Daughter of York (25 page)

Then George smiled one of his dazzling, face-changing smiles, and her heart melted, just as it always had when he wanted to please her. “Ah, well, Meg. I should not expect you to explain the mysterious ways of our big brother, should I? ’Twas unfair of me. Do you forgive me?”

Margaret was relieved. “Certes!” she said gaily, saved by one of his mercurial mood changes. “Although I will own up to fears for Edward’s rash choice of bride. If it makes you feel any better, just think of the agony of guilt Ned has endured for six months since May Day!”

George grinned. “Aye, in truth. Serves him right for marrying so foolishly. I shall never let my heart rule my head, of that you can be certain—or my prick,” he muttered.

“I believe you, George. We have been too well versed in our duty by our mother ever to behave like Ned.” Margaret laughed, moving away from him. “But now I am late for my meeting with Brother Damian. Be of good cheer, George. You could have been born a peasant,” she called.

She instantly regretted her choice of phrase, for Fortunata was staring accusingly at her. “Forgive me,
pochina,
but he is such a silly boy. I have to talk to him like that. If you want to know a secret, in truth, there are many times I wish I could be a peasant!”

Fortunata shook her head. “
Non, madonna.
You would be a very bad peasant.” And they both laughed.

Her thoughts of George were interrupted by the next course, several platters of roasted meats still steaming from the abbey kitchens. Margaret turned to look for Fortunata and was not surprised to find her servant right behind her holding her wand and three cups.

“I think we need a little entertainment,
pochina.
Are you ready to show your skills to these people?”

Fortunata needed no prompting. She loved performing and immediately began turning cartwheels and tumbling around the room in the new jester’s regalia Margaret had had made especially for her. The hood ended in two long points that protruded over both ears, each with a bell sewn on the end. The loose tabard was multicolored and belted, with long points hanging down her arms, also sporting bells. She wore this over a white chemise and hose. It was impossible to tell if she was man or woman, but as most of the company had seen the dwarf with Margaret during the abbey visit, they knew her.

Fortunata kept the company laughing and gasping at her tricks, while Margaret retreated into her reverie again. She returned to her walk along the path after leaving George, past the refectory and to the south-east entrance of the cloister. She admired the beautiful covered walkway, with its rounded arches from another time elaborately painted with scenes from the Bible and the decorated cream and brown tiled floor. An immaculately kept lawn gave a pleasing sense of space to the square within the cloister, and she leaned over the coping to admire some gillyflowers planted along the edge of the grass. She could hear the heart-melting sounds of chanting coming from the abbey, and she sighed with pleasure.

“Lord Anthony,
madonna.
He is coming,” Fortunata whispered, awed by this sacred place. Margaret turned to watch Anthony and Brother Damian walking silently along the south cloister towards her, past the entrance to the refectory, the hand basins outside and the rows of neatly hung towels.

The monk bowed and gave her a quiet blessing, and both women crossed themselves, Fortunata sinking into a deep curtsey. Anthony took Margaret’s hand and kissed it briefly. He bent and whispered, “
Buongiorno,
Fortunata,” and smiled when the dwarf’s astonished mouth formed “
Grazie,
lord.”

The visitors knew that a vow of silence was enforced on the monks who lived at Reading Abbey, except in cases like this, when several of the more senior brothers served as guides. Brother Damian cautioned them against speaking unnecessarily but indicated that a question or two would be permitted. Margaret noticed the north side of the cloister was the only one with windows, and the reason for them became evident when Brother Damian took them into the scriptorium. Both Anthony and Margaret were hypnotized by the astonishing scene. Rows of monks, some standing at their work and others seated at tables, were bent over books, pens and inks carefully placed far enough away so as not to spill the liquid onto the precious pages. Some of the older monks, their soft white hair sprouting around their tonsures, had their noses inches from the pages as they scratched out the words, so bad was their eyesight after decades of copying.

Brother Damian took them to a lectern and invited them with a gesture to look at the book upon it. Margaret gingerly opened the heavy volume to a page of meticulously copied Latin text, the beginning letter of the chapter richly decorated in gold leaf, azure and emerald. Their heads bent together to examine the work, Margaret was distracted by Anthony’s closeness. She could see the stitches on his slashed sleeve, smell his perfume—what was it, musk, perhaps?—and feel his leg touching her gown. She forced herself to look at the book and was grateful when Anthony whispered a question to their host and they moved apart. He, too, must have sensed the uncomfortable intimacy, and he did not go too near her again.

Shelf upon shelf of books lined the walls, and Brother Damian told them they had recently added a library elsewhere in the abbey to house others. They were astounded to learn that the abbey had a collection of
more than three hundred books, all produced by the monks over the past two hundred years. Margaret was particularly taken with the music that was shown her. She recognized one of her favorite songs,
“Sumer is icumen in,”
with its neum notes for voice, and touched the two-hundred-year-old manuscript reverently.

Anthony walked her back to her quarters following the visit, and they talked about what they had witnessed.

“Not long ago, I was told by a visiting ambassador that in Germany a man has devised a way of copying text with woodcuts and a wine press. Have you heard of this, Anthony?” Margaret asked. “Someone must bring the invention here and relieve those poor old brothers. I suspect some must die at their desks, their fingers forever curled around their pens! Did you see their backs? To be so bent in one position for so many hours, sweet Jesu, it must be painful. But the books, the books.” She sighed. “Oh, so beautiful, were they not?”

“Aye, they were. And, no, I have not heard of such a device as you describe. Are you certain the ambassador was not dreaming, Marguerite?”

Hearing his pet name for her after all this time again made her heart flutter, and she was about to touch his arm to acknowledge it when he called out, “Eliza, I am here!” to a tiny woman in green and her companion coming along the path from the physic garden.

Eliza Scales hurried to them, a plain, scrawny woman with a pronounced overbite, and when she saw Margaret, she dropped into a low obeisance. Margaret panicked. What does one say to the wife of the man one loves? Someone who clearly has no idea that the woman in front of her wants to claw her eyes out? But Margaret’s strict training allowed her graciously to ask Lady Scales to rise and greet her warmly. Anthony kissed his wife’s hand, taking her arm and tucking it under his.

Margaret’s smile was sickly sweet, and she hated her own hypocrisy. “I am glad to meet you at last, my lady. Anthony has told me much about you,” she lied twice in the same breath. “And I am sorry you have not been well enough to travel with him lately. He and I have a passion”—she paused for effect, but the mouse was listening politely with no sign of understanding the innuendo—“for books,” she finished, not daring to look at Anthony, whose mouth was twitching with amusement at her audacity.

“Aye, my dear lord does enjoy his books,” Lady Scales said, and Margaret thought she heard a hint of sarcasm, “far more than he enjoys his wife, I sometimes think.” And she began a false, high-pitched laugh that made Anthony wince. Margaret was embarrassed for him as Eliza continued to laugh until she was overcome by coughing.

“Lady Margaret, the air is too cold for Eliza. I beg you to excuse us while I take her inside. I hope we may resume our discussion soon,” Anthony said, his eyes telling her he would far prefer talking with her than accompanying his wife to her chamber.

Margaret inclined her head in the affirmative and wished them both a pleasant day. Lady Scales dropped a hasty curtsey, stared at Fortunata and trotted along obediently beside her husband.

Aye, Elizabeth was right, Eliza Scales is a bore, Margaret thought, as she walked towards the physic garden. A bore with a marriage contract.

T
HE ROYAL PARTY
lingered for several weeks, enjoying the peace and quiet of the abbey and the abbot’s fine table and by the time the barges left the Reading wharf in late October, Edward had already promised his bride the betrothal of the first of her many siblings to one of the noble families of England. However, before he approved this marriage of Elizabeth’s next sister to Lord Maltravers, the heir of the earl of Arundel, he made sure that Maltravers’ uncle, the earl of Warwick, was out of the country. Angering the earl twice in a month was, Margaret told Ned, imprudent to say the least.

“Meggie, you think too much,” Ned replied. “’Tis time you spread your wings and enjoyed life. Anthony is a bad influence. He, too, is always spouting philosophy around me. Where is young Harper? He would give you something else to think about, eh, Meggie.” He laughed, but, seeing her serious face, he remembered to add, “I know, I know, I have not forgotten my promise to find you a husband soon, but in the meantime, why not let the harper play your strings?”

“Edward!” Margaret cried, trying hard not to laugh. “You are incorrigible!”

8

1465–1466

Margaret did not return to Greenwich from Reading. She moved directly back into the Wardrobe but was often at Elizabeth’s side at Westminster Palace or at the queen’s town house on Knightridder Street close to the Newgate outside the city wall. The new queen found Margaret’s presence reassuring, she told Edward, and gradually Margaret grew to admire her sister-in-law for her dignity and courage in the face of the court’s disappointment with Edward’s choice. However, no one but Edward ever became the queen’s intimate. She was pleasant to her ladies but never betrayed her emotions to them. Her own household was run to a strict moral code, and the curious pondered on her resignation to Edward’s immoral one. Margaret saw that her brother adored his wife, and she knew Edward spent many nights in his wife’s bed—unusual for most married couples of rank—but she also heard the rumors that other women shared his attentions in his own apartments at Westminster.

Although the royal circle disdained his choice of bride, Edward’s decision to wed an Englishwoman of lower rank endeared him to his subjects,
who it seemed had adopted an aversion to things foreign since English lands in France were lost to them under Henry’s unstable rule. For a time their frustration with the young king’s many taxes was buried as they relished the thought of an English queen.

Fortunata, who enjoyed slipping anonymously through the London streets whenever she could, had heard Edward praised for his courage in wedding a mere dame. But there were those who could not resist making fun of him. She was regaling Margaret and her ladies with stories of her exploits one evening after Vespers when she remembered a particular incident.

“One man,
madonna,
who was very drunk, called the queen ‘the king’s Grey mare.’ Many people laughed. What is a ‘mare’?”

Some of her ladies giggled, others gasped in horror, and Margaret stifled a chuckle. She could not allow Fortunata or the women to repeat this disparaging remark in the household, as it was certain to get back to Elizabeth somehow. These rumors always did.

“I command all of you to keep the story inside this room, ladies. Fortunata, you do not need to know what the man meant. ’Twas cruel is all you need to understand,” she said sternly.

The women nodded and bent their heads over their needlework, hiding their smiles. Beatrice resolved to keep a closer eye on Fortunata’s comings and goings. But she was so small and so good at disappearing, it would be a difficult task. Margaret had no such misgivings about her
pochina.
She encouraged Fortunata to tell her what she saw and heard in the streets. How else would one know what is really happening in the realm? And she alone knew Fortunata was able to fend for herself after her squalid life in Padua.

Margaret changed the topic and told her ladies that she had been summoned to accompany the king and queen to Shene for the weeks before the queen’s coronation and that they should ready her things for the stay. The buzz of excited conversation took their minds off the unkind remark about Elizabeth, as Margaret hoped it would. Inwardly she fretted over Ned’s choices, for following the betrothal of Elizabeth’s sister in October, the queen had been the target of more snide remarks when Edward gave her nineteen-year-old brother John Woodville in marriage to the sixty-five-year-old dowager duchess of Norfolk—Warwick’s aunt. Edward seemed
bent on antagonizing the earl, she worried. The Woodville marriage had also been viewed on the Continent as a slap in the face for the earl, who was working hard for a treaty with Louis of France against Burgundy. Not only did Edward eschew the offer of marriage from Louis, but by marrying a descendant of the counts of St. Pol in Luxembourg, Edward could be perceived as allying himself with Burgundy.