Joan Wolf (5 page)

Georgie thought I was afraid of nothing. Georgie was wrong.

I met Lord Leyburn returning from Harrogate when I was two miles away from the castle. He greeted me with a smile, and our two horses began to walk side by side along the roadway. His lordship had not spoken after his initial greeting and I stole a glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He was frowning a little.

“Are you still in the attic room?” he asked me abruptly.

“Why, yes, my lord.” The question had taken me completely by surprise.

“You shouldn’t be.” His face looked very severe. “Ned was right about one thing. You aren’t a servant.”

“I like my room,” I said. “I don’t want to change it.”

He gave me a strange, slanting look. “What do you want to change?” he asked. “What do you miss from your old life?”

I answered before I thought. “Music.”

He stopped his horse. He was not riding Saladin today but a very well-bred-looking chestnut mare. “Do you play?” he asked.

“Yes. Piano, not harpsichord. My mother was a very fine musician and she gave me lessons when I was a child. But I’ve had few opportunities for formal study since then. We always had a piano, though. Papa saw to that for me.”

I stopped speaking suddenly. Surely this sounded like an odd background for a boy. Girls were the ones who were encouraged to play an instrument.

Lord Leyburn said nothing, however, and began to walk his horse forward again. He did not speak until we were in the stable yard and then only to say, “Come up to the house with me.”

I obeyed without comment, stretching my legs to try to keep up with his long stride, concentrating on keeping my face serene. What was he going to do?

He took me into the drawing room. It was an enormous chamber that had been the banqueting hall of the old castle. It was stiff and formal, and even on this sunny July day, it was cold and damp. On the far side of the room, near the fireplace, was a piano. Lord Leyburn gestured.

“Try it,” he said.

I moved slowly across the marble floor, sat down on the bench, and ran my fingers along the keyboard. In this cold and damp and unused room, the piano was in perfect tune. I looked up at the earl.

“Go on,” he said quietly.

I played Mozart’s “Sonata in C Major,” which I had always liked and which was not too difficult. It was a beautiful piano. When I finished I stayed as I was, my eyes on the keyboard.

‘ ‘You play with a great deal of feeling,’’ said his lordship.

I forced a smile. “What you really mean is that my technique is terrible.”

“No. I don’t mean that at all. You need more work, true, but technique can be learned. What you have is something that can’t be taught.”

I looked up at him. His face was as serious as mine.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It is hard to put it into words. It’s an understanding, but it’s an emotion as well.”

I nodded. “Do you play, my lord?”

“Yes.” Just that single word, with no qualifiers and no disclaimers. He played.

“What would you like to hear?” he asked.

I got up from the piano. “Haydn’s ‘Sonata Number Five in C Major?’ “ I asked tentatively. It was a piece whose difficulty was about on the level of the Mozart I had just played. He smiled very faintly and sat down in my vacated place.

I knew at once why the piano was in such perfect tune. He played as he did everything else: with the brilliance that was an integral part of his nature. There was passion in his music and the knowledge of suffering and of joy. His playing wasn’t even remotely amateur; his technique was flawless.

When he finished, I stared for a minute at the long hard fingers on the keys.

“Well?” His face was inscrutable.

There was no need to tell him how well he played. He knew that already. “Please,” I asked softly, “would you play some more?”

Without another word he turned back to the keyboard. I sat down on the edge of an extremely uncomfortable chair and for another hour felt myself in heaven.

* * * *

When finally I went upstairs to my room, it was to find Robert, one of the footmen, engaged in putting together my clothes.

“What are you doing?” I asked sharply.

“His lordship wants you moved to the blue bedroom downstairs,” he told me.

“What?” I sat down on my familiar sagging bed and gaped at him.

“Mr. Crosby gave me orders to move your things to the blue bedroom,” Robert said woodenly. “You’re coming up in the world, Val. Or should I say Master Valentine?”

“Stow it, Robert,” I said inelegantly, and after a minute he grinned.

“Well, like it or not, Val, you’re moving.” Robert looked eloquently at the shabby jacket he was holding.’ ‘You’ll be getting new clothes next, I expect. Perhaps his lordship is planning to adopt you.”

“I’m not a candidate for adoption,” I said fiercely. I, too, stared at the jacket. God, what was I going to do if I had to be measured for new clothes?

I picked up the book that was on the floor next to my bed and glumly followed Robert down the stairs to the part of the house the family used. I had not been in the bedroom wing before, and when Robert pushed open a door, I stared in wonder at the big, sunny, comfortable room. Army quarters had never looked like this.

“However can we have the card game here?” I asked suddenly. Robert and John and Mickey, three of the footmen, had taught me to play a very complicated game of cards and we had taken to meeting a few nights a week in my old room.

“Will you still want to play with us?” Robert’s voice sounded muffled, and I stared at him.

“Of course I want to play. How else am I to get my spending money?” I had been very successful at that card game.

Robert laughed. “We’ll have to find another spot. If Mr. Crosby ever found out, we’d be in trouble. He hates gambling.”

We played for pennies, hardly a princely sum, and no one was ever financially hurt by the games. But Crosby was a little unreasonable on the subject of cards. We had only begun to play when I offered my room. No one else had the luxury of privacy.

After Robert left, I walked slowly around the room, touching the surfaces of polished wood, picking up the fine china ornaments. Finally I came to a halt in front of the great mahogany-framed mirror.

I had not seen myself in a full-length mirror since I had come to Carlton Castle. My old room had held a little bit of glass for shaving, only large enough to make sure that my face was clean. I stood now and stared at myself critically. When Lord Leyburn looked at me, what did he see?

The slight figure looking back at me was straight and lithe as a boy’s, the legs long, the hips slim. I needed a haircut badly. At present I looked rather like an untidy page boy. I stepped a little closer to the mirror and stared appraisingly at my face.

The eyes that looked back at me were large and dark, more gray than blue; the long dark lashes looked betrayingly feminine, as did the finely textured skin. However, the face itself was thin, not full, and that helped to give an illusion of boyishness. The mouth and chin were finely modeled and firm, not soft. I looked like what his lordship thought I was: a delicately-featured fifteen-year-old boy.

But if I had to be measured for clothes ... my disguise would not hold up under that kind of a scrutiny.

In a sense it would be a relief to be found out. If I could only be certain that I would be allowed to continue as I was, I would tell Lord Leyburn the truth myself. For some obscure reason, I had begun to want him to see me as a girl. I stared at my masculine reflection and wondered what Lord Leyburn would think if he ever saw me in a gown. After a minute I turned away from the mirror in exasperation. I must, I thought wryly, be going out of my mind.

Chapter 7

The day following my move into the family wing I arrived in the kitchen as usual for breakfast. Mrs. Scone looked at me doubtfully. “I was going to send Robert to your room with a tray, Valentine. I don’t think it proper for you to be eating in the kitchen anymore.”

The last thing I needed was Robert darting in and out of my bedroom. “I have every intention of continuing to eat in the kitchen,” I said. “I hate to eat alone, and besides, I like you all very much. It’s fun eating here. Did you make muffins this morning, Mrs. Scone?”

Mrs. Scone laughed and ruffled my hair. “What a boy you are, Valentine. Yes, I made muffins. Sit you down and I’ll get you a plate.”

Later that morning, as I was lunging a yearling for Hutchins, I looked toward the fence and saw his lordship there watching me. When I had finished with the youngster, I made a fuss over him and gave him an apple.

“You have a magic touch with horses, Valentine,” said a voice at my shoulder, and I smiled a little.

“They’re very sensitive creatures, my lord. They know who loves them.” As if to prove my point, the youngster began to nuzzle Lord Leyburn’s chest. He laughed.

“So they do. I want you to come along with me this afternoon, Valentine.” He signaled to Georgie, who came over to take the yearling.

I grinned at Georgie and began to walk after the earl. “Where are we going?”

“To Middleham.” He didn’t say anything more and kept his silence all during the ride. I had never been to Middleham, even though it was not that far from Carlton and was the chief town of Coverdale. We went not to the town, however, but to the huge ruined castle that stands above it.

Still in silence, Lord Leyburn dismounted and I followed suit. He began to walk toward the great stone walls and I walked beside him, made uneasy by the still somberness of his face.

The great medieval ruin was eerily impressive, with its shattered battlements and roofless chambers where the birds had built their nests. I thought of Carlton, which might have looked like this if the family had deserted it, and shivered a little.

“Whose castle is this?” I asked softly.

“Richard’s,” the earl said gravely. Then as if he sensed my confusion, he looked down at me. “The last owner of this castle was Richard Plantagenet, King Richard the Third.” He was not smiling.

“Oh.” I looked around me. “It must have been very grand once.”

“It was. The jewel of the north Middleham used to be. The Tudors let it fall into ruin.”

I remembered what Mr. Fitzallan had told me about Richard III. “I understand that here in the north people do not think of King Richard as they do elsewhere,” I said tentatively.

The earl’s dark eyes were hard on my face. “No, they don’t. Richard the Third, Valentine, is the most bitterly wronged king in all of English history.”

I held his gaze. “I only know about him from Shakespeare.”

His mouth twisted. “You and everyone else. Crookback Richard, villain, usurper, murderer. And none of it is true.”

“What was Shakespeare’s source?” I asked. One thing I had learned from my father was to evaluate the bias of historical sources before coming to any conclusions.

Lord Leyburn looked at me speculatively.
“The History of Richard III
by Sir Thomas More.”

“Sir Thomas More?” I shook my head. “I don’t think one can call into question the integrity of a man like More, my lord.”

The earl made an abrupt gesture. “Sit down, Valentine.” I sat on a low stone wall and stretched out my legs. Lord Leyburn did the same.

“Thomas More was brought up in the household of Cardinal Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Morton was the right hand man of Henry the Seventh, the Tudor usurper who defeated Richard at Bosworth Field. Morton was also, and had been for years, Richard’s deadly enemy. There is no doubt that Morton is the one who supplied the information about Richard to his pupil, Thomas More. And the history was never published in More’s lifetime. It was found with his papers after his death. It was not finished. I’ve always thought that More, who was an extremely intelligent man, never finished it because he had begun to doubt the honesty and the value of the material supplied to him by Morton.”

This was all extremely interesting. “Are there no other sources?” I asked thoughtfully.

“Nothing chronological. There are, of course, Parliamentary records and decrees, personal letters from the time, the Patent Rolls, things like that.”

“Things like that can be very informative.”

He was sitting a little distance from me, staring straight ahead at the town clustered on the next hill. His hands were lightly clenched on a leather riding crop, and the breeze from the moors lightly stirred the raven thickness of his hair.

“Very informative indeed, to those who care to look with an unbiased eye,” he said, and his dark eyes turned to me. “What do you know of Richard the Third, Valentine?”

“That he murdered his nephews, the little princes in the tower,” I answered promptly.

“And why would he do that, do you think? Richard had already been crowned king and widely accepted by the country.”

“Because the princes were the sons of Edward the Fourth and Richard was only the former king’s younger brother. They had a better right to the throne than he.”

“So did the boy’s five sisters. And his brother George’s son and daughter. In getting rid of the boys he would only be scratching the surface of the York heirs who supposedly stood between him and the throne.”

I narrowed my eyes and stared at the stone walls of the ruined castle. “What happened to the other heirs?” I asked finally.

“You have a beautiful mind, Valentine,” he said. “When Richard died, they were all alive and prospering.”

“When Richard died,” I repeated. “What happened to them after he died?”

“Henry took immediate steps to secure the persons of all of the heirs and kept them in close seclusion until he could get rid of them with a minimum of fuss.”

“My, my, my.” I looked at him. “No one ever claimed Henry the Seventh was a pleasant man,” I remarked.

“He was more than unpleasant. He was the murdering bastard who had the princes killed,” the earl said, and proceeded to set forth the evidence.

“But these are
facts,”
I said when he had finished.’ ‘What you have just told me is there, in black and white, in the records of the time. Why has no one made this known?”