A Secret Alchemy (16 page)

“If it is prince, he must go to Ludlow,” said Edward one night, resting his hand on my belly. He still took me when I was with child, and took me eagerly. There are men who loathe women’s bodies as if our softer flesh would poison their own man’s strength, who possess us because they hate us, and to them a woman with child is most loathsome of all. Edward was not such a one. He loved my swollen belly and my heavy breasts, my rounded cheeks and hair thicker and more golden. And though the sickness rose in my throat I did not deny him, for if I had, he would have sought his pleasure elsewhere yet more often. But at these words I felt not sickness but tears rise, and had not the strength to master them.

“I know, sweeting,” he said. “But we must have more authority there, with Warwick now running counter to me in so many things, and no charter I can give to a council will have the power over men that a Prince of Wales does. And it is meet that he be brought up in his own household and on our family lands. And he will be happy there, as I was, and Edmund too.”

“I know it must be thus. But ’tis hard to think of such a babe gone so far from me.”

He was lying behind me, and at my words he stayed his hand. “Shall we have Antony for his governor?”

It was what I had thought myself, and an honor indeed: one I should covet for my brother. But now I had doubts. “He is most learned and holy, it is true. And a great knight: the greatest in the kingdom, some would say, excepting only yourself.”

“Oh, I am no knight, these days, Ysa,” he said, patting his own slack belly with a laugh. “To keep such a name uses up more hours of the day than I have to spare.”

“But would he understand a child, one no more than a babe? Would he know what is meet and what is not? I love him as much as any woman could love a brother, but sometimes I think he is like a Templar knight of old, as much ascetic as man of flesh and blood.”

“True! I tease your father that of his sons it is Antony he should have made a cleric, not Lionel. But who is better fitted to see to the education of a prince than a learned and holy uncle, whom I may trust also to rule the Marches in my stead? He knows from his own what makes a happy childhood, as all you Wydvils do. And he speaks most fondly of that daughter of his.”

“True. It is not that I do not wish it for him. Only that…” My voice cracked. “Forgive me, sire.”

“Of course, my Ysa. Do not cry. There is time enough to decide.”

He did not speak of it again that night, but in comforting me for my few, slight tears, his desire was aroused. Out of respect for my weariness he asked nothing of me, and if I had protested he would have left me in peace. But I did not protest, and he took me where I lay on my side, taking his pleasure as of right, until he came. Then he kissed my neck, bade me sleep well, and collapsed into his own, heavy slumber.

It was a girl, born but a few days before Palm Sunday, and Edward named her for his mother, Cecily. It was natural enough, but I wondered if he half-thought to conjure some charm over my womb, for his mother had borne four sons. Bess patted her new sister and loved to help her nurses with cloths and washing, but Mary was not yet two. One day she held out a toy bear, and when little Cecily could not take it, screamed, threw the bear, and caught her on the face. Two yelling, then, and when Mary got a whipping for it, Bess joined in her howls so that the chamber rang, even as the bell struck to tell me that my council awaited me. I did not think the girls heard the blessing I gave them before I hurried away; I could only hope that God did.

Now Warwick was in open rebellion, and had cozened George of Clarence to join him in restoring Henry of Lancaster to his throne. Had he promised George the crown when Henry was dead? It was not certain, though he had married his daughter Isobel to George in defiance of Edward’s expressed forbidding. It was even said that Warwick, the staunch upholder—the creator, its enemies would say—of the Yorkist crown, sought an alliance with Marguerite and her son, the heir and only hope of Lancaster.
Could it be true? Surely Marguerite would only treat with her sworn enemy to get her husband back his crown. What then of George’s ambition?

Then Warwick captured my father and my brother John, and murdered them before the walls of Coventry. When I heard the news it was like being struck in the face by a bloodied fist. My father. My brother. A double grief.

And a double threat, so close to the Crown and to the heart of our family. I reeled, faint as much from fear as grief, so that only my hands, gripping the arms of my chair, seemed anchored in safety. The news was certain, the threat like thunder on the horizon, dark, sullen, and constant, over the days that followed. I grieved as my sisters did, sorrow and fear heavy on us. And my mother grieved still more for the death of her great love and her son. But the business of the state and of my household would brook no withdrawal. None must think us weakened by even so great a loss. There was no time for private sorrow, except in the silence of the night, when grief tore at my heart and banished sleep. Antony spent much time at Grafton, for he had inherited our father’s title and estate, while our mother’s affairs were tangled almost beyond mending with the fortunes of her first husband and the House of Lancaster.

I could not make a parade of my sorrow, but no woman who has not loved a man as tall and broad as Edward can understand the comfort I found in his arms as nowhere else. If sometimes the release of passion also released my tears for my family, he understood, for he, too, had had a father and a brother murdered. Not long after Candlemas I was with child again.

The heat came early, soon after midsummer, and at Eltham I might hear from Westminster but escape the worst of it. Eltham was defensible, too, and in good order.

It was nothing new that I was sick, but I was weary with it as I had not known before. When I had respite from the business of the household, I walked round and round the courts and gardens, though even there I could not help but see yet more that wanted mending, altering, ordering. After some days of this my queasy dullness drove me further afield. My ladies trailed after me perforce, pale and sweating in the heat.

I heard one complain, and could tell even from that distance that it was Margaret Beaufort. Edmund Tudor got her boy Henry on her when she was but twelve years old, and she was a widow before she was delivered. No wonder, then, that she had neither chick nor child more, as Mal would have said, though married again long since. I could not reproach her, so my patience broke with the lot of them. “Go back, then! I do not want you here if you can do nothing but whimper.” They hesitated. “Go on! Go! If I have Mal, I have no need of you.”

They gathered up their skirts and backed away, hesitantly. I turned my back on them and made for the paddocks and trees beyond the stables.

“Madam,” said Mal, panting after me. She had grown stout with the years, and the ground was rough. “Your Grace…”

I was among the trees at last. Deep in the thickest shade was a hillock made by the roof of the ice-house, with a coverlet of stringy, late-summer grass. I lowered myself to sit down.

“Mistress Ysa!” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “I cry your pardon, Your Grace.”

“Oh, Mal,” I said, “there’s none to hear. I could wish it to be so more often. Pray you, sit down. To see you standing makes me feel hotter still.” She lowered herself to sit an arm’s length from me. At our feet the ground fell away to the south and west, and what little
wind there was seemed able to find us. Within a few minutes I felt cooler and Mal’s face had calmed from puce to pink.

“Mal, is this too much for you?” I said, after a while. “You know Hartwell is waiting for you. Not that my father’s bailiff is not content to manage it as part of the Grafton lands. But I think you would like to have the managing of it yourself. And court life is—is something any woman tires of in the end.”

“One day,” she said. “But I’ll see this baby through, madam, if you’re willing. And then…I’ll not deny it would be good to be back in my own country. And I’d hear the news: there’s not much gets to Grafton that doesn’t cross the river.”

“That’s true,” I said. Sitting among the trees as we were, with the dark-green and gold of summer before me, I could allow my mind to go freely down the lane to Grafton Mill itself and over the bridge, the land rising only gently now to the neat little stone manor I had bought from my father and given to Mal so that, whatever befell our family, she might be provided for.

“Very good. I’ll not deny that I would be sorry indeed to lose you just yet. But if—when—we know that all is well with this baby…you have earned your rest, and you shall have it.”

For a while we sat in silence, and it seemed that the breeze that stroked my cheek brought some ease with it.

Una—Thursday

In the dimness of the kitchen passage Mark is outlined
against the daylight beyond. The air is thick between us, and walking toward him is like pushing through water.

He is real, though: his hands are warm, their bones and muscles grip mine, and, suddenly, madly, all this—the Chantry,
the past—is real and solid too, for the first time since I came home.

Tears in my eyes and my throat, and he’s giving me a brotherly squeeze of the shoulders, and then he lets go and says over my head, “Hello, Gareth.”

“Mark, my dear boy!” Uncle Gareth’s voice is light and shaky. Mark goes past me into the hall, and they clasp hands. “It’s…It’s hard to believe. I—”

“We thought you might be dead,” I say. Where has this anger come from? Mark turns his head. “Why didn’t you tell us where you were?”

“I—”

“Let’s go and find a drink,” says Uncle Gareth quickly. I turn aside to wipe my eyes discreetly. “It’s all in the workshop, Mark.” He leads the way, though the back-door latch rattles for a moment before he lifts it.

Ahead of me, Mark looks about him as we cross the garden, as curious and calm as an insurance assessor. His hair was fair and it still is, because the threads that are gray are no paler than all that’s still blond, and it’s short and well cut above his broad shoulders. He moves easily, with a big-boned, loose-jointed confidence inside his dark sweater and very clean jeans. He was always tall: tall and fair and quiet against us little dark Pryors.

My anger’s cut with a strange and different heat, zigzagging through me until I’m shivering. I’m glad when Gareth pushes a half-full glass of whiskey into my hand.

“I know you’re still Una Pryor,” Mark says.

How? I want to scream. Were you watching us? But I say, “Yes, but I was married. His name was Adam Marchant. He was a
doctor. We lived in Australia and he died two years ago.”

“I’m so sorry” is all he says, but one of the things that was best about Mark, then, was that he always meant what he said, and said—with due kindness and tact—what he meant. He was like a good apple, I find myself thinking, as if the shock’s slightly unhitched my workaday mind: one of Aunt Elaine’s from the orchard, a Blenheim Orange, sharp and crunchy, straight from the tree, or a cinnamon-scented D’Arcy Spice lying in the storeroom, treasured up for Christmas. Strange how their scent changes from how they smell when you’re picking them. That’s a scent that once I thought I’d never forget.

He looks at me and says quietly, “You all right?” and I nod, because what else can I say? Mark always did worry about you.

Always. It’s a comfortable feeling, and on the heels of that comfortableness comes…what?

I don’t know. I think confusedly that it must have a name. But looking at him now, trying to sort out the feelings that I can only know as a trickle of water down my spine, a strange shakiness in my belly, I discover only how much that I loved in Adam I first learned to see in Mark.

Mark, who was my past for so many years, until Adam healed all such wounds. Perhaps that’s why missing Adam hurts so much, so easily. When he died, the paths of grief were already laid out for me.

And now Adam is dead. The times are suddenly reversed. Adam, whose voice I can still hear in the river-dappled rooms of my present, whose hands I can still feel pulling me toward him, is the past that Mark recalls. And Mark, who was past, is present.

“And you? Are you married?” Gareth’s saying, and suddenly
I miss Adam so much it’s like being punched in the stomach. By the time Adam died we were beyond desire, but I loved him with my body still, because if my body could have borne what his did, in his place, I would willingly have done it. Yes, it’s Adam I miss, Adam I want to hold, cling to, never let go. Adam, who can make my body live.

“No. Had a partner for the best part of ten years, though, Jean. She’s moved to Canada now. Her daughter I still see.” Mark’s face lights up. “Her name’s Mary, though she calls herself Morgan these days.” He looks round. “How’s the Press going? I see reviews in the Fine Press journals sometimes.”

So he hasn’t left fine printing behind altogether.

“Oh, very well,” says Gareth, waving a hand at the silent presses behind him, so obviously poised to start up with the latest project. “I’m doing a picture book,
Jason and the Golden Fleece
, which is going very well. Come and look.”

They get up and go over to the workbench, and I wonder if Mark can see in Gareth what I can so clearly: that he still touches paper as if he loves it, handles the machines like a patient groom or shepherd, judges space and proportion and form as naturally as breathing, his eyes sharp even as he shows Mark things he’s already looked at himself for hours each day. How can he give it up?

And if he’s angry with Mark, I can’t see or hear it. If he…What? What was Mark to him?

Mark’s gaze, too, is absorbed. “Why Plantin, not an Old Style typeface?”

“I thought originally of using Centaur,” says Gareth, going toward the shelf where he always kept the tryouts and interesting failures of the current project, and evidently still does. “But
it’s too light for the blocks—it looks spindly, and then the illustrations look clumsy. Whereas Plantin has just that much more body to it. Though I was tempted to stick to Centaur, because of Cheiron being one…”