The Last Daughter

by Nicola Cornick

  ‘Perhaps I would,’ I said, ‘if you use your influence to persuade the King to release his other nephew from the Tower,’ I said, hurt making me cruel, ‘instead of salving your conscience by teaching him swordplay and archery, and pretending that it is right that his uncle keeps him in captivity like a pet animal.’

  Francis walked out then and I was left with my grief that I had pushed him further from me still. Everyone was unhappy that year; it felt as though the country tiptoed on splinters of glass as matters grew worse and worse. Then the King’s only son died and the court was plunged into mourning.

  ‘There are rumours that the King is to put away his wife and seek another,’ my mother said waspishly to me. ‘No doubt your husband will do the same, for you give him scant attention and he is surrounded by the prettiest women at court.’

  I ignored her. It was true that there were many women at court now who were younger and prettier than I was, including the King’s nieces who, with their mother, had finally emerged from sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. It made for the most extraordinary brew of scandal and gossip. I felt as though I were looking through a mirror at a distorted image of what the world should be like, where two factions who despised each other with a deep and visceral hatred pretended to live in harmony. Something, I thought, was going to snap, and soon.

  One day I was walking in the pleasure gardens, along the little winding paths beneath the sweet-scented trees. I walked alone because I had no appetite for company even though there were plenty who would have accompanied me had I given the word. Today not even the sight of the climbing rose on the trellis, or the ivy entwined around the old trees, could bring me a sense of peace. The air felt heavy, as though a storm was coming, and I sat down on a turfed bench beside a pool and closed my eyes for a moment.

  A shadow fell across me, a woman, alone like me. I recognised her and rose, instinctively intending to curtsey, but she stopped me with a hand on my arm.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ I said.

  ‘I am Dame Elizabeth Grey now,’ Elizabeth Woodville said with the ghost of a pale smile. ‘I am the one approaching you for a favour, Lady Lovell.’

  I wished she would not. Elizabeth Woodville and I had never been friends, not even in the days when her husband had been alive, for we had clung fast to our factional loyalties. Now, though, she took a seat beside me and arranged the dove-grey folds of her skirts neatly. She was still almost as beautiful as she had been ten years before and still as cold. Her blue gaze appraised me, no softer than it had been when she was queen and I the wife of a minor baron far beneath her notice.

  ‘I need your help,’ she said. ‘A time is coming when I shall need to know that my son is safe. I wish to entrust his care to you.’

  I gaped at her. Not only was she speaking treason – and every rustle of a leaf and every snap of a twig about us might indicate the presence of a spy – but her words made no sense to me at all. Richard, her son, was still in the Tower of London, kept safe from the world, so we were told, that he might pursue his education in peace, away from those who would use the Prince to further their own ambitious ends.

  ‘Surely,’ I said, when I had regained my breath, ‘his uncle will see to his safety.’

  She smiled, a cold smile that moved her lips but failed to touch her eyes. ‘Of course,’ she said. She snapped off a leaf or two of sage from the plant beside us and rubbed them thoughtfully between her fingers. The smell of mint and bitterness was almost overwhelming.

  ‘But should there come a time when he is unable to do so,’ she said, ‘then I ask you to take his place.’

  I stared at her. ‘I cannot see what I could do,’ I said bluntly. ‘I would have no power to protect him—’

  She touched the lodestar pendant at my throat, a light touch, almost as though she was afraid that she might vanish in a puff of smoke. ‘You have this,’ she said.

  For a moment I stared at her in stupefaction. Then I remembered that Ginevra, when she had first given me the lodestar, had been tirewoman to Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta the witch. I put my own hand up now to cover the stone, as though to protect it.

  ‘You know about the lodestar,’ I said.

  ‘I recognised it,’ Elizabeth said. ‘My mother tried to bind its power but it was too dangerous. Yet you wear it like a jewel.’

  ‘It saved my life,’ I said. ‘It is my talisman and I am its protector.’

  She turned those pale eyes on me again. There was something very disturbing about her gaze. For all that I wore the stone, it felt as though she was the one who could see the future.

  ‘I have seen its power,’ she said. ‘I know it will save my son.’ She stood up. ‘Be ready,’ she said, ‘if either the King or I should send Richard to you.’

  She walked away from me down the winding path and I watched her go, watched as the brightly coloured knots of courtiers parted to let her through, saw the curious glances, the sly smiles, and the calculations of those who wondered whether Elizabeth Woodville was still a force to be reckoned with. And then I sat there, wondering if it were true, if I had the power to protect another woman’s child, and if I would be called upon to use it.

  The distorted mirror smashed one day in the year fourteen eighty-five.

  I had known that there would be an invasion; had known it from the very moment that Gloucester had taken the throne from his oldest nephew two years before. My only surprise had been that he himself had not had the wit to see it. Or perhaps he had, and he thought that he was strong enough to win. Whatever the case, in the spring of that year, news came of an invasion by Henry Tudor, Francis went to the south coast to oversee the provisioning of the royal fleet, and I returned home to Minster Lovell.

  Francis came to me there one day at the start of August. I had been working in the kitchen gardens for I found that being out in the open air was all that could lift my spirits these days. Outside, seeing the way that nature continued to turn regardless of the follies of men, gave me comfort and an obscure hope that one day the world might turn into the light again.

  I was in my oldest clothes and had soil smeared across my apron and very likely my face as well. When I looked up from my weeding, a man and a boy were standing beneath the laden branches of the apple tree on the edge of the orchard. They were plainly dressed, like countrymen, like me, in fact. It was a moment before I recognised Francis and then I got to my feet, a little stiff from kneeling and hurried across to him.

  ‘You should have told me you were coming,’ I said. ‘We are unprepared—’

  He put out a hand to stop my flow of words. ‘No one must know I was here,’ he said. He touched the boy’s back lightly. ‘I’ve brought Richard to stay with you here. The King commands it. Tell no one who he is. He will be safe here for a little while.’ He took my hands in his despite their dirt. ‘Henry Tudor will invade and soon. If there is a battle…’ He swallowed hard. ‘I have made provision for you, Anne. Two manors that will be yours alone, for you and any future children you may have should you remarry’ – I made a move of protest but he continued – ‘I will come back as soon as I may, but if I do not…’ He hesitated. ‘I am leaving Franke to protect both you and Richard. He will guard you with his life.’

  ‘I am sure he will detest that charge,’ I said. I tried for a light tone, but my voice broke on the words. ‘He will want to fight alongside you.’

  There was nothing else to say. For two long years Francis and I had been estranged, and now that I was about to lose him, I regretted it bitterly. I had loved him since I was six years old and at last I saw that in doing so, I had expected too much of him. He’d told me of his imperfections but I had held him to too high a standard. In my own way I had been as culpable as he.

  I stepped into his arms, and drew him close, and I thought: Oh, how much I have missed this. What a fool I have been.

  Francis buried his face in my hair and I felt the desperation in his touch and met it openly and with love as I held him to me. When we stepped b
ack, I was crying and I did not care who saw it.

  ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘Godspeed you safely back to me again.’ I wrapped my arms about myself and thought of Francis’ words, of the provision he had made for me, of the children we had never had. That was the bitterest pill of all.

  The boy had watched us in silence, and as Francis walked away, he looked at me with his mother’s clear blue eyes and her impenetrable coolness. Richard Plantagenet, not even twelve years old, too young for all he had witnessed, too vulnerable to be at the mercy of this sort of fate. It was not a conscious decision, but in that moment, I wrapped him tight in a hug and after an initial resistance I felt him melt and he clung to me, a boy still in need of a mother’s comfort.

  ‘All will be well,’ I promised him. I felt like a tigress suddenly with one cub to protect. ‘I will guard you with my life and Francis’ – I swallowed hard – ‘he will return. Francis always comes back.’

  Chapter 19

  Serena

  Minster Lovell, July 2010

  Something had woken her. She lay still whilst the last vestiges of sleep drained from her mind. The room was bright with moonlight that slid through a gap in the curtain and fell on the rumpled covers of Caitlin’s empty bed beside hers. She knew her sister must have slipped out to meet Leo again. Where else would she be on a hot summer night? The knowledge, previously like sandpaper against her mixed-up emotions, mattered far less now that she knew Jack liked her so much. She gave a little wriggle of pleasure.

  She was about to turn over and go back to sleep when she noticed that Caitlin’s red leather knapsack was missing from the chair beside the bed. She felt a touch of anxiety then and turning on the light, she saw that a few other bits and pieces had gone as well; the well-worn teddy from the pillow, Caitlin’s beaded bracelet, her Foo Fighters T-shirt, her gold pendant and the book she had half finished. She threw back the thin blanket and jumped out of bed.

  A quick, furtive sort through Caitlin’s drawer showed more items missing. Suddenly urgent, she groped for her shoes and slipped a coat over her pyjamas although she wasn’t in the least cold.

  Down the stairs quick as a mouse, quiet as a thief, avoiding the creaking step, tiptoeing over the stone floor… She did not want to wake her grandfather. He would be utterly mortified to know that Caitlin was running away. He would think that he had done something wrong or failed in some way. Serena felt a pang of fear. She had to protect him from that. And Caitlin… what was she thinking? It was one thing to sleep with Leo but it was quite another to run off with him… Her pulse quickened. She didn’t want to interfere. She really did not. But if Caitlin was going to do something so foolish, so short-sighted, she had to make her see sense.

  The latch of the door into the walled garden was very heavy but it lifted silently and the garden outside was such bright white and black in the moonlight that it looked like a chessboard. She paused on the gravel path, listening. She knew that Caitlin and Leo had been meeting in the ruin of the Old Hall. Her sister had told her all the intimate details with the bright, confiding openness that had led to Serena putting her hands over her ears – too much information. But now she could see nothing, no one, moving in the landscape. The hall lay still and silent, the moonlight pitiless on its old grey walls.

  It was as she was standing there that she felt the change come over her, first as a ripple of disquiet, then as a whisper of fear and finally as a clutch of terror. It was visceral and she felt it instinctively, in her bones. Caitlin was in terrible danger.

  She looked back only once. The light was still on in her bedroom window, a warm reassuring glow, the familiar world as she had known it up to this point. She ran then, regardless of the loudness of her footsteps on the gravel, down the path and out of the gate. Caught up in urgency and terror although she did not know why, her legs were shaky and her heart was pounding. The tufts of dry summer grass tripped her and the stones scored her bare feet. She could not keep up the pace; already she had a stitch in her side.

  Then she saw Caitlin silhouetted against the moon-washed walls of the ruin. Her sister was skipping lightly over the stones, smiling, happy, the knapsack in her right hand. Serena felt the clutch of terror again. She shouted.

  ‘Caitlin!’

  Caitlin looked up, pinned for a second in the bright glare of the waxing moon. Serena saw a shadow fall across her sister, a figure approaching from out of the dark. She was still running, the breeze on her face, the air tearing in her lungs but she knew with despair that she would not be in time. She saw the figure raise a hand to take the bag from Caitlin. There was a struggle – she saw it only in snatches of light as the moon fell on the two of them. Caitlin had fallen and the other figure was standing over her and then there was a flash, brighter than the brightest fireworks she had ever seen. For a moment the entire hall seemed to be illuminated like a film set, but it was not the ruin that she knew so well. This was a different Minster Lovell, with tall towers and encircling walls and a water gate beside the river where a boat was moored… She saw Caitlin vanish, literally disappear before her eyes, and she screamed and screamed. Then the light grew like a great explosion and she raised a hand to shield her eyes and fell down and down through the dark.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Warren,’ Inspector Litton said. She sounded utterly composed, as though she had heard many more improbable witness statements than this in her time. Very likely, Serena thought, she had. They were in the same bare little interview room as before and Serena had just finished recounting her memory of that fateful night.

  ‘It was good of you to come straight in this morning to tell us,’ Inspector Litton said.

  ‘You look as though you haven’t slept,’ the sergeant put in sympathetically.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Serena said. ‘Not much.’

  There was silence.

  ‘If we could pick up on a few points?’ Inspector Litton arched her brows.

  ‘Of course,’ Serena said wearily.

  ‘You say that Caitlin’s knapsack had gone,’ Inspector Litton said, ‘and with it a few items?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Serena said.

  ‘Check the original statements for that, sergeant,’ Inspector Litton said. ‘I don’t believe anyone mentioned it as missing at the time. And see whether the rucksack and any of the items Miss Warren listed were found during any of the searches.’

  Ratcliffe nodded, making a note on his empty writing pad in front of him. Neither he nor the inspector moved. They were watching her unblinkingly. It was slightly unnerving.

  ‘You say that you thought your sister was intending to run off with Mr Leo Whitelock, her boyfriend,’ Inspector Litton said.

  ‘That was my initial assumption,’ Serena said. ‘They had become very close and… well, I couldn’t imagine why else she would run away.’

  ‘Mr Whitelock has an alibi for the night of 25 July 2010,’ Sergeant Ratcliffe said. ‘It was checked at the time. He was working at the pub and hadn’t finished tidying up after closing time. The landlady confirmed he was on the premises.’

  ‘Speak to him again,’ Inspector Litton said. ‘And to the landlady.’

  Another squiggle joined the hieroglyphs on the sergeant’s writing pad.

  ‘You said that it was a woman’s figure you saw approaching your sister that night,’ Inspector Litton said to Serena. ‘Are you certain of that?’

  ‘I’m certain of nothing,’ Serena said honestly, ‘but that was the impression I had.’

  The inspector nodded. ‘And you also said that when this person tried to take the knapsack from Caitlin there was a flash of light so bright that you were blinded by it. And when you looked again, your sister had vanished.’

  ‘No,’ Serena said. ‘I was still looking at Caitlin, still seeing her, when she disappeared.’ She shrugged a little helplessly. ‘I know it sounds absurd but she really did vanish in front of my eyes. Or so it seemed.’

  ‘It’s easy to become confused,’ Inspector Litton said dismissively, �
��especially when you are remembering something from a long time ago and’ – her cold blue gaze considered Serena – ‘something that was evidently so traumatic – the disappearance of your sister – that you promptly erased the memory from your mind.’ She sighed, shuffling a few papers. ‘We’ll need you to talk to a psychologist, of course—’

  ‘If you’re willing,’ the sergeant put in, earning himself a glare.

  ‘But I think you will probably find that the bright white light was a figment of your imagination,’ the inspector finished. ‘A part of the trauma, the physical manifestation of the mind closing down, if you will.’

  ‘I see,’ Serena said, clamping down on the urge to tell Inspector Litton that evidently she didn’t need a psychologist’s input since she was such an expert. ‘I’m happy to talk to anyone you wish,’ she said.

  ‘And we’re grateful,’ Ratcliffe said warmly. ‘This can’t have been easy for you.’

  ‘A pity you weren’t able to get a closer look at the assailant,’ Inspector Litton grumbled. ‘That would have been really helpful.’

  ‘That woman has all the empathy of a crocodile,’ Serena said to Sergeant Ratcliffe as he escorted her back to reception. She couldn’t hold it in any longer. ‘Don’t the police have courses in emotional intelligence?’

  ‘Inspector Litton’s been on all of them,’ Ratcliffe said lugubriously. ‘You’ve either got it or you haven’t.’ He shook her hand. ‘Thank you, Miss Warren. We’ll be in touch.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ Serena said, sighing.

  She felt cold when she was out on the street. Although it was almost April and the sun, when it was out, was warm, the morning sky over Oxford was a uniform grey and the wind was cool. She pulled her scarf more closely around her neck and buttoned up her coat. She’d texted both Jack and Lizzie to tell them briefly what had happened; Jack was in Oxford anyway and said he would meet her in St Giles when she was ready. Lizzie rang as Serena was walking up Cornmarket Street.