The King's Grey Mare (25 page)

‘Madame, what do you desire?’

‘To be seated, your Grace.’
She smiled grimly through her discomfort.
All about them dancers swirled.
The court ladies tripped and swooned to the sweet frenzy of viol and rebec and cromorne.
There were no knights present; as befitting the honour of childbirth, only women revered the Queen with every tortuous dance-step, each humble gesture.
Elizabeth nodded again, and Jacquetta sank once more to her knees.
Like a gay bird, bright hair streaming, Margaret Plantagenet, the King’s young sister, danced before the Queen, and sank in a perfect curtsey before gliding on.
Too beautiful, thought Elizabeth.
It was well that she would soon be gone to Burgundy, bride for the young Charles of Charolais.
Warwick had been sent to negotiate the match.
At the thought of Warwick, powerless and sick with rage since that summer day two years earlier, Elizabeth smiled.
The company saw that smile, that lit her like a torch; a ripple of tension passed over the dancers.
They leaped and spun faster to the strains of the sweating minstrels.
When the Queen wore that smile, it was politic to perform one’s duty to the letter.

‘Speak,’ said Elizabeth to the Duchess.
‘Tell me what you most desire, this moment.’

‘There is an arras,’ said Jacquetta.
‘In the house of Sir Thomas Cooke, late Mayor of London.
Have you seen it?’

The tapestry beggared the glory of Goliath and David at Bradgate.
It portrayed the Siege of Jerusalem.
Ruby blood spouted from the wounds of golden knights; silver roses climbed each border.
Fifty men were needed to lift it.
The Duchess said:

‘Men say that Cooke has Lancastrian sympathies.’
She raised one plucked brow gently.
‘Traitors should not own such beauty.’
The irony of this made her smile.

The Queen looked away, saying softly: ‘The King loved Cooke well, once.
There are many whom once he loved.’
To herself she added: And I have changed all that!

She decided that her mother should have the arras, as speedily as Cooke should be summarily tried and gaoled.
By now she knew whom she could trust to work her will.
Upon her advent at court they had gravitated to her like wasps to a comfit-dish; some subtly, some openly, all useful.
There was Sir John Fogge, Lancastrian through and through, though none would have guessed it.
Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William; they had already shown great eagerness to wield her weapons.
And John Morton, a prelate of Marguerite’s time.
He came and went within the court, and never a word out of place, a dissembler too slippery ever to be marked down.
Morton was sometimes here, there, in France, in Scotland, or bowing the knee to Plantagenet and York, and always cloaked by holiness.

And there was Tiptoft, John.
They called him the Butcher of Worcester, and his face was enough to frighten the stars from the sky.
Eyes that bulged as if a fist thrust at them from behind, a full wet mouth, and hands cold as a winter death.
He was Constable of England, and the Queen’s loyal servant.
His conversation was somewhat uncomfortable; lovingly he would describe his new method of impaling felons.

‘I sever the head first, your Grace.
The body is turned upside down and a spike driven upwards through the neck.
I place the head between the legs and fasten it there with a further spike.
It is a humorous sight.’

The commonalty, she knew, cried outrage on these newfangled methods.
But they feared the Butcher.

‘I am at your Grace’s service,’ he had said, when presented.
The wet lip dropped upon her hand.
She had withdrawn her fingers quickly, thinking to see them bloody from the salute …

Beside Jacquetta, a diminutive figure was spreading its skirts in homage.
Lady Margaret Beaufort, with that plain narrow face old from the cradle.
Clever at chess and life alike.
Although she was dead Somerset’s kinswoman, she had taken the oath of fealty to Edward, and now danced with the rest.
Elizabeth beckoned her closer.

‘How is your son, Henry Tudor, my lady?’

The narrow black eyes held hers calmly.

‘He’s well, my liege, and still at Pembroke with his uncle, Jasper.
His Latin’s good, his Greek could be better, but he’s loyal.
Loyal to all we revere.’

The last five words spoken so dispassionately brought in a wash of memory, the time of Marguerite.
Men said that the French Queen was in Wales; sporadic risings in her favour continued to occur.
Elizabeth, Queen of England, gripped the arms of her golden chair.
She said coldly:

‘I understand that your husband died.’

Lady Margaret inclined her head in its stiff brocade hennin.

‘King Henry was graciously pleased to make him Earl of Richmond.
I am therefore Countess in his memory.
I have a new husband, Henry Stafford; I’m content.’

‘So your son is at Pembroke,’ pursued the Queen.
‘Lord Herbert governs there, does he not?’

‘We have much in common, your Grace.’
The sharp black eyes were amiable.
‘If it be true that your Grace’s sister Mary will wed Lord Herbert’s son.’

Such a devious wit!
thought Elizabeth.
I will cherish her; she may one day serve me well.
Then she clapped her hands; the music wavered into silence.
She rose carefully, lifting the heavy state robe.
Ermine facings swelled the bodice and sleeves.
She felt the icy bite of diamonds sliding against her neck.
She stretched out her hand to Lady Margaret Beaufort.

‘We will join the King’s court.
Madame, you and my mother shall bear my train.’

She descended from the dais and felt the drag of three ells of velvet lifted behind her as she proceeded smoothly across the lozenged tiles.
As she passed, the women were like a field of flowers stricken by storm.

Within the King’s chambers, the courtiers were gathered, just as they had been for her coronation.
Her lightning glance swept the separate features, saw that they all bore that look of stark obeisance overlying duty, indifference, or hatred.
She had marked those same faces, with their transparent expressions, before.

Her introduction to court after the Council meeting at Reading when Edward had proclaimed their marriage, had been an ordeal.
Edward’s younger brother George of Clarence had taken her by the hand.
Fair, petulant and plump, his eyes were veiled by outrage, the resentment shared by all the old nobility.
At Edward’s bidding he had led her before the Council, his hand moist on hers, mumbling oafish response to her own courtesy, and bemused by his brother’s apparent madness.
At her coronation George had been waiting again, unhappily riding a horse up and down Westminster Hall, with Norfolk, Marshal of England, ready to precede them to the ceremony.
Waiting, like the rest of England’s peerage, for Elizabeth, the Queen!

She had stood in her place of estate between the Bishops of Durham and Salisbury, her head ringing from the cheers of an obedient multitude, her eyes dazed by the pageant colours that blazed from London Bridge to St.
Thomas’s Chapel, where the singing soared to split the roof; throat dry from the costly sand sprinkled for her safe coming, she had suffered gladly the weight of the royal purple about her shoulders, the prick of the diadem upon her brow.
She would have suffered them had the robe been lead, the diadem fire.
If only for the look on Warwick’s face!
That impotent wrath, sourer than month-old milk; it warmed her with delight.

Anthony her brother had been regal in new velvet, and smiling subtly when she looked his way.
The sisters were happy; Margaret was married to Tom Maltravers, and there were betrothals well assured: sweet Kate to Harry Buckingham; Anne to Lord Bourchier, son of the Earl of Essex, Eleanor to Anthony Grey de Ruthyn, son of the Earl of Kent.
Mary should have Lord Herbert’s heir, and Jacquetta Lord Strange of Knockyn.
Martha would be the wife of Sir John Bromley, lord of Bartomley and Wextall in Shropshire.

I wrought all this.
So thought Elizabeth, as she extended her hand to William Lord Hastings, the King’s close friend, one-time partner in licentiousness.
She knew more than they realized; the past drinking forays, the past women.
Then Lord Stanley and Sir William knelt to her, their eyes speaking of readiness to serve.

And there was Thomas Fitzgerald Desmond, fresh from Ireland.
Even when he had bent to kiss her hand that maddening, mocking smile of his remained.
Disproportionate rage made her long to strike it from his face.

They had all been there that day; even Morton with his forked beard, eyes hard as agates and never a word out of place.
Today Morton was gone from court, but none knew where, and he was unmissed in the throng that waited to greet their Queen after her deliverance from childbed.
She moved through the chamber, and the King came, almost stumbling from his dais in eagerness to greet her.
She gave him the meekness that he loved, seeing the courtiers as a blur – Hastings, controlling his spleen with a wavery smile; George of Clarence, trying not to scowl, and, expressionless, the youngest brother, Richard of Gloucester.
Fourteen years old and of no account; lately of Warwick’s household.
She looked swiftly about her for Warwick, seeking to enjoy his tortured rage; but the King was pressing her close, blocking her view.
His lips were a warm song on her cheek.
‘Blessed be God for your deliverance,’ he whispered.
He turned, then, and with an arm about her shoulder, her narrow, arrogant shoulder, cried to the assembly: ‘Blessed be God!’

Rage was alien to the Earl of Warwick.
He was unsure whether to show or to conceal it, to vent it by kicking his hound or his page, or to sublimate it through icy dignity, although the past three years had shown him that dignity was not enough.
He was a stone in a millrace, tossed into confusion.
All the women he had known – his wife, Neville and Beauchamp of ancient Plantagenet line, his gentle daughters, Isabel and Anne – had set him no pattern for dealing with this particular blight.
Little Isabella Woodville.
God’s Blood!
he reminded himself: the Queen of England.
Only God could have forecast this.
Or the Lord of Evil himself.

He paced the King’s antechamber, fingers clasped whitely on his dagger’s hilt, and, thought savagely of days when he and Edward together had kept men waiting on audience, just as he, Warwick, was now forced to cool his heels.
New fury mingled with old as Westminster Clock boomed twice.
A whole hour wasted; Edward was doubtless dallying with – the Queen of England.
Like the kiss of plague, the past three years settled on him, striking sickly at his bowels.
He sought comfort in the thought of the common people’s love.
They thronged the streets for a sight of his magnificence.
For them his door was ever open on six succulent oxen roasting for a breakfast; his household rule was to turn no man away.
All were free to hack their fill.
Plump chops, haunches of venison, vanished as under the breath of locusts.
It was a small price to pay, for the commons’ love.
Louis of France had openly called him
‘Le conduiseur du royaume’
, but did he still?
Louis had been more than annoyed at the betrothal of the King’s sister to the heir of Burgundy.
And Warwick felt himself to have been used, sent, grim-humoured, as the ambassador for this match.
Sentiment … because the King was indebted to Burgundy.
The Earl spat on the floor.
God’s Blood!
He said it aloud this time.
There had been no home for sentiment at Towton and Mortimers Cross.

The door opened suddenly and Edward burst in, with his fool and a troupe of minstrels.
He was laughing.
Warwick bent the knee, and thought: that motleyed jester would wear the crown less lightly …

He answered the King’s greeting, then said abruptly: ‘I must speak privily with you,’ over the tuneless twanging of the lutanist, the fool’s mad rhyming cries.

Edward clapped his hands and the entertainers ran, the drummer rolling his instrument, the fool somersaulting high and cleverly into the air.
The King threw himself into a chair, gestured for wine which Warwick poured.
The Earl was surprised at the trembling of his own hands.

‘Well, my lord!’
said the King gently.
He was very slightly drunk, flushed and handsome.
‘It’s months since we had privy audience.
Sup with me.’