The Sunne in Splendour Page 5

  “Tell me about when you and Johnny were taken captive by Lancaster last year, after the battle of Blore Heath, Tom. Were you ill-treated?”

  Thomas broke off a chunk of bread, shook his head. “No…it’s too common to take prisoners to risk abusing them. After all, you never know when you might yourself be taken.”

  “But surely you must have felt some unease…at least at first?” Edmund persisted, and Thomas halted his knife in midair, looked at him in mild surprise.

  “No,” he said at last, as if he’d had to give the matter some thought. “No…I don’t recall that I did.” He completed his knife’s journey to his mouth, and then grinned again, saying with a ponderous playfulness that was as jovial as it was lacking in malice, “What be the matter, Edmund? Be you fretting about the Lancastrian hordes at our gates?”

  Edmund gazed coolly at him. “Greensick with fear,” he snapped, with heavy sarcasm so that none would doubt he spoke only in jest.

  As Thomas turned back to the capon, Edmund shifted his own gaze toward the window behind him, staring out into the bailey of the castle, deep in snow. He didn’t doubt that Ned would have answered Thomas quite differently, would have laughed and conceded cheerfully that, Jesus, yes, he was unnerved. Ned never seemed to concern himself with what others thought, and generally disarmed even as he surprised with his careless candor. Edmund wished he could do the same and knew it was quite impossible. He cared too much what others thought of him, even those he could not take all that seriously, like Thomas. To Ned alone could he have confessed his fears. And Ned was far to the south, back at Ludlow to raise troops for the Yorkist banner. He’d not be coming north to Sandal Castle for days yet.

  It was queer, he thought, that he still minded Ned’s absence so much. After all, he should be used to it by now; in the fourteen months since their flight from Ludlow, he and Ned had been apart for fully a year’s time. They’d been reunited only that past October 10, when Edmund and his father at last reached London, where Ned and their uncle Salisbury awaited them. And then, they’d lingered in London two scant months, Ned leaving for Ludlow and the Welsh borders on December 9, the same day that Edmund, his father, and uncle Salisbury headed north into Yorkshire.

  Edmund was glad there was but one day remaining in this year of grace, 1460. It had been an eventful year for the House of York, but not a happy year for him. For him, it had been a year of waiting, chafing at the isolation and inactivity of his Irish exile. Ned had drawn much the best of the bargain, in Edmund’s view, for Ned had been in Calais with Salisbury and Warwick.

  When they fled Ludlow into Wales, Edmund would’ve liked to have gone with his Neville kin, too. The freewheeling port of Calais held far greater allure for him than the staid seclusion of Dublin. But he’d felt honor-bound to accompany his father, while envying Ned his freedom to elect otherwise. It was an election that had not pleased their father in the least. Politely reluctant to offend the Nevilles by implying they’d give Ned less than satisfactory supervision, he’d nonetheless managed to make his views known to Ned, who’d listened respectfully and then proceeded to do as he pleased, which was to accompany his Neville kin to Calais.

  That was generally the case, Edmund conceded. Ned never argued with their father, he was unfailingly polite, and then nonchalantly went his own way; whereas, he, Edmund, deferred dutifully to his father’s authority and then found himself resenting both his parent’s austere discipline and his own reluctance to rebel.

  Edmund had envisioned all too well how Ned was amusing himself in Calais, and his discontent festered into a lingering depression when word reached Dublin in July that Ned and the Nevilles had landed upon English soil. They’d been welcomed into London and acted swiftly to consolidate their position. Eight days later, they’d marched north from London to confront the King’s forces at the town of Northampton. The Queen was some thirty miles distant at Coventry, but the hapless person of the King had fallen into the hands of the victorious Yorkists after the battle. Edmund had yet to ride into battle and it was with ambivalent emotions that he learned Ned had been entrusted with command of one of the Yorkist wings by his cousin Warwick. The day his father would do the same for him, Edmund was convinced, it’d be possible to go sledding in Hell. The King had been conveyed back to London after the battle and, with all due respect, installed in the royal residence at the Tower. For it was the Queen, not His Grace, good King Harry, whom they opposed, Warwick took pains to assure one and all as London awaited the return of the Duke of York from Ireland.

  York came in October and stunned Warwick, Salisbury, and his son Edward when he strode into Westminster Hall and laid his hand upon the vacant throne. During his months of Irish exile, he had at last concluded that he must either claim the crown in his own right or be doomed to fight an unending series of bloody and bitter skirmishes with the Queen and her cohorts.

  Edmund concurred heartily in his father’s decision; to him, a puppet King was even more dangerous than a boy King, and Scriptures spoke clearly enough on that subject: “Woe unto thee, O Land, when thy King is a child!” Harry of Lancaster was no more than a pale icon of authority, a shadow manipulated to give substance to the acts of sovereignty done in his name, first by Marguerite and now by Warwick.

  The Duke of York, moreover, had a superior claim to the throne. Sixty years ago, the royal succession of England had been torn asunder, brutally disrupted when Harry of Lancaster’s grandfather deposed and murdered the man who held rightful title to the English throne. Six decades later, the echoes of that violent upheaval were still reverberating. The murdered King was childless; the crown should, under English law, have passed to the heirs of his uncle, Lionel of Clarence, the third son of Edward III. The man who’d seized the crown was the son of John of Gaunt, the fourth son of the same Edward III, but he showed no inclination to adhere to the finer points of English inheritance law, and so began the Lancastrian dynasty.

  Had Harry of Lancaster not been so unmitigated a disaster as a monarch, it was likely that few would have chosen to challenge the consequences of a coup legitimized, if not legalized, by the passage of sixty years’ time. But Harry was weak and well-meaning and wed to Marguerite d’Anjou, and seven years ago, he had, at last, gone quite mad. Suddenly people remembered the dire injustice done the heirs of the long-dead Lionel of Clarence, and Marguerite showed herself willing to go to any lengths to destroy the man who might one day lay claim to the crown, the Duke of York, who traced his lineage from that same Lionel of Clarence.

  Edmund saw this complex dynastic conflict as a very simple issue, indeed. In his eyes, it was right and just and pure common-sense self-preservation that his father should act to claim the crown that was his by rights. He soon discovered, however, that right and just though it might be, it was a political blunder. While few disputed the validity of York’s claim, all were unexpectedly reluctant to strip the crown from a man who’d been born a King’s son, had been acknowledged as England’s King since his tenth month of life.

  It had taken Marguerite nearly ten years of unrelenting hostility to transform York from a loyal peer of the realm into the royal rival she’d always perceived him to be. But now he’d crossed the Rubicon as he crossed the Irish Sea and he was stubbornly and single-mindedly convinced that he had no choice but to claim the crown, was not to be dissuaded, even when faced with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for his claims by his Neville kindred and his own eldest son. It was not that they had any sentimental attachment to the man they referred to among themselves as “Holy Harry.” But they’d read the mood of the Commons and the country more accurately than York. Mad though Harry might be, he was the man anointed by God to reign, and the fact that he was utterly incompetent to rule seemed suddenly to be of little consequence when it had become a question of dethroning him.

  In the end, a compromise of sorts was reached, one that satisfied no one and outraged most. Under the Act of Accord passed on October 24, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, was formally re
cognized as the heir to the English throne, but he was compelled to defer his claims during the course of Harry’s lifetime. Only upon Harry’s death would he ascend the throne as the third Richard to rule England since the Conquest.

  As Harry was then thirty-nine years of age, a full ten years younger than the Duke of York, and enjoyed the robust health of one unburdened by the worldly concerns that so aged and encumbered other men, not surprisingly York and his supporters were less than thrilled by this Solomonlike solution. And as, under the Act of Accord, Marguerite’s seven-year-old son was summarily disinherited, an action of expediency many saw to be confirmation of the suspicions so prevalent as to the boy’s paternity, there was never any possibility that Marguerite and her adherents would give consent except at sword-point. The only one professing satisfaction with the Accord was Harry himself, who in his beclouded eccentric way clung tenaciously to his crown, yet strangely evidenced little concern that his son was thus rudely uprooted from the line of succession.

  After the July battle that had delivered the King into Warwick’s power, Marguerite had retreated into Wales and then into Yorkshire, long an enclave of Lancastrian loyalties. There she’d been reunited with the Duke of Somerset and Andrew Trollope, who’d spent several frustrating months attempting to dislodge Warwick and Edward from Calais.

  These Lancastrian lords were now securely ensconced in the massive stronghold of Pontefract Castle, just eight miles from York’s own Sandal Castle, and they’d recently been joined by two men who’d long nurtured a bitter hatred for the House of York, Lord Clifford and the Earl of Northumberland; their fathers had died with Somerset’s at the battle of St Albans won by York and Warwick five years past and they’d neither forgotten nor forgiven. Marguerite herself had ventured up into Scotland in hopes of forging an alliance with the Scots; the bait she dangled was a proposed marriage between her small son and the daughter of the Queen of Scotland.

  And so Edmund found himself spending the Christmas season in a region he little liked, finding Yorkshire stark and bleak and unfriendly to the House of York, with the grim prospect ahead of a battle soon to come in the new year, a battle that would decide whether England should be Yorkist or Lancastrian, at a cost of lives too high to contemplate.

  It had been one of the bleakest Christmas seasons within his memory. His father and uncle were too preoccupied with the coming confrontation with Lancaster to have either the time or the inclination for holiday cheer. Edmund, acutely sensitive to the disadvantages of being a seventeen-year-old novice to warfare midst seasoned soldiers, had forced himself to shrug off the lack of holiday festivities with what he fancied to be adult indifference. But secretly he’d grieved for the Christmas celebrations of years past, thought with longing of the seasonal merrymaking he was missing in London.

  His cousin Warwick had remained in the capital to safeguard custody of the Lancastrian King, and Edmund knew Warwick would keep a princely Christmas at the Herber, his palatial London manor house. From Warwick Castle would come his Countess and Isabel and Anne, his young daughters. Edmund knew his own mother would be sure to join them there, too, with his little brothers, George and Dickon, and Meg, who, at fourteen, was the only one of Edmund’s sisters still unmarried. There’d be eggnog and evergreen and the minstrel gallery above the great hall would be echoing from dawn till dusk with music and mirth.

  Edmund sighed, staring out at the drifting snow. For ten endless days now, they’d been sequestered at Sandal Castle, with only one brief excursion into the little village of Wakefield two miles to the north to break the monotony. He sighed again, hearing Thomas call for still more bread. The traditional Christmas truce was drawing to an end; by the time it expired, Ned should have ridden up from the Welsh Marches with enough men to give the Yorkists unchallenged military supremacy. Edmund would be very glad to see his brother, for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that he could talk to Ned as he could not talk to Thomas. He decided he’d write to Ned tonight. He felt better at that, swung off the window seat.

  “I’ve some dice in my chamber, Tom. If I have them fetched, will you forsake your capon for a game of ‘hazard’?”

  Thomas was predictably and pleasantly agreeable, and Edmund’s spirits lifted. He turned, intending to send a servant for the dice, when the door was flung open and Sir Robert Apsall, the young knight who was both his friend and his tutor, entered the chamber. It was a large room, half the size of the great hall, was filled with bored young men, but it was to Edmund and Thomas that he hastened.

  Stamping snow from his boots, he said without preamble, “I’ve been sent to summon you both to the great hall.”

  “What is it, Rob?” Edmund queried, suddenly tense and, as usual, anticipating disaster, while Thomas shoved his chair back from the trestle table, came unhurriedly to his feet.

  “Trouble, I fear. That foraging party we sent out at dawn is long overdue. They should’ve reported back hours ago. His Grace the Duke fears Lancaster may have broken the truce, that they may have been ambushed.”

  “Why do we tarry, then?” Edmund demanded and had reached the door before the other two could respond.

  “Wait, Edmund, get your cloak.” Thomas was reaching for the garment crumpled on the window seat, saw that Edmund was already out the door, and with a shrug, followed his young cousin from the chamber.

  The Duke of York’s suspicions soon proved to have been justified. Ambushed at Wakefield Bridge by a large Lancastrian force, the foraging party had died almost to a man. A few survivors fought their way free, however, and with the Lancastrians in close pursuit, raced for the refuge of Sandal Castle. Between the castle and the banks of the River Calder stretched a wide expanse of marshland, known locally as Wakefield Green. This was the only open ground between Sandal Castle and the village of Wakefield, and the fleeing Yorkists knew their one chance of escape lay across this meadow, knew that to enter the thick wooded areas to their left and right would be to mire their mounts down in belly-deep snowdrifts, to flounder helplessly until caught and killed.

  Across Wakefield Green they galloped, scant yards before their pursuers. Just when it seemed that capture was inevitable, arrows pierced the sky over their heads. The Lancastrians fell back under this aerial onslaught and the outer drawbridge was hastily lowered onto the stone platform that jutted out into the moat. As the drawbridge linked with the platform, the surviving soldiers raced across the moat, through the gatehouse, and on into the castle bailey. Behind them, the drawbridge was rapidly rising again, and even as they dismounted, they could hear the reassuring sounds of the iron-barred portcullis sliding into place across the gatehouse entranceway.

  Sleet had been falling intermittently all day, but the clouds over the castle were, for the moment, no longer spilling ice into the sky. Visibility was such that the Yorkists on the castle battlements could see the enemy gathering in the meadow below. They seemed to be in a state of some confusion, even at a distance, as if uncertain whether to withdraw or to lay siege to the castle itself.

  Within the great hall, a heated argument raged among the Yorkist lords. A sharp and irreconcilable split had developed, between those who favored engaging the Lancastrians in combat and those who considered it folly to leave the safety of the castle. The spokesman for the latter position was a friend of long standing of the Duke of York, Sir David Hall. He argued with force and conviction that common sense dictated but one course of action, to hold their men within the castle walls and await the coming of His Grace’s eldest son, Edward of March, with the men he was gathering along the Welsh Marches.

  Others, however, scorned such restraint as if it reflected upon their courage and contended with equal passion that the only honorable action open to them was to accept the challenge thrown down by Lancaster.

  For a brief time, the decision seemed to hang in the balance, but two factors tipped it in favor of assault. The Duke of York himself was most sympathetic to this argument, and the Lancastrians on Wakefield Green had now
swelled their ranks. With reinforcements, they were growing progressively bolder and had ventured within provocation distance of the castle, although prudently just beyond arrow range.

  Edmund stood in the shadows, listening in silence. Unlike most of his family, he had dark eyes, a striking shade of blue-grey that faithfully mirrored his mercurial shifts of mood. They showed only grey now, moving from face to face in the most searching of appraisals. Even at seventeen, he was not, had never been, a romantic. Common sense was what swayed him, not abstract concepts like “honor” and “gallantry.” It seemed stupid to him to risk so much merely for the problematical satisfaction of avenging their foraging party. It was true the risk did not appear to be excessive; they commanded a clear numerical superiority over the Lancastrians. But it did appear to him to be unnecessary, to be a self-indulgent exercise in chivalry.

  He wondered now if his father was motivated by a desire to seek vengeance for Ludlow. But then he found himself wondering if his own reluctance to engage the Lancastrians was really rooted in common sense. What if it were cowardice? He had, after all, never been in battle, could feel his stomach knotting up even now at the prospect. Ned had always insisted that fear was as common to men as fleas were to dogs and inns, but Edmund had his doubts. He felt sure his father and uncle Salisbury could not possibly know the lurch of a heart suddenly beating up in the vicinity of the throat, could not possibly share the icy sweat that traced a frozen path from armpit to knee. They were old, after all; his father was nigh on fifty, his uncle even older. Edmund could not imagine death holding the same fear for them as it did for him, any more than he could imagine that they were driven by the same sexual hungers, not at their ages.

  No, he’d never been able to agree with Ned…Ned, who would speak quite candidly of having been scared pissless and yet seemed to thrive on danger, to deliberately seek out risks Edmund would much rather have bypassed. He’d grimly matched Ned, risk for risk, all during their boyhood, riding along the crumbling edge of cliffs and swimming their mounts through rain-swollen rivers spanned by perfectly adequate bridges. But he could never quite convince himself that Ned ever knew the fear he did, and when others praised him for his daring, he felt a secret shame, as if he’d somehow perpetrated a gigantic hoax upon the world, a hoax that would one day inevitably be unmasked.