The Yeoman's Tale by M.J. Trow

Author:M.J. Trow [Trow, M.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448307562
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2022-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

The King came down from Windsor that day, his entourage bright with his banners, outriders trotting along both banks of the Thames as his barges butted through the sparkling water, the oarsmen in their deep green velvet keeping time to the beat of a single drum.

Sir Robert Knollys had been sent by the Earl of Salisbury the day before, the old soldier trying to talk sense to the boy without making him shit his breeches. Not that much actually troubled young Richard. He was fourteen and the cost of his haircut alone would keep Wat Tyler in clover for a year. Knollys looked down at the lad now, lolling on his throne at the stern of the boat. When he was little, people said that he had the looks of his father, Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince. But his clear blue eyes now looked arrogant, his lips thin and sneering. Above all, there seemed to be a perpetual smell under his nose.

‘Do they do things differently there?’ he asked, looking up from the locket he was holding.

‘Where, Your Grace?’ Knollys had given up trying to discern any logic in the boy hours ago.

‘Bohemia,’ the King said. ‘Where she comes from.’

She was Anne of Bohemia, the intended bride of the Lord’s Anointed, and he had not met her yet. For a moment, Knollys toyed with telling the lad that Bohemians had faces in the middle of their chests and that they walked on their hands, but he suspected the boy had no sense of humour at all. ‘The ladies, I believe, ride side-saddle,’ the old man said, ‘and, at court at least, they use forks, two-pronged skewers, to pick up food.’

The disgust on the King’s face said it all. ‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘But I meant in the bedroom. Swiving. Is it done in Bohemia as it is here?’

Robert Knollys’s children had long ago flown the nest. He had lost his own virginity when he was a page, before the Flood, and he had no intention of sharing intimate details with his King, especially one whose voice had not yet broken. ‘Perhaps Your Grace should discuss that with your Father Confessor,’ he suggested.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Knollys!’ Richard snapped. ‘The man’s a churchman. Doesn’t know one end of a woman from another.’

Robert Knollys raised an eyebrow. Clearly the boy was more of an ingénu than he realized. In the event, a petitioner, one of a clutch waiting patiently at the barge’s prow, intervened to save the day.

‘Grant mercy, liege lord,’ the man said, kneeling before the boy and handing him a scrolled parchment.

Richard clicked his fingers and a lackey took the document and read it. ‘Request for crenellation, sire,’ the clerk said. ‘Stoke by Nayland.’

‘Another one?’ Richard tutted. ‘Does no one want anything but lumps of stone on their houses?’

‘Status, sire,’ Knollys said. ‘It means everything to some people.’

‘Where are we, Knollys?’ The portrait of the pretty Anne had been consigned to a slop bucket. The veteran of Crécy and Nájera scanned the banks on both sides of the river.

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