Fortunes of the Heart (38 page)

She was suddenly aware of a man’s voice at her ear.

Startled out of her reverie, she turned her head and found
that she was staring into the glowing eyes of Auld
Shuggie
.
He shook his head in mock annoyance.

“I said, and I don’t think ye heard a word, I said, you’ve
fair done Pearce proud this day, Kate.”

Kate smiled and waved a dismissive hand towards the crumbs
of the feast.

“Oh, ’twas Jenny and Granny to thank for such a spread.”

But
Shuggie
, determined to
compliment his hostess, would not be thwarted in his purpose.

“Aye, that’s as maybe, Kate. But ’twas yourself, I’ll be
bound, who arranged for a piper, an Episcopalian Priest, and a layer of prime
ground in the Necropolis. Aye, you’ve done him proud. Given him a grand
send-off. As well as that, old Granny tells me you observed to the letter all
the other important old customs. Stopping the clock and covering with a white
napkin the mirror in the room where he breathed his last. Yes, altogether a
grand send-off, Kate. I just hope I’ll be as lucky when my time comes to cross
to the land o’ the Leal.”

It was at this point that Kate’s old friend, Big Betty
Donovan, reached across and patted her hostess’s hand.

“
Shuggie’s
right, Kate. He
couldn’t have had a better send-off to the Other Shore, had he been Royalty
himself.”

With the sound of laughter, spirited discussion and maudlin
sentiment raging all around her, Kate again retreated to the haven of her own
thoughts and quiet introspection.

Well, thank God the funeral has been such a success. Just a
pity that the high-and-mighty Josephine Delaney, nor Lady
Christabel
herself could not have witnessed the triumph of it. Oh, well. Can’t be helped.
Anyway, there’s one good thing. If the
fdks
hereabouts remember nothing else, they’ll at least know that my Pearce was a
true Irish gentleman. And, God willing, they’ll remember that he had a burial,
and a funeral tea, fully befitting his station in life. At least that’s
something.

Shuggie’s
voice drew her back to
awareness of the people round her.

“I hope ye dinnae mind, Kate, but I invited an auld friend
of yours tae pay his respects.”

From behind
Shuggie
, Terence
stepped out.

“I only got back to Glasgow yesterday, Kate, and met with
Shuggie
this morning. I’m right sorry for your loss. Maybe
we can talk again later like we used to?”

Kate smiled at him.

“I’ll look forward to that, Terence.”

Life, Fate, Destiny, call it what you will, was not yet
finished with Kate Rafferty Kinnon.

She would survive.

Jenny Chaplin, well known to loyal readers worldwide for her
books on Scottish social history and for her articles in the Scots Magazine and
the Scottish Banner, presents her first novel.

Jenny, as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians of
Scotland, is well qualified to write her historical novels after years of
research into and writing about Scottish social history.

She now writes her novels in her centuries old cottage on
the Island of Bute under the name Jenny Telfer Chaplin to differentiate between
her fiction and non-fiction writing.

If you enjoyed Fortune of the Hearts you may be interested
in Treason by Meredith
Whitford
, also published by
Endeavour Press.

Treason

Meredith
Whitford

Prologue

1505, the twenty-second day of August.

Edinburgh

Twenty years ago tonight I was riding for my life through
England. Riding blind, most of the time, from the head wound I’d taken in the
battle, and only Lovell’s hand on the bridle kept me going. Riding to tell
York’s Duchess that the last of her sons was dead. The last true King of
England.

I still keep the anniversary of his death. It is one of the
few times I attend Mass, for I no longer believe, except when I pray for my
dead. When we returned from the chapel tonight I fell into maudlin mood,
drinking too much of what passes for wine here in Edinburgh. (To think I’ve
ended my days in Scotland – twenty years ago I helped conquer the place.) My
wife offered to sit up with me, but she was heavy-eyed with her own memories
and I sent her up to bed. My children too offered to keep me company, but they
have heard all my stories and they have no wish to live in the past. It was my
daughter-in-law Mary who asked, why do I not write my story down? The others
agreed with suspicious readiness; anything to save listening to another
repetition, no doubt.

But I shall do it. I’m fifty-three, but with luck I’ve a few
years left, and I need a pastime. Perhaps my writings will amuse my
grandchildren, should they ever read them. I daresay I’ll prove no author, not
like Thomas Malory with his glamorous tales of King Arthur, but it seems
important to record my story. Perhaps my mark on history is small, but I am at
least an honest man, which in the company of monarchs has the charm of rarity.
All I can tell is my own story, and there is much I never knew – but I was
there, I saw it all, the quarter-century that changed England and the world
forever. And, after all, it’s not everyone who can say he grew up with two
kings.

PART I

One

1461

There being nothing duller than the tale of someone’s happy
childhood, I shall start with the day that childhood ended. The day the
Lancastrians came. January, 1461. I was eight.

I had been at the priest’s house in the village for my Latin
lesson. Snow had fallen in the night, but the day was sparklingly clear and the
air so crisp that despite the cold I dawdled on my way home. In the next year I
would go to some nobleman’s household for my knight’s training, and I was
wondering if the country would come to peace in time for me to go to the Duke
of York – or, even better, his son Edward, Earl of March. Mother had written
letters about the matter, but we could expect no answers until summer. So, with
my mind a whirl of plans and the Latin subjunctive, I pottered home.

As I crested the hill I had a clear view of our manor. The
courtyard was full of horsemen. My father was back! Whooping with delight, I
ran the rest of the way.

But these were not our men. Too late I saw that they wore
the Queen’s livery badge. There were a dozen or more of them, and they were
loading their packhorses with our barrels of wine and salted meat. One was
stuffing our precious silver plate into his baggage roll. I looked frantically
around for my mother, and saw two men bundling her into the house. Her gown was
torn right down the front and there was blood on her face.

She saw me and screamed to me to run. Perhaps I would have
obeyed, perhaps I would have tried to fight the men, but as I started
instinctively towards her I tripped over something. It was one of our dogs. Its
throat had been cut. As I stumbled one of the men grabbed me and twisted my
arms up behind my back, jerking me off the ground. I squealed with the pain of
it, and my mother broke loose and brought her knee hard up between one man’s
legs and hit the other in the face with her fists. It was useless, of course,
she was a small woman, and there were too many of them. My mother went very
still then. She said, ‘Let the boy go.’

‘Who is he? Your son?’

‘No. A servant’s child. He is no one. Let him go.’

The man holding me wrenched my arms until I thought my
joints would rend apart. ‘Who are you, boy? What’s your name?’

Mother’s eyes fixed wide and hard on mine. ‘I’m the
steward’s son,’ I said, and somehow I found the wit to use the local accent I
picked up from the village boys. ‘I work for my lady.’

‘This is the
Robsart
manor.
Robsart
has a son. Where is he?’

It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention; well,
terror makes a kindly stepmother. ‘Master Martin’s away at school. At King
Henry’s new school near Windsor. Who are you? Where’s Sir Martin?’

‘Dead and carrion, like his master York and the rest of the
traitors.’

I heard the words, but they meant nothing. My mother gave
one breathless sob, and the men holding her shoved her down onto the ground.
She said quietly, ‘Not in front of the boy. Please,’ and, laughing, they hauled
her up again and into the house. I heard her scream a few times, then there was
no more sound.

I don’t know how long it was before another man came, a man
on horseback, in better clothes than the others. Dismounting, he kicked idly at
a lump in the snow. Blood trickled out, and I saw that the lump was our
steward, Robert, his eyes open and with a great wound in his head. A sword lay
by his hand – he had done his best for us.

‘Find anything?’ the newcomer asked.

‘Meat and wine, a few beasts. They’ve got the women inside.
If you’re quick you can join the queue to have your sport with
Robsart’s
wife.’

With a flick of his eyebrow the newcomer went into the
house. He came back in a moment, shaking his head. ‘I’ve no stomach for this
work. Who’s this boy?’

‘The steward’s son.’

The new man looked me over, and I knew he recognised that my
clothes were too fine for a servant. But he had more Christian feeling than his
fellows, for he said, ‘Let him go.’ My captor protested, but this new man had
authority. ‘Go,’ he told me. ‘Get out while you can,’ and he gave me a slap on
the backside that sent me stumbling forward. He shouted again, and I ran for my
life. As I reached the top of the hill I saw smoke rising from our house.

The village was deserted, silent, every door shut. Not a dog
barked as I stumbled by. Obeying some age-old impulse I ran for the church. As
I wrenched hopelessly at the latch the door opened a crack and a masculine arm
snatched me inside. I screamed, then the smell of incense and unclean flesh
told me it was Father Anselm who held me.

‘We saw the soldiers come – Martin, what’s happened?’

‘They’re the Queen’s men, they’re hurting my mother, the
house is burning, please help, make them stop, go and help my mother!’

I got that much out, then the smith’s wife swept me up in
her arms. Most of the villagers were there, huddled down by the altar. Vaguely
I heard the gabble of voices and saw Father Anselm and the smith leave the
church.

~~~

Memory erects its own defences, and I remember almost
nothing of the next few days. Were I an artist I could draw every vein, every
age-spot, every swollen joint of the priest’s hands clasped in his lap as he
told me that my mother was dead and my home destroyed, but I can’t remember the
words he used. Nor do I remember Mother’s funeral.

I suppose a full week had passed when Father Anselm sat me
down in his parlour and asked what to do with me.

‘For you’ve no kin nearby, if I remember rightly?’

‘None, Father Anselm. My father had a brother but he died
when I was little. Mother was an only child and her parents are dead.’

He stared worriedly at me, biting his lip. ‘Not so much as a
cousin?’

The word broke through my apathy. ‘Yes!’ I cried. ‘Cousins!
The Duchess of York is – was mother’s kinswoman; I used to live at
Fotheringhay
. The Duchess is in London, I’ll go to her!’

Of course I had no idea what I was asking. It was the dead
of winter and we were at least four days’ ride from London. There was no one to
escort me. The Queen’s army was on the rampage, looting and burning its way
south through England; that much news had made its way to us. The country was
virtually at war. However, when it was put to an impromptu village parliament
the smith said that a man what’d brought a horse for shoeing had said as how
the Earl of March, young Edward of York, had his army not far away, two days’
ride at most; why shouldn’t Master Martin go there? Father Anselm could go with
him, not even the Lancastrians would harm a priest. The little lad’s dad was
one of the Duke of York’s men, it was right he should go to my lord.

So it was decided. That night, as I snuggled into my
makeshift bed in the priest’s house, some of my shock began to lift. Grief for
my parents still gripped me, but there was hope now, and the prospect of
comfort. The Duchess of York awed me less than she did the rest of the world
because I’d grown up in her household. I had the right to call her cousin, for
she and my mother were connected through two marriages. Mother had been lady
governess to the
Yorks
’ daughters Elizabeth and
Margaret; that was how she met my father, accompanying the Duchess and her
children when the Queen exiled the Duke to Ireland back in ’49. So yes, there
was comfort in the thought of the Duchess – and in the thought of seeing
Richard again. He was the
Yorks
’ youngest son, and my
own age to within three months; his mother had helped deliver me, and mine had
helped deliver him. I remembered him well, because it was not two years since
my grandparents’ death had meant my mother had to leave
Fotheringhay
to manage our family manor. I liked Margaret and George, Richard’s next oldest
brother, but Richard and I had grown up like twins. He had written to me once
after we left
Fotheringhay
, carefully penning a
postscriptum
to his mother’s letter. Since then he had gone
to Ludlow, the Duke’s castle over in the west, and met his elder brothers
Edmund and Edward. He too had suffered from the Lancastrian outrages, for the
Duke had been betrayed, men had gone over to Queen Margaret, and the Duke had
had to disperse his army and flee for Ireland. My father had gone with him. The
Duchess and her children had been taken prisoner. They’d only recently been
safely released; my father had brought that news when he and the Duke returned
from Ireland three months ago.