The King's Grace (16 page)

Bess chose to intervene. “She is right, my lord. Tom was with us that summer,” she said, touching his arm and giving Grace a moment of relief. However, she then turned to her half sister and leveled a gaze at her with those sincere blue eyes. “But Grace, you should be grateful Tom gave up the letter. It proves he is a loyal subject to my husband, does it not?”

It was then Grace understood that Bess was lost to their family cause; Henry Tudor and her child were her family now. She would digest this before she slept that night, but all she could do now was murmur, “Aye, your grace.”

Henry was all business from that moment. “Only the people in this
room shall know the true reason for your banishment, madam,” he began, turning back to Elizabeth. Grace heard Katherine’s sharp intake of breath. Elizabeth slumped back in her chair, all pretense of queenly bearing sapped from her at the pronouncement. “I have decided you shall find a holy house of your choosing and live there, where you will not have influence at my court ever again. Your daughters may visit you from time to time, but you will cease your meddling in affairs of state. Your estates shall be forfeit—although I shall bestow them on your daughter, my wife, so they shall remain in your family, and I will give you as generous a pension as my privy purse will allow.”

That will not be much, Grace thought, knowing Henry’s reputation for tightly pulled purse strings.

“Et quoique je n’ai pas de preuve,”
he now addressed the retreating Dorset in his preferred French. “I cannot allow you freedom of movement at this time, my lord. We hear many rumors of discontent up and down our kingdom, and because of your kinship to the dowager, I must keep a close watch on you.”

Dorset fell to his knees on the rushes. “My liege,” he pleaded, blanching, “I know nothing of these dealings with Lincoln. My mother acted alone. I swear my loyalty to you is unmatched, and I beg—”

“In faith, you have given the appearance of loyalty, my lord,” Henry cut in, “but I can take no chances. You shall be lodged in the Tower until this pretender is unmasked and brought to our justice.” Grace saw Thomas finger his dagger, then think better of it and let his arm swing back to his side.

A stifled groan turned Grace’s attention to Elizabeth and she watched helplessly as Elizabeth’s beautiful face crumpled in defeat. She could not bear to see her benefactress so humiliated and, without waiting for permission to rise, she got to her feet and ran to comfort the distraught dowager. Bess constrained Henry from forbidding the kind gesture, and he leaned back, relieved the unpleasant episode was over. His mother acknowledged his efforts with a squeeze of his shoulder. He sighed and patted her hand. In truth, he had expected more of a fight from his fiery mother-in-law, but her lack of defiance told him—told everyone—that she was guilty.

“Why do you not just execute me, Henry?” Elizabeth asked dully. “Like
any other traitor.” She fixed her eyes on Grace’s bent head at her knee, not wanting him to see the resignation in them.

“We do not execute women—as yet—Elizabeth,” he said grimly. “But we can prevent further meddling by sending you away.” He saw her flinch at the use of her given name; he was already treating her as an inferior. “Tomorrow, the council will be told that you are disgraced and will be retiring to an abbey. They will be told that you incurred my displeasure because of your past cooperation with the usurper Richard.”

Elizabeth’s head snapped up then, and, pushing Grace aside, she straightened her back and turned flashing eyes on Henry. Her daughters—and now Grace—recognized the danger signs. Bess frowned and shook her head at her mother, hoping to warn her, but Elizabeth was past caring. A peal of harsh laughter erupted from her and took Henry by surprise. For once, he found himself speechless, and looked to Bess for help.

The laugh was gone as quickly as it had come. “Cooperating with Richard, your grace? Me? What can you mean?” Elizabeth arched a finely plucked brow and sarcasm dripped from her mouth like honey from a spoon. “Ah, yes. Let me see. For taking my children into sanctuary to protect them from his greedy clutches. For allowing him to drag my little boy from my side while I screamed and fought. For supporting Henry of Buckingham’s rebellion against him, along with your mother and Bishop Morton. For risking my very life by agreeing to betroth my daughter to you, an exile, while Richard was still on the throne. For listening while he made a declaration renouncing my marriage, bastardizing my children and reducing me to the status of dame. I can quite see how you might mistake these for ‘cooperation,’ your grace.”

Bess stared in horror at her mother, but Henry was on his feet.

“
C’en est assez!
Enough!” Henry shouted, his pasty face now red with anger. “
Va-t-en!
Out! You ungrateful woman. I would have no more of you, and the court
will
have no more of you.”

His raised voice alarmed the guards outside and they burst into the room, halberds at the ready. He waved them back but, offering Bess his arm, stalked past Elizabeth and Grace and out of the room, Cecily and Margaret hurrying to keep up with them. Cecily turned at the last and sent her mother a sympathetic look before disappearing into the corridor. Katherine and Grace supported Elizabeth as she rose on unsteady legs and
gave her son a blessing before the guards escorted him out. Her face was ashen as the threesome made their way back to their barge.

“If I have been betrayed,” Elizabeth whispered, “’tis by my daughter’s weakness. My daughter, who sits on the throne only because I risked my life in scheming for her marriage to that weasel. God damn him to hellfire!” she spat.

Grace crossed herself and sent up a prayer, hoping to cancel the blasphemy and spare her mistress further heavenly punishment.

“Aye, Elizabeth. And that traitor Thomas Gower, whoever he may be,” Lady Hastings muttered, glancing over at Grace, who pretended not to hear.

But she, too, was beginning to doubt Tom’s innocence. She was learning not to trust anyone at court and to keep her own counsel. She grimaced. So, it was back into seclusion behind abbey walls for her, she reflected. And she thought she had come so far!

B
ERMONDSEY VILLAGE WAS
adjacent to the lively borough of Southwark, which Grace observed at her leisure as the royal carriage lumbered through the crowded streets after crossing London Bridge. A crowd was gathered at a respectful distance from an enormous chained and muzzled black bear, tormented by two dogs lunging viciously at its exposed belly. Every now and then a swipe from its powerful paw sent a howling dog hurtling into the spectators, who turned it around and sent it back into the fray. Grace dragged her eyes from the grisly scene and fixed them upon a buxom wench with a breast hanging out of her bodice and her ragged gown split open to expose a fleshy leg to any passerby interested in exchanging her talents for a few coins. Curious citizens gawped at the royal party as it wended its way up St. Margaret’s Hill. They did not know that the carriage and few carts were transporting the once all-powerful wife of King Edward to her forced retirement. The group passed the newly roofed St. Mary Overie, the pillory, the well, the bull-baiting ring, the breweries and the many inns and taverns—the Swan with Two Heads, the White Hart and the Tabard—on their way into Long Lane. Grace had so many questions on her lips, like: “The Tabard Inn is where Master Chaucer’s pilgrims began their journey, is it not?” “What do you suppose the man in the stocks has done?” and “How does that man walk on those tall sticks?”
But Elizabeth had sunk into despondency as soon as she returned to her house following her audience with Henry, and no one dared speak to her unless she invited it. When the small company left the busy thoroughfare and turned into Long Lane, the walls of the abbey could be seen looming over fields and woodlands in the near distance, and Grace’s heart sank.

“Certes, Elizabeth,” Henry had said upon the farewell meeting with his mother-in-law before the court removed to Shene. “We have no need of an unmarried bastard of Edward’s here. ’Tis not my duty to care for her. By all means, take her.”

Bess had turned sorrowful eyes on Grace, whose own eyes told the queen:
“Your mother has been good to me, and I will protect her if you will not.”
Bess was dismayed by the look and had the grace to lower her head. Elizabeth had embraced her oldest child fondly despite her previous ire towards her, and Bess for once cared not that Henry saw her tears. He frowned and gently pried the two women apart, wholly possessing Bess’s attention once again. He may love her, Grace thought, but only when he can control her. “You may visit your mother from time to time, my dear. Dry your tears; ’tis not as though she will vanish from your sight,” Henry had chided her.

Selfishly, Elizabeth had not thought of Grace’s comfort in her request, only of her own misery, but Grace had been proud that Elizabeth wanted her. It was only now, as the gates of the Abbey of St. Saviour closed behind her, that she felt trapped. She was all too familiar with life in a cloister, and she could not believe she was returning to it so soon after being liberated. Instead of the gray-habited nuns of Delapre, it was the black hoods of the Benedictine monks that greeted the dowager queen and her few attendants that blustery March day. Elizabeth had chosen Bermondsey Abbey because, in its twelfth-century charter, it was ordered to provide hospitality to any descendants of the great de Clare family, and Elizabeth’s husband, Edward, had been a member.

Elizabeth was gracious to Prior John Marlow, who came from nobility, as did many of the monks at Bermondsey. He was so fat it was hard to know where his chin began and his belly left off, ample evidence that one ate well at the abbey.

The prior blessed the new arrivals as soon as they stepped from the carriage, and then led the way to the few rooms that would be Elizabeth’s new home. The abbey, with its monastery and priory house, sat on several acres,
and outside its walls were the fields and orchards that fed the cloistered community. A small army of laymen kept the abbey running smoothly, all living in cottages or huts within the shelter of the abbey walls. Grace was pleasantly surprised to see grooms, cooks and gardeners milling around the buildings, working alongside the monks; and in the fields, harrowers, clodhoppers and ploughmen were readying the fields for sowing.

“Bermondsey is one of the wealthiest prior houses in the kingdom,” Cecily had confided to Grace when she had visited Ormond’s Inn before her mother’s departure. Elizabeth had been too distracted by choosing what to take to Bermondsey to spend time with her daughter, so Cecily had herded Grace into the garden to pick daffodils. Nodding and bobbing in the March wind, the flowers had sprung up all over the lawn in the first few warm days of the English spring. Accompanied by Cecily’s young maid, the two young women walked and talked among the golden blooms, occasionally stooping to cut one with small iron shears.

“Mother will be well looked after; never fear. I only wish you could go with us to Shene, Grace. How will you find a husband hidden away in an abbey?”

Grace had stared at her sister in astonishment. “Find me a husband? But you heard the king: I am but a banished bastard with no dowry. Who would want me now?”

“Never forget you are a Plantagenet, Grace,” Cecily retorted. “There are only a few of us, and someone will be proud to wed you, bastard or no.”

Grace grinned. “I think perhaps I will be better off in an abbey than forced into the bed of someone like Viscount Welles,” she replied, and ducked a clod that was aimed at her. “When will you two wed, pray?”

Cecily shrugged, taking off one of her crimson crackows and wiggling her cramped toes. “The later the better. He has been showering me with gifts, though,” she said, chuckling. “Look at this brooch—the pearl is as big as a duck egg. He does not seem to be as penny-pinching as his uncle, in truth. Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

L
YING IN THE
pitch-black of a rural night several weeks later, Grace was courting sleep by conjuring up such vivid memories as the conversation with Cecily as she tried to get comfortable in her truckle bed. She was still not yet used to the rope-slung cot with its palliasse of straw under a mat
tress of spiky chicken feathers, and she swore she could feel every knot as she tossed and turned. She yearned for the large, carved wooden bed topped with a goose-down mattress that she had slept on at Ormond’s Inn with another of Elizabeth’s attendants. In their new quarters, even Elizabeth had to share her bed, which she did with Katherine Hastings, and Grace’s cot was stowed underneath during the day.

Grace was missing her weekly conversations with Cecily, who had brought the court gossip to Ormond’s Inn and whose descriptions painted pictures for Grace that stayed with her for days afterwards. Hearing news from someone close to the king was not the same as hearing it from a traveler sharing the monks’ hospitality for a night. She remembered the gasp of disbelief that went up when one such passing merchant told the company that the boy claiming to be the young earl of Warwick had been crowned “King Edward the Sixth of England” by the Irish nobility in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral.

“But we saw the young earl with our own eyes in London not two months ago,” one diner said. “And he is back in the Tower. It cannot be the same lad.”

“Pah! ’Tis certain the boy in Ireland is false. But ’tis said not one of those Irish rebels raised a sword in allegiance to our sovereign lord Henry,” the man cried. “Certes, we all know what a nest of York arse-kissers those peat-burners are.” Several pairs of anxious eyes swiveled in Elizabeth’s direction, but she calmly continued eating her food, guest of honor at Father John’s table. No one could see her clenched fist under the table due to the elaborate linen laid upon the abbot’s table including an exquisitely decorated frontal cloth that hid the diners’ legs and kept them free from draughts.

“My good man,” Prior John’s voice erupted from his many chins and thundered across the hall, silencing the speaker. “You are in the company of the dowager queen of England, widow of our much-loved sovereign, King Edward.” He did not need to remind the embarrassed merchant that Edward had been the head of the house of York. Elizabeth nodded her thanks to the abbot, who called for more food. Plates of pheasant, duck and suckling pig were set upon the head table, but Elizabeth waved it away. Her confinement had done nothing to fatten her already dwindling flesh, despite the abundance of food provided daily by the rich abbey. When
Grace combed her mentor’s hair these days, she noticed how limp and white it had become, and although Elizabeth always attempted to look her best for these public dinners, her gowns hung off her bony shoulders and she had no breasts to fill the bodices. It was as though her appetite for life had died that day in February.