The Sunne in Splendour: A Novel of Richard III (5 page)

someone flayed alive for this. Lancaster does not make war on women and children."
Cecily said nothing, merely looked at him and saw color burn across his cheekbones. He turned away abruptly and began to give directives to the men who'd ridden into Ludlow under his command. With deep-felt relief, she saw that they all were sober.
"My men will escort you to the royal encampment, Madame."
She nodded and watched tensely while he dismissed her guards, found horses for them, and with a disgusted oath, swung with the flat of his sword at the more drunken of the soldiers squabbling over spoils of victory. Even now, with deliverance seemingly at hand, she breathed no easier, would not until she saw her sons safely on the road that led from Ludlow. And then, as she led the boys forward to their waiting mounts, Richard suddenly balked. At that, she gave way at last to the strains of the past twenty-four hours and slapped him across the face. He gasped but accepted the punishment without outcry or protest. The objection came from George, who moved swiftly to his brother's side.
"Don't blame Dickon, Ma Mere," he entreated. "He saw her, you see. He saw Joan." Seeing her lack of comprehension, he pointed toward the parish church. "The girl in the churchyard. It was Joan."
Cecily looked down at her youngest son and then knelt and drew him gently to her. She saw the tears on his lashes and the imprint of her slap on his cheek.
"Oh, Richard," she whispered, "why did you not say so?"
As they'd awaited the coming of the Lancastrian army that morning, she'd taken pains to impress both boys with the urgency of their need for control. Now, however, she no longer cared about pride or honor or anything but the pain in her child's eyes, pain that should have been forever alien to childhood.
It was then that Edmund Beaufort performed the act of kindness she would never forget, would not have dared expect. As she gazed up at him, framing an appeal she thought to be futile, he said before she could speak, "I'll send some of my men into the churchyard to see to the girl. I'll have her taken to you at
Leominster. Unless she . . ."He hesitated, looking down at the little boy she was cradling, and concluded neutrally, "Whatever must be done will be, Madame. Now, I would suggest that we not tarry here any longer."
She nodded numbly. He was holding out his hand; she reached up, let him raise her to her feet. He was, she now saw, very young, no more than four or five years older than her own Edmund. Very young and none too happy by what he'd found in Ludlow and perceptive enough to realize that she did not want
Richard to be present when Joan was found.

The Duke of York's second son was sitting cross-legged in the oriel window seat of the West Tower, watching with disbelief as his cousin, Thomas Neville, devoured a heaping plateful of cold roast capon and pompron buried in butter. As Thomas signaled to a page for a third refill of his ale tankard, Edmund could restrain himself no longer.
I shall not forget your kindness, my lord," she said softly, and with far more warmth than she would ever have expected to feel for a member of the Beaufort family.
"In war, Madame, there are always . . . excesses," he said, very low, and then the strange flicker of empathy that had passed between them was gone. He stepped back, issued a few terse commands. Men moved across the square, toward the churchyard. Others waited to escort the Duchess of York and her sons to the royal camp at Leominster. Edmund Beaufort nodded, gave the order to move out. Cecily reined her mount in before him.
"Thank you, my lord."
His eyes were guarded, shadowed by the uneasy suspicions of a man who'd surprised himself by his own candor and now wondered if he'd compromised himself by that candor.
"Do not mistake me, Madame. I have full faith in my brother's judgment. He did what he had to do. It was necessary that a lesson be learned here this day, one not to be soon forgotten."
Cecily stared down at him. "You needn't fear, my lord," she said bitterly. "Ludlow will not be forgotten."
SANDAL CASTLE YORKSHIRE

"Don't stint yourself, Cousin. After all, it's been two full hours since our noonday dinner . . . with four hours yet to go till supper."
Thomas glanced up with a grin, proving himself once again to be totally impervious to sarcasm, and speared a large piece of capon meat. Edmund suppressed a sigh, yearning for the cut-and-thrust parries that had spiced his conversations with Edward. The problem, as he saw it, was that Thomas was too good-hearted to dislike, yet after ten days with him in the solitude of Sandal Castle, his unfailing cheer and relentless optimism were rubbing raw against Edmund's nerves.
Watching Thomas eat and acknowledging glumly that his boredom would drag him down to new depths if he could think of no better way to pass the time, Edmund found himself marveling anew how four brothers could be as unlike as his four Neville cousins.
His cousin Warwick was assured, arrogant, audacious, and yet with an undeniable charm about him, withal. Edmund was nowhere near as taken with Warwick as Edward was, but even he was not immune to the force of his flamboyant cousin's personality. He had a deeper fondness, however, for Warwick's younger brother Johnny, reserved and gravely deliberate, possessed of a wry Yorkshire wit and a sense of duty that was as unwavering as it was instinctive. He had no liking at all, though, for the third Neville brother, named George like Edmund's own eleven-year- old brother. George Neville was a priest, but only because it was traditional for one son of a great family to enter the Church; he was the most worldly man Edmund had ever encountered, and one of the most ambitious, already Bishop of Exeter although still only in his twenties.
And then there was Thomas, the youngest. Thomas, who might have been a changeling, so little did he resemble his siblings. Fair when they were dark, as tall even as Edward, though easily twenty-five pounds the heavier, with milk-blue eyes so serene that Edmund was given to sardonic speculation whether
Thomas shared the same world as they did; a stranger to spite and, seemingly, to stress; as utterly courageous as the enormous mastiffs bred for bear-baiting, and in Edmund's considered judgment, with a good deal less imagination.
"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 recognized 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 sur