Ravenspur: Rise of the Tudors by Conn Iggulden Page A

wooden rail and the stone dock, then two and they were easing away.
    ‘Where is your home port, our destination?’ Richard called. The captain was practically weeping at the sight of the bales he’d left behind on the quay. The man stared at him, not daring to give voice to his anger at his turn of fortune.Richard of Gloucester felt like striding across the deck and strangling him where he stood. A man could suffer greater losses than a mere ship’s cargo. Something of that strong emotion in his gaze made the captain look down.
    ‘Picardy, my lord. France.’
    ‘No longer,’ Richard shouted over the increasing breeze. ‘Set your rudder and sail for Flanders, northern coast. We have friends there still. And look cheerful! You have played a fine part today. Your little ship holds the king of England.’
    The captain bowed in response, not that he had any choice at all. If any of his crew had dared to resist, Edward’s remaining knights and lords were still fighting men, for all their hunger and weariness.
    ‘Flanders, my lord, as you say.’
    The land retreated and, for the first time in days, Richard relaxed, settling into the motion of the merchant cog. Flanders in the north, with Luxembourg to the south. Below those, the duchies of Bar and Lorraine – and then Burgundy itself. He pictured them all in his mind’s eye, all disputed territory. Edward had only one ally over the Channel: Duke Charles of Burgundy, avowed enemy of the French king, who ruled from Flanders to his heartland. The duchy had made huge gains while the old French king was weak. Richard rather envied the man his position.
    Overhead, the sun was a smudge of light through the clouds, a weak thing that could not warm either brother as they stared at the green English coast, blurring in the distance.
    ‘Earl Warwick came back, Brother,’ Richard called to him. ‘Are you a lesser man?’
    To his pleasure, he saw Edward consider it, his eyebrows rising in surmise. Richard chuckled aloud. For all the failures and disaster they had suffered, there was still somethingjoyous about the sense of a live ship under them, of the salt spray and the morning.
    It was a joy that faded quickly when Richard began to belch and feel a sort of clammy sickness steal over him, made worse with each rise and plunge of the ship. After only a short time, his stomach heaved up into his throat and he rushed for the rail, guided backward and downwind by exasperated sailors. He spent the following day and night lashed to the stern, lolling over grey, rolling waves, helpless as a child and sicker than he had ever known was possible.

6
    Margaret of Anjou could sense the rise in her status in a thousand ways. It showed in the deference of King Louis’s courtiers, men and women who spent their lives with a fine appreciation for the power and connections of those around them. For too long, she had been one of a hundred little
moules
of the royal family. She had heard the word whispered by snide clerks and the fat daughters of French lords. Mussels clung to the belly of ships in clusters, or grew on rocks and gaped for their food like young birds in a nest. She did not know if the comparison stung all the more because of the truth of it.
    Her father was still alive, to her daily irritation. Others of his generation had passed sweetly away in their sleep, surrounded by loved ones. René of Anjou remained, made thinner by age, but still a great white toad into his sixties. Though he lived in the castle at Saumur, he had not invited his daughter to join him there. In her private moments, Margaret could admit that if he had, there was a chance she would have smothered him, so perhaps it was not a poor decision. René had offered her a broken old house on the Saumur estate, a cottage fit for a charcoal burner, without even a roof. Perhaps he had intended it as a mark of his disfavour; he had sent her out into the world to marry an English king – and she had come home with a son and