Harry had found the need to express, in vivid and crude terms, his disapproval of King Richard’s flexing of royal muscles in the north, to the King’s displeasure. Meanwhile Harry’s expression had closed, leaving me in no doubt that he would not discuss the clash of opinion with King Richard that had left a lurking shadow over our family, so I abandoned it for a meatier subject that would draw Harry back to the matter in hand.
‘What do you think Lancaster will do?’
‘I think he will say that he has returned to take back the Lancaster inheritance and his title.’
I took note of the careful wording. ‘I’d be surprised if that’s all, whatever he says.’ I knew my cousin Henry better than that. He would never tolerate injustice. If he was the victim of such injustice, cousin Henry would be driven into action to right the wrong. Stepping behind him, I dug my fingers into Harry’s shoulder, making him flinch as I discovered a knot of taut muscle. Peeling back the cloth I discovered a newly scabbed-over cut. It had been a deep one. Another scar to add to the collection.
‘Knife?’ I asked conversationally to negate the familiar brush of fear that his life was so often in danger of being snuffed out.
‘Sword,’ he replied. ‘Before I took the weapon from its owner. He’ll not be needing it. And it was a poor weapon.’
Since there was nothing more for me to say, and it was healing cleanly, I returned to the simple, or not so simple, matter of treason.
‘Do you think my cousin Henry will claim the throne?’ I asked, deliberately ingenuous.
It was as if I had dropped an iron pan onto a hearthstone with an echoing clang to draw every eye. Harry’s shoulder acquired a rigidity under my hand.
‘Now there’s a dangerous question. What makes you ask that?’
‘Merely a thought.’
‘You never merely have thoughts. All I can say is that Lancaster will not be well disposed to Richard. Nor will he trust him.’ He grunted. ‘By the Rood, Elizabeth, have mercy. I swear the Scots could learn a thing or two from you about torturing prisoners.’
As I continued to knead, but more gently, I caught the slide of Harry’s eye to where he had left his sword propped beside the door, an elegant Italian weapon with a chased blade at odds with the soldierly hilt. Harry had brought it back from a tournament somewhere in his early travels, since when it had become his pride and joy, rarely leaving his sight except when exhaustion took him to his bed.
‘So tell me what is in your mind,’ I said, my fingers stilled at last, my thoughts waywardly turning into those dangerous channels.
‘Not a thing.’
‘You looked positively shifty.’
‘I am never shifty. My thought processes are as clear as a millpond. I was thinking what you are thinking. That Lancaster’s not the only one with a claim to the throne. I don’t recall Richard, childless as he is, and will be for some years, ever naming Lancaster as his heir.’
‘No, he would not. There’s too much antipathy between them. Wasn’t it Edward of Aumale whom he named, at the last count?’
Edward of Aumale was another distant cousin of mine, son and heir of Edmund, Duke of York. I had more than enough cousins to rustle the leaves of England’s royal tree.
‘Yes, Aumale has been given that honour, but before that, as I recall, until his unfortunate death in Ireland, the heir was recognised as your brother Roger, Earl of March.’
So we had reached that scenario at last, as I knew we would. The Mortimer claim to England’s crown. It might have been rejected by a fair-weather Richard in favour of Aumale who had become the recent recipient of Richard’s affections, but the Mortimer royal blood was still there, looming over the future succession of a childless King, as immutable as ever it had been. In the opinion of a goodly number, and in mine, my brother Roger had had a stronger claim to the throne than ever Henry of Lancaster did. A claim inherited by his son Edmund, my nephew. It was temptingly close, terrifyingly close. If Richard were to die without a son, the new King should be Mortimer. If Richard were no longer King by whatever means, the new King should be Mortimer.
Harry’s gaze, looking up and over his shoulder, held mine, daring me to make the Mortimer claim out loud. But I would not. Richard was King, and there was no question of his right to be so.
‘Except that Richard then promptly unrecognised Roger when he fell out of favour,’ I said lightly, ‘to replace him with Aumale.’
‘That’s what happens when your brother and your uncle were hand-in-glove with the Lords Appellant.’
‘Roger was not, as you well know. Roger was loyal to Richard all his life.’
In a travesty of justice, Roger had gained Richard’s enmity by refusing to arrest our uncle Sir Thomas Mortimer for his admittedly too-close connections with the Lords Appellant who had forced the King to bow to their demands for good government.
Harry was not to be deflected. ‘Yet there is still that strong, and dangerous, dose of Plantagenet blood running through the Mortimers. And your sadly deceased brother Roger has a son to take on that Mortimer mantle.’ He paused, removing a knife from his belt, testing its sharpness against his thumb as he escaped my ministrations and ranged the length of the chamber and back.
‘What are you saying?’ I asked as he returned to stand before me, frowning down at the weapon.
‘I am saying this. Lancaster is back, that we know. Would we be naive, Elizabeth, to believe that he would risk a return to England, to an even more serious charge of treason from a furious King, for the sole purpose of supporting the Mortimer claim to England’s crown before his own?’
‘Yes. We would be naive.’ Suddenly, as if a candle sconce had been lit, I had no doubt of cousin Henry’s ambitions. If it became a struggle for power between Lancaster and Richard, Henry would not have Mortimer interests uppermost in his mind.
‘Yet I would hear his own words on the matter,’ Harry said. ‘Lancaster is not, I think, a man without honour.’
‘So you might be willing to give him your support and the use of your retainers.’
‘I might.’
An image insinuated itself into my mind, which I forced myself to consider: of King Richard returning with an army from Ireland to discover a considerable Lancaster force awaiting him, prepared to engage in battle. We were used to war and skirmish year on year in this northern March, where the Scots encroached at every opportunity and the Percys pushed just as wholeheartedly back, but this new power being set up might mean something of a far greater magnitude. I wondered if I should be fearful. And decided that I should.
‘It sounds like war, Harry.’
He nodded. ‘If it is in Percy interests, I will consider it.’ The knife sliced through the skin, his blood red along the edge of his thumb, which he wiped on his sleeve. ‘I’ll fight to the death to preserve what we have and what we can get. We need a King who will see the value of our control of the north and allow us free rein to exert it. If we have such a King, then my loyalty is ensured. But any man who threatens our hegemony here in the north is an enemy, and I’ll act accordingly.’
There it was, engraved in the line between his brows and the stain of his blood, the words that would be engraved on Harry’s tomb. Ambition. Power. Suzerainty over the lands of the northern March.
I raised a smile in an attempt to dispel the thought, dragging my eye from the blood on his sleeve. ‘It seems to me that you have three choices,’ I said.
‘Only three?’
The knife tossed from right hand to left, Harry had snatched at my fingers and raised them to his lips. By the simple expedient of latching my fingers with his, I kept him beside me.