The Dark Rose

Book 2: Morland Dynasty

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

1501: the turbulence of Henry VIII's reign brings passion and pain to the Morlands as they achieve ever greater wealth and prestige.

Paul, great-grandson of Elanor Morland, has inherited the Morland estates, and his own Amyas is set to be his heir. But Paul fathers a beloved illegitimate son, and bitter jealousy causes a destructive rift between the two half-brothers which will lead to death. Paul's niece, Nanette, becomes a maid-in-waiting to Anne Bolyen, and at the court of Henry VIII she becomes embroiled in the King's bitter feud with Rome.

Through birth and death, love and hatred, triumph and heartbreak, the Morlands continue proudly to claim their place amongst England's aristocracy.

Release date: August 25, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 560

Sample

When the old king, Henry VII, died, his mother – the ancient Margaret Beaufort – was so grieved that she survived him by no
more than a few weeks, dying in the middle of the new king’s revels and being bundled off unceremoniously so as not to spoil
the fun. It would have been hard, however, to find anyone else in the kingdom who regretted the passing of Henry Tidr, and
impossible to find any such person in Yorkshire.


In Yorkshire dwelt the old York families with their illustrious names – Neville, Fitzalan, Percy, Mortimer, Clifford, Holland,
Talbot, Bourchier, Strickland – and their long memories of personal rule by successive York lords – Richard of Warwick; Richard
of York; and Richard of Gloucester, their sweet King Richard who died at the hands of this same unloved and unregretted Henry
Tidr.


In Yorkshire also dwelt the Morland family, with their history of lives spent in the cause of the House of York. The founder
of the Morland house, Eleanor Courteney, had been a personal friend of the Plantagenets, and King Richard himself had been
a frequent visitor at Morland Place before he became king; and her youngest son Richard had served under that king in France.
Richard Morland, now universally known as Great Uncle Richard, was the elder and guiding spirit of Morland Place, though Eleanor’s
great-grandson Paul was the nominal head of the family. Great Uncle Richard had always been a gentle man and averse to killing
or hurting anyone, but even he had had his moment of blood-letting for the cause, and in his case it was purely for revenge.


The battle of Bosworth Field had lost King Richard his life, partly owing to the treachery of Lord Stanley, but even more
owing to the treachery of Lord Percy of Northumberland. ‘Proud Percy’ had delayed in his duty of calling out the men of the north to the King’s aid, with the result
that the huge Yorkshire army – Morland men amongst them – was still on the road when the battle was lost and over.


Richard Morland and Paul’s father Ned had felt the shame and anguish deeply, and when a fugitive from the battle had told
them that Percy, after holding back from the fighting, had been one of the first to do homage to Henry Tidr, they knew that
come what may they must be revenged on proud Percy. There were many who felt thus; their chance came not quite four years
later.


It was Lord Percy’s task, among others, to collect the taxes imposed by his new sovereign lord upon the people of the north,
and in 1489 in April a tax was imposed to raise funds for an invasion of France. Word flickered through Yorkshire like flames
through dry bracken; messages passed to and fro between certain members of Percy’s own household, and certain other men whose
hearts burned with revenge. When Richard Morland heard of the plot from Ned, he was at first shocked.


‘His own henchmen?’ he queried. ‘He is their lord, their special lord, to whom they owe the firmest duty. It is shame to them
not to protect him.’


Ned, normally cheerful and light, looked grim. ‘They are already shamed,’ he said, ‘and by their own lord. Percy failed in
his duty to the King, betrayed and abandoned him to his death. His henchmen want to wipe out that shame – it can only be paid
for by his blood.’


‘And who is to strike the blow?’

‘We shall draw lots.’ Ned’s candid gaze met Richard’s. ‘Are you with us, or against us?’ he asked simply. Richard’s heart
was torn; murder was prohibited by every tenet of Christianity and by every impulse of his gentle soul; yet something older
and more primitive was stirring in him, the acknowledgement of duty to one’s feudal lord. He had served under King Richard,
had sworn that same oath to him. His eyes fell on the blazoning of the Morland arms over the fireplace, and the motto underneath, the single word Fidelitas. Faithfulness, the Morland creed.


‘I’m with you,’ he said.

It was not hard to raise a mob – northern men never liked paying taxes to a southern king, and Henry VII was particularly unpopular.
Last year and the year before, tax collectors had been attacked, and goods constrained had been forcibly rescued by their
seething owners. Percy with his household men and retainers marched south to meet the mob and put down what appeared to be
a rebellion against the Tudor king and his taxation policy. The two armies met at Topcliffe, near Thirsk.


It was a strange scene. At first there was yelling, brandishing of weapons, threats and insults, but when Percy rode forward
into the small space between the groups, a silence fell. Perhaps he thought it was the power of his personality that created
the silence; if so, it was his last earthly gratification. There was no man there, from the greatest to the least, who by
now did not know what was coming. Two smaller groups detached themselves, one from the Yorkshire mob, one – his closest henchman
– from the Northumberland army, and gently, almost tenderly, closed round the mounted lord. A brown hand took the horse’s
bridle and the horse fidgeted and shivered, smelling the atmosphere. Percy smelled it too, and looked round, suddenly wary,
at the ring of faces, and the cold eyes.


The old fox, they called him – he was thin and red-haired and scar-faced; he had never been lacking in courage – you don’t
stay long in the high chair of a Border lord if you’re a coward – but there was something in the quiet, hard purpose of the
men who surrounded him that chilled his blood.


‘What’s this?’ he demanded. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Better dismount, my lord,’ said a voice beside him. It was his steward, a man who had grown up in his service from boyhood. Percy stared into his eyes, and read his death there. There was no appealing against that look. Trembling now,
he dismounted. The soft wind, blowing the smell of spring from the south, fluttered across the high field, stirring the men’s
hair and the horses’ manes. The two great armies stood silent, like a vast congregation, and between them stood the small
circle of men surrounding the white horse and the great lord. Now that the moment had come there was no anger, no glee, no
delight in revenge – there was only a kind of sober sadness, almost a pity. At the last moment Percy begged his men to remember
their vows, their oath of loyalty to protect him, but silence was the only reply, and that silence bid him remember his own
broken oath. Pride stiffened him again.


‘Strike from before, then,’ he commanded. ‘I never took a wound in the back.’ His eyes went round the circle coldly, to meet
in each face that same pity, and came to rest on a man bearing a naked sword. Others held swords at the ready, but in this
face was his death. It was a man in his thirties, fair and handsome, with a great spreading beard, dressed in a simple long
gown of good cloth. ‘It is you, then?’ Percy asked. The man nodded. ‘Let me know your name, at least.’ The man opened his
mouth to answer, but Percy’s steward prevented him.


‘No,’ he said. ‘This is not an execution. We are despatching a sick animal. Strike now.’ But the fair man shook his head.

‘I bore this sword in the King’s service, though I never killed with it,’ he said. ‘Blood calls for blood.’ His eyes left
Percy’s and met, over his shoulder, those of the two men standing behind their lord. Percy made a movement to turn and look
too, but rough hands seized him from behind, pulling his arms back and stretching his chest taut, and the sword went home
up to the hilt.


The white horse screamed and reared back at the smell of blood, and the quiet men turned away from the scene, the twitching
body bleeding slowly into the bracken, its astonished eyes regarding the pale-grey, windy northern sky. The henchmen lifted the body on to the horse to take it away,
and the man with the sword wiped it slowly and thoughtfully on a handful of dry grass. Ned put his arm across Richard’s shoulder
and turned him away from the scene.


‘The horses are down there. Let’s go home,’ he said. Richard was still staring at the blood on his hands and the smears of
it on the sword blade.


‘I never killed a man before,’ he said slowly.

‘It was the luck of the draw,’ Ned comforted him. ‘Besides, Hal was right. It was putting down a beast, not a man. An old
fox.’ Richard looked back at the trampled patch of bracken where the blood was soaking into the earth. He shook his head.


‘It wasn’t that,’ he said. ‘It was a sacrifice. A sacrificial beast. Offered up for all of us who have ever broken faith.’
He walked on a little, and then said even more quietly, but with a little of a smile, ‘No, it wasn’t even that. It was done
for love of our lord, that’s all.’


For Richard, that closed the matter, and for Ned too – they had seen too much, were perhaps too worldly-wise, to think anything
more could be gained. Others in the family were not so resigned, and continued to struggle for the cause that was dead, running
to each new standard raised against the Tudor on behalf of the young sons of Edward IV, who had been smuggled out of the country
in the first year after Bosworth.


Ned’s young nephews, Henry and Dickon Butts, the sons of his sister Margaret, were both killed in the so-called ‘White Rose
Intrigue’ in 1501, and Ned himself might have been drawn into plots on more than one occasion had not Richard been so firmly
convinced that each new pretender was an imposter.


‘But how do you know they aren’t the princes?’ Ned would ask him, and Richard would merely shake his head.


‘You can ask that, you who knew the boys personally? You were in the Household itself.’

‘I do ask it. How do you know?’ Ned would persist, and Richard would tap his big Morland nose.


‘This tells me. I think those children are dead; died in some obscure lodging in Antwerp of some childish disease. It’s foolishness
to go on hoping and struggling. It’s all over. Now there’s just the family and the estate to think about.’


And so Richard went back to his occupations about the estate, and Ned went back to his pursuits of drinking and gambling and
chasing women, and Henry Tidr went back to his activities of governing, and eliminating Plantagenets, and making the throne
safe for his son to inherit. And in 1509 when the old King died, his son succeeded to the throne without even a murmur of
opposition, proof indeed if proof were needed that the cause was dead; and that sweet spring day twenty years back when Richard
had killed Lord Percy amid the bracken always marked for him the true end of the struggle. The world was Tudor now for ever.


Paul Morland, whom the villagers called French Paul because his mother had been a Frenchwoman, was a tall, well-built, and
exceptionally handsome man. His lustrous, curling hair was dark brown, almost black, his skin smooth and brown. His features
were sensitive, his mouth beautifully sculptured, and his large dark eyes a woman would have been glad to own. He rode superlatively,
played many games, danced with grace, and was a fine musician. He was also head of the household, the master of the entire
Morland fortune, and he took himself very seriously.


It was perhaps inevitable that he should do so. He was only ten when his great-grandmother Eleanor Courtenay died, but he
remembered her perfectly, a woman of such stature and power she had seemed to him to stand in rank somewhere between the King and God. She had treated Paul even as
a child with the respect due to the eventual heir to Morland Place. Paul’s tutor had been a serious-minded young man and a
firm disciplinarian; and Paul had had before him constantly the bad example of his frivolous father who spent money like water,
was drunk more often than not, frequented low places and low women in the city, and finally met his death by a knife between
the ribs during a tavern brawl in the back yard of the Starre Inn.


Paul was twenty-five when Ned’s death gave him control of the estate, but he was already virtually in charge, and had been
running the farm and the business with Great Uncle Richard’s help for some years, for Ned never did anything that even approximated
to work or worry. Yet in spite of intending to be everything his father wasn’t, Paul still loved Ned, and was stricken when
he died. Paul’s mother had died when he was an infant, and his father’s second wife was a common, ignorant girl from the city
whom Ned had married because he believed her pregnant. Paul had hated her all his life, from the belief that she was cuckolding
his father with his cousin Edmund Brazen.


Well, she was dead now, and so was Edmund Brazen; so was everyone of that generation except Great Uncle Richard; but Morland
Place was shared by Paul’s half-kin, his step-mother’s children, Jack, Mary and Edward, and Paul hated them from the depths
of his heart, because he believed that they had been fathered not by Ned, but by Edmund. He could tell no-one of this, no-one
but the family chaplain, Philip Dodds. Week after week Paul confessed his hatred, and was shriven, and swore to cast the hatred
from his heart, but nothing could change it, and after a while Master Dodds stopped lecturing him and merely gave the penance
with a sigh and a shake of the head.


One of the ways in which Paul took himself seriously was as lord of the manor, and so the family dined in the great hall almost every day, though most gentry folk nowadays dined privately and left the steward to preside in the hall.
On feast days Great Uncle Richard also dined at Morland Place, though he had his own manor close by, about a mile away at
Shawes, which had been given to him and his heirs on Eleanor Courteney’s death; and it did not necessarily need to be a feast
day for his big, bearded form to be seen seated at the high table. Richard had been born and brought up at Morland Place,
and he felt more comfortable there. His eldest son Elijah ruled at Shawes along with his wife Madge and his young son Ezekiel,
and Richard always felt a little superfluous to their small happy circle. Richard’s own wife had died many years ago, and
he had never remarried. He had always felt drawn to the life of celibacy, and had thought at one time of being a monk. His
second son, Micah, had in fact been ordained in 1501 and was now attached to the household of the Earl of Surrey.


The state of the Church was a subject that often came up at dinner, and was eagerly canvassed at this table as it was at almost
every gathering of educated people, for the argumentative English were all reformist by nature.


‘How can you justify the existence of the monasteries in this day and age?’ Paul asked Richard at dinner one day. ‘It’s fifteen-twelve,
Uncle, and we have a more vigorous approach to religion than we did a hundred years ago. The truly devout man wants to go
out and do something for his faith, not just a sit back in luxury and think about it.’


‘There is a value in the contemplative life as well as the active life,’ Richard countered mildly. ‘God receives both offerings
gladly. Remember the story of Esau.’


‘Come now, Uncle,’ Paul said genially, ‘you don’t believe that. Why, you yourself, as you’ve often told me, gave up the idea
of being a monk because you wanted to walk round the country and meet God’s people and work with them.’


‘That was my way. It is not every man’s. Some men prefer to contemplate the holy mysteries from a retreat. It is not for me – or for you – to say that way is wrong.’


Philip Dodds joined in. ‘But even if the contemplative life itself has value, the monasteries no longer provide it. Look at
the abuses that they contain – idleness and luxury and vice. I doubt if you would find anyone in the country today leading
a true life of contemplation within a monastery.’


Richard waved the goblet he had lifted for a page to fill with wine. ‘My dear Philip,’ he said, ‘you cannot condemn the practice
because of the imperfection of the practitioners.’


‘I don’t see why not,’ Philip said. ‘If there are no perfect practitioners, perhaps it is because the practice itself is at
fault.’


‘Precisely my point,’ Paul broke in triumphantly. ‘In this year of Grace fifteen hundred and twelve there is no place for
that kind of life. There is no-one to follow it. Most of the houses now contain no more than a bare handful of inmates, and
most of them took orders when they were children too young to know what they were doing. Ask them now and I dare swear they would be as
glad to come out as to stay in.’


Paul’s wife Anne Butts joined the argument against him, not because she had strong views about it – she had strong views on
almost nothing in life – but because she loved to oppose him. They were cousins and had been betrothed as children and married
as soon as they reached good age – when Anne was fourteen and Paul sixteen – and their marriage might have been as content
as such marriages usually were, except that Anne had fallen in love with him, only to find that he did not love her. He rather
despised her, finding her colourless and uninteresting. Anne suspected he had a mistress, or maybe more than one, and she
hated him almost as much as she once loved him.


‘There is a place for them,’ she said in flat contradiction, and then, because all eyes were on her, she hastened to justify herself. ‘Who would look after the poor and sick if there were no kindly monks to take them in and feed them and give
them alms?’


Paul glared at her. ‘Don’t talk about things you know nothing of,’ he snapped, and Philip said more gently, ‘We give more
alms at our gates here than they do at most abbeys. Perhaps in the Border country the monks may still do good work of that
kind, but here and further south it is not so. The poor could be better helped by application of the wealth locked up and
useless in the closed houses.’


‘I’m a little surprised at you, Philip, I must confess,’ Richard said. ‘I thought that being a priest yourself –’

‘We clerics are not so prejudiced we cannot see that Holy Mother Church has her faults – isn’t that right, Edward?’ Philip
said, turning to Paul’s half-brother who, at twenty-two, had just returned home after taking orders and was looking for a
position. Edward smiled. He had inherited his mother’s good looks if not her poor brains. Whoever his father was, he was a
credit to him.


‘Indeed, sir,’ he said. ‘Hate the sin, but love the sinner, that’s the way we proceed. There are many, many areas in which
the practice of the Church could and should be improved. Pluralism, simony –’


‘Spare us the list, dear child,’ Richard said, putting his head in his hands in mock despair. ‘I have heard it over and over
again from your brother Paul – I think I know it by heart.’


Edward laughed and turned to attend to something his younger sister Mary said, but Richard’s eyes were on Paul. He hated to
be called ‘brother’ to his step-mother’s children, and he was stabbing furiously at a piece of meat on his plate with the
point of his knife, his fine lips set in a hard line.


‘What troubles you, Paul?’ Richard asked softly. Paul looked up and his eyes met Richard’s with a plea for silence. Richard
knew the boy was troubled about something – there had always been a vein of deep-seated unhappiness beneath Paul’s quietness – but he had no idea what it was. Well, perhaps he would tell him one day. If not – he
must possess his soul in patience. In any case, a change of subject was called for.


‘What do you think of the progress of the war?’ he asked.

After dinner, since the hall was warm from the fires, the family remained there instead of withdrawing, and the children were
brought down from the nurseries for their daily visit to their parents. The governess, whom the children called Mother Kat,
brought them, with Paul’s eldest son leading the way and trying to look as though he had nothing to do with the younger children.
His name was Paul too, but he was usually called Amyas, which name he had been given at his christening in honour of his godfather
Amyas Neville. Amyas was twelve, and older by far than any of the others, a tall, well-made, fair boy, pink-complexioned and
golden-haired like his mother. He was in the care of Philip Dodds, who acted as tutor to Amyas as well as chaplain to the
household, and as he walked into the hall he kept as far as possible from Mother Kat’s side, to emphasise how many years ago
he had left petticoat government.


He walked straight to his father, and bowed, and then reached up for a kiss. To his mother he merely bowed. Paul adored him,
and he adored Paul, and it was another source of resentment to Anne that the child had so readily learned his father’s contempt
of her. In fact, this was not entirely true. In his anxiety to show that he was a man of full years, Amyas slighted his mother
along with his ex-governess without realising the hurt he was giving; but to Anne the slight seemed intentional. She glowered,
and the child was glad to return to his father’s side.


After Amyas was born, Anne had gone through a long, unhappy succession of stillbirths and miscarriages, a misfortune which
should have brought her and Paul closer together but in fact only drove them farther apart, for Paul felt she was failing in her duty to provide him with children,
and she blamed him for her continued suffering. The chain of disaster had been broken in the end by the birth of a healthy
girl, and after that there were no more pregnancies. The girl, Margaret, was now a plump, golden-haired toddler of four, and
her mother’s pet as much as Amyas was his father’s. To have given birth to her after so many failures made her very precious
to Anne, who fretted at the slightest sign of an ailment, for she was dogged with the dread of losing her. But Margaret was
not only healthy, but of a sunny, equable disposition, and no amount of cosseting seemed to spoil her. She curtseyed formally
to her father as she had been taught, and then ran to her mother to curtsey sketchily and then climb into the silken lap to
be cuddled and cooed over.


The other children who were brought in from the nursery caused, in their innocence, only pain to Paul Morland, for he could
never see them without the knowledge gnawing him like a tooth that they were not his brood, but his half-brother Jack’s. Jack
had married, as was becoming customary with the Morlands, his cousin, Isabel – or Belle – Butts, the younger sister of those
two Butts cousins who had died in the White Rose Intrigue. It was a source of displeasure to Paul that the Butts cousin Jack
had married not only made him happy but gave him a brood of healthy children.


Belle, who accompanied the younger children into the hall, had lost their first child, but had soon repaired the breach with
a girl, born within a month of Margaret. She had been named Anne, but was always called Nanette, because she was so diminutive,
like a fairy child. ‘My little changeling’ Belle called her sometimes, for she was tiny and dark and delicately made, pretty
and sweet and graceful and sharp as a needle, the perfect foil to plump golden Margaret. The two little girls were constant
companions, which also galled Paul, who would have been happier if the children had all hated each other.


After Nanette had come two sons, Jackie and Dickon, now three and two years old, and another girl, Catherine, not yet a year
old, and brought in in Mother Kat’s arms in her long robes; and Belle was pregnant again, large with child, which was why
she had not been at dinner – she had been resting upstairs. Paul shut his mind to the rest of the children, and concentrated
on Amyas, asking him about his lessons and his sports, and sending him to fetch a book so that he might read aloud to his
father and have his progress judged. Paul was a hard critic when it came to his son, but Amyas was a good scholar, and managed
this time to wring some praise from his father, which pleased both of them.


‘Well done, child,’ Paul cried when the boy came to the end of the passage. ‘Thou hast learnt that lesson well. I am very
pleased.’


Amyas looked up from under his eyelashes, quick to follow up an advantage.

‘Then, sir, would it please you to give me permission to go into the city and visit my Uncle John? Aunt Belle says his boar-bitch
has whelped, and you said that I might have a puppy if I learnt my Greek.’


‘A puppy?’ Paul caught Belle’s eye across the hall, and saw the sharp amusement there. John was her brother, the heir to the
Butts fortune, which was closely bound up with the Morland’s, for the Butts family were merchants, and they dealt with the
selling and shipping of the cloth that the Morlands made from the wool they grew. John Butts, too, had married a cousin, Lucy
Courteney, another great-granddaughter of Eleanor Courteney, and had two fine baby boys. It sometimes seemed to Paul that
everyone was happy but him.


Amyas was looking up at him with expectation and hope. ‘You cannot go into the city alone,’ Paul said, and saw for a fraction
of a second the disappointment shadow that loved face, before he added, ‘But I have business there – I will take you, and you may stay the night at your Uncle John’s
house, and I will send a servant to fetch you tomorrow.’


‘Can’t I come back with you tonight, sir?’ Amyas asked, liking the thought of being seen riding in company with his father.
Being fetched by a servant was not half so splendid. Paul’s eyes slid away.


‘I shall be too late for you,’ he said. ‘I cannot say what time I shall have finished my business.’ Now Anne’s eyes were on
him, and questions trembling on her lips. She wanted to ask what the business was, and he must prevent any further discussion.
He got to his feet abruptly and said, ‘But I must go immediately. Get your cloak, child, and say goodbye to your mother. I
will meet you in the stable-yard. Don’t be more than five minutes.’ And he strode from the room, aware of two sets of eyes
in particular – Anne’s hostile and resentful, and Belle’s, no whit less amused. She was a very disconcerting young woman.


Amyas bid his mother and his tutor goodbye, bowed to Great Uncle Richard, and hustled Mother Kat as fast as her bulky skirts
would allow her to the cope chest to get him out his riding cloak, and while the little bustle of his going was still disturbing
the air, there began a larger bustle as Elijah and Madge arrived with their nine-year-old son Ezekiel to spend the evening.


‘What a pity Paul didn’t know you were coming,’ Richard said as he greeted them in Paul’s place. ‘He has gone into the city
on business and won’t be back until late.’


Elijah cocked an expressive eye at his father. ‘But he did know we were coming,’ he said. ‘Jack is coming home tonight, and
we were all to take supper together.’ Richard looked thoughtful, and then glanced over his shoulder at the other occupants
of the hall, who were talking and admiring the children round the fire. Elijah had spoken low, and no-one had heard.


‘Best not say anything, then,’ Richard said at last. ‘He has something on his mind. I dare say he forgot.’


‘I dare say he did,’ Elijah said, then, more loudly, ‘Now you must come and admire your grandson, who has been practising
a song for you this entire week and hasn’t seen you for long enough to sing it. You aren’t at