Within the Hollow Crown (21 page)

   Anne had to smile at her friend's shamelessness. "That is just what Robert
shouldn't have done, seeing he is married," she pointe
d out. "But go along now and read that letter, do, before it burns your pocket! And tell them to get Sir Meles a meal."

   "And you will try to persuade the Pope to get Robert a divorce?"

   "I will think about it."

   Left alone, Anne allowed herself to savour the unintended hurt in Agnes's consolation. "Richard isn't in love with me as Robert is with her," was the persistent burden of her thoughts, outweighing even the worry of this family scandal.

Even the joy of Richard's return was spoiled by Stafford's murder. Bells pealed and balconies were draped with costly tapestries and London cheered the triumphant army. But many of the banners and balconies were draped with black, and men were whispering everywhere, "Where is John Holland? Will the King pardon him?" Richard knew that the common people were watching him, waiting to see if he who had hanged their relatives when they rose in a just cause would condone a brutal murderer because he was of his own blood.

   And inside Westminster palace Agnes Launcekron was asking the same question of the Queen.

   "I don't know, Agnes. I wish I did, for my mother-in-law's sake," sighed Anne.

   "But haven't you asked Richard?"

   The Queen and her favourite lady were already dressed for hawking and breaking their fast, but after the previous day's celebrations most of the warriors they had come to welcome were still abed. Anne shook her head as she set her small white teeth into a medlar. "They looked so fit and had so much to tell—he and Robert—that I hadn't the heart—"

   Agnes arched freshly-plucked brows. "Surely last night—" she began, but observing Anne's uncommunicative air she pursued the matter no further. "Their sunburn suits them, doesn't it? And although they had such an exciting time they were both ridiculously glad to be home, weren't they?" she babbled on, glowing over her own happy recollections of the last twenty-four hours.

   "Robert at least had good cause to be," said Anne.

   It was not like her to speak caustically. But she had noticed enviously how early they had both excused themselves from the festivities. Whereas Richard had sat up late, laughing and talking with Brembre and Walworth and the Masters of the Guilds who had given him civic welcome. She knew what pleasure he took in their forthright company, their practical outlook and their constructive plans for the everyday problems of London—particularly when he had been for long in the company of his uncles. And last night he had been in brilliant vein, describing the more human incidents of the campaign with a vivacity which everybody found infinitely more amusing than Bolingbroke's tedious statistics. But it was ages since she had seen him alone, and he might have shown some of Robert's eagerness. She had lain in bed shaken with lonely frustrated sobs until her head ached and her eyes were all puffed and ugly; so that when at last she had heard his hand on the latchet of the door she had turned her head away and feigned sleep. He had stood awhile by the bed. She had felt him gently replace the tumbled coverlets. And then she had been unreasonably angry because he had tiptoed out again for fear of waking her. It had been one of those lost, ill-synchronized hours that beset the path of matrimony.

   Anne looked up and saw him now, coming into the room with Mathe beside him. His eyes seemed to be searching for her, but whether with sheepishness or reproach she could not tell. "Why so soberly dressed this morning after all yesterday's gorgeousness?" she asked, knowing that the clothes he wore always indicated his mood.

   "Business," he answered crisply, helping himself to salted almonds from a plate which Agnes held up to him.

   "You sat so long with City merchants last night that you are beginning to talk like one," laughed Anne lightly, so that he might know he was forgiven.

   "Well, Parliament, then. I find I am expected to go down and tell the Commons how the money they voted for this expedition was spent. Already some of them are beginning to suggest that it was hardly a success."

   "Not a success!" exclaimed Agnes indignantly. "But you took Edinburgh."

   Richard's immaculate, sun-tanned fingers dived again among the Provencal almonds. "True, my dear Agnes. But it seems there weren't enough people killed."

   He was in one of those flippant, aloof moods which Anne recognized as a kind of armour against unimaginative criticism. She laid aside her platter. "Surely it was much cleverer to have frightened away the French and impressed the Scots without much bloodshed," she said.

   "That is exactly how I felt about it," agreed Richard. "I took such a large army that the Scots avoided a pitched battle. It cost a good deal of money, of course. And I suppose the paunchy gentlemen who sit here at Westminster prefer spending soldiers' lives to spending money." Accepting a cup of wine from a page, he strolled over to where his wife was sitting. So often the sight of her quenched his bitterness, much in the same way as Simon Burley's quiet words. "And each man's life means a broken home," he went on thoughtfully. "I saw inside the home of a blacksmith once. And I've talked with the people, Anne. At the time of the revolt. They've minds and hearts and hopes the same as we have. And so pitifully little besides."

   Anne looked up at him with shining eyes. She had seen something of the aftermath of war on her journey through Flanders, and she loved it when he spoke his thoughts to her with that complete naturalness.

   "Robert feels like that too," murmured Agnes, with the pride of recent surrender softening her face. "But I supposed it was because he is partly a poet."

   Richard was conscious of vague resentment, and not a little envy. What was it about this new-born passion which gave people possessive knowledge of their lovers' minds? "We used to hold forth about it when we were youngsters," he said with studied negligence. "I suppose there were so many amusing things we wanted to do that all the hours spent on preparing ourselves for war seemed a waste of precious time."

   "'The life so short, the craft so hard to learn,'" quoted Anne, in her lovely voice.

   Richard laughed at her affectionately. "Quoting English poetry at me already, you clever little Bohemian!" he teased, bestriding a stool before her. "I suppose you read Chaucer because he's besotted with you. Your charming head-dress, your exquisite gowns, and your demurely coiffed face, piquante as a nun's. Shall I tell you a secret, Anne Plantagenet?" He lowered his voice to a momentous whisper and winked at Agnes. "I believe the man's writing a poem about
you
!"

   Anne clapped her hands in delight. Her brown eyes danced. "Oh, do you mean it, Richard?"

   "Of course I mean it. And of course you'll get unbearably conceited. With all my knights wanting to wear your favour at tournaments, too. Why, Tom Mowbray nearly drove us crazy singing some tuneless song about you up in Scotland. And only the day we parted from you Stafford said—" Richard stopped abruptly, appalled afresh at the loss of a life that held all the promise of an opening epoch—all the gifts that would have helped the cultural renaissance craved after by the youth of a war-weary age. To cover their mutual emotion he snapped his fingers to Mathe, trying to make the great gentle brute nuzzle Anne's hand. "This is the only purblind creature who hasn't the sense to love you best," he said.

   "Nothing less than a king will do for Mathe," she laughed ruefully, ruffling the hound's reluctant head.

   But whatever they spoke of, it was really the Stafford tragedy that filled their minds. Richard touched a fold of Anne's riding skirt, smoothing the rich green velvet absently. "It was nice of you to go to see my mother so often while I was in Scotland. Has she really been as ill as the doctors say, Anne?"

   "It's her poor tired heart, Richard."

   "I'm not surprised. Dragged from campaign to campaign. And then nursing my father through all those years of illness."

   Anne waited until Agnes had gone to join de Vere in the herb garden. "Why don't you ride over to Wallingford and see for yourself?" she suggested.

   "You know I would. It would be the first thing I should do. But now—it's so difficult…"

   "Then it's true what Burley tells me? You've decided your brother must die?"

   "He's not my brother," snapped Richard.

   "Your half-brother then," Anne corrected herself patiently. "Won't you pardon him for her sake?"

   "And have my people think that I have one set of laws for them and one for the nobility? That I twist justice how I like? Besides, John Holland is detestable. Everywhere he goes he makes trouble with his bombast and his brutality."

   Anne knew that he was right. But her heart ached for Joan. "In that case I suppose it would take a lot of courage to go and see her," she observed.

   "And listen to her heart breaking," he agreed with a sigh.

   Because Anne had finessed him into it he got up there and then to go, but mother-love forestalled him. Before the horses could be saddled Joan herself was at the door. And it didn't make it easier for Richard that she—a sick woman—had come to him. Women, for him, were creatures to be comforted and cherished. He hated to see her suppliant. Because he was furious about the ugly thing which had come between them he greeted her formally, so that all joy in seeing each other was spoiled. Yet in his miserable constraint he was grateful to see Anne show his mother the tenderness he could not.

   The Princess had been brought in a closed litter and her servants had carried her upstairs. She still held the letter John Holland had written her and it was clear that she had risen from her sick-bed and come at once. "You will spare him, Richard?" she beseeched. It had been some time before she could speak, but her eyes had been asking it from the moment she came into the room.

   By an almost imperceptible gesture Richard begged Anne to stay. He wanted her to see for herself how circumstances always hounded him to do the things he hated—to understand, and to be on his side. He himself leaned defensively against a table in the centre of the room. The change in his mother's face alarmed him, and he averted his glance with loathing from the desperately scrawled appeal in her hand. "He sent you here to beg for his life when all the physicians say you must rest," he broke out. "Wasn't it enough that he had to come crawling to me at Beverley?"

   "I should have come anyway," countered Joan faintly. "Don't you see, Richard—whatever he has done, he is my
son
?"

   "Your favourite son."

   "You said that before. You've always been jealous of him," accused Joan, with a spurt of anger.

   Moved by some uncanny dog-sense, Mathe growled as though his master were being attacked, and Richard pulled absently at his ear to quiet him. Somehow the warm, silky contact helped to soothe him. "Curiously enough, I'm not," he said slowly. "I just—dislike him. I dislike in him the same things that I dislike in Henry Bolingbroke. Except that when Henry brags he usually has something to brag about. One can't be jealous of someone who doesn't count."

   He looked up as if glad to make the discovery, and his mother's anger melted before the grace of his reasonableness.

   "I know it must have been difficult, to stand his sneering— his lack of understanding. And I know he has never loved you as Thomas does. I'm not upholding him, Richard…"

   Richard said nothing. He was thinking of that crazy ride to Mile End. Seeing Holland and his horrible raw-boned horse disappearing across Hackney marshes in ignominious haste. At least he had been able to spare her knowledge of that.

   But apparently others had been less kind. Her next words shook him out of all thought of his own reactions. "It was generous of you—not to tell me—about the time he ran away."

   That she—the Black Prince's widow—should have to speak such words…He was across the room in a few strides. "So you knew?" he whispered, dropping on one knee beside her as he used to do.

   "I've known all the time," she said, the great slow tears of spent grief welling in her lovely, faded eyes.

   "Then surely that makes it—easier?"

   Such knowledge seemed to Richard a bigger thing than knowing that one's son must die. If he had seen any son of his turn tail like that, he would go on loving him, he supposed, but all joy in him would be gone.

   Joan only shook her head. All his life Richard had adored her as the fount of gaiety and loveliness, and it hurt him horribly to see the helpless tears course unheeded down her raddled cheeks. "Even Uncle John—though Holland is his own son-in-law—agrees that there is nothing else I can do," he argued, in self defence.

   She made one last bid. She clutched at his encircling arm. "Dickon! Dickon! By all the loving joy we had together in your childhood—"

   He released himself gently and walked away so that he should not see her agony. "I can't. It's only common justice," he flung back at her. "You are here pleading with me now to spare his miserable life. But in my mind's eye I can still see Stafford's father—at Beverley, only a few days ago—weeping for
his
son. And Stafford was the sort of knight we all of us, in our better moments, hope to be."

   Joan's hands fell with defeated limpness to her lap. Simultaneously with the knowledge that John must die came the realization that Richard was no longer a malleable boy, but a man with a streak of obstinacy in him whom she could no longer melt. Her reign was over. If anyone moved or moulded him now it must be Anne.