Queen of the North Read online

  ‘Knife?’ I asked conversationally to negate the familiar brush of fear that his life was so often in danger of being snuffed out.

  ‘Sword,’ he replied. ‘Before I took the weapon from its owner. He’ll not be needing it. And it was a poor weapon.’

  Since there was nothing more for me to say, and it was healing cleanly, I returned to the simple, or not so simple, matter of treason.

  ‘Do you think my cousin Henry will claim the throne?’ I asked, deliberately ingenuous.

  It was as if I had dropped an iron pan onto a hearthstone with an echoing clang to draw every eye. Harry’s shoulder acquired a rigidity under my hand.

  ‘Now there’s a dangerous question. What makes you ask that?’

  ‘Merely a thought.’

  ‘You never merely have thoughts. All I can say is that Lancaster will not be well disposed to Richard. Nor will he trust him.’ He grunted. ‘By the Rood, Elizabeth, have mercy. I swear the Scots could learn a thing or two from you about torturing prisoners.’

  As I continued to knead, but more gently, I caught the slide of Harry’s eye to where he had left his sword propped beside the door, an elegant Italian weapon with a chased blade at odds with the soldierly hilt. Harry had brought it back from a tournament somewhere in his early travels, since when it had become his pride and joy, rarely leaving his sight except when exhaustion took him to his bed.

  ‘So tell me what is in your mind,’ I said, my fingers stilled at last, my thoughts waywardly turning into those dangerous channels.

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘You looked positively shifty.’

  ‘I am never shifty. My thought processes are as clear as a millpond. I was thinking what you are thinking. That Lancaster’s not the only one with a claim to the throne. I don’t recall Richard, childless as he is, and will be for some years, ever naming Lancaster as his heir.’

  ‘No, he would not. There’s too much antipathy between them. Wasn’t it Edward of Aumale whom he named, at the last count?’

  Edward of Aumale was another distant cousin of mine, son and heir of Edmund, Duke of York. I had more than enough cousins to rustle the leaves of England’s royal tree.

  ‘Yes, Aumale has been given that honour, but before that, as I recall, until his unfortunate death in Ireland, the heir was recognised as your brother Roger, Earl of March.’

  So we had reached that scenario at last, as I knew we would. The Mortimer claim to England’s crown. It might have been rejected by a fair-weather Richard in favour of Aumale who had become the recent recipient of Richard’s affections, but the Mortimer royal blood was still there, looming over the future succession of a childless King, as immutable as ever it had been. In the opinion of a goodly number, and in mine, my brother Roger had had a stronger claim to the throne than ever Henry of Lancaster did. A claim inherited by his son Edmund, my nephew. It was temptingly close, terrifyingly close. If Richard were to die without a son, the new King should be Mortimer. If Richard were no longer King by whatever means, the new King should be Mortimer.

  Harry’s gaze, looking up and over his shoulder, held mine, daring me to make the Mortimer claim out loud. But I would not. Richard was King, and there was no question of his right to be so.

  ‘Except that Richard then promptly unrecognised Roger when he fell out of favour,’ I said lightly, ‘to replace him with Aumale.’

  ‘That’s what happens when your brother and your uncle were hand-in-glove with the Lords Appellant.’

  ‘Roger was not, as you well know. Roger was loyal to Richard all his life.’

  In a travesty of justice, Roger had gained Richard’s enmity by refusing to arrest our uncle Sir Thomas Mortimer for his admittedly too-close connections with the Lords Appellant who had forced the King to bow to their demands for good government.

  Harry was not to be deflected. ‘Yet there is still that strong, and dangerous, dose of Plantagenet blood running through the Mortimers. And your sadly deceased brother Roger has a son to take on that Mortimer mantle.’ He paused, removing a knife from his belt, testing its sharpness against his thumb as he escaped my ministrations and ranged the length of the chamber and back.

  ‘What are you saying?’ I asked as he returned to stand before me, frowning down at the weapon.

  ‘I am saying this. Lancaster is back, that we know. Would we be naive, Elizabeth, to believe that he would risk a return to England, to an even more serious charge of treason from a furious King, for the sole purpose of supporting the Mortimer claim to England’s crown before his own?’

  ‘Yes. We would be naive.’ Suddenly, as if a candle sconce had been lit, I had no doubt of cousin Henry’s ambitions. If it became a struggle for power between Lancaster and Richard, Henry would not have Mortimer interests uppermost in his mind.

  ‘Yet I would hear his own words on the matter,’ Harry said. ‘Lancaster is not, I think, a man without honour.’

  ‘So you might be willing to give him your support and the use of your retainers.’

  ‘I might.’

  An image insinuated itself into my mind, which I forced myself to consider: of King Richard returning with an army from Ireland to discover a considerable Lancaster force awaiting him, prepared to engage in battle. We were used to war and skirmish year on year in this northern March, where the Scots encroached at every opportunity and the Percys pushed just as wholeheartedly back, but this new power being set up might mean something of a far greater magnitude. I wondered if I should be fearful. And decided that I should.

  ‘It sounds like war, Harry.’

  He nodded. ‘If it is in Percy interests, I will consider it.’ The knife sliced through the skin, his blood red along the edge of his thumb, which he wiped on his sleeve. ‘I’ll fight to the death to preserve what we have and what we can get. We need a King who will see the value of our control of the north and allow us free rein to exert it. If we have such a King, then my loyalty is ensured. But any man who threatens our hegemony here in the north is an enemy, and I’ll act accordingly.’

  There it was, engraved in the line between his brows and the stain of his blood, the words that would be engraved on Harry’s tomb. Ambition. Power. Suzerainty over the lands of the northern March.

  I raised a smile in an attempt to dispel the thought, dragging my eye from the blood on his sleeve. ‘It seems to me that you have three choices,’ I said.

  ‘Only three?’

  The knife tossed from right hand to left, Harry had snatched at my fingers and raised them to his lips. By the simple expedient of latching my fingers with his, I kept him beside me.

  ‘Three. Richard. Henry of Lancaster. My dead brother’s son Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March.’

  Harry tilted his chin. ‘Go on.’

  ‘If Lancaster was of a mind to remove Richard… If he was of a mind to support the Mortimer claim as more important than his own and make my nephew King, albeit a very young one, where would your loyalties then lie?’ I paused momentarily to marshal my thoughts. ‘Not that I think there is any chance that Lancaster would do so. Why hold a golden crown in your hand in one breath and give it away in the next? If Lancaster ever seizes the crown from Richard’s head, he’ll hug it to his chest for ever. But if he did consider a Mortimer King, would you remain loyal to Richard, to the man to whom you vowed allegiance at his coronation? Or would you see opportunities elsewhere?’

  Harry had become very still.

  ‘What are you suggesting, my wife?’

  I considered whether I should speak what was in my mind, and decided to do so.

  ‘I am suggesting to you the advantages of having a Mortimer King. To have a Mortimer King of England, and one who is of no age to rule, might seem to some of our great magnates a desirable circumstance to embrace. To have a wife of Mortimer blood, as you have, would place you suddenly very close to the crown. A crown that would demand a regency and an influential council for the coming years. Such a powerful position is not one to be carelessly swept aside when
you would be uncle by marriage to the young King. I suppose you have thought of all that.’

  ‘No. It has not crossed my mind.’

  His face was supremely enigmatic. Harry was not without his talents, on or off a battlefield. Occasionally, when it suited him, dissembling was one of them.

  ‘And I suppose it did not cross the mind of the Earl, years ago, when he was negotiating marriage alliances for you?’

  ‘My father’s mind has a depth that I am often unable to plumb.’

  ‘And was my value as a Mortimer bride in your mind when you married me?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But it might well have been in your father’s!’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t in mine. You were eight years old.’

  ‘And you were fifteen and precocious.’ But I had long ago abandoned any bitterness, even if it had ever existed, that my marriage had been negotiated merely to make a worthy alliance between Mortimer and Percy. My lot had been no different from that of any royal daughter. Now it was just an effective weapon with which to needle Harry. ‘I swear it would be in your father’s mind, that at some point in the future it might be an asset to have a Mortimer wife for you, with royal Lionel’s blood directly in her veins. Your father snapped me up as a beggar would snatch at a gold coin he spied in the gutter. What an appealing alliance. What an opportunity for the future to catch a wife of royal blood, descended from the old King’s second son. I swear you were aware of it too.’

  ‘Of course I was,’ he capitulated at last, ‘and of course I have considered the possibility of a Mortimer King.’ He leaned swiftly to kiss the edge of my jaw before I could evade him. ‘Quite a catch indeed. All I wanted was the Plantagenet blood in my bed, when you were old enough for me to get you there.’ He became serious. ‘But in all honesty, Elizabeth, none of us could have seen this eventuality. There was no thought that we would have been left with Richard, unpredictable at best, dangerously capricious at worst, and no direct heir on the horizon after him. The child wife he has taken will be no good to him for many years.’

  Which rough summing-up of the situation worried me even more. ‘Your father sees all eventualities that can bring him power. And it was certainly in his mind. I was a gift from heaven. Look where my royal connections could now lead us.’

  Harry understood perfectly. ‘I am looking. But to what purpose? All will hang on where Lancaster sees his future.’

  Indeed all hung in the balance. All rested with Lancaster himself. If he had returned merely to claim his dukedom and his estates, then what cause to worry? Richard would remain gloriously King of England with Lancaster his cousinly counsellor. But if Lancaster had greater ambitions, what then? If the succession was in any manner disturbed, the royal blood of my Mortimer nephew must be thrown into the mix. And what would Lancaster do about that? If he proved not to be willing to bow the knee before Richard, would he be prepared to recognise a Mortimer claim before his own? But had I not rejected such a possibility? There was suddenly, out of nowhere, an air of menace in the room, of battle and bloodshed. I feared it but there was no means of dispelling it. As Harry said. All rested with Lancaster.

  It was Harry’s voice that dragged me from my thoughts.

  ‘We have some unfinished business.’ Knife at last discarded, he pulled on my hand, so that I was in his arms, that brief earlier moment of intimacy restored to our pleasure. This room had a curtain-shrouded bed in it. ‘Dear Elizabeth. Do you recall our wedding?’

  ‘Yes. You patted my head, gave me a pair of gloves and a hawk, probably because someone instructed you to do so, then abandoned me to join in the jousting.’

  ‘And you returned to live with your parents.’

  ‘And when I came back, within two years my parents were dead, so was the hawk.’

  ‘I gave you another.’

  ‘So you did.’ I smiled at the memories of my growing up at Alnwick. ‘You were always kind, even before you decided that you loved me.’ And while he was distracted, pressing his mouth against my throat: ‘If you go to meet Lancaster – when you go – I will go with you, dear Harry.’

  He was not distracted at all. ‘No, you will not. As the Earl would say, it’s no place for a woman.’

  Was it not? I turned my face so that my lips met his, murmuring: ‘Now that we have that little domestic issue out of the way, let us take up where we left off.’

  ‘There is a bed.’

  ‘And you still reek of horse and sweat and leather and…’ I sniffed.

  ‘You are too fastidious.’

  ‘I am not fastidious enough.’ I made him laugh as I unlaced his shirt. ‘If you wish me to be quicker I can use that knife.’ It lay on the floor beside us.

  ‘I don’t need a knife. I can be very fast. Are you going to be a submissive wife?’

  ‘Mortimer wives are never submissive.’

  ‘Which I am of a mind to disprove.’

  Disrobed in no time at all, our reunion was sweet and thorough, with no more forays into family loyalties until Harry was lacing himself into a damask robe of vibrant colour that even dulled his russet hair.

  ‘We will be leaving before the end of the week.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I will deliver your cousinly good wishes to Lancaster.’

  ‘Thank you.’ And then, because I could not completely dispel my worries: ‘I have a bad feeling about this, Harry. Make sure that you know what Lancaster wants from you.’

  Harry belted the garment loosely around his hips.

  ‘Oh, we will. And we will make sure that he knows what we want from him.’

  And I would know too. I had no intention of being left at Alnwick when contentious issues were raised with my cousin of Lancaster, but better not to reveal my plans. Better to allow Harry to believe that he had persuaded me to be compliant. How had we been wed for so many years and he not realise that when he marched south, I would be with him? For the moment I would make my preparations, without fuss, as he made his.

  Chapter Two

  The Percy household spent the following days exclusively in making preparation for the march south to meet up with Lancaster, the Percy retainers arriving in number to camp both inside and outside our walls when space became an issue. Meanwhile two letters arrived for me, brought in a package of correspondence for the Earl. With a sister, a sister by law, as well as a slew of royal cousins, I was rarely without sources of information. Knowledge was power, knowledge tucked away within the lines of female and family gossip, which was in short supply for me in the northern March.

  Seated in solitude in my chamber, selecting my sister’s note first, I could imagine the venom with which it was written before I saw the familiar hurried scrawl. Four years younger than I, Philippa had acquired a forthright turn of phrase, and why would she not? Her second husband, Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, had met his death in the horrifying fashion of that doled out to a traitor, at Richard’s hands on Tower Hill for his part in the uprising to force Richard into seemly behaviour. Although she was now married again to Sir Thomas Poynings, revenge against Richard was never far from Philippa’s heart. And so it proved to be.

  To my dearest Elizabeth,

  I do not know where this will find you, since I imagine your Percy lords will not be slow in declaring their intent with this recent invasion, if that is what it turns out to be. It is my hope that they will declare for Lancaster. I will never forgive Richard for the blood on his hands. If you have any influence, use it in the memory of the agony our royal cousin brought to me. My lord of Arundel did not deserve death, nor the manner of it. I know that to act against the King could be damned as treason, but it was with the best of intentions, and for Richard to have my lord’s head hacked from his body in so foul a manner is beyond forgiveness.

  Nothing here that I would not expect. But this next surprised me, that Philippa was so well informed.

  If Henry of Lancaster is determined to recover his inheritance, I do not see him stopping there
. He was always a boy driven by principle, even if it was only to put Richard in the dust when they had nothing more than wooden swords. I would welcome any choice he makes to take the crown for himself. In fact I would support him wholeheartedly, although I suspect that our nephew Edmund of March is in your mind. I cannot give such a claim my blessing, Elizabeth. If he were older then I might. As it is, his youth would lay England open to those who are power hungry and would use him to their own ends. Henry of Lancaster will be his own man.

  Perhaps we will see each other at his coronation, sister. It would be sweet retribution against Richard, to have his power so bespoiled. I never thought that I was a vengeful woman but Arundel’s death changed all that.

  What will Northumberland do, Elizabeth? If you have your husband’s ear, then use your wifely charms. Northumberland’s power behind Lancaster could tip the balance. My lord, Sir Thomas, is of a mind to remain loyal to Richard, so I do not talk about my desires here at home.

  I folded the letter tightly, scoring the folds with my thumbnail. Treasonous talk here. So Philippa’s heart was set on the Lancaster cause, the Mortimer claim rejected for purely practical reasons. Philippa was drenched in vengeance, and who better to achieve it than Lancaster? I was disappointed. Our Mortimer claim had been rejected, so it seemed to me, on purely selfish grounds, and yet, as ever, Philippa had stirred my thoughts. A young King, in need of a regent or a council to advise, could be open to gross manipulation. I wondered what Harry thought about that.

  I picked up the second letter, knowing that the tone would be very different in this package. The writing was careful, well formed, almost fragile, but Alianore was never fragile. She had a will of iron, as had her grandmother Joan, Countess of Kent. Alianore Holland had been wed to my brother Roger, Earl of March. Left with two sons and two daughters, Alianore was now wed to a Welsh marcher lord, Edward de Charleton of Powys, so I enjoyed her letters of the region where I was born and recalled my earliest memories spent at Wigmore and Ludlow.