The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett
angry, but don’t speak to me just now. I am busy and important. I have better things to do than to be associated with your inefficiency.’
She has a bag in her hand. She doesn’t say a word to anyone. She just floats away into the antechamber, where the window looks out over the park with its drowned greens and greys. Despite the season, a fire is burning (he feels the cold, poor old Edward), and the enormous bathtub, hung with cloth and green ribbons for modesty’s sake, is already steaming.
Edward’s sitting on a stool by the window, still in his soursmelling travelling cloak, with his shoulders sagging, an old man near the end of his days staring out at nature, to which even a king must one day return. He looks round, startled, when he hears her. But then he smiles – only you – and goes back to his faraway thoughts as she moves about behind him.
Detail matters. Edward loves to wash off the dirt of the journey as soon as he arrives in a new place. It’s how he shuts the world out until he’s composed himself enough to behave like a king again. So Alice makes a ritual of it.
She’s ordered the Sheen servants to have water boiling from midday on, so he wouldn’t have to wait. A king shouldn’t wait for his pleasures. From the moment they left Westminster, she hasn’t for a moment taken her eyes off the man on the horse carrying the bag containing the great sweeps of towel and the bath hangings – the finest embroidered lawn, great cloudy sheets of it, with enough green vines and blue flowers and birds on it to blind a dozen seamstresses. She’d need that bag as soon as they reached Sheen: the moment when, as she knows from experience, the mess of arrival would be at its worst. Edward loves those hangings. They go everywhere with him.
She’s kept the little bottle of rose oil in her own saddlebag, and the exotic sponges provided by Brembre and Philpot’s grocers’ guild, and the gold-backed combs, and the silverchased scissors, and the oil of lavender to rub the sore on his ankle with, and the strips of bandage. She’s also personally carried three red roses plucked this morning from the gardens at Westminster Palace, wrapped in a damp rag, encased in a small wooden box.
Now she arranges all this on the window ledge. She tips a few drops of rose oil through the steam, watching the little ring of it cloud and dissipate in the water, sniffing at the rich scent of gardens in sunlight that suddenly fills the steam.
Finally, she opens the box.
‘Look,’ she says, and his eyes turn. Neatly, murderously twisting off the heads of each limp rose in turn, she pulls out three great handfuls of dewy pink petals and, with the air of a magician, opens the curtains and throws them on the water.
The mysterious scent of summer happiness wafts out to where the King is sitting. At last Edward smells it, and, now he can see the floating rose petals, seems to understand. Faintly, he smiles. It’s the first time today that he’s met her eye.
‘Beautiful,’ he murmurs, and fumbles for her hand. He’s as grateful as if it’s the first time she’s done this, and as surprised, she thinks sadly. ‘You’re very good to me, my dear.’
She kisses the top of his head. ‘I like to make you happy,’ she murmurs back as, putting her hands on his shoulders, she eases off the cloak.
Human decline – the slow return of dust to dust and ashes to ashes – is a strange business, she thinks as she undresses him down to the skinny arms and legs, the roughened barrel of chest, the bent back, the privy member hanging uselessly below, and braces herself to half push, half lift him into the water. He’s got so thin, but he’s still heavy enough to take her breath away.
How long is it since she first saw him like this, with that wondering, uncertain look in his eye? She can’t even remember the early shivers of anxiety she must have had when he started to forgot a word here, or a name there.
What she does remember is the time when she was still confident he was all right. She has to work back from those happy moments to find the shadows. For instance, he was definitely all right the day she heard him talking to prim little William of Wykeham. It was a conversation she probably wasn’t intended to overhear, but how could she not, since she was in the chamber with them, making them comfortable, pouring out wine, embroidering something in a corner, turning her alert eyes down, keeping herself quiet, keeping her lips tight together, keeping her ears open as she always did? He said, in that mocking way he used to have, in response to one of the Chancellor Bishop’s gentle naggings about his failure to make confession often enough, ‘But I’ve had to give up fucking and jousting since I saw sixty on the horizon, dear man, so what would I tell you?’ She’ll never forget the poor Bishop of Winchester’s shocked pink face. She had to bite her own lips tighter together and look down harder than usual at whatever never-to-be-finished piece of work was in her frame to stop herself from laughing. It still makes her smile now to remember it. Of course Edward didn’t mind shocking the Bishop. He just went on, with all his old bright brutal cheerfulness, ‘Though I still think about them. So you could be right. Perhaps it is time for confession.’
When was that? Before William of Wykeham was sacked as Chancellor, which must be three years ago, for Alice has had his confiscated manor at Wendover for two years already. And not that long before Edward turned sixty. And this greyness of mind has crept up on him since then, she doesn’t know when…whenever she isn’t looking.
It’s worse than his body going. That was understandable, at least. She can’t remember when she last made love with Edward, but it was certainly some time before that jocular remark of his to William of Wykeham. She doesn’t really even want to remember those last bouts of careful, non-jolting, old-man love, with both of them trying their best, and sometimes even having a quiet chuckle together over the slow indignity of age. Those last times have faded and blended in her mind. She prefers to remember the first times: the breathless excitement, the shape of his nakedness, the lion smell of him, before it was medical oils and piss.
Not that he’s faded, altogether. Even now, sometimes, Edward can still be so well, and his talk so full of energy and mischief and jest, that it seems as if days like today are only a cloud that has passed. Alice treasures those moments.
‘You,’ she says lovingly, supporting him back to the stool, catching her breath, then kneeling to towel him vigorously down. She looks up, over the sagging mound of his stomach, into the beautiful long eyes fixed on her above the damp beard. This is intimacy, in the winter of your life. This is all it can be. It must be sad for a man who once so enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh. She makes her voice a little throatier. ‘The handsomest man in Christendom, still.’ Sensuously, she strokes his blotchy thigh.
He’s feeling revived after the bath. He grins with some of his old charm. He even puts a gnarled hand on her head, as if he might push her down on himself. She knows from experience that he won’t. He knows that her flirtatiousness doesn’t really mean she expects him to make love to her. He just appreciates the make-believe. He’s playing along.
This is what they’ve always shared: a love of games; a belief you can play with the realities that no one else has the nerve to question; a faunish, pagan sense of fun. This, she tells herself, is why it doesn’t matter what age does to him.
He’s humming as she pulls the nightshirt over his head, and slips the slippers on his feet, and leads him away to dress the sore on his ankle.
Once they’re alone in the bedchamber, when he’s comfortable on the padded armchair before the fire, she puts one of his feet in the basin of lavender water and kneels before the other. She rubs unguent gently over the dry, flaking edges of the scab that won’t heal, then winds the bandages she’s cut carefully round the ankle whose skin was too old to renew itself, trying to stop the quiet horror inside herself at the thought of the bone just inside there, under the decaying skin, the white mark of death, waiting to come through.
It’s only now, when she sees Edward leaning back against the cushions, enjoying the feel of her young flesh rubbing the cold of death away for a moment more, and every now and then grunting a little – but himself again, more or less, with a twinkle in his eye – that she judges the time to be right.
She begins to tell him about her idea.
She