‘Vanité des vanités, toute la vanité!’
Queen Margaret of Anjou
She lay in her secret place with thoughts of love. This was a nook where none could find her, hidden by the deep flank of clustering willows and bounded by high reeds that grew around the edge of the little lake. One hand supporting her cheek, she lay comfortably against a bank of kingcups. Her feet were tucked beneath her gown, and she herself was like a willow, with her long hair, more silver than gold, reflecting the trees’ dappled greenness.
She could stay thus, motionless, for hours. A bright bird had settled near her sleeve and, an armslength away, two brindled trout sunned themselves in the shallows. Unseeingly she gazed at them, with eyes as clear and impersonal as the water, their blue merging with its gold and green; eyes that were still yet charged occasionally with passionate, half-formed thoughts. Virginal, receptive to the rippled message of the lake and bland as an artist’s new canvas; such were the eyes of Elizabeth Woodville as she dreamed, of sweet, unreal love sucked like honey from old romances; the Chronicles of Froissart, the magic tales of the Chevalier de la Tour Landry, and Chaucer’s high, gaudy myths. Love idealistic, love unfeigned, as in the far days of Eleanor of Aquitaine, when knight and lady lay on either side of a naked sword, only their souls communing. Kisses grew beside the kingcups. The trout, rising, plashed a courtly old song into her drowsy mind.
Je loe amours et ma dame mercye
Du bel acueil qui par eulx deux me vient …
She bit off the unsung tune midway. A song of Burgundy, the enemy of France, yet a good air, mellow and sad. She sighed, nibbled a shining strand of her own hair, smoothed the plain silk of her bodice. Courtly love, courtly dances filled her heart, but her dress, two years old, fitted her no longer, and was fast wearing out. The Woodvilles were by no means poor, but it was known that Elizabeth’s mother would have them richer.
‘God’s curse on this paucity of our estate,’ Jacquetta of Bedford had said lately. Then, with a rare and very secret smile, seemingly for Elizabeth alone: ‘Yet we have other things, to make us wealthy beyond the stars.’ That beautiful and mysterious smile had lingered with Elizabeth. Would her mother be smiling now? Elizabeth wondered; for an hour folk had been calling, searching for her fruitlessly. First, like the bellow of an ill-played shawm, the voice of her nurse, then the chaplain whinnying in a voice unused to anything but the mumblings of the Mass, and lastly her sisters, primly, dutifully crying her name and giggling as they ran up and down the pleasaunce paths.
She parted a strand of willow and peered across the garden, now deserted. What she saw gave her small gladness. It meant little that since 1168, when William de Wyvill enjoyed the tenure-in-chivalry of Grafton land and the favour of King Henry the Second, Woodvilles had walked these same velvet lawns and had culled from those borders their simples and condiments. The fennel, the rosemary, bryony and St. John’s Wort, ampion, vervain and rue; the herbs sweet and sour, the good herbs and the evil herbs, for fever and madness and the soul’s easement. The plants to hide rankness or add spice to a festal dish; the gillies and violets for table-dressing, and the reeds, amongst which she lay, for strewing on a dusty floor. The sheltering yews and the one great oak in the garden’s heart failed to move her. Likewise the manor itself, with its timbered gables flanking the soaring roof of the great hall and its chapel tower rosily tipped by sunlight. For Grafton Regis represented learning, nurture, discipline, and held her from that world for whose romantic splendours she yearned. At London, there was a French Queen, by rumour wildly fascinating, with a court, maybe, like that of fair Eleanor of Aquitaine …
The sisters came into view again, running from behind the high stone wall that bounded the stableyard and bakery. Shrill and anxious, their voices called her. Catherine, her favourite, broke from the others and ran alongside the stream towards the lake. She wore a well worn murrey gown. A gleam of plump flesh showed through a split seam. Round, where Elizabeth was slender, she ran, dodging the tussocks of reed. Elizabeth raised her arm above the banked kingcups and waved, watching her own white hand and the way the green folds of her sleeve belled about her wrist in an outworn elegance. At the French court, their sleeves were like great bladders, sewn with pearls and miniver to glisten in the dance. She knew; she had seen paintings. All her undanced dances faded as Catherine plunged towards her.
Her sister’s small coif was trimmed with tarnished gold, below which her fair hair spread itself in a tangled cascade. All the sisters were blonde, but none bore the colouring of Elizabeth, whose hair, silver-gilt and falling to her knees, was a shining mist in candlelight and under the sun seemed woven of rare and precious thread. Sir Hugh Johns had looked long at her hair; there had been tears in his eyes.
Breathless, Catherine threw herself down, crushing bright blossoms. The trout, frightened, flicked away into the depths.
‘Oh, Bess!’ Catherine gasped. ‘We’ve searched for you for hours – Margaret tore her gown and Martha fell – her nose bled. We are all going to be beaten. Dame Joan is wroth.’
Elizabeth frowned. Dame Joan was their crabbed old nurse and Elizabeth loathed the humiliation of beatings. Sometimes wheedling could bring lenience. Today, however, the weather was warm; Joan would be sweating and merciless under the old-fashioned houpeland that encased her girth like a knight’s harness. Catherine rattled on.
‘Bess, I pray you, come.’ Her round bosom strained dangerously at another seam. ‘The whole house is upside down. Anyway – ’ curiously – ‘what do you do here all this time?’
‘I think.’ Elizabeth chewed on a sour-sweet grass, gazed at the lake, diamonded by sun. ‘I muse. I dream.’
‘About Sir Hugh Johns?’ Catherine looked archly at her. ‘Oh, sister, imagine. You’ll soon be a wedded lady … the first of us. Come now, and talk of Hugh to Joan, it’ll cool her temper. I’ll miss you when you go,’ she finished wistfully.
‘I’ll go nowhere,’ said Elizabeth, biting the stem in two. ‘With him, at any rate.’
Catherine’s plump jaw dropped. ‘Don’t you like him?’ she said incredulously. ‘We all thought him a sweet and gentle knight. When he laughed at talk of your dowry and said he would almost be content with you alone, we were enchanted …’
‘Fool’s prattle,’ said Elizabeth. A brief vision of Sir Hugh’s plain pleasant face assailed her. She had asked him of fashions, of the latest airs and dances, and he had stuttered incoherently. He had never even spoken to her of love, had merely excused himself to seek her mother’s bower, where they conferred stiltedly about monetary matters. Sir Hugh was well purveyed of money. Was that what her mother had meant, speaking of their future with that strange little smile? Somehow she thought not. Somewhere, there was love, its colours unknown. Love the stranger, to be instantly recognized. Hugh Johns was not love, nor ever could be.
Catherine’s voice went on, complaining: Bess was all over green stains, Bess would have them all beaten. It was hard to be one of many unwed sisters. The brothers were in livery service at noble households. Lionel was destined for the Church, Edward for the sea. They were only young yet. Nearest Elizabeth’s age, Anthony was the best. She loved his slender elegance, his learning, his chivalry. He could translate any poem, Greek, Latin or French, into something better than the original. Soon he would be able to best any other stripling knight in the tourney. She wished he had been present at the interview with Sir Hugh. He would have made him blush rosier still, with his subtle, adult wit. There had only been seven-year-old John, pulling faces at the stammering knight’s back. That had earned him a beating that day …
Anthony would have been able to comfort her. ‘Do what you will, sweet sister,’ he would have said. ‘None can drag you to the altar!’
It was not as if the Queen had commanded the match. That would have lent a different colour to the affair. Elizabeth knew that her mother had the Queen’s ear through their mutual French birth. Jacquetta of Bedford’s first husband had been Regent for King Henry the Sixth in France; Tante Isabel was married to the Queen’s uncle, Charles d’Anjou. Thinking again of Queen Margaret, Elizabeth almost choked with frustrated longing. There was clodpoll Sir Hugh, lusting to bear her off to some distant manor, as tame and ennuyeux as Grafton Regis, while the lovely London court frolicked carelessly; for there had been scant talk of war since Jack Cade’s uprising two years earlier. York, the turbulent Richard, also seemed quiescent, despite his wearying aspirations and his stirrings of Burgundy. It was an old quarrel; York and Lancaster sporadically at each other’s throats like feast-day mastiffs. She was sure they would not talk of policy at the court. There would be only music and courtly love, in the royal palaces with their enchanted names: Greenwich, Eltham, Windsor, Sheen, the shining one.
‘The chaplain says,’ said Catherine pompously, ‘that your soul is wayward, wanton … faugh!’ She shifted to another patch of reed. ‘My dress is soaking. Why do you choose this dismal place to hide in?’
Elizabeth whispered: ‘I love the lake.’
Catherine said uncertainly: ‘Will you come now? Madam our mother, as well as Joan, will punish you.’
‘Mother knows?’
‘Yes, she came down to welcome the party from Calais. Our father’s here.’
‘Imbecile!’ cried Elizabeth, springing up. ‘Why did you not tell me?’
Her beloved father was home, and she not there to greet him. She ran, across meadow and lawn, past the falcons’ mew with its rank, raw-meat smell – under the archway into the ward and, skirting the chapel building, up the worn stone stairs to the children’s apartments. There the chaplain met her, muttering prayers or imprecations. Within the solar, the nurse fussed grimly among the sisters; Jacquetta, Eleanor, Anne, Martha and Margaret; toddling, preening or playing about the floor, according to their age and disposition.
‘Well, my lady,’ said the nurse sourly, motioning to a tiring-maid to unfasten Elizabeth’s laces, ‘may you find mercy, though you don’t deserve it. Hurry, now. My lord waits for you below.’
Elizabeth shivered at the cool touch of a clean linen shift. She danced impatiently on the spot, itching to run to the oriel through which she could hear the stamp and jingle of many horse, the deep voices of men, a breath of song. He could sing better than any man in England or France. How long of him had she missed already? Sometimes he only stayed a day, to enchant them all with a tale of courtly prowess. Then he would depart, leaving the manor even more dull and lifeless than before.
She was dressed at last in a high-waisted Italian silk patterned with red roses, its tight sleeves trimmed with marten. Catching the sun through an embrasure, her hair gleamed like thistledown. She descended the stairs to the Hall, followed by the sisters who were old enough to attend her, and she knew that she outshone them, as a silver candle shames a tallow dip. The Hall was full of courtiers, knights, wearing her father’s blazon. A royal herald stood stiffly by the fireplace. The colours on his tabard, the leopards and lilies of France Ancient, leaped to her glamour-hungry eyes like a blaze; she heard bright, soundless music.
The tables, flanking three sides of the Hall, were laid for supper and at the knights’ dais at the northern end sat her parents, talking with a tall boy. Anthony! Unexpectedly home on leave from his livery service. For the first time she cursed the seductive, solitary lake that had made her miss so much joy. She went forward to the dais and knelt.
After the long obeisance, she looked into eyes blue as her own. The eyes of Sir Richard Woodville, Earl Rivers; Knight of the Garter, Privy Councillor, Knight Banneret and leader of men; yet first, her own father, and deeply, possessively loved. He raised her, kissed her, beckoned to a henchman who came forward with a long package wrapped in hessian. Inside was a thick, shining-swathe of cobwebby lace.
‘From Alençon,’ said her father, smiling. ‘One of the many perquisites of my captaincy there. For my fairest daughter.’
She looked at him, at the way his russet hair was threaded with silver and curled on his broad shoulders; how the rich blue velvet doublet fitted him like a skin. The old collar of ‘S’s, worn by all knights in the service of Henry of Lancaster, gleamed on his chest. He was called by many the handsomest man in England. She thought, gloriously: they are right! Then, while she gloated over the lace, he turned again to talk to his wife.
‘Bordeaux has fallen,’ he said. ‘The French conquest of Aquitaine is complete.’
‘Ah, Jesu,’ said Jacquetta of Belford. Totally noncommittal was that little prayer, yet there was a triumph in it. England for the English, they said; yet Jacquetta’s heart was bred and nurtured among the French, and Lancaster was her watchword.
Young Anthony winked at Elizabeth. He had a golden fineness, too, she thought, in his gay scarlet habit and shirt of fair Rennes cloth. She mused again on Sir Hugh, already running to plumpness; she had been spoilt by father and brother for beauty in other men. Thinking of Hugh put her in mind of her mother’s yet unheard opinions. Disquiet crept over her. Had a decision been reached, while she was dreaming by the lake? And what did her father think of Sir Hugh? She listened closely to the conversation; still they spoke of policy.
‘As Seneschal of Aquitaine, I had a great force,’ said Sir Richard. ‘Two thousand bowmen, three hundred spears. And then I kicked my heels at Plymouth, revictualling a fleet which none seemed minded to use. The King, Jesu preserve him, sometimes seems …’
He ceased abruptly. Other conversations buzzed in the Hall; behind a screen one of the minstrels discreetly plucked his lute. Jacquetta’s face was impassive as she listened, waited for her husband to resume. Elizabeth studied her; it seemed this day as if she were seeing them all for the first time.
Duchess of Bedford in her own right, daughter of Pierre, Duke of Luxembourg and Marguerite del Balzo of Andria, Jacquetta Woodville still owned much of the legendary beauty of her youth. Her eyes were lustrous, her features clear and proud. The narrow band of hair revealed at the edge of her coif was still a rich coppery gold. She wore many rings, and about her neck lay a ruby and diamond reliquary reputed to hold a bone of St. James. She was holding a parchment letter from a personage of some note, for from it dangled a great seal like a gobbet of wet blood. A letter newly arrived; Elizabeth knew suddenly that it concerned herself. Her eyes flew to her mother’s, and were held in a strange, perceptive gaze. Her heart beat hard. Good or ill lay in that parchment.
The gamey scent of the roast peacock wafted to her nose, but her stomach fluttered fretfully. Now she would be able to eat nothing, even in her father’s honour. Not all Anthony’s wit could sharpen her taste, until she knew the content of that roll.
Still Jacquetta’s eyes, all-knowing, fathomless, held hers, as the clarions sounded for supper.
Early morning sunlight pierced the chapel windows and gleamed upon paten and pyx and chalice.
Confiteor tibi in cithara, Deus, Deus meus; quare tristis es, et quare conturbas me?
The chaplain watched Elizabeth constantly, while he tongued the Mass by rote. The words meant little after years of repetition and left his mind free to wander. He marked her trembling as she took the Host; this was in itself the sign of conscience, as was the way she bent her head to draw comfort from her missal. Soul, why art thou downcast, why art thou all lament? A tear crept softly down her cheek and the chaplain’s stern mouth relaxed. So the eldest Woodville maiden was penitent. She rued the disgraceful scene in Hall last evening, caused by a letter which, thought the priest, should have been hailed meekly and with gratitude.
The eldest Woodville maiden was, however, weeping not in penance but with renewed rage. She murmured, choking: ‘Spera in Deo, quoniam adhuc confitebor illi …’ Wait for God’s help … my champion and my God! The painted saints about the altar studied her coolly. Everywhere there was a candle, starred by her own tears, cold as the light in her father’s eyes when she had run from the Hall last evening.
They had given her the letter to read aloud. Its heavy seal had fallen across her wrist, the writing was powerful and black. Sir Richard had stretched himself in his chair, jewelled goblet in hand, prepared to enjoy his daughter’s pretty voice. At first, reading, she had been proud, then incredulous, and upon reaching the fierce, swarthy signature her tongue had trembled in fury. In the body of the Hall there had been whisperings. A young page, waiting near the dais with his dish of venison frumenty, had started to grin. Amid this growing interest, this knavish amusement, she finished the letter, and the echo of its words fed a sudden, incredible anger.
To Dame Elizabeth Woodville:
Right worshipful and well beloved, I greet you well, And forasmuch as my right well beloved Sir Hugh Johns, knight, which now late was with you until his full great joy, hath informed me how that he for the great love and affection that he hath unto your person, as for your great and praised virtues and womanly demeaning, desireth with all his heart to do you worship by way of marriage, before any other creature living as he saith.
I, considering [ – the lordly I! here she heard her own voice becoming high and strained] I, considering his said desire and the great worship he had which was made knight at Jerusalem … And also the good and notable service he hath done and daily doth to me, write you at this time, and pray you effectuously that ye will condescend and apply yourself unto his said lawful and honest desire, wherein ye shall cause me to show unto you such good lordship [here her tongue tripped over immoderate rage] as ye by reason shall hold you content and pleased, with the grace of God, which everlastingly have you in his blessed protections and governance,
Signed: Richard Earl of Warwick.
That name made folk tremble. Warwick was a living legend, hand in glove with half the crowned heads in Europe. It was said that he used Richard of York as his mammet, driving the Duke, his cousin, willy-nilly into uprisings, and lording it in England and in Calais, where Elizabeth’s own father was second-in-command to the Earl of Somerset. Warwick used folk to his own ends; some even said that Warwick’s word was law! She had always disliked the sound of his arrogance, his power. And now, here was Warwick, treating the whole business of her betrothal as a fait accompli – foisting his ditch water-dull liegeman upon her as if to bestow the greatest favour! Reading between the lines, the letter was tantamount to a command.
The words burned. ‘Wherein ye shall cause me to show you such good lordship as ye by reason shall hold you content and pleased!’ Reason left her. She would not suffer his good lordship. She would not be Warwick’s chattel, to marry to whom he thought fit, not even for the grace of the God he invoked so confidently. She was Elizabeth and none other. In that moment she felt that not even her parents, not even the King and Queen could command her, bend her ferocious, adamantine will. The nurse could beat her and the priests pray. She was Elizabeth, who would not be bidden! In that terrible moment of madness she had tried to tear the thick parchment across, had crumpled and ground it beneath her little shoe; all this under the company’s astonished gaze and her father’s mounting wrath.
Rising from the dais, he had shouted at her: ‘Dame, have you lost your wits? Is this the way to treat a fair offer? Earl Warwick …’
She had screamed back like an eelwife. ‘Warwick! Pox take Warwick! And you hate him yourself, my lord, for his treasonous talk against the Crown!’
Even Anthony, behind his father’s chair, had blanched, for there were several visiting Yorkist partisans in the Hall, dining in precarious amity. Sir Richard’s face had turned the colour of Clary wine.
‘God’s Passion, is this the speech of my daughter?’ he cried. ‘Madame, go to your room. Before this, I was not of a mind for you to marry Hugh, but by Christ, he shall have you now! And may Our Lady give him grace to tame that temper!’
At that instant the grinning page had laughed out loud, through sheer nervousness. Maddened further, she rounded on him and caught him a stinging blow across the cheek. The boy, who was the son of one of King Henry’s courtiers and new to the Woodville household, set up a noise like a pig being butchered. Two great hounds leaped roaring from under the table, and Sir Richard hurled his goblet across the chamber. Only Jacquetta had remained calm. Recalling the scene like a nightmare, Elizabeth realized that her mother had not spoken one word.
The Mass was over; she touched her lips to the Book. The chaplain rose, and, followed by a hobble of aged chantry priests and the singing-boys, came down the nave. She intercepted him in the porch.
‘Father, I wish to be professed as a nun,’ she said. Her lips were trembling. He looked at her not unkindly. ‘Nay, my daughter.’ He made to walk on. She caught at his vestment and he looked down, surprised.
‘I am in earnest,’ she said softly. Anything, rather than be used, be bidden. Anything so long as she, Elizabeth, could choose. In some convents life was, she believed, almost gay. She would be admired by her sisters as the fairest nun in Christendom.
‘No, my child,’ repeated the chaplain.
‘You yourself said,’ cried Elizabeth, ‘that my soul was wayward. For my soul’s good, Father, please …’
The chaplain smiled palely, twisted his gown from her grasp.
‘Your reasons are wrong, daughter,’ he said, as if he read her mind. ‘And do you consider yourself fit to be a Bride of Christ?’
The choir filed past. Standing abjectly in the porch, she heard the chaplain say to an acolyte, ‘My lady is to wed Sir Hugh … by the Rood, Jack, this chalice needs scouring; ’tis foul with fingermarks …’
The nurse escorted Elizabeth back to her apartments, where she was in durance with no company but that of the baby sisters. They had not allowed Anthony to visit her, and he was leaving that morning, bound again for the house of his patron in the south. Since last evening she had set eyes on neither parent. She sat down before her tapestry frame and began to work with short vicious needle-stabs. Appropriately the picture was one of St. Jerome lecturing some maidens. Elizabeth pushed her needle through his eye. Through the half-open window she could hear voices and the jingle of a bit as a horse tossed its head. She stole a glance at Dame Joan; the woman was drowsing, oblivious of a summer fly crawling on her neck. Elizabeth rose, crossed to the casement and pushed it wide. In the courtyard below a few of the guard lounged, gossiping. A saddled horse waited. Anthony was within the house, making his farewells. The few short sweet hours were over, unshared by her. Again she cursed Earl Warwick’s insolence. Hated Warwick! the fault was his. Warwick, powerful, remote, had, without even setting eyes on her, caused disappointment and grief. Dispiritedly she leaned from the window and listened to the men talking. Policy, of course, the old war-talk that bored her so; the familiar names: York, who last year had returned from Ireland ready to do battle with the royal House of Lancaster. He had been pacified only by a seat on King Henry’s Council, and the King’s declaration of trust in him. Beaufort of Somerset, under whose command her father had once been at Calais; true knight and liegeman of the King and especially of his Queen, Margaret. Hated by York, for some reason, more than any other man. Now they spoke of the Queen; the free, fortunate, beautiful Queen.
She would never see the Queen. Soon she would be cooped, brooding, on Hugh’s manor, bearing the customary child a year, Hugh himself doubtless flaunting off to Jerusalem again in the service of his lordly master Warwick. Perchance Warwick would visit her during her husband’s absence. Odious thought! her fancy saw Warwick inspecting her household, appointing her servants; her imagination all but endowed the unknown Warwick with horns and a cleft beard. Tiny drops of sweat broke out on her face; she clenched her hands and wept.
Anthony came down the steps into the courtyard, an esquire following him, and grasped the waiting horse’s bridle. The sun touched gold from his uncovered head. Elizabeth dared not call, even with the nurse snoring behind her. Instead she threw a rosebud down; it dropped on the horse’s saddle. Anthony looked up at her white face and small, imploring hands.
‘Ah, sweet sister,’ he said very softly. ‘God send you good fortune.’
He rode up to the window; by stretching up he could almost touch her hand. She glanced across the courtyard. Most of the guard had dispersed, but three were dicing on the cobbles outside the mew. Anthony’s esquire wandered over to join them.
‘Take me with you,’ she whispered. ‘Take me away!’ Before he could answer, she had nipped up her gown and was sitting on the sun-warmed window ledge. Her feet hung down a yard from the horse’s ears. Anthony’s face looked up, pale and troubled. The cobbles seemed a long way down. She had visions of her skull crushed, every bone in her body smashed to pieces. Yet in that instant she jumped, slid, fell into her brother’s arms. The horse reared in fright at the sudden burden and bolted, hooves ringing on the stones. Anthony struggled to hold her across his saddle-bow, while she began to laugh like a madwoman. They careered through the gate, swerved under the arch and raced across the meadow. Anthony was swearing, calling on the saints. Eventually he brought the horse to a bouncing halt.
‘Sweet Jesu!’ he said, rubbing a strained wrist. ‘You could have been killed! What a fool’s game!’
They were near the water, and her secret place. The shimmering willows seemed to listen as they argued, he shaking his head despairingly, she crying, pleading.
‘Take me away,’ she begged. ‘Grant me this one favour, and I will repay you, if it’s the last thing I do in life.’
‘Come, sweeting,’ he said, looking suddenly like a frightened child (he was little more). ‘It’s not your death. Sir Hugh is kindly, biddable. I doubt not you’ll have your way with him in the end. Come,’ disentangling himself from her arms, ‘make the best of it.’
Still she sobbed and besought him.
‘Where would I hide you?’ he said uneasily. ‘I … I should get into trouble.’
She recognized from his last sentence that he was as young, as powerless as she. She dismounted slowly into the reedy grass, her hair awry, her face drawn and miserable.
‘Go, then,’ she said dully. ‘I know you would help me if you could.’
‘Aye!’ he answered, eager to be off. ‘Saint Catherine keep you; we’ll meet again soon.’
‘Farewell,’ she said, turning away.
He gathered up his reins. ‘Bess, use our father kindly,’ he said. ‘You shamed him sorely last evening.’
She walked away, hearing the scudding hooves of his departure and his shout of farewell. In utter resignation she descended the moist green slope to where the bank of kingcups made a pillow and the same two trout lay basking under sun-kissed water. She sank down, curving her body beside the shady willows, and let sadness engulf her. Then came the unmistakable feeling that she was not alone. Someone was watching her. A chill enveloped her as she thought of ghosts of the reedland, bogies that changed themselves to water-birds; the Lord of Evil himself, inhabiting, for sport, this lonely, sunlit place. Then the uncomfortable feeling was broken by a calm, a beautiful voice.
‘Weep no more, daughter,’ said Jacquetta of Bedford.
Astonished, Elizabeth saw her mother sitting unattended on the other side of the willow tree. Green-latticed sunlight lapped at her steady profile. For all this rustic departure, she was attired with customary fineness. Her headdress was of silver cloth, stretched over a little pointed horn of starched damask. Small jewels winked in her ears and upon her white bosom. She wore dove-coloured satin and a high embroidered girdle. Her little shoes of clary velvet were stained with mud and rushes. Otherwise she was immaculate. A hand wearing a pearl-and-ruby rose, beckoned through the hanging frond of leaves.
‘Tis like the confessional!’ said Jacquetta, with a tinge of laughter. Elizabeth crept closer.
‘And truly I would beg forgiveness, Madame.’
‘Be still, Elizabeth.’ The strong white hand took hers, and mother and daughter sat silent for some minutes. In that clasp a force was born, communicating itself from the older woman to the younger. It was like the moments before a storm strikes, and there was in it also warmth, power, something so all-consuming that Elizabeth tried vainly to withdraw her hand.
‘Do you think,’ said the Duchess, ‘that I would have you wasted on any paltry Yorkist cur?’
Light rippled on the water. The leaves shook themselves at the incredible words.
‘You did not come to me,’ said Jacquetta, ‘being content instead to rave in unseemly fashion at my lord, which put him in a passion I have taken all night to still. Yet stilled he is,’ with a tiny smile of triumph. ‘You have much to learn of the ways of men. Obstruct them with rough speech, rantings, and, like a hog’s bladder kicked by boys, they grow more resilient. Yet, apply a sweet pinprick, a loving word, a sigh, a tear, and you cause them to think, and think again, and grow womanly, and do your will.’
She released Elizabeth’s hand, and uprooted a reed.
‘Or this, a better allegory-’ twisting and bending the stem brutally. ‘Force will not master this pliant reed. Yet – ’ splitting the green tip with sharp fingernails – ‘apply cunning, art – ’ the reed began to peel in layers – ‘some deviousness so slight ’tis scarcely there at all–’ the stem flaked, showed hollow – ‘and your adversary is undone. So it is with men, and policy, and love.’
The hypnotic voice ceased. From the further shore of the lake there came the whirring of wings as a brace of wild duck rose and made for the freedom of the forest.
‘So they fly,’ murmured the Duchess, watching. ‘And so they escape the ennui of Grafton Regis. How fair the female is, with the sun on her wings!’
She knows my every thought! marvelled Elizabeth. And, mother of mine though she is, I know her not at all. The past years had done little to bring them close. To Elizabeth, Jacquetta had been a distant, awesome figure, spending much time in Calais, London, Rouen, and almost yearly enceinte with another Woodville child. Jacquetta had seen the London court many times. Yet it was not she who had whetted Elizabeth’s fancy with tales of its glory; these had been gleaned from grooms, maidservants, and were often inaccurate. In all her fifteen years, Elizabeth had had only formal speech with her mother. The Duchess was talking again of Sir Hugh Johns.
‘The knight is pleasant enough,’ she admitted. ‘But his policies sour my stomach. No Yorkist shall have my daughter.’ Her pearly face was suddenly savage, then she laughed. ‘This day I will send word to the great lord Warwick declining his liegeman. Not even a King could gainsay me in matters of the heart! No upstart scion of York shall bid my blood!’
Intrigued, Elizabeth slipped through the screen of willow to kneel at her mother’s feet. The Duchess studied the upturned face. So perfect was its symmetry that she looked, spellbound, for longer than it took for a white frill of cloud to drift across the sun, and for the light to return, blindingly gold. It shone upon Elizabeth’s broad brow, small full mouth and pointed chin. Her eyes reflected back the sky; her hair was silver and gold, utterly unreal in its beauty. By the saints, Jacquetta thought: she is fairer even than I was, and men would maim one another for a smile from me!
She said: ‘It is time you knew my history. My life with Bedford was happy, almost to the time of his death, some sixteen years ago. I say almost; for, when Suffolk was my husband’s captain – (aye, Suffolk, butchered by Yorkists on Portsmouth strand two springs ago!) – I was with the army in France. Our captains were there, of course. There was one … ah, Jesu! it comes once in a lifetime.’
The handsomest man in England,’ said Elizabeth.
Jacquetta smiled. ‘Aye Sir Richard Woodville and none other. The first sight of him was like a strong blow to my heart. Thereafter came pain, the pain of partings. The pain,’ she said softly, ‘of loving, and of being bound to another man.’
She lowered her voice even more.
‘I believe, Elizabeth, that strong desire can cut through destiny; that even the planets can be turned in their courses by thought; worlds shaken by it, consummation achieved. For … my lord of Bedford died.’
She took Elizabeth’s hand again. Again the feeling of shattering power was born, and mounted.
‘There was no need thereafter to quell our longings, our hungers. There was no need for me to avoid Sir Richard’s eyes or run from his voice. He had been knighted by the child king Henry at Leicester, yet his lineage was not so high as my own. All the same, his was the face I had been born to look upon. It was the coup de foudre, the power and glory of the heart.
‘We were married full secretly, for my dower had been granted upon Bedford’s death by a patent of the King. I was pledged to do fealty to my uncle, the Bishop of Thérouanne, the King’s Chancellor in France. I was forbidden to marry without the King’s edict, given under the Great Seal of England. Yet soon I had no choice but to throw myself upon Henry’s mercy. I was great with you then, Bess. My uncle fumed and my brother, Louis of St. Pol, declared himself outraged by my disobedience. So I wooed the King. I besought him to extort whatever fine he wished, while my kinfolk railed at me. They threatened your father and me with all manner of punishment.
‘We were fined one thousand pounds. I smiled at the young reed of a King, I put him to my will. I knelt to Cardinal Beaufort, offered him my manor of Charleton Canville, and looked into his soul. He paid my fine; yea, gladly. Then your father was appointed to the royal commission of Chief Rider of the Forest of Saucy.’ She pointed. ‘Over there, Elizabeth, where your desires lately flew, in the guise of a wild duck!’
Her gaze wandered across the lake. A fish jumped, suddenly silver.
‘You love the water, Elizabeth,’ said the Duchess, her voice changed. Closed within her hand, Elizabeth’s fingers felt a throb, a vibration that encompassed flesh and veins, striking at that which was hidden, and deep.
‘In all water,’ said the Duchess, ‘there are spirits. In all fountains, meres, rivers, the sea. One spirit above all. Omnipotent. We are part of her and she of us. You knew it,’ looking at Elizabeth with a fierce tenderness, ‘My blood runs in you, my wit and will are yours. My shameful secret, Elizabeth, you were once, carried within me through anger, and born triumphant. Now, my fairest, my eldest. My Melusine …’
She was the Jacquetta of youth, burning-bright, all-powerful. Eyes closed, Elizabeth listened to slow, mystic words.
‘I am of the royal House of Luxembourg. I am of the blood of a water-fay, who ensnared Raymond of Poitou. Melusine met with Raymond by her home, the fountain in the forest; and took his wits away. She asked Raymond for as much of the land around the fountain as could be covered by a stag’s hide; she cut the hide into ten thousand strips so that her land extended far beyond the forest. There she built Lusignan. She bore Raymond children: Urian, with his one red and his one green eye; Gedes, of the scarlet countenance (for him she built the castle of Favent and the convent at Malliers); Gyot, of the uneven eyes (for him she built La Rochelle); Anthony, of the claws and long hair; a one-eyed son; and lastly, Geoffrey of the Tooth. He had a boar’s tusk.
‘She obtained an oath from her husband that she would be left alone each Saturday in strictest privacy. Raymond kept his word, though his courtiers swore that Melusine betrayed her lord with fiends. But one day he weakened and sought her out, deep in the heart of a lonely lake. There he saw that her nether parts were changed into the tail of a monstrous fish or serpent. He spoke to none of this, nor did Melusine betray that she had been discovered. One day, however, news came that Geoffrey of the Tooth had attacked the monastery of Malliers and burned it, putting to death his own brother and a hundred monks. So the house of Raymond rose against itself, and Raymond cried to his wife: ‘Away, odious serpent! Contaminator of my noble race!’
‘At this Melusine replied: ‘Farewell. I go, but I shall come again as a doom. Whenever one of us is to die, I shall weep most dolorously over the ramparts of Lusignan; whenever tragedy strikes a royal House, I shall do likewise.’ So she departed, after suckling once more her two youngest sons, holding them on the lap that owned scales shining like the moon.’
Elizabeth opened her eyes. The Duchess said: ‘This, then, is our heritage. We can fear naught with this immortal ancestry. Raymond, like all men, was a fool. Melusine is our strength. She lives in us. She fortifies us. Receive her power. From the time I bore you in my womb, Elizabeth, I knew you would be a fit child of Melusine, and fair enough to grace the ramparts of Lusignan. It was all written, long ago.’
‘Two days hence, you and I will say farewell for a while.’
Elizabeth, confused, said: ‘Madame, you are leaving us?’
‘Nay, it is you who will go. The time is full for you to visit the court. Queen Margaret will receive you into her service, she loves me well. Bear yourself discreetly; do the Queen’s will in all things. Now come, and beg your father’s pardon for last evening.’
Joyful, amazed, Elizabeth followed her mother. A summer storm was rising, gathering light from the lake. The Duchess of Bedford moved on under luminous clouds. The water rippled obeisance to her light passing. Her face was like a mask, beautiful, with a beauty that was worn, and knowing, and strong and evil.
My lady’s fair eyes
Put Dame Venus to shame
I drink to her name
In mine own tears and sighs.
I shrink from her scorn,
Though ’tis sweet as her breath;
Wellaway! I was born
To a love sharp as death.
The scrap of verse, as usual unsigned, had been concealed in Elizabeth’s dancing slipper. Reading it, she smiled impatiently; she knew from whom it came. Jocelyne de Hardwycke of Bolsover was constantly leaving such ditties in her path. She would find them tucked beneath her platter; they would flutter from her missal in the royal chapels of Westminster or Greenwich. These were the undying messages of courtly love, of which she had once dreamed so avidly, and which now, ironically, left her stifled with boredom. For Jocelyne only served to remind her of Grafton Regis, left far behind. Only a week after her arrival at court, she had looked up from her place at the board among Queen Margaret’s gentlewomen straight into the lovelorn eyes of her childhood neighbour. Mary have mercy! she thought, letting the note fall to the floor; I played Hoodman Blind with him when I was six years old! She continued the slow contemplation of her reflection in the polished oval of bronze. Her hair, as she sat, hung almost to the floor. She combed with long, languorous strokes; the silvery mass crackled like a hundred small fires. The Queen would soon be summoning her and the others to wait on her for the evening. Behind Elizabeth, there was whispering; from Ismania Lady Scales, with her long upper lip and snapping dark eyes; from the ladies Butler and Dacre, both pretty, with simpering, vacuous mouths. They disliked her, and she did not care. Margaret Ross was there also; kindly Meg, the arbiter in squabbles. Elizabeth combed and combed, while the hostile air in the chamber sang like a lute. Ismania’s face appeared, distorted by the mirror, behind her own.
‘Dame, we would like to complete our toilette,’ she said frigidly. Covertly Elizabeth watched her retrieve, and read, the dropped note. One of the ten little maids who were part of the Queen’s personal retinue stood near, holding a bowl of rosewater, and Ismania flung herself round to face the child.
‘By St. Denis! Renée! Do you know no better than to bring such as this into the chamber of virgins?’
Renée had been bribed by Jocelyne to secrete the note. Elizabeth watched while the child’s eyes filled with tears. Ismania was the last to talk of virgins. Everyone knew that she had been jilted recently by a gentleman from Ireland and, desperate, had paid the herbman extortionately for a special receipt a fortnight ago.
‘Corrupt, vile trash!’ Ismania cried, tearing up the note. ‘It is surely meant for none here.’ She looked spitefully at Elizabeth’s straight, slender back. ‘Mayhap it is, though … I’ve heard that in Northamptonshire virtue hides in the pigsty.’
Margaret Ross said, ‘Hush!’ and glanced anxiously at Elizabeth, who turned, smiling from the mirror and held out her hands to the bawling Renée.
‘Dry your eyes, chuck.’ Anger seethed within her like a hidden fiend, yet still she smiled. She pushed a dish of sugared violets towards the child. ‘Fill your purse, sweeting, and then you may put up my hair.’
Renée crammed comfits into her mouth, knelt eagerly, gathering up the gilt fall of Elizabeth’s hair. Dexterously she set to coiling the shining mass and covered it with a heartshaped, horned cap waiting on its stand by the mirror. Elizabeth rose at last from the only chair in the room. Her dress was of scarlet sarcenet, billowing below a gold cincture. Tiny marguerites, the Queen’s device, were powdered on the skirt. The low bodice revealed a silken swell of flesh and the shadows between Elizabeth’s breasts. On her first finger she wore the pearl-and-ruby rose, a parting gift from Jacquetta of Bedford. A single jewel hung from the veiling at her forehead; her eyes blazed blue fire. Ismania glared like a gargoyle.
‘That is a most unseemly gown,’ said Lady Dacre in a voice of hoar-frost. ‘I beg you, Dame, raise the bodice a whit. The sight of all that flesh will turn me from my dinner!’
‘Nay, leave it be,’ said Ismania unexpectedly, and strangely agreeable. ‘It is rumoured that the King will dine tonight.’
Elizabeth studied her ring, feeling uplifted. At last she would see the King, and not before time either, she thought. During the weeks she had been at court there had been that empty throne. She conjectured on the King’s appearance. He must be at least thirty, yet surely handsome. Was he not the son of Harry of Agincourt?
‘Where does the King go, these long whiles?’ she asked Margaret Ross. ‘To France? Ireland? Has he been negotiating about the war with York? What manner of man is he?’
Lady Ross was bathing her large hands in rosewater. ‘The King is holy,’ she said quietly. ‘He knows naught of war. He has been to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, and to Canterbury to gaze on the relics of blessed St. Thomas. As for his manner – you will see for yourself.’
There was a tap on the door. The Queen’s page, Thomas Barnaby, was revealed.
‘Mesdames, her Grace commands your presence in her bower.’ Oddly smirking – ‘King Henry’s back.’ His eye travelled over Elizabeth’s tight bodice and the milky upswept bosom. He gave a whistle. ‘Ma foi! Dame Woodville might be well advised not to …’
Ismania rose quickly. ‘Your pardon, Master Barnaby, but it grows late,’ she cried. Like a full-sailed carvel, she surged across the room and out of it. ‘Come, ladies!’ she called over her shoulder. They followed her to the next apartment, where the Queen sat under a canopy of blue cloth-of-gold. There, the women knelt to kiss her hand. When the turn of Elizabeth came, she raised the hem of Margaret’s gown to her lips in an especially gracious gesture.
The bower was airy and well appointed, but in other parts of the Palace of Westminster the hangings were in tatters and the furniture broken with age. The court was poor. By now Elizabeth had heard tales of the Queen’s financial hardship. Although Margaret had come as a French princess to wed Henry of England, she had pawned her silver plate to buy food for her retinue on the journey through Mantes, Pontoise and Rouen. King Henry himself was in debt to the tune of ten thousand marks.
Yet this evening Margaret of Anjou was dressed in all her available finery. She was small; the hand with which she beckoned the women from their knees was scarcely larger than a child’s and bore five heavy rings. Beneath a delicate diadem of fleur-de-lys gold, her fair hair hung free. From her purple mantle shone a broken mist of pearls. Pendent pearls wept on her sleeves and skirt forming a repeated motif of marguerites. In her mellow southern accent she greeted her ladies, while her small strong hand rested upon that of Elizabeth. She made no effort to conceal this mark of favour.
‘Bon soir, ma toute belle,’ she said. ‘Tu es ravissante ce soir.’
Elizabeth tried a discreet compliment in return. Margaret laughed.
‘Moi’ she said. ‘C’est vanite!’ – disparaging her own beauty as a man might mock his certain vigour. Her face glowed. Elizabeth thought, romantically: Love for her returning lord illumines her.
‘Dame Isabella–’ still she addressed Elizabeth. ‘This is your courtly name, and so we shall call you.’
She looked at the hand, with its one bright jewel, in hers. ‘So! My pearl and ruby, which I gave to your mother, returns to court! La sage Jacquette served me well. Will you be as loyal, Isabella?’
‘Always, Madame.’ Elizabeth heard a tiny hiss of chagrin from Ismania standing behind her, and tried to check a smile.
‘Ah, you laugh!’ said the Queen. ‘Doucette, I fear you are too gay for this dull court. We must find you a husband. Now, where is there a knight fittingly endowed for Isabella?’
Though the Queen spoke teasingly, Elizabeth’s spirits fell. Sir Hugh Johns was now wed to a stout wealthy lady named Maud, but there could be others as glum and tiresome as he.
‘I have seen Jocelyne de Hardwycke at Mass,’ pursued Queen Margaret. ‘At no time does he follow the holy writ; his eyes wander over to what he deems earthly Paradise. He is well-purveyed of lands, and the Stag, his father, grows old …’
‘Madame, I pray you,’ said Elizabeth, disturbed. ‘Jocelyne pays court to all. He loves only love!’
She should not interrupt the Queen, yet Margaret showed no annoyance. She said only: ‘Bien, Isabella. Perhaps it is better that you should choose your own husband. Your mother loved me well; I kept her close to me. Sainte Vierge! I above all, do not wish to lose you!’
She leaned and kissed Elizabeth, who thought, incredulously: the Queen does my will! My thanks, Mother, for the tale of your own love-match, of which Margaret must know. As she walked behind Margaret towards the great staircase leading to the Hall, she felt, for a moment, the stirrings of omnipotence, blinding and transient as a lightning flash.
A seneschal cried open the way before them, the clarions began their blazing fanfare. The Hall was crowded; Elizabeth, excited, had difficulty in matching her steps to the Queen’s slow tread. At the door she fell back so that Sir John Wenlock, the chamberlain, could escort Margaret to the chair of estate. Elizabeth walked beside Ismania, who smiled sweetly. Carelessly, she smiled back.
‘Since your are so beloved, Isabella,’ whispered Ismania. You must take my place at the board. I’ll sit lower down.’
She urged her forward, saying, still smiling: ‘Sit nearest the dais; thus you will see the King’s Grace better.’
They proceeded the length of the crammed Hall, between the trestles set to seat two hundred knights and ladies as well as the esquires, bishops, priests and clerks who by various means had contrived an invitation to the King’s homecoming banquet. To right and left jewels and velvet shimmered, threadbare tapestries billowed under the gale of courtiers bowing in reverence to the Queen’s passing. To the left of the throne, servers scampered in and out of the buttery with loaded dishes. Queen Margaret seated herself in one of the two chairs of estate. The other was still vacant. Close behind her seat stood three of her chief ministers: Piers de Brezé, the great French general; Lord Clifford, arrogant and black-browed, and the old white-haired Earl of Shrewsbury, the Great Talbot. Beneath the cloth of estate and further down was another empty chair.
‘Tis the Queen’s wish.’ Margaret Ross leaned forward to whisper. In memory of Suffolk.’
Yes. Suffolk, butchered by Yorkists on Portsmouth’s strand. Jacquetta’s voice had held vehemence. For the first time Elizabeth wondered about war. If the Queen’s heart were sore enough to honour thus one dead captain, might she not seek revenge on York? Was Richard of York as quiescent as his recent oath of fealty would have men believe? The clarions brayed again, as if for a call to arms.
‘Way for the King’s Grace! Here enters his Grace King Henry the Sixth, lord of England and Ireland …’
Down the Hall came a small procession of men. Elizabeth craned to look. Here was the King; none was crowned, but she picked him out. His hair was quite grey; he was tall, broad, slim in the waist. A white scar on his cheek, and eyes so dark a grey that they were almost black. Bronzed skin, and an ironic, humorous mouth. So handsome; a fit mate for Margaret. He wore sapphire velvet, and the Lancastrian collar of ‘S’s gleamed goldly on his chest. The King – or was he the King after all? – knelt before Margaret and remained in obeisance, as did two younger men, whose faces were hidden. Another, whom Elizabeth had not even noticed, ascended unsteadily to the Queen’s side. He might, she thought, staring, have been some humble clerk drawn by mistake into the royal party. He was thin, bowed, solemn, and clad entirely in dusty black. His narrow head and ears were covered by a cap of the same black stuff, his only jewels a great tarnished reliquary swinging at his breast. In a milk-white melancholy face, grey, lustreless eyes surveyed the company disinterestedly. From her close proximity, Elizabeth watched him with disbelief. Could this be the heir of Agincourt? She watched the Queen take one of his limp pale hands and kiss it.
With difficulty she dragged her gaze away as food was set before her; steaming breast of partridge with a sweet pepper sauce, eels stewed in almond milk. Thomas Barnaby filled her hanap with the wine of Anjou. Across the Hall, Jocelyne de Hardwycke lifted his cup and blew a soundless kiss towards her. Ismania Lady Scales leaned back in her chair and called, over the tumult of resumed conversation: ‘Do you see the King, Isabella? Does he see you?’ Then she laughed, a knowing, dangerous laugh. Elizabeth felt a surge of annoyance. The King, she observed, had given no sign of seeing her yet, and she resolved to make him look at her. He would acknowledge her finery, and devil damn Ismania!
The King was talking in a loud voice that contrasted with his frail appearance. The handsome scar-faced man knelt smiling at his side.
‘By St. John!’ said the King. ‘What a throng are here this day! I am weary from the pilgrimage. At Walsingham they have phials of Our Lady’s blessed milk–’ he crossed himself ‘–but I had no money. All last night I lay before the shrine. By St. John! I had me much ghostly comfort from it. Nay, nay,’ waving a steward away. ‘No wine. Wine makes madmen and fools.’
The knight with the scar poured the Queen’s wine; she smiled at him, while the King maundered on, glancing over the Hall as if in a dream. Elizabeth sat up straight. She dipped a bunch of grapes in wine and ate them sensuously, her eyes fixed on the dais, and at last caught Henry’s attention. He looked long at her, then, his face whiter still, beckoned her nearer. With one triumphant backward glance at Ismania she moved gracefully forward, and sank deeply before the King in homage.
‘Who is this?’ he said in a high, querulous tone. The Queen answered softly: “My kinswoman, Isabella Woodville, does you solemn duty here, your Grace.’
Elizabeth raised her eyes and smiled at the King. She could see the large smudge of ash on his forehead. So he did penance – for what? She realized suddenly that he had no smile in answer to hers. He rose slowly, eyes bulging. With a shaking finger, he pointed at the silken square of Elizabeth’s bosom, exposed in the candlelight.
‘Forsooth!’ he cried. ‘Look! Look!’ he commanded the whole company. ‘My court becomes a nest of harlots!’ Eyes still riveted to Elizabeth’s bosom: ‘Forsooth, have you no shame? By St. John!’ He shook his finger at Elizabeth, who drew back, gasped, and burst into tears.
Henry turned upon the Queen. Tears stood in his eyes, his voice became a shriek. ‘And ye, madam! Ye be much to blame!’ To Elizabeth, who was weeping copiously: ‘Whore of Babylon! Blasphemer!’
Elizabeth turned and ran down the Hall, and the King sprang from his dais and, crying aloud, rushed in the opposite direction, disappearing through the buttery. She did not linger to see where he went. Tears streaming, she fled, past Ismania’s smile of utter triumph, away from Jocelyne’s sympathetic face, and out from the Hall, through the ranked heralds and guard. She ran upstairs and along cool stone galleries until she reached her chamber.
Behind in the Hall, the scar-faced man bent to Queen Margaret and whispered. When she nodded, her face troubled and angry, he turned to one of the young esquires who had, throughout, been hovering near the steps of the dais.
‘By St. John!’ he mocked. ‘John, is she not fair? Think you that you can comfort her?’
There was no mockery in the young man’s answer.
‘For the rest of my life,’ he said softly. ‘Now, I’ll not trouble her, she is too distressed. Yes, she is fair.’ He glanced at Margaret with a lifted eyebrow, a peculiarly sweet smile. ‘Fair as a Queen.’
Long after it had grown dark, Elizabeth sat on the floor of her chamber. The tear-stained scarlet dress lay beside her and she wore an old grey gown, high at the throat and pinned with a brooch which stabbed her neck whenever she moved. All was deathly quiet. For the past hour there had been faint sounds ascending from the Hall; the sweet wail of the viële, the rasping reed of the cromorne, and occasional halfhearted laughter. Now the revel was over, but the other women had not returned. She felt cold; the river mist was rising around the Palace and there was the first touch of autumn about. It seemed to penetrate the chamber, deepening her humiliation with its dank breath.
At first she had imagined wildly the whole court discussing her. She endowed the blaze of gaping faces with cynical smiles, she saw them asking one another her name and dismissing her with the deathly sign once used above the arenas of Rome. Then, as time passed and her panic gave way to sorrow, fury at Ismania, and finally numb despair, she realized that her fears were possibly groundless. The whole disaster had been over swiftly; she had knelt before the King only for as long as it had taken Queen Margaret to consume a handful of sugared rose-leaves. She had not even taken a full reconnaisance of the other faces around the dais; their reaction was unknown. A fleeting image of the scar-faced man nudged her mind; from him she had caught a flash of real appreciation, from a man who loved pretty women in gay dresses. Mary have mercy! Realization struck at her. A normal man. Again and again she saw the chalkfaced King, a film of spittle on his lip, eyes protruding as if he were being strangled. In God’s name, what kind of a King was he? That crust of ashes on his forehead marked him as a saint, yet he had accused her vilely, unjustly. He had railed likewise at his Queen. ‘Madam! ye be much to blame!’ Margaret’s face had darkened swiftly; she had dashed one glance towards the scar-faced man. Though he had come from pilgrimage with the King he had seemed apart from Henry, he had served only the Queen with wine. She wondered vaguely at his name and lineage. Now she would never know, for the King would surely dismiss her from court. Ismania’s laughter rang silently in her mind. For the first time she longed for her mother; the austere comfort, the powerful presence, Jacquetta’s strange philosophies.
‘Melusine.’ She spoke the name aloud.
The room became quieter still, as if it waited for an answer. Then, far below, the river’s lapping voice grew louder, surging about the thick walls, drifting on mist. She rubbed her wrists, her flesh stared in points of chill. Somewhere a night-bird cried mournfully, and it seemed as if the dark chamber were full of swirling fog. She thought ardently upon Jacquetta’s rune-like wisdom. She lives in us. She fortifies us. Receive her power.
‘Melusine,’ Elizabeth whispered. ‘I am your child.’
A shudder assailed her. From the time when she had been old enough to lisp the responses in the Mass, she had been familiar with the punishments awaiting heretics. The fiery eternity of torture, justly applied by a fierce God. Heat stronger than ten thousand candle-flames. Even on earth, they burned you if you forsook the old saints, the law-givers. Folk said that that pain was over quickly, if the faggots were green and the smoke thick. Not so with the fires of Hell. There, you burned for ever.
And then the strength and horror of these matchless doctrines ebbed utterly into the silence, a darker deeper silence through which she said softly:
‘I need one to protect me.’ Because she spoke to an empty room she laughed, to chase fear. She thought of Jocelyne de Hardwycke more seriously than ever before. He was the son of a powerful lord, and none would insult her with Jocelyne as husband. He was well-favoured and courtly, and he was for Lancaster. Truly, she had dreamed of love, the coup de foudre, the unmistakable face of love; but love was only a small part of life. She might well wed Jocelyne. The Queen would raise her brows at this volte-face, but she would doubtless be pleased after all.
‘So, send me a husband, Melusine,’ she said more boldly. The night-bird cried again. In her mind, she added: And let him be kind, and let me be loved more than any woman.
The feeling of cold had left her. Almost banteringly she continued, her voice thrown back from the stone walls: ‘And bring Ismania a punishment for mocking me; only a light one!’ she added hastily. Although this was but a game, played for comfort’s sake, even games could go awry. A sudden banging on the door sent her to her feet. In the doorway, ringed by light from the fiery cresset he carried stood the page, Barnaby. He called: ‘Anyone there? Ho! Dame Woodville?’
He entered, warily looking about him, and saw her.
‘All alone, my dame?’ He looked her over, smiled foolishly. ‘You’ve changed your gown. I liked t’other better.’
‘Spare me your likes and dislikes, Master Tom,’ said Elizabeth stiffly. ‘Where are the ladies?’
‘Below, playing at cards with your love-lorn knight,’ he replied. ‘As for your gowns, I tried to warn you of the King’s humour.’ He yawned, losing interest. ‘Come with me now. God’s nails, I am weary worn.’
‘Come with you where?’
‘To the Queen. She commands it.’
Renewed dismay filled her. Margaret was enraged. And was the King with her, ready to shriek fresh dreadful words? Trembling, she asked the page. He laughed raucously.
‘Nay, sweet dame. He’s in chapel and likely to be there all night. Saying a novena, he is.’
She bound up her hair while Barnaby held the light steady before the mirror. She straightened her gown and followed the page through long passages with arched vaulting and faded gilt columns to where the guard stood drowsily to attention outside the Queen’s apartments. They passed through the outer chamber of reception and through another door into the Queen’s retiring room, where she chose to renew herself with entertainment, or conferred with her ministers. Beyond yet another door lay her bedchamber. Elizabeth entered uneasily. The Queen was seated on a carved chair of Spanish walnut and she had changed her gown to a pale azure robette. Ermine fringed her throat, her face was pale. Two men, of which one was the knight with the scar, stood behind her, studying a parchment loosely held on Margaret’s lap. Master Francis, the Queen’s physician, mixed a draught at a side table, and Margaret Chamberlain, the royal dressmaker, was folding the purple mantle into a coffer. On cushions near the Queen’s feet a maiden of about nine years sat alone with a chessboard.
Elizabeth knelt. Barnaby, self-possessed and slightly truculent, prostrated himself before the Queen and said, with his face against the parti-coloured tiles:
‘My liege, here’s Dame Woodville. And I can’t find your dog.’
The scarred man said quickly: ‘Her Grace’s dog is lost?’ Margaret smiled wistfully. ‘Yes, my lord. Dulcinea, the lovely bitch you gave me. She was frightened by the clarions and ran away.’ To the page: ‘Barnaby, go. Search further.’ Then she beckoned Elizabeth. There was the Queen’s hand under her lips, a smell of jasmine, kindness.
‘My poor Isabella!’
The Queen was not wroth. She bade her rise. Ashamed no longer, she looked squarely about, at the men behind Margaret’s chair, and at the chess-playing child. Hers was a strange face; long and aware; the small, snapping black eyes were old in wisdom. The Queen said:
‘My lords, I would present my most affectionate kinswoman, Dame Isabella Woodville. His Grace, James Earl of Wiltshire’ (tall, swarthy, a saffron tunic – he kissed her in courtly fashion) ‘and my dear cousin–’ the Queen’s voice became heavy, as if her throat pained her – ‘Edmund Beaufort, Earl of Somerset.’
The scar added to his attractiveness. He, too, kissed Elizabeth, and drew back smiling.
‘Ma foi! there’s naught so lovely as a blonde maiden! But even your Rhineland fairness, Dame Isabella, cannot quench the daisy-flower!’
And his smile was turned on the Queen, as he fingered the gilt marguerites he wore about his neck. Elizabeth thought: so this is Beaufort, York’s chief enemy. Warwick, so men say, hates him too. I shall therefore love him as if he were my kin. The old-faced child got up and stood beside her.
‘This is my niece, the Lady Margaret Beaufort,’ said the Earl. Playfully he pinched the unsmiling little face. ‘The cleverest mortal alive. Lucretius, Tacitus, Suetonius, Sallust; all are her bedfellows. Dame Isabella, my gold collar for your neck if you can beat her at chess!’
Solemnly the Lady Margaret set the ivory men in the initial position. Elizabeth hesitated. There was something to be said first, expiation to be made for her dress, her flight from the Hall.
‘Your Grace, permit …’
The Queen read her troubled face. ‘Nay, Isabella, it was no fault of yours. The King…’ She paused. Suddenly she looked paler, and ill.
‘The King is holy,’ said Beaufort of Somerset. He turned to the physician. ‘Master Francis, is her Grace’s draught ready?’
The doctor presented a small vial. Beaufort forestalled the Queen’s hand, and swilled a little of the potion round his mouth.
‘Camphor and poppy, naught else,’ said Master Francis. ‘Her Grace will sleep soundly.’
‘Two drops,’ said Beaufort. ‘Two drops only. The rest is danger.’
The physician bowed and quit the chamber, and the dressmaker, her work finished, went also. Elizabeth fidgeted. Lady Margaret was waiting, eyeing her shrewdly from the spread chessboard.
‘Shall I play, your Grace?’
The Queen looked absently up from Beaufort’s hand, which still held the little vial.
‘Yes, Isabella. I sent for you because you were sad. Now you must be happy. The King … the King is frail, and prone to shocks that others do not comprehend. We must protect the King.’ Her eyelids dropped again. Her gaze rested on Beaufort’s bronzed hand.
Elizabeth sat on the cushion opposite Lady Margaret, and, looking into the sharp eyes, knew instinctively that she would be beaten. The child went to the game with ice-cold foresight, like a military campaigner, while above their heads, the Queen held a conversation with her two ministers. It became apparent that they had forgotten the existence of both Elizabeth and Beaufort’s young kinswoman.
‘By God’s Passion! He lost his gown again at Canterbury,’ Beaufort was saying. ‘He gave it away to a poor friar, a thin fellow who took such a liking to it that half my money went in its recovery.’
The Queen drew in her breath, as if she were in pain.
‘Pardieu, le pauvre Roi!’ she said softly.
‘La pauvre Angleterre,’ muttered the Earl of Wiltshire, and bit his lip. Lady Margaret moved her King to the right, and almost smiled. Elizabeth sat, her eyes fixed on the chessboard, listening.
‘I mentioned to him once more Richard of York,’ continued Beaufort. ‘He’s dangerous; I’ll not forget his face when he saw me in the King’s tent at Blackheath; by the Rood!–’ he laughed arrogantly – ‘York was sure I had been banished. The King’s Grace knew not what he did when he summoned me once more. I thought that York would fall in an apoplexy, that day last February.’
‘Nay, he knew not what he did,’ said Margaret slowly. Elizabeth advanced her pawn two squares and looked covertly at the Queen’s troubled face.
‘Better than York have failed to quell me,’ said Beaufort of Somerset with a chuckle. ‘Yet he is far from conquered, and so I told the King, who replied: ‘By St. John! Richard Plantagenet gave me his word, in holy St. Paul’s, to keep the peace, to raise no troops, and be forever obedient. All the saints witnessed his sacred oath.’ Then it was that he bestowed his mantle on that puling friar.’
‘Is the Duke still at Fotheringhay?’ asked James of Wiltshire.
‘Yes. My scurriers report his standard flying there. His Duchess is again with child.’
Lady Margaret Beaufort, taking advantage of Elizabeth’s inattention, put her King in safety and brought her Rook into play. The Queen sighed.
‘So Proud Cis is enceinte,’ she murmured. ‘Doubtless with another son. Well, Isabella?’ She had caught Elizabeth’s eyes upon her unguarded face. Guiltily, the other answered: ‘I was but musing, Madame.’
‘Musing on what?’ the Queen said stiffly. Elizabeth babbled: ‘Why, your Grace, husbands … I thought, if it should please you, I will take Sir Jocelyne after all.’ It was the first refuge she could think of. The Queen’s face eased instantly. Beaufort of Somerset laid a light hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder.
‘Isabella,’ he said. ‘Marriage is but a licking of honey off thorns. You will have many eager to plight their troth. Wait a little while.’
The Queen rose. ‘I am weary,’ she said. ‘This evening was not a glad occasion. We must devise some entertainment – a fair, a joust. Yes, a joust!’
The two Earls agreed heartily, and Elizabeth, who had never seen a tournament, was overjoyed. The anticipation lingered, after she had bidden the Queen good night, and had congratulated the impassive little Lady Margaret on her victory. Light-hearted, she made her way back to her own apartments. Beaufort walked some little way behind her; she was embarrassed in case he did not wish for her company so went faster, her small shadow and his tall one thrown in wavering procession on the walls.
At the staircase she saw Queen Margaret’s dog. A slim little whippet that had been frightened by the noisy trumpets, and cowered and snarled as she bent to pick it up. Beaufort came quietly up behind her.
‘I will take the beast,’ he said, quite roughly, and scooped it, thin and trembling, up into his arms. He began to walk slowly back towards the Queen’s chambers. The torches were flaming brightly and the Palace was quiet, so that Elizabeth saw how he buried his face in the little dog’s neck and heard his broken, passionate whisper.
‘Marguerite! My Marguerite!’
Barnaby met Elizabeth at her door. He was in a fury. He had been awakened from snatched sleep to summon the leech to Ismania Lady Scales, who was vomiting and purging. They could find no reason for her malady. It was quite unaccountable, like the work of some mischievous spirit.
She rode to the jousting ground in a litter with the Countess of Somerset and Lady Margaret Beaufort, and she was pleased that the other ladies were somewhere behind in the entourage, more subordinate than she, the Queen’s chosen lady. That evening in Margaret’s private apartments was a covenant of favour which none could gainsay. Her mind often returned to it; to the soft, quicksand conversation going on above her head; to the Queen’s kindness; to her own extraordinary witness of Beaufort in the passage giving way to the festering wound of a forbidden emotion. She held that scene in her heart, like the tales of the old Court of Love.
Upon the rough road the litter swayed suddenly and she was thrown against the stiff brocade side of the Countess of Somerset, who smiled dreamily. What would you say, my lady, if I told you that your lord loves the Queen? She knew, without asking, the answer: We all love her, Dame Isabella. God strengthen her.
‘Is this your first tourney, Madame?’ Lady Margaret Beaufort’s pompous voice broke through. She sat, small and composed, with a massive brow and those dark eyes that probed calmly. Beside her, her aunt the Countess looked ruffled and homely; sweat gleamed on her pink cheek, for it was warm in the litter. The Beaufort maiden continued to study Elizabeth. To avoid the penetration of that look, she bent her head and gazed through the window let into the side of the barrel-shaped carriage. London Bridge, with its row of felons’ heads rotting over the drawbridge, lay seven miles behind, and the sparkling river had coiled beside them and finally withdrawn. Now the procession passed on down the long rutted road to Eltham. The way was divided by quickset hedges; fields sprawled on either side, peopled by scores of peasants. They watched as the royal train, with its banners and blazoned arms, went by. They dragged off their caps and knelt in duty as the King, black-clad as usual, rode mournfully past; but as the litter bearing Queen Margaret rolled by, a man, tall, ragged-bearded, took one pace forward and spat covertly towards the daisy-flower emblem. The Countess of Somerset was leaning back with closed eyes, but Lady Margaret Beaufort missed nothing.
‘The fellow is a madman. None the less, had I the power I should have him instantly beheaded.’
Elizabeth glanced at her and could well believe it.
‘It is because the Queen’s Grace is too French,’ pursued the diminutive maiden. ‘Doubtless that churl’s father fought at Agincourt. Now that our French possessions are well nigh lost, he feels the sting.’ With a candour that made Elizabeth gasp, she said: ‘And of course, the Queen has no issue to set on England’s throne. She’ll not find favour until such time as she bears a prince.’ Musing, she said again: ‘Yea, I would have that oaf butchered where he stands. Or better, have his tongue out so he can spit no more.’
She seemed set fair for a long homily. Elizabeth frowned. She would rather not hear of tongue-cuttings and butchery; her spirits were high. Her gown was a poem in dull pink and gold, she wore a new curved cap given by the Queen as a reward for one of Jacquetta’s old receipts. Lately the Queen had been smitten by pains in her breast.
‘Take woodsage and horehound equally much. Stamp them and temper them with wine and drink it three days fasting.’
This leechcraft she had shown to the Queen, and Margaret had been pleased. She had been raising the cup to her lips when Beaufort of Somerset entered. As before, with the sleeping potion, he had nipped the vessel from her hand to taste it with a fierce concentration. Then, nodding, he had thrown one of his bronzed smiles in Elizabeth’s direction, and had allowed the sovereign to drink.
‘If my lord has an evil of the breast, I can cure it,’ Elizabeth said, nervously jesting. ‘My mother swears on this draught.’
‘And for a pain in the heart?’ Still Beaufort smiled, but as if the smile hurt him. ‘Has la sage Jacquette simples to drive that ill away? Potions to steady the weight of government upon a frail head? Herbs against the canker of a realm divided?’
‘My lord?’ She had looked at him, only half-comprehending the reason for his sudden savagery. Then unexpectedly, King Henry had entered the chamber with John Faceby, his own doctor and the inevitable retinue of sombre-clad priests and monks. He had shuffled across to take the Queen’s hand as a child might seek the clasp of its mother. He had given Elizabeth one glance that held no recognition of the fact that she was even female, much less that the last time she had so desperately offended the eye. He was, she thought, an enigma.
The procession halted at the tiltyard. At the head of the line, Henry was squired from his horse. This day they had managed to part him from his black skull-cap, and a thin diadem on his head caught the sun in a sad little flash of fire. He murmured to himself, a prayer, and his eyes roamed to the great loges which had been built for the spectators on either side of the lists, to the flaring pennoncelles surmounting each pavilion, and to the royal standard above his own state canopy. He looked, and murmured, then cast his eyes down at the velvety grass, where his gaze remained.
‘Come, your Grace,’ said Beaufort crisply. Henry stood, pointing to something in the grass, visible only to himself, for all the lords peered, mystified. Then, urged, he took one faltering step, and another, and walked towards the royal loge, while heralds sounded his advance.
Elizabeth stood poised upon the step of the litter, stunned by the gaudy scene; the surging colours of tapestry and standard, the tall pavilions flinging round shadows on the emerald grass. A small figure in her wild-rose dress and golden cap, she gazed at the panoply of mock war; the great destriers caparisoned to the hoof in cloth of gold and silver, the knights already armed for the tourney, unwieldy yet magnificent in their ceremonial harness; the hundred different arms displayed on bright shield and pennon. The King, now joined by Queen Margaret in slow procession across the ground and seeming comforted by her presence; the Queen herself, divinely encompassed in a mist of teardrop pearls and silver tissue. Beaufort and his son Edmund; Piers de Brezé, James of Wiltshire, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Great Talbot, with his white head and veteran armour. Elizabeth looked only at the royal pair, the principal courtiers; those who stood in shadow went unnoticed. She did not see, very near and fixed upon her, the unknown eyes of love.
The young man in the sky-coloured tunic had waited long, yet at the shattering moment of seeing her emerge from the litter he felt the impact so keenly that he actually shivered and signed his breast with the Cross. Had any asked his reason he might have laughed, muttered that he was safeguarding his soul from too much beauty; or that he summoned the saints to protect this woman from all ill; or that he invoked the blessing of God, Our Lady, and even the pagan Venus, upon his own heart-tearing love.
That she had never noticed him, and indeed had not done so on the night when she had fled weeping from the King’s displeasure, did not trouble him unduly. So often had he possessed her in his mind that already it seemed she was wholly his. Had he been told otherwise, he would have been inconsolable, and bemused as a dreamer roughly roused. He was Beaufort’s esquire, he was just twenty years old, and he had never been in love. The posturing amours of court life were to him empty and meaningless. Likewise he had so far escaped the more serious affair of a politic marriage, shaped for the annexation of property and the enhancement of family power. His enthusiasms had lain with soldiering; his horsemanship, unequalled among his peers, and his courage bordering on rashness, were celebrated. Until the night when he had returned with Beaufort from escorting the King’s pilgrimage, his mind had been steadfastly applied to the pursuit of knighthood. Although, unlike many of his fellow esquires, he owned no crazy lust for blood, he had followed with interest the machinations of the House of York, in the vague hope that one day he might show his prowess in battle. Given a stout horse, he fancied himself, not without a little wry humour, leading a victorious charge. Beaufort inspired him, although the Earl, it seemed, had come close of late to breaking his knightly word. He had promised to send his esquire to Calais as emissary and scurrier, for there was information to be gleaned there regarding the humours of France and Burgundy, and the prospect was inviting. Yet this promise had been given a twelvemonth ago, and was not yet fulfilled.
Now, Calais meant nothing. Life was changed utterly, and it was Beaufort himself who had been the catalyst. For the Queen had sent word of her new gentlewoman, and Beaufort had been inspired to speak of her beauty to others. The reality of Elizabeth had been a shock; she was fairer than rumoured, as the vision of a saint outmatches the written legend.
He had never seen a saint, but he had seen Elizabeth, and found in her the distilled essence of his unimagined dreams. Now, at Eltham, she passed before him for a second time, and the whole scene wavered into mist around her, leaving her as the jewelled core, twice as bright, twice as lovely, and the bringer of soft tears.
So did John Grey, son of Lord Ferrers of Groby, stand with the filmed eyes of love, to watch his lady shining in the sun.
She descended from the litter with the Countess and her niece. Outside the jousting ground, folk had come to watch the sport through knotholes in the palisade. There were a few mendicant friars, a cluster of sore-ridden beggars, and some amateur entertainers, jugglers, a bear stumbling on a chain. Near the entrance were a half-dozen gypsies, darkeyed and filthy. One, a woman, broke from the rest and ran towards Elizabeth. Thomas Barnaby cursed her, dealing blows from his staff; but she dodged him and threw herself down before the three ladies.
‘Your future, worships, for a handful of silver!’
‘Silver be damned,’ growled Barnaby. The woman knelt upright, eyes knowing and unafraid, rat-gnawed kirtle stained with berry juice. Lady Margaret Beaufort held a muskball to her nose against the gypsy’s earthy reek. Yet Elizabeth looked for a moment into the strange eyes with their courage and calmness, and heard the woman say, softly:
‘Why don’t you wear your proper token, my lady?’ The eyes were set upon Elizabeth’s brooch, the tree-root emblem of the Bedfords, enclosed in a pearl frame. The woman moved closer, emitting the scent of woodsmoke and rank herbs.
‘The serpent,’ she whispered. ‘The beautiful serpent. You have her face. Earth, Fire, Air, Water; the last is yours.’
Elizabeth turned to Barnaby. ‘Give her money.’ The gypsy spoke again, unhesitatingly; a little rhyme.
‘A royal prince, fair lady, shalt thou wed,
But troubles dire shall fall upon thine head.’
She turned from Elizabeth, but it was still for her that she spoke.
She looked at Lady Margaret, haughty and fretful, and at the smiling, docile Countess of Somerset. Then her glance went to the royal standard, and finally back to Elizabeth.
‘Bone of they bone shall by a future fate,
With blood of these three houses surely mate.’
Then she clawed the coin reluctantly given her by Barnaby into her bosom and darted back into the swell of people. Disappointment filled Elizabeth. The rhyme had come too glibly. It was all nonsense, and a waste of silver. Barnaby was pulling her out of the path of a dozen horses, ridden by brilliantly armoured knights and surging towards the tiltyard. The breeze fanned banners to a blaze. Barnaby cried: ‘Tis the Tudor knights!’ They walked on across the green towards the loges and Barnaby said: ‘My lord Edmund, and my lord Jasper. Owen, the third brother, sports not.’
‘Owen is a monk,’ said Margaret Beaufort’s clipped voice. ‘So he jousts only with the saints. Edmund, Dame Isabella–’ she turned with great dignity – ‘is my future husband. It is arranged. He is the King’s half-brother, as you know.’
All knew, but Margaret could not resist pressing the point. One of the popular scandals was the old love-tale of Owen Tudor the elder, the humble Welsh esquire who had wheedled his way into the chamber of Queen Katherine, the widow of Harry of Agincourt. Owen had a singing voice to shame the birds, and bright gold hair. Folk said that Queen Katherine had a taint of madness; her father, Charles the Sixth of France, had been utterly lunatic. Thus they acquitted her fall from chastity. Her kingly son, the holy Henry, now made all well. Here were the Tudors, fruit of that old treasonous coupling, riding to the joust, welcome at the court. They had inherited little of their father’s comeliness; both were thin and sallow and Jasper’s mouth was cruel. They gave fair greeting to the King and Queen, who sat beneath their canopy while the contestants finished arming in the pavilions below. Taking her seat near the royal loge, Elizabeth heard the King’s clear brittle voice.
‘By St. John! I behold all my household knights! Why have we no foreign guests here this day?’
Beaufort, his foot upon the stair of the loge, said gently: ‘There was little time to send ambassadors, your Grace. The Queen devised this tourney for your pleasure.’
‘Yes, ’twas kindly thought,’ said the King vaguely. ‘By St. John! Let not the sport be too rough, though. Men have been slain in joust.’
Margaret leaned to him. ‘Sire, will you give the signal?’ The marshals were waiting with their white wands poised and the line of heralds had trumpets at shoulder height. The King nodded, and was about to raise his hand in which he held a gilded staff, when a commotion at the entrance to the lists diverted him. The whole company grew instantly alert; they rose a little from their seats, they whispered. They turned to one another and then back again to look, with expressions of incredulity, anger, and mirth, at the mounted men who rode on to the green. There were three knights, and the standards borne above them flaunted as if they bragged a challenge into the teeth of the wind. The snap of their colours drew all eyes; around the lists the whispers became a murmuring roar. Followed by a few esquires, the three cantered across the sward, and the banners leaped above them. Blazoned upon the air-flung silk was the fetterlock of York, next to it the device of Lord Salisbury, and, flaring so that its shadow ramped towards the royal dais, the snarling Bear and Ragged Staff of Warwick. Over their half-armour the three knights wore mantles starred with the White Rose of York.
‘Here,’ said Beaufort to the King, ‘would seem to be your foreign guests, my liege.’
Henry rose uncertainly and sat down again. The Queen showed anger. Briefly all her beauty vanished, leaving an expression of keen malevolence; her eyes became suffused with blood and the sweetness of her lips assumed a vitriolic line. A dangerous face; even as it faded and was replaced by her customary calmness, its memory was awesome. Slowly the three knights dismounted and walked towards the royal loge. They drew off their velvet caps and knelt. Warwick’s mantle parted to show two crests; two helms facing each other, one bearing the Beauchamp Swan for Warwick the other the Griffin of Montagu, for Salisbury. Richard of York came forward first to kiss the King’s hand. He was small and slight, with a high-boned, determined face. Dark hair with reddish lights fell to his shoulders, and his eyes were a clear, fanatical blue. Salisbury behind him was blond, more obviously Plantagenet, with great height and breadth of shoulder. Warwick, with the sureness of one who draws all eyes, came last to the dais. Like his father of Salisbury, he was tall and strong. His adamantine will was apparent in the long, clean-shaven chin and the grey eyes which, though large as a woman’s, had a glittering, hawkish fire. Through a long silence the King spoke doubtfully.
‘God’s greeting to my lords. Why are you come? I fear we are all unready for you.’
Barnaby, picking his teeth, said, in a voice loud enough to make heads turn: ‘God’s Tongue! Why does he speak thus, unwarily? There’s much truth in politesse …’
Warwick rose toweringly. His rose-dappled mantle swirled; black hair curled on his brow. Everything of him was puissant and challenging and might have said: Behold us! We of the blood royal, of Edward the Third …
‘My liege, we heard there was a joust, and have humbly come to see the sport. Also–’ he paused, enough to weight his words – ‘we wondered eagerly on your Grace’s health.’
‘The King is well.’ Queen Margaret answered, swiftly, coldly.
Warwick turned smiling to the Duke of York, ‘Then, our hearts rejoice, eh, Dick? These rumours should be hanged at birth, like wantless pups … ’twas said your Grace was ailing.’
‘News of this joust has travelled fast,’ said Beaufort of Somerset slowly. ‘It was arranged very recently; a privy affair.’
Warwick said, into the wind: ‘My lord of Somerset is skilled in knowledge of privy affairs. So much that others–’ he indicated Richard of York – ‘reck not what transpires in the royal Chamber of Council, though they have every right! And the fancies that are spread! for one, that in England, fair women rule …’
Beaufort’s face turned to angry chalk. But the King answered, amiable, artless: ‘By St. John! I know not what men say! At Walsingham lately I had a sign. If my lords do but love one another, all will be well. Will you ride in the tourney, my lords? Some of my knights lack an adversary. My lord of Somerset is keen to pledge a great spear against a worthy opponent.’
‘Nay, my liege,’ said Warwick easily. ‘This day we are not equipped. But I’ll touch steel with you, my lord of Somerset.’ The breeze blew his hair into serpent coils and his jaw tensed. ‘Another time. Gladly.’
The King laughed, a high, irrational sound. His eyes wandered mazedly over the three knights. He said suddenly: ‘And Richard of York? Well, cousin? How does your lady wife, the Rose of Raby?’
Again, Warwick was the spokesman.
‘Thriving, both long and large,’ he said lovingly. ‘There’s no more goodly sight than a fair woman great with child!’
And his eyes travelled insultingly over the Queen, her weasel waist and boyish breasts. She sat up straight, whitefaced as Beaufort, and the tear-drop pearls on her bodice quivered with her hard breathing. Warwick said musingly:
‘Children! they are strange creatures, my liege. Why, only lately, my cousin of York’s young son, Edward of March – but ten years old – talked of leading an army … all fancy, certes, yet what fiery blood! As if the spirit of dead warriors moves the child!’
The Countess of Somerset gasped. ‘Jesu!’ she whispered to Elizabeth. ‘The dogs make no effort to hide their aspirations to the Crown. Why does the King suffer this goading?’
Henry said gently: ‘Will you be with us long, my lords?’
Richard of York answered in his mellow, distinct voice: ‘Alas, your Grace must give us leave to ride as soon as the sport is finished. I must to Fotheringhay again.’
Salisbury added, laughing richly: ‘Yes, Sire. We save our strength. I promise you shall see us riding, armed, one day!’
‘For God’s love, start the tourney,’ breathed the Countess of Somerset. She looked appealingly at her husband and motioned towards the marshals, waiting with their white wands. Beaufort nodded and bent to whisper in the King’s ear. A look of utter blankness crossed Henry’s face. He looked up at the banners, the horsed knights waiting, their rich armour winking strongly at each pavilion. Esquires hung desperately on the bridles of excited horses. The King looked down at the green grass, as if seeking a sign, and was dumb.
‘Will you be seated, my lords?’ said Queen Margaret, in a voice like frozen rain. Warwick, Salisbury and York bent the knee again and withdrew. Elizabeth saw them advancing towards her own loge, Warwick growing bigger, taller, filling her sight. She shrank closer to the Countess, her eyes riveted upon the enemy’s steel and velvet, the reddish aureole of York’s flowing hair, Salisbury’s strength. Her disquiet grew. Mary have mercy! Warwick was taking his place in the loge beside her. She turned her face away, while the Countess, shaking with indignation, inclined her head stiffly and murmured a cool greeting to the Earl. Then, she heard him say:
‘Madame, you do not present me to this lady?’
She heard the ‘Countess’s reply. Because there was no help for it, she turned and looked straight into Warwick’s eyes. Yes, she said inwardly; this man is danger. This powerful renegade is truly my foe.
‘Dame Woodville. So, Madame, we meet.’
He was that rarity; a man who looked at her without admiration.
‘I had hoped,’ he said deliberately, ‘to have had a reply to my letter in your own hand, not your mother’s. I had imagined also that it would be far different from the one I received.’
So Jacquetta had given him a straight answer. Haughtily Elizabeth replied: ‘Sir, I thank you for your interest in my affairs, but the matter is closed.’ She looked again towards the royal loge, where Beaufort and the Queen bent to King Henry, who gazed dreamily still at some mystery in the grass. It was an ant, carrying an egg on its back, and he appeared to be talking to it.
‘The King seems distrait,’ remarked Warwick.
On the sward below, the first contestants, James Earl of Wiltshire and the Duke of Buckingham, sat their horses, holding great foil-tipped lances couched. The breeze fluttered the destriers’ housings, and the Earl’s beast pawed with a massive hoof. The trumpeters waited, silent. And suddenly, Richard of York laughed. It was a merry, sweet laugh, but all the danger in the world was in it. Queen Margaret moved swiftly. She rose, taking the royal wand from Henry’s lax hand. She shimmered, pearly and slender; the white oval of her face was savage, anxious. Her clear voice carried over the emerald sward.
‘I, Marguerite, as Lady Paramount, give the command. Earl Marshal, let the tourney commence!’
Under the scream of the clarions and the yell of ‘Laissez aller!’ Warwick said, with a studied insolence. ‘So it is true! Fair woman do rule England this day!’
Elizabeth slewed to stare at him. As the roaring thunder of hooves mounted and the two knights approached one another at a gallop, she knew that Warwick had not done with tormenting her.
‘Do not imagine I have forgotten the slight you offered my liegeman, Dame Woodville,’ he said, almost amiably.
She looked away again, pretending to be absorbed in the joust. With a splintering crash, the two destriers met on either side of the palisade. Wiltshire’s lance, held crosswise at an angle, found its mark in the ornaments on Buckingham’s helm. Simultaneously, Buckingham’s point lodged in the decorations of his opponent’s gorget. Both knights were unhorsed. The riderless horses thundered on, one of them plunging into the barrier dividing the lists from the spectators. The air was rich with cries.
‘You could have had my good lordship, Dame Elizabeth,’ said Warwick softly. ‘Yet you called down a murrain upon my person.’
One of the combatants was cast like a beetle on its back, helpless in his heavy armour. Esquires rushed to aid him. Elizabeth saw herself again in the hall at Grafton Regis, crying: ‘Pox take Warwick!’ and the outraged faces of the visiting Yorkists. Evidently they had lost no time in relaying her insult to their chief. She stared unseeingly at the lists. The contestants were horsed again and riding, faster this time, lances held loosely, ready for the moment of impact and the hard high thrust.
‘So, Dame Woodville,’ pursued the inexorable voice, ‘a knight of Jerusalem does not suit your lady’s palate. Likewise my patronage is to be spat upon … did you think it wisdom to make an enemy of me?’
The assault of his eyes drove into her. Under that terrible look the high preparation of words cringed and died. She feared and loathed him. Then the Countess of Somerset, who had been listening closely while feigning interest in the joust, saved her. Turning, she said kindly: ‘They fight like lions.’ (Wiltshire and the Duke were on foot, hacking at each other with broadswords.) ‘Isabella, is the sport too rude for you? Jesu! you are trembling. Will you not rest a while in our chariot? Barnaby – where is the boy? – will escort you.’
‘Merci, merci, madame,’ whispered Elizabeth. How clever of the Countess! A little of her courage returned and she cast one bitter glance at Warwick as he rose to allow her to step down from the loge.
‘Yes, my lady,’ he said softly. ‘You run from me. How fortunate are women – they may run while men must fight. Run, Dame Woodville. We shall meet anon.’
Barnaby gave her his arm and she leaned on him, affecting faintness as they walked down the tapestry-hung passage between the loges, to where there was calmness and birdsong and the air was sweet with crushed grass and blossoms. Barnaby grumbled all the way; he had been enjoying himself. She dismissed him.
‘Will you be safe?’ he said. ‘God’s Eyes, I never thought to play wetnurse. Go rest then, lady. I’ll see you later! He ran off, eager to witness the next joust, which was to be between Lord Clifford and the Great Talbot. He had laid heavy wagers on Buckingham’s victory and was furious at missing the outcome.
Elizabeth could see the litters drawn up by the roadside, with grooms and pages sleeping in their shadow, but she did not go to them. Instead, she turned and walked down a little leafy road, where Eltham’s crumbling palace stood among great oaks. There was a small stone archway through which she passed to find herself in a garden so beautiful that she stood entranced for a moment. Two or three tame peacocks bowed and danced upon the clipped lawns, yew hedges bounded the abundant rose-beds, and there was a large lake, white with lilies, their delicate stars nestling on broad flat leaves. Between the flowers the water was so clear that she could see every detail of her pale reflection. She knelt, and the pallid Elizabeth wavered up at her and smiled softly, with teeth like white seeds between scarlet lips, and eyes still shadowed with a remnant of disquiet. The friendly water welcomed her image. Far away, she heard the distant clarions’ scream and the rumble of hooves, like noises heard in a dream.
Still Warwick’s pressing menace cast a cloud on beauty, even as the breeze blew a cloud across the lake to hide the sun. Melusine, she said wordlessly, where is my protector? For I need one now, if ever. I have made an enemy of Warwick. Where he is concerned, even the Queen must look to her protection. A feeling of doom made her shudder, and the mirrored Elizabeth shuddered, her body long and wavering in the water. Melusine, Melusine, have you forgotten me?
Then brightness came again, but in the lake beside her image, a shadow remained. A young straight shadow that moved forward and became defined. A face that took gold from a sunbeam and mirrored itself brightly; a curving mouth that spoke of sweet temper and good sense. Straight features; one eyebrow set in a quirkish lift. Eyes that grew large in the lake. A face to cherish and to trust. A face to look upon for ever.
She gathered her skirts and rose slowly to face him. He wore a tunic of sky-blue satin and knelt instantly at her feet. When he raised his face, with its innocent mouth, all ready to do her homage, she thought, without surprise: So this is he. He is here at last. Love, I have waited, and now the waiting ends. She heard his quiet voice murmuring an apology for startling her. His lips were warm on her cold hand. He knew her name, he said, he had watched her progress from the lists. She knew him not, he said: John Grey, son of Lord Ferrers of Goby. And then the courtly conversation ceased, and they looked at one another, as if they had thirsted for the looking since time began.
‘She met with Raymond by her home, the fountain in the forest, and took his wits away.’
The coup de foudre. The power and glory of the heart. These were mere words, inadequate tools to describe the joy that was almost pain, the feeling of bodily dissolution, spiritual ecstasy. Words to skim only the surface of the deep water, the sure and sweet experience of mutual worship, the certainty that now the nucleus of the world breathed and lived.
There had been no need for coquetry or wooing. Within five minutes of that first meeting, all was equal. Reality made nonsense of her one-time cherished tales of romance. Those chroniclers knew naught of love, love’s real implications. Only Chaucer, perhaps, had come a little close.
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquering,
The dreadful joy, that alwey slit so yerne,
Al this mean I by love ..
The dreadful joy. The essence of pain, instinctive, unfathomable. A host of new, half-understood fears. Fear of the knowledge that this person, now so dear, was only mortal and would, one day, cease to breathe, to kiss, to laugh and sorrow with her. The dreadful joy of realizing that she was split in two, that half of her went with him through the world, into danger, or sadness, so that all his pleasures were hers and all his griefs, her misery. For the first time in her life, Elizabeth longed for self-abnegation. Pride slipped away; she wished to be fluid, invisible, to crawl inside his heart and be one with him for ever. If he were sad, she wept. If he rejoiced, she knew childlike gaiety. To her eyes, the sky seemed hard, a bright sapphire, and every flower, tall icy lily and blood-red rose, met her with an almost physical shock. Wherever she looked she saw his face, in searing beauty and fondness. His voice called her in the wind and the birds’ song, his very existence sharpened her senses. His name was a talisman, a comforter. The coup de foudre. So had Jacquetta named it, the passion few had known. Now Elizabeth held it in her heart, and was daily amazed, for she had not thought herself capable of such love.
She became careless, forgetful, smiling gently whenever the other women spoke to her; she fell in with their plans where once she would have been obstructive and tantalizing. She kissed Ismania on the cheek and offered to tire her hair in the new Italian fashion. She loaned Lady Dacre the pearl-and-ruby ring. Only when rumour of her attachment crept through the Palace, coming to roost in the women’s chamber, was this new madness explained, and they laughed. Only a little, for John Grey was truly noble, favoured by powerful lords. Bradgate Hall in Leicestershire, the inheritance of Petronilla de Grandmesnil, whose father Baron Hinckley was tenant in capite there to the Conqueror himself, had been handed down to Lord Ferrers of Groby; Bradgate, therefore, was a fine drop of honey to lick from the thorns of marriage! The reason for their jealous laughter was chiefly Elizabeth’s mien; she epitomized the love-lorn maiden of song and ballad. She heard their mockery through an amethyst haze; she looked upon the world with gentle uncaring joy. When without warning the bubble burst, and Beaufort ordered John to accompany him to Calais, it seemed an evil trick of fate.
On a day when autumn had cursed the trees leafless, John sailed, and Elizabeth went sadly about her duties. Going to the Queen’s bower, she passed the guard; one of the elderly knights chaffed her gently, saying that she looked like a maid preparing for death; her inborn swift anger, fettered for weeks by happiness, rose, an ugly beast. She tongued a cruel retort that brought the blood to the old man’s face.
The Queen was alone save for a viol-player scraping a lonely French air, and, beside him, two seamstresses repairing a gown. The window was half-open and banged restlessly under the assault of the wind. Margaret looked once at Elizabeth; it was enough.
‘What troubles you, Isabella?’
‘Your Grace cannot wish to learn of my small affairs.’
A little impatiently Margaret beckoned her nearer. The Queen looked unwell; her face was puffy, her eyes bright with unease.
‘Tell all, Isabella,’ she said. ‘I pray you, attend my hair. Take off this cursed headgear. My brow has an iron band around it.’
Elizabeth lifted off the little coif which was like a crescent moon, webbed with tawdry veiling. The pale hair fell free; she set the comb to the Queen’s small head. The two faces wavered together in the mirror. The comb moved down like a fish through sunlit water. Margaret’s expression was distant, troubled. Elizabeth thought suddenly: Can the Queen ever have loved as I do? All her world encompassed in that saintly, wandering King. She has been wed to him for seven years. Would to God that I were wed. John, ah, John.
‘Tell me,’ the Queen repeated. She took a strand of hair over one shoulder and began to braid it deftly. Sighing, Elizabeth said: ‘As you will, Madame. It is an old tale ever repeated. I have met the man I would marry and he has gone away.’
‘His name?’ said the Queen lightly, and Elizabeth told her.
It is a good choice,’ said Margaret. ‘Grey will be wealthy, and he is strong for Lancaster.’ She went on braiding, with delicate, unerring twists, talking almost to herself, like a man who names captains, deploys armies.
‘So, he is of the Norman blood. C’est vrai! I believe the title comes through an heiress of Blanchemains to the line of Ferrers Groby. And Bradgate is a prize … their demesne stretches far …
Elizabeth said, proud of her own extravagance: ‘Madame, I’d take him were he a beggar.’ And then her voice began to tremble. ‘For I love him. I loved him before I was born and I shall love him when we are both dust. With every vein of my heart and every hair of my head, I love him, sore.’
There was no showmanship in this last speech which astounded even herself. It left her weeping, trying to nudge away tears with the bell of her sleeve. She looked into the mirror and found the Queen’s blurred face. Its expression was indistinguishable.
‘And does he, too, love you with this so hot passion?’ enquired Queen Margaret in a strange voice. Her hands had ceased braiding and lay twisted in her lap.
‘Ah yes, Madame!’ cried Elizabeth with joy. ‘Yes, and yes, and more!’
‘Then you have everything!’ said the Queen. She sprang up, and took two or three frantic running steps towards the window, as if to cast herself out, and down. She turned as swiftly to show a haggard face, one unfinished braid coming apart, and the eyes of a trapped wolf. She’s ill, Elizabeth thought, appalled. She made a movement of dismissal to the sewing-women and they left hurriedly; the viol-player tucked his instrument under his arm and crept out after them. She searched for words to calm Margaret.
‘Sweet your Grace, I am sure …’
‘Naught is sure!’ cried the Queen wildly. There was anger directed at Elizabeth in her eyes and voice. O Jesu, thought Elizabeth: how have I offended?
‘Madame,’ she stammered, ‘you yourself advised me to choose my own husband. This I have done, and I ask your royal assent to my marriage with John Grey of Groby. Madame, as you have ever been kind to me, I ask you this.’
The dreadful thought occurred to her that Margaret, for some reason, might withhold her consent. Very well; she would approach the King, as her own mother had done (a sigh, a tear, a loving look. I bent the young reed of a king to my will!) She would go in ashes and mourning rather than give up John. Then Margaret said shrilly:
‘You shall have my royal assent. You shall marry John Grey. I shall watch your children growing strong about you. I shall see you loving and loved. And I shall curse you for it.’
Then she wept, and caught blindly at Elizabeth’s hand like a woman sinking in quagmire. After a long time, she was calm and said, looking through tear-washed eyes: ‘Doucette, some demon led my tongue. Envy is the deadliest sin of all It eats the heart. Isabella: is to love and be unloved crueller than love returned yet forbidden?’
‘Your Grace should not speak thus to me,’ Elizabeth said uneasily. In her mind she saw Henry, lack-lustre as a winter bird, and fleeing the flesh; and Beaufort, whispering of his bitter passion to a dumb beast.
‘Why not?’ said Margaret sharply. ‘You who will have everything, can you not help me bear my pain? You will have love, like few women. You will have sons, like all women … She bit her lips and the wolfish, haunted look returned to her eyes. ‘Richard of York’s wife … la maudite … mark you how they taunted me with the news that she’s with child again? Sancta Maria! My life, my throne, is threatened through love … lovelack!’ She caught Elizabeth’s hand again and dragged her to a prie-dieu in the corner of the room, where a small bright flame burned fitfully against the wind.
‘Pray with me,’ she commanded. ‘Maria, Maria, Sancta Maria, thou who wast Mother to Our Lord, hear me. Jube, Domine, benedicere … Lord, grant a blessing: a son!’ Inarticulately her prayers lashed upward about the flame, while Elizabeth added her own. To Saint Bernard, patron of childbirth; and in secret, to Saint Valentine, patron of lovers. Praying, amid Margaret’s tumult, for herself. That she and John should marry … that Beaufort should bring him back home, soon. The room was suddenly quiet. Margaret stared dazedly at the wall. Elizabeth whispered: ‘Madame, my lord of Somerset …’
The Queen flinched and trembled perceptibly. ‘What of him? He is in Calais.’
‘Where he commands my own dear lord,’ said Elizabeth softly. ‘Summon them home, my liege.’
Queen Margaret looked at her. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes. And may God answer all our prayers.’
Little and lovely for all her ravaged expression, she knelt before the prie-dieu and looked steadily at Elizabeth, who saw, unknowingly, the revelation of things to come. The Queen’s eyes were soft with love but the sacred flame, reflected obliquely, gave them the aspect of two fair cities, burning.
And she was happy again. The millrace of her joy moved fast through the remnants of autumn, laughed in the grip of winter, and bubbled over at the holy season of Christmas, when the court assumed a modest gaiety. Though the King spent more and more time in prayer and meditation, the Palace pleasured itself as extravagantly as Margaret could afford. Throughout the twelve days there were plays and disguisings, mostly of a sacred nature for the King’s approval. On the final evening, when the Lord of Misrule had capered an introduction, Richard Bulstrode, the revelsmaster, presented a pageant of his own contriving: the Passing of the Hours. Elizabeth played the Queen of Night. In a gown of clinging black tissue, with her unbound hair crowned with stars, she was borne into the Hall on a painted litter, dramatically lit by cressets. Lithe and rounded, she was carried high, the proud coin of her perfect profile luminous against the flames, the arrogant blue eyes meekly downcast, the silken, star-twined hair blowing gently in her wake.
She felt the heat of the torches warm upon her cheek, and close; she feared nothing, not even fire. She was immune, this night, and glorious. The procession approached the dais where Margaret sat with Beaufort kneeling at her side and where the King observed the secular scene with a gloomy primness. Beaufort’s brown hand rested near the Queen’s small foot. Little details sprang forth; the faces of servers and henchmen, the glint of a peacock feather stuck like a sword in the picked carcass; the ragged hem of a tablecloth There were glances too; the rapt looks of unknown men avid for beauty and caught in unconscious lust; the women’s faces tight with jealousy. She saw John, he stood a little apart from the dais. He was stamped with an almost sacred emotion: the look bestowed by a father on a cherished child, or a good priest on the Eucharist.
There was nothing priestly about him later. Intoxicated by the thunderous applause after she had said her few trite rhyming words and been borne again from the Hall, she sought him out, where he waited for her on the gallery. She cut short his courtliness, his murmured words of adoration, and flung her arms about his neck. Unwittingly she lit dangerous fires, whispering, teasing, turning her smooth cheek to meet his. Was I not fair, my lord? Did you hear their cries? He kissed the bubbling speech to silence, holding her tightly enough to hurt. He gathered handfuls of her shimmering hair to kiss, and she felt his power, the bruising inevitable harbinger of possession. Although she loved him and melted to him for an instant, a little cool corner of her mind whispered: Hold back. So she withdrew, seeing the candle of his eyes grown large with longing, leaned tiptoeing again to kiss each longing, lightly, and slipped away to stand apart from him against a pillar.
He groaned. ‘O Jesu, Isabella. Can one love so and still keep sanity?’
He followed her, kissing her hand, her sleeve, the hollow of her throat. Again she retreated, to stand in half-light. Above the black gown her face was pale, a disembodied candle-flame.
‘I love you, my lord, and trust have kept my wits.’ She tried to speak lightly. He was not to be put off, however. In his arms again, part of her succumbed to the sweetness of his mouth. The other part, away somewhere, watched and measured and warned. Hold back. Even the flame of his hand upon her breast was tempered by that coolness. He whispered of love, and incautious, impetuous suggestions: she lay with the other ladies of a night, did she not? And he, God’s curse on it, was bound to serve Beaufort of Somerset, should he be needful or wakeful; but there were ways, friends who would do duty for him, be it for gold or other favours. By the Mercy of Christ, Isabella! ‘I must have you this night, or die!’ And the heat of her leaped in gladness towards this consummation, while the wary, sea-cool essence of her, of Melusine, who lay apart from her husband every Saturday, writhed and gave tongue. A sweet rebuke, damning and promising in a breath.
‘Are we not then to be wed, my lord?’
Instantly he was contrite. It was a churlish, unforgivable thought, yet her beauty was wholly culpable. ‘Can you blame me? A king, an emperor, would want you. Do you think I don’t crave our wedding-day as much, more than you? I would wait for ever. The waiting would make of me an old man. An old, old man, for ever and ever in love …’.
There were tears in his voice. He rose from the knee so swiftly bowed before her. He stood tall and slender; she reached up to touch his cheek with her soft white hand.
‘I give you my life,’ he said. ‘My little lovesome wayward Isabella.’
‘Am I, John?’ she said, intrigued. ‘Am I all those things?’
He took her hand and kissed the palm. ‘Lovesome,’ he said, each word a kiss. ‘Little, yes. Wayward? Nay, love, I wronged you. Yet …’
‘Go on, my lord.’
Deeply he looked into the large eyes with their innocent, hidden power. When he spoke it was hesitantly, doubtful words strung out like beads.
‘I know little or naught of women. I would be a fool to say I understand them. Yet you, Isabella, are beyond all understanding. I feel … I feel that when I hold you in my arms I am on the boundary of a foreign country … You are strange, my love. You are a wonder.’ Inflamed by thought, he clasped her to him. ‘I would gladly enter that strange land. My Isabella, you rob me of my soul!’
She swayed to him, sinuous, enchanted and enchanting. The sound of distant music, a sweet high pagan wail, filled her ears from the Hall. Eyes closed, she saw visions. Rippling water, shapes sporting in a fountain. Almost she saw the face, the glittering hair like waterweed, the monstrous shining tail. I am strange. I am a wonder, and he feels it. She held him gladly. When he asked the measure of her love, she answered, in reverence and perfect truth: ‘My heart, you are my other self, and I am yours.’
‘Speak to the Queen,’ he said, trembling. ‘Desire her Grace to appoint our wedding-day.’
Within a few days, she did as he asked, and found Margaret strangely distrait, with a desperate air of indecision about her. She was surrounded by rolls and registers all awaiting the signet of the King, who had not been seen for days. Eventually she gave Elizabeth her attention.
‘I have your marriage settlement drawn, Isabella,’ she said. ‘I will give you all that I can afford. Two hundred pounds from my privy Purse. Would Jesu it were more. You have served me tenderly.’
‘Your Grace is more than generous.’
‘Then repay me,’ said Margaret.
‘How, your Grace?’
‘By staying at court until the spring. I need you, for there are few worthy of my trust. They are all about me with their greedy spying eyes, ready to do me duty until a better bargain shows itself. I would have you close to me these next few weeks. For the love I bore your mother and now bear you – will you stay? Will you share my chamber o’ nights, share my griefs, my passions?’
Elizabeth looked steadily into the Queen’s eyes. There was no mistaking her intent. Beaufort of Somerset’s image shone fatally from those hungry, longing eyes. Neither was there any mistaking the implications, the dangers.
‘The King, Madame …’
Margaret gave a short laugh. ‘He has a new pastime, my poor Henry. As he has spent so much on Masses, he must have the alchemists work night and day at the Philosopher’s stone. Only by conjuring gold from dust can he afford the prayers against his constant maladies, his vapourings. O Jesu! I came from France laden with joy – to a royal prince – to empty barrenness!’
Wildness rode her face. Elizabeth said swiftly: ‘Do not trouble further, sweet Madame. I will stay as long as you need me. But I would marry in the spring!’
‘You shall. When you have served me, and not only me. The Crown, and royal Lancaster! Did you know,’ she said with soft anguish, ‘that York’s wife did bear another son! On the second day of October last; a puling sickly wretch they call Richard. Another son! Edmund, Edward, George, Richard. The Yorkists multiply … so stay by me, Isabella. Be loyal, discreet, and loving, and I’ll not forget you when my dynasty is strong.’
Eyes lowered, she felt the Queen’s kiss on her brow, and nodded fervently. She would defer her own raging longing for John. Only for the Queen, whose words were half-comprehended, and at the same time, terribly clear. For Lancaster, and England – and for love? A web was growing, drawing her to Margaret, and woven of audacious fancies best sealed in silence.
The day following, Queen Margaret gave orders that she desired only the company of Dame Isabella Woodville in her chamber at night, and dismissed the guard from her door. The King, she said, had taken it upon him to seek her counsel late of nights, and she would not have him hindered. I am full of trust, she said, and will not be harmed by isolation. The court fluttered a little, shortly forgot, and was still.
It did not happen nightly. More often than not, the Queen slept tranquilly with Elizabeth close by. She in turn learned to anticipate the Queen’s whim; to read to her should she be restless, to serve her with wine or play the harp in the soft dark hours. And to withdraw gently, eyes blinded by duty, into the adjoining chamber when the tall figure, with his soldier’s step muted, entered like a ghost and passed through to the Queen.
The echoes of their love enhanced her own. Nightly she dreamed of John, and ached for the spring.
I love. He is mine. I love more than my own life, more than all pleasures, persons, dreams that I have known. This love is my whole world. She shivered suddenly, frightened by the dreadful joy, the fear of tempting demons with such utter bliss. Then his eyes smiled into hers, and she dismissed the fear. She studied his face, the face to look upon for ever; the crooked brow, the curving mouth, the firm, clean-shaven chin; the bright, new-coin hair so properly dressed upon his straight shoulders. John, I love. He for his part thought: She is mine. The fairest woman in the realm. Mine to cherish while life lasts, to have and love through long years. Until we are both white-haired ancients to whom that hot young love is but an unremembered mystery. Then, I lie. I shall remember, should I be ninety years. Oh God! he thought, let me have all those years with Isabella.
It was a day when every tree unfurled tiny green banners. It was the day when Dame Elizabeth Grey and her husband rode at last from the court. After the long ceremony in the Royal chapel, when the singing boys lifted their voices to heaven and candles painted the vaultings with softest light; after the nuptial Mass, the vows taken under the Queen’s smiling gaze, they did not delay in London even for a night. Standing with the holy water crystalline upon her flesh and with her hand in John’s, she whispered: ‘Let us to Bradgate, my lord, at once!’ He, bemused by love and joy, had nodded, murmuring: ‘Sweet, we must share a void with the Queen before parting!’ So they pledged Margaret in sweet hypocras, oblivious of the other courtiers standing about them, almost unconscious of the Queen’s presence. ‘To our years,’ John whispered. ‘To our happy years!’ Drinking from the cup which Elizabeth’s lips had touched, he felt the weight of those unlived years hang on his fancy like a sweet ripe fruit. Drunk with the future, he embraced it to the end, smiling again at the thought of himself an ancient man, spent and satisfied with love. It was an impossible thought. Then fleetingly, he thought of another old man, fallen just lately.
There had been mourning in the Palace. The Queen had wept openly and King Henry had ordered Masses for the soul of the Great Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. He had been killed in Guienne, fighting with all the miraculous strength of his eighty years, for England against France. Yet he was pledged to a French-born Queen! John’s bridal heart carelessly saw wry humour in it. England had lost the better part of France; yet they had a daughter of France reigning. Lovely, generous … his warm eyes surveyed Margaret as he prepared his farewell. God preserve her. The slender body was now rounded, and John, in innocent male awe, fancied he could hear that second heart beating within …
For the Queen was with child. Proclamation had been made to the assembled court. Henry had occupied the dais solitary, twitching his gown between thin dusty fingers, looking about him as for an ambush. When the Esquire of the Body, Richard Tunstal, came down the Hall, parchment in hand, the King had started up as if at foulest tidings. As Tunstal began to read, the glad cries from the court drowned any response from Henry, who quietly left the Hall. He returned to make it known that the said Tunstal should receive an annuity of forty marks from the duchy of Lancaster.
‘Because,’ said the King like a schoolboy, ‘he it was that made unto us the first comfortable relation and notice that our most dearly beloved wife … was enceinte.’ Here he paused and blinked at some parchment notes he held. ‘Aye, to our most singular consolation, and to all true liege people’s great joy and comfort.’ So saying, he got up, sat down, looked worriedly about him, and gave a great sigh.
The Palace hummed with triumph. The news was dispatched to York, to Canterbury, to Ireland and to Calais; and more especially to Warwick Castle and to Fotheringhay. Night and day prayers were offered that the Queen should, in November next coming, bear a son. Margaret took the ladies Ross and Scales to her chamber at nights, and the guard was reinstated, to cherish her doubly precious person. Thus was the most secret campaign concluded, and Elizabeth, Dame Grey, was free to go.
Richly clothed against the spring breezes, they rode together through sun, and showers up the long furrow of Watling Street. Although John had furnished a litter for his bride she scorned it, and rode with him, saying they should not be parted so soon. A strand of her hair tickled his face as he leaned to kiss her. They laughed and sang, riding hard towards Bradgate, and leaving the few pages and women who escorted them far behind on the road. The wind blew back their song and mingled it with that of the calling birds, until it was like the high pagan gaiety of spirits. John raised his voice:
‘Who shall have my fair lady?
Who shall have my fair lady?
‘Who but I, who but I, who but I?
Under the leaves green!’
And Elizabeth answered with shrill note:
‘The fairest man
That best love can,
Dandirly, dandirly, dandirly, dan,
Under the leaves green!’
Each passing moment was a target for laughter. John recalled one night in Calais, when the others had fed him so much wine that he had danced on the table and thought that he could fly.
‘It’s love, not wine, that gives us wings!’ he cried. ‘Watch me, my love!’
He put his restive horse at a quickset hedge. Elizabeth reined in, sat watching. The horse’s glossy quarters bunched in power. John’s hands were strong and light; fluidly anchored on the reins. His chestnut head bobbed against a tapestry of green leaves. He wore a red cloak; it tossed about him as horse and rider reared for the leap, rising until it seemed they would merge with the sun. They were silhouetted in blinding brightness, and John’s mantle glowed like fire. Fire? No, blood! He was clothed in blood. Elizabeth flung up her hands over her eyes, suddenly, senselessly demented. Thus blinded, she sat like stone. A timid touch stirred her sleeve. Renée, the little tiring-maid who had been given to her by the Queen, spoke softly:
‘What ails my sweet lady?’
She opened her eyes. John was trotting back down the road, patting his horse’s foamy neck. His cloak was rich red velvet, her own wedding gift, and fell in orderly folds about him to his stirrups. That was no vision, she told herself. I am fatigued after the ceremony. And I do not have visions. To Renée she said: ‘Tis naught; go ride with the others.’ None the less, she kept John closely within her sight thereafter. When she caught his hand and kissed it passionately, he looked at her with a little wonder and much love; he lifted her from her horse to his, singing anew:
‘The fairest man, Dandirly, dandirly, dandirly dan!’
‘How much further to Bradgate?’ she asked.
Two days’ journey, he said, if the roads were good. Incredulously he saw her pleading face. ‘Sweet, would you have us ride through the night?’ He kissed her, saying: ‘Nay, we must lodge tonight at some holy house.’
‘Must we? Can we not ride on? It would be one night less without Bradgate.’
Something in the name called to her. She craved Bradgate, needed it. In its image there was strength. A rock, a haven redolent of John’s heritage and the timelessness of their future together. She begged for speed as the day grew old along the worn greenness of Watling Street. She was not weary, would never be weary. Finally John gestured towards the flagging entourage behind. ‘Look at your women and my pages, sweet cruel wife! We may be strong and adventurous, but they would fall on the road. And there’s our resting-place ahead.’
The tented roof and towers of an abbey glinted in the sun’s last rays. Elizabeth pouted, feigned displeasure. When they were admitted by a porter she had a little, unlooked-for vengeance. The Abbot showed her to the women’s guesthouse and John the men’s quarters. Useless were his protestations – ‘Father, we were only married today!’
The Abbot looked hard at him. ‘Fitting, then, my son, that you should spend the night in prayer. I too will ask a blessing on your union. We are a poor house …’ he said mechanically. John beckoned for gold from his esquire. He turned back to Elizabeth with such a comical expression of dismay that she choked on laughter. She whispered, while the Abbot stood severely by, swinging his keys: ‘It’s best, love. I would not begin our honeymonth within a cloister. My heart–’ still jesting, happy and sad – ‘what’s one night, more or less?’
Her first sight of Bradgate was like a blow to the heart. They came upon it suddenly, riding down a path through densely wooded parkland. A tiny stream accompanied their progress and the boles of elms shone on either side. Banks of primrose and violet grew at the foot of ancient oaks; through a clearing there was a glimpse of bluebells like a still sheet of azure water. Wild orchids grew in profusion; rabbits fled nimbly for cover. Above the treetops arched in a lacy green cavern, filled with the song of throstle and blackbird and the mockery of the cuckoo. Crushing flowers, the little company galloped down the path and, amid a flurry of startled wings, around a bend where Bradgate lay in welcome.
Its lattices gleamed like noonday stars, its merlons seemed, to quiver. The standard of Ferrers Groby sprang and billowed from the tower. The fortified manor stood with its feet in flowers, clothed in rich ivy among a splendour of green lawns. Spreading westward was a lake that made the pool at Grafton Regis a murky puddle by comparison; a lake crowned with a distant drift of swans and fringed by bright willows. A little waterfall spilled through an aperture in the low wall girdling the manor. Elizabeth looked again at the lake; a breeze kissed the water and silvered it to fire. There were shallow steps leading down to the waters of her heart’s desire. Tears filled her eyes.
‘Do you not like it?’ said John softly.
Words could only dispel the depth of her feeling. John, the lake, and love were one. She turned and kissed him and clung, saying: ‘Aye, my heart. I like it well.’
She dressed with care for the evening. The scarlet sarcenet was revived, with no fear of gloomy Henry’s curses. She bade Renée brush her hair and leave it loose to befit the maidenhood soon to be willingly relinquished. Shy little Renée, made bold by her mistress’s gaiety, chattered, exclaiming: ‘Like a queen, madam, like a queen!’ Incongruously the face of the dirty gypsy at Eltham returned to her, and she smiled. A royal prince, fair lady, shalt thou wed! She had proved the woman a charlatan, and was glad of it. She turned to embrace Renée briefly, crying: ‘Yes! I am a queen! Queen of Bradgate! My king is John!’
‘You are my prince,’ she said later to John. They sat at their own high table, surrounded by friends, eating spiced heron. Elizabeth had been drinking deep of the deceptively flowery Rhenish. The well-wishers were admiring her, envying John.
He said, a little gloomily: ‘Sweet, it’s as well I am your prince. For myself, I am not even knight as yet. I pray I may be sent on campaign, where I may be dubbed … Calais again, though ’tis quieter there than for many months …
She said aghast: ‘Already you talk of leaving me!’
The company roared. John smiled adoringly, foolish. ‘Not yet, my lady, and not tonight, certes.’ He, the obliging host, began to sing.
‘Sweet mistress mine, ye shall have no wrong,
But as yet grant me, sith we be met,
That fair flower that ye have kept so long,
I call it mine own as my very debt …’
Under the applause, the laughter, he looked at Elizabeth and felt his manhood falter in awe. Sitting there in the candlelight with her pure pale face and shining hair, she seemed unfleshly and remote. He motioned for more wine, feeling a kind of anger at the sight of this spirituality; it made his own desire seem crude and unchivalrous.
His steps were a little unsteady as he followed her up the flaring shadowed spiral to their chamber. He was weary from the journey, from wine and joy. The company bade them a merry good night, before themselves retiring to envious beds. The proud, fey delicacy of Elizabeth was apparent to them all; thus they refrained from all but the mildest of marriage jests, called from the stair-foot. Alone with Renée, she was unrobed of the scarlet dress and attired in a loose white robe de chambre. In the adjoining room John cursed under the ministrations of Giles, his page, a shortsighted youth who fumbled with knotted laces and mislaid his master’s bedgear.
Then John sought Elizabeth and found her chamber empty save for Renée, sparkling nervously, arms full of discarded garments. He knew a swift irrational dismay, and thought: I imagined it all; the wedding was a dream, the ride here, her face against mine at the table. There is no Isabella; she was but my own desire made flesh. Renée saw his sadness and said gently: ‘Sir, my lady has gone to the chapel to pray.’ He smiled again, and gave her a gold half angel. She merged with shadows and left him alone.
He walked to the window-embrasure and looked out. A full white moon shed its weird light on the lawns, the sleeping flowerheads, and turned the lake into crystal. He stood breathing in the spring light, unaware that the scene on which he looked was the same which had caused Elizabeth, moments earlier, to quit the chamber murmuring of prayer. He wondered whether he should join her in the chapel, to give thanks for this, the greatest of his life’s blessings, yet he was loath to leave the whiteness, the stillness. Then, at the edge of the lake, something moved. He craned forward with a stifled exclamation at sight of it. It was small and shimmered; it caught the moonlight and blazed in it like a slim white flame. He began to tremble. Others of his acquaintance had seen spirits, wraiths that played in the moon’s full and could take a man’s wits away for ever. He had scoffed at these tales. And yet, this thing was real, fixed in his sight. It walked on air; it stepped among the reeds, dipped until it was one with the water and indistinguishable from the silvery ripples. He felt real fear, for himself, and for Isabella. Before she returned from the chapel, he must drive away whatever it was that sported in Bradgate’s lake.
He cast a fur robe about him and went swiftly downstairs. Moving quietly through the sleeping manor, he came upon the two great wolfhounds which he kept for game. Almost his hand went to their chains. These beasts would tear the throat from any enemy. Then he thought; should this enemy be of Hell, the creatures would die of terror. So he went steadfastly and alone into the garden scented by gillyflowers, and strode down towards the little watergate where the cataract bubbled and sang.
His sight had not lied. Something played and plashed in the shallows, its outline diffused as if it were clothed in light. It slipped in and out of the water; it floated a white flower on the surface. Its shape lengthened and it raised two drifting arms, gathering handfuls of water, letting them trickle down like jewels. He took all his courage and stepped forward, saying firmly:
‘In the Trinity’s Name, be gone!’
The shape gave a soft cry, a laugh, and began to glide towards him. Disbelievingly he heard it call his name, in the note of the falling fountain, in the high shrillness of the nightingale that sang from the trees.
She rose naked from the water and came to him, her wet hair shrouding her body like a tumult of silver weed. Anger at her outrageous folly, and pure delight rose and fought within him. Delight won, swelled by the sight of her flesh, diamond-glittering in water and moon. This was Isabella, his bride, no longer the image of an untouchable saint, but wanton, mischievous, maddening. The reprimanding words were stillborn in his mouth. All he could say was: ‘Sweet heart, you will be chilled to death!’ He snatched up her robe, discarded on the ground, and sought to wrap her in it, while she whispered, excited, irresistible:
‘Forgive me, my sweet lord. It was the lake! Oh, the lake!’ And she came closer so that drops from her tender, lithe flesh trembled on his own clothing. His hands let fall the mantle meant to robe her and reached instead for the slender, damp body leaning eagerly towards him. He was losing himself in the cold glittering torrent of hair, lifting and carrying the luminous creature into the shade of a willow. The moss was soft beneath them. And here was the strange, beloved country, its long-besieged harbours opening for him.
A single cry, like a night-bird, rose, shivering from her lips.
‘John! My one true love!’
The lake rippled gently and was still.
‘It was an evil day,’ said Jacquetta of Bedford.
Elizabeth glanced about her while her mother talked. The court had changed little in two years. Here at Sheen, the once-beloved palace of Richard of Bordeaux, burnt for grief after his wife’s death and later restored, the trappings were familiar. The hangings were perhaps a little shabbier, the wine they were drinking a trifle sourer. Otherwise there was no sign of the holocaust that had so nearly demolished the Queen’s party. Drinking from a dingy hanap, Elizabeth sat by her mother in the window-seat. Outside birds chirped merrily under the May sun, reminding her of Bradgate.
‘Two Augusts ago …’ said the Duchess.
‘Had his Grace been ailing before?’
Jacquetta shrugged. ‘You saw how he was. Always half in the next world, but well enough. Then, with no warning…
The King had dined at four, frugally. There had been only a few courtiers with him; the Duchess and Sir Richard Woodville had been invited by the Queen. His Grace had eaten a small portion of roast sturgeon, and had seemed himself, morose and fey, sitting close by the Queen, giving halfvoiced answer to all that Margaret said. There was nothing about him to show that he was possessed. All went well until an ambassador from Calais arrived. The ambassador was slow and soft-voiced and Margaret, seeing that the King appeared to be half-asleep, herself descended from the dais to take the dispatches offered. In her high-waisted gown and with her proud carriage, the presence of the royal babe was very evident. Her belly, said Jacquetta, burgeoned like a ship’s prow. Foolishness even to mention this, for all knew of the joyful condition, none more than the King. Yet there had been a sudden starting up from his chair, that familiar pointing finger, quivering and stabbing at the Queen. All had heard the King’s shrill cry, broken off short.
‘Forsooth! …’
Forsooth what, Our Blessed Lord only knew, for the King had sunk in a rapid swoon, falling headlong across the steps of the dais, his black robes hitched about his lean thighs, his dusty head and hands suppliant, down-pointing. Folk rose in dismay to succour him.
The King came to himself after a few minutes, when it was discovered that he could not speak. Stricken and mute, he looked uncomprehendingly at whoever addressed him. He was carried to bed, where he lay, his head turned to one side, gazing at the floor. The court was frantic. Master John Faceby had no rest for days and nights on end, desperately brewing simples or studying the planets’ courses for a reason for the King’s malady. Doctors were summoned privily from all over Europe; even a filthy wise-woman was consulted. This was August, and by Christmas the King had not uttered one word, nor had he lifted his eyes, even to survey the new Prince, England’s heir.
‘They carried the babe to him over and again, so that he might bless it,’ said the Duchess. ‘But it was useless. The King only moaned a little, and kept his eyes down. It was a terrible malady, a madness, carried in the blood. The King’s grandsire, Charles of France, was likewise stricken.’
The disaster was so close kept that half England remained in ignorance of it. Yet the agents of York and Warwick were no less vigilant than in times past. That very Christmas a deputation headed by Warwick arrived at court with the time-honoured, sardonic request to know how the King prospered. There was no help but to reveal Henry to them, and the secret was no more. One look at that face as empty as a dry well, those quivering drooping eyelids, coupled with his silence, and they knew then that the King wandered in some private world, alone among shadows.
‘There was naught to be done,’ murmured the Duchess. ‘Cursed York and his claim … he was appointed Protector of the Realm, being the nearest of the blood. A great triumph for Warwick. The Queen was nearly demented.’
‘Yet she had her son,’ said Elizabeth softly.
Out in the pleasaunce the birds were singing louder. Elizabeth dreamed of Bradgate, and folded her hands over the slight mound clothed by her green satin gown. Soon she would hold her own babe. She thought of John. He had ridden north to Groby to oversee some of his deceased father’s estates; he was bound for London soon, to join her. A little smile curved her mouth. ‘The fairest man, that best love can!’ Fairer than fair. The memory of all their days and nights together laid a veil over Jacquetta’s alarming narrative. All this talk of policy meant little, it seemed like the jousting of knights, spectacular but harmless. Lancaster had worn the crown for sixty years. What if the line did come only from Edward III’s fourth son, John of Gaunt? What if York, as he was ever at pains to stress, did descend directly from Lionel of Clarence, the third son? Lancaster was supreme – Agincourt had proved it. She sighed, and stroked again the little roundness below her narrow embroidered girdle. She could see her reflection in a sunlit pane of the oriel. Fair, I am fair. She cast a little sly smile at her mother. Fair enough to grace the ramparts of Lusignan! Then she said, dutifully:
‘And when did the King recover from this storm?’
‘The following Christmas. He awoke and was himself again. They rushed with the babe to his bedchamber and he cried: ‘By St. John! I bless this child. For it is surely one conceived by the Holy Ghost!”
Thus York’s brief power was ended. He and Warwick were banished from court with threats and unsheathed blades. Beaufort of Somerset (whom they had used cruelly, said Jacquetta) was reinstated. People rejoiced. ‘Yet I feel,’ said the Duchess soberly, ‘that the people only love the Queen while Henry lives; were she alone, I fear that my sweet Marguerite …’ She left the sentence and looked through the window as if searching for an enemy. ‘There will be war,’ she said. ‘I feel it.’
Elizabeth sat comfortably in the warm sunlight, trying to share the Duchess’s precognition, and failing. Again in secret she stroked the slight curve of her belly. The babe should be born at Bradgate. She turned to her mother, saying: ‘Madame, how much longer? When can I leave court? There is much to see to at my home.’
‘When the Great Council is over,’ said Jacquetta sternly. ‘Marguerite … the King wishes all his loyal friends to hear him.’
Then Thomas Barnaby, graceless as ever yet oddly dear to Elizabeth, knocked and entered the solar. He grinned, gaptoothed; she smiled at him, remembering the day he had escorted her to the garden at Eltham. ‘Ho, your Grace! Ho, Dame Grey!’ he said. The Queen awaited them, he said, and grinned, and mopped, and Elizabeth marked his face down for some reason that meant nothing, as a face she might see again somewhere, and she put the fancies away. They went in procession to the Queen’s chambers. Margaret was standing with her face to the window; she was much thinner. Her waist looked nothing, her shoulders were spare and taut. Elizabeth knelt, with her mother, and presently felt the Queen’s kiss on her brow. Bright and young and arrogant, she looked up, and saw that Margaret was changed. Hard lines were limned about her mouth, her eyes had a fervent glitter and her cheeks were colourless. Beside her stood Beaufort of Somerset, his hair whiter now, with. Piers de Brezé, James of Wiltshire, all the Queen’s trusted favourites.
Shyly Elizabeth addressed the Queen.
‘Felicitations, most noble Grace, on the advent of England’s heir.’ Instantly the strained white face sprang to bloom, and Margaret seized her hand. ‘You would see him? You would see my son?’
An armed guard surrounded them both as they climbed tight spiralling stairs and halted before an oaken door, upon which one of the henchmen beat with his halberd. Inside, a group of white-coiffed nursemaids doted on the infant prince. Tall for his age, he wandered forward to lay a tiny hand on Elizabeth’s skirt. She knelt in homage; the hand dropped to the toy dagger in his belt. His large dark eyes studied her as she murmured, ‘Most princely Grace,’ and a shower of quick baby-talk which awakened no reaction in the impassive small face. There was an oldness and wisdom about him. One conceived by the Holy Ghost? Rising, she said to Margaret: ‘Madame, he is the proudest, most winsome child,’ and was startled by the Queen’s expression. Love, conceits, all the aspects of a mother were there, but overshadowed by a kind of ferocity. She devoured the prince with her eyes; her breath came quickly. On their knees, the nurses followed the child wherever he wandered, hands outstretched lest he should fall. Four doctors were present, two tutors, and outside the chamber came the faint slither of the halberds crossing. The Queen sank to her knees before her son. She said:
‘Proud! Yea, Dame Isabella, he is proud! His name is Edward, after the great founder of Lancaster. His device is the Silver Swan. Bright and puissant, the heritage of might. And mine! My dynasty’s joy and hope!’ Her voice quivered and dropped almost to silence. ‘Ma fleur d’Anjou!’
The flower’s face creased in a subtle discontent. ‘Reine … ma reine …’ he lisped, pawing Margaret’s trembling hand.
‘We, through him,’ continued the Queen, through clenched teeth, ‘shall conquer. Our succession is secure. York can threaten, the devil Warwick can sneer, but we are fast on England. Does he sleep easy?’ she demanded of the nurses. To the tutors she said: ‘Let him read and write soon. Give him all knowledge, learning, power.’ To the doctors: ‘Your heads on a platter, messires, if any malady seeks him out.’ She turned again to the little Edward, taking his face between her hands, loosing a torrent of French endearments, the mother vanquishing the dynast for a little space.
They went by river to Westminster Hall, where the Great Council was to be held. Between her father and mother Elizabeth sat watching the swell of waves about the painted craft, and seeing disinterestedly the cranes dipping all along the river from Blackfriars to the Tower. Perfume and spices wafted from the ships from Italy and the East. At the Vintners’ Wharf casks of wine were being unloaded. Yet trade was sparse, men said. England was a country to beware. Denuded of her French possessions, she had an untrusted Queen, a demented King reigning.
Close, Elizabeth felt her father’s warmth. It was good to be with him again. Broad and handsome, he inquired as to her health and that of John. Jacquetta of Bedford sat enjoying the voyage, her head dipping to the rhythm of the lapping waves. And there was another passenger aboard, one who frowned at each miscast stroke of the oarsmen with the dignity of an octogenarian, who closed her nose with a herb-sprig at the stench of cod wafting from the fishmonger’s alleys: Lady Margaret Beaufort. Fully twelve years now, she sat, eyes on a sacred manuscript, but now and then looking about with a passionless, all-seeing gaze. Elizabeth ventured to ask her: ‘Are you wed yet, my lady?’ and the dwarfish maiden answered: ‘Next year, Dame Grey. To Edmund Tudor. The King so decrees.’ She bent again to her reading with one chilling, complacent look.
At Westminster Hall a host of knights and nobles were gathered, all wearing the Lancastrian ‘chain of ‘S’s or the flower of Marguerite. The Queen was already seated at the head of the throng, with Henry, gaunt and shadowy; the little prince, toy dagger occupying his hands, sat on a red velvet throne. The oaths were taken, the principals of the Council took their places. The occupants of the Hall accommodated themselves as best they could, some leaning against the walls. To Elizabeth, crushed behind three tall knights and their ladies, the Queen was a blur, the white face a little flame, the spare small body straining upwards. Beaufort of Somerset presided. On the faces of the councillors there was triumph, hardly veiled. Many were richly robed; in his poor gown, the King looked like some wantwit peasant come to solicit alms. Elizabeth twitched her father’s sleeve. ‘Why are they all so proud?’ she whispered. ‘I never saw my lord of Buckingham smile like that before.’ Buckingham was a tall dour knight who cared little for ceremony. Sir Richard Woodville leaned down to murmur: ‘It is a great day for Lancaster. Look about you!’
She glanced before and behind at the massed courtiers. Every face bore the same look; smugness, arrogance. Lady Margaret Beaufort, all but smirking, knelt on a prayer-stool near the dais, while beside her stood her betrothed, Edmund Tudor, and his brother Jasper, thin and sallow and haughty. Colours made a mosaic of the Hall; gowns red and green and yellow, the brown of a friar’s habit, the black robes of the tonsured clerks, who, quills and parchment ready, waited on the Council’s words. Sir Richard leaned again to his daughter.
‘There are no Yorkists present, Bess. And should any come, they will be refused entry. This is the Queen’s new Council. Today she pits her might against those puny adversaries. Listen to my lord of Somerset, Bess! See the tide turning!’
His blue eyes blazed with satisfaction. Nowhere was there a sign of the White Rose, the Bear, the Falcon, the Fetterlock, the Griffin. There was a scuffling at the great door, where guards with pikes conducted a whispered argument with someone outside. One who demanded admission, and pressed on the door so that it swung open; who doffed his grimy cloak to reveal a tunic studded with marguerites. Elizabeth swung round quickly to see the newcomer, now jesting with the apologetic guard, slip in under the raised halberds. He was tall and slender and copper-haired. The fairest man …
‘John!’ she cried, earning a frown from her father. Heedless, she ducked and writhed through the press of people, treading on feet, feeling her sleeve tear on the hilt of a dagger. Then she was at his side, feeling his strength, his velvet doublet smooth upon her throat and breast. She, a wife of two years’ standing, should neither feel nor act thus, hut feeling, like a whirlwind, swept her, overcame her; tears dissolved his face when she looked at him. He bent and took her mouth hungrily, released her, hugged her to him again. She said, over the sound of Beaufort in strident proclamation from the dais: ‘Ah, my lord, my lord! How I do love you!’ Around them heads turned, though not in annoyance. For in those ageless words was something to make those long past love remember, and be kind.
They whispered together like children, holding one another close. Silly loving words: why had he tarried so long? She died by inches when he was away. It was her fault, he said, there had been many complex matters in the Groby estates for his eye, his seal, on which he could not stay his mind for thinking of Isabella. Six weeks, six whole weeks. Did she prosper? And the babe? In the shadow of a tall squire’s cloak, his hand slid to caress her belly. Joyful tears stained her cheeks; he wiped them dry with his fine linen kerchief. Beaufort’s voice rose and fell, filling the Hall with meaningless words. What had her father said? That this was the tide turning? Let them talk and talk. Her own tide was turned this very day. Her ship was anchored in the sweet slack harbour of love.
Then John said: ‘I may have to go to war.’
Her racing pulse slowed. The grey arched pillars of the chamber rose high above her. She felt her body suddenly cast in their image; stone-cold and stiff, supporting the great weight of new trouble as they upheld the faded gilt roof … It would be madness to swoon. All men went to war. Their women harnessed them, remembered them in the Mass, and waited for their returning, or their non-returning. Or did they swoon, the weaker ones? Only at the reality of death, not at a word. She had never succumbed to such fits in her life. It must be the babe that made her head ache and grow light as a puffball. John’s arms pulled her back from a blinding greyness. Stinging heat rose in her eyes. She heard him say:
‘Listen, sweeting, to the Queen. She is going to address the Council.’
Margaret’s pallor held all eyes. Her diadem caught the light, and her little teeth gleamed in a wolfish smile. King Henry looked up frailly at her, and the little prince ceased toying with his dagger and took his mother’s outstretched hand. He walked, well-schooled, with her to the edge of the dais, and stood, his white silk mantle falling to the floor about him. Margaret said clearly, fiercely: ‘My lords and loyal subjects! Behold our salvation! This day I give to you the emblem of our royal House, destined to be anointed with the Chrism. Born of my body to defend our throne. My lords! The Prince Edward!’
Like a shipwrecking sea, cheering split the air. It lasted long minutes while Margaret stood, surveying her son. The King muttered, startled, and looked towards heaven, while Beaufort moved to the prince’s side, placing a bronzed hand on the small shoulder. Nearly all the councillors were tall, but Beaufort, in that moment, looked like a giant. The Queen began then to speak in earnest, her accent growing heavy, tortuous like a saw-edged knife, commanding like a mace. She lit the imagination and the loyalty of all. Even the sycophants who had squandered the King’s treasure while he prayed were moved. She lashed them with her own ambition. She spoke with French oaths, calling on the saints and all her ancestors to witness her renewed hope, her strength, in the presence of England’s heir. Her vengeance stirred a great wind in the Chamber, especially when she spoke of Beaufort.
‘Remember, my lords, that when Richard Duke of York forced himself upon this realm as Protector, he had our dearest cousin imprisoned in the Tower? Is this protection? To use thus one who has earned our favour through his great and laudable counsel at all times? Is this loyalty? To our royal and beloved husband? To me?’
King Henry raised his eyes. ‘Forsooth, nay,’ he said.
‘Gentlemen,’ continued the Queen, ‘we are weary of this false pretentious claim of York and all his minions. We will suffer him no longer.’ Her lips were slick with froth. ‘My lords! If you are my loyal and noble Council, you will this day order an assemblage of all our military. For the purpose of safeguarding our person against all enemies. Messires! Will you array yourself accordingly?’
John’s arm closed tighter about Elizabeth. ‘This is a formality,’ he whispered. ‘We are out to frighten the Yorkists … sweetheart, be calm.’ But his own voice was far from such, and full of excitement. A roar answered Margaret’s challenge. Already armed men were issuing from the adjoining chamber. Beaufort was down on one knee before the King. He proffered a sword. Uneasy and wistful, the King took it, weighed it, nodded an acceptance, then bowed his head over the gleaming steel, tracing the cruciform hilt with a devout finger.
‘Is the King to fight also?’ Elizabeth found this hardly credible.
‘There’ll be no fighting; the Yorkists will run,’ said John, as if he rued the prospect. ‘And the King must show himself. He’ll lead one of the levies. To Leicester.’
So he knew all the time, she thought sadly. Even the venue for the marshalling of the troops. I must be brave, like all other women. Yet no other woman loves as I … The hall was hot with talk, the throng dispersing. Hand-clasped, she and John slipped out into the corridor. Already there was the chill sound of sharpening steel on stone from the neighbouring courtyard where there was an armoury. Sick with longing, she said: ‘Pray Jesu you need not leave this very day.’
He laughed, lifted her off her feet, kissing her throat and bosom. ‘Nay, sweet, my arms are in good order! All this franticking to prepare I’ll leave to those who let their gear go rusty. Oh, Isabella!’ He shrugged his body in the travelstained velvet. ‘I’m not fit to kiss you. Lead me to a bath, and dinner!’ She looked at his eyes and knew with gladness that the bath would be cursory, the dinner rushed through. Warmth flooded her. My love, she thought. And more; my saviour and my friend.
She awoke once in the night and cried out, full of some obscure image, a dream of shadows and dark places. And he was there instantly, drawing her down in his arms, so strong that her bones felt like a kitten’s. The scent of him lulled her to sleep again before his murmurings of comfort had ceased. She dreamed again, that life itself was a dream, and that they walked together through drifting roses, their heads touched by the sun. There were flowers on every bush. When she bent to pluck the flowers she saw that they were really jewels, sapphire periwinkles, primroses of beaten gold. The rainbow blossoms were searing hot to the touch. She awoke laughing at the nonsense of it all, awoke to John’s warmth and his drowsy amorousness. And the old dance of love again, to greet the morning.
The royal army left for Leicester three days later. Henry wore a purple mantle over ill-fitting armour. A great cross he wore made a weird clanking sound as it jounced on his cuirass. He scarcely seemed to know why he was so attired. Margaret knelt before him, kissed his hand, and he looked down upon her with a vague tenderness.
‘Fie, my lady, why all this pother?’ he remarked. ‘If my lords do but love one another, all will be well.’ He turned to look out of the window on to the Thames, which sparkled under the May sky.
Beaufort came then to the Queen. His harness was scoured to a mirror sheen. As if he were going to a tourney, he wore the daisy-flower, tucked into the join at his gauntlet.
‘God speed you, mon cousin,’ said Margaret. The King was still at the window, gazing and muttering.
‘Look to his Grace,’ she said.
‘With my heart’s blood,’ replied Beaufort of Somerset. ‘I would die a thousand deaths before he should come to harm.’
‘And I will cherish our heir,’ said the Queen, giving Beaufort her hand. He held it tightly, tears in his eyes. At that moment a messenger, spur-blood on the hem of his cloak, was admitted. He offered a sealed roll, which Margaret waved away. ‘Speak!’ she commanded. ‘All here are my friends and advisers.’
‘Your Grace,’ complied the courier, ‘I bring news that the Duke of York and his followers are encroaching upon Leicester. They march south, together with Lord Salisbury and his men. They are hot to defend themselves against what they call slander … they come in peace, they say, to do homage to the King.’
‘Force!’ said Margaret coldly. ‘Is this loyalty? Is this homage? And what of me? What of my beloved heir?’
The messenger said unquietly: ‘Your Grace, the Duke of York would be Protector of the Realm again.’
‘Nom de Dieu!’ cried the Queen. ‘I have had my belly full of York’s protection. Sir, get you gone. Keep me informed. My lord–’ to Beaufort, who rose from his knee– ‘I wish you good fortune’. She took a large beryl from her finger. ‘May this token aid you.’
Beaufort kissed the jewel, patron of soldiers and of love. He extended his arm to the King and together they left the chamber. Elizabeth was alone with the Queen, whose eyes were hard and gleaming, like the beryl. Fearsome eyes.
‘Would Jesu I could go to war,’ said Margaret softly.
A blackbird began its virile song outside the window. Elizabeth knew, as surely as if the Queen had told her, that it was not possible for her to leave for Bradgate yet. And the trees would be a foam of pink and white; the lake would be patterned with lilies. Her sorrel mare would have foaled and there was a new troupe of minstrels to play for dinner. Listening now to the diminishing tramp of mailed feet, the rattle of the drawbridge, she walked in fancy through her own manor. There was the hall, with its hearth fragrant with resinous logs struggling to burn against a joyful finger of sunshine through the lattice; the south wall covered with her favourite tapestry – Goliath and David, marvellously worked and lifelike … the polished oak staircase. The chamber above with its great tester bed, empty now. The vast stone kitchen … the servants would be idling – the steward too, who needed a firm hand and was in love with the cook.
Margaret’s voice startled her, saying: ‘I had it fashioned especially.’
A page knelt before the Queen, pieces of a suit of harness strewn about him. The cuirass sparkled, its convexities points of shattering light. The greaves were delicately wrought and chased, and the casquetal, darkness showing through its eye-slits, bore a plume of proud mantling. The Queen motioned to Elizabeth, who helped unfasten Margaret’s robette. Without a word, the page, eyes on the floor, armed his sovereign. She was swiftly transformed into a figure of light. Small, mysterious, with the casquetal fitted over her head, she became half-human, neither male nor female. In her hand she took a heavy sword. The page fell back as Margaret took a few clumsy, weighted steps. Then she lifted her helm’s visor. The face of a pale savage youth looked at Elizabeth.
‘Oui!’ she said. ‘Comme La Pucelle d’Orléans! I, Marguerite, should be with them this day!’
Then she laughed, her stern face softening, and lifted the helm gently from her head. ‘But I do not go,’ she said. ‘I stay to guard my son, my hope, my pride.’
‘Madame,’ Elizabeth said nervously, ‘John says there will be no fighting; the Yorkists will run.’
The Queen was swiftly disengaging herself from the cumbrous armour. With a sudden gaiety, she nodded, she even broke into a snatch of song.
‘Your handsome lord speaks sooth, Isabella,’ she said. ‘The rats will run. So. I have indulged my fancy. We will to Greenwich, where I am always happy. Make ready the Prince. Come, Isabella, you shall entertain us. We’ll drink to Lancaster. And to France,’ she added, so softly that her words drifted almost unheard.
Elizabeth covered a sigh. No returning to Bradgate yet. Bradgate must wait, as it would always wait, secure and fair, gracious haven.
For the twentieth time she opened the manuscript of verse and read aloud:
‘Benedicite, what dreamed I this night?
Methought the world was turned up so down.
The sun, the moon, had lost their force and light,
The sea also drowned both tower and town.
Yet more marvel how that I heard the sound
Of one’s voice saying: “Bear in thy mind,
Thy lady hath forgotten to be kind.” ’
The Queen loved this poem, and Elizabeth read it sweet and true. Yet Margaret sat silent, and, looking up, Elizabeth saw sadness on the pale face. Half to herself, the Queen said:
‘Nom de Dieu! I have been kind. I have given him an heir to support his weakness. I have upheld him in all adversity. Henri! Le pauvre!’
‘Sweet your Grace,’ said Elizabeth, ‘be easy. My lord of Somerset will look after him.’
She stretched her dull limbs. She would have loved to walk across the green pleasaunce to where beds of blossom flourished. There was a pool, too, where moorhens paddled from bank to bank. Yes, Greenwich was beautiful; but it was not Bradgate. Although she had been at Greenwich for only a few days, it seemed like years. Margaret’s nervousness harassed her. Sitting daily under a May sun growing fiercer, the Queen would talk, in English, French, and Latin, and sometimes to herself, with determination, with disquiet. And there was no question of Elizabeth leaving her yet. Although Bradgate called in a torrent of memory she must sit, reading, or singing in her boyish treble little airs treating of God and the heart. She could not play with the little Prince; his mother kept him close confined, and besides, he was not the kind of child one played with. Daily Elizabeth felt the burgeonings of her own fruitful body, suffered discomforts that the Queen never noticed. Daily the minstrels who had been engaged to plumb King Henry’s madness twanged and scraped in gallery and garden. Ennui dragged at Elizabeth. Once she had craved the court above all. Now she would have given blood for a sight of Bradgate.
Jacquetta of Bedford had returned to Grafton, and Sir Richard Woodville had ridden with the levies to Leicester. Elizabeth thought of her brothers and sisters. She had not seen Anthony for months. He would be almost a man, ready for such knightly exploits as those on which his father and John rode today. Poor, sweet John! frustrated by his lack of knighthood. Perhaps if he acquitted himself well in putting the Yorkists to flight, the King might rouse himself to honour him. Then there would be more lands, more fee-farms, to augment Bradgate. She dared not ask the Queen when the army might be returning with their tales of Richard of York’s humiliation. Her only task was to divert the Queen from such thoughts. So she sat burned by the Greenwich sun, and read aloud.
‘To complain me, alas, why should I so,
For my complaint it did me never good?
But by constraint now must I shew my woe,
To her only which is mine eyes’ food,
Trusting sometime that she will change her mood …’
The Queen was not listening. Elizabeth left the verse in mid-air and beckoned to one of the yawning lutanists. ‘Sweet Madame, will you not sing with me?’ Anything to relieve that distrait watchfulness. Margaret turned, smiling distantly. She sipped from the scarcely touched hanap of wine at her side, and suddenly looked almost gay.
‘I will sing them all to perdition!’ she announced, but she melted from her strait position and came to sit, sisterly, on the cushions with Elizabeth. A page, heartened by the sovereign’s changed mood, poured more wine and drove away a wasp. The lutanist struck a sweet chord: The Roman de la Rose, in a setting by Antoine Busnois.
‘Bel Acueil le sergent d’Amours,
Qui bien scait faire ses exploitz
M’a ja cite par plusieurs fois …’
They looked at one another, broke off singing, and for no reason save the release of tension, both began to laugh.
‘Oh, Isabella!’ cried the Queen. ‘I well remember the time when you first came to court – so little, so vierge … abashed by my poor Henry’s humours. Now, you possess yourself well, and do I understand you are enceinte? May your son be as brave and proud as mine!’
At last the Queen had noticed. ‘Sweet Madame!’ Elizabeth bent gratefully to kiss the small hand, and in that same moment felt it grow stiff, actually felt the blood leaving it so that it was icy, like a dead hand. She looked up, and followed where the Queen’s eyes stared across the lawn. A man was running towards them. Running wearily; he stumbled twice and all but fell; he clutched at his side. His surcoat was ragged, its once-gay colours dirty. Half his mail was missing; he still wore steel gauntlets and part of his cuirass, but his legs were clothed only in torn and filthy hose. Down one thigh there was blood, seen clearly as he came nearer at that gasping, tripping run. His head was bare, and the sun tipped its familiar tawny with raw light. Elizabeth rose, freeing herself from the dead weight of the Queen’s hand. She took a step forward but did not run to him. The despair on his face slowed her feet. With him he brought fear that almost vanquished the sharp joy of seeing him again.
‘John, my lord,’ she whispered. The blood was crusted on his thigh; it doubled her fear. He came on, running, the figurehead of a terrible catastrophe. Now he filled their sight; he fell before Margaret, fighting for breath.
‘Your Grace,’ he said, and retched, turning his head aside. In her own body Elizabeth felt the torment of his outraged lungs. The Queen had risen and was standing straight, her wine-cup overturned. The red liquor soaked the grass.
‘Madame, your Grace,’ he said. ‘The news is dreadful. I beg leave to acquaint you with most dreadful news.’ This sort of thing he said, over and over. Whatever he has seen, Elizabeth thought, terrified, it has addled his wits. She cried shrilly: ‘What, John, in God’s name?’ And went to him and caught him in her arms, seeing the dried blood flake off against her gown. ‘Oh, Christ, my love, you’re wounded …’ He looked down, saying tersely: ‘It’s not my blood. Would Jesu it were.’
Not his blood. Oh, thank God, he is whole and sound, mine still, his beauty untouched. She clung to this, while his dreadful news came pouring out. The Queen’s face seemed to put on years, a year for each word he spoke, until she was eternally old even past death.
‘The Yorkists were magnificently arrayed, with a great force. All the Nevilles and their mercenaries; Salisbury’s troop alone outnumbered ours … they fought like devils. We were trapped, we had no chance. Your Grace, your lords have suffered … will you hear who died?’
‘I will hear,’ said Margaret.
‘Lord Clifford,’ said John, trembling as with ague. ‘Northumberland, and Buckingham’s son. Dorset, Devon and Buckingham were grievously wounded and taken prisoner. God knows where Wiltshire is; he fled the field. Sir Richard Woodville …’
‘Yes?’ said Elizabeth. She bit her lip; it bled.
‘Escaped by the hair of his head. He is safe, Isabella. Christ’s Passion! They were waiting for us, ready …’
‘What of the King?’ said the old woman that was Margaret.
‘They are bringing him back to London. They will not mistreat him, they say, because he is the King. But they proclaim their power, Madame. Your captains are hacked to pieces.’
‘And my lord Beaufort of Somerset?’
Jesu, she is calm, thought Elizabeth. It is not meet for her to be so calm. She frightens me. John looked down again at his stained hose.
‘This is his blood, your Grace. I was close by him when he fell. Beaufort is dead.’
Still the Queen showed no emotion. She said: ‘Where did this encounter take place?’ Her voice was like a chafed thread.
‘At St. Albans. We fought up and down the heart of the town.’
Then Margaret began to scream. She threw herself down upon the grass, and the spilled wine soaked her gown until it was bloodily red like the imagined corpses of those she loved, and she screamed.
‘Cursed be the name of St. Albans!’
John, his face sweated and grief-torn, went on talking compulsively, while the Queen’s shrieks faded to dry sobs and silence against Elizabeth’s breast.
‘The king is unharmed,’ John a vain comforter, repeated. ‘He …’ he laughed, a short, madman’s laugh. ‘He even jested with his captors. Love thine enemy, he said. He … embraced my lord of York.’
The Queen raised her head. Blackness ringed her eyes, as if she had been struck in the face.
‘I will make York to stink in the King’s nostrils,’ she said. ‘Even unto death.’
The victorious Yorkists came to London with a show of peace, demanding their inheritance. Sternly they insisted upon a voice in the Council. They confronted the Queen, who was for a time powerless. And so a fretful kind of peace obtained, shot through with bloody risings from Margaret’s party. And Bradgate shared this mockery of peace.
Like a cradle, the little boat tipped at its moorings in the willow’s shade. It was an old boat discovered by Elizabeth during her lakeside ramblings. John swore it to be unseaworthy, yet she had ordered the leaks repaired with pitch and plaited rushes, and now, with mischievous triumph, shepherded her family into it for an afternoon of water-sport. She lay back comfortably in the stern. Her second son, Richard, slept in her arms. Three-year-old Thomas was pretending to fish. Renée who was not enjoying the outing, crouched miserably at her mistress’s side. John, stripped to his shirt, had been glad to tie up the boat and rest, shipping the oars he had unskillfully plied across the deep green water.
‘Well, my lady,’ he said, loving and cross, ‘I told you I was no mariner.’ He rubbed his upper arms. ‘This crossing has crippled me. Renée! Look to young Thomas! I did not get sons to see them drowned!’
Undisciplined as a fiend, Thomas romped between his parents in the boat, falling flat as the wind-stirred ripples rocked it, bawling and laughing at the same time. Renée clutched at him. She was water-green with fear, and as the boat pitched under Thomas’s leaping, let out a muffled scream. Elizabeth spoke, a sharp rebuke, and the child quietened; with the silly young wench he could do as he pleased, but when his mother used that tone, it was time to act discreetly. So he sat down and treated her and his baby brother to a charming smile. Elizabeth thought him a lovely child. Wayward, yes, but so like John, with coppery chestnut hair and straight features. She cradled the baby closer. He too was lovely, and she had named him for her father, the best Richard living. The dappled sun touched her face. She trailed a hand in the water, feeling it cool as silk. Through the trees she saw the distant merlons of Bradgate, and closer, the face of John; eternally comforting, eternally fair. A wave of love filled her and unconsciously she smiled, a smile so dreaming and seductive that it was almost unearthly.
It was four years since the dreadful day at Greenwich; only a vague memory which she held best forgotten. Now that she had her sons, John’s frequent absences were less painful, and always short. Bradgate entwined itself deeper and deeper in her heart. It was a surrogate John, who was often summoned to Calais, where there was a new master. Loathed by the Queen’s party but proud in his suzerainty as Captain of Calais, the Earl of Warwick sat with the Channel under his hand. Like some hideous spider, thought Elizabeth, and was thankful not to have witnessed Margaret being forced to accede to the appointment. She could imagine the Queen’s face and voice, and the fancies brought unease. John was speaking of London affairs now, and she sighed, for the green day was fair, the water deep.
‘This is the nub of the matter,’ he said. ‘The merchants and traders. The common folk are more powerful than a score of royal or rebel forces. The people want peace at any price. London is full of gossip and the Queen is the butt of most shameful ballads. Even John Hardyng – you remember him, he writes good verse – felt moved to express himself against the evils of the day.’ He fumbled in his pouch for a scrap of paper. ‘A copy was pinned to the door of St. Mary Woolchurch. None can punish Hardyng, for it’s only the truth.’
Elizabeth took the slip and read.
In every shire with jacks and sallets clean,
Misrule doth rise and maketh neighbours war;
The weaker goes beneath, as oft is seen;
The mightiest his quarrel will prefer;
The poor man’s cause is put on back full far,
Which, if both peace and law were well conserved,
Might be amend, and thanks of God deserved.
She said silently: I know naught of poor men. My neighbours don’t war against me. Yes, I pity the weak but am glad I am not as they are. My needs are met; do not speak of things I do not understand. She handed the billet back to John without a word.
‘The people hate Margaret openly now,’ said John softly. ‘They will never forgive her for what Piers de Brezé did at her command, two years ago.’
The Duchess of Bedford had brought that particular piece of news, smiling sardonically. The Queen is like a raging devil since Beaufort was murdered, she said. Now John said the same.
‘You would not recognize Margaret; she has become a fiend. That is why she allowed Piers to land and burn Sandwich to the ground. A country invading itself! That pretty little port! I swear, Isabella, the world goes mad.’
A cloud crossed his face. He had been there, in the aftermath. He had seen children tossed into the flame, heard the screaming. The cobbles had been awash with firelit blood.
‘They raped the women; they impaled infants on pikes. I remember Sandwich well.’
Elizabeth saw Renée’s face grow sickly with dread. Tom, too was listening. ‘Hé, Master Big-Ears!’ she cried. But still John talked.
‘The citizens of London are hot for York. They have heard Margaret’s oath: that she will pillage and burn and ravish to secure the supremacy for her son. King Henry is like a dead man but the people are still loyal to him. It is the Queen they loathe. They offer up prayers that York will deliver England from the French she-wolf. They cry the Prince Edward bastard, saying that the Queen lay with James of Wiltshire, or Beaufort of Somerset. In York’s Parliament, the boy was disinherited.’
Elizabeth looked at the water’s depths, where dank reeds writhed. She felt the cool lapping turn icy against her fingers and withdrew them.
For the first time she felt and understood the tingling infective madness of Margaret’s hatred. John said: ‘They will not harm the King. York only wishes to be named heir when Henry dies. Warwick …’
‘Warwick!’ Again, that name, clouding her summer’s day..
‘He has vast power. His exploits in the Channel are famed abroad. The merchants adore him. He has a way – proud and yet humble – that enchants the common man. His generosity excels.’
‘Pox take Warwick!’ cried Elizabeth, right in Renée’s shrinking ear. Then she began to laugh, remembering that other time, not so long ago, when she had cursed Warwick accordingly. Had Warwick had his way she would be wed to Sir Hugh Johns. She threw the sleepy baby up and kissed him. John did not share her laughter.
‘Sweeting, you would be safer at Westminster,’ he said gravely. ‘While I am away, Margaret’s men could descend on this place and kill you all. She is recruiting the men of the north, and the Scots, who, by my faith, are Antichrist itself.’ Renée stifled a moan. ‘I think it best you come back with me to London.’
‘Leave Bradgate?’ cried Elizabeth. ‘You’ll have to bind and carry me. Besides, Margaret loves me, she would do me no harm. I will never leave Bradgate!’ And she folded her red lips on the subject, while John gazed at her, thinking how little she knew. She had not seen Margaret, as he had, the last time; the ghastly, insane face, the eyes suffused with blood. Margaret’s mercenaries ravaged where they would and Margaret, obsessed with hatred, had forgotten whom she loved.
‘We shall none of us be touched,’ said Elizabeth, with a heart-stopping smile. ‘We are under Divine protection.’ From the lake’s centre a fish rose suddenly, like a warning light. An odd thought struck her, a thought of Melusine. Was Melusine ever jealous of God?
‘The Duke of York has sons,’ said John. ‘Edmund, Edward, George, and the little, sickly one, Richard. Edward is Earl of March, Edmund Earl of Rutland. I saw Edward, the warlike one. He is taller than any man I know, and but seventeen. He says that if his father falls, he will rise like a phoenix in his stead. The Queen has sworn to have his head on a pike.’
For the sake of Thomas’s perked ears, he forebore to describe what else the Queen had promised for Edward of March, and continued: ‘He has a head of golden hair, and piercing blue eyes. A great broad fellow. I wish,’ he said sadly, ‘that as King Henry is so often wont to say, these lords could love one another. For when I saw Ned of March … enemy though he be, I liked him.’
She said sharply: ‘Have sense, for God’s love! York and all his sons are our sworn foes. Usurpers and pretenders!’ John’s fair skin reddened.
‘Are you quarrelling?’ asked Thomas with interest. John ruffled his hair. ‘Nay, child, just husband and wife. When you have a wife, you must beat her often!’ They all laughed, and Elizabeth asked, as a diversion: ‘How does Lady Margaret Beaufort, and her noble Richmond Tudor?’
‘Didn’t you know? She wed and buried him almost within the year. She has a son, Henry, two years old. Poor Edmund never saw the child.’
‘Holy Jesu! What killed him?’
‘Margaret’s terrible learning, so they say,’ chuckled John. ‘With her philosophy and Greek, her disputations and dissertations, Edmund, unsure of his own wit, pined and died. But Margaret will be married again soon. To Henry Stafford. She is proud of the babe,’ he added. ‘Now being nurtured by his uncle Jasper, in Wales.’
Secretly he thought of Margaret Beaufort with distaste. She flaunted at court as if her descent were of the most royal. Her bravado made no pretence at covering old history. The Beauforts were merely descended from John of Gaunt and his mistress, Kate Swynford. Bastards all, legitimized by Richard II with the proviso that none of the line should ever aspire to the Crown. Yet Margaret strutted like an Empress; her small black eyes could intimidate. There was something unnatural about her. He yawned, suddenly weary of all these heavy thoughts. Isabella sat opposite him in her white and saffron dress and Tom was pestering to catch some fish. John unhitched the boat and pushed off. They floated around the lily-pads, and the sun was bright.
Later, the sun down, the moon high, there were no wars in the whole world. Within the great tester bed there was no room for fear or cruelty, King or Queen. In that warmth was sanctuary, fair as a flower and sweet as honey.
She dreamed the jewelled dream again and turned to him in sleep, smiling like a happy child.
The following Christmas, snow fell. Snow the like of which defeated men’s memory, so thick and violent were the storms. The snow came like a silent white army from the shapeless sky. For an hour or so it would cease, when the close-packed whiteness seemed watchful, aggressive. Crisply it covered the frozen ground, the sleeping plants beneath. The lake was patched over by stiff ice, the lilies visible only as sad pale shapes. Then a fresh fall would descend, until the drifts climbed knee-high against the walls of Bradgate and each gargoyle on the buttresses wore a high white helm. In the surrounding meadows, the hirelings dug out frozen sheep. Men cursed and battled against the whirling white flakes, and struggled in sodden jerkins through days which seemed to last only a lead-grey hour until nightfall.
Elizabeth felt unbearably cold. She ordered great pine-log fires to be lit in every room; she wrapped herself in fine wool and fur. At night, rather than be prey to the draught which savaged the bed-curtains, she took Renée and the baby to sleep with her. They lay close-hugged under every available bed-cover, and still she was cold. Part of the chill was born of John’s absence. He had ridden north on the King’s service and this was the longest separation she had had to endure. She pictured him encamped somewhere on an icy wind-ravaged field, and his distress enhanced her own. No word came from him; the roads were almost impassable. The only person to get through to the manor was an old beggar, solid in death on the doorsill one morning, his beard pointing upward almost comically, like a jagged ice-sword.
The cold shortened her temper. It irked her that she could not wander the estate. A quicksand of white surrounded her, its great drifts hiding dead cattle. The servants went quietly about, their voices like the hush and drip of soft snow from the eaves. Although she knew her ill humour would pass with the sunshine, she crouched sadly by the roaring fire in the hall, with the cradle close at hand and Thomas snivelling from the inglenook, with a heavy cold. He was becoming more wayward, openly disobeying his nurse and tormenting the servants. Once, he even disobeyed his mother, staring insolently. She smacked his face; he did not weep, only went with a dangerous look to do her bidding.
Christmas came too soon. Elizabeth paced the house, bitterly disappointed that there was none to share the merriment engineered by Jakes, her long-faced fool, and that of the pages he had trained to bring diversion over the holy season. On Christmas Day she knelt before the altar in the little chapel, her face flowerlike in the light of a score of festive candles. She whispered: Blessed Christ, let John come home before the Twelve Days are out. Let him be here to make my season bright, bringing his own sun that melts snow … The candles flickered, coldly dispassionate. Her chaplain turned and watched her curiously. He thought her fair but unpredictable. He could not know her mind, her sudden discovery: that no feasts, no comfort or gaiety could satisfy in John’s absence. All was empty as air. Only Bradgate remained, her fortress and her rock, and even that like a hearth without a flame.
She thought of Christmas at Grafton Regis. The little sisters would be grown. Did Catherine miss her? Was Anthony home, full of wit, fashioning new games for them to play in the Great Hall? Lionel, let out from his clerkly studies? Edward, with his sea-coloured yarns? Was Sir Richard seated at the laden table, his colour deepening in firelight and wine? She did not even know if her father rode on campaign this Christmas. No messages; not a word, and only the hush of the deepening snow.
The steward and his wife were hungry. Far away down the hall, the pinched faces of her henchmen looked cheered as the roast peacock was borne in, its tail feathers spread in an iridescent fan over the meat. The venison frumenty was glazed with savour. Elizabeth set Thomas in the chair beside her, and warned him to behave well. She motioned to Jakes to dance, tell a story. In the gallery minstrels set up a sweet cold wailing. ‘A toast, Madame,’ said the steward gallantly ‘To our beloved mistress, this holy season.’ The wine in his cup was a jewel; an old memory sprang from nowhere. Queen Margaret, spilling her wine, a bloody stain upon her gown. Her screams. Elizabeth wrapped a fur tippet closer about her throat, and forced a smile.
‘To Bradgate,’ she responded, and the small company raised their goblets. She was suddenly renewed. This was her demesne. Never would she lust for anything more. Grafton Regis might be filled with a gay family; but she would dine with servants in Bradgate and count herself fortunate. Yet still she felt cheated, and angry with the Presence behind the cold white candles in the chapel. The Twelve Days were passing like a fugitive, and John was not there to share them.
There came a thaw. Water dripped from the gargoyles and cascaded down the towers. The stiff reeds on the lake became pliant like the swords of a vanquished army. The lake itself swelled, black and dangerous. The thaw was followed by freezing, virulent gales carrying more ice from the north, scattering the hard powdery snow-pellets everywhere. The steward slipped on fresh black ice and broke his arm. He lay agonized for days, and Elizabeth brewed the dried root of mandragora for his easement. Thomas grew naughtier and the babe more handsome. The treacherous roads yielded and John came home, as if at the whim of some spiteful force, now that the revels were over, the wine drunk, and the rich food a memory.
He came by night. Through a dream she heard the stamp and jingle of horses, the swish of hooves crossing melted snow. She awoke instantly. Her first thought was of Queen Margaret’s mercenaries, earlier so gaily dismissed, and with it came the chilling realization that Margaret’s love for her might indeed have waned. For was not she, Elizabeth, the sole witness to that which Margaret must most ardently conceal? The knowledge that the prince, the Flower, was neither conceived of the Holy Ghost nor of King Henry, but of Beaufort of Somerset? She began, in a heartbeat, to count the servants reliable enough to wield cudgel and axe for her protection. She slipped from the bed and ran to the window, snatching the baby Richard from his cradle. Outside it was broad moonlight, and passing through the courtyard were dark horsed shapes. More riders were silhouetted on the edge of the lawn, their mounts’ hooves churning the snow-filmed grass. Someone swung a lantern high. She heard the great door below reverberating to a mailed fist, then the steward’s shuffling feet. There were voices, strong and wide awake, the rasp and groan of keys. The hounds were snarling and raving. Suddenly their threatening note changed to bays of joy. Only for John did they make that keening, loving sound. She laid Richard down again and flung a robe about her. The moonlight whitened her hair; it hung to her knees. She ran along the gallery and stood at the stairhead, looking down upon a hall swarming with men. They were a weary, unshaven company, and most of them were harnessed. Pages were hurling logs on the half-dead fire, and plying bellows. Someone was calling for wine, and the steward was shouting at servants who ran with candles, flagons.
Drawing the robe close, she descended the stairs, her hair blowing in an icy draught. John came to the stairfoot holding out both hands. The rest of the company turned to look upwards. As one man they went upon their knee, a startling, pleasing gesture. She made a little, queenly motion bidding them rise. Then she was in John’s arms.
‘Sweet Jesu! You’re wet through!’ she cried, feeling damp soaking her thin robe. ‘William! Gervase! Bring fresh garments, and see to that fire!’
‘Once, my lady, I felt you likewise,’ he said, with a little smile. ‘Oh, the lake! How I love the lake!’ He mocked her lovingly, but his voice was blank with weariness. His face was drawn and hag-ridden under a stubbly beard.
‘These are my friends.’ He indicated the men behind them. ‘They have fought and ridden hard with me …’ He wavered and clutched the banister. Elizabeth led him to the fire; he dropped into the inglenook. She turned to offer hospitality to his followers, seeing bloody bands around a head, a wrist. While the servants scurried with meat and bread and mulled possets, she sat close beside John, while the hounds fawned on him. He had lost flesh; he closed his eyes and there were blue bruises under them. As he took a steaming cup, his hand shook like an ancient man’s. She said, whispering: ‘My love, my lord, you are sick.’ He replied. ‘Nay, only weary unto death.’ To her distress he began to weep silently, tears issuing from beneath his closed lids. ’Tis a strong fatigue that I can mend, she told herself. The herbal my mother gave me; Valerian, Our Lady’s balm, the juice of the cherry to bring tranquillity … She rose from his side murmuring: ‘Forgive me, love, I’ll not be long.’ He held her hand, fast.
‘Give thanks that you are a woman!’ His hard voice surprised her. ‘Lord God, the sights that I have seen these months, and this last week! Well, Isabella! Your Queen has her heart’s desire.’
He opened his eyes. ‘York’s head upon a pike. And Salisbury’s. And Edmund of Rutland. Seventeen years old, that one. In York, on Micklegate, those three proud foolish heads stare out, still bloody. The Queen’s men placed paper crowns about their brows. So York, the king that never was, now overlooks the town of York.’
Gladness welled in her. Now the wars would be over, and John with her always. She said, excited: ‘And Warwick? Where is his head?’
The man with the bandaged head spoke. He was a great sergeantat-arms, with bull-shoulders.
‘Warwick’s head still adjoins his body. He remained in London, to oversee the government.’ He spat into the fire, and Elizabeth’s brief satisfaction faded. It would have been such a sweet, private triumph. Still, with York dead, Warwick must surely abandon his cause. John, cold hand warming in hers, began to tell her all that had happened during the past months.
Soon after John left Bradgate in July, Warwick, Salisbury and Edward of March advanced on London. Spurred on by the chroniclers and balladeers, the City welcomed them like paladins. The magistrates of London loaned them a thouand pounds to equip their force, the merchants extolled them. Weary of the Queen’s dementia, the King’s fogged image, the citizens upheld their new salvation, who rode to Northampton, gathering men as they went. There, they joined battle wth the royal army and in less than an hour were victorious. Again Margaret’s lieutenants suffered sorely; the Duke of Buckingham, not long since released from prison, the new Earl of Shrewsbury, Lords Egremont and Beaumont were slain. Again the King was taken in courtesy to London, where York claimed the throne by hereditary right. This denouement fanned the flame of Margaret. From the sanctuary of Harlech Castle she set about recruiting fresh troops; the wild northerners, the rampant Scots, the fanatical Welsh. And in the blinding snow that fell over England, that had struck cold in even Elizabeth’s young bones, the crisis was reached, at Sandal in Yorkshire.
As Christmas approached, the Lancastrian party and the Duke of York’s men agreed to hold a truce for the holy season. Cold and weary, the Duke retired to his castle at Sandal, while a few leagues away the royal army encamped at Pontefract. A quiet descended, John said; an eerie, snowfilled quiet that no great fires or forced mirth could dispel. Victuals were scarce, and tempers like bowstrings. The royalists, minds filled with their Queen’s frenzy, sat tensely staring through the greyness towards Sandal. And on the thirtieth of December, something broke in the hearts of those men. The captains ordered an immediate advance. Violation of truce it may have been, but there was no gainsaying that brutal decision.
York was almost alone in his fortress. Half his men were out foraging; the rest slept exhaustedly.
‘We killed the guard and the troops stationed outside the castle, and we burst into the Hall. Young Rutland got away after York was slain, but he was pursued to Wakefield and struck down. Salisbury was killed almost at once.’
The Yorkists had made a pitiful attempt at jollity, hanging holly and mistletoe, and soon those green boughs floated in a sea of blood. Dead and dying littered the courtyard. And the following day the Queen’s men followed her command to the letter: crowned with paper and straw, they were impaled, the stricken heads of Rutland, Salisbury, and York.
Elizabeth said softly: ‘Then this ends our sorrow. The Queen may rest easy. Oh, my lord …’
He turned on her violently. ‘Jesu! Madame, you talk like a child! Think you that York’s kin will suffer this loss mildly? Have you forgotten that Warwick goes unscathed, and that in the West, gathering more armies, rages Edward of March? Like a phoenix, he said! And like a phoenix, he will rise against the Queen! The citizens pray for his victory. Don’t you know that even now Margaret’s men march southward, raping and burning! They sack churches, murder nuns and priests … Do you think that Edward of March will forgive his father’s and brother’s death?’
In all their time together he had not rebuked her thus. My lord is sick …’ she whispered. ‘Weary …!
‘Weary of war.’ He closed his eyes again. ‘This old, damned weariness. What a fashion in which to spend one’s life! When there is beauty and truth and learning to enjoy, I must ride, by day and night, chafed by my harness, rain upon my head, blood on my hands …’
He lifted his lids to show tenderness. ‘All I ever asked was you. To sit in peace with you, on my own manor, to lie in peace o’ nights with you in my arms. Even a knighthood matters little now, my love, my Isabella.’
He rose from the fireside stiffly. In every corner of the shadowy Hall men were asleep, heads pillowed on saddles or garments, faces blank with exhaustion.
‘To bed,’ he said, staggering. ‘We must be up betimes; tomorrow we have many leagues to cover.’
‘Tomorrow!’ she cried, awakening one of the sleepers. ‘Yes, we must ride southerly and join the royal army to help guard against Edward of March’s advance, and Warwick’s. Their troops are coming from all parts of the realm. They seek to gain London.’
Silently she escorted him to the bedchamber. There he stood for a little while looking down at the baby in his cradle. In the next room Thomas cried out sharply in a nightmare. John’s tired face relaxed; he sank upon the bed. With difficulty she removed his boots that were stiff and crusted with mud and snow. Almost instantly he was asleep, and she covered him with the quilt. As he succumbed his hand sought hers, and clasped it. So, throughout the remainder of the night, she sat, half-frozen, her fingers bonded in his, her long soft hair falling protectively about his face. She would not lie down. She would watch him until dawn; and how soon that dawn came up! She awakened him with hot wine, fresh clothes, and helped him with his harness. She said little, for there was an air of hushed ceremonial about the proceedings, as well as a heart-tearing regret. He kissed the boys, who were still asleep, and Elizabeth he held for a long moment in which she felt the forbidding chill of his steel breast; and he said, once more: ‘Isabella, my heart’s joy!’ and then, ‘Now, we ride.’
Ride then, said her mind. Ride and return, my love. And with the inexorable beat, the dull, living beat of her heart and the diminishing hooves, came the old wedding rhyme.
The fairest man,
That best love can,
Dandirly, dandirly, dandirly, dan!
There was more black ice, more snow. Snow, that had killed the timorous February buds, that swelled the lake to a murky flood. It swirled dark and dangerous, like her own unrest. Where were they now? Two months, two long months. She tried to envisage him, hoping his face had lost that look of bitter trouble; that he rested somewhere during a break in fighting; that the fighting was over. She delved deep, remembering times of gladness, feeding on words and images to soothe the irksome, waiting winter. If she closed her eyes she could recreate his strength, his lips, his hand playing with her hair. And his words: ‘My sweet Isabella, my dear Isabella, my douce one, my fair one, my joy!’ If she could have a penny for every word that had caressed her, she would buy another tapestry to grace the wall opposite Goliath and David. Sweet fancy … the tapestry shone the length of the hall. It was the fairest of all her possessions. The might of the giant, the subtle half-naked grace of the young David, the gay colours. Thomas was tugging at her sleeve. He chattered ceaselessly, laughs and cries of temper mingled. All morning he had whined to ride his pony. Elizabeth, or rather the weather, had forbidden it. He was tugging, tugging, trying to pull her across the room.
‘Mother! There’s a man coming!’
He let go her sleeve and ran to the window, mad with excitement, as well he might be. Since John’s departure, not even a dead beggar had visited the manor. Next moment the steward stood in the doorway. His broken arm had healed badly, it was misshapen and ugly; she averted her eyes from it. The man stood looking at the floor, passing his tongue over his lips. Jesu, she thought, this long winter has addled him. I share his vagaries, being fogged by lordlack and ignorance of the realm’s affairs. She said, her voice made sharp by this realization: ‘Well? What is it, Hal?’
‘An emissary from the Queen’s Grace, Madame.’
He bowed into the shadows and let another figure through, one as snow-stained and unkempt as any of John’s fighting men had been. One whose familiar face brought a urge of inexplicable affection. The graceless face of a court page.
She moved forward swiftly. ‘Why, Master Barnaby!’
She waited for him to greet her, Ho, Dame Grey! winking and saucy enough to be whipped, but his insouciance was gone. He must have learned manners, she thought, for he went on his knee on the stone flags and kissed her hand; and he kept his head bent during what even she thought a long homage. She noticed that the insides of his boots were rubbed almost through, as if he had ridden hard to be with her. He had caught his neck on a thorn, too, dried blood was patterned on the skin. He was pressing his brow upon her wrist, she felt a wetness on her hand. So, to jostle him from whatever pangs assailed (did the knave dare to love her?) – she said: ‘Up, Barnaby! What news from court? Who holds sway there, these perilous days?’
He made a muffled noise. ‘Tears, Master Barnaby?’ she said mockingly.
Then he rose, thinner, damp-suited, dolorous. Not a vestige of mirth in him, only embarrassment. ‘Dame Grey,’ he whispered. ‘They sent me, for I can ride swiftly. All the way I came, from St. Albans.’
The Queen’s image arose, shockingly clear. ‘Cursed be the name of St. Albans!’ Thomas was ramping round Barnaby, feinting at him with a wooden sword.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
He stood very straight, as if for execution. ‘Sir John Grey is slain, my lady.’
She thought: Barnaby is talking to me of some slain knight. So I must in courtesy ask him details, how this one died, and why. This she did, very calmly.
‘He was grievously wounded at the fighting at St. Albans. The Earl of Warwick met Queen Margaret’s force in a second battle there, and the Queen was victorious. She called it her vengeance for the first battle when Beaufort was slain. Warwick fled. But Sir John Grey led the last cavalry charge that routed the Yorkists. And he was wounded, and died.’
‘Where?’
‘In his tent. At St. Albans. Wounded head to foot and bloody. At cursed St. Albans, Sir John Grey, knight, did die.’
But John is not a knight! A frail gladness rose. It is some other, for he is but plain John Grey. Poor John, who ever craves knighthood. Sweet John. He is not dead.
‘My husband lives,’ she said, greatly relieved. ‘There is, to my knowledge, no Sir John Grey.’
Barnaby was weeping copiously.
‘They did knight him ’ere he died. For his services in war. They vowed none fought so bravely or with such chivalry, sparing the defenceless, crushing the strong. They gave him a knighthood.’
Outside the snow began again, softly covering the ground. Life struggled beneath, small buds kissed by cold to an infant death. Elizabeth snatched up a cloak. He was wounded; she would bring him to life. She would staunch his blood with her own body. There were elixirs known only to her mother and herself, secrets to heal a man of the most dreadful wound. Thomas was shouting around the room, war-cries, wielding his little sword.
‘Saddle me horses. My lord needs me,’ she said urgently.
‘Madame, your lord is dead!’ said Barnaby sadly. He took the cloak from her; it fell to the floor.
She would not scream as Queen Margaret did at the news of cursed St. Albans, or the taste of those screams would be forever in her mouth. With great care she sank to sit upon the floor, while the drain of grief within grew and grew until she felt bloodless from head to foot.
Sir John Grey, knight, is dead. There is no John.
As if the winter had slaked its venom in her anguish, the fierce weather yielded. On the trees’ stark limbs tiny tight buds showed themselves again. The lake receded, leaving a vista of cool busy water. And the manor was filled with the presence, the essence of John. It ringed her round with a desperate comfort, retrieving the past to veil her agony. In this unseen nimbus she wandered, lonely and sad as a ghost, speaking rarely, seeing the faces of all who dwelt with her as unreal shadows. Images from a time gone by and never to come again. So tormented, indrawn, she knew a half-life, and was sustained only by Bradgate’s stout walls and vivid furnishings. The meadows, like creatures recovering from long sickness, gained fresh slow colour from the wary assault of spring. She told herself: I shall make Bradgate a shrine to John.
Prostrate before the chapel altar, she heard the thin reedy note of the singing-boys rising, sweet and sour and tender, in the Requiem Mass. She flooded the stones beneath her face with hot tears; the first, last and only tears. It was only a short relief; she wondered: when shall I be done with this witless watching for his return, this night-waking, hungry for his presence? Under the high cold psalm that soared and soared she wept for the waste of a young life, a strong ardent body, a courageous, tender soul. Leaving the chapel, she caressed a stout pillar. Thank you, my lord, my love. Thank you for Bradgate. Always, I shall cherish it for your sake.
Slow as an old woman’s steps, March came and went with lengthening days. What to do with those days? those months and years ahead? Only wait for night to come, and then another day, and another. Nothing else; no hooves striking unexpected joy from stones; no moonlit ecstasy, no mellow future. She took needle and thread and a length of stuff and fashioned the widow’s barbe and wimple, coiling; her hair so that none of it showed beneath the stark headgear. Now she was a nunly thing of the spirit, pale, the blue eyes darkened with sorrow, her heart often raging and rebellious. And at this time, unknown to her, half England quailed under a fresh battle, and the tide of war turned yet again.
Green April came to mock her with the time when she first rode to Bradgate. That was the same cuckoo, surely, chuckling and invisible in the leafing trees; the same clustered primroses, rising like tiny gold roses where the snowdrops had hung their heads. Yet the air seemed chill; did that fickle sky still herald storm? One day she could bear the sounds of spring no longer. She went to the chapel murmuring within the ghostly halo of candlelight: ‘Ipsis, Domine … et omnibus in Christo quiescentibus …’ Grant to them, we entreat Thee, a place of cool repose, of light and peace. His face was a star against her closed lids, his face, its image still sharp enough to turn a knife in her heart. She felt the coolness of the carved prayerstall. Old wood, his heritage, hers, and that of their children. In the quiet that followed the requiem, she heard, very faintly, sounds outside. Horsemen again. A shiver ran through her body. Then, there was a mighty knocking on the outer door. It was like the sound of a judgement. She adjusted the seemly wimple and went to meet whoever it might be; she was pale, unknowing, ready.
There was the steward with his twisted arm, gesticulating, vainly barring the way to a score of armed knights. Their grouped presence made the doorway dark, their plumes wavered in the April breeze. The foremost brushed aside the gibbering steward and entered. He was tall. The light behind him hid his face but she knew him. Ah, she knew him. Tethered near the staircase where she stood were John’s two wolfhounds. They were old, but more savage than ever. Her hand went to their collars. She bent, whispered into the pricked ears, smelled the meaty tang of their breath, and struck off their chains. They leaped, roaring, straight for the tall figure who advanced so steadily.
Quickly he stripped his gauntlet and extended his fingers to the hounds and spoke. What he said she never knew, but the hounds became gentle, submissive and dropped their muzzles. To see her weapons thus blunted filled her with fury, new, necessary, warming. He came towards her, doffing his helm. Yes, she knew him. She spoke first, trembling with loathing;
‘My lord of Warwick.’
Unhurriedly he bowed and straightened so that he towered above her. He looked older, grimmer, but was otherwise the same as at Eltham.
‘Dame Grey,’ he said. The large brilliant eyes encompassed her, rage-less, calmer than she. She looked over his shoulder and saw the knot of armed men who accompanied him walking the Hall, obviously appraising its trappings. One of them fingered the Goliath tapestry. She said in a cold incredulous voice: ‘What means this intrusion?’
‘Your dogs are fierce, Dame Grey,’ said Warwick calmly. ‘And your manners are no better than I remember them. Is it not customary to offer refreshment to guests?’
‘Uninvited guests?’ she said violently. She saw then that the steward, obviously intimidated, had given orders already; Renée came, white-faced, bearing a flagon of wine and cups. The last of the Rhenish, thought Elizabeth furiously. May it choke this Yorkist swine. Warwick poured wine into two hanaps.
‘Will you not drink, Dame?’ he said. She took the cup he held, saw his eyes on her shaking hand. Rage, my lord, not fear, she wanted to say, and bit her lip against it.
‘Pleasure yourself, sir,’ she said shortly. ‘Then do me the goodness …’
Her eyes went again to the soldiers who milled about the Hall. They were examining the furniture. The hounds were growling softly, and Warwick’s voice was mixed up in the growl.
‘I come to acquaint you with the fortunes of England. You should know, Dame Grey, that York’s cause is utterly triumphant. We have crushed the madwoman. That French canker in England’s heart is excised at last. I have set Edward of March on England’s throne. At the battles of Mortimers Cross and Towton, that proud prince was victorious. Dame Elizabeth–’ here, the coldness of his voice was replaced by exaltation – ‘we have a new King. King Edward the Fourth, may God preserve him for ever!’
Renée was serving the soldiers with wine; they laughed, they tickled her chin, but at Warwick’s words all their mirth vanished. They raised their cups devoutly and drank deep. Elizabeth heard her own voice, asking after Queen Margaret, King Henry.
‘The Frenchwoman has fled to Scotland, with her bastard whelp,’ said Warwick brutally. ‘His Grace King Henry is in London, little better than a drooling idiot. Edward of March is King. And you, my lady, are to forfeit this manor to the Crown.’
He went on, saying that she had profited herself well in her marriage to the dead Lancastrian knight. He told her that her father and brother had tasted his tongue at Calais, being but mean squires and knaves, unfit to have language of princes, such as he, Warwick, and Salisbury and York, God assoil their murdered souls … And all this might well have been left unsaid, for she heard none of it. His previous sentence had drawn all the breath from her body. Her face, reflected in the polished wine-cup, was yellowish-grey as she stared at it. Even Warwick saw the change in her; he said, more kindly:
‘I have an escort outside to take you to Grafton Regis. You may have your maidservant, but the others must stay to help my bailiffs with the inventory.’
Still she could not speak. They were taking down the Goliath tapestry. Four men staggered under its jewelled weight. They rolled it like a corpse; Warwick watched them. ‘Forfeit to the Crown,’ he said, as if in explanation. Then, holding up his wine-cup. ‘Come, Dame Grey! Drink a toast to better days! Will you salute King Edward the Fourth?’
Deeply in his eyes she looked, and the brilliant pupils flickered for a moment as if she had struck him. Then she turned her hanap upside down so that the wine streamed out and splashed his boots.
‘Dame, dame,’ said Warwick, his voice thickly outraged. ‘Did you think it wise to make an enemy of me?’
He had said it before, at Eltham. Had she married Sir Hugh, none of this would have happened. She would have known no love, no happiness, no despair. Bereft, she said the one thing that could wound his chivalry. Out of her humiliation it came, and found its mark.
‘I will go then, and make ready. All my black gowns. Do you, my lord, think it brave to persecute widows?’
While the dark flush still bloomed on his neck, she curtseyed, insultingly low. Then, small and upright, she ascended the stairs. Behind her came the sound of Bradgate being stripped to the bones.
She seated herself before her mirror. Her hatred uncoiled like one of the serpents that lie sleeping for centuries to arise at their appointed time. She breathed like a runner over many leagues, like a woman in the throes of love, or labour, or madness. Her lips were stiff. She watched the mirrored ghostly face; it stared her out.
‘Grief, misfortune and tragedy attend them for ever,’ she said softly.
And the mirrored face was that of Melusine, the serpent. Melusine the beautiful. Melusine the accursed, who, with all her ancient force, now rose to damn the House of York.
They reached Grafton in two days. Renée and the baby went in a litter; Elizabeth, spurning comfort and setting a wild pace, rode her old sorrel, and Thomas jounced at her saddle bow. Warwick’s escort were completely silent, like wraiths in harness, eyeless and anonymous behind closed visors.
Jacquetta of Bedford was waiting. She wasted no words; she chivvied Elizabeth’s weeping sisters to their lessons and sent the little boys to the nursery. She went then with Elizabeth to the private solar, where she took her daughter in her arms, hiding Elizabeth’s face against her heart.
The still-beautiful eyes grew large in powerful thought. The lips moved comfortingly. Now, the eyes said. As I forecast. This knight of hers, who was naught, has played his part and is gone. She is despoiled of possessions, also naught, compared with what will be. The time is now, the way is open for our heritage, our destiny among the stars.
She is fairer even than I was, and Edward of March is a lecherous young fool.
Now I can begin.