Free We Speak No Treason Vol 2 by Rosemary Hawley Jarman Page B

of his esquires.
    ‘John Milwater—I saw him fall. Is there news?’ he asked.
    ‘Dead, my lord,’ said the surgeon, watching a fresh red seeping through clean linen.
    ‘Thomas Parr... he was beside me when I took this blow...’
    And just then they carried in that same knight, stripped of course of his rings and his purse, and with the life only lately gone from him; and those who brought him cried with joyful tongue that Earl Warwick had gone deathward, trampled underfoot, but whole enough to be displayed in St Paul’s on the morrow, together with his brother Montagu of the Pie’s Nest. And Richard Plantagenet, plucking his arm from the surgeon’s ministry, walked with unsteady step over to the corpse of Sir Thomas Parr, and kissed its face, and wept; wept, for Warwick and all that was gone.
    But is there only the Now? Could I not counterfeit a dream, a dream that will soon be ended? Master Brecher’s son has closed his eyes. How old is he? Seventeen? Eighteen? And there I was calling him a child. It is because I am old to his eyes. A grandad in his mind. My dream, if I can will it back again, is still full of steel-shriek and the dog-like moans of the dying. I was nineteen, at Tewkesbury. I had a fair young wife in my bed, and the kiss of a King on my cheek, for my work at Barnet Field.
    ‘In the Name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I create thee a knight.’ The heavy jewelled sword descending. That great golden face against mine. The joy, the wound-forgetting; the upsurging renewal. Richard Plantagenet, standing palely by the King. And the sound of the Frenchwoman’s host already sharpening our steel again. The men of the West Country behind her; the armies of Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire rallying to her fanatical voice. We had but a month to lick our hurts, to gather our force, and to borrow our money. Now I knew the meaning of livery and maintenance, but from the other end of the scale! Jasper Tudor (yea, the Dragon’s own uncle) waited in Wales for Queen Margaret to join him. I waged a stout company of friends. Some of those lives still hang heavy on my soul.
    Tewkesbury was a fair little town, tranquil and flower-framed, with a sweet-running river girdling the Abbey and its green fields. I gazed at that stream with fierce longing, and craved above all to rid me of my harness and plunge into the clear flood, The past hours weighed on me burdensome as the steel lapping my body. Our march had started, long before day’s beginning, from Sodbury Hill northward to Gloucester. There, a hasty recognizance that its gates were barred to the French Queen; then hot on her heels all day. Hot, God’s truth, the heat of hell fire from a pitiless sun turning our mail into an oven. I stewed gently in my own sweat, my sodden shirt a penance. A choking dust, and no drink. All the streams we came upon were like cesspits from the host that fled before us.
    My sorrel dropped her nose and sucked up mud, and I pressed her on. At times I fancied I had died and was in Purgatory, until I shook the sweat out of my eyes and looked for our leaders, and saw that if this were truth I was in fair company.
    For the King, and Hastings, Sir John Howard and Richard Gloucester, struggled ahead of me, encased in full harness; thus was I shamed and counted myself lucky to be only wearing brigandines; and wondered if they envied me; then began to look jealous at my own men in their jacks and sallets, light as the deer that had once worn the skins clothing them.
    Sir John Howard had given me words of comfort during that ride. ‘Remember,’ he said with his furrowing smile, ‘our quarry has fear as well as heat to combat. Jesu! One can almost scent their fear!
Her
fear!’ Watching him spur on, I pondered on loyalty; for he had sworn to have the elder John Paston’s head. I had lately learned that my erstwhile friend fought for Lancaster. So where did loyalty lie? There was naught to counsel me but the chafe of my flesh and the river running