The Rose of York (46 page)

“Why would he resent it when the King’s officers found for the city? Surely he does not intend to be unjust?”

“The Percys have been all-powerful in the North for a hundred years and don’t take kindly to others clipping their wings, whether for right or not. Besides, justice is not to him what it is to me.”

Anne laid down her needlework. Richard’s qualms over Percy had touched her, but the pride she took in him had stirred her more deeply. She gazed at her husband, finding him better looking than ever before. Gone was the diffidence of childhood and the fear she used to see in his eyes. Gone the sad set of his mouth. His grey eyes had the sheen of purpose, and his skin, bronzed by wind and sun, no longer contrasted starkly with his dark hair. He had gained weight, so that his nose did not dominate his otherwise well-proportioned face, and the lines about his mouth and eyes, which had once etched his face with care, now served to mute his youth with strength. He exuded energy and princely authority in his red and gold doublet, and in spite of his present mood, there was a new contentment to him.

“I hope our babe is a boy, and is as handsome as you, and as clever, and as generous, and as brave, and as princely, and as good,” she mused dreamily.

“I hope so, too,” replied Richard. She stared at him in astonishment. Arrogance was unlike him. Then she saw his smile and they both burst into laughter. She pushed from her window seat with effort and waddled over to him slowly, for she was nine months with child. Standing behind his chair, she clasped her hands around his neck and laid her cheek to his.

“’Tis no mystery why I love you, Richard,” she said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “’Tis for all those virtues, and one in particular…” She gave him another on the tip of his nose. “You care for the poor and wretched who have no one to speak for them.” As always when recounting Richard’s virtues, she remembered George, who was as different from Richard as Cain from Abel. How Richard had turned out so opposite was a mystery she couldn’t fathom, any more than she could count the drops of water in a well. “Of all the nobles, you’re the only one willing to champion them, though they can offer you nothing in return. I know what they suffer. I’ve walked in their shoes, but you have not… So how is it you are as you are?”

Richard slid her carefully onto his lap. Though her body had become too unwieldy for comfort, her face was radiant in its beauty. Pregnancy had heightened her colour, and her cheeks, which had always been a touch pale, reflecting her frail health, now blushed with rose like a May morning. Her lips were the colour of berries, and her violet eyes shone with joy and blessed expectation. He placed an arm around her shoulder, the other on her stomach, where he might feel the baby kick.

“When I was a boy, I saw an innocent man hung…” He blinked to banish the painful memory that rose before him. “So when it falls in my power to help, I cannot turn away. Besides,” he added on a brighter note, “I learned from your father, and John.”

“If my uncle John were earl of Northumberland, you’d not be troubled so.”

“He was a true knight.”

“Much like you, Richard. You might have been born brothers.”

Richard winced. “In many ways, we were.”

“I never thanked you for what you did for his Isobel.”

A silence fell. Richard stared into the blue twilight, his mind tumbling back to the first time he’d seen Lady Montagu after John’s death. It was in August, nearly three years earlier, that Lady Montagu and John’s squire had come to him in Bamborough on the Scots border. Richard had received his visitors in a tent and had been so swept with memory he had been unable to say much. The squire had knelt at his feet, and Lady Montagu had given Richard the ring he’d once given John. Her eyes were red with weeping, and emotion so threatened her composure the squire had to speak for her.

“My Lord Duke,” George Gower had said, “on the eve of the battle of Barnet, my master gave me this ring and said I should take it to my lady if anything… if anything happened to him. He told me to have my lady bring you the ring… for you would understand.”

In the light of the high lancet window, the sapphire had shone with the colour of John’s eyes: deep and calm as the sea on a gentle day. Richard had a sudden vision of John sitting with him on the rocky cliff at Barnard’s Castle, hugging his knees and smiling, his tawny-gold hair whipping in the wind, and again he’d heard him say, “
We younger sons… have no say in weighty matters…
”

“Dear lady,” he had replied, “ask, and it shall be granted.”

Richard came back to the present abruptly. He smoothed the folds of Anne’s silk chamber gown around her swollen stomach and felt a small movement that might have been the baby. All Lady Montagu had requested was the wardship of her four-year-old son George. Now that his father was dead, the boy would have been granted to someone else for the few pounds of income he held in his own right. He took Anne’s hand into his own. “Is your lady aunt happy in her new marriage?”

“Happy? Nay, my lord, she loved my lord uncle too much to be happy again, but Sir William Norris is a good man and kind to her. In that much, she is happy.”

“At least she has made a splendid marriage for her daughter Lizzie. Lord Scrope of Masham is a fine man, and a wealthy one.”

“He must have loved Lizzie very much, for he married her though she was penniless.” Anne smiled meaningfully and moved to kiss him, and froze. A gasp of pain escaped her lips.

With Anne’s weight in his arms and fear at his heart, Richard struggled up from the chair. “Is it time, my dearest?”

A hand to her back, Anne looked at him with frightened eyes. “It is, my lord.”

~ * * * ~

“And tho’ she lay dark in the pool she knew That all was bright, that all about were birds Of sunny plume in gilded trellis-work.”

Richard strode down the hall, creaked the door open, and went down the circular staircase and into the dark garden without realising he had moved. A light shone in Anne’s room high in the round tower. He stared at the window, wondered why he was outside, turned on his heel, and went back.

In the torch-lit antechamber, the physician, a greyfriar with a silver and crystal rosary dangling from his waist, waited outside the birthing chamber, ready to advise the midwife. Through the door came screams so terrible Richard could scarcely bear the sound. His eyes flew to the friar’s face.

The physician said kindly, “My Lord Duke, ’tis normal.”

“But it has been hours!”

“’Tis always so. I pray you retire to the hall, my lord. We will send word when it’s time.”

Richard left reluctantly, with many a backward glance as he went down the passageway, and hesitated when he caught sight of the Countess’s weary face leaving Anne’s room. Anne wasn’t visible but he glimpsed a tiring woman carrying away a basin of dark liquid that he knew was blood. The door closed. He slipped around a corner, sagged against the wall, and loosened his collar. He took a deep breath. Battle had not affected him so, when men stood with their bowels hanging out of their bellies, yet this…

The Countess did not see him as she passed. He leaned out and grabbed her arm. “How is my lady?”

She looked at him and bit her lip. Taking his elbow, she led him back around the corner. “The birth is difficult, my lord. She suffers much. I fear for her. She is delicate, as you know.” She avoided his eyes. “The midwife says…”

“Aye?” Richard managed. “Aye?”

“The midwife says…” Her voice cracked. “She says she may not be able to save both child and mother… You will have to choose.”

Richard felt as if a black wave rolled over him. “I—I— Anne…” he cried through parched lips, stumbling out towards Anne’s room. The Countess seized his arm. “My dear lord, you cannot go in there!”

He turned wild, bewildered eyes on her. “Anne…”

“Anne is frail, and childbirth difficult. We must pray for her and the child. ’Tis all we can do.”

He laid his forehead against the cold stone. The Countess rested a hand on his shoulder. “All unfolds according to His will,” she said softly. “Therein must lay our strength.” She pushed her crumpled handkerchief back into her sleeve and lifted her chin. “Now come, my lord, and take some rest. You have a decision to make.”

~*~

Richard did not take long to give the Countess an answer. Anne must live. Without Anne, there was no light, no air, no warmth in the world. Without Anne, he could not go on. The night passed. Richard did not sleep. Day broke; rain fell; nothing changed. The hours passed in wretched anguish for Anne and the babe who would not be born. He rose from the altar in the chapel where he had knelt all afternoon and went to the window. A storm had blown in and rain pelted from the dark skies, drenching the castle grounds. Lightning struck nearby, and a moment later, the crash of thunder rattled the windowpanes. Church bells tolled: he counted five. Almost a full day had passed since the evening in the solar. It seemed so long ago. He wandered through the passageways of the Keep and took the bridge to the birthing chamber in the Round Tower.

Cries still drifted from the room, though weaker than before, and the greyfriar still waited, though now he drooped on a stool. The lady-in-waiting was the first to notice Richard. She curtsied. The physician rose. “My lord, I have instructed root of peony be crushed and mixed with oil of roses. The mixture applied to my lady’s stomach eases pain,” he explained gravely.

“How much longer?” demanded Richard.

The physician shook his head. “There is no knowing. Sometimes the birthing takes days.”

“Days?”

The greyfriar omitted to add that in such cases where the birth dragged on for more than thirty hours, the babe was born dead. Longer than that, and infection was bound to set in and claim the mother. He looked at the Duke with pity, for many a beloved wife had faded out of this world with her babe just so, and physician though he was, and learned in the ways of medicines, potions, unguents, and the stars, often he had naught to do but sit outside their room until it was time to grant extreme unction.

“I must do something!” Richard cried.

“There is prayer, my lord,” the friar replied.

As if to mark his words, church bells clanged nearby and were echoed across the distance. Aye, all over the North prayers were being said. All that could be done was being done.

“My Lord Duke, if it be solace, I have consulted the stars and they are not ill-omened. Saturn is in dangerous alignment, but Jupiter is favourable to her moon.”

Richard inclined his head in a gesture of thanks. Anne had said that Heaven was against them. She was wrong. That, at least, was comfort.

~*~

Richard spent much of the evening in Anne’s chamber, on his knees at her prie-dieu. At last sleep stole on his bleary eyes. He fell into bed and tossed by the dimness of a candle, seized by dreams that sent him bolt upright in his sleep. There was Ludlow, lit by burning crosses and grinning fiends who danced in their flames… There was George, his blue eyes contemptuous, tossing his flaxen curls, sneering,
Thou art not our father’s son; thou art the son of an archer…
And there was the pale doomed face of Henry VI, holding up his silver crucifix, which grew until it blotted out all light behind it, while Henry smiled a secret smile.
Darkness will fall upon thee; I shall be avenged.

“No!” Richard panted, twisting his head from side to side. “No!”

“My lord, my lord…”

Someone was shaking him. Richard opened his eyes and sat up dizzily. His gaze focused slowly. The face that bent over him was blurred and he could not tell whose it was.

“My lord,” said his new squire, John Nesfield. “The Countess has sent me for you. ’Tis time.”

Richard leapt from the bed, his heart in his throat. “What hour is it?” he mumbled thickly, pushing his hair back from his brow. He must have slept more soundly than he realised; he had heard no church bells.

“Almost daybreak, my lord,” Nesfield replied.

Richard panicked. “My lady…?”

Nesfield shook his head. “I know nothing, my lord. A maidservant sent by the Countess bade me make haste and fetch you.”

Richard leaned over the silver ewer on the sideboard. Nesfield picked up a pitcher of water and poured. The frigid water stung. Richard grabbed the towel Nesfield offered and briskly dried his head and neck. He felt much better, except for his legs, which refused to carry him and moved as unsteadily as a drunkard’s. He grabbed Nesfield’s shoulder, indicated he should lead the way, and stumbled after him. They reached the anteroom of Anne’s birthing chamber. Her mother was waiting. Richard let go of Nesfield’s shoulder and practically fell on the Countess. He searched her face, his heart in his throat.

“My lord Richard,” she said. And smiled.