The Tudor Rose (18 page)

A flash of discerning anger made her recognize the first flaw of deceit in his sincerity. “Say rather it is because you know that I matter and you want me to believe in you,” she accused.

“It is too late to consider whether you matter or not!” he said, flinging round on her with a fine swinging of fur-lined crimson sleeves. “There was a time when I would have been content to hold the power as Protector. But not now. They were all here in the Palace at my brother's deathbed—as I would to God I had been! Hastings, Stanley, Morton, Dorset—all of them—while I was fighting for him up in Scotland. They, too, swore to carry out his wishes. And yet that day I held a Council-meeting, when everything was prepared for his son's coronation, I discovered that even those of them whom I had left unpunished were plotting against me. Even your mother—so frightened of me that she had to take refuge in sanctuary—had a finger in a plot upon my life. So I sent for your younger brother. It was to me—not to Anthony Rivers or any other accursed Woodville—that Edward left the care of his sons.”

Elizabeth faced up to him like a young fury. “Yes, they were left in your keeping. No sane man denies it. But what have you done with them?” And when he did not answer she forgot all fear and threw herself upon him, beating at his breast with maddened fists. “What have you done with my happy, laughter-loving brothers?” she repeated, her voice rising like any crazed market-woman's deprived of her young.

But he was King, and it was treason to strike him. He might have called his men and had her sent to the Tower too. Instead he held her wrists and shook her from him with quiet strength. “I did what was best for England,” he said, with something of the snarl of one of his own heraldic leopards in his voice.

For a few moments the fierce antagonism of their glances held. His face had whitened as hers had been flushed by leaping blood. Then realization of her helplessness came to her. Although her limbs shook, Elizabeth managed to sweep him a deep obeisance. It was her signal of surrender, but it also gave her time to master her emotion—time to add up the score of their encounter. Certainly he had betrayed the fact that she was a person of more importance than he would have deemed her had her brothers been alive. Whether he hated her or respected her the more for her outburst she could not be sure. All she knew was that there was that in his face which would intimidate her from ever asking him about them again. It was not until after wards, in the seclusion of her small room, that it occurred to her that she was probably the only person who had ever dared to ask him at all.

If Richard were shaken he did not show it. With that light tread of his he walked back to the table and began turning over some papers. “I admire your courage,” he said lightly. “Like that spirited younger brother of yours, you appear to have inherited more Plantagenet blood than Woodville.”

Elizabeth took an eager step or two towards him. “Then you— like him?” she stammered, realizing that he was speaking as if the boy were still alive.

But the King took no notice of her interruption. “Since you are so solicitous for your family, you may be interested to know that I have offered your sister Cicely to Lord Welles, and that my good friend the Duke of Norfolk is agreeable for one of his younger sons to marry Ann. The others,” he added, laying down the parchment, “are as yet too young.”

Poor Cicely and Ann, who would naturally have made brilliant foreign marriages! So she was soon to be parted from them. But an even more intimate question arose. Curiosity consumed her. “And for myself?” she asked, in a small voice.

“I have not as yet arranged anything.”

“Then for the present—I may remain free?”

In spite of the fact that it meant continuing to live as his guest, the relief in Elizabeth's voice was so patent that he looked across at her quizzically and smiled. “So your plotting was only half-hearted, although it cost Bucking ham his life? You did not really relish the prospect of lying with a Lancastrian?”

His words struck so near the truth, and her remorse for Buckingham was so great, that she made no answer.

“How old are you, Elizabeth?” the King was asking.

“Nearly nineteen, Sir.”

“Then it
is
high time you were married,” he agreed, grinning at some devilish new idea. “All the more so as you always seem to fail to get the husbands of your expectation. Why, I remember in this very room offering to avenge you in France. Your poor father was so choleric about the way the Dauphin jilted you that it may well have hastened his death. And now Henry of Lancaster has failed you!”

“Oh, how I hate you!” murmured Elizabeth. And al though she pressed both hands to her lips his sharp ears must have heard her.

“That is unfortunate, since our destinies have agreed that you must live in my house,” he laughed. “But do not despair, Elizabeth Plantagenet. There is always Master Stillington.”

“Master Stillington?” The name conveyed nothing to her.

“The son of our good Bishop Stillington.”

“The Bishop of Bath who preached sermons proclaiming us bastards to please you!”

“But with no prejudicial feeling, I do assure you—since, being a churchman, this son of his must be a bastard too. All the same, he is a very able young man, and so useful to me that he merits some reward.”

Elizabeth regarded her uncle with horror. “You mean that loathsome, greasy-haired clerk who leers at me from the lower tables in hall?”

“So you have noticed that he is already not without—desire?” jibed Richard.

“I do not notice the antics of menials,” said Elizabeth, at her haughtiest.

Richard went to the door and opened it for her courteously. “But nevertheless I should bear the possibility in mind, Bess,” he advised cheerfully. “Particularly when your singularly persistent mind is tempted to ask
other people
inconvenient questions.”

E
LIZABETH HOPED NEVER TO see her father's room again, for all its sense of security was gone. If Richard had not punished her with public penance as he had the wantonness of Jane Shore, he had humiliated her for her persistency with the threat of this horrible marriage. “There is only Lord Stanley left to whom I can turn for help,” she thought in panic, wishing that his kindly Countess were with him.

Being Steward of the King's Household, Stanley was always about the Court, and he had been her father's friend. Surely he would not stand by and see her married to some ugly byblow of a bishop. But although he was affable to everybody and always jovial to her sisters, she felt sure that he tried to avoid her. He did not want her to appeal or to be drawn in to taking sides even in so personal a matter. He was rich, generous and all the more popular, perhaps, because of his genius for avoiding controversy. Elizabeth had once heard the Duke of Buckingham say that Stanley's power lay less in the fact that he had twenty thousand armed retainers than in the fact that nobody could be sure upon which side they would fight.

Once, after finding the King's cross-eyed scrivener hanging about the passage to her room, she had insisted upon waylaying the Lord Steward. “Uncle Stanley,” she had asked straight out, using the old affectionate title by which they had all called him as children, “do you suppose the King really intends to marry me to that awful Stillington creature?”

“I should think it highly improbable, Lady Bess,” Stanley had told her imperturbably. “Gloucester may shed Plantagenet blood, but, with the fierce family pride he has, he is unlikely to demean it to that extent. And listen, child,” he had added, seeing how alarmed she really was, “my squire, Humphrey Brereton, has always been crazy about you. I will set him as watchdog upon this menial and you will be no more troubled with his prying.”

“But surely, milord, that will make two of them to fear,” objected Mattie, who had gone along with her mistress.

“My dear lady, Humphrey Brereton knows his place,” he had assured her, hurrying away upon some pressing or pretended business. He had spoken blandly enough, but the way he used Richard's old title and obviously attached no importance to the declaration of her illegitimacy set Elizabeth thinking.

“The King must trust a man very much to put him in charge of the very food he eats,” she remarked that evening, watching the efficient way in which Stanley looked over the tables set for one of those lavish banquets by means of which Richard sought to ingratiate himself with the rich aldermen of London.

“Since Henry of Buckingham betrayed him I should think it unlikely that Richard really trusts anybody,” the Queen had answered in that detached way of hers.

“But suppose Stanley were to poison him,” speculated Elizabeth, wondering whether, beneath his bonhomie, the suave, thick-set Lord Steward were ever tempted to do so.

“My dear Bess, the things you imagine!” laughed Anne, who never imagined anything at all. “I am thankful Richard and I are going north to-morrow, if that is the way you croak. Only I do so wish he would not insist upon stopping to grant charters and things in every town we pass through, when all we both want is to push on to Warwick to see our boy!”

The unaccustomed querulousness in Anne's voice made Elizabeth regard her with anxiety. “Are you sure you feel well enough to travel so far?” she asked. “You have been looking so white all day.”

“I am always white. Do they not call me the pale Queen?” sighed Anne. “Besides, Richard disturbs me, sleeping so ill at night. He calls out, waking from some dream; and sometimes when he cannot sleep and the hours of darkness crawl he pulls on his furred bedgown and goes wandering about the Palace.”

From the gallery where they stood Elizabeth could see him talking to Stanley in the hall below. “What ghosts, I wonder, go wandering with him?” she thought.

But she was recalled to reality by the touch of Anne's feverish fingers on her arm. “I wish you were coming with us, Bess,” she was saying. “Usually it is great fun travelling with Richard. He makes such a pageant of it and insists upon my having so many new dresses. But this time, somehow, I feel as if there is something out there on the roads of which I am afraid.”

“All tarradiddle, my dear!” scoffed Elizabeth, to calm her fears. “It is just that you have not been too well lately, and I am sure the fresh country air will do you good. Look, the King is ready now to lead you in to dinner.”

Secretly Elizabeth had been longing to be left alone with her sisters—all the more so as the following day would be the anniversary of her father's death. But when the royal party rode out from Westminster next morning they made such a brave cavalcade that she found herself almost wishing that she, too, were going. As she pushed open a lattice to look down upon them the April air was sweet with spring. There were outriders, the King's standard-bearer, and men-at-arms, with Lord Stanley's imposing figure well in evidence. Lord Lovell, Sir Richard Catesby, Sir Richard Ratcliffe and most of the officials of the house hold were in attendance. Anne, dainty as a little ivory figurine, turned in the saddle of her white jennet to wave good-bye—looking far less fragile with that glow of excitement in her cheeks at the thought of seeing her son. And beside her, with his proud standard flowing in the breeze, rode Richard on his famous charger White Surrey, resplendent with gold-and-crimson trappings.

It was only as the gallant company turned northward out of the Palace courtyard that Elizabeth noticed something amiss. There was no handsome John Green riding a pace or two behind his master. “If
he
is left behind it can only be that he is sick,” she thought; and, turning hurriedly from the window, bade old Mattie go and make enquiries.

“Please God it be so!” she prayed, laying her plans much as her mother might have done. “The young man has neither wife nor mother, so I can reasonably nurse him until he is convalescent. I will read to him and sit with him. I will even let him make love to me if only I can drag from him what message Gloucester sent to Brackenbury about the boys!” Her heart raced with excitement at the prospect of hearing something definite at last—and with fear of what, in the end, it might prove to be. Even the threat of sharing Will Stillington's bed would not hold her back from such a Heaven-sent opportunity.

But—even supposing Green's devotion to his master were not proof against any woman's wile—her heart's excitement was for nothing. “He is nowhere to be found in the Place,” Mattie told her.

Elizabeth sent for an old groom of her father's who had taught her to ride. “Master Green's horse be gone—and his servant's. But the pair of 'em went yesterday, Madam—and southward,” he said, gazing at her worshipfully.