The Lady of the Rivers (73 page)

His smile has lost its joyous light. ‘I’m safe,’ he says. ‘I thank God who guarded me the whole long night an day. What are you doing here? It’s like hell, here.’

‘Looking for you,’ I say. ‘And . . . Anthony, where is your father?’

‘Oh!’ he exclaims, realising what I am thinking. ‘Oh no, don’t, Mother. He is fine. He’s not injured. He’s just . . . ’ He looks around. ‘Here he is.’

I turn and there is Richard. I would hardly have recognised him. His breastplate is dented across his heart, his face blackened with smoke and blood, but he walks towards me, as he always walks towards me, as if nothing could ever separate us.

‘Richard,’ I whisper.

‘Beloved,’ he says hoarsely.

‘You’re safe?’

‘I always come home to you.’

We go west, to get away from the road to York which is choked with men falling to their knees and crying for water, and lined with those who have fallen out to die. We ride cross-country across the broad plain of York until we find a farmhouse where they allow us to sleep in the barn, wash in the stream, and sell us food. We eat farmer’s broth: a speck of overstewed mutton with gruel and carrots, and we drink their small ale.

When he has eaten and is looking less drained I ask, tentatively for I fear his reply, ‘Richard, the queen is going north to regroup, and then on to Scotland to raise more recruits, and then she says she will come back. What are we going to do?’

There is a silence. Anthony and my husband exchange a long look as if they have been dreading what they are about to say.

‘What is it?’ I look from one to the other. ‘What has happened?’

‘We’re finished,’ Anthony volunteers. ‘I am sorry, Lady Mother. I have handed in my sword. I have sworn loyalty to York.’

I am stunned. I turn to Richard.

‘I too,’ he says. ‘I would not serve the queen again, not in such an army, not under such a command. But anyway, we lost on the battlefield, we handed in our swords and surrendered. I thought Edward would have us executed but –’ He has a ghost of a smile. ‘He was merciful to us. He took our swords from us, I am dishonoured. I am no longer a knight, I am sorry. We swore fealty to him, and it is over for us. I cannot take arms against him. I was defeated, I surrendered my sword. I am sworn to the House of York. I cannot serve Henry or Margaret: they are outlaws now to me.’

It is his use of their names that shakes me as much as anything, that tells me that everything is over, and everything is changed. ‘Henry,’ I repeat as if saying the name for the very first time. ‘You call the king Henry.’

‘The king’s name is Edward,’ my husband says as if repeating a lesson. ‘King Edward.’

I shake my head. Even though I had ridden all day against the tide of wounded men, I had not thought of our cause as lost. I have been with Margaret for so long that I can think only in terms of battles. I thought that we had lost another battle, but that there would be yet another battle after this. Now, as I look at my husband’s weary face and the hollow eyes of my son, say, ‘You think that Henry and Margaret will never win back the throne?’

He shows me his empty scabbard, where his beautifully embossed sword used to be. ‘I cannot help them to it, at any rate,’ he says. ‘I have surrendered my sword to the new king. I am sworn.’

‘We are no longer of the House of Lancaster?’ I am still incredulous.

Anthony nods. ‘It’s over,’ he says. ‘And we are lucky to have escaped with our heads on our necks.’

‘That’s all that matters,’ I say, grasping at a truth. ‘That must be all that matters, at the very end. You are alive, and your father. At any rate, that’s what matters most to me.’

We lie, that night, like a poor family, in the straw together under our heaped capes for warmth, our small troop of men in the stable with our horses. Richard’s arm is around me, all the night long. ‘We’ll go to Grafton,’ I whisper as I fall asleep. ‘And we will be squires again, and we will think of all of this as a romance, a story that someone might write one day.’

GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE,
SPRING 1464

I gather my children about me and Elizabeth comes home with her two boys from Groby Hall. She is all but penniless; her mother-in-law will not pay her dower and in these troubled times we have neither power nor influence to make her keep her side of the marriage contract which gave me such pride and pleasure only a few years ago, and now means nothing.

Richard and Anthony are given official pardons and appointed to the Privy Council. The new king turns out to be an astute commander of men, a king for all parties. He rules with the advice of the Earl of Warwick who put him on the throne, but he calls as many of the lords into government as will come. He does not favour York lords, he truly seems to want to be a king for all the people of the country. A few lords go into exile, a few are with the queen, sometimes in Scotland, sometimes in France, forever raising forces, threatening England, planning a return. I think I will never see her again, the pretty French girl who would not marry until I had told her what her destiny would be. It has been the wheel of fortune indeed. She was the greatest woman in England and now she cannot have so much as a roof over her head in her own country; but she is hunted down like the last wolf.

I hardly ever hear of her, my news is all of the parish and the gossip is all from the neighbouring town. I see my son Anthony married to Elizabeth, Lady Scales, I start to consider suitable partners for my other children; but we do not command the wealth and the power that we had when Margaret of Anjou was on the throne and I was her dearest friend and lady in waiting, and my husband one of the great men of court. Now we are only squires of Grafton and though I find I am interested in my growing orchard, and even more in my children and grandsons, it is hard for me to look at other small country squires and think that my children should be married among them. I expect more for them. I want more for them.

Especially for my Elizabeth.

One day in spring, I go to the great chest in my bedroom, and I take out the purse that my great-aunt Jehanne gave me, all those years ago. I look at the charms, and at all the choices that there might be in the world for Elizabeth: a young woman – but not in the first blush of her youth; a beauty – but not a maiden; a clever scholarly girl – but not with the faith to make an abbess. I choose the charm of a ship to signify that she might travel, I choose the charm of a little house to signify that she might win her dower lands and get a house for herself, and I am about to choose a third charm, when one of them breaks from the bracelet and falls into my lap. It is a ring for a small finger curiously wrought in the shape of a crown. I hold it up to the light and look at it. I start to try it on my own finger and then I hesitate. I don’t want it on my finger, I don’t know what it means. I tie it on a long black thread, and tie the other two on their own long black threads and I go out of the house as the early silver moon starts to rise in the pale sky.

‘Can we come with you, Lady Grandmother?’ Her boys appear from nowhere, mud on their faces as usual. ‘Where are you going with that basket?’

‘You can’t come with me,’ I say. ‘I am looking for plover eggs. But I will take you tomorrow if I find a nest.’

‘Can’t we come now?’ asks Thomas, Elizabeth’s oldest boy.

I put my hand on his head, his warm silky curls remind me of Anthony when he was a loving little boy like this one. ‘No. You must find your mother and eat your supper and go to bed when she orders you. But I will take you with me tomorrow.’

I leave them and go across the gravel garden at the front of the house, through the wicket gate and down to the river. There is a little bridge across the river, a couple of small wooden planks where the children like to come to fish, and I go across, ducking my head under the upturned branches of the ash tree, and scramble down the little bank to the trunk of the tree.

I put my arms around the tree to tie the three strings around it, and my cheek lies against the rippled grey bark. For a moment I listen. Almost I can hear the heart of the tree beating. ‘What will become of Elizabeth?’ I whisper, and it is almost as if the leaves can whisper back to me. ‘What will become of my Elizabeth?’

I have never been able to foresee her future, even though of all my children she has always been the one that promised so much. I have always thought she might be especially blessed. I wait; the leaves rustle. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I say to myself. ‘Perhaps the stream will tell us.’

Each charm is now tied to the tree by its own long dark string and when I throw them out into the water, as far as they can go, I hear three splashes like a salmon snapping a fly, and they are gone, and the threads are invisible.

I stand for a moment and look into the moving water. ‘Elizabeth,’ I say quietly to the stream. ‘Tell me what will become of Elizabeth, my daughter.’

At dinner that night my husband says that the king is recruiting soldiers for a new battle. He will be marching north. ‘You won’t have to go?’ I say in sudden alarm. ‘Nor Anthony?’

‘We’ll have to send men, but to be hone my dear, I don’t think they would especially want us in the line.’

Anthony gives a rueful chuckle. ‘Like Lovelace,’ he says, and his father laughs.

‘Like Trollope.’

‘I should ask King Edward to enquire into my dower,’ Elizabeth remarks. ‘For sure my boys will have nothing unless I can find someone who will make Lady Grey keep her promise to me.’

‘Kidnap him as he rides by,’ Anthony suggests. ‘Fall on your knees to him.’

‘My daughter will do no such thing,’ my husband rules. ‘And we can provide for you here, until you reach agreement with Lady Grey.’

Elizabeth sensibly holds her tongue, but the next day, I see her wash her boys’ hair and dress them in their Sunday suits and I say nothing. I splash a little perfume of my own brewing on the veil of her headdress, but I give her neither apple blossom nor apple. I believe there is not a man in the world who could ride past my daughter and not stop and ask her name. She puts on her plain grey gown and sets off from the house holding her boys firmly by their hands, walking down the track to the road from London, where the king is certain to ride by with his troop.

I watch her go, a pretty young woman on a warm spring day, and it is like a dream to see her, stepping lightly down the lane between the hedges where the white roses are coming into flower. She is walking out to her future, to claim her own, though I still don’t know what her future will be.

I go to the still room, and take down a small jar, sealed tight with a waxed cork. It is a love philtre I made for Anthony’s wedding night. I take it to the brew house and put three drops in a jug of our best ale, and take it to the great hall, with our best glasses, and then I wait, quietly with the spring sunshine coming through the mullioned windows and a blackbird singing in the tree outside.

I don’t have to wait very long. I look down the road and there is Elizabeth, smiling and laughing, and walking beside her is the handsome boy that I first saw outside the queen’s rooms when he bowed over my hand so politely. Now he is a grown man and the King of England. He is leading his great war horse and high up on its back, clinging to the saddle, their faces bright with joy, are my two grandsons.