A Secret Alchemy (33 page)

“Ned?”

“My boy.” I say no more. After a moment he squats on the floor, studying the pages.

The air is thick and chill. He reads slowly, as if he must push the words through it.
“Pater aeterne! rogo te per vitam et mortem acerbissimam delectissimi Filii tuii…”

These are sounds I have had in my ears all my life, words I have always known, and he almost knows too. They roll from the black-clotted page to his eye, over his tongue, spoken to the air, hanging there like incense.

“…miserere mei nunc et in hora mortis meae. Amen.”

“Amen,” I say. He stays sitting on the floor by me. “Do you understand it?”

“Not exactly, my lord.”

I put out my hand, and touch his shoulder. He is warm. “Let me see…‘Eternal Father, I ask Thee by the life, and death—bitter
death—of Thy most beloved Son, and by Thy infinite goodness…mercifully grant that in Thy grace I may live and die.’” Under my hand, I feel the shock run through him. After a moment, I can go on. ‘“Most benign—most kind—Jesus, I ask Thee by Thy love of Thy Father, who—who always embraced Thee…and by Thy last word—when Thou wast hanging on the cross—which didst commend Thy spirit to the Father—receive my spirit at my life’s end. Holy Spirit, enkindle perfect charity in me and strengthen my spirit with it until I…I leave this life. O most holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on me now and in the hour of my death. Amen.’”

The candlelight is waxy yellow on his face, picking out the jet in his hair and eyes. He is small and alive, and his hair under my hand is rough and springy, like heather on a hillside where you might lie under a summer sun. But what of my boy—my Ned—my son?

“I should have guessed what Richard would do. I should! But I thought he would work through the Council. Through the court. I was ready for that. But not…not for what he did.”

He half-turns to me, and looks up. His look is my undoing.

“He has my boy.”

I can hold back my grief no longer. Under it I bow my head to my knees, and then it presses on me so greatly that I can no longer stay upright, and fall onto my side with my face to the wall, weeping for the end of my world, and for the world that will go on afterwards.

After a long time I feel Stephen’s arm about my back, a slight touch, then a firmer one when I do not shake it off, gripping my shoulder. It brings me back, and I realize my shirt has fallen open.
The inside of his wrist rasps on my hair shirt, and he starts.

“It will not hurt you,” I say. “The hairs are too fine to cut the skin; they cut your conscience only. They clothe a man in repentance.”

“Do you have need of repentance, my lord?”

“All men must repent, for we are all sinful, since the fall of Adam,” I say, like a dutiful schoolboy. It is not enough, though: if I speak of such things, at such a time, it should be wholeheartedly, to the glory of God.

I cannot. I am too weary, and too afraid.

Yes, afraid.

No man will speak of fear before a battle except to a dear friend, lest he be scorned. A captain may not speak of fear at all, lest the chill of it steal through his men. But now? What may I do to drown my fear, with no clangor of battle in my ears, no glory to hope for, no blood on my hands, no great and dreadful moments when it is kill or be killed?

I must sleep.

To go sleepless for prayer and fasting is to discipline the body’s desires, and so to free the soul to love God.

To go sleepless for mortal love is a joy so great it is beyond joy, and beyond pain.

To go sleepless for fear is weakness that will lead to weakness on the morrow.

I cannot sleep.

I am shivering, and I know that he feels it. I must sleep…I
must
.

“Will you lie with me, Stephen, that I do not sleep alone? I do not think…”

“Aye, my lord.”

His weight is slight; the ropes of the bed bear down only a little, and the straw in the palliasse creaks. I shift myself further toward the wall. And then behind me comes his warmth, his grubby boy’s smell, his breath on my neck, and his arms once more about my shoulders. He says nothing, but holds me. He is warm and my breath eases, then my body with it.

“Sire?”

“Yes?”

“I have hidden your letters in my jerkin, my lord. God willing, I will carry them safely.”

“Thank you.” I pull the blanket up around us both, and the Jason ring knocks my jaw. Soon I shall be with God and shall have no need of it. Nor could I be sure that so fine and large a piece of gold would not tempt a poor man in Richard’s ser vice. I pull it off. “Will you take this too, and give it with the letter to my sister Elysabeth?”

He takes it from me, and I feel his hand dive again into his jerkin. “Aye, my lord. I swear by the saints I will do as you ask, though it cost me my life.”

His ardent voice conjures tears in my eyes. “No, that is too great a cost for any boy. But if you can do it safely, you will have my very great thanks.”

Without my ring, which was Louis’s, it is as if I have at last relinquished everything that ties me to this world.

All is quiet. Sleep hovers over me. I am wearied unto death with all that mortals must know: weary with fear, weary with grief, weary with talking and planning and fighting, and weary with the old wound in my thigh, and the new wound in my heart—that I have destroyed Ned.

It is the feast of the Salutation of the Blessed Virgin. From inside the door of the Constable Tower the garrison’s sallets below me are ranks of steel cobbles, their faces invisible. It is dawn-cold, yet their brigandines are stained with weeks of sweat. No tabards, though, no standards to hang limp in the still air. There is no one here except Richard of Gloucester’s affinity, and they do not need reminding. The presented arms waver, for all the best men, Stephen told me, are gone south. These tenants and cottagers are held in by the castle walls, ranged to order round the headsman’s block, bound by their contract, their allegiance.

Standing over the Deputy Constable is Sir James Tyrell. I might have known he would be here, for he has ever been Richard’s most trusted man. He is here to see his master’s command obeyed. If there is need of other, more secret work—

I will not think it
. I have commended Ned’s soul to God, and trust in Him as I may trust in no man. I can do no more for Ned. And now I must do the same for my own soul.

I have seen many men executed, by the rope, or the ax, or the fire that cleanses heresy from the world. Some curse, some struggle and cry against the hangman’s grip, some scream of their innocence, or their guilt, as the flames begin to sear. Most shit themselves. I will not—I
will not
—betray myself thus. Besides, I am going to God. Who could feel fear or sorrow, knowing what I know?

A hand pushes me in the back: my guards are impatient. Stephen is nowhere to be seen. When I woke at the slamming-back of bolts that heralded the priest, he was gone.

The morning light is sharp. I blink and drop my rosary. The flesh feels naked where Louis’s ring has lodged on my finger these last weeks. The priest picks my rosary up and pushes it back into my hand, and I touch Saint Augustine and Saint Bridget and our
Holy Mother, the small, dull beads between them as small and dull as we are to God, yet part of the circle too.

“Dulcissime Jesu Christe, si ultimum verbum tuum in cruce…”

“Where are my friends?”

“They’re dead,” says the guard. “All three.” And, yes, in the corner of the bailey there is a cart, with rough sacking tossed over it and blotched with blood.

Elysabeth’s boy, Richard Grey, is dead. I sent him a scarlet whip-top from Sandwich, the day we were captured by Warwick’s men. Once I met him, stale-drunk, outside a whorehouse in Southwark. “You will not tell my mother?” he said. He was no more than Stephen’s age. Stephen has a widowed mother with no love or care in her life but him; Richard’s mother was a queen. She loved him very much, but she had too much, too many, to care for besides.

My cousin Haute is dead, who stood on the shore at Lynn as we stumbled up from the sands, and called that he had a ship, that the master would sail on trust that he would be paid in the end, that Edward and all of us were saved.

Sir Thomas Vaughan is dead, Ned’s chamberlain, who loved Ned as his son, and carved him Jason’s ship and all the Argonauts to sail on the millpond at Ludlow, and wept as we rode north.

They are dead. We shall meet again soon. And I shall see Louis when God grants that I may.

“Profiscere, anima christiana, de hoc mundo…”

I walk forward. I will not hesitate or stumble. I will not.

It is an ax, of course. I was not tried by my peers, as is my right. Nor am I granted that final right, the last rites of knighthood, that I be killed with our own, our honorable steel. No matter. Even such honor is a thing of the world.

“Deus misericors, Deus clemens, Deus qui secundum multi-tudinem miserationum tuarum peccata paenitentium deles…”

I am to be killed. I will—I can—in no wise seek to prevent it.

Thin ranks of men. A block, brightly bloodstained. I see it, but my vision is hazed with prayers.

“…sanctus Joseph, morientium Patronus dulcissimus, in magna spem te erigat…”

I look up. The sky still arches above me. Somewhere beyond it, beyond all possibility of imagining, judgment awaits. I walk forward to the block. The men stand silent. The man in the leather apron is speaking; I nod, for I do forgive him as we all hope to be forgiven, each of us, for what we have done in our lord’s ser vice.

“…contemplationis divinae delcedine potiaris in saecula saeculorum.”

Something moves. Down the steps from the keep, across the bailey, walks Stephen. He does not pass the line of men. But as I reach the block, he moves again, pulling off his cap. He bends his knee to me, and bows his head.

“In manus tua, Domine, commendo spiritum meum.”

I kneel before the block, and fix my mind’s eye on God. It is finished. It will begin.

“Jesu, Jesu, Jesu.”

Una—Sunday

The road gets narrower, turns off, then on another, smaller
lane we wind downhill and up between oak and beech, until Mark tells me to turn yet again, onto a rough track whose farm gate has
been open so long that brambles have lashed it to the hedge. Over our heads the trees tangle and the big car curtsies and sways along the track for what seems like an eternity, our progress marked only by stones and sudden hollows, and occasionally a scattering of birds shouting the alarm at our approach.

A small hand-painted sign announces Friary Cottage. The track leads to a large clearing and fades immediately to nothing. At the far side of the clearing is Morgan’s house: a small, red-brick, slate-roofed cottage like a child’s drawing, standing at the junction of wood and field. It has dormer windows, like raised eyebrows, smears of green where a gutter’s overflowed, a trickle of blue smoke from one of its four chimney pots, and the front door is propped open with a large stone. A black Labrador bounds from the woods with a token bark.

I get out to stretch my legs and greet Morgan, and am promptly butted in the small of the back. At my yelp Mark laughs, the dog barks again, and I turn, and find myself being butted in the stomach instead, by a dark brown donkey.

“Oh, that’s Neddy, don’t mind him,” says Morgan, bending to catch the dog by the scruff of the neck. “Quiet, Beth! Neddy’s terribly nosy, but if you rub his ears he’ll love you forever.”

I do as I’m told, and find them surprisingly muscular and warm, with miraculously soft fur. He has no collar or rope. “Does he run free?”

“Oh, yes. The chickens too, only I haven’t let them out this morning as I’m not going to be here. The only fences are to keep Neddy off the vegetables. He was found abandoned and I said I’d look after him. Come in while I get my stuff.” A big rosemary bush covered with blue flowers and happy bees hangs half across
the doorway. Neddy disputes our right to enter, but Mark gives him a shove and he dips his heavy head and ambles away.

“May I use your loo?”

“Yes, just through the kitchen and out the back door. It’s on the right.”

The kitchen has an ancient bottled-gas stove, a Formica table with an oil lamp on it and a scatter of jewelry tools and materials, a tiled fireplace laid ready with raw-smelling coal, and a beautiful inlaid Queen Anne wall clock tocking away in the corner, showing the phases of the moon and the movement of the sun through the zodiac. As I head out of the back door and find the privy, a black shadow of a cat with blue eyes slips past my legs and away like warm smoke.

“How are we going to handle talking to Fergus?” I ask Mark, while Morgan locks the cottage with the dog inside and the donkey outside.

“D’you reckon Izzy will have phoned him?” he asks. “To try and get in ahead—persuade him?”

“I don’t know. Lionel said he’d be talking to him. I have the feeling they talk quite often. They obviously get on. But Izzy’s—attitude—well, it could be very persuasive, to another artist.”

“Wouldn’t have thought Lionel was the type to be chummy with his son, somehow. Though I suppose Fergus isn’t on his territory.”

“You mean living in York?” I say, willfully misunderstanding him, because the relationship of fathers and sons isn’t easy to discuss with Mark.

“No. Being an artist, not a banker. No competition.”

I think of Lionel, running small and fast and strong down a rugby pitch; sitting in the Chantry kitchen in his brand-new City
suit, bowler on the table, arguing that the Press wasn’t profitable and never could be; sitting in Saint Albans and talking about the copy of Malory worth less than his. “I suppose he
is
competitive,” I agree, but keep to myself my fear that he’ll want the Chantry to be his project. “But territorial?”

“Always was,” says Mark, and there’s an edge to his voice. “Anyway, you’d better do most of the talking, being family. Ah, here she comes.”

Morgan opens the back door and settles into her seat. “All sorted out. I made Malkin a cat door last year; it didn’t work whether I shut her in or out. You can’t shut cats anywhere…This is great, by the way. Thank you for taking me along.”