Within the Hollow Crown (17 page)

   So the rebellion was really over. All around him men of the ruling classes were rejoicing because this hitherto unknown taste of subjection was lifted from them. But even that was a small thing to young Richard Plantagenet compared with finding the assurance of his own manhood. Bareheaded among the golden gorse, he faced the warm splendour of the dying sun and knew that the flame of courage that had illumined most of his ancestors was in him too. That from now onwards he could afford to disregard men's taunts—to laugh in his uncles' faces when they called him "peacemonger," and enjoy without self-searchings the beautiful, constructive things which appealed to him. And never more would he be afraid of fear.

   Reluctantly he withdrew himself from the moments of ecstasy during which he had let his soul browse upon her new-found treasure. Although his face was radiant, there were tears in his eyes. "Why are all the bells ringing?" he asked, looking beyond his companions at a silhouette of City churches.

   Walworth, proud unemotional man that he was, bent a knee in the dust and kissed Richard's hand. "Because you have saved London," he said. And Richard guessed that the wealthy fish merchant was all the more grateful because his own hasty act had endangered it.

   "It was rumoured in the City that you had been killed, sir," added Brembre, his humorously puckered face more serious than usual. "And they have just heard that it is untrue."

   Richard smiled at him ingenuously. "Do they care so much?" he said softly. Then, realizing that his mother must have heard the rumour too, he ran down from his gorse-clad hillock, calling for his horse. "We must get back to Carter Lane," he said, seeming to mount and make for London all in one movement.

   The rest cantered willingly after him. But above the cheerful bustle of departure he heard the peasants calling after him. Knollys' men were rounding them up, while Dalyngrigge's desperadoes, trained in despatching raiding Frenchmen, stood ready, knife in hand. With only a few seconds between them and Eternity, the peasants' voices rose to a beseeching scream.

   Richard reined in before his father's implacable old captain.

   "What are you going to do?" he asked, breathlessly.

   "Kill 'em," grunted Sir Robert. "It's all the swine deserve. If your Grace hadn't outwitted them they might have killed
you
."

   It was true enough. But on such a joyful day Richard couldn't bear to be the cause of so much suffering. He lifted an arm to stay Dalyngrigge's men. "Any fool can kill," he said. "I led these poor ignorant wretches here and I'll not betray them. I pray you, good Sir Robert, stop this butchery and send them home."

   It was sweet to have the power to reprieve men's lives and to hear a thousand blessings mingle with the music of the bells. And because this day he was the idol of all classes, Gloucester and Arundel bowed unquestioningly to his will.

It was in the dusk of a drear February afternoon that Richard came again, months later, to the Wardrobe house in Carter Lane. His mother was wintering at Berkhampstead and the Court had just returned to Westminster. He disembarked from a hired shallop with only Standish in attendance, and climbed Blackfriars steps through the mizzling rain, wrapped in his squire's cloak. And because they had given his uncles the slip they hugged the shuttered house fronts like a couple of cutpurses, and knocked almost furtively on Jacot's door.

   It had been one of those leaden grey days which depressed Richard to the soul. But inside the house all was warmth and welcome. The dapper little tailor bowed and beamed and sent his servants scurrying in all directions. No one was more glad than he. Now that the King was back from the County assizes and most of the rebel leaders hanged, London would come to life again. There would be new houppelardes to fashion and new winter furs to buy. Jacot could scarcely wait until his master had been warmed with wine before showing him the mulberry velvet he was itching to make up for the Twelfth Night revels. It wasn't often a Court tailor had a patron with a figure like Richard's, and an easy grace that set off sartorial genius to such advantage. "Straight from Utrecht," he murmured, unrolling the precious stuff. "And tones perfectly with the new scented gloves your Grace had from Paris."

   The wine in Richard's glass was no richer than the colour of the velvet. He sauntered across the room to finger it. At any other time he would have been enchanted. "It's exquisite, Jacot. You did well to buy it," he approved absently. "But I'm not wanting anything just now—except Mundina. Will you send for her?"

   Yet in the midst of his depression he spared a smile that charmed away the man's disappointment and left him contentedly calculating the extra inches he would have to add when cutting the new tunic. And when Mundina came
she noticed how muc
h taller and older the King had grown. But she noticed, too, with a woman's eye, that some spontaneous enthusiasm had gone out of him.

   He kissed her on both cheeks, French fashion, and restrained her from ordering a meal for him. "No, I have dined," he said, impatiently. "It is just that I wanted—to come home."

   Mundina understood. She left Standish and her husband to finish the wine and led the way upstairs to her own room. Richard thought it had a more comfortable, lived-in look than rooms in palaces ever seemed to achieve. A bright fire burned on the hearth, and candles had been lighted and curtains drawn against the river dankness—and against his other world. A sheet which Mundina must have been mending still trailed from the seat of a high-backed chair. And he recognized with pleased surprise many things which he had used or played with in childhood. Even the small four-poster was the one he had slept in at Bordeaux. Glancing from its faded tapestry to the bolted door, he wondered if Mundina's husband ever came here. He had often wondered why she had married Jacot. Probably she lay with him dutifully enough in the best bedroom they had given up to him that awful night when the Tower was taken. But Richard felt sure, somehow, that her soul lived here, apart in this sanctum over the forecourt gate.

   Understanding his mood, she took up her sewing in silence, seating herself unbidden in his presence as she used to do. She let him wander round picking up a remembered toy here and a trifle there, until the memories conjured up by each had wiped the listlessness from his face.

   He came to her soon with a small worn shoe in his hand. "Dost thou love me as much as all this, that thou must needs keep my old clothes?" he chided teasingly, slipping into the intimate
tu-toi of he
r native tongue as they always did the moment they were alone.

   She looked up sharply from her work, and it was not only the firelight that kindled a deeper colour in the southern olive of her cheek. She was a woman of strange reserves, and had not meant him to find the thing. But since he had…"I would give my body to be burned for you," she said, in matter-of-fact tones which precluded sentiment.

   Richard knew right down in his soul that she would. He put the shoe back very carefully between a little mother-of-pearl box his Uncle John had brought him from Spain and his first lopsided drawing of a horse. He took rather a long time about it because hot tears were pricking at his eyes. "Then go on loving me like that, Mundina Danos," he ordered with his back to her. "For God knows I have need of it to combat so much hate!"

   Her dark eyes surveyed him anxiously, adoringly. He had gone away a laughing boy. But tonight he looked more like eighteen than sixteen, she thought. "Something or someone has hurt you, ma mie," she said, biting off a thread with a jerk of strong, white teeth.

   Richard sat down on the edge of the bed. It was still hung with the set of crimson baudekin curtains which had been specially bequeathed to him in his father's will. The face of each gold embroidered angel was familiar as only one's earliest recollections are. "You can't have everything you believed in broken and stay the same," he said slowly. "Do you know where I have been all these months, Mundy?"

   "Everybody knows you went on a sort of Circuit with Tressilian, the new Chief Justice, and milords of Gloucester and Arundel. Cleaning up the counties and trying those vile rebels. Your mother said it would be good experience for you," she said, picking her words carefully.

   She knew that he was holding himself in check. That he probably had been ever since she last saw him—that day when he had been so radiant and confident, and the people had cheered him so. She knew, too, that when his mind had accustomed itself to the ease of being alone with her—the rare ease of being alone at all—the full flood of his feelings would overflow the dams built by his unique position. And, being a wise woman, she knew that only that way could relief come. But she was to be badly shaken by the accumulated bitterness laid bare.

   "Yes, it was experience all right," he agreed, turning the folds of baudekin about until he found his special angel and then staring at it with a sort of blank estrangement. "Up till then I had believed that the men who ruled England wished her well. And that this chivalry which was crammed down our throats meant keeping our word."

   "So it does, my dear," argued Mundina. "When your father captured King John of France didn't he keep him over here as an honoured guest, and then trust him to go back to collect his own ransom?"

   "Yes. Because he happened to be a king. But he butchered the women and children when he took Limoges." Richard let go of the curtains so roughly that they slid back along their rods with an angry swish. "I see it now. Chivalry is only for the rich. Even my mother thinks that."

   Mundina went on stitching and let him talk.

   "When I promised better conditions to those poor wretches at Mile End, I meant it. And—Christ help me for an unfledged fool—I thought the others
knew
I meant it. But they just laughed— Uncle Thomas and Warwick and that cur Arundel—and said I'd acted beautifully." Richard ceased sprawling on the bed and sat up. His blue eyes blazed. "But I wasn't acting, Mundina. For once, I wasn't acting! It was the best and most sincere thing I'd ever had a chance to do. Don't you see? My life's been like a golden cage—and I was in contact with real life at last. And overjoyed to find myself able to cope with it." His voice went suddenly gruff the way it did now adolescence was upon him, and he leaned forward and covered his face with both hands. "But they've killed my joy and covered me with shame."

   Mundina laid aside her work. "Who, Dickon—and how? You rode through the counties in state, didn't you?"

   "Yes. And they made me sit in evil-smelling courts while they condemned to death the very men I'd pardoned. Condemned them in my name. The Bloody Assize, men called it, in Essex. Tressilian wasn't really trying them. He was avenging his fellow lawyers on any peasant he could catch. And when he couldn't convict in court his soldiers used to stab them after dark in the woods. I've lain in bed many a time, at Havering, listening to their screams. And when Uncle Thomas broke up their camp at Billericay it was just plain murder."

   "Ugly things have been done here too, Dickon," she said, trying to distract him. "The few Flemings left alive were encouraged to avenge their countrymen on that block in Eastcheap. They say that even the Flemish widows—" But she saw that he wasn't even listening.

   "At Waltham they humiliated me by making me eat my own words," he raged. "Convicted peasants used to turn to me. They thought I'd save them at the last minute as I was able to that day at Clerkenwell—that happy day when all the church bells were ringing. 'Serfs you were, and serfs you still are!' I told them." He thrust out his hands before him, staring first at one upturned palm and then the other as if they were stained with blood. "I saw the look in their eyes—the slow realization that they were being betrayed…And I had to sit there like Judas seeing my people's love slip away from me."

   It was pitiful, knowing how hard he had striven to obtain it. "But couldn't you have refused?" asked Mundina, with small conviction.

   "Have you ever been alone with those two men?" laughed Richard shortly. "It didn't matter how I raved and argued—they always bullied me into doing what they wanted. Even my brother Thomas, who was dealing with his own Kentishmen, insisted that unless we crushed them once and for all our lives and property would never again be safe. I know it's true—
now
—the way they've bungled things. But it could have been the beginning of some new brotherhood—some better basis between craftsman and master…I had started something."

   "You couldn't expect men like your uncle and Arundel to see that."

   "No. They're so beastly. D'you know, Mundina, when I sent some money to Wat Tyler's daughter, they thought in then-stinking minds I wanted her for my amusement. They even had the poor frightened innocent brought to my bedroom. Hoped she would take my mind off arguing, perhaps…" He broke off in youthful embarrassment. "As if a man can't have a decent impulse, like pity! I had the devil's job to reassure her—and then to send her home before that lecher Arundel got at her."

   Mundina had heard plenty of stories about Arundel desecrating convents during the French wars. "The world would be better without either him or Gloucester," she said grimly.

   Richard laughed suddenly, as at some cherished recollection. "You should have seen their faces when I rode past them to meet the peasants at Smithfield!" he said, quite boyishly.

   "But don't you think that's just what they're trying to take out of you now, my love? That, and your ability to take command?"