Chapter Text
Richard was born in a castle in the south of France.
A modest fortress, once the seat of a French nobleman, it now stood silent beneath the shadow of the English flag, looking out over vineyards and sun-scorched fields.
On the day of his birth, the dull thud of cannon still rumbled in the distance. Inside, the midwife worked in a sweat-soaked frenzy, while servants stole glances towards the window, only to be driven back by the ladies-in-waiting. At last, a sharp, clear cry from within broke the tension, and a sigh of relief seemed to pass through every breast.
“A boy,” the midwife announced in halting English. “Healthy. A fine little prince.”
The young princess lay weakly against her pillows, her brow slick with cold sweat, yet she managed a faint smile. “Another son.”
She looked down at the tightly swaddled child. His face was red and crumpled, puckered as if in protest, with only his eyes peering out beneath the film of fresh tears—already watching the world with a grudging curiosity.
Not long after, his father returned.
The heir to the throne, a living legend in the eyes of England—the King’s eldest son, and the keenest spear in the English host in France—rode through the gate and dismounted, leaving the blood and mud of the campaign behind him. He scraped his boots hastily on the stone steps before entering. When he pushed open the chamber door, the shoulder of his armour was still stained with drying blood.
The room fell silent.
He crossed to the bedside, bent, and pressed a gentle kiss to his wife’s brow before turning to the newborn at her side.
“His name is Richard,” the princess whispered. “For your grandfather.”
The heir apparent stared for a long moment at the wrinkled scrap of a face, saying nothing. At last, he extended one finger, calloused from the sword-hilt, and brushed it against the infant’s hand. The tiny fingers closed at once, gripping him.
“Richard,” he repeated, and a rare, almost tender smile touched his lips. “Richard it is.”
Life within the castle walls was, for a child, deceptively peaceful—even for one born in the midst of war.
For a long time, “war” was something Richard heard rather than saw. He heard the occasional distant call of a trumpet; he saw knights in gleaming mail riding past the gate. Sometimes his father returned deep in the night, only to be gone again before dawn.
More often, other things filled his memory—
His mother holding him in the sun-warmed courtyard, teaching him the names of flowers and herbs; his nurse telling tales of saints in a muddle of French and English; his elder brother charging down the corridor, shouting, “You can’t catch me, Richard!”
His brother was two years older, with hair like pale gold that caught the light, and a careless confidence that seemed his birthright.
“When I’m grown, I’ll ride to war with Father,” his brother would declare, brandishing a wooden sword. “You’re too little. You’ll have to stay and mind the house.”
At that time, Richard’s speech was still clumsy. He could only cling to his rocking horse, widen his eyes, and insist, “Me too.”
“You want everything,” the princess said with a soft laugh, appearing in the corridor to gather both boys into her arms. “One day, when your father truly drags you off to war, you’ll see how lightly you speak now.”
His brother was undaunted. He tipped his head back and asked, “Mother, don’t you like fighting?”
The princess hesitated. Her gaze drifted towards the distant tents and banners just visible beyond the courtyard wall. “I do not like it,” she said quietly. “But your father has no other choice.”
The children did not understand the weight of “no other choice”. They took it for another of those puzzling phrases that belonged to the world of adults, and were soon distracted by their next game of chase.
The world beyond the castle walls was another matter.
Once, the princess insisted on taking the children “to see their lands”. Their father, unable to dissuade her, gave his reluctant consent.
The small procession wound its way from the gate. From his place in the carriage, Richard peered out through a gap in the curtain.
The fierce southern sun gleamed on the grapevines, turning them a vivid green. It also fell upon the faces of the peasants who stood at the edge of the fields, watching them pass.
Their expressions were strange.
Some in the distance bowed their heads; others merely paused in their hoeing, glanced at the procession, and turned away.
His brother, delighted, lifted the curtain and waved. “They’re greeting us!”
His mother gently but firmly pressed his hand down. “Lower it.”
Richard peeped again from under his brother’s arm.
He saw something else entirely— A roof-beam charred to cinder; a young woman with a child on her hip, whose eyes held wariness, not awe; a ragged boy who, catching sight of the carriage, seized his little sister by the wrist and dragged her down into the weeds of the ditch until both vanished from sight.
Richard did not understand what he was seeing. He only felt a peculiar tightness in his chest.
Back in the castle, he asked his nurse, “Why were they hiding from us?”
The nurse paused, then forced a smile. “They are shy, young master.”
“Why was their house burned?”
The woman opened her mouth, hesitated, then said, “That was done by wicked men. Your father is defeating the wicked men.”
Richard nodded, half-comprehending.
Later, he overheard soldiers drinking in the kitchens, their laughter loud and rough.
“That village today was a fine prize—”
“The one with the wine cellar? Or the one with the pretty wenches?”
“They’re only French, after all.”
Someone laughed and swore.
That night, Richard curled beneath his blankets, listening to the scattered sounds from outside. He wanted suddenly to ask his father, “Which side are the wicked men on?”
But his father had not returned to the castle for days.
He could only press the question down into his heart, pull the covers higher over his head, and hold himself tightly against the dark.
For all the shadow of war, Richard, as the heir apparent’s younger son, grew up swaddled in privilege.
Unlike his brother, he was not driven relentlessly by the steward in swordplay and horsemanship, nor was he expected to don armour and ride to battle. Everyone assumed that in time a secure title and a comfortable estate would be found for him.
“Your brother is the one who must bear the future,” the princess would say sometimes, combing his hair. “You need only look after yourself. Perhaps visit the men who fight for you now and then. That is enough.”
Richard blinked. “Do I have to look after you, Mother?”
The princess smiled and tapped his brow lightly with one fingertip. “Of course.”
He loved listening to his father’s tales of the field.
On his returns, his father would sometimes seat Richard on his knee and, while the servants unbuckled his armour, recount in his roughened voice some desperate charge or the storming of a town.
“The arrows fall like rain,” his father would say, gesturing. “You must ride on without flinching.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?” Richard asked.
“It does,” his father admitted after a moment. “But in that instant, you cannot think of the pain. You think only of the line of men charging behind you. They need you to hold.”
“What if you fall?”
“Then they must hold without you.” His father smiled faintly. “That is war.”
He spoke with the calm of a man discussing the weather. Only late at night, when he thought the children asleep, would he pause in some torchlit corridor to rub at his shoulder or leg, a flicker of pain crossing his face before the shadows swallowed it.
Once, Richard rose for water and saw this.
He said nothing. But, as he turned back to his room, his small fingers traced invisible lines along the cold stone wall.
When Richard was three, his brother fell ill.
It began as a fever. Everyone took it for some childish ague—hot one moment, coughing the next, sure to be well again after a nap and some broth.
But the fever broke and returned, then broke again.
Within days, his brother was raving, eyes unfocused, clutching at the princess’s sleeve and crying out nonsense.
A heavy dread settled over the castle.
Their father rode back from the war overnight, still in his armour, and pushed open the bedchamber door.
He found his wife kneeling at the bedside, gripping their son’s damp, small hand as though it were all that kept her from falling away.
“What has happened?” His voice was gravel.
“They say it is a fever,” the princess said, looking up with red-rimmed eyes. “But no remedy has touched it.”
Richard, held tight in a corner by his nurse, watched with wide eyes.
His brother’s face was fiercely flushed, his mutterings constant. Then, all at once, he fell silent, as though sinking into sudden, deep sleep.
“Is he sleeping?” Richard whispered.
The nurse only clutched him tighter, her lips pressed shut.
An eerie stillness filled the room, broken only by the sputter of candle-wax.
The physician knelt by the bed, bent to feel for breath, and pressed trembling fingers to the boy’s throat. His hands shook.
The princess stared at him for a moment, then seemed to fold in on herself, her head sinking onto the coverlet with a sob so smothered it was almost soundless.
His father stood motionless, his face like stone. He offered no words of comfort. He merely reached out and closed his son’s eyes.
Richard did not truly understand “death”.
He only knew that from the next day on, his brother no longer sat up in bed, nor chased him through the yard.
He crept to the door of the now-tidied bedchamber and peered through the crack for a long time. He saw only an empty bed, the covers neatly folded.
“Where did my brother go?” he asked his nurse.
“He has gone to see God, young master,” she said, her own eyes red. “God will care for him now.”
“Will God let him come back?”
The nurse drew him into her arms and did not answer.
His brother’s death was a stone dropped into the heart of the household, and its ripples reached every room.
His father shed no tears at the funeral. Only when the small coffin was lowered into the earth did the veins stand out on the backs of his hands, his knuckles whitening around the reins he still gripped.
Not long after, his old wounds began to plague him again.
They were the hidden cost of decades in the saddle and under arms—shoulder, back, leg, old scars stirring under the strain of grief and exhaustion.
He coughed often. At times, merely standing to speak left him pale and breathless, forced to lean heavily on a table until the weakness passed.
The physicians offered a chorus of advice, but their verdict was one:
“Your Highness must leave the wars. You must return to England and take your rest.”
The princess agreed without hesitation.
“I have lost one son,” she told her husband. “I will not lose you to this land as well.”
The heir apparent was silent for a long time before he bowed his head in assent.
And so, after nearly twenty years of campaigning in France, the heir to the English throne boarded ship with his wife and his one remaining son, and turned his face homeward.