Succession (9 page)

Margaret was hardly listening, transfixed by the Lady Alice’s unnatural smile, which did not reach her eyes.

‘I would have liked a little daughter,’ she said, nodding. ‘I would like you to be a daughter to me. I would like you to marry my son.’

All the protests died away on Margaret’s lips. There was no question in her mind that she would be a daughter to Lady Alice if that was what Lady Alice wanted.

Lady Alice said a few more words: that she hoped Margaret would be a companion for her son, that they would be companions for one another, throughout all life’s difficulties. Together they would face any adversity that life had to offer, and they would never be alone.

‘That is the great beauty of marrying young,’ she said. Then, unexpectedly, she let her head fall on to Margaret’s thin shoulders.

Margaret did not know what to do or say. She wondered if she should hold her tightly, as Betsy held her, or pat her shoulder. But Lady Alice rose swiftly, dabbing at her eyes, and went to the door where the servant was waiting outside. And Margaret understood that the interview was over.

Outside, the light seemed suddenly dazzling, though it was quite a dull day. John was waiting for her, scuffing one heel on the frozen earth. He looked up as she approached, and she looked at him as though she didn’t recognize him.

‘I told you we were going to be married,’ he said. When she didn’t answer he said, ‘And you will love me for ever. Wives do.’

She said nothing, but went to stand beside him. He looked at her uncertainly. ‘Will you marry me then?’ he asked, and she nodded. And hesitantly, awkwardly, he took her hand.

Soon she was standing with him in the little chapel, wearing the
white silk dress with seed pearls in the shape of daisies, while the little choir of poor boys sang. Their voices floated upwards to the ceiling which had been painted blue in imitation of the infinite sky. Then the priest told Margaret and John that marriage was a sacred sacrament, and they were joined together in an eternal bond.

Eternal
was one of those words, like
infinite
, that was hard to imagine. But she promised to marry John and to stay with him for ever, and to love him, as wives do.

And on the Sabbath day at about the tenth hour they beheaded him in a small boat and left his body with the head on the sea shore near Dover. And the body lay unburied for a month.

John Benet’s Chronicle

 

Lo! What availed him now all his deliverance of Normandy? And here you may learn how he was rewarded for the death of the Duke of Gloucester.

Brut Chronicle

 

After the messenger told her what had happened she said nothing for several moments. Then she said, ‘When?’

The messenger, a sharp-eyed man in rough clothing who had given his name simply as Watkin, pulled the corners of his mouth down. Then he advanced the opinion that it was probably three weeks ago now.

‘Three weeks?’

The man shrugged. He said that they had not discovered the body for a day or so, and at first they hadn’t known who it was. It had been stripped of its outer clothing and the head was … somewhat battered about. Once they had identified it as the duke they had sent a messenger straight away, but he had been attacked by robbers. He had been found not six miles away, so badly beaten it was unlikely that he would ever walk again. After that no one had wanted to make the journey, until Watkin had said that he was travelling north in any case.

She turned away from him then. She would not be sick.

‘The roads are bad, ma’am – very bad. It has taken me the best part of a week to get here.’

She knew he was hinting at payment. But he had not told her enough yet; or nothing she could comprehend. Her husband had been killed on a beach.

‘Where is my husband’s body?’

Watkin said that he was sure they would have moved the body by now. Into the church, most likely.

‘He must not be buried there,’ she said.

‘No, ma’am.’

‘You will take back my instructions to the monks.’

‘No, ma’am.’

She turned back to him.

‘I am travelling north,’ he said sturdily. ‘To Coventry. I am six days late already. I will not risk my life again on those roads.’

She stared at him. ‘What roads?’ And he began a long, rambling tale, about the soldiers coming back from Normandy in such great misery and poverty that all they could do was to rob poor people on the roads or in their own homes. No one was safe, he said. And the people of the countryside had grown unquiet.

She hardly heard him. Her husband’s body, with its severed head, had lain rotting on a beach. If she closed her eyes briefly she could see his face.
William
, she said, and he smiled at her.

‘So even if I did go back,’ the man was saying, ‘there’s no telling how long it’d take. And no saying I’d get there, either.’

She looked at him. He seemed like a man who could take care of himself. But she wasn’t going to argue. All she said was, ‘It doesn’t matter. I will send my own men to bring the bod– the duke back here.’

Watkin pulled his mouth again. Then he said that they should be well armed, and that if it were him, he would not travel in anything bearing the duke’s insignia.

She stared at him. ‘You may go,’ she said.

He bowed his head. ‘My lady –’

‘You may eat in the kitchens,’ she said, and he bowed his head once more and left.

Lady Alice made her way to a chair and sat on it. She wondered if she was trembling, but she was not trembling. Then she wondered again whether she would be sick, but she was not sick. She stared ahead without seeing anything. For the first time in her life, it seemed, she did not know what to do. When she closed her eyes she could see her husband’s face again, still smiling.

‘Tell me what to do,’ she said. She did not say it aloud but her lips moved as though she were praying. Her husband merely pointed out that she had always told him what to do. Then, superimposed over the image of his smiling face, came the image of his severed head,
somewhat battered about.

She opened her eyes again quickly. There were many things to do; many arrangements to make. The whole household had to be in mourning. She would send men for her husband’s body. And she would have to prepare for the funeral.

Still she did not move, but sat in her chair trying to comprehend this thing that had come to her; what it might mean. Her husband of nearly twenty years was gone, his body left on a beach in Dover. And there was her son.

At the thought of her son a low moan escaped her and she let her face fall briefly into her hands. Then she stood up, because there was so much to do.

The next morning her steward set off for Kent in an entirely plain carriage bearing no insignia, with a small company of armed men. But within three days he returned. The roads were impassable, he said. They had tried more than one way of getting through but had been turned back by great numbers of armed men. There was an insurrection in Kent.

[In June 1450] the commons of Kent arose with great power and came to Blackheath where they remained for seven days, surrounded by stakes and ditches.

London Chronicle

 

Fifty thousand men of Kent rose in rebellion choosing as their captain a most impudent and clever man calling himself John Mortimer.

John Benet’s Chronicle

 

The said captain and the Kentishmen came unto Blackheath, and there kept the field a month or more, pillaging all the country about …

An English Chronicle

 

It grew on her slowly, the horror of this thing, until some days after her steward returned she could no longer eat or sleep. At last she decided that she herself would go to visit the queen.

She travelled the next day at dawn so that she could make the whole journey in daylight, in an unmarked carriage. The queen received her at once, and the Lady Alice sank into a curtsy, then lifted her sorrowing face so that the queen could see. But all she said was that she begged permission to retrieve her husband’s body for burial.

The queen gripped her arms tightly, so tightly she would surely bruise them, and said, ‘It is true then?’

Lady Alice said nothing and the queen said, ‘It cannot be true!’

And she turned away from Lady Alice and burst into a storm of passionate weeping.

Lady Alice remained where she was, since she had not been given permission to rise, but after a few moments, when the queen’s frenzied weeping showed no signs of abating, she raised herself stiffly, holding on to the edge of the table, and took a few steps forward.

‘Your majesty –’ she said.

The queen turned towards her; her red, contorted face was almost unrecognizable.

‘How can it happen? How can it happen?’ she cried, her voice rising to a shriek. And she clutched handfuls of her hair as though she would tear it out.

Lady Alice felt calmer in the face of the queen’s distress. Now that another person was giving voice to her own fear and incredulity, they both faded. It could happen, and it had.

‘Your majesty, you must not distress yourself,’ she said.

‘No!’ shrieked the queen. ‘No! No!’ and she pounded the wall at her side.

Lady Alice thought briefly of sending for the physician, but then the queen stood still, clutching her hair again, as though by a vast, inhuman effort, she was containing her emotion. Then she began to make a high, keening sound, and Lady Alice put her arms round her. She was much taller than the queen, who collapsed against her, weeping into her shoulder.

Lady Alice felt quite assured in this role. Had she not, many times, offered comfort to the people on her estates? She was able to lead the queen over to a low seat and make her lie down. Then she summoned the queen’s ladies and the physician.

For the next few days she was constantly with the queen: holding her hands, insisting that she rested, making her eat. She gave orders for her own herbal remedies to be made up and fed them to the queen herself, on a spoon. She got little sense out of the queen in all that time. Sometimes she seemed calm, and would try to speak, but the sentence would end in another storm of tears.

It occurred to Lady Alice, from time to time, to wonder where all this grief was coming from.
Who is bereaved here?
she wondered. But she did not dwell on this. She did not believe the rumours about the queen and her husband, and if she had believed them, she did not know that she would have cared.

He would have done what he could to secure their position.

Besides, she came to see that the queen was not weeping for one single cause. It was as though the fragile shell of her world had fractured, and everything was spilling out.

‘They will destroy us,’ she moaned into her pillow, and Lady Alice did not know whether she meant the French, or the men of Kent, or the murderers of her husband.

So she comforted the queen in general terms, as though she were a child.

‘Ssh-sssh,’ she said to her. ‘Ssssh.’

And she felt better as she did so; or at least as if she was able to
step to one side, observing herself in this tragedy. All her life she had stood a little to one side, observing herself in this role or that, as though she were a player on a stage.

She felt safe in the palace for now, though she did begin to wonder when she might return.

Then, on the fourth day, the queen sat up and said, ‘He must be buried.’ Which was the point that Lady Alice had been making all along. But the queen was finally calm. She insisted on getting up and dressed. Then, on hearing that her husband was travelling from the parliament in Leicester back to London, she said, ‘I will go to meet him.’

She would not listen to any arguments; Lady Alice had done enough, she said. There were no words to express what she had gone through. She must go home now and attend to her affairs; the queen would make sure that her husband’s body was returned to her if she had to collect him herself. And Lady Alice was to worry about nothing; she would take care of her for the rest of her life. ‘You are my family now,’ she said.

And Lady Alice, curtsying deeply, wondered whether that was not the very thing she had to worry about.

The king sent unto the captain at Blackheath divers lords both spiritual and temporal to learn why such a great gathering of that misadvised fellowship had occurred …

Gregory’s Chronicle

 

The captain showed them the articles of his petition concerning the mischiefs and misgovernments of the realm …

An English Chronicle

 

We believe that the king our sovereign lord is betrayed by the insatiable covetousness and malicious purpose of certain false and unsuitable persons who are around his highness day and night …

The king’s false council has lost his law, his merchandise is lost, his common people are destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost, the king himself is so placed that he may not pay for his meat and drink …

 

The king should take about his noble person men of his true blood from
his royal realm, that is to say the high and mighty prince, the Duke of York, exiled from our sovereign lord’s person by the suggestions of those false traitors the Duke of Suffolk and his affinity.

 

Proclamation of Jack Cade, June 1450