Gradually the true explanation was seeping into Elizabeth's mind, quieting the beating of her heart but filling her with unspeakable horror. She remembered that she was wearing her brother Edward's suit, that her fair hair was arranged like his, and that she must seem spectrally illumined with the darkness all around her and the lamp above her head. She knew she must be deathly pale. And that Richard had not heard her come into the gallery, but had suddenly looked round and seen her standing there. As he stared at her in horror she was shaken to the soul by the knowledge that he believed her to be Edward's ghost.
His dagger clicked back into its sheath, useless against a murdered wraith. He covered his face with both hands as if he could bear no more, and fled down the passage back to his tormented bed. She supposed that no one else had even seen him shake with fear.
The moment Elizabeth heard his door bang she forced her trembling legs to move. Across that guilt-haunted gallery and the waving tapestries she ran, not daring to stop until Mattie let her into the familiar comfort of her own room.
Wildly she fell upon her knees, burying her face in the old woman's lap. Grief, horror, moral relief and gratitude for her deliverance were among the conflicting emotions that tore at her. “I know now. I know at last that he did it!” she cried incoherently. “Even my father could not blame me for betraying him. Whatever may come of the Lancastrians' plan, I regret nothing that I have done this night.”
ALTHOUGH IT WAS ONLY August, the ling on the Yorkshire moors was burned to autumnal brown. The oaks looked clumped and heavy in the fullness of their foliage. The strong walls of Sheriff Hutton Castle were bathed in sunlight, and across the still water of the moat where the far end of the tiltyard merged into open country the ground shimmered in the noonday heat. It was almost too hot to move, and down in the outer bailey the Constable's hounds sprawled in the small patch of shade against the gatehouse tower.
Yet Elizabeth Plantagenet paced restlessly about the battlements, her mind too tensed to endure physical immobility.
It seemed hours since her young cousin Warwick had returned from his ride, docile between his two attendants, and looked up from the drawbridge to wave. And now it was nearly dinnertime and he had slipped away from them to sit near her, singing tunelessly as he thrummed upon the lute she had brought him from London. “At least it gives him pleasure that I am here!” she thought. For herself it was misery, because she was not allowed to go out of the castle at all. She was both a prisoner and a prize. Like the legendary princesses in their ivory towers, she was part of the guerdon for which two princes fought.
“Blanc sanglier and Beaufort's son
Are fighting for the crown—”
sang Warwick; and the silly jingle which he must have picked up from the guardroom went round and round in her aching head as giddily as the heat seemed to swim in the tiltyard. “Why must the poor lad choose to sing that?” she thought, pushing back the moist tendrils of her hair. “Of course it is only the means to the crown, not me, they are fighting for!”
“The white boar beats the Welshman back
And knocks his castles down,”
went on the boy's high-pitched falsetto.
“Heaven help me if he does!” prayed Elizabeth, sinking exhausted on to a low crenel in the wall. “The white boar being Richard, he will either kill me or force me to marry him. Neither of them loves me, but Henry Tudor does not kill people. He hates violence. His mother said so.”
Elizabeth strained her eyes in an effort to see across the endless moors. If only she knew what was happening out there beyond them in the rest of England! If only someone would send her some news! Even bad news, she felt, would be more bearable than this suspense. All these important people who took one side or the other for politic motives did not realise how much more intimately it concerned her. The two descendants of prolific Edward the Third might be fighting even now for the crown, and because she had a better right to it than either of them she would be made to marry whichever of them won!
“This waiting will drive me as witless as poor Warwick!” she thought; and tried to steady her nerves by deliberately going over everything which had happened up to the day when she had left London. She suspected now that the King had heard of the Tudor's plans for invasion even when he was keeping that last splendid Christmas at Westminster; and as soon as he knew for certain that Henry's borrowed fleet had set sail he had sent her under strong escort into the heart of his own country, so that the invader should not get her. Some weeks before that he had had to give up for a time his own intention of marrying her. The temper of the people had grown too ugly. So ugly and menacing that he had even issued a public declaration to the effect that these rumours about his marrying his niece were all malicious gossip, and that he had never entertained any such idea. And because they went on muttering that Elizabeth had been living in the Palace since his wife's death, he had sent her for a time to live in Lord Stanley's town house. Considering his underlying mistrust of the man, that must have been the last thing Richard wanted to do, she supposed. But the indignation of the Londoners and the secret treachery among his barons had forced him to make many unwilling concessions of late.
It had been wonderful to be living freely in an ordinary friendly household, and the few days she had spent there had given her the longed-for opportunity to hear and discuss all the latest developments of those plans which had first been outlined to her so secretly in a tavern. And to her delight Stanley's intrepid Countess had risked a secret visit to them. Even now, sitting on the gatehouse battlements so many miles away, Elizabeth's strained face relaxed into a smile as she recalled those brief, happy hours during which she had listened with rapt intentness to Margaret of Richmond talking about her son. “If he is anything like you I shall be happy with him,” she had prophesied, having already formed a deep attachment for the kind and spirited woman whom she hoped would soon be her mother-in-law.
“He should be happy, too, with anyone so lovely,” Margaret had said. “Poor Henry, who has never known a father or had a home since he was a child!”
Elizabeth remembered how her pity had been stirred, contrasting such misfortune with her own happy girlhood.
“My first husband, the Earl of Richmond, died three months before Henry was born, and I was only fifteen,” Margaret had explained. “Without my brother-in-law Jasper Tudor I don't know what we should have done.”
“Only fifteen, Madam!” Elizabeth had exclaimed.
“The Tudors were ambitious and we Beauforts are descended from John of Gaunt, so Owen Tudor and Katherine of Valois got me for their elder son Edmund as soon as they could. But of course you know all that. Perhaps I loved Henry all the more because I was so young and he was all I had left,” Margaret had added, as if apologizing for all she had since done for him.
Elizabeth remembered how she had sat entranced, listening to the romantic story of all that had happened to them. Margaret, the child-widow, had brought him up in Pembroke Castle until he was four, when the fortune of civil war had driven Lancastrian Jasper Tudor out, and then her own father, King Edward, had given the castle and the custody of both of them to Lord Herbert.
“Were they unkind to you?” Elizabeth had asked anxiously.
“Oh no, they were always kind,” Margaret had assured her. “I loved Lady Herbert, and after Jasper was exiled and I was forced to marry again and leave Henry she was like a mother to him. The Herberts had a family of lively girls, so he was not too lonely. But when he was barely sixteen your father tried to get hold of him, and Jasper managed to get a ship and take him to Brittany.”
Elizabeth's memory of all his hazardous adventures which followed was slightly muddled because she had been thinking about the lively girls who had been his companions. “Were they beautiful?” she had asked.
“Who?” Margaret had asked, breaking off in the middle of her thrilling story.
“Those Herbert girls.”
“Really, I do not remember. There was one of them,
Maude, whom he specially liked, I remember. But of course he was only a lad,” she had added hastily, as if suddenly understanding the reason for Elizabeth's curiosity.
“Not much younger than you were when you fell in love with Edmund Tudor,” she remembered saying, and blushed at the memory of such gaucherie.
But Margaret had only smiled and explained that Henry was not headstrong like herself, and that if, being half Celtic, his head had been stuffed with romantic dreams, that was probably as far as any of his amours had got.
Elizabeth was sensible enough to appreciate how much it would mean to the Countess to get her son home after so long a separation, and how she and people like Bishop Morton looked upon it as a Christian duty to try to put an end to these interminable wars of the red and white roses. But even while realising that she, Elizabeth, was but a necessary part of their plans, she could not restrain her thoughts from dwelling more and more upon Henry, the chivalrous knight, who was coming to rescue her from a marriage which must be dreaded in the sight of God and man.
She got up and leaned upon the battlements, trying to imagine how they would meet, her present anxiety almost forgotten. But it was difficult to picture him. He was only someone who had been described to her by other people, and since he had always been abroad she had never even seen a painting of him. Whereas Richard Plantagenet's face and figure and movements had been familiar to her all her life. They were sharp and clear-cut in her mind, insistently before her. In moments of irresolution she always made herself think of him as he had looked that night in the Long Gallery, hideously condemned by guilty fear; but since then she had seen him several times riding out to review his troops or talking to Sir Robert Brackenbury about the Tower defences, and almost always he had been wearing his blazoned surcoat and the burnished armour he had worn at the battle of Tewkesbury. A man who, like her father, became more vital at the threat of physical danger and went capably about his plans for meeting it.
During those last few days before she left the Palace he had seemed to stand out all the more spectacularly because he stood so much alone. He had issued a cleverly worded proclamation calling upon his people to defend their country, and consequently the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Lovell and many other faithful friends were away raising troops for him in their own counties; and just before the news of Henry's landing had reached him Lord Stanley had purposely asked leave to visit his estates. Because he had pleaded ill health the King could not very well deny him, particularly as he dared not offend a family who between them owned most of Lancashire and Cheshire. But he would need someone else of high standing about the Palace to take his Lord Steward's place, he said. And unfortunately for Stanley his eldest son was present at the time. It was all being done as suavely as possible, but everybody knew that young Lord Strange was really kept at Court as a hostage for his father's fidelity.
“It is almost impossible to trick that man!” the Countess had said, commiserating with her husband's anxiety while superintending preparations for their journey into Lancashire.
But Henry Tudor, it seemed, had managed to do so a few days later. Hearing that his enemy intended to land at Milford, Richard thought only of the small port of that name near Southampton, and ordered his fleet to patrol all that part of the coast facing France; but the Tudor took a wide sweep round Land's End and landed at Milford Haven in Wales, disembarking only a few miles from Pembroke. Not only had he upset all Richard's military calculations but his move gave him all the advantage of a homecoming rather than an invasion. Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, was with him, of course; and the castle threw wide its gates in welcome. Seeing that popular warrior back again, all Wales rose in support of his nephew, marching beneath the fiery-red dragon banner of Cadwallader, the old British King from whom the Tudors claimed descent. Even now they were probably gathering more and more support as they swarmed across the border into England.
So much Elizabeth had heard; and she knew, too, that Richard was at Nottingham, his “castle of care,” with twelve thousand men. Since then the Constable of Sheriff Hutton had heard nothing; but anyone looking out across the dried-up country could be sure that this time there would be no floods to help the Yorkist, and that the supporters of the Lancastrian heir were scarcely likely to be caught napping a second time with unprotected bridges over the Severn.
So somewhere between Pembroke and Nottingham Lancastrians and Yorkists must have met. Even now the fighting might be over. Thousands of people up and down the country might know the result of some stupendous battle and be discussing it in home and street and tavern whilst she—to whom it mattered so supremely— must wait in captive ignorance upon these accursed battlements.
Mercifully, Warwick had ceased his irritating singing. He had climbed upon the low stonework beside her and was engaged in flicking tiny bits of masonry down into the moat. “Look, horses!” he said suddenly, clutching at her elbow. If his intellect were a bit weak, there was certainly nothing amiss with his eyesight.
Elizabeth could see nothing but a cloud of dust. “Where?” she asked eagerly.
“Beyond the tree they always let me ride to. Look, Cousin Bess, there are a lot of them and they are level with it. Now they have passed it. Surely you can see them, Cousin Bess?”
Yes, she could see them now. A party of horsemen making straight for the castle. And the sentries must have seen them too, for the Captain of the Guard was shouting orders; and soon the portly Constable, badly winded from hurrying up the turret stairs, was beside her. “Whoever comes here for your Grace is sure to be from the winning side,” he panted.
All her life Elizabeth would remember those moments of suspense. The party was halfway across the tiltyard now and in a matter of seconds the whole direction of her life would be known to her, one way or the other. She scarcely dared to look. “Is there anyone among them whom we know, Mattie?” she asked, as her excited women came fluttering to the wall beside her.
But Mattie's eyes were old and dim and the horsemen, bunched together, were but foreshortened figures who seemed to have helmets but no faces. It was younger eyes and a simpler mind that settled the matter. “No white boars!” lamented Warwick, for whom the blanc sanglier stood for Westminster and the entourage of Aunt Anne, the only person who had ever really made a home for him since his parents died.
“It is true, what the young Duke says,” corroborated the Constable, to whom it meant the break-up of a lifetime's service.
“That looks like Sir Robert Willoughby riding in the middle of them,” ventured one of Elizabeth's women.
“And it certainly is Sir Humphrey Brereton raising his hand in greeting,” said Elizabeth, closing her eyes in wordless gratitude. “How hot they must be, riding so fast beneath this fierce sun! Let us go down and welcome them.”
Since whichever way the fighting had gone Elizabeth would be Queen of England, the Constable could do no less than obey. He barked an unwilling order, and as she led the way down the winding stairs they could hear the rattle of the drawbridge chains and the hollow thud of hooves above the moat; and by the time they all emerged into the sunlight at the bottom the courtyard was full of men of the garrison staring and dusty Lancastrians dismounting.
Sir Robert Willoughby was no sooner out of the saddle than he was kneeling to kiss Elizabeth's hand. “Lord Stanley sent me to give your Grace the glad news,” he said. “At a place called Bosworth, outside Leicester, Henry Tudor was victorious.”
So all her misfortunes and anxieties were over. Because she could find no adequate words, Elizabeth smiled at him through tears of relief. “The new King has sent me to escort you home to Westminster,” he was saying.
“The new King?” she repeated.
“King Henry, may God preserve him!”
“You mean—they have already crowned him?”
“Milord Stanley crowned him upon the battlefield, and all men shouted 'Long live King Henry the Seventh,'” added Humphrey Brereton, coming, too, to kiss her hand.
But of co
urse they could not have crowned him without her. Elizabeth stood upon the bottom stair looking at their exultant, upturned faces, and trying not to see the sullen faces of Yorkshiremen who stood in silent groups behind them. Most of them had fought at Tewkesbury, and for them she knew it was as if their God had gone. “But what could they crown him with?” she asked in bewilderment, her voice sounding singularly young and fresh as it echoed back between the ancient walls.
“A soldier found the crown of England in a thorn bush,” Humphrey answered her eagerly.
For a moment Elizabeth did not see them at all, only a vivid picture of Richard Plantagenet on White Surrey with the golden circlet gleaming around his vizored helmet. While there was breath in his body, she knew, he would defend it. “Then Richard—?” she faltered.
“He is dead.”
The crisp triumphant words came from Sir Robert, but Elizabeth heard a hard-bitten old archer sob. Even in the moment of their success the Lancastrian party must have been aware of the hatred and sorrow that surrounded them. At a word from their officers the garrisons would have murdered them. They looked towards the Constable, and the Constable, doughty warrior as he was, looked down at the ground. When there is nothing left to fight for, why give orders?
“The Plantagenet fought like a lion. Three separate charges he led, although bleeding from his wounds,” stated Humphrey out of his young generosity. “But just as he had fought his way within grappling distance of the Tudor, we killed him.”
The groan that came from a score of Yorkist throats was made more expressive than any words. “How many were with him when he fell?” their Captain asked tersely.
“Only Lord Lovell—and possibly his standard bearer,” answered Sir Robert, and somehow, to his annoyance, for all the fine news he had brought, felt ashamed before them.
The Tudor rose Page 16
