This, then, was the stronghold of the Yorkist branch of the Plantagenet tree, who now occupied the throne and to whom we all owed allegiance. Here, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had been born nearly thirty years earlier, and here the bodies of his father, Richard, Duke of York, and one of his elder brothers, Edmund, Earl of Rutland — both killed at the bloody battle of Wakefield — had been re-interred with great pomp and ceremony a mere six years ago.
I have to record that nothing about it alleviated my feeling of deep misery and gloom.
I had left Bristol the day after Timothy’s unwelcome appearance and accompanied him first to London where I was reunited — if I may call it that — with His Grace, Alexander Stewart, Duke of Albany. The duke was lodged in Westminster Palace in a suite of rooms that did justice to his importance as a future king of Scotland, and one, moreover, who would be grateful enough to do exactly as he was told by his English ally. (A Canterbury tale if ever I heard one. Who was fooling whom? It was impossible to tell.) To do my young lord justice, he seemed genuinely delighted to see me, and made it plain from the start that I was to be accorded preferential treatment and never to stir far from his side. I was to sleep in his bed and to sit at his table, unless, of course, he was dining with the king or any other of his exalted kinsmen and friends. Even then, I was to remain near at hand.
Daunted by the prospect of such close and continuous proximity, I consoled myself with the knowledge that it could not possibly last beyond the first few weeks, when the duke would begin to find my ubiquitous presence as irksome as I would no doubt find his. However, his initial dependence on me was bound to make me highly unpopular with the rest of his personal servants, particularly if they had any suspicion of the reason for my inclusion in Albany’s household. Fortunately, although the five of them tended to scowl and mutter whenever they saw me, I had no real idea of what they were saying, for each one talked in a broad Scots dialect that was unintelligible to my west country ears.
The eldest of the five, James Petrie, was the duke’s body servant, assisting him with washing, dressing, undressing and all other intimate bodily functions. (I was very relieved to know that nothing of that sort was expected of me.) Although roughly of Albany’s own age — the duke was, at this time, twenty-seven years old, two years younger than myself — he looked a great deal older, a tall, emaciated man with lines of care and worry cut deep into his face. His eyes were a fierce, dark blue beneath bushy eyebrows as black as his hair, a combination of colours often to be found in the Celts. He was naturally taciturn, so I was not plagued by his mutterings every time I hove into view, and, indeed, said little to Albany himself. He carried out his tasks quietly and efficiently and even gently, with the minimum of fuss; but whether or not he were fond of his new master it was impossible to say. I felt that he would have behaved in the same way to a stray dog had he decided to befriend one.
John Tullo was the groom, a weather-beaten man with a passion for horses that made him almost one of them. He would whisper sweet nothings into the ear of the most mettlesome brute that ever trotted on four legs, and these terrifying creatures would drop their heads into his unsavoury bosom and nuzzle him like love-sick girls. Of course, he despised me from the start, as soon as I admitted that horses frightened me to death and insisted on being mounted on only the most docile mare in Albany’s stable. He roared with laughter and passed what were obviously ribald remarks every time he clapped his big brown eyes on me; eyes that were slightly protuberant and appeared to bore right inside me. I found his gaze extremely disconcerting.
Then there was the page, David Gray, always known as Davey, a slight, willowy creature who could, if the mood took him, speak English well enough to be understood, although he would affect not to comprehend my west country speech with its harsh ‘r’s and diphthonged vowels. He was a pretty boy with fair, wavy hair and violet-blue eyes, who accepted with good humour the obvious teasing of his fellow servants, and of Albany himself.
‘My brother, Mar, was very fond of Davey,’ Albany once remarked to me, with, I thought, a certain amount of significance.
Lastly, there were the two squires who, I gathered, had been devoted to their late master, the earl, and who had now extended that loyalty to his brother, Albany. They were both handsome youths of about the duke’s own age, the slightly younger one, Donald Seton, having red hair and the freckled skin that so often accompanies it. His eyes were hazel, flecked with green, and he tended to avoid looking directly at people when he spoke to them.
His companion and close friend was Murdo MacGregor, taller by half a head than any other member of Albany’s household, including James Petrie, and who seemed to be the more important of the two. Indeed, this brown-haired, blue-eyed man, with his princely bearing and aloof attitude sometimes appeared to be more important than the duke himself. He ignored me.
‘Don’t mind Murdo,’ Albany told me with a laugh. ‘The motto of the MacGregors is ‘Is rioghal mo dhream’. ‘My blood is royal’. And they all claim descent from the Clan Alpin, which is the oldest and most purely Celtic of all the highland clans. Furthermore, they hold rigidly by the ancient clan rule of defending what’s theirs by the sword and not by sheepskin.’
‘Sheepskin?’ I queried, puzzled.
‘Marriage charters, written agreements with their neighbours. The only way the MacGregors settle a dispute is with cold steel.’
Needless to say, after this introduction, I gave the elder squire as wide a berth as possible, and, as I have already mentioned, he didn’t seek me out. That isn’t to say that I didn’t notice him watching me very closely on occasions. All of which explains my misery. I was lonely, homesick and ill at ease.
At the beginning of June, our great sprawling cavalcade of lords and their levies, with the king at its head, set off northwards from London for Northamptonshire where, at Fotheringay Castle, we were to rendezvous with the Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Northumberland, travelling south. Before we reached our destination, news came of a successful foray into Scotland by Duke Richard and his forces, during which Dumfries had been taken and burned. His Grace had then coolly retired before an army could be raised against him and set out to meet his brother.
‘This doesn’t bother you?’ I had the temerity to ask Albany, lying by his side in bed at some inn where we were billeted for the night. It was blowing a gale and pouring with rain, and I could not help thinking of the poor foot soldiers and archers trying to sleep in some sodden field.
To my surprise, my royal bedfellow, sharing my company in the fire-studded dark, failed to snub me. He merely hunched his shoulders under the quilt and answered laconically, ‘You can’t make a cake without breaking eggs.’
I couldn’t let it go. ‘But these are your people being burned out of their homes. Aren’t you afraid such actions by your allies will turn them against you?’
There was a another shrug. ‘It’s more likely to turn them against my dear brother for not retaliating. They don’t like him, anyway.’
‘Why not?’ I asked. A log on the hearth crackled and fell, spangling the room with fire. Outside the door, I heard someone stir. One of the squires was sleeping across the threshold.