Figures in Silk (30 page)

The queen and her family were still at the abbot’s house, though someone had found more embroidering for the little girls to do, and Princess Elizabeth was sitting at the window quietly reading her prayer book. She could see little Richard’s legs under the hanging. He must be playing knucklebones there. He didn’t come out. The girls all looked searchingly at her as soon as they saw a new face—making Isabel blushingly aware of the happiness she couldn’t help showing after being with Dickon, and of the stubble- scratched pinkness of her cheeks. But they didn’t come creeping closer, hoping for comfort. They were busy. Isabel sensed that they were less worried than yesterday.

“We can’t come out,” the princess said, answering Isabel’s inquiring look. “Her Majesty my mother still doesn’t trust him.”

But her voice was calm. The younger children went on with their sewing, and watched.

“But . . . ,” Isabel stammered.

“We’re staying here,” the princess said. She was shrugging.

Then she did a strange thing. She looked at Isabel, very carefully, through narrowed eyes. And, once she’d satisfied herself of what ever she was thinking through, she leaned forward, challenging Isabel with suddenly lively eyes, and pulled a face. A gar-goyle grimace: eyebrows pulled up and lower eyelids down with her fingers, tongue stuck out.

Isabel began to laugh at the sheer cheek of the princess mocking her mother. She felt honored to have been trusted with that glimpse of childish rebellion, and relieved that the children’s spirits were so much higher, what ever fears the queen still harbored. The princess blanked her face again. She said, as somberly as if she’d never made herself so monstrous: “Her Majesty my mother says so.”

Hastings sat with Jane in her bower of roses long after the sun set, till after the curfew bell had broken off the clanging peals of relief from every church in town. “I worried too much,” Hastings said, leaning back on the bench and stretching out his long legs. One arm was around Jane’s shoulders. Out there with the birds and gnats and fruit trees, for the first time in years, he felt perfectly at peace. “I should have known Dickon was to be trusted.

I should have had more faith.”

She ran her hand through his hair.

“He hasn’t put a foot wrong,” Hastings exulted, enjoying the feel of her fingers on his scalp. Every muscle in his body was relaxing after all those days clenched for action; he would sleep to-night. “He’s changed us from government by the queen’s kin to government by the king’s with no more bloodshed than you’d get from a cut finger.”

She kissed him. He loved the look of trust in her eyes.

When Lord Stanley’s messenger banged at the door at midnight, Hastings’s first thought, looking down through the glass, then back at Jane’s perfectly peaceful sleep, curled up in the moonlight, was to send the man away. But it was midnight. It must be important.

He opened the window. A melodious low voice began to mutter Stanley’s message. He listened, incredulously. Stanley wanted to tell him he’d had a nightmare. It was an omen, the man was explaining. Hastings should leave town with his master now.

Hastings only realized he’d raised his own voice when he saw Jane lift her head sleepily toward him. He’d been snarling: “What do you mean, a nightmare?” But he didn’t want to frighten Jane.

And it was almost funny. It was funny. He laughed and lowered his voice. “Tell him not to be so superstitious,” he said, more gently.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“What was that?” Jane whispered, snuggling back into his chest. From out there in the silence, he could hear the unearthly bark of a fox. He thought, impatiently, Why is Stanley still so jittery? The man had woken up in terror, it seemed, after dreaming that he and Hastings were being chased by a boar. A white boar, Dickon’s emblem; and a white boar drenched in blood.

But experience had just proved they’d been wrong to mistrust Dickon. Stanley should have woken up from his nightmare and dealt with his own fears, without pestering Hastings. He put his brown arms around Jane’s white shoulders. He thought: Nothing matters except this.

“It was nothing,” he said softly.

She was already asleep.

12

friday 13th

Another shout woke Hastings into a hot morning.

He’d ignored the sounds of servants about their business in the house, the wafts of fish stew, the sun streaming into the room through bed curtains he’d forgotten to close. But he couldn’t ignore the cheerful voice yelling from the street: “Hey! Slugabed! My Lord Hastings! Stir yourself! Hey!”

Jane groaned and tightened against him. “Is that the time?” she whispered, but showed no sign of opening her eyes. He disentangled himself, stood up and stretched lazily, enjoying his freedom to look at her for as long as he wanted, disregarding the voice, which was still caterwauling away outside, for a moment longer.

He knew that voice. It was Howard’s son, Thomas. He must want to walk to Council together.

Without bothering to hide his nakedness—if Thomas Howard knew to find him here, he’d know why, and Hastings was proud of that—he went to the window and waved. Young Howard was leaning against a tree trunk. There were green shadows in his hair.

“All right,” Hastings called, resigning himself to spending this glorious morning niggling over the details of the coronation next month. He wasn’t in a mood for committee squabbles, personally.

The boy could wear purple sacking as far as he was concerned, now he knew they’d be getting him to the church on time. But he was sure Morton and Dorset would have a long list of points they’d insist be discussed, just to show Gloucester—who, they’d voted yesterday, in a belated climb- down he’d had the restraint not to gloat about, could, after all, be sole Protector—how attentive they were to protocol. “That’s enough yelling. I’ll be down in a minute.”

He pulled on yesterday’s linen. It would be fine. He should make proper arrangements soon, though; get some clothes sent here. He dipped his hands in the pitcher of water, sloshed a cold shock of it on his face. It was pure spring water. Jane didn’t stint herself. He drank some from his cupped hands. Ran wet hands through his hair to smooth it down; leaned down to kiss Jane’s shoulder, which glowed out of the nest of sheets like a ripe peach.

Mine forever, he thought; and wondered if he’d dare marry her.

Well, he didn’t have to decide now. He could just enjoy the golden summer’s day. He was whistling as he got to the bottom of the stairs.

They sauntered companionably through the streets, side by side, Hastings still whistling, young Howard still grinning. Hastings could see the townsfolk in their flapping gowns smiling at the sight of them. And why not? These two noblemen without a care in the world were living, walking proof that London was safe.

“Father Paul,” he called merrily at the priest gliding toward him on Tower Street, Jane’s confessor from St. Thomas of Acre.

The man’s pudding of a face broke into a smile. He changed course, crossed the road toward them to greet them.

“Come on,” Hastings heard Howard say at his side, “you don’t need a priest yet.” And he threw back his head and roared with laughter.

Hastings laughed with the younger man, who this morning looked the spitting image of his father as Hastings had first known him—fresh cheeks, bright eyes, a hay- mop of hair. He let himself be led on.

But he did stop to greet his poursuivant. He liked the sight of his own black and silver livery on the man’s back, against the glitter of silver on dark water at Tower Wharf. And he wanted to squint up at the palace. In this light, today, even that great pile of threat didn’t look as forbidding as usual. “Sir Thomas; my lord Hastings,” the man said, turning away from the barrels he’d been inspecting on the quayside to sweep them a deep bow. Hastings hoped they were the extra supplies of wine he’d ordered for his house hold to celebrate the king’s arrival with.

“How are you this morning, Robert?” Hastings asked affectionately, taking no notice of Howard fidgeting at his side. He could wait. They were early. And Hastings’s brave fighting men deserved the best, always.

Robert grinned back: “All the better for seeing all this, sir.

And you?”

Hastings drew in a deep lungful of glittering air, taking in the whiff of river dankness, the ropes like rat tails, the creaking of wood on water; thinking with grim plea sure of the Woodville prisoners at Pontefract, who were to be executed that day. “Me?” he replied exultantly. “I’ve never been better.”

The others were already inside, scuffing their feet on the floor like schoolboys waiting for class. Not many of them; there was another coronation meeting for the other half of Council at Westminster, chaired by Bishop Russell. The Woodvilles were there; the only people here were Archbishop Rotherham, the disgusting slug Morton, the Duke of Buckingham, and Lord Stanley, who was embarrassed enough now by the foolish night message he’d sent to be avoiding Hastings’s eye.

Well, it was understandable he might have panicked, Hastings thought forgivingly; after all, Stanley had more than most to worry about. It couldn’t be easy being married to that object of perpetual suspicion, the last Lancastrian princess, however deep Margaret Beaufort chose to bury herself in the countryside. No wonder the man’s nerve had broken.

He strode over to Stanley and clapped him on the back.

“Thomas,” he said; and when the other man turned baggy, anxious eyes toward him, he winked. Then he bowed low to Buckingham, who wasn’t a man to make an enemy of; who had been with Dickon on his dash across England to take the king from the Woodvilles; who, last year, had been the lord to pronounce Parliament’s death sentence on the Duke of Clarence; a man whose hard eagle features never relaxed. Hastings even nodded at Morton.

Hastings was the first to rise to his feet when he heard footsteps in the corridor.

“My Lord Protector,” he said, bowing deep as Dickon walked in, taking plea sure at letting the title he’d fought for Dickon to get roll off his tongue now; enjoying the tight smile he glimpsed on Morton’s fat little face too.

Dickon stopped in front of Hastings. Held his gaze for a second, with that stillness he’d always had. Then the Lord Protector whom Hastings had helped to create lifted the corners of his mouth into a half- smile, and nodded. “My lord,” he said lightly.

Hastings read that as a careful ac knowledgment of his loyalty.

Dickon nodded at Morton and Stanley too, keeping things even. He’d always been a diplomat. Then he said to the group, just as lightly: “Could you start without me? I’ll be with you in an hour,” and, without another word, left again. It was frustrating.

No one wanted to spend longer on this than they needed. But, watching Morton’s hand, with its list already out, ready to impress, fluttering disconsolately back down to his robe, Hastings couldn’t help but smile inside.

Morton's enthusiasm for the task at hand had thoroughly annoyed them all by the time the footsteps came back. Hastings and Stanley were raising exasperated eyebrows at each other as the prelate made one long- winded proposal after another, as if he wanted to organize the whole event himself before Dickon got back to run the meeting. Rotherham had retreated into a series of patient nods of assent; Hastings thought from the man’s occasional starts and blinks that he might be trying to fight the urge to doze off . Buckingham was sitting very still, looking impatiently out the window; while young Howard, who kept glancing sideways at the duke, was trying to do the same.

Hastings stood up with an easygoing smile of relief, ready to roll his eyes at Dickon too.

But the Protector who walked through the door this time was in no mood for laughing.

He was angry—breathing fast; walking fast; ready on his toes; full of fight. “What,” he barked out, staring round at them, one after the other, “should be the penalty for planning to destroy me?” There was an astonished silence. “Me, so near in blood to the king?” Another, sicker silence. “Me, the Protector of his realm?”

Dickon’s jaw was out; he was bobbing forward with every question; he was ready to go on lashing them with words unless he was answered.

Hastings recognized from the shuffling and shifting around him that the others were waiting for him to head off this unexpected rage. He’d known the Protector best for longest. He was a head taller than Dickon; so he did what he could to make himself smaller, hunching down in the inoffensive way of servants or grooms gentling horses.

“Why, my lord,” he said soothingly, “of course they should be arrested as traitors.”

Before he could ask who had made the Protector so angry, Dickon started plucking frantically at his left arm with his right.

When he couldn’t roll the off ending sleeve up, he ripped it. Underneath was the same scar from Scotland that Hastings had seen before—a thin white slash on dark skin, fully healed. But Dickon was staring at it with horror, as if it had changed. There was white all around the edges of his rolling eyes.

“They’ve withered me.” It was half snarl, half howl. “They’ve bewitched me.”

Hastings felt a sick black rush in his gut. This was how Clarence had got at the end: the ravings about pins and dolls and poisonings. He remembered how fastidiously Dickon had raised his eyebrows at his brother’s behavior then, the regretful way he’d shaken his head. It beggared belief that coolheaded Dickon could be going the same way now.

He was so worried that he stepped forward and put his hand on the Protector’s clothed arm. He pleaded, “Dickon?” not bothering with protocol, just wanting this stranger with the familiar face to turn back into his old friend.

Dickon whirled round to him as if seeing him for the first time. There was a cunning look on the Protector’s face.

“Ah,” he said, “you don’t ask who did it, do you? Ask me who.

Go on,” he said, sticking his face right up against Hastings’s. “Ask me who.”

The others had gone as quiet as woodland animals frozen before a predator. It was as if there were only the two of them left in the room.