Lady of the Roses (26 page)

“The missive I bring informs more eloquently than I, my liege—” I held it out.

Marguerite nodded to Somerset. I placed the missive into his hand, and he bent his head to read. When he looked up, his eyes held an anxious expression. He came and knelt before Marguerite. She frowned in puzzlement as she gazed down on him.

“My queen, they hold my brother Edmund prisoner in Calais. If you execute Neville, Warwick threatens to slay Edmund. I beseech you for mercy and pray you to grant pardon of life to John Neville so that my brother may live.”

The queen stood motionless as fury, tenderness, and fear battled for supremacy. After a long moment, she said, “Rise, loyal Henri of Somerset. If this capture of Edmund can be proven true, John Neville will not be executed with the others.”

I curtseyed low and withdrew. Somerset escorted me outside. We stood looking at one another for a moment. “Where do you go now?” he inquired.

“I know not…maybe Eversleigh…maybe Bisham….”

“You cannot ride alone. You will need protection.” He motioned to the sentry and murmured some instructions, and the man hurried off. I heard him calling for Ursula and the horses.

“Isobel,” Somerset said in an odd yet gentle voice, taking my hand, “there is something I wish to say to you ere you go.”

I looked at him in surprise.

He drew a thick breath. “I was wrong about you. That wild quality which drew me to you, ’twas not recklessness, but courage. You are the most courageous woman I have ever known, Isobel. I owe you an apology for my discourteous—nay, my insolent—behavior of years past. I regret it.”

I was unnerved by the change in him and stood there baffled. “I don’t know what to say—”

“Say you forgive me.”

I wavered, trying to comprehend what I was hearing. Then I realized that here before me stood a man facing the harsh realities of war. “I forgive you,” I said softly.

Somerset kissed my hand and regarded me strangely. “God keep you, Isobel.”

The sentry returned with Ursula and the horses. Little Annie and Izzie were babbling with delight, excited about something, but what it was I did not know. Then I heard barking, and Rufus bounded to me out of the darkness and circled my skirts, giddy with joy. I bent down and gave him welcome. He must have fled into the woods during the fighting and returned to camp in search of John. When I looked up again, William Norris had appeared with a party of men, and my horse.

Somerset took Rose’s reins and helped me mount my palfrey. He passed me the reins and stood looking up at me for a long moment, his hand over mine. “Fear not,” he said under his breath. “John Neville is safe. You have my word.” He threw Norris a glance. “Take good care of her!” He gave Rose a slap on her rump, and she leapt forward.

When I looked back, he was gone.

I MADE MY WAY TO BISHAM LISTLESSLY, MY BODY
engulfed in tides of weariness and despair, my mind awash with tortured thinking. Was John cold or hungry? Was he in pain? Would he survive? William Norris was the perfect squire, courteous and attentive but unobtrusive, his demeanor offering no hint of his own feelings for me. Ursula and I spoke little, and chose our words carefully when we did. The only laughter came from the children, who chatted merrily with Norris and asked questions of the other men and even of Rufus trotting along beside us. We passed through many small towns on our way north, and I found the journey as arduous as when I had first come to court with Sœur Madeleine, perhaps because then, as now, I nursed an aching heart.

I was relieved that John was safe, but little else offered much solace. King Henry’s gentle face came and went before me as we climbed hills and descended into meadows…. Poor Henry. The events of the past months had unhinged his mind. A mild, simple, endearing man ordained a king in some jest of Fortune, he was no ruler, but a pathetic shadow of a king who passed without resistance into the hands of enemies and rescuers alike. He preferred mercy to justice but, mild and simple, he could give his land neither, for his actions were dictated by his wife.

My hands tensed around my reins. The half-mad smile on Marguerite’s face as she had ranted about the Duke of York had told me more than I ever wished to know. I thought of the beautiful and learned young woman I had first met. In Marguerite, cruel Fortune had played yet another jest on England. It had coupled a monk-king totally lacking in ambition with a proud, willful, and boundlessly ambitious consort, who wielded power ruthlessly and arrogantly. Her reach for absolute authority had torn England into two and turned her into a demented she-wolf whose bloody fangs could be appeased only by yet more blood. Her mind, like her husband’s, had become unhinged by events, but her insanity, unlike Henry’s, bore a dark and brooding quality.

I thought about Somerset, too. A strange sadness came and went. He was no longer the same man who had accosted me in the passageways of Westminster, but as to what had engendered the change, I did not ponder. As I had witnessed with Marguerite, life had a way of changing people.

If there was beauty in the landscape, I didn’t see it. We passed a woman who had covered herself with a sheet to keep out the cold wind, and a peasant in coarse cloth whose toes stuck out through the rags that wrapped his feet. We passed others working in the fields whose rough mittens, with worn-out fingers, were covered in mud. We passed beggars pleading for alms: one-legged beggars; one-armed beggars; one-eyed beggars; beggars with terrible, oozing sores. The wars had created a plethora of beggars.

For luncheon we rested our horses in Little King’s Hill, at a tavern in the market square, just past the churchyard, near a dyer’s shop releasing noisome waters from its vats. A few people sat eating. With a wary eye on my Lancastrian guard bearing the insignia of King Henry’s white swan, they conveyed without commentary the reports they had heard. Though they spoke in low tones, I heard their conversation and wished I had not. Marguerite’s little prince, Edward, resplendent in purple velvet and gold, had presided over the trial of Bonville, Berners, and Kyriell, the lords who had offered to remain behind to act as Henry’s bodyguards while the battle raged and to whom Henry had promised pardon. The king’s pardon was set aside, and the seven-year-old prince passed judgment of death on them. Then he watched their beheadings.

Across the street, a butcher came out of his shop with a cage of chickens. He removed one from the group and very methodically axed its head from its body and flung the decapitated trunk into the air. The hapless corpse flew some distance before dropping lifeless to the ground. Behind him, a cloud of flies disturbed by the commotion settled down again to banquet on a slab of meat hung to dry. My stomach clenched with full force.

At Bisham, the reeve received us with great joy, but when he learned that our escort was Lancastrian, he fell quiet, though he made them welcome with ale and sausages and dark rye bread, as I instructed. But the next morning, when I came to bid William Norris farewell, I found the reeve and some of Bisham’s younger female servants gathered around the party of Lancastrians, laughing and making merry. The reeve even offered to ride with them through town, to make sure they received safe passage out of Bisham, which was deeply loyal to Warwick. “Good that you came thro’ after dark,” he told them as he mounted his horse, “or that swan on your livery might have caused yer a spat o’ trouble.”

I went up to William Norris. I wanted to wish him a safe journey, peace, and a good and long life, but I did not. Our fates lay in the hands of capricious Fortune, and if he prospered, perhaps that meant that John would not. And so I merely thanked him and bid him Godspeed.

MOST OF BERKSHIRE HAD GONE OVER TO YORK
now, and the danger of threat from Lancastrians was past, so I rested well in Bisham, especially since I was reunited with my babe, Lizzie. From there the following week I made my way north to Burrough Green in Cambridgeshire, where I was born. I needed the comfort of my old home. The fortified manor house I had inherited from my father dated from Saxon times, and while it was not designed to keep out an army, it was certainly strong enough to protect us from the bands of marauders that posed the greatest threat.

Soon after we arrived, I left the household behind and went to the empty east wing, where I used to spend so much of my time as a child, running through its long halls and hiding from my nurse in its many nooks and crannies. Taking the familiar narrow passageway with a ceiling of multiple arches covered in red brick, I passed many of the chambers it serviced before pausing in front of a nook where a coffer used to stand. Laying my hands over the redbrick wall, I pushed gently. The false wall gave way, and I stood in a small room lit only by a narrow pane of window and the light that seeped through the floorboards of the room above. Before me, a rope dangled from a large round metal hook in the ceiling. I shut the door. As a child, I used to leap for the end of the rope; now I took it into my hands. Dropping my gown, I caught the rope and began to swing as I’d done when I was small. Twirling, twisting, I gathered force, and it seemed to me that I flew through the air with the freedom of a bird, and I was a girl again, running through the long grass, shrieking with delight, chased by my nurse. The world turned around me, and time took shape and form, and became a thing of substance. I felt its sensuous touch on me like silk, melting the years away. Again I heard my nurse’s complaint to my father:
She ran away and almost fell into a well. She’s too reckless for her own good. Let me tame her with the rod!
And my father’s reply:
Nay, there’s a fine line between recklessness and courage, and she’ll need all her courage to get through life.
Then a magical thing happened. I saw myself beside me, a laughing child of six, twirling and twisting and whirling on the rope in imitation of each movement I made, and from that child’s face as she laughed and twirled, I saw that time was touching her too, for she changed as I gazed, and innocence melted away, and then she was no more.

During the next weeks, I pored over the household accounts and carried on with my daily chores of household management. Tallying the candles, doling out the rushes, and darning the woolens, I struggled to manage expenses carefully, for there was never enough money. At night I worked on John’s cloak, embroidering more griffins so that it now had a wide border of them around the collar, and when I finally grew weary, I hugged it to me and fell asleep.

“Are we poor?” little Izzie asked me one day as Annie and Lizzie pressed close. I gathered my children to me and explained as best I could that we had to be careful until Papa came home again. “But don’t worry, poppets,” I said. “Mama will make sure you never go hungry.”

In these days I listened avidly to all tidings brought my way by those who passed though Burrough Green. With Warwick’s defeat and Sir John Wenlock’s flight to Calais, and with him the departure of the Duchess of York and Warwick’s family, there remained no one in London to urge the city to remain true to York.

“Yet despite this,” a visiting Kentish merchant told me, “and despite the rumors—no doubt put out by the queen—of the Earl of Warwick’s capture and of Yorkist outrages by Edward of March’s army marching on London, the city stands firm for York, and has barred its gates to her. All this despite the pleadings of the mayor and city magistrates, who are Lancastrian.” He shook his head in wonder, and I poured him more wine. After a long sip, he leaned close and added, “The land would rather part with Henry, whom they love, than put up with his queen, whom they hate!”

A friar from London came next. “On February twenty-seventh London flung its gates wide to Edward of March!” he announced. “On March first he was proclaimed king with the blessing of the archbishop of Canterbury!” With a glad heart I listened to the rest of his tidings.

“They sang and danced around him—” The old man rose from his chair and, lifting his skirts, performed a little jig.
“Let us walk in a new vineyard,”
he sang in a high voice, mimicking what he had heard,
“and make a gay garden in the month of March with this fair white rose, the Earl of March—la-de-he, la-de-he!”
I laughed and refilled his wine.

One day a carpenter from York on his way south to seek work at St. Albans stopped at our doors to beg a night’s shelter. “The queen has set up in York while she awaits to give battle,” he said. With an anxious heart, I asked him, as he awaited his supper, if he knew anything of my lord husband.

“’Tis said she holds Lord Montagu captive in the dungeon at York.”

I knew I should give thanks that John lived, but a dungeon—“You may pour yourself more wine,” I said heavily, and departed.

Days later, a minstrel arrived offering music for a night’s shelter. “My lord of Warwick has returned to London with men and reinforcements for Edward of March. They go north to fight the rest of the queen’s forces!” I served him a plate of mutton and potherbs, and had the servants bring him wine. Though he played his flute well and my spirits lifted somewhat, I was unsure of John’s fate and found it hard to rejoice. The last battle awaited. The sword would decide who wore the crown. And York could not afford to lose.

ABRUPTLY, ON THE SUNNY MORNING OF THE FIRST
day of April, as narcissus spread a yellow mantle across the fields, clarions sounded in the village. My breath caught in my throat. I ran to the window and peered into the distance, but I couldn’t see anything, for the trees were budding into leaf. Then Rufus stood up and barked wildly—and at that moment, a pennant came into view for just a bare instant. It was all I needed, for it bore the emerald green and silver of John’s griffin emblem. Screaming, I fled the room, frightening the servants. Seizing a stunned Annie and Izzie from the nook where they sat playing, I ran wildly from the house with my little ones under my arms, out the door, down the stony path, my hair flying.

At the head of his men, John saw me. Breaking loose from the others, he galloped to my side. Oblivious to his men, he slid from the saddle and whirled us around joyously before giving me a long, lingering kiss on the mouth.