We Speak No Treason Vol 2 Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bestselling author both in the UK and North America, Rosemary Hawley Jarman was born in Worcester. She lived most of her time in Worcestershire at Callow End, between Worcester and Upton on Severn. She began to write for pleasure, and followed a very real and valid obsession with the character of King Richard III. With no thought of publication, she completed a novel showing the King in his true colours, away from Tudor and Shakespearian propaganda. The book was taken up almost accidentally by an agent, and within six weeks a contract for publication and four other novels was signed with HarperCollins. The first novel, We Speak No Treason, was awarded The Silver Quill, a prestigious Author’s Club Award, and sold out its first print run of 30,000 copies within seven days. We Speak No Treason was followed by The King’s Grey Mare, Crown in Candlelight and The Courts of Illusion. She now lives in West Wales and has recently published her first fantasy novel, The Captain’s Witch.

  BOOK 2

  THE WHITE ROSE TURNED TO BLOOD

  ROSEMARY HAWLEY JARMAN

  For my mother, who told me the truth

  Cover Illustration: Courtesy of Getty Images

  This edition first published 2006

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © Rosemary Hawley Jarman, 1971, 1983, 2006, 2012

  The right of Rosemary Hawley Jarman, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9187 5

  MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 9186 8

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  Contents

  About the Author

  Foreword

  Part Three: The Man of Keen Sight

  1469

  Part Four: The Nun

  Foreword

  Although this is a work of fiction, the principal characters therein actually existed as part of the vast and complex fifteenth-century society and had their recognized roles in history, sparsely documented though these may be.

  I have therefore built around the lives of my narrators. They were all real people whose destiny was in various ways closely interwoven with that of the last Plantagenet king. I have endeavoured to adhere strictly to the date of actual occurrences, and none of the events described is beyond the realms of probability. Conversations are of necessity invented, but a proportion of King Richard’s words are his own as recorded by contemporaries.

  R.H.J.

  Gloucester:

  You may partake of any thing we say; We speak no treason, man; we say the King Is wise and virtuous...

  Shakespeare:

  Richard III: Act I, Sc.I

  Part Three

  The Man of Keen Sight

  It standeth so: a deed is do

  Whereof great harm shall grow;

  My destiny is for to die

  A shameful death, I trow.

  Or else to flee, the t’one must be,

  None other way I know

  But to withdraw as an outlaw

  And take me to my bow.

  Wherefore adieu, my own heart true!

  None other rede I can;

  For I must to the greenwood go,

  Alone, a banished man.

  The Nut-Brown Maid

  The King of England is dead, and they have taken him away, I know not where. He will have no magnificent funeral rites, no sumptuous weeping or solemn obsequies, as did his brother, whose death I also witnessed. King Edward died with tears in his eyes, begging his ministers to embrace one another, and it is only today that I fully comprehend the reason for this. For King Edward, upon whom I have thought almost with hate, bestowed a fine legacy of sorrow and confusion upon us all, and especially upon one whom I loved better than any brother. King Edward was tall and sheen, and he died in his bed. It was his lust for a fair woman that helped bring about this day of death. There was another king, a youngling, uncrowned. Bastard slips shall take no root. He did not die; not even of shame. All the fat whispers in the world cannot render the living dead. Death is brought by the axe, the cudgel, a swordthrust. Or by an arrow in the face, as died yet another king of England defending his realm, long ago.

  The King is dead, and I am well-disposed to follow him, for I loved him, and never more than this week lately gone and on the day of his fall. They have shed his blood, they have used his body more shamefully than any man’s, let alone a King anointed with the Chrism. They have despoiled him of his life, his flesh, but his honour and his fame they cannot touch. This makes them angry. The wrath on their faces is like a mask hiding fear-sweat, for Death has nudged them, and the passing breeze of something greater...

  Richard is gone from us, yet his name fascinates every tongue. A thorn bush received his crown, and on a humble beast his corpse was carried, yet a beast as lowly bore Our Saviour into Jerusalem. Did they not think on this? When they flung my liege lord over his poor mount?

  There are a half dozen of us, knights and yeomen, a few from distant shires whose tongue I cannot understand. Close beside me, standing patiently in this foul cell, are Master William Brecher and his son Thomas. Brave warriors despite their simple stock. I fought beside them in the battle and marked the honour of young Thomas. He is afraid now, but has himself in hand. We are to be executed for our treason. Outside I can hear them erecting the gallows, with steady knocking blows, and my own heart echoes each rap. The roll has been read, the indictment signed, and in great haste, for the Dragon would be on his way to London to take up the reins of the kingdom into his long pale hands. We are traitors. And the cognizance of our treason? We fought too well in the King’s service. We bore too high the standard of Blanc Sanglier. His raison was ours. Loyaulte me lie.

  I am shriven. For the past hour I have made my devotions. I am thirty-three years old, and I have served three reigns and seen the separate and singular manner of their ending. A fourth reign I shall not see, nor would I wish it. There is no King, save the King of Heaven, other than the third Richard. Across my knuckles I have a scar. It was not got in battle, but in friendship. Dead white, it is shaped like an arrow-head, and pricks and burns at the most unlikely moments. Looking at this talisman, my mind is full of days stretching back like a long rolling road; without seeking my saddle I can ride that road again to its beginning. I will close my ears to the hammerings that build my doom and, in love, remember Richard. Then he was Duke of Gloucester, and seventeen. Now he is but ‘the traitor Plantagenet’ and he is dead.

  I shall think of the day when, for the first time, he asked: ‘Will you ride with me?’

  1469

  It was a fair, hot June when I rode to Hellesden to visit the Pastons, they being my guardian’s distant kin by marriage. I had ridden alone from Kent, leaving my lord’s chaplain muttering into his beard at the unwisdom of it, and I had turned to salute him with an edge of mockery in my farewell. I had seventeen years behind me, silver spurs, and the right to wear my sword without the belt. I was so gay as I journeyed through the cherry orchards that I retu
rned the obeisance of the villeins with long bows, as if I were the Earl of Warwick. They gaped at me, standing like stricken fowls in their tunics of coarse-weave and their wide straw hats. One of the wenches threw me a bunch of fruit. They looked like rubies and tasted of wine. The people seemed happiest when they were in the fields; it was only the confinement of the manor court which appeared to bring about an increase in choler. I had sat for hours listening to their arguments. Of course they had their rights, but some tenants were cunning in their abuse and I had seen many a slow-witted farmer protesting to our stewards against a new title he had had no notion existed. I tried to take an interest in these matters. For the past year or so there had been talk from my guardian’s tongue of sending me to study law at Cambridge so as to equip myself with better understanding of such affairs; as for my own half-stifled ambitions, they seeped through all the forecastings of my mentors. For the sport of gentlemen, the serious subject of the Statute of Winchester, had become, to me, an addiction. O, you pagan god or devil, I know not, O Toxophilus, you had me by the throat. My friends dreamed of maidens, and other sinful joys. I dreamed of a sweet bow easy in the hand, one that does not kick: a bow fashioned of the finest Spanish yew, with its demoniacal paradox of sapwood and heartwood, the one resistant as an unschooled colt, the other pliant and gracious as Our Lady’s smile. And as I grew in length, so did my bow become tall and strong as I; and on my seventeenth birthday, my Saint’s day, I became the owner of the finest, the real taxus baccata, whose tip exactly matched the crown of my own yellow head.

  In an indiscreet moment, I had mentioned my longing to become an archer de maison, for was I not the champion of three shires? My guardian’s lady had shrieked out loud and feigned to swoon, vowing that I should look upward, and that to labour thus would be but to demean myself. For did not common yeomen so employ themselves, and had I forgotten my lineage? Which in itself was foolishness, for having seen my father once, and marked his blazon and his heritage, I should have been want-wit to be heedless of it. I should of course see my father no more, and his terrible death did not haunt me, even when I burnt his Month’s Mind candle. As for my mother, why she was something fairer than motherly—proudly glad to wear the barbe and wimple of Lady Abbess. For these reasons, and for the thongs of kindliness and fair dealing, the Kentish castle was the only home I knew. But at seventeen the blood is hot, and the long struggle for independence begins. The trumpets have sounded, but the battle is yet to be joined. I did not think to find one in Norwich, for the Pastons’ quarrel with the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk was none of my affair. It had been going on for too long, and there was little to be done. None the less, I felt sad for young John Paston, and a little guilty besides, for not long after my arrival at Hellesden I had bested him at the butts and I took his money, three shillings and eight pence. Young John (I called him so to distinguish him from his brother John, a knight older but more frivolous) would have been deeply dishonoured otherwise. And he was full of misery. With the two Dukes biting great pieces out of the Paston estates, he said he had had no time to write to me, and with equally gloomy sympathy I replied that it mattered little, for I had no army yet to raise on his behalf, and most of my money was in trust until I came of age. The Pastons were always writing letters. Every day one or other of them would be pacing a room, feeding a yawning clerk with phrases, while trouble chased hope across their brows like a fox pursues a weasel.

  And in the pleasant garden at Hellesden, with a great hole in the wall through which one of Suffolk’s cannon balls had plunged, I cast Young John further into despair. Through a faultless hold and a draw that perchance Pandarus himself might have admired, I beat him at the pricks, and above his little wistful murmur heard someone say: ‘What a beautiful loose he has,’ and smiled to myself.

  I smiled, not just through boastful pride. For none watching knew of the struggle I had waged with my own recalcitrant body, over the years, to perfect the sport I loved the best. Because I am cursed with long-sightedness, the archer’s enemy.

  The physicians had studied my eyes. As a tiny knave I remember how they pried with their bright round circles of polished brass. They hummed sadly together over my strange sight, for they too realized it could jeopardize my skill. How can an archer study the nock and the unwavering hold when already the fat white clout dangles close to his nose? If I looked closely at the image for a moment it would come rushing up to me. At first I had been a little afraid of how to construe this magic. I could mark the strike of a hawk far away over a plain or high above a thicket. I could see what prey dangled from its talons, down to the glazing eye. I could scan the face of friend or foe long before they knew who approached them. The charges on their shields, the powderings on their garments and the emblems on their horses’ housings were known to me outside the fifth part of a league. Once my keen sight had saved a child being swept away by the mill race. Others had thought it to be a cat in the water, but my eyes saw her black hair and clothing, and I had crossed a meadow to seize her from the flood. That day, I had even mused that I might, through this trick of nature, do some great person a service.

  But archery, my leman! For that only, I battled with this useful fault. To ignore the abusing nearness of the target, to fix only upon the precious nock, to feel the urgent hemp pulled low to the right pap with a hand that wags neither up nor down, as Homer instructs us: the swift glance, the straight back and out-thrust chest—best for profit and seemliness—the yell of ‘Fast!’ and the unspoken command to those wilful eyes—thus did I conquer. It was a struggle, and at times I almost succumbed in the Castle of Perseverance. But it was the hand, the hand and the mind, and never the butt, wooed too soon by so many, which I bent to my will.

  Enough of me. I would to my friend, the future King of Care.

  Young John sighed, delving in his purse.

  ‘By troth,’ he said, ‘I would you lived nearer to help preserve us from our enemies.’

  This made me laugh.

  ‘You would have me stand upon the keep and pick off Norfolk’s men? With Master Calle to fill my cocker with arrows plucked from the slain?’

  ‘Aye, Norfolk, or cursed de la Pole,’ muttered Young John. ‘And Suffolk married to the King’s sister...’

  ‘With Suffolk wed to Lady Bess,’ I said, ‘I would have thought an appeal might bear more force. Now that John your brother is at court.’

  ‘He wrote lately,’ said Young John bitterly. ‘Of tourneys at Eltham, folderols, fat horseflesh and fair ladies. I would liefer see him here, or at our poor Caister, than at the joust even against Lord Rivers. He had become betrothed to Mistress Haute,’ he added. ‘A Woodville kinswoman. He thinks to gain favour. Meantime we sit awaiting the place burned about our ears.’

  Master Gloys came hurrying over the green towards us.

  ‘Sir, more trouble?’ asked Young John warily.

  The Chaplain shook his head. ‘Not in these parts. But the King rides near, waging men to quell the northern rising.’

  I had no intention of riding to war that day. So when the King’s train rode by it was only through curiosity that I mounted and followed them. They split into two bunches of knights and esquires, one of which passed through the orchard and down to the remains of a lodge, ruined by Suffolk’s men. It was then I first set eyes on Lord Rivers, marking his blazon; Young John was anxiously talking with him. Rivers wore white velvet over harness, and a sympathetic smile. Where the Woodvilles were, I thought, there would the King be also, so I rode off down the path and under the trees towards the lodge, hoping to spy out his Grace.

  The lodge was a sad sight. Suffolk’s men had burst doors with battering-rams, and had planted a few accurate cannon-shots through roof and windows. They had then tried to start a fire, for the gaping doorway revealed blackened floorboards and a crumbling pit down to the cellar. Green weeds and grass sprouted from the masonry, like hairs in an old man’s ears.

  There was someone standing a little inside the entrance, very still.
A dark youth, of about my age, in demi-armour. There was not much to him, or of him, for that matter. He stood in shadow. He was alone. And that was my first ever impression of him; his utter loneliness. His horse cropped grass outside. I dismounted and went to join him. He appeared to be talking to himself. This was a habit I, too, enjoyed, when I needed to straighten something out in my mind.

  ‘Brutal,’ he was saying.

  I was in agreement. ‘Yea, is it not?’ I said. I kicked the doorpost and a piece of it disintegrated and fell clashing through the floor with a great choke of filth. My companion stepped back a length.

  ‘This is not the way,’ he said. ‘Unnecessary violence. It is wrong.’

  ‘Violence is well, if the cause be good,’ I remarked.

  He said sharply: ‘This cause is ill. For centuries the philosophers have argued over what constitutes a good cause, and cheating, tyranny, never were such, and never shall be.’

  ‘It was a fine place once,’ I said, looking about me.

  ‘And now despoiled,’ he said softly. ‘Doesn’t it sadden you? Thinking that masons and craftsmen once laboured to the glory of God for something of beauty?’

  ‘And now the vainglory of man has plucked it down,’ I murmured. He gave me a quick, peculiar smile, no sooner born than dead.

  ‘You renew my faith,’ he said. ‘I shall speak to the King about this.’

  I thought him to be like John Paston, assaying to make his mark in Edward’s household.

  ‘How do you pleasure yourselves at court?’ I asked. His face darkened.

  ‘Well enough,’ he said shortly.

  ‘Let us go outside,’ I said. A huge bat dived out of the darkness and round our heads. My companion remained inside, picking up a piece of oak and weighing it in his hand. He had very slender hands, with fine jewels.