Within the Hollow Crown (27 page)

   But before Gloucester could quench his thirst a door opened at the far end of the room and Richard himself came in, followed by Simon Burley. The conspiratorial undertones stopped abruptly and both men stood looking at him, their glasses in their hands.

   "Good morning, Uncle.
Pax vobiscum
, milord Bishop. To what am I indebted for this—visit?" he asked pleasantly.

   His very urbanity held them tongue-tied. Seen like that at the end of the hall, with his hound beside him and the light from a tall coloured window etherealizing his good looks, there was a dignity about him which at times abashed even Gloucester.

   "There are certain questions, sir—" began Thomas Arundel, Bishop of Ely, and brother of Richard Arundel.

   Richard was clever enough to appreciate that a certain material distance kept them in their place. "I will do my best to answer them," he said. "But I was under the impression that I had promised audience to forty members of the Commons."

   "The Commons can ill afford to risk forty of their best members," broke in Gloucester rudely.

   Richard's eyebrows shot up in genuine surprise. "You suspect a trap? The same sort of trap, perhaps, as you told me Lancaster had prepared for me on the way home from Scotland? It was stupid of me, but I really hadn't thought how easy it would be for me to hold them as hostages. Particularly as I had flattered myself the Commons were my loyal subjects."

   Richard's voice was cool and mocking. For just so long as he kept it so he would, he felt, have the whip hand over these two. Even though they held all the cards. He had felt like that, he remembered, facing Wat Tyler's men at Smithfield. As if he were keeping wild beasts in check. And, although the peasants had certainly held all the cards, he had fooled them! He took his own wine from his page, keeping a friendly arm about him as he drank. Tom Holland was growing almost as tall as he, and looked more like a younger brother than a nephew. Joan's fair beauty was stamped on each of them, and Richard kept him there because he guessed hopefully that any sort of duplication of himself must be an annoyance to Gloucester. "Come, drink up your malvoisie," he urged hospitably. "Or do you suspect that it is poisoned?"

   Gloucester bolted the strong vintage at a gulp. "I suppose you know that the nation won't stand for this last absurdity about de Vere?" he spluttered, wiping the dregs from moustache to sleeve. He was always at his worst at Court, where his manners became a deliberate protest against the niceties of Anne's and Richard's household.

   "The dukedom, you mean?" inquired Richard blandly.

   "And all the lands. Already, he, who is no blood relation, has more than I."

   "If I had known that you wanted them, dear Uncle—"

   "What has he ever done to deserve them?"

   Richard appeared to meditate. "He has always been amiable and amusing. Perhaps if you, too, had been able to find time from all your violent activities to see a joke or write a sonnet sometimes—"

   To young Holland's intense joy, Gloucester nearly choked indeed. "Except for that military promenade through Scotland, the scented young fop has never even been to war," he shouted, advancing the only criterion he knew of for a young man's worth.

   "No," agreed Richard, handing back his glass and coming to warm his hands at a fire burning in the middle of the hall. "But he is going now. I have sent him up to Cheshire to prepare an invasion force against Ireland. Although I hope it won't be necessary to kill many of those unfortunate people. My idea was rather to colonize."

   But the deputation was not interested in his ideas, only in their own. "Ireland!" they cried, almost in unison. "With the French at our gates!"

   Richard had heard the parrot cry so often that he ignored it. "And you and milord Arundel will notice, perhaps, that Robert de Vere and I are not quite so inseparable as our foulest enemies make out," he added, looking straight at his uncle.

   He had the satisfaction of seeing Thomas Plantagenet's hardbitten hide go fiery red. "If you and he went to fight our enemies in France there'd be less need to persuade your enemies at home," he muttered.

   As a churchman, Ely rushed in to keep the peace. "The people are naturally beginning to panic about the possibility of a French invasion," he twittered, because it was the only thing he could think of before a Plantagenet storm had time to burst.

   "Very naturally, since they are never given a chance to stop thinking about it." Richard could still manage a casual voice, but Burley noticed that there was a brittle edge to it.

   "They might panic with some cause if they knew that your agent, Chaucer, had been caught in Canterbury," said Gloucester.

   "One scarcely speaks of a government official being 'caught' in the exercise of his duty," murmured Burley, trying to draw their fire and give the King time to compose himself.

   The duke looked round as if only now aware of the elderly statesman's presence. "You don't deny, I suppose, that he was on his way to Calais?" he demanded, in that sharp way of his.

   "Why should I?" shrugged Burley.

   "Nor that he was entrusted with power to make negotiations? Negotiations to sell Calais?"

   "Negotiations to sell
wool, my dear uncle," broke in Richar
d wearily. "I am naturally interested in wool, since most of my begrudged income comes from the wool taxes a more generous Parliament once voted me. You seem to forget that, apart from the upkeep of all my palaces, I have a wife to keep."

   "And all her Bohemian friends!" sneered Gloucester.

   Even then, for Burley's sake, Richard bit back the hot retort from his tongue. So that he shouldn't have to look at his tormentors, he walked carefully to the window, Mathe moving like a lean, stately lioness by his side.

   "The matter of your Grace's income might have been remedied," Ely was saying in that oily voice of his. "But once the Commons heard about this latest honour heaped upon Oxford and the expense of raising a force for Ireland—"

   "Which I paid for myself."

   "—even the Duke of York couldn't persuade them to make any further grant. They say that you should live out of your own—"

   To keep his hands from hitting someone Richard began violently plumping up the window cushions. He had lost all grip on mockery. "Live out of my own?" he cried, betrayed into serious argument. "What have I but my own private estates in Cheshire? You know very well that the Duchy of Lancaster should have gone with it—always
has
gone with it—but that my grandfather was so fertile he had to leave something to Uncle John. Had he guessed that my eldest uncle of Clarence would die, he probably wouldn't have. But as it is, although I am king, Henry Bolingbroke will inherit more private property than I. The Commons don't expect me to go out into Cheapside each morning and run a chapman's stall, do they?"

   "I don't know what they expect, but they are setting up a commission—now—to control all grants and taxation," answered Gloucester.

   "
They! You
are, you mean, using them as your cat's-paw!" accused Richard.

   "If they provide the money I suppose they've a right to see how it's spent."

   "You didn't think that when you wanted grants for your own b-bloody wars!"

   "All these stalwart, well-trained soldiers staring at the sights of London, for instance."

   "A handful of my own Cheshire archers—a mere bodyguard— now that Lancaster has withdrawn his forces. You're not suggesting that I'm trying to terrorize Parliament with them, are you?"

   "In case you should, we have some excellent levies gathered in readiness at Waltham Cross, and the first thing Parliament will do will be to get rid of your plebeian Chancellor."

   All histrionic caution forgotten, Richard flung round on them, furious and fighting back. "Get rid of de la Pole! How can they? What can they possibly find against him? Except that he has striven for peace. Sacrificed cheap popularity in an effort to give this battered, blood-drained country a respite after fifty years. A chance to rebuild her cities and to reconstruct her trade. And what is wrong with that? Except that it throws warmongers and profiteers like you out of commission."

   "It is not I who will be out of commission," sneered Gloucester, perceiving that he had jolted Richard out of his quelling superiority. "Nor Richard Arundel nor Warwick nor Ely. It is friends of yours like Burley there, and that smirking tradesman Brembre—"

   "Just because they
are
my friends?"

   "Yes, if you like. And lesser men like Chaucer, who creeps about on your secret missions—and Medford, your incorruptible secretary. And half your household…"

   Gloucester was almost incoherent and, at sound of their raised voices, Mathe had begun to growl.

   "This is unendurable—to speak so in the King's presence," protested Burley.

   The bishop had already backed towards the outer door.

   "So you would do that to me?" said Richard, his voice husky with fury. "Poke into my private household. Have me spied on in my own courtyards. When even the poorest country squire is master in his own manor!" Warm and beautiful before his mind came the contrasting picture of a tousled kitchen lad taken and forgiven in some forgotten fault, stooping to kiss his master's shadow. "Go back to Westminster, you traitors, and tell them I will not dismiss a single scullion at their bidding!" he shouted.

   Mathe's growl had grown dangerous. Teeth snapped murderously between drawn-back jowls. Knowing the deerhound's strength, Richard instinctively reached out and gripped him by the collar. He was aware that Tom Holland had come closer to him. That Ely's face was white as his episcopal robes. That Gloucester was beside himself with rage.

   For once Gloucester had failed to intimidate. This was the Richard who had defied a mob and laughed in his face. All these years he had supposed the young whippet to be cowed by the lesson given him after the Revolt; but here he was asserting himself again and learning to stand up to his elders with a fury equal to their own. He must be brought to heel. Without taking his hating eyes off him, Thomas Plantagenet reached for the helmet which he wore even in peacetime. "Edward the Second was made less than a scullion!" he reminded him, gritting the words out between savage teeth.

   But Richard had drawn new strength from somewhere. "Get out! God damn you, get
out!
Before I let loose this hound," he shouted. Even while he was still pulling on the leather with all his might, Mathe was dragging him forward step by step, straining to be at the throat of any man who quarrelled with his master. Gloucester was no coward, but he had seen many a stag mangled in the chase and he read death in the eyes of both of them. He clamped his
casque
on his head and followed the decamping bishop.

   Richard's straining muscles relaxed and the dog leaped. But the great oak door banged shut, cheating him by a second of his prey. Quivering and distraught, the creature ranged up and down, yelping and sniffing along the stone floor.

   The deputation was over.

   Richard drew a square of checkered silk from his close-fitting sleeve. Automatically, he began wiping some blood from his fingers where the iron studs of Mathe's collar had torn them. "I need not have lifted a hand to him—and it would have been accounted an accident," he muttered. He half turned towards Burley, as if to justify the thought. "I couldn't have held Mathe many seconds longer, Simon. You know I couldn't…"

   And then, quite suddenly, he seemed to crumple onto the window seat. With almost human comprehension, Mathe padded back across the room to lick consolingly at his slack, stained hands.

   "A pity you held him back so long, sir!" ventured Tom, patting Mathe approvingly.

   Burley held his peace. He had been ageing perceptibly of late, and he, too, was shaken. And because it had been partly his own life Richard had been defending, it ill became him to criticize.

   Presently, Richard pulled Mathe's head against him, fondling it with rough tenderness, and looked up. "Go on, say it, Simon!" he invited, with a poor attempt at a grin. "And sit down. Tom will pour us another glass. Heaven knows we need it!"

   Thankfully, Burley eased his joints onto the opposite seat to him in the raised embrasure. "They goaded you to it," he said. Then, twirling the freshly poured wine that Tom had brought him so solicitously, "I suppose it would have been wiser to submit tamely, but it wouldn't have been you."

   Richard smiled at his page and dismissed him. He had no need to tell him not to chatter. The members of his household had learned loyalty from their master. "I was doing pretty well until the last round," he said ruminatively, when he and Burley were alone. "Somehow I often seem to go down in the last bout."

   Burley was feeling better. He was sipping his wine and watching the Queen snipping off rosebuds down in the garden. "You won't now, Richard," he said quietly.

   "No. Thank you for reminding me, Simon." Richard's gaze followed his, and all the sunlight about Anne seemed to wash into his darkling soul, sustaining him. "It's going to be a long wrestle, and it looks as if I'm in for some hard punishment. And the score's not too good," he calculated. "Back almost to where I started from. A bewildered boy in a gilded cage, it was then, with the odds on any one of the three uncles. Well, now the boy isn't there any more—and we know which one we're fighting." He settled the slim gold dagger belt more snugly round his middle and jerked down the nether pleats of his short tunic. "And fighting can be good fun when one wears a lady's favour!"