The plain fact is, though for me the hand of the clock may creep ever more slowly from each numeral to the next, the King’s hours fly away fast as swallows, all spent in work or travelling. How we travelled; it made me very tired. In eight weeks we went from Nottingham to York, York to Middleham, Barnard Castle and Durham, and back to York. Then we went to Pontefract, and from there to York again for Corpus Christi, back to Pontefract, and then at the end of June another, longer journey to Scarborough. There Richard intended to oversee the fleet, which was to sail against the Scots. One way or another, on land or sea, we should give them a sit-up this summer, and force them to sue for peace.
Scarborough, briefly indulged by the fickle summer sun, should have put new heart into anyone, but it could not cure my sorrow. Throughout every mile of our journey from York to the sea, wind tore across the high, bare wold country as if it would pick us up from one place and set us down in another, but did not drive away the clouds that sagged out of the sky to veil the land in mist and rain, from which one came upon grey stone villages by surprise. Wet people in dingy woollens watched us. The roads were awash with chalky mud; our horses’ hooves splashed up puddles like dirty milk. Shivering, I remarked to my ladies that we seemed in for a right stormy northern July.
This weather lasted almost a week. I could not drag myself away from huge fires in draughty hearths, and coughed as if the cold sea wind that rained salt on Scarborough Castle, probing every chink in walls and windows, was rattling my bones together. July felt more like January. This was the first year I’d found the foulness of northern weather hard to tolerate, in a season meant to be summer. By the end of a week, however, the clouds went out to sea overnight and the sun came up cheerfully, as if unperturbed by what had gone before. The sea danced and smiled, and the north seemed itself again. The days became warm and clear; one could see for miles along the coast. Whins in bloom turned the heaths brilliant yellow.
On one of those idyllic summer days, at my wits’ end over my unanswered prayers and continuing barrenness, I blurted out the whole trouble to my closest friends, Joyce Percy and Grace Pullyn. Both can be trusted never to gossip. Some women are fond of exposing their married lives, of stripping their husbands naked in chatter with their friends. I have always hated this sort of talk, it seems so heartless, exposing not only the men, but the women, as discontented and waspish. For some time, this had made me reluctant to confide in anyone, but I no longer knew how to live with my misery. So, as we were walking in the rose garden, the sun warm on our backs, the wall at the cliff-edge keeping off the worst of the wind, the sea sparkling beyond, I unburdened my heart to them.
Words broke out of my mouth all of a sudden, louder than meant: ‘It is hard, to be a Queen.’ Then I wished the platitude unsaid. They stared at me. Joyce, who is one of those women born to mother everybody, opened her mouth, then shut it, nonplussed. I stood holding a blown crimson rose I’d just snipped, waving my scissors, and feeling the colour surge up my neck. Knowing my face must match the rose petals, my heart fluttered ridiculously.
Joyce said, ‘Your Grace tells the truth there. Anne, my love, you mustn’t be sad today. Can’t we bask in the sun and think of nothing? The others are playing closh and quoits on the lawn — we could join them.’ She was trying to coax me out of my gloomy mood. If it had not been for her, and my other friends, I think I should have gone mad, in these last months, grieving. From the other part of the garden, we could hear the clatter of tumbling pins, and the laughter of my ladies amusing themselves.
‘A Queen,’ I said, ‘is a precious vessel. The state ordains that her body shall exist to carry princes. It should be made the eleventh Commandment in England: the Queen shall bear her King heirs. Well, I have not. I am twenty-eight years old. Eight years barren. My son is dead. I tell you, Grace, Joyce, my body is useless as an empty bean husk. It grows thin and faded, and this cough is making a wheezy old woman of me. Surely, in honesty and by logic, I am no Queen?’
‘Anne!’ Joyce was aghast, more red in the face than I had been. ‘Your Grace must not talk in this way — as if God had abandoned you. Never, never let the King hear you say such things, it would be like pouring salt in an ulcer. You are young; there’s time for more children.’
‘After eight years? I should believe in miracles, but…’ Their faces were melting in a haze of tears, and I could no longer see their expressions of shock and anxiety. ‘I would die rather than hurt my husband the King. Yet I injure him by my very existence. If he did not care for me, he could rid himself of me by divorce, have heirs by another wife. But he is shackled by love and conscience. I hang round his neck like a millstone. He is in such danger, his throne, his life, because…’ I couldn’t go on, my voice was breaking.
Grace had so far said nothing, merely standing with downcast eyes and pursed lips. She is the best listener in the world, a quiet, plain woman, the eldest of us three, wife of a Yorkshire gentleman of no account at all. She took the rose out of my hand. I’d gripped the stem so hard, thorns had pricked my finger, and blood was dropping on to my gown, making rusty spots on the black damask, and bright red blobs where the skirt was folded back to show the white satin lining.
‘The King cares for you. He would never divorce you.’ She put the rose in her basket, then dabbed my hand gently with a handkerchief. ‘You must not give up hope.’
‘Hope? There’s precious little hope now. Besides, I don’t feel strong enough to carry a child, even if we summoned the energy to make one between us.’ A snail was crossing the paving stones of the path, leaving a silver trail. For one so slow, it seemed very sure of reaching its destination. I wished I might share the purpose of that snail.
‘Do you think, then,’ Grace said diffidently, beginning to perceive the unadmitted cause of my distress, ‘that if his Grace the King did not hear Mass every morning at four, and then ride to work down at the harbour on the affairs of his navy, and not come back until all his subjects are in bed, you might feel more hopeful?’
Thankful to be given so much lead, I said in a rush, ‘You must not think the King neglects me… He has to work so hard. This year has been full of trouble. He’s not had the heart for…’
Joyce, the practical, offered simple advice. ‘Make love to him. Don’t think yourself no longer desirable. You have an advantage over so many of us — a husband who has eyes and heart for no other woman. Woo him — whatever you do when moved by passion, at the height of bodily pleasure, do at the beginning — show you desire him. You mustn’t be shy… Maybe it is sinful to say such things, but a woman who is loved frequently stands more chance of a pregnancy than one who is not.’
I blushed hotly again; even the tips of my ears burned. ‘Surely nothing between man and wife who want a child is sinful?’
‘No. And it’s between them alone — no need to tell your confessor anything.’ Joyce was very firm. ‘As for feeling tired; you must sleep in the afternoons, and we’ll spend the rest of the day making you beautiful!’ She managed to raise some hope in me again; a lightening of the spirits came from sharing the problem with friends who love me.
On coming in from the gardens to my apartments, we were confronted by a scene of chaos. The two Elizabeths, Parr and Bess, King Edward’s daughter, and Anna, Lady Lovell, looked on in consternation. Servants were heaving rolls of arras the size and weight of siege guns, propping ladders against the walls, sweeping up heaps of dust and rushes. My spaniels ran delightedly among them, heedless of cuffs and curses. We called the dogs away, and my steward arrived to explain that a new set of wall hangings had been delivered, arriving from London by ship, and that afternoon brought up from the harbour. The set of six tapestries had been purchased from the famous workshops of Pasquier Grenier of Tournai, by special command of the King, as a gift for me, his wife, and the rehanging of the room was taking place on his orders — entirely for my pleasure, the steward said. This all but reduced me to tears of remorse, having spent an hour bemoaning my lot.
Whe
n all the hangings had been put up and the room tidied, we went back to look. We stood dumb-struck in the doorway. Joyce, not given to lavish praise, her feet usually planted firmly on her native soil — she comes from the East Riding — said in awe, ‘But this is magic, sorcery — it cannot be Scarborough Castle, it’s Paradise!’ She was right. The room was transformed from a rather old-fashioned royal apartment in a bleak northern castle, to an enchanted, secret garden. It made me think that a golden key would be needed if we wished to enter it, but all we had in fact to do, was walk through an ordinary oak door. We spent a long time going from one picture to another, to gaze and exclaim.
In each one, on a background of vibrant rose red, the figures of a lady, the young girl who waited upon her, a lion, and a unicorn, were standing upon an island of dark blue, like angels upon a cloud. The lion and the unicorn acted as standard bearers, though in two of the pictures the unicorn was shown in gentle submission to the lady, which is proper behaviour for a unicorn.
My ladies declared that the tapestries were the finest they had ever seen; even those who had travelled in France and Burgundy had not set eyes on their equal. Not only were colour and design marvellous, but the air of mystery created by the subject embodied the world of all the romances we had read. My room would now make a setting for the Roman de la Rose; the love stories of Tristan and Iseult or Lancelot and Guinevere could be re-enacted there. The tapestries were large, so enclosing us in their world of delightful deception, that one had to look out of a window to discover the real, English scene of sky, cliff and grey stone walls.
Joyce, Grace, Elizabeth, Bess and Anna engaged in a heated discussion of the lady’s gowns, jewels and headdresses; some they thought ugly, but some roused them to ecstatic envy. Even the most daring fashions of the court of Burgundy were not as rare and strange as these.
I listened to them with only half my attention, as I couldn’t keep from wondering at the lady with the unicorn. Who was she? Was she real, and living somewhere in France or Italy, or had the artist dreamed her up out of his own imagination? Perhaps he built his dream on some fleeting moment, a chance meeting, never forgotten. Beside such an artist’s ideal of a fair woman, I am nothing, Queen of England, yet nothing.
Joyce and Grace came back to me, smiling, obviously bursting with some idea. ‘Oh, madam,’ they exclaimed, ‘dear Anne, you shall be fair as the lady who has tamed the unicorn!’
‘All the glamour of that lady? I’m too pale, too…’
‘Nonsense,’ they said in chorus, ‘we’ll make you more beautiful!’ I let them carry me along on their own enthusiasm, and, it is true, as they got to work on me, I did begin to feel a little cheered.
First came the elaborate and tedious task of washing my hair. They set a huge silver basin on a stool and I knelt in front of it on a cushion. Grace combed all the hair forward into the basin. Elizabeth Parr poured rain water (this keeps hair silky) scented with camomile and gillyflowers over it from a silver ewer, which she dipped into a tub the servants kept replenished and hot. After soaping me vigorously with fine Castile soap of Bristol, they rinsed it away by pouring streams of water steadily from the ewer, until the hair felt slippery and squeaked between our fingers. Water trickling down my nose, I watched the perfumed steam rise, the mass of hair floating like dark weed, then as it was fished out and wrung, the water splashing back into the basin. At the bottom, the silver was engraved with a naked figure of the Goddess Fortune. She wavered and undulated with the liquid, and I thought: maybe she will smile on me again, for a little.
It took a long time to dry the hair, while I sat with my back to an over-warm fire, and Grace and Bess alternately rubbed it with towels and combed out long, wet strands. As it dried, it lost the seaweed look and returned to its own pale mouse-brown. However strong an infusion of camomile flowers is put in the water, it does not approach blonde. It has always seemed an uninteresting colour, but I only once dared to try a dye, and that was when I was thirteen and too young to know better. It turned the colour of a saffron bun, and my mother shrieked, declaring that no daughter of Neville and Beauchamp should look like a Flemish whore from the stews of Southwark. I didn’t know what a Flemish whore looked like, or stews, and had never been to Southwark. But I had to bundle it all under a tight cap for weeks until the garish colour faded, in case my father saw it, all the while made to feel wicked as Jezebel.
Ladies at court do use saffron dyes, or make brown hair red with quicklime, but they are usually of an age when the years cease to be counted after thirty, and of dubious reputation. It used to be fashionable to imitate the rare shade of silvery blonde that was the great beauty of Elizabeth Woodville, Lady Grey, until she was well over forty, and also that new-minted coingold of Shore’s wife;. We heard of one lady who became quite bald through bleaching. I’m afraid I shall never set fashions.
Bess said, ‘How your Grace’s hair crackles from the comb. It’s so fine…’ A skein of hair spun out from the comb like a cobweb, floating weightlessly down to mingle with the rest. When she had finished polishing it strand by strand with a piece of silk, it hung about my shoulders and waist like a curtain of silk itself.
Grace, who is gentle and skilful, plucked out a few hairs from the front with tweezers, to leave my forehead smooth and high. At the hairline, new hair grows downily, and fair enough to be barely noticeable, so I do not have to suffer the agonies and reddened skin of those less fortunate. Plucking is best; shaving is horrible, and has to be done every other day, as if one had a beard! The most she could do with my eyebrows was pluck them to a line fine as silverpoint, for they do not possess the haughty arched look required by fashion.
After that, my hair was wound into a rope and pinned up on top of my head under a linen cap, so it would not get in the way of the bathing. I sat on a large sponge on a plank in a wide wooden tub, with curtains of scarlet and white silk like a tent, trimmed with gold fringes and surmounted by a gilt fleur-de-lis. When I was finally helped out to stand upon damask towels to be dried, they poured so much rose-water over me, I had to be dried all over again.
At this point we felt we had earned a rest. I was dressed in a shift of flimsiest linen, and we sat eating strawberries, still warm from the castle garden. Dusk was drawing in; the sky had the purplish bloom of a plum. In the soft candlelight of early evening, my prolonged toilet continued.
About a hundred years ago, a French knight — de la Tour Landry — wrote a homily for his daughters, advising them on modest Christian behaviour. Master Caxton printed it in English this year. My own father was strict; to disobey him did not enter one’s head, but he was a man of the world, unlike the narrow-minded Frenchman. If women followed his advice we’d all look plain as puddings. He said painting the face is wicked, grooming the hair a sinful vanity, and predicted torments in Hell for women who pluck or shave their hair and brows; devils will stick red-hot pins in the denuded parts. Nevertheless, all of us do these things in varying degrees. Richard, in common with most men, loathes any too obvious interference with nature in the body of a woman, but he has never objected to discreet paint on the face. He’d hate me to be unfashionable or downright dull among others.
Elizabeth smoothed first lemon juice, then sweet almond oil on my hands to whiten and soften the skin, rubbed the nails with vermilion to make them rosy, then did the same to my feet. My face, after being washed with soap in the bath, was bathed with milk, then with cowslip and rosemary water to make if soft and clear, and I hoped, relax the tight little lines round the eyes that are a sure sign of being over twenty-five. As my skin is so pale, I never use the sticky white or pink ceruse that some women apply thickly as lime plaster. It must be repulsive for a man to kiss skin disguised in this way. No blue or green colour on the eyelids, either, or black lines drawn round the eyes; only whores use that much paint. But Joyce tilted my head back and told me to open my eyes wide, while she put into each a drop of nightshade juice. The Italians call it belladonna, or ‘lovely lady’, because it makes your
eyes look large and lustrous, and the pupils swell as a cat’s do in the dark. The vermilion was used again, sparingly across the cheekbones, rubbed in well, then more on the lips, blotted with a cloth, and applied again, to make it brighter. Without saying anything, Joyce began to stroke a little red on my nipples, and I almost told her not to, slightly shocked, then didn’t. They wrinkled pleasantly at the touch of her finger. If my husband’s reactions are anything to judge from, men particularly like this part of the female body, so there doesn’t seem anything wrong in enhancing its charms. The paint made the rest look startlingly white. Last of all, they lavished precious and potent perfume on me, far too much for modesty, and applied in the most immodest places. The heavy richness of oil of roses, musk and amber would linger for days on me, my clothes, my bed, and transfer itself to Richard’s skin and hair. I hoped no one would notice if on the following day he smelt like a Venetian courtesan!
Grace combed down my hair again, leaving it loose, but winding a string of pearls as a caul about my head to set it off. She stripped off the shift, so, like Eve before her fall, I was clothed only in the length of hair. Then she wrapped me in a gown of black velvet, sewn with roses in silver thread, lined with grey squirrel fur, more fur round the hem and wide sleeves. Joyce put her head on one side critically, then added a necklace of Florentine goldsmith’s work, fashioned like a spider’s web, a broad collar set with so many pearls they looked at first like dew upon the web, until one saw they made a design of interlocked roses. Joyce showed tact, I thought, in thus hiding the thinness of my neck. The result pleased her, as it did me. When she held up the mirror, I appeared both younger and healthier, lips very red, eyes enormous and black, reflecting back the light. We are clever, I thought, Richard will like me.
Some Touch of Pity Page 17