Queen Elizabeth alarmingly put her head down and burst into a wild trouble of weeping. She would not tell him, dare not tell anyone in the world, what the danger was with which Duke George of Clarence threatened her.
Lord Anthony argued with her for an hour. If she would not tell him where the trouble was, he could do nothing. He was not here to guess riddles set by his own sister. Either let her be open with him, or he would go back to Mote Manor and she could go to the devil. Queen Elizabeth wept three kerchiefs into sops, but she fought him off with all the bottomless obstinacy of a feeble-minded woman. Like a hen in front of a galloping horse, she tracked wildly from one side to another, but would not leave her road. The secret that Duke George was threatening to discover was one between her and King Edward and she dare not speak of it to a living soul: but let Duke George once find it, and the rule of the Wydvylles in England was at its end. The mob would tear them out of their beds and burn them alive. The King himself could not protect them. Probably the King would be deposed and Duke George or even Henry Tydder, the pretended heir of Lancaster, put in his place. Duke Richard, that cold-blooded, horrible little man who hated them all, would join Duke George and march his Northern savages against London. Her precious darlings, her dear children, would suffer death or worse: probably worse.
By this time, even assuming that half of what she said was moonshine and May-games, Lord Anthony was disturbed; felt his heart tighten. His sister — he had never realised it more clearly — was the biggest fool on two feet: but she was not a coward; was as little given to meeting trouble halfway as her husband. In the old days she had absolutely refused to see the threat in Kingmaker’s hourly darkening sullenness until the stroke fell and her father and her brother John had their necks on the block. During the awful months in Westminster Sanctuary she had never, by all accounts, doubted for a moment that the Rose of Rouen would come riding back like Sir Launcelot in the tale to rescue her. If she was seeing pitfalls in the snow now, then the pitfalls were there. He lost his temper with her.
“Woman, it was well said by King Solomon that there are birches for fools’ backs. So God help and redeem me, I could strip and whip you now, though you were twenty times Queen of England, with all the pleasure in life. For the last time before I ride back into Kent and leave you to hang yourself in your own garters, will you tell me what it is that Duke George may discover?”
She would not. King Edward would kill her if she ever breathed a word of it.
“Then if it’s as close as that, why in the name of all devils don’t you tell Edward that George is nosing after it, and let him deal with the matter?”
“I don’t dare, yet — not till I can prove more. He’d say I was jealous of George and meant to destroy him, and Christ knows I have always hated him, drunken treacherous pig, and he’s always hated me, and Edward knows it and he wouldn’t believe me, and besides he’s forbidden me ever to speak of the thing to him since the day when he told me; but it’s destruction for all of us if Duke George learns of it. I’m all alone, God have pity on a poor woman, and a good one too, whatever they may say, and you must help me. Anthony, you must help me.”
“Devils and thunders, you addle-witted woman, how in the name of the Blessed Blood of Hales am I to help you when you won’t say what you need?”
“But I’ve told you, Anthony. Watch Duke George. Spy on him. I’m sure he’s conspiring other wickednesses as well as this, and he wants the Crown for himself, and he works black magic. Find proof against him, enough to make Edward suspicious. Make Edward angry with him. Then I could dare tell him what George’s real drift is. But you must begin it.”
“That’s the first sense I’ve heard from you, sister. That might be contrived.”
“You must do it, Anthony, for all our sakes, for my precious children. Duke George must be killed. He must be killed.”
“That’s as may be. For the last time of all now, will you tell me what the root of the matter is?”
“No, Anthony, I daren’t. Not even you: it’s too horrible. I daren’t.”
“Now listen, Elizabeth. Do you solemnly swear to me on your salvation as a Christian woman that unless I check George of Clarence he can tell news that will destroy us?”
Queen Elizabeth got on her feet. Tears had made ruin of her planned complexion. Her hands opened and shut at her sides and her mouth wobbled. There was an extraordinary and disconcerting glare in her green, shallow eyes.
“I swear by almighty God and all His saints, by the Sacrament of the altar, if George of Clarence does not die he will ruin us utterly. I swear it by the body of Jesus Christ.”
“Very well,” said Lord Anthony.
He had gone to work. That had been months ago. At first he had a good hope that the mere thrust and twist of his investigations would worm out, somehow, from somebody, a hint of what the secret was that has turned his shallow sister into a bloodthirsty creature full of fears. He was disappointed. Whatever it was that Duke George was groping after, the secret was well kept. Dr. Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, knew something — Queen Elizabeth had hinted. He cultivated that simple-natured, saintly little man, with his gentle, candid face and his grave eyes, but got nothing out of him. Yet something was in the air. Something was forming. Duke George had been displaying eccentricities of late which were not the eccentricities of a common drunkard. For one thing — and this was fortunate, since it annoyed King Edward — he had been absenting himself more and more, and more and more rudely, from the Court; kept his own state at Warwick Castle; came to London only when summoned, and then showed an extraordinary unwillingness, he who had never refused wine, to eat or drink in the palace. Kind people said that grief for the loss of his wife had made a change in him. Duchess Isobel, elder daughter of Kingmaker, had died in December of last year, just after Lord Anthony came home from his Burgundian adventures. Duke George had given her a pompous funeral in Tewkesbury Abbey, which was in his domains, and laid her away in a good vault at the back of the high altar there. She had not had a very happy life, and perhaps he regretted it. But the real reason for his odd behaviour came out in the end and made a chilly scandal; startled and puzzled people. It was at a supper given to the Burgundian ambassadors: a simple meal, and particularly well chosen. Lord Anthony remembered an exotic dish of quails stuffed with figs and a sweetbread-tart: both good. Duke George sat at one end of the table, his lower lip stuck out; refused to talk. Edward, magnificent and enormous in mulberry-coloured velvet sewn with emeralds, had looked once or twice at him, puckering the side of his mouth in irritation. They brought him a big gold tankard of his favourite sweet wine, malmsey: and then, in front of them all, King, Queen, ambassadors, perhaps twenty Lords and Ladies, he did an unimaginable thing: put his hand in the breast of his black mourning-doublet; fished out a great piece of unicorn’s horn on a silver chain; dipped it into the drink. No one was there but knew that the strange twisted spikes of ivory, to be got at a price from the far North, were sovereign against poison; cleaned any drink one dipped them in. George, Duke of Clarence, had announced as plainly as by spoken words that he expected to be poisoned at his brother’s supper-table.
Lord Anthony still remembered the little suppressed noise that rippled round the place, the eyes turned on Duke George. It had looked for part of a second as though the King would do something. His face, that had so much broadened under the cheekbones and filled in at the jowl of recent years, turned blood-coloured. His eyebrows snapped down over his eye-sockets and his nostrils stiffened. But a curious lethargy, as Lord Anthony was aware, came between King Edward and the world nowadays. He belched over his food; pushed the plate forward from him; said nothing. But he could hardly have forgotten the incident, thought Lord Anthony contentedly.
He crossed to the tall cabinet by the fireplace that was one of his best-valued things. It was of highly-polished olive-wood inlaid with ivory, and held for the most part little objects of gold and rare stones — cameos of ancient work, ornaments from
Byzantium and the Saracen lands — that had come his way: but a sliver of wood along the front of a shelf went sideways under his fingers, and with a sad, thick noise a piece of the inlaid front pouted forward; showed a concealed place. He took out the small wad of papers that he kept there; might as well read them until the newest additions to his file arrived.
Several spies had contributed to the dossier of Duke George. The papers were written, both in cypher and longhand, in three languages. Sir John Fogg favoured dog-Latin for his reports, which were brief and ambiguous, mere indications of the spoken word to follow later. Sir Thomas Vaughan, a useful Welchman whom Lord Anthony had been at some trouble to attach to himself, wrote French. There were English scrawls from less reputable sources. Lord Anthony sat in a deeply-cushioned chair flicking them over, smiling a very little. There was enough here already to make trouble for Duke George, but not certainly the final trouble he intended. It was a mixture. Duke George was certainly addicted to magic. Mr. Stacy, his clever secretary, had been buying books on the casting of horoscopes and similar matters. That was recorded. A dismissed groom deposed that on a certain evening he had been ordered to bring a white cock up to a turret-chamber in the Castle of Warwick. That room had contained a brazier, an astrolabe and a number of books. The Duke had been there with Mr. Stacy and one Mr. Burdet. The Duke had been pale and excited, but not drunk. Mr. Burdet, of Arrow in Warwickshire, was a queer man. As long ago as the year 1474, Sir John Fogg had discovered, he had used very intemperate expressions about King Edward. The King, condescending to hunt in Arrow Park, had killed a tame white buck belonging to him. “And I wish the buck’s head,” Mr. Burdet had exclaimed, “in his belly that moved the King to kill it.” Almost lèse-majesté: Mr. Burdet would repay watching. Something a great deal more significant was in the next note. The Duke still kept by him, now in this year of 1477, an exemplification of the old Act of the Lancastrian Parliament of six years ago, whereby, supposing the death of Holy Harry of Windsor and the death without issue of his son, the Prince of Wales, he was declared heir to the throne of England. That was important; was almost worth retailing to the King. What did Duke George want with that shameful memorial of his old treachery, if he was a loyal man now? In comparison with it, the outcry he made when the King took Tutbury Castle out of his charge, though Lord Anthony had a full note of the ill words he used on that occasion, hardly was important.
There was a knock at the Privy Chamber door. That would be Sir John Fogg’s latest news out of the West country. He had gone down there to see whether a little unobtrusive ferreting in Dr. Stillington’s own bishopric of Bath and Wells would tell them anything, and his report was promised for to-day. Lord Anthony unlocked the door and took the sealed paper, addressed in Sir John’s crabbed hand, To my Lord Revieres att hys maner of ye Mote wth spede, from a page; locked the door again and broke it open. Within, the paper was as blank as the moon. Lord Anthony stroked his scented beard once more; approved. Only a fool ran risks. He took from a drawer of the cabinet a flat pewter dish and a small bottle of vinegar; laid the paper in the dish and soused it vigorously. If, as he supposed, the message had been written with the juice of the common spurge, it would soon show plainly. It did: one line in Sir John’s particular brand of cursive Latin. Lord Anthony bent over the dish, wrinkling his forehead, until the drastically abbreviated words were clear and could be read: Mulier’ qdam p’pheticam i Bath iveni q sec’ta om’ D.d.C. cog’it: I have found a certain prophetic woman in Bath who knows all the secrets of the D. of C.
Holding the paper delicately with finger and thumb, Lord Anthony shook off as much as possible of the vinegar; then dropped it into the fire that burned, though it was spring, in the lion-guarded hearth; began to walk the room again. All the secrets of the Duke of Clarence: that was promising.
That was very promising indeed. What could they be, those secrets that had terrified his silly sister so, that threatened such damage to her and him and their brother and sisters and the young Marquis Dorset and Sir Richard Grey and even the royal children: what black adders of secrets coiled under a stone and ready to bite if the light fell on them? Had Duke George discovered truth in the old wicked rumour that King Edward was none of the Duke of York’s get, but the son of Blackburn, the Scots archer? Was that it? But would even Duke George make a harlot of his own mother? Had Elizabeth, in some moment of inconceivable folly, cuckolded the King? No, it was not that, for whatever the secret was, King Edward shared it. Then had their mother, Jacquette of Bedford, really used sorcery to bring about the marriage? She had been charged with it by Kingmaker eight years ago, and had cleared herself before the Privy Council, but Lord Anthony was not blind to her nature. She would stop at neither sorcery nor murder for a sufficient end. Well, he would know soon now. The prophetic woman must be bribed or blackmailed until she talked. Edward was the difficulty: to find enough to convince Edward that his own brother was a danger to them; must go. For the first time in his long days of power, Lord Anthony found himself regretting the changes that had come over the King. He was easier to rule now; gave with both hands; shrugged off responsibilities onto any shoulder that would carry them. His paunch sagged and his face was permanently red, with little broken veins scribbled over the cheekbones. The old royal rages were no longer in him; had been replaced by a sort of sullenness, a bad temper that growled and smouldered on for days once it was roused. Virtue had gone out of him.
We did it, said Lord Anthony frankly to himself. We needed to do it. We found from the day of the marriage that he was ruled most easily through his pleasures; so multiplied them. Now we have ground the edge of the blade till we can never cut our fingers on it. I was in awe of him seven years ago; not now. He is not royal now. But if the blunted blade cannot hurt us, it is hard, too, to use it for a weapon. He would have struck quickly once, or else refused to strike at all. Now we shall have to work on him: but at last we know that the work cannot fail. Blunt or not blunt, the blade is in our hands for good.
He looked again round the exotic, ordered luxury of his Privy Chamber. Once he had owned nothing but a couple of horses, his clothes and armour, his good looks and wits. Then had come his marriage to the Dowager Lady Scales, widow of a detested Lancastrian Baron whom the London mob had torn in pieces after the Battle of Northampton. That was a beginning, the first change. God rest her soul in peace, he said to himself now. She has been a dull wife, but profitable. His marriage with her had been a kind of omen of the more splendid marriage of his sister. It had been fine horses then, Egyptian perfumes, cloth-of-gold gowns reversed with miniver. He had his Garter, and when the Bastard of Burgundy came over magnificently to the English Court he met him in the lists at Smithfield and beat him both on horse and on foot. The old nobility looked sideways at him; and sometimes that had seemed the best part of all. Let them look sideways. They could not look down. He had earned his place; played pimp to Edward’s least honest whims; run into dangers. England was a rogue horse to ride at first; reared; bolted. His father and his brother had been thrown. There had been exile and battles and the one act of necessity that he still kept his memory away from: Holy Harry’s mangled little corpse bleeding into the rushes in the Wakefield Tower. Now there was a crown on the work: money flooding in from a hundred sources, his blood mixed into half the noble blood of England, Edward subdued to him finally like a tame lion gone blunt in the claws and blindish. More was coming. Edward talked of a royal second match for him: a political marriage with the sister of the King of Scots. He would have brothers-in-law on two thrones then and, when the Princess Elizabeth married the Dauphin, a niece Queen of France: and Edward would not last forever; would not last as long as he did. His nephew, the Prince of Wales, whose upbringing more and more was in his hands, would be King of England and his puppet. The superb manor-house was round him like a cloak round a magnificent body: outside the locked door, rooms tapestried with the best work of Flanders where people waited for the chance to bow to him as he went past; over his head, the sc
ented bed-chambers with inlaid beds, silk pillows; beneath his feet, the vaults of priceless German and Cretan wines and the locked iron chest, packed up to the lid with little canvas bags of gold, whose secret only he and his secretary knew. There were forty horses in the stable, every one of them a blood, a pack of hounds the Christian King would envy, better hawks than in the royal mews. The aviary that he had built had hopoes and aigrettes in it and strange sickle-beaked crimson fowl from Egypt. It was very pleasant: and there was hardly a man in England who would not give his ears to take it from him.
He knew that; accepted it. He was hated in England. The old nobility hated him for a man of yesterday. The London citizens bitterly, personally hated him for the fashion in which he exercised his office of Chief Butler. The commons everywhere hated him because his fingers were in their pouches, because with each new tallage and benevolence King Edward raised he had more jewels on his doublet and more servants in his house. Husbands and fathers hated him for his nephew’s sake, the Marquis Dorset from whom no woman could be protected. His tenants hated him because he never let a tithe of his uttermost dues slip by him.
Give them a scent to bay on, he thought, and they would pull him down. Duke George of Clarence was casting round for the scent now. Mote Manor and all the works it crowned and gathered into itself were too dear and precious for a drunken prince to kick to pieces. I killed Holy Harry of Windsor, thought Lord Anthony, for less than that.
*
“And who for St. Ninian’s stall? Name someone, Dr. Beverley, if you can. I am open to hear proposals.”
“With respect, your Grace, Mr. Richard Cutler, whom I believe your Grace knows, is a pious clerk and also a very deserving one.”
“Richard Cutler” — the Duke of Gloucester tightened his upper lip over his teeth and almost shut his eyes — “I know the name. Yes, I have him: a Derbyshire man. Well and good; I like Derbyshire folk. He shall have St. Ninian’s stall if he pleases: and that closes the list. Have you his name down, Kendal?”
Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III Page 33
