The Tudor Rose (44 page)

After a splendid pageant, during which live doves were loosened as a special compliment to the bride, she and Arthur were bedded in the Bishop of London's house, and then the young Spanish bride was given back to the care of her ladies pending her people's return to Spain and her own departure with her husband for Wales. So Elizabeth hoped that her anxious counsel to her husband had carried weight.

And if she was a little lonely at Richmond after their departure, she was consoled by unusual demonstrations of affection from her elder daughter, Margaret, who seemed to cling to her mother more now her own time for parting was so near at hand. For as soon as it was summer and the roads became drier Margaret Tudor was to set out north with an imposing retinue to become James Stuart's bride and Queen of Scotland.

A
FTER ALL, IT WAS not her elder daughter whom Elizabeth was called upon to part with that summer. For by the time the roads were dry and the hedges green there was no marrying, only mourning. Elizabeth was still abed on the shining morning when the news came from Wales.

“It is Prince Arthur,” her women said, white-faced and stammering.

Elizabeth, who had been dreaming, as she so often did, that she was back in the monks' deserted little garden at Westminster, sat bolt upright. “Is he ill?” she asked, as if it were news which she had been expecting. But after a moment or two she knew by their frightened silence that he was dead.

That Arthur—the son whose throne had been made so secure—was dead. But as yet she knew it only as a fact accepted by the mind, not as a desolation to which one must learn to attune the heart. “How? What happened?” she asked.

“We do not know,” they answered, tying the last fastenings of their hurriedly donned clothes. “It is said that there were some cases of plague—”

“Or there might have been some accident—”

“No,” said Elizabeth, with a mother's certainty, “it is just that his Grace has never been really strong.”

Jane Stafford came and put loving arms about her. “We all wanted so much to let you sleep in peace a little longer,” she said. “But the King is asking for you.”

“He needs you,” said Ann Howard, her sister, hurrying in to join them. For Ann knew well that the best help she could give was to tell her beloved Bess that someone needed her.

Elizabeth looked at her bleakly. “I have been married to him for sixteen years and he has never really needed me,” she said, too stunned to realize that she spoke her thoughts aloud.

“They say he is distraught,” said Ditton, tenderly holding a cup of hot milk to her mistress's lips.

Elizabeth pushed the milk away untasted. Swinging her long slender legs over the side of the bed, she slipped her feet into the slippers they held for her. Then, tremblingly, thrust her arms into the gown they brought. She had been too suddenly roused from sleep and her mind was so stunned that she moved as obediently as a puppet. If her husband needed her she must hurry.

Outside in the anteroom she saw Patch, hunched against her door like a dog that keeps watch. His big brown eyes, the one thing of beauty which he had, gazed up at her in an agony of compassion. For once his glib tongue was stilled, and she knew that the soul within his ugly body rendered her much of the worship which should have been his Maker's. He was only her fool, but at such times devotion takes on a higher value than degree. Elizabeth stopped in front of him. “What am I to do, dear friend?” she asked simply.

The squat shoulders shrugged beneath their gay silk motley. “A market-woman with broken eggs in her basket, if she be wise, counts those she has left,” he muttered.

The Queen bent down the better to hear him. “But, Patch, how can I comfort
him
?”

Patch's gaze was sure and steady. “Only you,” he said, “can refill his basket.”

Like everyone else in her immediate entourage, he probably knew that it was a long time since the King had come to her bed, and that she was content to have it so.

She went on her way. It was odd, perhaps, to ask advice from a fool, but she saw that he was right. And when she came to the King's apartments she did just as Patch had told her.

She found Henry sitting at the foot of his great four-poster, where, on happier mornings, they had so often sat together, resplendent in their furred bedgowns, to receive the birthday gifts of courtiers; only now Henry's face looked grey and the embroidered leopards of England sprawling across the bed-head behind him seemed to be snarling maliciously. The gentlemen-of-the-bed-chamber withdrew at sight of her, and Elizabeth went to him and laid her arms about his bowed shoulders. “As your Grace's wisdom is renowned all over Christendom, you must now show proof of it,” she urged.

“But
Arthur
—” he said incoherently, his hands clinging to her encircling arms. “Arthur for whom we had such dreams and who had so much promise…Arthur who was to have been King…”

Elizabeth smoothed her husband's thin, disordered hair. “I know, dear heart,” she comforted; and in that moment they ceased to be a politically married couple who had little in common and were but two unhappy people who had begotten and lost a beloved son. “But consider, Henry, how your mother in all these marriages had no child at all save you, and how God has preserved and prospered you. Whereas we have still another son and two fair daughters.”

Henry sat silent, his hands still clutching her like a startled child's. All his plans lay broken about him, far bigger and more important than a child's toys. Even now he must inevitably be thinking not only of his grief but of his fine new dynasty. “If anything should happen to that reckless young hot-head Harry—” he whispered.

Elizabeth kissed him and stood smiling down at him. Even her own grief was forgotten in her desire to assuage another's sufferings. Past affronts and frustrations were forgotten. She remembered only Patch's words. “God is still where He was, and we are both young enough,” she said, humbly offering her husband the privilege he had lately spurned.

He rose from the bed then and kissed her with real gratitude. Some virtue seemed to have passed from her to him. His weakness had passed. He was the King again. “How can you appear so serene?” he asked, the more amazed because he was intelligent enough not to minimize her grief. “You Yorkist Plantagenets have courage!”

It was an accolade. The only compliment he had ever paid her. And Elizabeth knew it to be sincere. But his thoughts did not linger upon her. “This unspeakable loss is something quite outside my calculations,” he said, beginning to walk back and forth in thought. “What about Katherine of Aragon now?”

“I do not know,” said Elizabeth. “Except that we must send for her at once and be very kind to her—until such time as she goes back to Spain.”

“Back to Spain?” The words escaped the King's thin lips sharply. “But there is her dowry. Twenty thousand scudos.”

It shocked Elizabeth inexpressibly that he should think of it at such a time; but undoubtedly it was a contingency which he would have to deal with almost immediately.

Henry's pace quickened. He walked briskly to the door dividing his bedroom from the anteroom and closed it against the curiosity of the courtiers who waited there. “And we arranged that Arthur should make over to her a third of his estate, you remember? But now that she is widowed—we should have guarded against this—” A new excitement informed him. It had nothing to do with the lad Arthur who lay dead. Elizabeth watched him go to the table beside his bed, take a key from his wallet and unlock a drawer. She hated the eager fumbling of his fingers, the hungry light in his eyes, the sharp look upon his face. He might have been some money-lender making certain of a payment. She was sure that for the moment he had forgotten her. “I cannot remember how it was worded. Morton and de Puebla were there…” he was muttering. He had drawn forth the precious notebook, which was always kept under lock and key or about his person. But his bony hands were trembling and, incongruous as it seemed, his eyes were still blurred with tears. He turned over the pages, holding them close to his well-shaped nose. But in his haste he waxed impatient. “Here, look for me, Elizabeth,” he ordered, pushing the book into her hands. “My sight grows worse every day. It is all those accounts. Why, only yesterday I began a letter to my mother and could not finish it. The entry should be headed 'Spanish marriage' and made some time at the end of fourteen ninety-nine or the beginning of fifteen hundred. Somewhere about here, look you.”

Obediently, disinterestedly, Elizabeth did as she was bid. It should be easy enough to find. His small, neat writing was as clear as his high-pitched voice.

“January, December, November,” she read aloud, flicking the closely filled pages over backwards. “It must be on this page. You began to reopen negotiations for the Spanish marriage immediately after—after—”

Remembering, he reached out a sudden hand. “No matter! No matter! I can see it for myself now you have found the approximate date,” he said. And, noticing that she now seemed loath to relinquish the book, he almost clawed it from her.

But not before Elizabeth's quick glance had lighted upon something which interested her very much. Although certainly it was not headed “Spanish marriage.” It was just a small, enigmatic note made a little further up the page. Against a date in the previous November her husband had written: “Tell D. to leave both doors unbolted.”

Both doors? What doors? Even through her personal misery the significance of the entry penetrated her mind. That was the very week when Perkin Warbeck and her cousin Warwick had escaped, when Sir John Digby was Lieutenant of the Tower. Even before Henry had found the information he sought Elizabeth knew, in dazed horror, that in his circuitous way he was as much a murderer as her uncle.

She left him with his notebook in his hands. The necessity of settling an immediate problem would take his mind off his grief. He would have to call a Council and discuss what was to be done about Katherine of Aragon—and her dowry. For herself there was no such merciful necessity. She would not have to plan for the future, and all her thoughts would be with the precious past.

She went back to her room and sat by her window. The scent of summer flowers came up to her and the voices of her younger children at play. And for the first time she really realized that Arthur, her firstborn, was dead. Not just as something which someone had said to her in a second or two, but as a bitter loss which she must live with all her life. Delivered from the duty of comforting her husband—and bankrupt of any further desire to do so—she sat there and wept and wept.

As the day wore on Ann became worried for her health. She knew the strain under which her sister had lived, how the long-drawn-out uncertainty about Perkin Warbeck had played upon her emotions, and that since then Elizabeth had not seemed so strong. And in her anxiety Ann, Countess of Surrey, sent to tell the King, begging that his physicians might come. Instead, Henry came himself and was extraordinarily kind. It was
his
turn to comfort now, he said. But because he had disappointed her dreams Elizabeth loved her children far more than she had ever loved him. A few hours ago it had seemed that the shared sorrow of Arthur's death might be bringing them closer together, but now she knew for certain that he had ordered those prison bolts to be drawn, luring two young men to their deaths. The full meaning of what she had accidentally read now came to her with shattering clarity. And although Henry was her husband she felt that she hated him. She wished that she had not been so ready to comfort him with the promise of more sons, for he would certainly see that she kept her word. And in this hour of misery she, who so loved children, did not want to bear him any more. She was feeling utterly exhausted, and she told herself that if they two should come together again she would die of it.

It was only a passing hysteria, of course. Being Elizabeth of York, she mastered it. She thanked the King for coming and gradually regained her habitual expression of outward serenity and went on being a dutiful wife. And as soon as the first violence of her grief had subsided her first thought was for her dead son's widow.

“We must find out if she is pregnant,” said Henry portentously.

“Everything turns upon that,” agreed Morton.

“Your Grace's physicians could examine her, or the lady might be asked to attend a select committee,” suggested Sir Reginald Bray.

“Has not the poor child suffered enough?” asked Elizabeth, marvelling at the complicated processes of their masculine minds. “Would it not be very much simpler if I just—asked her?”