The King's Grey Mare (11 page)

For the Queen was with child.
Proclamation had been made to the assembled court.
Henry had occupied the dais solitary, twitching his gown between thin dusty fingers, looking about him as for an ambush.
When the Esquire of the Body, Richard Tunstal, came down the Hall, parchment in hand, the King had started up as if at foulest tidings.
As Tunstal began to read, the glad cries from the court drowned any response from Henry, who quietly left the Hall.
He returned to make it known that the said Tunstal should receive an annuity of forty marks from the duchy of Lancaster.

‘Because,’ said the King like a schoolboy, ‘he it was that made unto us the first comfortable relation and notice that our most dearly beloved wife … was
enceinte
.’
Here he paused and blinked at some parchment notes he held.
‘Aye, to our most singular consolation, and to all true liege people’s great joy and comfort.’
So saying, he got up, sat down, looked worriedly about him, and gave a great sigh.

The Palace hummed with triumph.
The news was dispatched to York, to Canterbury, to Ireland and to Calais; and more especially to Warwick Castle and to Fotheringhay.
Night and day prayers were offered that the Queen should, in November next coming, bear a son.
Margaret took the ladies Ross and Scales to her chamber at nights, and the guard was reinstated, to cherish her doubly precious person.
Thus was the most secret campaign concluded, and Elizabeth, Dame Grey, was free to go.

Richly clothed against the spring breezes, they rode together through sun, and showers up the long furrow of Watling Street.
Although John had furnished a litter for his bride she scorned it, and rode with him, saying they should not be parted so soon.
A strand of her hair tickled his face as he leaned to kiss her.
They laughed and sang, riding hard towards Bradgate, and leaving the few pages and women who escorted them far behind on the road.
The wind blew back their song and mingled it with that of the calling birds, until it was like the high pagan gaiety of spirits.
John raised his voice:

‘Who shall have my fair lady?

Who shall have my fair lady?

‘Who but I, who but I, who but I?

Under the leaves green!’

And Elizabeth answered with shrill note:

‘The fairest man

That best love can,

Dandirly, dandirly, dandirly, dan,

Under the leaves green!’

Each passing moment was a target for laughter.
John recalled one night in Calais, when the others had fed him so much wine that he had danced on the table and thought that he could fly.

‘It’s love, not wine, that gives us wings!’
he cried.
‘Watch me, my love!’

He put his restive horse at a quickset hedge.
Elizabeth reined in, sat watching.
The horse’s glossy quarters bunched in power.
John’s hands were strong and light; fluidly anchored on the reins.
His chestnut head bobbed against a tapestry of green leaves.
He wore a red cloak; it tossed about him as horse and rider reared for the leap, rising until it seemed they would merge with the sun.
They were silhouetted in blinding brightness, and John’s mantle glowed like fire.
Fire?
No, blood!
He was clothed in blood.
Elizabeth flung up her hands over her eyes, suddenly, senselessly demented.
Thus blinded, she sat like stone.
A timid touch stirred her sleeve.
Renée, the little tiring-maid who had been given to her by the Queen, spoke softly:

‘What ails my sweet lady?’

She opened her eyes.
John was trotting back down the road, patting his horse’s foamy neck.
His cloak was rich red velvet, her own wedding gift, and fell in orderly folds about him to his stirrups.
That was no vision, she told herself.
I am fatigued after the ceremony.
And I do not have visions.
To Renée she said: ‘Tis naught; go ride with the others.’
None the less, she kept John closely within her sight thereafter.
When she caught his hand and kissed it passionately, he looked at her with a little wonder and much love; he lifted her from her horse to his, singing anew:

‘The fairest man, Dandirly, dandirly, dandirly dan!’

‘How much further to Bradgate?’
she asked.

Two days’ journey, he said, if the roads were good.
Incredulously he saw her pleading face.
‘Sweet, would you have us ride through the night?’
He kissed her, saying: ‘Nay, we must lodge tonight at some holy house.’

‘Must we?
Can we not ride on?
It would be one night less without Bradgate.’

Something in the name called to her.
She craved Bradgate, needed it.
In its image there was strength.
A rock, a haven redolent of John’s heritage and the timelessness of their future together.
She begged for speed as the day grew old along the worn greenness of Watling Street.
She was not weary, would never be weary.
Finally John gestured towards the flagging entourage behind.
‘Look at your women and my pages, sweet cruel wife!
We may be strong and adventurous, but they would fall on the road.
And there’s our resting-place ahead.’

The tented roof and towers of an abbey glinted in the sun’s last rays.
Elizabeth pouted, feigned displeasure.
When they were admitted by a porter she had a little, unlooked-for vengeance.
The Abbot showed her to the women’s guesthouse and John the men’s quarters.
Useless were his protestations – ‘Father, we were only married today!’

The Abbot looked hard at him.
‘Fitting, then, my son, that you should spend the night in prayer.
I too will ask a blessing on your union.
We are a poor house …’ he said mechanically.
John beckoned for gold from his esquire.
He turned back to Elizabeth with such a comical expression of dismay that she choked on laughter.
She whispered, while the Abbot stood severely by, swinging his keys: ‘It’s best, love.
I
would not begin our honeymonth within a cloister.
My heart–’ still jesting, happy and sad – ‘what’s one night, more or less?’

Her first sight of Bradgate was like a blow to the heart.
They came upon it suddenly, riding down a path through densely wooded parkland.
A tiny stream accompanied their progress and the boles of elms shone on either side.
Banks of primrose and violet grew at the foot of ancient oaks; through a clearing there was a glimpse of bluebells like a still sheet of azure water.
Wild orchids grew in profusion; rabbits fled nimbly for cover.
Above the treetops arched in a lacy green cavern, filled with the song of throstle and blackbird and the mockery of the cuckoo.
Crushing flowers, the little company galloped down the path and, amid a flurry of startled wings, around a bend where Bradgate lay in welcome.

Its lattices gleamed like noonday stars, its merlons seemed, to quiver.
The standard of Ferrers Groby sprang and billowed from the tower.
The fortified manor stood with its feet in flowers, clothed in rich ivy among a splendour of green lawns.
Spreading westward was a lake that made the pool at Grafton Regis a murky puddle by comparison; a lake crowned with a distant drift of swans and fringed by bright willows.
A little waterfall spilled through an aperture in the low wall girdling the manor.
Elizabeth looked again at the lake; a breeze kissed the water and silvered it to fire.
There were shallow steps leading down to the waters of her heart’s desire.
Tears filled her eyes.

‘Do you not like it?’
said John softly.

Words could only dispel the depth of her feeling.
John, the lake, and love were one.
She turned and kissed him and clung, saying: ‘Aye, my heart.
I like it well.’

She dressed with care for the evening.
The scarlet sarcenet was revived, with no fear of gloomy Henry’s curses.
She bade Renée brush her hair and leave it loose to befit the maidenhood soon to be willingly relinquished.
Shy little Renée, made bold by her mistress’s gaiety, chattered, exclaiming: ‘Like a queen, madam, like a queen!’
Incongruously the face of the dirty gypsy at Eltham returned to her, and she smiled.
A royal prince, fair lady, shalt thou wed!
She had proved the woman a charlatan, and was glad of it.
She turned to embrace Renée briefly, crying: ‘Yes!
I am a queen!
Queen of Bradgate!
My king is John!’

‘You are my prince,’ she said later to John.
They sat at their own high table, surrounded by friends, eating spiced heron.
Elizabeth had been drinking deep of the deceptively flowery Rhenish.
The well-wishers were admiring her, envying John.

He said, a little gloomily: ‘Sweet, it’s as well I am your prince.
For myself, I am not even knight as yet.
I pray I may be sent on campaign, where I may be dubbed … Calais again, though ’tis quieter there than for many months …

She said aghast: ‘Already you talk of leaving me!’

The company roared.
John smiled adoringly, foolish.
‘Not yet, my lady, and not tonight, certes.’
He, the obliging host, began to sing.

‘Sweet mistress mine, ye shall have no wrong,

But as yet grant me, sith we be met,

That fair flower that ye have kept so long,

I call it mine own as my very debt …’

Under the applause, the laughter, he looked at Elizabeth and felt his manhood falter in awe.
Sitting there in the candlelight with her pure pale face and shining hair, she seemed unfleshly and remote.
He motioned for more wine, feeling a kind of anger at the sight of this spirituality; it made his own desire seem crude and unchivalrous.

His steps were a little unsteady as he followed her up the flaring shadowed spiral to their chamber.
He was weary from the journey, from wine and joy.
The company bade them a merry good night, before themselves retiring to envious beds.
The proud, fey delicacy of Elizabeth was apparent to them all; thus they refrained from all but the mildest of marriage jests, called from the stair-foot.
Alone with Renée, she was unrobed of the scarlet dress and attired in a loose white
robe de chambre
.
In the adjoining room John cursed under the ministrations of Giles, his page, a shortsighted youth who fumbled with knotted laces and mislaid his master’s bedgear.

Then John sought Elizabeth and found her chamber empty save for Renée, sparkling nervously, arms full of discarded garments.
He knew a swift irrational dismay, and thought: I imagined it all; the wedding was a dream, the ride here, her face against mine at the table.
There is no Isabella; she was but my own desire made flesh.
Renée saw his sadness and said gently: ‘Sir, my lady has gone to the chapel to pray.’
He smiled again, and gave her a gold half angel.
She merged with shadows and left him alone.

He walked to the window-embrasure and looked out.
A full white moon shed its weird light on the lawns, the sleeping flowerheads, and turned the lake into crystal.
He stood breathing in the spring light, unaware that the scene on which he looked was the same which had caused Elizabeth, moments earlier, to quit the chamber murmuring of prayer.
He wondered whether he should join her in the chapel, to give thanks for this, the greatest of his life’s blessings, yet he was loath to leave the whiteness, the stillness.
Then, at the edge of the lake, something moved.
He craned forward with a stifled exclamation at sight of it.
It was small and shimmered; it caught the moonlight and blazed in it like a slim white flame.
He began to tremble.
Others of his acquaintance had seen spirits, wraiths that played in the moon’s full and could take a man’s wits away for ever.
He had scoffed at these tales.
And yet, this thing was real, fixed in his sight.
It walked on air; it stepped among the reeds, dipped until it was one with the water and indistinguishable from the silvery ripples.
He felt real fear, for himself, and for Isabella.
Before she returned from the chapel, he must drive away whatever it was that sported in Bradgate’s lake.

He cast a fur robe about him and went swiftly downstairs.
Moving quietly through the sleeping manor, he came upon the two great wolfhounds which he kept for game.
Almost his hand went to their chains.
These beasts would tear the throat from any enemy.
Then he thought; should this enemy be of Hell, the creatures would die of terror.
So he went steadfastly and alone into the garden scented by gillyflowers, and strode down towards the little watergate where the cataract bubbled and sang.