The King's Grey Mare (21 page)

Slowly she obeyed.
She raised her eyes until they were level with his strong sunburned throat, then higher so that they encompassed his face.
He was more man than any she had ever beheld.
Broad and slender, but so monstrously tall – a giant.
After one glance at the mud and blood-splashed face she lowered her gaze again to his neck.
Thoughts ran through her like little flames.
This is Edward, the Yorkist butcher!
Then something stilled her inner wildness; a last pull from that invisible thread, reminding her that the struggles and the sacrifices of the past months should not go in vain.
A well-shaped hand was extended for her kiss.
She tasted sweat, beast’s blood, the fading hint of rosewater.
She lifted her innocent, starved face and gave the King one crystal look.
She ventured timidly (her mother’s first injunction – be always douce, he will wish to dominate): ‘Your Grace made a fine kill.’
And, hearing the distant crack of bones being dismembered: ‘A good store of venison.
The beast was fat.’

For a moment he was silent, then he said gently: ‘Unlike yourself, Madame, if I may say it.
The stag is yours.
I will have my grooms deliver it to your manor.’

She bowed her head and smiled.
Good.
Good.
Melusine had asked only for the hide!
Already she owned the whole beast.
She could feel the King’s gaze, hotter than the latticed sunlight.

‘Your Grace is generous,’ she said soberly, ‘and my family is always conscious of past benefits.’

The royal pardon.
So it was that he knew her.
It could have been none other in any case, he thought, than the daughter of the dreamlike Jacquetta, lately of Lancaster.
Had his eagerness left room for sense, he might have groaned at the thought.
Eleanor had been Lancastrian; these fair women always seemed to embrace foul policy.
Still, all that was over; soon all the world would be for York.

Thomas, meanwhile, had been regarding the King with interest.
His own head reached only to the top of Edward’s thighboot.
Rudely piping, his voice floated up.

‘Sir, are you really the King?’

Edward cuffed the child’s ear gently and laughed.

‘Yes!
little knave, by God’s grace.’
He looked down at the smaller, silent Richard, and back to Elizabeth.

‘Your sons?’

‘My fatherless sons.’
She raised sparkling eyes, in the face which she herself thought robbed by privation of much beauty, and which he marked as slender and winsome.
A good thing of the spirit, like the Virgin, Our Lady, whom he had adored as a child and swore upon as a man.
Yet in this face was something thrillingly at odds with things spiritual, that made his body molten and his face hot.
He was the veteran of frightful battles and skilled in political strategy.
His hand lay on England’s heart.
He knew and used women.
Yet his voice shook as he asked: ‘Have you ever been at court?’

‘Yes.
With Marguerite …’ She bit her lips.
Wrong.
A mistaken reminder likely to incense him.
Yet he seemed not to have noticed.
He became secretly further inflamed, and not with anger.
Starkly he wondered what her price was.
There were gaps in his imagination that admitted only what he wished to believe.

‘You might come to court as our guest,’ he muttered.
‘There are wondrous sights, and banquets.
Things are not as you would remember them.’
Henry’s piety had forbidden true revelling, and when she saw the new glory that was Edward’s, she would be his at once.
That slender body could writhe in dances public and private.
In his mind all was settled; so he was amazed when she answered:

‘Sire, I am widowed, and bound to stay at Grafton.
In prayer, and in duty to my mother and my sons.
You do me honour which I must sadly decline.
Yet … may I invite you to share our humble joy at the manor?’

This was Jacquetta’s second injunction.
Bring him under our roof.
Let him eat our food, drink our ale and wine.
Then the task will be easy.
Elizabeth continued: ‘We have little to offer a prince.
Yet our sun would shine, reflecting his splendour!’

Her words were spontaneous, yet they could not have been better chosen.
She looked into his gratified blue eyes.

‘All that we are or ever might be is in your keeping, Sire.’

And, royal cub, may God rot Warwick’s soul for Bradgate, and for the death of my love.
Come to Grafton, Edward of March!
Come, and be entranced!
She lifted her face again and smiled, a gentle, loving smile, facsimile of the forgiving Virgin’s look, while he began to ask her of her family.
Hearing of the many unwed sisters, an understanding pout spread across his face so that he was like a boy aping a wise old man.
She touched but lightly on her brothers and scarcely mentioned Anthony, whom Edward and Warwick had once cursed at Calais.
Although she felt instinctively that this episode had fled the King’s mind, she must do nothing to jolt his sweet mood.
Lastly she told him her name: Elizabeth, for the glad and loving Isabella was dead and buried.
Immediately Edward christened her anew.

‘Bessy,’ he said slowly.
‘Light and nimble.
A name like a piece of silk.’

‘Your Grace is a poet.’

‘I have inspiration.’
His eyes moved over her, lingering at her waist, her thighs.
The coarse black habit could have been a sheet of glass.
She stood, unworried.
Yes, my lord.
Look, and look again.
I shall build Lusignan in that look!

A figure approached behind the King.
A young, handsome knight, with a mouth that looked as if it always smiled.
Like a sleepwalker, Edward turned to address him.

‘Tom,’ he said, ‘this lady is the daughter of the Duchess of Bedford.
Grafton Regis …’To Elizabeth he explained:‘My lord of Desmond.’
The knight made a bow, all flourishes, stood hand poised on dagger, still smiling.
‘Greeting, Dame Woodville,’ he murmured.
The error raised a stab of anger in her.
‘My name is Grey,’ she said, with a wistful smile.

‘Widow of Sir John Grey,’ said Edward briskly.
‘You remember him, Tom.
He was a fine horseman who ran with the wrong pack!’

‘Certes, Grey!
Like the colour!’
Desmond laughed.
The laugh tingled down Elizabeth’s spine.
All her unvented spleen rose to envelop Desmond, while she continued to look meekly downward, smoothing the hair and clothing of the two little boys, by now yawning and fidgeting.
The King and his friend moved away a little, conferring.
She listened hard; they were speaking of the King’s future plans.
She heard the word ‘Fotheringhay’ and the King’s deep sigh.
He turned slowly and strode back to her.
He took her hands, so hard she thought the bones were crushed.

‘You offered me your hospitality,’ he said, very low.
‘But that stag is for you and yours, lady.
I would not have it wasted on those who eat venison daily.
He gestured towards the straggling knot of courtiers behind him, then looked down kindly at the two little boys.
He notes our meagre bodies and our pallor, she told herself.
She let her hands tremble in his as if they were too frail for the holding.
She whispered something, soft enough for him to bend closer.

‘My lady?’
His eyes were hot again.

Leaning a little so that her shoulder brushed his upper arm, she whispered: ‘If your Grace were … to come with a smaller entourage.
To my shame, Sire, you must know we are very poor at Grafton.’

He drew a quick, exultant breath.
He murmured: ‘Lady, my lady.
I will do better than that.
I will come alone.’

Then, like a schoolboy with his first passion, he abandoned kingship.
He covered both her hands with kisses.
Over his bowed shoulder she saw two things: the stag, now in pieces, being loaded on to mules, and Desmond’s face, which raised in her a peculiar hatred.

She stood feeling the King’s greedy mouth upon her wrists.
She was suddenly transfixed with awe and fear at how easy it had been; then the fear died under a leaping, pitiless joy.

Through that summer and autumn, during winter’s clutch and spring’s swift renewal, the King came riding.
He came as alone as a king can be, with a handful of armed knights, and an esquire or two.
These gentlemen respectfully withdrew to the neighbouring hamlet while their sovereign dallied at Grafton.

Elizabeth was a city under siege, her drawbridge bound up tight, enchained by the counsel of Jacquetta of Bedford.
Hold back.
Once you surrender, all is for naught.
There were times when Elizabeth, nerves taut as hemp, would gladly have disobeyed her mother, and been rid of the desirous hands, the hot mouth.
The voice which began the day softly, grew impatient, and rose to quarrelling petulance.
Often he left her in a foul humour, rode through the gates and returned minutes later to beg her pardon.
Each time he vowed his love; he would never desert her as he had other lemen (yes, he admitted past treachery), and once there were tears in his eyes.
He knew naught of the flood she herself loosed as soon as he was safely from the manor.
Painful tears, legacy of the exhausting battle against his demands.
She asked herself: would it be so harmful to yield just once?
And the Duchess, knowing her mind, would encompass her with passionate warning.

In September he brought her a device for her throat; diamonds and pale flaming rubies.
He sat beside her in the solar and fumbled to place his gift about her flesh.
Jacquetta knocked, entered, knelt.
Her lustrous eyes, the pupils blackly dilated, signalled to Elizabeth the required response.
Obediently there came the downward look, the regretful smile.
‘Nay, my liege, I am unworthy!’
Edward’s barely controlled temper was audible, little gusty breaths.
At Christmas came two harriers, lean joyful young dogs, which she returned with the courier who delivered them.
The following week she received an angry note, signed only: ‘Ned’.
He favoured anonymity, yet the sisters, maddened and curious, whispered their own assumptions in private, for there was none like him in the whole of England.

By April, her strength had diminished.
Drained by endless assault, there were times when she saw the true end of the campaign as something misty and forgotten.
Its purpose was veiled by the constancy of Edward’s bruising hands, his pleading, his temper.
Although she was but six years older than he, the six seemed sixty.
His voice echoed in her dreams.
‘Yield, Bessy!
Bessy, my heart’s lust!’
And his near-blasphemies, which should have offended her and strangely did not: ‘Forget the priests!
True love is past all priestly knowing!’Truly he was a boy, a child, uninitiated, unaware that there were others than God …

But one such dream made her cry out, mid-April.
Faithful Renée ran to her mistress’s bedside, while Elizabeth writhed, remembering.
She had been riding to Bradgate, John beside her, singing.
She turned to kiss him and was engulfed by the King’s mouth, that bruised her lips and breast.
Desire leaped within her shamefully, while Bradgate’s tower soared straight and strong before her eyes.
There were the jewels, falling like a rainbow; jewels everywhere, the device she had returned and countless more, pearls for her ears, a girdle studded with sapphire and gold, silver chalices flowing with rich wine, a unicorn’s horn filled with emeralds.
Then came her mother’s voice, that dried the King’s kisses and pinned a scowl upon his face.
She heard herself crying.

‘Get up, daughter.’
The feel of her mother’s arms, awesomely tender, shocked her awake.
‘Be comforted.’

‘I thought I was at Bradgate!’

‘You shall have Bradgate.
You shall have manors by the hundred.’

She said: ‘For Jesu’s love, madam, how much longer?’

‘Not long,’ said the Duchess.

I lusted for that necklace,’ said Elizabeth.
‘I long for Bradgate.’

‘All,’ replied Jacquetta.
‘All shall be yours, and more.
He comes today.
Prepare for storms, for Mars is in the ascendant!
But Venus waits, and Jupiter …’