Bella Court, Greenwich, Summer 1438
Bella Court, Greenwich, Summer
I CANNOT FORGET him, and he has stolen all the peace I had in winter time.
I send out spies to Wales and to Barking Abbey, to keep watch for him, just as I keep watch for him every night in my dreams. It is Margery Jourdemayne who brings the answer to the mystery of Owen’s vanishing, coming downriver in a wherry from Westminster in midsummer, bringing perfumes and oils for my bathhouse.
‘I have no vervain this season. I have sold it all to one of the Beaufort men at Windsor,’ she says, unpacking her basket in the warm, sweet-smelling room.
‘My,’ she says, admiring the pipes that bring the hot water to the wooden bath, ‘this is like magic.’
‘The fire burns night and day while I am in residence,’ I tell her. ‘My orders are that if I want a hot bath at midnight the water must be ready.’
She nods. ‘If I was a duchess, that’s what I’d have!
Now – you’ll want to hear this. I have no vervain because my customer has a guest who was sick with gaol fever.
I said I needed to know his constitution – was he fair or dark, short or tall?
He said he was a tall red-headed Welshman.
’ She laughs as if this is comical. ‘Who d’you think that might be? ’
I put a hand out to the seasoned wood bath to steady myself. ‘Where?’ I ask, through my teeth. ‘Where is this patient?’
‘Windsor Castle.’
I am astounded. ‘For God’s sake, how does a man break out of the vilest jail in Europe and then go for nursing to Windsor Castle? We can’t arrest him at Windsor Castle! He’s under the king’s peace! Unless he’s in the cells?’ A sudden hope strikes me. ‘Did they recapture him?’
She shakes her head. ‘He’s not in the cells. He’s in the infirmary,’ she tells me. ‘And well-nursed with nothing but the best.’
I look at her reproachfully. ‘And you sent him vervain?’
‘He has gaol fever,’ she says. ‘I can’t let him die?’
I GO AT once to my husband. He is in the library in the scholars’ tower, seated in one of the cushioned alcoves, hedged in with big leatherbound volumes of manuscripts on divination.
He and Abbot Wheathampstead are reading a new translation of a Greek book sent to him from his agent in Rome.
At the long table, Roger Bolingbroke copies a formula for an experiment from a black-bound manuscript.
Humphrey is happy here, at his studies in the silence of the library, no noise but someone muttering over a translation.
If England were at peace, he would be content to pursue learning, not his enemies.
Actually, he has no enemies – they are all mine.
‘I am sorry to disturb you, my lord.’
He looks up, hoping I have come with good news, hoping I am sweet-tempered. His face falls when I tell him that it is Owen Tudor again.
‘I cannot arrest him in the bounds of Windsor Castle; he’s under the king’s peace,’ he says at once. ‘You’ll have to go to the king, Eleanor. He’d listen to you before anyone else. He obeys you.’
‘The king’s becoming a man,’ Roger Bolingbroke says thoughtfully, ‘and all that Her Grace has done to hold him cannot keep him in childhood. He is of age; already, he has interrupted the privy council, overruled you, and freed your known enemy. We all thought he’d never grow beyond simplicity; but he’s thinking for himself and acting like a king.
He’s been a true leader in his defence of Owen Tudor.
Her Grace shouldn’t speak against Tudor.
She should not reveal her enmity.’ He hesitates.
‘I think your enmity should always be hidden,’ he says tactfully.
‘Then you’ll have to tell the king,’ I say to my husband. ‘Tell him Owen must go back to Newgate as soon as he is cured.’
‘Not I!’ Humphrey has never defied me before. ‘The king sus-pects me of hating Tudor already. I don’t want to be associated with him.’
‘Then what can we do?’ I demand.
‘Nothing openly,’ Bolingbroke advises. ‘Nothing yet.’