Ravenspur: Rise of the Tudors Read Online Free PDF

we went to visit Henry in his cell. He said he wished him forty years of good health, so that there could be no new young king over the water. He
understood
, Master Brewer. Just as I do now. You do not need to prod and poke at me with your suspicions. King Edward turned away from me and I have burned my boats with him. There is no return to that fold. I swear it on Mary, the Mother of God, on my oath and on the lives of my daughters. There now. I have raised an army to overwhelm him, like a cloak thrown over his head. Caesars
fall
, Master Brewer.
That
is what I have learned in my years.’
    Derry’s one-eyed gaze had not wavered as Warwick spoke, judging and reading the man for the first hint of a lie or a weakness. What he saw eased some of the tension in his shoulders. He reached out slowly so as not to startle the earl, patting him on the arm.
    ‘Good lad,’ he said. ‘You know, you’ve done great harm, in your time. With your father and with York. No, let me speak. Just about the only thing you ever did well was fight against Jack Cade’s rebels. Remember that? That was a night that still wakes me sometimes in a sweat, I tell you true. Now you have a chance most men
never
get – to undo some part of all the hurt you caused. I just hope you take it by the throat when it comes. God knows there won’t be another.’ As Warwick stared, Derry Brewer turned away, limping after the king he had followed and protected his whole life. In that moment, Warwick understood that Brewer was the closest thing to a father King Henry had ever known.
    Left alone, a glance over the wall reminded Warwick of the stakes. There were thousands of men and women filling the streets around the Tower of London, stretching further as those beyond came in as soon as they heard the news. King Henry had been freed. Lancaster was restored. There had been some fights and scuffles at the start, but those few willing to yell in anger for York had been battered silent, made to run or left to bleed. London was not a soft city, not a place to cross. Warwick knew that well. He needed the dockmen and fishermen, the bakers and smiths, the poachers and the knights and the archers. He needed the mercenary swordsmen he had been given by the king of France, despite the resentment they caused amongst the English. Despite the chests of silver it took to keep them loyal. He needed them all to keep his momentum, or his fate would be as if he fell from a galloping horse: dashed down and broken to pieces on the road north.
    The south was Warwick’s heartland and always had been. Kent and Sussex of old, Essex and Middlesex too: the ancient kingdoms where Edward of York was still whispered to be a usurper and a traitor. Cornish and Devon men had come tojoin him as news spread, with entire villages setting out together to restore the rightful king. Warwick had made London a stronghold to give them time to walk or ride to him, knowing he would need every one to defeat King Edward in the field.
    The mere thought of facing Edward brought fear – and jarring recollections of Towton to his mind: a Goliath in silver armour, fast and enraged and unstoppable. Yet so fragile as well, so prey to the whims of angels that he could be felled by a snagged foot, or by a single stone flying true. Warwick too had been at Towton. He had seen how easily good men could die and how little sense of right there was to it.
    As he stared out over London, Warwick saw the wide south of England in his mind’s eye, narrowing with every mile north. He imagined it as the head of a spike he could hammer in, struck from France against the white cliffs, driving an iron point into Edward of York in all his arrogance and youth. It did not matter what had gone before, whatever Derry Brewer thought. Not one night’s candles could be unburned, not even if kings and bishops prayed for it. Warwick patted the old stones of the Tower with his gloved hand. If it came to survival, of Edward of York at his