As, cut your hair up by your ear,
Your kirtle by the knee;
With bow in hand for to withstand
Your enemies, if need be...
I had not withstood my enemies. The Duchess of Bedford’s great burnished glass shone in my mind. Her face, too, set in it like a toad, unwinking, raddled beauty, while behind it, mine, white and attenuated, with plum-blue bruising round the eyes from the worry, worry, that she might rob me of a minute, a second in his arms. Even in my own mind I would not name him. He was he, and I was utterly his, and I would never again give his name a voice, I held it too dear. I would not dishonour it.
Great black bats began their sweeping dance between earth and heaven. Framed by the pointed grey arch of my window, they flew, silent as treachery. A bell tolled, heavy, urgent, the metal of the soul. I sat on the bed, and felt its dew soak through my gown. Motionless, I thought: my love has entombed me. Old thoughts and new flittered like the bats. The Duchess would have rushed into Sanctuary with her mirror and the Jerusalem Tapestry—that cloth of Arras for which Sir Thomas Cook had paid so dear. And Elizabeth, Elizabeth! who had flown so high and to good purpose—was her glory, too, crumbling like mine? Did she weep, and did she love? For the King was taken. The King was taken, and his brother, and the dampness of the chamber made me shake as I saw my love, fighting that moment to the death, against proud Warwick.
He would fight bravely, on his first campaign, striving to shield the worshipped King. Were he taken hostage, he would not cringe or seek the sanctuary of defeat, would give no fair words to sneering Warwick. Even his voice, crying his challenge against terrible odds, for St George and Plantagenet, would wear an edge. And if they took his sword, it would be in their own flesh. Would to God I were fighting for him, my hair cut off, the child asleep within me. Would the tears stand in his eyes, I wondered, when he saw his foe, the friend turned enemy? ‘Yea, the people love Warwick. All love him, as I did.’ Would his colour come and go, like the firelight, when he saw the cruel Bear and Ragged Staff? And I decided yea, and yea again, hearing through my fear’s torment the hammer of his steel. This, then, would be his mien. For I knew him as I knew myself.
Warwick, maddened by a usurping woman, would show him no quarter. Warwick, forgetting past love, would sanction his death.
Night fell, and I laid a curse upon Elizabeth. Laid it, and lifted it. For if Elizabeth loved, as I, and would have her love, to lie beside him all night and wake warm with him at day’s beginning, we were truly sisters, and cursing her, I cursed myself. Yet Elizabeth had done many things which I could not. There were Desmond’s boys, and Desmond himself, who still plagued me. Patch had told me: ‘Foully murdered, for their father’s affront to the vanity of her Grace.’ That is, if Patch could be believed, with his loose and dangerous wit.
Long after, hearing how matters really went, and how Warwick was outwitted, I could have mocked at my own thoughts, but perchance that evening saw the beginnings of my madness. For in those first few hours, I deemed myself truly mad. Made mad by love, and a cruel parting. Others in that house shared my longing, knew well the colour of my thought, but I had yet to learn of this.
There came a scratching at the door, and I kept silence trembling, for I still thought that there were those who sought my death, and I marvelled that none unlocked the chamber door and entered. I sat watching that broad piece of oak, like a cat—God save us! like Gyb spying on a mouse!—and wondering what lay without. Thus, with my growing dread, all the monsters I had ever seen, in books and dreams, scratched on the door; I reckoned the Duchess in her mercy could have sent a headsman, a hangman, to slay me for my crimes—what crimes? And the scratching grew more insistent, past bearing, so that I cried, in what was almost a scream: ‘Enter! in Our Lady’s Name!’ then called thrice upon the Trinity, and well that I did, for the door, that was not locked, crept open and there entered a spirit, a creature unearthly, from which I shrank in terror. Dear Edyth, how you affrighted me! You who would not harm the smallest thing alive, whom I have seen shed your cloak rather than jolt a slumbering butterfly, you little know how close I was to death that instant!
For the being that came silently in was green, green as a water-nixie, possessing a drowned, dead look, the flesh of its face made a more ghastly green by the quavering light it carried, and the arms, twig-thin, loaded with sour greenness, a great slithering mass that rustled and shook—a green pillow to smother me.
I beat out my hands to ward it off. But it came on, this apparition, steadily, flashing me one glance from great hollow eyes in a twilight face. And dropped its bundle on the ground, so that its true form in a gown greenish-grey was revealed to be thinner even than mine. The light it held up to my face, and the dropping gleam lit up its own, so that I shuddered this time with relief to see the countenance of a child. A child, spare to gauntness, a pale sad mouth, a body clothed in shrunken grey, wisps of hair lying like river-reeds upon its neck. A maid, with naught but duty in her face. Sweat ran down my sides in a sudden gush of warmth. I started to laugh, and the laughter shook me with its wanton witlessness. You looked puzzled, Edyth, then my laughter pleased you, for you too peered closely for the jest, saw it not and joined me, none the less, with a high tittering sound like the cry of some sad bird. When I had done, you also ceased, composed your little face into its old apathy and bent to your bundle, untying the bonds from its lush greenness and spreading it with your feet all round the chamber.
‘Rushes,’ she said. ‘Rushes fair and green.’
Kick, kick. Then, the ridged, bending spine, the hands flying like pale fish in a dark-green river, patting, smoothing, a meticulous procedure. I saw that one of the trampling feet was twice the other’s size; all but one thong of the sandal shoe had been severed to accommodate a clumped malformed mass. Now and then she stopped, peeped back over her bowed shoulder to give me the quarter of a smile. When she came to the corner where the wet seeped through, she thrust two fingers into her mouth and stood, considering deeply. She looked back at me.
‘Wet,’ she said. ‘By my faith, ’tis wet.’
She turned again to survey the rippling damp, and, dumb, I watched for a long moment the workings of her intelligence. Sudden energy seized her. She pulled the thickest sheaf of rushes into the corner, packed them tightly, and bending, so spare, so under-cherished, dammed the flow. Then she rose and hesitatingly came to me and laid a hand upon my arm, the first soft touch I had felt for many days. She began to stroke the silk of my sleeve. Now, I felt anger at myself for having feared her; she was no more than eleven years old, stroking, stroking, face bent, the pallid, bumpy brow close to my chin.
‘’Tis fair, this,’ she murmured, rubbing the stuff between two fingers. Together we stood, our foolish silence broken only by the bird’s claw hand chafing on silk. Our conversation, as it ran its course, was like the sighing of two branches in the wind, separate, alien one to the other.
‘A fine gown had I, once,’ she said.
‘What is this place? Your name?’
‘Madame sold it. Madame sold my gown. She said ’twas not fitting for such as I.’
Is Madame the Prioress? I thought, but did not ask. I would that the shocks came stealthily, on tiptoe one by one, for I felt as a bowstring must feel, drawn to the last aching limit.
‘Are you from York, lady?’ She looked up, frail-faced.
‘Nay, London,’ I said.
‘Sister Adelysia is of York.’ Her eyes studied mine. ‘She wept again today, and would not have my comfort.’
Jesu, what place is this, I thought. This crippled child, midway ’twixt death and life, herself assuaging sorrow. Yet more sorrow?
‘Where’s London?’
‘Child, what ails your foot?’
Raising the hem of her gown, she looked at the misshapen member as if for the first time, and blew a little puffing breath.
‘’Tis larger than its fellow,’ she said, then looked full at me, the dull eyes suddenly lit with remem
brance. ‘For when my mother bore me in her womb, she was wont to sleep o’ nights with legs crossed, left over right. So were the evil humours bred, and I lamed.’ She smiled. ‘They cry me idiot to the same purpose. But I am wise, really.’
I twitched my sleeve from her clinging fingers and went to the window. For until this night, I had forgot much, all the wise women’s tales, the ladies’ solar-gossip, the vital knowledge of what one should and should not do. I had not yet thought of myself in this connection. Toads, spiders, serpents. How many had crossed my unseeing path? Even a hare! ah God! to ruin, running, my baby’s mouth with sidelong stare! And the journey north, so rough, so rude, despite my entreaties. Enough to drive the life from this royal child, this cherished thing.
‘I must have medicines,’ I whispered.
I swung round to ask in desperation, if there was a leech, a good infirmaress, who might aid me to avert disaster, and stopped myself. Another moment and I would have betrayed my secret. I had seen the steel of my enemies, and trusted none. I had become a pawn in the privy policy of the court. Friendless and in great peril, mayhap, I was held in unknown hands. Let the child wax weak or strong in silence. For if they knew, might they not, for reasons of their own, do it harm? I felt the cold sweat on my brow, imagining the child being drawn from me by some alchemy before its time. Better to treat myself. I would be my own leech, my own counsellor.
‘Where is the knot-garden?’ I peered anxiously out at the reddening dusk. She understood. She came and pointed towards the far corner of the cloister-garth. I could see only a straggling mass of thistle and dandelion choking a tangle of herbs weakened by their own overgrowth. I spied a fennel, a celandine, a trail of white stitchwort, the bell-flowers of Venus’s navel. There were others, in a desolate moil of crowded life, like an army in confusion. There was the herb of grace, of sorrow, of repentance.
‘I see there’s rue aplenty,’ I murmured. Tall yellow tansy battled with a savage cluster of nettles. The Sun in Splendour, cut down by Warwick’s Ragged Staff? I turned away. I would think no more on that, or die, and the royal child with me. I must guard myself.
‘I’ll bind both my legs to the bedstead of a night,’ I whispered. Edyth did not hear me. She was looking again at her own bewitched foot.
‘But then, Dame Bridget says,’ she murmured, ‘that it was a judgment, for my mother was but leman to her lord.’
Ah God, she was, after all, a creature of Hell, some demon come to torment me! I clutched and shook her with all my strength. I had not known that I could be so cruel. She stood, unresisting, head lolling. She, whose last words were like hot iron in a wound. She, who smiled even as I punished her.
‘Yea, shake me, dear lady!’ she cried, with joking speech. ‘Shake sense into me, as the others do! For I would fain be sensible!’
My hands fell away to a great uprising of shame. With face averted, I asked her pardon. The next moment I felt her hand, her cold, rough claw, moving on my cheek, which she stroked as she had my sleeve.
She was still ill-pleased with the room, for she glanced round and said again: ‘’Tis wet.’ Then I asked her where the Prioress lay and she clapped a hand over her mouth, having forgotten the main purpose of her visit, which was to summon me to Dame Johanna’s supper table; a privilege, I learned after, enjoyed by all corrodians on their first evening. I was a little surprised. I had thought all would eat in the refectory, as they had done at Leicester. Leicester, still recalled by me with the love of a child grown up.
‘Come, lady,’ said Edyth.
She went ahead, out into the chill, vaulted passage, carrying the light. Without looking back, she put out her hand and gripped mine, to anchor me through the dark ways.
And the last remaining tears stung my throat, for that instant she was Harry, little Harry, leading me again to the chamber of love.
It was a court, and Dame Johanna Queen. She sat at her own high table, beautifully caparisoned with damask and gold thread, a flower-strewn board upon which, up and down, a sleek little dog ramped freely. It was the dog I noticed first, and her hands caressing it. She would sweep it up at times to kiss its slavering face, pinch it in her lap and lose interest, so that its black nose soon peeped again over the table top, its white paws appeared on the board, and its body gambolled once more under her lustrous, uncaring eyes.
A short nun, robin-round, opening the door to reveal this sight, wished me good evening and resumed a low gabble which I thought at first to be prayer; then, listening harder, knew as grumbling, an eternal flow of little words, French and Latin and English mixed up together. She swept me with her glance, dismissed me from it to encompass Edyth with a mingling of pity and scorn.
‘You’re late, child,’ she said in a heavy accent.
A brisk, hard trembling shook Edyth. She seemed literally to melt backward into the arching shadows. ‘Yes, Dame Joan,’ she murmured.
Joan smiled at her; I was caught by the tail of that gat-toothed smile. She had one tooth east and west, and none between.
‘Be chary, enfant,’ she told Edyth. ‘Madame is proud tonight. Serve not the sturgeon too hot.’
With that, she gathered a mouthful of phlegm, and shot it into the dark, where it dripped down a stone column, like a snail-trail. A little of it fouled my sleeve.
‘Pardon, pardon,’ she said blandly. Seeing my distaste, she laughed. ‘What ails you? Don’t they spit at court?’
So she knew my origin, already.
‘Yea, they do. But their aim is better,’ I said, stiff with misery.
‘I should not spit,’ she said mockingly. ‘I have defied a rule,’ gave a yelp of laughter and took my arm in a hard, clumsy grip.
‘Enter, enter,’ she said. ‘And bon appetit!’ She stared up towards the Prioress, with an uncompromising look of hate. ‘Good victuals, I trow! Better, pardieu, than any that touches our throats!’
The heat of an hundred candles washed me like a warm wind. I walked, foolish, alone, towards the dais, on the steps at either side of which stood a habited form. The nun on the right was reading aloud; I recognized the work instantly—Thomas à Kempis, Imitatio Christi, in the Latin. And as I went hesitantly in I felt my heart move suddenly, with an older longing and sorrow than that of the past months. All faded for an instant and I saw only my mother’s face, and the face of my spiritual mother, the gentle dame of Leicester. For, in the old days we three were wont to read that same book together, and I would oft-times fall asleep, to be jounced awake by some sonorous phrase and catch the mild eye upon me not without tenderness, under the proud grey wimple so recently assumed. Thereafter would come my mother’s shame. ‘Forgive her, Mother,’ she would say. And the douce answer... ‘She’s but a little maid, let her slumber. There’s time aplenty...’
‘She’s but a child. She would not withstand an inquisition...’ Queen Elizabeth’s cold eyes, with death, and death’s fear, shifting in their depths.
I knelt before the Queen, the Prioress. Rays of fire smoked off a great ruby and emerald cluster on the lifted white hand, and the dog leaped from her lap to sniff around my skirts. I had to crane upward to observe Dame Johanna properly, and for the second time was amazed, for between this Prioress and the ladies of court there was but a hair’s-breadth of difference; indeed, her habit was of stuff far richer than worn by, say, Anne Haute, a frugal soul. Brows had she none, they had been plucked out fine and fashionable, and the breadth of forehead above was like a wide white river. Certes, she was beautiful, with glass-green eyes sharply halved by lids of cream, and a full, small mouth. No princess would have scorned her jewels. She was mayhap ten years older than I, no more. Bemusedly I stared at her. Was there some little pleading in my gaze, for what I know not: for charity, or understanding, perchance? In any event, my glance disaffected hers and she looked away, snapping her white fingers to the dog, while the drone of Thomas à Kempis’s writings went on above my head.
‘Soyez la bienvenue,’ said Dame Johanna, still looking away. I moved nearer,
kissed the icy jewel extended to me, whispered ‘Gramercy,’ and took my seat at a side table two steps down from the Prioress’s dais, ill-ease and wild of mind, wondering to hear the courtly tongue in a House of God, looking at the fair table appointments, the heavy silver salt inlaid with beryl, the fat gold goblet at Dame Johanna’s elbow, and glancing up covertly to study the two nuns on the dais steps.
The one reading had a visage saffron yellow and long as a ram’s. She clipped each word with close, rat teeth. Black hairs prickled coarsely on her upper lip. She followed each line in the book with a tall curved nail, so that now and again her eyes could safely stray from the text and rest on Dame Johanna’s face in a curious glance both servile and truculent. It was, I decided, an envious, cunning face and heavy with secrets, and I turned quickly from it to have my own gaze caught up in that of the other, silent nun, who stared, and continued to stare, at me.
Although the eyes, half-closed, looked as if they had wept for years, a thread of dark intelligence struck at me from between the slits. A strange, wavering light that glowed and flattened and was extinguished even as I gazed. The rest of the face was commonplace. Pale, puffed cheeks and fleshy, dough-coloured chin surrounded a soft mouth oddly childish, hanging a little open to reveal blackened teeth, while deep lines stretched upward to the nostrils. An ordinary enough, face, as faces go, save for the look about the eyes. That woman looked at me as if she knew my very soul and all its secrets, as perchance she did. There was madness in those eyes; two demons straining at a chafed thread, and sorrow, and murder, and yet, despite these evil things, a cry for help, a desperate yearning for succour which those eyes knew would be ever late in coming. And all manner of dolorousness: the courier ambushed on the road, the poison drunk before the bridegroom’s arrival, the last standard falling beneath a field of spears... Within a few breaths’ space, I knew that those eyes could infect me with whatever sickness had their owner in thrall. So I looked down, smoothing the cloth with trembling fingers, picked up my trencherknife and replaced it, while the heat of the candles and Dame Bridget’s stare shrivelled my senses.
We Speak No Treason Vol 2 Page 24