My father is here to dispense justice, and while he sits in the great hall, settling quarrels and hearing petitions, Isabel and I and my father’s wards including Richard, the king’s brother, are allowed to go out riding every afternoon. We go hunting for pheasant and grouse with our falcons on the great moors that stretch for miles, all the way to Scotland. Richard and the other boys have to work with their tutors every morning but they are allowed to be with us after dinner. The boys are the sons of noblemen, like Francis Lovell, some the sons of great men of the North who are glad of a place in my father’s household, some cousins and kin to us who will stay with us for a year or two to learn how to rule and how to lead. Robert Brackenbury, our neighbour, is a constant companion to Richard, like a little squire to a knight. Richard is my favourite, of course, as he is now brother to the King of England. He is no taller than Isabel but furiously brave, and secretly I admire him. He is slight and dark-haired, utterly determined to become a great knight, and he knows all the stories of Camelot and chivalry which he sometimes reads to me as if they were accounts of real people.
He says to me then, so seriously that I cannot doubt him: ‘Lady Anne, there is nothing more important in the world than a knight’s honour. I would rather die than be dishonoured.’
He rides his moorland pony as if he were heading for a cavalry charge; he is desperate to be as big and strong as his two older brothers, desperate to be the best of my father’s wards. I understand this, as I know what it is like to always come last in a rivalrous family. But I never say that I understand – he has a fierce touchy northern pride and he would hate for me to say that I understand him, as much as I would hate it if he sympathised with me for being younger than Isabel, for being plain where she is pretty, and for being a girl when everyone needed a son and heir. Some things are better never spoken: Richard and I know that we dream of great things, and know also that nobody must ever know that we dream of greatness.
We are with the boys in the schoolroom, listening to them taking their lessons in Greek, when Margaret comes with a message that we are to go to our father, at once. Isabel and I are alarmed. Father never sends for us.
‘Not me?’ Richard asks Margaret.
‘Not you, Your Grace,’ she replies.
Richard grins at Isabel. ‘Just you then,’ he says, assuming, as we do, that we have been caught doing something wrong. ‘Perhaps you’ll be whipped.’
Usually when we are in the North we are left alone, seeing Father and Mother only at dinner. My father has much to do. Until a year ago he had to fight for the remaining northern castles that held out for the sleeping king. My mother comes to her northern homes determined to put right everything that has gone wrong in her absence. If my Lord Father wants to see us, then we are likely to be in trouble; but I cannot think what we have done wrong.
My father is seated before his table in his great chair, grand as a throne, when we come in. His clerk puts one paper after another in front of him and my father has a quill in his hand and marks each one W – for Warwick, the best of his many titles. Another clerk at his side leans forwards, with candle in one hand and sealing wax in another, and drips red wax in a neat puddle on the document and my father presses his ring to make a seal. It is like magic, turning his wishes into fact. We wait by the door for him to notice us and I think how wonderful it must be to be a man and put your initial on a command and know that at once, such a thing is done. I would send out commands all day just for the pleasure of it.
He looks up and sees us as the clerk takes the papers away, and Father makes a little beckoning gesture. We go forwards and curtsey as we should, while my father raises his hand in blessing, and then he pushes back his chair and calls us around the table so that we can stand before him. He puts out his hand to me and I go close and he pats my head, like he pats Midnight, his horse. This is not a particularly nice feeling for he has a heavy hand, and I am wearing a cap of stiff golden net that he crushes down with each pat, but he does not summon Isabel any closer. She has to stand rather awkwardly, looking at the two of us, so I turn to her and smile because our father’s hand is on me, and it is me who is leaning against the arm of his chair as if I am comfortable to be here, rather than alarmed at these signs of his favour.
‘You are good girls, keeping up with your studies?’ he asks abruptly.
We both nod. Undeniably we are good girls and we study every morning with our own tutor, learning Logic on Mondays, Grammar on Tuesdays, Rhetoric on Wednesdays, French and Latin on Thursdays, and Music and Dance on Fridays. Friday is the best day of the week, of course. The boys have their tutor for Greek, and work with a weapons master as well, jousting and learning how to handle a broadsword. Richard is a good student and works hard at weapon practice. Isabel is far ahead of me in her studies, and she will only have our tutor for another year until she is fifteen. She says that girls’ heads cannot take in Rhetoric and that when she is free of the schoolroom I will be left there all alone and they won’t let me out until I get to the end of the book of examples. The prospect of the schoolroom without her is so dreary that I wonder if I dare mention it to my father, and ask to be released, while his hand rests so heavily on my shoulder and he seems to be feeling kindly towards me. I look into his grave face and think: better not.
‘I sent for you to tell you that the queen has asked for you both to join her household,’ he says.
Isabel lets out a little gasp of excitement and her round face goes pink as a ripe raspberry.
‘Us?’ I ask, amazed.
‘It is an honour due to you because of your place in the world as my daughters; but also because she has seen your behaviour at court. She said that you, Anne, were particularly charming at her coronation.’
I hear the word ‘charming’, and for a moment I can think of nothing else. The Queen of England, even though she is Queen Elizabeth who was only Elizabeth Woodville, who was then little more than a nobody, thinks that I am charming. And she told my father that she thinks I am charming. I can feel myself swell with pride and I turn to my overwhelming father and give him what I hope is a charming smile.
‘She thinks, rightly, that you would be an ornament to her rooms,’ he says.
I fix on the word ‘ornament’ and wonder exactly what the queen means. Does she mean that we would decorate her rooms, making them look pretty like tapestries hung over badly washed walls? Would we have to stand very still in the same place all the time? Am I to be some kind of vase? My father laughs at my bewildered face and nods to Isabel. ‘Tell your little sister what she is to do.’
‘She means a maid in waiting,’ she hisses at me.
‘Oh.’
‘What do you think?’ my father asks.
He can see what Isabel thinks, since she is panting with excitement, her blue eyes sparkling. ‘I should be delighted,’ she says, fumbling for words. ‘It is an honour. An honour I had not looked for . . . I accept.’
He looks at me. ‘And you, little one? My little mouse? Are you thrilled like your sister? Are you also rushing to serve the new queen? Do you want to dance around the new light?’
Something in the way that he speaks warns me that this would be the wrong answer, though I remember the queen as a dazzled acolyte might remember the sight of a feast-day icon. I can think of nothing more wonderful than to serve this beauty as her maid in waiting. And she likes me. Her mother smiled at me, she herself thought I was charming. I could burst for pride that she likes me and joy that she has singled me out. But I am cautious. ‘Whatever you think best, Father,’ I say. I look down at my feet, and then up into his dark eyes. ‘Do we like her now?’
He laughs shortly. ‘God save us! What gossip have you been hearing? Of course we love and honour her; she is our queen, the wife of our king. She is his first choice of all the princesses in the world. Just imagine! Of all the high-born ladies in Christendom that he could have married – and yet he chose her.’ There is something hard and mocking about his tone. I hear the loyal words
that he speaks; but I hear something behind them: a note like Isabel’s when she is bullying me. ‘You are a silly child to ask,’ he says. ‘We have all sworn fealty to her. You yourself swore fealty at her coronation.’
Isabel nods at me, as if to confirm my father’s condemnation. ‘She’s too young to understand,’ she assures him over my head. ‘She understands nothing.’
My quick temper flares up. ‘I understand that the king didn’t do what my father advised! When Father had put him on the throne! When Father could have died fighting the bad queen and the sleeping king for Edward!’
This makes him laugh again. ‘Out of the mouths of babes indeed!’ Then he shrugs. ‘Anyway, you’re not going. Neither of you will go to court to serve under this queen. You are going with your mother to Warwick Castle, and you can learn all you need to know about running a great palace from her. I don’t think Her Grace the queen can teach you anything that your mother has not known from childhood. We were royal kinsmen when this queen was picking apples in the orchard of Groby Hall. Your mother was born a Beauchamp, she married into the Nevilles, so I doubt that she has much to learn about being a great lady of England – certainly not from Elizabeth Woodville,’ he adds quietly.
‘But Father—’ Isabel is so distressed that she cannot stop herself speaking out. ‘Should we not serve the queen if she has asked for us? Or at any rate shouldn’t I go? Anne is too young, but shouldn’t I go to court?’
He looks at her as if he despises her longing to be in the centre of things, at the court of the queen, at the heart of the kingdom, seeing the king every day, living in the royal palaces, beautifully dressed, in a court newly come to power, the rooms filled with music, the walls bright with tapestries, the court at play, celebrating their triumph.
‘Anne may be young, but she judges better than you,’ he says coldly. ‘Do you question me?’
She drops into a curtsey and lowers her head. ‘No, my lord. Never. Of course not.’
‘You can go,’ he says, as if he is tired of both of us. We scurry from the room like mice that have felt the breath of a cat on their little furry backs. When we are safely outside in his presence chamber and the door is shut behind us I nod to Isabel and say: ‘There! I was right. We don’t like the queen.’
WARWICK CASTLE, SPRING 1468
We don’t like the queen. In the early years of her marriage she encourages her husband the king to turn against my father: his earliest and best friend, the man who made him king and gave him a kingdom. They take the great seal of estate from my uncle George, and dismiss him from his great office of Lord Chancellor, they send my father as an envoy to France and then play him false by making a private treaty with the rival Burgundy behind his back. My father is furious with the king and blames the queen and her family for advising him against his true interests but in favour of her Burgundy kinsman. Worst of all, King Edward sends his sister Margaret to marry the Duke of Burgundy. All my father’s work with the great power of France is spoiled by this sudden friendliness with the enemy. Edward will make an enemy of France and all my father’s work in making friends with them will be for nothing.
And the weddings that the queen forges to bring her family into greatness! The moment she is crowned she captures almost every well-born wealthy young man in England for her hundreds of sisters. Young Henry Stafford the Duke of Buckingham, who my parents had picked out for me, she bundles into marriage with her sister Katherine – the little girl who sat on our table at the coronation dinner. The child born and raised in a country house at Grafton becomes a duchess. Though the two of them are no older than me, the queen marries them to each other anyway, and brings them up in her household, as her wards, guarding the Stafford fortune for her own profit. My mother says that the Staffords, who are as proud as anyone in England, will never forgive her for this, and neither will we. Little Henry looks as sick as if someone had poisoned him. He can trace his parentage back to the Kings of England and he is married to little Katherine Woodville and has a man who was nothing more than a squire as his father-in-law.
Her brothers she marries off to anyone with a fortune or a title. Her handsome brother Anthony gets a wife whose title makes him Baron Scales; but the queen makes no proposal for us. It is as if the moment that Father said that we would not go to her court we ceased to exist for her. She makes no offer for either Isabel or me. My mother remarks to my father that we would never have stooped to one of the Rivers – however high they might try to fling themselves upwards – but it means that I have no marriage arranged for me though I will be twelve in June, and it is even worse for Isabel, stuck in my mother’s train as her maid in waiting, and no husband in sight though she is sixteen. Since my mother was betrothed when she was just out of the cradle, and was wedded and bedded by the age of fourteen, Isabel feels more and more impatient, more and more as if she will be left behind in this race to the altar. We seem to have disappeared, like girls under a spell in a fairytale, while Queen Elizabeth marries all her sisters and her cousins to every wealthy young nobleman in England.
‘Perhaps you’ll marry a foreign prince,’ I say, trying to console Isabel. ‘When we go back home to Calais, Father will find you a prince of France. They must be planning something like that for us.’
We are in the ladies’ chamber at Warwick Castle, supposed to be drawing. Isabel has a fine sketch of the landscape from the window before her and I have a scrawl which is supposed to be a bunch of primroses, newly picked from the banks of the Avon, beside Richard’s lute.
‘You’re such a fool,’ she says crushingly. ‘What good would a prince of France do us? We need a connection to the throne of England. There’s the new king on the throne, there’s his wife who gives him nothing but girls. We need to be in the line of succession. We need to get closer. You are as stupid as a goose girl.’
I don’t even flare up at the insult. ‘Why do we need a connection to the throne of England?’
‘Our father did not put the York house on the throne of England to oblige them,’ she explains. ‘Our father put the Yorks on the throne so that he might command them. Father was going to rule England from behind the York throne. Edward was like a younger brother to him, Father was going to be his master. Everyone knows that.’
Not me. I had thought that my father had fought for the Yorks because they were the rightful heirs, because the queen Margaret of Anjou was a bad woman and because the king had fallen asleep.
‘But now that King Edward is advised by no-one but his wife and her family then we will have to join that family circle to rule him,’ she says. ‘You and I will marry his brothers the royal dukes, if Mother can possibly get them for us.’
I feel myself flush. ‘You mean that I would marry Richard?’
‘You can’t like him!’ She bursts into laughter. ‘He’s so dark-haired and olive-skinned and awkward . . .’
‘He’s strong,’ I say at random. ‘He can ride anything. And he’s brave, and . . .’
‘If you want a horseman for a husband why not marry John the groom?’
‘But are you sure they are going to arrange it? When will we marry?’
‘Father is determined on it,’ she says, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘But She is certain to try to stop it. She won’t want the king’s brothers married to anyone but her family and friends. She won’t want us all at court, showing her up, showing everyone how a truly great English family behaves. She spends all her time trying to take the king away from Father because she knows Father tells him the truth and gives him good advice, because she knows Father advises the king against her.’
‘Has Father asked the king for permission? For us to marry?’
‘He’s going to do it while he is at court,’ she says. ‘He could be asking him now: today, right this moment. And then we two will be betrothed – both of us – and to the brothers of the King of England. We will be royal duchesses. We will outrank the queen’s mother, Jacquetta, we will outrank the king’s mother, Duchess Cecily.
We will be the first ladies of England after the queen herself.’
I gape at her.
‘Who else should we be?’ she demands. ‘When you think who our father is? Of course we should be the first ladies of England.’
‘And if King Edward has no son,’ I say slowly, thinking aloud, ‘then his brother George will be king when he dies.’
Isabel hugs me in her delight. ‘Yes! Exactly! George Duke of Clarence.’ She is laughing with joy. ‘He will be King of England and I will be queen.’
I pause, quite awestruck at the thought of my sister becoming queen. ‘Queen Isabel,’ I say.
She nods. ‘I’ve always thought it sounded well.’
‘Izzy, you will be so grand!’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘And you will be a duchess beside me always. You will be the first lady of my household. We shall have such clothes!’
‘But if you live a long time, and have no sons either, and then George dies, then Richard will be the next heir and the next queen will be me: Queen Anne.’
At once her smile fades. ‘No, that’s not very likely at all.’
My father comes back from the court in stony silence. Dinner is served in the great hall of Warwick Castle, where hundreds of our men sit down to eat. The hall buzzes with the clatter of plates and the clash of mugs and the scrape of knife on trencher, but at the top table where my father sits and glowers, we eat in total silence. My mother sits on his right-hand side, her eyes on the table of the ladies in waiting, alert to any misbehaviour. Richard sits on his left, watchful and quiet. Isabel sits next to my mother, frightened into silence, and I come last as usual. I don’t know what has happened. I have to find someone to tell me.
I get hold of our half-sister Margaret. She may be Father’s bastard but he has recognised her from her birth and Mother paid for her upbringing and keeps her among her ladies in waiting, a trusted confidante. She is now married to one of Father’s tenants, Sir Richard Huddlestone, and though she is a grown woman of twenty-three and always knows everything, she – unlike everyone else – will tell me.