Philip frowned, but Catherine hushed him before he could ask any more questions.
JOAN BLINKED and twisted her eyes away from Catherine. Her hand strayed momentarily to the miraculous sword at her side—and it gave her the comfort and strength she so desperately needed.
They were before the throne now, and de Chartres was lifting the crown on high, showing it to the assembled masses.
A shout went up.
“Joan! Joan! Joan!”
Catherine smiled.
Then de Chartres turned to Joan, who had walked up to join him, and handed her the crown.
PHILIP COULD not believe it. Joan was going to lay the crown on Charles’ head? Sweet Lord, how did de Chartres feel about that?
Philip needed only one glance at the archbishop’s tight, angry face to know exactly how he felt. It should have been the Archbishop of Rheims who consecrated and crowned the new king … but here, today, he had been usurped by the Holy Maid of France.
Smiling in satisfaction, Philip sat back in his chair, folding his arms. Regnault de Chartres was his.
FOR AN instant, Joan thought she was going to drop the crown, but she gritted her teeth, then walked up the steps to Charles and, avoiding his nervously darting eyes, placed the crown on his head.
It slipped, and both Joan and Charles grabbed at it.
But the crown was heavy and awkward. It slipped through their fingers and, in the stunned silence that filled the cathedral, bounced down the steps to the stone floor.
It rolled over to Philip’s feet.
He stared at it, then bent down, picked it up, and stood.
Philip could not help himself. He laughed, and held the crown on high.
Then, as a red-faced Joan walked over, he handed it to her.
“You may have it,” he said. “For the moment.”
And then he cast his eyes over the cathedral and saw that every eye was on him.
Philip knew then, as he never had before, that he would eventually have France.
PART SIX
Dangerous Treason
King Richard:
Tell Bolingbroke, for yon methinks he stands, That every stride he makes upon my land Is dangerous treason; he is come to open The purple testament of bleeding war.
—William Shakespeare.
Richard the Second, Act III, sc. iii
CHAPTER I
Prime on the Friday within the Octave of the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
In the second year of the reign of Richard II
(daybreak 17th August 1380)
RABY SAT HIS HORSE in the cold pre-dawn, hunching into his cloak and squinting across the waters into the dim light.
There was nothing but the rolling waves.
The jingle of a bit behind him made Raby jump, and he swiveled about in his saddle and cursed the unfortunate man whose horse had shaken its head.
Raby turned back to the empty sea, feeling the better for having vented some of his frustration.
He waited, as behind him a dark twisting column of men and horses waited.
Beneath them spread the tiny village and port of Ravenspur at the very mouth of the Humber estuary in southern Yorkshire. Most of the villagers were huddled in their homes by the embers of their fires; they had not dared to venture outside since the arrival of the horsed warriors late the previous night. Their fishing boats had been moved from the single small pier to an anchorage far out in the estuary. They would not be going anywhere this day.
“Any news?” Raby growled to a soldier standing just to his right.
“No, my lord.”
Raby grunted. No man had approached the soldier, and there had been no signal from the beacons atop the surrounding hills, so Raby knew there was no news, but even so, he’d had to ask.
Where were they?
He swiveled about in his saddle again, his eyes searching for the man who sat his horse ten or fifteen paces back.
There, sitting calm and still where Raby fidgeted. Raby nodded, and turned back to the sea.
Where were . . .
A shout sounded, high above, and Raby’s eyes shot to the crest of the hill.
A flame flickered in the stacked wood of the beacon, and as Raby watched, it flared into life.
Raby jerked his eyes back to the sea. There! There! Six ships, pitching heavily in the waves, the first rays of the sun tangling within their sails.
“Bolingbroke!” Raby shouted, and dug his spurs into his stallion as behind him rose the shout,
“Bolingbroke! Bolingbroke! Bolingbroke!”
BOLINGBROKE’S SHIP was the first to draw alongside the wharf, but Bolingbroke was in too much of a hurry to wait for its sailors to slide the boarding planks down to the wharf. He had his white stallion on deck and, as men shouted and milled about him, he swung up to its back and, in a move so foolhardy it took men’s breath away, drove the animal toward the deck railing.
It leaped, twisted a little in the air, then sailed down to the wharf, landing with a great clatter of hooves, its snowy mane and tail streaming out behind it like battle standards.
Bolingbroke screamed, a sound half battle-cry, half joyous shout, and drove the horse at a gallop toward Raby, who, his patience at an end, was urging his own horse forward.
“Ralph!” Bolingbroke shouted, reining his stallion to a halt. His fair hair lifted in the wind, and his eyes shone. “Ralph, I am home!”
“Aye” said Raby, grinning hugely, “that you are. Welcome home, my lord.”
Bolingbroke clasped his hand briefly to Raby’s shoulder, then looked past him to the men and horses crowding the streets of Ravenspur and the road and hills beyond.
“Sweet Jesu, Ralph. Tell me.”
Raby could not tear his eyes away from Bolingbroke. He was old enough to remember Edward III in his prime, and had fought for many years shoulder to shoulder with the Black Prince, but neither Edward nor his son had ever exuded the presence that this man did, had never inspired the same surge of emotion—
“Tell me!” Bolingbroke said again, swinging his horse against Raby’s.
“All England has risen behind you,” Raby said. He lifted his arm and gestured to the mass of men waiting in the town and beyond. “Fifteen thousand waiting here to greet you, forty-five thousand waiting above York. All told, sixty thousand—”
“Lord Christ!” Bolingbroke said. “Sixty thousand? How did you—?”
Raby indicated the man riding his horse toward them.
Bolingbroke stilled. “Ah, Northumberland.”
“Aye,” Northumberland said, reining to a halt before Bolingbroke and Raby. “Northumberland indeed.”
Bolingbroke kicked his horse forward, then dropped the reins to take Northumberland’s hand and forearm in both his hands. “I will reward you well for this.”
Northumberland smiled without humor. “I would expect nothing less, my lord.”
Bolingbroke picked up his reins again, and glanced behind him to where the ship was now
disgorging its load. Neville had now disembarked and was riding toward them.
“Warwick and Nottingham wait for us with the majority of your army above York, my lord,”
Raby said.
Bolingbroke nodded. “And Richard?”
Raby glanced at Northumberland, and both men shared a smile.
“Richard and de Vere have only just disembarked at Waterford in Ireland, my lord,” Raby said. “Where, no doubt, they will soon learn of your arrival.”
“If we allow them two days of panic, and then a week to order themselves enough to turn their invading force back to defend England,” Northumberland said, “we should have two weeks at least.”
“And,” Raby said, “they have only twenty-five thousand.”
Bolingbroke lifted his face so that the dawning sunlight washed over it, and laughed for sheer joy.
“Good news, my lord?” Neville said, finally joining them.
“The best,” said Bolingbroke, “for I have come home to find that England is in my hand.”
He looked to where the men lined the road and filled the hill rising above Ravenspur. “This is my England,” he murmured, then spurred his horse forward toward the men.
“Hear me!” he screamed, standing in his stirrups and swaying lightly with the movement of the horse beneath him. “Hear me! I am Bolingbroke, son of Lancaster, stepped forth once more upon this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle! But I weep, for I find that this beloved land has been deeply bruised by the hand of a king who laid last summer’s dust with the blood of slaughtered Englishmen.”
He paused, his gray eyes sweeping over the massed men rising above him, his stallion half-rearing beneath him, then raised his voice once more.
“Some call me a traitor for setting foot once more to this tortured soil, but I step forth for only one reason—my duty! My duty to you, to your wives and to your children, and to this blessed plot, this realm, this England!”
He drew breath once more, and screamed to the very heavens: “Men of England, will you stand at my side?”
And it seemed to Neville that in the roar of acclaim that followed even the waves that girdled the harbor drew back in honor of Bolingbroke’s majesty, and in recognition of his right to lay claim to that majesty.