Mistress to the Crown (29 page)

For an instant, Hastings’ mouth hung open in shock. ‘No, Richard, it’s not like that,’ he began to splutter but the duke swung back on me.

‘Get out of here, you cursed whore! I don’t want to ever see your face again. Go!’

I scrambled to my feet, my trembling fingers clasped to my lips. Behind Gloucester’s back, Hastings gestured me to quickly leave and I fled in anguish at the unfairness.

Have you ever tried to rid the ink from your fingers? How hard it is. If only I could have pumiced that foul impression from Duke Richard’s mind.

For an hour I sat shivering before my fire. The sunne-in-splendour, warmth of my life and glorious light of my days, was dimming and I was already being cast into the darkness. Yet indignation can heat the body like a thousand torches. Summoning Isabel, I went to Mass at my brother’s church where we lit candles for my beloved.

England needs Ned
, I whispered to God as I knelt on those heedless flagstones, but was he listening? Had he already signed the next consignment for Hell?

Item i: one king, adulterous and avaricious
.

Item ii: a strumpet to follow
.

No, please God, no, no, no.

On my return from church, I found Myddelton in the kitchen warming his hands at the fire. His news cheered me; Richard had dealt with the Breton embassy and Ned was back in his wits and getting dressed. But then he gave me a sealed letter from Hastings. My lord advised me to lie low at my Aldersgate house until Richard returned to Yorkshire. I was displeased but what could I do? It would be a miserable, lonely Yuletide.

January was almost spent when Richard of Gloucester took his leave. The instant the duke’s horse’s tail disappeared through the clockgate, the King sent a servant hotfoot to fetch me back to Westminster.

I was so happy to feel the comfort of his arms and he held me so tenderly.

‘I’ve missed you so much, dearest Ned. How are you, my love?’

He cocked his head and managed a rascally smile. His breath smelled clean but then I realised he had been chewing a clove to sweeten his breath.

‘I am sorry, sweetheart. My brother was like a young dog yapping at me to rest. Easier to say yea and shut him up.’

I stood up on tiptoe and forgave him with kisses, but how I wished he had summoned me to the palace so I could show Gloucester my true livery of devotion.

‘Your brother called me the foulest names, Ned. He blamed me for your drinking.’

His large hands curled delicately on either side of my face like soft, protective leaves. ‘Hush, sweetheart, I told him it was not so.’

But yet my king had left me in brief widowhood at Aldersgate. Ah, I would not chide him. What was done was done. He needed cheerful company, not a watering pot, splashing over with self-pity.

‘Your pallor is better, Ned. I warrant his grace’s visit has done you good.’

He loosened his hold. ‘Like a damned nursemaid. All possets, purges and hie to bed at owl’s fart. Hell, even had Mother fussing and that’s a bigger miracle than waking Lazarus.’ He stood me away from him and thrust back his fur mantle. ‘What do you think of my new doublet, mercer’s daughter?’

Cornflower blue velvet furred with ermine. A kindly hue for him. Was I deluding myself he was getting better? The black he
usually favoured would have made his poorly skin look stark and slack.

‘I like it, Ned.’

Two rows of jaunty golden knopfs marched down his chest. Splashes of scarlet satin gleamed within hanging sleeves – sleeves bunched thickly at his shoulders to give him breadth.
To give him breadth?
My gaze crept to his belt. I had seen it before but never buckled in so much. ‘Will persuaded me to order a new set of apparel,’ he was saying. ‘I can afford it, after all.’

‘Yes, of course, you can,’ I whispered and laying my cheek against his chest, I burrowed my arms around him beneath his mantle and for the first time, my fingertips met.

Throughout the following weeks, the court remained tight as a wary snail at Westminster. Ned gave few audiences and soon it became impossible to sheath the whispers that he was not in good health. Even the Queen bestirred herself. She did all within her power to heal him, ordering distilled waters, purges, infusions – borage, rose, thyme, valerian – to ease Ned’s digestion. Slivers and morsels, mild and unspiced, adorned the royal platter. Alicorn horn and bezel stones, reliquaries containing saints’ bones, all these she brought to his chamber. She conferred hourly with his apothecaries, physicians and chaplains, and I’m told the works of Galen lay open in her bedchamber.

But the pain increased. Little escaped Ned’s bowels and there was scarcely room within his body for nourishment. He could only lie on his right side because of the pain and he would wake in the middle of the night, cradling his belly, and yell for his servants to bring him syrup of white poppy. Many a time during February and March, I would cross that freezing yard at the hour of ghosts.

His jester and I devised entertainments to distract him, dancers, players, tumblers, and oftentimes his children would come in with puppets and interludes. Little Prince Dickon was a merry prattler, but such children expect close listening and his father was too easily exhausted. By night, to shutter out the darkness and the agony, I told Ned stories of dragons and princes, tailors and millers’ sons, or memories of happier times we had shared. As dawn brushed colour across the turrets of the city, he would fall asleep, but mostly he dozed shallowly and stirred unrefreshed, his eyes red-rimmed, with no peace for his bruised mind.

Across the Channel, King Louis was dying but no other news was good. In March we heard that my lord of Albany had made peace with King James so Gloucester’s Scotland campaign had been for naught. England was bereft of friends and all the princely bridegrooms promised to the princesses had been just airy promises. Hindsight made me wonder if Ned’s decisions that previous year had been made with the sickness already in him, rusting his judgment, and none of us aware.

‘Those cursed foreigners all used me, Jane,’ he complained, his tears almost unharnessed. ‘I am become the laughing stock of Christendom, a toothless, clawless lion roaring at the wind.’

I dared not tell him the Londoners now spoke of him as ‘Old Ned’.

‘Nearly forty-one, Jane. Nearly forty-one, with a pain that WON’T GO AWAY.’ In misery, he turned on his side and drove his fist into his pillow.

‘Yes, it will, my dearest,’ I lied for both of us, ‘providing you take the medicines and behave yourself.’

‘Where’s the cursed sport in that?’ Then suddenly he turned and his fingers fastened round my wrist with sudden urgency. ‘Jane, Jane! Next fine day after Easter, we shall go fishing just like we did when we first met. I promised my girls I’d take them. Bess
shall have a longer rod and Dickon may come if he promises to stopper his chatter.’

‘Whoa, steady,’ I exclaimed, glad to see him enlivened. ‘Yes, we shall – if her grace agrees.’

‘A pox on that, wench! Next fine day!’

Easter fell at the tail of March and Ned attended Mass in St Stephen’s Chapel on Good Friday and Easter Sunday for his soul’s good but at his body’s peril. Past Fool’s Day, the weather softened and a warmer breath stole over the land. Ned still pleaded to go fishing; he was obsessed with the notion. I prayed the Queen would put a dampener on such an outing. Amazingly, we held a little domestic council, she and I.

‘Are the physicians wise in permitting this, your grace? April can be as moody as a pimpled youth.’

Elizabeth Woodville perused the sky. The scatters of clouds were idling. ‘It would do him good, I think, Mistress Shore, for if we refuse, he’ll be worse than a baited bear.’ She snapped her fingers at one of her ladies. ‘Fetch the children, and one of you, inform the Lord Chamberlain.’

‘Shall you come with us, then, madame?’

The cherub bow lips almost smiled. ‘Me, fish? My dear Mistress Shore, is the pope a woman?’

Never in the brief exchanges we had shared over the years was I permitted to feel at ease. This time she lowered her feline stare to my collar of pearls and sapphires. ‘That is such a lovely piece. Did my husband give you that – or was it from Hastings?’

At a gilded hour that afternoon, when there was still good humour in the sun, the royal barge took us upriver. The princesses and little Prince Dickon were delighted to have their father’s attention, and Ned laughed and teased them, hiding the pain. Watching, those who loved him could have wept.

As the shadows deepened and the breeze frisked up with a bite in its jaws, I pleaded with Ned to order the boats home. Stubborn man, he would not go back until one of us had hauled in a decent fish. Yes, he wrapped his thick mantle about him, but that was his only concession.

We delayed too long. The twilight turned chilly as a murderer’s smile, and though Ned was furred thickly as a bear, he started to feel cold. By the time we arrived back in Westminster, he was shivery and the tips of his fingers were numb. The royal apothecary provided him with a yarrow infusion. We put his feet in hot water but it took a long time to have him warm again.

In the days that followed, he grew weaker, despite the fussing of his seven physicians. The death of his old treasurer, the Earl of Essex, rocked him further. My poor Ned, he had so much unfinished business. He realised he was the clay that held us together and tried to make things right. Although I was not there to witness it, for I could only flit in like a little bat when most of the world slept, I heard about the handshakes and fulsome promises of forgiveness made across his coverlet. And in my growing grief, I recognised my own fear. Once the masks were off, would the blades hiss out? I would have to find my way alone.

On Tuesday afternoon, Ned was given absolution, and Hastings sent across the yard for me. It irked me that I must be grateful for these precious moments but I was not the only one who had to lurk in the shadows. As I stood waiting for permission to enter the royal apartments, Myddelton shepherded a sombre youth and a maiden from the Painted Chamber. They looked in need of a kindly voice.

‘Goodness me, I have not set eyes on you two before,’ I said brightly, curious to their parentage for their resemblance to Princess Bess was at odds with their modest apparel.

The lad bowed. ‘We are his grace’s bastards, my lady. My name is Arthur and this is Grace.’

‘Elizabeth Lucy’s children,’ explained Myddelton.

‘Oh.’ Words fled me, not because Mistress Lucy had been Ned’s mistress before he wed – the embers of that affair were long cold – but that I should have no babe of his begetting. ‘God keep you both,’ I said huskily, and tried to put away self-pity. I hoped that Prince Edward was hastening from Ludlow and would arrive in time.

The guards let me in and I stood in the doorway, my optimism challenged like a tiny candle flame in winter’s gust. Poor Ned was tucked into the great bed of state with a white cloth wound about his head and it was as though he already lay upon his bier in the abbey, for the window lights were shuttered against the outside day and two great stands of flickering candles stood either side the bed. Incense tapers sanctified the air and only the knavish smoke from a tumbled log on the hearth played heretic. The ceaseless whisper of prayers from two cowled friars was marred by the snores of my lord of Canterbury, slumped like a question mark on the only chair.

This inevitability of defeat was not my creed. I paused, arming myself once more with defiance. If Death stood in the corner, I would shake my fist at him.

Hastings rose from a stool by the bed and beckoned me across.

‘Good morrow, lazybones,’ I murmured cheerfully, leaning down to kiss Ned’s moist brow. His eyes opened and a smile drifted like light brushwork across his pallid skin. I clasped his hand, trying not to cry at how weak his fingers were now. He tried to scuff my palm with his thumb as he always had but the effort was too costly.

‘Jane, my … Jehane d’Arc.’ I still winced when he called me that. ‘I want your forgiveness, sweetheart.’

‘For what, my dearest lord?’

His voice was the merest whisper, like the soft shiver of wind through pine boughs. ‘The times I’ve played around.’ A crinkly, sheepish smile.

‘Of course, I absolve you a thousandfold, Ned.’

‘But I hurt you, my Jane.’ His hand reached out weakly towards my cheek and I stooped and carried his fingers to my cheek. ‘What’s to become of you, my little love?’

Oh, dear, foolish man to worry about me. ‘Why, my liege,’ I teased, ‘I’ll set up a stall in the seld for cakes and people will become so fat that they’ll have to buy new girdles, too.’

Ned ignored my nonsense. He turned his face slowly to Hastings. ‘Can she rely on you, Will? You’ll see she wants for nothing?’

‘I swear it, Ned.’ Hastings crossed himself. ‘To my dying day.’

‘Good, that’s good.’

‘Ned, I—’ I wanted to plead with him to fight on but I could see every painful breath was a battle he could lose at any moment. ‘I … I love you, sluggabed.’

‘Now … tell me a story, my Jane. As profane as you like.’ His eyes slid wickedly across to the source of the gentle snores.

Fearful I would be shooed out, I looked up at Hastings but he nodded and withdrew into the shadows. The archbishop slumbered on.

‘Harken, then, great King of England and Lord of Ireland, once there was a miller’s daughter, slender as a willow sapling. Her eyes were the blue of a summer sky and her hair red as fox fur, and she could weave …’ I watched Ned’s eyelids grow heavy and his lips relax into a weary smile as he fell into slumber.

Once, I told myself silently, there had been a duke’s son who became King of England and he was the handsomest youth in all of England.

And once there had been a mercer’s daughter who loved him.

WITCH

I

Ned died early next morning. Wednesday, the Feast day of St Mary of Cleopas. The tolling of St Stephen’s bell woke me and my heart almost broke as I heard St Peter’s Abbey join in the doleful clanging. Dong-dong-dong-dong-dong. Like drops of lifeblood splashing relentlessly into an ewer, one by one by one. Ned’s pain was over. I should rejoice for him but to let go was so hard; to believe seemed so impossible.