“Naturally, since he is her only son,” smiled Elizabeth.
“But all reports confirm the trend of her devotion. Doctor Lewis here, who has just returned from Brittany, has been telling me in what high esteem Henry of Richmond is held.”
The clever little doctor was quick to take up his cue. “He is handsome and prudent and a great lover of learning,” he said, his shrewd eyes having observed Stafford's gift book lying beside the Princess's embroidery.
“And his mother says it is high time he took a wife,” added the Dowager Queen.
“Probably he will marry the Duke of Brittany's daughter. I heard the French Ambassador talking about it the other day,” remarked Elizabeth, with polite indifference.
But her mother leaned forward and placed a hand upon her knee. “The message was particularly for you,” she said impressively.
Elizabeth came out of her own private thoughts with a start. Her blue eyes stared almost uncomprehendingly. During her short life she had become accustomed to being offered as matrimonial bait for some political reason or another; but the implications of her mother's words appeared to have neither rhyme nor reason. “A message for me about Henry Tudor of Lancaster?” she exclaimed; and the scornful abhorrence in her voice was as unmistakable as it was purely hereditary.
“Better a well-disposed Lancastrian than a treacherous Yorkist!” snapped the Dowager Queen.
“But my father would never have heard of such a thing,” stammered Elizabeth, realizing that the suggestion was being made in earnest.
“Were your father alive to hear there would be no need of such a thing,” pointed out his widow. “But times have changed and we must change with them.”
“Have you forgotten, Madam, that Henry Tudor is attainted of treason and still in exile?”
“He might be persuaded to come home.”
“Persuaded?”
“Doctor Lewis goes back and forth, seeing to accounts of the vast estates and bearing loving messages from mother to son. The Lancastrian heir is not so cut off from affairs here as you suppose.”
The fantastic scheme began to unfold itself as a reality. None but a Woodville, thought its victim, could have conceived anything so daringly incongruous. “What chance would he have of even landing here against the will and ability of Richard of Gloucester?” asked Elizabeth contemptuously, unconscious of the involuntary compliment she paid her uncle.
Her mother's slim shoulders lifted themselves in that inimitable French shrug of hers. “None, at the moment,” she admitted. “But married to King Edward's eldest daughter—”
When an ambitious woman's world crumbles about her she can still meddle in the advancement of her children, thought Elizabeth bitterly. “Nothing would induce me to marry him,” she said, and, having always rendered sweet obedience to both her parents, was amazed at her own words.
The Dowager Queen flushed red with anger. She dismissed her new physician with a gracious but hurried gesture. “I think you forget, Elizabeth, that in his will your father expressly left me charge of my daughters' marriages. Even our enemies who dispute your legitimacy cannot dispute that,” she said.
Elizabeth knew that that was true, and that scheming was indeed the breath of life to her. This latest idea seemed so far beyond the realms of possibility that one should be glad of it, perhaps, since it helped to take the poor Queen's mind off cruel realities. All the same, it angered Elizabeth intensely. “Do you love the white rose of York so little?” she demanded, standing defiantly before her mother as soon as they were alone.
The older woman rose, too, and faced her. “I hate Richard of Gloucester,” she answered, tight-lipped.
“So you must plot with a Lancastrian? White rose or red, I suppose it can be all the same to you Woodvilles!” accused Elizabeth Plantagenet, for the first time insulting her mother's birth. They were no longer Queen and subject, mother and daughter, as they stood there, but two women racked beyond endurance or courtesy. Yet without the memory of Stafford's kisses still warm in her heart Elizabeth could not have said it. Apart from her horror of union with a rival dynasty, he had made the thought of any marriage of diplomacy abhorrent to her.
Before such rare defiance the Dowager Queen's vivacity wilted to self-pity. She leaned back in her chair and asked for her women, complaining to high Heaven that the one person upon whom she had supposed she could always count should so insult her in adversity. Automatically Elizabeth began ministering to her, all anger spent. After all, it seemed, it had been but an idle conversation, ending in the kind of scene which her mother always worked up to whenever life began to stagnate. And surely there was no need for anxiety, since, however much she might want her daughters to marry, there was nothing she could do about it while shut up in sanctuary. “Probably I shall never marry anybody,” thought Elizabeth, almost too harassed to care.
“You do not consider me at all,” her mother was wailing, as Elizabeth dutifully dabbed rose-water to her brow.
“It is the boys who need considering,” said Elizabeth, in the flat, unemotional voice with which she unconsciously countered her mother's facile spurts of emotion. “In what way would your proposal benefit them? Judging by what my father has told me of Henry of Lancaster, it would not get Edward back his crown.”
“No, but it might save their lives.”
Elizabeth straightened herself with the damp kerchief still in her hand, as though physically meeting the impact of the thought.
“We could make it a condition,” went on the Woodville woman, softly pressing home the argument which Lewis had suggested to her. “You could offer him your precious Plantagenet blood, couldn't you, in return for a promise that he would keep your brother honourably in his household?”
An odd assortment of thoughts and memories passed through Elizabeth's mind before she answered. A passionate longing for the warm security of her father's presence—an enchanting echo of young Richard's laughter—the firm tenderness of Tom Stafford's mouth. “I do not see that Henry of Richmond has the least hope of landing,” she said at last, with detached common sense. “And as for promises, has not Uncle Gloucester sworn exactly the same thing? Why should I sell myself in the hope that a Lancastrian's word may prove more reliable than a Yorkist's?”
“Because your uncle has already broken his word. He has not kept them in his household but in prison,” pointed out their mother incontrovertibly.
Elizabeth stood aside as the solicitous waiting-women came to escort the Dowager Queen to her room. “I begin not to believe much in any promise,” she said sadly.
YOUNG RICHARD PLANTAGENET was kneeling on the window-seat in one of the smaller rooms of the royal apartments in the Tower and pressing his nose against the leaded panes in an effort to see something more interesting than the stone wall of the tower across the garden. “Do you remember when Dorset showed us the menagerie down by the moat where they keep all those wild beasts?” he asked over his shoulder.
His elder brother Edward, sitting at a table in the middle of the room, grunted disinterested assent.
“That day I left Westminster Cicely said I might see them again,” persisted Richard, craning his neck in the likeliest direction. “And Bess called after me 'Remember the lions!'”
“They said it to cheer you, I expect,” said Edward, listlessly turning over the pages of his book.
“Do you suppose Uncle Gloucester would let us?”
“Is it likely, since he keeps us cooped up in these two rooms and will not even let us dine in hall any more?”
“We could perhaps ask Will Slaughter to take us,” suggested Richard, sliding restlessly to the floor.
“You could ask him. Surely it is not to be expected that I should ask a servant to let me see my own lions?” replied Edward pompously. “Besides, he will do anything for you.”
“I expect nobody dares to disobey an order from Gloucester now he is King,” decided his younger nephew, after turning over the chances in his bored but fertile mind. “Well,
let us play at something instead.”
“You can play soldiers with your chessmen,” said Edward more kindly. “It will help to pass the time until Slaughter, or that ruffian Forest, brings the next abominable meal.”
Richard stuck out his underlip at his chessmen. He was tired of playing alone. Cicely and Ann, although they were girls, had always entered into his ideas and been fun to play with. When he had first left them his uncle had received him charmingly and everybody at the Tower had been kind. Aunt Anne Neville's distrait gentleness had soothed his homesickness, and there had been amusing minstrels at mealtimes and his cousin Edward's puppy to play with. But now Will Slaughter or his cross-eyed underling, Miles Forest, always bolted the door when they went out, and it was days since he and Edward had seen anyone else. Sighing, Richard drew from his wallet two or three pieces of Master Caxton's leaden type and set them upon the table. There were not enough of them to build a castle, but somehow the sight and feel of them comforted him. He had been playing with them when he last stood by his father's table, and now he kept them as a kind of talisman. Gloucester, or the Council, had taken away his family and his fun and even his dukedom. He was plain Sir Richard Plantagenet now, so they told him. They could not take away his knighthood, he supposed. That and the little pieces of lead were all he had left of the wonderful things his father had given him. But it was not in Richard's nature to repine. “If you won't play let us learn to dance,” he suggested, sweeping the type back into his wallet and tugging irritatingly at his brother's book.
Edward was much bigger than he, but, to Richard's surprise, instead of cuffing his head he flung away from him and went and stood with his back to him by the empty hearth. “It would be better to learn to die!” he said, in a strangled sort of way.
“Why, Ned!” exclaimed Richard, all the teasing eagerness wiped from his face.
And suddenly, as if strained beyond endurance, Edward covered his face with both hands and burst into tears. “Now that that fiend has taken my c-crown I pray to God he will at least leave me my l-life!” he blurted out between sobs. Richard watched his heaving shoulders and was terribly sorry for him; but this was the wild dramatic way in which their mother sometimes talked, and during his sojourn in sanctuary his highly sensitive nerves had been too often rasped by it. “Who should want to kill a boy of thirteen?” he asked. “What have you ever done to hurt anyone?”
“It is enough that I was born my father's eldest son,” said Edward, who had been made to read more history.
“Well, at least we are with our own relations here,” said Richard, trying to soothe him. “Not hunted, as our father was, by our enemies the Lancastrians.”
“An enemy in one's own camp is more dangerous than a dozen outside,” said the lad who should have been King, slouching despondently back to his chair. “I do not like it that nobody comes near us—or knows where we are.”
“Perhaps the new King is busy and has forgotten us,” said Richard forlornly. And then, seeing that his brother would not be comforted, he fell to dancing by himself. Up and down the sombre room he went, every now and then passing the high arched window through which a shaft of moated sunlight fell upon his graceful, childlike figure. And because it was not very amusing to dance alone he had soon invented a partner. Each time he reached the end of the room he would bow to her, handing her gallantly in and out of the intricacies of the dance and making her admiring little speeches under his breath as he had seen his father do when leading the dance with witty Jane Shore. His vivid imagination had created a world beautiful with candlelight and elegantly dressed guests and lilting music, and so happily was he living in it that he failed to notice the quiet opening of the door.
Edward's fair head was still hidden desolately in his arms on the table, so it chanced that neither of them saw their uncle standing there watching them. “So you can still dance?” said the new King, after a moment or two.
At sound of his pleasant voice Edward's head shot up angrily. His chair was scraped back with a gesture of defiance even while he made a shamed and futile effort to hide his tears. Young Richard, arrested in some strange dance steps of his own invention, just stared in surprise; then, recollecting himself, bowed politely.
As Will Slaughter closed the door from the outside King Richard came forward into the room. “And who is your partner?” he asked, still ignoring his elder nephew.
It was seldom that young Richard was tongue-tied, but, as he had once told Bess, he was never certain how to take the uncle for whom he had been named.
“Some May Day sweetheart? Or your wife, perhaps?” rallied the King, entering into his imaginings so as to set him at his ease.
“My wife is dead,” said Richard solemnly.
The King looked momentarily bewildered and then laughed. “Why, yes, of course I remember. When you were about six they betrothed you to the rich Duke of Norfolk's daughter. Another of your mother's clever moves!”
“It was an honour for the Mowbrays of Norfolk!” spluttered Edward furiously from the middle of the room.
The new King's eyes narrowed dangerously, but mercifully at that particular moment Richard found his tongue. “Her name was Anne too,” he volunteered; and either the name or the sudden thawing of the boy's shyness must have averted the older Plantagenet's anger. “So we two not only bear the same names but are both married to an Anne,” he said, his manner wholly delightful.
“And it was my wife I was dancing with,” confided his younger nephew, trying to pull forward a carved chair which was considerably too heavy for him. “We met only once, at our betrothal. You were away in Scotland, I think, Sir. But I wish you could have seen her. She was sweet as a rosebud, was she not, Ned? And she had a wreath of white roses on her hair. But the ceremony in St. Stephen's Chapel was very long and she grew very sleepy towards the end. I think I could have loved her almost as much as I love Bess.”
At his invitation the King seated himself in the high-backed chair, stretching his long supple fingers along the arms of it. “You all seem to love your sister Elizabeth very much,” he said. “I have been away soldiering so much that I scarcely know her. And when I come back your mother insists upon shutting you all up in sanctuary. What is she really like?” He paid them the compliment of talking to them as if they were grown people, and looked particularly at Edward, trying to charm away his sulks and draw him into the conversation; and possibly expecting from him a more disinterested report.
“She is not clever like our mother,” answered Edward, more civilly.
“So I should suppose,” said the King, his thin lips twitching to a smile.
“But when things go wrong she always knows what to do,” put in Richard. In his eager loyalty to Bess and his joy at having a visitor he went and leaned against the arm of his uncle's chair much as the little Prince of Wales might have done; and the King, knowing himself to be awkward with children, was secretly pleased. “You mean that she has ingenuity?” he asked.
Their two intelligent, sensitive faces were close together and young Richard looked back at him, trustingly. And it was the trustfulness, more than the older boy's antagonism, which hurt. “I am afraid I am not quite sure what ingenuity means, Sir,” he confessed. “But when Ned let his pet monkey loose at a banquet it was Bess who covered it quickly with her skirt so that it shouldn't pick walnuts off the French Ambassador's plate.”
“I can easily suppose that too,” said the King, realizing that, after all, he had not managed to get all the danger that was to be reckoned with safely imprisoned in this one small room.
Edward hated him the more for his sarcasm, but was learning the advantages which might accrue from courtesy. “It was kind of you to come to see us, Sir,” he said.
The King seemed to pull himself back from the long vista of his thoughts. “I came to see you, Edward, because I am going away. To make sure that Will Slaughter is looking after you as befits the son of Lady Elizabeth Grey.”
The sternness of his voice seemed t
o escape Richard. “Where are you going, please, Sir?” he asked, with the liberty which his own father had allowed his extreme youth.
Mellowed by the thought of being in the saddle again, the King settled himself more comfortably in his chair. “Up through the Midlands to Oxford—a few days in Gloucester, of course—and then to our own town of York.” In speaking to this eager little kinsman he found himself talking of it quite involuntarily as “our” town.
“You will like that much better than stuffy council-chambers!” grinned young Richard, with quick intuition. “And will Aunt Anne—the Queen, I mean—go with you?”
“She will go direct to York. A gesture to our northern subjects which every wise Sovereign should make after his crowning in the south.”
“And Cousin Edward?”
“We are both hoping so. But he is rather young for so long a journey considering that he has been sick these last few days.”
If the King's anxiety was patent, so was his nephew's envy. “I am a little older and not at all sick,” he stated, not daring to ask outright. And then, as the King did not answer, he fetched a prodigious sigh and added, “I do so ache to be out in the sunshine. The Duke of Buckingham gave me a new pony and I have scarcely ridden him.”
The King laughed, rumpled his red-gold hair and got up, conscious of a queer reluctance. “Clearly, my dear Dickon, your duty is to stay here and cheer your brother until we come back,” he told him, glancing disapprovingly at his elder nephew's slovenly, untied points. “It would be a good thing perhaps if you could teach him—to dance.”
Disappointed, Richard watched him go. “Could you perhaps, of your kindness, give our love to Bess?” he ventured, seizing his final chance. “I think she may be anxious about us.”
“Why should she be anxious?” enquired the King, in that thin kind of voice which made people feel foolish and uncertain.
“I—do not know,” faltered Richard, made conscious of a lapse of manners which he scarcely understood.
The Tudor rose Page 7
