Red Rose, White Rose. Joanna Hickson

All over the wide plain below stretched a carpet of red roses, covering the earth as far as the eye could see, as if a celestial gardener had scattered divine seed. The knight gazed in silent awe, struck by the power of the symbolism laid before him; that the single rose, an object of beauty and simplicity could, when massed with a myriad others, become a potent force, a source of mystery and strength. The words of a hymn sprang into his mind, which he had heard sung in the dust and heat of the Holy Land by choristers in his crusading army.

       There is no rose of such vertue

       As is the rose that bore Jesu,

       For in this rose contained was

       Heaven and earth in a little space.

      ‘If there is a heaven on earth,’ he declared, ‘it is surely here.’

      The knight was Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, crusader brother to Edward I, King of England and known throughout Christendom as Edmund ‘Crouchback’ or ‘The Cross-Bearer’. Returning through France from his crusade, he was making a mercy mission to Provins where the Count of Champagne had recently died, leaving his young widow and their baby son vulnerable to abduction by neighbouring barons, eager to acquire access to the great wealth generated by the famous rose fields.

      Grown from a single root brought back from Damascus by an earlier crusader, the precious roses were not just objects of beauty, they were an industry. Their dried petals became shards of perfumed sunshine to freshen the rushes on a rich man’s floor; their floral essence could be distilled into attar of roses to perfume a lady’s breast or diluted into rosewater for bathing and cooking; rose leaves were pounded into healing poultices and even the prunings, with their long, sharp thorns could be woven into fences for protecting flocks and crops.

      But it was the rose of ‘vertue’ that Edmund held in his mind when he first encountered Blanche, the lady in distress. Wearing white robes of mourning, she held her baby in her arms and her face was sweet and troubled. ‘The Blessed Virgin has answered my prayers,’ she sighed as he kissed her hand. By the next rose harvest Edmund and Blanche were married and the red Damask rose became for him a talisman, a badge of honour which he bore on his shield and gave to his favoured followers; the Red Rose of Lancaster.

      A hundred years later another Edmund, younger brother to the great John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was created Duke of York by their father, King Edward III. This Edmund aimed to better his brother in all things, including the heraldic symbol of his dukedom. He could not have the red rose so he chose the white, the lovely wild rose of England with its five creamy petals and fierce, hooked thorns. He declared the white rose superior to the red because it was native to the soil it grew in, spreading over the hills and valleys of England in great tangled brakes, delighting all with its airy fragrance and spangled masses of blooms but repelling any who tried to seize it. Edmund had his minstrels compose a song in praise of the white rose:

       Of a rose, a lovely rose

       Of a rose I sing a song.

       Lyth and lysten, both old and younge

       How the white rose becomen sprong,

       A fairer rose to oure leking

       Sprong there never in kynges lond.

      During the next century, in the battle for supremacy between Lancaster and York, the red rose and the white were to scratch a bloody trail across the ‘kynges lond’, leaving England blighted and bleeding.

PART ONE

       1

       Langleydale, Co Durham

       Cicely

      I breathed deeply of the scented air that swept off the Teesdale fells. It carried the chill of snow-capped mountains and the smell of juniper. When I was a small child my father had perched me in front of him on his great warhorse and taken me out on the moors to teach me the names of the peaks and pikes that rolled towards the horizon to the north and west of our home. Now I identified them one after another all the way to Cross Fell, misty blue in the distance; Snowhope, Ireshope and Burnhope, Holwick, Mickle, Cronkley and Widdybank. Their names sang in my head like a psalm, accompanied by the moan of the wind over the rock-strewn slopes and the cries of the birds that haunted them.

      When I turned my mare’s head to the east, her ears framed a view even more familiar. Each beck and stream from those high moors fed into the River Tees, which flowed through a valley ever-wider and greener as it meandered towards the coast. Dominating the upper reaches of this fertile basin was Raby Castle, the ancestral home of the Neville family – my family. Renowned as one of England’s great northern fortresses, Raby’s nine massive towers sprawled below me like the giants of legend; they loomed over the meagre mud-plastered cotts of the village beyond its moat. I had lived most of my seventeen years within those soaring walls. To my mother it was a palace, a great haven of security and splendour demonstrating infallibly the enormous wealth and power of the Nevilles, but to me it had become a prison. Often I had felt like a caged bird longing to fly. It was wonderful to be out, after a winter confined by its grey stones, up high above Langley Beck, relishing the wind in my face and the trembling anticipation of the hooded falcon on my fist.

      ‘Look lively, Cis! Stop admiring the view and start working that bird of yours.’

      It was my brother who spoke. We Nevilles were a numerous family and I could count six brothers who still lived; some I liked better than others. Three of them were out hunting with me on that March morning, but this particular brother held a special place in my life. Dark and even of temper, Cuthbert was my personal champion, five years my senior and sworn to protect me for life by an oath made to our father before his death. He was an expert swordsman, had enormous skill with the lance and a physique unsurpassed among the knights of the Northern March. Nevertheless I did not let him order me about.

      ‘Selina will fly in good time, Cuddy, when the dogs put up some partridge. I do not fly her at inferior prey.’

      His baptismal name was Cuthbert, after the great hermit-saint of the Holy Isle whose bones lay only five and twenty miles away in Durham Cathedral, but I used the nickname he had earned among his fellow henchmen at Raby for his close affinity with horses. Not only was Cuddy the local name for the saint, it was also one of the many northern words for a horse, particularly the small, strong, nimble pony which carried men and goods over the treacherous terrain of the border moors. Cuddy had the knack of getting a good performance out of even the most stubborn nag. It would not be boasting to say that I sat a horse as well as he did, since it was Cuddy who had taught me to ride, and I rode astride from the very first lesson, despite the disadvantage of wearing skirts.

      His reaction to my protest was indignant. ‘Huh! It will be a miracle if your merlin brings down a partridge. They are twice her size.’

      We were hunting game for the Easter feast that was just over a week away. The birds would hang until then to intensify their flavour, while we Christians completed our Lenten fast. Cuddy preferred chasing stag. On this hunt he was acting as my bodyguard and the captain of our armed escort. He carried no hawk and, in my opinion, knew little or nothing about them.

      ‘You may think that, big brother, but Selina can bring down snipe, which are the same size as partridge and fly a lot faster.’

      I dropped my reins briefly to remove the crested hood from the little bird on my other fist and felt her claws clench expectantly over the thick leather gauntlet that protected my hand and wrist. Released from the imprisonment of the blindfold, the falcon blinked and her yellow eyes began to dart about, filled with anticipation at the sight of the moor and the busy spaniel quartering the heather ahead of