She lowered her head, not speaking, but he knew now she would do as he asked.
MARGARET WALKED up behind Raby, silently, hardly daring to breathe, wondering if she had the courage to see this through. “My lord? Ralph?”
Raby jumped, his face registering surprise and anger at this intrusion into his grief.
He shifted his head slightly, saw who stood there, then turned his back to her.
“Leave me.”
“My lord … I must speak with you.”
“Damn you, Margaret!” Raby hissed, wheeling about to face her. “There is nothing we have to say to each other! You are safe home in England, and there is nothing to bind us. What bargain we made is delivered.”
“There is this to bind us!” Margaret placed both her hands on her six-month belly, trying very hard not to think of how Thomas had touched her there the previous night.
“Do you think to use that child to bind me? You know I will never own it.”
“Nevertheless,” Margaret said in a quiet voice, “everyone knew you lay with me between summer and winter of last year. Whatever pretenses are mouthed about court, all know you put this child in me, not some long-dead husband.”
“For the love of Jesus Christ, Margaret, what do you want?”
“A father for my child. Recompense for my labor pains. A house for shelter, and an income for life. A settlement, on the child and on me.”
Raby went white with anger. “You self-seeking whore!”
Margaret managed to suppress a flinch with the greatest of efforts. Damn it, that she must do this to further another’s plans! “I want you to acknowledge this child, and to give it—and me—a name. You cannot abandon us.”
“You want me to marry you?” Raby started to laugh, then stopped as two of the knights standing guard about the coffins stared in his direction.
“I will not,” he continued. “My betrothal to the Lady Joan Beaufort will be
announced within the month.”
“I did not say I wanted you” Margaret said, still very calm. “I said I wanted a husband and a name … and a husband and a name that will give this child good rank within society.”
“You will return to your husband’s parents, and there you will give birth to your husband’s child! Our bargain was that I should enable you to return to England in return for your warmth in my bed. A simple transaction. Don’t try to raise the price now.”
“And when I ask for audience with your new wife in her comfortable castle of Raby with a mewling fatherless infant in my arms? How will she feel, presented with her new husband’s bastard as a wedding gift? If I have to, Ralph, I will gift the child to her. The Neville name and heritage is its natural right, and I will fight tooth and nail to—”
Raby stepped forward and grabbed her wrist, pulling her close to him.
“I do not take threats kindly!” he hissed in her face. “And you will not humiliate me before my wife or her family!”
“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you mounted me, my lord.”
He breathed deeply, patently angry beyond measure. Margaret knew that Raby, the warrior, would be thinking that she had chosen her site of confrontation very carefully, for he could do little here save whisper furiously at her. For an instant, staring into Raby’s furious brown eyes, Margaret thought he might actually strike her, and one of her hands went defensively to her belly.
He saw it, and his own hand tightened about her wrist, hard enough that Margaret could not stifle a gasp.
“Hear me now,” he said, “and hear me before God as my witness. I will never acknowledge the child, and I will take every means possible— do you understand me? —to ensure that you never present your bulging belly or its contents at my court.”
It took all of Margaret’s willpower not to try to wrench her wrist from his furious grip. Damn him! she thought, and she did not mean Raby with that curse. “Do you threaten me before God, my lord?”
“Did you not threaten me first, bitch?”
Raby let her go, and Margaret took a step back, more shocked by Raby’s use of the epithet than by her throbbing wrist. Bitch, he called me. Bitch .. . Ah, what else could he think of me?
“I think it more than time,” he said, “that you return to your husband’s home to inform his parents of your happy tidings. I shall speak to Lancaster this day, to suggest that you be not fit company for his wife’s retinue.”
“Lancaster has ever stood by his mistress and his bastards,” Margaret said quietly.
“At least he is a man of honor.”
They stared silently at each other for a long minute, then, almost as one, they turned to face the draped coffins, bowed, made the sign of the cross, and turned to walk down the great nave of the abbey, the footsteps echoing high above to disturb the cobwebs among the beams of the vaulted roof.
Raby walked the faster, and as he exited the abbey, Margaret slipped inside the private chapel.
“Are you satisfied now?” she hissed at Bolingbroke. She had tears in her eyes, and she rubbed at her reddened wrist. “Are you? I have humiliated myself, all for your cause!”
“Our cause, darling Margaret,” Bolingbroke said softly. “Our cause.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Feast of St. Valentine
In the first year of the reign of Richard II
(Sunday 14th February 1379)
NORTHERN LINCOLNSHIRE was a harsh and forbidding place, and even more so in the late winter. An arctic wind swept down over the Humber estuary and river and then whistled between the low hills below Barton toward the small village of Saxbye, adding bone-chilling misery to the late February hunger. The bounty of Christmastide was long past, and all that most households had to sustain themselves before the first of the spring vegetable crops were a few meager handfuls of half rotten grain and legumes. Even the occasional poached rabbit or hare was hardly worth the effort of its entrapment—below the sparse, winter-matted fur lay nothing but bones and empty entrails. In the old language February was Hungry-month, and in the peasants’ yearly agricultural cycle the month was notable for two things besides belly-aching hunger: birth and the beginning of the spring plowing.
Many peasant women timed the birth of their children—generally through selective abortion—for February so that they could be back in the fields working by May at the latest. May through to October were the busiest months of the year, and few peasant women could afford to spend the summer months laboring with a big belly.
The members of the party from London that wound its slow way through Cambridgeshire and then southern Lincolnshire grew used to seeing thin, hunger-ravaged women with tiny, squalling infants in their arms. They also grew used to the newly turned earth of village graveyards as both infants and mothers succumbed to the rigors of childbirth and of the leanness of the year.
As their women struggled—and often died—in childbed, so husbandmen abandoned the warmth of their hearths to struggle with their heavy-wheeled plows and dim-witted oxen in the frozen fields. Now was the time to turn the soil before it thawed and became impassable mud, now the time to cart manure from winter stables and spread it over fields in preparation for the planting of the spring corps.
What should have been a joyous time of the year—the time of birth and the first forays into the field—was made miserable and disheartening by bone-deep cold and
hunger.
At least, as the fields were frozen, so too were the roads, and that made the way easier for the horses. Nevertheless, the riders were almost as miserable as the local peasantry who struggled for their lives and livelihood in the hovels and fields. No number of cloaks or wraps could keep the cold at bay, and there was nothing in the frozen land to please the eye.
There was merely the bone-jolting jar of every stride of their mounts, the unceasing sting of the wind, and the chilling silence between the riders.
Edward III and his son, the Black Prince, had been interred in Westminster Abbey in the second week of January. The ceremonies, whether the official rites in Westminster or the unofficial grievings across London, were as cheerless and cold as the time of the year.
Richard’s coronation would not take place until May. England needed time to grieve for two well-beloved men, and the bureaucracy needed time to prepare for a new king. There were new seals to be fashioned, new coins to be made, new appointments to fight over, and intricate plans laid for the first coronation England had witnessed in over fifty years.
All this would take time, and in this time, Thomas could finally head north to Bramham Moor friary in Yorkshire to there, God willing, discover Wynkyn de Worde’s casket and its secrets. Thomas was grateful for these months that always intervened between the death of one monarch and the coronation of the next, simply because it gave him the time he needed to find the proof that Richard was indeed the next Demon-King.