The Tudor Rose (16 page)

“He must be made to take a solemn oath to marry Elizabeth immediately he lands,” Morton told him.

“And at least he is no murderer!” said Katherine.

“Even if Richard
is
a murderer he would never sell a single sod of England!” muttered Buckingham. But the Bishop's silver tongue had beguiled him, and he was soon reaching for a map and pushing the memory of Richard's smile behind him. “Mercifully Dorset is back and can join forces with the Devon Courtenays to raise the west,” he calculated, his voice gathering the old tones of command. “The Bishop of Salisbury, being a Woodville, can, of course, be counted on for Wiltshire. Then there is a useful man called Bray who was in the Countess of Richmond's service in the days when she was married to my uncle.”

“Sir Reginald Bray is still with her and
au fait
with our plans,” the Bishop told him.

“Then we must send him to sound the men of Kent.”

“And it is imperative that we let the Queen Dowager and the Princess know the good news that your Grace is with us,” said Morton, finishing off the wine.

“Doctor Lewis will gladly be our go-between again,” declared Katherine. “You see, Henry, how easy it is to pierce the gloom of sanctuary!”

“I see how sensible it was of the King to set a guard about it, though many people called it uncivilized,” retorted Buckingham.

And so Elizabeth Woodville was visited again by her favourite physician, and her health improved amazingly. With the threads of a conspiracy once more between her restless fingers she seemed to come to radiant life again. “When Doctor Lewis comes we are always sent to play in some other room,” complained her younger daughters, weary of their confinement. But the privileged elder sister whom they envied listened with mixed feelings to the news their visitor brought. She was grateful for the carefully laid plans and her heart beat at thought of the important part she was to play. But her lovely face was no more animated than a piece of wood. “It is unbelievably good of the Countess of Richmond, my kinsman of Buckingham and the Bishop,” she said, seeing herself as a pawn upon the great chessboard of England, being pushed frighteningly forward by the eager hands of two ageing women. She herself had given her word to go forward, swayed by a passion of pity for her brothers which cried aloud for vengeance. The same motive, perhaps, which in smaller degree had moved her Uncle Buckingham. But already revenge was growing cold—cold as their poor murdered bodies. Vengeance could not bring them back. All she really wanted was to get out of this suffocating place where one heard things muffled at second-hand—to have liberty to see people and ask questions—to search the Tower—to find out for herself what had really happened.

In her desire for freedom Elizabeth even consented to a wild plan whereby she was to be smuggled out of Westminster and join her relatives at Brecknock; but King Richard was better served than she imagined and that night Nesfield doubled the guard. Looking down upon the motionless, watchful figures in the courtyard Elizabeth of York, in her inmost heart, was thankful. No woman could have wanted to marry Henry of Lancaster less.

Yet Morton of Ely must have been right in his estimate of Henry's gifts, for once the names of places and sup porters for the rebellion were sent abroad that young man moved so quickly and efficiently that the King of England had a bare week's warning. Of the shock that it must have been to him to hear that his friend had rebelled against him and that Henry of Lancaster might be landing at any moment, Richard never spoke. And of that bare week he wasted not a moment.

The courier system he had organized in his brother's time with relays of horses every twenty miles along the roads proved invaluable, enabling him to issue far-flung orders and to keep himself informed of the movements of his enemies. As usual he called upon his trusty Yorkshire-men, and brought every available man from London. He changed into well-worn armour, marched as only his men could march and took his enemies completely by surprise by setting up his standard at Nottingham, in the very centre of England.

“Where we can all converge and surround him!” laughed Dorset.

But Dorset was one of those men with a charmed life who always laugh too easily.

It was Buckingham who began to do the converging. With perfect timing, during the October week when Henry Tudor had promised to land, he marched a formidable army from Wales, with every promise of success. But Richard, anticipating the movement, sent two trusty knights to cut every bridge across the river Severn, and the Almighty abetted him by sending torrential rains. Such floods swamped the Welsh borders that neither man nor horse could live in them, and the peasants whose homes were swept away saw them as a punishment for treachery. “Buckingham's great water” they called that devastation; and even among his stauncher supporters the superstitious laid down their arms.

The Lancastrian came promptly with a fleet lent him by Louis the Eleventh of France; but the same fierce storm drove him back to Brittany, in spite of his manful efforts to land in little, landlocked Lulworth Cove. The rest of the rebels were defeated, and soldiers wearing Richard's cognizance of the white boar seemed to be rounding them up everywhere. Dorset and Morton were the type of men who usually escape, and Richard granted pardon to their soldiery. They had but obeyed orders, he said. For Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, there was no such mercy. He was executed in the market-place of Salisbury. Sold for the sake of the reward by an old servant named Ralph Banister, with whom he had sought shelter.

“Why would you not see him before he died?” asked Anne, the Queen, seeing the bleak look on Richard's face in the midst of so much triumph. “Was it because your heart would have betrayed you into pardoning him?”

“That was not what he wanted. No man who wears the Stafford knot would have come cringing for his life,” Richard told her.

“Then why did he beg so hard to speak to you?”

“Probably because he meant to kill me,” said Richard lightly. “It seems he had strangled one of his guards to get a dagger.”

“Oh, but, my dear! After you had been so kind to him?”

“In all probability he had been very kind to that Banister creature,” shrugged Richard, trying to elude her questioning.

“But Henry Stafford must have had some reason for wanting to kill you,” persisted Anne, with the obstinacy of a woman who is not very perceptive. “Particularly as all the blame was on his side.”

Her husband took her by the shoulders and looked with exasperated tenderness upon the childlike face he had loved so long. He had cared too much for Buckingham to be unfair to his memory. “In this chancy world, my dear Anne, the blame is seldom all on one side,” he said. “Henry did have a very good reason.”

Which was as near as Richard Plantagenet ever came to showing anyone his tormented soul.

I
T SEEMED STRANGE TO Elizabeth to be back in Westminster Palace again. To live in her own home as a guest—to put out her hand for a familiar piece of furniture or a book and remember that it belonged to someone else. She had been given the small room where Mattie used to sleep, and her younger sisters climbed a winding staircase every night to share a dormitory with some of the Queen's younger ladies. It seemed strangest of all, perhaps, to be called just “the lady Elizabeth.”

“But the Duke of Buckingham has no bed at all save his coffin—and he took the risk for our sakes!” she would tell herself, whenever her pride rebelled. Besides, the King had been generous, people said. After the rebellion he had been so determined to keep his nieces safely in his own hands that he had tempted “the Woodville woman” with advantageous terms. He would risk no more dangerous marriages being planned to deprive him of his throne. He himself would choose the girls' husbands, he said; and they would be gentlemen by birth, but no higher in station than was suitable for the late King's bastards. But he promised to provide them with dowries and to treat them honourably. Before treating with him the Queen Dowager had still had spirit enough to make him swear to it publicly. And then, sinking into despondency after the failure of her plot, she had at last agreed to come out of sanctuary—for her daughters' sake, she let it be known, so that they might have some new dresses and enough to eat.

The children were overjoyed. The Abbot of Westminster, spreading his possessions about his own parlour again, must have been as much relieved as they were, Elizabeth supposed. But her mother, poor lady, had only exchanged self-imposed isolation for durance of a less dignified kind. The King kept his bare word. She had rooms in the Palace, but in some distant wing where the children seldom saw her; and with the hated Nesfield still on guard.

To the Plantagenet Countess of Richmond the King had been kinder. She, too, had been found guilty of treason; but so careful had she been not to incriminate her husband that he retained office as Steward of the King's Household. Indeed, bland Stanley benefited by her misdemeanours by being given charge both of herself and of her fortune, providing only that he kept her in one of his manors well away from London.

For Elizabeth, sharing their punishment would have seemed less humiliating than conspiracy contemptuously ignored. Having to live under her uncle's roof and eat his food was abhorrent to her. Had it not been for the new Queen's kindness her homecoming would have been even worse than being mewed up in sanctuary. But now at least she had a friend to talk to, a good horse to ride, with plenty of music and dancing, dresses and books, all of which she and her sisters enjoyed.

“Why are you so unbelievably good to me?” she asked her royal hostess with shy constraint, when they were alone in the garden gallery.

“Perhaps because I, too, have known what it is to be humiliated and unhappy,” smiled Anne Neville, arranging some spring flowers which Ann and little Katherine had been gathering for her. “Besides, since my only sister died it is pleasant to have someone like yourself for company. And has it never occurred to you that you are a person whom it is easy to love, Bess?” Anne tilted her honey-coloured head admiringly as she tweaked first one blossom and then another to better advantage. “Richard likes you too, I believe,” she added. “And Richard does not like everybody.”

When Anne said guileless things like that, seemingly unaware of any tragic situation, Elizabeth was dumbfounded. How could Richard like her when she had tried to best him, and when her mere presence must be an embarrassment and a reproach? “Perhaps it is because I look like my father,” was all she could find to say.

“Your father was his whole world—the man's part of it, as apart from me, I mean,” said Anne, beckoning to one of her women to set the bowl of flowers where she could see them. “That is where I am so fortunate, Bess. The sort of marriages we have to make usually have so little to do with love. I imagine most royal husbands hate, or merely tolerate, their wives. But mine loves me!” She said the naïve words exultantly and began singing softly in a sweet, husky little voice. Clearly, Richard made her very happy.

Elizabeth stood and stared at her. It was all so irreconcilable. This ideal family life, Richard's dutiful affection for that grim mother of his in Baynard's Castle—and the things men said of him!

By tacit consent the two young women, who had both been through so much, never spoke of poor Buckingham's rebellion, although it might have provided one of them with a husband she did not desire and deprived the other of one she loved. And in return for the Queen's generosity in this matter Elizabeth tried not to plague her with questions about her brothers. Instead they talked of relatives they had in common and of matters of mutual feminine interest. But the questions burned all the time in Elizabeth's mind. “It is kind of the King to let you keep young Warwick in your household,” she said, looking out upon the hopefully budding trees and skirting the subject ever nearest to her heart.

“Poor Warwick is so simple and harmless, and nephew to both of us,” Anne reminded her.

“So were Ned and Dickon his nephews, but where are they?” burst forth Elizabeth, in spite of all her resolutions. Even if Ned had to be disposed, she thought, how wonderful to be able to see them both sitting at the King's table, instead of the witless Warwick boy who could not answer the simplest questions.

Anne sighed and laid down her scissors. Life had taught her patience. “My dear Bess, I have already told you that I do not
know
! I am sure they are being well cared for in the Tower, but even to me Richard never mentions them. And once when I questioned him for your sake he shut himself up in that terrible reserve of his and it spoiled everything between us for days. He is not usually ill-tempered,” she offered an apology. “But he has been sleeping badly of late. It is having so many unaccustomed affairs of state.”