A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

  The formidable Cheshire bowmen of Venables and Vernon had claim to all the positions with forward cover, notably along the wings and up the slope, where they could shoot over the heads of their fellows; and the men-at-arms were massed behind the stout headlands on either wing, and behind the scrub bushes and the watery bowl and ripening peas in the centre. The chivalry of the north poised in formation, two companies aligned with the hard ground either side the centre, where their downhill rush could not be impeded by crops or water, and the headlands would give them firm running if they carried through; two more set in reserve, one on either flank, to the rear of the archers, and to be used only when the archers had done their part, and themselves were in need of reinforcement. He did not make the mistake of spreading his limited forces too widely, for the weight of numbers was hugely against him, and they had need of a solid central mass that could not be shifted. He held what pikemen he had well back, so that if any cavalry broke round the flanks to the rear they could still be confronted with a solid wall of steel, able to turn and hold them off from any angle.

  “Hugh Brow commands the left wing. You, uncle, the right. My lord of Douglas, I would have you with me in the centre. Take the right company here, and keep your Scots about you.” He cast a critical eye over his dispositions, and could see no immediate way of bettering them. Across the green expanse of fields before them the two squires were riding back from their errand. “We’d best begin to arm,” he said. “We shall at least get some word of their state soon.”

  They went to work, the squires coming running with their knights’ mail and plate and helms. Revolving under the hands of his servitors, Hotspur watched his two emissaries ride in along the headland at the edge of the field.

  “Well, what said the duke of Lancaster?”

  “Hardly a word, my lord, but the common coin of greeting and thanks. But he read it, beginning to end! In dismissing us he said he would make reply when he had considered and taken counsel. At least,” said young Salvayn, “he gave us time to look about us. He’s busy making his dispositions for attack, and the prince’s companies are just moving up on his left to join with him.” He gave a detailed account of such arrangements as he had seen, and his companion added his own observations. “My lord, most likely they’ve already reviewed this ground before we occupied it, but if not, you may trap their centre when they reach the edge of the bowl here, for the ponds can hardly be seen until a man is very close. In such soft land even a little slope like ours here is a hill, and even a ditch full of water is a valley. And if they separate and turn aside to go round, the archers will have a fine target at an easy range.”

  “They’ll have seen you turn aside,” said Hotspur drily. “Henry is no fool, he can read the signs as well as any.”

  “My lord, we took good care to set a direct course for the headland. No one will think that unusual in field country, where men ride round the crops out of pure habit—even when they may be charging through the same crops within the hour.”

  Hotspur smiled and approved him. The boy was from yeoman stock, and thought as a farmer thinks, and none the worse for that. And he reflected for a moment, ruefully, on the farmer who had planted this field of peas, and what good he would ever get out of his labour.

  “I thank you for your errand and your news. Better go and get into steel now. If we may doff again without dinting it, so much the better, but we’ll be ready for whatever comes. Though for my part I think his reply will be the trumpet sounding.”

  But in that he was wrong. Douglas, tall and glistening in steel, but as yet bare-headed, stood peering out from the shadow of a clump of trees, and suddenly turned his head sharply to bring his good eye to bear upon his friend. “Harry, you’re to have visitors in your turn! Look here, at yon venerable gentlemen! We shall have priests enough to bless us or bury us!”

  Others had heard his words, and turned to gaze where he pointed, and a gradual hush of surprise and wonder passed like a shudder along the lines. Out of the king’s camp two sedate, unmartial figures had advanced, and were ambling slowly towards Hotspur’s lines, mounted on two white riding-mules. The sober clerical robes were easily recognisable, but not until they had covered more than half the distance between the two armies could face and bearing be distinguished.

  One was a big, vigorous, well-fleshed man in his prime, with a commanding face and an upright carriage; the other half a head shorter, half his companion’s bulk, and some ten years older, lean, agile and grey. Both were known to Hotspur, and by the hush that attended their approach, to many of those who followed him. Whatever Henry had to say, he had chosen the most venerated and pacific figures in his following to be his voice, for he had sent to Hotspur as emissaries Thomas Prestbury, abbot of Shrewsbury, and his own secretary, John Prophet, dean of St. Chad’s.

  * * *

  They were brought into camp with all reverence and ceremony, and delivered their message.

  “His Grace the king is desirous of avoiding, even at this late hour, the bloodshed that must result to many of his subjects if this quarrel come to trial in battle. He offers you, my lord, and your adherents pardon and peace, and promises redress of all those grievances of which you can justly complain, if you will disperse this force quietly and forbear such gatherings hereafter. If your will is as good as his, then an agreement can be negotiated. Or his Grace asks, if you prefer, that you will come yourself to speak with him, or send another in your place.”

  Hotspur stood bare-headed before the abbot, and fixed his wide brown stare intently upon the face of this man, patently honest, who offered him pardon and peace in Henry’s name. The sound of the words was infinitely sweet, and tugged at him unexpectedly with all the old memories of companionship and rivalry. Henry, absent, and speaking through this anxious, kindly man, was again the Henry he had known from childhood. But he could not forget the stranger who had peered out at him through the known mask no long time ago. And there was matter to be pardoned upon both sides, and he was not sure that he could pardon, or that he had any right to do so, or that there would be peace for him ever again if he did.

  “Father abbot,” he said, “I am obliged to you for the pains you have taken in this matter, and for the grace of your visit. Will you hold me excused if I leave you for a moment to speak with my uncle and counsellor?”

  “Don’t go,” said Worcester shortly, when they had drawn apart among the scattered trees. “I know you too well. He still has some power to disarm you. And trust me, it is useless. The peace he designs for you is not of this world.”

  “I have no thought of going. There are grievances he’s too late to redress by two years and more, and the redress not due to me or mine.” But there was more in it than that; he did not want to see Henry now at the end, and start again every treacherous doubt that had ever harboured in his heart. And above all, he would not for any consideration have set eyes at this pass upon the boy, to Hal’s bitter distress and his own. “But for the due appearance of our right, we ought to fall in with even the apparent offer of discussion. Will you go with them and see him? It may even be,” he said, tormented, for he had the lives of many men upon his heart, “that he means peace honestly.”

  “Do not believe it. But if you want me to go, go I will.”

  “Yes, go. And judge for me. I trust your wisdom more than my own. Listen to what he has to say, but read his eyes, too, and if they speak a different language from his tongue, answer as you see fit. Give him the last defiance, if need be,” he said, “and let’s have done. Yet if you can with good assurance speak peace with him, do. I trust the decision to you. You will not go beyond the bounds of honour.”

  Only when Worcester had ridden out with the two clerics, and was dwindling into an embroidered knight-errant upon a green field, did he suddenly realise how much time had been eaten away by these to-ings and fro-ings across what must soon be a battlefield. For the sun was in the zenith, and the hour past noon. He realised, too, how foolish it had been in him to suppo
se, even for a moment, that any return was possible from this precipice over which both he and Henry were sliding irresistibly with all their host, as though the earth had opened under their feet. And curiously, he found this certainty calming and comforting, for irresolution itself was the rarest and bitterest pain he knew. He turned to finish his arming, his mind no longer divided. There would still be time for shriving when his uncle returned. The chaplain was among the archers, doing his principal office with as much fervour as he would presently undertake his secondary one among the ranks, with a pike in his hands.

  “We waste the day,” complained Douglas, fully-armed, and passing his unsheathed sword from hand to hand in many varying throws to exercise his quickness of vision with his one good eye, that saw as much and as clearly as most men’s two, and the agility of the left hand he had been practising to use freely ever since his injury at Homildon. “I have a great hunger in me to meet with this Henry of Bolingbroke.”

  “Be content,’ said Hotspur sombrely, “there is still time for a deal of dying before the sun sets.” He looked round for the page who ran his errands, and the boy sprang eagerly to meet even his unexpressed wishes. “Martin, bring my sword.” The page ran for it, and made to buckle it on. “No, not that. My luck—the old one. Knayton knows.”

  This time the boy came back empty-handed and distressed, not out of any fear, but chagrined by his failure to satisfy his lord’s wishes. “Sir, they say it’s not to be found. It was in your baggage yesterday, of that they’re sure, but now no one can lay hand on it anywhere. My lord, they’re afraid it may have been left behind overnight.”

  There was dismay in his voice, for the squires were more disturbed by the loss than he cared to remember. An ill omen, they said, considering how the Lord Henry always loved to have it about him, and called it his talisman. “My lord, they say, all of them, that they never touched it last night, that it cannot have been lost by fair means. Is it witchcraft? How could it go astray?”

  Hotspur remembered then what he himself had done with his favourite, and laughed, though softly and privately, to think of it still lying beside Julian’s secret bed. No wonder his squire had not missed it, it had gone to earth like a fox. How she came back to him at the very thought of it, fragile flesh and yielding bones and steely spirit in his arms all the night through.

  “Never give it a thought, child, there’s nothing sinister here. No ill omens! Tell them this is not yet my death-field—I was promised long ago by a soothsayer in Northumbria that I should die, when my time came, hard by Berwick, and that’s two hundred and fifty miles from here, and so close on my own doorstep I doubt I shall die an old man in my bed. I have remembered now what I did with the sword. It was lost in a good cause, I don’t repent it. Very well, let me have the other.”

  The boy hastened to serve, proud to be allowed to help in his lord’s arming, instead of merely carrying his messages; for his seniors in this jealous service were themselves getting into steel, and marshalling their master’s lances and their own. Many of the archers and men-at-arms, satisfied of their readiness, had sat down at their stolid ease in the turf, and were gnawing at the bread and meat they had carried with them, for the day was past its crest, and a man fights better with food in his belly. Their faces were dour and calm; they were professionals who fought for pay, and gave value for money, and yet in their own fashion they fought for more than pay, since so few of them ever quit their lord to go after a wealthier or an easier service. Some of their parents and kin were new and ambitious tenant farmers, like many who had rented land in these parts, once worked for the manor by heavy, grudging feudal labour. Some of them looked with compunction at the ripe crop before them, and wondered what poor soul its loss was going to ruin, and whether this day would sell him back into the serfdom from which he had escaped by his own efforts. Or whether so many more local landlords would die here that a dozen other poor souls now serfs would climb out of their servitude over the corpses and this field of pease.

  “Father,” said Hotspur, “do your good office also for me, for I am a sinner, and all too sure of penance due.”

  He made his brief confession—he had never a mind for brooding in retrospect on detail, even in his sins—kneeling, but never thinking to bend his head or cover his eyes either from God or his confessor. He so seldom looked back, and so seldom regretted anything, that he had difficulty in thinking of many sins, and concluded simply: “What I have else done amiss, God He knows, and when the time is fit He will remind me after His own fashion.”

  His chaplain was tall and spare, and burned like a votive candle, and in his youth he had been a soldier before he took orders; but in his heart, and in this one lifelong service, he was a soldier still, and though he wore a cilice of hair next the skin, he wore a coat of mail over it, beneath his gown. He was growing old as a tree grows old, dourly, strongly and stubbornly; and whether he believed more in the cross he carried or in the rightness of all that Hotspur did, was matter for doubt. That he believed devoutly in both was past doubt. Yet he was no courtier, and had not been chosen for his pliability. Fanatical love had grown upon him unawares; and Hotspur had never observed it.

  “Son, in this hour I bid you lay aside all hate from your heart. For he who fights in hate is in deadly sin.”

  “Father, I am without hate, but not without anger. Our Lord himself knew what anger is, and himself felt its power. I will well to this land, and to all good men within it, even those in whom I am mistaken, and cannot see the good. For there are more men mistaken than evil. God sees all, and will divide and assign according to right and justice. I do not ask more or better.”

  The chaplain shrived him clean, and he drew aside, and walked again the length of his lines, to leave Douglas free to make his confession in privacy, though dearly he wondered, being human, about that dark matter of Rothesay’s death. From the crest he looked out over the Fields towards the king’s station, studying the formation there, and picking out by their colours the standards he could identify at that distance. Henry had drawn up his whole army now in two main divisions, it seemed, with a third and smaller one as a vanguard before them. The attacker must needs use his cavalry to try to break through the cover set up by the archers, before ever he could get to grips; and to do that he must be ready to see great slaughter done among his knights and squires, however skillfully he used them. A great many of those gay banners and pennants would fall before night. But he had nearly double the number his opponent could muster, and in the end weight tells, and even archers can be killed.

  Hotspur knew both the exultation and the guilt of this hour before the battle, but they balanced within him, and his mind was at rest in that hushed equilibrium, like a hawk riding the air all but motionless. He was still there watching from the crest when he saw the solitary figure of his uncle draw clear of the lines and set course for his own camp. It was nearly time now; for in his heart he knew how that encounter had gone, and almost he knew why. He turned back, and went lightly down the slope to his own division.

  He had almost reached it, when one of the older squires from the pickets along the rear came running after him.

  “My lord!…My lord, here’s a local lad come asking for you. He says he’s brought your sword…”

  She came down the green slope between the companies of archers, heads turning to stare at her with more than usual curiosity, for any strange comer filled up this heavy waiting, and for a youngster of the countryside to venture near instead of removing himself hurriedly from the path of an army was a rare enough happening. Her face had a strained and brittle serenity, but her eyes were glad, and shone when she saw the astonished pleasure in his. If he felt any anger that she should again walk so hardily and stubbornly into danger for his sake, it left him almost before he knew it for anger. How dared he attempt to limit her right to do what she chose, to throw away what she did not value, and hold fast to what she did? He knew her by now too well to suppose that she did anything with her eyes closed,
or was more likely to repent her actions than he. All the same, he must send her away quickly, before the trumpets sounded.

  “My lord,” she said, “I could not reach you sooner, there were some outposts of the prince’s army covering their march as they rejoined the king’s host, I had to wait in cover until the last withdrew. But I have made what haste I could to bring you back what I know you prize.”

  She looked full into his eyes and smiled, holding out the sword to him on her two spread hands, like an offering. “You left it behind,” she said “in the camp by Berwick.”

  * * *

  He had put out his hand to take the sword by the hilt, smiling back at her no less gladly. The hand halted on air, a stone hand; the smile remained, but frozen into intense stillness. He was gold and bronze and steel in the sun, and could not turn pale, but some motion of joy in him had died abruptly. He put forth all the force that was in him to contain and overcome the moment, and at all costs to be to her reassurance and comfort. The hand came to life again, gripping strongly and affectionately on the hilt of his old favourite. The smile warmed and moved and spoke. He got command of his voice, and it came brisk and cheerful, without impediment:

  “Is that the name of the place where we slept the night—Berwick? It seems I was nearer home than I knew.”

  “The village is half a mile from where you lay, my lord. What is it? I thought you started at the name.”

  “Nothing! I was startled to hear it here. I am to be always in your debt, it seems. I can but thank you now, and bid you go. As you must, for my peace. But tomorrow, if God please, there shall be better thanks.”

  “I could not let you go to such a venture without your talisman,” she said. He had stripped off his gauntlet to unbuckle the sword he wore at his belt, for her pleasure, and put his favourite in its place, but she swooped to her knees suddenly, and was before him at the thongs. “Let me do the service of squire to you this once, my lord, before I go.”