Roses were the scent my wife liked best. Sometimes I’d think Anne bathed herself in rose-water; she’d even eat syrupy preserves made from roses, or the candied petals. The perfume she used, roses warmed by musk and amber, was luscious enough to make the head spin; it clung to her warm body, to her hair. That hair would sweep over me like silk, winding itself about me in the most delightful, hampering ways.
I pulled the bed covers over my head, trying to escape the remembered fragrance, but it seemed to have intruded through the briefly-opened window, to linger and torment me. Through the window of my mind, I saw only the sheen of hair, the sprawl of limbs, so clear that I put out my hand to caress the familiar place. She always responded to that particular caress with a surprised, indistinct sound, intaken breath dissolving in a small moan. But my fingers met only a sheet and feather-bed, cold and rough. A poet said:
Know ye that I would be glad,
To seek a thing that will not be had…
Alone, I lie alone.
I fastened my teeth in my lower lip, to keep the groans in. She had such tender flesh. At the moment of taking, she would sound even more surprised. A strange banging noise alarmed me, until I discovered it to be my own heart, echoing fit to wake the whole castle. Later, she’d make cries like a bird, weird and disembodied. I must have been groaning aloud after all, for the squire woke, and came to my side. The sight of his frightened face, sleep-bleared and unshaven, acted like a cautery.
I said, ‘It’s nothing…nothing. Go back to sleep.’ My voice sounded thick, a stranger’s. He hesitated, looking guilty, as if troubled to leave me. I sat up and reached for the flagon of wine set on a small table beside the bed. He forestalled me, poured wine into a gold cup, put it into my quivering hand. ‘Fetch another cup,’ I told him, ‘and drink yourself.’ He did so, watching me.
I indicated the white manchet loaf on the table. ‘Eat if you wish. I never do — it’s only there out of custom.’ He carefully cut a slice and ate it. There had been no need to strike a light for a candle, the moonlight came in the room in sheets. Colours in the arras on the far wall were transformed by it, a woodwose capered clad in silvery leaves, among ghostly trees.
‘Your Grace does not sleep?’
‘There’s nothing new under the sun — no. I will soon.’
‘The moon strikes full in our faces,’ he said doubtfully, ‘it’s ill luck to sleep so.’
‘Geoffrey, if that were true, I’d have been struck down in infancy. I’ve slept in a haycock and under a quickset hedge before now, and none the worse for the moon having a look at my face. Is that a tale put about by the old wives of Wharfedale?’ He grinned at that, for I was teasing him a little. He was a man about my own age, in my service some years, who came from Kettlewell in Wharfedale.
‘Aye, that’s right,’ he said, ‘they heard it from the old wives of Yoredale! Will your Grace have more wine?’ I covered the cup with my hand to signify refusal, and had to smile at being paid back so neatly in my own coin. He’d used the old name for Wensleydale too.
I lay down again, shielding my eyes from the bright moon. ‘Go to bed now.’ Soon I heard a gentle snore. I often wonder how much gossip leaves the household. The King cannot sleep, dreams, and groans in his dreams. They must think sometimes that I will go out of my mind. Given another night like this one, I believe I will — anything, anything but that — that hopeless bodily craving. I hadn’t thought it possible to so desire something of which death had deprived me.
*
On the first day of June, we rode to Coventry for the festival of Corpus Christi, to watch the Guild plays. We were met without the walls by the Council of twenty-four and the Mayor, Master Robert Onley, a wool merchant who is reported rich as Croesus. By some freak of nature, he resembled a large sheep, with greying woolly hair and yellowish, protruding eyes, clad in scarlet robes furred with miniver and a chain of office round his shoulders heavier with gold than any our party could boast, myself included. I had met him before, as an Alderman, on the progress two years ago, and felt unable to alter my first estimation of him. Anne said she thought that his wool sacks would contain a minimum of good stuff hiding a large core of rubbish. He was immensely deferential, though remaining as unlikeable as before, and entertained us in his town house at the sign of the Bull with a lavishness a little inappropriate, as we were still in mourning and our visit to the town not a state occasion.
Early next morning, Thursday, an ordinary, grey day but mercifully dry, we attended the customary breakfast banquet provided by the Corpus Christi Guild. Afterwards a procession was made with the sister Trinity Guild through the city. Preceded by the senior company of Mercers, the Mayor and the Macebearer, the Host was borne through the streets under a canopy of cloth-of-gold. In the enclosed space between the houses, misty-blue threads of incense from the priests’ censers coiled and drifted, mingling with the voices of the singing boys. The bells of all the city churches almost split the sky apart with their pealing. It’s said that Coventry is a city close to Heaven, as the great spire of St Michael’s almost touches the clouds. Though great loads of green rushes, fresh-cut leaves and herbs had been laid down, the street was muddy and ill-paved, and the tang of crushed mint and sweet woodruff could not disguise that Coventry is also a city of fullers, dyers and tanners.
At the open place where the plays would be enacted before me, the city waits in their livery of scarlet and green struck up on harp and dulcimer, small organ, pipe, tabor and trumpets, blowing fit to burst veins. I’d heard the Coventry plays are famous for music and singing; even the Flood is accompanied by thunderous notes on bass shawms and large drums. The musicians were well trained for town players, and so enthusiastic they made me smile for the sheer pleasure of watching them. The crowd smiled with me, laughing and whooping themselves into holiday mood.
We were to watch the plays from a dais, before which each clumsy-wheeled pageant was dragged by draught horses. The pageant masters of the various Guilds were presented to me by the Mayor. The man who’d produced the play of Noah and the Flood smiled nervously, and almost dropped his hat at my feet.
To set him at ease, I complimented him on his ark. ‘You’ve employed a skilful carpenter there, Master Colclough. That ark looks fit for the North Sea in a gale.’
‘Yes, Highness, indeed, an ark to be proud of. We sent for a Trent barge-builder from Burton to do the job. Your Grace seems knowledgeable of ship-building.’
‘No more than anyone who has seen ships stripped and careened in dock, though I’ve overseen the fitting of a good many ships of war. At Kingston-upon-Hull, the Holy Trinity Guild produce a Noah play every Plough Monday, for the blessing of the herring fleet, and as the first week in January usually brings snow, it is played in the church itself. Their ark is no better than yours.’
He was quite overcome. ‘Thank you, your Grace, thank you — how kind. Of course a coastal town has professional shipwrights… Has your Grace witnessed plays in other towns? The noble city of York, what finer cycle of plays… I remember some years ago, your Highness’s players passed through Coventry and played the story of Jason — your noble patronage has long been given to plays. Now you have honoured us by visiting our city, we hope to show you the equal of any plays.’
The Nativity of our Lord, played by the Shearmen and Tailors, was especially touching. The girl who played our Lady was very young, little more than a child, with startlingly fair hair and eyes one could see even from a distance were blue as my mother’s. Her husband, whose misfortune was to have red hair, played Judas in the Smiths’ play. You couldn’t have found a prettier, more tender mother, the baby, I was told, her first-born son. She sat low in the straw and suckled him as if she were in her own home, making us believe that Christ might have been born in a humble street in Coventry.
After the offerings of the Kings of Cologne and the Flight into Egypt, a hush fell upon the crowd like the stillness before rain, the next episode being the Slaughter of the Innocents. If it had b
een London, the crowd would have turned their eyes on me like avenging angels, but here only a few covert glances betrayed that some citizens of Coventry wondered if the English King Herod might be in their midst. Let them wonder. But looking at my hands, I found they trembled, and that I was up to the usual trick of sliding rings up and down over the joints of my fingers.
Herod strutted like a peacock in his pride, in bright blue tawdry satin, bedizened with tinsel patterns in gold, silver and green, and he flourished a fearsome wooden sword, covered with paint and gold and silver paper. Over his head and shoulders, he wore a mask painted with leering lines, red-rimmed eyes and grimacing open mouth, and a long black-ringleted wig like the Jew of Lincoln. When Herod leapt from the stage, the crowd recoiled with shrieks, leaving a space for him to rage up and down, proud as Lucifer and horrendous as Beelzebub, while the property men ducked down behind the stage and let off charges of gunpowder to lend thunder to his storm. The reek of it filled the street as if serpentines had been fired.
The soldiers marched on in jacks and sallets, armed with swords, snatched the babies from the arms of the shrieking women by hanks of yellow hempen hair, savagely dismembering them, unravelling yards of swaddling bands. The mothers put up a fight, belabouring the men with pots and ladles; a fat woman resoundingly smashed a crock over the steel hat of the burliest soldier. But Herod’s orders were obeyed. At the end, an ear-splitting howl of woe went up from the players and the crowd, in protest at the ungodly deed. The soldiers stood and exonerated themselves; ‘The King,’ they said, ‘must bear the blame.’ A hard truth, that. The King is a useful scapegoat, to bear universal guilt until the burden breaks his back.
After, men came with brooms and cleared up the remains of the Innocents, and the plays proceeded. Our Lord’s suffering and death, enacted by the Guild of Smiths, distressed me as it always does. Christ, like the Blessed Virgin, was young and fair. This is customary, but perhaps not truthful; our Lord was thirty-three. I thought of my friends, and of my own battered face, but one could argue an entirely blameless life must preserve youth.
Darkness fell upon the Harrowing of Hell, the stage lit by cressets that threw an evil, flickering glow over the players, like the flames of the pit, casting their shadows huge as the giant Gogmagog. The Cappers’ company possessed a magnificent Hell mouth, built of canvas, glue and wire, painted in every lurid colour conceivable, and made still more ghastly by the red coals of Hell fire, on which brimstone burned nauseously. Satan turned cartwheels like an acrobat, fire-crackers exploding from his ears and tail, taunting the audience with obscene gestures. His lesser attendants prodded a squirming mass of black damned souls with pitchforks. The company paid damned souls less than the saved, who wore white and at the end were gathered singing to the hem of God’s white robe. With everyone else, crossing myself, I began to pray, that at the end of darkness there might be some salvation through Christ’s suffering.
The next day, we returned to Kenilworth. Robert Percy, who is the only close friend at present in my company, and his sensible, handsome wife Joyce, rode beside me. Joyce had been endlessly kind to me at the worst time of the scandal, putting herself out to be seen talking to me, or to walk with me, when everyone knew that she was a strong-minded and virtuous woman who had been the Queen’s friend.
Rob had as much a look of impatience as his fair face could show. He had been waging war ever since we came to Kenilworth on a pike that lived in the Mere, one of those tyrannical old monsters that lurk in the same territory for years, for the purpose of outwitting fishermen. Rob had tried everything, fishing from the wall at the edge of the tilt-yard, or having a man row him about on the deepest part of the Mere. Joyce, like Dame Julian Berners, who wrote of fishing, is also skilful with a rod and fly, and fishing parties with friends who share the passion is their chief recreation. I envied them a little this pastime in each other’s company.
Rob’s mind was not entirely occupied with fish, however, but moved after a while to other slippery game. ‘How often,’ he enquired unexpectedly, ‘has Lord Stanley turned his coat?’ This was difficult to answer quickly.
‘If I calculate correctly,’ I said, ‘six times in the last twenty-five years.’
Joyce glanced from one to the other of us shrewdly, as if she had known this subject nagged at her husband’s mind. ‘Then it must be like Joseph’s coat of many colours,’ she remarked, ‘it works miraculously to his advantage every time.’ Rob brought his horse round to one side of mine, leaving his wife and her sorrel mare on the other. I had a feeling this conversation had been planned.
He asked another question. ‘Has your Grace ever heard John Howard speak of the battle of Blore Heath, between your uncle of Salisbury and Queen Margaret’s men?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thomas Stanley was careful to put six miles between himself and the fighting. He was supposed to be loyal to Lancaster, but pledged himself to my uncle just the same. In the end he joined neither.’
‘And yet he somehow obtained pardons from both parties, though he’d been no more use than a fart in a colander to either.’ Rob marvelled at this feat of Stanley’s.
‘My brother pardoned him again, after he’d played safe and deserted our cause during the restitution of poor Henry of Lancaster.’
‘He makes much of your association in previous years,’ Joyce observed, ‘but both Rob and I think that he bears you several old grudges, Richard, of which your Grace should be aware.’ I was surprised that she should put this in such strong terms.
‘We’ve had differences, certainly, and I do not count him a friend, but he dislikes making enemies.’
‘You frighten him,’ she said, ‘and you first frightened him when you were seventeen.’
‘I hadn’t thought he was so nervous. Am I alarming? Are you frightened of me?’
She tilted her head to one side, and a dimple appeared in each cheek. Her smile grew broad enough to show one little gap in otherwise neat teeth, a defect more endearing than disfiguring.
‘No.’ I was absurdly relieved, though I’d been half teasing her.
‘But I,’ she said seriously, ‘am not Lord Stanley.’
Rob gave a hoot at this. ‘By the mercy of Heaven,’ he laughed, ‘there’s no resemblance!’
‘Go on, Joyce,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to remember being seventeen.’
‘Rob should tell the tale. He was with you.’
‘Yes.’ Rob grinned rather maliciously at the recollection. ‘We were in Lancashire, at Passiontide. Lord Stanley had gathered more than two thousand men, which anyone could have guessed he intended using to aid King Edward’s enemies.’ He did not mention that those enemies were my brother Clarence and my wife’s father, the Earl of Warwick.
‘He had the ill luck to meet us on the road, if you could call it a road, it looked more like a river. He knew us, and rode straight to you, furious that he’d been discovered moving his personal army. When you told him to disband his men and get out of your way, he turned redder than a radish and swore he’d be damned if he would. Then you said, flat as you please, that if he did not move aside within the count of ten, you’d see it done by force. He gave way, collapsed in his dignity as if you’d slapped him round the face with a wet mackerel. I’ll never forget him, sitting there with rain dripping off the end of his nose and those goggling eyes of his standing out like apples. But he obeyed without a word, though he turned his horse as if to leap a gate from a stand. My knees trembled for an hour afterwards, I was so scared you really would set our few hundred against him. A few of them laughed out loud to see him dismissed so summarily, and poor Stanley was quite purple with cold and mortification.’
I had to smile a little at this, it recalled Stanley so vividly. ‘Rob, I was too exhausted to argue with him. We’d come from South Wales in three days, and if I spoke sharply, it was because I was cold, hungry and very wet. Also, I was desperate to bring those men safely to join my brother. Maybe I was too young to see the value he sets upon his dignity. Yo
u think a few hasty words still rankle?’
‘Yes. You all but accused him of treason. He complained to your brother the King, who laughed as if he’d been told a joke, which only increased his chagrin. I remember King Edward’s laugh…’ So did I, and remembering brought the familiar, wrenching pang of loss.
‘He had a lovely laugh,’ I said. Seeing me sad and musing, Rob paused, but he was not long deflected from his urge to provide me with unwelcome information.
‘Stanley still thinks himself the hero of the siege of Berwick, because the town surrendered to him, not to you.’
‘I was grateful for his assistance. He had ample reward.’
‘But not acclaim in the streets of London, as you did. If he had endured those two winters we spent preparing war on the Border, he might have allowed more credit where it was due. Winters! — they say the second was the wettest in the memory of man. As for the chilblains, mine lasted until May.’
‘And mine,’ I said. My fingers had swollen until no rings would fit them, cracking at the knuckles until they bled. ‘So you think Thomas Stanley was envious of my command at Berwick? If he’d been in my shoes, he’d have soon wished himself out of them. Besides, I took pains to see that the services of all my captains were brought to my brother’s notice and given as much acclaim as my own.’
‘But not enough to stifle his resentment. Given a situation like that at Blore Heath, with Stanley able to put an army of two or three thousand into the field, do you consider he would engage those men on your behalf?’
‘Possibly — more probably not, as I think it unlikely that he will engage in a battle at all. However that busy little wasp of a wife, Lady Margaret, is stinging him, I am convinced he will not join Tudor openly. He knows that if I, with God’s help, am victorious, I would have his head, every acre of his north-western kingdom, and the subjection of every man in his private army. The evil of the situation is that he can maintain such an army outside the King’s control. I cannot break his power without first being given cause; it would be unjust, and I would risk a rising in the north-west. Let him stick to his bird in hand. If you want to bet on his circumspection, Rob, you may as well lay a high stake. I am forced to wager my crown on it.’
Some Touch of Pity Page 25
