A Secret Alchemy (39 page)

He nods. “I could do nothing for the Princes except stay where I might hear it, if there was a whisper to be heard. It was two days after Ascension Day. I met a man in a tavern, better not to say which, or name him. I thought I knew his face from the court of the Duke of Brittany, and I was right: he had but lately sailed from Brest. Thinking that he might have news of who had collected about Henry of Richmond, as he was then, at Rennes, I called for wine. I think he was lonely, and happy to speak in French. This man knew little of any plans, but he suddenly began to speak of what had brought him to London. Not exactly, you understand. He would not at first tell me what his own commission was. But he spoke of secret doings about the Tower, of meeting Richard of Gloucester’s man Sir James Tyrell. He told me that it was not thought safe for King Richard’s crown that the Princes were known to be alive.”

“And…” I must know, yet I feared to know, even as a man fears his death but fears still more not to know the hour of it. “And this meeting? What was decided?”

“Everything. On the day we met—he was in his cups by then—he told me…Ah, Madame, would you have me go on?”

His voice is gentle and it breaks through my guard. “Yes, I must know, I must! Anything is better than this torment, anything! You must tell me.”

“He said that now King Richard was safe.”

“Ah, God have mercy!”

“But, Madame, it is not quite…That is not the whole story. He told me…that he had borne a message from Rennes—you understand?” I nod. “From Rennes, yes, with gold for Sir James Tyrell, and a message, that—Rennes would also find it safer if your sons were not known to be alive. And the gold was to make doubly sure it were done, and done soon…and done mercifully.”

I am overwhelmed with sorrow so strong I cannot stand.

Louis de Bretaylles is kneeling before me where I sit, gripping my hands as if only thus can he be sure that I will hear his tale. “Madame, thus was it done: mercifully. It was the eve of Ascension Day, and that was the reason given for sending their confessor to them that evening. They confessed, were shriven and blessed. Then together they slept, on that holy eve, and knew nothing until they woke and found themselves with God.”

I am weeping still, though not for long: so much grief have I known that I have learned to stop my tears quickly when I must.

“Madame, forgive me. I have stayed too long for your safety or mine. You must know that their mortal remains are safe, and decently interred within the Tower, although I know not where. Forgive me, I must be gone.”

“Of course. Monsieur, you have all—all my gratitude, to the end of my days. And I know…you pray for my brother’s soul, even as I do.”

“Oui, Madame,”
he says, and now I can hear his grief in his voice.

“Excuse me,” I say, and turn away. When I turn back, he has pulled on his cloak and taken up his hat. “I have something that was his. He sent it…with a letter that he wrote on the eve of his death. He asked my forgiveness for what had happened, and now…May I consider you his representative on earth, and give you this, in token of my gratitude?”

I hold out Antony’s ring, heavy in my palm and warm from my heart’s blood. The pilgrim’s cockleshell gleams, then the little ship inside catches the light too, and I remember the sobriquet Louis de Bretaylles used. “I think you know this ring.”

He takes it from me with a bow, and presses it to his lips. “Madame…” He clears his throat. “Your brother gave it to me many years since. It was a token of our friendship, and of the journeys we made together. When I saw what was toward at Stony Stratford, I contrived to give it to your son Sir Richard Grey. Sir Richard—you will, I think, like to know that he, too, was most courageous in the face of such force…And he must have done as I hoped in giving the ring privily to Antony…It…I am more grateful to have it than I have words to express.”

“No more words, then, Monseigneur. There is no more to say, I think, though much to pray for. You will have my thanks for all eternity. Farewell, and
à Dieu
.”

He bids me farewell with all courtesy, and yet, by the time the door is open and my woman is in the room, he has shrunk to the ordinary Master Jason, and by the few words that he says before
he takes his leave you might think he had never traveled further afield than Deptford.

I withdraw from the parlor, go to my chamber, and weep.

After many hours the black, bitter stone that has been lodged in my heart for so many years begins to soften, as if my hot new grief is an alchemist’s fire.

I have decided to trust what Louis de Bretaylles has told me: not only that my sons are dead but as to the manner of their dying. But tonight I do not sleep, or even lie in my bed, though my woman pleads with me till I send her away. I sit at my window with the casement open to whatever bad airs choose to enter; it is no matter. I sit and feel the emptiness next to my heart where Antony’s ring was hidden until this day, and look through the night at where my boys died, and where they lie.

I think, too, of my son Richard Grey and weep for him, that in his last days he did this small ser vice, which he cannot know brought comfort to three people.

But my thoughts and tears cannot long stay away from Ned and Dickon. To know their fate is such a new sorrow, and such a comfort, that I can hardly bear to believe it. Sometimes as the night draws on I think I do not deserve such comfort, for it was I who gave up Dickon to his fate. Sometimes I wonder if Louis de Bretaylles spoke truth. But I
must
believe. Slowly, as the night wears on hour by hour, marked by each bell that rings in the heavy air, and each night-watchman’s and sentry’s cry of “Who goes there?”…

Slowly, by God’s grace, I do believe.

The darkness is lifting: to the east, down the river, the land is rimmed with gray the color of pearl. Below, in the Abbey grounds,
I hear the sharp shuffle and murmur of the lay-sisters rising to go about their tasks in the garden, the kitchen, the orchard. The silence of the holy sisters calls me to join them. The latch rises: my woman is coming to help me dress, though it is an hour or more till Prime. Even with plain old gowns and no more headdress than a widow’s hood it takes time, for we are both old, and my bones ache, and there is little flesh on them. I move slowly.

But I have been granted God’s grace in this: the pain and weariness of my body keeps me in mind of the pain and weariness of this whole world, racked as it is by the endless turning of Fortune’s wheel. This is God’s mercy, for there may be mercy even in the death of hope: He did bring me news so that my days and nights might be quiet at last. And His still greater mercy is that each of these quiet days brings me nearer to my death, happy in the knowledge that in Heaven all weariness is banished, all life is joy, and there, at last, I shall see my boys.

Una—Sunday

We picked Morgan up from Heworth, and Fergus waved us
off, knee-deep in his gently rebellious garden. When we dropped Morgan home, even though the midsummer light still stretched before us, we didn’t linger after the hugs and farewells. Morgan whistled Beth out of the way as the car bumped over the grass. Threading our way through the lanes toward the motorway, I suddenly saw how Morgan makes sense of what Fergus has inherited from the Chantry: how in her, art and craft are underpinned by the ordinary family business of food and talk and fondness, which has been lost to us—to Izzy with her dry-as-dust life, to Lionel who never touches anything unclean, and to me—since were
scattered. And Mark? Perhaps what’s new in Mark has come from Morgan too.

Driving at night is a bit like being in limbo: all you can see is what’s lit as you go past, and the small patch ahead that your own lights illuminate. The noise of road and wind is mesmerizing: I hear Uncle Gareth reading me a bedtime story, his voice low and rumbly. My fingers fiddled illicitly with the fraying hole in the silk of my rosy eiderdown, and Smokey Bear snuggled up against my side. Something about days being like a string of beads but traveling days belonging to a different string. But what book was that from? I can’t remember, but it’s true, and I think suddenly of a rosary.

No slow stations on our pilgrimage now: the motorway roars straight past Nottingham and Derby, Leicester, Northampton, Saint Albans, and into a diversion that’s traffic-clotted even though it’s gone eleven o’clock, so that we crawl around to enter London by way of Barnet and Highgate. Mark and I don’t talk much. There’s nothing more, for now, to be said about Izzy, though on Monday there’ll be a lot before I fly.

What still needs to be said about Mark and me is also going to have to wait till the morning. And Adam.

It’s nearly midnight when we roll off the end of the A1 and into a queue of panting cars at Archway. “You must be so tired,” says Mark. “Why don’t you drive straight to Limehouse, and I’ll get a cab home from there? Ealing’s out of your way.”

“Well, if you’re sure…I am tired, I must admit.”

In Limehouse I draw up outside my house and pull on the handbrake, and he lays his hand over mine. “Well driven.”

“Come in. We’ll call a cab, and have a drink while you wait for it.”

I unlock the front door and we go into the same chilly empti
ness that was waiting for me when I arrived from Australia. The alarm shows that it’s past midnight. It’s Monday. I’ve been in England exactly a week, and tomorrow evening I’m flying home to Sydney. Will the emptiness be there too?

The difference is that Mark’s here, behind me, tall and warm as he follows me into the house, his voice filling the emptiness and his hands dealing competently with bag and baggage: his by the front door, mine at the foot of the stairs.

In the kitchen I turn on lots of lights, switch on the hot water and heating, find bottle and corkscrew and give them to Mark. The cab-company phone number’s in my England Admin notebook, which has buried itself somewhere in my overnight bag. When I straighten up and turn to go back into the kitchen, he hasn’t poured the wine; he’s just standing there in the brilliant light, watching me.

Suddenly I want him so badly it’s like being punched in the gut. I want his mouth, his hands, his weight on me, the smell and touch and taste of him filling my mind and my body and my bed. Before I can ask myself why now, before I can remember anything, or forget it, I say, “Would you like to stay the night?”

He might not want to…That’s silly, he does want to. I’ve seen that heat in enough men’s eyes.

But he still might say no. Maybe he’s not sure what kind of stay-the-night I mean. Maybe he’s remembering that once, in another life, so long ago, I said that I loved him.

I should have waited till we were comfortable, till we’d had a drink, till later, till never. My heart’s banging in my chest and he hasn’t answered me. If he does…He’s protecting himself, or me, or he’s thinking of some other comforting reason that won’t expose me or him to humiliation. Because I can feel humiliation
crawling up from my belly, over the skin of my chest and up into my face till my head hums with it.

He puts the bottle and the corkscrew very carefully on the table, comes over to me, and takes my hands, holding me at a distance.

“Una, are you sure?” Which relieves one of my fears.

I nod.

He draws me closer, bends his head, and kisses me. “I’d like that very much.”

His touch washes away the rest of my fears. We take the wine upstairs to the drawing room and light the fire, though it doesn’t seem chilly at all. I’m wide-awake from the driving, but not tired, it seems, and neither is he; we’re curled close together on the sofa and I’m feeling the fire warm on my face, and watching it gild his. This time it’s not about comfort, it’s more than comfort: I’m more alive with each shift and tautening of his muscles under my hands, his touch on my neck, shoulder, waist, his mouth and tongue flickering against my skin, the faint salt-sweat taste of him and the scratch of hair against my cheek.

When I want more of his skin against mine, I uncurl and stand up, holding out my hand. He stands up too, and we go quite quietly and simply upstairs to my bedroom.

There’s light coming in from the river, watery scraps of brightness and no need for more, or less, no need to draw the curtains and shut it out.

His shirt’s already unbuttoned. I pull it free and slide it off his shoulders, and then while I fumble with his belt buckle, he catches my hands and pulls my top up over my head. How easy it is! Even the silly fiddling with zips and hooks, even the ridiculousness of socks: we’re easy with each other, with everything about desire,
about each other’s body and our own. We take our time, relishing each button, each crease of skin, each rumple of cloth pushed aside, each delicate revelation: the soft skin on the inside of my elbows that his tongue finds, the dip under each of his ribs where the muscles turn inwards, his tiny groan when I nip the dark flesh at the base of his thumb, my gasp when he brushes each of my breasts, then cups them, their weight and heat filling his hands, his gaze blurred.

Would it have been like this then? If I’d had this, my heart’s desire, when I first fell in love with him? If he had loved me? Or would it have been as young love is: awkward, embarrassed, urgent, clumsy? Secret, it would have been, almost defiant. Would we have given in to our need even so, and grabbed for each other as the young do? It’s maturity that’s wise enough to savor every lick and kiss and shiver.

Do I want it now so much because I’ve wanted it so long? So keenly that my body cries out to seize him now and drag him into me till we both explode, because I couldn’t seize him then? Is this…Is this an ending, not a beginning? And if it is, does it matter? I’m alone in the world, and in myself. May I not take my pleasures where I find them, even in ending?

“Professor Una Pryor,” he says softly, slowly, stretching the syllables, relishing them, and relishing me, too. The breath hisses out between his teeth in a way that makes me want him desperately: the only thing I want, the only thing that matters. “You always were wonderful, Una Pryor…”

Is this an ending for him, too? Is his relish not for me but for himself, that he’s finally taking possession—the ultimate kind of possession—of what my family denied him for so long? Is
that
why he wants me?