When he could make himself heard again, he set off another demonstration by suggesting that the Lord Mayor might like to escort them all into the city.
Watching as the crowd thronged forward, squeezing through the barbican, and as church bells began to peal throughout the city, sending men and women out into the streets to verify their reprieve, Warwick glanced at his brother, said softly,
“Not the worst of beginnings, Johnny. There are more than enough Lancastrian malcontents to foment disorder here, but there’ll be others now, as well, who’ll remember the prick of the sword at the throat, and that we chose to withdraw it unbloodied.”
John nodded. “He did give me a bad moment there, though. He so desperately needed a target, needed someone to blame that I feared he might lash out at York. God knows, it was the most visible target!”
“I admit the same thought did cross my mind,” Warwick conceded, and then grinned. “I should have known better, though. He’s a good lad, Johnny. Keeps his head when it does count. His record was well nigh perfect until today! Passing strange…I’ve fought beside Ned on the field, shared exile, gotten drunk together, claimed a crown together, and this was the first time I’ve ever seen him truly shaken. And after all he’s seen…queer!”
“If you think you can endure two such shocks in one morn, Dick, I’ll tell you quite frankly that it was not one of my better days when I rode through that damned gate for the first time, either.”
Warwick gave John a quizzical look. “It’s merely a question of discipline, Johnny. You only see what you let yourself see; that’s the secret. Now, if you look up at that gate and imagine you see Tom, or Ned does the same and sees Edmund, Christ, man, of course it’ll turn your stomach! Now, I see only—”
“I don’t think I want to know, Dick,” John said hastily, and managed a sour smile. “You’re most likely right, but if ever my head does end up on Micklegate Bar, I’d rather my loved ones weren’t quite so philosophical about it!”
Warwick laughed; of all his kin, he was fondest of this brother. “I’ll bear that in mind!”
Looking around, he signaled for his horse. “Well, I’d best see to those executions for our young cousin, the King. And I expect we’ll be going to St Peter’s to make an offering and hear Mass….”
Within moments, he’d given the necessary orders and returned to his brother, confident they’d be carried out with dispatch and without mishap. All in Warwick’s service were disciplined, dependable, and most were, as well, personally devoted to him; he paid more lavishly than any lord in England and his badge of the Bear and Ragged Staff conferred an enviable social status upon its wearer. Now he resumed the broken threads of conversation, said, “Ned said he meant to stay with the Franciscans; we’ll find quarters for you there, too, Johnny. That wasn’t where the French harlot stayed? I’d not put it past her to have poisoned the drinking well or worse, the wine kegs, as a parting gift to our cousin, the King!”
“I think she was lodged at St Mary’s,” John said absently, and then echoed, “ ‘Our cousin, the King.’ ”
“What?”
“Our cousin, the King,” John repeated. “Were you aware, Dick, that twice in our conversation you made use of that phrase?”
“So?”
“I’m not all that sure. But I think I’d feel more comfortable in my own mind had you said, “The King, our cousin.’ ”
Warwick stared at him and then he laughed.
“Christ, I did miss you, Johnny, these six weeks past! Shall I tell you what I did miss the most about you? That cloud of gloom you do drag around like a lap robe!”
Still laughing, he swung easily up into the saddle, sent his mount cantering through Micklegate Bar. He did not look up as he passed through, nor did he look back. John Neville watched, and then he smiled to himself and mounting his own stallion, followed after his brother.
6
Durham
December 1462
On Christmas Day, the northern border castle of Bamburgh fell to the Yorkists. The siege had lasted more than a month, and in the final days, the trapped Lancastrians had been reduced to eating their horses. But they thus only prolonged their own suffering. The end was inevitable. Marguerite was in Scotland; she had not the forces at her command to come to the aid of Bamburgh. With the dawning of Christmas Day, Edward’s standard of the Sunne in Splendour gleamed white and gold above the castle battlements, and John Neville, now titled as Lord Montagu, formally accepted Bamburgh’s surrender in the name of the Yorkist King.
Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, knew himself to be a dead man. He measured his life now in terms of hours, in the time still remaining before they reached Durham. At Durham, Edward of York awaited his arrival. Edward had been taken ill a fortnight ago, unable to assume personal command of the siege of Bamburgh. He’d closely followed its progress from his sickbed, but the actual direction of the military operation had fallen to his Neville cousins, Warwick and John. It was John who now conveyed Somerset south, to Durham and death.
Somerset had always known what he might expect should he ever fall into Yorkist hands. What there was of mercy or magnanimity in the Yorkist-Lancastrian rivalry had died with Edmund of Rutland on Wakefield Bridge. Somerset knew that, in Yorkist eyes, his sins were legion…Ludlow, Sandal Castle, St Albans, Towton. And in the twenty-one months since Edward’s bloody victory at Towton, he’d given Edward even more reason to wish him dead. He’d journeyed to France in a futile attempt to win French backing for Marguerite, negotiated with the Scots on her behalf, had taken Bamburgh in her name. Marguerite had no more devoted loyalists than Somerset and his younger brothers, and John Neville had accepted Somerset’s surrender with the grim gratification of a hunter who’d at long last run his prey to earth, after a particularly grueling and punishing chase.
But Somerset was now discovering the bitter distinction between contemplating death as an eventuality and confronting it as an actuality. He could not, in conscience, fault Edward of York for what he would himself have done had the chance ever arisen. He had never questioned his own courage; nor did he do so now. He’d faced death often enough to feel sure he’d not dishonor his last moments of life. But he was still only twenty-six years of age, had a healthy, disciplined body that served him well, and he found much to love in life, even as a hunted rebel under Bill of Attainder. On the road to Durham, he came to understand that the fear of a battlefield death was comparable to the fear of the executioner’s axe only in the way that a fear of consumption was comparable to the doomed realization of one who’d begun to cough and bring up blood.
Durham lay sixty-five miles to the south of Bamburgh. It was there, in the Benedictine Priory of St Cuthbert, that Edward had kept Christmas, his second since laying claim to England’s crown. With him was his cousin Warwick. With him, too, was his youngest brother, Richard, who’d been permitted a brief escape from his studies in Latin, French, mathematics, law, music, manners, and the survival skills of war and weaponry at Warwick’s Middleham Castle, some fifty miles distant from Durham.
John Neville had gone at once to his cousin, the King. Somerset expected to be taken to the Lyinge House, the prison cell beneath the master’s chamber in the infirmary. Somewhat to his surprise, he was led, instead, to a small chamber next to the Chapter House. It was, he was told, where monks guilty of minor offenses were confined, and the monk blinked at him in bewilderment when Somerset burst into unsteady laughter.
“Minor offenses!” he gasped. “Shall we call it petty treason, then?”
The joke, if indeed it was one, eluded the monk entirely. He shrugged, edged away. As the door slammed behind him, the draft extinguished the only candle. Somerset was left alone in the dark.
Soon thereafter came the summons Somerset had steeled himself to expect. He followed his guards into the Prior’s lodging, into the great hall crowded with Yorkist retainers. The solar, too, was thronged with men. He was jeered and jostled some as his guards steered him through, but the atmo
sphere was more expectant than angry, much like the almost festive mood of a crowd gathering for the public hanging of a notorious highwayman.
He was pushed through the solar doorway, found himself in a large chamber some thirty by twenty feet. He recognized the Prior’s privy chamber, recognized, too, the Prior. John Burnaby was a man well known to the Beaufort family; he’d granted Somerset a night’s shelter at the priory on Somerset’s flight into Scotland after Towton Field. Yet now his eyes slid past Somerset without acknowledgment, with only a trace of embarrassment.
But before Somerset could fully take in his surroundings, his guards were pulling him across the privy chamber, propelling him through an open doorway, none too gently. He stumbled, regained his balance, and looked about him in astonishment.
He was in a torch-lit bedchamber, hung with red to banish fever, heated by a huge recessed hearth and several braziers heaped with smoldering coals. Two enormous wolfhounds and a smaller alaunt hound lay by the fire; a tethered peregrine falcon watched unblinkingly from a far corner. Somerset’s bonds were suddenly slack, cut cleanly through, falling to the floor at his feet. He rubbed his wrists before he could think better of it, and then raised his head high.
The dogs were regarding him with lazy goodwill, the Earl of Warwick and John Neville with chill appraisal. He returned their stare and then sought the Yorkist King. Edward was sprawled, fully dressed, upon the bed, propped up by half a dozen feather pillows. His color was high but he showed no other effects of his recent illness, watched Somerset with speculative eyes.
No one spoke. Somerset’s guards backed away, moving unobtrusively toward the door. Only then did Somerset notice the boy, sitting cross-legged on cushions by the bed, with yet another alaunt stretched out on the floor beside him. He was a dark-haired youngster of no more than ten or thereabouts, and Somerset felt a distinct shock, bitter disbelief that his death sentence was to be passed in Edward of York’s bedchamber in the presence of a child.
“You do know my Neville cousins,” Edward said dryly, and as Somerset stared at him, flushing with impotent fury, he gestured toward the boy on the floor. “My brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester.”
The boy gave Somerset a cool, composed look.
“We did meet at Ludlow,” he said, and Edward laughed; so did the Nevilles. Somerset felt a surge of hatred that, for the moment, overrode any feelings of fear.
“Do you mean to have me beheaded here in your bedchamber before the boy?” he challenged, with a burst of defiant scorn.
John Neville came to his feet. “Have a care, Somerset,” he said softly. “Tonight or tomorrow, it be all the same to me.”
Warwick hadn’t bothered to move, but the dark eyes had narrowed, conveyed an antagonism more implacable and ominous than his brother’s dispassionate warning.
Edward, however, was shaking his head, now said impatiently, “You’re no fool, Somerset. Why, then, do you choose to sound like one? For Christ’s sake, man, do you truly think I’d have you brought to my private chamber like this if I meant then to strike your head from your shoulders?”
The Nevilles looked no less stunned than Somerset. Only Richard seemed unaffected, twisting around to look up at his brother with extreme interest.
Warwick spoke first, dismissing what they fancied they’d heard with a brusque, “You cannot mean to spare his life, Ned. Somerset, of all men? Impossible.”
Unfazed by his cousin’s peremptory tone, Edward reached down, added one of Richard’s cushions to the pile already on the bed, and then settled back comfortably on his elbows.
“You tell me, Somerset,” he said calmly. “Is my cousin of Warwick correct? Is it, indeed, impossible?”
Somerset had no answer for him. This sudden suggestion of reprieve overwhelmed his defenses, engulfed him in raw emotion. He could think only that this must be some particularly vindictive and vengeful prelude to execution.
“I don’t understand,” he said at last, and even that admission cost him dear.
“You’ve been laboring for a cause lost these twenty-one months past. Your Queen can beg in every court of Europe for all it’ll avail her. England is mine, man. Can you accept that? Come to terms with a Yorkist monarchy?”
Somerset was silent. He no longer felt certain this was a cruel hoax, York’s satisfaction for Sandal Castle. He stared at Edward and then at the disbelieving Nevilles, suddenly seeing that Marguerite was right in her estimation of Edward and he was wrong, that this casual twenty-year-old youth was no man’s puppet, was accommodating to his Neville kin only because it suited him to be so.
“And if I could?” he said warily, not yet willing to embrace hope, not yet able to believe Edward’s matter-of-fact offer was genuine.
“I’d be willing to give you a full pardon. To welcome you at my court.” Edward paused. “And to restore to you the titles and lands which were forfeit under the Bill of Attainder passed against you by my first parliament last year.”
“My God,” Somerset breathed, no longer able to dissemble, no longer able to do anything but wonder at the magnitude of his enemy’s offer.
Edward glanced over at his speechless cousins, and then down at his wide-eyed younger brother, before looking back at Somerset.
“Well?” he said. “What say you?”
“You truly mean it, don’t you?” Somerset blurted out, so flustered that for the moment, he looked the younger of the two. But for the first time in many years, pride no longer counted for all. He felt only confusion and a sudden intoxication of the senses, so intense that he was in danger of becoming drunk on air alone.
“Am I right in assuming you accept my offer?” Edward asked, and grinned, so infectiously that the dazed Somerset found himself grinning, too.
“I’d be a fool beyond redemption if I didn’t!” he heard himself confess, saw Edward laugh in genuine amusement. He moved then, crossed the chamber, and as Edward sat up on the bed, he knelt before the young Yorkist King and swore the oath of allegiance pledged to one’s sovereign.
Warwick moved toward Richard and smiled down at the boy.
“Dickon, why don’t you take the dogs out to the priory garth for a run? They’ve been penned up here all night, do need the exercise.”
“Yes, sir.” Richard started obediently to rise, when Edward caught his arm and, laughing, pulled him onto the bed.
“What our cousin Warwick does mean, Dickon, is that he plans to quarrel with me and wants you safely away from the field of battle.”
He grinned, shook his head. “Let the lad stay, Dick. I daresay he’ll find it more entertaining than walking those abominable hounds of yours.”
Richard looked uncertainly between the two. He hadn’t needed to be told that Warwick’s suggestion was a stratagem. His cousin’s anger was palpable and he’d been much distressed by it. Since joining Warwick’s household at Middleham, Richard had become very attached to the cousin whom many had begun to call the “Kingmaker.” Richard could not help but be impressed by Warwick’s expansive good humor, his munificence, his unerring instinct for the dramatic gesture, the eye-catching exploit, and Warwick’s periodic visits to Middleham were notable occasions for Richard. His cousin made things happen, livened everyday routine and invariably brought excitement with him as he rode laughing into the castle bailey with a retinue even larger than Edward’s riding household. But the truth was simpler; the truth was that Warwick, who had no son of his own, had given Richard more attention and approval in thirteen months than Richard had gotten from his own father in eight years.
Now the thought that this much-admired cousin might quarrel with Edward was deeply disturbing to Richard. Until he looked more closely at Edward, saw that his brother was quite composed, showed no signs of anger. He relaxed somewhat then, decided that if Ned were so little concerned by this looming confrontation, he need not be all that concerned, either. He settled himself as inconspicuously as possible at the foot of the bed, quite happy to be included in these interesting adult happenings, g
rateful that Edward had seen fit to let him witness so exciting an event as Somerset’s capitulation.
Warwick saw Richard wanted to remain, saw no reason to make an issue of the boy’s presence. Nor could he contain his anger any longer.
“Ned, you must be mad! Marguerite has had no more steadfast ally than Somerset. She’s always had the backing of the Beauforts, and little wonder! It’s more than likely Somerset is half brother to that little bastard she dares claim to be Lancaster’s son. You remember how blatantly she did favor Somerset’s father, do you not?”
“I cannot exactly say I remember…I was, after all, only eleven when the brat was born!”
Warwick was not amused, and Edward leaned back against the pillows, made no further attempts at levity.
“Your point’s well taken, Dick. If Harry of Lancaster himself thinks the Holy Ghost did sire her son, I’d say the late Duke of Somerset be as good a guess as any! But it is the present Duke of Somerset who does concern me. The Beaufort family has been to Lancaster what the Nevilles have been to York…of inestimable value. If I can win the Beauforts to York, I’ll have gone far toward reconciling the country to my rule. Surely you’d not deny the truth of that?”
John Neville now spoke for the first time. “I do not think it possible, Ned.”
“You may well be right, Johnny. But I do think it worth the gamble, that the reward to be gained warrants the risk to be taken.”
“I see no risk whatsoever in separating Somerset’s head from his body,” Warwick said flatly, and for an instant, impatience shadowed Edward’s face.
“You both do know I’m not loath to shed blood if that is what must be done. I’ve done my share. Most from necessity and a few…” He paused and then concluded with a bleak twisted smile, “Well, a few for auld lang syne.”
It was a Scots expression not known to Richard, but the allusion was unmistakable. He didn’t know how to give comfort, though, only how to share hurt. Edward saw, and reached out, pulled the boy to him for a brief wordless hug. He was instinctively inclined to make a physical response to emotional need, especially with children and women; with the former, he found a hug generally to be the most effective form of comfort, and with the latter, it more often than not led to far more pleasant offerings than consolation. Now he smiled at his little brother and then looked up at his cousins, saying coolly, “I grant you that necessity is as loose a term as a Southwark whore’s virtue. But I’m not convinced that I need put Somerset to death. If I’m right, we do gain a great deal. If he does prove me wrong…” With an expressive shrug.