The King's Grey Mare (32 page)

Elizabeth sought out Anthony.
He, praise God, was whole and sound.
She embraced him with a lover’s fervour.

‘Did
you
do naught to ease the King’s plight, sweet lord?’

He shrugged.
‘He sent me to Norwich when we were attacked, for my own safety; Warwick hates me most of all.
But I would have aided the King, if I could.’

‘And now you are Earl Rivers,’ she said sadly, and he bowed his head saying: ‘Aye, Jesu preserve my murdered father’s soul!’

‘Thank God I have other brothers.’
No more would she think of poor young headless John.
She thought of Edward, master seaman, Lionel, now Bishop of Salisbury; Richard.
She would look to her own sons, Thomas, newly created Marquis of Dorset; young Richard Grey.
Edward’s daughters too must be protected from the Fiend.
She was indignant that the King had promised Elizabeth, the first-born, to John Neville’s son.
This knight, said he, although Warwick’s brother, had remained loyal throughout.
As if any Neville were less than a demon, a traitor!

‘Warwick is not quenched,’ said Anthony, voicing her own thought.

She cast a desperate glance towards the King.
He had donned the Order of the Golden Fleece, bestowed by Charles of Burgundy.
By this token he signified to all that Burgundy was his ally, and to hell with France!
There had been more talk of Marguerite, who, it was said, was only awaiting the chance to rise again.
But during one of the skirmishes following Edward’s release from the northern fortress, King Henry, witless and saintly as ever, had been captured.

‘They found him sitting under a tree, singing,’ said Anthony.
‘While Edward put the enemy to flight.
They ran so fast they shed their jackets … they called it ‘Lose-Coat Field’!’
He laughed.
‘Old.
Harry came willingly, still whistling the same tune: “if my lords do but love one another …” ’

“… All will be well,” said Elizabeth, but she did not laugh.
The certain knowledge of Warwick’s undiminished spleen persisted.
When Clarence and Warwick came a few days later to bow the knee in contrition, she was doubly certain of his ill-will.
Hatefully close to her own small silkclad feet he knelt, and the King took him by the hand.
Warwick was leaner, his black curls were traced with silver.
The large grey eyes flared to meet Elizabeth’s, and she felt the steel of his will.
The sight of him hurt her heart.
All her curses turned inward and festered impotently.
So she turned her uncompromising loathing upon Clarence and saw the meekness on his face give way to bafflement.
Self-confessed traitor though he was, the Queen’s malevolence startled him.

Warwick would rise again; she knew it.
And here, at the Tower, in the quailing oak of her bedchamber, in Renée’s yelps, and the slither of a drawn sword, was the proof of her foreboding.
She flung on a silk robe and pushed through the bed-curtains, to stand, hard-eyed, while one of two messengers knelt and thrust a parchment towards her.
He and his fellow were both pale, scarred by wind and mud.
Renée was still volubly dispensing grief.
Elizabeth thought fleetingly: she had seen much disaster, both in Marguerite’s household and in mine; yet I should be the one to scream!
She turned and struck Renée in the face; the screams diminished to a sob.
To the messengers she said: ‘Tell me, quickly.
Is the King dead?’
the while unrolling the parchment and seeing, in a quick surge of relief, that part of the letter was written in Edward’s own flambouyant hand.
Written at Doncaster …

‘He is exiled, my liege,’ said the man.
‘He and the Duke of Gloucester and your Grace’s brother, Earl Rivers; Lord Hastings and others.
Warwick’s army came upon them by night.
John Neville led the rout – he was enraged because the King had taken his earldom away and bestowed it on Lord Percy.’

Yes, she had warned him in vain.
Never trust a Neville!
She said: ‘Where is the King now?
I must join him instantly.’

‘Your Grace,’ said the courier desperately, ‘he’s half-way to the Low Countries.
They took ship at Lynn, with only the clothes on their backs.
Read, Madame.’

Candlelight flickered on the message, penned by a panicking clerk, and all ink-blots.
Her eyes leaped to the postscript written by Edward.

‘Twenty thousand men are at our heels.
God keep you, dearest, my Bessy.
Get you to Sanctuary with our little maids …’

Ah God, she thought, he has left me.
Left me alone to the Fiend’s mercy.
Curse him for it.
Nay, (hastily) rather Jesu preserve him for without him I am doomed.
To Renée she said: ‘My clothes, now.
We, too, will ride to Lynn; command one of my brother Edward’s ships and follow his Grace.’

The courier gave one pitying succinct look at Elizabeth’s swollen body.
Had the Queen lost her wits?
She was seven months gone with child.
And she, following his eyes to what she had, for the moment, forgotten, thought in despair: why must I be
enceinte
at such a time as this?
Ned takes his pleasure, pardons the Fiend, then puts the North Sea in between us …

‘Madame!’
said the bearer, urgently.
‘Collect your daughters and let us be gone to Sanctuary.
There’s a boat waiting below.’

He was no hero, and he wished the Queen would hurry.
He had heard enough tales of slaughter to frighten him.
Warwick rode on the Tower itself, to rescue witless Harry Six, who had been housed there since after the battle of Lose-Coat Field.

Dressed in her furs, Elizabeth met her household at the steps of the watergate.
Through the archway rain fell in drifting spears and the wind moaned up the slime-green stairs leading to the river.
A handful of men held torches high, and the flames billowed and swirled with a ghastly leaping light.
A flurry of wet dead leaves, blown by a far-off gale, slapped against the portcullis.
Agitated by tempest, the swollen river flowed by, black, then red in the cressets’ glare.
Frightened, the nurse, Lady Berners, was fussing over her three fair-haired charges: Elizabeth, in her fifth year the replica of her father, Mary, a year younger, and eighteen-month-old Cicely.
The gentlewomen wore an odd assortment of garments hastily donned, and were shivering with cold and fear.
Margaret Cobbe, the midwife, had her little coffer of medicines firmly beneath her arm.
Renée was still sobbing.
Elizabeth said sharply:

‘My mother!
Where is the Duchess of Bedford?’

‘Here, my liege.’
Two more women were supporting Jacquetta along the narrow way.
She came like a brittle-winged black bird.
The wind tugged her widow’s veil, and blew it aside, revealing the crudely rouged cheeks, the vacant stare.
Elizabeth set her foot upon the slippery step while the torchbearers milled about her, whispering: ‘For God’s love, Madame, take care!’
their hands trembling protectively about her cumbrous body.
She had begun the descent when there was a cry from Renée.

‘My liege, wait!
We have forgotten someone!’

She stopped, half-turned.
The esquires saw her shudder and marked it down to the cold.
Oh, Renée, Renée, she thought.
I had hoped that none would notice.
How the past follows us!
One of the men was already running back to the nursery.

‘Oh, my liege,’ said Renée, laughing and crying.
‘We had forgotten Mistress Grace!’

The man returned after a moment.
He held a drowsy baby girl clasped against his mud-splashed doublet.
Secretly he hoped the Queen might reward him – with a coin, or even a smile – for saving the bastard daughter of King Edward; the child by whom all seemed to set such store; this flaxen mite, who shared the princesses’ nursery.
But the Queen gave no sign of approval.
She looked down once at the yawning infant, drew her furs about her and proceeded down to the waiting boat.

‘Rest easy, little maid,’ said the esquire kindly.
He had six sons and longed for a daughter.

As they rocked on the black water, Elizabeth sat stonily withdrawn.
On either bank cressets flamed eerily as Warwick’s advance guard entered the City; she saw them, but paid little heed.
The cold reproachful wind tossed the dark river around their small craft.
Mary was crying, and Jacquetta of Bedford muttered to herself.
Elizabeth heard neither of them.
Her mind was filled with Edward’s angry voice, two years ago, in the chamber with the white roses and the damning grief.

‘I go to spend my time with a lady who is kinder than you.
And should I get a child upon her … it shall be a reminder of your evil work this day!
Oh Desmond, Desmond …’

As Westminster Sanctuary loomed ahead, dimly lit by monkish tapers, the Queen glanced down once more at the living token of her guilt.
And Mistress Grace, seeing only beauty, stretched out her arms and smiled.

Lancaster!
Lancaster!

The name was carried in the beating hoofs, in the hiss of the rain, in the rattle of spur and bridle and arms, as the Earl of Warwick, flanked by a score of harnessed men, rode on London.
And he recalled how in his youth, among the fresh winds of Yorkshire, the toast had always been: ‘Death to Lancaster!’
Now Lancaster was his buckler and battle-cry; it jangled sickly in his ears.
The outriders growled it, like a talisman to ward off ill.
Warwick rode for Lancaster and yet he rode for England, and at an unthinkable price.
Memory rose like bile.
As the miles swept by – dull, damp November roads treacherous with leaves – he was back, in thought, at Angers, in high summer.
There and then, he had wrought the impossible, for England’s good name.
He, whom they once called ‘
le conduiseur du royaume’
had grovelled like the meanest cur.
To a woman!

Blood sprayed from his rowels; his horse shrieked and went faster.
Riding mechanically, he saw again that French council chamber with its effeminate furnishings: fanciful tapestries, curlicued window-frames.
The sun brightened the rich blue and green of the carpet.
He had had time to study that carpet minutely, kneeling on it for the best part of an hour before a woman whom he hated more than any other.
Save Isabella Woodville, who by her guile had brought him to this.

He knelt before Margaret of Anjou; she who had ridden with fire through England, who had set his own father Salisbury’s head on Micklegate.
To Margaret, whom he had denounced publicly all those years earlier, he sued for aid.
She was his only hope, with her French troops and King Louis (the wily old spider, hand-rubbing upon the dais) ready to uphold his kinswoman in any overthrow of England.
Warwick had always found Louis’s attentions flattering and it doubled his humiliation that Louis had to witness this sickening confrontation.
Yet he, with his long Valois nose for intrigue, had engineered the meeting.

At first Margaret would not speak at all.
Her eyes were two cold flames, gazing somewhere rapt and lost.
Warwick was null; an entity so loathsome that he had ceased to exist.
Yet he persisted; he had rehearsed a speech until it was a second skin on his tongue.
A classic paean in which he abjured all his past insults against the Frenchwoman.
He debased himself absolutely yet left room for his usefulness to be gauged.
He had been careful to ride to Angers escorted by sumptuously armoured men.
During his plea, while Margaret stared stonily away, he drew his sword and laid it symbolically before her.
To all this he added a soupçon of flattery; flattery in truth, for Margaret’s beauty was much diminished.
At last, one flicker in her eyes showed her resignation to the hideous fact that she and Warwick needed one another.

While Louis, like a pander, washed dry hands and quirked his lip, Margaret deigned to address her old enemy.
She berated him in a hoarse and searing voice, opening old wounds – the death of Suffolk, Clifford, Northumberland, and Beaufort of Somerset.
He was amazed at her long memory.
He knelt abjectly; the carpet’s green and blue merged, shimmered.
No fury like a woman’s, he thought, and was himself angry, his thoughts turning again to the one responsible; the Woodville witch.
Sweat trickled down inside his shirt.
There was a grinding in his vitals, a constant discomfort around his middle which he had had for a long time and grown used to; this day, however, long kneeling and tension made it unbearable.