The Tudor Rose (5 page)

The Queen could have refused to use the seal, knowing that in the absence of the Duke of Gloucester none other would have dared; but her brief essay to take command had burnt itself out. At the first shock of combined opposition her high-handed assumption of authority had dissolved into self-pity. In her blood was no stain of royalty to sustain her. “Then I must let myself be overruled by your counsel,” she submitted. “And I pray God none of us assembled here may live to rue it!”

R
AIN BEAT UPON THE painted windows of the Abbot of Westminster's parlour, and every now and then a large drip from the smoke louvre high up in the middle of the roof would fall with a melancholy plop upon the May Day branches decorating the hearth. The tall candles guttered in the draught from a hole in the wall through which men had been bringing in furniture and chests of clothing from the adjoining Palace. And on the floor, low among the rushes, sat the Queen. She stared straight before her, scarcely noticing the strange disorder, and the pale hair which had once enmeshed an impetuous King hung like a yellow cloak about her.

Seeing her mother all abased and desolate like that seemed worse to Elizabeth than looking down upon the splendid coffin of her father—except for the fact that she loved him more.

“Do you remember, Bess, how we made our own May Day fun when we were in sanctuary before?” asked Cicely, picking wistfully at the withering green branches. To Elizabeth, sobered early to womanhood by the shame of a broken betrothal, the loss of such revelling meant little; and the others were too young to remember. But to fifteen-year-old Cicely small present disappointments assumed as big proportions as the portentous news that Uncle Gloucester had somehow intercepted Uncle Rivers and their younger half-brother Grey and imprisoned them in Pontefract Castle.

“We could not in any case have kept May Day with our father dead,” young Richard reminded her, looking up from the book he was reading as he lay on his stomach by the Queen's side.

“All safe in sanctuary! Safe in sanctuary!” chanted small, pink-cheeked Katherine, dancing round and round the fireless hearth with outspread skirts. To her and to eight-year-old Ann, their change of fortune was all a new kind of game.

Only Elizabeth knew that it was not her daughters' safety, nor yet her own, that their mother was nearly crazed about. It was the thought of Edward in Uncle Gloucester's hands. Each time Richard would have sprung up to join in the younger ones' play the Queen's restraining hands reached out to fondle him. “As long as I keep them apart
each
is safe,” she had said more than once, looking across the boy's smooth, burnished head to seek the comfort or corroboration in her eldest daughter's eyes.

This had been the Queen's instant answer to the ill news—her supreme strategy. Even with anxiety for her brother and her son Grey weighing upon her, she had roused the children of her second marriage from their beds and appealed to the Abbot for sanctuary, and he, poor man, not deeming it fit that they should share the asylum of felons claiming the Church's protection from justice, had given up to them his fine hall—never dreaming that in her desire for speed and secrecy the Queen would move in so precipitously as to wreck his masonry. Her move had taken everybody by surprise. To the saintly Abbot it must have seemed scarcely necessary, considering that the young King was already coming southwords in his royal uncle's care and had been proclaimed King in York by Gloucester's orders. But to the Queen's more suspicious mind, nurtured as it was on years of strategic struggle for the succession, the keeping of her younger son where no one could touch him seemed the most necessary move of all. As long as Richard was in safe keeping there could be no point in harming or dethroning Edward. “It takes a woman to outwit them,” she had said triumphantly, as soon as they were installed.

Yet even Elizabeth felt that her mother was consumed by an unreasonable obsession about Gloucester. “After the beautiful letter of condolence he wrote you surely you cannot believe that he means harm to either of them?” she said consolingly.

“No harm!” flared the Queen. “When he throws my own relatives into prison!”

“Madam, may he not be only detaining them because it seems to him that they interfered—or at any rate acted too hastily?” ventured Elizabeth.

But the Queen was not to be placated. “Who is he to talk of haste when he swooped south like a vulture to intercept them at Northampton?” she said.

“I wonder how Uncle Gloucester could march a hundred miles farther than Uncle Rivers and yet catch up with him?” said Richard, closing his book.

“He could not have had the news so quickly either,” added Elizabeth thoughtfully. “Unless, of course, the Earl of Northumberland or someone warned him.”

“He can make his men do anything, your father used to say. Make them march without sleep—and go without himself, no doubt. He looks like it with that pinched face of his!” their mother railed shrewishly. “And as to interference, you talk like a fool, Bess. Had not the Council ordered my brother to bring the King? By the authority of the Court Chamberlain.”

“It is true that milord Hastings
was
Chamberlain in my father's lifetime, but is he now?” began Elizabeth uncertainly.

“Had he let me order out those archers this would never have happened,” said the Queen, with truth.

“Poor Uncle Rivers!” murmured Richard, sitting up and hugging his knees. “He used to show us the loveliest illuminated manuscripts and make all the old legends come alive.”

“He is the most cultured man in the country; and of what can that misshapen clot of cold arrogance accuse him save of being my brother?” agreed the Queen despondently.

Elizabeth went and knelt beside her and began braiding back her hair. “I know how terrible it must be for you,” she said, motioning to a hovering lady-of-the-bedchamber to bring a fresh headdress. “But, after all, perhaps the people
expect
Uncle Gloucester to bring him.” Being a Plantagenet herself she could scarcely remind her mother that Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, was not.

Baby Bridget was asleep in her cradle and the two younger girls had wandered to a window, where they had drawn back a curtain and were whispering together excitedly. “What are you two looking at?” asked the Queen, instantly alert. “What is out there in the street?”

“Soldiers,” reported Katherine stolidly.

“Soldiers with lighted torches,” elaborated Ann.

That was too much for Richard. Feeling himself to be the only man of the party, he evaded his mother at last and ran to join them, clambering on to the window-seat. “Uncle Gloucester certainly
can
march!” he exclaimed, his nose flattened against a window-pane.

Elizabeth helped her mother to rise and went to look. “Are you sure they are his men, Dickon?” she asked, peering through the trickling raindrops.

“See the boar on their badges!” pointed out Richard conclusively. “And, look Bess, there is Uncle's old groom, Bundy, who taught me to ride my first pony. Over there, standing in the light of a torch.”

So it was true. Gloucester had reached London.

“Come back, Richard!” called their mother.

The boy obeyed reluctantly, and Elizabeth could not help feeling that to be singled out for such express anxiety was bad for so imaginative a child.

“The yard is full of them. Do you suppose they are trying to surround us?” asked Cicely, beginning to be scared.

“They cannot harm us, foolish one. Not all the soldiers in the land can make us come out from here,” Elizabeth reminded her.

“But they could prevent anyone else from getting
in
,” pointed out Richard, the quick-witted.

“You mean they could starve us?” groaned Cicely, to whom no worse calamity was conceivable.

“Oh, for the love of our Lady, be sensible, all of you!” exclaimed Elizabeth, shooing the two smaller girls back to their dolls. “Why should Uncle Gloucester want to starve us? Probably he will ask leave to come and see us soon and bring you all some sweetmeats. Do try to remember that he is in as deep a grief as we are.”

“He will go to his precious wife first,” muttered Cicely, pouting at her sister's unaccustomed rebuke.

“And why not?” asked Richard. “I like Aunt Anne.”

“It is one of the nicest things about him that he loves her so,” reflected Elizabeth, feeling that so human a trait made him more like the rest of them and therefore all the less to be feared.

But the Duke did not beg leave to come and see them. Perhaps he was worn out with forced marches, or—as Richard suggested— had not had time to change his dusty armour. Or perhaps it was just that he avoided as much as most men the edge of an angry woman's tongue.

Instead they had a visit from their host, the Abbot. “The Protector is back, Madam,” he announced, having been bidden to sup with the Queen.

“The Protector?” The title, if not the news, stunned her.

It being Friday, the Abbot helped himself to fish. “He styles himself so,” he said, not liking to tell her that he had already by common consent had the title thrust upon him.

“And fills our peaceful courtyards with soldiery!” The poor Queen had scarcely eaten for days, and even now, in spite of her daughter's anxious urging, only picked distraitly at some fruit. “And what of Edward?” she asked immediately.

“The Duke has taken him to lodge the night in the town house of the Bishop of Ely.”

Tears rose to her tired eyes. “Not with me, his mother,” she said.

“Dear Madam,” soothed the Bishop compassionately, “they say the young King was overtired from the long journey and needs immediate sleep.”

“One is scarcely surprised after the shock of seeing his favourite uncle, who was appointed his tutor and who has always done everything for him, arrested like a common traitor. Surely, too, it was enough to kill him, coming across England at that pace. I would have you know, my dear Abbot, that for all his sturdy looks he is not so wiry as young Richard here.” After brooding on her wrongs a while the Queen added with inconsistency, “To-day is the fourth of May. He was to have been crowned this day.”

“The heralds have given it out in every ward of the City that his Grace will be crowned as soon as he is rested.”

“And who told the heralds?” demanded the widow of their late master.

“Milord the Duke.”

“The Protector?” She laughed shortly. “Heaven send he proves to be one!”

“But is he not the most obvious person?”

“We will see what milord Hastings has to say about that. At least there will have to be a Council-meeting. I shall tell them—”

“But, Madam—”

No one present dared to remind the Queen in so many words that, having withdrawn into the sanctuary of the Church, she could no longer expect to attend Council-meetings
;
but during their embarrassed silence she sat realizing the possible results of the one grave mistake she had made. Everything must depend upon Hastings now. Being loath to admit the disadvantages of the situation, she changed the subject. “How did London welcome my son?” she asked. And all young Edward's family hung upon the Abbot's words.

“With every possible show of deference and loyalty, Madam,” he assured her. “They brought the late King's cloak of purple and ermine for him to wear.”

“Was it not horribly heavy?” asked Richard, leaning eagerly over the back of his mother's chair.

“Indeed it was, my little Duke,” agreed the Abbot, with a twinkling smile for the boy who had always been his favourite. “But his uncle had a thought for that and bade old Bundy arrange it so that most of the weight fell upon the flanks of his Grace's little white horse. Gloucester rode bare-headed beside him, Madam,” he went on, “and the Lord Mayor tells me that every now and then, wherever the crowds were thickest, he would make a motion towards the lad with his cap as if to say 'Here is your King,' and then reined back his great charger a little so that the cheers seemed only for his nephew, and not at all for his own victorious campaign in Scotland.”

“That was well done,” conceded the Queen. “And how did Edward bear himself?”

“As became your husband's son, save that he looked grievously tired. The children threw white roses in his path and many of the women wept.”

“Wept?”

“Because he was so young, I suppose.”

“I would we could see him!” sighed the Queen, thereby giving her host the opening for which he had been waiting.