The Tudor Rose (26 page)

In the midst of her own triumph it had been good to see her mother's mended pride, and the happiness that shone in Margaret Beaufort's lovely, ageing face; but in her secret heart Elizabeth had been most grateful of all for Pope Innocent's considerate kindness when, in his dispensation, he had purposely alluded to her as “the undoubted heir of her illustrious father,” thus killing for all time the ugly slur upon her name.

But even the magnificence of her wedding could not make her forget its tardiness. The battle of Bosworth had been fought and won in August, yet it was not until after Christmas that Henry had married her—and then only because Parliament, prodded by the angry mutterings of the people, had specially petitioned him to do so. And because Parliament had been astute enough to make the petition synchronize with their proposal to grant him poundage and tonnage for life, Elizabeth was never sure whether it was the remembrance of his promise or the considerable addition to his income which had persuaded him.

For her part, she had gone to her marriage with gladness. With all the natural sweetness of her nature she had striven against resentment, preserving her gaiety and trying to please him. Again and again she reminded herself that, except for hearsay, she and her husband were practically strangers, believing in her optimism that she would soon come to understand him.

“Have you seen what our loyal poet John de Gigli says about us?” she asked one morning, sitting up in their great state bed and laughing delightedly over an illuminated presentation scroll. “He calls me 'the fairest of King Edward's daughters.' Surely I am not more beautiful than my dainty sister Ann?”

She looked so much more beautiful, and her question was so provocative, that it was the moment for any new bridegroom to be passionately definite; but Henry Tudor had risen early and was putting on his furred bed-gown because he had a great many business plans for the day.

“Look, Henry, what the dear man says, too, about all the happiness we are going to bring our people!” persisted Elizabeth, waving the flattering verses beneath his nose.

Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have let their business go hang and taken her fragrant body in their arms; but Henry only took the scroll. He did not care particularly about the personal happiness of a lot of Englishmen, but he skimmed through the lines politely. To his more critical, cosmopolitan mind they seemed more loving than polished, and overfull of pro-Yorkist enthusiasm. “I see the fellow has the impertinence to infer that your title has become mine,” he remarked, laying the effusion down on the gorgeous coverlet.

Watching the frown gather on his forehead, Elizabeth remembered too late that this was just the impression he had been trying so hard to avoid. “But won't you read on?” she invited hastily. “He says all manner of admiring things about you later.”

“I am afraid what Master de Gigli thinks of me is not highly important, and my secretary will be waiting,” he excused himself, inserting his slender feet into his neatly placed slippers.

“Is your secretary so much more important than your wife?” pouted Elizabeth.

Henry smiled indulgently and bent to kiss her, explaining something about his plans for reducing the immense private armies of the barons which he was anxious to have prepared before Parliament reassembled; but Elizabeth scarcely listened because of the resentment rising hotly within her. “Does it mean nothing to you that other men consider me beautiful?” she demanded.

“It means a great deal,” he assured her, straightening himself and passing a careful hand over his hair where she had ruffled it.

“Then why will you not sh-show it?” she persisted, her pansy-blue eyes filling with disappointed tears.

Instead of holding her close against his heart and showing her then and there beyond all possible doubt, Henry merely handed her his handkerchief. “Surely, my dear, I showed how proud I was of you in that so fine wedding procession which cost me more than my coronation,” he pointed out gravely.

He was trying to please her, but the very temperance of his praise enraged her. And it did not help matters that his precise English sounded as if it had been conned out of a book, with occasional sentences arranging themselves like an exact translation from the French; although she supposed that in some people—people with more sense of humour, perhaps—it might have sounded charming. “In a public procession, where other men are judging what you got for your money—yes!” she cried, with a fine echo of her father's temper. “But what about when we are alone—in bed?”

She was talking straight out of her mind, just as her younger brothers were wont to do, without weighing her words. It was the way they all talked between themselves in her family. But, in spite of the adventurous life he had led, her husband was singularly full of inhibitions, and his obvious embarrassment made her feel crude. “Though, after all,” she thought in exasperation, “bed is the only place in which he ever bothers to see me alone. And even that he probably looks upon as part of his state duties.”

Seeing that she was really upset, he came and sat down beside her. “Marriages like ours are—only arranged,” he reminded her patiently.

Obviously he could not comprehend the cause of her anger; but he looked thoughtful and considerate, and perhaps a trifle forlorn himself. “Of course you are right, and I have probably been foolish to expect—whatever I did expect,” agreed Elizabeth, sniffing a little and absent-mindedly arranging his damp handkerchief in a square across her drawn-up knees. It was hard to admit that perhaps all that hopeful, rosy haze of romancing might have been on her side only. That while she was thinking of the all-important invasion in terms of rescuing knights and grateful meetings he had probably been thinking only about transport and supplies. Hard; but, after all, quite reasonable. And even after his arrival, while she had been eating her heart out impatiently and filling in time at Westminster, she knew that Henry had been busy establishing himself securely and making so many wise plans for the country that it had probably seemed to him no time at all.

“You are not imagining, are you, that I married you only because the Commons pressed me to it?” he said. “Had I wanted an excuse to delay our wedding still longer there was the sweating sickness in London; but, as you know, I disregarded it.”

There was no gainsaying his argument, and the sweating sickness had been so bad that even her own mother had wanted the ceremony postponed because of the swift contagion. Elizabeth had found him to be one of the least pretentious of men, but was beginning to understand how extremely touchy he was about his own rights and capabilities. “I do not let other people move me,” he went on explaining rather unnecessarily. “I do whatever I have planned neither sooner nor later than I have planned to do it.”

“Like God Almighty!” thought Elizabeth irreverently; but, realizing once again that her spontaneous reactions were more worthy of her unregenerate young brother Dickon than of a Queen, she managed to answer with a suitable mixture of dignity and wifely submission. “I understand perfectly your reason for wanting to be crowned first, and I pray that our 'arranged' marriage, which was so necessary to your plans, has not proved too distasteful. We are neither of us children, and you have lived precariously abroad. Both of us have had ample time to meet and care for someone whom we might have
preferred
to marry.” She was delighted to see how sharply and searchingly he looked up at her unexpected words, and forestalled him with any questioning there might be. “Has it been more difficult for you, Henry, because you were once in love with Maude Herbert?”

“How did you hear of that?” he asked, shaken out of his usual complacency.

“Your mother told me how kind Lord and Lady Herbert were to you when you were my father's prisoner in Pembroke Castle, and that you two were friends. But since you were little more than a lad when your uncle took you away to Brittany I hoped that you might have forgotten her.”

An almost boyish smile curved Henry of Richmond's thin mouth. “You don't suppose that I submitted to exile as tamely as that, do you?” he said. “Your father and that war-mongering uncle of yours would probably have worried themselves into yet earlier graves had they known I was back home in Wales!”

“You were in Wales?” Elizabeth leaned forward, watching him. Watching the intrepid young Earl of Richmond he must have been. She was seeing him as a new person, and he had never interested her so much.

“More than once. Keeping my place warm against my return,” he laughed shortly.

“And meeting Maude?” Somehow, because of his venturesomeness, she minded much more now about the Yorkist Governor of Pembroke's pretty daughter.

“Naturally, I went secretly to Pembroke. She and I had been used to ride and read together in the old days. Lady Herbert would have been glad for us to marry. But then your father saw fit to give her in marriage to Percy of Northumberland—” Henry, who was usually so precise, left his sentence unfinished and wandered away towards the window.

“Then you really loved her,” said Elizabeth, regarding him with pity.

But he only shrugged and began collecting up some papers and hunting for a private notebook which he always seemed to carry somewhere about him, and Elizabeth began to fear that she would never really know.

“I suppose I did,” he admitted, having found the precious notebook. “We lived in a fantasy of Celtic dreams. But as one knocks about the world one grows out of such things.”

“Does one?” murmured Elizabeth softly, thinking of her Uncle Richard's lasting love for the Earl of Warwick's little daughter, who had befriended him in similar circumstances. “And more recently perhaps,” she suggested, “you hoped to marry the Duke of Brittany's daughter, and that is why you regret—”

“My dear Elizabeth, I regret nothing,” broke in Henry. He had already wasted much time and even
his
exemplary patience was wearing thin. “Why
should
I have wanted the woman? She is not half so beautiful as you. I meant to marry you, and I have.” Merely by speaking so emphatically he kindled a glow of expectant happiness in his disappointed bride, only to damp it out again by adding as he turned away, “Besides, England is more important.”

Elizabeth tried not to hate him for his calculating coldness. Probably when a man is cast out of his inheritance and forced to accept hospitality from foreign princes who would sell him at any moment that it suited them, she thought, the one thing he needs to acquire
is
calculating coldness. She tried to imagine Henry when he was very young, misfortunate and full of dreams. Before anxiety had etched lines prematurely upon his face or thinned his straight, brown hair. He could have been quite attractive then, she decided. And he was not much older now. Margaret Beaufort, she was sure, would not purposely have deceived her by overrating him. That was the way she, his mother, remembered him—as a fatherless, hardy and intelligent boy—and probably part of the way in which she thought of him now. For Henry always showed his mother a dutiful affection, freely acknowledging all that he owed to her; and one was so apt to think of people long beloved as a compound of their living selves and of all one's memories of the years that made them. She, his wife, must try to remember how considerate he had been to her and to all her family in material ways, and to hope that, once surrounded by security and love, all his carefully built barriers of coldness would gradually melt away. She must try to talk to him naturally, ignoring the difference of their ways.

“There is one thing I have been wanting to ask you, Henry,” she felt emboldened to say before he left her.

“Yes?” he said, with a hand already on the bolt of the bedchamber door.

“It is about my uncle,” began Elizabeth, not venturing to look at him. “They tell me the Grey Friars took up his—mangled body. He was your enemy, but he fought courageously—”

“And very nearly killed me,” agreed Henry. He did not sound at all angry, so she need not have been afraid. Yet, without realizing that she did so, she began twisting his long-suffering handkerchief into tortured knots. “Will you not—could you not of your triumphant magnanimity—have him buried somewhere as befits—his blood?” she begged.

“His friends have leave to purchase a suitable tomb for him in Leicester,” Richard's successor told her without any particular emotion. All her life, weathering the seas of adversity and joy, Elizabeth had been surrounded by warm family affection, and the complete detachment of his answer made her feel like a shipwrecked soul cast up upon some strange and inhospitable coast.

The industrious new King closed the door with relief upon her wifely probings and hurried away to his absorbing work. He thanked God—and the admirable forbearance of Henry Tudor—that he had not lost his temper, or struck her or even rebuffed her for her feminine curiosity and her extraordinarily tactless demand. He had done none of these things, nor had he the least glimmering of an idea how much an honest display of feeling and a real, outspoken quarrel might have cleared the matrimonial air.

And as soon as the door closed against him, Elizabeth, his frustrated wife, buried her face against the grand Tudor rose embroidered on her pillow and wept hopelessly. “A man who is incapable of hate,” she sobbed aloud, “may be incapable of love!”