The Maiden and the Unicorn (30 page)

The three women watched, fascinated, as George of Clarence finally crumpled slowly to his knees, his left arm still clamped to the bedpost. He was lullabying himself asleep with some tuneless rigmarole they could barely hear.

Richard rescued the half-empty cup and set it on the tray. Isabella instantly rose and came across to peer at her husband.

"Is he safe now?"

"He will have the mother and father of all headaches tomorrow and will curse the hours he must spend in the saddle. If you would kindly remove the tray, madam, I will lift him into bed."

The eighteen-year-old Neville nose crinkled in disgust. "I do not want him in my bed. He stinks."

"I shall cleanse him, my lady. Can one of you find me some water while we set this room to rights?"

Ankarette pulled a face at Margery as she corrected a footstool. "I can see now why you did not want to wed Master Huddleston. Do they breed tyrants in Cumbria?"

Margery found a jug of water that had miraculously survived and carried it across. Isabella merely stood and watched as Richard pulled back the bedding and rearranged the pillows before he dragged Clarence up onto the bed.

"Madam, you must take care that his tongue does not fall back into his throat else he will choke and die."

"You mean you are going to leave him here with me?"

Richard had removed the Duke's slippers and began to untie the points that were still holding the ducal hose. "This is where he desired to be." He straightened up and looked down gravely at the little duchess. There was a hint of shared blood with Margery but more of the Countess in the girl's face. "Your grace, a little deception would be advisable. Let his grace awake as if he had—shall we say—achieved his objective. If we remove his clothes and you are sympathetic to him in the morning, I will wager he will remember none of this."

"Sympathetic!" snorted Ankarette, coming across to glare at the unconscious man. "He was a monster."

"That is my advice," retorted Richard curtly. "If you can think of a better way to deal with the future king of England..."

His meaning reached Ankarette. She chewed her lip angrily but nodded. "Oh, you are clever, Master Huddleston. I suppose my future is now in jeopardy."

Margery tipped some water onto a sponge and waited while he tied his hanging sleeves behind his back before she handed it to him.

"You are in no danger, Ankarette," Isabella protested. "You were doing your best for me."

"He fell, madam." Richard made it a statement as he swabbed the Duke's face and wiped the mixture of wine and supper from the pale hairless chest. "He fell and hit his head because he had been drinking. The fault was his."

"Yes." Isabella brought her fingers together in a steeple. "Yes, Master Huddleston is right. That is exactly how it happened."

"And the chip in Our Lady?" Margery lifted the statue and ran a finger over the Virgin's head.

"I leave that to Ankarette's devising. She will, of course, have to explain to the curious how she came by her bruise." His eyes met Margery's for a brief second of understanding. Ankarette's tongue usually waggled in other people's matters.

"We shall think of something." Isabella seemed to be able to confront the damage now. "Do you think George will remember which of my ladies was in attendance, sir? Shall we say that Ankarette fell down the stairs?"

Richard wanted no more of the business. "You will need to put ointment on that cut, my lady, and restore this room to rights. I can probably rehang the King of France's curtains and the arras."

While Ankarette hunted for the salve and Margery picked up the shards of glass from the fur rug, he and the Duchess finished undressing the Duke. It took time. It was like stripping a corpse and Richard found the task distasteful. He only hoped the Duke's memory would prove as confused as the tangle of the bedchamber.

Isabella seemed superlatively grateful. But if ever she became queen, would she bother to remember? He doubted it as he stood up on the bed, straddling the Duke, and tidied up the bedcurtains. No one liked to be reminded of previous embarrassments.

"Madam, I shall leave you." He did not know where the rest of the strewn clothes and finery belonged. "Margery?"

His wife's eyes grew round as gooseberries. Damnation on the wench, did she think he still ached to bed her? And yet the notion was not unappealing.

"No, I beg you, Master Huddleston…
Richard,
" the Duchess set a gracious hand upon his sleeve, her eyelashes fluttering. "Richard, please, will you sleep in the outer chamber tonight in case he wakes?"

"He will not, I assure you." Out of the corner of his vision, Richard saw Margery clap a hand to her lips and turn her back. The little witch was laughing.

"Shall you disobey me, Master Huddleston?" The Duchess fixed him, her mouth in a pout.

"No, madam," he sighed and brushed his lips across the back of her proffered hand.

It was a relief to escape into the outer chamber. He looked around and sat down wearily on one of the empty beds. Cecily and Blanche, still awake, were instantly out of bed and on either side of him as he fended off their questions. It restored his belief in the state of things and he was quite pleased when Margery came out a while later and found them still making a fuss of him. Dark shadows underlined her eyes but her amusement was fresh enough.

"Blanche, Cecily, we must all get some sleep if we are to leave tomorrow. That is usually my bed, sir, but you are welcome to it. I shall take Ankarette's." Her fingers slowly undid the band which held her headdress and she ran her lithe fingers through her hair for pins, seductive blue eyes taunting him wantonly. Oh, she could do it now to torture him, knowing she was safe. Was this how the King had seen her? Mischievous, seductive?

Richard thought rapidly—to save his sanity—of sieges, decrepitude, altars, anything. Anything that would stop the rising heat, the aching for release. By the Saints, he would pay her back mercilessly for this night's work. "This arrangement should please you, sir. It will be like sleeping in a paynim harem for the night."

He hoped his gaze scorched her, that she would lie awake aching for him.

"Is it true that the female slaves are supposed to wriggle up from the bottom of the Sultan's bed?" Cecily sat up giggling.

"No, that is the duty of his wives and concubines," Margery answered confidently. Richard watched with pleasure as she met his raised eyebrow and blushed livid as she realised what she had said. There were no more alluring glances after that. She snuffed out the two candles that lit the room. The sound of her sliding down her garters to remove her stockings pained him.

When finally Blanche and Cecily slept, she came and stood at the foot of his bed, unwittingly tempting him further. "I am sorry that you were hauled into this. You acted with great ingenuity and foresight."

"Praise coming from you? It was hardly unselfish, believe me. I cannot afford to make so powerful an enemy."

"To be truthful, I am not easy about him becoming king."

He laughed softly, bitterly, at the circumstances in which he found himself, in exile with a rebellious wife to tame and a fickle wine-bibbler to placate. "Are you not, Margery Huddleston? Well, let us see what his most Christian Majesty of France has to say in the matter when we reach Amboise."

Chapter 15

At least the journey to Amboise was without incident, Margery conceded on the last day. That was if she discounted the Countess mislaying her favourite ring, a cart mysteriously disappearing overnight and the damp sheets which marred the hospitality of the abbey where they had stayed two nights ago.

The grumbling, which had begun then, had stoked the complacency of the English visitors. Warwick's entourage, as many travellers do, spent their time comparing their own land favourably with that they were visiting. Such self-congratulation, Margery noted, skirted the fact that they themselves were beggars on the King of France's hospitality.

The Duke, with as much discretion as a flea on an archbishop's forehead, had declared that the farms in France were less prosperous than their English counterparts. He was unfortunately right. The buildings were meagre, the thatch threadbare and untidy. Few yeomen were to be seen, and the peasants haymaking in their lord'' meadows were more raggedly garbed than any Margery had ever seen in the Kingmaker's fields. The men, mostly bare-legged and unshod, wore unbelted loose smocks looped up into their breech clouts. The women labourers were pronounced less comely than their English counterparts, although Margery observed the Englishmen noting the naked sunbrown legs beneath the hoisted kirtles and the flesh showing beneath the loose lacing of the bodices.

Where her husband's looks sped, Margery had no inkling, for Richard Huddleston did not travel with them. He rose earlier always, bidden to ride ahead with the King of France's officers to ensure the coming night's hospitality was adequate. He never sat long at supper either. He was giving her time and space but she sensed that like a patient hunter, he would eventually close in.

As the pilgrims to King Louis's gold left the apple orchards and the small high-hedged fields of Normandy, the land flattened and the whisper of the vast fields of waving seed heads betokened a good harvest. Near journey's end, they glimpsed the towers of Tours, but took a road past vine-yards to the south-east. At noon of the last day, they found Huddleston and some of the other knights awaiting their company beside a small tributary with the news that the French dignitaries would be with them within two hours and that they were now but three miles from Amboise.

The convoy of carts and riders halted and the chests were unlocked. A pavilion was swiftly thrown up for the ladies to exchange their riding gowns for courtly garments. The slap of water on male skin filled the air. Blushing maidservants carried ewers from the stream to the Countess and her daughters while the ladies-in-waiting lifted out the newly-stitched gowns from where they had been packed so carefully after pressing. Some of the fabric had fared ill but it would have taken too much time to have lit fires for the flat irons.

For the Countess, the tiring women shook out a dark blue brocade with sweeping dalmatian sleeves and a heavily embroidered border of emerald leaves and golden daisies. For her eldest daughter, Ankarette lovingly brought an overgown of lavender, spangled with tiny gold and silver stars and edged with a broad collar and stiff back-turned cuffs in cloth of gold.

The simplest kirtle was Anne's with its round, modest neck. Blue threads adorned the folds of snowy shimmering silk with tiny meadow speedwells, the only ornament a belt of small white and gold enamelled platelets that clasped about her slender hips. Unwed, she wore her blonde hair free beneath a satin cap latticed with tiny gems.

Her mother and sister needed more imposing edifices. The Countess fussed loudly about the construction going on above her brow. For years she had followed the fashion set by the late Queen Ysabeau of France—the steeple henin—but her daughters had at last persuaded her to adopt the more modish butterfly headdress which at least did not rise to such monstrous, uncomfortable heights.

While Isabella was having a final tantrum about her eyebrows, Ankarette and Margery were at last free to hastily change their attire. Margery was permitted much less extravagance than her half-sisters, but the Burgundian dusky dark rose overgown which Alys hurriedly tugged over her head was the finest she had ever worn. Grumbling as she pinned, Alys lamented that her mistress had insufficient curls to whirl into a chignon beneath the high, flat-topped cap surmounted by a stiff wire loop. It was not very comfortable. The top of the wire reared like the antennae of a butterfly above the cap. Over it Alys draped a delicate veil of cascading gauzy tisshew so transparent that it revealed the darker hue beneath.

Margery rose, unconcerned about applauding her own reflection, which was just as well since Isabella was monopolising the polished silver handmirror. The decision as to whether Ankarette should come and fasten a sapphire brooch with tear-drop pearls in the centre of the Duchess's cap did not concern Margery, but she was irritated by the Countess's pleas for reassurance on the new-style headdress from every woman in the pavilion.

Only when a dab of rouge had been administered to each cheek did Warwick's wife finally rise satisfied to inspect her daughters and their attendants. It was inevitable she found something to criticise about her husband's bastard. Sweeping a haughty eye down Margery's overgown with its tiny white and pink marguerites, she sucked in her plump cheeks. "Yes, we all know you look very fine, Mistress Huddleston, but at least try to behave like a lady. You are supposed to thrust your belly out in deference to Our Lady and keep your hands clasped upon your girdle as you walk and your eyes modest and downcast. Remember, it is a royal court."