Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

We are in bed at the time. We spend a lot of time in bed after the Queen has gone to Scotland to raise a new army and I have been there long enough to feel I can express my resentment, well, jealousy, really, of the beautiful girl whose portrait hangs on the wall by the door.

'Ah, me,' he says, in that deep voice of his. Even when he speaks softly it resonates in my ear, which is pressed on the white hairs in the middle of his chest. 'She was the first love of" my life. A king’s daughter and the wife of a king."

'Wife? You are not a king, are you?'

He laughs. 'Who knows what a king is? I am a king in everything but name. She was, look you, the daughter of the mad old King of France and after the big battle there, on St Crispin's Day – I was there, though I was only fifteen years old – the Inglysshe King married her, though she herself was a year younger than I.'

'Which king was that?'

'Henry, though Harry was what he liked to be called.' I frown, trying to work it all out. He senses my puzzlement. 'That's right,' he says. 'The father of the present king.' 'So she, your lover, was his mother. The mother of the present king?'

'That's right too. But King Harry died when she was just twenty-one. Now I had been a page in the King's court, and was by then a squire in her service.'

'And you fell in love?'

'That's right. Of course, they didn't like it one bit. I even went to prison for her after the birth of our son Edmund but in the end they let it stand, let us live as man and wife, so long as we kept out of the way of things. You see, in some ways they were grateful to have the Queen off their hands. She was French, the old wars had started again, as the child king's mother she might have interfered, insisted on being part of the regency, messed up the war effort

'But instead you brought her here and lived happily ever after.' He hears the envy in my voice.

'No. We remained in the south, in or near London, mostly at the palace of Waltham where I was master of her wardrobe. As a mother she continued to look after her son, the King, as well as the children we had together, so we had to stay down there.'

'There were more children?'

'Three more.'

'And then she died. In childbirth?

'No. Of a long and painful illness. The one with claws. Like a crab's.'

'I can cure it. When was that?' 'Twenty… twenty-three years ago.'

I take heart from that hesitation. At least he isn't counting the days.

He sighs a little, then runs his hand through my hair while the other strengthens its clasp round my back, pushing my breasts into his midriff. He answers my questions before I have to ask them.

'You are every bit as lovely as she was. But in a very different way.'

Well, I can see that. The lady in the portrait is fair-skinned, though dark-haired. Later, on my own, I look into her hazel eyes, and kiss her rosebud lips. She was all right, you know? But different.

How does all this begin? You mean this passion shared with Owen ap Maredudd ap Tewdyr?

When we arrive, the Queen, the Prince and I, through the gates of that massive long wall, and ride Dobs up the gravel paths between rosebeds filled with blooms, and past ponds where carp drift in the summer heat, Owen is already there, beneath the keep's portcullis, with his family about him to welcome us. His son Edmund died some four years previously but his daughter-in-law is there with their son Henry, a three-year-old who never knew his father. This son is already an earl, the Earl of Richmond, a title granted his commoner father since his wile was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt by his third wife. There was, therefore, a connection by blood to the royal family, as well as that by marriage through Katherine of Valois, Henry the Fifth's queen.

This little boy is a serious soul, whom I get to know well in the next few months. He plays most seriously and is advanced for his age-in manner and speech. He also has a certain low cunning, playing off one grown-up against another. His grandfather, my Owen ap Tewdyr, which the English call Tudor, does not much like him, detecting a meanness of nature foreign to the old man's disposition, but says he will go far. Maybe. To go far in Ingerlond, if you are a man, requires only that you should be strong, violent by nature and cruel. This Henry so far displays none of these, save perhaps cruelty, but even then only when it serves his ends. But, as I said, he is cunning.

I'm sorry. You ask how it all begins between me and my Owen. Simple enough. A day soon dawns when it is decided the Queen should go to Scotland whose queen is an old friend and may help her to raise money and an army. While they are all seeing her off, I nip upstairs, take off my man's clothes and get into his bed. Where, an hour or so later, he finds me.

There. That is quite enough for now. Much was happening in the south, which Ali knows far more about than I do. I'll leave him to take up the tale.

Actually not. More letters from Prince Harihara to his illustrious cousin, written out in Chamberlain Anish's neat hand, were left out for my perusal.

Dear Cousin

We have been relieved at last, taken out of our palace/prison, and set free. Wonderful! Let me tell you how it happened while it is fresh in my mind. You will remember, if you ever got the letter, that we were still in the Tower, though London was in the hands of the Yorkists, that the main Yorkist army had inarched north under Warwick. Fauconberg and March, leaving two thousand or so under Lord Salisbury, Warwick's father. For three weeks they laid siege to the Tower but without a great deal of effort, being prepared to starve us out. Meanwhile our host, the irascible Lord Scales, continued to hurl cannonballs amongst the houses his guns could reach, to the annoyance and discomfort of the burghers who owned and lived in them.

He boasted loudly that no fire was returned, because if it had been he would have cannonballed the guns aimed at him. But in this he had made one foolish miscalculation: all his guns were sited in the towers that overlooked the city from which he might expect any attack to come. Lord Salisbury, after a fortnight or so, perhaps during which he ascertained that this was indeed so, moved five large cannon across the bridge (the move necessitated the destruction of a row of shops) on to the south bank and thence downriver so they could fire across at the riverside walls from a mere two hundred paces and without any danger to themselves – the guns in the Tower were so securely emplaced they could not be easily or quickly moved.

A lesson for us here – again obvious in its way, but the sort of thing one does not think of until too late: one's guns need protection from the enemy's, but the protection should not be such as to render their redeployment difficult or impossible.

For three days they pounded the riverside walls, which soon began to tumble as they had not been designed to withstand any sort of punishment, and by the fourth day the south wall of the inner keep was exposed. We were now in some danger and certainly suffered severe discomfort from dust, falling masonry and noise. It was not long before the lords who, as I told you in my last, had come with their families for shelter from the Yorkists, now urged Lord Scales to surrender. Since, as I have said, we were also running short of food, this he felt constrained to do, and yesterday evening it was proposed between heralds chosen by each side that this morning there should be a formal handing over of the keys of the great gate. Our chief concern now is that Lord Salisbury will remember and recognise us from our brief sojourn in Calais nearly seven months ago and thus identify us as people sympathetic to the Yorkist cause.

At nightfall, after this had been arranged, Anish and I came upon Sergeant Bardolph Earwicca in the Tower Gardens, drunk and maudlin: his fear was that, having merely done his duty for the King and the King's man, by which he meant Lord Scales, he would now be out of a job, that another, more solidly inclined towards the Yorkists, would be given his place as Under Master Sergeant of Ordnance, and he would end up begging on the streets. Where, if his identity and previous occupation were revealed, he would probably be torn to pieces as the main instrument of the bombardment of the town. Anish, ever quick to see an opportunity, immediately promised him employment in Vijayanagara if he had no objection to travelling some distance. He had no objection for he had lost his wife and three children to the most recent outbreak of plague and was on his own, at which he became maudlin again and began to sob for the loss of the people he referred to as his 'fucking loved ones'.