We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (12 page)

‘Do my will,’ he said, and those who were incapable of speech, nodded fervently.

‘
Kyrie eleison
,’ intoned the young monk from his corner. Weak from the heat and heaviness of that hour, I listened to King Edward’s last bequests, the slow painful words broken by great gaps while he sought breath, and the spaces filled by the scraping of quill on parchment.

‘...and rectify any extortions of which we may be guilty... paying all our just debts... Your hand, Will, I feel cold. And to the poor people of London, we bequeath... and I pray you have Masses aplenty for my soul, and to this end...’

So he apportioned his worldly goods, and laboured for air, while Hastings held his hand, and somewhere without I heard a woman wailing and wondered if it were the Queen. Then he was silent, and with great care the clerk under the eye of Doctor Morton began to burn the wax for the imprint of the Great Seal and Edward’s signature, when the King spoke again, with a suddenness that startled us all.

‘And having in mind,’ he said deliberately, ‘our dear son Edward, Prince of Wales, he having only tender years and being the future monarch of this realm, we hereby appoint...’

He was taken with a seizure and brought up blood. So it was with blood on his mouth that he said:

‘...sole Protector and Defensor of the realm and our heir, our entirely beloved brother Richard Plantagenet, Knight of the most noble order of the Garter, Duke of Gloucester, Earl of Cambridge and Constable of England... Set it down.’

He raised himself to watch the clerk write. When the rustling pen ceased he signed with difficulty and said: ‘So be it. Shrive me now, Father, for I have much to confess. All men are frail.’

They came with the Host and the heavy-hearted incense, and we withdrew for a space, and none looked at another, and the tumult of thought was well-concealed.

About an hour later he awoke from fretful sleep and cried:

‘Ah, Dickon! It grows dark!’

Thereafter my blindness, the witching of my keen sight. There were stars I should have followed, portents I should have recognized; I, who was wont to scan men’s faces hungrily for their intent. I know not if it were sloth and ignorance that lamed my perspicacity, or the ringing promise that boomed in my ears. The bells said it: ‘Love one another!’ cried the tolling voice of St-Dunstan-in-the-West. ‘Our promise, Sire!’ sighed the sweeter tongue of St John of Clerkenwell. Throughout London was the song of mourning translated in my mind as loyalty proclaimed to a dead King. An end to strife and the subtle warring waged within the court, all bound in that one note which swung out upon the funereal air: from St-Martin-in-the-Fields, from St Olave’s at Southwark, St Peter in Chepe and St Mary Woolchurch. And in the great Abbey’s tumultuous voice, overwhelmed by the brassy note of Paul on Ludgate Hill.

I should have known. I should have heard that the great bell of Westminster sang a warning as well as sorrow and an empty pledge. I should have even remembered mad Hogan’s words on a distant June morning. I should have listened well to the splendid bidding prayer, which ran: ‘...for our dread sovereign Edward V and the lady queen Elizabeth, his mother’; and went on grandly, paying homage to ‘all of the blood royal, and all the nobles and people of our new prince’. All of them, vowed the bidding prayer. All. Save one.

I might have put my keen sight to employment over the humours of Mistress Shore. Yet what did I but stand gaping at Dorset’s elbow in the antechamber by where the quiet figures in their new-donned mourning robes passed in and out during the King’s last sleep. I stood, and Jane wept and sighed, and Dorset bit his lip, and looked at her, while the Lord Chamberlain stood at her flank, close, as if to glimpse again the memory of Edward in her, his merry harlot.

‘Christ have mercy on him,’ she gasped. Then she cried, unfittingly: ‘What will become of me?’ and even I, stupefied by this new world a-making, saw the look she urged upon Dorset. A gusty look that, through all her grief, enveloped him from head to foot: his youth, his slender thighs in their well-turned hose, his tight-pulled waist and massive shoulders, his fair Woodville face. A glance in replica of that carried by the fen-maid of Fotheringhay, who vowed that Dickon of Gloucester shone so bright. A look like flame.

‘Sweet Jane,’ said Thomas Dorset, and childlike, she stretched out her hand, while her face trembled. He tipped up her chin and kissed her, a kiss too short for Jane, for her eyes were still closed as he addressed himself, over the tip of her spiked bonnet, to the Lord Chamberlain:

‘Good my lord, will you not comfort our late sovereign’s comforter?’

Hastings’s tongue passed over his lips, a swift, nervous movement.

‘Go to him, Jane,’ said Dorset kindly. And like a child she clung until he placed her in Hastings’s arm, which closed tightly about her.

‘Let us love one another,’ Dorset said. The great bell echoed his words.

I should have marked that Hastings was old, and Dorset young, and Shore a woman—a woman in love at that, which makes them twice as foolish and ready to pawn their own souls. I should not have ridden to my manor that day to tell Margetta of the King’s death, nor should I have tarried there until the secret Council meeting was over. I remember how I punished an alehouse ancient on one of my farms who cried: ‘Woe to the realm that’s ruled by a child!’ My moon was in eclipse, and the promising bells deafened me.

I should have marked how Bishop Morton went straightway to the Queen, and that there were no tears in his eye. For I saw all this, and without seeing.

And had I followed a saner star, what odds?

For how shall we know that our life’s span is not like unto a sparrow’s flight?

‘Get you to Ludlow,’ said Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset.

There was a saw of which old Sir John Paston was very fond. ‘Get you lordship and friendship at any cost,’ he had been told: ‘
Quia ibi pendet tota lex et prophetae
’. This advice had he been given while he hivered betwixt Norfolk and Suffolk and their changing moods, and thus had he bidden Calle, his bailiff, who suffered much hardship during service for the Pastons, being beaten from manors and gaoled constantly.

The King was dead. There had been a council meeting, and there were sundry rumours that the Woodvilles had overstepped themselves. The Queen and her daughters were closeted away in some part of the palace, and everywhere was black and shrouded, even the thoughts of men. Here, then, was my good lordship in these changing days.

‘Get you to my uncle, Earl Rivers,’ repeated Dorset. ‘He and Bishop Alcock will break the news to his Grace the King.’

King Edward is dead, I thought stupidly. Long live King Edward. The crown will sit heavy upon a twelve-year-old head. Praise be that Gloucester is skilled to advise him.

‘Take men.’

‘Men?’ said I.

‘Certes, sir, men,’ he repeated, with his flashing Woodville smile. ‘You raised a fine force for the French enterprise, I recall. How many can you find me now? Two—three hundred? A stout bodyguard for the infant King. Arm them well.’

I must have looked aghast. He struck me on the shoulder, bidding me not to disquiet myself, telling me I would not be alone on this precious commission; that Edward, God assoil him, had entrusted him, Dorset, with troops and armaments for the especial safety of his heirs, that he as Constable of the Tower could furnish others loyal and willing to bear the young king to London, but that I was a direct, swift-riding and capable man. And so saying, he weighed my hands with a purse of gold that nearly dropped me on the floor.

‘Ride under my blazon and with my blessing,’ he said, and I nodded. Pleased.

‘Who will take the news to the Lord Protector?’

His face became a shop-front with the shutters down.

‘I could reach Middleham in four days,’ I suggested.

He waved my words away. ‘Ride where I decree,’ he said a little shortly. ‘You have my friendship. Heard you not our King’s words a-dying? How he bade us use each other kindly.’ I looked away swiftly, hearing his gentle voice. ‘My lord of Gloucester will know soon enough,’ he said.

So they brought to me Dorset’s own barrels of harness from out the Tower, and I sought men, henchmen and esquires from off my own manor, and those bound to me by livery and maintenance (ironic jest), who would do aught for gold and colours. Yet before I rode meekly out from London, I was confronted in the courtyard by the Lord Chamberlain, pallid, and at his side Richard Ratcliffe, who had ever been one to bear me cordiality, and with whom I had shot in a bow many times. And Hastings’s guard slithered their pikes across my face, while the Lord Chamberlain stared, and my sad humour waxed impatient.

‘Your pardon, my lords,’ I said, taking up the haft of one weapon to push it from me.

‘You go hastily, sir,’ said Ratcliffe. ‘Should one ask whither?’

Through an archway I could see my men, harnessing themselves. They flew Dorset’s standard. I could see one or two of the serjeants glancing in my direction. Their mail was in good order, burnished bright. I fancied such a guard of honour would please the prince, in all his sorrow.

‘I ride to Ludlow, with others,’ I said, more sharp than chivalrous.

Hastings looked over my shoulder. ‘A strong force for such a sober task,’ he remarked.

‘But two hundred, or less,’ I answered. ‘’Tis a wild ride from the marches.’

‘So you aim to protect him, then,’ said Ratcliffe, unsmiling. ‘I fancied there was one already appointed by our late sovereign lord for that work.’

‘The Lord Protector of England,’ said Hastings, looking again towards the troops, then back to me.

‘I ride for the Marquess of Dorset,’ I said, angry.

‘So I see,’ said Hastings slowly, glancing at the standards, and for the second time I saw his face lose its hard determination and his eyes waver a little, and tongue on lip as when he had looked at Mistress Shore. He struck up the halberds with a gesture.

‘Pass on, sir,’ he said. ‘Two hundred men is a fair number to escort a king.’ He turned his back upon me and walked towards the palace.

And Ratcliffe? He with whom I had shot and played and laughed many times, when he was not at Middleham with Gloucester: he looked me up and down and then he spat and with his heel scraped the spittle into the stone, and left me gaping like an idiot.

I had been dreaming. I stood in the round Norman Chapel, the chapel to St Mary Magdalene at Ludlow, and heard again Earl Rivers honouring the little Prince in the St George ceremony, as he had done some hours before I took my bed. There were more bells in my dream, long after the six tongues of St Laurence had ceased and the curfew sounded for the town’s closing. There were songs in my head, as if I had been given some witch’s root, hen-bell or wolfsbane, for I saw visions: the jewelled mitre of Bishop Alcock turning to the horned headdress of an old pagan priest, the shimmering robes of Earl Rivers leaping like fire. I heard voices, whispering, and the whispers rushed around my senses, friendly, drowsy ghouls. Then I came to full consciousness and knew that the sighing sounds were real, and in the chill April dawn I slipped from my couch and opened the chamber door a fingersbreadth. The Great Hall lay lapped in shadow. Sleeping dogs and pages littered the hearthstone, where smoke from a last smoulder of fire wound upward. Three figures were closebound in conversation. There was Sir Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers himself, his hairshirt itching him, for he ran a finger round his neck and shuddered while he talked in the same low tone that had disturbed my sleep; my eyes growing used to the twilight, I recognized Sir Thomas Vaughan, whom I had seen cosset the young King in his first grief when the news came to Ludlow; and Lord Richard Grey, the Queen’s youngest son by her first marriage. Prince Edward’s childhood counsellors, and Woodvilles all. They had been well pleased with the escort I had brought them.