O God! What security shall our Kings
have henceforth that in the day of battle
they may not be deserted by their subjects!
The Croyland Chronicle: 1485
Grace Plantagenet stood at the latticed window of the stillroom and watched the sky, where oyster-coloured clouds were palely lit by sun. Between delicate spires and stout turrets she could see distantly the brown, boiling river, flushed with spring tides. Once a bird – blackbird or thrush, too swift to tell – dived straight at the window, then veered off, wheeling up and away over the palace of Westminster. She thought: my father’s spirit! But this was foolishness; if Edward had departed as a bird it would be no common warbler but a golden kestrel, or a snowy falcon. The Falcon of York. The ethereal towers blurred suddenly and she dabbed at her eyes with a sleeve. She had sworn to weep no more; rather mourn in silence. The ostentatious wailing and hair-tearing of the women and some of the men repelled her. Many had only courted Edward for his easy favour. She, Grace, came from his royal loins; she had more right to cry than they. Even now in some corridor outside the stillroom she could hear Jane Shore, voluble in grief as in laughter.
Jane. Her thoughts ran back like a silken coil to that night eight days ago. The night before the King had been taken so grievously and suddenly sick. She remembered it well; that night she had attended the Queen in the great chamber where Edward so seldom came of late. To cosset the Queen was Grace’s joy. She received no thanks, hardly a look or a word, yet, all the while she basked in inexplicable content. Merely to be in that presence was to bathe in the cool unearthly tranquillity of moonlight. Yes, if Edward was the glowing Sun in Splendour, his consort was the moon.
That particular night had been different, troubling, however. As always, Grace had waited, lying taut and vigilant on her trestle until the breathing in the bed should soften almost to inaudibility. She heard midnight chime; then one, two, three, four hours, and still from above came rustlings, little coughs, sighs. Once she thought she heard a murmured prayer, or the drift of a poem; and fancied that she had fallen asleep and dreamed, and snatched at wakefulness to find the silence more pronounced. Not even a dog barked; the palace seemed fixed in enchantment. A finger of dull starlight shone through a gap in the curtains. Grace, sick with weariness, lay willing the Queen to sleep. Then, a few seconds after the quarter’s chime, there was a great commotion as the Queen flung herself out of bed, calling for light. Grace lit candles; their wavering flames showed the Queen’s pale face, pale hair streaming, hands that clutched and pleated her damask bedgown. She was angry.
‘Holy Jesu!’ she ‘cried. ‘Will she never stop that noise? Hour after hour … I could tear out her tongue!’
She paced the room, and the silence grew more profound than ever. Grace, shocked and afraid, stared at the Queen, who then, for the first time in months, addressed her directly.
‘Is she not possessed?’ she demanded. ‘Some devil must enter her, bidding her mar my sleep! Have you slept, mistress? Nay, how could you? Listen! she grows louder … laughing. The King calls her merry. I call her mad!’
The candlelight fluttered; in the corners shadows crept. The Queen ran to the window and threw back the curtains.
‘Almost dawn, I swear! There again! You hear her?’
Grace, her teeth chattering, whispered: ‘Who, highness?’The silence was caught up in the shadows and licked around them both.
‘Why, the creature Shore, of course!’ The Queen leaned against the window, peering through. ‘It sounds – Jesu! It sounds as if she were making merry on the roof!’
Grace, paralysed with uncertainty, waited close to the Queen’s silhouetted shape, watching the perfect profile outlined against candlefire and dawnlight, telling herself: I am deaf, and I am witless. This day I will go to the physician and have him probe my ears, however much it hurts. For before God, I hear nothing.
‘Is she laughing?’ said the Queen. ‘Or is she weeping?’Through the gloom her eyes sought Grace’s small upturned face. There had to be an answer. The Queen abhorred laughter; that was well known. In the desperate, clinging silence, Grace said: ‘I think …’
‘Well?’
‘Weeping, your Grace.’
The Queen was looking away. Slowly the tension left her body, her hands unclenched. ‘Ah!’ She sighed and shuddered. ‘It is finished. Praise God.’
After a while she returned and climbed into the deepsided bed. Grace snugged the coverlet down over the Queen, and extinguished the candles. Although it was mild for April, she felt deeply chill, and lay for a long time, wondering. Finally the Queen’s voice reached her, strangely quiet.
‘Mistress Grace, will you pray?’
‘Yes, highness.’
‘Pray for protection.’
Grace slid from the trestle once more, and knelt. ‘Libera nos, Domine, ab omnibus malis …’
The Queen cut her off short, saying: ‘Nay, leave it. I am foolish. I will see the Comptroller this day. My household becomes a beargarden. And I will speak to Mistress Shore.’
Grace was there when Jane was summoned. She came dishevelled, mud upon her gown. The Queen spoke to her kindly, while Jane looked up with artless eyes.
‘Can you not temper your merrymaking of a night?’
‘Madame?’
‘Shrieking – aloft … where were you last night, Mistress Shore?’
Jane, looking mystified, said primly: ‘Madame, I have only just returned from the City. My husband is sick, and sent for me two days ago.’
Both she and Grace saw the Queen’s face slacken for an instant, but only Grace heard the word that leaped from the Queen’s lips, soft as a breath, a blasphemy. Then Elizabeth made a gesture of dismissal, her smooth features once more expressionless. Following the Queen back to her apartment, Grace saw how slowly she walked. Once she leaned on a pillar, and said clearly:
‘When sorrow strikes a royal house … ah, Jesu!’
It was not the Holy Name she had whispered in that one startled gasp at Mistress Shore. It was a name that Grace had never heard; a liquid, silvery name. Half an hour later, Master Hobbes, the King’s physician, came almost demented to say that Edward was ill.
Now he was dead. Rain, an April squall like sudden grief, smacked against the window. Grace turned away at last. She watched Renée preparing a draught of honeyed ale for the Queen. Renée’s eyes were red; she looked suddenly very old. To Grace’s fourteen years, forty were legion. Yet the Queen, who was even older than Renée, seemed ageless.
‘She will find that posset too sweet,’ Grace said. Renée answered angrily: ‘I need no schoolroom cook to teach me my work!’ and Grace’s sadness gave way to unease. Now that her father was dead, would people change? They already mocked her for having no husband. Fourteen years old, and the bastard of a King. No beauty – she had decided that for herself long ago. The mirror in the Queen’s bower – that mirror girdled with sea-shapes, sirens, fishes – showed her a face too thin, a mouth too full. Under the pointed hennin the blonde curls were scraped back and hidden. She missed the striking loveliness of the brilliant green eyes slanted like a cat’s, the lissom waist, the kindly lips. She saw only the defects which made her murmur, for comfort: I am Grace Plantagenet.’
Renée was keening to herself, uttering little scraps of thought. Perhaps she did have the right to weep – if only for the twice-widowed Queen; but somehow her sorrow was mechanical.
‘She was so happy, so glorious. Only two weeks ago. At that pageant the King arranged, showing that her Grace was descended from the Magi. All three kings came to kneel to her … and now … ’ She omitted to weep for Edward, who had died in a bloated agony so that some whispered of poison.
‘I still say the draught is too sweet,’ said Grace. ‘She will send it away.’
None the less she took the silver cup covered with fair linen to the Queen’s chamber. As she walked, each step was measured by the passing bell. The deep sound had beaten on her brain for so many hours that she thought she would never lose it; like a heartbeat, it would remain until death. All around her was unreality. The stones she trod, the carved columns by which she passed, wavered and were fluid. The men and women whom she met swam silently by like blackclad ghosts. Only at the Queen’s door did things solidify, among them the figure of Thomas Dorset, Elizabeth’s firstborn. He was standing, hand raised to knock, and upon hearing Grace approach he turned with a smile. Although puffed with weeping, his eyes stripped her naked. He bowed elegantly. He mocked her, through envy of her as a King’s bastard, but the courtesy and the wandering eyes were tribute to the challenge of her virginity. After the King, Tom Grey had the monopoly of all the remaining maidenheads at court.
‘Beauty. Enter, I pray.’
She answered formally: ‘My lord takes precedence,’ disliking him. It came to her forcibly that she disliked almost everyone at court. With her father’s death, this thought crystallized. Half-way up the spiral stair behind her, she heard Jane Shore wailing for the dead King. Jane could have been kind, but she was too shallow and undependable. Grace stood hesitantly while Dorset bowed and sneered. Through the closed door came voices, among them the sibilant note of Reynold Bray, who, whenever he saw her, exhorted Grace to prayer, while resembling a rat in search of a hen-house. Then she heard the Queen’s voice, precise and plaintive; a male answer, indistinct, and the name: ‘Gloucester.’
Grace’s mood suddenly lifted. Naturally, Richard Duke of Gloucester would be coming south for Edward’s burial, and there was the thread of a chance that he would bring with him the one person she most wished to see. Someone near enough her own age to be intelligible; someone whose presence in the past had lightened days which were frustrating, bewildering and often hopeless. John. John of Gloucester. A smile trembled on her lips so that Dorset, encouraged, bent closer. The last time she and John had met was at Eltham by the lake. She had wanted a lily, a lily like a fat, pink-tipped candle. He had waded into the water to pluck it, and had spoiled his forest-green hose; new that day. Then they had walked together the periphery of the lake, their hands lightly clasped. She had been two fingers taller than he. Glancing behind at the grass patterned by his soaked feet, she had teased him.
‘Will your father have you beaten?’
‘I wish he were more often at home to beat me,’ John answered. ‘He’s always away; fighting.’
She had said, inconsequentially: ‘I never knew my mother.’
‘Nor I mine.’ His clear pale face was thoughtful. ‘Richard Plantagenet is father and mother to me; and of course, I have the Lady Anne, his wife.’
It was, she decided, because they were of like station that their affinity grew and blossomed into a mood of ease and comfort. Both royal bastards; both Plantagenet, yet touched by unknown, possibly simple blood. Conceived in a moment of lust, or, boredom, or even revenge. Lately Grace had wondered about her own mother; there must be tacit reason for the Queen’s manner – the coldness that should have hurt and sometimes did, the unease which filled the Queen’s eyes when they looked at Grace. Although it was of no consequence; so long as she was not sent from that hypnotic, spellbinding presence. Only once had she discussed the Queen with John, and he had said, surprisingly: ‘Her Grace dislikes my father. Because Edward loves him so. And because he is married to Anne of Warwick.’
Warwick was a name almost out of Grace’s time. Only his castle of Middleham remained, a place steadfast yet wild, and painted with vivid glamour by John. He would talk for hours about the moors of Middleham, a tapestry of hawks and horses and sweeping winds. A place of pagan holiness, he called it. A castle warned by great fires and mirth. And as he talked he himself became imbued with the cold and the crying birds, the bubbling, water-white garths, the warm heathery scents and the haunted mists, making them also a part of Grace. She heard the name ‘Gloucester’ spoken again, and as Dorset pushed the door open, she twinned a prayer: May the Duke bring John with him to London; and may John not have changed.
The Queen was sitting surrounded by her family. She was in mourning, its doleful black lit by a white barbette beneath her chin. She was pale, with a high flush on each cheek. Her hands were clasped hard together and trembled slightly. Behind her chair stood her brothers, Lionel Bishop of Salisbury and Sir Edward Woodville the sea-captain. Her sister Catherine, also in mourning, knelt at her feet. Bishop Morton stood sombrely by; a great parchment, brightly sealed, drooped from his hand. Without being told, Grace knew instantly that this was the King’s last will and testament. Again her vision blurred so that the group of tense faces – Margaret Beaufort, Lord Stanley, Reynold Bray (who stood at a lectern, quill poised) shimmered and gleamed in her sight. She blinked, and a tear fell on the snowy linen covering the cup. Dorset moved swiftly forward from her side and knelt, pressing his forehead to the Queen’s fingers. She said: ‘Where have you been? I summoned you hours ago.’ He murmured excuses which she dismissed turning her face with an odd little gesture sharply to one side, closing her eyes. Grace thought: she seems nervous, changed. She pictured the Queen of, two weeks ago, as lamented by Renée; at the pageant of the Magi. There had been something mystic in that scene; the robes green and gold, the incense rising and the rich gifts. Paradoxical, too. Though everyone knew that in the land of the Magi the river of Paradise rose, there were other opinions: that all evil as well as good came from the East – the devils of the sand, the herbs to drive men mad. It was difficult to decide, but the Queen had seemed well pleased.
Also present were Lord Berners, the Queen’s Chamberlain, and his wife, nurse to the Princess. With a stab of sympathy Grace wondered how Bess did. She had not wept at the news of her father’s death as had Mary and Cicely. Her wide, rather childish blue eyes had looked puzzled and a little afraid. The babes, Katherine and Bridget, were too young to feel much grief. Nine-year-old Richard Duke of York had stifled sorrow bravely, only to break down in Grace’s arms when she dressed him in the black velvet doublet. Mourning put a degree of manhood upon him and stopped his noisy battle-games for a day; the powerful atmosphere of disquiet, acutely felt all over the Palace, made his pert face thoughtful. He said to Grace: ‘Now my brother Ned will be King.’
‘Yes, yes, my lord.’
He blew his nose, sighed as if released from travail.
‘Then I shall see him soon. He seems to have been years at Ludlow.’ From that moment he was himself again.
Grace shifted her feet. A small figure among the crowd of nobles, she held the rapidly cooling cup of ale. The Queen was speaking, hard and high, pausing only while Reynold Bray, his nose almost touching the parchment, scratched out a letter with his quill.
‘To Sir Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, Governor of Ludlow. Right worshipful and well beloved brother, we greet you well. And it is our doleful duty to acquaint you of the passing of our sovereign lord, Edward King of England …’
A dozen hands made the sign of the cross.
‘We as Queen-Regent–’ the delicate eyelids fluttered; the voice laid down the words, hard and definite, like coins on a table – ‘we, as Queen-Regent, make it known that the said Edward in his last will and testament named as Protector of the Realm his brother Richard Duke of Gloucester, to have sole charge and ruling over our sovereign-elect, our son the Prince Edward of Wales, now in your lordship’s care. Having regard for … for our own standing and fortunes in the realm, we charge you thus.’
She stopped, swallowed. Grace looked uneasily down at the draught she held. The Queen was far from finished; it would have to wait. Hard and cool the words flowed on.
‘As Queen-Regent we charge you to be diligent in thwarting this decree, and to bring our son Edward Prince of Wales with all speed to London where he shall be crowned King of England in the presence of his rightful supporters. I pray you spare no cost or effort in hindering the Duke of Gloucester …’
She turned suddenly to Margaret Beaufort. ‘Can I make it plainer?’ The Countess, coming closer, answered: ‘Madame, Sir Anthony is the cleverest knight in Christendom. The missive is clear enough.’
Reynold Bray finished writing and brought quill and parchment over for the royal signature. The Queen said quickly: ‘Master, an addition. Write: Gloucester knows not of the King’s death. Delay all messengers. I pray you, fail me not.’
Bray wrote. The Queen dipped the pen and in perfect silence, added ‘Elizabeth’ – fine and hard, the small round ‘e’ and wild long-tailed ‘z’ – the whole underlined by a ripple like a seawave. She looked then at the assembly and, as if daring them to disagree, said: ‘You are in accord’?’ There was an instant mumble of assent. With a rustle of mourning gowns they knelt and bowed and quit the Chamber. Grace, save for Dorset, was alone with the Queen who continued to ignore her, beckoning her son nearer with a small, frenetic gesture.
‘Tom, why did you delay?’ she demanded. ‘You are vital to this enterprise. You must ride at once to Ludlow with the message. Where is Hastings now? Jesu! I know that he will send the news to Gloucester with all speed. Hastings was one we could not suborn. That stupid, arrogant knight,’ she said vexedly.
‘Madame,’ said Tom Dorset. ‘I cannot go to Ludlow. There is much to do here.’
She clenched her hands in irritation. ‘Did I make you Constable of the Tower for nothing? Are all your honours in vain?’
He smiled, a little seductive smile. ‘Madam my mother, it is because I am Constable of the Tower that I must remain. Already my men are preparing the armaments – five thousand handguns, ten thousand longbows, a thousand cannon … for our endeavour.’
‘I pray,’ she said uneasily, ‘that we need not array ourselves in arms. The Londoners will not love us for it. And Gloucester is a warrior, a strategist …’
‘Madame, be courageous,’ said Thomas Dorset, smiling again. ‘My swiftest men shall ride to my uncle at Ludlow. Leave the rest to him. It will be but a short battle for this … this ill-chosen Protector, Gloucester. Short, secret, final.’
‘And Hastings?’ said the Queen uneasily.
‘That,’ answered Dorset, ‘you may leave to me. There are subtler ways than force. Give me the letter, Madame. Couriers, sworn men, are waiting.’
He took the roll, now sealed, and turned. He saw Grace, and still mocking, yet unquiet, asked her: ‘Is that soothing potion cold, mistress? And tell me, do you love our Queen?’
Grace answered instantly: ‘Till death.’ She knew the Marquis’s reasons for asking her allegiance; she was privy to a plan. A plan to kill. Bluntly and unequivocally, a plan to kill the Protector assigned by Edward. It all meant little. She thought: let them kill Gloucester if they must, for although he is my uncle, I scarcely know him. But let them leave his son, my friend, alone.
Dorset left, bound for the chamber of Jane Shore. He had decided to seduce her afresh; for a long time he had resented sharing her with the King. At last Grace could approach the Queen, who was still pale although the fiery spots upon her cheeks had diminished. Grace knelt, and proffered the cup. The honey had congealed on the ale’s amber surface.
‘Your highness complained of evil of the throat. Dame Renée sent this,’ she whispered.
‘My throat is better. It was weeping that made it sore.’
Again she had spoken and looked directly. It was happiness of the highest order. Grace raised her eyes to the Queen, who was sipping the fluid delicately. Then Elizabeth said a strange thing.
‘There is none to taste this posset for me! I have no Beaufort of Somerset! Are you poisoning me, mistress?’
It was cruel, like a knife. Yet Grace thought: I answered Dorset truly. I love you. Although you have never been kind, I adore you as a dog loves the only master he has ever known, one who rewards his duty with a kick, his loyalty with blows. Is it because, within you, there are those deep fears, those lost feelings, that I myself own? God save me, silver lady. I love you, and know not why.
With a small entourage Elizabeth moved to Windsor to wait out the days. It was mild enough for her to spend the afternoons in the ripening parkland. Wrapped in fine fur over her black gown, she sat on cushions, her spine supported by an ancient oak. All around was a rising cadence of birdsong; thrush and blackbird and robin shrilled in their small-leafed gallery above her head, and from the forest came the guttural rapping of a woodpecker. On the small mere by which she sat, two moorhens bobbed beneath the flashing splendour of a pair of kingfishers. It was April, cruel green April.
Only by sitting very still could she contain herself. Grief, rage and anxiety warred within her. Over all was a black fear that made her finger constantly the diamonds at her breast, the pearls in her ears, seeking comfort in their cool stability. Now and then the sorrow pried through like an irrelevant toothache. It was April; acutely, when she closed her eyes, she saw Bradgate opening to her round a luscious flower-strewn bend. Sir John Grey, knight, is dead. As is Edward, King of England. Strange that I, twice-widowed, should have attended neither of them at the end. I would have staunched John’s wounds with my hair. But Edward never even sent for me! She bit her lips. Rage gained sovereignty until ousted by unrest. Why did he not call me? While I waited, sending messages every hour, he preferred the company of my son Dorset, my brother Lionel, and cursed, vacillating Hastings. Were all these nineteen years for naught? I gave him sweet daughters, strong sons. The last, little George, died through no fault of mine. I gave him a Prince of Wales, Ned, made in our image, royal and fair and pale. A stout, rumbustious, merry Duke of York, little Dick. And I closed my eyes to lechery and drunkenness. (A picture of Edward rose, Edward reeling to the vomitorium behind the dais, to spew up a thirty-course dinner so he might dine again.) Then Melusine cried on the battlements and he was gone, without asking for my presence at his side. He rejected me to spare his own immortal soul. He died in sin, in bigamy. Tom whispered that he called for Eleanor at the last. Pray Jesu none heard him. Let not my glory pass away.
The only tribute to his consort, a poem penned by a stumbling amateur and written as if from the tomb, was nauseating to her in its irony.
… Where is now my conquest and royal array?
Where be my coursers and horses high?
Where is my mirth, my solace and my play?
As vanity is naught, all is wandered away!
O Lady Bessy! long for me ye may call,
For I am departed until the doomsday,
But love ye that Lord who is sovereign of all.
She thought: I am again alone. More than when John died. For then I was four-and-twenty, fruitful, resourceful, with a strength that was doubled by the skill and purpose of my mother. Now I am forty-six, and old. A soft wind blew across the tiny lake, and unexpectedly, incredibly, her spirit lifted. I am Queen-Regent. Behind me lies the power of Cleopatra, or the Queen of Sheba. Even now my son Thomas lays hands upon the treasures of the Tower, the vast fortune amassed by Edward, and the weapons of war to crush any who dare question my might. How can I be alone? She lifted her eyes to the greenness above and smiled faintly. All my enemies are dead; the Fiend rots in earth and writhes in Hell. Clarence will ferret no more for secrets to undo me. Even Desmond’s laughter is stilled. His two little knaves also, cut off in play … The smile fled. That was unlucky. Too late now, to mend that. But Tiptoft should have spared them. Unlucky. She began again, for comfort’s sake, to account her benefits. I have Anthony, strong, clever Anthony …
(‘Sweet sister, think of me when you come into your glory!’
‘Anthony, we shall be supreme! More powerful than the King himself!’)
I have Margaret Beaufort, with her man’s mind and her unerring judgment. And now she has a new husband, Lord Stanley, well to heel. His was the loudest voice upholding me at the Council meeting, when Edward’s last decree was superseded. Edward’s last decree! Gloucester shall not have charge of my son, that precious chalice of royal blood, that vessel of power. Gloucester, whom I had almost forgotten, shall die. No doubt he is already dead, if Anthony keeps faith, which he will. Anthony shall be rewarded with a quarter of my treasure from the Tower.
Her busy mind went meticulously on, reliving scenes and conversations like a series of tableaux. The interment of Edward in St. George’s Chapel, so near through the trees. The lying-in-state; Edward’s great chest and belly exposed above the loincloth, his gross flesh ethereal in the tapers’ light, so that he drew on a reminder of his slender sunlit youth. So, he was with his Eleanor now! She thought: I once dreaded his death as the end of my power. But now I know my power begins.
The servants, and the Princess Elizabeth who sat near by, looked at the restless twisting hands, the face that smiled and frowned in turn as assets were reckoned, hazards appraised. She calculated ceaselessly her prizes both monetary and prestigious; she saw the realm like cloth of Arras, starred goldly with her possessions. Her fee-farms by the thousand, acre on acre of sweeping land rich with barley or patrolled by a million wool-bearing sheep. Her scores of royal chases thronged with venison and birds to grace a paladin’s table. The gold, the silver and jewels, the horses, hawks and weapons, the fabulous furnishings and tapestries in fifty or more palaces. And beside all these the ocean of wealth amassed for Thomas and Richard Grey, for Anthony. She nodded, a gesture weird to the watchers, as she thought: I acted well over Exeter’s daughter. Even when she died after a year’s marriage to Tom I prevailed on Edward for those vast estates to remain my son’s. Clarence’s bounty, too. All mine, ours. Earldoms and duchies and marquisates. My brother Edward in charge of a mighty fleet, lying off the French coast. Even Calais mine one day …
I asked for as much of the land around the fountain that could be covered by a stag’s hide. Then I cut the hide into strips so that my land extended far beyond the forest.
The pattern goes on. Even in my widowhood there is naught to fear. Only Hastings, with whom Tom has promised to deal speedily. And Richard Gloucester … What possessed Edward? To pronounce as Protector of the Realm, a brother whom he scarcely ever saw, one content to rusticate in the soulless North. But Anthony would put him down. The Council should issue all writs in aurunculus regis uterinus and frater regis uterinus. In the name of the Queen’s brother and son.
As for Edward Prince of Wales, he was the greatest asset of all. A pocket King of England, more biddable than the weakest of grown monarchs. Edward should stay at his lessons until he was twenty-one!
Queen’s College, Cambridge. Mine. Endowed and refounded to my honour. What Marguerite began I finished, far more gloriously.
Elizabeth, Princess of York. Young Bess. Out of the tail of her eye she could see her, sitting on spread cloth-of-gold; tall and blonde, wistful in her black. A royal prince for her! More glory for the house of Woodville. All the crowned heads of Europe would be present, the jewelled banners would lift, and foreign chroniclers would gape at the marriage of Bess, daughter of the most powerful Queen in Christendom. She who had breasted the tide of humiliation, who herself had snared a king, and had seen her enemies fall like flowers. Twenty bishops would witness a second generation’s rise to royal heights.
The bishops. Again, her face sobered. The courtiers did her will, but that covey of wily, guilt-ridden old men were yet to be sounded. Russell, Bishop of Lincoln and Keeper of the Privy Seal; Story, Bishop of Chichester and King’s Executor; Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York. Bishop Morton of Ely was already hers, through the gracious intercession of Margaret Beaufort. Her own brother Lionel had the see of Salisbury in his grip. One thing was clear; the bishops needed the patronage and favour of the Crown. They were only too conscious of the ritual squabbling in their ranks, the obloquy in which the Church was held by the laity, to the extent of physical assault on clergy. Yes, the Church would soon come begging for the Queen-Regent’s assent. And they should have it. She liked the new bidding-prayer already written: ‘for our prince, the lady Queen Elizabeth his mother, all the royal offspring, the princes of the King, his nobles and people’. This augured well; she was not to be overpassed as the mothers of previous infant kings had been; Joan of Kent, mother of Richard II, or Katherine, who bore crazy Henry. Then Councils had reigned and lesser Queens embraced obscurity.
She flicked back over her thoughts as one turning the pages of a book. Katherine of France took a lover, Owen Tudor. Bore Edmund Tudor, Margaret Beaufort’s first husband. They in turn begat young Henry. Strange young Henry, of the deep curtsey and cadaverous smile. She looked idly across at the little lake; irrelevantly Henry’s smile seemed to wink from it. Such manifestation meant that the person concerned was thinking of you. But according to Margaret Beaufort, and Lord Stanley, Henry’s new stepfather, this was unlikely. Henry was again in Brittany, thanks to Edward’s hectoring of him some years previously; the King had mumbled vaguely about the aspirations of bastard Welshmen. She had paid little heed, but remembered that Henry had been chased to St. Malo by some Yorkist fleet with little else to do. Yet she remembered his smile; that look from the wise, heavy eyes. He could only have been admiring her.
He had looked long at the Princess Elizabeth too. Almost as if he lusted for her. It was impossible to associate such gross emotions with the son of the nunly Countess. Last year Margaret had come to beg the royal licence to her third marriage. Elizabeth had said politely: ‘God send you many children.’
The bright black eyes were primly amused. ‘Madame, I have told you I am done with childbearing. My marriage to Stanley will be one of the mind.’ To this, Stanley showed no objection. He and Margaret were alike, cool and quiet and unfleshly. Margaret made all the decisions, still signing herself Countess of Richmond, a pretension to which she had no vestige of right. This had annoyed Edward, but Elizabeth had been amused. Let Margaret deck herself with small honours like bracelets; the title of noble blood had escaped her. Like all the Beauforts, she was merely the offshoot of old Gaunt’s sinful liaison with Katherine Swynford. She had no enchanted heritage … Elizabeth’s thoughts rustled on, like the bird-haunted trees.
A commotion reached her. Across the parkland came shouting and the baying of dogs. Around the Queen, the circle of grooms, falconers, guards, rose to attention. Hunting was forbidden during the period of royal mourning, yet there appeared to be a chase in progress, not a quarter-league distant. Then, bursting from a covert of briars, appeared what seemed to be a bundle of rags. It leaped nimbly towards the Queen’s little camp of pleasaunce. It was an old woman, running like a hare. Tatters and thorns encompassed her; her face was streaked with blood and filth. Bounding close behind her were a half-dozen sleek, snarling wolfhounds, followed more clumsily by a group of yeomen from Windsor. The woman ran on, mouth gasping in terror, hands clawing the air. She ran straight into the royal circle, throwing herself with one last lunge past the servants who tried to grasp her. She fell face down at the Queen’s feet.
Like creatures of Hell, the hounds were close, eyes bloodshot, jaws gaping. Princess Elizabeth screamed. The Queen’s women clutched at one another in terror, while several brave pages threw themselves forward to grapple with the rearing beasts. The yeomen raced up and, with difficulty, put the dogs on leash. Baulked, they whined and slavered over the prone woman. Elizabeth, who had not moved, said coldly: ‘What is the meaning of this entertainment?’
To the woman she said: ‘Get up.’ As soon as the eyes in the caked disfigured face met hers, she knew recognition and this worried her. Soon, she thought, I shall be seeing acquaintances in the bole of a tree or the shape of a flower. First, Henry Tudor’s smile in the lake, and now this wretched vagrant. One of the men trying to calm the hounds spoke hastily.
‘Highness, forgive us. We tried to stop her. She was too fleet. She wished to see your highness. Whitefriar here–’ he soothed a hound – ‘nearly had her. One more moment and she would not have troubled you’.
Bloody teethmarks stained the woman’s brown bare heel. Rough and indistinct, she spoke. She addressed Elizabeth directly; too old, too poor to acknowledge fear.
‘Oh, lady,’ she said. ‘Do you remember Eltham?’
An instant engulfing wave, memory rose. No trick then, no false recollection. Eltham; the day of the joust, of John. The rolling train of festive knights and ladies. The Countess of Somerset, dozing in the litter. The Tudors, Jasper and Edmund, sweeping on to the tiltyard. The coming of York, and the Fiend, to discomfit King Henry. And the old woman (old even then!) whose skull Barnaby craved to break … Here was certainty that memory was unimpaired, save for deeds born to be forgotten.
A royal prince, fair lady, shalt thou wed,
But trouble dire shall fall upon thine head …
Then, she had thought the rhyme glib, and suspect. But how true it had become!
Bone of thy bone shall by a future fate
With blood of these three houses surely mate …
But which three houses? Her mind groped. She had been saying the rhyme out loud, while the gypsy followed her with little nods and smiles.
‘Lady,’ she said softly, ‘the first two are York and Lancaster …
‘And the third?’
The woman laughed. ‘Lady,’ she said with finality, ‘that is for you to decide.’ Her deep, lined eye swivelled to rest upon the Princess Elizabeth, still trembling from her recent fright.
‘She, lady.’
‘My daughter? What of her?’
In the eyes there were traces of tears that might have been seen in the gold-framed eyes of ancient Egypt; the tears of dead kings doomed by their enemies to be unremembered.
‘She will be Queen of England. God have mercy.’
It is favourable, Elizabeth thought joyfully, disregarding the last strange phrase. My destiny comes to the full. Bess will be a Queen and twenty bishops shall bow to the crowning of a Woodville. And yet – Queen of England? What of Ned, who even now rides to London in Anthony’s care? To be crowned king, to be ruled by our Council for years until the name of Woodville is as rooted as Plantagenet … How can Bess supersede her brother, or his brother, Richard of York? She felt the skin stretch tight over her face.
‘Then this means, dame–’ she addressed the gypsy courteously but each word slid like ice – ‘that my sons will never rule England?’
The woman inclined her head.
‘They will … die young?’
‘They will.’
She felt her own senses rejecting the answer almost before it was out. She saw also that the dogs had done more mischief than was earlier evident; blood ran down the woman’s legs. The sight of it stole away some magic; this, then, was no seer. Only a wretch who lived on her wits. London, England, abounded with false prophets. Yet she leaned forward again, and said: ‘Tell me …’
Then Whitefriar, the largest hound, slipped his chain from the inattentive hand of a groom and sprang. The stench of blood led him to his duty. He was trained for the throat, and all was quickly over. One stifled shriek, a flurry of torn clothing, brown flesh bursting into red, and silence. Elizabeth sat frozen for a moment, watching Whitefriar whipped and chivvied into subservience, then fondled, then cuffed again by men uncertain of the Queen’s humour. Then she rose, carefully pulling her gown away from the woman’s body where it lay. I might have kept her to be my soothsayer, she thought, then, looking down: foolishness. How could this mangled bone-bag have had the gift of sight? She saw that the Princess was milk-faced and shuddering; this annoyed her. She moved swiftly to her daughter’s side and pinched her wrist, hard.
‘Be still,’ she commanded. ‘Are you some half-wit, to snivel at death?’To herself she added: when I was seventeen no sight disturbed me! She listened impatiently to the girl’s stammering reply.
‘It was her words, Madame … she said … she said … Madame, I do not want to be Queen of England! I would liefer marry for love!’
‘Jesu, God!’ cried Elizabeth. She could have boxed Bess’s ears. Resisting the temptation she turned with an imperious look to the assembled company and said:
‘We have tarried long enough here. We shall return to our Palace of Westminster.’
‘Mistress Grace!’ Rough hands, rough voice, roused her from sleep. The flickering gold of a cresset pried through her darkness. She moaned with fatigue and sat up in bed. In the communal chamber, the other women were awakening too. Renée’s cross voice said: ‘What is it?’ Grace, suddenly wide awake, peered into the face of a guard.
‘Mistress. Rouse the Queen.’
He turned away as she fumbled for her clothing, her body like lead from the exhaustion born of the last few days. The Queen’s tense mood had sapped vitality from all the women. It seemed only five minutes since Grace had taken the last cup of cordial into the royal chamber, returning to fall into deepest sleep.
‘What time is it?’
‘Just on midnight. Hurry, mistress.’
She shivered, wrapping a robe about her, and thought: Today is the third of May. The day for which my Queen has waited and wished. The young king must have arrived, with his uncle Anthony. Today he will be crowned. Grace wished that they had chosen a time other than midnight to arrive. She wished also that she was not always the one to fetch and carry, to be roused because her trestle bed lay nearest the door, or was it because she was the youngest in the chamber? But she was the Queen’s servant; this thought renewed her.
‘You may turn round, Master Jack,’ she said to the guard. ‘What is the message for the Queen?’
‘Desperate and urgent. Bishop Morton waits outside. I have bidden him to the Queen’s Council chamber. For God’s love, there is no time to lose.’
Why this frenzy, if the Prince were here? She looked once more at the man’s taut face and hurried through into the Queen’s bed-chamber. Grace’s candle illuminated the unforgettable face, deeply dreaming. As she watched, the broad white forehead creased, the lips puckered in some unknown distress. Tenderly, Grace awakened her.
‘He is here,’ the Queen murmured, drugged with sleep. ‘Is the fighting over? John, you have come …’
The utterance of that name bred warmth in Grace. John of Gloucester would surely be brought to London now. If they had killed his father as planned, he would be of as little account as any royal Plantagenet bastard. One who lived between dark and light, humbled one day, revered the next. She thought, with unconscious callousness: we shall be even more in sympathy; he will no doubt sorrow for his father, and I will comfort him. To the Queen she said softly: ‘Bishop Morton begs audience.’ Instantly alert, Elizabeth threw off the bedcovers and said sharply: ‘Morton? Why?’
She slipped her feet into high wooden chopines, snatched up a black houpeland with a cowl and swathed her slenderness in its dark folds. The hood fell about her brow. She looked like a pure youth about to take holy orders. So enraptured was Grace by this sight that she fell dumb. Elizabeth’s unexpected slap stung her cheek. So be it: that’s a caress. I love and serve her.
‘Will you speak?’ said the Queen. ‘Why is Morton here? Have they arrived from Ludlow? Great God! I’ll see for myself!’
They passed through the room full of drowsy robing women who knelt before the Queen as she went, the black gown blowing about her swift walk. Her lips were set, her eyes as clear as if they had never closed in sleep. Grace followed a pace behind along tortuous ways stone cold with the night’s chill, and entered on the breeze of powerful black into the Queen’s council chamber, which was day-bright with torches, and choked with the ambience of disquiet. Several people were there; Morton dominated. He had come fast from Holborn through the night. Thomas Dorset had been roused from the bed of Jane Shore. Catherine Woodville was weeping into her sleeve. Margaret Beaufort and her husband Stanley were present, standing with Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York. Yet the Queen addressed Morton alone.
‘What news, your Grace?’
Before, the Bishop could reply, Dorset ran forward, sank on his knee before his mother. He was almost in tears.
‘The worst possible news, Madame. The Protector …’
‘Who?’ The Queen’s voice was outraged.
‘Gloucester. He intercepted Anthony upon the road. The ambush failed, and he’s read your letters, even the one bidding his death. He has taken Edward, our prince, and rides on London with him.’
Morton spoke, sonorously calm against Dorset’s hysteria.
‘Lord Anthony, your Grace, has been taken north in captivity, for acting under your orders. Likewise imprisoned is your son, Lord Richard Grey; also the Prince’s companions, our allies Vaughan and Haute. It seems …’
Dorset interrupted. ‘… that we are culpable of high treason!’ He gave a short bark of laughter. ‘In that we did disobey the King’s last decree! Gloucester came riding almost from Scotland. He would never have known of our plan had not cursed Hastings sent couriers straightway to him. He would never have conquered Anthony, had not Harry Buckingham ridden to him with reinforcements.’ The Queen looked at Catherine.
‘Sister, come here, I pray.’
Catherine, weeping, fell upon her knees.
‘Ingrate,’ said the Queen softly. ‘Your own husband has betrayed me. Did I marry you to Harry Buckingham so that he might use me thus? Are you my sister and cannot sway a man?’
‘Your Grace,’ blubbered Catherine, ‘he did as he liked. And he told me he was going on pilgrimage, for our late King’s soul!’
‘I fear, Madame–’. Morton’s voice rolled like a stroked drum – ‘that we have little time. Gloucester is full of righteousness. Remember, he holds York more dear than anything else. What your Grace may have planned against his own person is a grain of sand in the desert of York’s betrayal. York, to Gloucester, is God. That decree of Protectorship from Edward’s dying mouth – that was no less than God’s ordinance.’
‘The Devil’s ordinance!’ she said savagely. ‘That any should usurp my heritage. The Prince is mine! Mine! Ours, to be ours in might!’
Grace wondered whether the Queen might fall in a fit. Beside herself, she spilled out tantrum.
‘Shall the blood of my inheritance go unrewarded? Shall all my work be unfulfilled? Who is this Gloucester, to take in charge the crown of my estate? You, my lord Morton! Why could you not prevent it?’ Morton spread his hands, smiled a sorry ecclesiastical smile. ‘You, Catherine, who have shared my splendour – without me you would be mouldering still at Grafton Regis! You, Thomas! Why could you not forestall this plague!’
As Dorset stammered nonsense, the door was flung open. Breathless and dishevelled, Lionel Woodville, Bishop of Salisbury, entered.
‘You have heard all?’ the Queen demanded.
He nodded, his heavy face flushed. ‘My man rode in five minutes ago. Our brother with your son and his followers have been taken to Yorkshire. Their soldiers turned straight to Gloucester, who pardoned them for their part in the affair and sent them home. Gloucester came in mourning, with a mere six hundred men. He ordered a requiem for our late sovereign in York. On reaching Northampton he met Buckingham who informed him of the ambush. Gloucester caught our party at Stony Stratford. Another half a day and the Prince would have been here, and crowned.’
‘Crowned and ours,’ she said furiously. ‘What does Gloucester, now?’
‘He brings the Prince, but to be crowned under his Protectorship. He adheres to Edward’s decree – that his Council shall govern for the child until he is grown. He has sent barrels of harness on into London so that the people may see the proof of our conspiracy.’
‘The arms show our blazon!’ said Dorset feverishly. ‘They declare us traitors to the Crown …’
‘The people have never loved us,’ trembled Catherine. ‘Because we are for Lancaster.’
‘My lord Bishop,’ said the Queen to Morton. She spread her hands; the wide black sleeves fell in a graceful imploring gesture. ‘My lord, what now?’
‘Take your son,’ said Morton unhesitatingly. ‘Your youngest son, Richard Duke of York. Take your daughters and your women and go at once into Westminster Sanctuary.’
Grace saw the Queen’s face set like an effigy, and she herself viewed the prospect of Sanctuary without relish. To her, it was a vague time of chanting monks, of cold and sparse food, a time when she, a tiny girl, cried outside the door where the Queen laboured to bring Prince Edward into the world. This prince over whom men now fought like curs with a carcass.
‘We are to retreat?’ said the Queen. Morton smiled. ‘For the nonce, highness. It is politic to have no discussion with Gloucester or his creatures. All is far from lost. Sir Edward Woodville still anchors in the Channel, does he not?’
‘Yes, with much treasure,’ said Dorset, brightening.
‘My daughter,’ the Bishop swung round to address Grace. She had not realized he was even aware of her presence. ‘My child, fetch the Duke of York. Don’t alarm him. Remember he is only a little knave.’
‘Madame, let me come with you into Sanctuary!’ Catherine ran forward to the Queen.
Coldly she replied: ‘You are a traitor and a fool, but you are still my sister. Make ready.’
‘And I?’ Dorset said unsteadily.
‘No, you will be more useful in London. Watch Hastings, Gloucester, Buckingham. Send me all news, discreetly …’ She turned and quit the chamber so swiftly that she left her son gaping and the three Bishops drawing together grave-faced, with whispers.
Grace awakened the small prince and helped him to dress. Hand in hand they walked to the outer gate of the Palace. A rosy-pale May dawn was streaking the horizon. Scores of serving men ran across the cobbled strip which divided the Palace from the Abbey precincts. The sound of the monks’ morning office came faintly; soft light waxed and waned behind the arched windows as the unseen chanters processed, each carrying a flame. Outside the activity was frenzied. Grooms and servants, each laden with a box, or a pile of richly bound books, or a sheaf of silk garments, ran like madmen towards the Sanctuary door. One man carried two brachets slung over his shoulders. Their jewelled collars flashed like swords in the dawn light. Bumping down the Palace stair came the larger chattels; fardels crammed with gold plate, coffers so full of jewels that the lids were bursting open. A gold chain slithered like a serpent on to the cobbles. One man ran with a vast bundle of cloth-of-gold on his head; six others struggled with a carved table of Spanish chestnut. The Queen’s gold-framed mirror, Turkish carpets, rainbow-coloured and rolled like battering-rams, were borne into the Sanctuary. In went the Queen’s prie-dieu, studded with sapphires and diamonds, and two Flemish paintings of the late King. An enormous oak dresser with handles of beaten gold defeated the men. Cursing, they tried all ways to introduce it, finding the arched doorway too narrow. One of the dresser drawers slid open, revealing the flash of diadems, golden wands, necklets, all clumsily, hastily packed.
‘It’s too big, your Grace!’ one man cried.
As if she were commanding a battle, Elizabeth pointed eastward to where the abbey wall was fragmented by arched windows.
‘There!’ she cried. ‘Where it is weakest. Get hammers. Breach the wall!’
Abbot Milling, who had been drawn out into the courtyard by the commotion, looked as if he were about to swoon. ‘Madame,’ he said diffidently, ‘is there no other way?’
‘My lord Abbot,’ said the Queen, without looking at him, ‘I trust you have not forgotten my bequests to your house.’ He bowed, and was silent, looking unhappy.
She watched as the last of the movables was rushed from the palace. The Siege of Jerusalem, under whose fabulous weight staggered fifty men. Grace saw the Queen’s face – fear and satisfaction and determination all mingling there, and heard the quiet voice say:
‘Yes, yes! Break down the wall. They shall not rob me a second time!’
She turned and smiled at Grace, and the dawn rose clear and bright.
‘Scream,’ Morton ordered. ‘When they come, scream and cry.’
Haggardly she looked at him. This ageing prelate, so calm and bland, had in him something of the dead Jacquetta and it gave her confidence. Morton was solid, unlike the vacillating Rotherham, Archbishop of York. How glad she had been to receive, in Sanctuary, the Great Seal from Rotherham’s hands. How furious when, panicking, he had demanded it back not twenty hours later. When she had asked his reasons he had said, with a fatuous smile: ‘The Lord Protector wishes it.’
Only dignity had held her hand from striking him. Dignity and the knowledge that his behaviour was only to be expected. The Bishops, those fearfilled, conscientious old men, lusted for favour, no matter from what source. Gloucester was supreme in Westminster; therefore it was politic for them to work his will. Not so Morton; he remained her close ally, rich with the wisdom of his years and his skill at being where the grass grew greenest. Although she disliked his appearance; those hard agate eyes among folds of flesh, the forked beard above the dewlapped jowl.
‘Madame, hear me,’ he repeated. ‘When they come to take your youngest son, weep loudly. And let down your hair.’
‘My hair?’
‘It adds a certain pathos.’ he said seriously. ‘The brothers in this place go about … it would be favourable if you were seen to be – persecuted.’
There was no need to question him. Only one question.
‘How does my son, the Prince Edward?’
‘Fit as a cock,’ he answered. ‘They plan to crown him on the Nativity of St. John. He is in the royal apartments at the Tower, playing at sovereignty. I wish, though, that we could have kept the little one with us. However …’ he sighed. ‘Gloucester vows it is a stain upon his Parliament …’
‘His Parliament!’ Rage erupted through her.
‘Indeed, highness. Unfortunately his claim to the Protectorship is good. As I say, he avers it debases his Council that the king-elect’s brother should be absent from the coronation. Like yourself, my lady. He would dearly have you present.’
‘I shall not leave Sanctuary,’ she said, through her teeth.
Morton looked about, at the stones where damp trickled, at the cracked panes through which a breeze cavorted, and pursed his lips.
‘As you will. You are wise. Never fear. The day will come when you dance again in Westminster Great Hall. For now, let them have young Dick. But scream, claw him to your bosom. Let them tear him bodily away.’
‘Is Gloucester’s wife with him?’ she said suddenly.
‘She is to join him soon. At present she is ailing, at home in the north. Like their son, Edward, she is frail and sickly …’
She found herself averse to hearing more about the Fiend’s daughter, and shut off her mind to Morton’s talk. When next she gave him her attention he was saying:
‘Your son the Prince has a will of his own. It is his doing as well as the Parliament’s that the other boy joins him.’
‘Yet he is not strong enough to defy the Protector,’ she said bitterly.
‘Or Buckingham; for Buckingham is the spokesman always in this affair,’ said Morton. At that unfortunate moment Catherine chose to appear, and the Queen turned on her.
‘You hear that? Have you naught to say? Your husband, ranged against our blood!’
Placatingly Catherine held out a sealed roll.
‘A letter, Madame.’
Elizabeth broke the seal quickly, cried: ‘From Anthony!’ She read avidly, laughed, raised feverish eyes. ‘Clever,’ she murmured. ‘He bribed the guard at Pontefract to let this bill through. He says he is safe and well. Our adherents are everywhere. Thomas has already bidden him good cheer by letter. Hastings is the key. The weak link in the chain. Hastings blows where he lists and has not yet chosen his allegiance.’ She looked up, scornfully. ‘Yes! for years I watched him, wantoning with the King in evil company. Now, for all his love of the Protector, he finds old ties, of lust, of drinking, to be slender things … he would join us, if he dared.’
Avidly she looked at Morton. ‘Is there salvation, my lord?’
He bowed. ‘I have examined the situation, highness. With your brother and Sir Richard Grey still in captivity, I admit the cause has its limitations. But as your brother Sir Anthony reveals, your friends are legion, waiting to support you. Let us consider. Gloucester comes to uphold the Crown, the focus of his battle-cry and credo. He burns with his late brother’s ordinance. You and your kin, Madame, are disliked by the old nobility. Forgive me, but it is so. Factions are bound to arise over the ruling of a child king. Gloucester feels therefore compelled to form a strong Council to uphold what he deems the right. The old nobility are with him. But you, Madame, have a subtler strength. All the families of Lancaster who strive, quietly, in the shadow of your power. Your power, soon to be restored.’
He went on: ‘Let us count your allies: Rotherham; he grew frightened, but he is still yours. Salisbury, yours by blood. Lord Stanley …’
She frowned. Stanley was another gall-bitter disappointment. Lately she had learned that he, Margaret Beaufort’s husband, cherished the Protector, and sat on his Council. But Morton murmured: ‘do not fear. Stanley can feign love for the most suspicious heart. He pays lip service to the new order, but he dreams of your inevitable majesty.’
As he spoke, the Bishop moved towards the window, seeing white seabirds wheeling beyond the high cracked panes. Where? Across the North Sea perchance, to France, to Brittany? Where the true saviour waited. The one who, without doubt, would value Morton as he deserved. The one in whose service he could rise to magnificence and terrible power. The only one; the master chosen long ago. He kept his back daringly turned on the Queen, while excitement boiled within him. I am an old man, he thought, but I must not die until our hopes are fruited. Until Henry Tudor reigns in England. Meanwhile I must cherish this foolish woman. By my own hand must I move these pawns of state. He turned back slowly, saying:.
‘It is better that I do not visit you again here, my liege. All our plans are en train. Dorset will suborn Hastings. You know, Madame, where Mistress Shore is now?’
Startled, she said: ‘Shore? What has a cackling harlot to do with our plight?’
‘She is with your son, Dorset, hidden deep in London. He is teaching her – how to render an ageing lecher witless. Surely, Madame, you have not forgotten Adam’s Fall?’
There was knocking, faintly heard, upon the postern door of the Sanctuary. The voice of Abbot Milling echoed in the passage outside.
‘I fancy this is Cardinal Bourchier,’ said Morton. ‘Make ready your son, Madame.’
He was poised to leave, unseen, through the intricacies of cloister and watergate. She said quickly: ‘You have given me comfort, my lord. But what of Gloucester?’
‘Gloucester will be murdered, as planned previously,’ said the Bishop, half-way through the door. ‘They come, Madame. Let down your hair.’
The night sounds of Southwark rose and filtered through the upper window of the inn room. From the street where hanging gables and a hot white moon made patterns on the ground, came a snatch of a drunken song. A dog howled gruesomely for minutes on end until quenched by a blow or a caress. Running feet and the jangle of steel told of the night watch pursuing a miscreant. Someone threw a metal canikin from a window and a woman yelled shrewishly. Further down the street someone else was noisily sick.
In the inn’s best bed, Jane Shore lay watching the cockroaches. Two were parallel, neck-and-neck, and Jane curled her toes under the coarse sheet, willing the one she had christened Dorset to win. It was through Dorset she was here at all. For him she had temporarily abandoned luxury and lay in this miserable abode of illicit love with the late King’s Lord Chamberlain. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him. Hastings was fast asleep, breath bubbling gently. He looked younger in the moonlight; the greyish stubble on his chin looked almost fair. Jane sighed gently, and glanced back at the roaches. The smaller one had spurted ahead and Dorset was at least an inch behind. This was dull sport. She thought tenderly of her last meeting with Tom Dorset when he had promised her the world. She decided, when this tiresome half-understood affair was over, that she would ask him to take her to the horseraces at Smithfield. Hastings would not take her anywhere – he would not even lie with her in the Palace. ‘Too dangerous, my heart.’ Too old, too dull. The satisfaction of raising him to a pitch of undreamed-of ecstasy had soon palled for Jane, but this she kept to her practised professional self. Dorset had bidden her, and she would obey to the letter. Dorset was her sky and stars, her daily bread, her master. And her work was nearly at an end.
Day after day, robed in a nun’s habit, she had gone meekly through the cloister of Westminster Sanctuary, past the grim grey arch with its vine-leaf capitals, walking like a penitent yet wanting to scream with laughter. In her sleeve she usually carried a packet, writings of instruction, warning, information. Once inside with the Queen, she could throw off the seemly hood, smile brightly into the tense white face, and take wine. Often there would be a present for her, a small gold nouche for her bosom, trinkets insignificant enough to be worn unnoticed. When it was time to return and wait for Hastings at the inn, she had to commit to memory a message. The Queen would never touch pen to paper in this enterprise. So Jane would take her measured murmuring way from the sanctuary like the holiest nun treading out a psalm. Half the messages meant nothing to her; that was why she needed to repeat them over and over. Some were mere fragments.
Tell him – Stanley is with us now in spirit.
The Bishop approves.
Sometimes the Queen’s face was terrible. Jane had always been afraid of her, and muttered the messages more fervently in consequence.
We shall be victorious. This latest blight is doomed.
There was mention of the Queen’s relatives; sweet Tom’s uncle and brother.
Anthony is full-fettled. He awaits your men to help his escape.
Sir Richard Grey has his captor’s ear. They will drop the bridge at your captains’ signal. Pray reply soon.
Bishop Rotherham is mine again.
This last made Jane chuckle. It was a succession of riddles; yet the Queen had never shown more tolerance of Jane. No raised voices, no wounding waspish chiding of Jane’s noisiness. Today, after the weeks of trudging back and forth, the lesson had been easy; it made sense.
Tomorrow, Friday 13th June. Stand ready. Kill Gloucester and Buckingham. Bring out my sons from the Tower and meet with me at Westminster.
She slid cautiously from the bed and crept across the moon-dappled floor to drink wine from a pitcher. King Edward had taught her to drink. Burgundy wine like rubies; the fiery cornelian of good Clary; sack possets heavy with curdled cream, mace and nutmeg. The breath-taking hypocras, burning with aqua vitae and pepper. Last November they had toasted La Mas-Ubel, patron of seeds and fruits, in a great bowl of strong ale in which six roasted apples swam in raw sugar and ginger. They had taken it piping hot and later Edward had tumbled her on the floor of the chamber. A florid, laughing giant, ogreish with fat. She had never loved him, but she had liked him and she missed him sorely. Were it not for Dorset, her life’s light, she would be quite alone. The Palace was shrouded in mourning and preparation for the young King’s coronation; all was lawyers’ talk, work, no gaiety. The most commanding voice was that of Buckingham, so haughty that he had dissolved Jane in tears. Gloucester seemed not to notice her at all. But between the two of them they ruled Westminster, and the happy drinking days were fled.
She stole back to bed, her long, sweat-damp hair stranded over her naked body. Hastings was awake and watching her.
‘My Jane,’ he said, sleepily reproachful. ‘Why did you leave me?’
She wound her arms about him, feeling the slack, old man’s flesh, suffering the rasp of his beard on her breast. ‘Sleep, my lord. You were so peaceful.’
‘No, I had a dream–,’ he said uneasily. ‘An awful vision.’
She crooned to him. ‘Dreams are airy stuff, the work of devils trying to frighten bliss. Sleep, lord.’
‘Then stay close, Jane.’ He stroked her shoulder with a thin veined hand. ‘Holy Jesu! Never did I think these times would come …’
‘You and I together, dear lord?’ she said artfully. He was so often tongue-tied with her; she had to shape the words for him.
‘Nay … yea! Truly, Jane, I never thought I should have you – I watched you with Ned – I longed, imagined. I turned from my good wife, Kate. I behaved like a heretic and would not lie with her. You’ve bewitched me, Jane. Or someone has,’ he said in a quieter voice.
Tomorrow, his thoughts ran. Tomorrow, tomorrow, like the tick of a clock, or the frantic riding of an army.
Tomorrow I shall engineer the killing of one who was dear to me, to a man I loved. One who himself loved me well, who rode with me against Lancaster, when he was a sickly stripling youth. Gloucester, who took my hand, not two moons ago – Jesu! who took my hand today! – saying: ‘Thank God for you, Will Hastings. Thank God for you, in these times of strife and madness.’ Tomorrow Gloucester’s blood will stain this loving clasping hand. And Elizabeth, upon whose coming I once looked with spleen and disapproval, shall be again supreme. Elizabeth, who put down venom like a ratcatcher throughout the court. Elizabeth, whose policies are loathed by me. She who broke her sovereign’s heart with Desmond’s death, and used her brother like the most skilled provocateur to bring wretched Clarence to a bubbling end. Elizabeth, who split the soul of Warwick until he knew neither day from night, nor friend from foe. Elizabeth, whose messages. I meekly bear, whose will I wreak! Cloudily her face swam before his mind; the lazy-lidded eyes, the tight red mouth. Woodville and Lancaster wench, you never warmed my lust. Yet to Edward, you were Bathsheba, Salome …’
He turned closer to Jane, burying his tired slack flesh against her, weary, cold of conscience. She murmured, ‘Yes, my lord,’ and, ‘There, my lord!’ while the inn’s lath-and-plaster quaked with the quarrels and lovemaking of others, and they lay tightly within it, part of a corporate squalidity.
He slept and dreamed anew. He awoke shouting, beating the bedcovers. From sheer terror, Jane swore at him, using the coarse expressions of her early life in Chepeside. Sticky with sweat he clung to her, the pupils of his eyes distended and black in the moonlight.
‘Holy God!’ he gasped. ‘First, a boar – Gloucester’s Boar, a device of unsurpassed might. But worse! Christ protect me! It came out of the sea …’
His hands hurt her; she listened. ‘Monstrous, shining like harness, plated with gleaming scales. It took me about the neck, each scale like a barber’s knife. Jane! Jane …’
Tomorrow is cursed. Friday, the thirteenth of June. I have schemed against the Protectorship. Will the Queen save me now? Or Morton, or Stanley? Or Rotherham? Or Anthony Woodville, Richard Grey, and the others who like myself are embroiled blood-deep in this treason? All these weeks I have been blinded and by what? For what? For the love of a foul-mouthed whore whom my great family would not have used in their kitchens … He turned upon Jane, but she had left his side.
‘Be comforted, sweet Will,’ she cried, anxious to amend the oaths she had hurled at him. Look!’ She began to writhe and cavort in the moonlight, as the King had loved her to do. ‘Look! I’ll dance for you!’
She danced, and another danced with her, a shadow whose hair was long and streamed like fern, whose hips and thighs undulated, whose whole outline bore an unearthliness beyond thought. Fresh sweat gushed on Hastings’s brow. He rose, clumsy with fright, tangling his feet in the bedclothes and falling on the filthy boards. He scrambled and groped; broken with panic he found his clothes at last. The fine velvet doublet and the shirt in fair Rennes cloth, the plumed bonnet with the pendent diamond, the hose, the piked brocade shoes. Jane became still. Her full face regarded him quizzically. The King had had these strange humours too, leaping up in dead of night to leave her; these hauntings which she did not try to understand.
‘I must go back to Westminster,’ he muttered, fumbling to fasten his cloak, and making for the door.
‘You will have to cross the river,’ said Jane. ‘And no boatman will bear you at this hour.’
His face livid, he wheeled once more to face her, made an inarticulate noise and plunged through the doorway. After a moment Jane crawled back into bed. Light-headed, lightminded and calm as ever, her last thought before sleeping was that tomorrow all would be well. No more of this fleahouse. No more coaxing of an old man’s stubborn pizzle. The Palace again, and sweet Thomas in her arms.
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, sat writing at a small table. Meticulously he shaped his work, giving to each initial letter a thick downstroke and to the tails a delicate grace so that they hung like cats on a wall. Sunlight pooled on his bent head and touched sparks from the jewel on his hand as it moved elegantly across the parchment. He looked up, and, half-blinded by radiance, saw, through stout bars, the surging green world outside. The bailey of Pontefract Castle lay below his window; by craning a little he could see, beyond the wall, the wild north country rioting in summer. Things too distant for his eye he imagined: the dales, green upon green, tracts of mighty oak, fells assaulted by torrents of white water. From far away came the sound of a hunting horn. He bent again to his work. Scholar, aesthete, courtier, Earl and Duke, he wrote; and so doing, saw visions.
I fear, doubtless
Remediless
Is now to seize
My woeful chance.
For unkindness
Withoutenless
And no redress
Me doth advance.
‘Advance!’ he said softly, and laid the quill aside. The horn became a trumpet, with acid, flaunting bray. His sister sat before him. Every detail of her burned his sight with its impeccable loveliness. Her high crown had rich closed arches, each point diademed with a fleur-de-lys. Suncoloured brocade clothed her; striped and slashed with the royal pattern, her sleeves were gold and blue, the rich dark azure of the Garter. Broad strips of ermine crossed her bodice to fall in rouleaux over her shoulders. More ermine bloomed on the hem of her gown and ran like the tail of a beast along the immensities of the train, a fold of which she held looped over her wrist. Her hair was loose and she was smiling, a little smile directed at the points of her tiny shoes. He knelt. He stretched out both hands, and laughed as she did, a sound of ecstasy and triumph. ‘Queen! Queen of England and of France!’ said Anthony and bent his head, his bedizened bonnet held in courtly fashion in one hand swept out behind him. A wind blew about him; a perfumed tempest emanating from a dozen costly gowns; a hectic breeze of laughter. All his sisters and other ladies of the court surrounded him – fair as flowers – their shining heads auburn and black and gold. With their chattering mirth they engulfed him. He felt a soft fumbling about his thigh, looked down and saw a gold token clasped there; a priceless garter ingrained with sapphires. From its centre hung an enamel flower of rosemary; the whole garter was fashioned in the double ‘S’, the one-time device of Lancaster.
Elizabeth said softly: ‘Souvenance, my dear lord. A token of my remembrance and of yours.’
One of the ladies roguishly said: ‘Sir! Look in your hat!’ and he felt inside its velvet rim, and drew out a letter bound with gold thread, bearing the same emprise of remembrance, with a jewel for a seal.
The Queen bent forward. ‘The articles of combat, sir. You shall do me honour in the tourney.’
‘My adversary?’ he said.
‘De la Roche.’ Her eyes gleamed, flickering a pattern of joy across the vibrant air. The look caught him up and spun him round. De la Roche was grounded already, brought grunting to the turf by one lance-thrust. To your great honour, Madame!
‘Souvenance,’ she said again. ‘Remember me.’ Her eyes were bright, too bright to gaze on longer, and he wrote again, steadily.
With displeasure
To my grievance
And no surance
Of remedy.
Lo, in this trance,
Now, in substance …
The vision changed. A pale girl leaned dangerously far from a window above him. Tears lined her cheeks. Beneath his body he felt his horse curvet and plunge. Be careful! he wanted to cry. It is a long way down! Her lips moved, but he could hardly hear her. Take me away. Take me with you! He shivered, shook his head, saw his own bony boyish wrists straining at the taut bridle.
‘No.’ He turned from her. ‘Make the best of it.’
‘I will repay you,’ she wailed. ‘If it’s the last thing I do in life!’
Nay, Bess. I am today repaid. He took up the pen afresh. That was the only time, Madame, that I did not your will. The rest of my days have been yours, inspired by you; your wit, your will was mine.
Lo, in this trance,
Now in substance,
Such is my dance,
Willing to die.
He had jousted with De la Roche. He had fought him with broadsword, lance and axe, horsed and on foot. The loges all around were crammed with screaming exaltation. The sound of excitement drowned the blaze of the clarions and the silken throb of the great standards flying over the royal canopy. He had beaten De la Roche into the ground, then, full of delight, had made the Bastard of Burgundy eat earth; had struck a secret blow for France, and for Lancaster. For the old days of his heritage, for his parents’ pride. Above all, as in all things, for her. He had jousted, he had sung and prayed and had travelled, in the presence of England’s flower; he had visited shrines in undreamed places, had crossed the snarling bare mesetas of Spain and the cypressed plains of Italy. His translations, his tracts and verses, lay, revered as genius, in the Palace library. Dancing, jousting, learning, teaching, prayer. Such is one man’s life … along the passage outside he heard unhurried, inexorable steps. In this castle Richard of Bordeaux was done to death, secretly. Yet some said that he still lived, that he was seen twenty years after in the wilds of Scotland … a bad place, Pontefract.
Methinks only
Bounden am I,
And that greatly
To be content.
Seeing plainly
Fortune doth wry
All contrary
From mine intent.
He murmured, as a release from the poem’s terse metre:
‘Fortune is a woman. She cannot be gainsaid.’
The pale face reappeared, crowned, speaking later words: ‘Do my will. Help me, I am afraid. Do my will.’ Aghast, he saw the slender figure falling, dropping from the window like a falcon in stoop, landing by chance rather than judgment upon his saddle. The horse bolting, going at a steaming pace through briars and brushes so that their faces, the faces of brother and sister, were torn and their eyes blinded by the wind. Elizabeth laughed, a madwoman, a spirit of air, utterly fey … In the lock of his cell door a key turned. He wrote on, faster.
My life was lent
Me to one intent,
It is nigh … spent
Welcome, Fortune!
But I never went
Thus to be shent
But she it meant
Such is her custom.
With careful finality he put the quill aside, and smiled. Apt as anything Lucretius wrote. Let those who read it afterwards think I chided Fortune. I, wherever I may be, shall know otherwise. There is but one ‘she’. One who breaks the bread of recklessness and holds out a bitter cup. I loved her; I did her will. He rose at the entrance of Sir Richard Ratcliffe, the lawyer and constable sent by Gloucester to oversee this day’s work. A chaplain was with him. Ratcliffe said: ‘Are you ready, Earl Rivers?’
‘I shall never be more or less so.’ He smiled, and with lordly hand indicated the pile of neatly tied rolls on the table: his will, several greetings to followers, and an apology to someone wronged long ago.
‘You will see to these?’
They bowed in assent and parted for his going from the cell. The barred sunlight lit the grey walls and his erect back with the same impartial joy. As they reached the courtyard he stopped and looked about. There squat and terrible, was the block, and lined up near it with a muttering priest were the Queen’s son, Sir Richard Grey, and Thomas Vaughan and Dick Haute, his adherents from Ludlow. Grey and Vaughan were composed, but Haute looked as if he were about to vomit up his fear. Along the wall of the bailey a little detachment of Yorkshire infantry stood at attention. A drum crackled and throbbed. Anthony turned to Ratcliffe and said ‘Then we are all to die?’ The herald began his proclamation: ‘In the name of Richard Duke of Gloucester, Earl of Cambridge, Constable of England, Lord Protector of the Realm …’ and Ratcliffe inclined his dignified head.
‘What of the others?’ said Anthony.
‘I may tell you now, my lord. Lord Stanley is confined in the Tower of London, as is also Archbishop Rotherham. Bishop Morton is in the custody of the Duke of Buckingham at Brecon. William Lord Hastings is sentenced to death.’
So this was where conspiracy had led them all. They had been so confident, Buckingham and Gloucester as good as dead and the whole house of Woodville reunited in triumph. They had reckoned without Buckingham’s tireless agents by whom the whole conspiracy had been smelled out. Buckingham and Gloucester had acted swiftly and ruthlessly.
The sun crept behind a cloud. ‘For great treason against the Crown of England!’ The herald’s voice broke harshly upon the last syllable. Anthony went forward to the block. He smiled, partly to comfort Grey, Haute and Vaughan, partly because he remembered his poem.
Such is her custom
When he knelt, the white-hot sun appeared again, so that ripples of livid light, drifting, coruscating, gilded the axe. The steel fell swiftly, like the plunge of a great silvery fish.
Mistakenly she thought the worst to have befallen. When they brought the news of the utter collapse of all she had striven for, she fell into a rare swoon. Recovering to the sound of her daughters’ sobbing, she stared about her, temporarily witless. The familiar chamber with its stark holiness seemed to shrink into a prison. Even the sound of Abbot Milling’s monks, droning their ceaseless praise, was a salute to the Protector’s power. With one sweep five of her most precious pawns were scattered from the board, lost irrecoverably. Anthony – a thought not to be borne; Richard, John’s son. Vaughan and Haute were more dispensable, Hastings a mere broken tool. Dead, all dead, none the less; no more could she call upon them, mould them, direct them. And Morton, imprisoned in Buckingham’s castle – that was a grievous loss, and Stanley, and Rotherham … She sat among the rushes and held her head, while her women looked on, daring to say nothing. Summer boughs brought in for decoration lay around the hearth. In their greenness she saw the shape of demons. Nothing could be worse than this.
Now she knew. What she had termed the worst was only a rumble forecasting the holocaust. Under the stream of waking thought the fear had always remained no matter how many times she had laid it away like a worn-out gown, telling herself she was done with it. Now, into her sanctuary came that fear, nourishing and well-fanged, with the stem approval of the law behind it. Cardinal Bourchier gave it a voice. Silk-clad and hatted, he entered with his train of priests and lawyers. He unleashed a great vellum, newly sealed, and read from it sombrely.
He read that news had been disclosed to the Council that Edwardus Quartus, late monarch of the realm, did take unlawfully in marriage one Elizabeth Grey, he being already trothplight and married to another, Dame Eleanor Butler, daughter of the old Earl of Shrewsbury. The Cardinal’s voice faded, was replaced by Edward’s, hoarse and bemused as he rolled on the bed, his brain glittering with herbs of madness. I am married already.
‘… that they did live together therefore sinfully and damnably in adultery …’
Eleanor is with the nuns. She will die soon. Bessy, my fate!
Nineteen years of suffering Edward’s demands, his boisterousness, his infidelities. Of bearing and burying his children. Of always feeling alone.
‘… and that we, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal declare that as the said King stood trothplight and married to another, his said pretended marriage with Elizabeth Grey is null … that all their issue have been bastards, and unable to inherit or claim anything by inheritance, according to the law and custom of England.’
A shrill voice interrupted; young Bess, running forward, ill-mannered through desperation.
‘Eminence! Am I no longer a princess?’
He looked at her severely, yet indulgently, and his voice was quite gentle.
‘Madame, you are the Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet, bastard daughter of King Edward.’ He then cleared his throat to resume reading from the membrane. A pain gripping her breast, Elizabeth said, before he could continue:
‘By whose ordinance is this document signed and sealed? And by whose information are these things said?’ She felt her head and face grow hot; the feeling frightened her. She repeated, more quietly: ‘Is there proof?’
The Cardinal lowered his roll. ‘Madame, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal ordain this statute in accordance with the Three Estates of the realm. It is the most important document of this century. As for the source, there are many witnesses, the most prominent being Bishop Stillington. It was he who performed the marriage ceremony between his Grace and Dame Eleanor Butler.’
Stillington. She wanted to scream and swear. Stillington, whom she had thought dead by now and no danger. Years ago she had instructed Bishop Alcock to keep a close eye on Stillington. The pain in her breast grew stronger, frightening her even more. Death was brought by humours such as these.
‘There is more, Madame,’ continued Bourchier rather ominously. Without looking at the parchment he said: ‘God help you, for there is much talk of sorcery.’ To a man, the priests and lawyers crossed themselves. ‘That you and the late Duchess of Bedford did …’
Elizabeth closed her eyes, turned her head sharply to the left, a gesture which silenced the cardinal. The pain receded, leaving a dullness as if a stone lodged in her breast. She counted those who had known about the Duchess’s secret campaign. The clerk, Daunger – he was dead. The Sewardsley nuns – they had told Bray. Margaret Beaufort! Yes, so I have lost her too, she thought numbly. She has betrayed me and upholds Gloucester. For the first time she thought of Gloucester not as an obstacle to be slain or thwarted, but as a vastly under-estimated enemy. Worse than the Fiend, more dangerous than babbling, power-crazy Clarence. If she looked through the window over the Abbot’s little flower garden she could see Gloucester’s fleet anchored in the Thames. He was leaving no hazard open. She had never chosen to know him, but it seemed that he knew her well. Bourchier said: ‘Dame Grey. Are you sick, Dame Grey?’
She did not answer. The pain returned, spread from breast to throat to head, gripping with vicious jaw. This was the worst. Worse than any outrage of the Fiend’s. Warwick had stripped her only of Bradgate and that had been regained. He had taken only her tapestries, her lands. But Gloucester, who had wept at Warwick’s corpse-side, now stripped her of her sovereignty. Dame Grey. Dame Grey. No more Elizabeth, Queen of England. Her head began to shake, as if an unseen hand moved it.
Cardinal Bourchier was alarmed at her appearance. As if by alchemy the contours of her face sank and flattened, the taut jaw dropped. Her colour changed from livid white to fiery red then back to startling pallor. While her mind spun on like a leaf in a vortex. I am Queen no longer. Nineteen years for naught. My princes are mere bastards and my princess likewise. No throne now for my son Edward, whom I laboured to bring forth in this same comfortless Sanctuary. She heard herself saying, in a queer rasping voice:
‘May I ask who will be King of England now?’
‘I am instructed to deliver a copy of this Act,’ he said, ‘It sets out the Titulus Regius – the Council’s findings and decision as to the crowning of our sovereign. It is Parliament’s decree to the title of King.’
Her fingers could not grasp the parchment. It slipped down, curling, to lie at her feet like the open horn of a trumpet Even then, the half-hidden words, plain and black, leaped to her eyes.
‘So Gloucester will be King!’
She could not hear how her own wail echoed in the embossed vaultings above, and drifted, lonely, through the open window to where the river lapped and fretted. There was an overpowering drumming in her ears. Queens can be brought down. How many had said it, and how often? The Fiend had returned in glory, to mock and cheat her and persecute her. His weapon was the Act of Titulus Regius, defying her own enchanted blood.
Grace Plantagenet stood outside the gate of the Sanctuary. A hard summer shower was falling, taking the starch from her spiked hennin and veil, and staining her gown. One or two monks passed in and out of the postern. Weary, disapproving of the constant upheaval about their demesne, they ignored her, going swiftly by with sandal-slap and the reek of incense and dirt from their habits. She tried to catch the attention of one; he looked sourly at her, muttered a benediction or a curse and went in, slamming the wicket behind him. To Grace’s left was the wall with its great raped hole, sketchily shored up with timber. The hole was spacious enough to admit slim Grace, but to what? Only a reprise of a painful scene, perhaps added fury, doubled unkindness. Even now that sudden assault beat at her brain, the more shocking for its very unexpectedness.
She had been working on a tapestry of St. Simon and St. Jude, with her ear and eye alert for any movement or request, her heart beating in time with Elizabeth’s tumultuous heart. Elizabeth had raised her head, had studied Grace for several minutes. Then she had spoken, with quiet, savage anger.
‘You!’
Grace had risen, eagerly, pushing the tapestry frame away
‘Go. Get you from this place, and out of my sight. Do not return’.
The red eyes, the whiteness, had moved Grace to murmur: ‘Madame, you are ill. I pray you …’ and to receive the whiplash answer: ‘I am not ill. I am invincible. Get out of this house!’
Then Elizabeth had risen, had said loudly to her cowering attendants: ‘I dismiss, this day, a bastard. I am done with Plantagenet bastards!’ To Grace she said in a low fury: ‘You bring me ill luck! Jesu! I should have seen it before.’
Young Bess had spoken up bravely. ‘Madam my mother, do not turn away my father’s child, my sister by blood!’ and Elizabeth had silenced her. ‘Ah, God! Edward could sire only bastards. Be still, for you know naught of it!’
Grace had gone, assuming a high dignity she did not feel, out through the grey arch and to the fringe of the frightening outer world. To the edge of a city thronged by turmoil where speculation roared like a milling sea. Taverns were thick with secrets; even the carved gables seemed to take on life, murmurously quivering with various allegiance. Loyalty to Gloucester, to Buckingham; to Tom Dorset, exiled in France; to Sir Edward Woodville, whose spy-ships ran free in the channel; to Lionel Woodville, who had retired to his estates, perhaps to pray; to Morton, silent in the fastness of Buckingham’s Welsh castle. And to another, whose unknown voice was a distant clarion, whose face was the gleam of a ghostly banner. In the alehouse certain men clashed tankards and whispered: ‘To the Dragon!’
Grace’s gown was almost soaked with rain. She moved to stand beneath a projecting buttress. Everywhere people tramped about their affairs; merchants, clerks, hurried in and out of Westminster Hall, where the court was in session. Folk in fine wool, in rags, in velvet, were clotted about the entrance to the chambers. Pedlars and cookboys pranced about, bellowing their wares; beggars whined, fiddlers scraped. A tall, ebony-faced Moor went by with a monkey on his shoulder. Westminster clock spoke like Jehovah; the world rocked. A leering gargoyle spat a mouthful of rain down upon Grace and she shivered. Occasionally through the crowd came the flash of the Watch’s uniform. Grace saw herself arrested, declared a vagrant or worse and bundled into the Fleet, where Jane Shore, a branded harlot, lay by order of the Protector.
‘But I’m the daughter of a king!’ she said loudly. She sat down on a stone from the breached sanctuary wall and began to weep. Now, in all the ballads, a knight would appear. She looked up; there was only a band of urchins, with sly rotten-toothed smiles. One weighed a jagged stone in his hand. Another postured a bow, minced nearer. ‘Lady’s rich gown is wet’, suggested another. The oldest, a boy about Grace’s age, said softly: ‘My mother lusts for a gown like that!’ He had coal-black fingernails and the face of a pirate. They ringed her round, eyes bright, bare toes gripping the cobbles. She opened her mouth, sucked in air and dry panic. Behind her she felt the stone buttress, slippery with rain under her palms. The boys came closer. None of them saw the man approaching. His large purposeful feet slapped spray from the puddles, his broad face was crimson with wrath. He wore a tabard blazoned with a chained white Boar, and he was armed with knife and staff. The latter he used to good effect, laying about him, direct and sure. The clique bolted, heads clubbed bloody. A hand reached out for Grace.
‘Art harmed?’
She shook her head. Holding her hand in his vast paw, he spoke to her in a dialect barely comprehensible, yet with the essence of kindness. He chided her for standing unescorted among the rowdy toils of Westminster. All the time his eyes appraised her dress, her white hands, her obvious gentleness.
‘Tha’ shall be taken to my lady,’ he said finally.
‘Who?’
‘Thou. To the Lady Anne Neville, wife to my lord of Gloucester,’ he said, looking down with pride at the device on his tabard. Then she understood. This was one of the Yorkshire yeomen appointed as personal guard to Gloucester’s lady. Gloucester’s lady! She withdrew her hand from his.
‘I can’t go with you.’
He looked closely at her face, murmuring how much she reminded him of someone, a sharp resemblance save for the eyes. She told him her name, and that of her father. His face became gravely decisive. He took her hand again.
‘Tha’ must not stand here one moment longer.’ He said, in his tortuous northern speech, ‘that my lord of Gloucester would be wroth at such things … his brother’s child crying in the road!’ He led her down towards the river. The rain died as they entered the boat; the current rocked them as they passed the high carved merchantmen anchored at every quay, the hundred petermen drawing in nets heavy with salmon and flounder. Supple clouds moved across the river, charmed, elemental shadows changing with each ripple. All the time the Yorkshireman held Grace’s hand, speaking only once, when he pointed out banners billowing damply from turret and fortress.
‘They are preparing for the coronation. London is ready. Soon, my lord of Gloucester will be King.’ Radiance flooded his face; Grace sat silent in the little boat.
On the steps of Baynard’s Castle, home of the Plantagenets for centuries, bright-liveried guards stood like granite. Within the great hall, the walls were stiff with gay quarterings; over the fireplace banners proclaimed the heritage of Warwick together with the Griffin of Montagu, the Beauchamp Swan, and Gloucester’s Boar. Grace made a muffled sound, and pulled back; the broad hand led her on.
‘Come. Come to my Lady Anne.’
As they ascended the stairs she felt a mood so powerful it was as if the walls spoke. An aura of frail, transient joy – a peak of unstable pleasure that swayed the senses. So tangible was it that she lifted her eyes expecting to see, above the solar door, a motto limned in gold, something that might say: All happiness is here. Welcome. Welcome to a joy that does not last!
Outside the rain had ceased completely; the solar which they entered ran with fluid brightness streaming through the diamond panes. Anne Neville sat playing chess at a centre table. She raised her face; it was almost the face of a severely ill child; smooth and veined at the temples and completely guileless as if the sins and strategies of the world were without moment; as if the world itself were too fleeting for anything but tranquillities. As she saw Grace, and as the Yorkshireman began his cumbrous explanation, she smiled very sweetly. She held an ivory man posed over the board; her partner was oblivious to all, pondering his play. All that was visible of him was a slender green velvet back, a fall of black hair and one elegantly hosed leg stretched out to the great danger of passers-by. Anne Neville’s smile grew broader; her small white teeth looked very bright between her pale lips.
‘I greet you well, mistress,’ she said. To Grace’s escort: ‘Master Walter, you did right to bring her here.’ And, to her absorbed partner, ‘Sir, leave the game, I beg you. Greet our guest!’ The chair flew back and he rose, smiling an apology, turned fully so that Grace saw him dark against the sun. The rippling brightness obscured his features; for a moment she was unsure. Then he took a step towards her.
‘Madame,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Why, Madame … Grace! Have you forgotten me?’
‘John,’ she said softly. ‘Lord John of Gloucester.’ He came closer, taking her cold damp hand to his warm lips.
‘This is good fortune!’ he said gaily, and looked down at her. She was confused. The last time they had met, he seemed such a little boy, a gallant little boy. As she did not speak he continued: ‘I fear you had forgotten me!’
‘You’ve changed. You are taller, bigger – grander!’
‘It is the archery,’ he answered proudly. ‘It stretches a man,’ and behind them Lady Anne said, laughing: ‘Then, John my love, you should be a giant, by reason of practising night and day!’
‘It is my father’s wish that I excel in arms,’ he said gravely. ‘Not only the longbow, but the axe …’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Anne, with an amused shudder. ‘No more talk of weapons for a while. Embrace your cousin, like a courtier!’
Gravely he bent his head. His lips brushed Grace’s mouth. From a bowl of white roses on the table he plucked a bloom and placed it in her hand.
‘Madame, my honour and duty,’ he said. Anne Neville clapped her hands.
‘Perfect, John. Now, mistress, come and greet me. I have not seen you since …’ Her smile faded at some turbulent memory. ‘You were very young. You would not remember.’
Grace sank low before the Duchess Anne. Fingers touched her shoulder and her bent head. Anne cried: ‘Why, child, you’re wet and cold. John, send for Lady Lovell. Fresh clothes, at once!’ She kissed Grace on the brow. Thoughts in chaos, Grace told herself: today, misery and banishment bring me again to John, my dear friend. And I am kissed by Warwick’s daughter … The feeling of disloyalty to Elizabeth gave her great unease, and she turned to look again at John. He was not really changed, only so much taller and broader. His cheeks, tanned by the northern wind, were leaner. He was fashionably dressed in the new tunic with slashed sleeves and a short swirling jacket trimmed with marten. On his fingers he wore several rings, and he was very self-assured. When he had left the room, Anne said: ‘He is the image of his father, and my constant companion, my dear foster son. It is a compensation for lacking my own son, Edward, in London.’ Her face grey heavy as she spoke.
‘I don’t like London,’ (as if to herself). ‘I have been ill, and the journey wearied me. I am often ill, you know. Edward, my little prince, also. Richard is the strong one. He will soon be crowned, and then perhaps we can see Yorkshire again.’
She asked Grace: ‘How is Dame Grey?’
Grace looked deeply into the bowl of flowers. In their close snowy shape there was pain. ‘She is sick with wrath and despair. You must know this already.’
‘Will she attend my husband’s coronation?’ said Anne quietly. Grace shook her head.
‘Will you, mistress?’
‘I cannot.’ Grace looked directly at Gloucester’s lady. ‘Any more than can Dame Elizabeth. How could she, madame?’ She heard the high thread of her own voice, saying: ‘Her heirs have been dispossessed. The crown passes from little Edward to your husband. She is robbed of everything, through Gloucester’s will …’ Tears burned her eyes; she stopped abruptly.
‘No,’ said Anne Neville, after a long time. ‘Do you not know, silly child, who brought this day about? None other than Edward Plantagenet, who through his folly cast his whole dynasty into chance and sin? Do you think my husband coveted the crown? In the north, we had our own kingdom. But the Council decreed Richard heir; there was none other, now that the boys are bastard. Even Clarence’s son is attainted by way of his father’s treason …’ She coughed dryly. ‘I will speak of it no further. I am weary of policy, threats, rantings. I only know that Richard will rule England. I have known him all my life; he will endeavour to do well.’
Her mind sped through the past to Middleham where there was peace and breezes like wine, and the small son who was the light and the beginning of the world; and further back to the time when she, a sixteen-year-old maid, was sold in marriage to the French Queen’s son. When he died at Tewkesbury, a virgin knight, I was glad, she thought. Otherwise I would not have known marriage to my sweet, troubled lord, or a return to my home in the blessed North. A further bout of coughing paralysed her momentarily and she was frightened. London! this plagued, unhappy domain; it afflicts my breast. She got up and to ease herself, walked about the room. Melancholy shortened her tone.
‘I am sorry that I see you cannot love your new sovereign, or me. I had hoped mistress, that you would stay with us. Any child of Edward Plantagenet is welcome in my lord’s house’
Grace watched her. She was so thin; her wrists were tiny, brittle as twigs; her waist a mere wisp of flesh. Her face was like a tragic child’s.
‘I’ll stay, your highness,’ said Grace. ‘But in fairness, it is because I have nowhere else to go.’
Suddenly the door opened and, to Grace’s wonder, Margaret Beaufort entered. She was richly gowned, and carried her breviary like some diligent, knowing, female priest. The sight of Grace, standing now hand in hand with Lady Anne, caused the Countess’s mouth to fall agape; only for a moment. She clamped her jaw and bustled forward.
‘Well met, mistress,’ she said perfunctorily. ‘I heard you were with Dame Grey – but you are not. No matter. Greetings, Lady Anne!’
Grace watched the Countess kneel. Anne said softly: ‘Mistress Grace Plantagenet is to remain with me for a time. How are you, Lady Margaret?’
‘The happiest of women,’ replied the Countess. She seized Anne’s hand and bestowed on it a dry kiss. ‘Today my lord of Gloucester has pardoned my husband Stanley. You, Madame, must have prevailed upon him. God bless you for it.’
‘I did naught,’ said Anne. ‘Richard has promised a pardon to all who swear fealty to the Crown. Stanley and Rotherham have taken the oath; others will follow.’
‘And I, my lady,’ went on the Countess, mixing meekness and exaltation, ‘am to bear your train at your coronation!’
‘I know,’ said Anne. Her mist-grey eyes looked at and through the Countess. Her thoughts moved frailly on. Oh, Dickon, are you wise? To pardon these traitors, to welcome, with such warmth this woman whom I distrust and dislike so heartily? Night after night, Anne had pleaded with her husband. Day after day, snatching brief moments with him between Council meetings. Grasping at conversations when she could cut through the bray of Harry Buckingham, who from the first had been determined to have Richard on the throne, or die …
Always, Gloucester had said: ‘Sweet Anne, don’t trouble yourself. I have a credo: trust a man and he’ll prove worthy. I must have men about me in this task. This yoke of kingship needs stout steeds to draw the plough. And we shall carve a straight furrow, sown with the pure line of Plantagenet, you’ll see …’
He was so anxious, so obsessed with the laws of God, with the plight of the commons. He had a revolution planned for the Statutes of England; he was bent on changing the old order and undermining the power of the barons. Already he was lauded for his dealings with lesser men. But that was in York, and York was not London. Anne shivered. Margaret’s measured voice cantered smoothly on.
‘I am to oversee the ladies’ wardrobe… twelve hundred lengths of sarcenet, studded with the Rose, the Falcon or the Boar. The skirts must be simply cut, or the Abbey will bust asunder!’
She gave a shrill, unpractised laugh, while Grace stared sombrely at her. She was like a young girl, indecently gay.
‘Speaking of gowns,’ said Anne. ‘John must have forgotten his errand. Go, mistress, and find Lady Lovell. Put on dry clothes, and then, a walk in the sun!’
As the door closed behind Grace, Anne sat down, suddenly exhausted. Listening to the hard cheerfulness of the Countess of Richmond, she thought: Dickon, where are you? Doubtless in Council, when you should be on the moors, or in your own northern court. Are you even now setting a hidden scowl on the barons’ faces with your new audacious laws? Come to me soon, for my day is dour without you. In London, this London that I fear will be both our deaths.
Lady Lovell, after searching fruitlessly for a fitting headdress for Grace, advised: ‘Leave your hair loose then, doucette – so!’ She twined a lock, a tendril about Grace’s temples and throat. ‘So curly!’ she murmured. Unfashionable – but it suits you, somehow.’ She tugged at the hair until the girl’s brow was bare and high; she added a band with a small jewel and retreated to gaze at the result. ‘Dulcissima,’ she said. She called to the others, old Yorkist ladies unfamiliar to Grace: ‘I have made a pretty poppet! What eyes, child!’ The Duchess of Norfolk remarked: ‘You’ll make the wench vain’; and Lady Lovell waved white, frivolous hands, crying: ‘Go, child! Into the garden!’ So Grace obeyed, stepping slowly so as not to disturb the jewel, and leaving the Duchess muttering, as was their custom, about the ways, the general laxity of modern youth. They were never allowed to go unchaperoned, they observed enviously. But Lady Lovell, who loved to matchmake and who had already seen John of Gloucester go into the garden, silenced their censure with a laugh.
It was a small pleasaunce at the rear of the fortress, and neatly squared with rows of box, paved walks. Beds of little flowers, newly glistening from the rain, glowed like illuminations on a psalter. Blue and yellow iris thrust upward with proud languid lips. A sleek robin pecked and whistled at the flags and from a dovecote in the far corner came an amorous murmuring. Here was the joy again, the unknown, fragile happiness, voiceless yet heard, invisible yet unmistakable; the precious clue, the whisper of new worlds.
He was waiting, he had been watching her as she came. He advanced swiftly, light-footed, his hair falling to his neck like the black folded wings of a bird. She had forgotten the colour of his eyes; it had never seemed important – they were dark blue, and very bright. She had, she knew, mislaid his image altogether. Here was more man than child, and with the bearing of a knight. This made her stiff and formal. Gone were the easy confidences, gone the sympathy, for she thought: my little John is a stranger. He was composed, assured; with light courtesy he complimented her, touching her hands to his lips, and he and she began a slow promenade along the rapidly drying pavement. The robin jeered sweetly at them and flew, swift and gaudy, a little way off, to contemplate them from a rosebush. Deftly, directly, with no art or skirmishing, John’s hand took hers. And instantly the old times were back; she could breathe deeply, enjoy the garden scents, be at peace. But as they reached the dovecote, his easy clasp tightened and became a pain. She felt the pressure trembling in his wrist and hers, and his fingers slick with moisture. The white birds whirred and murmured about them. He stopped suddenly.
‘Ah, God!’ he said. ‘If only I were older!’
Surprised, she answered: ‘Life’s short enough, don’t wish it away!’ a platitude she had listened to herself, many times.
‘None the less, I do,’ he said. ‘I am an esquire now, you know. The life is hard – look!’ He flexed his jaw and turned his head so that a hairline scar showed white. ‘It’s dog eat dog in Hall,’ he said proudly. ‘But my adversary’s head was addled for two days! And I unhorsed three of my fellows in the tourney. It was only a mock tourney,’ he added sadly, ‘And yet … I am not old enough to defend my father!’
‘Your father?’ So, he was not altogether changed; his favourite topic of conversation was still the same. She felt oddly disappointed; the day was fair, she was fair, and yet he addressed her as if she were a fellow esquire, obsessed only with male chivalry.
‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘that they tried to assassinate him. Twice.’
She turned her head quickly away, and stared at the doves’ wooden house, which was festooned with greyish droppings. The flowerscents faded, leaving the stink of wet wood, of murder.
‘My grandfather was slain so’ he said. ‘By Margaret – and the Woodvilles are partisans of Margaret. I was so afraid – that history would repeat itself; it has an infamous habit of so doing.’
And had this happened, now glibly she had imagined the scene; Gloucester murdered, and how she would comfort little John. Here was John, by now no means little and probably not so easily comforted. She was at a loss, and sought refuge in gaiety. She disengaged her hand, and took a couple of elegant, dancing steps before him.
‘No more! The sun’s too beautiful!’ she cried. ‘Lady Lovell had decked me – like a popinjay. I am a great lady today; not a bastard.’ She stopped short, feeling herself blushing.
He looked at her, oddly adult, serious. Then he smiled. ‘Is there anything better than a royal bastard? Full privilege, yet unable to claim inheritance. Some might grumble at it, but the calling suits me well. And you … for we have never known another state. It must be hard, though, for Edward and Richard of York.’
Grace bit her lip, remembering Elizabeth’s screams when they came to take Richard of York away. My lady, my cruel, lovely lady, she thought. How are you now? Deep sadness began in her, and faded as John took her hand again.
‘Let us walk,’ he said, and they went slowly while the sun, washed hotter by rain, burned their brows. He hummed a little song, stroked her first finger with his. She looked down at the brown ringed hand and the white entwined. Perfumed rain trickled from the calyx of an iris. The robin reappeared and tripped staccato along the path.
‘Do you remember the lake at Eltham?’ she said. ‘You brought me a lily.’
‘I will do it again,’ he said.
‘No, you’ve proved your chivalry once,’ she began, and saw him frown.
‘I know nothing of chivalry,’ he said, and again: ‘O Jesu, would that I were older!’
This time, she said simply: ‘Why?
‘My father led campaigns when he was fourteen. He loved the Lady Anne. He could have married her, but his loyalty forbade it until Warwick was dead.’ He stooped, and picked up a pebble. ‘Now he will be King.’ He pitched the pebble to the end of the walk. ‘I made a good Deo Gratias for that! But I … I seem to be merely marking time. I have never fought, nor have I loved …’ As he spoke, he knew this to be nonsense. ‘What I mean is … I have never wooed, paid court, only in my mind, my heart.’
She looked at him quickly. His face was red. He occupied himself with more pebbles, choosing flat ones and skimming them along the smooth pavement. She made a jest of the moment. ‘What do you know of love? Tell me, for I know nothing!’ Talking, she thought, like a jade, a wanton, like poor Jane Shore, who would speak thus in past days to madden the courtiers. Wretched Jane, now in Fleet prison for her treason, her folly.
John threw one last stone. ‘I know all about love,’ he said sternly. From the pouch at his waist he drew out a crumpled yellow parchment; a mere scrap, thumbed and ragged. From this he read, self-consciously at first, then clearly and more positively.
‘It is not sure a deadly pain
To you I say that lovers be,
When faithful hearts must needs refrain
The one the other for to see?’
He stopped and looked at her. She said ‘That is a sad song, John.’ A breeze wafted the breath of the iris around them. The white doves called thoughtfully.
He went on reading aloud, his cheek still darkly flushed the fragment of paper unsteady in his hand.
‘If you assure ye may trust me,
Of all the pains that ever I knew
It is a pain that most I rue.’
‘A fair, sad song,’ she murmured. ‘Did you write it?’ At Middleham they were trained to make verses as well as break each others’ heads.
‘No, it was written by someone long dead, to soothe my heart perhaps. When I was parted … from my lady.’
So he had a love. At Middleham it was fashionable to be in love. The young ones were encouraged to dance together, in between learning to wear armour and weave cloth of Arras. There were many female wards at Middleham. Suddenly she felt old and isolated and sad. The light faded from her eyes; she looked down at the little Spanish shoes Lady Lovell had given her. Her downcast face had a tragic repose about it; John watched it for a long moment. Within the space of a breath, emotion crystallized in him, making nonsense of feigned love, killing the painted imagery of his unreal heartaches at Middleham. The love he had squandered on dreams was here; the unknown lady was blinding reality. Love, he realized, had always worn the face of Grace Plantagenet.
‘Didn’t you know?’ he demanded, of himself as much as of her. As he put his arms about her so roughly that she gasped, he thought: here is something too precious, too clearly seen to lose. She was sweet and slender and perfumed against him. He laid his hand tenderly against her cheek and kissed her.
‘My Grace. My lady, my love.’
She tried to answer: John, I have thought of you as a friend, a companion. Never did I dream you were the end of loneliness. But he kissed the words, and her face, eagerly, inexpertly; startled by love, he looked into the brilliant green eyes and closed them with his lips. Then extravagantly, hastily, he went upon his knee before her. As if aware of time obedient to his ever fervent plea and passing more swiftly, he said:
‘From this day, this moment, I vow my heart and duty to you. God grant we may be betrothed one day. Soon.’
‘We’re cousins,’ she murmured. (Banned, by the Church …)
He leaped up, smiled into her face. ‘My father and the Lady Anne are cousins,’ he said. Again he kissed her; the sun grew brighter, and the flowers blew, and at the parlour window Lady Lovell smiled with delight. While Lady Norfolk muttered dourly of the ways of modern youth.
After many days of endeavour, Butcher Gould had penetrated Sanctuary. He came with only one prentice; of the other two, one had been killed in a Fleet brawl and the other was in Ludgate for striking the Watch. The remaining boy therefore bore the weight of a shoulder of mutton and a brace of pheasants slung about his neck. Garnet drops from their beaks rolled down his soiled jerkin. Master Gould was laden too; under each arm he carried a screaming piglet, and his pockets were crammed with sausages.
‘Perchance that’s why they cry so lustily,’ he observed, glancing down at the writhing animals. ‘They smell their ancestors.’ Grimly and gloomily he smiled at his own jest. One had to smile; one had to forget: Matilda gone. His pretty, silly, ribboned wife, snatched in a day by the plague, that pustulent curse that emanated from all the open ditches in town. It took friend and foe alike, and left bitterness. He sighed, rapped on the Sanctuary door, his ears deafened by the porcine yells which rose higher than the clochard spire nearby.
He did this for Matilda. So long and so often had she talked of her one sight of the Queen; how she looked, her expression when she showed them the baby prince Edward. Gould thought of his visit to Sanctuary as a kind of Month’s Mind celebration – made in remembrance of a day that had brought Matilda joy. He tucked the piglets more firmly beneath his arms, and kicked the door of Sanctuary until at last someone came to admit him. The cloister was as forbiddingly chill as ever. Full of stolid melancholy he stumped through, and swung a further kick at the door outside which Matilda had shivered with excitement. It was opened by the Princess – Lady Elizabeth of York, he reminded himself. She looked ill and bored and weary, and swirled away without a second glance at him. Gould entered and knelt before the lady’s mother. Over the screaming of the pigs he uttered: ‘Good morrow, your Grace,’ and looking up, saw the pale face, scarred by old rages and tears, alight with pleasure at his salutation. All unwittingly he had given the best possible greeting.
‘It is good to see you again, Master. Catherine!’ She called to her sister, gestured at the piglets. ‘Have them taken away and killed. My appetite returns at last.’ She beckoned Gould closer; he looked for somewhere to lay the mutton, finally setting it awkwardly down upon a faldstool. From the tail of his eye he saw Catherine Woodville ordering a page to remove the meat, and the pheasants. The world is upside down, he told himself. While Buckingham sits in state at Westminster, here’s his wife starving by choice with her sister. For he noticed that all the women looked meagre and poor. He compared them to his trade; he measured their flesh by the pound, and in fantasy saw himself bankrupt.
‘Sausages, your Grace.’ He emptied his pockets and laid his tribute on the stool. Elizabeth was asking him meanwhile how his wife was. He told her.
‘And I lost a daughter too …’
She answered with what seemed to him disproportionate vehemence.
‘A daughter! Master, I have lost father, mother, two brothers, two sons, and two more sons were taken cruelly from me! Locked away!’ She began to sob, with such extreme suddenness that he was startled. She wrenched at her hair. A tuft of it drifted down to lie among the foul rushes.
‘Tell me, Master; tell me. Have you seen my boys, my kingly heirs?’
‘Yes, I’ve seen them,’ he said stolidly. Playing at bow-and-arrow on the ramparts of the Tower.’
‘So they are still there,’ she murmured, and wept no longer. She was silent then, for such a long time that Gould grew restive.
‘Did you see the usurper’s coronation?’ she said next.
Gould blinked. He said carefully: ‘Aye, Madame. It was a great affair. All the nobles of England attended; you could not move for lords and bishops …’
‘Curse the Bishops!’ she cried. ‘Cursed be that creeping ruin, the Church!’
‘Your Grace!’ Scandalized, Gould stared, seeing a swift smile replace anger.
‘I value you, Master Gould,’ she said softly. ‘You address me as is my right!’
I fear for her, he thought, bowing his head. Once a bull had been brought to him for slaughter; a breeding bull, a beautiful animal turned savage and impotent. In its eyes had been that same half-human wildness he saw now; in the eyes of Dame Grey, the late King’s concubine …
‘I address you so, Madame,’ he blundered, ‘in memory of our late sovereign lord.’
Succour my Bessy, William. They had been tossing dice together, the King incognito, in one of the lesser stews of St. Mary Woolchurch. Thirteen years ago.
A sudden rap on the door made him start. Elizabeth’s frozen gaze passed over his head, behind which came mutterings, shuffling feet, and a voice. ‘Madame, may we enter?’ Gould saw the white hand wave in dismissal to him or assent to others, impossible to tell. He rose uncertainly and backed against the wall, where he stood scratching his calf with the other foot. A clerk wearing dusty black came stoopingly across the room and bowed before Elizabeth. Following the clerk was a gaunt man in a skull-cap who carried a leather bag.
‘May we enter?’ repeated Reynold Bray.
Traitor, she said. Traitor and knave. No better than your falseheart mistress, Margaret Beaufort. How dare you show your face?
She and the two men were alone. In her chair she leaned away from Bray, who still stank of sour ale and the reek of a hundred secret parchments.
‘What do you want?’ she cried with a hating glance. Bray coughed and hawked and looked around the floor with a full mouth. She half-rose, eyes daring him to spit. He swallowed, and with a fidgety motion, indicated the hollow man behind him.
‘To present a friend.’
‘Are there such things?’ said Elizabeth. ‘And how, by God’s grace, did you pass into Sanctuary?’
‘My holy cloth knows no horizon,’ said Bray pompously. ‘Neither does the majesty of medicine.’ He nudged the other man forward.
‘So! A doctor!’ she said with great scorn. Rising, she stepped up to the gaunt-faced man. ‘Heal my sickness,’ she commanded. (Heal this sore heart, this burning humiliation. Raise me, through alchemy, again to the heights …)
‘Ach!’ said the doctor. ‘Madame, I don’t know the nature of it.’ His voice was so Welsh it sounded like a song.
‘He comes from Bishop Morton,’ said Bray, squinting about him. ‘He has …’
‘A message, my lady,’ said the Welshman. ‘From the Bishop. For you,’ he added, so that there should be no mistake. The corner of his mouth and one eye twitched, as if at some unspeakable jest. It was an affliction he had owned for years, but she was not to know this. Overflowing with temper, she sat and twisted her hands.
‘You are no friend,’ she said tightly. ‘I have never seen you before. As for Master Bray – he can return to his mistress. She who sings Gloucester’s praise in Westminster.’
Bray kept silence. He had been warned to expect this lunatic stubbornness. His bones were sore from saddle-hours; he had ridden hard, from Margaret Beaufort to Brecon, collecting the Welsh doctor en route; to the estates of Sir William Stanley, then back to Margaret and her husband again. He had sat up all night penning letters to the Dragon in Brittany. Now Woodville abused him. She was not what she once was, but he must play out his time.
‘You and your mistress!’ she continued. ‘Time-servers both! Once she loved me; now she is Gloucester’s toady. So is Stanley …’
‘Madame,’ answered the clerk patiently, ‘I come only from your loyal lovers and admirers.’
She stood up, frail and terrible. ‘I do not trust you.’ Bray looked around at the bare discomfort, the dirt, the despair all but written into the grimy walls.
‘My lady, may I speak?’ intoned the doctor. ‘I come from Bishop Morton personally; I am his physician. He sends comfort, and a solution to all your miseries. A promise of better days, Dame Grey.’
Her temper broke absolutely.
‘As you see fit to address me thus,’ she said, trembling, ‘bear this message. Let your master come to me himself. Let him bow the knee. Let him deliver his comfort in person.’
Reynold Bray smoothed the air with his hand. ‘Madame, you know that the Lord Bishop is closely immured. It was only by great good fortune that my friend was able to come here this day.’
‘I care naught,’ she said violently. ‘My edict remains unchanged. Let Morton come and tell me this glorious news, the smell of which I distrust already. Can he tell me how my sons are, my Richard, my Edward, in the Tower? Or the whereabouts of my son and lieutenant, Tom Dorset?’
‘Your sons are all well,’ said Bray quietly. ‘Dorset is part of the plan, if you would only listen to it.’
She turned away. ‘I’ll listen only to Morton.’ The Welshman was laughing at her, she knew it; her blood sang with murder.
‘Morton is in Buckingham’s prison.’ As to a child, Bray repeated. ‘Buckingham, the King’s chief minister …’
‘King!’ she cried. ‘Usurper!’
She advanced on them like a crazed beast, her face ravaged. ‘Leave me!’ Her voice cracked, then softened. ‘Leave me alone.’
Murmuring together, they left, and she sat still, her body drawn and shuddering. In her mind she turned over half-doubts and suspicions, while her ladies fearfully returned to her side. Out of her tumult, one piece of vital information remained clear. Morton was a prisoner of Buckingham. She beckoned to Catherine, who knelt, ingratiating, cowed.
‘Sister–’ the drained eyes looked down – ‘I have a task for you.’
‘Anything. Everything, Bess.’
‘Does your husband love you?’
Catherine’s face crumpled almost in tears. About her person she carried letters, from Buckingham the adored, Buckingham, whom she sadly missed. Night after night she had toyed with the impossibilities of breaking Sanctuary and rejoining him.
‘Tell me. Has he a grudge, even the faintest, against the King?’
Buckingham had, and had only hinted at it in one secret letter, daring her to speak of it. But under the look from Elizabeth’s eyes she was powerless, and stammered: ‘Yes, Bess. He wished to marry our daughter to Gloucester’s son – so that she could be Queen-Consort one day. Gloucester would have none of it. Harry was angry.’
‘It is enough.’ She plucked vellum and quill from a table. ‘Write. Fan your husband’s resentment. Sound him out.’ She smiled a twisted smile. ‘Tell him I shall repay him, one day.’
Catherine busied herself. Once she raised her head and asked anxiously: ‘Sister, how shall this bill be carried?’
Elizabeth turned from her pacing. Butchers could go anywhere, welcomed with their priceless cargo. Meat for captor and captive alike. Letters could be carried in a wrapped joint, and no questions asked. She said softly: ‘Is Master Gould still within Sanctuary?’
In Bloomsbury, he dismounted to fill her arms with flowers. She sat upon a grey palfrey, skirts neatly falling in rich green folds over the sidesaddle. Lady Anne had given Grace the dress. Green, love’s colour. She had smiled as she said it, knowing that their love was child’s love and not the love she herself knew. Not the suffering love that devours, that nourishes more pain than pleasure; not the love that feeds on anxiety. Now, in the green of Bloomsbury Grace sat lapped in love, while the bright face turned to hers was full of innocence and faith, and the day long. He plucked for her tall white daisies, and the gold and cream of cowslip; the delicate-hearted dog-rose with its shades of saffron and pink, and the anemone, with its swift-dying purple. He gathered them in a great sheaf, damp and heavily odorous, and offered them high, a fragile pledge, the essence of summer’s love.
She buried her lips in their mixed fragrance and wanted to weep. Tomorrow, John would ride north on the first great progress of King Richard after his coronation, and thereafter to Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire to resume his knightly training. Through the web of green stems she looked at his slender, fiery face, so full of the joy of life, and at the eyes that held no guilt or guile. She saw there his delight in her presence, and his anticipation for Richard the king, to be followed tomorrow through cheering cities. During their weeks together at Baynard’s Castle he had talked ceaselessly of the coronation, the great banquet, the roars of acclaim for his father. The people, free of the turbulent Woodvilles, had welcomed Richard like a god. When John spoke of this, she was forced to turn away to hide her face, for the thought of Elizabeth nagged like the toothache. She saw her ill, raging, smiling, sleeping like a weary child. She imagined her waking frightened in the night; no Grace to mouth a bitten-off prayer for her. Only Renée, slow, and growing deaf, or the sisters, too anxious to be of much use. She called me her ill-luck, thought Grace; yet I was really her talisman against despair.
Across the meadow, the little group of knights and ladies, lately abandoned by John and Grace, were hawking. Lady Lovell had a fierce young merlin, Against a blue sky faintly silvered with cloud, it brought down two clumsy panicking partridge, one after the other. Higher still a tiny sparrowhawk chased a lark almost to infinity. They hung for an instant, remote as stars, then plummeted, a Lucifer-fall charged with tragic beauty. John said softly: ‘Love. Love, are you listening?’
She lowered the tender green bouquet and tried to smile. She had not heard a word he said. Yesterday they had looked together at the Titulus Regius, a copy of which had been delivered to every courtier. The stark terrible words of it had given her pain, and John had felt it. Gaily he had tossed the roll into the air, making some jest about dull lawyers’ talk; and so dismissing the most important document of the century, had drawn her close, a target for his impetuous, unskilled kisses. Now he mounted his horse so that he could move nearer and take her hand, clasping it over the mountain of flowers.
‘You are sad,’ he murmured. ‘Sweetheart, we have so few moments alone together. Be happy.’
What he said was true. In Lady Anne’s household – the new Queen’s household – privacy was impossible and chaperonage constant save for snatched moments such as these. To Grace the reason for such surveillance was still not clear. No gossip tarnished her or John. She looked at his worried face and said: ‘You are sad, too.’
‘Tomorrow is almost with us.’ He frowned, chewing a green stalk. ‘I could arrange for you to accompany us on the progress. You could stay at Sheriff Hutton, and we need not be parted.’
Violently she shook her head; his face darkened.
‘You said that you loved me.’ His voice was dangerously quiet. He was a Plantagenet, jealous, volatile, like all the male members of the dynasty. He stared into the green eyes made amber by sunlight, at the sweet brows like birds in flight. Lastly he looked at the small pale mouth, the mouth like honey. He felt a great and hungry tenderness.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Most heartily. Come to Sheriff Hutton.’
The fronds were cool against her face, balm to her tears. Thoughts, hidden from John, repeated: I cannot leave her. Not while she might need me, call for me. One day she may forgive me the sin of loving her, and while she lies in Sanctuary I cannot leave London. I am a dog, a bitch, turning to lick the striking hand, grovelling to the beloved’s frown.
‘Do you love me?’ he said. ‘If you do not, there are others who will.’
She looked at his anguished, bewildered boy’s face, heard his tongue aping cruel adult words.
‘I love you, John of Gloucester,’ she answered. ‘And I shall love none other.’
So he was ashamed, and touched her cheek with shaking fingers. ‘I am mad,’ he admitted. ‘Churlish, too. I’ve no experience in these matters.’ He grinned at her and she felt safe again. Today,’ he said inconsequentially, ‘my father sent me two tuns of malmsey wine. It was a token that he considers me a man. Soon I shall be old enough to serve him. If I do well, he will ordain me Captain of Calais, old Warwick’s commission. Ah, love!’ Joyful now, all rancour forgotten. ‘Love, lovely life!’
The melancholy drew near to Grace again. She imagined the forthcoming progress, the panoply surging northward through England. John in the train with his new livery, his gay shield with the bend sinister across royal quarterings. While she wore out the aimless days in London. Did Elizabeth know of her new allegiance? If so, she would brand her traitor, like Margaret Beaufort. As for John – he would easily forget her. His future beckoned, a time to show his valour; soon her own light image would be buried beneath new faces, new triumphs. Perhaps in a year, he would not even remember her name.
All the time he watched her, astutely guessing her thoughts, and secretly a little angry that she should demean his vows. Yet when he saw the smooth honey of her face tremble in sorrow his annoyance died. He took the flowers from her and threw them down. He lifted her easily from her horse on to his. There, he held her silently, while in the distance the hawks winged like legends, rising in majesty, dropping as if stunned.
‘We will meet again soon.’ His voice was muffled by her hair. ‘All will be well, sweet heart.’
Now the hunting party was preparing to leave, the falconers calling in the birds to the lure, the grooms whistling the dogs and running to fetch horses tethered in a grove of oaks. Lady Lovell was casting anxiously about for Grace and pages were looking for John. A group of riders detached itself from the main party and came at a lilting gallop through the grass, raising crickets and bumblebees, scattering flowerheads. Pages ran leggily at the side of a dozen mounted knights, who came as if blown on a holiday wind, their horses’ legs shimmering strongly. The foremost horse was blindingly white. Someone shouted, jesting, indistinct, and the horse’s rider laughed.
‘O Jesu!’ said John, his face crimson. ‘It is the King, my father. He must have joined the party lately. Mistress, we must dismount.’
It was not so easy. The palfrey, excited by the oncoming horses, backed into John’s mount. Grace struggled to extricate herself from one of John’s spurs, caught in the trailing hem of her mantle. The more she tugged the more they were entwined. The horse humped its back and kicked out, and John half-fell to the ground, leaving a long rent in the green skirt. Grace was left trying to curb both horses, while the King’s mount, raising a bright pollen-cloud, drew up before them.
‘Sire,’ said John, on his knees.
King Richard sat and laughed at his son’s scarlet cheeks and Grace’s pale embarrassment. He surveyed the two smooth faces and his laughter died as a pang of almost unrecognized envy jolted him. He himself had forgotten what it was like to be so young, to play at love. Once, before Edward died, while Warwick lived, there had been days like this for him, at Middleham, with Anne. He had a sudden insane urge to gather blooms for Grace, to wrestle with John. As he would have done twenty years ago, before battle wearied him, and kingship laid its yoke on him. He snapped his long, ringed fingers; a page ran to quieten the horses and lift Grace down. She curtseyed in the bruised grass and said: ‘Excuse me, highness.’ The King was relaxed, holding the great white destrier with one easy hand on the reins. He had the same dark eyes, fine bones, as John. But John was robust of countenance, whereas the King could often look sick and haggard, his pallor turning to ash, his eyes indrawn. She studied him shyly; Richard in turn, saw a true daughter of Edward Plantagenet, with the gold of Edward before indolence and excess coarsened him.
‘Excuse you for what, mistress?’ he said softly. For being happy?’ At his elbow Lord Stanley said: ‘such truth, highness!’ Stanley and his brother Sir William were very near, proper and subservient, falling over each other to do the royal bidding. Richard motioned to John and Grace to rise, and suddenly, painfully, he saw them as himself and Anne, standing handclasped in the green-gold day. So long ago. Now Anne was ill, trying to gather strength for the progress and unable to join him even for this brief hour of pleasure. He said abruptly:
‘We ride for Westminster now. John, I trust you will be ready for tomorrow?’
‘Yes, Sire,’ John said eagerly. ‘It will be wonderful.’
Richard inclined his head, thinking. Yes, by God’s mercy, it will. I shall see York, and my little prince again. I pray Anne will stand the journey, and that Buckingham’s temper will improve. There was something amiss with him – an arrant insolence, an ill-covered fermenting of – what? He was almost like a cardplayer who has presented the wrong suit and regrets a better ploy. The King turned his horse. Its pelt flamed white in the sun; its rider’s cloak made a purple swirl about the saddle.
‘God be with you, mistress,’ he said to Grace. To a page: ‘Escort and assist her.’
They rode away, in a leaping gallop through the high grass. Lord Stanley’s mount switched its quarters from side to side, avoiding rabbit-holes. John took Grace’s hands and kissed them solemnly.
‘I must follow him. Sweet Jesu Christ keep you always, dearest, dearest mistress.’
She turned from him, from the future Captain of Calais, from the adventurer to be, thinking dully: Why do they sing of love so, if it’s as sad as this? Then she felt his arms pulling her to him, a rain of kisses on her face. The next moment he was in the saddle, spurring so that his mount leaped forward in a cloud of petals and the seeds of grass. He was soon diminished; at the edge of the meadow he waved violently before merging with the King’s train. Grace murmured to herself:
‘Of all the pains that ever I knew
It is the pain that most I rue.’
and found no comfort in it.
As the chariot bearing Bishop Morton through the night skirted St. Albans, the rain began again. A solid fall of black water descended as if someone had emptied a pail from the sky. Frightening in its vehemence, the torrent thundered on the wooden roof of the litter, startling the horses and extinguishing the frail lanterns. Morton lifted the sodden curtain and peered out into the murk. He absently murmured a curse, withdrawing it next minute, for in one way the foul weather was a blessing. Few would brave such a tempest to hunt the Bishop down, fugitive and renegade though he was. The King’s men would not look for him tonight and any vigilantes among the people would be busy mending their roofs. Such nights as this had ruined the plans of a month ago; a torrent had fallen ever since Buckingham had engineered the rebellion and Morton had been permitted to escape. Folk were already calling it the year of the Great Water. He sank back on damp cushions and pulled his fur closer, stroking the collar as if it were a docile beast. If the roads were not too foul they would reach their destination in a few hours. Morton’s hand, blue with cold, left his collar and caressed the icy gold chain at his breast. Calmly he listened to the curses of the drivers, flogging the horses through thick mud. These men would not fail him – he had paid them handsomely. He had paid Buckingham too – with lies and promises and flattery, although Buckingham had proved, to say the least, unfortunate. He lay now in October clay, headless, with his right hand fashionably struck off to mark his treason against King Richard.
For Morton, this journey was a necessary madness. The Dragon himself had warned him to take care. ‘Remember, my lord, I shall need a Cardinal Archbishop!’ smiling that swift glassy smile, pressing Morton’s hand in his skinny nervous fingers. Yet implicit in that warning had been a command to accomplish what was necessary. The last campaign against that ageing, impetuous Woodville. The final dangling of the mammet. ‘I will see her dance,’ he muttered to himself. A jet of rain through the storm-tossed curtain soaked his robe. He leaned and shouted to the drivers: ‘How goes it? There’s a bridge ahead, if my memory serves,’ and received back the eldritch cry: ‘Rest easy, my lord! We’ll have you there by midnight!’
He had said a Mass for Buckingham; the poor fool gone to his end not knowing that he was only a catspaw in a game of such magnitude that death was an integral, even a necessary part of it, like the blood-sacrifice laid beneath the walls of a great abbey; the founding of a dynasty. Morton put his long blue hands together and prayed: ‘Let me live for many years. Let me laugh in secret, and don the Cardinal’s hat that Richard Plantagenet would now never give me. Let me retrieve the schemes ruined by Hastings’s bungling and Buckingham’s ill-luck. O Thou, whoever and whatever. Thou art, let me live!’ Wind battered rain against the carriage, rippling the curtain and spraying the Bishop with pungent filth.
‘The pity of it is, I need her,’ he said to himself of Elizabeth while the chariot ploughed lurching on. The Dragon had stipulated his price. And certainly there was sense in it. Sir Edward Woodville, with his stolen fleet, had been of great value, lying ready in the Channel and still ready … Despite the rough ride, Morton slept a little. He dreamed he was eating strawberries at Brecon with Buckingham who had received a secret bill in a pig’s trotter; a letter that touched fire to his spleen and made him pliant, ready for rebellion. Morton breathed on the flame. ‘Harry, such ingratitude! After all your loyalty! What recompense! But there is one who would not use you so, one who recognizes a good heart.’ Buckingham’s bright eyes were thoughtful, his bent head listened.
‘Sheen, my lord!’
Morton woke up, looked out of the carriage. A light in a tower flickered ahead, a light half-hidden by drenching rain. They were making good time. Stretching his shivering limbs, he wondered how Dorset was. He had hoped originally that Tom might come from his refuge in France to uphold the Dragon’s invasion. Since that invasion had proved abortive, the Woodville’s son had been, in the event, wise. The litter rolled on through the long wet night. It had been a tortuous journey from Ely; Ely, that cowed diocese that did and was as Morton bade it. Soon he would be in Westminster Sanctuary. He felt for the friar’s habit rolled up under his feet; it would soon be time to don the disguise. Shameful? With such a stake? He smiled. Never. With laboured, mudsucking breath the sodden horses ploughed north of Sheen and he caught the first sound of the Thames. He reached down and lifted the friar’s mantle.
At Westminster the river had risen, nearly lapping the Sanctuary door. The Bishop’s thunderous knock resounded against a carillon of rain from the gushing gargoyles. He was admitted at once. Despite the friar’s habit, the brothers knew him, and Abbot Milling was afraid, lost long ago in the deep waters of conspiracy. The Bishop went in and left a trail of mud along the cloister; he stood dripping while Elizabeth was roused. In the chamber where he waited, a fire still burned in the hearth; a miserable half-dead flicker. He extended his wet foot to it, and was standing thus when Elizabeth entered. Hands clasped inside the sleeves of her gown, she walked towards him. A little shiver ran over her body.
‘Domine vobiscum,’ he said, and threw back his hood. He lowered his hand for her salute, and felt her icy lips on his fingers.
‘So you have come at last. My lord–’ some irony in her tone amused him – ‘how was your stay in prison?’
‘Comfortable. I was protected from storms such as these. Such a night!’
‘Buckingham let you escape?’
‘Ah, Buckingham!’ He crossed himself. ‘He left this world in a vile humour, cursing the King, cursing me, and cursing you, Madame. He cursed you on the scaffold, for sowing the seed of his revolt. That letter your sister wrote ‘– those were your sentiments, not hers.’
He saw her face whiten: ‘Where is the letter now? If Buckingham cursed me, then I curse him. For his failure to overthrow the usurper and bring back my sons. What incubus thwarted this latest plan?’
‘The weather,’ said Morton coolly. He bent to feed the sullen fire with a branch. ‘The bridges were down, the passes sealed off by storm and Gloucester’s armies. As for the letter – do not fear implication this time. I myself saw it burn.’
She was able to smile. ‘My lord, I misjudged you.’
He moved to grasp the moment. ‘You did not trust my doctor friend. You asked for me in person and here I am, come through a night of devils, Madame.’ He watched the hem of his robe steam. During a summer of frustration he had aged somewhat; the blue-white skin hung in folded dewlaps at his throat and eyes. He felt a hand upon his damp sleeve.
‘My lord,’ she said, ‘how can you help me?’
‘Shall we be seated?’ he said gently. They sat on either side of the fire which shifted, revealing deep red caves, a grey abyss edged with white, a falling tree, a withered serpent. The night grew close and secret about them.
He said: ‘There is one whom you would destroy?’
Wariness sprang again in her. Margaret Beaufort had often spoken thus to her, with wisdom and provocative confidence, and where was Margaret now? She let the Bishop answer for her.
‘King Richard,’ he said, and jetted his spittle into the ashes.
‘An anointed king,’ she said, without expression, and waited.
‘To be ruined and vanquished by you.’
Instantly she was convinced that he was a provocateur and said stiffly: You think too highly of my power. I am a poor widow.’ The tears would come at a thought – no need, these days, for feigning.
‘Madame!’ said Morton with a deep and withering smile ‘let us, for Jesu’s love, be plain. Have you not been death’s instrument, more than once? Have I not been witness to your deeds?’
She was silent. The fire settled itself. A little blaze built up, like Hell-Mouth, in a tunnel.
‘Lady,’ said the Bishop softly, ‘God forbid, I should judge you. You have been sorely tried.’
She lifted her eyes and looked at him directly.
‘Richard of Gloucester is young, and a great warrior. He has a certain reputation. You may kill an old man, but not a King like the usurper. Like the Hog!’ she said violently.
‘Yes, the Boar, the Hog,’ the soft hypnotic voice agreed. Morton looked disgustedly about him. ‘Devil damn me, this is no place for you! Have I not said you will dance again in Westminster?’
‘What is the price of this solution?’ she said, surprisingly sharp and cool.
‘Your eldest daughter, the Lady Bess. In marriage to Henry Tudor.’
She gasped, her brow wrinkled. ‘Tudor!’ she said incredulously.
Morton said: ‘He will be King of England, at my guess, within a twelvemonth. Your daughter will be Queen, and you Queen-Dowager, with all the pomp and pride you wish. I will help you to a height. Henry Tudor will invade …’
‘With what? Who will follow him?’
‘Tudor will conquer with the aid of your forces. Immured in Sanctuary as you are, have you not realized that all of Lancaster is now for Tudor? Sir Edward Woodville’s fleet still runs free, with all the treasure amassed by your son Dorset. It is enough to pay for another invasion. There are men in France and Brittany willing to spill English blood for Tudor; Lord Stanley will …’
‘Stanley and his wife have betrayed me. They attend the Council; they gave their hand to Titulus Regius.’
Smiling, shaking his head, the Bishop fingered his gold collar.
‘Foolishness,’ he murmured. ‘Madame, do you not believe me when I say they will not, cannot show their hand yet? Have you forgotten that Tudor is Margaret’s son?’
Yes, she had forgotten. Now it seemed that Henry was a figurehead of true power; her solution, as Morton said.
‘But why is my daughter so necessary to this enterprise?’ she said.
‘Tudor will conquer,’ said the Bishop. ‘But he cannot reign by conquest alone. He needs the seal of Plantagenet blood. He will unite the houses of York and Lancaster, and be beloved for it. He comes from God, a saviour. But he must marry into a royal dynasty.’
Then she remembered.
Bone of thy bone shall be a future fate
With blood of these three houses surely mate.
The old riddle was answered. Lancaster, York and Tudor. Henry Tudor was of Lancaster … it was an omen. Her shivering had nothing to do with the cold, with the dead fire or the dripping walls of Sanctuary. Against the blackened chimney fresh dreams blazed. A reprieve. A frantic hope. Herself Queen-Dowager and no more plain Dame Grey. She tried to speak calmly.
‘It is a fair prospect, my lord Bishop. But you have forgotten something!’
Morton inclined his ear.
‘The people love Richard! They love him better than they loved his brother. They admire him for his new statutes and his justice. Whatever the barons say, he has won the people’s heart!’
She had heard tales of the progress, how England had shaken with cheers for the Hog, the usurper.
‘They love him,’ she repeated. ‘They will not rise against him. And I am powerless.’
That hateful word. Where was Melusine now? And where the secret doctrines of strength and cunning? As if to catch again at that lost mystery and might, she gazed at the Bishop’s white, wattled face. He smiled comfortably.
‘All that you say is true, my liege lady,’ he murmured, ‘The time is full. Now we must turn that love to hate.’
On a day of ribald March winds she arose and came out of Sanctuary, for it was time and more than time for her to do so. She knew that Morton disapproved; this, oddly, added impetus to her step, as she thought: I am not yet totally his; I am not yet altogether committed. She stood outside the gate and drew in lungfuls of breath, catching the high-tide smell from the river, the smoke of chimneys, the odour of brawn patties from the cookstalls outside Westminster Hall. Armed with a worn dignity, she stood erect, while behind her young Bess shivered in the unfamiliar gales. The girl’s mouth was sullen and her cheeks hollow from months of boredom and privation. Elizabeth, stealing a glance, thought: I myself have looked fairer, but what’s to be done? Nearly all the jewels, the gold and the fine clothing so carefully rescued months earlier had been handed over to Morton’s keeping to swell the funds for the new campaign. The smaller treasure had gone in barter for food and fuel during the long siege in Sanctuary. So Elizabeth stood, naked of glory, in a long cloak of white wool fastened with a tawdry beryl brooch. Her slim face was resolute, her eyes, now finely lined, full of hard brightness. Several merchants with their prentices passed her without a second glance, and she smiled grimly. This time I am not the bait for a king, she thought. It is Bess who must be cherished. A rare wave of affection moved her to clasp the girl’s arm, and they moved in procession with the shabby female entourage down to the quay.
‘So, daughter, we’re out of prison!’
Bess nodded glumly, her eyes on the cobbles.
‘Look up!’ said Elizabeth. ‘Learn to bear yourself straighter. You will be a Queen.’
Bess had no more tears to shed. She had wept so much since Morton’s visit that the cause of her grief had become somehow blunted and confused. She was to marry Henry Tudor. So she was finished with romance, both read and dreamed of. Her father had warned her against Tudor, long ago. She was a little girl, at her first ball and banquet. It was early enough in the evening for Edward to be still coherent. Henry had just bowed and quit the Hall, and everyone was sniggering over his quaint continental manners. But the King had growled: ‘He is an enemy of my throne,’ and none had heeded this. Bess, feeling sorry for her father, had crept close to him, and he had talked to her for about five minutes, as if she were a wise old courtier. Warning, admonishing her. She had never forgotten it. Now, a look of flat despair lay on her face and moved her mother to say, surprisingly gently:
‘Everyone must marry. And Henry Tudor is young, probably biddable. Between us we will pluck his plumes!’
Elizabeth saw herself as the matriarch, the omnipotent Queen-Dowager, exerting subtle pressure on her son-in-law. And this, strangely, gave birth to oblique doubts about the whole affair. What if Henry were all that young and biddable! What if Morton were flying so high with ambition that he failed to see certain weaknesses in his protege. He had promised that Tudor would invade, but what if Tudor and his foreign force were unsuccessful? Henry, apparently, had never fought in battle in his life. Gloucester was a skilled and seasoned warrior, vanquishing even the Scots and proving such a strategist that King Edward at the end had left all campaigns in his brother’s sole charge. The wind snatched at her veil, whipping it like a battle standard against her face. No, she was by no means committed to the proposal. Better to wait, and get the measure of the Hog. She was summoned, nay, begged to return to his court. He had forgiven her, and was this not weakness of a different kind?
‘I, Richard, promise and swear, verbo regio, that if the daughters of Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England, will come to me … then I shall see that they shall be in surety of their lives … that I shall marry them to gentlemen born, and give in marriage lands and tenements to the yearly value of 200 marks for term of their lives. And such gentlemen as shall hap to marry with them I shall straitly charge lovingly to love them, as wives and my kinswomen, as they will avoid and eschew my displeasure.
‘And over this, I shall yearly pay the said Dame Elizabeth Grey … the sum of 700 marks …
Strange, to reward treason and hatred thus.
‘Moreover I promise to them that if any surmise or evil report be made to me of them by any person, I shall not give thereunto faith or credence …’
Forgiven, forgiven. His one wish was to live in amity. He was the Fiend’s lover, and her greatest enemy. Yet what a fool he was! She wondered, as she wondered every day, whether the whispers had reached him yet; whether love was turned to hate in England. In France, it was certain. The messengers had come and gone between Morton and herself: each step of the campaign was planted firmly. She knew the words of the Chancellor of France almost by heart:
‘Listen, I pray you, to the events which have taken place since the death of King Edward in that country.’ (The sneer in the voice; Guillaume de Rochefort would, like all good Frenchmen, have taken pleasure in it: the barbarism of the English!) ‘These beautiful children, King’s sons, butchered, and the assassin crowned by the will of the people!’
She even knew the go-between’s name. Dominic Mancini, poet and chronicler and fast friend of Morton, had the Chancellor’s ear. So the rumours were busy, more than rumours now. Dorset did his part in France, and Sir Edward Woodville, and Reynold Bray, when he could be spared. And Henry Tudor himself; what was he doing now? She knew that on Christmas Day last he had all but proclaimed himself King of England in Rennes Cathedral, swearing with flourishes that he would take Elizabeth of York to wife, and thus unite York and Lancaster. She would have liked to witness that scene; to see how he comported himself, whether his voice shook or if his hands faltered on the holy relics. She would have liked to measure his strength. His cadaverous face flashed before her mind, the grey eyes humbly bowed yet with a strange yellowish spark in their depths. An almost priestly face, its spare outlines softened by some unknown lust or longing. And above all, that weird aura of familiarity. If she but knew him as she thought.
‘Madame, can we go in the barge now?’ Catherine’s plaintive voice jolted her from the torment of musing. The river’s surface was broken by a thousand sharp-edged waves. From boats people were alighting, some with pallid, relieved faces. A royal escort stood on the slipway below which rocked a painted craft. The men were tall, and the arms on their livery glowed like jewels. With staves, the escort pressed a way among the disembarking people so that Elizabeth’s little train should come unhindered. Folk loitered to look at the sombre procession of women. A murmuring arose, over the hiss of the wind on the waves.
‘Look, John!’ said a voice almost in Elizabeth’s ear. ‘Isn’t it …’
‘God’s robe! So ’tis! The King’s Grey Mare!’
Like an ogre’s fist, rage gripped and shook her. Her face turned white, then scarlet. One of the royal henchmen saved her dignity, catching her elbow as she swayed. His murmuring respect choked the passion on her lips, or she would have turned and screamed her frenzy into the face of the crowd. Two of the escort lifted her, as if she were crippled, into the barge, setting her down, light as a leaf. The boatmen bowed to the oars, and the craft moved over the choppy currents. Through the forest of cranes dipping industriously, tall buildings rose; the Manse fortress, Coldharbour, the amber needles of churches, and a mile, beyond, the distant whiteness of the Tower. My boys, she thought. My murdered boys. When the usurper is vanquished, you shall be brought to life again. Young Lazarus, both of you. She wondered if they themselves knew of their supposed death. Richard would find humour in it, but Edward was delicate; it might distress him.
Surging towards them suddenly came a lavishly gilded barge. Banners flew from it and in the stern stood a small group of minstrels. The sound of viols came in squeaky snatches above the rush of tide and air. The craft passed close so that the woman reclining on a canopied couch was visible in detail. She wore rich blue velvet and a gold coif from which depended a drift of white veil. A leather book lay open on her lap, and she drank from a crystal cup. Two pages were draping her shoulders with a fur. She looked up at one of them and laughed. Like a night-bird’s shriek the laugh blew away, raucously merry.
‘Sweet Jesu!’ cried Elizabeth, twisting in the boat to stare as the rich craft shot by. ‘Jane Shore!’
One of the royal escort answered. ‘Nay, Madame. That is Lady Lynom. She was released from prison last fall. She is married now to the King’s Solicitor-General.’
‘But she was a traitor! Conspirator and harlot – condemned by the King!’
‘He pardoned her,’ said the man, dipping his head on his chest as if to weight his words. ‘He showed her mercy.’
Elizabeth sank back in her seat. The wind played on her lips, still incredulously parted. Slowly her thoughts reformed themselves. Richard was more than a fool; he was utterly possessed of lunacy. If this treatment of Shore were token of his mercy … She began to laugh, to hold in laughter, shaking silently, tears spilling down her cheeks. The boat rocked on the wash from Lady Lynom’s barge. Young Bess stole a glance at her mother and was alarmed. She touched her hand gently.
‘Madame, don’t weep,’ she whispered. ‘I am sure my uncle of Gloucester will take good care of us.’
‘Oh, he will,’ sobbed Elizabeth. ‘On my soul, he will!’
That evening she walked into the hall at Baynard’s Castle with downcast eyes, primarily to retain her composure. Were the truth known, she found the sudden warmth and noise and life of the court disturbing after the spectral peace of Sanctuary. Even though there were only about a hundred sitting at table that evening, she felt their presence crowding her, their eyes vying with the thousand firefly candles and seeking her out. The usher’s voice rebounded from the walls and the hammerbeam roof: ‘Dame Grey! Grey! Grey!’ Behind her, so close that she could feel Bess’s breath touching her bare neck, came the daughters. The rustle of their new gowns, the hard little slither of their dancing shoes, sounded like a school of adders in stealthy progress. From the corners of her eyes she caught the lazy movement of the White Boar bannner and the fidgeting of a page standing with his fellows against the wall. About fifty of Richard’s Council were seated above the salt, whose great silver barrel divided nobles from relatives, henchmen, and hangers-on. Trestles lapped in shining damask flowed past on either side her slow advance to the dais where King Richard sat with his Queen.
She had planned her most obsequious curtsey, thinking to inject mockery into the swept-back skirt, the crooked knee. No sooner had she begun to bend to the throne than Richard rose and came to her on light hurried feet down the two steps; he took her hands, holding her up from the obeisance. His thin grasp was cool and strong. She dipped her mouth to his hand but his arms went about her. He held her stiff, outraged body against him and spoke loudly over her head.
‘My lords and councillors! I bid you give welcome heartily to our well-beloved Dame Elizabeth Grey!’
Was he the mocker now? One insult, and she would turn and leave him to humiliation. With her unwilling face grazing his soft velvet doublet she heard him bidding the court rise and salute her. ‘Drink, my friends! to her who gave comfort to King Edward for many years.’ He released her then, enough to look at her, saying softly:
‘Your presence here gladdens me, Elizabeth,’ and would have said more but for the shudder of distaste she could not hide. He whispered again, ‘Welcome,’ and she stared into his dark face. The blue eyes were tired yet vital, but there were ageing marks of stress in his high-boned countenance. She looked, past his dark head with the glittering diadem, to the dais, to her place for so many lost years. Queen Anne was watching anxiously, twisting her hands above her damask napkin. Mortal sickness lay upon her. Her skin was so pale that the blood could almost be seen moving beneath it; on each cheek flew the dangerous bright flag of a wasting disease.
Elizabeth smiled faintly. She raised her lips and gave to Richard a dry and dutiful kiss. In contrast to his hands, his face burned. His whole body was hard and tense and feverish. She thought with sudden clarity: born under Mars, with the Scorpion rising. Mars is burning him up, and the Scorpion will sting him to death. She was instantly assuaged.
A place had been set for her at the top of the right-hand trestle. From it she watched her daughters received in turn, saluted, and presented to the company. Bess was first in line – weeping anew, Elizabeth noted angrily; weeping, casting herself into her uncle’s arms so that a pleased indulgent murmur arose from the Hall. Elizabeth was uneasy. For some reason unknown, save perhaps that he had coddled her when she was a child, Bess had always been fond of her uncle. The girl’s face was hidden against his shoulder. At any moment she might complain to him about the unwanted Tudor marriage … dare she? Elizabeth half-rose, but the danger was past, Bess was leaving the dais while Richard embraced her younger sister, Cicely.
As the meal began Elizabeth wondered if it were a celebration – of her own capitulation? A line of butlers served the company with roast swan; the carvers dismembered a dozen roasted oxen. There were wines like liquid jewels, a syllabub covered with coils of spun sugar, and a great subtlety depicting in honied pastry and crystal fruits the Coming of Christ in Majesty. Young Bess fell upon the food, eating until her small belly was as tight as a tabor. Her sisters flirted and giggled with Richard’s younger henchmen. Elizabeth stared down at her platter from which rose the smell of well-hung meat and herbs. Famished yet nauseated, she could eat nothing. Despite the concern of Sir Richard Ratcliffe who sat by her, she left all untouched, crumbling her bread-trencher, barely tasting her wine. From a seat across the hall, Margaret Beaufort was trying vainly to catch her eye. Let her wait, she thought. I will make my peace in my own time.
For much of the banquet, and when the board had been cleared for entertainment, she watched Anne Neville. Yes, death sat by her, she coughed and coughed and held her throat, her eyes bright with tears of anguish. As the jugglers strutted, throwing up lighted brands, her colour worsened. A woman came with a consort of viols and sang, piercingly sweet, of love and flowers and destiny. Anne left the dais and slipped away; her physician followed close behind her. The King forced a smile to his lips and looked away down the Hall. Near him Bess, rosy with food, made careless by wine, raised her goblet in a gay salute. Courteously he returned her gesture, while his anxious eyes reluctantly registered her youth, her health. Like a small candle on a dark plain, a thought flickered in Elizabeth’s mind and she too smiled at Richard. Across the Hall Margaret Beaufort whispered to Lord Stanley. It was their turn to be uneasy. Later when the guests were dispersing, Elizabeth approached the Duke of Norfolk.
‘I wish for an audience with his Grace,’ she said, trying to speak kindly. She must bring out of retirement the silver tongue which had seduced Edward, were she to serve his brother likewise.
‘I will inquire,’ said Jack of Norfolk. Serpent. The word hovered with him as he went away. He loved Richard dearly but sometimes thought his actions unfathomable.
They brought her to him after a little while. He was in his private apartments, writing at a table, with a great shaggy hound at his feet. A grim old lady knelt before a prie-dieu in the corner. Her raiment was crow-black and a great bunch of keys hung at her waist. Proud Cis Plantagenet, mother of two kings. She finished her prayer as Elizabeth entered. She rattled her fingers down her rosary with a sound of skeletal menace, and stalked towards the door.
‘I shall retire now,’ she announced. Richard got up. The hound followed him to where the Duchess of York stood; it waved its long banner of a tail.
‘Good night, my son,’ Her gaunt face swivelled so that her eyes, deep hollows and black ageless fires, rested on Elizabeth. ‘Good night,’ she said again. Still looking at Elizabeth: ‘May God protect you, Richard, through this night.’
Moving strongly like a black ship, the hound in her wake, she quit the room, and left behind a mood of grave disquiet.
‘Be seated, Elizabeth,’ Richard said. He had a fair idea of why she had come, and did not delude himself that it was out of affection. Her enmity had communicated itself plainly in that public embrace. In nine months of power he had discovered that people can forgive much, but not the crime of being forgiven. Magnanimity hurts.
‘It is a long time since I was here,’ she said, laughing nervously. He bowed agreement; sitting, contemplatively turning his finger-rings.
‘I fear your lady wife the Queen is sick,’ she said next, and saw his face grow more haggard in the space of her words. ‘I have no doubt her doctors are skilled’ she went on, ‘but I have remedies, tried remedies, for evil of the breast.’
Take woodsage, horehound … It had not cured Marguerite! Neither would it heal the Fiend’s daughter.
‘God grant that she will recover soon,’ she continued, and knew by his expression that he had already given up hope. And the little candle of thought, lit while she watched Bess salute her uncle, smouldered and burnt up brightly. How much better for Bess’s bridegroom to be already King! No need to parry then with Tudor and his uncertain conquest … it would be satisfying, too, to hatch a plan without Morton’s knowledge. To serve Richard as her own mother had served Edward – by seduction, witchery, the torments of temptation. It was a thought to be mulled over very carefully. Bess would be Queen of England by some means; Tudor was not the sole solution.
Richard said: ‘Madame, I am a little weary, and I must look to the Queen. What is your desire?’
‘I came to thank you,’ she said, ‘for receiving me back into your grace and for the gifts to me and mine. I am conscious of –’ it was hard to say, even in feigning – ‘of my transgressions against you in the past. I hope these are forgotten out of your great generosity.’
His tired eyes brightened. ‘This is more than I hoped for,’ he said softly. ‘Elizabeth, believe me I spoke truly when I bade you welcome to my household. I wish to live at peace.’
‘And I, Sire.’ Lids lowered, she smiled her little downward smile, not knowing that it was now a grotesque twitch, unnervingly without appeal.
‘I shall while I rule give you every comfort,’ he went on. ‘None shall harm or mistreat you. Did Nesfield deliver my grant from the Privy Purse?’ She nodded. He said: ‘And after my time is done, my son Edward will, at my decree, continue to cherish your children. For God’s sake, let the next generation use one another more kindly than we have done!’
She exhaled a long sigh that wavered the candles in their sconces. She raised eyes full of blue piteousness.
‘My lord, I must speak … you talk of your son and this grieves me. Sire, I have sons also. This is my request.’
He listened, the candlelight shuddering on his face.
‘May it please your Grace to receive back my son, Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset. Would you permit him safe-conduct from France?’
It would be wonderful to have Tom near her again. He would be so much more useful than kicking his heels in Henry Tudor’s camp. He was the one prop and ally of her blood who was as close as Anthony … Anthony. She felt her jaw tighten despite herself. She heard the King’s quick answer.
‘Aye, gladly. Write him tomorrow. He will be welcome as you are. Certes, bring Dorset home. I harbour no grudges. I will pardon him.’
She thought – how easy it all is! Now for the last and most important gamble. The pin on which all could hinge, if all else failed.
‘Your Grace is bountiful.’ He waited. ‘One more thing. I am certain you have not forgotten the existence of – my other sons. Edward and Richard, in the Tower of London.’
‘The Lords Bastard,’ he said instantly.
She bit her lip. ‘Yes. I would dearly love to have my boys with me again.’ Once more, she looked down.
He was silent for a long time while a feeling of sour self-congratulation on his own wit crept over him. For a few moments he had wondered whether he was wrong about Elizabeth’s purpose – now it seemed she had only been taking her time. The knowledge that he had read her aright filled him none the less with disillusion. Within him, a second Richard sneered at the first’s gullibility. Overall he felt downcast, flattened. He stared at the slender face opposite, willing her to raise her eyes that he might look and be confirmed in that which disappointed him. As if so commanded, the veined white lids flickered upwards, revealing a glittering hardness of purpose which no loving smile could temper.
‘May it please your Grace?’ she repeated softly.
‘Nay, Madame,’ he heard himself say. ‘No.’ He saw the lit eyes dull like two doused fires. He bent and stabbed with a poker at the green logs in the hearth, occupying himself until she should speak again, and thinking: Jesu! we are but two actors in some tawdry play. How often I have foreseen my part, and hers, and this moment. In a blinding instant of clarity such as that experienced in high danger, he saw his own future spread before him like a plain on which grew bloody flowers. A plain, ending in a sheer abyss frighteningly near. The mystic vision appalled him. He straightened abruptly from the fire and heard Elizabeth’s voice pathetically say:
‘Your Grace, I cannot believe … for the love of your own son, let me have mine! Must I petition the Queen?’
‘The Queen is too ill to be disturbed.’
For the love of Christ, thought Richard. Elizabeth has not seen her one son for years; she knows nothing of the love that Anne and I bear our little prince. These thoughts gave an edge to his voice.
‘And she is of like mind with me,’ he said. ‘We refuse your plea.’
‘Why?’ she said quietly.
He sighed, and rose. Only the truth would satisfy her, even if it changed her into a foaming wildcat. He took a turn about the room, and said coldly:
‘Dame Grey, plain speech does wound, but since you ask it, I will give my reason. I had hoped there would be kindness between us, and pray that I am wrong in my surmise. I think that it is not through maternal affection alone that you wish your sons returned. There are still many ready to rise and unseat me from my throne. Therefore the Lords Bastard must remain my wards until such time …’
Until you and all the scions of Lancaster and Woodville are dead or quiescent, he thought. He was surprised to hear her answer in a voice still silvery cool.
‘My lord, what danger are two little bastard boys?’
He turned to face her squarely. ‘They could,’ he said quietly, ‘with your aid, Madame, raise such a faction to strike blood from England’s very core.’
Her lips drew back from her teeth. She seemed to grow immutably old, a being of legend. He almost expected to see flames or bubbling venom issue from her mouth and for an instant was afraid. Her next words, by contrast, seemed ordinary, although he recognized them as more lines from their deathly, deathless play.
‘It presumes me to speak of this, Richard,’ she said. ‘But for your own sake I feel you should know that the people whisper about the safety of my sons. Some even say that you have had them put to death.’
Avidly she watched him, saw the little bitter smile he could not hide and knew that the rumours had reached him already. The secret words nurtured by herself, by Morton, through France and England. And yet he sat, doing nothing. Awed, she stared at him, inwardly fuming the next minute, seeking to attack him from one side or another, seeking weakness in the many-faceted person of the Hog …
‘So, my lady,’ he said gently.
‘I beg you, Sire, for your honour and the high regard you hold in the realm, and for my own comfort as your kinswoman, produce my sons. Reveal them to the people. Let them ride through London for a week – put an end to these dreadful whisperings!’
A great weariness overtook him. He felt his soul sucked down into some alien marsh, dragged into blackness, oozing, all-encompassing. He sat staring at his own hands, turning his rings to ward off devils, and knew one lucid thought. God be thanked I had the wit to remove the boys. Now if by some ill chance the Woodvilles broke down the Tower, poisoned the guards – they would not find these small foci of power. Thank God I sent them north.
He said, quiet and outwardly tranquil: ‘This I’ll not do, Madame. There will be no little wars breaking out on Tower Hill – no abductions.’ He heard her harshly indrawn breath. ‘As for my honour and my high repute, I will gamble these gladly for England’s peace.’
She sat on for a few minutes. Neither looked at the other or spoke. Then she rose. The audience was over, and she had failed. The only salvage from this trying hour was the information gleaned. The rumours were flying, even to the King’s ear. There was no chance of securing the boys, but their usefulness was far from outworn. And Queen Anne was sick unto death. Bess should have a royal husband yet, of one breed or another.
‘If I have spoken uncivilly, forgive me,’ she said softly. ‘I abide by your decree.’
He did not take her hands or kiss her, but let her swoop down to lip his fingers. He did not pity her, for she was gone beyond pity. He only wondered on her tortured life, and was lost in wonder.
‘Good night, highness.’
Outside, racked by sudden nausea, she leaned on the wall, trembling so that her skirts shook upon her thighs. The pitchlight overhead flamed and whispered in sympathy. Gradually she controlled herself, and made her way to her own apartments. She passed by Bess’s chambers, from which came muffled laughter; the sisters were all in there together, reliving the banquet. The sound of their weightless youth irked her. She longed desperately for comfort, kindness, a breast on which to cry. To vomit up the tears of centuries until their cause faded like a nightmare.
At her door, a slight figure pulled itself from the shadows. A frightened pulse started up in her head and heart. She cried sharply: ‘Who’s there?’ and the shape moved into the warmly blazing torchlight. The tilted green eyes of Mistress Grace looked up at her. Looked with such imploring anguish that the face could have been a mirror of her own.
She could no more have turned that face away than she could have taken a blade and split her own greedy, lifeloving heart. The chamber door opened and together they went in.
Death struck the King two blows within the year. The first crippled his dynasty; the second destroyed his heart. Both fell in spring, that cruel blossom time. In April at Middleham the small prince Edward burned out his life and so, mysteriously consumed, died in a day upon his nurse’s arm. The following March Queen Anne suffered a fatal haemorrhage of the lungs at Westminster. The people muttered of poison, but by whose will administered was not made clear.
Joined like two praying hands, the great roof of Westminster Abbey arched over the mourners. The stone faces, the flowery bosses, the images of saint and martyr and mason gazed impassively down at the black-clad ants in nave and aisles, while the lamenting and the perfumed incense wreathed and whirled hopefully to the feet of God. Possessed of that same granite impassivity, Elizabeth watched the small coffin’s entombment; but when the King leaned to drop something after it – a jewel, a flower, a tear? she shivered. Never more than a pace behind, Grace took off her own wool cloak and hung it about her mistress’s shoulders. Again, Elizabeth wondered what reward she sought for such devotion. Daily she waited for the whispered request, the shifty boon-begging, but it never came.
With a hand under each elbow, the Duke of Norfolk and Sir Francis Lovell supported the King. Behind them was John of Gloucester, his dark head bowed; as tall as the King now, but broader. Elizabeth looked at him with fleeting favour; he was the proof of Richard’s susceptibility, and Bess was more comely than ever these days. Newly robed by the King’s bounty, fine-coloured, she was happy to acquiesce in her mother’s new desire. There was no more talk of Tudor. From across the nave Margaret Beaufort watched Elizabeth and nudged Stanley, who was weeping into his kerchief.
‘I mislike it,’ she whispered. The choir began a piercing, heart-tearing motet, rising in a vain hope to touch the essence of God. Stanley shook his head under cover of the fine linen, cocked an eye at his wife.
‘She is cold to us,’ she muttered. ‘She will scarcely speak to me. Never did I think she would go her own way so.’
The Dirige and Placebo were sung, and the King, pale as marble, walked with his ministers from the Abbey. From that moment choristers would sing a ceaseless Requiem, trusting by their eloquence to waft Anne’s soul into the steady gilt presence of the saints. Two processions went on either side of the nave, Dukes and Earls and their ladies. Behind them, some yawning, some weeping, walked their households. Proceeding thus, Grace came level with John of Gloucester.
He had wept for Anne, but he was calm, and the calmness gave him sombre maturity. He was so like Richard in appearance that it was almost comical, until the disparity of grief and years was seen. John’s face was young, the King’s was a sad skull, and there the jest ended. At the great door John looked and saw Grace. He inclined his head, he smiled. She edged nearer to him, out of the wake of Elizabeth’s measured progress. Her shoulder touched his. He whispered: ‘God greet you, mistress,’ and then: ‘My love!’
The anxious months of separation fell away at the sound of his warm voice, at the look in his eyes. It was not even ominous, she thought carelessly, that they should meet again at a funeral. Joy poured into her heart, obliterating her concern for Elizabeth and the vague sadness she felt for dead Anne and her half-dead husband. The procession moved out under the arch and into the milky spring day.
‘We are for Eltham Palace,’ he whispered. ‘Come with us!’
He strode on steadily. Before him, a pack of bishops and priests surrounded the King, offering bleak comforts as droningly intense as the strong arms of the supporting knights. Grace ran a step to keep up with Elizabeth.
‘I must go where she goes,’ she breathed. John nodded, but he frowned.
‘And I must follow him.’ He looked towards Richard. ‘Come to Eltham, mistress!’
For once, their paths did not divide. Some days later, Elizabeth ordered her household to make ready for Eltham. To Bess, she said: ‘Wear your finest gowns, and the jewels Master Nesfield brought for you last week.’
‘Everything is ready,’ Grace said quietly, an hour later. She tried to strip her tone of gladness in case Elizabeth’s whim should go wantoning and the decision be reversed. The glittering blue eyes moved to survey her and a little ironic smile twisted the mouth.
‘You work swiftly.’ Amazingly: ‘Good wench!’ She was in an eager humour, determinedly lightened. At one of the gloomy mourning feasts she had laughed aloud, earning the fury of the Duchess of Norfolk. Beneath the black veil Elizabeth was almost radiant, her eyes alive again, her skin rapt and luminous. Silver lady! thought Grace. Her heart turned, just as it did at John’s name; the same feeling yet vastly different. Today was well-starred. They were bound for Eltham, Elizabeth was restored in spirit, and John was home from the North. Good had come out of grief.
Grace was not insensitive to the loss of Anne Neville. More than once Anne’s face returned to her, and she heard the echo of her voice: ‘Why, child, you’re wet and cold …’ But Anne was destined for the grave even on that first showery day, and removed by an unknown dimension from things earthly. The hundred kindnesses of Anne diminished beside one smile from Elizabeth.
They rode into Eltham down the greensward leading to the now silent tilting ground. They entered the great hall built by King Edward, where a score of round windows were blazoned with the Falcon, the Fetterlock and the Rose. Grace was dismissed for an hour. Elizabeth was fussing over Bess, straightening the rich gown of black tissue latched with gold. She kissed the girl; Bess, ever prone to weep, burst into tears, then smiles, and Grace went out into the garden alone. She passed through a small stone tunnel, its moist base was thick with violets. On the lake, white swans drifted like petals. Crocuses pushed up their stiff flames around the lake’s perimeter. Dying snowdrops hung down their milky hands.
He was there already; unerringly he had known where to find her. The two black figures walked slowly towards one another, she in her high-waisted gown with the jutting stomacher; he in his velvet doublet and jaunty short jacket weighted with a fine gold chain. They walked slowly at first, and then they ran, with arms outheld. They clasped one another breathlessly. His mouth covered hers before she could speak, and she thought: he is more practised – he has been wantoning with others in the North. She was not to know that he had dreamed so often of this kiss that it was merely a practised dream made flesh. He held her, stroking her cheek and her white neck, his fingers, calloused by the handling of horse and weapon, rough on her smooth skin. ‘We have only a few days,’ he said. ‘Then I must return to Sheriff Hutton. My father says that there are troublous times ahead, and he would have me safe. Safe!’ he repeated the word disgustedly. ‘I am almost done with my training. I am Captain of Calais, and the King’s heir.’
She nodded, strained close, as if to expunge the lost months and the turmoils which might keep them apart.
‘I know, my love. But surely – the Earl of Lincoln is his heir … he proclaimed it.’
‘I did not mean his royal heir,’ he said, laughing. ‘A bastard cannot claim the throne. I meant only his heir in love and duty.’ His face darkened. ‘When his little son died, he was nearly demented …’
‘Hush!’ she kissed the taut mouth. ‘It’s over. Have you spoken to him about our betrothal?’
‘What chance?’ he said dourly. ‘He’s full of trouble and policy. What do you know of this Tudor? This whelp who threatens invasion?’
Policy, always policy, when all she needed was to hold him, her love, her lord, during this brief season. As if he had read her thought, he said: ‘I love you, lady. There shall be none other, Grace, while I live. And we have no tokens to exchange, have plighted no vows. Can we find a priest in this woodland, I wonder? I would be yours, your true knight and maker, in heart and thought, always.’
‘No priest,’ she said, laughing gently. ‘Is not our word enough?’
The glassy lake, starred by lily-leaves and drifting birds, dreamed on in the chill sunlight. ‘Will you take me?’ he said. ‘With only the swans and flowers for witness? This is a good place. How many lovers I wonder, have here plighted their troth?’
‘How many Graces?’
‘And how many Johns? They lived, loved, and now …’ He had been merry; now the laughter left him. She was afraid, and moved closer into his arms, feeling his slenderness and strength, and the quick hard beat of his living heart.
‘Come,’ he said. They walked together to the water’s edge and knelt there. Solemnly he snapped off a tall yellow flower and placed it between her folded hands. Then he clasped his own hands together, saying in a loud voice:
‘I, John Plantagenet of Gloucester, Captain of Calais, being neither husband nor leman to any, do pledge heart and lands to my dearly beloved Grace Plantagenet, in this place, as God witness my deed. I do so vow my sole regard and affection to her, Grace, this day. I forsake and renounce all other. And should I swerve from her, may God strike me and damn me to eternity.’
At these terrible words she turned sharply and looked at him. His head was bowed, his dark brows drawn together in a grim line.
‘Answer!’ he said.
She opened her mouth; nothing emerged. Slowly he raised his head.
‘Plight me your troth,’ he said, soft and savage.
‘I cannot!’ she whispered.
His colour ebbed. ‘So,’ he said flatly. ‘You don’t love me. But you could have spared me this!’
‘I love you!’ she cried wildly. Desperately she said: ‘It is this place. Such vows are wrong, given in a … a profane place.’ She gazed across the lake, as if imploring the water’s judgment. ‘No good could come of it. Forgive me, love.’ She pressed her cheek against his shoulder, and slowly his body relaxed. He stood, drawing her up from her knees, and he smiled faintly.
‘You aren’t to blame. I was inopportune. There have been too many tales. Such secret pledges are used by lecherous clerks and knaves to draw poor witless maids into a bed that’s no marriage-bed … yet you could not have thought that I would use you thus! Let it rest; I am still plighted to you. One day we shall complete this vow in church. With a shoal of gloomy priests muttering about the sin of cousins marrying!’
He removed a jewel from his thumb. ‘Wear my ring, at any rate,’ he said. ‘Wear it in love of me, and in remembrance, while I am kicking my heels at Sheriff Hutton and you are serving your beloved mistress!’
The ring, like a gold-rimmed bead of blood, was too large. She would need to bind thread round it for safekeeping.
‘Yes,’ she said absently. ‘I must serve my Elizabeth.’
‘How you do love her!’ he said in a voice so rough and strange that she looked up from caressing the ring. ‘Was it from Titulus Regius that you remembered your “profane place”?’
She felt her face grow cold. ‘That is cruel.’ She walked a few paces away, and he followed her, gnawing his lips. ‘I know she did wrong,’ Grace said. ‘But …
He was by her side, turning her into his arms with a grasp as rough as his voice. ‘Damn the Titulus Regius, and all such documents that hurt you and yours. And forgive me. But do not ask me to love Elizabeth. By that same profane marriage she bastardized the heir of England and set our realm upon its head.’
‘And made your father King!’ Her green eyes held his steadily.
‘Even now, she schemes,’ he answered, stung. ‘Her latest ploy is to marry Bess to my father. She has already enquired of the papal legate about a dispensation, as they are niece and uncle. It is a heresy, an impossiblity.’ He looked hard at her and said: ‘Can I believe you live so close to Elizabeth and did not know of this?’
She said dully: ‘Why is it an impossibility?’
‘Because,’ John answered like a lawyer, deadly serious, ‘Bess is bastard now, like you, or I. To make her Queen my father would need to reverse the Titulus Regius. This in turn would make Bess’s brother King, in Richard’s place. The young Edward …’
‘Stop!’ Her hands flew to her ears. He pulled the hands away and said relentlessly: ‘You know, Grace, in whose grip England would be then – Elizabeth’s. The realm would rise in blood against her. God’s life, don’t you know how the Woodvilles are loathed? Have you not heard Elizabeth mocked and derided?’
His face was flushed. To him the matter was all impartial, crystal logic. To Grace each word was insupportable. Instantly the imprint of her hand flared white on John’s cheek. They stared at one another, he bewildered, she panting with rage. Swallowing hard, she said, ‘Sir, good day,’ and began to walk across the pleasaunce away from him. After a moment she realized the yellow flower still lay within her hand; with great scorn she tossed the bloom into the lake.
‘Madame,’ said John coldly, and bowed at her retreating back. He watched her walking, so slim and small and furious in her black gown, and a smile pulled at his mouth. A great wave of tenderness rose in him. He stood, feet planted apart, and laughed. He shouted: ‘Madame!’ Her steps quickened slightly.
He ran after her. She stopped, half-turned, moved forward again.
‘Grace!’ he bellowed. ‘Sweetheart!’ Then: ‘Madame, farewell! For, you, I drown!’
The tremendous splash jerked her about. John was standing, waist-deep in the lake; he was plastered with mud. A swan, disturbed on the nest, was approaching him, its white wings vibrating with rage. It surged towards him, beak opening savagely. He laughed even as it attacked him; it tore a great wedge out of his padded sleeve, but as he threw up his arms to ward off the furious bird, his laughter pealed across the water. All thoughts of the quarrel left Grace. Alarmed, she ran to the water’s edge, seizing a fallen branch as a weapon, and wetting shoes and hose among the reeds. She snatched up her gown preparing to wade into the water. ‘John! Take care!’ The swan hissed, saw her and beat across the lake’s surface towards the fresh enemy. John laughed no longer. Shouting to Grace to run, he plunged for shore. His feet were tangled in water-weed, sucked down by mud. He thought of her green eyes blinded by the bill, her limbs broken by the angry wings. It was a nightmare in which he floundered while the great white shape ran at Grace like an outraged angel. An angel with a serpent’s head and neck.
She stood still, her arms at her sides. The wings lashed the air, the awkward feet drove the white bulk almost into her face. The graceful neck coiled and shimmered in anger. And John knew how much he loved Grace, more even than he had dreamed; that her destruction meant his own life’s ruin. Kicking his feet at last from the clinging slime, he ran towards her, then checked in unbelief. The bird and the girl stood motionless, the attack abandoned, the wings folding, the neck dipping like a sail. Then the swan spread its wings once more, white against the black-clad figure of Grace, spread them in homage and farewell. It turned and waddled back towards its nest.
When he reached her side he was weeping. He gathered her into his arms, leaving smears of mud upon her hands and veil. What he had seen seemed no longer incredible, only a token of her purity, her goodness. What could he fear, when even the wild things revered her?
After a long time she said: ‘My hour is almost up. I must go back to my lady.’
‘We have wasted it, quarrelling,’ he said tenderly. ‘Ah, my love, my own dear …’
‘And we have so little time …
He held her closer, walking with her, stopping to kiss her in the stone arbour, and parting from her with a sigh. ‘Tomorrow. The same hour.’
‘My love. My love, yes.’
She fled to Elizabeth’s chambers, hearing the rebuking clock boom from the tower and brushing dried mud from her gown. As soon as she entered the apartment she knew that something was amiss. Bess’s wild wailing, heard even through a closed bedroom door, told her well enough. What now? she thought, gripped by the old, weary anxiety, She entered to confusion, to the litter of packing cases made ready for a journey. And to the silver lady’s face, grey again, and full of demons.
‘My lords,’ said King Richard. ‘It is beyond my comprehension that men give credence to the rumour that I intend marriage with Lady Elizabeth, bastard daughter of Dame Grey. It is so that divers seditious and evil disposed persons enforce themselves daily to sow seed of noise and disclaundre against our person; some by setting up of bills, some by message and sending forth of lies, some by bold and presumptuous speech and communication one with another …’
He had gone down to the Hospital of St. John in Clerkenwell and had assembled there the lords spiritual and temporal to hear him. His words rejected Bess. Yet underlying them was all his frustrated despair, his stubborn yet veiled denial of all the greater rumour noised against him. He dared not say too much, yet in his impotent frenzy said too little. By reason of this anguish, venom entered his speech and so doing, touched off fresh madness in Elizabeth.
She was like a beast, pacing, raging, ripping her bodice to shreds so that it flowed about her. Her pale hair, now threaded with subtle white, fell about her face, as cursing, she wore out the carpet in her chamber. She threw back her head and cried damnation to the frightened air. She reviled the King while anger hollowed her cheeks and sapped the transient beauty of her face so that she looked old and crazed.
Bess wept in Grace’s arms. For her, the slight was more personal. Over and again she said: ‘He loved me! I know he loved me!’ while Grace, horribly ill at ease, answered: ‘Sure, lady, sweet lady, he loves you still; but then he is your uncle, banned from marriage with you by blood!’ Bess wept louder, and Grace saw that she was undeceived.
Grace, in her turn, dogged Elizabeth, blown in her wake like a leaf in a hurricane. The unquestioning part of her whispered daily: I love and serve her. On the day of the proclamation Bess was taken away. Her score of new gowns, her lutes and lapdogs were packed and ready when the escort arrived. John of Gloucester was one of the officers commissioned to guard her. In a snatched secret moment he took Grace’s hands; he smiled sadly.
‘Our time is ended sooner than I deemed,’ he whispered.
‘Where are you taking my lady?’
‘To Sheriff Hutton, for safety, at my father’s orders.’
Safety from whom, what? she thought. John looked particularly fine; he wore a long cloak of Kendal green over his trim doublet and doeskin thighboots. His bright eyes were proud with his new commission. Not for the first time, Grace was jealous.
‘Guard my sister well,’ she murmured mockingly.
‘Would to God you rode with me.’
He pressed the red-eyed ring she wore with strong fingers. Say nothing, my love, he thought. I know your stubborn allegiance to your dangerous lady. He looked deeply in her eyes; his mouth shaped a kiss. Jesting yet loving and immeasurably sad was that look; and they both grew old upon it. It held all their lost spring days.
‘My lord, John!’ They called, him from the doorway. Farewell again, always farewell. They were gone, slim, gaudy knights shepherding the golden Bess, whose weathervane spirit had swung again to fair; her laughter blew back up the staircase. Farewell, murmured Grace, longing to run to the window, to watch him ride. It was best to remain, however, in line for the next command from Elizabeth. It was not long in coming.
‘Bid Lady Margaret Beaufort attend me here.’
Grace needed scarcely a dozen steps for this errand. The Countess and her husband were in the next tower. They were sitting quietly, as if waiting for a boat or a chariot to bear them to a certain destination. When Grace delivered the summons, the Countess smiled a terrible smile. With her and her lord were Stanley’s brother Sir William and Reynold Bray; and the look that passed like a lamplighter set itself upon each of the four faces, a mingling of triumph and scorn. The air grew sickly with a sour jubilation.
‘Madame,’ said Grace unquietly, ‘Dame Grey is waiting.’
Margaret turned her face, piously shadowed by a long wimple. It was a brittle face, a stranger to all ungovernable emotion. She answered evenly.
‘Mistress Plantagenet, I have been waiting for this day for years.’
Then she laughed softly, and Stanley clapped his brother on the shoulder, and Bray, jumping up, plaited his feet in a little jig.
‘I should not jest,’ said the Countess, rising, ‘It is unseemly. We come.’
Grace followed them as they entered to Elizabeth, who moved to stand before her fireplace, hands joined at her breast. Margaret kissed her deliberately, first upon each cheek and then upon the folded hands. Her husband and Sir William did likewise. Bray crooked his knee, hawked and spat, with great delicacy as if this too were part of the ritual.
‘Madame,’ said the Countess, ‘I have hoped and dreamed for this.’
And Sir William looked petulantly at Grace with a raised brow.
‘Let her stay,’ said Elizabeth, following his glance. ‘She loves me.’
‘As do we all,’ said Lord Stanley.
Wickedly the Countess murmured: ‘Our condolences, Madame, on the proclamation; it was unchivalrous …’
‘Have done!’ cried Elizabeth, startling them all. ‘My daughter shall be Queen of England. I look to you now to supply her King!’
Margaret’s black eyes had an almost holy light.
‘So you would have my son?’
‘Tudor,’ said Elizabeth. She clipped the word, as if it hurt her tongue. ‘Yes, Henry your son. He shall have my daughter, as Morton advised. He shall wipe out this slur and restore us to the royal table.’
‘He shall,’ said the Countess, like an amen. The Stanleys bowed, and Bray passed a hand over his own hot face.
‘How can I know you will not fail me?’ said Elizabeth.
‘Tudor will not fail you. He will sweep the past away. He will light a fire in England that you may warm your hands at in old age.’
‘I look to Henry Tudor for my vengeance. He must conquer the Hog, the usurper.’ There was a tightness in her head; she felt herself beginning to shake and swayed against the chimney-piece. Grace’s hand took hers, supporting her.
‘He must invade, and be successful,’ she continued. ‘Morton has my gold; my brother Edward has the ships …
‘And my son has gathered a force in France and Brittany,’ said the Countess. ‘Fear naught.’
Reynold Bray spoke. ‘Northumberland is ours, too. You recall how King Edward made Gloucester Lord of the North in Northumberland’s stead … the Earl resents him still, and will join our standard.’
‘Are you to fight, Master Clerk?’ Elizabeth disliked him so much she could not resist a gibe.
‘Nay Madame,’ (smirking). ‘My calling is to help pray for all the dead in King Richard’s army.’
‘Enough,’ said Lord Stanley. He moved swiftly forward to kiss Elizabeth’s hand. ‘I must be gone. There is much to do. Tudor will come in August. I shall tell the King that I am sick, and must retire to my estates. Leave all to me. God bless you, Madame.’
‘One thing.’ She stretched out her thin, shaking hand. ‘A promise.’
He listened, quiet and grave.
‘We have failed before to kill the Hog. At times I think he is immortal. See that he falls this time. And …’
‘My lady?’
‘Let him be killed with ignominy,’ she said. ‘For his insults to me and mine. Let his death be inglorious. Let him be reviled. Do this, Stanley, in remembrance of me.’
He bowed. ‘It is done, Madame.’
They went away swiftly. Below, she could hear them calling their esquires, and the noise of hoofs. Margaret Beaufort remained, statuesque, silent, smiling.
‘Margaret?’ said Elizabeth uncertainly.
‘Madame, I feared you had ceased to love me,’ said the Countess. She moved rapidly to a flagon on the table, poured red drink into two hanaps, splashing it carelessly. She thrust a goblet into Elizabeth’s hand.
‘To Henry ap Tydder!’ she cried. ‘And to the union of the Red and White Roses! To the new dynasty! You and I will build it together!’
Elizabeth set the cup to her lips. Her throat was closed, she regurgitated the wine, turning quickly to spew it into the hearth.
‘My lady, you’re unwell,’ soothed the Countess. ‘Attend her, Mistress Grace.’ The door closed behind her.
After a while, Elizabeth said: ‘I will lie down.’
Grace said tentatively: ‘Madame …’
‘Well?’
It came pouring out like that undrinkable toast: if the King were killed, would his son suffer likewise? Would John of Gloucester be safe?
Elizabeth answered with more patience than she had ever shown.
‘He will be safe, Grace. He is of no consequence.’
They went then to the bedchamber. Elizabeth slept a little while Grace watched, wanting to weep and knowing no reason for it.
August came in with thunder. Storms the like of which no village ancient could remember crashed over England. Rain burst bridges and laid whole landscapes awash. Daily, white veins of lightning split the heavy sky, striking cattle, firing forest and tenement. The people crossed themselves and looked up aghast for the image of God descending from the clouds to chastise the sins of man. Listening thus for the trumpet, folk cursed the loss to their livelihood, and cursed the King.
‘Tis a judgment,’ Butcher Gould told his prentice as they hurried along Tower Wharf. He averted his eyes from the fortress etched white against a bursting black cloud. Indignant sorrow fomented in him as he thought of Elizabeth’s murdered sons. Smothered or stuck at the orders of the Hog. A friar had muttered the whole tale in the butcher’s ear, so it must be right. A rheumy tear filled Gould’s eye as he recalled his first sight of the baby prince in Sanctuary. And the Queen – addressing him as her equal: ‘Ned is coming home, Master – spread the word!’ Now that baby prince was traitorously slain. A fork of fire bisected the heavens, making the prentice leap and howl.
‘Nay, not yours, lad,’ said Gould grimly. ‘The King’s judgment. Swine. May he lose his battle.’
The shore of Milford Haven was slippery with rain; Henry’s first footstep shuddered and slid. Behind him in the boat his attendants gasped and held their breath. Henry righted himself swiftly. The others, mantling themselves in preparation for stepping ashore, marvelled at the smile he gave them.
‘You saw, my lords?’ he called. ‘I almost fell! Just as the Conqueror did! What better augury that England would have me clasp her?’
The sea-wind blew him, tugging at the fine rust-coloured hair beneath the velvet cap, and whipping colour into his white cheeks. He looked back across the ocean, where, lying a little way out, was the full-masted carrack that had brought him tossing through days and nights from Harfleur. Further out on the horizon was the rest of his fleet. Ships like ghosts, apparently motionless yet making speed to his support. Ships crammed with his fighting men. My beauties! thought Henry, with a grim little smile. He itched at the memory of their lousiness, their scabs. The gaols of Normandy had yielded a fine crop. Scrofulous, ragged (before he clothed them in leather and steel) but strong. More like beasts than men. Murderers trained by circumstance from the cradle and pleased by the bargain that had released them to fight against Plantagenet. He walked a pace to where the ground was firmer and knelt, pressing his face into the sand, feeling the salty grit upon his tongue. Then, raising himself, he cried:
‘Oh God! Observe my cause! Uphold me!’
‘Amen, amen.’ Morton stood at his shoulder. The wind fluttered his robes. He stood, a black carrion crow, crucifix upraised. The breeze smoothed his face to a strange resurgence of youth. He among few had enjoyed the crossing; something in the buffeting waves had called to his own turbulence, had whipped the longings that had gnawed him for so many years. Exaltation rose and he checked it immediately. Time to rejoice when the battle was won. When York and Lancaster were wedded and the succession secure. When the scarlet hat of Cardinal Archbishop lay upon his own head. Yet he sent up one tiny prayer, like a scurrying rat. Deo Gratias; I have been spared to see Tudor on England. Even a moment’s delay irked him and he touched Henry’s arm.
‘We should make camp, I think.’
He was unprepared for the look, the answer, both edged with hauteur. Henry’s voice had changed. Still quiet, but not diffident as of old; still sibilant, but ringing like brass.
‘My lord, do you give orders to your sovereign?’
And Henry smiled. The smile touched every corner of the lean face, drew back the long lipless mouth until a glint of teeth showed, struck yellow fire from the sombre eyes. Obediently the sun emerged from behind a blue cloud and painted Henry’s shadow on the sand. Morton, shocked and impressed, said ‘Sire,’ very humbly. Behind, the lords stepped from the rowing-boat, wetting their feet in the wavelets. Morton turned and gave them a look that bade them clothe themselves in respect. They came quietly to Henry’s side. He spoke their names.
‘My lord and uncle, Jasper, Earl of Pembroke.’
Jasper Tudor came, no longer young, but tall, wiry and unbowed. He kissed his nephew’s fingers.
‘John, Earl of Oxford.
‘Sir John Cheney.
‘Sir William Brandon.’
‘Sir Edward Woodville.’
Wet sand stained their hose as they came to kneel like penitents before a shrine. Hot lips, cold lips, touched Henry’s hand. He raised his eyes to where dunes soared above the beach. On the ridge a little company of horsemen wheeled about. Their standards blew wildly, wrapping themselves about the staves. Two of the riders broke away from the party and rode jerkily down the slope, their horses’ haunches low, fighting the loose sand. Henry stared at the banners. The second was his own; he had dreamed of it. The Red Dragon of Cadwallader, torn and tugged by wind so that it streamed like a flame, like the ancient myth that he had been told surrounded his ancestry. He knew himself the offspring of gods and princes, and his heart shivered in him.
The first standard he did not recognize. To Jasper Tudor he said: ‘Who comes?’
‘Rhys ap Thomas, Sire. They bring your personal standard. Praised be God, the Welsh chieftains have mustered to our call. And see–’ he pointed to the cliff top where more horses were sliding down, urged by their riders – ‘Sir John Savage’s men.’
‘They will all come.’ Henry’s voice was steady. He sought with his eyes among the whipping cloud of standards, saw, descending, the bucks’ heads, the azure and gold of Sir William Stanley’s arms, borne by a lieutenant.
‘Where is Maredudd?’ he said sharply. ‘My cousin should be here to greet us. And where is my stepfather?’
Jasper Tudor conferred with the mounted envoys, then turned again to his nephew.
‘Stanley awaits us in Denbighshire. He has gathered a great force. He plans to join us on the day of battle; likewise Northumberland. Until then, Richard believes he has their loyalty.’
Henry did not join in the ensuing laughter. The battle. Two words to chill his heart, words to be left unfaced until the last necessity. The Dragon fluttered and thrummed above him, and now there was no comfort in it. It was only a strip of coloured silk. God, he thought. Let it be over quickly, and let none see my fear.
‘Where is my clerk?’ he said abruptly. ‘I must write to John ap Marredud at once, and to Gilbert Talbot. Set up camp, my lords.’
Within an hour he was seated in a tent, away from the rush of the waves. The wind had dropped and given way to an oppressive warmth. Out to sea thunder growled, coming nearer. Henry chafed his hands, and began to dictate rapidly, in a clear quiet voice.
‘We will ride on Shrewsbury for London, and cross the river at Tewkesbury,’ he said. ‘Attend me at Shrewsbury.’ He raised his eyes and glanced at the attentive faces lining his tent: at Morton, the Welsh chiefs, the Woodville knight. And looking at Sir Edward Woodville he was reminded of Tom Dorset, his thoughts wandering back to Harfleur. Dorset! What would he not give to be back on his home soil! And how fortunate that he had been apprehended in time. Creeping home to his mother, to follow God knew what whim, what allegiance. Well, Dorset was now a pawn and a pledge to Charles of France; a surety against those thousands of men given to the battle-day. So that Lancaster and France and England could be all one again, and the Yorkist plague forever ended.
‘Sire?’ said the clerk, waiting.
‘Yes.’ Henry’s face altered, becoming bland and hard as a tombstone effigy. The yellowing light blazed in his eyes. ‘Say: ‘Attend us there.” He rose.
‘And head the letter: “From the King” ’
A vast thunderhead, livid at the edge, rolled westward over England, but the rain held off long enough for Henry’s forces to spread, to close up, and to deploy themselves near Redmore Plain, the appointed place of trial. September was nudging August. It was night.
Most of the royal army was asleep, stretched beside their fires, their weapons close at hand. King Richard was wakeful. He stood by his pavilion and watched the sky, the movement of the clouds, the occasional dull flicker of a star. As if it were written in large letters on the sky, the ground, the sleeping tents, he knew this to be his last night on earth. Very strongly he felt the presence of those he had loved; Anne’s gentle face, the small laughing Edward, and the larger, the adored golden brother. And Warwick, hands clasped about his knee before the fire at Middleham. The great knight, and himself, the untaught boy. All Plantagenet. All York. All dust.
And he? With the uncanny certainty that comes in lonely, pre-dawn hours, he knew himself a sacrifice, the last offering to a force so strong that no philosophy could reckon it, no priest exorcize it. Gazing at the dark bowl of the sky, he shuddered at the mystique of this knowledge. The clarity of his thought would be gone in the morning, driven off by the primaeval urges of survival and conquest. Yet now he knew himself bought and sold; knew, as surely as Noah anticipated the Flood, that the Stanleys would endeavour to bring about his downfall. He was not afraid, only awed by certainty. He felt destiny rapping at his soul.
A moment’s guilt, a moment’s pity for the brave men slumbering beside their little fires, brought the sting of tears to his eyes.
‘But we will fight, by God!’ he said aloud.
He would give this destiny a run for its money. Tudor was the target; if Tudor were slain, this hungry, urgent fate might be appeased.
Yet thinking thus, he knew it vain. As surely as he was born, so would he die, and his dynasty with him.
If only Edward had contained his lust. Had he but married, as Warwick wished, a foreign princess. Or had he but thrown the woman down at Grafton Regis and ravished her, leaving her conquered and himself sated and bored. To Edward all women had been foreign citadels, to be invaded …
Too late, too late to change the pattern of the years. By that marriage, so secret, so cunningly devised, the houses of York and Plantagenet fell like Sodom, burnt up to ashes. Richard thought: the salt of their wounds is the smile of Elizabeth.
The white-edged thunderhead was dispersing, moving swiftly away. Dawn was coming, hailed by a brave trumpet.
She stirred in her bed, awakened by dream or noise or movement, but unaware of which. The heavy curtains at the window made it impossible to tell whether it was night or day. Grace was still sleeping at the foot of the bed, her breathing so peaceful that Elizabeth was envious. It must surely be dawn. And what would this dawn bring? How many nights lately had she lain in this London bed, fretting the hours until another day of disappointment? Could this one be different at last? Margaret had seemed so sure, so proud and confident. Pressing her hand, whispering as the royal army left a week ago, not to fear because of their great number. Stanley would not fail, even if he came to Henry’s aid at the last moment …
Elizabeth turned her face, seeking coolth from the pillow. A swarm of worries bombarded her. Would Henry conquer? Was he weak? She conjured his face for the thousandth time; so strange, so significant to her. He had never fought a battle in his life. Would Stanley and his brother and Northumberland, and the Welshmen, be strong enough to uphold him? She wound her hands together beneath the covers, imagined disasters spearing her like toothache. There would be no further forgiveness from Richard. Could she pray? Our cause is God’s, Margaret had said. Often Elizabeth had prayed to God, and gone away empty. It was not God to whom she had prayed, before the battle of Barnet …
‘Oh, Melusine,’ she said very quietly. ‘Send me a saviour, Melusine!’
She waited, while faintly a growl of thunder passed over, miles away. Neither omen nor answer; only the ever-present tempest talking to itself.
‘My soul in payment!’ she said. ‘My soul and those of all I love. Aye, and their bodies too!’ reckless with anxiety. Then, like a lover: ‘Melusine, ah, Melusine …’
With incredible swiftness sleep took her again. As if drugged she lay fathoms deep, entranced, exhausted. A pleasant dream coiled about her. She walked in a forest; her mother held her hand. Jacquetta, young again, and sumptuously dressed, towered above her, bright eyed. Elizabeth skipped beside her, laughed, listened. Lyrical words accompanied their walk, and the wood thickened, and the treetops closed about their heads. Bright fungi clustered at their feet.
‘… and there, she built Lusignan. She bore Raymond children: Urian, with his one red and one green eye; Gedes, of the scarlet countenance; Gyot, of the uneven eyes, Anthony, of the claws and long hair; a one-eyed son; and Geoffrey of the Tooth; he had a boar’s tusk.’
The forest grew black, and all about the foliage was on fire. The soft voice repeated the names, over and over; then, without warning, there appeared an abbey, an abbey with wounded firefilled windows, an abbey running red with blood; she knew it to be the monastery of Malliers, where Geoffrey of the Tooth had attacked his brother. There was the abbot, and a hundred monks, bleeding, burning. Shrieking, half weeping, half laughter, filled the air. She looked up at her mother for reassurance and saw a scarlet countenance, one leaking, suppurating eye, a mouth that was no mouth but a hole from which jutted a bloody tusk. The hole spoke:
‘See, child! See what you have borne! Monsters all!’
The screams grew louder, lifting her scalp; a cry pitched in ecstasy yet keening like a mourner. High above her bed, above the towers, it tossed and wailed. Her blood heard it, the springing sweat on her face acknowledged it. She plunged in the bed; she cried: ‘O Jesu, Jesu …’
She was dragged from certain disaster by Grace’s arms, felt Grace’s cheek against her own, and clung desperately.
‘Lady, my sweet lady Elizabeth.’
‘Is it morning?’
‘Yes. Yes. It’s morning.’
‘Draw back the curtains … Nay, don’t leave me!’
They stayed together, Grace on her knees, Elizabeth almost falling from the bed, her hair shrouding them both. Grace stroked the heavy silken mass and kissed it, murmuring little loving words, while Elizabeth leaned shivering on Grace’s neck. They stayed thus for some time. Then Elizabeth detached herself with a great sigh.
‘Let in the light now, Grace.’
Grace arose and went to the window. She tugged at the drapes and sunlight streamed in. Then she glanced down at the courtyard and was suddenly still.
They were raising the drawbridge. A party of horsemen galloped in, their mounts black with sweat, their gear and their harness visible under their habits mired with blood and mud. Even from the height of the tower she could see their wild faces, and heard indistinctly their shouting.
‘What is it?’ Elizabeth asked from the bed.
‘Part of the army returning.’
‘Open the window. Let me look.’ She came to stand beside Grace. Across the cobbled yard a figure was running; comically foreshortened, the black-clad tonsured form of Reynold Bray. Joined by half a dozen other men, he rushed towards the knights now swinging down from their punished horses. The cheering rose like smoke. The men were embracing, dancing in the courtyard. Stewards rushed out with flagons as more horsemen surged over the drawbridge; standards flying, men wearing stained liveries, the horned bull of Cheney, the buck of Stanley, the silver crescent of Northumberland; and a score more, Welsh arms, red roses, red dragons, harness red with blood.
Bray turned in the midst of his capering to wave like a boy up at the tower window. He cupped his hands and shouted, then flung out his arms in a wild exultant gesture. Elizabeth murmured in annoyance:
‘How can I hear at this distance?’
‘The Hog – is – dead!’ Bray bawled, long-drawn-out notes. ‘Henry lives! Vivat Rex!’
‘Does he say – is it …’ Elizabeth said hesitantly.
Bray, desperate to impart his message, turned and seized a banner from an esquire. A soiled despoiled banner, furled and carried as proof of conquest, as booty. He unrolled it, and for a moment the White Boar ramped and snarled on an azure ground. Then Bray in savage pantomime, flung it to the cobbles, stamped upon it, and for good measure, spat. Over his head the Red Dragon flamed, tongue and claws like gouts of fire.
Elizabeth turned from the window. Grace looked at her and knew that the warmth, the intimacy between them was over for that day. Triumph and crystal hardness sat on the worn, dewy face.
‘Gown me,’ she ordered. ‘I must look my best. My saviour is come.’