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The evil it spread
like a fever ahead
It was night
when you died, my firefly
He was eight and the cold of Fotheringhay crept through the arras like a damp hand on the back of his neck where the hump was already pushing the skin into a crooked question. Richard had been sent to the chapel to pray for his father’s victory, but his knees ached and he could not fold his twisted spine into a supplication acceptable to God. Instead he stood in the gallery and listened. When the messenger’s spurs tore the silence, his mother’s wail flattened the torch flames. The Duke of York was dead, his head mounted on Micklegate Bar wearing a paper crown, a smear of blood for a smile. Richard did not cry. He did not feel like crying. He felt something else — a dark, crawling heat moving outward from his own misshapen bones, a certainty spreading like ink through water that the world was a feast to which he would never be invited. He looked at the candleflame by the prie-dieu and saw a firefly caught in a jar, its light dying in pulses. That is my father’s soul, he thought, and then the candle guttered, and the night swallowed it, and he felt a fever take root in the place of love. He stood there until his joints locked — a small, broken gargoyle peering at the first sighting of death.
Well, you do enough talk,
my little hawk,
why do you cry?
Tell me,
what did you learn
from the Tillamook burn?
The corpse of Henry the Sixth bled again when he came near: a sluggish, obedient trickle from the dead king’s wounds, as if sanctity could be summoned to testify against him. Lady Anne’s grief was a raw and flayed thing, and Richard took it between his teeth and shook it gently, then less gently, spinning words of penitence and love that dripped with sincerity. He had practised this sincerity in mirrors until his own face became a stranger’s. He knelt in the dust of the street, bared his chest, offered her his blade and his heart, to complete the narrative of her vengeance; her hatred curdled into confusion, then into a horrified, unwilling fascination. When she placed the ring on his finger and left, trailing her mourning veil through the muck, he stood alone by the bier and laughter tried to claw its way out of his throat, but it never quite managed to. What emerged was a single, inexplicable tear tracking down his sunken cheek. He caught it on his fingertip and stared at the wetness like an alchemist facing an unknown element. A voice he had not heard since childhood — mother’s, perhaps, or some scrap of nursemaid’s song — was whispering in the vault of his skull. Why do you cry, my little hawk? He was learning how a woman’s sorrow burned, how its ashes could warm you for a time. Every fire that unfurled devouring a little of the firefly too. The tear dried; he smiled his twisted smile and walked toward the palace, already feeling the cold return.
What could I have said
to raise you from the dead?
Oh, could I
be the sky
on the Fourth of July?
The Tower breathed around him on the night before his coronation: the sixth of July, the summer of his ascension. But the sky over London was already feverish with something else, squibs arcing like souls in purgatory, the populace drunk on the promise of a new sun. Richard stood at a narrow window in the White Tower and listened. He was not listening to the fireworks. He was listening for sounds from a certain close chamber where two small boys had been smothered hours before. The silence was absolute, thicker than the stone. I am sorry. I did not mean it. This is the kingdom you will inherit. The phrases rehearsed themselves behind his teeth, useless as curses. He imagined being the sky on this fourth of July eve: vast, pitiless, incapable of remembering what a child’s hand felt like in his. The sky could watch the fires and feel nothing. But Richard’s hands were shaking, the crooked one and the straight one both, and the guilt was a rodent gnawing behind his sternum. He pressed his forehead to the icy glass and saw, in the distant flares, the faces of the princes, their lips blue, asking a question he could not answer. He had wanted to be king, and now the crown was a hoop of hot iron shrinking around his brain, and there was no word that could summon the dead from their saffron-wrapped sheets.
Did you get enough love,
my little dove?
Why do you cry?
The memory came to him now with brutal clarity: his mother’s chamber at Baynard’s Castle when he was five, the great bed hung with blue damask, her hair unbound like a girl’s. He had woken from a nightmare of teeth and crawled into her room, aching to be gathered up and tucked beneath her duvet. But Cecily Neville looked him — at the hump on his back, the shoulder that rode higher than its brother, the legs of unequal length — and her face shuttered. “Thou toad,” she breathed, “thou blot on thy father’s name.” She turned then, and called for a servant to remove him. He had cried hot, scalding tears that seemed to confirm her disgust, and then bitten his own arm to silence the sobs. Now, a lifetime later, he sat before her as king and saw the same revulsion still swimming in her old eyes. She called him a foul, misshapen villain, a murderer of innocents, each curse falling like a lash. He gave her back a marble smile, and thought of a sky of falling doves. Falling into an eternal, starless cold.
Shall we look at the moon,
my little loon?
Why do you cry?
Make the most of your life,
while it is rife
While it is light.
On their wedding night, Anne Neville had been full of a terrified, fledgling hope. She had known the monster he was, had seen his teeth at the bier of her father-in-law, but some desperate, girlish part of her had still wanted to be loved, to find in the crooked king a hidden softness. She drew him to the window of their chamber at Westminster. The Thames was a sheet of hammered lead below, the moon a silver hook caught in the clouds. “Shall we look at the moon?”she said, looking at him. Her face in the moonlight was pale and almost beautiful, and for a splinter of a moment Richard felt something loosen in his chest: a desire to be worthy, perhaps, to set aside the elaborate machinery of his ambition. He knew now he could have chosen differently. He could have kissed her forehead and meant it, could have let the light in. Instead he smiled his courtier’s smile and calculated how many months it would take for her to become superfluous, how her death might be blamed on a winter fever. He made the most of her, drained her lineage, her womb, her claim, and when she died he stood by her tomb with little beyond the distant satisfaction of a craftsman. Now, in the sleepless watches before Bosworth, the memory returned unceasingly: the moon, her voice, the offer of light. He was crying now, in the dark, ugly, wrenching sobs that twisted his spine into a crescent, then nothing at all.
The hospital asked,
should the body be cast
before I say goodbye,
my star in the sky.
He dreamt he was a corpse on a table, all yellowed bone and shrunken sinew, and a figure in a physician’s robe — it was his mother, it was Anne, it was the boy Prince Edward — asked the trembling air, “Shall the body be cast?” The ghosts came then, filing into the tent at Bosworth with the rustle of grave-clothes, eleven wronged souls with frosty eyes. Each mouth bent to his ear: Despair and die. He saw himself as they saw him: a ruptured vessel, a hollow man stuffed with other people’s deaths. Lives, too. The star of York that he had clutched so fiercely was falling, dragging a trail of blood across the heavens. He woke shrieking for a horse, his mouth awash with his own damnation, and in that shriek was the goodbye he had never been able to say: to the child he might have been, to the brother he had drowned, to the nephews he had smothered, to the wife he had poisoned, to the single firefly within him that had long extinguished.
We’re all gonna die.
Richard fell in the mud of Redmore Plain, the weight of his armour pressing him into England’s wet mouth. The blade found his throat, and the sky swung into view — August, not July, a pale and indifferent blue. His blood ran into the earth. In the final unspooling of his mind, he was eight again, watching a candle die in a chapel, feeling the evil spread out of his own bones and into the world. And now his consciousness was flickering, fading, the darkness rushing in as a cool, annihilating hand. He saw the faces of all he had murdered, and his own face among them, identical. There was no crown to wear now, nor kingdom to bear. Just a boy with a crooked spine, the earth holding him at last.