"You incredible goose! Take the account-book back to Decons now and-and try not to love me so extravagantly."

Left alone, Elizabeth, the Queen of England, stood for a while by her table touching each humble gift as if some specially precious benison had come with them, and wondering what her life would have been like had she married Tom Stafford and had this turbulent little beauty not as a lady of her bedchamber but as a sister-in-law. She might have found much quiet happiness, she supposed; but after all that she had now experienced she doubted if that would have satisfied her.

The pattern of her life had grown so much larger since the days when she had imagined herself in love with Tom. Although Henry made a confidant of no one, save sometimes his mother and Morton, a Queen lived at the hub of things. Those things which were never confided to her between the drawn curtains of her bed she inevitably heard discussed around the white napery of her board. Affairs of the country were talked about freely by knowledgeable men like Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William; Morton and the King's family bandied the names and news of European rulers who were personally known to them, while through the Palace flowed the widening influence of foreign amba.s.sadors and envoys, the invigorating tang of spreading commerce and the culture of all the painters, writers, architects and printers whom Henry encouraged. Although Elizabeth never meddled, she learned. She took delight in hearing the management of her country discussed, and came to have a wholesome respect for her husband's mind.

"He cares so much less pa.s.sionately than Richard, who loved the very earth of England, and yet in whatever he undertakes he seems to succeed," she thought. Conscientiously following his statecraft without the encouragement of his confidence, she came to understand it even better than some of his councillors. She knew, for instance, how hard he had tried to avoid war with France. The people, of course, clamoured for it. Through the centuries war with their nearest neighbour and traditional enemy had been the one thing for which they willingly voted supplies, the dangerous enterprise which they strained at the leash to join; and although it was their safety as well as his own that he was considering, they spoke disparagingly of Henry because he preferred to negotiate. Yet when Charles the Eighth threatened to occupy Brittany how efficiently the King of England moved! With no hatred of France inherent in his heart, he yet saw the danger it would mean to England if he allowed all the Breton ports across the Channel to fall into French hands. Although Spain and the Emperor of Rome, who seemed to be his allies, withheld their help, Henry sent forces to the defence of Brittany and, crossing to his own town of Calais, personally laid siege to Boulogne. While he was away Elizabeth made no bid for vicarious power, but wrote to him affectionately and often, telling him news of home and particularly of the progress of Arthur, who was already beginning to construe his Latin with Bernard Andreas.

The siege of Boulogne was short and resulted in no spectacular military victory. Charles, who had probably not bargained for such swift intervention, was glad to pay off his cool aggressor with good French gold and afterwards outwit him by persuading the orphaned heiress of Brittany to marry him, so that Henry sailed home in a sort of stalemate triumph which added nothing to his waning popularity. Military-minded men had sold their manors to win fame in France, the rank and file muttered bitterly because there had been precious little plunder and the hard-working populace at home wanted to know where their money had gone. But Henry returned unruffled. He had not been hankering for martial glory. Most of Charles's money had gone straight into his own pocket, England was once more at leisure to pursue her commercial prosperity, and-newcomer as he was-he had shown Spain and all the other European countries that he could manage his own affairs quite well without them.

It was some time before he found time to come to his wife's private apartments, but when he did he was rubbing his thin hands together with satisfaction. "Spain will be all the more anxious to carry on with our marriage proposals for Arthur," he congratulated himself, caring more in his long-sighted way for ultimate results than for the present feelings of his people.

"Then, although Ferdinand and Isabella left you to fight France alone, you still want him to marry their daughter?" marvelled Elizabeth, who had expected him to show strong resentment.

"Undoubtedly," said Henry. "I want Arthur to have the best marriage we can arrange for him; and Spain, I am convinced, is the coming country."

"While you were away I was wondering whether you would want to cement your new peace treaty with a French alliance?" said Elizabeth, well versed in his ways.

"Later on, with one of the other children, perhaps."

"Margaret?" murmured Elizabeth, who, like a wise woman, had already begun to school herself for the pain of parting.

"No. I would sooner send her to Scotland," said Henry, so far forgetting himself as to take a born Yorkist into his confidence. "I have been pondering these many months upon the inestimable advantages of an alliance with Scotland. If in time the same King could reign over both countries, the way it already is with Wales-"

"And Ireland."

"If anyone could be said to reign there at all, with my own Deputy turning traitor!" laughed Henry shortly. "I have sent Sir John Egremont to arrest him."

"To arrest the Deputy of Ireland!" exclaimed Elizabeth. "Whatever has he done?"

"Made a complete fool of himself, I should imagine," said Henry, ferreting for his book to make a note of something he had forgotten to tell Egremont to do. "He sent for that ridiculous young man whom the Irish believe to be your brother and questioned him, as I ordered. But instead of publicly denouncing him he seems to have fallen under the spell of this-this extraordinary person himself. And it seems he actually allowed the Earl of Desmond to write to the Kings of France and Scotland telling them some c.o.c.k-and-bull story about the real heir to the throne of England being alive. Just the sort of thing they would seize on at the moment to annoy me!"

"But of course they must know it isn't true," said Elizabeth, determined to keep a hold on commonsense and not let such things again stir up her past sorrow.

Henry took a turn or two about her room. In spite of the success of his campaign, he looked more perturbed than she had ever seen him. "The devil of it is," he said at last, coming to a standstill before her, "that this pretender was with the King of France in Paris when I was there. Charles treats him as if he were the Duke of York and has even given him a bodyguard captained by the Sieur de Concressault. Half the army knows this, and the fantastic rumour will be spread all over England in a week."

Elizabeth laid down the rings she had been drawing from her fingers. "Oh, Henry, not again! Immediately on your homecoming, and after all the trouble you had over that Simnel boy pretending to be Warwick!" she exclaimed, readily sympathizing with his annoyance. "But surely, now that you have won this campaign, you can insist that France shall not harbour him?"

"I have made that one of the clauses of the peace treaty. And unless Charles turns the impudent knave out bag and baggage he will get no daughter of mine for his Dauphin. I told you, did I not, that my succession was bound to produce a crop of pretenders? Oh, well, so long as they keep all their lunacy in France or Ireland..." laughed Henry ruefully. In spite of this fresh worry, Elizabeth was pleased that he was behaving so much more humanely, and even thought to commend her about something. "And, speaking of Simnel, that was not such a bad idea of yours, Elizabeth," he said, preparing to get into bed. "Though how you discovered that a baker's son had any feeling about birds is beyond me. They tell me at the mews that Simnel is one of the best men they have ever had for training a peregrine or a gyrfalcon. Knows just the moment to take a young wild bird from its nest, too. You'd better come hawking with me to-morrow and see him at work. My head falconer is getting past it and I could offer your late scullion a much lower wage for the same work."

It was the sort of small meanness which so often spoiled a pleasant concession, but next morning Elizabeth forgot it in the joy of hawking on the sun-swept heath at Hampstead. And her protege proved himself well. He seemed quite unflurried by the King's scrutiny and more interested in the success of the birds he had trained than in a few envied words of royal praise. And as soon as the hawks were being chained again to their perches and the gay company preparing to return, Simnel himself came to lift the jessed merlin from the Queen's gloved wrist. Standing close beside her palfrey, he looked just as she imagined he would-upstanding and strong, with the wind in his hair.

That he must have worked hard she knew, and also that he was no longer a boy but a man. "You look happy, Simnel," she said kindly, looking down into his sun-tanned face.

"I am in love," he said simply. "She is a good country wench and will wed with me as soon as I can afford it. If one day I might bring her to the Palace to look just once upon your Grace's face-"

"I will ask one of my ladies to arrange it," promised Elizabeth, deeply touched. "And be patient with her goodness, for I think you may have a cottage of your own very soon."

"If ever there is anything I can do for you, Madam-" he said, inarticulate with grat.i.tude. Elizabeth thought how dependable he looked, how typical of all that was best in rural England, and was glad when he laid his strong brown hand for a moment upon her rein. "I mean," he added, "anything at all."

Elizabeth called together her ladies and rode back to Westminster with a warm glow at her heart, for life had already taught her that, however exalted one may be, it is good to know of someone who will gladly serve one in any way at all.

IN ALL HIS DISPATCHES to the King of France Henry was careful to speak of the mysterious pretender contemptuously as that garcon, and Fox and Empson and his other councillors realized that he was far more concerned about the coterie of discontented Yorkists who were sneaking abroad to join him and forming quite a pseudo-royal Court. Particularly when a man as influential as Sir George Neville went. But Elizabeth noticed that her uncommunicative husband was less p.r.o.ne to sarcastic sallies and cracked his thin fingers less once the imposter was known to be over the French border, homeless and presumably penniless, in Flanders. Yet there was one danger which even Henry's astute mind had overlooked, and that was the opportunity it gave to a woman who hated him. Margaret Plantagenet of Burgundy, who had loved her brother Edward this side of idolatry, lost no time in sending out an invitation to the young man who claimed to be his son.

Nothing could have annoyed Henry more.

"Now that Charles the Bold of Burgundy is dead and she is only a dowager d.u.c.h.ess she has no political considerations to bind her and can do anything she likes, I suppose," said Cicely, when Henry's womenfolk were gathered together in the Queen's apartments to discuss it.

"But surely a Lambert Simnel sort of person would never dare to accept," said newly married Ann. "Aunt Margaret would recognize him for an imposter at once."

Cicely, more worldly wise, snorted over the purse she was embroidering for her husband. "Even if she did she would pretend not to!"

"She is my son's bane!" sighed the Countess of Richmond.

"He seems to believe she even started the Simnel business," said Cicely.

"But n.o.body knows that she did. After all, she never even saw him," protested Ann, who, in common with her brothers, had preferred this younger, livelier aunt from Burgundy to their staid Aunt Elizabeth of Suffolk or their shrewish Woodville aunt, Katherine.

"And even supposing this new pretender were the Duke of York, would she remember him? Well enough to be certain, I mean," queried the Countess of Richmond. "It is a long time since she saw him."

"His little Grace was eight years old when the d.u.c.h.ess came on that visit to King Edward," stated Mattie, with the liberty of long service. "Do you not remember, my lady Cicely, how he would take the deerhound he had for his birthday to show her and how the wild puppy creature bit a hole in her best gown?"

They laughed at the memory and by Mattie's loving precision the date was incontrovertibly fixed. "I do not think Aunt Margaret would accept anyone spurious as her nephew even to enrage the King," said Elizabeth, who had at yet contributed nothing to the conversation. "For in spite of the gown episode she delighted in d.i.c.kon."

Whether the d.u.c.h.ess would accept him or not was the Touchstone for which all Europe waited. Henry sent his spies abroad and all the Court waited for news. And soon the amazing truth was rippling through the Palace and men were marvelling about it in the streets. "The d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy recognized him as her nephew." "'Like one given back to her from the dead,' she declares." "Not to be outdone by the King of France, she, too, has provided him with a retinue." "The young gallant goes everywhere with her."

"So that she may instruct him what to say about his supposed family and teach him manners," scoffed Henry.

"By what Sir Robert Clifford says he has no need to learn manners from anyone," said Sir William Stanley, who had recently been made the King's Chamberlain; but he waited to say it until the King had gone out of the room.

"Everyone we have questioned seems to agree that this person has a princely bearing and that his clothes become him," added Tom Stafford.

"But what language does he speak?" asked the King's mother.

"English, of course," said Lord Stanley, with husbandly terseness.

"With a strong foreign accent, no doubt!" laughed Elizabeth, remembering how even Henry had one when he first came.

"Why, no, quite perfectly, they say," said Sir William, evidently very much impressed. "And excellent French as well."

"Quite an accomplished tradesman's son the d.u.c.h.ess has found this time!" scoffed Margaret of Richmond elegantly. And younger Margaret, copying her, set them all laughing by declaring with true Tudor incisiveness, "We want no more baker's boys here!"

"Well, well, they will no doubt be crowning him in Antwerp or somewhere as Richard the Fourth!" said Elizabeth, with a hard note in her lovely voice, brought there by the bitterness of so much unnecessary suffering.

And to small Harry's delight Patch began parading up and down the Queen's gallery crowned with an upturned charcoal brazier and sweeping all and sundry aside with the skirts of a cloak improvised from the Queen's best Syrian rug.

Although she had joined in the jibing with the rest, Elizabeth slept but ill, and in the morning she took Jane Stafford and Ditton with her and rode out over the bridge to the convent at Bermondsey, which was in her Mortimer heritage. For there her mother, because of failing health and Henry's displeasure, had betaken herself to be nursed by the nuns.

"Her Grace is sleeping," said Mistress Grace, the Queen Dowager's companion, coming out to them and seeming to bar the bedroom door with her scrawny body.

"Then I will go in and sit with her until she wakes," said Elizabeth.

"It may be a long time," said Mistress Grace grudgingly.

"Then go and take a rest or gossip with my ladies out in the suns.h.i.+ne. You must be in need of change," ordered Elizabeth, wondering whether it was anything more than jealousy which made the woman unwilling for her to talk with her mother alone. But once within the quiet room, where conventual austerity blended pleasantly with the familiar furnis.h.i.+ngs of her family, and a great carved crucifix dominated all, Elizabeth forgot everything else and sat patiently listening to her mother's laboured breathing and looking pitifully at the high, white forehead and sharpened nostrils protruding so defencelessly above the neatly turned-back sheet.

"I do not think she will last long, Madam," said the Mother Superior, when she came in presently with a gla.s.s of cordial for her patient.

"That is partly why I came," said Elizabeth. "I am with child and near my time, so may not see her again. Also there is something I want to ask her before it is too late. And I would like to thank you and all your sisterhood for the tender care you have bestowed upon her."

The Mother Superior set down the gla.s.s. Before leaving she glanced from the crucifix to the face of her dying friend. "An earthly crown must be beset with thorns, too," she said. "Both she and your Grace have been called upon to suffer more than most women; but soon her soul will be at rest."

Upon first wakening Elizabeth Woodville seemed all bemused, fancying herself back in sanctuary; but a few sips of the cordial and the joy of finding that it was her eldest daughter who was ministering to her helped to clear the shadows from her mind. All difference of age pa.s.sed from them. For a while they talked quietly together of past happenings. The Dowager Queen said how much she hoped that Bridget, her youngest, would make her vows and come to live in this peaceful place where she herself had received so much kindness, and Elizabeth was able to tell her how radiantly happy was young Ann now that she had been married to the Earl of Surrey as she had hoped.

"And your own husband has come back triumphant again, I hear," said the Dowager Queen, "although scarcely to a bed of roses, with this second pretender to plague him. But at least he cannot imagine that, sick as I am, I had any hand in the matter this time."

"Whatever he thinks, he has sent you some of his best grapes. I will have Ditton give them to Mistress Grace." Elizabeth moved to a window and drew the curtain a little so as to protect her mother's fading sight from the brightness of the morning sunlight. "Have you heard that Aunt Margaret has received the young man into her household?"

"Margaret of Burgundy?"

"She swears that he is d.i.c.kon," said Elizabeth, staring unseeingly out into the garden where her ladies and Mistress Grace were sitting together on a stone bench.

And after a moment she was surprised to hear the sick woman chuckling in the bed behind her. "I like your Aunt Margaret," she was saying, with a spark of her old malice. "I, too, would swear almost anything to annoy that solemn-faced husband of yours!"

Elizabeth turned to find those intelligent dark eyes still bright in the sunken face and felt that even with the breath nearly out of her body her mother was quicker in wordly wisdom than either of them. That here was someone to whom she herself could still turn for guidance as in the drawn-out days of her submissive dependence. "Tell me seriously," she said, coming back to the bedside. "Do you still believe that it cannot possibly be true-this constantly recurring rumour that one of them was spared?"

"You know that I do," was the uncompromising answer. "Your Uncle Richard was never the kind of devil to do things by halves."

Elizabeth hated to badger a sick woman, but pursue the matter she must. "Sir Robert Clifford, whom Henry sent to Flanders specially, saw this young man riding through Arras," she said. "And even he, who cannot possibly care one way or the other, says that he is the very spit of my father."

Edward the Fourth's widow chuckled again until it ended in a fit of coughing and the necessity for more cordial. "So he might, and it still not mean a thing," she said, when the paroxyism had pa.s.sed. "If Margaret of Burgundy or any of our other Yorkist friends wanted to find a personable young man who looked sufficiently like your father to bolster up their tale, it should not be difficult. England is full of his b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. And no doubt Flanders too, for that matter, since he spent some dull days of exile there."

So that was probably the simple solution, thought Elizabeth absently fingering the bowl of gillyflowers which the nuns had set upon a stool beside the great bed. "Jane Sh.o.r.e bore no children," she said inadequately, her mind going back only to the days of his most constant mistress.

"No. But there were plenty of others who did," said the Dowager Queen, with the growing irritability of weariness. "Grace here is the child of one of them."

Elizabeth had been used to seeing Grace and her young brother about the Palace at Westminster, and beyond a mild dislike had never particularly thought about them. "So that is why she has no other name?" she said, surprised at her own foolishness. "With those prominent predatory eyes she must take after her mother. Who was she?"

"I have long since forgotten," yawned the drowsy Woodville woman plaintively. "But now that no one cares about me any more Grace at least is kind and does what I tell her."

"I wonder what sort of things my poor mother does tell her to do? I wonder if, after all, they did have some hand in this?" pondered Elizabeth, trying to remember what the young brother had looked like; but she soon chased the thought away as ungenerous and undutiful. Her mother had fallen asleep with the suddenness of the very weak, and for a moment or two Elizabeth stood looking down upon her, remembering her vivacity and the dramatic skill with which she had always dominated any scene, and feeling sadly sure that it was the last time she would ever see her on this earth.

All that spring the whole country was seething with rumours about the so-called Duke of York across the water, and it appeared that an amazing number of people believed in him. To Henry it must have seemed that a weapon had been put into the d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy's hand which could not only cause unrest but could also be used against him by any other foreign power with whom he was not friendly. He went about his affairs as usual, writing endless dispatches about the intended Spanish marriage between his heir and Ferdinand of Aragon's daughter, paving the way for a peace treaty with Scotland and granting charters to that intrepid mariner Jean Cabot to sail in the Matthew in search of treasure from the East, and tracing with his tapering fingers on the great map of the world the possible course of his return from Newfoundland. Elizabeth knew that in his own realm and abroad her husband was respected, and that for all his reasonable gentleness men feared him; but she often wished that some of them loved him. But then probably Henry did not want their love, she supposed, any more than he wanted hers. He went on making notes and ama.s.sing money and making sure that his elder son studied Greek and Latin and-above all-Spanish, at Croydon. He was becoming a little more near-sighted and a little meaner, and Elizabeth, knowing that she would never now have a real love affair, solaced herself more and more with the affection of her children and particularly with the amusing liveliness of Harry, whose health had never given her a moment's anxiety.

"We might be living in the Dark Ages instead of at a time when books are printed and fresh countries explored," complained Henry, accompanying her in the royal barge from all the unrest in London to the quiet of Greenwich. "The people are behaving like hysterical children."

"They were foolishly credulous about Simnel but you never seemed to care," said Elizabeth, sitting beside him beneath an awning resplendent with Tudor roses.

"That was a mere May revel compared with this. I had only to make the real Warwick ride through the streets to show them what fools they were. But now I have nothing to produce. Not even a murdered body." Without even noticing how her whole body winced, he turned to her almost in exasperation. "Elizabeth, has none of your family any idea where they were buried?"

"Would that we had! All we know is that it was in-there," said Elizabeth, trying not to look at the grimness of the Tower as their barge shot smoothly past. "The Tower priest must have known, I suppose. But he was old and ailing, and died before we came out of sanctuary. There was a squire of Richard's, called John Green, who took a message to Sir Robert Brackenbury. I tried to have speech with him, but Richard sent him away to the Isle of Wight. And poor Brackenbury, as you know, was killed at Bosworth."

"I will get to the bottom of this business if it takes me half a lifetime," swore Henry.

"Then may I never hope to forget it?" reproached Elizabeth. And because her time was nearly upon her he said no more.

It was a sad confinement, for her mother died at Bermondsey, and her baby, whom she called after her, did not live long. Her mother-in-law was not with her at the time, and when she came to visit her afterwards even her serenity seemed badly shaken. "There is something the King asked me to tell you, but which I am very loath to speak of," she began, when at last they were alone together. "Are you sure that you are quite strong again, Elizabeth? You have so little colour in your cheeks."

"Of course I am well," said Elizabeth, with a wan smile. "But naturally I have been grieving. And that wretched ague seems to have come back to plague me. It is often so in damp weather."

"Then I will tell you some other time," said Margaret, looking unaccountably relieved and preparing to go. But Elizabeth missed her mother-in-law's company. From the couch on which she was resting she reached out a restraining hand. "No, stay and tell me now," she begged, supposing it to be some finicky whim or new economy of her husband's. "Does Henry want to cut down my allowance again? Or must all my servants wear dragons as well as roses on their livery? Whatever it is, is it so terrible that you cannot stay?"

To her surprise there was no answering smile on Margaret's comely face. "It is more terrible than anything I ever heard," she said slowly. "And you, my dear daughter, will have to bear it."

Elizabeth sat up abruptly. "I? Then it concerns me-especially?" she stammered, with a great foreboding at her heart.

"You and your sisters. Henry has been making exhaustive enquiries about the disappearance of your brothers. He had to, Elizabeth-you must see that-to counter this growing belief that the younger one is alive."

"Yes, yes. I see that. And he has found out-?"

"That it is quite true that they were both murdered. With merciful swiftness, I a.s.sure you."

Elizabeth's hands flew to her blanched cheeks. Not until that moment had she realized how strong, how unquenchable, had been the hope that had flickered in her, nor how much she had allowed it to be kept alive by all these happenings. She felt it die in her now as if some part of herself died too, or a child in her womb. "G.o.d was very merciful to let my mother die when she did. But then, of course, she was so much cleverer than I. She never really believed..." Elizabeth's low voice trailed away into silence.

"It is no new grief, my poor sweet," consoled Margaret, without realizing how hope can outlive common sense. "Only the details. You are bound to hear of them sooner or later, and I could not bear that you should hear from some uncaring stranger."

"Tell me now," said Elizabeth, composing herself rigidly against her cus.h.i.+ons and holding her hands very still. "I promise you I will not cry out or-faint."

"G.o.d give you courage!" prayed the Countess. "Henry went in person to the Tower and looked up the wages accounts. You know how methodical he is. There was a man paid to look after them called Slaughter."

"Black Slaughter. Yes, I remember. It was really through some woman of his that I heard," said Elizabeth, reliving those confused moments in the Abbot of Westminster's kitchen, when she had struck some lout for daring to say that Ned and d.i.c.kon were dead. "But I always supposed that he was kind to them."

"He may have been. Anyway, I don't think he had anything to do with it. But we could not trace him. He was probably killed in battle with his master. But it seems that while the Princes were in his care someone brought a message to Sir Robert Brackenbury."

"Richard's squire, John Green," supplemented Elizabeth, weary of the beginning part of the story.

"Yes. That was the name. Whatever Richard wanted Brackenbury to do, he refused. But he offered to give up the keys of the Tower for a night."

"It does not sound very likely."

"And then Richard sent Sir James Tyrrell."

"Tyrrell is still alive," said Elizabeth, leaning forward excitedly. "I always wanted Henry to question him."

"Well, he has questioned him now, offering reward and pardon. And the miserable man has confessed."

"That he did it?"

"He maintains that he did not see it done. That he stood at the bottom of the stairs and sent his man Dighton up, with some hired cut-throat called Forest."