Loyalty (21 page)

   Christ, what was he thinking? “Sound the advance!” he cried, buckling on his helm, “and let no man falter. Forward!”

   He moved down the slope at the head of his retainers, battle-axe in hand. It was many years since Warwick had fought in person, not since Northampton, where he won a great victory over the Lancastrians.

   Now he led his men to save the day for Lancaster. Who was he, really? Whom did he serve?

   The answer to that was straightforward enough. “A Warwick! A Warwick!” he shouted, and broke into a run. His men followed suit.

   The close-packed ranks of billmen in Montagu’s livery parted as he charged. They were fearful and confused, huddled together like sheep, their nerve shot to pieces.

   “To me!” Warwick exhorted them, “rally to me! A Warwick!”

   Few responded, but he had no time to waste on rallying his brother’s men. He carried on down the slope, towards the shouts and screams.

   Cries of “treason!” echoed inside his helm. Soldiers fled past him, throwing away their bows and bills and halberds, brave men reduced to terrified children.

   “Treason!” they shouted, “treason! We are betrayed!”

   He made out his brother’s standard, still flying in the middle of a knot of Montagu’s retainers. They were bunched in a circle, pole-axes lowered to ward off an attack from any side.

   The ground trembled, and the thunder of galloping hoofs rent the air. Horsemen appeared, huge and terrible in their gleaming armour, banners waving and lances lowered.

   They were led by a gigantic figure on a pale white destrier. The Plantagenet arms blazed on his surcoat, and he wore a slender golden coronet on his helm.

   “The King,” Warwick whispered. Edward of March was leading a charge at the head of his household knights to break the wavering Lancastrian line.

   Warwick and his men were too late and too few to repel the charge. The Yorkist knights crashed into the remnants of Montagu’s division, and for a few seconds all was dust and noise, war-yells and shrieking horses and splintering lances.

   “Forward!” shouted Warwick, waving his men into the fray, “charge! A Warwick!”

   He hung back while the bravest of his followers hurled themselves into the fight. Edward’s knights had smashed Montagu’s apology for a battle-line, and now rode among the dogged survivors, doing terrible execution with sword and axe, mace and lance.

   Montagu’s standard still flew, protected by a handful of loyal knights, but then a dreadful cry went up:

   “John Neville, slain! John Neville, slain!”

   The cry was taken up by the Yorkist knights. Their exultant shout echoed and re-echoed across the field, filling Edward’s battered troops with new fire.

   Warwick did not see his brother fall, but the knowledge of his death hit him like a fist to the stomach. He felt it instinctively, the loss of his kinsman, one who had fought for and against him. Whether playing friend or foe in the great game of war and politics, the two men had always put the interests of their family first.

   Now Montagu – John - was gone, chopped down on this hellish battlefield. Warwick had no time for sorrow, but the last reserves of his morale collapsed. Leaving his men to their fate, he turned and struggled back up the slope.

   The triumphant shouts of his enemies sounded like mocking laughter inside the stifling prison of his helm. Careless of the risk, he fumbled with the straps, tore the helm from his head and threw it away. His axe, nothing more than a useless weight now, flew after it.

   A few men remained on the crest of the hill, beardless esquires and wounded men-at-arms who had crawled there for respite. Fugitives from the battle streamed past them, still shouting treason and betrayal.

   Warwick stopped, panting, and wiped the sweat from his eyes to look over the field. The fog still hid all from view, though the sound of vicious fighting in front of him and to his left suggested that the Lancastrian army was not yet broken beyond repair.

   “Oxford,” he muttered, “where in God’s name is Oxford?”

   In his mind he was already formulating excuses for his defeat, drawing up a list of those to blame for it.

   The trickle of fugitives was rapidly becoming a flood. Wounded and terrified survivors from the shattered ruins of Montagu’s division came stampeding up the slope. Not just Montagu’s men – soldiers wearing Exeter’s badge were among them.

   “The duke is down!” Warwick heard them cry. “Our lord is slain! Fly, fly!”        

    Exeter was slain. Montagu was slain. Oxford had vanished. The battle was lost, and all Warwick’s thoughts turned to survival.

   He had ordered the horses be taken to the rear, so the infantry could see that their lords mean to fight on foot alongside them. The hill was crowned by a little wood, and the horses had been taken there, protected, if that was the word, by Warwick’s priests.

   Warwick made for the trees now, lumbering up the slope as fast as he could inside his weight of armour. His destrier, Black Saladin, was tethered just inside the wood, attended by a single page, fresh and ready to carry him away from this disaster.

   Even as he ran, fresh schemes formed in his mind. His army might be destroyed, but Queen Margaret had another just across the Channel, waiting to sail. Perhaps her fleet had put to sea already.

   He knew that Margaret planned to land at Weymouth, where she would be joined by Somerset and Courtenay and other supporters. Lord Wenlock, Warwick’s old comrade who had once warned him not to enter Calais, would also be with her. Warwick would flee to the south-west and join them. And the next time he met his former friend Edward of March in battle, it would be in the broad light of day, with no thrice-cursed fog.

   The wood was further than he thought. Shouts and screams erupted behind him. They were uncomfortably close. Warwick’s army had collapsed, and now the rout had started. This was when the real butcher’s work occurred, when one side gave way, threw down their weapons and turned their backs to flee.

   Puffing and sweating, he had gained the edge of the trees. Black Saladin was less than twenty yards ahead, still tethered to her tree, though the page had vanished. The priests had also made themselves scarce.

   No matter. At that moment, a good horse was of more use to Warwick than a thousand holy men.

   “Here is one of them!”

   A voice screeched in his ear, and a pair of strong arms wrapped round his neck. Warwick got his gauntleted hands up in time to block the knife as it slashed for his throat.

   Gripping the blade with one hand, he reached up with the other and grabbed a handful of hair. His assailant yelled in pain, and for a moment they staggered back and forth in an absurd wrestling match. Warwick tried to throw the man over his shoulder, but the weight was too much. 

   More men bore down on him, many more, like hounds converging on a cornered stag. They seized hold of his arms and legs, trying to pull him down.

   “Get him down,” they shouted, “get him on his back.”

   Warwick was a reasonably strong man, but he could not hope to resist so many. Cursing, blinded by fingers groping at his eyes, he was tripped up and thrown onto his back.

   He tried to rise, but a man straddled his chest. The hand over his eyes lifted, and he stared up at coarse peasant features, dirty and unshaven, bad teeth fixed in a snarl, eyes blazing with hatred.

   “Mercy!” Warwick shouted, holding up his arm in vain to ward off the killing blow, “I am Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, you cannot slay me! I have money, plenty of money. I can pay a ransom. The king will want me alive…the king…”

   A knife flashed down into his eyeball. Pain and darkness flooded in, and he knew nothing more.

Chapter 20

Honfleur, 13
th
April

God had once again withdrawn His favour from the House of Lancaster. Having cast the sun of York into the dust, He now chose to cover the waters of the Channel in darkness for sixteen days and nights, and send endless storms and frightful gales to render the sea impassable.

   From the Queen’s base at the port of Honfleur, Mary sat beside the window of her modest lodgings in the town, overlooking the harbour, and watched the wrath of God transform the formally placid waters into a boiling cauldron.

   Sixteen days and nights. There was something Biblical about it, though others whispered that the atrocious weather was caused by witchcraft. The more credulous among the Lancastrians held that Edward of March’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had employed hags to stand on the cliffs of Dover and cast spells upon the waves. After all, Gloucester was famously misshapen in body, and physical deformity was a sure sign of the Devil’s mark. 

   Mary was a devout woman. She did not doubt the existence of the black arts, but could scarcely believe that Gloucester would stoop to such a tactic.

   “They say he is a pious man,” she remarked to her companion over supper, “I have heard, from those who have seen the duke in the flesh, that his deformities are much exaggerated.”

   Sir John Dacre smiled. “I saw him once, in London,” he said, “a pale little fellow, stuck up on a destrier too big for him. There was no obvious deformity. Apparently he has a slight twist in his spine.”

   Mary attended to her meal. Not that there was much to attend to. The money grudgingly doled out by King Louis for the Queen of England to support her household was not excessive, and lesser folk like Mary received the bare minimum to eat and live.

   “Let’s not speak of the Duke of Gloucester any more,” she said, dipping her spoon into a bowl of lukewarm broth, “he reminds me of the war, and the dangers my brothers must be facing.”

   “Of course,” Dacre said hurriedly. He was still too eager to please. Mary would have preferred him to show her slightly less respect, but could hardly say so.

   She glanced out of the window. Rain pelted at the glass, and the turbulent sky was black as ink, illuminated by the occasional stab of lighting.   

   “God preserve me,” she sighed, “I would give much, for a little news from England. The war is raging at home, and here we sit, powerless to intervene.”

   “The storm will break soon,” Dacre said confidently, “it must break.”

   He reached across the table to lay his hand on hers. “Your brothers are safe. I know it. They are shielded by your constant prayers.”   

   “Much good my prayers will do against swords and arrows,” she replied with some asperity, but did not withdraw her hand.

   Dacre had been paying court to her for weeks now. In stark contrast to their first meeting in the garden at Angers, when he had been too forward too soon, he now approached her with polite caution and delicacy.

   As a result he had become more like a useful acquaintance than a lover. Mary was conscious that some of Dacre’s friends looked at her with disapproval, thinking that she took him for granted, but was unable to offer him anything more. The Queen also disapproved, for it had been her idea to match widower to widow, but had more pressing matters to attend to.

   Mary’s thoughts were turning increasingly to God, and the solace of the convent. When this latest war was over, and she owed no more to her family or the future, she would decide whether or not to retreat from the world.

   There was, of course, another person to be considered before any decision was made. Her eyes strayed from the window to her daughter, playing in the corner with a pair of toy wooden knights. A French esquire had carved them for her, and the lances were made so they detached from their holders when the knights were banged together.

   For a girl, Elizabeth had a great fondness for playing with such martial toys, and little for the company of her own sex.

  
A typical Bolton female
, Mary thought fondly. She dimly recalled her own childhood, running wild with her brothers and their friends.

   One such friend had been Geoffrey Malvern. Geoffrey and her late brother Richard were fast friends, but somehow that all changed when they grew to adulthood. The war had poisoned them against each other. 

   Now Richard was dead, killed in battle, his remains shovelled into an unmarked grave somewhere near Empingham. Presumably Malvern still lived, though as a staunch Yorkist he might have suffered in recent times. Mary hoped so. She hoped he was dead, and his soul reunited in peace and happiness with Richard’s in Heaven.

   “Mary, what ails you?”

   Dacre’s voice was full of concern. She lifted a hand to her cheek, and was surprised to find that she was crying.      

   “It is nothing,” she said, quickly brushing away the tears, “I merely wish England at peace again, my brothers safe, and me and my daughter with them.”

   “England cannot be at peace,” he said, “until wiped clean of traitors. It will happen. God does not allow treachery to prosper.”

   “You think so? He has allowed it to prosper well enough, these past ten years. He has given the Yorkists victory after victory. Sometimes, when I am at my weakest, I wonder…”

   She stopped. This was revealing her innermost thoughts, and she didn’t want to discuss such things with Dacre. Not yet. It felt like a betrayal of her husband, a man Mary had grown to love in death far more than she did in life.