His words struck so near the truth, and her remorse for Buckingham was so great, that she made no answer.
“How old are you, Elizabeth?” the King was asking.
“Nearly nineteen, Sir.”
“Then it is high time you were married,” he agreed, grinning at some devilish new idea. “All the more so as you always seem to fail to get the husbands of your expectation. Why, I remember in this very room offering to avenge you in France. Your poor father was so choleric about the way the Dauphin jilted you that it may well have hastened his death. And now Henry of Lancaster has failed you!”
“Oh, how I hate you!” murmured Elizabeth. And al though she pressed both hands to her lips his sharp ears must have heard her.
“That is unfortunate, since our destinies have agreed that you must live in my house,” he laughed. “But do not despair, Elizabeth Plantagenet. There is always Master Stillington.”
“Master Stillington?” The name conveyed nothing to her.
“The son of our good Bishop Stillington.”
“The Bishop of Bath who preached sermons proclaiming us bastards to please you!”
“But with no prejudicial feeling, I do assure you—since, being a churchman, this son of his must be a bastard too. All the same, he is a very able young man, and so useful to me that he merits some reward.”
Elizabeth regarded her uncle with horror. “You mean that loathsome, greasy-haired clerk who leers at me from the lower tables in hall?”
“So you have noticed that he is already not without—desire?” jibed Richard.
“I do not notice the antics of menials,” said Elizabeth, at her haughtiest.
Richard went to the door and opened it for her courteously. “But nevertheless I should bear the possibility in mind, Bess,” he advised cheerfully. “Particularly when your singularly persistent mind is tempted to ask other people inconvenient questions.”
ELIZABETH HOPED NEVER TO see her father's room again, for all its sense of security was gone. If Richard had not punished her with public penance as he had the wantonness of Jane Shore, he had humiliated her for her persistency with the threat of this horrible marriage. “There is only Lord Stanley left to whom I can turn for help,” she thought in panic, wishing that his kindly Countess were with him.
Being Steward of the King's Household, Stanley was always about the Court, and he had been her father's friend. Surely he would not stand by and see her married to some ugly byblow of a bishop. But although he was affable to everybody and always jovial to her sisters, she felt sure that he tried to avoid her. He did not want her to appeal or to be drawn in to taking sides even in so personal a matter. He was rich, generous and all the more popular, perhaps, because of his genius for avoiding controversy. Elizabeth had once heard the Duke of Buckingham say that Stanley's power lay less in the fact that he had twenty thousand armed retainers than in the fact that nobody could be sure upon which side they would fight.
Once, after finding the King's cross-eyed scrivener hanging about the passage to her room, she had insisted upon waylaying the Lord Steward. “Uncle Stanley,” she had asked straight out, using the old affectionate title by which they had all called him as children, “do you suppose the King really intends to marry me to that awful Stillington creature?”
“I should think it highly improbable, Lady Bess,” Stanley had told her imperturbably. “Gloucester may shed Plantagenet blood, but, with the fierce family pride he has, he is unlikely to demean it to that extent. And listen, child,” he had added, seeing how alarmed she really was, “my squire, Humphrey Brereton, has always been crazy about you. I will set him as watchdog upon this menial and you will be no more troubled with his prying.”
“But surely, milord, that will make two of them to fear,” objected Mattie, who had gone along with her mistress.
“My dear lady, Humphrey Brereton knows his place,” he had assured her, hurrying away upon some pressing or pretended business. He had spoken blandly enough, but the way he used Richard's old title and obviously attached no importance to the declaration of her illegitimacy set Elizabeth thinking.
“The King must trust a man very much to put him in charge of the very food he eats,” she remarked that evening, watching the efficient way in which Stanley looked over the tables set for one of those lavish banquets by means of which Richard sought to ingratiate himself with the rich aldermen of London.
“Since Henry of Buckingham betrayed him I should think it unlikely that Richard really trusts anybody,” the Queen had answered in that detached way of hers.
“But suppose Stanley were to poison him,” speculated Elizabeth, wondering whether, beneath his bonhomie, the suave, thick-set Lord Steward were ever tempted to do so.
“My dear Bess, the things you imagine!” laughed Anne, who never imagined anything at all. “I am thankful Richard and I are going north to-morrow, if that is the way you croak. Only I do so wish he would not insist upon stopping to grant charters and things in every town we pass through, when all we both want is to push on to Warwick to see our boy!”
The unaccustomed querulousness in Anne's voice made Elizabeth regard her with anxiety. “Are you sure you feel well enough to travel so far?” she asked. “You have been looking so white all day.”
“I am always white. Do they not call me the pale Queen?” sighed Anne. “Besides, Richard disturbs me, sleeping so ill at night. He calls out, waking from some dream; and sometimes when he cannot sleep and the hours of darkness crawl he pulls on his furred bedgown and goes wandering about the Palace.”
From the gallery where they stood Elizabeth could see him talking to Stanley in the hall below. “What ghosts, I wonder, go wandering with him?” she thought.
But she was recalled to reality by the touch of Anne's feverish fingers on her arm. “I wish you were coming with us, Bess,” she was saying. “Usually it is great fun travelling with Richard. He makes such a pageant of it and insists upon my having so many new dresses. But this time, somehow, I feel as if there is something out there on the roads of which I am afraid.”
“All tarradiddle, my dear!” scoffed Elizabeth, to calm her fears. “It is just that you have not been too well lately, and I am sure the fresh country air will do you good. Look, the King is ready now to lead you in to dinner.”
Secretly Elizabeth had been longing to be left alone with her sisters—all the more so as the following day would be the anniversary of her father's death. But when the royal party rode out from Westminster next morning they made such a brave cavalcade that she found herself almost wishing that she, too, were going. As she pushed open a lattice to look down upon them the April air was sweet with spring. There were outriders, the King's standard-bearer, and men-at-arms, with Lord Stanley's imposing figure well in evidence. Lord Lovell, Sir Richard Catesby, Sir Richard Ratcliffe and most of the officials of the house hold were in attendance. Anne, dainty as a little ivory figurine, turned in the saddle of her white jennet to wave good-bye—looking far less fragile with that glow of excitement in her cheeks at the thought of seeing her son. And beside her, with his proud standard flowing in the breeze, rode Richard on his famous charger White Surrey, resplendent with gold-and-crimson trappings.
It was only as the gallant company turned northward out of the Palace courtyard that Elizabeth noticed something amiss. There was no handsome John Green riding a pace or two behind his master. “If he is left behind it can only be that he is sick,” she thought; and, turning hurriedly from the window, bade old Mattie go and make enquiries.
“Please God it be so!” she prayed, laying her plans much as her mother might have done. “The young man has neither wife nor mother, so I can reasonably nurse him until he is convalescent. I will read to him and sit with him. I will even let him make love to me if only I can drag from him what message Gloucester sent to Brackenbury about the boys!” Her heart raced with excitement at the prospect of hearing something definite at last—and with fear of what, in the end, it might prove to be. Eve
n the threat of sharing Will Stillington's bed would not hold her back from such a Heaven-sent opportunity.
But—even supposing Green's devotion to his master were not proof against any woman's wile—her heart's excitement was for nothing. “He is nowhere to be found in the Place,” Mattie told her.
Elizabeth sent for an old groom of her father's who had taught her to ride. “Master Green's horse be gone—and his servant's. But the pair of 'em went yesterday, Madam—and southward,” he said, gazing at her worshipfully.
And in the end the information she sought came to her quite casually. “Oh, John Green?” said the hated Stillington, who wrote out most of the King's orders. “Did you not know, Madam, that he is gone overseas?”
“You mean to France?” Elizabeth brought herself to ask, wondering if the trusted body squire had been sent to spy on Henry of Lancaster.
“Why, no, Madam, not so far as that,” the King's clerk informed her unctuously. “Only across the Solent. If there is anything I can do—”
“Then he may be back soon?” snapped Elizabeth.
“Not for a long while, I should think, Madam,” grinned Stillington. “As a reward for his devoted service the King has made him Receiver of the Wight.”
“A dull appointment, on an island, for the best-looking bachelor at Court,” pouted Cicely, who—like half the Queen's ladies— considered herself in love with him.
“But one where no one is likely to ask him questions!” murmured sagacious old Mattie, setting out her mistress's embroidery frame.
On the ninth day of April, that sad anniversary of the bereavement which had so altered their lives, Elizabeth and her sister were allowed to visit their mother. The King had been quite humane about it when Anne Neville, before departing, had begged the favour for them. “Providing John Nesfield is present,” had been his only stipulation, thereby guarding himself against any further trouble from the Woodville woman's plotting. The poor deposed Queen Dowager was pathetically glad to see them and the loving prattle of her younger children helped to cheer her. The older girls were able to assure her of Anne Neville's kindness and more than once she sighed, envying them their freedom to live publicly at Court. Elizabeth, in Nesfield's presence, could not speak of the disadvantages which went with it when one's birthright had been taken away. All she could tell her mother was that the allowances the King had promised to make them when they left sanctuary had been legally confirmed. Of his proposals for marriages for Cicely and Ann the Queen Dowager was already bitterly aware, and Elizabeth had not the heart to add to her bitterness by speaking of the marriage threat he had made in private to herself.
The hours passed almost happily, but the Queen Dowager clung especially to her eldest daughter at parting. “When Uncle Richard returns I will ask if we may visit you again,” Elizabeth promised, although she hated above everything to ask him for favours.
But a bare week later, when the King's courier rode in mud-splashed and breathlessly from Nottingham, she went again—alone and without permission. She went white-faced and shocked along the corridors to her mother's far-off apartments, and when Nesfield would have kept her out the preoccupied regality of her bearing silenced even him. “Let me pass, Sirrah. I must tell her Grace that my cousin, the King's heir, is dead,” she said, passing through the open doorway without so much as glancing at him.
Her mother rose at sight of her, and by the look of triumph on her face Elizabeth knew that she had heard. “It is the curse you laid upon him. That dreadful curse!” she said, almost accusingly.
“When did the boy die?” asked the elder Elizabeth steadily.
“That day we spent with you—the anniversary of the very day upon which my father died.”
“Then God has been good to me,” the Queen Dowager said with slowly savoured satisfaction. “Three of my sons that fiend slew.”
Elizabeth sat down unceremoniously beside her because she could no longer stand. “They had reached Nottingham when they heard. They were holding Court in the castle there. They did not even know the boy was sick. The messenger says they are beside themselves with grief.”
The Woodville woman stared straight before her into the pit of her own sufferings. “Then they will know now what it is like,” she said scarcely above a whisper.
Elizabeth, too, stared before her in the heavy silence of her mother's meagre room. So this was the fearful thing which poor Anne had felt was out there waiting to meet them on the road. Elizabeth recalled how bravely they had set forth, with their banners and their gorgeous clothes and their happy anticipation; and tried to picture their return—with the empty bleakness of their faces and of their lives. No matter what wrongs she herself had suffered, she could not but be sorry for anyone who had been as kind to her as Anne had been. Yet, strangely enough, in that hour it was Richard whom she was most sorry for. Richard, the man whom she hated. Whatever he had done had been done because he had this son and so could preserve the strength of the dynasty he had sinned for. And now, it seemed, the sinning was left denuded of its better motive, with nothing but the tattered shreds of remorse to clothe its shame.
The Queen's homecoming was sad beyond words. She had gone forth a gay and placid young woman, and came back a sick and heartbroken one. Her warm trills of laughter no longer spilled over the formality of Court life to inspire people's love, and the citizens of London, already deeply suspicious of her husband, saw the date of the Prince of Wales's death as an indication of God's judgement, and so withheld even their pity.
Elizabeth, the tender-hearted, seldom left her; and the King did all he could to comfort her. “You must grow strong again, my sweet, and bear me other sons,” Elizabeth overheard him say, leaning over his wife's bed. But she also caught sight of his twisted face as he said it. For it was difficult to believe that Anne would ever get strong again, and the only child she had ever given him had been born eleven years ago.
Even if the lines about his mouth were deeper and his crisp orders sounded more impatient, he went about his affairs as usual. He was accustomed to suffering in silence and asked for no one's pity. And it was characteristic of his Court that the following Christmastide should be kept as splendidly as ever.
“Will the King let our mother be with us for Christmas Day?” little Katherine had asked wistfully, leaning against Elizabeth's knee.
“The Countess of Richmond is to be allowed to—Lord Stanley told me so,” said her sister Ann.
“And so is his eldest son, Lord Strange,” said Cicely, who believed in seizing all the fun she could before being hustled into a loveless marriage, and was looking for some one to replace John Green.
When the time came it was good to see her and young Ann being flattered by all the personable young courtiers and enjoying the dancing as they used to do; and to hear Katherine and Bridget shrieking with delight over their toys and sweetmeats and carrying out the spirit of the season by sharing them with simple Warwick, who was so much bigger than themselves. Even the Queen roused herself to take part in the festivities and sat in the midst of them to watch the Nativity plays and acrobats and mimes. “Although the mimes are but poor this year without our Dickon!” declared Cicely stoutly.
Since her return to the Palace Elizabeth had never known the King to be so gracious to her. He teased her about the new blooming of her beauty occasioned by freedom and fresh air, saying that his home evidently suited her. And when the Queen ordered a crimson gown pearled with holly leaves for Twelfth Night he insisted upon Elizabeth having one made exactly like it. “That crimson stuff will suit Bess now that she has wild roses in her cheeks,” he had said, coming into his wife's room while the dressmakers had the exquisite stuff spread out. “Though I am desolate at the thought that they may be Lancastrian roses!” It was not like Richard to be tactless and both women knew that the comparison was unkind to Anne. Elizabeth saw the raised brows of the 'tiring-women. In any other circumstances the lovely creation she was being offered would have delighted her, but she was uncomfort
ably aware that to wear a dress exactly like the Queen's would cause talk about the Court; and, more important still, that Anne herself must be displeased. “How can Richard be thinking about clothes when we have no child to enjoy Twelfth Night?” she had cried indignantly after he was gone.
“Because he can feel two completely different kinds of things at once,” said Elizabeth, realizing even as she spoke how odd it was for her to be explaining a man to his own wife. It used to be the other way round, but her mind had dwelt so much and so searchingly on the man of late. Seeing that all the preparations and festivities and dressmakers had tired the poor Queen out, she gently persuaded her to lie down upon her day-bed. “Madam, I did not seek this,” she said soberly, when they were alone.
“I know that you did not,” agreed the Queen at once. “Have I not already told you that when I know people well I trust their motives better than what other people say?” Impulsively she caught at her friend's hand, looking up at her with special urgency. “I know that I am often peevish these days,” she added. “But, whatever may happen and whatever people may say, I want you always to remember that, dear Bess.”
THE SEASONS HAD GONE round again since that splendid cavalcade had had all its gaiety quenched at Nottingham— his “castle of care,” as Richard now called it. Elizabeth stood at the Queen's window at Westminster looking down upon the greening garden. “The spring flowers will soon be in bloom again,” she said to cheer her.
But poor Anne was not to be comforted. “I shall not live to see the spring,” she said listlessly from her bed. “Do not the physicians all agree that I have the same wasting sickness which took my sister and my little son? And now Richard tells me it is because of the contagion that he must shun my bed. But I do not believe him. There must be some other reason.”
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