Georgette Heyer (32 page)

‘Well, of all the churlish hounds!’ said Harry, when the furious barking had subsided into blood-curdling growls. ‘What creatures you do cosset, brother! The last time I saw you you had a half-manned hawk that bated whenever I came near you.’ He glanced at the table, with its litter of papers. ‘What are you ding here, John?’

‘Jack-raking!’ John replied, signing to the secretary to take his hound away.

‘Ah!’ Harry said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, that has to be done, of course.’ His eye rested enquiringly on Gilbert, and when John presented his friend he smiled, and said: ‘Are you my brother’s lieutenant? He has spoken to me of you.’

‘My pledge-borrow,’ said John, betraying his knowledge of Gilbert’s appointed task. ‘But he would liefer go with you to win his spurs.’

‘Yea? How many years have you in your dish?’ Harry asked.

‘Fifteen, my lord!’ Gilbert said, a wild hope in his breast. He saw the quizzical gleam in John’s eye, and reddened, adding: ‘In two weeks – only two weeks, my lord!’

But Harry laughed, and shook his head. ‘Nay, what would Sir Robert say? Stay with my brother until you have your uncle’s leave to join me.’

There was disappointment in Gilbert’s face, but his eyes, as he raised them to Harry’s, glowed shyly. John saw that Harry, with one friendly smile, had cast his spell over him. He nodded him away, looking kindly after him, a little amused.

‘Oof !’ said Harry, throwing himself on to the banker and stretching his limbs with a sigh of relief. ‘I’ve been in the saddle for days!’

‘Will you rest here?’

‘No, I must push on. I’ve set my men on the road to Berwick. I wanted to have speech with you.’

‘Well?’ John said.

‘John, how came it about that Scrope and Mowbray were taken without one blow struck?’

‘They were taken under a flag of truce,’ John replied.

It was like the flicker of lightning, that look of Harry’s. John’s eyelids quivered, but he kept his gaze on Harry’s face.

‘So they told me! But I would not believe!’ John said nothing. ‘John, how could you do so black a thing?’

‘There was a blacker thing I could not do.’

‘You have stained your knighthood!’

John was very pale, but he answered steadily: ‘It is well-worth, since you are here to tell me so.’

His words fell heavily, and were not immediately answered. Harry’s fierce eyes stared up at him; he said, after a moment: ‘For my sake, this deed? For
my
sake?’

‘For your sake, and all our sakes.’

Harry flung out a hand, as though to thrust the thought away. ‘No! Not unfaith!’

‘Content you, never to you! You bade me hold the North for you, and it is held.’

‘Holy Rood, did I bid you use such arts as those?’

‘You didn’t know, Harry, nor I, indeed, that it would come to this: that I must betray you or our enemies.’

‘Not betrayal of me, to keep your knightly faith!’

‘Not betrayal, to have the means to save you from neck-break, and to put them from me? God shield you, Harry, do you rate my love so low? There was no other way – or if there was I did not see it.’

There was a strange, haggard look in Harry’s face. He sprang up, and lunged away to the window, muttering: ‘This throne, this throne! Jesu defend!’

John was silent. Presently Harry said, in a cold voice: ‘Was it your stratagem?’

‘No, but I might have said the nayword, and did not. I think I should have hurled our little force against the rebels. We should have been shent, and you too, but you would have had time to mourn me, perhaps – a stainless knight!’

Harry’s face softened, but he said: ‘Did you know, when you suffered it to be done, that you were sending them to a shames-death?’

‘Mowbray, yes. Not the Archbishop. But if I had known I should not have said the nayword. Saving only your anger, Harry, I’ve no gainbite at my heart – and your anger I knew I should win me!’

‘Sturdy words, brother!’

‘Yea, I will utter no leasings to you.’

Harry passed a hand across his brow. ‘It was Neville’s rede, I suppose. You couldn’t have prevented him.’

‘No, I think I could not,’ John agreed, a smile in his eyes. He did not add that he had not made the attempt, because he saw that Harry was going to believe what he must, for the easement of his unquiet soul. So it had been when King Richard had died; so it would be many times again. The world might see only Harry’s strength, but John knew his weakness, and loved him the more.

‘What task are you set, Harry?’ he asked after a pause, and in a lighter voice.

Harry glanced at him, still frowning. ‘Chastisement. To give the Scots to drink of their own medicine. I don’t like rapine, but I shall be blithe to carry fire across the Border: I hate the Scots!’

‘Out and alas! They will say you have broken the truce!’

Harry stared at him. ‘
I
break the truce? God’s dignity, what did the Scots, then, when they seized Berwick, and laid waste this country of yours?’

‘But they will still call you a truce-breaker,’ John said.

‘They may hang in hell! What I shall do will be for right and justice!’

‘Witterly!’ John said, laughing at him. ‘What you shall do will always be for right and justice, Harry.’

‘Do you doubt me?’ demanded Harry, strongly grasping his hands.

‘No, not I! Don’t set me out of your grace! Will you dine now?’

The grip tightened on his hands. ‘John, are you shriven?’

‘Yea, I am assoiled.’

‘Yet you could say to me that you feel no gainbite? Was it so small a thing to do? So easy a thing?’

‘No,’ John answered, meeting his look. ‘I thought there was only one thing more evil that I could do.’

‘Yes, I see,’ Harry said, quite gently. ‘There’s no more to say. The evil lies at Ralph’s door. At his, and at – ’ He stopped, and then said, ‘Let it sleep! Take me to dinner: I mustn’t linger. Can it be done speedily, my task? I don’t know this country, and I must be back on my own Marches before the month is out.’

They went out together on to the stair, and stood for a moment, dazzled by the hot sunlight. ‘Do you think the French will come, then?’ John asked.

‘Yes, and I must be there to welcome them! If I had Edward – ’ He looked back over his shoulder, as he went down the stairs, his face suddenly softened in laughter. ‘John, Edward is writing a book!’

‘
Edward
writing a book? Harry, you losel!’

‘No, by the faith of my body! I’ve had word from Pevensey now and now. He fell into great dis-ease, poor Edward, when the King would not answer his petition, but he has a kind gaoler, and is now amended. He must be, if he has taken on him such a task!’

‘For God’s bane, not more poems to the Queen’s grace?’ John said.

‘No! He’s not so wood!’

‘Harry, Edward
could
not write a book!’ John protested. ‘It’s all leasings! What could he write of ?’

‘Lurdan!’ Harry tossed at him. ‘Of the chase, no force!’

That made John laugh so much that he nearly missed his footing on the stair. ‘Oh, does Father know?’

‘Nay, it would be daffish to speak of Edward to him at this present. Trust me, I’ll have him back on the Marches before Allhallowmas!’

‘Will you?’ John said doubtfully.

‘I must! He sends me word it is for
me
, his great book!’

5

By July 12th Berwick had fallen; and two days later Sir Henry Percy surrendered Alnwick to the King. On July 16th the King was at Newcastle again, transacting business with John with the same nervous energy which had carried him through his campaign. He wore a sterner expression than John had ever seen on his face, but it seemed that with the death of Scrope his rage had burnt itself out. In the one day he spent at Newcastle he signed pardons flock-meal. Very few executions were ordered; and when, three days later at Raby, he signed some death warrants, provision was made for the dependants of the condemned. Confiscations were decided upon at Pontefract, whither he carried John, and kept him for four days crammed to overflowing with business. Following Westminster Law, he was able to reward the faithful out of the confiscated estates, and to make provision for his younger sons. But several manors had to be apportioned to the Queen; and one, from Mowbray’s estates near Baldock, he granted to Sir John Cornwall. Something, he told John, must be done to ease his sister Bess of her displeasure: she had not ceased to bewail her son-in-law Mowbray’s death since the news of it had reached her.

John did not see Harry again until they met at Eltham Palace at Yule-tide. At the head of the King’s force, he swept like a flame through Lauderdale, and Teviotdale, and Ettrick Forest, plundering and burning, until on either side of the Border the land was smouldering. He was gone again before the fires were quenched: and was back on the Welsh Marches when, early in August, the Lord of Hugueville reached Milford Haven with a hundred and twenty vessels, battered by storms, but carrying a formidable host. They were met by Glendower, with a large force; and the two armies moved on Haverfordwest. Failing to reduce the castle, which was held by a little Flemish colony, staunch for the King, they descended on Tenby, leaving a trail of rapine in their wake. But here they were met by ill tidings. The Lord Berkeley, detached by Thomas with the Western Fleet, had sailed into the harbour and destroyed fifteen of their ships. The Welsh drew off immediately; the French, lacking the horses which had perished on the voyage, mistrustful alike of their allies and of a land strange to them, were only with difficulty held from following the retreat. The force was got together again, and besieged Carmarthen; and by the time the King arrived from the North with the reinforcements Harry so urgently needed, all Glamorganshire was over-run, and the invaders were within ten miles of Worcester.

Far to the north, in his own troubled country, John got scant news of the fighting which drove the French out of Wales, and had little leisure to attend to it. All along his own Border a destructive warfare raged. Truces were ignored; on both sides of the Tweed no man dared pasture his cattle, or put off his harness to work in the fields; and the Scots, the stronger at sea as they were on land, patrolled the coast from Tweed to Tyne. Disaffection was rife in Berwick, where the pay of the garrison was six months in arrears; no provisions could reach Fastcastle, and the castles of Scarborough, Whitby, and Hartlepool defied the royal mandate. John was too weak to enforce the mandate; though he pledged his plate and his jewels he could not make good the deficiencies in pay and stores; and letter after letter sent by him to the Council, telling of the desperate need of siege-guns and ammunition, urging that the levies of Yorkshire and Lancashire should be sent to his aid, met with little or no response. He wanted to be granted the means to wage a winter war across the Border, but this was a revolutionary scheme that found no favour at Westminster.

He was before Scarborough when the news was brought to him from York that great crowds were assembling day after day to worship at Scrope’s tomb. He sent an order for the dispersal of such false fools, and decreed that stones should be piled up between the pillars of the parclose, to shut the tomb from sight. He heard next that there had been brawling in the cathedral, and that the dead Archbishop had appeared in a vision to an old man, who had straightway removed all the stones in a single night. There was talk of miracles; the See stood vacant; and every day John expected to hear that the crowning disaster of excommunication had befallen them.

It was prepared, and the document even sent to England, but it was never published. Archbishop Arundel, shaken and sick in heart and body, was still the King’s friend.

Winter brought an uneasy peace to the North. When the snow covered the Cheviots, the truce was remembered. The Lord John rode south through a landscape shivering under bitter winds, leaving behind him a country torn and blackened by the raids that had swept over it, many of its people ruined, all of them exhausted. His mood was as bleak as the moors which loomed against a grey sky, for it seemed as though nothing had been accomplished, as though nothing would ever be accomplished, even though he was pushing south to confront the Council in person, and to fling before them not entreaties but demands.

It was quite a little thing that gave his thoughts a turn, nothing more than a knot of men gaping unrecognisingly at him as he rode through a Midland village. He had raised his hand instinctively to acknowledge a greeting, but they did not know him, they gave no sign. He rode on, his heart suddenly lighter. They would have had a greeting for him in the dour North. He had been too preoccupied to notice the change in his people, too conscious of his own impotence to drive out the enemy who preyed on them; but it came to him all at once that he needed no pledge-borrow now when he went amongst them. There were rebel castles which still held against him; there were underpaid garrisons which threatened to leave their posts; but he no longer met ill-will. In a hundred little ways, often rude, often grutching, his people had been showing him that they did not blame him for the disasters that had befallen them, or even for the failures which lay like a load on his mind. They would rally to him when he called upon them; they believed that he would win help for them in London; next year, they said, all would be amended.