Within the Hollow Crown (22 page)

   "I don't know how John comes to be your son, my sweet," he was saying pitifully. "We all of us have vile tempers, I know. But his violence is a destructive, uncivilized thing—part of this professional warmongering—and I mean to pluck it out of England."

   Despairingly, Joan looked across at her daughter-in-law. Anne's sweet face was pale with pity and distress. But she said nothing. She sided with her husband. Involuntarily, she moved closer to him. Through her tears Joan of Kent saw them standing side by side. And it was as if for the first time and with prescient clarity she saw them facing life together. Only they were facing it with a completely different code from the one she and her husband had known. In whatever they did they would be moved less by traditional impulses, more by their own young minds and consciences.

   "You can see him to say good-bye," offered Richard. "After I refused to pardon him he ran away—again. But I will have him brought to you."

   When her women came for her he went with her to her litter. He took her hands tenderly and had his own physician accompany her. But he could not kiss her. Through no fault of his own he had been made to feel like Cain.

   And he never saw her again.

   Only a few days later her tired, generous heart was stilled for ever. They would have fetched him home from hunting but Anne insisted upon breaking the news to him herself. "Let him have a few more joyous hours," she entreated, knowing how remorse would always gnaw him. How all the happy memories of his mother's radiance must be blurred by regret.

   "If only I had let John go!" he kept saying over and over again, when the first storm of his grief was past.

   "It couldn't have made much difference—only a few days or weeks perhaps," comforted Anne.

   "But she would have gone out happy—with a smile on her face." He covered his own face with both hands. "Every day, as long as I live, I will pray for the repose of her soul," he vowed with intensity.

   It was already dusk but the servants had not dared to come in and light the torches. Richard began to pace up and down the room, while Anne, etched in half-tones against the uncurtained window, watched him from a high-backed chair. "It wasn't only what Holland did to Stafford," he burst forth presently, sensing her compassion. "But how could I tell her more?"

   Anne stretched out a hand as if to halt his tortured progress. "What else, Richard?"

   He stared at her consideringly for a moment or two. He was wont to see her as some witty, exquisite being, surrounded by gilded youth—the pampered daughter of an emperor. Ever since she had come to him as a bride he had thought of her as a charming companion for his leisure hours—someone to say pretty things to, or go hawking with to the accompaniment of jingling bells and carefree laughter. Someone who must be sheltered from the sordid things of life, just as her delicious gowns must be protected from the splash of mud. It had never occurred to him to make a serious confidante of her. But his mother was dead, and Mundina was at Wallingford laying her out. Rare, unshockable Mundina whom he had been wanting so desperately…"Weeks before Stafford was murdered an old friar came to me with some story about Lancaster wanting to betray me to the Scots," he said, half ashamed to begin talking to his young, foreign wife about these miserable, ever-recurring state intrigues. "People are always telling me Lancaster is treacherous."

   "Perhaps only because he is so powerful, and they are jealous," she suggested reasonably. "What did you do?"

   Richard resumed his maddening tramp across the sweet-scented floor rushes. "Do? Why, what anybody with a grain of common sense would have done. Changed our route at the last moment so as to avoid the alleged ambush, and had the monk detained in the nearest castle until I had time to go into the matter. I wasn't concerned with the tale-bearer himself. I wanted to get at the people who sent him. To settle once and for all if there's any truth in these rumours, and who spreads them. It's so important to know if I can trust Lancaster."

   "And did you find out?"

   "No. That cursed half-brother of mine went back secretly to the castle and tortured the poor wight. Tortured him so horribly that even the men-at-arms refused to have anything to do with it, and he and his friends had to do the beastliness themselves."

   Anne shuddered, but would not break his mood by moving nearer to the fire. "How can men do such things?" she murmured.

   "God knows! And men we have both sat at meat with. The poor devil died in spite of everything the constable of the castle could do for him. And now, thanks to those inhuman fools, I shall never know whether there really was an ambush or not."

"Weren't you furious?"

   "So furious that I hit one of Holland's friends in the face. A bishop, I believe. I behaved like a maniac. And then I come back and preach at my poor mother about John Holland's temper!" He laughed harshly, then fetched up penitently before her. "But I'm not really like that, Anne. You know I don't get wild unless other people do something vile first. And at least I'm not smug. Tell me I'm not smug, Anne! "

   "I can't imagine you ever being smug, Richard," she assured him gravely. In the gathering darkness he could not see her lips twitching into an almost maternal smile.

   "I know only too well afterwards when I've behaved badly."

   "And suffer for it."

   "Yes. I suppose that if one chooses to indulge in ideals one must often suffer shame. And now I can't even show the people my fine gesture about justice."

   "You mean you won't have him—"

   "How can I have him put to death after this? It's as if
she
had already paid his debts, and I've no longer the heart. He'd better go on a pilgrimage or a crusade or something. Anything, so long as I don't have to look at him again for a very long time!"

   Richard stood there staring out at the drizzling rain, too wretched even to call for torches. There was a flurry of silken skirts behind him and suddenly it was Anne, his impeccable little wife, who was playing penitent.

   "Oh, Richard, please don't hate me!" she entreated, clutching his hand and pressing her smooth cheek against his sleeve.

   He swung round, surprised by her vehemence. "I—hate you?" he repeated vaguely.

   "For causing all this. For sending Sir Meles—"

   "That was Uncle Thomas's fault." His jaw set savagely, as if almost glad to discover one more score against the man. "It was all Uncle Thomas's fault, damn him! If he hadn't butted in—"

   Anne disliked Thomas of Gloucester intensely, but she had not witnessed the years of bullying frustration that had built up Richard's loathing. And sometimes the deep-seated intensity of it frightened her. "But it was I who fussed about getting a letter from you," she reminded him hastily. "I wanted one so badly."

   Richard drew her down on to the window seat and into the comforting circle of his arm. "Dear Anne," he comforted, the kindness of his smile seeming to illuminate her life again. "And I never wrote you a proper love letter after all!"

Richard lay full-length on the daisy strewn lawn in the privy garden at Westminster. His green hose and tunic made him as one with the grass but his head looked like a splash of copper against the grey coping of the lily pond. He rolled over on to his stomach and began indolently tickling the golden carp with a bulrush reed. The scent of red and white roses, for which the palace gardens were famous, drifted over him and the warm afternoon sunshine warmed him through and through.

   All morning he had sat in a stuffy Council chamber where tempers ran high—and his own, in the finish, higher than any—and after dinner he had come out here to be alone. But somehow it seemed a king never
could
be alone. People had to be near him to feel they were at the centre of things, or because they were afraid of missing some favour—or sometimes, of course, simply because they liked his company. Robert de Vere, stretched on a stone bench nearby, wrapped in the throes of composition with his lute, was quietly companionable. But now Lizbeth de Wardeaux must needs come running out from the Queen's apartments and seat herself unbidden on the grass beside him.

   Richard glanced from one to the other of them without enthusiasm and returned to his preoccupation with the fish. At least in line and pose they detracted nothing from the peaceful beauty of the garden. Robert with his lute and Lizbeth with her ridiculous daisy chains. Richard had had his fill of looking at ugly, quarrelsome faces round the Council table. He could bear it for so long, at first with bored indifference and then with a sort of exasperated patience, and then when they started picking Michael de la Pole's foreign policy to pieces or being rude to Burley, he would cut in with some sarcastic reminder of the business they were really there to settle. And then it would always end up with Gloucester or Arundel criticizing
him, and he would fly out at them. Each tim
e he would go to a meeting determined to emulate Burley's polished calm, and each time he would lose his temper. And losing his temper took so much out of him. It was so much more exhausting if one cared tremendously for the principle of the thing involved. He couldn't go home and eat a good dinner like Uncle Edmund, for instance, who could argue like an obstinate mule just for the sake of hearing his own voice. Half closing his eyes until pink and yellow water lilies merged themselves into a waxy carpet of exquisite colour, Richard admitted to himself that he felt tired in mind and full of lassitude in body. "But perhaps it's only that I'm missing the strenuous exercise of the campaign," he thought.

   Lizbeth edged closer to him. For all her demure looks and sober mourning damascene, he felt sure that she, too, had come to argue about something. "It is just three months now since my dear lady the Princess died," she sighed, looking up appropriately to watch a flight of white pigeons flap upwards towards the blue sky. But as Richard took no notice she dropped her daisy chain and the guilelessness of her childlike pose. "It is true, isn't it, sir, that I am
your
ward now?"

   "I suppose so," said Richard, chivvying an obese carp to sanctuary beneath a lily pad for no better reason than because its protruding eyes and rapacious gills reminded him of Richard Arundel.

   Without looking around he sensed that Lizbeth was settling her skirts in the deliberate way of pretty women who intend to stay until they have got what they came for. "Well, what are you going to do about me?" she asked, her impertinence excused only by the informality of the hour.

   "After a morning with Lancaster coveting the crown of Castile and Edward Dalyngrigge wanting a permit to build a new castle, I should imagine the King came out here precisely because he didn't want to have to do anything more about anybody," observed de Vere, pausing in the middle of a stanza to tighten a string.

   But Lizbeth only made a grimace at him and defied convention still further by taking off her tall head-dress and setting it on the stone coping, where it stood like a miniature church steeple.

   "I've had you brought here as one of the Queen's maids-ofhonour, haven't I?" pointed out Richard. "What else do you want me to do?"

   Lizbeth regarded the back of his comfortably relaxed body with exasperation. "You might take an interest in me, for one thing."

   With a ponderous sigh he abandoned his piscatorial pursuits and sat up. She was so pretty that he could only review her pouting persistence with amusement. "I'm sorry," he apologized charmingly. "But judging by the way half the eligible bachelors and widowers in the country plague me, I should say that quite enough men are interested in you already."

   She tossed her head so that her loosened curls made delectable little shadows against the whiteness of her neck. She probably knows, thought de Vere, how enticing she is without that tight wimple affair. "I don't want dozens of men," she was declaring. "And you know very well they are interested only in my money!"

   Richard forgot the aftertaste of political wrangling and began to smile. "I'm not exactly disinterested in it myself," he reminded her, tossing a pink water lily into her lap.

   She tucked the blossom absently between the coral buttons of her tight-fitting corsage. "Oh, I know that's why you all want wardships. So that you can sell us poor girls to the highest bidder—"

   "Oh, come, Lizbeth! I'm not as mercenary as all that."

   De Vere laid aside his lute. He was always interested in a girl whose amatory technique surpassed his own. "But it would help to pay for some of those banquets and tournaments the Commons were complaining about," he pointed out, hoping to prod her into a fury. Lizbeth, he knew, always looked her best with her passions unleashed and he wished that Richard would stop being such a monkish fool about her.

   "And to pacify the Commons you'll send me away to marry a Percy in the wilds of Northumberland or a Courtenay right down in Devon?" she protested.

   "My dear child, I can't afford to forgo my wardship fees," began Richard reasonably. "And surely every respectable girl wants a husband—"

   "I'm not a dear child!" she raged.

   "Nor fundamentally respectable," murmured de Vere.

   "I'm nearly the same age as yourself, Richard Plantagenet, and we've known each other practically all our lives. As long as you've known that versifying nincompoop over there. And I won't lie in any fat baron's bed! Nor bear his vacant-looking brats. I'd murder him first!"

   Both men burst out laughing. But Lizbeth was very seductive with the tears in her eyes and her little pointed breasts heaving indignantly. Richard reached over and tumbled her into his arms. "My precious poppet," he expostulated. "You don't suppose I'd marry you to any man you really loathed, do you? Or that I forget how brave you were that day you helped Chaucer to get my mother away from the Tower? But you're so beautiful and so alone in the world that you need protection, don't you?"