We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (27 page)

‘O Lord Jesus, yet more trouble,’ he groaned, and his head fell back.

How they laughed! as the living bowels died in the flame.

He was a prophet, Colyngbourne.

I wanted to cry aloud to those who whispered. I longed to take a woman by the hand, a woman, blonde, slender and haughty of mien, and drag her through the cheapnesses of London. I lusted to stand with her upon Paul’s Cross, roaring: ‘Here then, behold! Look well upon her! Here is Richard’s advocate!’

Of course, I did no such thing. I only watched her, Elizabeth Woodville, mother of the Lords Bastard, still lovesome, still bejewelled, sitting at dinner with the King, and I flew to Margetta demanding, with a kind of wondering fury, why was I not told that the woman was out of Sanctuary?

‘Husband,’ she said meekly, ‘you were full of other things, quiet and dolorous, since your return from York’.

I could not deny it. I had shunned even my Margetta’s presence, and naught to do with York. It was since the night in Richard’s chamber. I had bought candles for my shame... His soul burned bright on many an altar.

‘Tell me quickly, of the Queen.’

‘Anne is woefully sick,’ she said sadly.

Impatience. ‘Nay, the false Queen Elizabeth.’

Her frown gave way to mischief. ‘Dame Grey. Thus is she known, an honest name befitting her rank, which is no more than that of... of Katherine Bassingbourne.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘A goodwife whom Richard helped of late; he took her case of hardship before the Common Pleas. Ragged, scarce able to state her grievance—some neighbour had defrauded her. The King made a great pother and ordered restitution. I was there. Some thought it an ado over naught, but folk cheered after the hearing...’

‘Tell of Elizabeth.’

The week of our departure for Nottingham, said Margetta, Dame Elizabeth Grey had come from Sanctuary, of her own free will, and bringing all her daughters. Unsolicited, she had placed them in King Richard’s hands.

‘Winter strikes cold in Sanctuary,’ said Margetta with a smile.

‘All her daughters?’

‘All five, to the King’s safekeeping. She wished it. He has promised them protection, good marriages for them all, that none ever mistreat them, and, on their betrothal, two hundred marks a year in perpetuity.’

‘Say on.’

‘Dorset, her son.’

‘Yea, traitor Dorset.’ I saw again bright eyes, strong teeth, whispered voice seducing me with gaiety. ‘What of him?’

‘She has written to Dorset, begging him to return. She has asked that he pledge loyalty to Richard, who will pardon him freely. My lord...’ and a line scarred her brow again, and she looked at me in a kind of sorrowful, hurting way.

‘What ails you?’ I asked gently.

‘Once, you spoke to me of things that pained you, made me weep... Dame Grey is, like me, a mother. Surely, you were wrong?’

I strode to the window, watching the whirling snow settling pure and white upon the gable opposite.

‘Never more so,’ I said, so quietly that she came to me to repeat it and we stood hugged against the tooth and sight of winter.

‘Seven hundred marks a year,’ said my lady. ‘To Elizabeth. She’s well content.’

Seven hundred marks is not a fortune. I stroked the smooth tail of Margetta, as I shall do no more.

‘And I, my love,’ I said. ‘And I.’

Epiphany. Richard restive and sad, and the fiddles wailing their sweet, threadbare joy. A mockery of a feast; death made all counterfeit, sitting so close by Anne of the broken heart. For all the rich gowns the King bought her, and the gems with which he girdled her throat, she was his no longer, nor was she shapely and fair, but a pitiful, cough-racked shell; she was claimed already, yet he kept his hand on hers, as if to stay her going. She wore bright April-leaf velvet slashed with scarlet like the raging blood in her lungs, a dress one would have thought past copying. Yet a blowing breeze, an usher’s lusty voice:

‘Dame Grey, and her daughters.’

Quiet, speculative mirth. Dame Grey was clad in black, befittingly demure in her reverence to the dais. But Bess! Elizabeth of York—she drew all eyes, her bared swelling breasts thrusting above a gown of April green with scarlet slashing. Thus came the two Elizabeths, leading a train of sisters richly dressed at the King’s expense, and young Bess’s face was transparent as a glass window. At her glowing approach, Queen Anne seemed to diminish. A ripe, swooning look lay on the bastard daughter of King Edward. Her eyes sought Richard’s: it was no way for a niece to look upon her uncle, not that pleading, hungry glance of love.

I danced with her, a thing I should have hesitated over once, when she was a Princess. She was bold and charming, with her blue eyes ever over my shoulder.

‘Can you read the cards, Sir Knight?’

Nay, madame, I cannot read the cards, and your dress mocks at my King’s dear love.

‘You like my gown? Her Grace had some stuff left over... Richard is fond of green.’

How long, I wondered, had this rich wound been festering? Dancing, I spun her in a reel, felt her hard paps press me, right through my doublet’s cloth... the viols shrieked louder and Patch, her self-appointed fool, mimicked and smirked like the madman he was, feigning jealousy... Bess seized a cup of wine and drained it even while Anne’s coughing rose above the music. In almost a gay tone she said, with a French prince’s jilting behind her (for I must excuse the maid, she did but love):

‘Ah, God! Will the Queen never die?’

I could not answer, and what I would have said is now past thought, for there was a tumult at the door that moment and two couriers ran in, flushed and rain-soaked. As I watched Richard rising slowly with the candlelight gleaming on his crown, with the music dying and the hot dance stilled, I knew with the foreknowledge that makes words null, that this was the tide turning. And I saw him extraordinarily changed. A sudden lightness and youthfulness fell upon him. His strong voice carried down the Hall.

‘News, my lords,’ he said. ‘Of Henry Tydder, calling himself Richmond, the adversary of our might. Through our spies across the sea, it is known beyond question. He gathers a force even now and plans to invade our realm.’

A rushing tumult of cries.

‘When, Sire?’

Richard leaned forward. The gleam had reached his eyes.

‘This coming summer,’ he said. ‘And to his cost.’

My gaze swept them all. On one side of the room, Catesby, Ratcliffe, Norfolk, Lovell, Metcalfe, Brackenbury. On the other, Sir William Stanley, Lord Thomas Stanley; Lord Strange, his son, Lady Margaret, his wife. And Dame Grey, veiling herself for the solemn occasion. She looked at Richard too, but not, like her daughter, at his mouth, his hands or his hair. Only, unmistakably, at the Crown of England on his head.

I am afraid. So, to sheathe my craven fear, I plunge into a chaos of thought. Memory. Disjointed. I call it back like a faithful hound. The good and the bad mingling.

They tolled the bells one day... March it was, a month of treacherous, whispering winds, and Richard ordering the commissions of array to guard the coast towns, spending days in the Tower Armoury among the ranks of burnished steel. Richard keeping Lord Stanley waiting on audience one day while he spoke with, and rewarded, King Edward’s aged nurse, whom, he said, mankind seemed to have forgotten... they tolled the bells, and there was wailing in the Queen’s apartment, and he said, looking up: ‘What means this?’ with a fearful, fragile countenance, and Anne crying: ‘They say that I am dead!’ with her hair hanging loose and wringing her hands in the cold corridor...

They tore him from her bodily, the physicians, protocol forgotten for an instant. ‘Her sickness is mortal, mortal, your Grace, you must not enter her chamber!’

And he, seeking comfort, turned to Bishop Rotherham with a sad and piteous look: ‘So I have lost everything. Everything.’ Rotherham’s velvet arm through his. His turncoat smile. Would he had come to me for comfort! It would have assuaged a little of my present grief.

John of Gloucester, kneeling for his father’s kiss. John, a fine boy, God preserve him, Plantagenet nose and chin, and the grey eyes, rabbit-fur in sunlight, of Anne’s Flemish substitute. ‘We appoint our dear bastard son, John, who is both quick in wits and agile of body, Captain of Calais from this day forward...’

Anne dying, quietly as she had lived. And no sooner was she chested and the King’s tears sealed with her under stone in Westminster, than a poisonous wave, another riot of rumour, sprang up. It came from the lips of Rotherham, he who had clave closest to the King in his sorrow. The face of Bess was made hideous to me in all its beauty, for her cruel young words came back. ‘Will the Queen never die?’ We could hear only the whispers and watch the guileless faces on the stair; we could do naught. Until there was one day a crying on Paul’s Cross, of Richard’s patience ended. And in the pleasaunce, when the daffodils had blown their trumpets ragged, I met with Bess again, smelling of gillyflowers and honey, but half-mad. I had never seen her so distraught. I could have embraced her, but I did not wish it. She wept and tore her hair

‘Why do they treat him thus?’ she cried. ‘The evil that men say outweighs the good.’

‘What do men say, lady?’

‘Evil, evil,’ she sobbed. ‘To say he gave her poison! Why, I hated her because he loved her so!’

She wound both hands in the neck of her gown till the fine silk split and tore.

‘He is my joy and maker in this world,’ she said. ‘I am his in heart and thought. I would have him. I would bed with him and bear him the sons he never got on the sickly Neville Queen. I would give him joy, gladness...’

Brutally, to quell her storm, I said:

‘What of your brothers? You know how the rumour runs? That Richard...’

‘Lies!’ she screamed. ‘Two bastard boys! What harm they? What harm any of us? O God, that I had knives to carve the tongues from those who speak against him! Know you not, Sir Knight’—she put her face up close to mine, and her breath was no longer sweet, but rank with hatred—‘that they are the cause of my sorrow?’

‘Lady, you are raving,’ I said sadly.

‘Nay, sir,’ she said, clutching my arm. ‘For to wed poor Bess the King would need to legitimize me—no bastard Queen for Richard Plantagenet! And my brothers then by custom made the same. The stain wiped out. Christ, sir,’ she said, weeping again, ‘I wrote in love to my uncle of Norfolk, giving my whole self to the King. And what did Richard, for England’s sake? He sent a herald on Paul’s Cross, crying me bastard, vowing he would not marry me!’

‘He cannot marry you,’ I said. ‘’Twould be vile, incestuous...’

Her eyes slitted, mere threads of blue. ‘The Pope would grant a dispensation,’ she murmured, trembling. ‘In ancient Egypt, brother and sister married... why not uncle and niece... my lady mother says it; once, a woman, an Egyptian, told me I should be Queen of England; I was but a babe, but my mother tells me...’

‘Speak not to me of your mother,’ I said bitterly. ‘For I know she would see a crown upon your head and herself Queen-Dowager again. Not through you, but through Ned or Dickon. Then, again, the old warry dance. Speak not of your mother.’

‘She would have me wed,’ she said tightly.

‘I doubt not,’ I said furiously, seeing again Richard’s face at Anne’s burying. ‘I doubt not, she has for you a second choice. Another pretty bridegroom... across the sea, lady? Do I speak truth?’

She blanched. In all my hurt, there was satisfaction. My sight was still keen. I left her and went to tell Richard, who knew already. During my absence in York, Dame Grey had offered her daughter to Henry Tydder.

Margetta loved Richard too, and reverenced him. I never knew how much until we said farewell in June. It was raining, and she, looking from the solar window, said quietly:

‘It rains. They even blame him for the rain. They say that God is angry with the Plantagenets. There are factions set against him, like some devil that would do him harm. Yet Bishop Langley... heard you how he wrote to the Prior of Christ Church?’

I touched her hand. Still looking at the rain, she said:

‘“He contents the people where he goes best that ever did prince; for many a poor man that has suffered wrong many days has been relieved and helped by him and his commands. On my truth I liked never the conditions of any prince so well as his; God hath sent him to us for the weal of us all”.’

‘You have it by heart,’ I said.

I thought, I do think, of the gaols and the prisoners who through his kindliness had parted company; of the newly endowed College of Arms; of the jurymen who nevermore would fall prey to corruption; of the poor men who knew their rights through the Statues writ in English, of the cheating and sharp practice to which he had put an end... and the steadily rising poem to God in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge... and the little Priory of Holy Trinity, York, rebuilt when he was Lord of the North. And his words, at Worcester, Gloucester, Coventry: ‘Nay, my friends: rather your hearts than your money’—with that rare smile. The one phrase the epitome of his desire—love in lieu of ambition. And I grew suddenly affrighted, for in a world as sinful as ours, I thought, what man could prosper by such philosophy?