A Secret Alchemy (24 page)

He was sitting by the hearth in his shirt and an old fur robe that had proved none the worse for being shut in a chest, staring into the red heart that was all that was left of the fire’s kindling. I stood in my smock in the middle of the chamber floor, suddenly afraid beyond all sense.

As if he felt my shiver, he looked up. “Mistress?”

“I—” But if I admitted my fear to him, would he see that which until now he had not seen?

He rose. “Must you learn me again? You have not changed, not by a hair, I think. And I think I have not forgotten you.”

He had not, it was true. And I found I had not forgotten how to please him in our time apart. I knew how to yield my flesh inch by slow inch to his desire, and how to command that he please me, each finger touching where I, in turn, desired it.

A log slipped on the hearth and flared, and the chamber filled
with light. His red-gold limbs tangled with my silver, we swam together, sliding, slipping, before, behind, between. I was Melusina again, Melusina reprieved, not bathing secret and alone but granted her freedom, my freedom, the spell broken, the wheel of Fortune halted, man and woman conjoined and reborn in the golden waters of alchemy.

Antony—Vespers

Ahead, the air is still thick with heat rising from the road,
though the sun is lower in the sky, striking yellow diamonds from the waters of the Aire. A cart overladen with hay is swaying across the bridge toward us and my escort draws to one side that it may clear the bridge before we move on. At the mouth of the bridge a chapel stands, half-hanging over the water: a chantry, I recall, even as the bell begins to ring. I catch Anderson’s eye.

He shakes his head, knowing as a good commander must what his prisoner is thinking even as I think it. I cannot give up so easily. “Would you deny me the chance to pray for my soul?”

“The day grows late, my lord. You will have time enough for prayer when we reach Pontefract.” But we cannot cross the bridge yet, and behind us the rest of the escort hesitates.

I smile at him. “No time can be enough for God. Sir John, we
are knights, you and I, men of worship sworn to uphold the Faith and to be merciful to all. I pray you of your knighthood to grant me the last prayer that I may ever make in this life unprisoned.” Still he hesitates. “I have no thought of escape, only of seeking salvation. I give you my parole.”

At last he nods.

The chapel-door hinges want oil and the air within smells as much of river water as of frankincense. Anderson and three of the men cluster about me; the rest are left outside, their horses and ours that they hold dozing in the sun.

Four priests and four boys.
“Aperi, Domine, os meum ad benedicendum nomen sanctum tuum…”
they chant.

Open my mouth, Lord, to bless Thy holy name
.

One boy looks around at our entry, open-mouthed instead in secular surprise. He is nudged to order by a virtuous fellow, but at the clank of spurs the clerks’ heads turn too.

“…munda quoque cor meum ab omnibus vanis…”
they chant, the sound wavering with a small fear. Anderson holds up both his hands in sight of the clerks, then crosses himself as I genuflect.
“…perversis et alienis cogitationibus.”
Two of the men stay by the door, and the singing steadies.

Cleanse also my heart from all vain, evil, and distracting thoughts
.

I step forward, alone, feeling my soul catch and hold to these same words, to the shape and spring of them, to the bowing of my knee, my lowered head, the pressing of my palms at my breast.

“Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.”

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for me, a sinner, now and at the hour of my death.

We pray so fervently to know the hour of our death: all men’s greatest fear is to die unshriven, no peace made with man, no mercy begged of God.

But it was not force that we lacked as we went about, away from Lynn to the north, and at last found a landing in Yorkshire, it was favor: this was Neville land, not Edward’s own. “Since my own brother George Clarence has proved a turncoat, what man may not?” Edward would say. “With Warwick joining hands with Marguerite, it needs only that we fail in winning men over for Lancaster to be victorious.”

Then we slipped past Pontefract on the road south; had Warwick’s brother Montague chosen to challenge us, we would have been lost. Late one night I sat alone by the fire in the cottage we had commandeered near Wakefield until Louis came in from the town. He was a good height for a Gascon, was Louis, strong and broad with bright black eyes. And yet I know no man who could make himself less visible, tucked into a corner of an alehouse, sipping a single tankard for a couple of hours, saying only a few words and those in the accent of the common sort, and listening to the drink-loosened, careless talk that tells all.

“Montague waits to see which way the wind blows,” he said, dropping the dirty cloak of his disguise on the floor and stretching like a cat. He saw my desire kindled, and smiled, his own kindling in return. “He will not support his brother if it make him enemies among his neighbors here. If we can win enough men, all should be well.”

And we did win men over, hundreds and then thousands, most
especially at Hastings’s call. And in winning battles we won yet more men, for coats turned quickly when they saw that Edward of York was again more than a man, more even than a king, more royal, certainly, than poor, simple Henry of Lancaster.

Many have told tales of those days, of the turns that Fortune gave to her wheel. Soon Warwick was dead and his brother Montague too, the greatest of the Nevilles naked and despoiled both on Barnet field. I still feel the wound I suffered that day, but to see Edward holding baby Ned, kissing Elysabeth, kneeling beside her at Mass that night in his mother’s house was worth a hundred times the pain. It was but a sword-cut to the thigh: men have suffered much worse and lived. Though even now, a dozen years later, when I have ridden hard it stings as sharp as a penitent’s steel cilice.

And now there is scarcely any riding left to me, and little time for penitence.

Marguerite landed from France, and our army met hers at Tewkesbury. Henry’s son—Edward of Lancaster, his heir, their son—was killed. He was seventeen. Ought I—ought we all—to have mourned more for him? Would I have felt more sorrow for his mother’s grief—caught and caged in the Tower at last, like her husband, Henry—if I had known what I have since learned of a father’s love for a son? My daughter, Margaret, I did love, but only because she was fair and sweet, and the image of her mother, my dearest Gwentlian. I did not watch her grow and change, teach her philosophy, kingship, and the love of God, as I did Ned.

Yes, at the time Edward of Lancaster’s end seemed nothing but a fortunate, politic death for which we could not but thank God, even as we commended his soul to Him.

Then from the north news came that the Neville affinity was arming again. Edward marched from the West Country to quell
it. Still the Nevilles had not done with us. Warwick’s bastard nephew of Fauconberg took his uncle’s men of Calais, invaded and raised Kent. He marched on London and, finding the bridge guarded, went on to Kingston. There I kept them in parley while my forces mustered at the Tower, and the city men armed themselves and, after due deliberation, put their men under my command as well.

It was early morning, a week or so after Saint John ad Portam Latinam, I recall. The watch called that the rebel batteries were drawn up along the south bank, from Bankside to Potters Field, and that houses were afire. I ran up to the Lanthorn Tower to see what their gunners might hope to hit. A happy shot might strike the Middle Tower or the tower on the causeway. But by the grace of God, even these Calais-trained gunners would not be so lucky, and the shot would fall in the moat and cause no more harm than a wetting to anyone. But men trained under Warwick will not easily allow luck to go another’s way. To the west, houses on London Bridge itself were ablaze; to the east, rebel ships were moored in the river.

Our own guns had been reported in position late last night: all might yet be well. The Constable of the Tower had ordered that the privy garden be used as a storage yard, and Elysabeth was setting her servants to stacking arrow-bundles where until yesterday had been lavender beds and lawns. Only the roses still stood, their thorns and our lack of time to dig preserving them, though now they were dimmed by the soot of the beerhouses that the rebels fired.

“No, stupid! Leave that clear,” my sister Margaret cried, to a couple of lads who made to dump a pile of cressets by the Iron Gate as I ran down the steps from the Lanthorn Tower. “If the
cannon must be withdrawn from the city, we will mount one here to defend the gate.”

“Madam,” I called to Elysabeth, from halfway up the stair, yet not so harshly as to awaken fear in those not bred to steadiness. “You must take the prince and his sisters and go into the White Tower.”

“I will be of more use here, brother. There is much still to do. Margaret, fetch Ned to the White Tower, and the girls and their women.”

“Aye, madam,” Margaret called. As I reached the foot of the stair, she caught at my hand and squeezed it fiercely. “
À Dieu
, brother.” Then she picked up her skirts and was gone. Elysabeth was counting the bundles of pitch-soaked arrows and the cressets that would be used to light them.

“Madam?”

She stood up and eased her back while she looked at me. She had thinned while we were in exile: so many months trapped inside Westminster Sanctuary showed in the lines about her eyes, and the thinning of the skin over her bones, but any man would still have called her beautiful. She said nothing, but I knew her of old: her silence did not mean consent, but only consideration. Truly, I thought she might dispute with me. Would she, who could command me as her subject in all things, command my obedience in this? Or could I, her brother, head of her house, commander of the King’s forces, also command hers?

“Madam—Ysa—I know that you had rather fight. But your best work and your prime duty is to look to the prince, and to preserve your own person.”

A crack of cannon from the far shore startled us both, and another and another. Then our own guns began to answer the
rebels, so near that the very ground beneath our feet seemed to shake.

Without another word she put her hand to my shoulder and kissed my cheek. “Good fortune, brother.
À Dieu
, and we will meet next where God wills.”

I kissed her. For a heartbeat we were still, and in the scent of roses and crushed lavender we might have stood in the walled garden at Grafton. I looked down, and thought that she, too, recalled those days.

“Mon seigneur!”
It was Louis’s voice. I turned. “
Milord le Connétable
would have speech with you. He has word from the Mayor.”

“Tell the Constable I am with him. Sister, I must go.
À Dieu
. Heaven keep you and the children. Farewell.”

“God speed you,” she said quietly, and I hastened away.

Fauconberg’s rebels shipped across the river from Kent: we watched them from the walls as they landed on the wharf by Saint Katharine’s and marched up the Minories: well-armed, well-made Calais men, seasoned but not wearied by the last two days’ fighting. It needed no panting messenger to cry that the gates on the Essex side of the city were under attack but held yet, for we could see it from the White Tower roof. We armed and mustered, and when all was ready, with Louis at my shoulder, I led the advance. Out by the Lions Gate we marched, over Tower Hill and across East Smithfield, and struck deep into Fauconberg’s left flank, even as the Mayor and sheriffs charged out of Aldgate and met them head-on.

Tales are told of those days. Prentices in the alehouse compare scars and shake their heads over lost friends. Goodwives tell quar-relling children to hush or the Falcon Bird will get them. Alder
men sit at their wine after a day in the counting-house, and recall how hard they fought—sword to sword, hand to hand—to hold the city, and how their knighthoods were earned not by trade but by valor, in the old, grand fashion. It was true, I saw it: Mayor and sheriffs all, fighting to hold off the looters from their shops and homes, and to keep the King of their choice on the throne, as did we all who held Edward’s claim in blood to be the right one. Though for the City men, even that choice was about gold as much as blood: a deposed king cannot repay vast loans or even the interest on them, and Henry of Lancaster would have had no use for their wives, or granted any favors in return.

So they tell their tales over and over: an arming sword that once took Harfleur next did duty in a mercer’s hand; a goldsmith’s life saved by the saint’s kerchief tucked in his brigandine; this arm wounded by a poleax and that sallet split in two; sooty hand-gunners; pipes and drums a-shrieking; valiant baggage-boys; rebels crushed when the Aldgate portcullis was dropped; rebels trapped in the gateway like fish in a barrel; rebels hunted down though it took to Mile End to do it.

No doubt the hippocras tastes sweeter for being drunk to such tales, and the women’s eyes grow rounder. But I have come to think that all fighting is the same fighting, and all that the tales contrive is to hide its sameness in a semblance of difference. The names and places change, but what do we know of names and places when the alarum is sounded? On our memories it is orders and cries that are branded; the clangor of steel and braying of trumpets; the stench of sweat and shit and blood; the hot, crazed terror that masquerades as courage; the screams of a man struck in the belly; the clouding gaze of a dying boy. These are not new matters, or even great matters. They are what mortals know
and, like all mortal things, they are so tiny before God that I must think Him indifferent to who dies…who lives…who reigns.

When Edward, victorious, entered London, he made Richard of Gloucester Constable of the Tower for he of all men, Edward knew, would not turn his coat from the colors of their great Plantagenet father of York, as their brother George had done.

On the morrow, it was given out that Henry had died of despair at the loss of his cause. His corpse was shown at Paul’s, his face uncovered, that the commons would see and know it to be true. If they ran forward with kerchiefs to soak them in his blood for a holy relic, that did less harm to the realm than if the blood had stayed in his living body.

And with that the civil war, as we saw it, was ended. Edward was reconciled to his brother George, and gave him all that he asked. He forgave his marriage to Warwick’s daughter Isobel, though he then allowed Richard’s marriage to her sister Ann, who was widowed when Edward of Lancaster died at Tewkesbury, so that the brothers fought over dead Warwick’s vast lands and riches. But that was a small matter. In the business of the kingdom peace might reign at last. Edward was not best pleased that, with the realm secured, I asked permission to go on pilgrimage to Portugal and Compostela, but I had my way with the promise of doing royal business at the same time as God’s work against the infidel, and that Louis, traveling in my train, would seek out intelligence that I might not.