The King's Grey Mare

by Jarman, Rosemary Hawley

‘You have done well,’ said the King. ‘We shall not forget.’ He looked down at the letters again, and the faint smile pulled at his mouth.

  ‘Why does he cross his ‘t’s’ this way?’ he said.

  After a moment Morton said: ‘Shall he be arrested now, Sire?’ and Henry shook his head. ‘Nay!’ he said loudly. ‘I will make him a gift – a gift of time. Am I not merciful?’ A look almost of regret crossed his face as he tapped the sheaf of letters. ‘With these, he has built his scaffold, woven the hemp. Now let him sharpen the knife.’ To Ralph he said: ‘Dismiss!’ as if he spoke to the Yeoman. He did not look at the prentice again. The smell of betrayal hung heavily. Great God! he thought. He must have loved John of Gloucester closely to have these weapons placed within his hand. Jesu preserve me from such men.

  ‘Next,’ he said, holding out fingers that trembled slightly. The boom of courtiers’ voices sounded outside the chamber. Parliament would soon be in session. ‘Swift, now. Let us be done.’

  ‘A fish, Sire,’ said Morton, passing the King another deposition. ‘A big and a strange fish.’

  Henry read, half-hearing Morton’s explanation of how his agents had gone to work; pure chance, Sire. No betrayals here, only a whisper near Oxford, a courier drunk with weariness, a sealed letter mislaid, a horse recognized. Pure chance. Good fortune for one; ill for the other. But what ingratitude on the subject’s part! What arrant folly!

  ‘Sweet Christ!’ said Henry, looking up. ‘Why …’

  Why am I surprised? he thought. It makes me afraid that I should be surprised. Carefully, and swiftly, make an end of it now. Speeches prepared, and a different reason for disaffection stated. Tracks covered, like the burning of Titulus Regius; might enforced like the predating of our victory. Have done, Elizabeth. Drown, witch.

  He stood up. ‘Ride to Bradgate,’ he ordered Bray. ‘And take armed men. The Queen-Dowager’s time is done.’

  There was a little knot of people standing outside the Council chamber; among them Margaret Beaufort, who had promised herself that one day she would invade the sanctum of men and have herself a voice; and Maud Herbert, who had not been long enough at court to keep her opinions secret. When Maud saw the Yeomen coming with Elizabeth, she gasped. The men were tall and ungentle; they were half-dragging the Queen-Dowager. Once she slipped and struck her side against a pillar. Maud heard her cry of pain.

  ‘Madame!’ She turned, shocked, to the Countess. ‘She is the Queen’s mother, after all!’

  ‘She is but the Mare,’ said Margaret, her eyes like black enamel. ‘And her usefulness is outworn.’

  Maud closed her lips and looked back at the little company approaching. Behind Elizabeth stumbled Dorset, His hands were manacled and he had a bloody ear. Much to everyone’s surprise, he had fought like a tiger when apprehended at Bradgate. Now, he wept, drily, hopelessly. They waited a little while in the corridor until summoned to the Council chamber. Elizabeth’s face was yellow, her eyes were glazed. Her headdress had slipped askew and revealed hair lily-white and thin in patches, like melting snow on mottled earth. The silver girl who had ensnared princes was dead. Even the palsy was quiescent; her hand hung still, her head, slightly bent to the side, was like the head of a corpse.

  Soon they were admitted, Dorset writhing as if he feared the chamber were some dreadful oubliette to plunge them summarily into oblivion. The chamber itself was not large and was made smaller by the great assembly of lords and prelates seated on either side of the long table. Elizabeth stood, swaying a little, facing the King. Her eyes rushed forward to encompass him: his face, the face of unknown significance now plain to her; the delicate face touched by a frailty which in itself was strength; the supernormal aura of wisdom, the awful knowledge surrounding it. It was all there, as she had recalled it in some unrealized, uninterpreted dream. In that moment she was a part of him, and he of her.

  He stood leaning against a high gold chair. He was wearing a violet gown lined with cloth-of-gold; a collar of many jewels. On his head lay a dark velvet cap pinned by a large diamond and a priceless pearl. An unassailable power poured from him and was manifest above, in the banners, in the fiery tongue and claws of the Dragon. His long, deeply hooded eyes were bleak and ageless, and visions chased across them in her sight. In the little space before he spoke she remembered vague, irrelevant things … the Jerusalem Tapestry, and Jacquetta’s greedy laughter at sight of it. She heard sounds she had never heard, saw sights she had never seen; through the wizard glass of Henry’s eyes, Desmond’s boys screamed and pleaded vainly for their lives; Edward wept and Warwick died; Gloucester’s head was broken upon Bow Bridge. Her own sons called upon her and God. Their voices were stilled, and merged into Morton’s, reading the indictment. Thomas was committed first: ‘… Marquis of Dorset, for your treason against his most sovereign Majesty to be confined during the King’s pleasure in the Tower of London …’

  She came from her glassy trance and looked at Dorset’s white face. Swift tears rushed into her eyes. My son. My first born son. Tom, the boy conceived in far, lost love; John’s son, condemned, committed. Helplessly she stretched her arms out towards him. He tried to smile and she saw that he was grievously afraid. The heavy door closed sternly. Her tears receded; she stood, glacial and still, fighting this new loss, sudden nausea, pain.

  Her own arraignment was begun; a long farrago. Treason of course; but what treason? She waited vainly to hear the name of Lovell, or of Lincoln.

  ‘That you, Elizabeth, did so displease his Majesty the King by aligning your loyalty with that of the traitor Plantagenet, Richard of Gloucester, the rebel and usurper. That you did place your daughters under his protection, to the great anger of our sovereign lord.’

  She frowned, and made a little uncertain gesture. She said: ‘Forgive me, my lords. I do not understand. That was all … a long time ago.’

  Henry waited. There was silence. Then she understood.

  ‘The charge is false,’ she said. ‘I have displeased your Majesty, and I am glad of it!’ Her chin was up, as high as she had ever carried it; there was within her a last surging flicker of strength. ‘I have displeased your Majesty,’ she said again, ‘because you would not give me my sons. I sought to uphold one of my still living sons!’

  There was a sharp silence, only momentary, but one which seemed to go on for hours. The King looked towards Morton. An early bumblebee tapped gaily at the window

  ‘Your sons are dead, Madame,’ said the Cardinal Archbishop. He looked at the window, and the bee, as if he were reciting a psalm with half his mind upon it. ‘The traitor Plantagenet had them smothered in the Tower.’

  ‘Sire,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Be still, Madame.’ Jasper Tudor’s voice; strangely quiet, mingled with the tapping of the bee. ‘Be still and hear your sentence.’

  ‘Am I to die?’ she said. She looked down the polished length of the table, and up into Henry’s eyes. Death. It had a stark and beautiful sound. Sir John Grey, knight, is dead.

  ‘You are to be confined for life,’ someone said, but she had ceased to listen. Her eyes were fixed on Henry’s in fascination. Their glances merged as if welded. They drowned in one another’s fluent steel, each seeing pitilessness, fear, and the dread of lost power. In the glitter of his sumptuous jewels she saw her own old insecurities, the lusts and longings, the spitting in the eye of God and Fortune; the fate formed by the writhing forces, one stronger than the other. Melusine – Cadwallader. Melusine had folded her coils and gone, sleeping for another thousand years at the bottom of her lake. Only her fading shadow remained in Henry’s eyes. Elizabeth looked, and saw herself.

  Bermondsey, they said. The Abbey of St. Saviour, and none to communicate with her on pain of severe reprisal.

  Bermondsey, they said. There you will live and die.

  She looked at him once more before leaving. It was as if she had borne him, had nurtured and moulded his wit and will until they were the facsimile of her own.

  As you wax, Henry, s
o must I wane.

  The November sky was coloured like iron, and the river cloaked by mist. All along the Thames lay tall carracks, weighted with Eastern spice, velvet and perfumes from Genoa, vessels carrying gold and silver from Venice, falcons from Iceland. Outgoing craft shivered at their moorings; the high-masted ships bound for Flanders, with decks hidden beneath sarplers of wool, hemp and flax that gave out a pungent smell over the low-tide stench of the fog. The masts seemed to reach the heavy sky, and from each rode a pennon, clinging twisted about the spidery shrouds. Grace raised her eyes to them, and prayed that they should blow, and carry her and John with them. The eel-boats lay in harbour. Usually there was a crowd of wives eager to board them, but this day the quay was silent. The City had gone to Westminster. Grace looked at the towering, webbed mastheads, about which sad seabirds made their dance. November was a bad month for sailing, yet sail they must; she, and the unknown ships, and John, whose heart was sick again.

  When Ralph had brought the news of Lincoln’s defeat at Stoke, John had cried out in anguish: Plantagenet dies again! She had felt herself lacking in the words and actions to heal him. She could only hold him, pressing her valueless body to his, watching his new-found health fade from him. He was wild of nights, springing up to cry of battles unfought, bloody deeds only dreamed of, vengeance unwreaked. Frustration rode him, and he grew incautious, speaking loudly of the Yorkist cause to strangers who, cursing him, turned away for their own safety. She saw bitterness where there had been hope, stress in place of calm, and finally this silent apathy which accompanied him upon his walk by the river. In this limbo of distress she led him, trying to divert him, pointing out the beauty of the lacy carved ships with their sails asleep, and the envied seabirds, who darted and screamed about them. Near the Steelyard she stopped and put her arms about him. By now she knew that she was called a harlot in the City; it was of no matter. She took him in her arms and he did not resist.

  ‘My dear love,’ she said, ‘when shall we take ship for Ireland?’

  His eyes were dull. ‘Ireland?’

  ‘From Bristol?’ she said gently. ‘Great ships go from there, John. They search for the isle of Brasil.’

  Salazar had told her this, in their daily conversations, and he had laughed to see her eyes wide from his talk of sea monsters. Now she chattered to John about it, while he leaned on her like a tired tree; he, who was always so strong and passionate, now bereft and slack. The failed rebellion had taken away a part of him. Grace longed for escape – forgetting. Her own longings as well as his; Elizabeth still tugged at her. As if Elizabeth were the bell and Grace the tongue; where Elizabeth swayed, Grace sounded and was bruised. She knew that Elizabeth had been arrested, and daily, secretly, she remembered her in her prayers.

  ‘The Boy!’ said John, for, the hundredth time. ‘He was only a blacksmith’s son. Tudor has put him to work in the kitchens. It would have been better had he hanged him.’

  ‘Yes, John,’ said Grace, as always. ‘He was only a feigned boy. He was not the Earl of Warwick, nor was he one of my father’s sons.’

  Henry had fetched the true Warwick out of the Tower and had paraded him briefly, slug-pale and mindless from incarceration. Although Clarence’s son could hardly tell night from day, the point was taken. Simnel was Simnel, and now washed pots for the King’s pleasure.

  ‘John,’ she said, ‘we are ready for the journey.’

  Hopeless yet hoping, she had made sure of this. All the bags packed, the green gowns chested in that lonely upper room. Yet all John could talk of was Lincoln, utterly defeated at Stoke and bloodily dead, and the rising shattered by Tudor’s waged men. On London Bridge the rebel heads, stripped by kites, had mouldered weeks ago. More and more Grace longed to leave England. It was nearly six months since Stoke, and she and John still lived untouched, above the butcher’s shop. The only change had been Master Ralph’s dismissal – for laziness.

  ‘My love.’ She laid her face against his smooth velvet shoulder. She glanced up at his eyes, now listlessly fixed upon the tall ships and the dozen barges that suddenly appeared around the curve of the river. Painted barges, gilt banners shuddering limply in the thickening fog.

  ‘Where are they all going?’ he asked; apart from the world, no longer a lover but a child, young yet immeasurably old, careworn and drained.

  ‘To the coronation. Bess is to be crowned today.’

  This affected him; he showed life, his lips curled. ‘The time is full, God knows!’ he said scornfully. ‘The usurper would have held off another ten years, had not London cried shame … I love Bess, she is Edward’s daughter. Although she is the witch’s daughter, too.’ He looked at Grace with a tinge of the old hatred. Sadness caught at her heart.

  ‘My lord.’ Only a sigh, drifting with the rotting November fog.

  ‘The witch!’ he said, cruelly. ‘More good men died through her this year. Do not forget that she conspired in the rebellion too. Ralph said …’

  ‘Unfair!’ cried Grace. ‘You too would have fought! Did you not write to Ireland, offering your arms? Elizabeth joined your cause …’ She stopped, knowing that whatever Elizabeth did, she could never redeem herself with John. Then she said softly: ‘Love, don’t miscall her. I can’t bear it.’

  He looked at her, his woman, in whom he slaked needs, passions, rages. She was the moon to his tides, and still she could not realize it. He lifted her chin and gave her a token she could understand; a hard kiss on her pale mouth. She smiled wanly.

  ‘We have been fortunate,’ he said.

  Yes. John was as guilty as any of the fleshless rebel heads on London Bridge had been. This renewed her itch of unease. She stared at him, willing his whole attention on her words.

  ‘We must leave England,’ she said.

  She would carry the bags, arrange for pack-mules to Bristol, or Pembroke, or wherever was necessary. She would take him bodily aboard some rough Irish vessel. In her mind she saw the shore slide away, heard the seabirds shrieking of hope, of peace. Desmond’s family would welcome them, cordial and careful, like their last letter. Still John did not answer and a fearful thought occurred: did he court death? As his father had done on Bosworth Field? Men said that Richard cared nothing for life that day, went roaring and singing to his end. Men said many things, and daily the tenor of opinion changed. A great gold boat passed along the river to Westminster; it carried the flaccid banners of the Earl of Pembroke. Jasper Tudor, newly made Earl of Bedford, but keeping his old colours. Pembroke! Yes, Bristol was the safer for her and John to slip from the country. Her unease grew like the fog, and John felt it. He knew it, and suddenly he was back with her, he was the John she knew and loved, and she was once more passive, clinging, guided. His cold fingers crept about her own icy hand. A gang of prentices hastened past, best-dressed, to Westminster, where they would gape and howl and drink too deeply of the Queen’s health.

  John touched her face, set his lips to the damp curl beneath her hood.

  ‘All my fault,’ he said. ‘You’re sad. When you are sad, my Grace, I want to die.’

  I want to die. The words entered her heart; every vein felt squeezed up tight. She stood on the fog-filmed cobbles and longed for a high-masted galley. She would steer it herself in fancy, over the black ocean, into the slack green harbour of Ireland.

  ‘There can be other risings, and you will join them,’ she said softly. The mist had a weird effect, as if the gap between them were widening. As if he were slipping away, hold him as she would. And like a soothsayer, he answered her:

  ‘There will be other feigned boys. And none will restore my father’s name. Men have cast him into Hell. Yet I know that he drinks of the water of life.’

  Closely they began to walk, as if their steps were driven by a lifeless wind. And he began to talk to her, not of war or policy, but as he had rarely talked; of how he loved her, that she was his life’s light and salvation, and that without her he was dead and damned. The fog about them became warm, a sheltering balm,
the cobbles satin beneath their feet. They joined the crowd hastening towards Westminster, yet they were apart from the people. Dreaming, they went slowly, while merchant and friar, peasant and ale-wife scampered by; while carts and chariots flying bright liveries forced them into doorway and alcove. Pliantly the two of them bent before the onrush of traffic, untouched, invulnerable. They filtered through the pulsing vein of London, his arm about her waist, her head in the hollow of his neck. Baynard’s Castle fell behind. There was neither hope nor need of entering the garden with its sweet early memories; the flowers bloomed in the clasp of his hands, her breath on his cheek. As Westminster towers rose before them, in stern yet ethereal greyness, he stopped, touched her mouth with his in the sight of festive London.

  ‘My little maid!’ he said, and smiled, a smile to live and die upon. And she babbled again of Ireland and escape; any thing, to keep that smile inviolate, and hers.

  ‘We must leave. Today.’

  ‘Hush!’ he said. ‘Let us go and see Bess’s coronation – let us say a prayer for her as she enters the Abbey.’

  There was an immense crowd outside, yet folk let them through as if they were ghosts, and they stood at the forefront of the throng, close to the Abbey’s entrance. Covering the flags outside was a great carpet, striped in white and red whereon the Queen would walk under a golden canopy. The carpet’s shimmering breadth divided the holiday crowd. People pushed forward, heads turning, craning. Wives and merchants, prentices, clerks and schoolboys lined the carpet’s edge; and were controlled by armed men; pikemen and swordsmen wearing the Tudor tabard. Beside Grace a pretty young woman held the hand of a small boy. She drew a long dagger from her belt and gave it to the child.

  ‘Now wait, Robin,’ she told him. ‘Wait until the Queen has passed, and then go to!’

  The little boy smiled up at Grace. ‘I am to cut the carpet,’ he confided.

  ‘I promised him,’ explained the woman. ‘But I fear the knife isn’t sharp enough!’