A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

  He looked her over in silence, from her patched chausses and shabby tunic to her shorn hair and broad, pale brow, and she was strange and dangerous, but to him beautiful. She did not come empty-handed from this last encounter; something had been given, and something taken, and in his heart he thought that she had been the gainer, at whatever cost, and whoever was man enough to win her and her winnings would be the gainer, too. Also, she was inexpressibly alone, though he dared not therefore suppose that she was lonely, or felt the need of him that he had long felt for her. No untimely word must be said here of love.

  “The Lord Owen kept his time faithfully,” he said. “This is no fault of his. And I must ride back to meet him, and tell him we are forestalled, and he comes too late. Come with me! Come with me now to Walter’s cottage, and we’ll cross there, and ride to Montgomery before night. There is no place for you now but the place that always waited for you, with us in Wales.”

  She looked at him long and gravely, the sheathed sword clasped jealously to her side, and said neither yes nor no to him; but when he held out his hand to her in silence, she put her left hand into it, and went with him, their two long shadows straining and beckoning before them, towards the west.

  18

  On Sunday there were services of thanksgiving in all the churches of Shrewsbury, the bells pealed, and the king heard mass after mass to his comfort and consolation. The rest of the day was given to the pious duty of burying the dead, of whom by now there were some four thousand, besides those of birth and coat-amour whose kin had already conveyed them to the grave. Citizens, peasants, and soldiers were all recruited to the sacred labour, and the summer being so high, and time so short for so many obsequies, there was no alternative but to make one great mass grave upon the battlefield, and there lay all the slain of both parties together, to wait for judgment day,

  So they did. And so they wait still.

  * * *

  Those three noble prisoners who owed direct fealty to the king were brought to trial, without overmuch ceremony, on the Monday. There was little room for much trying of any issue, since they were taken in arms against King Henry, to whom they had once sworn allegiance, and King Henry, through his council, was their judge. The two barons of Cheshire made blunt avowal of their unending loyalty to Richard, and to the child who was Richard’s acknowledged heir. They knew they were dead men. So was their only desired liege lord. They made no complaint of their fortune, they asked no clemency, as none would have been granted.

  The earl of Worcester came to his trial composed, distant, and stern, as judge rather than judged. He stood before King Henry with bound hands but free eyes and free tongue, though the eyes were wept half-blind for his dearly-loved nephew, and the tongue was dry with thirst, for they had kept him close, and forgotten the heat of his cell. He, too, was a dead man, but already past one death, and the second is a nothing, a desired oblivion. But he had somewhat to say before he completed his dying.

  “My lord of Lancaster, there is nothing now your vengeance can do to me, nothing you can take from me that I will not gladly part with. But I tell you to your face, you do ill to use such words as traitor and treason to me, or to him that’s dead in his splendour. What have we done that you have not taught us before? We took arms for our rights against wrongs inflicted by an unjust king. So did you! We did our endeavour to curb his actions and take from him his crown. So did you! If we are traitors, so were you when you struck against Richard. Did we go back on an oath of allegiance? So did you! There is nothing we have now done against the crown that you did not yourself commit against it four years ago. Hold up the mirror of treason before you, and see your own face! And more—for you did things we have not done, nor never thought to do. It was in fair fight in the field, and far outnumbered, that Harry Percy set out to take your life, Henry of Lancaster, man to man, not by proxy in a prison cell, fifteen days starving to death!”

  He had not raised his voice at all, nor was there need, for the silence in the stone chamber within the castle was profound; and when one made to silence him or hustle him away before he had done, the king made a faint gesture of his hand, and held them still.

  “Let him speak! It is his right.” His own face, heavy and greyish-white, looked like the face of a dead man not yet decently composed for burial. This was a part of his penance, and he could not avoid it. Even vengeance was sour and stale, and showed him always a new vengeance waiting at the door to make answer to the old.

  “It was Richard’s right, also, but it was denied him. But let me speak, for after this day you’ll hear my voice no more, that was never backward in your council, and willed well to this kingdom. And you will do well to remember what Worcester said at his departing, for you have no long time left, and you will be old before your time, and before your time you will make an end. This is not the last battle of a war, my lord, but the first, and your sons and grandsons will reap what you have sowed, for a hundred years yet. For this is truth—the one treason my house ever committed was committed against Richard in your favour, not against you, and though we began in all good intent, not meaning such usurpation as came of our act, yet we cannot escape the penalty. What we have now done was not treason, but penance for treason, and this ending is just, but it is not your justice, Lancaster. And your turn is yet to come.”

  “I abide,” said the king, in a voice as hollow as if he spoke from a tomb, “the judgment and the mercy of my maker. I will answer, and not stint.”

  “You will answer your fellow-men also, though you live out your reign almost in peace. For he is gone, that was the pattern of chivalry, and valour, and noblesse in all this realm, and make no doubt but that he shall be missed as long as men have memories and singers make ballads. Whenever our grandchildren speak of this battle of Shrewsbury, never think they will talk of your triumph, but only of his death, never look for any celebration, but only laments. He will be Hotspur still when your name is forgotten and you have no face, as all the glory of Troy clings to the name of Hector, and not of his killer, and to Hector’s nobility, not to ignoble Achilles. He was the first of my brother’s sons,” said Worcester softly, “and the last. And I am not sorry to go after him out of this world.”

  And so he turned, not waiting to be taken, and went out with a firm and masterful step to bend his neck to the sword, he who had been high admiral of England, and governor of the household of the prince of Wales, besides many lesser offices. And the king, as he signed the order committing the earl’s head to be set up on London Bridge, knew to his abysmal grief and frustration that within every traitor to him, as long as he lived, there would exist such a man of parts and quality, disaffected beyond cure or redress.

  It was harder to face them, dead, than alive. After death they grew, like legends passed from lip to lip. The future was swollen with the ghostly offspring of this almost denuded house.

  On this same day the earl of Northumberland, moving south with a force in arms, heard of his son’s death and of the battle lost and won, and drew back before the levies of the earl of Westmorland, his nephew and bitter rival, to his castle of Warkworth, there to contemplate his bereavement, and his inevitable submission to the king.

  And on this same day, while the prince lay retired in solitude and silence, nursing his wound, the mysterious, sourceless word began to be passed furtively through Shrewsbury, over market stalls, over counters, in the settles of inns and the backyards of houses, that Hotspur was not dead at all, but spirited away living from that bitter field by those who loved him exceedingly, and that he was now safely away into Wales with Mortimer and Glendower, and would come again with a new and terrible army to avenge his uncle’s death and his own passing defeat.

  There was also the small, strange matter of what could have happened to the earl of Worcester’s body, which had been left neglected for a while after the head was taken away, and now was nowhere to be found. Only the stain of his blood remained after the head had been despatched to London. And everyone knew
that Glendower was a wizard, and Hotspur, perhaps, more than mortal.

  It was John Norbury, the only man to be trusted with bad news, who brought the ghostly word to the king. Henry sat with tired, sagging eyelids, and jaw set like a man braced against nausea, and leaned his head upon his hand for a long time in silence. It was more than he could bear. Let there be no more dead men eternally climbing out of their graves and dogging his steps in their shrouds wherever he turned. Shrewsbury should learn by its own senses, England should learn by the stench and the putrefaction, that death could overtake even Hotspur. There was no other way with these defiers of the grave but to deprive them of a grave.

  He lifted his head, and looked up with sick, savage eyes into Norbury’s face.

  “John, take six men with you, and a horse litter, and ride to Whitchurch. In the vault of Furnival’s kinsfolk there you’ll find Percy’s body. Bring it back here and set it up under strong guard at the Cross. He shall never again set an ambush for me out of his tomb. Not Shrewsbury only, but the whole realm shall see how even Percy flesh can rot.”

  * * *

  The prince got out of his bed when he heard it, burning with fever, a bright, rose-coloured blotch of heat on one cheek, the bloated dressing of his wound on the other, wrapped his gown about him with shaky hands, and went down to plead with his father. It was the first time he had approached him since his appeal on Furnival’s behalf on the night following the battle, and but for this extreme distress he might have kept his bed and his privacy a week or so longer. Already he had stirred himself once that day, to give orders to some whom he trusted utterly to be his men and not his father’s, to have Worcester’s corpse quietly conveyed to certain cousins of the house, and to ask no questions as to how they meant to dispose of it, for what is not known cannot be told. But this was a dearer need. He went himself, thin and bright, and dropped to his knees beside the king’s chair, and would not be lifted up.

  “This you cannot do, upon grounds so trivial! You gave me your good word, now you take it back as though it weighed nothing. If you be not as light as you seem, send after, call them back! Do not so shame yourself and me, for I, too, gave my word.”

  “Child, what are you about?” Henry took him by the wrists and tried to lift him, aghast at his burning intensity. “You should not be out of your bed. Get up! This is foolish!”

  “Let him rest! Let rumour run its course, as it will. Fools will always make up stories, what hurt can they do you? Have you not enough advantage over him, seeing he is dead? The whispers of the whole world cannot bring him back. Let him rest in the grave!”

  “Fool boy, he will not rest! There’s no other way but this to lay him. They must see, they must be made to see, that he was mortal, and is gone to a mortal end.”

  It was on the boy’s tongue then to say outright: “They saw Richard, and yet they still believe him living, and you will still be haunted by him all the days of your life.” But he did not say it; there was too great a distance between them, and no bridge across the void capable of sustaining so much truth. Instead he said, with practical and chilling certainty: “If you do it, you undo any good you have gained, for they will hate you for it, and pity him, and you had best set a strong cordon about him, or they will have him away in spite of you, and give him clean burial.”

  The king in his despair forgot his son’s wound, his fever, and his youth, and took him roughly by the chin, jerking up his hectic face to the light. “You will see to it, I suppose? This is your intent, so to defy me? Is that your meaning?”

  “No,” said the boy, coldly and steadily. “God forbid I should force salvation upon you, if you will not be saved.” And he rose from his knees, knowing that argument and pleading were alike vain, and plucked his face from between his father’s hands so fiercely that the dressing was torn aside, and his wound bled again. He turned to leave the chamber, asking no permission and making no farewell, and fell like a felled sapling in the doorway, and was carried back to his bed.

  The wound is healing well enough,” said the surgeon, anxiously questioned, “if his Grace can be made to rest. But he’ll carry the scar of Shrewsbury to the day of his death.”

  * * *

  In the Trinity chapel of St. Mary’s church, by night, certain good friends to the earl of Worcester opened the tomb of the Leybourne family, once lords of Berwick, a family now extinct in the county, reverently lifted out the bones of two men and a child interred there, and laid beneath them, at the bottom of the grave, a rough wooden coffin hurriedly nailed together. Inside it, swathed in leather, lay the earl’s headless body. The Leybourne bones they carefully replaced above him, and closed the tomb. Nor was there wanting a priest to say the office over him. On the stone lid a Leybourne knight lay cross-legged and calm in his armour, a hundred years and more out of fashion. The iron crow with which they had opened the tomb had done some slight damage to the stonework at his feet; but if anyone ever noticed, he took care to say nothing. Worcester slept with strangers, but in dignity and peace.

  * * *

  After two days the prince rose from his bed, his fever gone. He had asked nothing and confided nothing; the last interview with his father might never have taken place. He was cool, courteous and apart.

  When he was ready—and by what strange and terrible process of thought and prayer and will he made himself ready no one knew—he went out and rode the short way up to the Cross from the castle gatehouse, and sat his horse there for many minutes, gazing earnestly at the spectacle the king had provided for the inhabitants of Shrewsbury.

  There were others standing gazing as well as himself, though it had already been there some days; and all of them were silent, and secret, keeping their thoughts close behind the masks of their faces as he did. There was no triumphing over this carrion exposed here between two millstones, and ringed by a dour-faced and formidable guard; rather a strong distaste, a large, inarticulate pity, and a deep and obstinate resentment, not against the dead enemy, but against the author of his defilement. And stranger still, infinitely strange, the body itself in its dusty decay, the ruin of nobility and valour and generosity, was not defiled. Everything that had been done to him his very corpse parried and returned triumphantly upon his conqueror. It was not the man to whom this thing had been done who stood humiliated and contemptible, but the man who had done this abominable thing to him.

  In the night there was a double guard set, so afraid were they of rescue. If the king felt insecure when he had that resplendent enemy enclosed in lead and stone, how much more did he dread him now that he had enlarged him, and how much more cause he had for dread now that he had himself turned all the sympathy he had enjoyed in this town into burning animosity, and all their earlier terror of Hotspur into awe-struck sympathy. A dead eagle he might have buried, but he had chosen rather to light a fire for a phoenix.

  For the first time the prince despised his father; and that was merciful, for if he had not, he would have had no choice but to hate him. But now he was liberated from hating, and if he could never love, at least he might some day be able to pity.

  He took his eyes at last from the poor relic that was not Hotspur, that could not touch the legend of Hotspur at any point, or by its slow corruption dim by so much as a breath his hectic glory. He rode back slowly with the sunlight on his face, and there were birds wheeling and soaring above his head, so high that they dwindled to silver sparks and vanished into the blue.

  The quarters of that dead wonder would soon be disseminated to all the regions of the realm as a warning to traitors, to vanish utterly at last into air, without need of obsequies or tomb, as though his fiery spirit had never had a body.

  Epilogue

  March 1413

  1

  The king opened his eyes in a room in the abbot’s lodging, where they had carried him after he had fallen senseless against the stone of St. Edward’s shrine in the abbey. He saw, but in a blurred double vision because his eyes were affected, a tapestry-hung chamber, a
nd two faces close to him, on the right his confessor bending solicitously over him, on the left the prince, erect, observant, dutiful and chill, as he had been all these past ten years, through all the vicissitudes and aggravations of their relationship, the alternate suspicion and affection, the terms of favour and the terms of disfavour. Always consistent, always loyal. But loyal to what? To some image of kingship, perhaps, kept private from other men.

  He asked, in a thread of a voice that hardly reached his own ears: “Joan?”

  “We have sent word to the queen, my liege,” said the priest gently. “She will come.”

  “What is this place?”

  “They call it the Jerusalem chamber. We carried you here from the church, to bring you to a place of rest.”

  A place of rest! No question but he was in need of such a place, and very near to it now. There had been little rest in his life since he first put on the crown. He turned his head in sudden disquiet, looking for it, for he had come in state to make his offering at St. Edward’s shrine. But it was there, on a cushion beside his pillow, where his eyes, however dim, could find it. Jerusalem! Yes, how fitting an allegory for a life of such early promise, long since dwindled into anticlimax and discouragement. He had been promised that he should die in Jerusalem, and he had dreamed of a glorious pilgrimage, a crusade to crown his achievement. And here he lay dying in the Jerusalem chamber in the abbot’s lodging at Westminster, in his bed—no, in a borrowed bed, like a beggar and a stray.

  What was that story they had of Hotspur, long ago, that he was to die at Berwick? Berwick by Shrewsbury, a hamlet no man from north of the Humber had ever heard of ! The wrong Berwick, the wrong Jerusalem! Why should he remember those linked destinies now, when he was bond, and the other was free? Freer than any man who lay sepulchred in the earth, for where he lay who could say, and the blowing abroad of his dust who could measure or control? A few bones had been conveyed to his widow at last, the fragments still tangible; but the rest of him was where? Not even the church and chantry chapel the king had founded over the mass grave on the battlefield, to pray for the souls of the dead, could lay for him the ghost of the man who had no grave. And those eyes that stared so straight and wide-set, and whose regard he could not sustain…