The Tudor Rose Part 12

"All of us knew that everything was over then. Only Richard, with a soldier's tenacious bid for the hundredth chance, refused to know it. Some misguided fool brought him a fresh horse and begged him to escape. 'Escape!' he scoffed. 'Bring me my battle-axe, and by Him that shaped both sea and land, I will die King of England!'

"There was only one chance left for him; and that was to kill the invader with his own hand. Stopping for a drink of water, he caught sight of Henry of Richmond with a few followers on a hill and pulling his vizor dawn, spurred White Surrey towards him. 'If no man will follow me I will try this last hazard alone!' he called out, leaving his dismayed and broken army behind him. And such was the inspiration of his valour that a few men did follow him-men like Viscount Lovell, Ferrars, Catesby and good old Sir Robert Brackenbury."

"And only Lovell is alive to tell of it," added Stafford.

In all the talk there had been about the battle no one had told Elizabeth this before. "You actually saw it?" she asked, scarcely above a whisper.

Surprisingly it was the deep voice of Stanley's son that answered her from out of the gathering gloom. "I saw it from that hill," he said. And although he spoke reluctantly, as became a confirmed Lancastrian, he seemed to be seeing it still. "The Plantagenet set his spear in rest and charged, leading that heroic little handful. His untiring sword seemed to cleave a pa.s.sage for them. He looked like some inspired superman fighting his way through bare steel, with his horse slipping and stumbling over the dead and wounded he left behind. There was that burly giant, Sir John Cheney, I remember, standing guard before his Lancastrian master. But the King, slight of frame as he was, unhorsed him. With one stroke he slew Sir William Brandon, the Tudor standard-bearer, and, wrenching the silken banners from his dying hand, threw them con temptuously to the ground-then pressed on so that the proud Pendragon emblems were trampled into the blood-red earth by White Surrey's hoofs. There was no one between the two rivals then. Yorkist Richard had fought his way across the field and the Lancastrian was almost within his grasp. I wouldn't have given a row of pins at that moment for Henry Tudor's life!"

"Riding back to help him, I could see his face, and it was livid," said Stafford. "Henry Tudor is no coward, but seeing that invincible surcoat of English leopards bearing down upon him he must have believed his last hour had come!"

"And then a miracle happened-"

"My uncle, William Stanley, moved for the first time. With his three thousand men he dashed in and surrounded Richard, cutting him off within striking distance of his prey-"

"Nothing could have been more neatly timed-"

"'Foul treason!' yelled Richard, turning in the saddle to strike in all directions," went on Brereton. "Catesby tried to get him out of it, but he just went on hacking and fighting his way through the growing number of Sir William's men. When his horse was killed under him he stabbed yet another man and stumbled forward, his hands outstretched as if to get at his enemy's throat. His head was bare, his gauntlets gone, and his green eyes were blinded with blood. He must have had a dozen wounds before they closed in and killed him..."

Elizabeth was thankful that the tall candles had burnt themselves out. "And then they set his crown upon Henry," she said in a proud calm voice, hoping that they would not notice that her face had been hidden in her hands.

"A soldier found it in a hawthorn bush and gave it to Sir Reginald Bray, and my father put it upon the Tudor's head and everyone shouted 'Long live King Henry,'" said Strange, repeating the words she had heard so often during the last few days. "The new King called all his supporters together and made a fine speech of thanks and then we all chanted the Te Deum. Towards evening, after we had eaten and cleaned ourselves, we rode with triumph into Leicester. No one dared to oppose us, so my father ordered all the trumpets to be sounded and my stepbrother was proclaimed Henry the Seventh of England."

They had told their story well, but somehow the recital of that splendid moment, which should have been the climax of it all, fell flat and stale. They talked a while of how well Henry had been received as they came southwards down to London, and of how modestly he had avoided all military display; but their minds kept going back to the battle.

"Where was Richard buried?" Elizabeth said, voicing the question she had long been wanting to ask.

"The Grey Friars in Leicester begged his body after it had been shown to the people at one of the city gates," one of them told her.

"That was kind," she said. "But how was he brought there? From Bosworth, I mean."

There was an uncomfortable silence during which Tom Stafford picked up his lute and Humphrey Brereton fiddled quite unnecessarily with a disarranged ribbon on his doublet. "George was the last to see him," he said evasively.

Tom Stafford moved behind her stool, swinging the gaily ribboned lute, and his free hand rested momentarily on her shoulder. "You do not want to hear that, Bess," he said gently. "After all, he was your uncle-and had been an anointed King."

"But I must hear," said Elizabeth, brushing aside his hand and still looking expectantly towards Stanley's son.

"His body was brought into Leicester across a horse," Strange said with slow reluctance. "Dusk was drawing on and after the long hot day it had begun to rain-that steady, hopeless rain that beats slantingly across open country."

It was quite dusk in the Princess's apartment and rain was beating hard against the window-panes. Elizabeth tried to picture those long, sodden, midland fields. "Not on poor White Surrey," she said, sighing.

"No. Some borrowed farm nag, I should think. But the sorry brute was so bespattered with his blood I could not really see."

Elizabeth could picture that too. It was her own blood-her father's... "If-he was so wounded-hadn't someone taken off his armour?" she managed to ask.

"They had taken off-everything," muttered Strange. "He was stark naked, with his head hanging down on one side and his feet dangling from the other."

"And his face?"

"I could not see it. His brown hair hung over it, all matted. And although they had pulled his body from beneath a pile of the slain, some s.a.d.i.s.tic fool had found it necessary to put a halter about his neck. I do a.s.sure you, Madam, this was no doing of my father's-"

Elizabeth had left the fireside with a swish of skirts and gone swiftly to the window. "Merciful Mother of G.o.d!" she moaned, leaning her forehead against the coolness of the painted gla.s.s.

"You should not have told her!" she heard Stafford hiss savagely. And then Strange's reasonable retort, "She asked me!"

"I did," she called back to him from the window. "Go on!"

The unfortunate young man had no choice. "The fellow who led the horse had hunched himself into his jerkin against the rain," he recalled, with a trained soldier's eye for detail. "It was quite dusk by the time I saw them, and they were crossing that narrow bridge that leads across the Soar into Leicester. And as the horse jogged over the hump of it so Richard's head b.u.mped like a dangling wet mop against the wooden struts of the bridge."

"Don't!" cried Elizabeth sharply.

There was a long silence in the darkening room. The three elegantly dressed young men stood about discomfited until she rejoined them. It had been her own fault, and they all knew it. "He was the last Plantagenet King," she said apologetically, feeling like a murderess of her race. And then suddenly she clapped her hands impatiently. "Bring lights, some of you!" she called. "Are there no servants in the Palace that we must endure this abominable darkness?"

And when the servants came running and the lovely room sprang into soft golden light again she turned to her guests with eyes unnaturally bright-whether from excitement or from tears they knew not. "But what I have destroyed I will restore," she vowed. "From now on there will be Tudors. Born of my body." She seemed scarcely to be speaking to them, but rather to some unseen audience beyond the Palace walls, and with a gesture of magnificent certainty she pa.s.sed her hands, palms spread, down her body from b.r.e.a.s.t.s to slender thighs. "With the agonies of childbirth I will pay for what I have done. Without warmongering or murder, I will give England and Wales a new dynasty. My children's children will bring this country peace and prosperity."

Then, dropping from her high prophetic mood, she began to laugh crazily and held out her hands invitingly to Stafford, drawing him into a gay measure. George Strange, relieved that their conversation was over, reached across the settle for his friend's lute and began to pick out an accompaniment to their steps. Humphrey Brereton's dark eyes lighted with half-envious laughter as he stood watching the two of them prance and turn about the room-watching Elizabeth dancing away the desolating picture of Richard Plantagenet's body being jogged ignominiously over Leicester Bridge.

ELIZABETH'S WEDDING HAD BEEN every whit as splendid as her mother-in-law had promised. There had been the beautiful ceremony in the Abbey and feasting in the Palace, and a procession through London with all the church bells ringing. And when, in their relief at the cessation of years of civil warfare, the people had lit bonfires and danced around them in the snow, Elizabeth knew that their singing had been a spontaneous expression of their love for her. All her sisters had begged to help dress her in her bridal finery, and Cicely and Ann, looking almost like stately grown women, had held her train. Remembering her mortification over her first wedding gown, Elizabeth had thanked G.o.d that this one betokened no lifelong exile in a foreign land. Instead of being covered with fleur de lys it had been lovingly embroidered with red and white roses; and when her kinsman, Cardinal Bourchier, placed her hand in Henry's, people had wept for joy because at that moment it had seemed that the familiar war-worn emblems had turned into a single bloom. A great Tudor rose, with red encircling white. And to her delight Henry had taken this as their mutual badge, and already it was woven on her bed-hangings and his chair of state and on the royal servants' liveries.

In the midst of her own triumph it had been good to see her mother's mended pride, and the happiness that shone in Margaret Beaufort's lovely, ageing face; but in her secret heart Elizabeth had been most grateful of all for Pope Innocent's considerate kindness when, in his dispensation, he had purposely alluded to her as "the undoubted heir of her ill.u.s.trious father," thus killing for all time the ugly slur upon her name.

But even the magnificence of her wedding could not make her forget its tardiness. The battle of Bosworth had been fought and won in August, yet it was not until after Christmas that Henry had married her-and then only because Parliament, prodded by the angry mutterings of the people, had specially pet.i.tioned him to do so. And because Parliament had been astute enough to make the pet.i.tion synchronize with their proposal to grant him poundage and tonnage for life, Elizabeth was never sure whether it was the remembrance of his promise or the considerable addition to his income which had persuaded him.

For her part, she had gone to her marriage with gladness. With all the natural sweetness of her nature she had striven against resentment, preserving her gaiety and trying to please him. Again and again she reminded herself that, except for hearsay, she and her husband were practically strangers, believing in her optimism that she would soon come to understand him.

"Have you seen what our loyal poet John de Gigli says about us?" she asked one morning, sitting up in their great state bed and laughing delightedly over an illuminated presentation scroll. "He calls me 'the fairest of King Edward's daughters.' Surely I am not more beautiful than my dainty sister Ann?"

She looked so much more beautiful, and her question was so provocative, that it was the moment for any new bridegroom to be pa.s.sionately definite; but Henry Tudor had risen early and was putting on his furred bed-gown because he had a great many business plans for the day.

"Look, Henry, what the dear man says, too, about all the happiness we are going to bring our people!" persisted Elizabeth, waving the flattering verses beneath his nose.

Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have let their business go hang and taken her fragrant body in their arms; but Henry only took the scroll. He did not care particularly about the personal happiness of a lot of Englishmen, but he skimmed through the lines politely. To his more critical, cosmopolitan mind they seemed more loving than polished, and overfull of pro-Yorkist enthusiasm. "I see the fellow has the impertinence to infer that your t.i.tle has become mine," he remarked, laying the effusion down on the gorgeous coverlet.

Watching the frown gather on his forehead, Elizabeth remembered too late that this was just the impression he had been trying so hard to avoid. "But won't you read on?" she invited hastily. "He says all manner of admiring things about you later."

"I am afraid what Master de Gigli thinks of me is not highly important, and my secretary will be waiting," he excused himself, inserting his slender feet into his neatly placed slippers.

"Is your secretary so much more important than your wife?" pouted Elizabeth.

Henry smiled indulgently and bent to kiss her, explaining something about his plans for reducing the immense private armies of the barons which he was anxious to have prepared before Parliament rea.s.sembled; but Elizabeth scarcely listened because of the resentment rising hotly within her. "Does it mean nothing to you that other men consider me beautiful?" she demanded.

"It means a great deal," he a.s.sured her, straightening himself and pa.s.sing a careful hand over his hair where she had ruffled it.

"Then why will you not sh-show it?" she persisted, her pansy-blue eyes filling with disappointed tears.

Instead of holding her close against his heart and showing her then and there beyond all possible doubt, Henry merely handed her his handkerchief. "Surely, my dear, I showed how proud I was of you in that so fine wedding procession which cost me more than my coronation," he pointed out gravely.

He was trying to please her, but the very temperance of his praise enraged her. And it did not help matters that his precise English sounded as if it had been conned out of a book, with occasional sentences arranging themselves like an exact translation from the French; although she supposed that in some people-people with more sense of humour, perhaps-it might have sounded charming. "In a public procession, where other men are judging what you got for your money-yes!" she cried, with a fine echo of her father's temper. "But what about when we are alone-in bed?"

She was talking straight out of her mind, just as her younger brothers were wont to do, without weighing her words. It was the way they all talked between themselves in her family. But, in spite of the adventurous life he had led, her husband was singularly full of inhibitions, and his obvious embarra.s.sment made her feel crude. "Though, after all," she thought in exasperation, "bed is the only place in which he ever bothers to see me alone. And even that he probably looks upon as part of his state duties."

Seeing that she was really upset, he came and sat down beside her. "Marriages like ours are-only arranged," he reminded her patiently.

Obviously he could not comprehend the cause of her anger; but he looked thoughtful and considerate, and perhaps a trifle forlorn himself. "Of course you are right, and I have probably been foolish to expect-whatever I did expect," agreed Elizabeth, sniffing a little and absent-mindedly arranging his damp handkerchief in a square across her drawn-up knees. It was hard to admit that perhaps all that hopeful, rosy haze of romancing might have been on her side only. That while she was thinking of the all-important invasion in terms of rescuing knights and grateful meetings he had probably been thinking only about transport and supplies. Hard; but, after all, quite reasonable. And even after his arrival, while she had been eating her heart out impatiently and filling in time at Westminster, she knew that Henry had been busy establishing himself securely and making so many wise plans for the country that it had probably seemed to him no time at all.

"You are not imagining, are you, that I married you only because the Commons pressed me to it?" he said. "Had I wanted an excuse to delay our wedding still longer there was the sweating sickness in London; but, as you know, I disregarded it."

There was no gainsaying his argument, and the sweating sickness had been so bad that even her own mother had wanted the ceremony postponed because of the swift contagion. Elizabeth had found him to be one of the least pretentious of men, but was beginning to understand how extremely touchy he was about his own rights and capabilities. "I do not let other people move me," he went on explaining rather unnecessarily. "I do whatever I have planned neither sooner nor later than I have planned to do it."

"Like G.o.d Almighty!" thought Elizabeth irreverently; but, realizing once again that her spontaneous reactions were more worthy of her unregenerate young brother d.i.c.kon than of a Queen, she managed to answer with a suitable mixture of dignity and wifely submission. "I understand perfectly your reason for wanting to be crowned first, and I pray that our 'arranged' marriage, which was so necessary to your plans, has not proved too distasteful. We are neither of us children, and you have lived precariously abroad. Both of us have had ample time to meet and care for someone whom we might have preferred to marry." She was delighted to see how sharply and searchingly he looked up at her unexpected words, and forestalled him with any questioning there might be. "Has it been more difficult for you, Henry, because you were once in love with Maude Herbert?"

"How did you hear of that?" he asked, shaken out of his usual complacency.

"Your mother told me how kind Lord and Lady Herbert were to you when you were my father's prisoner in Pembroke Castle, and that you two were friends. But since you were little more than a lad when your uncle took you away to Brittany I hoped that you might have forgotten her."

An almost boyish smile curved Henry of Richmond's thin mouth. "You don't suppose that I submitted to exile as tamely as that, do you?" he said. "Your father and that war-mongering uncle of yours would probably have worried themselves into yet earlier graves had they known I was back home in Wales!"

"You were in Wales?" Elizabeth leaned forward, watching him. Watching the intrepid young Earl of Richmond he must have been. She was seeing him as a new person, and he had never interested her so much.

"More than once. Keeping my place warm against my return," he laughed shortly.

"And meeting Maude?" Somehow, because of his venturesomeness, she minded much more now about the Yorkist Governor of Pembroke's pretty daughter.

"Naturally, I went secretly to Pembroke. She and I had been used to ride and read together in the old days. Lady Herbert would have been glad for us to marry. But then your father saw fit to give her in marriage to Percy of Northumberland-" Henry, who was usually so precise, left his sentence unfinished and wandered away towards the window.

"Then you really loved her," said Elizabeth, regarding him with pity.

But he only shrugged and began collecting up some papers and hunting for a private notebook which he always seemed to carry somewhere about him, and Elizabeth began to fear that she would never really know.

"I suppose I did," he admitted, having found the precious notebook. "We lived in a fantasy of Celtic dreams. But as one knocks about the world one grows out of such things."

"Does one?" murmured Elizabeth softly, thinking of her Uncle Richard's lasting love for the Earl of Warwick's little daughter, who had befriended him in similar circ.u.mstances. "And more recently perhaps," she suggested, "you hoped to marry the Duke of Brittany's daughter, and that is why you regret-"

"My dear Elizabeth, I regret nothing," broke in Henry. He had already wasted much time and even his exemplary patience was wearing thin. "Why should I have wanted the woman? She is not half so beautiful as you. I meant to marry you, and I have." Merely by speaking so emphatically he kindled a glow of expectant happiness in his disappointed bride, only to damp it out again by adding as he turned away, "Besides, England is more important."

Elizabeth tried not to hate him for his calculating coldness. Probably when a man is cast out of his inheritance and forced to accept hospitality from foreign princes who would sell him at any moment that it suited them, she thought, the one thing he needs to acquire is calculating coldness. She tried to imagine Henry when he was very young, misfortunate and full of dreams. Before anxiety had etched lines prematurely upon his face or thinned his straight, brown hair. He could have been quite attractive then, she decided. And he was not much older now. Margaret Beaufort, she was sure, would not purposely have deceived her by overrating him. That was the way she, his mother, remembered him-as a fatherless, hardy and intelligent boy-and probably part of the way in which she thought of him now. For Henry always showed his mother a dutiful affection, freely acknowledging all that he owed to her; and one was so apt to think of people long beloved as a compound of their living selves and of all one's memories of the years that made them. She, his wife, must try to remember how considerate he had been to her and to all her family in material ways, and to hope that, once surrounded by security and love, all his carefully built barriers of coldness would gradually melt away. She must try to talk to him naturally, ignoring the difference of their ways.

"There is one thing I have been wanting to ask you, Henry," she felt emboldened to say before he left her.

"Yes?" he said, with a hand already on the bolt of the bedchamber door.

"It is about my uncle," began Elizabeth, not venturing to look at him. "They tell me the Grey Friars took up his-mangled body. He was your enemy, but he fought courageously-"

"And very nearly killed me," agreed Henry. He did not sound at all angry, so she need not have been afraid. Yet, without realizing that she did so, she began twisting his long-suffering handkerchief into tortured knots. "Will you not-could you not of your triumphant magnanimity-have him buried somewhere as befits-his blood?" she begged.

"His friends have leave to purchase a suitable tomb for him in Leicester," Richard's successor told her without any particular emotion. All her life, weathering the seas of adversity and joy, Elizabeth had been surrounded by warm family affection, and the complete detachment of his answer made her feel like a shipwrecked soul cast up upon some strange and inhospitable coast.

The industrious new King closed the door with relief upon her wifely probings and hurried away to his absorbing work. He thanked G.o.d-and the admirable forbearance of Henry Tudor-that he had not lost his temper, or struck her or even rebuffed her for her feminine curiosity and her extraordinarily tactless demand. He had done none of these things, nor had he the least glimmering of an idea how much an honest display of feeling and a real, outspoken quarrel might have cleared the matrimonial air.

And as soon as the door closed against him, Elizabeth, his frustrated wife, buried her face against the grand Tudor rose embroidered on her pillow and wept hopelessly. "A man who is incapable of hate," she sobbed aloud, "may be incapable of love!"

EVERYONE SAID THAT IT was owing to the new King's clemency that Lord Lovell, the sole survivor of Richard Planta-genet's last charge, was back at Court. Still pale from his wounds and limping a little, he waylaid Cicely on her way to Ma.s.s. "Is it really true about the Queen?" he asked eagerly.

Having lost her adolescent plumpness, Cicely now bade fair to be the beauty of the family. She was soon to be the bride of Lord Welles and felt herself to be a grown woman of consequence. "Is what true, milord?" she enquired negligently, although perfectly well aware of the latest spate of Court gossip.

"That her Grace is with child-already?"

Cicely's own excitement over the prospect of becoming an aunt was so great, and Lovell's battle record so romantic, that her spurious hauteur soon vanished. "You should know by now, milord, that my brother-in-law the King is competent in all things," she told him, with mischievous blue eyes demurely downcast.

"I do-to my cost!" grinned Lovell, glancing ruefully at his bandaged sword arm. "And I know, too, that you are an enchanting hussy and Welles a fortunate man. But I thank G.o.d indeed for this news, Lady Cicely," he went on with a new seriousness which became him, "and so must every man who has the welfare of the country at heart. Without this future fusing of our interests in a living heir, all that we have fought for, on either side, might well have been in vain and all to do again, drenching the land in yet more bitter hatreds and bloodsheds, I pray you suit your gay steps to my wretched limp, sweet lady, and let us go into chapel and thank G.o.d together."

"And ask Him particularly to take care of my darling Bess," added Cicely softly, slipping a helpful hand beneath his uninjured arm. Like herself, he had been caught young in this maze of divided loyalties but, whichever side he had fought on, his affection for her family and the Yorkist cause was beyond dispute, so that she answered his questions about the Queen's health with a good heart. "She is often sick on wakening, which is but to be expected," she told him, a.s.suming the matronly air of one soon to be married herself. "But, oh, Lord Lovell, there is a brightness in her eyes which has not been there since our brothers-died. She sits dreaming as she used to do, and then her lips begin to smile tenderly. Our Bess looks just like the Madonna in the Palace Chapel when she smiles that way!"

"Shall we see her there this morning?"

"No, they are in the private apartments discussing it-she and the King and the Countess of Richmond," Cicely told him, nodding her pretty head in the direction of one of the Queen's rooms in pa.s.sing.

"What is there to discuss?" he asked.

"Lord, how dense you men are!" jibed Cicely. "Where she is to have the baby, of course, and what physicians are to be in attendance, and who shall be asked to be G.o.dparents, and all manner of things!"

But behind the closed doors of the new Queen's apartments it was Henry the Seventh and his mother who were doing most of the discussing. Elizabeth, the mother-to-be, sat in a high-backed chair by the window, smiling at her thoughts in the way that Cicely had described; and most of the discussion flowed over her unheard. Their serious voices arranging a fitting setting for so important a national event and planning for her material needs were just a benevolent murmur filling the sunlit room. "I was so afraid it would never happen-because my husband does not love me," she was confiding to the Mother of the Christ Child. "Yet now, before Lent-why, it could not have begun sooner!" While the two Tudor voices rambled on, Elizabeth seemed to be wrapped apart in the haze of sunlight from the window. "I hope he will look like d.i.c.kon," she thought, certain in her happiness that her firstborn would be a boy. "Dear G.o.d, let him look just like a little d.i.c.kon-and I would not mind what I suffer or where they arrange for me to be. Almost, I could wish it to happen in a stable...Always, because of such consolation, I will strive to be humble and reverent..."

She became aware that her companions had risen from their chairs and that Henry was kindly motioning her to remain seated. "I shall leave the entire arrangements for the accouchement to you, Madam, since you must be more au fait with such feminine affairs than I," he was saying to his mother.

"And so the whole Court will move to Winchester," Margaret of Richmond answered on a note of triumphant finality.

"Why Winchester?" asked Elizabeth, coming out of her reverie.

Henry blinked at her in surprise-and disapproval. "Because my ancestor King Arthur is said to have been born there. And my Welsh heralds have just proved that my lineage goes back to the great British King Cadwallader. And by a.s.sociating the birth of our son with Winchester I wish to impress these facts upon my people. Have you not been listening?"

Elizabeth's apologetic glance pa.s.sed appealingly to her mother-in-law, who, as usual, understood. "I think our Bess is so overcome by her good fortune in bringing you an heir, Henry, that it is difficult for her to take in anything else," she explained, with an invaluable blend of her son's calm efficiency and her own saintly gentleness. "I shall stay with you, Elizabeth, so you do not need to worry your head about material details but can rest after all your vicissitudes and dream of this new comfort which is coming to your bereaved heart-and to our country. This is a consummation, my dear children, for which I have worked and prayed during most of my adult life."

And so by the time the Lent lilies had begun to rear their golden heads Westminster Palace was bustling with preparations for the journey down into Hampshire; and to her great delight Elizabeth found that Henry had arranged for her mother and all the rest of her family to go with her. "All but poor Warwick," she remembered, when thanking him.

"A complete change of environment will be good for you. You have suffered too much in London," said Henry, although she knew that that was not the reason why he was sending her.

"And may not Warwick come too?" she asked, less because she wanted her poor witless cousin than because she hated the thought of his being lonely.

"I am afraid not," said Henry, intent upon a map he was unrolling.

"Why must you keep him in the Tower? What has he ever done?" she persisted, remembering how kind Anne Neville had been to the lad when she was Queen.

"It is not what he has done but who he is," answered Henry, leaning over the spread map to trace a route from town to town with a scholarly-looking forefinger. "Although your Uncle Clarence was so justly attainted of treason to your father, his son is still a potential source of trouble from my enemies."

"Yet Richard let him be about the Court," she said. But either Richard must have had less to fear from Warwick's better claim or else he loved his wife sufficiently to take a considerable risk in order to please her. And obviously Henry-for all his vaunted lineage-was taking no more risks than he could help for anybody. "Does it concern you so much whether that good-looking nitwit comes or goes," he asked aggrievedly, "since I shall not be there?"

"You will not be there?" exclaimed Elizabeth, forgetting all about dead Clarence's son. "But I had taken it for granted-"