But no laughter lightened Richard's. "Any one can afford to," he answered bleakly, "who does it purposely to keep a friend in countenance."
The sun climbed higher and the practice went on. But the roses had begun to languish and the early morning enchantment to fade. It was often so when one grew tired. Bolingbroke's swagger became more insufferable and Bartholomew's voice more raucous. Richard felt hot and sticky and wanted to be sick. Although he never stopped the sandbag again he achieved no spectacular success, "I could have killed you for doing that just now!" he broke out irritably, when at last he and Robert found themselves alone again.
"Doing what?" asked de Vere guilelessly, reigning in in the shade of the wall. It wasn't always easy being friends with a fellow who was as clever as he was sensitive.
Richard had had enough. He dismounted wearily and sat down on a bench, pulling off his lance hand gauntlet. "Oh, I admit you're a good actor. But you can't fool me—or Burley. Muffing your thrust just because I'm so in-c-competent!"
"You're not incompetent." Robert handed over his horse to be rubbed down with Blanchette and came and stood argumentatively before him. "Look here, Richard, if you'd only use that devastating perception of yours where it's needed you could figure it out for yourself. Don't you see you're up against some of the best trained athletes of your age? I wager you in a few years' time, Harry and Tom will be two of the most famous champions in Europe. I'm just erratic, of course. Brilliant at times—hopeless at others. But you—in any other company at all—would be steadily well above average."
"Oh, I've had the best instructors, if that's what you mean!" agreed Richard bitterly.
"Steadily and deservedly above average," repeated de Vere, ignoring the interruption. "And that in spite of not having a powerful physique."
Richard swung the gauntlet moodily between his knees. "It's not only physique. I let outside things affect me."
De Vere sniffed derisively. "Would you like to be smug and stolid like your cousins?"
Emerging from his glumness, Richard glanced across at them and smiled.
"Very well, then," said de Vere. "Let's thank God we are not as other men and go on being temperamental!"
"It's all very well for you—you can hide it."
"Everything's easier for me—or for any of us, come to that."
It was just such flashes of intuition that made Robert so precious; and Richard had wanted that particular sympathy so much that it almost unmanned him. "People don't realize—how awful it is sometimes—being me," he stammered incoherently.
"They must be fools!" said de Vere quietly.
Richard picked up his discarded lance and began stabbing savagely at a little tuft of toadflax that reared its yellow glory bravely from the beaten earth. "And then there's my name—the same as that first Richard Plantagenet's. The very sound of it makes men expect miracles."
De Vere flicked distastefully at the dust still clinging to his pink tunic. "I don't see that his military prowess did England much good," he observed.
"No," agreed Richard, wondering if military prowess ever did—except that the lack of it left one open to attack and only a clod wouldn't want to fight efficiently in defence of his own land. "I often wish my brother Edward had lived. I scarcely remember him. But being three years older than I he always seemed so much stronger and more—more like they want me to be."
De Vere stopped a passing page and told him to bring some wine. He always knew by the fading colour in his friend's cheeks when it was needed. "But Richard, you know most of the time you enjoy being King—" he objected.
"Yes, in a way I do—in spite of ces maudits oncles." Richard laughed ruefully and made room for his companion to sit and drink beside him. "Perhaps it's the only way I can get even with selfsatisfied fellows like Harry Bolingbroke."
The young Earl of Oxford tossed off his wine and stretched his elegant long legs before him. "But that isn't the only reason," he said, regarding his well cut hose with satisfaction.
"No, it isn't." Richard sat sipping thoughtfully while the pages collected his gear. "I suppose one always enjoys doing anything one can do well. And sometimes—oh, I know it sounds conceited—but if only they'd let me alone I believe I could do and say the right thing. Preside over my Parliament—get hold of the people…"
"Your sense of the dramatic should help."
"Yes, I suppose it does. And I've enough imagination to know how they're feeling—like holding someone's pulse…If only Uncle Thomas and that beast Arundel wouldn't keep butting in, riding bald-headed at everything—" The colour had come back into Richard's face and he leaned forward with a sort of shy eagerness. "You know, Robert, when the Archbishop anointed me something really d-did happen," he explained with the slight stammer which caught him only in moments of diffidence or anger. "I am different. There's something inside me that no one can touch—only God perhaps. Something I've got to guard from ridicule or—or any sort of indignity. That's why, although I'm not in the least ambitious personally, I feel I must struggle to do even the things I'm not good at well enough not to make a fool of myself in front of people. You see, it isn't just me…"
If Robert de Vere was too sceptical to share his friend's idealism, at least he had the wit to envisage his unique loneliness. He loved Richard for his very naïveté; but, having lost his own, there was little he could say in comfort. "I should talk to old Burley about it," he suggested, with unaccustomed awkwardness.
But Burley had walked back to the palace with Sir Thomas Holland, who was worrying at a problem of his own. Both he and his younger brother John had inherited the Holland features; but nothing, he was thankful to reflect, of their mother's fragility and rose petal skin. "Young Richard looks almost like a girl at times," he was complaining.
Simon Burley reassured him. "You needn't worry, Thomas. He's perfectly healthy. Only a bit highly strung. And after all, one wouldn't want—" He left the sentence unfinished; but, like de Vere, he glanced back significantly at the rubicund cheerfulness of Mowbray and the insensitive toughness of Lancaster's cub.
But apparently Holland's anxiety wasn't wholely for Richard. "My own small son is with him so much these days—he's growing very like him," he said.
"I've certainly noticed a great improvement in his manners," agreed Burley dryly.
Holland threw cloak and gloves to a hovering page. "His mother was set on his being at court. And I must admit Richard's very kind to him." The great banqueting hall where the late King had been wont to feast his royal captives was crowded with people waiting to dine at the lower tables and, blood-relation as he was, Holland had the sense to lower his voice. "But I don't want young Tom to blow his nose on a square of silk and grow up effeminate and slack about sport like—" noting an icy sternness in Sir Simon's eye he floundered a little— "like that scented young fop de Vere."
Just as well, thought their tutor, that de Vere was negligible and debonair—seeing that men so often substituted his name when they dared not use the King's. "Slack about sport?" he repeated, with simulated density. "I should have thought that after this morning…"
"Child's play tournaments!" sniffed Holland, fresh home from Aquitaine. "If the Prince were still alive you know as well as I do that Richard would have been sent campaigning abroad like young Bolingbroke of Derby. Why, I don't suppose the boy's so much as seen a man killed!"
"Would it do him any particular good, do you suppose?" inquired Burley, stopping a passing clerk who was carrying some books Richard had recently chosen for his growing library.
"It might make a man of him," declared Holland, in his highhanded way. "What does he know or care about laying waste a city or raising a siege?"
Old soldier as he was, Burley lingered lovingly over the pile of richly bound volumes. Froissart's Chronicles and Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose. Really, the boy's taste was growing remarkably good. "There are other things, you know," he submitted, a trifle absently.
Holland stared at him doubtfully. "Poems and s
tuff, you mean?" he inquired, viewing both clerk and burden with uneasy contempt.
"Why, yes," agreed the King's tutor blandly. "And the building of cities and encouragement of trade—"
Unfortunately the last part of his remark was drowned in a rather inopportune outburst of catcalls and cheering from the direction of the village. "Our tradesmen don't sound as if they needed much encouragement at the moment!" snorted Holland, turning an indignant head to listen. "What with mere prentices and journeymen agitating for Guilds of their own, and these unlicensed preachers inciting them at every street corner, we shall soon need half our foreign levies brought back to keep order at home!"
"Too true," admitted Burley, ever the least contentious of men. And certainly the labour situation was growing grave when peasants dared to demonstrate under the very walls of one of the King's palaces.
Holland was hungry. He wished his pernickety young stepbrother would hurry out of his bath and come to dinner. "And anyway, we're at war," he added, clanking towards the dais with much ringing of spurs.
It was the cliché that had terminated most conversations during the past twenty years. Burley was an old man now and even he could scarcely remember the beginning of all the bickering in France and Spain. "Yes," he sighed, reluctantly closing the delectably illuminated Romaunt, "we're still at war."
Chapter Three
Richard and his friends rose early next morning so that they might reach London before the noonday heat. Leopards and lilies on a silk banner drooped motionless from the tower in the oppressive air and thundery grey clouds were beginning to roll up along the river flats. Their horses had been brought round into the cool shadow of the gatehouse and while they were mounting a man in the Mayor's livery galloped into the forecourt covered with sweat and dust. He muttered a Deo Gratia at seeing they had not yet started and, scarcely stopping to make obeisance, asked urgently for Sir Simon Burley, who was just coming down from the great hall to see them off.
"Some last-minute arrangements about the lists perhaps," suggested Tom Mowbray, who could talk of nothing but his first big tournament.
"They won't get such big crowds anywhere as at Smithfield," asserted Harry Bolingbroke, confident that his own performance would be well worth watching.
But Thomas Holland, who was escorting them to London, dismounted in silence and went to join Sir Simon and the gesticulating messenger at the foot of the steps. It seemed to Richard that they stood talking there for an unconscionable time, and that they kept glancing anxiously in the direction of his gay little cavalcade of impatient youths and restive horses.
"I wish Sir Simon were coming with us instead of crossing to Calais," he said. For although Burley wouldn't pass over a fault he always wanted one to do well. Burley believed in one. That was why he was such a comfort at public functions, always giving one confidence and unobtrusively heading off the people who destroyed it.
"Why does he have to go abroad?" asked Mowbray.
Because he lived most of the year on the Bigods' vast estates in Norfolk, he was always asking questions when he came to Court. And de Vere, out of sheer boredom, made a pass at him, trying to tousle his countrified thatch of straight brown hair. "Didn't you know he has to scour Europe to find Richard a bride?" he answered teasingly.
But before Mowbray could pursue the exciting bit of gossip, Burley himself came across to them. Evidently he and Thomas had arrived at some decision at last. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting, Richard," he apologized. "But we think it will be wiser to augment your escort."
Richard looked up quickly. "You mean in case of more trouble about this wretched tax?" he asked.
Besides being the King's tutor, Burley was Vice-Chancellor and had attended all the Council meetings. His fine, lean features were unwontedly grave. He, too, was sorry that he had to go abroad just then. He came and gentled Blanchette's high-bred nervousness with a gesture which seemed to include her rider. "Only as a routine precaution, of course," he explained quietly.
So things were as bad as that. "Was that all the messenger came about?" Richard asked levelly.
Burley turned so as to include the whole gaping group. "It's bad luck on all of you after the hours you've spent practising, but Sir William Walworth has regretfully decided to postpone the tournament," he announced.
A howl of wrathful disappointment went up from competitors and attendants alike. "Why? At the last moment like this?" they wanted to know.
Burley spread a deprecating hand. "It appears there has been rioting at Dartford, and now the peasants at Canterbury and Maidstone are refusing to work."
Bolingbroke stared uncomprehendingly with eyes expressionless as hard brown pebbles. "You're not suggesting that they could be dangerous?" he said.
Burley strove to be patient with the blind egotism of their youth. "You must all realize that this new poll tax the Commons have pushed through Parliament is grossly unfair to the poor," he reminded them.
"Of course it is, sir," agreed Bolingbroke readily. "But surely they wouldn't dare to do anything about it?"
It was the comfortable assumption that had held so long. The assumption on which the families of all of them existed. But would it hold forever, wondered Burley? Tolerant, far-seeing men like Michael de la Pole and himself sometimes found themselves comparing the handful of people who fixed the taxes with the hordes who paid them. And the numerical comparison could be quite frightening—if one assumed that sufficient provocation might one day produce a leader for the people who paid…It was an ugly train of thought. "Well, quite annoyingly, they have," he observed dryly. "According to this man of Walworth's, they've even stoned to death one of the tax collectors!"
After he had turned back to the palace there was a deflated silence. Even a postponement of their personal triumphs and petty wagers paled before such glaring impertinence aimed against their kind. "Surely you don't believe that's more than an isolated case?" asked Bolingbroke of no one in particular.
De Vere, who had had one of the grooms walk his horse up and down, stood drawing on his gloves. "Well, if it isn't, I see no reason why people should be so amazed about it," he drawled. "After all, they're the same men who fought at Crécy and Poitiers. Our fathers called out all our villeins and pushed pikes into their hands and expected them to do something then."
"But under proper leadership." Bolingbroke's fierce black stallion had been chafing so long at the bit that only firm horsemanship could hold him. "Good Heavens, man—" he argued, between stampings and uprearings—"you don't suppose they've either brains—or the initiative—"
"Perhaps empty stomachs can be equally inspiring," suggested de Vere, stepping back a pace to avoid the beast's plunging hoofs.
The earnest young Earl of Derby always found such flippancy baffling. It stifled all serious argument. "What a queer fellow you are, Robert!" he complained, showing off his skill in a few more equestrian contortions. "One would almost suppose you sympathized with the treacherous scum."
"On the contrary, it's a grievous blow about the tournament— particularly as I appear to be on top of my illusive form and might have unhorsed you!" explained de Vere pleasantly. "But I've enough imagination to wonder what it must feel like to see one's wife starving and not be able to buy her any bread."
"And imagination's so uncomfortable, you know," murmured Richard.
Bolingbroke was never quite sure when they were getting at him. "But of course they've enough to eat!" he blustered. "You know very well, they're always grumbling about something."
"Well, thanks to Gloucester's expensive military fiasco in Brittany it looks as if they've got something to grumble about this time," said de Vere, with asperity. "And for God's sake keep that brute still, can't you? He's simply covering me with dust."
Tom Mowbray turned to the cousin who had so far contributed least to the conversation. After all, he was king. And a king should know. He had to attend enough boring debates. "What's it all about really, Richard?" he asked, with a disarming trustfulness w
hich always made him seem younger than the rest of them.
Richard, who had been calculating whether his mother would have left Canterbury before the trouble started, came out of a rather worried abstraction to smile at him. He had suffered so much loneliness and uncertainty himself that he was always considerate to youngsters less experienced than himself. "The only really fair method of taxation, Tom, is assessment on property; not so much per head, regardless of people's income."
The boy ranged his mount alongside Blanchette, whom he adored. "But we had a poll tax before," he recalled. "When everybody had to pay a groat a head for your father's wars."
Richard had a shrewd idea that more of the groat tollage had gone to pay for his grandfather's mistress in England than for his father's battles in Spain. But he had disliked them both and probably the money had been wasted either way. "That was a kind of experiment, I imagine—to see if the people would endure it," he said.
Within the Hollow Crown: A Valiant King's Struggle to Save His Country, His Dynasty, and His Love Page 3