“Oh,” she exclaimed with a sigh. “I wish I could save this moment forever and take it out whenever I feel sad.” But soon it would be curfew; glittering cressets were already lit along the long waterfront of Baynards and shortly the boat must turn and the evening would end. “Thank you, sir.” For once, she dared to be froward and chastely leaned up and kissed the pitted cheek that Dionysia had so disdained.
“That is a paltry thanks, lady. I want more than that.” His kiss slid a dagger into her self-resolve. What magic and mysteries did a woman need to please a man? she wondered, despising her innocence; she kissed him back rebelliously with all her heart, flattered when his right hand slid from her waist to clasp her silk-sheathed breast. Oh, if Lancelot had caressed the tip of Guinivere’s breast so cunningly, no wonder that queen had broken her vows, weak and dazed with desire. Kingdoms had been lost for love and now Heloise understood why.
“This is heresy,” she whispered, her fingers tangling in his hair and drawing his head back so she might fathom him. He might want her now but it was not enough.
“Why?” The words were breath against her cheek as he took possession of her lips again.
“Baynards!” announced the boatman and unkindly let the rocking timbers slap against the steps to jolt his passengers apart.
Rushden boldly squired her in past the duchess’s guards. There were no scoldings, no raised eyebrows at her high color. Wafers and fruit had been left beside her pillow. Wonderful! She crossed her arms across her breast and threw back her head in sheer happiness, only to come back to reality with a bump. Her eyes opened again. What were Rushden’s motives in being so kind? Guilt or . . . ? Was it not madness to encourage him when all she might be left with was a broken heart? Opening the window, she sought out the boat that might be carrying him away. I’ll not be Miles Rushden’s mistress, she told the faeries and St. Catherine. He must not come again.
But next day Miles arrived respectably at Baynards’ front gate, and kissed hands charmingly with her grace of York before he requested his lady’s company.
“Where are we going? To sign our annulment?” Heloise goaded, trying not to care, as he lifted her onto Cloud’s saddle.
“Nothing so exhilarating. Merely to collect a wagon, bribe our way into the interlude cupboard of the royal wardrobe, don our disguises, and create misrule. And pinned to a feather cushion, owlet, is already a ribbon with your name writ large.”
SNIFFING AT THE DOORWAYS, SCRATCHING ITS UNDERBELLY and lifting its leg to piss upon random doorsteps, a cockatrice danced its way along the Strand, accompanied by an individually selected entourage of twenty of Buckingham’s more imaginative men-at-arms costumed as roosters, gryphons, and yales. In the procession’s midst was a curtained cart containing a feather bed, and upon the driving board, a beleaguered carter had been joined by a crowing gryphon whose minions whooped and perched upon the vehicle like maddened apes, hurling firecrackers at the apprentices. By the time the raucous procession trooped over the bridge, the noise of its coming had emptied the Strand Inn of customers and collected such a crowd that Miles, shaking with laughter in his feathers and fustian, was sorry they had not thought to pass an upturned hat for donations; he might have broken even with the bribe to the deputy keeper of the royal wardrobe for loan of the costumes.
At the Bishop of Chester’s portal, the cockatrice laid a large egg and skipped happily past a row of tenements to snuffle at the backside of the embarrassed guard at Bishop Alcock’s residence. The apprentices cheered the monster on to more impertinence and the housewives shrieked with laughter. Its cavorting and the accompanying explosives sucked out Alcock’s household like poison from a wound.
“Clear off or we shall summon the watch,” bawled the bishop’s officials, struggling to be heard above the pandemonium, helpless as the cockatrice scratched its head perturbed before it danced up the steps, followed closely by its masked friends, who draped their arms round the necks of the officials. Only the extremely observant in the crowd would have seen a gryphon jab an elbow into the guard’s gut as it flapped its eagle wing and force him inside with a hand grasping his collar.
The onlookers waited, breath hushed, for the watch to arrive for fisticuffs. The cart, dull entertainment now it was bereft of firecrackers, slunk into a laneway forgotten, but two yales rushed out of Alcock’s door with firkins of ale to woo the crowd, who in consideration blocked the main street in each direction.
Inside, it took Miles precious time to find the locked door that hid Stillington. He set a mask upon the bishop’s unconscious head and his attendant gryphons wrapped the sick man in curtaining ripped from Bishop Alcock’s bed then carried him tenderly like a battered comrade out to the wagon.
Breaking the city limit for empty carts, the vehicle hurtled down Fleet Street then south to Knightrider Street to avoid the watch. Along Eastcheap a zealous sergeant of the sheriff pursued it, forcing it recklessly to a halt, but inside there was only a wretched woman writhing with the early pangs of childbirth, on her way to her mother’s house and the waiting hands of a midwife.
By the time the western sun was silhouetting the central turrets of the Tower of London, Bishop Stillington was tenderly bestowed at Baynards Castle; Heloise, no longer in labor, was shaking down the cushion from beneath her skirts; and Miles and his companions arrived home, soberly clad, to find Harry yawning while Bishop Alcock discussed the Dominican Heinrich Kramer’s draft treatise on witchcraft with Archbishop Bourchier and Dr. Dokett.
At Baynards Castle that night, Heloise kept vigil by the bishop’s bedside while below, in the chapel, her grace of York and her household knelt to pray that God would look in mercy upon his servant, Stillington, and grant him salvation and the healing virtue of heavenly grace. The prayers were needed. Rushden was right; it looked as if the bishop was being slowly poisoned.
“IS THERE NOTHING MORE WE CAN DO FOR STILLINGTON BUT pray?” Buckingham demanded of Miles after his ecclesiastical guests had gone home well tippled.
“My lord, I would stake my life that he was being poisoned. I have left it to her grace of York and her physicians to do all they can. We could have tried purging him with bryony but since he has lost consciousness, we might have ended up choking him. And if it is deadly nightshade, we cannot risk belladonna or mandrake as an antidote. Believe me, we are like blind men in this. It could be anything—poppy, foxglove, toadstools, even hemlock. If the sleep leaves him, we may purge him then. This business is in God’s hands now.”
While her grace’s physician snored in the antechamber and Father William, the Baynards priest, intoned prayers on one side of the bed, Heloise sat resolutely upon the other, stroking her fingers along veins that ran across the mottled back of Stillington’s frail right hand like hedge roots, willing him to live. She questioningly touched the soft skin where he had once held a quill. The swelling that usually betrayed a scholarly man had almost gone and no ink stain discolored his fingers. Through the night, she sat silently urging him to fight, and slowly as the sky grew pearly grey beyond the wooden shutters, she felt the light in him begin to grow. The faint pulse was still there. Her thoughts whispered to the old man that he was not alone, that she understood the struggle within him—the temptation to be rid of the world and its troubles—to surrender and eke out Purgatory until his soul’s doomsday.
Father William withdrew, and Heloise sang softly with such sweet sadness that tears made rivulets upon her skin and seeped beneath her gown. As blades of gold pierced the shutters, gentle arms assisted her away. Rushden was in the bishop’s bedchamber with the duchess and the physician when she returned to find that blessed color at last suffused the sick man’s countenance.
“Well, your grace,” her husband was saying, “it is Sunday, the first of June, and here we have a rusty bishop.” He offered Heloise a smile that warmed her heart. “With your permission, my lady, may I open the casement and let the bells in to stir him?” At the Duchess of York’s nod, he set back the shutters. “Listen, my
lord bishop!” he exclaimed as the sunshine’s benedictory light fell upon Stillington’s tired face. “There is Paul’s peal of bells, and the chimes close by are from St. Laurence’s on Poultney and that distant cascade must be Allhallows.”
“No.” Fragile as breath to stir a crinkled fallen leaf, the faint Yorkshire voice was edged with pride. “No . . . St. Martin . . . le Grand.”
Eighteen
Bishop Stillington was as weak as a rabbit kitten from whatever foul dose had been given him but his heartbeat slowly strengthened. By Monday he was returning to the brawnier Yorkshire dialect of his childhood and stealing birds’ eggs at Nether Acaster, but slowly, as he whetted his mind on reminiscences, his intellect sharpened. Why would anyone wish him to poison him?
“Were you the shepherdess that sang me back into the earthly fold?” he asked Heloise. “Methinks I was carried by gryphons from my prison but I suppose it was a dream.”
“Actually . . .” began Heloise. Out tumbled the events from Stony Stratford to the cockatrice. Then, emboldened by the bishop’s dry chortle, she confessed the swordpoint marriage within his diocese and that the chief gryphon was her reluctant bridegroom. Stillington soaked in her tale without a comment but when Rushden came to visit, the old man studied him with new-grown suspicion, as though he might sprout feathers again.
“Well, my lord bishop,” drawled Harry, joining Miles next day at the bishop’s bedside. They were alone—Heloise was keeping well clear of Buckingham. “I daresay you are feeling more secure about your future now, seeing that the Woodvilles are finished.”
The former chancellor, propped upon the pillow and bolster, hands limp upon the coverlet, stared at him as though he were an insubstantial mirage over a summer ocean.
“Who rules this realm is of little consequence to me.” He did not move his coiffed head but spoke it like a litany.
“Your pardon, Bishop, but that is not the answer I want.” Harry met Miles’s ironic glance. “Dear me, Cysgod, I thought you told me he was sane.” They watched the bishop’s watery blue gaze rise to evaluate the last lawful heir of the House of Lancaster. Perhaps he did not respect the murrey satin doublet with silver thread acorns and the beading of pearls, for he looked away as though Harry bored him.
“Did you know he was once lord chancellor?” whispered the duke in mock confidence across the coverlet. “I never thought he would become so mouselike.”
Stillington folded his lips tighter, staring stubbornly at the coverlet. “Have I unwittingly committed some offense against you, Buckingham? You have my thanks for dragging me back from my body’s doomsday. Is that not enough?”
“We have helped you, my lord bishop,” Miles threw in his pennyworth. “We should now like you to help us.”
Harry leaned forward. “We have the queen muzzled but, of course, there is not the slightest doubt that if she regains her authority she will have you killed, Bishop—thoroughly this time. Why? What is it you know?”
The old man glowered. “I was friend to Clarence. Will that suffice? You headed the peers that sat in judgment on him. You heard the testimonies.”
“But they proved so insufficient that King Edward ordered us to condemn him. Why, Stillington?” Within the generosity of the night robe’s sleeves, the bishop’s hands were agitated. Harry leaned forward. “What was the secret that Clarence died for?”
The grey head drooped. Keep at him, Miles gestured. The arguments were his but the performance had to be Harry’s.
The duke’s tone softened: “Gloucester is a good man, righteous, compassionate. You helped him when he was a youth. He needs your help more than ever now. Will you advise him if I bring him here? Tell him what he needs to know?”
It was whistling in the wind. Miles held his breath as Stillington ran a tongue nervously over cracked lips like a waiting reptile. Harry fidgeted.
The wrinkled Adam’s apple moved finally. “A pretty speech, your grace. Someday you may grow famous for your silver tongue. Tell me, is this altruism in you, my lord of Buckingham, or is it the Bohun inheritance that you desire? The lord protector cannot give you manors for your friends when he has insufficient to reward his own.” God’s truth, the old man was shrewd. He guessed that Harry wanted to play the kingmaker. The ancient gaze crawled over Miles’s face like a foul spider but his question was for Buckingham. “Or is this merely revenge?”
“Why deny it?” Harry stormed to the foot of the bed. “The Woodvilles are parasites, Bishop, crawling to riches through the bedclothes.” Miles frowned at Harry. Perhaps they should come back later—let the arguments mature—but the duke strode back to the bedside. “I think about the future, Stillington, the Woodville future. Our new king will be even more a pawn than his father was. Elizabeth Woodville will rule England and when her poison is once more congealing in your belly, it will be my turn to kneel down at the block, and Gloucester’s, and our sons’ after us, not to mention Clarence’s boy.” The bedchamber was silent. “Well, Bishop?” Harry rasped. “I need an answer.”
“I shall pray for guidance, my lord duke,” the ecclesiastic replied perversely. “It is God’s matter.”
“It is England’s matter, I believe,” said Miles to them both, making an end of the conversation as he unlatched the door and bowed.
“So do I get an accolade for ‘silver tongue,’ my friend?” Harry flung his arm about Miles’s shoulder as they landed ebulliently on the bottom stair.
“You deserve the Holy Roman Empire.” Miles grinned as their horses were brought to them across the courtyard. “I doubted whether there was actually any secret at all, but there is, there plaguey well is.”
“You were right. He was worth the expense.”
“I think, my lord, you should stir Gloucester into the Stillington brew. Shall you go to Crosby Place straightway before the council meeting starts and apprise his grace?”
“Yes, but do you not intend to accompany me?”
“Not yet, my lord, I crave leave to transact some business of my own.” A caravel named Heloise and it was high tide.
HELOISE HAD NOT MEANT TO DROWSE AND THE DREAM MUST have lasted but a few moments—a dream of a lord clad in black dragged struggling from a mighty keep by soldiers. They threw him to the ground and his sleeves crawled like spider’s legs as he fell forward and then a bell struck thirteen times.
St. Mary Magdalene’s in Old Fish Street was tolling a funeral bell as she awoke shivering. For an instant she was uncertain where she was, for the anguish of the prisoner in her dream was still with her. The scavenging kites flying westwards over Baynards drew her gaze; their cries had been in her dream too.
“Heloise, are you ill?” Rushden stepped out from beneath the mulberry tree.
With a swift denial, she rose, disliking the edge of misgiving in his expression. How long had he stood observing her? She shook her head, warming beneath the male discerning eyes that were observing her black gown and the stiff reversed front of her cap, in silver taffeta that helped disguise her hairline.
He smiled slowly in the maddening way he sometimes had. “I wondered if you might like to come and see Crosby Place.”
Gloucester’s London hive? Heloise brightened. “As a reward for stuffing cushions up my girdle, sir?”
“Something like that.” The hand held out to her assumed her obedience; she did not mind.
“You realize,” she pointed out, “that all this associating with me is verging on the scandalous.”
“Yes,” he agreed, ushering her towards the stable. “Suffice it to say that tail-pulling of the noble-and-flattered has some appeal.”
“I suppose you will not bother to explain that.”
“Absolutely not.” And his brigand’s smile tightened the band already round her heart.
***
THE BELLS FOR TEN O’CLOCK AT CROSBY PLACE IN BISHOPSGATE had not yet struck and Miles had plentiful time to escort Heloise up to the minstrel gallery to watch the royal council assemble below. A chair of estate domin
ated the long trestle that had been set up down the length of the hall with benches on either side.
“Oh, this is wonderful,” exclaimed Heloise, tapping her fingers on the rail, her doelike eyes wide with admiration.
“A gracious dwelling, is it not?” He was heartened that she beamed at him like an excited child, sharing his pleasure in the lovely symmetry. Unlike other lords, Gloucester kept no house of his own in London nor did he choose to lodge at Westminster Palace or Baynards Castle; he always rented Crosby Place.
The house was built on three sides of a courtyard—a great hall and private apartments facing the chapel, kitchen, and buttery. At the back lay a large garden, protected by a high, crenellated wall. For Miles, the beauty of the dwelling was stolen by the magnificent five-sided oriel window, set in a framework of wondrous stone tracery, built into the great hall’s southern wall. He watched with pleasure the sunlight surging in through the lozenged glass to play warmly on the black and white Purbeck tiles and the matching clustered councilors. Above the window’s soaring bay, a boss embellished with a crest and helm embroiled the stone ribs that fanned across the arches of the windows into a soft-edged stone sun. Opposite the oriel window was a large wall fireplace. There was a central stone hearth, too, for standing braziers in wintertime. Beams rose with perfect grace to meet each other lovingly beneath gold-leafed bosses. Nor was the hall bereft of hangings fit for a great lord’s pleasure: a French hunting tapestry, its colors glowing against the whitewashed masonry, brightened the parlor wall behind the chair of estate. The sheer perfection of it all started him thinking what changes could be made at Bramley.
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