In an instant she pulls me closer and puts her fingers firmly across my mouth. ‘Shut up! Don’t speak like that of them! Ever!’
Without thinking I nip her hand, and she gives a yowl of pain and rears back to slap me hard across the face. I scream at the blow and push her back. She rocks against the wall and we both glare at each other. Suddenly I am aware of the stunned silence in the room and the delighted gaze of the audience of ladies. Isabel stares at me, her cheeks red with rage. I feel my own temper drain away. Sheepishly, I pick up her ornate headdress from the floor and offer it to her. Isabel smooths her gown and takes her headdress. She does not look at me at all. ‘Go to your room,’ she hisses.
‘Iz—’
‘Go to your room and pray to Our Lady for guidance. I think you must have run mad, biting like a rabid dog. You are not fit to be in my company, you are not fit for the company of ladies. You are a stupid child, a wicked child, you may not come into my company.’
I go to my room but I don’t pray. I pull out my clothes and I put them in a bundle. I go to my chest and I count out my money. I am going to run away from Isabel and her stupid husband and neither of them will ever tell me what I shall or shall not do, ever again. I pack in a feverish haste. I have been a princess, I have been the daughter-in-law of the she-wolf queen. Am I going to allow my sister to make me into a poor girl, depending on her and her husband for my dowry, depending on my new husband for a roof over my head? I am a Neville of the House of Warwick – shall I become a nothing?
I have my bundle in my hand and my travelling cloak around my shoulders, I creep to the door and listen. There is the usual bustle in the great hall as they prepare the room for dinner. I can hear the fire-boy bringing in the logs and carrying out the ashes, and the clatter as they slam down the trestles and bang the table-tops on them, then the squeak of wooden feet on floorboards, as they drag the benches from the sides of the room. I can slip through everyone and be out of the door before anyone notices that I am gone.
For a moment I stand, poised on the threshold, my heart hammering, ready to run. And then I pause. I don’t go anywhere. The resolve and the excitement drain from me. I close the door and go back into my room. I sit on the edge of my bed. I don’t have anywhere to go. If I go to my mother it is a long journey, across half of England, and I don’t know the way, and I have no guard, and then at the end of it is a nunnery and the certainty of imprisonment. King Edward for all his handsome smile and easy pardons will just lock me up with her and consider it a little problem well solved. If I go to Warwick Castle I might be greeted with love and loyalty by my father’s old servants but for all I know George has already put a new tenant in my father’s place, and he will simply hold me under arrest and return me to Isabel and George, or worse, hold a pillow over my face as I sleep.
I realise that although I am not imprisoned like my mother-in-law Margaret of Anjou in the Tower, nor like my mother in Beaulieu Abbey, equally I am not free. Without money to hire guards and without a great name to command respect I cannot go out into the world. If I want to get away I have to find someone who will give me guards and fight for my money. I need an ally, someone with money and a retinue of fighting men.
I drop my bundle and sit cross-legged on the bed and sink my chin into my hands. I hate Isabel for allowing this – for colluding with this. She has brought me down very low – this is worse than the defeat at Tewkesbury. There it was a battle on an open field, and I was among the many defeated. Here I am alone. It is my own sister against me, and only I am suffering. She has let them reduce me to a nothing and I will never forgive her.
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1471
Isabel and George attend the king and his queen at their triumphant Christmas feast, restored to their beautiful palace, at ease among their friends and allies, a byword for beauty, for chivalry, for royal grace. The country has never seen anything like it, ever before. The citizens of London can speak of nothing but the elegance and extravagance of this restored court. The king spends his newly won fortune on beautiful clothes for the queen and her pretty princesses; every new fashion from Burgundy graces the royal family from the turned-up toes of their shoes, to the rich colours of their capes. Elizabeth the queen is a blaze of precious stones at every great dinner, and they are served from trenchers of gold. Every day sees a new celebration of their power. There is music, and dancing, jousts and boating on the cold river. There is masquing and entertainments.
The queen’s brother Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, holds a crusade of scholars in which theologians of the Bible argue with the translators of Arabic texts. The king comes disguised into the ladies’ chamber and amid much screaming and pretend terror holds them up like a pirate and steals their jewels from their arms and necks and replaces them with finer gifts. The queen, with her son in her arms, her mother at her side, and her daughters in her train, laughs with relief every day of the Christmas feast.
Not that I see any of this. I am in Isabel and George’s household living in the rambling village that is Westminster Palace, but I am not bidden to dinner, not as the daughter of a formerly great man, nor as a dowager princess. I am kept out of sight as the widow of a failed pretender, the daughter of a traitor. I have rooms in the palace overlooking the river, near to the gardens, and at mealtimes my food is brought privately to me. I go to the royal chapel twice a day and sit behind Isabel, my head penitently bowed, but I do not speak with the queen nor with the king. When they go past me I sink into a curtsey and neither of them see me at all.
My mother is still imprisoned in Beaulieu Abbey. There is no pretence any longer that she is in sanctuary, that she has sought a life of retreat. Everyone is absolutely clear that she is held as a prisoner and that the king will never release her. My mother-in-law is held in the Tower, in the rooms that belonged to her dead husband. They say she prays for him daily, and constantly for the soul of her son. I know how bereft she feels, and I did not even love him. And I – the last woman standing after the attempt to throw Edward from the throne – I am held in this twilight world by my own sister: I am her prisoner and her ward. The agreeable fiction is that George and Isabel are caring for me, have rescued me from the battlefield, they serve as my guardians, and I am living with my family at peace and in comfort. They are helping me recover from the terror of battle, from the ordeal of my forced marriage and widowhood. The truth, as everyone secretly knows, is that they are my gaolers just as the guards in the Tower hold my mother-in-law, and the lay brothers at Beaulieu secure my mother. We are all three imprisoned women, we are all three without friends, money, or hope. My mother writes to me and demands that I speak with my sister, with George, with the king himself. I answer her briefly that nobody ever speaks to me but to give me orders and that she will have to free herself, that she should never have locked herself away.
But I am fifteen years old – I cannot help but hope. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and dream that the prince my husband was not killed but escaped from the battle and will come for me right now – climb through the window and laugh at my astounded face, and tell me that there is a wonderful plan, an army outside waiting to overthrow Edward, and I will be Queen of England as my father wanted. Sometimes I imagine that his death was wrongly reported, that Father still lives and that the two of them are mustering an army in our lands in the North and will come to rescue me, my father high on Midnight, his eyes bright under his helmet.
Sometimes I pretend that none of it ever happened, and when I wake in the morning I keep my eyes closed so that I cannot see the small bedroom and the lady in waiting who sleeps in the bed with me, and I can pretend that Iz and I are at Calais, and that soon Father will come home and say that he has defeated the bad queen and the sleeping king and that we are to come with him to England and be the greatest ladies in the land and marry the York dukes.
I am a girl, I cannot help but hope. My heart lifts at the crackle of the fire in the grate. I open the shutters and see the milky clouds of
the early morning, and sniff the air and wonder if it will snow. I cannot believe that my life is over, that I have made my great gamble and lost. My mother may be on her knees at Beaulieu, my mother-in-law may pray for the soul of her son, but I am only fifteen and I cannot help but think every day – perhaps today something will change. Perhaps today a chance will come for me. Surely, I cannot be held here, without a name, without a fortune, forever?
I am on my way back from chapel with Isabel’s ladies when I realise I have left my rosary on the floor where I was kneeling. I say a brief word to my companions and go back. It is a mistake, the king is coming out of the chapel as I am coming in, his arm linked with his great friend William Hastings, his brother Richard behind him, a long stream of friends and hangers-on behind them.
I do as I have been commanded, I shrink back, I sink down, I look down. I do everything to indicate my penitence and my lack of worthiness to tread the same rushes as this king, who walks here in pomp only because he killed my father and my husband on the battlefield and my father-in-law by treachery. He goes past me with a pleasant smile: ‘Good day, Lady Anne.’
‘Dowager princess,’ I say to the rushes under my knees, but I make sure that no-one can hear me.
I keep my head down as the many pairs of beautifully embossed boots dawdle past and then I get up. Richard, the king’s nineteen-year-old brother, has not gone. He is leaning against the stone frame of a doorway and smiling at me, as if he has finally remembered that once we were friends, that he was my father’s ward and every night he used to kneel for my mother’s kiss as if he were her son.
‘Anne,’ he says simply.
‘Richard,’ I reply, giving him no title if he gives me none, though he is the Duke of Gloucester, and a royal duke, and I am a girl with no name.
‘I’ll be quick,’ he says, glancing along the corridor where his brother and his friends are strolling away speaking of hunting and a new dog that someone has brought from Hainault. ‘If you are happy living with your sister, with your inheritance robbed from you and your mother imprisoned, then I will not say another word.’
‘I’m not happy,’ I say rapidly.
‘If you see them as your gaolers, I could rescue you from them.’
‘I see them as my gaolers and my enemies and I hate them both.’
‘You hate your sister?’
‘I hate her even worse than I hate him.’
He nods, as if this is not shocking, but utterly reasonable. ‘Can you get out of your rooms at all?’
‘I walk in the privy garden in the afternoon most days.’
‘Alone?’
‘Since I have no friends.’
‘Come to the yew arbour this afternoon after dinner. I’ll be waiting.’
He turns without another word and runs after his brother’s court. I walk swiftly to my sister’s rooms.
In the afternoon my sister and all her ladies are preparing for a masque, and they are going to try their costumes in the wardrobe rooms. There is no part for me to learn, there is no ornate costume for me to try. They forget all about me in the excitement of the gowns and I take my chance and slip away, down a winding stone stair that leads directly to the garden, and from there to the yew arbour.
I see his slight form, seated on a stone bench, his hound beside him. The dog turns his head and pricks his ears at the sound of my shoes on the gravel. Richard rises to his feet as he sees me.
‘Does anybody know you are here?’
I feel my heart thud at this, a conspirator’s question. ‘No.’
He smiles. ‘How long do you have?’
‘Perhaps an hour.’
He draws me into the shade of the arbour, where it is cold and dark but the thick green branches hide us from view. Anyone would have to come to the very entrance of the circular planting of trees and peer inside to see us. We are hidden as if enclosed in a little green room. I draw my cloak around me and sit on the stone bench and look up at him, expectantly.
He laughs at my excited face. ‘I have to know what you want, before I can suggest anything.’
‘Why would you suggest anything at all for me?’
He shrugs. ‘Your father was a good man, he was a good guardian to me when I was his ward. I remember you with affection from childhood. I was happy in your house.’
‘And for this you would rescue me?’
‘I think you should be free to make your own choices.’
I look at him sceptically. He must think I am a fool. He was not thinking of my freedom when he led my horse to Worcester and handed me over to George and Isabel. ‘Then why didn’t you let me go to my mother, when you came for Margaret of Anjou?’
‘I didn’t know then that they would hold you as a prisoner. I thought I was taking you to your family, to safety.’
‘It’s because of the money,’ I tell him. ‘While they hold me, Isabel can claim all the inheritance from my mother.’
‘And while your sister does not protest they can hold your mother forever. George gets all your father’s lands, and if Isabel gets your mother’s lands that great inheritance is made one again, but inherited by only one of the Warwick girls: by Isabel, and her wealth is in George’s keeping.’
‘I am not allowed to even speak to the king, so how can I put my case?’
‘I could be your champion,’ Richard suggests slowly. ‘If you wanted me to serve you. I could speak to him for you.’
‘Why would you do this?’
He smiles at me. There is a world of invitation in his dark eyes. ‘Why d’you think?’ he says quietly.
‘Why d’you think?’ The question haunts me like a love song, as I hurry from the chilly garden and go up to Isabel’s rooms. My hands are freezing and my nose is red from the cold but nobody notices as I slip off my cloak and sit by the fire, pretending to listen to them talk about the gowns for the masque, though all I hear in my head is his question: ‘Why d’you think?’
It is time to dress before dinner. I have to wait on Isabel as her maids lace her gown. I have to hand her little flask of perfume to her, open her jewel box. For once I serve her without resentment; I hardly even notice that she asks for a collar of pearls and then changes her mind, and then changes back again. I just take the things from the box and put them back and then get them out again. It does not matter to me if she wears pearls that her husband has stolen from someone else. She is not going to steal anything from me, ever again, for I have someone on my side.
I have someone on my side now and he is a king’s brother just as George is a king’s brother. He is of the House of York and my father loved him and taught him like a son. And, as it happens, he is heir to the throne after George, but more beloved than George, and more steadfast and loyal than George. If you were going to pick one of the York boys it would be George for looks, Edward for charm, but it would be Richard for loyalty.
‘Why d’you think?’ When he asked me he gave me a naughty smile, his dark eyes were so bright; he almost winked at me as if it were a private joke, as if it were a delightful secret. I thought I was being clever and guarded to ask him why he would help me – and then he looked at me as if I knew the answer. And there was something about the question, about the gleam of his smile, that made me want to giggle, that even now, as my sister moves to her hand-beaten silver mirror and nods for me to tie the pearls around her neck, makes me want to blush.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she says coldly, her eyes meeting mine in the silvered looking glass.
I steady myself at once. ‘Nothing.’
Isabel rises from the table and goes to the door. Her ladies gather around her, the door opens and George and his household are waiting to join her. This is my signal to go to my room. It is generally agreed that I am in mourning so deep that I cannot be present in mixed company. Only George and Isabel and I know that it is they who have made this rule: they don’t allow me to see anyone or speak to anyone, they keep me like a mewed hawk that should be flying free. Only George a
nd Isabel and I know this – but Richard knows it too. Richard guessed it because he knows what I am like, what Isabel is like. He was like a son to my father, he understands the House of Warwick. And Richard cared enough to think about me, to wonder how I was faring in Isabel’s household, to see through the façade of guardianship to the truth: that I am their prisoner.
I curtsey to George and keep my eyes down so he cannot see that I am smiling. In my head I hear again my question: ‘Why would you do this?’ and his answer: ‘Why d’you think?’
When there is a knock at the door of the privy chamber I open it myself, expecting it to be one of the grooms of the servery with dishes for my dinner, but the presence chamber is empty except for Richard, standing there, magnificently dressed in red velvet doublet and breeches, his cape trimmed with sables slung around his shoulder as if it were nothing.
I gasp. ‘You?’
‘I thought I would come and see you while they are serving dinner,’ he says, strolling into the privy chamber and seating himself in Isabel’s chair under the cloth of estate by the fireside.
‘The servers will come with my dinner at any moment,’ I warn him.
He makes a careless gesture with his hand. ‘Have you thought about our talk?’
Every moment of this afternoon. ‘Yes.’
‘Would you like me to be your champion in this matter?’ Again he smiles at me as if he is proposing the most delicious game, as if asking me to conspire against my guardian and my sister is like inviting me to dance.
‘What would we do?’ I try to be serious but I am smiling in reply.
‘Oh,’ he whispers. ‘We would have to meet often, I am sure.’
‘Would we?’
‘Once a day at least. For a proper conspiracy I should want to see you once a day, probably twice. I don’t know that I wouldn’t need to see you all the time.’
‘And what would we do?’
He pulls a stool towards the chair with the toe of his boot and gestures that I should sit near him. I obey: he is mastering me as he would pet a hawk. He leans towards me as if to whisper, his breath warm on my bare neck. ‘We would talk, Lady Anne, what else?’