Mistress to the Crown (19 page)

‘Pay attention, Jock. We shall not be long, Mistress Shore.’

He was so detached, as if we had never been lovers. That hurt. Relegation: Elizabeth Lambard was jarred and lidded on a high shelf. Today’s repast was the war.

Ledgers and orderly stacks of opened letters were pancaked on the shelf behind him, vellum scrolls with rolling pin handles lurked in open coffers at knee level within a hand’s reach and a pile of dispatches with their seals still virginal waited for attention.

Two secretaries, round-shouldered like herons, were perched on stools at either end the table with wooden writing boards slung
round their necks. Each had their own tray of inkpots, penknives, quills, pine dust, pumice, candles, sand and sealing wax. One was making notes as the discussion moved from how many soldiers could be squeezed aboard a carrack to the price of arrow-shaft feathers and on to whether they could afford to pay the mounted men-at-arms 18d a day. This could go on for hours, and as I’d noticed a huge book chained onto a lectern, I wandered over to investigate.

The title page depicted a king dining in state. I turned the pages of the long preamble to the main text – written in Latin and English – and discovered it contained the duties and allowances of every officer of the king’s household. Amazing how many there were.

‘It interests you?’ Lord Hastings joined me after the others had left. If this were Gerrard’s Hall, he would have put his arm about me; now he took care that nothing touched. Common sense, no complications and yet … To be knifed out of his life like an unwanted grub was painful.

I turned the pages until I found the entry for the Lord Chamberlain.

‘Oh, how unfair, you only get two esquires and two yeomen. Is there an entry for “the King’s Mistress”?’ I improvised:

A mistress serving in the king’s chamber shall have due care his highness shall not exhaust himself. She shall be available at all times and ensure she introduce neither goujere, pox, pestilence, lice or fleas into the royal bed. She is allowed silken chemises, down pillows, sundry perfumes and the order of the Gart—’

‘Oh, for God’s Sake!’

I subsided, delighted I could still make his conscientious look evaporate, but it returned within the instant, and he was avoiding looking me in the face.

‘What if I am unavailable for his highness, my lord?’

‘I haven’t all day. Elizabeth. The King wishes you to reside at Westminster forthwith, and since I have to inform the Exchequer and need some distraction from this cursed campaign, I’ll walk across with you. Leave ahead of me. I’ll meet you in Palace Yard.’

He was still in terse mood when he joined me outside.

‘You should not have spent entire nights in the royal bedchamber,’ he growled, ‘and as for taking the King of England – and the princesses – to a common pie shop! They could have caught the pestilence.’

‘It’s not high summer yet but, yes, I’m sorry,’ I murmured, gathering up my skirts to match his stride.

‘Hell, Elizabeth, I thought you’d have more sense. Thank the Blessed Christ nothing went wrong.’ He crossed himself. ‘Can you imagine the danger to the realm, the anarchy that might ensue if … Well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. I feel myself to blame, I should have made clear to you there are rules for his grace’s mistresses that must be followed.’

My good humour ceased. ‘How many of us are there, my lord? Am I only for use on Tuesdays and Saturdays?’

‘You won’t be for any, if you don’t show sense. I heard all about you being stranded without any decent clothing. You belong only to his
private
life. The common people expect him to be contented with a beauteous queen and a brood of perfect children.’

‘As if the common people are blind, deaf and stupid, my lord! Our guildwives’ embroidery mornings would have been silent as a coroner’s morgue if we hadn’t had the tittle-tattle.’

‘Elizabeth!’

‘Oh, I must be as unobtrusive as a spider, lurk among the royal cobwebs until whisked down with a bunch of feathers.’

‘I’m glad you understand.’

‘Oh yes, my lord,’ I conceded wearily. ‘I shall exist in an adulterous Purgatory.’

Hastings sent a beseeching look at the featherbed of clouds overhead and continued with the pulpit admonition.

‘No more rebellion, Elizabeth, your time is now the King’s.’ Then he added stiffly, ‘I’m pleased that you have cheered Ned as I hoped you would. Now let us proceed.’

‘Wholesome, merry, and capable of whamming into the bull’s eye like a champion’s arrow?’ I muttered. ‘Is that how you see me?’

‘I have had my say!’ His profile was stony as granite. He began striding towards a row of gabled buildings overlooking the river.

‘I still have questions.’ I hastened after him, bridling my hurt.

‘Well?’

‘If … if the court travels to another palace such as Windsor or Eltham, do I trudge along at the back with the horseboys like a camp follower or am I expected to languish with tears and swoons until his grace’s return?’

He held open the door for me. ‘If the King desires your presence, you will be escorted separately, usually ahead of what we call “the riding household”.’

‘Ah, the thrill of being trundled off before dawn on a winter’s morning. Are hot bricks part of the arrangement, my lord?’

He did not answer. We had reached the Exchequer.

It was a two-storeyed building manned by an army of clerks. We did not go into the lower rooms where the king’s moneys were received but upstairs where the board bearing the famous chequered cloth (albeit shined and grimy from much use) was set up. Beside it, a dispute was in full sail. I recognised the merchant grocer who was brandishing his end of a tally stick at one of the officers. He halted in mid-argument on beholding us. The frenzied hubbub hushed and every clerk put down his quill, rose and bowed to Hastings.

‘As you were, gentlemen.’

Business resumed. I kept my gaze lowered, but my woman’s antennae could sense the suppressed leers and speculation – did Mistress Shore lie with my Lord Chamberlain as well as the King’s grace? A frolic
à trois
?

Hastings beckoned over a gorbellied man in a leather doublet. Around us, the scratching of quills began anew even if every ear was straining to hear our business.

‘This is Master Peter Beaupie, Clerk of the Green Cloth, Mistress Shore. He will assist you if any problems arise. It is agreed by the Treasurer that you will be given a regular allowance of ale, wine and so forth like the rest of the household. You will be entered in the accounts as a gentleman usher of the King’s chamber. There are four, Masters Young, Hervey, Talbot and Ratcliffe. You are the fifth.’

Gentleman Usher No
5! At least it had a ring of permanence. If I was careful, I should be able to afford to buy some apprenticeships for some of the street boys and children of poor families. But how long would my good fortune last?

‘So, my lord, is there a Gentleman Usher No 6 who wears pretty garters?’ I asked coldly as we left the Exchequer.

He halted. At last his blue eyes met mine with an apology that he could not speak. But perhaps that was my imagination, for after a moment’s hesitation, he asked, ‘Tell me, have you heard Ned speak with Dorset about the marriage to Cecily?’

‘I cannot tell you, my lord. That is the King’s business.’

He drew breath to press the matter, and then nodded wearily. ‘Well done, Elizabeth Lambard. You pass the test.’

I guessed he had hoped otherwise. But maybe I was wrong.

‘And … it was the right decision?’ he asked.

I could have pretended not to understand, to brandish my hurt, but in truth I owed him everything.

‘Yes. And since the King believes it was …’ Here I reached up a gloved hand to straighten the lappet of his robe. ‘What other decision is there?’

VI

I admit I was afraid of the Queen while Ned and his noblemen made war in France. Not that she was known for poisoning anyone, but rather because Pestilence stalked the London streets in high summer and a fat bribe to the coroner might ensure a convenient epitaph for a king’s mistress and no questions asked in high places.

Mama was relieved when I agreed to go with her and Father to the house he had purchased at Hinxworth, a blink-as-you-gallop-through hamlet in Hertfordshire.

It was restorative to be in a shire where no one knew me save my uncle and aunt, who wanted no truck with a jezebel like me. My parents were still in the womb, so to speak, in replacing the old dwelling they had purchased, but I paid little heed to their plans for I was utterly lovesick for Ned’s arms about me, so terrified he might end up with a French arrow through his visor. Every day I lit a candle and said prayers for him. With good reason, too, the tidings from across the Channel had England tense.

Leaf fall came. The Michaelmas daisies in my mother’s garden let down their mauve skirts, garnet berries adorned the hawthorns in the hedgerows and bryony necklaced the thickets with berries like bright drops of blood. And Ned was still in France.

In the end, the closest he went to any ‘Agincourt’ was the village not the victory. In return for a massive pension for himself and his captains, a marriage for Princess Bess and a favourable trading treaty, he promised to withdraw his mighty army and bother France no more.

Like the rest of England, my father heard the news with disgust. ‘What! After all those years of high taxes and forcing donations out of us?’ he fumed. ‘All those ships and men, and the King doesn’t draw a poxy sword?’ His tankard hit at the fireplace. ‘Well, he should be right glad England is not a republic otherwise the daggers will be out when he gets back. And don’t you try to shush me either, Elizabeth. A man has a right to his opinion in his own hall. Think I’m a fool to bellow treason in the market place? By St George, the shame of it! That oily Louis is boasting he’s defeated the English army with naught but French wine and venison pies.’

Ned remained in Calais throughout September until all his soldiers had been shipped home. I thought that unwise for there was talk of rebellion in England. Although the guilds sent their liverymen to welcome him back to London, the citizens did not huzzah or fling their caps up as he rode past. He noticed. By the time he was free to visit me in my new lodgings in King Street (close to St Margaret’s and just across from Westminster Great Hall), there was a tail-between-the-legs vulnerability about him.

‘If our soldiers had set fire to half of France and toasted all the babies, there would be no derision,’ he complained, as he lay back in my arms on the daybed in my parlour after we had made love. ‘But no, I’m labelled a coward because I negotiated a peace, a very good peace.’

‘You could never be a coward, Ned.’

His face was bitter. ‘The common people think I am.’

I snuggled within his arm, happy to have him real to my touch. ‘Give them time, my gracious lord.’

‘Ha! The royal council insists I go round the southern shires and restore order. I’m leaving tomorrow.’

‘But you’ve only just come home,’ I protested. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

He kissed my hair. ‘Darling Jane, all I really want to do is make love to you for a week and forget the world.’ But I knew ignominy scorched his mind. What he needed was absolution.

I leaned up on my elbow and stroked my finger down his brow and nose. ‘Is King Louis as greasy haired and spidery as people say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he understand your French?’

‘Of course,’ he replied immodestly. ‘Didn’t you know I was born in Rouen?’

‘Born speaking fluently?’ I teased. ‘What a clever family you are.’

‘Yes, born in Rouen and I’d damn well hoped to be crowned there.’ He took a swig of ale. ‘You know, Jane, I could have, should have, gone through with it. Ever since I became king I dreamed about invading France. I was going to seize back all the lands that old Henry lost, yes, with a glorious victory that would leave Crecy and Agincourt looking like a walk in the garden, and what happens? I let myself be talked around by that damnable French prick. Richard told me I was a blockhead.’

‘Hmm, for what my humble opinion’s worth, I think you behaved correctly.’

‘Distaff approval. That makes me feel so much better.’

I fisted the cushion by his head. ‘No, don’t you dare be patronising!’

‘You forget I’m the King of England, woman,’ he scolded affectionately, burying his fingers in my long tresses. ‘I can be what I poxy well please.’

I ran a finger across his lips. ‘Listen to me, my dearest lord, if I were a French peasant woman, I’d be thanking God my family are still alive, I haven’t been raped or skewered, and my haystacks haven’t been torched.’

He muttered something about French peasants not having brains to know there was even a war afoot. How could I cheer this unhappy, splendid man?

I sat back on my heels. ‘Oh, Ned, God was with you. He guided you although you may not realise it. Just consider how many thousands are still alive because you chose to talk matters out. And the benefits to trade!’

He snorted. ‘I wish you’d go out and tell my subjects that. Whoresons!
They
didn’t have to deal with damned Burgundy. If dithering Charles hadn’t played shall-I-shan’t-I like a green virgin, I might be King of France by now.’ He clambered to his feet. ‘Christ! I wish I did not have to go on this plaguey circuit to poxy Hampshire.’

I knelt up upon the daybed. ‘But you’ll be merciful.’

‘Will I?’ The ruthlessness that had seen the fugitives in Tewkesbury Abbey dragged forth and executed was naked in his eyes.

‘Yes,’ I said firmly, although his expression dismayed me. ‘Of course, you will.’

Yuletide that year was joyous. Carol dances and disguisings. Such merriment! The palace walls and lintels were festooned with branches of holly and ivy, and everywhere you could hear minstrels. Apart from worshipping at the special Masses, we feasted and we sinned. But I also became acquainted with the stars and planets that whirled about Ned’s sunne-in-splendour universe; the accomplished men with intelligent discourse, not Shore-and-Paddesley-stuff about wrestling at Smithfield, but men who had been to Russia
and Arabia; travellers who had seen magical lights in the waves of the night sea and a green brilliance dancing in the northern skies.