Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  ‘They’re waiting,’ I said. ‘There’s been some babble about priests, some of them think you should hear Mass.’

  ‘No.’ He shut his lips tight. He appeared to have nothing more to say. He walked over to the little altar in the corner — a small table with a triple folding painting of our Lord’s crucifixion, flanked by two lit candles — and knelt in front of it. He bent his head a moment, as if asking absolution for his sins, though, as far as I could see, his lips did not move in prayer. In his steel, he looked a little frightening, a weapon of war in himself; his spurs jingled and the sword had clanked against his knee when he walked. When he got up, I saw that a little ivory image of St Christopher was set on the table; we both gave it a last glance, to keep us safe from a violent death that day.

  Then he went out. At their first sight of him, a murmur of shock travelled round. John Kendal stepped forward. In his armour he looked desperately uncomfortable. He stared in dismay at Richard’s face. ‘Your Grace,’ he said, ‘are you sick? You look fit for nothing, let alone a battle. Man, you’re a ghost, all parcelled up in steel plate. You’ll melt away in sunlight!’ Poor Kendal, he was far too tense in his own unfamiliar guise to restrain his words.

  It was true, though. Inside, in the lamp-glow, I’d not realized fully how dreadful Richard looked. In the dawn light his face was the colour of wood-ash in a dead hearth. It had been haggard for many months, but now it was ghastly. His eyes had sunk deep into blackened sockets. He looked at us as if from a great distance.

  ‘I’m no ghost, John.’ Even his voice sounded grey. ‘I never sleep well.’ He rubbed his hand over his face and eyes abruptly, as if to wipe away the tiredness, characteristically trying to shrug off their concern. ‘Last night, I had time to think.’ The words were so low, so beaten, we had to strain to hear. ‘I must be honest with you, my lords and friends. I can see no future for this realm but an unhappy time of trouble and change. If this unknown Welshman wins the field today, it will be by treachery and he will rule as a tyrant, by fear, out of his own fear. Mercy will be dead, as it will if the victory is mine. I have reached the end of my patience with treason. I’ll stamp it out, by taking the heads of half the noble blood in England, if necessary. Justice I cannot forget, but mercy — no — even I will not be bitten twice.

  ‘If the battle is lost, then I will not retreat. For me, this day will be the end of war, or of life.’ These terrible words were rendered more bitter by the gentleness of their utterance.

  After an appalled silence, a concerted jabber of protest rose up, in which a voice said, ‘Why are there no priests attending your Grace? Will you go into battle unhouselled?’

  Richard replied calmly, ‘There are no priests here on my orders. If God regards my cause with favour, then He will absolve me without the aid of Holy Church, if not, to touch His sacred Body and Blood would be a blasphemy.’ He spoke as if this must be immediately comprehensible to all, oblivious of the dropping jaws and shocked mutterings. I knew he’d left Dr Roby his confessor, and his chaplains, in Leicester town to stay in the house of Greyfriars. Even so, the bleakness of this reasoning chilled me.

  It’s my belief he thought that the determination to finish with life in the event of defeat had put him in a state of mortal sin. Thus he would not claim the comfort of the Blessed Sacrament. Last night, my hand had felt his fear, the slippery cold sweat on his skin, the mute trembling; he’d been afraid for his soul, that it might be condemned to the everlasting death, forsaken by God for all eternity, and severed from the company of the souls he had loved. Lord Jesus, I thought, do not let him suffer this. Some of the others tried to make me plead with him, to alter his mind. I would not. What could we do, that our Saviour Jesus Christ would not do out of His infinite mercy and forgiveness? I let him alone.

  A groom who’d been walking White Surrey round in circles led him up. The horse was lightly armoured, his white ears and nose projecting from the spiked chamfron like a metal-disguised unicorn. The blinkered eyes knew his master, and pink, whiskery lips nuzzled the familiar hand hopefully. Amazingly, Richard had remembered to bring him a little apple, which he champed, tossing his great head and snorting with wet and noisy affection.

  The King had mounted and gathered up the gilded leather reins, when I saw the Metcalfe squire, carrying the helmet with the coronet of gold and gems circling it like a nimbus. I held White Surrey’s bridle for a moment and said quietly, so the others should not hear, ‘You’ll not wear that crown in the fighting? Richard, for God’s sake — every whoreson Dai archer will pick you out as soon as they’re in bowshot. Don’t take more risks than you need.’

  I thought Richard almost smiled, though it was hard to be certain, as his mouth was partly hidden by the steel neckpiece that covered his chin. ‘Francis,’ he said, ‘that way I’m certain of dying a crowned king. They’ll not take it while I live.’ The archangel Michael himself, with his flaming sword, could not have turned him from this resolve. I acknowledged defeat.

  We marched north, back past the village of Stapleton. The air slid by our faces, very cool, unlike the afternoon before, and I breathed deep of it while I had the chance. The sky had a fresh-scoured look, clear and pinkish as the sun came up from a horizon of mackerel cloud on the army’s right hand. A knee-deep mist wreathed over the low-lying ground.

  The King rode ahead of his heralds and trumpeters, the standards raised over their heads. Priests bore a great jewelled Cross before us, and banners of the Holy Trinity, St George and St Cuthbert of Durham — this last to rally the northern men. The horses were fresh, and jostled each other, squealing. My Lyard must have been fed too many beans, for he eyed every rising lark and scuttering coney as coyly as a virgin, his ears flipping back and forth and his quarters bunching up angrily, as if I were a gad-fly on his back.

  Norfolk’s army had drawn up across the track, waiting. John Howard rode forward on his roan horse, bright with scarlet trappings, to greet the King. He took one look at Richard’s face, opened his mouth to remark, as Kendal had, but must have decided against comment. The strained silence of the household knights could have done nothing to dispel his unease. I noticed his son Thomas glance round with his shrewd dark eyes, calculate the situation, and elect to make the best of it. It was reassuring to see their long, leathery Howard faces, undisturbed as a mudflat by a Suffolk river.

  The great host moved on through another cluster of cottages, past a little squat church, and the place was deathly silent. The tramp of feet and hooves, the jingling creak of harness and clang of arms intruded brutally upon its peace. No dogs barked, even the pigs in the street were gone. There were no roosters to crow in the morning; they had all been stuffed into baskets and taken away by villagers, who had bolted like rabbits down a burrow. Uncut corn stood in half-harvested fields, until trodden flat by the advancing army. Eight thousand men made a brave show. By now the sun had climbed out of early cloud to shine slantwise upon the ridge of rising ground along which we marched. You could see clearly across Redmore plain to where, on the flat ground to the west, the enemy gathered. They would approach us round the north side of the marsh that lay between us.

  Norfolk was saying, ‘We have the hill. Oxford will have to kick his hung-over hirelings in their backsides this morning.’

  Richard nodded, staring into the distance. The light was making him frown again. ‘Don’t underestimate Oxford, Jack. If anyone can flog those hirelings into semblance of an army, he will.’

  On the north-west slope of the rise called Ambion Hill, Norfolk halted his men. They stretched out in a curve — not a deep line, but a long one, designed to act upon the enemy attack like the pincers of a crab, crushing it in upon itself. On either flank stood the guns: serpentines chained together in rows, some brought from Warwick Castle, some from Nottingham, and the great bronze gun I’d heard christened for the occasion by the northerners, out of very vulgar affection, ‘Owd Dick’! Archers were set in clumps along the front of the line, linked by pike-men and knots of hand
-gunners. They were mostly fair, sturdy men, of the three eastern counties, from Colchester to Lynn. Between the greasy collars of leather jacks and helmets, necks and faces wore a sun-boiled look, angry against the scarlet Howard livery.

  A stubble-faced sergeant chivvied his men. ‘Now you whoresons,’ he bawled, ‘see those standards? Oxford arms. You’re going down there, you ugly brutes, to find the lord bearing those arms. You’ll lay him on his back — with Jesus’ help — and slice him fine as my mother does bacon!’ And they all crossed themselves as if facing the Turk, and not a mere Essex rebel.

  When the King was satisfied with the disposal of his troops, he left Norfolk. By this time, Northumberland and his three thousand men should have joined us on the ridge. There was no one in sight. No sound of pipers rent the air. Only in the distance, a mile or so back, were there signs of movement, curls of smoke and wink of metal.

  I strained to see, shifting in my saddle; the arming-doublet stuck to me already. ‘What in God’s name is Henry Percy doing?’ I said to Dick Ratcliffe. ‘The sluggard’s not doused his camp-fires yet.’

  Ratcliffe looked. ‘If he’s doing what I think — nowt,’ he said slowly. ‘We’re close on three thousand lads short. All the best men from Alnwick and Barney Castle to Humberside short. If they find out what he’s at… Dickon’s got two knives drawn behind his back, then.’

  ‘Stanley?’

  ‘Aye.’

  I gave him a sick look, and turned to Richard. If anything, he looked worse than before, in the visor’s shadow. He was frowning and biting his lip, while the white horse leaned against the bit, fretting and circling. He dismounted, and a groom took the reins.

  Two heralds went speeding away, bearing a few curt words, summons to our dilatory Northumberland, and to Lord Stanley, who stood waiting a mile or so to the south. In the north-west, the horsemen of Sir William Stanley were stationed.

  Suddenly someone yelled, and pointed. ‘They’re coming! Moving up there, on the right of the marsh.’

  We walked forward to the highest point of the hill, to watch. As they came closer, the devices on their banners became clearer: the two badges of De Vere, Earl of Oxford, a silver star, not seen in England since the fog-bound chaos of Barnet, and the blue boar, the black Welsh-mountain ravens of Rhys ap Thomas, Sir John Savage’s silver unicorn and in front of them all, the great dragon standard of the Welsh princes, scarlet upon white and green. A dragon with claws, forked tongue and tail; it called to mind the fiery dragon I’d seen so often in the Alpha and Omega east window of St Peter’s at York, that made a gift of a sceptre to the hydra-headed beast. They were singing, you could hear it in bursts and snatches — no English words, nor French; it was the Welsh who were singing, deep over the rattle of the drums.

  Ratcliffe said, between his teeth, ‘They’ll soon shut that caterwauling. Jack Howard’s red-faced crew’ll stuff it down their leek-guzzling throats with ten feet of English pike behind it!’ It was stirring, though, the singing, they put their hearts into it.

  When they were past the marsh, Norfolk gave his signal. The cannon went off with a crack fit for the Day of Judgement. The ground under our feet shuddered as if it were the graves about to render up their dead. Horses jerked their heads, whinnying in answer to the guns. In the blunt-ended, wedge-shaped mass of the enemy, the rake of shot opened little holes, that closed again, as if they had never been. It must have been like marching over a butcher’s slab. Their own guns returned the fire in good measure.

  All of a sudden, the air quivered with a most magnificent sound. To men brought up on tales of Agincourt, as Dickon and I had been, it was the most exciting sound in all the world. The archers had loosed their first flight — an enormous, concerted plunk! loud as hitting a huge drum with a hammer, followed by a thrumming whistle. The arrows passed across the sky in as dark a cloud as a flock of rooks homing. Arrows came back, flight for flight. Good bowmen had been found to put in the enemy’s front rank — Cheshire men most likely, from Stanley country — too many of them for comfort. I knew very well who had put them there — William Stanley. Pray God someone put a clothyard shaft through his treacherous gut!

  A blare of trumpets meant that Norfolk had sounded the advance. The vanguard of the King’s army began to move forward, in tight-knit order, very disciplined. They went down the slope at a trot, shouting for Norfolk, for Howard, and for King Richard; it drowned even the Welsh singing. As the armies clashed, their din swept back up the slope, and half-deafened me.

  It was not long before Norfolk’s line began to sag a little in the middle, buckling back up the slope. Oxford’s tactic of throwing every man he had hard against our centre was having some success. Norfolk was outnumbered. Richard began to move men quickly in blocks of a few hundred at a time, to bolster the line. Our force on the hill dwindled, and there was still no sign of Northumberland.

  I began to taste salt trickling off my upper lip. The sun burnt one side of my head through the helmet; its dazzle broke in the open visor. The day was warming up already, and we’d not been fighting half an hour. Horses were stamping and tossing, maddened by flies that had invaded the hill to torment men and beasts, worse than all the plagues of Egypt. A brown fog of dust hazed the air. Down there in the battle, the confusion grew. Worse, a worm of fear had begun to slide like poison through our reserve of men on the hill. It was becoming obvious to even the most dim-witted yokel shoving a pike that Northumberland would betray the King. That, and the thought of four thousand fresh troops waiting only for orders from the Stanley brothers, made my mouth feel as though it were stuffed with sawdust. I pushed through the press of household knights who stood near Richard.

  When he saw me, he said, ‘They don’t move a pike’s length either way. Our men are less, but better. If I can put some heart into them, we should be able to force Oxford back. My Lord Lovell will remain here in command — if Northumberland comes, then he knows how to deal with him.’ If! Well, I laid no bets on my chance to relieve him of his duties.

  Richard was riding around his men, giving last-minute orders, when the heralds came back, almost upon one another’s heels. The replies from Lord Stanley and Northumberland were alike to the point where grimness verges upon farce. Each supplied ample evidence that the other’s actions were treacherous, so both intended to keep a close guard on the other’s inactivity! It could have been a dull child repeating his brother’s lesson. Seven thousand men stood idle, no more than a mile away, and within our sight. Word had only to gain a hold in Norfolk’s army for a sickle of panic to slice through it; they’d run fast as rabbits caught in the last swathe of harvest.

  Richard swore an oath that was doubly shocking, coming from him. Truly, I’d never seen him so savage. ‘I’ll have George Stanley beheaded — now! any one of you can do it — over the shafts of a wagon if you like. Stanley may have other sons, but now he’ll be one less. Do it, I say! — before the rest of my army turns its coat!’

  With that he slammed down his visor, raised his arm in signal, and dug spurs into White Surrey’s sides. The horse threw up his head angrily, and leapt down the slope in erratic, stiff-legged bounds. Men under Scrope, Ferrers, Clifton, and Zouche poured after him, yelling. Norfolk’s army took up the cheer, and surged to the attack again, bellowing the King’s name.

  I’d never seen anything like it. The men fought with new heart. As if he were a giant reaching out his arms across their backs to block them from any retreat, Richard held his army together. He was everywhere, the sun glancing on his crown clear as a torch flame to follow. The men could only move forward, for the fear of him harrying their backs was as great as their fear of the enemy in front. Up and down the twisting mêlée of a line he went, like a galley master between ranks of toiling slaves. Wherever the enemy advanced thickest, he hacked a way among them, and his men followed — they’d have followed him into Hell mouth itself.

  But it was futile, only a prolonging of the agony. Tudor was getting reinforcements from somewhere, it could
only be from William Stanley, if not Lord Thomas too, by now. Watching, I grew frantic to join the fight — anything to tilt the scales in our favour, to stop the killing, that looked as if it would become a massacre, before we were done. The armies were flagging with heat, straining in a dogged wrestler’s clinch, as they writhed over the same bloody yardage of earth. It was hard to see who was dead and who still fighting. Richard must have sensed how bad things were, for he came out of the battle suddenly, riding fast; a group of household knights followed him. Men bundled out an inert body behind them.

  Beside me, someone was panting, ‘Norfolk — it’s Norfolk — dead — an unlucky shot — the King’s been told. He’s out of his mind if he thinks he’ll hold them without more men. We’ll all be butchered where we stand if he won’t withdraw. My Lord Surrey’s in dire straits down there. Where’s Northumberland? God damn the whoreson, treacherous, son of a bitch… We’re beaten — the King must know it…’

  I had no time to think on this new disaster. White Surrey’s distended, blowing nostrils loomed in my face, and I dodged out of the way of his great gory platters of hooves. There was blood all over his mouth — he’d savaged men as a dog does. Red-stained froth splattered my armour as he ground furiously at the bit. He was still mad from the battle, and the reins were tight enough to break his jaw. Even so, it could be dangerous to get too near.

  Richard was wrenching off his helmet, careless of straying arrows. He gasped for air, shaking out the sodden hair from his neck, so that dripping tails stuck to his face. He flung his right arm up against his forehead for a moment, trying to stop sweat running into his eyes, but it slid down faster than rainwater off a window. His arm looked as if it had been dipped in crimson, and smeared his face and hair with blood not his own. It had run right up to his shoulder and down his side, was even dribbling over the knee-crop of his armour. The silk tabard he wore, blazoned with the arms of England, hung off him in tatters. He had become a machine for killing, driving himself beyond exhaustion, comprehending nothing but violence.