The King's Grey Mare (46 page)

Now in substance,

Such is my dance,

Willing to die.

He had jousted with De la Roche.
He had fought him with broadsword, lance and axe, horsed and on foot.
The loges all around were crammed with screaming exaltation.
The sound of excitement drowned the blaze of the clarions and the silken throb of the great standards flying over the royal canopy.
He had beaten De la Roche into the ground, then, full of delight, had made the Bastard of Burgundy eat earth; had struck a secret blow for France, and for Lancaster.
For the old days of his heritage, for his parents’ pride.
Above all, as in all things, for
her
.
He had jousted, he had sung and prayed and had travelled, in the presence of England’s flower; he had visited shrines in undreamed places, had crossed the snarling bare mesetas of Spain and the cypressed plains of Italy.
His translations, his tracts and verses, lay, revered as genius, in the Palace library.
Dancing, jousting, learning, teaching, prayer.
Such is one man’s life … along the passage outside he heard unhurried, inexorable steps.
In this castle Richard of Bordeaux was done to death, secretly.
Yet some said that he still lived, that he was seen twenty years after in the wilds of Scotland … a bad place, Pontefract.

Methinks only

Bounden am I,

And that greatly

To be content.

Seeing plainly

Fortune doth wry

All contrary

From mine intent.

He murmured, as a release from the poem’s terse metre:

‘Fortune is a woman.
She cannot be gainsaid.’

The pale face reappeared, crowned, speaking later words: ‘Do my will.
Help me, I am afraid.
Do my will.’
Aghast, he saw the slender figure falling, dropping from the window like a falcon in stoop, landing by chance rather than judgment upon his saddle.
The horse bolting, going at a steaming pace through briars and brushes so that their faces, the faces of brother and sister, were torn and their eyes blinded by the wind.
Elizabeth laughed, a madwoman, a spirit of air, utterly fey … In the lock of his cell door a key turned.
He wrote on, faster.

My life was lent

Me to one intent,

It is nigh … spent

Welcome, Fortune!

But I never went

Thus to be shent

But she it meant

Such is her custom.

With careful finality he put the quill aside, and smiled.
Apt as anything Lucretius wrote.
Let those who read it afterwards think I chided Fortune.
I, wherever I may be, shall know otherwise.
There is but one ‘she’.
One who breaks the bread of recklessness and holds out a bitter cup.
I loved her; I did her will.
He rose at the entrance of Sir Richard Ratcliffe, the lawyer and constable sent by Gloucester to oversee this day’s work.
A chaplain was with him.
Ratcliffe said: ‘Are you ready, Earl Rivers?’

‘I shall never be more or less so.’
He smiled, and with lordly hand indicated the pile of neatly tied rolls on the table: his will, several greetings to followers, and an apology to someone wronged long ago.

‘You will see to these?’

They bowed in assent and parted for his going from the cell.
The barred sunlight lit the grey walls and his erect back with the same impartial joy.
As they reached the courtyard he stopped and looked about.
There squat and terrible, was the block, and lined up near it with a muttering priest were the Queen’s son, Sir Richard Grey, and Thomas Vaughan and Dick Haute, his adherents from Ludlow.
Grey and Vaughan were composed, but Haute looked as if he were about to vomit up his fear.
Along the wall of the bailey a little detachment of Yorkshire infantry stood at attention.
A drum crackled and throbbed.
Anthony turned to Ratcliffe and said ‘Then we are all to die?’
The herald began his proclamation: ‘In the name of Richard Duke of Gloucester, Earl of Cambridge, Constable of England, Lord Protector of the Realm …’ and Ratcliffe inclined his dignified head.

‘What of the others?’
said Anthony.

‘I may tell you now, my lord.
Lord Stanley is confined in the Tower of London, as is also Archbishop Rotherham.
Bishop Morton is in the custody of the Duke of Buckingham at Brecon.
William Lord Hastings is sentenced to death.’

So this was where conspiracy had led them all.
They had been so confident, Buckingham and Gloucester as good as dead and the whole house of Woodville reunited in triumph.
They had reckoned without Buckingham’s tireless agents by whom the whole conspiracy had been smelled out.
Buckingham and Gloucester had acted swiftly and ruthlessly.

The sun crept behind a cloud.
‘For great treason against the Crown of England!’
The herald’s voice broke harshly upon the last syllable.
Anthony went forward to the block.
He smiled, partly to comfort Grey, Haute and Vaughan, partly because he remembered his poem.

Such is her custom

When he knelt, the white-hot sun appeared again, so that ripples of livid light, drifting, coruscating, gilded the axe.
The steel fell swiftly, like the plunge of a great silvery fish.

Mistakenly she thought the worst to have befallen.
When they brought the news of the utter collapse of all she had striven for, she fell into a rare swoon.
Recovering to the sound of her daughters’ sobbing, she stared about her, temporarily witless.
The familiar chamber with its stark holiness seemed to shrink into a prison.
Even the sound of Abbot Milling’s monks, droning their ceaseless praise, was a salute to the Protector’s power.
With one sweep five of her most precious pawns were scattered from the board, lost irrecoverably.
Anthony – a thought not to be borne; Richard, John’s son.
Vaughan and Haute were more dispensable, Hastings a mere broken tool.
Dead, all dead, none the less; no more could she call upon them, mould them, direct them.
And Morton, imprisoned in Buckingham’s castle – that was a grievous loss, and Stanley, and Rotherham … She sat among the rushes and held her head, while her women looked on, daring to say nothing.
Summer boughs brought in for decoration lay around the hearth.
In their greenness she saw the shape of demons.
Nothing could be worse than this.

Now she knew.
What she had termed the worst was only a rumble forecasting the holocaust.
Under the stream of waking thought the fear had always remained no matter how many times she had laid it away like a worn-out gown, telling herself she was done with it.
Now, into her sanctuary came that fear, nourishing and well-fanged, with the stem approval of the law behind it.
Cardinal Bourchier gave it a voice.
Silk-clad and hatted, he entered with his train of priests and lawyers.
He unleashed a great vellum, newly sealed, and read from it sombrely.

He read that news had been disclosed to the Council that Edwardus Quartus, late monarch of the realm, did take unlawfully in marriage one Elizabeth Grey, he being already trothplight and married to another, Dame Eleanor Butler, daughter of the old Earl of Shrewsbury.
The Cardinal’s voice faded, was replaced by Edward’s, hoarse and bemused as he rolled on the bed, his brain glittering with herbs of madness.
I am married already
.

‘… that they did live together therefore sinfully and damnably in adultery …’

Eleanor is with the nuns.
She will die soon.
Bessy, my fate!

Nineteen years of suffering Edward’s demands, his boisterousness, his infidelities.
Of bearing and burying his children.
Of always feeling alone.

‘… and that we, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal declare that as the said King stood trothplight and married to another, his said pretended marriage with Elizabeth Grey is null … that all their issue have been bastards, and unable to inherit or claim anything by inheritance, according to the law and custom of England.’

A shrill voice interrupted; young Bess, running forward, ill-mannered through desperation.

‘Eminence!
Am I no longer a princess?’

He looked at her severely, yet indulgently, and his voice was quite gentle.

‘Madame, you are the Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet, bastard daughter of King Edward.’
He then cleared his throat to resume reading from the membrane.
A pain gripping her breast, Elizabeth said, before he could continue:

‘By whose ordinance is this document signed and sealed?
And by whose information are these things said?’
She felt her head and face grow hot; the feeling frightened her.
She repeated, more quietly: ‘Is there proof?’

The Cardinal lowered his roll.
‘Madame, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal ordain this statute in accordance with the Three Estates of the realm.
It is the most important document of this century.
As for the source, there are many witnesses, the most prominent being Bishop Stillington.
It was he who performed the marriage ceremony between his Grace and Dame Eleanor Butler.’

Stillington.
She wanted to scream and swear.
Stillington, whom she had thought dead by now and no danger.
Years ago she had instructed Bishop Alcock to keep a close eye on Stillington.
The pain in her breast grew stronger, frightening her even more.
Death was brought by humours such as these.

‘There is more, Madame,’ continued Bourchier rather ominously.
Without looking at the parchment he said: ‘God help you, for there is much talk of sorcery.’
To a man, the priests and lawyers crossed themselves.
‘That you and the late Duchess of Bedford did …’

Elizabeth closed her eyes, turned her head sharply to the left, a gesture which silenced the cardinal.
The pain receded, leaving a dullness as if a stone lodged in her breast.
She counted those who had known about the Duchess’s secret campaign.
The clerk, Daunger – he was dead.
The Sewardsley nuns – they had told Bray.
Margaret Beaufort!
Yes, so I have lost her too, she thought numbly.
She has betrayed me and upholds Gloucester.
For the first time she thought of Gloucester not as an obstacle to be slain or thwarted, but as a vastly under-estimated enemy.
Worse than the Fiend, more dangerous than babbling, power-crazy Clarence.
If she looked through the window over the Abbot’s little flower garden she could see Gloucester’s fleet anchored in the Thames.
He was leaving no hazard open.
She had never chosen to know him, but it seemed that he knew her well.
Bourchier said: ‘Dame Grey.
Are you sick, Dame Grey?’

She did not answer.
The pain returned, spread from breast to throat to head, gripping with vicious jaw.
This was the worst.
Worse than any outrage of the Fiend’s.
Warwick had stripped her only of Bradgate and that had been regained.
He had taken only her tapestries, her lands.
But Gloucester, who had wept at Warwick’s corpse-side, now stripped her of her sovereignty.
Dame Grey.
Dame Grey.
No more Elizabeth, Queen of England.
Her head began to shake, as if an unseen hand moved it.

Cardinal Bourchier was alarmed at her appearance.
As if by alchemy the contours of her face sank and flattened, the taut jaw dropped.
Her colour changed from livid white to fiery red then back to startling pallor.
While her mind spun on like a leaf in a vortex.
I am Queen no longer
.
Nineteen years for naught.
My princes are mere bastards and my princess likewise.
No throne now for my son Edward, whom I laboured to bring forth in this same comfortless Sanctuary.
She heard herself saying, in a queer rasping voice:

‘May I ask who will be King of England now?’

‘I am instructed to deliver a copy of this Act,’ he said, ‘It sets out the Titulus Regius – the Council’s findings and decision as to the crowning of our sovereign.
It is Parliament’s decree to the title of King.’

Her fingers could not grasp the parchment.
It slipped down, curling, to lie at her feet like the open horn of a trumpet Even then, the half-hidden words, plain and black, leaped to her eyes.

‘So Gloucester will be King!’