We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (49 page)

‘Yea! yea! The King said that! The King said that, when all was done!’ In the wake of their passing I stood to pray, for the King victorious. Along the road behind, more men advanced. I went to meet them. I went, willingly, towards outrageous grief, arms raised to clasp insanity. O Jesu! God! What was it that I saw!

This band came slowly, in formation. A column of mailed riders and infantry on either side of the road, flanked a mass that wavered and plunged as it came closer, of men whose feet dragged in the dirt, unarmed men in chains, men who staggered, and bled, and wept. At the core of the mêlée was a horseman, bent double as if mortally hurt. From his lax hand trailed the rein of a small beast, and across the beast’s back hung a thing, swaying. At first glance it looked like a tapestry all red and white, bright white patterned with red, and above it a standard blew, a tattered strip of silk borne by the wounded knight who rode ahead. Arching over the mule was a forest of halberds. One of the outriders nudged his mount into a trot, leaned down and smote the mule upon the rump and it pricked forward, so that the dangling burden hung heavy and jostled and would have fallen had it not been held fast with thongs, and the felon’s rope which clasped its neck under the tossing black hair. For it was a man, had been a man, once, and the ragged standard overhead, the arms of England, the lilies specked and spotted with blood, the leopards almost torn in two...

They were coming faster. They would ride me down. Would to God they had. For it was a man, and, as I knelt, the bloody, naked body, the swinging head, cast low like that of a slaughtered sheep, came close to mine, and I saw the face which for seventeen years had been held in my heart.

Others have told me how I got up and ran behind, crying out, and that the Tudor’s men mocked me. That I ran alongside and fell upon my face, and got up, and fell again and again, until my robe was dabbled with blood and mire from the trail of his passage, caked dark with the blood of his wounds, and that I called him, most piteously, and sought ever and anon to touch his dangling hands, or a strand of his hair.

And that as we came through into Leicester the people, crowding out of the houses, jeered at me and sang: ‘A nun, a nun! Behind the traitor see her run!’ But some there were that crossed themselves, and turned pale at what was reckoned after to be a wondrous sight, and some there were that swore and turned indoors again. But I saw none of this, neither did I properly hear the deep, swelling chant that came from the throats of Henry Tudor’s mercenaries, those well-schooled agents of death, shame and defilement, the chanting that grew as we approached Bow Bridge, that little bridge, so small and stonily narrow. And I knew in my heart that there was no room for all that host to pass without injury to my lord, for ’tis true I thought him badly hurt but still alive, and screamed for them to halt, my scream lost in the clamour of the crowd, the roar of ‘Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!’ and the stinging rain of flints from a group of corner-boys who revelled in the show.

They surged on to the bridge, packed tight, the horses struggling in fear. The mule, now nearly dropping from weariness among the foaming destriers, the steel-clad thighs, its flanks sodden with bloody sweat, staggered against the side of the bridge. The King’s head was crushed upon the stone. I heard the sound of rending bone, saw the bright new hurt done to that head which once did lie so sweetly in my lap. And I went mad.

All this is many years ago, now I may speak of it, whereas before, a certain noise or sight would have me raving in an instant, self-imprisoned in a closet for days on end, until the racking grief ebbed enough for me to talk again, and pray again, and take my meat once more.

They sent Giles out to find me, which he did, standing in the market-place. He said that I was singing, but that’s a lie. He carried me home in his arms, with many a backward look. I reckon he came knowing that King Herod, dead, could do him no harm. Though I saw no more that day, I know that they laid Richard on a hurdle in the market-place, naked in death with eyes upturned to the circling kites and four of Henry’s men standing yawning around him, on guard over the evidence of his destruction; and that the obedient townsfolk came to spit upon him and to gape at a proclamation that the Tudor had made to the effect that he, Henry, was King, and had been King by right of conquest from the day before the battle. So that there, stiff mortal clay, lay tyrant and usurper, traitor and renegade, Richard Plantagenet, who had dared ride against the King. Richard Plantagenet, whose soul I loved, whose child I bore.

Being then so devoid of sight and thought, I believed that he still lived, and had escaped. This I believed for three days while my mind went away—that he had gone overseas, to Flanders, mayhap, like when he was a young child, and that the corpse lying in Leicester Market had naught to do with him.

With the three days’ dying, he came to me at last.

On the fourth day the Mother rose from her sick-bed and came to me. Her words were merely a formless babble of sound. All I could hear was the bell tolling, one thick stroke upon another, more regular, but almost in time with, my own heart beat. It rang on every hour for some little time, and the intervals of quiet were terrible to hear. They could not stop us ringing the bell, I told her, and she looked at me troublously, and brought me Clary wine. I knew it was Clary, I remembered the taste well, and I laughed in the Mother’s face, which was ghostly and dewed with sickness and said: ‘But I am not with child!’—meaning the Clary—a dreadful thing to say in truth, but she stroked me and murmured: ‘Nay, my daughter,’ and asked me to help her in a task and look for Giles. There was I, spilling the Clary, the madness potion, and trying, with a swollen bitten tongue, to explain that I had sent Giles to the chandlers, with all the money I could lay hands on. Giles was not back yet, I said, the Tudor’s men had caught him and he lay stripped stark dead down in the Market.

A little man stood behind the Mother; he had a leather bag with him and eyes that roamed uneasily about, up and down the nave as if he counted the gargoyles, the weeping monk, the holy monk, the mason and the lion; and his feet moved up and down too, first one and then the other, as if he was afraid the stone faces might come down and get him, or as if he was anxious to be up and doing, at whatever craft was his.

Everyone was there except Ursula, and Lucy begged the Mother to rest, but the latter raised hands leaf-thin and said: ‘Dame, our King is dead,’ and Lucy bowed and started on her beads, which she had not left off telling for the three days, good Lucy. At this I marvelled, for King Edward had been dead many years.

Another man came to stand beside the Mother; I thought him at first one of the Abbey priests, for he had a black cloak wrapped all about him with the cowl pulled deep over his face so that only his lips were visible, moving in a whisper at the Mother’s ear. They murmured together for a long while. Their whispering washed up over the carved columns and shivered goldly upon the altar-cross. Then I saw the Mother nodding, nodding, and heard her say: ‘Yea, gladly. It shall all be done, when the boy comes back,’ and I started to cry like a child, thinking in some way she was wroth with me for sending Giles out for so many candles. They went away, then. When he brought them to me there must have been an hundred, heavy as a sheaf of May-blossom, whiter than almond’s milk. I tried to stay Giles but he ran off, saying that they wanted him, the Mother and a man, because he was so tall and strong.

I lit the candles one by one. I ranked them like soldiers all the way along the altar steps, and was glad that the evening outside was thunderous dull, for thus their light was unchallenged and fell, soft as silk, in a spreading stain from the altar to the tiles, to the edge of the misericords, crept softly up the walls and painted each gargoyle with soft light, so that each one had a shadow like a round black beard, wavering infinitesimally. All the way down the nave bloomed my petals of light, tier upon tier, echoing each other, my sacred fires, burning. At last there came calmness.

The garden was full of birds, singing. To the outer gate I went, and drew it wide. And waited. And knew. The little man with the leather bag stood beside me, chattering. ‘Your Reverend Prioress is a passing noble lady,’ he would say. Then: ‘The streets are quieter now. The people have gone to their homes. Yea, they’ve all gone home.’ Over and over he said the same thing, and fidgeted, and looked up and down, for fiends. ‘She ought not to have gone out,’ he would say. ‘But the streets are much quieter. Yea, that’s right.’

‘What have you in your bag?’ I said, watching the road.

‘Why, Sister, thread and needles.’

‘Then you must see Dame Ursula,’ I said.

‘I’m not selling.’ He shifted his feet. A crazy man.

Together we watched the street. And soon they appeared in the dusky distance, and there was a light about them that was not earthly, and the dust that rose about them seemed silver and gold and hung like St Elmo’s fire, a shining mist. Although when I glanced again at the needleseller whose wares were not for sale, he had it too.

Giles plodded on one side of the mule, the tall cloaked stranger on the other. Behind them walked the Prioress, holding up her cross.

‘’Tis scandal and shame,’ said the needle-man. ‘You’d have thought King Henry could have had him decently entombed. We couldn’t leave him lying there, could we?’

They were coming. ‘But the Abbey monks were afraid,’ he said. ‘Certes, I admire the Mother’s charity. In truth, I do.’

They had reached the gate. I watched Giles move to the mule’s offside, lifting strong arms. The swirling cloak of the stranger hid them from my sight.

I pushed the wicket wider still, so my lord should come to no harm.

They were bringing him in, and he was dead. None could have taken those blows, and lived. He was dead, and I loved him. He was dead, dead, my heart, my life, my lord, my love, my King. My love had come to me at last. My love was dead.

‘Lay his Grace in church,’ the Mother said. She wept. She said softly:’ ‘Holy Jesu! this is an awful day!’

They had brought a catafalque and, lapped in light, he lay upon it. Someone had thrown a coarse cloth over him, covering him to the throat. Deftly the little man removed it, and became a craftsman. He opened his bag, drew out a shining spool, and threaded needles, clicking his tongue as if what he saw were a bad piece of work, something botched and untidy that he must right. Giles stood gaping near and listened to soft explanations, a bad business this, deep wounds, see, boy, yonder was a knife-thrust, this a pike, the arm is broken here, the bone protrudes, and by my faith, they hone their axes sharp these days—see how it let his blood! I kept them from his face, they took one look at mine, and went on, murmuring: right through the lungs here, lad, well, lookee! the sword broke in him here, and shame, shame! all this done after death. Pass me my fluid, knave, don’t spill. This is for the embalming.

I kept them from his face. I looked on it again, my candles licked it gold. I took a cloth with water from a ewer and washed his face gently as he lay upon the bier, and he was dead, with his fine-boned countenance cloven and gashed by a dozen horrid wounds, and his long dark hair heavy with blood, and his eyes not yet at peace, for they were half open. So I it was who closed those eyes that stared deathward into betrayal, and I signed his brow with the Cross, and dared not kiss him, for he was the King, so instead I washed his feet and let them have his face, to make it fair again.

I thought of the old story Patch was wont to tell, of the woman who had loved Owen Tudor, who cleansed his face and combed his hair and set an hundred candles burning around him, and she too was a woman whom no one knew but who was thought a crazy woman, and now the cursed Tudor had slain my lord. And as all his sorrow was ever my sorrow, so did I die with him that day. Although I still walk and breathe and sometimes smile, I have no heart...

Men came to kneel by me, first one, cloaked like the stranger, then another still clad in harness and with a neck wound from which the red oozed wearily, then four or five together. One of these wore a hermit’s robe, carelessly donned, with the strength of his mail winking beneath it. They say that the church filled up from porch to rood-screen with men who entered like ghosts and wept like babes. There were running feet and a voice that burst through the whispering silence with ‘My Lord! My Lord Lovell!’—that they were hanging the prisoners and fugitives in Leicester Market and Lovell must fly at once, and for answer came only the deep, dreadful sound of men’s grief; the hasty feet clattered nearer and stopped short, the voice said: ‘Ah, Dickon!’ as a child might wail in the night, then swore like a man in the face of murder. And the church was filled with love and hate and vengeance, and a heaviness that one could touch with the hand. Over all came the sweet blossomy smell of the candles, and the Tansy, with which my sisters anointed the hurt men. That wondrous wound herb, that false, pretentious herb, which, like all the flowers of this world, could not stay death.

His despair was my despair, his ruin my ruin. I died, and there was none to bury me.