A Secret Alchemy (37 page)

He did not answer me, but said merely, “Only as far as my manor of Heytredsbury. It will be my care to make sure that you and your daughters are comfortable in my custody.”

My courage rose: as I recalled, Heytredsbury was indeed only a manor, no fearful castle where we might be hidden. But it was a long way to Wiltshire, three days’ journey or more, and we were none of us fit for such a ride.

“My younger daughters are in poor health. They will need to rest.”

He gestured behind him. “As you can see, they may travel in this litter. My orders are to reach Heytredsbury as quickly as we may, and for that it is necessary to ride. You need have no fear: the horses are ridden by trusty men.” I had to bite my tongue not to ask him what danger he thought to avoid by forcing us to travel quickly. It would not be politic to quarrel with our keeper, and yet it was hard, for we were in custody as we had not been in sanctuary. Now we were confined by Richard of Gloucester’s order, not by our own free choice.

We rode along Petty France. For all my anger and fear, my spirits rose to see the road stretching before us, and to be mounted on a horse beneath a wide sky. Once Westminster was behind us I could see primroses, pale as sunlight, tucked into the grass beneath the hedgerows as we approached Knight’s Bridge. But we were prisoners no less, though differently from the prisoners we had been in sanctuary. To judge by his tight-closed mouth and the silence of the men who rode with us, Nesfield would not be a gaoler who took his duty lightly. No matter: I could hold my peace, for I knew that Henry of Richmond, too, bided his time and planned for the future.

At Michaelmas, Bess and Cecily were ordered to court. Nesfield allowed us to come to the gate to bid them farewell, though without much ceremony. It was cold, and Bess was impatient to be off, and after we had embraced, and they put up behind the grooms, I gripped the little girls’ hands, because I could not hold my big girls to me anymore. What manner of farewell was this? Had I judged right that they would be safe? Men swear oaths before God and man: Who can tell which will be broken until they are? God send I have done right, I prayed. God keep them safe and send
them health and happiness.

“Madam, you’re hurting me,” said Anne, tugging her hand away.

“Your pardon,” I said. The horses had vanished round a bend in the lane, and only by the faint jingle of steel did I know that they were not long gone. “Go in, now. It’s too cold for little girls.”

As the days passed, thick with the tedium of a household that was not mine, and that heard no news that was not censored, I could only pray that Bess and Cecily would be safe, and trust that even Richard would not forswear his oath. My brother Edward wrote that Richard needed the respect of the great men before whom he had sworn more than he needed Bess and her sisters dead, and I had to be content with that assurance. And the younger girls stayed with me.

The first hard frost came just before Martinmas. Nesfield’s secretary brought me a letter from Bess and I sat on the settle beside the fire to read it. It had been unsealed, of course, and read, too, I had to assume. There was nothing that reached us unexamined.

From the farmyard came a scream as long and shrill as any human soul’s. Bridget burst into tears, and Anne dropped her embroidery hoop on the floor.

“It’s only the pigs,” I said, as my woman went to comfort Bridget with a sugarplum. “Pick your work up, Anne.”

“I don’t like it,” said Anne.

“It must happen, or what shall we do for meat, all winter long? It’s quickly over.”

“Sausages!” shouted Katherine. “Madam, may I go and watch?”

“No. Hush.”

“But there’ll be blood! Lots of it.”

“No. Be quiet, daughter. That’s no sight for a princess.”

Another squeal came. Bridget looked up but did not begin to cry again. She took the sugarplum from her mouth, stared at it, as if to judge its power to keep her safe, and popped it back in. In her stead Anne began to cry. “The poor p-pigs. It must hurt them so.”

“Block your ears,” I said. “What can’t be mended can always be endured.”

“It doesn’t work, madam. It never does. I hear it still, like a nightmare.”

I know too well what you can hear in a nightmare. “Come here, then, and bury your ears in my lap.”

I stroked her head, and began Bess’s letter once more. There was nothing in it to trouble the most censorious gaoler. She began in the proper form, recommending herself to me, but then her news outran her care to write a neat hand: everyone at court was very kind, and she had three new gowns; they had held a competition among the maids as to whose hair was the longest—Aunt Buckingham the judge—and Cecily had won by three handspans. The King had spoken most kindly to them both, though the Queen was sick again and had not left her bed for a fortnight past. In fact, the King had danced with Bess twice last evening, and made her promise to dance again with him when next they met. Could I arrange for her silver girdle with the turquoises to be sent? It would look well with her new blue gown. And her Cicero too, please, she thought she had left it in her bedchamber. She had not studied as much as I had recommended, but had promised at confession to amend this as soon as she might. Next time she would send presents for the girls, if I could let her have a few shillings, for all her money was gone on cards.

As well as my eyes would permit, I searched her words for a
sign that she did not think of Richard of Gloucester as King in her rightful place, nor yet Ann Neville as his queen. Had she written with Nesfield’s secretary in mind, or was her pleasure real? She deserved the pleasure, my good and clever Bess—if I could but be sure that she knew what was her true desert, and cleaved to the knowledge even as she danced with her usurper.

My woman still dandled Bridget, so I asked her to set pen, ink, and paper on the table at my elbow that I might write to Bess myself.

I had only just begun when Nesfield’s secretary entered. “A Dame Peters has called. My master permits you to receive her. Is it your pleasure to do so?”

Mal! My dearest Mal, come all the way from Hartwell! Rounder than ever for the cloaks and scarves she had wrapped herself in, and rosy-cheeked from the frost, she stumped into the room, and when I had raised her from the small curtsy that was all her rheumatics allowed, we embraced. In her arms, though my sorrows and fears were beyond her power to amend, for one strange moment it was as if I had no more to trouble me than a cut knee and an unlearned lesson, and Mal the craft to mend them both. But even Mal had not such craft.

She saw the tears I could not hide, and nodded to my woman to take the girls away. “I’ll come and see you in a while, my sweets. Off you go.”

“Can we go and see the pigs being butchered?” I heard Katherine beg, as they went out. “Please? Please? They’re all killed now, so Anne needn’t be such a cry-baby.”

“Your brother Master Edward was just the same,” said Mal, loosening her wrappings and casting her cloak on the window-seat. “A pity she’ll not be Admiral of the Fleet like her uncle, for I warrant she’d do well…” She sat down beside me. “And how keep
you, madam?”

I had to shake my head, but mastered myself at last. “Well enough. Bess and Cecily are at court, did you know?”

“Now that I did know. With your brother Sir Richard—the new Lord Rivers, I
should
say—with him at Grafton so much, even quietly, the news gets there. And as I promised you, there’s not much that doesn’t cross the valley to Hartwell after. And is she well, Lady Bess?”

“So she says. I would I knew more of how she does.”

“She’ll do well enough. Your sister Mistress Margaret—my lady Arundel, I
should
say—she’ll have an eye to them. It’ll not be your girls getting a court belly, whoever else does. And from all I hear His Grace of Gloucester’s court is sober and godly, like himself, and his lady too.”

“So he would have us think. And poor Ann Neville mortally sick. She was not made for such a great position, I think, usurped or no. Warwick crushed everything out of her before ever she was married. And then she lost her own boy, Edward. But who knows what Richard of Gloucester really is?”

She sighed. “And there’s no hope?”

A great lump of grief rose in my throat. “How can I hope? And how can I not?…Oh, Mal, every day I go from one to the other until my belly heaves with it. I’m frightened, now we’re not in sanctuary, and yet it’s better for I cannot see…I cannot see Dickon as I could at Westminster. And Ned…Oh, Ned…”

She drew me into her arms and let me weep unhindered, uncajoled, but comforted, as I had not wept since the day I had vowed to act as if they were lost forever.

I shall never reach the end of my grief for my boys: it is unfathomable. But from near enough to it, deep in the well of my sorrow,
I cried out, “I cannot recall Ned’s face. Or his voice. Or his smiles. I have nothing of him to remember. Antony had it all, and Antony lost him, and Antony is gone.”

Then Mal wept too, for Antony had ever held the chief place in her heart, and two winters had not served to still her grief, any more than they had mine.

At last I was too weary to weep any longer, but half-lay against the cushions on the settle. Mal sat with her arms about me, staring into the fire. When my woman entered with comfits and sweet wine, I could command myself well enough to eat and drink, then asked for the children. Mal had never seen Bridget, and knew the others scarcely more, and she had brought presents for them all.

They did me credit, thanking Mal prettily enough. Then Anne showed Katherine how to whip her top, though I had to frown at her before she would open the chapbook of the story of Saint Martin that Mal had brought her. Bridget patted the little wooden horse and cart but then just sat and looked at it, not trying to play. After a while Mal scooped her up and carried her to the window to catch what light there was. Then she gave her a kiss, set her down before her toy, and came back to where I sat.

“More than sixty years I’ve been on this earth,” she said quietly to me, “and I’ve never seen a child with eyes like Lady Bridget’s that learned her book. Did you say she’s sickly?”

“Yes, though it’s not her chest or her belly. The doctors say her heart murmurs. But she’s happy enough, always laughing. Do you remember the rages my poor George used to fall into?”

“Aye, God rest his soul. He’ll not be raging where he is now. But Lady Bridget is a sweet soul, that I can tell, and always will be. You may find she’s best off with the holy sisters when she’s older.

They’ll care for her, and Saint Bridget will guard her as her own, for she is that, bless her. She’ll learn enough before then, with her sisters to play with her.”

“I think I could not bear to lose another.”

“You’ll not be losing her, Mistress Ysa, only looking after her in the best way you may. Just as God looks after all those He has in His keeping.”

I wept again then, but quietly.

It was past Nones, but Nesfield would not let Mal lodge with us. “No matter,” said Mal. “The sisters at Warminster have a guest-house; my head plowman’s niece is but lately taken on there as a novice. It’s no distance with rested horses, and my man knows the road.”

So we parted, with many promises to Heaven and each other to meet again, whether better times came to us all, or no.

Una—Sunday

In the church of Saint Helen and the Holy Cross, Mark lays a
hand on the boy’s tomb. The figure’s worn, the praying hands lost and the feet too, the stone face smoothed almost to nothing in the cool morning light. But the proportions are a boy’s, and the long, heavy gown and elaborate cap, the high Gothic moldings of the base, all breathe the grandeur and wealth of his small life. ‘“Edward of Middleham,’” Mark reads. “He must have been important.”

“He was. He was Richard of Gloucester’s son, his only heir. He died when Richard had been King for less than a year, of a fever, I think. A political disaster too, of course, to lose your heir—for the Prince of Wales to die. His parents were shattered. His mother died a year later.”

“Losing a child.”

“Yes.”

It’s not even certain that this is his tomb, I read, despite the hopeful local labels. And yet someone’s present, as they weren’t at the castle: a man and a woman mourning a child. It’s not Elizabeth, not Anthony, who mourn this child: they’ve never stood where we stand and this is the home and the sorrow of their enemies. And yet somehow, in this air scented with long-dead candle-smoke, the cold and ancient stone, the bitter spice of myrrh…somehow they invade my senses and my mind and bring Anthony before me like an opium dream of the heart, and Elizabeth too, for losing a child is losing a child: a grief unfathomable.

Behind us the latch of the church door clacks, footsteps sound and the swish of a cassock. A woman dressed thus is still a novelty. She’s carrying a stack of old books and newer booklets and has a square, sensible face. Only when we catch her eye does she come over.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Amazing to think of it being so old.”

“And they don’t know for sure who it is?” I ask.

“So I’m told. I haven’t really had a chance to catch up with the history yet. Goodness knows, there’s enough of it, somewhere like this, but what with the school and all the work in the parish and the diocesan projects…York’s not the glamorous time-capsule the tourists think it is. Are you just visiting?”

“Sort of, though it’s also professional. I’m a historian.”

“You might be interested in these, then,” she says, nodding at the pile of books in her arms. “My husband’s been working his way through the books my predecessor left behind, and he said these two should go in the safe. Would you like a quick look before I lock them up? My name’s Anne, by the way. Anne Stewart. I’m the rector, as you’ll no doubt have deduced from the collar.”

I smile and thank her with the automatic but noncommittal
warmth I use for nonprofessional helpfulness, and she unlocks the vestry and takes us in.

The bindings are mid-eighteenth-century calf, thick and smooth and in remarkably good condition. The first book turns out to be contemporaneous with its binding:
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
. A racy read for an eighteenth-century clergyman, I’d have thought. I show it to Mark.

“Could he have thought it really was a history?” he says. “They’d only just invented novels.”

“Or an improving tract,” says Anne Stewart, stacking Series Three Communion booklets briskly on a shelf, next to worn but gaudily illustrated Ladybird
Stories from the Holy Land
and
The Good Samaritan
. “Like all those awful Victorian moral tales. Do sit down, by the way.”

“Nothing very moral about Tom Jones. At least, not in the Victorian sense,” I say, perching on a schoolroom chair tucked into a corner. I flip carefully through the pages: it’s printed by Foulis in Glasgow, which is as I’d expect. “It’s a nice, workaday edition, and a good binding. May I see the other?”

It looks much the same on the outside, but it isn’t the same at all inside. No businesslike product of the clattering presses of the Enlightenment, this. Here is a mixture of pages, papers, sizes, typefaces. There’s no real title page, only a printed list of the contents, the printer given as Peter Small of York, MDCLXVII. It starts, orthodoxly enough, with the sermons and prayers of Lancelot Andrewes in a good Plantin, though the type was worn: his Jacobean words lilt steadily across the page.

Then there’s a
History of the Parish of Sheriff Hutton incorporating also the parishes of Lilling, Whenby, Cornborough, Stittenham and Flaxton, their Notable Inhabitants and Memorable Events,
as recorded by the Reverend Isaac Ferguson esq. MA DD, late of Magdalene College Cambridge, to celebrate the restoration of King Charles II. A rather roughly cut van Dyck fount. I run my eye down a page or two, and it’s clear why
A History of Tom Jones
was the better seller.

Anne Stewart emerges from a deep cupboard and sees my faint grin. She looks over my shoulder as she goes past behind me with a whiff of mothballs and brass polish. “Is that handwriting? Strange, in a proper book.”

I look down at where my careless page-turning has brought me to. “Oh, it’s quite common at this date. Printers sent their books out in the sheets, and they were bound and sold locally. So you could get your local binders to bind anything that you wanted kept together: essays, recipes, letters, whatever. You get all sorts of stuff mixed up.”

It’s a good late-sixteenth-century hand, not the court hand of clerks, my paleographic colleagues would say, but the italic style of an educated man or woman, accustomed to writing a good deal. The black strokes jog across the page with no more force or flourish than necessary, as if the writer was old and could spare little time for more than was needed to tell the tale.

“Is it authentic?” says Mark, putting a hand on my shoulder to peer at the page.

“I don’t know. You’d need to test the paper and so on to be sure. But everything fits: the binding, the handwriting, the dates. On the face of it…”

I turn the page. The next is in a much older hand, though fluent enough in its still-Gothic style, the spelling more variant, the words and their ordering more foreign to the eye.

And then, in the same hand, but more carefully, as if the writer took care to observe words and spellings that were not his own:

Not a ghost, an opium-dream: a vision so real my mind does not trouble to tell me it is not.

Something touches my shoulder. “Una, are you all right?” says Mark.

“May I copy this?” I say to Anne Stewart, as I pull notebook and pencil out of my bag. My hands are trembling and I drop both on the floor.

“Not in pen,” she says quickly. I straighten up. “Oh, you’ve got a pencil. Yes, of course. But why don’t you both come over to the rectory and you can do it there? It’s much warmer, and my husband’s probably got the kettle on.”

“He never knew,” I say to Mark. We’re sitting on a rug on the grass by the great stump of a windmill, just off the road to Thornton-le-Clay. Around us the country stretches away without a soul or an animal in sight, just trees and fields the greeny-gray of unripe wheat, and a small breeze, under a pale gray sky as flat and bright as the fields. “He never knew if she got the letter or not…Or if Ned was safe.”

“Ned?”

“Edward, Prince of Wales. ‘May God forgive me, for I cannot.’ His son, as near as made no difference. Anthony never knew if Ned forgave him.”

After a long time Mark says, “What are you going to do about the letter?”

Somehow I find a neutral, scholarly voice. “Well the diocesan archivist is the proper person, as Anne’s husband said. But I’ve got the copy and there’s no reason I shouldn’t use it. If I were a young, hungry history post-doc, I’d think I was made, professionally speaking.”

“But you’re not.”

“What?”

“A young, hungry history—what did you say?”

“Post-doc. Someone who’s done their PhD and is trying to make a career.”

“Is it relevant? I mean, to your book about Anthony and Elizabeth’s books?”

With a shock I realize it hasn’t occurred to me to ask myself the question. “Of course it’s not relevant, except in the general
way. He doesn’t mention his own books in the letter, though the will refers to them. If he wrote anything in prison, the way Walter Raleigh wrote his
History of the World
, or Malory wrote
Le Morte Darthur
, we don’t know about it. The letter’s not even an autograph, though a contemporaneous copy’s much more convincing than a later one. If it
is
a copy of something that once existed. It might even turn out to be a fake—a game—a wish-fulfillment by some Woodville supporter up here in Richard’s fiefdom. But I wish it was relevant. To me, I mean. Because it’s him, isn’t it?” I can hear the longing of the opium addict in my voice. “It’s him the way a will isn’t. His voice, not just his business.”