The King's Grey Mare (24 page)

‘In splendour!’
His face was sharply alight.
Suddenly she was infected by his ecstasy.

‘Anthony, Anthony!’
she cried.
‘You shall be with me!
We will be supreme!
More powerful … than the King himself!’

Young and mocking and handsome, he saluted her, slung his cloak about him and quit the room.
Very soon, straining her eyes through the window she saw the little blossomy cloud of dust that heralded the King.

He came into the chapel quite alone.
In the gloom his golden head was luminous as the aureole around a painted saint.
He was plainly dressed in brown velvet.
With the Duchess, Elizabeth stood to welcome him among banked flowers and candles.
The smell of the tallow and the spring blooms rose thickly intoxicating and mingled with the cloying incense.
Above all was the scent of the peerless vervain with which she had anointed her body, drifting through the chapel like a breath of mysterious song.
He saw her and grew pale with longing.
More unaccountably, the face of the parish priest waiting at the altar whitened also; he shot one uneasy sideways glance at her and clutched at his breviary.
Beside him a boy acolyte stood motionless.

‘My love.
My fate.’
The King’s lips were cold upon her hand.

‘Edward, our day is come,’ she whispered.

‘Swear me one thing.’

She nodded, expecting to be asked for assurance of love.
The words were ready on her tongue.

‘Swear that you, as my Queen, take upon you eternal fealty to the House of York.’

For an instant her mind cried out in rejection.
She lowered her eyes.
But John was dead, love was dead.
And during the past months, perjury had become her bedfellow, and her tongue the tool of blackness.

‘I swear.
May God preserve York for ever and ever.
Amen.’

He gave a little satisfied nod, and from his golden height looked down at her adoringly.
She laid her hand on his for their binding.

The boy acolyte began to sing, a high pure cadence of almost pagan sound, like the calling birds outside the high arched window.
The music pleasured her; she glanced to thank him with a look, and saw no answering flicker in the sightless eyes.
Edward’s cold and sweating fingers fumbled with the marriage ring.
The Eucharist was raised to heaven; the Blood of Christ burned her mouth.
Like a tortured lark, the blind boy sang.

There was darkness as there might be after the end of the world.
Darkness and silence.
In the hour between dog and wolf, she lay plunged fathoms deep, oblivious of the bed, the world, the great naked body now quiescent beside her.
And she dreamed that she was dead, lapped in blissful blackness, all struggles ended.

His voice and hands roused her yet again.
The velvet darkness clung as unwillingly she rose from it, her limbs slack with fatigue, like an old woman’s.
Never had she been so weary, not even after the long travail of bearing the two little boys.
Resentment at Edward’s vigour trembled on the lip of her mind.
But she stretched her leaden arms to him, yielded her body, brittle as an autumn leaf, while somewhere far beyond her consciousness he kissed, and groaned, and possessed.
His flesh damp and burning like a marsh-fire, he muttered endearments, striving as though his one desire was to be irretrievably lost within her.
The last of the comforting darkness ebbed and she was wide awake to hear him say:

‘God, God!
I have been in a dream these past weeks, and now the dream is mine.’

She thought irrelevantly of her sisters.
Poor Anne, grumbling at the convent bells.
The girls would doubtless also be awake at this hour, summoned down draughty cloisters to mouth their sleep-sick prayers and conscious of their yawning bellies …

‘Bessy, Bessy!
My lady, my heart!’
said the King.
‘My poor sisters …’ she murmured.

‘Yea!
Lovely, lovesome wenches.
A nosegay of flowers, and my Bessy the fairest flower of all.’

‘I wish they could have shared our wedding feast.’

The supper, prepared by Jacquetta’s own hand, had been sumptuous for Grafton.
Roast sturgeon, a salmon morteux rich with cream.
A syllabub with candied violets.

‘Yes, the little doves,’ he said foolishly.
‘So they should have done.’

She smiled in the blackness.
‘My lord, you yourself said …

‘Yes, yes, all must be secret,’ he replied hastily.
‘It was fitting they should lie from home this night.’

He hugged her closer, stifling her breath.

‘Yet even a king can change his whim,’ he said.

She laid her lips against his neck.

‘Anthony came today,’ she said softly.

‘Ah, Lord Scales!’
he answered after a moment.
‘A worthy knight.’

Yes, he had truly forgotten Calais, when he and Warwick called Anthony a knave’s son.
She went on, softly stroking the muscular plateau of his chest:

‘He longs for favour.
Would that you knew him better!
He is so learned, daring in the joust.
He can create a song out of air, and weapons from wit.’

‘He shall have my favour,’ said Edward.

‘And Lionel!
He is the most devout in Christendom.
For years he has studied the priesthood.
And my young brother John!
There, sweet lord, you’d find no more worthy courtier.
Gracious, cultured.
Dick, too …’

‘Lionel, Dick, John,’ said Edward.
‘Anthony; is there more?
You have forgotten Edward, my namesake!
God’s lady, Bessy!
You’ll have me jealous of these poxy brothers!’

Although he was jesting, she thought it pertinent to kiss him again, which she did, deeply.
It was his turn to smile, unseen.
This wife of his was a strategist, and it pleased him.
The large and ambitious family of Woodville pleased him too.
They were a potential buckler against the power of Warwick.
Now the clever Nevilles should dance to the King’s air.
With this new phalanx of beholden kinfolk about him, he would have his renaissance.
Not only at court, but throughout England.
Sweep the board clear for a fresh set of chessmen, schooled to his every whim by gratitude.
His arms tightened about Elizabeth’s frail nudity.

‘Which is your favourite sister, honey sweet?’

‘Why, Catherine, though Margaret is nearest to me by birth.’

‘Have I seen Catherine?’
He mused awhile amid the girlish bodies, the shy, perplexed smiles.

‘The little, round one.’

‘Ah yes.
Well, Kate shall have for husband young Harry Buckingham.
A Plantagenet of ancient line.
Clever.
Handsome, too.
And Margaret … she could do worse than Maltravers, Arundel’s heir.
The others betrothed as I see fit.’

‘And my brothers?’

He only kissed her, laughing tormentingly, his dawning beard rasping her throat.
His mind went its separate way, gauging the worth of Anthony, Lionel, Richard, Edward, John.
Lionel he had heard of already; cunning and glib of tongue.
There might soon be a vacancy in the See of Salisbury for such a smart prelate.
Edward was a seaman, always useful.
Richard?
A secretary perhaps.
John, nineteen?
He almost laughed aloud.
Warwick’s own aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, was lately widowed and very rich.
She was eighty if a day; they would call it a marriage made in Hell.
But it would benefit Bessy and her family, and it would make Warwick writhe.
Was it too cruel?
He would see.
At the moment he felt too utterly content.
Virtue rose and fermented in him.
He could even push to the back of his mind his mother’s last letter.

‘My son, for all we hold most dear, put not your soul in jeopardy for one woman.
I beg you to think anew.
For bigamy is an odious state and mortal sin, and shall bring ruin and sorrow to our House …’

Those words, swiftly torn across with the parchment that bore them, had been like a fierce jet of flame.
She was so pure, so utterly faithful to York and its old scions.
She could not understand his longings that made nonsense of past loyalty.
She did not know the wellspring of his dream: the enigma of Jacquetta’s eyes; the silver body of Elizabeth.
He could not write in reply saying: Mother, I know not why, but I am bound to her.
From that sacred moment in the forest, all my life’s map lay spread before me, and every path, Elizabeth.

‘I was right!’
he said out loud.

He crushed her to him, heedless of the thousand love-inflicted bruises.
He said thickly: ‘And you?
What do you desire, my jewel?’

‘Bradgate,’ she answered mechanically.

He burst out laughing.
‘Bradgate!
That little cot!
Yes, it’s yours, sweeting.
But there’s a house in London for you called Ormond’s Inn; its hangings are all gold and gems, it’s one of the tallest buildings in town.
And there’s Sheen for you, and Greenwich, where cursed Margaret once played her wargames; yours, my honey, all yours.’

‘Do not forget my mother,’ she said, under his mouth.

‘Blessed be she who bore you.
The world’s not wide enough for her deserts.’

Lassitude came on him and he slept.
Elizabeth moved cautiously from the slackened circle of his arm.
She lay wakeful until dawn delved beneath the threadbare curtains.
Tireless now, her mind weaved the trappings for her own coronation; the pitiless change in her achieved completion, making her bright and invincible as the diamonds she planned to wear.

It was as if the years shimmered and slid together, time itself galloping; as if no sooner had she painted all that rich early splendour, out of thought than it was upon her, past and gone.
To be relived, two years later, with the same gusto as she had imagined it.
Save that it had been far more glorious.

It was February, 1466.
Enthroned upon a golden chair in the palace of Westminster, she watched the women dancing.
Hawklike, her eyes noted every detail of their apparel (none dared outshine her), and their abject subservience.
Their awed faces emphasized her queenliness; every courtly posture before the dais spoke it aloud.
They had not forgotten her coronation, and today’s ceremony echoed that past glory a thousand-fold.
She sat stiffly on the gleaming chair, her hands too weighted with rings to lift easily.
She saw all the old nobility dancing to her tune.
They were celebrating her deliverance from childbirth.
That stiff sharp labour was over and already in the space of days she felt renewed.
The accouchement had been vastly different from her struggles to birth Thomas and Dick.
This time she had had the most skilled midwifery in the realm; Mother Cobbe.
When the old woman’s veined hands had drawn a red bawling creature from the Queen, there was a united gasp of disappointment.

‘A wench,’ said the crone.

Elizabeth only smiled.
Outside the door sat Master Dominic Serigo, physician and astrologer, who had so firmly prophesied a male child.
While they lifted her on to the sweet new damask and sponged her with fragrances, she heard scratching on the door.
A voice inquired: ‘Is it over?’

One of the women opened the door a crack.
Master Dominic was maundering: ‘What has the Queen’s Grace, if you please?’
and received the tart reply: ‘Whatever ’tis the Queen has in here, sure it is a fool stands without!’
Poor Master Dominic!
He was full of fear that Elizabeth could not share.
For whatever she gave the King seemed to please him mightily.
When he came to her bed, his face was full of mooncalf love.
He kissed the red roaring babe tenderly.

‘My little maid!
We will call you Elizabeth!
Though you can never match my own, my peerless Elizabeth!’

The babe thrived, seemed strong.
This day the Queen had been churched in Westminster and now the court came to thank the Giver of all good gifts for the sovereign’s health.
Close to the dais knelt Jacquetta of Bedford, the light from a thousand costly candles turning her gem-spiked headdress to a pinnacle of ice.
Her straight back quivered a little with fatigue.
Elizabeth did not address her during the ceremonial, any more than she acknowledged the rest of the company, and protocol forbade Jacquetta to speak.
In this, the Queen found more than a little malicious pleasure and marvelled at herself.
No one is greater than the Queen!
Yet Jacquetta was cherished and rewarded, rightly so; but by a Queen, and not an obedient daughter.
Elizabeth turned her head and nodded to her mother, and the Duchess rose awkwardly, grimacing as the blood returned to her legs.
She fixed eyes full of furious pride upon the Queen.
Elizabeth spoke at last.