Rebellion (17 page)

She looked at the sky. There were the stars
in their formal arrangements, but there was no reflection of them in the water, just a
smooth sheen which further out became the suggestion of a glimmer.

‘Sometimes I think that the stars are
dreaming us,' he said, but the queen was in no mood for poetry. She wanted to say to him
that he should not go, but it seemed impossible to ask him to disobey the summons of his
king here, when everything was so quiescent and still.

‘They should dream differently,' she said,
and he made a small sound that might have been a laugh, but she went on, ‘What will I do
without you, Chevalier?'

‘Ah, my lady,' he said, turning to her at
last.

‘Louis does not need you. I need you.'

‘People are coming here all the time, to
join you.'

But they are not you
, she did not
say, and she realized that she had come to him as she had always come, for
reassurance.

‘I suppose the war will be over eventually,'
she said.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘and then there will be
another war.'

She didn't like the sound of that. ‘But you
will come back,' she said. ‘You must come back, to fight for me.'

He had turned away again. When he didn't
answer, she said, ‘Or perhaps you are tired. Tired of fighting for me and my hopeless
cause.'

‘You don't think that,' he
said, looking out over the water.

She said, ‘If it was clear to me that it was
all hopeless I could give up now. Go and live a quiet life in my father's house.'

‘You would not do that,' he said.

No, she would not do that. Not while her
husband was forced to live as a fugitive, and she and her son were in exile. Her war
could not be over. But she was a little disturbed by his pronouncements. He sounded as
if he knew something she did not know, as if the dark surface of the lake had revealed
something about her or her destiny.

‘What do the stars say about me, eh?' she
said.

‘They say that they have given you their
fire, so that you can make it burn more brightly here on earth.'

She would not be cajoled. ‘I am tired,' she
said. ‘Sometimes I think I would like to walk away from all of this – and from myself.
Forget that I was ever queen of England, or even Margaret of Anjou.'

‘Who would you be?' he asked, turning
slightly.

‘How should I know?' she said. ‘I would be
someone else.'

He laughed.

‘Just a child, perhaps – an ordinary child.
Picking flowers on a hillside.'

As she said it she felt a nostalgic hunger
for the child that she had never been. She had never, as far as she could remember,
picked flowers on a hillside.

But Pierre de Brézé had turned fully towards
her now. ‘Flowers?' he said. Then unexpectedly he cupped her face. ‘
Ma petite
Marguerite
,' he said in the old rhyme. ‘Stars are the flowers of the sky.' He
stroked her face with his thumbs, moved his fingers through her hair.

She did not reject him or move away. She
closed her eyes and rested her face in his hands. In that moment she knew what she was
offering him; despite the difference between them, and the lopsided ugliness of his
face; despite the fact that she had decided
it must not ever happen
again. She would offer him everything if he would not go.

His hands paused round her face. For a
moment everything seemed hung in the balance. Then the balance shifted and she knew that
he would go. He was a fighting man; he had been summoned, and he would go.

‘My lady –'

‘Don't say it.'

‘I won't say it.'

‘Promise me that you will come back.'

‘Of course,' he said tenderly. ‘How could I
not?'

‘If you don't come back to me, I do not know
what I will do.'

‘Hush,' he said, moving his fingers to her
lips. ‘Don't you know that I will always come back to you?'

When she received the news that he had been
killed at Monthléry she had walked away from the messenger, nodding, as if to herself.
She had made her way to her room, then cried like an abandoned child on her bed.

The pain was at first savage, then heavy and
dull.
My heart is heavy
– she'd heard that phrase before, but hadn't imagined
the physical reality. Because now it seemed to her as though her heart had grown
physically heavy, like a great weight in her chest, making it difficult to breathe.

Soon she heard that her husband had been
taken prisoner, tied to a small horse and led through the streets of London to be mocked
and reviled. His companions were scattered; some of them, it seemed, had escaped to
Harlech. But the king her husband was in the Tower.

The pain was not worse, but it was
different. It seemed to her that all the fire had gone out of the world, that it was
impossible to get warm.

But there was nothing to be done except to
pick up the burden that had been mysteriously allocated to her once again. She
wrote to her supporters, to her brother, Duke John of Calabria, and
to Jasper Tudor, and to any of the French nobility who would listen to plead her cause
to King Louis, who was still too occupied with his own war
to respond to her.
She sent her agents into England and Wales and received each month a small trickle of
newcomers to her court: escapees from the Yorkist regime, which, they said, had become
intolerable. Edward IV had his spies everywhere, the nobles were at loggerheads with
each other and many people were being arrested.

So it was not that there was no reason to
hope; just that it was hard to fan the flames of hope again. Still she continued
diligently writing her letters, gathering support, overseeing the education of the young
prince. Because in the absence of hope there was only effort, and in the absence of
effort there was only despair.

My lord, here beeth with the queen
the Duke of Exeter and the [new] Duke of Somerset [Edmund Beaufort] and his brother,
and also Sir John Courtenay, which beeth descended from the House of Lancaster. Also
here beeth my lord Privy Seal Dr John Morton [and others] … We beeth all in
great poverty, but yet the queen sustaineth us in meat and drink, so as we beeth not
in extreme necessity … in all this country is no man that will or may lend you
any money, have ye never so great need.

Letter from Sir John Fortescue to the Earl of Ormond, Koeur-la-Petite,
France

The procession, led by the Earl of Warwick,
wound its way from Islington through Cheapside and Newgate. Behind Warwick were his
guards and retainers, and behind them, led by Ralph Hastings, was the former king.

He sat on a small horse, not much bigger
than a donkey. He was leaning to one side so that Queen Elizabeth wondered that he did
not fall. Until she realized that he had been tied to it, his legs bound to the
stirrups, and a straw hat tied to his head.

The crowds screamed and jeered.

King of fools!

King of carrots!

Where is your throne now?

Where is your wife?

Two men ran before him making obscene
gestures; one of them pretending to be his wife, taking it from behind from the other,
who by his paper crown represented the king of France. The crowd roared with
laughter.

It was, in fact, a comical sight. The small
horse, unaccustomed to such weight, made slow progress. Sometimes it shied or skittered
at the noise, or because some prankster had prodded it from behind with a stick, and
sometimes it wandered from side to side, eating the vegetables thrown at it, while the
king sagged forward like a straw man.

The new queen could not
see the face of the former king, and she was glad of that. He seemed barely conscious,
and that too seemed to her to be a good thing. She could see Warwick's face, as he led
the procession with mock solemnity. It repelled her more than the savagery of the
crowd.

It was necessary, of course, to humiliate
the former king so that no one would ever think of him as king again. It was the obvious
thing to do. It was less obvious what to do with him afterwards.

She thought about his wife, whose
lady-in-waiting she had been. She was now in France, where she would receive news of her
husband's capture and imprisonment. Which would be another nail in the coffin of her
hopes.

All of this should be a source of rejoicing
to the new queen, but instead she felt only a cold melancholy. Perhaps it was her
awareness of how the people disliked her also, and how Warwick would have delighted in
leading her through the streets in the same way. Or the fact that she had been disposed
to like the former queen; had admired her dignity, her hauteur; had thought her ill
served by her men.

Or perhaps it was the pregnancy, stirring
new emotions in her. Whatever the cause, she could not take pleasure in the scene below.
She turned away from the window in the royal apartments of the Tower, before the
procession reached the Tower Gates. She would not allow herself to think about the man
who had once been king, who was now tied to a small horse. It was just another
demonstration of God's irony.

She did not entirely trust God and his sense
of irony. Look at the way he had made her wait a full year for her pregnancy.

More than a year, in which she had suffered
the curiosity, the searching glances of the court. The silent triumph of Cecily Neville,
that she, who had brought
proof of her fertility
to her marriage, should be so
long infertile. She had endured medical probing and investigation. And, of course, the
intensive questioning of her mother, who had not let a single month pass before posing
the
same question. And when she received the same answer would respond
with raised eyebrows and some barbed comment or advice of a spectacularly useless
kind.

‘If I were you I would not keep him waiting
too long.'

Or, ‘He is still coming to your bed, I take
it?'

Or, ‘I trust you are not going to follow the
former queen's pattern?'

Meaning Margaret of Anjou, who had waited
eight long years for a child.

It was a good thing that Elizabeth Woodville
was practised at keeping her temper. She felt like slapping her mother, or pulling her
hair, or banning her from court.

It would not do to ban her mother from
court. Not while so many people were anticipating the downfall of the Woodville
clan.

So she smiled and said, ‘All in good time,'
or, ‘If I am, Mother, you can be sure that I will let you know.'

Her mother, of course, had been pregnant
almost every year of the first twenty years of her marriage to Elizabeth's father.
Before that she had been married to the Duke of Bedford, and had not conceived at
all.

‘Ah, but that was only for a short time,'
she would say, and, ‘He was away for most of it, in France.'

Still, her mother had been fertile with one
man and not another. Elizabeth had to hope this would not be true in her own case. She
could not afford to be infertile with the king.

It would be another of God's ironies if she
was infertile with the king.

The king himself did not ask as frequently
as he had at first, but sometimes she saw a shadowed expression on his face when he
looked at her.

So she took the advice of his physician, Dr
Dominic de Serigo, about diet and about the phases of the moon; about praying to certain
saints and donating at certain shrines.

She lay beneath her husband, praying to all
the saints in order.

Meanwhile, her two sons
from her first marriage grew bigger and stronger, like a rebuke. And Elizabeth Lucy was
pregnant for the second time.

The queen was not given to displays of
emotion, and certainly not before the king. She had discovered early on that he did not
like them; his face would close and he would leave the room. So only once, when her
monthly flow was unusually heavy and prolonged, had she burst into violent weeping. One
of her ladies had stayed with her, and chafed her hands and told her not to worry, she
should not think about it so much.

But how could she avoid thinking about it
when the entire court was watching her, like so many hawks?

Then, exactly one year after her marriage,
the flow of blood had been slight and short.

She had gone to Dr de Serigo to be examined
in the usual way, and he had risen from between her thighs saying, ‘The Lord be
praised,' with the smile of one who might expect a pension from this. Or a promotion at
least.

She made him promise to say nothing, worried
about the smear of blood. She'd had miscarriages in her first marriage. But the next
month there was no show of blood at all. Her breasts hurt and she felt permanently
queasy. And so she told the king. And he carried her around the room.