The King's Grey Mare (52 page)

‘Stanley and his wife have betrayed me.
They attend the Council; they gave their hand to Titulus Regius.’

Smiling, shaking his head, the Bishop fingered his gold collar.

‘Foolishness,’ he murmured.
‘Madame, do you not believe me when I say they will not, cannot show their hand yet?
Have you forgotten that Tudor is Margaret’s son?’

Yes, she had forgotten.
Now it seemed that Henry was a figurehead of true power; her solution, as Morton said.

‘But why is my daughter so necessary to this enterprise?’
she said.

‘Tudor will conquer,’ said the Bishop.
‘But he cannot reign by conquest alone.
He needs the seal of Plantagenet blood.
He will unite the houses of York and Lancaster, and be beloved for it.
He comes from God, a saviour.
But he must marry into a royal dynasty.’

Then she remembered.

Bone of thy bone shall be a future fate

With blood of these three houses surely mate.

The old riddle was answered.
Lancaster, York and Tudor.
Henry Tudor was of Lancaster … it was an omen.
Her shivering had nothing to do with the cold, with the dead fire or the dripping walls of Sanctuary.
Against the blackened chimney fresh dreams blazed.
A reprieve.
A frantic hope.
Herself Queen-Dowager and no more plain Dame Grey.
She tried to speak calmly.

‘It is a fair prospect, my lord Bishop.
But you have forgotten something!’

Morton inclined his ear.

‘The people love Richard!
They love him better than they loved his brother.
They admire him for his new statutes and his justice.
Whatever the barons say, he has won the people’s heart!’

She had heard tales of the progress, how England had shaken with cheers for the Hog, the usurper.

‘They love him,’ she repeated.
‘They will not rise against him.
And I am powerless.’

That hateful word.
Where was Melusine now?
And where the secret doctrines of strength and cunning?
As if to catch again at that lost mystery and might, she gazed at the Bishop’s white, wattled face.
He smiled comfortably.

‘All that you say is true, my liege lady,’ he murmured, ‘The time is full.
Now we must turn that love to hate.’

On a day of ribald March winds she arose and came out of Sanctuary, for it was time and more than time for her to do so.
She knew that Morton disapproved; this, oddly, added impetus to her step, as she thought:
I am not yet totally his; I am not yet altogether committed
.
She stood outside the gate and drew in lungfuls of breath, catching the high-tide smell from the river, the smoke of chimneys, the odour of brawn patties from the cookstalls outside Westminster Hall.
Armed with a worn dignity, she stood erect, while behind her young Bess shivered in the unfamiliar gales.
The girl’s mouth was sullen and her cheeks hollow from months of boredom and privation.
Elizabeth, stealing a glance, thought: I myself have looked fairer, but what’s to be done?
Nearly all the jewels, the gold and the fine clothing so carefully rescued months earlier had been handed over to Morton’s keeping to swell the funds for the new campaign.
The smaller treasure had gone in barter for food and fuel during the long siege in Sanctuary.
So Elizabeth stood, naked of glory, in a long cloak of white wool fastened with a tawdry beryl brooch.
Her slim face was resolute, her eyes, now finely lined, full of hard brightness.
Several merchants with their prentices passed her without a second glance, and she smiled grimly.
This time I am not the bait for a king, she thought.
It is Bess who must be cherished.
A rare wave of affection moved her to clasp the girl’s arm, and they moved in procession with the shabby female entourage down to the quay.

‘So, daughter, we’re out of prison!’

Bess nodded glumly, her eyes on the cobbles.

‘Look up!’
said Elizabeth.
‘Learn to bear yourself straighter.
You will be a Queen.’

Bess had no more tears to shed.
She had wept so much since Morton’s visit that the cause of her grief had become somehow blunted and confused.
She was to marry Henry Tudor.
So she was finished with romance, both read and dreamed of.
Her father had warned her against Tudor, long ago.
She was a little girl, at her first ball and banquet.
It was early enough in the evening for Edward to be still coherent.
Henry had just bowed and quit the Hall, and everyone was sniggering over his quaint continental manners.
But the King had growled: ‘He is an enemy of my throne,’ and none had heeded this.
Bess, feeling sorry for her father, had crept close to him, and he had talked to her for about five minutes, as if she were a wise old courtier.
Warning, admonishing her.
She had never forgotten it.
Now, a look of flat despair lay on her face and moved her mother to say, surprisingly gently:

‘Everyone must marry.
And Henry Tudor is young, probably biddable.
Between us we will pluck his plumes!’

Elizabeth saw herself as the matriarch, the omnipotent Queen-Dowager, exerting subtle pressure on her son-in-law.
And this, strangely, gave birth to oblique doubts about the whole affair.
What if Henry
were
all that young and biddable!
What if Morton were flying so high with ambition that he failed to see certain weaknesses in his protege.
He had promised that Tudor would invade, but what if Tudor and his foreign force were unsuccessful?
Henry, apparently, had never fought in battle in his life.
Gloucester was a skilled and seasoned warrior, vanquishing even the Scots and proving such a strategist that King Edward at the end had left all campaigns in his brother’s sole charge.
The wind snatched at her veil, whipping it like a battle standard against her face.
No, she was by no means committed to the proposal.
Better to wait, and get the measure of the Hog.
She was summoned, nay, begged to return to his court.
He had forgiven her, and was this not weakness of a different kind?

‘I, Richard, promise and swear,
verbo regio
, that if the daughters of Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England, will come to me … then I shall see that they shall be in surety of their lives … that I shall marry them to gentlemen born, and give in marriage lands and tenements to the yearly value of 200 marks for term of their lives.
And such gentlemen as shall hap to marry with them I shall straitly charge lovingly to love them, as wives and my kinswomen, as they will avoid and eschew my displeasure.

‘And over this, I shall yearly pay the said Dame Elizabeth Grey … the sum of 700 marks …

Strange, to reward treason and hatred thus.

‘Moreover I promise to them that if any surmise or evil report be made to me of them by any person, I shall not give thereunto faith or credence …’

Forgiven, forgiven.
His one wish was to live in amity.
He was the Fiend’s lover, and her greatest enemy.
Yet what a fool he was!
She wondered, as she wondered every day, whether the whispers had reached him yet; whether love was turned to hate in England.
In France, it was certain.
The messengers had come and gone between Morton and herself: each step of the campaign was planted firmly.
She knew the words of the Chancellor of France almost by heart:

‘Listen, I pray you, to the events which have taken place since the death of King Edward
in that country
.’
(The sneer in the voice; Guillaume de Rochefort would, like all good Frenchmen, have taken pleasure in it: the barbarism of the English!) ‘These beautiful children, King’s sons, butchered, and the assassin crowned by the will of the people!’

She even knew the go-between’s name.
Dominic Mancini, poet and chronicler and fast friend of Morton, had the Chancellor’s ear.
So the rumours were busy, more than rumours now.
Dorset did his part in France, and Sir Edward Woodville, and Reynold Bray, when he could be spared.
And Henry Tudor himself; what was he doing now?
She knew that on Christmas Day last he had all but proclaimed himself King of England in Rennes Cathedral, swearing with flourishes that he would take Elizabeth of York to wife, and thus unite York and Lancaster.
She would have liked to witness that scene; to see how he comported himself, whether his voice shook or if his hands faltered on the holy relics.
She would have liked to measure his strength.
His cadaverous face flashed before her mind, the grey eyes humbly bowed yet with a strange yellowish spark in their depths.
An almost priestly face, its spare outlines softened by some unknown lust or longing.
And above all, that weird aura of familiarity.
If she but knew him as she thought.

‘Madame, can we go in the barge now?’
Catherine’s plaintive voice jolted her from the torment of musing.
The river’s surface was broken by a thousand sharp-edged waves.
From boats people were alighting, some with pallid, relieved faces.
A royal escort stood on the slipway below which rocked a painted craft.
The men were tall, and the arms on their livery glowed like jewels.
With staves, the escort pressed a way among the disembarking people so that Elizabeth’s little train should come unhindered.
Folk loitered to look at the sombre procession of women.
A murmuring arose, over the hiss of the wind on the waves.

‘Look, John!’
said a voice almost in Elizabeth’s ear.
‘Isn’t it …’

‘God’s robe!
So ’tis!
The King’s Grey Mare!’

Like an ogre’s fist, rage gripped and shook her.
Her face turned white, then scarlet.
One of the royal henchmen saved her dignity, catching her elbow as she swayed.
His murmuring respect choked the passion on her lips, or she would have turned and screamed her frenzy into the face of the crowd.
Two of the escort lifted her, as if she were crippled, into the barge, setting her down, light as a leaf.
The boatmen bowed to the oars, and the craft moved over the choppy currents.
Through the forest of cranes dipping industriously, tall buildings rose; the Manse fortress, Coldharbour, the amber needles of churches, and a mile, beyond, the distant whiteness of the Tower.
My boys, she thought.
My murdered boys.
When the usurper is vanquished, you shall be brought to life again.
Young Lazarus, both of you.
She wondered if they themselves knew of their supposed death.
Richard would find humour in it, but Edward was delicate; it might distress him.

Surging towards them suddenly came a lavishly gilded barge.
Banners flew from it and in the stern stood a small group of minstrels.
The sound of viols came in squeaky snatches above the rush of tide and air.
The craft passed close so that the woman reclining on a canopied couch was visible in detail.
She wore rich blue velvet and a gold coif from which depended a drift of white veil.
A leather book lay open on her lap, and she drank from a crystal cup.
Two pages were draping her shoulders with a fur.
She looked up at one of them and laughed.
Like a night-bird’s shriek the laugh blew away, raucously merry.

‘Sweet Jesu!’
cried Elizabeth, twisting in the boat to stare as the rich craft shot by.
‘Jane Shore!’

One of the royal escort answered.
‘Nay, Madame.
That is Lady Lynom.
She was released from prison last fall.
She is married now to the King’s Solicitor-General.’

‘But she was a traitor!
Conspirator and harlot – condemned by the King!’

‘He pardoned her,’ said the man, dipping his head on his chest as if to weight his words.
‘He showed her mercy.’

Elizabeth sank back in her seat.
The wind played on her lips, still incredulously parted.
Slowly her thoughts reformed themselves.
Richard was more than a fool; he was utterly possessed of lunacy.
If this treatment of Shore were token of his mercy … She began to laugh, to hold in laughter, shaking silently, tears spilling down her cheeks.
The boat rocked on the wash from Lady Lynom’s barge.
Young Bess stole a glance at her mother and was alarmed.
She touched her hand gently.