The Tudor Rose (3 page)

“I held it very carefully, Bess.”

“I saw that you did.”

“Where from? What are you doing?”

“I was in my room trying on—a dress.”

“They are always making you do that. But now for once I have you to myself. I like books better than dresses, Bess.”

“I believe that I do too, Dickon. Yes, I am sure that I do now.”

Having managed to heave his burden on to an appropriate shelf, the boy had more opportunity to observe things. “You are sitting in the King's chair!” he said, quite shocked.

“He invited me to. You know I would not sit here otherwise.”

“Of course not,” agreed Richard. “But perhaps Ned will sit in it one day.”

“Not for years and years, I hope!” declared Elizabeth, still passionately grateful for her father's kindness.

“Is it specially comfortable?”

“No. Rather hard, in fact,” she laughed, surprised that she could be so soon amused.

The boy was tired with his play and came and leaned against her, and it was strangely comforting to have him there. He began building wooden castles with Master Caxton's little pieces of type, and Elizabeth was able to think her own thoughts. After all, apart from hurt pride, why should she mind so much? She had never seen the Dauphin. And now, perhaps, she would be able to stay in England with Richard and the others. Her arm went round him, drawing him closer. She supposed him to be childishly absorbed in the construction of a tower; but with young Richard one could never be quite sure. Evidently his nimble brain had been pursuing some line of thought suggested by the troubled times of which his elders talked. “It is strange, is it not, Bess,” he observed, hoisting a paper flag from his tower, “how many people want to sit in the King's seat even if it
is
uncomfortable?”

M
ONTHS LATER ELIZABETH WAS wearing another new velvet dress; but this time it was black. As she stood at an open latticed window she could feel the sun hot upon the sombre stuff. There were gold tips to the little willows along the river bank, and lilacs scenting the Palace garden, and the invitation of an April morning made it seem all the more unbelievable that instead of planning some pleasant expedition she should be looking down upon the coffin of her dead father.

Because Edward the Fourth of England had been a soldier and a sportsman and had died quickly in the prime of his manhood the coffin was both long and heavy, and the bearers stumbled a little as they bore it out in to the sunshine from the dark Abbey doorway. Seen from above they looked oddly foreshortened creatures, so that Elizabeth wondered in a detached sort of way how they would lift so dead a weight on to the standing hearse, while that part of her mind which was freshly bludgeoned by grief recalled how briskly he had been wont to cross the courtyard in his lifetime. Following after, as if borne upon the sad sound of requiem chants, came the lords spiritual and temporal; and high upon the hearse went Edward Plantagenet's wooden effigy, wearing his sparkling crown and clad in his crimson cloak, so that it made a splendid splash of colour among the sombre crowd of Londoners who were come to gape at it. And to his eldest daughter it seemed that no living creature in the whole bareheaded throng would ever cut so fine a figure as he, who had dwarfed men by his height and dazzled women by his handsomeness.

As men mounted their horses and the procession began to move, a small piteous cry was wrung from her. Her father, who had always so cherished her, was leaving home for the last time. He had begun his last journey to be laid to rest at Windsor. More than anything that had happened during these past dreadful days, the slow, dull rhythm of mourners' feet in a stilled street made her feel bereft. So much more bereft than the daughter of any ordinary citizen; not by the measure of her grief but by the measure of her insecurity. It was as if the strong champion of her family's reclaimed inheritance were gone.

From the raised embrasure of the window where she stood Elizabeth turned for comfort to the living relatives who were left. They were all assembled there except the elder of her brothers, now so suddenly and frighteningly important, who was with his tutor at Ludlow. Elizabeth looked at them imploringly—at her mother, the Queen, sitting apart by the table, and at her younger sisters and Richard huddled in their unaccustomed mourning at the far end of the room. She had supposed that they, too, would want to come crowding to the window to watch the outset of the late King's funeral. That Cicely at least, who was rising fifteen, would want to look her last upon that effigy and wish a loving father farewell. But fear seemed to inform them; and it was natural enough, she thought indulgently, that in the strange circumstances of Death they should draw closer together and leave her, the eldest, to watch alone.

But a small gust of indignation rose in her as she watched her mother, marvelling that so newly made a widow should sit there dry-eyed, locked in some inward scheming with a half-written letter before her—trying, as ever, to improve on destiny. That
she
should not be too moved to do aught but mourn! But perhaps even that, too, was natural. For did not the whole realm know that Jane Shore, the glover's daughter, had more immediate cause to grieve? That most alluring of the late king's many mistresses who had dimmed the lustre of his name, causing him to smear with sloth and self-indulgence what should have been the well-earned years of leisured honour after his splendid wars. Jane Shore, reflected Elizabeth, must be a lost and frightened woman by now.

At seventeen Elizabeth Plantagenet knew all about her father's faithlessness; but knowing also his parental fondness, she found it hard to understand how humiliation can harden a supplanted woman's heart.

With tears in her eyes, she turned her back upon them all. Already the solemn procession was wending its way into King Street, and soon the velvet-draped coffin with the great silver gilt cross would be borne beyond the bend of the river, to be censed again by the lovely village cross at Charing. Was she the only one to care? But before it had passed from sight she heard the slither of a light step beside her and a cold hand was slipped into hers. “Where are they taking him?” whispered Richard.

“To Windsor,” she told him, holding his hand reassuringly.

When he turned his head to look up at her the sunlight on his cheek made him look defencelessly young and fair. “Why not to the Tower, Bess?” he asked.

“Because people go there only to prison, sweet—or before they are going to be crowned,” she told him, speaking softly too.

“Will our brother Edward go there when they crown him?”

“I expect so.”

He thought the matter over in that quick way of his which often made her think he would be the cleverer of the two. “Ned is very young, don't you think, to be a King?”

“He is thirteen now, Richard, and of course he will have a regent to act for him.”

“Who?”

“The Queen, perhaps. Or Uncle Richard of Gloucester.”

“I wish it could be Uncle Rivers.”

“But milord Rivers is only a Woodville uncle on our mother's side—not royal at all.” And there, thought Elizabeth, lies a part of our insecurity—that our mother was not royal, but just someone the King married secretly when he was young.

But such matters weighed little with eleven-year-old Richard who knew only that he liked the gay and accomplished Lord Rivers and was nervous and tongue-tied with his Uncle Gloucester. He wriggled from his sister's hold and thrust his head through the open lattice, the better to look down. “How sad all the people look!” he said.

“And bewildered,” added Elizabeth more to herself than to him.

“Because they have no King?”

“But they have, Dickon,” she reminded him.

“Of course. Edward the Fifth? How odd it sounds!” he laughed involuntarily. “Is he that now, this very minute, Bess?”

“From the moment our father died.”

It was a difficult thing to believe about someone with whom one had been arguing and learning Latin up to a few weeks ago. But for those silly chills he had had last winter, and his mother making all that pother about his seeing the King's physician, Richard supposed he would have been with Edward at Ludlow still. And now poor Ned would have to wear all that heavy ermine and sit through stuffy councils instead of hawking with him on the Welsh hills! Probably they would both have to live in London; but however horrible things were, at least Bess would be there. She wasn't going away to marry the Dauphin. “It is worse for us than for all those people, anyway,” he sighed, kneeling back on his heels on the window-seat. “
We
have no father.”

He leaned his fair head against the sun-warmed folds of her dress, and she bent over him tenderly so that a braid of her own hair mingled with his short, wind-blown locks. So exact were they in colouring, she noticed, that they might well have grown from one head. The new young King's hair was yellow like their mother's; whereas her own and Richard's were burnished with authentic Plantagenet gold. The thought pleased her, for, fond as she was of all her family, from tall-growing Cicely to baby Bridget, this slender, sensitive younger brother held her heart.

But it was Edward, the long-awaited elder son—Edward, the new thirteen-year-old king, who, with his good looks and sturdy health, promised to be as fine a man as his father—who was the widowed Queen's pride. Elizabeth knew instinctively that it must be he whom she was worrying about.

Through bad times and good she had always been her mother's companion, so she descended the stone steps from the window and crossed the great, richly tapestried room to stand beside her—pityingly, protectingly, her former flash of indignation forgotten. “He should know by now, Madam. The roads are in good condition and your messenger must have reached Ludlow.”

Elizabeth the Queen stirred at last. “Yes, poor boy, he must know. And none of us there to help him bear the shock,” she sighed. “He will not have dreamed of succeeding for years, Bess. And, as we both know, it is a sore thing in these days for a boy to inherit a crown before his sword arm is strong enough to protect it!”

Living through the bitter holocaust of civil war had taught these two Elizabeths the need of a strong man on their side. For years Yorkists and Lancastrians, sprung from two different sons of the great third Edward, had riven England for her crown. It was the old vexed question of descent through a woman from the elder son, or descent from the younger through a man. Their rival emblems, plucked during a furious quarrel in the Temple gardens, were a red rose for Lancaster and a white rose for York; and now the strong, thorned stem for their white branch was dead, leaving only a tender bud.

“Uncle Rivers is with him,” said Elizabeth.

“And kind Sir Richard Vaughan. Don't you remember, Madam, how he used to carry us on state occasions when Ned and I were small, and how he always told us what to do?” joined in young Richard, who had followed her and was trying to add some comfort to his own.

Absently, fondly, the Queen stretched out a hand to smooth his ruffled hair. “My brother Rivers will stand by him, of course. And Dorset and milord Bishop of Salisbury,” she ruminated, as if marshalling the Yorkist forces upon some imaginary battlefield. “And although milord Hastings never had much love for us 'upstart Woodvilles' as he calls us, your father made him swear that he would always protect our sons. That was some years ago, before your father came under the spell of this unspeakable woman. But he respected my acumen. In his will, which was read to me only last night, it is expressly stated that the arrangement of marriages for you girls is to be left to me.”

“Though perhaps no European princes will be clamouring for us now!” thought Elizabeth, whose youthful confidence had been shaken.

Richard leaned across the table, eager and gallant in the morning sunlight. “The Cheshire men were all around Ludlow. I saw them armed and watchful as I came south to join you here,” he was saying to reassure his troubled womenfolk. “Edward says they have always mistrusted the horrid Lancastrians.”

“It is not the Lancastrians
I
mistrust,” said the Queen surprisingly.

The boy's blue eyes opened wide. For him life was a simple affair where people were either on one side or the other, white or red, as in a game of chess. “Who then, Madam?” he asked.

But the Queen did not answer. Instead she asked him to light a candle that she might seal a freshly written letter which lay before her; and presently, wearying of grave matters, he slipped away to play catch-as-catch-can with plump, five-year-old Katherine.