The Tudor Rose Part 21

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 G.o.d 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 a.s.suage another's sufferings. Past affronts and frustrations were forgotten. She remembered only Patch's words. "G.o.d 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 grat.i.tude. Some virtue seemed to have pa.s.sed from her to him. His weakness had pa.s.sed. 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sing 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?"

So she had a specially comfortable horse litter prepared for her daughter-in-law's journey and paid for the black-velvet curtains out of her own purse. For Henry, she found, was not nearly so ready to spend lavishly on his daughter-in-law now; and Elizabeth knew that, pregnant or not, the poor girl would want privacy from the morbidly gaping crowds.

She made a point of greeting her personally, treating her in public as the chief mourner in the tragedy, although everyone must have known how much deeper her own sorrow went. In spite of trailing weeds, the Aragon girl did not look at all tragic. Somehow her black only succeeded in accentuating her young fairness, and there was about her an air almost of levity and relief. "Madam, it is for you that I grieve," she said, with a disarming generosity.

"I will try to be as good to her as Margaret Beaufort has always been to me," vowed Elizabeth. And she realized that even if the girl had not loved Arthur she must be feeling very lonely after such sad happenings in a strange land, and very unsure of the future, finding herself no longer married to the King's heir. Although, of course, everything would be much the same were she to be the mother of Arthur's child.

"Are you with child?" asked Elizabeth, scarcely able to frame the words for thinking of her own son Harry, who might be disinherited. But to her relief Katherine shook her head.

"Then the marriage was never really consummated? You see how important this is. You must be quite sure about it."

The Spanish girl's eyes met her with candour equalling her own. "No, Madam. Arthur talked big-how do you say?-boasted-a good deal before the pages after our wedding night. But it was only-boasting. And after that, as you know, I went back to my women. And then he seemed ill-"

"Then you are still virgin. And I am sure it will not be long before your parents find you another husband," said Elizabeth gently.

"Then shall I be allowed to go home?" Clearly these were the pathetic words of longing which Katherine must have been saying to herself over and over again during that long, jolting journey in the closed litter; but before her mother-in-law's kindness she managed to keep their eagerness within the bounds of courtesy.

Elizabeth, who liked her, was touched. She bent to kiss the ingenuous young face. "My poor Katherine, I really do not know. Certainly not until we have heard from Spain. The King and de Puebla and all of them are in the council-chamber discussing it now. But we have been so completely stunned with grief that nothing has been arranged. So you must stay here for the present, and it has occurred to me that one of my ladies, another Katherine, who is widowed and lonely, may help to console you. But I have heard the King and Archbishop Morton speak about a house for you at Croydon where you can have your Spanish priests and set up your own household."

"The King has been very kind," murmured Katherine, who did not in the least want to go away to some quiet place called Croydon. "He sent me a message that he will let me have back my personal jointure which my father had put in his Grace's keeping."

Elizabeth was surprised. Evidently Henry wanted to keep the girl's favour. "But I doubt if you will ever see the rest of your dowry again, if he can find means to keep you in England!" she thought. In the meantime Elizabeth was at a loss how to entertain her guest, seeing that the Court was in deep mourning. "How the sun s.h.i.+nes!" she said, going to the window. "After being in that cramped litter for so many hours each day perhaps you would like to go out in the gardens? We cannot devise any entertainment in public, of course, but if there is anything you would like to do-"

Katherine joined her at the window. The lovely gardens of Greenwich were spread before them and down in the courtyard the horses were being brought round. In spite of the sad quiet that reigned within the Palace, there was bustle and laughter down there. For Prince Harry was going riding in the park with Charles Brandon and a few other lads of his own age. Although they were all dressed in sober black, one could not expect young people to be decorous all the time or quite broken-hearted. And to the Spanish princess who had spent several miserable months constrained by the failing health of a sick husband they must have looked very gay. Perhaps she remembered how her brother-in-law had made her laugh during the bridal procession. "If it please your Grace," she said, brightening, "I, too, should like to go riding in your so beautiful park-with Harry."

After Spanish Katherine had gone to don her becoming velvet riding-habit with the wide-brimmed hat which Harry so much admired, Elizabeth stood for a while watching him mount his horse. Whatever her husband had hoped, she was more thankful than she could say that the Spanish girl was not pregnant. Harry was a very important personage now. And what a King he would make, with those long, strong limbs, that unaffected, infectious laugh...Elizabeth turned as some one came into the room behind her. "Send the Lady Katherine Gordon to me, Ditton," she said, and went on watching from the window until Arthur's lively widow had joined the informal cavalcade and ridden out towards the park with young Harry Tudor obviously teasing her about her strange foreign saddle. "A pity," thought Elizabeth, looking into the future, "that there is so much difference in their ages!"

A soft footstep and the rustle of a skirt behind her recalled her to the commonsense present.

"Your Grace!"

Kate Gordon, sweeping an obeisance to a Queen she adored, was a thing of slender, lovable beauty. If she had thought to be Queen herself, it was a thing which was never spoken of between them; for both of them knew that it was love and not ambition which had induced her to follow the fortune of the man she still believed to be the rightful King of England.

"Ah, come and sit here," said Elizabeth, inviting her to the window-seat. "I sent for you because I want you to comfort that other poor Katherine-"

"Comfort?" The word came scornfully.

"Ah, no, dear child, I know her grief is not of the heart like- ours. But just bewilderment. But you are so sweet and gentle and more of her age than I. Will you try to befriend her?"

"Anything that your Grace wishes I will do," promised the Scots girl, thereby unconsciously accepting from a discerning mistress some measure of healing for her own deep hurt.

"My new daughter-in-law wants to go back to Spain," said Elizabeth.

"It may bring her happiness, though for myself I have no desire to go back to Scotland. For no matter where one goes one's heart travels with one. Madam, have I leave to ask you something?"

"Yes, dear Kate."

"Just now you said 'her grief is not of the heart like-ours.' Do you, too, believe-"

Elizabeth rose restlessly. "Oh no, no, of course not! Did I say that? I do not feel too well to-day. This morning on rising I thought perhaps-" Before her companion could ask an eager question the Queen broke off suddenly and turned to ask her one. "All the same, I do often think of your husband and his ridiculous claims because it concerns-I mean it might have concerned-my son. But, Kate, I am Queen of England. I cannot go around to this person and that asking about such things. Or even voice my thoughts, lest they give rise to misconception. But surely they told you. Surely you must know?"

Kate Gorden stared at her in bewilderment. She had never seen the serene Queen so agitated before. "Know what, Madam?"

Elizabeth glanced towards the open doorway through which she could see Jane and Ditton sewing, and lowered her voice. "How two young men, one of them feeble in mind and weak physically perhaps from long confinement, could possibly come within a hair's breadth of escaping from the Tower. Even supposing"-Elizabeth's voice stumbled a little and the colour rose in her pale cheeks- "even supposing communication between them had purposely been made possible-it could never have been intended that they should so nearly really escape. My brother-in-law, Surrey, said they very nearly did, and must have given the Governor of the Tower a horrible fright. It is known that they got as far as the Byward Tower. That means that there was only the drawbridge between them and freedom-out in Thames Street. I never shall understand it. There must have been scores of men-at-arms about, and those two may not have had so much as a dagger between them. It sounds fantastic, Kate!"

The Scots girl was standing before her, her head held high. "Neither of them was much over twenty, and for ten minutes they held the entire Tower garrison at bay!" she confirmed proudly, her eyes s.h.i.+ning as if she could see them doing it.

"My cousin was no coward," said Elizabeth, watching her. "But whatever they did must have been contrived in your husband's fertile brain. But what?"

Katherine Gordon came out of her trance of pride. "Why, Madam, do you really not know," she said wonderingly. "But I know. Once they had won their way nearly to the gates, with half the garrison at their heels, Richard ran to the place where you English keep the King's wild beasts. I cannot imagine how he knew where to find the bolts. But he let the lions loose and kept their pursuers at bay."

Elizabeth, the Queen, should have reprimanded her severely. The great Scottish Earl of Huntley's daughter had been forbidden to call her husband anything but Perkin. But the girl was so pa.s.sionately excited, and somehow the Queen's words of reprimand would not come. Elizabeth really did feel ill. The faintly freckled face of her companion, the wide latticed windows and the suns.h.i.+ne seemed to be slowly fading away, and in their place Elizabeth seemed to see an arched doorway in the Abbot of Westminster's parlour and a slender boy in black walking away from her towards it. She could hear her own voice calling gauchely, "d.i.c.kon, remember the lions!" He was going through the doorway, farther and farther away like the walls and everything else. And it was growing cold. But once, before he disappeared, he turned and smiled-that far-off, gay, enchanting smile...

Elizabeth, who even in the direst moments of her varied life had never before fainted, sank down unconscious upon the cus.h.i.+ons of the window-seat. And Kate Gordon, who had no clue with which to link her words to such sudden collapse, shouted in frightened amazement to Jane and Ditton to come quickly and send for a doctor.

NO ONE THOUGHT THERE was anything strange about the Queen's indisposition. Her Grace had complained of not feeling well that morning; and, later, while talking to milady Katherine Gordon, she had fainted. And the royal physicians had confirmed the fact which all had suspected. Her Grace was pregnant again. "Please G.o.d the baby will prove to be a son," prayed her friends, recognizing a dutiful effort to console her husband's grief. And in spite of young Harry's robust strength the King must have hoped this more fervently than any of them.

But the Queen herself received the doctor's a.s.surance listlessly. There was none of her usual joyousness at the thought of another child. She would sit silent for hours as if turning something over in her mind; and her thoughts were certainly not upon her coming confinement, for when one of her ladies would try to rouse her with some question about the tiny garments they were embroidering Elizabeth would start and answer absently. Her sisters noticed that this time no tender, Madonna-like smile curved her lips. Instead of looking forward to the future it seemed rather as if she were brooding upon the past and saying farewell to someone whom she had loved. And naturally all of them supposed her sad thoughts to be wholly of Arthur, who was so like his successful father and who would have made such a wise and prudent King.

"I hope I shall be allowed to have this new baby here in Greenwich, without any fuss," she said one day to Jane Stafford. "My mother-in-law is no longer at Court to insist upon so much ceremonial, and one has less heart for it now that our beloved Mattie is dead."

"This place is home to you now, is it not, Madam?" said Jane.

"Yes. I like to sit here by the window and hear the younger children playing in the garden. I must be getting old, Jane."

"Old, at thirty-seven!" laughed Jane, appealing to Ditton, who was coming in at the door. "I wonder, my dear sweet, if you have any idea how beautiful you look at this very moment with the sunlight on your hair?"

"Whatever beauty I had must be fading fast!" smiled Elizabeth. "Unlike most women, I seem to have had no love affairs to keep it warm."

"It is only deepening and maturing," said Jane. "And you are still so enviably slender."

"If you have a few lines round your eyes it is because you have suffered so much, Madam," added Ditton, setting down a bowl of the Queen's favourite pansies which she was carrying. "Lately you have seemed as if you liked to be alone, sorting out your mind perhaps. Or just-remembering. But we have all missed your Grace's laughter."

"My poor dears, what dull company I must have been!" Elizabeth reproached herself. "But I promise you I will mend my ways. I have been resolutely locking away the past, and now I must turn my thoughts to the future. So now you may hope to hear me laugh again-though not quite so boisterously as that young roisterer Harry, I hope!"

But the laughter seemed to be struck from her lips almost as soon as the promise was said. For before the morning was out the King's secretary waited upon her with a formidable-looking list of instructions. "It is his Grace's arrangements, Madam, for the coming happy event," he explained.

"Is the King so busy that he cannot come himself to talk them over?" enquired Elizabeth.

The secretary bowed so obsequiously that he missed the spirited reproach in her eyes. "The King is always busy," he said.

"Yes, ama.s.sing money and making notes until his pale eyes go blind!" said some new demon of unforgiving hatred in his wife's mind. But she knew that this was not true, and that Henry also worked conscientiously for the order and improvement of his realm.

"Then he will probably have need of you, Master Secretary," she said aloud. And, being dismissed, the man seemed uncommonly glad to go.

Elizabeth carried her husband's letter to the window and the more favoured of her ladies waited, grouped about her. "Well, Bess, where is it to be this time?" asked Ann, her sister, whose turn it was to be in attendance.

It was several moments before Elizabeth answered, and she had already read and refolded the letter. Her eyes looked out hungrily upon her beloved gardens, now all aglow with flowers. "The Tower," she said at last, quite tonelessly.

"The Tower!" they all gasped.

"Yes. The Tower, of all places! For a Welshman Henry has singularly little imagination. He might have spared me that!" It was the first time that she had ever criticised the King aloud before her gentlewomen, but the words were torn out of her.

"But why?" asked Jane, aghast.

"I do not know," said Elizabeth wearily, sitting down upon the window-seat.

Ann came and sat beside her, putting a comforting arm about her waist. "It may not be so bad, dear Bess," she said. "The royal apartments are right away from the-dungeons. And the King is sure to have them done up."

"If he can spare the money!" muttered Ditton daringly.

"And there is a little garden," said Jane, making her small contribution to their meagre sum of consolation. It was the dear, intuitive sort of thing a Stafford would say.

"But the rooms are so damp and her Grace suffers so with ague. And it will be winter again then," Ditton reminded them.

"Yes, it will be winter again then, Ditton," agreed Elizabeth. "But let us not think about it now."

It was easy enough to say. But how could one not think? They hung about for a few minutes in unhappy silence. Of course the Tower was a royal residence like any other and children had been born there before, yet they all felt as if the morning's brave suns.h.i.+ne had pa.s.sed behind a cloud. And presently they drifted away, leaving the two Plantagenet sisters together.

"Would it be any good asking Henry-" began Ann, as soon as they were alone.

But they both knew that it would not be. Elizabeth did not trouble to reply. She just sat there with her back to the window and the crumpled letter in her hand. When the Tudor ordered something one obeyed. "He must have some very particular purpose, Ann," she said slowly after a time. "Henry never does anything without a purpose."

"No, I daresay not," agreed Ann anxiously. "But the damp and the depression will kill you!"

"Perhaps," said Elizabeth, looking straight before her, "that is the reason."

"Bess, you must be mad!"

They were quite alone in the quiet room. Only to one of her sisters could Elizabeth have said such a thing and hope to be understood. And this new thought that had come to her was so utterly terrible that-even though she might be wrong-she must voice it just once.

Ann, the quick-witted, was down on her knees in a moment with protective arms about her. "You mean-because of this Aragon girl?"

"Because of her dowry. And the alliance. Henry, G.o.d help him, has not enough heat in his blood to put his worst enemy away for the getting of a girl. But this love of money grows on him. And this obsession about Spain."

They were close together and they spoke in frightened, jerky whispers. "And if you were to die-naturally, in childbirth-he would be free," said Ann, reading the thoughts from her sister's eyes and repeating them as if she were learning some incredible lesson.

"And he could probably get a dispensation from the Pope, because Kate says the marriage with Arthur was never consummated. Then he could marry her himself. And keep the alliance-and all that money..."

"Twenty thousand scudos!" remembered Ann.

But suddenly Elizabeth pulled herself together, getting briskly to her feet. "But of course it is impossible!" she decided. "He could not be so wicked. It is I who am wicked ever to have harboured such a thought. It is just because I have been unwell and depressed." She bent down and took her sister's anxious face between her own two cold hands. "Dear Ann," she implored, "forget that I ever said it!"

At the sound of approaching voices Ann rose from the cus.h.i.+on upon which she had been kneeling and began hurriedly rearranging the pansies. "You are not the kind of person to have harboured it without some cause," she said judiciously. "But you must try to put the suspicion from your mind, dear Bess. You know that I have always disliked Henry; but whatever his shortcomings as a husband, he is no murderer."

"N-no," agreed Elizabeth, with so much uncertainty that Ann gave her a swift, surprised glance. Elizabeth had been thinking of the undrawn bolts in the Tower; but because there were people about she said no more. Everything was stir and movement again. Curly-haired Mary had escaped from her nurse and was running to Elizabeth with an eager request to hear the pet parrot talk, and Margaret was wanting to tell her about the pet parrot talk, and Margaret was wanting to tell her about the finished splendour of her wedding-dress. Margaret would wait now until the Court was out of mourning and until her mother's baby was born, and then she would go to Scotland and really be married to handsome James.

There were so many things to see to and Elizabeth was naturally so cheerful that life began to interest her again. The wide, s.p.a.cious life of the Tudors. She felt better and she began to laugh again. And to be ashamed of her feelings towards her husband. And one day the King came to her with an important-looking letter in his hand impressed with the great seal of Spain. He looked, she thought, immensely pleased. A great and confident King, whose policies were in all ways to be relied on. "Read this, Elizabeth. It concerns you," he said almost genially. "It is from our good friends Ferdinand and Isabella. They are agreeable to their daughter staying on in England. Staying in our care and learning our language and our ways-until Harry shall be old enough for marriage. I sent for him last evening and talked to him about it and tried to instill a little of Arthur's seriousness into him." Elizabeth held the letter in her hands but scarcely took in the sense of it. Her husband's words had been enough. Enormous relief uplifted her, swiftly followed by self-reproaching shame.