Light was coming. The mist had broken into milk-coloured banks and thinned. With the others, shouting with the others, he jostled after the retreating company of Lancastrians that split and spread so that presently there was no thick mass of men together, but only a scattering, over the whole range of sight, of separate retreats and separate contests. A man on the ground struck with a knife at his legs. He swung his pike up as though it were a flail and hit him with it. Then another was coming with a halberd at him, but there was a rush from behind, half-a-dozen archers shouting: “À York,” and swinging axes. The halberdier was swallowed by them, and when they had gone on he lay on his back and had no top to his head. Ralph jumped his body, running and yelling. The main battle had passed him now. Between two banks of mist, in a space where sun was, he saw the rider on the roan horse pulled down, three archers and a pikeman at him. The pikeman stuck him under the vizor, gaffing him like a fish and pitchforking him out of the saddle, as one of the archers cut the horse’s throat. Both fell in a tangle. He did not stop; went past them and past where, in a line like a pack of cards flicked from the hand, hundreds were dead together; had died standing. Here wounded were moving. One man, his face bright crimson, knelt and groped at the corpses near him as though he were looking for something in the dark. Another was screaming. He went forward. Behind him, chiefly, it seemed, and much to his left, the shapeless and untiring din went on; but round him there was no battle and he was lost; walked only through dead men and over ground the fight had used and given up. The mist had closed again. Something gave under his foot: an arm hacked through at the shoulder. The green wool sleeve, soaked red, looked odd on it. Tiredness caught him suddenly again. He would rest a little; stood and leaned on his pike. He would have liked to sit down, but did not dare. Have we won, he thought, or been beaten? The battle-noise was going farther away. He had somewhere in his mind the thought of finding the Duke of Exeter’s man that he had killed, and stripping him. Then there were figures coming to him out of the mist, two of them, walking slowly and dragging between them an un-moving third, and he levelled his pike again, breathing sharply.
“Whose man are you?”
“Sir William Parr’s.”
“God be loved. Come here with you. Here’s Lord Say – hurt.”
They were two squires who strained, bending forward, to draw a trailing and steel-plated limp body over the ground. Ralph helped them to lay it down and unfasten the basnet. One of them was saying over and over and over again: “What a field, what a devil’s field.”
He asked the other: “What’s doing? I was lost in the fog, but I killed two of them.”
The squire looked at him across their work. “I think I’ve killed ten. By God, we’re winning. Where in hell’s name’ve you been? The Duke of Gloucester’s smashed their van back into their middleward. By God, I never saw anyone do like him. We’ve swung ’em clean round like a wheel. They’re facing the way they came.”
Ralph saw that the front of his body was all streaked and splashed with blood and that there were many bright scratches on his armour. Lord Say’s basnet came away under their hands. Lord Say had a thin, tired face with a hole in it, rather above the right eyebrow, and a red stain down the cheek.
The other squire began to cry. “Dead,” he said, “our kind lord, dead, right through his vizor.”
Ralph looked across the heath. Not far away, two more corpses were. One was an archer. He lay crucified and a wound had split his chest. From where he was, Ralph could see the splinters of bone looking out through the red cleft, white and clean. The other man lay on his face. Beyond, he began to see more corpses, single or piled together, foolish-looking, then more. The mist was walking away from him very slowly, like an edge of cloth being trailed languidly over the ground. His mind was timeless, drowned in the noise he could still hear.
One of the squires said: “We’d best wait a little till the fog breaks again.” Then, as soon as he had said it, he stood up and drew the dagger of mercy hanging at his right side. The battle had begun to come toward them again.
On the edge of the mist they could see people running.
They were not charging, but flinging along with their heads thrown back and their hands weaponless. One came a little toward them, holding his side, and then pitched to the ground. The men as they ran shouted a new word, and voices from the fog answered and shouted it back to them:
“Treason! treason!”
“Come on!” called the squire with the dagger. He ran holding the long, thin blade level with his chest, and Ralph followed. Out of the milky, moving curtain an archer came. Ralph saw the ragged staff on his clothes and saw the squire strike him as he passed. The man staggered and threw his hands forward. Ralph drove at him; felt his weight on the pike and saw him step backward slowly, fall down and lie. Then he was in a clear place again, a wide patch of light, and men with the cresset or ragged staff were all round him, but were not fighting. They streamed past in thick groups. He heard the sob of their breath and, again and again, the word gasped or cried out: “Treason!” A great surge of happiness and excitement filled him. Men with the white rose were coming, tearing down on the runners, hacking those they could reach or with pike-thrusts skewring them through. A mounted knight with a mace rode among them; called out: “No quarter, men! Lancaster thieves!” We are winning, he thought. We have broken them, Kingmaker’s men. There was something else to see: an armoured lord running away. He came into the patch of clearness running top-heavily with short, tripping steps. He had a sword in his hand, and his armour was damascened; shone in two colours. Half a dozen Yorkists with the Duke’s own badge of the silver boar were after him. But Ralph saw, a hundred yards separating him from the place, a knot of running Lancastrians, badged with the silver X, come between. There was fighting, but the man in armour ran hobbling on. He looked helpless and laughable, stiffly moving like a man with clogged legs in a nightmare. Then in his mind Ralph heard Red Tom say: “There’s pickings on a dead lord if you’ve time to strip him.”
As he ran, there were all sorts of pictures in his mind of spending money in his village and telling tales. He could hear other people behind him now and a voice shout: “After him, after him: don’t let him slip.” But I’m leading the field, he thought. I shall get him and kill him. I have helped to make Edward of York King of England again, and I’ll kill a lord and I’ll be rich on it. The tottering, shining figure was just ahead and the pursuers were just behind. It was a helpless thing, mail-clogged and slow, he was hunting, he thought, and shortened his pike. With a queer little stumble and swerve the mailed man suddenly ran round in a little circle, as a rolling coin circles before it falls, and was facing him, holding the sword in both hands, the point downward. With great clearness, Ralph saw the quarterings on his breastplate of an eagle displayed and three lozenges, and a tiny gold bear on his helmet with a ragged staff in its paws. He was a tall man. If that on his helmet is gold, I could buy a farm, Ralph thought. I must strike now. He lunged, but the steel man before him swayed sideways from the point, lifting, as a woodman his axe, the long, wide blade of his sword upward from his shoulder. Ralph thought: I am glad Tom taught me the trick I must use. I will swing the butt round and trip him, and then he is mine. He swung his pike quickly as the steel man brought his sword downward and forward. The blade caught him in the left side. He felt a moment’s shock and deathly sickness, and tried to breathe. His life faded and finished in his body like the fading red of a small coal.
CHAPTER THREE
BLOOD-LETTING
(England: 1471)
“Sum Rex, sum Princeps,”
O qui iura regis
Hoc quod agas melius,
Nudum ius a te
Qualia vis metere
Si ius nudatur,
Si seritur pietas,
neutrum fortasse deinceps.
Christi specialia Regis,
iustus es, esto pius.
vestiri vult pietate:
talia grana sere!<
br />
nudo de iure metatur:
de pietate metas.
Wm. Langland, Visio De Petro Plowman.
RAIN and black night were over Dorsetshire as though God had stripped a wet cloak from his shoulders and thrown it down there. The rain clucked and chattered in the gutters of Cerne Abbas, heavying the clothes of the men who went out on watch. Alone in the guest-hall of the Abbey, the Lady Anne, Princess of Wales in the right of Lancaster, could hear what they were singing as they clumped out into the wet.
Deo gratias, Anglia, redde pro victoria!”
Our King went forth to Normandy
With grace and might of chivalry,
There God for him wrought marvellously,
Wherefore England may call and cry:
Deo gratias,
Deo gratias, Anglia, redde pro victoria!”
It was the old triumphal song of the victory of Harry of Monmouth at Azincourt, slow and noble; but in the rainy night it sounded like a Dies Irae.
There was a good fire in the guest hall. Our King went forth to Normandy, thought the Lady Anne. I wish this Queen might never have come forth from there. I wish to God I were well out of this.
A great deal had happened to her in the last year: being told by her father that Edward of York, the big, laughing King that he had made and quarrelled with, was no King for them now; that the old, terrible Queen, Marguerite of Anjou, and her mad husband in the Tower were true Queen and true King, after all; that the old Queen’s son, whom he had called a bastard begotten in adultery, was a fine young Prince. That had been the beginning, last year in France, after they had run hurriedly across the Channel and she had crouched in the after-cabin listening to the screams of her sister Isobel in child-bed and the slamming of the guns Lord Wenlock fired at them from Calais: and later her father had said more. He had said the old Queen’s son was a well-conditioned youth, and very handsome. They married her to him in Amboise with all the bells ringing for the strange alliance of the exiled House of Neville with the exiled House of Lancaster. The French King had been there, smiling close to people’s faces and talking very rapidly. He stooped to pat a dog as they came out of the Cathedral. Whilst she was walking solemnly and glimpsing the dog’s waving tail — all dogs loved Louis of France — out of the corner of her eye, she realised suddenly, like seeing the mottled sky between two roofs, that she was actually the wife now of the pretty-faced boy whose mother had had the head from her grandfather’s shoulders and who, though he had never fought a battle, talked of little else but chopping heads off.
The wife and not the wife: that was a discovery she made later. These were very confused times that she was living in. When she was married there was talk that Edward, whom her father had chased out of England and who had landed in the possessions of the Duke of Burgundy, was dead. Then he was alive again, but Holy Harry — and she had to remember very carefully that he was now her father-in-law — was on the throne. The old Queen talked daily of setting sail for England, but somehow the year turned and February stretched to March whilst they were idle at Dieppe, hearing stories of how the great Earl and the old King contented the people after the long tyranny and usurpation of the House of York. Anne dined under a cloth of state at the Queen’s left hand and her husband sat at the Queen’s right. He bowed to her when they took their places, and she curtsied; but the staircase that went up to his bedroom did not go to hers.
It took her a long time to understand it. At first she thought that there must be some question of the Pope’s dispensation, and that her husband had scruples of religion. She was in no hurry, for her part, to have things different. Something of the shrinking and chilling she felt in the presence of the Queen came on her in the presence of the Queen’s handsome son. They were not canny, these two. When they were silent she felt that their four black eyes were always watching the same picture: blood squirting from wounds or running down the blades of swords. Her father had fought many battles and signed many death-warrants; but his eyes never looked like the eyes of a cat watching a bird. He had turned King Edward out of England without striking a blow, but this did not seem to please Queen Marguerite or her son. “Your father was too cautious,” the Prince told her in his sharp voice. “If I had commanded, I would have forced that traitor to a battle and made a finish of him.” The old Queen nodded at that, and tapped her hand on the table as though impatient for something. It was strange, Anne thought, that in all the nursery years when her governess had shaken a finger and said: “If you’re not good the Queen will come for you,” she had not been afraid; had never understood why her father’s nostrils stiffened when he said: “Lancaster” or “the Queen’s party”: and now she did. Now that her father was the Queen’s friend, she understood most perfectly why he had been her enemy.
It was only after they had kept Christmas and gone down to Dieppe, with the cold wind blowing and the sea shrugging grey shoulders between them and England, that she realised that she need not fear the consummation of her marriage. It came to her in a cold shock of understanding and anger, freezing something inside her that would never wholly thaw again. They did not trust her father yet, this black-eyed pair, the old she-wolf and the young whelp. Marriages had been dissolved before to-day, and the more easily when the married pair had no carnal dealing with one another. If her father failed his promise, then give the Queen half an hour’s talk with a Papal Legate and Anne Neville might go packing to the nearest nunnery, neither maid, wife nor widow. The woman who had been hard enough to make that match for her one son would be hard enough, and to spare, to break it. Anne knew how a good cloak or a ring must feel when it was put in pawn in Lombard Street.
She held her hands to the fire. The mantle was carved with a device of the last supper. Christ sat among the twelve with wine and bread, and Judas, leaning forward, upset the salt. The noise of the men singing had dropped away and she could hear only rain: English rain that was perhaps falling on her father too, wetting the flanks of his great horse as he rode South to meet them and join his army with theirs for the new campaign. She would see him soon, and perhaps the world, that had felt like twitching bog under her feet these months, might harden into security again. They had sailed for England hurriedly enough when it came to it, blown on the breath of a fantastic rumour which had proved to be fantastic truth. Edward, the overgrown schoolboy, the laughable fellow who had once been King and had bolted like a chased hare out of his kingdom, was back in England with his young brother Richard. He had landed at Ravenspur, the ill-omened port from which Henry Bolingbroke once marched to steal the crown from Richard of Bordeaux, and was coming South, ‘accompanied,’ her father wrote to them, ‘with Flemings, Easterlings and Danes, not exceeding the number of two thousand persons, nor the country as he cometh not falling to him.’ The old Queen gritted her teeth and called up the French mercenaries that King Louis had promised her; and her young son looked hopeful. He would fight a field, after all, and have blood-letting. They rode seventeen days at anchor on a merciless sea. It was strange to Anne, shut in a cabin with the Queen and feeling the boat endlessly and sickeningly dancing under her, that all this unreal interlude of France and intrigue and separation should end, as it began, in dirty weather in the Channel. She was going back to her father again, who governed England again, even if he did it in King Henry’s name now, and not King Edward’s.
This was her second night in England. The Queen was asleep and the Prince had gone with the Earl of Devon on inspection. She was quite alone. The Lancastrian nobles did not pay much court to their Princess. Sir John Fortescu, the wise, kind old man who had once been Chancellor, spoke to her as often as he could, asking little questions about how she had slept and whether the wine they had was to her taste. She would have liked to reply cordially and make him sit down beside her and talk of the books he had read and the great men — the Good Duke Humphrey and the Cardinal of Winchester — he had known in the old days: but she did not seem able to talk now. Words lost their meaning on the way betwee
n her mind and tongue. Lord Wenlock, with his yellow beard and his eyes rather close together, was still more attentive. He explained that he had always been a loyal man to her father, and that when he fired his guns at them from Calais it had been only policy. He was of a piece, she thought, with all the rest of her life as Princess of Wales in the right of Lancaster. He spoke and moved, and one would take him for a man; but there was something hollow.
Nothing is real, she thought. Big Edward and little Richard once seemed real to me; but that Queen and her son, my husband, never. Lancaster is not real; is a name they frightened me with when I was little. My father has a green eagle in his quarterings. On a shield or a tapestry it looks right enough; but not flying in the sky or stooping at a lamb, behaving as birds do behave. These Lancastrians are the same. I believe in them when I remember stories my father told me about St. Albans and Towton and how Queen Marguerite and the Earl of Wiltshire laid a plot to kill him: but I do not believe that I am eating and drinking with them, and shall be always. Only my father is real, now riding toward us from London through the wet, my father who has chosen to pretend these ghosts are men, for his own purposes.
There had been voices, and horses clicking and stamping in the Abbey courtyard whilst she thought of these things. Now suddenly a door flew open and there was a man in the room. She could not see him, for the firelight did not reach the door, but she heard his voice: voice of a gentleman, but loud, strained, impatient and enormously tired.
“The Queen, I must see the Queen. Has that squire not announced me? Is no one doing anything?”
Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III Page 10