The Lady of the Rivers Read online

  She glances at my shocked face and hurries to me. ‘Jacquetta, were you there? Not hurt?’

  ‘Your Grace, the Earl of Warwick was attacked in the council chamber itself,’ I say bluntly. ‘By men in the livery of Buckingham and Somerset.’

  ‘But not by me,’ the twenty-two-year-old duke says, as pert as a child.

  ‘Your men,’ my husband observes, his tone level. ‘And it is illegal to draw a sword in the royal court.’ He turns to the queen. ‘Your Grace, everyone will think this is ordered by you, and it is most treacherous. It was in the council chamber, in the demesne of the court. You are supposed to be reconciled. You gave your royal word. It is dishonourable. Warwick will complain and he will be right to do so.’

  She flushes at that and glances at the duke, who shrugs his shoulders. ‘Warwick doesn’t deserve an honourable death,’ he says pettishly. ‘He did not give my father an honourable death.’

  ‘Your father died in battle,’ Richard points out. ‘A fair fight. And Warwick has begged and been given your forgiveness, and paid for a chantry in your father’s name. That grievance is over and you have been paid for the loss of your father. This was an attack inside the safety of the court. How will the council do its business if a man risks his life attending? How will any of the York lords dare to come again? How can men of goodwill come to a council which attacks its own members? How can a man of honour serve such a rule?’

  ‘He got away?’ the queen ignores Richard to ask me, as if this is all that matters.

  ‘He got away,’ I say.

  ‘I should think he will get away all the way to Calais and you will have a powerful enemy in a fortified castle off your shores,’ Richard says bitterly. ‘And I can tell you that not one town in a hundred can be defended against attack on the south coast. He could sail up the Thames and bombard the Tower, and now he will think himself fre do so. You have broken his alliance for nothing and put us all in danger.’

  ‘He was our enemy at any time,’ young Somerset remarks. ‘He was our enemy before this.’

  ‘He was bound by a truce,’ Richard insists. ‘And by his oath of allegiance to the king. He honoured it. Attacking him in the council chamber releases him from both.’

  ‘We shall leave London,’ the queen rules.

  ‘That’s not the solution!’ Richard explodes. ‘You can’t make an enemy like this and think that all you need do is flee. Where will be safe? Tutbury? Kenilworth? Coventry? Do you think to abandon the southern counties of England altogether? Shall Warwick just march in? Is it your plan to give him Sandwich, as you have given him Calais? Shall you give him London?’

  ‘I shall take my son and go.’ She rounds on him. ‘And I shall raise troops, loyal men, and arm. When Warwick lands he will find my army waiting for him. And this time we will beat him and he will pay for his crime.’

  ON CAMPAIGN, SUMMER–AUTUMN 1459

  The queen is like a woman possessed by a vision. She takes the court with her to Coventry, the king in her train. He has no say in what happens now, he is startled by the failure of h

  is truce and the sudden rush into war. She defies advice to be careful, she can smell victory and she is eager for it. She enters Coventry with all the ceremony of a reigning king, and they bow to her as if she were the acknowledged ruler of the country.

  No-one has seen a Queen of England like this before. She is served on one knee, like a king. She sits under the royal canopy. She musters men, she demands a levy of every man from every county in England, ignoring the traditional way of raising an army which is that each lord calls out his own men. From Cheshire she recruits her own army, she calls it the prince’s army, and she distributes his own badge, the new livery of the swan. She calls his captains the Knights of the Swan and promises them a special place in the battle that is certain to come.

  ‘The swan children wore collars of gold and were hidden by their mother to appear like swans, and they all came back but one,’ I say, uneasy at her sudden love of this badge, at her invoking this old myth. ‘This is nothing to do with Prince Edward.’

  The prince looks up at me and beams one of his sudden radiant smiles. ‘Swan,’ he repeats. She has taught him the word. She has sewn two swan badges of silver on his collar.

  ‘You said you had seen the crown of England taken by a swan,’ she reminds me.

  I flush, thinking of the lie I told to hide the real vision, of my daughter Elizabeth laughing with a ring shaped like a crown on her finger. ‘It came to me like a daydream, Your Grace, and I warned you that it might mean nothing.’

  ‘I will take England, if I have to turn into a swan myself to do it.’

  We move to Eccleshall Castle fifty north of Coventry in September, and we are less and less like a court, more like an army. Many of the ladies in waiting have gone back to their homes as their husbands have been summoned to march with the queen militant. Some of them stay away. The few ladies who travel with me and the queen all have husbands in her rapidly growing army; we are like a baggage train on the march, not a court. The king is with us, and the prince; both of them go out daily to attend the musters of men as Margaret brings in more and more recruits that she houses in the buildings inside the castle walls and in tents in the fields around. She calls on the loyal lords to come to her support, she parades the young prince before them. He is only six years old, he rides his little white pony around the ranks of the men, straight-backed and obedient to his mother’s commands. His father comes to the castle gate, and holds up his hand as if blessing the thousands of men who are under his standard.

  ‘Is it the French?’ he asks me wonderingly. ‘Are we going to take Bordeaux?’

  ‘There is no war yet,’ I reassure him. ‘Perhaps we can avoid war.’

  Old James Touchet, Lord Audley, is to command the army, and Lord Thomas Stanley is to support him. Lord Audley comes to the queen with the news that the York lords are assembling their forces in England and mustering their men. They are planning to meet at York’s castle at Ludlow; and so the Earl of Salisbury will have to march south from his castle of Middleham, in the North of England, to Ludlow, on the borders of Wales. Lord Audley swears that we will catch him as he marches nearby, and take him by surprise as he hurries to join the other treasonous lords. Our forces will be about ten thousand men; thousands more will come with Lord Stanley. Salisbury has a force of less than half that number – he is marching to his death, hopelessly undermanned, and he does not know it.

  I find it a grim process, watching the men arm, check their weapons and their equipment, and form up in ranks. Elizabeth’s husband, Sir John Grey, on his beautiful horse, leads an armed band of his tenants on the two-day march from his home. He tells me that Elizabeth cried unstoppably as he left and seemed filled with foreboding. She asked him not to go, and his mother ordered her to her room, like a naughty child.

  ‘Should I have stayed with her?’ he asks me. ‘I thought it my duty to come.’

  ‘You are right to do your duty.’ I repeat the worn phrase which allows wives to release their husbands, and women to send their sons to war. ‘I am sure you are right to do your duty, John.’

  The queen appoints him as head of cavalry. Anthony, my heir and most precious son, comes from our home at Grafton and will fight alongside his father. They will ride to the battle and then dismount and fight on foot. The thought of my son in battle makes me so sick that I cannot eat for fear.

  ‘I am lucky,’ Richard says stoutly to me. ‘You know I am lucky, you have seen me ride out to a dozen battles and I always come safe home to you. I will keep him at my side, he will be lucky too.’

  ‘Don’t say it! Don’t say it!’ I put my hand over his mouth. ‘It’s to tempt fate. Dear God, do you have to go out this time?’

  ‘This time, and every time, until the country is at peace,’ my husband says simply.

  ‘But the king himsehas not commanded it!’

  ‘Jacquetta, are you asking me to turn traitor? Do you want me to wear a whi