and Sussex; Hampshire is theirs. Every man who ever served in the royal household would turn out for them. There is always support for my house in Cornwall, and the Tudor name will bring out Wales. Buckingham has tremendous lands and thousands of tenants, and my son Henry is promised an army of five thousand from the Duke of Brittany.”
He nods. “It could be done. But only if you can be certain of Buckingham. You are not strong enough without him.”
“Morton says that he has completely turned Buckingham against Richard. My steward Reginald Bray has spoken with them both. I will know more when I see him.”
“Where are you meeting?”
“By chance, on the road.”
“He will play you,” my husband warns me. “As he has played Richard. The poor fool Richard even now thinks that Buckingham loves him as a brother. But it turns out that it is always his own ambition at the end of it. He will agree to support your son’s claim to the throne, but think to let Tudor do the fighting for him. He will hope that Tudor and the queen will defeat Richard and leave the way open for him.”
“It is lip service for all of us. We are all fighting only for our own cause, all of us promising our loyalty to the princes.”
“Yes, only the boys are quite innocent,” he remarks. “And Buckingham will be planning their deaths. No one in England would support his claim if they were still alive. And of course, as High Steward of England, with the Tower in his command, he is better placed than any of us to see them murdered. His servants are inside already.”
I pause as his meaning becomes clear to me. “You think he would do it?”
“In a moment.” He smiles. “And when he does it, he could give the orders in the name of the king. It could be made to look like the orders of Richard. He himself would make it look like Richard’s doing.”
“Is he planning this?”
“I don’t know if he has even thought of it yet. Certainly, someone should make sure it has occurred to him. For sure, someone who wanted the boys dead could do the deed no better way than to make it Buckingham’s task.”
There is a rap on the door, and my lord’s guards admit the steward of the abbey. “Dinner is served, my lady, my lord.”
“God bless you, my husband,” I say formally. “I learn so much from studying you.”
“And you,” he says. “And God bless your meeting with His Grace the duke; may much good come of it.”
I can hear the Duke of Buckingham approaching along the winding dirt road even before I can see him. He rides with a train as great as a king’s, with outriders going ahead and blowing trumpets to warn everyone to clear the highway for the great duke. Even when there is no one as far as the eye can see, but only a little boy herding sheep under a tree and a small village in the distance, the trumpeters sound the call and the horses, more than a hundred of them, thunder along behind, raising a plume of dust on the summer road that blows like a cloud behind the rippling banners.
The duke is at the forefront of the riders, on a big bay warhorse, caparisoned with a saddle of red leather trimmed with golden nails, his personal standard before him, and three men-at-arms riding around him. He is dressed for hunting, but his boots, also red leather, are so fine that a lesser man would have kept them for dancing. His cloak, thrown back over his shoulders, is pinned with a great golden brooch; his hat badge is of gold and rubies. There is a fortune in jewels embroidered on his jerkin and his waistcoat; his breeches are of the most smooth tan broadcloth, trimmed with red leather laces. He was a vain, furious boy when Elizabeth Woodville took him as her ward and humiliated him by marrying him to her sister, and now he is a vain, furious man, not yet thirty years old, taking his revenge on a world that has never, in his mind, shown him enough respect.
I first met him when I married Henry Stafford, and then he was a little boy, spoiled by the indulgent duke, his grandfather. The death of his father and then that of his grandfather gave him the dukedom while he was still a child and taught him to think of himself as born great. Three of his grandparents are descended from Edward III, and so he believes himself to be more royal than the royal family. Now, he considers himself the Lancaster heir. He would consider his claim is greater than that of my son.
He pretends surprise at suddenly seeing my more modest train, though it must be said, I always travel with fifty good men-at-arms, and my own standard and the Stanley colors go before me. He raises his hand to halt his troop. We approach each other slowly, as if to parley, and his young charming smile beams out at me like a sun rising. “Well met, my lady cousin!” he cries out, and all his troop’s banners dip in respect. “I didn’t think to see you so far from your home!”
“I have to go to my house at Bridgnorth,” I say clearly for any spies who might be listening. “And I had thought you were with the king?”
“I am returning to him now from my house at Brecon,” Buckingham says. “But do you want to break your journey? There is Tenbury just ahead of us. Would you do me the honor of dining with me?” He casts a casual wave towards his troop. “I have my kitchen servants with me, and provisions. We could have dinner together.”
“I should be honored,” I say quietly, and I turn my horse and ride beside him as my outnumbered guard stand aside and then follow the Buckingham troops to Tenbury.
The little inn has a small room with a table and a few stools, adequate for our purpose, and the men rest their horses in lines in the nearby field and light their own campfires to roast their meats. Buckingham’s cook takes over the meager kitchen of the inn, and soon has servants running backwards and forwards to kill a couple of chickens and fetch his ingredients from the wagon. Buckingham’s steward brings us two glasses of wine from the cellar wagon and serves them in the duke’s own glassware, with his seal engraved at the rim. I note all his worldly extravagance and folly and think, This is a young man who thinks he is going to play me.
I wait. The God I serve is a patient God, and He has taught me that sometimes the best thing to do is to wait and see what comes. Buckingham has always been an impatient boy, and he can hardly pause for the door to be closed behind his steward before he starts.
“Richard is unbearable. I meant only that he should protect us against the ambition of the Riverses, and I warned him against them for that reason; but he has gone too far now. He has to be pulled down.”
“He is king now,” I observe. “You warned him early and served him so well that he has become the tyrant that you feared the Riverses would be. And my husband and I myself are sworn to serve him, as are you.”
He waves his hand and spills a little wine. “An oath of fealty to a usurper is no oath at all,” he says. “He is not the rightful king.”
“Who is, then?”
“Prince Edward, I suppose,” he says quickly, as if that is not the only question of importance. “Lady Stanley, you are older and wiser than me, I have trusted your holy judgment for all of my life. Surely, you feel that we must free the princes from the Tower and restore them to their state? You were such a loving lady to the Queen Elizabeth. Surely, you feel that her boys must be freed, and Prince Edward must take his father’s throne?”
“Surely,” I say. “If he were a legitimate son. But Richard says he is not; you yourself proclaimed him a bastard, and his father a bastard before him.”
Buckingham looks troubled by this, as if it were not he who swore to everyone that Edward had been married before he promised marriage to Elizabeth. “Indeed, I fear that much is true.”
“And if you put the so-called prince on the throne, you would stand to lose all the wealth and positions you have been given by Richard.”
He waves away the post of High Steward of England as if it were not the greatest honor in the land. “The gifts of a usurper are not what I want for my house,” he says grandly.
“And I would gain nothing at all,” I remark. “I would still be lady-in-waiting to the queen. I would return to the service of the Dowager Queen Elizabeth, having served the Queen Anne-so I would be still in service. And you would have risked everything to restore the Rivers family to power. And we know what a grasping, numerous family they are. Your wife, the queen’s sister, would rule you once more. She will repay you for keeping her at home in disgrace. They will all laugh at you again, as they did when you were a little boy.”
His hatred for them flares in his eyes, and he quickly glances away at the fireplace, where a little fire licks at the logs. “She does not dominate me,” he says, irritated. “Whatever her sister is. Nobody laughs at me.”
He waits; he hardly dares to tell me what he truly wants. The servant comes in with some little pies, and we
