Fortune's Wheel

by Rhoda Edwards

  ‘But we have many friends here,’ he said. ‘Send to Sir Richard Beauchamp and tell him we will destroy Gloucester if he does not allow us to pass.’

  Messages were useless. Beauchamp knew that he was safe. King Edward was on his way. The French Queen did not have time to start banging away with guns. She would have to move on; there was not time even to rest, when her army needed it as desperately as she needed to keep them moving.

  *

  By mid-morning, everyone in King Edward’s army had stopped talking. It was too hot, and the flies were too bothersome and the hills too steep and the feet too sore for chatter with one’s companions to be anything but a waste of breath. On the left hand, far below where they toiled along the hills, lay a sunlit expanse of the Severn Valley, the river like a great silver eel among the pastures, and beyond, the heat-hazed mountains of Wales. May Day had brought in a premature burst of high summer. Where a few weeks ago they might have slid about like ninepins in greasy mud, now the sheep country had dried like a housewife’s sheets in the wind and the trackway dissolved in a fine, floury dust which powdered all the grass verges grey and in which the sharp Cotswold stones rose to the surface in heaps. Stones kept sticking in the horses’ feet and laming them. The dust felt like lye soap gathering on hot faces; it seemed able even to pass through cloth. Yet perhaps the sun being in the ascendant was a good omen; he shone in greater splendour than any of King Edward’s banners, following them in the sky. The trackway avoided villages and towns, and it was difficult to tell what sort of progress they were making.

  Scouts were sent ahead to search for water. News of a spring or well would be more encouraging than even a sight of Queen Margaret’s army and the knowledge that their quarry could not escape. But there was nothing, no spring, no stream, not even a farm pond. The army did not carry enough water, and all the beer had gone. Only the grass was succulent, and the horses snatched at it feverishly, until green slobber spread along the reins of their bridles. Once they rode through a cloud of blue butterflies, which had been settled, drinking from the downland flowers.

  Someone brought Richard wine in a flask. It was warm and made his mouth taste rusty and his lips smart as if on fire. He touched his face and looked at the other men and realized that the sun had burnt him. It had got the backs of his hands as well, judging from their itching. His left arm hurt; it was healing, but bandaged and painful in the heat. He saw a man sitting in the grass, his shoes off, whimpering over his feet; his hose had disintegrated at toe and heel and his blisters had burst and begun to bleed. By the end of the day he’d either be crippled or left to lie by the road. It was possible for a man to die from feet wounds gained on forced marches.

  At midday there was not even a cloud shadow in the sky. But there was water, a small river, lying at the bottom of a valley so narrow and steep-sided that it might have been made by some giant ditch digger. It might be water, but it was also a fiend-made obstacle. The vanguard of the army had the advantage here of being able to fill their flasks and water their horses before it had been stirred up by hundreds of feet and hooves. Richard’s own horse sucked the water up for minutes without raising his head, then took a breath, lifting his nose and blowing and shaking water and grass slobber all over everyone standing near. They were the lucky ones. Before half of the others had crossed, the stream had turned into mud, which even the horses did no more than futilely snuffle at.

  The drop down into the hollow and the haul up out of it caused as much trouble as the churned-up stream bed. Even with extra draught animals hitched to the heavier carts, some guns and weighty items had to be carried across by teams of men before the wheeled vehicles could be heaved out of the mud and up the slope on the other side. To get the whole army across seemed to take an intolerable length of time, during every minute of which the enemy would be gaining on them.

  King Edward came and stood beside his brother as they rested their horses, to watch the struggle, alternately cursing and yelling encouragement. Edward’s particular brand of badinage with his men was something Richard envied. Not that he was ever ill at ease with his own men, but he lacked the ebullience of Edward, and a gift for vulgarly humorous repartee. The soldiers loved it, storing up the memory of his often unkingly words for telling to their grandchildren. Today, the King was in lively wit, as if he challenged the enemies of heat and thirst and an impossible country to beat down his spirits.

  Clarence joined them. He was supposed to be assisting the King with the middleward of the army. At last, Richard noticed, George had stopped looking clean and shining, and was as sweaty and dust-smothered as the rest of them, and being rather fairer than the King and himself, he was even more sunburnt and freckled.

  ‘Well,’ he said to Richard, half jibing, half grinning. ‘Do I live up to your example of the worthy soldier, brother? I scarcely recognize myself!’

  Richard shrugged. It was too hot to rise to George’s bait. He tried to run his fingers through his hair, but it was impossibly tousled, and harsh with dust and dirt.

  ‘I do believe he’s enjoying himself,’ George said. He was watching the King joke with Lord Hastings, his expression part curiosity, part mockery and part grudging admiration. ‘I’m not!’

  ‘Nor am I, and I don’t need you to tell me so.’

  ‘Bad tempered pup!’

  ‘Where are we, do you know?’ Richard asked, in an effort to stop the all too familiar sparring with George. His brother knew the Cotswolds; he did not.

  ‘North-east of Stroud, if this is the river Frome. About fifteen miles more of high Cotswold, God help us.’

  Even King Edward’s good humour and energy were worn down during the afternoon, as the hills became steeper and the going rougher. The men moaned of the brutality of the stones underfoot. One could see further than ever; half England seemed spread out below. The enemy could be seen, too. Richard stared with narrowed eyes at the distant columns, mostly recognizable only by the wink and sparkle of metal catching the sun — it was too far to distinguish colours, or even the difference between horse and foot — down on the flattest part of the green plain, before the lines were swallowed by woods.

  He felt little curiosity about his enemies. Most of them he knew only by repute. He could not care if Somerset and the other Lancastrian lords were marching to damnation, though when it had been Warwick he had gone against, every step had turned a knife in his breast. Their own army was visible all the time, winding along the ridge of the hills, so slowly that it must appear not to move at all. God, their march was like a race of snails.

  Each hour became a day, each minute an hour. The horse Richard was riding got a sore under the saddle girth; it was the third horse he had used that day. One had been lamed on the stones, another tired out. The fourth was sweating, though it had not been ridden.

  When Richard began to see his men stagger upon their feet with weariness, one of his scouts came back to say that the village of Cheltenham was only a mile or so ahead, and that the tower of the abbey at Tewkesbury could be seen in the distance. Soon they reached the top of a great hill, scarred with stone quarries, which swept steeply down to the plain. Beyond, the sun glowed more gently now, upon the Malvern Hills. Richard could see Tewkesbury. It looked like the Promised Land, mile after beautiful green mile. We’ve done it, he thought, we have outmarched them. The breeze began to dry the sweat in his hair. He began to say a Pater Noster to himself. Then he turned as the King rode up to his side. They smiled at each other.

  ‘What time is it?’ Edward asked casually.

  Richard looked up at the sun and ran his hand over his smeary face. ‘Getting on for five o’clock.’ His hands were filthy, caked with dirt and his horse’s sweat and his own; the nails were black.

  King Edward grinned hugely — to laugh was a little too much effort. He let the reins drop slack on the lathered, drooping neck of his horse and raised both arms above his head, the fists clenched in triumph. ‘By the mercy of God,’ he said, ‘we have won the race!’ />
  *

  Somerset said hoarsely, ‘The last trump wouldn’t move this army another step.’ The men were lying down on the road, beside the road, in the fields, propped against walls, slumped with heads on knees or prone on the ground like dead men. ‘We must lay up here for the night, madame. It is a miracle we have got so far. If we must fight tomorrow, then we fight and make an end of it.’

  Queen Margaret nodded, sitting slumped on her horse in a hopeless attitude. She had ridden all the way from Gloucester at the head of her army to encourage them. Now there was nothing more she could do.

  ‘Why should we fail?’ the Prince said angrily, and looked at Somerset for reassurance.

  ‘We are probably stronger in numbers than the usurper Edward. He must be as tired as we are; he has been moving even faster. Why should we not win? The odds are not against us, madame, far from it.’

  That night Anne lay in bed with her fingers in her ears, trying to shut out the unceasing noises outside. The army lay encamped almost up to the walls of the house. Shouts, clumping feet and grinding cart wheels, and once a ringing clatter like a pile of pewter basins being dropped, as someone spilled quantities of armour on the ground. Sleep was impossible, though she was so tired that all her limbs and her head ached.

  When the noises began to lessen a little, and it had been very dark for a long while, the Prince came to her room. When she had got over the initial instinct to scream at seeing a man in her room and controlled her fright, she said nervously, ‘Highness, what are you doing…? The Queen…’

  ‘My mother cannot see me,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘I am your husband.’

  He walked very quietly across the floor, starting when the boards creaked. ‘I’m man enough to fight tomorrow. No one can deny a man the right to his wife when he’s going to fight the next day.’

  Anne’s heart sank. Yet it was perfectly reasonable that he should want to.

  He shed some of his clothes and climbed in beside her. The creak and squeak and rustle of the bed frame sounded loud enough to be the entire house falling about their ears. Anne expected the Queen to burst in the door and haul her son out by the scruff of his neck. But no one came.

  ‘Am I a match for Edward of March, if I meet him hand to hand?’ her husband asked.

  Anne suddenly visualized Edward in armour. The Prince was not small, but no, he was no match.

  ‘He’s enormous,’ she said.

  ‘But he’s a dozen years older than I am, and probably fat.’

  Anne doubted if Edward after months of exile and campaigning was anything but formidably strong and fit.

  ‘Clarence is more your build,’ said Anne, then stopped, appalled at herself. Her sister’s husband! The Prince wanted to kill; it was that, or be killed. She lay as if frozen, unable to say more.

  ‘You are afraid again,’ the Prince whispered. ‘Why? Are you afraid of me?’

  ‘No-o.’ Not afraid of him exactly, just now of everyone, everything, especially this one thing.

  After he had finished, he put his face against her shoulder and lay very still. She did not think that he slept. She had an uneasy feeling that she ought to put her arms round him, or make some other wifely gesture, because he had wanted her. Affection? Love? She felt neither, nothing at all, in fact, except bruised discomfort again. She could neither lift her arms nor put a hand on him; she did not have the will left to make these signs.

  When he felt sleep about to swallow him, the Prince jerked himself awake. It would be disaster to go to sleep while illicitly in his wife’s bed; he was very tired and might well sleep until everyone thought he had disappeared and run away into the night because he was afraid of the battle. He climbed out of his side of the bed, half hoping for a farewell embrace, if nothing else. But Anne pretended to be asleep, more out of shyness than any wish to let him go without saying goodbye.

  In the morning, when it seemed to be night still, Lady Katherine came to rouse Anne. They would have to move from the manor house immediately. The enemy army had broken camp at dawn and were approaching in battle order. Gloucester led.

  ‘You see how Edward of March puts trust in his young brother, even if he is the little Yorkist runt,’ the Prince said to his mother. Anne was shocked to hear him say this about Richard. It was not true; she could not recollect him as so little, or weedy.

  ‘We have the advantage in position,’ the Prince went on. ‘It’s good. Any attack they make will be slow — there are dykes, water meadows, narrow sunken lanes between them and us, and quickset hedges so thick they’ll need to hew a way through.’

  Anne watched him. He had a beautiful suit of armour, Italian work, with gilt borders inlaid with swans, and fleurs-de-lis and ostrich feathers, and so shiny that when he looked down he must see his face in his knees. It must have been specially made for him, perhaps as an extravagant present from his grandfather King René, and as René of Anjou lived perpetually on credit, King Louis had no doubt paid for it, or would be doing so. Gold tassels and hawk bells hung from the reins of his horse, and from its trappings of blue and white silk, glinting, bobbing and jingling with every movement. Behind him were the banners, St Edward the Confessor, the silver swan, King Henry’s antelope, the three foxtails of Lancaster, the Trinity, and the Five Wounds of Christ.

  The Prince was smiling, drunk on his excitement. When he turned his head and saw Anne, he waved his hand. She did not think quickly enough to return his greeting. Somerset rode up, red-faced and scowling — his men were still tired, and difficult to handle. The Prince wheeled his white horse to join him and rode away.

  The Queen hustled her women out of the way of the armies, taking with her Dr Morton and one or two other priests and servants, and went to wait nearer the ferry over the river Severn. On the other side of the river, all the way into Wales, lay a territory empty of hope. Jasper Tudor had not come in time. Wales was a refuge from the unthinkable.

  The movement of the armies had scared the birds from the fields and hedges; flocks of them passed twittering overhead. A fox slunk across the road, leaving his earth for somewhere safer.

  The noise of gunfire began quite suddenly and very loudly. Even at a distance, the din was terrifying. Edward of March must have far more guns than they did, and all going off at once, louder than the loudest thunder. Anne held on with both hands to the side of the carriage in which she sat, and tried to stop herself jumping at every crash. Smoke rose up in the sky from where the fighting was, and what looked like more flocks of birds, but were flights of arrows.

  The Queen had demanded that messages should be brought to her of every swing in the fighting. Anne crouched at her side — the hems of their gowns were touching on the floor — and listened. Mounted men raced up, and then galloped back again towards the battle.

  Gloucester had attacked first. He had most of the guns, and he had archers brought right up front, just behind them. He was giving Somerset a terrible pasting, letting fly with everything at once, while his men struggled forward through water, mud and overgrown hedges.

  Somerset, baited like a bull, had stood so much and no more. Having the advantage of a downhill run and more open ground, he led a furious charge.

  But Edward of March, quick as thought and bold as a lion, led his men across the scummy dykes and smashed through the hedges, faster than one would have thought possible, striding like a giant at their head, few people daring to tackle him man to man. Gloucester attacked, too, as if he knew what his brother would do before it was begun, then Hastings joined them, not hesitating a moment.

  Somerset was routed! His charge was more difficult than he’d thought, and it ran into Edward in the wrong place. No one had brought up the rest of their army to help him against a flank attack. The three in command of the middleward, the Prince, Langstrother and Wenlock, had appeared paralysed by Edward’s boldness. Devonshire with the rearguard was still waiting for orders.

  The Yorkist army came on like a battering ram. It drove into the standing divisions of
the Prince and Devonshire without check. Somerset’s flight had unnerved them. They were being driven back towards Tewkesbury town, running like sheep in every direction. It was defeat, rout, all hope lost.

  Queen Margaret sat staring-eyed, her mouth twitching.

  ‘Mon fils,’ she croaked, ‘I must have news of him. Find him for me!’

  ‘Madame, we must escape — the ferry! We’ll be across before they can catch us if we go now.’ Dr Morton, in no mind to be captured, was the first to take control of the situation.

  ‘Not until I have news of my son!’ Margaret moaned in wild unreason.

  ‘Madame! Now!’ Morton was a determined man.

  ‘No. My son!’

  ‘Dear madame, Margot,’ Lady Katherine Vaux said in French, on her knees, holding the Queen’s hand. ‘Save yourself. You cannot help him by staying here. God willing, he will have escaped. He will come to you.’

  Margaret did not answer her. ‘Edouard. Mon fils…’ she said again.

  Morton, taking matters into his own hands, leapt onto his horse with amazing agility, shouted at the drivers of the Queen’s carriage to whip up their horses and to follow him to the Severn ferry.

  So, against her will, the Queen was carted away. Morton and her women bundled her aboard the boat. Anne clambered in after them, moving as if in a dream. A nightmare, rather, for the first fugitives could be seen in the meadows, running towards the river. But the pursuers ran faster — screaming and yelling could be heard.

  Queen Margaret looked as if she would throw herself over the side of the boat. Lady Vaux held her by the arm, and Dr Morton took the liberty of grasping a handful of her skirts. The ferryman rowed as hard as he could; seeing the murder being done in the Tewkesbury meadows, he preferred to be on the other side.

  Somehow, they managed to get the Queen ashore, and to the shelter of the only house of substance nearby. A family called Payne lived there, whom Morton persuaded to give them shelter. He had tried to persuade Margaret to move on, to take the road towards Wales. But she sat clutching the arms of her chair, as if they would have to prise her out of it, her eyes starting out of her head, staring into empty air.