The Queen's Lover (46 page)

Gently, wonderingly, Owain shook his head. Maredudd clearly had no idea about the anti-Welsh laws in force here if he thought it could be that easy to remake himself. He didn't yet know that his blood was tainted; his family ruined and himself doomed, whatever he did. Owain could already begin to see
how this evening would develop. He'd buy his cousin many tankards of ale, and listen as Maredudd sank further into self-pity, then carry the Welshman home. He'd promise to put his cousin up for a few days and arrange him an audience with the Bishop. It would only be later, after that, and after the excitement of the pardon, that the miserable truth would begin to sink in for Maredudd. Owain thought: I could have done without this, after all that's happened.

Maredudd had hardly mentioned the passing of the King. He didn't even seem to be worried that Henry's death might affect the old offer of a pardon. He certainly didn't ask whether Owain was saddened to lose his master. He didn't seem to be aware of Owain's fatigue.

"It's not much to ask, is it?" Maredudd was saying. "A marriage and a bit of land? Of course I accept that I'll never get a title, because of being Welsh. Nothing we can do about that. Look at you--plaything of the English half your life." Owain winced, but his cousin only shook his head and slurred, "Don't take offense now. Figure of speech. Though it's true enough. Still, I've been following what's happened to you since you've been in England. You were good in the war. In France. They say you captured the Duke of Orleans at Azincourt, with your own hands?"

Embarrassed, Owain nodded. He didn't tell anyone that story; he knew there'd been no great bravery in what he'd done. But Maredudd shook his head with grim pleasure; his prejudice confirmed. "And you weren't even knighted. Even for that. You see, as a Welshman you haven't got a hope. Even if you're the best, transcendently much better than the rest, you still haven't got a hope. They'll pass you over all your life."

So Maredudd did have some idea of a few of the problems of being Welsh then, Owain thought, feeling suddenly sorry for him, knowing how many more unpleasant discoveries there would be for him in the weeks and months to come.

Maredudd leaned forward, grinning as if the thought of being cut off from the normal life of a man of honor gave him a perverse kind of pleasure, and clapping Owain on the shoulder.

"So what you and I need, cousin, are good marriages. No
hope for us as things are. They'll trip us up at every turn. 'Bloody Welsh savages.' All that. But a good English wife each...eh? A girl with a family to look up to, and a dowry. That's what will set us straight. Put a generation between my father and a decent future. Give us children who can hope."

He didn't even seem to have looked at his London cousin carefully enough to see that under his black cloak Owain was wearing friar's black. The realization irritated Owain. Had Maredudd spent so long assuming robes were something you dressed up in for pretense that he didn't notice them at all anymore, or at least couldn't see them as a sign of a genuine wish to be considered a man of God? Was the man utterly self-absorbed?

Worse still, Maredudd had started talking loudly. Too loudly. He looked triumphantly around, then he did a tipsy double-take. The Southwark tavern folk had given up turning away their eyes. A dozen faces were turned toward him, giving him assessing stares that seemed to mean trouble.

"Welsh, eh?" the tavern keeper said.

There was a murmur from his mates; an edging and a tightening of bodies. They didn't like Welsh, their bodies were saying.

Maredudd's eyes rolled. He eyed them, seeming to be wondering whether he could take on this whole crowd and quite relishing the prospect. But you couldn't spend your life brawling in taverns for the honor of a Wales that no longer existed. Peaceably, Owain replied, "No, no. Brittany. Saint Malo. Breton." Breton sounded just like Welsh; he'd made himself understood, more or less, in Brittany. They'd have to believe him. He looked the tavern keeper straight in the eye, baring his teeth in a determinedly naive smile that he felt probably looked foolish, but did the trick of easing the man's anger, then passed him a coin. "Here," he added, knowing this would calm any last suspicions the mini-mob were being made fools of. "Let us buy our friends from London a drink."

The men turned away, thronging round the tavern keeper with a quiet hubbub in which Owain sensed embarrassment, watchfulness, and excitement at getting something for nothing.

It wearied him, the whole shameful business of living in the world he found himself in. There was so much of this: of small lies and evasions in the inglorious name of peace and quiet.

"Come on," he muttered, and Maredudd, looking shocked, followed him out. They didn't talk as they hurried back to the Bishop of Winchester's palace. Owain could sense Maredudd weighing up a future in which you often had to pretend to be Breton to avoid being roughed up by a Southwark ruffian.

Suddenly, in the darkness, with the whiff of whale tallow coming from the barrel down the street, the pity Owain felt for Maredudd overwhelmed him, and he put an arm out and laid it over his cousin's shoulder. Poor Maredudd, who was probably doing the right thing by making his peace with the English lords, but who would hate so much of the adjustments that would be forced on him along the way. Maredudd, who still didn't understand that he would never have the life of an English lord that he hoped for. Maredudd, who might just about manage to wangle a marriage of sorts, but certainly not the glorious sort he wanted. Maredudd, who hadn't understood yet that if you truly wanted to find peace, as a son of defeat, you had to step back altogether from the world and give up the notion of fathering children who'd only have to go on paying the price of their fathers' and grandfathers' crimes against England.

Owain could feel the uncertainty, the hurt, and the awareness of worse to come in the other man's tense shoulders. But, for the first time, he also felt peace in his own heart at the knowledge that he'd accepted that his blood was tainted; that now all he had to do was live, and trust in God.

"I've chosen my way, and it isn't marriage," he muttered. They were safe enough talking Welsh in the quiet of the night street, going at this pace. The chastened Maredudd nodded him on, listening properly for the first time. Owain nodded down at his robes and saw his cousin take in the cut of them and their meaning. "I'm choosing the world of beauty and meditation; not this. In due course, I'll join the Augustinians at Saint Mary's in Oxford," he went on. "There's a place for me; it's all arranged. But I have to wait seven years. I'd do it before then, to
get away from all this faster, if there weren't one last task tying me to this world."

Maredudd turned to give him a closer look.

"I promised to look after the son of my King while he's an infant," Owain said, still walking but uncomfortably aware of that turned head beside him, the slow eyes. He pushed himself on to add, in the most neutral voice possible, "...and the widow. I'm going to work in her household."

Maredudd didn't look away. It was Owain's turn to feel uneasy. He didn't know why he felt rattled enough that he added: "It was the King who wanted me to. His last wish." He knew he was telling a lie.

"Why not go to Oxford now? What is the King of England's last wish to you?" Maredudd said, and there was no offense in the hard words, just a kind of astonishment--as if Maredudd was wondering what had happened to the brave young Welsh cousin he remembered.

Owain shook his head, thinking of Henry; lost in admiration he couldn't put into words. The rage of the road slipped away, leaving only the fatigue. He felt his eyes soften and moisten. "He was..."

His voice cracked. They both stopped walking.

"A kindness. Seven years," Owain said when his voice came back. "It will slip past in no time."

TWENTY-FOUR

Two months later, with the first snow in the iron air of November, Catherine sat before Duke Humphrey and listened warily to the statement he'd prepared about her future life.

It didn't matter what the ginger Duke said really, she told herself, keeping her breathing steady and the polite little smile on her face. Nothing mattered now she had Harry back; a Harry who, at eleven months old, could walk properly and cheerfully yell "No!" at anyone who crossed him. And a Harry who'd remembered his mother. As soon as he'd seen her for the first time since the summer, he had said "Mama" with such treble reverence that it had wrung her heart and brought tears to her eyes, even before they'd run into each other's arms and she'd swung him round and round until they were both dizzy and laughing and crying and chattering at once.

For the past two weeks, between solemn Masses and funeral rites, Catherine and her son had been inseparable--however much Mistress Ryman still clung on, hissing and clicking her teeth, and muttering disapprovingly that the King had been used to doing this or that or the other thing at this hour, and that the routines she'd established were important for the child's well-being, and upsetting them would only be damaging.

It was strange to be back in England--not as Queen, with at least the possibility of winning the respect of her new subjects (though she'd never felt that was a very likely prospect), but as Queen Mother--an old woman's position, she thought bewil
deredly, whose importance would dwindle with every passing year; an acknowledgment that, at twenty-one, the best days of her life were over. True, it didn't feel very different from being Queen yet--she'd been ignored or bossed around before Henry died, too. The only difference now was that there was a little more edge to both being ignored and bossed around, though it was all still very polite; and she knew she'd have no one to complain to if it did stop being polite.

Yet, strangely enough, being reunited with Harry after the strange emptiness of those months of separation seemed reward enough. They'd have nearly seven years together, she and her son, just as they were, living together, each with their little household. Each day would be a blessing. Her thoughts wouldn't move beyond that time, not yet. It was long enough. There was too much to get used to as things were. If she were really honest, she couldn't make herself imagine any time period beyond the next few weeks or months; beyond the small hope in a corner of her heart that somehow she'd find a way to get rid of the obnoxious Mistress Ryman. (Mistress Ryman was full of unpleasant ideas and harsh notions: she liked to swaddle Harry so tight in the evenings that he could scarcely move, to keep him docile; and she insisted that it was undignified and unqueenly for Catherine to sit on the floor and play with her son.)

Still, Catherine knew she'd have to be strong and watchful of events outside the nursery. The tussles of the dukes that she'd suspected would come had started already. The Council of England had taken one look at Henry's will and decided that it would be asking for trouble to let Duke Humphrey, the harsher, more capricious, younger royal brother, have the complete control over little Harry's person and over England that the dead King had stipulated. So they'd overridden Henry's will. This was largely because Duke John, writing from France, had made plain that he didn't want his little brother to be given too much power back in England, and no one else wanted to annoy the older royal Duke. It was Bishop Beaufort who'd masterminded the change and got the Council to limit Duke Humphrey's power. Under the new rules set out by the Bishop and Council, no single person--by which they meant Duke Humphrey--could
substitute for the King until Harry was old enough to exercise royal power for himself. Instead of Duke Humphrey being considered the Protector, the Council and Parliament were to reign collectively. Duke Humphrey would open and close the Parliament next month that would formalize little Harry's inheritance of the crown, but only because the older Duke John was away and the Council had given Humphrey permission to act on his infant nephew's behalf.

That wasn't what Duke Humphrey wanted. Catherine had observed him hurting at being deprived of absolute power. She could see it in the twitch of his bulging eyelids; in the extra effort he made to bow and hand her into her seat, and ask after her health, consciously and a little pompously, projecting power and affability though such courtesies came unnaturally to him. He was a stocky, bluff man with weather-beaten cheeks, a booming voice, and a habit of breaking into conversations with an opinion that would always be forcefully expressed, but might not always be wise. He was uncomfortably aware that his appearance struck some people as funny: his great lion's head and deep voice; his short stumpy legs. There was nothing he hated more than being ridiculed.

Still, he was the man she had to obey, and she needed to look gracious about it. Not that there was anything very hard to stomach in the orders she was hearing now. She'd already settled in at Windsor with Harry and begun the job of displacing Mistress Ryman. All he was telling her now was that she'd have to pay for that privilege out of her widow's dower.

It was only when he got to how much she'd have to pay that she began to feel shocked. "My brother's will leaves you well provided for," Duke Humphrey was saying. "You will keep your own suite of retainers, separate from His Majesty's household but attendant on His Majesty at all times until his seventh birthday. Since you will be sharing living quarters you will be expected to contribute seven pounds a day to the shared household expenses."

Catherine was glad of the seat's hard back propping her up. Seven pounds a day. That would come to more than PS2,500 a year--or more than a third of the total income from the vari
ous estates in England and Wales and France that had been settled on her. It would be enough to pay for both households. She'd probably be paying, out of her own purse, for the entire running expenses of the King's household, saving the treasury the cost of an expense that England should rightfully have paid.

She had no idea whether this was genuinely Henry's wish, or just Duke Humphrey driving a hard and rather dishonest bargain of his own. She hadn't been shown Henry's will, so there was no way of judging. She had no choice. Submissively, she nodded.