The King's Grey Mare (75 page)

‘Your fame is not unknown.’
He chewed the quill, indecisive.
The King had given no instructions on this score.

‘I will consult my lord Abbot: wait here.’
He went out, and Grace stood still, near to the door left ajar, and trembling from the cold, thinking only: Where is she?
with her glacial, crescent-moon face, once so beloved.
Reclining somewhere, little knowing that today is her last upon this earth.
Grace’s eyes strayed to the walls.
The Abbot, before taking holy orders, had been a fighting man; some of his old weapons were displayed.
A tarnished shield, a rusty sword with an ornate hilt, and a delicate poignard studded with three red stones.
This last Grace unhesitatingly took down; she thumbed its edge and stared at the starting bead of blood on her flesh.
After all the years, the dagger was sharp enough to shear a blade of grass.
She tucked it in her belt and arranged her cloak in concealing folds.
Somewhere down the cloister a door opened and closed.
Grace swallowed, and wiped her wet palms, one with the other.
Soon, now, if God were merciful.

The monk came back, entering so softly that her heart shook.
He carried a small whip and a rosary in one hand.
In the other he held a breviary.

‘My lord Abbot is satisfied,’ he said.
‘I may deal with your penance.
Take off your shoes, my daughter.’

Grace knelt and unplaced her little pointed slippers.
Looking at the flagstones, she said casually:

‘Is it true that the Queen-Dowager is here?’

‘She is; the King suggested that she should retire here, for her health and comfort.
Are you ready?’

She stood up and the cold leaped to encompass her naked soles.
It was like putting her feet in fire.
Within seconds, her ankles began to ache; ice shivered her skirts.
The monk moved forward, proffered the scourge and the book.

‘Now you must walk,’ he said gently.
‘Fifty times along the cloister.
Give yourself five-and-twenty lashes and say fifteen
Aves
.
Then I will give the absolution.
I must strike the first blow in the name of God.’

Grace knelt again.
She pushed back her hood and parted the curling hair in the nape of her neck.
The monk said: ‘
In Nomine Patris
,
Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
,’ and raised the little whip.
She waited, oblivious, uncaring.
Again, she heard the sound of a door closing in the passage without.
Soon, she would find the enemy.

‘For God’s love!
Stop!’

The voice was colder than the stones and filled the chamber, a shriek.
It was a voice used to command, yet ghostly, an exhausted voice raised in outrage.
Very slowly Grace lifted her head.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw a rush of black garments, the monk’s hand falling, the knout go spinning to the floor.
And the voice spoke again, silver, imperious, yet drained, as if by its first utterance.

‘For Jesu’s love, Master Dominic!
Are you mad?
This child …’ The voice broke, on a sob.
‘This child is without sin!’

‘Madame,’ said the monk, bewildered.

‘Would to God that my life were hers,’ said the sobbing voice.
‘And that I had had her charity!
Strike
me
, Master Dominic!
Strike
me!’

‘Madame,’ he said again, deeply shocked.

‘Grace!’
gasped the voice.
‘Like her name … full gracious, and my true beadswoman and comforter.
Kind beyond belief.
Would that I had been as kind.’

There was touch as well as a voice.
A thin transparent hand with raised blue veins clasped Grace’s wrist.
An icy, burning hand, that sucked all hatred away into itself.
The hand of salvation.
Grace looked into the face of Elizabeth.
The face came close; she kissed her on the mouth.

‘You have come back!’

Hard against her hip Grace felt the poignard.
Her fingers found it, drew it from her belt.
Elizabeth’s tremulous voice went on, addressing the priest.

‘This child … is the reminder of my past sin.
She is my living penance, my sin-eater.
And you would scourge her, Master Dominic!’
He, his narrow life utterly dislocated, was praying to cover the Queen-Dowager’s heretical words.

Then Elizabeth saw the knife.
Her steady look encompassed it; in her eyes a joyous excitement grew.

‘Yes,’ she said softly.
‘Give me release.
Be kind, my Grace.
And when your kindness is ended, pray for my soul.
Your prayers were always the most efficacious.’

The dagger slipped from Grace’s hand and shivered on the floor, its blade pointing away.
Brother Dominic picked it up and, his face a mask of disapproval, replaced it on the wall.
Still muttering a psalm he strode from the chamber.
Grace began to cry, in long shuddering sobs.
Elizabeth wrapped her thin arms about her.
Embraced, they knelt upon the freezing floor, beside the tokens of penance, the rosary, the book, the scourge.

‘Pray for me,’ Elizabeth whispered.
‘Be merciful; be my living token of grace.’

‘Madame,’ said Grace, weeping.
‘Isabella.’
She did not know why she used the name.
It was a name heard long ago, a courtly name, an infant’s memory; even perhaps a name unheard.
Fitting, anyway, for this re-baptism of Elizabeth.
The name said farewell to hatred.
The hatred that rocks worlds and ruins kings and kills the common man.

‘Protect me from Melusine and all her works,’ said the Queen-Dowager.
Grace held her close.
Elizabeth was skeletal, her flesh alternately freezing and burning.
She had shrunk in stature; her face was yellow.
She wore the wimple of deep mourning.

‘I am not without sin,’ said Grace.
‘But I will pray for you and guard you.
I will not leave you.’

The sad, perished face lightened a trifle.

‘Stay,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Stay until I am dead.’

Grace raised the Queen-Dowager and helped her to a stance.
Very slowly they left the chamber together.
The November evening gathered.
A ray of misty light peeped through the windows and touched the rusted weapons of war, hanging still and silent on the walls.

AND now the little flame burned sadly beneath the fair face of the Virgin, so that the compassionate mouth seemed to smile.
The Matins bell had rung and the deep chanting of the monks had died away, their office finished.
The night was quiet save for a soft breeze whispering at the window.
The chamber was still, waiting, as the unseen stranger waited.
Elizabeth’s breath came harshly, ceased for seconds, then began again, a soft sound that was compounded of echoes, shadows, the language of the undiscovered land.

All the women except Mistress Grace had gone.
The others were the King’s servants, young, and ignorant of the time that was passing away with Elizabeth.
Grace had controlled their gossip and their idleness and had made them serve the Queen-Dowager as was fitting.
Yet there was no place for them now.
Dr.
Benedictus had made his last examination and gone away.
Elizabeth had been shriven.
Even so, it was doubtful whether she knew that she was dying.
She whispered, spoke names, and held Grace’s hand.
Lucid if only to herself, she held conversations, repeated the score of names that lately had narrowed to one or two.
This night she dwelt hour on hour upon one alone.

‘John, my lord …’ she said, and smiled with closed eyes.

Grace’s head drooped.
She rested it upon her clasped hands.
Five years, she thought, and still the name turns a blade in my heart.
They lie, who say that time heals all.
Elizabeth is proof of this.
It is thirty years since her fair John was slain.
And seven-and-twenty years since her coronation.
And almost as long since Desmond’s death.
Desmond, the reason for my existence.
A strange story, told during the years of sorrow at Bermondsey; yet a story which, on first hearing, had seemed to Grace more like a reprise, a recollection, a legend in her blood.
She raised her head again and looked at Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, alone.
Brothers and sisters dead, all save Catherine, who never came.
The latest victim of circumstance was the seaman-knight, Sir Edward, killed in a skirmish at St.
Aubyn du Cormier.
The house of Woodville was all but extinguished.
As for Elizabeth, the cheerless years at St.
Saviour’s had killed her slowly, by inches.
There had been but one day of parole, an incident that might have been comical but for its irony.

The King had commanded her appearance at court, for the sake of the French Ambassador’s visit.
Bess had been brought to bed of a daughter, Margaret, and could not attend the reception.
The court was greatly changed; folk smiled when the King smiled, walked as if over live coals; and never spoke above a murmur.
Holiness, riches and pageantry existed, coldly muted.
The Ambassador had seemed impressed, although the sight of Elizabeth, already mortally ill, had disturbed him.
The King too had not been unobservant.
His incisive glance appraising Elizabeth, he had called his Chancellor to his side.

‘An annuity to the Queen-Dowager in her retirement,’ he had said vigorously.
‘Four hundred livres for life!’
There had been a genteel hiss of approbation from Henry’s mammets, who danced and sang to his calling.’

The money had not lasted long.
Some time before this June night, she had made her will, a pathetic little document witnessed by the Abbot of Bermondsey and Dr.
Benedictus.

‘In the name of God, 10th April, 1492, I, Elizabeth by the Grace of God Queen of England’ (they let this pass) ‘being late wife to the most victorious prince of blessed memory, Edward IV …’

The pride was still there, but changed, refined.
It was lawful, and held no vanity.
When she was asked for instruction as to her burial, she said softly: ‘Let me be interred with … my lord.’

‘Ah, with Edward at Windsor,’ they said.
Then she failed again and left the will for an hour, while she fell into the swift delirium that plagued her.
They wrote what they thought fitting.

‘Item, I bequeath my body to be buried with the body of my lord at Windsor.’
Later, recovering, she looked at their writing and nodded sadly, continuing more strongly thereafter.

‘…without any pompous interring or costly expenses done thereabout.’
Ruefully she said: ‘Whereas I have no worldly goods to do the Queen’s Grace, my dearest daughter, a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children according to my heart, and mind, I beseech God Almighty to bless her Grace, with all her noble fame …’

Then she laughed a little, and said: ‘What is my blessing worth, masters?’
Dr.
Benedictus and the Abbot bowed, without answering.

‘I will that such small stuff and goods that I have to be disposed truly in the contentation of my debts and for the health of my soul, as far as they will extend.’

Here she looked at Grace piteously, wishing that there were gold and jewels to leave her, but saying nothing, for there was no need with her hand in the kind hand of Grace, who asked for no reward.
When the will was done, the Abbot and Dr.
Benedictus signed and affixed their seal and went, bloodless and remote, away.
Again her spirit lapsed and she raved softly in the bed, crying of Desmond, of Thomas Cooke, of Gloucester, of Dick and Ned.
She was mercurial and strange; one day, fevered, she told Grace: ‘Bury me at midnight.’

Grace noted this down faithfully, but said: ‘Midnight, sweet dame?’
and Elizabeth muttered of Lusignan, dreamed of Melusine and the pool, of Gyot, Gedes, Geoffrey of the Tooth, and woke with a cry.
Sometimes she said, fervently: ‘
In manus tuas, Domine
’, and Grace whispered a paternoster, watching Elizabeth, craving her release from the interminable sickness.

And now it was June, in the small and weary hours, and the look on Elizabeth’s face was unmistakable.
She seemed to grow younger every hour, pale and small and childish, her fluent blood stilling, her quicksilver mind running down like a silent glass, her hands no longer stirred by palsy or pain.

‘John.
Ah, love …’ she said, and groaned.
‘Lusignan … the monster child destroyed his brother …’

Her eyes opened on Grace, who said gently:

‘Are you still afraid?’

‘I have wrought great evil,’ said Elizabeth for the hundredth time.

‘Ah’ said Grace, and kissed her.
‘There, Madame.
It is finished.’
She mused that Elizabeth was only the instrument of something mystic and vast.
She thought: Like all of us, she was put upon this earth to tread the written measure of destiny.
For I sometimes believe that our life is a map drawn before our conception, our joys and sorrows meted out, far from our consciousness.
And how shall we be remembered?
Destiny having used us and consigned us to dust, shall we, perhaps, be unremembered?
What of our loyalties and our loves, our passions and our tears?
Our power is all that might leave a mark upon the world.
She looked down at Elizabeth’s fading countenance.
Where is power now?
Gone, together with beauty and riches.
She was an instrument.
And so was I.
I, who loved one man and one woman.
Less than a dusky moth, born to dance and die in a night.

Elizabeth whispered: ‘You loved me … does this absolve me?’

‘Perhaps I inherited a little of Desmond’s soul, Madame.
As his death was the reason for my birth, perhaps a little of Desmond forgives you.
If not all.
Maybe this was my destiny, Isabella, my lady.’

‘Grace.’
The voice was faint.

‘Madame?’

‘At my funeral … I wish twelve poor men of the City to follow me and be rewarded.
No pomp or splendour.
See to it.
We shall go by river to Windsor.
Be with me to the end.’
She was breathing badly, in quick, tearing gasps.

‘I shall be with you,’ said Grace steadily.
And the water will be calm.’

Elizabeth did not hear.
Her eyes, their brightness dimmed at last, looked past her companion.
She tried to sit up; sudden tremulous joy illuminated her face.
It was plain that though her body was willed to lie with Edward, her spirit had its own destination.
Grace rose quickly, crossed the room and flung open the window.
The night breeze swept in, smelling of June lilies and on the edge of morning, for somewhere a bird awoke with a crystal spray of song.

The breeze gained vigour and curled about the chamber joyfully, like a child at play.
In its niche beneath the Virgin, the flame went out.

THE END