A shattering pain shot through him, and he felt as if his head would burst from the burning in his ears and the blood that gagged his mouth. He tried to cough it out or swallow, but he couldn’t. As suffering invaded every pore of his body, he was back on the table in the Tower, writhing and shivering. No—help me, Jesus! I am not brave or strong—I pray you, take me from this place—And all at once he was on the beach at Loch Lomond, laughing and running along the sand, and Catherine was stealing backward glances at him as he followed in her footsteps, his pants rolled up to his knees. He caught her and they fell down together in the water, wrapped in one another’s arms, and he felt the heat and the joy of her body. Catherine, how I love you—he said, but he was not with Catherine any longer. He was with his uncle’s man, Edward Brampton, and he was ten years old on a stormy sea, and Brampton was at the helm, drenched to the skin, yelling for all hands on deck, and the wind was whipping the sails, and the ship was tossing and groaning in the roaring waters, the great lantern swinging wildly. In its narrow illumination he saw with horror that the black sea had turned white with foam, and he was thinking they were going to die—
But they didn’t die, for Aunt Meg smiled at him in her green velvet-draped study, and opened her arms wide to receive him, and he ran into them and she held him tight against her breast, and he felt a warmth such as he had never known before in life, and the wet of her tears fell against his face when he looked up at her. “My dear darling—you are safe—you have come back to me—my beloved, darling little White Rose—”
He saw himself going through the wicket gate in Picardy and someone was calling, Pierrequin, come to the river! and someone else was jangling a set of keys as he watched his foster-father, Jehan, standing in a rocking boat, loading sacks of flour. But instead of the river, he was in Brabant, riding beside his friend, Philip the Handsome, and the streets were hung with tapestries and silks, and horns were playing. Like a king, he was passing out the silver coins that Aunt Meg had minted for him in Flanders, bearing his image with the words King Richard IV on one side, and O Mater Dei, memento mei on the other. Remember me, O Mother of God—and Catherine was examining one in her palm, and smiling at him. “May I keep this as a memento, my love?” Before he could reply, he was a small child again, being wed to a little girl, and he was marveling at a lion someone had brought him as a gift, and one of his uncles, clad in black velvet, was jousting at his wedding. Then there was more black, and he was at the funeral of the little girl he’d kissed at the altar. He fled, and peeking through an open door, he saw the damask hangings of his royal bedchamber and a page dragging a dog away by its studded collar. He opened his eyes to object. A black shape turned to look at him. Let him stay, he cried, gasping for air; he is my friend—
But the black shape made no move to obey, and he closed his eyes again. Now he was with King James in the tent where they had written out their agreement before their invasion of England. “You must give me Berwick,” King James was saying, and he heard himself reply, “My country needs it more.” Choking and gasping for air, he opened his eyes again and the scene around him swam dizzily before him. Faces stared up at him, silent, immobile, a tableau frozen in time, and then it was night, and he was in Artois, and before him stretched another multitude come to celebrate a great feast day, each carrying a candle in their hand, and they seemed to him a burning sea of light beneath the starry sky.
Catryn, see that star, it is my star—And Catherine’s face rose before him, radiant with joy. I will always love you, Richard. She turned to smile at him, and she was in her wedding dress, and Dickon was at her shoulder. His son put out his arms to him with a shriek of delight and pushed away from his mother to come to him, and Catherine laughed, and he laughed with her. O Catryn, you have been my joy on this earth.
The executioner standing beside the gallows looked up. The prisoner’s murmurings and little gasping movements had ceased and his lips had turned blue. Silence reigned. His soul had departed to God.
He took out his dagger and moved to cut down the body. It had taken a full hour for Perkin Warbeck to die, and never before in twenty years had he seen a hanged man endure his death agony so calmly, without a struggle. That took courage, and they had said he was a coward. But then, they had said a lot of things about this man.
PART II
1502-1526 A Rose for All Seasons
Chapter 16
Mirror of the Mind
1502
When Catherine awoke each morning since Richard’s death, for a drowsy moment she was at St. Michael’s Mount and the gulls were crying, and the surf was pounding and Richard was stirring at her side. She had no illusions. Richard was dead. But his ghost haunted the great hall, and from the castle passageways and the palace gardens, she saw him smile at her with his brilliant blue eyes, while every evening she felt his presence in the shadows of dusk.
She found it strange that she shed no tears, and attributed this to the soothing sense of his presence. He felt so close to her that she communed with him each day. Sometimes she withdrew into that secret place in her mind where she lived in another time and another place, when Richard had been alive and there had been laughter and smiles. When memories of the past failed to comfort, she laid Dickon’s coif against her cheek, drank in his sweet scent, and moved into the future, into that shining spot where, one day, she would once again enfold her child in her arms.
She had been afraid that time would erase her memory of Richard’s face but that fear was gone, thanks to the queen, who had stolen Richard’s portrait for her from the king. It had been made for Henry by his spies in Scotland. “He will think his monkey ate it, just as he ate his memorandum book.” Elizabeth had smiled as they sat together shrouded in mist one cold afternoon at the river’s edge.
Seated on the same bench at Windsor in the first week of April 1502, Catherine fingered the portrait that was hidden between the pages of a Book of Hours, and smiled up at Richard, who she knew was somewhere behind the glorious curtain of the sunrise that drenched the water with gold at her feet. Strangely, her memory of the day of his death and the immediate aftermath remained dim; she recalled only the few hours of that terrible morning when a great weariness had weighed her down, as if she wore the same metal chains that had shackled Richard’s limbs.
On the morning of his execution she had stolen away deep into the snowy woods of Windsor, and sat down by a brook edged with half-melted snow. The trees, covered with ice, had sparkled with bridal beauty in the sunlight, and the sky was as turquoise as Richard’s eyes had been. “I won’t let you be dead, Richard,” she had promised him, calling out to the sky, the earth, the water. “I will keep you alive for as long as I live, my beloved—”
And she had.
She told him everything as it happened. How Edward, Earl of Warwick, was beheaded at the Tower, five days after Richard had died, with no one to weep for him except Heaven, and how Heaven had sent down howling winds and torrents of rain to drench the land and swell the river over its banks as soon as his head was severed from his body. Even Henry knew that Heaven was displeased, for his mental anguish was such that he aged twenty years within weeks of the executions. Catherine told Richard how Kate’s husband, William Courtenay, and the Spanish ambassador, de Puebla, who had witnessed both deaths, had been overwrought after Richard’s execution, and refused to talk about it. “They said you died bravely, that is all they would say, Richard,” she had told him, knowing that would please him. “So bravely, my love.”
She told him how, for weeks afterward, white roses had appeared around her, sometimes on her pillow at night; sometimes in the spot where they used to stand together in the great hall. Sometimes they were flung over hedges into her path as she strolled in the garden, or through an open window to land at her feet. “Once a dove brought a white rosebud to my windowsill,” she said, smiling at him in the sky. “There were many who loved you, Richard, but they were afraid.”
She told him that his grieving Aunt Meg h
ad kept a room for him at Binche, and celebrated mass for him every day. On the first anniversary of his execution in 1500, she spent three times the usual sum to burn candles in her chapel.
She had told him how the queen banished her husband from her bed after the executions. “She knew you were her brother, and wanted to save you, but there was nothing she could do,” she had explained. “And Henry fell so ill within the month after you died that his death was expected, and the succession was murmured. Whether from conscience, or to appease God for his regicide, he had you buried at the Church of the Austin Friars on Broad Street, where executed nobles are buried, not at All Hallows on Bread Street where commoners are interred. He knows what he did, Richard . . . He knows who you were.”
And she gave him joyous news about his sister, Cecily, who had fled court after the death of her husband, Viscount Welles, and married Thomas Kymbe on the Isle of Wight, surrendering all her estates and titles for the obscure country squire she had loved as a girl in sanctuary. “She writes me of her happiness,” Catherine had told Richard, turning her face up to Heaven. “She says it is because of us that she did it. Because of us, Richard—”
Across London, bells pealed for prime. She stirred from her reverie. She might miss Richard and need her visits into the past; she might cry out to him now, and hear him crying out to her in her mind, but there was one thing she could not deny. There was no going back. She was going forward, to Dickon.
“You’ve made a habit of living in the past, but you’re not dead,” said a voice behind her.
She turned with a start.
“You have a life before you, God willing, a long one. Live it,” James Strangeways said. He stood looking down at her, his dark hair ruffled by the breeze, his dark eyes holding hers. He was a massive, self-confident presence in black and silver, and she resented every inch of him.
She rose angrily. “How dare you speak to me in this fashion! Who do you think you are?”
“A friend.”
She was so breathless with fury at this intrusion on her privacy that she could find no voice to answer. He was right, of course. She could not reclaim the past, and there was no guarantee she would be able to shape her future and find her child. The present was all she really had, and she chose to reject it. She opened her mouth to retort in anger, then shut it again, flooded with remembrance of his many kindnesses since Richard’s death.
Shortly before the execution, he’d offered to take Richard a message from her. “No one can get through the guards the king has set upon him in the Tower. How can you?” she’d demanded with the suspicion that came so naturally to her since her arrival at the Tudor court. “I cannot tell you that,” he’d replied. “Not because I don’t wish to but because I cannot endanger the one I shall ask for the favor. You will have to trust me.” Catherine had regarded him with disgust and asked, “Did the king put you up to this?” “The king would no doubt have my head if he knew,” Strangeways had replied. Despite the impishness that stole into his smile, she knew he spoke the truth. He was putting himself at risk for her—she didn’t know why, and she didn’t care. It was enough that he would serve her needs at this moment. She’d given him her message, and he’d brought the one Richard sent back. The last she would exchange with her beloved on this earth.
“This world has been my prison and I do not regret to be leaving, my beloved Catryn,” Richard had written. “As I prepare to meet my Maker, I return to you the token you gave me for good luck. One day I will see you again, my Celtic princess, and we shall be reunited. Until that day comes, think me not gone, for I will always be with you and Dickon. Remember your promise to me at St. Michael’s Mount.”
Catherine had stared at the tiny silver coin stamped with Richard’s image, the one she had given him at the Tower before his escape. King Richard IV, it proclaimed on one side. She had turned it over in her palm. Remember me, O Mother of God, said the inscription on the back.
Remember me . . .
She had squeezed the coin in her hand and closed her eyes on the pain.
Strangeways’s kindness had not ended there.
On that first Yuletide following Richard’s death in 1499, in despair and forsaken by God who was deaf to her pleas, she had sought refuge in the garden at Windsor. All she had to sustain her were the few treasures of her past: the gold locket of diamond fleur-de-lis, Richard’s love letter, his silver groat and portrait, their babe’s little coif—and hope. Hope that her son lived, that one day she would see him again. If that day came, it would mean that Richard had not died in vain and that she did not live in vain. But what if it didn’t come? What if this suffering were for naught? Such had been her thoughts when Strangeways found her hidden in the shrubbery. He had fallen to a knee before her. “Pray accept my condolences,” he’d said, his voice surprisingly gentle for such a powerful man. “I cannot pretend to know how hard this Yuletide is for you, but I know it must be frightening to find yourself as alone as you are, far from kin and kith and everything familiar at this time of year when others make merry with those they love.” He had laid in her lap a sprig of holly that was covered with fresh snow, its red berries glistening. “You need a friend at court, my lady. Everyone does. I beg you to think of me as one.”
“No one is my friend,” Catherine had replied.
“You are mistaken. Many would be your friend, if you’d but permit them.”
She had lifted her head and looked at him then. Gone was the mocking grin that she had detested, and the bold look in his eyes that earlier had offended her so deeply. Since the day she’d refused the king’s gift of a gown, respect and concern had crept into his attitude toward her, along with a deference that she knew owed nothing to the gulf of their births: she as a royal and he as a commoner. His deference was to her suffering, and to Richard’s.
Later, Strangeways had escorted her to Richard’s grave at the Austin Friars. Henry had left it unmarked, perhaps to save money on the engraving, as he had done with King Richard, or perhaps to prevent the grave from becoming a shrine. And perhaps for both reasons. The Austin Friars was where executed nobility was buried; where dukes, and earls, and knights were interred. Henry had granted Richard that one small boon in death, expecting no one to notice.
Aye, James Strangeways had proved himself a friend, and she owed him the courtesy of one.
“You are never to take such liberty with me again,” she said with a toss of her head.
As soon as Catherine stepped into the palace, she knew something was wrong. Pandemonium had broken out and courtiers, servants, and men-at-arms rushed about in a state of alarm. She stopped one of them. “What’s happened?”
“Prince Arthur—he’s dead!”
“Dead? What—how—” cried Catherine.
“No one knows—’twas sudden—my lady, I must go!”
Catherine reeled. She turned and rushed up the tower stairs. She had to get to the queen!
The rooms were crowded with the stunned faces of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting. She ran past them to the royal bedchamber and pulled up short at the threshold. Elizabeth had collapsed on the floor in a frenzy of grief, crying out for her boy. “Arthur—Arthur—O God—O God . . .” she sobbed, her body heaving. A priest knelt on the floor beside her, murmuring soothing words she didn’t seem to hear. Catherine watched in pity. How well she remembered—She heard herself say, “Is there nothing that can be done?” and knew the answer even as she spoke: Nothing.
Lady Daubeney said, “We’ve sent for the king.”
Catherine turned away.
Events moved rapidly after that fateful day in April 1502. Fifteen-year-old Prince Arthur was buried at Worcester Cathedral barely five months after his wedding to the Spanish princess. His young widow arrived from Wales soon afterward, her future in disarray. Henry didn’t wish to send her back to Spain, since to do so would require him to return her dowry, so she hovered at court, huddling miserably with her ladies, cutting almost as lonely a figure as Catherine, for few
spoke Spanish, and she spoke no other language but Latin. While Arthur’s devastated parents grieved in seclusion, eleven-year-old Prince Harry, the only member of the family not mourning Arthur’s death, paid court to her and wrote sonnets and poems for her amusement. Sometimes Catherine heard them laughing together. “Fret not, Katherine,” young Harry would comfort her, “I shall be king now, and marry you, and you shall be Queen of England. Would you like that, Katherine?” To which she always responded, “Es cierto, mi príncipe galan.” Truly, my charming prince.
From the window where she used to stand with Richard, Catherine’s gaze went to Katherine. The Spanish princess was desperately homesick and unhappy and well Catherine knew how lonely she must be. Each woman had lost her country and her husband both. But she found herself devoid of sympathy. It was for Katherine’s royal marriage that Richard and Edward had died.
With Arthur gone, it was Harry who sat with Katherine on the grass. Strange, how Arthur had died so suddenly, and at Easter, too. The English throne had claimed yet another royal at Easter, for Elizabeth’s father, King Edward IV, had died at Easter in 1483; and it was at Easter exactly a year later that King Richard’s only son and heir died. Poisoned, so it was rumored. Now Arthur was taken in April, by who knew what means and what hand? Six months before his death, that worm, John Skelton, had predicted Harry would be king. Only one way could that happen—and it had. For his prophecy and the dedication of his treatise, How to Rule, to Prince Harry, the king had sent Skelton to the Tower. A smile lit Catherine’s lips at the thought.
She turned away from the window, aware of approaching footsteps. James Strangeways gave her a deep bow.
“I have brought you some items, my lady,” he said, handing her a small wooden box.
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