‘Try to stand up, Uncle,’ Mortimer said.
‘They even deprive us of Mass, as if we were excommunicated,’ said the old Lord.
He insisted on eating on his pallet, and indeed scarcely touched his portion.
‘Have my share, you need it more than I,’ he said to his nephew.
The turnkey had gone. The prisoners would not be visited again till evening.
‘Have you really made up your mind not to go with me, Uncle?’ Mortimer asked.
‘Go with you where, my boy? No one ever escapes from the Tower. It has never been done. Nor does one rebel against one’s king. Edward’s not the best sovereign England’s had, indeed he’s not, and those two Despensers deserve to be here instead of us. But you don’t choose your king, you serve him. I should never have listened to you and Thomas of Lancaster, when you took up arms. Thomas has been beheaded, and look where we are.’
It was the hour at which his uncle, having swallowed a few mouthfuls of food, would sometimes talk in a monotonous, whining voice, recapitulating over and over again the same complaints his nephew had heard for the last eighteen months. At sixty-seven, the elder Mortimer was no longer recognizable as the handsome man and great lord he had been, famous for the fabulous tournament he had given at his castle of Kenilworth, which had been the talk of three generations. The nephew did his best to rekindle a few embers in the old man’s exhausted heart. He could see his white locks hanging lank in the shadows.
‘In any case my legs would fail me,’ the old man added.
‘Why not get out of bed and try them out a little? In any case, I’ll carry you. I’ve told you so.’
‘Oh, yes, I know! You’ll carry me over the walls and into the water though I can’t swim. You’ll carry my head to the block, that’s what you’ll do, and yours too. God may well be working for our deliverance, and you’ll spoil it all by this stubborn folly of yours. It’s always the same; there’s rebellion in the Mortimer blood. Remember the first Roger, the son of the bishop and the daughter of King Herfast of Denmark. He defeated the whole army of the King of France under the walls of his castle of Mortemer-en-Bray.3 And yet he so greatly offended the Conqueror, our kinsman, that all his lands and possessions were taken from him.’
The younger Roger sat on a stool, crossed his arms, closed his eyes, and leaned backwards a little to support his shoulders against the wall. Every day he had to listen to an account of their ancestors, hear for the hundredth time how Ralph the Bearded, son of the first Roger, had landed in England in the train of Duke William, how he had received Wigmore in fief, and why the Mortimers had been powerful in four counties ever since.
In the refectory the soldiers had finished eating and were bawling drinking songs.
‘Please, Uncle,’ Mortimer said, ‘do leave our ancestors alone for a while. I’m in no such hurry to go to join them as you are. I know we’re descended from royal blood. But royal blood is of small account in prison. Will Herfast’s sword set us free? Where are our lands, and are we paid our revenues in this dungeon? And when you’ve repeated once again the names of all our female ancestors – Hadewige, Mélisinde, Mathilde the Mean, Walcheline de Ferrers, Gladousa de Braouse – am I to dream of no women but them till I draw my last breath?’
For a moment the old man was nonplussed and stared absent-mindedly at his swollen hands and their long, broken nails, then he said: ‘Everyone fills his prison life as best he can, old men with the lost past, young men with tomorrows they’ll never see. You believe the whole of England loves you and is working on your behalf, that Bishop Orleton is your faithful friend, that the Queen herself is doing her best to save you, and that in a few hours you’ll be setting out for France, Aquitaine, Provence or somewhere of the sort. And that the bells will ring out in welcome all along your road. But, you’ll see, no one will come tonight.’
With a weary gesture, he passed his hands across his eyes, then turned his face to the wall.
Young Mortimer went back to the window, put a hand out through the bars and let it lie as if dead in the dust.
‘Uncle will now doze till evening,’ he thought. ‘He’ll make up his mind to come at the last moment. But he won’t make it any easier; indeed, it may well fail because of him. Ah, there’s Edward!’
The raven stopped a little way from the motionless hand and wiped its big black beak against its foot.
‘If I strangle it, I shall succeed in escaping. If I miss it, I shall fail.’
It was no longer a game, but a wager with destiny. The prisoner needed to invent omens to pass the time of waiting and quiet his anxiety. He watched the raven with the eye of a hunter. But as if it realized the danger, the raven moved away.
The soldiers were coming out of the refectory, their faces all lit up. They dispersed over the courtyard in little groups for the games, races and wrestling that were a tradition of the Feast. For two hours, naked to the waist, they sweated under the sun, competing in throwing each other or in their skill in casting maces at a wooden picket.
Then he heard the Constable cry: ‘The King’s prize! Who wants to win a shilling?’4
Then, as it drew towards evening, the soldiers went to wash in the cisterns and, noisier than in the morning, talking of their exploits or their defeats, they went back to the refectory to eat and drink once more. Anyone who was not drunk on the night of St Peter ad Vincula earned the contempt of his comrades. The prisoner could hear them getting down to the wine. Dusk fell over the courtyard, the blue dusk of a summer’s evening, and the stench of mud from the river-bank became perceptible once again.
Suddenly a long, fierce, hoarse croaking, the sort of animal cry that makes men uneasy, rent the air from beyond the window.
‘What’s that?’ the old Lord of Chirk asked from the far end of the dungeon.
‘I missed him,’ his nephew said; ‘I got him by the wing instead of the neck.’
In the uncertain evening light he gazed sadly at the few black feathers in his hand. The raven had disappeared and would not now come back again.
‘It’s mere childish folly to attach any importance to it,’ the younger Mortimer thought. ‘And it’s nearly time now.’ But he had an unhappy sense of foreboding.
But his mind was diverted from the omen by the extraordinary silence that had fallen over the Tower during the last few minutes. There was no more noise from the refectory; the voices of the drinkers had been stilled in their throats; the clatter of plates and pitchers had ceased. There was nothing but the sound of a dog barking somewhere in the garden, and the distant cry of a waterman on the Thames. Had Alspaye’s plot been discovered? Was the silence lying over the fortress due to a shock of amazement at the discovery of a great betrayal? His forehead to the window bars, the prisoner held his breath and stared out into the shadows, listening for the slightest sound. An archer reeled across the courtyard, vomited against a wall, collapsed on to the ground and lay still. Mortimer could see him lying motionless on the grass. The first stars were already appearing in the sky. It would be a clear night.
Two more soldiers came out of the refectory holding their stomachs, and collapsed at the foot of a tree. This could be no ordinary drunkenness that bowled men over like a blow from a club.
Roger Mortimer
