The Tudor Rose (24 page)

She had caught herself so often of late holding cynical conversations with herself like that. She must mention it as a fault to her confessor—she, who this very day had so much to be thankful for! In the meantime as soon as dinner was over she would give orders to her women about the packing of her gear. She must not keep Henry waiting.

“And my cousin of Warwick?” she asked, hoping the boy had not been forgotten.

“He is to come too,” Sir Robert told her. So she leaned across the table to tell the boy. “We are going back to Westminster where there will be the acrobats and mummers that you like, and Katherine and Bridget to play with,” she told him, vowing in her heart that she would try to be as kind to him as Anne had been.

“I will have my people pack everything to-night so that we may all set out in the cool of the morning,” she promised Sir Robert and Humphrey. “And I shall forget about Richard,” she added to herself, “when I get away from here and no longer see the faces of his men around me.”

The next morning Elizabeth was happier than she had been for months. A light breeze had sprung up in the night, cooling the countryside. Puffy white clouds scudded across a blue August sky, the scent of honeysuckle was sweet in the hedgerows, and in the long fields red-gold barley ripened early to harvest. As they left Yorkshire behind people came out in all the villages to call down blessings upon her, and she knew the loving welcome which awaited her in London. “All my griefs and anxieties I am leaving behind,” she thought, “and a new life lies ahead. New apartments are being prepared for my mother, who must be delighted at the outcome of it all. She will be one of the most important personages in the land again, and Margaret of Richmond, who cares less for these things, will have her son. Dorset and Tom Stafford and other attainted friends will be home again. There will be all the excitement of preparing for a wedding and a coronation and I must try to forget the past. And I shall have a good husband—and, blessed Mother of God, let me have children!” prayed Elizabeth. “And because God has delivered me from so much, though I be Queen of England,” she vowed, “I will take the words 'Humble and Reverent' for my motto.”

H
ALF THE NOBILITY IN the country seemed to flock in Elizabeth's wake to Westminster, and the Londoners' welcome was rapturous. The reinstated Queen Dowager met her with every show of tenderness, the return of her son Dorset seeming to have alleviated much of her bitterness; but although Elizabeth was officially in her mother's care she wisely insisted upon keeping some of their apartments to herself. They were the pleasantest in all Westminster Palace and Henry's courteous instructions for their comfort had been irreproachable; but although everybody had expected that he would want to strengthen his position by an immediate union with the Yorkist heiress, so far there had been no talk of marriage.

Elizabeth's first meeting with Henry Tudor had not been at all as she had pictured it in her romantic imaginings at Sheriff Hutton. After spending a long time consolidating his success in the various counties as he came southward, he had come to wait formally upon them. There had been nothing of Elizabeth's own impulsive gladness in his manner. She had found him a grave, reserved young man who looked considerably older than his age; and not quite so good-looking as his mother and the Stanleys had suggested. It was not that he was plain or lacked dignity, but his face was pale and a thought too long and narrow. But one could scarcely expect him to be gay or amusing after the hardships of his life, she supposed; and even if he spoke with a slight French accent, at least he appeared to have acquired no foreign mannerisms.

“Why does he so seldom come to see us?” she asked of Stanley, after the new King had finally taken up residence in the opposite wing of the Palace.

“Because there is so much for him to do,” Stanley had said, excusing him either because he admired his stepson's industry or because he himself had just been rewarded with the earldom of Derby. “His Grace has already made himself popular with the London merchants, not by inviting them to lavish banquets as the late King did, but by knowledgeably suggesting fresh markets for them abroad. He is giving important offices to men of ability like Morton, too, with a view to curbing the barons' power and so preserving peace in the realm. And now he is calling his first Council so that preparations may go forward for a coronation.”

“Perhaps he has said nothing about a wedding because he feels ill at ease taking precedence in my home,” thought Elizabeth, very well aware of her superior rights. And on the occasion of one of Henry's rare visits, when for a moment or two they had been tactfully left alone, she had turned to him with all her habitual generosity. “I hope that you like living here,” she had said shyly, thinking pitifully of his fatherless years. “You must know that everything I have and am is yours, Henry, in return for the risk you took to avenge my brothers. Lord Derby tells me how well the people have received you, and once my lineage is linked to yours…”

But to her hurt amazement he had seemed to want nothing from her, ignoring even his own slender Plantagenet claim through John of Gaunt. “My father's forebears were Kings of Wales, so I need no modern title,” he had said cooly. “And apart from that I do assure you that there is no need for you to worry about me, Cousin Elizabeth, since I am King by right of conquest.”

Feeling that her richest gift had been flung back in her face, Elizabeth's rare temper blazed out. “Even your conquest might not have been accomplished without my help,” she told him, remembering her hazardous and secret visit to the tavern. “It was my promise to marry you, and Lord Stanley's strategy, that made it possible.”

“And my Uncle Jasper's popularity in Wales,” Henry had added, with maddening exactitude.

And so the weeks had run on into autumn and still no marriage had been arranged. But there had been a coronation. A coronation at which she and her mother and sisters had been honoured guests, but no more. For Henry the Seventh, having by his own quiet efficiency established himself strongly enough on the throne, seemed to resent the thought of taking his title through her.

“I do not see how you can be crowned until you are his wife,” Margaret of Richmond had pointed out kindly, noting her outraged fury.

“It is not for
him
to give
me
the crown,” Elizabeth had retorted haughtily, “since I already
am
the Queen.”

“In reality—and in the people's hearts,” Margaret had agreed gently. “Only give my son a little time to work for the reordering of this poor torn kingdom, my child, and your wedding will come later. And we shall see that it is very splendid. Apart from anything else, you must remember that, although you are only distant cousins, Henry has to wait for a dispensation from the Pope.”

There was no gainsaying that. Henry was always so gallingly right. And so Elizabeth had waited in proud resentment, passing the time mostly in her own rooms, shamed once more because the man who was to marry her did not appear to want to. And whenever Tom Stafford and other young men who had been her friends came to pay their respects to her she was more delighted to see them than an affianced bride should have been.

There were three of them gathered together in her candlelit room one evening towards the end of October. Outside rain lashed at the window-panes, making their fireside companionship the more cosy. Humphrey Brereton read aloud the poem he had been writing about her, Tom Stafford thrummed his lute and sang her the latest love-songs, and George Strange, the only one of the trio who was not in love with her, regaled her with the latest gossip while her ladies handed round wine and sweetmeats. Elizabeth knew that she was looking radiantly beautiful in the soft candlelight, and altogether it had been one of those happy evenings which one stores in memory. “Now tell me about Bosworth,” she invited suddenly, seating herself informally on a fireside stool. Remembering those tense moments on the battlements at Sheriff Hutton and the joy of her subsequent journey to London, she had the feeling that life had somehow stopped for her since then. “But surely you must have heard it all a dozen times, Madam!” the young men protested, joining her around the hearth.

“From my new Lancastrian entourage, yes,” she admitted dryly. “But you must remember that I have been a Yorkist all my life. Could you not tell me everything just as it really happened—from both points of view? How Henry Tudor won and how Richard Plantagenet—was betrayed?”

“Although it is a long story, the actual battle lasted only two hours,” began Brereton, suddenly sobered by the recollection.

“Yet it practically changed the face of England,” said Stafford thoughtfully, laying aside his lute.

“And if ever a man were betrayed, it was Richard Plantagenet,” corroborated George Strange, who should have known, being Stanley's son.

Their faces were grave now, yet eager, as they tried to relive it for their beloved Princess, and to be impartial. At an impatient wave of Elizabeth's hand the women had withdrawn to the other end of the room, and the only sounds about her were the homely crackling of the freshly thrown logs and the alternating depths and lightness of three manly voices.

“It was the sixteenth of August when Richard marched out of Nottingham with twelve thousand men, and he was in Leicester by sunset,” began Stafford. “I remember the dates because I had managed to escape his restraint by then and join in this second attempt for the same cause for which my father lost his life. On the eighteenth Richard was about a mile from this place called Bosworth and our spies brought us word that he had had his men throw up breastworks and pitch tents.”

“I marched eastward from South Wales with Henry Tudor,” joined in Brereton eagerly. “He had only seven thousand men, so you can imagine we had been anxious all the way to know on which side Lord Stanley would fight! It was not until we reached Athelstone that your father and uncle met him secretly, George. So secretly that Henry stole out to them quite alone, and almost lost himself getting back; and the rest of us hadn't an idea until the battle was almost over what your precious family meant to do.”

“When the Lancastrians came up the two armies were in sight of each other, each upon a hill,” George Strange explained. “But I noticed that my father placed his men slightly nearer to King Richard's so as to allay his suspicion until the last moment. You see, Lady Bess, I was a hostage with the Duke of Norfolk's forces and he had instructions to kill me at the first indication of my father's defection. Richard was never fool enough to trust any of us, once he'd gone back on his word about keeping your brothers safe.”

“You must have spent some mightly uncomfortable hours, George!” said Stafford.

“I only wished they would get started. But Richard would not fight on the Sunday.”

“He was such an odd mixture of ruthlessness and superstition!” murmured Elizabeth, sitting over the fire with chin cupped in hand.

“At least his suspense that Sunday must have been worse than mine!” grinned Strange. “For I think he had an inkling that my father and Henry Tudor had met. They say he scarcely slept till dawn and then waked in a sweat complaining that he had seen avenging ghosts.”

“I hope my father's was one of them!” said Stafford, unobtrusively crossing himself.

“When he couldn't stand it any longer he called out for Lord Lovell and Catesby and went the rounds of the camp, leaving his tent so early that there was neither priest to shrive him before battle nor any breakfast,” continued Strange. “Lovell told me afterwards that they caught a sentry sleeping and Richard stabbed him to the heart with that jewelled dagger he was always fingering. 'I found him asleep and have left him so,' he said.”

“One can almost hear him saying it,” laughed Brereton, half admiringly. “He was a fiend for discipline, and must have known there were traitors all around him.”

“How would he have known?” asked Elizabeth, listening spellbound.

“It appears that Norfolk had already found some doggerel pinned to his tent flap,” explained Strange. “A friend trying to warn him, probably. 'Jock of Norfolk be not too bold, for Dickon thy master is bought and sold,' it said.”

“You may owe your life to that scrap of paper, George,” observed Tom Stafford. “For John Howard of Norfolk must have known that if your father were on the winning side it would go ill with anyone who had harmed you!”

“Richard must have had good reason to kill that sleeping sentry too,” added Brereton. “For we'd sent Sir Simon Digby to get through the Yorkist lines, and it was such laggards who made it possible. If spies could come and go like that the King must have realized that, splendid as his army looked, it was half full of traitors.”