The Tudor Rose (35 page)

The Mother Superior set down the glass. Before leaving she glanced from the crucifix to the face of her dying friend. “An earthly crown must be beset with thorns, too,” she said. “Both she and your Grace have been called upon to suffer more than most women; but soon her soul will be at rest.”

Upon first wakening Elizabeth Woodville seemed all bemused, fancying herself back in sanctuary; but a few sips of the cordial and the joy of finding that it was her eldest daughter who was ministering to her helped to clear the shadows from her mind. All difference of age passed from them. For a while they talked quietly together of past happenings. The Dowager Queen said how much she hoped that Bridget, her youngest, would make her vows and come to live in this peaceful place where she herself had received so much kindness, and Elizabeth was able to tell her how radiantly happy was young Ann now that she had been married to the Earl of Surrey as she had hoped.

“And your own husband has come back triumphant again, I hear,” said the Dowager Queen, “although scarcely to a bed of roses, with this second pretender to plague him. But at least he cannot imagine that, sick as I am, I had any hand in the matter
this
time.”

“Whatever he thinks, he has sent you some of his best grapes. I will have Ditton give them to Mistress Grace.” Elizabeth moved to a window and drew the curtain a little so as to protect her mother's fading sight from the brightness of the morning sunlight. “Have you heard that Aunt Margaret has received the young man into her household?”

“Margaret of Burgundy?”

“She swears that he
is
Dickon,” said Elizabeth, staring unseeingly out into the garden where her ladies and Mistress Grace were sitting together on a stone bench.

And after a moment she was surprised to hear the sick woman chuckling in the bed behind her. “I like your Aunt Margaret,” she was saying, with a spark of her old malice. “I, too, would swear almost anything to annoy that solemn-faced husband of yours!”

Elizabeth turned to find those intelligent dark eyes still bright in the sunken face and felt that even with the breath nearly out of her body her mother was quicker in wordly wisdom than either of them. That here was someone to whom she herself could still turn for guidance as in the drawn-out days of her submissive dependence. “Tell me seriously,” she said, coming back to the bedside. “Do you still believe that it cannot possibly be true—this constantly recurring rumour that one of them was spared?”

“You know that I do,” was the uncompromising answer. “Your Uncle Richard was never the kind of devil to do things by halves.”

Elizabeth hated to badger a sick woman, but pursue the matter she must. “Sir Robert Clifford, whom Henry sent to Flanders specially, saw this young man riding through Arras,” she said. “And even he, who cannot possibly care one way or the other, says that he is the very spit of my father.”

Edward the Fourth's widow chuckled again until it ended in a fit of coughing and the necessity for more cordial. “So he might, and it still not mean a thing,” she said, when the paroxyism had passed. “If Margaret of Burgundy or any of our other Yorkist friends wanted to find a personable young man who looked sufficiently like your father to bolster up their tale, it should not be difficult. England is full of his bastards. And no doubt Flanders too, for that matter, since he spent some dull days of exile there.”

So that was probably the simple solution, thought Elizabeth absently fingering the bowl of gillyflowers which the nuns had set upon a stool beside the great bed. “Jane Shore bore no children,” she said inadequately, her mind going back only to the days of his most constant mistress.

“No. But there were plenty of others who did,” said the Dowager Queen, with the growing irritability of weariness. “Grace here is the child of one of them.”

Elizabeth had been used to seeing Grace and her young brother about the Palace at Westminster, and beyond a mild dislike had never particularly thought about them. “So that is why she has no other name?” she said, surprised at her own foolishness. “With those prominent predatory eyes she must take after her mother. Who was she?”

“I have long since forgotten,” yawned the drowsy Woodville woman plaintively. “But now that no one cares about me any more Grace at least is kind and does what I tell her.”

“I wonder what sort of things my poor mother does tell her to do? I wonder if, after all, they
did
have some hand in this?” pondered Elizabeth, trying to remember what the young brother had looked like; but she soon chased the thought away as ungenerous and undutiful. Her mother had fallen asleep with the suddenness of the very weak, and for a moment or two Elizabeth stood looking down upon her, remembering her vivacity and the dramatic skill with which she had always dominated any scene, and feeling sadly sure that it was the last time she would ever see her on this earth.

All that spring the whole country was seething with rumours about the so-called Duke of York across the water, and it appeared that an amazing number of people believed in him. To Henry it must have seemed that a weapon had been put into the Duchess of Burgundy's hand which could not only cause unrest but could also be used against him by any other foreign power with whom he was not friendly. He went about his affairs as usual, writing endless dispatches about the intended Spanish marriage between his heir and Ferdinand of Aragon's daughter, paving the way for a peace treaty with Scotland and granting charters to that intrepid mariner Jean Cabot to sail in the
Matthew
in search of treasure from the East, and tracing with his tapering fingers on the great map of the world the possible course of his return from Newfoundland. Elizabeth knew that in his own realm and abroad her husband was respected, and that for all his reasonable gentleness men feared him; but she often wished that some of them loved him. But then probably Henry did not want their love, she supposed, any more than he wanted hers. He went on making notes and amassing money and making sure that his elder son studied Greek and Latin and—above all—Spanish, at Croydon. He was becoming a little more near-sighted and a little meaner, and Elizabeth, knowing that she would never now have a real love affair, solaced herself more and more with the affection of her children and particularly with the amusing liveliness of Harry, whose health had never given her a moment's anxiety.

“We might be living in the Dark Ages instead of at a time when books are printed and fresh countries explored,” complained Henry, accompanying her in the royal barge from all the unrest in London to the quiet of Greenwich. “The people are behaving like hysterical children.”

“They were foolishly credulous about Simnel but you never seemed to care,” said Elizabeth, sitting beside him beneath an awning resplendent with Tudor roses.

“That was a mere May revel compared with this. I had only to make the real Warwick ride through the streets to show them what fools they were. But now I have nothing to produce. Not even a murdered body.” Without even noticing how her whole body winced, he turned to her almost in exasperation. “Elizabeth, has
none
of your family any idea where they were buried?”

“Would that we had! All we know is that it was in—there,” said Elizabeth, trying not to look at the grimness of the Tower as their barge shot smoothly past. “The Tower priest must have known, I suppose. But he was old and ailing, and died before we came out of sanctuary. There was a squire of Richard's, called John Green, who took a message to Sir Robert Brackenbury. I tried to have speech with him, but Richard sent him away to the Isle of Wight. And poor Brackenbury, as you know, was killed at Bosworth.”

“I will get to the bottom of this business if it takes me half a lifetime,” swore Henry.

“Then may I never hope to forget it?” reproached Elizabeth. And because her time was nearly upon her he said no more.

It was a sad confinement, for her mother died at Bermondsey, and her baby, whom she called after her, did not live long. Her mother-in-law was not with her at the time, and when she came to visit her afterwards even
her
serenity seemed badly shaken. “There is something the King asked me to tell you, but which I am very loath to speak of,” she began, when at last they were alone together. “Are you sure that you are quite strong again, Elizabeth? You have so little colour in your cheeks.”

“Of course I am well,” said Elizabeth, with a wan smile. “But naturally I have been grieving. And that wretched ague seems to have come back to plague me. It is often so in damp weather.”

“Then I will tell you some other time,” said Margaret, looking unaccountably relieved and preparing to go. But Elizabeth missed her mother-in-law's company. From the couch on which she was resting she reached out a restraining hand. “No, stay and tell me now,” she begged, supposing it to be some finicky whim or new economy of her husband's. “Does Henry want to cut down my allowance again? Or must all my servants wear dragons as well as roses on their livery? Whatever it is, is it so terrible that you cannot stay?”

To her surprise there was no answering smile on Margaret's comely face. “It is more terrible than anything I ever heard,” she said slowly. “And you, my dear daughter, will have to bear it.”

Elizabeth sat up abruptly. “I? Then it concerns me—especially?” she stammered, with a great foreboding at her heart.

“You and your sisters. Henry has been making exhaustive enquiries about the disappearance of your brothers. He had to, Elizabeth—you must see that—to counter this growing belief that the younger one is alive.”

“Yes, yes. I see that. And he has found out—?”

“That it is quite true that they were both murdered. With merciful swiftness, I assure you.”

Elizabeth's hands flew to her blanched cheeks. Not until that moment had she realized how strong, how unquenchable, had been the hope that had flickered in her, nor how much she had allowed it to be kept alive by all these happenings. She felt it die in her now as if some part of herself died too, or a child in her womb. “God was very merciful to let my mother die when she did. But then, of course, she was so much cleverer than I. She never really believed…” Elizabeth's low voice trailed away into silence.

“It is no new grief, my poor sweet,” consoled Margaret, without realizing how hope can outlive common sense. “Only the details. You are bound to hear of them sooner or later, and I could not bear that you should hear from some uncaring stranger.”

“Tell me now,” said Elizabeth, composing herself rigidly against her cushions and holding her hands very still. “I promise you I will not cry out or—faint.”

“God give you courage!” prayed the Countess. “Henry went in person to the Tower and looked up the wages accounts. You know how methodical he is. There was a man paid to look after them called Slaughter.”

“Black Slaughter. Yes, I remember. It was really through some woman of his that I heard,” said Elizabeth, reliving those confused moments in the Abbot of Westminster's kitchen, when she had struck some lout for daring to say that Ned and Dickon were dead. “But I always supposed that he was kind to them.”

“He may have been. Anyway, I don't think he had anything to do with it. But we could not trace him. He was probably killed in battle with his master. But it seems that while the Princes were in his care someone brought a message to Sir Robert Brackenbury.”

“Richard's squire, John Green,” supplemented Elizabeth, weary of the beginning part of the story.

“Yes. That was the name. Whatever Richard wanted Brackenbury to do, he refused. But he offered to give up the keys of the Tower for a night.”

“It does not sound very likely.”

“And then Richard sent Sir James Tyrrell.”

“Tyrrell is still alive,” said Elizabeth, leaning forward excitedly. “I always
wanted
Henry to question him.”

“Well, he has questioned him now, offering reward and pardon. And the miserable man has confessed.”

“That he did it?”

“He maintains that he did not see it done. That he stood at the bottom of the stairs and sent his man Dighton up, with some hired cut-throat called Forest.”

Elizabeth waved the sordid details aside with shaking hands. After all these years the names of the murderers seemed to matter so little. “
How
was it done?” she demanded, in a voice which croaked huskily.

“
Must
you know?” asked Margaret, regarding her with anxious pity.

“Yes. Yes. If they suffered it I can bear to hear it.”

“This John Dighton says that they—wrapped them around with the bedcovers and smothered them. That the little King was asleep but that the younger one called out to warn him.”

“And are you sure that he did not escape?”

“How
could
he escape; with two strong men and another waiting below?”

Elizabeth's love for Dickon was such that even then hope died hard. “Or that he was not just left for dead and crawled away somewhere afterwards? Or that one of them did not take pity on him?”

“Those butchers carried down the bodies to show to Tyrrell.”

“It is only this Dighton's word.”

“And Tyrrell's.”

“They were master and man. They would naturally tell the same story.”

For a long time there was silence in the Queen's bedroom. Sad as the flickering out of the new life which had so recently been born into it, the gloom of such a deed seemed to put out the sunshine. “And those poor innocent bodies?” asked Elizabeth presently, her voice little more than a whisper.