A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

  They had remounts not two hours away; that was no problem.

  “Yes, bring them. If they give their parole, take it. But keep archers at their back.” Even a knight was worth a fair ransom; and better worth if he decided, upon consideration, to enlist upon the other side. He looked down at Edmund Mortimer, motionless at his feet, his mailed hands relaxed and empty in the turf. “Bind him on his own horse—it will go better under him than another. We’ll have the harness off him at Llanbadarn, and see to his hurts. I would not lose him for every noble we’ll get for him. But have him out of here we must, and quickly.”

  They hoisted him into his saddle and bound him there, lying forward upon the beast’s neck with his arms lashed about it to hold him secure, and a folded cloak under his breast and cheek They took what there was to take, all the mounts that were fit to travel, all the arms that lay masterless about the field, and vanished in the dusk up-river into the mountains with their prisoners and their triumph. The night came down over Bryn Glas, and the remnant of the Mortimer forces crept out of hiding, salvaged what they could, and made lamely for home with their wounds and their disgrace.

  * * *

  The squire who carried the news to the king at Berkhamsted reached him on the evening of June 24th. The young man had ridden hard, and was stained and tired, and not a little frightened at the magnitude of the disaster he reported. When he had finished, the king was motionless and silent for so long that the messenger held his breath, in dread of the repercussions that commonly attend the bearer of bad news. But when at last Henry spoke it was mildly and quietly enough, though his eyes, deep-set and haggard under their drawn brows, looked curiously opaque, like grey glass with no light behind it of lantern or sky, and his hands, slightly gnarled like the hands of an older man, gripped hard at the arms of his chair.

  “Carried away prisoner, you say. And alive? You are sure he was alive?” A strange question; who would burden his raiding party with a dead man? “Was he wounded?”

  “Your Grace, I saw him felled. It was not a killing blow, it was meant to stun. But I think he was already wounded.”

  “Gravely?”

  “No, your Grace, for when he mustered what force he had left and drove at the Welsh knights, he could both ride and fight, and so did, and well. And they were careful of him, knowing his worth.”

  The king thought long, or perhaps sat silent long without thought, hardly yet fully grasping what had befallen. Then he asked slowly: “What other losses have we suffered in this battle?”

  “My liege lord, three knights killed, and as many captured, and of others killed, some three score archers, men-at-arms, and squires. The Welsh losses were but light, but for the archers of Welsh blood in our forces, who are all dead or deserted with the enemy.”

  “You have been at some personal pains,” said the king in the same quiet voice, “to bring us an eye-witness’s account, and for that we thank you. How came you off so fortunately?”

  “Your Grace, I and two others were some way behind, bringing up the spare horses, and came on the scene only in time to see Sir Edmund at grips, and the battle all but done. When they saw us they pursued us, but not far, for it was growing dusk. And when they gave over I ventured back to see from the hillside, where there was some cover. So we rode for Whitton, and were able, as soon as the Welsh were gone, to bring off some of our wounded safely.”

  “You could do no more. Very well, you may leave us. Take your rest and refreshment here, and when you leave tomorrow I will send letters by you to Wigmore.”

  And when the messenger had made his reverence and limped out from the presence, Henry turned his head a little, and looked at his closest confidants, but obliquely, out of the corner of a sunken eye, and dismissed them, too.

  “Leave me. I must have time to think. This cannot go on unchecked. I’ll call you when I need you.”

  The door closed on them. He was alone; he could let his face fall, and his eyes open and cast their shutters. There was no one to see in him either dismay or glee, or the furious fusion of both that raged in him. He lay back in his chair limply, and felt himself begin to tremble. He could not have borne a mirror in the room with him now, for fear of what he might see; in his heart he knew that it would be unrecognisable, as he failed to recognise the turmoil of his own feelings as having anything to do with the self he had always known.

  Bad news, so bad the boy had almost been afraid to utter it! If only he had known enough, he might have come privately and hoped for a reward!

  Grey in April—that was one thing. But now Mortimer in June! Of all men, Mortimer! Great-grandson to King Edward the third, and by a branch senior to Lancaster, even though his descent came through a woman. For Edmund’s mother was Henry’s cousin Philippa, the daughter of Lionel, duke of Clarence who had been born before John of Gaunt. And no matter how the experts argued about the legitimacy of descent through the female line, nevertheless the people recognised no bar, and the council had accepted it as just and right when Richard, in view of his childlessness, had been urged to name his heir presumptive, and had named Philippa’s elder son, Roger, earl of March. Well, Roger was no rival now. He was dead in Ireland, four years ago, in Richard’s service; but he had left behind other Mortimers, far too many Mortimers, to inherit his claim: Edmund and Roger, his sons, Anne, his daughter. And if all these should flicker out like candles, still his young, lusty brother Edmund, strong as a stag, and ripe for marriage, capable of getting more sons, more Mortimers to carry on the line and the claim to eternity. And if this second branch failed, there was yet another Mortimer, Edmund’s sister Elizabeth; and like Philippa, even if she was but a woman, she had given birth to a son, the youngest Henry Percy, Hotspur’s heir.

  He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustible and prolific to the end of time. True, Roger’s children were all in the king’s wardship, the boys far too young to cause trouble, and in reliable hands even if they should try, or others should try on their behalf. Yet they lived—and all men knew they lived. And this elder Edmund, their uncle, he was no child to be held in fosterage, but a young man of power and property and ambition. Why could not Wales have taken care of him as efficiently as Ireland had of Roger? “Captured” was well enough in its way, at least it disabled and immobilised him. But it might so easily have been “killed”!

  The king seemed to himself to turn suddenly, and gaze back into his own mind, and it was like peering into a cavern where dangerous creatures lurked, such as he had never suspected could habit within him. He willed to turn his eyes away, but he could not. Once having looked, he could never again be unaware. And yet it was false, he had no ill intent, he had done no wrong to Edmund or to any of them. Was it any fault of his if the Welsh rebels had made prisoner a Mortimer, at this moment the most formidable of the Mortimers? Had carried him off into the mountains, in this harsh summer of storms and floods? And wounded, if only lightly! Perhaps not so lightly! Perhaps gravely. And such a forced journey after—Who knew where death was lying in wait for him? No, he had done nothing to harm Edmund, nor would he in the future. Only let be, he thought, hardly knowing he thought it, and there may be no need!

  And yet this matter of the battle at Pilleth could not be left unanswered, for the sake of his tenure. The blow to English arms was bitter, and he felt it as an insult to his own person. The threat from Wales grew steadily, and could not be suffered any longer. It was time for him to take action. He had left things to others too long, and his sovereignty was in danger of being slighted. In this matter, too, he hardly recognised himself. When had he ever had to be pricked into action before? He was at his best when reacting promptly and powerfully to every threat, how had he let himself be hemmed in thus by forms and processes and the operations of incompetent deputies? It was easy now to decide what to do, both for outward appearances and for the comfort of his own spirit. He must and would take the field himself against Glendower, and make an end of him.

  (
Yet if he did so, was not Edmund Mortimer let loose again from his prison?)

  He rang his silver bell, and it was John Norbury himself who came in to answer it.

  “My lord?”

  “John, I must write to my council. Send Nicholas Bubwith in to me. And bring Thomas, too, and do you stay with us. I need your advice.”

  And when they were come, and settled into conference with him: “I desire your views upon the decision I have taken in this matter of the Welsh war. It is in my mind that this last outrage cannot be allowed to pass, nor can I longer leave the handling of the affair to Prince Henry or his advisers. I purpose, therefore, to wage war myself in Wales, and I intend to set out from Lichfield on—let me see, this is the twenty-fourth of June—on the seventh day of July. Draft a letter to my council, Nicholas, notifying them that I have already had the news of the action at Pilleth, and asking them to send out orders for the knights and squires of all the midland counties to meet me at Lichfield, fully prepared, mounted, and arrayed for war, by the seventh day of July. You may say also that I think it well that the musters of the northern counties should prepare themselves for possible action against the Scots at the same date, and those along the south coast should be ready to resist any assault by sea from my enemies in Europe. For we already have knowledge,” said the king, “that our enemy in Wales has sent letters praying aid to all these potential foes of our state, and a joint assault is more than a possibility. So write, Nicholas,” he said, leaning back relaxed and smiling in his chair, “and I will sign it. And you, my friends, show me your will, and say if I do well.”

  His eye had regained its clarity, and his head its proud poise, as in the days when Norbury had accompanied him in his Prussian crusade with the Teutonic knights, long ago. With one voice they told him that he did well.

  * * *

  At very much the same hour Edmund Mortimer came out of the deep sleep that follows fever, and opened his eyes reluctantly, remembering instantly and ruefully a day and a night of indignity and discomfort before he had lost all sense of place, time, and direction, and finally of his own identity. He had no idea where he was, except that it must be somewhere in the wilds of Wales, well hidden from any possibility of rescue; and he took his first unwilling look about him in the conviction that captivity could mean nothing better than solitude, close confinement, and squalor.

  He opened his eyes upon discreet candle-light, upon a small room hung with tapestries and green fir-boughs that smelled of spice and resin and open air; and upon a girl’s face bent solicitously over him.

  She could not have been more than eighteen years old, golden as a kingcup and white as windflowers. He had never seen hair of such a full, glowing gold, or a fairer brow underneath it. The great thick braid of spun metal hung over her shoulder, and brushed his cheek as she leaned over him. Her eyes, which were blue-black, were very large, grave, and kind. As soon as she saw that he was awake she slipped a hand expertly under his head, and held a cup to his lips, and he drank thirstily, like a child, all the more willingly because it was plain that his docility pleased her.

  He must, of course, be dreaming her. During the fever brought on by wounds, forced marches, wet and cold he had dreamed many odd and discomforting things, but never anything like this.

  He tried whether he had a voice in the dream, and it seemed that he had, though a curiously meagre one, for she leaned still closer to hear what he wanted, inclining her earnest head to bring a small, close-set ear almost within touch of his lips.

  “Madam, I see that—after all—I have not been too much a sinner. For you can be nothing—but an angel.”

  She heard and understood him. She drew back a little, and let him see her face whole again, and in focus. The briefest of smiles took flight from her lips to her eyes, and away, leaving her portentously grave again; and with careful, frowning concentration she said in English, her bright, light, child’s voice forming the words as gingerly as a novice using an untried weapon:

  “Oh, no—I am only Catherine.”

  5

  King Henry’s moves that summer afforded a curious study to an observant man. His decision was taken, and the orders sent out for the triple muster, yet even after news from the northern border confirmed only too clearly that Scotland intended to take a full part in the harrying of his realm, he was slow to move. He was still at Berkhamsted at the end of June, but at least then he had the relief of writing to his council with somewhat more reassuring news from Northumberland. The earl had successfully held minor raids near Carlisle, apparently launched to sound out the defences of the western march, and at Berwick the garrison, with the help of George Dunbar, that angry refugee from over the border, poacher turned forester, had decisively defeated a party of four hundred Scots. But this was no more than the beginning; for by now they knew very well that there were French knights fighting with the Scottish companies, and in fair numbers, too, and the south of England had been warned to look to its defences in case of a direct assault from across the channel.

  In July the king finally moved north, took up his residence in the abbey of Lilleshall, and made it his headquarters while he reviewed the defences of the Welsh border. He remained there long enough to draw many camp-followers of various kinds, including several of the merchants of Shrewsbury, who had an interest in the supply of gear and provisions, and smiths and other craftsmen who could pick up lucrative jobs among the armouries. It was easy to move among this great, churning concourse, and hear all there was to be heard, and no great trick, for an intelligent man, to winnow the less likely rumours out of the crop, and be left with the grain.

  The king, so they said, had made four new commands on the Welsh front, though it was only four months since he had made the previous appointments of the two Percies as lieutenants of north and south Wales. He hardly knew his own mind, they said candidly among their own intimates. His executives went in and out of office like dogs at a fair, and so did his treasurers. True, Lord Henry Percy had his hands full on the eastern march of Scotland, and could hardly be in two places at once, but the earl of Worcester was still in Wales, and acting as the prince’s governor and head of council, too. The only magnate who kept his place unchallenged for long was the prince himself.

  And now that he had his muster here, what would the king do? Strike directly into Wales? Surprisingly, he turned not westwards, but eastwards, to Lichfield again, and on to Burton-on-Trent, where he issued orders for the victualling of all the border towns by the 27th of August, ready for an advance into Wales.

  Thus far Iago Vaughan, like many another displaced labourer tramping the roads in search of casual work in these disturbed times, had followed the unwieldy cavalcade and kept his ears and eyes open. But if the victuallers were to have their stores ready only by the end of August, and the king was intending, as it seemed, to continue his journey eastwards across the centre of England, equidistant from the possible battle-grounds of the Welsh and Scottish borders and the threatened south coast, and ready to move in whichever direction should first require his presence, then there was no longer anything to be gained by loitering here, and he had better be making his way over to Owen with what information he had, and whatever intelligent inferences could be drawn from that information.

  * * *

  “We need not expect him, then,” said Owen, “until the beginning of September. And these estimates you bring me of his numbers—since they can but be estimates—have you shot low or high? He’ll have more, or less?”

  They were sitting together over a rough table in a room in a farmhouse outside Abergavenny. Owen distrusted castles unless he had had the ordering of them and the garrisoning for a year or more; there was infinitely more safety in the hills, because the hills were his castle and not another man’s, and could not be betrayed or easily taken by storm. The English feared for their lives to be shut out of a keep; but the Welsh were more wary of being shut in.

  “My lord, as I think, less. If I am in doubt, I overshoot. An
d as you see, the numbers with which I credit him are more than enough. But more important is how he will use them. And—my lord—there is here something more than strange.”

  “I am listening,” said Owen.

  “I have studied this Bolingbroke carefully and long. I know his record, before he became king and after. So do you, better than I, and you must check me if I stray. For my life I cannot understand, what is it makes this man now so lame, so hesitant, so crippled, who was wont to be hale and prompt enough. He moves about his business, life or death, like one with a broken back. He can, but he will not, or he will, but he cannot. He knows what he wants, and he means to go forward and grasp it, but ever he turns aside, or his feet lag. I have seen the son, and he is no such being. So far as he’s let, he knows his mind very well, he determines and he does. What has happened to this Henry, since he landed at Ravenspur and struck out so baldly for a crown?”

  “He has won it,” said Owen, his mouth curling in a dark, private smile.

  “Should that unman him?”

  “He was ever a man of terrible rectitude,” said Owen dispassionately, half-closing his eyes to peer back into a past he hardly ever dwelt on now. “Narrow as a lance, but sure of his own probity, and very well able to act if his rights were infringed. What has he to be sure of now in that quarter? As certain as he thinks “my rights” and puts out his hand to strike in defence of them, he knows they’re none of his. How came the son of a younger son to have any “rights” in the throne?”

  “Make no mistake, my lord,” said Iago vehemently, “he’ll stoop to any shift now to keep his hold of it.”

  “So he will, I know it. So he must. But his arm will be lead to lift, and his feet chained when he seeks to stride. Like a man in a dream, that must for his life run like a deer, and can only crawl like a broken worm. When most he wants and needs to strike home, he’ll find himself shuffling and stumbling and hesitating, waiting to see what his enemy will do. You cannot be a man of such icy probity as he was, and not be crippled when your credit’s gone.”