The Tudor Rose (13 page)

Coming into the parlour already shocked by experience and emotionally drained, Elizabeth could survey the scene almost sardonically. The Abbot was there, and Doctor Lewis—the one tall, the other short; one offering spiritual comfort, the other herbal remedies. And in the centre of the scene her mother, who had now lost every male relative except Dorset. The hour that followed was Elizabeth Woodville's and unforgettable. Alternately she paced the room and threw herself down among the rushes on the floor. Her fingers tore distractedly at the fairness of her prematurely greying hair. And all the time she called aloud the names of her young murdered sons, until the whole building seemed to be filled with the torment of her grief. It seemed that Cicely and Ann had tried to comfort her and retreated, inept and frightened, before an anguish beyond their comprehension. Now they were crying quietly for the brothers in a corner. Their relief at Elizabeth's appearance was patent. For Bess, and only Bess, would understand and know what to do.

By forgetting her own grief which ran too deep for frenzy, and emptying herself out in a tide of pity, Elizabeth could help. Both pity and the need of it were utterly sincere. Surely, she thought, cradling her mother's thin shoulders in loving arms, no woman could have been called upon to bear so much. That she might have aggravated fate did not lessen her suffering. “It may not be true,” murmured Elizabeth.

“It
is
true!” cried the Queen Dowager, spurning false-hope. “After my brother Anthony and your brother Grey what else could we expect? I knew it when I let Richard go. It is the very kind of devilry that that Gloucester fiend would do.” And standing slim and straight before them she cursed him with the cruellest curse of all. “O God, if there be any justice, avenge my innocents!” she cried. “And make Richard of Gloucester's only son die too!”

There was something so awesomely prophetic about her that the children huddled, silenced, in their corner. The Abbot came to her reprovingly, holding out as if in expiation the jewelled cross that hung upon his breast. By sharing the burden of her anguish Elizabeth managed to quieten her at last, and Mattie coaxed her, in her exhaustion, to accept a few hours' merciful oblivion by means of the sleeping draught which Doctor Lewis had prepared.

“How did you hear this—terrible thing?” Elizabeth asked him, when at last the Queen Dowager lay quiet on her bed.

“The Countess had a message from milord Stanley and sent me here immediately, fearing some chance rumour or some rougher tongue might be the means of killing the Queen Dowager.”

“If grief could have killed her Grace surely it would have done so long ago!” sighed Elizabeth, thinking that it is seldom the women who involve others in their lamentations whom sorrow kills, and herself longing for the ordinary relief of pent-up tears. “But it was very kind,” she added, marvelling afresh that the woman who should by rights have been her worst enemy should have sent to help her over some of the worst patches of her life. “We have much to thank you for too, Doctor Lewis. To sleep and to forget is perhaps the greatest mercy of all.” She stood for a moment or two looking almost enviously at her mother's quiet form, experiencing something of the relief that even death can bring to a household after days of a loved one's painful breathing. “But not for those who are very young!” her heart cried. “Not for Dickon, with all the shining adventure of life before him!”

Turning, she noticed the Abbot's pitiful gaze upon her; but the added reverence in his manner escaped her. “Can we be sure that it is true?” she asked, drawing the bed curtains close and shooing away most of the weeping women before walking slowly with him to the anteroom.

“I think so, Madam,” he told her gently.

“But why this time, for certain?” Rebelliously, scarcely noticing what she did, she stopped before a
prie-dieu
and let her fingers drum upon the open book of devotions which her mother must have been reading when the news came. “There have been so many rumours. My brothers' bodies have been seen floating round in the Thames. They have been sent abroad. The young King was killed and Richard, Duke of York, kept in prison—”

“My dear child! That you should have heard such things!”

Shocked by the fierce hardness of her face, the Benedictine laid a restraining hand upon her arm and Elizabeth relaxed. “Oh, what does it matter what I heard!” she cried. “It is nothing compared with what they must have suffered, my poor lonely loves.” She stood by the window, unable to speak, her lovely eyes suffused with tears. But after a while, summoning all the courage of her breed, she made a great effort to be practical. “You are able to go out about London and meet people, Father. What convinces you this time that it is true?” she asked.

After the trying hour he had been through the Abbot was grateful for her composure. Her behaviour, he considered, merited nothing less than the truth. “Margaret, Countess of Richmond, is one of the wisest women I know. And also one of the kindest,” he began tentatively.

“The saintly woman with the paragon of a son!” thought Elizabeth, who was growing tired of hearing this.

“Do you suppose she would have sent such tidings to you were she not sure that they were true?”

“Not purposely, of course. But is she so infallible that she could not be mistaken?”

“She would be more likely than most to hear the truth. You must remember that Lord Stanley, her husband, is now Chamberlain of King Richard's household.”

“I remember that Lord Stanley was once my father's friend,” said Elizabeth bitterly.

The Abbot moved to a side-table and stood absently fingering the red-and-white pieces set out upon a chess-table. “There is also something else which gives colour to the story,” he said thoughtfully. “Sir Robert Brackenbury, as you know, succeeded your half-brother as Governor of the Tower.”

“And I have always felt that with Sir Robert they must be safe,” said Elizabeth, coming to seat herself by the table and giving him her complete attention.

The tall, black-robed churchman whose hospitality had been so sorely tried looked down with real affection at the steady intelligence of her lovely face. Small wonder, he thought, that the late King had loved her so. “Your intuition was probably right, Madam,” he said. “And that is, I imagine, the reason why he was relieved of his command.”

She was quick to grasp the implication. “Relieved of his command?” she gasped.

“For one night only.”

“Was he ill?”

“No.”

“How do you know this, Father?”

“That squire Gloucester always keeps about him—John Green, I think he is called—rode back from whatever town the Court had then reached on this northern circuit. Twice he came past Westminster. And I happen to know that each time he went straight to the Governor's lodgings in the Tower. The second time a close-eyed man called James Tyrrell rode with him, and when Green returned this Tyrrell person stayed behind.”

There was silence in the Queen Dowager's bedroom and all that broke the quiet of the little anteroom was the low sound of their two absorbed voices and the singing of the birds outside. “What more?” prompted Elizabeth.

“Nothing much perhaps,” shrugged the Abbot, “except that Sir Robert Brackenbury rode out of the Tower that evening with baggage for the night and a mere handful of servants. To spend the night with a relative on the other side of the river. I happened to meet him at the end of the bridge and he stopped to tell me so. It seems that he told several other people too, as he came along Thames Street. Which was strange in a busy man who seldom tells any body his business. And he positively loitered over the bridge, almost as if he wanted to be seen by as many people as possible.”

“You mean—so that they should know he wasn't in the Tower that night?”

“Yes. Brackenbury is no fool—although he did forget,” added the Abbot with a reminiscent smile, “that he had told me not so long ago that he hadn't a relative nearer than Calais!”

Deep in concentration, Elizabeth began pushing the pawns into impossible gambits up and down the squares of the chessboard. “And this man Tyrrell?” she asked.

The Abbot folded his hands noncommittally inside the wide sleeves of his habit. “As to that, I know nothing,” he admitted. “Only those within the Tower could tell you, Madam.”

“But that night,” deduced Elizabeth slowly, “
someone
must have held the keys.”

“It was the eighth day of August,” said the Abbot, as if some day it might prove wise to have committed the particular date to memory.

“The eighth of August,” murmured Elizabeth. “With wild roses sweet in the hedgerows and dawn glimmering early over the cornfields. Merciful God, what a night to be young—and die!” Suddenly she pushed aside the disordered chessboard and stood up. Inaction was intolerable. “And Sir Robert is back?” she asked, almost lightly.

“Oh yes. He and I are both supping with the Lord Mayor this evening.”

“Then I suppose you could not possibly—”

“No, Madam, for all his humanity, Sir Robert is a soldier who serves with loyalty the hand that pays him.” Elizabeth thanked her host none the less warmly for sparing her his time. “I so miss my father that I have need of someone—like yourself—to talk to sometimes,” she explained, and would have knelt for his blessing had not her shaking knees betrayed her.

“I shall always be at your Grace's service,” he promised; and because there was more than ordinary insistence in the courteous words she looked up questioningly. His eyes were very grave although his lips smiled.

“Your Grace—?” repeated Elizabeth, fumbling for enlightenment. And suddenly, in the midst of her wild confusion of grief, the momentous realization came to her, whipping the blood into her pale cheeks. “If it be true that my brothers are dead,” raced her thoughts, “then I am Queen of England.”

There was a usurper on the throne and a Lancastrian pretender across the Channel, and there had been much venomous and hypocritical talk about illegitimacy; but neither Gloucester nor the powerful, turncoat barons could alter the true bloodline of royal descent. For years the family of Edward the Fourth had lived and moved, familiar and accepted, about the land, and Elizabeth knew—and in their hearts the people must know—that if his sons died childless, then she, his eldest daughter, must be Queen in her own right.

During some formless space of time, during which even bereavement ceased to be, Elizabeth Plantagenet stood withdrawn into her own consciousness, absorbing the sense of change in her own status. And as she did so a strange inner warmth sustained her, mingling with her awe and terror, and seeming to invest her with some second, and as yet unfamiliar, personality.

It was only a few minutes before Doctor Lewis came into the anteroom from her mother's bedside. “Madam, I must now entreat
you
to call your women and take some rest,” he said with professional authority of manner.

But Elizabeth did not even hear him. In the light of royal obligation, she was thinking that whatever happened to her now there could be no more daydreaming about lovable young men who were commoners. And trying to realize that only an hour ago she had been nerving herself for an undignified
gamin
adventure. Well, there would be no need to nerve herself for it now. She wore Edward's difficult inheritance instead of his cast-off clothes, and she would never see either him or Richard any more. If only she could have shielded them with her own body! “Oh, Dickon, little Dickon!” cried her heart. “Did they hurt you hideously?”

“Madam, you have been through a great deal with vast fortitude.” The doctor had given up speaking to her professionally and was now appealing to her with the ordinary compassion of a layman. “If there be anything at all that I can do for you—”

Brought back at last by his insistence to awareness of material things, Elizabeth caught sight of her reflection in the Queen Dowager's mirror. The last few tragic hours seemed to have snapped her youth. There were smudges of fatigue beneath her eyes, and their sad stare was set as a Medusa's. Yet she felt that both men were aware of her new-born regality as she answered, and she was glad that the Abbot of Westminster should be there to witness her words. He had been her confessor of late and had probably smiled tolerantly over all her foolish, immature sins. Now he would see something of her adult, naked soul. “There is nothing, I thank you, Doctor Lewis,” she said, with a gesture of dismissal. “Except that I would have you tell the Countess of Richmond that I will marry her son if he will come back to England and kill my uncle Richard of Gloucester.”