We Speak No Treason Vol 1 Read online

  ‘The King likes well this disguising,’ she murmured. Pinching my arm gently: ‘Jesu! It’s cold in this place. I’m going back.’

  She slid into the darkness and I was left alone, staring till my eyeballs ached at the mummery below. Though the whole court was mad with enthusiasm, smiting the tables with their hanaps and roaring bravos, I was not sorry to see the bloody battle finish. It was, after all, a man’s sport, and I would liefer watch the dancing again, gazing at the rich gowns, the gracious gestures, jealous and a little sad.

  Suddenly I saw Patch. He came riding a donkey, bringing light into the gloom with a blazing torch held high. His mount was caparisoned in red cloth of gold. Peacock feathers waved on his head and a blackamoor child ran at his stirrup like a hound. He circled the Hall smartly. As he passed below me I saw his face. Patch indeed, Patch, untrimmed by the years, still wrinkled and smiling wickedly, oddly dear to my sight. And the Hall was bright again, and I drank eagerly of the company, my eyes seeking first the royal chair of estate, beneath whose great broidered canopy King Edward lolled. His hair was ruffled, but he was more well-favoured than ever. His fine teeth showed in his laugh, he was tall as an oak, fair skinned and straight of limb, with diamonds flashing on his doublet. Behind his head, thirty yards in. measure, hung the royal dorsal with the leopards and lilies of England, watching with tapestry eyes the fickle splendour of their court.

  Beside the King, Madonna-like, sat my late mistress, Elizabeth. Elizabeth the Queen, whose ivory face betrayed neither joy nor distaste for the scene under her eyes. The King drank, held his goblet to her lips, which pouted, smiled, declined. He dangled a bunch of grapes before her, made some jest, at which she smiled again, with downcast look. She took one grape, kissed it, and popped it into Edward’s mouth.

  Swiftly I scanned the others round the royal dais. I saw Earl Rivers, flushed and heavy faced, leaning close, talking earnestly in the King’s ear. Anthony Woodville also bent his handsome head near the dais, smiling unceasingly. The torchlight flamed up and caught the coldness in his eyes for an instant. I remembered those eyes, how they had terrified me once as a foolish child. Never again would they affright me.

  Patch was capering in the centre of the floor. Someone threw an orange, and he caught it deftly, speared it on his dagger, and strutted, mimicking the royal orb with his new-fashioned toy. The court howled with laughter, looking to the King for his approval, and seeing it, Patch turned a somersault, landed on a slippery square of rushes and fell on his rump. A great hound rushed snarling from under the King’s table and flew at him. The fool yelled in fear and fled, round and round the Hall. Gales of laughter swept the company, and watching each face, anxious to share in their enjoyment in my unseen way, I realized that there were those who did not laugh.

  The Earl of Warwick did not laugh. For the second time that day I marvelled at the icy splendour of his mien. In dark green satin crusted with rubies, the hilt of his dagger heavy with gems of price, he stood near the door, his arm about the neck of a tall, golden-haired youth, who held a brimming wine-cup. From his likeness to the King, I knew him instantly to be George, Duke of Clarence. Warwick was murmuring in his ear, gesturing the while with a glittering hand. I saw his glance fly to the little company about the King, and there again was the same disdain as when he passed the Countess’s litter.

  George of Clarence listened, nodded, laughed a little too loud, and drank more wine.

  ‘All artifice,’ Elysande had said. I pondered on this deeply, my eyes raking the crowd. Nay, not all were happy; that was sure. One small lady, in a rose-pink drift of gown, stood alone, wistfully smiling. Middle-aged, a woman alone; but those were not the reasons for her obvious sadness. Some strange intuition told me there was more. All artifice, was it? I searched the throng deeper and saw that some were the worse for wine, lolling white and heavy-eyed back in their chairs. From my eagles’ eyrie, I saw sly fingerings of naked breast and arm, hot kisses pressed on cheeks in unlit corners, quiet speech between men and men, looks of love and hate and jealousy darting like lightnings from eye to eye.

  Suddenly I thought: if the case stood thus, and I could choose, there is none here I would have for my lover! If this were the court, the true splendour, for the privilege of whose enjoyment men slew each other, I was sorely disappointed. Patch had finished his joculing, and was creeping back across the Hall, feigning a mortal hurt. His face a mask of pain, he crawled out of the door under my gallery and disappeared to roars of applause. Clarions sounded, and music swept into life again. The sweet wholesome sounds of viol and cithern, shawm and lute and psaltery soared to my ears. Earl Rivers bowed to the Queen and sought her in the dance. The King urged her from her chair, kissing her hand as she descended with cool grace.

  It was the music. That was all my joy. The music froze me like ice, burned me like fire. It rose to unattainable heights, wailed and sobbed and laughed. The voices of spirits were in it, songs of the laughing dead, borne on the wind of rebec and string and cromorne, and the heartbeat of the lusty living too, struck from the skin of a joyous tabor. Poetry and battle, love and death, all grew strong in that music, and my skin had lumps like those on a plucked goose, as I clasped my hands and forgot my own existence, following the courtly pattern of bright dance with misted eyes.

  Footsteps were approaching along the passage and I shrank into the concealing shadow. I heard a voice muttering to itself, rude oaths, but a voice that I knew, none the less. I stepped out into the flaring torchlight.

  ‘Patch!’ I cried.

  All colour fled his face.

  ‘Jesu!’ he said with quiet gladness. ‘’Tis a ghost, a lovesome sprite. Come to taunt poor Patch.’

  ‘’Tis truly I, Patch,’ I said merrily, and kissed him on both cheeks, while he swung me off my feet.

  And all he could say was ‘Well met, well met’ and babble about love, his favourite jest and one which I thought he always saved for me, and he swore himself a prophet, for he had vowed that I should come to court, and here I was, and he also, with all the favourable planets swimming in Heaven for him, for he had thought often of his own true love.

  ‘Give me space for a word,’ I said, laughing and struggling from him. ‘Are you well? Your skill is undimmed, I see.’

  ‘I do well enough,’ he answered. ‘So my lady Jacquetta brought you? The Queen Mother. Mother of the King’s Grey Mare!’

  Now I could laugh at an old jest. We talked of Grafton for a while, then I turned back to the embrasure, which drew me like the moon the tide.

  ‘I have been watching the merrymaking.’ I looked again to where men and women disported themselves in the Hall. Patch leaned close to me against the stone.

  ‘A fine spectacle,’ he murmured. ‘Often I come up here to watch—’tis better than any May-Games, and none know we are here.’

  He pointed out several celebrated people, among them a group of Bohemian knights whom the King was entertaining; the Queen’s sisters and the Duke of Buckingham. He even spotted Dick and Thomas Grey, playing merels together in a corner. Tom’s wife, the Duke of Exeter’s daughter, was the one in the green gown. She had a furious temper. I pointed to the small lady in rose-coloured silk, the sad lady, and asked her name.

  ‘That is Katherine. Countess of Desmond,’ said the fool, and all merriment left him. ‘Poor lady.’

  Then he was saying other things: possibly the Countess of Desmond’s history, or he may have been reciting a psalm; or making his will, for whatever he said, I heard it not. I heard no more, though his voice went on and on, as a background to the beating of my heart, which started up enough to frighten me, as if I were in mortal fever. For my idle gaze had suddenly fallen on one who had not been in the Hall when I looked before. To this, I may swear.

  And had I been an old old woman with three husbands buried and twice as many children, or had I been a coal-black queen from the East with the whole of Byzantium under my hand; or had I been an idiot with no tongue, no ears, and only eyes, eyes to se
e whom I saw then, and a heart to feel as my heart felt; had I been any of these, I would have done as I did. And being what I was, a virgin maid, with but an armoured dream to cherish, I looked that night upon a man, and loved.

  Next to the Earl of Warwick he stood, but apart from him. He was solitary, young and slender, of less than medium stature. His face had the fragile pallor of one who has fought sickness for a long time, yet in its high fine bones there was strength, and in the thin lips, resolution. His hair was dark, which made him paler still. He was alone with his thoughts. Ceaselessly he toyed with the hilt of his dagger, or twisted the ring on one finger as if he wearied of indolence and longed for action. Then he turned; I saw his eyes. Dark depths of eyes, which in one moment of changing light carried the gleam of something dangerous, and in the next, utter melancholy. And kindness too... compassion. They were like no other eyes in the world. Like stone I stood, and loved.

  The jester was babbling in my ear, and I could not answer him. With my whole heart I hoped that he might not be one too highborn to give me a glance. I longed to know that he was an esquire, mayhap the son of some lesser noble, or a member of his retinue. This, seeing the sumptuous fire of jewels on the restless fingers, the collar of suns and roses about his neck, I knew it all useless; my dreams but vapourings; and he on whom I looked with such love further removed than the topmost star. By rank more distant, and by riches far apart. Above all, by the way in which he stood, solitary, yet dignified by his solitude, among the noisy splendour.

  In the face of this, I asked, trembling:

  ‘Who is that young knight?’

  Patch was acting craftily. ‘Which one, madam? Madam, maiden, mistress, honeybee. Names, yea, names for one passing sweet, and she with many names would have a name to play with. Which name, my Venus, cozen and cuckoo-eye, which knight?’

  A page was offering him wine. He waved it away.

  ‘The one who does not drink tonight,’ I said, and my voice was like a frog’s croaking.

  ‘Ho! a sober knight!’ said Patch, and peered to follow my slowly pointing, wavering fingers. He dug his sharp chin into my neck.

  ‘Certes, I had forgot you were fresh to the court,’ he said with a little laugh. ‘’Tis young Dickon.’

  ‘Dickon?’

  ‘Yea, the sad one. The scant-worded one. The one who beds with his battle-axe. If my eye be not crossed, you point to Richard of Gloucester.’

  ‘An Earl, a Duke?’ I whispered.

  ‘Both, and more besides. A prince. He is Richard Plantagenet, the King’s brother.’

  I loved. I loved, and to my surprise, the world went on its way as usual. As Elysande had foretold, there was much groaning and head-holding in the morning. Many lay abed, including the Duchess, but the King was up betimes, and after hearing Mass rode out hunting with a large train of knights and nobles, some looking as if they would liefer have stayed quiet in their chambers, nursing the quantities of wine that churned about their bellies. But King Edward was fresh as a flower, calling his friends in a voice like a clarion, mad to spear the otter. Elizabeth was serene, smiling gently with downcast eyes as she wished her lord a successful chase. Her own chase had been wondrous profitable, I thought, as we watched the King, at the head of his entourage, gallop out between the guard and disappear beneath the toothed portcullis. Yet as soon as his back was turned, her expression suffered a brisk change. The matron of Grafton Regis returned, and soon the whole Household was flying about like souls in torment in pursuit of their various duties. Little was seen of her, but her lightest wish was keenly felt. Even so, there was space for gossip—down the corridors it crept, the arras shivering with whispers: who had quarrelled with whom last evening; whose bed had remained bare till dawning; and once again, I came on Patch, whose face served as a beacon in a bewildering world of stares that were curious, and sometimes hostile.

  He looked unwell, and was wearing a hermit’s robe, all rags and tatters. ‘To mock the Church,’ he explained, and shook with laughter at my shocked face. ‘Tarry a moment,’ he said, catching my fingers in the passage.

  I could scarcely bother to listen; my mind was floating high, my eyes burned with a memory.

  ‘I’ve been speaking to my cousin,’ he said. ‘Men say there will be mischief shortly.’

  ‘Oh, do they, Patch,’ I murmured.

  ‘You seem weary, maiden,’ he said inconsequentially. ‘Did you not sleep? I neither. My arse is sore. Did you see me fall last night? By St Denis, I thought my back was broken.’ On and on, ad infinitum.

  ‘Mischief,’ I reminded him, after a long space, in which he had his thoughts, and I mine.

  ‘There are signs in the heavens that England will have war again,’ he said. ‘At Bedford, two weeks ago, a dame laid out her bed linen to dry.

  ‘So?’ I said. A face crossed my mind, a young, noble, dangerous face; a face dark and pale; eyes of light and darkness, heat and cold, day and night. A face like the beginning and the ending of the world.

  ‘And lo! it came on to rain, but the rain was not rain at all, but gouts of blood which stained the sheets and bolsters beyond repair, and all about shrieked and knelt in prayer, for this is a dread warning of things to come.’

  I said naught. I wondered where the prince was, what he did. I had not seen him ride out hunting, but there had been so many in the train I could have missed seeing him, though this was unlikely. Patch, bursting with his fanciful tale, looked wounded at my inattention.

  ‘By God’s bones!’ he cried. ‘I might as well have speech with yonder arras, for the holy men broidered thereon would at least listen better than you!’

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said swiftly. ‘Poor woman! Did she buy new sheets?’

  ‘There is worse,’ he said. His voice sank to a hollow groan. ‘In Huntingdon County, there was a woman great with child. And at about the time that the washing was be-blooded, she heard the infant in her womb sobbing and crying with a great roaring noise, and she was sore affrighted, for this means sure sorrow in this realm and dolour for all men.’

  This time I felt a prick of fear.

  ‘Seek you to drive me witless with your tales, Sir Fool?’

  ‘It is truth,’ he begged.

  ‘Once, you sickened me with a bloody heart,’ I said, catching up my gown. ‘Now you fright me with falseness. I’ll hear no more.’ And I ran, and the image of Richard Plantagenet ran with me in my mind, looking worried, and I wondered how he looked when he did laugh, and reckoned him passing fair, laughing; and ran into our chamber and slammed the door.

  ‘Patch is like something possessed,’ I told Elysande, who was sponging stains off the Duchess’s red satin. I recounted the wild tales to her.

  ‘War, hey?’ she said, raising her plucked eyebrows, and went on sponging. Her calmness infected me and I put the whole matter aside. It was time to rouse the Duchess. I pinned on my sweetest smile as I sped to her chamber.

  When night came, and all the upper apartments were deserted, and the merriment came loud from the Great Hall, I stole again to the gallery. Unseen, unheard, I gazed again at the bright scene below. Flattened against a pillar under the hissing torchlight, I stood for an hour. With my fingers I traced the carved faces in the embrasure, until the cold seemed to turn me to stone, as they were. I learned a great heaviness in that hour, for though the whole court assembled in glory beneath my eyes, all were effigies, without form or being. They swam like ghosts, devoid of colour or life. He was not there.

  Patch came again midway through the evening, giving me sweet foolish words, snatching kisses on my cheek and neck. I smote at him as if he were a troublesome fly, and he called me cruel, so I gave him my hand to hold and together we watched the disguisings. Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight held sway on the floor below, the knight clothed in green branches, his horse also green, a little unsteady on its legs, but marvellously lifelike. I had begun to take pleasure in the play, when Patch brought back my dolour with a chance word.

  ‘I see my lord o
f Warwick does not grace the company tonight,’ he said. I do not care, I thought. They could all be missing, save one, and he alone would make for me a feast day.

  ‘And George of Clarence, too, begs urgent business elsewhere,’ went on the fool cunningly. ‘Could it be, sweet mistress, that these two fair knights sup quietly somewhere together and talk of a lady?’

  ‘What lady?’ I said dully.

  Cautiously yet pleased, Patch murmured: ‘Men speak much before a fool. They think me truly witless, I trow, when they should but substitute an “n” for an “l”, and be nearer the truth.’

  ‘Go on,’ I sighed, my eyes on the court.

  ‘George of Clarence would wed Warwick’s eldest maiden,’ he whispered. ‘It would be a right wealthy match for him, and the great Warwick knows his mind. Isabel is the lure to draw this falcon from his royal brother’s side. And across the sea, waiting, sits an old spider, a French spider. King Louis...’

  ‘I know naught of these intrigues,’ I answered. ‘And in any case, are they not cousins, George and Warwick’s daughter?’

  ‘Dispensations have been arranged,’ muttered the fool. ‘The Curia is greedy. And ’twould be a weapon in the hand of Warwick, to have George as close ally. Warwick has never, will never, forgive Edward for his lowly marriage.’

  I looked sharply at Patch. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Did I not love you, maiden, I would not tell you all these secrets, for you and I could be thrown in the Tower for such whisperings,’ he replied, with a frightening grimace.

  I pressed his hand. ‘Pray, don’t leave a tale in mid-air.’

  ‘Warwick had planned a great marriage for his Grace,’ Patch murmured in my ear. ‘He had arranged for him to wed the Princess Bona of Savoy, sister-in-law of Louis of France. Imagine his fury when your fair widow of Grafton Regis filched the prize from under Europe’s eyes! I trow the Earl writhed in his skin with rage. Think you, while we were at the May-Games that day, England was being set on its head!’