The King's Grey Mare

by Jarman, Rosemary Hawley

  Grace answered instantly: ‘Till death.’ She knew the Marquis’s reasons for asking her allegiance; she was privy to a plan. A plan to kill. Bluntly and unequivocally, a plan to kill the Protector assigned by Edward. It all meant little. She thought: let them kill Gloucester if they must, for although he is my uncle, I scarcely know him. But let them leave his son, my friend, alone.

  Dorset left, bound for the chamber of Jane Shore. He had decided to seduce her afresh; for a long time he had resented sharing her with the King. At last Grace could approach the Queen, who was still pale although the fiery spots upon her cheeks had diminished. Grace knelt, and proffered the cup. The honey had congealed on the ale’s amber surface.

  ‘Your highness complained of evil of the throat. Dame Renée sent this,’ she whispered.

  ‘My throat is better. It was weeping that made it sore.’

  Again she had spoken and looked directly. It was happiness of the highest order. Grace raised her eyes to the Queen, who was sipping the fluid delicately. Then Elizabeth said a strange thing.

  ‘There is none to taste this posset for me! I have no Beaufort of Somerset! Are you poisoning me, mistress?’

  It was cruel, like a knife. Yet Grace thought: I answered Dorset truly. I love you. Although you have never been kind, I adore you as a dog loves the only master he has ever known, one who rewards his duty with a kick, his loyalty with blows. Is it because, within you, there are those deep fears, those lost feelings, that I myself own? God save me, silver lady. I love you, and know not why.

  With a small entourage Elizabeth moved to Windsor to wait out the days. It was mild enough for her to spend the afternoons in the ripening parkland. Wrapped in fine fur over her black gown, she sat on cushions, her spine supported by an ancient oak. All around was a rising cadence of birdsong; thrush and blackbird and robin shrilled in their small-leafed gallery above her head, and from the forest came the guttural rapping of a woodpecker. On the small mere by which she sat, two moorhens bobbed beneath the flashing splendour of a pair of kingfishers. It was April, cruel green April.

  Only by sitting very still could she contain herself. Grief, rage and anxiety warred within her. Over all was a black fear that made her finger constantly the diamonds at her breast, the pearls in her ears, seeking comfort in their cool stability. Now and then the sorrow pried through like an irrelevant toothache. It was April; acutely, when she closed her eyes, she saw Bradgate opening to her round a luscious flower-strewn bend. Sir John Grey, knight, is dead. As is Edward, King of England. Strange that I, twice-widowed, should have attended neither of them at the end. I would have staunched John’s wounds with my hair. But Edward never even sent for me! She bit her lips. Rage gained sovereignty until ousted by unrest. Why did he not call me? While I waited, sending messages every hour, he preferred the company of my son Dorset, my brother Lionel, and cursed, vacillating Hastings. Were all these nineteen years for naught? I gave him sweet daughters, strong sons. The last, little George, died through no fault of mine. I gave him a Prince of Wales, Ned, made in our image, royal and fair and pale. A stout, rumbustious, merry Duke of York, little Dick. And I closed my eyes to lechery and drunkenness. (A picture of Edward rose, Edward reeling to the vomitorium behind the dais, to spew up a thirty-course dinner so he might dine again.) Then Melusine cried on the battlements and he was gone, without asking for my presence at his side. He rejected me to spare his own immortal soul. He died in sin, in bigamy. Tom whispered that he called for Eleanor at the last. Pray Jesu none heard him. Let not my glory pass away.

  The only tribute to his consort, a poem penned by a stumbling amateur and written as if from the tomb, was nauseating to her in its irony.

  … Where is now my conquest and royal array?

  Where be my coursers and horses high?

  Where is my mirth, my solace and my play?

  As vanity is naught, all is wandered away!

  O Lady Bessy! long for me ye may call,

  For I am departed until the doomsday,

  But love ye that Lord who is sovereign of all.

  She thought: I am again alone. More than when John died. For then I was four-and-twenty, fruitful, resourceful, with a strength that was doubled by the skill and purpose of my mother. Now I am forty-six, and old. A soft wind blew across the tiny lake, and unexpectedly, incredibly, her spirit lifted. I am Queen-Regent. Behind me lies the power of Cleopatra, or the Queen of Sheba. Even now my son Thomas lays hands upon the treasures of the Tower, the vast fortune amassed by Edward, and the weapons of war to crush any who dare question my might. How can I be alone? She lifted her eyes to the greenness above and smiled faintly. All my enemies are dead; the Fiend rots in earth and writhes in Hell. Clarence will ferret no more for secrets to undo me. Even Desmond’s laughter is stilled. His two little knaves also, cut off in play … The smile fled. That was unlucky. Too late now, to mend that. But Tiptoft should have spared them. Unlucky. She began again, for comfort’s sake, to account her benefits. I have Anthony, strong, clever Anthony …

  (‘Sweet sister, think of me when you come into your glory!’

  ‘Anthony, we shall be supreme! More powerful than the King himself!’)

  I have Margaret Beaufort, with her man’s mind and her unerring judgment. And now she has a new husband, Lord Stanley, well to heel. His was the loudest voice upholding me at the Council meeting, when Edward’s last decree was superseded. Edward’s last decree! Gloucester shall not have charge of my son, that precious chalice of royal blood, that vessel of power. Gloucester, whom I had almost forgotten, shall die. No doubt he is already dead, if Anthony keeps faith, which he will. Anthony shall be rewarded with a quarter of my treasure from the Tower.

  Her busy mind went meticulously on, reliving scenes and conversations like a series of tableaux. The interment of Edward in St. George’s Chapel, so near through the trees. The lying-in-state; Edward’s great chest and belly exposed above the loincloth, his gross flesh ethereal in the tapers’ light, so that he drew on a reminder of his slender sunlit youth. So, he was with his Eleanor now! She thought: I once dreaded his death as the end of my power. But now I know my power begins.

  The servants, and the Princess Elizabeth who sat near by, looked at the restless twisting hands, the face that smiled and frowned in turn as assets were reckoned, hazards appraised. She calculated ceaselessly her prizes both monetary and prestigious; she saw the realm like cloth of Arras, starred goldly with her possessions. Her fee-farms by the thousand, acre on acre of sweeping land rich with barley or patrolled by a million wool-bearing sheep. Her scores of royal chases thronged with venison and birds to grace a paladin’s table. The gold, the silver and jewels, the horses, hawks and weapons, the fabulous furnishings and tapestries in fifty or more palaces. And beside all these the ocean of wealth amassed for Thomas and Richard Grey, for Anthony. She nodded, a gesture weird to the watchers, as she thought: I acted well over Exeter’s daughter. Even when she died after a year’s marriage to Tom I prevailed on Edward for those vast estates to remain my son’s. Clarence’s bounty, too. All mine, ours. Earldoms and duchies and marquisates. My brother Edward in charge of a mighty fleet, lying off the French coast. Even Calais mine one day …

  I asked for as much of the land around the fountain that could be covered by a stag’s hide. Then I cut the hide into strips so that my land extended far beyond the forest.

  The pattern goes on. Even in my widowhood there is naught to fear. Only Hastings, with whom Tom has promised to deal speedily. And Richard Gloucester … What possessed Edward? To pronounce as Protector of the Realm, a brother whom he scarcely ever saw, one content to rusticate in the soulless North. But Anthony would put him down. The Council should issue all writs in aurunculus regis uterinus and frater regis uterinus. In the name of the Queen’s brother and son.

  As for Edward Prince of Wales, he was the greatest asset of all. A pocket King of England, more biddable than the weakest of grown monarchs. Edward should stay at his lessons until he was twenty-one
!

  Queen’s College, Cambridge. Mine. Endowed and refounded to my honour. What Marguerite began I finished, far more gloriously.

  Elizabeth, Princess of York. Young Bess. Out of the tail of her eye she could see her, sitting on spread cloth-of-gold; tall and blonde, wistful in her black. A royal prince for her! More glory for the house of Woodville. All the crowned heads of Europe would be present, the jewelled banners would lift, and foreign chroniclers would gape at the marriage of Bess, daughter of the most powerful Queen in Christendom. She who had breasted the tide of humiliation, who herself had snared a king, and had seen her enemies fall like flowers. Twenty bishops would witness a second generation’s rise to royal heights.

  The bishops. Again, her face sobered. The courtiers did her will, but that covey of wily, guilt-ridden old men were yet to be sounded. Russell, Bishop of Lincoln and Keeper of the Privy Seal; Story, Bishop of Chichester and King’s Executor; Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York. Bishop Morton of Ely was already hers, through the gracious intercession of Margaret Beaufort. Her own brother Lionel had the see of Salisbury in his grip. One thing was clear; the bishops needed the patronage and favour of the Crown. They were only too conscious of the ritual squabbling in their ranks, the obloquy in which the Church was held by the laity, to the extent of physical assault on clergy. Yes, the Church would soon come begging for the Queen-Regent’s assent. And they should have it. She liked the new bidding-prayer already written: ‘for our prince, the lady Queen Elizabeth his mother, all the royal offspring, the princes of the King, his nobles and people’. This augured well; she was not to be overpassed as the mothers of previous infant kings had been; Joan of Kent, mother of Richard II, or Katherine, who bore crazy Henry. Then Councils had reigned and lesser Queens embraced obscurity.

  She flicked back over her thoughts as one turning the pages of a book. Katherine of France took a lover, Owen Tudor. Bore Edmund Tudor, Margaret Beaufort’s first husband. They in turn begat young Henry. Strange young Henry, of the deep curtsey and cadaverous smile. She looked idly across at the little lake; irrelevantly Henry’s smile seemed to wink from it. Such manifestation meant that the person concerned was thinking of you. But according to Margaret Beaufort, and Lord Stanley, Henry’s new stepfather, this was unlikely. Henry was again in Brittany, thanks to Edward’s hectoring of him some years previously; the King had mumbled vaguely about the aspirations of bastard Welshmen. She had paid little heed, but remembered that Henry had been chased to St. Malo by some Yorkist fleet with little else to do. Yet she remembered his smile; that look from the wise, heavy eyes. He could only have been admiring her.

  He had looked long at the Princess Elizabeth too. Almost as if he lusted for her. It was impossible to associate such gross emotions with the son of the nunly Countess. Last year Margaret had come to beg the royal licence to her third marriage. Elizabeth had said politely: ‘God send you many children.’

  The bright black eyes were primly amused. ‘Madame, I have told you I am done with childbearing. My marriage to Stanley will be one of the mind.’ To this, Stanley showed no objection. He and Margaret were alike, cool and quiet and unfleshly. Margaret made all the decisions, still signing herself Countess of Richmond, a pretension to which she had no vestige of right. This had annoyed Edward, but Elizabeth had been amused. Let Margaret deck herself with small honours like bracelets; the title of noble blood had escaped her. Like all the Beauforts, she was merely the offshoot of old Gaunt’s sinful liaison with Katherine Swynford. She had no enchanted heritage … Elizabeth’s thoughts rustled on, like the bird-haunted trees.

  A commotion reached her. Across the parkland came shouting and the baying of dogs. Around the Queen, the circle of grooms, falconers, guards, rose to attention. Hunting was forbidden during the period of royal mourning, yet there appeared to be a chase in progress, not a quarter-league distant. Then, bursting from a covert of briars, appeared what seemed to be a bundle of rags. It leaped nimbly towards the Queen’s little camp of pleasaunce. It was an old woman, running like a hare. Tatters and thorns encompassed her; her face was streaked with blood and filth. Bounding close behind her were a half-dozen sleek, snarling wolfhounds, followed more clumsily by a group of yeomen from Windsor. The woman ran on, mouth gasping in terror, hands clawing the air. She ran straight into the royal circle, throwing herself with one last lunge past the servants who tried to grasp her. She fell face down at the Queen’s feet.

  Like creatures of Hell, the hounds were close, eyes bloodshot, jaws gaping. Princess Elizabeth screamed. The Queen’s women clutched at one another in terror, while several brave pages threw themselves forward to grapple with the rearing beasts. The yeomen raced up and, with difficulty, put the dogs on leash. Baulked, they whined and slavered over the prone woman. Elizabeth, who had not moved, said coldly: ‘What is the meaning of this entertainment?’

  To the woman she said: ‘Get up.’ As soon as the eyes in the caked disfigured face met hers, she knew recognition and this worried her. Soon, she thought, I shall be seeing acquaintances in the bole of a tree or the shape of a flower. First, Henry Tudor’s smile in the lake, and now this wretched vagrant. One of the men trying to calm the hounds spoke hastily.

  ‘Highness, forgive us. We tried to stop her. She was too fleet. She wished to see your highness. Whitefriar here–’ he soothed a hound – ‘nearly had her. One more moment and she would not have troubled you’.

  Bloody teethmarks stained the woman’s brown bare heel. Rough and indistinct, she spoke. She addressed Elizabeth directly; too old, too poor to acknowledge fear.

  ‘Oh, lady,’ she said. ‘Do you remember Eltham?’

  An instant engulfing wave, memory rose. No trick then, no false recollection. Eltham; the day of the joust, of John. The rolling train of festive knights and ladies. The Countess of Somerset, dozing in the litter. The Tudors, Jasper and Edmund, sweeping on to the tiltyard. The coming of York, and the Fiend, to discomfit King Henry. And the old woman (old even then!) whose skull Barnaby craved to break … Here was certainty that memory was unimpaired, save for deeds born to be forgotten.

  A royal prince, fair lady, shalt thou wed,

  But trouble dire shall fall upon thine head …

  Then, she had thought the rhyme glib, and suspect. But how true it had become!

  Bone of thy bone shall by a future fate

  With blood of these three houses surely mate …

  But which three houses? Her mind groped. She had been saying the rhyme out loud, while the gypsy followed her with little nods and smiles.

  ‘Lady,’ she said softly, ‘the first two are York and Lancaster …

  ‘And the third?’

  The woman laughed. ‘Lady,’ she said with finality, ‘that is for you to decide.’ Her deep, lined eye swivelled to rest upon the Princess Elizabeth, still trembling from her recent fright.

  ‘She, lady.’

  ‘My daughter? What of her?’

  In the eyes there were traces of tears that might have been seen in the gold-framed eyes of ancient Egypt; the tears of dead kings doomed by their enemies to be unremembered.

  ‘She will be Queen of England. God have mercy.’

  It is favourable, Elizabeth thought joyfully, disregarding the last strange phrase. My destiny comes to the full. Bess will be a Queen and twenty bishops shall bow to the crowning of a Woodville. And yet – Queen of England? What of Ned, who even now rides to London in Anthony’s care? To be crowned king, to be ruled by our Council for years until the name of Woodville is as rooted as Plantagenet … How can Bess supersede her brother, or his brother, Richard of York? She felt the skin stretch tight over her face.

  ‘Then this means, dame–’ she addressed the gypsy courteously but each word slid like ice – ‘that my sons will never rule England?’

  The woman inclined her head.

  ‘They will … die young?’

  ‘They will.’

  She felt her own senses rejecting the answer alm
ost before it was out. She saw also that the dogs had done more mischief than was earlier evident; blood ran down the woman’s legs. The sight of it stole away some magic; this, then, was no seer. Only a wretch who lived on her wits. London, England, abounded with false prophets. Yet she leaned forward again, and said: ‘Tell me …’

  Then Whitefriar, the largest hound, slipped his chain from the inattentive hand of a groom and sprang. The stench of blood led him to his duty. He was trained for the throat, and all was quickly over. One stifled shriek, a flurry of torn clothing, brown flesh bursting into red, and silence. Elizabeth sat frozen for a moment, watching Whitefriar whipped and chivvied into subservience, then fondled, then cuffed again by men uncertain of the Queen’s humour. Then she rose, carefully pulling her gown away from the woman’s body where it lay. I might have kept her to be my soothsayer, she thought, then, looking down: foolishness. How could this mangled bone-bag have had the gift of sight? She saw that the Princess was milk-faced and shuddering; this annoyed her. She moved swiftly to her daughter’s side and pinched her wrist, hard.

  ‘Be still,’ she commanded. ‘Are you some half-wit, to snivel at death?’To herself she added: when I was seventeen no sight disturbed me! She listened impatiently to the girl’s stammering reply.

  ‘It was her words, Madame … she said … she said … Madame, I do not want to be Queen of England! I would liefer marry for love!’

  ‘Jesu, God!’ cried Elizabeth. She could have boxed Bess’s ears. Resisting the temptation she turned with an imperious look to the assembled company and said:

  ‘We have tarried long enough here. We shall return to our Palace of Westminster.’