‘Often. Even in the King’s palace, where I live sometimes, I’ve had, well…they keep coming back. We don’t have stoves in England — I like this one.’
‘It came from Cologne; my husband brought it back. My friends admire it. Do you serve the King?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is he like, tell me. I’ve seen him — such a big, tall man. Is he really such a seducer of women?’
‘Sometimes.’
She laughed uproariously at this. ‘I will have to meet him. Perhaps I could sell him a book!’
‘He has no money to buy books.’
‘You are all, how do you say it — d’une complexion?’
‘In the same boat.’
‘Hm. Fortune will change.’
After they had eaten and the meal had been cleared away, she took him to see the workshop. This lay behind the main dwelling part of the house, with the apprentices’ living quarters over it. The place was very clean again, and tidy, remarkably free of paint stains. It smelt of size, paint and glue. It was colder there, because the fire was not lit.
‘We write books, paint initial letters, borders, pictures. One of us is a bookbinder. Some workshops separate these tasks, but I have found it more satisfactory to do everything under one roof.’
Laid out upon the tables in boxes and jars were the pens, brushes, bone smoothers for parchment, and several glasses for magnifying the finest work. Parchment folios of books in progress stood on wooden stands at the scribes’ desks.
Richard said, ‘I have always wondered how the writers can make their letters so even and perfect for page after page. After we ordinary people are taught to write and make our letters from the horn book by our schoolmasters, we all end writing hands of all shapes and sizes. Even the clerks cannot write a book hand.’
‘It is mostly a matter of practice — perhaps even the least of the skills. I’ll teach you how to write a fine Roman hand in the latest fashion — how to hold the pen, and form the letters. It is easy.’
‘Show me some of your own work.’
She led him over to one of the desks. On it were a row of little jars, several peacocks’ feathers, glowing with the colours of a kingfisher or a beetle’s back, and a row of mussel and whelk shells, pearly within, ash grey or ribbed buff without. She had been painting the shells onto the border of the page of the book, and they were so lifelike as to appear to be mirrored images. He was almost ashamed to be startled by the evidence of her competence as an artist. He had never met a woman so gifted before.
‘When I have finished the shells, I will start upon a border of the peacock feathers. I am looking forward to that. I always try to make the colours shimmer as they might on the bird, but it is never quite There is oil in the feathers, you see — it cannot look quite the same in paint. But it is a test of skill.’
‘The shells are beautiful,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I should like to see you at work on them.’
‘Another day, you shall. Now I do not have my colours set up. Besides…’ for some reason she did not finish what she was saying.
He bent over the painting she had been doing, to peer more closely at the detail. Some of it was so fine, he was sure she must use a brush with only a single hair. He was holding the sides of the stand on which the unfinished painting rested, when she touched his left wrist, sliding her forefinger and thumb round it, as if about to measure it up for reproduction on the page. Then she did the same to the right.
‘You have wrists of different sizes,’ she said, as if she had made a great discovery.
He felt as if it were he who was making the discovery. ‘Yes, I have.’
She was standing close, and he looked intently at her face, as if they had only that moment met. She had brown eyes, which was unexpected, because her skin was clearly meant to go with blonde hair, though the hair was hidden away under folds of white linen.
‘Why?’ she asked with simple logic.
‘I was trained for fighting. When I was young I was not tall or sturdy enough… But I survived and seemed to grow to it. One arm stronger than the other.’
‘What a mystery you are!’
‘No, surely not a mystery?’
‘But you are. There is a great deal I do not yet understand. There must be more to you than I can see.’
She paused, then leaned forward — she did not have to lean far — and kissed him softly on the lips. ‘I am inquisitive,’ she said. ‘I want to know more.’
The delightful shock of her sudden and amazing action made him feel as if he had been turned upside down and righted again in the same moment.
‘Why?’ It was his turn to say. His breathing had become very slow, preparatory to becoming very fast indeed.
She laughed. Then she laid the smooth palms of her hands on either side of his face, holding him, after her laughter, suddenly grave. ‘Why should you say why, as if you did not expect such attentions? Interesting men are always mysteries — that is why it is good, trying to seek the solution. I would like to begin now!’
It was a beginning which led on to other things with remarkable speed.
As downstairs in the room where they had dined, there was a tiled stove in the bedroom, which when fed with more wood gave out a marvellous warmth. It was true, what was said in in London, about the Flemish vrouwes She was the colour of the inside of one of the shells, and her mouth as warm as the stove. He had never realized his own capacity for pleasure before, until he tried to match it to this woman, who was no raw girl. King Edward couldn’t do better than this.
When, after a long time, it was possible to make conversation, she said, ‘How old are you?’
He told her.
‘So young? I’d have thought you were of age. You look older than eighteen.’
‘I’m still a minor in the charge of my brother the King,’ he said, laughing, then realized he had given himself away. He scarcely ever referred to his brother by name alone, and it had slipped out. She would have known sooner or later.
Her soft brown eyes — velvety like the fur on some dark bees — opened wide and stared at him, or as much of him as she could see — their eyelashes brushed together.
‘Den hertoge van Gloster! You misled me before.’ She could hardly get up and kneel before him and kiss his hand, she was in a position of disadvantage. So, for that matter, was he.
‘No, I did not wish to mislead you.’ The closeness of her lips made him kiss them again. They were velvety, too, rose pink.
‘You were like yourself,’ he said, against her cheek. ‘If I had told you I were — how do you say — den broder van Coninc van Ingelant — you would have behaved as someone not quite yourself.’
‘And now I have acted as myself, I cannot put on a mask as if I were at the carnival.’
‘No!’ he said triumphantly.
‘So that is why you are so masterful,’ she said at protracted length. ‘You are a duke!’
‘I doubt it — it’s because you invite me!’ They both rolled about together, laughing.
Vrouwe Thonine van den Watere sent one of her servants to accompany her lover back to the Gruuthuse huis. Richard went with the man as if he had walked out through the curtains of a dream. He remembered now all the questions he might have asked Thonine van den Watere. He knew nothing of her dead husband, or whether she had children. That made him begin to worry about his own child, little Katherine, who was now nearly a year old, and fostered with her mother’s family. He could do nothing for his daughter. He would have liked to see her. But he inhabited a different world now, as if the previous one had never existed.
For more than a week, he went often to the house upon the Dyver. It was inevitable that his nightly absences from the Gruuthuse huis should be noticed. The entire party of English exiles knew that he was involved in an affair, but his own efforts at discretion kept them from knowing with whom. King Edward did not probe much, although he grinned a lot at his brother and looked almost proud of him. This was nearly as bad as ye
ars ago, when Edward had taken a fatherly concern in his virginity, or rather in the desirability of his losing it by the time he was fifteen. Edward had always made his affairs casually public and could not understand Richard’s unwillingness to reveal anything at all.
Once or twice, Richard was able to go to the workshop to watch Vrouwe van den Watere at her painting. Her total absorption in her work and her harmonious relations with the craftsmen — and women — that she employed, impressed him deeply. She was good, if not better, than the men. He felt he was not going to encounter anything quite like this again. God knew what he might be likely to encounter; he had schooled himself not to envisage the future, not able to see anything in it for himself. He occasionally wondered what he would do if Charles of Burgundy turned them out — go to the Italian States perhaps, where the Dukes were always wanting foreign mercenaries. This was sufficiently unreal a situation as to be not worth the thought.
At the beginning of February King Edward sent Richard to see their sister at Lille. The Duchess Margaret had letters from Clarence, and from their mother. King Edward wrote letters to his prodigal brother which were models of patience and assurances of forgiveness, which their sister would send to England together with her own pleas.
Richard found his sister at Lille much the same as when he had seen her in early January. That was, surrounded by an elaborate court, gorgeously dressed, loaded with jewels, but with no sign of Duke Charles, or that he even visited her from one month’s end to the next. As adults, Richard and Margaret scarcely knew each other.
When Margaret had left England two and a half years before she had been twenty-two, a mature bride, self-willed and handsome, and fond of the admiration of men. She and Clarence had been very close since childhood. Richard sometimes thought she was the only person George cared for. If anyone were able to persuade him to return to his natural family allegiance, it was Margaret.
When Richard got back from Lille, King Edward called his followers together and told them that their chickens were coming home to roost and the loans so assiduously applied for had begun to materialize. The biggest triumph was the agreement with the Hanse merchants. In return for a restoration of all their privileges in England, they would supply 14 ships and 1500 soldiers, good troops, handgunners among them. The money Duke Charles had promised had arrived. The bonds for several other loans had at last been signed and sealed.
‘There is no sense in any more delay now,’ King Edward said. ‘We have enough — well, the minimum — but if we delay we will lose any advantage we have. I have heard from England that Warwick’s position is precarious and Henry of Lancaster is incapable of governing. Margaret of Anjou and her son have not yet left France. While they delay, Warwick’s troubles will only multiply. If I can strike while they are so weakened, then we have a chance. A chance so slender I shudder to think of it. But the time has come for us to act, not to think.
‘My Lords, I want you to suffer no misapprehensions. Any one of three outcomes is about equally weighted, as I see it. Item one: We may succeed in England and overcome our enemies. Item two: We may, as you are well aware, die in the attempt. Item three, which comforts me not at all: We may be driven back to Burgundy with our tails between our legs. If this were to happen, my noble brother-in-law Duke Charles would eventually turn us out to beg our bread round Europe.’
Richard took his eyes off his brother’s sober, utterly resolute face, to glance round at his companions. He saw that both Lord Hastings and Lord Rivers were hanging upon the King’s words as much as he was himself. Will Hastings was a fine man, the best of all King Edward’s close friends. Rivers too, Richard had to concede, had not faltered in loyalty; for the first time he felt some liking for the Queen’s eldest brother. Anthony Woodville was a strange companion for their adventure yet he was proving himself steadfast and resourceful. He was the best of the Woodville bunch.
‘So there you have it,’ the King said to them. ‘I am determined to go back. I give you a fortnight in which to prepare. Then I suggest we commend ourselves to God, and Saint George — and we’d better make a long list of those saints who will protect us because we may never again need their favours as much as we do now.
‘Other than this, you know what we need — money, ships, men, weapons, good Flemish horses — don’t waste space on supplies other than arms — in England we live off the land. I rely on each of you to scrape together whatever you can beg, borrow or steal in the name of my long-lost credit, even down to the last horseshoe nail and the flight feathers for our arrows.
‘I’m no Icarus, flying foolish too near the sun. I’m Edward of March again and, by all the saints, I’m more determined to have my life and my crown than even I was before Towton, before all my battles. I have the best New Year gift a man could — news of the birth of my son Edward. November the second, the feast of All Souls, and it was a month before I knew of it. Now I have a son, a Prince, to fight for. By God, if by his Grace I cross the sea safely, we shall see another Towton this Palm Sunday!’
As he said it, tempting fortune in all his smiling confidence, towering above them all, Richard believed every word. We cannot fail, he thought, because my brother will not allow failure. He could have hugged and kissed his brother with a child’s enthusiasm. Instead, King Edward embraced them one by one, Anthony Woodville, Lord Hastings, the many other knights who were dependent on him for their lives, and finally he stood with his arm round the shoulders of his brother Richard, who looked as usual beside him a little absurd, a boy.
‘In this adventure,’ King Edward said, ‘my brother Richard is a limb of myself. We live and die with each other.’
It was the best thing Richard had ever heard Edward say to him, and it made him deeply happy, until he left the house and went out into the town to begin the inevitable haggling with sundry merchants upon his brother’s behalf. Then he thought of Thonine and became troubled. He had met a woman in Bruges who had actually wanted him, and he was fascinated by her. It was the forthrightness without boldness, the allure without artifice. He wanted to make love to her endlessly, to talk to her until words ran out, to watch her unknown pattern of life revealed to him. Now he could not even spare the time to go to see her during the day, to watch her make shells and feathers out of parchment and colours. He had only a fortnight of days and an equal number of short nights, maybe less. He determined to make the most of them. It would be hard, telling her that there was so little time. It was hard for himself, but he was becoming used to the cruel indifference of fortune.
He left the Gruuthuse huis in the winter dark each night with his mind buzzing with calculations of sheaves of arrows, and helmet sizes and the doubly incomprehensible languages of Flemish and German handgunners. At the house upon the Dyver, he never once had a petulant welcome. Thonine accepted whatever hour he managed to arrive, without comment, fed him, talked to him of everything except ships and arms and Flemish caution and hard bargaining, and opened her body to him with a freedom and generosity he had never before encountered. She freed him from the sense he had of guilt that he should be committing the sin of fornication knowing he would desert the woman so soon. No one in Bruges bothered much about this sin.
One night she said, close against his ear, letting curls of his hair fall between her lips, playing with them with her tongue, ‘In two weeks’ time we have the carnival in Bruges, at Shrovetide. Will you be here then?’
She was not a person one dreamed of feeding with false hopes. ‘No,’ he said, and began to smooth flat strands of flaxen hair down over her full, beautiful breasts.
‘A pity,’ she said with gentle regret. ‘Everyone, great lords and citizens and beggars go masked in the street, unknown to each other. You and I would have met as equals in the world.’
‘But we are equals here, and we don’t wear masks.’
Later, when she was holding him like a child and he was on the verge of sleep, regret overtook him again. If only, he thought — though his life had taught him not to us
e this wishful phrase — he had met her when he first came to Burgundy, instead of on the feast of St Sebastian in January. He felt that to be with her for a while would be a journey of discovery not only for himself and herself, but a window opening upon the world of women, not just of their bodies, but their souls, their mysterious minds. Yet he was left with a scant fortnight of snatched, desperate and overwhelming desire and not even time for pondering on the enjoyment. His body yelled aloud its needs at night, to be enclosed within hers, both cause and effect of her pleasure, but during the daytime he scarcely gave it a second thought. To him life seemed often a whirlwind hurrying towards the grave, a series of passing images. It was as if one were running along a long corridor, lined with windows, some of which opened as one passed. He could never have time for staring out through open windows, however tantalizing the view. Sometimes he was afraid that he might pass a window and see through it the truth of God and Christ His Son and all the angels and be hustled on, denied his vision by the demands of his place in life. Only the contemplative could gaze on visions at his leisure.
When the last night came, he did not say that it was, but he knew that Thonine knew as well as he did.
‘When you are in England and a rich man again, will you remember Bruges?’
‘If I forget Bruges, I will never forget some things which happened to me there. I will persuade all the rich men in England to order books from Vrouwe van den Watere at the house upon the Dyver.’
She laughed. ‘I shall be overworked.’ Then, ‘I shall pray for you. I should like you to come back to Bruges, but I will pray that you stay safely at home.’
‘I shall need plenty of prayers. Our chances of victory, defeat or death are all equal.’
‘Yet you are willing to risk your life to make your brother King of England again?’
‘Yes.’
‘He means everything to you, your brother, I can see. Too much for your own good.’
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