“Emmett began to curse then, foul, frightful, blasphemous curses snarled out of a terror-spawned rage. Spinning about, he raced down the several flights of stairs—I following—until he once more stood before the console. He beat at the device with his fists, kicked at it with his booted feet… for all the good it did him, or me.
“He kept trying, through every day, two or three or four times each day, for a week and more, before he finally admitted defeat. Then he began to make rapid plans for a quick return to Ireland. At our constrained parting, I gifted him most of the remaining capsules, retaining only a brace of them for myself. I never have seen or heard from him since that long-ago day that he and his retainers rode west from York.
“After a reign very long for this world, Arthur II died after a lengthy illness. Unfortunately, no one of his sons outlived him—Henry, Edwin, Phillip, Edward, Patric, Harold, all died before him from one cause or another. But Henry, who had been the eldest, had had two sons, one of whom had succeeded his father as Prince of Wales, and that Prince, Richard, succeeded his grandsire as Richard IV.
“As I lowered the crown onto Richard’s head, I had a presentiment that that act presaged dark days for this realm, Bass, nor was I wrong. Richard was not a good king; though loving and pious, he was weak. His scheming wife and her Roman coterie soon had him and England dancing to their own tunes; the nation’s wealth soon was flowing—nay, rushing, torrent-wise—into their greedy hands and, through them, into the insatiable coffers of the Roman Papacy.
“There had been anti-Roman sentiment a-brofl in all of England since the very first of the Priests’ Plagues, Bass, and, of course, under Richard it grew apace, ‘mongst nobles and commons alike. Nor did a rumor that Queen Angela had persuaded her royal spouse to journey to Rome, sign over England to her uncle, the Pope, and then accept it back as a Papal feoff help matters at all. It was only by unremitting luck that we avoided civil war as long as we did.
“When Richard died—and it was not murder, Bass, no matter what you may have heard to the contrary; rather, it was simply a resurgence of the strain of bodily infirmity that had killed Richard’s father and almost taken off his grandsire several times—and King Arthur III was crowned, it were safe
to state that all the land breathed a collective sigh of relief, for Arthur had never kept a secret of his personal disenchantment with the grasping ways of the Roman Papacy, his utter loathing of his sister-in-law and her clique, or his impatience with his brother’s weak will.
“The nation rallied to Arthur unrestrainedly, Bass. The mourning period for Richard was scandalously short, and few paid it more than mere lip service. Arthur was only eighteen, but in most ways he was far more the man and the King than his brother ever had been. He openly scorned the machinations of certain factions to wed him to Angela, his brother’s still-scheming widow, remarking in her very presence a distaste for half-eaten apples, before sending her and all her pack from court
“It was not until Angela dropped her shoat that Arthur decided to wed, choosing the daughter of Lothair, Hike, and announcing to all within earshot that no Italian bastard ever would sit the throne of the Tudors.”
Bass nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard that rumor, too, Hal. Is there any truth in it?”
The eyes of the Archbishop narrowed. “Possibly. Though Angela, of course, made much public show of fealty and devotion to Richard, it was well-known in court circles that she despised him, and several courtiers and foreigners were bruited at one time or another to be her chosen bedmates, most notably Duque Tomaso del Monteleone, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
‘Too, the child bears no resemblance at all to the Tudors—being swarthy and black-haired and -eyed, with high cheekbones and a hooked beak of a nose that looks not at all like either his mother or his supposed paternal line, but quite a bit like the House of del Monteleone in general and the late Duque in particular.”