‘I needed the piss-pot, only to find our friend the pedlar up and prowling about.’
‘Why?’
‘Ask him!’
‘Before I answer any of your questions,’ I hissed angrily, ‘what I want to know is why, ever since we left London and before, you two and Davey have pretended that you couldn’t speak anything but the raw Scots’ tongue, when all the time you can speak English perfectly well.’ I considered this statement. ‘Well enough, at least, for me to understand you,’ I amended.
‘We’ve had nothing to say to you before,’ was Murdo’s laconic answer; which I supposed, in its own way, was true. I had hardly sought their company. But their deception irked me, nonetheless.
‘So what’s the answer to my question?’ Murdo insisted.
‘Something woke me — I don’t know what — and then I discovered that the door between the main bedchamber and this one was ajar. Master Seton will vouch for that.’
‘Donald?’
‘It’s true. It was open, but I didn’t open it. And I’ll swear nobody could have come through here without rousing one of us.’
‘Impossible,’ his fellow squire agreed.
But it wasn’t impossible, not the way those two had been snoring. I reckoned more than one assassin could have walked into my lord’s chamber without disturbing either of his guardians in the room without. I wondered uneasily about that unbolted outer door. Was it just carelessness, an ingenuous belief that their master was indeed safe amongst his English friends? Or was it an alibi to cover their own tracks if they really did intend Albany harm?
Murdo rapped out something unintelligible and lay down again, pulling the blanket over his head.
Donald nodded. ‘He said let’s get back to bed before we catch our deaths of cold.’ He seized the chamber-pot and unrinated into it, a long, steaming, healthy-looking stream. ‘That’s better. Now, get back to sleep, chapman, and settle down. You’ve been dreaming. Your belly’s overfull and you’ve been riding the night mare.’
Copying his friend’s example he, too, lay down and pulled the blankets up around his ears. As he did so, something floated to the ground. Unnoticed, I stooped and picked it up, carrying it back with me into the main chamber where the object of my concern was peacefully sleeping, oblivious to the whisperings and shufflings in the ante-room. His earlier restlessness had abated, and Albany now lay quietly, one cheek pillowed in his hand, like an innocent child. Cautiously, I found the tinder-box and lit a candle, well away from where its light could shine on the bed, and held my prize towards the flame.
What lay in my palm was a silken leaf, green and veined with golden thread. A leaf come loose from a mummer’s costume — or a mummer’s mask.
The Green Man!
It was long before I slept. Dawn was rimming the shutters before I finally closed my eyes.
The night’s events had convinced me that Albany’s suspicions concerning his Scottish servants, however nebulous, were nevertheless founded on reason. They were not the figment of his overripe imagination that I had at first thought them. The explanation given to his immediate retainers for my constant presence — for my presence at all — had been that he feared treachery by the English. Yet his two squires were unimpressed enough by this threat to leave unlocked a door that, if they took their royal master’s fear even half-seriously, should have been carefully bolted. Moreover, while they had pretended to an ignorance of English, except as it was spoken in Scotland, I had presumed, as I was meant to presume, that their understanding of the tongue was equally feeble. I wondered what unguarded remarks I had made to Albany, and he to me, that the squires and Davey Gray, at least, had found perfectly intelligible.
But was the duke so ignorant of these men that he did not know this? Perhaps. When he addressed any of them it was in broad Scots, and they answered him in the same language. I had noticed that he kept them all at a distance, having no more converse with them than he was bound to. He certainly did not treat them with the camaraderie that he used towards me. And yet …
And yet the five of them had joined him during his exile in France, fleeing the wrath of King James after the Earl of Mar’s murder. If it had been murder …
But it was at that particular point that my tired brain refused to be teased any longer and, with the sun rising on another day, I at last fell asleep. Not for long, of course. All too soon the trumpets were blaring in the camp beyond Fotheringay’s grim walls, servers were hurrying up from the kitchens with jugs of hot shaving water and the whole castle wakened to life. Through a fog of sleep, I remembered that today we set out for York either under the command of the King or under that of His Grace the Duke of Gloucester.
To no one’s surprise, it turned out to be the duke who would lead us — eventually — into Scotland. As soon as King Edward entered the great hall after breakfast, it was obvious to all but the meanest intelligence that he was in no fit state of health to head a military expedition. His face had taken on an even greyer tinge than it had worn the previous evening and he was supported on both sides, leaning heavily on the arms of Lord Hastings and his elder stepson, the Marquis of Dorset. There was a sheen of sweat across his forehead; and the way in which he dropped thankfully into his chair at the head of the council table proclaimed that his legs were in imminent danger of collapsing under him.
His first words, therefore, were to announce that he was passing over command of the army to his dearly beloved brother, the Duke of Gloucester, whom we were all to obey as we would himself. Prince Richard, rising from his seat, knelt to kiss the king’s hand and promised faithfully to carry out the royal commands.
‘Berwick shall be yours again, my liege, if we die in the attempt.’
A cheer went up at these words from the assembled nobility. All very well, I thought to myself, but it will be the poor bloody foot soldiers who do most of the dying. Then a sense of justice made me revise this opinion. I knew Richard of Gloucester by repute to be a valiant soldier, not afraid to put himself in the thick of any fight should his presence be needed. As a young man he had fought valiantly for his eldest brother at the battle of Barnet, when Edward returned to England eleven years previously to reclaim his crown. In the vanguard of his men, he had helped to carry the day. And a month or so later, his actions on the bloody field of Tewkesbury had again brought the Yorkist faction victory and preserved his brother’s throne …
My wandering thoughts were interrupted by the general surge of movement as the council disbanded. The king had risen to his feet and was embracing his brother, tears of weakness glistening on his sunken cheeks. He held the duke tightly as though loath to let him go, and it seemed to me that no one who saw them could help but be struck by the contrast between them; one, once so handsome and athletic and strong, now a sad wreck of a man, worn out by a life of excess; the other, so fragile in youth that his life had more than once been despaired of, now a creature as healthy and lithe as a whippet, his skin tanned by wind and sun, his dark eyes alive and eager in his thin, sallow face.
The king next turned to Albany, his embrace more perfunctory than the one he had bestowed on my lord Gloucester, but warm enough and sufficiently prolonged to impress those watching with a sense of the duke’s importance. But although he addressed him fondly as ‘Cousin’ it was plain — to me at any rate — that true affection was lacking, as he adjured Albany not to forget, once he was crowned, the urgent matter of the Princess Cicely’s dowry.
‘Our coffers are not so full, my dear fellow, that we can afford to forgo its return.’
Albany smiled thinly; a smile that failed to reach his eyes.
‘I never imagined for a second that Your Highness had any intention of relinquishing his claim. Once my brother is deposed — ’ the words ‘and dead’ weren’t uttered, but I think we could all hear them, echoing in the air — ‘I shall, of course, be Your Highness’s liege man of life and limb.’