The Exiled (23 page)

Whitby, she was in Whitby again, but this time she was alone, cold and very frightened. She’d lost someone, someone dear to her. And when she looked down at herself, saw the blackened wood crucifix clutched in her hand, saw what she was wearing, she choked down a scream for she was dressed in the rough-spun robes of a postulant — a novice nun.

The shock brought her back to the present and the heat — and the joy. The court party was passing by where she was standing and like a magnet, she found she was drawn towards them through the crowd. Around her, the guests squeezed aside to let her through, allowing her to join with the members of the combined courts of England and Burgundy as they trailed out of the hall, singing lewd versions of popular songs and shouting, to accompany the bride and groom to their bedchamber.

Many covert glances slid towards Anne as she made her way, smiling and nodding to friends and acquaintances, but detached, so detached — out of the hall, oblivious. She had a focus now: blank out what she had just seen, blank out the feeling of trapped desolation, the certainty of truth the vision had given her. To see forward was to be armed. To see the future merely conveyed possibilities, nothing more.

She would never be a nun, willingly or unwillingly. And she would never return to England again. How could she?

And, of course, the feeling ebbed as she found herself so solidly in the present again, pressed up against her fellow guests as they crowded onto a staircase that wound up to a great gallery off which was the duke’s own private suite of rooms.

Up ahead, she could see that the bride was being taken into the nuptial chamber by her mother and a crowd of court ladies from both England and Burgundy. Behind the closed door, they would undress Margaret and clothe her in virginal white before placing her in the marriage bed. The duke, impatient to take his place beside his new wife, hurried with his suite, including Edward, into his own rooms where he too would be arrayed for the long night to come.

Anne waited patiently with the remainder of the excited, chattering court outside the bridal chamber; soon there would be the invitation to view the bride in her bed, before the ceremonial entry of the duke into his new wife’s room.

William Caxton was waiting too, with Maud, as he spied Anne.

‘Excuse me, wife. I’ll return in a moment,’ and before Maud could stop him, William plunged into the press of people, quickly navigating a path through the crowd to Anne’s side.

‘Lady Anne. We have not spoken, but I did not want the night to finish without saying how pleased I am to see you looking so well, so very well.’

He meant more, of course. He wanted to say how beautiful she was in her fine silk dress, how worried he’d been for her, how grateful he was that she had recovered.

Anne understood something of the turmoil of his feelings and smiled so sweetly and yes, so intimately at him that he found himself speechless. It was such a long time since he’d experienced such intensity of feeling. For one mad moment he felt himself leaning down, felt himself moving closer and closer, felt as if he would ...

But Anne was no longer looking at him. She was staring over his shoulder. Involuntarily he turned to find himself looking directly into the eyes of the King of England. And the king was glacially furious. Furious with him. Somehow, Edward had noticed the moment between he and Anne. As had Maud — her face also swam into focus behind Edward’s shoulder.

In the horror of that second, poor bemused William felt immensely guilty — and confused. Surely he’d dealt with his own body demons, and women, long years before, yet here, incongruously, he heard words booming in his mind, ‘Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar’s ...’ Did that mean the powerful effect Anne had on him, wearing that dress, was treason? The look in Edward’s eyes said as much. William gulped as the king advanced towards him, towards Anne.

Fortunately, the moment was masked by the rowdy bunch of young men surrounding the duke as they were swept up along the gallery to the door of the bridal chamber, catching and herding the guests ahead of them towards the bride’s sanctum.

Loudly, at his young suite’s urging, the groom himself knocked at the bronze-bound doors.

‘I am Duke Charles! Where is my bride?’

The crowd laughed heartily. The urgency in the duke’s tone sounded very real, joke or no joke.

There was flustered giggling from behind the great door until, at last, ‘We need a few moments more, Your Grace. Just a few moments.’

That was not good enough for the duke.

‘I am waiting! Who dares keep me from my bride!’ He was mock angry, but looked enough like a lion to inject a certain nervousness in his courtiers and honoured guests. They added their voices to his.

‘Come on now, you’ve had long enough.’

‘Open for the duke!’

‘We’re all dying of heat out here!’

It was a confused, rising babble of sound, but it must have had some effect for, at last, the door opened and a most appealing sight was there to be seen.

The new duchess, Margaret, was clothed in a modest but semi-diaphanous white bed-gown, sitting in the very centre of a vast bed covered in a green velvet counterpane thickly strewn with white petals. The bed’s size was so great, Margaret looked like a girl in a flower-filled meadow.

Quickly the duke’s young men pushed the groom ahead of them to the side of the bed, only just in front of the surging mass of guests, all trying to crowd through the doorway together. Protocol seemed suddenly abandoned and Anne, hanging back as much as she could, felt for the poor bride, who was looking rather alarmed by this shouting mass of red-faced, drunken people surging towards her.

Vainly, the duke called for quiet, but the crowd, who’d been looking forward to this moment all night, were having none of it. Suddenly a great cacophony struck up; many of the wedding guests had purloined silver plates and other vessels from the feast and were banging on them with gusto as they shouted for the duke to join his wife in bed.

A certain madness seemed to infect the stifling heat of the bedchamber. Though it was vast, it was jammed with sweating bodies and the candles, on their great stands, caught the brilliance in many a girl’s eye and added to the heat. The young men were moving through the pack of courtiers around the bed, surging closer to any good-looking woman, taking advantage of the crush to press themselves against equally willing bodies. Lust was in the air. Weddings always did that.

Anne, doing her best to wriggle away from impertinent hands and overbold glances, had worked her way towards the back of the crowd. It would be soon enough for Duchess Cicely, or someone she had once known at the Palace of Westminster, to catch sight of her. Besides, she wanted the chance to watch Edward from a little distance, unobserved if she could. It took a few moments, as the duke and his chamberlain continued to ask for quiet, but soon she found herself back against the wall, standing in front of one of the precious tapestries which lined the chamber.

It was hard to see, but she found that there was a low chest beside her and it only took a moment to clamber up so that now she could see clear over the crowd to the centre of the room, where the bed stood.

Anne frowned as she scanned the room — where was Edward?

‘And so, dear friends, the time has come, and I claim your indulgence.’

A hush had settled at last as the crowd allowed the duke, finally, to be heard.

‘No indulgence, no indulgence,’ — it was a chant. No one wanted to leave, they wanted to play this game out for a long as possible.

‘But yes! I am your duke and I command it. It is time for my bride and I to ...’

Anne did not hear the last words that the duke said for suddenly a powerful hand was over her mouth and she was pulled backwards through a gap between tapestries and into darkness.

It was so quick she had no time to feel fear. That came a moment later, for suddenly a fine scarf was pulled tight over her eyes and she was picked up bodily by what felt like two men — two strong men.

Her instinct was to fight but her hands were securely held and another scarf was tied around her mouth to give her no chance to scream. Abruptly the noise and the heat of the bridal chamber disappeared into muffled silence and she felt herself being quickly carried, squirming and kicking at her captors, through some sort of stone-lined space. She could tell it was stone, she knew the sound of boot leather on flags well enough.

The men were silent and they hurried on their way, but they were careful how they carried her and though her heart hammered, she found some slight reassurance in their treatment, though it was a fleeting thought for equally suddenly she heard a door open, then close, and she was placed on her feet again.

And then she was alone, for before she could pull the scarves from her eyes and mouth, she heard the men leave, closing the door gently behind them. And a key scraped as it turned in a lock.

Angry she was, certainly, and fearful. But very soon something much more complex ran through her.

She was in an exquisite room hung with rose-coloured damask. And, what she least expected, there were doors opening out to a spacious balcony. There was food and drink too and, in Moorish fashion, in one wall of the room was an alcove in which was a sumptuous ivory and ebony wood couch draped with lustrous green silk.

This was not a prison, and yet ...

Anne forced herself to breathe more slowly and as if unconcerned, sauntered out onto the balcony. She could see the canals, two or more floors beneath her feet. She could even make out the bend in her own part of the canal above which stood the Cuttifer house. And when she looked directly down, there was her barge, waiting patiently in line with those of the other guests. Such irony; none of her servants was to be seen — and they would not hear her even if she called out. And there was no way down of course, unless she tried to jump.

‘A pretty view, is it not? Especially on such a mild night?’

She hadn’t heard the key turn in the lock again, but she knew that voice.

‘I apologise for the fright you must have felt. There was no other way to remove you without comment.’

Suddenly he was real again, and close, so close.

‘I was not frightened.’

She turned to see him standing in the open doorway. Edward.

Never had he looked so magnificent. Or more grim. Unblinking they stared at each other.

Sometimes it is hard to see, to really see. Anne wanted to remember this moment, to remember each of his features, his clothes, his hands. To hold time from moving forward because, as soon as they spoke, as soon as they moved ...

Deliberately he walked towards her, oblivious to all else but her face, her eyes, her mouth.

‘Anne, where have you been?’

It was a whisper, a husky whisper, but it contained more longing, more yearning than she had ever heard in her short life. She shivered, her throat so tight it hurt to try to speak.

He was beside her now — how could she have forgotten he was so tall?

‘I have been here, in Brugge.’

‘All this time?’

‘Yes.’

What they said was irrelevant; mere words. The speed of her heart, the lack of breath made Anne’s head swim. Unconsciously she took a step towards him.

‘Hello.’ She whispered the word. It seemed such a childlike thing to say. But it broke the dam for both of them.

In a breath he was kissing her, so hot and so hard that her knees buckled. She moulded herself to him, heart beating against his chest, nearly sobbing as she tried to speak, trying to hold some semblance of where she was, and what she was doing in the midst of the dark, hot tide which engulfed them both.

Quickly he pulled her back into the room and, in his haste to kiss and hold her at the same time, picked her up to carry her to the couch in the alcove.

‘Wait, Edward. Wait. Please.’

‘I don’t want to wait. Trust me, please trust me.’ He’d ripped off his magnificent jerkin, careless of buttons and frogging, and in a moment his fine linen undershirt had followed as he tore at the lacing of her dress.

Sandalwood and ambergris. She closed her eyes fleetingly; that had always been his smell; and his sweat, musky, warm, so male it bypassed her skin on its way to her bones. But they had to talk. Had to. Before this went any further.

‘Stop.’ Could she stop him? Further words were wasted by his urgent mouth on hers.

‘No!’ Somehow she slipped out of his arms, although the bodice of her dress was half unlaced.

‘Why!’ There was such agony, such longing from the king that she swayed on her feet as she tried to contain his roaming hands. ‘Don’t deny me. Please don’t deny me, Anne.’

She saw the love in his eyes, and the heat and the power. She knew he saw the same in hers. His presence was so formidable that her mind almost surrendered to the clamour of her body. But then, ‘I have a child. A boy. And I’ve made a life. Without you.’

There was stillness, and silence, except for their breathing: two athletes after a long, long race.

‘A child? Whose child?’ He was deeply wounded, tears in his eyes.

She took a step back from him, careless of her semi-nakedness and lifted her head fearlessly. He felt a great surge of love for her, for her magnificence and her courage.

‘What is his father’s name?’

She paused before she spoke. ‘Edward.’ That is my son’s name also.

‘Your child — and mine?’

There was such a surge of jubilant hope, of joy in his voice, that tears sprang from her eyes and she could not speak.

Now she let him hold her, now she let him kiss the tears away as he rocked her tenderly.

‘Ah, sweetest, dearest Anne; how hard it must have been for you. And I did not know. Why did you not tell me?’ For a moment he was angry, and then proud. Of course she would not have told him.

He sighed. ‘How much I love you. Do not cry ... there, I am here now, we are together. Nothing shall harm you, nothing.’

Sweetly now, gently now, he held her closely, soothed her as she cried as if she would never stop. All the pain, all the loss, all the agony of their parting was in those tears.