A Secret Alchemy (41 page)

He sort of laughs and we start to make our way through the terminal. It’s a limbo-world, constantly moving and always the same; none of it touches me. We go up some stairs, Mark moving clumsily, without his usual craftsman’s concision and ease. We find a corner of a coffee bar that is neither crowded nor dirty, and I’m making some silly remark about hoping the customs don’t ask to see documentation for my father’s picture, it not being that valuable or him that famous, when Mark puts his hand over mine and grips hard. I stop dead.

“Yes, I did sort it out with Gareth,” he says, and then is silent, his gaze withdrawn as if he’s still hearing the conversation. “But, Una, he said something else.”

“What?” My heart starts to thud as if his hand’s squeezing it directly.

“He—he said you said something…about ending properly.”

“Yes—yes, we did. About…I was trying to explain
why
you told me about you leaving the Press. So he wouldn’t think I was just giving away a confidence.”

“I know. You wouldn’t. But—but…I’m sorry, tell me if it’s none of my business. I’ve been thinking about Sunday night. It’s all I’ve thought about since…And Gareth said he wondered…Did you…I understand that for you—it’s…Was it about ending for you? About the Chantry? About leaving England? About Adam, above all? I know that…But I hope you’ll forgive me if I say…An ending, like you said. For you.”

“I—”

“I’ve always remembered what you said, that day picking apples. I didn’t know how to cope with it, I’m sorry. That’s the past. Maybe you’ll forgive me someday.”

“Yes,” I say, and mean it, but he goes on as if I haven’t spoken.

“But Sunday—now—it’s not an ending for me. And I’ve realized that I…I…” He stops.

I have no words, nothing to say, nothing that could possibly keep up with the feelings that are pouring through me. Everything I’ve been afraid of seems to be happening. I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know if I want to stop it. I look away, because looking at Mark’s eyes, at his mouth, at his beautiful hands, which are trembling as much as mine are, makes my mind slip its moorings.

Mark clears his throat. “I…I don’t think I should say what I’d like to say,” he says, and when I can’t help looking up, the way he’s watching me reminds me suddenly of Morgan. “Such a lot has happened. And Adam, still. So…so I won’t say it. Not yet. But if…I’m sure we’ll be in touch over the Chantry. But if I found myself in Australia in the next few months, could I come and see you?”

Inside me, everything stills. Good manners would say yes. My fear for myself—for Adam—would say no.

But what I loved in Adam, I first learned to love in Mark. If Mark does come to see me…then whatever happens, I can still hold on to Adam. There is no battle. He’ll always be there…whatever happens.

I smile at Mark, though I think he can see I’m nearly crying. “I’d like that, dear Mark. I’d like that very much.”

When the aeroplane’s engines have settled from a shriek to a roar and the seatbelt lights are switched off, I stand up to open the luggage locker above my head. I so nearly missed the plane that my belongings are in a muddle, and I get a dirty look from my neighbor, as if I’ve caused quite enough trouble to my fellow passengers already. I dig in my bag and eventually find a notebook, then a pen, and a photocopy of Mancini’s account of Richard III’s coup d’état. Before I do, I bark my knuckles on wood. On the crate he hand-made to fit
Dawn at East Egg
so exactly, Uncle Gareth has written property of professor una pryor, his writing as always black and beautiful, and now on the crate a grand statement, visible to all. Only it’s not my property, not exactly. On the other hand, it’s not Gareth’s either, according to my legal inheritance. But who would know that, except me?

I sit down and arrange my books on the tray-table as well as I can. Even my work has changed, though it’s got no easier. Can I do it?
Can
I?

It isn’t that I don’t know what happened. With patience it’s possible to leave few stones unturned, though even now there may be more scraps to be ferreted out, or stumbled on as we did the letter, more connections to see, more conclusions to reach. The gaps you have to bridge do get smaller.

But just bridging gaps isn’t what I want to do, not anymore. “You have to make it whole,” said Mark.

Perhaps I’ve found some kind of answer, some way of telling the truth in the blanks between the facts where, till now, there’s been nothing. A way that is neither truth nor falsehood but is whole. But do I dare? There are no authorities for this, no references and precedents and peer-reviewed journals; no familiar track with familiar rules. My only authority is what I choose to write. The freedom’s frightening, the track, such as it is, is strange: Narrow Street, East Smithfield and the Chantry, Saint Albans and Grafton, from Astley to Pontefract and York and thence to Sheriff Hutton, and a letter that was there all the time…

I
know the journey has a beginning, a middle, and an end, that it is whole, but Anthony and Elizabeth could not. To them it was a pilgrimage: the past was past, the future unknown. All they had was the moment.

At each moment—each station of the cross—they’re no more beyond my reach than Adam is. But there’s only one way to reach them, I’ve been thinking, slowly and uncertainly since yesterday: only one way. I must dare to do it this way, because otherwise I’ll never reach them.

Gareth said, “I think it was really so that he could do what he wanted…he didn’t have to stick to the literal truth. He could make the patterns—use the colors—that said what he wanted to say.”

Will what I write be my words or theirs? My life or theirs? It won’t be history’s. “Visible at two feet, and invisible at four,” said Mark’s friend Charlie, at Eltham Palace.

And where should I begin? At the beginning, as Izzy begins her story of the Solmani Press? Or at the moment when, after exile and despair, God amended all?

I think of Mark, and the emptiness that awaits me in Sydney seems warmer and more bearable because it won’t be forever.

I’ll start, I realize, with Elizabeth, no longer a child, riding home, knowing that awaiting her was a new life and a new place in the world.

Elysabeth
, she signed herself, but I must find her voice, and give it to her. Slowly, I begin to write…

T
o my mind, bibliographies and lists of sources are out of place in a work of fiction, but the Heisenberg principle applies to historical novelists as well as to historians. In plotting the position of Elizabeth and Anthony Woodville at certain moments in their lives, I know that I may have left readers wondering about the trajectory of their story. So here it is.

Elizabeth (Elysabeth) Woodville was probably born in 1537, and Anthony (Antony) four years later. Their mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, had first been married to John, Duke of Bedford, who ruled as regent for his nephew, the boy-king Henry VI, and wore himself out trying to hold on to England’s vast possessions in France. Their father, Sir Richard Woodville (Wydvil), had been the late duke’s seneschal, or deputy, in Normandy: his and the widowed Duchess Jacquetta’s elopement caused a court scandal. They were soon forgiven, became active in royal ser vice, and had fourteen children. Richard held various commands, most notably at Calais, and Jacquetta was a lady-in-waiting to her fellow French-
woman Queen Margaret (Marguerite), daughter of the King of Anjou. Margaret was strong-minded and perforce became politically active, for Henry VI was gentle and pious, and wholly incapable of controlling a ruling class that no longer had England’s traditional claims to France as a safe outlet for their rivalries.

The Woodville family seat was at Grafton in Northamptonshire, and at some time around 1452 Elizabeth was married to Sir John Grey, the eldest son of a knightly family based a little farther north at Groby, just outside Northampton. They probably lived at Astley in Warwickshire, and she bore two sons, Thomas (Tom) and Richard (Dickon in the first half of the novel) Grey. Anthony, meanwhile, following in his father’s footsteps, became well known as a successful soldier and performer in the joust. He married an heiress, Elizabeth, Lady Scales, and became Lord Scales in right of his wife. The Woodvilles and Greys were staunch supporters of Henry VI and the Lancastrian royal line. But in 1454 Henry VI succumbed to what seems to have been catatonic schizophre nia. His cousin Richard, Duke of York, who had a better claim in blood to the throne, was made regent, with his own cousin Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, as his chief supporter. During this time Margaret of Anjou gave birth to a son, Edward of Lancaster, Prince of Wales. When Henry VI recovered his wits, Richard, Duke of York, resigned the regency, but claimed and won the right to be Henry’s heir in place of the baby Edward of Lancaster. Refusing to accept the disinheriting of her son, Margaret drew even more on the support of her ally the Duke of Somerset, and the nation’s political rivalries were polarized: supporters of the House of York or of the House of Lancaster.

Through the twists and turns of what became known as the War of the Cousins, the Woodvilles and the Greys supported Henry VI.
Sir John Grey was killed at the Second Battle of Saint Albans in 1461, leaving Elizabeth a widow with two young sons. Richard, Duke of York, was killed in battle in 1460, and his eighteen-year-old son Edward inherited his claim. At the battle of Towton in 1461, Henry and Margaret’s army was annihilated. Along with many others, the Woodvilles switched sides to the victorious young Edward. Henry was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London, Edward was crowned as Edward IV, and Richard and Anthony Woodville were soon active in royal ser vice.

In 1464 Edward IV fell in love with Elizabeth Woodville and they were married in secret. He was twenty-two, and she twenty-seven. In the next five years she bore him three daughters: Elizabeth (Bess), Mary, and Cecily. Her father was raised to the peerage as Earl Rivers, and he and all her brothers were prominent in royal ser vice, while her sisters made a series of advantageous marriages. Inevitably there were tensions between the different factions at court, including that of the Woodvilles. It was accepted that the king’s family would benefit from grants of land and power (the two being more or less synonymous at this date) as well as wealthy marriages. But Elizabeth was the first English-born queen consort, and there was no precedent for the proper treatment of a queen’s family, and such a large one at that. Elizabeth’s son Thomas Grey was made Marquess of Dorset, and in due course was given a place on the Royal Council and some political importance, while her younger son Sir Richard Grey did little in royal ser vice and received correspondingly little reward.

Anthony became the courtier par excellence, finding time for literary and philosophical study even while he was engaged in political, diplomatic, and military ser vice, as well as running the complicated business affairs of any man of property. He was
England’s champion at a famous joust with the champion of Burgundy, an event of political as much as chivalric importance. One of his squires at this tournament was a member of the Gascon gentry named Louis de Bretaylles, who was in English ser vice at the time. Years later Louis is also known to have been of Anthony’s party on a diplomatic and religious mission to Portugal and to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

By 1469 Edward was growing ever more independent of the Earl of Warwick’s judgment, and Warwick began to intrigue with Edward’s younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, and then with his erstwhile enemy—the exiled Queen Margaret. The upshot was a series of treasonous rebellions, and when Edward realized that even his supporters could not be relied on, he fled with Anthony and others to Bruges in Flanders, then part of the domain of the Duke of Burgundy, who was lately married to Edward’s sister, Margaret of York. Elizabeth’s and Anthony’s father, Earl Rivers, was killed by Warwick’s faction along with his son, their brother John. Elizabeth fled with her daughters into sanctuary at Westminster, where she gave birth to a son, Edward (Ned), styled from birth Prince of Wales. It seems likely that it was in exile that Anthony translated from the French an anthology of the
Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers
, while it is fairly certain that it was in Bruges that he met Caxton, who had set up a printing press there. In 1470 Edward invaded England, giving command of the Tower of London to Anthony, and in a series of battles defeated Margaret of Anjou’s forces. Her son and Henry’s heir, Edward of Lancaster, was killed in battle, as was Warwick, while Henry died at the Tower in mysterious circumstances. The line of Lancaster, founded by the usurping Henry IV, seemed extinct, the only male remaining being Henry Tudor, Earl of Rich
mond, who traced his royal blood through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, not his father, Edmund Tudor, and lived a fugitive life in Wales and Brittany.

The toddler Edward, Prince of Wales, was sent to Ludlow, one of the York family’s principal castles, to endow the council that ruled the often-troublesome Welsh Marches with royal authority. Anthony was appointed head of the Prince’s Council, his guardian and governor and, although he traveled a great deal on his own and royal affairs, spent much of the rest of his life at Ludlow. His
Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers
was the first book that Caxton printed in England after his own, and he and Elizabeth became noted patrons of Caxton’s press. Elizabeth, meanwhile, gave birth to more children: Margaret, who died at eight months old; Richard (little Dickon in the second half of the novel), who, as second son of the king, was immediately made Duke of York; Anne; George, who died before the age of two; Katherine; and Bridget. Elizabeth’s second daughter, Mary, died in 1482, aged fifteen. In 1475, when Edward invaded France in support of the traditional claim of English monarchs to the French throne, he made Elizabeth an executor of his will, and guardian of the Prince of Wales.

A crisis in 1478, when George, Duke of Clarence, attacked Elizabeth and her mother, Jacquetta, with accusations of witchcraft, finally exhausted Edward’s patience with his traitorous brother, and he was tried by his peers and condemned to death. Meanwhile their youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was ruling the north of England in the King’s name, as Anthony was the west. At one stage, as part of an alliance with Scotland, it was proposed that Anthony should marry the sister of the Scottish king, as his wife had died in 1473. Anglo-Scottish relations
cooled soon afterwards, and nothing came of it. He later married Mary FitzLewes, a young and well-connected heiress, but both his marriages were childless: his only known child is Margaret Stradling, whose mother, Gwentlian Stradling, was a member of an important Welsh gentry family.

In 1483, at the age of only forty-one, Edward IV died. His will appointed Elizabeth as his chief executor, and she also had a seat on the Royal Council. His only surviving brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was to be appointed Protector until his twelve-year-old son Edward attained his majority, which by custom might only be a few years hence. Arrangements were made for Anthony to bring Edward from Ludlow to London for his coronation. At Northampton, on April 30, 1483, Richard and the Duke of Buckingham met them as agreed, but arrested Anthony, then Elizabeth’s son Sir Richard Grey, took control of the new king and his escort, and sent Anthony to Richard’s castle at Sheriff Hutton.

On hearing this news Elizabeth again took sanctuary at Westminster with her five daughters and youngest son, Richard, Duke of York. Her eldest son, Thomas Grey, escaped to France, while her brother Edward Woodville, admiral of the fleet, held ships in King Edward’s name but eventually escaped to France as well. Their brother Lionel Woodville, as bishop of Salisbury, was relatively safe. The sanctuary was surrounded by troops, and Elizabeth could no longer take part in the Royal Council’s affairs as they ran the country with Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as Protector, and arranged the coronation of her son. At last she gave in to pressure from the Council, and in May allowed young Richard to join his brother Edward in the royal apartments at the Tower.

Eight weeks after his arrest Anthony was moved to Pontefract, where he and Richard Grey were executed on June 25, 1483,
then buried uncoffined in a common grave at a nearby monastery. Anthony was forty-one. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was proclaimed king on the following day. From that time the boys—Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York—were seen less and less, and their servants were reduced drastically in number: the last sighting of them is recorded as being in July of that year. The evidence suggests that rumors of their deaths spread quite quickly, although it will never be known for certain what happened to them, when they died, or by whose hand.

Elizabeth and her daughters probably left sanctuary some time in March 1484 and entered the custody of Richard III, although where they lived is not known. Later that year she allowed her two oldest living daughters—Elizabeth of York, as she was known, and Cecily—to go to Richard’s court, while the three youngest stayed with her. Since the disappearance of her brothers, Elizabeth of York had a strong claim to be queen of England in her own right. After some months the girls were sent to Sheriff Hutton, where the children of George, Duke of Clarence, had long been kept. Meanwhile the exiled Lancastrian Earl of Richmond, Henry Tudor, laid his own claim to the throne, and undertook to marry Elizabeth of York when he had succeeded in his claim.

Henry’s second attempt to invade England, in August 1485, was successful, and at the battle of Bosworth Richard III was killed.

Only when he had been safely crowned king of England did Henry marry Elizabeth of York and have her crowned as his consort. Elizabeth Woodville, as Queen Dowager and the Queen’s Mother, had an assured place at court but in practice was very much subordinate to Margaret Beaufort as the King’s Mother. In 1487 Elizabeth retired to the traditional royal retreat of the Abbey
of Bermondsey, giving up her personal estates and assets to her daughter, as was traditional, and accepting in return a pension from Henry. She died at Bermondsey on June 8, 1492, at the age of fifty-five, and was buried with Edward in the Chapel Royal he had built at Windsor.