The King's Grey Mare (74 page)

‘While he waited, Morton worried about the herald Rous’s roll.
Such as he should be interrogated, sounded out.
God knew how many little clerks there were, scratching the dangerous truth in hidden corners, fancying themselves chroniclers.
Morton’s task was to achieve an ellipse, woven of thoughts, images, histories.
Impossible to close the mouth of every secret scribe.
Better to open them wider with a new tale.
But how to bring the pattern to its full?
So far the story was good – the shedding of infants’ blood – Black Will Slaughter was a fine invention, worthy of Chaucer’s genius … Yet there were too many who remembered Richard – the York epitaph exemplified this.
Men lived longer these days, he thought, and despite all, found comfort in it.

The players entered and there was a most hideous hunchback among them.
Clever, he told rhymes with tongue-torturing skill.
He danced a little hornpipe.
Yet freakish chance had loaded his body with a clubbed mass of bone; his arms were longer than his legs.
Black flowing hair grew on his face.

‘Holy Jesu,’ murmured Morton, in wondering distaste, but he applauded the monster’s antics graciously.
Then, suddenly, watching how, during a rest, the other entertainers ignored their wretched companion, illumination bloomed in the Cardinal’s mind.
He called the hunchback over to the throne.

‘Why do they use you thus?’

The dwarf grinned.
‘Why, highness, behold!’
He bent double so that the misshapen hump moved beneath Morton’s eye.
‘I am touched by Lucifer – so men say!’

‘And are you?’
Morton’s heresy-sniffing nose dilated.

The hunchback raised clear eyes, his only beautiful feature.
‘No, lord,’ he said quietly.

Morton gave the dwarf a broad gold piece on parting.
Now he knew how Rous should amend his Roll.
He knew exactly.

‘Touched by Lucifer,’ he whispered, charmed.
‘Aye.
Touched by Lucifer.’

Salazar was waiting for Grace when she came out of the Holborn mansion.
He held two Arabian horses.
Grace went and rested her head upon the Moor’s motleyed breast.

‘It is today,’ she said softly.
‘At noon.’

The monkey sprang to her shoulder.
The Moor was crooning, a little hypnotic song stirred by the waves of an alien sea.
He laid one long black hand upon Grace’s shivering head.

‘I know,’ he said.
‘Upon Tower Hill.
You must not go there.’

‘I must.’

‘It will bring you pain.’
Tenderly he looked down at her, so fair and small against his own dark mystery.
She was his bright token, his proxy daughter, his special charm, and he, for months, her unknown amulet and guard.

‘You must not go,’ he repeated.
‘Look at the people!’

They were already hurrying through Holborn, dragging on gowns, eager for the dreadful joy, not far removed from love, of witnessing an execution.
The apple-sellers were trundling their wagons through the City.
The Londoners, the artisans, mercers, clerks and prentices, always the prentices, ran to watch, to feel their own necks secure and take comfort in vicarious death.
John’s execution would propitiate each man’s especial god.

Salazar said, in his dreaming voice: ‘I went yesterday to the Tower.’

Broken, she said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me?
Why did you not take me?’

The stroking hand ruffled her hair, leaf-light.
He thought of how he had found her, sitting mutely in the upper room without food or drink for three days; how he had carried her out through the stinking shop.
How he had nursed her at his house, listening to her ravings, fed and restored her, talked softly through her anguish while she clung to his hand as her one anchor.
He knew all her joys, her loyalties and griefs.

‘Did you see him?’
she whispered.

‘Nay, not I.
None could.
But he sent you this.’
He withdrew from his gold-laced pouch a tiny parchment scrap.
She read from it, weeping.

‘My dear beloved, stay from me now.
Remember that you are Plantagenet, accursed by the witch.
Guard yourself.
Sweet Christ Jesu send you happy.
Written at the Tower by my own hand.’

His hand, the hand of delight, whose writings, like black sea-waves, bound her closer and closer, to what?
A twitching body, a lifeless, severed head.
She would go to Tower Hill.
With fortune, the axe might also find her neck.

‘Come, Salazar, let us follow the people!’

He nodded, lifted her on to one of the horses, where she sat, swaying, her head shrouded by mist, her outline blurred.
Taking the other mount’s bridle, the Moor began to walk.
A tavern bush, threaded with dried flowers and ribbon, loomed to the left.
He looked at Grace; he was with her in this last tribulation; he knew what he must do.

‘It is only eleven,’ he said.
‘A drink, first.
A void, to warn you.’

He took her down, wrapped his long arm about her and guided her into the deserted inn.
He pressed her down into a high-backed settle.
She leaned her cheek against the wood.
It smelled of cinnamon and musk, a scent lately left by some wealthy wife.
Its smell was the smell of grief, its black oak the colour of death.
There was a little knot in the grain, and into this she ground her cheek until the bruise broke and blood started.
Good.
Good pain.

Salazar stood before her, his vastness blotting out the little window over her head.
He held a silver cup.
It smoked and was aromatic.
Her hands steadied about its warmth.
She tasted the cup; an unfamiliar taste, it was writhing-sour, like swallowing a serpent.

‘Drink,’ said Salazar sweetly.
The monkey chattered and hung upside down from the back of the booth.

‘Drink,
doña
.’

Salazar, tall, and wavering like a tree under storm, stood before her.
Her head felt heavy, her eyes pained from the quivering colours of his dress.
Her gown was creased and her feet had been arranged neatly upon the settle.
The tavern swam.
With difficulty she looked past the Moor’s head to the window.
Through the lattice she saw one star, steadfast and burning bright.
She thought: it is the end of the world.
Night has come in the morning.
She felt a weightless warmth in the crook of her arm.
The monkey was there, fast asleep.

‘It’s over,’ said Salazar.
‘All over, little one.
Quick, and noble.’

She tried to speak, and failed.

‘He was not tortured,’ said Salazar.
‘Nor was he despoiled.
One stroke, swift and clean.
He smiled on the scaffold.
My faith is not yours; yet who knows that we do not all cheat death?’

Then he gathered her to his coloured breast and rocked her, humming his foreign song as if he did not care, for this was the way to heal her; no commiseration, no crying against what cannot be mended.

‘Now,’ he said at last.
‘My time here is done.
But you?’

‘I do not know,’ she answered.
‘I do not care.’

‘You have a place,’ said Salazar.
‘Tell me where, and I will take you there.’

‘I have nowhere, no one, nothing.’

‘Impossible.’
His ear-rings gleamed in the candlelight.
The inn was filling up; gossip drifted among the high-backed stalls.

‘Did you love none but him?’
he asked gently.
‘No man, woman or child?’

Within her purse, Grace’s fingers cracked on the last letter.
Plantagenet, cursed by the witch
.
And his words, returning like ghosts:
The wheel comes full circle!
She thought: I have been blind, uncaring, utterly ignorant.
That dragging love I felt – it is turned to gall.
My only love is dead, headless – accursed like the whole of York and Plantagenet.
I have loved evil – the evil of Elizabeth.

‘I will go to the witch,’ she said softly.

‘Bueño
,’ said Salazar, calmly.
‘Tomorrow I will speed you there.
She lies at Bermondsey.’

‘I will be revenged upon the witch,’ said Grace, and trembled.
Salazar nodded gently.

He paid the boatman and saw Grace embark near Dowgate.
He left her and was gone, tall, coal-black and mysterious, more elemental than man.
He would return to Spain, where he could report to Ferdinand and Isabella that England was gaining in stability.
He watched one of the last victims of that stability sitting muffled in her green hood as the boat struck out across the river.
He scratched his monkey’s ear, and sighed.

Grace passed through Southwark with its teeming stews and whorehouses and into the quieter area of Bermondsey, where the tower of St.
Saviour split the sky and the sound of its mournful bell floated across the river.
Water and sky were opaque and each dull flat cloud, each timeless ripple, held a terrible truth.
Several times she repeated: ‘John is dead!’
trying the words out, trying to find in them a clue to rob them of meaning.
For the first time in her life she saw the terrible face of hatred and felt its fangs.
Now she knew the craving for vengeance that poisons every sight and sound, turns blood acid and stretches the spirit on a subtle rack.
She knew what John had felt, and why, unrevenged, he had gone almost placidly to death.
Death was better than the insupportable corruption, the lonely sickness of hatred, with each stab of which her memory grew long, bringing old weapons brightly renewed; Elizabeth’s coldness, her curses, that slap in the face.
All rushed, a ragged army, to fan the fearful power into an inferno.
Her mind felt like a swollen serpent’s egg, filled with all the clamour of the condemned dynasty, and heavy with its tears.
She took the unfamiliar burden of hatred upon her, felt its sourness, shivered in its flame.
She looked up at the vast door of Bermondsey Abbey and saw it misted, corroded, red.

She pulled the bell and heard it jangling down catacombs of darkness.
She muttered: ‘Like a dog, I loved her!’
The wheel comes full circle
.
Then again, wearily, as if questioning the dying bell’s note: ‘John is dead.’
Infected by hatred, Grace said loudly: ‘I am Plantagenet!
and I will rid the world of this pestilence!’

Perhaps she is sick, she thought.
Lying defenceless in some rich chamber.
It will be easy; she is old and I am young and strong.
If she should want a drink, it will be easy to doctor her cup.
There are swift poisons and there are slow.
Dementedly her lips drew back from her teeth.
She tugged the bell again.
From within came the slap of sandals, and the grille was slid aside.
A monk peered through the aperture and saw a dishevelled woman, green eyes that sparked like the eyes of a demon, a slight body shaking as under a gale.

‘What do you want, daughter?’

He had an expressionless voice.

‘The Queen-Dowager …’ began Grace softly and stopped.
No.
This was certain failure.
There must be subtlety.
She went on her knees on the step.

‘Sanctuary,’ she said formally.
‘I crave Sanctuary for the love of God and King Henry.’

The face disappeared for an instant.
The great door opened.
The monk was revealed, his pallor disembodied against his robe and the creeping darkness behind him.

‘Yes,’ he said.
‘We are by charter a sanctuary house.’
He peered at her.
‘In the King’s name, what is your crime?
Treason?’
They were careful at St.
Saviour’s; the fall of the Abingdon Abbot for having sheltered the Stafford brothers was well known.

‘Whoredom,’ said Grace dementedly, and laughed.
The monk’s face grew long, hiding relief.

‘Follow me,’ he said, and walked away, girdle and keys swinging.
She went after him down a cloister so cold that it raised the hair on her scalp, and under forbidding arches, past many doors closed like tombs.
A thought came to her in passing: it is not a sanctuary, it is a prison.
She looked eagerly at each door, for one of them housed the enemy.
She followed the monk into a small round chamber with dim lights set high and deeply into the walls.
There, he seated himself at a table, took up a pen, opened a ledger.
He asked her name, and when she answered, looked up sharply.