THE
KINGMAKER’S
DAUGHTER
By the same author
The Cousins’ War
The Lady of the Rivers
The White Queen
The Red Queen
History
The Women of the Cousins’ War:
The Duchess, the Queen and the King’s Mother
The Tudor Court Novels
The Constant Princess
The Other Boleyn Girl
The Boleyn Inheritance
The Queen’s Fool
The Virgin’s Lover
The Other Queen
Historical Novels
The Wise Woman
Fallen Skies
A Respectable Trade
The Wideacre Trilogy
Wideacre
The Favoured Child
Meridon
Civil War Novels
Earthly Joys
Virgin Earth
Modern Novels
Mrs Hartley and the Growth Centre
Perfectly Correct
The Little House
Zelda’s Cut
Short Stories
Bread and Chocolate
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Philippa Gregory, 2012
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Philippa Gregory to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster, India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 978-0-85720-746-3
Trade Paperback ISBN 978-0-85720-747-0
eBook ISBN 978-0-85720-750-0
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Anthony
CONTENTS
THE TOWER OF LONDON, MAY 1465
L’ERBER, LONDON, JULY 1465
BARNARD CASTLE, COUNTY DURHAM, AUTUMN 1465
WARWICK CASTLE, SPRING 1468
CALAIS CASTLE, 11 JULY 1469
CALAIS CASTLE, 12 JULY 1469
CALAIS CASTLE, SUMMER 1469
ENGLAND, AUTUMN 1469
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1469–70
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1470
WARWICK CASTLE, MARCH 1470
DARTMOUTH, DEVON, APRIL 1470
THE RIVER SEINE, FRANCE, MAY 1470
ANGERS, FRANCE, JULY 1470
ANGERS CATHEDRAL, 25 JULY 1470
AMBOISE, FRANCE, WINTER 1470
PARIS, CHRISTMAS 1470
HARFLEUR, FRANCE, MARCH 1471
HARFLEUR, FRANCE, 12 APRIL 1471
CERNE ABBEY, WEYMOUTH, 15 APRIL 1471
TEWKESBURY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, 4 MAY 1471
WORCESTER, MAY 1471
THE TOWER OF LONDON, 21 MAY 1471
L’ERBER, LONDON, AUTUMN 1471
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1471
L’ERBER, LONDON, FEBRUARY 1472
ST MARTIN’S, LONDON, FEBRUARY 1472
ST MARTIN’S, LONDON, APRIL 1472
ST MARTIN’S, LONDON, MAY 1472
LAMBETH PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1472
WINDSOR CASTLE, SEPTEMBER 1472
FOTHERINGHAY CASTLE, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, AUTUMN 1472
WINDSOR CASTLE, CHRISTMAS 1472
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SPRING 1473
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, JUNE 1473
FARLEIGH HUNGERFORD CASTLE, SOMERSET, 14 AUGUST 1473
BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, SUMMER 1473
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, JULY 1474
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SPRING 1475
LONDON, SUMMER 1475
BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1475
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SUMMER 1476
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1476
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS DAY 1476
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1477
BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, JANUARY 1477
LONDON, APRIL 1477
BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, MAY 1477
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SUMMER 1477
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, AUTUMN 1477
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1477
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1478
BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, FEBRUARY 1478
BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, MARCH 1478
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SUMMER 1482
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1482–3
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, APRIL 1483
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, MAY 1483
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, JUNE 1483
BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, JUNE 1483
THE TOWER OF LONDON, JULY 1483
A ROYAL PROGRESS, SUMMER 1483
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, OCTOBER 1483
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, WINTER 1483
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1483
GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, MARCH 1484
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE, MARCH 1484
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE, SUMMER 1484
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1484
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1485
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, MARCH 1485
THE TOWER OF LONDON, MAY 1465
My Lady Mother goes first, a great heiress in her own right, and the wife of the greatest subject in the kingdom. Isabel follows, because she is the oldest. Then me: I come last, I always come last. I can’t see much as we walk into the great throne room of the Tower of London, and my mother leads my sister to curtsey to the throne and steps aside. Isabel sinks down low, as we have been taught, for a king is a king even if he is a young man put on the throne by my father. His wife will be crowned queen, whatever we may think of her. Then as I step forwards to make my curtsey I get my first good view of the woman that we have come to court to honour.
She is breathtaking: the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. At once I understand why the king stopped his army at the first sight of her, and married her within weeks. She has a smile that grows slowly and then shines, like an angel’s smile. I have seen statues that would look stodgy beside her, I have seen painted Madonnas whose features would be coarse beside her pale luminous loveliness. I rise up from my curtsey to stare at her as if she were an exquisite icon; I cannot look away. Under my scrutiny her face warms, she blushes, she smiles at me, and I cannot help but beam in reply. She laughs at that, as if she finds my open adoration amusing, and then I see my mother’s furious glance and I scuttle to her side where my sister Isabel is scowling. ‘You were staring like an idiot,’ she hisses. ‘Embarrassing us all. What would Father say?’
The king steps forwards and kisses my mother warmly on both cheeks. ‘Have you heard from my dear friend, your lord?’ he asks her.
‘Working well in your service,’ she says promptly, for Father is missing tonight’s banquet and all the celebrations, as he is meeting with the King of France himself and the Duke of Burgundy, meeting with them as an equal, to make peace with these mighty men of Christendom now that the sleeping king has been defeated and we are the new rulers of England. My father is a great man; he is representing this new king and all of England.
The king, the new king – our king – does a funny mock-bow to Isabel and pats my cheek. He has known us since we were little girls too small to come to such banquets and he was a boy in our father’s keeping. Meanwhile my mother looks about her as if we were at home in Calais Castle, seeking to find fault with something the servants have done. I know that she is longing to see anything that she can report later to my father as evidence that this most beautiful queen is unfit for her position. By the sour expression on her face I guess that she has found nothing.
Nobody likes this queen; I should not admire her. It shouldn’t matter to us that she smiles warmly at Isabel and me, that she rises from her great chair to come forwards and clasp my mother’s hands. We are all determined not to like her. My father had a good marriage planned for this king, a great match with a princess of France. My father worked at this, prepared the ground, drafted the marriage contract, persuaded people who hate the French that this would be a good thing for the country, would safeguard Calais, might even get Bordeaux back into our keeping, but then Edward, the new king, the heart-stoppingly handsome and glamorous new king, our darling Edward – like a younger brother to my father and a glorious uncle to us – said as simply as if he was ordering his dinner that he was married already and nothing could be done about it. Married already? Yes, and to Her.
He did very wrong to act without my father’s advice; everyone knows that. It is the first time he has done so in the long triumphant campaign that took the House of York from shame, when they had to beg the forgiveness of the sleeping king and the bad queen, to victory and the throne of England. My father has been at Edward’s side, advising and guiding him, dictating his every move. My father has always judged what is best for him. The king, even though he is king now, is a young man who owes my father everything. He would not have his throne if it were not for my father taking up his cause, teaching him how to lead an army, fighting his battles for him. My father risked his own life, first for Edward’s father, and then for Edward himself, and then, just when the sleeping king and the bad queen had run away, and Edward was crowned king, and everything should have been wonderful forever, he went off and secretly married Her.
She is to lead us into dinner, and the ladies arrange themselves carefully behind her; there is a set order and it is extremely important that you make sure to be in the right place. I am very nearly nine years old, quite old enough to understand this, and I have been taught the orders of precedence since I was a little girl in the schoolroom. Since She is to be crowned tomorrow, she goes first. From now on she will always be first in England. She will walk in front of my mother for the rest of her life, and that’s another thing that my mother doesn’t much like. Next should come the king’s mother but she is not here. She has declared her absolute enmity to the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville, and sworn that she will not witness the coronation of a commoner. Everyone knows of this rift in the royal family and the king’s sisters fall into line without the supervision of their mother. They look quite lost without the beautiful Duchess Cecily leading the way, and the king loses his confident smile for just a moment when he sees the space where his mother should be. I don’t know how he dares to go against the duchess. She is just as terrifying as my mother, she is my father’s aunt, and nobody disobeys either of them. All I can think is that the king must be very much in love with the new queen to defy his mother. He must really, really love her.
The queen’s mother is here though; no chance that she would miss such a moment of triumph. She steps into her place with her army of sons and daughters behind her, her handsome husband, Sir Richard Woodville, at her side. He is Baron Rivers, and everyone whispers the joke that the rivers are rising. Truly, there are an unbelievable number of them. Elizabeth is the oldest daughter and behind her mother come the seven sisters and five brothers. I stare at the handsome young man John Woodville, beside his new wife, looking like a boy escorting his grandmother. He has been bundled into marriage with the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, my great-aunt Catherine Neville. This is an outrage; my father himself says so. My lady great-aunt Catherine is ancient, a priceless ruin, nearly seventy years old; few people have ever seen a living woman so old, and John Woodville is a young man of twenty. My mother says this is how it is going to be from now on: if you put the daughter of a woman little more than a witch on the throne of England you will see some dark doings. If you crown a gannet then she will gobble up everything.
I tear my eyes from the weary crinkled face of my great-aunt and concentrate on my own task. My job is to make sure that I stand beside Isabel, behind my mother and do not step on her train, absolutely do not step on her train. I am only eight, and I have to make sure that I do this right. Isabel, who is thirteen, sighs as she sees me look down and shuffle my feet so that my toes are under the rich brocade to make sure that there is no possibility of mistake. And then Jacquetta, the queen’s mother, the mother of a gannet, peeps backwards around her own children to see that I am in the right place, that there is no mistake. She looks around as if she cares for my comfort and when she sees me, behind my mother, beside Isabel, she gives me a smile as beautiful as her daughter’s, a smile just for me, and then turns back and takes the arm of her handsome husband and follows her daughter in this, the moment of her utter triumph.
When we have walked along the centre of the great hall through the hundreds of people who stand and cheer at the sight of the beautiful new queen-to-be and everyone is seated, I can look again at the adults at the high table. I am not the only one staring at the new queen. She attracts everyone’s attention. She has the most beautiful slanty eyes of grey and when she smiles she looks down as if she is laughing to herself about some delicious secret. Edward the king has placed her beside him, on his right hand, and when he whispers in her ear, she leans towards him as close as if they were about to kiss. It’s very shocking and wrong but when I look at the new queen’s mother I see that she is smiling at her daughter, as if she is happy that they are young and in love. She doesn’t seem to be ashamed of it at all.
They are a terribly handsome family. Nobody can deny that they are as beautiful as if they had the bluest blood in their veins. And so many of them! Six of the Rivers family and the two sons from the new queen’s first marriage are children, and they are seated at our table as if they were young people of royal blood and had a right to be with us, the daughters of a countess. I see Isabel look sourly at the four beautiful Rivers girls from the youngest, Katherine Woodville, who is only seven years old, to the oldest at our table, Martha, who is fifteen. These girls, four of them, will have to be given husbands, dowries, fortunes, and there are not so very many husbands, dowries, fortunes to be had in England these days – not after a war between the rival houses of Lancaster and York, which has gone on now for ten years and killed so many men. These girls will be compared with us; they will be our rivals. It feels as if the court is flooded with new clear profiles, skin as bright as a new-minted coin, laughing voices and exquisite manners. It’s as if we have been invaded by some beautiful tribe of young strangers, as if statues have come warmly to life and are dancing among us, like birds flown down from the sky to sing, or fish leapt from the sea. I look at my mother and see her flushed with irritation, as hot and cross as a baker’s wife. Beside her, the queen glows like a playful angel, her head always tipped towards her young husband, her lips slightly parted as if she would breathe him in like cool air.
The grand dinner is an exciting time for me, for we have the king’s brother George at one end of our table and his youngest brother Richard at the foot. The queen’s mother, Jacquetta, gives the whole table of young people a warm smile and I guess that she planned this, thinking it would be fun for us children to be together, and an honour to have George at the head of our table. Isabel is wriggling like a sheared sheep at having two royal dukes beside her at once. She doesn’t know which way to look, she is so anxious to impress. And – what is so much worse – the two oldest Rivers girls, Martha and Eleanor Woodville, outshine her without effort. They have the exquisite looks of this beautiful family and they are confident and assured and smiling. Isabel is trying too hard, and I am in my usual state of anxiety with my mother’s critical gaze on me. But the Rivers girls act as if they are here to celebrate a happy event, anticipating enjoyment, not a scolding. They are girls confident of themselves and disposed for amusement. Of course the royal dukes will prefer them to us. George has known us for all his life, we are not strange beauties to him. Richard is still in my father’s keeping as his ward; when we are in England he is among the half-dozen boys who live with us. Richard sees us three times a day. Of course he is bound to look at Martha Woodville who is all dressed up, new to court, and a beauty like her sister, the new queen. But it is irritating that he totally ignores me.
George at fifteen is as handsome as his older brother the king, fair-headed and tall. He says: ‘This must be the first time you have dined in the Tower, Anne, isn’t it?’ I am thrilled and appalled that he should take notice of me, and my face burns with a blush; but I say ‘yes’ clearly enough.
Richard, at the other end of the table, is a year younger than Isabel, and no taller than her, but now that his brother is King of England he seems much taller and far more handsome. He has always had the merriest smile and the kindest eyes but now, on his best behaviour at his sister-in-law’s coronation dinner, he is formal and quiet. Isabel, trying to make conversation with him, turns the talk to riding horses and asks him does he remember our little pony at Middleham Castle? She smiles and asks him wasn’t it funny when Pepper bolted with him and he fell off? Richard, who has always been as prickly in his pride as a gamecock, turns to Martha Woodville and says he doesn’t recall. Isabel is trying to make out that we are friends, the very best of friends; but really, he was one of Father’s half-dozen wards that we hunted with and ate with at dinner in the old days when we were in England and at peace. Isabel wants to persuade the Rivers girls that we are one happy family and they are unwanted intruders, but in truth, we were the Warwick girls in the care of our mother and the York boys rode out with Father.
Isabel can gurn all she wants, but I won’t be made to feel awkward. We have a better right to be seated at this table than anyone else, far better than the beautiful Rivers girls. We are the richest heiresses in England, and my father commands the narrow seas between Calais and the English coast. We are of the great Neville family, guardians of the North of England; we have royal blood in our veins. My father has been a guardian to Richard, and a mentor and advisor to the king himself, and we are as good as anybody in the hall, richer than anyone in this hall, richer even than the king and a great deal better born than the new queen. I can talk as an equal to any royal duke of the House of York because without my father, their house would have lost the wars, Lancaster would still rule, and George, handsome and princely as he is, would now be brother to a nobody, and the son of a traitor.
It is a long dinner, though the queen’s coronation dinner tomorrow will be even longer. Tonight they serve thirty-two courses, and the queen sends some special dishes to our table, to honour us with her attention. George stands up and bows his thanks to her, and then serves all of us from the silver dish. He sees me watching him and he gives me an extra spoonful of sauce with a wink. Now and then my mother glances over at me like a watch-tower beacon flaring out over a dark sea. Each time that I sense her hard gaze on me, I raise my head and smile at her. I am certain that she cannot fault me. I have one of the new forks in my hand and I have a napkin in my sleeve, as if I were a French lady, familiar with these new fashions. I have watered wine in the glass on my right, and I am eating as I have been taught: daintily and without haste. If George, a royal duke, chooses to single me out for his attention then I don’t see why he should not, nor why anyone should be surprised by it. Certainly, it comes as no surprise to me.
I share a bed with Isabel while we are guests of the king at the Tower on the night before the queen’s coronation as I do in our home at Calais, as I have done every night of my life. I am sent to bed an hour before her, though I am too excited to sleep. I say my prayers and then lie in my bed and listen to the music drifting up from the hall below. They are still dancing; the king and his wife love to dance. When he takes her hand you can see that he has to stop himself from drawing her closer. She glances down, and when she looks up he is still gazing at her with his hot look and she gives him a little smile that is full of promise.
I can’t help but wonder if the old king, the sleeping king, is awake tonight, somewhere in the wild lands of the North of England. It is rather horrible to think of him, fast asleep but knowing in his very dreams that they are dancing and that a new king and queen have crowned themselves and put themselves in his place, and tomorrow a new queen will wear his wife’s crown. Father says I have nothing to fear, the bad queen has run away to France and will get no help from her French friends. Father is meeting with the King of France himself to make sure that he becomes our friend and the bad queen will get no help from him. She is our enemy, she is the enemy of the peace of England. Father will make sure that there is no home for her in France, as there is no throne for her in England. Meanwhile, the sleeping king without his wife, without his son, will be wrapped up warm in some little castle, somewhere near Scotland, dozing his life away like a bee in a curtain all winter. My father says that he will sleep and she will burn with rage until they both grow old and die, and there is nothing for me to fear at all. It was my father who bravely drove the sleeping king off the throne and put his crown on the head of King Edward, so it must be right. It was my father who faced the terror that was the bad queen, a she-wolf worse than the wolves of France, and defeated her. But I don’t like to think of the old king Henry, with the moonlight shining on his closed eyelids while the men who drove him away are dancing in what was once his great hall. I don’t like to think of the bad queen, far away in France, swearing that she will have revenge on us, cursing our happiness and saying that she will come back here, calling it her home.
By the time that Isabel finally comes in I am kneeling up at the narrow window to look at the moonlight shining on the river, thinking of the king dreaming in its glow. ‘You should be asleep,’ she says bossily.
‘She can’t come for us, can she?’
‘The bad queen?’ Isabel knows at once the horror of Queen Margaret of Anjou, who has haunted both our childhoods. ‘No. She’s defeated, she was utterly defeated by Father at Towton. She ran away. She can’t come back.’
‘You’re sure?’
Isabel puts her arm around my thin shoulders. ‘You know I am sure. You know we are safe. The mad king is asleep and the bad queen is defeated. This is just an excuse for you to stay awake when you should be asleep.’
Obediently, I turn around and sit up in bed, pulling the sheets up to my chin. ‘I’m going to sleep. Wasn’t it wonderful?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Don’t you think she is beautiful?’
‘Who?’ she says; as if she really doesn’t know, as if it is not blindingly obvious who is the most beautiful woman in England tonight.
‘The new queen, Queen Elizabeth.’
‘Well, I don’t think she’s very queenly,’ she says, trying to sound like our mother at her most disdainful. ‘I don’t know how she will manage at her coronation and at the joust and the tournament – she was just the wife of a country squire, and the daughter of a nobody. How will she ever know how to behave?’
‘Why? How would you behave?’ I ask, trying to prolong the conversation. Isabel always knows so much more than me, she is five years older than me, our parents’ favourite, a brilliant marriage ahead of her, almost a woman while I am still nothing but a child. She even looks down on the queen!
‘I would carry myself with much more dignity than her. I wouldn’t whisper with the king and demean myself as she did. I wouldn’t send out dishes and wave to people like she did. I wouldn’t trail all my brothers and sisters into court like she did. I would be much more reserved and cold. I wouldn’t smile at anyone, I wouldn’t bow to anyone. I would be a true queen, a queen of ice, without family or friends.’
I am so attracted by this picture that I am halfway out of my bed again. I pull off the fur cover from our bed and hold it up to her. ‘Like what? How would you be? Show me, Izzy!’
She arranges it like a cape around her shoulders, throws her head back, draws herself up to her four feet six inches and strides around the little chamber with her head very high, nodding distantly to imaginary courtiers. ‘Like this,’ she says. ‘Comme ça, elegant, and unfriendly.’
I jump out of bed and snatch up a shawl, throw it over my head, and follow her, mirroring her nod to right and left, looking as regal as Isabel. ‘How do you do?’ I say to an empty chair. I pause as if listening to a request for some favour. ‘No, not at all. I won’t be able to help you, I am so sorry, I have already given that post to my sister.’
‘To my father, Lord Rivers,’ Izzy adds.
‘To my brother Anthony – he’s so handsome.’
‘To my brother John, and a fortune to my sisters. There is nothing left for you at all. I have a large family,’ Isabel says, being the new queen in her haughty drawl. ‘And they all must be accommodated. Richly accommodated.’
‘All of them,’ I supplement. ‘Dozens of them. Did you see how many of them came into the great hall behind me? Where am I to find titles and land for all of them?’
We walk in grand circles, and pass each other as we go by, inclining our heads with magnificent indifference. ‘And who are you?’ I inquire coldly.
‘I am the Queen of England,’ Isabel says, changing the game without warning. ‘I am Queen Isabel of England and France, newly married to King Edward. He fell in love with me for my beauty. He is mad for me. He has run completely mad for me and forgotten his friends and his duty. We married in secret, and now I am to be crowned queen.’
‘No, no, I was being the Queen of England,’ I say, dropping the shawl and turning on her. ‘I am Queen Anne of England. I am the Queen of England. King Edward chose me.’
‘He never would, you’re the youngest.’
‘He did! He did!’ I can feel the rise of my temper, and I know that I will spoil our play but I cannot bear to give her precedence once again, even in a game in our own chamber.
‘We can’t both be Queen of England,’ she says reasonably enough. ‘You be the Queen of France, you can be the Queen of France. France is nice enough.’
‘England! I am the Queen of England. I hate France!’
‘Well you can’t be,’ she says flatly. ‘I am the oldest. I chose first, I am the Queen of England and Edward is in love with me.’
I am wordless with rage at her claiming of everything, her sudden enforcing of seniority, our sudden plunge from happy play to rivalry. I stamp my foot, my face flushes with temper, and I can feel hot tears in my eyes. ‘England! I am queen!’
‘You always spoil everything because you are such a baby,’ she declares, turning away as the door behind us opens and Margaret comes into the room and says: ‘Time you were both asleep, my ladies. Gracious! What have you done to your bedspread?’
‘Isabel won’t let me . . .’ I start. ‘She is being mean . . .’
‘Never mind that,’ Margaret says briskly. ‘Into bed. You can share whatever it is tomorrow.’
‘She won’t share!’ I gulp down salt tears. ‘She never does. We were playing but then . . .’
Isabel laughs shortly as if my grief is comical and she exchanges a look with Margaret as if to say that the baby is having a temper tantrum again. This is too much for me. I let out a wail and I throw myself face down on the bed. No-one cares for me, no-one will see that we were playing together, as equals, as sisters, until Isabel claimed something that was not hers to take. She should know that she should share. It is not right that I should come last, that I always come last. ‘It’s not right!’ I say brokenly. ‘It’s not fair on me!’
Isabel turns her back to Margaret, who unlaces the fastening of her gown and holds it low so that she can step out of it, disdainfully, like the queen she was pretending to be. Margaret spreads the gown over a chair, ready for powdering and brushing tomorrow, and Isabel pulls a nightgown over her head and lets Margaret brush her hair and plait it up.
I lift my flushed face from the pillow to watch the two of them and Isabel glances across at my big tragic eyes and says shortly: ‘You should be asleep anyway. You always cry when you’re tired. You’re such a baby. You shouldn’t have been allowed to come to dinner.’ She looks at Margaret, a grown woman of twenty, and says: ‘Margaret, tell her.’
‘Go to sleep, Lady Anne,’ Margaret says gently. ‘There’s nothing to carry on about,’ and I roll on my side and turn my face to the wall. Margaret should not speak to me like this, she is my mother’s lady in waiting and our half-sister, and she should treat me more kindly. But nobody treats me with any respect, and my own sister hates me. I hear the ropes of the bed creak as Isabel gets in beside me. Nobody makes her say her prayers, though she will certainly go to hell. Margaret says: ‘Goodnight, sleep well, God bless,’ and then blows out the candles and goes out of the room.
We are alone together in the firelight. I feel Isabel heave the covers over to her side, and I lie still. She whispers, sharp with malice: ‘You can cry all night if you want, but I shall still be Queen of England and you will not.’
‘I am a Neville!’ I squeak.
‘Margaret is a Neville.’ Isabel proves her point. ‘But illegitimate, Father’s acknowledged bastard. So she serves as our lady in waiting, and she will marry some respectable man while I will marry a wealthy duke at the very least. And now I come to think of it, you are probably illegitimate too, and you will have to be my lady in waiting.’
I feel a sob rising up in my throat, but I put both my hands over my mouth. I will not give her the satisfaction of hearing me cry. I will stifle my sobs. If I could stop my own breath I would; and then they would write to my father and say that I was quite cold and dead, and then she would be sorry that I was suffocated because of her unkindness, and my father – far away tonight – would blame her for the loss of his little girl that he loved above any other. At any rate, he ought to love me above any other. At any rate, I wish he did.
L’ERBER, LONDON, JULY 1465
I know that something extraordinary is going to happen for Father, back in England in our great house in London, is mustering his guard in the yard and his standard bearer and the gentlemen of his household are bringing their horses out from the stables and lining up. Our home is as grand as any royal palace; my father keeps more than three hundred men at arms in his livery and we have more servants under our command than anyone but the king. There are many who say that our men are better drilled and better disciplined than the king’s own; they are certainly better fed and better equipped.
I am waiting by the door to the yard, for Father will come out this way, and perhaps he will see me and tell me what is happening. Isabel is in the upstairs room where she takes her lessons, and I am not going to go and find her. Isabel can miss all the excitement for once. I hear my father’s riding boots ring on the stone stairs and I turn and sink down into my curtsey for his blessing but see, to my annoyance, that my mother is with him and her ladies behind her, and Isabel with them. She sticks out her tongue at me and grins.
‘And here is my little girl. Are you waiting to see me ride out?’ My father puts his hand gently on my head in blessing and then bends down to look into my face. He is as grand and as big as always; when I was a little girl I thought his chest was made of metal, because I always saw him in armour. Now he smiles at me with dark brown eyes shining from beneath his brightly polished helmet, his thick brown beard neatly trimmed, like a picture of a bold soldier, a military god.
‘Yes, my lord,’ I say. ‘Are you going away again?’
‘I have great work to do today,’ he says solemnly. ‘Do you know what it is?’
I shake my head.
‘Who is our greatest enemy?’
This is easy. ‘The bad queen.’
‘You are right, and I wish I had her in my power. But who is our next worst enemy, and her husband?’
‘The sleeping king,’ I say.
He laughs. ‘Is that what you call them? The bad queen and the sleeping king? Well enough. You are a young lady of great wit.’ I glance at Isabel to see how she – who calls me stupid – likes this? My father goes on: ‘And who do you think has been betrayed to us, caught, just as I said he would be, and brought as a prisoner to London?’
‘Is it the sleeping king?’
‘It is,’ he says. ‘And I am riding out with my men to bring him through the streets of London to the Tower and he will stay there, our prisoner forever.’
I look up at him as he looms above me, but I dare not speak.
‘What is it?’
‘Can I come too?’
He laughs. ‘You are as brave as a little squire, you should have been a boy. No, you can’t come too. But when I have him captive in the Tower you can look through the doorway sometime and then you will see that there is nothing for you to fear from him any more. I have the king in my keeping, and without him the queen his wife can do nothing.’
‘But there will be two kings in London.’ Isabel comes forwards, trying to be interesting, with her intelligent face on.
He shakes his head. ‘No. Just one. Just Edward. Just the king that I put on the throne. He has the true right, and anyway, we won the victory.’
‘How will you bring him in?’ my mother asks. ‘There will be many wanting to see him go by.’
‘Tied,’ my father says shortly. ‘Sitting on his horse but with his feet tied by the ankles under its belly. He is a criminal against the new King of England and against me. They can see him like that.’
My mother gives a little gasp at the disrespect. This makes my father laugh. ‘He has been sleeping rough in the hills of the north,’ he says. ‘He’s not going to look kingly. He has not been living like a great lord, he has been living like an outlaw. This is the end of his shame.’
‘And they will see that it is you, bringing him in, as grand as a king yourself,’ my mother observes.
My father laughs again, looks towards the yard where his men are as smartly dressed and as powerfully armed as a royal guard, and nods in approval at the unfurling of his standard of the bear and ragged staff. I look up at him, dazzled by his size and his aura of utter power.
‘Yes, it is me that brings the King of England into prison,’ he acknowledges. He taps me on the cheek, smiles at my mother, and strides out into the yard. His horse, his favourite horse called Midnight for its dark shiny flanks, is held by his groom at the mounting block. My father swings into the saddle and turns to look at his men, raising his hand to give the order to march out. Midnight paws the ground as if he is eager to go; my father has him on a tight rein and his other hand strokes his neck. ‘Good boy,’ he says. ‘This is great work that we do today, this finishes the work that we left half-done at Towton, and that was a great day for you and me, for sure.’
And then he shouts, ‘March!’ and leads his men out of the yard under the stone arch and into the streets of London to ride to Islington to meet the guard that has the sleepy king under arrest, so that he will never trouble the country with his bad dreams ever again.
BARNARD CASTLE, COUNTY DURHAM, AUTUMN 1465
We are both summoned, Isabel and me, to my father’s private rooms in one of our houses in the north: Barnard Castle. This is one of my favourite homes, perched on cliffs over the River Tees, and from my bedroom window I can drop a stone into the foaming water a long, long way below. It is a little high-walled castle, surrounded by a moat and beyond that a grey stone outer wall, and behind that, clustered around the wall for safety, is the little town of Barnard Castle where they fall to their knees when we ride by. Mother says that our family, the Nevilles, are like gods to the people of the North, bound to them by oaths which go back to the very beginning of time when there were devils and sea serpents, and a great worm, and we swore to protect the people from all of these and the Scots as well.
My father is here to dispense justice, and while he sits in the great hall, settling quarrels and hearing petitions, Isabel and I and my father’s wards including Richard, the king’s brother, are allowed to go out riding every afternoon. We go hunting for pheasant and grouse with our falcons on the great moors that stretch for miles, all the way to Scotland. Richard and the other boys have to work with their tutors every morning but they are allowed to be with us after dinner. The boys are the sons of noblemen, like Francis Lovell, some the sons of great men of the North who are glad of a place in my father’s household, some cousins and kin to us who will stay with us for a year or two to learn how to rule and how to lead. Robert Brackenbury, our neighbour, is a constant companion to Richard, like a little squire to a knight. Richard is my favourite, of course, as he is now brother to the King of England. He is no taller than Isabel but furiously brave, and secretly I admire him. He is slight and dark-haired, utterly determined to become a great knight, and he knows all the stories of Camelot and chivalry which he sometimes reads to me as if they were accounts of real people.
He says to me then, so seriously that I cannot doubt him: ‘Lady Anne, there is nothing more important in the world than a knight’s honour. I would rather die than be dishonoured.’
He rides his moorland pony as if he were heading for a cavalry charge; he is desperate to be as big and strong as his two older brothers, desperate to be the best of my father’s wards. I understand this, as I know what it is like to always come last in a rivalrous family. But I never say that I understand – he has a fierce touchy northern pride and he would hate for me to say that I understand him, as much as I would hate it if he sympathised with me for being younger than Isabel, for being plain where she is pretty, and for being a girl when everyone needed a son and heir. Some things are better never spoken: Richard and I know that we dream of great things, and know also that nobody must ever know that we dream of greatness.
We are with the boys in the schoolroom, listening to them taking their lessons in Greek, when Margaret comes with a message that we are to go to our father, at once. Isabel and I are alarmed. Father never sends for us.
‘Not me?’ Richard asks Margaret.
‘Not you, Your Grace,’ she replies.
Richard grins at Isabel. ‘Just you then,’ he says, assuming, as we do, that we have been caught doing something wrong. ‘Perhaps you’ll be whipped.’
Usually when we are in the North we are left alone, seeing Father and Mother only at dinner. My father has much to do. Until a year ago he had to fight for the remaining northern castles that held out for the sleeping king. My mother comes to her northern homes determined to put right everything that has gone wrong in her absence. If my Lord Father wants to see us, then we are likely to be in trouble; but I cannot think what we have done wrong.
My father is seated before his table in his great chair, grand as a throne, when we come in. His clerk puts one paper after another in front of him and my father has a quill in his hand and marks each one W – for Warwick, the best of his many titles. Another clerk at his side leans forwards, with candle in one hand and sealing wax in another, and drips red wax in a neat puddle on the document and my father presses his ring to make a seal. It is like magic, turning his wishes into fact. We wait by the door for him to notice us and I think how wonderful it must be to be a man and put your initial on a command and know that at once, such a thing is done. I would send out commands all day just for the pleasure of it.
He looks up and sees us as the clerk takes the papers away, and Father makes a little beckoning gesture. We go forwards and curtsey as we should, while my father raises his hand in blessing, and then he pushes back his chair and calls us around the table so that we can stand before him. He puts out his hand to me and I go close and he pats my head, like he pats Midnight, his horse. This is not a particularly nice feeling for he has a heavy hand, and I am wearing a cap of stiff golden net that he crushes down with each pat, but he does not summon Isabel any closer. She has to stand rather awkwardly, looking at the two of us, so I turn to her and smile because our father’s hand is on me, and it is me who is leaning against the arm of his chair as if I am comfortable to be here, rather than alarmed at these signs of his favour.
‘You are good girls, keeping up with your studies?’ he asks abruptly.
We both nod. Undeniably we are good girls and we study every morning with our own tutor, learning Logic on Mondays, Grammar on Tuesdays, Rhetoric on Wednesdays, French and Latin on Thursdays, and Music and Dance on Fridays. Friday is the best day of the week, of course. The boys have their tutor for Greek, and work with a weapons master as well, jousting and learning how to handle a broadsword. Richard is a good student and works hard at weapon practice. Isabel is far ahead of me in her studies, and she will only have our tutor for another year until she is fifteen. She says that girls’ heads cannot take in Rhetoric and that when she is free of the schoolroom I will be left there all alone and they won’t let me out until I get to the end of the book of examples. The prospect of the schoolroom without her is so dreary that I wonder if I dare mention it to my father, and ask to be released, while his hand rests so heavily on my shoulder and he seems to be feeling kindly towards me. I look into his grave face and think: better not.
‘I sent for you to tell you that the queen has asked for you both to join her household,’ he says.
Isabel lets out a little gasp of excitement and her round face goes pink as a ripe raspberry.
‘Us?’ I ask, amazed.
‘It is an honour due to you because of your place in the world as my daughters; but also because she has seen your behaviour at court. She said that you, Anne, were particularly charming at her coronation.’
I hear the word ‘charming’, and for a moment I can think of nothing else. The Queen of England, even though she is Queen Elizabeth who was only Elizabeth Woodville, who was then little more than a nobody, thinks that I am charming. And she told my father that she thinks I am charming. I can feel myself swell with pride and I turn to my overwhelming father and give him what I hope is a charming smile.
‘She thinks, rightly, that you would be an ornament to her rooms,’ he says.
I fix on the word ‘ornament’ and wonder exactly what the queen means. Does she mean that we would decorate her rooms, making them look pretty like tapestries hung over badly washed walls? Would we have to stand very still in the same place all the time? Am I to be some kind of vase? My father laughs at my bewildered face and nods to Isabel. ‘Tell your little sister what she is to do.’
‘She means a maid in waiting,’ she hisses at me.
‘Oh.’
‘What do you think?’ my father asks.
He can see what Isabel thinks, since she is panting with excitement, her blue eyes sparkling. ‘I should be delighted,’ she says, fumbling for words. ‘It is an honour. An honour I had not looked for . . . I accept.’
He looks at me. ‘And you, little one? My little mouse? Are you thrilled like your sister? Are you also rushing to serve the new queen? Do you want to dance around the new light?’
Something in the way that he speaks warns me that this would be the wrong answer, though I remember the queen as a dazzled acolyte might remember the sight of a feast-day icon. I can think of nothing more wonderful than to serve this beauty as her maid in waiting. And she likes me. Her mother smiled at me, she herself thought I was charming. I could burst for pride that she likes me and joy that she has singled me out. But I am cautious. ‘Whatever you think best, Father,’ I say. I look down at my feet, and then up into his dark eyes. ‘Do we like her now?’
He laughs shortly. ‘God save us! What gossip have you been hearing? Of course we love and honour her; she is our queen, the wife of our king. She is his first choice of all the princesses in the world. Just imagine! Of all the high-born ladies in Christendom that he could have married – and yet he chose her.’ There is something hard and mocking about his tone. I hear the loyal words that he speaks; but I hear something behind them: a note like Isabel’s when she is bullying me. ‘You are a silly child to ask,’ he says. ‘We have all sworn fealty to her. You yourself swore fealty at her coronation.’
Isabel nods at me, as if to confirm my father’s condemnation. ‘She’s too young to understand,’ she assures him over my head. ‘She understands nothing.’
My quick temper flares up. ‘I understand that the king didn’t do what my father advised! When Father had put him on the throne! When Father could have died fighting the bad queen and the sleeping king for Edward!’
This makes him laugh again. ‘Out of the mouths of babes indeed!’ Then he shrugs. ‘Anyway, you’re not going. Neither of you will go to court to serve under this queen. You are going with your mother to Warwick Castle, and you can learn all you need to know about running a great palace from her. I don’t think Her Grace the queen can teach you anything that your mother has not known from childhood. We were royal kinsmen when this queen was picking apples in the orchard of Groby Hall. Your mother was born a Beauchamp, she married into the Nevilles, so I doubt that she has much to learn about being a great lady of England – certainly not from Elizabeth Woodville,’ he adds quietly.
‘But Father—’ Isabel is so distressed that she cannot stop herself speaking out. ‘Should we not serve the queen if she has asked for us? Or at any rate shouldn’t I go? Anne is too young, but shouldn’t I go to court?’
He looks at her as if he despises her longing to be in the centre of things, at the court of the queen, at the heart of the kingdom, seeing the king every day, living in the royal palaces, beautifully dressed, in a court newly come to power, the rooms filled with music, the walls bright with tapestries, the court at play, celebrating their triumph.
‘Anne may be young, but she judges better than you,’ he says coldly. ‘Do you question me?’
She drops into a curtsey and lowers her head. ‘No, my lord. Never. Of course not.’
‘You can go,’ he says, as if he is tired of both of us. We scurry from the room like mice that have felt the breath of a cat on their little furry backs. When we are safely outside in his presence chamber and the door is shut behind us I nod to Isabel and say: ‘There! I was right. We don’t like the queen.’
WARWICK CASTLE, SPRING 1468
We don’t like the queen. In the early years of her marriage she encourages her husband the king to turn against my father: his earliest and best friend, the man who made him king and gave him a kingdom. They take the great seal of estate from my uncle George, and dismiss him from his great office of Lord Chancellor, they send my father as an envoy to France and then play him false by making a private treaty with the rival Burgundy behind his back. My father is furious with the king and blames the queen and her family for advising him against his true interests but in favour of her Burgundy kinsman. Worst of all, King Edward sends his sister Margaret to marry the Duke of Burgundy. All my father’s work with the great power of France is spoiled by this sudden friendliness with the enemy. Edward will make an enemy of France and all my father’s work in making friends with them will be for nothing.
And the weddings that the queen forges to bring her family into greatness! The moment she is crowned she captures almost every well-born wealthy young man in England for her hundreds of sisters. Young Henry Stafford the Duke of Buckingham, who my parents had picked out for me, she bundles into marriage with her sister Katherine – the little girl who sat on our table at the coronation dinner. The child born and raised in a country house at Grafton becomes a duchess. Though the two of them are no older than me, the queen marries them to each other anyway, and brings them up in her household, as her wards, guarding the Stafford fortune for her own profit. My mother says that the Staffords, who are as proud as anyone in England, will never forgive her for this, and neither will we. Little Henry looks as sick as if someone had poisoned him. He can trace his parentage back to the Kings of England and he is married to little Katherine Woodville and has a man who was nothing more than a squire as his father-in-law.
Her brothers she marries off to anyone with a fortune or a title. Her handsome brother Anthony gets a wife whose title makes him Baron Scales; but the queen makes no proposal for us. It is as if the moment that Father said that we would not go to her court we ceased to exist for her. She makes no offer for either Isabel or me. My mother remarks to my father that we would never have stooped to one of the Rivers – however high they might try to fling themselves upwards – but it means that I have no marriage arranged for me though I will be twelve in June, and it is even worse for Isabel, stuck in my mother’s train as her maid in waiting, and no husband in sight though she is sixteen. Since my mother was betrothed when she was just out of the cradle, and was wedded and bedded by the age of fourteen, Isabel feels more and more impatient, more and more as if she will be left behind in this race to the altar. We seem to have disappeared, like girls under a spell in a fairytale, while Queen Elizabeth marries all her sisters and her cousins to every wealthy young nobleman in England.
‘Perhaps you’ll marry a foreign prince,’ I say, trying to console Isabel. ‘When we go back home to Calais, Father will find you a prince of France. They must be planning something like that for us.’
We are in the ladies’ chamber at Warwick Castle, supposed to be drawing. Isabel has a fine sketch of the landscape from the window before her and I have a scrawl which is supposed to be a bunch of primroses, newly picked from the banks of the Avon, beside Richard’s lute.
‘You’re such a fool,’ she says crushingly. ‘What good would a prince of France do us? We need a connection to the throne of England. There’s the new king on the throne, there’s his wife who gives him nothing but girls. We need to be in the line of succession. We need to get closer. You are as stupid as a goose girl.’
I don’t even flare up at the insult. ‘Why do we need a connection to the throne of England?’
‘Our father did not put the York house on the throne of England to oblige them,’ she explains. ‘Our father put the Yorks on the throne so that he might command them. Father was going to rule England from behind the York throne. Edward was like a younger brother to him, Father was going to be his master. Everyone knows that.’
Not me. I had thought that my father had fought for the Yorks because they were the rightful heirs, because the queen Margaret of Anjou was a bad woman and because the king had fallen asleep.
‘But now that King Edward is advised by no-one but his wife and her family then we will have to join that family circle to rule him,’ she says. ‘You and I will marry his brothers the royal dukes, if Mother can possibly get them for us.’
I feel myself flush. ‘You mean that I would marry Richard?’
‘You can’t like him!’ She bursts into laughter. ‘He’s so dark-haired and olive-skinned and awkward . . .’
‘He’s strong,’ I say at random. ‘He can ride anything. And he’s brave, and . . .’
‘If you want a horseman for a husband why not marry John the groom?’
‘But are you sure they are going to arrange it? When will we marry?’
‘Father is determined on it,’ she says, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘But She is certain to try to stop it. She won’t want the king’s brothers married to anyone but her family and friends. She won’t want us all at court, showing her up, showing everyone how a truly great English family behaves. She spends all her time trying to take the king away from Father because she knows Father tells him the truth and gives him good advice, because she knows Father advises the king against her.’
‘Has Father asked the king for permission? For us to marry?’
‘He’s going to do it while he is at court,’ she says. ‘He could be asking him now: today, right this moment. And then we two will be betrothed – both of us – and to the brothers of the King of England. We will be royal duchesses. We will outrank the queen’s mother, Jacquetta, we will outrank the king’s mother, Duchess Cecily. We will be the first ladies of England after the queen herself.’
I gape at her.
‘Who else should we be?’ she demands. ‘When you think who our father is? Of course we should be the first ladies of England.’
‘And if King Edward has no son,’ I say slowly, thinking aloud, ‘then his brother George will be king when he dies.’
Isabel hugs me in her delight. ‘Yes! Exactly! George Duke of Clarence.’ She is laughing with joy. ‘He will be King of England and I will be queen.’
I pause, quite awestruck at the thought of my sister becoming queen. ‘Queen Isabel,’ I say.
She nods. ‘I’ve always thought it sounded well.’
‘Izzy, you will be so grand!’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘And you will be a duchess beside me always. You will be the first lady of my household. We shall have such clothes!’
‘But if you live a long time, and have no sons either, and then George dies, then Richard will be the next heir and the next queen will be me: Queen Anne.’
At once her smile fades. ‘No, that’s not very likely at all.’
My father comes back from the court in stony silence. Dinner is served in the great hall of Warwick Castle, where hundreds of our men sit down to eat. The hall buzzes with the clatter of plates and the clash of mugs and the scrape of knife on trencher, but at the top table where my father sits and glowers, we eat in total silence. My mother sits on his right-hand side, her eyes on the table of the ladies in waiting, alert to any misbehaviour. Richard sits on his left, watchful and quiet. Isabel sits next to my mother, frightened into silence, and I come last as usual. I don’t know what has happened. I have to find someone to tell me.
I get hold of our half-sister Margaret. She may be Father’s bastard but he has recognised her from her birth and Mother paid for her upbringing and keeps her among her ladies in waiting, a trusted confidante. She is now married to one of Father’s tenants, Sir Richard Huddlestone, and though she is a grown woman of twenty-three and always knows everything, she – unlike everyone else – will tell me.
‘Margaret, what’s happening?’
‘The king refused our father,’ she says grimly, as I catch her in our bedroom, watching the maid sliding a warming pan in the cold bed, and the groom of the bedchamber thrusting a sword between the mattresses for our safety. ‘Shame on him. He has forgotten all that he owes, he has forgotten where he has come from and who helped him to the throne. They say that the king told your father to his face that he would never allow his brothers to marry the two of you.’
‘For what reason? Father will be so angry.’
‘He said he wanted other matches for them, alliances perhaps in France or the Low Countries, Flanders again, or Germany. Who knows? He wants princesses for them. But the queen will be looking out for her kinswomen in Burgundy, no doubt she will have some suggestions, and your father feels himself to be insulted.’
‘We are insulted,’ I assert. Then I am uncertain: ‘Aren’t we?’
Emphatically she nods, waving the servants from the room. ‘We are. They won’t find two more beautiful girls for the royal dukes, not if they go to Jerusalem itself. The king, God bless him, is ill-advised. Ill-advised to look elsewhere than the Neville girls. Ill-advised to slight your father who put him where he is today.’
‘Who tells him to look elsewhere?’ I ask, though I know the answer. ‘Who advises him ill?’
She turns her head and spits in the fire. ‘She does,’ she replies. We all know who ‘She’ is.
When I go back to the hall I see Richard, the king’s brother, in close conversation with his tutor, and I guess he is asking him for the news, just as I spoke to Margaret. He glances over to me and I am certain that they are speaking of me and that his tutor has told him that we will not be betrothed, that the queen, though she herself married the man of her choice, will make loveless matches for the rest of us. For Richard there will be a princess or a foreign duchess. I see with a little surge of irritation that he does not look in the least upset. He looks as if he does not mind at all that he will not be commanded to marry a short, brown-haired, fair-skinned thin girl who has neither height nor blonde hair and no sign whatsoever of breasts, being persistently as lean as a lathe. I toss my head as if I don’t care either. I would not have married him, even if they had all begged me. And if I suddenly grow into beauty, he will be sorry that he lost me.
‘Have you heard?’ he asks, walking over to me with his diffident smile. ‘My brother the king has said that we are not to marry. He has other plans for me.’
‘I never wanted to marry you,’ I say, instantly offended. ‘So don’t think that I did.’
‘Your father proposed it himself,’ he replies.
‘Well, the king will have someone in mind for you,’ I say crossly. ‘One of the queen’s sisters, without a doubt. Or one of her cousins, or perhaps a great-aunt, some old lady with a hook nose and no teeth. She married her little brother John to my great-aunt, you take care she doesn’t match you with some noble old crone. They called it the diabolical match – you’ll probably have one too.’
He shakes his head. ‘My brother will have a princess picked out for me,’ he says confidently. ‘He is a good brother to me, and he knows I am loyal heart and soul to him. Besides, I am of an age to marry and you are still only a little girl.’
‘I am eleven,’ I say with dignity. ‘But you York boys all think you’re so wonderful. You think you were born grown-up, and high as lords. You’d better remember that you would be nowhere without my father.’
‘I do remember it,’ he says. He puts his hand on his heart as if he was a knight in a fairytale and he does an odd little bow to me as if I was a grown-up lady. ‘And I am sorry that we won’t be married, little Anne, I am sure you would have made an excellent duchess. I hope you get a great prince, or some king from somewhere.’
‘All right,’ I say, suddenly awkward. ‘I hope you don’t get an old lady then.’
That night Isabel comes to bed shaking with excitement. She kneels to pray at the foot of the bed and I hear her whisper: ‘Let it be, lord. Oh lord, let it happen.’ I wait in silence as she sheds her gown and creeps under the sheets and lies first one way, and then another, too restless to sleep.
‘What’s happening?’ I whisper.
‘I’m going to marry him.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. My Lord Father told me. We are to go to Calais and the duke will join us secretly there.’
‘The king has changed his mind?’
‘The king won’t even know.’
I gasp. ‘You’ll never marry the king’s brother without his permission?’
She gives a little gasping giggle and we lie silent.
‘I shall have such gowns,’ she says. ‘And furs. And jewels.’
‘And does Richard come too?’ I ask in a very small voice. ‘Because he thinks he is to marry someone else.’
In the darkness, she puts her arm around my shoulder and draws me to her. ‘No,’ she says. ‘He’s not coming. They will find someone else for you. But not Richard.’
‘It’s not that I like him especially . . .’
‘I know. It is that you expected to marry him. It’s my fault, I put the idea in your head. I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘And since you are to marry George . . .’
‘I know,’ she says kindly. ‘We should have been married together to the brothers. But I shan’t leave you. I’ll ask Father if you can come and live with us when I am a duchess and living at court. You can be my maid in waiting.’
‘It’s just that I rather wanted to be a duchess myself.’
‘Yes; but you can’t,’ she says.
CALAIS CASTLE, 11 JULY 1469
Isabel wears a gown of brilliant white silk with cloth-of-gold sleeves. I walk behind her carrying her ermine cloak, wearing white and silver. She has a high headdress draped with a white veil of priceless lace that makes her look six feet tall, a goddess, a giantess. George, the bridegroom, is in deep purple velvet, the colour of emperors. Almost everyone from the English court is here. If the king did not know of the secret wedding he will have realised it when he woke this morning to find half his court is missing. His own mother, Duchess Cecily, waved off the wedding party from Sandwich, blessing the plans of her best-loved son George over the plans of her disobedient son Edward.
Richard was left behind with his tutor and friends at Warwick Castle; Father didn’t tell him where we were going, he didn’t even know we were coming here to celebrate a grand wedding. I wonder if he is sorry that he has been left out. I hope very much that he thinks he has missed a great chance and been played as a fool. Isabel may be the oldest Neville girl, and the most beautiful, she may be the one that everyone says is so graceful and well-bred – but I have an inheritance as great as Isabel’s and I may very well grow into looks. Then Richard will have missed a beautiful wealthy wife and some shabby Spanish princess will not be half such a treasure as I might have been. I think with some pleasure of him being filled with regret when I grow rounded and curvy and my hair goes fair like the queen’s, and I get a secret smile like hers and he sees me married to a wealthy prince, dripping in furs, and he knows that I am lost to him, just like Guinevere.
This is not just a wedding; it is a celebration of my father’s power. Nobody seeing the court assembled here at my father’s invitation, bowing as low to him as if he were a king when he walks through the beautiful galleries of Calais Castle, set in the fortress town that he has held for England for years, can doubt for a moment that here is a power equal to the King of England, perhaps even greater than the King of England. If Edward chooses to ignore my father’s advice he can consider that there are many who think that my father is the better man; certainly he is a richer man with a bigger army. And now here is the king’s brother, forbidden to marry, but freely taking my sister’s hand in his own, smiling at her with his blond easy charm, and pledging himself.
The wedding feast goes on for all the afternoon, long into the night: dish after dish comes from the kitchen trumpeted by our musicians, meats and fruits, breads and sweetmeats, thick English puddings and French delicacies. It makes the queen’s coronation feast seem like nothing. Father has outdone the King of England in a great demonstration of his wealth and power. This is a rival court that outshines Edward and his commoner wife. My father is as grand as the wealthy Duke of Burgundy, grander than the French king. Isabel sits in state in the middle of the top table and waves dish after dish down the hall to the tables that must be honoured. George, handsome as a prince, puts little cuts of meat on Isabel’s plate, leans towards her, whispers in her ear, and smiles over at me, as if he would have me in his keeping too. I cannot help but smile back: there is something thrilling about George in his wedding suit, as handsome and as confident as a king himself.
‘Don’t fear, little one, there will be a grand wedding for you too,’ my father whispers to me as he walks behind my table where I am seated at the head of the ladies in waiting.
‘I thought—’
‘I know you did,’ he says, cutting me short. ‘But Richard is heart and soul for his brother the king, he would never do anything against Edward. I could not even ask him. But George here,’ he glances back at the top table where George is helping himself to another goblet of malmsey wine, ‘George loves himself before any other, George will take the best route for George, and besides, I have great plans for him.’
I wait in case he will say more, but instead he gently pats my shoulder. ‘You will have to take your sister to her bedroom and get her ready,’ he says. ‘Your mother will give you the word.’
I look up at my mother who is eyeing the hall, judging the servants, watching the guests. She nods at me and I rise to my feet, and Isabel suddenly pales as she realises that the wedding feast is over and the bedding must start.
There is a noisy and joyful parade that takes George to my sister’s new big bedroom; the respect for my mother prevents it being too bawdy, but the men of the garrison bellow their encouragement and all the wedding guests throw flowers under her feet and call out blessings. My sister and her new husband are put to bed by an archbishop, twenty maids in waiting and five knights of the garter, in a cloud of incense wafted by half a dozen priests, to the stentorian bellow of my father’s shouted good wishes. My mother and I are the last to leave the room, and as I glance back Izzy is sitting up in bed, looking very pale as if she is afraid. George leans back on the pillows beside her, naked to the waist, his blond hair glinting on his chest, his broad smile very confident.
I hesitate. This will be the first night in all our lives that we have slept apart. I don’t think I want to sleep alone, I don’t think I can sleep without my sister’s peaceful warmth in my bed, and I doubt that Izzy wants George, so loud, so blond, so drunk, as a bed-mate. Izzy looks at me as if she would say something. My mother, sensing the bond between us, puts a hand on my shoulder and starts to lead me from the room.
‘Annie, don’t go,’ Izzy says quietly. I turn back and see that she is shaking with fear. She stretches out a hand to me as if she would keep me with her, for just a moment longer. ‘Annie!’ she whispers. I can’t resist the alarm in her voice. I turn to go back into the room as my mother takes me firmly by the arm, and closes the bedroom door behind us.
That night I sleep alone, refusing the company of one of the maids; if I cannot be with my sister then I don’t want any bedfellow at all. I lie in the cold sheets and there is no-one to exchange a whispered account of the day, no-one to tease, no-one to torment me. Even when we fought like cats in a basket, there was always the comfort of having Izzy there to fight with. Like the very walls of Calais Castle she is part of the scenery of my life. I was born and bred to be secondary to her: the beauty of the family. I have always followed behind an ambitious, determined, vocal older sister. Now suddenly I am alone. I lie awake for a long time, staring into the darkness, wondering what my life will be, now I no longer have an older sister to tell me what to do. I think that in the morning everything will be utterly different.
CALAIS CASTLE, 12 JULY 1469
In the morning things are even more different than I had dreamed in my solitary night. The whole place is wide-awake at dawn. The rumble of cartwheels from the kitchen yard to the quayside, the shouting from the armoury, and the scramble and haste in the basin of the port show that far from celebrating a wedding, Father is preparing to go to sea.
‘Is it pirates?’ I ask my tutor, catching his hand as he goes past me with a writing desk towards my father’s rooms. ‘Please, sir, is it a raid of pirates?’
‘No,’ he says, his face pale and frightened. ‘Worse. Go to your mother, Lady Anne. I cannot stop and talk now. I have to go to your father and take down his orders.’
Worse than pirates must mean that the French are about to attack. If so, then we are at war and half the English court has been caught in a castle under siege. This is the worst thing that has ever happened. I go to my mother’s rooms at the run but find everything unnaturally quiet. Mother is seated beside Isabel. Isabel is in her new gown but there is no excited chatter of bridal joy. Isabel looks furious, the women, sewing shirts in a circle, are silent with a sort of feverish anticipation. I curtsey low to my mother: ‘Please, Lady Mother,’ I say. ‘What’s happening?’
‘You may tell her,’ my mother says coolly to Isabel, and I scurry to my sister and pull up a stool beside her chair.
‘Are you all right?’ I mutter.
‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘It wasn’t too bad.’
‘Did it hurt?’
She nods. ‘Horrible. And disgusting. First horrible, then disgusting.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Father’s making war on the king.’
‘No!’ I speak too loudly and my mother shoots a sharp look at me. I clap my hand over my mouth and I know that over the top of my gagging palm my eyes are huge with shock. ‘Isabel – no!’
‘It was planned,’ she whispers fiercely. ‘Planned all along, and I was part of it. He said he had a great plan. I thought he meant my wedding. I didn’t know it was this.’
I roll my eyes towards the stony face of my mother who simply glares at me as if my sister is married to a treasonous royal every day of the week and it is vulgar of me to show any surprise.
‘Did our Lady Mother know?’ I whisper. ‘When did she find out?’
‘She knew all along,’ Isabel says bitterly. ‘They all knew. Everyone knew but us.’
I am stunned into silence. I look around the ladies of my mother’s chamber, who are all stitching shirts for the poor as if this were an ordinary day, as if we were not going to war with the very King of England that we put on the throne only eight years ago.
‘He’s arming the fleet. They’re sailing at once.’
I give a little whimper of shock and bite my palm to silence myself.
‘Oh come on, we can’t talk here,’ Isabel says, jumping to her feet and bobbing a curtsey to our mother. Isabel drags me into an anteroom and up the winding stone stairs to the leads of the castle where we can look down at the frantic hurry on the quayside as the ships are loaded with weapons and the men carry their armour and tug their horses on board. I can see Midnight, my father’s great black horse, with a hood over his head so that he will walk up the gangplank. He goes with a great bound, frightened of the echo of the wood under his metal-shod hooves. If Midnight is anxious then I know there is danger.
‘He’s really doing it,’ I say disbelievingly. ‘He’s really setting sail for England. But what about the king’s mother? Duchess Cecily? She knew. She saw us all leave from Sandwich. Won’t she warn her son?’
‘She knows,’ Isabel says grimly. ‘She has known for ages. I should think just about everyone knows but the king . . . and me and you. Duchess Cecily has hated the queen from the moment they first told her that Edward was married in secret. Now she turns against queen and king together. They have had it planned for months. Father’s been paying men to rise up against the king in the North and the Midlands. My wedding was their signal to rise. Think of it – he told them the very day that I was going to take my vows, so they could rise at the right time. Now they are up, looking like a rebellion of their own making. They’ve fooled the king into thinking it is a local grievance – he is marching north out of London to settle what he thinks is a small uprising. He will be away from London when Father lands. He doesn’t know that my wedding was not a wedding but a muster. He doesn’t know that the wedding guests are sailing to march against him. Father has thrown my bridal veil over an invasion.’
‘The king? King Edward?’ I say stupidly, as if our old enemy the sleeping King Henry might have woken and risen up from his bed in the Tower.
‘Of course King Edward.’
‘But Father loves him.’
‘Loved,’ Isabel corrects me. ‘George told me this morning. It’s all changed. Father can’t forgive the king for favouring the Rivers. Nobody can earn a penny, nobody can get a yard of land, everything that can be taken, they have taken, and everything that is decided in England is done by them. Especially Her.’
‘She’s queen . . .’ I say tentatively. ‘She’s a most wonderful queen . . .’
‘She has no right to everything,’ Isabel says.
‘But to challenge the king?’ I lower my voice. ‘Isn’t that treason?’
‘Father won’t challenge the king directly. He’ll demand that he surrenders his bad advisors – he means Her family, the Rivers family. He will demand that the king restore the councillors who have guided him wisely – that’s us. He’ll get the chancellorship back for our uncle George Neville. He’ll make the king consult him on everything, Father will decide on foreign alliances again. We’ll get it all back again, we’ll be where we were before, the advisors and the rulers behind the king. But one thing I don’t know . . .’ Her voice quavers in the middle of these firm predictions, as if she has suddenly lost her nerve: ‘One thing I really don’t know . . .’ She takes a breath. ‘I don’t know . . .’
I watch as they swing a great cannon on a sling and lower it into the hold of a ship. ‘What? What don’t you know?’
Her face is aghast, like when we left her in her marriage bed last night, and she whispered: ‘Annie, don’t go.’
‘What if it’s a trick?’ she asks in a voice so quiet that I have to put my head against hers to hear her. ‘What if it is a trick like they played on the sleeping king and the bad queen? You’re too young to remember but King Edward’s father and our father never challenged the sleeping king. They were never open rebels against him. They always said only that he should be better advised. And they led out the armies of England against him, always saying that he should be better advised. It’s what Father always says.’
‘And when they beat him in battle . . .’
‘Then they put him in the Tower and said that they would hold him forever,’ she finishes. ‘They took his crown from him although they always said they just wanted to help him rule. What if Father and George are planning to do that to King Edward? Just as Father and Edward did it to the sleeping king? What if Father has turned traitor to Edward and is going to put him in the Tower along with Henry?’
I think of the beautiful queen, so confident and smiling at her coronation feast, and imagine her imprisoned in the Tower instead of being the mistress of it, and dancing till dawn. ‘He can’t do that, they swore fealty,’ I say numbly. ‘We all did. We all said that Edward was the true king, the anointed king. We all kissed the queen’s hand. We said King Edward had a better claim to the throne than the sleeping king. We said he was the flower of York, and we would all walk in the sweet garden of England. And we danced at her coronation when she looked so beautiful and they were so happy. Edward is the King of England: there can’t be another. She’s queen.’
Isabel shakes her head impatiently. ‘You think everything is so easy! You think everything is straightforward like that? We swore fealty when Father thought that he would rule through King Edward. What if he now thinks he will rule through George? Through George and me?’
‘He will put you on the throne of England?’ I say incredulously. ‘You’re going to wear Her crown? You’re going to take Her place? Not waiting for Edward to die? Just taking everything?’
She does not look excited as she did when we used to play at queens. She looks aghast. She looks afraid. ‘Yes.’
CALAIS CASTLE, SUMMER 1469
Isabel’s new husband George, my father, and all the men that assembled as wedding guests, turn out to be a recruited force, sworn to loyalty to each other, ready to invade England, and they set sail, land in Kent, and march on the Midlands. Men pour out of the cities to join them, throw down their spades in the fields and run after Father’s army. He is still remembered by the people of England as the leader who freed the country from the curse of the sleeping king, he is beloved as the captain who holds the narrow seas and keeps both pirates and the French from our shores. And everyone believes him when he says that all he wants is to teach the young king how to rule, and free him from the command of his wife: another strong-minded woman, another bad queen that will curse England if the men give way to another female ruler.
The people of England learned to hate the bad queen, Margaret of Anjou. At the first mention of another woman, a strong-willed determined woman who is presuming on her position as the king’s wife to try to rule the kingdom, they turn out in a frenzy of offended male pride. My uncle George, whose post of Lord Chancellor was taken off him by the king and his wife, catches Edward on the road as he is riding to join his army, captures him and sends him under guard to our home: Warwick Castle. Father captures the queen’s own father and her brother as they ride away into Wales. He sends a special force to Grafton in Northampton and snatches the queen’s mother from her home. Events tumble after one another too fast for the king. Father hunts down the Rivers family before they realise they are prey. This is the end of the king’s power, this is the end of the bad councillors for the king. For certain, it is the end of the Rivers family. Of the queen’s extensive family, Father holds in his power three of them: her father, mother and brother.
Only slowly, with a growing dread, do we realise that this is not a threat from Father, to teach them a lesson. These are not kinsmen who have been taken for ransom in the ordinary way: this is a declaration of war on the Rivers. Father accuses the queen’s own father and her handsome young brother John of treason and orders their execution. Without rule of law, without a proper trial, he has them brought from Chepstow to our stronghold, Coventry, and executed without chance of appeal, without a chance of a pardon, outside the hard grey walls. The handsome young man, married to a woman old enough to be his grandmother, dies before his ancient bride, his head on a block, his dark curls gripped by the executioner. Lord Rivers puts his head down in his son’s blood. The queen, stricken with grief, in terror for herself, separated from her husband, fearing that she will be an orphan, barricades herself and her little girls into the Tower of London and sends for her mother.
She can’t reach her. The queen’s mother, who planned the table for the children at the coronation dinner and smiled at me, is in my father’s power at Warwick Castle. Father creates a courtroom to have her tried and brings witnesses against her. One after another they come with reports of lights burning in her still-room at night, of her whispering to the river which runs near her home, of rumours that she could hear voices and that when one of her family was going to die she was warned by singing, spectral singing from the night sky.
Finally they search her home at Grafton and bring in the tools of necromancy: two little figures made of lead, bound together in a devilish union with wire of gold. Clearly one is meant to be the king, the other Jacquetta’s daughter, Elizabeth Woodville. Their secret marriage was brought about by witchcraft, and King Edward, who has acted like a madman since he first set eyes on the Northampton widow, was all this time under an enchantment. The queen’s mother is a witch who brought about the marriage by magic, and the queen herself is the daughter of a witch and half-witch herself. Clearly, Father will obey the injunction in the Bible that says Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, and put her to death, doing God’s work and his own.
He writes all this to Mother, as we wait in Calais, and she reads it in her measured voice as the ladies sit around and forget to sew, open-mouthed with shock. Of course, I want Midnight to ride with his high-stepping stride over all the kingdom; but I cannot rejoice at the thought of that young man John putting his handsome head on the block. I remember how he looked like a lamb going to the slaughter at the coronation feast when they made him go handfast with his elderly bride – but now he is a slaughtered lamb indeed and he has died before the old lady. My father rebels against the rules of nature as well as those of kingship. The queen’s mother, Jacquetta, who smiled at me so kindly on the night of the coronation feast, has been widowed by my father’s executioner. I remember her walking into dinner with her hand in her husband’s arm, their pride and joy shining from them like candlelight. Yet my father has killed her boy, and her husband too. The queen herself is fatherless; is she to lose her mother as well? Is Father going to burn Jacquetta, Lady Rivers?
‘She is our enemy,’ Isabel says reasonably. ‘I know that the queen is beautiful and she seemed very pleasant, but her family are grasping and bad advisors, and Father will have to destroy them. They are our enemy now. You must think of them as the enemy now.’
‘I do,’ I say; but I think of her in her white gown and her high headdress and her veil of lace, and I know that I don’t.
For most of the summer we are in a state of constant excitement as the reports come from England that Edward, the one-time king, is living as our forced guest at Warwick Castle, that Father is ruling the realm through him, and the reputations of all of the Rivers are being destroyed. Father tells everyone that the evidence from the trial of the queen’s mother shows clearly that the royal marriage was brought about by sorcery, and the king has been under an evil spell. Father has saved him, he is keeping him safe and he will kill the witch and break the spell.
My mother has waited in Calais for news before; we waited here when my father fought one brilliant battle after another to defeat the sleeping king. It is as if we are re-enacting those days of victory and Father is once again unstoppable. Now he has a second king in his keeping and he is going to put a new puppet on the throne. The French servants who come into the city of Calais tell us that the French call my father ‘the kingmaker’ and say that no-one can hold the throne of England without his permission.
‘The kingmaker,’ my mother murmurs, savouring the word. She smiles at her ladies, she even smiles at me. ‘Lord, what foolish things people do say,’ she remarks.
Then a ship from England brings us a packet of letters and the captain comes to the castle, to see my mother in private, and tell her that the news is all over London that King Edward was born a bastard, not his father’s son but the misbegotten child of an English archer. Edward was never the heir of the House of York. He is base-born. He should never have been on the throne at all.
‘Are people really saying that Duchess Cecily lay with an archer?’ I ask out loud as one of the ladies whispers the gossip. The king’s mother, our great-aunt, is one of the most formidable ladies of the realm, and no-one but a fool would believe such a thing of her. ‘Duchess Cecily? With an archer?’
In one swift angry move, my mother rounds on me and boxes my ears with a ringing blow that sends my headdress flying across the room.
‘Out of my sight!’ she shouts in a rage. ‘And think before you dare to speak ill of your betters! Never say such a thing in my hearing again.’
I have to scuttle across the room to get my headdress. ‘My Lady Mother . . .’ I start to apologise.
‘Go to your room!’ she orders. ‘And then go to the priest for a penance for gossiping.’
I scurry out, clutching my headdress, and find Isabel in our bedroom.
‘What is it?’ she asks, seeing a red handprint across my cheek.
‘Lady Mother,’ I say shortly.
Isabel reaches into her sleeve and lends me her special wedding handkerchief to dry my eyes. ‘Here,’ she says gently. ‘Why did she box your ears? Come and sit here and I’ll comb your hair.’
I stifle my sobs and take my seat before the little silvered mirror, and Isabel takes the pins out of my hair and combs out the tangles with the ivory comb that her husband gave her after their one night of marriage.
‘What happened?’
‘I only said that I couldn’t believe that King Edward was a bastard foisted on his father by the duchess,’ I say defensively. ‘And even if I am beaten to death for saying it, I still can’t believe it. Our great-aunt? Duchess Cecily? Who would dare to say such a thing of her? She is such a great lady. Who would say such a thing against her? Won’t they get their tongue slit? What d’you think?’
‘I think it’s a lie,’ she says drily, as she twists my hair into a plait and pins it up on my head. ‘And that’s why you got your ears boxed. Mother was angry with you because it’s a lie that we are not to question. We are not to repeat it, but we’re not to challenge it either. It’s a lie that our men will be telling all over London, Calais too, and we are not to contradict it.’
I am utterly confused. ‘Why would our men say it? Why would we not forbid them to speak, as I am forbidden? Why would we allow such a lie? Why would anyone say that Duchess Cecily betrayed her own husband? Shamed herself?’
‘You think,’ she advises.
I sit staring at my own reflection, my brown hair shining with bronze lights where it is elegantly plaited by Isabel, my young face creased in a frown. Isabel waits for me to follow the tortuous path of my father’s plotting. ‘Father is allowing the men to repeat this lie?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Because if Edward is illegitimate, then George is the true heir,’ I say eventually.
‘And so the true King of England,’ she says. ‘All roads lead to George taking the throne and me at his side and Father ruling us both forever. They call him the kingmaker. He made Edward, now he unmakes him. Next, he makes George.’ Her face in the mirror is grave.
‘I would have thought you would be pleased to be queen,’ I say tentatively. ‘And to have Father win the throne for you.’
‘When we were little girls playing at being queens we didn’t know the price that women pay. We know now. The queen before Elizabeth, the bad queen, Margaret of Anjou, is on her knees like a beggar asking for help from the King of France, her husband in the Tower, her son a prince with no principality. The present queen is hiding in the Tower, her father and brother dead on a scaffold, beheaded like common criminals, her mother awaits death by burning for witchcraft.’
‘Iz, please tell me that Father wouldn’t burn Jacquetta Woodville!’ I whisper.
‘He will,’ my sister says, her face grim. ‘Why else arrest and try her? When I wanted to be a queen I thought it was a story, like the legends, I thought it was all about beautiful dresses and handsome knights. Now I see that it is pitiless. It is a game of chess and Father has me as one of his pieces. Now he uses me on the board, next I may fall to one side and he won’t even think of me, as he brings another piece into play.’
‘Are you afraid?’ I whisper. ‘Are you afraid of falling off to one side?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
ENGLAND, AUTUMN 1469
My father has England in his grip. Victorious, he sends for us to share his triumph. My mother, Isabel and I take ship from Calais in the best vessel of my father’s great fleet, and arrive in London in great state as the women of the new royal house. The former queen Elizabeth skulks in the Tower, my father transfers the former King of England to our castle at Middleham and holds him there. In the absence of any other court we suddenly become the centre for London, for the kingdom. My mother and the king’s mother, Duchess Cecily, are seen everywhere together, with Isabel following behind them, the two great women of the realm and the bride who will be made queen at the next parliament.
This is our moment of triumph: the kingmaker deposing the king who has wearied him to install another, his son-in-law. It is my father who decides who will rule England. It is my father who makes and unmakes the Kings of England. And Isabel is with child, she too is doing just what Father requires, she too is being a kingmaker; she is making a King of England in her belly. Mother prays every morning before a statue of Our Lady that Isabel has a boy, who will be Prince of Wales, heir to the throne. We are a triumphant family blessed by God with fertility. The former king, Edward, has only three daughters, he has no son and heir, there is no prince in his nursery, there is no-one to bar George from the throne. His beautiful queen, so healthy and so fecund, can only make girls with him. But here we are, entering England a new royal family, a new queen for crowning, and she is with child. A wedding-night baby, conceived in the only night they were together! What a sign of grace! Who can doubt that it is our destiny to take the crown and for my father to see his grandson born a prince and live to be a king?
My father orders us to Warwick Castle, up the dry roads with the brightly coloured leaves whirling around us and the trees a treasury of gold and bronze and copper. The roads are dry and hard after the long summer; we leave a cloud of dust behind us. Isabel leads the way, resting in a litter drawn by white mules. She is not to live in London with her victorious husband. It does not matter if they are parted now since she is already with his child. She is to rest and prepare for her coronation. My father will call a parliament at York that will proclaim George Duke of Clarence as king and she will be queen. There will be a huge coronation in London. She will take the sceptre in her hand and lay it across her big belly, and her coronation gown is to be gathered thickly at the front to emphasise her pregnancy.
Chests of goods come north from the royal wardrobe. Isabel and I open them like children on New Year’s Day in the best chamber of the castle and spill the contents all around the room, seeing the gold lacing and the encrusted stones sparkle in the firelight. ‘He’s done it,’ Isabel says breathlessly, looking at the boxes of furs that Father has sent her. ‘Father has taken her goods. These are her furs.’ She buries her face in the thick pelts, and gives a little awestruck gasp. ‘Smell them! They still smell of her perfume. He has taken her furs, he will have taken her perfume. I shall wear her perfume too. He says I am to have all her furs from the royal wardrobes to trim my gowns. He will send me her jewels, her brocades, her cloth-of-gold dresses to be fitted to me. He has done it.’
‘You can’t ever have doubted that he would?’ I ask, stroking the creamy ermine with the dark spots, which only kings and queens are allowed to wear. Isabel will have all her capes trimmed with it. ‘He defeated King Henry, and holds him prisoner. Now he has defeated King Edward and holds him. Sometimes I think of him, high on the back of his horse, Midnight, riding across the whole country, unbeatable.’
‘Two kings in prison, and a new one on the throne?’ Isabel questions, putting the furs aside. ‘How can it be? How shall the third king be safer than the other two? And what if Father turns against George as he turned against Edward? What if my father’s plans don’t just neglect me but come to oppose me? What if the kingmaker wants a new king after George?’
‘He won’t do that; there is no-one for him but you and George now, and you are carrying the prince, his grandson,’ I say certainly. ‘He’s done all this for you, Isabel. He will put you on the throne and keep you there, and then the next king of England will be a Neville. If he had done it for me I would be so happy. If he had done it for me I would have been the happiest girl in England.’
But Isabel is not happy. My mother and I cannot understand why she is not exultant. We think she is tired in her pregnancy for she will not walk out in the bright cold mornings, and takes no pleasure in the sharp autumnal air. She is anxious, though we and all our loyal household are triumphant, revelling in our rise to power. Then one day at dinner, my father’s Master of Horse, the most trusted and reliable man of his household, is announced. He walks the length of the hall, which falls silent and whispers as he hands a letter to my mother across the high table, and she takes it, surprised that he should come into the hall still dirty from the road, but knowing from his grave face that it is urgent news. She looks at the seal – my father’s standard of the bear and ragged staff – and then, without saying a word, she goes through the door at the back of the dais into the solar, leaving us in silence.
Isabel and I and the dozen ladies of her chamber eat our dinner, trying to look untroubled under the hushed scrutiny of the great hall, but as soon as we can we withdraw to wait in the presence chamber outside the solar, pretending to talk cheerfully among ourselves, horribly aware of the locked door and the silence behind it. If my father were dead, would my mother be weeping? Does she weep? Actually, can she weep? I have never seen my mother weep. I find I am wondering if she has that capacity, or if she is forever hard-faced and dry-eyed.
If my father’s Master of Horse had given her a letter telling us to come to London at once for Izzy’s coronation would she not have burst out through the door with the good news? Does she cry out in joy, I wonder? Have I ever seen her dancing with exultation? The red afternoon sun walks slowly along the tapestried walls lighting up one scene, and then another, and still there is no sound from her room.
Finally, in the evening as it is starting to get dark and the servants are bringing in the candles, the door opens, and my mother comes out, the letter in her hand. ‘Fetch the captain of the castle,’ she says to one of her ladies, ‘and the commander of the personal guard. Command my lord’s steward, and the groom of the chambers, and his Master of Horse.’
She sits in her great chair under the canopy embroidered with her noble crests, and waits for the men to come through the double doors, bow, and stand waiting. Obviously something important has happened but there is no way of telling from her impassive face whether we have triumphed or are ruined.
‘You ask her,’ Isabel mutters to me.
‘No, you.’
We stand with the ladies. Our mother is seated like a queen. She does not order a chair for Isabel, which is odd. It is as if Isabel’s baby is suddenly not the greatest baby that will ever be, as if Isabel herself is not one step from being queen. We wait for the men to come and line up before her to hear her orders.
‘I have a message from my husband, your lord,’ she says, her voice hard and clear. ‘He writes that he has restored the King of England, Edward, to his throne. My husband, your lord, has made an agreement with King Edward and in future the king will be guided by the natural lords of the kingdom; there will be no newcomers.’
Nobody says anything. These are men who have served my father for many years, through good battlefields and bad; they are not likely to stir and comment at ominous news. But the ladies shake their heads and whisper. Someone nods at Isabel as if in sympathy that she is not to be Queen of England after all and need not think herself special any more. My mother does not even look at us; her gaze is fixed on the wall hangings above our heads, and her voice never trembles.
‘We are going to London to demonstrate our friendship and loyalty to the rightful King Edward and his family,’ she says. ‘My daughter the duchess will meet with her husband George Duke of Clarence. Lady Anne will attend me of course. And my lord sends me more good news: our nephew John is to be betrothed to the king’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth of York.’
I snatch a quick glance at Isabel. This is not good news at all; it is utterly terrible. My father has taken up another pawn just as Isabel feared, and she is put aside. He is marrying his nephew into the royal household, to the royal heir, little Princess Elizabeth. My father will get a Neville on the throne one way or another; this is his new way. Isabel is the old way that he has surrendered.
Isabel is biting her lower lip. I reach out for her and, hidden by the widely spread skirt of her gown, we grip hands together.
‘My nephew will be given a dukedom,’ my mother says steadily. ‘He is to be the Duke of Bedford. This is an honour from the king and a gesture of his goodwill to our nephew, my husband’s heir. It is proof of the king’s friendship with us and his gratitude for our care of him. That is all. God save the king, and bless the House of Warwick.’
‘God save the king and bless the House of Warwick!’ everyone repeats as if it were possible to wish for two such contradictory things at once.
My mother rises to her feet and nods to Isabel and me to come with her. I walk behind Isabel, showing the respect due to a royal duchess: a royal duchess – but not a queen. In one moment Isabel has lost her claim to the throne. Who cares about being a royal duchess if our cousin John is to marry the heiress of York, the king’s own daughter? Cousin John is to be a duke, and the king has signalled to his brother that he can easily make other dukes and bring them into his family. Father has other pawns to put on the board.
‘What will we do in London?’ I whisper to Isabel as I lean forwards and straighten her veil.
‘Show our friendship, I suppose,’ she says. ‘Give back the furs to the queen, return the coronation gown to the royal wardrobe. Hope that Father is satisfied with marrying our cousin into the king’s family, and doesn’t take arms against the king again.’
‘You won’t be queen,’ I say sorrowfully. Ignobly, I feel a secret little glow that my sister will not wear ermine, will not be the greatest woman in the kingdom, Queen of England and my father’s favourite, the daughter who fulfils his greatest ambition, the pawn that can make the winning move.
‘Not now, no.’
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1469–70
Once again Isabel and I walk into the queen’s rooms sick with apprehension. The queen is in her great chair, her mother Jacquetta standing like sculpted ice behind her. Our mother comes behind Isabel but before me, and I wish that I were young enough to get my toes under her train and pass unnoticed. Nobody will think I am charming today. Isabel, though a married woman and this queen’s sister-in-law, has her head down, her eyes down, like a child in disgrace longing for this moment to be over.
My mother curtseys as low as she must do to a Queen of England and comes up, standing before her, hands quietly clasped, as composed as if she were in her own castle of Warwick. The queen looks her up and down and her eyes are as warm as grey slate in icy rain.
‘Ah, Countess of Warwick,’ she says in a voice as light and cold as drifting snow.
‘Your Grace,’ my mother replies through gritted teeth.
The queen’s mother, her lovely face blank with grief, wearing white, the royal colour of mourning of her house, looks at the three of us as if she would cut us down where we stand. I do not dare to do more than snatch a glance at her before I drop my eyes to my feet. She smiled at me at the coronation dinner; now she looks as if she will never smile again. I have never seen heartbreak engraved on a woman’s face before; but I know that I am seeing it in the ravaged beauty of Jacquetta Woodville. My mother inclines her head. ‘Your Grace, I am sorry for your loss,’ she says quietly.
The widow says nothing, nothing at all. We all three stand as if we are frozen in the ice of her gaze. I think – well, she must say something, she will say something such as ‘fortunes of war’ or ‘thank you for your sympathy’ or ‘he is with God’ or any of the things that widows say when their husbands have been lost in battle. England has been at war with itself, on and off, for the last fourteen years. Many women have to meet each other and know that their husbands were enemies. We are all accustomed to new alliances. But it seems that Jacquetta, the widow of Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, does not know these conventions, for she says nothing to make us any easier. She looks at us as if we are her enemies for life, as if she is cursing us in silence, as if this is the start of a blood feud that will never end, and I can feel myself start to tremble under the basilisk hatred of her gaze and I swallow, and wonder if I am going to faint.
‘He was a brave man,’ my mother volunteers again. In the face of Jacquetta’s stony grief the comment sounds frivolous.
At last the widow speaks. ‘He suffered the ignoble death of a traitor, beheaded by the Coventry blacksmith, and my beloved son John died too,’ the queen’s mother replies. ‘Both of them innocent of any crime, in all their lives. John was just twenty-four years old, obedient to his father and his king. My husband was defending his crowned and ordained king yet he was charged with treason, and then beheaded by your husband. It was not an honourable death on the battlefield. He had been on dozens of battlefields and always come home safe to me. It was a pledge he made to me: that he would always come home safe from war. He didn’t break it. God bless him that he didn’t break his promise to me. He died on the scaffold, not on the battlefield. I shall never forget this. I shall never forgive this.’
There is a truly terrible silence. Everyone in the room is looking at us, listening to the queen’s mother swear her enmity against us. I look up and find the queen’s icy gaze, filled with hatred, is resting on me. I look down again.
‘These are the fortunes of war,’ my mother says awkwardly, as if to excuse us.
Then Jacquetta does an odd, a terrible thing. She purses her lips together and she blows a long chilling whistle. Somewhere outside, a shutter bangs and a sudden chill flows through the room. The candles bob and flicker throughout the chamber as if a cold wind has nearly blown them out. Abruptly one candle in the stand beside Isabel winks and goes out. Isabel gives a little scream of fright. Jacquetta and her daughter the queen both look at us as if they would whistle us away, blow us away like dirty dust.
My formidable mother shrinks before this extraordinary inexplicable behaviour. I have never seen her turn from a challenge before but she flees from this, as she ducks her head and walks to the window bay. Nobody greets us, nobody breaks the silence that follows the unearthly whistle, nobody even smiles. There are people here who danced at the wedding at Calais Castle where this whole terrible plan was set in motion; but to look at them you would think they were utter strangers to us three. We stand in stony shame, quite alone, while the gust of air slowly dies down and the echo of Jacquetta’s long whistle goes silent.
The doors open and the king comes in, my father at his side, George his brother on the other side, Richard the younger York duke a little behind him, his dark head high and proud. He has every reason to be pleased with himself; this is the brother who did not betray the king, the brother whose loyalty was tested and stayed true. This is the brother who will have wealth and favour poured over him while we are in disgrace. I look towards him to see if he will acknowledge us and smile at me; but it seems that I am invisible to him, as we are to the rest of the court. Richard is a man now, his boyhood in our keeping far behind him. He was loyal to the king, when we were not.
George slowly comes over to our lonely little corner, looking away from us, as if he is ashamed to be with us, and Father follows him with his long loping stride. Father’s confidence is unshaken, his smile still bold, his brown eyes shining, his thick beard neatly trimmed, his authority untarnished by defeat. Isabel and I kneel for Father’s blessing and feel his hand lightly touch our heads. When we rise he is taking Mother’s hand as she smiles thinly at him, and then we all go into dinner, walking behind the king as if we were still his dearest friends and dedicated allies and not defeated traitors.
After dinner there is dancing and the king is cheerful, handsome and buoyant as always, like the lead actor in a masque, playing the role of the merry good king. He claps my father on the back, he puts his arm around his brother George’s shoulders. He, at least, will play his part as if nothing has gone wrong. My father, no less cunning than his former ally, is also at his ease, glancing around the court, greeting friends who all know that we are traitors and are only here on the king’s goodwill and because we own half of England. They smirk behind their hands at us, I can hear the laughter in their voices. I don’t look to see the hidden smiles; I keep my eyes down. I am so ashamed, I am so deeply ashamed of what we have done.
We failed, that was the worst of it. We took the king but we could not hold him. We won a little battle, but nobody supported us. It was not enough for my father to hold the king at Warwick, at Middleham; the king simply ruled from there and behaved as if he were an honoured guest, and then rode out and away when it suited him.
‘And Isabel must join the queen’s court,’ I hear the king say loudly, and my father replies without taking breath: ‘Yes, yes, of course, she will be honoured.’
Both Isabel and the queen hear this and look up at the same moment and their gazes meet. Isabel looks utterly shocked and afraid, her lips parting as if to ask Father to refuse. But the days when we could claim to be too good for royal service are long gone. Isabel will have to live in the queen’s rooms, wait on her every day. The queen turns her head with a little gesture of disdain, as if she cannot bear to see the two of us, as if we are something unclean, as if we are lepers. Father is not looking at us at all.
‘Come with me,’ Isabel whispers urgently to me. ‘You have to come with me if I have to serve her. Come and live in her household with me, Annie. I swear I can’t go on my own.’
‘Father won’t let me . . .’ I reply rapidly. ‘Don’t you remember Mother refusing us last time? You’ll have to go, because of being her sister-in-law, but I can’t come, Mother won’t let me, and I couldn’t bear it . . .’
‘And Lady Anne too,’ the king says easily.
‘Of course,’ Father says agreeably. ‘Whatever Her Grace desires.’
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1470
The queen is never rude to us: it is far worse than that. It is as if we are invisible to her. Her mother never speaks to us at all, and if she passes us in the gallery or in the hall she steps back against the wall as if she would not let the skirt of her gown so much as touch us. If another woman stepped back like this I would take it as a gesture of deference, giving me the way. But when the duchess does it, with a quick step aside without even looking at me, I feel as if she is drawing her skirts away from foul mud, as if I have something on my shoes or my petticoat that stinks. We see our own mother only at dinner and at night when she sits with the queen’s ladies, a little circle of unfriendly silence around her, while they talk pleasantly among themselves. The rest of the time we wait on the queen, attending her when she is dressing in the morning, following her when she goes to the nursery to see her three little girls, kneeling behind her in chapel, sitting below her place at breakfast, riding out with her when she goes hunting. We are constantly in her presence and she never, by word or glance, ever acknowledges that we are there.
The rules of precedence mean that we often have to walk immediately behind her, and then she is simply blind to us, speaking over our heads to her other ladies. If the two of us happen to be the only ones with her, she behaves as if she is quite alone. When we carry her train she walks at the same speed as if there were no-one behind her, and we have to scuttle along to keep up with her, looking foolish. When she hands her gloves to us she does not even look to see if one of us is ready to take them. When I drop one she does not demean herself to notice. It is as if she would let the priceless perfumed and embroidered leather lie in the mud rather than ask me to pick it up. When I have to hand something to her, a book of tales or a petition, she takes it as if it had come out of thin air. If I pass her a posy of flowers or a handkerchief she takes it so that she does not touch my fingers. She never asks me for her prayer book or her rosary, and I do not dare to offer them. I am afraid she would think them defiled by my bloody hands.
Isabel sinks into a white-faced sullenness, does as she must do, and sits in silence, never volunteering a remark while the ladies chatter around her. As Isabel’s belly grows the queen asks her to do less and less, but not as a courtesy. With one disdainful turn of her head she suggests that Isabel is not able to serve her, is no good as a lady in waiting, is good for nothing but to breed like a pig. Isabel sits with her hands folded over her belly as if to hide the curve, as if she is afraid that the queen will cast her eye on the baby.
But still, I cannot see the queen as my enemy, because I cannot rid myself of the sense that she is in the right and we are in the wrong, and that her visible contempt for me and my sister has been earned by my father. I cannot be angry, I am too ashamed. When I see her smile at her daughters or laugh with her husband I am reminded of the first time I saw her when I thought her the most beautiful woman in the world. She is still the most beautiful woman in the world but I am no longer an awestruck little girl; I am the daughter of her enemy and the murderer of her father and brother. And I am sorry, deeply sorry for all that has happened – but I cannot tell her so, and she makes it clear she would hear nothing from me.
After a month of this I cannot eat my dinner at the ladies’ table. It sticks in my throat. I cannot sleep at night; I am always cold as if my bedroom in her household is whistling with a chill draught. My hands shake when I have to pass something to the queen, and my sewing is hopeless, the linen covered with spots of blood where I have pricked my fingers. I ask our Lady Mother if I may go to Warwick, or even back to Calais, I tell her that I feel ill, living at the court among our enemies is making me sick.
‘Don’t you complain to me,’ she says shortly. ‘I have to sit beside her mother at dinner and be chilled to my soul by that witch’s ice. Your father risked everything and lost. He could not hold the king a prisoner on his own, the lords would not support him and without them, nothing could be done. We are lucky the king did not have him executed. Instead we are in a fine place: at court, your sister married to the king’s brother and your cousin John betrothed to the king’s daughter. We are close to the throne and may get closer still. Serve the queen and be grateful that your father is not dead on a scaffold like hers. Serve the queen and be glad that your father will seek a good marriage for you and she will approve it.’
‘I can’t,’ I say weakly. ‘Really, Lady Mother, I can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to, nor that I could disobey you or Father. It is that I simply can’t do it. My knees will give way rather than walk behind her. I can’t eat when she watches me.’
The face she turns to me is as kindly as stone. ‘You come from a great family,’ she reminds me. ‘Your father took a great risk for the good of his family and for the benefit of your sister. Isabel is lucky that he thought her worth the effort. We may now be in some discomfort but that will change. You show your father that in your turn it is worth us making an effort for you. You will have to rise to your calling, Anne, there is no point being weak and sickly now. You were born to be a great woman – be one now.’
She sees I am pale and shaking. ‘Oh, cheer up,’ she says roughly. ‘We’re to go to Warwick Castle for your sister’s confinement. It will be easier for us there, and we can stay away from court for four months at least. There is no pleasure in this for any of us, Anne. It’s as bad for me as it is for you. I will keep us at Warwick as long as I can.’
WARWICK CASTLE, MARCH 1470
I thought we would be happier every mile we were away from the court; but only weeks after we get to the castle, my father sends the groom of his chamber to tell us that he wants to see the two of us in his room. We enter his privy chamber, Isabel leaning heavily on my arm and holding her swelling belly as if to remind anyone who might forget for even a moment that she is still carrying the child of the heir of the King of England, and he will be born next month.
Father is seated in his carved chair with the Warwick crest of the bear and the ragged staff bright in gold leaf behind his head. He looks up when we come in and points with his quill pen at me. ‘Ah, I don’t need you.’
‘Father?’
‘Stand back.’
Isabel quickly releases me and stands perfectly well on her own, and so I take my place at the back of the room, put my hands behind my back and trace the linenfold panelling with my fingers, waiting until I am called on to speak.
‘I am telling you a secret, Isabel,’ Father says. ‘Your husband the duke and I are riding out to support King Edward as he marches on a rebellion in Lincolnshire. We go with him to show our loyalty.’
Isabel murmurs a reply. I can’t hear what, but of course it doesn’t matter what she says, or what I think, this is what the men have planned to do, and it will happen whatever our opinion may be.
‘When the king lines up his men on the battlefield we will turn on him,’ my father says bluntly. ‘If he puts us behind him we will attack from the rear, if he has me on one wing and George on another we will come together from both sides and crush him between us. Our forces outnumber his and this time we will take no prisoners. I shall not be merciful and try to come to an agreement with him this time. The king will not survive this battle. We will finish it on the battlefield. He is a dead man. I will kill him with my own sword, I will kill him with my own hands if I have to.’
I close my eyes. This is the worst thing. I hear Isabel’s muted gasp: ‘Father!’
‘He is not a king for England, he is a king for the Rivers family,’ he continues. ‘He is a cat’s-paw of his wife. We did not risk our lives and our fortunes to put the Rivers in power and their child on the throne. I did not throw my fortune and my life into his service to see that woman queen it around England like a drab in borrowed velvets with your ermine stitched to her collar.’
His chair scrapes as he gets to his feet and pushes it back and walks round the table towards her. Ignoring her belly Isabel drops to her knees before him. ‘I am doing this for you,’ he says quietly. ‘I will make you Queen of England, and if that child you are carrying is a son, he will be a royal prince and then king.’
‘I will pray for you,’ Isabel whispers almost inaudibly. ‘And for my husband.’
‘You will take my name and my blood to the throne of England,’ Father says with satisfaction. ‘Edward has become a fool, a lazy fool. He trusts us and we will betray him, and he will die on the battlefield like his father, who was a fool as well. Here, child, get up.’ He put his hand under her elbow and hauls her ungently to her feet. He nods at me. ‘Guard your sister,’ he says with a smile. ‘The future of our family is in her belly. She could be carrying the next King of England.’ He kisses Isabel on both cheeks. ‘Next time we meet you will be the Queen of England and I shall kneel to you.’ He laughs. ‘Think of that! I shall kneel to you, Isabel.’
The whole household goes to our chapel and prays for Father to be victorious. The whole household, thinking that he is fighting for the king against the rebels, prays without understanding the real danger he is in, the great risk he is running, challenging the King of England in his own kingdom. But Father has prepared the ground; Lincolnshire is alive with rebels, one of our kinsmen has roused the country complaining of the king’s ill-judged rule and false councillors. George has an army of his own sworn to him whatever side he takes, and Father’s men would follow him anywhere. But still, the fortunes of war are changeable and Edward is a formidable tactician. We pray for Father’s success morning and night, and we wait for news.
Isabel and I are sitting in her chamber, Isabel resting on her bed and complaining of a pain in her belly. ‘It’s like a gripping pain,’ she says. ‘Almost as if I had eaten too much.’
‘Maybe you have eaten too much,’ I reply unsympathetically.
She pulls a face. ‘I am nearly eight months into my time,’ she says plaintively. ‘If Father were not marching out I should be going into confinement this very week. I should have thought you would be kinder to me, your own sister.’
I grit my teeth. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am sorry. Shall I call the ladies, shall I tell Mother?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I probably ate too much. There’s no room in my belly, and every time he moves or turns I can’t breathe.’ She turns her head. ‘What’s that noise?’
I go to the window. I can see a troop of men coming down the road towards the castle, out of their lines, stumbling like a weary crowd not marching together like a force, and ahead of them the mounted knights going slowly, wearily. I recognise my father’s warhorse Midnight with his head bowed, and a bleeding wound deep in his shoulder. ‘It’s Father, coming home,’ I say.
Isabel is up from her bed in a moment, and we run down the stone stairs to the great hall and fling open the door as the servants of the castle pour into the yard outside to greet the returning army.
My father rides in at the head of his troop on his weary horse, and as soon as they are safe inside the castle walls, the drawbridge creaks up and the portcullis rattles down and my father and his son-in-law, the handsome duke, dismount from their horses. Isabel at once leans on my arm and puts her hand to her belly, to make a tableau of maternity, but I am not thinking of how we appear, I am looking at the faces of the men. I can tell at one glance that they are not victorious. My mother comes up behind us and I hear her quiet exclamation and I know that she too has seen weariness and defeat in this army. Father looks grim, and George is white with unhappiness. Mother’s back straightens as she braces herself for trouble and she greets Father briefly with a kiss on each cheek. Isabel greets her husband in the same way. All I can do is curtsey to them both and then we all go into the great hall and Father steps up on the dais.
The ladies in waiting are standing in a line, and they bow as my father comes in. The senior men of the household follow us into the room to hear the news. Behind them come the servants, the garrison of the castle and those of the troop who chose to come to listen rather than go to rest. Father speaks clearly enough so that everyone can hear. ‘We rode in support of my kinsmen Lord Richard and Sir Robert Welles,’ he says. ‘They think, as I do, that the king is under the control of the queen and her family and that he has reneged on his agreements to me, and that he is no king for England.’
There is a murmur of approval; everyone here resents the power and success of the Rivers family. George clambers up on the dais to stand beside my father as if to remind us all that there is an alternative to this faithless king. ‘Lord Richard Welles is dead,’ Father says bleakly. ‘This false king took him out of sanctuary –’ he repeats the terrible crime done against the laws of God and man ‘– he took him out of sanctuary, and threatened him with death. When Lord Richard’s son Sir Robert was arrayed for battle this false king killed Lord Welles before the battle even started, killed him without a trial, on the field of battle.’
George nods, looking grave. To break sanctuary is to undermine the safety and power of the church, to defy God Himself. A man who puts his hand on the altar of a church has to know that he is safe there. God Himself takes such a criminal under his protection. If the king does not recognise the power of sanctuary then he is setting himself up as greater than God. He is a heretic, a blasphemer. He can be very sure that God will strike him down.
‘We were defeated,’ my father says solemnly. ‘The army mustered by the Welles’ was broken in Edward’s charge. We withdrew.’
I feel Isabel’s cold hand come into mine. ‘We’ve lost?’ she asks disbelievingly. ‘We’ve lost?’
‘We will retreat to Calais and regroup,’ Father says. ‘This is a setback but not a defeat. We will rest tonight and tomorrow we will pack up and march out. But let no-one mistake, this is now war between me, and the so-called King Edward. The rightful king is George of the House of York, and I shall see him on the throne of England.’
‘George!’ the men shout, raising their fists in the air.
‘God save King George!’ my father prompts them.
‘King George!’ they reply. In truth they would swear to anything that my father commanded.
‘À Warwick!’ My father gives his battle cry and they bellow with one voice after him: ‘À Warwick!’
DARTMOUTH, DEVON, APRIL 1470
We travel at the steady speed of the mules that carry Isabel’s litter. Father has scouts following behind our retreating army and they report that Edward is not chasing us out of his kingdom. Father says that he is a lazy fool and he has gone back to the queen’s warm bed in London. We go by easy stages to Dartmouth where Father’s ship is waiting for us. Isabel and I stand on the quayside as the wagons and the horses are loaded. The sea is so calm it could be a lake, the day is hot for April, with the white seagulls wheeling in the air and calling; there is a pleasant smell of the quayside, the tang of salt, of drying seaweed from the nets, of tar. This could almost be a summer day and Father planning a pleasure voyage for us.
Midnight, Father’s black warhorse, is one of the last to be led up the gangplank. They put a sack on his head so he cannot see the ridged plank and the water beneath. But he knows they are putting him on board a ship. He has gone criss-crossing the seas many times, he has invaded England twice. He is a veteran of Father’s many battles but now he behaves like a nervous colt, pulling back from the gangplank, rearing up so that the men scatter from his flailing hooves, until they put him in a sling and load him on board and he cannot resist them.
‘I’m afraid,’ Isabel says. ‘I don’t want to sail.’
‘Izzy, the sea is as calm as a pond. We could practically swim home.’
‘Midnight knows there is something wrong.’
‘No he doesn’t. He’s always naughty. And anyway, he is on board now, he’s in his stall eating hay. Come on, Izzy, we can’t delay the ship.’
Still she won’t go forwards. She pulls me to one side as the ladies go on board and Mother too. They are raising the sails, shouting commands and replies. The royal cabin door stands open for us. George goes past us, indifferent to Izzy’s fears, Father is giving his last orders to someone on the quayside and the sailors are starting to release the ropes from the great iron rings on the quay.
‘I’m too near my time to sail.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ I say. ‘You can lie in the bunk on the ship just as you would lie in your bed at home.’
Still she hesitates. ‘What if she has whistled up a wind?’
‘What?’
‘The queen, and her mother the witch. Witches can whistle up a wind, can’t they? What if she has whistled up a wind and it’s out there, waiting for us?’
‘She can’t do a thing like that, Iz. She’s just an ordinary woman.’
‘She would, you know she would. She will never forgive us for the death of her father and her brother. Her mother said as much.’
‘Of course they were angry with us, but she can’t do it, she’s not a witch.’
Father is suddenly beside us. ‘Get on board,’ he says.
‘Izzy is frightened,’ I say to him.
He looks at her, his oldest, his chosen daughter; and though she has her hand on her swelling belly and her face is white, he looks at her with hard brown eyes, as if she were nothing to him but an obstacle between him and his new plan. Then he glances back inland, as if he might see the billowing standards of the king’s army trotting down the road to the quayside. ‘Get on board,’ is all he says and he leads the way up the gangplank without looking back, and gives the order to cast off as we scurry after him.
They cast off the ropes, and the barges come and take their lines on board to tow us out to sea. The rowers in the barges lean forwards and pull as the little drummer boy starts a steady beat to keep them in time and they edge the ship away from the cobbled quayside and out into the river. The sails flap and start to fill with wind, and the boat rocks in the slapping waves. Father is beloved in Devon, as in all the ports of England, for his protection of the narrow seas and there are many people waving, kissing their hands to him, and calling their blessing. George immediately goes and stands beside him on the poop deck, raising his hand in a kingly salute, and my father calls Izzy to his side and puts his arm around her shoulders, turning her so that everyone can see her big pregnant belly. Mother and I stand in the bow of the ship. Father does not call me to his side, he does not need me there. It is Isabel who is to be the new Queen of England, going into exile now, but certain to return in triumph. It is Isabel who is carrying the child that they all hope will be the son who will be the King of England.
We reach the open sea and the sailors drop the ropes to the barges, and reef the sails. A little breeze comes up and the sails fill and then the timbers creak as the wind takes the boat and we start to plough through the blue water with the waters singing along the prow. Izzy and I have always loved sailing and she forgets her fear and comes and stands with me at the side of the boat, looking over the rail for dolphin in the clear water. There is a line of cloud on the horizon like a string of milky pearls.
In the evening, we heave to off the port of Southampton where the rest of Father’s fleet is at anchor, waiting for the command to join us. Father sends a little rowing boat to tell them to come, and we wait, wallowing a little in the swirling currents of the Solent, looking towards land expecting to see, at any moment, a moving forest of sails, our wealth and pride and the source of Father’s power – the command of the seas. But only two ships appear. They come alongside us and Father leans over the side of our ship as they bawl to him that we were expected, that the Rivers’ son, Anthony Woodville, with his family’s cursed foresight rode like a madman with his troop to get here before us, and that he has commanded the crews, arrested some, killed others; but at any rate he has all of Father’s ships, including our brand-new flagship the Trinity, in his grasping hands. Anthony Woodville has the command of Father’s fleet. The Rivers have taken our ships from us, as they took our king from us, as they will take everything we own from us.
‘Go below!’ Father shouts furiously to me. ‘Tell your mother we will be at Calais in the morning and that I will come back for the Trinity and all my ships, and Anthony Woodville will be sorry he stole them from me.’
We will sail all evening and all night, running before the wind in the narrow seas to our home port of Calais. Father knows these waters well, and his crew have sailed and fought over every inch of these deeps. The ship is newly commissioned, fitted out as a fighting vessel but with quarters worthy of a king. We are sailing east before the prevailing wind and the skies are clear. Isabel will rest in the royal cabin on the main deck, I will stay with her. Mother and Father will have the large cabin beneath the poop deck. George has the first officer’s cabin. In a little while they will serve dinner and then we will play cards in candlelight which flickers and moves with the roll of the ship, then we will go to bed and I will sleep, rocked by the rise and fall of the waves, listening to the creaking of the timbers and smelling the salt of the sea. I realise that I am free: my time in service to the queen is over, completely over. I will never see Elizabeth Woodville again. I will never serve her again. She will never forgive me, she will never hear my name; but equally I will never again have to bear her silent contempt.
‘The wind’s getting up,’ Izzy remarks as we are taking a stroll around the main deck before dinner.
I raise my head. The standard at the top of the sails is flapping wildly, and the seagulls that were following the wake of the ship have wheeled away and gone back towards England. The little pearly clouds strung out along the horizon have massed and now lie grey and thick, like feathers.
‘It’s nothing,’ I say. ‘Come on, Iz, we can go into the cabin. We’ve never had the best cabin before.’
We go to the door that opens onto the main deck but as she puts her hand on the brass lock the ship dips and she staggers and falls against the door, which yields suddenly, making her tumble into the cabin. She falls against the bed and I scramble in behind her and get hold of her. ‘Are you all right?’
Another big heave of a wave sends us tottering to the other side of the little room and Izzy falls against me and knocks me against the wall.
‘Get to the bed,’ I say.
The floor rises up again as we struggle towards the bed and Isabel grabs the raised edge. I cling to the side. I try to laugh at the sudden swell that made us stagger like fools, but Iz is crying: ‘It’s a storm, a storm like I said!’ Her eyes are huge in the sudden gloom of the cabin.
‘It can’t be, it’s just a couple of big waves.’ I look towards the window. The clouds that were so light and pale on the horizon have darkened, and lie in black and yellow stripes across the sun, which is itself growing red and dark though it is still the afternoon.
‘Just clouding up,’ I say, trying to sound cheerful though I have never seen a sky like this in my life before. ‘Shall you get into bed for a rest? You might as well.’
I help her into the swaying bed but then the sudden drop of the boat into the trough of a wave, and the smack of the impact as it hits the bottom, throws me to my knees on the floor.
‘You come in too,’ Izzy insists. ‘Come in with me. It’s getting cold, I’m so cold.’
I heel off my shoes and then I hesitate. I wait and it feels as if everything is waiting. Suddenly, everything goes still as if the world has suddenly paused, as if the sky is silently waiting. The ship falls quiet, becalmed on an oily sea, and the wind that was blowing us homeward, steadily east, sighs as if exhausted and ceases. In the calm we hear the sails flap and then hang still. Everything is ominously horribly quiet.
I look out of the window. The seas are flat, as flat as if they were an inland marsh and the ship wallowing on silt. There is not a breath of wind. The clouds are pressing on the mast of the boat, pressing down on the sea. Nothing is moving, the seagulls are gone, someone seated on the crosstrees of the main mast says ‘Dear Jesus, save us’ and starts to scramble down the ropes to the deck. His voice echoes strangely as if we were all trapped under a glass bowl. ‘Dear Jesus, save us,’ I repeat.
‘Take down sail!’ the captain bellows, breaking the silence. ‘Reef in!’ and we hear the bare feet of the crew thundering on the decks to get the sails taken in. The sea is glassy, reflecting the sky, and as I watch it turns from dark blue to black and starts to stir, and starts to move.
‘She is taking a breath,’ Izzy says. Her face is haunted, her eyes dark in her pallor.
‘What?’
‘She is taking a breath.’
‘Oh no,’ I say, trying to sound confident but the stillness of the air and Isabel’s premonition are frightening me. ‘It’s nothing, just a lull.’
‘She is taking her breath and then she will whistle,’ Izzy says. She turns away from me and lies on her back, her big belly rounded and full. Her hands come out and grip either side of the beautifully carved wooden bed, while she stretches her feet down to the bottom of the bedframe, as if she were bracing herself for danger. ‘In a moment now, she will whistle.’
I try to say cheerfully: ‘No, no, Izzy . . .’ when there is a scream of wind that takes my breath away. Howling like a whistle, like a banshee, the wind pours out of the darkened sky, the boat heels over and the sea beneath us suddenly bows up and throws us up towards the clouds that split with sickly yellow lightning.
‘Close the door! Shut her out!’ Izzy screams as the boat rolls and the double doors to the cabin fly open. I reach for them and then stand amazed. Before the cabin is the prow of the ship and beyond that should be the waves of the sea. But I can see nothing before me but the prow, rising up and up and up as if the ship is standing on its stern and the prow is vertical in the sky above me. Then I see why. Beyond the prow is a mighty wave, towering as high as a castle wall, and our little ship is trying to climb its side. In a moment the crest of the wave, icy white against the black sky, is going to turn and crash down on us, as a storm of hail pours down with a rattle that makes the deck white as a snowfield in a second, and stings my face and bare arms, and crunches beneath my bare feet like broken glass.
‘Close the door!’ Izzy screams again and I fling myself against it as the wave breaks on us, a wall of water crashes down on the deck, and the ship shudders and staggers. Another wave rears above us and the door bursts open to admit a waist-high wall of water which pours in. The door is banging, Isabel is screaming, the ship is shuddering, struggling under the extra weight of water, the sailors are fighting for control of the sails, clinging to the spars, hanging like puppets with flailing legs, thinking of nothing but their own fragile lives, as the ship rears, the captain screaming commands and trying to hold the prow into the towering seas, while the wind veers against us, whipping up enemy waves that come towards us like a succession of glassy black mountains.
The ship reels and the door bangs open again, and Father comes in with a cascade of water, his sea cape streaming, his shoulders white with hail. He slams the door behind him, and steadies himself against the frame. ‘All right?’ he asks shortly, his eyes on Isabel.
Isabel is holding her belly. ‘I have a pain, I have a pain!’ she shouts. ‘Father! Get us into port!’
He looks at me. I shrug. ‘She always has pains,’ I say shortly. ‘The ship?’
‘We’ll run for the French shore,’ he says. ‘We’ll get in the shelter of the coast. Help her. Keep her warm. The fires are all out, but when they are lit again I’ll send you some mulled ale.’
The ship gives a huge heave and the two of us fall across the cabin. Isabel screams from the bunk. ‘Father!’
We struggle to our feet, clinging to the side of the cabin, hauling ourselves up on the side of the bunk. As I pull myself forwards I blink, thinking I must be blinded by the flashes of lightning outside the cabin window, because it looks as if Izzy’s sheets are black. I rub my eyes with my wet hands, tasting the salt of the waves on my knuckles and on my cheeks. Then I see her sheets are not black, I am not dazzled by the lightning. Her sheets are red. Her waters have broken.
‘The baby!’ she sobs.
‘I’ll send your mother,’ Father says hastily and plunges through the door, fastening it behind him. He disappears at once into the hail. Now and then the lightning shows the hail as a wall of white, smashing against us, and then it is black again. The black nothingness is worst.
I grab Isabel’s hands.
‘I have a pain,’ she says pitifully. ‘Annie, I have a pain. I do have a pain.’ Her face suddenly contorts and she clings to me, groaning. ‘I am not making a fuss. Annie, I am not trying to be important. I do have a pain, a terrible pain. Annie, I do have a pain.’
‘I think the baby is coming,’ I say.
‘Not yet! Not yet! It’s too early. It’s too early. It can’t come here! Not on a ship!’
Desperately I look towards the door. Surely my mother will come? Surely Margaret will not fail us, surely the ladies will come? It cannot be that Isabel and I are clinging to each other in a thunderstorm as she gives birth without anyone to help us.
‘I have a girdle,’ she says desperately. ‘A blessed girdle for help in childbirth.’
Our chests of things have all been loaded into the hold. There is nothing for Isabel in the cabin but a little box with a change of linen.
‘An icon, and some pilgrim badges,’ she continues. ‘In my carved box. I need them, Annie. Get them for me. They will protect me . . .’
Another pain takes her and she screams and grips my hands. The door behind me bursts open and a wash of water and a blast of hail comes in with my mother.
‘Lady Mother! Lady Mother!’
‘I can see,’ my mother says coldly. She turns to me. ‘Go to the galley and tell them they must get a fire lit, that we need hot water and then mulled ale. Tell them it is my command. And ask them for something for her to bite on, a wooden spoon if nothing else. And tell my women to bring all the linen we have.’
A great wave tosses the boat upwards and sends us staggering from one side of the cabin to the other. My mother grabs the edge of the bed. ‘Go,’ she says to me. ‘And get a man to hold you on the ship. Don’t get washed overboard.’
At the warning I find I dare not open the door to the storm and the heaving sea outside.
‘Go,’ my mother says sternly.
Helplessly, I nod and step out of the cabin. The deck is knee-deep in water, washing over the ship; as soon as it drains away another wave crashes on us, the prow climbs and then crashes, shuddering, as it falls into the sea. For sure, the ship cannot take this pounding for much longer, it must break up. A figure, shrouded in water, staggers past me. I grab his arm. ‘Take me to the ladies’ cabin and then the galley,’ I shriek against the shrieking of the wind.
‘God save us, God save us, we are lost!’ He pulls away from me.
‘You take me to the ladies’ cabin and then to the galley!’ I scream at him. ‘I command you. My mother commands you.’
‘This is a witch’s wind,’ he says horrifyingly. ‘It sprung up as soon as the women came on board. Women on board, one of them dying, they bring a witch’s wind.’ He pulls away from me and a sudden heave of the ship throws me onto the rail. I cling to it as a mighty wall of water stands before the stern and then washes down on us. It takes me, lifting me clear off my feet, only my hands snatching at the ropes and my gown caught on a cleat save me, but it takes him. I see his white face in the green water as it plucks him over the rail and he goes past me, turning over and over in the wave, his arms and legs flailing, his white mouth opening and closing like a cursing fish. He is out of sight in a moment, and the ship shudders under the hammer blow from the sea.
‘Man overboard!’ I shout. My voice is a little pipe against the pounding drums of the storm. I look round. The crew are lashed to their stations; nobody is going to help him. The water drains off the deck past my knees. I cling to the railing and look over the side, but he is gone into the darkness of the black waters. The sea has swallowed him up and left no trace. The ship wallows in the trough of the waves but there is another towering wave coming. A sudden crack of lightning shows me the door to the galley, and I tear my gown from the cleat that saved me and make a dash for the doors.
The fires have been washed out, the room is filled with smoke and steam, the pans are clashing on their hooks as they lurch one way and then the other, the cook is wedged behind his table. ‘You have to light the fire,’ I gasp. ‘And get us mulled ale, and hot water.’
He laughs in my face. ‘We’re going down!’ he says with mad humour. ‘We’re going down and you come in here wanting mulled ale!’
‘My sister is in labour! We have to have hot water!’
‘To do what?’ he demands of me, as if it is an entertainment of question and answer. ‘To save her, so that she can give birth to fishes’ meat? For without a doubt her baby will drown and her with it, and all of us with them.’
‘I command you to help me!’ I say through clenched teeth. ‘I, Anne Neville, the kingmaker’s daughter, command you!’
‘Ach, she’ll have to do without,’ he says, as if he has lost interest. As he speaks the boat yaws violently and the door bursts open. A wave of water sweeps down the stairs and breaks into the fireplace.
‘Give me some linen,’ I persist. ‘Rags. Anything. And a spoon for her to bite on.’
Bracing himself he reaches under the table and heaves out a basket of bleached cloths. ‘Wait,’ he says. From another box he brings a wooden spoon and from a cupboard he produces a dark glass bottle. ‘Brandy,’ he says. ‘You can give her that. Take some yourself, bonny maid, might as well drown merry.’
I take the basket in my arms and start up the steps. A heave of the ship throws me forwards and I am out in the storm, my arms full, and dashing to the cabin door before another wave breaks over the deck.
Inside the cabin my mother is bending over Isabel, who is moaning steadily. I fall inwards and bang the door shut behind me as my mother straightens up. ‘Is the galley fire out?’ she asks.
Mutely I nod. The ship heaves and rocks, and we stagger as it shudders. ‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘This is going to take a long time. It is going to be a long hard night.’
All through the night my only thought is that if we can plough through these seas, if we can survive this, then at the end of the voyage there is the outstretched arm of the Calais harbour wall and the shelter behind it. There is the familiar quayside where people will be looking for us, anxiously waiting with hot drinks and dry clothes, and when we come ashore they will gather us up, and rush us up to the castle, and Isabel will be put in our bedroom and the midwives will come, and she will be able to tie her holy girdle around her straining belly, and pin the pilgrim badges to her gown.
Then she will have a proper confinement, locked in her rooms and I locked in with her. Then she will give birth with half a dozen midwives at her beck and call, and physicians at the ready, and everything prepared for the baby: the swaddling board, the cot, the wet nurse, a priest to bless the baby the moment that he is born and cense the room.
I sleep in the chair as Isabel dozes and my mother lies beside her. Now and then Isabel cries out and my mother gets up and feels her belly which stands up square, like a box, and Isabel cries that she cannot bear the pain, and my mother holds her clenched fists and tells her that it will pass. Then it goes again and she lies down, whimpering. The storm subsides but rumbles around us, lightning on the horizon, thunder in the seas, the clouds so low that we cannot see land even though we can hear the waves crashing on the French rocks.
Dawn comes but the sky hardly lightens, the waves come rounded and regular, tossing the ship this way and that. The crew go hand over hand to the prow of the ship where a sail has been torn down and they cut it away, bundling it overboard as waste. The cook gets the galley fire working and everyone has a tot of hot grog and he sends mulled ale to Isabel and all of us. My mother’s three ladies with my half-sister Margaret come to the cabin and bring a clean shift for Isabel to wear, and take away the stained bedding. Isabel sleeps until the pain rouses her; she is getting so tired that now only the worst racking contractions can wake her. She is becoming dreamy with fatigue and pain. When I put my hand on her forehead she is burning up, her face still white but a hot red spot on each cheek.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ I ask Margaret.
She says nothing, just shakes her head.
‘Is she ill?’ I whisper to my mother.
‘The baby is stuck inside her,’ my mother says. ‘As soon as we land she will have to have a midwife turn it.’
I gape at her. I don’t even know what she is talking about. ‘Is that bad?’ I ask. ‘Turning a baby? Is that bad? It sounds bad.’
‘Yes,’ she says baldly. ‘It’s bad. I have seen it done and it is a pain beyond pain. Go and ask your father how long before we get to Calais.’
I duck out of the cabin again. It is raining now, steady heavy rain that pours down out of a dark sky, and the sea is running strongly under the ship and pushing us on our way though the wind is buffeting against us. Father is on deck beside the steersman, the captain beside him.
‘My Lady Mother asks when we will get to Calais?’ I say.
He looks down at me and I can see he is shocked at my appearance. My headdress is off and my hair tumbled down, my gown torn and bloodstained, and I am soaked through and barefoot. Also, there is a wild sort of desperation about me: I have watched through the night, I have been warned that my sister might die. I have been able to do nothing for her but wade through water to the galley to get her a wooden spoon to bite on in her agony.
‘In an hour or two,’ he says. ‘Not long now. How is Isabel?’
‘She needs a midwife.’
‘In an hour or two she will have one,’ he says with a warm smile. ‘You tell her, from me. She has my word. She will have her dinner at home in our castle. She will make her confinement with the best physicians in France.’
The very words cheer me, and I smile back at him.
‘Set yourself to rights,’ he says shortly. ‘You’re the sister of the Queen of England. Put your shoes on, change out of that gown.’
I bow, and duck back to the cabin.
We wait. It is a very long couple of hours. I shake out my gown; I have no change of clothes, but I plait my hair and put on my headdress. Isabel moans in the bed, sleeps, and wakes in pain; and then I hear the lookout shout, ‘Land ho! Starboard bow! Calais!’
I jump up from my chair and look out of the window. I can see the familiar profile of the high walls of the town, the vaulted roof of the Staple Hall, and the tower of the cathedral, then the castle on top of the hill, the battlements, and our own windows with the lights shining. I shade my eyes against the driving rain, but I can see my bedroom window, and the candles lit for me, the shutters left open in welcome. I can see my home. I know we will be safe. We are home. The relief is extraordinary, I feel my shoulders lighten as if they have been hunched against the weight of fear. We are home and Isabel is safe.
There is a grinding noise and a terrible rattle. I look at the walls of the castle, where dozens of men are working at a great windlass, its gears clanking and screaming as they turn it, slowly. Before us, at the mouth of the harbour, I can see a chain coming out of the depths of the sea, trailing weed from the deepest depths, slowly rising up to bar our way.
‘Quickly!’ I scream, as if we could cram on sail and get over the chain before it is too high. But we don’t need to race the barrier; as soon as they recognise us they will drop the chain, as soon as they see the standard with the ragged staff of Warwick they will let us in. Father is the most beloved captain that Calais has ever had. Calais is his town, not a town for York nor Lancaster, but loyal to him alone. This is my childhood home. I look up to the castle, and just below my bedroom window I can see the gun placements are being manned, and the cannon are rolling out, one after another, as if the castle is preparing for attack.
It is a mistake, I say to myself. They must have mistaken us for King Edward’s ship. But then I look higher. Above the battlements is not Father’s flag, the ragged staff, but the white rose of York, and the royal standard, flying together. Calais has remained true to Edward and the House of York, even though we have changed. Father declared that Calais was for York, and it has remained loyal to York. Calais does not shift with the tides. It is loyal as we were once loyal; but now we have become the enemy.
The steersman sees the danger of the rising chain just in time and shouts a warning. The captain leaps down to bellow at the sailors. Father flings himself on the wheel, heaving at it with the steersman to turn the ship away from the deadly snare of the taut chain. The sails flap dangerously as we turn sideways to the wind and the heaving sea pushes the ship sideways and looks likely to overturn us.
‘Turn more, turn more, reef the sail!’ Father shouts and, groaning, the ship comes round. There is a sickening explosion from the castle and a cannonball drops into the sea near the bow. They have our range. They have us in their sights. They will sink us if we don’t get away.
I cannot believe that our own home has turned against us but Father gets the ship round and out of range at once, without hesitation. Then he reefs the sail and drops the anchor. I have never seen him more angry. He sends an officer in a little boat with a message into his own garrison demanding entrance of the men he commanded. We have to wait. The sea stirs and heaves, the wind blows us so that the anchor chain is taut, the ship pulls angrily, dips and rolls. I leave the cabin and go to the side of the ship to look back at my home. I cannot believe they have shut us out. I cannot believe that I will not be going up the stone stairs to my bedroom and calling for a hot bath and clean clothes. Now I can see a small boat coming out of the harbour. I hear it bump as it comes alongside and the shouts of the sailors who let down ropes. Up come some barrels of wine, some biscuits and some cheese for Isabel. That is all. They have no message; there is nothing to say. They sheer off and sail back to Calais. That is all. They have barred us from our home and sent wine to Isabel out of pity.
‘Anne!’ my mother calls, shouting into the wind. ‘Come here.’
I stagger back to the cabin, as I hear the anchor chain creak protestingly, and then the rattle as it comes on board and sets us free. The ship is groaning, released again to the mercy of the sea, pounded by the waves, pushed along by the wind. I don’t know what course Father will set. I don’t know where we can go now that we have been banned from our own home. We cannot return to England, we are traitors to England’s king. Calais will not admit us. Where can we go? Is there anywhere that we will be safe?
Inside the cabin, Isabel is up on the bed on her hands and knees, lowing like a dying animal. She looks at me through a tangle of hair and her face is white and her eyes rimmed red. I can hardly recognise her; she is as ugly as a tortured beast. My mother lifts her gown at the back and her linen is bloody. I have a glimpse and I look away.
‘You have to put your hands in, and turn the baby,’ my mother says. ‘My hands are too big. I can’t do it.’
I look at her with utter horror. ‘What?’
‘We have no midwife, we have to turn the baby ourselves,’ my mother says impatiently. ‘She’s so small that my hands are too big. You’ll have to do it.’
I look at my slender hands, my long fingers. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say.
‘I’ll tell you.’
‘I can’t do it.’
‘You have to.’
‘Mother, I am a maid, a girl – I shouldn’t even be here . . .’
A scream from Isabel as she drops her head to the bed interrupts me. ‘Annie, for the love of God, help me. Get it out! Get it out of me!’
My mother takes my arm and drags me to the foot of the bed. Margaret lifts Isabel’s linen; her hindquarters are horribly bloody. ‘Put your hand in there,’ my mother says. ‘Push in. What can you feel?’
Isabel cries out in pain as I put my hand to her yielding flesh and slide it in. Disgust – disgust is all I feel through the hot flesh, and horror. Then something vile: like a leg.
Isabel’s body contracts on my hand like a vice, crushing my fingers. I cry out: ‘Don’t do that! You’re hurting me!’
She gasps like a dying cow. ‘I can’t help it. Annie, get it out.’
The slithery leg kicks at my touch. ‘I have it. I think it’s a leg, or an arm.’
‘Can you find the other?’
I shake my head.
‘Then pull it anyway,’ my mother says.
I look at her aghast.
‘We have to get it out. Pull gently.’
I start to pull. Isabel screams. I bite my lip, this is disgusting, horrifying work and Isabel disgusts and horrifies me that she should be here like this, like a fat mare, labouring like a whore, forcing me to do this. I find I am grimacing, my head turned aside as if I don’t want to see, standing as far as I can from the bed, from her, from my sister, this monster, touching her without pity, holding tight onto this limb as I am ordered, despite my loathing.
‘Can you get your other hand in?’
I look at my mother as if she is mad. This is not possible.
‘See if you can get your other hand in, and get hold of the baby.’
I had forgotten there was a baby, I am so shocked by the horror of the stench and the sensation of the slippery little limb in my hand. Gently I try to press my other hand in. Something yields horribly, and I can feel, with the tips of my fingers, something that might be an arm, a shoulder.
‘An arm?’ I say. I grit my teeth so I don’t retch.
‘Push it away, feel down, get the other leg.’ My mother is wringing her hands, desperate to get the work done, patting Isabel’s back as if she were a sick dog.
‘I’ve got the other leg,’ I say.
‘When I tell you – you have to pull both legs,’ she commands. She steps sideways and takes Isabel’s head in her hands. She speaks to her: ‘When you feel your pain is coming you have to push,’ she says. ‘Push hard.’
‘I can’t,’ Isabel sobs. ‘I can’t, Mother. I can’t.’
‘You have to. You must. Tell me as the pain comes.’
There is a pause and then Isabel’s groans gather strength and she screams: ‘Now, it is now.’
‘Push!’ my mother says. The ladies get hold of her clenched fists and heave on her arms, as if we are tearing her apart. Margaret slips the wooden spoon in her mouth and Isabel howls and bites down on it. ‘You pull the baby,’ my mother shouts at me. ‘Now. Steady. Pull.’
I pull as I am ordered, and horribly I feel something click and give under my hands. ‘No! It’s broken, broken!’
‘Pull it. Pull it anyway!’
I pull, there is a rush and a gout of blood, a stink of liquid and two little legs are dangling from Isabel and she screams and pants.
‘Once more,’ Mother says. She sounds oddly triumphant, but I am filled with terror. ‘Nearly there now, once again, Isabel. As the pain comes.’
Isabel groans and heaves herself up.
‘Pull, Anne!’ Mother commands and I hold the thin little slippery legs and pull again, and there is a moment when nothing moves at all and then one shoulder comes and then another and then Isabel shrieks as the head comes and I clearly see her flesh tear, as if she were a crimson and blue brocade, red blood and blue veins tear as the head comes out and then the slithery cord, and I drop the baby on the bedding and turn my head away and am sick on the floor.
The ship heaves, we all stagger with the movement, and then Mother comes hand over hand down the bed, and gently takes up the child and wraps him in the linen. I am shuddering, rubbing my bloody hands and arms on some rags, rubbing the vomit from my mouth but waiting for the words that will tell us a miracle has happened. I am waiting for the first miraculous little cry.
There is silence.
Isabel is moaning quietly. I can see that she is bleeding but nobody staunches her wounds. My mother has the baby wrapped warmly. One of the women looks up smiling, her face stained with tears. We all wait for the little cry, we wait for my mother’s smile.
My mother’s exhausted face is grey. ‘It’s a boy,’ she says harshly: the one thing we all want to hear. But oddly, there is no joy in her voice and her mouth is grim.
‘A boy?’ I repeat hopefully.
‘Yes, it’s a boy. But it’s a dead boy. He is dead.’
THE RIVER SEINE, FRANCE, MAY 1470
The sailors take down the sails and cart them to the sailyards for repair, and scrub out the royal cabin where the boards are stained with Izzy’s blood and my vomit. They say that it is a miracle we were not drowned in the storm, they speak of their own horror when the chain went up across the Calais harbour entrance. They say only my father’s weight on the wheel made it possible for the steersman to get the ship round. They say they never want to take a voyage like that again, but if they had to, they would only do it with my father at the wheel. They say that he saved them. But never again will they sail with women on board. They shake their heads. Never again with women who are chased by a witch’s wind. They are exultant in their survival. They all think that the ship was cursed with a woman in labour and a dead baby on board. They all believe that the ship was chased by a witch’s wind whistled up by the queen to blow us to hell. Everywhere I go on board there is an immediate and total silence. They think the witch’s wind was hunting us, will follow us still. They blame us for everything.
They get up the chests from the hold and at last we can wash and change our clothes. Isabel is still bleeding but she gets up and gets dressed, though her gowns hang oddly on her. Her proud belly has gone, she just looks fat and sick. Izzy’s holy girdle and pilgrim badges for her confinement are unpacked with her jewels. She puts them in the box at the foot of our bed without comment. There is a wordless awkwardness between the two of us. Something terrible has happened, so terrible that we don’t even know how to name it or speak of it. She disgusts me, she disgusts herself, and we say nothing about it. Mother takes the dead baby away in a box and someone blesses it and throws it into the sea, I think. Nobody tells us, and we don’t ask. I know that it was my inexperienced tugging that pulled his leg from the socket; but I don’t know if I killed him. I don’t know if Izzy thinks this, or Mother knows it. Nobody says anything to me either way, and I am never going to speak of it again. The disgust and the horror lies in my belly like seasickness.
She should be in confinement until she has been churched, we should all be locked in her rooms with her for six weeks, and then emerge to be purified. But there are no traditions for giving birth to a dead baby in a witch’s storm at sea; nothing seems to be as it should. George comes to see her when the cabin is clean and her bed has fresh linen. She is resting as he comes in and he leans over the bed to kiss her pale forehead, and smiles at me. ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he says.
She hardly looks at him. ‘Our loss,’ she corrects him. ‘It was a boy.’
His handsome face is impassive. I guess that Mother has already told him. ‘There will be others,’ he says. It sounds more like a threat than a reassurance. He goes to the door as if he cannot wait to get out of the cabin. I wonder if we smell, if he can smell death and fear on us.
‘If we had not been nearly wrecked at sea I think the baby would have lived,’ she says with sudden viciousness. ‘If I had been at Warwick Castle I would have had midwives to attend me. I could have had my holy girdle and the priest would have prayed for me. If you had not ridden out with Father against the king and come home beaten, I would have had my baby at home and he would be alive now.’ She pauses. His handsome face is quite impassive. ‘It’s your fault,’ she says.
‘I hear that Queen Elizabeth is with child again,’ he remarks, as if this is an answer to her accusation. ‘Please God she gets another girl, or a dead baby herself. We have to have a son before she does. This is just a setback, it is not the end.’ He tries to smile cheerfully at her. ‘It’s not the end,’ he repeats and goes out.
Isabel just looks at me, her face blank. ‘It is the end of my baby,’ she observes. ‘Certainly, it is the end of him.’
Nobody knows what is happening but Father; and though we seem to be homeless and defeated, washed up at the mouth of the Seine, he is strangely cheerful. His fleet of warships escapes from Southampton and joins us, so he has fighting men and his great ship the Trinity under his command once more. He is writing constantly and sending messages to King Louis of France; but he does not tell us what he plans. He orders new clothes for himself, and has them cut in the French fashion, a velvet cap on his thick brown hair. We move to Valognes, so that the fleet can prepare in Barfleur for an invasion of England. Isabel makes the move in silence. She and George are given beautiful rooms on the upper floor of the manor house, but she avoids him. Most of the day she spends with me in Mother’s presence chamber where we open the windows for air and close the shutters against the sun and sit all the day in warm gloom. It is very hot, and Isabel feels the heat. She complains of a constant headache, fatigue even in the morning when she first wakes. Once she remarks that she cannot see the point of anything, and when I ask her what she means she just shakes her head and her eyes fill with tears. We sit on the stone windowsill of the big chamber and look out at the river and the green fields beyond and neither of us can see the point of anything. We never say anything about the baby who was taken away by Mother in the little box and thrown in the sea. We never say anything about the storm, or the wind, or the sea. We never say much at all. We sit in silence for a lot of the time, and there is no need to talk.
‘I wish we were back in Calais,’ Isabel says suddenly one hot quiet morning, and I know she means that she wishes none of this had ever happened – not the rebellion against the sleeping king and the bad queen, not Father’s victory, not his rebellion against King Edward, and most of all: no marriage to George. It is to wish away almost every event of our childhood. It is to wish away every attempt at greatness.
‘What else could Father have done?’ Of course, he had to struggle against the sleeping king and the bad queen. He knew they were in the wrong, they had to be pushed from the throne. Then, when they were defeated and thrown down, he could not bear to see the couple that replaced them. He could not live in an England ruled by the Rivers family; he had to raise his standard against King Edward. He is driven to see the kingdom under the rule of a good king, advised by us; George should be that king. I understand that Father cannot stop striving for this. As his daughter I know that my life will be shaped by this unending struggle to get us where we should be: the first power behind the throne. Isabel should realise this. We were born the kingmaker’s daughters; ruling England is our inheritance.
‘If Father had not turned against the king, I would have had my baby at home,’ she goes on resentfully. ‘If we had not set sail on that day, into that wind, I would have a baby in my arms now. Instead of nothing. I have nothing, and I hardly care at all.’
‘You will get another baby,’ I say – as Mother has told me to. Isabel is to be reminded that she will have another child. Isabel is not allowed to indulge herself in despair.
‘I have nothing,’ she repeats simply.
We hardly stir when there is a hammer at the door, the double doors are opened by one of the guards, and a woman comes quietly in. Isabel raises her head. ‘I am sorry, my Lady Mother is away,’ she says. ‘We cannot grant requests.’
‘Where is the countess?’ the woman asks.
‘With my father,’ Isabel says. ‘Who are you?’
‘And where is your father?’
We don’t know, but we are not going to admit it. ‘He is away. Who are you?’
The woman puts back her hood. With a shock I recognise one of the York ladies in waiting: Lady Sutcliffe. I jump to my feet and stand before Isabel as if to protect her. ‘What are you doing here? What d’you want? Have you come from the queen?’ I have a pang of sudden terror that she has come to kill us both and I look at her hands, tucked in her cloak as if she is holding a knife.
She smiles. ‘I have come to see you, Lady Isabel, and you too, Lady Anne, and to speak with your husband George, the duke.’
‘What for?’ Isabel asks rudely.
‘Do you know what your father is planning for you now?’
‘What?’
The woman looks towards me as if she thinks I am too young to be present. ‘Perhaps Lady Anne should go to her room while I talk to you?’
Isabel clutches my hand. ‘Anne stays with me. And you shouldn’t even be here.’
‘I have come all the way from London as a friend to warn you, to warn you both. The king himself does not know I am here. Your mother-in-law, the Duchess Cecily, sent me to speak with you, for your own good. She wants me to warn you. You know how she cares for you and for your husband, her favourite son George. She told me to tell you that your father is now dealing with England’s enemy: Louis of France.’ She ignores our shocked faces. ‘Worse even than that: he is making an alliance with Margaret of Anjou. He is planning to make war on the true king, Edward; and restore King Henry to the throne.’
I shake my head in instant denial. ‘He never would,’ I say. Father’s victories over the bad queen, Margaret of Anjou, and the sleeping king, Henry VI, were the stories of my childhood. Father’s hatred and contempt for them were my lullabies. He fought battle after battle to throw them down from the throne and replace them with the House of York. He would never, never make an alliance with them. His own father died fighting them, and Margaret of Anjou spiked the heads of my grandfather and my uncle on the walls of York, as if they were traitors. We will never forgive her. We will never forgive her for this, if we forgave her for every other sort of corruption and evil. Father would never make an alliance with her after that. She was the nightmare of my childhood; she is our enemy till death. ‘He would never ally with her,’ I say.
‘Oh yes, he would.’ She turns to Isabel. ‘I have come in friendship to warn your husband George Duke of Clarence. And to reassure him. He can return to England; his brother the king will receive him. His mother has arranged this and wants to welcome you too. You are both beloved of the House of York, now and always. George is next in line to the throne of England, he is still heir to the throne. If there is no son born to the king and queen then you could be queen one day. But – think of this – if your father puts the old king back on the throne you will be nothing, and all that you have suffered will be for nothing.’
‘We can’t join Lancaster,’ I say almost to myself. ‘Father cannot be thinking of it.’
‘No,’ she agrees shortly. ‘You cannot. The idea is ridiculous. We all know that; everyone knows it but your father. This is why I have come to warn you. I have come to you, not to him, and you must consult your husband and see where your best interests lie. Duchess Cecily – your mother-in-law – wants you to know that you are to come home and she will be as a mother to you, even if your father is the enemy of the House of York and all of England. She says come home and she will see that you are properly cared for. She is appalled – we were all appalled – to hear of your ordeal at sea. We were shocked that your father would take you into such danger. The duchess is grieved for you and heartbroken for the loss of her grandson. It would have been her first grandson. She went into her room and prayed all night for his little soul. You must come home and let us all take care of you.’
The tears start into Isabel’s eyes when she thinks of Duchess Cecily praying for the baby’s soul. ‘I want to come home,’ she whispers.
‘We can’t,’ I say at once. ‘We have to be with Father.’
‘Please tell Her Grace that I thank her,’ Isabel stammers. ‘I am glad of her prayers. But of course, I don’t know what . . . I shall have to do as my fa . . . I shall have to do as my husband commands me.’
‘We are afraid that you are grieving,’ the woman says tenderly. ‘Grieving and alone.’
Isabel blinks away the tears that come so quickly to her these days. ‘Of course I feel my loss,’ she says with dignity. ‘But I have the comfort of my sister.’
Lady Sutcliffe bows. ‘I shall go to your husband and warn him of what your father is planning. The duke must save himself, and he must save you from the Lancastrian Queen Margaret. Don’t mention my visit to your father. He would be angry to know that you received me and that now you know that he is faithless.’
I am about to declare stoutly that Father is not faithless, that he could never be faithless, and that we would never keep a secret from him. But then I realise that I don’t know where he is now in his new French clothes – nor what he is doing.
ANGERS, FRANCE, JULY 1470
Father orders us to join him at Angers and sends a handsome liveried guard for the long ride. He sends no explanation as to why we are to travel nor where we will stay, so when we arrive, after five long days on the dusty roads, we are surprised that he is waiting to meet us outside the town, looking handsome and proud, high on Midnight, with a mounted guard beside him, and he escorts us through the walled gates, through the streets where people doff their hats as we go by, into the courtyard of a great manor house on the wide main square, which he has requisitioned. Isabel is white with fatigue and yet he does not give her permission to go to her bedroom but says that we are to go straight into dinner.
In the great hall my mother is waiting for us before a square table laden with food; it is like a banquet. She greets me and Isabel with a kiss and her blessing and then looks to my father. He seats Isabel on one side of the table, while George comes in and takes his place beside her with a murmured greeting. We bow our heads for grace, and then Father smiles on us all and bids us eat. He does not thank Isabel for making the long journey, nor commend her courage to her husband.
Me, he praises for my looks that he says are blooming in France – how is it that experiences which exhaust my sister make me so pretty? He pours the best wine into my glass, he places me between my mother and himself. He cuts slices of meat for me and the server puts them before me, serving me before Isabel, before my mother. I look at the food on my plate and I don’t dare to taste it. What does it mean when the best cut of meat is served to me before anyone else? Suddenly, having spent my life following Isabel and my mother into every room we ever enter, I am going first.
‘My Lord Father?’
He smiles and at the warmth in his face I find I am smiling back. ‘Ah, you are my clever girl,’ he says tenderly. ‘You always were the brightest cleverest girl. You are wondering what plans I have for you.’
I don’t dare to look at Isabel, who will have heard him call me the brightest cleverest girl. I don’t dare to look at George. I never dare to look at my mother. I know that George has met Lady Sutcliffe in secret, and I guess that he is afraid that Father knows. This sudden favour to me might be Father’s warning to George that he cannot play us false. I see Isabel’s hands are trembling and she puts them under the table out of sight.
‘I have arranged a marriage for you,’ my father says quietly.
‘What?’
This is the last thing I expected. I am so shocked that I turn to my mother. She looks back at me, perfectly serene; clearly she knows all about this.
‘A great marriage,’ he continues. I can hear the excitement under the level tones of his voice. ‘The greatest marriage that could be got for you. The only marriage for you now. I daresay you can guess who I mean?’
At my stunned silence he laughs merrily, laughs in our dumbstruck faces. ‘Guess!’ he says.
I look at Isabel. For a moment only I think perhaps we are going home, we will reconcile with the House of York and I will marry Richard. Then I see George’s sulky face and I am certain it cannot be that. ‘Father, I cannot guess,’ I say.
‘My daughter, you are going to marry Prince Edward of Lancaster, and you will be the next Queen of England.’
There is a clatter as George drops his knife to the floor. He and Isabel are frozen as if enchanted, staring at my father. I realise that George has been hoping – desperately hoping – that Lady Sutcliffe was reporting false rumours. Now it looks as if she was telling only part of the truth, and the whole of it is worse than any of us could have imagined.
‘The bad queen’s son?’ I ask childishly. In a rush, all the old stories and fears come back to me. I was brought up thinking of Margaret of Anjou as all but a beast, a she-wolf who rode out at the head of wild men, destroying everything in their path, in the grip of her terrible ambition, carrying with them a comatose king who slept through everything, as she tore England apart, murdered my grandfather, my uncle, tried to assassinate my own father in the kitchen with a roasting spit, in the court with swords; and was finally only defeated by him and Edward, our Edward, fighting uphill through snow in the most terrible battle that England has ever seen. Then like a blizzard herself, she blew away with the bloodstained snow into the cold North. They captured her husband and let him sleep in the Tower where he could do no harm; but she and the icy boy, who was inexplicably conceived by a wolf mother and sleeping father, were never seen again.
‘Prince Edward of Lancaster, the son of Queen Margaret of Anjou. They live in France now and are supported by her father René of Anjou, who is King of Hungary, Majorca, Sardinia and Jerusalem. She is kinswoman to King Louis of France.’ My father carefully ignores my exclamation. ‘He will help us put together an invasion of England. We will defeat the House of York, free King Henry from the Tower, and you will be crowned Princess of Wales. King Henry and I will rule England together until he dies – saints preserve him! – and then I will guide and advise you and Prince Edward of Lancaster who will be King and Queen of England. Your son, my grandson, will be the next King of England – and perhaps of Jerusalem too. Think of that.’
George is choking as if drowning on his wine. We all turn to him. He whoops and flails and cannot catch his breath. My father waits until his fit subsides, watching him without sympathy. ‘This is a setback for you, George,’ my father concedes fairly. ‘But you will be heir to the throne after Prince Edward, and you will be brother-in-law to the King of England. You will be as close to the throne as you have always been, and the Rivers will have been thrown down. Your influence will be clear, and your rewards great.’ My father nods at him kindly. He does not even look at Isabel who was going to be Queen of England but will now give precedence to me. ‘George, I shall see that you keep your title and all your lands. You are no worse off than you were before.’
‘I am worse off,’ Isabel remarks quietly. ‘I have lost my baby for nothing.’
Nobody answers her. It is as if she has become so unimportant that nobody needs to reply.
‘What if the king is still asleep?’ I ask. ‘When you get to London? What if you can’t wake him?’
My father shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter. Whether he is sleeping or awake I shall command in his name until Prince Edward and –’ he smiles at me ‘– Princess Anne take their thrones and become King Edward and Queen Anne of England.’
‘The House of Lancaster restored!’ George leaps to his feet, malmsey wine staining his mouth, his face flushed with rage, his hands shaking. Isabel tentatively puts out her hand and rests it on his clenched fist. ‘Have we gone through all this to restore the House of Lancaster? Have we faced such dangers on land and sea in order to put Lancaster back on the throne? Have I betrayed my brother and deserted my House of York to put Lancaster on the throne?’
‘The House of Lancaster has a good claim,’ my father concedes, throwing away the alliance with York that his family forged and defended for two generations. ‘Your brother’s claim for York is a poor one if he is indeed, as you suggest, a bastard.’
‘I named him as a bastard to make me the next heir to the throne,’ George shouts. ‘We were fighting to put me on the throne. We discredited Edward to prove my claim. We never discredited my house, we never slandered York! We never said that anyone should be king but me!’
‘It couldn’t be done,’ my father says with mild regret as if speaking of a battle that was lost long, long ago, in a country far away, rather than England, and only this spring. ‘We tried it twice, George, you know. Edward was too strong for us, there were too many people on his side. But with Queen Margaret in alliance with us she will bring out half of England, all the old Lancaster lords will flock to us, the Lancaster gentry who have never taken to your brother. She has always been strong in the North and Midlands. Jasper Tudor will bring out Wales for her. Edward will never be able to defeat an alliance of you and me and Margaret of Anjou.’
It is so strange to me to hear her name no longer cursed but cited as an ally – I used to have nightmares about this woman, yet now she is to be our trusted friend.
‘Now,’ my father says. ‘You, Anne, have to go with your mother and meet the seamstresses. Isabel, you can go too, you are all to have new gowns for Anne’s betrothal.’
‘My betrothal?’
He smiles as if he thinks to give me the greatest joy. ‘Betrothed now, and then the wedding as soon as we have the permission from the Pope.’
‘I am to be betrothed straightaway?’
‘The day after tomorrow.’
ANGERS CATHEDRAL, 25 JULY 1470
There are two silent figures at the high altar in the cathedral, handfast, plighting their troth. A light from the great window behind them illuminates their grave faces. They incline towards each other as if they are promising love as well as loyalty to death. They hold each other close, as if to be certain of each other. Someone watching might think this a love match from the intensity of their gaze and the closeness of their pose.
It is those great enemies, my father and Margaret of Anjou, side by side. This is the great union; her son and I will merely enact with our bodies this plighting of our parents. First she puts her hand on a fragment of the True Cross – the real cross brought here from the kingdom of Jerusalem – and even from the back of the cathedral I can hear her clear voice reciting an oath of loyalty to my father. Then it is his turn. He puts his hand on the cross and she adjusts it, making sure that every part of his palm and his fingers are on the sacred wood as if, even now, in the very act of swearing their alliance, she doesn’t trust him. He recites his oath, then they turn to one another and give each other the kiss of reconciliation. They are allies, they will be allies till death, they have sworn a sacred oath, nothing can part them.
‘I can’t do it,’ I whisper to Isabel. ‘I can’t marry her son, I can’t be a daughter to the bad queen, to the sleeping king. What if their son is as mad as everyone says? What if he murders me, orders me beheaded as he did to the two York lords who guarded his father? They say he is a monster, with blood on his hands from childhood. They say he kills men for sport. What if they cut off my head as they did our grandfather’s?’
‘Hush,’ she says, taking my cold hands in hers and rubbing them gently. ‘You’re talking like a child. You have to be brave. You’re going to be a princess.’
‘I can’t be in the House of Lancaster!’
‘You can,’ she says. ‘You have to be.’
‘You once said that you were afraid that our father used you as a pawn.’
She shrugs. ‘Did I?’
‘Used you as a pawn and might let you fall.’
‘If you are going to be Queen of England he won’t let you fall,’ she observes shrewdly. ‘If you are going to be Queen of England he will love you and serve you every moment of the day. You’ve always been his pet – you should be glad that now you are the centre of his ambition.’
‘Izzy,’ I say quietly. ‘You were the centre of his ambition when he nearly drowned you at sea.’
Her face is almost greenish in the dim light of the church. ‘I know,’ she says bleakly.
I hesitate at this, and our mother comes up and says briskly, ‘I am to present you to Her Grace the queen.’
I follow her up the long aisle of the cathedral, the dazzling stained-glass window making a carpet of colour beneath my feet, as if I were walking over the sun in splendour. It strikes me it is the second time that my mother has presented me to a Queen of England. The first time I saw the most beautiful woman I have ever known. This time: the most ferocious. The queen sees me coming, turns towards us and waits, with a killer’s patience, for me to reach the chancel steps. My mother sinks into a deep curtsey and I go down too. When I come up I see a short plump woman, magnificently gowned in cloth-of-gold brocade, a towering headdress on her head draped in gold lace, a gold belt slung low around her broad hips.
Her round face is stern, her rosebud mouth unsmiling. ‘You are Lady Anne,’ she says in French.
I bow my head. ‘Yes, Your Grace.’
‘You are to marry my son, and you will be my daughter.’
I bow again. Clearly, this is not an inquiry as to my happiness. When I look at her again her face is bright as gold with triumph. ‘Lady Anne, you are only a young woman now, a nobody; but I am going to make you Queen of England and you will sit on my throne and wear my crown.’
‘Lady Anne has been prepared for such a position,’ my mother says.
The queen ignores her. She steps forwards and takes both my hands between hers, as if I am swearing fealty to her. ‘I will teach you to be a queen,’ she says quietly. ‘I will teach you what I know of courage, of leadership. My son will be king but you will stand beside him, ready to defend the throne with your life, you will be a queen as I have been – a queen who can command, who can rule, who can make alliances and hold to them. I was just a girl, not much older than you, when I first came to England and I learned quickly enough that to hold the throne of England you have to cleave to your husband and fight for his throne, night and day, Anne. Night and day. I will hammer you into a sword for England, just as I was hammered into a blade. I will teach you to be a dagger at the throat of treason.’
I think of the horrors that this queen unleashed on the country with her court favourites and her ambition. I think of my father swearing that the king had flung himself into a sleep like death because he could not bear waking life with her. I think of the years when my father ruled England and this woman raged in Scotland, raising an army which came south like a band of brigands, half-naked, stealing, raping and murdering wherever they went until the country swore that they would have no more of this queen, and the citizens of London closed their gates to her and begged her best friend Jacquetta Woodville to tell her to take the army of the North back to their home.
Something of this shows in my face for she laughs shortly, and says to me: ‘It is easy to be squeamish when you are a girl. It is easy to be principled when you have nothing. But when you are a woman and you have a son destined for the throne, after years of waiting, and when you are a queen and you want to keep your crown, you will be ready to do anything; anything. You will be ready to kill for it: kill innocents if need be. And you will be glad then that I have taught you all that I know.’ She smiles at me. ‘When you can do anything – anything – to keep your throne and keep your crown and keep your husband where he should be, then you will know that you have learned from me. Then you will be my daughter indeed.’
She repels me, she absolutely terrifies me. I dare say nothing.
She turns to the high altar. I see a slight figure standing beside my father: Prince Edward. There is a bishop before him with his missal open at the page of the marriage service.
‘Come,’ the bad queen says. ‘This is your first step, I will guide all the others.’ She takes me by the hand and leads me towards him.
I am fourteen years old, the daughter of an arraigned traitor in exile with a price on his head. I am about to be betrothed to a boy nearly three years older than me, the son of the most terrifying woman England has ever known, and through this marriage my father will bring her back into England like the wolf that they call her. And from this moment I will have to call this monster my mother.
I glance back at Isabel, who seems a long way away. She tries to smile encouragingly at me but her face is strained and pale in the darkness of the cathedral. I remember her saying to me on her wedding night: ‘Don’t go.’ I mouth the words to her and then I turn and walk towards my father to do his bidding.
AMBOISE, FRANCE, WINTER 1470
I cannot believe the life that is unfolding before me. In the cold light of the winter mornings I wake beside Isabel and have to lie still and look around the stone walls of the room and the tapestries, dull-coloured in the early light, to remind myself of where I am, how far we have come, and my dazzling incredible future. Then I tell myself once more: I am Anne of Warwick; still me. I am betrothed to Prince Edward of Lancaster, I am Princess of Wales while the old king lives, and on his death I will be Queen Anne of England.
‘You’re muttering again,’ Isabel says crossly. ‘Muttering like a mad old woman. Shut up, you sound ridiculous.’
I press my lips together to silence myself. This has become my ritual, as regularly observed as Prime. I cannot start the day without running through the changes in my life. It is as if I cannot believe that I am here, without reciting my expectations, my unbelievable hopes. First I open my eyes and see again that I am in one of the best rooms of the beautiful chateau of Amboise. In this fairytale castle we are the guests of the man who was once our greatest enemy: Louis King of France, now our greatest friend. I am betrothed to marry the son of the bad queen and the sleeping king, only now I must always remember to call her Lady Mother, and him, my royal father: King Henry. Isabel is not to be Queen of England, George is not to be king. She will be my chief lady in waiting and I am to be queen. Most extraordinary of all, Father has already taken England by storm, marched on London, released the sleeping king – King Henry – from the Tower, taken him out before the people and had him loudly proclaimed as King of England, returned to his people, restored to his throne. The people welcome this. Incredulously, in France, we learn to celebrate the triumph of Lancaster, say ‘our house’ when we mean the red rose, reverse all the loyalties of my life.
Queen Elizabeth, in terror of the open enmity of my father, has fled into sanctuary and is in hiding with her mother and her daughters, pregnant with another child, abandoned by her husband. It does not matter now if she has a boy, a girl, or the miscarriage that George wished on her – her son will never sit on the throne of England, for the House of York is utterly thrown down. She is cowering in sanctuary, and her husband, the handsome and once-powerful King Edward, our friend, our former hero, has fled from England like a coward, accompanied only by his loyal brother Richard and half a dozen others, and they are kicking their heels and fearing for their futures somewhere in Flanders. Father will make war on them there, next year. He will hunt them down and kill them like the outlaws they now are.
The queen who was so beautiful in her triumph, who was so steely in her dislike, is back to where she started, a penniless widow with no prospects. I should be glad, this is my revenge for the thousands of slights that she paid to Isabel and me, but I cannot help but think of her, and wonder how she will survive childbirth in the dark rooms of sanctuary beneath Westminster Abbey, and how she will ever get out?
Father has won England – he has returned to his irresistible winning form. George was faithfully at his side throughout the campaign, despite the temptations to treachery from the House of York, and Father has done all that he said he would do. I am to join him, as soon as Prince Edward and I are married; we wait only for a dispensation from the Pope to confirm our betrothal. As a young husband and wife, we will join Father in England, and we will be proclaimed Prince and Princess of Wales. I will be at the side of Queen Margaret of Anjou; she is my mentor and my guide. They will send Queen Elizabeth’s ermines from the wardrobe once again, only this time they will stitch them on my gowns.
ТЕЛЕГРАМБот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
Канал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
ВКОНТАКТЕБольшая библиотека с любыми жанрами и авторами
Большая Библиотека
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2 книги