The King's Pleasure, page 37
Sir Edmund and Sir Edward, alerted by the bustle, saw that his horses were being made ready. The Spanish Ambassador, after the shortest possible visit, was leaving. He had brought no money, issued no definite order; his promises of yesterday afternoon were mere empty words. They were glad that they had not provided him with a good breakfast, and sorry about the dish of doves.
“A woman of that kind,” Sir Edmund said, when Chapuys had made his request, “would be impossible to provide. The Princess Dowager would not welcome the ministrations of anyone who will not call her Queen, and anyone who would cannot be admitted to Kimbolton—as you must see, Messire.”
“She needs other things too, bed linen, fuel, delicate food. It is in my mind, sirs, that neglect has played no small part in her decline.”
“Not ours,” Sir Edmund said firmly and with some justification. “You, of all men, should know. The allowance was never enough and for the last six months it has not been paid at all. We have not been paid. But for the fact that we had some small means of our own…”
“I know, I know,” Chapuys said placatingly. “I left London hurriedly, with only just enough money for my journey. But I do assure you, sirs, that my master, the Emperor, will be responsible, will pay all debts, reimburse any expenditure—if the King fails. As I think he will not. He, no more than I, realized the true state of affairs. But he will know, so soon as I am back in London.”
“What is that?” Sir Edward asked, cocking his head.
It was a voice; the loud, confident, carrying voice of an Englishwoman of rank, accustomed to issuing orders in spacious places and to having those orders obeyed.
“Fetch your master, fool. Don’t stand there arguing with me.”
The two knights and Chapuys ran to the archway from which the moat and the drawbridge were visible. The men who were preparing to lower it for Chapuys’ exit, stood staring across the moat’s width, at a woman on the farther side. She held a horse by the bridle.
Chapuys recognized her and turned so dizzy that he almost fell down. An answer to prayer, and he had not even prayed; he had simply thought that if he could wish one wish…And there she stood, the Dowager Countess of Willoughby, who had once been Maria de Salinas. One of the secret friends…
Sir Edmund went forward a few paces and before he could speak the voice bellowed,
“Are you in charge here? Order that bridge let down and let me in.”
“I can admit no one who does not carry a pass.”
“I have no pass. I have a lame horse. Am I to be benighted? In the snow?”
Chapuys said, “It is the Countess of Willoughby. Her daughter recently married the Duke of Suffolk.” He then turned away, back to the courtyard where his servants and the horses waited. “Lower away,” Sir Edmund said. The moment the moat was spanned, the Countess was on the bridge, her voluminous skirts bunched in one hand, the other tugging at the limping horse. Chapuys, waiting on the inner side to allow passage, gave her the mere, formal salutation that any well-bred man would give a lady in such circumstances. He bowed from the saddle, doffed his cap; but when she was dead level with him, he said, “Thank God you are here!” Then, followed by his servants, he clattered across and took road to London, just one hour ahead of the snow.
Filipez, as usual, had come out to see what was afoot. The Countess’s dark eyes, undimmed by the years, saw him. She left the horse, tremulous and with broken knees where he stood, and said to Filipez “Take me to her.”
Maria de Moreto sat by Katharine’s bed with a bowl of broth growing cool between her hands. She had said, “Just a sip, to please me,” and Katharine had said, “I would do anything to please you, Maria. But it sickened me this morning and the very smell of it sickens me now.” So there they were, quiet and waiting, when Filipez opened the door and said, “Your Grace, the Countess of Willoughby.”
The other Maria; the fortunate one. Maria de Salinas over whose dowry the Queen had taken such trouble—all wasted, for the Englishman was so infatuated that he would have taken the girl in her shift. And off she’d gone to a great house, two great houses, in the country, coming back to Court now and then, Lady Willoughby, more English than any native. She had sent gifts and messages at New Year and on the Queen’s name day. Until trouble came. She had made one visit to The More. After that nothing.
“You!” Maria de Moreto said in a voice that held everything, the old jealousy, the envy, the accusation of faithlessness. “Her Grace is asleep.” She made a silencing gesture.
Katharine was not asleep; she had closed her eyes to avoid any more pestering with the broth. Dr. de La Sa’s latest dose of drops had dulled the sharpest edge of the pain and she had lain neither sleeping nor waking, drifting, the Alhambra and Joanna, Ludlow and Arthur, Henry and Greenwich all one, all muddled. When, with a great effort, she opened her eyes and saw Maria de Salinas—the other Maria, the high-spirited one, she was no more real, for a moment, than the phantoms. But she was real; here in the room, the daylight dying, no candles yet, we must be sparing with candles; and a poor sulky fire. I was on my way…now I am called back. There is something different, an outdoor smell…
“It was good of you to come, Maria. I am glad to see you.” Even though your coming pulled me back. “How did you get in?”
“I shouted,” Maria de Salinas said simply. She had learned, so long ago, that if you shouted loudly enough and in the right tone of voice you got what you wanted that the ease with which she had gained entry had not surprised her. “I should have been here earlier, but my horse fell. I walked the last six miles.”
“Can you stay?”
“I shall stay until Your Grace is better.”
Dimly, aware of being dragged back, farther and farther into the pain, the need to think, Katharine remembered the old enmity between the two Marias.
“That will be good,” she said. “My other Maria has watched tirelessly and is worn out. You can relieve her.”
“I need no relief. Or at least…it would relieve me if Your Grace would take just a spoonful…”
The Countess looked into the bowl and then into Maria de Moreto’s face and her expression was eloquent: Is this the best that you can tempt her with?
“Could you take a little manchet bread, sopped in wine?”
“Maria, explain,” Katharine said.
“Her Grace has seen no wine for more than a year. As for manchet bread, we have forgotten what it looks like.” While you, uncaring, full-fleshed, not a wrinkle, not a grey hair, nothing but the sagging jowls to show that you are of our age, you have fed full every day! We have shared her hardships and her exile.
The Countess’s sharp eye had taken it all in; the shabby bed, the poor fire, the other Maria’s air of hopelessness and defeat. It was plain to her that there was some more shouting to be done.
She said, “If Your Grace will excuse me for a moment…”
“And a fine pair of rogues you are,” she said to the knights. “Guzzling and stuffing your own bellies while the poor Queen dies of neglect. Your fire halfway up the chimney and hers worse than a tinker’s. You will rue this. I will make it my business to see that you are properly punished.”
For a second time in an hour they tried to explain.
“So!” she shouted. “What are you drinking? Well water? I need wine for her.”
They admitted that they had a little, a very little wine; and she was welcome to it. But when she mentioned manchet bread they said, truthfully, that there was not a crumb of it in Kimbolton.
“Get somebody to make a batch then. And the linen on her bed is a disgrace.”
“She brought very little,” Sir Edward said, not without spite. “Most of her stuff was looted from Buckden.” And who was responsible for that? The man who was now this termagant’s son-in-law. “And I would inform your ladyship that Sir Edmund and I have made repeated requests…”
“Words on paper. Filed away and forgotten. Did either one of you think of going to London and asking? Well, I am asking now; I want fresh linen and some logs that will burn, and bread made of flour sieved three times and mixed with milk. And do not tell me that you have no milk. I heard a cow. Are you keeping it for a pet?”
It was not until she had gone, carrying the jug of wine snatched from their own table that they remembered that she had no right here at all.
“You should have come sooner, my Lady Willoughby,” Maria said in a soft, very vicious voice.
“So it seems. And so I should, had I known half. It was not until I was at Bedford to attend a wedding that I heard that she was sick, not likely to live long. Even so I had no idea that she was living in such discomfort and squalor.”
The words cut Maria de Moreto who had tried so hard and managed so well on so little.
“Things have changed since you last saw her—at The More, was it not? Three years ago.”
The Countess was not prepared to explain to the other Maria what lay behind this seeming neglect and indifference. When the Queen rallied—as she must, now that things were taken in hand—she would explain to her, and she would understand that some causes were best served in secret. She said:
“You know full well that after The More visitors were not allowed. But you should have known that if I had been informed of how things were here I should have sent such a plenitude of what was needed that even when those vultures over there had eaten their fill, she would have had enough. Why did you never think to let me know?”
“How could I? I have shared her imprisonment.”
“People go in and out every day,” the Countess said scornfully. “Any woman with a tongue in her head can find some man to carry a message for her, if she has a mind to.”
“And why,” Maria de Moreto asked, “should I think of appealing to you? You who married your daughter to the lout who robbed us at Buckden?”
That bolt found its mark and the fact that it was fired in ignorance did not lessen the blow. Perhaps the poor Queen had also looked upon what had been a shrewdly diplomatic move as a sign of disloyalty. Yet there had been no shadow of reproach in her greeting.
“What he did at Buckden cannot be blamed on me; and he is already sorry for it. He will be sorrier still, that I promise you,” Lady Willoughby said. “Now what you need is a sound night’s sleep. Go to your bed and leave watching to me.”
“I have one mistress here and it is not you. I shall watch as I have done.”
“As you wish. I see no sense in it.”
It was an echo of the past when they had bickered continuously and energetically, mostly about trivialities. Both looked back for a moment and thought, mistakenly, that the sun had always shone then and the future had seemed long, of promise. What the future had brought to them was very different and had worked superficial changes on them both, but in a way, obscure and perverse, the discovery that something, even an enmity, had survived intact, rejuvenated them.
Katharine, under the influence of Dr. de La Sa’s soothing drops, slept in fresh linen. Each Maria took a chair, one on each side of the bright fire. Presently Maria de Moreto’s tired mind accepted the lessening of responsibility, communicated the fact that another person shared it to her will, and from her will the message passed to her exhausted body. She slumped in her chair, slipping downwards and forwards until her head sagged against the chair’s unaccommodating back and her body seemed about to slip over the edge of the seat.
Maria Willoughby rose to her feet and moving softly, put a stool under the other Maria’s legs, waited, and then, assured that Maria de Moreto had fallen into a sleep from which she would not easily be awakened, folded a shawl and wadded it between her head and the back of the chair. Nothing but her sense of good management activated her and when Maria de Moreto, made more comfortable, sinking deeper into the restorative sleep, began to snore, she thought: Yes, I remember; you always slept like a pig! She mended the fire and sat down again.
Katharine woke to pain. The syrup, in doses large enough to induce sleep brought dreams too, very strange dreams, quite unlike those in ordinary sleep which, however unlikely and fantastic, had some relationship to this world and could be described. Each time as the pain lessened and she drifted into sleep and crossed the boundary of the other world her last conscious thought was that she was dying, very easily and with a sense of happy anticipation. Wakened by pain she thought, still here and still in misery, and then lay, adjusting herself to this world again.
Tonight the adjustment took longer than usual because when she opened her eyes the room seemed so bright, the bed felt different, and she could not see Maria. Only the pain was familiar and for a moment she knew real panic; not here and still in pain; was pain to be her companion through all eternity? Then her confused mind cleared and she saw that the unusual quality of the light was due to the fact that the fire burned brightly and that a real candle had replaced the dim rushlight; that Maria de Moreto was asleep in a chair and the other Maria sat bolt upright on the other side of the hearth. She said softly, “Maria.”
“I am her, Your Grace. Maria de Salinas.”
“I know. I think God sent you. To do me a service I could not ask of anyone else around me.”
And small wonder; handless, spiritless lot, letting things drift into such a state. God sent me to save you. You are just my age, fifty, nothing! Look at me! I dragged a lame horse six miles—and, at the end of a long ride, I ground Sir Edward and Sir Edmund into the dust where they belong. I have strength, I have power, I will save you yet…
“Could you prop me a little,” Katharine asked. “Sometimes a change of position eases my pain.”
This Maria’s arms, in the tight sleeves of her riding habit, were strong and well-padded, lifting effortlessly.
“Is that better, Your Grace?”
“Yes. Yes, thank you.”
“Wine helps,” Maria de Salinas said. “I had an abscess once, in my breast. Wine deadened the worst pain. Will Your Grace take a sip or two?”
“Dear girl, we have no wine here.”
“We have now. You took a little. And kept it down.” That had been a triumph and it had encouraged the Countess. Tomorrow, if she knew her way about, there would be a bowl of good veal broth. Wherever there was a cow in milk there was a calf not far away. Of course the gluttonous scoundrels on the other side might have eaten it, in which case they could send out into the countryside to find another. Inch by inch, with a sip of wine, a spoonful of good broth, a slice of manchet bread, a slice of boiled fowl, with comfort and cosseting and with hope, she would drag Katharine back from the brink of the grave. Only fifty, she thought again, just my age and ailing nothing that anyone can put a name to…but I have always eaten well!
Katharine took the wine. There was a slight, too slight to be acknowledged, link between this bright, warm world in the heart of the night and the world into which she slipped away when the dose worked. The quality of the light, Maria de Salinas, suddenly back and moving about so cautiously, not to wake the other Maria. And the wine running down, easing the pain a little. Once she had seen a man, dead drunk, have his arm cut off…This was a halfway world, not completely real, not completely fantasy, a stopping place on the road to death. She must make the best use of it.
“Come and sit near me, Maria. There is so much to say…”
“I have something of importance to say to Your Grace,” Lady Willoughby said earnestly.
“About my daughter? Do you see her?”
“No. Of late I have avoided London, and the Court. It is about that that I wish to speak. She…” she jerked her head at the sleeping Maria, “considers me disloyal because I allowed my daughter, Catharine, to marry the Duke of Suffolk; and because I have not embroiled myself by asking permission to visit. Visits have not been allowed and to ask would be to draw attention to myself. Some causes are best served in the dark.”
“Until I was known to be dying no visitors, not even the Emperor’s Ambassador was allowed to see me. That you should be here now is miraculous. You must not mind Maria; hardship has soured her. And if your Catharine wished to marry the Duke…” Maria de Salinas’ own marriage had been a love match, she would probably have sympathy with her daughter’s choice.
“She wanted to be a Duchess,” the Countess said cryptically. “And, being so young, she was flattered by the attentions of so experienced a womanizer. But she did not love him and that gave strength to my hand. I talked to her very straightly.” Maria’s voice rose a little as she remembered that straight talk and its result. Katharine made a warning sound and looked at the sleeper. In an incongruous whisper the tale went on. “I said to her, ‘Do you wish, in ten years’ time to be put away as his second wife was, or to live in loneliness and neglect as his third did—and she once a Queen?’ The child said, ‘No,’ of course. ‘Then,’ I said, ‘you must establish supremacy over him now; what is lightly come by is lightly regarded and what is lightly regarded is easily discarded.’ She is a dutiful girl, well brought up and she heeds me. She asked what she must do, and I told her: ‘You must say to him,’ I said, ‘and hold to it, that you will not marry him unless he agrees to your mother’s condition.’ And that she did. Perhaps it will surprise Your Grace to know what that condition was. It was,”—the voice hardened again—“that when the time came for the people to rise in your cause, against the King, my lord of Suffolk would not take arms against you. That promise I extracted from one of the King’s closest friends and one of his best soldiers! I have not been idle!”
And Suffolk had dared to call her a traitor! What a muddled, corrupt, horrible, world! Who would not be glad to be done with it?
“There must be no rising, Maria. I repudiated that idea years ago. I have instructed Mary to repudiate it when I am dead.”
“There is no other way to right the ills of this country, Your Grace. You have been locked away so long you have no knowledge of what is going on in the world. Things go from bad to worse.”
“Civil war would not improve them.”
