The King's Grey Mare (33 page)

His witch-hunter, Thomas Wake, had mentioned waxen images, had repeated the description given him by one of the Sewardsley nuns.
No trace of them remained, however, and Wake had seen no physical proof.
As for the nuns, they were all under a terrible penance imposed by their bullying Abbess; they could speak to none.
He thought: God’s Blood!
– as Margaret’s ranting voice continued – I would fain have seen those Woodville women brought down; the old one walking the streets with a taper, and the other … the red lips, the sinuousness, the unjust, unholy power of her!
Her image wound about him like a doom.
Margaret was coughing, a rough draining sound.
Beaufort of Somerset the younger stepped forward with wine, and Warwick raised his eyes.

Margaret gulped, taking wine like a man, wrist stiff.
She said: ‘I have listened.
Your words stink in my nostrils.
Non!
Jamais
!’

Warwick said, douce as a maiden: ‘Most noble Queen of Heaven …’ and she turned, white with fury to Louis.

‘Hear how the dog mocks me!’

‘It will not hurt to hear him further,’ soothed Louis.
He found Margaret’s histrionics irksome; he had housed and fed her for months and now hoped for some recompense.

‘Madame, I come in peace,’ said Warwick simply.
‘Join forces with me and return with an army.
I will help you to claim the throne of England for–’ reverently – ‘your sacred son.’

A long silence followed.
Hope trembled within him.
Then Margaret said:

‘My son.
My prince.
Whom you called bastard!’

‘Your son, the Prince of Wales by right,’ said Warwick.
‘His father, noble Henry, lies now in the Tower sorrowing for you.’

Louis interposed.
‘To me, the scheme sounds fair.
With French and English force, the realm could be snatched from Edward of March.
French troops in the majority, though,
monsieur
.
We would not wish for another debacle, as when Englishmen refused to follow …’

Warwick coloured at the barb, controlled himself.
He said sagely: ‘True,
mon roi.’

Margaret was waspish.
‘My lord Warwick, you are a traitor.
Once you upheld Edward of March; how do I know you will not betray me?’

He said steadily and with truth: ‘Yes, Madame.
I loved Ned of March, and gave him my heart’s loyalty.
That was before he was ruined by his Queen.’

‘Ha!’
said Margaret, savagely amused.
‘Isabella!
I doted on the child.
She rose high.’
The amusement faded.
‘She usurped my own estate!’

‘She did,
ma, reine
,’ agreed Warwick.
‘And now she and her family are no more than night-thieves.
They rob, degrade, murder.
They must be dispossessed.’
His voice shook.

‘I do not trouble over which of your barons is robbed or which rewarded,’ said the Frenchwoman icily.
‘My concern is for my son.’
Her voice grew unrecognizably soft.
‘
Le Cygne d’Argent … La Fleur d’Anjou!’

God, let us make an end, thought Warwick; she rambles of silver swans and flowers.
He said stoutly: ‘The throne is promised to Edward of Lancaster, your son, Madame.’

He fancied she weakened, and again his hope built.
‘Well, Madame?’

‘Clarence!’
she spat the word.
‘What of his claim?’

Inwardly he sighed.
She knew all.
It had been folly, the way he had used Clarence, giving him Isabel, promising him the throne once Edward was deposed.
But Clarence could be bribed, blinded with words, fobbed off.

‘There is no other heir,’ he assured Margaret.
‘Only your son, Edward of Lancaster.’

‘
Vraiment
.’
Then she shook her head.
‘I mistrust you, my lord.
You will betray me.’

‘Madame–’ he had this last hurdle already breached – ‘I can make surety against that.
Let your prince marry my youngest daughter, Anne.
Then if I play you false, I butcher my own line!’

The Queen burst into ugly laughter.
With renewed venom she beat Warwick with words.
She would as lief marry her prince to a pig than to Anne Neville, who was unfit to tie the points of his hose, whose blood was scullions’ blood compared to that of the Swan, the Flower.
He thought: Margaret of Anjou is mad; a different malady from that of Henry her husband; but mad none the less.

‘
Ma reine
,’ he said patiently, ‘the lady Anne and your son are all slips from the same tree.
Are we not all descended from the great Edward Third?’

For a further hour they wrangled.
Even Louis’s wily calm was tried by their arguments.
A distraction was provided in the form of Edward of Lancaster himself.
He entered with a train of foppish noblemen.
He wore blood-coloured satin and looked older than his seventeen years.
Strong and slender, with hard eyes; a warlike mien, Warwick thought approvingly.

‘I shall give the Prince Edward my stoutest captains for the affray,’ he promised.
‘We shall grind York into the dust and Edward of Lancaster shall be immortalized in the annals of chivalry.’

We shall grind York into the dust.
The words were iron in his throat.
For the first time he looked into his own mind; anguish writhed there like snakes, and every snake a Woodville.
Why, oh God, did Edward ever wed her?
Those small white hands have stabbed York to the heart.

‘Yes!’
the Prince was saying, sharp and bright.
‘I will ride on England, and claim my throne.
I will wed your daughter,
monsieur
, and make England mine for ever!’

Queen Margaret looked appealingly at Louis, who spread his hands, smiled like a depraved cardinal.
Warwick carefully rose from his knees.

‘It tears my heart, this,’ she said, sighing deeply.
But I see there is no other way.
One thing.’
She raised a fierce admonishing hand.
‘Your Anne shall have my prince.
But they shall not lie together until Lancaster is strong in England.
I forbid it!’

She looked ardently at her son.
Warwick bowed.

‘So be it.
When shall the arrangements be made?’
Margaret was coughing again.
She said: ‘I care not; but let us ride on England soon.’

Louis said kindly: ‘I will arrange all.
The contract shall be solemnized here, in the Cathedral of Angers.’

‘
Bien
.’
Margaret looked viperishly at Warwick.
‘And we will both swear on a piece of the True Cross to keep faith!’

Sweating, Warwick had quit the chamber at last.
The pain in his bowels was like pincers.
By sheer mental strength he threw it off, and rode to his lodging.
Anne waited there for whatever news he brought.
Waited patient, helpless, scarcely out of childhood.
When he climbed the curling stair to her bower he found her weeping, as if she knew already that her destiny was tied to Lancaster’s star.
In the next room her sister Isabel, Clarence’s wife, lay moaning in child-bed fever, nursed by two unskilled slovenly Frenchwomen.
Warwick stood on the doorsill and watched while his youngest daughter dried her eyes.
He knew more of her heart than she realized.
Long ago at Middleham, when both she and Richard of Gloucester were children, she had given him her heart, lastingly, with every expectation of a happy marriage.
Now Gloucester should never have her.
Warwick had offered her to him once (at a price) and Gloucester’s loyalty had rejected the bribe.
Clarence had had no such scruples regarding Isabel.
Gloucester, Clarence, Edward!
How long since they were all together?
And who was it who had slashed that bond to ribbons?
The endless permutation.
All evil, all disorder, all betrayal.
Like a great spider-web, it flung itself over the houses of Plantagenet and York.
And inevitably at its nucleus – the divine corruption of Elizabeth Woodville.

So thought Warwick as he rode on London, to the heart-heavy beat of Lancaster!
Lancaster!
Unknown to him, Edward and Gloucester tossed on the North Sea, exiled into darkness.
Something within Warwick brought forth a groan, and muffled words.

‘Ah, God, Ned!
Once we could have conquered the world, and now I must ride against you!’

Butcher William Gould was on his way to the river.
With him went his wife, three prentices, and half a beef and two muttons already rank from hanging in his Chepeside shop.
The prentices were a necessary evil, brought along to shoulder the meat, and Mistress Gould had simply refused to stay behind.

‘You promised I should see the Queen.’
She caught up her kirtle and ran, trying to match her husband’s long strides.
She was a pretty woman, dressed in her best scarlet houpeland trimmed with rabbitfur.
A snowy wimple starched with arrowroot haloed her small bright face.
Gould looked at her indulgently.

‘So you shall, dame.’
Although, as they fought the seething crush that spilled down Mincing Lane into Tower Street – fishporters, carters, vagrants – he wondered on this score.
The last time he had gone to Westminster Sanctuary with the weekly carcasses, the Queen had been closeted; praying, Lady Scrope had told him tartly.
Gould had smiled, knowing he had a right to inquire.
For he had promised King Edward long ago, that he would succour ‘his Bessy’ in any emergency.
And this was one, in truth.

Warwick’s men were conspicuous in the City.
Everywhere the Bear and Ragged Staff or Clarence’s Bull were blazoned on tabards, carried on banners by small knots of wary-eyed foot-soldiers.
Gould grinned as he saw how the Londoners persecuted these men – in little ways subtle enough to ensure impunity – a carelessly outthrust foot, a jostle, a curse half-spoken.
Rancour fermented, and lately a lack of hope obtained.
Two months had passed since Edward and his followers had been driven from the shores of Norfolk.
It seemed that Warwick was master; all the frowns and praying, all the tears (Gould’s wife had wept copiously) could not gainsay this.
And yet, on neither occasion when he had been admitted to the Queen had Gould seen tears or hopelessness – only a poised tension.
Cool she is, the butcher mused, catching his wife’s sleeve as she migrated to a pedlar selling ribbons.
Was she always?
He wondered, unrealistically, what it would be like to bed the King’s Grey Mare.

He turned to chivvy the prentices who staggered redfaced beneath the reeking joints of meat.
Royal meat!
He pushed the youths in front of him so that he could watch their safe progress.
At the corner of Tower and Thames Street where the way narrowed and the carved house-gables leaned drunkenly down, Gould’s little party was brought to a sudden halt by people sweating, swearing, elbowing.
Gould was pressed close against the stinking habit of a friar, whose creeping lice transferred themselves to the butcher’s doublet.
Incensed, he brushed them off and tried to push on, his passage blocked by a row of broad backs.
Something or someone was coming; the people were straining on tiptoe; the hubbub of voices soared a semitone higher.
Gould peered over the shoulders of a small fishmonger.
From Billingsgate and Petty Wales, from Eastchepe and up from Dowgate on the Thames, folk were crowding towards a procession that filtered slowly from the Tower.
The Tower itself looked unreal, an almost luminous grey-white against a hanging pall of fog.
Several urchins were clinging on to a water conduit and Gould pulled them down, himself climbing to this vantage point, and craning upwards.
The procession struggled nearer; they were Warwick’s men, and their coming was halted by a carter’s mischievously overturned wain.
Vile language drifted through the misty air.
Then the company came on, escorting someone who rode in their midst.
A ragged cheer went up, followed by shouted insults.
Throughout the crowd a shiver of incredulity ran as they saw who came; Gould whistled in amazement.