The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers (46 page)

She has seized three thousand pounds a year from the royal purse!

From where had they conjured that sum? Any monies I had taken were gifts from Edward. I had stolen nothing. It was his right to give gifts where he chose, and when I had borrowed to purchase some manor or feudal rights, it had never been without Edward’s consent. Except for the purchase of the manors of Hitchin and Plumpton End that very year, when Edward’s mind had slipped into some distant territory. And the borrowed sums had been paid back. For the most part, anyway…And if I had not repaid them through some oversight—well, I defied Parliament to find me guilty of fraud or embezzlement in that quarter.

She has seized Queen Philippa’s jewels. She wears them. She has no shame in proclaiming her immorality with the King.

Yes, I wore them. Yes, I had no shame. Had Edward not given them to me? There was no illegality here. I read on.

She has shut the King away from his people. The only influence over him is hers, so that she might squeeze him dry of wealth and power.

True. I had kept him apart, protected. If it was a crime, I must answer for it, but it was not treason.

Ah! And then a charge with more than a snap of teeth. My heartbeat jumped again.

She has made use of the King’s Court in her acquisition of land. She has been so bold as to sit beside the judges, influencing their verdicts in manorial disputes to her own ends.

I had. If I had been a man, intent on urging my interests in the courts, there would have been no accusation made. Was it a crime to do so? Windsor’s harsh warning came back in a flood. They would seek to punish me for overstepping the boundaries suitable for a woman—but it was not treason.

My heart settled again. It would all come to nothing. By the end of
the year there would be some new scandal to stir Parliament’s ire. Edward need not be troubled, for the threats against me were empty ones and would die on their feet. My mind was more at ease, and, reassured by the power of my logic, I returned to Westminster and from there, as the heat of June began to press down on us, I wrote to Windsor.

Latimer and Lyons and Neville languish in prison, for which I am sorry. I have no power to help them. Gaunt is furious. Edward is inconsolable for reasons that will be known to you. De la Mare is frustrated that he can find no evidence of treason against me. I think that they might be content to let me go.

There is no need for your concern about my safety.

Of late I have wished you here with me.

Edward is inconsolable,
I had written, but not in reaction to my own predicament, because I told him nothing of the accusations leveled at me. How could I? The loss of his beloved son, in the same month that Parliament delivered those accusations, was too much for him to bear.

The Prince was dead.

I was with the King in those final days of his son’s life, as were many from London and far beyond who traveled to see the end of this great warrior, struck down before his allotted time. At Westminster, men and women filed before the Prince’s bed and wept openly as he wavered between sense and delirium. Joan remained beside him, rigid and tearless in her grief.

I did not weep for the Prince, but I did for Edward. For it was Edward’s burden that he must watch the Prince die, his favorite son, his firstborn, his hope for the future and the protector of England. What hope could Edward have in Richard, the nine-year-old child who was ushered into the death-ridden chamber to make his nervous farewell and be recognized as the future King of England? The Prince slid in and out of consciousness, the pain great enough to disfigure his noble face, and Edward remained throughout to witness his passing. The outpouring of grief was too much for the King’s spare frame. His face was gray with fatigue.

When it was over, I helped Edward to turn his stumbling steps back to his rooms and lie down on his bed, unseeing, unmoving, as if the Prince’s death had drawn some of the life from his own body. Sitting beside him well into the night hours, I knew that I would not tell him of Parliament’s attack on me. I told myself, willing myself to believe, that the Commons had slaked its thirst for blood on Latimer and Lyons; that the evidence against me was weak, and they would abandon me as not worth their effort.

Wrong! How desperately wrong I was. De la Mare would conjure the evidence from the ashes in the fire grate if he had to. I should have known he would not let me be, yet if I had, what could I have done?

I soon learned the depths to which de la Mare could sink in his desire for revenge.

We were at Sheen, where I hoped that the superb quality of the hunting and the comfort of tiled courtyards and newly glazed windows would give Edward’s mind a more optimistic turn. Wykeham, restored to earthly glory as one of the newly appointed twelve high-minded men to counsel Edward in place of his scurvy ministers, arrived at the same time as a group of merchants representing the City of London, who had come to petition the King. Complaining bitterly over the precarious state of law and order in the capital, they were determined to be heard, though I would have preferred to send them away. They had been invited to send a delegation, so here they were to see the King and beg his intervention. Accepting the rightness of their cause, and perhaps conscious of the hate-filled de la Mare breathing his fetid breath down my neck, I allowed it. I had no intention of adding fuel to the fire by keeping Edward shut away from his people. We worked hard to make the best show we could, not in the great audience chamber, but in a smaller one, where the King was already seated when the petitioners arrived.

They bowed before him. Edward made no gesture of recognition.

Forgive me, Edward! Forgive me!
I could have wept again for him. How close my tears were in those days, when for most of my life I had been dry-eyed. Could de la Mare, in rare pity for his King, not acknowledge the truth of why I had kept Edward from the public eye?

We had swathed him in cloth of gold and tied him as well as we could into his chair so that at least he gave the appearance of normality, but it was as if a statue filled the royal throne, not a living, breathing man. He looked vacantly at the merchants when they complained that the peace of the realm was in jeopardy. And when they went on to describe the lawless behavior of the mobs and John of Gaunt’s troops, and the scandal of an attack against the Bishop of London himself, Edward, uncomprehending, replied with a mumbling of incoherent words that no one could hear, let alone understand.

“This is a travesty,” murmured Wykeham in my ear where we stood a little removed from the audience.

“But I must allow it,” I stated.

“Why?”

“Because de la Mare accuses me of standing between the people and the King, and—before God!—what he says is true. I have done exactly that.” I could hear despair building in my voice. “You can see why.…”

“Yes…” Wykeham looked back to where Edward remained engraved in stone. “The commons should not have to see this.”

“Nor should the King have to endure it,” I added more curtly than I had intended. “To put him on show in this manner is…” I recalled having had the same argument with Windsor. Suddenly I felt very tired.

“…is cruel.” Wykeham finished my train of thought with a sigh.

One of the knights standing beside Edward leaned over to grasp his shoulder and keep him upright.

“End this, Alice,” Wykeham murmured. “It can’t go on.”

The delegation stood uncertainly, a mix of horror and pity on their faces, and I hurried forward.

“The audience is at an end, gentlemen.…” And as the merchants bowed themselves out, gestures that Edward did not see, I touched Edward’s hand. He did not respond. “Take the King to his chamber,” I instructed. “I will come to him.”

“I doubt he will know whether you do or not. I had not known he had faded so quickly,” Wykeham said.

“The Prince’s death was the final blow.”

“Before God, it’s pitiful.”

“It’s more than that.…” I could not watch as the knights lifted Edward from the throne and led him stumbling away. “Now, why are you here, Wykeham? I hope it’s good news.” I did not need to ask, now that I had time to read his expression.

“No.”

“Then tell me. It can’t be worse than what we have just seen.”

“I think it can, mistress. Let us find someplace where you can be emotional.”

“Emotional?”

“You might feel the need to throw something.”

The words sent a bolt of fear through my body.

“I thought you should know, mistress, what de la Mare is saying to stir the Commons against you.”

I was in no mood for guessing games. “What now? That I have secreted the whole of the crown jewels—including Edward’s crown—in a cache to ward off future poverty?”

“It’s far worse.” He waited until there was no one within earshot, and whispered, “De la Mare is citing necromancy.”

I came to an abrupt halt, my hand fastening like a claw around Wykeham’s wrist.

Necromancy?
Witchcraft!

I think I laughed at the absurdity of it—until my throat dried, my thoughts tumbling as I tried to recall. This was no time for laughter. I could think of no possible evidence of necromancy that could be laid at my door…unless…Joan’s accusations and the box of remedies. Surely her impassioned words would have no bearing on de la Mare’s attack. My notions had been what any goodwife could have produced.

“He can’t accuse me of that!” I retorted.

“Don’t be too quick to judge! You might listen first, mistress, to what I know.”

I took him into the garden, where we could walk or sit without eavesdroppers. Onlookers might wonder at a conversation between the King’s Concubine and the Bishop of Winchester, but, under the circumstances, they might consider my need for confession to be urgent.

Confession, by God!

“I am no witch!” I could barely wait until we were secluded, apart from the bees enjoying the heady flowers of lavender and thyme.

“That’s not what your physician is saying!”

“My physician?” Father Oswald, a gentle, unassuming Benedictine monk, had been attached to my household for many years now. I would have thought him to be unswervingly loyal. “What has he said?” I racked my mind for anything that could be construed as dealing with the devil. A few foolish love potions for the damsels—but they were far in the past. As were the salves and drafts I’d given Philippa to ease her pain. There was no witchcraft there; nor would Father Oswald have any intelligence of them.

“Your physician’s been put under some…pressure…to speak of what he knows.” Wykeham was deadly certain. “His accusations against you ran like a stream in spate.”

“Torture?”

“So I understand.”

This was dangerous stuff. How many times had a difficult woman been accused of being in league with the devil, ultimately to face death by drowning or the excruciating pain of fire…? I shuddered in the warmth of the parterre.

“I am no witch,” I repeated stalwartly.

“Then let me tell you what’s being said, mistress.”

Wykeham pulled me farther along the pathway until we stood in the very center, facing each other on either side of the sundial. It was a magnificent tale, as old as time, told with remarkable—and frightening—exactitude. There we were, whore and priest, standing in a summer landscape, and I felt the jaws of death closing in around me. “So that you should be clear about it,” Wykeham said dryly, his face severe but not without compassion, “they’ll hound you to death if they can, Alice.” Wykeham always had a way with words, probably from preaching so many sermons to the damned.

“Where did the evidence come from?” I asked.

“John de la Mare, brother to the Speaker of the Commons—how fortunate,” Wykeham explained with blistering brevity. “He visited Pallenswick with a chamber pot of urine, asked for help to have his
entirely fictitious malady diagnosed—and in pious charity Father Oswald agreed.”

“Father Oswald always was a gullible fool when it came to judging others,” I observed irritably. “Had he no suspicions?”

“Apparently not. He was brought to London and questioned. I’ve no doubt force was used.” Wykeham eyed a lively flight of goldfinches in the adjacent bushes. “Your admirable physician admitted to a remarkable range of activities on your behalf.”

“The last thing he did for me was mix a salve to calm my chilblains.”

Wykeham grunted. “It’s far worse than that. By the by, they said you were there, at Pallenswick. And that you grew pale with fear when you saw your man under restraint.”

“By God! I was not!”

“I think God has no role in this. Rather the devil. This is what your man did for you, if he is to be believed.”

Wykeham ticked the charges off on his fingers while I absorbed the depth of my supposed guilt. This was far worse than fraud and embezzlement. The accusations smeared the soft air in that pretty spot with the filth of necromancy. All of it false, yet its falsehood impossible to prove.

“Your physician claimed that upon your order he created two images, of yourself and His Majesty, and bound them together to make an indissoluble bond. Thus he explained Edward’s infatuation with you. Their words—not mine. Your physician made two rings with magical properties for you to put onto Edward’s finger, one to refresh the King’s memory so that you would always be in the forefront of his thoughts, the other to cause forgetfulness of all else but yourself. And he made love potions and spells suffused with herbs picked at the full moon, at your request, to work your magic to bewitch the King into infatuation.” He paused, eyeing me. “You have been very busy, it seems, Mistress Perrers.”

“Have I not? And do you believe all this?”

Wykeham shrugged. “He also said he made a spell so that you could charm Gaunt and the Prince to your own ends.”

“Both of them?” My voice was no more than a croak.

“Yes. I think he added both for good measure.”