The Tudor Rose (14 page)

H
ENRY STAFFORD, DUKE OF Buckingham, first heard the horrible news when the royal party had reached Oxford. He was the greatest and most favoured baron on that northern progress and would not have credited the news for a moment had not his own son brought it. Even while surveying Thomas's concerned face and mud-bespattered clothing he could not bring himself to believe it.

“I honestly considered that a strong man like Gloucester would be best for England,” he kept saying, pacing up and down within the privacy of a room which had been lent him in one of the colleges. “'Heaven help the country that is ruled by a child or a weak woman' is a wise old adage. How can this country survive, I asked myself, if she is to be rent much longer by these quarrels for the succession. Nor we ourselves, for that matter. Half the nobility have been wiped out during the wars. I did not want that to happen to you, Thomas, or to our family.”

“And so you made that speech in his first Council which moved men to offer him the crown,” said Thomas, who had never quite been able to forgive it.

“Yes, and would do it again for the peace of this realm, were I sure Gloucester would keep his word!” declared Buckingham. “For did he not swear to Stanley and to me that no harm should befall those hapless children?”

Thomas unclasped his riding-cloak and threw it wearily across a table. “And now the news is all over London that they are foully murdered,” he said flatly, thinking of what must be Elizabeth's torment of mind.

As the splendid Buckingham lowered himself carefully into a chair the thought passed through his mind that either he must be getting old or that it took an exceptionally strong man to survive such troubled times. “Does the Woodville woman know?” he asked.

“Yes. They say it nearly killed her. And they say that the grief-stricken Princesses—”

“So much of it is 'they say,'” complained the Duke, whose journey in the new King's company had been so serene and enjoyable until this hot-head bore down upon him with his incredible rumours.

“It is true that I myself saw the Princes standing watching the ships a few weeks ago,” admitted Thomas. “But no one has seen them since.”

“And if anything had happened to two defenceless boys in that grim rabbit-warren of a place who could possibly know?” cogitated his father.

“Only the man who did it…”

“And if there has been no murder?”

“The King would know—just the same.”

The handsome greying Duke swung round upon him. “Have a care, Thomas!” he warned sharply. “Your implication is treason.”

Thomas shrugged and wandered to a dresser to help himself from a dish of fruit. He had been in the saddle since dawn and was ravenous. “Murdered or not, Sir, the King had gone to great trouble to have them both in his care,” he pointed out, biting deeply into an apple. “We know that no one else would dare to lay a finger on them—and that no one else would have cause.”

“In either case, what can I do?” asked his father, after a silence during which the crunching of the apple had been the only sound.

“You could perhaps ask the King straight out how they fare,” suggested his son, more diffidently.

It sounded so easy; but the very fact that it was not magnified suspicion. “There are things one does not ask the King,” admitted the man to whose help he owed most. And then, as if to turn his kindly mind from such sinister thoughts, Buckingham smiled quizzically at his son. “I suppose it is for the sake of Bess's beautiful eyes that you have ridden here like a fiend to badger me?” he bantered.

“What hope have I in that quarter? Particularly if this be true, since she is King Edward's eldest daughter?” Thomas tossed aside the apple core and strode to his father's side, impelled by love rather than by ambition. “Though there was a time when my hopes rose because you seemed to think our claim through the Beauforts at least as good as Gloucester's,” he reminded him with tentative eagerness.

But Buckingham had made up his mind about that long ago.

“It was in order to save this very kind of bloodshed that I forgot that moonshine. Besides,” he added, out of his fundamental integrity, “even on the Lancastrian side of the lineage the Countess of Richmond and her son come before us.”

Thomas looked down upon him with affection. He knew that his father had loved King Edward and had acted for the best; and how sincerely concerned he was about the two boys. “I suppose it is partly because of Bess that I came,” Thomas admitted, following his father's lead in. “But, believe me, Sir, in their shocked bewilderment all London looks to you. You are the most royal of all the barons. And, after all, are not poor Ned and Dickon your wife's nephews?”

“Yes, poor lads. But with King Richard one does not want to stress the fact that one is so closely related to the Woodvilles.”

“Yet to you, I suppose, it must make this thing seem all the more horrible?”

The Duke heaved himself up and fell to pacing the room again. “So horrible that it becomes fantastic,” he admitted. “I like the King. On this journey I am always about with him. In many ways—since we are speaking frankly—I find him finer than King Edward. He is just as manly and openhanded, and yet without his brother's lamentable lasciviousness. As everyone knows, his family life is impeccable.”

“There is John of Gloucester, his bastard, who governs Calais. And some girl-child he would have married to the Earl of Huntingdon had she not died.”

“Bah! Mere youthful pastimes when he was bored between battles, mending that arm of his,” scoffed Buckingham, kicking aside a stool in his path. “I tell you he has
always
wanted Anne Neville, ever since the Kingmaker brought him up with his own daughters in Warwick Castle. Only consider what trouble he went to to get her!”

“Or the half of dead Warwick's wealth!” muttered Thomas, determined to hear no good of him.

His father did not hear him, but went on arguing out the issue half to himself. “He is capable and courteous. Not able to charm men and women into doing his will, perhaps, like Edward—but cool and cultured and friendly. How am I to believe, while chasing a wild boar with him or laughing with him at table, that he deliberately had murdered the sons of the man whom he so loyally loved and served?”

Because it seemed so impossible to believe, Buckingham felt that he must go straight to the King—to watch him at work, or catch him talking to others, all unaware. In order to look at him with eyes newly opened to this terrible doubt. For surely, if he had just ordered two innocent children to be put to death the hideous guilt of it must be written on his face?

But Richard Plantagenet looked much the same as usual. He was sitting at a table signing some papers with his secretary and one or two of his officers about him, and every now and then he would look up to question something or to give a brief order. And each time he lifted his face it was illumined by the torches stuck in iron sconces on the wall. They showed up everything that was there to be noted. The gentle, almost sad expression, belying ruthless activity and courage. The lines from eye to mouth, so weary for a man of thirty, which must have been etched by physical suffering of which neither friend nor foe had ever heard him complain. Every line of him, decided Buckingham, was a baffling contradiction. The taut body, quite as richly clad yet so much slighter than King Edward's. The slight hunch of the right shoulder, suggesting a clerk rather than a soldier. The long, thin hand holding the pen, which might well have been a monk's, and yet was more strong and supple on a hilt than any swordsman's in England.

How
could
one assess him, or be sure?

As if feeling such intentness of gaze upon him, King Richard looked up and smiled—and the case building itself up against him in his friend's mind was knocked endwise. “Why, Henry, you look as if something my cooks concocted has disagreed with you!” he said, handing the last parchment to the Captain of the Guard and rising with brisk relief.

“I wanted to see you—” began Buckingham, clumsily.

The King came and clipped him on the shoulder. “My dear fellow, have I not been visible all day?” he retorted good-humouredly, sending a small page scuttling for some wine.

Laughing sheepishly, the older man passed a hand across his forehead and was surprised to find it moist with sweat. “Stupid of me… Too much of your potent Burgundy at dinner, perhaps,” he apologized. “But I just wanted to reassure myself, Richard. You see, if a friend you had always had—was not really there…”

The King quirked a mystified eyebrow at him as if he were mad. “It
must
have been the Burgundy,” he said. “But I hope you are sober enough to take in the gist of something I want you to do for me.”

“Work should be good for the whimsies,” smiled Buckingham, getting a grip on himself.

“I have always found it so,” said Richard, without smiling at all. “And mercifully just now this realm pro vides me with all the work I want.”

“What would you have me do, Sir?” asked Buckingham.

Standing glass in hand, the King came to the point with his usual economy of words. “It is about John Morton, Bishop of Ely, who with the unfortunate Hastings opposed my succession. I want you to make yourself responsible for him. He is an enterprising sort of person, so his—host—must be someone I can trust.”

“And so?” prompted Buckingham, shamed by so swift a lesson to his own distrust.

“I am releasing him from the Tower, and, with your permission, sending him under armed escort to your castle at Brecknock. That seems far enough away, in the wilds of Wales. I have just signed the necessary orders.” Sipping appreciatively at the good red wine, he nodded towards the table where his writing things were still set out. “But I would like you, if you will, to send with them a letter to your Constable, telling him to have a comfortable room prepared and some books set out for the Bishop's use, and so forth.”

“So you are releasing him from the Tower?” said Buckingham, surprised at such clemency.

“Why not? He is a man of unusual ability, one of our coming churchmen, I suspect, and if by some little show of friendliness we can win him over to our side, so much the better. In these times all our best brains ought to be used in the service of the country, not shut up to turn sour. And if you remember, my dear Henry, Stanley opposed me at that Council-meeting, too, and had to be hit on the head with a pike before he came round and saw reason.”

“Would you say he has one of the best brains?” enquired Buckingham, who, having upheld Gloucester from the first, resented the pardon and easy favour shown his rival.

“Perhaps not,” said Richard tersely. “But he has the most men.”

“And you want me, I take it, to use my persuasive powers with Morton as a gentle substitute for a pikestaff?”

“That was my idea,” smiled the King. “You will have all the long winter months shut up there with him, and you and Katherine should find his pithy conversation a godsend.” Buckingham, who was ageing, had been looking forward to a few weeks' peace after such an avalanche of disturbing events, and his royal kinsman grinned at the ill-concealed glumness of his looks. “Or perhaps one does not want for pithy conversations when one happens to be married to a Woodville?” he laughed. “I fancy that is how my brother must have felt when he solaced himself with so many nitwit beauties!”

“Jane Shore is no nitwit,” Buckingham reminded him defensively.

“No,” agreed Richard. “Otherwise she would scarcely have lost so little time in getting first Hastings and then that odious Dorset to protect her.”

“Is Dorset back in England?”

“Yes. Waiting to stir up trouble, no doubt. Had your Woodville wife not told you?”

And so, with Richard's pleasant friendliness fresh in his ears, Buckingham's horror would be lulled. But, again and again, as the days passed, he would find himself watching the King's face, seeing it as crafty and secretive; and then suddenly the Plantagenet would smile, and an impression of soldierly straightforwardness would remain. To Buckingham, the Sovereign he had backed with all his considerable standing became an enigma. Uncertainty chafed his days, suspicion kept him awake at night. He lost appetite at meals and accuracy at sport. He would recall pleasant scenes in which his friend, the fourth Edward, was playing with his children, and suddenly rage would surge uncontrollably in him. Remembering the good looks of young Ned and the charm of small Dickon, he would marvel how any normal person could have the heart to undo the Creator's work and still such animation. There were men, he knew, who seemed to have two personalities. It was as if in some strange way their minds were split in twain and good and evil stood apart, not humanly mixed, in them. Dangerous men, touched by the same supernatural forces which inspired witchcraft, in whose presence one felt beyond one's depth and shuddered. Could this youngest and most able of the great Duke of York's sons possibly be one of them? And if so, wondered Buckingham, was Anne the Queen aware of it? She did not seem to be. But could that be, perhaps, because she was not particularly clever or because she had been accustomed to Gloucester's ways since childhood? The whole idea grew frightening. By the time the royal progress had reached Richard's own city of Gloucester all triumph and enjoyment seemed to have gone from it for Buckingham, in spite of the tumultuous welcome. “I think, by your Grace's leave, I will go home to Brecknock for a while,” he said, taking advantage of one of the King's rare moments of leisure.