Within the Hollow Crown (26 page)

   "Is that such a good thing? Or just selfishness?"

   "A thousand times better than snarling gregariously in the bear pit of our daily bread—or just raging impotently on the edge of it, like me! Robert's always such good company."

   "But so undependable. Look at his poems, Richard. Pure gold in places, in others second-rate dross. It was the same with his tilting, you remember…"

   "To me he is always the same."

   As he grew older Richard so often said quiet, unexpected things like that, which cast a new light on things, showing them from some reasonable angle which seemed in part to prove him right. "I believe he is," agreed Burley ungrudgingly.

   Richard turned on him with his disarming smile. If only more of his Councillors would try to bridge a generation to meet him mentally sometimes! "I have to conform my life to the ideas of so many uncongenial people," he took the trouble to explain. "They grate on my nerves excruciatingly at times. Robert de Vere, never."

   He looked at this older man who never grated either. Whose susceptibilities were so fine that he could garnish truth with kindness, and who made so dignified a picture with his grey hair, uncoarsened figure and long, belted houppelarde. How pleasant life would be, thought Richard, if one could stay always at Sheen with the kind of people one loved best! Years of deep understanding made it one of those moments when a man may speak his inmost thoughts without offence. Burley smiled back at him. "And the Queen?" he asked gently.

   Richard looked really perturbed at last. "You mean—is she jealous?"

   Burley put a hand on his arm to fend off resentment. "She might conceivably be
hurt
—"

   "How awful, Simon! She might have been." Richard seemed to speak only in the past tense. And then, to Burley's amazement, his grave concern gave place to laughter. Spontaneous, wholehearted laughter which made the suggestion sound ridiculous. But as Richard turned around the laughter stopped abruptly and the bits of grey-green lichen fell unheeded from his hands. He drew himself erect as any pikeman on parade. He didn't know that he did so, but Burley felt the stiffened arm fall from beneath the friendly pressure of his own fingers—felt the whole consciousness which had an instant before been contacting his—utterly and instantly withdrawn.

   He looked up and saw Richard's face. His unblemished young face lit strongly by the sunshine of early morning. Watched happiness transfiguring him and the way he looked back towards the palace with all his soul in his eyes. And then Burley himself turned and saw the Queen.

   She was coming down the garden path with something more glad than beauty about her. Something that had nothing to do with terrestrial grief or time. Yet she must have chosen each item of her toilette with special care. Her little buoyant shoes were grey, her gown a poem in dull pink; her long, white veil flowed out behind her from her high headdress as she walked. And her cheeks, fragile as narcissi, were radiant with a shade just pinker than the gown.

   Richard watched her come down the path as if by no movement could he bring himself to destroy a vision. A vision, it seemed, of something which he had scarcely hoped for this side of Heaven. Only when she had come quite close did he take a few steps to meet her, and seize her hands and kiss them with a sort of humble gratitude. Even then it was not so much as if they walked towards each other but as if they were drawn, each to each, by some attraction stronger than themselves, until their shadows merged in the most moving silhouette upon the flower-strewn grass. The silhouette of a young man and a girl held deeply, passionately, in the bonds and wonder of first love.

   Simon Burley turned away and leaned upon the wall, as if absorbed in the unloading of a red-sailed wherry that had come up with the tide. He was comprehending the nature of that new armour against calumny and adversity and thanking God for the fulfilment of a daily prayer. And at the same time he found himself murmuring a Nunc Dimittis. Looking at their young rapture had suddenly made him feel old. He had an inkling that his task of king-making was nearly finished. It had not been easy and soon, perhaps, he could relinquish the exacting effort. Anne, whom he had influenced, would know how to carry on.

   He would have slipped away, and left them alone a little longer in their sunlit garden, had not Anne disentangled herself from the King's embrace and come to him. Always, she greeted him with affection. But this morning she did a thing unusual for a queen. She reached up a-tiptoe on those mouse-grey shoes of hers and kissed him on either cheek. "Don't go away, dear Sir Simon. I want to thank you all over again for bringing me to such happiness," she said simply.

   "He can't go away," explained Richard, watching their mutual pleasure with delight. "There's a deputation from the Commons arriving at any moment."

   Anne's face fell. "Not
today
, Richard! I had hoped we could go riding. The broom is flaming in the deer park…"

   "Even today," he sighed. Clearly, for them, it was some very special day, and time spent on Parliamentary business like golden hours torn from a honeymoon. Normally, Burley might have tried to stave off the Commons with their everlasting mutterings, or have got de la Pole to deal with them. But this time the opposition lords were hand in glove with them and their treachery far more serious than Richard realized. Burley suspected that Richard did not realize by the carefree way in which he swung himself up onto the wall. "I've been thinking," he announced, swinging his feet as they dangled just above the clean, upturned faces of a spread of daisies.

   "About the miserable Commons?" asked Anne, drooping a little and wondering why she had gone to all the trouble of putting on his favourite dress.

   "No. About Lizbeth."

   "Richard! After—last night?"

   "Oh, not in that way, darling! I've just thought of a husband for her."

   "Who?" his audience asked in eager unison. Anne looked inordinately pleased and Burley's quick sense of amusement was tickled by so swift a gesture of amendment.

   "Sir Edward Dalyngrigge."

   Even Anne, who bore the wench no love, wouldn't have done anything as drastic as that. "
That
ruffian!" she exclaimed.

   "The man's something out of the last century. He still fights with a spiked mace," murmured Burley, stroking his little pointed beard to hide a smile.

   "Positively pre-crusader," scoffed Anne, always ardently modern in her views against the subjection of her sex. "My women say that whenever he went away to sea he used to have the armourer padlock his last wife into her old-fashioned iron stays!"

   Richard gave vent to a delighted guffaw. "Which just goes to show my acumen! Isn't he the only man who's likely to keep my lovely ward in order? Not that I'd give her to him unless I really liked him," he added, a faint trail of Lizbeth's sweetness still troubling his senses. "But I've always owed him something for his help in the peasants' revolt and, given a lovely heiress, a man like that might come in very useful again."

   Anne eyed him suspiciously. "Is that your only reason?" she inquired.

   "Well, no—" Without meeting her gaze, Richard began whistling softly to the flippant prowlike points of his swinging shoes.

   "I thought not," said Anne severely. She would have to be firm about this tendency towards commercial calculation. It must be something he had acquired from Brembre and his fellow tradesmen.

   "You may as well tell her," urged Burley, highly diverted by the growing nimbleness of his erstwhile pupil's mind.

   From his perch on the wall the King of England began to propound his nefarious scheme. "Well, Dalyngrigge has been pestering me for a permit to build a new castle. To defend the Sussex coast, he says. Hoping to get a grant towards the expenses as well, which I can ill afford. And Arundel, who has property there, backs him up. But I know very well it's because the incurable old pirate wants a handy jumping-off place for his own ships to raid the French. And I've promised Charles of Valois that this cruel, senseless sacking of seaport towns on either side shall stop."

   "What's all that got to do with Lizbeth?" asked Anne.

   "Her parents had a castle at Bodiam, hadn't they?" recalled Burley, beginning to see light.

   Richard nodded. "It's in Sussex, and not
too
near the sea. Dalyngrigge can have that—and Lizbeth with it."

   Secretly, Anne was more relieved than shocked. "Oh, Richard! And you talk about the low cunning of the Commons!"

   "I've been taking lessons in statesmanship from de la Pole, my sweet. And I have a very retentive memory, haven't I, Simon? What is it Michael says?" Looking up into the summer blue, Richard aired some of his new Chancellor's axioms as if repeating a carefully conned lesson. "'When your enemies grow dangerous, watch for the first rift in their camp, and use it to drive a wedge between them. Sooner or later, opportunity will deliver them into your hands.' That's heartening, isn't it? And then again, 'Never forget individual requests. Hold them in your memory like the frayed ends of a rope until you can knot them together to your own advantage.'" Looking maddeningly pleased with himself he jumped lightly from the wall and went to Anne as if, fooling or serious, he could no longer bear to be separated from her. "Dalyngrigge asks for a castle, and my wife—admittedly not without reason— thinks it high time Lizbeth de Wardeaux got married.
Et voilà
!" he declaimed, waving a declamatory arm and then stooping to arrange a jewel at Anne's neck to better advantage.

   "Idiot!" mocked Anne. "And am I to infer from that that my desires rank equally with a pirate's?"

   "You can infer from it that you have me eating out of your hands!" Richard told her, turning up her small palms to kiss them. "I put it to you, Simon," he appealed, with plaintive solemnity. "If I were to go fluttering the dovecotes at Bodiam—king or no king, and quite apart from the little difficulty of the stays—shouldn't I get my brains bashed out with that horrible mace?"

   Their laughter had scarcely died away before a servant came hurrying out from the palace. "The deputation," groaned Richard, letting go of Anne's hands. "Whom do you suppose they have sent
this
time, Simon?"

   Burley looked at him pityingly. Extravagant and wayward he might have been, in the common manner of youth. But couldn't they ever let him alone and trust to that brilliant flair that was in him and the new steadying influence of a sensible wife? Must the shadow of a disapproving Parliament always fall across these two? "Gloucester and Arundel, I am afraid," he said.

   Richard flung round on him. "Gloucester and Arundel! Since when have they constituted themselves the mouthpiece of the Commons' grievances?"

   "It is probably they who stirred them up in the first place," said Anne indignantly.

   In spite of serious foreboding, Richard managed to smile at her. "I'm sorry, my dear. You and Agnes will have to go riding alone," he said. "But don't forget to gather me a sprig of broom for luck, my love. Because it is June."

   Reluctantly he nodded to the waiting servant, whistled to Mathe, and walked back to the palace with Burley. All preoccupation with happiness was gone. "I wonder if I was a fool to listen to all these aspersions on Lancaster and let him go?" he said.

   "It is difficult to know, Richard," answered Burley. "If it comes to a life and death struggle between two parties he would certainly have been powerful enough to tip the scales. And it is my personal belief that the aspersions were cast purposely because if he were here—and on your side—Parliament would never have dared to do this."

   The King looked up sharply. "Do what, Simon?"

   "They are threatening to impeach de la Pole. I couldn't tell you just now, in front of the Queen."

   Richard quickened his pace, forgetting that it was hard on a man of sixty. But at the palace door he stopped. "You're not in any danger from these devils yourself, are you, Simon?" he asked earnestly.

   Burley looked back over the way they had come—the rose-lined pathway and the longer pathway through the years. More than anything he had wanted to live to see this pupil of his make good. None knew better than he that this scion of the able Plantagenets, given wise handling and a fair chance, had gifts enough to make one of the best kings England had ever had.

   But what wise handling or fair chance would men like Gloucester and Arundel ever give him? And was that strange Aquitanian woman completely
eldritch
when she used to say that her nursling was "ill-beset"? Simon Burley thought it probable that he wouldn't be there to see, but he answered evasively so as not to distress a man who already had enough burden on his shoulders. "When people are frightened with a sort of mass hysteria—as they are frightened just now about this bogey of a French invasion—they can be made to applaud incredibly cruel things," he said slowly.

   "Simon, you don't think—"

   "Much depends on how cool you keep, and how reasonably you treat with them."

   "I—treat with them! With that scum—"

   Richard's flurry of scorn was fine to see. So might his father

and grandfather have spoken. With a victorious army and a united nation at their backs. But their very prowess had left a painful legacy behind. A legacy of debts and maimed men, of ambitious war veterans and peasants who had begun to perceive their own value. Things were very different now…

"I am afraid it will come to that," warned Simon Burley.

Young Tom Holland was pouring wine for the King's uninvited guests in the great hall at Sheen. He was also trying to overhear what they said; but they talked in rumbling undertones, standing close together like conspirators. The tall, beak-nosed bishop and the dark, humourless duke. The duke was a sort of relation, but he never tipped a page a florin or two towards a new hawk or took the least interest in his advancement. Tom handed him his wine and hoped that it would choke him.