The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III Read online

He glanced round. The sorceress was pointing, a wing of velvet hanging from her outstretched arm, back towards the wildwood. A wide, clear path had opened between the trees.

  At the far end – another illusion, surely – he could see Ludlow Castle standing upon its hill. Home.

  “Take that path, child,” said the sorceress. “No creature of the twilight will harm you while you’re under our protection. They’ll not dare. You’ll come back when you are ready.”

  With those last ominous words chasing him, Richard pulled free of the marsh, and fled. He clutched his flimsy sword for all he was worth, teeth bared against green-eyed sprites that chittered in the undergrowth as he passed. The castle at the end of the starlit path stood aloof, never drawing any closer.

  That was not my father’s head I saw, he told himself. Not my father’s. Yet tears of dread choked him.

  He ran. He left the netherworld behind, although it tried to pull him back. Wraiths tugged at his heels with cold blue fingers. Blanched and staring faces swam before his blurred eyes. However far, however hard he fled, the terror rushed along with him.

  Inside him, the shadow stretched fledgling wings and made its claim.

  ###

  “She spoke the truth,” said the king, pacing slowly in the dim light of the tent. “My future was darkness. Almost everyone I have ever loved is dead. That was the head of Owen Tudor she showed me. He was the Welsh squire who married Henry the Fifth’s widow. Their son Edmund Tudor spawned my enemy, the pretender who waits for me now. But Owen Tudor did not lose his head until two years or more after I met the witches. When I heard the story of the madwoman lighting the candles… I knew I’d seen a glimpse of the future and I cannot describe the fear that this hellish netherworld struck into me. I don’t envy you your dreams, my friend.”

  “I think that I would have gone into the cave,” Raphael said.

  “Then you’re braver than me.”

  “No. Just more afraid of them.”

  “I knew – not thought, knew – that if I entered the cave, my soul would be lost.”

  “But you might have understood what they wanted to show you.”

  “Yes, perhaps so, and perhaps that would have given me undreamed-of power – but at the cost, as I said, of my soul. All my life, the shadows within me have been trying to drag me back there. The temptation has been almost unbearable, sometimes. But I fought back. If I lose my soul anyway, no one can say I haven’t battled to the death to keep it.”

  Richard turned, his face aglow and ghastly. “I’ve never spoken of this to anyone. I could never confess my terror, not to my brothers, nor even to my mother. She would only have told me to pray for redemption. How could I explain what horror I’d seen, still less explain that this darkness is so interwoven with my soul that an eternity of praying and an army of priests could never exorcise it? They’d have thought me bewitched. All I’ve done to avert this destiny has been in vain. I might as well have torn down the altar, burned my prayer books, ripped out my own heart and offered it to Satan.”

  His voice rose, making Raphael start. He was suddenly alight with passion. “Well, let Tudor come! Let them have the apocalypse they want. I shall fight as I have lived, and take as many with me as I may to the pits of hell.”

  Outside, Raphael heard the first sounds of the camp coming to life.

  King Richard rose, moved towards the pavilion’s entrance and lifted the flap. The first indigo glimmer of dawn brushed distant Redemore Plain. In the gloom, Raphael saw tiny figures toiling up the hill.

  Very quietly, Richard said, “For all I’ve done, for all I am, and for all the sins of my family, I am punished. I’ve spun a web of soot and barbs. And now, the final act.”

  Inset: Dreaming the Past

  The battlefield of Bosworth always feels bleak, even at the height of summer. Imagine away the midge-clouded heat and the visitors, and just beneath the surface there’s a harder, darker reality. King Richard was piteously betrayed and slain here. The land has never forgotten.

  It happens once in a lifetime that you encounter someone who goes straight into you, like a laser. You can’t explain why it’s that person and not another, or what it means. But in they go, directly into your soul and they’re locked there forever, dark and sweet and painful. Even when, as often happens, they don’t know you exist.

  For some it’s a god or a guru, for others a lover, a film star, an absent father. And for me – what? A villain? A hero? An enigma. A man who died five hundred and eighteen years ago.

  I remember the moment.

  Three years into the twenty-first century and I’m new at university, studying medieval history and already wondering if I’ve made a mistake. I come back to the halls of residence, tired. My tutor doesn’t like me, I think, and is already giving me a hard time. The girl across the hall from me, Fin, comes out at just the right moment.

  “Fancy watching a video, August? I’ve opened a bottle of wine. Come and join us.”

  She’s a rare one, Fin. Easy to be with, open and kind. I’m so glad to curl up on her sofa, accept a glass of merlot, and forget everything.

  A couple of other students are with her, sprawled on the floor smoking. The film they are watching is Richard III. The fifteenth century isn’t the period I’m studying and all I know is the wisdom received from Shakespeare, now laid before me in 1950s Technicolor, with gorgeous costumes, pageantry, a rainbow of banners and, at the centre, holding the attention like a dark star, the ravishingly handsome Laurence Olivier, trying to convince us he is an ugly hunchback.

  “Since I cannot prove a lover… I am determined to prove a villain.”

  The room is dark, bathed in the flickering colours of the tragedy. No villain was ever more attractive. At times gleeful, at others flatly chilling, slaughtering his way through brother, friends, nephews and wife to gain the throne, and doing so with such wit, sharp self-awareness and panache that we cheer him on even as we recoil. Entranced, I watch him weave a web of deadly charm over Lady Anne, turning her in minutes from venomous hatred to love with his honeyed lies; and I believe it completely. If I were her, I would fall too.

  I can’t explain what magic lashes from the screen, from a film a half-century old… Not the actor, nor the real Richard III, but an entity, a delicious shadow.

  When the hero, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, arrives to defeat him, I am dismayed. Fin and her friends boo. Who could celebrate the triumph of bland conformity over such ruthless, wild creativity?

  “It’s all cobblers, of course,” says one of the others, a Yorkshire lass. Fin pours more wine into my glass and sits smiling, inscrutable.

  “A ton of dramatic licence,” I say, “but why is it cobblers?”

  “I thought you were doing medieval history, August?”

  “Twelfth century.” I pull a face, recalling my tutor’s demolition of my essay; I’d focussed on the wrong aspects, he said, and I disagreed, but he’d crushed my feeble attempts to put my case.

  “Bloody good play, not much resemblance to reality,” the Yorkshire lass states flatly. “Best king we ever had, Richard the Third.”

  “Shakespeare never let facts stand in the way of a good story,” says Fin. “It’s a morality tale. Higher truth. Triumph of good over evil.”

  “Except he wasn’t evil!” says her friend.

  They go on arguing with half-remembered facts. I pick up the remote and rewind to the wooing scene. God, he’s convincing; Olivier, or Richard, or the Entity. Seducing his victim with all the dark charisma of a vampire. It’s spellbinding. It is the beginning.

  That night, as I lie down to sleep, he comes to me.

  Chapter One. 1460: Eleanor.

  RICHARD

  The curse my noble father laid on thee

  When thou didst crown his warlike brows with paper

  And with thy scorns drew’st rivers from his eyes

  And then, to dry them, gav’st the Duke a clout

  Steeped in the faultless blood of pretty Rutland �
�

  His curses then, from bitterness of soul

  Denounced against thee, are all fallen upon thee;

  And God, not we, hath plagued thy bloody deed.

  Richard III Act 1 scene 3

  White-gold light flooded a frieze of snow. Katherine played in white enchantment, on her knees in a drift, squeezing snowballs between her palms and pressing them into small figures, naming each one as she set it down. Her own king, queen and court. She wondered at the sensation of snow compacting and the ice-water running between her fingers. Strange it should be so cold and yet burn like flame. Her wet, burning fingers were as red as strawberries.

  Other children played around her in the courtyard garden, hurling snow. Kate ignored them, even when a stray snowball burst on her shoulder and trickled its chill down her neck. Their babbling laughter was a vague background. The friar who had been set to supervise them stood blowing on his hands, his long nose scarlet.

  From within the house – that of her mother’s friend, Dame Eylott – she could hear the low chanting of the priestesses. From the street beyond the courtyard wall carried the sharper sound of raised voices, the quick tramp of boots muffled in the snow. Tension fogged the air. One boy stood apart, waiting anxiously at the closed, solid gate that led onto the street. Now and then Kate sat back, cushioned by the thick wool of her skirts, to see if he was still there.

  She knew the boy only by sight. The custom was for the priestesses to include their sons and daughters in the early part of the meeting, to dance a circle in the incense-wreathed light of the cellar temple. Then the adults would proceed to their own secret business, while the children were turned loose to play. The boy had gone straight to the gate and waited there ever since. She’d asked him why, but he hadn’t answered.

  Kate began to build an ice palace for her courtiers. It would be large and fantastical with spires of ice, as she imagined great ice palaces in the sparkling lands of the north.

  The courtyard gate was flung back and knocked the boy flying. Thomas Copper, her mother’s steward, came running through, yelling. “The battle’s lost, York is dead!” He rushed straight past and inside the house. “My Lady Lytton, Dame Eylott, Dame Marl…”

  Kate glanced down at her at her snow figures and found them ruined. She had struck off their heads with her sleeve.

  Seconds later, women came pouring out of the house, nobles and servants mingling together. Across the courtyard and out into the street they went, gathering children in their wake. Katherine found herself swung up into her mother’s arms and carried along in a river of people. Nan, the little maid, only a few years older than Kate, ran at their side.

  Winter had transformed the city of York, turning its walls to sparkling veils. All dirt and imperfection lay smothered in white drifts, goosedown-thick and achingly cold. The tall houses glittered under deep caps of snow. Underfoot, slush lay rutted and churned brown.

  “My lady, what’s happened?” Nan cried, her white breath curling in wisps.

  “The Duke of York is dead,” answered Lady Eleanor Lytton, Kate’s mother. Her voice sounded sad and remote. “The battle went against them. This time, the Lancastrians triumphed.”

  Slowed to a walk by the press of people, they reached the city gate. Before them rose the crenellated bulk of Micklegate Bar, black against the bright sky. A great crowd had gathered around it, stamping and breathing fog into the air, and staring up at the parapet that arched above the gate.

  “Oh, great goddess,” said Lady Eleanor.

  Katherine squinted against brightness and shaded her eyes with a chilled hand. Atop the gate, framed against the glaring acid-gold of the sky, were three heads. Three severed heads, stuck on spikes, staring across the city.

  Their faces were vague in silhouette but appeared ragged and bruised. The sight filled Kate with an immense, nebulous sense of tragedy.

  “Mama, who are they?” Katherine asked after a while.

  “She shouldn’t see this,” said Nan. Tears were rolling down her cheeks and nose.

  “No, she should,” Eleanor answered. She began to chafe Kate’s numb fingers with hands that felt like fire. “Let her see the ways of men. The fewer illusions she grows up with, the better.” Her voice was low, calm, but full of passion. “Look well, sweetheart. The head in the centre is that of the Duke of York. He quarrelled with King Henry and tried to claim the throne. Some say his claim was better than Henry’s, but that made him too troublesome; and this is where it has got him. The head on his right was his friend, the Earl of Salisbury. The one on his left was his son, Edmund of Rutland.”

  “The boy was only seventeen,” said Thomas Copper. He’d shouldered his way to them and stood hunched under his thick fleece-lined coat, looking up at the trophies. “I’ve heard tell that the Lancastrians attacked during a truce, while the duke was still at Sandal Castle, celebrating Christmas. He stood no chance. Edmund fled, but Queen Marguerite’s men chased him and slaughtered him even while he was pleading for mercy. Massacre!”

  He went on, grumbling about the atrocities perpetrated on the battlefield by the House of Lancaster. Slaughter, mutilation, vengeful cruelty beyond belief. Kate’s rich imagination conjured its own images and wove them into a crimson nightmare.

  “Is this the end, then?” asked Eleanor. “Gentle Harry has destroyed his enemies. We might see peace at last.”

  “Not a chance,” Thomas Copper replied. “York still has three sons living. Edward, George and Richard.”

  “Yes. Naturally it will never end.”

  “Why?” asked Kate.

  Her mother didn’t answer for a time. Katherine looked closely at her strong, gentle, troubled face, her kind hazel eyes, her hair showing coppery beneath a covering of umber velvet. Her appearance of demure grace was deceptive, Kate knew. As her other-self, her hidden self, Eleanor was unrecognisable.

  Around them, the crowd murmured with outrage and wonder. Eventually she said under her breath, “White rose and red rose, Kate; different shoots of the same thorn bush. They’re cousins who have become the deadliest rivals.”

  Kate had a clear view through the open gates of Micklegate Bar to the road beyond. She saw a cloud of ice crystals, whirling and billowing along the road towards them. In an ecstasy of terror, she clutched her mother.

  “Are they coming to kill us?”

  “Of course not. Why, Kate?”

  “Because Father loved the Duke of York.”

  Eleanor bit her lip. There was a hard shine in her eyes. “They won’t kill us for that. One king is much the same as another. Whoever wins, we’ll swear loyalty to the crown and keep our heads down, as we’ve always done. There’s nothing to fear, love.”

  Closer came the glittering cloud, like a swirl of wintry spirits. Through the cloud appeared the grey silhouettes of six priests, scattering holy water and flaunting huge crosses with dagger-pointed ends. They were trying to drive the elementals away. They looked like wizards, ridiculously fighting an invisible enemy.

  Kate’s mother gave a small, tight gasp. Exorcism. Such rituals always made her hiss in contempt. The holy men kept chanting and the elementals went on playing. Suddenly – of its own mischievous will, not the priests’ – the diamond cloud twisted, veered into the air and vanished in a shower of snow-mist. The exorcists were slow to cease their ritual; looking around bewildered, as if unsure of their success.

  Kate realised she could see more clearly than them.

  She saw the road beyond with a hard white landscape around it. A long column of mounted knights was approaching, thunderous and magnificent. Kate’s heart thumped. The priests, running to avoid being ridden down, formed two hasty lines to flank the column. Their cloaks flapped in the chill air. They’d been frantic to drive the mischievous snow spirits out of the way, as if the elementals had been trying to obstruct their passage into the city. Perhaps, thought Kate, Mama and her friends had summoned them.

  The riders reached the gate and came rumbling through. The ground shook.
The crowd peeled back to watch the great procession. Huge horses breathed steam like dragons. Men in armour, their surcoats torn and bloodied, advanced amid a forest of banners stiff with ice. There were ten couple of graylix on chains: great charcoal creatures with almost-human faces, snarling and snapping at the onlookers, straining to escape the pages who fought to hold them. A sigh of fear went through the onlookers. On every surcoat the red rose glistened like a burst heart.

  Eleanor and Katherine were jostled as the people around them pushed backwards and forwards. Kate was afloat on a sea of florid, staring faces.

  In centre of the army rode a woman. A slender, blade-straight woman, armoured beneath a golden cloak. Her face was all hard planes, pale and keen, with eyes of colourless ice. Hair as straight and pale as straw fell from beneath her crowned helm.

  “Queen Marguerite of Anjou,” whispered Eleanor. The whisper ran through the crowd around them. Queen Marguerite. Henry sits like a monk in a cell while his wife fights his battles for him! She’s a monster. Slew a boy of seventeen. Poor Edmund! From some throats came a hiss that she must have heard. Others bent a reluctant knee as she passed.

  The queen pulled up her horse hardly two yards from Kate and her mother, and looked back at Micklegate Bar. Her chestnut mount danced on the spot, half-rearing. Its thick neck was bent, foam dripping from its open mouth.

  “Regard!” Marguerite cried, pointing upwards, her arm straight as a spear. “York looks out over York.” Her voice was harsh, sharply accented. “He strove to be king; so let him be crowned indeed. With straw!”

  And all her knights and supporters roared with laughter.

  The image of the queen, silver and gold and terrible, struck Katherine to the heart with excitement. She hated her on sight. Yet she was magnificent.