The King's Grey Mare (45 page)

Sir Richard Grey has his captor’s ear.
They will drop the bridge at your captains’ signal.
Pray reply soon
.

Bishop Rotherham is mine again
.

This last made Jane chuckle.
It was a succession of riddles; yet the Queen had never shown more tolerance of Jane.
No raised voices, no wounding waspish chiding of Jane’s noisiness.
Today, after the weeks of trudging back and forth, the lesson had been easy; it made sense.

Tomorrow, Friday 13th June.
Stand ready.
Kill Gloucester and Buckingham.
Bring out my sons from the Tower and meet with me at Westminster
.

She slid cautiously from the bed and crept across the moon-dappled floor to drink wine from a pitcher.
King Edward had taught her to drink.
Burgundy wine like rubies; the fiery cornelian of good Clary; sack possets heavy with curdled cream, mace and nutmeg.
The breath-taking hypocras, burning with aqua vitae and pepper.
Last November they had toasted La Mas-Ubel, patron of seeds and fruits, in a great bowl of strong ale in which six roasted apples swam in raw sugar and ginger.
They had taken it piping hot and later Edward had tumbled her on the floor of the chamber.
A florid, laughing giant, ogreish with fat.
She had never loved him, but she had liked him and she missed him sorely.
Were it not for Dorset, her life’s light, she would be quite alone.
The Palace was shrouded in mourning and preparation for the young King’s coronation; all was lawyers’ talk, work, no gaiety.
The most commanding voice was that of Buckingham, so haughty that he had dissolved Jane in tears.
Gloucester seemed not to notice her at all.
But between the two of them they ruled Westminster, and the happy drinking days were fled.

She stole back to bed, her long, sweat-damp hair stranded over her naked body.
Hastings was awake and watching her.

‘My Jane,’ he said, sleepily reproachful.
‘Why did you leave me?’

She wound her arms about him, feeling the slack, old man’s flesh, suffering the rasp of his beard on her breast.
‘Sleep, my lord.
You were so peaceful.’

‘No, I had a dream–,’ he said uneasily.
‘An awful vision.’

She crooned to him.
‘Dreams are airy stuff, the work of devils trying to frighten bliss.
Sleep, lord.’

‘Then stay close, Jane.’
He stroked her shoulder with a thin veined hand.
‘Holy Jesu!
Never did I think these times would come …’

‘You and I together, dear lord?’
she said artfully.
He was so often tongue-tied with her; she had to shape the words for him.

‘Nay … yea!
Truly, Jane, I never thought I should have you – I watched you with Ned – I longed, imagined.
I turned from my good wife, Kate.
I behaved like a heretic and would not lie with her.
You’ve bewitched me, Jane.
Or someone has,’ he said in a quieter voice.

Tomorrow, his thoughts ran.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, like the tick of a clock, or the frantic riding of an army.

Tomorrow I shall engineer the killing of one who was dear to me, to a man I loved.
One who himself loved me well, who rode with me against Lancaster, when he was a sickly stripling youth.
Gloucester, who took my hand, not two moons ago – Jesu!
who took my hand
today
!
– saying: ‘Thank God for you, Will Hastings.
Thank God for you, in these times of strife and madness.’
Tomorrow Gloucester’s blood will stain this loving clasping hand.
And Elizabeth, upon whose coming I once looked with spleen and disapproval, shall be again supreme.
Elizabeth, who put down venom like a ratcatcher throughout the court.
Elizabeth, whose policies are loathed by me.
She who broke her sovereign’s heart with Desmond’s death, and used her brother like the most skilled provocateur to bring wretched Clarence to a bubbling end.
Elizabeth, who split the soul of Warwick until he knew neither day from night, nor friend from foe.
Elizabeth, whose messages.
I meekly bear, whose will I wreak!
Cloudily her face swam before his mind; the lazy-lidded eyes, the tight red mouth.
Woodville and Lancaster wench, you never warmed my lust.
Yet to Edward, you were Bathsheba, Salome …’

He turned closer to Jane, burying his tired slack flesh against her, weary, cold of conscience.
She murmured, ‘Yes, my lord,’ and, ‘There, my lord!’
while the inn’s lath-and-plaster quaked with the quarrels and lovemaking of others, and they lay tightly within it, part of a corporate squalidity.

He slept and dreamed anew.
He awoke shouting, beating the bedcovers.
From sheer terror, Jane swore at him, using the coarse expressions of her early life in Chepeside.
Sticky with sweat he clung to her, the pupils of his eyes distended and black in the moonlight.

‘Holy God!’
he gasped.
‘First, a boar – Gloucester’s Boar, a device of unsurpassed might.
But worse!
Christ protect me!
It came out of the sea …’

His hands hurt her; she listened.
‘Monstrous, shining like harness, plated with gleaming scales.
It took me about the neck, each scale like a barber’s knife.
Jane!
Jane …’

Tomorrow is cursed.
Friday, the thirteenth of June.
I have schemed against the Protectorship.
Will the Queen save me now?
Or Morton, or Stanley?
Or Rotherham?
Or Anthony Woodville, Richard Grey, and the others who like myself are embroiled blood-deep in this treason?
All these weeks I have been blinded and by what?
For what?
For the love of a foul-mouthed whore whom my great family would not have used in their kitchens … He turned upon Jane, but she had left his side.

‘Be comforted, sweet Will,’ she cried, anxious to amend the oaths she had hurled at him.
Look!’
She began to writhe and cavort in the moonlight, as the King had loved her to do.
‘Look!
I’ll dance for you!’

She danced, and another danced with her, a shadow whose hair was long and streamed like fern, whose hips and thighs undulated, whose whole outline bore an unearthliness beyond thought.
Fresh sweat gushed on Hastings’s brow.
He rose, clumsy with fright, tangling his feet in the bedclothes and falling on the filthy boards.
He scrambled and groped; broken with panic he found his clothes at last.
The fine velvet doublet and the shirt in fair Rennes cloth, the plumed bonnet with the pendent diamond, the hose, the piked brocade shoes.
Jane became still.
Her full face regarded him quizzically.
The King had had these strange humours too, leaping up in dead of night to leave her; these hauntings which she did not try to understand.

‘I must go back to Westminster,’ he muttered, fumbling to fasten his cloak, and making for the door.

‘You will have to cross the river,’ said Jane.
‘And no boatman will bear you at this hour.’

His face livid, he wheeled once more to face her, made an inarticulate noise and plunged through the doorway.
After a moment Jane crawled back into bed.
Light-headed, lightminded and calm as ever, her last thought before sleeping was that tomorrow all would be well.
No more of this fleahouse.
No more coaxing of an old man’s stubborn pizzle.
The Palace again, and sweet Thomas in her arms.

Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, sat writing at a small table.
Meticulously he shaped his work, giving to each initial letter a thick downstroke and to the tails a delicate grace so that they hung like cats on a wall.
Sunlight pooled on his bent head and touched sparks from the jewel on his hand as it moved elegantly across the parchment.
He looked up, and, half-blinded by radiance, saw, through stout bars, the surging green world outside.
The bailey of Pontefract Castle lay below his window; by craning a little he could see, beyond the wall, the wild north country rioting in summer.
Things too distant for his eye he imagined: the dales, green upon green, tracts of mighty oak, fells assaulted by torrents of white water.
From far away came the sound of a hunting horn.
He bent again to his work.
Scholar, aesthete, courtier, Earl and Duke, he wrote; and so doing, saw visions.

I fear, doubtless

Remediless

Is now to seize

My woeful chance.

For unkindness

Withoutenless

And no redress

Me doth advance.

‘Advance!’
he said softly, and laid the quill aside.
The horn became a trumpet, with acid, flaunting bray.
His sister sat before him.
Every detail of her burned his sight with its impeccable loveliness.
Her high crown had rich closed arches, each point diademed with a fleur-de-lys.
Suncoloured brocade clothed her; striped and slashed with the royal pattern, her sleeves were gold and blue, the rich dark azure of the Garter.
Broad strips of ermine crossed her bodice to fall in rouleaux over her shoulders.
More ermine bloomed on the hem of her gown and ran like the tail of a beast along the immensities of the train, a fold of which she held looped over her wrist.
Her hair was loose and she was smiling, a little smile directed at the points of her tiny shoes.
He knelt.
He stretched out both hands, and laughed as she did, a sound of ecstasy and triumph.
‘Queen!
Queen of England and of France!’
said Anthony and bent his head, his bedizened bonnet held in courtly fashion in one hand swept out behind him.
A wind blew about him; a perfumed tempest emanating from a dozen costly gowns; a hectic breeze of laughter.
All his sisters and other ladies of the court surrounded him – fair as flowers – their shining heads auburn and black and gold.
With their chattering mirth they engulfed him.
He felt a soft fumbling about his thigh, looked down and saw a gold token clasped there; a priceless garter ingrained with sapphires.
From its centre hung an enamel flower of rosemary; the whole garter was fashioned in the double ‘S’, the one-time device of Lancaster.

Elizabeth said softly: ‘
Souvenance
, my dear lord.
A token of my remembrance and of yours.’

One of the ladies roguishly said: ‘Sir!
Look in your hat!’
and he felt inside its velvet rim, and drew out a letter bound with gold thread, bearing the same emprise of remembrance, with a jewel for a seal.

The Queen bent forward.
‘The articles of combat, sir.
You shall do me honour in the tourney.’

‘My adversary?’
he said.

‘De la Roche.’
Her eyes gleamed, flickering a pattern of joy across the vibrant air.
The look caught him up and spun him round.
De la Roche was grounded already, brought grunting to the turf by one lance-thrust.
To your great honour, Madame!

‘
Souvenance
,’ she said again.
‘Remember me.’
Her eyes were bright, too bright to gaze on longer, and he wrote again, steadily.

With displeasure

To my grievance

And no surance

Of remedy.

Lo, in this trance,

Now, in substance …

The vision changed.
A pale girl leaned dangerously far from a window above him.
Tears lined her cheeks.
Beneath his body he felt his horse curvet and plunge.
Be careful!
he wanted to cry.
It is a long way down!
Her lips moved, but he could hardly hear her.
Take me away.
Take me with you!
He shivered, shook his head, saw his own bony boyish wrists straining at the taut bridle.

‘No.’
He turned from her.
‘Make the best of it.’

‘I will repay you,’ she wailed.
‘If it’s the last thing I do in life!’

Nay, Bess.
I am today repaid.
He took up the pen afresh.
That was the only time, Madame, that I did not your will.
The rest of my days have been yours, inspired by you; your wit, your will was mine.

Lo, in this trance,