A Secret Alchemy (29 page)

To no avail. I can still feel the hand of the captain on my shoulder; hear the scrape of my sword as I unsheathed it and gave it up at his request; see Richard of Gloucester’s eyes as black as a lake in the dark while he listened courteously to my reasoning.

“The King is safe in His Grace of Buckingham’s care,” he said at last, with a shake of his head. He stands very still, does Richard of Gloucester, but when he moves at last, he is quick and sharp. “He will be taken to London as arranged, with all due ceremony. But I cannot allow any men guilty of plotting against the blood royal to go free, however much
undeserved
favor my late brother granted them. Not even if they are men of the cloth like your brother Lionel.”

I was taken aback. Here, new-minted, was his brother Clarence’s envy. Had Richard only been more politic in hiding a bitterness that was yet the same?

I suppressed my scorn for his rancorous words. “I tell you again, and plainly, and swear it on the most Holy Cross: I have made no plots, nor have my affinity. Such favor as I have been granted is nothing to what the late King most properly gave to those of his own blood. And what I have, I have certainly earned, as has my sister, Her Grace the Queen. Those of our family whose ser vice to the King has been more modest have had no more than modest advancement.”

“And your nephew, the Queen’s son? When did he earn the right to enter the Tower and seize the treasure there?”

“Thomas Grey?
If
he has done so, it will be by a commission of the Council’s, of which he is a member. If there is some misunderstanding, it may be put right in a moment when I reach London.”

“You will not reach London. Richard Grey, Haute, and Vaughan are all arrested. You will be taken to separate custody in the north, that the King and the realm and the blood royal may be safe.”

Then he turned away and vaulted onto his horse unaided, as he always did, though he was small and ill-made, and took the road to Stony Stratford. My only comfort was that as I mounted, unarmed and set about with many well-armed men, I looked at the sky, the clouds, and toward the west. “I hope it will not rain,” I said to my captors.

“Aye, my lord” was all they vouchsafed, but it was as well they were taciturn, for a qualm of hope had seized me. To the west, dark clouds were massing, but also, down Alley Yard, I had seen Louis. He made no sign that might have betrayed him or me, and even as I turned my head away that my gaze might not draw others’ to him, he vanished.

We were brought north with a politic haste, each of us guarded by a body of men, so that we might not speak or even signal to each other. My cousin Haute and good old Vaughan were to ride straight to Pontefract; Richard felt no need to prison them so deep in his own fiefdom. Our roads parted at Doncaster, for Richard would not chance our being imprisoned together. I was bound for Sheriff Hutton, but I was permitted to embrace Richard Grey before he set off on the long road to Middleham. Each of us prayed for Ned’s safety, and promised to get word to Elysabeth and Thomas Grey if we might. His body pressed to mine, and I felt his hand slip inside my jerkin, inside my very shirt. Then he was led away.

For the last long hours of the ride I did not dare seek what Richard Grey had given me, though I could feel it, tucked inside the linen of my shirt, a tiny penance where it pressed my hair shirt just that more hardly into my flesh.

Sheriff Hutton stands high and lonely in those wide Marches. In the failing light it was dark indeed. When at last the door of my cell was closed and bolted, and I was alone, I undid my jerkin.

Richard Grey had given me Louis’s Jason ring. It lay heavily in my hand, and though it could give little hope, it gave much comfort, for I knew even then that I had little time left to me, and that after two score years my life’s journey was almost at an end.

Little time, indeed, and all of it needed to prepare my soul for death. Yet I have spent hours and days of my captivity trying to understand Richard of Gloucester; trying to understand how I could have misjudged him so; trying to understand what he will do with Ned. When I heard that Elysabeth had gone into sanctuary at Westminster on that same first day of May, and young Dickon with her, I was glad. If Dickon was safe, then so, too, was Ned, for Richard was shrewd enough to know there was then nothing to be gained by harming him.

Yes, that is how I failed. I should have seen Richard for what he is: the same breeding as his brothers. George of Clarence would have killed his brother and taken his crown could he have done it. Even Edward did not scruple at the last to kill a cousin and anointed king, then his own brother, to keep himself safe. What Richard of Gloucester has done should be no surprise. He will not rest till he has everything in his grasp, and he thinks that we Wydvils are of the same mettle. He must hold land, and ships, and gold, and women, and the person of the King so that we cannot. It is beyond his imagining that Elysabeth and I want nothing but Ned and the kingdom’s good, no more than our just deserts for our great labor in the ser vice of the King, and peace among the guardians of the realm.

Now I am brought to Pontefract in my turn. A horse slips and stumbles on the cobbles as we turn into the Castle Garth. Its rider curses, and slashes his whip across its neck. The drawbridge echoes under our hooves, there is the clang of bolts, and almost
silently the gates begin to open. This strange pilgrimage—one hot day’s journey, and my whole earthly life—is almost at an end.

Una—Saturday

The car-rental office is a City company round the corner.
Adam and I used it so much, rather than keep a second car, that we ended up having an account with them as if we were a company. We went on using it when we visited from Australia.

“Good morning. I rang earlier. I’d like to rent a small car for the weekend.”

“What’s the account number, please?”

I flip the pages of my England Admin notebook and find it. The assistant clacks away on her computer. “That’s in the name of a Dr. Adam Marchant?”

“I’m the other driver.” I show my license. “Una Pryor.”

More clacking. “That’s fine, Professor Pryor. We have a complimentary upgrade for you this morning,” she says, which I know means they’ve run out of small cars. A printer squawks, I sign things, and when I say I’d like to pay now rather than put it on the account, as I’m going abroad, she smiles and waves my card away. “That’s all right, Professor Pryor. Dr. Marchant left a credit on the account last time he was here. There’s nothing to pay. Enjoy your weekend.”

A small grief prickles in my throat, but the car Adam’s already paid for is as solid as a great ship that’s just slipped its anchor, the engine a deep hum in the carpeted hush inside, so that soon I’m all right again. I head west through London toward Mark. When I pull up outside his flat in Ealing, and he gets in and closes the passenger door, it seems to embrace him in his turn. I pull away from the curb.

At Grafton there’s not much to see: a handful of houses clustered about a Y-fork off the Northampton to Stony Stratford road. There’s nothing left of the manor that Elizabeth and Anthony knew, and the church, which they did know, is locked, our effort to get hold of the key foundering on churchwardens who’ve gone out for the day. We stand by the porch and wonder what to do. A sign points along a lane and down the hill to Ashton and Hartwell. “What good names,” I say. “Hartwell. Ashton. They sound as if they mean something. Where’s the map? Is the river that way?”

“Yes,” says Mark, showing me. “First the canal—that wouldn’t have been there—then the river and, look, there’s a mill. Fancy a leg-stretch?”

“Yes.” I’m looking at the map. “I suppose the railway wouldn’t have been there either.”

“But it’s the lay of the land that dictates them, and the old main road.”

“And the M1, look, over there by Salcey Forest. And that’s the east-coast main line heading for the north, I’m sure. All within a couple of miles of each other. The arteries of the kingdom.” The road is an old one, sunk between deep banks. “I wonder what it was like, the village. Not so different, maybe. Still fields and trees. Smaller fields and the lanes muddier. A pig in each garden. It must be very quiet at night even now.”

“Except for the owls,” says Mark. “Ever heard a rabbit that’s been caught by one?”

“Witches’ familiars…I suppose there’s no reason not to put that sort of thing into the book: what people would have believed. But I can’t know what
they
would have believed, Elizabeth and
Anthony. They would have been pretty sophisticated. But I don’t
know
. You can’t
tell
. I can’t
say
. Not really.”

He’s been looking at me hard, and now he smiles. “Oh, Una, I know. You never do know. Doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying, though.”

We walk as far as the canal, then wander back up the hill. As we reach the car, I say, “Just so I don’t put my foot in it with Morgan, why did you and Jean split up?”

“She found someone else,” he says. “Usual thing. It was bad at the time, but it hadn’t been good for a while. We had about ten great years, and then…Well, people change, don’t they? Mostly it was just recognizing it was over. And Mary—Morgan—she got over it. I worried about her when Jean emigrated to Canada. But I think she’s okay.”

I nod but don’t say anything, because he’s made the story sound so finished. I start the car. I’m glad he found someone in the end, I realize, though there was a time when it would have hurt almost beyond bearing to know it. But how little I know, really, about his life. He gives so little away.

“So, where next on our pilgrimage?” he says.

Pilgrimage
, I think, as the road dips down and away from the Grafton crossroads and toward Northampton.
Pilgrimage
. It was so important. It might be Jerusalem, and the heat and danger were the sacrifice you were making to God. It might be what we’d call a crusade, murdering the infidel or converting them at the point of a sword: your own grace bought with the souls of others. It might be walking with a crowd of goodwives along the cold, salty road to Walsingham. Or Canterbury, full of miraculous stories, the building more vast than any you’d ever known, the gold and ivory and jewels of the shrine beyond imagining, while the great arches seemed to stretch up into the clouds of incense.

But you might have a pilgrimage to a shrine in the next town, the same town where on another day you went to buy a pig and hear the latest news, and you might take no more than a day to do it. If the same journey could be, or not be, a pilgrimage,
how
you went must have been important too. The actual steps, the movement of your body, the songs you sang and the prayers you prayed, the images you held before your eyes.

I must have spoken, because Mark turns his head and raises an eyebrow.

“I was thinking about pilgrimages,” I say. “About the traveling being as important as where you were going to.”

“D’you remember what Izzy said about her
Stations of the Cross
?”

“No.”

“In an interview she did for one of the fine-arts magazines. She said, ‘For me, it’s about the right image for each moment. But I must remember that for the believers it’s just as much about what happens in between.’” He speaks slowly, as if her words have been some kind of talisman for him: “Una, what happened to Izzy?”

The loss in his voice makes me ache for him, and I don’t have to ask what he means: I’ve asked myself the same thing often enough. “I’ve never been sure. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good enough, not when she was in her twenties. And Paul was proud of her then. But he didn’t want to live at the Chantry, and you can’t blame him, I suppose. And when Fay was born it was hard. They didn’t have much money, and she had no one to help, which she would have if they’d been at the Chantry. It was hard for her to get the commissions, and Paul…Well, he’s not a bad bloke, but I don’t think he understood how Izzy needed fueling. How she needed everyone talking art and printing around her. How she couldn’t work in
a vacuum, and look after Fay, and drop everything to make sure supper was on the table when he got in from the office. Away from the Chantry and without the work—commissions—she was out of the loop…But why that should make her so against the restoration I don’t know…”

At Astley there’s even less to see. The landscape is flatter and less rolling than in Northamptonshire, and less satisfyingly rural too, the fields wedged between light-industrial overspill from Coventry and Birmingham. When Elizabeth was its lady, Astley Castle was, though not really a castle, certainly a fortified manor house. But now there’s only a burned-out, privately owned brick shell of Victorian battlements that we can’t reach and can only just see from the churchyard. And this church, too, is locked.

“D’you want to track down the key?”

“No,” I say. “I’ll have to see it someday, but let’s not bother now. If we’re meeting Morgan at four-ish, we ought to get going.”

We head back to the motorway and, with the driving easy, the same questions start to beat in my mind again.

How much did he love Izzy? Could I have made him love me, as I did him? Why did he leave? I’d thought it was settled, my love for him, a solid layer of despair low down in me like a river-bed above which life went on swirling by. But when he left, it all started again.

How can questions I’ve asked myself so many times, for so many years, still ring so loudly in my head?

Because ring they did. Yes, I tried to bury myself in libraries and archives, the deep trench-digging of my doctorate work, the academic papers, the meetings and seminars, the conference speeches, the new appointments and departmental committees, but nothing stopped my ears. Then, before long, I found a way
that did silence the ringing in my head, for a day, or a night, or a week.

A smile just that little bit longer than good manners across the lecture hall should allow, an eye-meet at a dull drinks party to welcome a new professor, the academic gossip spun out late into the evening in the bar of the conference hotel.