Within the Hollow Crown (38 page)

   "Then why
did
you come?"

   He perceived that he had given her wantonness some cause. Dalyngrigge was not the man to have betrayed the nature of their business. And to a woman whose beauty was notorious, and whose vanity was fed by a husband's undiminished and unrequited passion, the almost furtive nature of his visit might well have looked like that.

   He offered her a chair, but she preferred the foot of the bed. Kicking off her ermine slippers, she sat there provocatively framed by her husband's prancing unicorns—giving them, as some ribald imp in Richard's mind observed, something to look surprised about.

   "You won't be seducing me," she said softly, her eyes a smouldering invitation beneath up-curled lashes. "I've always been yours—in desire. And you know it. The violation was when you made me marry
him. A great clumsy devil who cages me in thi
s God-forsaken place and comes to bed with his bloodstained boots on! Who'd strangle me if I smiled out of sheer boredom at that shaven priest down there, and yet can't keep faith with me if he goes on a three days' foray!"

   "Oh, come, Lizbeth! He isn't as bad as that," protested Richard, with compunction. "Look how he trusts you—tonight, for instance."

   "It's you he trusts—not me!" she spat at him, and could have bitten her tongue out as soon as the words were spoken. For she, of all people, ought to have known Richard long enough to take into account his loyalty.

   "Oh, what does it matter anyway?" she hurried on, trying to cover her mistake. "I know why you made me marry him, and because of that I've tried to forgive you."

   "Forgive me?" As a king, Richard had to laugh at her brazen impudence. "I'd be interested to know what reason you ascribe to me, other than the normal one of having a marriageable ward and wanting his money?"

   Life had made Lizbeth too sure that with all men the delight of her body excused the sharpness of her tongue. "It's obvious isn't it?" she shrugged. "Because you yourself had to marry. A girl you'd never seen. To beget an heir. You weren't in love with her and—"

   Richard dragged her off his bed and shook her until the damascene slipped from her pointed breasts. She had roused him from his nonchalance at last. "Be quiet, will you, you jade?" he shouted at her, his face white with anger.

   But no Wardeaux had ever wanted courage. "You weren't! You know you weren't!" she snarled back. "And yet you were too fastidious to offend your wife with an affair like any other man. But when Robert de Vere was making love to Agnes, you were so nearly in love with me—you thought you'd better find me a husband!"

   "You were always singularly intelligent, Lady Dalyngrigge," he mocked, trying to keep a hold on himself.

   Nothing had been denied to Lizbeth de Wardeaux as a child, and now, at thirty, she was grasping for the only thing she had ever really wanted. Something that money couldn't buy. "That day you kissed me by the pool at Westminster—"

   "Don't tell me I loved you! I never in my life came within miles of loving you!" broke in Richard. "For an hour or two I may have lusted after you. I suppose most young men about the Court did at that time."

   "Yet you sent me a message that you were at Sheen—"

   "As far as I remember, Robert and I had a bet about it."

   Lizbeth threw back the heavy strands of her hair. Her eyes were angry as a tiger's. She went back to the hearth and beat with clenched fists upon the stone canopy. "And when I got to Sheen—they told me you were with the Queen!" she cried, in a strangled sort of voice. She stood for a while resting her forehead against the stone. By some sort of just reckoning it seemed that she, who nightly tormented Edward Dalyngrigge, must be driven suppliant to Richard Plantagenet. She turned to him with a sort of wistful, impassioned earnestness. "Oh, I don't deceive myself. I know that no other woman ever existed for you afterwards. But I'm not asking for that stained-glass sort of love. I shouldn't know what to do with it." She came and sat on the edge of the hutch where his houppelarde lay, beseeching him. "I only want your kisses, Richard, and to feel that coldness in you run to flame. Not because you're a king…"

   "I know that."

   "Richard, I've waited ten years for you to come—"

   Between pity and his driven senses, he turned to her almost savagely. "Why must you make me hate myself? I don't forget that you saved my mother's life. Nor the fun we all had before—Radcot Bridge. But a man doesn't want cheap tavern stuff once he has drunk good wine—"

   A new look of amazement came into her beautifully chiselled face. It was as if she were really thinking about him for the first time. "But now that your life is dust and ashes, Richard? You must long sometimes to forget."

   He leaned wearily against one of the carved bedposts. "There is nothing I want to forget. I treasure every moment," he said.

   "And you seriously mean that all these months—with all the girls who must be enamoured of you—there's never been another woman?"

   "Since you are impertinent enough to ask—no, there hasn't."

   It seemed incredible to Lizbeth. "And you mean to go on trying to live like that for the rest of your life?"

   She approached him gradually, almost gaping at him as she came. "You make me wonder—is it true what people say about you—that you were sired by one of the priests in the Bordeaux abbey where you were born? Are you a saint or something?"

   Richard laughed harshly. "On the contrary, I'm a very thoroughgoing sinner. My conscience is black as hell. So black that I can't sleep o' nights. If you could see into my mind, my dear Lizbeth, strumpet as you are—you'd shrink from me!"

   She was too accustomed to living with men of violence to shrink from evil consciences, and his very indifference excited her. She slipped bare arms about his neck. "Then what further harm can it do to sin or sleep if I stay with you tonight?" she pleaded.

   He still stood unresponsive. "You pretty fool! It has nothing to do with goodness. Can't you understand that when Anne died all that part of me died too? For ever."

   She drew away then, half incredulous, half fearful. Almost as if he were something inhuman. And as if to prove the thing he said, both to her and to himself, he suddenly reached out and pulled her half-naked body close against his own, kissing her roughly till he bruised her. Those moist, seductive lips that so many other men had thirsted for. Lizbeth closed her eyes in ecstasy. But after a moment or two he released her, and struck her open, avid mouth lightly with the back of his hand. And somehow he managed to make the blow less offensive than the kiss.

   She recoiled from him as though he had stripped the lure of her warm flesh to the repulsive bone. "I would sooner you had beaten me," she breathed.

   But he only laughed, a little insanely, glad for the proved triumph of his constancy. People shouldn't tempt him to half the sins in the decalogue all in one day like this.

   "It's not being a strumpet, to desire one man all one's life—so that even until one grows old and passion passes one can find joy with none other," she protested presently. All the proud, laughing fire had gone out of her voice, and she was half crouching against the bed hangings.

   He turned and looked at her with understanding compassion. "My poor Lizbeth," he said.

   When she gathered herself up, her movements were no longer lithe and young. She had learned so much in so short a time. "Just occasionally, I suppose, only one insatiable love is given to a woman—" she whimpered.

   Richard picked up her cloak and put it across her shoulder. "And—more occasionally still—to a man," he agreed.

   He wandered to the window and stood there with his back to her, trying not to hear her sobs of self-pity. After a while he heard her whimper her way towards the door and down the winding stair. Although he did not see the actual moment of her going, at some point he knew himself to be alone, and eased his strained emotions with a deep sigh. In a few moments, as far as he was concerned, it was as if she had never been.

   The moon had risen high above his vision, shedding a gentle silver radiance on the smooth turf of the tilt yard and on the lush river meadows beyond. Somewhere in the beech trees an owl hooted. The water of the moat looked black and fathomless in the shadow of the castle wall, and on its surface, cupped by a darker bed of floating pads, glimmered a single water lily left over from summer. To Richard's longing eyes it looked like the little white soul of Anne.

   As always, the perfection of the night's beauty was like a sword, stabbing at his loneliness.

   "Anne! Anne!" he whispered softly. And instantly the reassurance of her abiding love came back to him.

   He leaned against the stone embrasure with closed eyes, letting her tenderness enfold him. For a few blessed moments all the frets and plottings of the day were blotted out. But tonight he could not keep his mind blank enough. Other thoughts kept crowding in. Suppose Mowbray's warning were true? Already this thing he planned to do in Calais was intruding upon Anne's influence. Coming between them. What was the good of pretending to Mundina that it wasn't so? Of brazening it out? Deep in his soul he knew that if Anne had lived she would never have let him become a murderer. That he was sacrificing some part of his love for her to his hatred of Gloucester. That if he did this thing, the unappeased Christ must always come between her white soul and his guilt.

   "Everything that I have or am that man has spoiled, dear God!" he moaned. "All my life he has been goading me to this hour, and if it be accounted mortal sin to kill such vermin why, why should the punishment be mine?"

   He turned, shivering, to his cold bed. The fire had burned low and the servants were long since asleep. He kicked the door shut and closed the casement. The following wind had freshened. Running before it, Dalyngrigge's ship must be halfway to France by now.

Westminster palace was in a turmoil of preparation for the state visit to France. The regalia was brought from the Jewel Tower, and courtiers were getting out their best furs. Servants must have new liveries and horses new trappings. And even Mathe, a new collar. The ladies who were invited were either vying with each other over the height of their headdresses, or deep in dudgeon because "that governess of the Lancasters" was now a duchess and—until the new Queen came—the first lady in the land.

   In his private apartments the King was trying on his resplendent new clothes. Bed and chairs were strewn with them. Pages bumped into each other, running back and forth with coloured leather shoes and scented gloves and other modish accessories. Squires and gallants who prided themselves on being dressed in the
dernier cri
were struck dumb with admiration for such sartorial genius.

   This was Jacot's hour.

   He was fitting the cloth of gold houppelarde his master was to wear to his meeting with the King of France. And Richard Plantagenet, that super-critic of beautiful fashions, was regarding his reflection with satisfaction in the long metal mirror. Jacot's dark hair was winged with grey, but he bobbed round his royal client with the same ecstatic, simian movements as of yore.

   "Well, Jacot, any news of Mundina?" asked Richard leisurely, when the more breathless moments of suspense were over.

   "News, sir?" repeated Jacot absently, marking an alteration of

the fraction of an inch in a seam.

"From France."

   The little tailor looked up, more like a puzzled monkey than ever. "I don't understand, sir, I thought she was here with you. I was going to see her presently—"

   "But surely, Jacot, you knew she asked me to arrange for her to cross to Calais with the Duke of Norfolk? On her way overland to Bordeaux?"

   Jacot laid down his chalk and blinked. "To Bordeaux, sir?"

   "To settle up her brother's estate or something."

   Richard was holding up to the light a selection of rings a page had handed him, and he had put them all back on their black velvet cushion before he noticed her husband's curious reactions.

   "Mundina never had a brother," Jacot said.

   Their eyes met in the reflecting mirror. They had both forgotten about the houppelarde. "I thought it strange at the time that she had never mentioned him. But Mundina is like that," said Richard slowly.

   When a couple of his gentlemen had eased the gorgeous garment from his shoulders, he walked over to a window recess and beckoned Jacot to follow him. "You had better come with me to Calais," he said. "I told her to rest when she got there. And the Governor sent a message by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge to say that she seemed none the worse for the journey and left the Citadelle a week later with two of his own servants."

   "Since milord of Norfolk says she is on her way to Bordeaux—"

   But all Richard's sense of security as a child had been staked on Mundina. Never once had she deceived him. Why should she lie to him now? "All the same, you had better question the servants. And make inquiries in the streets. You're a Frenchman. They'll tell you things." Come to think of it, there were quite a number of things one would like to know. "And while you go about it, unpick my badge from your cloak," Richard added.

   The word "Calais" was on everybody's lips that winter—and on their minds. The King was going to France to fetch his new bride. How strange to have a child for a queen! Though better by far than having a bad queen out of France like the second Edward. And if King Richard had chosen anyone grown up she'd need to be an angel, God help her, after their beloved Bohemian one!