The Tudor Rose Part 14

"An ague of which I am almost cured!" scoffed Elizabeth. "Do you suppose it was less harmful to my spirits to hear of it from my waiting-women?"

"It is a lot of moonshine, anyway."

Elizabeth looked him up and down with irritating calmness. "Is that why you are wearing your armour?"

"I am arming to deal with men like Lovell and your half-brother, who have eaten my salt and who are now supporting him in this country with a horde of foreign mercenaries," snapped Henry, without slackening his pace. "And afterwards," he added, with a slow kind of relish, "I will have my treasurer deal with the woman whose fertile brain invented all this spiteful idiocy."

Elizabeth knew that he spoke of her mother, and probably with good reason. So she saved her breath to keep peace with him. But once inside the garden door she caught at his arm and detained him. "Who is this pretender?" she asked, still thinking of her lost brother and the long months of uncertainty.

Almost to her relief, Henry seemed in no doubt at all. "A young lad of fifteen called Lambert Simnel. The son of some well-to-do tradesman in Oxford. A baker, I believe."

"A baker's son-posing as a Plantagenet!"

"Oh, it is not the young fool's fault. I am all in favour of more learning for the ma.s.ses, but his parents must have given him an education above his station. His tutor, a cunning and ambitious rogue, was probably bribed. Your aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, may even have had some thing to do with it. She appears to have loved your father so extravagantly that she would lay her hand to anything that might annoy me."

"And people are really so credulous-"

"It is amazing what they will believe. Even the Londoners are beginning to be hoaxed by it, judging by the glum looks I met. It seems that this Simnel is upstanding and fair-haired like your family. Naturally, my enemies would have chosen such a lad!"

"The impertinence!" sympathized Elizabeth. "What will you do, Henry?"

"There is only one intelligent thing to do at the moment. Have the real Warwick brought here from the Tower, riding with an imposing retinue through the streets of London so that everyone may see him. And then, when the fraud is exposed, deal with his supporters who are crazy enough to try a landing in England."

Elizabeth looked at him with half-grudging admiration. Without ever trying to be spectacular, he was ever one to apply the simplest and most sensible remedies; and if for one moment she had disbelieved his a.s.surances and suspected him of treating her cousin as King Richard had treated her brothers, she was ashamed.

As if almost guessing her thoughts, Henry turned back to her with a twisted kind of smile. "And I shall want you to meet him here and welcome him publicly. You, who have lived with him off and on since childhood," he said. "My subjects seem to find it difficult to believe that I do not murder people like my glamorous predecessor; but whatever you do or say they seem to believe in."

At Stoke, near Nottingham, Henry defeated his Yorkist enemies and crushed the Simnel plot. Using only the vanguard of his army, he outmanoeuvred them so that all their courage could not save them. The Earl of Lincoln, Lord Lovell, the Earl of Kildare and Martin Swart, who commanded their German mercenaries, all perished that day-only Dorset, who was preparing the way for them in London, persuaded the King of his innocence and escaped with a short imprisonment in the Tower. And Henry rode home more firmly established on the throne than ever; and almost casually, in his train, he brought Simon, the tutor-priest, and Lambert Simnel.

"What will you do with them?" asked Elizabeth, trying to divert attention from betrothed Cicely's uncontrollable tears for the twice-wasted gallantry of Francis Lovell.

Henry was a temperate eater, but after so much activity was enjoying his homecoming meal as much as any of them. "The priest will have to be imprisoned somewhere, of course," he said negligently, breaking a manchet of bread.

"Not hanged?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Treasurer Empson, with disappointment.

"And Simnel himself?" asked Stanley.

Selecting a succulent chicken bone, Henry turned to smile at his wife. "You had better have him in your kitchens, my dear," he suggested. "Being a baker's son, he should be quite at home among the ovens."

There were men at the table who remembered his predecessor's summary way with traitors. They sat, knives suspended, and stared; and Cicely so far forgot herself as to burst into tears. "To think that men like Lincoln and Lovell should be k-killed," she stammered, "and this lout Simnel, who s-started it all, go free!"

Being in a good humour, Henry could afford to smile at another display of Plantagenet emotion. "Take heart, dear sister," he teased, his sharp eyes glancing down the long table to where she sat. "Lord Welles may not have so fine a leg, but his coffers are well filled, I a.s.sure you."

"I beg you to consider, Sir," expostulated Stanley, bringing him back to the matter in hand, "that Simnel had the effrontery to have himself proclaimed King."

"Then what good would it do, my dear Stanley, to make a martyr of him as well?" countered Henry pleasantly. "At the moment the Londoners must be feeling very foolish, and in that mood I am hoping they may lend me some more money."

"How right his Grace is!" laughed handsome Jasper Tudor, surveying his nephew with affectionate pride. "The sooner all this talk of pretenders is forgotten the better. There is something very apt about the turnspit idea, although we might all prefer to see Lambert Simnel hanged. And ridicule, I do a.s.sure you, is often a surer and swifter weapon than the sword." And because what the experienced, grey-haired Welsh chieftain said was usually worth listening to, no one discussed the matter at table any more.

But Elizabeth was more interested in the strange nature of her husband than in the fate of Simnel. "Do you really mean to make a turnspit of him?" she asked that night, when Henry came to her room.

"It should give the servants something to laugh at," he yawned, having none of the love for the common people that she had.

"And the real Warwick?"

"He can go back to the Tower to-morrow."

"And it really does not anger you that this baker's son dared to impersonate him?" she persisted, trying to understand him.

"As I told you before, it was not his idea," said Henry. "Probably he has no idea beyond food, and I have dealt with those who had- quite successfully. Really, Madam, I do not see why you should concern yourself with such carrion."

It exasperated her that he should call her Madam in the privacy of her own bedroom, and that he could neither love nor hate. Nor let anyone but his mother-and possibly that Morton man-look inside his thoughts. He would be called merciful over this rebellion business, she supposed; yet to be young and unprotected from ridicule was a cruel fate. Probably Henry would not show vengeance lest men guessed that he was afraid-that he knew the usurper's growing fear of anyone who had a better claim to the throne than himself, or who could make men believe they had. But whatever the cause, it was his uncaring mercy which was so much more terrible than rougher men's vengeance. Elizabeth knew herself to be no coward, and yet she was afraid of him. She had often stood up to Richard Plantagenet, with all his ruthlessness; but knew no way of defending herself against the impersonal civility of Henry Tudor. Gradually, as the years pa.s.sed, her resistance, her very personality, would be worn down. She, whose menfolk had had pa.s.sion about them, wanted no man who yawned or called her Madam in her bed-and longed to have the right to tell him so. "I am his broodmare, his chattel," she thought bitterly, submitting to his silent, businesslike embrace. "I who, by every Christian right, am Queen of England!"

In her chapel next morning Elizabeth confessed herself an undutiful wife and prayed anew for that humility which she had taken as her motto but which, alas, came so hardly to her. And later in the day she went to console her mother, who was wildly aggrieved because the King had cut down the allowance he made her. "The crown coffers were so emptied by war when he came," Elizabeth tried to explain loyally, "and the Commons would grant him only the half of what he asked-and then only as a loan."

"But it is so unjust when I did everything I could to help him against Richard!" complained her mother.

"And have of late been doing everything secretly to harm him!" flashed out Elizabeth, angered because her mother was still pretending innocence. "I do not think anyone can accuse Henry of being unjust," she added more gently, because the Queen Dowager had begun to cry. "It is probably we who have misjudged him by blaming him for delaying my coronation, when all the time he had this treacherous plot on his mind."

"That an ungrateful daughter of mine should speak to me so!" wailed the Woodville woman. "I wish this wretched Simnel were dead!"

"I daresay he does, too, by now!" said Elizabeth, returning to her apartments before her patience gave out.

And even there n.o.body seemed to be able to talk of anything else. "None of us has ever heard of a pretender being spared before," one of the Countess of Richmond's women was saying. "Anyone but our merciful Welsh King would have had him hanged, drawn and quartered by now!" And as Elizabeth pa.s.sed close to two of her younger women, who had their heads too close together to notice her, she overheard one of them saying excitedly, "I peeped through one of the kitchen windows and saw him. They'd put a saucepan on his head and made him hold a poker for a sceptre. The poker was red hot, my dear...The head cook was letting people in from the street at a groat a time to look at him. You should have heard the other scullions hoot with laughter..."

Elizabeth pa.s.sed on without even reproving their lapse from duty, but the painful picture stayed with her. It had sounded so like the guardroom torturing of the Christ. And this Simnel was of about the age her brothers would have been had they lived. It had even been supposed at first that he impersonated one of them, not Warwick. That thought and an uneasy sense of responsibility for what was happening among her own servants worried her all day. "I am going down to the kitchens," she announced towards evening, taking only two ladies with her. "And I will go in alone," she added, making them wait in the stone corridor outside.

In the main kitchen preparations were going on for supper, so that the cooks were all occupied, and at first the turnspits and scullions were too busy carrying crocks back and forth between the well and the great open fires to notice her. When the kitchen clerk came bowing and sc.r.a.ping from his little room she waved him aside. "Tell them to go on with their work," she said. "Which is the lad they call Lambert Simnel?"

A lonely figure bending before an open fire at the far end of the great vaulted room was pointed out to her. Clumsily and painstakingly, as though unaccustomed to the work, the unfortunate lad was turning a roasting pig before the blaze. His ostracism was patent and complete. "I will talk to him alone," said the Queen of England, lifting her skirts fastidiously to cross the brick floor.

Hearing someone approach, Simnel swung round defensively, lifting an arm to protect his head from the usual blow. His eyes were too reddened and bleared from the smoke to see her very clearly at first. Even his well-built body had been rendered ridiculous by giving him a kitchen smock which was far too small for him.

"Are you the tradesman's son who pretended to be an earl?" she asked.

"Yes, Madam," he answered, obviously wondering who she was.

"And now you are a turnspit?"

"By the King's grace," he said almost cheerfully.

"His Grace treated you better than you deserve."

"'Tis better than hanging. I did not want to die." The lad rubbed a hand across his aching eyes, leaving his face yet more smeared with soot. "I had no wish to harm him, Madam," he said, with uncowed independence. "I but did as my tutor bade me. I see now that it was wrong."

"It was very foolish," said Elizabeth, surveying his large hands and grease-smeared jerkin, and noticing for the first time the ugly bruise beneath his matted hair. In spite of the roaring fire, such rough clouts as he had hung damply to the strong muscles of his back, so she guessed that dishwater had recently been thrown over him.

"So you are content to work in the kitchens?" she said, with an effort to control her loathing of the way he stank.

"Grateful, my lady. Not content."

In spite of everything, there was a manliness about him, and apart from his broad country accent he spoke well.

"Are they-very unkind to you?" she asked gently.

It was then that he saw her for the first time as someone worshipfully beautiful. "I can fend for myself," he muttered awkwardly.

Because of the accessible humanity of her father, Elizabeth had had considerable contact with the cheerful courage of the people. Here, she thought, was the patient, unglamorous kind which had won fame for England at Crecy and Agincourt. And the thought pa.s.sed through her mind, too, that probably Henry-who had pa.s.sed this much-talked-of merciful sentence-would not even have recognized it. "What would content you?" she found herself asking, hating to waste a quality which she rated highly.

Warned by the smell of burning meat, Simnel gave the spit another turn. "I suppose they'd never let me go back home to Oxfordshire?" he said wistfully.

"I am afraid not," smiled Elizabeth.

He sighed and pushed back his grease-bespattered hair. For all her grand clothes, here was a lady one could tell things to, even if one hadn't much gift that way. "It's the open country-" he began diffidently. "Sometimes the other servants go out into the fields beyond the City walls-by the way these townsmen brag when they come back, it's mostly to tumble a wench, I reckon-saving your presence! But for me it'd be the s.p.a.ce and the sky. And the clean smell of it. I hate this filth more than their fists." For the first time the tears welled in his eyes. "If I could only get outside these kitchens and hear the birds sing again-"

Elizabeth saw that his face beneath the dirt was fresh and ruddy, his mouth kind. "Do you love birds, then?" she asked.

"Yes, Madam. There's scarcely a call I can't imitate." His eagerness suddenly cooled to wonder. Perhaps he had become aware of the hushed servants staring from a respectful distance. "But why should the likes of you care? Who are you, Milady?"

"A woman who once had young brothers whom she loved," answered Elizabeth, her voice low and warm as it always was when she spoke of them. And as she spoke an idea was born. "Do you know anything about falcons, Simnel?"

"Well, not rightly," he admitted. "But back home I sometimes helped one of the Earl of Oxford's falconers clean their mews and in return he let me go along to watch them being trained. Once he let me carry his perch and unhood them. Quick to learn, he said I'd be. Their wings were so strong, and swift as lightning as they mounted!"

The lad's eagerness shone through his awkwardness and filth so that the Queen cared what became of him, and was angry with herself for caring. In her heart she knew that she had really come to this abominable place, as she would have gone down to h.e.l.l, secretly hoping to see someone who faintly resembled d.i.c.kon. And this youth did not resemble him at all. Others might say easily, "He is upstanding and blue-eyed and fair"-but where was the slenderness, the grace? The gaiety and fine-bred intuition? She had ceased to listen to the turnspit's ramblings. "Do you know who this is?" she asked harshly, jerking from beneath the bosom of her gown an exquisitely painted miniature that hung about her neck upon a slender gold chain.

Startled by her seeming irrelevance, Simnel leaned forward to look at it. "I never saw the young gentleman before in my life," he affirmed.

"It is my brother, Richard Duke of York," she said, almost s.n.a.t.c.hing it back from his gaze. "A pity, perhaps, that you did not see it before." Because this boy from Oxfordshire had convinced her that he was somebody with a decent personality she wanted to show him the enormity of the thing which he had done. "You are as much like a Plantagenet as that burnt pig there is like the sun!" she cried, raging at him out of the constant ache in her heart.

It was clear that he thought she had come to mock at him too, and by the stricken look on his face she saw that because of some worship that had grown in him the sudden disillusionment hurt more than all the cruelties he had endured. "But I will see what the King says about having you trained for falconry," she promised before she turned to leave him; and by the bemused way in which he stared and by the obsequiousness with which all the other servants made way for her she supposed that he must have guessed then who she was.

Whether it was the swaying of her emotions between pity and indignation or merely the smell of cooking, Elizabeth did not know; but back in her rooms she felt herself shaking with a return of the ague which she had supposed to be cured. Very sensibly she sat still for a while, quietly, in an anteroom by a favourite window which overlooked the peace of her herb garden, consciously trying to control the trembling of her hands as they lay idle in her lap. And as she sat there she wondered how she could have been so foolish as to have disturbed herself over a very ordinary young man caught in a clumsy fraud. He had nothing to do with the rich eventfulness of a life such as hers.

And all unexpectedly in the middle of such rare peace the great moment of her life was upon her.

The door of the anteroom was thrown wide for the King and he was standing there before her telling her that he had arranged Sunday, the twenty-fifth of November, for the date of her coronation.

The little room seemed suddenly to be full of important people with whom he had been arranging it, and judging by the pleased expressions of their faces Elizabeth suspected that they had used their utmost efforts to push him to this decision at last. Her good friend Stanley was positively beaming at her; Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, kissed both her hands; and even Bishop Morton's dark, secret face showed relief and satisfaction. "Henry and I have been two years married and I have given him a son, yet it takes a Yorkist conspiracy to convince him that it will be safer not to slight me any longer," thought Elizabeth involuntarily. She rose from her chair and made a deep obeisance to him and thanked him, trying to keep all signs of ague from her limbs and all trace of irony from her voice. Yet seeing the sheaves of notes in his secretary's hand and having to listen to the almost tediously careful arrangements which had been made, she came to the conclusion that Henry had intended to keep his promise, anyway.

"I have arranged for a procession through London, and my mother and I will watch your triumph from some window," he told her later, when at last they were alone. "You have waited with great patience, Elizabeth, and I want this to be your day."

Elizabeth looked up at him with a swift new hope of gladness in her heart. When he spoke appreciatively like that it was so easy to be beguiled into believing that he loved her; not merely that he was a just man, repaying her for producing an heir. "I shall love to ride through London, and be Queen," she said simply. "And I will try to make you proud of me."

"It should not be difficult, with your extraordinary beauty," he said, consulting his papers when most men would have been looking at her face. "And with the lavish sum of money I have set aside to spend on the pageantry."

It was unfortunate to mention money at such a moment, even though his early life may have taught him to count every florin. His wife's grateful radiance faded visibly, and as she stood watching him her thoughts strayed to her mother, that supreme opportunist who had always man aged to advance some member of other of her grasping family upon each special occasion of her life-whether it were childbirth or crowning or merely her husband's latest infidelity. "Now is the moment to ask Henry for anything you want, Bess," she would almost certainly have whispered, had she been there.

But what was there to want, save what the irrevocability of Death had taken? Other women might ask for jewels; but jewels were cold comfort when all one longed for was the warm love of a man's heart.

"Is there anything that I can do for you?" asked Henry, as if reading the direction of her thoughts.

But really at that moment there was nothing that Elizabeth particularly wanted-which was, she supposed, the most subtle poverty of all. So, although it was to be her coronation gift, it was only a very small thing she asked for. Because she had always loved young people she suggested almost casually, "I would like that poor Simnel boy down in the kitchens to be transferred to the mews. He might, I imagine, be much happier with hawks than herded with pitiless humans."

If Henry felt surprise he did not make it manifest. The happiness of a baker's son was nothing to him. He did not even enquire whether she had ever seen Lambert Simnel, nor why she should make so strange and modest a request. "As you wish, my dear," he agreed. "I will have him apprenticed to my head falconer over at Charing."

Elizabeth saw him open one of his everlasting memorandum books and make a note of it, and was satisfied that he would keep his word. In her mind she saw also a pleasing vision of a clean and self-respecting young man standing beneath G.o.d's open sky again. And Henry-who had acquiesced so easily-saw, no doubt, another cheap opportunity of demonstrating Tudor clemency.

FOR THE LONG-LOOKED-for coronation of the Queen all England seemed to be en fete. Elizabeth could have wished that it were summer-time; but mercifully the sun shone and, as Henry had promised, it was her day indeed. He had had her brought in the great state barge to London, with all her watermen wearing the new green livery with a great Tudor rose embroidered upon the breast of each. The whole width of the Thames had seemed alive with gaily decorated boats accompanying her. Young girls with flowing hair and white dresses leaned from a slender skiff to scatter red and white roses before the prow of her barge, and keeping pace with her a boatload of students from Lincoln's Inn made the air sweet with music; and for the delight of the spectators along the banks one barge was ingeniously converted into a dragon, copied from the proud Welsh emblem on the Tudor banners, which belched fire into the sparkling waters.

King Henry met her at the Tower. Even about that he had been considerate. Knowing her natural aversion to the place, he had satisfied convention by having her stop in the royal apartments there only long enough to rest and to refresh herself. "There will be so many people crowding about you and so much to do, taking a meal and changing for your procession through the streets, that you will scarcely have a moment to think of what may have happened here," he told her. And his words had proved true. Her thoughts had scarcely once strayed beyond the room in which they were dressing her. It was her day, and in a few minutes now she would be borne in a open litter beneath the gateway out into the City streets and in a glittering procession down the hill towards the Fleet Bridge, out through Lud Gate and along the Strand to Westminster.

"It seems incredible that after all that has happened to me I am still no more than twenty-two!" she said with awed excitement as her ladies set the final touches to her grandeur while Ditton, her youngest lady, knelt before her to hold her new gla.s.s mirror.

"A good thing you are reasonably tall to carry off the heaviness of this velvet!" laughed Ann Plantagenet, arranging the folds of ermine-trimmed crimson with clever fingers while Jane Stafford tied the heavy silken ta.s.selled cords of it across the white damask of her gown.

"A good thing, too, that the King listened to the people's wishes and allowed your Grace to go to your coronation with your hair unbound, although you are no maid," said Mattie, who had brushed the gleaming ma.s.s of it until it outshone the golden circlet on her mistress's head and the caul of jewelled net with which they bound it.

Out in the November sunshine they seated her in a litter draped with a cloth of gold, and the bells of all the City churches rang out as her procession started. Before her rode her ladies on white palfreys, and stalwart knights of the Bath held a golden canopy above her. Immediately before her and heralding her approach, went Jasper Tudor on his charger-an ornament to any procession, as half the women said. The familiar streets were ablaze with colour, with richly woven tapestries hung from every house. And from every window-and even from roof-tops-smiling people waved, joining their cheers with those of the populace packed tightly in the cheering streets below. For Elizabeth their welcome was the best part of her day, for she sensed that it was neither curiosity nor subservience, such as both Richard and Henry had been given, which moved them, but a real loving welcome. They had known her since she was a child and were grateful for the a.s.surance of peace which her marriage had brought them. However much she might have been called upon to pay for it in her private life, this union of red and white roses had at last enabled them to settle down to their lives, to their crafts and their sports and their love-making, in security. So Elizabeth, the first Tudor Queen, rode among them smiling, giving them that long dreamed-of blessing with all her heart.

As her glittering procession approached Westminster heralds sounded a fanfare which shrilled like silver against the deep-tongued clamour of the Abbey bells. In the stately beauty of Westminster Hall her ladies changed her crimson mantle for one of royal purple. Her mother-in-law followed behind her, and Cicely- pale and overawed for once-held up her train. In the sanct.i.ty of the Abbey itself mitred bishops and abbots, all in the rich colour of their vestments, awaited her. The Duke of Suffolk, her uncle by marriage-although still mourning the wasted death of his son Lincoln-was a resplendent figure bearing her sceptre; and handsome Jasper Tudor bore her crown. As Elizabeth went forward up the aisle the great west doors were closed behind her, shutting out the joyous abandon of the bells, and the swelling music of the organ took up their triumph in more solemn tones. All around was a galaxy of jewels and rich apparel, and a sea of expectant faces; and as she walked forward, head erect, Elizabeth was aware of Henry watching her from a curtained gallery which had been built beyond the pulpit. Enigmatic Henry, who, after two years' delay, was giving her a coronation so much grander than his own! Making a sign to Cicely to stop, Elizabeth pleased all beholders by sinking into a grateful and deferential curtsey before him, hoping that she had given him cause to be proud of her this day. Then, forgetting all earthly prides, she went straight on towards the waiting priests and the golden haze of tall wax candles and the blaze of gold plate upon the high altar; and all pomp and circ.u.mstance of the day was left behind her as she entered into the sacred hush of the sanctuary, to receive her crown from the hands of the beloved Bishop of Winchester and her dread responsibility from G.o.d.

After she came out from the Abbey there was a great feast at which all the highest in the land served her, and next morning Henry joined her to hear Ma.s.s celebrated in St. Stephen's Chapel. For the first time she sat beneath a canopy of state as Queen of England; there were tournaments and masques, and in the evening the festivities came to an end with the splendid coronation ball to which her younger sisters had been looking forward for days. Never since her father's time had there been such gaiety in the Palace or such spontaneous joy outside in the streets, where the shopkeepers and their wives danced round the bonfires which their 'prentices had built. But the following day, to Elizabeth's delight, she and the King went quietly home to Greenwich and she was able to spend some hours with her year-old son.

Elizabeth was glowing with health and beauty. The excitement of the last three days was still upon her. She knew that she had been a success, and her sense of personal triumph made all things seem possible. And now for a while she and Henry would be at leisure and done with public ceremony. "To-night he will come to me and I will show him that I am grateful," she thought. "My foolish resentments will be gone and his bred-in-the-bone aversion towards us Yorkists will be wiped out. To-night our marriage will begin anew and be the satisfying thing of which I used to dream."

She had her women bathe her and comb out her wonderful hair and put on her new brocaded bed-gown of Tudor green which she had had made to please him; and then she sent them all away and went to her mirror. Studying her reflection by candlelight, she thanked G.o.d that she was desirable. And all that was warm and generous in her-all that apt.i.tude for physical love which she had inherited from her father-was eager to find that completion which she desired and deserved in a marriage which had been so hazardous to come by. Somewhere in Henry must burn the poetic fires of his Celtic youth, and if only she could rouse them, she supposed with almost childlike simplicity, the happiness of both of them would be attained. And surely, surely, she thought, gazing at the reflected loveliness of her body, she could fail with no man this night!

But the evening wore on and Henry did not come. The tall candles began to gutter and burn down. And sitting in the gloaming staring at her untouched bed, Elizabeth-for no reason save that she was alone perhaps-began to think of his predecessor. Of how Richard's mocking touch had often stirred her pulses as her husband's never did. Of the strange attraction of his eyes, and of the effort it had needed not to yield to his advances. It was sin, of course. One of those shameful, half-committed sins which she had kept locked away in the back of her mind and never spoken of even to her confessor. And in the stillness of the shadowed room she could almost hear Richard's lazy, charming voice telling her that there were more subtle kinds of brutality which she might find out if she married someone else. The words had been meaningless then. But now, though Henry was no murderer, Elizabeth recognized their truth. There were brutalities of omission, committed week in, week out against a woman's happiness, which could be consistent with a man's self-righteousness and which called for no confession to any priest. It had been true, too, what Richard had said about the life of any woman who was his never lacking warmth or colour or kindness. There were some men, sensitive and imaginative, who saw to these things. But what would happen now-even if Henry came-save crude begetting, shorn of all thought for her? And, suddenly hungering unbearably for the precious tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of love, Elizabeth buried her hot cheeks in her hands, thankful that all the brave candles had at last burned themselves out.

Raging, she rose and paced her room, hands still pressed to cheeks; until, worn out with frustration-with all her warm urge to give thrust back upon itself-she threw herself across the bed-foot in the darkness, not even trying to stifle her sobs. It was so difficult to believe that there was no hope of married ecstasy-so humiliating to realize that with all her beauty it was beyond her womanly power to change this unsatisfactory mating. "If Henry comes a hundred times," she sobbed, "it will always be the same."

Next day Elizabeth was distrait and listless and her ladies attributed it to all the tiring ceremony of her coronation; but old Mattie, who had nursed her from childhood, knew that the newly crowned Queen had been weeping. "Shall I have the Prince brought?" she suggested, to cheer her.

But instead of nursing him Elizabeth only stood beside his cradle staring down at him while small Arthur, who was a solemn baby, stared unblinkingly back. "He is very like his father, do you not think Mattie?" she asked. "Do you suppose he will grow up like the King in nature?"

And Mattie, who had no book-learning, had looked into her mistress's face and read what was amiss. "His little Grace will be clever for his age," she said noncommittally. "But who can see into the future?"

"Perhaps that is G.o.d's supreme mercy," sighed Elizabeth, thinking of all the sorrows which had been hidden behind the door of her mother's marriage and deciding to risk Henry's displeasure and visit the Dowager Queen in her seclusion. Grief had once battered the Woodville woman into weeping on the floor in sanctuary, but it had never made her subservient.

And that night when Henry came to her room Elizabeth stood defensively outside the carved rail about their bed.

"I have been busy clearing up all the doc.u.ments which have acc.u.mulated during your coronation, and last evening the French envoy stayed late," he stated briskly, as if excusing himself against her unexplained silence.

"And you still have the matter on your mind?" she said coolly.

"One does not want war with France."

Elizabeth watched him curiously. "Do you actually like fighting?" she asked.