It was the first time that I had seen at close quarters the workings of a lord’s great household or had any understanding of the vast numbers of people necessary to his welfare. The knowledge did not come all at once, and I never mastered all the intricacies, but by the end of three days I was beginning to have a rough idea of who people were and of their various functions.
The steward, who carried a white wand to signify his standing in the hierarchy, the treasurer and the comptroller were the three most important officers. After them came the Knights and Squires of the Body, companions, friends and intimates of their lord, as well as servants. The Squires of the Household, of whom Matthew Wardroper was one, rode and hunted with the Duke, waited upon him at table and provided, when necessary, entertainment, either with conversation, by playing a musical instrument or by singing. Next came the Gentlemen Ushers, whose job it was to enforce protocol, and then the Yeomen of the Chamber, which now included myself among their number, and whose duties were those explained to me by Timothy Plummer. At the bottom of the heap, pages and Grooms of the Chamber tended fires, made beds and generally kept things clean, with particular injunctions laid upon them to ensure that the rooms were free of dog droppings. I could only feel thankful that, between them, the Duke and Timothy had seen fit to raise me to a slightly more elevated station.
In addition, the royal ménage boasted cofferers and surveyors; a Doctor of Physic, a Master Surgeon, a barber and his underlings; minstrels, clerks, chaplains and chapel children; a Sergeant of Confectionery, of Ewery and Napery and a Yeoman of the Laundry; cooks, bakers, butchers, spicers and attendants of the buttery, who were supposed to know all that there was to know about wines. There were others, whose names and functions I can no longer remember, but who all played their part in keeping the Duke of Gloucester’s household running smoothly.
I was told that, in fact, fewer than half of the duke’s lesser retainers had come south with him from Middleham, but the number was daunting, none the less; particularly when I considered that, in theory at least, the would-be assassin could be any one of them. I was indebted for the information to Humphrey Nanfan, whose acquaintance I had hastened to make after I had been left with my fellow Yeomen of the Chamber. He was, I judged, a couple of years older than myself, with a mop of thick, carelessly cropped brown hair, grey eyes and, outwardly at any rate, the jollity which is generally associated with people of his build and stature. He was not really fat, just short and rounded, girth and height together giving the impression of a greater corpulence than he deserved. I soon discovered that he was the butt of the other Yeomen, who teased him unmercifully about the amount of food he ate; again undeservedly for, after observing him closely at several mealtimes, I noted that although he piled his plate high with victuals, the greater part of them went into the charity bowls for the beggars. He also gave the impression of being stupider and slower than he was and, in between bouts of good-natured clowning, would sit still and silent, forgotten temporarily by his peers, but alert and observant of everything and everyone around him. He was the man suspected by Timothy Plummer of being a spy for George of Clarence and, while I could imagine that it might very likely be the case, I could not bring myself to believe that the Duke, any more than the King, would order the killing of his own brother. And for what reason?
It was true that he and my lord of Gloucester had married sisters and had a mother-in-law in common. But cautious inquiries elicited the fact that the Countess of Warwick’s lands had already been divided between her daughters’ husbands, just as though she were dead, the Act of Settlement having been finally confirmed in Parliament only four months earlier. And the greater share of the estates had gone to the Duke of Clarence. So there was no cause on brother George’s part that I could see for resentment. Besides, why would he insist that the killing should take place before the Eve of Saint Hyacinth? There was no sensible explanation for that, and I was more than half inclined to erase Humphrey Nanfan from my list of suspects there and then. But wisdom had taught me that nothing was ever exactly as it seemed and there might well be other reasons for my lord of Clarence to harbour a grudge against his brother. It behoved me, therefore, to keep an eye out for Master Nanfan, however much I would have wagered that he was not our assassin.
The other Yeoman of the Chamber mentioned by Timothy was Stephen Hudelin, the only one of the five that he called a spy without conjecture. Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, eldest brother of the Queen, was named his paymaster; and although this might, in itself, have been sufficient to make me take Stephen Hudelin in dislike, it was not necessary. I disliked him on sight, from the moment of our very first meeting.
Chapter Ten
Stephen Hudelin was, I judged, somewhere in his middle thirties, thickset without being squat, the top of his head reaching well above my shoulders. He had red hair in which there was not a trace of brown, so that his fiery pate was visible wherever he was, indoors or out, and his eyes were a greenish hazel. I soon discovered that he had the quick temper which went with his colouring, but which, in general, he was forced to subdue, a necessity which left him in an almost permanent state of truculence. It also became obvious that the other Yeomen of the Chamber, or at least those who had accompanied the Duke of Gloucester south on this expedition, did not much like him. They were wary, however, of his bouts of ill-humour, treating him with an off-hand civility which excluded him from their fellowship far more effectively than picking a quarrel could have done.
I learned from Humphrey that the Hudelins had been in the service of Sir John Grey, Lord Ferrers of Groby, the Queen’s first husband and sire to her two eldest sons. The Greys, and therefore the Hudelins, had supported the House of Lancaster, and both Lord Ferrers and Walter Hudelin, Stephen’s father, had been killed at the second battle at Saint Albans, fighting for the late King Henry.
When, however, King Edward’s fancy had settled on Lord Ferrers’s widow, the Hudelins, like the new queen’s own family, the Woodvilles, had found no difficulty in changing sides and becoming staunch followers of the House of York. Their loyalty, in common with that of so many, was not to a cause but to the masters they had served for generations, now embodied in the young Marquess of Dorset and his brother, Lord Richard Grey, and in Anthony Woodville, their maternal uncle.
‘How does Stephen come to be in the service of the Duke of Gloucester?’ I asked Humphrey as he instructed me in the laying of the dinner-table.
My mentor shrugged. ‘Why shouldn’t he be? There’s no law of the Medes and the Persians which says a man may not move from one place to another if he so wishes. Perhaps Stephen wanted a change and Lord Rivers recommended him to His Grace, for he’s a good enough worker and pulls his weight. I myself was previously with my lord of Clarence, but fell out with a fellow servant and wished to find another berth. His Grace used his influence with his brother and here I have been, very happily, ever since.’
I made no answer, keeping my thoughts to myself, and concentrating instead on Humphrey’s instructions concerning the protocol of place settings. The raised dais at the end of the hall, facing the musicians’ gallery, was easy: the Duke and his mother, the Duchess of York, would sit beneath the canopies with other persons of note on either side of them.
‘The table to the host’s right,’ Humphrey explained, ‘the one against that wall, is known as the Reward, because people at the head of it are served with the same dishes as the lord and his guests. The table opposite, to the host’s left, is called the Second Mess, and the people sitting there mostly get the same food as the upper servants. And in both cases, the lower you sit down the board, the further away from the dais you are and the nearer to the kitchens, the coarser the victuals. Wooden plates and spoons below the salt, pewter above it. Trenchers of bread for all, with smaller ones to heap the salt on. While we’re here in Baynard’s Castle, we keep the same hours as the Duchess Cicely: breakfast at seven, dinner at eleven and supper at five o’clock, although at home, at Middleham or Sheriff Hutton, the Duke likes his meals somewhat earlier.’ Then, without being asked, he provided the information which interested me most. ‘Members of the household have their meals beforehand.’