Vanity

by Jane Feather

  For a second he seemed to hover at the very brink of the dark space beyond the low-silled window, then he twisted and fell. A shriek of astounded terror accompanied his plunge to the flagstones beneath.

  The woman twitched aside the curtain so that she could look down without being seen. At first in the dark depths below the window she could make out nothing, then came the sound of upraised voices, the tread of many feet; light flickered as torchmen came running from the four corners of the courtyard. And now, in the light, she could see the dark, crumpled shape of her husband.

  How small he looked, she thought, clasping her elbows across her breast with a little tremor. So much malevolence, so much violence, reduced, deflated, to that inert heap.

  And then she seemed to come to life. She moved back swiftly to the far side of the chamber, where a small door gave onto the garderobe. She slipped into the small privy and stood for a second, listening. Running feet sounded in the corridor beyond her chamber. There was a loud knocking, then she heard the latch lift. As the door was flung wide she stepped out of the garderobe, hastily smoothing down her skirts.

  An elderly woman stood in the doorway in her nightrobe, her head tucked beneath a white linen cap. “Ay! Ay! Ay!” she exclaimed, wringing her hands. “What is it, my chuck? What has happened here?” Behind her, curious faces pressed over her shoulder.

  The woman spoke to those faces, her voice measured, calming. “I don’t know, Tilly. Lord Stephen came in while I was in the garderobe. He called to me. I was occupied … I couldn’t come to him immediately. He grew impatient … but …” She gave a little helpless shrug. “In his agitation, he must have lost his balance … fallen from the window. I didn’t see what happened.”

  “Ay … ay … ay,” the other woman repeated, almost to herself. “And ’tis the fourth! Lord-a-mercy.” She fell silent as the younger woman fixed her with a hard, commanding stare.

  “Lord Stephen was drunk,” the younger woman said evenly. “Everyone knew it … in the hall, at table. He could barely see straight. I must go down.” She hurried past the woman, past the crowd of gaping servants, gathering her skirts to facilitate her step.

  Her steward came running across the great hall as she came down the stairs. “My lady … my lady … such a terrible thing.”

  “What happened, Master Crowder? Does anyone know?”

  The black-clad steward shook his head and the unloosened lappets of his bonnet flapped at his ears like crows’ wings. “Did you not see it, my lady? We thought you must have known what happened. ’Twas from your chamber window that he fell.”

  “I was in the garderobe,” she said shortly. “Lord Stephen was drunk, Master Crowder. He must have lost his footing … his balance. It was ever thus.”

  “Aye, ’tis true enough, madam. ’Twas ever thus with his lordship.” The steward followed her out into the courtyard, where a crowd stood around the fallen man.

  They gave way before the lady of the house, who knelt on the cobbles beside her husband. His neck was at an odd angle and blood pooled beneath his head. She placed a finger for form’s sake against the pulse in his neck. Then with a sigh sat back on her heels, the dark folds of her gown spreading around her.

  “Where is Master Grice?”

  “Here, my lady.” The priest came running from his little lodging behind the chapel, adjusting his gown as he came. “I heard the commotion, but I.” He stopped as he reached the body. His rosary beads clicked between his fingers as he gazed down and said with a heavy sigh, “May the Lord have mercy on his soul.”

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed Lord Stephen’s wife. She rose to her feet in a graceful movement. “Take my lord’s body to the chapel to be washed and prepared. We will say a mass at dawn. He will He in state for the respects of the household and the peasants before his burial tomorrow evening.”

  She turned and made her way back through the crowd, back into the house, ducking her head as she stepped through the small door that was set into the larger one to keep the cold and the draughts from invading the hall.

  Lady Guinevere was a widow once more.

  LONDON, APRIL 1537

  “How MANY HUSBANDS did you say?” The king turned his heavy head towards Thomas Cromwell, his Lord Privy Seal. His eyes rested with almost languid indifference on his ministers grave countenance, but no one in the king’s presence chamber at Hampton Court believed in that indifference.

  “Four, Highness.”

  “And the lady is of what years?”

  “Eight and twenty, Highness.”

  “She has been busy, it would seem,” Henry mused.

  “It would seem a husband has little luck in the lady’s bed,” a voice remarked dryly from a dark, paneled corner of the chamber.

  The king’s gaze swung towards a man of tall and powerful build, dressed in black and gold. A man whose soldierly bearing seemed ill suited to his rich dress, the tapestry-hung comforts of the chamber, the whispers, the spies, the gossip-mongering of King Henry’s court. He had an air of impatience, of a man who preferred to be doing rather than talking, but there was a gleam of humor in his eyes, a natural curve to his mouth, and his voice was as dry as sere leaves.

  “It would seem you have the right of it, Hugh,” the king responded. “And how is it exactly that these unlucky husbands have met their deaths?”

  “Lord Hugh has more precise knowledge than I.” Privy Seal waved a beringed hand towards the man in the corner.

  “I have a certain interest, Highness.” Hugh of Beaucaire stepped forward into the light that poured through the diamond-paned windows behind the king’s head. “Lady Mallory, as she now is … the widowed Lady Mallory … was married to a distant cousin of my father’s when she was sixteen. He was her first husband. There is some family land in dispute. I claim it for my own son. Lady Mallory will entertain no such claim. She has kept every penny, every hectare of land from each of her husbands.”

  “No mean feat,” Privy Seal commented. “For a woman.”

  “How could she do such a thing?” The kings eyes gleamed in the deep rolls of flesh in which they were embedded like two bright currants in dough.

  “She has some considerable knowledge of the law of property, Highness,” Lord Hugh said. “A knowledge the bereaved widow puts into practice before embarking on a new union.”

  “She draws up her own marriage contracts?” The king was incredulous. He pulled on his beard, the great carbuncle on his index finger glowing with crimson fire.

  “Exactly so, Highness.”

  “Body of God!”

  “In each of her marriages the lady has ensured that on the death of her husband she inherits lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “And the husbands have all died …” mused the king.

  “Each and every one of them.”

  “Are there heirs?”

  “Two young daughters. The progeny of her second husband, Lord Hadlow.”

  The king shook his head slowly. “Body of God,” he muttered again. “These contracts cannot be overset?”

  Privy Seal lifted a sheaf of papers from the desk. “I have had lawyers examining each one with a fine-tooth comb, Highness. They are drawn up as right and tight as if witnessed by the Star Chamber itself.”

  “Do we join Hugh of Beaucaire in his interest in these holdings?” Henry inquired.

  “When one woman owns most of a county as extensive and as rich in resources as Derbyshire, the king and his Exchequer have a certain interest,” Privy Seal said. “At the very least, one might be interested in adequate tithing.”

  The king was silent for a minute. When he spoke it was again in a musing tone. “And if, of course, foul play were suspected with any of these … uh … untimely deaths, then one would not leave the perpetrator in possession of her ill-gotten gains.”

  “Or indeed her head,” Privy Seal murmured.

  “Mmm.” The king looked up once more at Lord Hugh. “Do you suspect foul play, my lord?”

  “Let us just say that
I find the coincidences a little difficult to believe. One husband dies falling off his horse in a stag hunt. Now, that, I grant Your Highness, is a not uncommon occurrence. But then the second is slain by a huntsman’s arrow … an arrow that no huntsman present would acknowledge. The third dies of a sudden and mysterious wasting disease … a man in his prime, vigorous, never known a days illness in his life. And the fourth falls from a window … the lady’s own chamber window … and breaks his neck.”

  Lord Hugh tapped off each death on his fingers, a faintly incredulous note in his quiet voice as he enumerated the catalogue.

  “Aye, ’tis passing strange,” the king agreed. “We should investigate these deaths, I believe, Lord Cromwell.”

  Privy Seal nodded. “Hugh of Beaucaire, if it pleases Your Highness, has agreed to undertake the task.”

  “I have no objection. He has an interest himself, after all … but …” Here the king paused, frowning. “One thing I find most intriguing. How is it that the lady has managed to persuade four knights, gentlemen of family and property, to agree to her terms of marriage?”

  “Witchcraft, Highness.” The Bishop of Winchester in his scarlet robes spoke up for the first time. “There can be no other explanation. Her victims were known to be learned, in full possession of their faculties at the time they made the acquaintance of Lady Guinevere. Only a man bewitched would agree to the terms upon which she insisted. I request that the woman be brought here for examination, whatever findings Lord Hugh makes.”

  “Of what countenance is the woman? Do we know?”

  “I have here a likeness, made some two years after her marriage to my fathers cousin. She may have changed, of course.” Hugh handed his sovereign a painted miniature set in a diamond-studded frame.

  The king examined the miniature. “Here is beauty indeed,” he murmured. “She would have to have changed considerably to be less than pleasing now.” He looked up, closing his large paw over the miniature. “I find myself most interested in making the acquaintance of this beautiful sorceress, who seems also to be an accomplished lawyer. Whether she be murderer or not, I will see her.”

  “It will be a journey of some two months, Highness, I will leave at once.” Hugh of Beaucaire bowed, waited for a second to see if the sovereign’s giant hand would disgorge the miniature, and when it became clear that it was lost forever, bowed again and left the chamber.

  It was hot and quiet in the forest. A deep somnolence had settled over the broad green rides beneath the canopy of giant oaks and beeches. Even the birds were still, their song silenced by the heat. The hunting party gathered in the grove, listening for the horn of a beater that would tell them their quarry had been started.

  “Will there be a boar, Mama?” A little girl on a dappled pony spoke in a whisper, hushed and awed by the expectant silence around her. She held a small bow, an arrow already set to the string.

  Guinevere looked down at her elder daughter and smiled. “There should be, Pen. I have spent enough money on stocking the forest to ensure a boar when we want one.”

  “My lady, ’tis a hot day. Boar go to ground in the heat,” the chief huntsman apologized, his distress at the possibility of failing the child clear on his countenance.

  “But its my birthday, Greene. You promised me I should shoot a boar on my birthday,” the child protested, still in a whisper.

  “Not even Greene can produce miracles,” her mother said. There was a hint of reproof in her voice, and the child immediately nodded and smiled at the huntsman.

  “Of course I understand, Greene. Only …” she added, rather spoiling the gracious effect, “only I had told my sister I would shoot a boar on my birthday and maybe I won’t, and then she will be bound to shoot one on hers.”

  Knowing the Lady Philippa as he did, the chief huntsman had little doubt that she would indeed succeed where her sister might not and shoot her first boar on her tenth birthday. Fortunately he was spared a response by the sound of a horn, high and commanding, then a great crashing through the underbrush. The hounds leaped forward on their leashes with shrill barks. The horses shifted on the grass, sniffed the wind, tense in expectation.

  “’Tis not one of our horns,” the huntsman said, puzzled.

  “But its our boar,” Lady Guinevere stated. “Come, Pen.” She nudged her milk-white mare into action and galloped across the glade towards the trees, where the crashing of the undergrowth continued. The child followed on her pony and Greene blew on his horn. The leashed dogs raced forward at the summons, the huntsmen chasing after them.

  They broke through the trees onto a narrow path. The boar, his little red eyes glowing, stood at bay. He snorted and lowered his head with its wickedly sharp tusks.

  Pen raised her bow, her fingers quivering with excitement. The boar charged straight for the child’s pony.

  Guinevere raised her own bow and loosed an arrow just as another flew from along the path ahead of them. The other caught the boar in the back of the neck. Pen in her mingled terror and excitement loosed her own arrow too late and it fell harmlessly to the ground. Her mothers caught the charging animal in the throat. Despite the two arrows sticking from its body, the boar kept coming under the momentum of his charge. Pen shrieked as the animal leaped, the vicious tusks threatening to drive into her pony’s breast.

  Then another arrow landed in the back of the boar’s neck and it crashed to the ground beneath the pony’s feet. The pony reared in terror and bolted, the child clinging to its mane.

  A horseman broke out of the trees at the side of the ride and grabbed the pony’s reins as it raced past. As the animal reared again, eyes rolling, snorting wildly, the man caught the child up from the saddle just as she was about to shoot backwards to the ground. The pony pawed and stamped. Other men rode out of the trees and gathered on the path facing Guinevere’s party.

  Pen looked up at the man who held her on his saddle. She didn’t think she had ever seen such brilliant blue eyes before.

  “All right?” he asked quietly.

  She nodded, still too shaken and breathless to speak.

  Guinevere rode up to them. “My thanks, sir.” She regarded the man and his party with an air of friendly inquiry. “Who rides on Mallory land?”

  The man leaned over and set Pen back on her now quiet pony. Instead of answering Guinevere’s question, he said, “I assume you are the Lady Guinevere.”

  There was something challenging in his gaze. Guinevere thought, as had her daughter, that she had never seen such brilliant blue eyes, but she read antagonism in the steady look. Her friendly smile faded and her chin lifted in instinctive response. “Yes, although I don’t know how you would know that. You are on my land, sir. And you are shooting my boar.”

  “It seemed you needed help shooting it yourself,” he commented.

  “My aim was true,” she said with an angry glitter in her eye. “I needed no help. And if I did, I have my own huntsmen.”

  The man looked over at the group of men clustered behind her. He shrugged, as if dismissing them as not worth consideration.

  Guinevere felt her temper rise. “Who trespasses on Mallory land?” she demanded.

  He turned his bright blue eyes upon her, regarding her thoughtfully. His gaze traveled over her as she sat tall in the saddle. He took in the elegance of her gown of emerald-green silk with its raised pattern of gold vine leaves, the stiffened lace collar that rose at her nape to frame her small head, the dark green hood with its jeweled edge set back from her forehead to reveal hair the color of palest wheat. Her eyes were the astounding purple of ripe sloes. The miniature had not done her justice, he thought.

  His gaze turned to the milk-white mare she rode, noticing its bloodlines in the sloping pasterns, the arched neck. A lady of wealth and discrimination, whatever else she might be.

  “Hugh of Beaucaire,” he said almost lazily.

  So he had come in person. No longer satisfied with laying claim to her land by letter, he had come himself. It certainly expl
ained his antagonism. Guinevere contented herself with an ironically raised eyebrow and returned his stare, seeing in her turn a man in his vigorous prime, square built, square jawed, his thick iron-gray hair cropped short beneath the flat velvet cap, his weathered complexion that of a man who didn’t spend his time skulking with politicos in the corners and corridors of palaces.

  “This is my son, Robin.” Hugh gestured and a boy rode out of the group of men behind him and came up beside his father. He had his father’s blue eyes.

  “I claim the lands between Great Longstone and Wardlow for my son,” stated Hugh of Beaucaire.

  “And I deny your claim,” Guinevere replied. “My legal right to the land is indisputable.”

  “Forgive me, but I do dispute it,” he said gently.

  “You are trespassing, Hugh of Beaucaire. You have done my daughter a service and I would hate to drive you off with the dogs, but I will do so if you don’t remove yourself from my lands.” She beckoned the huntsmen to bring up the eager hounds.

  “So you throw down the glove,” he said in a musing tone.

  “I have no need to do so. You are trespassing. That is all there is to it.”

  Pen shifted in her saddle. She met the gaze of the boy, Robin. He was looking at least as uncomfortable as she was at this angry exchange between their parents.

  “Greene, let loose the dogs,” Guinevere said coldly.

  Hugh raised an arresting hand. “We will discuss this at some other time, when we are a little more private.” He gathered his reins to turn his horse.

  “There is nothing to discuss.” She gathered up her own reins. “I cannot help but wonder at the sense of a man who would ride this great distance on an idle errand.”

  She gestured back along the path with her whip. “If you ride due west you will leave Mallory land in under an hour. Until some months past, you would have found hospitality at the monastery of Arbor, but it was dissolved in February. The monks seek shelter themselves now.” Her voice dripped contempt.

  “You would question His Highness’s wisdom in dissolving the monasteries, madam? I would question your sense, in such a case.”