The Crippled Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

gold, silver and pewter ware, and the initial dishes of the feast. The entwined harmony of lively chatter and music from the musicians walking up and down the aisles wound its way to the roof beams and then back down again, echoing about the hall.
    The feast was proving an auspicious start to the weekend of tourneying that lay ahead.
    Neville and Margaret sat with his uncle Ralph Neville’s wife, Joan, and her mother, Katherine, the Dowager Duchessof Lancaster, on the first table to the right of the High Table. Their placement was an indication of the king’s high esteem. As Baron Raby and Earl of Westmorland, Ralph Neville himself sat with the king and queen at the High Table on the dais. Sharing the High Table with Bolingbroke, Mary, and Raby sat the Abbot of Westminster, Henry Percy Earl of Northumberland, and John Holland Duke of Exeter and Earl of Huntingdon.
    The Abbot’s presence at High Table was no surprise. Not only was he the senior ranked churchman present, but the Abbot of Westminster was the man who’d crowned Bolingbroke as King Henry of England. To not seat him at High Table would have been a grave insult to both man and Church.
    As the Abbot’s presence was no surprise, neither was that of Ralph Neville, the Earl of Westmorland, and Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland. The combination of the power and influence of both these northern nobles had been pivotal in allowing Bolingbroke to raise the army needed to wrest the throne from Richard. But while Raby was an old family friend, taking as his second wife Bolingbroke’s half-sister Joan, the Percy family’s loyalty had once been with Richard. Northumberland’s allegiance to Bolingbroke was still relatively new, and thus relatively fragile—and made the more fragile because Northumberland’s son, Hotspur, had yet to swear allegiance to Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke had gone out of his way these past months to keep Northumberland happy, and to heap upon him (as Raby) those preferments both men deserved for their part in bringing Bolingbroke to the throne.
    Bolingbroke had not ascended the throne via the smooth transition of father to son. Instead, Bolingbroke had wrested the throne from his cousin, Richard, taking England to the very brink of civil war in so doing. For long months England’s nobles had been divided between those who’d supported Richard’s right to hold the throne, and those who’d supported Bolingbroke’s right to take it from Richard. In the end, Bolingbroke’s faction had prevailed, but the wounds were still open, particularly since the Decemberreports of Richard’s untimely death due to a sudden fever while incarcerated at Pontefract Castle.
    Thus the inclusion of John Holland Duke of Exeter and Earl of Huntingdon at High Table. Exeter had not only been one of Richard’s closest supporters, he was also Richard’s older half-brother: Richard and Exeter shared a mother, the beautiful (and sexually adventurous) Joan of Kent, who had been married to Sir Thomas Holland before the Black Prince seized her (she’d also had a bigamous marriage to William Montague, but fortunately there’d been no children from that union). Over the past six months Bolingbroke had worked assiduously to gain the acceptance and eventual support of those nobles who’d originally supported Richard. Bolingbroke had ostracised none of them, and had presented many of them with good preferments, appointments, and, on occasion, an advantageous marriage.
    Yet Bolingbroke still sat the throne uneasily. Only rarely could allegiances be changed overnight, and Bolingbroke never truly knew what the smile on a courtier’s face truly meant: allegiance, or hidden treachery.
    Tonight, however, any concern about allegiances was well hidden behind smiles and courtly conversations. Mary was looking better than she had for several weeks. Her face was still pallid, but her eyes shone brightly, and her thin hands were steady as she accepted delicacies from the plates of