Ravenspur: Rise of the Tudors Read Free Page A

both he and his mother coming close to death, so they said. He’d heard it was surely a miracle that a woman so tiny had survived at all. Not twenty feet from the gatehouse wall where William Herbert stood, Henry had come into the world, his mother just thirteen years old and half-mad with fear and pain. He had been given to a wet nurse and little Margaret Beaufort had been spirited away to marry again, her only child and dead husband to be forgotten and left behind. When the Yorkists took Pembroke and his uncle Jasper had been hunted as a Lancaster traitor, Henry Tudor had been left utterly alone.
    He was convinced it had made him strong, that isolation. No other lad had grown up without a mother, without friends or family, but instead with enemies on all sides to hurt and scorn him. As a result, in his own mind, he had been made about as hard as Pembroke. He had suffered a thousand cruelties from the Herberts, father and son, but he had endured – and he had watched, all the years of his life, for one single moment of weakness or inattention.
    There had been shameful times, when he had almost forgotten the hatred and had to nurse and blow upon it to keep it alight. Before the old earl had been killed, there had even been days when Henry had felt more like the man’s second son than the mere coin he truly was, to be hoarded and spent at the right time. He’d found himself wanting to earn some word of praise from William, though the older boy never missed a chance to cause him pain. Henry had hated himselffor his weaknesses then, and clutched anger to his breast as he slept, curling in on it.
    On the road below, he heard his uncle grow stern. The man’s stream of words caught at Henry like a barbed line snatching across his throat. ‘… under the cold
ground
if you harm him.’ It was the first concern for his well-being that Henry could remember and it shook him. At that instant, as he understood in wonder that a man cared enough to threaten an earl, his uncle Jasper looked directly at him. Henry Tudor froze.
    He had not known his uncle had spotted him creeping closer. He was pierced by the gaze and his thoughts shook suddenly, skipping a beat ahead.
Under
the earth.
Deep
under it. Hope soared in Henry’s chest and he ducked back inside, away from his uncle’s eyes – away too from a Herbert earl who had long taken out his hatred of Lancasters on the weakest end of a distant line. Henry Tudor had taken no sides in the wars, at least beyond the colour of his blood, as red as any Lancaster rose.
    The boy ran, clattering along the walkways that rested on beams beneath the battlements. In the flickering torchlight, one of the guards put out a hand to stop him, but Henry knocked it away, making the man swear under his breath. Old Jones, stone-deaf in his right ear. The Tudor boy knew every man and woman in the castle, from those who lived within the walls and tended to the Herbert family, to the hundred or so who came up from town each morning, bringing supplies and carts and their labour.
    He leaped down steps, throwing himself against the outer post with all the carelessness of youth so that he thumped hard into the rails but lost no speed. He had raced across the castle grounds a thousand times, building his wind and his agility. It showed then, coupled with a purpose that had himcasting off all caution and running like a scalded cat through Pembroke grounds.
    In near darkness, he scrambled through a workshop erected on the main yard, raising himself on his arms as he jumped across piles of crates, thick with the briny green smell of the sea. On another day he might have stayed to see the silvery fish or oysters unpacked, but he had a path to follow and a burning need to know that he had not been mistaken. Across the open ground, he could see the setting sun had dropped beyond the walls, casting an odd light as he reached the stone halls around the keep, the massive tower that stretched five storeys above the rest of