This Son of York Page 3

  Still smarting from George’s slight, Dickon nodded politely, thinking for the thousandth time of one day getting even with his bully of a brother.

  For the next two days as the attendants of the York children readied their young charges to travel, Dickon frequented the kennel to play with Traveller, who began to recognize its master’s young voice and scramble towards Richard, its hairy tail waving its pleasure. Dickon fondled the velvet ears, examined the leonine paws and rubbed his cheek against the irresistible softness of the coat, communing with his new friend. Here was a living creature that looked on him as a gentle giant, someone in control, and it gave the boy confidence.

  He was determined to take the dog to Ludlow, and use the milk-soaked cloth drip along the way. He had already found a suitable corked vessel to fill with milk from the dairy and would hide it in his chest of clothes. He had not yet thought how he would extract the bottle once the luggage was piled high on a cart—nor that the milk would spoil.

  As soon as the cock crowed on the appointed day of departure, Nurse Anne roused Dickon and helped him to dress. “I trust you will be a good boy and not cause any trouble on the road, mon petit,” she counseled him. “I am to sit up with the driver, but not to forget I have les yeux in the back side of my head.”

  Dickon was wide-eyed in his innocence. Had Nurse Anne guessed his secret? “Trouble? What sort of trouble?”

  The faithful old nursemaid chuckled, put her arms about the fidgeting Dickon and held him close. For nearly twenty years she had nurtured the duke and duchess’s many children. She had sat with the duchess while they listened to the feeble cries of two of the babes who did not live to see their second sunrise, and had taken little Brigid from her mother’s arms when Cecily refused to believe the infant was dead; she had cried when her first charge, Anne, had been sent away to be married so young; and she had been as proud as any mother at the blossoming of the heir, Edward, into a giant of a young man, yet had thought nothing of upbraiding him for his wandering eye. Whether she was getting soft in her dotage, she did not know, but she had never felt as protective of a child as she did this youngest of the Yorks.

  An hour later, Dickon, holding his cloak tightly around him, climbed nimbly into the carriage behind his siblings and huddled on a seat in the corner. The vehicle was nothing more than a brightly painted cart with a wooden roof holding leather curtains that could be rolled up and down according to the weather, but it proudly flew the pennants of the house of York, the white roses mingling with the falcon and fetterlock.

  The little cavalcade was already halfway through the outer bailey when an angry shout came from the carriage.

  “Stop, I say! Stop!” It was George’s voice. What now? Anne thought crossly. Only a nursemaid can truly know her charges, and, sadly for her, this boy, with his shallow, self-centered nature, had lost his charm.

  As she turned to see that a squabble between George and Dickon had turned into a fully fledged fight, she smacked the driver’s hand to make him stop. Meg was attempting to pull the boys apart while the armed escort reined in their mounts and stared openmouthed. The captain of the guard was clearly amused, but Roger Ree rode up to the carriage and demanded an end to the fracas.

  George glared at his father’s emissary and pointed at Richard. “It is his fault, Master Ree,” he cried, imperiously. “Dickon has smuggled his dog aboard. Look! ’Tis not permitted. Master Hood said they were too young to leave.”

  “Is this true, Lord Richard?” Ree lowered his brow at the shamefaced Dickon. Before the boy could reply, George delved under his brother’s cloak and held aloft the wriggling Traveller.

  Humiliated, tears ran down Dickon’s cheeks. He could hardly believe it. George had betrayed him. Dickon was mortified as the escort laughed at the scene; oh, how he hated being mocked. And, at this moment he detested his brother.

  The chuckling Ree turned his mount towards Fotheringhay’s open gate and deposited the dog into the groom’s hands for return to the kennel. Even Meg’s comforting arm offered no ease for this deeply hurt and confused little boy. He was struggling with a valuable lesson: if he could not trust his family, whom could he trust?

  It was Richard’s first experience of betrayal—and at the hands of his own brother. Was it as early as this that the seed of the boy’s later hatred of George was sown?

  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.”