The Other Elizabeth

Chapter XXVIII: Lammastide 1460

Chapter XXVIII: Lammastide 1460 

Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, England

It is ten years gone, a decade gone, that I did bear my dead baby Isabel. How can the time have gone by so quickly, filled with seemingly such misery? It makes me realise how long ago my childhood and youth now is, how my marriage to Henry seems to have faded into the past- he will have been dead for two years in a sennight, yet I barely remember who he was.

And now my Father is dead. 'Tis strange to me still that he just ceases to exist... so suddenly. We were not especially close, and I had seen him but a few times during the course of my married life. He was at court, or in France fighting for most of my childhood, and he did not dote on me. Despite this, he was still my Father, and we had a blood tie, and he should not have been killed so brutally, despite how he terrorized the Londoners. What gives them the right to take justice into their own hands and murder one of their noblemen? He was an old man, a warrior since six and ten when, as a ward of the old King Henry, he showed his skills at the fabled Agincourt. He was an old, proud lord who faced a most vile end. To think of his body, cast aside on a church porch, after being defiled by commoners. To think of the pain which he must have gone through as their knives tore at his flesh... I am almost a little bitter that Lady Eleanor, who I can see standing on the steps of her manor as our litter comes up the path, still has her husband, for Lord Hungerford escaped safely. I suppose we must all lose someone to war.

I glance at my Mother beside me. I urged her not to make this journey, but she insisted, she must see where her husband lies. A small smile had come across my face when I had heard of her defiance- I am my Mother's daughter very much so- for did I not ride across half the country to my husband's place of burial also? Despite the season, she is wrapped in many furs and has hot coals under her feet, for she is still very much complaining of a chill. And I know not just of the body- but of the heart. Her heart has gone cold; after all the pain of his infidelity that he put upon her, his violent ways, his disappointment that she could not produce another son, his brusque dismissiveness of her at times, I know that somehow, she always felt a strong sense of love and respect for him. They had been married for nigh over thirty years- rather long, as others have had as many or more as four husbands in that time. I do not think she would marry again, even if it were an option. Because I know she is dying. My Father's death has come as a last and most painful canker, and his manner of death is even more so distressing. To think we are now so directly involved in this cousin's war, that he died for it; and that we were targeted. We are not safe.

Our journey to Stoke Poges has taken the best part of over a week. I feared my Mother may not live through the journey, and I know our time together is so very far and few between. On our way, inevitably, we had to pass through St. Albans, and the streets in which the battle was fought. I clutched my stomach the whole way through the town. This was where Henry and so many others fell. Their blood was spilt on the very cobbles our horse litter trundled over, the wheels running over the crevices where dried, stained patches of faded scarlet remain. Does my Father's blood stain London Bridge; the blood of one deemed such as traitor? Should I be thankful his head does not sit for all the world to behold on that bridge?

I feel as if I am losing so much from my life. My children, my husband, my Father, and my Mother is so weak... Who shall be next? Anthony- who's fate is still so very much uncertain? My Bessie, who sits between Agnes and Kateren on the other side of the litter, tight-lipped and pale from uncomfortable sleepless nights at many inns? My Mother's beloved maids and companions are ageing themselves, snowy-haired beneath their caps, and Bessie is almost past her childbearing years. As much as I do not want to relinquish her, I do not want her to devote her whole life to my care.