The Green Man by Kate Sedley Read Free Book Online Page A

their own scarecrows stopped work and watched us pass in sullen silence, or else mouthed insults and obscenities at us and shook their fists. I remembered that when I had accompanied the army to France, seven years earlier, people in every village that we rode through, shouted, ‘The king! The king!’ and rang the church bells and strewed our path with flowers. Today, the only cries that reached our ears were demands to know why England wasn’t supporting Burgundy against King Louis. The army commanders ignored them, pushing on with stony faces, glancing to neither right nor left, and I doubted that King Edward could even hear them, carried as he was in a litter with the curtains drawn. His doctors had decreed him too weak to mount a horse that day, and for several days prior to that.
    In the ordinary way of things, someone as insignificant as myself would have seen little or nothing of the royal entourage, but my instructions to remain closer to Albany than a second skin had brought me into daily contact with the king and his immediate circle. And the shock of my first sighting of King Edward had increased as the days passed, rather than diminished. I recalled him as he was not so very many years ago; a great, golden giant of a man: ‘the handsomest man in Europe’ he had been called, and not without justification. His badge of the Sun in Splendour had described the man to perfection; huge, generous, radiating warmth. But now, he was fat, disease-ridden, his face the colour of unbaked dough, his marvellous energy dissipated by the pleasures of the flesh; too much food, too much wine, too many women. Perhaps I exaggerate a little – women still found him attractive, I was told – but he appeared to me to have deteriorated rapidly since my last glimpse of him, in London, two years earlier. (And as I write these words, an old man in his seventies, I cannot but recall that I have seen the youthful Edward live again in his grandson, our present king, Henry, as unlike his cheese-paring, miserly Tudor father as it is possible to be, but with the same tendency to excess in everything as his maternal grandsire. Will he go the same way as King Edward? Or will he be able to curb his insatiable appetites? Who can tell? Certainly not me. My life will be ended in a few more years.)
    And so, after that digression, I have lost my thread, and serve me right. Where was I? Ah, yes! Approaching Fotheringay Castle in those early June days of the year 1482 when I was still a young man – well, comparatively young – of twenty-nine, although a little more than three months off my thirtieth birthday; an unhappy man, desperately missing his wife and children.
    Fotheringay was as gloomy inside as it was out.
    The Duke of Albany and his retinue were assigned a number of rooms on the ground floor, close to the king’s own suite, which were, as I soon discovered, somewhat more luxurious than those of even such highly placed lords as Earl Rivers and Sir Edward Woodville, two of the king’s brothers-in-law, the Marquis of Dorset, his elder stepson, Lord Hastings, his particular, life-long friend, Lord Stanley and many others. These flowers of the English court were definitely not pleased by Albany’s preferential treatment, and made their annoyance plain, at least to us, his servants, if not to the prince himself. Not that he was unaware of it, but he was not in the least discomposed by their disapproval.
    â€˜After all, I am a future king of Scotland,’ he said to me, as we tumbled into bed that first night, adding with a grin, ‘And you will see tomorrow, or whenever my lords of Gloucester and Northumberland arrive from the north, that I shall be given pride of place when His Highness receives them.’ His voice sharpened. ‘And don’t you move far from my side, Roger! There’s something about this place. I don’t like it. I have a premonition of danger.’
    I sighed, not