We Speak No Treason Vol 1 (33 page)

‘I had a dream of you last autumn.’ She smiled softly. ‘A fair dream, I hope?’ So I told her how strange it was, and affrighting, and as I spoke I thought I saw something cousin to fear growing in her eyes. Then when I came to the end, where I fancied I saw her burning and heard the whisperings of necromancy, she cried: ‘Ah, God! Do not! Say no more!’ and turning from me fell upon her knees. I caught her shoulders and drew her up, full of remorse.

And all she could say, with sobs pouring, was: ‘I am innocent—I had no part of it. All were lies,’ and she raised her face, just the shape of a little shield, perfect and pointed. And looking at that face which was incapable of sin, I said: ‘Sweet lady—it was but a foolish dream, and you never wrought witchcraft in your life, that I know.’

Yet she talked on wildly. ‘You have told me, this night, that the Duchess of Bedford is dead and chested—I could have been served likewise. Ah, God help her!’

‘Yes, she’s dead,’ I said, wondering.

She whispered: ‘Was it—the block—the stake?’

‘The Duchess died in her bed,’ I said slowly. ‘Peaceful, and shriven, with all her daughters round her, and the window wide for her spirit’s passage. What talk is this of judgements?’

‘But she bewitched the King!’ said the Maiden, shuddering.

This I had not heard, and was full of horror for my lady’s indiscretion. ‘There was a charge of sorcery, indeed,’ I said, very quiet. ‘But it was my Lord of Warwick whom she was said to have enthralled. They said she made images of him with an iron band round his waist, to sap his strength. Not of his Grace, certes. There was a clerk named Daunger, whom Thomas Wake said had practised witchcraft years ago and knew the Duchess. But naught was proven. The arraignment was dropped, and all was fog and mist for there was none to testify.’

‘Did they not speak of me?’

‘At no time,’ I said truthfully. I had only wished they had spoken of her, far she had vanished, and it seemed that none knew, or cared.

‘Or—of love-sorcery?’

‘Dear lady,’ I said, patient, ‘it was all a pitiful attempt to shake the Queen’s kin during the rebellion—gone like summer haze. Be calm, for your soul’s sake!’

She laughed, with no humour in it, more like weeping. I was nigh frantic, perplexed by her. I was almost glad when Edyth stole back into the chamber. To my lady she whispered: ‘She is fretting for you.’

‘Coming!’ said the Maiden in a stronger voice. ‘Farewell, Sir Fool.’

‘Give me the letter,’ I said, holding out my hand.

But she only smiled, and held the roll in the flame, and it burnt up bright and lit all our faces with a glow like Hell Mouth at the Gild plays, and was destroyed.

‘God send you good fortune,’ she laid her lips most sweetly on my cheek. She was leaving, and I could not bear it.

‘St Catherine have you in her keeping,’ I said with difficulty.

‘We shall not meet again,’ she said, and was gone the next instant.

Fool that I am, I wept.

His Majesty keeps mastiffs. They lie outside his chamber of a night. Soon after his coronation we had a big baiting at Smithfield: in its way an innovation because instead of a bull, he commanded that a lion should be tried against three of his dogs. When the great tawny beast lay dead, and the curs, all gaping gory wounds, stood panting froth, King Henry ordered a strange conclusion to the sport.

‘Hang them,’ he said in his high Welsh voice. ‘Traitorous dogs shall not rise against a king.’ It took long moments for the big animals to choke on the end of a felon’s halter. Some of the ladies shuddered at the unnatural sight; my sweet Elizabeth merely smiled a curious little smile. But then she knows his Majesty’s mind, being wedded to him, and sees reason where most ignorant folk cannot...

There were many dogs at Middleham. When I rode up from the market-place, a half-dozen of Richard’s hounds ran to greet me. I waved my staff with its merry moonface jester’s banner, crying: ‘Call off your dogs, my lord! Here enters the king of mirth and none other. My sword is wit—yet, marry, though there be no bone in the tongue it has often broken a man’s head!’ All this was wasted—there were only the open-mouthed stable knaves and the smith to hear me. They shook their heads, muttering that I must be a Turk or a Frenchie, so odd were my ways. Nor could I reckon much of their northern speech. I dismounted and fondled Richard’s dogs: great deer-hounds with a brush of wolf in them, slender running-whelps and harriers. Strong dogs.

That first evening, during supper, when I bounded into the Great Hall full of quips and favoured heraldic allusions, I looked to my new master’s dais and was quite put at a loss. Though he sat under his cloth of estate with his wife and his friends about him, I had ado to recognize him. This was not the sombre, watchful young knight of the royal court. Those once guarded eyes had a light in them—like the renewed flame in those of one recovered from a dolorous sickness, or the gleam of those returning from blessed Compostella. Now and again his face broke up into smiles, as if he had no control over a deep gladness and comfort deep within. I looked along the table for the reason for his joy. In great Warwick’s powerful day, my lady Anne was ever a lovesome little creature. Now it was not the rich jewels or the blue velvet that made her fair, though lovely indeed she was. She, too, had that same inner light.

He held her hand, shamelessly. Their joined hands lay on the damask; this made eating difficult, but quite often they disdained to eat, and looked at each other. My jests that night were a little diffident, as I was anxious to try the humour of this strange place, but my lord and lady laughed at everything I said, or did. I closed one eye at John and Robert. After a time the minstrels struck up
‘Filles à marier
’ which warns maidens against marriage because of its domestic hazards, and Anne Neville smiled, casting down her eyes, shaking her head.

Item, I had seen a friend when we passed through York. Coming up Stonegate, where they had brought the masonry to finish the fair Cathedral Church, I chanced to raise my eyes to the new houses and the gildsmen’s high halls, and there, perched on a stone buttress, was my devil. I stared him out, saying under my breath: ‘All this is your fault, fiend,’ but to my surprise he only looked straight ahead, as if we had never been familiar, or argued about the fate of Lady Anne. I was quite wounded by his unmannerly ways.

Gloucester’s friends sat about him at the high table: Francis Lovell, Robert Percy, James Harrington, William Parr, Richard Nele and Miles Metcalfe, lawyers both; and two of the Warwick kinsmen, Lord Scrope of Bolton and Baron Greystoke, Richard’s loyal friends. James Tyrell was there, too. When the pale purple evening deepened to violet through the high windows, they brought torches and Gloucester beckoned me to the dais. It was for a moment reminiscent of King Edward’s easy custom. He was not bent on mirth, Richard, however, for he leaned across and asked softly: ‘Now, my friend, what of London?’

It seemed as if this was another pressing me for news, as if I knew more than the lords about him. I was curious, for Richard was not cloistered in a nunnery, like my sweet lady. Accordingly I gazed with innocent and lackwit eyes, saying:

‘Marry, sir, the forests of Eltham mourn now that the noblest of Boars is departed,’ and although his lips flickered upwards he said: ‘Don’t flatter me, Sir Fool,’ and I thought how George of Clarence would have preened at my choice folly. I told him that the King was well, and his Queen, for diplomacy throwing in ‘more beautiful than ever,’ at which my lord turned to the Lady Anne. He murmured: ‘Sir Fool prates of beauty. How should he know, when all beauty is at Middleham?’ and this threw me adrift for a moment, to hear such words from one who had just condemned flattery—until, looking at their faces, I realized that he was in earnest.

‘How does my brother of Clarence?’ he said, turning to me again.

So I was to be his eyes and ears. I had warned the King, times past, about Warwick’s rebellion, yet he had dallied. Richard knew of this. Men speak much before a fool—the name misguides them. In a low tone, I gave my master what I knew. George was again dabbling in conspiracy with the slippery Archbishop of York, George Neville—I cast many an anxious glance at the Lady Anne; it was a passing difficult situation for me. Richard listened and I saw his face begin to lose its lightness.

‘The Archbishop is in touch with my lord of Oxford, in France,’ I said. ‘King Louis has tried attacking Calais, once...’

He gestured impatiently. ‘Yea, I know of that. It’s my brother who troubles me ... surely even he would not be so...’

He was about to say ‘so rash, so witless’ but checked himself. To try and find an excuse for witless Clarence I murmured, ‘Mayhap my lord Astrologer was led by a false star.’

For the prophecy, I reckoned, had given George remembrance that he was in fact, King of England, having been declared heir by the Lancastrian Parliament in ’70. Now with Prince Edward of Lancaster and Harry VI entombed, who else? Then I grew cold from the look on Richard’s face.

‘What prophecy?’ he whispered.

Holy Jesu! I thought. He had not heard of it. Impossible but true—he had been too busy looking for Anne. I told him as lightly as I could, and with growing courage, for astrology cannot be treason, that ‘the next King’s name would begin with “G”.’ I saw him whiten and cross himself, and it was like a window opening in my mind, flooding me with cold light. I thought of my lord as ‘Richard’—often, to myself, I called him ‘Dickon’. The name George began with G, indeed—but so did Gloucester. We stared into each other’s eyes: I, the fool, he, the Lord of the North. The Great Hall with its gently laughing throng, the clatter of silver, the scurrying servants, quivered into the distance around us. Anne’s laughter, rich and soft, answered some gallantry of Francis Lovell.

Gloucester took a late rose from the bowl in front of him. Young and fresh and fair, like in Chaucer’s poem. He twirled the little yellow bloom between his fingers. Then he spoke and sometimes, in these clouded days, I hear his words again.

‘God forbid,’ he said softly. ‘This’—and he embraced the whole company with one slight gesture—‘this is my kingdom.’

His kingdom was a right wild one. Behind his court, the moors rolled upward to the sky. Middleham had stood on the slope of that dale for more than three centuries, and even before that the Conqueror’s men had raised a pile of stone, the remnants of which burgeoned against the waving grasses, the shape of motte and bailey still existing. Earlier still, the ancient Celts had built a palace there—it was old as time, this place, and mysterious.

After that first evening I took care to guard my tongue—I am paid to make men merry, not distress them. We never spoke again of the prophecy, though he talked often of Clarence, and once about sending his brother an invitation to stay a while at Middleham. He was all anxiousness; I thought of how he had drawn the flickering Duke over to the King’s standard again, before Barnet Field.

In his kingdom he was absorbed. He knew every inch. The flying winds, the bold sunlight that slipped across the moors with dark cloud-banners following were in his blood, as was the swift-rushing Ure, foaming on its journey down to the Mill Gill force at Aysgarth. Secretly I would watch him—for I am curious about my masters—when he rode out hawking, strong and frail, a creature of paradoxes, with his great white gerfalcon on the gauntlet. Its silver bells would catch in the breeze and jingle. Spaniels ran beside, black silk and scent-eager. Spring was coming, and Lent around the corner, the day I challenged him, for a jape, to single combat. Unsmiling, he took me to the tiltyard and with one lance-thrust... well, I consider myself nimble, but I fancied he had broken my wrist. Thereupon he hoisted me up with a merry laugh and bound my arm, as a brother might do, roughly gentle. ‘Try hawking,’ he counselled me and thereafter I accompanied him over the long slopes which opened like the scroll of a manuscript, with the great abbeys, Fountains, Jervaulx, Rievaulx, for initial letters and the dotted thickets the lesser text. Often it was just he and I and the Lady Anne.

The blessed time of Passion and Resurrection was behind us soon. I remember how heavenly sweet the choristers lifted their voices. At one moment it seemed that their praises would burst right through the roof of the nave and up into the clear moorland air among the larks who carolled of our deliverance. There was a great freedom about that place, a sanctity. I rode down the dale with my lord and lady. Anne’s mare, Cryseyde, stopped to nibble a hazel sapling. The new buds were tempting as almond milk—no matter how she tugged the rein, the beast wouldn’t budge, so I disengaged horse from branch, and Lady Anne smiled her thanks, singing to herself all the while. The ballad she sang hurled my heart down into my parti-coloured boots.

‘For if ye, as ye said,
Be so unkind to leave behind
Your love, the Nut-Brown Maid...

Why do you weep, Sir Fool?’

I shut my eyes hard, and laughed so loud that Gloucester turned back to see what we were about.

‘That poor song ill-befits so fair a voice,’ I said, and in a great burst of rodomontade, ‘Marry, I have a song that I fancy may outshine it; if it does not please you, madame, then I will eat it, together with salt and pepper and a wing of the next duck your lord puts up.’

She clapped her hands together, joyful as a child. I had meant to hoard this poem for some special occasion, but I would fain change the tune on her lips, for at this moment, all the day’s sweet was mixed with sour. So I cleared my sandy throat and gave forth with my poor effort, all in praise of the little Duchess. Her pale face flamed with pleasure. Gloucester watched her with a serious love. ‘Brave, Patch,’ he said. ‘For that, you shall put up the first bird.’

I rode off, balancing my sparrowhawk, sending in the dogs, gently showing my hawk the light, then throwing her up into the winds. And when I looked back from the fluttering, diving birds, I saw Richard lifting his lady from her horse on to his. So gently he set his lips on her brow, on each eyelid, on her small, pale mouth. The spaniels started many birds that day, and all for me, for my master had lost interest. There are a lot of songs written about the toils of wedlock, and most of them by fools. As for the poem, the manuscript was lost long ago, but some of the lines bide with me: