“Men-at-arms, at my door? The wench is daft. Oh Lord, I shall be daft myself before this morning’s out.”
She peered down. Anne was quite right. There were men in scarlet, carrying pikes, clustered before the door of the Silver Pack. Horses were held in the street by pages, and a crowd had collected. She stared at Anne.
“He’s found me out.”
“Who’s found you out?”
“The King.”
“The King? Holy mother Mary, was it the King that … ?”
“Yes.”
There were steps clapping on the staircase. Bet flung the door open, round-faced and round-eyed.
“Oh, mistress, there’s Mr. Wrangwysh here and a parcel of soldiers and a fine Lord in velvet, and they’re demanding of you. I never saw the like.”
The Widow Wrangwysh gulped twice and felt her morning malaise pressing more heavily on her, tangling her lips and wits.
“My gown,” she croaked, “get me into my gown, Bet. I’ll see ’em in the solar. I think the world’s run mad.” She got the choking fustian thing over her head somehow, kicked her feet into straw slippers and stumbled to the door, poking her hair out of her eyes. “My hood, girl,” she snapped, and Bet put it on her.
A soft hand closed on hers and she saw Anne at her side.
“Don’t tell them. For God’s sake don’t tell them.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said the widow, and pushed past her into the solar, shutting the door behind her.
Two men were there: Thomas Wrangwysh in his bawdekin gown made of the stuff that she had got for him, and another. This was a small man, very richly dressed in black and silver with ermine. He had a pale, pointed face and queerly wrinkled-up eyes under straight eyebrows. The Widow Wrangwysh blinked at him for a second and then gasped. Her fat, tired legs came near to failing her in the unaccustomed exercise, but she dropped a curtsey.
“Sister,” said Thomas Wrangwysh, “his royal Grace the Duke of Gloucester has come to ask you about a matter. You’ll mind telling me last night at supper how you had a little maid with you was in his Grace of Clarence’s household once.”
The Duke let him get no further than this. He had been drawing his thin lips tight against his teeth and twisting a ring on his finger; but he spoke in the softest and pleasantest voice she had ever heard.
“Mrs. Wrangwysh, I must ask your pardon for invading you. I have cause to think this maid of yours is a lady I have sought very earnestly for a long while. Will you be pleased to let me speak face-to-face with her? If she is one I think she is, I promise you your kindness to her will not be forgotten.”
Round and round in the widow’s ale-drenched mind there churned the thought: It is the King she fears. She’s always spoken kindly of the Duke. She opened her mouth twice, but no articulate words escaped it.
The Duke was staring at her. He had the brightest eyes she had ever seen: clear grey with pupils that swelled and shrank like a cat’s. He took a step toward her and looked up — he was the shorter by half a head — into her face.
“Mrs. Wrangwysh, I do not know what tale this lady may have told you. She is in great fear of injury and has been badly used. But I do promise, on my soul’s salvation, that if you will give me the means to come to her she will bless you for it all the days of her life; and I will also.”
The Widow Wrangwysh had had three husbands. Her bleared eyes looked into the Duke’s and she made a clumsy gesture sideways with her left hand.
“In there,” she grunted.
The Duke was past her like a weasel. He was through the door before Thomas Wrangwysh could spring up to open it. The widow heard a small cry of terror from within and, immediately upon it, in a voice that shook with triumph and incomprehension, one word:
“Dickon!”
The widow lifted her own voice then.
“Bet, come out of that.”
Bet’s eyes were goggling as though they would pop like squeezed orange-pips out of her face. She gave her news breathlessly but very clearly.
“He’s kissing our Anne.”
“Shut your foolish, flappering mouth,” ordered the widow vehemently, “and down with you to the cellar and fetch up the best claret, and take and clean these silver cups my second left me.”
*
“But Anne, Anne, you could never have believed it: not of Edward.”
“I did believe.”
“But of Edward, Edward that you’ve known since we were little: how was it anyway possible that he could have intended dishonour to you? How could you believe that?”
“Oh God, Dickon, everything has been possible in these last three years. Only think what things have been possible already. I’ve been an exile. I’ve been Princess of Wales. I’ve been a cookmaid. The whole world has been like a quagmire under my feet, shifting, no ground to stand on: and it was George himself who told me. I thought he could not invent such a slander against his own brother.”
“Was he sober when he said it?”
“No.”
Anne closed her eyes for a second and saw a picture of the great, sweating, red-faced man who had sat beside her on an oak settle, whispering fuzzily in her ear, blowing a breath of stale wine into her face and telling her what Edward had in mind.
“The saints be thanked for that at least. I do not think I could sleep quiet in my bed again if I thought he had told that lie sober.”
“But why did he ever tell it? Why does he hate me so?”
A frigid imitation of a smile moved Duke Richard’s face.
“He does not hate you; but he knows I love you, and he meant we should not marry if he could hinder it. He is your guardian, Anne, and you are heiress to half your great father’s lands.”
“And only for that …”
“Only for that: Anne, Edward must not hear of this. There is bad blood enough between them. I think he would kill George if he knew.”
“I shall not tell him. But how am I heiress, Dickon? Mother is alive.”
“Yes, but she will not be permitted to inherit. I fear not. Edward has a long memory, Anne. I can get her pardoned, but that is all. But what does it matter, bird? Whilst we’re together there is a home for her.”
“Oh, Dickon, I’m a fool. I’m going to cry. Don’t mind me. But it’s so long.”
“Don’t cry. Anne, my precious bird, my love, it’s all over now. It’s all over if you’ll have me.”
“If I’ll have you? Oh, d’you know as little of me as that?”
She looked at him. They were sitting together in the little house in St. Martin’s Sanctuary that he had brought her to, armed men in scarlet clanking before and behind them, from the Widow Wrangwysh’s home that morning. He returned her look seriously, with intent, wide eyes.
“Think, Anne,” his low voice told her. “Think, my love. We are an evil house to marry into.”
“The royal house of York?”
“Royal and evil, with the curse of Plantagenet, Black Fulk of Anjou’s curse: think of us. George you know. He is our blackest sheep. Edward — I can hardly speak indifferently about Edward. He is God to me, Anne, the god of my idolatry. I would damn my soul for him. But other men have not found him as I have. He has done terrible things: and as for me …”
He swung round a little in his chair, cocking a knee up and joining both hands round it, frowning and chewing his lip. His face was a puzzled scholar’s face, bent over a hard manuscript, weighing and considering scrupulously. Bunched in this way, his body was absurdly small.
“I have my own devils, Anne,” he said after a long while. Anne’s mind was moving by tiny spasms, as grass twitches back into position when a heel has crushed it, to a life of years ago: Middleham Castle and children playing ball and Richard sitting with her and telling secrets.
“What devils, Dickon?”
His words were coming more and more slowly, as though dragged with cables.
“I am one of those who will let nothing stand between me and what I see clearly ought to be
done.”
“But that is what saints are, not devils.”
There was something almost haggard about his eyes and brow as he turned round on her.
“I am no saint. I am a man who trusts too much to his own conscience, and that is how men are damned. I tell you that when I choose what I think to be right I’ll stop at no wrong to accomplish it. There you know the worst of me. I thought it right, and I think it right now, to support my brother Edward and his title in the teeth of universal Christendom: and in supporting him, I helped to kill your father.”
She remembered words said to her long ago: “I do not think so, my Lady, I heard it was common men who followed your father into Wrotham Wood.” Richard had help to kill the man who said them, too. She put her hand out, but he did not reach for it.
“It was not you who cut him down.”
“No, I was not there. But as God sees me, I would have killed him with my own hands if there was need.”
She took a deep breath.
“But there is one thing, Dickon, you would not have done. If you had joined him as George joined him, you would not have betrayed him as George betrayed him.”
“I did not join him, and so betrayed you.”
“Never, never and in no fashion have you betrayed me, my dear heart.”
He put his hands to his face as though to stop her reading it.
“Think, Anne, think. George betrayed his King and got Isobel to wife. If I had done as much, should I not have saved you from that infamous marriage with Marguerite’s bastard?”
“You’d have been no husband for me, Dickon, if you had sold your brother for my sake.”
“Most women would prize a husband who cared so much for them.”
“Not I.”
Duke Richard straightened himself in his chair. His hands dropped from his face and he looked hard at her.
“Anne, that is what I hoped in my heart that you’d say. That is you: Neville pride in you. Whether you take me or not, I do thank the saints you are still the Anne I loved, my Anne of Middleham who’d have no truck with dirty bargains. But, Anne, I’ve not done my tale yet.”
“I might think you didn’t want me, you argue so well against yourself.”
“But you don’t think so,” he said certainly, and went on: “I’ve dipped my hands deep in blood since we were children at Middleham, and some of it was honest blood. Not only in battle: I’ve headed and hanged where I saw heading and hanging would serve Edward. After Tewkesbury — and I shall never know, to the day of my death, whether Edward really swore their pardon as they claimed he did — I was a butcher. That’s not much in itself: but I had no anger to help me. Edward would have been in a royal rage and shouted them to the block. I didn’t hate them. The only man I hated died on the field, killed like a coward whilst he was yelling to George for succour. But I headed them for all that, coldly and in sober blood, because it was needful. Anne, I am afraid of myself sometimes. My cold wits let me to the things other men will only do in passion. Even in love: I have never loved any woman in my life but you. I’m not lustful like Edward; don’t need something always between the sheets to keep my bed warm. Yet I have had them, coldly, because I wished to be sure how little they meant to me. I’ve a fine crop of bastards now, and the poor babes were every one of them got without affection either of body or mind, like dolls whittled from wood. That is what I am.”
Again, she put out her hands to him.
“And it was that conscience of yours in which you trust too much, and those frozen wits of yours that weigh and measure and probe, that made you tell me all these things too, so that I should be sure of my bargain before I made it.”
“That is true. You have understood. That is the perfect truth. Because I am clear-sighted, this same cursed conscience of mine will not let you take me with your eyes shut, my dear. It will not let me deal any way but honestly with you. You must not take me unless you take me for what I am.”
“Richard, I know what you are.”
“You shall not take me from gratitude, nor from old affection in the days when we were children together. If you refuse me now, I will go out of here and never set eyes on you again: but I will make sure that George shall pay you the last penny of your just due and make no trouble for whatever man you choose to marry. Consider that, and then you shall give me your answer.”
She had not thought that she could cry so much, since the time her marriage with Queen Marguerite’s son had dried and withered something in her. The tears dazzled her eyes to blindness, but she found him with her hands and held him, not laying her head on his breast, but clasping and soothing his on hers.
CHAPTER FIVE
WINE
(France–England: 1475–1478)
The Queen was in her parlour
Eating bread and honey,
The King was in his counting-house
Counting out his money.
English Nursery-Rhyme, n.d.
THE Christian King was awaiting the summons that he had dreaded all his life. He awaited it very cheerfully, sitting on a bench in the room at Croissy-sur-Andelle which had been rigged up hastily as a presence-chamber for the occasion. The Sieur de Concressault, the Due de Bourbon, the Sieur d’Argenton — his name was Philippes de Commynes, and he had once been in the service of the Duke of Burgundy — with a great number of other noblemen of France stood about the room; looked serious; talked in low voices. The Christian King took not the faintest notice of them. He had a little spaniel in his lap and was pulling its ears and telling stories to it.
Philippes de Commynes, Sieur d’Argenton, was less unhappy than the others looked. It was three years now since he had made up his mind which side to back in the continual quarrel between the nobles and the crown of France and, slipping quietly at night out of the household of Charles of Burgundy, had gone to join the King whom he esteemed the abler man. It was not time yet to regret his bargain. Louis of France had been in tighter corners than this and come away from them with his skin whole: and as for Charles the Hardy, what madness transcending all his other madnesses led that rash man to sit in siege before the inexpugnable city of Neuss, at feud with the Emperor, at feud with the Landgraf of Hesse, at feud with the Archbishopric of Cologne? He should be marching his eighteen thousand Burgundians, his three thousand English auxiliaries and the Italian mercenaries he had hired under that dangerous adventurer, Count Niccolo di Campobasso, westward to the Somme, not eastward to the Rhein, if he wished to achieve the ambition of his life against King Louis. But such is the nature of the man, thought de Commynes. The more he is embroiled, the more he will embroil himself. He edged a little way along the wall and set his ears to discover what the King was whispering to his dog. It was likely to be better sense than what the King’s councillors were whispering to one another.
The King had lifted the dog up by its forepaws and was smiling his damp-mouthed smile at the self-conscious way in which it turned its face aside and looked down its nose.
“Listen, Cher-Ami, and I shall tell you a story about a bear which the Emperor — who is a very witty man, although he is so mean and such a coward — told an ambassador of mine not long ago. It is a very instructive story for you to hear, so listen and do not make those foolish grimaces. You are listening very carefully? Good: there were once two men who persuaded an innkeeper to let them chalk up a scot on the slate because, they said, they were going to kill a great bear which lived in the district and annoyed the people, and its skin would sell for a good sum. So when they had dined, they went out to look for this bear; but alas, they found it very much sooner and very much nearer to them than they had reckoned. Then these two poor men were afraid and ran away. One climbed a tree, but the other the bear caught and threw down on the ground, standing over him and thrusting its muzzle against his ear, thus.”
He thrust his face into the dog’s wavy fur for a second and went on:
“This poor man stayed very still and made as though he were dead, for it is the nat
ure of a bear that it will injure neither man nor beast that does this; and indeed presently this bear left him and returned to its cave. As soon as the man saw himself delivered, he was up and away at a fine pace, and his companion, who had observed this mystery from the top of his tree, behind him; and when they had come up with one another, he who had been in the tree demanded of his friend what it was that the bear had told him when it kept its snout at his ear so long. To which he answered very sensibly that it had told him never to sell the skin of a bear till the beast was well dead.”
Precisely, thought de Commynes, and felt a page plucking his sleeve.
“The Herald, Monsieur, he’s here.”
He nodded, and made his bow to the King.
“If it pleases you, Sire, the Herald of the English is now in attendance.”
“Good,” said King Louis brightly. He stood up and pushed Cher-Ami into the arms of the Due de Bourbon, who looked as though he did not know what to do with him; made shuffling haste up to his chair of state; sat in it; coughed twice and composed himself.
A boy’s voice called into the silence clearly: “The Herald Jarretière, bringing letters of defiance from King Edward of England.”
Garter King-at-Arms was a short man with a dark bony face; shimmered and glistened in his tabard of the arms of England and France, or on azure, quarterly three leopards passants and three fleur-de-lys. He walked alone and the smack of his footsteps sounded through the room, noise of new tribulation coming upon France. The summons King Louis had been dodging for fifteen years now was scrolled and sealed in his right hand.
When he was in front of the King’s chair and had bowed, he flicked his eyes once round the room and intoned with a strong Norman twang:
“Sire, be it known to you that the purpose of my coming is to present to you, after salutation, these letters under the hand and seal of my master Edward, fourth of that name since the Conquest, by the Grace of God King of England and France, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and Lord of Ireland, by which he summons you to surrender to him his lawful realm of France, appertaining to him of ancient hereditary right, to the end that he may restore the Church, the nobility and the commons thereof to their former liberty, of which they have long stood deprived; letting you know that in case you should deny or withhold this his said right, he is utterly determined to take and resume the same by the way of arms.”
Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III Page 26