A Secret Alchemy (38 page)

“Should you be writing a biography?”

I’m dumbstruck. It hasn’t occurred to me. I stare out to where the broken spars of the castle are black against the sky. “I don’t know. It’s not my field. Some people would be rather shocked. Academic historians despise biographers, much of the time.”

“But you don’t.”

“No, not at all. But it’s not what I do. I do books.” I don’t know where my sigh comes from. “I want to do people, but it’s so difficult. You’re trying to write something whole, where things make sense, where they’re certain, and you can’t. Not with people like that. There’s too much you can’t know. It’s all
if
and
perhaps
and
maybe he thought
and
maybe she remembered
, and the last two are pretty dubious, in scholarly terms. At least balance sheets and watermarks actually exist.”

“Just have to wait and see when you’ve got all the material, won’t you?” says Mark. “Like a survey of a building I’m involved with restoring. Then you’ll know how best to set it out. Whether it’s best guess, or clean glass and steel, as Charlie said.”

“Yes, I suppose I shall,” I say slowly.

I’m so aware of Mark’s presence on the other half of the rug that I feel him bracing himself to say something before he speaks. Then he says, “Could you forgive me for leaving? Someday?”

The breeze brushes over us and the leaves show their pale undersides like a wheeling flock of birds. “Yes,” I say, because I find I have. I’ve forgiven Mark for leaving. And I’ve forgiven him for not loving me. Only I’m not going to say that, am I, because that’s past, very past, long before Adam.

“I’m glad.”

The silence is enormous. It’s a vast space where my anger was and now just…isn’t. Perhaps it’s this pilgrimage. Or perhaps it’s as Anthony would say: forgiveness is not an act of will, it’s God-given, a grace we can only pray for.

But when Mark turns and smiles down at me, as if it were my own body not his, I can feel the easing of something in him. My heart turns over and I can’t pretend it hasn’t happened; I can’t pretend any longer that I don’t want him, and I can’t pretend he doesn’t know.

Would Adam forgive me for desiring Mark?

The thin cloud above us is breaking into wisps and scraps and the breeze is freshening. Mark looks up at the sky. “Are you cold?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Had enough of these sandwiches?”

“Yes, thanks.”

I realize I’m very tired, though why I don’t know, and then a voice in my head that sounds like Morgan’s says, “If you’re tired, lie down,” so I do, as simple as that, with the wool of the rug tickling my cheek. We borrowed it from Fergus, and it smells faintly of oil paint.

I could lie here forever, I think, smelling the grass and the wind. Mark’s leaning back propped on his elbows, idly watch
ing the breeze brushing the wheat from dark to light again, like a hand brushing velvet. Yes, I could stay here forever, with Mark, not speaking, just being.

Only I can’t stay another night, must go back to London, back to Australia, back to where I can best hold on to Adam. But for the first time since I set off from Sydney, I wish I could. I want to see the castle with the bare daylight waning or the moon-cast shadows showing me what wasn’t there before.

Am I silly—childish—to want to see that shadow bowed over this letter, to hear the scrape of quill on paper, the stamp of horses and the clatter of arms? To smell the resin of hot sealing wax, the sweet dryness of a snuffed candle, even, yes, the stench of a prison, the dirty straw and bucket of soil, the fear…Is it silly, if it means being able to touch his world and tell his story as I believe it?

Believing stories is what children do, and I’m not a child.

I trust in God that the one I loved best in all the world will follow me into His care
.

Who was that? We know so little, except that it was probably neither of his wives. There was Gwentlian, the mother of his child, or the child Margaret herself—we know he did love her. It might not even have been in England but Rome or Portugal. It might not even have been a woman.

Even if somewhere there’s a letter, a poem, a chronicle that tells me, I shan’t know, not really. Not
know
, as you know your own hands, or your child’s face, or your lover’s body. I can’t write how he paces out his cell, four paces wide and six deep, the walls of pale gray stone and the sky beyond the window. I can’t say that he sits in his cell remembering the weight and grip of a goshawk on his arm, or the scrambling, bloody stab and slash in the dark at Sandwich and the ropes cutting shame into his wrists as they were herded below
decks and realized with a terrible, hollow fear that they were bound for their enemy’s stronghold at Calais. I can’t say that he looked up from his book in a Flemish tavern and saw a young man with skin the color of copper, and loved him and lay with him, touching each gloss and flaw, the thick muscle close under fine, hard skin, the broad fighter’s hands, thigh pressed to thigh and arms that grip, bodies as taut as an archer’s bow, seizing each other.

I’m woken by Mark gently touching my shoulder. “Una, we should go. It’s getting late, and we’ve got a long way to drive.”

Elysabeth—the 6th yr of the reign of King Henry the Seventh

I sleep better, these days, than I have for many a year, but still, as
all my life, I wake early. This morning, Saint John’s Day, that was the eve of my brother Antony’s death not so many years since, I stood watching the sun rise over the Thames, and listening to the last notes of Matins from the chapel across the Abbey garden. When the sun had risen in glory, I turned away.

I am no prisoner, but live here in right of my royal widowhood, and it is enough for me. And I have realized that a chamber such as this is all that my life requires. Four paces wide, and six deep, the same on both sides, and another chamber beyond it where I and my woman sleep. I know, because I paced them out when I first came to Bermondsey, to see what of my goods would fit to my new life. Four well-made walls of pale gray stone and a window high enough to admit God’s light and air. Bermondsey Abbey is a great house and generously endowed: every beam is massive and well seasoned, every stone well carved and dressed, and the chapel glows with gold and fine work. Here I have all that a soul and body require: meat and bread, a roof and a fire to warm my thin old bones, holy
Mass and private prayer. The sun and the moon shed light for me and I have my book of hours and an image of Saint Bridget painted on ivory, as perfect as a jewel. And I have my books. Here, at my hand, is the wisdom of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Antony’s translation of Christina of Pisa, my book of the
Hours of the Guardian Angel
, tales of Saint Nicholas and of Iseut and Tristan, and the songs of love and beauty and despair that were sung at the courts of the great Queen Aliénor who came from Aquitaine.

I do not have the letter that Antony wrote the night before he died. I took it and the ring from the lad’s frozen hand and gave him meat and gold and set him to warm himself at the fire, for autumn had come early to Westminster that year, and the stone walls of sanctuary breathe cold. He told me what he could of Antony’s end, and when he had gone I read the letter, over and over again, till the words were written on my heart. Then, because I dared not keep it, I held the paper to the flames, and it flared and burned away to nothing, and into my bodice, next to my heart, I put his ring.

It was nearly two years before Henry of Richmond sailed from the Seine and landed in Wales, but that day did come, and then came the news that Richard of Gloucester was dead. We heard it at Heytredsbury, and did not trouble to hide our rejoicing from Nesfield.

I was still much about King Henry’s court when we first heard that a rebellion was formed on a boy they cried as Richard, Duke of York, younger son of the late King Edward IV. At the news my heart was joyful, then sick. I knew it to be false, yet my spirit craved the consolation that it was true, that though Ned was lost, Dickon did live and breathe. For an hour or two I hoped, though hope for Dickon meant I must fear for Bess and the King and baby Arthur, my grandson. Then the men who pulled the lad’s strings
changed their tale: this was George of Clarence’s boy, they cried. But I knew—we all knew—that
he
lives at the Tower, a prisoner of King Henry as surely as my boys ever were prisoners there.

It was nothing, though it took a battle at Stoke to show it for the nothing it was.

Yes, I have my books, and they comfort me, and make me smile and laugh, or ponder great things, or breathe with those lovers who thought the world well lost, so greatly did they love. But sometimes I can do nothing but sit at my window and look over the rooftops to the river and beyond it to the Tower. I know not if it is my sons’ grave, but it is all the grave I can imagine.

When there is nothing left, there is always prayer. Each bead and image on my rosary stands for a prayer that helps to fill the void.

My daughters visit me, and I do go to court. But I find there so little that I wish to find, excepting only my grandchildren, and the courtiers court not me, the Queen Consort’s Mother, but Margaret Beaufort, the King’s Mother. I have known her all my days, and I do not wonder at it. But it leaves little business for me, who was wont to have the business of a kingdom to look to, and what business I had about my own estate wearied me as it has never wearied me since my first days at Astley. So I have given up my dowry lands to Bess in return for a pension from the King, and with them I have given up all that tied me to this world and tangled me in the web of interest and obligation, power and treachery. On the eve of Bess’s coronation, I watched the ceremonial barges sail upriver from Greenwich to the Tower, and prayed that she might know all the happiness and none of the sorrow that I have known.

That was two years ago. Now I am sitting in the window with my work untouched on my lap, looking across the river, which lies like gray, crumpled silk about the Tower walls.

A lay-sister enters. “So please you, Your Grace, one Master Jason is in the visitors’ parlor, and craves an audience.”

This is puzzling: I know of no such man. But I learned of Edward many years since that he or I may forget many a man who will never forget meeting us. So I summon my woman, and go down to the parlor.

A small man, Master Jason, I see, peering through the glass which is let into the door of the visitors’ parlor that no religious might be accused of secret or unholy dealings with those still in the world. This man is certainly still in the world, though plainly dressed and dark; you may see a dozen such in any street in London and swear you saw none. He uncovers his head as I enter, but before he kneels to me he looks keenly into my eyes as if to be sure that I am the one he seeks. When I raise him, I find him taller than I had thought, and broader, strong in the arm and with a light in his dark eyes that I suddenly know.

“You are—”

He raises a hand and I am silenced. I turn to my woman. “You may go.”

“Madam—” she says.

“I am not a religious and Master Jason has private business with me. You may watch through the glass if you prefer,” I add, for I have no wish for idle gossip, however ill-founded, about this visit.

“Aye, Madam, if you wish it.”

When the door is shut behind her I say, in French, “You must forgive my lack of ceremony, and that I speak French, not the Gascon tongue. But you are nonetheless welcome, Monseigneur le Chevalier de Bretaylles.”

“Madame, I see no lack of ceremony in such royal discretion. I pray you excuse my directness, but I have little time and must
come to the point. I think you know that your brother was the man I loved most in the world.”

“I know it,” I say, and though it is six years since Antony was killed, I must swallow hard to keep my tears in check, for the love I bore my brother is very like to that which such close comrades in arms bear each other, and to hear de Bretaylles speak of his awakes my own. There were times when it seemed that Antony was more faithful in my ser vice and constant in his love for me than was Edward or any other man, even as I was in my love and care for him. This man before me must have tasted some of that same constancy in the face of the world’s battles.

If Louis de Bretaylles feels his own grief rise, I cannot see it. After a moment he says, “I must tell you that when Antony was taken I was with the Prince, your son, at Stony Stratford. I…Prince Edward had many good men about him, not least your son Sir Richard Grey, and I pray you will not think me a coward that I judged it better to be free, and do what I might in secret, than make yet one more prisoner to be buried in the Duke of Gloucester’s fiefdom.”

“No, indeed, and I am glad to know that you were not taken.”

“
Mais oui, madame
. I regret that I have not been able to come to you before, but in such uncertain times any man who is known about the court for secret work is regarded with suspicion. Only when I heard news of King Henry’s great victory over the pretender at Stoke, and that he was truly safe, did I judge it safe for me, too.”

“You were wise. You must know that so dangerous did the King judge the times that he even imprisoned my son Thomas, though my brother Edward fought in the King’s name and was wounded.”

“I had heard. But, Madame, I have little time, and I must tell my tale.”

“Of course.”

“When I saw there was nothing I could do during the new King Edward’s journey to London, I rode ahead. But soon I knew there was little to be done, either, in overthrowing Prince Richard. He had too tight a grip on men and arms, and still tighter once he was crowned. I knew—I knew my lord Rivers was dead…I stayed in London, listening and watching for news of the Princes, your sons.” I nod, and swallow again. “Nor did I dare come to you at Westminster, for many there would know me for myself. I set myself up as a Milanese, a teacher of sword-fighting, and made a name for myself also as a frequenter of the alehouses in Smithfield and the Hounds’ Ditch.”

He seems at a loss how to go on, and then my heart begins to pound. “And…?”