King's Fool (31 page)

BY MARGARET CAMPBELL BARNES

THE SIMPLEST ENGLISH WORDS had been scattered from her mind. And when she raised her eyes she saw another man standing in the wide span of the doorway. The fat man who had laughed on the bridge, laughed because he was so confident of making a good bargain. But he wasn’t laughing now. And when he doffed a plumeless cap from his closely-cropped, red-gold head, Anne knew him to be Henry Tudor and herself to be the bargain.

Their eyes met across the disordered room—met and held. She knew that she must look like a startled rabbit. She saw the same disappointment repeated in his eyes—but far more poignantly. She watched his cheerful, rubicund face work painfully like that of a child deprived at the last minute of some promised treat. He looked half ludicrous, half pitiful, so that even in her humiliation some mothering instinct in her wanted to comfort him. But she was far more sorry for herself.

Henry recovered himself almost immediately. He strode into the room, brushing Sir Anthony and the staring women aside, and bade her welcome with a fine gesture. Although his presence seemed to fill the room, he no longer looked fat or ludicrous. One was aware of him rather as a mighty personality. One knew that whether he were clothed in cloth of gold or worsted, he would always—inevitably—take the center of the stage. Mentally, he was master of the situation and his ruddy vitality was such that other men, crowding respectfully into the room on his heels, looked nondescript as the figures on some faded tapestry. In her distressed state of mind, Anne felt him towering over her. His voice was warm and cultured and kind; but she had read her doom in both men’s eyes and all she could think of was Hans Holbein in her bedroom and Nan Boleyn on the scaffold. And because—after all the strain she had been through—her legs felt as if they would collapse under her at any moment, she very sensibly went down on her knees before her future husband.

Henry was magnificent. Nothing he had rehearsed in his rejuvenated lover act could possibly have been more gallant than the way in which he lifted her up and embraced her and forbade a daughter of Cleves ever to kneel to him again. He made her sit down while he presented his friends. Probably he saw how ill she felt and Anne only hated herself the more for behaving like a weakling.

“Even if I’m plain as a pikestaff, at least I’m healthy enough to rear him a dozen children!” she thought savagely, remembering all her mother’s reassurances to Wotton on this important point.

Because he hated gaucherie, Henry made an effort to set her at ease. Much as he might have gentled a horse, he sat and talked with her. When he inquired after her comfort and whether everything possible had been done for her, poor Anne could have screamed, remembering how very much the Duchess of Norfolk and Lady Rochfort had managed to do for her in one short hour in this very room. And all the time she could feel the man controlling some inner fury and trying to avert his eyes from her unbound hair and the feminine disorder of the room, as if by not looking at them he could make them cease to exist. She could almost hear the punctilious Duke of Suffolk inquiring afterwards if it were customary in Cleves for well-bred women to strew their living rooms with clothes chests, and could have died with shame on observing that her discarded stays were protruding from beneath the cushion which the careless Hagalas girl had so hurriedly thrust over them.

Anne was amazed to hear him ask by name after most of the people she had met on her journey, and touched to find that he himself had planned even the smallest details of her reception at Calais and Dover. But that was before he saw me! she thought, longing—yet dreading—to be alone with the knowledge of his disappointment, to absorb it and to adjust herself to the new outlook on life it would necessitate.

She guessed that the cooks were preparing an elaborate meal; but she was spared the tedium of this, for when at last the Bishop’s steward came in to announce dinner, the King said something to Cranmer in Latin about what we have already received and got up to go. Being on his best behavior, he turned to chat for a few minutes with her ladies on his way out; but, after raking the lot of them with a selective eye, he seemed to think better of it. Anne could scarcely blame him. Now that he was really going, several quite amusing remarks occurred to her, most of which she found herself capable of saying in impeccable English. But he turned abruptly on his heel.

Just outside the room, Katherine stood flirting with one of the younger men who had been sent to Calais. Although it was still broad daylight, the servants had set torches to light the dim, monastic gallery, and the light from one of them shone down on her exquisite little head, warming the mischievous curve of her cheek and her moist, red mouth. Evidently the young man adored her, but Anne saw her make a little secret gesture to check his ardent talk. She lowered her eyes respectfully, and flattened her childish body against the wall to let the King pass. But he stopped squarely in front of her. He cupped her little chin in his great hand and gazed at her disconcertingly, although half his mind was still elsewhere.

“You look like a rose with the dew still on it,” he said, and sighed prodigiously. Presently he let her go and turned to the young man beside her. “What did you tell us her name was, Tom, that morning she annoyed milord Cromwell by playing shuttlecock at Greenwich?”

“Katherine Howard, your Grace,” said Tom Culpepper, blood hotter than any torchlight flashing his own ingenuous face.

“Ah, yes. I remember thinking what a charming name it was.” Henry turned to the delighted Duchess. “And when you bring the new Queen to court, Madam, be sure you bring this child as well,” he ordered affably.

BY MARGARET CAMPBELL BARNES

COME AND SIT BESIDE me, Bess. Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, has sent us a message, and as it is confidential we will send the others away.” With a wave of one bejeweled hand Elizabeth Woodville cleared the parlor.

“The Countess sends me word how gifted and personable a young man her son has grown,” she said.

“Naturally, since he is her only son.” Elizabeth smiled.

“But all reports confirm the trend of her devotion…and his mother says that it is high time he took a wife,” added the dowager queen.

“Probably he will marry the Duke of Brittany’s daughter,” remarked Elizabeth, with polite indifference.

But her mother leaned forward and placed a hand upon her knee. “The message was particularly for you.” She said impressively.

Elizabeth came out of her own private thoughts with a start. During her short life she had become accustomed to being offered as matrimonial bait for some political reason or another, but the implication of her mother’s words appeared to have no rhyme or reason. “A message for me about Henry Tudor of Lancaster?” she exclaimed. The scornful abhorrence in her voice was as unmistakable as it was purely hereditary.

“Better a well-disposed Lancastrian than a treacherous Yorkist!” snapped the dowager queen.

“But my father would never have heard of such a thing,” stammered Elizabeth, realizing that the suggestion was being made in earnest.

“Were your father alive to hear, there would be no need of such a thing,” pointed out his widow. “But times have changed and we must change with them.”

“Have you forgotten, madam, that Henry Tudor is attainted of treason and still in exile?”

“He might be persuaded to come home.”

When an ambitious woman’s world crumbles about her, she can still meddle in the advancement of her children, thought Elizabeth. “Nothing would induce me to marry him,” she said, and having always rendered sweet obedience to both her parents, was amazed at her own words.

The Dowager Queen flushed red with anger. “I think you forget, Elizabeth, that in your father’s will he left me charge of my daughter’s marriages. Even our enemies who dispute your legitimacy cannot dispute that,” she said.

“So you must plot with a Lancastrian? White rose or red, I suppose it can be all the same to you Woodvilles!” accused Elizabeth Plantagenet, for the first time insulting her mother’s birth.

Before such rare defiance, the Queen dowager’s vivacity wilted to self pity. “You do not consider me at all,” her mother was wailing as Elizabeth dutifully dabbed rose water to her brow.

“It is the boys who need considering,” said Elizabeth. “In what way would your proposal benefit them? Judging by what my father told me of Henry of Lancaster, it would not get Edward back the throne.”

“No, but it might save their lives. We could make it a condition… you could offer him your precious blood, in return for a promise that he would keep your brother honorably in his household.”

“As for promises, has not Uncle Gloucester sworn exactly the same thing? Why should I sell myself in the hope that a Lancastrian’s word may prove more reliable than a Yorkist’s?”

“Because your uncle has already broken his word. He has not kept them in his household but in prison,” pointed out their mother.

Elizabeth stood aside as the solicitous waiting women came to escort the dowager queen to her room.

“I begin not to believe much in any promises,” she said sadly.

Margaret Campbell Barnes
lived from 1891 to 1962. She was the youngest of ten children born into a happy, loving family in Victorian England. She grew up in the Sussex countryside and was educated at small private schools in London and Paris.

Margaret was already a published writer when she married Peter, a furniture salesman, in 1917. Over the next twenty years, a steady stream of short stories and verse appeared under her name (and several noms de plume) in leading English periodicals of the time, including
Windsor, London, Quiver
, and others. Later, Margaret’s agents, Curtis Brown Ltd., encouraged her to try her hand at historical novels. Between 1944 and 1962, Margaret wrote ten historical novels. Many of these were bestsellers, book club selections, and translated into foreign editions.

Between World Wars I and II, Margaret and Peter brought up two sons, Michael and John. In August 1944, Michael, a lieutenant in the Royal Armoured Corps, was killed in his tank in the Allied advance from Caen to Falaise in Normandy. Margaret and Peter grieved terribly the rest of their lives. Glimpses of Michael shine through in each of Margaret’s later novels.

In 1945 Margaret bought a small thatched cottage on the Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast. It had at one time been a smuggler’s cottage, but to Margaret it was a special place in which to recover the spirit and carry on writing. And write she did. All together, over two million copies of Margaret Campbell Barnes’s historical novels have been sold worldwide.