The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  Anthony wraps his cloak around him and lies down near to the king. “George and Richard together?” he asks softly of Hastings.

  “I would trust George as far as I would throw a cat,” Hastings says quietly. “But I would trust young Richard with my life. He will keep his brother on our side until battle is joined. And won, God willing.”

  “Bad odds,” says Anthony thoughtfully.

  “I’ve never known worse,” Hastings says cheerfully. “But we have right on our side, and Edward is a lucky commander, and the three sons of York are together again. We might survive, please God.”

  “Amen to that.” Anthony crosses himself, and goes to sleep.

  “Besides,” Hastings says quietly to himself, “there’s nothing else we can do.”

  I do not sleep in the sanctuary at Westminster, and my mother keeps a vigil with me. A few hours before dawn, when it is at its very darkest and the moon is going down, my mother swings open the casement window and we stand side by side as the great dark river goes by. Gently I breathe out into the night and in the cold air my breath makes a cloud, like a mist. My mother beside me sighs and her breath gathers with mine and swirls away. I breathe out again and again, and now the mist is gathering on the river, gray against the dark water, a shadow on blackness. My mother sighs, and the mist is rolling out down the river, obscuring the other bank, holding the darkness of the night. The starlight is hidden by it, as the mist thickens into fog and starts to spread coldly along the river, through the streets of London, and away, north and west, rolling up the river valleys, holding the darkness into the low ground, so that even though the sky slowly lightens, the land is still shrouded, and Warwick’s men, on the high ridge outside Barnet, waking in the cold hour before dawn, looking down the slope for their enemy, can see nothing below them but a strange inland sea of cloud that lies in heavy bands along the valley, can see nothing of the army that is enveloped and silent in the obscuring darkness beneath them.

  “Take Fury,” Edward says to the page quietly. “I fight on foot. Get me my battle-axe and sword.” The other lords—Anthony, George, Richard, and William Hastings, are already armed for the slugging terror of the day, their horses taken out of range, saddled and bridled, prepared—though no one says it—for flight if everything should go wrong, or for a charge if things go well.

  “Are we ready now?” Edward asks Hastings.

  “As ready as ever,” William says.

  Edward glances up at the ridge, and suddenly says, “Christ save us. We’re wrong.”

  “What?”

  The mist is broken for just a small gap and it shows the king that he is not drawn up opposite Warwick’s men, troop facing troop, but too far to the left. The whole of Warwick’s right wing has nothing against them. It is as if Edward’s army is too short by a third. Edward’s army overlaps slightly to the left. His men there will have no enemy: they will plunge forward against no resistance and break the order of the line, but on his right he is far too short.

  “It’s too late to regroup,” he decides. “Christ help us that we are starting wrong. Sound the trumpets; our time is now.”

  The standards lift up, the pennants limp in the damp air, rising out of the mist like a sudden leafless forest. The trumpets bellow, thick and muffled in the darkness. It is still not dawn, and the mist makes everything strange and confusing. “Charge,” says Edward, though his army can hardly see his enemy, and there is a moment of silence when he senses the men are as he is, weighted down with the thick air, chilled to their bones with the mist, sick with fear. “Charge!” Edward bellows, and plows his way uphill, as with a roar his men follow him to Warwick’s army, who, starting up out of sleep, eyes straining, can hear them coming, and see glimpses now and then, but can be certain of nothing until, as if they have burst through a wall, the army of York with the king, toweringly tall, at their head, whirling a battle-axe, comes at them like a horror of giants out of the darkness.

  In the center of the field the king presses forward and the Lancastrians fall back before him, but on the wing, that fatal empty right side, the Lancastrians can push down, bear down, outnumbering the fighting York army, hundreds of them against the few men on the right. In the darkness and in the mist the outnumbered York men start to fall, as the left wing of Warwick’s army pushes down the hill, and stabbing, clubbing, kicking, and beheading, forces its way closer and closer to the heart of the Yorkists. A man turns and runs, but gets no farther than a couple of paces before his head is burst open by a great swing from a mace, but that first movement of flight creates another. Another York soldier, seeing more and more men pouring down the hill towards them and with no comrade at his side, turns and takes a couple of steps into the safety and shelter of the mist and the darkness. Another follows him, then another. One goes down with a sword thrust through his back, and his comrade looks behind, his white face suddenly pale in the darkness, and then he throws down his weapon and starts to run. All along the line men hesitate, glance behind them at the tempting safety of the darkness, look ahead and hear the great roar of their enemy, who can sense victory, who can hardly see their hands before their faces but who can smell blood and smell fear. The unopposed Lancastrian left wing races down the hill, and the York right flank dare not stand. They drop their weapons and go like deer, running as a herd, scattering in terror.

  The Earl of Oxford’s men, fighting for Lancaster, are on their trail at once, baying like hunting dogs, following the smell since they are still blind in the mist, with the earl cheering them on until the battlefield is behind them and the noise of the battle muffled in the fog, and the fleeing Yorkists lost, and the earl realizes that his men are running on their own account, heading for Barnet and the ale shops, already settling to a jog, wiping their swords and boasting of victory. He has to gallop around them to overtake them, block the road with his horse. He has to whip them, he has to have his captains swear at them and chivvy them. He has to lean down from his saddle and run one of his own men through the heart, and curse the others before he can bring them to a standstill.

  “The battle isn’t done, you whoresons!” he yells at them. “York is still alive, so is his brother Richard, so is his brother the turncoat George! We all swore the battle would end with their deaths. Come on! Come on! You have tasted blood, you have seen them run. Come and finish them, come and finish the rest. Think of the plunder on them! They are half beaten, they are lost. Let’s make the rest run, let’s make them skip. Come on, lads, come on, let’s go, let’s see them run like hares!”

  Driven into order and persuaded into ranks, the men turn and the earl dashes them at a half run back from Barnet towards the battle, his flag before him with its emblem of the Streaming Sun proudly raised. He is blinded by the mist, and desperate to rejoin Warwick, who has promised wealth to every man at his side today. But what de Vere of Oxford does not know, as he leads his troop of nine hundred men, is that the battle lines have swung round. The breaking of the York right wing and their pressing forward of their left has pushed the battlefield off the ridge, and the line of battle now runs up and down the London road.

  Edward is at the heart of it still; but he can feel he is losing ground, dropping back off the road as Warwick’s men push them harder and harder. He starts to feel the sense of defeat, and this is new to him: it tastes like fear. He can see nothing in the mist and the darkness but the attackers who come, one after the other, out of the mist before him, and he responds with the instincts of a blind man to the rush of the men who come, and then come again, and again, with a sword or an axe or sometimes a scythe.

  He thinks of his wife and his baby son, waiting for him and depending on his victory. He has no time to think what will happen to them if he fails. He can feel his own soldiers around him, giving way, as if they are being thrust back by the sheer weight of Warwick’s extra men. He can feel himself wearying at the unstoppable approach of his enemies, the constant demand that he should swing, thrust, spear, kill: or be killed. In the rh