by Hilda Lewis
They were asking that last question everywhere, Guillemote said, standing with downcast eyes lest her own misgiving be read. Catherine laughed aloud; but for all her laughter, Guillemote had her answer in the deepened colour of the Queen's cheeks.
Catherine would stay no longer at Windsor where she must betray herself at every glance; where gossip might suddenly leap to the truth.
But London was no better. She was restless and fearful; and she missed Tudor unbearably. She dared not, as yet, face Johanne; those keen eyes would pierce to the heart of the trouble. To the heart, indeed, Catherine thought and smiled wryly.
My lord of Exeter raising no objection, she rode over to Eltham. Harry seemed pleased to see her. He still had the pale-angel look that caught at her heart. He answered her questions gravely and with care; as always, he needed to be wooed.
…Yes, he ate quite enough, thank you, he wasn't a greedy sort of person. God did not like boys to be greedy—though the palace boys didn't seem to care about that! It was easy for him, though, because he didn't like meat much. No, he couldn't eat what he chose; a person who had to rule others had first to rule himself. Yes, old Astley still kept the whip handy; she didn't use it much now, only when my lord Governor said to. No he didn't mind...not very much...
But the shrinking of the thin shoulders told a different tale.
Of course, he was not whipped when he was good, he told her. And he did try to be good; and not only because of the whipping.
And now he was chatting freely.
When he was good and very quiet, St. Dunstan came and spoke with him; and St. Edmund, too. Sometimes in church he could see God, very little, sitting on the priest's hand. He liked God best when He was little. And, sometimes, if he sat very still and closed his eyes and let himself go empty, he could send the soul out of his body, send it flying like a bird right up to God.
Drawing him close, her poor little saint, her hand met the knotted cord about his waist. She was horrified; would have lifted his doublet, removed that hateful thing, but he pulled himself away. “I do it to myself. I do it because I'm sure to see God in the priest's hands.”
She could not help but be proud of his visions; yet she was troubled, too; troubled by his look of other-worldness, troubled even more by his delicate air...four of her brothers, she could not but remember, had died young.
She asked to hear his lessons but he preferred to recite his prayers. He said them beautifully, the Latin correct and clear. He said them with all his heart; it was as though he spoke with God. But when she had, at last, persuaded him to read his lessons, he hardly knew A from B.
“When I am big I shall build schools, lots of schools,” he said, surprising her. “You see, next to prayer, learning is best. Father Netter says if we are slow ourselves to learn, then we must, if we can, help others.”
She left Eltham troubled and yet proud. A little saint. But she would have preferred him more of a child! She rode over to Greenwich to visit my lord of Exeter. She found him ailing, a little. Nothing much, he said; a little tired, he would be well again soon.
She told him about Harry and his visions. “I know,” he said, “I know. They stuff his head with saints and martyrs, those two; Netter and Gloucester—it suits my nephew's book. Yes, I know I'm the King's Governor but I can't keep him from his confessor who was also his father's; and I can't keep him from his uncle who also happens to be lord Protector. Besides—” he leaned his head against the great cushioned chair, “it's in Harry's nature; his father's piety translated not into deeds but into dreaming.”
“A child should pray,” she conceded, “but he should play, too.”
“I would rather see young Harry with a sword than with a bible. Still, as God wills...”He looked a sick man.
Once more in London she had to fight herself not to go running back to Windsor. She went to Langley instead. Johanne was pleased to see her. Johanne, too, was disturbed about Harry. “Exeter's ailing, as no doubt you've seen,” she said. “I don't think he'll last long. If you ask me Harry will have a new Governor before the year's out. No, my dear!” she answered the Queen's look of hope. “If I know anything the answer's Warwick—,and you'll find him harder to deal with than Exeter. Go back to the country—you have enough, it seems, to look after yourself. You're too thin.”
The tears darkened Catherine's eyes.
“Well, child, what have I said now, that you must play crybaby?”
“I'm tired, I think; and worried, worried about Harry. And I'm losing my looks—that doesn't make me any happier.”
“A wise woman doesn't lose her looks at twenty-five; no, nor at thirty-five, neither, with luck.”
“Luck?” Catherine was passionate. “What luck have I? Or ever had?”
“Good and bad alike, like the rest of us. But if you don't like your luck, why then change it, girl. Make your own luck. Must I speak plainer? No, I've heard no gossip—no need; I've got eyes. Take a lover if you must; but never a husband. For, if you do, there's your husband hanged from the nearest tree and you alone in your bed again—if no worse. Master Humphrey would think nothing of clapping you into gaol—it's been done before.”
Catherine raised a troubled face. “Is my sickness so plain for all to see?”
“I hope not. And I think not. As for me, I know you, Catherine. Such a father, such a mother! How can you be but what you are? But—” she was thoughtful, “where in your country paradise is Man the Serpent? There's no gentleman, as I remember, fit to love a Queen.”
Catherine said slowly, “A gentleman of low estate...but his fathers were Kings.”
“So it's the handsome Welshman! Every Welsh brat is a King's son—if you are to believe them. Would it please you to breed such a brat?” She put out her hand all swollen at the joints, the beautiful hand Henry Bolingbroke had once worshipped. “Forget what I said just now. A lover could lead to danger as surely as any husband; others, too, perhaps...innocents. All, all of you together. It was not good advice I gave you, not good at all.”
CHAPTER XXVII
Take a lover. Johanne herself had advised her, Johanne that woman more head than heart. But the other thing Johanne had said—that it was not good advice, that it must lead to danger-Catherine forgot.
These days Tudor never came unless she sent for him. He never knew how he might find her—jewelled and robed as for state occasions and very much a Queen; or a young girl in a pale gown, hair flowing free. She might be gay, plucking upon the lute and singing the old song of the charming princess and her lusty lover; she might be sorrowful, the tears running through long fingers. Her splendour kept his desire at fever-heat; her tears strengthened his love.
But he never came unless she sent for him.
* * *
She was telling him about the King. She knew she looked attractive so—the mother young and perplexed. But for all that she was truly disturbed about the child. His head was stuffed with saints and martyrs, my lord Governor Exeter had said so! He prayed too much; and—she could see for herself—he did not play at all.
“It is for God to choose who shall pray and who play,” Tudor said. “A saint. Do you break your heart for that? In my country we honour the saint above the King.”
“But he is so small,” she said, “so small...and always the threat of the rod.”
“Princes must be curbed more than common men.”
She sat there, tears running through her fingers and wondering why she wept. She had not been bred soft herself; she had known the taste of the whip, the small ache of hunger and of cold. But she was alone and desolate.
A tear dropped; and then another. And though her heart felt fit to break, she was still conscious that she looked charming so, pure pearl upon pure pallor of her cheek. But for all her piteousness, all her charm, there he stood, comforting, impersonal, telling her what, indeed, she knew—Spare the rod and spoil the child.
“This is not a child to be spoiled,” she said; and told him about the knotted rope.
/> “For the saints there are two disciplines,” he said. “One from within and one from without. Even the saints must feel the rod, and—what is more—accept it. It is part of their sainthood.”
“Yes,” she said, “yes. I lose my wits...a woman alone.” She put a hand to her breast. Above the low-cut gown her breasts were high and dazzling white. Her pointing finger drew the eye. He could not, if he would, look away.
He was a man to take love where he found it; to take it lightly, giving and getting pleasure. Since his hand had touched the Queen in the dark of the garden he had sought no woman...though the Queen, he knew well, had sought him.
The tide of his manhood rose. He thrust it down. The woman was a Queen and friendless. More than any woman in the land she could be brought to disgrace and ruin.
“You should take a husband, Madam,” he told her. “For, when all is said, what is there for a woman but a man and his children?”
He saw her breasts lift in the low gown. “Oh,” she said, “tell that to my fair brother of Gloucester! The days go by, day upon empty day, night upon empty night...”
But still he stood, a man of stone, the width of the chamber between them.
“Oh,” she said, “and must I speak plainer? And why not, for why should I pretend to undue modesty? I have lain in the marriage-bed and all eyes upon me—a virgin ready to be taken. Lying there and trying not to listen and being forced to listen to the lewdness with which they blessed the marriage-bed. After that, it does not become me, I think, to act over-innocent.”
In the brightness of the Queen's chamber he took her.
* * *
In the heat of the summer afternoons the Queen was slumbrous, satisfied. She let the first month go by and the second—and no word to her lover. It was too early to be certain. By the third month she was certain; and she was frightened.
“It is a hard thing that a man may not rejoice in the birth of his child,” Tudor said. “But I must put aside my joy. It is of you I must think, of you alone.”
“Yes,” she said, “yes.” And for a while was silent.
“I am a Queen,” she said and her voice was sudden in the quiet room, “but poorer than the poorest. They have taken my first-born from me. I may not see him from day to day, how he grows, nor treasure the dear things he says. Harry gets a crown—and loses his mother. For him the bargain is good enough. But I? I'm a mother who has lost her child; a widow who must not wed; a lover who must hide her love. And now I am to bear this child—your child, mv love—and I must go in fear, hiding my condition as though my body carried some monster.”
“Be comforted, my heart. It will not always be so. Our child is like treasure put out to sea.”
“And if the treasure strike upon a rock?”
“I will chart a safe course. A little journey; and it will return bringing you a three-fold blessing.”
“You talk like a poet,” she said. “But you do not understand a mother, how she yearns over her child...every word, every look, every sweetness of childhood garnered against the future. For what in the end is left to us but the little things we remember? Oh,” she said piteously, “what is life to me if I must hide my love as though it were a shameful thing and lose this child, this child also? I will go to John, thank God he is here—the most powerful of them all; and he has a better heart than Humphrey. Humphrey when he's angered is a heart of stone; but John had always a kindness for me. I will beseech him. I will not move from my knees until he says Yes to our marriage.”
“It is all useless,” he said. “My lord of Bedford has his full share of Lancaster pride. But even should he say Yes—which I much doubt—then the moment he is gone back to France, Gloucester would hang me.”
She cried out at that.
“I hanging from the nearest tree and you wearing your heart out in prison. They would shut you from the light of day and our child would die. That is a thing I could not endure and God would not ask it. Rather I would die by the rope—though it is not a death I desire—or, by the torment, and gladly.”
It was true and she knew it.
“Then what must I do?” she asked. “A queen's bastard. In my country it could be managed; not easily perhaps when the queen has no husband. Still, it could be done. But in this country of the most chaste Henry, in this cold and righteous country...” She wrung long, fine hands.
“There is Madam Queen Johanne,” he said. “She has no great love for the house of Lancaster. And she is your kinswoman and your friend.”
* * *
“I said you would find your answer,” Johanne told her, austere, “but this is more of an answer than I bargained for.”
Catherine looked at Johanne old and virtuous, lean and sapless. She was glad to be Catherine and not Johanne; glad, in spite of all her fears, that she was lusty enough to bear a child to her love.
“It was your advice,” she told Johanne. “Take a lover you said. Well—I followed it.”
“That's only too evident! Well, once the matter is done, God forbid it should be undone. All will go well enough if you are careful. You will pass for some time yet; a high stomach is the peak of fashion and you are neat enough. Stay in London; show yourself while you're fit to be seen. Leave Windsor—that's where you'll get the gossip; you'd probably have to leave in any case. Exeter may decide, any day, it's wanted for Harry. I'm a little surprised he hasn't said so already...except that he's sick. Go to one of your own houses, one you haven't visited before and where your face isn't known—and the further away from the court the better! Move from one house to another; and don't stay too long at any. You have women you can trust?”
Catherine nodded.
“Then take them with you; no others. And keep them near you. Dress simply, live simply—and it's odds the servants won't pick you out from the rest. There's a young woman of yours—the one whose English sits sweetly on a French tongue...”
“De Coucy.”
“You can trust her?”
“As I trust you, Johanne.”
“Then take her with you. Keep her always about you. And who is to say which Frenchwoman lies in the great bed of the Queen's Chamber and which in the truckle? Or who sits in the Queen's place? Say little. Lies grow like snowballs. You'll need discretion but nothing beyond your wit. When you're near your time send for me. I'll have everything arranged—midwife, swaddling clothes, whatever you need. And...the child? You'd like me to arrange that, too?”
Catherine said, head turned away, “He...will see to it.”
“If you think to keep the child now, or ever, put it out of your mind. Don't tempt the gods too far, Catherine; I'm warning you.”
Catherine said, “You will have done enough in this matter without burdening yourself with the child. If your part in this should ever be known...”
“I've seen the inside of a prison before now.”
“All the more reason you should never see it again.” She ignored the faint dwelling upon I She took Johanne's hand with its swollen joints—Johanne's famous hands. “Why do you take this risk for me?
“Because we are friends. Or because we are of kin, maybe. Or because like you I love a well-made man. Or because it pleases me to rob Humphrey's slut of her tit-bit of scandal. Or...it could be that I'm glad to see my dearest son Henry cuckold in the grave.”
* * *
She took Johanne's advice. She did not return to Windsor and she appeared in public a great deal. Christmas she spent at Westminster with Bedford and his wife, very gay—and missing Tudor miserably. Early in the year she went over to Eltham with her presents to the King—the little soldiers carved and painted, the missal its great letters set about with flowers that he might learn them, the gay abacus to help him in his counting.
She found him enraptured with Gloucester's present—the coral beads that had belonged to the martyred King Edward. He had put them on a shelf beneath the crucifix and could hardly bear to leave them. Not for all her persuading could he be induced to wear them; he was unworthy,
he said. He was still wearing the knotted cord; and it was clear that he was not likely to play with his soldiers or with anything else. She tried to make him laugh, but it was not easy. When he came from his tutors, Astley and Butler kept him with a firm hand. And the chaplain Netter had notions of kingship and of sainthood, however young the king, however small the saint.
Still he was not uncheerful. He had enjoyed a merry Christmas, he told her. My lord Governor had sent the players, Jacques Travail and all his company. Yes, he had liked the players well enough; but he liked church best of everything. He liked the coloured windows and the tall candles and the singing and the smell of incense...and watching for God. And when God did not come, it was as though, he said, his soul was a bird that beat against his heart and longed to fly right up to heaven.
“There is time enough for that!” she told him smiling.
“Father Netter says we are never too young to face God,” he told her gravely.
She was chilled by his unchildlikeness, his lack of warmth. She was not to know how he had longed for this visit, picturing her as though she were the Queen of Heaven. And now, something about her, something he did not understand, offended him. It must be her worldliness, he thought. She did not care about the saints; and certainly she did not care enough about God. That curiously tutored in piety he was learning to fear all women he did not know; nor that her pregnancy, sensed but not understood, offended him. He only knew that he must turn his eyes from the white bosom against which he longed to lay his head; he only knew that something about her threw him back upon himself.
The visit was not a success. She was glad to get back to London to say Goodbye to John before his return to France. She was sorry to see him go; in his careful, measured way, he was a good friend—and at this moment she could ill afford to lose him. And Exeter lay dying in his Greenwich home. For all her complaining he had been a wise governor to the King and she knew it. He had not approved of over-saintliness nor of visions and fantasies. And he had let her see her child. A new governor might not be so easy. Truly she had lost a friend there.
