The King's Bed

by Campbell Barnes, Margaret

  “I think your step-mother will — all too easily.” He lay silent awhile and then added with laboured breathing, “Always go to Will Jordan — in any difficulty — as you would to me. And there is Tom … You two have always been good friends. I ought to have arranged a marriage for you — while I had the strength.”

  But somehow, in spite of the insecurity of her position, Tansy was thankful that he had left her free.

  Although Robert Marsh lingered for several weeks, that was almost the last time he was able to speak to her coherently, alone. He never knew that with the fall of the last Plantagenet his inn had become the Blue Boar, or that his beloved daughter had formed more than a passing attachment for King Richard’s bastard son.

  His death was a much-regretted event in Leicester. And when the contents of his Will became known, relations between his widow and his daughter grew increasingly difficult. Resenting Tansy’s promised interest in the business, Rose made use of her in every possible way yet tried to keep her subservient. Although she was well provided for during her lifetime, it infuriated her to realize that her value as a comely and well-to-do widow would always be diminished in the eyes of any matrimonially-minded man by her stepdaughter’s ultimate inheritance. Her good-humoured moments of expansion became rarer, her tongue sharper. When Hugh Malpas, calling ostensibly with neighbourly condolences, not only omitted his usual lavish compliments, as was proper enough in the circumstances, but made a point of treating Tansy with a new, ingratiating respect as a grown person, she found it hard to take. Enraged, she retaliated on Tansy afterwards when her friend, Druscilla Gamble, came to proffer sympathy and gather gossip. They were sitting near the parlour door, and Tansy, who was chopping herbs for Friday’s fish by the open kitchen window, could not but overhear them.

  “At least I didn’t give him the satisfaction of asking how custom was going at the Crown,” Rose was saying.

  “No need to ask. Anyone can hear it every night,” said Mistress Gamble, the shoemaker’s wife, who had the misfortune to live hard by in Cordwainers’ Lane. “What did Malpas say about your changed sign?”

  “Thought it was the best thing we could do in the circumstances — and mind you, he’s a shrewd business man — and wanted to know whose idea it was to keep the Boar, but turn it blue. I gave credit where credit was due. Said it was Tansy’s — or some artist lover of hers. And that although his night’s lodging wasn’t marked up on the slate we couldn’t grumble at the way he had paid for it.”

  Tansy dropped her knife with a clatter, and even spiteful Druscilla Gamble protested, “Oh, no, Rose!”

  “I thought it would cure him of casting such calculating looks in her direction. When Hugh Malpas has that calculating look he is usually thinking up some dangerous mischief. He was treating her altogether too much as though she were already Mistress of the Boar.”

  “And no longer treating you as if he wanted you to be mistress of the Crown, eh?” giggled Druscilla Gamble, who could also play the cat. “But seriously, Rose, do you suppose our prudish Tansy really let some man tumble her in the hay that night when the town was full of soldiers?”

  “Diggory says he heard them, and a man doesn’t spend two or three hours restoring an awful old signboard for nothing,” said Rose, with more determination than conviction. “But you’d better ask Tansy herself if you’re so much interested.”

  “Chit as she is, I wouldn’t dare,” admitted Mistress Gamble, in spite of her proclivity for minding other people’s business. And as if struck by the oddness of the admission even she kept silence for a few moments, wondering what it was about the girl. “Tansy,” she repeated ruminatively. “How did she come by such an odd name?”

  “Her mother must have been full of pretty whimsies. There is some cock and bull story about Robert having met her in a manor when he came back from the wars.”

  “She must have found the talk on the tavern benches a bit different!” sniggered Druscilla Gamble.

  “Perhaps they toned it down a bit, same as they do for her daughter.”

  “I never could abide those fancy flower names myself,” said Mistress Gamble, forgetting that she was addressing a full-blown rose.

  “’Tisn’t a flower. It’s a weed. A tall, quick-growing, coarse, yellow-topped weed.” Tansy could hear the spite in her stepmother’s voice, and found it frightening. “Come to think of it, the name just suits her.”

  “She certainly is growing up, the way the lads begin to look at her,” agreed Mistress Gamble, with less animosity.

  “Even Malpas.” Evidently that was a sore point too.

  “He’d look at anything that had two breasts.”

  “And, of course, there’s Tom Hood always hanging around.”

  The shoemaker’s wife laughed indulgently. Most women had a soft spot for the young fletcher. “He’d make a kind enough husband if she didn’t mind his shooting off at a tangent sometimes. Not unnatural, I suppose, for one in his line of business. Or that he should like his quiver full of girls as well as arrows.”

  “At least he’s the sort to get on. I thought her father would have fixed it up. If I were her I’d snap him up. But the girl’s got no gumption. All whimsy, high-flown fancies like her mother before her, no doubt. She’ll probably marry some conscience-ridden, steady-going stick-in-the-mud like I did for the sake of his looks and end up worse off than she began.”

  Tansy banged down her knife, scattering herbs, bowl and chopping-board in all directions, and flung open the parlour door. Like a slender fury she faced the two astonished women. “Throw whatever slime you like from your horrible mind over me, now there is no one to stop you,” she told her step-mother. “But you can’t talk that way about my mother in this house where everybody loved her before you came, nor about my father whom everyone in Leicester respected — and grew sorry for, after he married you!”

  “You common little eavesdropper!” accused Rose, too taken aback to think of anything else to say.

  “I should think every passer-by in the street must have heard without trying to!” said Tansy contemptuously, too proud to explain what she had been doing.

  “My, what a temper we have! I didn’t know you had it in you, child,” said Mistress Gamble, half-soothingly, half-admiringly.

  “Imagine her talking to me like that, the ingrate — living in my house, eating my bread!”

  “And earning it,” snapped Tansy.

  Before such unexpected anger, even the indomitable hostess of the Boar began to weaken. Tears of self-pity welled in her periwinkle blue eyes. “And me still wearing black for him,” she faltered, appealing to Tansy’s well-known pity.

  But for those who maligned her loved ones Tansy had no pity at all. “Because black suits your red hair,” she said coldly, “far better than a dead king’s scarlet silk.”

  For the first time Rose saw her as a person to be reckoned with. She got up from her chair and planted herself before the girl as she would have stalked out of the room again. “Listen, Tansy,” she said, almost civilly. “This is not an easy time for either of us. Wisely or unwisely, your father has left us both an interest in the Boar, and however much a step-mother is inevitably disliked, we must pull together if we are to make any money out of it.”

  “I am always willing to do my share of the pulling.”

  “I know. And I do not think too badly of you for taking your fun sometimes. Some parents would have beaten you.”

  “There was no cause. But after what you said in the tavern the other day all our customers must suppose there was.”

  “And think none the worse of you, seemingly.”

  Which was probably true, since Rose’s cruel words had but increased her own unpopularity. And during that sad Autumn Tansy was to find what good friends she had.

  Partly because the name of the inn was changed, travellers no longer feared to put up there, and out of sympathy for a respected citizen’s affairs most of Robert Marsh’s local customers continued to come. Master Jordan cro
ssed the street every evening to pass an hour, seeming to bring something of his friend the innkeeper’s genial spirit with him. And Tom Hood looked in whenever he could and tried to cheer them, but business was bad with him, too. He rode as far afield as Warwick trying to sell his arrows but, excellently made as they were, no one in castle or manor seemed to be wanting any. “Only a few score sold here and there to civic authorities who are bound to provide them for weekly archery practice, and they want only the cheapest,” he reported, stretching his long legs wearily before the cheerful fire in the Boar. “Now that the new King is accepted and crowned in London everyone seems to think that the barons will stop skirmishing about England in support of Yorkist or Lancastrian, and settle down under a Tudor dynasty.”

  “And crafts and trade and shipping will have a chance, and the ordinary people will come into their own,” added Master Jordan, regarding him with an affectionate smile.

  “It may be very good for England, Sir,” admitted Tom ruefully, “but devilish bad for fletchers!”

  “Poor Tom! Your wallet is empty and your hose wringing wet,” commiserated Tansy, ruffling his rain-soaked hair as she handed him a warming drink.

  He caught at her hand and kissed it. “The long-term trouble is that if we do have battles again everybody will be wanting to buy cannon,” he said, pulling her down beside him on the settle.

  “You really mean that?” asked Jordan.

  “I am afraid so. They are difficult to make and cumbersome to move, but they turned the tide at Bosworth. I shall have to start an iron foundry. I understand there is iron ore to be found down in Sussex. It is always as well to have a second trade at one’s finger-tips,” he added more lightly. “By the way, was that fellow who repainted the sign a master craftsman as well as a soldier?”

  “He couldn’t have been. He wasn’t old enough,” said Tansy, cautiously.

  “Well, he made a masterly job of it,” allowed Tom generously.

  “If you want a second trade you could always make your arrow feathers into pillows for the ladies,” teased Tansy.

  “And show them how to lay their pretty heads on ’em. It’s an idea.” He set down his empty tankard and, as if reminded by some association of ideas, announced abruptly, “I spent an hour in the Golden Crown last evening.”

  “Surely you’re not going to desert us!” exclaimed Rose Marsh, coming to join them as the last of her other customers departed.

  “As I said, if your own business isn’t paying, it’s best to take a look at the methods of the man whose is.”

  “What do you find to do there?” asked Rose.

  “Oh, plenty. Note how they run with the times by disguising their flea-bitten performing bear as a fierce Welsh dragon. Watch how they pour the drinks short when their customers are too sozzled to notice. Manage to take a rise out of old Malpas sometimes. Squeeze the alluring Gladys.”

  “Tom!” squeaked Tansy, pulling away from his casually proprietary arm.

  “Your fault for being so unkind. A man must find some consolation. She blackens her eyelashes with some eastern paint. Did you know? And she has a new song, Mistress Marsh. I’ll see if I can remember it. It ought to be sung in a fierce, rollicking double bass, of course, not in her enticing love notes. But it doesn’t matter because she makes all the men sing with her.” He sprang up from the settle and stood with his back to the leaping fire, embellishing an indifferent singing voice with fine dramatic gestures:

  “‘My Gold Crown shall crush the Boar, And make the Angel fly. He’ll drown the Bow Inn in the Soar, And drink the Three Cups dry.’ There are several more verses, of course. But there’s competitive advertising for you!”

  “Oh, the venomous bitch!” cried Rose, sinking down into the nearest chair.

  “She probably has to sing what she is told. Malpas works her hard, poor mopsy. No doubt he composed the lines himself.”

  “And now we shall hear every tipsy lout who passes chanting them.”

  “Which won’t do us any good,” sighed Tansy, wishing she could think of some riposte.

  “There’s one way in which you can score,” said Tom, as if reading her thoughts. And when they all looked at him expectantly, he began to explain. “Hugh Malpas may have a luscious singing wench, and a performing bear patched up as a dragon, and a ready turn for verse, but what he doesn’t have is a king’s bed.”

  “We shan’t get much for that — ” began Rose, doubtfully.

  “Don’t sell it. Not on your life!” advised Tom. “Keep it just where it is and make it the show piece of Leicester. And so enhance your trade. The country is at peace at last, the Tudor is making more stringent laws against road and river thieves, and people are beginning to travel about their affairs again. As the roads improve with the Spring, they will be coming back. Put up a notice over your door. State boldly that the last Plantagenet King stayed here, which in no way indicates which way your sympathies lie. Offer to show them the King’s Bed at so many groats a time.”

  “But who would want to see it?” asked Rose.

  “Quite a number of people, believe me. Either from loyalty or curiosity. Keep the door of your great chamber locked, Mistress Marsh, and make a great to-do of taking down the key from the wall and leading them upstairs as a special privilege. Leave everything in the room just as it was. Let Tansy show it to them.” Warming to his idea, he began to see it not only as a financial enterprise, but as something which might help to take the sweet girl’s mind off her unhappy loss. “Like this, Tansy.” With his gay gift for mimicry, he became Tansy, showing it. Turning a key, throwing wide a heavy door, then standing aside to give her audience a full, impressive view of the interior. “Our best bedroom, just as King Richard the Third slept in it. The folding bed which went with him everywhere, no matter where he was fighting. Note the fleurs-de-lys and the carving and the box beneath the mattress for his possessions. And see, here are his nightgown and his shoes — everything, just as he left them — the night before Bosworth, when he had only one more short night to live. Here, you will tell them, his squires dressed him in tabard and armour. Here he put on the crown of England … Yes, yes, I know it was downstairs, but what matter? … And from here he went forth in splendour. And for an extra groat or two you could tell them how he came back.”

  “Oh, no, no!” protested Tansy.

  “But it is what they really want. The Bow Bridge part. And showing of his corpse afterwards. Most people are morbid.”

  “We could try it,” agreed Rose, feeling that she herself would rather enjoy describing the lying-in-state. “Have another drink, Tom, on the house.”

  Tansy sat in silence. She had promised to do anything to help and here was something which she should be able to do all too well. For whereas to the others the King’s room was already becoming an interesting background to a fragment of history, for her it held heart-shattering reality, kept alive through the existence and the shared emotions of his son. And only sensitive old Will Jordan, without knowing the cause, suspected how much she shrank from the part so blithely assigned to her.

  10

  If the King’s Bed did not make a fortune, for months after the battle of Bosworth it helped to keep the Blue Boar going. Tansy tried to be always at hand to take visitors upstairs and to say her piece, more or less as Tom had instructed her. The people who came were very varied — some were staying in the inn, some just happened to be in Leicester and some were brought by relatives who lived there. Some were curious, some sceptical and a few much moved.

  At first Tansy hated telling strangers about something which had touched her so profoundly. She often found herself wishing that she could show it to Dickon who would have felt about it as she did, and to whom in a sense the bed belonged, since no man could have died more bereft of close relatives than had King Richard. But gradually, as she said the same words over and over, they became automatic and lost their poignancy. And gradually, also, she became aware that the Yorkists still had a strong following. They came
mostly from the north and midlands. Many men who had served under him came, as on a devoted pilgrimage, from Yorkshire. Tansy always sensed this because of the way they listened when she told them anything about the Plantagenet’s last hours. They knew as well as she did what he had looked like, and would stand in silence drinking in every detail of the room and, as like as not, cross themselves in prayer for his soul. But outside of their own county such ardent adherents would not dare to show their feelings because of the smooth success which the first Tudor king was enjoying in London. The Duke of Norfolk, Brackenbury and the majority of Richard’s closest followers had been killed, and Sir Francis Lovell was thought to have escaped to the court of the Duchess of Burgundy, Richard’s sister, so they lacked a leader. And as Henry the Seventh had put out a false report that Richard’s nephew, the Earl of Lincoln, was dead, they lacked the inspiration of a Yorkist heir for whom to fight.

  Weapon-makers, like Tom Hood, whose fathers had thriven during the years of civil war, were hard put to it to make a living. “I should come to you only as a beggar,” he said to Tansy, too proud to urge her to marry him even when her father had been dead a year. And Tansy, liking him the better in his misfortune, had begun to wonder why she had held out so long against him. Certainly it was not on account of the advances which Hugh Malpas had been making to her, which were not only unwelcome in themselves but invariably became a cause of still more dislike from her stepmother.

  But riding to Lutterworth market one Spring morning she was to learn the reason for the dullness of her present life and for the reluctance of her heart. Gufford, the London chapman, was there with all manner of attractive women’s finery laid out on his stall, which looked all the more enticing after a year of economy and mourning, and when she had dismounted to finger and to admire he produced a small packet for her. “I should have brought it to you in Leicester next Saturday when I have my pitch there, if I hadn’t recognized you in the crowd,” he said. “A likely looking young man brought it to me in Cheapside and more or less threatened to kill me if I didn’t deliver it at the Blue Boar. But, more important than his urgency, was the fact that he paid me well for my pains. You’ve changed the name of the inn, he tells me. Which I shouldn’t have known, not having been up this way for months, with trade in London so good — ”