The Tudor Rose by Margaret Campbell Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

and now some nameless terror was being conjured up before him. She held him tightly to her, his head against her heart. “God send you good keeping,” she prayed, the tears raining down her face. Then, cupping his troubled face in both her beautiful jewelled hands, she bent to kiss him with prophetic passion. “Kiss me before we part, my sweet son, for God knows when we two shall kiss together again!”

    And because she wept Richard wept too, and they clung together so that the gentle Abbot had perforce to part them. The Queen turned away, covering her eyes with a dramatic gesture and leaving the boy sobbing alone in the midst of them. It was one of those devastating scenes which the Woodville Queen seemed almost involuntarily to create.

    After a moment or two the Archbishop of Canterbury cleared his throat. “Your uncle is waiting in the Painted Gallery to welcome your Grace with all kindness,” he told Richard, and at the gently spoken words the boy straightened himself. Uncle Gloucester, like his father, was a soldier and would stand for no womanish tears. His sister watched them go down the long hall to the door together, the prelate with an arm about the young Duke's shoulder so that his splendidly embroidered vestments seemed to be covering him like a protective wing.

    And suddenly all the Queen's foreboding sprang to life in Elizabeth's heart. She would have given anything to hold him back—done anything to keep him. Seeing how bravely he was trying to play the man, she wanted desperately to say something to comfort him, to tell him how dearly she loved him. But no adequate words came to her. It was as if, surfeited with the prodigality of her mother's emotion, all expression of her own were damned. “Don't forget the lions, Dickon!” she called out cheerfully as he passed her.

    He did not answer her, and she could have bitten her tongue for producing such an inanity. The great oak door at the end of the room was thrown open. A shaft of sunlight from outside shone all about her small brother, glinting on his red-gold hair and making a charming silhouette of his slender figure in its sad black velvet. And in the doorway he stopped, disengaging himself courteously from the Archbishop's protective arm. And to her great joy he turned and smiled at her, answering the unconscious fervour of love in her eyes.

    Then there was the sharp thud of pikes as the guard outside sprang to attention, and, although the warm spring sun still shone, he was gone.

A S THE DAYS WARMED to high summer the hammering ceased. London lay decked and waiting for a coronation. The spectators' stands were all set up, the merchants' gabled houses draped with richly coloured damask, the civic banners bravely flying. And in the Abbot's quiet garden out at Westminster, among the red and white roses, paced the two sad women who should have been the most radiant figures in the coming pageantry.

    “All this preparation is for himself—for Gloucester, the false usurper!” raged the widowed Queen. “Did I not warn you?”

    “You were right, Madam, and I a blind artless fool,” admitted Elizabeth.

    “He never intended to have young Edward crowned. It was all lies, lies!” The Queen's black skirts swished angrily against the low box borders, stirring a bitter sweetness from their sun-drenched greenery. “The moment those credulous clerics had wheedled Richard from me, what did the fiend do but have my brother and my first husband's son executed at Pontefract? My poor brother Rivers was so handsome, so brilliant…Gloucester was always jealous of him.”

    “My father would never have believed this of Gloucester,” mourned Elizabeth. “It is bewildering to recall how he trusted him.”

    “And now the unnatural creature dares to justify himself by calling your trusting father's children bastards! You, Cicely, Edward—all of you. Trying to strengthen his case by reminding the world that the King and I were married secretly.”

    “It