Portrait of an Unknown Woman (41 page)

 
          
The Guildfords would have taken us both. But I wouldn’t go. I told Morton to find me somewhere else. I said I couldn’t live with that coward.

 
          
Perhaps he was a bit scared of the strutting little bully I was then. More likely he just felt sorry for me. So I stayed at Gipping with the Tyrrells.

 
          
And my pride. It didn’t win me a kingdom, though. It just lost me my brother.

 
          
I was lonely after he went. And I got scared. Of course I did. I wasn’t allowed to stay in touch with my mother or my sisters. And I wouldn’t have anything to do with the one person in my family I was still permitted to know. I wouldn’t give in, even when Archbishop Morton started wanting me to go to the Guildfords and make my peace with Edward.

 
          
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll go abroad if I have to go somewhere. I’d rather go to my aunt’s court in Burgundy than live with Edward again.’ That’s where pride and ambition got me next. I’d lost my brother; then I gave up my country too.

 
          
And it didn’t stop there. Before I left for Burgundy, I started writing to my mother. She was at court again by then, all bustling and happy that the deal she and Morton had struck with Henry had made her daughter the queen of England. I wrote her terrible letters. I accused her of forgetting her sons for the sake of her own ambition: of abandoning the truth, betraying her husband’s memory, forgetting God. She was a difficult woman. But she didn’t deserve the things I said to her. So she met me.

 
          
And she pleaded with me. But I wouldn’t forgive her. I slammed around and raged. I didn’t mean to be so angry. I thought it was just a beginning. A negotiation. It wasn’t just my ill manners; it was what we were brought up to. Raging and blackmail were how she did things too, how everyone in my family did things. But we never finished our row—because King Henry found out we’d met. And he didn’t play by our rules. When the old king got angry, it was a quiet, obstinate sort of anger. He said she’d broken their pact, so he was going to punish her. I didn’t see her again. I was packed off to Burgundy without more ado. And she was sent over the river to the nunnery at Bermondsey. They monitored her letters. There was no way we could have written. And then she died.”

 
          
John stared into the fire. There were tears on his cheeks. He’d almost forgotten me. He was talking to himself. “So my thrashing around lost me my mother too. And it lost her everything,” he murmured.

 
          
I squeezed his hand. Suddenly he looked properly at me—a flash of blue. He laughed, but a bad laugh, full of self-hatred, full of pain. “And do you know what?” he went on. “It was all for nothing. My whole one-boy rebellion. My whole willingness to turn on my family for the sake of an idea. It turned out to be a joke—a joke on me.”

 
          
“What do you mean?” I whispered.

 
          
“They didn’t let my mother go to her funeral, but I saw Elizabeth before she died. When I heard her baby had been born dead, and that she was weakening too, I came running back from Burgundy. I got a travel pass in my groom’s name, took his clothes, and just rode off. I was lucky—I heard fast. She was my sister and the queen of England and people talked 
about her in Burgundy. My aunt kept tabs on everything. And I was a man by then—twenty-nine—and just about wise enough to listen when my heart said ‘Be with your sister at her end.’ But it was the same old recklessness too. I was homesick. I wanted to be where the air smelled of life, and people spoke English in the streets. I did it just because I could. I still craved that head-rush of danger.”

 
          
“What?” I quavered. But John wouldn’t be prompted. He was in his past.

 
          
“I bribed a man to take a note . . . I got myself taken in . . . she was in the State Apartments at the Tower . . . and she was very pale on her bed, with her red hair turning gray and wrinkles and bruises around her eyes, and her body bloated and coarsened, so I might never have known her as the girl I’d last seen in the sanctuary at Westminster nearly twenty years before, except that when she saw me and smiled she suddenly looked young. Her face had been like my father’s—beautiful and fleshy and sensual, with fat little laughing rosebud lips—and that’s how it became again.

 
          
And then she half sat up in the bed and said, ‘Richard . . . I never imagined you’d come like this . . . God has brought you,’ with the most transforming look on her face, like a ray of light. There was something on her mind that made her hands flutter and her face twitch. She called a woman to bring her a box, her writing materials. She said, ‘There’s something I’ve got to show you before I die.’ She stroked my face. ‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ she said. ‘Not like this. Not in peace.’ I had no idea my appearance at her side would bring her such joy. And when they brought the box she sent everyone away and had me pull out the parchment she wanted.

 
          
She didn’t have the strength to do it herself. ‘Look, Richard,’ she said.

           
Weakly. Eagerly.

 
          
It was an old document. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the faded writing in the bad light. But once I began to follow what was on the page, I felt a rush of blood to the head. I was so dizzy I was grateful I wasn’t standing. I couldn’t have stayed on my feet.

 
          
It was a letter she’d written me years before, in Henry’s first years as king, during the uprisings. She’d never known from one day to the next whether one of those invading armies on one of those beaches might not turn out to have me at its head. However much Henry had sworn that Uncle Richard must have had me and Edward murdered, she’d never quite known if he was telling her the truth. They didn’t trust each other. She’d never known, either, whether she’d have wanted me to be alive, because if I was, and I came back to claim the throne, then what would become of her children? So she’d written to me as a kind of private defense, in case that ever happened—a letter she’d never have shown her husband. It was her

appeal to deflect the wrath of a vengeful returning brother. An appeal to my better judgment.

 
          
What she’d written about was something that had happened many years before, before we were even born. Her letter said she’d seen proof that our father had already contracted one secret marriage before he’d secretly married our mother. That’s what Uncle Richard had accused him of, when he deposed Edward and me; but I’d always assumed Uncle Richard had made it up. But what Elizabeth said was that Uncle Richard had been telling the truth. She’d actually seen the record: an agreement, binding in law, to marry Lady Eleanor Butler. Dated 1462, years before my parents married. Drawn up and signed by Robert Stillingfleet and the affianced couple. The written proof Bishop Stillingfleet had sworn to Parliament never existed. But then, by the time he talked about it, there was no one left to contradict him. The Lady Eleanor had died in the convent she’d been put into years before—Father must have got tired of her as soon as he’d had her, and moved on to some other pretty copper-haired war widow whose virtue was easier, and he must have got scared that the Lady Eleanor might try to make him honor his empty promise. And anyway, Stillingfleet had let the contract be burned.”

 
          
John turned back to me and the present. His eyes were still shocked now. “I couldn’t stop staring at the paper,” he whispered. “I said, ‘But, Elizabeth . . . this means . . . this means . . .’ I was stammering like an idiot . . . and she said yes, more calmly than me, but she’d had years longer to think about what it meant. ‘It means Father wasn’t free to marry Mother when he did. It means he was a bigamist and we are a family of bastards, just as Uncle Richard said.’

 
          
‘How did you see it?’ I said.

 
          
‘Stillingfleet brought it to Mother.’ She laughed—our family laugh, a last little wolf-howl of defiance at fate. ‘After Father died. He told her she should pray for guidance from God; he must have half believed it would make her give up her children’s right to the throne. He can’t have known Mother very well. Naturally she burned it. I watched her. I didn’t try to stop her. I didn’t try to stop Henry relegitimizing me when he’d won the wars, either. Why would I? I was fed up with being a helpless girl in a war.

 
          
I wanted to be queen of England. We all knew Henry had almost no real claim to the throne; he needed me to be royal so my blood would legitimize him; he’d never have married a bastard.’

 
          
‘Why are you telling me now?’ I said.

 
          
‘Because I know you’re the only one left who dreams of the old days. Edward’s safe. Everyone else is dead. I kept it to give to you, because, if you didn’t know the truth, you might go on thinking you had a claim to the throne. You might harm my boy. And I dread that happening. My children aren’t like we were—not so hard; they were born in kinder times.

 
          
My boy Arthur would have been a king to be proud of; a king of Camelot. But now he’s dead’—she didn’t flinch; she was made of stern stuff—‘and there’s just little Harry. Nine years old. As headstrong as Father ever was, but he’s just a child. I don’t want you to hurt him. I want you to keep him safe. Will you promise, Richard? And will you pray with me for God to bless Harry’s reign?’

 
          
I promised. And we prayed. And when she wanted to sleep—she didn’t have much strength left—I kissed her and left with the letter in my pocket.

 
          
I hardly noticed where I was on the way out. Everything that had sustained me since I was a child was falling away from me. It was as if I were dropping into an abyss, with nothing to catch a fingerhold on and save myself. In one moment I’d stopped being a king-in-waiting and been turned back into a man like any other—except that, because of everything I’d done, I was alone in the world.

 
          
I wanted to stay; Elizabeth was my last family; but of course I couldn’t.

 
          
I wanted to go to Edward and beg his pardon; but I didn’t know where to begin to find him, and I was scared to try. I wanted to be back in Burgundy, but I could never tell Aunt Margaret what I knew. I didn’t know what to do.

 
          
So I ended up in some tavern near Walbrook, drinking myself silly in my cloak in a corner, and when it got late enough and I was fuddled and despairing enough, I got the letter out and set fire to it at the table. Before I knew where I was, before it had even burned right up, two big broken-nosed thugs who’d been sitting at the next table had me down on the floor. They said I looked suspicious. They were yelling that I’d been burning a Lollard tract. They couldn’t read, but they were pawing over the last scraps of the letter in my tankard, screeching, ‘A blasphemer, eh?’ until I began to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all and said to the biggest one, ‘Call the justice, then, you thieving thug.’ That sobered us all up. They kept my purse but they did march me round to the justice’s house with my black eye and broken nose. He only lived round the corner.

 
          
Your father was still very young then and building up his practice. Dealing with street drunks was the kind of case he did. I didn’t recognize him when he came into the stable they’d put me in. When I’d first seen him at Morton’s, he’d just been a boy. A page. But he recognized me straightaway. He got me out. He sent away the troublemakers. He even lent me the money to get back to Burgundy. And he talked to me. He brought me in here, into this parlor, and we sat up half the night talking in front of this fire. He was curious about me. Morton had charged him with following my fate and helping me if he could. And Erasmus (I knew Erasmus from Burgundy; he was in my aunt’s lover’s household) had told me all about him—the rising young humanist lawyer. And he’s an easy man to talk to. So I poured my troubled heart out to this stranger. Obviously I couldn’t tell him my sister’s dying secret, you’re the first person I’ve ever told, but I told him a lot of the other things I’d been realizing over my beers in the tavern. That I was homesick. That I was English, not Burgundian, and couldn’t live all my life in a foreign land. That I’d become more pragmatic and knew neither I nor Edward would now come to the throne.

 
          
That I wanted to live quietly and mend my ties with my brother. That I’d do anything to come back here.

 
          
He listened and listened, and nodded and nodded. And he sent me back to Burgundy, but he promised to play his part in bringing me back to England. The deal was—I should put my fate in his hands and promise never to meddle in affairs of state. Take no risks, and have no expectations, beyond the kind of personal happiness I would be unlikely to know otherwise.