We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (47 page)

The shadow, if there ever was a shadow, was gone from the window. Only a cloud remained that stood across the moon, behind the dappled pear tree that waved in the April night wind. And sorrow, deep and heavy, not for myself. A visitation it was in truth, but that which was not seen, not evil, but dolorous behind all thought.

Now I know. I hardly needed the telling, by town crier or herald, that some dreadful calamity had overtaken him.

His little son is dead.

They say he is nigh demented, by reason of his sudden grief.

Yesterday we rang the bell merrily for St George of England. Today, another Requiem bears the blossom down.

Whom shall it toll for next, I wonder?

My sisters looked oddly at me for days. They reckoned I knew of the Prince’s passing before anyone. My face told it, they said.

Of course it’s true, and this frightens me. Yet can I help it if his sorrow is ever my sorrow, his breath my life?

I shall write no more this day.

Then came Katherine, soon after Christmas, taller than I, her waist no rounder, I swear, then the fine festive candle we had lit to Christ’s Mother. I watched her arrive, on a grey palfrey whose outline shimmered like a ghost horse in the lightly falling snow. She laughed, dismounting; one of her women chided her gently for laughing so loud within holy walls. When she knelt before me, with eyes bird-bright, the imprisoned smile still quivered on her mouth. She was lovely, fair. In her rich furs she was like a lissom animal. Her hood was forest green, her nut-brown hair silk to the touch.

‘Kate, you’re a song,’ I said, utterly foolish. The slender, snow-damp face smiled against mine. I drew her down beside me on a chest in the parlour. To London she had been, for Christmas. She burst into a recital; the court revels from end to end, from the entry of the Boy-Bishop to the dwarfs riding their mules around the Great Hall. She told it all to me, who needed no telling. She coloured an old picture.

‘Mother, the cook made a great pie! When the carver opened it, a lot of frogs jumped out. There must have been a score of them, all the ladies screamed. One of the frogs leaped into Lady Grey’s soup, and splashed her gown. She was furious.’

‘Where did you stay?’

If at Greenwich, she would have roamed those same passages, mounted those old, broad stairs. Yet she, the King’s daughter, would have walked in the light.

‘Crosby’s Place,’ she replied. For the first time I noticed the ring on her finger, a large beryl set in gold. Crosby’s Place, the tallest building in London. Was it still? My memory lurched with the sway of a crowded litter, the Duchess of Bedford’s dog yapped around my feet, someone pointed out the sights to me, a bumpkin. Seventeen years ago, and I with a light heart. Then I had not known a man, this man now King, who owned Crosby’s Place, had entered neither Heaven nor Hell. Kate was watching me. Probably I seemed stern, musing thus.

‘King Richard sent for me, and for John of Gloucester. To pleasure us for Christmas,’ she explained. Instantly I was hungry, longing.

‘How did he look?’

‘As a King looks,’ she answered, then shot me a sideways glance, mischievous and at the same time well pleased, as if she were bringing me a piece of sewing, or writing, for approval. ‘I am betrothed.’

With difficulty I tore my mind from the King.

‘His name is Lord Herbert. William.’

‘The Earl of Huntingdon?’ I asked. She nodded, came close to my ear to whisper.

‘And Mother, he is
young
! Handsome...’ Her manner grew frivolous. ‘We had thought he might be bald or squint. At Barnard we used to play for hours at guessing what my husband would be like! Ned and Dickon had a wager...’

‘Dickon? Ned?’ I asked sharply. She was laughing, she was fair, like a pretty, purring kitten. I had a sudden awful fear that she might have been foolish. With these unknown, teasing names.

‘I trust you’ve comported yourself virtuously, Katherine, in the north,’ I said severely, yet thinking Lord! how pompous! ‘There are temptations in a household where young women and henchmen are thrust together...’

I might not have spoken. The flood of her talk went on.

‘Yea, the Earl is handsome, and pleasant. And the King has settled a thousand marks a year upon us to start with, and he will send letters patent for at least another hundred pounds when we are wed. I had a private audience with him, in the State Chamber.’

All her laughter suddenly vanished. She twisted the beryl ring nervously. I looked at her, the long, odd-shaped eyes, and the hands like his, that moved like his, and I said, very quietly, for I wanted to hear, so much:

‘What was his dress?’

‘Black,’ she said, and without warning, burst out crying and cast herself into my arms. ‘His face was so sorrowful. So weary. He kissed me, his lips were cold. He seems... near death.’

I shook her, gave her harsh words. God forgive me.

‘Don’t say that! D’you want to put a curse upon his Grace?’

‘Ah, never, never, but the Queen is sick of lung fever and I thought he may have taken it from her. He looks as if he never sleeps. I did not know he was... so old.’

A pain gripped my heart. ‘He is but thirty-two,’ I said, without emotion.

She was quiet, shaking her downcast head like an old woman. After a time I asked: ‘Did he speak of the Queen?’

‘He spoke only of me. He said how glad he was I am his daughter, and that once he had a little son, whom God took from him. Ah, Mother!’ She raised eyes black with tears. ‘He’s a good man, good and gentle. And Ned and Dickon hate him so. When I return to Barnard they will call him names.’

I grew wrath with these unknown pages, who made rude wagers over Kate’s betrothed, who spoke against the King.

‘Who are these knaves?’ I asked, angrily. ‘Have naught to do with them. I forbid it.’

Now she looked mutinous. ‘I’m teaching them to dance!’ she expostulated. ‘They are fond of me, really. Dickon is naughty, Ned often sick—but they both call me fair.’

Her pouting mouth unnerved me. King Edward’s blood, I thought. As well as mine, and Richard’s. The late King’s lustful ardour, that seething itch. How much of it in Katherine? Holy God! next thing and Kate, royal maid or no, will be with child, not by Earl Huntingdon but one of these young rogues.

‘Give me your word you’ll have no more ado with them,’ I said wildly. Rainbow-humoured, she was laughing again.

‘But Mother, they are my cousins!’ she cried. ‘And if Dickon is sometimes rude, Ned is as courtly, in truth, as King Edward his late father would have been, had he not been drunken when I saw him last. Sweet Jesu! Mother, there’s no harm...’

Then she stopped. Stopped dead. Every particle of colour fled her face, so that the hand she lifted to her mouth looked golden against that sudden whiteness. Truly I thought she was taken with catalepsy, possessed. I sat frozen in horror. We stared at each other like fools.

‘What’s the matter?’ I whispered.

She said in an anguished voice: ‘I have broken a promise, a promise made not seven years ago. I should have my tongue cut out.’

It was half an hour before I could get it from her. And when all was told, it seemed very little. What if the royal bastards
were
at Barnard Castle? But she would not be quenched, she would keep repeating: ‘None must know, none must know. I promised King Richard. I swore on oath.’ At the last, she dragged me into the church, and, frantic, ran searching the most sacred object so that I too should swear. Had I not been grieved for her guilt I might have felt annoyed. For any secret of Richard’s I, above all, would hold most dear, whatever the reason. But she was not to know this and eventually she had me kneel with my hands clasped on the phial of Virgin’s Milk and swear before God never to tell the whereabouts of King Edward’s sons.

Then we pleasured ourselves. I took her to see Ursula, who let her put a stitch in the frontal. That meant that all of us had at one time had a hand in it. It was a marvellous piece of work already; Ursula raised her head long enough to say that she hoped to have it ready by the Annunciation, then immediately fell to unpicking the last spray of roses, and Katherine and I went away shaking our heads. Robin came, and Kate played with him. The brindled cat, still clinging round our house for scraps, sat in the snow and watched, malevolently, its tail draggled with wet, a lousy, unkempt intruder. I hope and pray that Katherine was happy that day. Had I but known she was to be part of the long pattern—Adelysia, Edyth, even the old ballad-maker, for everything I touched must die—I would have given her soft, kind words and kisses every hour. Had I but known I would never again set eyes upon her, that she would be dead within the year of a foul wasting sickness that naught could stay, I would have laid down my own life to halt her passing. Sweet Katherine. If you watch over me, pray. Give me the strength to finish this tale, and, if it is sad, remember, there is truth in sadness, joy being but an illusion.

When she had gone, my thoughts returned to the King. I thought: Let him come to me, as I have dreamed it, saying: ‘My son is dead, my wife also. Give me your smile, your joyful words, your welcoming hand.’ And, though I could only offer him a psalm, a candle, the sound of sombre music, both he and I would be assuaged. That he should come again, I prayed it.

And my prayers were answered: in blood and fire and tears.

‘
Miseratur vestri omnipotens Deus, et dismissis peccatis vestris, perducat vos ad vitam aeternam
.’

Ursula squinted up from the frontal. Though by now she was almost blind, she had an eye at the end of each clever finger.

‘Can you make it out? Is it clear, and fair, and true?’

Softly I read it. ‘May almighty God have mercy upon you’ (in purple). ‘Forgive you your sins’. A silver cross, and then the green, colour of hope: ‘and bring you to life everlasting.’

Another cross, and then the royal Rose.

High above Ursula’s cell, thunder shivered the skies. The seeing hands clasped my own.

‘Tell me,’ she said, a little querulously. ‘’Tis good? Are the colours too bright?’

‘It’s a masterwork,’ I answered. Thank God, Dame, that you have lived to finish it. I swear you would have returned yearly, from your heavenly reward, had it been left undone. I said none of this.

‘That is well,’ she nodded. ‘Now, I must make alteration. The border troubles me. The stitches seem lumpy and coarse. Hand me the gold, Sister.’

‘Sweet Dame, sweet Ursula,’ I said, doing as I was asked, ‘leave it now, I beg you. You cannot better it. We must go. The Prioress has ordered that we pray. The Great Intercession...’

‘Are we to be invaded?’ she asked, calmly threading. ‘I heard that the King is coming, in arms. Thank Christ I am too old to be afraid.’ Her needle began to swoop and flash. ‘It must be to the glory of God,’ she said, for the thousandth time.

‘Yea, it almost looks as if we shall be in the heart of the battle,’ I said. She must have heard the tremor in my voice, though she could not know its true cause. He was coming. Even now, he rode to Leicester. Ursula sang half of a short psalm, bent low again, and went on sewing. I walked among her silks and tapestry frames, while the fitful August sun pried through the high window. I imagined all that Ursula could not.

The villagers were arming. From the south-west of Leicester, men marched to his standard. From Stoke Golding, Earl Shilton and Stapleton, from the hamlets of Kirkby Mallory, Atterton and Fenny Drayton they came. A few of them had knocked last night upon our gate for a blessing, strong, rustic men, soft-spoken, coarse-tongued, shuffling their thonged feet awkwardly up the nave. The King was coming to Leicester. Tomorrow, the day after, they were not sure. Little villages, known to us over the years for their poverty, their surly, crying needs, yielded up their men. Northeasterly marched the yeomen of Glenfield, Desford, Kirby Muxloe and Newbold Verdon. And from farther west they came, grim, patient and hastily equipped, the men of Atherstone, Maxstoke, Stone, Stanton, Sapcote and Appleby Magna. We had nursed and succoured them, these men of Leicester, over the long years, and now they crowded through Swine Market to the Cross, and down to the sign of the White Boar where the King would surely lie, tomorrow or the next day, before his triumph, his great campaign and acquittal, his vengeance and the wreaking of his might.

I had completed five days of the novena I was making for him, so I went into the church and stayed there to augment it after the others had gone. For the first time the words came haltingly, some I even had to grope for. There was too much distraction. Sounds drifted from the distant street, men’s voices, the occasional trundle of wheels. I closed my eyes and pictures formed out of my blindness. I saw the men, the arms-cart, the plodding mule. One of the marchers played a little experimental riff on a drum. A great deep-throated roar of laughter sounded, as if they were going to a cockfight rather than to battle.

A female voice shrilled unintelligibly. More laughter. The camp-followers had come already. I wondered about men’s lust, the strange potency that grips each soldier in the last hours before death, the weird need to perpetuate, in the jaws of extinction, his fleshly image... God! what thoughts! in the midst of my most special novena. I finished my broken prayer, flushed with shame, projecting the Cross into my mind. A face rose and blocked it out. Narrow, poised, with a sharp, inward-looking cleverness, it stared from behind my closed lids. There were demons in me, surely. Why, when my thoughts should be of God and the King, should she arise, little Lady Margaret Beaufort? I crossed myself and she faded, did Lady Stanley, who even now must hang her head, do penance for being mother to the enemy. Or would she, instead, seek comfort in old books of learning, tomorrow, or the next day, with her Henry justly slain?

I knew that Richard cherished her still. He would; it was ever his way.

I got up and went outside. By the pear tree, Robin provoked the brindled cat, with fluttering runs and leaping. Giles was there too, long-shadowed, simpering with excitement.

‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I asked.

He was a great lummox. With sparkling baby-face, he pointed towards the dove-cote. On the bench beneath sat a man, a dark-jowled stranger, holding a harp.