The Maiden and the Unicorn (48 page)

But it was the Bitch who held Margery's interest. The Queen had now grandly curtsied to both kings and seated herself. Calabria and the Prince, having made their bows, stood either side of her chair.

Brave once, impoverished now, and as indefatigable as her reputation, Margaret d'Anjou looked older than her forty years. There could be little gold left in her hair now; where her henin had slipped back, the strands showed grey and lacklustre. The plucked forehead of fashion did not flatter her; it accentuated the deep lines of bitterness which destiny had etched across her brow and the slashes of frown marks above her nose. The burning fire for revenge must have gradually consumed her beauty.

Studying her, Margery could see where the exiled Queen's satin gown had been discreetly darned. Even the deep, golden border was tarnished. Although her bodice was fashionably cut away, it was sadly obvious that her scraggy neck and shoulders had missed the salves and potions which most other princesses could afford. The Countess of Warwick, staring across at her, was white, plump and pampered in comparison.

Having learned Margaret d'Anjou's history in a Neville nursery, it was easy for Margery to hate her. But, trying to be objective, she could feel sorry for her too.

Margaret had been sent over to England, at the age Anne was now, to marry Henry VI. It must have been a jolt to her hopes for it was said that all that Harry had in common with his famous father, Henry V, was his name. Everyone knew that he had been better fit for the cloister than the throne. Margery had been told that apart from averting his eyes from every female cleavage in his proximity, Henry had also inherited a strange sort of madness from his Valois mother's family, an illness that had bedevilled Louis XI's grandfather as well. As Queen, Margaret had struggled to control the factions of ambitious nobles. She managed to form her own party of loyalists and even have a son, Prince Edouard, whom she was able to pass off as her husband's. One faction, however, led by both Ned's father, the Duke of York, and Warwick, finally evolved into a powerful opposition.

York and Warwick's growing predominance was strengthened by Henry's increasing bouts of insanity. Military conflict ensued. Battle after battle was fought until finally the Duke of York was slain in the north by the Queen's army. But London had denied her victorious forces entry and, Warwick, with the citizens' acquiescence, had crowned Ned as King Edward IV.

Ned had proved a far more powerful enemy. Not only had his charm and good looks enhanced his leadership qualities, but he was a good strategist. Queen Margaret, despite her loyal captains, suffered defeat and fled with her husband and young son to Scotland. Her husband, Harry, in his simple madness, crossed back into England and was made prisoner in the Tower of London. Margaret returned to her family and had kept an impoverished court of exiled Lancastrian lords about her for nine long years.

The timing of the Queen's encounter with her father suddenly began to make sense to Margery. Edouard was seventeen, unwed and old enough to fight. Had several years of planning gone into this? Louis and her father had been friends since '64.

Where
was
her father? Huddleston must have sensed Margery's tension. He rested his hand upon her shoulder. "Not yet," he mouthed. She should have shrugged him away. His fingers played with the wisps of hair escaping from her cap. She wished the candlestick had hit him.

Three noblemen strode, one behind the other, up through the hall, and made obeisance before each throne before they clustered about the Queen. The ardent Lancastrians.

"The heart-stealer is Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke," Huddleston informed Margery. The Earl was kissing the Duchess of Anjou's hand. "On his left, Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. Behind them, Courtenay, Earl of Devon."

Tudor, with an easy manner, exchanged words with the Prince and then waved and nodded with a roguish grin to someone within the throng of retainers in the body of the hall.

Margery gazed at the three English lords calculatingly. Was this trio to be trusted? There was the same pride of spirit and resilience in them that was familiar in her father.

Expectancy hushed the hall. It seemed that King Louis had arranged matters in his typical manner to draw every shred of suspense from the occasion. Its unique quality went without saying but the most dramatic moment was imminent. The heralds sounded; the Earl of Warwick was announced. Heads swivelled; eyes divided between the doorway and the tense expression on the Queen's face.

"Jesu," whispered Margery. "Can one build an alliance on hate?"

"I hope so," her husband's voice replied softly at her ear, "otherwise we are all wasting our time." His hand moved up beneath the concealment of her cascading veil and settled possessively below her collar necklet. His touch heated her and a faint flush of colour played traitor in her cheeks. She would have stepped away if she could but the throng was pressing around them.

The sound of one man's footsteps echoed from the entrance portal and halted. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, paused upon the threshold of the hall.

"What entertainment!" murmured her husband, his fingers stroking her as if she was an overspirited mare. Her profile held but inside her, hidden, parts of her stretched longingly.

The Queen involuntarily sat forward, her knuckles white upon the carved chair arms, then she sank back into the seat uneasily.

As taller people leaned forward to gape at the Earl's face, it was hard for Margery to see her father. For a moment she caught a glimpse and her heart beat with pride at the confident manner with which he swiftly scanned a hall full of his many enemies, like a bear about to face the dogs. Now she understood why he had been angered by the Earl of Oxford's tardiness. They were to have entered together so that Warwick might seem less like a Yorkist. As it was, he had been forced to enter alone.

The hall held its breath. Only the sound of Warwick's footsteps fractured the silence. Looking neither to right nor left, he walked proudly up to the dais.

Margery could not see his face as he approached the thrones but she watched the Queen fix simmering eyes upon the man who had engineered her downfall. As he drew level, the Bitch of Anjou pointedly jerked her head away, refusing to watch the Earl make obeisance to each king in turn. The Lancastrians instinctively tightened their phalanx behind the Queen as Warwick strode across to take his stand on Louis's right hand.

Then the argument for an alliance began. Charles, Due de Guienne, King Louis's younger brother, spoke first, proposing amity, suggesting a treaty between Warwick and the Queen.

"Could the fair and much wronged Margaret, Queen of England, Princess of Anjou and Maine, be generous and merciful and pardon..." He was not the most comfortable speech maker. His voice droned on.

The Queen listened, troubled, looking as though her head ached beneath the heavy gold cloth henin with its jewelled circlet. She had probably been bombarded with written arguments by King Louis for days. Told that she needed a general to rally the Lancastrians and disenchanted Yorkists; lectured that it was her last chance to win England back; and threatened that there would be no arms and no money unless she made peace with Louis's great friend, Warwick.

Guienne mumbled to a close without a peroration and there was a short silence while they all looked at the tarnished exile who sat gnawing her lower lip. With supreme effort she seemed to will herself to look at last upon her great enemy before she rose stiffly and walked forward, her train lapping loudly over the tiles in the hush. Below her cousin of France's throne she stopped to cast an arch look over the silent ministers of France and Anjou.

Margaret d'Anjou's voice was surprisingly husky. The very sound of it physically jolted Warwick and Margery wondered if the years had rolled back for him to the tense confrontations at Eltham and Westminster. "How can I pardon him?" she was saying. "All the miseries, shame and debasement my family and friends have suffered are of his making. This is the man who dares to do what God alone may do." Her disdainful lip curled in scorn. "He has unmade a king who by right of birth and his own holy nature was,
is,
the true anointed and the only King of England!"

Old Yorkist arguments, taught from the cradle, rose unbidden to Margery's mind. Anointed, maybe, but had not old King Harry's grandfather, Bolingbroke, seized the crown by force and murdered its rightful wearer, Richard II, at Pomfret castle?

"He deposed the King's grace, my lords," continued the Queen, drawing Margery back to the present, "to set in his place a coxcomb, a whoremonger with no royal blood, not one drop of Plantagenet blood in his veins, but Neville blood certainly!"

Warwick's tanned cheeks turned a dark red as a rumble of laughter from the Lancastrians washed through the hall. It was the old tale that Ned was no son of the Duke of York but the child of a handsome Flemish archer that his mother had lain with in Rouen.

The Queen was smiling at her enemy now, her golden-brown eyes provoking him to admit that the King he had set up had hounded him out of England. With arrogance, she turned her gaze upon the two kings. "In God's name, my lords, I will neither besmirch my son's honour nor my own. What would my loyal friends in England say if they heard I had become ally to the bloody Earl of Warwick!" She swept a perfunctory curtsey to King Louis and, turning to the Due de Guienne, declared in a voice still loud enough to be heard by all, "Royal cousin, I beg of you not to ask for such an alliance ever again."

"Madam!" The Queen's shoulders flinched. "Madam!" rasped Warwick's voice again.

For a moment Margaret seemed to shake. Pembroke and one of her ladies moved forward, concern in their faces. Then the Queen rallied and turned to face her enemy, turned enough for everyone to see her face.

It was not over. It was a match between equals.

Warwick had come down the last step of the dais and moved into the centre of the hall. White and scarlet, they confronted each other like figurines upon the chequer board.

"I own that because of my armies, aye, and my kinsmen's, you had to flee into exile, but, by our Holy Lord, lady, you know as well as I do that your bad counsellors plotted the downfall of my kinsmen and myself for no just reason. I would have been a lunatic indeed not to have fought back to save my own.

"Any other lord here would have done the same in my place. I acknowledge that I have erred in putting the usurper Edward on your husband's throne but, madam, I have paid for my mistake." His voice grew humbler and, with it, softer. "He has kicked me out of England like an unwanted cur and I am rewarded by his ingratitude. It is his witch-queen and her grasping Woodville kinsmen who rule England now, seizing property and goods unlawfully. Every Englishman here knows how Sir Thomas Cook was found guilty on a trumped-up charge because the Duchess Jacquetta coveted his fine house; you all know how Elizabeth Woodville sealed the Earl of Desmond's death warrant because he thought that Edward had married beneath him and said so publicly. She did not stop at his execution either but had his little sons murdered.

"Oh yes, madam, you and your friends have good cause to hate me but you have sufficient reasons to pity me. Almighty God has punished me and destined this meeting. You and I are equal in our hatred now."

He took a step nearer Margaret but she recoiled. "Gracious Queen, what I have made I can unmake. Where I have set up one king, I can set another. You and I share a common cause against the house of York, so therefore, let us make peace and become... allies." The last word spoken so softly that only those close by caught it.

It was an arrogant speech, Margery thought, but then he was a confident man.

He slowly went down on one knee and wearily raised his proud face to the Queen. She was not looking at him. He took his beaver hat off and bowed his head. Taking a deep breath, he spoke hoarsely and at great speed, like a priest hurrying through mass to go to dinner. "I beg you to pardon my past faults and to forgive me. The princes of this world are greater than all other men upon this earth and therefore capable of greater acts of mercy and marvellous wisdom than lesser men. Madam, the Earl of Warwick asks your pardon."

Sweet Heaven, it must have cost him, thought Margery. Little wonder that he had been tense and irritable for the last week.

There was an uncomfortable silence. The Bitch was not answering. Warwick shifted his weight slightly. The tiles were probably biting into his knee but there was no doubt his pride was smarting even more. Humility was not his metier and there he was, as foolish as a love-sick swain, kneeling in front of a capricious woman in full view of two courts of noble lords.

Margery watched him turn his face to King Louis. The slight nod and lowering of the eyebrows by the King signalled encouragement. The Queen moved deliberately to his right out of his vision.

His voice was quivering with scarcely leashed anger as he spoke again. "I do understand that it is asking a great deal from you but I am willing to swear to be your true and faithful soldier as his majesty King Louis can tell you. You will stand surety, will you not, your majesty?"

"Oh certainly," announced Louis, rising and coming down to make a triangle. "You see, my sweet cousin, my friend can lead your armies for you. We beg of you, Marguerite, forgive him. Mercy is given as a gift to the beloved of Christ. "Blessed are the merciful"." He rested a comforting hand on Warwick's shoulder, probably to keep him there. "The Earl of Warwick is my friend and a man of his word. We are in his debt for many favours in the past and we value his friendship above a peace with
Angleterre.
Pardon him for our sake!"