Brian Wainwright - The Adventures of Alianore Audley

It was well after midnight before my master came to bed, and he was nothing if not ratlegged after drinking numerous quarts of Holt’s beer. He had to hold on to the bed curtains to steady himself while he pissed up the wall. Then he began to tell the bolster how beautiful it was, and how much he wanted it to give him another fine son. I think he only puked about fifteen times. To be honest, I lost count.

When he woke, he sat clutching his head and groaning for about an hour and three quarters. Then he told me that there was no passage to the church, after all. There had been one in the old days, but the Town Council had sent a man round to condemn it as unsafe, and they’d blocked it up with stones. This was many years ago, when King John was still in nappies, and no one even knew where it had been.

‘Brilliant,’ I said, less than impressed. ‘I think the only answer is for us to stay here while I embroider a replacement banner. We’ll swear blind that it’s the original, and no one will be any the wiser. It’ll only take about three months.’

I don’t think that Roger treasured the idea of all those weeks in Wigan. ‘We could try having a quiet word with Stanley himself.’ he suggested.

I had to agree that the idea had certain merits. I fancied having a look inside Lathom House. It was odds on that there’d be some interesting papers lying around somewhere. People like Stanley always have a couple of conspiracies on the boil. It gives them something to talk about with their friends.

‘A pity I haven’t got a letter of authority from the King,’ he went on. ‘That’d certainly help him to see sense.’

‘That’s no problem,’ I said, opening my travelling box and rooting around inside my spare hennin until I found my copy of the Privy Seal.

Roger snatched it from me, staring at the die as if he’d never seen a seal in his life.

‘Have you any idea of the penalty for forging the King’s seal?’ he asked, putting on his Justice-of-the-Peace-for-Gloucestershire voice.

‘It’s not a forgery, it’s a duplicate, and I’ve full authority to use it in an emergency. If saving the entire North of England from civil war is not an emergency then I don’t know what the hell is. Let’s get something down on parchment, and then we can get on our way after breakfast.’

Don’t let the name fool you. Lathom House is a castle, and a hellishly formidable one at that. Getting in to such a place is rarely a problem, it’s the getting out that can give you the odd difficulty.

We were politely received by the Steward and shown into lodgings that not even Northumberland would have scorned. The price of the wall hangings alone would have bought half of Scotland. Stanley was not short of a biscuit or two, that was for sure.

Roger and I got out of our clothes, which had more than the odd trace of the local mire on them, and into our Court gear. In a situation like this you have to go out of your way to look as if you’ve got more money than sense. It helps people to take you seriously. Roger wore his collar of golden Yorkist suns, to show that he was one of the King’s knights, ludicrous piked shoes to show that he was fashionable, and a massive codpiece to show that he had a vivid imagination. I wore a top-of-the-range butterfly hennin, with enough wire and gauze to rig a ship of war, and a gown of crimson velvet with a train so long that it saved the Stanleys the trouble of sweeping their floors for the next century.

When we were quite composed we walked down to supper, our attendants forming a suitable procession behind us. We paused at the entrance to the hall, and looked up at the big sign above the doorway. It said:

‘THIS IS LATHOM

(Maximum hennin room VIII feet, VI inches.)’

‘I’m impressed!’ snorted Guy, spitting at it.

‘Kindly remember, all of you, that we are here as guests,’ Roger instructed. ‘I want the absolute minimum of hassle. Understand?’

Some bowing oik with a fancy stick led us up to the top table, where Stanley was sprawled in the biggest chair, picking his teeth with a knife. Next to him was his wife. Lady Margaret Beaufort.

Those of you who have not fallen asleep will remember Lady Margaret from the early part of my story. She had been through another husband since then, Sir Henry Stafford, and was now onto her third, she and Stanley having fallen deeply in love with each other’s money.

The process of diplomacy now began. For those of you who don’t understand what goes on in such circumstances I should explain that we started by mouthing elaborate courtesies all round, no one meaning a word of it. We did not get down to business. We did not go within a hundred miles of it. We talked about everything else under the sun while we tucked into the feast that had been laid before us.

Roger, to be quite honest, was always very much better than me at this sort of thing. I tend to get bored after about the first three hours of sustained politeness, especially when I’m dealing with people I despise. I really would have made a lousy Duchess. If you’re married to a royal Duke you spend half your life smiling and nodding at ambassadors, mayors, abbots, sheriffs and other sundry creeps as they try to talk you into twisting your husband’s balls on their behalf. (This may sound a crude description of the process, but it’s what it amounts to.)

Stanley’s men began to clear the lower tables away.

‘We’re hosting the heats of the All-Lancashire Hoodman Blind Championship tonight,’ he explained. ‘Perhaps you’d both care to take part?’

‘Not in this hennin,’ I said hurriedly.

Call me boring if you will, but staggering about with my head in a bag while everyone else beats me has never been my idea of fun.

‘Perhaps Dame Beauchamp would prefer to withdraw to see my new manuscript,’ suggested Lady Margaret, smiling carefully, like a woman with no teeth. Perhaps she thought that there was a tax on opening her mouth too far.

‘I should enjoy that more than a multiple orgasm,’ I replied, inclining my head towards her.

We made our way from the table and up the stairs to Margaret’s private solar. This was a cross between a chapel and a library. I’d never seen so many books in one place in my life. I reckon she had at least fifty, and a good half of them were not even in English. She told me that she’d even written one or two of them herself.

She took down the manuscript from the shelf. It turned out to be a family tree, very prettily drawn, of the descendants of King Henry III. That meant that you could find both of us on it for a start, although I didn’t consider my portrait to be particularly flattering. Mind you, it got a shade crowded as the generations expanded, with half the people in England above the rank of yeoman. I think the idea was that you could work out where you stood in line to the throne, and how many you needed to kill in order to get there.

I reckoned that if about one hundred and thirty-eight people dropped dead over night I’d become Alianore, Queen of England and of France, of that name the First. Margaret was quite a bit closer, but not as close as she liked everyone to believe.

‘Where is your son?’ I asked, pointing at his portrait. The artist had obviously never seen Henry Tudor. He had left off the horns and tail. ‘I noticed he was not in the hall.’

‘You refer to the Earl of Richmond?’ she asked snootily, as if I had just crawled out of the cess-pit.

‘The only one you’ve got, isn’t he?’

‘We do not all breed like conies, Dame Beauchamp. Richmond is in exile. Safer so. Since the death of King Henry and the Prince, my son is the senior surviving Lancastrian claimant.’

‘Hmmm!’ I said, thinking back to a profitable afternoon I had spent in Warwick’s library, reading Every Damosel’s Guide to Genealogy . ‘I’m none too sure of that. I think you will find that King Henry IV, of unblessed memory, the first of our Lancastrian sovereigns, specifically excluded the Beaufort family from the succession. Even though the Beauforts of the time were his own half-brothers, old John of Gaunt’s bastards.’