Chapter 1
I
It was the mad witch who woke me.
Mad she had been for a good number of years. Ever since she lost her precious son, her husband king and the English crown to my family, and was made prisoner by my late brother Edward, Margaret of Anjou had been raving mad. A lunatic in a faded red queen's dress, dirty and torn, who wandered aimlessly through the castle corridors like some forlorn silver haired ghost.
My kingly brother Edward pitied her deeply when he was still alive. God knows why, but his soft buttered heart had a vulnerable emotional spot for damaged women, and he had allowed her to live outside a prison cell and walk around the royal palace unchained and unchecked. For what, Edward argued to me, could this poor defeated wreck still do to the glorious sons of York? She was obviously driven insane by her grief, and no longer a danger to anyone.
But I was far less charmed by her presence. Nor was I so easily deceived. Mad or not, Margaret still believed she was rightful queen of England. She acted not much like a defeated prisoner, but more like an eccentric houseguest really. The kind that hid a dagger up their sleeve, and waited for the right night to come to slit your naked throat. Whenever I was so unlucky to bump into her during my daily routines, the hag would curse me in such a terrible fashion that even my brother's lowest servants would cover their ears to block out the horrible profanity. No doubt, of the three York brothers she must despise me the most. For Margaret may be as crazy as a sack of March hares tossed together with a feisty cat, she still remembered. She knew who put the many holes in the heart of her husband, the truly pitiful but feeble king Henry, who was fitter to be a dead saint than a living ruler.
She remembered who slit the throat of her beloved son, and sniggered at the sight of her wretched tears while the last of her hope bled to death right in front of her upturned arrogant nose.
To be frank, not one night did I sleep with my bedchamber door unlocked and unguarded when Margaret of Anjou was allowed to roam free in the king's palace.
And now, as I opened my eyes, not to the grey and cold sky hanging low above Bosworth, but to a dark vaulted ceiling, it was Margaret who greeted me. Her face hovered only inches away from mine in the weak flickering light of a single candle.
I knew then immediately that I was to pay dearly for these past moments of small pleasures.
"Devil! Are you awake?" Her breath stank of cesspits. Her wild strands of hair swept like a dirty mop over my cheeks, itching like spider-legs.
"Devil! Do you hear me?"
Courtesy to Richmond's butcher work, my vocal cords were slashed. All I could utter were the weakest, most pitiful of sounds, like the mewling of a sick newborn kitten.
"Oh you can! You can hear me!" Margaret's eyes widened, and her dry, chapped lips pulled into a wide ecstatic grin.
"It worked! The spell worked! I brought you back from the doors of hell."
Her joy abruptly ended. "Not that you deserve to be spared. Oh no, not vile Richard, the uprooting hog of Gloucester." She raised her chin and twirled a silver lock between her filthy fingers, exuberating pure contempt when she looked down at me from hooded eyelids.
"I should have left you there to rot." She stabbed an accusing finger into the still raw open wound in my throat, causing me to almost pass out in pure agony. "Why did he make me bring you back?! Why!" She wailed, poking repeatedly into the torn tissue. I whimpered like a beaten dog. Fresh blood welled up in my mouth, damaged nerves firing multiple alarm salvos of pain.
So much for my brother's belief that the ruined she-wolf of France was now a benevolent silver haired angel.
"Instead of closing this hole I should make it larger! Widen it from ear to ear till I can see the white of your neck bones, just like you have done to my poor boy." Her voice shivered, was raw with grief, and bitter from the bile of her rage. She took out a dagger and showed me a signet ring marked with the red Lancastrian rose.
"I should avenge my sweet son today. Wash his emblem clean in your luke-warm blood!"
She placed the blade on my throat, and for a heartbeat, I truly believed that she was going to kill me. Such hatred blazed from her eyes, such mindless, mad, almost animalistic hate that it turned my heart cold with fear.
But then, as sudden as the rapid passing of dark clouds blown from the shores by a merciful wind, her malice subsided. Margaret bowed her head and stared down at her son's signet ring. Her rage and bitterness slowly dulled. She held on to the keepsafe for a long time, aimlessly, indecisively, before finally putting it away while uttering a heartbroken sigh.
Instead of cutting my throat, the mad witch pushed a foul smelling concoction of green mush and spit into my wounds, which she prepared by chewing and mixing herbs in her mouth. Then she dressed my injuries with clean linen ribbons and wrapped me up tight, till I was swaddled like a helpless infant.
"Rest." She finally commanded, after she was done.
She did not need to tell me twice. Well before she left my side, I had already sunk into deep dark oblivion.
II
"Are you awake uncle?"
Two boys were standing in front of my cot. Bathing in halos of saintly light, one was 13, the other 10. They were rosy-cheeked and healthy looking, just the way their doting mother Elizabeth would undoubtedly prefer to remember them. Forever would they stay this way, captured in their prime of youth, for prince Edward and his little brother Richard were no longer bothered by the good and evil deeds of mortal men. No, prince Edward and little prince Richard were very much deceased, and I was the man responsible for their deaths.
"He's not responding. Do you think he's still asleep like we once were beneath the staircase?" Asked Richard, always the less sharp minded of the two.
Edward shook his head at his younger sibling. "His eyes are open. He cannot speak because the mad witch has not healed all of his wounds yet."
"But we don't need our wounds to heal. We don't even need our own bodies to be here."
"He is not a ghost like we are, Richard. He is still alive."
"But you said uncle Richard was dead." my poor little nephew sounded really disappointed now. "You said he was cut to pieces by Henry Tudor and the great army he brought with him from France."
"Uncle Richard did die, but now he's alive again. The mad witch brought him back." Edward came closer, and studied the rhythmic rising of my chest. "Come here and I will show you." He beckoned. "Look, he's breathing. Can't you see? And look, he just blinked his eyes."
His little brother cautiously crept closer and examined the delicate signs of life that Edward had so smartly pointed out to him.
"How come he is the one who is brought back?" Richard asked with bitterness in his whiny voice. "This is so unfair! Uncle Richard sent out his men to murder us in the Tower. He is a villain! Why is he allowed to live again while we have to stay dead? Our poor mother doesn't even know where he buried us!"
"We are still ghosts because the witch has no use for us. She undoubtedly has some use for uncle Richard." Edward explained patiently. He studied me closely. I had never liked the brat when he was still alive. Too world wise for his young age, he had often been harder to fool than his kingly buffoon of a father. Indeed, it didn't take him long to see through my façade.
"Are you afraid uncle?" The youngster asked with a sly little smile. The little devil was so very smug that he had spotted a dent in my armor. "You remember how we visited you in your sleep the night before the battle of Bosworth? We cursed you. We bid you despair and defeat and ruin. We wished with so many others who you have wronged that your enemies would strike you down without mercy. How did it feel uncle? How did it feel to die alone?"
I was struggling to breathe. My heart pounded in my chest like a rabbit on the run that was chased by a pack of vicious greyhounds. Certainly, this horrible specter could not be real. I was not awake, but ailing, caught in a web spun by my own coward conscience. It must be.
"Edward, I don't think uncle Richard really believes he has died." Richard remarked. I was shocked that the brat was somehow capable of reading my innermost thoughts. "He thinks Margaret found him in the field after the battle was over and brought him here alive."
"Is that true uncle Richard? Edward sniggered. "Do you really think that mad Margaret saved you on a whim and that you were spared?"
"Oh I know, you should tell him!" Little Richard clapped in his hands in great excitement. "Tell him what they did to him afterwards, that will make him remember!"
Edward, always the good older brother keen to humor his sibling, gave the rascal an affectionate smile. The eagerness that I saw in his eyes seemed too unnaturally cruel for such a tender age, but then, maybe he had always been a vindictive little monster underneath that rosy-cheeked exterior.
"Come on, tell him like you told me. Don't leave out any gory details!" His younger brother urged.
Children, aren't they just lovely. The world's true delight.
"Shall I uncle?" Edward grinned. "Let me see, after Henry Tudor cut your throat and left you to bleed out like a slaughtered pig in the muddy field..."
Edward's words conjured up a most frightening reality. The stone walls in which I was entombed melted away to be replaced by the blood-soaked fields of Bosworth. I was lying once again on the cold muddy ground. My eyes were still open and stared blankly up to the sky. Then I witnessed, from the periphery of my sight, Richmond's hand, reaching out and lifting the golden round from my head. Blood dripped down from the rim into my eyes. It blurred my world crimson as I watched how he raised my crown high for all around him to see, before placing it on his own head.
His companions let out a loud celebratory cheer, crying victory for their new lord and master.
Then Richmond stepped aside.
His men, still charged with the mad rush of battle, and their hearts overflowing with hatred for their enemy, stripped me from my armor, leaving me naked and exposed.
They laughed at my deformity.
They spat at me and dragged me down the hillside.
"See for whom you have fought!" They jeered, while rounding up my defeated troops, forcing them to bear witness to my shame. "Come and see your dethroned tyrant! We have skinned your vicious hog. See what is hidden beneath, a deformed crippled monster! A foul wretched beast whose existence was a great offence to all Godly men of England! Come and see! Come and see!"
The traitor Norfolk bound my hands and feet and hoisted me over the back of a decrepit old mule. As Richmond's army made their way to Leicester, I was paraded through the streets, stripped from cloak, armor and crown, exposed shamefully to the common mob to be jeered and spat at.
The first lance struck me between my ribcage.
The second pierced my side.
Countless more followed. A minor noble who had once sworn me loyalty and whose lovely wife and children I had imprisoned and tortured to ensure that loyalty, stuck his sword in my buttocks. He was rewarded with a roar of laughter from Henry's men. Stones were thrown by rowdy peasants, making black and blue blooms on my dead flesh.
"The injuries that took your life were just two, but the wounds that the angry crowds inflicted on you after your death were numerous." Edward continued. "Despite your own arrogant believes, you were no more fit to be king than old king Henry was. At least king Henry was kind and virtuous and had the heart of the people. You, on the other hand…no one had any pity for you."
The world shifted before my eyes. I was staring at what was left of me, being dragged behind the mule right through the disgusting filth lying out in the gutter. When we finally reached the castle, I was hoisted up by the neck and hanged from the parapets above Traitor's gate.
"And there you were left to hang, to be exposed to the rain and sun for days. Crows plucked at your flesh and flies laid eggs in your rotting flesh, till good Richmond was crowned Henry Tudor king of England. The newly anointed monarch wished to be merciful to the last of the York kings. However, there was of course, no sanctioned burial for a dethroned tyrant."
My body, bloated with maggots and swarming with black flies, was tossed unceremoniously into a shallow grave in the cemetery of the Black-friars monastery, hidden from public eye. No stone was erected to mark the grave. King Henry did not want anyone to find my remains and mourn my passing.
He did not need to worry. I was certain that by now, there was no one left in this kingdom who would.
"So now you see uncle." Edward concluded. "You were dead."
He paused, and coldly observed the tears brimming in my eyes with as little compassion as I once had for him and his sibling.
"I don't think he likes your story very much." Richard said quietly.
Edward shrugged. "Tears of remorse from a villain who had known no pity nor love for anyone in this world but himself. My dear brother, I don't think that my cold dead heart is moved much."
"Neither is mine..." Little Richard paused for a while to think, then asked. "What will become of him now Edward?"
"I don't know. To the rest of the England, he's dead. If there is any justice, his name and his evil work will be erased from history by king Henry and his kin, or it will be kept alive to serve as a warning for future generations."
"What does Margaret want with him?"
Edward shook his head. "What is going on in the mad queen's head, only Margaret knows."
"And us, what shall become of us?"
"My poor little brother." Edward placed his hand on his sibling's shoulder. "We are ghosts now, haunting spirits who are bound to our wretched uncle. As long as he is still alive, I fear we shall find no peace."
"Then we must stay by his side and wait in the shadows. She hates him. She truly does. She remembers what he has done to her and her family. She wouldn't want to keep him alive for very long I think."
"I did wonder if Margaret was not only bringing our uncle back to make him suffer more." Edward taunted, and undoubtedly took pleasure in the raw fear his words had sparked in my heart. "I agree with you brother. We should keep an eye on him. Who knows what Margaret has is store for our traitor uncle."
"Besides, everything is better than to go back beneath the staircase and sleep." Little Richard complained. "Being dead is truly boring. Nothing ever happens to us anymore."
Both of them started to drift away, back into the shadows. Their pale shining frames were fading fast till they were but two tiny specks of light in the darkness.
Oh how I longed for the quiet and boredom of death.
TBC
