A Secret Alchemy (25 page)

Of that journey the chroniclers have recorded the business that was done and the realm safer for it. And our private happiness is recorded in our hearts.

When we reached England again, I was made governor to the Prince of Wales, and head of his Council in the Marches. Elysa
beth kissed Ned and set him on my saddlebow, and we rode away to Ludlow, with many in attendance. Richard Grey was among them, for his mother hoped that it would be to his good to attend to his royal half-brother and the troubles of the Welsh Marches, so far away from the London taverns and the stews of Southwark.

I call Ned my boy, though in blood he is but my nephew. When Edward first promised to make me governor to the Prince of Wales, I was flattered. Who would not be so? But I was a young man and knew little of the governing of children. I did not know what it may do to even a young man’s heart to have a little boy of some three summers sit on his saddlebow and sob for the leaving of his mother and sisters. I did not know that my heart was changed that day, or for some months after, though I did my duty and followed the ordinances set forth by Edward for the education of his son. And then one afternoon I was standing in the outer bailey at Ludlow, looking over some ponies, for I had decreed that it was time the Prince of Wales learned to ride.

“Sire! Sire!” I turned. Ned had escaped his nurse and was galloping over the cobbles as fast as his fat little legs would go. “Is froggies! Come and see!”

The best-looking of the ponies was a fine little Welsh gelding. “Trot him out,” I commanded, and the groom did so, jogging alongside. The gait was good: even, and free in action.

Ned grabbed my hand and tugged at it. “Sire, come and see!”

“Your Grace must wait,” I said. Was there a slight halt on the offside hind? “Canter!” I ordered the groom. No fault to be found there. “And take him round on the other leg.” The groom pulled it around to circle the other way.

“No, not horse! Froggies! They’ll go!” Ned yelled loud enough to cause the pony to shy a little, the groom cursing as it trod on
his foot. So nervous a mount would not be safe for the Prince, I thought, and yet he must learn to handle such a one in the end.

Ned’s nurse came panting up. “Your pardon, my lord. Come here at once, Your Grace! Can you not see your lord governor is busy? You show me the froggies. Come along, now.”

“No!” said Ned. “Lord Gov’nor see.” He tugged my hand again, and I looked down. He is fair, is Ned, and was fairer still in his baby days, and his eyes as round and blue as the heavens. “Lord Gov’nor see froggies,” he said again. “I want
you
!”

How could I not go? The frogs were not full-grown, their leaps small and without purpose. I caught one in my hands and sent a nursemaid running for a bucket. Until she returned, Ned peered into the little gap between my fingers, which was all that I dared open. In the bucket its leaps against the sides were unavailing. “See how its back legs are long, the better to jump with?” I said to Ned. “Like the hares we saw across the river.”

“Hares do boxing,” said Ned. “Froggy do boxing?” He squatted down and poked at the frog, which leaped away and struck the other side of the bucket.

“No, though we might catch another and put them to each other.”

“Lord Gov’nor do it!”

But another frog was not to be caught, at which I was glad, for I have never cared for such sport. Predator and prey is one thing, and I have hawked and hunted and gone rabbiting with as much pleasure as any other boy or man; it is the way of creation, for all creatures must eat. But to confine two creatures of the same kind close enough that they can do nothing but fight is an amusement of the crudest sort, fit only for men so base in their nature—however high their worldly degree—that they
can find no joy but in destruction. My Ned would never be one such, I vowed, and I have kept my word. He has learned to fence and dance and hunt, and though he got into mischief, as did the other children of the household, and was whipped for it, he loved his book, too.

Some days, if his tutor was absent on Council business, I would enter his chambers unannounced rather than send for him, the better to know how well he studied, and whether his lessons were suited to his tastes as well as to the needs of the kingdom. He and the chaplain and the two boys that studied with him would scramble to their feet and bow, and I would take up the slates and read what they had written. Ned’s Latin verses were the best, and his understanding of science, his rhetoric, too; it was not my love that made them seem so, but his desert. He has all Edward’s cleverness, and Elysabeth’s, but willingly directs his mind to philosophy and reason, while his faith is true and strong. Sometimes I watched him kneeling before the Host at Mass and my heart sang to see my boy lost so well in the love of God.

But not all the business of the kingdom may be so cleanly and wholeheartedly done. I have killed many men, Chris tian and heathen both. I have spitted Moors on my sword for the greater glory of God. I have studied where armor may be pierced; I have strengthened my arms the better to wield an ax; I have ordered men hanged for stealing a hind, or murdering a child. And then there was the great joust with Burgundy. Once, when we lay together, I asked Louis if it was he who conceived that…plan. He laughed and shook his head, but did not deny it.

Henry of Lancaster I did not kill. We all knew his death was necessary, though he was a king anointed by God. There could be
no peace in the kingdom else. But none knew what was toward that night but Richard and Edward. Not the hour, or how the deed was done.

And yet, when my thigh wound aches like a red-hot wire in my flesh, as it does now, it is Henry’s death for which I do penance, and for which I pray forgiveness.

Henry’s death, and Ned’s life.

Since that night I have known that it is not so hard to kill a prisoner, not even one of your own blood. Not even a king. It is not hard when you have all the keys at your belt, and at your command the watch will close their eyes, and the woman that scrubs the stone floors afterwards is deaf and mute from birth.

The bridge climbs steeply before us, the heat trapped between the parapets and rising thickly to the summit. I cannot see the far side: we ride into a translucent fire.

Una—Friday

As we pass signs to Greenland Dock and Rope Street, Mark
starts talking about the first evening class he took in building maintenance, which led to diplomas in joinery and electrical engineering, a bit of teaching evening classes himself, friendships with other tutors, and the growing feeling that the real use for it all—the biggest difference he could make—was abroad. “Not that there weren’t slums enough to clear in England,” he’s saying, and I know he’s thinking of his father’s yard. “At least, that’s how everyone saw it then: sweep it away and start again. But in Africa…it makes so much more difference. And I wanted to work outdoors.”

ROTHERHITHE TUNNEL CLOSED OVERNIGHT FOR REPLACEMENT OF ORIGINAL TILING
, says a series of notices, and we have to
backtrack along Jamaica Road to cross the river by Tower Bridge. A gaggle of tourists reels across our path from the bars of Saint Katharine’s Dock and take pictures of each other against the view of the Tower. The one-way system is organized by traffic lights and signs that garland the dark, office-block canyons of the Minories, then swirl us around and down East Smithfield.

The thought of the unconvincingly clean and carefully rusticated Victorian stone solidity of the Tower makes me ask Mark suddenly, “Do
you
think restoring the Chantry would be a lie?”

He shakes his head. “No. It’s…Well, you have to tell the truth where you know it. And with the Chantry we—you—know a lot. Everything, even.”

Or nothing, I think. “But what if you don’t know the truth? I mean, if there’s something I don’t know about Elizabeth and Anthony. About when she saw her son Edward? About how, exactly, Anthony looked after him? And there’s a lot we don’t know—swathes of court and government records were destroyed in Tudor times, quite apart from the houses and monasteries and so on. I mean, I’m going to have to say all the time, ‘We don’t know.’ Or ‘perhaps,’ or sometimes ‘It seems likely that,’ though then you have to go carefully, if you’re not to get your colleagues laying into you in reviews. But with restoring a house you actually have to make it happen. You’ve got to have something to open the doors, after all. What do you do if you don’t know what the handles were like?”

“You make your best guess, from what you know. From similar-date places, letters, whatever.”

“Left here…Okay, make it not door handles. Make it pictures, or who slept in which bedrooms, or what books would be on the shelves. It must have been a certain way, but you don’t know what.

Do you just leave everything bare and empty?”

He smiles. “No. Not if you can help it. If you’re just showing off the architecture, it’s okay. But not if you’re trying to re-create a whole world. Because that would be a different kind of lie: that everything was bare. You have to make the story whole. Right here?”

“Yes, and it’s there on the left.” The house is dark, the windows empty. “Thank you so much for the lift. Have you got time for a quick drink?”

He nods, and draws up at the curb. “That would be good. Thank you. How’s the sale going?”

“It’s on the market. They’re going to drop the details in for me to approve tomorrow.” I unlock the door into the chill of the house and go to switch off the alarm. “I’ve realized I’ve actually got the weekend free. I thought I might go and do some libraries. Only preliminary stuff, but still. Do go through to the drawing room. Don’t worry, there are still things to sit on, though I’ve organized getting rid of it all. But not till after I’ve gone.”

When I reach the drawing room, he’s standing with his back to the river. “Is it—is it all right?” he says abruptly. “Selling? Getting rid of everything?”

I’m suddenly enormously tired, my joints aching and the fog closing in. I have to sit down. “Yes. It’s…Yes, it’s all right.”

“Do you want the fire?” he says, and I nod. He works out the controls for the gas without asking, casts a look at me, and then again, without asking, goes to find drinks. Only when he’s put one in my hand does he say, “You would tell me if there was anything I could do, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. Thank you. But there isn’t, not really. Except about the Chantry.” I put a hand out to where he sits at the other end of the sofa. “Mark,
do
you think it’s possible? Or is it just wishful think
ing, because none of us really wants to see it go? I mean, if it isn’t possible, is it fair to raise Gareth’s hopes?”

“I don’t know. But it’s not…it’s not
stupid
. It’s worth a try. Hard to know, more than that.” There’s something so solid about his uncertainty, I think suddenly, if that doesn’t sound odd. It’s honest: an uncertainty you can rely on. It isn’t odd because it’s true to Mark, to what he always was.

The tremor seizes me again, hotter, more threatening, and to hide it I drink half my glass of wine. With the alcohol comes sudden clarity, like searchlights in the fog. It’s about Mark at the Chantry and Mark here. It’s not old, not then, it’s now. I want to tell him he should run the Chantry. If he wants to. But I daren’t, not after what Izzy said. Besides, what if he says no?

Suddenly I need him to say yes so much that it hurts. Need him to say he will, for Gareth, and for—for me?

No. I can’t be thinking that. I won’t think it. Some trick of jet lag, or grief, or the English air of my past. I won’t think it. Of course I want to show him that he ought to be at the Chantry, that he’s welcome—no, more than that: that he’s
necessary
. I need to make him think there’s something there for him. But I won’t say that, it’s too close to the bone.

I drink more, and say instead, because I do actually want to know, “What would you do, if you were restoring it? How would you do it? About the things you don’t know or you can’t have, because of fire regulations or whatever?”

“Best guess is all we can do. It’s not the same as someone else’s guess, though. Sometimes you undo past restorations and it’s hard to believe what they did. Looks all wrong to us. Dare say our best guess will look just as wrong in a century or two. It’s like
how language changes. All the difference in the world between how Shakespeare talked, and how we do. Even when we’re talking about the same things.”

“And how Walter Scott makes his Shakespeare-date people talk is different again, being halfway between then and now…”

“Visible at two feet, and invisible at four,” Mark’s friend Charlie said. Something shifts inside me, like the pixels on a computer display, the fog lifting again so I’m seeing blocks of color and shape: deep, bright medieval gold and scarlet and lapis-lazuli, settling into a pattern that makes sense. An astonishing sense, but still…

“Mark?” He’s been watching the fire, sitting back against the sofa cushions, but at the sound of my voice he turns his head. “Mark…I’m—I’ve got a couple of days, I think I said. I want to see some of Elizabeth and Anthony’s places. Sheriff Hutton and Pontefract. There’s not much to see at Grafton, I gather, though the church is still there. Astley, maybe…” I’m wittering. Concentrate, Una. “And then there’s Fergus. It’s horrible, but I can’t help wondering if Izzy might try to get him to…to see it her way. She’s so angry. Maybe we should try to persuade him…And I don’t want to do the drive on my own.”

He grins—“Are you afraid of the ghosts?”—and as if it’s my own body I see his twinge of horror as he realizes what he’s said. “I’m…so sorry.”

“No, of course not…Oh, Mark, don’t worry. I’m used to it, really I am. The other afternoon”—I’m smiling, a painful sort of smile but still—“the other afternoon wasn’t how it always is, I promise. It’s been two years after all. I was just a bit shaken. No, this weekend, it’s only the driving. And you could persuade him so much better than I can, explain it all. Would you come with me? Share the driving? See Fergus?”

He says fiercely, “You don’t have to, you know.”