The King's Grey Mare (14 page)

‘Your Grace,’ complied the courier, ‘I bring news that the Duke of York and his followers are encroaching upon Leicester.
They march south, together with Lord Salisbury and his men.
They are hot to defend themselves against what they call slander … they come in peace, they say, to do homage to the King.’

‘Force!’
said Margaret coldly.
‘Is this loyalty?
Is this homage?
And what of me?
What of my beloved heir?’

The messenger said unquietly: ‘Your Grace, the Duke of York would be Protector of the Realm again.’

‘Nom de Dieu!’
cried the Queen.
‘I have had my belly full of York’s protection.
Sir, get you gone.
Keep me informed.
My lord–’ to Beaufort, who rose from his knee– ‘I wish you good fortune’.
She took a large beryl from her finger.
‘May this token aid you.’

Beaufort kissed the jewel, patron of soldiers and of love.
He extended his arm to the King and together they left the chamber.
Elizabeth was alone with the Queen, whose eyes were hard and gleaming, like the beryl.
Fearsome eyes.

‘Would Jesu I could go to war,’ said Margaret softly.

A blackbird began its virile song outside the window.
Elizabeth knew, as surely as if the Queen had told her, that it was not possible for her to leave for Bradgate yet.
And the trees would be a foam of pink and white; the lake would be patterned with lilies.
Her sorrel mare would have foaled and there was a new troupe of minstrels to play for dinner.
Listening now to the diminishing tramp of mailed feet, the rattle of the drawbridge, she walked in fancy through her own manor.
There was the hall, with its hearth fragrant with resinous logs struggling to burn against a joyful finger of sunshine through the lattice; the south wall covered with her favourite tapestry – Goliath and David, marvellously worked and lifelike … the polished oak staircase.
The chamber above with its great tester bed, empty now.
The vast stone kitchen … the servants would be idling – the steward too, who needed a firm hand and was in love with the cook.

Margaret’s voice startled her, saying: ‘I had it fashioned especially.’

A page knelt before the Queen, pieces of a suit of harness strewn about him.
The cuirass sparkled, its convexities points of shattering light.
The greaves were delicately wrought and chased, and the casquetal, darkness showing through its eye-slits, bore a plume of proud mantling.
The Queen motioned to Elizabeth, who helped unfasten Margaret’s robette.
Without a word, the page, eyes on the floor, armed his sovereign.
She was swiftly transformed into a figure of light.
Small, mysterious, with the casquetal fitted over her head, she became half-human, neither male nor female.
In her hand she took a heavy sword.
The page fell back as Margaret took a few clumsy, weighted steps.
Then she lifted her helm’s visor.
The face of a pale savage youth looked at Elizabeth.

‘Oui!’
she said.
‘Comme La Pucelle d’Orléans!
I, Marguerite, should be with them this day!’

Then she laughed, her stern face softening, and lifted the helm gently from her head.
‘But I do not go,’ she said.
‘I stay to guard my son, my hope, my pride.’

‘Madame,’ Elizabeth said nervously, ‘John says there will be no fighting; the Yorkists will run.’

The Queen was swiftly disengaging herself from the cumbrous armour.
With a sudden gaiety, she nodded, she even broke into a snatch of song.

‘Your handsome lord speaks sooth, Isabella,’ she said.
‘The rats will run.
So.
I have indulged my fancy.
We will to Greenwich, where I am always happy.
Make ready the Prince.
Come, Isabella, you shall entertain us.
We’ll drink to Lancaster.
And to France,’ she added, so softly that her words drifted almost unheard.

Elizabeth covered a sigh.
No returning to Bradgate yet.
Bradgate must wait, as it would always wait, secure and fair, gracious haven.

For the twentieth time she opened the manuscript of verse and read aloud:

‘Benedicite
, what dreamed I this night?

Methought the world was turned up so down.

The sun, the moon, had lost their force and light,

The sea also drowned both tower and town.

Yet more marvel how that I heard the sound

Of one’s voice saying: “Bear in thy mind,

Thy lady hath forgotten to be kind.” ’

The Queen loved this poem, and Elizabeth read it sweet and true.
Yet Margaret sat silent, and, looking up, Elizabeth saw sadness on the pale face.
Half to herself, the Queen said:

‘Nom de Dieu
!
I have been kind.
I have given him an heir to support his weakness.
I have upheld him in all adversity.
Henri!
Le pauvre!’

‘Sweet your Grace,’ said Elizabeth, ‘be easy.
My lord of Somerset will look after him.’

She stretched her dull limbs.
She would have loved to walk across the green pleasaunce to where beds of blossom flourished.
There was a pool, too, where moorhens paddled from bank to bank.
Yes, Greenwich was beautiful; but it was not Bradgate.
Although she had been at Greenwich for only a few days, it seemed like years.
Margaret’s nervousness harassed her.
Sitting daily under a May sun growing fiercer, the Queen would talk, in English, French, and Latin, and sometimes to herself, with determination, with disquiet.
And there was no question of Elizabeth leaving her yet.
Although Bradgate called in a torrent of memory she must sit, reading, or singing in her boyish treble little airs treating of God and the heart.
She could not play with the little Prince; his mother kept him close confined, and besides, he was not the kind of child one played with.
Daily Elizabeth felt the burgeonings of her own fruitful body, suffered discomforts that the Queen never noticed.
Daily the minstrels who had been engaged to plumb King Henry’s madness twanged and scraped in gallery and garden.
Ennui
dragged at Elizabeth.
Once she had craved the court above all.
Now she would have given blood for a sight of Bradgate.

Jacquetta of Bedford had returned to Grafton, and Sir Richard Woodville had ridden with the levies to Leicester.
Elizabeth thought of her brothers and sisters.
She had not seen Anthony for months.
He would be almost a man, ready for such knightly exploits as those on which his father and John rode today.
Poor, sweet John!
frustrated by his lack of knighthood.
Perhaps if he acquitted himself well in putting the Yorkists to flight, the King might rouse himself to honour him.
Then there would be more lands, more fee-farms, to augment Bradgate.
She dared not ask the Queen when the army might be returning with their tales of Richard of York’s humiliation.
Her only task was to divert the Queen from such thoughts.
So she sat burned by the Greenwich sun, and read aloud.

‘To complain me, alas, why should I so,

For my complaint it did me never good?

But by constraint now must I shew my woe,

To her only which is mine eyes’ food,

Trusting sometime that she will change her mood …’

The Queen was not listening.
Elizabeth left the verse in mid-air and beckoned to one of the yawning lutanists.
‘Sweet Madame, will you not sing with me?’
Anything to relieve that
distrait
watchfulness.
Margaret turned, smiling distantly.
She sipped from the scarcely touched hanap of wine at her side, and suddenly looked almost gay.

‘I will sing them all to perdition!’
she announced, but she melted from her strait position and came to sit, sisterly, on the cushions with Elizabeth.
A page, heartened by the sovereign’s changed mood, poured more wine and drove away a wasp.
The lutanist struck a sweet chord: The
Roman de la Rose
, in a setting by Antoine Busnois.

‘
Bel Acueil le sergent d’Amours
,

Qui bien scait faire ses exploitz

M’a ja cite par plusieurs fois …’

They looked at one another, broke off singing, and for no reason save the release of tension, both began to laugh.

‘Oh, Isabella!’
cried the Queen.
‘I well remember the time when you first came to court – so little, so
vierge …
abashed by my poor Henry’s humours.
Now, you possess yourself well, and do I understand you are
enceinte
?
May your son be as brave and proud as mine!’

At last the Queen had noticed.
‘Sweet Madame!’
Elizabeth bent gratefully to kiss the small hand, and in that same moment felt it grow stiff, actually felt the blood leaving it so that it was icy, like a dead hand.
She looked up, and followed where the Queen’s eyes stared across the lawn.
A man was running towards them.
Running wearily; he stumbled twice and all but fell; he clutched at his side.
His surcoat was ragged, its once-gay colours dirty.
Half his mail was missing; he still wore steel gauntlets and part of his cuirass, but his legs were clothed only in torn and filthy hose.
Down one thigh there was blood, seen clearly as he came nearer at that gasping, tripping run.
His head was bare, and the sun tipped its familiar tawny with raw light.
Elizabeth rose, freeing herself from the dead weight of the Queen’s hand.
She took a step forward but did not run to him.
The despair on his face slowed her feet.
With him he brought fear that almost vanquished the sharp joy of seeing him again.

‘John, my lord,’ she whispered.
The blood was crusted on his thigh; it doubled her fear.
He came on, running, the figurehead of a terrible catastrophe.
Now he filled their sight; he fell before Margaret, fighting for breath.

‘Your Grace,’ he said, and retched, turning his head aside.
In her own body Elizabeth felt the torment of his outraged lungs.
The Queen had risen and was standing straight, her wine-cup overturned.
The red liquor soaked the grass.

‘Madame, your Grace,’ he said.
‘The news is dreadful.
I beg leave to acquaint you with most dreadful news.’
This sort of thing he said, over and over.
Whatever he has seen, Elizabeth thought, terrified, it has addled his wits.
She cried shrilly: ‘What, John, in God’s name?’
And went to him and caught him in her arms, seeing the dried blood flake off against her gown.
‘Oh, Christ, my love, you’re wounded …’ He looked down, saying tersely: ‘It’s not my blood.
Would Jesu it were.’

Not his blood.
Oh, thank God, he is whole and sound, mine still, his beauty untouched.
She clung to this, while his dreadful news came pouring out.
The Queen’s face seemed to put on years, a year for each word he spoke, until she was eternally old even past death.

‘The Yorkists were magnificently arrayed, with a great force.
All the Nevilles and their mercenaries; Salisbury’s troop alone outnumbered ours … they fought like devils.
We were trapped, we had no chance.
Your Grace, your lords have suffered … will you hear who died?’

‘I will hear,’ said Margaret.

‘Lord Clifford,’ said John, trembling as with ague.
‘Northumberland, and Buckingham’s son.
Dorset, Devon and Buckingham were grievously wounded and taken prisoner.
God knows where Wiltshire is; he fled the field.
Sir Richard Woodville …’

‘Yes?’
said Elizabeth.
She bit her lip; it bled.

‘Escaped by the hair of his head.
He is safe, Isabella.
Christ’s Passion!
They were waiting for us, ready …’

‘What of the King?’
said the old woman that was Margaret.

‘They are bringing him back to London.
They will not mistreat him, they say, because he is the King.
But they proclaim their power, Madame.
Your captains are hacked to pieces.’

‘And my lord Beaufort of Somerset?’