The King's Bed

by Campbell Barnes, Margaret

  He spoke with such quiet authority that, after a moment’s hesitation, the Judge beckoned to an usher to bring a stool Gratefully, Tansy sank down on it. And the tension was still further eased for her because people were no longer staring at her. This strange young man who wore the travel-stained garb of an apprentice and yet recommended humanity to a King’s Justice of the Peace, and who had calmly announced that he intended to marry the accused, was now the centre of attention. The questioning was transferred to him.

  “If you have come straight from London how did you know that this trial was going on?”

  “I didn’t. But Tom Hood, your fletcher, waked me in the early hours of the morning three days ago and told me about the murder. He, too, works for Sir Walter Moyle.” Dickon turned from his questioners to Tansy and spoke gently as if trying to soften some blow. “He was deeply concerned, but was on the point of leaving for Calais.”

  Everyone knew about the young fletcher’s fortunate appointment, so the stranger’s explanation rang true and held the interest of all.

  “And you say that you are going to marry Tansy Marsh,” said Langstaff, with understandable surprise. “How long have you known her?”

  “About two years.”

  “Did you know that she had this money in her possession?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how she came by it?”

  “She told me that she found it on the floor beside the late King’s bed soon after he left the Boar for Bosworth.”

  Although he had not been present, his words exactly confirmed Tansy’s own explanation. A gasp of relief went up from Tansy’s friends. Master Langstaff spread the gold coins triumphantly across the table. “Then these have nothing to do with this recent robbery. For whatever purpose she may have hoarded them, Robert Marsh’s daughter has been in possession of them since August 1485.”

  “Not all of them, all the time, sir,” corrected Dickon. “During the first year she could not in any case have spent most of them because she had lent them to me.”

  “Why?” demanded the defendant’s lawyer, swinging round on him.

  A new fear assailed Tansy, but Dickon faced him imperturbably. The truth, and only the truth, would clear Tansy of all the slurs which both murderer and murdered had somehow managed to cast upon her. For himself, he had no guile. “To get away from Leicester after Bosworth,” he said.

  In that Lancastrian Court a shocked hush followed his clearly-spoken words.

  “Then you were on King Richard’s side?”

  “Most ardently,” admitted Richard’s son.

  “And you repaid the money?” There was a new gentleness in the Judge’s voice which possibly revealed where his sympathies lay.

  “Certainly, milord. As soon as I was able to earn it.”

  “Is there any witness to this transaction?” blustered Malpas’s lawyer, for want of something better to say.

  “A chapman from Cheapside named Gufford. He comes often to Leicestershire and may be known to some of you”

  By the way people turned to each other and mouthed the familiar name, he certainly was. The whole story was becoming entirely credible. Even those who had discussed all the suspicious evidence with relish began telling themselves that of course they had never for a moment doubted Robert Marsh’s daughter.

  Relief swept over Tansy. The nightmare experience was nearly over. No one was going to condemn her. They were looking instead at the guilty pair she had accused. They believed her. She dared to raise expectant eyes to the Judge’s face. But what she saw there froze her with a new fear. Not for herself, but for Dickon. What was it his royal father had said? “If I should be killed, leave Leicester and never come back. You are too much like me.” But he had come back, for her sake.

  And the little old Judge was peering short-sightedly at Dickon. Peering with a curiosity which exceeded any interest he had taken in the routine court proceedings. Slightly deaf and short-sighted he might be, but his intellect was still acute. He had been on that circuit ever since Tansy could remember, and must have served under the last two Plantagenet kings. And now his eyes were like probes on Dickon’s defenceless young face. “What did you say your name was?” he asked.

  Something in his trained, retentive mind had been set in pursuit of some elusive memory. Some likeness. A mere hint — the name of Richard or the suggestion of Broome — might give him the clue. Dickon and Tansy looked at each other in sharp mutual anxiety. Dickon took time to answer. And in those few moments of time the Judge’s mind was diverted and the situation saved.

  For at that instant, with no scapegoat to suffer for her own sin, Gladys Grumbold’s nerve broke and she made a dash for the door. Her hands were no longer folded in her lap, but clawing wildly for freedom. There was the crash of an overturned bench as Hugh Malpas fought his way after her, to be trapped neatly at the door by Jod.

  The whole attitude of the Court was changed. Although no hiding place for the stolen money was ever found, it came to light that the guilty pair had two accomplices who must have made off with it. There was no need of further evidence.

  15

  Immediately after the trial, Will Jordan took Tansy, who was almost in a state of collapse, to his home. But later in the day she crossed the street and went back alone to the Blue Boar, which now belonged to her. She wanted to say good-bye to the only home she had ever known. There were plenty of congratulatory friends who would willingly have accompanied her, but she took only Dilly and, except to Jordan, had said nothing of her intentions. Weary with emotional strain, she was thankful to be alone, and, averting her eyes from the closed door of her step-mother’s bedroom, 6he went up to her own familiar attic.

  The little room was flooded with late afternoon sunlight just as it had been that August day before Bosworth. She closed the door behind her and opened the two narrow casements. Leaning out, she remembered how King Richard’s two gentlemen had come riding down the street looking for accommodation for their royal master, how gladly they had exclaimed at sight of the White Boar sign, and how Hugh Malpas had tried to inveigle them into the Golden Crown. She had stuck out her tongue at him, she remembered. And she remembered too, almost dispassionately, that this sunny evening, two years later, he was to hang. Once his guilt had been established, the administrators of justice — more outraged at the way he had shielded himself behind an innocent girl than by his original crime — had lost no time in carrying out the death sentence. People were even now gathering in the square by Gallowgate to enjoy the gruesome spectacle.

  Wrapped in an apathy which was a reaction from all she had been through, Tansy felt strangely apart from it all.

  Leaning from her window, she looked out over the familiar city and back over her life. It had been like a placid stream until King Richard came. And ever since then it seemed to have been gathering momentum until this terrible week. Before Bosworth she had been a girl, full of common-sense, but singularly trusting and unsophisticated, and now she was a woman who had learned to see through the smooth deceptions of human selfishness. A woman who would in future have to make her own judgments and shape her own destiny. In this difficult hour of decision she prayed for strength to shape it wisely!

  Slowly, almost abstractedly, she opened the fine oak chest which her father had given her on her seventeenth birthday, and began laying out her clothes upon the bed. The low, narrow bed upon which she had cried herself to sleep when each of her parents had died, on which she had whimpered fearfully when the White Boar sign was being stoned, and on which she had afterwards lain awake thinking about the strange story of Dickon Broome. The bed on which she wanted never to sleep again.

  Hurrying footsteps began clattering along the cobbles below. Scraps of conversation drifted up to her, spoken in voices high-pitched with nervous excitement, and accompanied by the false laughter of those who try to hide their horror while morbidly wanting to watch a hanging.

  Tansy would not listen. She began sorting and folding some of her best
garments. She had finished with Leicester. What would women be wearing in London, she wondered. She had packed most of her possessions into the capacious pannier basket which was usually attached to Pippin’s saddle for marketing, when there was a tap on the door and Dilly stood there, scared and panting. “Everybody’s hurryin’ past. Goin’ to Gallowgate — ”

  “I know,” said Tansy, wrapping her best new shoes in a kerchief.

  “They’re goin’ to see that wicked Master Malpas hanged. An’ worse.” The girl’s eyes became wider still in the whey-like pastiness of her face. “Diggory’s just rushed into the yard on his way to see it. I heard him shout to Jod to come, too, because they’ve built a pile of brushwood alongside the gallows. For that Grumbold cat! They’re goin’ to burn her alive!”

  For a moment Tansy’s strange calm deserted her. She sank down on the bed. “God be thanked I shall be getting out of this town!” she murmured, covering her face with both hands. No one could possibly have been more wicked to her than Gladys Grumbold. No one could possibly have been more wicked to poor Rose. But that this terrible thing should happen to someone who had lived in this house …

  Dilly was down on her knees, clutching at her, in tears — providing a merciful distraction. “Oh, Mistress Tansy, you b’aint goin’ away? Not yet? Not leavin’ us — I can’t bear it!”

  Tansy’s comforting arms went round her. “But you will have your parents, Dilly, which is more than I have. And cook, who is always kind to you. And I’m sure whoever buys the inn will employ you both. I have left a special message with Master Langstaff to recommend you.”

  “But it won’t be the s-same,” sobbed Dilly.

  Remembering past scenes, the new owner of the Boar had to smile. “It should be much better. Surely, you remember how Mistress Rose used to scold and beat you?”

  “I was scared out of my wits of her. Still am,” admitted Dilly, rising from her knees and preparing to depart with singular reluctance. “Truth is, I’m mortal feared to pass that best bedroom door. Fair bolted up these attic stairs, I did, in case of what ghosts might appear. Hers, or maybe poor King Richard’s.”

  “Then why did you come up here?” asked Tansy, returning to her packing.

  “Because Master Broome, who put everything to rights this mornin’, be come. Went first to see about his poor, overtired horse that Jod’s been cossetin’ for him. An’ now he be waitin’ for you in the parlour.”

  Tansy suddenly came alive from her trance-like tiredness. Reminiscences of the past gave place to plans for the future. “Oh, Dilly, Dilly, you little fool! Why didn’t you tell me?” she chided. “Here, find room for these shifts in the basket, be sure it’s fastened securely, and carry it down to Pippin’s stable. And then make us some kind of meal. If there’s nothing in the larder, you’re sure to find some eggs in the hen-run.” And, pushing the pile of underwear into the astonished girl’s arms, she ran down the stairs even quicker than Dilly had come up, without a single thought for ghosts.

  She found Dickon waiting by the parlour hearth, looking serious and carefully refurbished from his hurried journey. It was the first time they had been alone since the old days in the hayloft. “I had no opportunity to ask you first” he began, with something of his old diffidence.

  “To ask me about what?” said Tansy, halting in the middle of the room.

  “What I said in front of all those people. That I was going to marry you.”

  She came to him then and laid both hands upon his breast, setting his mind at rest with a beautiful gesture of surrender. “There was no need,” she said, looking into eyes as honest as her own. And then she was in his arms — the strong arms of a remarkably resolute young man — and he was kissing her with all the hunger of long abstinence.

  After the ecstasy of a long embrace which helped to assuage his passionate yearning and assured Tansy of the reality of her own, a few coherent thoughts began to come back to them. “Your coming saved me,” she whispered, when at last he allowed her breath.

  “If I had known that suspicion had fallen on you — ”

  “You would have winded that poor horse past hope,” she laughed happily, between his renewed kisses.

  “I would have stolen a whole string of horses to get here … But all that horror is over for you now, my love.”

  “And you are taking me away.”

  He released her abruptly. The glow of love’s inconsequent laughter faded from his face, as he pulled her down beside him on the settle, “I ought to let you wait here, with friends,” he said soberly.

  “Wait!” Tansy sat bolt upright, proud and hurt.

  He took both her hands in his but made no more attempt to embrace her. “What I said was to protect you. For effect before the Court and all those devils who were tormenting you.”

  “You mean — you were just sorry for me? You don’t want to marry me?”

  “Before God, I want it more than anything on this earth. Did I not tell you, when I was little more than a bewildered boy, that I should always carry your image in my heart?”

  “And I have always remembered — and cherished — your words, because you have a habit of always doing just what you say, Dickon.”

  “But you must know, Tansy, that I cannot marry you while I am still an apprentice. It is forbidden by my indentures. And the humiliating truth is that until I am a fully trained mason I do not earn enough money to keep you. Only pocket money. It is Master Hurland who is paid to teach me.”

  “The Sheriff returned our gold coins, and I shall have money from the sale of the inn.”

  “If you ever get any.”

  “But, Dickon, surely you know that at my step-mother’s death the Boar becomes mine?”

  “I know now. I didn’t know when I left London,” he said, inexplicably beginning to laugh.

  “Well, what amuses you about it?”

  “Only the way I first heard about it. As I came down the steps from the court-house some hulking great friend of Malpas’s came up to me. It was small wonder, he said loudly, that I had ridden in such a hurry so as to get in first and marry a girl who was going to inherit one of the best inns in Leicester.”

  “Oh, Dickon, what did you say? And in front of all those people, too! Though when you arrived I certainly couldn’t have looked much as if I were going to live long enough to inherit anything.”

  “I didn’t say anything. I just hit him on the jaw and left him.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “Still lying in the gutter, for all I know. Truth to tell, I’ve been so crazed with joy at seeing you again that I’ve only just remembered him.”

  “My dear idiot! And you so patiently reasonable!”

  “After all you’d been through I felt the need of hitting something,” he explained calmly. “And though the inn is yours, Tansy, you must realize that these legal negotiations sometimes take months to go through. Even if anyone wants to buy it, after all that has happened here. Which most people seem to doubt.”

  “That’s just what Master Langstaff has been warning me about,” agreed Tansy sadly. “He says there will be a kind of curse on the place. That even though men may come in to drink, travellers won’t want to stay here. And I can see now that because we did everything possible to make the King’s Bed famous, everybody within miles is sure to hear about the landlady of the Blue Boar who was murdered in it.”

  They sat hand in hand considering their difficulties.

  “It will be only a few months before I become a member of my Guild, and then we can marry,” said Dickon. “And in the meantime I may be able to persuade the wife of one of our masons to take you into her house.”

  “I could work for hire,” said Tansy eagerly. “There must be plenty of work for a girl to do in London.”

  “And I should have persuaded you to leave a good home, and friends like Master Jordan, to work, perhaps, like Dilly,” he objected, as the girl came in, bearing two steaming platters.

  “It seems as if it is I wh
o am doing most of the persuading,” smiled Tansy, drawing him to the table. “Come and make a good meal before we start.”

  After a mouthful or two he was still objecting, but she was scarcely listening. An idea had come to her. “Tell me, is there not an inn called the Boar in Cheapside?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Gufford, the chapman, used to speak of it to my stepmother. And I told you he lived near there, do you not remember, so that you could send me letters. Somehow the name of that inn in London always seemed to make you feel nearer. Is it anything like this one?”

  “Yes, now you speak of it. But I suppose all good inns look much alike.”

  Tansy set down her glass and turned to him eagerly. “Then probably it is run much like ours. And I could help there. It is the only kind of work I am familiar with.”

  “It is possible they might have a vacancy,” he admitted, “London becomes increasingly full of foreign merchants looking for lodgings. The Tudor encourages them, and I suppose one must admit he has done much for trade. In any case, it is a respectable place where you could get a bed for a night or two until we have time to look round.”

  “I should like to have sold some of my step-mother’s expensive gowns. But Master Langstaff is sending someone here tomorrow to make an inventory of everything, and he says I mustn’t take away anything except my personal possessions. I have packed my clothes in a basket which hangs on Pippin’s saddle.”

  Clearly she was not going to profit by her lover’s unselfish solicitude. But yet another difficulty confronted him. “Jod thinks my hired horse won’t really be fit to ride for days.”

  “There is my father’s fine black mare. Dear Dickon, surely I can give you that if you leave yours in place of her.”

  He lifted her hand from the table and kissed it. “Then I shall certainly be the proudest ’prentice in London. I saw her in her stable. A horse fit for a king!”

  Their glances met, full of secret laughter at his unintentionally apt remark, and as soon as Dilly had withdrawn to eat her own supper they rose and stood closely embraced again.