Edward could sense the power of a king in the way others looked to him. He saw it in the knights so eager to spar, to show their worth. It was more than just the favours or even the titles he could bestow. The young knights saw a new England in him, after years of ruin and confusion.
At times, it felt like magic. Edward had asked Warwick about it only once, after a perplexing introduction to a squire too red-faced and choked to speak at all in his presence. Edward frowned whenever he thought of that. He felt some of the same awe, but not so much as to render him speechless. Perhaps it was in him from birth, or because his father had shown him the truth of power.
‘They’ll hang on your every word,’ Warwick had said in London. ‘They’ll flatter you, but they’ll fight for you, long after they should have run – because you are king. They will cherish the memory of just a few words with you as perhaps the most precious moment of their lives. If you are a man to follow, the crown will gild you further and make you … heh, a true giant, a King Arthur in silver armour. On the other hand, if you rape or strike a woman, say … if you show cowardice, if you kill a barking dog even, or show some petty temper, it will be as a mirror breaking.’
The words had gone deep. Edward had only shrugged at the time, though he had committed them to memory and had decided to live by them, with a certainty he could feel in his bones. He had even refused drink each evening, letting the men see him sober and pouring with sweat as he trained. He drank water and ate mutton and salt fish, revelling in his health and youth as he slept like a rock and rose again before dawn.
Four days out from London, they met John Neville coming south. He had made his way down the London road, following the Roman flagstones and healing as best he could, though some fever still laid him low. Warwick had greeted his brother with riotous delight until he saw the fading bruises and the pus-filled cut on the back of his right hand. Warwick had grown cold then and pushed the men on, turning his brother in his own tracks back to the north.
For his part, John Neville was delighted and awed at the sight of so many thousands. On a fresh horse and fed on meat for the first time in weeks, he recovered enough over the days that followed to ride the bounds of them, trotting his mount for miles to the east and west. He passed on all he had learned, but Derry Brewer had kept him blindfolded whenever there had been something to see. Even so, Warwick gave thanks for his brother’s deliverance. For all he shared a common cause with Edward, there was something disturbing about the unleashed wolf of the new king, simmering with anger at the slightest provocation. Edward was not easy company and Warwick had missed the easy trust he’d shared with his younger brother, where he did not have to watch every word.
King Edward’s host had been nine days on the road when the furthest scouts came across the first sign of a hostile enemy. The London road ran through the village of Ferrybridge, where a fine construction of oak and pine planking had always stretched across the River Aire. The waters now raced past broken and splintered beams, the bridge cut down. Edward’s ranks were a mile east of the crossing and he gave orders for Fauconberg and Warwick’s square to move up and repair the bridge – to build a new one from felled trees so that the army could funnel through and continue its progress north. The city of York lay not twenty miles further on and Edward was determined to enter those walls and retrieve the relics of his father and brother. Every day lost was one more of humiliation and he would not be denied.
Warwick watched the carpenters work. Overseen by a couple of serjeants who knew their way around peg joints, they had set to with a will. Replacing a bridge was meat and drink to such men, good solid work with the satisfaction of a craft and a task completed. They smiled as they hammered axe-head wedges into birch logs to split them, while others took over with adze, billhook and plane.
The bridge piles were still there, of course, too deeply set to pull out and too wet to burn. They would sit in the water for a century; all his men had to do was put beams and planks over them. They anchored ropes around their waists and risked falling in to carry the planking across the piles, hammering in spikes with massive blows. It was crude work, but it did not have to last for a generation, just a few weeks.
Fauconberg wandered over, eating a wizened apple. Warwick heard him crunch through the core of it and turned.
‘Uncle William,’ Warwick said. ‘It will not be long now. There’s half of it in place already. We’ll be back on the road by tomorrow morning.’
‘I was not checking on you, lad. No, this is land I know well enough. I hunted not ten miles from here with your father when we were young fellows together.’
Warwick’s smile became slightly strained. His uncle’s stories could catch him unawares, so that he felt his eyes prickle and his breath become short. He resented it, as if it was weakness dragged out of him.
‘Perhaps you could tell me another time, Uncle. I have some papers I must read and letters to finish.’
He looked at the sun and saw it was a smear of light behind grey clouds. There would be lamps lit in his tent and the cold was already bitter.
‘I see,’ Fauconberg said. ‘Go to your work then, Richard. I will not hold you. Your brother John was standing here not an hour back, just chafing to cross the flood. I take pride in you both, you know. You would make your father proud.’
Warwick felt his chest tighten and a surge of anger in response. He inclined his head.
‘Thank you, Uncle. I hope so.’ He gestured to the river, so swollen that the banks were crumbling in swirls of brown clay. ‘The work goes well enough. We’ll move when the sun rises again.’
Lord Clifford was not in the best of moods. He had not appreciated being given the task of cutting the London road to the south and he was near certain that Derry Brewer was behind his being singled out in such a way. It was surely the sort of work better suited to a lowly serjeant or a band of common labourers. There was no need at all for a man of high birth to oversee two hundred archers and as many with axe-handle billhooks, all trudging along and casting resentful glances in his direction. Somerset and Earl Percy of Northumberland would not have agreed to such a task, he was certain. Still, it was done. The bridge had been hacked apart and the pieces thrown into the torrent, to vanish downstream as if it had never existed. Clifford had asked a senior captain about removing the bridge piles. The man had shown clear insolence on his grinning face – an expression that had earned him a dozen lashes. The man had been popular amongst his fellows, it seemed. Certainly they thought his treatment entitled them to glare at Lord Clifford as they marched back to the main army. He refused to respond to such rudeness, staring always ahead.
‘My lord! Lord Clifford!’ came a voice.
Clifford turned with a sinking feeling, knowing that the strain in the young scout’s voice would be an unlikely herald of good news.
‘Report,’ he commanded, waiting while the scout dismounted and bowed, as he had trained them to do.
‘There is a force of soldiers at the bridge, my lord. Already cutting new wood and nailing on.’
Clifford felt his heart leap in anticipation. The bridge was still down and he had archers. If this was the first sighting of the Yorkist army, he had a chance to wreak havoc in their lines. With the advantage of surprise, he might even manage to thump an arrow through the chest of Warwick or Edward of York himself, the false king whose very existence made heaven rage. He would return to King Henry and Queen Margaret as a hero …
‘My lord Clifford?’ The scout had the temerity to interrupt the bright-coloured visions parading across his eyes. ‘Begging your pardon, my lord, but do you have orders? They were using the old piles across the river and it will not be long before they are on the road behind us.’
Clifford put aside his irritation at the younger man’s questions. He’d known those damned piles would be a problem. If the captain hadn’t burst his heart during the flogging, he would have dragged him back to the river to have him shown the point.
The sun was sett
ing and Clifford knew he had ridden only a few miles from the broken bridge. He looked at the archers halted around him, suddenly seeing why Somerset had insisted he take such a force for so very ordinary a task.
‘Back to the river, gentlemen! Let us surprise these traitors. We’ll show them what good archers can do.’
The men around him turned where they stood. Without a word, they began a loping trot that ate the miles, racing the fading light of the sun.
As darkness came, Warwick had finished the last morsels of a fine brown trout, caught in the very river he had stared at all day. The temperature had dropped even further and he was weighed down by thick blankets over his jerkin and underclothes. Well wrapped, he was content and beginning to drowse when he heard the jingle of armed men moving. In the black tent, Warwick sat up on his elbows, staring into nothing.
Outside, across the river, he heard voices call for archers to draw. Warwick threw back his coverings and sprang across the tent, yelling for shields as he scrambled into the night.
The camp was not dark, he realized in horror. He had given orders for the work to continue during the night, lit by dim yellow lamps. It meant that the workers out on the river gleamed gold, all oblivious to the sound of men approaching as they hammered and sawed.
‘Shields! ’Ware archers!’ Warwick bellowed.
He could see spots of light all over the ground thereabouts, each one the embers of a cooking fire for thirty or forty men.
‘Douse those fires!’ Warwick yelled. ‘Water there!’
He was answered by shouts of confusion and surprise, while over the river a single order rang out. Warwick took in a frozen breath, hearing arrows whine into the air, loud even over the rushing of the torrent. Out of instinct, Warwick raised a hand over his face, then forced it back by his side. Without armour, it would not save him, and he did not want his men to see him cower. All around, he could hear shafts strike, thumping into wood and metal and flesh, tearing tents and ripping choked screams from sleeping soldiers. More and more punched the ground on his side of the river, white feathers visible.
There was almost no light, the moon but a crescent. Warwick caught glimpses of men in shirts or jackets grabbing shields, sacks, anything. Some even swept up planks of birch, carrying them in front of their faces, though arrows thumped through and pierced their hands. Warwick was sweating, expecting an arrow in his flesh at any instant. When his steward took his arm, he swore in shock, accepting a shield held out to protect him with embarrassed thanks.
The cooking fires were smothered, dropping darkness on to the camp. The torches on the river had vanished as the carpenters threw them into the water. Warwick knew he was panicking. He had been caught by surprise and horrible confusion. Yet the enemy archers could not move past the opposite bank, some two hundred feet away. The answer struggled slowly through his addled mind.
‘Fall back three hundred yards – fall back! Move!’ he roared.
The shout was taken up by others, over the sounds of screeching pain and dying men. He had the sense of arrows arcing in towards him, but he had his own shield up by then and he did not dare to stop moving. The light on the river was gone, making the water a stretch of impenetrable darkness. Beyond it, there was not a single lamp, just the sounds of moving men, taunting and jeering at a camp in disarray.
Warwick turned away, feeling a surge of terror at showing his back to archers, with shafts still whirring in all around them. Some of his men had draped shields or planks on their backs, but the only true protection was in getting out of range. There was no sense of decorum in that dark flight. Warwick felt himself buffeted by men who did not know him. He fell, but staggered up and pushed his way past others, struggling against the fear of sudden death that was upon him.
He saw Edward coming towards him, lit by flaming torches. Even in the darkness, the banners gleamed silver, catching the moonlight. The presence of the king was like cold water thrown across the faces of the fleeing men. They lost their wild look and wide eyes, suddenly ashamed and stumbling to a halt.
‘Someone report!’ Edward shouted at them. He had found his army running away into the darkness and he was consumed with rage. Not one of them would meet his stare. ‘Well? Warwick? Where are you?’
‘Here, Your Grace. It was my order to take the men out of range of archers. They sit across the river and they cannot drive us further away.’
‘Yet I would cross that river,’ Edward snapped. ‘And how can I do that if there is no fucking bridge?’
Warwick swallowed his irritation at being lectured in such a way by the young man. His uncle Fauconberg spoke before he could.
‘There is another crossing place, Your Grace, some three miles west of here.’
‘Castleford?’ Edward replied. ‘I know it. I hunted all these lands as a boy and … more recently.’
He had an image in his mind of a woman then, in a house not too far from that spot. Elizabeth, her name had been. He wondered if she thought of him at all, then smiled to himself. Well, of course she did.
‘Very well. Lord Fauconberg,’ he said, putting aside more pleasant thoughts. ‘Take three thousand fit lads and run to that ford. Be sure some of them are archers as well. Understand? Some small part of the night remains – you should be back on the other bank before dawn or thereabouts. Let’s see if we can surprise our brave attackers.’ Edward waved Fauconberg away and turned to the man’s nephew. ‘Warwick, get the damned bridge finished. Have shields held over the carpenters, as you should have done before, whatever you need to do – but make me a crossing.’
Warwick bowed his head stiffly.
‘Yes, Your Grace,’ he said.
Turning on his heel, Warwick was pleased the darkness hid his seething anger. He had helped to make Edward a king, an eighteen-year-old giant, who it seemed would order him about like a bootboy. At the same time, Warwick reminded himself that it did not matter if the young man was brash or thoughtless. What mattered was that King Henry and Queen Margaret were brought down – the queen far more than her pitiful husband. There were heads on the Micklegate Bar in York, and Warwick knew he would swallow any humiliation or unfairness to see them removed.
The dawn’s dim light revealed everything Lord Clifford had hoped to see. Careful not to stray into bow range, he rode as close as he dared, as soon as he could make out the opposite bank. He shook his head then, in disbelief and delight. Four of his captains rode with him and they thumped each other on the backs and laughed in awe at the carnage and destruction they had created.
‘You see, gentlemen, what good planning and foresight will bring!’ Clifford declared. ‘For the price of one bridge, for a morning of hard effort, we have torn the heart out of a traitor’s army.’
What had been hidden from view the night before was the sheer numbers of men killed in their beds. They had lain close-packed on the ground, wrapped in blankets like cocoons against the chill of the night. As the fires had died, they’d shuffled closer and closer, risking scorched hair and cloth to keep from freezing. Into that packed mass had come some three thousand shafts – two hundred men with a dozen or eighteen arrows each, shooting blind until even their long-accustomed shoulders burned. There had been no answer to the rain of death they had laid down across the waters. Under the pale sky, Clifford was only sorry it had not been more.
Hundreds of corpses were still being collected and laid out in rows, even as Clifford rode up to observe. Most of the bodies remained where they had been struck, sprawled around the bridgehead, dark in a field of white shafts. Boys ran to collect the arrows, at least where they had struck into marshy ground and could be salvaged. They hurried around with armfuls of them, barbs snagging on their woollen jerkins, so that they hung like bee stings.
Beyond those scurrying boys and the dead, a dark line of horsemen rode up in silence, wider and wider, with Edward at the centre of them. Clifford’s smile grew sickly as the banners of York were raised on either side of the man who claimed the throne of England,
who dared to call himself a king. There was no mistaking the son of York. The horse he sat was a huge stallion, uncut and aggressive enough to snap at any other horse near him. The rider made no acknowledgement of Clifford or his captains. Edward simply held his reins loose in one gauntlet and waited, staring. Above them, the sky was full and pearl-white, the wind dropping to nothing as the cold only deepened.
16
Lord Clifford’s four captains rode up to his side, each wearing his crest of a red wyvern on white surcoats over their armour. Despite that proud symbol, somehow Clifford sensed they made a pitiful group compared with the false king and his knights on the other bank. He could make out the banners of York as well as those of Warwick. There was no sign of Fauconberg or the colours of the Duke of Norfolk. Clifford felt his much smaller force was under similar scrutiny. He sat as tall as he could in his saddle.
The oldest of his captains cleared his throat thoughtfully, leaning over to spit on the muddy ground. Corben was a wry, dark man, with deep lines cut into his cheeks and right around a mouth that some might have called sour. He was a veteran of twenty years’ service to the Clifford family and had known the baron’s father.
‘My lord, we might try a last handful of shafts dipped in oil and set afire. Now that the sun has risen. It will slow the work once again.’
Lord Clifford looked at him in pity, recalling why he had never considered putting the man forward to be knighted.
‘We do not want them delayed further, Captain Corben. I’m certain His Majesty King Henry has not assembled an army of so great a size just to wait for spring. No, I have achieved my purpose – and much more! I believe I have struck the very first blow in this “war of two kings” – as it may come to be known, in time.’