Within the Hollow Crown (34 page)

"How long?" he asked them tersely.

"A few hours, perhaps," they told him, and moved away.

   In the midst of her delirium Anne sensed his presence. "Richard!" she cried joyfully, holding out shaking arms to him as if he were an angel from Heaven.

   He sat on the bed and gathered her into his arms. It seemed incredible that only that morning she had set forth with him, laughing and radiant. All the strength and youth seemed to have been burned out of her. "My heart's resting place!" she murmured, great tears welling up into her lovely eyes.

   All night long he held her. They had so little time left. The plague was like that. It had carried off his grandmother, the beloved Queen Philippa, before he was born.

   At first Anne talked a little in happy, broken sentences. Why had all her women gone away? All except Mundina, who knew just where the pain was and put hot poultices. Not that she minded their going, really—except that she had wanted Agnes. "I prayed to the sweet Mother of Christ that you would come. And now that I am in your arms again nothing else matters… It's been such fun, Richard, being married to you!" An echo of all the laughter they had shared throbbed weakly through her lovely voice. "Do you remember the favourite little
chanson yo
u used to sing?

   Anne was growing light-headed again. "You and Robert could make a party out of a bottle of Bordeaux and a couple of candles, couldn't you?" The foolish question broke on a small sob, as if for the first time she realized that the fun was nearly over and the candles burning out. "Do you suppose that Robert and Agnes have been as happy as you and I?"

   Regardless of the dread disease, Richard crushed passionate lips to hers. "Nobody
could have been…" he said brokenly, knowin
g that never again would her senses respond deliciously to his kisses.

   "It seems odd—how I used to envy them. Before you really cared…"

   "Don't Anne! God knows I did too! And now—to think of all the precious, wasted weeks…"

   Anne's flicker of strength was spent. Her lashes fluttered down again. "Nothing—is ever—wasted, Richard…" Her tired voice trailed away, leaving nothing but his need to hold courage for hereafter.

   There were ugly blotches on her bare arms and several times she retched horribly. As the night wore on, he was aware of Mundina and the doctors doing things for her. The ugly, necessary things of sickness. Once he laid her down while a priest came and gave her Extreme Unction. And soon afterwards she brought up blood.

   After that they left him alone with her. He could not see beyond the haze of tapers at the foot of the bed, and no one moved any more in the shadowed room. Anne was jasmine white and could no longer speak. He knew now that their unexpected June visitor had come. That he was neither Jehan Froissart nor any of the pleasant people they had discussed so gaily a million hours ago, but uninvited Death. And that he had come only to see the Queen. With all his will Richard wrestled with him. He was learning the extremity of love. The love that lasts, with the sweets of passion shorn away. Beginning to understand that this kind of love was the only weapon with which he could in the end cheat Death. "Give her to me, God! With nothing for myself, if only I may keep and see and serve her," he implored, the sweat running down his face. But as the sands ran inexorably through the hour glass, so the dark, hooded figure approached nearer and nearer until his stagnant breath extinguished all their lovely youth and happiness.

   The long night wore away at last. The tapers burned themselves out at dawn. Mundina moved quietly to open a casement. Out in the garden the birds were beginning their drowsy twittering. A faint pink flush in the east painted the beginning of a new June day. An earthly pageant that must inevitably flame to decay. But as yet the first quiet peace of early morning held some spectrum of a timeless world, and the dew-drenched virgin grass seemed to wait, expectant, for the touch of Heavenly feet.

   Richard felt the faintest sign flutter from the cold lips against his cheek. In his arms he still held the beloved body that had wept and danced with him through the transient years; but the soul of Anne had escaped him.

   Nothing that happened in June could ever matter any more.

The king's quill moved slowly over the parchment, and every now and then the words ran into each other, smudged by his tears. He was writing his wife's epitaph, and part of him seemed to be standing outside himself watching in unbelieving amazement.

   Chaucer had humbly offered to do it. Chaucer, who could have done it so much better. For Richard was no poet. He could only feel poetry, as he had once explained to Robert de Vere. But he must do this for Anne, because there was so little left that he could do for her. And he felt tough enough to live for years. Each night either Mundina or Standish had insisted upon his drinking a hot posset and he had fallen into a sound sleep. Some of the fond woman's witchery, no doubt; but he had been more grateful for those hours of oblivion than for any spoken sympathy.

   Laboriously, he construed each spontaneous English thought into metrical Latin.

how she had held in check his smouldering hatred of Gloucester and Arundel! The quill scratched on again.

   "Beauteous her form, her face surpassing fair."

   Her face surprassing fair…Richard Plantagenet laid his own face on his arms and sobbed, smudging the parchment still more. But he must hurry. In an hour's time the cortège was to assemble outside the palace of Westminster, where he sat writing. And he wanted his words to go with Anne to her last resting place in the Abbey, so that all should know how wonderful she was. Later they would be carved upon her tomb. "She passed away into eternal joys," he concluded, and laid down his pen.

   "Oh, Anne, my darling Anne, God give you eternal joy! But how can you be happy while I, the other part of you—"

   He rose hastily, called to Richard Medford to take the thing, and strode through the still passages to his bedroom that they might dress him for his wife's funeral. The new mourning Jacot had made for him was already laid out. His pages and squires waited with downcast eyes so that they might not seem to look upon his ravaged face. They washed and shaved him in heavy silence.

   Never had Richard dressed more carefully. Anne had always been so interested in what he wore. He fastened the silver belt himself because it had been her birthday gift last Twelfth Day. "Yes, my love, occupy your fingers with such foolish trifles," she must be saying compassionately, "so that your heart has time to grow gradually into its loneliness."

   When he was ready he looked himself over critically in the metal mirror as he always had done, to see if he were well-groomed enough to meet her. The black brocaded houppelarde suited him, with his fair skin and red-gold hair and beard. But he was almost shocked to see how young it made him look. Only thirty, like many a gallant going a-wooing. And all happiness behind him.

   He went to a window and looked down at the great concourse of people gathered to do honour to his Queen. He had summoned them, knights and wives, out of every county. It seemed so short a time ago since he had dictated the words to Medford. "Inasmuch as our beloved companion, the Queen, will be buried at Westminster, on Monday, the third of August next, we earnestly entreat that you (setting aside all excuses) will repair to our city of London…We desire that you will, the preceding day, accompany the corpse of our dear consort from our manor of Sheen; and for this we trust we may rely on you, as you desire our honour…Given under our privy seal at Westminster, the 10th day of June, 1394."

   His invitation had been a command. Such wording had brought them all. He went down to join them, and their respectful silence greeted him. Only the occasional whinny of a horse or the impatient clink of a bit broke the silence as he took up his place in a procession which began to move, like an endless black serpent, towards the age-old Abbey where Anne's embalmed body had lain in state for weeks.

   Richard was conscious of the warm summer sun on his face— the mocking summer sun which once he had so blithely loved. Of the deep bell tolling. Of the sad dirge of priests and the uncontrollable sobbing of London women. And then the maw of the great monastic building swallowed him up and the chill of it smote into his soul. Here he had come each evening to kneel beside her. Here for both of them was the end of mortal life. For here, during the long cold centuries, their speechless effigies must lie among the dusty violet shadows, staring unseeingly at time as yet unborn. Other lovers would stare at them, wonder about them a little, perhaps. For their enlightenment he would see that he and Anne lay hand in hand. Already he had spoken to Lote and Yevele, the masons—and to an expert brass worker—about it. And how shocked the uncles had been! So human a touch had never been wrought—and on a royal tomb and during the lifetime of one of them! But then his own life was finished too, and never had a royal marriage been like theirs.

   He was walking slowly up the aisle, just as he had walked on their wedding day. Only then Anne had been beside him, instead of lying beneath the great raised catafalque around which the priests and singing boys were gathered. Just as then, the Abbey was ablaze with candles. He had sent for wax specially out of Flanders. There must be nothing gloomy or niggardly about Anne's funeral. They shone like stars from the high altar, and made tall lakes of soft light about her little coffin.

   And then, as the shifting haze of incense swung by a score of thurifers cleared a little, Richard saw the yawning gap of the vault beneath the stone-flagged floor. He came upon it so suddenly that Standish put out a hand to stay him; and with it came realization. He and Anne had come to the end of their road together. It took all his kingly training not to cry out. To tell all these solemn priests and officials that he would not let them put her beloved body down there. The beloved body that he had burned with passion—the tender fingertips he had so often kissed lest they be nipped in wintertime. Alone, in the cold dark, waiting for him to come.

   
"Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, in die ilia tremenda…"
intoned Archbishop Arundel, as colourless as Simon Sudbury had been vibrant.

   In a detached sort of way, Richard measured the depth of the vault. Grave-diggers' ropes trailed gruesomely on either side down to the level of the crypt. It should be deep enough to break a man's neck. If he took a step or two forward—now—there would be for Anne no waiting alone…

   But it was one thing to meet death violently, as Stafford had done. To go unshrived and unhouselled to one's Maker through no fault of one's own. But to take one's own life? So that men buried you at the crossroads with a knife through your body to keep your lost soul from wailing over the heath o' nights. That would be to lose Anne forever…

   
"Deus, cui proprium est misereri semper et parcere, te supplices
exoramus pro animaet famulae tuae Anna…"

   But of course the words had nothing to do with Anne. Anne was a living spirit. A joyful, tender essence which could neither be entombed in cold marble nor barred behind the gates of Purgatory. Something beautiful that would always be about him. Something that even in the midst of the most ordinary occupations he must always catch at, and listen for and hold. So that never could she try to make contact and find no one there, at the listening place of his soul.

   
"Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth. Plemi sunt

   A sort of spiritual ecstasy upheld him, as if she had been spared from Heaven to comfort him in this most mutilating moment of his life. Never again could they two be separated as when he had been in Scotland or Ireland, and she at Sheen. Whenever he was tired or disillusioned, or wanted to tell her something funny, she would be there—closer than his eyes or hands. She would laugh through his brain and linger in his senses, wrapping him round with the tenderness of her love. And she would be more utterly his than ever, because no one else would see or hear her or know that she was there.

   But that was a selfish thought. One that she, of all people, would deplore. There were so many others who loved her. Not in the way that finishes life, but to the point of tears. Geoffrey Chaucer, who had perceived the beauty of her soul—and young Tom Holland, whose eyes had been red for days. He must bestir himself out of this introverted melancholy and try to comfort them for Anne's sake.

   Richard looked about him for the first time with seeing eyes. At Mowbray, leaning on his sword, motionless and reverent as a crusader—at Lancaster and York, looking as if they had lost some cherished daughter of their own—at Gloucester, expressionless, standing a little apart. He saw household servants weeping unashamedly as bearers wearing the white hart badge began to lower the coffin, and looking to the humbler places in the nave, he made his usual unobtrusive sign to Mundina whose keen eyes probed only at the sorrow in his soul.