Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Factions in the Wars of the Roses

  Prologue

  Part One: Priory of St Mary, Haverhurst, County of Lincoln, February 1460

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two: Across the Narrow Sea, February–June 1460

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Three: The Road to Northampton Field, June–July 1460

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Four: Marton Hall, County of Lincoln, September 1460

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Five: To Kidwelly Castle, Wales, January 1461

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Six: To Marton Hall, County of Lincoln, February 1461

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Part Seven: To Towton Field, County of Yorkshire, March 1461

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  February, 1460: in the bitter dawn of a winter’s morning a young nun is caught outside her priory walls by a corrupt knight and his vicious retinue.

  In the fight that follows, she is rescued by a young monk and the knight is defeated. But the consequences are far-reaching, and Thomas and Katherine are expelled from their religious Orders and forced to flee across a land caught in the throes of one of the most savage and bloody civil wars in history: the Wars of the Roses.

  Their flight will take them across the Narrow Sea to Calais, where Thomas picks up his warbow and trains alongside the Yorkist forces. Katherine, now dressed as a man, hones her talents for observation and healing both on and off the fields of battle. And all around them, friends and enemies fight and die as the future Yorkist monarch, Edward, Earl of March, and his adviser the Earl of Warwick, later to become known as the Kingmaker, prepare to do bloody battle.

  Encompassing the battles of Northampton, Mortimer’s Cross and finally the great slaughter of Towton, this is war as experienced not by the highborn nobles of the land but by ordinary men and women who do their best just to stay alive. Filled with strong, sympathetic characters, this is a must-read series for all who like their fiction action-packed, heroic and utterly believable.

  About the Author

  Toby Clements was inspired to write Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims having first become obsessed by the Wars of the Roses after a school trip to Tewkesbury Abbey, on the steps of which the Lancastrian claim to the English throne was extinguished in a welter of blood in 1471.

  Since then he has read everything he can get his hands on and spent long weekends at re-enactment fairs. He has learned to use the longbow and how to fight with the pollaxe, how to start a fire with a flint and steel and a shred of baked linen. He has even helped tan a piece of leather (a disgusting experience involving lots of urine and dog faeces). Little by little he became less interested in the dealings of the high and mighty, however colourful and amazing they might have been, and more fascinated by the common folk of the 15th Century: how they lived, loved, fought and died. How tough they were, how resourceful, resilient and clever. As much as anything this book is a hymn to them.

  He lives in London with his wife and three children. Winter Pilgrims is his first novel.

  Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

  Toby Clements

  To Karen, with all my love.

  Though the Lancastrian Claim comes from Edward III’s THIRD son, it relies on a) possession and b) that the crown can not pass through a woman – Philippa Mormer – so must fall to the next male in line. The Yorkist Claim relies on their descent from Edward III’s SECOND son, and says it can pass through Philippa. The Tudor Claim ignores the fact of passing through a woman – Lady Margaret Beaufort – or that John, Earl of Somerset, was born illegimate.

  Factions in the Wars of the Roses

  Principal Yorkist leaders in 1460

  Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, senior Yorkist claimant to the throne (died at the Battle of Wakefield, 1460).

  Edward Plantagenet, Earl of March, son of the Duke of York (to become King Edward IV).

  Edmund Plantagenet, Earl of Rutland, second son of the Duke of York (died at the Battle of Wakefield, 1460).

  Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury – powerful magnate (executed after Wakefield, 1461).

  Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick – Earl of Salisbury’s son, later known as the ‘Kingmaker’ having helped Edward IV to become king.

  Lord Fauconberg – Earl of Salisbury’s brother, a fine soldier.

  William Hastings – Earl of March’s friend and pimp.

  Principal Lancastrian leaders in 1460

  King Henry VI – Son of Henry V, weak willed and possibly insane.

  Margaret (of Anjou) – Henry VI’s strong-willed French wife.

  Henry, 3rd Duke of Somerset – Margaret’s favourite, good soldier, louche.

  In addition almost every other magnate in the land, including the Dukes of Buckingham, Exeter, Devon, the Earls of Shrewsbury, Wiltshire, Northumberland, as well as Lords Scales, Roos, Hungerford, Ruthyn and Clifford.

  Prologue

  DURING THE 1450S England was in a sorry state: her hundred-year war in France had ended in humiliation, law and order had broken down in the towns and shires, and at sea, pirates were everywhere so that the wool trade – which had once kept her coffers brimming – had withered to nothing. Meanwhile her king, Henry VI, was prey to bouts of madness that robbed him of his wits, and with no strong leader, his court had become riven by two factions: one led by the Queen – a strong-willed Frenchwoman named Margaret from Anjou; the other by Richard, Duke of York, and his powerful allies the Earls of Warwick and of Salisbury.

  Relations between the two factions first broke down in 1455 and each summoned its men to arms. In a short sharp action in the shadow of the Abbey of St Albans in Hertfordshire, the Queen’s favourite, Edmund, second Duke of Somerset, was killed, and the Duke of York and his allies won the day.

  But York’s ascendancy was short-lived. By the end of the decade the King had regained his wits and the Queen her control of the court, and the sons of those killed at St Albans sought vengeance for their fathers’ sakes.

  In 1459 the Queen summoned the Duke of York and his allies to court in Coventry, where she was strong, and, fearing for his life, the Duke once more raised his banner and summoned his allies. The Queen – in the King’s name – did likewise and on the eve of St Edward’s Day in October that year, the two sides once more took the field, at Ludford Bridge, near Ludlow, in the county of Shropshire.

  But the Duke of York and the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury were betrayed, and so, finding their position hopeless, they fled the country: the Duke of York to Ireland, the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury across the Narrow Sea to Calais.

  And so now while those of the Queen’s faction strip the land of all that is left, me
n in England are waiting, waiting for the spring to come, waiting for the exiles to return, waiting for the wars to start once more.

  PART ONE

  Priory of St Mary,

  Haverhurst, County of Lincoln,

  February 1460

  1

  THE DEAN COMES for him during the Second Repose, when the night is at its darkest. He brings with him a rush lamp and a quarterstaff and he wakes him with a heavy prod.

  ‘Up now, Brother Thomas,’ he says. ‘The Prior’s asking for you.’

  It is not time for prime yet, Thomas knows, and he hopes if he is asleep, the Dean will let him alone and wake one of the other canons: Brother John perhaps, or Brother Robert, who is snoring. A moment later his blankets are thrown back and the cold grips him fast. He sits up and tries to gather them to him, but the Dean casts them aside.

  ‘Come on now,’ he says. ‘The Prior’s waiting.’

  ‘What does he want?’ Thomas asks. Already his teeth are chattering and there is steam rising from his body.

  ‘You’ll see,’ the Dean says. ‘And bring your cloak. Bring your blanket. Bring everything.’

  In the lamp’s uncertain glow the Dean’s face is all heavy brows and a crooked nose, and the shadow of his head looms across the ice-rimed slates of the roof above. Thomas untangles his frost-stiffened cloak and finds his worsted cap and his clogs. He wraps the blanket about his shoulders.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ the Dean urges. His teeth are chattering too.

  Thomas gets up and follows him across the dorter, stepping over the huddled forms of the other canons, and together they go down the stone steps to the Prior’s cell where a beeswax candle shivers in a sconce and the old man lies on a thick hay mattress with three blankets drawn up to his chin.

  ‘God be with you, Father,’ Thomas begins.

  The Prior waves aside the greeting without taking his hands from under his covers.

  ‘Did you not hear it?’ he asks.

  ‘Hear what, Father?’

  The Prior doesn’t answer but cocks his narrow head at the shuttered window. Thomas hears only the Dean’s breathing behind him and the gentle rattle of his own teeth. Then comes a distant rising shriek, pitched high, thin as a blade. It makes him shudder and he cannot help but cross himself.

  The Prior laughs.

  ‘Only a fox,’ he says. ‘Whatever did you think it was? A lost soul, perhaps? One of the lesser devils?’

  Thomas says nothing.

  ‘Probably caught in the copse beyond the river,’ the Dean suggests. ‘One of the lay brothers sets his snares there. John, it is.’

  There is a silence. They ought to send for this John, Thomas thinks, the one who set the trap. He should be made to go and kill the fox. Put it out of its misery.

  ‘Quick as you can then, Brother Tom,’ the Dean says.

  Thomas realises what they mean.

  ‘Me?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes,’ the Prior says. ‘Or do you think you are too good for such a thing?’

  Thomas says nothing, but that is exactly what he is thinking.

  ‘Do it like this,’ the Dean says, miming with the staff, jerking its tip down on the skull of an imaginary fox. ‘Just above the eyes.’

  The Dean has been to the wars in France, and is well known to have killed a man. Perhaps even two. He passes the staff to Thomas. It is almost as tall as him, stained at one end as if it has been used to stir a large pot.

  ‘And be sure to bring the body back,’ the Prior adds as the Dean guides Thomas from the cell, ‘for I shall want the fur, and the infirmarian the flesh.’

  The Dean’s light leads Thomas down more stone steps into the fragrant darkness of the frater house where he is drawn to the warmth of the fire’s embers glowing under their cover, but the Dean has already crossed the room and pulled aside the door’s drawbar.

  ‘God’s blood!’ he exclaims as he opens the door.

  Outside it is the sort of cold that stops you dead, the sort that drops birds from the sky, splits millstones.

  ‘Go on, young Tom,’ the Dean says. ‘The sooner it is done, the sooner it were done. Then get back here. I’ll have some hot wine for you.’

  Thomas opens his mouth to say something, but the Dean shoves him out into the cold and closes the door in his face.

  Dear God. One moment he is asleep, almost warm, dreaming of the summer to come even, and now: this.

  The cold sticks in his throat, makes his head ache. He gathers his cloak, hesitates a moment, then turns and sets out, picking his way across the yard to the beggars’ gate, his clogs ringing on the ice.

  He unbars the gate and steps through. Beyond the priory walls the dawn is already a pale presence in the east and the snow lying over the fen gives off a light so cold it is blue. To the south, where the river curls around itself, the millwheel is frozen in mid-turn, as if opening its mouth to say something, and beyond it the bakery, the brewhouse and the lay brothers’ granges stand deserted, their walls frosted, their roofs bowing under the weight of snow. Nothing moves. Not a thing.

  Then the fox screams again, high and sharp. Thomas shudders and turns back to the gateway, as if he might somehow be allowed back in to return to bed, but then he collects himself and turns again and forces himself to move. One step, two, carefully keeping close to the priory walls, following them around to where the dark line of the old road comes into view on its way through the fen towards Cornford and the sea beyond. There was a time when it might have been busy, he thinks, even on a morning such as this. Merchants might have been making their way to Boston with their wool for the fleet sailing for the Staple in Calais, or pilgrims might have been coming to the shrine of Little St Hugh in Lincoln. These days though, with the land so lawless, anyone abroad at this time of day is either a fool or a villain, or both.

  By the time he reaches the sisters’ cloister Thomas’s shins are scorched, his chilblains throb and his fingers are already so thick and clumsy with the cold he knows he will not be able to hold a quill all day, knows he’ll make no progress with his psalter. Even his teeth ache.

  He stops at the sisters’ gate, pauses a moment, glances at it though he knows he must not, then he leaves the shadow of the priory’s wall and cuts away, down across a field where the lay brothers will plant rye in the distant spring. There is an old path on the snow, a line of footprints he follows through the furlong and down towards the dung heap by the river. Here the path ends in a confusion of dimples in the snow and broken ice, as if someone has been fetching water.

  Thomas climbs down the low bank on to the ice where a mist unfurls around his ankles. He steps on to it, testing it though he knows it to be strong enough to bear a cart and ox, and he hurries across in a few quick strides to thread his way through the ice-rimed reeds on the far side. Just as he is scrambling up the bank, the fox shrieks once more, rough-edged, filled with pain. Thomas pauses, frozen. The scream stops abruptly, as if cut off.

  Thomas wavers again, looks back to the priory, at the low clutch of stone buildings that huddle around the stump of the church’s tower. He sees the frater house roof leaking smoke into the pale sky and he wishes he were safe behind those walls again, readying himself for prime, perhaps, or even still asleep and dreaming again of the summer to come.

  Curse the Prior. Curse him for waking him. Curse him for sending him on this errand.

  And why? Why him? Why not this John who set the snare in the first place? Thomas is a scribe, an illuminator, not a lay brother, no longer some farm boy. He’d meant to pass that day applying leaf to one of the capitals, burnishing it with Brother Athelstan’s dog’s tooth tool. But now his fingers are like sausages.

  This is the Prior’s design, of course. Thomas understands that. The Prior means to knock the pride from him. He said as much the night before, when he’d preached against the sin during supper. Thomas had felt the old man’s eye settle on him more than once during the meal, but had thought little of it. He hadn’t looked contrite enough; that wa
s it. A lesson there.

  He carries on to where the snow is deeper, undisturbed since it started falling the day after Martinmas this last year. He breaks through the snow crust up to his knees, stumbles, flounders. Soon he is sodden. On he goes, up the gentle slope until he is only a few footsteps from the tangled borders of the copse. It hurts to breathe. He peers through the lattice of unruly branches. He sees nothing, only darkness, but something is in there. Again the hair on his nape bristles. He raises his stick to hook aside a bough.

  There is an explosion. A rattling boom. There is a cry, a tearing sound, the beating of wings. It comes at him, soot-black, straight at his face, at his eyes.

  He bellows. He ducks, swings the staff, throws himself to the snow.

  But the crow is gone before it is really there.

  It flies off with a dismal caw.

  Thomas’s heart is pounding. He hears himself blubbing, making no sense. When he gets to his knees, his hands are blue, his cassock quilted with snow.

  The crow has settled on a snow-capped post by the dung heap.

  ‘Bastard bird!’ Thomas calls, shaking the staff. ‘Bastard bloody bird!’

  The crow ignores him. The bell begins tolling in the priory, and from the river a mist rises, thick as fleece. Thomas turns back to the copse, resolute now, but he can find no way in through the tangle of brambles. He hacks at them with his staff, circles the copse until he finds a track; the lay brother John’s prints, he supposes. He ducks under the first low branches and fights his way in. The brambles pull at his cassock, snow tips down on him from above. He steps over a fallen trunk and finds himself on the edge of a tight clearing and something makes him stop. He eases aside a branch, and there it is: the fox, a slur of matted red fur in the gloom.

  He steps forward.

  Its neck and foreleg are caught together in a loop of wire, and the wire itself is hooked over a spur of hornbeam. The fox is on its hind legs, half-hanged, half-frozen, its narrow snout sunk on its blood-wet chest. The snow below is scraped to the frozen black earth and bloodstains and clumps of russet hair are everywhere.