“George is to be attainted of high treason.”
“What?”
She did not believe it; did not believe it at all. The words did not mean that; had some other meaning she would see in a moment.
“He is to be attainted in Parliament to-morrow.”
Duke Richard’s voice was absolutely flat. She could not see him in the dark.
“But of high treason?”
“Of high treason, of having assembled armed men in Cambridgeshire, of having maligned the King and procured enchanters to bring his death about.”
“Oh God.”
“There’s worse.”
“Dickon, I can’t bear this. Have we all gone mad?”
“He is accused of having called Edward a bastard.”
“A bastard! No, then it’s all lies. It’s all lies, Dickon. It will be disproved. Even George wouldn’t do that. Men don’t call their own mothers whores.”
“Good God!” he said, “it will be disproved. Do you suppose I thought for an instant it would not? But what has induced Edward, what devil has got into the man, to countenance such a filthy piece of comedy, let it get as far as Parliament?”
“George must have done something foolish, Dickon, and he means to frighten him.”
“Frighten him by letting it be said before all England that he called our mother a harlot?”
“Ah, Dickon, but I’m afraid I know whose device that was.”
“Thank you. I know myself. Haven’t they always hated George? He was a partaker with your father in the heading of old Rivers. They’ve not forgotten it. But that they should have the insolence to use such a shameful means of getting revenge on him, and Edward should be so besotted as to let them do it — by St. Paul, if I can lay hands once on that pack …”
“Why listen to dogs barking? We know George is no worse than a fool. He’ll be cleared, and it’ll be the more shame to the Wydvylles that they ever drove Edward to this point.”
“When dogs piss in the King of England’s Court, and on the name of his mother and mine, d’you think it’s likely I shan’t notice them? A huntsman’s lash is what’s wanted in Westminster. I’ve had the heads off honester men than that stinking Rivers for far smaller sins against Edward. Beaufort and the Bastard were angels of God and good friends to my house compared with him. I was thanked for putting them in their graves: but when I told Edward to his face to-night that this attainder was a mere piece of Wydvylle impudence, he cursed me like a water-man. He was not drunk then. As soon as we were alone he went into the garderobe and vomited. I heard him: but he’d scarcely come back when he was calling for hippocras and a cold pasty to cram himself sick again. That’s the manners the Wydvylles have taught him since the French journey. Anne, my darling, do you think I’m a fool?”
His voice in the dark had come more urgently, more nakedly, with each sentence. His rather hideous self-control had been put aside for a little, as though it were armour that tired him out. Anne squeezed his hand.
“My dear love, no man in England’s less a fool, none.”
“Nevertheless, I think I must be one. I must be. Consider. I’m twenty-six years old, a husband, a father. I’ve ruled a province; been in exile; fought battles. I should know a monk by his frock by this time.”
“You do, Dickon, you, the cleverest head of all of them.”
“But with that much experience …”
He stopped, biting the sentence off with a snick of the shut teeth; then deliberately went on again like a man hurting himself, squeezing a boil.
“But with that much experience I’ve still loved and adored a fatted animal as though it were King Arthur.”
“Ah, Dickon!”
“A fatted animal: one thing beside you and our son I’ve loved, I’ve served, I’ve worshipped, I’ve fought and told lies for: and look at it. Pitiful saints, look at it: a fool that juggled away his crown once for the sake of a woman no more fit for his bed than a pig for Paradise, a wencher without even the wits to do his wenching with the curtains drawn, a gut-stuffer who’ll cram a knight’s ransom into his big belly and then spew it up for the pleasure of cramming himself over again, a tradesman who’ll pawn the honour of his crown to a Frenchman, and before God, a man who’ll have it said that his own brother called him a bastard.”
“Dickon, listen. He may really have said it. Think what he said to me about Edward years ago. He’d say anything: and if he did, Edward is right to punish him.”
“My lass, he may have said it. Where does that take us. Edward should have had more care than ever not to drag our name through all the kennels of England. He should have taken George in private and beaten him within an inch of his life with his own hands: and he’d have done it once, as I’d do it now. But if the Plantagenets of York are to show their sores to the world like lepers at a town-gate, I know whom I may thank. Anne, I am afraid I have my eyes open, and for the first time since I was weaned. Oh God, I could forgive Edward seventy times seven, as our Saviour told us to: but not every time, not each pitiful time I’ve given him a chance to hurt me. I trusted him to be the King our father would have been if he had lived: and all he did after Towton was to fool it with one wench after another until your father threw him out of the realm like a dismissed groom. I trusted him to give me honourable work, and he set me to heading men he’d sworn to pardon. I trusted him to help me be a good Lord to our poor folk in the North: and I’ve had to badger and plead, and sue to clerks and lawyers I wouldn’t trust to groom the heels of my horse, to get the few common acts of justice you’d ’ve thought he’d do without asking. I’ve served him better than any other three men in his kingdom, and the upshot is I’m the last man of all whose wants he’ll care for. He can be sure of me, and so he’ll grudge me a smile or a hearing that might be given one of his Greys and Wydvylles. I tell you, by the head of St. Paul, there’s nothing, nothing, nothing I ever trusted him in where he hasn’t betrayed me; nothing, ever. The man I love more than I do the health of my soul, God forgive me, is a fat, sodden, self-seeking playboy who’d break my heart to get a smile from a whore in the gutter: and may the saints have some kind of pity on me somehow, for I still love him.”
“Well?” asked Sir Richard Hawte.
“All well, sir,” said the gaoler, and coughed.
The Tower was a lake of fog in a verge of stone walls that evening. The fog had followed him like a stray cat up the stairs of the Lieutenant’s Lodging and was invading the room. Sir Richard Hawte irritably bade him shut the door.
“What were they doing?’
“The Bishop was praying, sir, and the Duke was having his supper.”
“Good: you may go.”
The man turned half round; hesitated; put on his bonnet and pulled it off again. “Asking your pardon, sir …”
“Yes, what?’
“Have you heard anything more of what’s to become of him, like? The Duke, I mean.”
“Not a word: now get out of here and shut that door after you.”
The gaoler got out. Sir Richard Hawte had been sharp-tempered, and everyone in the Tower had been, since the day, a month back now, when the Duke of Clarence was carried back in procession to his cell from Westminster, the edge of the axe turned toward him, attainted by Parliament of high treason. It had come as a surprise. Everybody had said he would be acquitted. The King, they said, would not see sentence of death and disinheritance passed on his own brother. They had been wrong there.
The gaoler, whose name was Miles Forest, was interested in politics. Plenty of folk had told him how things went that day before the Lords when the Duke took his trial: but, as they said, the mind shrank from dwelling on it, the quarrel between those two brothers, and such brothers, seemed so sad. No one spoke against the Duke but the King and a few witnesses who behaved more as if they were accusers. No one answered the King except the Duke. The rest of the Lords sat with their eyes down; could not bear it when King Edward told the tale of what his brother was supposed to have done. He h
ad cherished the Duke, he said, as tenderly as any creature could his natural brother and had made him the richest man in England, and the Duke had paid him by taking sides with Kingmaker in the year ’seventy. Aye, thought Miles Forest, and so he did; but that’s dead and done now. Why would he want to bring that up again? Then the Duke had made a scandal when Mr. Stacy and Mr. Burdet got their deserts. So he had, too, and very silly of him: but was anybody going to believe he had really gone about saying the King was a necromancer, a poisoner and a bastard? No very likely witnesses had been produced to show it. But then, if it weren’t so, why had the King solemnly told the Lords that he could not be answerable for the public peace if the Duke were let alone?
I never heard tell of such a thing, Miles Forest decided, not in all my time. Wicked King John that died of the devil in his belly did nothing like this: to stand up and ask the nobility to judge his own brother to death. I don’t wonder the Duke of Gloucester refused to be there. They say he’s all at work to have the sentence undone again; and God speed him. We never had such doings in England. We don’t want them.
Turning the corner of the Bell Tower and going along under the West wall toward the Beauchamp Tower, coughing and spitting, he met a fellow. There was too much fog to see his face, and he challenged without thinking.
“Who goes?”
“Who goes yourself, Miles. Don’t be such an addlewit.”
“Nay, is that you, Will?”
“It’s not my ghost.”
“Whorish night, isn’t it?”
“Proper bastard: want a sup? I’ve some claret here.”
“God love you, man. Where in the saints’ names d’you nip it from?”
“The Constable’s butler: here, take hold.”
The leather jack was passed to him. He tipped it with a slopping sound and gulped. The wine was sourish.
“May you live long, man. I’ve just been to old Hawte.”
“What’s he to say for himself?”
“Get out and shut the door. Damn you. Damn the Duke. Damn everyone.”
“Ah, he’s always so nowadays. Any news?”
“Oh, him?” He nodded sideways and forward in the dark toward the Bowyer Tower.
“Aye.”
“Not a whisper.”
“They’ll never make away with him, Miles?”
“Well, he’s attainted. Lord High Steward passed his sentence. Commons of Parliament sent up a petition to have him ended.”
“What in the name of twenty devils did they do that for?”
“Thought it’d please the King, I reckon.”
“His own brother: nay, he’ll never be put away. It wouldn’t be Christian. There’s never such a thing been done since King Arthur.”
“Aye, well, that may be. But it’s not King Arthur we’ve got now, look you. It’s King Edward.”
“He’s a hard master on us, with his cursed benevolences, and subsidies and all manner of devilries. Aye, God’s teeth, he’s a hard master: but I’ll never credit that he’d have his brother’s blood on him.”
“He had Holy Harry’s, didn’t he? But I tell you what. It’s his other brother’ll put a stop to it.”
“Duke o’ Gloucester?”
“That’s your man. Listen, I was talking to a servant of his this morning. Give us another pull of that jack.”
“Pox on you, have you a fire in your guts?”
“I’m so dry, Will, I couldn’t spit as far as the ground.” The jack was given him again.
“God bless you, Will, and may you never wear horns. Here, I’ve only taken enough to wet my mouth.”
“Aye, but with a mouth your size … Jesus be with us, listen!”
A deep, frightening sound, a little like the bark of a cannon, but prolonged, came suddenly over the moat and wall. It was the roar of one of the lions in the dens at the Lion Gate. Instantly, the others answered it, and crash and crash of their voices, thickened by fog, rolled over the ground. They were joined, after a second, by the shriller cries of leopards, miawling like giant tomcats; and then the whole pandemonium was slashed through and through by the devilish screams of a hyena. The outcry did not subside. The men could almost hear the lions draw breath after each explosion of roars to start again. It was as though the fog were populated by noisy demons. After what appeared a long while, the voices fell silent one after another, a single lion closing the tumult with a rolling of short broken grunts.
“What’s come to ’em to-night, in the devil’s name?” Miles Forest said.
“If you’d ask me,” Will Slater told him, “I’d say something unholy had just come into this Tower. Beasts know such things.”
“The cross of Christ between us and harm.” Miles Forest blessed himself.
“Amen: go on with what you were saying the Duke of Gloucester’s servant told you.”
“Oh, him: he told me when he heard the sentence was passed the Duke was like a man in a fit. Like a man in a fit, he said. He hadn’t looked for it any more than the rest of us. He went stiff, he said, and couldn’t speak, and his eyes glared to frighten you. Then he yelled for his barge and off to the Palace, and he’s been at the King ever since. It’s the talk of them all, I hear, the anger he’s got against the Queen and the Lord Rivers and the way he’s rated the King to his face. He said, this servant fellow, his master’s contrived a secret audience with the King to-night, no Queen to be there or none of them, and when that’s achieved the Duke of Clarence’ll walk out of here as free as a bird.”
“And I hope he does so,” said Will. “With all my heart I do. I’m fairly sorry for him, and that tale of treason’s moonshine, if you ask me. It’s the Queen’s nasty spite.”
“Like enough: eh, I wish I might’ve had a word with our King before he ever married the widow Elizabeth.”
“Go and rub your arse on a thistle, man; what’d you’ve said to him?”
“I’d ’ve said this. I’d ’ve said: Think on, your Grace, there’s them that’s born to be ruled like me and there’s them that’s born to rule like you, and that’s the nature of things. But don’t go to set up one that was born to be ruled, like your lousy widow, to be one that rules, for the rest of them that was born to be ruled won’t love her.”
“Aye, you’re an orator: and shall I tell you where the King would’ve set you up? Over the Bridge on a spike to poison the crows.”
“Well, there’s many a poor soul as honest as me that he’s set up there. He’s a changed man since the French journey, Will.”
“Ah, God rot and consume that journey. It beggared us all to fill half-a-dozen Lords’ sleeves with gold.”
“Aye, and fill all the roads of the country with robbers: and what do we get for it?”
“Better trade, they say.”
“Let them say it. There’s none of us London folk’ll be any the happier for it, not with the Earl of Rivers as Chief Butler.”
“That’s a true word. Look you, Miles, what d’you reckon he’s gone and clapped up Dr. Stillington for?”
“Ask about. I’m not in the Privy Council.”
“To put a Bishop in hold: he must have some cause or other. It’s a grave thing to do.”
“You’re right. It is. All I know is, he’s a very decent soul for a Bishop. I looked in there about an hour back, and there he was, God damn me, down on his two knees praying like a holy hermit: and he’s as patient as you could wish. I reckon there’s good Bishops just as there’s good folk of all kinds.”
There were steps in the fog and a voice calling: “Miles Forest and Will Slater, is that you clacking there?”
“Aye.”
“Then stretch your fat legs the two of you and get on up to Sir Richard Hawte. You’re summoned.”
“We will, then.’
They went through damp obscurity toward the fuzzy lights of windows in the Lodging, and climbed the stair. Miles Forest wondered why they were wanted; hoped no one had escaped. It could be a pardon for the Duke of Clarence, he thought, if the Duke of Glo
ucester’s had his audience with the King now. That fellow told me it was all over the Palace the King was only waiting to be sued to a little more to reverse the sentence.
He knocked at Sir Richard Hawte’s door and was called in. Sir Richard had his back to the fireplace and his hands under the tail of his gown; was biting his lips. There was another man in the room. Miles Forest stared at him. A friar’s dirty habit sloped forward and outward over a huge belly and hung thence straight down. A hood, drawn in close, made a frame round a broad, glistening, snub-nosed face like a brass mask, yellowish and abominable. Miles Forest remembered Will Slater’s saying that something unholy had come into the Tower. It had. There was an abysmal wickedness in those hanging, sweaty jowls, that wide mouth with a set between a smirk and a sneer. Below the broad, menacing forehead, the eyes were like two black rats peeping from holes in a haystack. The friar stood with his hands in his sleeves, rocking comfortably from foot to foot and missing, it could be seen, nothing that was said or done.
Sir Richard Hawte’s face was a little paler than when Miles Forest had seen it last. He spoke in a quick voice.
“Forest, this is Friar Bungay, from whom you will take certain instructions.”
The name explained everything to Miles Forest. Friar Bungay was a legend. It was said the old Duchess of Bedford had found him first and he had helped her by necromancy to get her daughter married to King Edward. Now he assisted the King in his search for the Philosopher’s Stone and, so it was hinted, in the construction of wax images and the concoction of foul potions and the conjuration of those whom a man invokes only to his loss and never, in the last upshot, to his gain. Few people had seen him: but the hangman was known to tap on the door of his lodging after dark, bringing him things he needed from the gibbet: and old country women of bad repute sold him baskets of herbs and toadstools that were not good to eat, and adders and spiders that would make better ingredients for poisons than for medicines. Some people claimed to have seen him hanging about churchyards at night, repeating sentences that were not the Office of the Dead.
“Pax vobiscum.”
His voice was something between a creak and a squelch. Miles Forest did not answer; would have liked to cross himself. The black, moving eyes in the yellow face considered him for a moment and the voice went on:
Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III Page 36
