Читать книгу The King's Bed - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 3

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An angry sunset flamed over Leicester, as if reflecting the troubled heart of England. City walls and gates, gabled houses, and the massive Abbey of St. Mary might all have been but a flat template carved in black wood against the portentous sky. The heat of an August day still hung about oppressively, trapped in narrow streets by overhanging eaves.

It was the hour when the day’s work was done and townsfolk usually strolled abroad to take the air; but a sense of tension and the threat of ominously piling thunder clouds kept the women grouped apprehensively about their doors, while their men sat elbow to elbow on tavern benches grumbling at the danger to trade and fidgeting for news of the invader.

At the sign of the White Boar seventeen-year-old Tansy Marsh, helping her father to serve their customers, heard all that they said. But she heard it with the half-interested ears of youth. National crises and party arguments about Yorkists and Lancastrians, over which her elders waxed so hot, concerned her less closely than the color of her new gown for Michaelmas, the lovableness of her new pony, Pippin, or the spells of breathlessness which had recently attacked her father.

“If this Lancastrian, Henry Tudor, has landed in Wales it could mean civil war again,” declared William Jordan, the master of the grammar school, through the sweaty heat of the low beamed room.

“He be landed right enough,” confirmed the Guild Hall watchman, who should know. “At Pembroke, so that Welsh merchant who rode in this morning told our Mayor. And marching nearer and nearer across Wales every hour, making towards Shrewsbury, he said. And because he marches under his father’s banner of the Welsh dragon, men rush singing to join him, swelling his handful of invaders at every market cross.”

“Ten groats to our Tansy’s shoe buckle the King will bring an army down from Nottingham to stop him!” wagered Tom Hood, the dashing young fletcher, catching her about the waist.

“An’ a pretty clash there’ll be when they meet!” guffawed the blacksmith, tossing back his ale with relish.

To fletchers and farriers the prospect of approaching armies must suggest gain, supposed Robert Marsh, the landlord. But having struggled for years against the ill effects of an arrow wound in the chest sustained on the Scottish border and being now settled in life with an extravagant second wife, he wanted no more Lancastrian troublemakers drawing men away to battle from his tavern benches. Business was chancy enough at it was, with that loud-voiced, enterprising rival Malpas over at the newly built Golden Crown, and he himself not able to work as he used. “Our Duke’ll make mincemeat of the Tudor,” he prophesied testily, beckoning to his man Jod to breach a fresh cask.

Richard the Third had been King of England for over two years, but to many a Midland man like Marsh who had fought under him he would always be the Duke: young Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, who had spent most of his life soldiering to keep the peace for his elder brother, the fourth Edward, serving him loyally, from one campaign to another, with little time to join in Edward’s court revels and philandering.

Because mine host was not one to speak lightly, his words lent graphic reality to the probable encounter. An uneasy silence hung in the room. “How far would King Richard’s army have come by now, think you, sir?” quavered a first-year apprentice, voicing the fear in several minds.

“Not far as yet, my lad,” replied Marsh kindly, as much to reassure his own young daughter as the questioner. “But he makes his men march swiftly, as I should well know.”

“Do you suppose he will come through Leicester?” asked the fletcher, with more eagerness than fear.

“More likely westwards, towards Gloucester, so as to prevent this upstart Tudor from crossing the Severn. Though if he be too late for that maneuver, he might well make for the stronghold of Warwick so as to cut him off from London. It would be like his bold military skill to place himself in the very middle of his kingdom. But who can tell?”

What with the heat and the rumors and the distant thunder, it had been a trying day. Noting the landlord’s weariness, and sharing it, the gray-haired schoolmaster rose and handed his empty tankard to Tansy with a half-sketched bow. There was a fair purity about her which made men of discernment treat her with respect, and even the roughest churl present knew that if he presumed to do otherwise in her father’s presence he would soon find himself on the wrong side of the Boar’s hospitable doors. “Our good friend Marsh is probably right,” Master Jordan said. “And as even Warwick is over thirty miles away, there should be no bloodshed here. So I wish you all a peaceful good night.”

The beloved old pedagogue’s departure was the signal for a general scraping back of stools and benches. The Abbey bell began to ring the Augustine brothers to bed, the sun had sunk behind the castle walls, and—invasion or no invasion—many of Marsh’s customers would have to be up at cockcrow. With a hubbub of “good nights” they left in twos and threes, going their ways along the darkening streets home to their nervous wives.

Jod bolted the door behind them and gathered up the last of the dirty mugs. Tansy, yawning, lighted a candle at the damped-down kitchen fire to light herself to bed. And Robert Marsh sat down abruptly on an upturned barrel, trying to hide his exhaustion.

Glancing across at him, Tansy forgot her own weariness in a rush of anxious affection. “Bring your master a cup of mulled malmsey, Jod,” she called, carrying her candle to the table where her father sat. “Is it your heart again?” she asked anxiously.

“Or the heat.” Robert Marsh shrugged, trying to make light of it.

“Small wonder, with such a fug of stale liquor and sweat!” said Tansy, pushing open a casement to freshen the air. “How horrible they all smell!”

“The result of honest toil,” he reminded her. “But I wish that you did not have to wait on them.”

“I like to, since it helps you. And it is only when Dilly goes home to her parents.”

But they both knew that it was not so much the young serving maid’s occasional absence which put more work on Tansy as her stepmother’s proud idleness. While there were two unwed girls to serve drinks to half the louts of Leicester, let them do it until they dropped, thought Mistress Rose Marsh, going her pleasure-loving ways about the town. It was a recognized factor in the household, but not one of which Robert or his daughter ever spoke. They merely held the time precious in her absence.

When Jod had brought the sweetened steaming wine and gone out into the yard to shoot the stable bolts, Tansy drew a stool close to her father. “You are not really worried about all this talk of more civil war?” she asked, seeing that the normal color had come back into his face.

“No need to be,” he assured her, settling himself more easily with his elbows on the table. “This Tudor’s claim to the throne is flimsy as thistledown. Descended from Edward the Third he certainly is, but only through the third son, John of Gaunt, and his children’s governess, Katherine.”

“Sister-in-law to the poet Chaucer, wasn’t she? You remember how Mother used to recite to us lovely lines from his story of the Canterbury Pilgrims?”

“Aye. I remember.” Robert Marsh sighed, and took up his tale. “And when John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, had had a family by her, he married her. And their descendant, Margaret Beaufort, married one of these Welsh Tudors.”

“And the Tudors themselves?”

“Owen Tudor was put in charge of the household of Henry the Fifth’s widowed queen, Katherine of Valois, and had the effrontery to marry her.”

“But everyone says they were so deeply in love that it wasn’t just ambition,” sighed Tansy romantically.

“That’s as may be. But the fact remains that they married their elder son Edmund to Margaret Beaufort and so became the grandparents of this present perfidious claimant, Henry Tudor.”

“Who has French royal blood as well as Welsh.”

“And has cunningly picked the propitious moment when our King Richard is widowed and his infant son but recently dead. There is no direct heir.”

Tansy nibbled at a honey cake and spoke diffidently because she knew that her father would brook no criticism of the King. “They do say that the child’s death was a judgment from Heaven because of those two poor Princes shut up in the Tower. Pratt, the packman, who is often in London, swears that they have been murdered. No one ever sees them now and——”

“A packman has to bring gossip so as to sell his wares. The apartments in the Tower are a royal residence like any other, and what profit would it be to the King to murder his own brother’s boys after they had been declared bastards, because of their father’s previous marriage, and the crown freely offered to him?”

“None, I suppose, though he might feel safer,” agreed Tansy, her mothering heart still shocked by the packman’s lurid tales. “And you think the people still like him well enough to stand by him, as you do?”

“They certainly should, seeing the good firm rule he has given them after all the wars of the red and white roses. Peace on the borders, a truce with Scotland at last, and protection for our trade abroad. Why, even our laws are written in English now, instead of highfalutin Latin, so that the meanest poacher can understand what he is convicted of. And this new idea he has organized for the safe posting of merchants’ important letters from town to town—why, it may well be that even now our Mayor has news of Henry Tudor’s movements by this very means.”

“If only some of the aldermen had come in tonight, we might have heard,” said Tansy, beginning to wipe the liquor-stained table.

“Most of ’em drink at the Golden Cross these days,” Robert Marsh reminded her bitterly.

Tansy stopped polishing to watch a group of merrymakers, singing some catchy tune, lurch tipsily past the open window from the direction of the rival inn. She thought with a sigh of the comfortable rooms above, aired but sparsely occupied for weeks, which in her mother’s time had been so constantly used by travelers. “Why, for pity’s sake, does everybody go there now?” she asked.

“Something new,” said Marsh, rising and standing before his own empty hearth and looking round at well-worn benches and old smoke-grimed beams. “A juggler and a singing wench hired to entertain them. And if she stops at singing... It’s anything to get money, these days. A go-ahead man, is Hugh Malpas!”

“Yes,” agreed Tansy, remembering how jocularly he had pinched her leg as she had ridden into his spacious yard with some message from her stepmother, who admired his successful ways. Careful not to add fuel to her father’s envious wrath, she forbore to mention the incident and, leaving her task for Dilly to finish, went and slipped a hand through his arm. “So that is why you have worked harder than you should all spring, helping Jod to modernize the cellars and enlarge the stables!”

It was the way his first wife used to stand beside him in everything, loyally encouraging, helping him to overcome the disability of his wound. “At least we can bait a score of horses now.” He grinned, looking almost young and eager again.

Though for what use, when most of the stalls were so often empty? wondered Tansy. But, hearing her stepmother’s warm, resonant voice in the yard calling good night to some friends and almost immediately scolding Dilly for returning late, she hastily took up her candle, stood a-tiptoe to kiss her father’s cheek, and went upstairs to bed. Up the wide oak stairs, past the closed and silent rooms, and then up the narrow winding flight to her attic under the middle gable.

Tired though she was, her sleepiness had gone. The worst of the distant thunder had passed over, and the few heavy drops of rain which were falling had already cooled the air. Gratefully she leaned from her window, with its small leaded panes. Above her head finely carved timber came to a point beneath a roof of blue local tiles, and within arm’s reach below her, from its spiked iron shaft, hung the inn sign. In the still air the familiar White Boar, which usually swung and creaked, looked dead as their diminished fortunes, and—even Tansy had to admit it—sadly in need of a coat of paint. Beyond the city walls strips of unharvested corn in the peasants’ fields gleamed whitely against thick forests, and to the west occasional flashes of lightning played over the flat land around Bosworth beyond the river Soar. But light streamed comfortingly from the tall windows of the Abbey and twinkled in dozens of windows along the darkening streets and in the market place, where vendors were still setting up their stalls and where on Monday she would go marketing. It was the newly entrusted treat of her week, going to market on her pony with a purseful of money for the inn’s provisioning and Jod lumbering on a packhorse behind. There would be chaffering and chattering, and all manner of pretty things on the chapmen’s stalls, a performing bear perhaps, and plenty of impudent apprentices bringing blushes to the cheeks of every pretty girl. Apprentices and their like were beginning to loom large in Tansy’s secret, personal life. Their calls and whistles had become a kind of judgment, like the apple offered by the shepherd Paris to the most beautiful goddess. And by the way they looked at her, Tansy was beginning to realize that, in spite of her stepmother’s unkind teasing about a tiptilted nose and straw-colored hair, she could not be so plain after all.

If I wash with the rose water which that extravagant Tom Hood bought me last May Day, and put on my rose-sprigged gown, I shall look very different from how I do now, she thought, unfastening the crumpled bodice of her workaday linen and fastidiously shaking her slender body free from a clinging, sweat-damp shift.

She leaned farther out and looked half enviously towards the Golden Crown on the other side of the street, where lanterns still flared and laughter still sounded. She watched the better-dressed citizens leaving, some calling for their horses, some in convivial groups afoot. Ostlers came and went, and presently, as his popular inn emptied, Hugh Malpas himself appeared, standing in his doorway, prosperous and capable. A large man, dark and Levantine. He spread out a palm to see if the rain had ceased and looked up at the sky. Looking up, his sharp eyes caught sight of his rival’s daughter, hanging slutlike and unbuttoned from an attic window. By the light of the Crown lanterns Tansy saw his thick red lips widened in a grin, the gleam of his splendid teeth, and the florid gesture as his money-grubbing fingers touched them to blow her a kiss. From any other neighbor it might have been a friendly greeting to a young girl, but from him it was somehow mocking, lascivious and nauseating. A fierce stab of anger tore through her because his brash success had harmed her father. But, being Tansy, with a maternal ancestry molded more in manors than in inns, she scorned to draw her disheveled head back out of sight and turned it sharply in the opposite direction. And so she was the first to see the two horsemen, cloaked against the spattering rain, come galloping down the street from North Gate. There was something so urgent about their behavior that she had no need to pretend that she had not noticed Master Malpas. She simply forgot him altogether.

They appeared to be strangers because, hard as they urged their tired mounts, they were looking to right and to left as if searching for something, hampered by the semidarkness. She quite expected them to canter past, but as they drew nearly level the leading horseman stopped, pulled his jaded beast almost to its haunches, and shouted back over his shoulder with glad surprise, “The White Boar!” He pointed up at the signboard as if it were some welcome miracle from Heaven, and his companion pulled up beside him.

Lights still streamed from the open door of the rival inn. The more ostentatious sign of the Golden Crown hung invitingly only a few yards farther on. But they ignored it and, dismounting, hammered urgently on Robert Marsh’s door. Looking down from immediately above, Tansy remarked the fineness of their travel-stained clothing and realized that they were rich, belated travelers such as her parents had been used to cater for.

She heard Malpas’s footsteps hurrying down the street to lure them away. “The Golden Crown has better accommodation, sirs,” he was telling them persuasively. But they were not to be dissuaded.

“The White Boar is good enough for us,” they said, almost in unison, laughing as at some private joke and brushing him aside.

Triumphantly, all maternal precepts forgotten, Tansy stuck out her tongue at him. Quick as one of those lightning flashes over Bosworth fields, careless of her appearance, she ran downstairs, fastening her bodice as she went.

Fortunately her stepmother must have been regaling Marsh with a vivacious account of her doings, as neither they nor Dilly had gone up to bed. The travelers had ridden in under the archway of the yard, and the landlord was receiving them with his usual courtesy. All was welcoming bustle. “There are excellent rooms upstairs,” Rose Marsh was explaining, moved to eagerness by the evident quality of her unexpected guests and ushering them inside. “This is but the ale room, stale from the low kind who use it.”

They seemed to appreciate only its cosy homeliness. Their minds were full of more important issues. “We shall want all your rooms,” they said.

“Then you are traveling with a large party, sirs?” surmised Rose delightedly, signing to Tansy to take their cloaks while her husband called across the yard for Jod to come and take their horses.

“With an army,” said the older of the two gentlemen. “They should be coming in through the North gate now. Best ride back, Critchley, and direct his Grace here.”

The younger man hurried out and galloped up the street again. Tansy, with the cloaks still across her arms, stood stock still and stared. Her father, closing the door after him, swung round with shining eyes. “The King’s army!” he exclaimed proudly.

The same pride was reflected in Sir John Hungerford’s face, drawn as it was with weariness. “Our men have marched down from Nottingham in the day with only one break.”

“Like he made us march when he was Duke of Gloucester,” said Robert Marsh, reaching for a flagon of his very choicest wine.

Sir John sat down gratefully in the high-backed chair which Tansy hastily pulled forward, relaxed for the first time and smiling over the sparkling Bordeaux which was handed to him. “Then you, too, mine host, have served under him? Which explains why you took his badge for your sign.”

“And will serve him with my whole heart while his Grace is beneath my roof!” exulted Marsh, knowing that his inn would be famous for all time.