The King’s other brother, George of Clarence, was a different sort entirely. He’d laugh and joke with the best. Yes, he’d charm the birds out of the trees – so that he could wring their necks.
Clarence came courting Warwick’s elder girl, Isabel. She was well taken with him, and you could see why. He had a handsome face, and winning ways, and he was (at that time) King Edward’s heir. The fact that he was rarely sober for more than an hour at a time didn’t seem to trouble her.
Early one morning I found myself combing out Isabel’s hair. She kept me at it for ages, because she had read somewhere that hair needed a hundred and fifty strokes of the comb at each session to keep it at its best. You get all the fun jobs when you’re a young damosel in someone else’s household. (Don’t ask me why she was so worried about the condition of her hair when it was all going to be hidden under her hennin anyway. Isabel was that kind of person.)
‘I’m so in love that if the King will not give his permission for me to marry Clarence then I shall just die,’ she said dreamily. By the way she was staring at herself you’d have thought that she was in love with the looking-glass.
‘No, you won’t. We don’t die that easily.’
‘Then I’ll go into a convent.’
‘You must be joking! They never waste an heiress on God. Your father will just find you someone else.’
She frowned. She was good at that. I think she learned it from Warwick himself. ‘The trouble with you, Alianore, is that you’ve never been in love with anyone. You don’t understand.’
‘I understand perfectly,’ I said, ‘and that’s why I’m not such a damn fool. Sooner or later my brother Audley is going to find me a husband, and when he does I’m going to have to make the best of it. I shall fall in love with the man I’m given, instead of wasting the rest of my life mooning over someone I can’t have.’
‘Alianore! He could be old, or fat, or ugly. He could have horrible breath. He might beat you. He might even be someone who doesn’t know how to dance.’
‘As long as he isn’t short of a few shillings, that’s the main thing. And don’t tell me that you’d love Clarence if he wasn’t a duke and one of the richest men in the country, because I know you wouldn’t.’
She pouted angrily. ‘That isn’t fair. Even if George was only an earl like Daddy, I’d still want him.’
You only had to scratch Clarence’s skin to find solid pork. I found myself beginning to feel sorry for Isabel. Not that I could do anything about it, you understand.
We had started to make preparations for the wedding when word came up from London that King Edward had forbidden it. Isabel didn’t die in consequence, but she wept in her room for about three and a half weeks as she thought about that Duchess’s coronet slipping away. Meanwhile, her father was stalking about the castle muttering under his breath and biting big chunks of stone out of the walls.
Warwick and Clarence busied themselves drawing up a whole fresh list of grievances, and began to plot against the King. It was still a long-term plan, but their idea was to put Clarence on the throne. (With Isabel as Queen, of course. And her daddy pulling all the strings. Warwick didn’t explain this last bit to Georgie. I expect it slipped his mind.)
If Warwick had troubled to ask me (which of course he didn’t) I could have told him that he had more hope of turning the courtyard puddles into claret wine. You see, England was divided into three camps; those who thought that Edward IV was the rightful King; those who supported Mad Harry VI; and those (the great majority) who didn’t give a toss either way. No one (except Clarence) wanted Clarence to be King – how on earth can you have a King called George?
One of the advantages of being a woman, and especially a young damosel, is that almost everyone thinks that you are stupid, and deaf to boot. I would be sat next to Lady Warwick in her solar, my head bent over my embroidery or whatever, and George and Warwick, only three or four feet away, would be openly plotting their treasons. Not even troubling to lower their voices. Amazing, I know, but true. I doubt whether they even noticed that I was there, and if they did they certainly didn’t care. Some of the things they said about King Edward made my hair curl to such an extent that I could feel the hennin lifting off my head.
When I decided that matters had gone far enough, I wrote a long letter to my brother Audley that had, shall we say, the odd interesting fact in it. Rob Percy happened to be going into York on Warwick’s business, and I gave him this letter to carry for me, knowing that he’d have no trouble in finding someone there to take it south. You may think that this was a pretty low trick, informing against Warwick and using his own esquire to carry the tale, but, as the saying goes, loyalty bound me.
It was about a month after this that a new face in the hall caught my eye. Warwick always had plenty of guests, of course, most of them eager to lick his backside in the hope of gaining one favour or another, but this man stood out from the crowd. Why he stood out I am not sure, unless it was that his clothes spoke of the Court.
‘Who is that?’ I asked Alice Savage, who happened to be sitting next to me.
‘Who?’ Alice was day dreaming as usual. I was always having to give her a sly kick to bring her back to reality. Lady Warwick didn’t much care to be ignored, and her anger wasn’t particularly selective, so it paid to keep the rest of the team in line.
I tilted my hennin in the appropriate direction. ‘Between Isabel and Lady Scrope.’
‘Oh, him!’ cried Alice, the light of understanding dawning somewhere deep below the surface. She broke off a piece of lamprey and stowed it in her capacious mouth. ‘That’s Roger Beauchamp. My lady’s cousin. Cousin in some degree, anyway. Doesn’t show up much in these parts. He’s in the King’s service, not Warwick’s.’
‘I did rather gather that from his livery collar,’ I said, irritably. ‘You don’t happen to know the length of his rent-roll, do you?’
She shook her head. ‘No. He’s got nice eyes, though.’
This was true, although it was scarcely to the point. Alice was the sort who never noticed the really important things about a man.
Much later that evening I was sent to the solar to fetch a book of recipes for the Countess. She had had a dispute with Lady Scrope about the best means of preserving parsnips, or something equally exciting, and decided that the only way to solve the issue was to look it up. The volume in question was a great, thick thing, bound in red leather, which had come down to her from her paternal grandmother, and was emblazoned with the Beauchamp and Ferrers arms. This should have been easy to find, and it would have been if it had been in its proper place instead of buried under seven cushions, a bundle of accounts, a lute and an abandoned embroidery project.