The King's Grey Mare

by Jarman, Rosemary Hawley

  Jane. Her thoughts ran back like a silken coil to that night eight days ago. The night before the King had been taken so grievously and suddenly sick. She remembered it well; that night she had attended the Queen in the great chamber where Edward so seldom came of late. To cosset the Queen was Grace’s joy. She received no thanks, hardly a look or a word, yet, all the while she basked in inexplicable content. Merely to be in that presence was to bathe in the cool unearthly tranquillity of moonlight. Yes, if Edward was the glowing Sun in Splendour, his consort was the moon.

  That particular night had been different, troubling, however. As always, Grace had waited, lying taut and vigilant on her trestle until the breathing in the bed should soften almost to inaudibility. She heard midnight chime; then one, two, three, four hours, and still from above came rustlings, little coughs, sighs. Once she thought she heard a murmured prayer, or the drift of a poem; and fancied that she had fallen asleep and dreamed, and snatched at wakefulness to find the silence more pronounced. Not even a dog barked; the palace seemed fixed in enchantment. A finger of dull starlight shone through a gap in the curtains. Grace, sick with weariness, lay willing the Queen to sleep. Then, a few seconds after the quarter’s chime, there was a great commotion as the Queen flung herself out of bed, calling for light. Grace lit candles; their wavering flames showed the Queen’s pale face, pale hair streaming, hands that clutched and pleated her damask bedgown. She was angry.

  ‘Holy Jesu!’ she ‘cried. ‘Will she never stop that noise? Hour after hour … I could tear out her tongue!’

  She paced the room, and the silence grew more profound than ever. Grace, shocked and afraid, stared at the Queen, who then, for the first time in months, addressed her directly.

  ‘Is she not possessed?’ she demanded. ‘Some devil must enter her, bidding her mar my sleep! Have you slept, mistress? Nay, how could you? Listen! she grows louder … laughing. The King calls her merry. I call her mad!’

  The candlelight fluttered; in the corners shadows crept. The Queen ran to the window and threw back the curtains.

  ‘Almost dawn, I swear! There again! You hear her?’

  Grace, her teeth chattering, whispered: ‘Who, highness?’The silence was caught up in the shadows and licked around them both.

  ‘Why, the creature Shore, of course!’ The Queen leaned against the window, peering through. ‘It sounds – Jesu! It sounds as if she were making merry on the roof!’

  Grace, paralysed with uncertainty, waited close to the Queen’s silhouetted shape, watching the perfect profile outlined against candlefire and dawnlight, telling herself: I am deaf, and I am witless. This day I will go to the physician and have him probe my ears, however much it hurts. For before God, I hear nothing.

  ‘Is she laughing?’ said the Queen. ‘Or is she weeping?’Through the gloom her eyes sought Grace’s small upturned face. There had to be an answer. The Queen abhorred laughter; that was well known. In the desperate, clinging silence, Grace said: ‘I think …’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Weeping, your Grace.’

  The Queen was looking away. Slowly the tension left her body, her hands unclenched. ‘Ah!’ She sighed and shuddered. ‘It is finished. Praise God.’

  After a while she returned and climbed into the deepsided bed. Grace snugged the coverlet down over the Queen, and extinguished the candles. Although it was mild for April, she felt deeply chill, and lay for a long time, wondering. Finally the Queen’s voice reached her, strangely quiet.

  ‘Mistress Grace, will you pray?’

  ‘Yes, highness.’

  ‘Pray for protection.’

  Grace slid from the trestle once more, and knelt. ‘Libera nos, Domine, ab omnibus malis …’

  The Queen cut her off short, saying: ‘Nay, leave it. I am foolish. I will see the Comptroller this day. My household becomes a beargarden. And I will speak to Mistress Shore.’

  Grace was there when Jane was summoned. She came dishevelled, mud upon her gown. The Queen spoke to her kindly, while Jane looked up with artless eyes.

  ‘Can you not temper your merrymaking of a night?’

  ‘Madame?’

  ‘Shrieking – aloft … where were you last night, Mistress Shore?’

  Jane, looking mystified, said primly: ‘Madame, I have only just returned from the City. My husband is sick, and sent for me two days ago.’

  Both she and Grace saw the Queen’s face slacken for an instant, but only Grace heard the word that leaped from the Queen’s lips, soft as a breath, a blasphemy. Then Elizabeth made a gesture of dismissal, her smooth features once more expressionless. Following the Queen back to her apartment, Grace saw how slowly she walked. Once she leaned on a pillar, and said clearly:

  ‘When sorrow strikes a royal house … ah, Jesu!’

  It was not the Holy Name she had whispered in that one startled gasp at Mistress Shore. It was a name that Grace had never heard; a liquid, silvery name. Half an hour later, Master Hobbes, the King’s physician, came almost demented to say that Edward was ill.

  Now he was dead. Rain, an April squall like sudden grief, smacked against the window. Grace turned away at last. She watched Renée preparing a draught of honeyed ale for the Queen. Renée’s eyes were red; she looked suddenly very old. To Grace’s fourteen years, forty were legion. Yet the Queen, who was even older than Renée, seemed ageless.

  ‘She will find that posset too sweet,’ Grace said. Renée answered angrily: ‘I need no schoolroom cook to teach me my work!’ and Grace’s sadness gave way to unease. Now that her father was dead, would people change? They already mocked her for having no husband. Fourteen years old, and the bastard of a King. No beauty – she had decided that for herself long ago. The mirror in the Queen’s bower – that mirror girdled with sea-shapes, sirens, fishes – showed her a face too thin, a mouth too full. Under the pointed hennin the blonde curls were scraped back and hidden. She missed the striking loveliness of the brilliant green eyes slanted like a cat’s, the lissom waist, the kindly lips. She saw only the defects which made her murmur, for comfort: I am Grace Plantagenet.’

  Renée was keening to herself, uttering little scraps of thought. Perhaps she did have the right to weep – if only for the twice-widowed Queen; but somehow her sorrow was mechanical.

  ‘She was so happy, so glorious. Only two weeks ago. At that pageant the King arranged, showing that her Grace was descended from the Magi. All three kings came to kneel to her … and now … ’ She omitted to weep for Edward, who had died in a bloated agony so that some whispered of poison.

  ‘I still say the draught is too sweet,’ said Grace. ‘She will send it away.’

  None the less she took the silver cup covered with fair linen to the Queen’s chamber. As she walked, each step was measured by the passing bell. The deep sound had beaten on her brain for so many hours that she thought she would never lose it; like a heartbeat, it would remain until death. All around her was unreality. The stones she trod, the carved columns by which she passed, wavered and were fluid. The men and women whom she met swam silently by like blackclad ghosts. Only at the Queen’s door did things solidify, among them the figure of Thomas Dorset, Elizabeth’s firstborn. He was standing, hand raised to knock, and upon hearing Grace approach he turned with a smile. Although puffed with weeping, his eyes stripped her naked. He bowed elegantly. He mocked her, through envy of her as a King’s bastard, but the courtesy and the wandering eyes were tribute to the challenge of her virginity. After the King, Tom Grey had the monopoly of all the remaining maidenheads at court.

  ‘Beauty. Enter, I pray.’

  She answered formally: ‘My lord takes precedence,’ disliking him. It came to her forcibly that she disliked almost everyone at court. With her father’s death, this thought crystallized. Half-way up the spiral stair behind her, she heard Jane Shore wailing for the dead King. Jane could have been kind, but she was too shallow and undependable. Grace stood hesitantly while Dorset bowed and sneered. Through the closed door came voices, am
ong them the sibilant note of Reynold Bray, who, whenever he saw her, exhorted Grace to prayer, while resembling a rat in search of a hen-house. Then she heard the Queen’s voice, precise and plaintive; a male answer, indistinct, and the name: ‘Gloucester.’

  Grace’s mood suddenly lifted. Naturally, Richard Duke of Gloucester would be coming south for Edward’s burial, and there was the thread of a chance that he would bring with him the one person she most wished to see. Someone near enough her own age to be intelligible; someone whose presence in the past had lightened days which were frustrating, bewildering and often hopeless. John. John of Gloucester. A smile trembled on her lips so that Dorset, encouraged, bent closer. The last time she and John had met was at Eltham by the lake. She had wanted a lily, a lily like a fat, pink-tipped candle. He had waded into the water to pluck it, and had spoiled his forest-green hose; new that day. Then they had walked together the periphery of the lake, their hands lightly clasped. She had been two fingers taller than he. Glancing behind at the grass patterned by his soaked feet, she had teased him.

  ‘Will your father have you beaten?’

  ‘I wish he were more often at home to beat me,’ John answered. ‘He’s always away; fighting.’

  She had said, inconsequentially: ‘I never knew my mother.’

  ‘Nor I mine.’ His clear pale face was thoughtful. ‘Richard Plantagenet is father and mother to me; and of course, I have the Lady Anne, his wife.’

  It was, she decided, because they were of like station that their affinity grew and blossomed into a mood of ease and comfort. Both royal bastards; both Plantagenet, yet touched by unknown, possibly simple blood. Conceived in a moment of lust, or, boredom, or even revenge. Lately Grace had wondered about her own mother; there must be tacit reason for the Queen’s manner – the coldness that should have hurt and sometimes did, the unease which filled the Queen’s eyes when they looked at Grace. Although it was of no consequence; so long as she was not sent from that hypnotic, spellbinding presence. Only once had she discussed the Queen with John, and he had said, surprisingly: ‘Her Grace dislikes my father. Because Edward loves him so. And because he is married to Anne of Warwick.’

  Warwick was a name almost out of Grace’s time. Only his castle of Middleham remained, a place steadfast yet wild, and painted with vivid glamour by John. He would talk for hours about the moors of Middleham, a tapestry of hawks and horses and sweeping winds. A place of pagan holiness, he called it. A castle warned by great fires and mirth. And as he talked he himself became imbued with the cold and the crying birds, the bubbling, water-white garths, the warm heathery scents and the haunted mists, making them also a part of Grace. She heard the name ‘Gloucester’ spoken again, and as Dorset pushed the door open, she twinned a prayer: May the Duke bring John with him to London; and may John not have changed.

  The Queen was sitting surrounded by her family. She was in mourning, its doleful black lit by a white barbette beneath her chin. She was pale, with a high flush on each cheek. Her hands were clasped hard together and trembled slightly. Behind her chair stood her brothers, Lionel Bishop of Salisbury and Sir Edward Woodville the sea-captain. Her sister Catherine, also in mourning, knelt at her feet. Bishop Morton stood sombrely by; a great parchment, brightly sealed, drooped from his hand. Without being told, Grace knew instantly that this was the King’s last will and testament. Again her vision blurred so that the group of tense faces – Margaret Beaufort, Lord Stanley, Reynold Bray (who stood at a lectern, quill poised) shimmered and gleamed in her sight. She blinked, and a tear fell on the snowy linen covering the cup. Dorset moved swiftly forward from her side and knelt, pressing his forehead to the Queen’s fingers. She said: ‘Where have you been? I summoned you hours ago.’ He murmured excuses which she dismissed turning her face with an odd little gesture sharply to one side, closing her eyes. Grace thought: she seems nervous, changed. She pictured the Queen of, two weeks ago, as lamented by Renée; at the pageant of the Magi. There had been something mystic in that scene; the robes green and gold, the incense rising and the rich gifts. Paradoxical, too. Though everyone knew that in the land of the Magi the river of Paradise rose, there were other opinions: that all evil as well as good came from the East – the devils of the sand, the herbs to drive men mad. It was difficult to decide, but the Queen had seemed well pleased.

  Also present were Lord Berners, the Queen’s Chamberlain, and his wife, nurse to the Princess. With a stab of sympathy Grace wondered how Bess did. She had not wept at the news of her father’s death as had Mary and Cicely. Her wide, rather childish blue eyes had looked puzzled and a little afraid. The babes, Katherine and Bridget, were too young to feel much grief. Nine-year-old Richard Duke of York had stifled sorrow bravely, only to break down in Grace’s arms when she dressed him in the black velvet doublet. Mourning put a degree of manhood upon him and stopped his noisy battle-games for a day; the powerful atmosphere of disquiet, acutely felt all over the Palace, made his pert face thoughtful. He said to Grace: ‘Now my brother Ned will be King.’

  ‘Yes, yes, my lord.’

  He blew his nose, sighed as if released from travail.

  ‘Then I shall see him soon. He seems to have been years at Ludlow.’ From that moment he was himself again.

  Grace shifted her feet. A small figure among the crowd of nobles, she held the rapidly cooling cup of ale. The Queen was speaking, hard and high, pausing only while Reynold Bray, his nose almost touching the parchment, scratched out a letter with his quill.

  ‘To Sir Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, Governor of Ludlow. Right worshipful and well beloved brother, we greet you well. And it is our doleful duty to acquaint you of the passing of our sovereign lord, Edward King of England …’

  A dozen hands made the sign of the cross.

  ‘We as Queen-Regent–’ the delicate eyelids fluttered; the voice laid down the words, hard and definite, like coins on a table – ‘we, as Queen-Regent, make it known that the said Edward in his last will and testament named as Protector of the Realm his brother Richard Duke of Gloucester, to have sole charge and ruling over our sovereign-elect, our son the Prince Edward of Wales, now in your lordship’s care. Having regard for … for our own standing and fortunes in the realm, we charge you thus.’

  She stopped, swallowed. Grace looked uneasily down at the draught she held. The Queen was far from finished; it would have to wait. Hard and cool the words flowed on.

  ‘As Queen-Regent we charge you to be diligent in thwarting this decree, and to bring our son Edward Prince of Wales with all speed to London where he shall be crowned King of England in the presence of his rightful supporters. I pray you spare no cost or effort in hindering the Duke of Gloucester …’

  She turned suddenly to Margaret Beaufort. ‘Can I make it plainer?’ The Countess, coming closer, answered: ‘Madame, Sir Anthony is the cleverest knight in Christendom. The missive is clear enough.’

  Reynold Bray finished writing and brought quill and parchment over for the royal signature. The Queen said quickly: ‘Master, an addition. Write: Gloucester knows not of the King’s death. Delay all messengers. I pray you, fail me not.’

  Bray wrote. The Queen dipped the pen and in perfect silence, added ‘Elizabeth’ – fine and hard, the small round ‘e’ and wild long-tailed ‘z’ – the whole underlined by a ripple like a seawave. She looked then at the assembly and, as if daring them to disagree, said: ‘You are in accord’?’ There was an instant mumble of assent. With a rustle of mourning gowns they knelt and bowed and quit the Chamber. Grace, save for Dorset, was alone with the Queen who continued to ignore her, beckoning her son nearer with a small, frenetic gesture.

  ‘Tom, why did you delay?’ she demanded. ‘You are vital to this enterprise. You must ride at once to Ludlow with the message. Where is Hastings now? Jesu! I know that he will send the news to Gloucester with all speed. Hastings was one we could not suborn. That stupid, arrogant knight,’ she said vexedly.

  ‘Madame,’ said Tom Dorset. ‘I cannot go to Lu
dlow. There is much to do here.’

  She clenched her hands in irritation. ‘Did I make you Constable of the Tower for nothing? Are all your honours in vain?’

  He smiled, a little seductive smile. ‘Madam my mother, it is because I am Constable of the Tower that I must remain. Already my men are preparing the armaments – five thousand handguns, ten thousand longbows, a thousand cannon … for our endeavour.’

  ‘I pray,’ she said uneasily, ‘that we need not array ourselves in arms. The Londoners will not love us for it. And Gloucester is a warrior, a strategist …’

  ‘Madame, be courageous,’ said Thomas Dorset, smiling again. ‘My swiftest men shall ride to my uncle at Ludlow. Leave the rest to him. It will be but a short battle for this … this ill-chosen Protector, Gloucester. Short, secret, final.’

  ‘And Hastings?’ said the Queen uneasily.

  ‘That,’ answered Dorset, ‘you may leave to me. There are subtler ways than force. Give me the letter, Madame. Couriers, sworn men, are waiting.’

  He took the roll, now sealed, and turned. He saw Grace, and still mocking, yet unquiet, asked her: ‘Is that soothing potion cold, mistress? And tell me, do you love our Queen?’