Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  Bess my niece stood idly, playing with my comb. She looked so dejected, her beauty was spoilt. Her face is smooth as a peach, but now seemed pinched and drab. I found her difficult to talk to, though she responded to kindness with a gratitude that made me feel guilty, and sorry for so many things that had happened. She had fallen from Fortune’s wheel, and found her fall hard. We should find her a kind husband.

  I’d found my fall hard too. Two weeks after my fifteenth birthday, I had been brought into London, the traitor’s daughter, a captive in the tail end of King Edward’s Roman triumph after Tewkesbury field. The honour of leading that procession had been given to Richard. I saw him only once, when the crowd, drunk with sentimental joy and free wine at Edward’s victory, had milled around him, garlanding him with such a weight of laurels and white roses he looked like a garden hedge, his horse shying as flowers were hung on its ears. Two months later, I was washing dishes in an Aldersgate cook-shop. Bess’s long, elegant hands would never know that humiliation; she would never have to feed like a scullion on broken meats and stale bread.

  ‘Leave me now,’ I said, ‘tomorrow, if it is fine, we’ll go riding along the sands.’ I wanted to wait in peace, for Richard to come to me. As the night was not cold and my furs warm, I opened a window. The night was dark as my velvet gown, though the stars over the bay were very bright, the new moon dropped into their midst like a sliver of white apple. The air smelt of the sea, and mown hay from the castle meadow.

  I knelt in front of the window and prayed, under my breath: ‘Hail Mary, Star of the sea, come to our aid — give us a child. You who bore the Holy Child, let me bear my husband the King a son.’ I’d have a bad time, I knew that. I might die. But if I bore a son that lived, it would not matter. The first one died. I prayed for his little soul, for Edward, my son, until the inevitable tears came. I blinked them away, and tried to shut out memory from my heart.

  I listened to the wash of the sea, the sigh of the wind. I thought: women’s bodies are akin to the tides, that wax and wane with the moon. This brought back another memory, of a day when we had visited the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumberland. We had ridden out over the causeway at low tide, all of us together, Richard, little Edward, who was only two and had to be carried, myself and the other children. As far as the eye could see was a desert of wet, rippled sand, across which the light and shadow of clouds passed like wayfarers. The sea had receded from us, almost out of sight, leaving a debris of white shells and pebbles, brown ribbons of weed and shimmering pools of water. So, I thought, the tide of happiness has drained out of our lives, leaving me barren as the sea-less sand.

  Not only this, the demands of kingship are draining away whatever is left of my husband’s youth. What should I do to rouse passion in him now? What did those famous beauties, Elizabeth Woodville, and Shore’s wife, do when they made love with King Edward, that I do not know of? Whores know what to do to men’s bodies; each man possessing them must teach them something new. I have known no other man but Richard. The lady in the tapestry has a secret look, as if a child has been conceived in her only a little while before. I envy fecund women…

  Lost in thought, I did not hear the door open and close softly. I opened my eyes to find Richard standing at my side, eyeing me in a puzzled way. He was alone; his servants sleep on the opposite side to my ladies, in an outer room which has a separate staircase. He wears black or white a great deal now, as I do, but tonight he had been arrayed regally in the gown I had given him at our coronation. It is the most splendid thing, made of yards and yards of purple cloth-of-gold tissue, lined with white silk damask, and embroidered all over with the blue garter emblem and white roses. It would be fine enough to receive a foreign embassy in, worn over daytime clothes, but none the less sumptuous for being worn over nothing at all. I must have looked strange, kneeling on the cold tiles in front of an open window, the ends of my hair trailing on the floor around me.

  ‘You’ll catch cold,’ Richard said, clasping my hands in his to help me up. His grip felt very warm. He went over to close the window.

  I said, ‘The King’s Grace is a very clever man, to find such magic, perfect things to give me. Richard, I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as these tapestries. I’d thank you on my knees for them a hundred times over.’

  ‘You will not.’ He took hold of my hand, instead. ‘Show me them.’ He fetched a candle sconce to hold up, so that we might look at the pictures close to in a bright light. Every foot of the tapestries contained some fresh miracle of colour and grace. Once again amazed by their beauty, I said, ‘They must have cost — oh — three hundred pounds?’

  ‘Three thousand would not have been too much if it gave you pleasure. I was shown the designs in London by an agent my sister Margaret sent from Burgundy. There was another set, with the hunting of the unicorn, through forests and flowers. They showed the beast drawing poison from a stream by touching it with his horn, and being captured by the virgin. But the huntsmen surround him and kill him with spears. It’s a sad fable of the life of Our Lord, His Holy purity, His Virgin Mother, the hunt which ends in His betrayal and death. I thought you would prefer these.’

  I put my hand on his wrist, under the smooth white silk of the wide sleeve, and drew him closer to the picture. ‘Did Master Grenier’s agent explain to you the significance of these pictures?’

  ‘They represent the five senses. This one is sight, the others are hearing, smell, taste and touch.’

  I liked best, I think, the picture representing sight. The lady sat alone and pensive, the unicorn lying beside her, his front hooves in her lap, peeping rather coyly into the mirror she held up. On her other side, the lion held up a standard blazoned with the King’s arms, and my own.

  The picture of taste, which covered one entire wall of my room, was almost too big to look at properly without daylight. In this, the lady took comfits from a golden dish held by the maiden waiting upon her. A green popinjay fluttered upon her gloved left hand. Behind them grew a hedge of roses in full bloom. I did not cease to be enchanted, though I’d spent an hour looking at the pictures already. Richard, seeing them for the first time, was equally fascinated, but I think he was more taken with life-like animals and birds, or the details of flowers, than by the romantic mystery of the lady.

  ‘I had a popinjay,’ I said, ‘my father gave it to me for New Year when I was seven.’

  ‘I remember. It bit me.’ Richard had hated it; it had screeched every time it saw him.

  ‘There’s a unicorn foal — or is it a fawn?’ he said. ‘He has a little beard, but his horn hasn’t started to grow yet.’ I knelt down to examine the bottom of the tapestry, and Richard sat on his heels beside me. We counted at least ten different flowers in just one small area: forget-me-nots, violets, daisies, pansies, gillyflowers, love-in-a-mist, bluebells, lily-of-the-valley, marigolds and daffodils, all blooming together in glorious disregard of proper season.

  ‘The lady,’ I said, ‘wears dresses of materials that I might use, and in some ways the cut resembles our latest fashions. How elegant she is. I wonder if her hair is really golden? Artists even paint me with yellow hair; it’s supposed to be a compliment.’

  ‘Stand up,’ Richard said. When I obeyed, he took a strand of my hair in his hand and held it to the light. He let it slide through his fingers along all its length, until the end fell out of his hand, then picked it up and repeated the gesture. ‘You have very pretty hair, Anne; I’ve told you so many times. Look, it’s smooth as satin. Don’t you see how much better a living thing is than a picture? Those fashions are not as ugly as the one used ever since I can remember, where you women pluck out the hair on your foreheads. Thank God you don’t do it to excess. Or shave yourself here.’ He touched me rather unexpectedly, so I gasped. ‘The thought makes me squirm,’ he said, ‘a woman’s so very soft and tender there,’ and proceeded to demonstrate the fact with intimate accuracy. I felt so hot and weak, my knees trembled and I clutched him for suppo
rt. He kissed the strand of hair in his hand. ‘Besides, I’ve never cared for yellow hair.’

  ‘The French lord did, perhaps. Enough to honour his lady by the legend over the door of her pavilion: A mon seul désir.’ My voice sounded odd, husky and breathless.

  For answer, Richard laid his cheek against my hair; I could feel his warm breath on my neck. ‘You are my one desire,’ he said softly. I blushed and felt confused as a young girl. He held me at arm’s length, studying me with the concentration of a man deciphering a mystery. ‘Look at you, pearls in your lovely hair, soft fur and black velvet, white neck, hands and feet. You don’t need that necklace — let me take it off. You smell very sweet. You’re much, much fairer than any tapestry lady. May I lie in your lap, like the unicorn?’

  ‘I thought,’ I whispered, ‘that only virgins could capture unicorns.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, mouthing my ear, ‘when did you last catch one?’

  ‘Oh, twelve years ago, or thereabouts! I’d forgotten what they looked like, it’s so long.’

  After that, it was easy to do what my friends had advised — make love to my husband. The artist who had designed those tapestry pictures composed an elegant play upon the five senses, in which those senses, as they are used in love, had no part.

  Sight — well, we left the candles to burn down and gutter out in a stink of wax. I took the purple gown off Richard, surprised at the weight of it in my arms. When he was in bed, I asked him to fetch my eagle-stone bracelet from a chest on the other side of the room, I must confess, only so I might see him walk back to me naked. I like to watch him, when he is unaware that I am watching.

  When he lay down, his head in my lap like the unicorn, I looked at his face. He smiled at me then — he hadn’t smiled much lately — and I did not see the deeper lines in his skin, the grey scatter in his hair. I thought how much I liked his mouth, smiling; the lips are beautifully shaped, more than anyone would think. Gentleness suits him. We lay scarcely stirring, our mouths touching, as if we had wounds that must be healed by gentleness before our strength came back. His face and hair smelled good, of a favourite blend of spices he’s always used: nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, angelica-root and musk, mixed in rose-water.

  ‘Talk to me,’ I said. The words were half nonsense, half serious, telling me how he’d bought me the tapestries so that their strange magic might provide some brief escape from the unkindness of the world in which I had to live, how much he needed me now, how he thought of me often in the long, absent days. I drowned in the tenderness of his voice, and the ache of sadness was soothed in me a while.

  I looked downward at myself, almost lost in deep featherbeds. I’m too thin, I thought vaguely. My breasts were always small, but round; now they’re more pointy. The tips are quite large though, and red as cherries. Once, when I was very small, my sister had hung cherries — the double-stalked ones — on my ears for ear-rings. I could remember the feel of them bobbing against my cheek, the glossy skins warm from the sun. Richard had picked them for us, climbing a high wall rather unnecessarily to get in the orchard. He’d been caught there, and duly beaten.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’

  ‘You,’ I told him of my inconsequent recollection.

  Equally foolish, he said,

  ‘How should a cherry

  Be without a stone?

  And how should a dove

  Be without a bone?’

  He took one of my own cherries softly between his lips and licked it, and I forgot to say how sorry I’d been twenty years ago, when he got caught and did not have time to eat a single one. ‘When the cherry was a flower, then it had no stone,’ he murmured. ‘My hinny bird, you’re softer than any dove. You want me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Much later, at the other end of the night, I watched the grey of day steal upon the room. We had forgotten to draw the bed curtains. Chairs and chests, black lumps by night, slowly regained their natural shapes. The unshuttered window gleamed palely. On the sill outside, a gull stood, preening casually. It was too early to know if the day would be fine or dull.

  We were lying head to foot of the bed, the sheet wound into a rope, our feet somewhere among the pillows. Richard’s heart was jerking like a running rabbit; his face was wet. I wiped it gently with the sheet. He opened his eyes and looked at me. It would be hard to imagine a look more sad, tender and bitter, all at once. ‘You kept saying — “Give me a child, please give me a child.” Don’t say that to me, Anne.’ He turned his face aside, into the tangled heap of bedclothes.

  ‘Maybe you have,’ was all I could say.

  That morning, and on many following, my ladies found me asleep disgracefully late. Grace and Joyce said nothing, but their glances spoke for them. They gave me water distilled from yellow wallflowers, to drink noon and night for a month, and tisanes of sage leaves, to aid conception. I waited for the signs, ignoring a nagging little ache in the small of my back, and an ever increasing lassitude. My face in the mirror grew paler, shadows round the eyes darker. This spoilt the new look of softness brought by pleasure. In all my married life there had never been so much pleasure, unexpected and exquisite in its intensity. Yet what should have been a joy was only a mask for unhappiness.

  It could not last.

  Richard, whom I did not often see in the daytime, began to look as bad as I did. He had the kind of pallor that revealed a shadow on the lower part of his face, even when freshly shaved. It wasn’t long before I overheard a remark — not servants gossiping, but a gentleman — about the candle that burns at both its ends. Thereafter I felt shamed, and became conscious that eyes had begun to watch for a change in the outline of my belly.

  Why does the menagerie at the Tower of London not include a King and Queen — in a cage like the lions and bears? ‘Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have a genuine King and Queen, to amaze you with their antics. The wonder of the world is, they’re very like you ordinary folk!’ We’d get as big an audience as a two-headed calf. I grow too bitter at fate; it is a fault that I should confess. I must be more grateful at having been born to high estate. Unlike some foolishly romantic ladies, I do not delude myself that it would have been better to be born a peasant, or to remain a kitchen girl all my life.

  They were right, though, about the candle that burns at both its ends. The King works longer hours than a labourer who does overtime in his dinner break to earn a few more pence. A mason, like those we saw at Cambridge, starts work in the summer at half past four, then: beer and breakfast from eight to nine, beer and dinner from eleven to one, beer and bread at three to four, home at seven or three on Saturdays. Thirty-seven days in the Church’s year are holidays. The King is lucky to get half an hour for his mealtimes, a little longer if he dines in company; Saturdays are no different. Only on the thirteen principal feast days can he confine his work to necessities. Sometimes he works past ten at night, and is always at his desk in the morning as promptly as a foreman on a building site. In winter, though, he can work as early as six, because the King, unlike a mason, may use unlimited candles.

  I’d been worried for a year now at the way Richard drove himself, but throughout this summer it almost passed the limits of reason. I think he wished to prove to himself his right to rule, and perhaps to forget he had no son to build a new world for. No issue is too trivial, no detail too small, no person too humble, to be given his personal attention. Things even a clerk would pass over to an under-clerk, the King will do himself. He’d even write out a warrant to the treasurer of the household for a payment of a shilling to a servant, if no one else was on hand to do it as quickly. As he says, he has pen, ink and a hand, and his breath is saved by not dictating it. Kendal his Secretary has begun to look like a harassed cadaver. Men groan and yawn; wives grumble at seldom seeing their husbands.

  Of the great issues, the most important was to strengthen England by securing friendships with foreign countries. We could achieve less than we hoped for, because Burgundy and Brittany were weakened by civ
il strife, Spain and Portugal friendly but distant, France and Scotland still hostile.

  Towards the end of our stay at Scarborough, the fleet put to sea against the Scots and won a small but decisive fight. The enemy piled on all sail and headed home for Leith. Richard went out with the Duke of Norfolk on his carrack, the Mary Howard, a gold whistle hung round his neck like a sea captain. They captured a Scots vessel, though the commander, Sir Andrew Wood of Leith, who Norfolk said was the most daring reiver on the North Sea, escaped.

  They were at sea two days. We watched from the castle battlements, but there was little to see except a cluster of specks on the horizon, and a little cloud like a smudge of charcoal hanging over it. Fearful that the Scots might sink an English ship, I spent half the night in the chapel, praying that if anything so terrible happened, it might not be the King’s ship. But by the second evening, they were all safe home in harbour.

  Richard came back to the castle that night, from the house in Sandside where he often worked during the day. He fell into bed and lay without speaking or moving for some time. When I put an arm round him, he moved away, though not irritably — I think he was too tired to enjoy being touched. After a while he said, ‘There’s not a muscle in me that doesn’t ache. I could sleep for days.’ He must have spent hours on end standing on the pitching deck of a ship.

  ‘Hush,’ I said. ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘I killed a man today, in hand-to-hand fight. I’ve not done that for years. We boarded a Scots ship and took it. He was a seaman with no armour, wearing only canvas breeches. He tried to swing out of the rigging on top of me. Someone warned me in time.’