The Tudor Rose (40 page)

It had never occurred to her that she might see him and still not be sure. But this was a man's face, with no boyish curves left. The fair skin was bronzed a little by the weather, the smooth flesh of cheek and chin tightened by shaving. There was about it a jauntiness, a wariness, and even an unfamiliar suggestion of hardness. Only the mouth was tender, as she had remembered Dickon's. Of course he, too, might feel uncertain and be taking a chance. But whoever he was he had the advantage over her, for he must often have seen her recent portrait in Margaret of Burgundy's house. Elizabeth withdrew her half-extended hands which had moved so spontaneously to meet his. “Are you the person they call Perkin Warbeck?” she asked.

By turning to lay his book aside upon the seat he gained a moment for reflection. But he must have decided to make no effort to gainsay her. “Or Osbeck,” he shrugged, as if amused. “They never seem quite certain. And you, Madam,” he said, bowing profoundly, “must be Elizabeth, the Queen.”

“I came to see how you fared,” she lied, “after all that they did to you.”

“That was heavenly gracious of you. But their tormentings did not amount to much,” he said, gathering up his cloak and spreading it for her across the stone bench. “Will your Grace deign to sit here?”

Elizabeth's limbs were trembling and she could not have refused him if she would. She sank down thankfully in the pleasant shade of an old mulberry tree. “Surely it was hard to bear, the hooting and the—things they threw?”

He winced, but she guessed that his fastidious pride was suffering less from the memory than because she had heard of it. He stood easily before her, expounding his philosophy of life. “One can always keep one's thoughts on something else,” he said. “On a lark that is singing, on the thought of how badly the man in front rides, or upon the woman one loves.”

“And that would help?” The Queen's voice was low and pitiful.

“Imagination can always rise above reality.”

“You have certainly not been wanting in imagination! Imagination for which others have suffered,” she said scornfully. He made an expressive gesture of regret and she relented. “But—when you read aloud your confession and they mocked you?”

“Ah, there I found it paid to employ other tactics,” he told her, entering into the matter with absurd zest. “It was not
my
confession, of course. But, even so, one should join in the baiting, giving back shaft for shaft, steering their sense of the ridiculous, whenever possible, towards something else. Always with wit and good humour,
bien entendu.
For there is nothing your Londoner likes better than a good laugh. I assure you, Madam, I am becoming so experienced in these matters that I thought of employing my tedium here by writing a book for my fellow-unfortunates. 'Eloquence through rotten eggs,' perhaps, or 'Suitable sayings from the stocks.'”

“Don't!”

Grinning down at her, he looked more than ever like her memories of Dickon. “But why should you care?” he asked, teasing her with mock amazement.

“Because you remind me—”

“Ah!” He grew grave again, but did not pursue the advantage.

The precious time was passing, and she had so much to ask him—so many traps to set. “Tell me about my aunt, the Dowager Duchess,” she commanded.

“She is in good health and entrusted me with her love to you.”

“Then she really supposed that you would get so far as to see me?”

“And so I have,” he reminded her.

“But scarcely in the way that she intended.”

“That will be a great disappointment to her,” he admitted. “The Duchess was extraordinarily good to me.”

“And you adored her.” Illusion was so strong that it was on the tip of Elizabeth's tongue to add, “You always
did
adore her.”

“Although I was grateful, I did not enjoy being beholden. Her Grace had too much the ordering of my life. And she could be vindictive. Particularly to the Tudors, of course.”

“And it was she, I suppose, who really taught you English?”

“Heaven forbid!” he exclaimed, with a boyish burst of laughter. “She has acquired an execrable Lowland accent.”

His own was pure native as the English hills.

“But she taught you all about us. Our names and habits, and how we looked and talked, so that you could speak of us familiarly. And about King Edward.”

“There was no need. I remember my father perfectly.”

“Jean de Warbeck, the merchant of Tournay?”

“If you say so, Madam.”

Quite unreasonably, his good-tempered agreement angered her more than his pride. “Why do you so meekly say everything that is put into your mouth? Oh, I know that you had no choice—out there—when the King made you. But here—with me?”

His smile was both diffident and engaging. “Having failed, would it not be but poor kindness to persuade you?”

“You mean,” she said, quick to pick up his thought, “that, so long as there was any question of your succeeding, it was my son or you?”

“And since my day is done let it be indubitably your son.”

The insolence of his presuming to give her peace of mind infuriated her. “And probably not pressing his claim is just a clever way to avoid my questioning,” she thought.

“How can anything that you do affect my son? Or anyone seriously suppose you to be a Plantagenet?” she demanded. “Men of my family do not persuade their allies to retreat. They fight like the third Richard fought at Bosworth, or ride out alone to face an angry mob like the second Richard did in the Peasants' Revolt.”

The colour rose hotly in his cheeks. “Neither of them had to see their own country ravaged for the sake of destroying it, or Englishwomen raped by foreigners,” he said.

He was too readily plausible, she decided. And then, just when she was sure of his guile, he was down on one knee beside her, neither parrying nor posing, but unfeignedly sincere. “I pray you give me news of my wife,” he beseeched. “I hear that she is with you.”

“She is well,” said Elizabeth, looking down into his ardent face and thinking what a lover he would make. “I should like to be able to tell you that she is happy. But at least she is kindly treated.”

“Everybody says you are the kindest Queen in Christendom!” he cried gratefully, bending to kiss the hands that lay in her lap.

In spite of herself, she was pleased with the compliment. She would have liked to touch his bent head. “Your Kate is easy to be kind to,” she said smilingly.

“She gave up everything to follow me. She is sweet as the heather on the Scottish hills,” he said. “Could you tell her that you have seen me? That I am shamefully well. And give her my undying love—”

Elizabeth released her hands from his eager hold and held up one to stay his importunity. “How can I tell anyone that I came here?” she reminded him. “Do you not suppose that I took some risk to do so?”

“Of course you must have done, ingrate that I am!” he agreed, rising to his feet.

But, seeing the disappointment upon his sensitive face, Elizabeth found the same difficulty in refusing him which had so often betrayed her into doing things for her young brothers. “She is coming to Richmond with me to-morrow, and one day I shall probably find means to reassure her,” she half promised him.

“Bess—Madam—I will make a bargain with you,” he began; and it was well done, she thought, that artfully dropped name even in the midst of his real sincerity. “If you will go on being kind to Kate I will go on playing Warbeck. I owe that much to her now—and to you.”

“You have no choice,” said Elizabeth, trying to speak coldly. “The King has made you confess yourself an impostor and may do so again.”

“But if ever I came to the scaffold I could say anything. No one could prevent me in those last moments. And I look so inconveniently like you.”

It was uncomfortably true. Sitting near him in the sunlight, Elizabeth could not deny it; and although she had almost persuaded herself that he was not Dickon, the idea of anyone so like her brother standing on the scaffold was unbearable. “What do you remember about your father?” she asked abruptly, as if to allay the thought.

Instantly his wariness seemed to change to pleasure and there was a reminiscent smile upon his lips. He seemed to be upon sure ground and there was no talk now of the Tournay merchant. “Chiefly how tall he was, and how good to look upon. And how pleasantly his clothes smelt of musk or amber. There was a locket, he wore, I remember, and straight bands of pearled beading across his breast.”

“Most of which you could have gathered from his portraits,” said Elizabeth.

“Of course,” he agreed without offence. “But no painting could show how the room came alive with his vitality when he came into it, or how even the most ordinary things suddenly became interesting. How he was always laughing and telling Will Hastings to do all the dull things. And how, when he had time, he made one love his books and yet seemed always to be either coming in hungry from the chase or in a tearing hurry to go to it!”

“Aunt Margaret could have told you all that.”

“But she couldn't make you feel it, could she? Not the laughter and the
security
. When I was small and he lifted me on to his knee and let me build castles on his table. Or the bursting pride in my breast when he swung me up high above his head and called out in his great voice: 'By Christ's breath, Will, this youngling of mine is the most diverting companion of them all!' It is one's
feelings
one remembers.”

Elizabeth was leaning forward, spellbound. “What did you build your castles
of
upon his table?” she asked.

He stopped in full spate and frowned uncertainly. “I do not really remember. It is so long ago. Little blocks of wood of some sort, I suppose.”

“Pieces of type?” she suggested eagerly—and saw her mistake too late. How useless to ask leading questions and then be beguiled into supplying the right answers.

She was watching him so intently that she caught the momentary gleam of satisfaction on his face; yet his voice sounded indifferent enough. “Yes, it could have been something like that,” he said, and began negligently exploring the contents of the purse at his belt.

“Do you remember watching his funeral from a window?” she persisted, and immediately he described it. But he was clever enough to talk mostly about the wooden effigy clad in the King's state clothes which would naturally have made most impression upon a small boy.

His passing reference to the hole made in the Palace wall when they went into sanctuary sounded convincing and the sort of thing a child would remember, but of course he could have been told that too. She must think of something which he could not possibly have been told. “And do you remember what I said to you when—when I last saw you? As you went out of the Abbot of Westminster's door?”

He stared at her for a moment, seemed about to say something and then changed his mind. Playing for safety, no doubt, she thought. Finally, he shook his head. “It is so long ago,” he murmured. But Dickon, who loved her, would have remembered.

It was queer. She could swear that he remembered some things—up to a point. But not those more recent things which were most vivid to her. Probably her mother's explanation was right. “But of course you remember Mistress Grace?” she asked carelessly.

“Grace? Grace?” he repeated; and she supposed that he must be picking his words very warily now. “I seem to remember the name.”

“She was always about the Court.”

If he knew who she was he kept a noncommittal silence.

“She is said to have been a love-child of my father's and was devoted to my mother, who, of her charity, brought her up.”

In her intense desire to make him betray himself Elizabeth leaned towards him eagerly; but he only shook his head. “My life has been so wandering, and spent in different countries. I have met so many people since then,” he explained. Which was, of course, reasonable enough.

“Like me, this Mistress Grace had a younger brother,” added Elizabeth meaningly.

“And you think that I am he?”

“I think that so many people have told you so many lies about yourself for their own ends that—”

“By now it is difficult for me myself—”

“To know which to believe.”

He was uncannily quick at picking up her ideas, but was smiling broadly as he recapitulated them. “Then you will go so far as to permit yourself to think that I am one of the King's bastards? And that this Grace woman, to please the late Queen in her last illness, sent me to the Duchess. That is very ingenious.”

“It is at least as likely a story as any.”

They were talking now in quick, half-finished sentences as only those can whose minds are intimate. Not since the older Richard rode to Bosworth had Elizabeth talked like that with a man who seemed to be of her own blood. And she found it a mental release to talk so again, with someone who picked up her half-spoken thoughts, who did not kill conversation by taking light expressions literally—someone whom she could argue with and yet like, disbelieve in and yet trust. And it made her realize sadly how stilted had been all her conversations with Henry Tudor—and how impossible it was for even a lifetime of such barren utterances to lead them to see into each other's minds.