“‘Broome. Yes, it could well be. But don’t do it!’
“He spoke as sharply as if he were in sudden pain. ‘Don’t do what, Sir?’ I asked, horribly conscious that I had been taking liberties with his precious books.
‘“Don’t stand there turning that damned ring on your finger. He always did that in moments of stress or thoughtfulness. And what with that and your facsimile of a face, I really believed for a moment — ’
“He came and perched on the table, shading his face with his hand, so that I shouldn’t see how badly he had been shaken. But he soon pulled himself together with a shrug and a smile. ‘Broome. Of course, I remember. Broome for Plantagenet. He sometimes used the name himself, when we slipped away from Court or camp and he didn’t want to be known. And God knows, he had time for too few of such carefree hours! You are so like him at that age that you can only be his son. That by-blow he was so concerned about during his first campaign, no doubt.’
“It was then that I knew he must be Francis, Lord Lovell. Only you had said he was stocky, and this man was almost gaunt. But I remembered that he must have fled from place to place, through Flanders or France, then back to England, in danger of his life, and was probably half starving. And at the same moment that this occurred to my bemused mind, he said quite abruptly and without ceremony, ‘Can you lay your hands on any food, young Dickon?’ He trusted me like that from the first moment of our meeting.
‘To my joy I remembered that, in my eagerness to finish the work and return next day to Oxford, I had been too busy to finish the food in my bag. I hurried to fetch it and when I returned Lord Lovell had seated himself in what was, I suppose, his own chair by the window and the evening light was on his face, so that I saw how worn he was. ‘The old caretaker has worked for my family all his life. He brings me what he can get from loyal cottagers on the estate, but now, with workmen hammering all over the house, he is afraid of giving away my hiding-place,’ he explained. And then, as I was rummaging in my bag for bread and meat, he saw my tools. ‘So you are one of them? I could not imagine how you came to be here, reading one of my favourite books — ’
“‘Yes, I am a mason,’ I told him.
“‘Thank God for that!’ he said, and sat munching ravenously until the last crumb was gone, while I wondered what caused such fervent gratitude for my particular calling.
“‘I wish I had more, Sir,’ I said, grinning at the obvious inadequacy of my offering.
“He grinned back and motioned me to sit opposite to him. ‘Now that your noisy mates have gone, old Jacques will be able to bring me something in the morning/ he said. In all the two weeks I was with him it never once seemed to occur to him to treat me as anything but an equal. As his friend Richard’s son.
“He knew that Minster Lovell had been given to the Tudor’s mother and feared that, now repairs had been ordered, the place would no longer be left empty. ‘And that will make it more dangerous for me,’ he said.
‘“Everyone thinks that you were killed in battle,’ I told him.
“‘I know,’ he said. ‘It is probably only because of that I was eventually able to make my way back here. Actually, I swam across the Trent on my horse.’
“‘You mean you had the glorious effrontery to come and hide in your own house?’
“‘Surely the last place where any pestering Lancastrian is likely to look for me?’
“‘Too true,’ I had to agree. Colour had come back into his face, and some of the devil-may-care expression into his laughing blue eyes, and I thought what a wonderful companion he must have been. ‘But surely, milord, you do not intend to go on staying here now, with people living in the house?’ I asked.
“‘It is still the safest place from Henry’s spies. And I have made this a centre of our plans. But I must have that door blocked up. That is why during the last few days I have been wondering how, cooped up here, I could find a mason whom I could trust. Trust beyond bribes or blabbing in his cups, I mean. For it is not only my own worthless life now, but notes and documents’ — he nodded to the small inner room, in which I could see a table strewn with papers — ‘which would endanger the lives of many ardent Yorkists whose names would surprise you.’
“‘You know that I will do this,’ I said instantly. ‘But how would you get in or out? You would be immured.’
“‘You must find me some way to get out into the little garden. It is surrounded by a wood thick with shrubs and great spreading trees. Through that one can get out on to a lane which joins the Oxford road. But I do not know how to make an exit in the stone wall which will not show. One would need to be a clever mason, Dickon, to work that out, and also to brick up the inside wall so that it looks like the original.’
“‘Leave that to me, Sir,’ I said.
“‘You sound very confident.’
“So then I told him about my examination and Master Vertue’s offer and my mad refusal. And that, I think, brought us closer together than anything could have done.
“‘We should have to begin immediately, and work at night.’
“This very night,’ I said, saying farewell to all my high hopes in Oxford. And was amply rewarded when he said, ‘How like your father you sound!’
“And, Tansy, when he said ‘we’ it was no polite expression. Belted earl as he was, and a King’s bosom friend, we worked in shirt and hose together like galley slaves. And, apart from my hours with you, it was the happiest time of my life.
“‘Let us go out into the garden now before the light fails,’ he suggested. And after examining the walls from inside the little room and from outside in the wood, I decided to hollow out a small passage space and low inward swinging stone doorway in one of the buttresses.
“‘This buttress, beneath the biggest tree,’ he suggested. ‘It will be better hidden.’
“I demurred, I remember. ‘If that tree should fall you would be trapped,’ I pointed out.
‘“How could such a mighty beech tree fall?’ he argued.
“‘It could be struck by lightning in a storm,’ I said. He laughed at me for the world’s worst pessimist, of course — ”
“You have probably saved him from discovery and death,” said Tansy, marvelling as much as he and Lord Lovell about such a God-sent coincidence. “And you must have learned more about your father than you can ever have hoped.” She could judge what this meant to him by the love she bore her own.
“And learned about him not just as Duke or Regent or King, but as a man among his friends. Francis Lovell let me give him all the tedious tasks — I had to, because he knew nothing of the craft, of course, and while we filled in the existing doorway with some old stones from a disused cloister, or sat on a tree-trunk sharing my lunch in the middle of the night, he described how they used to live in Warwick’s household at Middleham. And how my father fought against his natural delicacy, becoming a fine horseman and practising hours a day with sword and mace and bow. I had never realized how despondent he felt sometimes because his two elder brothers were of such fine physique, while he was always small-boned, lean as a whippet and of only medium height like me. Or how he worshipped the kindly, handsome Edward, and after he became King devoted his whole life to serving him. He used to say that if he were no courtier, at least he could fight for him, and he would go on swinging that mace of his long after Lovell and the rest of them ached for their beds. And fight for him, he did, commanding an army when he was little more than a boy. And King Edward was so pleased he sent him butts of Gascony wine which, considering the successful young general’s usual sobriety, may possibly have accounted for his begetting me! He had the knack of winning his men’s hearts as well as their willing hands, Lord Lovell said.
“‘That I know,’ I said, smoothing the face of the stone he was working on so as to hide all recent joins. ‘For my wife’s father was one of them. Robert Marsh, who kept the Blue Boar in Leicester. And a fine type of man he was.’
“‘So you are married, and I have been mo
nopolising you day and night. And have scarcely the wherewithal to pay you.’
“And then I told him about you. And, Tansy, my dear, he remembered you. ‘A sweet, fair girl,’ he said. ‘Quick for the comfort of her father’s guests, yet interested in other things.’ And after we. had gone on working in silence for a while, he said, ‘Dickon, how strange that out of all the girls in England you should marry one whom your father saw and actually spoke to — and who, I am sure, pleased him.’ That has often been a great source of happiness to me, Tansy.”
“And to me. Was that all that milord Lovell told you?” asked Tansy, held spellbound.
“No. He spoke often of his plans — his and the Duchess of Burgundy’s — to bring back a Yorkist dynasty.”
“I do not think they will ever succeed now. As Master Jordan says, the country is too settled — too prosperous.”
“But they will never give up. He knew the priest, Simon of Oxford, of course, and he and Lincoln organised the disastrous Lambert Simnel affair, though he thought the young fellow badly chosen. They had several secret agents over here on the look-out for likely young men to impersonate one or other of the Plantagenet princes. I told him how the Flemish merchant had tried to persuade me to be a second Pretender, and how I had been sorely tempted at the time but had refused.
‘“You have not regretted it?’ he asked. We have found a young Flemish fellow called Perkin Warbeck. With training, he may do. But you — with your Plantagenet features — ’
“I could see that he wanted me. And how we could have worked together, I thought!”
Tansy caught at his arm. “Not again, Dickon?” she cried.
He bent to kiss her, and all the preoccupation was gone from his face. He was eagerly alive, and all hers. “No, my beloved, not ever again, I told him that I had the most precious wife in all the world, that I had let her down when I refused to work on the Tudor’s chapel, and that every hour of the rest of my life was hers.”
In spite of material difficulties, both of them felt that they were entering into a more secure, complete period of their marriage. The room was already full of shadows, but they had scarcely noticed it. He put the kitten in its basket and lit their candle. “So your visit to Oxford wasn’t very lucrative?” laughed Tansy, the practical, too happy to care much any more.
“No. Not in terms of money. I doubt if he had any. Anyway, he didn’t offer me coins, and I was glad. I told him, when we parted, that to have been able to help one who had risked and lost so much for my father was the greatest happiness I could have. He gave me the copy of La Forteresse de Foy, which had belonged to him, and the complete trust which is between friends, and some precious glimpses into the private life of the last Plantagenet King.” Suddenly Dickon burst out laughing. “And even if we never meet again, I shall always remember the most inept and lovable mason’s mate I ever had to bear with. And those most precious hours when we hewed and heaved, and toiled and talked together. Please God his plots prosper and he is now safe!”
Rising from the settle, Tansy stretched her arms and felt as if she were coming back from some gripping legend into their everyday world. “It was all wonderful, Dickon, and I cannot tell you how glad I am for you,” she said. “But I ought to remind you that my inn money will soon be gone, and with dear old Jod we have three to keep and — ” she paused for a moment, but still could not bring herself to add to his pecuniary worries by telling him that before half a year was out they might be four — “and what do we live on now? To-morrow — and all the other to-morrows?”
But Dickon, her conscientious husband, seemed to have learned something of Lord Lovell’s optimistic gaiety. He grasped candle in one hand and willing wife by the other. “Dominus providebit” he pronounced piously. “But to-night we live on love.”
25
Next morning, when they had finished a late breakfast of bread and meat and ale, Dickon unwrapped the book he had brought from Lovell Minster and showed it proudly to Tansy. But he had scarcely translated more than a few words of the front page for her when they heard hoof-beats and Jod’s voice bidding someone good morning.
“The bailiff!” exclaimed Tansy, hurriedly clearing away their pewter platters. “It is just a month since he came with the kitten. Will you get the money, Dickon? It is in the safe place you made beneath the bedroom floorboards.”
Dickon rose to get it, and saw that the tall, fashionably clad figure passing their window was no bailiff. It was Master John Moyle himself.
“Hurland Dale must have told him what I did, and that I am out of work. I warrant he is here to tell us to go,” he muttered, hurriedly closing the book.
“Tom and Amy would never let him do that,” breathed Tansy.
And it certainly seemed to be the last thing which was in young Master Moyle’s mind. He was in the soaring high spirits of a man recently betrothed. He remarked cheerfully on the beauty of the early spring morning, stopped to admire a small statue of Saint Francis which his tenant had carved on the lintel, looked round their room approvingly and, before finally settling himself in the chair they pulled forward for him, exclaimed, “You have improved this shabby old place out of all knowledge, Broome!”
“I am glad you think so, because some things I have done without your permission. But I think we showed you most of them, Sir, when you came before. Will you try some of Tansy’s homemade wine?”
“And thank your sister again for sending me this adorable kitten,” added Tansy.
“She thought you would be fretting while your husband was away,” he said, stretching out a hand to stroke it.
“So you know all about — what happened?” stammered Dickon.
“My dear Broome, no one who is interested in building could help but hear. It seems you infuriated Hurland Dale and set your Guild by the ears by refusing work from the Vertues. No one seems to know why, but as I am concerned with raising funds for the King, I have a pretty shrewd idea. Did you manage to get work in some other city?”
“Nothing permanent, Sir,” confessed Dickon.
It was at that moment that Moyle’s beauty-loving eyes caught sight of that well-worn copy of La Forteresse de Foy. He rose and began leafing through the pages, taking so much pleasure in it that he seemed almost to have forgotten them.
“We thought — perhaps you. have come for the rent? It is here,” offered Tansy, nervously.
“By all means, if you wish.” Without removing his gaze from what he was reading, he picked up the coins and pocketed them. “And I hope it will be for the last time.”
They both stared at him aghast.
“You mean — because Master Dale has dismissed me?”
“In a sense, yes. This is indeed a lovely book. Almost as lovely as one I once saw upstairs.” He looked across the table at Dickon, then down again at the exquisitely-bound volume. Very deliberately he turned to the title page. With his fine long fingers holding it open, he looked up searchingly again at its owner. “It is true then, what I thought,” he said.
The blood mounted slowly in Dickon’s face. He stood there saying nothing, unaware that he was inevitably adding to Moyle’s conviction by twirling the ring on his finger.
“I saw King Richard’s own signature in that other book you have upstairs. At the time, I wondered, but kept my mouth shut. But now, because I did see it, and now see it again, 1 can guess why you did that mad thing at Westminster. Smashing your own career sooner than add beauty to the Tudor tomb.”
Still Dickon did not speak.
“You are King Richard’s son, aren’t you?” he asked out-right.
“His bastard,” admitted Dickon at last, his head held high.
He knew that it was a dangerous admission. That his likeness to his father would always be a hazard to him. “I know that; all through the Wars of the Roses your family have been firmly on the Lancastrian side. You can throw us out now. Even if my Guild in London will have none of me, by the nature of our calling we journeymen must have lesser Guilds in oth
er towns. Or at least I can always get work as an unskilled labourer.” He gave vent to an odd little reminiscent laugh, explicable only to Tansy. “I have seen better men than myself doing it.”
John Moyle closed the book smartly and hurried to him, shaking him by the shoulders. “Richard Broome, what do you take me for?” he demanded. “I am a loyal Lancastrian, yes. With my specialized knowledge of financial law I hope to rise high in King Henry’s service. For my father’s sake he has already shown me favour. I admire him for an acute business man and a hard worker. Even those of you who look upon him as a usurper must admit that when he took the crown he took all the responsibilities with it. And Welshman as he is proud to be, he strives equally for England. On the Continent we are no longer looked upon as an unimportant little island, but, thanks to him, begin to take our place in trade and culture with the countries of Europe. But I know courage and loyalty when I see them, no matter on what side. And I seem to have hit by chance on the reason why you refused such profitable employment on his chapel.” He turned back for a last look at La Forteresse de Foy, but this time touched it only absently. “I only hope that in your place I should have had sufficient courage to do the same.”
“My father chose Loyaulté me lie as his personal motto, and the least I can do is to live up to it,” said Dickon, overcome by such generous understanding. “But as to courage — I have never fought in battle, and seem to have been avoiding recognition ever since I learned the truth.”
“There are different kinds of courage, Broome. Yours was of your father’s ‘Loyalty binds me’ kind. I can imagine the dilemma you must have been in, between conscience and the well-being of your wife and any family yon may have. And as an artist — albeit an amateur one — I can appreciate what you gave up.”
“I have a wife who should be happiness enough for any man,” said Dickon, drawing her to him and hating her to feel that she was in any way responsible for his professional loss. “And by keeping in obscurity I shall be doing as my father bade me.”
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