The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (23 page)

I don’t know where the lass is. And I’ll do you one better for your pains by telling you this: I don’t care a damn.” He shoved me into the arms of my page. “Take your idiot master home, boy. Use the river landing if you please. He looks green. Don’t let him puke on those fresh clothes you dressed him in; it’s a sad waste of fine fabric.”

We were making our way to the landing, my feet growing more unsteady with each step I took, when the servant who had been given the task of seeing us out—one who had been in and out of Clarence’s chamber earlier in the evening, and who I realized later had been paying unusually close attention to our conversation—whispered, “Your grace? If you are indeed a friend of the Lady Anne, I have tidings for her of you.”

“I am,” I said faintly.

“She is in the habit of a cook maid, at a tavern in Fleet Street.”

“
What
?”

t h e s t o l e n C r o w n 1 4 9

“It is true, your grace. There’s no time to explain; I must be back.” He handed a slip of paper to me, then thought better of it and gave it to my page. “Here is the address.”

Late as it was when our waterman finally deposited us at Westminster—more or less hauling me out of the boat by my collar—I insisted on being brought to Richard’s chambers, with a vociferousness that carried the day against the common sense of my page. Richard’s servants would have kept me out, but I protested so vigorously, and so loudly, that I at last heard Richard say wearily, “Let him in. God know what he wants, but it had better be good.”

“It ish!” I promised as my page supported me into Richard’s bedchamber.

Richard stared at me. “Harry?”

“I’ve found her! Anne! She’s in a cook shop! In Fleet Street.” I held out my hand with a flourish, having forgotten that it was my servant who had the precious paper. “Address!”

“Harry, you’re drunk.”

“That’s where she
ish
!”

Richard sighed. “Harry, how did you come by this er—information?”

“Clarence’s man.” Wobbling out of range of my page’s grasp, I teetered dangerously to one side, then to another, and caught hold of a bedpost after only one or two misses. “Visited his house. We drank together,” I added in a confidential tone.

“Well, I can believe that much.”

“It’s the truth, Ricshard. She’s a kitchen maid! In Street Fleet!” To better demonstrate my credibility (clearly my words were not doing the job), I let go of my friendly bedpost to wave my hand in emphasis. Somehow I ended up in an undignified heap on the floor. “I wist you would believe me,” I said lugubriously from my new station.

“Shall I take him to his chamber, your grace?” my page asked as I tried to remember how to rise to my feet. It was a question that suddenly required a lot of thought.

1 5 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m “No. He’s too far gone; you’d probably have to drag him. I’ll keep him here with me. You go and explain that he took slightly ill and he’s staying here overnight. God knows, he will be ill, so there’s no lie there.” Richard helped me to my feet as my page scurried off. “Easy now, Harry. Let’s get you undressed and into bed.”

“Cook shop,” I repeated with a drunkard’s stubbornness. “Anne.”

“All right, Harry. If you say so. I’ll check in the morning.”

I pointed in what I thought was the direction of my page and touched my own nose, which I couldn’t have managed otherwise. Staring at my finger in surprise for a moment, I finally added, “Has address.”

Shaking his head, Richard propped me against the bed and began undressing me. Whether it was the strangely erotic sensation of being undressed by hands other than my page’s, or whether it was my complete and utter intoxication, or whether there was some longing in me that I had never dared to acknowledge, or all three, I do not know, but when Richard had stripped me of my clothes and more or less pushed me into his bed, I put out my hands and drew his face to mine, then kissed him full on the lips, with a passionate abandon of which I would not have guessed myself capable at age sixteen. “I love you,” I whispered.

To Richard’s everlasting credit, he did not slam me across the face or laugh. He pulled away from my grasp and pushed my hands down upon my chest, gently. “You’re very drunk, Harry,” he said quietly. “I’d best sleep elsewhere tonight, I think.”

“No. Stay.”

“Go to sleep, Harry. I’ll wait here while you do.”

Had he done the unthinkable and acted upon my kiss, I hardly know how I could have managed to play my part; I am not sure I even knew exactly what that would entail. Too inebriated to form further words of protest, I closed my eyes and did not open them until late in the morning, when my page obligingly held back my hair as I retched into the basin he had wisely provided for me. Twice I repeated this inglorious act before falling into a deep sleep, from which I did not awake until late in the

t h e s t o l e n C r o w n 1 5 1

afternoon. My head was pounding, half from the effects of drink, half from the awful memories of my behavior with Richard. Hoping that some time the previous evening I might have caught some plague that would carry me off without delay and with a minimum of fuss, I buried my face in the pillow and turned against the wall.

Then I heard Richard’s voice and felt him shake my shoulder. “Awake, old man?” I whimpered some sort of answer. “Good! You were right! I have found her.”

“Did you doubt me?” I asked miserably, still with my back to him.

“Of course. Addled as your brain was last night, your own mother would have doubted you. Your own confessor! But you told me true.

In vino veritas
, eh? I’ve brought Anne out and taken her to sanctuary. St.

Martin’s. They’ve pleasant quarters for a lady. She’ll stay there until she and I marry.”

“Did you find her well?” I asked, less out of concern than a desire to forestall the moment when we would come to my unspeakable act the night before. Painfully, I rolled over to look at Richard.

“Yes. She’s Warwick’s daughter, all right; she was telling them how to run the kitchen! What a manager! They won’t be sorry to see her go, I’m sure. I will make good use of her talents on my own estates. Damn George had her convinced I’d personally slain her husband as he was fleeing so that I could get her estates, instead of him dying in fair battle.”

“But why was she in the cook shop?” I asked foggily.

“It’s owned by a family that’s connected with one of George’s servants.

George and he arranged for Anne to board there until George could quietly move her to one of his estates to escape my wicked clutches while Anne pondered whether she wanted to take the veil.” He saw my puzzled look.

“I know, it’s somewhat lacking as a plan, isn’t it? Did George really think everyone would just forget about the girl after a couple of months? Even Anne admitted that it had its shortcomings. But she said she couldn’t stand to marry the man who’d killed her husband in cold blood. Fortunately, we got that straightened out. I told her I had witnesses—and I do—to prove

1 5 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m that I did no such thing and that Clarence was not exactly a disinterested party. Wenches! You never know what they are going to get into their heads, even the intelligent ones.” He chuckled and then looked at me sympathetically. “Speaking of heads, how’s yours, Harry?”

“It would be kind of you if you chopped it off.”

“You’ll feel better by tomorrow. Sooner if you’re lucky. But what possessed you to drink with George? And why is your cheek bruised?” He touched it gently. “Did he assault you?”

I longed to prove myself to you. To serve you
, I almost said. I shrugged. “No, he didn’t assault me. It’s a long story. I just wanted to help you find her, that’s all.”

“Well, you did that, even though I told you not to, and I’m grateful. But don’t try to keep up with George again, old man, whatever you do.”

“I won’t.” I started the painful process of getting out of bed, then remembered my state of undress and decided to stay put. “Where’s my page?”

“I sent him out for a while. There’s something I wanted to talk about.”

“Richard, I—”

Richard looked out the window. “You’ve not been with a woman yet, have you, Harry?”

“No. Kate’s too young to risk getting with child just yet.”

“I wasn’t thinking of your wife. Do you remember I promised to take you to some houses I knew when you turned sixteen?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s time, I think. Your wife will need a man with some experience when the day comes. You’re sixteen, right?”

“I just had my birthday in September,” I said, a little hurt that Richard had not remembered the date.

“Well, then, you need to go to Southwark with me. I’d say tonight, but I think you’ll have more enjoyment if you wait until tomorrow. The wares there are best sampled with a clear head. Anyway, I need to stop by and see how Anne’s faring.”

t h e s t o l e n C r o w n 1 5 3

“All right. Tomorrow.”

“Good. I’ll call in your page for you.” He turned away from the window and smiled at me. “Thank you again for helping me find Anne. I won’t forget it.”

I will leave the details of my visit to Southwark to the imagination, as my experience was probably no different than that of any other youth my age. Richard, much amused by the story of my visit to George that I told him when I was feeling more myself, made a great point of trying to find a whore named Molly, but the only Molly we found in the fine establishment Richard patronized was a rather tall, large lady whose Amazonian presence might have intimidated even the king or William Hastings, never mind a novice like myself. Instead, we settled on Sally, a comely lass of around twenty who appeared to specialize in initiating nervous young gentlemen.

I enjoyed myself with Sally. I even returned to see her from time to time, though not perhaps as much as another youth my age might have done, for I soon discovered in myself a certain fastidiousness that shrank from enjoying women who had been palmed by so many others. It was much sweeter to think of chaste Kate, who would be all mine and no other man’s when the time came. There was something else, too, that I might well admit now that I never could admit then: that the odd feeling that Richard—and no other man but Richard—had stirred in me never quite left.

I suppose, at this point, it never will.

xii

Kate: May 1472 to January 1473

With Harry waiting impatiently to enter onto his late uncle’s estates—there had been a delay in proving the will that delayed the assignment of the lands—I itched to be away from my sister’s household and to be the mistress of my own establishment. I knew how to run a household—in theory, at least. I could dance gracefully, sing, play the lute, and embroider. I could make gracious small talk for hours on end in English, if called upon, and I could do the same in French—much better than many others, thanks to Mama. I knew the uses of various herbs, and I could dress a wound if need be. At fourteen, in short, I knew all I could possibly know, and I was eager to demonstrate this once and for all.

My longing increased when Mama died in May 1472. She had been ailing quietly for some time, so her death was not a surprise, though we all mourned her deeply. I prayed for her several times a day, liking to think that she would soon be out of Purgatory and reunited with my father and John, who surely had not tarried long there before landing duly in Paradise.

But her death made me even more acutely aware that my childhood had drawn to a close, and that it was time to leave childish things far behind.

There was something else: I wanted to share a bed with Harry.

The bawdiness of my brother-in-law’s court has been greatly exagger-ated. It was true that Edward had mistresses—sometimes more than one at any given time, especially if Bessie was in the late stages of pregnancy and was unavailable to him. But he conducted his amours discreetly; his mistresses were not seen at court, and he would not have welcomed them

t h e s t o l e n C r o w n 1 5 5

there to mingle with Bessie and his daughters. We in the queen’s household were expected to behave with propriety, and even the boys at court, as Harry had often complained, were kept on rather a short leash. It was, in short, a decorous place for young people. Yet I had become well aware of what went on between men and women, and I wanted nothing more than to have it happen between me and my husband. Not being a wanton, I thought of the act with no other man; my daydreams and my night dreams were all of Harry.

Harry and I had married so young and so long ago, the details as to when we were to consummate our relationship had been left very vague, all depending, I gathered, on how soon I physically matured. The word “fifteen” had been mentioned now and then, but when I considered the matter one evening as Cecilia was undressing me, I looked at my full hips and breasts and decided that this was a purely arbitrary figure and that fourteen was just as good. How much difference, after all, would a few months make? This, I decided, would surely be Mama’s sensible position on the question if she were alive.

I had high hopes that summer of 1472, for there were two family weddings at that time. The first nuptials, in June, were of Harry’s aunt Margaret Beaufort to Thomas Stanley, the king’s steward. As she was nearly thirty and he nearly forty, and she had been married twice before and he once before, with a large brood of children to show for it, it was not a terribly romantic wedding, but I hoped against hope that it might give Harry ideas.

It did not, a circumstance for which I blamed Margaret Beaufort. Though her wedding dress was obviously expensive, it struck me as old-fashioned, and indeed, the bride looked rather prim and grim throughout the whole proceeding. I suspect that she found Stanley tolerable enough but would have preferred to live the pious life of a wealthy widow had she not thought that this marriage might somehow serve her young, exiled son.