The King's Grey Mare (20 page)

Catherine had wept over Jocelyne de Hardwycke.
Not a month after her exile from Bradgate, Elizabeth had received him; he had sought her out, his face troubled and tender.
The facile love-poems were a thing of the past.
He knelt, he spoke of the passion that had kept him single for years, recalling episodes: her flight from the Hall under King Henry’s displeasure (Jocelyne had wept for her); her beauty at the Christmas disguising.
He was not John, but these were John’s memories too, brought like a dead bird by a hound.
John’s bones fed the red earth of England, and Elizabeth, robbed of sense or will, gave Jocelyne her hand.
She said: ‘I am a dead woman; to which he replied: ‘Let me bring you back to life!’

His respectful kiss brought no intoxication.
She reminded him that John had not been dead six months.
These words brought fresh tears from her, more kisses from him.
He begged her to accept his meagre estate, for Hardwycke had suffered too, as a Lancastrian holding.
His arms were comforting, and he was kind.
Broken, uncaring, she agreed, and sought the Duchess to inform her.
It was a moment not to be forgotten.
‘We shall not wed until next year,’ she finished.
‘I will keep John’s Month Mind properly, as his widow.
Jocelyne will wait.’

The Duchess was writing at her lectern.
Slowly she laid down her quill.
Even with her face backed by window-light, the white fury stabbed clear, a warning.
Confused, Elizabeth thought: Jocelyne should have approached my mother first.
His ardour led him into forgetfulness …

‘There’s no love between us,’ she stammered.
‘But I have the little knaves to look to, and .
.

The Duchess advanced across the room, a terrible look on her face.
Holy Jesu!
thought Elizabeth.
Is Jocelyne a felon?
Has he some great crime?
His policies are right; he is of Lancaster … Then the Duchess struck.
Her hand cracked on Elizabeth’s cheekbone, making her teeth rattle and her head sing like a hive.
Reeling, she tried to speak.

‘Madame…’

‘Madame me not,’ said the Duchess.
‘What, madam, have you done this day?’

They stared at each other stonily.

‘The truth,’ whispered the Duchess.
‘Has any priest witnessed your vows?’

‘Nay,’ said Elizabeth, trembling hard.
‘It was a privy matter, decided between Jocelyne and me, on the moment.’

Uncomprehending, she heard the great hiss of expelled breath, saw the colour return to Jacquetta’s face.
She knelt, and waited.

‘He must be forbidden our manor,’ said the Duchess.
Lost, Elizabeth bowed her head.
Presently she felt her shoulder lightly touched and looked up.
The Duchess held something under her eyes.
It was a wax manikin, and about its head was twined a fuzzy comb of black hair.
At its waist was a tiny band of iron, meshed so tightly with the wax that the figure was almost cut in two.

‘To sap his strength,’ said the Duchess, very low.
‘My enemy and yours, child.
Soon or late, he will fall.
By Mithras, he will perish and die.’

That day was the first she had sworn on the ancient heathen god, in Elizabeth’s hearing.
She held the figure closer to her daughter’s face.

‘My lord of Warwick!’
she said and hissed, pointing.
Fear, and joy worse than any fear, filled Elizabeth.

‘Do not marry Hardwycke.
Do as I say,’ said the Duchess.
So the campaign began.
Catherine wept; she loved Jocelyne, and thought her sister cruel.

Elizabeth walked on, bending beneath the branches hung with succulent leaf, going deeper into the forest.
She felt impelled by a force beyond thought, tied by an invisible thread to her mother’s solar, and her steps were guided by that thread’s true pull and play.
In the dim greenness of Whittlebury’s heart, she was conscious of the little cold hands in hers, and the silence, for the birds had stopped singing.
All but one, who screamed a constant, urgent warning.
There was a vast oak, big enough to house twenty men within its crusted trunk.
The unseen thread had loosed its pull.
She halted beneath the tree, raising her eyes at last to the trellised blue above.
Tom sat down in the elbow of a cavernous root and began to whittle with his knife.
Soon she heard the thick hollow moan of the hunting horn.
Commanded, she raised her hands to the dusty black wimple and loosed it from her hair.

Less than half a league away the King rode through the forest like a meteor.
His legs splashed, his doublet rent, he was gloriously happy.
He had brought three horses to exhaustion.
He had lost his velvet cap long ago and his bright hair blew tangled as he rode.
Desmond galloped his mount beside the King’s.
Often the two men glanced back and laughed to see the courtiers unhorsed, belabouring baulking horses or caught in thickets and cursing.
The huntsman was blowing like one possessed, the sweet language of the chase; the notes long and short:
Trout trout, tro ro rot!
Hastings rode hard behind the King; he waved his whip and smiled.
‘There!
There!’
yelled Edward, pointing at a distant backlash of green branches.
Illoeques, illoeques!
replied the huntsman, signalling the sighting.
Twenty couples of sleek hounds poured forward, a mottled river.
Edward’s spur struck blood as, with Desmond, he plunged after the pack, bending just in time to avoid an overhanging branch.
He jerked his mount’s head around a bend; there, down a green avenue, bowshot-straight, the quarry, a great bronze stag, fled surgingly.
The pack sang and bayed.
Edward cried out, joining with the huntsman’s scream:
sa, cy, cy, avaunt, sohow!
He had been disappointed to find no boar, but, by the Rood!
this was better.
From the moment that the limer had tracked down this magnificent beast, and the blood-mad hounds had been uncoupled to run unerringly, every care had dropped from him.
He had forgotten Warwick; as for the secret that sometimes plagued him like a hairshirt – it was dead and buried.
He smote his horse and rode knee to knee with Desmond.
As if he were racing at Smithfield Horse Fair (an unrealized dream).
There was so much that kingship forbade.

The stag was cunning, like a lovesome woman.
As all women should, it evaded capture until the very last, trying every manoeuvre until that inevitable moment … but this outshone the pursuit of women.
Ahead of the hounds singing their lustful joy, the stag twisted and doubled, plunged through a fat thicket and reappeared further up the glade, its antlers festooned with foliage like a knight’s jousting helm.
The hounds had lost a little ground.
They burst from the bushes, muzzles scratched bloody and surged forward, all bravery, while the kingly beast, for which Edward now felt a passionate love, soared boundingly on.
Could the pack be tiring?
God’s Blessed Lady!
he muttered.
The stag was fleet, the distance between it and pursuit growing steadily.
Edward frowned, gripping his horse between strong thighs: He had never wanted a kill so much in his life.
Close behind him rode bowmen, weapons slung and jouncing.
A pity to deny the dogs but that hateful gap was lengthening, the gold-bronze, sweated haunches of the quarry lunging powerfully, and the path growing more tortuous.
He half-turned in the saddle to yell a command.
Several goose-quill arrows thrummed past his ear, falling wide.
One or two overshot the running beast; it swerved wildly before racing on.

‘Blood!’
cried Edward.
‘Give me a bow!’

He tore on the reins so that his horse reared and screamed.
Behind him, the whole company clashed to a disorderly halt.
One of Hastings’s henchmen soared over his mount’s head into a thornbush and Desmond laughed for joy, but the King’s mouth was grim with anguish.
He seized the proffered bow, fitted a barb and, standing in his stirrups, discharged one, two, three shots, snatching arrows and loosing them with powerful fluid movements.
The first shot bounded off the quarry’s antlers, the second missed completely.
Then, in the third dart’s swift trajectory, he saw the stag waver and plunge.
His cry of triumph mingled with arrogant music of the horn, the frenzy of the hounds.

Wounded in the shoulder, the stag still ran under the impetus of its own leaping fear.
It would feel no pain yet, only the lust to flee – like a virtuous woman under the first kiss!
He called to the half exhausted hounds:
‘How amy, swef, amy, sa, sa, sa!’
Time to check them a little, or they would be too run down to effect the consummation.

Churning up bog-mire, tearing through branches, the King’s hunt rode.
The deep wound was taking its toll of the quarry; it slowed and stumbled now and then.
The pack, renewed by joy, was gaining.
The hunt thundered across a glade, struggled through a streamlet and up a steep bank.
John Neville’s mount slid on to its side and brought down four other horses.
Terrified birds left their perches with a roar of wings.
Overall the horn cried:
Trout, trout, tro, ro, rot!
Covered in mud, thorns in his hair, King Edward chased the stricken animal into a grove of trees.
Under his breath he called it endearments.
Then the hounds had it by the heels.

It was down, antlers rearing like the mast of a broken ship in a sea of writhing, brindled life.
Desmond leaped down to steady the King’s horse as, nearly falling from excitement and stiffness of limb, he dismounted.
The huntsman came forward with the special weapons of chivalry, each knife honed to separate sharpness, each blade designed for the ritual kill and dismembering.
Solemnly Edward took the slaying knife.
When the dogs had been whipped from their prey he bent and looked into the brown, fear-glazed eyes.
So like a woman’s … he saw his own face, mudstreaked and haloed by the sun, reflected there.
Under his hand the great antlers heaved, almost throwing him off balance.
He set the knife to the sweating, satiny throat.

Behind him came the murmurs of approval.
A good, kingly kill, by a man skilled in venery with strength to sever proud muscle and sinew.
A rich jet of blood soared and splashed the King’s face, to make patterns with the crusted mud.
He straightened his back and sighed.
‘A noble beast.’
He handed the killing-blade back to the huntsman, feeling drained and holy.
He turned to count his followers, to speak to Desmond, to drink in the surrounding greenness and worship the blue day.
About a dozen strides away he saw the woman beneath the oak.
So still, so small and nunly in her black gown.
But the hair that cloaked her to her knees made nonsense of nunliness.
Two little boys sat at her feet; he scarcely saw them.
He looked at that hair, that face, lit by silver sunlight.
And then he knew why he had come to Grafton.

Thomas Fitzgerald Desmond saw her too, and his lips pursed in a little soundless tune, a tribute, courtly and almost mechanical, to her beauty.
She was so still; that stillness sent an unexplained shudder over his body.
He felt the sweat drying cold upon his neck and face.
He knew his King, however, as well as any man can know another.
So at his whispered command the other courtiers pulled their horses round and drew off from Edward.
They faded, converging about the huntsman and the cadaver of the stag, they became part of the backcloth of green trees.
Their outlines were misty, their voices muted.
With steps still unsteady from the ride Edward walked towards the great oak, from whose heart came the liquid piping of one uneasy bird.
The King felt himself trembling, and deeply aroused, ridiculously ashamed of this arousal, and subsequently confused.
He knew an odd desire to kneel before Elizabeth, which was madness.
All these warring emotions made his voice unusually harsh.

‘I am Edward Plantagenet.’

There was no need for this; she herself already knelt, pressing the little boys down on either side of her.
At this he felt an irrational regret.
Looking down upon the crown of her head, which was clothed by finest shining textures impossible for anything but divinity to weave, he said more softly: ‘Rise, lady.
The ground is damp under trees.’