The Tudor Rose (32 page)

Henry's slipper dropped smartly to the floor. “What more do you want of me?” he demanded, the angry colour mounting to his cheeks at last. “I have had you crowned, haven't I, and spent a mint of money on it?”

“Ye-yes, yes. It was w-wonderful,” gasped Elizabeth, striving after her lost self-control.

“And I am not impotent, am I? I have given you a son, haven't I?”

“I had supposed—that it was I—” she countered, going off into another gale of laughter.

“Then what
is
it you complain of? And laugh about like— like that giggling young fool Cicely? Is it because I am neither a murderer nor a lecher, like the men in your own family?” If there was one thing the Tudor could not take it was ridicule. He thumped the great carved bed-post with his clenched fist. “What can you possibly have to complain of, Madam? Why, ever since the night of our marriage I have even been faithful to you!”

But Elizabeth was beyond reasoning. Born of an emotional race, she had suffered enough of that parsimony of demonstrative affection which starves a woman's body and warps her soul. Her husband might be the first Tudor King of England, but with all her inborn Plantagenet recklessness she gathered up his discarded bed-gown and bundled it back into his arms. “Then for God's sake go out and be unfaithful and come back human!” she cried out at him. “But not to-night!”

N
EXT DAY IT WAS not to her confessor but to Margaret of Richmond that Elizabeth went; for if anyone could judge of the provocation she had had or help her to understand Henry, surely it was his mother. “I sent him away. I denied my body to my own husband. Were I a mercer's wife and not a Queen I suppose he might have beaten me,” she confessed bluntly, standing by the long oriel window in the beautiful austerity of Margaret's private room.

“But since you
are
a Queen—” submitted Margaret, bending over an exquisite altar cloth she was embroidering so as to hide a smile.

“It does not make my lack of wifely duty any the less.”

“It is not so heinous, my dear. Even if Henry
were
a mercer I cannot imagine him being impatient about—whatever you did.”

“That is just it,” sighed Elizabeth, picking savagely at the silk cord of a crimson cushion lying on the window-seat. “Sometimes I wish he
would
beat me. Beat me or desire me. Or—or show
some
kind of emotion! I don't imagine he lacked ardour with that Herbert girl!”

“But this was a political marriage for the binding up of England's wounds—loving you both, I had hoped that it would turn out to be a love-match too.” Margaret thrust her needle into the centre of a gold lily and let her lovely hands lie idly in her lap, giving the matter her full attention. “Henry does not show his feelings, I know. Which is strange, considering the way his father loved me. And how his grandfather, Owen Tudor, must have swept King Henry the Fifth's little French widow Katherine off her feet—he being only her Master of Horse and she a Valois! So it would seem, perhaps because of the need of caution during his exile, that my son is scarcely a typical Tudor.” After sitting for a while with a reminiscent smile illuminating the beauty of her face Margaret leaned forward and caught at her daughter-in-law's hand as she went pacing turbulently across the room. “But this I will tell you, child. Henry, of course, has said nothing of this matter to me; but I can see that he is hurt.”

“I am truly sorry,” said Elizabeth, looking down at her with deep affection. “If only because he is your son.”

“You two are so different in nature that I think he finds you difficult to understand,” sighed Margaret.

Elizabeth's blue eyes widened with surprise. “
I
, difficult! When even Cicely says I blurt out all I think?”

“And so embarrass him, perhaps. I wager, Bess, that he does not always understand how he offends.”

“I will try to make amends,” promised Elizabeth, without enthusiasm.

Margaret let go her hand to jerk forward a stool, and for a while they sat in silence, informally, each thinking in her different way about Henry. “Perhaps if you two were alone more often—if it were
he
who helped you to make all your decisions…” began the older woman thoughtfully. “If I were to go away for a while and stay in one of my manors or one of Stanley's, as I did before—”

But that was the last thing Elizabeth wanted. “Oh no!” she cried, laying a beseeching hand on Margaret's knee. “You have been so good to me. I know that I frequently see my own mother, but somehow she…” It was not easy to explain how the vagaries of Elizabeth Woodville could in time wear out the most patient of love, so her daughter did not finish the sentence. “I would not for worlds drive you away, Madam!”

“But you would not be driving me away,” Margaret assured her pleasantly.

Elizabeth stared at her, remembering how Cicely and Ann always contended that she stole the place of their mother. “Do you mean—that you
want
to go?”

“It means a great deal to me seeing my son every day, after all those empty years.”

“Of course. And your husband,” prompted Elizabeth.

It was Margaret who now rose and wandered to the window. “Stanley is goodness itself to me, but it is a long time since we lived as husband and wife,” she said, breaking a reserve which was as strong in her as in her son, although far less obvious. “You see—since you and I are exchanging confidences—I took a vow of chastity.”

“You took a
vow
…” Elizabeth's gaze followed the gracious figure with the still youthful lines and prematurely greying hair. “Then no wonder you were not so shocked at me!”

“Oh, with my husband's consent, of course,” explained Margaret lightly. “And not through any lack of dutiful feeling. It was at the time of the Buckingham rebellion. I felt it was not fair to endanger him because he let me help my son by a former marriage. And had it not been proven that we were no longer bedfellows King Richard might have found it difficult to believe milord Stanley ignorant of the plot.”

“I don't think Richard ever trusted him, anyhow,” said Elizabeth slowly. “But your absence may have saved his life.” For a while the two women fell silent again until Elizabeth asked in bewilderment, “Do you really not like Court life, Madam? You, who so adorn it?”

“Were it not for Henry—”

“But all this is really more yours than his. You stood aside for him.”

“England is not yet ready for a Queen regnant,” said Margaret thoughtfully. “And I would sooner live quietly in a convent.”

“You would make a lovely abbess! Looking like a stained-glass saint yet understanding the silliest peccadillo of your least-important novice!”

“That is the nicest tribute I have ever had,” laughed Margaret Beaufort, turning to kiss her daughter-in-law. “But I have no vocation. Or perhaps I have been too much in love with life. I meant only that I often yearn for the peace and leisure to pursue those things which are of most value and which are so crowded out at Court. Such things as the fostering of learning and the contemplative life of the spirit.”

“But you are so devout. And look how much you are doing in building colleges up at Oxford and Cambridge! And how you encourage Master Caxton with the printing of more and more books.”

“I do not want the chance to learn to be locked only in our hands, but given freely to the people.”

“Will it make them any easier to govern, do you suppose?” smiled the practical Queen.

“Perhaps not,” agreed Margaret. “But they have a right to it. I am so proud that Henry is improving the conditions of the ordinary people.”

“Only, I suspect, because it cuts down the power of the barons and makes him feel safer,” smiled his wife. “Will he succeed as a ruler, do you suppose, Madam?”

“I am sure that he will,” said the Countess. “You see, this Tudor dynasty of ours is starting with a new formula. Because Henry cannot rely upon having been born a King he is forced to make up for it by working harder than any of his subjects. Both Wales and England should benefit by this; and I, and many others who have striven to bring about this union of the Lancastrian and Yorkist branches, believe that it will give our country time to lick her wounds and live graciously. This was the dream for which poor Buckingham died. So I beseech you, dear Bess—even though you may derive no personal happiness from your marriage—to continue to see in it something more than the emotional satisfaction or dissatisfaction of two people. And, of your abounding generosity, I pray you pour into it all the patience and intelligence necessary to make at least a smooth outward symbol to the world.”

When Elizabeth returned to her own apartments, full of good resolutions, she was greeted by gales of laughter and found to her relief that Henry had met her halfway in the matter of reconciliation. Although he may not have understood in the least how he had offended, he had sent her a peace-offering. A human peace-offering already surrounded approvingly by her laughing sisters. “In the pursuance of weightier matters I forgot that a Queen should have a jester,” he had written in the letter which was handed to her. “And the bearer of this, although short of stature, has a large store of wit. Moreover, his Welsh heart is full of the music which you love.”

Elizabeth accepted the gift, and the lack of rancour which it stood for, with alacrity. Already her rooms seemed full of laughter, and looking upon the small, misshapen fool she read a wealth of wisdom in his sad, simian eyes. “What shall we call you?” she asked, when he had sung to them of his native hills, plucking a wild sweetness from the strings of his beribboned lute.

“What but the Queen's fool, Madam?” he asked, squatting before her like a devoted dog.

“But he must have a real name!” insisted young Katherine, more delighted with his drollery than with his music. And the little man looked at his Queen with his big head on one side and said with all the liberty of inconsequent jesting, “Many's the lover sends a gift to his mistress to patch up a quarrel; and I, who wish you well, would be that patch.”

“Then Patch you shall be,” agreed Elizabeth, with a smile which sealed the beginning of a queer, enduring friendship.

And so Patch came into her household, teasing her ladies without malice and making absurd quips by day, and soothing her with his singing when she sat alone in the evenings waiting for her husband. And because a woman's senses may be starved and her body yet prove fertile, Elizabeth was soon able to promise Henry as
her
peace offering a second child.

“Let us hope it will be another boy,” he said, kissing her gently.

“Yes, it would be greater charity to produce a son,” she had agreed, “for at least they have the ruling of their lives.” And he had looked at her uncertainly. She was always kind and dutiful these days, but often of late she had made odd, disconcerting remarks like that, and he had not known how to take them. But because, for all his studiousness, one of the few subjects he had not bothered to learn about was a woman's mind, Elizabeth was beginning to find that she could say them with impunity.

There was the same tedious etiquette of the lying-in chamber to be gone through, but this time Henry wanted her to stay at Westminster in order to appease the Londoners, who, it seemed, resented his heir having been born at Winchester. And whatever they wished for, this time the child was a girl. They called her Margaret after the King's mother, and upon this eldest daughter of his Henry came as near to lavishing affection as was in his nature.

These were the domestic years, with a growing nursery and a round of public royal duties.

There was the grand ceremony of the festival of the Order of the Garter to attend at Windsor, and all the excitement of her sisters' marriages, and—grandest of all perhaps—the marriage of her Aunt Katherine, Buckingham's widow, to the King's uncle Jasper. And it saddened Elizabeth a little when Henry proposed, for political reasons, to push Tom Stafford, who had loved her, into a union with the girl-heiress from Brittany. For everyone that summer seemed to be a season of marrying and giving in marriage. “Though for me,” sighed Elizabeth, who so loved the sunshine and the countryside, “everything seems to happen in the winter! My marriage, my coronation—and even my babies.”

But at last, in the midst of all the fullness of her life, there came a summer when her June baby was born at Greenwich. Born much more informally, in a room with windows open to the riverside gardens that she loved. He was lusty, good-tempered and a red-head, and from the moment old Mattie put him into her arms Elizabeth loved him with a delight which made all the disappointments of her marriage bearable.