The Lady of the Rivers Read online

  ock the road north and prepare the stand against Warwick and the boy who now calls himself king: Cecily Neville’s handsome son, Edward.

  The king rises to the danger he is in, his wits sharpened on the ride, and writes a letter to Edward’s army reproaching them for rebellion, and commanding them to come over to our side. The queen rides out every day with the prince, calling on men to leave their villages and their occupations and join the army and defend the country against the rebels and their rebel leader, the false king.

  Andrew Trollope, the royals’ best general, advises that the army should make its stand on a ridge, some fourteen miles south of York. He puts Lord Clifford as an advance guard to prevent the Yorks crossing the River Aire, and Clifford tears the bridge down, so that when the young Edward marches up the road from London there is no way across. Boldly, Edward orders his men into the water, and as the snow falls on them in the swirling current in the evening light, they work on the bridge, up to their waists in freezing water with the winter floods running strong. It is easy work for Lord Clifford to ride down on them, kill Lord Fitzwalter and wipe out the troop. Richard sends me a note:

  Edward’s inexperience has cost him dear. We have sprung the first trap, he can come on to Towton and see what we have for him here.

  Then I wait for more news. The queen comes to York Castle and we both put on our capes and go up Clifford’s Tower. The armies are too far away for us to see anything, and the light is failing, but we both look south.

  ‘Can’t you wish him dead?’ she asks. ‘Can’t you strike him down?’

  ‘Warwick?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head. ‘Warwick would change his coat, I know it. No, curse that boy Edward, who dares to call himself king.’

  ‘I don’t know how to do such things, and I never wanted to know. I’m not a witch, Margaret, I’m not even much of a wise woman. If I could do anything right now I would make my son and husband invulnerable.’

  ‘I would curse Edward,’ she says. ‘I would throw him down.’

  I think of the boy the same age as my son, the handsome golden-haired boy, the pride of Duchess Cecily’s &l. I think of him losing his temper in Calais, but his quick flush of shame when I told him that we had guarded his mother. I think of him bowing over my hand outside the queen’s rooms in Westminster. ‘I have a liking for him,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t ill-wish him. Besides, someone else will kill him for you, before the day is out. There has been enough killing, God knows.’

  She shivers and pulls up her hood. ‘It’s going to snow,’ she says. ‘It’s late in the year for snow.’

  We go to the abbey for dinner and the king leads her in through the great hall filled with his household. ‘I have written to Edward Earl of March,’ he says in his fluting voice. ‘I have asked for a truce for tomorrow. It is Palm Sunday, he cannot think of fighting a battle on Palm Sunday. It is the day of Our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem. He must want to be at prayer. We will all be at prayer on such a holy day, it is God’s will.’

  The queen exchanges a quick look with me.

  ‘Has he replied?’ I ask.

  He casts his eyes down. ‘I am sorry to say that he refused a truce,’ he says. ‘He will risk the fortunes of war, on the very day that Our Lord went into Jerusalem. Edward thinks to ride out on the very morning that Our Lord rode to His holy city. He must be a very hardened young man.’

  ‘He’s very bad,’ Margaret says, biting down on her irritation. ‘But it must be to our advantage.’

  ‘I shall order the Duke of Somerset not to give battle,’ the king tells us. ‘Our men should not make war on a Sunday, not on Palm Sunday. They must just stand in their ranks to show our faith in God. If Edward charges they must turn the other cheek.’

  ‘We have to defend ourselves,’ the queen says quickly. ‘And God will bless us all the more for defending ourselves against such a faithless act.’

  The king considers. ‘Perhaps Somerset should withdraw until Monday?’

  ‘He has a good position, Your Grace,’ I say gently. ‘Perhaps we should wait and see what is the outcome. You have offered a holy truce – that must be enough.’

  ‘I shall ask the bishop for his view,’ the king says. ‘And I shall pray tonight for guidance. I shall pray all night.’

  The king performs his vigil in the minster, the monks from the abbey coming and going in the great church as he prays. I go to bed but I am wakeful too; I cannot sleep for thinking of Richard and Anthony, out all night in the cold, a north wind blowing snow, with a battle coming tomorrow on a holy day.

  In the morning the sky is heavy and white as if the clouds are pressing down on the very walls of the city. At about nine o’clock it starts to snow, great white flakes swirling round in dizzy circles and lying on the frozen ground. The city seems to huddle down under the snowflakes, which come thicker and thicker.

  I go to the queen’s rooms and find her prowling around, her hands tucked in her sleeves for warmth. The king is praying at the abbey, she is giving orders for their goods to be packed up again. ‘If we win we will advance on London and this tie they will open the gates to me. Otherwise . . . ’ She does not finish the sentence, and both of us cross ourselves.

  I go to the window. I can hardly see the city walls, the snow is blinding, it is a blizzard blowing around and around. I put my hand over my eyes, I have a memory of a vision of a battle uphill in snow, but I cannot see the standards and I do not know, when the snow turns red, whose blood is staining the slush.

  We wait, all day we wait for news. One or two men come limping into York with wounds to be dressed and they say that we had a good position on the hillside but the snow made it hard for the archers, and impossible for the cannon. ‘He always has bad weather,’ the queen remarks. ‘The boy Edward always fights in bad weather. He always has a storm behind him. You would think he was born of bad weather.’

  They serve dinner in the hall but there is almost no-one there to eat – just the household staff who are too old or too frail to be pressed into service or are maimed from earlier battles in the queen’s service. I look at a serving man who is deft with his one remaining arm and I shudder as I think of my whole-limbed son, somewhere out in the snow, facing a cavalry charge.

  The queen sits proudly at the centre of the high table, her son at her side, and makes a tableau of eating. I am at the head of the table of her ladies and I push some ragout around my plate for the entire meal. Anyone who does not have a husband or a son or a brother in the field called North Acres eats with a good appetite. The rest of us are sick to our bellies with fear.

  In the afternoon a steady stream of men start to come in from the battle, the ones who can still walk. They tell of hundreds dying on the road to York, thousands dead on the battlefield. The abbey hospital, the poor men’s hospital, the leper hospital, all the sanctuaries and hostels throw open their doors and start to strap on rough bandages, pack wounds, and amputate. Mostly they start to stack dead bodies for burial. It is like a charnel house in York, the south gate sees a constant flow of men staggering like drunkards, bleeding like stuck calves. I want to go down to look in every face, for fear that I will see Richard or Anthony glaring sightlessly back, his face blown away by one of the new handguns or smashed to a pulp by an axe; but I make myself sit by the window in the queen’s apartments, some sewing in my hands, always listening for the roar and rumble of an approaching army.

  It gets dark; surely the day is over? Nobody can fight in the dark, but the bells toll for compline and still nobody comes to tell us that we have won. The king is on his knees in the abbey, he has been there since nine this morning and it is now nine o’clock at night. The queen sends his grooms of the bedchamber to fetch him from his prayers, feed him, and put him to bed. She and I wait up, by a dying fire, her feet up on her travelling box of jewels, her travelling cape laid over the chair beside her.

  We sit up all night, and at dawn, in the cold light of the earliest spring morning, there is a bang on th