The Queen of Last Hopes (9 page)

And I hoped that the world would not go too hard with Henry and Margaret. If Margaret could bear a child, if we could hold on to something in France…Well, at least I had replaced “if only” with “if.”

The door clattered and two sailors hustled me out upon the deck. The sun was breaking over the water; on another day, I would have thought it a glorious sight.

I stood silently as I was stripped of my russet gown and my mailed doublet—more clothing, I presumed, for the master’s collection. Then my hands were tied behind my back and I and my confessor were hustled into the same boat on which I’d arrived, accompanied by the most disreputable looking of the sailors, whose name I had somehow managed to catch during the squabble over the jury box. Richard Lenard. My eyes went to the rusty sword he carried, and the master smiled. “Would we lie to you? A nobleman’s death. But no need to muck up my ship with your blood.” He stepped back and the boat was lowered slowly into the sea as my confessor prayed. I could see my own ship in a distance, my men lining the deck, watching.

“Kneel, Suffolk, and say your prayers if you’ve any to say.”

When I received my confessor’s blessing and kneeled, I found that I could not summon more than the simplest prayer, for the long night of confession and absolution had exhausted me spiritually. Instead, my thoughts drifted to a day nearly twenty years before, back at Jargeau. I had fought as long as I could until, weakened from my wounds and surrounded, my brother Alexander lying dead at my feet, I had finally given up, knighting the young man who took me captive so I could surrender to an equal. (It had given me a certain comfort.) With my brother John, badly wounded and delirious, propped against me, I had been conveyed by water to Orléans, where in due course I had been brought before the victorious Maid. Even as I had knelt in submission, mourning my dead and dying brothers and cursing myself for the mistakes I had made, I had sensed that I was in the presence of greatness. “My lady”—how exactly did one address a female in armor?—“I am your prisoner, for you to do with as you will.”

“You put up quite a fight, my lord. It was well done.” The Maid smiled, very faintly, and said in that gruff voice of hers in the most matter-of-fact tone possible, “But I put up a better.”

Let these ruffians play their games with their mock trial and rusty sword; they might have bested me, but I had met defeat from a far more formidable foe: at the hands of the most gallant general France had ever known. And I had put up a good fight; she said so her very self. It was something of comfort to take to my grave with me. I smiled, and I was still smiling when that rat-catcher Lenard raised his sword.

I have become a master at hearing bad news. I stand firmly on my feet; I ask logical questions—How? Who? What? When?—and no one but I knows that I am shaking inside and want only to find someone’s skirts in which to bury my face. But Suffolk’s death was the first bad news I had that struck me to the bone, and besides I had just turned twenty and still had the foolish notion that men could act decently and not like savages. So as Henry Spenser, a yeoman of my husband who had accompanied Suffolk on his journey, told me his story, I wept, then finally sank to my knees and hugged them as my ladies clustered around me. It was the chief of them, Emma, Lady Scales, who was managing to ask questions.

“They used a rusty sword to behead him,” Spenser said in a flat voice. “It took six strokes—it was the rust that made it difficult, I suppose, and the knave didn’t know what he was doing anyhow. They drew near our own ship so we could watch what became of the traitor, they said. The duke’s confessor said that the men on the
Nicholas
were laughing, joking that his aim was so bad, calling out encouragement and making bets on how many strokes it would take. There was so much blood, your grace—we could see it from our own vessel, pooling on the floor of the boat as they butchered him.”

“For mercy’s sake!” I managed. “Tell me that he was not conscious throughout this!”

“I believe the second stroke killed or stunned him, your grace. He made no movement or sound afterward—he had groaned after the first one. The third one I would say most definitely. It went so deep…” Spenser closed his eyes and swayed as I fought back sickness. “I can say no more about it, your grace, I am sorry. Afterward, they rowed to Dover shore and tossed his body there in a heap, like debris from a slaughterhouse. They stuck his head on a pole they had and set it near the body; his confessor had to watch all this. Then they came back for us and stripped us of any valuables we had and brought us to shore alongside him in the same boat they’d used to murder the duke in.”

“Does he lie on Dover sands now?” Lady Scales asked.

“No. There was a crowd that collected to jeer at him and us, but a couple of us managed to slip away and borrow a horse to get to the sheriff, and he sent armed men to assist us and linen to wrap the body in. And a wagon to take him away. He lies at St. Martin’s in Dover now, and the sheriff has sent to the king for instructions about what to do with the body.”

“Does his widow know of this?”

“Yes. She was in London—arranging some of her lord’s business, in fact. She is on her way home to Ewelme and is bearing up as well as can be expected.”

I commanded myself enough to rise and to say to my chamberlain, “See to it that every assistance she needs is given to her. And make certain the king is informed of this so he can assist her also.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“And now I wish to be alone. Lady Scales, take me to my chamber.”

Lady Scales obeyed and led me to my private chamber. There, I clutched the poem Suffolk had copied for me to my chest and wept for three days straight.

***

“Your grace cannot keep on like this,” said Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Duchess of Bedford, three days later. A Frenchwoman like myself, she had been married at seventeen to John, Duke of Bedford, a younger brother of Henry V. Widowed after scarcely two years of marriage, she had scandalized her family by marrying one Richard Woodville, the son of her husband’s chamberlain. The marriage was by all accounts a most happy one, and a fruitful one as well; even in my bleary-eyed state I noted that yet another Woodville was growing in the duchess’s belly. “You will die at this rate, weeping and not sleeping and not eating, and what if perchance your grace should be with child?” She patted her belly absently. “It cannot thrive if you mourn so.”

“The Duchess of Bedford is right,” put in the Duchess of Buckingham, the older of the ladies for whom Lady Scales, fearing for my life, had sent. She sighed, for she had lost four of her seven sons in early childhood. “We know that the Duke of Suffolk was close to your grace’s heart, but you can do him no good by starving yourself.”

“And the king will be most grieved if you sicken,” said Lady Scales. “Please, your grace, for his sake. The Duke of Suffolk would not want to see you ruin your health,” she added coaxingly.

I stared listlessly past the gaggle of ladies standing round me to my damsels, who had given way to their seniors. They had been sewing, but now I noticed that they were passing a piece of paper around. “What is that?” I demanded.

Katherine Peniston made a move as if to hide the paper she held. “N-nothing, your grace.”

“Of course it is something, or you would not be saying that.” I frowned. “I hope you are not receiving letters from William Vaux.” William, thirteen like Katherine and one of my pages, had been eying the well-developed Katherine for some time, I had noticed. She had been eying him back as well. “I will not have you conducting yourself in such a manner. Don’t you think I have more to concern myself with at present than your love business? Give it here.”

Katherine sighed and handed it over. “I wish it were what your grace thinks it is, but it is not. It is a horrid thing. Please pay it no mind.”

I took the paper impatiently. As soon as I took it into my hand I found that it was certainly not a personal letter; it bore nail holes and had obviously been ripped from a wall. It read:

In the month of May when grass grows green,

Fragrant in her flowers with sweet savor,

Jack Napes went over the sea, a mariner to be,

With his clog and his chain to sell more treasure.

Such a pain pricked him, he asked a confessor.

Nicholas of the Tower said I am ready, this confessor to be;

He was held so, that he not passed that hour.

For Jack Napes’ soul
placebo
and
dirge
.

Who shall execute the fest of solemnity

Bishops and lords as great reason is,

Monks, canons, and priests, with all the clergy,

Pray for him that he may come to bliss,

And that never such another come after this.

“Jack Napes” was a common name for a tame monkey or ape, and Suffolk’s badge was the clog and chain that such an animal would wear. I stared at the ladies. “Jack Napes is Suffolk?”

“Yes, your grace. They are putting copies all around town.”

I skimmed the rest, nearly a dozen sickening stanzas. Gleefully, they mockingly described a funeral service held for poor Suffolk, attended by all of those the writer deemed to be enemies of the people. Anyone remotely associated with Suffolk—and with Henry’s government—was mentioned there. “This is detestable!” I flung it into the fire and watched it disappear into the flames. “I would like to do that to the man who wrote this.”

The Duchess of Bedford, whose own husband was named in the poem, nodded in satisfaction. “Aye, your grace. So would I. But there are plenty of copies of this poem about, sadly.”

Unthinkingly, I reached for a wafer that had been left strategically nearby by the ladies and bit into it furiously. “Why are they not being destroyed?” I asked after a moment.

“The writings, or the writers?”

“Both,” I said grimly. Just weeks before, while Henry was heading to Parliament in Leicester, a man had run into Henry’s path and struck the ground with a flail. This, he had said, was how the great Duke of York would deal with filthy traitors such as Suffolk if he were at Leicester. Henry with his reputation for leniency had shocked many, including me, by ordering that the man be hanged, drawn, and quartered. “The men who are circulating these vile things should be treated as that man at Stony Stratford was.”

“I have heard that Lord Saye has threatened to turn all of Kent into a wild forest in revenge for what was done to Suffolk,” said the Duchess of Bedford. “But it may be no more than wild talk from the people.”

“I hope it is true and that is exactly what he will do,” I said. “They deserve it.”

Katherine goggled at me. “Well, Katherine? Why look you so? I owe you an apology about this writing, I suppose.”

“It is not that. It is only that you sounded so—vengeful just now, your grace. I don’t believe you ever have before.”

“No one has ever cruelly murdered someone of whom I was so fond before. And smacked his lips over his death as these people do.” The girl still looked so worried that I drew her closer to me and stroked her hair. “Come, Katherine. I spoke wildly. There must be good people in Kent who deplore what has been done. But I do intend to write to Henry and ask him to suppress these dreadful writings, and I intend to ask him what is being done to apprehend the duke’s murderers and to press him to do some more to hunt them down. My ladies Bedford and Buckingham are quite right. I have been here weeping and starving myself long enough. It is time I took some action.”

But others, with very different intentions, were thinking the same thing. Their leader was one Jack Cade.

***

Who was he, Jack Cade? To this day, I hardly know. Some said that he was a physician; some said that he was a sorcerer. Others said that he had fought for the French. One story, which I was certainly ready enough to believe, had it that he had fled his master’s household after impregnating and murdering a fellow servant there. Some said he was a Kentishman, others claimed that he had spent his life in Ireland and was a distant relation of the Duke of York; indeed, he called himself at one point John Mortimer, the Mortimers being the ancestors of the duke. But whoever he was, by mid-May, he was marching from Kent to London with a horde of armed men, determined to present a list of grievances to the king.

When Henry, who was holding Parliament at Leicester, heard the news, he and a number of his lords hastened to London, where they stayed at St. John’s priory in Clerkenwell. I stayed at Greenwich, where I passed the fine June days pacing up and down by the riverside, waiting for the return of the messengers I dispatched two or three times a day to the king for news. At last, on June 18, I learned that Henry himself was riding to meet the rebels at Blackheath, where they had encamped. It was the first time my husband had ever arrayed himself for battle, and I suppose it could be termed a success in a way, because when Henry arrived, the rebels had disappeared the night before. Soon, Henry was back with me at Greenwich.

In no time at all, it seemed, bad news followed us there: two of Henry’s kinsmen, the Stafford brothers, had pursued the fleeing rebels into Kent, certain that they could be dealt with easily now that they were out of London. Instead, the Staffords and about forty of their men had been killed near Sevenoaks, and Jack Cade, who by now had become the rebels’ official leader, was strutting about in Humphrey Stafford’s brigandine, salet, and spurs. Meanwhile, another contingent of Henry’s men, itching for action, ran wild through another part of Kent. Instead of intimidating the rebels, they only succeeded in bringing them more adherents.

“Even your grace’s men at Blackheath are beginning to murmur in favor of the rebels now,” the Duke of Buckingham informed Henry and me at Greenwich. He looked drawn and weary; the Staffords who had died were his cousins. “They have threatened to join them unless you imprison Lord Saye.”

Lord Saye had held the hopeless job of royal treasurer since the year before. I knew better than to ask Buckingham what he had done to incur the anger of the Kentishmen; he had been close to Suffolk, which was enough. “You think they are serious?” Henry asked.

“I fear so. Lord Saye is unpopular in Kent in his own right, your grace must know; he is claimed to have acquired property there through foul means. Whether there is truth to it, who knows? But he is also blamed for our difficulties in France, and having been associated with the Duke of Suffolk…”

I blinked back tears. Henry said resignedly, “I must trust to your judgment. Have young Exeter arrest him.” Henry Holland, the sulky young duke I’d played cards with in more innocent times, had returned from Ireland (without his guardian) and had been allowed to take over his late father’s duties as Constable of the Tower.

“That will please them,” Buckingham said dryly. “One of the complaints of Cade’s men is that men of royal blood like Exeter and the Duke of York have been kept from your grace in favor of men affiliated with the Duke of Suffolk.”

“God’s wounds!” I said unthinkingly. Henry turned grey-faced at the oath, the first I’d ever used in his company. “Must they speak of Suffolk always as if he were the devil incarnate? They have his life. Will they not be satisfied until they destroy every vestige of his memory?”

“They are bitter men, your grace, and frightened ones. Kent has suffered from the war more than most parts of the country, in terms of trade, and it has been raided by the French. Too, they see the soldiers returning from abroad, demoralized. And they believe they lack justice.”

They should all be lacking heads, I thought, but Henry looked so miserable I forbore from saying anything. Instead, I excused myself and went back to my garden and my ladies.

***

“I am going to Westminster, my dear. And then I am going to Kenilworth.”