Anne O'Brien

by Virgin Widow (epub)

  ‘Will you wed me? With Edward of Lancaster’s blood on my hands?’ he asked again when I still hesitated, suspended in my own indecision.

  Richard needed honesty from me at this time more than ever before. So I would give it. ‘I said I would consider marriage and I will. I would like this night to do so. Give me until tomorrow, Richard, and I will give you my answer.’

  It tore my heart to do it, to see the flicker, the faintest flicker of doubt that I had sown in his mind. But I would weigh his words and make my decision. And in the way of a woman who had been made to feel insecure, unwanted, unloved—and had still not heard the man who would wed her actually speak the words that his love was hers!—I would keep him waiting just a little while.

  Richard stepped back. Bowed formally.

  ‘Until tomorrow, lady.’

  How difficult it was to balance one side against the other. I had long acknowledged that the boy I had known had gone for good. Now I was faced with the man. Could I love him, respect him? Put all the past behind me with the guilt and recriminations? If I couldn’t, as Richard had intimated, there was no comfortable path forwards for us.

  One thing was clear. This was not the simple continuation of our childhood relationship, but a different and complicated leap into a world of power and political scheming. How strange it was. We had so many shared memories, such intimate knowledge of each other and yet…It was as if the foundations were the same but the walls were different. Different construction, different perspectives. I saw in this man a wielder of power, a man who would enjoy the rewards of it. I thought he might be ruthless in getting his own way. He was certainly more reserved, more taciturn than he had ever been, more unapproachable. Could I truly love him?

  ‘Is it possible for a woman to love a man who has blood on his hands?’ I asked Margery as she braided my hair.

  ‘Depends whose blood, and why it lies there, my lady.’ She attacked a knot with vigour.

  ‘Because the man who was killed was a danger to others, and to the kingdom.’

  ‘If you mean my lord of Gloucester’s dispatching of the Prince of Lancaster…Good riddance, I say!’

  I sighed. I would get no fair balancing of judgement here.

  How much blood had my mother been forced to accept on my father’s hands? Too much, many would say, and not all in battle. Yet she had remained true to him, loyal until the day of his death. Had she ever questioned, ever cast recrimination, as I was now doing? Of course she had. She would not be the woman she was if she had accepted all without judgement.

  ‘Ask yourself this, lady.’ Margery left me to my solitary contemplations. ‘If the Prince could have killed Gloucester, would he have given it more than a passing thought? Even if it was stabbing him in the back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why, then, do you need to worry your sleep?’

  I presumed that Richard had spent as troubled a night as I since he was at my door barely after dawn. And launched into his obviously prepared speech before I had pushed aside my cup and platter. Gone was the cold composure, the careful distancing. Here was the boy I had loved, full of tense energy. For the first time I felt that the outcome between us mattered to Richard on a purely personal level.

  ‘Before you give me your decision, let me say this, Anne. Whatever the outcome…you have my love, my regard. There will be no compulsion…’

  All my intentions of graciously soft and smooth words fled. ‘No compulsion? You’ll hound me unmercifully until you get your own way! We both know it, so don’t tell me that you’ll allow me to retire unwed, or accept the hand of another.’

  ‘Am I so obstinate?’ I saw the flare of temper. ‘Not as obstinate as you—’

  I stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Hear my decision first. Then tell me I’m obstinate. I accept what you did. I acknowledge the need. I’ll not allow the Prince of Lancaster to stand between us in death as he did in life. He will not be a restless ghost to divide us.’

  Richard flexed his shoulders as if a weight had been lifted. I could see the storm of relief move through him. So I would leap the second barrier. ‘Now I need to know this—do you love me, Richard?’

  ‘You know that I do.’

  ‘No, I don’t! When we were together at Court, when we were young, then I knew, or I thought I did. Even when we were at Warwick and all was so difficult…But so much has happened since. Treachery and exile for both of us. I am not so ingenuous, believing that love will overcome all. We are so taken up with power and inheritance, the demands of Clarence, the threat of renewed warfare. You have barely exchanged a handful of words with me since my return to Court. You were driven to abduct me, but even then it was all dealing and negotiation. How do I know that you love me? You have not said so.’ I could feel my anxieties rising again as the words poured out. ‘I will wed you, but my fears have not been laid to rest. For all I still know, you want my inheritance more than you want me.’

  ‘We’ve been over this before, Anne. I thought…’ He looked beleaguered.

  ‘Richard…I understand what you say, but I’ve spent an unconscionable length of time as a kitchen maid because of it. I am carried along like a twig, helplessly into every ripple and eddy of a stream in full flood, and I don’t like it. Do you love me, Richard? We were children when we last spoke of this. If your heart has changed…I would rather know the truth. I will marry you because it is in the best interests of both of us. I can accept that. But do you love me, because my heart aches for you?’ I could not make it plainer. I never thought I would lay myself open to such possibility of hurt, but I had done just that.

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘I love you with every bone in my body.’

  I thought he was smiling at me. I would not have it. ‘You have been distant and silent, Richard, keeping me from your confidence. Deliberately so to my mind. And don’t smile at me! I am no longer a child to be patronised!’

  The smile vanished. ‘This seems to be the day for truth. Your intuition is as strong as ever.’ Amusement glimmered again before solemnity set it. ‘I stand accused and am guilty, but in my own defence I would say this. My purpose, first and last, was always to protect you. Clarence would stop at nothing to block our marriage. I could not put myself weakly into his hands by singling you out. It was better that he think I was uninterested or looking elsewhere for a wife. So I remained cold and distant, as you rightly say. I did not seek you out. I did not ask you to dance. Look at what happened when he discovered my interest? He was going to parcel you off to Tewkesbury; then, when time ran out, he put you into his kitchens! I had to safeguard you until I could marry you and protect you myself. I couldn’t rely on Edward, so all I could do was lure Clarence into thinking that all was at an end between us. That he could plot to take your inheritance without fear of redress.’

  ‘You kept your distance to protect me.’ I could feel the first knots begin to untie, the fist of ice to melt.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish I’d known. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘And have you reveal it to Isabel?’

  ‘I would never have done such a thing! I am not indiscreet!’

  ‘In all honesty, I was uncertain how close your sister was in Clarence’s plans, or how matters stood between the two of you. I dared not risk it.’

  Which reasoning I might accept. But, ‘You never said you loved me,’ I challenged, returning to my primary grievance.

  ‘I kissed you!’

  ‘A chaste salute when you brought me here and I reeked of tallow. Unless you count the…the assault on my person at Westminster.’

  ‘Assault? Which assault?’ His brows rose expressively, annoyingly.

  ‘So it seemed to me. I was swept up, all but smothered, and dropped back on my feet with an avowal that you would have me against all odds. I don’t know if that was love. Your kiss was no wooing, I swear! I don’t even know if you enjoyed it!’

  Richard laughed outright as
light dawned. ‘Anne, my love, my heart! I enjoyed it. My only excuse—that my control was not at its best. All I wanted at that moment was to keep you with me, safely behind locked doors, never to let you out of my sight.’ He cocked his head as I remembered him doing as a child. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Yes…no. That doesn’t matter!’ I glared, horribly flustered.

  ‘Then I see that I must put things right, so that they do matter.’ Richard advanced. ‘That is—if you wish it, lady.’

  I did. Oh, I did. After all that had separated us I had no intention of holding back with a simper and virginal modesty. So it was not Richard who covered the distance between us in the end. I took the step, I lifted my arms to clip around his neck to pull him close, I lifted my face to encourage his kisses. But it was Richard who spoke the words. For both of us.

  ‘I love you.’ He sighed them against my mouth. ‘You are the half of me that makes me whole. My other self.’

  ‘And I love you.’

  There was no distance between there and the bed, for two lovers of a consenting mind.

  ‘I should go…’ Richard murmured reluctantly, continuing to press his mouth all along the line of my jaw to the soft skin below my ear.

  I held on, fingers burrowed into his tunic. ‘You will notice, dear Richard, that I have no chaperon.’

  ‘Where is she?’ His mouth moved deliciously to where the blood beat at the base of my throat.

  ‘Gone to visit her family.’ I gasped as his lips burned. ‘She’ll not be back for hours…’

  ‘I should go…’

  ‘Stay with me,’ I whispered against his lips. Nothing would separate us now, even though the sun illuminated the room with its sharp brilliance, hardly setting the mood for a subtle seduction. Chastity was a fine commodity for a righteous woman, but desire was in my mind. Nothing would separate us—except for the one omission that leapt starkly before my eyes. The omission that I could sidestep no longer.

  ‘There’s something you should know,’ I warned him tentatively, pulling on Richard’s shoulder.

  ‘It can wait,’ he murmured against the soft angle where neck meets shoulder, applying himself, quite expertly, to ribbons and laces. ‘Everything can wait.’

  ‘It can’t!’

  He would discover anyway, but I would rather he knew before the event. So I told him, fighting to ward off that illogical sense of shame. Sitting on my bed, I told him the how and where and why of it, forcing myself to watch the reaction on his face. Did I tell him of the terrifying closeness between Margaret and her son that curdled my stomach? No, I did not. Some things were beyond me to talk about. I kept them locked tight in my heart, like a damaged jewel at the bottom of a casket. I did not tell Richard that, but as I told him the rest the tears that had never fallen then dripped silently down my cheeks into the lace of my collar. The first and only tears I had shed over the Prince since that dreadful night. Then I found that I could no longer speak, for on a shattering sob I could not stop the tears, as if I wept at last for myself, for my father’s death, for the loss of my mother and my sister. Even more ashamed, I covered my face with my hands and turned away. But Richard would not allow me to grieve alone. He held me silently within the shelter of his arms until I could cry no more.

  The storm passed. Richard mopped prosaically at my wet cheeks. ‘I must look terrible,’ I sniffed, horrified with the prospect of red and swollen eyelids.

  ‘Never to me,’ he stated bluntly, making me look up at him, at the raw pain in his face. ‘I didn’t know, Anne.’

  ‘The whole Angevin Court did.’ The old mortification swept over me. ‘I felt dishonoured beyond bearing.’

  ‘He never touched you.’

  ‘Not without six layers of clothing between us.’ My voice caught on the wretched attempt at humour.

  There was no answering gleam in Richard. Rather his eyes had a flat and hard glitter, as did his reply. ‘I despise him for it. I would kill him again, today, tomorrow, and thank God as I spilled his blood, for inflicting that on you.’ The low pronouncement was far deadlier than any blaze of fury.

  ‘It was not entirely his own doing,’ I felt driven to excuse.

  ‘Ha! God’s Blood!’ His hands tightened about mine. ‘Would I degrade you publicly at the insistence of my mother?’

  No, he would not. I knew beyond doubt that Richard would never put me through such degradation. ‘I just thought I should tell you.’

  ‘Well, now you have. So there’s an end to it.’ Such a casual dismissal, I might be piqued by it, except that I knew his motive. There was nothing casual about Richard of Gloucester. He would draw my thoughts away from the horrors of the past, any inclination I might have to dwell on them. I could feel by the tension in his shoulders that his own anger had not dissipated to any degree.

  ‘Thank you.’ I kissed him. ‘An end to it. A beginning for us.’ And saw at last the hot temper begin to loose its grip as his mouth curved into the hint of a smile.

  ‘Your courage astounds me,’ he said. ‘And now I’ll do all in my power to make you forget. It has no part in our life together.’ His smile widened. ‘I find that I am not sorry that you are a virgin widow, after all. My kisses were an assault, did you say?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Let me make amends.’

  As the bars of sun spread across the quilt, making of it a strangely gilded prison, Richard proceeded to teach me, his virgin widow, step by amazing step, all the things the Prince had callously retreated from. I gloried in it, Neville pride subsumed beneath Plantagenet possession. Who possessed whom? I swear Richard’s control was not what he thought it to be when he showed me how passion can make a woman forget the worst of experiences, whilst I was astonished at what I did not know, eager to learn, delighted with my new knowledge. He made love to me as I would have expected, with a thorough intensity, a consideration, as if I were the centre of his world.

  He was, for sure, the centre of mine. And if an assault was what it was, I welcomed it. Glowed in response to the onslaught of mouth and hands. Curled my fingers into his dark hair as he wound mine into a living shackle around his wrist. Shivered beneath the power of a fluidly muscled body.

  I cried out when Richard made me his. A glorious victory.

  At last I lay beside him as my breathing settled, as did his, as sleep stole up on us. Richard was rarely at rest, I mused, as I simply lay and watched him, the lines about his mouth relaxed, the firmly determined mouth a little soft. There was the hint of vulnerability again, when he was unguarded. So much energy to stir and drive him. Where would it take him, and where would it take me as his wife?

  I too fell asleep.

  ‘What happens to me now?’ I asked, allowing the nails of my right hand to track across the hollow of his back, splaying my fingers against the sleek muscles of his hip. Richard shivered. One of my new skills, happily practised, to undermine his control.

  Richard grunted in pleasure, words muffled with his face buried in the pillow. ‘You must stay here.’

  ‘Indefinitely?’

  At last he turned his head. ‘Impatient as ever!’ But with his hand on my cheek, the lips that followed were infinitely loving.

  ‘I am. Can I talk to you about my mother?’ And silently cursed myself as immediately I saw the warmth and openness of the past hours drain away. We might pretend that all was put to rights between us, but there were still shadows that disturbed him and left me uncomfortably aware of the dark corners of my ignorance.

  ‘I know it brings you grief, Anne, but not now. Not yet. I’ve not forgotten her and I know you want a settlement for her.’

  ‘And her release,’ I persisted. ‘I won’t have her kept in Beaulieu for the rest of her life.’

  ‘There are difficulties there…’

  ‘I don’t understand why…’

  ‘Later. I will do what I can, I promise it. When the time is right. Does that satisfy you?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why did I think i
t would?’ A wry twist of his lips. ‘But I swear on my honour that I will not forget. Allow me a little space in which to manoeuvre.’

  ‘And exactly how would you plan to manoeuvre now…?’ My fingers stroked, lured.

  ‘I’ll show you…’

  And he did.

  I had to be content. I had so much else to be happy with. It shames me, but my own joy filled my heart to the exclusion of all else.

  Edward was back, leaving the nobility of the Welsh Marches simmering in discontented peace. Richard was summoned to report. Now perhaps my own future would be settled.

  ‘What does the King say about me?’ I asked Richard as soon as he crossed the threshold. The peace, the seclusion of my sanctuary, was beginning to pall.

  ‘Nothing that pleases me.’

  I had wanted plain speaking, had I not? I got it and didn’t like what I heard. ‘He won’t support us against Clarence?’ My brows rose at the perfidy of it. ‘He was fulsome enough in his praise for me as a prospective wife when you first asked his permission.’

  ‘Nothing quite so definite. But you know how Edward is. He dislikes to commit himself to anything without some escape route if he becomes hard pressed.’ Richard bared his teeth at the memory of some edgy conversation with his brother. ‘The King’s moved to play fast and loose with any promises he’s made in the past. With the Welsh threat on his mind he wants Clarence with him, not against him. We knew that was so, but I’d hoped he would not be so easily swayed. And Clarence—God damn him!—is breathing fire and damnation over this whole business.’

  ‘So does the King want us to marry or not?’

  ‘He’s considering it again.’