The Tudor Rose (22 page)

The ride back to Westminster was always in her mind a confused blur. This time they rode with Lord Stanley and the rest of his party. After that overcrowded room the fresh air outside was like wine. It was dark, and save for an occasional lighted window only the stars above the overhanging gables lighted their way through the narrow streets. Elizabeth was half frightened, half elated by what she had done. High-sounding words which had been said to her flitted through her mind. “The red and white roses will be united at last.” “The country will know peace and prosperity.” And closer and more personal her mother's tragic voice saying “Now my sons will be avenged!” And closer still Margaret of Richmond's lovely voice saying gently about her son, “He is studious and competent and gentle.” Would he be gentle to her, his wife? Riding home under the stars, though she rode like a page at Stanley's stirrup, Elizabeth felt herself to be a Queen. A sovereignty which she was prepared to share. In her warm generosity all that she had she gave to Henry Tudor, who would come like a legendary knight to deliver her. “This night,” she thought, glancing down from the immensity of the stars to her ringless finger on the reins, “I have perhaps changed the destiny of England.”

Only as the dark mass of the Palace loomed before them did her spirits begin to fall. Elation passed and cold fear gripped at her because of the inevitableness of this thing she had done. Seeing a light still burning in the private apartments, she thought for the first time of Richard. Of Richard, not as the representative of a dynasty, but as a person. A person whom she had talked and laughed with—and betrayed. Betrayed to his death perhaps. Like her self, he was a Yorkist—not a stranger Lancastrian. Suppose, nagged her veering conscience, it should ever be proved that he was innocent of her brothers' death? Suppose young Ned still lived somewhere and she had deprived him, too, of all hope of his rightful inheritance. Might she not regret this night's impulsive work during all the rest of life? In spite of the cloak which Brereton had lent her, she shivered as they rode quietly into the Palace courtyard.

Seeing Lord Stanley, the guard saluted. Men stumbled from the guardroom, hastily fastening their belts. Grooms came for the horses and a sleepy servant brought a torch. Elizabeth, stiff from riding astride, slid down from the saddle as she had seen her brothers do. She let Humphrey Brereton's cloak fall where he would be sure to see it. “Here, boy, hold my hat and gloves a moment!” called Stanley, giving her an excuse to keep near him as they went through the gatehouse archway; and later gave her an unceremonious push towards the backstairs. “Up you go and get you to bed, or you'll be more of a dunderpate than ever in the morning!” he ordered, so that all should hear.

Elizabeth climbed the stairs with thankfulness, glad that the episode was over. Up to the present, excitement had kept her unaware of how much it had taken out of her. Now she trailed up yawning in the darkness, plucking the eagle badge from her shoulder as she went. Small need to tell her to go to bed, she thought, with a reminiscent smile. All she longed for was to get there. She would ask Mattie to stay and would snuggle down beside her.

At the top of the stairs Elizabeth paused to make sure that no one was about. Mercifully everyone else in the Palace seemed to be asleep. Through a closed door she could hear someone snoring. How good God had been to her!

In order to reach her unpretentious bedroom in the wardrobe wing she had yet to traverse some of the private apartments which were full of memories of Anne. She paused again to listen when she came to the Long Gallery at the end of them; but that, too, seemed to be deserted. A lamp was always kept burning beneath the arch at either end of it. The wind had risen and somewhere a casement banged, stirring the life-size figures embroidered on the wall-tapestries so that they moved a little in the shifting half-light as they so often did. Elizabeth stepped softly through the threshold, wishing she were well past them. And only then, when it was too late, did she see a figure at the far end detach itself from the more shadowy ones and move into the circle of lamplight beneath the archway.

Elizabeth's hand flew to her mouth, stifling an unborn scream.

It was the King himself standing there.

“He overlooked my part in the Buckingham affair. If he sees me now he will kill me,” she thought in panic. The livery badge crumpled in her hand would be death warrant enough.

But his head was turned away from her. He was in his damasked bedgown and looking along the passage that branched off at right angles towards his bedroom. More over he was twisting the rings up and down his long fingers as he always did when ill at ease. Something in the nervous stealth of his movements suggested that he might be watching for someone or something.

Elizabeth was certain that he had not seen her.

She had only to step back as silently as she had come. To retreat into one of the other rooms and hide behind some piece of furniture. Or gain the backstairs, perhaps. And God would deliver her.

But before she could bring her petrified limbs to move Richard must have detected some sound. He swung round, his hand flying to his dagger. Quick as a man attacked from behind he had drawn it. Standing there motionless and mercilessly illumined, Elizabeth could imagine the sharp steel in her heart. She felt the blood drain from her face and was powerless to move. She just stood there looking at him across the length of the gallery with terrified and beseeching eyes.

She knew the strength of his wrists, the rare but terrible unleashing of his wrath. All the fine plans which had filled her mind for days were wiped out as if they had never been. Chance had delivered her up to him. “Now,” she thought, “I shall join my brothers.”

But the moments passed and Richard did not move. He only stared at her with a terror surpassing her own. Seeing his shrinking body and contorted face, coherent thought began to come back to her. For the first time it struck her as odd that beneath his damask bedgown he should be wearing a mail shirt and poignard belt. Instinctively she knew that he always wore it now, by day and night; and the inconsequent thought occurred to her that perhaps this had been the real reason why he would not sleep with Anne. He hadn't wanted Anne to know. In case she guessed at the fears which are bred by guilt…

Gradually the true explanation was seeping into Elizabeth's mind, quieting the beating of her heart but filling her with unspeakable horror. She remembered that she was wearing her brother Edward's suit, that her fair hair was arranged like his, and that she must seem spectrally illumined with the darkness all around her and the lamp above her head. She knew she must be deathly pale. And that Richard had not heard her come into the gallery, but had suddenly looked round and seen her standing there. As he stared at her in horror she was shaken to the soul by the knowledge that he believed her to be Edward's ghost.

His dagger clicked back into its sheath, useless against a murdered wraith. He covered his face with both hands as if he could bear no more, and fled down the passage back to his tormented bed. She supposed that no one else had even seen him shake with fear.

The moment Elizabeth heard his door bang she forced her trembling legs to move. Across that guilt-haunted gallery and the waving tapestries she ran, not daring to stop until Mattie let her into the familiar comfort of her own room.

Wildly she fell upon her knees, burying her face in the old woman's lap. Grief, horror, moral relief and gratitude for her deliverance were among the conflicting emotions that tore at her. “I know now. I know at last that he did it!” she cried incoherently. “Even my father could not blame me for betraying him. Whatever may come of the Lancastrians' plan, I regret nothing that I have done this night.”

A
LTHOUGH IT WAS ONLY August, the ling on the Yorkshire moors was burned to autumnal brown. The oaks looked clumped and heavy in the fullness of their foliage. The strong walls of Sheriff Hutton Castle were bathed in sunlight, and across the still water of the moat where the far end of the tiltyard merged into open country the ground shimmered in the noonday heat. It was almost too hot to move, and down in the outer bailey the Constable's hounds sprawled in the small patch of shade against the gatehouse tower.

Yet Elizabeth Plantagenet paced restlessly about the battlements, her mind too tensed to endure physical immobility.

It seemed hours since her young cousin Warwick had returned from his ride, docile between his two attendants, and looked up from the drawbridge to wave. And now it was nearly dinnertime and he had slipped away from them to sit near her, singing tunelessly as he thrummed upon the lute she had brought him from London. “At least it gives
him
pleasure that I am here!” she thought. For herself it was misery, because she was not allowed to go out of the castle at all. She was both a prisoner and a prize. Like the legendary princesses in their ivory towers, she was part of the guerdon for which two princes fought.

“
Blanc sanglier
and Beaufort's son
Are fighting for the crown—”

sang Warwick; and the silly jingle which he must have picked up from the guardroom went round and round in her aching head as giddily as the heat seemed to swim in the tiltyard. “Why must the poor lad choose to sing
that
?” she thought, pushing back the moist tendrils of her hair. “Of course it is only the means to the crown, not me, they are fighting for!”

“The white boar beats the Welshman back
And knocks his castles down,”

went on the boy's high-pitched falsetto.

“Heaven help me if he does!” prayed Elizabeth, sinking exhausted on to a low crenel in the wall. “The white boar being Richard, he will either kill me or force me to marry him. Neither of them loves me, but Henry Tudor does not kill people. He hates violence. His mother said so.”

Elizabeth strained her eyes in an effort to see across the endless moors. If only she knew what was happening out there beyond them in the rest of England! If only someone would send her some news! Even bad news, she felt, would be more bearable than this suspense. All these important people who took one side or the other for politic motives did not realise how much more intimately it concerned her. The two descendants of prolific Edward the Third might be fighting even now for the crown, and because she had a better right to it than either of them she would be made to marry whichever of them won!

“This waiting will drive me as witless as poor Warwick!” she thought; and tried to steady her nerves by deliberately going over everything which had happened up to the day when she had left London. She suspected now that the King had heard of the Tudor's plans for invasion even when he was keeping that last splendid Christmas at Westminster; and as soon as he knew for certain that Henry's borrowed fleet had set sail he had sent her under strong escort into the heart of his own country, so that the invader should not get her. Some weeks before that he had had to give up for a time his own intention of marrying her. The temper of the people had grown too ugly. So ugly and menacing that he had even issued a public declaration to the effect that these rumours about his marrying his niece were all malicious gossip, and that he had never entertained any such idea. And because they went on muttering that Elizabeth had been living in the Palace since his wife's death, he had sent her for a time to live in Lord Stanley's town house. Considering his underlying mistrust of the man, that must have been the last thing Richard wanted to do, she supposed. But the indignation of the Londoners and the secret treachery among his barons had forced him to make many unwilling concessions of late.

It had been wonderful to be living freely in an ordinary friendly household, and the few days she had spent there had given her the longed-for opportunity to hear and discuss all the latest developments of those plans which had first been outlined to her so secretly in a tavern. And to her delight Stanley's intrepid Countess had risked a secret visit to them. Even now, sitting on the gatehouse battlements so many miles away, Elizabeth's strained face relaxed into a smile as she recalled those brief, happy hours during which she had listened with rapt intentness to Margaret of Richmond talking about her son. “If he is anything like you I shall be happy with him,” she had prophesied, having already formed a deep attachment for the kind and spirited woman whom she hoped would soon be her mother-in-law.

“He should be happy, too, with anyone so lovely,” Margaret had said. “Poor Henry, who has never known a father or had a home since he was a child!”