The King's Grey Mare (49 page)

She looked at him quickly.
His face was red.
He occupied himself with more pebbles, choosing flat ones and skimming them along the smooth pavement.
She made a jest of the moment.
‘What do you know of love?
Tell me, for I know nothing!’
Talking, she thought, like a jade, a wanton, like poor Jane Shore, who would speak thus in past days to madden the courtiers.
Wretched Jane, now in Fleet prison for her treason, her folly.

John threw one last stone.
‘I know all about love,’ he said sternly.
From the pouch at his waist he drew out a crumpled yellow parchment; a mere scrap, thumbed and ragged.
From this he read, self-consciously at first, then clearly and more positively.

‘It is not sure a deadly pain

To you I say that lovers be,

When faithful hearts must needs refrain

The one the other for to see?’

He stopped and looked at her.
She said ‘That is a sad song, John.’
A breeze wafted the breath of the iris around them.
The white doves called thoughtfully.

He went on reading aloud, his cheek still darkly flushed the fragment of paper unsteady in his hand.

‘If you assure ye may trust me,

Of all the pains that ever I knew

It is a pain that most I rue.’

‘A fair, sad song,’ she murmured.
‘Did you write it?’
At Middleham they were trained to make verses as well as break each others’ heads.

‘No, it was written by someone long dead, to soothe my heart perhaps.
When I was parted … from my lady.’

So he had a love.
At Middleham it was fashionable to be in love.
The young ones were encouraged to dance together, in between learning to wear armour and weave cloth of Arras.
There were many female wards at Middleham.
Suddenly she felt old and isolated and sad.
The light faded from her eyes; she looked down at the little Spanish shoes Lady Lovell had given her.
Her downcast face had a tragic repose about it; John watched it for a long moment.
Within the space of a breath, emotion crystallized in him, making nonsense of feigned love, killing the painted imagery of his unreal heartaches at Middleham.
The love he had squandered on dreams was here; the unknown lady was blinding reality.
Love, he realized, had always worn the face of Grace Plantagenet.

‘Didn’t you know?’
he demanded, of himself as much as of her.
As he put his arms about her so roughly that she gasped, he thought: here is something too precious, too clearly seen to lose.
She was sweet and slender and perfumed against him.
He laid his hand tenderly against her cheek and kissed her.

‘My Grace.
My lady, my love.’

She tried to answer: John, I have thought of you as a friend, a companion.
Never did I dream you were the end of loneliness.
But he kissed the words, and her face, eagerly, inexpertly; startled by love, he looked into the brilliant green eyes and closed them with his lips.
Then extravagantly, hastily, he went upon his knee before her.
As if aware of time obedient to his ever fervent plea and passing more swiftly, he said:

‘From this day, this moment, I vow my heart and duty to you.
God grant we may be betrothed one day.
Soon.’

‘We’re cousins,’ she murmured.
(Banned, by the Church …)

He leaped up, smiled into her face.
‘My father and the Lady Anne are cousins,’ he said.
Again he kissed her; the sun grew brighter, and the flowers blew, and at the parlour window Lady Lovell smiled with delight.
While Lady Norfolk muttered dourly of the ways of modern youth.

After many days of endeavour, Butcher Gould had penetrated Sanctuary.
He came with only one prentice; of the other two, one had been killed in a Fleet brawl and the other was in Ludgate for striking the Watch.
The remaining boy therefore bore the weight of a shoulder of mutton and a brace of pheasants slung about his neck.
Garnet drops from their beaks rolled down his soiled jerkin.
Master Gould was laden too; under each arm he carried a screaming piglet, and his pockets were crammed with sausages.

‘Perchance that’s why they cry so lustily,’ he observed, glancing down at the writhing animals.
‘They smell their ancestors.’
Grimly and gloomily he smiled at his own jest.
One had to smile; one had to forget: Matilda gone.
His pretty, silly, ribboned wife, snatched in a day by the plague, that pustulent curse that emanated from all the open ditches in town.
It took friend and foe alike, and left bitterness.
He sighed, rapped on the Sanctuary door, his ears deafened by the porcine yells which rose higher than the clochard spire nearby.

He did this for Matilda.
So long and so often had she talked of her one sight of the Queen; how she looked, her expression when she showed them the baby prince Edward.
Gould thought of his visit to Sanctuary as a kind of Month’s Mind celebration – made in remembrance of a day that had brought Matilda joy.
He tucked the piglets more firmly beneath his arms, and kicked the door of Sanctuary until at last someone came to admit him.
The cloister was as forbiddingly chill as ever.
Full of stolid melancholy he stumped through, and swung a further kick at the door outside which Matilda had shivered with excitement.
It was opened by the Princess – Lady Elizabeth of York, he reminded himself.
She looked ill and bored and weary, and swirled away without a second glance at him.
Gould entered and knelt before the lady’s mother.
Over the screaming of the pigs he uttered: ‘Good morrow, your Grace,’ and looking up, saw the pale face, scarred by old rages and tears, alight with pleasure at his salutation.
All unwittingly he had given the best possible greeting.

‘It is good to see you again, Master.
Catherine!’
She called to her sister, gestured at the piglets.
‘Have them taken away and killed.
My appetite returns at last.’
She beckoned Gould closer; he looked for somewhere to lay the mutton, finally setting it awkwardly down upon a faldstool.
From the tail of his eye he saw Catherine Woodville ordering a page to remove the meat, and the pheasants.
The world is upside down, he told himself.
While Buckingham sits in state at Westminster, here’s his wife starving by choice with her sister.
For he noticed that all the women looked meagre and poor.
He compared them to his trade; he measured their flesh by the pound, and in fantasy saw himself bankrupt.

‘Sausages, your Grace.’
He emptied his pockets and laid his tribute on the stool.
Elizabeth was asking him meanwhile how his wife was.
He told her.

‘And I lost a daughter too …’

She answered with what seemed to him disproportionate vehemence.

‘A daughter!
Master, I have lost father, mother, two brothers, two sons, and two more sons were taken cruelly from me!
Locked away!’
She began to sob, with such extreme suddenness that he was startled.
She wrenched at her hair.
A tuft of it drifted down to lie among the foul rushes.

‘Tell me, Master; tell me.
Have you seen my boys, my kingly heirs?’

‘Yes, I’ve seen them,’ he said stolidly.
Playing at bow-and-arrow on the ramparts of the Tower.’

‘So they are still there,’ she murmured, and wept no longer.
She was silent then, for such a long time that Gould grew restive.

‘Did you see the usurper’s coronation?’
she said next.

Gould blinked.
He said carefully: ‘Aye, Madame.
It was a great affair.
All the nobles of England attended; you could not move for lords and bishops …’

‘Curse the Bishops!’
she cried.
‘Cursed be that creeping ruin, the Church!’

‘Your Grace!’
Scandalized, Gould stared, seeing a swift smile replace anger.

‘I value you, Master Gould,’ she said softly.
‘You address me as is my right!’

I fear for her, he thought, bowing his head.
Once a bull had been brought to him for slaughter; a breeding bull, a beautiful animal turned savage and impotent.
In its eyes had been that same half-human wildness he saw now; in the eyes of Dame Grey, the late King’s concubine …

‘I address you so, Madame,’ he blundered, ‘in memory of our late sovereign lord.’

Succour my Bessy, William
.
They had been tossing dice together, the King incognito, in one of the lesser stews of St.
Mary Woolchurch.
Thirteen years ago.

A sudden rap on the door made him start.
Elizabeth’s frozen gaze passed over his head, behind which came mutterings, shuffling feet, and a voice.
‘Madame, may we enter?’
Gould saw the white hand wave in dismissal to him or assent to others, impossible to tell.
He rose uncertainly and backed against the wall, where he stood scratching his calf with the other foot.
A clerk wearing dusty black came stoopingly across the room and bowed before Elizabeth.
Following the clerk was a gaunt man in a skull-cap who carried a leather bag.

‘May we enter?’
repeated Reynold Bray.

Traitor, she said.
Traitor and knave.
No better than your falseheart mistress, Margaret Beaufort.
How dare you show your face?

She and the two men were alone.
In her chair she leaned away from Bray, who still stank of sour ale and the reek of a hundred secret parchments.

‘What do you want?’
she cried with a hating glance.
Bray coughed and hawked and looked around the floor with a full mouth.
She half-rose, eyes daring him to spit.
He swallowed, and with a fidgety motion, indicated the hollow man behind him.

‘To present a friend.’

‘Are there such things?’
said Elizabeth.
‘And how, by God’s grace, did you pass into Sanctuary?’

‘My holy cloth knows no horizon,’ said Bray pompously.
‘Neither does the majesty of medicine.’
He nudged the other man forward.

‘So!
A doctor!’
she said with great scorn.
Rising, she stepped up to the gaunt-faced man.
‘Heal my sickness,’ she commanded.
(Heal this sore heart, this burning humiliation.
Raise me, through alchemy, again to the heights …)

‘Ach!’
said the doctor.
‘Madame, I don’t know the nature of it.’
His voice was so Welsh it sounded like a song.

‘He comes from Bishop Morton,’ said Bray, squinting about him.
‘He has …’

‘A message, my lady,’ said the Welshman.
‘From the Bishop.
For you,’ he added, so that there should be no mistake.
The corner of his mouth and one eye twitched, as if at some unspeakable jest.
It was an affliction he had owned for years, but she was not to know this.
Overflowing with temper, she sat and twisted her hands.

‘You are no friend,’ she said tightly.
‘I have never seen you before.
As for Master Bray – he can return to his mistress.
She who sings Gloucester’s praise in Westminster.’

Bray kept silence.
He had been warned to expect this lunatic stubbornness.
His bones were sore from saddle-hours; he had ridden hard, from Margaret Beaufort to Brecon, collecting the Welsh doctor en route; to the estates of Sir William Stanley, then back to Margaret and her husband again.
He had sat up all night penning letters to the Dragon in Brittany.
Now Woodville abused him.
She was not what she once was, but he must play out his time.

‘You and your mistress!’
she continued.
‘Time-servers both!
Once she loved me; now she is Gloucester’s toady.
So is Stanley …’

‘Madame,’ answered the clerk patiently, ‘I come only from your loyal lovers and admirers.’

She stood up, frail and terrible.
‘I do not trust you.’
Bray looked around at the bare discomfort, the dirt, the despair all but written into the grimy walls.

‘My lady, may I speak?’
intoned the doctor.
‘I come from Bishop Morton personally; I am his physician.
He sends comfort, and a solution to all your miseries.
A promise of better days, Dame Grey.’