The King's Grey Mare (7 page)

Elizabeth glanced at her and could well believe it.

‘It is because the Queen’s Grace is too
French
,’ pursued the diminutive maiden.
‘Doubtless that churl’s father fought at Agincourt.
Now that our French possessions are well nigh lost, he feels the sting.’
With a candour that made Elizabeth gasp, she said: ‘And of course, the Queen has no issue to set on England’s throne.
She’ll not find favour until such time as she bears a prince.’
Musing, she said again: ‘Yea, I would have that oaf butchered where he stands.
Or better, have his tongue out so he can spit no more.’

She seemed set fair for a long homily.
Elizabeth frowned.
She would rather not hear of tongue-cuttings and butchery; her spirits were high.
Her gown was a poem in dull pink and gold, she wore a new curved cap given by the Queen as a reward for one of Jacquetta’s old receipts.
Lately the Queen had been smitten by pains in her breast.

‘Take woodsage and horehound equally much.
Stamp them and temper them with wine and drink it three days fasting.’

This leechcraft she had shown to the Queen, and Margaret had been pleased.
She had been raising the cup to her lips when Beaufort of Somerset entered.
As before, with the sleeping potion, he had nipped the vessel from her hand to taste it with a fierce concentration.
Then, nodding, he had thrown one of his bronzed smiles in Elizabeth’s direction, and had allowed the sovereign to drink.

‘If my lord has an evil of the breast, I can cure it,’ Elizabeth said, nervously jesting.
‘My mother swears on this draught.’

‘And for a pain in the heart?’
Still Beaufort smiled, but as if the smile hurt him.
‘Has
la sage Jacquette
simples to drive that ill away?
Potions to steady the weight of government upon a frail head?
Herbs against the canker of a realm divided?’

‘My lord?’
She had looked at him, only half-comprehending the reason for his sudden savagery.
Then unexpectedly, King Henry had entered the chamber with John Faceby, his own doctor and the inevitable retinue of sombre-clad priests and monks.
He had shuffled across to take the Queen’s hand as a child might seek the clasp of its mother.
He had given Elizabeth one glance that held no recognition of the fact that she was even female, much less that the last time she had so desperately offended the eye.
He was, she thought, an enigma.

The procession halted at the tiltyard.
At the head of the line, Henry was squired from his horse.
This day they had managed to part him from his black skull-cap, and a thin diadem on his head caught the sun in a sad little flash of fire.
He murmured to himself, a prayer, and his eyes roamed to the great loges which had been built for the spectators on either side of the lists, to the flaring pennoncelles surmounting each pavilion, and to the royal standard above his own state canopy.
He looked, and murmured, then cast his eyes down at the velvety grass, where his gaze remained.

‘Come, your Grace,’ said Beaufort crisply.
Henry stood, pointing to something in the grass, visible only to himself, for all the lords peered, mystified.
Then, urged, he took one faltering step, and another, and walked towards the royal loge, while heralds sounded his advance.

Elizabeth stood poised upon the step of the litter, stunned by the gaudy scene; the surging colours of tapestry and standard, the tall pavilions flinging round shadows on the emerald grass.
A small figure in her wild-rose dress and golden cap, she gazed at the panoply of mock war; the great destriers caparisoned to the hoof in cloth of gold and silver, the knights already armed for the tourney, unwieldy yet magnificent in their ceremonial harness; the hundred different arms displayed on bright shield and pennon.
The King, now joined by Queen Margaret in slow procession across the ground and seeming comforted by her presence; the Queen herself, divinely encompassed in a mist of teardrop pearls and silver tissue.
Beaufort and his son Edmund; Piers de Brezé, James of Wiltshire, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Great Talbot, with his white head and veteran armour.
Elizabeth looked only at the royal pair, the principal courtiers; those who stood in shadow went unnoticed.
She did not see, very near and fixed upon her, the unknown eyes of love.

The young man in the sky-coloured tunic had waited long, yet at the shattering moment of seeing her emerge from the litter he felt the impact so keenly that he actually shivered and signed his breast with the Cross.
Had any asked his reason he might have laughed, muttered that he was safeguarding his soul from too much beauty; or that he summoned the saints to protect this woman from all ill; or that he invoked the blessing of God, Our Lady, and even the pagan Venus, upon his own heart-tearing love.

That she had never noticed him, and indeed had not done so on the night when she had fled weeping from the King’s displeasure, did not trouble him unduly.
So often had he possessed her in his mind that already it seemed she was wholly his.
Had he been told otherwise, he would have been inconsolable, and bemused as a dreamer roughly roused.
He was Beaufort’s esquire, he was just twenty years old, and he had never been in love.
The posturing amours of court life were to him empty and meaningless.
Likewise he had so far escaped the more serious affair of a politic marriage, shaped for the annexation of property and the enhancement of family power.
His enthusiasms had lain with soldiering; his horsemanship, unequalled among his peers, and his courage bordering on rashness, were celebrated.
Until the night when he had returned with Beaufort from escorting the King’s pilgrimage, his mind had been steadfastly applied to the pursuit of knighthood.
Although, unlike many of his fellow esquires, he owned no crazy lust for blood, he had followed with interest the machinations of the House of York, in the vague hope that one day he might show his prowess in battle.
Given a stout horse, he fancied himself, not without a little wry humour, leading a victorious charge.
Beaufort inspired him, although the Earl, it seemed, had come close of late to breaking his knightly word.
He had promised to send his esquire to Calais as emissary and scurrier, for there was information to be gleaned there regarding the humours of France and Burgundy, and the prospect was inviting.
Yet this promise had been given a twelvemonth ago, and was not yet fulfilled.

Now, Calais meant nothing.
Life was changed utterly, and it was Beaufort himself who had been the catalyst.
For the Queen had sent word of her new gentlewoman, and Beaufort had been inspired to speak of her beauty to others.
The reality of Elizabeth had been a shock; she was fairer than rumoured, as the vision of a saint outmatches the written legend.

He had never seen a saint, but he had seen Elizabeth, and found in her the distilled essence of his unimagined dreams.
Now, at Eltham, she passed before him for a second time, and the whole scene wavered into mist around her, leaving her as the jewelled core, twice as bright, twice as lovely, and the bringer of soft tears.

So did John Grey, son of Lord Ferrers of Groby, stand with the filmed eyes of love, to watch his lady shining in the sun.

She descended from the litter with the Countess and her niece.
Outside the jousting ground, folk had come to watch the sport through knotholes in the palisade.
There were a few mendicant friars, a cluster of sore-ridden beggars, and some amateur entertainers, jugglers, a bear stumbling on a chain.
Near the entrance were a half-dozen gypsies, darkeyed and filthy.
One, a woman, broke from the rest and ran towards Elizabeth.
Thomas Barnaby cursed her, dealing blows from his staff; but she dodged him and threw herself down before the three ladies.

‘Your future, worships, for a handful of silver!’

‘Silver be damned,’ growled Barnaby.
The woman knelt upright, eyes knowing and unafraid, rat-gnawed kirtle stained with berry juice.
Lady Margaret Beaufort held a muskball to her nose against the gypsy’s earthy reek.
Yet Elizabeth looked for a moment into the strange eyes with their courage and calmness, and heard the woman say, softly:

‘Why don’t you wear your proper token, my lady?’
The eyes were set upon Elizabeth’s brooch, the tree-root emblem of the Bedfords, enclosed in a pearl frame.
The woman moved closer, emitting the scent of woodsmoke and rank herbs.

‘The serpent,’ she whispered.
‘The beautiful serpent.
You have her face.
Earth, Fire, Air, Water; the last is yours.’

Elizabeth turned to Barnaby.
‘Give her money.’
The gypsy spoke again, unhesitatingly; a little rhyme.

‘A royal prince, fair lady, shalt thou wed,

But troubles dire shall fall upon thine head.’

She turned from Elizabeth, but it was still for her that she spoke.

She looked at Lady Margaret, haughty and fretful, and at the smiling, docile Countess of Somerset.
Then her glance went to the royal standard, and finally back to Elizabeth.

‘Bone of they bone shall by a future fate,

With blood of these three houses surely mate.’

Then she clawed the coin reluctantly given her by Barnaby into her bosom and darted back into the swell of people.
Disappointment filled Elizabeth.
The rhyme had come too glibly.
It was all nonsense, and a waste of silver.
Barnaby was pulling her out of the path of a dozen horses, ridden by brilliantly armoured knights and surging towards the tiltyard.
The breeze fanned banners to a blaze.
Barnaby cried: ‘Tis the Tudor knights!’
They walked on across the green towards the loges and Barnaby said: ‘My lord Edmund, and my lord Jasper.
Owen, the third brother, sports not.’

‘Owen is a monk,’ said Margaret Beaufort’s clipped voice.
‘So he jousts only with the saints.
Edmund, Dame Isabella–’ she turned with great dignity – ‘is my future husband.
It is arranged.
He is the King’s half-brother, as you know.’

All knew, but Margaret could not resist pressing the point.
One of the popular scandals was the old love-tale of Owen Tudor the elder, the humble Welsh esquire who had wheedled his way into the chamber of Queen Katherine, the widow of Harry of Agincourt.
Owen had a singing voice to shame the birds, and bright gold hair.
Folk said that Queen Katherine had a taint of madness; her father, Charles the Sixth of France, had been utterly lunatic.
Thus they acquitted her fall from chastity.
Her kingly son, the holy Henry, now made all well.
Here were the Tudors, fruit of that old treasonous coupling, riding to the joust, welcome at the court.
They had inherited little of their father’s comeliness; both were thin and sallow and Jasper’s mouth was cruel.
They gave fair greeting to the King and Queen, who sat beneath their canopy while the contestants finished arming in the pavilions below.
Taking her seat near the royal loge, Elizabeth heard the King’s clear brittle voice.

‘By St.
John!
I behold all my household knights!
Why have we no foreign guests here this day?’

Beaufort, his foot upon the stair of the loge, said gently: ‘There was little time to send ambassadors, your Grace.
The Queen devised this tourney for your pleasure.’

‘Yes, ’twas kindly thought,’ said the King vaguely.
‘By St.
John!
Let not the sport be too rough, though.
Men have been slain in joust.’

Margaret leaned to him.
‘Sire, will you give the signal?’
The marshals were waiting with their white wands poised and the line of heralds had trumpets at shoulder height.
The King nodded, and was about to raise his hand in which he held a gilded staff, when a commotion at the entrance to the lists diverted him.
The whole company grew instantly alert; they rose a little from their seats, they whispered.
They turned to one another and then back again to look, with expressions of incredulity, anger, and mirth, at the mounted men who rode on to the green.
There were three knights, and the standards borne above them flaunted as if they bragged a challenge into the teeth of the wind.
The snap of their colours drew all eyes; around the lists the whispers became a murmuring roar.
Followed by a few esquires, the three cantered across the sward, and the banners leaped above them.
Blazoned upon the air-flung silk was the fetterlock of York, next to it the device of Lord Salisbury, and, flaring so that its shadow ramped towards the royal dais, the snarling Bear and Ragged Staff of Warwick.
Over their half-armour the three knights wore mantles starred with the White Rose of York.