“For me? Thank you, my darling child.” Suffused with love, I gave her a tight embrace. But in my chamber that night, it was Harry who filled my thoughts.
“What troubles you, my dear?” Henry inquired.
I heaved a sigh. “Harry.”
“What has he done now?”
“He injured old Lady Fogge.”
“How did he manage that?”
“He shot an arrow straight into her backside.”
Henry laughed. Then he recovered his gravity. “Is she all right?”
“God be thanked, she shall be well in a week or two. She is recovering in the east wing. I have placed Dr. Nicholas at her disposal.”
“How did you punish him?”
I rose and moved to the window. “I didn’t, Henry. I have tried to talk to him, appeal to his conscience. But I cannot reach him. I don’t know what to do. He is no Arthur.”
“Does he not heed when the whipping boy is chastised in his place?”
“He laughs, Henry. ’Tis more than I can bear. He seems not to have a care in the world for anyone but himself. I can’t make him heed.”
“By God, he shall heed me!” said Henry, rising angrily. “Bring Prince Harry in,” he told the man-at-arms on duty at the door.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, suddenly anxious.
“You shall see.”
Harry was delivered to our privy suite and everyone else commanded to leave. Henry waited until the door had shut behind them before he turned to his son.
“I am told you injured the aged Lady Fogge and that you will not apologize for your behavior. Am I correct?”
Harry nodded vehemently. “She’s naught but an old woman. I am prince, and need give her no apology.”
“What if I demand you apologize?”
“No!”
Henry sat down and took Harry by the shoulders. “Will you reconsider?”
Harry shook his head defiantly. “I will not. I am prince!”
“You may be prince, but I am king, and those that defy the king merit punishment of the harshest measure. Therefore, because you insist in engaging in outrageous behavior and you do not heed your tutors, your nurse, your mother, or your king, there is naught else to be done but to chastise you in a way that you will understand.”
He pulled Harry across his lap and drew down his hose. Holding him firmly as he protested and squirmed, Henry lifted his hand and struck him a hard blow on his buttocks. I gasped; Harry screamed. Slowly, a red welt took shape on his tender white skin. Henry lifted his hand again, and again.
“Henry, stop! I pray you, stop!” I cried.
But Henry was relentless. Not until Harry wept and begged for mercy did he halt the punishment. “Will you apologize to the lady you wronged?”
Harry nodded through his tears.
“Then you shall have mercy.” Henry drew up Harry’s hose and set him down on the floor. He rose and straightened his own gown. “But remember this. Each time you do not heed your mother, you shall be taught by me more strenuously than before.”
With a nod to me, he left the chamber.
Harry glared at his father’s back. “I hate you!” he sneered when Henry was out of earshot.
“Harry!” I exclaimed. He threw me an accusing look. Then, abruptly, his foul expression melted into a smile of the sweetest tenderness. He came to me and placed his little arms around my neck. “I love you, Mother.”
“And I, you, my dear child,” I soothed. But I could not entirely banish my misgivings.
AS OFTEN HAPPENED IN THESE DAYS, GOOD TIDINGS arrived hand in hand with sorrowful ones. That summer Kate gave birth to a son she named Henry. He was a sweet child who barely ever cried. But within days of his birth we learned that my grandmother Cecily had died. Again I donned black; again, I sought my prie-dieu.
Another explorer came seeking Henry’s aid who claimed he knew a better route to the riches of the Orient, and Henry leapt at the chance to fund him. Heading west like Columbus, John Cabot left with a small ship from Bristol, and Henry went back to tracking his demon, the elusive pretender.
Ever watchful, ever cautious, he sent trusted servants to spy on his spies and check the truth of the rumor that claimed the pretender was in Scotland. The strain was telling on him, for he was often morose and preoccupied, and he shed so much weight that he grew gaunt. To drown his fears, he thrust himself into activity. Each morning, he indulged in a game of the tennis he loved before closeting himself with his councilors, and regularly each week he rode out from the castle with a falcon on his wrist and his yeomen of the guards around him to hunt deer in the royal forest. Every evening before supper, he went over his books meticulously, making notations in the margins of questionable charges and taking pleasure in his growing hoard of treasure. After dinner he gambled at dice with his nobles, or sat in my chamber listening to the songs I sang for him.
But his riches were never enough for him. He raised taxes continually and curtailed expenses with a ferocity he had not shown before. Beset with night sweats, he came to my bed more frequently in order to avoid having his discomfort witnessed by the attendants of his bedchamber, but he slept fitfully, and often he cried out and bolted up in bed.
“Is it the dream again, my lord?” I asked one warm August night, placing my arm around his shoulders.
He nodded.
I checked his forehead. His brow was damp and feverish. Pushing back the heavy bed curtains, I alighted from bed. By the flame of the candle that burned in the wall sconce in the alcove, I made my way to the side table where a ewer stood ready. I poured rosewater into the golden basin, wetted a towel, and returned to mop Henry’s brow.
“Is it the same dream?” Yesterday had come news that my Aunt Margaret and her son-in-law, Maximilian, had written the pope for his blessing on the pretender, calling Henry a tyrant without sufficient title, sprung from adulterous embraces.
Henry sighed. “ ’Tis always the same. I am being chased to the death by hounds in a dark forest. This time I saw your aunt’s face, and Maximilian’s as well.”
I gave him a cup of wine and took up my lyre by the fire, where a few embers still smoldered. Strumming the chords of a soft melody, I raised my voice in song. Even in the darkness, I saw that the lines on Henry’s forehead and at his mouth had grown ever more pronounced, his sunken cheeks more hollow. The strain of kingship was etching into his flesh. Pity flooded me. I was planning to wait before telling him my news, but I decided to do so now. As the last notes of the song faded, I dropped my hands from my lyre.
“Henry, I am with child again.”
He rose and came to me, knelt at my feet, and took my hand, then kissed it tenderly.
“Amid all the troubles that beset me,” he said hoarsely, averting his face, “by God’s grace, there is one sure light. One blessing that never falters.” He lifted his gaze to me. “You, Elizabeth.”
SOON ALL THE LAND KNEW THAT THE PRETENDER had surfaced in Scotland and was well received by James IV. Then came astounding news. It was Kate who broke it to me. I had just returned from receiving petitioners in the audience chamber. Patch had greeted me merrily and I had taken up my lute to practice a new version of a favorite old song when she burst into the room without knocking.
“The pretender is getting married!” she cried.
“What?” I rose to my feet, stunned.
“To a royal cousin of King James IV—Lady Catherine Gordon, daughter of George, Earl of Huntly, the most powerful lord in all Scotland after the king himself!”
I opened my mouth to speak but no words came. “ ’Tis not possible,” I managed at last. Marriage was always a financial affair, entered into without emotion by the bride’s father, and there was nothing in this union to advance, or even secure the interests of the Earl of Huntly. Far from it; he had much to lose. Further, the marriage now bound King James to the pretender as surely as it bound Lady Catherine.
“ ’Tis said the pretender gave James’s privy council a most
heartrending account of his life—how his brother was slain, how King Richard had given him papers and sent him to the Continent on the eve of Bosworth with orders not to return until the time was right,” Kate went on, wide-eyed. “Lovell was supposed to contact him, but after Lincoln’s rebellion, no word came from him. So Aunt Margaret of Burgundy hid him with a trusted retainer and moved him around Europe to protect him. Now James has wed him into his own royal family. Surely that has to mean he is who he says he is—our brother Dickon?”
Though Kate had married and was a mother now, she didn’t comprehend the full implications of her words; she was still too young, her head filled with the ideals of romance. I clenched my fists to still my pounding heart. “It just means that James believes it, not that he is really our brother,” I said.
Patch sauntered before us. He turned to the minstrel who sat on a stool in the corner with his gittern and gave him a nod. As the man launched into a melody, Patch puffed his chest like a troubadour and screeched out a ballad in his high voice.
Once there was a baron’s daughter
Who fell in love with a juggler
Who conjured a fine steed from bits of old horse bone and cloth.
He pranced so alluringly—
Patch imitated a man riding a horse in such a ridiculous fashion that Kate couldn’t stop laughing.
That she bedded him, thinking him a duke, or at least an earl.
At dawn she looked again—
And what did she see, my ladies?
“What?” Kate demanded with excitement.
“What?” I asked absently, still trying to digest the news.
“A bleary-eyed churl.”
“But they say she is as desperately in love with him as he is with her,” Kate persisted. “And that she is the most beautiful maiden in the land of Scotland, with eyes like stars. Her father firmly believes the pretender is our Dickon.”
I raised a hand to my throbbing head. Commoners didn’t wed royalty for love, and when they did—as in the case of my own mother, or my distant ancestor, Katherine de Roet, who had wed the Duke of Lancaster—they caused worldwide scandal. Yet this marriage had not elicited a murmur of reproach. Clifford’s words echoed in my ears: Without exception, the crowned heads of Europe have accepted him as Richard of England. Even Spain.
Blessed Virgin, who is he?
Is he my brother?
I don’t want him to be my brother!
“Henry’s spies say James will go to war against us on behalf of this Richard, and that ’tis James, not the pretender, who is pushing for invasion,” Kate said.
Patch fell to one knee before me and swept his feathered cap from his large, malformed head. “The pretender has no thirst for battle! He wishes only to kneel bareheaded before the one he loves, murmuring words of endearment.”
“Patch, you fool, what do you know of love?” Kate laughed.
I left them abruptly and went to the window. The minstrel in the corner of the room picked up the rippling chords of melody I had been playing earlier. “October.” Even in the heat of August, the melody suited my mood.
’Tis October, when I wait, cold and alone, he sang. For love to find me.
Love . . . Never would I know wedded love. To feel so close to someone that my flesh seemed to contain both our hearts. To be undressed by the one I loved, to have him unpin my headdress, to loosen my hair, to unfasten my bodice, to lift my kirtle over my hips. To have my hands loosen his princely trappings and let them fall away, robe, surcoat, shirts, points . . . To lay together inside our drawn bed curtains, in the thick of the labor of love, in the tender darkness of the night, to work by touch, to close our eyes at the height of pleasure, and lose ourselves in the rapture of our bodies. To have the one I loved abandon himself to me, and to cry out to him in love.
To be his; and to have him mine.
My sense of loss was beyond tears; I drew a long breath and let it out slowly. The pretender had sought a crown, and found something far more precious.
Dickon, if it is truly you, take what you have won, and let the crown be!
Kate came to me and placed an arm around my shoulders. She led me to the settle and sat me down beside her.
“All the world believes he is Dickon, Elizabeth. Except here in England, where Henry rules.” She hesitated, added on a sigh, “Because they dare not.”
She took my hand in hers, and I dropped my head on her shoulder wearily.
OVER THE LAST OF SUMMER DAYS, IN OUR GORGEOUSLY hung rooms in Windsor Castle with their views of the river and the scattering of houses beyond, we carried on with our daily lives and tried to pretend all was normal. The cobbled palace courts rang with jingling horses and greetings of welcome for the lords and ladies who were our invited guests. At banquets we clapped for the feats of tumblers and a man who ate coals. Other evenings, we laughed at Diego the Spanish Fool, who cavorted about as a horse to entertain us, and at the antics of my fool, Patch, and Henry’s fool, whom he had named Dick the Fool in a slur on Richard. The children went fishing; they rode at the hunt with us and chased hares; they played tennis with their father. Whole nights were spent at tables with games of cards. Losing at Triumph or Plunder, Henry would borrow money from his councilors to continue.
But he could no longer hide his dismay beneath a casual dismissal of the pretender, whose wife, Catherine Gordon, had given birth to a son. Before he granted his approval to such a marriage, King James IV must have been offered incontrovertible proof that Perkin Warbeck was my brother Dickon. This plunged me into a depression of spirit that forced me to take to my bed. Again I was in an agony of mind, remembering the days in sanctuary and the sorrow of my little brother’s parting from my mother. I kept seeing my uncle Richard standing in the chapter house, and Dickon, disguised as a grimy stonemason’s boy helper, stepping through the door behind him. “Dickon!” my mother had cried, stumbling toward him, her arms open wide. “Dickon!”
Was this pretender my brother? If he was, and he won the throne from Henry, what of my Arthur? My mother’s words echoed across the years: No matter what happens, you and Arthur will be safe. Never doubt that.
But good intentions meant little when weighed against reality. My father had never wished to destroy Henry VI, but in the end, he did. Shutting my eyes against the agonizing thought, I tumbled into fitful sleep and a turmoil of confused dreams.
CHAPTER 22
Rebellion, 1497
AS SEPTEMBER ARRIVED, THE NIGHTS GREW LONG and cold, but never more so than now, in this year of 1495, for great heartbreak was mine. My little daughter Lizbeth, the precious darling who loved to bring me flowers, whose kisses had always been so abundant and whose laughter and sweetness had delighted everyone that beheld her, fell ill. She died on the fourteenth of September, aged three. The palace went as silent as a tomb. My pain could not be eased, nor grief stifled. I fell into a deep despondency. As the October day approached that had been Richard’s birthday, the heaviness that always bore down on me in this season reached oppressive heights. Leaves turned, painting the earth in glorious color, but I knew their bright triumph would prove brief and transitory, for soon they would fall to the ground and crumble into dust.
“Let us make a pilgrimage to Walsingham,” Kate urged me. “It will do you good, dear sister.”
To my surprise, as Margaret Beaufort was not at court to dissuade him, Henry approved my request, though I was four months with child, even lamenting he could not come with me. I left for Walsingham on my white palfrey, for I wished to see the people and have them see me. Only when I tired did I take to a litter. The outpouring of love in all the hamlets and villages, in the towns and cities that we passed through brought me solace, for I realized once again how much I meant to my people. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth!” they cried, dropping their burdens in the fields where they labored. They emerged from their small dwellings with babes in their arms and children at their skirts as they rushed to greet me. “God bless King Edward’s daughter!” they shouted,
lining the roads—merchants, craftsmen, farmers, carters, students, and apprentices. “God bless Elizabeth the Good! Elizabeth the Good, our queen, the king’s beautiful daughter—”
Many times I had to avert my face to hide my tears, so moved was I by their love. They brought me gifts of pudding and spices, fresh fruit, dried cherries, even birds in cages. I never accepted their presents without giving back others of more value, for I knew how poor they were and how much sacrifice their small gifts represented to them.
On our journey to Walsingham, we stayed a night at Lucy Neville’s family estate of Burrough Green. The spires of the little church pierced the sky, and as we approached, bells rang melodiously. The rolling fields were ringed by woods of bright gold poplars and orange aspen shimmering in the sun. Enfolded in the serenity of the place, I was reminded that I was not the only one who had drunk from life’s cup of sorrow; others had trod these roads before me who had known love and loss. I glanced at Lucy, riding beside me. Her father, Lord Montagu, had been brother to the Kingmaker, and had died with him at Barnet.
“Your parents, Lucy—I hear they wed for love against daunting odds, because they came from the enemy camps of York and Lancaster. Is that true?”
“Indeed, it is, Your Grace. My father paid a thousand pounds for my mother’s hand, for she was the ward of Queen Marguerite, the sworn enemy of my grandfather, the Earl of Salisbury, and my uncle, the Earl of Warwick.”
“A thousand pounds. ’Tis a king’s ransom. Your father must have loved her very much.”
“He did. And she loved him. I remember the way she ran to him each time he came home from battle—the way he touched her. The way they gazed at one another—” She broke off, tensing visibly.
I caught the glint of tears sparkling on her lashes in the sunshine. “What is it, dear Lucy? What ails thee?” I asked softly.
“Nothing, my queen. ’Tis nothing important. Merely a memory.”
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