The King's Grey Mare (39 page)

‘My doctors despaired, and my women left me … or they died,’ said Margaret vaguely.
‘They were afraid … of my great beauty!’
Her laughter began again.
‘My beauty and my greatness!
Behold my greatness!’
She coughed, the yellow sinews in her throat straining like cords.
Elizabeth felt the burn of tears at the back of her eyes.
A false, far image of the lost Marguerite, darting and skimming like a swan in the dance … the Marguerite of jewels and fire and love.
Standing alone in the unused shining armour, braver and more soldierly than many of her courtiers.
She said, choking:

‘Ah, Madame, that you should have come to this!’

There was something more than pity to make her weep.
A prescience of certain doom.
As if she had glimpsed, unwittingly, the forecast of a time to come.
As soon as this thought arose she pushed it savagely away, construing it as a malaise born of Margaret’s dreadful presence.

‘I am dying,’ said Margaret.
‘Betrayed.
They all turned upon me – slaughtered my flower in the field, murdered my poor, wandering husband.
Did you know?
Not a hall’s length from here, they snuffed the life from that kingly monk … 
Non!
Isabella, you would not know of this.’

Elizabeth was silent.
It was better so; confessions did only harm, and Margaret had shown violence to the guard.
She therefore let Margaret talk on, while tears collected in a strange pattern upon the misshapen face.
Yet she looked at the hands that had once held her own tenderly while their owner wished her well in marriage; and she murmured: ‘They have used you ill, Madame.’

‘One especially,’ said the Frenchwoman.
‘One who promised me the world for my son.
Curse Warwick!’
Sadly she said: ‘Was it my fault?
Was it my vanity?
Vanité des vanités, toute la vanité!’

Which was worse, Elizabeth wondered, the weeping or the laughter?
Worst of all was to see Margaret beginning to dance, a few trembling, parodying steps.
See, Isabella, I am still fair!
She came close, placing her arm about Elizabeth, who shrank in dread.
She disengaged herself.

‘I am dying,’ Margaret said again.
‘And I am judged.
Remember the old rhyme,
ma belle
?
That you read so prettily that day?

‘Benedicite, what dreamed I this night?

Methought the world was turned up so down,

The sea had covered both tower and town …’

I have forgotten it … ah, yes:

I heard the sound

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

Thy lady hath forgotten to be kind!’

Perchance I was unkind.
Now is my reckoning.
So be kind, Isabella.
Always …’

The arm clung again.
Elizabeth averted her face.
The canker could be carried on a breath.
Margaret was singing in a ghost’s voice, moving her feet in that travesty of a dancestep.

‘We were so gay, in France, when I was a little maid.
Oh, Jesu, Isabella, help me!’

‘How, Madame?’

She said: ‘I do not wish to die here in the Tower.
I must go home to France.’

Shivering, Elizabeth said: ‘I will speak to Edward.’

‘Yea, go to the Yorkist butcher!’
said Margaret bitterly.
‘He who slew
le pauvre Henri
.
You see, Isabella, they did not need to tell me.
I knew the day and moment of the deed.
I heard Melusine cry on the battlements, and I knew.’

Elizabeth’s heart began to beat in slow, thick strokes.
The sunken eyes searched her face.

‘An old legend, you may not know of it,’ said the Frenchwoman listlessly.
‘But whenever sorrow strikes a royal house – Melusine wails and weeps nightlong.
You’ll
not have heard her, for the world is yours.
Queen!’
She spat the word.

Yes, Queen, thought Elizabeth, chilled to the bone.
Queens can be brought down
.
She looked again at Margaret, at the horrifying translation of her beauty.
And they can be brought to this!
She glanced quickly towards the locked door.
Outside lay freedom, jewels, a soothing posset, music to forget by.
No more of this painful, insufferable presence.

‘Madame, I leave you now.’
But Margaret went with her to the door, hanging desperately on her arm.
With difficulty Elizabeth shook her off.

‘Give me your word, ‘Isabella.
I would, I must, die in France.’
She began to cough, rasping, weeping.
‘If ever you loved me, child; this one favour.
Bid the King release me from this place!’

Elizabeth reached the door and hammered upon it.

‘Promise!’
It was like the high wild cry of a bird.

She looked once more.
Frail and ghastly, a living doom, Margaret stood there; also betrayed by Warwick, also a scion of Melusine, and also a Queen.
A terrifying mirror image, a living, dying warning.
She felt the chamber walls closing about her.
For here, unmistakably, was destiny seeking to be placated.
She retraced her steps, took Margaret in her arms.
She pressed her face against the rotting, tear-wet cheek.

‘I promise,
ma reine
,’ she said.
‘I promise.’

Edward called for wine.
More than half-drunk already, he sought in the cup’s red heart a panacea for guilt.
An end to trouble.
He swirled the liquor round, turning the priceless goblet so that firefly prisms streaked from the silver.
Pretty … He swallowed wine and motioned blindly for replenishment.
He felt the cup’s coldness against his mouth; the taste brought Clarence back.
He, Edward, drank wine, and wine had drunk Clarence.

The King sat among his court, detached from all by a thin red veil.
The faces about his dais were distant and drifted hazily.
Their talk, geared to the sovereign’s mood, was discreet and soft.
He heard their voices but their words were meaningless, for they were overlaid by the hammering echoes of earlier speech.
Anthony Woodville’s voice, full of rich certainty, regret.

‘My heart’s blood not to tell you this, Sire.
But Clarence is crazed with spleen.
He has this day usurped the royal prerogative; accused and, hanged a woman said to have murdered his infant son.
On your orders, my liege!’

It must be true, Edward thought.
Trusted Anthony had come riding from Ludlow to tell him this.
So Edward had seized and hanged two of Clarence’s men in retribution.
It had not been enough, however.

‘Your Grace!
Today Clarence burst into Council in your absence and incited the lords to rebellion.
He’s high in madness.
“Twas all they could do to prevent him crowning himself King there and then …’

His own rage had grown and burgeoned, while he stared into Anthony’s clear eyes.
Anthony’s hand sought his, to steady him for the next phrase.
Spoken without a tremor, for Anthony was courageous where the truth was concerned.

‘He declared that your Grace is no son of York, but the spawn of a French archer!
and that England is ruled by bastards.’
The lines on his smooth face deepened in pain as he continued: ‘And that your Grace holds consort with witches.’

He had needed that steadying hand, feeling the blood leaping and throbbing in his head, hearing his own roar: ‘Enough!’
then falling mightily upon a couch.
While Anthony bowed devoutly so that his face was hidden.
Much later, he heard his own voice saying: ‘She was right.
Bessy was right, and I would not listen to her.’
And fear for the future had stared him in the face, fear that Clarence’s wild accusations cloaked a deadlier weapon.
Clarence had kept close with their mother.
How much had he wheedled from that ageing saint?
How much would conscience let her hide?
She who was privy to the knowledge of Eleanor Butler …

Though Eleanor was now dead, she was his first and lawful wife.
No Queen’s Gold for Eleanor, but Bessy was no more than the King’s concubine.
The game was too dangerous.
So, enough.
Now he gripped the cup so that his fingers blenched.
Clarence had chosen his own death, and a bizarre, unholy death it was.
‘To drown in wine, my brother!’
The plump bitter face smiling.
‘Can your Grace afford it?’

Nauseous, Edward wondered: had he drunk deep before he died?
What was it like to feel such bloodlike redness filling the lungs?
How much could a man swallow and remain afloat?
And, Jesu preserve us all!
What had the everthirsty Tower gaolers done – after they took bloated Clarence from the vat?
To cast out horror, he began the mental calculation of the cost of a tun of malmsey given to every child named Edward in the realm … With the fifty thousand crowns from Louis of France, a pittance.
Louis had paid for peace.
No battle was joined, although Edward had taken to Picquigny a hundred thousand men at arms.
Everything had ended in love and gladness, with Louis’s veined and spotted paw clasping the King’s upon a fragment of True Cross.
All had rejoiced; save Gloucester.
The wine-cup was again empty, and here was Gloucester’s remembered voice, to torment him.

‘For the love of God, Edward, spare our brother of Clarence!’

‘Edward, our honour is sacrificed for this shameful truce.
Louis will betray us, mark me …’

‘Ned, my brother, let Clarence live!’

Now it was all over.
Clarence dead; Louis paid off.
Bess, the Princess Elizabeth of York, betrothed to the Dauphin of France as part of the bargain.
And Margaret of Anjou sent home to France.
He had been amazed by the fervour of Bessy’s plea for her release, and had acquiesced, for it was little to him where the dying woman ended her days.
Now a chance, perhaps, for peace.
He had soon silenced the army who had been cheated of their French battle.
A few hangings, beheadings, and they came straight to heel.
He was in his thirty-sixth year; middle-aged; time to settle down with a happy land under his gauntlet, his sons growing strong, his daughters beautiful.
His Queen content and his mistresses willing.
He lifted his heavy head and surveyed the courtiers.
They shimmered behind the blood-coloured veil.
Thomas and Richard Grey, laughing quietly together.
Anthony, unrolling a gay Latin verse for the perusal of the Queen.
Hastings, gazing in undisguised longing towards Jane Shore.
Jane herself sat at the King’s feet, a foreshortened image of golden coiffed hair and two apple-round breasts.
He touched her shoulder.
She seemed very far away.

‘Sing,’ he commanded.

High and shrill like an untaught boy, she sang rudely about a lecherous clerk.
He grew quickly bored with the ditty.
Again the spectre of Clarence arose, bobbing to the surface of the vat like a great wine-bag, and the gaolers crowding with their pannikins held ready … Gloucester had wept when he learned that his plea for leniency had been in vain.
Gloucester seldom wept; he was a good soldier.
He had gone home to the North, to his Anne, where he would expunge his sorrow in fighting the Scots.

Edward called for yet more wine.
Death drank with him, and the knowledge that Richard of Gloucester had been right – both about the French truce (for Louis could never be trusted) – and about Clarence, whom a spell in the Tower might have tamed.
But Gloucester knew nothing of the dangers.
He stretched his hand down to dabble between Jane’s breasts.

‘Eleanor,’ he said softly, drunkenly.
‘Eleanor’ And the Queen was suddenly at his side, pale, patting Jane’s head as she might caress a dog, talking swiftly over the high bawling song.

‘My lord, how you do tangle up fair ladies’ names!
I have a boon to beg, a small one.
The Countess of Richmond begs leave to present her son.
Henry Tudor.’

In his vision the silvery face swung and dipped.
Fighting the dizziness, he said: ‘Ha!
Tudor cub?
Fruit of Lancaster …’ and saw the narrow poised face of Margaret Beaufort, looking shocked.
From out of a long tunnel her even voice said: ‘Your Grace, my family are all loyal!’
Some remnant of sense spoke in his mind, ridiculing the Countess, but the words were too difficult, and he nodded, saying: ‘Let him come.’