The King's Grey Mare (55 page)

She nodded, strained close, as if to expunge the lost months and the turmoils which might keep them apart.

‘I know, my love.
But surely – the Earl of Lincoln is his heir … he proclaimed it.’

‘I did not mean his royal heir,’ he said, laughing.
‘A bastard cannot claim the throne.
I meant only his heir in love and duty.’
His face darkened.
‘When his little son died, he was nearly demented …’

‘Hush!’
she kissed the taut mouth.
‘It’s over.
Have you spoken to him about our betrothal?’

‘What chance?’
he said dourly.
‘He’s full of trouble and policy.
What do you know of this Tudor?
This whelp who threatens invasion?’

Policy, always policy, when all she needed was to hold him, her love, her lord, during this brief season.
As if he had read her thought, he said: ‘I love you, lady.
There shall be none other, Grace, while I live.
And we have no tokens to exchange, have plighted no vows.
Can we find a priest in this woodland, I wonder?
I would be yours, your true knight and maker, in heart and thought, always.’

‘No priest,’ she said, laughing gently.
‘Is not our word enough?’

The glassy lake, starred by lily-leaves and drifting birds, dreamed on in the chill sunlight.
‘Will you take me?’
he said.
‘With only the swans and flowers for witness?
This is a good place.
How many lovers I wonder, have here plighted their troth?’

‘How many Graces?’

‘And how many Johns?
They lived, loved, and now …’ He had been merry; now the laughter left him.
She was afraid, and moved closer into his arms, feeling his slenderness and strength, and the quick hard beat of his living heart.

‘Come,’ he said.
They walked together to the water’s edge and knelt there.
Solemnly he snapped off a tall yellow flower and placed it between her folded hands.
Then he clasped his own hands together, saying in a loud voice:

‘I, John Plantagenet of Gloucester, Captain of Calais, being neither husband nor leman to any, do pledge heart and lands to my dearly beloved Grace Plantagenet, in this place, as God witness my deed.
I do so vow my sole regard and affection to her, Grace, this day.
I forsake and renounce all other.
And should I swerve from her, may God strike me and damn me to eternity.’

At these terrible words she turned sharply and looked at him.
His head was bowed, his dark brows drawn together in a grim line.

‘Answer!’
he said.

She opened her mouth; nothing emerged.
Slowly he raised his head.

‘Plight me your troth,’ he said, soft and savage.

‘I cannot!’
she whispered.

His colour ebbed.
‘So,’ he said flatly.
‘You don’t love me.
But you could have spared me this!’

‘I love you!’
she cried wildly.
Desperately she said: ‘It is this place.
Such vows are wrong, given in a … a profane place.’
She gazed across the lake, as if imploring the water’s judgment.
‘No good could come of it.
Forgive me, love.’
She pressed her cheek against his shoulder, and slowly his body relaxed.
He stood, drawing her up from her knees, and he smiled faintly.

‘You aren’t to blame.
I was inopportune.
There have been too many tales.
Such secret pledges are used by lecherous clerks and knaves to draw poor witless maids into a bed that’s no marriage-bed … yet you could not have thought that I would use you thus!
Let it rest; I am still plighted to you.
One day we shall complete this vow in church.
With a shoal of gloomy priests muttering about the sin of cousins marrying!’

He removed a jewel from his thumb.
‘Wear my ring, at any rate,’ he said.
‘Wear it in love of me, and in remembrance, while I am kicking my heels at Sheriff Hutton and you are serving your beloved mistress!’

The ring, like a gold-rimmed bead of blood, was too large.
She would need to bind thread round it for safekeeping.

‘Yes,’ she said absently.
‘I must serve my Elizabeth.’

‘How you do love her!’
he said in a voice so rough and strange that she looked up from caressing the ring.
‘Was it from Titulus Regius that you remembered your “profane place”?’

She felt her face grow cold.
‘That is cruel.’
She walked a few paces away, and he followed her, gnawing his lips.
‘I know she did wrong,’ Grace said.
‘But …

He was by her side, turning her into his arms with a grasp as rough as his voice.
‘Damn the Titulus Regius, and all such documents that hurt you and yours.
And forgive me.
But do not ask me to love Elizabeth.
By that same profane marriage she bastardized the heir of England and set our realm upon its head.’

‘And made your father King!’
Her green eyes held his steadily.

‘Even now, she schemes,’ he answered, stung.
‘Her latest ploy is to marry Bess to my father.
She has already enquired of the papal legate about a dispensation, as they are niece and uncle.
It is a heresy, an impossiblity.’
He looked hard at her and said: ‘Can I believe you live so close to Elizabeth and did not know of this?’

She said dully: ‘Why is it an impossibility?’

‘Because,’ John answered like a lawyer, deadly serious, ‘Bess is bastard now, like you, or I.
To make her Queen my father would need to reverse the Titulus Regius.
This in turn would make Bess’s brother King, in Richard’s place.
The young Edward …’

‘Stop!’
Her hands flew to her ears.
He pulled the hands away and said relentlessly: ‘You know, Grace, in whose grip England would be then – Elizabeth’s.
The realm would rise in blood against her.
God’s life, don’t you know how the Woodvilles are loathed?
Have you not heard Elizabeth mocked and derided?’

His face was flushed.
To him the matter was all impartial, crystal logic.
To Grace each word was insupportable.
Instantly the imprint of her hand flared white on John’s cheek.
They stared at one another, he bewildered, she panting with rage.
Swallowing hard, she said, ‘Sir, good day,’ and began to walk across the pleasaunce away from him.
After a moment she realized the yellow flower still lay within her hand; with great scorn she tossed the bloom into the lake.

‘Madame,’ said John coldly, and bowed at her retreating back.
He watched her walking, so slim and small and furious in her black gown, and a smile pulled at his mouth.
A great wave of tenderness rose in him.
He stood, feet planted apart, and laughed.
He shouted: ‘Madame!’
Her steps quickened slightly.

He ran after her.
She stopped, half-turned, moved forward again.

‘Grace!’
he bellowed.
‘Sweetheart!’
Then: ‘Madame, farewell!
For, you, I drown!’

The tremendous splash jerked her about.
John was standing, waist-deep in the lake; he was plastered with mud.
A swan, disturbed on the nest, was approaching him, its white wings vibrating with rage.
It surged towards him, beak opening savagely.
He laughed even as it attacked him; it tore a great wedge out of his padded sleeve, but as he threw up his arms to ward off the furious bird, his laughter pealed across the water.
All thoughts of the quarrel left Grace.
Alarmed, she ran to the water’s edge, seizing a fallen branch as a weapon, and wetting shoes and hose among the reeds.
She snatched up her gown preparing to wade into the water.
‘John!
Take care!’
The swan hissed, saw her and beat across the lake’s surface towards the fresh enemy.
John laughed no longer.
Shouting to Grace to run, he plunged for shore.
His feet were tangled in water-weed, sucked down by mud.
He thought of her green eyes blinded by the bill, her limbs broken by the angry wings.
It was a nightmare in which he floundered while the great white shape ran at Grace like an outraged angel.
An angel with a serpent’s head and neck.

She stood still, her arms at her sides.
The wings lashed the air, the awkward feet drove the white bulk almost into her face.
The graceful neck coiled and shimmered in anger.
And John knew how much he loved Grace, more even than he had dreamed; that her destruction meant his own life’s ruin.
Kicking his feet at last from the clinging slime, he ran towards her, then checked in unbelief.
The bird and the girl stood motionless, the attack abandoned, the wings folding, the neck dipping like a sail.
Then the swan spread its wings once more, white against the black-clad figure of Grace, spread them in homage and farewell.
It turned and waddled back towards its nest.

When he reached her side he was weeping.
He gathered her into his arms, leaving smears of mud upon her hands and veil.
What he had seen seemed no longer incredible, only a token of her purity, her goodness.
What could he fear, when even the wild things revered her?

After a long time she said: ‘My hour is almost up.
I must go back to my lady.’

‘We have wasted it, quarrelling,’ he said tenderly.
‘Ah, my love, my own dear …’

‘And we have so little time …

He held her closer, walking with her, stopping to kiss her in the stone arbour, and parting from her with a sigh.
‘Tomorrow.
The same hour.’

‘My love.
My love, yes.’

She fled to Elizabeth’s chambers, hearing the rebuking clock boom from the tower and brushing dried mud from her gown.
As soon as she entered the apartment she knew that something was amiss.
Bess’s wild wailing, heard even through a closed bedroom door, told her well enough.
What now?
she thought, gripped by the old, weary anxiety, She entered to confusion, to the litter of packing cases made ready for a journey.
And to the silver lady’s face, grey again, and full of demons.

‘My lords,’ said King Richard.
‘It is beyond my comprehension that men give credence to the rumour that I intend marriage with Lady Elizabeth, bastard daughter of Dame Grey.
It is so that divers seditious and evil disposed persons enforce themselves daily to sow seed of noise and disclaundre against our person; some by setting up of bills, some by message and sending forth of lies, some by bold and presumptuous speech and communication one with another …’

He had gone down to the Hospital of St.
John in Clerkenwell and had assembled there the lords spiritual and temporal to hear him.
His words rejected Bess.
Yet underlying them was all his frustrated despair, his stubborn yet veiled denial of all the greater rumour noised against him.
He dared not say too much, yet in his impotent frenzy said too little.
By reason of this anguish, venom entered his speech and so doing, touched off fresh madness in Elizabeth.

She was like a beast, pacing, raging, ripping her bodice to shreds so that it flowed about her.
Her pale hair, now threaded with subtle white, fell about her face, as cursing, she wore out the carpet in her chamber.
She threw back her head and cried damnation to the frightened air.
She reviled the King while anger hollowed her cheeks and sapped the transient beauty of her face so that she looked old and crazed.

Bess wept in Grace’s arms.
For her, the slight was more personal.
Over and again she said: ‘He loved me!
I know he loved me!’
while Grace, horribly ill at ease, answered: ‘Sure, lady, sweet lady, he loves you still; but then he is your uncle, banned from marriage with you by blood!’
Bess wept louder, and Grace saw that she was undeceived.

Grace, in her turn, dogged Elizabeth, blown in her wake like a leaf in a hurricane.
The unquestioning part of her whispered daily: I love and serve her.
On the day of the proclamation Bess was taken away.
Her score of new gowns, her lutes and lapdogs were packed and ready when the escort arrived.
John of Gloucester was one of the officers commissioned to guard her.
In a snatched secret moment he took Grace’s hands; he smiled sadly.