"The King must trust a man very much to put him in charge of the very food he eats," she remarked that evening, watching the efficient way in which Stanley looked over the tables set for one of those lavish banquets by means of which Richard sought to ingratiate himself with the rich aldermen of London.

"Since Henry of Buckingham betrayed him I should think it unlikely that Richard really trusts anybody," the Queen had answered in that detached way of hers.

"But suppose Stanley were to poison him," speculated Elizabeth, wondering whether, beneath his bonhomie, the suave, thick-set Lord Steward were ever tempted to do so.

"My dear Bess, the things you imagine!" laughed Anne, who never imagined anything at all. "I am thankful Richard and I are going north to-morrow, if that is the way you croak. Only I do so wish he would not insist upon stopping to grant charters and things in every town we pa.s.s through, when all we both want is to push on to Warwick to see our boy!"

The unaccustomed querulousness in Anne's voice made Elizabeth regard her with anxiety. "Are you sure you feel well enough to travel so far?" she asked. "You have been looking so white all day."

"I am always white. Do they not call me the pale Queen?" sighed Anne. "Besides, Richard disturbs me, sleeping so ill at night. He calls out, waking from some dream; and sometimes when he cannot sleep and the hours of darkness crawl he pulls on his furred bedgown and goes wandering about the Palace."

From the gallery where they stood Elizabeth could see him talking to Stanley in the hall below. "What ghosts, I wonder, go wandering with him?" she thought.

But she was recalled to reality by the touch of Anne's feverish fingers on her arm. "I wish you were coming with us, Bess," she was saying. "Usually it is great fun travelling with Richard. He makes such a pageant of it and insists upon my having so many new dresses. But this time, somehow, I feel as if there is something out there on the roads of which I am afraid."

"All tarradiddle, my dear!" scoffed Elizabeth, to calm her fears. "It is just that you have not been too well lately, and I am sure the fresh country air will do you good. Look, the King is ready now to lead you in to dinner."

Secretly Elizabeth had been longing to be left alone with her sisters-all the more so as the following day would be the anniversary of her father's death. But when the royal party rode out from Westminster next morning they made such a brave cavalcade that she found herself almost wis.h.i.+ng that she, too, were going. As she pushed open a lattice to look down upon them the April air was sweet with spring. There were outriders, the King's standard-bearer, and men-at-arms, with Lord Stanley's imposing figure well in evidence. Lord Lovell, Sir Richard Catesby, Sir Richard Ratcliffe and most of the officials of the house hold were in attendance. Anne, dainty as a little ivory figurine, turned in the saddle of her white jennet to wave good-bye-looking far less fragile with that glow of excitement in her cheeks at the thought of seeing her son. And beside her, with his proud standard flowing in the breeze, rode Richard on his famous charger White Surrey, resplendent with gold-and-crimson trappings.

It was only as the gallant company turned northward out of the Palace courtyard that Elizabeth noticed something amiss. There was no handsome John Green riding a pace or two behind his master. "If he is left behind it can only be that he is sick," she thought; and, turning hurriedly from the window, bade old Mattie go and make enquiries.

"Please G.o.d it be so!" she prayed, laying her plans much as her mother might have done. "The young man has neither wife nor mother, so I can reasonably nurse him until he is convalescent. I will read to him and sit with him. I will even let him make love to me if only I can drag from him what message Gloucester sent to Brackenbury about the boys!" Her heart raced with excitement at the prospect of hearing something definite at last-and with fear of what, in the end, it might prove to be. Even the threat of sharing Will Stillington's bed would not hold her back from such a Heaven-sent opportunity.

But-even supposing Green's devotion to his master were not proof against any woman's wile-her heart's excitement was for nothing. "He is nowhere to be found in the Place," Mattie told her.

Elizabeth sent for an old groom of her father's who had taught her to ride. "Master Green's horse be gone-and his servant's. But the pair of 'em went yesterday, Madam-and southward," he said, gazing at her wors.h.i.+pfully.

And in the end the information she sought came to her quite casually. "Oh, John Green?" said the hated Stillington, who wrote out most of the King's orders. "Did you not know, Madam, that he is gone overseas?"

"You mean to France?" Elizabeth brought herself to ask, wondering if the trusted body squire had been sent to spy on Henry of Lancaster.

"Why, no, Madam, not so far as that," the King's clerk informed her unctuously. "Only across the Solent. If there is anything I can do-"

"Then he may be back soon?" snapped Elizabeth.

"Not for a long while, I should think, Madam," grinned Stillington. "As a reward for his devoted service the King has made him Receiver of the Wight."

"A dull appointment, on an island, for the best-looking bachelor at Court," pouted Cicely, who-like half the Queen's ladies- considered herself in love with him.

"But one where no one is likely to ask him questions!" murmured sagacious old Mattie, setting out her mistress's embroidery frame.

On the ninth day of April, that sad anniversary of the bereavement which had so altered their lives, Elizabeth and her sister were allowed to visit their mother. The King had been quite humane about it when Anne Neville, before departing, had begged the favour for them. "Providing John Nesfield is present," had been his only stipulation, thereby guarding himself against any further trouble from the Woodville woman's plotting. The poor deposed Queen Dowager was pathetically glad to see them and the loving prattle of her younger children helped to cheer her. The older girls were able to a.s.sure her of Anne Neville's kindness and more than once she sighed, envying them their freedom to live publicly at Court. Elizabeth, in Nesfield's presence, could not speak of the disadvantages which went with it when one's birthright had been taken away. All she could tell her mother was that the allowances the King had promised to make them when they left sanctuary had been legally confirmed. Of his proposals for marriages for Cicely and Ann the Queen Dowager was already bitterly aware, and Elizabeth had not the heart to add to her bitterness by speaking of the marriage threat he had made in private to herself.

The hours pa.s.sed almost happily, but the Queen Dowager clung especially to her eldest daughter at parting. "When Uncle Richard returns I will ask if we may visit you again," Elizabeth promised, although she hated above everything to ask him for favours.

But a bare week later, when the King's courier rode in mud-splashed and breathlessly from Nottingham, she went again-alone and without permission. She went white-faced and shocked along the corridors to her mother's far-off apartments, and when Nesfield would have kept her out the preoccupied regality of her bearing silenced even him. "Let me pa.s.s, Sirrah. I must tell her Grace that my cousin, the King's heir, is dead," she said, pa.s.sing through the open doorway without so much as glancing at him.

Her mother rose at sight of her, and by the look of triumph on her face Elizabeth knew that she had heard. "It is the curse you laid upon him. That dreadful curse!" she said, almost accusingly.

"When did the boy die?" asked the elder Elizabeth steadily.

"That day we spent with you-the anniversary of the very day upon which my father died."

"Then G.o.d has been good to me," the Queen Dowager said with slowly savoured satisfaction. "Three of my sons that fiend slew."

Elizabeth sat down unceremoniously beside her because she could no longer stand. "They had reached Nottingham when they heard. They were holding Court in the castle there. They did not even know the boy was sick. The messenger says they are beside themselves with grief."

The Woodville woman stared straight before her into the pit of her own sufferings. "Then they will know now what it is like," she said scarcely above a whisper.

Elizabeth, too, stared before her in the heavy silence of her mother's meagre room. So this was the fearful thing which poor Anne had felt was out there waiting to meet them on the road. Elizabeth recalled how bravely they had set forth, with their banners and their gorgeous clothes and their happy antic.i.p.ation; and tried to picture their return-with the empty bleakness of their faces and of their lives. No matter what wrongs she herself had suffered, she could not but be sorry for anyone who had been as kind to her as Anne had been. Yet, strangely enough, in that hour it was Richard whom she was most sorry for. Richard, the man whom she hated. Whatever he had done had been done because he had this son and so could preserve the strength of the dynasty he had sinned for. And now, it seemed, the sinning was left denuded of its better motive, with nothing but the tattered shreds of remorse to clothe its shame.

The Queen's homecoming was sad beyond words. She had gone forth a gay and placid young woman, and came back a sick and heartbroken one. Her warm trills of laughter no longer spilled over the formality of Court life to inspire people's love, and the citizens of London, already deeply suspicious of her husband, saw the date of the Prince of Wales's death as an indication of G.o.d's judgement, and so withheld even their pity.

Elizabeth, the tender-hearted, seldom left her; and the King did all he could to comfort her. "You must grow strong again, my sweet, and bear me other sons," Elizabeth overheard him say, leaning over his wife's bed. But she also caught sight of his twisted face as he said it. For it was difficult to believe that Anne would ever get strong again, and the only child she had ever given him had been born eleven years ago.

Even if the lines about his mouth were deeper and his crisp orders sounded more impatient, he went about his affairs as usual. He was accustomed to suffering in silence and asked for no one's pity. And it was characteristic of his Court that the following Christmastide should be kept as splendidly as ever.

"Will the King let our mother be with us for Christmas Day?" little Katherine had asked wistfully, leaning against Elizabeth's knee.

"The Countess of Richmond is to be allowed to-Lord Stanley told me so," said her sister Ann.

"And so is his eldest son, Lord Strange," said Cicely, who believed in seizing all the fun she could before being hustled into a loveless marriage, and was looking for some one to replace John Green.

When the time came it was good to see her and young Ann being flattered by all the personable young courtiers and enjoying the dancing as they used to do; and to hear Katherine and Bridget shrieking with delight over their toys and sweetmeats and carrying out the spirit of the season by sharing them with simple Warwick, who was so much bigger than themselves. Even the Queen roused herself to take part in the festivities and sat in the midst of them to watch the Nativity plays and acrobats and mimes. "Although the mimes are but poor this year without our d.i.c.kon!" declared Cicely stoutly.

Since her return to the Palace Elizabeth had never known the King to be so gracious to her. He teased her about the new blooming of her beauty occasioned by freedom and fresh air, saying that his home evidently suited her. And when the Queen ordered a crimson gown pearled with holly leaves for Twelfth Night he insisted upon Elizabeth having one made exactly like it. "That crimson stuff will suit Bess now that she has wild roses in her cheeks," he had said, coming into his wife's room while the dressmakers had the exquisite stuff spread out. "Though I am desolate at the thought that they may be Lancastrian roses!" It was not like Richard to be tactless and both women knew that the comparison was unkind to Anne. Elizabeth saw the raised brows of the 'tiring-women. In any other circ.u.mstances the lovely creation she was being offered would have delighted her, but she was uncomfortably aware that to wear a dress exactly like the Queen's would cause talk about the Court; and, more important still, that Anne herself must be displeased. "How can Richard be thinking about clothes when we have no child to enjoy Twelfth Night?" she had cried indignantly after he was gone.

"Because he can feel two completely different kinds of things at once," said Elizabeth, realizing even as she spoke how odd it was for her to be explaining a man to his own wife. It used to be the other way round, but her mind had dwelt so much and so searchingly on the man of late. Seeing that all the preparations and festivities and dressmakers had tired the poor Queen out, she gently persuaded her to lie down upon her day-bed. "Madam, I did not seek this," she said soberly, when they were alone.

"I know that you did not," agreed the Queen at once. "Have I not already told you that when I know people well I trust their motives better than what other people say?" Impulsively she caught at her friend's hand, looking up at her with special urgency. "I know that I am often peevish these days," she added. "But, whatever may happen and whatever people may say, I want you always to remember that, dear Bess."

THE SEASONS HAD GONE round again since that splendid cavalcade had had all its gaiety quenched at Nottingham- his "castle of care," as Richard now called it. Elizabeth stood at the Queen's window at Westminster looking down upon the greening garden. "The spring flowers will soon be in bloom again," she said to cheer her.

But poor Anne was not to be comforted. "I shall not live to see the spring," she said listlessly from her bed. "Do not the physicians all agree that I have the same wasting sickness which took my sister and my little son? And now Richard tells me it is because of the contagion that he must shun my bed. But I do not believe him. There must be some other reason."

It was the first time that Anne had disbelieved anything that Richard had said. "Please G.o.d she does not think, in her distraction, that I am the reason!" thought Elizabeth.

"Why is he arranging marriages for your sisters and not for you?" asked Anne suspiciously, after tossing and sighing a while.

"Probably because he thinks mine is more important," suggested Elizabeth, carrying a cloth and a dish of rose-water to the bedside.

"Because you are the real Queen of England?" jibed Anne.

Elizabeth said nothing, but gently wiped her friend's hot forehead.

"Perhaps after I am gone he will marry you himself," went on Anne, determined to provoke an argument.

"He is my uncle," said Elizabeth coldly, setting down the basin.

"You could get a dispensation from the Pope. The Spanish d.u.c.h.ess of Infantasgo and some of the Austrian royalties did."

"Possibly. If we both wanted to. But it takes two to make a marriage," said Elizabeth. "And if there is one thing you can be sure of, my dear, it is Richard's love."

The words melted Anne momentarily to tears. "Oh, Bess, forgive me!" she cried weakly. "It is just that everything seemed to go wrong when we lost our son." But she spoiled her lovable contrition by adding with a hardness which seemed all the more terrible considering her natural child like naivete, "You got what you wanted then, didn't you?"

"Oh, Anne, don't talk so wildly!" implored Elizabeth, struggling with her anger.

"Well, if you didn't, your mother did. And whatever happened to your precious brothers they have been well avenged!" muttered the dying woman, hunching herself back among her pillows.

Long after Anne had fallen into an uneasy sleep Elizabeth sat by the window with her stirred and troubled thoughts. Had the poor Queen's words been so wild after all, she wondered? Or had she herself during these last few weeks been merely imagining things? That Richard's att.i.tude towards her had changed must be patent to all. Her status at Court was very different now and many enjoyments came her way. To have been glad of it was only human; although with everything that she accepted from him went the self-abasing thought that she was being disloyal to her brothers. But now, reviewing her own feelings in the light of remorseless candour, she asked herself whether there had been something more? Some excitement because he singled her out-some strange attraction? Something unnatural, shameful, vile? Could it possibly be that Anne was right?

So often of an evening now that Anne was sick in bed, when supper was over and the musicians were filling the hall with sweet music from their gallery, she would find Richard at her side. Richard at his most charming. A grown edition of her younger brother- highly strung, mercurial, amusing, quick in mutual exchange of thought-speaking the same easy, expressive language of her breed. The sort of companion whom she so much missed.

As the threads of poor Anne's life grew more tenuous and she called constantly for them both, inevitably they were thrown more and more together. And when Anne died, as she had said she would, before the spring flowers were well in bloom, they shared a common sorrow. When the Archbishop finally folded the pale hands of the mighty Kingmaker's daughter across her small, cold b.r.e.a.s.t.s, for the first time in her life Elizabeth heard the hard-bitten Plantagenet sob-and yet by now she was almost sure that Anne's suspicions had not been groundless.

There were all the outward forms and ceremonies to go through, the solemn obsequies in the Abbey to be borne; and even while taking part in them Elizabeth was aware that some of the spectators remembered her replica of the dead Queen's dress at Christmastime and whispered, looking upon the withdrawn harshness of the King's face, that his tears had been the final hypocrisy. The mysterious disappearance of her brothers had dimmed his popularity, making people so suspicious of him that they were prepared to pin upon him any crime. There were even some of them, she was told, who whispered that he had hastened the pa.s.sing of a barren Queen for the sake of young and healthier beauty. Elizabeth wished with all her heart that she could go away. But there was nowhere else for her to go. She was in Richard's hands. And, as the weeks pa.s.sed, likely to become so quite literally.

"I suppose you avoid my touch because you still believe I butchered those brothers of yours?" he jibed, hating the way she tried to withdraw herself from his hold when the Court began to dance again.

"Produce them then!" she challenged, being now so much more familiar with him.

"But that is not the real reason, my sweet Bess," he said, ignoring her challenge and speaking too low for the other dancers to hear. "It is because you are afraid of what my touch does to you."

The tell-tale blood had sprung instantly to her cheeks and he had laughed, his eyes mocking her as he handed her in and out of the intricacies of the dance. His green eyes were flecked with brown and singularly beautiful, she noticed; and although he had not her father's grace, yet, being a man who took pains to be proficient in all he did, he was by far the best dancer in the room.

To all outward appearances their evenings were spent quite formally. No one overheard the frightening jibes and compliments he made and there was no one to whom she could speak about them save old Mattie. And as often as not there was nothing to speak about, because she and Richard would forget their antagonism and fall into natural discussion.

"You are no longer frightened of me," he stated one morning, as they rode leisurely through Windsor Park with Lord Stanley and Cicely and a string of courtiers dallying somewhere behind them.

"Oh, yes, I am-but only at times," laughed Elizabeth. "You change like a chameleon, Sir. You are so many different sorts of person."

"Convenient, perhaps; but rather exhausting," said Richard, interested.

"Convenient?"

"It always gives one the initial advantage not to look exactly what one is. If you had seen me for the first time sitting in a tavern-dressed in decent homespun, say-what would you have guessed me to be?"

Elizabeth turned to consider him in the clear June sunlight. "You might well be a scholar or a priest," she told him, unaware how devastating she looked when wrinkling her nose in thought. "Or even, when you are tired and with those long lashes of yours," she added wickedly, knowing how much it would enrage him, "a woman in disguise. One of those interesting-looking women who are nearly, but never quite, beautiful."

"G.o.d in Heaven, how horrible!" exclaimed Richard, almost letting his horse stumble into a rabbit warren. "But never by any chance a King?"

"Not in worsted," decided Elizabeth, remembering how her father would have looked like one in anything. "Not unless you spoke," she was quick to add in fairness, remembering Richard's voice.

"Nor yet a soldier?" There was nothing pompous about him, but her candour was hard to take. "Surely you would guess I was a soldier?"

"Only when I looked down at your hands." She looked, now, at his hands on the reins, trying to picture a side of him she had never seen. When he had been "the young Duke of Gloucester" men had clamoured to follow him into battle, and he was not much older now. "What is it like to go into battle?" she asked, knowing it for the foolish, womanish question it was.

Richard tried his best to answer her, however inadequately. "For different men it is different things, I suppose," he said. "Some go into it without fear or imagination, like well-trained chargers. For me it is plain h.e.l.l beforehand, and once my sword is in my hand the wildest exultation this side of Heaven. Afterwards-well, it has been a proving to one's self of one's manhood and a bringing of the right to enjoy one's worldly status and one's woman. It would be just the same for one of my archers, I imagine."

"There is so much of your lives we women do not know," sighed Elizabeth.

Richard grinned down at her from his tall horse. "That is mutual," he said. "Do you not suppose that we often wonder about childbirth and the tigerish love you bear your children and what you really say about us when you are alone together? It is to these hours which a man and woman cannot share that their shared hours owe excitement. If there were no mystery one might just as well kiss one's page." He had turned in his saddle to beckon the others on. "That young sister of yours is practising her wiles even on burly Stanley!" he complained lightly. "Look, she is keeping the whole party waiting while she gathers pink chestnut blossoms to twine in his unfortunate sorrel's mane!"

But all their encounters were not so light. All summer Elizabeth walked with proud discomfort beneath the speculative glances of his courtiers. And then the thing which Anne had foretold happened. One August evening when the sweet scent of stocks was drifting in through the open cas.e.m.e.nts Richard asked her to marry him.

"But you are my uncle!" she cried out, shrinking from him in horror.

"And the Pope is infallible!" he mocked, grinning at her across the chairback against which he leaned. "It would not be the first time he has given a man permission to marry his niece in order to insure the peaceful succession of a state."

"It is horrible," said Elizabeth.

"Why more horrible than cousin marrying cousin unto the third and fourth generation, which most of us scions of royal houses have to do until we become so inbred that we produce specimens like my brother Clarence's Warwick?" He crossed the room and lifted her chin with his fingers, the better to scan her lovely troubled face. "You and I are both intelligent people and of very suitable ages," he said.

"After all you have done to my mother's family how can you pretend to love me?" she flared indignantly; and could have bitten her tongue out afterwards, for Richard merely laughed at her.

"But I am not," he said cheerfully. "I have never pretended to love anybody but my fragile, uncomplicated Anne, G.o.d rest her sweet soul! And you of all people, Bess, should know that is true."

She did know-and knew, too, that some shameful part of her wanted him to make love to her because the cool, casual touch of his fingers stirred her more than the ardent kisses of Tom Stafford had ever done. That earlier madness had been but a prelude, the awakening of an inexperienced girl's senses; whereas now she was a woman emotionally awake, with all her father's capacity for ardour coursing through her veins, beginning to promise and torment.

"Of course I know you never wanted anyone but her," she answered awkwardly, jerking herself from his hold.

"Then we understand each other and can discuss this thing frankly," he said, wandering to the window. "It is an heir I want- born of your Plantagenet blood."

"You are brutal," she said, watching him warily as he stood there with his back to her.

"There are different kinds of brutality, as you may find out for yourself if you marry someone else," he said, shrugging that right shoulder of his which was almost imperceptibly higher than the left. "G.o.d defend me from being the kind of brute who leaps in and out of his wife's bed for the plain intent of getting himself a son and does not try to beautify the business for her by courting her mind!" He turned towards her as he stood in the window embrasure. There was that manliness about him which must, as he had said, have been bought in battle, and having come from some tournament at Smithfield he was wearing the straight tabard with the gorgeous quarterings of England and France which suited him best. "If you could bring yourself to trust me I do not think you would be unhappy," he said. "The life of a woman who was mine would never lack warmth and colour and kindness."

Because she knew this also to be true, Elizabeth made herself repel him the more frigidly. "You cannot force me to this. I am not your ward as my brothers were. My father left our marriages to my mother, and everyone in the country knows it."

"That is why I am asking you. I am not a humble man, but I am trying humbly to woo you. Or perhaps you consider the word coerce more fitting?"

Recognizing his ultimate power, Elizabeth s.h.i.+fted her ground. "And why do you want a son from me, whom you have publicly called b.a.s.t.a.r.d?" she demanded.

"Do you really need me to tell you?" he said, coming back to her. "You who are Edward's favourite daughter must know that both he and I would have done almost anything to keep the Lancastrians out."

"He himself once offered me to Henry of Lancaster."

"Only as a bait to get him into his hands. I was with him when he discussed it. He offered you to a number of men for political reasons, but I doubt if he was ever serious save for the King of France's son. Nothing less than a throne would have satisfied him for you." He stood there pus.h.i.+ng the signet ring up and down on his finger. "To keep this throne strong I have let those priests and lawyers argue about your legitimacy; and for the same reason I will make sure that you do not marry Henry Tudor, with his Welsh blood and his Frenchified ways. He is sure to have heard of my unspeakable loss. As long as my son lived the Lancastrian's invasion would have been more of a gamble; but now, I suppose, to a good many of the people it looks a pretty good gamble. They don't want any more uncertainty about the succession. A few more years of civil war would so drain England that she might become a mere appendage of France. But with you as my wife there would be no more uncertainty about the succession, and no incentive for Henry Tudor."

He faced her with expressive hands and s.h.i.+ning eyes, letting her see the whole purpose of his life. He looked almost fanatic-a man with one idea who had staked everything upon his hazardous convictions and who had hitherto been strong enough to sweep aside all opposition to his will.

"But, on the other hand, would not the people be repelled from you by the thought of incest, even with the Pope's permission?" she reminded him, momentarily half persuaded.

"To get a dispensation would take months, but you have their love-their complete trust," he said, speaking less fervently.

"Since you do not love me, are there not plenty of princesses in Europe whom you could ask?" she suggested.

"Say that I like you the better of two evils?" he countered, with a smile. "You are very beautiful."