Within the Hollow Crown (18 page)

   "Yes, I suppose so," he agreed, more soberly.

   Mundina raged inwardly because she could not bear these burdens for him. "Sir Simon will be coming home soon," she reminded him.

   "And Uncle John's on his way down from Scotland. Gloucester's never quite so horrid when he's here." He seemed to brighten considerably, and got up, settling his rumpled collar. "Poor Uncle John! It will be a sad homecoming for him. I wish it had been Gloucester's place at Plashy that had been burned."

   "How terribly you hate him, Richard!"

   "Why shouldn't I, Mundina?" he demanded sharply.

   Although she had had the upbringing of him, Mundina offered him no moral platitudes. "Because it is so bad for you, Dickon," she said simply.

   He came instantly and hugged her for her candour. "Mundy, m
a
cherie
! Your heart always did outrun your hopes of Heaven, didn't it?" He laughed and pressed his cheek to hers, then moved away sadly. "But how few people realize what cause I have! If Lancaster wants my crown, I sometimes think Gloucester would like to destroy my soul."

   He went and stood before the fire, with the warm glow leaping up over his straight, slender thighs, and his handsome face in shadow. When he spoke again his voice sounded strained with anger, and his clenched fists beat against the hooded chimney. "When I tried to stand up to them about keeping my word—tried to go on being
me
, the King—that presumptuous swine, Thomas Plantagenet, dared to remind me of what happened to the second Edward!"

   Mundina listened with absorbed attention. She had read a good many books about sciences in which women were supposed not to dabble, but few about English history. "He was deposed, wasn't he?" she hazarded.

   Richard's fists ceased their angry tattoo, and dropped almost resignedly to his sides. "And with some reason," he admitted. "Although he was an anointed King."

   "What did he do, Richard?"

   "Oh, he neglected the country and filled all the best places with his favourites. He'd a proud young French wife. He put first Piers Gaveston and then Hugh Diespenser in her place—and fondled them in public, so she plotted against him with her lover. The She-Wolf, people called her."

   "I remember now." In spite of the warmth from the fire a shiver shook the Aquitanian woman's gaunt frame. "He was murdered, wasn't he?"

   "Horribly."

   The same
frisson
seemed to touch him too. She leaned forward from her chair and took one of his quiescent hands. "Don't think about it, child," she urged, as if he were still her nurseling.

   He flung round on her, half angrily. "Not think of it! How can I help thinking of it—
now? Although he was my great-grandfather
, I never knew till now. Only what everyone knows. That they hounded the poor, handsome trifler from prison to prison, until finally he died mysteriously in Berkeley Castle."

   One of the candles, burning low, hissed itself out in its own grease, and Mundina let go the King's hand to snuff the other. She might have been an image carved in brown wood, with her dark gown and intelligent face, and the half-light from the fire centred on her wimple and the sheet lying in white folds about her feet. "And your uncle took care to tell you?" she prompted.

   Richard swallowed hard. His eyes were fixed unseeingly on the tester of the little bed behind her, and he began to speak monotonously like an indifferent actor repeating his lines. "Yes, he told me first, of course—in front of Henry. Sneered, and supposed a lily-livered exquisite like me, who couldn't bear to see a few miserable peasants hanged, would faint if he told me what happened at Berkeley. Of course, I laughed. Carelessly, like Robert does—and said that as I hadn't hung back at Smithfield for someone else to go first, no doubt I could sustain it—if he and Henry found that sort of thing amusing."

   A log fell with a thud to the hearth, shaking out a shower of golden sparks only to leave a deeper darkness. And young Richard Plantagenet's tortured voice dragged on. "And so he described it—in that horrible ill-lit room at Waltham. And I just stood there, leaning against the window—trying to look like Robert. And wishing to God I were…"

   "Oh, my poor poppet!" Out of the shadows Mundina's deep voice was a caress.

   "It wasn't so much what he said as the way he seemed to tower over me. His tall, menacing shadow on the wall—and the hatred glowing like twin coals in his eyes. As if—as if he were doing it all over again—to me…And taking joy in it—" Richard flung up his hands to cover his eyes, so that the words seemed to force their reluctant way through his tense fingers. "And Henry standing there, so unmoved by pity—although I swear he had never heard it before either—"

   Mundina got up swiftly and went to him. "What did he tell you, Richard?"

   "It's not fit for a woman's ear," he mumbled. He would have turned aside, trying to spare her, gripping at his manhood. But her strong hands were on his shoulders, her dark fierce eyes compelled him. And suddenly he was clinging to her, his copper-gold head hidden in the gauntness of her sterile bosom. "Oh, Mundina, Mundina, take it from me! For Christ's sake, take it from me! Like you used to exorcise those dreadful dreams when first I knew I would have to be King."

   She coaxed him to the edge of the bed and sat facing him, knee to knee, his cold hands beneath her own. She knew that only speaking of this thing could help him.

   "He told me they kept him for days at the bottom of the garderobe tower, up to his waist in human filth," he said, tearing away a hand to toss back the damp hair from his forehead. "Slowly the rats gnawed him, and his gaolers starved him slowly. And then, when he could suffer no more, they pretended he was to be freed. Took him back to the guard room, lit torches and mocked him with a feast. But before he could slake his hunger on the first dish two killers were upon him. They stripped him and threw him upon the table among the overturned food and spilled wine. They'd red-hot irons ready in the next room and they thrust them up his body, burning out his bowels. 'This—and this,' the sadist devils shouted, 'for Piers Gaveston!' They say that through the vast thickness of the walls his screams were heard down in Berkeley village." The second Richard flung himself across her knees, the full flood of his suffering gushing forth in tears. "And he was a young k-king," he stammered between rending sobs, "whom the people had been taught to hate!"

   What thoughts corroded Mundina's mind, what vows of vengeance seared her soul, this child of her heart would never know. When he was quite exhausted she laid him back, trembling, on the bed. He turned his head from her so that it was hidden in the pillows. She rose stiffly and lit fresh candles, and left him. When she came back she had a little wooden bowl and pestle in her hands with which she ground some white powder while she stood watching him. Presently, when his limbs became still, she put a pinch of powder into a cup and filled it with water from a ewer, and bent over him. "Drink this, Dickon," she said, in the cool matter-of-fact way which had never failed to control with sickness or tantrums when he was small.

   He raised himself obediently, looking at her with drenched, dark-circled eyes. His face was drained of all colour. He was too shamed for speech. He drank docilely as a child. Whatever happened to his world, he trusted her utterly.

   "You will sleep peacefully here in your own bed as you used to sleep in the happy sunshine of Bordeaux," she said, her voice so sure and soothing that she might have been chanting some incantation. "And whenever you feel that you can no longer live in the same world with this fiend Gloucester I have enough powder to put
him
to sleep—for ever."

   Richard smiled faintly, his hot hand fumbling for hers. "Even to rid the world of
him
, I couldn't let you endanger your soul. Suppose I got to Heaven—and you weren't there…"

   His voice fluttered out, his wet lashes came to rest upon his cheek. Mundina stood holding the empty bowl until his breathing became light and even as a child's. Then she looked around the room for something in which to put the rest of the powder. She put half of it in a phial and half in Richard's little mother-of-pearl box. Then she went in search of Ralph Standish. Strong woman as she was, she walked wearily, for much virtue had gone out of her.

   "You may as well go to bed, Ralph," she said. "The King won't want you again tonight. He is fast asleep."

   Standish rose from the table where he had been dicing drowsily with her husband. "He hasn't slept properly for weeks. Not ever since we left Waltham. You're an angel, Mundina!" he exclaimed, with relief.

   Her tight, thin lips relaxed into a grim smile. "Better be careful whom you say that to, young man," she warned, with asperity. "Because I have more book learning than most women and my father was an alchemist, plenty of people are more disposed to call me a witch." But she caught at his arm in passing, so as to draw him apart while Jacot grovelled for a dice which her sleeve had swept as if by accident onto the floor. "Take this, Ralph," she urged in an undertone, thrusting the phial of white powder into his hand. "Keep it in some secret place. And whenever the King is overtired or excited, or those uncles of his have been at him, mix a little in his cup. As much as you can put on one of these new-fangled florins,
but no more
. There is no taste that he will notice."

   On more than one occasion Standish had proved his devotion to his master, but he was not without caution. He held the phial suspiciously on his palm. "It is a risky game," he demurred, "putting powder in a king's cup."

   Mundina Danos gave his arm a friendly, reassuring push so that he should slip the stuff into his pouch before her husband joined them with the missing dice. "Yet most of us would play riskier games than that," she scoffed, "for one so lovable and so ill-beset as Richard of Bordeaux."

—CHAUCER

The new Bohemian Queen sat at her embroidery frame in a room at Westminster Palace. Every now and then she paused in her stitched creation of a tree to look round at her new friends and relatives. She knew that, like all royal brides, she was a pawn in the politics of Europe. But the first pangs of homesickness had passed and, being an adaptable creature, she thanked God daily that her lines had fallen in such pleasant places.

   It was one of those lovely leisure hours when the King summoned Chaucer to read aloud to them. And although Anne could not always understand the people's English which he wove into such wonderful verses, she loved the lilt of them. She loved, too, the fine books and hangings and goldsmiths' work with which the King's apartments were garnished. Shame always covered her now when she remembered the disdain with which she had viewed her parents' proposal to marry her to Richard Plantagenet. She had believed England to be a rude and uncivilized place. And then Sir Simon Burley had come to Prague, and she had found him to be one of the kindest and most courteous men she had ever known.

   She looked up now to find him watching her speculatively, and returned his smile without embarrassment. It was he who had described her future husband to her, making her see Richard from the first as someone infinitely lovable. She did not realize, even now, how skilfully the ageing statesman had predisposed her unformed mind, nor how much of Richard's none too ardent courtship he had conducted for him. All she knew was that Sir Simon had done her a score of unobtrusive kindnesses, that a tender understanding had grown up between them, and that, in some undefined way, he looked to her to do a great deal for Richard.

   While the rest of Geoffrey Chaucer's small, intimate audience followed without effort the lively sense of his words, Anne allowed her mind to wander a little, resting affectionately on each of them. There was her mother-in-law—indolent, extravagant and kind—attended as usual by that pretty minx, Lizbeth de Wardeaux. Richard's eldest uncle, suave and handsome, home from the wars. And Robert de Vere. Few women, Anne supposed, could look upon Robert with disapproval. He had been her husband's friend for years, and she might have been jealous of him. But Robert was so amusing, so disarmingly
léger
, and at the moment all his attention appeared to be devoted to her favourite lady, the Landgravine Agnes Launcekron. It was reprehensible of him, of course, seeing that he had a wife in Oxfordshire. But, if he must philander, one could not but commend his taste. For Agnes was very lovely, besides being a beloved bit of home.

   But however much Anne's eyes and thoughts might wander, they always came back to the attractive figure of her own husband. He was standing by the open window looking out over the river, with the afternoon sunshine streaming over him so that it seemed as if he were dressed in gold. But whether he stood in sunshine or in shadow, there always seemed some quality of brightness about him which made all the other people in her life a mere background for his beloved presence.

   "Write us something about London and her river," he was saying, as Chaucer finished the last verse.

   Chaucer's gaze, too, turned towards the busy Thames which was so much a part of their daily lives. But for all his versifying, he was obliged to see it sometimes with the practical eyes of a Customs official. "There's a wool ship due out for Ghent with the turn of the tide," he made so bold as to remind them. "And unless I keep my eye on the tally of export tax—"