The King's Grey Mare (15 page)

Jesu, she is calm, thought Elizabeth.
It is not meet for her to be so calm.
She frightens me.
John looked down again at his stained hose.

‘This is his blood, your Grace.
I was close by him when he fell.
Beaufort is dead.’

Still the Queen showed no emotion.
She said: ‘Where did this encounter take place?’
Her voice was like a chafed thread.

‘At St.
Albans.
We fought up and down the heart of the town.’

Then Margaret began to scream.
She threw herself down upon the grass, and the spilled wine soaked her gown until it was bloodily red like the imagined corpses of those she loved, and she screamed.

‘Cursed be the name of St.
Albans!’

John, his face sweated and grief-torn, went on talking compulsively, while the Queen’s shrieks faded to dry sobs and silence against Elizabeth’s breast.

‘The king is unharmed,’ John a vain comforter, repeated.
‘He …’ he laughed, a short, madman’s laugh.
‘He even jested with his captors.
Love thine enemy, he said.
He … embraced my lord of York.’

The Queen raised her head.
Blackness ringed her eyes, as if she had been struck in the face.

‘I will make York to stink in the King’s nostrils,’ she said.
‘Even unto death.’

The victorious Yorkists came to London with a show of peace, demanding their inheritance.
Sternly they insisted upon a voice in the Council.
They confronted the Queen, who was for a time powerless.
And so a fretful kind of peace obtained, shot through with bloody risings from Margaret’s party.
And Bradgate shared this mockery of peace.

Like a cradle, the little boat tipped at its moorings in the willow’s shade.
It was an old boat discovered by Elizabeth during her lakeside ramblings.
John swore it to be unseaworthy, yet she had ordered the leaks repaired with pitch and plaited rushes, and now, with mischievous triumph, shepherded her family into it for an afternoon of water-sport.
She lay back comfortably in the stern.
Her second son, Richard, slept in her arms.
Three-year-old Thomas was pretending to fish.
Renée who was not enjoying the outing, crouched miserably at her mistress’s side.
John, stripped to his shirt, had been glad to tie up the boat and rest, shipping the oars he had unskillfully plied across the deep green water.

‘Well, my lady,’ he said, loving and cross, ‘I told you I was no mariner.’
He rubbed his upper arms.
‘This crossing has crippled me.
Renée!
Look to young Thomas!
I did not get sons to see them drowned!’

Undisciplined as a fiend, Thomas romped between his parents in the boat, falling flat as the wind-stirred ripples rocked it, bawling and laughing at the same time.
Renée clutched at him.
She was water-green with fear, and as the boat pitched under Thomas’s leaping, let out a muffled scream.
Elizabeth spoke, a sharp rebuke, and the child quietened; with the silly young wench he could do as he pleased, but when his mother used that tone, it was time to act discreetly.
So he sat down and treated her and his baby brother to a charming smile.
Elizabeth thought him a lovely child.
Wayward, yes, but so like John, with coppery chestnut hair and straight features.
She cradled the baby closer.
He too was lovely, and she had named him for her father, the best Richard living.
The dappled sun touched her face.
She trailed a hand in the water, feeling it cool as silk.
Through the trees she saw the distant merlons of Bradgate, and closer, the face of John; eternally comforting, eternally fair.
A wave of love filled her and unconsciously she smiled, a smile so dreaming and seductive that it was almost unearthly.

It was four years since the dreadful day at Greenwich; only a vague memory which she held best forgotten.
Now that she had her sons, John’s frequent absences were less painful, and always short.
Bradgate entwined itself deeper and deeper in her heart.
It was a surrogate John, who was often summoned to Calais, where there was a new master.
Loathed by the Queen’s party but proud in his suzerainty as Captain of Calais, the Earl of Warwick sat with the Channel under his hand.
Like some hideous spider, thought Elizabeth, and was thankful not to have witnessed Margaret being forced to accede to the appointment.
She could imagine the Queen’s face and voice, and the fancies brought unease.
John was speaking of London affairs now, and she sighed, for the green day was fair, the water deep.

‘This is the nub of the matter,’ he said.
‘The merchants and traders.
The common folk are more powerful than a score of royal or rebel forces.
The people want peace at any price.
London is full of gossip and the Queen is the butt of most shameful ballads.
Even John Hardyng – you remember him, he writes good verse – felt moved to express himself against the evils of the day.’
He fumbled in his pouch for a scrap of paper.
‘A copy was pinned to the door of St.
Mary Woolchurch.
None can punish Hardyng, for it’s only the truth.’

Elizabeth took the slip and read.

In every shire with jacks and sallets clean,

Misrule doth rise and maketh neighbours war;

The weaker goes beneath, as oft is seen;

The mightiest his quarrel will prefer;

The poor man’s cause is put on back full far,

Which, if both peace and law were well conserved,

Might be amend, and thanks of God deserved.

She said silently: I know naught of poor men.
My neighbours don’t war against me.
Yes, I pity the weak but am glad I am not as they are.
My needs are met; do not speak of things I do not understand.
She handed the
billet
back to John without a word.

‘The people hate Margaret openly now,’ said John softly.
‘They will never forgive her for what Piers de Brezé did at her command, two years ago.’

The Duchess of Bedford had brought that particular piece of news, smiling sardonically.
The Queen is like a raging devil since Beaufort was murdered, she said.
Now John said the same.

‘You would not recognize Margaret; she has become a fiend.
That is why she allowed Piers to land and burn Sandwich to the ground.
A country invading itself!
That pretty little port!
I swear, Isabella, the world goes mad.’

A cloud crossed his face.
He had been there, in the aftermath.
He had seen children tossed into the flame, heard the screaming.
The cobbles had been awash with firelit blood.

‘They raped the women; they impaled infants on pikes.
I remember Sandwich well.’

Elizabeth saw Renée’s face grow sickly with dread.
Tom, too was listening.
‘Hé, Master Big-Ears!’
she cried.
But still John talked.

‘The citizens of London are hot for York.
They have heard Margaret’s oath: that she will pillage and burn and ravish to secure the supremacy for her son.
King Henry is like a dead man but the people are still loyal to him.
It is the Queen they loathe.
They offer up prayers that York will deliver England from the French she-wolf.
They cry the Prince Edward bastard, saying that the Queen lay with James of Wiltshire, or Beaufort of Somerset.
In York’s Parliament, the boy was disinherited.’

Elizabeth looked at the water’s depths, where dank reeds writhed.
She felt the cool lapping turn icy against her fingers and withdrew them.

For the first time she felt and understood the tingling infective madness of Margaret’s hatred.
John said: ‘They will not harm the King.
York only wishes to be named heir when Henry dies.
Warwick …’

‘Warwick!’
Again, that name, clouding her summer’s day..

‘He has vast power.
His exploits in the Channel are famed abroad.
The merchants adore him.
He has a way – proud and yet humble – that enchants the common man.
His generosity excels.’

‘Pox take Warwick!’
cried Elizabeth, right in Renée’s shrinking ear.
Then she began to laugh, remembering that other time, not so long ago, when she had cursed Warwick accordingly.
Had Warwick had his way she would be wed to Sir Hugh Johns.
She threw the sleepy baby up and kissed him.
John did not share her laughter.

‘Sweeting, you would be safer at Westminster,’ he said gravely.
‘While I am away, Margaret’s men could descend on this place and kill you all.
She is recruiting the men of the north, and the Scots, who, by my faith, are Antichrist itself.’
Renée stifled a moan.
‘I think it best you come back with me to London.’

‘Leave Bradgate?’
cried Elizabeth.
‘You’ll have to bind and carry me.
Besides, Margaret loves me, she would do me no harm.
I will never leave Bradgate!’
And she folded her red lips on the subject, while John gazed at her, thinking how little she knew.
She had not seen Margaret, as he had, the last time; the ghastly, insane face, the eyes suffused with blood.
Margaret’s mercenaries ravaged where they would and Margaret, obsessed with hatred, had forgotten whom she loved.

‘We shall none of us be touched,’ said Elizabeth, with a heart-stopping smile.
‘We are under Divine protection.’
From the lake’s centre a fish rose suddenly, like a warning light.
An odd thought struck her, a thought of Melusine.
Was Melusine ever jealous of God?

‘The Duke of York has sons,’ said John.
‘Edmund, Edward, George, and the little, sickly one, Richard.
Edward is Earl of March, Edmund Earl of Rutland.
I saw Edward, the warlike one.
He is taller than any man I know, and but seventeen.
He says that if his father falls, he will rise like a phoenix in his stead.
The Queen has sworn to have his head on a pike.’

For the sake of Thomas’s perked ears, he forebore to describe what else the Queen had promised for Edward of March, and continued: ‘He has a head of golden hair, and piercing blue eyes.
A great broad fellow.
I wish,’ he said sadly, ‘that as King Henry is so often wont to say, these lords could love one another.
For when I saw Ned of March … enemy though he be, I liked him.’

She said sharply: ‘Have sense, for God’s love!
York and all his sons are our sworn foes.
Usurpers and pretenders!’
John’s fair skin reddened.

‘Are you quarrelling?’
asked Thomas with interest.
John ruffled his hair.
‘Nay, child, just husband and wife.
When you have a wife, you must beat her often!’
They all laughed, and Elizabeth asked, as a diversion: ‘How does Lady Margaret Beaufort, and her noble Richmond Tudor?’

‘Didn’t you know?
She wed and buried him almost within the year.
She has a son, Henry, two years old.
Poor Edmund never saw the child.’

‘Holy Jesu!
What killed him?’

‘Margaret’s terrible learning, so they say,’ chuckled John.
‘With her philosophy and Greek, her disputations and dissertations, Edmund, unsure of his own wit, pined and died.
But Margaret will be married again soon.
To Henry Stafford.
She is proud of the babe,’ he added.
‘Now being nurtured by his uncle Jasper, in Wales.’

Secretly he thought of Margaret Beaufort with distaste.
She flaunted at court as if her descent were of the most royal.
Her bravado made no pretence at covering old history.
The Beauforts were merely descended from John of Gaunt and his mistress, Kate Swynford.
Bastards all, legitimized by Richard II with the proviso that none of the line should ever aspire to the Crown.
Yet Margaret strutted like an Empress; her small black eyes could intimidate.
There was something unnatural about her.
He yawned, suddenly weary of all these heavy thoughts.
Isabella sat opposite him in her white and saffron dress and Tom was pestering to catch some fish.
John unhitched the boat and pushed off.
They floated around the lily-pads, and the sun was bright.

Later, the sun down, the moon high, there were no wars in the whole world.
Within the great tester bed there was no room for fear or cruelty, King or Queen.
In that warmth was sanctuary, fair as a flower and sweet as honey.