Peel Castle, Isle of Man, Spring 1448
Peel Castle, Isle of Man, Spring
ONE MARCH, THE second March, as we chip the tallow from the shutter frame and open the shutter during the day; there is a change of guards again, and a new Mary starts work on Lady Day.
The new soldiers and household servants bring letters for Glegg from the mainland, and the day after, he bangs on my door, scrutinises me through the peephole as I sit at the fireside, and comes in.
‘Not reading?’ he says, looking at the unopened missal on my table.
‘No,’ I say shortly.
‘I have to tell you grave news,’ he says.
I lift my head to look at him. For a moment, I wonder if the little king is dead as Raum promised, and my husband King of England, and I am queen.
I don’t hope; I feel nothing more than a detached interest. I will never feel anything ever again but this cold awareness of my own darkness.
It’s not penitence for my sinful nature.
I am no more a sinner than a lion at Le Quesnoy is a sinner when he tears the head off a lamb thrown into his cage.
That is his nature. No one blames him for it, but no one is fool enough to set him free.
Darkness is my nature, and they were all fools who set me free.
Now I am caged with my own darkness, and I know it.
There is a deep satisfaction in that. It is a rare woman who can face her own darkness; but I know mine.
‘D’you want to know the news?’ Glegg says a little impatiently.
‘Is it what was foretold?’
He crosses himself. ‘I don’t know what was foretold. I only know what has happened. I am sorry to tell you that your former husband is dead.’
‘The Duke of Gloucester?’
‘Do you have any other former husbands?’
I promised myself to Owen Tudor. I loved Roger Bolingbroke.
I lay with Raum; I embraced a dead man. ‘How did he die?’
He clears his throat and I know at once that he is going to lie to me.
Glegg is an honest man; he touches his pocket.
Without a doubt, he has a letter in there, a report.
He cannot bring himself to tell me what it says.
I will have to make him show me the letter, without frightening him by demanding it from his pocket.
‘He died peacefully,’ he tells me – as if I care.
‘He was ill?’
‘Apparently so. They found him in his bed. He had taken to his bed for a few days. He was buried in St Albans Priory, in his vault.’
I cross myself and close my eyes as if in prayer.
‘This is a great shock,’ I say quietly. But I am thinking: if he died in disgrace, if anything was proved against him, then perhaps he will take all the blame in death that he should have taken in life.
Perhaps someone will say that all this was his doing and I am guilty of nothing but wifely obedience.
‘He was buried in honour?’ I ask, widening my eyes. ‘The king attended? The court is in mourning? They are sending me mourning sables?’
Again, he touches his pocket; again, I see the flinch of an honest man forced to lie. ‘Not exactly,’ he says.
I rise to my feet; I put my fingertips to my eyelashes as if to wipe away tears. ‘Whatever he has done, whatever he did, he was my husband,’ I say sadly. ‘May I pray for his soul?’
‘Of course,’ he says awkwardly. ‘If you want to. But you will find the chapel as usual. The court is not in mourning; we are not in mourning.’
I hide the bright flare of curiosity in my eyes by looking quickly down. ‘Why not?’ I ask simply.
He shifts from one foot to another; his hand creeps to his pocket.
I look him full in the face. ‘Captain Glegg, I have just learned that I am widowed; please tell me honestly: in what condition did my husband die?’
At last, he slides the letter from his pocket. ‘You better read this,’ he says.
I unfold the single page. It is written from the priory at St Albans by one of Beaufort’s clerks.
It is addressed to Thomas Stanley. It tells me everything: that the long battle between my husband and his uncle is over – and the cardinal has won.
Humphrey was arrested for treason when he took to his bed and was found dead next morning.
If he had the sense to keep me at his side, it would have been the reverse!
The cardinal arrested for treason and dying in his bed.
And we would have said it was peaceful in his case too.
If I were not keeping my face grave and sweet and still, I would laugh out loud.
The clerk writes that the Stanleys must inform Eleanor Cobham of the death of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester.
He doesn’t say why I must be told – since I am neither wife nor widow by their own ruling – and I do not blame him for avoiding the difficult question.
He says that it is Cardinal Beaufort’s will that Eleanor Cobham be told that the duke was arrested for treason, under suspicion of raising a rebellion in Wales against his nephew the king and the new queen, his wife.
I had not known they had got the poor little weakling to the altar. I pity his wife. I raise my eyes to Glegg. ‘The king is married?’ I ask.
He looks awkward. ‘The Princess of Anjou,’ he says. ‘The year before last.’
‘Oh, her,’ I say dismissively, and go on reading. The clerk writes that the false duke – that is what they call him – was to be accused at a parliament specially called for his condemnation, at Bury St Edmunds, when Humphrey took to his bed.
‘Of course he did,’ I remark.
Without me to tell him what to do or to pull him out of the warm sheets to defy his enemies, he conveniently died in bed, of grief – just like Canon Southwell died of grief the night before his execution.
Of course, Humphrey might have had the courage to kill himself rather than face his enemies, or someone could have given him poison and told him it was a physic, or someone could have held a pillow over his sleeping face.
Either way, he will never inherit the throne now.
There will be no rebellion for me and no rescue.
But, knowing Humphrey, I doubt that there ever was any rebellion at all. I am the second wife he has failed to rescue and the second that he has denied. I doubt there was even a rebellion outside of the king’s nightmares and Cardinal Beaufort’s vivid imagination.
I fold the letter and hand it back to John Glegg. ‘So now I am a widow,’ I say. ‘And quite powerless, like Queen Joan who was a widow accused of witchcraft and released with honour. D’you think they will release me?’
He tucks the letter back in his pocket, and he puts his hand to his chest as if he would shield his heart from pity. ‘I don’t know, Your Grace,’ he says, using my title for the first time ever. ‘It’s not up to me.’
I DEMAND A white gown of mourning for my husband, and I wear it to attend a memorial mass, which I insist is held for him.
I am not ordered to squint from the leper’s seat; I take my place before the altar in the best position.
No one else attends, but I do not care. My guards wait at the doorway of the chapel and then follow me back to the tower.
As I go towards the outer door I see a black hound seated in the doorway, ears pricked for my footstep, as if he is my loyal dog, waiting for me. I say: ‘You can come in,’ and he trots behind me and stretches out before the fire.
When I go to bed, he sleeps on the threshold of my door, and when the guards open the spyhole to stare at me, he lifts his head and growls softly, as if to warn them to come no closer. When they bring my food I feed him from my own plate, and I set a bowl of water for him to lap.
He follows me to Prime. They allow him into the chapel at my heels; he waits at the chancel steps when I confess in a whisper about nothings.
When I walk to the northern point of the island, he goes ahead of me, sniffing for rabbits and barking at the seagulls that the wind flings over our heads.
He leads the way down to the shore but gallops above the line of sea wrack – he shares my fear of the sea.
I have no name for him but I never need to call him: he follows me wherever I go, his warm head is always under my hand. When we get back from our walk, the guard opens my chamber door for me.
‘Let the dog come in,’ I tell him.
He looks down the stairs; he looks at the guard on the bottom door.
The man shakes his head. ‘There’s no dog here,’ he says.