Cecily by Annie Garthwaite

Author:Annie Garthwaite
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241990988
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

25

September–October 1450

In the end he rides with eight hundred. They look like nothing more than the lordly escort any great man might take when he rides into the world on a fine September morning. But under every fine cloak lies a close coat of mail, every man has a blade at his side, and the long-legged coursers they ride are as fit for battle as swift travel. It’s enough, he says, to make a showing. To defend himself, at need.

Pray God a show is all that’s needed.

She watches from the walls as he rides out down Broad Street towards Ludford Bridge and the roads that lead east and south to London. Outpacing him speeds a lone messenger, his horse throwing up dust and carrying to the King the letter they’ve composed together. I am your true liege man and servant, it says. If any say otherwise, they lie. Call them, and I, to your presence, let them charge me and I will answer.

At last, even the noise of his going is over. She bows her head and feels the risen sun beat upon it. She’s nauseous, and there’s a taste on her tongue like old coins. She knows what it means. Her hands find their way to her belly. She’s with child again. Conceived in a green Irish summer when the sun’s heat was still a blessing. God’s blood. What need has she now of another babe to pull on her? She steps down from the wall and finds her boys behind her. Edmund, tow-headed beside his brother’s gold, stands quiet, but Edward is surly, throwing his weight and kicking his heels.

‘I wanted to go with him,’ he accuses. ‘You should have let me.’

Her hand strikes his head faster than a snake. ‘Would you were a man that you could be of such use!’

Striding past him to the tower stair, she hears his scream of shock and outrage, then his tutor’s hushing.

Let him shout, she thinks. Stoke the fire in him. Better angry than weeping.

She is not kept short of news. Every second or third day a messenger comes from Richard. Each is given food, a fresh horse, then sent back with her reply. It is some comfort to hear that, as he rides, more men of his affinity come to swell his numbers.

‘I am thankful for that,’ she writes him.

He replies that, in the towns he passes through, knights and burghers complain of the loss of Normandy – and of the King’s favourites, who ride roughshod over their rights. They are glad he is come and petition him to take up the reins of government, as Cade said he should. ‘It will not make Edmund Beaufort love me,’ he confides.

‘He hates you already,’ she reminds him. ‘And you must wrest him from the King’s side.’

Richard writes that several nobles and not a few royal officers have come. ‘They want to know what I’m about,’ he says. ‘To serve the King’s justice, I tell them, and to clear my name. And, yes, you may send word to the King of that intent.

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