The King's Grey Mare (73 page)

‘Now wait, Robin,’ she told him.
‘Wait until the Queen has passed, and then go to!’

The little boy smiled up at Grace.
‘I am to cut the carpet,’ he confided.

‘I promised him,’ explained the woman.
‘But I fear the knife isn’t sharp enough!’

All down the line folk were discreetly unsheathing daggers for the timeless privilege of taking a square of the royal cloth, for good luck, as a protection against king’s evil, and in sheer joy and reverence.

‘I cut the carpet at Queen Anne’s coronation,’ said the young woman softly.
‘But then she and Richard were crowned together.’
John’s cold hand tightened on Grace’s; nearer the flaring bray of trumpets sounded and suddenly out of the hanging mist came the procession.
A great cheer arose, caps sailed into the air.
An ancient man burst into tears, crying: ‘Bess!
Jesu preserve you, Bess!’
Slowly, gently, the Queen began the long walk up to the Abbey door.
Her sister Cicely bore her train.
Bess wore a kirtle of purple velvet banded with ermine.
Her shining wheaten hair, crowned with pearls and rubies, fell to her hips and rippled as she walked.
Her face was pale and thin and serious.
Edward’s daughter, Elizabeth’s daughter, silver and gold, she came graciously on; the mob erupted with delight.
The pure profile, the glittering hair passed by, gone in an instant.
Bright-eyed, the small boy turned to his mother.

‘Now!’
she whispered, and he ran forward, waving his dagger.
Likewise did a hundred men and women, knives gleaming like fishes slipping through the mist.
And the guard moved, too swiftly.
The majority of them were Breton; they had never heard of the custom and were desperately afraid of their master’s wrath.
They did not see the joy or the innocence of the crowd; they saw only knives and sudden movements.
Unsheathing their weapons, they laid about them.
The cheers, the laughter, turned to screams of anguish.
Grace saw an old man clubbed, his delicate skull shattered; a woman trampled.
There was the sound of splintering bone, and one rending shriek that rose above all other.
The small boy, Robin, was impaled on a guardsman’s lance.
Within a minute a dozen people lay dying, and the beautiful carpet was more red than white.

At the Abbey’s portal, the Queen turned and saw all.
Cicely dropped her sister’s train and buried her face in her hands.
All the Queen’s ladies were crying; Jasper Tudor rushed them into the porch.
Grace watched the Queen go weeping from dead bodies to her coronation.
Her own mind froze; she slid fainting into John’s arms.

She found herself lying on a tavern bench.
John’s face was fogged and strange.
He had been trying to dribble wine into her mouth; the bosom of her gown was soaked.
She could hear the landlord cursing softly in the background.

‘Be still, my love,’ John said.
She tried to smile; her face was stiff.

‘You were right!’
he said.
She frowned.
Objects came clearer, then blurred again as, remembering the massacre, she began to weep.
‘We must go away,’ he went on.
‘After today, I have had enough of Tudor’s England.
We will leave at once.’

She sat up; her head spun, then quietened slowly.
She nodded and rose, wiped away tears.
‘I’m ready.’

‘I must find horses and a boy to bear our goods,’ he said.
He crossed to the landlord and spoke swiftly; the man: nodded and went away.
‘Then, a ship to carry us.
Wait here for me.’

‘No!’
she cried.
‘I’ll come with you, don’t leave me.’

Seriously he looked at her.
He said: ‘Never.’

‘Let us not return to Gould’s.
Let’s leave everything.
I have all that I need.’

‘You must take your pretty gowns,’ he said, smiling: ‘I shall have no more money once we are exiled.
I shall need to attach myself to some Irish lord … come, love.
I love you in your pretty gowns.’

When they returned to the butcher’s shop, Gould was there alone.
He looked at them dourly.
When John, stiffly arrogant, informed him that they were quitting the lodging, he only grunted, and began sawing at a haunch of venison on the counter.
Hand in hand they went upstairs and entered the small room for the last time.
Together they leaned from the window once more.
Salazar stood on the corner, teaching his monkey a trick; he was absorbed and did not look up.
John touched the dingy walls of the room, the crooked table, found a forgotten doublet in a chest.
Everything was very quiet; Gould’s sawing and chopping had ceased.
John sat on the viciously lumpy bed, and stroked its covers.

‘Sweet Jesu!
I was happy here!’
he said softly.
Then, without looking at her: ‘My lady.
Such as you are given by God.’

Tears stung her eyes.
She said shakily: ‘We shall be even happier.
Look!’
Trying to laugh, she nudged the coffer containing her gowns.
‘I can’t lift it!’

‘The boy will be here soon,’ he said.
He sat quietly, turning the ring upon his finger, looking at the floor.
Restlessly Grace walked about.
Paul’s clock struck its harsh remembered note.
She turned and looked at John as he sat there, all darkness and light, with his pallor and his black hair, and the sad tempestuous eyes pensively veiled.
Love filled her as she looked.

‘Oh, my lord!’
she began.
There was a noise on the stair, steps forcefully, imperatively advancing.
No baggage-boy owned such a tread, or wore mailed shoes, or carried halberds that slithered and struck upon the walls of the narrow staircase.
There were at least four, faceless ones, ascending the stair.
The small upper room shook.
John stood up, crossed easily, deliberately, to where she stood aghast, and drew her to him, covering her face with kisses.
He set his mouth on hers in an endless embrace, bending her body to his, almost engulfing it, protectively yet with desire, the wild regretful desire of the condemned.

A weapon crashed once upon the door.
Still he kissed her, held her as if to merge her body finally and forever with his.
Half-fainting again, she cried in her mind: He knew!
He knew they would come for him; he knew and did nothing …

Then they were in the room; the bright Dragon blazons and the royal insignia; tall men, stooping beneath the lintel, disinterested men come by order of their sovereign.
And behind them was Gould, peeping gloomily to see his work accomplished.

‘You are John of Gloucester, son of the traitor Plantagenet.’

He had withdrawn from Grace, and was standing respectfully apart.
He was smiling.

‘I am the son of Richard, rightful king of England.’

‘You must come now,’ they said, sounding foolish.

‘The lady has no part of it, of course,’ said John.
Still he smiled.
They inclined their heads, and accepted this.
They had their orders; Grace was invisible.

‘The charge is treason?’

‘Treasonable correspondence with Ireland.’
The pikes were hefted and set to attention with a crash.

‘Why did he wait so long?’
said John softly.

‘Come,’ they said.
The question was irrelevant; one did not question divinity.

Formally John kissed Grace’s hand.
‘Remember me,’ he said.
His eyes smiled as well as his mouth; he was full of tenderness.
He was slipping away; the fog of destiny had him.
He was gone.
Strangely, he said: ‘My dynasty is damned.
The wheel comes full circle.
My lady, my love.
Remember …’

Even when the door had closed and the footsteps had died, she could not move.
She stood like a stone, gathering strength against the storm about to break in her.
When it did, his smile remained, almost but not quite enough to make the moment bearable.

Although Cardinal Morton now had palaces and mortmains the length of England, he found it sometimes convenient to lodge at his old manor of Holborn.
There, in the quiet rooms or the pretty garden with its strawberry beds, he could nod acquaintance to harder times.
He sat in his parlour, while a serious-faced boy of nearly nine stood reading from a scroll on a lectern.
Morton listened to the fluid Latin cadences approvingly.
Thomas More, son of a Lincoln’s Inn judge, was the wittiest pupil ever to come the Cardinal’s way.
The clear voice relaxed Morton; he was feeling his great age.
There was still so much to do; to shape the Tudor dream, to instruct what should be remembered and what forgotten.
He was annoyed when his clerk and gatekeeper knocked, entered, and knelt to whisper against the folds of the scarlet robe.

‘Oh, this is monstrous!’
cried Morton.’
‘It is not fitting for women to enter these precincts.
Send her away.’

Thomas More slipped from the lectern stool and left the room.
He disliked to hear his master in choler, even though this occurred infrequently.

‘Eminence,’ faltered the clerk.
‘Every day for weeks, she has embarrassed us.’
He flushed.
When Grace wept, he did not know what to say; when she swooned, he was utterly put out, and let her lie moaning.

‘She speaks of going to his Majesty.’

‘Foolishness,’ said Morton quietly.
‘Very well.
I will see her.
No doubt she wishes to confess her sin.
Are there no lesser men to give her an ear?’

He let her wait some minutes more while he occupied himself with the latest problem; the entry in York Civic Records, only lately brought to his notice.
It was an old entry, dated 22nd August, two years earlier.
He was slightly troubled by it.
‘This day was our good King Richard, late mercifully reigning over us, piteously slain and murdered to the great heaviness of this City.’
It was full time to stop such rot as this.
And the herald, Rous, was due for an audience too; the Rous Roll must be amended for it too spoke glowingly of Henry’s predecessor.
How should it be re-written?
And now he was plagued by the bastard wench of Edward Plantagenet.
He looked sternly at her when she was admitted.
She did him obeisance.

‘Rise, child,’ he said impassively.
Her lips left the great jewel on his finger and she got up.
Her eyes were green a glass, contained a thousand years of sorrow, and discomfited him a little.

‘You are penitent?’

‘Penitent?’
An incredulous breath.

‘For your carnality during the past year with the traitor Gloucester.
Remember the words of St.
Jerome: God can do all things but restore virginity!’

She smiled a little.
‘Your Eminence,’ she said, ‘I come to you because you are of God.
I wish to plead for John of Gloucester’s life.’

‘You are too late,’ he said stiffly.
‘He has been tried and found guilty.
He is sentenced to death.’

Something shifted in the green eyes.
Fleetingly he saw how she would be as an old woman; a stranger to smiles, still fair, but almost nunly.
Somehow this made him feel older still.

‘I shall appeal to the King himself,’ she said quietly.
Then he thought; she is mad, a heretic.

‘The King is not in London.
The King sees no one.’
He picked up a quill, made a notation on Rous’s offending roll.

After a time she said: ‘When is the execution to be?’
and he told her, not looking up.
When he raised his eyes, the room was empty.
He sent again for Thomas More.

‘Divert me, Tom,’ he said.
‘I am weary.’

‘Alas, my lord.’
The boy blushed.
‘I have no talent for it.’

‘Nonsense.’
The fresh young mind was geared to storytelling, and untouched by the past thirty years of war.
All More’s schooling had been directed by the accession of King Henry, the mystical union of Rose Red and White, like Christ and the Church.
Brightly the boy said: ‘There is a new troupe of entertainers outside.
They will do better than I.’