Within the Hollow Crown (23 page)

   "Yes," murmured Lizbeth, with her lips against his tunic.

   "And you can't stay virgin for ever."

   "No," murmured Lizbeth, with still more conviction.

   Her little marauding hands clung tighter and she nearly swooned with ecstasy when she felt Richard's cheek lightly caressing her hair.

   "And only last night the Queen was saying that it was high time we—"

   Clever as a cat, Lizbeth detected the teasing note in his voice and guessed that all the time he was fondling her he had been grinning at de Vere across the top of her head. She sprang up, rigid against his encircling arm. "You're mocking me—as if I were some light-o'-love offering you the infatuation of an hour!" she accused, her angry eyes searching his down-bent, laughing ones. To be made a fool of before de Vere was more than the undisciplined little spitfire could bear. Too quick for thought she freed an arm to slap Richard's face. She forgot that he was King of England. He was just a devastatingly attractive young man who always inflamed her desire by his indifference, until her senses were consumed by him. Mercifully, he was even quicker than she and caught her hand in time. His eyes went light, warning her momentarily with their cold fury. For a split second she caught a glimpse of that other Richard—white, austere, and anointed—usually hidden so successfully behind the radiant, colourful personality he showed to everyday friends. And then it seemed that they were just sitting there normally as before—two young men and a girl in the sunshine—with the arm of one of them casually about her. But each of them had been sobered by a revealing flash of fundamental emotions. Even Lizbeth realized that but for Richard's quickness she must have been sent away in disgrace. She drew a deep breath. "I know why the Queen wants to get rid of me," she said with a desolate defiance, staring straight before her at the shadows of the darting fish.

   Richard knew too, with the invitation of her body still against his own. He knew that when he held Anne in his arms he did not feel like this. Anne was so exquisite and always charming about his inexperienced love-making. She never asked for more than he could give, nor made him feel inadequate. One couldn't imagine her pushing her wares, so to speak. But he had married so young, and with so little sex experience. And the complete, all-consuming union of Robert and Agnes dangled before him, like a mirage that he never reached. He, too, wanted to taste life to the full. With all his heart he wanted it, sensing that nervous irritability and frustration could be drowned in that well of sweet oblivion. That, caring less for all else by comparison, he could draw new strength of, character from its depths.

   He often wondered about it. Was there some virility lacking in him? To achieve such felicity did one have to take some delicious, Eve-old child like Lizbeth? Or be promiscuous, like Arundel and the uncles? Even Lancaster, with his greying hair and suave manners, took his daughters' governess, Katherine Swinford, to bed. "Into the same bed, naked, with his bargained Castilian wife," people said. De Vere and some of the other officers, slightly drunk in Scotland, had been bandying coarse jests about it… But, of course, it couldn't really be true of a cultured man like Lancaster. Just backstairs gossip, no doubt, because the people hated him…

   Richard shook himself out of the erotic train of thought. "You'd better get up, you little baggage," he said, purposely giving Lizbeth's thigh a callow push and trying to speak lightly. "And if you'll give me some indication of the sort of husband you'd like I'll see what I can do about it."

   He sprang lithely to his feet and pulled her up beside him so that they stood hand in hand, facing each other. Her demure grey dress was crumpled and the daisy chain lay broken at her feet. But she still looked at him with demanding eyes. "I don't mind what he is like as long as he lives at Court," she told him shamelessly. "Please don't let them send me away, Richard!"

   She walked away obediently enough between the rose bushes, swinging her expensive headgear by its veil. Both men stood to watch her go, shaken by the unexpected power of her passion. Somehow, their sophisticated baiting hadn't been so amusing after all. And presently Richard joined de Vere on the bench. "Well, that's that," he said inadequately.

   "Not all of it perhaps," suggested de Vere, looking after Lizbeth with grudging admiration until a door in the palace wall swallowed her up.

   The summer afternoon was spent. The sun was beginning to dip down towards the river, so that already the water in the lily pond looked brown, and the long shadow of the Council chamber reached across the garden. It crept like a menacing finger to where they were sitting, symbolic of the shadow its dictates could cast across a sovereign's life. Even if one went out into a garden or dallied with a girl, thought Richard resentfully, one couldn't forget it for long.

   "What a herd of obstructionists in there this morning!" he exclaimed, nodding towards the splendid Norman building, so that de Vere wasn't certain whether he were deliberately trying to change the conversation or whether the thought had been there all the time, hag-riding his mind.

   "Gloucester faced with a new idea is like a ringed bull with a freshly unleashed dog. His only reaction is to tear it blindly to pieces, head down," laughed de Vere. "I thought he would literally have gored poor Michael de la Pole across the table when he brought up this new plan of establishing our wool staple at Bruges instead of Calais. Quite sensibly, I thought, considering that most of our trade comes from Flanders."

   "A pity you didn't say so," remarked Richard.

   De Vere shrugged fashionably padded shoulders. "What was the good? With everybody so worked up already."

   "It might have added weight to the proposed bill."

   "Or damned it straight away. My dear fellow, can you imagine
my approval making any bill more popular? 'The King's echo!' som
e wit has only to whisper behind his hand. And then what happens? Arundel and Gloucester sneer, Burley or Lancaster tries to pour oil on troubled waters, you rush in with some stinging sarcasm and then can't eat any dinner."

   Richard had to laugh at so accurate an epitome of the familiar scene. "Oh, Robert, I suppose you are right," he conceded, flinging himself full-length along the bench while his friend strolled over to the pond. He lay supine for a moment or two, poignantly aware of the muted twittering of birds and the peace preceding eventide. From the Abbey near-by a bell began to drone for Vespers. Idly, he picked up Robert's lute and began trying to fit a ribald little chansonnette to the sonorous undertones of the bells. "I wonder if I was wise in letting Lancaster go to contest Aunt Constanza's claim in Spain? You know, I could like Lancaster—if only I were
sure
," he murmured. And then, giving up his weird harmonic experiment, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we were irresponsible again? Or else knew whom we could really trust?" Suddenly, restlessly, he swung both scarlet shod feet to earth again. "Come to think of it, Robert, there are precious few. One could almost count them on the fingers of one hand." He laid aside the instrument and began to do so. "Burley—de la Pole—Tom Moivbray. Henry, I suppose, in a way—"

   "And Anne," supplemented de Vere, watching him from across the little pond.

   "
Cela va sans dire,
" agreed Richard. "One's wife is part of oneself."

   "Not always."

   Richard knew that it wasn't so with Robert. And here was another matter that he supposed he should have done something about. But, hotly resenting interference in his own private concerns, he had purposely refrained. "You made no objection when we arranged your marriage with Philippa de Courcy," he reminded him reluctantly.

   "I'm making no objection now," countered de Vere. "She's your own distaff cousin. She's very rich. And her people seem to own half Devon."

   "Oh, for God's sake, stop being cynical!" snapped Richard.

   De Vere stopped immediately. His whole manner changed. "Don't you see, Richard, that for once I'm not?" he said. "A man can't live on money and high places alone. One wants something beautiful, glowing, intimate—to warm the loneliness we all try to cover from the world—the love of someone utterly responsive to oneself"

   "Like Agnes?"

   "Yes, like Agnes."

   Their glances met and held and gradually the spark of authoritative anger died out of Richard's. "It's real this time, Robert?" he said.

   "Yes, it's real."

   Richard tried not to envy him. But one couldn't have the Queen's most intimate friend living in open sin; and nothing, he knew, would ever placate the de Courcys. "It's damned unfortunate," he muttered.

   De Vere flashed out at the word. "Not unfortunate for us. A thousand times no!" he protested. "However little our official marriages mean, Agnes and I will have lived." He looked across at the lovable figure of his friend, a person at once so vulnerable and so capable of ecstasy; and all that the worldly Earl of Oxford would have deemed best in himself rose to the surface. He wanted Richard to share this bigger experience, just as they had shared all the fun that came to them as boys. "You're so—young, somehow!" he exclaimed, with a kind of fond exasperation. He came and rested one foot on the garden seat, leaning eagerly towards Richard with gesticulating palm. "You think
you're
fortunate, Richard, because you're married to a very charming girl. She isn't haughty and reserved like Philippa. Your fears about her being a stranger to you were all dispelled by the fact that she speaks perfect French. She's witty, and you're proud of her in public and enjoy paying her pretty compliments. But there's something more than that—something you haven't tasted."

   Richard was aware of it, and his very awareness seemed a disloyalty. But when he would have sat silent de Vere added impulsively, "Why don't you take that bewitching trollop Lizbeth?"

   Richard knew that Lizbeth wasn't a trollop. That, with all her seductiveness, she had never seriously tried to tempt any man but himself. "I don't know," he said truthfully. All he knew was that something always held him back. Not morality. Fastidiousness, perhaps…Or just because he was waiting for something better… And anyhow, his parents had always been faithful to each other, and he had been brought up in that sort of household.

   "Good God, man, is your blood made of water?" urged de Vere. "All these months, when she throws herself at you, I've been wondering how you can resist her!"

   Richard knew that whenever he tried to make peace with France there were people who said contemptuously that he wasn't the Black Prince's son at all, but the son of some Bordeaux priest. Gloucester himself had slandered his sister-in-law's memory by taunting him with the tale. Gloucester might even have started it. And because he was an uncle, and a Plantagenet, Gloucester must go free.

   He sprang up from the seat. "Then I wager you I'll take her before the week is out!" he cried.

   "Done!" De Vere clapped a hand to his. "And I hope you win," he added, turning away, his own casual self. "Then perhaps you'll be more kind to Agnes and me."

   Richard began to brush the bits of grass from his hose preparatory to going in. "I don't see what I
can
do," he admitted ruefully. "Half the powerful families in England are related to the de Courcys. And already they are champing about the insult to Philippa."

   "One of the reasons you were seeking for my unpopularity, no doubt."

   "And you're supposed to have a bad influence over me," grinned Richard. "A charge which you can't very well deny!"

   Even de Vere, who deliberately posed for publicity, sometimes tired of the venom of men's tongues. "If only the things I
really
do were half as bad as the things they invent," he sighed wearily. "You've forgotten the worst charge of all."

   "Which charge?" asked Richard negligently, breaking off a red rosebud and pulling it through the top buttonhole of his tunic.

   De Vere shifted his stance uncomfortably. "Oh, you know, Arundel's masterpiece, that fits so well with his filthy mind. The thing quite a number of people are beginning to say about us."

   Richard was still contorting his neck in an effort to enjoy the rose's perfume. "And what are they saying this time?" he inquired, between appreciative sniffs.

   De Vere didn't answer at once. He was beginning to wish he hadn't mentioned the subject. But since Richard chose to be so dense—"What
do people
say about two young men who are always about together like us?" he asked, with a deprecating shrug. "Particularly if one of them happens to be fair-skinned like you."

   Richard's head shot up. His face blanched visibly. He stared at de Vere in horror. "So that's why Gloucester's forever referring to our being 'inseparable!'" he muttered at last, in a strangled sort of voice.

   "I thought you knew," muttered de Vere, flushing beneath that unwavering stare. "Why, even young Mowbray's got hold of it now. He called me 'Piers' the other day as if by mistake, and then apologized elaborately in front of a whole anteroom of people, including Gloucester and Arundel, of course—"

   "Mowbray said
that
?" Richard's eye blazed with fury.

   "Oh, more in sorrow than in anger, I imagine. Mowbray is very religious. So I suppose it was the only way they could think of to knock you off your pedestal." In order to cover his embarrassment, de Vere was talking much too quickly and saying more than he had intended. "Arundel's trying to strengthen their party by persuading Tom to marry one of his daughters. Didn't you know? And even a thick-skinned fool must see that he'd have to kill Tom's devotion to you before dragging him into the detestable family circle."