Chapter Two

September 1459

Hampered by the cumbersome carts, the journey to Ludlow took the Fotheringhay party a week through mostly friendly Neville country. Had Queen Margaret of Anjou been aware of the movements of these important children, she might have sent a troop to intercept them. It was always valuable to have a hostage or two to barter with—as Warwick had hoped to have with the captive king after Northampton, until he clumsily lost his prize at St. Alban’s. Happily, however, fortune smiled on the youthful travelers until they reached their destination on the edge of the Welsh Marches—the borderlands between England and Wales.

“Ned favors you, you know, George,” Meg had said idly as they passed by a village named Market Bosworth during one of the boring stretches of the Midlands’ rolling road, the carriage’s curtains tied up on all sides.

“And you are Father’s favorite,” George had shot back resentfully. “He never notices me.”

“Or me,” Dickon joined in. “I’m not sure Maman does either. I think she loves Edmund the best. I don’t remember much about Ned and Edmund, but I’m sure they wouldn’t favor me.”

“Don’t say that, Dickon,” Meg said, kindly. “I’m sure someone loves you best.”

George laughed. “Aye, every peasant at the castle—and don’t forget the dogs.”

All of a sudden, Anne swiveled around on her perch. She could not bear to listen to one more of George’s taunts. “It is better to have the honest love of the common folk than the loyaulte faux des nobles,” she pontificated, “the false love, vous comprennez? Et bien, do not ever forget it.”

The children were speechless. Like all sensible indentured servants of her time, Anne was not prone to voicing her opinions. Of common Norman stock, she was grateful for her position in the powerful York household, and thus she limited her platitudes to issues surrounding her charges’ safety and good health. She knew she had overstepped her bounds, but when she quickly turned back, the carter patted her hand.

Dutiful Dickon mulled over what she had said and kept it in his heart.

A thrill of pride warmed Dickon as he looked up at the sturdy walls around Ludlow, the town strategically perched on a hill above the River Teme. The castle within was another residence owned by his family, and he was beginning to realize what a great landowner his father was. Rumbling under the Broad Gate and up the cobbled street to the Market Square, its market cross standing sentinel, his several disappointments vanished as he anticipated the reunion with his older brothers.

Dickon stared up at the two giants grinning down at him. Could these be the same brothers he vaguely remembered as rough-and-tumble boys? He sidled close to George, who shook him off, puffed out his chest and extended his hand to Edward and Edmund. “Ned, Edmund, ’tis good to see you again,” George drawled, blocking Richard from their line of sight.

Edward stepped forward to grasp George’s wrist in an affectionate greeting. Dickon noticed with dismay he was eye level with Ambergris, his oldest brother’s wolfhound, who lapped Dickon’s face in greeting. Pray God Ned doesn’t call me runt, he thought, finding the dog’s ears. In truth, I pray he doesn’t notice me at all. A shadow fell on him as Edmund approached. With the ease of an athlete, the fourteen-year-old Edmund sank down on his haunches to a level with his youngest sibling. “Remember me, Dickon?” he asked gently. He had observed the boy’s reticence and was anxious to reassure him. “It seems you have grown since I last saw you. How old are you now?”

A grateful grin lit the small boy’s face, and Edmund noticed the striking likeness to their father. “I’m nearly seven, and I know how to let an arrow fly now,” Dickon said proudly, his fear banished. “Piers Taggett showed me.”

“A good man, Piers,” Edmund replied.

During those long September days, Dickon, George and Margaret were wide-eyed observers upon the high ramparts above their apartments on the western wall of Ludlow’s impressive fortifications as they puzzled over the hurly-burly below them in the inner bailey. Meg was able to glean from Edmund some news of the many meetings held in the ducal audience chamber, while he enjoyed getting to know his quick-witted sister.

“Edmund says our father is summoning more men to support his petition for the king to recognize his rank as royal duke and to acknowledge his loyalty,” she explained to her younger brothers. “He says Father does not want to fight, but he has to protect his rightful claim to the throne. ’Tis complicated, in truth.”

Dickon was staring out at the Welsh hills and idly fingering a tiny dagger at his waist given to him by Ned. He did not understand all this talk of petitions and rightful claims; he just wanted this wonderful time with his family to go on forever. He had told his mother all about Traveller, whom he sorely missed. He had not noticed her secret smile when he owned up to trying to smuggle him out of Fotheringhay; she delighted in his boyish attempt at guile and his honesty in owning it. Dickon had not, however, revealed George’s betrayal, which lay buried and festering somewhere inside.

“So, he did not tell you that George informed on him?” York asked Cecily later when she regaled her husband with the story. “Aye, Roger Ree told me the whole tale. Not betraying George—that’s the part I will remember, Cis, not the act of rebellion. Our son learns quickly, and he learns well. He has promise.”

The tension in the castle was mounting daily as messengers cantered in from the town and out again with alarming regularity. The children were forbidden to leave the castle’s inner yard, the women were discouraged from riding out to hawk, and lookouts were stationed night and day on the ramparts. Cartloads of armor and armaments trundled over the Teme and up the cobbled streets of Ludlow Town along with mounted soldiers and yeomen on foot carrying pikes, halberds and makeshift weapons. That York was mustering a force must surely have reached the king, who was heard to be advancing from Coventry, with his queen’s army north at Chester.

When George was not tied to the schoolroom with Dickon, he escaped to join his older brothers at the butts, supervising the forging of their new suits of armor, or exercising their horses in the yard.

It was during these tedious afternoons, when he had been left alone to study his Latin or complete a mathematical problem, that Dickon discovered men were not the only creatures who supervised life in the castle. He was learning the importance of organization and that life in a castle did not happen without order. And Dickon liked order. He followed his mother and Meg to the kitchen one day and watched as Cecily instructed her daughter how to inventory what was in the pantry, to assess how many mouths there were to feed and with what, and when the pantler showed the duchess his accounting, she made Meg add it all up to make sure it was correct. Candles needed to be counted, laundry supervised, and complaints heard from staff. Dickon was astonished that his mother had so much to do, and that the servants, who were all male but for a few, listened to and obeyed a woman.

“Do you like being a girl?” he had asked Meg once and had been struck by her vehemence when she replied. “No, I do not. You are always ruled by a man your whole life: first your father, then your husband. And some men are perfectly stupid, and it could be I will be made to marry a fool.”

“Why?”

“You and your questions, Dickon. Families like ours need to make contracts with other noble families so we carry on the noble names.” Margaret shrugged, irritated by a subject she loathed. “We cannot marry beneath us, you see.”

Dickon’s eyes were wide. “Beneath us? What does that mean?”

“It means you cannot mix the peasantry with the nobility or the natural order will be undone, Mother told me.”

“Will I be made to marry someone even if I don’t want to?” Dickon’s worried frown made Margaret laugh.

“Boys are different. But yes, you will have to do your duty and marry well. Our two sisters were married when they were younger than I,” Meg told him. “It was arranged by Father and Mother. Lizzie cried when she had to go to marry Suffolk, and he didn’t know her either. It’s just the way of the world.” And she had hurried off, unsure she knew the answers to the rest of the boy’s interminable questions. But Dickon was impressed with how much Meg knew. Why, she was much cleverer than George, he decided, and she was a girl.

His admiration of Meg, his mother and women rose considerably not only on that day but upon straying into his mother’s physician and confidante’s sanctuary on another. It was not usual for a woman to become a doctor, but Constance LeMaitre had grown up a physician’s daughter in Rouen, where Cecily had first offered her a place in the York household and where she had lived for almost thirty years. A progressive man, Doctor LeMaitre had sent his bright young daughter to Salerno to attend medical school and she had come to Cecily’s attention when the Yorks had spent time in Normandy.

“Why are you not married, Constance?” Dickon wanted to know. “You are pretty and very clever.”

Constance laughed. “You must learn not to ask such difficult questions, Master Dickon. I have no need of a husband, because your mother lets me do what I love to do best—and she pays me,” she explained. She put her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell anyone, but I would dearly like to know what love is—like the love your mother and father show each other. ’Tis very precious and very rare.” She sighed. “But I am more useful as a doctor than as a wife, I fear. So I love my work instead of a husband.”

Dickon blinked a few times, for in truth he had not understood some of this conversation, but he enjoyed the feeling of being a confidante, and it warmed him that Constance trusted him. Perhaps she could be his friend, he mused; he sorely needed one. Or, and he suddenly asked:

“Do you want to marry me, Constance? Are you allowed to choose?”

Constance’s laugh rang merrily around the infirmary. She curtsied. “Merci beaucoup, milord, but I cannot marry you, because I am not born noble like you.”

Dickon nodded sagely. “You are beneath me. Now I think I understand.” He beckoned to her to bend down to him and whispered, “We may not marry, but I would tell you that I love you.”

“Then let this be our secret, Dickon,” Constance said earnestly, and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

Embarrassed, Dickon stared up at the dried lizards, newts and frogs hanging above him. “What did you want to show me, Doctor?” he said hurriedly. Soon he was enthralled by the bottles, jars, vials, liquids bubbling over a flame, scales, dried herbs, colorful powders, collections of dead insects and small bones, and the overpowering scents the preparations gave off. He watched, fascinated, as Constance ground substances in her mortar and added liquids that changed color in oddly shaped glass tubes.

Dickon left the dispensary not only warmed by her special attention, but in awe of Constance’s knowledge, and again he marveled at a woman’s capabilities. He came to the conclusion moreover, that it was not merely his mother’s rank that made her so capable. Constance was every bit as clever. He told himself there and then it would be the last time he would underestimate any female—even good old Nurse Anne.

It was a wise decision, because in his life, Dickon was to face a few formidable women and even fall in love with one who was quite beneath him.

One glorious afternoon, when Dickon had slipped away from Anne’s care and was on his favorite perch high above the Teme on the south side of the castle, he was surprised to see his mother, accompanied by Piers Taggett and three others, ride over the Dinham Bridge and up the grassy banks of Whitcliff Hill. Dickon had yet to understand that whatever his mother wanted, his father was loathe to deny. An avid hawker, Cecily had obviously prevailed upon the duke to relax his no-riding rule for her. Dickon was learning fast that the world was not strictly run by men.

Today, Dickon’s focus was on the falconer, Piers, who carried the duchess’s hawk expertly on his wrist. Dickon had known Piers all his life, and he would demand the solid Piers tell him the story over and over again of how he came to be the York’s falconer. As Dickon grew into a thoughtful little boy, he probed deeper into Piers’s boyhood and why he had attacked Duchess Cecily in a forest one day and made off with her horse and betrothal ring.

“My father was killed fighting under the Salisbury banner when I was two,” Piers had told him, “and as soon as I was old enough, I had to work hard to help put food on the table for my mother and sisters. Your mother’s horse and ring would have fed my family for a year. Times were hard,” he had explained. Piers did not like to tell a duke’s son that times were still hard for the yeomanry, and that many of them, like him at that earlier time, had been forced into the woods as outlaws. “Your mother was alone and I was desperate,” Piers had confessed.

The more Dickon heard the story, the more he thought about it, contemplating the criminal act of the man who seemed the most trustworthy of all their servants. “And you would have hanged had it not been for my Mother, you say. How clever she is! She understood that you were only trying to stop your family from starving, in truth. But why did you not go to your lord, my uncle Salisbury, and ask for food?”

Piers had laughed. “A peasant does not have the right, young master.”

“It doesn’t seem fair that you should be punished for something that was not your fault.”

This statement astonished the falconer. The boy had grasped the heart of the matter, but the conversation had made Piers uneasy.

“I would do anything for her grace, your mother,” he assured the young lord, hoping the boy would not relay the dangerous conversation to anyone else. “She took a chance on a poor country boy. In truth, I should not be talking to you like this—you a duke’s son. We all have our place.”

“Place?”

“I am a servant, young master. Some would call me a peasant. You are a lord, and you make the rules—the laws.”

Dickon was learning his own place, although he had not felt different playing with the boys at Fotheringhay. What made one boy noble and another a peasant? It was not a philosophical question a boy of seven might usually pose, but Dickon was unusual. His lack of physical prowess had made him rely on his mind, which was expanding daily.

“Then perhaps the laws should be changed,” Dickon said almost to himself.

Piers winked at him. “Only the king can change the laws, Dickon. Are you going to be king?”

Dickon grinned then, his pensive mood relieved by Piers’s good-natured jesting. “Nay, Master Falconer, I have no wish to be a king. Besides, King Henry has a son who will be king after him, Mother says. That is the way of the world,” he said, borrowing Margaret’s grown-up phrase and making Piers chuckle. “I shall never be king.”

Still unaccustomed to his surroundings and never tiring of exploring the castle ramparts so high on Ludlow’s strategic hill, Dickon turned and ran along the wall walk to the Northwest Tower looking towards the darkly wooded Welsh hills. A glint of metal in the distance caught his eye—lots of metal, he saw now. Then he was aware of a peculiar thrumming. Unused to hearing the sound of men on the march, he tried to imagine what it might be. As the noise grew louder, and he could now see the snake of men, he knew. “It must be the king,” he gulped and raced along the precarious walkway to the closest watchman, who called: “I see ’em, young lord.”

Grabbing his shawm, the sentry puffed out his cheeks and pushed his breath through the long, wooden instrument, deafening Dickon with its sharp wail of alarm.

Fascinated but fearful, Dickon watched the army of mounted men and foot soldiers slide like a moving carpet of gleaming silver over the landscape. Then wasting no more time, he scampered down the stairs to tell George that an army was at the gates. He should have waited to recognize the standard in the green and yellow colors of his uncle, the earl of Salisbury. The castle was not under attack after all. Even so, the boy would not soon forget his first sight of an army on the move. What he had also not waited long enough to see was that this army, which had recently seen battle, was a bedraggled and wounded horde of men straggling through Ludlow’s streets towards the castle.

When he joined his family in the courtyard, Dickon stared horrified as his uncle Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, and his immediate entourage were helped from their mounts, blood and muck streaking their tabards and their beards. The colorful trappings on their horses were cut to tatters and dark blood caked the animals’ sides; one man’s head was wrapped in bandages, most of his jaw missing; dozens of foot soldiers supported others hobbling through the gateway on broken limbs or carried on makeshift litters; and the sounds of human suffering chilled Dickon to the marrow. He wanted to be sick, but he was a son of York and forced down his bile.

Many of the wounded had dropped where they stood once inside the safety of the curtain wall. Cecily picked up her skirts and began to move from one man to another offering prayers and words of encouragement. The common soldiers stared in awe at the beautiful duchess, clad in crimson damask and silk, who tore strips off her petticoat to wipe a bloodied brow here or staunch a wound there. Dickon stood in George’s shadow and observed his mother with pride.

Not long after her mistress jumped into the fray, Constance arrived with her bag of supplies and went from one victim to the other, ascertaining their condition and giving instructions to rush the badly wounded into her makeshift infirmary in the lodgings adjacent to the kitchen house. After years of caring for routine ailments of the household, she finally felt useful and was dispensing orders to the duke’s servants with the confidence of a battlefield commander. Then Dickon saw Meg run forward with a ewer of water and hold the vessel to the parched lips of as many as called for it. The women seemed fearless, and he could not stand idly by. As soon as he saw Meg’s pitcher was dry, Dickon picked up a pail and hurried to the well hard by the kitchen to fetch her more water. It felt good to him to be of use.

“There’s a good boy,” Richard of York called, seeing his youngest heaving the bucket back to Meg. “These men have given their blood for our house. Help as many as you can. George!” he cried, striding towards the great-hall steps with Salisbury and his oldest sons, looking to his brother-in-law for a full report. “Make yourself useful, like your young brother.”

Dickon waited his turn to fill his wooden bucket and then tentatively moved towards a figure lying awkwardly on his side. A battered tin cup lay abandoned on the ground, and picking it up, Dickon dipped it in the water, hoping to slake the billman’s thirst. He gently shifted the man onto his back and then jumped back in horror. The boy—for certes, he was no more than Meg’s age—had only half a face. His lips clung to where his mouth once met his cheeks, exposing his teeth and gums in a bloody, gaping hole. His remaining eye was fixed on Dickon, and he cried out something unintelligible so desperately that Dickon, overcoming his disgust, knelt down beside him and took the lad’s out-stretched hand. It was then he saw the young soldier’s other arm was missing below the elbow and a wad of blood-blackened linen had helped to stem the flow of blood. Constance had told him how every living creature only had so much blood running through its veins, and when it ran out unheeded as this poor lad’s had, even Dickon, young as he was, understood the lad must be dying.

He searched the melee for Constance or any adult who might better save the boy than he, but, seeing everyone was already occupied, he reluctantly turned back and resorted to prayer. “Pater noster, qui es in coelis,” he recited, trying to comfort the billman with the familiar words that always helped him when he felt sad and alone. “Hallowed be thy name….” All at once he faltered as he felt a lifelessness in the fingers he held, and he knew instinctively the man’s soul had flown. “Requiescat in pace,” he whispered, crossing himself and carefully released the cold hand. Staring at the inert form, he suddenly imagined himself lying on a bloody field, his own life seeping into the soil, and he wept—as much for himself as for the unknown yeoman.

Playing at soldier with George, Dickon had often feigned dying, but witnessing real death this day would forever change the boy’s understanding of the seriousness of war.

Sobbing in Nurse Anne’s arms later, he wondered whether he wanted to be a knight at all. He doubted his courage to face awful maiming and death. He could not erase the image of the billman’s gray face and glassy eye, which would haunt his dreams.

“And I did not even know his name,” he moaned, as Anne rocked the trembling boy in her arms.

Much later, Dickon’s curiosity—and a good dose of Anne’s wisdom and chamomile infusion—took him down to the hall to join his mother, where her brother had been enthralling his audience by reporting on the battle with the queen’s army near Market Drayton. Dickon’s eyes were still red from crying, but Cecily was too engrossed in Salisbury’s tale to notice.

“Praise God, we routed them,” Salisbury told York. “I will take credit for two ruses—one that feigned flight—which not only won the day but allowed us to make our way here without pursuit. As well, many of the queen’s men joined our side. It seems there are Englishmen who believe in your cause, Your Grace,” he told the surprised York. “’Tis a brave man who risks treason to join you.”

York nodded, his gray eyes thoughtful. “How many slain?”

The company gasped when they were told: “Our side lost a thousand good men, and our adversaries lost twice as many, but after the rout, when many of my soldiers followed the fleeing enemy and cut them down, ’twas hard to tell.”

Dickon shrank back. One death from battle wounds had been terrible enough, his young imagination could hardly contemplate thousands.

“Do you want to hear my ruse?” Salisbury said, and Dickon was startled to hear his uncle laugh. How can there be anything to laugh at? he wanted to ask. However, he listened as Salisbury told a preposterous story about paying a priest to man a canon all night, who let fly a ball or two to pretend his army was still there. Dickon stared around at the amused courtiers and tried to comprehend how grown-ups could bemoan thousands of deaths in one breath and make a joke in the next. Still numbed and close to tears, he forced himself to join in the laughter, but whether his was from amusement, grief or relief, Dickon did not know.