The King's Grey Mare (66 page)

‘Don’t stay?
Don’t go?’

He would never ask, she knew; his shame was great.
But his answer was there in the drowning way he clung to her hand, and fumbled with the ring, hurting her finger as he pushed it on again.
There was one more thing to say, and still kneeling, she said it, carefully, the private oath.

‘I, Grace Plantagenet, being neither wife nor leman to any man and by this reason free, do pledge my heart to my dearly beloved John of Gloucester.
In this place, as God witness my deed.
And should I swerve from John may God take my life and damn me eternally.’

‘Yes,’ he said hoarsely.
He raised her and took her in her arms, clasping her so hard that they both swayed against the wall, and his kiss brought a drop of blood into her mouth that mingled with their tears.

She had dreamed of love many times, thinking it to be a thing of softness, swift and gay as a butterfly, and as trivial.
When he lifted her and took her to the bed it was the death of her dreams, and she was afraid.
Love was not kind; it was a driving storm that stripped her spirit naked.
Far away she heard her own sobbing and his words of love.
He was the wind and she the leaf; in his arms she knew dissolution.
She became the altar for his sacrifice, the balm for his wounds.

For a space they were apart from the world.
The squalid room floated, a fragile rainbow bubble, and sheltered them.

He slept a little, wrapped in her hair.
When he awoke, there was fresh colour in his cheeks, and he was John again.
She held him, looking like a madonna down at his face.
Outside a little breeze had freshened and the shutters slapped against the casement, creaking like the timbers of a galleon.
He took her hand and filled it with kisses, then raised himself to gaze at her.

‘My lady.’
He looked at the marks of his mouth upon her honey flesh.
‘I have dishonoured you.’

She smiled.
‘You have bound me to you.’

He sighed, searching her face; she knew his mind.
How long before the return to Westminster?
The parting kiss, the void, doubly tragic after past joy.
As if bidden, the brass note of Paul’s struck.
Outside the chamber door, the stair groaned as someone trod, listened, and went away.

‘The butcher,’ said John bitterly ‘Or one of his louts.
How many hours has that ear been at the door?’

She kissed him.
‘When I arrived the bell was sounding.’

‘So you must go.’
He turned his face away, and waited, holding his breath.

‘By my faith, love!’
said Grace.
‘This bolster is stuffed with rocks, I swear.
How can you sleep?’

She felt under the pillows and drew out a leather bag.
Gold coins spilled from it and rolled about the bed.

‘That is my pension,’ John said quietly.
‘My pension from the Tudor.
Twenty pounds a year.
I have not spent one penny, nor shall I, until I can use it against him.’

‘God knows,’ he went on, ‘why he has been so bountiful.
Be sure though that he has spread word of his generosity, so that the public may applaud.’
He frowned, threw up a gold angel and caught it.
Drawing Grace close, he laid his cheek, against hers.
‘And yet … it would pleasure me to spend the money.
On you, sweeting.
We could be merry with it.’

She closed her eyes.
Outside, the quarter boomed.
She must dress and leave, or it would be too late.
John’s voice went softly on.

‘I keep it beneath my pillow in the hope that one of Gould’s lads might steal it, and then I could be rid of it.
Graceless, unkindly fellows … and Gould hates me.
He would poison me if he dared.’

Grace lay, breathing his warmth.
Her gown and cloak lay on the floor.
It was a hundred miles to walk and pick them up and put them on.
Quiet and blissful, John set his lips upon the crown of her hair.

‘I am hungry,’ he said.

‘We have been here most of the day.’

‘Yes.
And now …’

‘Now.’

‘Now you must return to the Palace.’
She sat up and looked down at his face, its sadness, the transiency of his joy.

‘I cannot marry you,’ he said gravely.
‘It would mean asking the Tudor’s assent, and I will ask him for nothing.’

She bowed her head, silent.

‘Go, go,’ he said roughly.
‘Already I feel the pain.’

She took his face between her hands, and found herself speaking words that might have been long rehearsed; words without which time itself were void.

‘I shall go nowhere without you,’ she said.
‘Have I not sworn?
Never send me away, my dear love.’

Against her breast she felt the quick hard beat of his heart, so vibrantly alive.

‘You are sure?’

She nodded, smiling; he leaped up, seizing her discarded gown and bringing it to her where she lay.

‘Get up, my love!’

Between tears and laughter she looked at him.

‘We’ll go out,’ he declared.
‘To the best cookhouse in London.
I shall be a merchant–’ he started to fling the gold angels about the bed – ‘and you a rich and pampered merchant’s wife.
I thought I had forgotten how to be happy!’

Naked and laughing, he said, ‘Hurry, love; it grows late.
Come, love, wife, my honey sweet!’
She caught his mood and, sprang up, quickly making herself fine again with the aid of his dingy steel mirror.
But when they were ready, a doubt assailed her, and made her new joy bleak and terrible for a moment.

‘Elizabeth…’ she began, and saw his face change, and went to him, putting her arms about his neck.

‘My heart, don’t blame me; don’t chide me if I speak of her at times.’
He sighed, and held her close, saying: ‘What then, love?’

‘She will be treated fairly?
She is in favour with King Henry.’
She said it as if to convince herself.

For a moment he was silent.
Then he said: ‘Doubtless.’
He opened the door and Grace went down the dark stairs with a light step.
As he followed her, he said softly, for his own peace: ‘Elizabeth!
Tudor will see you damned!’

‘Way for Elizabeth, the Queen-Dowager!’

‘Welcome to Winchester, highness!’

The words were gold in her ears.
Accompanied by Dorset, she walked into the splendid hall.
She told herself: these words mean more than my estates, my jewels, more even than the bounty I have lately surrendered, and for which the King will pay me in lieu.
These titles are more than Sheen, through which we passed on the journey, or Greenwich, or the Queens’ College, Cambridge, or Windsor, or Eltham.

Queen-Dowager!
Highness!
These hard-won words that break and vanish like bubbles on the air are more than the seat of princes.
Does this mean that I have changed, grown old, less striving?
Who knows?
I am content with my saviour’s ordinance, and I will tell him so, given the chance.

Elegant and emaciated in dark blue, she entered Winchester, allowed for the first time to visit Bess.
All around courtiers bowed down, corn in a gale.
The familiar feeling of near-divinity touched her.
The royal matriarch comes!
Winchester itself she did not know well; only now, in Henry’s time, did it assume the stamp of majesty.
She had visited the cathedral which stood rosily weathered in an emerald close.
There, within the holy quiet she had seen the fabulous Round Table, the King’s innovation.
Painted with the Tudor Rose, it lay beneath the Dragon banners with sunlight shafting down upon twelve empty thrones.
Mystic silence surrounded it, as it awaited King Arthur’s return.

Summer was nearly over, and Winchester also waited, for Arthur’s practical incarnation.
Henry’s progress was complete.
As Elizabeth and Dorset travelled their southerly road, royal courtiers had overtaken them, crying of safety and success.
Now, as Elizabeth and her son proceeded up the hall, the King’s mother rose to receive them.
The Countess was not pleased; but after a summer of asking she could no longer withhold the sight of Bess.
She kissed Elizabeth, and gave Dorset a gimlet look.
Then she led him to the Queen’s apartments.
Every door was guarded and the ways were clotted with monks and priests and nurses.
Throughout the palace preparation for the King’s arrival was apparent.
Servants smoothed fresh Arras on the walls, strewed a bushel of gillyflowers, bullied one another.
Yet within the Queen’s chamber all was peace; an almost unhealthy quiet, a tomblike tranquillity.

Great with child, Bess reclined on a day-bed.
Her face was bored and flushed.
An abigail fanned her tirelessly.
The Queen’s hair was loose, and wheaten tendrils waved in the draught.
Her boredom deepened visibly at sight of the Countess, but when Elizabeth entered she brightened a little.
Margaret bustled forward, dismissing the maid with a sharp handclap.

‘Daughter!
Still abed!
You should stretch your limbs, or the babe will grow stunted: See, I have a visitor for you.’

Bess stretched out her hand to Elizabeth.
Her eyes rolled saying: See how I am persecuted!
but she smiled.

To the Countess, Elizabeth said: ‘I will speak to the Queen alone.’

‘Do not weary her,’ said Margaret commandingly, and went out.

‘Mother, be seated,’ said Bess.
‘You too, Thomas.
Elizabeth took a corner of the bed, and Dorset hitched himself on to an oak chest.

‘My daughter,’ said Elizabeth.
A surprising memory jolted her: Bess in her cradle, with Edward’s large sparkling face bending down.
What shall we call you?
Elizabeth?
Yet not as fair as my own, my peerless Elizabeth!
Moved by her own thought, she leaned to kiss the Queen.

‘We have been apart too long,’ she said, and realized the truth of it.
Had she been dreaming?
Where had the summer gone?
None had the right to hold her from her daughter, or her sons.
Richard and Ned would be grown now, big boys.
And Dorset, who did not often follow the train of her thought, said:

‘Madame, it’s good to be one family again.’
Drumming his heels like a schoolboy against the chest, he said: ‘How are my little brothers, Dick and Ned?’

Bess reached towards a bowl of fruit, took a peach and examined it.
One side was blackly bruised, marring the tawny lusciousness.
She threw the peach back into the dish.

‘How should I know?’
she said, wishing someone would rub her aching back.
She raised her blue eyes, smoothed the stomach filled with destiny.
‘I thought they were with you.’
She found a ripe grape and ate it – content to lie and wait, and reckon nothing.

Henry rode in with Morton an hour later.
He flung his reins ro a groom and strode through the portal.
He was still grimed from the hasty last stages of his journey, but was anxious to see that all was well with Bess, and went straight to her chamber.
He had thought about her constantly on the progress.
At Worcester, where the people openly mourned Richard, he had been obliged to hang a score of them on the High Cross – an example more salutary than the five hundred marks he fined them.
He had watched them drop and strangle, and Bess’s face had intruded, overlaying the spectacle, so that the victims were no more than so many insects brushed by storm.
At York, the ordeal of entry under Micklegate Bar was tempered by the thought of Bess.
The eyes of hate had been like fireflashes.
He had ordained that York’s Crown dues should be lowered (better to woo than to war at this juncture); and their resentment sailed over him like migrating birds, even when someone tried vainly to assassinate Northumberland.
Bess’s swollen body was in the forefront of his mind; a living pledge of new hope, the towering beginning of an everlasting line.
Only in Gloucester, the dead King’s own Duchy, had a chilling thought struck: what if the child were a girl?
He took ironic comfort from an old proverb: it takes a man to get a girl!
and he was not, even now, altogether sure of his own manhood.