“My name is Tansy Marsh.”
Dickon repeated it carefully, as if committing something precious to memory. Then suddenly light-heartedly, all gloom and secrecy gone, “Do you know what Piers says? He says I must be one of Lord Lovell’s numerous by-blows! It is the wild sort of suggestion he sometimes comes out with.”
But Tansy was too much intrigued to laugh. “How long ago were you taken to this grand house?”
“Oh, only a matter of months. It was a year ago this spring, just after young Prince Edward died. I remember because I had hoped to see some wrestling, but all London seemed to be in mourning.”
“And what was this gentleman who spoke to you like?”
“Medium height and lean and brown-haired, like me.”
“Then you can tell your imaginative friend it couldn’t have been Lord Lovell. He was here last night and he is stocky and fair.”
For one who had no fond relatives and no rosy prospects, Dickon looked remarkably relieved, she thought. “I believe you would rather stay in London with your friends and be apprenticed than be adopted in some wealthy manor.”
“In a way I should. When one has no family, one cleaves to familiar friends. And although the life is often hard, ’prentices have plenty of fun.”
“I imagine they do,” agreed Tansy with a smile, remembering market days. “What craft or trade do you think Master Gervase will set you to?”
“Before there was all this mysterious going and coming he said that I might choose. And of all things I want most to become a master mason.”
“A mason?” Tansy looked down at his long, clever fingers and at the odd drawings he had made, and decided that he would probably become a very good one. Because he had not yet been out into the world to earn his living, and, as an innkeeper’s daughter, she was accustomed to meeting all kinds of people, she felt almost maternal towards him. But he certainly had individuality.
“Above everything,” he repeated, speaking to himself rather than to her, “I want to build gracious homes, and exquisitely carved pillars upholding soaring arches that look as if they are reaching up to praise God.”
Tansy stared at him, surprised and fascinated by an aspect of him so alien to her workaday world. But she was recalled to more mundane matters by approaching voices. “Well, when you have rested you will both need to eat,” she said, rising hastily, “so I must not sit here wasting any more time.”
In spite of his ridiculous disability, he rose with her. Evidently, although the school diet had failed to put much flesh on his bones, Master Paston had not omitted to teach him manners. “Do you really think it is wasting time listening — as if you really cared — while some lonely fool unburdens his inmost mind?” he asked. And although he grinned and raised a quizzical eyebrow, his voice was rather sad and, to Tansy, somehow reminiscently adult.
4
That Sunday was a strange day in Leicester. A day of waiting and false quiet. Not having been able to attend Mass, Tansy slipped into the church of St. Nicholas to pray for the safety of her father. It was then afternoon, and by the time she returned Master Gervase and Dickon were gone. “And I did not even remember to ask his surname,” she thought, passing through the parlour where the lad had — as he had termed it — “unburdened his inmost mind”. But, because of some mutual liking there had been between them, she had remembered him briefly in her prayers.
People were all agog for news, and those who had ventured to ride out in the direction of Bosworth reported that the King’s army was encamped and all was quiet, although some of them, who had scrambled up a small hill for a better view, insisted that they could see the tents of the opposing army in a meadow across the little river Tweed. So Master Gervase would probably have had time to discharge his mysterious errand. As Tansy sat enjoying an unaccustomed hour of leisure, she wondered if King Richard would really see them, and whether, on their way back to London, she would see young Dickon again and hear the outcome of it all. And far more urgently she wondered when her father, who had evidently led the troops to the desired position, would return.
The opening of a door made her spring up hopefully, but to her surprise it was Master Malpas, their rival. He poked his head in, looked appraisingly to right and left and, seeing her alone, came forward. It was the first time for months that he had crossed their threshold and Tansy felt sure that, save for her father’s absence, he would not have done so. “A comfortable, homely place you have here,” he conceded ingratiatingly. “But I suppose, like the rest of us, you are eaten out of your last bite of bread?”
“With friends of long standing in Bakehouse Lane we have little need to worry,” lied Tansy valiantly.
“But think of the appetite those Yorkists will bring back in a day or two,” he persisted. “I am sure Mistress Marsh will be glad enough then of a fat ox or two all ready for the spit. Urgent as my own need is, with all milord Stanley’s friends to feed, I can spare her a couple and welcome.”
The landlord of the Golden Crown almost begging them to accept a favour! Perhaps he hoped that as their fortunes rose they would recommend to him guests they had no room for. It was certainly, a straw in the wind, like the influx of all his most influential customers since the coming of the King. A sure sign that her father’s fortunes would go up and up. “A couple of whole oxen to spare — here, in Leicester, now?” gasped Tansy. “However did you come by them, Master Malpas?”
He laid a fat, conspiratorial finger against his nose. “Shall we say that Gladys, my pretty Welsh singing girl, has a father who is a prosperous farmer?”
“Or a lover, more likely,” said Tansy, who knew very well that the painted hussy’s father was the drunken old showman who ran the bull-baiting down in Swinemarket.
“How you innocent-looking poppets grow up!” laughed Malpas. But she was certainly not innocent enough to risk his attempt at fondling. “I will call my step-mother and tell her of your kind offer about the meat,” she said, making her escape.
Rose was putting on her best taffeta gown, with an admiring Dilly in attendance. Already she felt it incumbent upon her to play the part of successful hostess. “Everyone comes to the White Boar now,” she boasted, well pleased with Tansy’s news. “You must make yourself some new aprons, Dilly, and when that clever mercer next comes with all the latest fashions from London you must tell me, Tansy, so that I may get some clothes suitable for the kind of guests we shall be entertaining. And as soon as the King’s account is paid, we must get you some new shoes,” she added, in a burst of exuberant generosity. She waved Dilly aside and gave her step-daughter a perfunctory hug in passing. “Tansy, my girl, we are made! And shrewd Hugh Malpas would naturally be the first man to realize it. How sickening it must be for him to have to come offering gifts so as to keep in with us!”
Tansy was as glad as she and, encouraged by this rare burst of affability, hoped that prosperity would bring easier times in more ways than one. But she had lived with Robert Marsh for longer and understood what kind of things enraged him. “Would my father like it?” she demurred.
“Like what?” asked Rose, with a final glance in her mirror.
“Accepting anything from him.”
“My good girl, the King will probably be back to supper tomorrow evening and we shall have to feed him somehow. We should be fools to refuse.”
“There is the salted pork Tom got us from the castle — ”
Rose Marsh spurned it with a gesture. She could afford to now. “Salt pork is all very well for common folk. But juicy cuts of prime beef for the gentry!” she chortled in that deep, throaty voice of hers. “Remember, we have a reputation to keep up now.” Half-way down the wide staircase she turned and called back, “I tell you what, Tansy. After all this silly fighting is over I shall get your father to have a notice inscribed ‘The King slept here’, and nail it to the wall beneath our signboard. That should put paid to the Golden Crown and the Three Cups, and all the other inns in Leicester.”
And flushed with
success and full of rather over-ripe sex allure, she went down to accept the offering of her defeated rival. He was her type of man. She had always admired his methods. When Tansy went out through the yard to feed her pony she could hear her talking and laughing more boisterously with their visitor than she ever did nowadays with her husband. “Come to think of it, she should have married a man like Hugh Malpas,” thought Tansy. “If only she had met him in time, how happy we might all have been!”
In the quiet, warm stall which he had humbly shared with a King’s horse, Pippin nuzzled against her with his soft, pink mouth, and while he champed contentedly at his oats she promised him that their pleasant country rides were only deferred until life should become ordinary again. Then she wandered out into the sunny yard to find Jod busy with a hammer at the side gates. “I be fixin’ a better bolt,” he explained. “Come tomorrow night we’ll have all them valuable horses in our stalls again.”
“But they have their own men to look after them. You don’t have to feel responsible, Jod.”
“’Tis true. But folks’ll come pryin’ in to look at the King’s White Surrey, as like as not.”
Tansy watched him approvingly and then, while the gate was still open, they walked together a few yards along White Boar Lane to the corner of the High Street After their sudden breathless activities it was good to have time to loiter again, and Jod had adored her since she was a child. “Do you know what the Mistress says, Jod? That she will get a notice made saying that the King of England slept here, and have it nailed beneath our signboard. I believe that young man from London could have drawn one.”
They stood at the comer looking up at the familiar front of the hostelry which represented their life, the slender fair-haired girl and the bent old man. “That there ole boar certainly did ought to be proud this day, Mistress Tansy,” he said, with a cheerful, toothless grin.
“We will give him a new coat of paint next week,” she answered, with more truth than she knew. And then they both gave a cry of relief as the Boar’s owner came riding up from Applegate and. through the main arched doorway into the yard.
They hurried to greet him as he slid Wearily from his saddle. “We scarcely dared to hope you would come back so soon,” cried Tansy.
“They were all well placed for the battle — just where the King said, along that swampy little river Tweed by Bosworth. There was nothing more I could do. So I thought I had best get back and help you here. We are sure to have a busy evening, and then we must prepare for the King’s return.” Tansy wondered if that had been the only reason. He leaned heavily on her shoulder as they walked towards the inn, and turned to her with a wry smile as they went indoors. “I wanted to stay,” he admitted, too quietly for his approaching wife to hear. “But I doubt if I should be much good at fighting any more.”
Cold apprehension clutched at her heart. “Tom Hood came and helped us this morning and we took a mint of money,” she said, to cheer him.
“A good lad, Tom,” he said. Then, with a vestige of his old teasing chuckle. “You might do worse than encourage him, my poppet.”
A busy evening they certainly had. The curious, the anxious, the secretly Lancastrian, the confidently Yorkist — everyone came to drink at the White Boar that night. And they came for news as much as for drink. For had not the landlord of the White Boar — always a respected citizen — actually been with the King?
“Where were Lord Stanley’s men placed?” asked the Mayor, anxiously.
“He and his brother, Sir William, came up later as you know. They are midway between the two camps, as you might say,” said Marsh, handing him his glass.
“A clever move of his Grace’s to keep young Strange, his son,” remarked someone.
“Maybe. And a finer or more disciplined army than marched through our town never took the field,” said Mayor Wigston proudly. “No pillaging, no interfering with our women — ”
“I reckon they were too dog tired for that sort of lark, the way he marches ’em,” laughed Marsh, shortly.
Master Jordan, the schoolmaster, stirred in his accustomed seat in the chimney corner. “Seriously, Robert, what chances do you think Henry Tudor has?”
“Precious few, I should imagine, Will,” said Marsh jauntily, but felt obliged to add on a more sober note, “But while I was there our spies brought back a rather disturbing report that he had some of these modern cannon. It was a topic bound to spark off general comment.
“Like we hear they have in France?”
“Barrels from which they expel stones by making an explosion with some kind of flintlock — ”
“Great cumbersome things — beyond a man’s strength to carry, surely?”
“They’ll soon get bogged down in our watery meadows — ”
“If they ever have a chance to use them, once our bowmen start,” contributed Tom Hood.
“And if I know the Plantagenet, he’ll let fly at them as soon as it is light,” chuckled Marsh.
The babble of discussion went on, but after they had all gone he sank down as he had before. But this time the exertion and excitement of his ride, followed by such a press of questioning customers, had tried him beyond pretence. “I am a sick man,” he admitted, and allowed his wife and daughter to help him to his bed. Tansy took him a hot posset and sat by him while he drank it.
“I must be up and about to-morrow somehow,” he said, gradually reviving as he spooned up the nourishing herbal mess. “The King promised to lodge here on his return. If the Tudor is taken alive everyone says he will be brought south to London for trial and execution. And speaking of London, Tansy, did that lawyer his Grace spoke of ever come?”
“Yes, and stayed to dinner. And the young man with him. Dickon Somebody. I forgot to ask his family name.”
“Odd visitors for the King to bother about at such a time.”
“Yes. But he tried to explain it — -as far as he understood it himself.”
“Who? Gervase?”
“No, Dickon. In confidence.” Because she trusted her father utterly, and partly in order to take his mind off the worry of his failing health, she related what the strange young man had said.
With bigger affairs on his mind, Marsh dismissed it with a laugh. “A likely story!” he scoffed. “Don’t you know that Bedlam is full of lunatics who believe they are descended from John the Baptist or Julius Caesar or somebody?”
“But this young man was not at all mad,” persisted Tansy, earnestly. “All he seemed to want was to live an ordinary life in London and be apprenticed to a mason.”
“Then probably the Gervase man is using him as an impostor to claim some rich inheritance. All this tarradiddle about being taken to some grand house I In case I should be taken from you, you must learn to be less gullible, my girl. And if they should come back here for beds,” he added wearily, “tell them we are full up, which we shall be. Turn them out and have nothing more to do with them.”
The pain from his old chest wound seemed to stab closer to his tired heart, and he spoke more sharply than he intended. Before leaving him, Tansy shaded the rushlight and pulled the covers more comfortably about him, hoping that her step-mother would soon come to bed.
But next morning Jod was sent hurrying off for the doctor, who decreed that whatever excitement went on at the White Boar, the landlord himself must rest. It was a bitter blow to Robert Marsh, but at least he had the satisfaction of knowing, in the midst of his pain and weakness, that he had been right about the Plantagenet beginning the battle before cockcrow so as to take the enemy unprepared. For the town was already astir with rumours. People swore they could hear the strange firing of cannon, and before Nones all the church bells had begun to ring.
“They be comin’ back,” Jod shouted up from the yard. “Men marching along the road from Wales — a whole army of them,” reported Rose, poking her head round the bedroom door to impart some of the news in the midst of her flustered preparations.
“How do you know?” asked Marsh, hati
ng his enforced inactivity.
“Captain’s look-out men can see them from the tower of the castle church.” In a flurry of excitement she slammed the door in spite of the doctor’s orders that her husband must be kept quiet.
“Then it is all over!” he murmured, sinking back against his pillows with a gratified sigh.
Yes, it was all over. Strangers exchanged scraps of news in passing, people who had been sworn enemies for years hugged each other in the streets, women rushed back to the meals they had been preparing. And then, quite suddenly, the bells stopped, leaving a strange, rather frightening stillness. It was as if some known way of life were suspended. Surprised, uncertain, more subdued, householders went to their open doors or hurried towards the West Bridge. In the sudden stillness they could certainly hear the tramp of feet coming closer. The tramp of a whole army, as the castle lookouts had said. Orderly and disciplined, if weary. But to their bewilderment it turned out to be a different army from the one they had cheered so lustily as it set out. Instead of the leopards and fleurs-de-lys of England and the familiar Blanc Sanglier of Richard, a great flaunting banner with the red dragon of Wales was being borne triumphantly across the Soar. And the man riding beneath it into their city was a stranger. Henry Tudor, the man with Lancastrian and Valois and Welsh blood, who had spent most of his thirty years in Pembroke castle or exiled overseas, and whom few Englishmen had ever seen. Most of the people of Leicester stared at him with hatred, but some, whose grandfathers had fought at Agincourt, looked to him with hope. Anyone, anyone, prayed the more thoughtful traders, whose coming will put a stop to this bloodshed and ravaging of our country!
The King's Bed Page 4
