The Kingmaker's Daughter

The pains start at midnight, just when I am going to sleep with Isabel in the big bed beside me. I give a little cry and within moments she is up, throwing a gown over her shoulders, lighting candles from the fire, sending the maid for the midwives.

I can see that she is afraid for me, and her white-faced ordering of ale and her sharp tone to the midwives make me afraid in my turn. They have a monstrance with the Host inside it set up on the little altar in the corner of my room. I have the girdle that was specially blessed for Isabel’s first birth tied around my straining belly. The midwives have spiced ale for me and everyone else to drink, and they send orders to the kitchen for the cooks to be woken to make a great dinner, for it will be a long night and we will all want sustaining.

When they bring me a fricassee of game followed by some roast chicken and boiled carp the smell of the food turns my stomach and I order it from the room and prowl up and down, turning at the window and at the head of the bed while outside, in the presence chamber, I can hear them eating greedily and calling for more ale. Only Iz and a couple of maids stay with me. Iz has no appetite either.

‘Are the pains bad?’ she asks anxiously.

I shake my head. ‘They come and go,’ I say. ‘But I think they’re getting stronger.’

About two in the morning it gets a lot worse. The midwives, flushed and merry from the food and drink, come into the bedroom and walk me between the two of them. When I pause they force me to walk onward. When I want to lie down and rest, they cluck and push me on. The pains start to come more closely together and only then do they allow me to lean on one of them and groan.

At about three in the morning I hear footsteps coming across the bridge from the great chamber, and there is a knock at the door and I hear Richard calling: ‘I am the duke! How is my wife?’

‘Merrily,’ says the midwife with rough good humour. ‘She’s doing merrily, my lord.’

‘How much longer will she be?’

‘Hours yet,’ she says cheerfully, ignoring my moan of protest. ‘Could be hours. You get yourself some sleep, Your Grace, we’ll send to you the moment she takes to her bed.’

‘Why, is she not in bed now? What is she doing?’ he demands, puzzled, the door barred to him, knowing nothing of the mid-wives’ arts.

‘We’re walking her,’ the older one replies. ‘Walking her up and down to ease the pain.’

Pointless to tell them that it does not ease the pain at all, for they will do this, as they have always done it, and I will obey them, for I can hardly think for myself now.

‘You are walking her?’ my young husband demands through the closed door. ‘Is that helping much?’

‘If the baby was slow in coming we would toss her in a blanket,’ the younger one replies with a hard laugh. ‘She is glad we are just walking her. This is women’s work, Your Grace. We know what we are doing.’

I hear Richard’s muffled expletive, but then his footsteps go away and Iz and I look bleakly at each other as the women take my arms and lead me from fireplace to doorway and back again.

They leave me as they go to take their breakfast in the great hall, and once again I find I cannot eat and Iz sits beside me as I rest on the bed, and strokes my forehead like she used to do when I was ill. The pains come so often and so powerfully that I think I cannot bear it any longer. Just then the door opens and the two midwives come back in, this time bringing with them the wet nurse, who sets the cradle to rights, and spreads the sheets on the birthing bed.

‘Not long now,’ says one of the midwives cheerfully. ‘Here.’ She offers me a wooden wedge, polished by use and indented with teeth marks. ‘Bite on it,’ she says. ‘See those marks? Many a good woman has bitten on that and saved her own tongue. You bite on it when the pain comes, and then you take a good hold of this.’

They have tied a cord across the two bottom posts of my big bed and when I reach forwards from the day bed I can get hold of it and brace my feet against the foot of the big bed. ‘You pull on that, and we pull with you. You bite on the wedge when you feel the pain rising, and we roar with you.’

‘Do you have nothing you can give her to ease the pain?’ Isabel demands.

The younger woman unstoppers a stone bottle. ‘You take a drop of this,’ she suggests, pouring it into my silver cup. ‘Come to think of it, we’ll all take a drop of this.’

It burns my throat and makes my eyes water but it makes me feel braver and stronger. I see Iz choke on her draught and she grins at me. She leans forwards to whisper in my ear: ‘These are two greedy drunk old women. God only knows where Richard found them.’

‘They are the best in the country,’ I reply. ‘God help the woman in travail with the worst.’

She laughs and I laugh too but the laugh catches in my belly like a sword thrust, and I give a great cry. At once the two women become businesslike, seating me on the birthing bed, putting the looped cord into my hand, telling the maid to pour hot water from the jug at the fireside. Then there is a long confused time when I am absorbed by the pain, and the firelight reflected on the side of the jug, the heat of the room, and Isabel’s cool hand bathing my face. I feel as if I am fighting a pain in my very bowels and it is a struggle to breathe. I think of my mother, so far away from me, who should be here with me now, and I think of my father who spent his life fighting and who knew the final last terror of defeat and death. Oddly enough I think of Midnight, throwing up his big head as the sword went in his heart. At the thought of my father, going out on foot to put down his life in the fields outside Barnet so that I might be Queen of England I give a heave and I hear a crying, and someone saying urgently, ‘Gently, gently now,’ and I see Isabel’s face blurred with tears and hear her say to me: ‘Annie! Annie! You have a boy!’ And I know that I have done the one thing that my father wanted, the one thing that Richard needs: I have given my father a grandson and my husband his heir, and God has blessed me with a baby boy.

But he is not strong. The midwives say cheerfully that many a frail boy makes a brave man, and the wet nurse says that her milk will make him grow fat and bonny in no time, but through the six weeks of my confinement after his birth, before my churching, my heart quails when I hear him cry, a little thin reedy sound, through the night, and in the day I look at the palms of his hands which are like little pale leaves.

Isabel is to go back to George in London after the baby’s christening and my churching. We call him Edward for the king, and Richard says that he foretells a great future for him. The christening is small and quiet, as is my churching, the king and queen cannot come and although nobody says anything, the baby does not look likely to thrive, he is hardly worth the cost of a great christening gown, three days of celebration in the castle, and a dinner for all the servants.

‘He will be strong,’ Isabel whispers to me reassuringly as she climbs into her litter in the stable yard. She is not going to ride, for her belly is broadening. ‘I thought he was looking much stronger this very morning.’

He is not, but neither of us admit this.

‘And anyway, at least you know now that you can have a child, that you can have a live birth,’ she says. The thought of the little boy who died at sea, who never even cried out, haunts us both, still.

‘You can have a live child too,’ I say staunchly. ‘This one, for sure. And I shall come to your confinement. There is no reason that it should not go well for you this time. And you will have a little cousin for Edward, and please God they will both thrive.’

She looks at me, her eyes hollow in her face with fear. ‘The York boys are lusty stock but I never forget that our mother conceived only me and you. And I have had a child and lost him.’

‘Now you be brave,’ I order her, as if I am the older sister. ‘You keep your spirits up, and all will be well with you as it was with me. And I will come to you in your time.’

She nods. ‘God bless you, Sister, and keep you well.’

‘God bless,’ I say. ‘God bless you, Iz.’

After Isabel has left I find that I am thinking of my mother, and that she may never see this, her first grandchild, the boy that we all wanted so much. I write her a brief note to tell her that the child is born, and that he is thriving so far, and I wait for a reply. She answers me with a tirade of rage. To her my child, my darling boy, is illegitimate; she calls him ‘Richard’s bastard’, for she did not give permission for the wedding. The castle where he was born is not his home but hers, and so he is a usurper, like his father and mother. I must leave both child and husband at once and go to join her at Beaulieu. Or I must go to London and petition the king for her freedom. Or I must command my husband to set her free. George and Richard must return her fortune, they should be charged as thieves. And if I do none of these things then I will feel the coldness of a mother’s curse, she will disown me, she will never write to me again.

Slowly, I fold the letter into smaller and smaller portions, and then I walk to the great hall where the fire is always burning and drop the wadded paper in the back of the fire and watch it smoulder and burn. Richard, coming by with his deerhound at his heels, pauses at my solemn face, and looks at the little flame in the grate.

‘What was this?’

‘Nothing,’ I say sadly. ‘It’s nothing to me any more.’

MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, JUNE 1473

It is the time of day that I love the best, the early evening before dinner, and Richard and I are walking around the walls which run around this great castle, a long square walk which takes us to all points of the compass and begins and ends at the prince’s tower where my darling little Edward has his nursery. To our right is the deep moat. As I look down I can see them pulling a net from the moat gleaming with wriggling silver fish and I nudge Richard and say, ‘Carp for dinner tonight.’

Beyond the moat is the jumble of stone and slate buildings of the little town of Middleham and all around the town the rich pasture that runs up to the moorland. I can see two milkmaids with their yoke and pails over their broad shoulders, carrying their three-legged stools, going out to milk the cows in the fields, and the cows raising their heads from the grass when they hear the call ‘bonnie coo! bonnie coo!’ and walking slowly towards them. Beyond the fields the lower slopes of the hills are dark green with bracken and beyond that, higher and higher, is the misty amethyst tinge of flowering heather. This has been my home, and my family’s home, forever. Most of the boys in the cottages are named Richard after my father, and his father before him. Most of the girls are called Anne or Isabel after my sister and me. Almost everyone has sworn obedience to me or to the new Richard here – my husband. As we turn the corner on the walkway of the castle and go away from the town I see an early barn owl, white as a cloud, floating silent as a falling leaf along the bushy line of the hedge. The sun is sinking down into a layer of rose and gold clouds, my hand is tucked in Richard’s arm, and I lean my head against his shoulder.

‘Are you happy?’ I ask.

He smiles at the question, which is not one he would ever pose. ‘I am glad to be here.’

‘You mean – not at court?’

I am hoping that he will say something about loving my company and loving being with me and the baby in this, our most beautiful home. We are still newly wed, we are still young, I still have a sense of playing the part of being the lord of the manor and his lady, as if I am not yet old enough or grand enough to take my mother’s place. For Richard it is different. This life has been hard-won; he shoulders the responsibilities of being lord of the North of England. For me, being his wife, living here, in my family home, is a girl’s dream. Often I cannot believe that such a dream has come true.

But Richard merely says: ‘Court is like a general melee in a jousting tournament these days. The Rivers keep gaining, and George and the other lords keep fighting back. It is a constant unspoken struggle. Not a yard of land nor a coin in my pocket is safe. There is always some kinsman to the queen who thinks they should have it.’

‘The king . . .’

‘Edward agrees with the last person he spoke to. He laughs and promises anyone anything. He spends his days riding and dancing and gambling and his nights carousing on the streets of London with William Hastings, and even with his stepsons – and I swear that they are not his true companions but are there only to serve their mother. They go along with him, their stepfather, to be her eyes and ears, they lead him into all sorts of bawdy houses and stews, and then I swear they report back to her and tell her everything. He has no friends, only spies and toadies.’

‘That’s wrong,’ I say with the stern morality of the young.

‘It’s very wrong,’ Richard confirms. ‘A king should set an example to his people. Edward is beloved and the people of London like to see him; but when he is drunk in the streets and chasing women—’ He breaks off. ‘Anyway, these are not matters for your ears.’

I match my steps to his, and I don’t remind him that I spent much of my girlhood in a garrison town.

‘And George seeks advantage at every moment,’ Richard says. ‘He cannot stop himself, he thinks of nothing but the crown he lost to Edward and the fortune he lost to me. His greed is phenomenal, Anne. He just goes on and on trying to get more land, trying to get more offices. He goes around court like a great carp with his mouth wide open gulping in fees. And he lives like a prince himself. God knows how much he spends on his London house buying friends and extending his influence.’

A skylark rises up from the meadow below the castle and sings as it beats upwards, and then pauses and then mounts again, going up and up as if it would never stop until it gets to heaven. I remember my father telling me to watch, watch carefully, for in a moment it will close its wings and drop silently, drop like a stone to the ground – and where it lands there will be its little down-lined nest and four speckled eggs, arranged point to the centre, for the skylark is a tidy bird, as any candidate for heaven should be.

We are coming down the winding stair of the gatehouse tower to the main courtyard of the castle as the doors are thrown open and a litter with curtains drawn and twenty outriders comes clattering through the gate.

‘Who’s this?’ I ask. ‘A lady? Visiting us?’

Richard steps forwards and throws a salute at the leader of the guard as if he has been expecting him. ‘All well?’

The man takes off his bonnet and rubs his sweaty forehead. I recognise James Tyrrell, one of Richard’s most trusted men of the household, Robert Brackenbury behind him. ‘All well,’ he confirms. ‘Nobody followed us, as far as I know, and nobody challenged us on the road.’

I tug at Richard’s arm. ‘Who is this visitor?’

‘You made good time,’ Richard remarks, ignoring me.

A hand draws back the curtains of the litter, and Sir James turns to help the lady out. She puts aside the rugs that have kept her warm on the journey, and she takes his hand. He stands before her, hiding her face.

‘Not your mother?’ I whisper to Richard, horrified at the thought of a formal visit.

‘No,’ he says, watching as the lady steps out of the litter and straightens up with a little grunt of discomfort. Sir James steps aside. With a sensation like fainting, I recognise my mother, whom I have not seen for two long years, brought back from the grave, or at any rate from Beaulieu Abbey, stepping out of the litter like a living ghost, turning to smile a ghastly triumphant beam at me, the daughter who left her in prison, the daughter who left her for dead.

‘Why is she here?’ I demand.

We are in the privy chamber, completely alone, the door shut on the company in the great chamber outside who are waiting for us to lead them into dinner, the cooks in the kitchen down below cursing as meat is overdone and the pastries too crisp and brown.

‘I rescued her,’ he says calmly. ‘I thought you would be pleased.’

I break off to look at him. He cannot have thought that I would be pleased. His bland expression tells me that he knows that bringing my mother to me is to stir up a war inside our family that has been raging in furious letters and painful apologies and excuses for two long years. After her last letter when she named my son, her own grandson, a bastard and my husband a thief she has not written to me again. She told me that I had shamed my father and betrayed her. She told me that I was no daughter of hers. She cursed me with a mother’s curse and said that I would live without her blessing and she would go to her grave without saying my name. I did not reply – not so much as a single word. I decided when I married Richard that I had neither mother nor father. One had died on the battlefield, one had deserted me and sent me to a battle alone. Isabel and I call ourselves orphans.

Until now. ‘Richard, for the love of God, why have you brought her here?’

Finally, he decides to be honest. ‘George was going to take her,’ he says. ‘I am sure of it. George was going to kidnap her, appeal against the king’s decision to share her fortune between the two of us, demand justice for her. Reclaim it all for her as if he was her knight errant, and then, when she had all the Warwick lands back in her keeping, he was going to take them from her. He was going to keep her in his household like he took you – and he would have got everything that we have, Anne. I had to get her before he did.’

‘So to prevent George taking her – you have taken her,’ I say drily. ‘Doing the very crime that you suspect he would have done.’

He looks at me grimly. ‘When I married you, I said I would protect you. I am protecting your interests now.’

The mention of our courtship silences me. ‘I didn’t think it would mean this.’

‘Neither did I,’ he says. ‘But I promised to protect you and this is what it takes.’

‘Where is she going to live?’ My head is whirling. ‘She can’t go into sanctuary again, can she?’

‘Here.’

‘Here?’ I almost scream at him.

‘Yes.’

‘Richard, I am frightened to even see her. She said I was no daughter of hers. She said I would never have a mother’s blessing. She said I should not marry you. She called you things that you would never forgive! She said our son—’ I break off. ‘I won’t repeat it. I won’t think about it.’

‘I don’t need to hear it,’ he says cheerfully. ‘And I don’t need to forgive her. And you don’t need her blessing. She will live here as our guest. You need never see her if you don’t want to. She can dine in her rooms, she can pray in her own chapel. We have enough space here, God knows. We can give her a household of her own. She need not trouble you.’

‘How can she not trouble me? She is my mother! She is my mother who has set her face against me. She said that she would go to her grave without saying my name!’

‘Think of her as your prisoner.’

I sink into a chair, staring at him. ‘My mother is my prisoner?’

‘She was a prisoner at Beaulieu Abbey. Now she is a prisoner here. She is never going to regain her fortune, she lost that when she claimed sanctuary at the moment that she heard of your father’s death. She chose then to leave you to whatever danger the battle would bring. Now she has the life that she chose then. She can abide by her choice. She is a pauper, she is in prison. It just happens that she is a prisoner here rather than in Beaulieu. She might like that. She might prefer it here. This was her home, after all.’

‘She came here as a bride, it was her family home,’ I say quietly. ‘Every stone in every wall will speak to her of her rights.’

‘Well then . . .’

‘It’s still hers.’ I look at his young handsome determined face, and realise that nothing I say will make any difference. ‘We live here like thieves and now the true owner will be watching us collect her rents, claiming her dues, sheltered by her walls, living under her roof.’

He shrugs and I break off. I knew that he was a man of abrupt decision, a man who was capable – just like his brother – of powerful, rapid acts. The York boys spent their childhood in rebellion against the king, watching their father and then their brother risking everything at war. All the York brothers are capable of dauntless courage and stubborn endurance. I knew he was a man who would follow his own interests, without scruples. But I did not know that he was a man who could arrest his own mother-in-law and hold her, against her wishes, steal her lands from her as she sleeps under his roof. I knew that my husband was a hard man, but I did not know that he was granite.

‘How long will she live here?’

‘Till she dies,’ he says blandly.

I think of King Henry in the Tower, who died the very night that the York brothers came home victorious from Tewkesbury, determined to end his line. I think of him when the three of them quietly walked into his darkened room as he slept. I think of him sleeping under their protection and never waking again; and I open my mouth to ask him a question, and close it again, saying nothing. I realise that I am afraid to ask my young husband how long he thinks that my mother may live.

Reluctantly, sick in my belly, I go to the rooms that have been allocated to my mother, that evening, after dinner. They have served her the best dishes from the evening meal, and presented them to her on one knee, with all the respect that a countess should receive. She has eaten well; they are taking out the empty plates as I come in. Richard has ruled that she shall be housed in the northwest tower, as far away from us as it is possible to be. There is no bridge from her corner tower to the main keep; if she were allowed out of her rooms, she would have to go all the way down the stairs and through the door to get into the courtyard, cross the courtyard, and then go up the stairs to the keep to get to the great hall. There are guards at every doorway. She will never visit us without invitation. She will never leave the tower without permission. For the rest of her life she will have a blinkered view. From her windows she can see only the roofs of the little town, the wide grey skies, the empty landscape and down to the dark moat.

I go in and curtsey to her – she is my mother and I have to show her respect – but then I stand before her, my chin up. I fear that I look like a defiant child. But I am only just seventeen and I am terrified of my mother’s authority.

‘Your husband intends to hold me as a prisoner,’ she says coldly. ‘Are you, my own daughter, serving him as his gaoler?’

‘You know I cannot disobey him.’

‘You should not disobey me.’

‘You left me,’ I say, driven to speak out. ‘You left me with Margaret of Anjou and she led me to a terrible battle and to defeat, and to the death of my husband. I was little more than a child and you abandoned me on a battlefield.’

‘You paid the price of overweening ambition,’ she says. ‘Your father’s ambition, which destroyed us. Now you are following another ambitious man, like a dog, just as you followed your father. You wanted to be Queen of England. You would not know your place.’

‘My ambition didn’t take me very far,’ I protest. ‘Isabel imprisoned me, my own sister!’ I can feel my anger and my tears welling up together. ‘There was nobody to defend me. You let Isabel and George hold me against my will. You put yourself safely in sanctuary and you left me to be picked up from the battlefield! Anybody could have taken me, anything could have happened to me.’

‘You let your husband and Isabel’s husband steal my fortune from me.’

‘How could I stop them?’

‘Did you try?’

I am silent. I did not try.

‘Return my lands to me, and release me,’ my mother says. ‘Tell your husband he must do this. Tell the king.’

‘Lady Mother – I cannot,’ I say weakly.

‘Then tell Isabel.’

‘She can’t either. She is expecting a baby, she’s not even at court. And anyway – the king does not hear petitions from Isabel and me. He would never listen to us in preference to his brothers.’

‘I have to be free,’ my mother says, and for a moment her voice trembles. ‘I cannot die in prison. You have to set me free.’

I shake my head. ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘There’s no point even asking me, Lady Mother. I am powerless. I can’t do anything for you.’

For a moment her eyes blaze at me; she can still frighten me. But this time, I hold her gaze and I shrug my shoulders. ‘We lost the battle,’ I say. ‘I am married to my saviour. I have no power, nor does Isabel, nor do you. There is nothing I can do for you if it goes against my husband’s will. You will have to reconcile yourself, as I do, as Isabel does, to being the defeated.’

FARLEIGH HUNGERFORD CASTLE, SOMERSET, 14 AUGUST 1473

It is a relief beyond measuring to leave my home with the silent brooding presence of my mother in the northwest tower, and go to Isabel for the birth of her baby in Norton St Philip, Somerset. Isabel is in confinement when I arrive and I join her in the shadowed rooms. The baby comes early and the two days of labour do not give her great pain, though by the end she is very tired. The midwife hands the baby to me. ‘A girl,’ she says.

‘A girl!’ I exclaim. ‘Look, Iz, you’ve got such a pretty girl!’

She barely glances at the perfect face of the baby, though her face is as smooth and as pale as a pearl, and her eyelashes are dark. ‘Oh, a girl,’ she says dully.

‘Better luck next time,’ says the midwife drily, as she bundles up the bloodstained linen and rubs her hands on her soiled apron, and looks around for a glass of ale.

‘But this is the best of luck already!’ I protest. ‘See how beautiful she is? Iz, do look at her – she’s not even crying!’

The tiny baby opens her mouth and yawns, and she is as delightful as a kitten. Iz does not stretch out her arms for her. ‘George was determined on a boy,’ she says shortly. ‘He will not thank me for this. He will see it as a failure, as my failure.’

‘Perhaps a boy next time?’

‘And She never stops giving birth,’ Isabel says irritably. ‘George says that her health must break down soon. They have a baby almost every year. Surely one of them will kill her in childbirth?’

I cross myself against her ill-will. ‘Almost always girls,’ I say to console her.

‘One boy already, which is all she needs for a Prince of Wales, and another baby due this very month. What if she is carrying a second boy? Then she will have two sons to inherit the throne that their father usurped. And George will be pushed another step away from the crown. How will George ever get the throne if she has more sons?’

‘Hush,’ I say instantly. The midwife has her back to us, the wet nurse is coming into the birthing chamber, the maid is clearing away the linen and turning down the sheets of the big bed, but still I am afraid that we may be overheard. ‘Hush, Isabel. Don’t speak of such things. Especially not in front of people.’

‘Why not? George was Edward’s heir. That was their agreement. But She goes on having children, as if She would never stop, like a farrowing pig. Why would God give her a boy? Why would He make her fertile? Why does He not rain down pestilence on her and blow her and her baby to hell?’

I am so shocked at her sudden malice so soon after childbirth that I say nothing. I turn away from her to hand the baby to the wet nurse, who settles down in a rocking chair and takes the baby to her breast and coos over her dark downy head.

As I help Isabel into the big bed, my face is grim. ‘These are not your thoughts, nor George’s, I know,’ I say firmly. ‘For it is treason to speak against the king and his family. You are tired from the birth and drunk on the birthing ale. Iz, you must never say such things, not even to me.’

She beckons me close so that she can whisper in my ear. ‘Do you not think that our father would want George to challenge his brother? Do you not know that our father would think that the very gates of heaven were opening if George were to take the crown and make me queen? And then your husband would be the next heir to the throne. This baby is a girl, she counts for nothing. If George took the throne, then Richard would come next. Have you forgotten that the one thing our father wanted above everything else in the world was to see one of us as Queen of England and his grandson as Prince of Wales? Can you imagine how proud and happy he would be if he saw me as queen and you as queen after me, and your son as king after us both?’

I pull away from her. ‘It cost him his life,’ I say harshly. ‘He rode out to his death. And our mother is imprisoned, and you and I all but orphaned.’

‘If George were to win then that would be the only thing that made it all worth while,’ she says stubbornly. ‘If George were to claim the throne then Father would be at peace.’

I flinch at the thought that my father is not at peace. ‘Ah don’t, Iz,’ I say hastily. ‘I pay enough for masses to be said for his soul in every one of our churches. Don’t say such things. Look, I’ll leave you to rest. The birthing ale has gone to your head. You shouldn’t say such things and I won’t hear them. I am married to a loyal brother of the king and so are you. Let that be the truth. Anything else will only lead us into danger and defeat. Anything else is a sword through the heart.’

We don’t mention the conversation again and when I leave them, and George himself helps me onto my horse, thanking me for caring for Isabel in her time, I wish him every happiness and that the child grows strong and well.

‘Perhaps she will have a boy next time,’ he says. His handsome face is discontented, his charm quite overshadowed by such a setback, his smiling mouth is downturned. He is as sulky as a spoiled child.

For a moment I want to remind him that she had a boy, a beautiful baby boy, a boy who would have been the son and heir that he now wants so badly, a boy who would have been running around the hall now, a sturdy three-year-old with his nursemaid hurrying behind him; but that Iz was so shaken by the pounding waves on board my father’s ship that she could not give birth to him, and she had no-one but me as a midwife, and the baby’s little coffin was slipped into the grey heaving seas.

‘Perhaps next time,’ I say soothingly. ‘But she is a very pretty girl, and feeding well and growing strong.’

‘Stronger than your boy?’ he asks nastily. ‘What d’you call him: Edward? Was that in memory of your dead husband? Funny sort of tribute.’

‘Edward for the king of course,’ I say, biting my lip.

‘And is our baby stronger than yours?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ It hurts me to say the truth but little Margaret is a wiry hungry baby and is doing well at once, and my baby is quiet, and is not thriving.

He shrugs. ‘Well, it makes no odds. A girl’s no good. A girl can’t take the throne,’ he says, turning away. I can hardly hear, but I am sure that is what he says. For a moment I think to challenge him, to dare him to repeat it, and warn him that this is to talk treason. But then I gather my reins in my cold hands and think better that he had never said it. Better that I never heard it. Better go home.

BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, SUMMER 1473

I meet Richard in Baynard’s Castle, his family’s London home, and to my relief the court is away from London and the city is peaceful. Elizabeth the queen has gone to Shrewsbury for the birth of her baby, another boy, the second son that Isabel feared, and the doting king is with her. Without doubt they will be joyfully celebrating the birth of another boy to give certainty to their line. It makes no difference to me if she has one boy more or twenty – Richard is three steps from the throne, a fourth step makes little odds, but I cannot help a twinge of irritation at her constant fertility which serves her so well.

They are calling him Richard, in honour of his grandfather and his uncle, my husband. Richard is pleased for them; his love for his brother means he delights in his success. I am only pleased that they are far away in Shrewsbury and I am not summoned with the rest of the ladies to hang over the crib and congratulate her on another strong son. I wish her and her newborn son well, just as I wish any woman in childbed well. I really don’t want to see her in her triumph.

The rest of the lords and courtiers have gone to their lands for the summer, nobody wants to be in London during the hot plague months, so Richard and I will not stay long before we go on the long journey north to Middleham together, to see our baby again.

The day we are due to leave, I go to tell Richard that I will be ready within the hour, and find his presence chamber door is closed. This is the room where Richard hears petitions and applications for his judgement or generosity; the door always stands open as a symbol of his good lordship. It is his throne room, which is always visible so that people can see the youngest son of York about his business of ruling the kingdom. I open the door and go in. The inner door to his privy chamber is closed too. I go to turn the handle, and then I pause at the sound of a familiar voice.

His brother George Duke of Clarence is in there with my husband, talking very quietly and very persuasively. My hand drops from the ring of the handle and I stand still to listen.

‘Since he is not a true son of our father, and since their marriage was undoubtedly brought about by witchcraft . . .’

‘This? Again?’ Richard interrupts his brother scornfully. ‘Again? He has two handsome sons – one newly born this very month – and three healthy daughters against your dead boy and puling girl, and you say his marriage is not blessed by God? Surely, George, even you can see the evidence is against you?’

‘I say they are all bastards. He and Elizabeth Woodville are not married in the sight of God, and their children are all bastards.’

‘And you are the only fool in London who says it.’

‘Many say it. Your wife’s father said it.’

‘For malice. And those who are not malicious are all fools.’

A chair scrapes on the wooden floor. ‘Do you call me a fool?’

‘Lord, yes,’ Richard says scornfully. ‘To your face. A treacherous fool, if you like. A malicious fool if you insist. Do you think that we don’t know that you are meeting with Oxford? With every fool who still carries a grudge though Edward has done everything he can to settle with the embittered placemen who lost their positions? With the Lancastrians who rode against him? With every leftover out-of-place Lancaster follower that you can find? With every disgruntled squire? Sending secret messages to the French? D’you think we don’t know all that you do, and more?’

‘Edward knows?’ George’s voice has lost its bluster as if he has been winded. ‘You said “we know”? What does Edward know? What have you told him?’

‘’Course he knows. Assume he knows everything. Will he do anything? He won’t. Would I? In a moment. Because I have no patience with hidden enmity and I prefer to strike early and quick. But Edward loves you as only a kind brother could, and he has more patience than I can muster. But, brother mine, you bring me no news when you come here to tell me you have been a traitor before and you could be one again. That much I know already. That much we all know.’

‘I didn’t come here for that. Just to say . . .’

Again I hear the scrape of a chair as someone leaps to his feet and then Richard’s raised voice: ‘What does that say? Read it aloud! What does it say?’

Without opening the door to see him, I know that Richard will be pointing to his motto, carved in the massive wooden chimney breast.

‘For God’s sake!’

‘Loyauté me lie,’ Richard quotes. ‘Loyalty binds me. You wouldn’t understand such a thing, but I am sworn heart and soul to my brother Edward the king. I believe in the order of chivalry, I believe in God and the king and that they are one and the same thing and my honour is bound to both. Don’t you even dare to question me. My beliefs are beyond your imagining.’

‘All I am saying,’ now George’s voice is a persuasive whine, ‘all I am saying is that there are questions about the king and questions about the queen and that if we are legitimate and he is not, then perhaps we should divide the kingdom, fairly – as you and I divided the Neville inheritance – and rule jointly. He has all but given you the North, he has allowed you to rule it almost as a principality. Why can’t he give me the Midlands in the same way, and he can keep the south? Prince Edward has Wales. What is this if not fair?’

There is a moment’s silence. I know that Richard will be tempted by the thought of a kingdom of the North, and him as its ruler. I take one tiny step closer to the door. I pray that he will resist temptation, say no to his brother, cleave to the king. Pray God that he does nothing to bring the enmity of the queen down on our heads.

‘It’s to carve up the kingdom that he won in a fair fight,’ Richard says bluntly. ‘He won his kingdom entire, by force of arms in honourable battle, with me and even you at his side. He will not divide it. It would be to destroy his son’s inheritance.’

‘I am surprised to see you defend Elizabeth Woodville’s son,’ George says silkily. ‘You of all people, who are supplanted in your brother’s love by their clan. You of all people, who was his best friend and most beloved; but now you come after her, and after her brother the saintly Anthony, and after her commoner sons, his constant companions in every whorehouse in London: Thomas and Richard. But I see that the Woodville boy has a champion in you. You are a loving uncle, as it turns out.’

‘I defend my brother,’ Richard replies. ‘I say nothing about the Rivers family. My brother married the woman of his choice. She was not of my choosing; but I defend my brother. Always.’

‘You can’t be loyal to her,’ George says flatly. ‘You can’t be.’

Again, I hear my young husband hesitate; it is true, he cannot be loyal to her.

‘We’ll talk,’ George says finally. ‘Not now; but later. When the Woodville boy wants to come to his throne. We’ll talk then. When the boy from Grafton, the base-blooded bastard, wants to step up to the throne of England, and take our brother’s crown which we won for him and for our house, not for them – we’ll talk again then. I know you are loyal to Edward – I am too. But only to my brother, to my house and to the blood of kings. Not to that base-born bastard.’

I hear him turn on his heel and walk across the room and I step back to a window bay. As they open the door, I look round with a little start as if I am surprised to find them there. George barely nods at me as he heads towards the door and Richard stands and watches him go.

MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, JULY 1474

Richard keeps his word and although my mother and I live under the same roof I hardly ever see her. She has rooms in the northwest tower, near to the gatehouse for the convenience of the guards, overlooking the thatched roofs and stone gables of the little houses of Middleham, while our rooms are high in the central keep, with views all round like an eyrie. We come and go to London, to York, to Sheriff Hutton, Barnard Castle, accompanied by guards and our household of friends and companions, and she stays in the same rooms, watching the sun rise through the same windows every morning, and set on the opposite side, throwing shadows across her room in the same way every day.

I order that our son Edward shall never be taken along the walkway of the outer wall to see his grandmother. I don’t want her to have anything to do with him. He bears a royal name, he is the grandson my father longed for. He is many steps now from the throne but I am raising him with the education and the courage of a king – as my father would have wanted, as my mother should have done. But she has cursed me and she has cursed my marriage – so I will not give her as much as one glimpse of my beautiful son. She can be dead to him, as she said I was dead to her.

In midsummer she asks to see Richard and me together. The message comes from her chief lady in waiting and Richard glances at me as if asking me if I would like to refuse.

‘We have to see her,’ I say uncomfortably. ‘What if she is ill?’

‘Then she should send for a physician, not for you,’ he says. ‘She knows she can send for a physician, to London if she wishes. She knows I don’t stint on her household.’

I look at Lady Worth. ‘What does she want?’

She shakes her head. ‘She told me only that she wants to see you,’ she says. ‘Both of you.’

‘Bring her to us,’ Richard decides.

We are seated in matching chairs, almost thrones, in the great chamber of Middleham Castle and I don’t rise when my mother comes in the room though she pauses as if she expects me to kneel for her blessing. She looks about her as if to see what changes we have made to her home, and she raises an eyebrow as if she does not think much of our tapestries.

Richard snaps his finger at a manservant. ‘Set a chair for the countess,’ he says.

My mother sits before us and I see the stiffness of her movements. She is getting old; perhaps she is ill. Perhaps she wants to live with Isabel at Warwick Castle, and we can let her go. I wait for her to speak, and know that I am longing to hear her say that she has to go to London for her health and that she will live with Isabel.

‘It’s about the document,’ she says to Richard.

He nods. ‘I thought it would be.’

‘You must have known I would hear about it sooner or later.’

‘I assumed someone would tell you.’

‘What is this?’ I interrupt. I turn to Richard. ‘What document?’

‘I see you keep your wife in ignorance of your doings,’ my mother observes nastily. ‘Did you fear she would try to prevent you from wrongdoing? I am surprised at that. She is no champion of mine. Did you fear that this would be too much for even her to swallow?’

‘No,’ he says coldly. ‘I don’t fear her judgement.’ To me he says briefly: ‘This is the resolution to the problem of your mother’s lands that George and I could finally agree. Edward has confirmed it. We passed it as an act of parliament. It has taken long enough for the lawyers to agree and to formulate it as a law. It is the only solution that satisfied us all: we have declared her legally dead.’

‘Dead!’ I stare at my mother who stares haughtily back at me. ‘How can you call her dead?’

He taps his booted foot on the rushes. ‘It’s a legal term. It solves the problem of her lands. We could not get them any other way. Neither you nor Isabel could inherit them while she was still alive. So we have declared her dead and you and Isabel are her heirs and you inherit. Nobody steals anything from anyone. She is dead: you inherit. As your husbands, the lands are passed on to George and me.’

‘But what about her?’

He gestures at her and he almost laughs aloud. ‘As you see, here she is: living proof of the failure of ill-wishing. It would make a man disbelieve in magic. We called her dead and here she is, hale and hearty, and eating me out of house and home. Someone should preach a sermon on it.’

‘I am sorry if you find me costly,’ my mother says bitingly. ‘But then I remember you have taken all of my fortune to pay for my keep.’

‘Only half your fortune,’ Richard corrects her. ‘Your son-in-law and your other daughter have taken the other half. You need not blame Anne, Isabel has abandoned you too. But we have the cost of housing and guarding you. I don’t ask for gratitude.’

‘I don’t offer any.’

‘Would you prefer to be imprisoned in a nunnery?’ he asks. ‘For I could allow that. I can return you to confinement at Beaulieu if you wish.’

‘I would prefer to live on my own lands in freedom. I would prefer that you had not abused the law to make away with me. What is my life now? What can it be if I am declared dead? Am I in purgatory? Or is this hell?’

He shrugs. ‘You posed an awkward problem. That’s now resolved. I did not want to be seen to be stealing from my mother-in-law and the king’s honour was at stake. You were a defenceless woman in sanctuary and he could not be seen to rob you. We have resolved this very neatly. The act of parliament declares that you are dead and so you have no lands, no house and I suppose no freedom. It is here, or a nunnery, or the grave. You can choose.’

‘I’ll stay here,’ my mother says heavily. ‘But I shall never forgive you for doing this to me, Richard. I cared for you as a boy in this very castle, my husband taught you all that you know about warfare and business. We were your guardians and we were good and kind guardians to you and to your friend Francis Lovell. And this is how you repay me.’

‘Your husband taught me to march fast, kill without remorse, on and off the battlefield and sometimes outside the law, and take whatever I wanted. I am a good pupil to him. If he were in my shoes he would be doing just as I am doing now. In fact his ambition was greater. I have taken only half your lands but he would have taken all of England.’

She cannot disagree. ‘I am weary,’ she says. She gets to her feet. ‘Anne, give me your arm back to my rooms.’

‘Don’t think you can suborn her,’ Richard warns her. ‘Anne knows where her loyalties lie. You threw her away into defeat, I rescued her from your neglect and made her a great heiress and a duchess.’

I take my mother’s arm and she leans on me. Unwillingly, I lead her out of the presence chamber, down the stairs and across the great hall, where the servants are pulling out the tables for dinner, to the bridge which leads to the outer walls and her rooms.

She pauses under the archway to the tower. ‘You know he will betray you and you will feel just like me, one day,’ she says suddenly. ‘You will be alone and lonely, you will be in purgatory, wondering if it is hell.’

I shudder and would pull away; but she has my arm in her grip and she is leaning heavily on me. ‘He will not betray me,’ I say. ‘He is my husband and our interests lie together. I love him, we married for love and we love each other still.’

‘Ah, you don’t know then,’ she says with quiet satisfaction. She sighs as if someone has given her a gift of great worth. ‘I thought you did not know.’

Clearly, she will not take another step and for a moment, I stand with her. Suddenly I realise that it is for this moment, alone with me, that she asked for my arm. She did not want a moment alone with her daughter, she was not hoping for a reconciliation. No, she wanted to tell me some awful thing that I don’t know, that I don’t want to know. ‘Come on,’ I say. But she does not move at all.

‘The wording of the law that makes me dead names you as his harlot.’

I am so shocked that I stop quite still and look at her. ‘What are you saying? What madness are you speaking now?’

‘It’s the law of the land,’ she laughs thinly, like a cackling witch. ‘A new law. And you didn’t know.’

‘Know what?’

‘The law that says that I am dead and you inherit goes on to say that if you and your husband divorce, then he keeps the lands.’

‘Divorce?’ I repeat the strange word.

‘He keeps the lands, and the castles and the houses, the ships on the seas, and the contents of the treasure rooms, the mines and the quarries and the granaries and everything.’

‘He has provided for our divorce?’ I ask, stumbling on my speech.

‘How could such a thing happen? How should you divorce?’ she crows. ‘The marriage has been consummated, you are proven to be fertile, you have given him a son. There can be no grounds for a divorce, surely? But in this act of parliament, Richard makes provision for a divorce. Why should he do that, if no divorce could ever take place? Why would he provide for a thing which is impossible?’

My head is whirling. ‘Lady Mother, if you must speak to me at all, then speak plainly.’

She does. She beams at me as if she has good news. She is exultant that she understands this and I don’t. ‘He is providing for the denial of your marriage,’ she says. ‘He has prepared for his marriage to you to be set aside. If it was a true marriage it could not be set aside, there are no possible grounds. So my guess is this: you did not get a full dispensation from the Pope; but married without it. Am I right? Am I right, my turncoat daughter? You are cousins, you are brother- and sister-in-law, I am his godmother. Richard is even a kinsman to your first husband. Your marriage would need a full papal dispensation on many, many counts. But I don’t think you had time to get a full dispensation from the Pope. My guess is that Richard urged you to marry and said that you could get a dispensation later. Am I right? I think I am right for here, in this very act where he shows why he married you – for your fortune – he also gets a ruling that he will keep your lands if he puts you aside. He shows it is possible to put you aside. It all becomes wonderfully clear!’

‘It will be how the act is framed,’ I say wildly. ‘It will be the same for George and Isabel. There will be the same provision for George and Isabel.’

‘No it is not,’ she says. ‘You are right. If George and Isabel had the same terms you could be reassured. But it is not the same for them. There is no provision for the annulment of their marriage. George knows that he cannot annul his marriage to Isabel so he does not provide for it. George knows that they got a dispensation for their kinship and their marriage is valid. It cannot be set aside. But Richard knows that he did not get a full dispensation and his marriage is not fully valid. It can be set aside. He has that in his power. I read the deed very carefully, as any woman might carefully read her own death certificate. My guess is that if I were to send to the Pope and ask him to show the legal dispensation for your marriage he would reply that there was none, full dispensation was never requested. So you are not married, and your son is a bastard and you a harlot.’

I am so stunned that I just stare at her. At first I think that she is raving but then one after another the pieces of what she is saying fall into place. Our driving urgent haste to marry and Richard telling me that we would do so without a dispensation, but get it later. And then I just assumed, like a fool, that the marriage was valid. I just forgot, like a fool, like a fool in the honeymoon month, that being married by an archbishop with the blessing of the king was not as good as a dispensation from the Pope. When I was greeted by his mother, when I was received by the court, when we conceived our son and inherited my lands, I assumed that everything was as it should be and I forgot to question it at all. And now I know that my husband did not forget, did not assume, but has provided that he can keep his fortune if he ever decides to set me aside. If he wants to rid himself of me he has only to say that the marriage was never valid. My marriage to him is based on our vows before God – at least those cannot be denied. But they are not enough. Our marriage depends on his whim. We will be husband and wife as long as he wishes it. At any moment he could denounce our marriage as a sham, and he would be free and I would be utterly shamed.

I shake my head in wonderment. All this time I thought that I was playing myself, both the player and the pawn, and yet I have never been more powerless, never more of a piece in someone else’s game.

‘Richard,’ I say, and it is as if I am calling out to him to rescue me once more.

My mother regards me with silent satisfaction.

‘What shall I do?’ I whisper to myself. ‘What can I do now?’

‘Leave him.’ My mother’s voice is like a slap in the face. ‘Leave him at once and come with me to London and we will overthrow the act, deny the false marriage, and get my lands back.’

I round on her. ‘Don’t you see yet that you will never get your lands back? D’you think you can fight against the King of England himself? Do you imagine you can challenge the three sons of York acting together? Have you forgotten that these were my father’s enemies, Margaret of Anjou’s enemies? And we were fatally allied to Father and to Margaret of Anjou? Have you forgotten that we were defeated? All you want to do is to throw yourself into prison in the Tower, and me alongside you.’

‘You will never be safe as his wife,’ she predicts. ‘He can leave you whenever he wants. If your son dies, and you fail to get another, he can go to a more fertile woman and take your fortune with him.’

‘He loves me.’

‘He may do,’ she concedes. ‘But he wants the lands, this very castle, and an heir more than anything in the world. You have no safety.’

‘I have no safety as your daughter,’ I counter. ‘I know that at least. You married me to a claimant to the throne of England and abandoned me when we had to go into battle. Now you call me to commit treason again.’

‘Leave him!’ she whispers. ‘I will stand by you this time.’

‘And what about my son?’

She shrugs. ‘You will never see him again but as he is a bastard . . . does it matter?’

Fiercely, I take her by the arm and march her towards her rooms where the guard stands to one side to let us go in, and will then block the door so she cannot go out.

‘Don’t call him that,’ I say. ‘Don’t you dare ever call him that. I stand by my son, and I stand by my husband. And you can rot in here.’

She wrenches her arm from me. ‘I warn you, I will tell the world that you are not a wife but a harlot, and you will be ruined,’ she spits.

I push her through the door. ‘No you won’t!’ I say. ‘For you will have no pen and no paper, and no way to send messages. No messengers and no visits. You have taught me only that you are my enemy and I will keep you straitly. Go in, Lady Mother. You will not come out again, and no word you say will ever be repeated outside these walls. Go and be dead – for you are dead to the world and dead to me. Go and be dead!’

I slam the door on her and I round on the guard. ‘No-one to see her but her household,’ I say. ‘No messages passed, not even pedlars or tinkers to come to her door. Everyone coming or going to be searched. She sees no-one, she speaks to no-one. D’you understand?’

‘Yes, Your Grace,’ he says.

‘She is an enemy,’ I say. ‘She is a traitor and a liar. She is our enemy. She is enemy to the duke, to me and to our precious son. The duke is a hard man on his enemies. Make sure you are hard on her.’

MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SPRING 1475

I think I am becoming a slate-hearted woman. The girl that I was – who dreaded her mother’s disapproval, who clung to her big sister, who loved her father like her lord – is now an eighteen-year-old duchess who orders her household to guard her mother like an enemy, and writes with meticulous care to her sister. Richard warns me that his brother George is becoming a dangerously outspoken critic of the king, and that Isabel is known to agree with him; we cannot be seen to associate with them.

He does not have to convince me. I don’t want to associate with them if they are walking into danger. When Isabel writes to me that she is going into confinement again, and would like me to come to her, I refuse. Besides, I cannot face Isabel with our mother in my keeping, gaoled for the rest of her life. I cannot face Isabel with my mother’s terrible threats in my ears and in my dreams every night of my life. Isabel knows now, as I do, that we have declared our own mother a dead woman so that we could take her lands to give to our husbands. I feel that we are murderers, with blood on our hands. And what would I say if Isabel asked me if my mother is kept well? If she endures her imprisonment with patience? What could I say to her if she asked me to let our mother go?

I can never admit that my mother is kept in her tower so that she cannot speak about my marriage. I cannot tell Isabel that not only have our husbands declared our mother dead but that now even I wish her dead. Certainly I wish her silenced forever.

And now I am afraid of what Isabel thinks. I wonder if she has read the act that declares my mother dead with the care that my mother did. I wonder if Isabel has suspicions about my marriage, if one day George will tell everyone that I am the duke’s whore just as much as Elizabeth Woodville is the king’s whore: that there is only one son of York with an honest wife. I dare not see Isabel with these thoughts in my mind, so I write and say that I cannot come, the times are too difficult.

Isabel replies in March that she is sorry I could not come to her but that she has good news. At last she has a boy, a son and heir. He too is to be called Edward, but this boy will be named after the place of his birth and after his grandfather’s earldom. He will be Edward of Warwick, and she asks me be happy for her. I try, but all I think is that if George makes an attempt on the throne he can offer any traitors who might join with him an alternative royal family: a claimant and now an heir. I write to Isabel that I am glad for her and for her son, and that I wish her well. But I don’t send gifts, and I don’t ask to be godmother. I am afraid of what George may be planning for this little boy, this new Warwick, the grandson of Warwick the kingmaker.

Besides, while I have been troubled by my mother’s words, by my fears for my son, the country has been building up to war with France at a breakneck pace, and everything that was done in peace has been forgotten as taxes have to be raised, soldiers recruited, weapons forged, shoes cobbled, liveries sewn. Richard can think of nothing but mustering his army from our estates, drawing on tenants, retainers, household staff and everyone who has offered him their loyalty. Gentlemen have to bring their own tenants from their farms, towns have to raise funds and send apprentices. Richard hurries to recruit his men and join his brothers – both his brothers – as they go to invade France, with the whole of the kingdom for the re-taking, laid out like a rich feast before them.

The three sons of York are to march out in splendour again. Edward has declared himself determined to return to the glory of Henry V. He will be King of France again and the shame of England’s failure under the bad queen and the sleeping king will be forgotten. Richard is cool with me as he prepares to leave. He remembers that the King of France, Louis, proposed and organised my first wedding, called me his pretty cousin and promised me his friendship when I would be Queen of England. Richard checks and double-checks the wagons which will carry everything to France, has his armourer pack two sets of armour, and mounts his horse in the stable yard at the head of about a thousand men. Even more will join him on the march south.

I go to say goodbye. ‘Keep safe, my husband.’ There are tears in my eyes and I try to blink them away.

‘I am going to war.’ His smile is distant; already his mind is on the work he must do. ‘I doubt that I’ll be able to keep safe.’

I shake my head. I so much want to tell him how afraid I am for him, that I cannot help but think of my father who barely said goodbye in his rush to get to his ships and go to war. I cannot help but think of my first husband whose life was cut so short on a battlefield so bloody that, even now, nobody talks about his death. ‘I mean only that I hope you will come home to me and to your son Edward,’ I say quietly. I go up to the side of his horse and put my hand on his knee. ‘I am your wife, and I give you a wife’s blessing. My heart will be with you every step of the way, I will pray for you every day.’

‘I will come home safe,’ he says reassuringly. ‘I fight at the side of my brother Edward and he has never been defeated on the battlefield, only ever by treachery. And if we can reconquer the English lands in France it will be the most glorious victory in generations.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

He bends low in his saddle and kisses me on the lips. ‘Be brave,’ he says. ‘You are the wife of a commander of England. Perhaps I will come home to you with castles and great lands in France. Keep my lands and keep my son and I will come home to you.’

I step back and he wheels his horse and his standard bearer lifts his pennant that unfurls in the breeze. The sign of the boar, Richard’s badge, raises a cheer from his men, and he gives the signal for them to follow him. He loosens the reins and his horse eagerly starts forwards, and they go, under the broad stone archway where the tramped feet echo over the drawbridge which spans the moat, as the ducks scutter away in fright, and then down the road past Middleham, and south, south to meet the king, south over the narrow seas, south to France to restore England to the days when the English kings ruled France and English farmers grew olives and grapes.

LONDON, SUMMER 1475

I move from Middleham Castle to our family house in London, Baynard’s Castle, so that I can be close to the court and learn what is happening while my husband and his brothers are at war in France.

Queen Elizabeth keeps her court at Westminster. Her son, the little Prince Edward, is named as ruler of England in his father’s absence, and she is glorying in her importance as the wife of a king on campaign, and as the mother of the prince. Her brother Anthony Woodville, the prince’s guardian, has gone with the king to France, so her son is in her sole keeping. She is the leader of his council and his advisors and tutors are all chosen by her. The power of the kingdom is supposed to be vested in a council, but this is led by the newly appointed Cardinal Bourchier, and since he owes his red hat entirely to the king, he is at her beck and call. In the absence of anyone else, Elizabeth Woodville is leader of the House of York. She is all but regent, she is all but ruling. She is a self-made woman and has grown grand indeed: from squire’s wife to all but queen regnant.

Like half of England, I cannot imagine the disaster that would overtake the country if our king were to die in France and the throne be inherited by this little boy. Like half of the country I suddenly realise what extraordinary power has been vested in this family from Northamptonshire. If the king were to die on this campaign, just as Henry V died on his campaign in France, it would put all of England into the hands of the Rivers family forever. They completely dominate the Prince of Wales and increase their power step by step across the country, as they appoint their friends or their kin into every place that becomes vacant. The prince’s mentor and guardian is the queen’s beloved brother Anthony Woodville Lord Rivers, the prince’s council is headed by her and managed by him. The prince is richly endowed with Woodville brothers and sisters, as well as aunts and uncles for both Elizabeth Woodville and her mother, the witch Jacquetta, have been unnaturally – suspiciously – fertile. Those of us who are royal kin to the king hardly know the little princes – they are forever surrounded by the Rivers and their friends or their servants. The little boy is my husband’s blood nephew and yet we never see him. He lives alone at Ludlow with Anthony Lord Rivers, and when he does come to court for Christmas or Easter he is dominated by his mother and his sisters who fall on him with joy and never let him out of their sight for the entire visit.

We have destroyed the House of Lancaster but in its place, as I now understand, we have allowed a new rival house, the House of Rivers, the Woodvilles who have their friends, their favourites or themselves in every position of power in the kingdom and the heir is a boy of their making.

If the king were to die in France it would be to make the Rivers the new royal family of England. Neither George nor Richard would be welcomed at court. And then, almost certainly, there would be war all over again. There is no doubt in my mind that George would oppose the usurpation of the Rivers, and he would be right to do so. They have no royal blood, they have not been chosen to rule. What Richard would do, I can hardly guess. His love and loyalty to his brother Edward runs very deep; but like everyone else who sees the queen’s grasping ways, he cannot endure the power of his brother’s wife and her family. I think it almost certain that the two brothers of York would turn on the Rivers and England would be torn apart by a war of rival houses once again.

She invites me to a dinner to celebrate the good news that they have landed safely and started to march in France, and as I go in to the noise and bright lights of the queen’s presence chamber I am surprised and delighted to see my sister Isabel at her side.

I curtsey to the queen and then when she offers me her cool cheek, I kiss her as my sister-in-law, I kiss all three York girls, and curtsey to the five-year-old prince, and the toddler his brother. Only then, when I have worked my way through this extensive family, can I turn to my sister. I had been afraid that she would be angry with me for failing to be with her in her confinement but she hugs me at once. ‘Annie! I am so glad you are here. I have only just arrived or I would have come to your house.’

‘I couldn’t come, Richard wouldn’t let me come to your confinement,’ I say in a sudden rush of joy as I first hold her and then lean back to take in her smiling face. ‘I wanted to; but Richard wouldn’t allow it.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘George didn’t want me to ask you. Have they quarrelled?’

I shake my head. ‘Not here,’ is all I say. The slightest tip of my head warns Isabel that Queen Elizabeth, who is apparently leaning down to speak to her son, is almost certainly listening to every word we say.

She slides her arm around my waist and we go as if to admire the new royal baby: another girl. The nursemaid shows her to us and then takes her to the nursery.

‘I think my Edward is a stronger child,’ Isabel remarks. ‘But She always has such beautiful babies, doesn’t she? How does she do it, do you think?’

I shake my head. I am not going to discuss the dangerous topics of the queen’s remarkable fertility or the success of her child-rearing.

Isabel follows my lead. ‘So – d’you know what is wrong between your husband and mine? Have they quarrelled?’

‘I overheard them,’ I confess. ‘I listened at the door. It’s not the money, Iz, not mother’s inheritance. It’s worse.’ I lower my voice. ‘I am very afraid that George may be preparing to challenge the king.’

She glances behind her at once, but in the noisy court we are alone and cannot be overheard. ‘Did he say so to Richard? Are you sure?’

‘Didn’t you know?’

‘He has men coming to him all the time, he is building up his affinity, he is taking advice from astrologers. But I thought it was for this invasion of France. He has brought more than a thousand men into the field. He and Richard have the greatest of the armies, they outnumber the king’s men. But I thought that George was mustering his men for his brother Edward, for this invasion of France. He surely cannot be thinking of claiming the throne when he has just put an army together to support Edward?’

‘Does he really think that Edward has no true claim to the throne?’ I ask curiously. ‘That’s what he said to Richard.’

Isabel shrugs. ‘We all know what is said,’ she answers shortly. ‘Edward looks nothing like his father, and he was born out of the country, during a time when his father was away fighting the French. There have always been rumours about him.’ She glances over to the royal family, at the queen among her beautiful children, laughing at something her daughter Elizabeth is saying. ‘And come to that, nobody witnessed their wedding. How do we know it was properly done, with a proper priest?’

I can’t bear to speak of invalid weddings with Isabel. ‘My husband won’t hear a word of it,’ I say. ‘I can’t speak of it.’

‘Is your sister telling you all about her new baby?’ the queen interrupts, calling across the room. ‘We have a richness of Edwards, do we not? We all have an Edward now.’

‘Many Edwards, but only one prince,’ my sister replies gracefully. ‘And you and His Grace the king are blessed with a fine nursery of many children.’

Queen Elizabeth looks complacently at the girls who are playing with their brother the Prince of Wales. ‘Well, God bless them all,’ she says pleasantly. ‘I hope to have as many as my mother did, and she gave her husband fourteen children. Let us all hope to be as fertile as our mothers!’

Isabel freezes, the smile vanishing from her face. The queen turns away to speak to someone else, and I say urgently: ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Iz?’

‘She cursed us,’ she whispers to me, her voice a thread. ‘Did you hear her? She cursed us to have children like our mother. Two girls.’

‘She didn’t,’ I say. ‘She was just talking about her mother’s fourteen children.’

Isabel shakes her head. ‘She knows that George would inherit the throne if her sons were to die,’ she says. ‘And she doesn’t want my boy to succeed. I think she just cursed us. She cursed my son, in front of everyone. She wished that I would have the issue that my mother had: two girls. She cursed you too: two girls. She has just ill-wished our boys. She has just wished them dead.’

Isabel is so shaken that I take her out of sight of the queen, behind some people who are learning a new dance. They are making a lot of noise and practising the steps over and over. Nobody pays any attention to us at all.

We stand near an open window until the colour comes back into her cheeks. ‘Iz – you cannot fear the queen like this,’ I say anxiously. ‘You cannot hear curses and witchcraft in everything she says. You cannot suspect her all the time and speak your fears. We are settled now, the king has forgiven George and rides with him at his side. You and I have our fortune. Richard and George may squabble about the future; but we should be at peace.’

She shakes her head, still frightened. ‘You know that we are not at peace. And now I am wondering what is happening in France right now. I thought that my husband had mustered an army to support his brother the king in a foreign war. But he has a thousand men under his command and they will do whatever he wants. What if George plans to turn against the king? What if he has planned it all along? What if he is going to kill Edward in France and come back and take the throne from the Rivers?’

Isabel and I wait for anxious weeks, wondering if the English army, far from fighting the French, has fallen to fighting itself. Her terror and mine is that George is following my father’s plan of marching in the vanguard and then closing in to attack. Then Richard sends me a letter to tell me that their plans have all gone wrong. Their ally, the Duke of Burgundy, has marched out to set a siege, far away, of no use to our campaign at all. His duchess, Margaret of York – Richard’s own sister – has no power to recall him to support her brothers as they land in Calais and march to Reims for Edward’s coronation as King of France. Margaret, born and bred a loyal York girl, is despairing that she cannot make her husband support her three brothers. But the duke seems to have lured them to fight with France so that he can make his own gains; all the allies seem to have their own ambitions. Only my husband would stick to the original plan if he could. He writes me a bitter account:

Burgundy pursues his own way. The queen’s kinsman, our famed ally St Pol, the same. Now we are here ready for battle, we find that my brother has lost his desire to fight, and King Louis has offered him magnificent terms to leave the kingdom of France alone. Gold and the hand of his daughter the Princess Elizabeth so that she will be the next Queen of France turns out to be the price of our withdrawal. They have bought my brother.

Anne, only you will know how bitterly I am shamed by this. I wanted to win English lands in France for England again, I wanted to see our armies victorious in the plains of Picardy. Instead we have become merchants, haggling over the price. There is nothing I can do to stop Edward and George snapping up this treaty, just as there was no way that I could drag my men out of the town of Amiens where King Louis served a feast of meats and an unending supply of wine, knowing that they would drink and eat until they were sick as dogs, and I am mortified that it is my badge on their collars. My men are poisoned with their own gluttony, and I am sick with shame.

I swear I will never trust Edward again. This is not kingly, this is not as Arthur of Camelot. This is behaviour as base as an archer’s bastard and I cannot meet his eyes when I see him stuffing his mouth at King Louis’ table and pocketing the gold forks.

BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1475

By September they are all home, richer than they dreamed, loaded with silver plate, jewels, crowns and promises of more to come. The king himself has seventy-five thousand crowns in his treasury as payment for his promise for a peace treaty to last for seven years, and the King of France will pay fifty thousand pounds a year, every year that Edward does not re-state his claim to English lands in France. George Duke of Clarence, who was always at his brother’s side during the haggling, at the ready when there was easy money to be made, is named as the trustworthy councillor to arbitrate on this dishonourable pension, and he too is being paid a fortune. The only dissenting voice comes from my husband – of all the men who rode to France and came back richer, only my husband Richard warns Edward that this is no way to defeat the French king, cautions him that the commons of England will think that their taxes have been wasted, swears that the citizens of London and the gentry in parliament will turn against him for this dishonour, and begs him not to sell England’s birthright for this pension. I think Richard is the only one in all of the great English army to speak against the treaty. Everyone else is too busy counting their own bribes.

‘He knew I advised against it, he knew I wanted war, and yet the French king still gave me half a dozen hunters and a fortune in silver plate!’ Richard exclaims in our private rooms, the door shut against eavesdroppers, his mother – thank God – at Fotheringhay and unable to add her voice to the complaints against the king.

‘Did you accept it?’

‘Of course. Everyone else has taken a fortune. William Hastings is taking two thousand crowns a year. And that’s not all – Edward has agreed to release Margaret of Anjou!’

‘Release the queen?’

‘She’s not to be called queen any more, she’s to renounce her title and her claim on the crown of England. But she is to be released.’

A terrible fear strikes me. ‘She wouldn’t come to us? Richard, I really could not have her at one of our houses.’

He laughs out loud for the first time since his return home. ‘God, no. She is going to France. Louis can take care of her if he wants her so much. They are well-suited. Both dishonourable, both greedy, both liars and both a disgrace to their thrones. If I had been Edward, I would have executed her and defeated him.’ He pauses. ‘But if I had been Edward I would never have stooped to this dishonourable truce.’

I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘You did your duty. You mustered your men and you rode out to fight.’

‘I feel as if my brother is Cain,’ he says miserably. ‘Both of them. Two Cains to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. I am the only one that cares about honour. They laughed at me and called me a fool for chivalry, they said I dreamed of a better world that could never be; while they put their noses in the trough.’ He turns his head and kisses my wrist. ‘Anne,’ he says quietly.

I bow my head and kiss his neck, his hairline, and then as he draws me into his lap, his closed eyes, his frowning eyebrows and his mouth. As he lies me down on the bed and takes me I reach for him and I pray that we are making another boy.

MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SUMMER 1476

Edward my son is three years old and released from the nursery, out of his gowns and into proper clothes. I have Richard’s tailor make miniature copies of his father’s dark handsome suits and I dress him myself every morning, threading the laces through the holes at the sleeves, pulling his riding boots on his little feet and telling him to stamp down. Soon his hair will have to be cut, but every morning of this summer I brush his golden-brown curls over his white lace collar and twist them around my fingers. I pray every month that another child comes, to be a brother to him, I even pray for a girl if that is the will of God. But month after month goes by and still my courses come and I never feel sick in the morning, and I never feel that wonderful faintness that tells a woman that she is with child.

I visit a herbalist, I summon a physician. The herbalist gives me the most vile potions to drink and a sachet of herbs to wear around my neck, the physician tells me to eat meat even on Fridays, and warns me that I am cold and dry in disposition and must become hot and moist. My ladies in waiting whisper to me that they know of a wise woman, a woman who has powers not of this world; she can make a baby, she can melt one away, she can call up a storm, whistle up a wind – I stop them there. ‘I don’t believe in such things,’ I say stoutly. ‘I don’t think such things can be. And if they were, they would be against the will of God, and outside the knowledge of man, and I will have nothing to do with them.’

Richard never complains that our next child is a long time coming. But he knows that he is a fertile man; there are two children that I know of, from before we were married, and there may be more. His brother the king has bastards scattered round the three kingdoms and sired seven children with the queen. But Richard and I have only one: our precious Edward, and I have to wonder how the queen gets so many babies from one brother while I get only one; does she know things outside the will of God and the wisdom of man?

Every morning that I walk along the outer wall to the tower where Edward has his nursery I hear my heart beat a little faster for fear that he may be ill. He has gone through the childhood ailments, his little white teeth have come in, he grows, yet I always worry for him. He is never going to be a big-boned man, like his uncle the king. He is going to take after his father, lithe, short, slight of build. His father has made himself strong and powerful through constant practice and hard living, so perhaps Edward too can become strong. I love him completely, and I could not love him more than I do if we happened to be a poor family with nothing to leave to a son. But we are not. We are a great family, the greatest in the North, and I can never forget that he is our only heir. If we were to lose him, then we would lose not only our son but also our step into the future, and the massive fortune that Richard has put together by matching the grants from his brother the king with my vast inheritance would all be wasted, scattered among our kinsmen.

Isabel is far luckier than me. I cannot deny my jealousy of her easy conception of children, and the robust health of her babies. I cannot bear her to excel me in this. She writes to me that she had feared that our line was a weak one – our mother had only two girls, and that after a long wait. She reminds me that the queen cursed us, wishing our mother’s weak seed on us. But the curse does not fix on Isabel, who already has two children, the pretty girl Margaret, and a son Edward, and she writes exultantly that she is pregnant again, and this time she is certain it will be another boy.

Her letter, scrawled in her wide hand, blotted with excessive ink in her joy, tells me that she is carrying the baby high, which is a certain sign of a boy, and that it kicks as strongly as a young lord. She asks me to tell our mother her good news and I write coldly in reply that while I am glad for her, and look forward to seeing her new baby, I do not visit our mother in her part of the castle, and that if Isabel wants her to have the good news she should tell her herself. She can write a letter to me and I will have it delivered for – as Isabel well knows – our Lady Mother is not allowed to receive any letters that we do not see first, and is not allowed to reply at all. As Isabel well knows, our Lady Mother is dead in the eyes of the law. Does Isabel want to challenge this now?

That silences her, as I knew it would. She is ashamed, as I am ashamed, that we have imprisoned our mother and stolen our inheritance from her. I never speak of Isabel to my mother, I never speak to her at all. I cannot bring myself to admit that she lives quite alone, our prisoner, in her rooms in the tower and that I never visit her, and she never sends for me.

I would always have had to keep her in strict confinement, there was no other choice. She could not be out in the world, leading a normal life as a widowed countess – it would have been to make a mockery of the act of parliament that declared her dead as Richard and George agreed. She could not be allowed to meet people and complain to them that she had been robbed. She could not be allowed to go on writing, as she did from Beaulieu Abbey, to every lady of the royal household calling on them as fellow ladies, in sisterhood, to defend her. We would never have been able to risk her living out in the world, challenging my inheritance and the very basis of our wealth, our ownership of this castle, the vast acres of our lands, my husband’s great fortune. Besides – what would she have lived on after George and Richard took everything? Where would have been her home since George and Richard took all her houses? But since she spoke to me, so terribly, so disturbingly, since she told me that she believes my marriage is invalid, since she named me, her own daughter, as a whore, since that day I cannot bear even to see her.

I never go to her room; I inquire after her health once a week from her lady in waiting. I ensure that she has the best dishes from the kitchen, the best wine from the cellar. She can walk in the courtyard before her tower, which is walled all round, and I keep a guard on the door. She can command musicians as long as I know who they are and they are searched when they arrive and leave. She goes to the chapel and takes mass, she goes to confession only with our priest, and he would tell me if she made any accusations. She has no cause to complain of her circumstances, and no-one can hear her complaint. But I make sure that I am never in the chapel when she comes in, I never walk in her garden. If I look down from the high window in the privy chamber and see her dully circling on the stony paths, I turn my head away. She is indeed as a dead woman, she is almost buried alive. She is – as I once feared she was – walled up.

I never tell Richard what she said about him, I never ask him is our marriage valid, is our son legitimate? And I never ask her if she is certain, or was she just speaking from spite to frighten me? I am never going to hear her say again that she thinks my marriage is invalid and that my husband tricked me into a false service and that I live with him now balanced on his goodwill, that he married me only for my fortune to him, and has made cold-hearted preparations to keep my fortune and lose me. To avoid her repeating this I am prepared to never hear her speak again. I will never let her say that to me – or to anyone else – as long as she lives.

I wish she had never said it, or that I had never heard it, or that having heard it I could simply forget it. I am sickened that she should say such a thing to me and I am unable to refute it. I am sickened that I should know, in my heart of hearts, that it is true. It eats away at my love for Richard. Not that he should marry me without a papal dispensation in the first place – I don’t forget that we were so much in love and so steeped in desire that we could not wait. But that he should not apply for dispensation after our wedding, that he should keep that decision from me, and that – most chillingly and worst of all, far and away the worst thing – he should secure his rights to my inheritance even if he were to put me aside and deny his marriage to me.

I am bound to him, by my love, by my submission to his will, by my first passion, and since he is the father of my son and he is my lord. But what am I to him? That is what I want to know and what I can now – thanks to my mother – never confidently ask him.

In May Richard comes to me and says that he wants us to leave Edward at Middleham with his tutor and the lady of his household, and go to York to start the procession to Fotheringhay, for a solemn service: the reburial of his father.

‘Margaret of Anjou’s army beheaded him, and my brother Edmund, and put their heads on stakes above Micklegate Bar at York,’ Richard says grimly. ‘That’s the sort of woman she was, your first mother-in-law.’

‘You know I had no choice in my marriage,’ I say, speaking steadily though I am irritated by the fact that he cannot forget or forgive that part of my life. ‘And I was a child in Calais when that happened, and my father was fighting for York, fighting alongside your brother.’

He gestures with his hand. ‘Yes, well, that doesn’t matter now. What does matter is that I am going to have my father and brother honourably reburied. What d’you think?’

‘I think it would be a very good thing to do,’ I say. ‘They lie at Pontefract now, don’t they?’

‘Yes. My mother would like them buried together in the family vault at Fotheringhay Castle. I should like him to be honoured properly. Edward has trusted me to arrange it all, he prefers me to George for this.’

‘There could be no-one who would do it better,’ I say warmly.

He smiles. ‘Thank you. I know you are right. Edward is too careless and George has no love of chivalry and honour. But I shall take pride in doing it well. I shall be glad to see my father and brother properly buried.’

For a moment only I think of my own father’s body dragged off the battlefield at Barnet, the blood pouring from his helmet, his head lolling, his great black horse lying down in the field, as if he were asleep. But Edward was a good enemy; he never abused the bodies of his foe. He showed them in public so that the people would know that they were dead, and then he allowed them to be buried. My father’s corpse lies in Bisham Abbey, in the family vault, buried in honour but without ceremony. Isabel and I have never gone to pay our respects. My mother has never visited his grave, and now she never will. Bisham Abbey will not see her, till I bury her there, beside him: a better wife than she was a mother. ‘What can I do to help?’ is all I say.

He thinks. ‘You can help me plan the route, and the ceremonies at each place. And you can advise me as to what people should wear and the ceremonies we should order. Nothing like this has ever been done before. I want it to go off perfectly.’

Richard, his Master of Horse and I plan the journey together, while our priest at Middleham advises as to the ceremonies of walking with the body and the prayers that should be said at each halt. Richard commissions a carved model of his father, to lie on top of his coffin, so that everyone can see the great man that he was, and adds a silver statue of an angel holding a golden crown over the effigy’s head. This symbolises that the duke was a king by right, dying in his fight for his throne. It shows also how wise Edward was, to trust only Richard with this ceremony and not his brother George. When George joined my father he denied that the duke was a king by right, and that his son Edward was legitimate. Only Richard and I know that George still says this, but now he speaks in secret.

Richard makes a beautiful procession to bring the body of his father and his brother from Pontefract to their home. The cortege travels south from York for seven days and at every stop it goes into great churches on the way to lie in state. Thousands of people file silently past it to pay their respects to the king who was never crowned, and are reminded of the glorious history of the House of York.

Six horses draped in black pull the carriages, and ahead of them rides a knight, quite alone, carrying the duke’s banner as if he were going into battle. Behind him rides Richard, his head bowed, and behind him come the great men of the realm, all honouring our house, all honouring our fallen father.

For Richard this is more than a proper reburial of his father; this is a re-stating of his father’s right to be King of England, King of France. His father was a great soldier who fought for his country, a greater commander, a greater strategist even than his son Edward. In this lengthy procession Richard honours his father, claims his kingship, reminds the country of the greatness and nobility of the House of York. We are everything the Rivers are not, and Richard shows this in the wealth and grace of this remembrance service.

Richard keeps watch by the coffins every night that they are on the road, rides before them every day on a black horse with dark blue trappings, his standard lowered before him. It is as if for the first time in his life he allows himself to grieve for the father he lost and for the world of nobility and honour that went with him.

I meet him at Fotheringhay and find him thoughtful and tender with me. He remembers that his dead father and mine were allies, kinsmen. His father died before my father’s disastrous alliance with the bad queen, died even before he saw his son come to the throne, died before Richard had fought his first battle. That night, before Richard goes out for his last vigil by his father’s coffin, we kneel in prayer together, side by side in the beautiful family church. ‘He would have been glad of our marriage,’ Richard says quietly as he rises to his feet. ‘He would have been glad to know that we were married, despite everything else.’

For a moment, as he stands and I look up to him, the question And is our marriage valid? is on the tip of my tongue. But I see the grave sadness in his face, and then he turns and takes his place as one of the four knightly watchers who will stand all night around the coffin until dawn releases them from their vigil.

George and Isabel come to the funeral at Fotheringhay and she and I stand next to each other, both wearing beautiful gowns of the royal mourning colour of dark blue as the king and the queen and their family receive the two coffins at the cemetery at Fotheringhay church. Edward kisses the effigy’s hand and I see George and then Richard follow suit. George is especially tender and pious in this scene, but nobody takes the eye more than the little princesses. The ten-year-old Princess Elizabeth, exquisitely beautiful, is in the forefront; she leads her sister Princess Mary by the hand, and behind them come ambassadors from all the countries in Christendom to honour the head of the royal family of York.

It is a masque – a performance rich in symbols as well as an act of mourning. Nobody can see the royal family burying their forebear as if he were a king without reflecting how kingly is Edward, and his brothers, how reverent is the little prince, and how enchanting and queenly are Elizabeth and her daughters. I cannot help but think that they are more like actors than real kings and queens. Elizabeth the queen is so poised and beautiful, and her girls – especially the Princess Elizabeth – so conscious of themselves and their place in the procession. At her age I was frightened that I might step on my mother’s train, but little Princess Elizabeth walks with her head up, looking neither to left nor right, a little queen in the making.

I should admire her – everyone else seems to adore her, and perhaps if I had a daughter I would point to the princess and tell my little girl that she must learn the poise of her cousin. But since I don’t have a little girl, though I pray for one, I cannot look at the Princess Elizabeth without irritation, and think her spoiled and artificial – a precocious pet who would be better confined to the schoolroom rather than walking through a serious ceremonial as if she were taking the steps of a dance, revelling in all the eyes on her.

‘Minx,’ my sister says briefly in my ear, and I have to lower my eyes and suppress my smile.

As ever, with anything that Edward does, there has to be a banquet and a great show. Richard sits beside his brother and drinks little and eats less, as more than a thousand guests dine in the castle, and thousands more in beautifully dressed tented pavilions outside. Throughout the dinner there is music playing and good wines poured, between each course there is a choir singing solemn beautiful anthems and fruit served. Elizabeth the queen sits on the right hand of her husband as if she were a fellow ruler of the kingdom and not merely a wife, a crown on her head, dark blue lace covering her hair, and she looks around her with the serene beauty of a woman who knows that her place is safe, and her life beyond challenge.

She catches me staring at her, and she gives me the glacial smile that she always shows me and Isabel, and I wonder if she is thinking, at this ceremonial reburial of her father-in-law, of her own father who died a hasty criminal death at the hands of my father. My father hauled hers into the town square at Chepstow, accused him of treason, and beheaded him – without trial, without rule of law – in public. His beloved son John died beside him, his last sight would have been his son’s severed head.

Isabel, seated next to me, shivers as if someone had stepped on her grave. ‘D’you see how she looks at us?’ she whispers.

‘Oh, Iz,’ I reproach her. ‘What can she do to hurt us now? When the king loves George so much? When Richard is so honoured by them? When we two are royal duchesses? They went to France as allies, and they came home as good friends. I don’t think she wastes much love on us but there is nothing she can do to us.’

‘She can put us under an enchantment,’ she says very softly. ‘She can blow up a storm that nearly drowns us, you know that yourself. And every time my little Edward runs a fever, or is sleepless while he is cutting a tooth, I wonder if she has turned her evil gaze on us, and she is heating up his image, or putting a pin into his portrait.’ Her hand covers the swell of her belly beneath her gown. ‘I wear a specially blessed girdle,’ she says. ‘George got it from his advisor. It is specially blessed to ward off the evil eye, to protect me from Her.’

Of course my mind goes at once to Middleham and my own son, who could fall from his pony, or cut himself while practising jousting, catch a chill or take a fever, eat something bad, breathe a miasma, drink foul water. I shake my head to dismiss my fears. ‘I doubt she even thinks about us,’ I say stoutly. ‘I bet she thinks of nothing but her own family, her two precious sons, and her brothers and sisters. We are nothing to her.’

Isabel shakes her head. ‘She has a spy in every household in the land,’ she says. ‘She thinks about us, believe it. My lady in waiting told me that she prays every day that she never has to run into sanctuary again, that her husband holds his throne unchallenged. She prays for the destruction of her enemies. And she does more than pray. There are men who follow George everywhere he goes. She watches me in my household, I know she has a spy on me. She will have someone placed to watch you in yours.’

‘Oh really, Iz, you sound like George!’

‘Because he’s right,’ she says earnestly. ‘He is right to watch the king and fear the queen. You’ll see. One day you’ll hear that I have died suddenly, without good reason, and it will be because she has ill-wished me.’

I cross myself. ‘Don’t say it!’ I glance at the high table. The queen is dipping her fingers in a golden bowl of rosewater and wiping them on a linen towel held out to her by a kneeling manservant. She does not look like a woman who keeps herself safe by putting spies in the households of her sisters-in-law, and sticking pins in images. She looks like a woman who has nothing at all to fear.

‘Iz,’ I say gently. ‘We fear her because we know what our father did to hers, and we know how wrong it was. His sin is on our conscience and we fear his victims. We fear her because she knows that we both hoped to steal her throne – one after the other – and we both were married to men who raised their standards against hers. She knows that both George and the prince, my first husband, would have killed Edward and put her in the Tower. But when we were defeated she received us. She didn’t have us locked up. She didn’t have us accused of treason and imprisoned. She has never shown anything but courtesy to us.’

‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘She has never shown anything but courtesy. No anger, no desire for revenge, no kindness, no warmth, no human feeling of any sort at all. Has she ever said to you that she can’t forget what our father did to hers? After that first time? That terrible time when the witch her mother whistled up a cold wind that blew out all the candles?’

‘One candle,’ I correct her.

‘Has she ever said she still feels rage? Has she ever said she forgives you? Has she ever said anything as a sister-in-law, as one woman to another, anything at all?’

Unwillingly, I shake my head.

‘Nor to me. Not one word of anger, not one word of her revenge. Don’t you think that proves that her malice is stored coldly inside her like ice in an ice house? She looks at us as if she is Melusina, the emblem of her house, half woman, half fish. She is as cold as a fish to me, and I swear to you that she is planning my death.’

I shake my head at the server who is offering us a dish.

‘Take it,’ Isabel prompts anxiously. ‘She sent it from the high table to us. Don’t refuse her.’

I take a spoonful of the potted hare. ‘You don’t fear it is poisoned?’ I say, trying to laugh her out of her fears.

‘You can laugh if you like; but one of her ladies told me that she had a secret enamel box, and in the box a scrap of paper with two names written on it. Two names written in blood, and that she swore the two named would not live.’

‘What names?’ I whisper, dropping the spoon in the dish, all appetite gone. I cannot go on pretending that I don’t believe Isabel, that I am not afraid of the queen. ‘What names does she have in secret?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘The lady in waiting didn’t know. She only saw the paper, not the words. But what if they are our names? Yours and mine? What if she has a scrap of paper and the words written in blood are Anne and Isabel?’

Isabel and I have a week together at Fotheringhay before we go with the court to London. Isabel is going to give birth to this baby at their London home of L’Erber, and this time I will be allowed to share her confinement. Richard has no objection to me staying with Isabel in the London palace, as long as I visit court from time to time with him to keep on the best terms with the queen, and make sure to never hear one word against the royal family.

‘It will be so nice to be together for a long time again,’ Isabel says. ‘And I like it best when you are there with me.’

‘Richard says I can only stay for the last weeks,’ I warn her. ‘He does not want me under George’s protection for too long. He says that George is talking against the king again and he doesn’t want me to come under suspicion.’

‘What does the king suspect? What does She suspect?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t know. But George is openly rude to her, Iz. And he has been far worse since the funerals.’

‘It should have been him to organise the reburial of his father but the king did not trust him with it,’ she says resentfully. ‘It should be him at the side of the king but he is never invited. Do you think he does not notice that he is slighted? Slighted every day?’

‘They do wrong to slight him,’ I grant her. ‘But it is more and more awkward. He looks sideways at the queen and whispers about her behind his hand, and he is so disrespectful of the king and careless with the king’s friends.’

‘Because She is always beside the king before anyone else can get there, or if not her then the king is with her Grey sons, or with William Hastings!’ Isabel flares up. ‘The king should cleave to his brothers, both his brothers. The truth is that though he says he has forgiven and forgotten George for following Father, he will never forgive and forget. And if he did ever forget, for even one minute, then She would remind him.’

I say nothing. The queen, though pointedly cool with Isabel and me, is icy with George. And her great confidant, her brother Anthony Woodville, smiles when George goes by as if he finds my brother-in-law’s tinderbox temper amusing, and worthy of very little respect.

‘Well, at any rate, I can come for the last three weeks,’ I say. ‘But send for me if you are ill. I will come at once if you are ill, whatever anyone says, and at least I shall be there for his birth.’

‘You are calling the baby “him”!’ she says gleefully. ‘You think it will be a boy too.’

‘How can I not, when you call it a boy all the time? What name will you give him?’

She smiles. ‘We are calling him Richard for his grandfather, of course,’ she says. ‘And we hope your husband will stand as his godfather.’

I smile. ‘Then you will have an Edward and a Richard, just like the royal princes,’ I observe.

‘That’s what George says!’ she crows. ‘He says that if the king and the queen and her family were to disappear off the face of the earth then there would still be a Prince Edward Plantagenet to take the throne and a Prince Richard Plantagenet to come after him.’

‘Yes, but it’s hard to imagine what disaster could wipe the king and the queen off the face of the earth,’ I say, lowering my voice cautiously.

Isabel giggles. ‘I think my husband imagines it every day.’

‘Then who is doing the ill-wishing?’ I ask, thinking to score a point. ‘Not Her!’

At once she looks grave and turns away. ‘George is not ill-wishing the king,’ she says quietly. ‘That would be treason. I was speaking in jest.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1476

I should have taken a warning from that, but when we get back to London I am amazed at how George behaves around the court while Isabel rarely comes out of their private rooms to join everyone, as if to snub the queen and her household. George walks surrounded by his own particular friends; he is never seen without men of his choosing, and they stand guard around him, almost as if he feared attack within the high walls of Westminster Palace.

He comes to dinner in the great hall, as we all do, but once he is seated, in full view of everyone, he makes no pretence at eating. They set dishes before him and he glowers, as if he has been insulted, and does not even pick up his knife or spoon. He looks at the servers as if he fears the dish has been poisoned, and he lets everyone know that he eats only what his own cooks prepare, in his private rooms.

Any time of the day you can be certain to find the doors to the Clarence apartments bolted shut with a double guard on the door as if he thinks someone might storm the rooms and kidnap Isabel. When I visit her, I have to wait outside the double doors for someone to call my name, then a shouted order comes from behind the closed door, and the guards lower their pikes and let me in.

‘He is behaving like a fool,’ my husband rules. ‘It is a performance of suspicion like a masque, and if Edward stands for it because he is lazy and indulgent with George, he can be very sure that the queen will not.’

‘He cannot really think that he is endangered?’

Richard scowls. ‘Anne, I really don’t know what he thinks. He has not spoken to me about Edward since I told him that I took his warnings to be treason. But he speaks to many others. He speaks ill of the queen—’

‘What does he say of her?’

‘He constantly speaks ill of the king.’

‘Yes, but what does he say?’

Richard turns and stares out of the mullioned window. ‘I can hardly repeat it,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t stoop to repeat it. Let me leave it that he says the worst thing one can say of a man, and the worst thing one can say of a woman.’

I don’t press him, as I have learned that his sense of honour is always alert. Besides, I don’t need to ask, I can guess. George will have been saying that his brother Edward is a bastard – slandering and dishonouring his own mother in the attempt to show that he should be king. And he will be saying that Elizabeth got into the king’s bed by witchcraft and that their marriage is not holy or valid, and that their children are bastards too.

‘And I am afraid that George is taking money from Louis of France.’

‘Everyone is taking money from Louis of France.’

Richard laughs shortly. ‘None more than the king. No – I don’t mean the pensions, I mean that Louis is paying George secretly to behave like this, mustering men and reciting his claims to the throne. I am afraid Louis will pay George to make an attempt on the throne. It would suit him to have the country at war again. God knows what George is thinking.’

I don’t say that George will be thinking what George is always thinking – how he can get the most advantage from any situation. ‘What is the king thinking?’

‘He laughs,’ Richard says. ‘He laughs and says that George is a faithless dog, and that our mother will speak to him, and that after all, there is little that George can do except curse and glower.’

‘And what does the queen say?’ I ask, knowing that she will oppose any slur on her children, she would fight to the death for her son, and that it will be her advice that will control the king.

‘She says nothing,’ Richard replies drily. ‘Or at any rate, she says nothing to me. But I think if George continues the way he is going she will see him as her enemy, and the enemy of her sons. I would not want to be her enemy.’

I think of the scrap of paper in the enamelled box and the two names written in blood. ‘Neither would I.’

When I next go to the Clarence apartments the door is standing open and they are carrying boxes out, down the tower stairs to the stable yard. Isabel is sitting by the fire, with her travelling cloak around her shoulders, her hand on her big belly.

‘What’s happening?’ I ask, coming into the room. ‘What are you doing?’

She gets to her feet. ‘We’re leaving,’ she says. ‘Walk me down to the stable yard.’

I take her hand to keep her inside the chamber. ‘You can’t travel like this. Where are you going? I thought you were going to L’Erber for your confinement?’

‘George says we can’t stay at court,’ she says. ‘It’s not safe. We won’t be safe even at L’Erber. I’m going into confinement at Tewkesbury Abbey.’

‘Halfway to Wales?’ I exclaim in horror. ‘Iz, you can’t!’

‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘Help me, Anne.’

I take her hand in my arm and she leans on me as we go down the winding stone stairs and out into the cold bright stable yard. She gives a little gasp at a stab of pain in her belly. I am certain that she is not fit to make the journey. ‘Isabel, don’t go. Don’t travel like this. Come to my house if you won’t go to your own.’

‘We’re not safe in London,’ she whispers. ‘She tried to poison George and me. She sent poisoned food to our rooms.’

‘No!’

‘She did. George says that we are not safe at court nor even in London. He says that the queen’s enmity is too great a danger. Annie, you should leave too. Get Richard to take you home to Middleham. George says that she will turn Edward against both his brothers. He says she will strike against us this Christmas. She will bring the court together for the Christmas feast and then accuse both brothers and have them arrested.’

I am so frightened that I can hardly speak. I take both her hands in mine. ‘Isabel, surely this is madness. George is making a war in his dreams, he constantly speaks against the king and his right to the throne, he whispers against the queen. The dangers are all of his own making.’

She laughs without humour. ‘D’you think so?’

George’s master of horse brings up her litter, drawn by matched mules. Her ladies in waiting draw back the curtains and I help her seat herself on the soft cushions. The maids put hot bricks beneath her feet and the kitchen boy comes with a brass tray of hot coals.

‘I do,’ I say. ‘I do.’ I am trying to suppress my fear for her, so near her time, travelling cross-country on muddy roads. I cannot forget that she had to travel near her time once before and that ended in a death and heartbreak and the loss of a son. I lean into the litter and whisper: ‘The king and the queen are bent on pleasure this Christmas, and showing off their new clothes and their endless children. They’re drunk on vanity and luxury. We’re not in danger, neither of us are in danger, nor our husbands. They’re the king’s own brothers, they’re royal dukes. The king loves them. We are safe.’

Her face is white with the strain. ‘I have a dead lapdog who stole a piece of chicken from a dish meant for me,’ she says. ‘I tell you, the queen is set on my death, on yours too.’

I am so horrified I cannot speak. I just hold her hand and warm it between my own. ‘Iz, don’t go like this.’

‘George knows, I tell you. He knows for certain. He’s had a warning from someone in her household. She is going to have both brothers arrested and executed.’

I kiss her hands and her cheeks. ‘Dearest Iz . . .’

She puts her arms around my neck and hugs me. ‘Go to Middleham,’ she whispers. ‘For me: because I ask it of you. For your own safety: because I am warning you. For your boy: to keep him safe. For God’s sake go. Get away from here, Annie. I swear they will have us all killed. She will not stop until your husband and my husband and both of us are dead.’

All through the cold days which grow increasingly dark and wintry I look for news of Isabel’s confinement, and think of her in the guest rooms of Tewkesbury Abbey, waiting for her baby to come. I know that George will have provided her with the best of midwives, there will be a physician nearby, and companions to cheer her, and a wet nurse waiting, and the rooms will be warm and comfortable for her. But still I wish I could have been with her. The birth of another child to a royal duke is an important event, and George will have left nothing to chance. If it is a boy then it establishes him as a man with two heirs – as good as his brother the king. Still, I wish I had been allowed to go to her. Still, I wish that he had allowed her to stay in London.

I go to Richard as he sits at his table in his privy chamber to ask him if I may join Isabel in Tewkesbury, and he refuses me out of hand. ‘George’s household has become a centre of treason,’ he says flatly. ‘I have seen some of the sermons and chapbooks which are being written under his patronage. They question my brother’s legitimacy, they name my mother as a whore, and my father as a cuckold. They suggest his marriage to the queen is invalid and that his sons are bastards. It is shameful what George is saying. I cannot forgive it, Edward cannot overlook it. Edward is going to have to act against him.’

‘Would he do anything to Isabel?’

‘Of course not,’ Richard says impatiently. ‘What has she to do with it?’

‘Then can’t I go to her?’

‘We can’t associate with them,’ Richard rules. ‘George is impossible. We cannot be seen near him.’

‘She is my sister! She has done nothing.’

‘Perhaps after Christmas. If Edward does not arrest him before then.’

I go to the door and put my hand on the brass ring. ‘Can we go home to Middleham?’

‘Not before the Christmas feast, it would be to insult the king and queen. George leaving the city so suddenly is insult enough. I won’t make matters worse.’ He hesitates, his pen raised over a document for signing. ‘What is it? Are you missing Edward?’

‘I am afraid,’ I whisper to him. ‘I am afraid. Isabel told me something, warned me . . .’

He does not try to reassure me. He does not ask me what was Isabel’s warning. Later, when I think about it, that is the worst of it. He merely nods. ‘You have nothing to fear,’ he says. ‘I am guarding us. And besides, if we left it would show that we were fearful too.’

In November I receive a letter from Isabel, travel-stained and delayed on the flooded roads. It is one of Isabel’s exultant three-page scrawls.

I was right. I have a boy. He is a good size, long-limbed and fat, and fair like his father. He is feeding well and I am up and walking around already. The labour was quick and easy. I have told George that I will have another just like that! As many as he likes! I have written to the king and to the queen and she sent some very good linen with her congratulations.

George will attend court at Christmas after all, as he does not want to look as if he is afraid. Then he will meet me at Warwick Castle after the king’s feast. You must come and see the baby after the twelfth night. George says there can be no objection to you visiting us on your way to Middleham, and that you are to tell your husband so, from him.

It has rained so much that I have not cared about being in confinement though I am getting tired of it now. I shall be churched in December and then we will go home. I can’t wait to bring a new Richard into Warwick Castle. Father would have been so pleased, I would have been his favourite daughter forever – getting him a second grandson, and he would have plans for his greatness . . .

And so on, and so on, over three crumpled pages, with afterthoughts in the margins. I put the letter to one side and place my hand on the softness of my belly as if the warmth of my hand could hatch a new baby as if it were a chick in a shell. Isabel is right to be happy and proud in the safe delivery of another baby, and I am glad for her. But she might have thought how her words would strike me: her younger sister, still only twenty years old, with only one little boy in the nursery, after four, nearly five years of marriage.

Her letter is not all boasting, for she writes one word at the end of the letter to show that she has not forgotten her fear of the queen.

Take care what you eat at the Christmas feast, my sister. You know what I mean – Iz

The door of my presence chamber opens and Richard comes in with his half-dozen friends, to escort me and my ladies to dinner. I stand and smile at him.

‘Good news?’ Richard asks, looking at the letter on the table beside me.

‘Oh yes!’ I say, holding my smile. ‘Very.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS DAY 1476

It is the season of Christmas and the royal family will blaze in jewels and the bright colours of the new fabrics that they have bought in, at the price of a small fortune, from Burgundy. Edward plays the part of a king in a swirl of cloth of gold and colour and the queen is always at his side as if she were born to the place – and not the lucky upstart she truly is.

We wake early for mass in the king’s chapel on this most holy day of the year. I have a great wooden bath, lined with the finest linen, rolled into my bedroom before the fire and the maids bring jugs of hot water and pour it around my shoulders as I wash my hair and my body with the rose-petal soap that Richard bought from the Moorish traders for me.

They wrap me in hot sheets while they lay out my gown for the day. I will wear deep red velvet trimmed with marten fur, a dark shiny pelt as good as anything the queen has. I have a new headdress that sits snugly on my head with coils of gold wire over my ears. They comb my hair dry as I sit before the warmth of the fire and then plait it and twist it up under the headdress. I have a new linen shift embroidered this summer by my ladies under my direction, and from the treasure room they bring my box and I pick out dark red rubies to match the gown.

When Richard comes to my presence chamber to accompany me to mass he is dressed in black, his preferred colour. He looks handsome and happy and as I greet him I feel the familiar pulse of desire. Perhaps tonight he will come to my room and tonight we will make another child. What could be a better day than the day when the Christ-child was born, to make another heir for the dukedom of Gloucester?

He offers me his arm and the knights of his household, all richly dressed, escort my ladies to the king’s chapel. We line up and wait, the king often keeps us waiting; but then there is a rustle and a little gasp from some of the ladies as he comes in, dressed in white and silver, and leading Her. She is in silver and white like him and she gleams in the shadows of the royal chapel as if she were lit by the moon. Her pale golden hair just shows beneath her crown, her neck is bare to the top of her gown, which is cut low and square and veiled with the finest lace. Behind them come their children, first the young Prince of Wales, six years old now, taller every time he comes to court, dressed to match his father, and then the nursemaid holding the hand of the little prince, still in his baby clothes of white and silver lace, then comes Princess Elizabeth dressed in white and silver like her parents, solemn with an ivory missal in her hand, smiling to one side and the other, poised and precocious as always, and behind her the rest of them, beautiful, royal, richly dressed little girls, all three of them and the new baby. I cannot watch them without envy.

I make sure that I am smiling, as the court smiles, to see this exquisite royal family walk by. The queen’s grey gaze flickers over me and I feel the chill of her regard, and the astute measurement, as if she knows that I am envious, as if she knows that I am fearful; and then the priest comes in and I can kneel and close my eyes and spare myself the sight of them.

When we get back to our own presence chamber there is a man waiting outside the closed double doors, travel-stained with his wet and muddy cape thrown on the stone windowsill. Our household guard bars the door to him, waiting for our return.

‘What’s this?’ Richard asks.

He drops to one knee, and holds out a letter. I see a red wax seal. Richard breaks it, and reads the few lines on the one page. I see his face darken and then he glances at me and back down at the page.

‘What is it?’ I cannot say what I fear – I think at once with horror that it might be a letter from Middleham about our son. ‘What is it, Richard? My lord? I pray you . . .’ I snatch a breath. ‘Tell me. Tell me quickly.’

He does not answer me at once. He nods over his shoulder to one of his household knights. ‘Wait there. Hold the messenger, I’ll want to see him. See he speaks to no-one.’

Me, he takes by the arm and walks through our presence chamber, through my privy chamber and into my bedroom where no-one will disturb us.

‘What?’ I whisper. ‘Richard, for God’s sake – what is it? Is it our boy, Edward?’

‘It’s your sister,’ he says. His quiet voice makes it sound almost like a question, as if he cannot believe what he has read himself. ‘It’s about your sister.’

‘Isabel?’

‘Yes. My love – I don’t know how to tell you – George wrote to me, this is his letter, he told me to tell you; but I don’t know how to tell you . . .’

‘What? What about her?’

‘My love, my poor love – she’s dead. George writes that she is dead.’

For a moment, I cannot hear the words. Then I hear them, as if they are clanging like a bell right here, in my bedroom, where only two hours ago I was dressing in my gown and choosing my rubies. ‘Isabel?’

‘Yes. She’s dead, George says.’

‘But how? She was well, she wrote to me, she said it was an easy labour. I had her letter, full of self-praise. She was well, she was very well, she told me to come and see . . .’

He pauses, as if he has an answer, but does not want to put words to it. ‘I don’t know how. That’s why I’m going to speak with the messenger.’

‘Was she ill?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did she have childbed fever? Did she bleed?’

‘George doesn’t say that.’

‘What does he say?’

For a moment, I think he is going to refuse to answer me, but then he spreads the letter open, smoothing it flat on the table, and gives it to me, watching my face as I read the words.

22 December 1476

Brother and Sister Anne,

My beloved wife Isabel died this morning, may God keep her soul. There is no doubt in my mind that she was poisoned by an agent of the queen. Keep your wife safe, Richard, and keep yourself safe. There is no doubt in my mind that we are all in danger from the false family that our brother the king has brought about. My baby son yet lives. I pray for you and yours. Burn this.

Richard takes the letter from my hand and, leaning towards the fire, pushes it into the red embers and stands over it as the paper curls black and then suddenly flares into flame.

‘She knew it would happen.’ I find I am shaking, from my fingertips to my feet, as if the letter has frozen me with a whistle of an icy gale. ‘She said it would happen.’

Richard takes hold of me and pushes me to sit on the bed as my knees give way beneath me. ‘George said so too, but I wouldn’t listen to him,’ he says tersely.

‘She said the queen had a spy in her house, and that she has a spy in our house too.’

‘I don’t doubt that. That’s almost certainly true. The queen trusts no-one, and she pays servants for intelligence. So do we all. But why would she poison Isabel?’

‘For revenge,’ I say miserably. ‘Because she has our names on a scrap of paper in an enamelled box hidden among her jewels.’

‘What?’

‘Isabel knew, but I wouldn’t listen. She said the queen has sworn to be avenged on the murderers of her father – that would be our father. Isabel said she had written our names in blood on a scrap of paper and kept them hidden. Isabel said that one day I would hear she was dead and she would have been poisoned.’

Richard’s hand is on his belt, where his sword would be, as if he thinks we might have to fight for our lives here, in the Palace of Westminster.

‘I didn’t listen!’ The loss of her suddenly hits me and I am shaken by sobs. ‘I didn’t listen to her! And her baby! And Margaret! And Edward! They will have to grow up without a mother! And I didn’t go to her! I told her she was safe.’

Richard goes to the door. ‘I’m going to talk to the messenger,’ he says.

‘You wouldn’t let me go to her!’ I fire out.

‘Just as well,’ he says drily, and turns the handle of the door.

I scramble to my feet. ‘I’ll come too.’

‘Not if you’re going to cry.’

Roughly, I rub my wet face. ‘I won’t cry. I swear I won’t cry.’

‘I don’t want this news getting about just yet, and not by accident. George will have written to the king also, announcing the death. I don’t want us making accusations and you crying. You will have to be silent. You will have to be calm. And you will have to meet the queen and say nothing. We will have to act as if we think nothing against her.’

I grit my teeth and turn to him. ‘If George is right, then the queen killed my sister.’ I am not shaking any more and I am not sobbing either. ‘If George’s accusations are true, then she plans to kill me. If this is true then she is my mortal enemy and we are living in her palace and dining on the food that comes from her kitchen. See – I am not making accusations, and I am not crying. But I am going to protect me and mine, and I will see her pay for the death of my sister.’

‘If it is true,’ Richard says levelly.

It is like a pledge. ‘If it is true,’ I agree.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1477

The court wears dark blue in mourning for my sister and I keep to my rooms as much as I can. I cannot bear to look at the queen. I truly believe that in her beautiful face I see the murderer of my sister. I am afraid for myself. Richard refuses absolutely to discuss anything until we meet with George and know more. But he sends his right-hand man Sir James Tyrrell to Middleham with instructions to guard our son, to examine every member of our household, especially any that are not Yorkshire born and bred, and to see that Edward’s food is tasted before he eats anything.

I order my food to be cooked in our private rooms in the palace, and I stay in my privy chamber. I almost never sit with the queen. When I hear a sudden knock on the door I start from my chair and have to steady myself, holding the table by the fireplace. The guard on the door swings it open and announces George.

He comes in wearing deepest blue, his face drawn and tragic. He takes my hands and kisses me. When he draws back to look at me he has tears in his eyes.

‘Oh, George,’ I whisper.

All his smug confidence has gone; he is lean and handsome in grief. He leans his head against the carved chimney. ‘I still can’t believe it,’ he says quietly. ‘When I see you here – I can’t believe that she is not here with you.’

‘She wrote to me that she was well.’

‘She was,’ he says eagerly. ‘She was. And so happy! And the baby: a beauty, as always. But then she suddenly weakened, fell away almost overnight, and in the morning she was gone.’

‘Was it a fever?’ I ask, hoping desperately that he will say yes.

‘Her tongue was black,’ he tells me.

I look at him aghast: it is a sure sign of poison. ‘Who could have done it?’

‘I have my physician inquiring into her household, into our kitchen. I know that the queen had a woman in Isabel’s own confinement room, to report to her at once whether we had a boy or a girl.’

I give a little hiss of horror.

‘Oh, that’s nothing. I have known of it for months. She will have a servant set to watch you as well,’ he says. ‘And a man placed among the household, perhaps in your stables to warn her when you mean to travel, perhaps in your hall to listen to the talk. She has watched us all ever since we first came to her court. She will have watched you as well as Isabel. She trusts no-one.’

‘Edward trusts my husband,’ I protest. ‘They love each other, they are faithful to each other.’

‘And the queen?’

He laughs shortly at my silence.

‘Will you speak to the king about this?’ I ask. ‘Will you name the queen’s guilt?’

‘I think he will offer me a bribe to buy me off,’ George says. ‘And I think I know what it will be. He will want to silence me, he will want me out of the way. He won’t want me accusing his wife of being a poisoner, naming their children as bastards.’

‘Hush,’ I say, glancing at the door. I go to him at the fireplace so we are head to head, like conspirators, our words blowing up the chimney like smoke.

‘Edward will want me out of the way, somewhere I can’t speak against him.’

I am horrified. ‘What will he do? He will not imprison you?’

George’s smile is a grimace. ‘He will command me to marry again,’ he predicts. ‘I know that is what he plans. He will send me to Burgundy to marry Mary of Burgundy. Her father is dead, our sister Margaret his widow has suggested my name. Mary is her step-daughter, she can give her in marriage to me. Edward sees this as a way of getting me out of the country.’

I can feel the tears spill down my cheeks. ‘But Isabel has been dead less than a month,’ I cry. ‘Are you supposed to forget her at once? Is she to be buried and a new wife in her place within weeks? And what of your children? Are you supposed to take them with you to Flanders?’

‘I’ll refuse him,’ George says. ‘I will never leave my children, I will never leave my country, and I certainly will not leave the murderer of my wife to walk free.’

I am sobbing, the loss of her is so painful, the thought of George taking another wife so shocking. I feel so alone in this dangerous court without her. George puts his arm around my shaking shoulders. ‘Sister,’ he says tenderly. ‘My sister. She loved you so much, she was so anxious to protect you. She made me promise that I would warn you. I will protect you too.’

As always, I have to wait in the queen’s rooms in the hour before dinner for the king and his household to join us, so that we all go into the great hall together. The queen’s ladies assume that I am quiet from grief, and leave me alone. Only Lady Margaret Stanley, recently come to court with her new husband Thomas, takes me to one side and tells me that she prays for the soul of my sister and for her blessed children. I am oddly touched by her goodwill and I try to smile and thank her for her prayers. She sent her own son, Henry Tudor, overseas, for his own safety, as she does not trust this king with his keeping. Young Tudor is of the House of Lancaster, a promising youth. She would not allow him to be raised by a York guardian in this country, and though she is now married to one of the lords of York and high in favour with both king and queen she still does not trust this royal family enough to bring her boy home. Of all the court she will understand what it is to fear the king that you serve, she knows what it is to curtsey to the queen, uncertain if she is your enemy.

When Richard comes in with his brother the king, all smiles, and takes me by the hand to lead me into dinner, I walk close to him and whisper that George has come to court and promised me that he will find the murderer of my sister.

‘How will he do that from Flanders?’ Richard asks caustically.

‘He won’t go,’ I say. ‘He refuses to go.’

Richard’s crack of laughter is so loud that the king looks back and grins at him. ‘What’s the jest?’ he asks.

‘Nothing,’ Richard calls to his brother. ‘Nothing. My wife told me a jest about George.’

‘Our duke?’ the king asks, smiling at me. ‘Our Duke of Burgundy? Our Prince of Scotland?’ The queen laughs aloud and taps the king on the arm as if to reprove him for publicly mocking his brother though her grey eyes gleam. I seem to be the only person who does not understand the richness of the humour. Richard draws me to one side and lets the dinner procession go past us. ‘It’s not true,’ he says. ‘It’s the reverse of the truth. It is George who is demanding a chance at the dukedom of Burgundy. He hopes to become the duke of one of the richest countries in Europe and marry Mary of Burgundy. Or if not her, then the Princess of Scotland. He’s not particular as long as his next wife is wealthy and commands a kingdom.’

I shake my head. ‘He told me himself he would not go. He is mourning Isabel. He doesn’t want to go to Flanders. It is the king who is trying to get him out of the kingdom to silence him.’

‘Nonsense. Edward would never allow it. He could never trust George as ruler of Flanders. The lands owned by the Dukes of Burgundy are enormous. None of us would trust George with that power and wealth.’

I am cautious. ‘Who told you that?’

Over his shoulder I can see the queen seating herself at the high table that looks over the great hall. She turns and sees me, head to head with my husband. I see her lean to the king and say one word, two, and then he turns and sees us both too. It is as if she is pointing me out, as if she is warning him about me. As her gaze flicks indifferently over me I shiver.

‘What’s the matter?’ Richard asks.

‘Who told you that George was trying to go to Flanders or to Scotland and that the king would not allow it?’

‘The queen’s brother, Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers.’

‘Oh,’ is all I say. ‘It must be true, then.’

She looks down the great hall at me and she gives me her beautiful inscrutable smile.

Rumours swirl around court and everyone seems to be talking about me, and about Isabel and George. It is generally known that my sister died suddenly, having come through the ordeal of childbirth, and people are starting to wonder if she could have been poisoned, and if so, who would have done such a thing. The rumours grow in intensity, more detailed and more fearful as George refuses to eat in the great hall, refuses to speak to the queen, takes off his hat but does not bow his head as she goes past, crosses his fingers behind his back so that anyone standing beside him can see that he is using the sign of protection against witchcraft against the queen as she goes by.

He is frightening her, in his turn. She goes pale when she sees him and she glances at her husband as if to ask what she should do in the face of this insane rudeness. She looks to her brother, Anthony Woodville, who used to laugh when he saw George stalking down the gallery, acknowledging no-one; but now he too scrutinises him, as if taking the measure of an adversary. The court is utterly divided between those who have benefited from the Rivers family’s long ascendance, and those who hate them and are willing to suspect them of anything. More and more people watch the queen as if they wonder what powers she has, what she will be allowed to do.

I see George every day, for we are staying in London though I long to go home to Middleham. But the roads are too bogged down for travel and Middleham itself is snowed in. I have to stay at court though every time I walk into her rooms Elizabeth the queen receives my curtsey with a look of blank enmity, and her daughter, Princess Elizabeth, draws back her gown in a mirror copy of her grandmother the witch.

I am afraid of the queen now, and she knows it. I don’t know the extent of her powers or what she would do to me. I don’t know if she played any part in the death of my sister, or if that was nothing but Isabel’s fearful imaginings – and now my own. And I am alone in these fears. I feel horribly alone in this merry beautiful flirtatious court, alert with gossip and rich with whispers. I cannot speak to my husband, who will hear nothing against his brother Edward, and I dare not be seen speaking to George, who swears to me in our one secret meeting that he will discover the murderer of my sister and destroy her – when he speaks of the murderer he always says ‘her’ – and then everyone will know what a woman of malice and evil powers can do.

George comes to our London home at Baynard’s Castle to say farewell to his mother the duchess, who is leaving for Fotheringhay the next day. He is locked up with the duchess in her rooms for some time; he is her dearest son, and her enmity for the queen is well known. She does not discourage him of speaking ill of his brother or of the queen. She is a woman who has seen much of the world and she swears that the queen married Edward through enchantment, and that she has gone on using dark arts while the crown of England is on her head.

As George comes through the great hall he sees me at the doorway of my own rooms and hurries forwards. ‘I hoped I would see you.’

‘I am glad to see you, Brother.’ I step back into my rooms and he follows me. My ladies move to one side and curtsey to George – he is a handsome man and I realise with a pang that he is now an eligible husband. I have to steady myself with a hand on the windowsill when I think that I may have to see another woman in Izzy’s place. Her children will run to another woman and call her ‘Mother’. They are so young, they will forget how Isabel loved them, what she wanted for them.

‘Richard tells me that you are not going to marry Mary of Burgundy,’ I say quietly to him.

‘No,’ he says. ‘But who do you think is going to marry the sister to the Scottish king? They suggested the Scots princess for me, but who do you think is the king’s preferred candidate?’

‘Not you?’ I ask.

He laughs shortly. ‘My brother has decided I am safer kept close at hand. He will not send me to Flanders or to Scotland. The Scottish princess is to marry none other but Anthony Woodville.’

Now I am astounded. The queen’s brother, born the son of a squire, surely cannot dream of marrying royalty? Is there no height that she will not attempt? Are we to accept anything that the Rivers propose for themselves?

George smiles at my astounded face. ‘A daughter of a little manor in Grafton on the throne of England, her brother on the throne of Scotland,’ he says drily. ‘It is a climbing expedition. Elizabeth Woodville should carry her standard and plant a flag on the peaks. What next? Shall her brother become a bishop? Why should he not be Pope? Where will she stop? Can she become the Holy Roman Emperor?’

‘How does she do it?’

His dark glance reminds me that we both know how she achieves her goals. I shake my head. ‘She has the ear of the king because he loves her so dearly,’ I say. ‘He will do anything for her now.’

‘And we all know how this woman, out of all the women that he could have had, took hold of his heart.’

BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, JANUARY 1477

The Christmas feast is over but many people are staying in London, trapped by the bad weather. The roads to the North are impassable, and Middleham is still closed in by snow. I think of its safety, guarded by storms, moated with the great rivers of the North, shielded by blizzards; and my son, safe and warm behind the thick walls before a roaring fire with the gifts I have sent him spread out on the rug before him.

In the middle of January there is a quiet tap on the door of my privy chamber, a little rat-a-tat-tat that is George’s knock. I turn to my ladies. ‘I’m going to the chapel,’ I say. ‘I’ll go on my own.’ They curtsey and stand as I leave the room and I take my missal and rosary and walk towards the chapel door. I sense George fall into step behind me and we slip into the shadowy empty chapel together. A priest is hearing confession in one corner of the church, a couple of squires muttering their sins. George and I step into one of the dark alcoves and I look at him for the first time.

He is as white as a drowned man in the gloom, his eyes hollow in his face. All his debonair good looks are wiped away. He looks like a man at the very end of his tether. ‘What is it?’ I whisper.

‘My son,’ he says brokenly. ‘My son.’

My first thought is of my own son, my Edward. Pray to God that he is safe at Middleham Castle, sledging in the snow, listening to the mummers, tasting a mug of Christmas ale. Pray God he is well and strong, untouched by plague or poison.

‘Your son? Edward?’

‘My baby, Richard. My baby, my beloved: Richard.’

I put my hand to my mouth, and beneath my fingers I can feel my lips tremble. ‘Richard?’

Isabel’s motherless baby is cared for by his wet nurse, a woman who had raised both Margaret and Edward, whose milk had fed them as if she were their mother. There is no reason why Isabel’s third child should not thrive in her keeping. ‘Richard?’ I repeat. ‘Not Richard?’

‘He’s dead,’ George says. I can hardly hear his whisper. ‘He’s dead.’ He chokes on the word. ‘I just had a message from Warwick Castle. He’s dead. My boy, Isabel’s boy. He has gone to heaven to be with his mother, God bless his little soul.’

‘Amen,’ I whisper. I can feel a thickening in my throat, a burning in my eyes. I want to pitch down onto my bed and cry for a week for my sister and my little nephew and the hardness of this world, that one after another takes all the people that I love.

George fumbles for my hand, grips it tight. ‘They tell me that he died suddenly, unexpectedly,’ he says.

Despite my own grief, I step back, pulling my hand from his grasp. I don’t want to hear what he is going to say. ‘Unexpectedly?’

He nods. ‘He was thriving. Feeding well, gaining weight, starting to sleep through the night. I had Bessy Hodges as his wet nurse, I would never have left him if I had not thought he was doing well, for his own sake as well as his mother’s. But he was well, Anne. I would never have left them if I had any doubt.’

‘Babies can fail very suddenly,’ I say weakly. ‘You know that.’

‘They say he was well at bedtime and died before dawn,’ he says.

I shiver. ‘Babies can die in their sleep,’ I repeat. ‘God spare them.’

‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘But I have to know if he just fell asleep, if it is innocent. I am leaving for Warwick right now. I shall have the truth of this, and if I find that someone killed him, dripped poison into his little sleeping mouth, then I will take their life for it – whoever they are, however grand their position, however great their name, whoever they are married to. I swear it, Anne. I shall have vengeance on whoever killed my wife, especially if she killed my son too.’

He turns for the door and I grip his arm. ‘Write to me at once,’ I whisper. ‘Send me something, fruit or something with a note to tell me. Write it in such a way that I will understand but nobody else can know. Make sure that you tell me that Margaret is safe, and Edward.’

‘I will,’ he promises. ‘And if I see the need I will send you a warning.’

‘A warning?’ I don’t want to understand his meaning.

‘You are in danger too, and your son is in danger. There is no doubt in my mind that this is more than an attack on me and mine. This is not an attack solely on me, though it strikes me to the heart; this is an attack on the kingmaker’s daughters and his grandsons.’

At his naming this fear I find I am cold. I go as white as him, we are like two ghosts whispering together in the shadows of the chapel. ‘An attack on the kingmaker’s daughters?’ I repeat. ‘Why would anyone attack the kingmaker’s daughters?’ I ask, though I know the answer. ‘He has been gone six years this spring. His enemies have all forgotten.’

‘One enemy has not forgotten. She has two names written in blood on a piece of paper in her jewel box,’ he says. He does not need to name the ‘she’. ‘Did you know this?’

Miserably, I nod.

‘Do you know whose names they are?’

He waits for me to shake my head.

‘Written in blood it says: “Isabel and Anne”. Isabel is dead, I don’t doubt that she plans you will be next.’

I am shaking in my fear. ‘For vengeance?’ I whisper.

‘She wants revenge for the death of her father and her brother,’ he replies. ‘She has sworn herself to it. It is her only desire. Your father took her father and his son, she has taken Isabel and her son. I don’t doubt she will kill you and your son Edward.’

‘Come back soon,’ I say. ‘Come back to court, George. Don’t leave me here alone at her court.’

‘I swear it,’ he says. He kisses my hand and is gone.

‘I can’t go to court,’ I say flatly to Richard, as he stands before me, in rich dark velvet, ready to ride to Westminster where we are bidden for dinner. ‘I can’t go. I swear I cannot go.’

‘We agreed,’ he says quietly. ‘We agreed that until we knew the truth of the rumours that you would attend court, sit with the queen when invited, behave as if nothing has happened.’

‘Something has happened,’ I say. ‘You will have heard that the little baby Richard is dead?’

He nods.

‘He was thriving, he was born strong, and now he dies, only three months after his birth? Dies in his sleep with no cause?’

My husband turns to the fire and pushes a log into place with his booted foot. ‘Babies die,’ he says.

‘Richard, I think She killed him. I can’t go to court and sit in Her rooms and feel Her watching me, wondering what I know. I can’t go to dinner and eat the food from Her kitchen. I cannot bring myself to meet Her.’

‘Because you hate her?’ he asks. ‘My dearest brother’s wife and the mother of his children?’

‘Because I am afraid of Her,’ I say. ‘And perhaps you should be too, perhaps even he should be.’

LONDON, APRIL 1477

George returns to London and comes at once to his mother’s house to see Richard. My ladies tell me that the brothers are together, behind closed doors in Richard’s council chamber. In a little while one of Richard’s trusted grooms of the household comes and asks me will I attend my lord. I leave my ladies to their excited speculation and walk across the great hall to Richard’s rooms.

When I enter I am shocked at George’s appearance. He has grown even thinner during his absence, his face is lean and weary, he looks like a man who is undertaking work he can hardly bear to do. Richard glances up when I come in and holds out his hand to me. I stand beside his chair, handclasped.

‘George has bad news from Warwick,’ Richard says to me shortly.

I wait.

George’s face is grim, far older than his twenty-seven years. ‘I have found Isabel’s murderer. I have arrested her and brought her to trial. She was found guilty and put to death.’

I feel my knees weaken, and Richard gets up from his chair and presses me into his seat. ‘You have to be brave,’ he says. ‘There is more and it is worse.’

‘What can be worse?’ I whisper.

‘I found the murderer of my son also.’ George’s voice is a hard monotone. ‘He too was found guilty by the jury that I sent him to, and was hanged. These two, at least, will be no danger to you or yours.’

I tighten my grip on Richard’s hand.

‘I have been inquiring ever since Isabel’s death as to her murderer,’ George says quietly. ‘Her name was Ankarette, Ankarette Twynho, she was a maidservant in my wife’s rooms. She served Isabel’s meals, she brought her wine when she was in labour.’

Briefly I close my eyes, thinking of Isabel accepting the service and not knowing that she was being cared for by an enemy. I knew that I should have been there. I would have seen the servant for what she was.

‘She was in the pay of the queen,’ he says. ‘God knows how long she has been spying on us. But when Isabel went into childbirth and was so happy and confident that it would be another boy – the queen ordered her servant to use the powders.’

‘Powders?’

‘Italian powders: poison.’

‘You are sure?’

‘I have the evidence, and the jury found her guilty and sentenced her to death.’

‘He has only proof that Ankarette named the queen as her employer,’ Richard intercedes. ‘We can’t be sure the queen ordered the murder.’

‘Who else would hurt Isabel?’ George says simply. ‘Was she not beloved, by everyone who knew her?’

I nod blindly, my eyes filling with tears. ‘And her little boy?’

‘Ankarette went to Somerset as soon as Isabel was dead and her household dismissed,’ George says. ‘But she left the powders with her friend John Thursby, a groom of the household at Warwick. He gave them to the baby. The jury found them both guilty, they were both executed.’

I give a shuddering sigh, and I look up at Richard.

‘You must guard yourself,’ George cautions me. ‘Eat nothing that comes from her kitchens, no wine but from your own cellars, have them open the bottles before you. Trust none of your servants. That’s all you can do. We cannot protect ourselves from her witchcraft except by hiring our own witch. If she uses dark forces against us, I don’t know what we can do.’

‘The queen’s guilt is not proven,’ Richard says doggedly.

George laughs shortly. ‘I have lost a wife, a blameless woman that the queen hated. I don’t need more proof than that.’

Richard shakes his head. ‘We cannot be divided,’ he insists. ‘We are the three sons of York. Edward had a sign, the three suns in the sky. We have come so far, we cannot be divided now.’

‘I am true to Edward and I am true to you,’ George swears. ‘But Edward’s wife is my enemy, and she is the enemy of your wife too. She has taken the best wife a man could have had from me, and a boy of my making. I shall make sure she does not hurt me again. I will employ food tasters, I will employ guards, and I will employ a sorcerer to protect me from her evil crafts.’

Richard turns away from the fireside and looks out of the window as if he could find an answer in the sleety rain.

‘I shall go to Edward and tell him of this,’ George says slowly. ‘I don’t see what else I can do.’

Richard bows his head to his duty as a son of York. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Richard never tells me in detail what passes between the three brothers in the meeting when Edward accuses George of taking the law into his own hands, packing a jury, inventing charges and executing two innocent people and George replies to his brother that Elizabeth Woodville set murderers on Isabel and her baby boy. Richard only tells me that the gulf between George and Edward is perhaps fatally wide, and that his loyalty to one brother is on the brink of destruction because of his love for the other, and that he fears where this will take us all.

‘Can we go home to Middleham?’ I ask.

‘We go to dine at court,’ he says grimly. ‘We have to. Edward has to see I stand by him, the queen cannot see that you are afraid of her.’

My hands start to shake, so I clasp them behind my back. ‘Please . . .’

‘We have to go.’

The queen comes to dinner white-faced and biting her lips; the look she shoots at George would fell a weaker man. He bows low to her, with ironic respect, a flowery court bow like a player might make as a joke. She turns her shoulder towards George’s table, speaks constantly to the king as if to prevent him even glancing at his brother, leans close to the king at dinner, sits at his side as they watch an entertainment, allowing no-one else near him; certainly not George, who stands leaning back against the wall and stares at her as if he would put her on trial too. The court is agog with the scandal and horrified at the accusations. Anthony Woodville goes everywhere with his thumbs in his sword belt, walking on the balls of his feet as if ready to spring up to defend his sister’s honour. Nobody is laughing at George any more, not even the careless Rivers family who have always taken everything so lightly. Matters have become serious: we all wait to see what the king will do, whether he will allow the murderous witch to guide him, yet again.

BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, MAY 1477

‘I am not afraid,’ George tells me. We are seated by the fireside in my privy chamber at Baynard’s Castle. Unseasonal rain is running down the windows, the skies are heavily grey. We are head to head not for warmth but for fear. Richard is at court, consulting with his brother Edward, trying to reconcile his brothers, trying to balance the unending drip of poisonous advice that is the counsel of the queen, trying to counteract the unending gossip that comes from L’Erber, where George’s household speaks of a bastard clinging to the throne, a king enchanted by a witch, and a poisoner at work in the royal family. Richard believes that the brothers can be reconciled. Richard believes that the House of York can stand with honour – despite the Rivers family, despite their death-dealing queen.

‘I am not afraid,’ says George. ‘I have my own powers.’

‘Powers?’

‘I have a sorcerer to protect me from her spells. I have hired a cunning man named Thomas Burdett, and two others, two astronomers from Oxford University. They are very skilled, very serious scholars, and they have foreseen the death of the king and the throwing down of the queen. Burdett has traced the influence of the queen, he can see her path through our lives like a silver slime. He tells me what is to be, and he assures me that the Rivers will fall by their own hand. The queen will hand over her sons to their murderer. She will end her own line.’

‘It’s against the law to forecast the death of the king,’ I whisper.

‘It’s against the law to poison a duchess, and the queen did that without reprisal. I should like to see her challenge me. I am armed against her now, I don’t fear her.’ He rises to go. ‘You always wear your crucifix?’ he asks. ‘You wear the amulet I gave you? You always carry your rosary in your pocket?’

‘Always.’

‘I will get Burdett to write a spell for you to carry, deep magic to hold her at bay.’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t believe in such things. I won’t believe in such things. We should not fight her with magic, it means we are no better than her. What are we to do? How far should we go? Invoke the devil? Call up Satan?’

‘I would have called up Satan himself to defend Isabel against her,’ he says bitterly. ‘For I have lost a wife I loved, to the queen’s poisoner, I have lost my baby to her accomplice, and before that a son, my first son, in a storm of a witch’s wind. She uses magic. She uses dark arts. We have to use them against her. We have to turn her own weapons against her.’

There is a knock at the door. ‘Message for the Duke of Clarence!’ someone shouts from outside.

‘Here!’ George shouts, and the messenger comes into the room and my husband Richard strolls in behind him.

‘I didn’t know you were here,’ he remarks to George, casting a frowning glance at me; he is determined that we must be neutral in the struggle between the two brothers. George does not reply, as he is reading the message over and over again. Then he looks up. ‘Did you know of this?’ he demands of Richard. ‘Or are you a part of it? Are you here to arrest me?’

‘Arrest you?’ Richard repeats. ‘Why would I arrest you? Unless endless gossiping and rudeness and glumness is a crime, in which case I should.’

George does not respond to this joke at all. ‘Richard, do you know of this: yes or no?’

‘Of what? What does it say?’

‘The king has arrested my friend, Thomas Burdett, my protector, my advisor. Arrested him and charged him with treason and sorcery.’

Richard’s face is grim. ‘Damnation. Has he done so?’

‘Arrested my closest advisor? Yes. This is to threaten me.’

‘Don’t say so, George. Don’t make it worse than it is. I knew only that he was thinking of it. I know that you have pushed him so far that he doesn’t know what he should do.’

‘You didn’t warn me?’

‘I warned you that your accusations and your spreading of slander and your insulting behaviour would cause trouble.’

‘He is in mourning for his wife!’ I protest. ‘He knows that she was murdered. How should he behave?’

‘Richard, you must support me.’ George turns to him. ‘Of course I have advisors to protect me against the ill-wishing of the queen, to guard me from poison and enchantments. Why should I not? When the whole court knows what she did to my wife? I have done nothing more than you.’

‘Not so fast! I have not accused the queen of murder.’

‘No; but have you set someone to guard your house? Your kitchens? Your wife? Your son?’

Richard bites his lip. ‘George—’

‘Brother, you must stand by me against her. She has taken my wife, she has her sights on me. She will murder your wife and then you. She is a woman of most terrible enmity. Richard, I call on you as my brother to stand by me. I beg you not to abandon me to her enmity. She will not stop until we three are dead, and our children too.’

‘She is the queen,’ Richard says. ‘And you’re not making any sense at all. She is greedy, God knows, and she has overmuch influence with Edward, but . . .’

George flings himself to the door. ‘The king shall not hurt one hair of the head of this innocent man,’ he says. ‘This is Her doing. She thinks to pay me back for the death of Ankarette. They think to take my honest servant in payment for the death of their spy and poisoner. But she will see that she dare not touch me. I am a royal duke – does she think my servants can be thrown into a common gaol?’

George dashes out to save Burdett; but he cannot save him. The royal inquiry into Burdett and his colleagues – for George has hired two other advisors, and possibly more – reveals a plot of spells and forecasting, threats and fears. Many wise people do not believe one word of this; but Thomas Burdett, Dr John Stacey and Thomas Blake, his chaplain, are found guilty of treason and sentenced to be beheaded. Thomas Blake is saved from the scaffold by an appeal to Edward, but the other two are sent to die, protesting their innocence to the last moment. They refuse the traditional confession of their guilt that buys a man a quicker death and protects the inheritance of his heirs. Instead, they go to the scaffold like innocent men who will not be silenced, shouting that they have done nothing but study, that they are innocent of any wrongdoing, that the queen has turned their learning against them and has had them killed to ensure their silence.

George tears into the king’s council meeting at Westminster, protesting his innocence, protesting the innocence of the dead men, and has his spokesman read the words of their speeches from the gallows – powerful words from men about to meet their maker, saying they are innocent of any charge.

‘This is a declaration of war,’ Richard says shortly. We are riding side by side through the streets of London, on our way to dine at court. The queen is about to go into confinement yet again, to prepare for the birth of yet another baby; this is a dinner to honour her before she withdraws. She is leaving a court buzzing with gossip about witchcraft, sorcerers and poisonings. She must feel as if all the peace and elegance that she has worked for is falling apart. She must feel as if she is discovered, as if her true nature, the fish beneath the woman, is pushing its scaly head through her very skin.

It is a hot May afternoon and I am dressed very richly in red silks, and my horse has a saddle of red leather and a red leather bridle. Richard has a new jerkin of black velvet with embroidered white linen beneath. We may be going to dinner; but I have eaten already. I never take anything that comes from the queen’s kitchens now, and when she glances over to me she can see me with my fork poised to eat, crumbling bread, spreading the sauce with a spoon, and then putting my plate to one side. I pretend that I am eating food that comes from her kitchen, she pretends that she does not see that I am eating nothing. We both know that I think she will poison me if she can. We both know that I am not like George or my sister; I don’t have the courage to challenge her in public. My husband is determined to be her friend. I am easy prey to her ill-will.

‘A declaration of war?’ I repeat. ‘Why?’

‘George is saying openly that Edward was not our father’s true-born son and heir. He is telling everyone that Edward’s marriage was brought about by witchcraft and his sons are bastards. He is saying Edward prevented him from marrying Mary of Burgundy because he knows that he would claim the throne of England with her army. He says that many people would rise in his support, that he is better loved than the king. He is openly repeating everything he has whispered before. This is as bad as a declaration of war. Edward will have to silence him.’

We ride into the courtyard of Westminster Palace, the herald announces our titles and the trumpeters blow a blast of welcome. The standard bearers dip the flags to acknowledge the arrival of a royal duke and duchess. My horse stands still as two liveried servants help me down from the saddle and I rejoin Richard as he waits in a doorway.

‘How can the king silence his brother?’ I pursue. ‘Half of London is now saying the same thing. How can Edward silence them all?’

Richard puts my hand on his arm and smiles around at the people who throng the gallery that leads to the stable yard. He leads me onward. ‘Edward can silence George. At last, I think he is driven to do it. He is going to give him one last warning and then he will charge him with treason.’

The crime of treason carries a death sentence. Edward the king is going to kill his own brother. I stop still with the shock and feel my head swim. Richard takes my hand. We stand for a moment, handclasped as if we are clinging to each other in this new and terrifying world. We don’t notice the passing servants, or the courtiers hurrying by. Richard looks into my eyes and once again I know us for the children that we were, who had to make our own destiny in a world we could not understand.

‘The queen has told Edward that she will not feel safe, going into her confinement, if George is still at large. She has demanded his arrest for her own safety. Edward has to satisfy her. She is putting the life of his child against his brother.’

‘Tyranny!’ I breathe the word and for once Richard does not defend his brother. His young face is dark with anxiety.

‘God knows where we are going. God knows where the queen has taken us. We are the sons of York, Edward saw our three suns in the sky. How can we be divided by one woman?’

We turn into the great hall of Westminster Palace and Richard raises his hands to acknowledge the cheers and bows from the people gathered there and in the gallery to watch the nobility arrive. ‘Do you eat the food?’ he asks quietly.

I shake my head. ‘I never eat the food from the queen’s kitchen,’ I tell him in a whisper. ‘Not since George warned me.’

‘Neither do I,’ he says with a sigh. ‘Not any more.’

MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SUMMER 1477

We leave London, with George’s fate still unsettled. I might almost say we flee from London. Richard and I ride north away from the city, which is racked with rumour and suspicion, to get home, where the air is clear and where people speak their minds and not for their own advantage, and where the great northern skies bear down on the mossy green hills and we can be at peace, far from court, far from the Woodville family and the Rivers adherents, far from the lethal mystery that is the Queen of England.

Our son Edward greets us with joy, and has much to show us with the bursting pride of a four-year-old. He has learned to ride his little pony and tilt at the quintain; his pony is a skilled steady little animal that knows its business and rides at a bright trot at exactly the right angle for Edward’s little lance to hit the target. His tutor laughs and praises him and glances at me to see me alight with pride. He is progressing in his studies and is starting to read Latin and Greek. ‘So hard!’ I protest to his tutor.

‘The earlier he starts, the easier it is for him to learn,’ he assures me. ‘And already he says his prayers and follows the mass in Latin. It is just to build on that knowledge.’

His tutor allows him days at liberty so that he and I can ride out together and I buy him a little merlin falcon so that he can come hunting with us with his own bird. He is like a little nobleman in miniature, astride his stocky pony with the pretty falcon on his wrist, and he rides all day and denies that he is tired, though twice he falls asleep on the ride home and Richard, astride his big hunter, carries his little son in his arms, while I lead the pony.

At night he dines with us in the great hall, sitting between us at the top table, looking down over the beautiful hall crowded with our soldiers, guards and manservants. The people come in from Middleham to see us dine, and to carry away the scraps from the dinners and I hear them comment on the bearing and charm of the little lord: my Edward. After dinner, when Richard withdraws to his privy chamber and sits by the fire to read, I go with Edward to the nursery tower and see him undressed and put to bed. It is then, when he is newly washed and smelling sweet, when his face is as smooth and as pale as the linen of his pillow, that I kiss him and know what it is to love someone more than life itself.

He prays before he sleeps, little Latin prayers that his nurse has taught him to recite, hardly understanding their meaning. But he is earnest over the prayer that names me and his father, and once he is in bed and his dark lashes are softly lying on his little cheek, I get to my knees beside his bed and pray that he grows well and strong, that we can keep him safe. For surely there never was a more precious boy in all of Yorkshire – no, not in all of the world.

I spend every summer day with my little son, listening to him read in the sun-drenched nursery, riding out with him over the moor, fishing with him in the river, and playing catch, and bat and ball in the inner courtyard, until he is so tired that he goes to sleep on my lap as I read him his night-time story. These are easy days for me, I eat well, and sleep deeply in my richly canopied bed with Richard wrapped around me, as if we were lovers still in our first year of marriage; and I wake in the morning to hear the lapwing calling over the moorland, and the ceaseless chatter and twitter of the nesting swallows and martlets that have made their nests in cups of mud under every corbel.

But no baby comes to us. I revel in my son but I long for another baby, I am yearning for another child. The wooden cradle stands below the stairs in the nursery tower. Edward should have a brother or a sister to play with – but no child comes. I am allowed to eat meat on fast days, a special letter from the Pope himself gives me permission to eat meat during Lent or any day of fasting. At dinner Richard carves for me the best cuts of the spring lamb, the fat of the meat, the skin of the roast chicken, but still no little body is made from the flesh. In our long passionate nights we cling together with a sort of desperate desire but we do not make a child; no baby grows inside me.

I had thought we would spend all the summer and autumn in our northern lands, perhaps going over to Barnard Castle, or looking at the rebuilding work at Sheriff Hutton, but Richard gets an urgent message from his brother Edward, summoning him back to London.

‘I have to go, Edward needs me.’

‘Is he ill?’ I have a pang of fear for the king, and for a moment I think the unthinkable: can She have poisoned her own husband?

Richard is white with shock. ‘Edward is well enough; but he’s gone too far. He says he is putting a stop to George and his unending accusations. He has decided to charge George with treason.’

I put my hand to my throat where I can feel my heart hammer. ‘He will never . . . he could not . . . he would not have him executed?’

‘No, no, just charge him, and then hold him. Certainly, I shall insist that he holds him with honour, in his usual rooms in the Tower, where George can be well-served by his own servants and kept quiet until we find an agreement. I know that Edward has to silence him. George is completely out of control. Apparently he was trying to marry Mary of Burgundy only so that he could mount an invasion against Edward from Flanders. Edward has evidence now. George was taking money from the French, as we suspected. He was plotting against his own country, with France.’

‘This is not true, I would swear that he did not plan to marry her,’ I say earnestly. ‘Isabel was hardly buried, George was beside himself. Remember how he was when he first came to court and told us! He told me himself that it was a plan of Edward’s to get him out of the country, and only forbidden by the queen, who wanted Mary for her own brother Anthony.’

Richard’s young face is a mask of worry. ‘I don’t know! I can’t tell the truth of it any more. It’s the word of one brother against another. I wish to God that the queen and her family would stay out of the business of ruling the country. If she would only stick to having children and leave Edward to rule as he sees fit, then none of this would ever happen.’

‘But you will have to go . . .’ I say plaintively.

He nods. ‘I have to go to make sure that George is not harmed,’ he says. ‘If the queen is speaking against my brother, who will defend him but me?’

He turns and goes into our bedroom where his servants are packing his riding clothes into a bag. ‘When will you come back?’ I ask.

‘As soon as I can.’ His face is dark with worry. ‘I have to make sure that this goes no further. I have to save George from the queen’s rage.’

MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, AUTUMN 1477

The summer days with my son turn to autumn, and I send for the tailor from York to come and fit him for his winter clothes. He has grown during the summer, and there is much exclaiming at the new length of his riding trousers. The cobbler comes with new boots, and I agree, despite my own fears, that he shall go on to a bigger pony, and the little fell pony that has served him so well will be turned out to grass.

It is like a sentence of imprisonment when Richard rides home and tells me that we have to return to London to be at court for Christmas. Elizabeth the queen has come out of her confinement, mother to a new boy, her third; and as if to add lustre to her triumph, she has arranged for the betrothal of her younger royal son Richard to a magnificent heiress, the richest little girl in the kingdom, Anne Mowbray, a cousin of mine, and the heiress to the mighty Norfolk estate. Little Anne would have been a great match for my Edward. Their lands would have tallied, they would have made a powerful alliance, we are kinswomen, I have an interest in her. But I did not even bother to ask the family if they might consider Edward. I knew Elizabeth the queen would not let a little heiress like Anne into the world. I knew that she would secure her fortune for the Rivers family, for her precious son, Richard. They will be married as infants to satisfy the queen’s greed.

‘Richard, can we not stay here?’ I ask. ‘Can we not spend Christmas here for once?’

He shakes his head. ‘Edward needs me,’ he says. ‘Now that George is imprisoned Edward needs his true friends even more, and I am the only brother he has left. He has William Hastings as his right-hand man, but apart from William – who can he talk to but her kinsmen? She has him surrounded. And they are a choir of harmony – they all advise him to send George into exile and forbid him ever to come again to England. He is confiscating George’s goods, he is dividing up his lands. He has made up his mind.’

‘But their children!’ I exclaim, thinking of little Margaret and Edward his son. ‘Who will care for them if their father is exiled?’

‘They would be as orphans,’ Richard says grimly. ‘We have to go to court this Christmas to defend them as well as George.’ He hesitates. ‘Besides, I have to see George, I have to stand by him. I don’t want to leave him on his own. He is much alone in the Tower, nobody dares to visit him, and he has become fearful of what might happen. I am certain that She can never persuade Edward to harm his brother, but I am afraid . . .’ He breaks off.

‘Afraid?’ I repeat in a whisper, even though we are safe behind the thick walls of Middleham Castle.

He shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think I am as fearful as a woman, or as superstitious as George has become with his talk of necromancy and sorcery and God knows what darkness. But . . . I find I am afraid for George.’

‘Afraid of what?’ I ask again.

Richard shakes his head; he can hardly bear to name his fears. ‘An accident?’ he asks me. ‘An illness? That he eats something that turns out to be bad? That he drinks to excess? I don’t even want to think about it. That she works on his sorrow and on his fears so that he longs to end his own life and someone brings him a knife?’

I am horrified. ‘He would never hurt himself,’ I say. ‘That’s a sin so deep . . .’

‘He’s not like George any more,’ Richard tells me miserably. ‘His confidence, his charm, you know what he is like – it’s all gone from him. I am afraid she is giving him dreams, I am afraid she is draining his courage. He says that he wakes in a terror and sees her leaving his bedroom, he says he knows she comes to him in the night and pours ice water into his heart. He says he has a pain which no doctor can cure, in his heart, under his ribs, in his very belly.’

I shake my head. ‘It can’t be done,’ I maintain stoutly. ‘She cannot work on someone else’s mind. George is grieving, well so am I, and he is under arrest which would be enough to make any man fearful.’

‘At any rate, I have to see him.’

‘I don’t like to leave Edward,’ I say.

‘I know. But he has the best childhood a boy could have here – I know it. This was my own childhood. He won’t be lonely; he has his tutor and his lady of the household. I know he misses you and loves you but it is better for him to stay here than be dragged down to London.’ He hesitates again. ‘Anne, you have to agree to this: I don’t want him at court . . .’

He needs to say nothing more than that. I shudder at the thought of the queen’s cold gaze on my boy. ‘No, no, we won’t take him to London,’ I say hastily. ‘We’ll leave him here.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1477

The Christmas feast is as grand as ever, the queen exultant, out of the birthing chamber, her new baby with the wet nurse, her new boy paraded around the court and mentioned in every conversation. I can almost taste the bitterness in my mouth when I see her boy, carried everywhere behind her, and her six other children.

‘She’s naming him George,’ Richard tells me.

I gasp. ‘George? Are you sure?’

His face is grim. ‘I am sure. She told me herself. She told me and smiled as if I might be pleased.’

The poisonous humour of this appals me. She has had this innocent child’s uncle arrested for speaking ill of her, threatened him with a charge that carries a death sentence, and she names her son for him? It is a sort of malicious madness, if it is nothing worse.

‘What could be worse?’ Richard asks.

‘If she thought she were replacing one George with another,’ I say very low, and I turn from his aghast face.

All her children are gathered here at court for Christmas. She flaunts them everywhere she goes, and they follow behind her, dancing in her footsteps. The oldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, is eleven years old now, up to her tall mother’s shoulder, long and lean as a Lenten lily, the darling of the court, and her father’s particular favourite. Edward the Prince of Wales is here for the Christmas feast, taller and stronger every time he comes back to London, kind to his brother Richard, who is just a little boy but a stronger and sturdier little boy than my own son. I watch them go by with the wet nurse bringing up the rear with the new baby George, and I have to remind myself to smile in admiration.

The queen at least knows the smile is as real and as warm as her cool nod to me, and the offer of her smooth cheek to kiss. When I greet her I wonder if she can smell fear on my breath, in the cold sweat under my arms, if she knows that my thoughts are always with my brother-in-law, trapped by her in the Tower; if she knows that I can’t see her happiness and her fertility and not fear for my own solitary son, and remember my own lost sister.

At the end of the Christmas feast there is the shameful charade of the betrothal of little Prince Richard, aged only four, to the six-year-old heiress Anne Mowbray. The little girl will inherit all the fortunes of the Dukes of Norfolk: she is their only heir. Or rather she was their only heir. But now Prince Richard will get this fortune, for the queen writes a marriage contract for them that ensures that he will have the little girl’s wealth even if she dies as a child before they are old enough to be married, before she reaches adulthood. When my ladies tell me of this I have to make sure I don’t shudder. I cannot help but think that the Norfolks have signed her death warrant. If the queen gets a great fortune on Anne’s death, how long will the little girl live, after the contract has been signed?

There is a great celebration of the betrothal, which we all must attend. The little girl and the little prince are carried by their nursemaids in procession and are stood side by side on the high table in the great hall like a pair of little dolls. Nobody seeing this tableau of greed could doubt for a moment that the queen is in the heyday of her power, doing exactly what is her will.

The Rivers of course are delighted with the match and celebrate with feasting and dancing and masquing and a wonderful joust. Anthony Woodville, the queen’s beloved brother, fights in the joust in the disguise of a hermit in a white gown with his horse caparisoned in black velvet. Richard and I attend the betrothal in our finest clothes and try to appear happy; but the table where George and Isabel used to sit with their household is empty. My sister is dead and her husband imprisoned without trial. When the queen looks down the hall at me I smile back at her, and under the table I cross my fingers in the sign against witchcraft.

‘We don’t need to attend the joust if you don’t wish to,’ Richard says to me that night. He has joined me in my bedchamber in the palace, sitting before the fireplace in his gown. I climb into bed and pull the covers around my shoulders.

‘Why don’t we have to?’

‘Edward said we could be excused.’

I ask the question that matters more and more at the court in these days. ‘What about Her? Will She mind?’

‘I don’t think so. Her son Thomas Grey is to be one challenger, her brother is the first knight. The Rivers are in full flood. She won’t much care whether we are there or not.’

‘Why did Edward say you could be excused?’ I hear the caution in my own voice. We are all afraid of everything at court now.

Richard rises and takes off his robe, pulls back the covers and gets into bed beside me. ‘Because he sees that I am sick to my heart at George’s imprisonment, and sick with fear at what might come next,’ he says. ‘He has no stomach for merrymaking either when our brother is in the Tower of London and the Queen of England is pressing for his death. Hold me, Anne. I am cold to my bones.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1478

They keep George in the Tower without trial, without visitors, in comfortable rooms – but he is imprisoned as a traitor for the rest of the year. Not until January does the queen finally get her way and persuade the king to bring him before the court and charge him with treason. The Rivers adherents have got hold of the jurors at the trial of Ankarette the poisoner, and persuaded them to say that they thought her innocent all along, even while they sent her to the gallows. My sister, they now declare, died quite naturally of the consequences of childbirth. Suddenly, Isabel had childbed fever, though when they were last consulted, they swore she was poisoned. They now say that George exceeded his authority in charging Ankarette and acted like a king himself, in having her executed, they say that he presumed on the royal state, they make him a traitor for punishing the murderer of his own wife. In one brilliant move they have hidden the murder, hidden the murderer the queen, exonerated her instrument, and shifted the blame for everything onto George.

The queen is everywhere in this matter, advising the king, warning of danger, complaining very sweetly that George cannot serve as a judge and an executioner in his town of Warwick, suggesting that this is practically a usurpation. If he will order a jury, if he will command an execution, where will he stop? Should he not be stopped? And finally?

Finally the king is driven into agreement with her and he himself undertakes the work of prosecuting his brother, and nobody – not one single man – speaks in George’s defence. Richard comes home after the last day of the hearing with his shoulders bowed and his face dark. His mother and I meet him in the great hall and he takes us into his privy chamber and closes the door on the interested faces of our household.

‘Edward has accused him of trying to destroy the royal family and their claim to the throne.’ Richard glances at his mother. ‘It’s proven that George told everyone that the king was base-born – a bastard. I am sorry, Lady Mother.’

She waves it away. ‘This is an old slander.’ She looks at me. ‘This is Warwick’s old lie. Blame him, if anybody.’

‘And they have proof that George’s men were paid to go round the country saying that Thomas Burdett was innocent, and was murdered by the king for foretelling his death. Edward heard the evidence for that and it was good. George certainly hired people to speak against the king. George says that the king is using black arts – everyone supposes this is to accuse the queen of witchcraft. Finally, and almost worst of all: George has been taking money from Louis of France to create a rebellion against Edward. He was going to mount a rebellion and take the throne.’

‘He would not,’ his mother says simply.

‘They had letters from Louis of France addressed to him.’

‘Forgeries,’ she says,

Richard sighs. ‘Who knows? Not I. I am afraid, Lady Mother, that some of it – actually, most of it – is true. George hired a tenant’s son and put him in the place of his own son, Edward of Warwick. He was sending young Edward to Flanders for safekeeping.’

I draw a breath. This is Isabel’s son, my nephew, sent to Flanders to keep him safe. ‘Why didn’t he send him to us?’

‘He says he did not dare to let the boy stay in England, and the queen’s malice would be his death. They cited this as evidence of his plotting.’

‘Where is Edward now?’ I ask.

‘The child is in danger from the queen,’ his grandmother says. ‘That’s not proof of George’s guilt, it is proof of the queen’s guilt.’

Richard answers me: ‘Edward’s spies arrested the boy at the port as he was about to take ship, and took him back to Warwick Castle.’

‘Where is he now?’ I repeat.

‘At Warwick, with Margaret, his sister.’

‘You must speak with your brother the king,’ Duchess Cecily tells Richard. ‘You must tell him that Elizabeth Woodville is the destruction of this family. There is no doubt in my mind that she poisoned Isabel, and that she will destroy George too. You have to make Edward see that. You have to save George, you have to safeguard his children. Edward is your nephew. If he is not safe in England you have to protect him.’

Richard turns to his mother. ‘Forgive me,’ he says. ‘I have tried. But the queen has Edward in thrall, he won’t listen to me any more. I cannot advise him. I cannot advise him against Her.’

The duchess walks the length of the room, her head bowed. For the first time she looks like an old woman, exhausted by sorrow. ‘Will Edward pass the death sentence on his own brother?’ she asks. ‘Am I to lose George as I lost your brother Edmund? To a dishonourable death? Will She have his head set on a spike? Is England ruled by another she-wolf as bad as Margaret of Anjou? Does Edward forget who his friends are, his brothers?’

Richard shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. He has removed me from my place as Steward of England, so that I don’t have to rule on the death sentence.’

She is alert at once. ‘Who is the new steward?’

‘The Duke of Buckingham. He will do as his Rivers wife tells him. Will you go to Edward? Will you appeal to him?’

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘I will go to one beloved son to beg for the life of another. I shouldn’t have to do this. This is the consequence of a wicked woman, an evil wife, a witch on the throne.’

‘Hush,’ Richard says wearily.

‘I will not hush. I will stand between her, and my son George. I will save him.’

BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, FEBRUARY 1478

We have to wait. We wait and wait from January to February. The members of both houses of parliament send delegations to beg the king to pass a sentence and finish the case against his brother one way or the other. Finally, the sentence is passed and George is found guilty of treason. The punishment for treason is death but still the king hesitates to order his brother’s execution. Nobody is allowed to see George, who appeals from his prison for the right to be tried by single combat – a chivalric resolution to a dishonourable charge. It is the final defence of an innocent man. The king, who claims to be the very flower of English chivalry, refuses. This seems to be a matter outside of honour, as well as outside of justice.

Duchess Cecily goes as she promised to see Edward, certain that she can make him commute the death sentence into exile. When she returns to Baynard’s Castle from court, they have to help her out of her litter. She is as white as her lace collar and she can barely stand.

‘What happened?’ I ask her.

She clings to my hands on the steps of her great London home. She has never reached out to me before. ‘Anne,’ is all she can say. ‘Anne.’

I call for my ladies and between us we help her into my rooms, seat her in my chair before the fire, and give her a glass of malmsey wine. With a sudden gesture she strikes the glass away and it shatters on the stone hearth. ‘No! No!’ she screams with sudden energy. ‘Don’t bring it near me!’

The bouquet of the sweet wine fills the room as I kneel at her feet and take her hands. I think she is raving as she shudders and cries: ‘Not the wine! Not the wine!’

‘Lady Mother, what is it? Duchess Cecily? Compose yourself!’

This is a woman who stayed at court while her husband plotted the greatest rebellion against a king that England has ever seen. This is the woman who stood at the market cross in Ludlow when her husband ran away and the Lancaster soldiers sacked the town. This is not a woman who cries easily, this is not a woman who has ever acknowledged defeat. But now she looks at me as if she can see nothing, she is blinded by tears. Then she lets out a great shaking sob. ‘Edward said that all I could do was offer George his choice of death. He said that he must die. That woman was there all the time, she never let me say a thing in George’s favour. All I could win for him was a private death in his room in the Tower, and he can choose the means.’

She buries her face in her hands and weeps as if she could never stop. I glance at my ladies. We are so shocked to see the duchess like this that we all stand in a helpless circle around the grieving mother.

‘My favourite son, my own darling,’ she whispers to herself. ‘And he has to die.’

I don’t know what to do. I put my hand gently on her shoulder. ‘Will you not take a glass of something, Your Grace?’

She looks up at me, her beautiful old face ravaged with grief. ‘He has chosen to be drowned in malmsey wine,’ she says.

‘What?’

She nods. ‘That’s why I didn’t want to drink it. I will never touch it again as long as I live. I won’t have it in my house. They will clear the cellar of it today.’

I am horrified. ‘Why would he do such a thing?’

She laughs, a bitter dry sound that peals like a carillon of misery in the stone-walled room. ‘It is his last gesture: to make Edward treat him, to make Edward pay for his drink. To make a mockery of the king’s justice, to drink deep of the queen’s favourite wine. He shows it is her doing, this is her poison for him, as it was her poison that killed Isabel. He makes a mockery of the trial, he makes a mockery of his death sentence. He makes a mockery of his death.’

I turn to the window and look out. ‘My sister’s children will be orphans,’ I say. ‘Edward, and Margaret.’