The Tudor Rose (2 page)

“If Madame la Dauphine would but stand still!” shrilled the Frenchwoman, trying the effect of a makeshift veil with her mouth full of pins.

“And if Madame la Dauphine would but remember to talk French…” sighed the special governess her father had engaged for her.

“I must get used to this 'Madame la Dauphine' title,” thought Elizabeth, and heard Cicely snigger from her stool. In private her brothers and sisters often teased her about all her new pomp and circumstance. Through the new window of leaded glass she could see the younger ones at play in the garden now, making a sweet childhood travesty of it: Edward dressed in a piece of trailing tapestry as the Dauphin, Ann with a nuptial daisy-chain on her head, Katherine as her bridesmaid, and Richard supposed to be reading the marriage service from one of their father's big books; while baby Bridget crowed delightedly at them from her nurse's arms. At sight of them out there on the sunlit grass a tender smile curved Elizabeth's lips, and suddenly she hated the white gown which symbolized the reason for her departure to France. “I am tired of all this trying on,” she complained. “I pray you, ladies, put the dress away.”

“But should we not wait for your English Queen to see eet?” expostulated its proud creator. “Her Maj-es-tie express a so ardent wish…”

“My sister the Queen promised to come,” admitted Katherine of Buckingham.

“Were our mother coming she would have been here by now. She has been out from matins this half-hour or more, but hurried back to her apartments,” vouchsafed Cicely, from her vantage-point by the window.

“Then something important must have detained her,” the disappointed women decided.

So the wedding finery was reluctantly put away and Princess Elizabeth clad again in her everyday brown velvet with the square beaded neckbands. But before they could pin up her hair one of the King's pages, pushing his way through the protests of her women, came and bowed before her.

“Why, Almeric, how pale you look! Have you been making yourself sick again stealing the Queen's strawberries?” she teased.

“No, Madam.”

“Madame la Dauphine,” corrected the Duchess with asperity.

But either Almeric was mulish or he did not hear. “His Grace sent me to fetch you,” he said, speaking directly and without ceremony to Elizabeth.

“Then wait while they bind my hair,” she answered blithely. After so much standing about for dressmakers it should prove a pleasant diversion to see the King.

“No, Madam, by your leave,” insisted the lad. “His Grace said 'immediately.'”

For a moment or two Elizabeth stood wondering. What could the King want with her so urgently? It could be some last-minute arrangements he had been making with the French Ambassador, of course, or even just some new book he wanted her to read. One of those wonderful new printed books, perhaps, fresh from Master Caxton's press. Or perhaps, with his usual impulsiveness, her father had bought her some amusing gift. Something from the tall-masted foreign ship which had just put in at St. Katherine's Dock—some strange spices from the very edge of the world, a little monkey or some other pleasant surprise. “You mystify me, Almeric!” she said with a laugh and a shrug; and, waving aside her women with their pins and their combs, she lifted the folds of her gown in either hand and followed him. Elizabeth almost ran through the long galleries of Westminster Palace, singing a gay little song as she went. It was always a joy to see her father. And nowadays, since this Shore woman had captivated him, she saw him so seldom.

Edward the Fourth of England was the fondest and most indulgent of parents.
Self
-indulgent, too, her mother said. And growing more indolent of late as his wife waxed more meddling. Their children often heard them quarrelling about it. But to Elizabeth, his firstborn, he had never raised his voice in anger.

Yet before Almeric had pushed upon the heavy oak door of the audience-chamber she could hear her father's powerful voice, and it was certainly raised in anger now. The easy-going King had been driven to one of his rare outbursts of Plantagenet rage, using that oath of his ancestors which always came to his lips when abnormally roused. “By God's breath, I will revenge this treacherous insult in every vein of his heart!” he was thundering, as she came into the room. There appeared to have been some sort of hurried Council-meeting, but it was over now and all the important men about him looked frightened as rabbits. Even Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the King's young brother, and Lord Hastings, his trusted Chancellor, stood silent; and the French Ambassador was cringing like a whipped cur.

“Even Guienne and Acquitaine, which my fathers fought for, I agreed to as her dowry,” said Edward thickly. His strong hands were twisting a letter on which was impressed the seal of France, and presently he flung it to the floor and set his spurred heel upon it. His comely face was dangerously flushed and his tall body shook with anger.

“Will it mean war?” Elizabeth heard a man near the door whisper behind his hand.

“A year or two ago it might have,” whispered back his neighbour. “But not now, perhaps. That harlot, Jane Shore, has softened him.”

No man in that great room had eyes save for the furious King. No one noticed his daughter standing in the doorway until Gloucester, whom little ever escaped, touched his brother on the arm. As the torrent of his rage subsided, Edward must have remembered that he had sent for her. Glancing in her direction and seeing her white frightened face, he tried to take a hold of himself. He strode across the room to her, his arms with their hanging crimson sleeves driving his courtiers before him as he went, so that every man of them melted away through the open door way to discuss the dreadful purport of the French King's letter in some safer place.

Only Gloucester lingered, who—for all the battles he had fought—was not so many years older than herself. Although all the others had stared at her surreptitiously, Gloucester did not so much as glance at her, whether from tact or pity she did not know. “If you need me, Sir, I can raise an army for France,” he offered, in that pleasant, unemotional voice of his.

But the King's oath had outrun his decisiveness. He only made a vague gesture of dismissal to his brother and drew her back with him to the centre of the room. For some moments it seemed that he could not speak. “That those false fiends should have done this to you!” he managed to say at last, when the door was shut and they were alone.

“Done—what?” she asked, trying not to see the offending letter trampled into the scented rushes at her feet.

“Broken their solemn betrothal contract.”

Even then Elizabeth, so freshly come from all that femine preparation, could scarcely credit her understanding. Tall for her years, she stood close before him, looking up searchingly into his face. “You mean—the Dauphin does not want to marry me?” Her shamed words dropped slowly into the silence of the imposing room, reducing an event of world-wide importance to the personal feelings of a girl.

Shaken out of his anger at sight of her stricken face, the King would have taken her in his arms; but Elizabeth stood stubbornly still. This was an affront to her feminine nature. Something which would make her different in her own eyes as well as in the eyes of others, and which no man, however kind, could accept for her.

“He has asked for the Duke of Burgundy's daughter instead,” her father told her, reducing his explanation to the same simplicity of terms.

Elizabeth felt as if someone had hit her a stinging blow across the face. She had been humiliated in public, so that the whole palace, the whole world, seemed full of mockery and belittling laughter. She saw herself again as she had looked in the mirror, a lovely bride in jewelled velvet. Madame la Dauphine, a future Queen of France. For a moment the figures on the wall-tapestries wavered uncertainly before her, but she was not a person given to fainting. Instead she just stood there, holding her chin a little higher. And in those searing moments she ceased to be the high-spirited child who ran singing through her father's palace, and became a woman. A woman aware of the ambitious cruelties of men.

“Bess, my dear!” implored her father, who could not bear to see such subdued bewilderment upon so young a face. And at sound of his voice, bereft of all but love, her mask of dignity slipped and she hurled herself into his arms. “C-couldn't they have sent their horrible messenger before p-people had seen me t-trying on my wedding-dress?” she sobbed out against his breast.

Edward sat down in his great state chair and drew her on to his knee. He stroked her unbound hair and tried to comfort her as if she had been small Katherine or baby Bridget, but with infinitely more understanding, since they two had always been very close. “It has nothing to do with you as a woman. You must always remember that,” he told her. “This Burgundian chit might be as ugly as sin for all France cares. All Louis wants is to avoid war for the succession—the same horrors of civil war as we have suffered here. So, because my sister Margaret's husband keeps a Burgundian army which is a perpetual menace, the Dauphin must marry into their family.” Explaining the matter to her, Edward almost came to see it from Louis the Eleventh's point of view, and his indignation waned. “You know how these marriages are, my poppet, with our daughters as the bait for political alliances.”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, who had already been the proposed bait for several. But those other proposals had never been serious and she had been but a child. Whereas now the whole face of life was changed. She would have to readjust herself. “What a waste it seems, all the hours I spent learning to write French,” she said, with a gallant effort at lightness.

But neither of her cultured parents would think so. “No learning is ever wasted,” Edward told her gravely. “Particularly for people like ourselves who live in an era of expansion and invention, with William Caxton bringing the literature of the world within the reach of all. See here, child, how he had already improved his methods since I took you and your brothers to watch him at work. He is even illustrating his books with woodcuts.” Reaching across a mass of state papers, the King picked up a box of small wooden pieces of type and scattered them on the table beside him. “That printing machine of his will turn out more books in a month than is done in years by the tedious script of monks.”

“Will they ever be as beautiful?” asked Elizabeth.

“In time perhaps. And girl as you are, I warrant you a day will come when you will be glad that you can write a fair hand in more languages than one.”

Elizabeth tried to fix her attention on what he was saying, knowing that he was trying to keep her thoughts from the shock which she had just sustained. He told her that she might come every day and read his books. “Not that I will have them taken away even by you,” he stipulated.

“No, Sir,” said Elizabeth meekly, knowing well enough that Richard, her younger brother, had one of them out in the garden.

Edward recommended
The Sayings of the Philosophers
for her piety, and Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
for her diversion, but inevitably he had more serious matters to attend to. “I must go now and talk with your uncle and Hastings,” he told her, getting to his feet.

And she must face again all those people who had so lately assisted in the preparations for her splendid marriage. Worse still, she must face them with red eyes, looking like any lovesick milkmaid jilted by her swain. “If it please your Grace,” she asked in a small voice, “may I stay here a while?”

“Assuredly, my pretty,” he agreed readily. “And I will send your mother to you.”

Elizabeth stood twisting her hands together in the folds of her skirt. “Please, no…” she began, before she had time to think.

“No?” Her father, already gathering up some papers, awaited some kind of explanation.

Both of them, perhaps, had been tried beyond pretence. “She would begin—trying to put things right—to
manage
…” Elizabeth stammered, without reverence or caution. But before lowering her eyes she caught the answering gleam of amusement in his. “I mean, I would rather have someone who—who knows nothing of the matter. Someone who will not want to speak of it, or even be thinking 'The—Dauphin does not want to marry her.'”

With his free hand the King pushed her gently into his vacated chair. “But someone of your own, dear child?” he urged.

Elizabeth's only wish was to be alone; but even from this side of the Palace she could still hear the distant shouts of children at play, “Then I will have Richard,” she said.

“A wise choice. I always find him a most engaging companion,” commended the departing King. And from the doorway she could hear him calling an order to someone to fetch his Grace the Duke of York.

So presently Richard came to her, still struggling with the weight of the big leather book.

“Why, Dickon, it is
The History of Troy
!” she reproached.

“I know. I can read some of it. I took it from the King's collection,” he said, with that look of complete candour which he had.

“But how
could
you?”

“We had to have a book for the wedding service.” For all his sensitive air of delicacy there was a streak of obstinate daring in this ten-year-old which was not in the other royal children.

“Well, we shall not need it now,” sighed Elizabeth. “So put it back with the others. Mercifully, our father did not miss it. I hope you let no dew from the roses get on it.”