A Secret Alchemy (23 page)

“And the warden would be you?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” says Mark blandly, but I think he’s angry, as he wasn’t, quite, at Lionel’s insult.

“Izzy, my dear, don’t be silly,” says Gareth. “We wouldn’t do anything vulgar, and we’re nowhere near thinking about appointing people.”

“I can’t see how you’d begin to get the money together. You know how arts funding’s cut to the bone, these days.”

She said it to me, but it’s Lionel who answers back: “Well, who knows? And it would be heritage funding just as much, and that’s easier to make a case for that politicians understand. No reason we shouldn’t put out some feelers, gauge the interest, even get some conditional agreements—promise of match-funding, that sort of thing.”

She ignores him. “Una, you’re the historian. You must see it wouldn’t be
real
! It wouldn’t be the real thing. Just plastic—a fake. A day out for the tourists. Art and craft as a tourist attraction.”

“The Press would be real enough.”

“But San Diego are expecting the archive. I should be at home finishing the catalog now.”

“It’s not signed and sealed yet,” says Lionel, making another note.

“Well, I’m sorry,” she says, getting to her feet. “I know it’s horrible, having to sell the Chantry, but doing some fake tourist attraction would be worse. The past is the real Chantry. I should know—I’ve read the letters, I’ve cataloged the prints and the little invitations and handbills and Christmas cards. This—this is
lying
,
and I won’t have anything to do with it. And I’m surprised you will, Uncle Gareth.” Before any of us can answer, she stalks off toward the front of the house.

“Iz—wait!” calls Lionel, scrambling up and going after her.

Uncle Gareth’s leaning back in his deck chair, staring at the gables and chimneys of the blank-eyed house. Mark gets up and picks up a pair of pruning shears and his gloves from the grass. By the time we hear the slam of Izzy’s car door and the snarl of the engine, he’s pruning a hedge on the far side of the lawn.

Lionel’s walking back over the grass.

“Did you persuade her?” I say, as soon as he’s near enough.

“I suggested there’s no harm in trying to take it further. She wasn’t convinced. I’m not convinced either, yet. I’ll need some much more solid figures first.”

“Of course. But you think we should at least try?”

“Oh, yes. At least until we have to decide to commit ourselves to significant costs.”

Uncle Gareth turns his head to look at him. “D’you think she’ll change her mind? We can’t get far, legally, if everyone doesn’t agree.”

“I don’t know,” says Lionel, glancing across the garden to Mark and lowering his voice. “She said…She said she’d be suspicious of anything Mark suggested. That he doesn’t deserve a voice, after walking out. That he just wants a job.” He looks at his watch. “I must go—got a breakfast meeting in the morning. Don’t move, Una, Gareth…I’ll do some telephoning tomorrow, and let you know how it looks.”

By the time Lionel’s left Mark is digging over what was once the vegetable patch, though the light’s going. Uncle Gareth and I clear up the remains of the picnic and carry everything indoors out of the dew, the phrase reminding me of Aunt Elaine eyeing
the bikes and blankets and cast-off gym-shoes scattered over the summer grass of my childhood.

Uncle Gareth switches on the lamp and peers out of the window. “I hope Mark’s all right. I’d no idea…Well, it was rude of Lionel, but he thinks that way. Izzy, though…”

“Perhaps…” I’m hesitating because the thought’s only just forming in my mind. “Perhaps it’s just because they haven’t thought about him much, not since he left. Don’t see him as he is. Whereas I…And you…”

He’s looking at me very sharply through the slippery blue twilight. “I know.”

And suddenly I can say it. “You loved him, didn’t you? Mark? All the time.”

He nods and then, as if he’s suddenly very tired, he goes over to one of the armchairs and sits down. The other chair seems too far away, so I perch on the arm of his. He moves over to make room for me, but his shoulder’s pressed comfortably against my hip.

“Yes, I loved him. Oh—not in that way.”

I nod, because I know what he means.

“Though I am—I’ve always been—homosexual. Did you know?”

“I didn’t then. I half-realized later, but I didn’t know how to ask, wasn’t sophisticated enough. And besides, well, it seemed your business, not mine.” He’s silent, and I wonder if he’s going to say that he never did much about it; that for many queers in those days what was on offer by way of affairs was less attractive than getting on with the rest of life; that in the end you stopped being interested in any of it. He doesn’t. But perhaps through our bodies touching he can sense something of my understanding. I sit there and will—will with fierce hope—that he can sense it.

He says, “I loved you from the moment I saw you. Your nanny was holding you…nurse, she called herself. When…when it happened, she just took you home and went on looking after you. I think it was she who christened your bear Smokey. Anyway, there you were. It was easy. But with Mark…I worked with Mark. We worked together, and I loved him, and I taught him, and I wanted him to take over the Chantry because he was the only one who could keep it running as it should have been. And—and because I wanted him to have the share in it he deserved.”

A little tremor of something that’s almost like joy, that might be hope, passes through me. I slide around on the chair arm so that I’m facing him. “Well, maybe—just perhaps—maybe he will. If we can persuade the others.” He smiles, just a little, and the feeling, whatever it is, gets stronger.

And then I wonder, Why joy? Why hope? It’s too intense for mere relief that Gareth and the Chantry may yet be saved. It’s something to do with Mark being its savior, with Mark having a place there again, at last.

I don’t want this tremor, though. That joy—that hope—it’s all to do with Mark, and it takes up too much of me. There’s not enough left for Adam. It’s as if my hold on Adam, on my love, is slipping.

“Maybe we will persuade the others,” he says, and I think how he was never one to tell you to stop hoping.

He takes my hand. “I sometimes used to wonder what Kay would have done, if he’d lived: what having him here would have made the family into. He was so clear—so absolute—about art and craft and how life should be. Izzy reminds me of him very much, sometimes. Though you’re the one who looks like him. Especially around the eyes and mouth…Mark’s a good man. He always was.”

I wonder if he’s guessed about me—if he, too, always knew—but Mark’s shadow crosses the window, and there’s the splash of tools cleaned under the outside tap, and then he puts his head through the still-open door and asks if I’d like a lift home again.

Elysabeth—the 11th yr of the reign of King Edward the Fourth

To lie with Edward was to be Melusina again, private in the thick
gold water of the fire-lit air.

It was very late by then, with no sound but the occasional cry of a waterman crossing to the far shore and the soft slap of the river below the casement. Edward rolled aside, and his warm hand slid from my breast to my waist and over my belly. He cupped my bush as gently as any alchemist with his first precious metal.

“What did I do without you in Bruges, my beautiful Ysa?” he said, and for all it was dim in our chamber, I knew that he smiled in his drowsiness.

“I was in even worse case, without my lord.”

“You kept my son safe, nonetheless.”

“He was my first care,” I said, of course, and my smile was real, at the thought of Ned’s fair head and pink fists that morning, bouncing and waving in his father’s arms. Edward’s eyes had been for his son, and so had mine. Yet I had wondered what he would think of me, his faithful wife. A year and a half in those gloomy little abbey chambers built not for us but for men who had abjured the world. It was sanctuary, sure enough, licensed by His Holiness himself. But some days it felt as if my eyes and brow were being carved by fear into the likeness of the gray stone that surrounded us. And then to be brought to bed in so bare a room, and the girls in the next chamber, so that I all but drowned in silent screaming.

“How was it, with Ned?” he asked suddenly. “Comfortless, my poor girl?”

My heart jumped at his knowing my thought. “No worse than Cecily” was all I said, however. “And worth twice as much pain for a prince.”

He kissed my brow. “When he is older, we will do as we thought to: give him your brother Antony as his governor, and send him where we most need royal authority—the Marches, perhaps. He could live at Ludlow…” He said no more, and I knew he was thinking again of his own youth, hunting and dancing and jousting with his brother Edmund among those round, dark-green Welsh hills. “He looks like Arthur, I think, as well as you.”

The thought of Arthur had never troubled me much, and not at all now that I, too, had given Edward a son. Arthur’s mother seemed content to live retired, and he was a pretty child who caused no trouble when he did lodge in the nursery with my children. But I would not have Edward think of him, even were it only to take his thoughts from his murdered brother, this night of all nights.

“He and Ned have their sire to thank for that. Ned’s hair is red as much as gold. And he is very forward. We had the swathing bands off before he was five months old. He had his first tooth by then, too.”

“Yes, you told me so at supper.”

I was out of practice, I realized. I bit my lip and ran the back of my fingernail along the line of his jaw. It was lean once again; the stubble of a long day glittered in the firelight, and the muscles hardened as my touch made him smile. His chest and belly, too, were as taut as once they were.

I knew he was remade from his stride that morning, when we had met at Westminster. I could hear it in the sound of his spurs
striking the stone through Henry of Lancaster’s dirty rushes, in his being that filled the room, in his eyes as bright as a knife and the sharp sweat of a man whose work is yet half-done. He took baby Ned in his arms and kissed him; I saw more than one tear fall and darken Ned’s hair. And then he raised me, kissed me long on the lips, and held me away from him the better to gaze.

For a moment his eyes lost their battle-ready narrowing and widened into the dumb, dull stare of desire. I knew it so well, and born of this knowledge was my own desire, gripping my bowels and holding his gaze with mine. If my ladies thought my tears to be womanly weakness they were right in the first, but not in the second; it was not weakness that I rejoiced in but power. All would be well, I knew, as he raised Bess, and admired Mary’s uncertain curtsy, and tickled Cecily’s cheek where she sat in her nurse’s arms. I had an eye to the girls, while Edward’s men paid their respects to me and answered when I asked after their fortune in the interregnum. My brother Antony was to have command of the Tower, that London might be held as Warwick approached with his army and poor silly Henry of Lancaster in his train. Likewise was high command given to Lord Hastings and young Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and all the others who had cleaved to their king in exile.

The day went on: there were miry messengers to hear, dispatches to scrawl, troops to number, and wavering aldermen to cozen. And at the back of our every thought and action was war. None could doubt it: there was a great battle yet to come. Warwick came ever nearer, and there were witnesses that Marguerite and her boy had sailed from their exile in France, and would land in the West Country.

All day I saw and heard His Grace the King—my lord—num
bering men and arms and roads, laughing, swearing, listening, talking, questioning, answering, planning, and all to make the most of his advantage in having reached Westminster. I spoke of what I knew, for the thick walls of the Westminster Sanctuary have their chinks, and all the while I went about my own business of the Queen’s Household. Family business; the business of the kingdom.

As the blue dusk began to creep into the sky, we took oars from Westminster to London. I thought of Greenwich or Eltham, not so far downriver but a world away: all sunshine and sweet airs like some enchantment hovering beyond my reach. But it was safety we needed, not enchantment, and that was best found in the gray towers of Edward’s mother’s house, Baynard’s Castle, in the heart of the city. Behind me I heard Bess whimpering, weary and fretful with the long day. “There, Mistress Bess, nearly there now,” said her nurse. “There’s Whitefriars and Blackfriars and Watergate and Paul’s Wharf. Can you say that? Whitefriars, Blackfriars, Watergate, Paul’s Wharf…And, look, there’s Paul’s itself! See the great steeple?” It was a lee tide: the oarsmen struggled against the oncoming waters and the wind and overshot by design so as to drift back to the landing place at the foot of the castle walls.

After supper we heard Mass in the chapel, as private a
Te Deum
and prayer for future aid as the Mass and crown-wearing at Paul’s that morning had been public. The clamor of the day was suddenly stilled. Edward and I knelt together, so close that his arm touched mine. A different fear crept over me. What would he think of the worry-carved lines about my eyes, my thin flesh slack with the idleness of our days in sanctuary, a tooth drawn, that scald on my arm, so many small, weary hurts to my worn body?

God knew—though Edward’s confessor might not—how many
women he had found to his taste among those plump Flemish maids in Bruges. And which of the dark-browed husbands of the Burgundian court had he not cuckolded? I was accustomed to putting such thoughts away from me, for there was no use in indulging them. At divine ser vice it was even a sin. I prayed for a little forgiveness, and dug my fingers into the scald on my arm, for it was still angry red, and painful enough for a penance. Then I raised my eyes to the rood screen and the nails that held Christ’s bloody flesh to the carved and gilded cross of his last agony.

We were to share a bedchamber, so full was his mother’s house with nobles and men, and fear of Edward’s disgust grew in me as the door closed behind the last of my women, and he and I were alone. A year and a half is a long time in a woman’s face—even in mine, that had brought me to a crown—and still more in her body.