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

to me... when I returned. Holy God! If I returned! There were others who had sought her favours and been turned upon with a pouting lip which served but to madden them further. I cursed Montagu, and his pie’s nest.
    It began to rain great drops which, against an unnaturally red sky, looked like blood.
    I curled myself into damp, miserable sleep, to be wakened hours later by a call from the look-out.
    ‘A strange fleet astern, Captain, and your Grace,’ he said, uncertain as to which he should address first: his familiar master or a fugitive King.
    ‘I can’t see what they are flying, but they come in haste,’ and he craned out from half-way up the rigging until he looked like an old figurehead of Saxon time. ‘Great speed!’ he yelled. His voice was whipped away as the wind changed and nudged us southerly.
    ‘I will look,’ I said, and hoisted myself high, burning my hands with the fierce sheet’s tooth. Margetta waited far away, and I had no wish to drown—not in that dark draught at any rate. One glance only, and that enough to make me assume mastership, crying in unashamed fear:
    ‘The Easterlings! Cram on all sail!’ and sliding down in readiness to fight by the side of my lord, and my King.
    They were out for our cargo, and our lives. The dreaded Hanseatic League, spiders of the sea, coming nearer and nearer with each bounding gust. Great ships, manned by grim, pitiless men. Topsail, mainsail, each straining inch of belly, not like a woman now, more like an old man hard-swollen with the dropsy of death; and the foolish, loving wind, as like to change as a King’s whim, sweeping us up in its embrace. The cross-currents buffeted us hither and thither, and we swore, and called on St Peter and Blessed Nicholas. Again my keen sight picked up the blandly fierce faces of the Hanse traders, and their snarling blazon, and the fire of their steel, and I saw their pointing arms, and the spideriness of them, working up and down their rigging for a closer look.
    ‘Now may God be with York!’ cried Richard, for this was verily a battle-charge, against an accursed, shifting wind; then I knew us humbled by a miracle, for our look-out cried: ‘Landfall!’ while at the same moment a detachment of armed craft showing the pennons of the Seigneur de la Gruthuyse hove into sight, come from the nearing shore of Alkmaar to drive off the men of the Hanse towns. So we were delivered from distress.
    ‘Blessed be Jesus!’
    ‘Amen and amen,’ said I, then: ‘Soon we shall be on Flanders soil for the first time, your Grace.’
    ‘For your first time,’ Richard said, sad and sharp and gentle. ‘On my part—it is like a wicked dream come round once more.’ He looked instantly at Edward, fine-coloured from the sprayful wind. Be calm, my lord, thought I; the one who expunged your evil dreams before is still within a handgrasp and will not fail you—no more than he did when you were seven years old. You see how I was as the wind is? Full of pride and all a-bluster with good counsel, yet veering one side to the other, and whirling in currents of rancour, admiration, envy and love!
    The horse they gave me for the ride to Bruges was not to be compared with my sorrel, and the sere terrain of Flanders far less pleasing than the flower-starred fields of Bloomsbury, where Margetta and I had lain together. The Seigneur de la Gruthuyse was a great man, tall and round-bellied. When he embraced King Edward, the Governor’s gold collar, weighty with rubies, caught for a moment on the salt-soaked doublet of his Grace, and, doubtless showing his cognizance of this brotherly omen, Gruthuyse took it off, placing it lovingly about Edward’s neck
    ‘My house is yours, cousin,’ he said, in what passed for English. ‘Yaa! Like bird in storm the King of England comes. One day—bird strong: he fly away—pouf! To deliver us all from those who plague us.’ And I looked at the woolships nudging the quay, and thought on King Spider, Queen