The King’s Sister

by Anne O'Brien

  Whether my sister believed me or not I had no idea, but I found myself waiting, day after day, for the next offering, disappointed when none materialised, setting up a dialogue that part infuriated me, part intrigued.

  He will grow tired of it.

  He will not. He is trying to wear down my resistance to him.

  He will grow weary if you do not reply.

  But I will not reply. To reply will put me in his power. To show any interest whatsoever will tell him that he is in my thoughts.

  Some of them are charmingly subtle.

  And some are particularly crude!

  Some are romantic.

  Wait until he sends me a dose of agrimony to move the bowels …

  What does he intend, with a wooing of such charming foolishnesses?

  I knew exactly what he intended. He had great practice in seduction. Did Isabella not have a coffer full of such offerings?

  Do you care what Isabella has?

  No. And I wish he would stop!

  But he did not, and the gifts, trivial as they were, warmed my heart’s blood. But I was not seduced. I would not be. My feet could never walk in unison with those of John Holland.

  And then. A single glove, which I recognised full well. My own. Was he returning it to signal he no longer had a care to keep it? Perhaps he would at last allow me to forget him, for my mind and my senses to live at ease.

  My heart leapt, dismay a chill coating in my belly. I did not want that. I tore at the wrapping, dropping it to the floor. ‘It’s just the glove I lost.’ Philippa was keeping a closer eye on my gifts. I busied myself discovering its mate in my coffer to hide any heat in my cheeks

  ‘No need for Jonty to buy you new ones then!’ she remarked dryly. ‘You seem to be in receipt of many packages.’

  I crunched the message in the palm of my hand, smoothing it out as soon as I could, and exhaled with relief.

  To restore the lost glove to its partner. They were not made to exist apart. As you were not made to live apart from me …

  Slowly I pulled on the reunited pair, smoothing the soft leather over my fingers. No, they were not made to exist apart. This was right that they should be together. But was I prepared to acknowledge my own need? He was not allowing me to forget him. It exercised all my will to struggle to banish him from my memory. I was burning with loss and longing. And would have continued to do so until another torn piece of parchment, finely folded, made its way to me. As I opened it, suitably intrigued at the blank sheet with no message, a smattering of coarse dust fell to the floor. I knelt. Not dust but tiny pieces of dried leaves. Rescuing some of them, I placed them in my palm and sniffed. The aroma was very faint.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked Philippa, holding out my hand.

  She too sniffed. ‘An herb. Is it rue?’

  It could be. So what was this? A pinch of rue and no words of love or seduction. I knew its uses, but not its meaning. As it crossed my mind to wonder which of his female acquaintances had supplied him with this, I headed to the kitchens for a discussion with Constanza’s cook, to ask the question: ‘If a woman receives a gift of rue, what should she understand by it?’

  John Holland intrigued me, fascinated me, repelled me. I despised the artifice he employed to woo my senses, for rue implied regret. It implied grief and farewell.

  He had given up on me at last.

  Or had he? Was this merely another ploy to whet my appetite, enticing me with sentimental humours, only to cast me adrift with a clever pinch of crushed leaves that I had dusted from my hands to the floor?

  I cared not.

  Oh, but I wished … But then, I did not know what it was that I truly wished for. All I heard was the echo of John’s voice in my mind, in my ear, whispering inducements with all the subtlety of the snake in the Garden of Eden. It was dangerous, but I enjoyed the danger. What woman would not?

  One of Philippa’s women fetched me, with a warning that set my heart racing. My sister was unwell. When I came into her bedchamber, it was to find her weeping without restraint, her ladies fluttering round her.

  ‘Philippa!’

  I was across the space from door to bed in an instant, taking her in my arms.

  ‘Don’t mind me.’ Her reply was muffled against my shoulder. ‘It’s nothing.’

  My sister did not weep for nothing. My sister rarely wept. I cast about in my mind for a reason that would reduce her to such misery.

  ‘Is it Henry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mary, then …’ Had she not recovered from the tragic birth of their little son?

  ‘No. They’re happy enough. They’ve agreed to wait before Mary invites him to her bed again.’

  And Philippa wept even harder.

  ‘Tell me.’ Waving her women away, I shook her gently. ‘I’ll hang the finches in your room if you don’t.’ Their shrill singing wearied after a while.

  ‘What will become of me?’

  ‘I can’t imagine. Are we talking about the next hour or the next three years?’

  She did not smile, but at least she told me.

  ‘I am twenty-two years old. Where is the marriage plan for me? What if there never is?’

  ‘But there will be.’

  ‘Don’t tell me there is a foreign prince just waiting for me to land in his lap. Sometimes I have a terrible conviction that I will end my days in a convent.’

  I smoothed her hair, wiped her cheeks. Philippa was softer than I, gentler, far kinder. What a waste it would be if she did not have her own family to love and cherish.

  ‘It will happen. You know that the Duke will …’

  ‘I have no one—and you are so ungrateful,’ she interrupted on a wail of misery. ‘You have a husband. You have a man who flirts with you disgracefully. And you don’t want either of them …’ She covered her mouth with her hands looking at me in utter dismay, eyes blind with tears. ‘I never meant to say that.’

  I grew still under the bitter lash. Was it not true? I was wrapped about in my own desires, with no thought for Philippa’s lack. How hard she must find it, with both Henry and I wed, and there was nothing I could say to remedy her grief. Except that I could be more understanding, less heedless of everything that did not touch my own life. I promised myself that I would try. But for now …

  ‘I’ll let you have John Holland,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want him,’ she sniffed. ‘He’s a born troublemaker.’

  ‘Then you can share Jonty.’ Philippa sniffed again, but her tears were ending. ‘A new audience for his enthusiasms is just what he wants. If you talk to him about anything that yaps or cheeps he will love you more than he loves me.’

  At last she smiled, but it had put my faults into stark relief. I was too self-absorbed. I always had been. Maturity demanded that I make amends. In the following days, I devoted myself to her entertainment, until Philippa smiled and played her lute again without descending into lachrymose melodies, and I did not mention Jonty or John Holland even once.

  The news of the cataclysm, the whole unbelievable order of events, kept company with us, dominating our thoughts, throughout every mile of that endless journey from Hertford. In the heat of the summer of 1384 Philippa and I were riding for Richard’s court at Sheen on the Thames, as if a storm wind harried our heels. Not Constanza—it would take a major tremor of the earth to move Constanza from Hertford—but Philippa and I discovered a need to be where events were unfolding.

  Or at least I did, and persuaded my sister who was not averse to accompanying me, even if we were silent for most of the journey, the potential horror of what might have occurred cramming our thoughts without mercy. Philippa had the angel of death riding beside her to expel her anxiety over her unmarried state.

  It had all begun at Salisbury where Richard, summoning a meeting of parliament, was staying at a house belonging to Robert de Vere. Was Richard ever so uncontrolled, so lacking in good common sense? Richard’s political acumen barely matched that of a tadpole. Afte
r an early Mass, a Carmelite friar had found his way to whisper in the ear of our puissant King that our father, the Duke of Lancaster, was knee deep in a plot against Richard’s life. The Duke, the friar said with monastic certainty, had the death of Richard in mind. On what evidence? The friar did not know, but he had been told. No, he could not recall who had told him …

  What would I have done in the circumstances? The question beat at my mind in time with my mare’s hooves.

  Thrown the accusation out, along with the mischief-making friar.

  What did Richard do?

  I hissed a breath as my mare, under pressure, stumbled.

  Richard flew into a fury, ordering that the Duke be put to death for so foul a treason.

  ‘Why would Richard do so ill-considered a thing?’ I demanded of Philippa. ‘To execute our father without trial. To even believe it in the first place.’

  ‘Because he is afraid.’ All Philippa’s anxiety over her virginal state had vanished under her disgust. ‘Richard is afraid of any man with royal blood who wields power more adeptly than he can.’

  ‘Surely he cannot believe the Duke’s guilt. I would not.’

  ‘Richard does not have your confidence, Elizabeth. Or your loyalty to family.’

  No, he did not. Fortunately the more reasoning of the lords around him persuaded our King of the unwisdom of so precipitate a reaction. So the Duke was safe, that much we knew, but in the brooding atmosphere at court, who knew what might transpire? We needed to be there to see for ourselves. Nothing would have kept me at Hertford.

  Yet for me there was another gnawing anxiety, far more urgent now that the Duke was safe.

  What was John Holland’s role in this? I was unsure, and I disliked what I had heard. The friar, taken into custody for his lies, had been seized by men who proceeded to apply unmentionable torture to extract information over the origins of the plot, until the friar died a horrific death. Which might, as I was forced to admit, have passed my attention except for the name of one of the royal household involved. The hands of John Holland, the same hands that chose and sent me gifts and fairings, were now coated in blood in this unpleasant episode.

  Why was the friar dead? To close his mouth forever, stopping any incriminating evidence against those who paid him to perjure the Duke, the court gossips opined. For who was to blame? The men who had done him to death, perhaps?

  I needed to see John Holland. This man who touched my heart in some manner, had by this unsavoury incident shattered my confidence in my own judgement.

  Before we left Hertford, I handed a bound coffer to one of our escort to strap to his saddle.

  ‘Come on, Elizabeth! Do we need the extra burden?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied to Philippa who was hovering.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  When I handed the little wicker cage containing two singing finches to one of my women, Philippa made no attempt to disguise her impatience.

  ‘Do you really need to take those? You can buy them two a penny in the street in London.’

  ‘They travel with me,’ I said.

  ‘If you want to be rid of them, why not just open the cage door?’ My sister had the uncomfortable ability to read my mind.

  ‘That would rob me of a chance to drive my opinion home,’ I replied.

  ‘I’ll remind you of that when the birds drive you demented by their tweeting.’

  But I was already mounted, my mind already in London. What would I say to him when I met him again? Was ever a woman thrown into disarray by the actions of a man who should have meant nothing to her?

  You love him, don’t you?

  I was not entirely certain that I knew what love was. And how could I love a man who might be embroiled in foul murder?

  ‘What do you think?’ Philippa asked as we approached the gateway to the royal palace at Sheen, and were forced by untoward circumstances to draw rein.

  I looked aghast at what we saw. As did my sister.

  ‘I think there’s a storm about to break on our heads,’ I replied. ‘I don’t like it. And I don’t understand why our own Sergeant at Arms looks as if he would turn us away.’

  There were guards at the gate, forbidding us entry, and the guards were in Lancaster colours. I recognised the Sergeant at Arms; I could even name him. I could not imagine what was afoot. All the personal anxieties, the difficulties of choices when violent death had taken a role, were swept aside by the sight of the Lancaster retinue equipped for war.

  ‘Has something happened we don’t know of?’ I asked.

  Philippa merely shook her head.

  All was not right with Richard, that much we knew. For the past months his court had exuded the noxious stench of a festering sore, the atmosphere tense, strained with rifts within and without. Dangers had rumbled, from a Scottish invasion of Northumberland, to Richard’s unpopular policy of negotiating a peace with France. As for the cost of Richard’s household and entertainments, parliamentary voices were raised in dismay, and aimed at the royal favourites of Burley, de la Pole and de Vere. Over it all had hung the uncompromising heat with no rain to assuage heated tempers. Drought had threatened. Famine and death.

  But this was quite different, enough to touch my nape with fear. Lancaster guards on the gates of Sheen?

  At least they recognised us, the Sergeant at Arms offering a smart salute.

  ‘What’s going on, Master Selby?’

  ‘Some trouble, my lady.’ A laconic enough reply but his face was set in grim lines.

  ‘Is the Duke here?’ Philippa asked.

  ‘He is, mistress.’ He helped me to dismount. ‘If you go in, you’ll hear his voice. He’s not best pleased—and who can blame him, I’d say.’

  ‘Is Sir John Holland here?’ I asked.

  ‘He is. And doubtless deciding which way to hop.’ And when I looked puzzled, he added: ‘Which side of the fire will scorch him least, if you take my meaning.’

  Which made not much sense, until we stepped into the Great Hall which was awash with uncontrolled emotion. It all but blistered us so that we halted in the doorway.

  ‘Your father would call down shame on your head if he saw the counsellors you choose to give ear to.’ The Duke, in the centre of the chamber, raised his voice well above normal pitch as he addressed Richard.

  ‘I am King. I choose my own counsellors.’ Supreme on his dais was the King, his pointed nose quivering with fury, fists clenched.

  The heated heart of a conflagration the like of which I had never seen. And there were Richard’s courtiers, including John Holland, awaiting the outcome.

  ‘And bad counsellors at that.’ The Duke was in no mood to retreat. He might not name de Vere, but there was no doubting the sleek object of the Duke’s disgust.

  ‘I do not have to answer to you, Uncle. By what right do you take me to task?’

  ‘As for shame …’ My father continued, jaw rigid with a pure reflection of the royal fury. ‘How shameful is it for a King to stoop to murder one of his own family? His own blood. You would have me done to death?’

  Was this some monstrous joke? Some ill thought out masque?

  It was beyond belief, but my heart began to throb with a heavy beat as I allowed myself to observe the faces of those present. There was no laughter. Nor was there shock. No one questioned the accusation, despite Richard’s face becoming perfectly white. The Duke was fearless in his attack, but I could see the lines of a breastplate beneath his robe. He had come here in fear of his life. John Holland, eyes alert, lips close set, standing a little apart from both, kept his gaze close-trained on his brother. What he was thinking I could not imagine. If he saw my entrance, he gave no reaction. Nor would he, for all was balanced on a dagger edge and any dalliance would be far from his mind. This was a catastrophic expression of power with the outcome undecided, and with a crucial decision for John Holland to make. Lancaster or King? How mask-like his face, a face I had come to know with its range of vivid exp
ression. John Holland’s decision today might deny any need for me to be here, effectively ending any future communication between us.

  This was politics in the raw and my stomach lurched.

  ‘Why would you see a need for revenge on me, sire?’ the Duke demanded. ‘I am your man. I have always been your man.’

  ‘You humiliate me by your lectures, sir.’

  ‘So you would plot my murder with the likes of de Vere?’

  The gathering was still, motionless in anticipation, de Vere as frozen in time as the carved doorpost on my left. John Holland took one step forward.

  ‘Sire …’

  But Richard commanded his brother’s silence with a crude gesture. ‘How dare you so accuse me?’ Richard said to the Duke.

  ‘Because it is the truth. I will no longer attend you at court. I fear for my life at your hands. Should a man have to wear armour in the presence of his nephew? By God, he should not.’

  And on that, the Duke bowed and stalked out, brushing past Philippa and me without any sign of recognition. The expression on his face smote at my heart.

  ‘You will not walk away from me!’ Richard’s words exploded, high-pitched, his hand clenched on the sword at his side, and he would have leapt from the dais if John Holland had not stepped forward.

  ‘No, sire.’ His hand closed on Richard’s sleeve. ‘Would you strike your uncle?’

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘Richard!’ I saw it, the tightening hand of a brother on the King’s sword-arm as Sir John strove to draw the poison from the deadly situation. I took note as Sir John’s hand moved to close round the King’s wrist. And Richard paused. ‘You need to consider, sire.’

  ‘Why would I need to consider?’ Still Richard’s features were livid. ‘I am King here and I demand honour, even from my uncle.’

  ‘Lancaster does indeed honour you. Has he not always been the most loyal of your subjects?’

  He might release the sword, but Richard wrenched his arm away and stormed from the room. With a shrug and a glance at his brother Thomas, John Holland followed the King.

  Thus the audience stuttered into an uneasy end.

  Oh, I admired the stance John Holland had taken, his calming words, his attempt to deflect Richard’s wrath. Here was a man who was more than a skilled courtier, all outward glamour with sword and tongue. Here was a depth of understanding that surprised me, a skill to diffuse a potentially unpleasant situation, and a concern for my father that touched my senses.