The Tintern Treasure Read Online Free Page A

legitimate heirs of Richard II. Besides’ – he gestured once more with his spoon, flicking bits of fricassee in all directions and his voice rising almost to a squeak – ‘according to my friend, there’s another, much more serious rumour gaining ground in Wales.’ He drew a deep breath and lowered his voice to its normal level. ‘And that is that the two boys, the two princes, have been murdered in the Tower on the orders of the king.’
    There was an aghast silence. The landlord sat as though turned to stone while Oliver Tockney and I looked at one another in total and utter disbelief.
    â€˜What a fucking great lie!’ Oliver roared, so loudly that the lawyer jumped and spilled gravy down his tunic.
    At the same moment, I pounded the table and demanded, ‘Surely you don’t believe such vicious nonsense, do you?’
    I was remembering some words of King Richard’s, spoken to me back in the summer. ‘You have saved the life of a young boy, a very precious thing.’ Moreover, I knew the man – had known him, on and off, for the past twelve years – and I would swear to his probity and honour. He was deeply religious, but even if he weren’t, he would never order the death of any child, let alone his own nephews. And in any case, why would he need to? Parliament had accepted his right and title to the crown. He had been consecrated king in Westminster Abbey.
    I felt confident that the rebellion would come to nothing. King Richard had been a seasoned soldier since the age of eleven. He was perfectly capable of putting down any revolt against him. The story of the murders would then be disproved. The lie had been concocted by someone or other for his or her own ends. But who that person was and what those ends were was not yet clear.
    And they were still not clear when I finally climbed the inn stairs to bed. The intervening two hours had been spent in fruitless discussion of the news with Master Heathersett and Oliver Tockney – the landlord had been called away by his irate wife to deal with some emergency, either real or imagined – but I was perfectly satisfied in my own mind that the rumour was false and would soon be quashed by the king’s public denial.
    In spite of this conviction, however, I found it hard to fall asleep, and for this, my unruly thoughts were as much, if not more, to blame than the storm still raging outside. (There would be some loose tiles and missing thatch come daybreak.) The news of the uprisings had disturbed me and, for a while, I stubbornly refused to acknowledge the cause. Instead, I feigned astonishment that a king so universally acclaimed – from all I could gather – wherever he had been received on his royal progress, whose coronation had been among the best attended for a hundred years or more, whose acceptance of the throne, in place of his twelve-year-old nephew, had been hailed with apparent relief by everyone of note, could so soon be facing rebellion. But in the end, I forced myself to face the truth.
    The fact was that by no means had everybody been happy with the change of sovereign. There were many people who remained dubious about the legitimacy of King Richard’s claim. Even I, with the knowledge gleaned from my journey to Paris the previous year, was uneasy. Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, had sworn that he had betrothed the late King Edward to the Lady Eleanor Butler well before the former’s wedding to Elizabeth Woodville, and there seemed no reason to doubt his word. In the eyes of the Church, the bishop had maintained, a betrothal was as good as a marriage. Maybe it was, but it should have had the endorsement of a papal court before declaring King Edward V and his siblings bastards. Besides, I had heard it argued, if the children of everyone who broke off a betrothal to marry elsewhere were declared illegitimate, half the population would be bastardized.
    Then there