It was not easy to lower myself between the stones. Every joint hurt and the thing in my belly pained me. Heavy it was, but not like a living child, for it was one of those dead things which somehow know how to grow. What I carried this time was killing me.
It was no mystery. I'd seen tumors. Worse, my mother before me had died of something like. There was no sense in clinging to life, clattering about like a crab dropped alive into a hot pot. Best to go down quietly while I still had a few shreds of dignity left and get it over.
The sky overhead was clear, the wind very cold. Tonight, after the sun went down, it would freeze. Between the cold and the vial I'd brought with me, I'd be dead by morning.
I had wanted to be strong, but I wept as I crouched down inside the cold stones, down in the crack below the twisted tree. No matter how terrible the pain, how stern the resolve, it is a cruel decision to leave this life, to leave the green leaves, the sun, the silver rain, the flowers and sweet scent of a mown meadow.
Still, there was no more joy to be had. I could only watch the lambs playing, no longer jump like one, no longer shout for joy or throw a ball with my grandchildren. All that lay before me was to be abed, to have pain as the tumor feasted upon my flesh, to watch the eyes of my dear ones turn bitter and resentful as they were forced to tend a shit-covered old woman.
Above me was the twisted oak. Today it reminded me of Ambien Hill and the sorry, broken trees. Here was my place to die, beneath this smaller, but much older oak, reclining in the stony arms of mother earth.
Deliver my soul into this stone womb and thence into the roots of this ancient tree! Perhaps I'd be born again, as Mistress Ash had said. God the Father might rage at the notion, might punish my act, but The Blessed Mother would understand, just as the women who trained me and loved me always had. Our Lady of the Blue Robe would calm the Old Man. She would know that this sin was to benefit my family, just as so much else in my life had been. I do not claim all my acts selfless, certainly, for there was, after all, my Dickon, but a great deal had been well done besides.
The taste of the Belladonna and henbane is bitter, cold, sickly. It kills the pain, a flaming sword in my belly. A sip now, the rest later. Drowsy, I can better keep it down. The rock feels good against my cheek, just as always. I am at home now, already buried upon the dale.
Above, a cry, a hawk coursing. There! I'd known he'd come—cloud rider, his glinting talons, floating between my eyes and the long rays of a rare, cold April sun.
He spirals—here and gone, here and gone—a savage angel mastering the arching sky. What a gift to see him, my true love come for me at the end.
* * *
Dickon Fletcher came balancing through the rocks. He could hear the others who had come out with him shouting, but to him their noise was useless, offensive. With such bawling they couldn't hear, couldn't even see. He remembered his mother explaining exactly that, asking him to be silent while they searched for a strayed sheep.
He was certain he knew where she was, so he followed the path they'd taken so many times, across the barren rock, jumping over the cracks, and balancing along the ledges to get around the narrow deep breaks when it was too wide to jump. It was difficult going, even for him, and he didn't know how she, so ill and weak as Rosemary had said, had managed to get here.
Something kept him going, in spite of the gusty, frigid wind, in spite of his reason still nattering away, saying Mother was in too much pain—not to mention, too sensible—to force her dying body across this fissured terrain.
At last he reached the tree, the most stunted, twisted, wind-tortured, water-and-earth-deprived living thing he had ever seen. He looked down into the crevice, and there she was, just as he’d known.
Yes, here, this place she took me to when I was small, when I was sad, when she wanted to tell me secrets….
The wind gusted, slashing through cloak, stockings, tunic, everything. He shuddered, feeling about as warm as if he'd walked out naked.
How could she have ever come so far?
As he prepared to climb down, he heard a hawk. He lifted his dark head, but he could not see the bird, for he was dazzled by the sun in that clear, cold sky, now blazing like a smith's fire as it set.
Dickon returned to looking down, let his eyes adjust to the gloom. She was wrapped in a worn brown cloak, pale beneath her freckles. With joy in her eyes, she said, "Dear my Lord! Have you come at last?"
She was intent, yet he knew she didn't recognize him. She spoke to someone else, someone from her past, from the bright years before he was born, when she had served the mighty Duke of the North and his Duchess, those most high princes who had once dwelt at the now empty Middleham. His mother had even lived—incredibly—in the great palace in London, a servant to that Anne Neville who had become—briefly—tragically—Queen of England.
Dear My Lord….
Dickon shivered and it traveled all the way to bone. All his life he'd known he was different. He remembered the way that old crippled soldier, the man said to be his father, had sometimes studied him.
Dickon’s Master, Geoffrey, Physician of York, prized him, his attention to detail, his dexterity, his quick intelligence, his hard work. Now twenty-two, he had been brought into the family. The hand of the Master's elder daughter, sweet Alys, would soon be his. He'd walked a long way to tell his mother of his good fortune, but it was too late to tell her anything now. She could no longer hear him. He could see in her eyes that she had entered the past.
The heart stops and the soul is left in once-upon-a-time….
Dickon squeezed down beside her. There wasn't much room for two grown people, but he managed, pulling his knees under his chin, as he'd done as a child, sitting and listening to her fabulous stories, some told in this very place.
"Mother!” He touched her cold, freckled cheek. It was bitter to think he would never speak with her again. “Mother, it's Dickon."
"Dear Dickon," she said. "Where is our dearest Anne?"
Dickon noted the dilation of her pupils. He did not try to speak again. He understood what she had done. It was hard to learn so much all at once and Dickon Fletcher shed tears, holding her against his shoulder. Rose was barely breathing. Her extremities were ice, the warmth already devoured by the surrounding rock.
What she had done was wrong, against God's command, but if she had chosen it, there must be a deeper right. As for the rest, as for whose son he was….
Am I a king’s bastard, son of an evil usurper, a man whose hands were stained with the blood of his two young nephews? Or am I the bastard son of "Good Duke Richard," a lord of whom the wise old men of York still spoke with reverence? This was a Lord, the old men said, who had taken trouble to see justice done, even to the humblest of his subjects.
If my mother loved King Richard….
He felt her body jerk. She had leapt to her death, as to a lover's arms.
With her silence, with the harsh peasant's life she'd chosen, she'd kept her secret. She'd kept him, child of the last Plantagenet King, alive. Dickon knew only too well what King Henry had done with the rest of that royal kin, both the high-born and the low.
* * *
"She asked me to deliver it to you and to you only, Dickon." Father Martin, the first priest he ever remembered his mother liking, had handed him a flattened, stiff leather wallet. Now, the sun well-risen and some distance from Aysgarth, he’d stopped by a pool. The land was quiet, bare, no one else on the path to worry about. It was, after all, a little early in the year to be a traveler.
Birds sang in the nearby thicket, telling the world that spring, the miracle, was come again. His heavy heart rose at the thought, for he and Alys were to marry as soon as Lent and the Holy Feast of Easter were past. It had been arranged to take place at once, before the unlucky month of May began.
Sitting on a rock close by the backwash from the river, he reached inside his tunic and removed the wallet. He was not certain why it had been so easy not to open it sooner, but now that he was alone, away from the village, away from his grieving sister Rosemary and her too-inquisitive husband, the desire to see the contents was strong.
The wallet had been folded for a long time. Through the exterior, he saw the outline of a pair of rings and something long, perhaps a chain. Slowly, he brought them to light, possessions so precious his mother had not kept them at home. He laid each article in his lap.
A gold sovereign came first, stamped with the head of Edward IV.
"Thank you, Mother!" By weight alone, this was a great deal of money!
Then, sure enough, two rings appeared. One was a woman's ring, very old, from the look of it. Dickon wondered if it would be too small for Alys. The other ring was heavy, old tarnished silver, 'graved with a boar, the dead King's emblem, Blanc Sanglier.
Once again, he wondered at the intimacy in her last words. There had been no titles, only a sweetly spoken diminutive. The very idea! Rose Fletcher was a woman who had spent the last years of her life milking sheep, tending the sick, growing herbs and brewing ale.
Last of all, he drew forth a chain with a beautifully carved charm, a white rose made of ivory. This would make a splendid wedding gift for his York bride!
At the very bottom, lay a handkerchief, crackling with ancient blood and folded small. When he broke it open, there was a hank of human hair. The bit of scalp to which it was attached had dried, the blood fell into his lap as a fine ochre powder.
For an instant, Dickon considered simply dropping this dreadful relic into the rushing river, but, in the end, he simply tucked it back again into the farthest corner of the wallet.
This last should have gone into the ground with Mother, but the best I can do now is to take it back to the oak tree someday.
Slipping the wallet inside his tunic, he rose, retrieved his staff and tightened his belt. It was a long tramp back to the City, but the black heaviness he’d felt began to lift as soon as he broke sweat. Swinging his oaken staff, Dickon Fletcher marched down the road leading to his future, a slender, upright form haloed in the present splendor of a rising sun.
The End