Within the Hollow Crown (35 page)

   The priests had ceased intoning, monks and choristers no longer sang. There was only the slither of ropes and the straining of the bearers. And then the sad silence was broken by a dull banging of the great West door, and footsteps coming louder and louder up the aisle. Spurred footsteps that began to grate across Richard's consciousness before his ears had really heard them. Even at that solemn moment, heads turned furtively. Priests stood arrested in the performance of their office. Archbishop Thomas Arundel, standing on the altar steps, looked down the pillared length of aisle, and because he was blood relation of the intruder his hand trembled on the illuminated missal which a kneeling acolyte held for him.

   There was a moving aside of crowded people, a murmured protest and a thrusting. The King watched and waited, his brow black with Plantagenet rage. Opposite to him, across the open vault, appeared Richard Arundel, shoving his way into the place left for him beside Gloucester. Arundel, carelessly dressed and mud-splashed, with Richard's carefully worded invitation in his hand. Arundel, clattering in half an hour late for the Queen's funeral. The insensate brute who had dared to keep her waiting in her lifetime, and had let her kneel to him.

   John of Lancaster glared at him. Chaucer, whose life she had saved that day, stepped forward to bar his way. Even Edmund of York said "Hush!" and waved shocked hands.

   But something snapped suddenly in the King's overwrought brain. The imposing scene lost reality and all the tall candles ran together into one piercing swordpoint of light. All he saw clearly was the dark vault yawning before him and Arundel's hawk-nosed face on the other side.

   Joy—that forgotten thing—surged up in him. The joy of some leashed beast within him breaking its bonds. To the horror of all beholders, he leapt the grave and caught Arundel a stinging blow on the mouth, so that the blood flowed. All the savagery of his ancestors momentarily possessed him, and Richard was so much stronger than he looked. The earl reeled backwards, striking his skull on consecrated flagstones.

   Richard was vaguely aware of the gasp that went up, of people running and the sharp echo of overturned faldstools. Of Arundel's groans, and Gloucester bending over him, the anticipatory smirk wiped from his face.

   "One day I will kill you both," Richard vowed. "But this is not the time or place."

   Aloud he said nothing. There was nothing to be said. He strode out of the Abbey alone, by some side door, to face the perpetual darkness of his joyless life.

"Through Death men come unto the Well of Grace,
Where green and lusty May doth ever endure."
—CHAUCER

—RONSARD

It is high time you married again!"

The words had hammered on Richard's brain all day. And the raucous voice of his Uncle Thomas, saying them. Saying them in full Council, of course, with Arundel and Warwick to back him. Where everyone took it for granted that a king owed it to his State, and even York jibbered about the necessity of getting an heir. Whatever Lancaster had felt, he had declined to enter into the debate. Richard had been thankful for his silence, although he knew that most people cynically attributed it to the fact that his own son, Henry Bolingbroke, stood second in succession to the throne.

   The matter had been bound to crop up. Richard himself was well aware that Parliament had been wanting—and not daring—to broach the subject for months. He had been a widower for two years and whenever he rode abroad he saw the same dictum reflected more humanly in his subjects' eyes.

   What did they take him to be, he wondered furiously. A pawn to be bartered irrespective of feeling for some foreign alliance? Did they see him in their bovine minds as a bull or a stallion, to be mated solely for the purpose of producing high-bred stock? And in any case, what did it matter about an heir apparent, with Roger Mortimer, his late Uncle Clarence's grandson, whom he liked and trusted, doing so well in Ireland? Of course, if it had been a question of the succession passing to
Henry
, who could be relied upon to plunge England into war within a few weeks…

   Richard rose impatiently from his half-finished dinner at Westminster and called for his barge to be brought to the landing stage. When he gave an order these days he gave it without a smile, and men ran to do his bidding. They loved him still, their hearts still bled for him—for had they not known the Queen, and been privileged to see the happiness of his private life? But there was none of that good-humoured badinage which had once made them feel part of some delightful pageant. The King seldom troubled to explain to them the why or whither of a journey. His voice had a clipped authority; and although he laughed and said the polite things in public, his eyes never smiled. He never mentioned Anne's name.

   He spared no time on masques and tournaments but went about with a quiet, calculating look, as if he were planning something bigger and biding his time. All the people he had loved so loyally were dead except Mundina, who had left the Wardrobe house in Carter Lane to be with him. He played chess with her of an evening, and applied the same technique to statecraft during the day time. One game was as fascinating as the other to a man who had only his brains left to live upon. And as long as he lived Richard meant to be a move ahead of his opponents' knights and to keep the king out of check. It pleased him that he no longer had need to explain even his most startling movements to anybody. He held England in the hollow of his hand.

   "To Sheen," he ordered curtly, as soon as he had stepped aboard.

   He saw Standish and young Holland exchange glances. It was two years since any of them had been to Sheen. Two years since he had held his dying wife in his arms through the long June night. Two years to the day. Probably that was what had prompted Gloucester to probe the wound.

   Although Richard's mind worked inwardly, his unsmiling eyes were extraordinarily observant. As he sat under the silken awning, sped forward by the rhythmic muscles of his watermen, he noted everything going on on either bank and stored it up, subconsciously, for future use. It was a habit acquired early from Michael de la Pole. He remembered what meadows looked prosperous and which of the landowners, living in their stately riverside mansions, had sided with the Merciless Parliament. It wasn't that he intended to harm them, but so that he could hold it over them. He wanted power to render his enemies impotent. To reverse the humiliating position of his youth. The acquisition of power had become almost an obsession. And now that love was denied him, and pleasures palled, his mind had room to play with hatred.

   He left his escort by the Sheen water gate and strode up alone through the neglected gardens. Anne's unpruned roses bloomed in wild profusion. Because their sweetness tore at his heart he brushed brusquely past them, scattering their loosened petals with his swinging sleeves. The smooth lawns where Chaucer had been wont to read to them stood high with tottle grass, and cobwebs spanned the richly glazed windows. Inside the palace all was shuttered and desolate. The few remaining servants, caught in their undirected sloth, stared at him unbelievingly as though he were a ghost.

   Either their wits were slow, he supposed, or they had grown used to ghosts. But the way they stared sent his thoughts back to the bustle there had been that other June, when he had arrived unexpectedly, mudstained and sore with slander, and Anne had healed him. And to Robert de Vere, an expensive, tinkling echo out of the carefree past. Robert, who had been savaged to death in a boar hunt on foreign soil, but whose body he had had honourably brought home because of the numbed sort of love he still bore him.

   Richard went straight to his wife's room.

   Though bathed in the clear light of a summer's evening, it looked cheerless and bereft. But he had had to come here once again to sort out his mind before settling this question of remarriage which was being forced upon him.

   He stood just inside the door and rammed home the bolt behind him. His nostrils dilated, hunting some lost scent; but only the impersonal dankness of a scrubbed and unused room came back to him. Instinctively, as one dodges a lacerating swordpoint, his eyes avoided the bed. After one quick comprehensive glance at the rest of the room, he went slowly to a cunningly carved armoire between the two tall windows. Mundina had told him there were papers there. Papers belonging to Anne. Things treasured by her, perhaps. Trifles that no one had dared to touch because of the plague.

   With the westering sunlight emphasizing the new faint lines about eyes and mouth, Richard drew a key from his wallet and opened the armoire. And here was the alchemy he sought. Faintly, yet more poignantly than sight or sound, the subtle perfume that had hung about Anne's clothes drifted out to him, transmuting time. Avidly, his whole being rushed out to meet it; but after that first heady whiff it had no more power to intoxicate his senses with the past. The long line of lifeless dresses were just dresses. Even the faded pink one against which he pressed his cheek. Steadying himself, he jerked open an inner drawer. He lifted out the contents one by one. The heavy necklace he had loosened from her neck the last night he had been here; the faded sprigs of broom he had given her—and forgotten he had given—all those years ago before he went to Scotland. A roll of his letters from Ireland—the love letters she had wanted, tied with a gay ribbon, and already yellowing. The original of a poem in Geoffrey Chaucer's fine script.

   Yes, by her kindness and humility Anne had saved Chaucer's life—saved him to write this delightful series of Canterbury tales he was giving to the world. If only she had been able to save Simon Burley too! Burley who would have said to him, "Be glad, my son, through all your suffering, that at least you are bearing it instead of her."

   With reverent fingers, Richard untied the ribbon and unrolled his letters. He sat down on Anne's dressing stool and read them through. He was glad of their tenderness. Fleetingly, he recaptured the feel of that lost thing—happiness. But when he could read no more because of the waning light, illusion lingered.

   He turned towards their shadowed bed. The familiar hangings were half drawn and, with the spell of the past hour upon him, he could almost believe that Anne lay there—just out of his sight, in the shadow of the rosy tapestry. That she would stir presently and call to him and stretch out warm arms. That the frozen bitterness holding him in thrall would be all broken up, and his heart warmed again with the love that other men enjoyed.

   But reality lay in wait and he could bear no more. With a strangled cry he tore aside the hangings and threw himself across the empty bed, his face breaking into unspeakable grief. "Anne! Anne, my beloved! Never, never will I hold another woman in my arms," he vowed. "Never will I love with my body some new queen whom my spirit rejects as wife. No matter how they badger me… Not even for England…"

   He lay there, where night after night they had lain together, sobbing against her pillow. The hard, rare sobs of manhood.

   "What does it matter about sons, if they be not ours? We were complete—too young and too desperately in love to care. How were we to know this would happen? Thank God, we didn't know…" he whispered brokenly. And then, when his sobbing had subsided, "I suppose, if you had left me a son, my heart's love—if he had looked like you and spoken with my voice—he might have done the things we dreamed of for my country. Unhampered from the start. Lifting her above the common, warmongering, unreasoning rut. Making her a pattern state for all Christendom."

   The dam of his restraint was broken. "Oh, Anne, my sweet, it is so long—so terribly long—since I saw you! Your dear kind hands, your funny little plucked brows and your smile. Dear Christ, do I have to go on living for years, bearing this daily desolation?"

   Presently, he raised himself on straightened arms, still talking softly as if Anne lay back on the pillows between them. "I know what I will do. So that they don't drive even this wedge of physical infidelity between us." At the thought of Gloucester and Arundel something of that closed, crafty manner came back to him. "Even in this I will outwit them, using their very importunities to further my own purposes. I will marry the French king's daughter." He sat up and laughed, a little wildly. "She is eight years old. I don't remember her name. It should cement the alliance so that there is peace with France so long as I live."

   He was surprised to see how dark it was. His sharp ears caught the sound of approaching footsteps. Someone knocked at the door. He passed a handkerchief over his face and pushed back his hair. When he strode to the door and threw it open, a loutish country servant stood there, bearing a torch.

   "Well?" demanded Richard, furious at the intrusion.

   "It be growin' mortal dark," the man mumbled.

   "It's been mortal dark for two years," retorted Richard.

   The old man stared, gap-toothed, at the King's disordered hair and ravaged face. "Oi thought maybe you'd be wantin' a light, sir."

   Richard banged the door in his face. What should he and Anne be wanting with lights—here, in this room, where they knew every stick of furniture. Where there had always been light to lighten their darkness. In this room where no lesser lovers must ever sleep.