“I cannot be your mistress,” I say simply. “I would rather die than dishonor my name. I cannot bring that shame on my family.” I pause. I am anxious not to be too discouraging. “Whatever I might wish in my heart,” I say very softly.
“But you do want me?” he asks boyishly, and I let him see the warmth in my face.
“Ah,” I say. “I should not tell you…”
He waits.
“I should not tell you how much.”
I see, swiftly hidden, the gleam of triumph. He thinks he will have me.
“Then you will come?”
“No.”
“Then must I go? Must I leave you? May I not…” He leans his face towards me and I raise mine. His kiss is as gentle as the brush of a feather on my soft mouth. My lips part slightly and I can feel him tremble like a horse held on a tight rein. “Lady Elizabeth…I swear it…I have to…”
I take a step back in this delicious dance. “If only…” I say.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” he says abruptly. “In the evening. At sunset. Will you meet me where I first saw you? Under the oak tree? Will you meet me there? I would say good-bye before I go north. I have to see you again, Elizabeth. If nothing more. I have to.”
I nod in silence and watch him turn on his heel and stride back to the house. I see him go round to the stable yard and then moments later his horse thunders down the track with his two pages spurring their horses to keep pace with him. I watch him out of sight, and then I cross the little footbridge over the river and find the thread around the ash tree. Thoughtfully, I wind in the thread by another length and I tie it up. Then I walk home.
At dinner the next day there is something of a family conference. The king has sent a letter to say that his friend Sir William Hastings will support my claim to my house and land at Brad-gate, and I can be assured that I will be restored to my fortune. My father is pleased; but all my brothers—Anthony, John, Richard, Edward, and Lionel—are united in suspicion of the king, with the alert pride of boys.
“He is a notorious lecher. He is bound to demand to meet her; he is bound to summon her to court,” John pronounces.
“He did not return her lands for charity. He will want payment,” Richard agrees. “There is not a woman at court whom he has not bedded. Why would he not try for Elizabeth?”
“A Lancastrian,” says Edward, as if that is enough to ensure our enmity, and Lionel nods sagely.
“A hard man to refuse,” Anthony says thoughtfully. He is far more worldly than John; he has traveled all around Christendom and studied with great thinkers, and my parents always listen to him. “I would think, Elizabeth, that you might feel compromised. I would fear that you would feel under obligation to him.”
I shrug. “Not at all. I have nothing more but my own again. I asked the king for justice and I received it as I should, as any supplicant should, with right on their side.”
“Nonetheless, if he sends, you will not go to court,” my father says. “This is a man who has worked his way through half the wives of London and is now working his way through the Lancastrian ladies too. This is not a holy man like the blessed King Henry.”
Nor soft in the head like blessed King Henry, I think, but aloud I say, “Of course, Father, whatever you command.”
He looks sharply at me, suspicious of this easy obedience. “You don’t think you owe him your favor? Your smiles? Worse?”
I shrug. “I asked him for a king’s justice, not for a favor,” I say. “I am not a manservant whose service can be bought or a peasant who can be sworn to be a liege man. I am a lady of good family. I have my own loyalties and obligations that I consider and honor. They are not his. They are not at the beck and call of any man.”
My mother drops her head to hide her smile. She is the daughter of Burgundy, the descendant of Melusina the water goddess. She has never thought herself obliged to do anything in her life; she would never think that her daughter was obliged to anything.
My father glances from her to me and shrugs his shoulders as if to concede the inveterate independence of willful women. He nods to my brother John and says, “I am riding over to Old Stratford village. Will you come with me?” And the two of them leave together.
“You want to go to court? Do you admire him? Despite everything?” Anthony asks me quietly as my other brothers scatter from the room.
“He is King of England,” I say. “Of course I will go if he invites me. What else?”
“Perhaps because Father just said you were not to go, and I advised you against it.”
I shrug. “So I heard.”
“How else can a poor widow make her way in a wicked world?” he teases me.
“Indeed.”
“You would be a fool to sell yourself cheap,” he warns me.
I look at him from under my eyelashes. “I don’t propose to sell myself at all,” I say. “I am not a yard of ribbon. I am not a leg of ham. I am not for sale to anyone.”
At sunset I am waiting for him under the oak tree, hidden in the green shadows. I am relieved to hear the sound of only one horse on the road. If he had come with a guard, I would have slipped back to my home, fearing for my own safety. However tender he may be in the confines of my father’s garden, I don’t forget that he is the so-called king of the Yorkist army and that they rape women and murder their husbands as a matter of course. He will have hardened himself to seeing things that no one should witness; he will have done things himself which are the darkest of sins. I cannot trust him. However heart-stopping his smile and however honest his eyes, however much I think of him as a boy fired to greatness by his own ambition, I cannot trust him. These are not chivalrous times; these are not the times of knights in the dark forest and beautiful ladies in moonlit fountains and promises of love that will be ballads, sung forever.
But he looks like a knight in a dark forest when he pulls up his horse and jumps down in one easy movement. “You came!” he says.
“I cannot stay long.”
“I am so glad you came at all.” He laughs at himself almost in bewilderment. “I have been like a boy today—couldn’t sleep last night for thinking of you, and all day I have wondered if you would come at all, and then you came!”
He loops the reins of his horse over a branch of the tree and slides his hand around my waist. “Sweet lady,” he says into my ear. “Be kind to me. Will you take off your headdress and let down your hair?”
It is the last thing I thought he would demand of me, and I am shocked into instant consent. My hand goes to my headdress ribbons at once.
“I know. I know. I think you are driving me mad. All I have been able to think about all day is whether you would let me take down your hair.”
In answer I untie the tight bindings of my tall conical headdress and lift it off. I put it carefully on the ground and turn to him. Gently as any maid-in-waiting, he puts his hand to my head and pulls out the ivory pins, tucking each into the pocket of his doublet. I can feel the silky kiss of my thick hair tumbling down as the fair cascade of it falls over my face. I shake my head and toss it back like a thick golden mane, and I hear his groan of desire.
He unties his cloak and swings it on the ground at my feet. “Sit with me!” he commands, though he means “Lie with me” and we both know it.
I sit cautiously on the edge of his cape, my knees drawn up, my arms wrapped around them, my fine silk gown draped around me. He strokes my loosened hair and his fingers penetrate deeper and deeper until he is caressing my neck, and then he turns my face towards his for a kiss.
Gently he bears down on me so I am beneath him. Then I feel his hand pulling at my gown, pulling it up, and I put both hands on his chest and gently push him away.
“Elizabeth,” he breathes.
“I told you no,” I say steadily. “I meant it.”
“You met me!”
“You asked me. Shall I go now?”
“No! Stay! Stay! Don’t run away, I swear I will not…just let me kiss you ag
ain.”
My own heart is thudding so loud and I am so ready for his touch that I start to think I could lie with him, just once, I could allow myself this pleasure just once…but then I move away and say, “No. No. No.”
“Yes,” he says more strongly. “No harm shall come to you, I swear it. You shall come to court. Anything you ask. Dear God, Elizabeth, let me have you, I am desperate for you. From the moment I saw you here…”
His weight is on me; he is pushing me down. I turn my head away but his mouth is on my neck, my breast; I am panting with desire, and then I feel, unexpectedly, a sudden rush of anger at the realization that he is no longer embracing me but forcing me, holding me down as if I were some slut behind a haystack. He is pulling up my gown as if I were a whore; he is pushing his knee between my legs as if I have consented, and my temper makes me so furiously strong that I thrust him away again and then, on his thick leather belt, I feel the hilt of his dagger.
He has my gown pulled up, and he is fumbling with his jerkin, his hose; in a moment it will be too late for complaints. I draw his dagger out of the scabbard. At the hiss of the metal, he rears back to his knees in shock, and I wriggle away from him and spring up, with the dagger unsheathed, the blade bright and wicked in the last rays of the sun.
He is on his feet in a moment, weaving and alert, a fighter. “Do you draw a blade on your king?” he spits. “Do you know treason when you do it, madam?”
“I draw a blade on me, on myself,” I say quickly. I hold the sharp point to my throat and I see his eyes narrow. “I swear, if you come one step closer, if you come one inch closer, I will cut my throat before you and bleed to death here on the ground where you would have dishonored me.”
“Playacting!”
“No. This is not a game to me, Your Grace. I cannot be your mistress. I first came to you for justice, and then I came tonight for love, and I am a fool to do so and I beg your pardon for my folly. But I too can’t sleep, and I too can think of nothing but you, and I too could only wonder and wonder if you would come. But even so…even so, you should not—”
“I could have that knife off you in a moment,” he threatens.
“You forget I have five brothers. I have played with swords and daggers since I was a child. I will cut my throat before you reach me.”
“You never would. You are a woman with no more than a woman’s courage.”
“Try me. Try me. You don’t know what my courage is. You may regret what happens.”
He hesitates for a second, his own heart hammering in a dangerous mix of temper and lust, and then he masters himself, raises his hands in the gesture of surrender, and steps back. “You win,” he says. “You win, madam. And you may keep the dagger as a spoil of victory. Here—” He unbuckles the scabbard and throws it down. “Take the damned scabbard too, why don’t you?”
The precious stones and the enameled gold sparkle in the twilight. Never taking my eyes from him, I kneel and pick it up.
“I shall walk with you to your home,” he says. “I shall see you safely to your door.”
I shake my head. “No. I can’t be seen with you. No one must know that we have met in secret. I would be shamed.”
For a moment I think he will argue, but he bows his head. “You walk ahead then,” he says. “And I will follow behind you like a page, like your servant, until I see you safe to your gate. You can revel in your triumph in having me follow you like a dog. Since you treat me like a fool, I shall serve you like a fool; and you can enjoy it.”
There is no speaking against his anger, so I nod and I turn to walk before him, as he said I should. We walk in silence. I can hear the rustle of his cloak behind me. When we get to the end of the wood and we can be seen from the house, I pause and turn to him. “I will be safe from here,” I say. “I must beg you to forgive me for my folly.”
“I must beg you to forgive me for my force,” he says stiffly. “I am, perhaps, too accustomed to getting my own way. But I must say, I have never been refused at the point of a knife before. My own knife at that.”
I turn it round and offer him the hilt. “Will you have it back, Your Grace?”
He shakes his head. “Keep it to remember me by. It will be my only gift to you. A farewell gift.”
“Will I not see you again?”
“Never,” he says simply, and bowing slightly walks away.
“Your Grace!” I call, and he turns and pauses.
“I would not part with you on bad terms,” I say feebly. “I hope that you can forgive me.”
“You have made a fool of me,” he says, his voice icy. “You may congratulate yourself on being the first woman to do that. But you will be the last. And you will never make a fool of me again.”
I sink down into a curtsey, and I hear him turn and the swish of his cape on the bushes on either side of the path. I wait till I cannot hear him at all, and then I rise up to go home.
There is a part of me, young woman that I am, that wants to run inside and fling myself on my bed and cry myself to sleep. But I don’t do that. I am not one of my sisters, who laugh easily and cry easily. They are girls to whom things happen, and they take it hard. But I bear myself as more than a silly girl. I am the daughter of a water goddess. I am a woman with water in her veins and power in her breeding. I am a woman who makes things happen, and I am not defeated yet. I am not defeated by a boy with a newly won crown, and no man will ever walk away from me certain that he won’t walk back.
So I don’t go home just yet. I take the path to the footbridge over the river to where the ash tree is girdled with my mother’s thread, and I take another loop in the thread and tie it tightly, and only then do I walk home, brooding in the thin moonlight.
Then I wait. Every evening for twenty-two evenings I walk down to the river and pull in the thread like a patient fisherwoman. One day I feel it snag, and the line goes tight as the object on the end, whatever it is, is freed from the reeds at the water’s edge. I tug gently, as if I were reeling in a catch, and then I feel the line go slack and there is a little splash as something small but heavy falls deeper, rolls over in the current, and then lies still among the pebbles on the streambed.
I walk home. My mother is waiting for me by the carp lake, gazing down at her own reflection inverted in the water, silver in the grayness of the dusk. Her image looks like a long silver fish rippling in the lake, or a swimming woman. The sky behind her is barred with cloud, like white feathers on pale silk. The moon is rising, a waning moon now. The water is running high tonight, lapping at the little pier. When I stand beside her and look down into the water, you would think we were both rising from the water, like the spirits of the lake.
“You do it every evening?” she asks me. “Pull the line?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s good. Has he sent you any token? Any word?”
“I don’t expect anything. He said he would never see me again.”
She sighs. “Oh well.”
We walk back towards the house. “They say he is mustering troops at Northampton,” she says. “King Henry is gathering his forces in Northumberland and will march south on London. The queen will join him with a French army landed at Hull. If King Henry wins, then it will not matter what Edward says or thinks, for he will be dead, and the true king restored.”
My hand flies out to catch her sleeve in instant contradiction. Swift as a striking viper, my mother snatches my fingers. “What’s this? You can’t bear to hear of his defeat?”
“Don’t say it. Don’t say that.”
“Don’t say what?”
“I can’t bear to think of him defeated. I can’t bear to think of him dead. He asked me to lie with him as a soldier facing death.”
She gives a sharp laugh. “Course he did. What man going off to war has ever resisted the opportunity to make the most of it?”
“Well, I refused. And if he doesn’t come back, I shall regret that refusal for the rest of my life. I regret it now. I will regret it
forever.”
“Why regret?” she taunts me. “You have your land restored either way. Either you get it back by order of King Edward, or he is dead and King Henry is king and he will restore your land to you. He is our king, of the true House of Lancaster. I would have thought we would wish him victory, and death to the usurper Edward.”
“Don’t say it,” I repeat. “Don’t ill-wish him.”
“Never mind what I say, you stop and think,” she counsels me harshly. “You’re a girl from the House of Lancaster. You cannot fall in love with the heir to the House of York unless he is king victorious, and there is some profit in love for you. These are hard days we are living in. Death is our companion, our familiar. You need not think you can keep Him at arm’s length. You will find He bears you close company. He has taken your husband; hear me: He will take your father and your brothers and your sons.”
I put out both hands to stop her. “Hush, hush. You sound like Melusina warning her house of the death of the men.”
“I do warn you,” she says grimly. “You make me a Melusina when you walk about smiling as if life is easy, thinking you can dally with a usurper. You were not born in an untroubled time. You will live your life in a country divided. You will have to make your way through blood, and you will know loss.”
“Nothing good for me?” I demand through gritted teeth. “Do you, as a loving mother, foresee nothing good at all for your daughter? There is no point cursing me, for I am ready to weep already.”
She stops, and the hard face of the seer dissolves into the warmth of the mother whom I love. “I think you will have him, if that is what you want,” she says.
“More than life itself.”
She laughs at me but her face is gentle. “Ah, don’t say that, child. Nothing in the world matters more than life. You have a long road to walk and a lot of lessons to learn if you don’t know that.”
I shrug and take her arm and, walking in step, we turn for home.
“When the battle is over, whoever wins, your sisters must go to court,” my mother says. She is always planning. “They can stay with the Bourchiers, or the Vaughns. They should have gone months ago, but I could not bear the thought of them far from home and the country in uproar, and never knowing what might happen next, and never able to get news. But when this battle is over, perhaps life will be as it was, only under York instead of Lancaster, and the girls can go to our cousins for their education.”