The Tudor Rose (30 page)

And even there nobody seemed to be able to talk of anything else. “None of us has ever heard of a pretender being spared before,” one of the Countess of Richmond's women was saying. “Anyone but our merciful Welsh King would have had him hanged, drawn and quartered by now!” And as Elizabeth passed close to two of her younger women, who had their heads too close together to notice her, she overheard one of them saying excitedly, “I peeped through one of the kitchen windows and saw him. They'd put a saucepan on his head and made him hold a poker for a sceptre. The poker was red hot, my dear…The head cook was letting people in from the street at a groat a time to look at him. You should have heard the other scullions hoot with laughter…”

Elizabeth passed on without even reproving their lapse from duty, but the painful picture stayed with her. It had sounded so like the guardroom torturing of the Christ. And this Simnel was of about the age her brothers would have been had they lived. It had even been supposed at first that he impersonated one of them, not Warwick. That thought and an uneasy sense of responsibility for what was happening among her own servants worried her all day. “I am going down to the kitchens,” she announced towards evening, taking only two ladies with her. “And I will go in alone,” she added, making them wait in the stone corridor outside.

In the main kitchen preparations were going on for supper, so that the cooks were all occupied, and at first the turnspits and scullions were too busy carrying crocks back and forth between the well and the great open fires to notice her. When the kitchen clerk came bowing and scraping from his little room she waved him aside. “Tell them to go on with their work,” she said. “Which is the lad they call Lambert Simnel?”

A lonely figure bending before an open fire at the far end of the great vaulted room was pointed out to her. Clumsily and painstakingly, as though unaccustomed to the work, the unfortunate lad was turning a roasting pig before the blaze. His ostracism was patent and complete. “I will talk to him alone,” said the Queen of England, lifting her skirts fastidiously to cross the brick floor.

Hearing someone approach, Simnel swung round defensively, lifting an arm to protect his head from the usual blow. His eyes were too reddened and bleared from the smoke to see her very clearly at first. Even his well-built body had been rendered ridiculous by giving him a kitchen smock which was far too small for him.

“Are you the tradesman's son who pretended to be an earl?” she asked.

“Yes, Madam,” he answered, obviously wondering who she was.

“And now you are a turnspit?”

“By the King's grace,” he said almost cheerfully.

“His Grace treated you better than you deserve.”

“'Tis better than hanging. I did not want to die.” The lad rubbed a hand across his aching eyes, leaving his face yet more smeared with soot. “I had no wish to harm him, Madam,” he said, with uncowed independence. “I but did as my tutor bade me. I see now that it was wrong.”

“It was very foolish,” said Elizabeth, surveying his large hands and grease-smeared jerkin, and noticing for the first time the ugly bruise beneath his matted hair. In spite of the roaring fire, such rough clouts as he had hung damply to the strong muscles of his back, so she guessed that dishwater had recently been thrown over him.

“So you are content to work in the kitchens?” she said, with an effort to control her loathing of the way he stank.

“Grateful, my lady. Not content.”

In spite of everything, there was a manliness about him, and apart from his broad country accent he spoke well.

“Are they—
very
unkind to you?” she asked gently.

It was then that he saw her for the first time as someone worshipfully beautiful. “I can fend for myself,” he muttered awkwardly.

Because of the accessible humanity of her father, Elizabeth had had considerable contact with the cheerful courage of the people. Here, she thought, was the patient, unglamorous kind which had won fame for England at Crecy and Agincourt. And the thought passed through her mind, too, that probably Henry—who had passed this much-talked-of merciful sentence—would not even have recognized it. “What
would
content you?” she found herself asking, hating to waste a quality which she rated highly.

Warned by the smell of burning meat, Simnel gave the spit another turn. “I suppose they'd never let me go back home to Oxfordshire?” he said wistfully.

“I am afraid not,” smiled Elizabeth.

He sighed and pushed back his grease-bespattered hair. For all her grand clothes, here was a lady one could tell things to, even if one hadn't much gift that way. “It's the open country—” he began diffidently. “Sometimes the other servants go out into the fields beyond the City walls—by the way these townsmen brag when they come back, it's mostly to tumble a wench, I reckon—saving your presence! But for me it'd be the space and the sky. And the clean smell of it. I hate this filth more than their fists.” For the first time the tears welled in his eyes. “If I could only get outside these kitchens and hear the birds sing again—”

Elizabeth saw that his face beneath the dirt was fresh and ruddy, his mouth kind. “Do you love birds, then?” she asked.

“Yes, Madam. There's scarcely a call I can't imitate.” His eagerness suddenly cooled to wonder. Perhaps he had become aware of the hushed servants staring from a respectful distance. “But why should the likes of you care? Who are you, Milady?”

“A woman who once had young brothers whom she loved,” answered Elizabeth, her voice low and warm as it always was when she spoke of them. And as she spoke an idea was born. “Do you know anything about falcons, Simnel?”

“Well, not rightly,” he admitted. “But back home I sometimes helped one of the Earl of Oxford's falconers clean their mews and in return he let me go along to watch them being trained. Once he let me carry his perch and unhood them. Quick to learn, he said I'd be. Their wings were so strong, and swift as lightning as they mounted!”

The lad's eagerness shone through his awkwardness and filth so that the Queen cared what became of him, and was angry with herself for caring. In her heart she knew that she had really come to this abominable place, as she would have gone down to hell, secretly hoping to see someone who faintly resembled Dickon. And this youth did not resemble him at all. Others might say easily, “He is upstanding and blue-eyed and fair"—but where was the slenderness, the grace? The gaiety and fine-bred intuition? She had ceased to listen to the turnspit's ramblings. “Do you know who this is?” she asked harshly, jerking from beneath the bosom of her gown an exquisitely painted miniature that hung about her neck upon a slender gold chain.

Startled by her seeming irrelevance, Simnel leaned forward to look at it. “I never saw the young gentleman before in my life,” he affirmed.

“It is my brother, Richard Duke of York,” she said, almost snatching it back from his gaze. “A pity, perhaps, that you did not see it before.” Because this boy from Oxfordshire had convinced her that he was somebody with a decent personality she wanted to show him the enormity of the thing which he had done. “You are as much like a Plantagenet as that burnt pig there is like the sun!” she cried, raging at him out of the constant ache in her heart.

It was clear that he thought she had come to mock at him too, and by the stricken look on his face she saw that because of some worship that had grown in him the sudden disillusionment hurt more than all the cruelties he had endured. “But I will see what the King says about having you trained for falconry,” she promised before she turned to leave him; and by the bemused way in which he stared and by the obsequiousness with which all the other servants made way for her she supposed that he must have guessed then who she was.

Whether it was the swaying of her emotions between pity and indignation or merely the smell of cooking, Elizabeth did not know; but back in her rooms she felt herself shaking with a return of the ague which she had supposed to be cured. Very sensibly she sat still for a while, quietly, in an anteroom by a favourite window which overlooked the peace of her herb garden, consciously trying to control the trembling of her hands as they lay idle in her lap. And as she sat there she wondered how she could have been so foolish as to have disturbed herself over a very ordinary young man caught in a clumsy fraud. He had nothing to do with the rich eventfulness of a life such as hers.

And all unexpectedly in the middle of such rare peace the great moment of her life was upon her.

The door of the anteroom was thrown wide for the King and he was standing there before her telling her that he had arranged Sunday, the twenty-fifth of November, for the date of her coronation.

The little room seemed suddenly to be full of important people with whom he had been arranging it, and judging by the pleased expressions of their faces Elizabeth suspected that they had used their utmost efforts to push him to this decision at last. Her good friend Stanley was positively beaming at her; Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, kissed both her hands; and even Bishop Morton's dark, secret face showed relief and satisfaction. “Henry and I have been two years married and I have given him a son, yet it takes a Yorkist conspiracy to convince him that it will be safer not to slight me any longer,” thought Elizabeth involuntarily. She rose from her chair and made a deep obeisance to him and thanked him, trying to keep all signs of ague from her limbs and all trace of irony from her voice. Yet seeing the sheaves of notes in his secretary's hand and having to listen to the almost tediously careful arrangements which had been made, she came to the conclusion that Henry had intended to keep his promise, anyway.

“I have arranged for a procession through London, and my mother and I will watch your triumph from some window,” he told her later, when at last they were alone. “You have waited with great patience, Elizabeth, and I want this to be your day.”

Elizabeth looked up at him with a swift new hope of gladness in her heart. When he spoke appreciatively like that it was so easy to be beguiled into believing that he loved her; not merely that he was a just man, repaying her for producing an heir. “I shall love to ride through London, and be Queen,” she said simply. “And I will try to make you proud of me.”

“It should not be difficult, with your extraordinary beauty,” he said, consulting his papers when most men would have been looking at her face. “And with the lavish sum of money I have set aside to spend on the pageantry.”

It was unfortunate to mention money at such a moment, even though his early life may have taught him to count every florin. His wife's grateful radiance faded visibly, and as she stood watching him her thoughts strayed to her mother, that supreme opportunist who had always man aged to advance some member of other of her grasping family upon each special occasion of her life—whether it were childbirth or crowning or merely her husband's latest infidelity. “Now is the moment to ask Henry for anything you want, Bess,” she would almost certainly have whispered, had she been there.

But what was there to want, save what the irrevocability of Death had taken? Other women might ask for jewels; but jewels were cold comfort when all one longed for was the warm love of a man's heart.

“Is there anything that I can do for you?” asked Henry, as if reading the direction of her thoughts.

But really at that moment there was nothing that Elizabeth particularly wanted—which was, she supposed, the most subtle poverty of all. So, although it was to be her coronation gift, it was only a very small thing she asked for. Because she had always loved young people she suggested almost casually, “I would like that poor Simnel boy down in the kitchens to be transferred to the mews. He might, I imagine, be much happier with hawks than herded with pitiless humans.”

If Henry felt surprise he did not make it manifest. The happiness of a baker's son was nothing to him. He did not even enquire whether she had ever seen Lambert Simnel, nor why she should make so strange and modest a request. “As you wish, my dear,” he agreed. “I will have him apprenticed to my head falconer over at Charing.”

Elizabeth saw him open one of his everlasting memorandum books and make a note of it, and was satisfied that he would keep his word. In her mind she saw also a pleasing vision of a clean and self-respecting young man standing beneath God's open sky again. And Henry—who had acquiesced so easily—saw, no doubt, another cheap opportunity of demonstrating Tudor clemency.

F
OR THE LONG-LOOKED-for coronation of the Queen all England seemed to be
en fête.
Elizabeth could have wished that it were summer-time; but mercifully the sun shone and, as Henry had promised, it was her day indeed. He had had her brought in the great state barge to London, with all her watermen wearing the new green livery with a great Tudor rose embroidered upon the breast of each. The whole width of the Thames had seemed alive with gaily decorated boats accompanying her. Young girls with flowing hair and white dresses leaned from a slender skiff to scatter red and white roses before the prow of her barge, and keeping pace with her a boatload of students from Lincoln's Inn made the air sweet with music; and for the delight of the spectators along the banks one barge was ingeniously converted into a dragon, copied from the proud Welsh emblem on the Tudor banners, which belched fire into the sparkling waters.