’ Miles asked with tolerant affection. ‘Cockcrow?’
‘Ten, tomorrow, but a small matter. Yon fool has challenged me to combat. Whether he thinks it will settle matters, God knows. I reckon that whoreson wouldn’t know a charger from a packhorse.’
‘Combat?’ Miles’s dark eyebrows rose, his amusement vanishing. His father might have earned his knighthood at the second battle of St Albans, but that was twenty-two years back. ‘You are surely not going to fight the fellow?’
‘No, of course not,’ exclaimed his father, flinging an arm about his shoulders. ‘Now that you are here, you are.’
Chapter 3
It was one thing for your family to acquire a castle but it was quite another to be accepted by the nobility. And if your grandsire had been a crossbow dealer and your father had gained his temporal power by swaggering around London, buying himself a baron’s younger daughter, donating liberally to royal funds and doing disgustingly well in the world, then you were definitely to be ignored. What made matters worse for Heloise and her younger sisters after they had settled into Bramley with their timid stepmother, Matillis, were the tidings that Phillip, Lord Rushden, was disputing their father’s right to the castle. He had already journeyed from Dorset with an armed force, seized one of the dwellings in the nearby manor of Monkton Bramley and was trying to collect rents from her father’s villagers by coercion. Vowing vengeance, Sir Dudley had taken every able man and was gone down to Bramley village to put a stop to such effrontery.
Sir Dudley’s daughters were used to their sire charging off in a pother as if he had been stung by a gadfly, and Matillis, who was scarcely older than Heloise, was too dreamy to be anxious, so the women gathered in the solar, the castle’s warmest chamber, and deliberately busied themselves with Dionysia’s departure for Middleham.
Growing uncomfortable from the huge fire, Heloise gazed forlornly at the thick glass panes dribbling with moisture. The chamber smelt stiflingly of woodsmoke, beeswax and the lavender perfume that her stepmother had dabbed on too generously that morning. Heloise’s day had begun poorly: her father, expecting her to be more omniscient than God, had scolded her not only for the red cloth, left in the laundry, that had turned his underdrawers rosy, but also the hole in his boot sole and her youngest sister’s cut knee. A wonder he did not blame her for the Rushdens!
With a sigh, she rearranged the fireguard and dutifully knelt again to finish pinning Dionysia’s hem, but her discontent was contagious. Their old nurse, darning by the window, was muttering about her eyesight, and at the small table, despite Matillis’s attempt to hold the peace, Heloise’s youngest sisters were growing peevish, squabbling over scraps to clothe their dolls.
‘Are you nearly done, Heloise?’ asked Dionysia with a seventeen year old’s impatience, draping an uncut sweep of emerald satin across her perfect bosom and squinting to see what a lock of her golden hair looked like against the green.
‘How can I finish this if you fidget so?’ Heloise chided, trying to make the hem flow gracefully into the short train so that they could start sewing on the embroidered border.
‘Pah, a few rucks will not show when the border is on. Can we set this lower?’ Dionysia poked discontentedly at the broad band of honey-hued silk that edged her bodice and reassessed her reflection.
‘No, Didie, we cannot. It took me all last evening to shape it.’ Heloise rose wearily to her feet, picking off the wisps of thread that clung to her fine wool skirts. ‘I have never known a fabric slither so.’
Behind her, Nurse set the darned woollen stocking aside. ‘Them Rushdens,’ she declared, with a tone that promised gossip, and all the sisters turned towards her. ‘Slitherin’ is what put me in mind of it. The Rushden serpent story.’ Matillis, unused to these utterances, looked perturbed, but Nurse continued: ‘They say that over two hundred years ago in the days of King Edward Longshanks, the Lady Dyota Rushden cuckolded her husband by making a pact with the Devil.’
‘What does “cuckolded” mean?’ asked Lucretia, the youngest at ten years old, and was dispatched immediately from the chamber to find a non-existent bag of mending.
‘What kind of pact?’ whispered Dionysia as soon as the door closed.
‘The fiend lay with her as a serpent.’
‘Better than a bull,’ muttered Heloise, wondering just how snakes mated. ‘Would it not have been more sensible for the Devil to keep a human form?’
‘Perhaps he likes variety. I should prefer a swan myself,’ giggled Dionysia, glancing around as if Lucifer had ventured out of Hell to note her name.
‘Please go on, Nurse,’ urged Clio, thirteen years old, still smirking at the petty victory over her younger sister.
‘And in each generation ever since that day,’ the old woman lowered her voice, ‘there has been a Rushden with the soul of a serpent.’
‘No more, Nurse,’ protested Heloise. This talk of the Rushdens was stirring up unease – a foreboding – not exactly that something calamitous would happen, rather, that Fortune had shifted the wheel and a change had occurred.
‘It’s no gossip, bless you, my darling. There’s wicked black serpents on the Rushdens’ insignia to prove it.’ The old woman was well versed in the heraldic flauntings and genealogia of her betters.
‘Hmm, that story is not in the least original.’ Heloise picked up Lucretia’s doll from the small table and plucked at its veil. ‘The Plantagenets claimed to be descended from the Devil much further back than that. Mayhap we should invent a legend to give ourselves respectability.’
‘Do we know any lusty swans?’ Dionysia flounced across to tuck her arm through Heloise’s and beam at Matillis. ‘Or fiendish serpents? A fiend for Heloise to match her elfin hair.’
‘I think you are mixing up Jupiter and the Devil.’ Matillis crossed herself for good measure. ‘And no more talk of the Rushdens.’
‘I just pray Sir Dudley thwacks them right out of the shire.’ Nurse grabbed another stocking from her basket. ‘Them Rushdens are said to be murderous thieves to have truck with,
and the heir as ugly as sin, and a cold-hearted knave withal. Leastways your father has a temper on him hot as Tewkesbury mustard and it will be a brave man who will cross him.’
‘Or woman,’ muttered Heloise.
Nurse set down her mending. ‘You poor sweeting,’ she clucked. ‘’Twas not fair you took the brunt of it this morning. Well, never you mind, there’s a good man out there somewhere for you, mark my words.’
‘Is there, Nurse?’ For once, Heloise did not hide her feelings. ‘Must my fortunes depend on finding a husband? I hate the way the world is tilted so that fathers and husbands have all the authority. They treat us as though we are breeding stock to be sold at market.’ She might have added more, but the horns sounded and a chorus of barking heralded Sir Dudley’s return.
‘Well, I am back,’ he exclaimed, striding into the silent solar some moments later, two grinning hounds, reeking with pond water, at his heels.
‘Yes, we can see that, sir,’ muttered Dionysia, swishing her new skirts out of the dogs’ path. Heloise stepped in front to shield her and shooed the beasts to the hearth where they settled appreciatively. At least her father could have ordered the servants to sluice them down, but he clearly had another matter foremost in his mind for he was wearing the familiar smug expression that usually boded ill. Warming his hands behind his back at the fire, he beamed at them like a general about to announce a victory.
‘You would have been proud of me, my wenches. The bailiff was right. We came across Rushden trying to force rent from the villagers and, when I demanded he depart, he had the hide to call me a scoundrel and a disgrace to the shire. It was so close to the alehouse that half the village heard him. There was nothing for it but to toss my glove at him.’ His eyes lingered on his new wife. Matillis was beaming admiration – at least on the outside.
The Silver Bride Page 3