Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  I looked at my son, sitting at the table reading his book. He’s not a sturdy child; his knees are bony and poke baggy holes in his hose, and his arms are like sticks, but many little boys of six are as thin, and not in the least frail. Richard, when he came to Middleham to be educated in my father’s household, had been both small and skinny; I could see no reason why his son should not grow up as strong and hardy. Edward is quick at his lessons, but spoils his work by spells of dreaming and carelessness. Richard says he used to feel the flat of his tutor’s hand even more often for the same faults, and now no one could be more conscientious. Though our son is the only one, and precious, we are both determined that he should not be coddled, or have preferment over the other children in any way other than rank. Life is still easy for him; he has one more year of women’s rule, and the small indulgences allowed those not yet seven.

  When I looked at Richard again, he was staring into the fire, though he still fondled my wrist absently. Under his obvious pleasure at being home, I thought something nagged at his mind.

  ‘How was London?’ I wanted a truthful, not a stock answer.

  ‘As it usually is.’ This meant: as unpleasant as ever.

  ‘And your brother the King?’

  For a moment I got no response. He was frowning. ‘I thought my brother had become a stranger to me, since…’ He broke off. I knew what he meant, and why it was left unsaid. Since their other brother, George of Clarence, had been accused of treason and executed in the Tower, Richard had kept away from court, meeting the King only five times in as many years.

  ‘He wouldn’t let me out of his sight. He kept me up every day into the small hours of the morning, saw me out of pocket in gambling, and made me drink too much. But no women in our company — he preferred me.’ He gave me a little, sideways half-smile, that died instantly. ‘The King is not well, Anne. I saw his physicians, but they could tell me nothing definite. He’s become so fat — there’s no other word for it. He always did make me feel the size of a small boy, but this time I was dwarfed. It’s not only his bodily health. He seems overburdened with melancholy.’

  ‘Melancholy?’ This sounded so unlike the King.

  ‘He’s still smarting from the treachery and duplicity of the King of France — old Louis electing to marry his half-witted Dauphin to Maximilian of Austria’s child, instead of to Edward’s daughter, Elizabeth.’

  ‘And the Prince of Wales?’ The talk of the King’s worries and ill-health had disturbed me.

  ‘Well enough.’ His voice took on a hard, offhand note I didn’t often hear in it. ‘No, not well enough. The child’s not strong. Pale as a weed grown in the dark. He’s too bookish; if Rivers had his way, the Prince would be Archbishop of Canterbury, not King of England!’ Lord Rivers, the Queen’s younger brother, is in charge of the Prince’s education. He is a man of many talents, some think too many, especially for book learning and political, as well as tourney, jousting.

  ‘Did he sit in Parliament?’ The Prince is twelve.

  ‘Yes, though it’s a wonder his mother allowed him to mix with us provincials, in case he caught some ailment.’

  ‘The Queen’s family were as much in evidence as ever?’ One could scarcely avoid Elizabeth Woodville’s four brothers, three sisters and two sons!

  ‘Those hounds always did hunt in a pack. Anne, when I sat among the Lords in Parliament, I was thanked, flattered and rewarded, only to hear, in the next Bill, Nevilles disinherited once again by the Queen’s relatives.’

  ‘You mean the marriage intended for Dorset’s son?’ The Marquess of Dorset, the elder of the Queen’s sons by her first marriage, is the same age as Richard, though would pass for younger. With his mother’s silver-gilt hair and perfect features, he has the beauty of an angel, but the habits of a tomcat, and a turnip between the ears.

  ‘That carpet captain! His son is well provided for — he’s getting my sister Anne’s daughter, and the Holland estates.’ He can never contain his anger and contempt at a mention of Dorset, whose knightly valour is confined to the bedchamber. During the Berwick campaign he had been obliged to serve a while under Richard, who had said disgustedly that he’d been unwilling to get his pretty feet wet.

  I thought it best to stop talking about the Queen’s family. Between supper and bed, we would hear Vespers in the castle chapel, and one shouldn’t meet God thinking un-Christian thoughts.

  ‘Will the King give you a new title — Lord of Liddesdale, or Duke of the Debatable Land?’

  ‘No! Anne, you’re poking fun at me. Duke of the Debatable Land indeed! My brother has granted me the most godforsaken, desolate stretch of peat-hag on the Western March and I’m not sure what use it is, apart from a defence against the Scots. Over thirty miles of it, and not a tree in sight — oh, and as much more as I can seize from the Borders of Scotland. If that means more raids into Liddesdale and Tarras Moss, then I’m not sure I want it.’

  James III of Scotland talks publicly of ‘the reiver Edward, calling himself King of England’, but it is Richard who has to do the reiving. I had hoped there wouldn’t be any more raids for a while; they sounded so rough and terrifying, ridden at dead of night with no moon. I didn’t want to be a Border widow.

  Richard might make light of it, but King Edward had given him more than just this Border haven of cattle thieves and murderers. King of Cumberland, Westmorland and half Yorkshire would be a more appropriate title for him now. I did not say so, for it implied that he had become an over-mighty subject in his brother’s realm, and he would not like to hear this said. The Earl of Warwick, my father, kept the state of a king in the north, until like Lucifer he fell in all his pride and splendour. When I was a little girl, I thought my father as wonderful as King Arthur. He was not, but men followed him as a lodestar, and when they called him the maker of kings, it was with awe, not censure. Now my husband has more power than my father did, and I do not know whether to be glad, or a little afraid for the future. Richard himself is glad of this new grant of a principality on the Borders of Scotland, to be ruled by him and his heirs for ever as hereditary Wardens of the West March, because he cannot see himself as anything but a loyal subject — the most loyal subject of all. I do not wish to spoil things by thinking too far ahead, of how loyalties between our son and the King’s son may not be so strong. Little Edward has no glorious elder brother to make a hero and serve faithfully for a lifetime, and the Prince of Wales, who will be King one day, is so very much the Queen’s son. Though Richard has avoided any open quarrel with her, the Queen is his enemy. But, thank God, the future is not with us now, in this year of 1483; we are strong, and England is at peace.

  ‘Lord of Liddesdale sounds very fine,’ I said, keeping my doubts to myself.

  ‘I hung a sheep-stealer once who called himself that — Earless Sim Armstrong was his name. He lived in a pele tower and shared his hearth with fowls and a milch cow. We burned his steading.’

  I laughed, and all the children joined in. ‘Come,’ I said to Edward, ‘my Lord of Salisbury should be in bed.’

  For me, there was too much of the evening left. It could not be cut short, for important guests had come to the castle with Richard, and must be entertained at supper. Fish, because it was Lent: some fine carp, tench and bream, made sluggish with cold, had been taken from the stew-pond, so the travellers might make up for their dinner-time spent on the snowy road.

  We put on fur gowns to go to Vespers, because the chapel, even with braziers of glowing coals set around, was icy as a cellar. When we walked into it from the great hall, which was made warm by huge fires, and stuffy by a crowd of people and food, I shivered. We knelt on cushions of green velvet sewn with Richard’s silver boar badge, and in spite of the arras hung all round the walls and doorways, the draught found my feet, and I kept wriggling my toes in my fur-lined shoes. I huddled my chin down into my fox furs, watching my breath rise like incense smoke. On the altar stood a silver-gilt reliquary, studded with rubies, emeralds, sapphires and diam
onds, that held a piece of St Cuthbert’s robe, and a cross of even greater richness that came from my mother’s family, the Beauchamps, and used to be at Warwick.

  Fingering the smooth, cool beads of my Italian rosary, I tried to restrain my mind from wandering, and to rebuke it for thinking thoughts during prayers that it should not. Out of the corner of my eye, when it should have been closed in prayer, I watched Richard. He was so close I could have touched him by leaning a little in his direction. I wanted very much to do this. I could let my arm rest against his, or shift sideways on my cushion so that our knees touched. I promised guiltily to say ten extra Aves tomorrow for contemplating such a thing in church, then decided if I really thought it sinful, I’d have to say them tonight, before I went to bed. Tomorrow would have to do! I didn’t move, for shame; the people of our household were meekly kneeling behind us. What would they think if the Duchess couldn’t keep her hands off her own husband during Vespers!

  I shut my eyes, but opened them again before the chaplain had got halfway. Even if I stopped myself from touching Richard, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. It seemed to me that each time he came home, he had to go away again before I’d had time to look at him as much as I wanted. I thought: how weather-beaten he’s become. The side of his face towards me was relaxed, and his eyes were shut, but lines ran out from their corners as if cut by a knife, more scored his forehead and between the brows, other fainter ones marked the corners of his mouth. None of them had been put there by ill-temper, but by the harsh northern weather, and the harsher demands of the life he has led. His rough soldiers, the reivers who ride the Border hills, gazing into the bright distances, or more often into lashing rain, have lines like those on their faces. It gave me a twinge of heart-ache to see him so worn; fourteen years of the anxieties of power and war, and an ever increasing responsibility for the lives of other men, had left their mark. But I consoled myself with the thought that if one looks at him whole, instead of only at that weathered face, one sees a man who looks younger, not older, than his thirty years. He’s so full of life, a quiet energy that drives him hard always, often leaving other men exhausted. It’s a thing I know every minute he’s in my sight, even when he’s sleeping I can feel it, in the warmth his body gives, the strong heart-beat.

  I wondered if within his head he’d be alert and thinking, of God, of me? I didn’t know; strange how far away we are from those we love. His right eye opened, blinked and shut again, so that the black lashes lay still. He didn’t look at me, though I’d have liked him to. His eyes, deep-set under straight dark brows, are grey-blue, like slate; eyes the shifty do not care to meet. I’ve never met anyone so quick at detecting lies, which is an art learned through years of ruling all sorts and conditions of men. Maybe he is too honest with himself; some people, usually those more accommodating to their own weaknesses, think him a hard man. I suppose, if hardness is taken to mean strength, this is true, but if harshness is meant, then they are quite wrong, he has too much humanity for that.

  Even when calm and at prayer, his face is not soft. I cannot honestly call him handsome, though I would not change him for one of the archangels. His face is too bony, too thin — the features strongly marked, too much jaw, too much nose — with hollows under the cheekbones that are as ageing as the lines in his skin. Also, and this is something not at once apparent, his shoulders are lop-sided; he carries the right higher than the left. A bad fall from a horse when he was a child — I can remember it happening — had smashed a bone that did not set straight. It has never troubled him much, and the tailor contrives to hide it almost entirely, though when he’s wearing armour it’s easy to see, because the right shoulder-piece is made bigger. His left arm is scarred almost from wrist to elbow; a narrow-bladed dagger, run under the armpiece, had done it at Barnet Field. Not much of a wound, he had said. I shuddered to think what a serious wound would be like. Altogether, life has left him a little battered.

  When we sat back in our chairs to listen to the boys of the chapel choir sing a motet by Dr Banaster, the King’s Master of Song, I was able to watch Richard less guiltily. One or two grey threads showed in his hair at the temples, but no more than when I last looked. When I offered to pull them out, he winced and said six were sure to spring up for one gone, and they’d come soon enough without encouragement. For a man who has broken bones, been bruised black from head to foot and wounded in battle, he hates a little tweak — he can’t bear to watch me pluck a hair out of my eyebrow. His hair is a nice brown colour, thick and curly, good to touch; when he was a child it was a fluffy mop that always stood on end when he tried to be tidy. I think it must be his only vanity — a secret one, as he denies any good looks — for he wears it as long as that coxcomb Dorset’s, the carpet captain.

  I sometimes wonder if other women find my husband attractive. Once or twice I’ve heard odd questions asked about whether he was born with some deformity, that caused the imbalance of shoulder; people have excessive interest in the persons of princes, and are ready to shrink from any bodily peculiarity. Their fear usually disappears when they meet him. But these stories do not seem to have brought him bad luck with women; in the years before he married me, he provided himself adequately with bedfellows. That has never mattered much to me, but I’m still a little jealous of those years I did not have with him. He was sixteen when he had his first lover, Katherine’s mother. It’s hard to imagine what he must have been like, for her: the young boy’s body, the rather serious face, his shyness. Had he been clumsy at first, eager to learn? I looked at the chapel floor, ashamed at my roving thoughts again. There was his son John too, a couple of years after Katherine, and, some said, there might have been others. That winter exile in Burgundy had been so cold and miserable — the day before his eighteenth birthday, he’d almost been drowned in the North Sea — and the women of Bruges are most expert in the pleasure of love. Each day, when he was young, he never knew if he would see another. O God, I thought, don’t let him live like that ever again, but it was foolish to ask so much. Before long, he’d have to go raiding on the Border — the Scots won’t disappear because I want them to.

  ‘Per Christum Domitium, amen,’ the chaplain was saying. As Richard opened his eyes, mine were still fixed on his face. He looked startled. I hadn’t realized my thoughts were revealed so clearly in my eyes — the message stared out of them: my lord husband, darling, love me. Though he did not smile, his mouth looked softer than anyone else ever sees it, and his eyes said: soon.

  *

  After Easter, in the first week of April, when Richard had been home one blissful, fleeting month, the sun shone. Master Chaucer the poet talked most delightfully of the sweet showers of April that pierce the drought of March, but he was a Londoner, and did not know these dales, where heavy snow and a thaw in March had made us willing to do without the showers. Because the day was the first of the year which could be called spring-like, Richard decided that we would go out for pleasure, hawking, taking with us only a small party of friends. We rode up the southern side of the dale, high into bare moorland where, in spite of the sunshine, snow still lay in grubby patches on last year’s flattened grass and heather. All the land up there was still a lifeless brown, the whins and bilberry bushes like so many heaps of dead brushwood. Only the middle of the broad valley below us by the river Ure, showed green. Though the wind blew from the south, it was not warm, and so strong at times we could have leant sideways on it without falling out of the saddle. Wind and sun made a clear day, and the distant fells, so often hidden in mist or drizzle, seemed unusually sharp and near. The ring of soft purple-brown hills around us stretched away for ever and ever, like ripples on a sunlit pool; one could not tell where they ended and the sky began.

  We looked very fine that day, Richard and I. No one for miles around could mistake the Lord and Lady of Middleham when they went out riding. Following a whim, we had gowns made from the same cloth — green velvet, embroidered with gold in a pattern of roses, little scrolls bearing our mot
to, Loyaulté me lie — loyalty binds me — Richard’s pledge to the King and ours to each other, and love-knots linking our initials, R and A. I had a little flat hat of black velvet with ear-flaps, so that the wind should not tug out my hair, though Richard says it’s a pity women always hide their hair. His own hair blew about all over his face, which slightly spoiled his elegance — long boots of crimson Spanish leather, a velvet hat with an emerald pin, and green gloves with gold tassels. Our horses were perfectly matched greys, brother and sister. Greys are very popular hereabouts; Richard could mount three hundred horsemen for the King’s service, all on grey or white horses. We rode knee to knee, touching often. I used to ride pillion sometimes behind my husband, which was nice, because I could hug him, but I enjoy handling my own horse and carrying my own hawk.