Within the Hollow Crown

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  "Followed me?"

  "Oh, not immediately. But I didn't need sending for. I guessed that if you were in trouble or hurt you would come to Sheen—just as I should myself…"

  Richard came closer, taking her by the shoulders impatiently. "But who told you that I was hurt?"

  "Agnes, of course." She lifted candid, troubled eyes to his. "Oh, Richard, how could you make Robert Duke of Ireland? She's in floods of tears because she can't go there officially. And just imagine what the uncles will say! He'll be their equal. And our children's. If we ever have any now!"

  But Richard wasn't attending. Uncles and titles and other people's troubles left him cold just then. He was looking down at his wife's white, sensitive face. "Wait! Let's get this straight," he insisted. "If Agnes told you all that, then you know about—what people are saying…"

  "Of course. You know Robert tells her everything—"

  Meticulously, he lifted his hands from the tight sleeve-tops of her gown. "And you still don't mind my touching you?"

  "That's why I came," she said simply. "I thought you might need me—tonight."

  He still stared down at her without moving. "You care about what happens to me—more than about what happens to yourself?" He hadn't supposed that any woman did, except Mundina. Marriages were made—very often, in his own walk of life, without the man and girl meeting—and they usually turned out successfully. Even cold-blooded Philippa of Oxford, for instance, would consider it her duty to "make Robert a good wife," bearing his children and never letting him down in public. But here was Anne caring desperately what happened to his own private soul. Coming all alone on that ridiculous sidesaddle of hers, no doubt. Putting aside her pride. He could imagine what it must have cost her to come.

  "Oh, Anne, my poor darling! That you should have to know that—loathsomeness!"

  "But I also know that it isn't true," she said, with regained serenity.

  "How do you know?"

  That generous mouth of hers, which his mother had foreseen would be his undoing, curved tenderly. "Don't you know there's a sort of shining quality about you? In the way you walk and when you smile. A kind of—of flame. And if this slander were true it would be—put out."

  He stood there with puckered brow trying to understand what she meant. And because at the moment he looked such a very ordinary young man to say such things about, with his shirt open at the neck and mud on his clothes, Anne began to laugh. It was so seldom they found themselves unsurrounded by ceremony, and she adored him like this, unshaven, waiting on himself and smelling a little of saddle leather. Perhaps it added to her passion for him that he had been caught out in an affair. But actually they had both forgotten about it. "Oh, Richard, don't be ridiculous!" she exclaimed, catching at his arm. "If it were true how could I possibly love you as I do!"

  He pulled her roughly into his arms. His breath caught in his throat. His eyes shone with elation. What if here—here all the time—were the perfection he had been waiting for? Here on his own hearthstone. "You mean—you love me—like that?"

  "Shamelessly, Richard. Ever since the first day I saw you!"

  His hard young lips silenced her, his whole body possessed her. Because he had dissipated nothing of his manhood on other women, his rising passion consumed them. From now on, because the whole of her sweetness and her desire was his, nothing outside their love could ever really touch him. Never again could he know loneliness of spirit. Not while he could hold Anne to his heart and lose himself in the utter response of all her senses.

  He pulled her down with him to the foot of the shadowed bed. For a while they sat there, talking a little between their kisses. But they spoke only in half sentences—too close in spirit to have need of them, too thrilled in body to care.

  "To think I used to wonder if I should like you!"

  "Burley used to tell me about you." And then, with a little spurt of laughter, "I think he almost willed me to love you."

  "And now all that matters is if I can be decent enough to keep your love."

  Once Anne managed to free herself for a moment from the exciting urgency of his embrace. "What if Lizbeth comes—now?"

  "Even Gervase wouldn't be fool enough—"

  "What will you tell her tomorrow, Richard?"

  "That I spent the night in prayer and meditation and have at

  last found her a suitable husband."

  The room was filled with their mingled ecstasy of unsteady laughter, refuting life's venom with fond foolishness. Then Richard's deep, happy laugh, alone, as he raised himself a little to blow lustily at the nearest candles and drew her down and down into his arms.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Among other things, Parliament is seething about your giving de Vere a dukedom. They say that before long he will persuade you to make him King of Ireland."

  "Far from persuading, he doesn't even want to go there. And Gloucester was eager enough for Uncle John to clear out of England and make himself King of Castile."

  Sir Simon Burley had never looked more bothered nor the King more bland. They were strolling, as they talked, in the gardens at Sheen. The dew was scarcely off the grass, and the Queen not yet dressed.

  "I came early to warn you that there's an angry deputation on the way," added Burley, with a sidelong glance at his companion.

  But nothing seemed to shake Richard this morning. "You are always welcome, however early, Simon," he said. Like his uncle of Lancaster, he was a charming host.

  But after a night of sleepless worry his imperturbable detachment was more than the privileged old statesman could bear. "For once, and with regard to this particular foolishness, I agree with them," he broke out, with heat. "For years the gifts and lands you have loaded Oxford with have made your personal expenditure look even more extravagant than it is. And he's not good enough for you, Richard!"

  Having eased his mind of the long-felt words, Burley waited for the full spate of Plantagenet rage to break across his devoted head. But a smile still lurked at the corners of Richard's mouth as though his mind were centred on some happy reminiscence. "If only you'd tell me one thing—" went on Burley, emboldened by such unwonted mildness and trying to voice what half the nation wanted to know. "I don't often probe into your private concerns, do I, Richard?"

  Richard plucked himself from his abstraction to pat him affectionately on the shoulder. "God bless you, Simon, no!"

  "Then tell me—what is it you hold so precious about de Vere?"

  They had come to a low wall dividing private gardens from public barge walk. And still Richard, recently so cruelly sensitive on the subject, showed neither self-consciousness nor resentment. "Oh, I don't know," he said, picking consideringly at a closepacked wad of lichen. "He's precious in grooming, looks and grace; and even in the timing of those priceless remarks of his." There was a perfection of artistry in verse, vestment, or architecture from which Richard wittingly drew great joy; but in a person the quality was not so easy to define. "He's so—different from everybody else. He stands apart and laughs at them—dispassionately—like some Greek god."

  "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 ne
rves 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?"