Within the Hollow Crown (25 page)

   Richard hadn't thought of that—nor realized what a constant burden of anxiety a royal husband could be to a girl. He hurried to take her cloak and make her welcome. "I'm so sorry. I ought to have let you know," he said. But in the light of all that had happened his words sounded formal and inadequate. Almost as if he were apologizing to his Aunt Constanza or the Duchess of Oxford for being late for some trivial party.

   But he couldn't say more. And anyhow, the servants were back in the room, bringing more lights and laying a meal. "Haven't you eaten yet?" Anne asked. She stood sipping some wine from the glass he had handed her, her eyes ranging over the informal assortment of food. Even before she noticed, Richard saw himself betrayed by the stolid laying of two covers. Such a contretemps would never happen to Robert, he supposed, suppressing a grin. But one could scarcely expect a couple of bewildered chamber grooms, acting on hurried instructions, to have the wit to cope with so unexpected a situation. Anne set down his priceless Venetian goblet hurriedly, realizing that it had not originally been intended for her. "Oh, I see," she said bleakly.

   Clearly, Anne was seeing several things. Her gaze turned from the table to her husband. Divorced from all elegance and ceremony, there was a sort of amused virility about him. She saw that for all his gentle courtesy, he was quite as capable of having love affairs as Robert, or any other personable young man—that for all she knew he might have had several. And that because he was a King he could do what he liked, and neither she nor anybody else would dare to reproach him. She saw, in fact, that if she wanted to keep him she must fight for him. All these months they two had lived together on the shining surface of things—so charmingly, so conventionally—that it was a nasty jolt. "You must be badly disappointed," she stammered. "But I will go soon."

   Richard didn't answer. If Edward the Confessor were his patron saint, as people said, he must have leaned from Heaven to lay a finger on his lips, knowing in his wisdom what a taste of honest jealousy can do. This was a new Anne—less controlled, more comfortably human. He liked that spark of anger in her, brittle and dangerous as burning sticks. It flattered him, when most he stood in need of something to restore his self-respect. And beckoned to all those primitive urges which had been crying out for satisfaction.

   To ease the constrained moment Anne looked round the illprepared room, taking charge like any housewife. It was her right and unconsciously she used it as a challenge. Before the servants withdrew she asked them sharply why they hadn't lit a fire.

   "It is June and I hadn't told them to," Richard said in thendefence, as one of them came and set a torch to the brushwood stacked against October on the hearth. Watching the man's unresentful back, he wondered irrelevantly how it must feel to be a servant and not be able to retort that the King had been in a vile temper and had barred them out.

   Anne sat down and began peeling a peach, scraping at it with little vicious dabs, waiting for the man to go. "Yes, it is June," she said.

   Richard caught the allusion. Standing with a chicken bone

poised between his fingers, he set his teeth to it hungrily. Yes, all the important things had happened to him in June. Good things and bad. And now—but perhaps after all, this thing that Robert had let slip wasn't really important enough to count. The fire was blazing up, the good old vintage warmed him. Turning his head to look towards the darkening river he found that the dreary vista was already blotted out. Tomorrow the Thames would be full and sparkling again. What, he wondered, would happen to him
this
June?

   "How did you know that a fire would make everything so much better?" he asked boyishly, as soon as they were alone.

   Anne wiped her fingers on a fringed napkin. Throwing a cushion to the hearth, she knelt on it, warming her hands at that extravagant blaze. One oughtn't to be cold in June—unless one were dying, or driven away from the warm intimacy of a man's love…"Because you're the sort of person who needs a fire for spiritual comfort as much as for bodily warmth," she told him, trying to forget her own stab of misery. "Were you so frightfully wretched, Richard, that you had to ride about all night until you were wet through?"

   "Of course not. It was just that sitting around a Council table a man needs exercise. I suppose that is one of the few arguments in favour of war—"

   "Must you lie to me?"

   He stopped exploring for favourite morsels among the dishes, a silver cover still upraised in his hand. "Oh, my dear! After you were sweet enough to come to me—" He covered the steaming frumenty carefully, trying with compunction to answer her first question. He wasn't particularly hungry any more. "It was just that yesterday afternoon I found out something that makes me want to be sick," he said.

   Anne jerked up her proud little chin. The riding hood had ruffled her hair, making her look less
soignée and remote. "Tha
t happens to most of us—sometime or other," she reminded him, spreading her fingers to the blaze.

   "And every time I look at Gloucester and Arundel I could commit murder," he went on, unheeding the implication of her remark.

   Anne slewed her exquisite little body round on the great, tasselled cushion. "And don't you suppose I feel sick every time Lizbeth throws herself at you? Don't you suppose I could murder her now—when she's managed to take you from me?" she demanded.

   Richard, who had been ranging back and forth dramatically, stopped in his tracks. "Anne!" he exclaimed, gazing down at her. A great excitement began to rise in him, crushing out all smaller emotions. "I didn't know—how could I—that you felt like that."

   She sprang up then and faced him. All her poise and elegance were gone. She might have been a gypsy's daughter, not an emperor's. "Well, it's natural, isn't it? I'm your wife. And I've always known you're not in love with me. And I imagine it's Lizbeth you were expecting here tonight?"

   "She didn't throw herself at me this time," said Richard.

   Anne began to laugh, rather piteously. "Oh, I've landed myself in a queer situation, haven't I?" she said. "And you're being very patient with me." For the first time she understood that—although he had never said so—he wanted everything. Everything that a woman could give. And that a woman couldn't give everything until she had thrown away her dainty pride— even her pride in not letting a man see that she gave more than he did. But now, probably, it was too late…"Please believe me," she added, still gathering the remnants of that pride about her, "that I wouldn't have followed you here if I hadn't supposed you needed comfort—"

   "Followed me?"

   "Oh, not immediately. But I didn't need sending for. I guessed that if you were in trouble or hurt you would come to Sheen—just as I should myself…"

   Richard came closer, taking her by the shoulders impatiently. "But who told you that I was hurt?"

   "Agnes, of course." She lifted candid, troubled eyes to his. "Oh, Richard, how could you make Robert Duke of Ireland? She's in floods of tears because she can't go there officially. And just imagine what the uncles will say! He'll be their equal. And our children's. If we ever have any now!"

   But Richard wasn't attending. Uncles and titles and other people's troubles left him cold just then. He was looking down at his wife's white, sensitive face. "Wait! Let's get this straight," he insisted. "If Agnes told you all that, then you know about—what people are saying…"

   "Of course. You know Robert tells her everything—"

   Meticulously, he lifted his hands from the tight sleeve-tops of her gown. "And you still don't mind my touching you?"

   "That's why I came," she said simply. "I thought you might need me—tonight."

   He still stared down at her without moving. "You care about what happens to me—more than about what happens to yourself?" He hadn't supposed that any woman did, except Mundina. Marriages were made—very often, in his own walk of life, without the man and girl meeting—and they usually turned out successfully. Even cold-blooded Philippa of Oxford, for instance, would consider it her duty to "make Robert a good wife," bearing his children and never letting him down in public. But here was Anne caring desperately what happened to his own private soul. Coming all alone on that ridiculous sidesaddle of hers, no doubt. Putting aside her pride. He could imagine what it must have cost her to come.

   "Oh, Anne, my poor darling! That you should have to know that—loathsomeness!"

   "But I also know that it isn't true," she said, with regained serenity.

   "How do you know?"

   That generous mouth of hers, which his mother had foreseen would be his undoing, curved tenderly. "Don't you know there's a sort of shining quality about you? In the way you walk and when you smile. A kind of—of flame. And if this slander were true it would be—put out."

   He stood there with puckered brow trying to understand what she meant. And because at the moment he looked such a very ordinary young man to say such things about, with his shirt open at the neck and mud on his clothes, Anne began to laugh. It was so seldom they found themselves unsurrounded by ceremony, and she adored him like this, unshaven, waiting on himself and smelling a little of saddle leather. Perhaps it added to her passion for him that he had been caught out in an affair. But actually they had both forgotten about it. "Oh, Richard, don't be ridiculous!" she exclaimed, catching at his arm. "If it were true how could I possibly love you as I do!"

   He pulled her roughly into his arms. His breath caught in his throat. His eyes shone with elation. What if here—here all the time—were the perfection he had been waiting for? Here on his own hearthstone. "You mean—you love me—like that?"

   "Shamelessly, Richard. Ever since the first day I saw you!"

   His hard young lips silenced her, his whole body possessed her. Because he had dissipated nothing of his manhood on other women, his rising passion consumed them. From now on, because the whole of her sweetness and her desire was his, nothing outside their love could ever really touch him. Never again could he know loneliness of spirit. Not while he could hold Anne to his heart and lose himself in the utter response of all her senses.

   He pulled her down with him to the foot of the shadowed bed. For a while they sat there, talking a little between their kisses. But they spoke only in half sentences—too close in spirit to have need of them, too thrilled in body to care.

   "To think I used to wonder if I should like you!"

   "Burley used to tell me about you." And then, with a little spurt of laughter, "I think he almost willed me to love you."

   "And now all that matters is if I can be decent enough to
keep
your love."

   Once Anne managed to free herself for a moment from the exciting urgency of his embrace. "What if Lizbeth comes—now?"

   "Even Gervase wouldn't be fool enough—"

   "What will you tell her tomorrow, Richard?"

   "That I spent the night in prayer and meditation and have at

last found her a suitable husband."

   The room was filled with their mingled ecstasy of unsteady laughter, refuting life's venom with fond foolishness. Then Richard's deep, happy laugh, alone, as he raised himself a little to blow lustily at the nearest candles and drew her down and down into his arms.

Among other things, Parliament is seething about your giving de Vere a dukedom. They say that before long he will persuade you to make him
King
of Ireland."

   "Far from persuading, he doesn't even want to go there. And Gloucester was eager enough for Uncle John to clear out of England and make himself King of Castile."

   Sir Simon Burley had never looked more bothered nor the King more bland. They were strolling, as they talked, in the gardens at Sheen. The dew was scarcely off the grass, and the Queen not yet dressed.

   "I came early to warn you that there's an angry deputation on the way," added Burley, with a sidelong glance at his companion.

   But nothing seemed to shake Richard this morning. "You are always welcome, however early, Simon," he said. Like his uncle of Lancaster, he was a charming host.

   But after a night of sleepless worry his imperturbable detachment was more than the privileged old statesman could bear. "For once, and with regard to this particular foolishness, I agree with them," he broke out, with heat. "For years the gifts and lands you have loaded Oxford with have made your personal expenditure look even more extravagant than it is. And he's not good enough for you, Richard!"

   Having eased his mind of the long-felt words, Burley waited for the full spate of Plantagenet rage to break across his devoted head. But a smile still lurked at the corners of Richard's mouth as though his mind were centred on some happy reminiscence. "If only you'd tell me one thing—" went on Burley, emboldened by such unwonted mildness and trying to voice what half the nation wanted to know. "I don't often probe into your private concerns, do I, Richard?"

   Richard plucked himself from his abstraction to pat him affectionately on the shoulder. "God bless you, Simon, no!"

   "Then tell me—what
is
it you hold so precious about de Vere?"

   They had come to a low wall dividing private gardens from public barge walk. And still Richard, recently so cruelly sensitive on the subject, showed neither self-consciousness nor resentment. "Oh, I don't know," he said, picking consideringly at a closepacked wad of lichen. "He's precious in grooming, looks and grace; and even in the timing of those priceless remarks of his." There was a perfection of artistry in verse, vestment, or architecture from which Richard wittingly drew great joy; but in a person the quality was not so easy to define. "He's so—different from everybody else. He stands apart and laughs at them—dispassionately—like some Greek god."