only, and gathered the child into his arms.
Neville thought it a pretty trick, something to further strengthen the crowd’s approval, but he caught a glimpse of Bolingbroke’s face—the man was staring at the child with such love that Neville instantly thought that the girl might actually be his get from some casual affair.
He looked to the woman again. No, surely not… she was plain, and approaching middle age. She was not a woman who would catch Bolingbroke’s eye or fancy.
Neville gazed back at Bolingbroke, now planting a kiss in the child’s hair, and remembered how he enjoyed playing with Rosalind. Perhaps he merely loves children, Neville thought. Well, Mary shall give him some soon enough, pray God.
Bolingbroke now hefted the child, showing her to the crowd. “Is she not beautiful?” he cried. “Has she not the face of England?”
Now that was pure showmanship, Neville thought, grinning wryly.
Again the crowd roared and clapped, and Bolingbroke, with apparent reluctance, handed the girl back to her mother and took up the reins of his stallion, urging the horse into a slow, prancing trot down the street.
“Whither goest thou?” shouted a man in a rich country burr, and the question—and the burr—was taken up by the throng.
Whither goest thou, fair Prince Hal?
Bolingbroke waved for silence, and the close-pressing crowd consented to dull its adoration to a low rumble.
“I go to Westminster,” shouted Bolingbroke, “to receive the surrender of the French bastard king!”
The crowd erupted, and Neville burst into admiring laughter. Why, Hal would have them believe that he alone had taken King John on the battlefield, and then negotiated a treaty to see all of France quiver on its knees before even the lowliest of English peasants!
Bolingbroke swivelled in his saddle, sending Neville a quick grin, then he turned forward again, and spurred his stallion through the crowds who parted for him as if he were Moses.
Neville eventually managed to ride to Bolingbroke’s side as they cantered past Charing Cross and Westminster rose before their eyes.
“They would have you king!” he shouted above the continuing roar.
“Do you believe so?” Bolingbroke said, his eyes fixed on Neville. “Should we indeed reach for that vial of poison, Tom?”
And then he was gone again, spurring forward and waving to the crowds. Neville was left staring after him and wondering, as others already had, how high Bolingbroke’s ambition leapt.
If they did manage to destroy Richard—and wasn’t that what they truly planned?—then who else could take the throne? Who else? Who else was there to lead England to safety but Bolingbroke?
Richard had caused a table to be set under the clear skies beyond the porch leading into Westminster Hall. The Hall was closed, undergoing renovations to its roof (Richard would have a greater roof put on, so he might be the more gloriously framed), and so the treaty would be signed in the courtyard, where not only the noblest peers of the realm could witness, but also (suitably restrained behind barriers) the commons themselves of England.
Bolingbroke and Neville dismounted when they reached the courtyard’s perimeter, and monks from Westminster Abbey led them to their places in the ranks to the right of the table. Here stood the greatest of nobles and their closest of confidants, and Bolingbroke led Neville directly to his father’s side.
“My Lord of Lancaster,” Bolingbroke said formally, greeting his father with an equally formal bow. Katherine, Lancaster’s duchess, was not present: no wives were here, only the holders of titles and the wielders of power.
Neville also murmured Lancaster a greeting, bowing even deeper than Bolingbroke, but Lancaster gave him only a cursory glance before turning to his son.
“I wish Richard had taken my advice and had this cursed treaty signed under roof.” Lancaster, who looked even more tired and grey in the noonday sun than he had in the candlelit dimness of the Savoy, gestured at the table several paces away: it was strewn with damasks and weighted down with gold and silver candlesticks and a great golden salt cellar. “If the crowd doesn’t become unruly and upset everything, then no doubt a raven will fly overhead and shit on the treaty. John is being difficult enough about the signing … if his pen must perforce thread its way through a pile of bird shit then doubtless he will call the odoriferous mess a bad omen and refuse to sign.”
“At least a treaty is to be signed,” Bolingbroke said.
Lancaster sighed, his eyes still on the table. “Aye. But a treaty declaring Charles a bastard and Richard the heir to the French throne is worth even less than a pile of bird shit in real terms.”
“How so, my lord?” Neville said.
Lancaster turned and gave Neville the full benefit of his cold grey stare. “Do you think that even with this treaty in Richard’s possession the French will lie down and surrender a thousand years of proud history into his hands? Richard can wave it about all he likes, but unless he can enforce it with sword and spilled French blood then it becomes worthless in practical terms.”
“No Frenchman will accept it unless he be forced to do so,” Bolingbroke said.
“Aye,” said a new voice behind them, “and do not think, my bright young Lord of Hereford, that English swords will not force French pride to its knees in the near future.”
All three men turned and stared at the newcomer.
“My Lord of Oxford,” Lancaster said, with no bow and no respect in his voice, “how pleasing to see you here. But also how passing strange, for I thought that surely you would have been at Richard’s side.”
Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, lifted a corner of his mouth in a well-practised sneer. He was a man of some twenty-five or twenty-six years, of the broad chested and shouldered physique that often softened to fat in later years. His face, however, did not suit his body: it was narrow and suspicious, with a sallow complexion and scarred along cheeks and nose by a childhood pox. Yet this was an arresting face, for his dark eyes and full-lipped mouth were of startling beauty, and invariably made any who met him for the first time wonder if perhaps he had stolen both eyes and mouth from some poor beauteous corpse and somehow incorporated them into his otherwise fox-like features.
“And will you lead our fine English knights and archers to so humiliate the French?” Bolingbroke said.
De Vere simpered, the expression challenging rather than coquettish. “Why, dear Hal, I much prefer the comforts of home fires and the sweet meat of our home-bred wenches. Perhaps,” and his face suddenly, violently, darkened into outright threat, “you might like to lead the charge? Unless your father cannot bear the thought of you spitted on some French count’s lance, of course. Well? What say you, oh brave one?”
Neville suddenly realised that the crowd’s cheers for Bolingbroke must surely have been heard by de Vere … as most surely also by Richard, and he wondered if the same thoughts had occurred to them as had to him.
How high did Bolingbroke’s ambition fly?
