Like the first book, The Flowering of the Rose, this book is divided into two parts (Parts 3 and 4 in the original one-volume novel). The narrator in the first is the Man of Keen Sight, a landless knight and one of Richard's company, whom we have already met, and in the second we are back with the Nut-Brown Maiden, the twelve-year old we started with at the beginning of the first book, now Richard's ex-mistress and mother of his bastard daughter, living in a nunnery.
When this volume opens, Richard is dead, and the narrator and his companions are in a cell awaiting execution for "treason" ie fighting on behalf of the King against the usurper Henry.
I am thirty-three years old, and I have served three reigns and seen the separate and singular manner of their ending. A fourth reign I shall not see, nor would I wish it. There is no King, save the King of Heaven, other than the third Richard. [...] I will close my ears to the hammerings that build my doom and, in love, remember Richard. Then he was Duke of Gloucester, and seventeen. Now he is but 'the traitor Plantagenet' and he is dead.
I shall think on the day when, for the first time, he asked: 'Will you ride with me?'
And so we go back to 1469, when the young knight first met Richard and entered his service, and we follow Richard's career through again from a quite different perspective.
I love this. It reminds me of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet in its four-dimensional approach, the three different spatial views followed by a view from further on in time. And the way she links the different perspectives is masterly: here, for instance, the narrator meets the Nut-Brown Maiden.
It was at Fotheringhay, and I had gone down into the camp, late, with some message. Everything was steaming with damp summer heat and in the musky darkness I discovered him with a young maid whom he bade me guard through the ranks and deliver to the Duchess of Bedford's apartments.
Kneeling beside him, I remembered more. I had thought it prudent to offer the damsel my arm, as she struggled through the trailing briars. Her hand on mine was like a small smooth flame. She stopped suddenly when we had gone a few steps and turned to look back.
'Ah Jesu!' she whispered. 'How he shines!'
I fixed my sight upon the pale Duke, bringing him near in the lanternlight. A moth flew round his face and he lifted his hand to brush it away. The maiden smiled, in tears.
'There is a light ... a light,' she sighed.
'What then, mistress?'
She had looked up at me from the cavern of her hood.
'A light about him not of this world,' she said.
I could see nought but the fen-fires, burning malefically.
MBG
