The Lady of the Rivers

  ock the road north and prepare the stand against Warwick and the boy who now calls himself king: Cecily Neville’s handsome son, Edward.

  The king rises to the danger he is in, his wits sharpened on the ride, and writes a letter to Edward’s army reproaching them for rebellion, and commanding them to come over to our side. The queen rides out every day with the prince, calling on men to leave their villages and their occupations and join the army and defend the country against the rebels and their rebel leader, the false king.

  Andrew Trollope, the royals’ best general, advises that the army should make its stand on a ridge, some fourteen miles south of York. He puts Lord Clifford as an advance guard to prevent the Yorks crossing the River Aire, and Clifford tears the bridge down, so that when the young Edward marches up the road from London there is no way across. Boldly, Edward orders his men into the water, and as the snow falls on them in the swirling current in the evening light, they work on the bridge, up to their waists in freezing water with the winter floods running strong. It is easy work for Lord Clifford to ride down on them, kill Lord Fitzwalter and wipe out the troop. Richard sends me a note:

  Edward’s inexperience has cost him dear. We have sprung the first trap, he can come on to Towton and see what we have for him here.

  Then I wait for more news. The queen comes to York Castle and we both put on our capes and go up Clifford’s Tower. The armies are too far away for us to see anything, and the light is failing, but we both look south.

  ‘Can’t you wish him dead?’ she asks. ‘Can’t you strike him down?’

  ‘Warwick?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head. ‘Warwick would change his coat, I know it. No, curse that boy Edward, who dares to call himself king.’

  ‘I don’t know how to do such things, and I never wanted to know. I’m not a witch, Margaret, I’m not even much of a wise woman. If I could do anything right now I would make my son and husband invulnerable.’

  ‘I would curse Edward,’ she says. ‘I would throw him down.’

  I think of the boy the same age as my son, the handsome golden-haired boy, the pride of Duchess Cecily’s &l. I think of him losing his temper in Calais, but his quick flush of shame when I told him that we had guarded his mother. I think of him bowing over my hand outside the queen’s rooms in Westminster. ‘I have a liking for him,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t ill-wish him. Besides, someone else will kill him for you, before the day is out. There has been enough killing, God knows.’

  She shivers and pulls up her hood. ‘It’s going to snow,’ she says. ‘It’s late in the year for snow.’

  We go to the abbey for dinner and the king leads her in through the great hall filled with his household. ‘I have written to Edward Earl of March,’ he says in his fluting voice. ‘I have asked for a truce for tomorrow. It is Palm Sunday, he cannot think of fighting a battle on Palm Sunday. It is the day of Our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem. He must want to be at prayer. We will all be at prayer on such a holy day, it is God’s will.’

  The queen exchanges a quick look with me.

  ‘Has he replied?’ I ask.

  He casts his eyes down. ‘I am sorry to say that he refused a truce,’ he says. ‘He will risk the fortunes of war, on the very day that Our Lord went into Jerusalem. Edward thinks to ride out on the very morning that Our Lord rode to His holy city. He must be a very hardened young man.’

  ‘He’s very bad,’ Margaret says, biting down on her irritation. ‘But it must be to our advantage.’

  ‘I shall order the Duke of Somerset not to give battle,’ the king tells us. ‘Our men should not make war on a Sunday, not on Palm Sunday. They must just stand in their ranks to show our faith in God. If Edward charges they must turn the other cheek.’

  ‘We have to defend ourselves,’ the queen says quickly. ‘And God will bless us all the more for defending ourselves against such a faithless act.’

  The king considers. ‘Perhaps Somerset should withdraw until Monday?’

  ‘He has a good position, Your Grace,’ I say gently. ‘Perhaps we should wait and see what is the outcome. You have offered a holy truce – that must be enough.’

  ‘I shall ask the bishop for his view,’ the king says. ‘And I shall pray tonight for guidance. I shall pray all night.’

  The king performs his vigil in the minster, the monks from the abbey coming and going in the great church as he prays. I go to bed but I am wakeful too; I cannot sleep for thinking of Richard and Anthony, out all night in the cold, a north wind blowing snow, with a battle coming tomorrow on a holy day.

  In the morning the sky is heavy and white as if the clouds are pressing down on the very walls of the city. At about nine o’clock it starts to snow, great white flakes swirling round in dizzy circles and lying on the frozen ground. The city seems to huddle down under the snowflakes, which come thicker and thicker.

  I go to the queen’s rooms and find her prowling around, her hands tucked in her sleeves for warmth. The king is praying at the abbey, she is giving orders for their goods to be packed up again. ‘If we win we will advance on London and this tie they will open the gates to me. Otherwise . . . ’ She does not finish the sentence, and both of us cross ourselves.

  I go to the window. I can hardly see the city walls, the snow is blinding, it is a blizzard blowing around and around. I put my hand over my eyes, I have a memory of a vision of a battle uphill in snow, but I cannot see the standards and I do not know, when the snow turns red, whose blood is staining the slush.

  We wait, all day we wait for news. One or two men come limping into York with wounds to be dressed and they say that we had a good position on the hillside but the snow made it hard for the archers, and impossible for the cannon. ‘He always has bad weather,’ the queen remarks. ‘The boy Edward always fights in bad weather. He always has a storm behind him. You would think he was born of bad weather.’

  They serve dinner in the hall but there is almost no-one there to eat – just the household staff who are too old or too frail to be pressed into service or are maimed from earlier battles in the queen’s service. I look at a serving man who is deft with his one remaining arm and I shudder as I think of my whole-limbed son, somewhere out in the snow, facing a cavalry charge.

  The queen sits proudly at the centre of the high table, her son at her side, and makes a tableau of eating. I am at the head of the table of her ladies and I push some ragout around my plate for the entire meal. Anyone who does not have a husband or a son or a brother in the field called North Acres eats with a good appetite. The rest of us are sick to our bellies with fear.

  In the afternoon a steady stream of men start to come in from the battle, the ones who can still walk. They tell of hundreds dying on the road to York, thousands dead on the battlefield. The abbey hospital, the poor men’s hospital, the leper hospital, all the sanctuaries and hostels throw open their doors and start to strap on rough bandages, pack wounds, and amputate. Mostly they start to stack dead bodies for burial. It is like a charnel house in York, the south gate sees a constant flow of men staggering like drunkards, bleeding like stuck calves. I want to go down to look in every face, for fear that I will see Richard or Anthony glaring sightlessly back, his face blown away by one of the new handguns or smashed to a pulp by an axe; but I make myself sit by the window in the queen’s apartments, some sewing in my hands, always listening for the roar and rumble of an approaching army.

  It gets dark; surely the day is over? Nobody can fight in the dark, but the bells toll for compline and still nobody comes to tell us that we have won. The king is on his knees in the abbey, he has been there since nine this morning and it is now nine o’clock at night. The queen sends his grooms of the bedchamber to fetch him from his prayers, feed him, and put him to bed. She and I wait up, by a dying fire, her feet up on her travelling box of jewels, her travelling cape laid over the chair beside her.

  We sit up all night, and at dawn, in the cold light of the earliest spring morning, there is a bang on th
e door of the abbey and Margaret starts up. We hear the porter slowly opening the door and a voice asking for the queen. Margaret snatches up her cloak and goes down. ‘Wake the king,’ she says to me as she goes.

  I run to the king’s apartments and shake his grooms of the bedchamber awake. ‘News from the battle, get His Grace ready to leave,’ I say shortly. ‘Now.’

  Then I hurry down to the great entrance hall and is man in Clifford livery on his knees before the queen.

  She turns her white face to me and for a moment I see the frightened girl that would not marry on her wedding day unless someone told her future. I did not foresee this, then. I wish I had been able to warn her. ‘We have lost,’ she says bleakly.

  I step forwards. ‘My husband?’ I ask. ‘My son?’

  The man shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, Your Grace. There were too many to see. The field was covered in dead, it was as if everyone in England was dead. I have never seen . . . ’ He puts his hands over his eyes. ‘Some of them were getting away over a little bridge,’ he said. ‘The Yorks came after them and there was fighting on the bridge and then it broke and they all went into the waters, Lancaster, Yorks, all in together, and they drowned in their heavy armour. The meadow is covered in corpses, the river, filled with men, is running red. The snow is falling on everything like tears.’

  ‘Your lord,’ Margaret whispers. ‘Lord Clifford.’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘My commander, Sir Andrew Trollope.’

  ‘Dead. And Lord Welles, and Lord Scrope. Hundreds of lords, thousands of soldiers. It looks like the final day when the dead come from the ground but they are not moving. They are not rising up. Every man in England is down. The wars must be over now, for every man in England is dead.’

  I go to her and take her icy hand. The king comes down the stairs and looks at the two of us, hand-clasped, horrified.

  ‘We have to go,’ Margaret says. ‘We have lost a battle.’

  He nods. ‘I did warn him,’ he says irritably. ‘I did not want fighting on a holy day; but he would not be warned.’

  Behind him, down the stairs, come the grooms of the household carrying his Bible and his crucifix, his prayer stool and his altar. Margaret’s clothes and her crate of furs follow.

  We go out into the yard. ‘Come with me?’ she asks, like a girl again. ‘I don’t want to go alone.’

  Not for a moment do I think I will go with her. I will leave her now, even if I never see her again in all my life. ‘I have to look for Richard, and Anthony,’ I say. I can hardly speak. ‘I will have to go out and find their bodies. I may have to see them buried. Then I will go to my children.’

  She nods. The horses are saddled and ready, they put the goods into a wagon, her jewels are strapped behind her on her horse. The prince is in the saddle already, dressed warmly in his riding cape with his bonnet on his head, his swan badge pinned at the front. ‘We will be avenged for this,’ he says cheerfully to me. ‘I will see the traitors dead. I swear it.’

  I shake my head. I am sick of vengeance.

  They lift Margaret into the saddle and I go to stand near her. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘We’ll regroup,’ she says. ‘They can’t all be dead. We’ll raise more men. I’ll get more money from Scotland, from France. I have the king, I have the prince, we will come back and I will put Edward March’shead on the spike at Micklegate Bar beside his father’s rotting face. I’ll never stop,’ she says. ‘Not while I have my son. He was conceived to be king, he was born to be king, I have raised him to be king.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. I step back and she holds up her hand to give the signal for them to ride out. She waves them out, and then she tightens her grip on the reins and looks down at me, her face warm with love. She holds out her hand, she extends her finger, in the air she makes the sign for the wheel of fortune, then she clicks to her horse and digs in her heels, and she is gone.

  All day more and more men come hobbling into the city, looking for food, looking for someone to strap their wounds. I wrap myself in my cape and get my horse from the stables and ride, in the opposite direction to all the others of the royal court: I ride south down the road to Towton, looking in the faces of all the hundreds and hundreds of men that I pass, for someone I recognise. I am hoping to see Richard or Anthony, I am afraid when I see a man hopping with a makeshift crutch, I freeze when I see a brown curly head face down in a ditch, a congealing patch of blood in the hair. I ride down the road with one man to go before me, and every time we meet a man on horseback, head down, slumped in the saddle, I ask him if he has seen Lord Rivers, or if he knows what happened to his company. Nobody knows.

  I start to see that it was a long, long battle, fought in snow so thick that nobody could see further than the end of their sword. Enemies loomed up out of a white blindness and thrust blindly and were blindly cut down. The Lancastrian archers were firing against the wind into driving snow and missed their mark. The Yorks, with the wind behind them, fired uphill and scythed down the Lancaster men, waiting to charge. When the lines met they barged and stabbed and hacked at each other, not knowing what they were doing nor who was winning. One man tells me that, when night fell, half of the survivors dropped down on the battlefield and slept among the dead, covered with snow as if they were all to be buried together.

  The road is crowded with men, so many men, so bedraggled in their livery or working clothes that I cannot tell one from another and their sheer numbers and misery force me off the road so I stand in a gateway and gaze at them as they go by. It seems as if it will never end, this procession of men who have escaped death but are still bloodstained, and bruised, and wet with snow.

  ‘Lady Mother? Lady Mother?’

  I can hear his voice, and for a moment I think I am imagining it. ‘Anthony?’ I say disbelievingly. I slide down from my horse and stumble forwards until I am almost submerged in the sea of wounded men who barge towards me and jostle me. I pull at their arms and look into their shocked grey faces. ‘Anthony? Anthony!’

  From a group of men he steps out. My gaze rakes him from head to foot in an instant, taking in his weary eyes, his grim smile, his unharmed body. He is holding his arms out to me and his hands, his precious hands, are whole, he is not missing a finger, his arms are not slashed to the bone. He is standing upright. His helmet is off and his face, though grey with weariness, is unmarked. ‘Are you all right?’ I ask incredulously. ‘My son? Are you all right? Have you got through this unhurt?’

  His smile has lost its joyous light. ‘I’m safe,’ he says. ‘I thank God who guarded me the whole long night an day. What are you doing here? It’s like hell, here.’

  ‘Looking for you,’ I say. ‘And . . . Anthony, where is your father?’

  ‘Oh!’ he exclaims, realising what I am thinking. ‘Oh no, don’t, Mother. He is fine. He’s not injured. He’s just . . . ’ He looks around. ‘Here he is.’

  I turn and there is Richard. I would hardly have recognised him. His breastplate is dented across his heart, his face blackened with smoke and blood, but he walks towards me, as he always walks towards me, as if nothing could ever separate us.

  ‘Richard,’ I whisper.

  ‘Beloved,’ he says hoarsely.

  ‘You’re safe?’

  ‘I always come home to you.’

  We go west, to get away from the road to York which is choked with men falling to their knees and crying for water, and lined with those who have fallen out to die. We ride cross-country across the broad plain of York until we find a farmhouse where they allow us to sleep in the barn, wash in the stream, and sell us food. We eat farmer’s broth: a speck of overstewed mutton with gruel and carrots, and we drink their small ale.

  When he has eaten and is looking less drained I ask, tentatively for I fear his reply, ‘Richard, the queen is going north to regroup, and then on to Scotland to raise more recruits, and then she says she will come back. What are we going to do?’

  There is a silence. Anthony and my h
usband exchange a long look as if they have been dreading what they are about to say.

  ‘What is it?’ I look from one to the other. ‘What has happened?’

  ‘We’re finished,’ Anthony volunteers. ‘I am sorry, Lady Mother. I have handed in my sword. I have sworn loyalty to York.’

  I am stunned. I turn to Richard.

  ‘I too,’ he says. ‘I would not serve the queen again, not in such an army, not under such a command. But anyway, we lost on the battlefield, we handed in our swords and surrendered. I thought Edward would have us executed but –’ He has a ghost of a smile. ‘He was merciful to us. He took our swords from us, I am dishonoured. I am no longer a knight, I am sorry. We swore fealty to him, and it is over for us. I cannot take arms against him. I was defeated, I surrendered my sword. I am sworn to the House of York. I cannot serve Henry or Margaret: they are outlaws now to me.’

  It is his use of their names that shakes me as much as anything, that tells me that everything is over, and everything is changed. ‘Henry,’ I repeat as if saying the name for the very first time. ‘You call the king Henry.’

  ‘The king’s name is Edward,’ my husband says as if repeating a lesson. ‘King Edward.’

  I shake my head. Even though I had ridden all day against the tide of wounded men, I had not thought of our cause as lost. I have been with Margaret for so long that I can think only in terms of battles. I thought that we had lost another battle, but that there would be yet another battle after this. Now, as I look at my husband’s weary face and the hollow eyes of my son, say, ‘You think that Henry and Margaret will never win back the throne?’

  He shows me his empty scabbard, where his beautifully embossed sword used to be. ‘I cannot help them to it, at any rate,’ he says. ‘I have surrendered my sword to the new king. I am sworn.’