Ravenspur: Rise of the Tudors (2 page)

In the fifteenth century, two great houses of England were bound by blood. The older line, Lancaster, held the throne for three generations – until King Henry VI fell ill. The lesser line, York, snatched up the reins then – and war followed.

There could not be two kings. Edward of York joined with Earl Warwick to settle the issue on the battlefield in 1461. The house of Lancaster was defeated. Queen Margaret fled to France with her son, leaving her husband, Henry, to be held in the Tower of London.

King Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville, who turned him against Earl Warwick. After endless provocations, Warwick snapped and captured Edward, holding him prisoner. Warwick also allowed the king’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence, to marry his daughter.

Though Warwick freed Edward in the end, their friendship never recovered. Edward acted on accusations of treason against Warwick, sending men to arrest him.

At the end of the events in
Bloodline
, Warwick ran. He left England with his heavily pregnant daughter and his son-in-law, George of Clarence. Denied safe harbour, the child was born and died at sea. Warwick and Clarence were made exiles in France, rejected by friends and family.

The French king, Louis XI, saw a rare chance. He gave Warwick and Clarence an army of mercenaries – and the ships to
land them. They returned to the coast of England in September 1470. Leaves of gold and red and white had been swept up in a great gale, so that no one knew how they would land. The season of vengeance had begun.

The river bent a tail around Pembroke Castle. Winter sun shone red against the walls and the keep rose above the rest, tall as a cathedral, and about as proud.

On the path by the gatehouse, the stranger rested his hands on his saddle pommel, rubbing a thumb along a line of broken stitching. His horse was tired, the animal’s head drooping as it found nothing to eat on stones. Compared to the guards staring down, Jasper Tudor was as dark as a shepherd. His hair was thick with road-dust, like matted cloth. It hung to his shoulders, keeping his face in shadow as the sun set and the day began to die around him. Though he was weary, his eyes were never still, watching every movement on the wall. Each time a guard turned his head to the inner yard, or glanced at an officer below, Jasper saw and listened and judged. He knew when news of his presence had summoned the master of the castle. He knew how many steps that man had to climb to reach the outer gate, barred in iron and just the first of a dozen defences against an attack.

Jasper counted under his breath, distracting himself from the anger he felt just at being in that place. He imagined each turn of the stone steps within and his mouth quirked when he saw William Herbert arrive on the crenellations. The young earl looked down at him, strong emotion making him mottled. The new master of Pembroke was just seventeen years old, a red-faced brawler, still reeling from the death of his father. It seemed Earl Herbert did not much like the sight of the dark and wiry man looking up at him. That much was
clear from his expression and the way he gripped the stone with his thick hands.

Jasper Tudor had been the Earl of Pembroke once, a dozen years before. It was hard not to bristle when a man half his age looked down upon him in arrogance from his own walls.

Earl William Herbert merely stared for a time, his eyes pinched small as if he had swallowed something that irked him. The younger man had a wide head, not fat but broad, topped by sleek hair cut straight across. Under that gaze, Jasper Tudor inclined his head in greeting. It would have been hard enough to deal with the father, had the man lived.

The older Herbert had not died well, giving no new honours to his family line. He had not lost his life in some valiant action, but had been cut down without thought when Warwick had captured King Edward. That small loss, ignored at the time, had been eclipsed by the greater sin of Warwick laying hands on the king. In Pembroke, it had meant an entire town in mourning.

In the gathering gloom, Jasper Tudor swallowed nervously. Glints of light appeared and vanished in stone slots along the walls, as men in armour shifted their weight. He knew he had gained no advantage by spotting them. No one could outride a bolt.

Clouds drove across the sky, lit from beneath by the last of the sun. Above, the new earl lost patience at last with the silence. For all it cost him a slight advantage, for all his grief and dominance, there were not many seventeen-year-olds who could have matched the stone-like calm of a man at forty.

‘
Well?
What do you want here, Master Tudor?’ The young earl seemed to find some small pleasure in the lack of a noble title. Jasper Tudor was King Henry’s half-brother. He had been raised high by the house of Lancaster, and in return he
had fought for them. He had taken the field against the eighteen-year-old Edward of York, the giant still weeping in rage for the death of his father. Jasper repressed a shudder at the memory of that monster in red armour, carmine as the sun on Pembroke walls.

‘I give you God’s good day and recommend me to you. I have sailed from France to this coast, running ahead of all news. Have you heard yet from London?’

‘Does it so stick in that Welsh throat to call me lord?’ William Herbert demanded. ‘I am the Earl of Pembroke, Master Tudor. If you’re at my gate to beg for food or coin, you will be disappointed. Keep your news. Your Lancaster mobs and your ragged,
prisoner
king have no claim on me. And my father gave his life in defence of the
rightful
king of England, Edward of York.’ The young man’s mouth turned up on one side, twisting his face. ‘While you, Tudor, I believe you were
attainted
, losing all honour, titles, property. I should have you struck down at this moment! Pembroke is mine. All that was my father’s, is
mine
.’

Jasper nodded as if he had perhaps heard a point worth considering. He saw bluster in the young man, covering weakness. Once more, he wished he could have dealt with the old earl, who had been a man of honour. Yet that was the way of it, when wars began. Good men died and left their sons to follow them, for better or worse. Jasper shook his head, swinging the clotted locks of his hair. He was one of those sons himself, perhaps a lesser man than his father, Owen. Worse, in the years of his exile, Jasper had found no wife nor made sons of his own. If the French king hadn’t granted him a stipend as his cousin, Jasper thought, there was a chance he would have starved to death, alone and penniless. Yet he had remained loyal, to King Henry, and to Queen Margaret of Anjou, in all her despair and her fall.

Jasper looked down for a moment, his hopes fading under the earl’s scorn. Yet he stood before Pembroke, and that old place had been his. It still rang with an aching familiarity and gave him some strange comfort just from being there, tempting him to reach out and touch the stone. He could not allow himself to be shamed in sight of those walls. He raised his head once more.

There was still one whom he loved within the fortress, as well as any father loved a son, and the real reason for his visit. Jasper Tudor had not come to Pembroke for accusations or vengeance. The tide of men’s affairs had called him home from France and he had asked permission of Warwick to take the time for a private errand. As the great fleet braved the open sea, his ship alone had set off into the west.

Jasper looked along the length of the battlements and saw no sign yet of his brother’s son, kept for fourteen years as a ward, or a prisoner.

‘I used to think Pembroke was a different world from all the busyness in London, all the doings and the trade,’ Jasper said, raising his voice to carry. ‘Two hard weeks on the road, with a string of horses. It can be done, but it is no easy task. And in the winter, the roads are such a quagmire, it is better to sail round the Cornish coast, though it takes at least as long and is more perilous. For myself, I fear those winter storms that can tear a ship’s hull open and drown all those who risk their lives on deep waters, God bless their souls.’

The words flowed from him, making the eyes of the earl grow glassy until the young man shook his head in confusion.

‘You will not enter here, Master Tudor,’ Earl Herbert snapped, losing the last threads of his patience. ‘Play no more of your Welsh games; I will not open my gate to you. Say what you have come to say and then go back to your
damp woods and your camps and your poaching of hares. Live like the grubby, starving brigand you are, while I enjoy Pembroke and roast lamb and all the comforts of King Edward’s trust.’

Jasper rubbed his jaw with the back of his thumb to keep a flash of anger from showing. He loved Pembroke still, every stone and arch and hall and musty storeroom, filled with wine and grain and preserved haunches of sheep and goats. He had hunted the land all around and Pembroke was home to him in a way that had a greater claim than anywhere else in the world. It had been a dream as a child that he might one day own a fine lord’s castle. When it had actually come true, Jasper Tudor had been satisfied. There was no greater dream, not for the son of a soldier.

‘Whether you have heard or not,
my lord
, the tide is turned. Earl Warwick has come home with a fleet and an army.’ Jasper hesitated, searching for the right words. The young earl watching him had leaned right out on hearing that name, gripping the stones so hard it looked as if he wanted to break a piece off and hurl it at him. Jasper went on slowly, making the words fall far from the gatehouse.

‘They will restore Lancaster, my lord. They will lay a hot iron over the wounds, ending York. I speak not to threaten, but to give you the good word so that you may choose a side, perhaps before anyone asks again with a sword in their hands. Now, I have come for my nephew, my lord. For Henry Tudor, son of my brother Edmund and Margaret Beaufort. Is he well? Is he safe within?’

As the Earl of Pembroke opened his mouth to reply, Jasper saw movement along the wall at last, a white face, surrounded by thick black hair. The boy, surely, not yet with a man’s growth. Jasper gave no sign he had seen.

‘
You
have no claim on him,’ William Herbert snapped,
showing his teeth. ‘My father paid a thousand pounds to gain a ward. I can see the ragged edge of your cloak, Tudor. I can see the grease and dust on you from here. Can you return that thousand pounds to me?’ The young man’s sneering grin vanished as Jasper Tudor reached behind him to a parcel of canvas and leather strapped to the small of his back. He pulled it out and shook it to jingle the gold coins within.

‘I can,’ he said, though there was no triumph in his voice. He could see the scorn in the earl and he knew it would not matter.

‘Oh yes? Do you also have …’ William Herbert’s mouth worked as if some thick clot of rage had closed his throat ‘…
the years
spent on his training in that bag of yours? Do you have my father’s time? His trust?’ The words spilled out faster, his confidence returning. ‘It looks too small for all of that, Tudor.’

The young earl’s will would prevail, no matter what was said, or who had the better of the exchange. One man could not force the door of Pembroke. Ten thousand could not.

With a sigh, Jasper shoved the pack out of sight once more. At least the French king would not own him once he had returned the loan. He rubbed his forehead as if in tiredness, hiding his eyes from the man thirty feet above him so he could flicker a glance at his nephew. Jasper did not want the boy seen and sent away. If he addressed him directly, he sensed enough spite in William Herbert to make his nephew’s life a misery, or even put it in peril. When Jasper spoke again, it was as much for the ears of Henry Tudor as it was to the new earl in Pembroke.

‘This is a chance to earn a little goodwill, my lord,’ he called up. ‘The past is the past, all our fathers gone to tombs. You stand now where once I stood as earl – and Pembroke is yours. The years turn,
my lord
, and we cannot take back a day,
or return one
hour
to make a better choice when we had the chance.’ He took heart from the earl’s silence, feeling that the young man was at least not yelling curses and threats.

‘Edward of York is away in the north, my lord, far from his armies and palaces. And now it is too late for him!’ Jasper went on proudly, making his voice ring out for all ears. ‘Warwick is returned to England! With a vast host raised in Kent and Sussex, aye, and France. Men such as he have even kings bend close to listen when they speak. They are a different breed to you and me, my lord. Look you, Earl Warwick will bring Henry of Lancaster from the Tower to rule again.
There
is your rightful king – and he is my half-brother! Now, I would like to take my nephew to London, my lord. I ask you to pass him into my care, in good faith and in trust of your mercy. I will repay your father’s investment in him, though it be all I have.’

While they had spoken, torches and shuttered lamps had appeared along the walls, seeming to snatch away the last of the day’s light. Lit by a flickering gold, William Herbert waited only an instant when the entreaty came to an end.

‘No,’ he called down. ‘There’s my answer. No, Tudor. You’ll have nothing from my hand.’ The earl was enjoying his power over the ragged man at his gate. ‘Though I might have my men take your coins from you, if that was not one of your lies. Are you not a brigand on my road? How many have you robbed and murdered to gather so much coin, Tudor? You Welsh hedge-lords are all thieves, it’s well known.’

‘Are you so much a
fool
, boy?’ Jasper Tudor roared up at the younger man, making him splutter in outrage. ‘I have told you the tide has turned! I came to you with an open hand, with a fair offer. Yet you bleat at me and threaten me still, from behind the safety of your walls? Is that your courage
then, in the stone under your hands? If you will not give up my nephew, then open your ears, boy! I will put you under the cold ground if you harm him in any way. Do you understand me? Deep under the earth.’ Though he spoke in apparent rage, Jasper Tudor shot a glance to the fourteen-year-old nephew watching him from the battlements further down the wall. He held his nephew’s gaze until he sensed William Herbert craning round to see what had caught his attention. The face vanished. Jasper could only hope his message had been understood.

‘Serjeant Thomas!’ the young Earl of Pembroke called in imperious tones. ‘Take half a dozen men and ride down this brigand on my road. He has not shown sufficient respect to a king’s earl. Be thou
ungentle
with this Welsh bastard. Spring a little blood from him, then fetch him back to me for punishment.’

Jasper cursed under his breath as great thumps and cracks sounded within the castle gatehouse, along with the rattle of enormous chains. Soldiers raced up to the walls on all sides to check the environs for any force in hiding. Some of them carried crossbows and Jasper Tudor could feel their cold gazes crawling over him. It did not matter that one or two might have been his own men, from years before. They had a new master. He shook his head in anger, wheeling his horse and digging in his heels so that the animal bunched and lunged down the open road. No bolts sprang after him into the darkness. They wanted him alive.

Leaning out as far as he dared between the stones, Henry Tudor had stared at the rider, thin and defiant before the gatehouse of Pembroke, sitting like a beggar on a dark horse and yet daring to challenge the new earl. The black-haired boy had no memory of his uncle and would not have been
able to pick him from a crowd if William Herbert hadn’t called him Tudor. All he knew was that Uncle Jasper had fought for King Henry, for Lancaster, in towns so distant they were just names.