Mistress to the Crown (23 page)

‘No, it’s not that, my dearest lord,’ I laughed, kneeling by the chair. ‘I was trying to stand on my own feet.’

Beneath his lashes, he dashed a sulky glare at my knees. ‘You can’t. You’re my mistress. You don’t
stand
, you
recline
. You’re meant to ask for perfumes, jewels and … houses. Christ, Jane!’ Hurt misted his hazel eyes. ‘Don’t you want to do this anymore? Do you still want Hastings?’ He stared beyond me at the tapestry, as if imagining himself the lonely side of the triangle. ‘Is that it?’

He thought that Hastings and I might still … Oh, God, surely not.

‘But horns would never fit inside your crown,’ I murmured lovingly, turning his face to me. I had to forgive his taunt even though it burned. ‘Don’t ever doubt me. If I had a coat of arms, I would steal your brother Richard’s motto:
Loyaulte me lie
. As for Hastings, you might as well bid the Moon to flee the Earth’s embrace. You come first with him, ever and always.’ I nestled my cheek against Ned’s breast. I could hear his heart. Oh Sweet Christ, what if it ever stopped?

Gently, his fingers stroked down my throat. Eventually he asked, ‘Why, then?’

I looked up at him with all the love I could muster. ‘I was trying to make provision. One day you will tire of me and there is no Guild of Mistresses to bolster my fall.’

‘Jane,’ he chided, running a loving finger along my lower lip.

‘Oh, Ned, it will happen. Do you really believe we shall hobble to bed together thirty years from now?’

With both hands, he drew my face to his. ‘I’ll never tire of you.’ He kissed my lips as though they were the most delicate flower petals. ‘Love isn’t just the laying, it’s friendship, it’s trust, it’s laughter, and thirty years from now, if we both live that long, you will still make me smile.’ I suppose I looked ridiculously enraptured by his honeyed words because he dissolved into laughter, grabbed me across him and shouted, ‘and
then
we’ll hobble to bed together.’

Pillow talk when your lover is mellow after a bout of sinful coupling is a smoother-out of quarrels. Ned agreed to loan me funds from his private purse; I vowed I should pay him back.

Before the winter could come on us again, I bustled and found a pretty stone dwelling near Aldersgate. My buried treasure for a rainy day. Meantime, I was content to dwell in King Street and let out my new city purchase to a wealthy widow.

In December my former maidservant, Isabel, came to tell me that she was free to join me. My grumbling husband had sailed to Antwerp with a royal letter of protection from Ned, a valuable guarantee of credit that would have his rivals in Brabant drooling with envy. Oh, I could have swung on the bell ropes of St Paul’s. I need no longer fear encountering him in the city. Shore was finally
offshore!

IX

At least I was not a concubine confined in a pagan’s seragalio. Ned did take me to Eltham and his other river palaces, but I had never visited Windsor, and Provost Westbury had pricked my curiosity. I longed to see this special chapel where the Order of the Garter ceremonies took place, and that summer I begged Ned to take me aboard his barge since he was going to Windsor on his way to Nottingham.

‘I hate Windsor,’ yelled Dorset as we rode beneath the castle gatehouse with the trumpets blaring. ‘I always get lodged on the north side, it’s gloomy as hell and the poxy rooks in the upper ward wake me up too damn early.’

‘I’m glad something wakes you up,’ muttered Hastings.

I had never been in a castle, except to visit the menagerie at the Tower of London. Windsor similarly had acquired towers and lodgings of every age and style as each king made changes, but it was King Edward III’s stern, drum tower with a little watch turret stuck jauntily to one side of its battlements, like gloves on a hat brim, that my gaze flew to first.

Despite the masons’ drays, the piles of timber and stone and general building mess across the lower bailey, a huge crowd had
mustered to welcome Ned: the dean and canons, an ‘anthem’ of choristers, officers, garrison knights and menials. A festoon of masons even saluted from the scaffolding helming the chapel’s great west window.

A page conducted me to my chamber, which was off the royal apartments and had once been occupied by Alice Perrers, mistress to Edward III. Judging by the furnishings, little had changed. While Isabel unpacked my coffers, the boy offered escort to the top of the Round Tower. I do not care for spiral steps, especially when they twist through several storeys, but the God’s eye view had me gasping and not just from the climb. I had never stood so high in my life.

A dizzy drop below, a miller and his apprentices were heaving sacks through the upper postern, and further off servants were laughing as they carried fresh linen across the courtyard. I observed Dorset lolling against a doorway, still in his riding clothes, laughing with a servant girl, and further off one of the young choristers was giving a furtive glance behind him before he lifted his skirt and pissed. There was smoke from the town chimneys curling lazily into the air beyond the southern gatehouse and a nobleman’s barge gliding along the river. Bridle paths and streams ran through the green of the pastures like silver threads and the shadows of the clouds sailed over the copses and fields with the self-importance of huge caravels. I supposed God could see every detail – the antlers of the deer grazing in the park, blissful as cows; the household of does and fawns plodding behind their lord and master along the edge of the woods, woods that stretched for twenty miles or more, woods where ghosts hunted by night and the king’s men by day – a group of birdcatchers were striding across the pasture towards the trees

I lingered, exulting at the glory of the day until … O God! As a small bird flew high across the bailey, a slash of wings hurtled
from the sky. So fast, so deadly. In an eyeblink, the little bird was snared in the cruel talons of a sparrowhawk. My body shuddered as though I felt the bird-claws ripping into my body, too, and I crossed myself with a desperate prayer. That vast sky had become a threat. I felt exposed, alone, so tiny beneath the eye of Heaven. It was a reminder that Life could flick his fingernail again and nothing would be the same.

Next morning, with great pride, Ned thrust open the scarlet doors, embellished with the gilded iron scrolls, and led us into his beloved chapel.

‘This will be the mausoleum of generations of Yorkist kings,’ he boasted, leading us from the bright July sunshine of afternoon into a mason’s paradise. ‘My Fontevrault.’

Hastings tapped his staff loudly. All hammering and yelling in the chapel ceased. In every direction, workmen tumbled to their knees on the gritty flagstones or saluted from the ropes and planking.

I could smell fresh timber. A fine dust hung in the air. The masons were working on the interior stone vaulting over the choir stalls, and most of the chancel and nave was hazardous with scaffolding. Because of the danger and lack of space, Hastings wisely closed the door on Ned’s retinue, so there were just the three of us picking our way through shavings and offcuts, and Ned delivering a sermon on the differences between Taynton, Reigate and Caen stone.

The craftsmen were delighted to banter with the King, especially the fellow who was chiselling a row of angels. Ned clapped him on the shoulder and they had a wicked conversation about the heavenly choir.

Everything was rich in glorious craftsmanship. I could see why Ned needed to divert so much money to this enterprise. I was
not a little envious that he was to able to fund such beauty, but I confess to pride, too, that it was my lover who was creating this jewel of architecture to awe the sons and daughters of the future. A pity I did not have a little child I could bring to admire his father’s achievement.

When Ned had finished settling a few matters with the master mason, he led me to the shrine where, with the Pope’s permission, he planned to inter the bones of St John Schorne, the village priest and healer who had once conjured the Devil into a boot.

‘Don’t you have the actual boot?’ I teased.

‘I’m sure we could find one. The Order of the Holy Boot, Ned?’ suggested Hastings, inspecting the ceiling with sudden interest.

‘I’ll bestow the order of the boot upon the pair of you,’ Ned muttered, and hauled me away to see King Edward III’s sword and the fragment of the True Cross that had been pilfered from the Welsh (who probably hadn’t paid for it in the first place).

Oh, I was so happy being with Ned and Hastings that I knelt and prayed with great gratitude, but then Ned pricked my happiness. Instead of letting me inspect the scurrilous scenes the wood-carvers had made for the misericords, he insisted on showing me the drawings for his death monument.

‘It’s to be in black marble and separated from the aisle here by a grille of gilded wrought iron, finest you can imagine.’ He spread his arms high. ‘And I’m going to have my effigy done in steel and silver gilt. That will be at this height, and down beneath, level with the aisle, I’ll have a stone skeleton. Heigh, don’t make a face, Jane. Kings have to plan for these things. What about your tomb, eh?’ he chuckled, tweaking my nose. ‘Have your feet on a little dog?’

‘Don’t be daft, Ned,’ quipped Hastings. ‘More like a brass showing her latest headdress.’

I put my tongue out at them.

‘Well, mine is going to be the glory of England,’ boasted Ned, and he tossed my veil over my eyes.

‘Stop it!’ I exclaimed, longing to return to the misericords. ‘I hate this talk of tombs.’

‘What about you, Will?’ Ned jested. ‘You are more likely to need one before us.’ That was so crass, but Hastings did not look offended.

‘I would ask that I be buried where I stood in life.’

‘At my side?’ Ned buffeted his shoulder. ‘Alas, plot taken. The Queen will have to slide in there and she won’t like a grave
à trois
.’

‘At your feet, then.’

Ned’s merriment ceased. For an instant these two men I adored so much stood staring at each other. Tears gathered behind Ned’s eyes and then he flung his arms about his friend. ‘By God, Will, I owe you so much. You shall lie in a chantry next to mine. Yes, it shall be so and all shall know it.’

Then he looked round at me.

‘Heigh, Will, we’ve made Jane snivel, too.’

I was certainly in tears next day when Ned was brought back from the hunt on a litter. His horse had thrown him and he was put to bed in foul temper, aching and shaken, but at least alive.

Hastings had no appetite at supper.

‘We were tempting fortune, talking about death so blithely,’ he muttered, catching up with me on the stair landing after I’d left the Great Hall. ‘England could have been a heartbeat away from a boy king and Lord Protector Uncle George.’

‘But they’d have you,’ I said, and kissed his cheek. It was the first time I had done so since we had been lovers. ‘Have an early night, my lord,’ I suggested kindly, curtsied and left him.

‘You two do not waste much time, Mistress Shore,’ drawled Dorset, emerging from the lower spiral.

‘Oh really,’ I groaned. ‘Don’t you have “friends”, my lord?’

‘“Friends”, is it? Oh, I have “friends”. Poor old man not up to it anymore?’ he jibed.

‘All the hunt are exhausted, my lord marquis.’

‘Ouch, nurse! And this naughty boy didn’t go hunting.’ He slapped his own wrist and put an arm across to block me. ‘Want to risk a night with me, then?’

‘Oh, be hanged, my lord marquis!’ I scolded lightly. ‘You always whistle the same tune.’

‘Darling,’ he cooed, pursing his lips. ‘They’re getting old, but you and me … think of the joust we could have.’

‘I haven’t your imagination, my lord.’ I extricated my person. ‘Goodnight to you! Oh, a murrain on it! I’ve left my mantle on the King’s bed.’

A lie, but I was not going to my quarters with Dorset on the prowl. The ancient lock to my door didn’t work. So I argued my way past Ned’s servants, slipped into his bed and cuddled against his hale side. He had been given some poppyhead infusion and was snoring like a creaking windmill so it was hard for me to fall asleep.

I lay staring up at the bed canopy. It was possible, I thought charitably, that Dorset’s expensive doublets might button over some very deep scars. In his shoes, how would I have felt seeing my father’s battle-hacked body carted shamefully home for a traitor’s burial? Or my inheritance snatched away because Papa had fought for King Henry? And imagine a few years later, another reversal in fortune: landless at noon and by three o’clock the King’s stepson! Heady liquor for a boy on the cusp of manhood. What did the boy feel as his mama suddenly bestowed all her attention on a handsome young stranger? Left out? And then the
sneers of the ancient nobility and the accusations that his mother and grandam were witches.

It would be pleasing to do a spell myself and conjure Dorset and Hastings into friendship. No, I thought, falling into slumber at last. It was just too hard.

Ned was restored sufficiently next day to hear Mass in the makeshift chapel off the Great Hall, and then he was closeted with his brother-in-law, Lord Rivers, who was come that morning to make report from the young prince’s household and the Council of Wales at Ludlow.

I was left at leisure to browse through the books Ned kept here. His best collection was at Richmond Palace, but there was plenty to amuse me. It was raining and the servants lit a fire to outwit the damp in the air. Once the smoke was gone, I closed the window light intending to sit upon the seat below so I did not need candles.

I had found a book that Ned had owned as a boy,
Liber de secretis secretorum
. The Latin was too much work to discover what the secret was, so I looked through a beautiful illuminated manuscript from Burgundy, and then settled into
De cas des nobles hommes et femmes malhereux
by Boccaccio.

About eleven of the clock, Dorset sauntered in. He had been riding. He did not disturb me but stood before the fire to dry his hose, staring down at the hearth. The air began to stink of wet wool. I was about to make some excuse to leave the room when Hastings came in. He was holding a letter and, judging by his scowl, primed for a quarrel. I kicked out my skirts to hurry out but he waved me to remain.