Grisly Grisell; Or, The Laidly Lady of Whitburn: A Tale of the Wars of the Roses by - (best adventure books to read .TXT) 📖

Above, below, the Rose of Snow,
Twined with her blushing face we spread.

Gray’s Bard.

News did not travel very fast to Whitburn, but one summer’s day a tall, gallant, fair-faced esquire, in full armour of the cumbrous plate fashion, rode up to the gate, and blew the family note on his bugle.

“My son! my son Rob,” cried the lady, starting up from the cushions with which Grisell had furnished her settle.

Robert it was, who came clanking in, met by his father at the gate, by his mother at the door, and by Bernard on his crutch in the rear, while Grisell, who had never seen this brother, hung back.

The youth bent his knee, but his outward courtesy did not conceal a good deal of contempt for the rude northern habits.  “How small and dark the hall is!  My lady, how old you have grown!  What, Bernard, still fit only for a shaven friar!  Not shorn yet, eh?  Ha! is that Grisell?  St. Cuthbert to wit!  Copeland has made a hag of her!”

“’Tis a good maid none the less,” replied her father; the first direct praise that she had ever had from him, and which made her heart glow.

“She will ne’er get a husband, with such a visage as that,” observed Robert, who did not seem to have learnt courtesy or forbearance yet on his travels; but he was soon telling his father what concerned them far more than the maiden’s fate.

“Sir, I have come on the part of the Duke of York to summon you.  What, you have not heard?  He needs, as speedily as may be, the arms of every honest man.  How many can you get together?”

“But what is it?  How is it?  Your Duke ruled the roast last time I heard of him.”

“You know as little as my horse here in the north!” cried Rob.

“This I did hear last time there was a boat come in, that the Queen, that mother of mischief, had tried to lay hands on our Lord of Salisbury, and that he and your Duke of York had soundly beaten her and the men of Cheshire.”

“Yea, at Blore Heath; and I thought to win my spurs on the Copeland banner, but even as I was making my way to it and the recreant that bore it, I was stricken across my steel cap and dazed.”

“I’ll warrant it,” muttered his father.

“When I could look up again all was changed, the banner nowhere in sight, but I kept my saddle, and cut down half a dozen rascaille after that.”

“Ha!” half incredulously, for it was a mere boy who boasted.  “That’s my brave lad!  And what then?  More hopes of the spurs, eh?”

“Then what does the Queen do, but seeing that no one would willingly stir a lance against an old witless saint like King Harry, she gets a host together, dragging the poor man hither and thither with her, at Ludlow.  Nay, we even heard the King was dead, and a mass was said for the repose of his soul, but with the morning what should we see on the other side of the river Teme but the royal standard, and who should be under it but King Harry himself with his meek face and fair locks, twirling his fingers after his wont.  So the men would have it that they had been gulled, and they fell away one after another, till there was nothing for it but for the Duke and his sons, and my Lords of Salisbury and Warwick and a few score more of us, to ride off as best we might, with Sir Andrew Trollope and his men after us, as hard as might be, so that we had to break up, and keep few together.  I went with the Duke of York and young Lord Edmund into Wales, and thence in a bit of a fishing-boat across to Ireland.  Ask me to fight in full field with twice the numbers, but never ask me to put to sea again!  There’s nothing like it for taking heart and soul out of a man!”

“I have crossed the sea often enow in the good old days, and known nothing worse than a qualm or two.”

“That was to France,” said his son.  “This Irish Sea is far wider and far more tossing, I know for my own part.  I’d have given a knight’s fee to any one who would have thrown me overboard.  I felt like an empty bag!  But once there, they could not make enough of us.  The Duke had got their hearts before, and odd sort of hearts they are.  I was deaf with the wild kernes shouting round about in their gibberish—such figures, too, as they are, with their blue cloaks, streaming hair, and long glibbes (moustaches), and the Lords of the Pale, as they call the English sort, are nigh about as wild and savage as the mere Irish.  It was as much as my Lord Duke could do to hinder two of them from coming to blows in his presence; and you should have heard them howl at one another.  However, they are all with him, and a mighty force of them mean to go back with him to England.  My Lord of Warwick came from Calais to hold counsel with him, and they have sworn to one another to meet with all their forces, and require the removal of the King’s evil councillors; and my Lord Duke, with his own mouth, bade me go and summon his trusty Will Dacre of Whitburn—so he spake, sir—to be with him with all the spears and bowmen you can raise or call for among the neighbours.  And it is my belief, sir, that he means not to stop at the councillors, but to put forth his rights.  Hurrah for King Richard of the White Rose!” ended Robert, throwing up his cap.

“Nay, now,” said his father.  “I’d be loth to put down our gallant King Harry’s only son.”

“No one breathes a word against King Harry,” returned Robert, “no more than against a carven saint in a church, and he is about as much of a king as old stone King Edmund, or King Oswald, or whoever he is, over the porch.  He is welcome to reign as long as he likes or lives, provided he lets our Duke govern for him, and rids the country of the foreign woman and her brat, who is no more hers than I am, but a mere babe of Westminster town carried into the palace when the poor King Harry was beside himself.”

“Nay, now, Rob!” cried his mother.

“So ’tis said!” sturdily persisted Rob.  “’Tis well known that the King never looked at him the first time he was shown the little imp, and next time, when he was not so distraught, he lifted up his hands and said he wotted nought of the matter.  Hap what hap, King Harry may roam from Church to shrine, from Abbey to chantry, so long as he lists, but none of us will brook to be ruled or misruled by the foreign woman and the Beauforts in his name, nor reigned over by the French dame or the beggar’s brat, and the traitor coward Beaufort, but be under our own noble Duke and the White Rose, the only badge that makes the Frenchman flee.”

The boy was scarcely fifteen, but his political tone, as of one who knew the world, made his father laugh and say, “Hark to the cockerel crowing loud.  Spurs forsooth!”

“The Lords Edward and Edmund are knighted,” grunted Rob, “and there’s but few years betwixt us.”

“But a good many earldoms and lands,” said the Baron.  “Hadst spoken of being out of pagedom, ’twere another thing.”

“You are coming, sir,” cried Rob, willing to put by the subject.  “You are coming to see how I can win honours.”

“Aye, aye,” said his father.  “When Nevil calls, then must Dacre come, though his old bones might well be at rest now.  Salisbury and Warwick taking to flight like attainted traitors to please the foreign woman, saidst thou?  Then it is the time men were in the saddle.”

“Well I knew you would say so, and so I told my lord,” exclaimed Robert.

“Thou didst, quotha?  Without doubt the Duke was greatly reassured by thy testimony,” said his father drily, while the mother, full of pride and exultation in her goodly firstborn son, could not but exclaim, “Daunt him not, my lord; he has done well thus to be sent home in charge.”

“I daunt him?” returned Lord Whitburn, in his teasing mood.  “By his own showing not a troop of Somerset’s best horsemen could do that!”

Therewith more amicably, father and son fell to calculations of resources, which they kept up all through supper-time, and all the evening, till the names of Hobs, Wills, Dicks, and the like rang like a repeating echo in Grisell’s ears.  All through those long days of summer the father and son were out incessantly, riding from one tenant or neighbour to another, trying to raise men-at-arms and means to equip them if raised.  All the dues on the herring-boats and the two whalers, on which Grisell had reckoned for the winter needs, were pledged to Sunderland merchants for armour and weapons; the colts running wild on the moors were hastily caught, and reduced to a kind of order by rough breaking in.  The women of the castle and others requisitioned from the village toiled under the superintendence of the lady and Grisell at preparing such provision and equipments as were portable, such as dried fish, salted meat, and barley cakes, as well as linen, and there was a good deal of tailoring of a rough sort at jerkins, buff coats, and sword belts, not by any means the gentle work of embroidering pennons or scarves notable in romance.

“Besides,” scoffed Robert, “who would wear Grisly Grisell’s scarf!”

“I would,” manfully shouted Bernard; “I would cram it down the throat of that recreant Copeland.”

“Oh! hush, hush, Bernard,” exclaimed Grisell, who was toiling with aching fingers at the repairs of her father’s greasy old buff coat.  “Such things are, as Robin well says, for noble demoiselles with fair faces and leisure times like the Lady Margaret.  And oh, Robin, you have never told me of the Lady Margaret, my dear mate at Amesbury.”

“What should I know of your Lady Margarets and such gear,” growled Robin, whose chivalry had not reached the point of caring for ladies.

“The Lady Margaret Plantagenet, the young Lady Margaret of York,” Grisell explained.

“Oh!  That’s what you mean is it?  There’s a whole troop of wenches at the high table in hall.  They came after us with the Duchess as soon as we were settled in Trim Castle, but they are kept as demure and mim as may be in my lady’s bower; and there’s a pretty sharp eye kept on them.  Some of the young squires who are fools enough to hanker after a few maids or look at the fairer ones get their noses wellnigh pinched off by Proud Cis’s Mother of the Maids.”

“Then it would not avail to send poor Grisell’s greetings by you.”

“I should like to see myself delivering them!  Besides, we shall meet my lord in camp, with no cumbrance of woman gear.”

Lord Whitburn’s own castle was somewhat of a perplexity to him, for though his lady had once been quite sufficient captain for his scanty garrison, she was in too uncertain health, and what was worse, too much broken in spirit and courage, to be fit for the charge.  He therefore decided on leaving Cuthbert Ridley, who, in winter at least, was scarcely as capable of roughing it as of old, to protect the castle, with a few old or partly disabled men, who could man the walls to some degree, therefore it was unlikely that there would be any attack.

So on a May morning the old, weather-beaten Dacre pennon with its three crusading scallop-shells, was uplifted in the court, and round it mustered about thirty men, of whom eighteen had been raised by the baron, some being his own vassals, and others hired at Sunderland.  The rest were volunteers—gentlemen, their younger sons, and their attendants—placing themselves under his leadership, either from goodwill to York and Nevil, or from love of enterprise and hope of plunder.

I would mine heart had caught that wound
   And slept beside him rather!
I think it were a better thing
Than murdered friend and marriage-ring
   Forced on my life together.

E. B. Browning, The Romaunt of the Page.

Ladies were accustomed to live for weeks, months, nay, years, without news of those whom they had sent to the wars, and to live their life without them.  The Lady of Whitburn did not expect to see her husband or son again till the summer campaign was over, and she was not at all uneasy about them, for the full armour of a gentleman had arrived at such a pitch of perfection that it was exceedingly difficult