We Speak No Treason Vol 1

by Rosemary Hawley Jarman

  ‘He’s been back,’ I murmured.

  ‘Yea, and none of your persuasions have swayed the uncle, for he came himself, and snared me in my own parlour, chasing me round the table. I was distressed enough to go say an Ave and a Pater at your father’s tomb, I who had his Month’s Mind kept all these past years.’

  Rageful and sorely anxious, I said: ‘You should have married Butcher Gould. You know as well as I how widows are fair game. Even now ’tis not too late to get you to the Minories.’

  ‘Never!’ she cried. ‘I am not shaped for the cloister, and I’ll marry none. This’—she gestured around—‘is my all. ’Twill take more than Master Fray to drive me out.’

  I gave her a moment to cool and she ran downstairs; she said she smelled burning and was anxious for a special order—a dozen eel-and-grape pies, coming to their peak. When she returned I asked: ‘Has his nephew’s pate healed yet? Tell me, that I may break it again.’

  ‘I feared for that, too. He talked of summonsing you for assault on the lad. He held this over me if I did not submit.’

  ‘I’m in his Grace’s service,’ I said wildly. Even so, I thought of John Davy, late favourite of the King, who had had his hand cut off for striking a man in front of King’s Bench at Westminster Hall. I saw myself fleeing again into Sanctuary, wading into the sea after my forty days’ grace crying: ‘Passage, for the love of God and King Edward!’ like any common felon. And the King would take unkindly to my fleeing the judgement of his Mayor—hiding beneath the clergy’s mantle. Then, with relief, I remembered that Fray, with a tavern full of whores in their striped rays and Lancastrian spies thick as roaches, would be ill-advised to seek a lawsuit. All ale-sellers were reckoned guilty; whatever the matter.

  ‘He would find no sympathy at the sessions, I’d dare my next feastday wage,’ I said. ‘We’ll have him for trespass—we’ll appeal to the Gild. He has been uttering threats against your person.’

  An unwilling smile curved her mouth.

  ‘The Gild is not much concerned with personal matters,’ she murmured. ‘Anyway, he said that all he offered was an honourable proposal of marriage—no threat has passed his lips—he did but offer me protection.’

  ‘By God!’ I said sourly. ‘He is as cunning as Clarence! Naught to lay hold of, and in his ways as stubborn as a mule.’

  She was instantly distracted.

  ‘Ah, poor young Gloucester!’ she said. ‘All the City watch for him daily. My boys were in Smithfield yesterday and saw him questioning the horse-copers. Billingsgate likewise, among the fish merchants. He has paid his respects to every Abbess in town. The lady Anne has vanished from human sight, and Gloucester’s like one of Arthur’s knights in search of the Grail.’

  ‘Cast in solid gold and weighty with gems,’ I remarked.

  ‘So!’ she said keenly. ‘Is there love?’

  ‘Barter,’ said I.

  ‘What of Clarence?’

  I told her about the playing cards and she grimaced. ‘A bad jest,’ and then: ‘But I would not speak against Clarence outside these walls.’ She gestured, east.

  ‘Three doors down,’ she said. ‘Although they are under Duke George’s patronage, I mislike that woman. She whispered that I gave short weight in my mutton pasties and since Corpus Christi last our dealings have been few.’

  She laughed at my indignation.

  ‘Put up your staff, before you break more heads. It will be a long while before they hang my pies about my neck on Cornhill. Words can’t hurt me when I know my merchandise is good.’

  ‘We have strayed,’ I said. ‘What had Fray to say finally?’

  ‘He gave me till Michaelmas for the banns to be cried. I told him the same answer, so he waved his plaguey deeds of title before my face. I said he would have to bring this before the justices of this ward and the courts are jammed with suits. We shall have a few months’ breathing space.’

  ‘But you can’t go on like this!’ I cried. ‘Tell him to go to the Devil!’

  She squared her shoulders. ‘That was my last injunction. I’ll take what he brings, and I’ll best him.’ I leaped from the table and embraced her.

  ‘If there’s trouble...’

  ‘Can I call on you?’ she said timidly.

  ‘Yes, ask Butcher Gould to send a boy to the Palace—the King thinks much of him since he succoured Elizabeth in Sanctuary. They’ll give a message.’

  ‘Only if there’s real mischief.’

  ‘I shall come straightway.’ To end a disquieting hour with jesting, I told her of my wager, and bade her commend me to her silkmaid at Michaelmas to make me a costly new hose; that is, if the Duke of Gloucester had not found his lady by then.

  I walked down Eastchepe into the widening strip of Candlewick Street with its lines of mercers’ and drapers’ shops displaying rich cloth; then, because I had time to spare, strolled up Tower Street. I stopped for a swift mazer of ale in the Boar’s Head. Sir John Howard was there, entertaining strangers; I made way with full courtesy, and the commonalty in turn fell back for me. The crenellated turrets of the Tower stood stark against the haze of the September afternoon. Within that building I had often entertained the King. My mind turned idly to the woman who doubtless now paced up and down behind one of those faraway slits in the great white fortress. Margaret of Anjou: I’d heard that her hair had turned grey from the loss of her son. I wondered if she wept, too, for old Harry. And Somerset—Beaufort had been her last link with a dead love; men said his father, the old Earl, had bedded with the French Queen. Like Owen Tudor and Queen Katherine.

  Thinking of the slain Prince, I thought again of Anne Neville, Richard Gloucester, and the wager. I had given John and Robert until Michaelmas, and knew my money safe. He would never find her. Idly I wondered where she was, and decided she had got herself out of England—but to whom? In my mind I saw her little, childish face, blonde-framed. I had seen it often at court before the rift with Warwick; to deem her friendless made me rather sad.

  That evening I brought a goat into the Hall and made a parody of John Lydgate’s ‘Little Short Ditty against Horns’, I dressed the beast in a hennin filched from a Flemish dancing maid, and there was much mirth and not a few red faces under the extravagant headgear of the court ladies. I plied my craft with gusto and genuine feeling—I have thought it a shame to conceal a woman’s hair, her fairest possession—and when I plucked out a few hairs from the goat’s brow, aping a tiring wench, and caused it to bleat and butt me in the nether end—the company laughed like demons. Therefore one did not heed the few glum and abstracted persons who sat, toying with their trenchers and staring into air. Richard Gloucester was one of these. He had come in late, a little footsore I swear and glad to be seated, his face worn and weary and unsmiling. My own magical powers took hold of me and I half-killed myself trying to make him laugh, but to no avail. By the end of the entertainment I had the strangest feeling of kinship with him. For I, too, had wandered many weeks in search of my love, and I remembered how people had chaffed me. This feeling grew stronger until I reminded myself of Gloucester’s motives; I drew a callous skin over my soul and thought of how Anne Neville, if she remained hidden, would make of me a fashionable man.

  Neither did the Queen smile. When the Maiden was at court, we would talk of Elizabeth—I got some sly kind of sport from the days of Grafton Regis, when food was sparse and the rod heavy on my poor sweeting’s back. King Edward’s wooing—ah, God! that sweet, innocent conversation:

  ‘Lady Grey went for a walk in Whittlebury Forest and was nearly run down by the King’s horse.’

  Marry, what would Lady Grey expect? Everyone knew that Whittlebury was a royal chase. If that were an accident that she were there on that day, holding a fatherless boy by each hand under the Queen’s Oak, then I had six toes on either foot. All sorrowful beauty would she be, suing piteously for the restoration of Bradgate, her children’s inheritance. They had been dispossessed following the defeat of Lancaster at St Alban’s. Sir John Grey had
been knighted by Mad Harry at Colney in the spring of 1461, but had died of his wounds shortly afterwards. No wonder food was short at Grafton; Elizabeth Woodville had been near destitution. Fortune smiles on the fair. And the not so fair. As early as 1461 the King had affectionately considered the benefit of Jacquetta Duchess of Bedford, his cozen’s mother. He paid her an annual stipend of 300 marks—and 100 livres in advance. Lust makes fools of all. Even Kings.

  I bowed low before the royal pair, and the goat got loose and bolted round the hall, sweeping a tablecloth off with its horns. The Master of the Revels made a note in his book and looked at me, and I gave him obeisance.

  In the space between the end of dinner, and supper at four, John, Robert and I, and others employed in the sweet pursuit of do-naught, would gather near the entry to Westminster Hall. There we would watch the world and his wife, and some exceeding pretty wives there were, in truth. We stood under the Clock House, and as the last deep note throbbed and burgeoned and died (and we waited for our hearing to return) Lady Elizabeth Lucey rode out from the Palace on a splendid bay. Green velvet she wore, and her headgear was almost as high as the Clochard spire with its three giant bells which, men said, soured all the drink in the town. John affected a swoon at sight of the lady. Robert said, soft and knowing:

  ‘His Grace had me make music for that sweet face in his inner chamber.’

  We trusted one another. I said: ‘Love songs, I doubt not.’

  He nodded. ‘Well, the Queen had the costliest new device. Italianate silverwork collar and baubles for her ears—a fair bargain.’

  ‘Riches or love, which would you?’ asked Robert. I thought of Gloucester and shrugged, saying: ‘’Tis all the same, it seems.’

  None could resist the King; I reckoned no surprise at it, so beautiful a person was he, and for the sheer pleasure of the words on my tongue, I quoted gently:

  ‘Now is the Rose of Rouen grown to great honour

  Therefore sing we every one blessed be that flower

  I warn ye every one that he shall understand

  There sprang a Rose in Rouen that spread to England

  Had not the Rose of Rouen been, all England had been dour,

  Y-blessed be the time God ever spread that flower.’

  So we sang Edward’s Coronation song, and continued to watch: the serjeants of the Crown in their silken hoods and the lawyers in long gowns of striped ray hurrying in and out the door of the great Hall of Westminster; jammed with suits, as my mother had said, like any other City Court. That splendid building was erected by King William the Red, and rebuilt in magnificence by Richard of Bordeaux; whose wife was Anne. The fellow Gloucester was on my mind again, and I shook him off like a flea. There were comings and goings from the Hall; above was the Court of Chancery, and the busy Exchequer and Star Chamber, womb of many stern laws. The Court of Common Pleas too lay within, and King’s Bench, where Edward had sat for three days together at the start of his reign. All about milled the plaintiffs and defendants, the suitors and witnesses, the red robes of aldermen mingling with the commonalty’s poor worsted. Flemings, in the sad-coloured smocks and hanging liripipes hawked pins and spectacles and fine felt hats, while nearby an amateur fiddler scraped a hideous noise for groats. Fierce-eyed cook-knaves, their manners more thrusting even than in Eastchepe, blustered of fine fare at the gate, clutching at hastening lawyers with their cries. Wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

  Barefoot, travel-seamed, in a dusty-grey habit, a Franciscan touched my sleeve. He gave me a blessing. ‘Sir, I seek the London lodging of my house.’

  ‘You’ll hear the Jesus bells of St Paul’s, Father,’ I told him. ‘North of Paul on Newgate you’ll find your church and cloister.’

  ‘And the library?’ His weary eyes lit up. ‘That which the Sun of Marchandy, Sir Richard Whittington, so generously endowed?’

  I nodded. ‘You’ve travelled far?’

  ‘From Norwich.’ He fingered his wooden crucifix. ‘God’s mercy on all there.’

  I heard the inrush of breath behind me.

  ‘Plague,’ I said softly... He smiled wanly as John and Robert shrank from him.

  ‘Fear naught,’ he murmured. ‘Weeks I lay, my bones dissolving to water, but the Lord spared me. I am whole again.’

  I felt for a coin—he was not importunate, and it was luck to fill his wooden bowl. ‘God be good to your house,’ I said.

  A slender dark shadow fell across us. I looked into the face of the Duke of Gloucester and saw it to be weary and grim with a look of restless days and nights. The Franciscan’s bowl was still extended and Richard dropped a gold piece and bowed his head briefly, passing on. The friar looked after him wistfully.

  ‘Benedicite,’ he whispered.

  ‘His Grace of Gloucester,’ I told him.

  ‘I have seen him before, my son,’ he said gently. ‘Two years ago, before all the troubles in this realm, be came to Our Lady of Walsingham with the King. I spoke with him then, though he could not have remembered me.’

  But he had remembered him, I thought. As the friar blessed us and moved away, I wondered deeply. What manner of man was Richard? There was no doubt in my mind: after two years, he had given recognition to an impoverished and anonymous friar. For some reason I began to feel much incensed. I heard the others whispering.

  ‘He should not have come to London,’ Robert said grimly. ‘Death can be carried—by God, I didn’t know they had plague in Norwich.’

  ‘Nor I,’ whispered John, all jelly-trembling.

  ‘You should wear the bezoar stone,’ I said, laughing again, and I fingered my talisman, smooth and round within my pouch. While I jested and saw their courage returning, I felt cold, thinking of the sudden crippling dizziness that assailed a man even in the ale-house; the orange-sized hard swelling in the armpit, the black vomit, the fires of Hell...

  So I comforted them.

  ‘Carpe diem,’ Robert said: ‘When his Grace sent us to play at Bungay six weeks gone, I heard no talk of plague at Norwich, for I and the King’s bearward were only speaking of sickness.’

  ‘They had no plague in Norwich,’ said John, ‘since August five years past, when hundreds died. Mistress Paston’s household left town for fear of it.’

  ‘One case,’ Robert argued. ‘The Lady Eleanor Butler. She died in the house of the Carmelites three years ago.’

  ‘That was not the plague,’ John insisted. ‘At first they thought it lung fever—but she died bewitched—no prayers or simples could aid her. They said she courted death, and went willingly.’

  ‘What talk for a fine day!’ I cried. ‘Pestilence, and tombs, and white faces, and my lord of Gloucester wandering the streets like a walking curse. All be merry, as I!’ and I snatched a pair of spectacles from a Flemish pedlar, donned them and, blinded instantly, walked smack into a wall.

  ‘Patch, I mislike this wager of ours,’ said Robert.

  ‘So you’d withdraw,’ I said. ‘You have not the wherewithal to pay me when I win.’

  ‘Nay,’ said Robert. He thought it too sorry a matter for gambling on. The Lady Anne was the Lord knew where, and her mother, Countess of Warwick, was in durance in the Sanctuary of Beaulieu, and it was, in effect, her money we were gaming on.

  ‘She has petitioned the Commons that she has never done aught to offend the King; she has sought safe-conduct in vain, all her estates being forfeit. She has written most piteously to the Queen’s Grace, the Duchess of York, the King’s daughters, and the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, all in her own hand in the absence of clerks. She tells of great affection between herself and her daughter Anne, and craves her whereabouts. What we are about seems knavish,’ he said lamely.

  ‘God’s Passion!’ I cried. ‘What harm can it do?’ John looked down, and shuffled his feet.

  ‘I too,’ he said. ‘Last night I sang a song, and incurred my lord of Gloucester’s displeasure, for he looked at me with a most terrible look.’

  He raised his pure boy’s voice and sang
a dolorous French song so beautiful it made me want to howl like a wolf. People passing smiled with joy.

  ‘Sing it in English,’ I said. ‘I thought you attended the scholae minstrallorum in Paris—yet your accent mazes me utterly.’

  He reddened. ‘I had ado with many Southerners,’ he said.

  ‘Alas, of you I should indeed complain

  If it please you not that I see you again

  My love, who has my soul enchained.

  For without I see you wherever I be

  All I behold displeases me

  Nor, until then, shall I sated be.’

  He spoke the words.

  ‘It loses pith in the translation.’

  I thought of the Maiden, and the sun went behind a cloud.

  Butcher Gould’s ’prentice rode a sweating palfrey, and the beast was nearly done. He had ridden hard to Westminster Palace, nearly a league’s distance, and was short of breath himself, while the horse, its sides pumping in and out, stood making water on the cobbles outside the Palace gate, a thing forbidden in the meanest streets. I had thrown my cloak on inside out in my frenzy, and was clad in my worst suiting, for I had that evening been in rehearsal—trying out the dramatization of Ovid’s Art of Love, with many effects ad libitum, and I had no mind for ruining good clothes by rolling on the floor with Flemish Jeane, so ill-prepared for a night’s foray was I. I had not yet dared ask the boy what kind of trouble was afoot—the one gasped word was enough.

  I had been bedwards and on my way to the panterer’s to get my bread and ale and candle-ends when the message came. The King was sitting late in Council; there had been no entertainment. The gateman grumbled as he let me out, but he had that very day taken two shillings from me at dice so I clattered unrebuked on my mare into the September night to where Gould’s boy waited. Together we rode in the direction of the Strand. There was a last gleam in the sky as we reached Temple Bar, but the serjeant closed the gate behind us and I was fast in the City for the night. So be it, I thought. If she needs me, I will risk reprimand. Our horses’ hooves crashed on the cobbles in a dangerous, slippery ride. Few people were abroad; only the cressets of the Watch flickering on the edge of Candlewick Street, and the occasional ragged bundle in the gutter, groaning under a hunger-dream. Few people; that is, until we came into Eastchepe and saw a fair crowd. Then I knew, with sinking belly, what kind of mischief this was. The most dread enemy, after plague. Outside my mother’s shop I threw my reins to one of the gawping crowd and ran into the fierce light of flames that feasted on dry timber, chuckled over greasy rushes, and roared approval as they fed.