Bella Court, Greenwich, Summer 1438
Bella Court, Greenwich, Spring
MY HUSBAND AND I meet again at our home at Greenwich. He comes without Owen Tudor’s dead body slung over a plough horse behind him, just as I come from Barking without Tudor’s sons. Owen was glimpsed riding out of Newgate, but outside the city walls, he seems to have vanished into air.
‘You did ask at every inn?’ I demand of Humphrey.
‘I asked all the way to Daventry. But I couldn’t follow him into Wales – no English man could, without a full army.
They’d raise the flag of Owen Glendower for him.
We have to be glad that he’s out of England, Eleanor.
We’ve dealt him shame and disgrace and parted him from the king. That’s enough for us.’
It is not enough for me. ‘Of course,’ I say equably. ‘We cannot waste your valuable time on such a petty criminal. You’ve been wonderful; I am amazed he escaped you.’
He flushes with pleasure at praise; I kiss his cold mouth.
‘You were born to be king,’ I whisper. ‘I long to see you on the throne.’
As soon as I can get away from my husband, I go to the library on the ground floor of the scholars’ tower.
Roger Bolingbroke is there with a visiting student of Arabic texts.
I wait till they have finished looking at a new manuscript, and then I invite Dr Bolingbroke to climb the winding stair to the divining room above.
I ask him to cast Owen’s horoscope. I hope to see where he is hiding and who is hiding him, and I hope to see his death and the madwoman who mourns him.
It is long complex work to cast a horoscope, and since Owen is a common man, there are many things – the time of his birth, even the exact day – that cannot be known. Roger Bolingbroke works on it for weeks; but he cannot tell me where Owen Tudor is.
‘He has disappeared,’ he says. ‘I cannot see him with my arts, and your husband could not find him with his guard. Can you let him disappear? We know he was sick in the prison; he may even be dead.’
‘And a madwoman who grieves for him and places candles around his dead body?’ I ask.
He looks at me with such deep pity that I think I am the mourning madwoman and he has seen me in a vision. ‘I did not see her either,’ he says gently. ‘Can Your Grace let him become invisible to your memory as he is to my calculations? Can you forget him?’