Queen of Trial and Sorrow (23 page)

“My lord, do you still say you don’t know where the lady is?” asked Edward, voice neutral, no note of skepticism.

“I tell you she just disappeared from my house, probably in the middle of the night, or very early morning before anyone was up.  Ask Isabel!  Ask anyone in my household!”

“I can well understand our brother of Gloucester’s disbelief,” I interjected.  “That a gently-bred girl, Warwick’s daughter, should choose to run away, leaving all her possessions behind, rather than marry a young duke of unblemished reputation, passes the bounds of credulity.”

Ignoring me, Clarence glared at his younger brother.  “You have to talk to him, Edward.  He’s getting too far above himself.  Who does he think he is to barge into my house and do violence to me in front of my household – and my wife, who was so distressed by the whole incident that she had to be put to bed with a sedative.  And then he has the unmitigated gall to order a search, to go poking and prying through my entire house!  He forgets I am your brother, too!  He deserves to be punished!”

“I will talk to him.  He tends to be impetuous.  It’s his youth.  I’m sure he already regrets his treatment of you.”  Edward waved a hand in dismissal.  “You have leave.  Take your lady home.  She looks tired.”  When Clarence had sauntered off, Edward’s demeanor seemed to relax and he looked at the younger duke with a mixture of exasperation and affection.

“Well, Dickon, did you, in fact, try to throttle our brother?” he asked mildly.  

“No!” said Gloucester, and then shrugged.  He was staring at his shoes.  “I merely held him by the neck for a little time.”

“With your bare hands?  How did that feel?” Edward asked, and Gloucester glanced up at him, seeing a gleam of amusement in the blue eyes.

“Very satisfying,” he said with a grin.  Their eyes met and they were unable to hold back their laughter.  Clarence, turning back, scowled in their direction.  Edward quickly became serious.

“Listen, Dickon, you had better learn to control your temper.  No man who exercises power can do so to the limits of his competence when his blood is hot.  He is both blinded and shackled by passion.  It takes a cool mind to weigh options, make rational decisions and act effectively.  If you lose your temper in any situation you are likely to lose your hold on that situation.  Stay in control, always.”

Gloucester said: “Admit it: you’d have liked to strangle him a time or two.”

“But it’s only a pleasant fantasy.  You cannot relieve your feelings by half-strangling our brother even if you think you have good cause.  I want you to keep your hands off him.  I want you to moderate your conduct, treat him with respect, don’t quarrel with him.”

Gloucester stood rigidly, with his hands knotted and a look in his eyes that I imagined Clarence must have viewed close up as he struggled for breath.  “He’s the one who has offended!  He’s hidden her away somewhere, or murdered her – I know he has!  Why is the onus on me?” 

“Because I am fortunate to be able to compel your obedience,” Edward said calmly.

“You’re not being fair, Edward.  You said I could have her.”

“Well, logic dictates you can’t have her if you can’t find her, and you won’t find her by provoking our brother.  You will only succeed in annoying
me!
”

“You could force him to reveal where she is,” said the duke without much hope.

Edward raised one cynical eyebrow. “What do you suggest?  The rack?  Burning faggots?  How about a lightless cell with only rats for company and a daily ration of bread and water? Or perhaps I should threaten to burn his wardrobe.”

That brought a smile.  The duke’s face underwent a wondrous transformation, losing its severity and revealing just a hint of the youthfulness mercilessly suppressed.  He struck me as very competent, the kind of man who got things done with ruthless economy.  At all times there was a restless energy about him that sometimes translated into a kind of barely leashed violence lurking just beneath the surface in the coil of muscle and sinew.

Edward pointed to a footstool and Gloucester sat reluctantly, with his chin cupped in his palms.

“Dickon, it’s been a hard road to get to this point,” Edward said gravely.  “And you know what the cost has been.  I pray Tewkesbury was my last battle.  I haven’t the heart for it anymore.  I’ve been taken captive, lost scores of friends, endured exile, albeit briefly, while my queen was forced to flee to sanctuary with our daughters, where our son was born in such pitiful circumstances.  And,” he added with a sigh that came from the soul, “I have committed regicide.  And now, having paid a bitter price over ten long years, when all my enemies are in their tombs and there is a very real prospect of peace, I find my brothers at each other’s throats – literally!  I won’t have it, Dickon.  I know our brother is a nuisance.  So do you, so if you can’t keep your temper I can only advise you to stay away from him.”

“Believe me, nothing would please me more.”

“On a happier note,” said Edward, signaling for wine, “the queen believes she’s with child again.”

One thing my critics could not fault was my fecundity.  I now had six children, and was more fortunate than most in never having suffered a stillbirth.  One miscarriage had predated the birth of Thomas. 

“My felicitations, Madam.  I shall pray for a happy outcome,” Gloucester said stiffly.

“Thank you, my lord.”

It was not that we actively disliked each other, only that Gloucester was ridiculously shy with ladies, which had the effect of making him very aloof and formal in their company, and this was particularly true when he was in the presence of his dazzling brother whose way with women was like a flower to bees, or a flame to moths.  As for me, compelled by pride to gather to me every shred of dignity and deference I saw as my due, I was still defensive concerning my marriage and read disapproval in his remote manner.  Thus, our exchanges were always stilted.

……….

Since he wouldn’t be ready to take up his duties in the north for several more weeks, (there were indentures to be drawn up, parameters of jurisdiction to be worked out and many offices to fill with reliable men) Gloucester spent much of his free time in the search for Anne Neville.  If a high born girl were to leave her home with only the clothes on her back, and on the assumption that Clarence had spoken the truth when he said she had left of her own volition, there was really only one place she was likely to go: a religious house.

He began with the Poor Clares, a Franciscan house of nuns near Aldgate and home to many wellborn ladies, including my mother, retired from the world to expiate their sins in contemplation and worship.  The other convents in and around the city received visits from him or his men and he did not neglect the priories and monasteries, as women were not barred from such enclaves.  When his activities reached the ears of the king, he was summoned to his brother’s presence and told in no uncertain terms that he could not continue to push his way into houses of religion and ransack their quarters like some Viking of old in search of spoil. 

Though he apologized to the king and wrote letters of apology to those he had offended, Gloucester did not give up his search.  Fortunately, he was done with religious houses, at least those within a close radius of the capital, and he was able to continue more circumspectly.  Armed with a description, his men searched the hospitals and entered the sanctuaries at Westminster and St. Martin-le-Grande to scrutinize the inmates.  They sat in taverns and casually brought up the subject of the missing heiress.

Inevitably, since a reward was offered, there were those who claimed to know where she was, or know someone who knew something.  When he wasn’t busy with the council working out the details of his northern command, Gloucester followed every lead until it petered out and went on many a wild goose chase.  Anne Neville was nowhere to be found.

The mystery of the missing heiress kept my ladies and I enthralled as we worked on our sewing during those lovely long summer days when the white roses were abloom in Westminster’s garden.  The king was so busy repairing the fabric of his government he scarce could get away, and I was busying myself with my new chapel, which I intended to dedicate to St. Erasmus.

Meantime, the quarrel between the brothers was escalating.  Clarence stuck to his story: that when informed of Gloucester’s wish to wed her, the lady was so overcome with revulsion that she fled his house and he had no idea what had become of her.  Whereas Gloucester was convinced that any well-born lady who would prefer to take her chances in the streets of London rather than with a man of his standing must be a little soft in the head.  And didn’t he have a point?  They could not be in the same room together; there were clashes between their followers, and the king was losing patience. 

Where could she be?  There was a remote possibility that she had run away, my ladies all agreed.  Gloucester, some said, could be… well, intimidating.  On the other hand, if she were such a mouse, would she have the courage to disappear into the benighted streets of London where all manner of hideous traps awaited the unwary?  There were worse fates than marriage to a royal duke. 

But if hidden, whether by her own choice or not, how could she remain hidden so long when even the stone men who peered down from the cornices of the abbey knew she was missing and a reward offered for her whereabouts?  Alice Fogge was of the opinion that she had been trussed up and tossed in the Thames so that the Duke of Clarence could keep her estates in his greedy hands, but the others insisted that even he, wicked as he was, dare not encompass the murder of a great lady.  Someone else posited that perhaps she had died naturally, of a fever, say, and he had been too frightened to admit it because everyone would think the worst of him?  This, too, was not a popular theory, since everyone already thought the worst of him.  And how complicit was the Duchess Isabel?  Surely she must know what had happened to her sister.  Why didn’t she speak up?  So pale she looked in those days, so thin.  She had never really recovered her health after the birth of her baby at sea the previous year when Warwick had fled England.

Catching everyone by surprise, the news raced through the palace like fire on dry timbers that the Lady Anne had been found.  She was at the Bishop of Ely’s Palace in Holborn and in apparent good health.  The Duke of Gloucester descended directly and whisked her away to the sanctuary at St. Martin-le-Grande near Newgate where, he proclaimed, she would be safe from those who wished her harm and also under no duress to wed him.

When the king came to sup with me, I fed him roe on wafers from my own fingers, which he contrived to capture every now and then to kiss.  I expect he thought I would provide a few convivial guests, but it was only the two of us. I had dismissed all but the servants who were to wait on us and a page standing by the door.  The ubiquitous William Berkeley was in attendance with his lute.  I wanted to get the story out of Edward without distraction and without the need to be circumspect.  He had it from the Bishop of Ely and from Gloucester.  Even so, it was a little confused.  

Apparently, Clarence didn’t have to force her to anything.  She welcomed the chance he gave her to hide away; her husband, the Lancastrian prince, had been so nasty and obnoxious that she was terrified of marrying again.  But when Clarence bundled her into a carriage in the dead of night, she expected to be taken to a nunnery, or to sanctuary.  She was taken instead to the home of Sir Thomas Burdett in Holborn, where she was inducted into a life of unimaginable drudgery, scrubbing floors, sweeping the hearth, emptying chamberpots onto the midden and cleaning them out, carrying pail after pail of water from a standpipe in the yard of an adjacent tavern – in other words, the basest of kitchen work, the kind that could be accomplished even by one as soft and unskilled as Warwick’s daughter.  Her fellow denizens were given a plausible explanation of her circumstances.  She was the bastard child of a prosperous knight, tolerated by the first wife but not by the second and thrown out of the house with only the weeds she stood up in.  It was a story that brought out all the envy and spite of the downtrodden for those fallen from dignity to their own level. 

“But she was not chained!” I protested.  “She was allowed outside the house.  She could have just walked into the tavern and told them who she was.  Why didn’t she?”

“Who can say?” said Edward, signaling his server for another helping of the roast lamb.  “She didn’t know London and its environs well and lacked the courage to make her escape.  And if she had told them in the tavern, would they have believed her?  Or would they have locked her up and sold her to the highest bidder as a virgin?  Few grown men of my acquaintance would think of going abroad in London without a considerable escort.  How much more terrifying to someone of the Lady Anne’s upbringing would be the prospect of venturing into those forbidding warrens alone?” 

He took a drink of wine; his eyes gleamed over the rim of the goblet but he knew he would get little interest from me until I’d heard the story.  

“So how did she escape?”

“It was easy in the end.  Every Sunday she went with the rest of the household to the parish church of St. Andrew’s to hear Mass.  This past Sunday when she was trailing after the others on the way back, she heard the sound of many horses and saw several pairs of liveried men preceding a carriage over the stone bridge that crosses the Fleet.  As it drew closer she saw clearly revealed in the window the profile of the Bishop of Ely, a very good friend of her uncle, the Archbishop of York, whose palace was just across the street.  It was a whim that seized her, Dickon said, no more than that.  Perhaps the bishop’s timely appearance opened a portal through which she had a glimpse of her old life and reminded her that she was the daughter of an earl and the most powerful men in the land are her kin. So she sprinted toward the horses, and when she reached them she flung herself to her knees and clasped her hands together begging for help.

“At first the good bishop didn’t recognize her.  In fact, he let the carriage roll by without stopping and only when it had entered the gates of his palace did he alight and walk back to where she was still kneeling in the road.  She kept babbling over and over that she was Anne Neville.  Of course, she didn’t look like Anne Neville.  She was wearing a coarse homespun robe and dirty coif, with patens on her feet.  Her face was grimy and when he examined her hands later he saw they were red and blistered and scabbed, the nails bitten to the quick.  Still, there was just a trace of the girl she had been when he last saw her.”

“Oh, the poor, poor child,” I said, looking down at my own hands, so soft and white, the fingers long and the nails perfect polished ovals.  The rings I wore, on three fingers and a thumb accentuated their delicate beauty.

“The first thing the bishop did was to pop her into a bath – she had a necklace of fleabites – after which she napped.  While she was thus engaged, the bishop hurried to me.  I made clear to him that it would be best for all concerned, and for the kingdom itself, if nothing were said about where she was found – for obvious reasons.”

“Because Sir Thomas Burdett is one of Clarence’s household knights.”

“For obvious reasons,” he repeated in a hard tone.  “I’ve had enough trouble with the Nevilles.  I want no more.”

“Of course,” I agreed.

“If Dickon finds out… well, I cannot answer for his actions.  I asked the bishop to impress upon the lady the need for discretion and cooperation, in the hope of avoiding further friction between my brothers.”

Why is it, I thought, that no matter how outrageous his behavior, no matter how many lives he tramples in order to achieve his ambitions, Clarence is never called to account?  Where is justice?  Does royal blood automatically convey immunity?  Yes, the king would say: How can I punish my brother?

……….

There was a new chill in the air.  Mists lay along the river in the mornings and wind stripped yellowing leaves from the trees.  The courts opened for Michaelmas Term and Westminster Hall was again crowded with lawyers and their clients, judges and clerks.

Jasper Tudor, finally giving up a lost cause, escaped to sea along with his nephew Henry, intent on throwing himself on Louis’ tender mercy.  By some happenstance, he washed up on the shores of Brittany, and in spite of Francis’s recent importunities to Edward, Tudor was given a cordial reception and a promise of protection.  Edward was not unhappy with this outcome: Tudor was out of the kingdom and out of Louis’ clutches too, where he would undoubtedly have been used to cause trouble.  

The quarrel continued. 

Gloucester, inflexible and tenacious, could not let his brother win this time.  All his life Clarence had been taking from him.  Whenever he was given a present as a child, Clarence would take it and play with it, returning it only when he grew bored.  When the king, struggling to find lands to give his younger brother to support his estate as a duke, finally gave him the honor of Richmond, Clarence who, as the eldest and heir, had already been well endowed, threw such a fit that Edward took it from the younger and granted it to the elder.  Not to mention that he had made that mad attempt to deprive Gloucester of his intended bride. That was Clarence:  If you have it, I want it; if I can’t have it, you can’t have it.  While in this present conflict Edward appeared to be favoring Clarence, he repeatedly assured Gloucester that no matter the outcome with respect to the countess’s estates he would not be the loser. 

Gloucester said:  “You should see her hands.  He deserves to be horsewhipped for that alone.”

Smug, Clarence retorted: “He can’t prove anything against me.”

“Maybe I should horsewhip Thomas Burdett.” 

Clarence, with a shrug: “He’s a friend of mine.  What of it?” 

Gloucester: “He doesn’t have friends, only bully-boys and creatures that crawled out of the slime.”

The king: “There will be no more talk of horsewhipping.”

The quarrel escalated after the discovery of Anne Neville.  Now they were snarling over the Warwick estates like two starveling mongrels over a juicy bone.  Clarence, typically, wanted the lot, as the husband of the eldest daughter, but Gloucester wanted a more equitable division.  The king was determined Gloucester should have the north; the very idea of Clarence having any power or influence in that volatile area was enough to alarm him.  Although my husband and his two brothers acted as if the Countess of Warwick had ceased to exist, she was in fact still in sanctuary at Beaulieu Abbey under close guard, and she wrote letter after letter to the king, to me, the two brothers, my mother, the king’s mother and sisters and even to the Lady Bessie, protesting the appropriation of estates that were hers by hereditary right.

Gloucester did his best to avoid Clarence, but the quarrel did not abate, being carried on between their servants, for when two royal dukes were involved every man had an opinion and felt himself free to express it in tavern and guildhall, resulting on one occasion in an undignified scuffle between an obese chandler and a gouty fishmonger.

When Gloucester went so far as to seek the opinion of the learned doctors of Trinity College the king, growing ever more concerned, invited them to put their respective cases before his council in the hope that the best minds of the kingdom might find a solution.

“It was quite amazing,” he said to me that evening.  “Even those councilors learned in the law were astonished by the acuity of their arguments and the rhetorical skills they employed to present them.  The Bishop of Ely told me he’d not heard a more impressive address outside the universities.”

“I expect they were very properly rehearsed by some of those same learned men,” I remarked, laving my hands with an expensive cream.

I was always careful not risk my husband’s displeasure by letting my hostility toward his treacherous brother show too overtly, for he would not abide criticism of his family from me.  When I had demanded that he punish Clarence for his part in the deaths of my father and brother, I was the one punished and in a way that he knew would hurt me where I was most vulnerable, my pride. That was the first time he had taken another woman to his bed and it followed upon five years of fidelity, but it wasn’t the last.  Since his return from Burgundy, he was a different man, and he took women for his pleasure whenever the fancy suited him

There was nothing I could do about it.  I couldn’t even bring myself to reproach him, for I knew the effect would be to drive him further from me.  In general, he was discreet and I was grateful for that, but there were many at court who wished me to know where my husband was when he wasn’t in my bed.  We pretended, he and I, that it wasn’t happening.  I told myself that I was the queen and that was all that mattered.  These other women were nothing.  They passed in and out of the king’s bed and left barely an impression.

I lifted my hand mirror and gazed critically at my reflection.  Was I still beautiful?  Surely I was, but there was no doubt that tiny lines were emerging around my eyes; so tiny they were invisible except in the clearest light.  My figure was still good, except that my breasts were heavier, with a tendency to – oh, loathsome word –
sag,
particularly when I had a babe in the womb.  I think he still desired me, and not just for the children I could bear him, but perhaps Elizabeth Howard had reminded him that a diet of even the finest bread was a poor feast.   

“What did they say?” I asked, always eager for information about Clarence that might presage his fall from favor. 

He settled onto an upholstered bench from where he could watch me being prepared for bed.  Lady Ashley handed him a goblet of wine with a coquettish smile.  I would pay her out later.

Balancing the goblet on his knee, he said:  “The debate was on the point of becoming an exercise in irksome didacticism when George swept away all Dickon’s arguments by pointing out that he was putting the cart before the horse and had no more right to claim a share of the inheritance than had the clerk of the council or his Eminence, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  He had no claim in law at all since he was not wed to Lady Anne, whereas it could not be disputed that he, George, has a very valid claim in right of his wife.”

“Point to Clarence,” I said.

Dismissing my tiring woman, I went to sit beside him on the bench.  His arm went around my shoulder drawing me close and his hand slipped inside my robe to stroke the curve of my belly.

“The problem with Clarence is that he is utterly spoiled,” I said carefully, a mild criticism he could hardly refute.  “He’s accustomed to having his own way.  But surely he cannot stop Richard from wedding Anne Neville.”

“No, he has no authority in that matter, which won’t prevent him from causing as much trouble as he can.  But, Dickon doesn’t
want
to wed her until the matter of the estates is settled.  This isn’t about Anne Neville.  It’s about wealth in all its guises: estates, retainers, crops, revenues and that most potent of aphrodisiacs: power.”

“Everyone seems to have forgotten that it’s the Countess of Warwick who’s in possession of all that wealth. She isn’t dead and she hasn’t handed it over to her daughters.”

“Quite right, sweetheart,” he said, taking a drink of his wine and feeding me a few sips, before resuming his stroking of my belly. 

How can he be so tender, I wondered?  If the mood takes him, he’ll go from here to whichever complaisant doxy presently has him in her toils.