Читать книгу The King's Bed - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 7

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The Marshes’ bitter cup of disappointment was full when the new, self-appointed King stopped at the Golden Crown. The sign must have seemed as propitious to him as the White Boar had to Richard. There he collected scribes and messengers with as much ardor as Richard had collected skilled bowmen. While Malpas’s cook kept hot the prime cuts of roast ox for dinner, he dictated news of his victory to all parts of the realm. “Henry, by the grace of God, King of England and of France, Prince of Wales and Lord of Ireland,” he styled himself, staking his claim to everything. And he wisely began by charging his followers, upon pain of death, “to rob no man, nor despoil the people’s common lands, nor to pick quarrels with any, but to keep the King’s peace.”

When at last he relaxed from his statesmanship, the alluring Gladys was sent to sing Welsh songs to him while he ate. But although he applauded the songs and complimented the cook, he scarcely seemed to notice the allure.

While Hugh Malpas expanded visibly with pride, across the street in the deserted White Boar only a few faithful old regulars came sheepishly to drink, and Rose Marsh was glad enough to take their humble groats. “What is this Tudor like?” she asked of those who had seen him.

“Very different from our fourth Edward,” guffawed a sheep dealer who had been to London in his youth. “They say that Malpas’ singing hussy all but undressed herself and he went on talking to Lord Stanley about the best way to raise taxes.”

“At least he has not boasted about the battle,” added a merchant’s clerk with Lancastrian leanings. “In fact, he says very little at all. A secretive type.”

“I mean, what does he look like?” persisted Rose, womanlike.

“Not particularly striking in any way,” the sheep dealer told her. “Thin as King Richard, but fairer. Thoughtful-looking like he was—and thin-lipped, too. But without the Plantagenet’s rare, warming smile.”

“But in a way, not unlike him,” added the clerk, obviously rather taken aback by his own unexpected conclusion.

“Which is scarcely surprising,” pointed out Master Jordan, “seeing that they are cousins of a kind.”

Tansy watched her opportunity. When the babble of conversation had died down a little, she went to take the schoolmaster’s empty tankard. “Could you come up and talk a little with my father, Master Jordan?” she begged. “He feels so out of everything, laid low at such a time, and you could tell him so much that he wants to know. And naturally,” she added, lowering her voice, “we are all worried for the business.”

He rose at once and followed her upstairs, and after she had set a chair for him she lingered awhile to savor her father’s pleasure in his company and to hear their friendly talk. “This is a sad day for you, Robert, even apart from your sickness,” said Jordan, his finely drawn face full of sympathy.

“How that pushful brute Malpas must be crowing!” lamented Marsh weakly. “My wife and I were so sure that we were made. And God knows I needed the money, William!”

William Jordan knew it too, considering the debts Rose Marsh accumulated at the drapers’. “And now, will you ever see even what the royal party owes you?”

“I doubt it. Where are they all—Norfolk, Lovell, and the rest?”

“Scattered. Riding hell for leather to some place of hiding, I suppose, those of them who are still alive. No, I fear you will never be repaid.”

“And the White Boar’s takings will go down again.... For Rose, of course, it is the disappointment about success and the royal patronage. For party loyalties she does not care much either way. But for me it is the loss of a good master.”

“Everybody says he died in personal combat, fighting furiously. That he killed the invader’s standard bearer and almost reached the Tudor himself.”

“Would that he had! Where is his body? What did they do with it?”

The schoolmaster shook his head sadly. “I heard a rumor that the Gray Friars came out and begged to be allowed to give it sanctuary. Perhaps we shall know more definitely tomorrow.”

Robert Marsh pulled himself up in the bed. “It is incredible! Not only that he lost the battle——”

“No one could have won it against such tremendous desertion.”

“But that this usurper, this stranger, should be allowed to march unmurdered through England!”

“Perhaps it is because he is a stranger,” suggested Jordan thoughtfully.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I know that we feel differently about this, Robert. You, like all men who actually served the Plantagenet, see only his ability, his decisiveness—the way he saw that his own people were properly armed and fed and personally looked into their grievances. Around Middleham, where he lived with his wife, and throughout all Yorkshire, he was God. But it seems it wasn’t so in London, where people remember his easygoing brother. Where the Queen dowager and all her Woodville tribe tried to thwart and blacken him because they wanted the power themselves. And where the young Prince whom the Londoners looked upon as their future King has been set aside.”

“He had to have traitors like Buckingham and the Woodville Earl Rivers executed. Woodville plotted for the Protectorship, which King Edward, in his last words, willed to his brother Richard.”

“Admittedly. But personally I have always thought he would have been wiser to spare Lord Hastings who had been his brother’s honored counselor for so long.”

“You said because the Tudor is a complete stranger——”

“Yes. Just because to some people Richard Plantagenet is a god and to others a devil. Because this country has been ravaged and impoverished by civil war for years. Is it not possible that hundreds of farmers and traders and peace-loving folk see a complete stranger as a new hope? As the unknown quantity upon which some kind of agreement may be built? He has begun well by forbidding his followers to ferment disturbance. If he can get to London alive, I think he may pull off his impertinent venture. Start an altogether new dynasty with hope——”

Marsh drummed impatiently on the counterpane. “How can you be so impersonal?”

“Perhaps it is a kind of impersonal wisdom that England needs just now. As a sick man, like you, needs soothing drugs,” said Jordan, reaching for a phial which the doctor had left.

Marsh waved it aside. “But what can a man called Tudor care for England?”

“Perhaps the Plantagenets cared too passionately?”

Tansy left them arguing and slipped away. Most of the customers had already gone, fearing violent disturbances. For if Henry Tudor’s immediate followers obeyed his humane orders, there were many who did not. Stragglers and citizens, local people who had always been supporters of the Lancastrian cause, now began to make nuisances of themselves. Having drunk heavily to celebrate, some of the younger men began brawling and beating up inoffensive citizens and were soon joined by the wilder elements of Henry’s Welsh followers.

“Best be going home, William. The streets may not be safe,” advised Robert Marsh, weary with talking. “Tell Tansy to make sure that Jod bolts all the doors,” he called after him, chafing because he could not see to such things himself.

After thanking the old gentleman and watching him cross the street to his schoolhouse, Tansy went out into the yard and stood listening for a few minutes to the sudden bursts of shouting. The last of the customers’ horses had been taken, and Jod was just about to close the gates onto the lane. From the direction of the river they could hear even more violent shouting and the footsteps of many people running.

“Just as well I fixed them new bolts,” said Jod, with his hands already on the gates to push them shut.

But just at that moment the yelling crowd swept round the corner into the lower end of White Boar Lane, hot in the excitement of a man hunt. In the gathering darkness, Tansy could discern the unfortunate victim they were pursuing: a slight, darkly clad figure, doubling and stumbling with exhaustion as he ran. “They will catch up with him in a matter of minutes,” muttered Jod, stepping out into the lane.

“And kill him,” murmured Tansy pitifully.

“Aye, the poor wight is prid near finished.”

The rabble were catching up on him quickly. “The telltale Yorkist! Didn’t even fight! But quick enough to spoil our sport!” were some of the things they were shouting. “Cut his wheedling tongue out! Throw him in the river!” And the river was very close.

He was stretching out a hand now to touch the innyard wall, either to steady himself as he ran or because it was the asylum he sought, and Tansy could hear the sobs of his panting breath. “Wait!” she whispered, as Jod would have slammed the gates.

“For Christ’s sake, no! We shall have the whole cutthroat pack in here,” he warned.

But, taking a risk on it, Tansy held one gate open a moment or two longer. She pulled the poor wretch in and slammed them with only a few yards to spare. In those moments she had caught a glimpse of his pursuers’ cruel, drink-inflamed faces and knew that they would have killed anyone who stood in their way. As Jod shot the great iron bolt, howls of disappointment went up, as from wild beasts cheated of their prey, and blows from their fists rained on the other side. But the strong oak held.

Realizing her moment of danger, Tansy stood with wildly beating heart until at last the mob gave up and began to drift away in search of fresh entertainment. It was some moments before she turned to look at the man she had saved.

He had collapsed on the ground and lay there with arms outstretched, his body still heaving with the effort to draw breath. Jod fetched a lantern. He set it down on the ground and propped the panting young man against the wall. His clothes were torn, one hand clutched at his ankle, and blood gushed from a nasty gash on his forehead, almost obliterating his features.

“Get a pail of water and a clean horse cloth,” Tansy told Jod. Then, kneeling, she began to wipe the wounded man’s face.

Revived by the cold water, he opened his eyes and looked at her.

“Dickon!” she exclaimed.

“I didn’t—think—I should make it!” he panted.

Unreasonably, she was immeasurably thankful that he had. “I shall have to tie this tightly to stop the bleeding,” she said, pushing back his matted brown hair.

Her friendly presence helped him to pull himself together. “It isn’t much, really,” he said. “They began throwing stones. It is my ankle that hurts. I tripped on the cobbles as I ran. When they all set on me, I ran for my life.”

“Anyone would have,” she assured him, remembering their murderous faces.

“Anyone, yes. But not my father. He wouldn’t have been very proud of me, would he?”

“Your father?” repeated Tansy, mopping some blood from her skirt. “I thought you told me you’d never even seen him.”

“I have now,” he said, without embellishment. “He was the King!”

Tansy stared at him apprehensively, supposing him to be lightheaded. His eyelids had dropped shut again, but there was a small proud smile on his lips, a contentment where, when she had first met him, there had been only a kind of restless bewilderment. And because in his extremity his face looked older and bore the marks of suffering, the queer sense of some elusive likeness which had bothered Tansy resolved itself. With lantern light throwing into relief the fine molding of his cheekbones and the tightly compressed lower lip, she saw how closely he resembled the man who had explained to her about the bed carvings and who had touched her shoulder when he commanded so urgently that this young man should be brought to him. She suddenly knew, without logical explanation and beyond skepticism, that what Dickon had said was true.

All that was maternal in her, all that part of her which invariably rose up compassionately to defend even an animal in danger of being hurt, was terribly afraid for him.

She sat back on her heels in the starlit yard and wondered what to do. “A likely story!” her father had said, when she told him about mysterious payments and a fantastic visit to a grand house, and an ordinary schoolboy who thought he might be some nobleman’s bastard. This story was more incredible still, yet she had seen the fleeting likeness and believed. “If they should come back, send them away and have nothing more to do with them,” Robert Marsh had said. Never before had she deliberately disobeyed her father. But how could she turn out into the dangerous streets one so helpless, who had already been set upon, perhaps because he had been seen about King Richard’s camp? How could she bring herself to do it even if he were of no particular interest to her? And honesty forced her to admit that he was.

Feeling far too young to have such an important decision thrust upon her, she shook the lad to full consciousness. “Where is Master Gervase?” she asked, in a last effort to shelve her feeling of personal responsibility.

“I don’t know. He made off.”

“After the battle?”

“As soon as he saw that the King was killed.”

So there was to be no help from that quarter. Tansy thought furiously while she finished bandaging the damaged ankle with linen soaked in cold water. Jod, who had served her mother’s family before ever he came to the inn, must be her only confidant. “Help the gentleman up the ladder into the hayloft and make him comfortable for the night. I will put something for him to eat on the rain butt outside the back door. And please, Jod, do not speak of this to anyone.”

The old man’s steady gray eyes met hers, and although she could not know how much she looked like her mother at that moment she knew that no verbal promise was needed, either for the hiding of a fugitive or for the strange thing which Jod might have overheard.

She stood up and said formally to Dickon, “I will not pretend that our rooms are full. They are empty—and probably often will be now. But it would be unwise to offer you one.”

He caught at her hand, still wet from her ministrations, and pressed it to his lips. “Is it not enough that you saved my life just now?” he asked huskily.

She turned hurriedly towards the lighted kitchen windows, but by the time he had risen shakily with Jod’s help, her curiosity had forced her to come back. “Why did they call you telltale Yorkist and yell that you had spoiled their sport? And then set on you?” she asked.

“Because I ran to the Gray Friars and entreated them to take the King’s body from them, to give it decent Christian burial before they... It was at Bow Bridge.... The sadistic curs had...” Dickon shuddered and covered his bruised face with both hands. He was not much more than a schoolboy and he could bear no more.

“Tell me tomorrow, Dickon,” said Tansy pitifully, and went back into the inn to find herself, as usual, the butt for her stepmother’s strident wrath when things went wrong.

“Where have you been loitering at such a time?” she demanded. “With your father sick again and all those ruffians howling at our door and throwing stones. Huddling with some tipsy lout in the hayloft, I’ll be bound. If the Mayor and Guild Masters do nothing to stop this broiling we shall all be murdered in our beds!” All the warmer expansion of Rose’s good mood when prosperity seemed certain had turned to gall, which must be taken out on the absurdly loved daughter of the man, the ailing luckless man, whom she had been fool enough to marry. “At least in King Richard’s time we could sleep in peace,” she admitted, cooling down a little. “What have they done with him, d’you know?”

Tansy stood still and outwardly respectful before her. “He was killed,” she said stupidly, battered by the torrent of the tirade.

Rose began to loosen her over-tight bodice preparatory to joining the sick husband who was of no use to her either by day or by night. “Of course he was killed, nitwit. We all know that. But what have they done with the corpse?”

Tansy did not like to think. “The Gray Friars took it, I was told.”

“You were told! Who told you?”

His son—and he should know! thought Tansy, who had got into the habit of carrying on simultaneously a spoken and an unspoken conversation when her stepmother bellowed at her. Aloud she said, unromantically but truthfully, “Someone who came to the inn this evening.”

“And ended up in the hayloft!” sneered Rose, who had been trying to drown her disappointment in malmsey.

When Tansy reached her attic she found that at least some of her stepmother’s words were true. Exultant Lancastrian sympathizers paraded the streets so that decent citizens could get no sleep. They bawled ribald songs about dead Richard and Norfolk the lion and Lovell the dog, referring to their heraldic badges. And what better target could they ask for than the sign of the White Boar, gently swinging in the evening breeze? Stones were hurled at it until it rocked madly, and those which missed spattered on the timbered front of the inn. When one stone broke a pane of transparent horn in her casement and struck her bare shoulder sharply, Tansy, tired out, pulled the bedclothes over her head and whimpered. But her tears were more a general miserere for the misfortunes of her father’s inn, and for slain King Richard and his lonely unacknowledged son, than for her own discomfort.