Kate Sedley: The Midsummer Crown

‘Oh, I’m not thinking of returning to London,’ I said forcefully. ‘That’s the last thing on my mind. It’s my intention not to stir much beyond the Bristol pale for the next few months.’

Jack was shaken with silent laughter. ‘I’ve heard you say stuff like that before, Roger, my lad, and it never works out that way. You tempt providence, you do! I reckon you’ll be back in London inside a month. What’ll you wager me?’

‘Nothing,’ I said angrily. ‘Stop talking nonsense! I’ve told you! Adela and the children need me. I’m staying near home for the rest of the summer.’

He grinned. ‘Oh, ah! And I might find a pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow.’ He got up. ‘I must be off. You coming?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll stay a bit longer.’

‘Please yourself. Josh?’

‘Ay’ The other man rose ponderously to his feet and they went out together.

‘Don’t get drunk,’ was Jack’s parting shot. ‘I reckon you’ve had enough.’

I stuck two fingers in the air, but the gesture was wasted. He was already out of the door. As it happened, I had no intention of spending my money on more ale: I simply wanted to be alone, to think.

I could have sworn, when I left London three weeks earlier, that trouble was brewing. The general mood of the city was edgy and had been, or so I guessed, ever since the heralds had cried the news of King Edward IV’s death on April the ninth. Certainly, by the time I rode in through the Lud Gate on St George’s Day, there was a febrile atmosphere that was hard to explain. Even the arrival of the Duke of Gloucester with the young king three days after May Day had done nothing to dispel the general sense of uneasiness. Duke Richard’s perhaps over-excessive gratitude to his cousin, Henry of Buckingham, for riding to warn him of the Northampton plot, had put many noses out of joint; and, as I said before, I knew for a fact that Lord Chamberlain Hastings had begun plotting almost at once with his old enemies, the Woodvilles, and some of their adherents to overthrow the Protector.

Nothing, however seemed to have come of it. If Joshua Bullman were telling the truth — and there was no reason whatsoever why he should not be — all was quiet in the capital and plans going ahead for the young king’s coronation and the calling of his first parliament. And yet. . I repeat that no one knew better than I that Duke Richard strongly suspected, even if he were not entirely convinced, that the late king had been his mother’s bastard by an archer, named Blaybourne. Had he not sent me to Paris the previous year in an attempt to discover the truth of the matter? Unfortunately, the evidence I had uncovered had been sufficient merely to bolster the duke’s suspicions without amounting to proof. And as long as the Dowager Duchess of York refused to confirm or deny the allegation she had once made, on the occasion of the late king’s marriage to Dame Elizabeth Woodville, then my lord of Gloucester had no alternative but to accept his elder nephew as his rightful sovereign.

I swallowed the dregs of my ale and rose to my feet. But even as I did so, a memory obtruded itself; a memory of the night I had spent at Reading Abbey on my recent journey to London and the sudden flurried arrival, which I had accidentally witnessed, of Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells. My lord had appeared unnecessarily agitated, as he had also done when I saw him just over a week later on his way to the service of thanksgiving, for the king’s safe entry into his capital, at St Paul’s. A third sighting of him leaving Crosby’s Place in Bishop’s Gate Street, where the Duke of Gloucester had been temporarily lodging, convinced me that my lord bishop had something on his mind. And this, in turn, had provoked the recollection that Robert Stillington had not only been a close friend of George of Clarence, but had briefly been imprisoned around the time of the duke’s execution.

I sat down again, much to the annoyance of a man who had been waiting to take my seat, and stared sightlessly ahead of me, twisting my empty beaker between my hands. Here was certainly food for thought. But then, suddenly, resolutely, I once more stood up and made my way outside, breathing in the balmy evening air. What concern was any of this of mine? I asked myself. The capital and its affairs, its intrigues and secrets, were none of my business. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me back there. I was home and that was where I was going to stay.

I had been hawking my wares around the manor of Clifton with some success — enough, at any rate, to make me feel at peace with myself and life in general — and was seated on the edge of the gorge, eating the dinner of bread and cheese with which Adela had provided me. Far below me it was low tide, and the sluggish Avon was a narrow thread between its glistening banks of mud, while on the opposite side of the river, as on my own, the towering cliffs were cloaked in the green of trees and shrubs that clung perilously to the rock face. As I watched, a faint breeze tossed the sun-bronzed leaves into patterns of silver and jade and slate-blue, and the distant hills were awash with light, waves of beaten copper rolling towards some celestial shore. The June day was playing at being high summer to make up for the previous evening’s wind and rain.

I thought once more of the giants, Vincent and Goram, whom legend credited with cutting the gorge using only one axe between them. The latter, the lazy, gluttonous brother, had suggested that they raise great mounds of rocks mingled with bones of the huge creatures which stalked the earth at that time. Vincent could supply the rocks, he the bones, and incidentally provide meat for their table. The axe, which Goram also used for hunting, would be tossed from one to the other as needed, preceded by a shout of warning, a system that worked well enough until one day the inevitable happened. Goram, asleep in his chair, failed to hear his brother, who was digging three miles off, call out. The axe split his skull in two and he died instantly, leaving Vincent, grief-stricken with self-blame, to devote the rest of his life to good works, amongst which were the building of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, the raising of the ancient stone circle at Stanton Drew and even the single-handed building of the Giant’s Dance on Salisbury Plain.

Hercules, my dog, who had accompanied me on my excursion, as he so often did, nudged me with his cold, wet nose, indicating his willingness to finish my bread and cheese for me if I really didn’t want it. As he had already demolished a large chunk of meat which Adela had thoughtfully packed for him, I ignored the suggestion and, instead, got to my feet preparatory to starting on the homeward journey.

‘You’re quite right,’ I said, addressing him. ‘All this brooding on old legends and fairy stories is doing no good whatsoever. I don’t know what’s got into me lately.’

Hercules wagged his tail in a disappointed sort of way as I crammed the last of the bread into my mouth, but was soon happy again now that we were on the move, snuffling for rabbits among the long grass. (He had never caught one and never would, but he lived in hope.) I strode out across the downs, that high plateau of grassland that shelters Bristol from the northerly winds, keeping it snug in its marshy bed from the worst of the winter weather. In the past ten years, however, since I had been a resident, the city had begun to spread its tentacles ever further beyond the walls, spawning dozens of little communities on the slopes rising towards Clifton and Westbury, so that it was no longer remarkable to encounter children escaping from harassed mothers or to meet with washing drying on wayside bushes, or even blowing about one’s ankles on windy days.

As we descended the first of the three main slopes leading homeward, a young lad, some ten or eleven years old, toppled out of the lower branches of a birch tree, landing almost at my feet with a painful thud. Luckily, his fall was broken by a pile of small, leafy branches which he had hacked off previously and which provided a sort of mattress at the base of the trunk.