When the feasting was done and the tables in the center of the chamber cleared away for dancing, the minstrels broke into a pavane. King Richard offered his hand to Queen Anne, and they took their places on the floor. I noted that the head minstrel had slowed the pace for Queen Anne’s sake, for she was as delicate as a snowdrop. Even this small exertion soon tired her, however, and by the time the brief melody had ended, she was out of breath. King Richard led her back to the dais and took his seat beside her.
I danced with my cousin, Jack de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, King Richard’s nephew by his older sister, Lisa. Jack was a merry fellow with bright eyes and red cheeks who loved to jest and place wagers and was never still. I was twirling under his raised hand and laughing at a joke he’d made when, from the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something that stilled my gaiety. At the back of the hall, coming toward the dais, a noble lady dragged herself forward, leaning heavily on a retainer’s arm.
“ ’Tis the Countess of Warwick—” Jack murmured. “She never leaves Middleham . . . never leaves her grandson’s side.”
I saw that Jack had gone pale. He turned his eyes to the king and queen, and I followed the direction of his gaze. They were frozen in the moment, their eyes riveted on the countess, their faces white as phantoms.
Clad in a black robe and mantle, unadorned by jewelry, the queen’s mother, the Countess of Warwick, shuffled forward, her face contorted in anguish. Her dark figure contrasted strangely with the glittering jewel-colored silks and velvets of the other guests. The minstrels ceased their song and a hush fell over the hall. We stared, then opened a path for her. She reached the dais and stood before her daughter and King Richard, her mouth working with emotion. Slowly, so slowly they didn’t seem to move, the king and queen rose from their chairs.
“Ned,” the countess said,“Ned, our beautiful boy—is dead—”
“No!” moaned King Richard through bloodless, trembling lips. He stepped back and his chair crashed to the floor. “No! O God, God, no—”
He was covering his ears; he looked as if he would drop to his knees. He staggered to the wall. Reaching out, he caught the cold stone mantelpiece as his knees gave way. Queen Anne let out a long, guttural half-human wail and fled down the dais, a quivering madwoman, running from wall to wall like a cornered animal until there was no breath left in her. With wild eyes she cast about. Putting her trembling hands before her, she fumbled forward. Her legs collapsed beneath her and she swooned to the floor in a heap.
THE COUNTESS MINISTERED TO HER DAUGHTER AS she lay in her bed, tossing wildly and crying out for her son. And her husband sat sleepless in his chair, holding her hand, keeping vigil at her side, grieving silently. I saw them in a tableau each time the chamber door was cracked open to let a servant pass, and the sight shredded my heart.
How hard it is for him, I thought; to be a king, to lose an heir; to go on with royal duties as though nothing has happened. He had put them aside for two days now, but soon they would clamor for his attention. Pity tugged at my heart. He looked slovenly, unkempt; not much like a king at all or even the old fastidious King Richard I had met only a month ago. For two days he had not shaved or bathed, and his white shirt, dingy and stained with perspiration, hung open at his neck. The stark pallor of his face heightened the darkness of the growth shadowing his chin as his stricken gray eyes stared mutely at his wife. Sometimes his lips moved, but I couldn’t make out the words. Then one day, I heard him gasp for breath, close his eyes, and murmur, “Forgive me, Anne—Forgive me!”
I couldn’t imagine what he thought he could have done.
Along with the physician and the servants tending to the king and queen, the countess moved about the gloomy chamber like one risen from the dead, bringing food and drink, which was returned untouched. From time to time, the weary woman would leave the chamber and, shutting the door behind her with utmost care, collapse on a window seat in the anteroom; sometimes she closed her eyes; sometimes she just stared out into the darkness of the night. I regarded her with a depth of sorrow. She had been orphaned, and widowed; she had buried a daughter and lived to see the destruction of the great House of Neville. But perhaps nothing she had endured compared to this shattering grief.
I inhaled a sharp, pained breath. ’Tis not only their child they have lost, I thought, my eyes touching on the queen asleep in the curtained four-poster bed and moving to the king grieving silently at her bedside. They have lost their future and their hope.
We journeyed to Middleham. As the royal procession wound its way mournfully north, the king’s lonely figure rode ahead. Every so often, he cast back at his queen’s litter anguished looks of torment and sorrow. I longed to go to his side, take his strong sunburned hands into my own, and comfort him.
The townspeople gathered to watch us pass. Some crossed themselves and wiped tears from their eyes, while others looked on with hard faces. For now it was being murmured that this was surely divine retribution. Ned—King Richard’s ten-year-old Edward—had died on the anniversary of his namesake, my father King Edward IV, the child being the same age as one of my brothers.
Wild grief ripped through me. No! I wanted to scream at them. King Richard is innocent. My brother Richard lives! But since I could not, I rode onward silently. Across the fields, near a village, we saw maidens dance around the colorful maypole, but we did not hear their song, and their gaiety touched us not. We journeyed on at our slow pace. On the sixth day of May, Middleham Castle rose up before us. Sunlight filtered through an opening in the clouds like rays sent from heaven, illuminating the black-draped castle in a strange, pearly light.
“ ’Tis Ned’s birthday today,” said King Richard’s son, Johnnie of Gloucester.
A ponderous silence fell over all who heard. I couldn’t believe the Fates would be so cruel, to send a father to bury his son on his child’s birthday.
There was no relief for King Richard and Queen Anne. Ned had died, and neither of them had been with him. Even harder to bear was the knowledge that he had suffered. Queen Anne sat in a carved chair on the dais in the Great Hall at Middleham Castle, clutching Ned’s worn velvet blanket, while King Richard stood stiffly at her side, white-knuckled and unmoving, his face ashen. Together they listened to a procession of doctors, clerics, and servants who related the terrible details of Ned’s passing.
He had fallen ill with a bellyache in the middle of the night on Easter Monday after a pleasant dinner and evening of music, and the doctors could do nothing for him. He was in great pain to the end and had cried out for his mother. My gaze went to the queen, who closed her lids and swayed in her chair. He had died the next day.
King Richard had to practically carry Queen Anne from the room, for she could barely stand. In their bedchamber where Ned used to play chess with them and read poetry, the king’s son, Johnnie, sat with Clarence’s son, Edward, by the cold fireplace. Eyes red-rimmed, their cheeks tear-stained, they stroked Ned’s dog, Sir Tristan, as the other hounds watched. Even the animals mourned Ned, for they lay silent, chins flat on the cold tiled floor, a knowing, sorrowful expression in their eyes. In the corner where King Richard’s suit of armor hung beneath a tapestry of the Siege of Jerusalem, Clarence’s daughter, Margaret, and Richard’s love child, Cat, knelt at the black-draped prie-dieu together.
When the king and queen reached the threshold of their room, they halted. Directly ahead, in full view of the window, stood the tall elm where Ned’s archery target still hung. The boys rose slowly, followed their gaze, saw the tree. Their faces crumpled. Young Edward of Warwick ran to them, threw his arms around Anne’s skirts. “L-Lady a-aunt,” he cried in a strangled voice, unable to control his stutter, “w-w-why did N-Ned have to go? D-Did God n-not kn-know I w-would have g-g-gone for him?”
Queen Anne burst into tears and sank to her knees. She clasped her sister’s child to her breast and opened her embrace to young Johnnie, who rushed to her. Cat and Margaret ran to her, too, and King Richard knelt and put his strong arm
s around them all. Together they huddled on the floor, all weeping, except for Richard, who stared over their heads with a blank expression.
To King Richard fell the duty of arranging his child’s funeral. He knew, too, that this blow could kill his queen. Borne in the cart beside me, she was feverish, ailing, and she coughed as if her chest would shatter. I exchanged an anxious look with Cat, who rode beside me. Her father had lost his only son and heir and now might lose his wife, the childhood sweetheart he had adored for as long as anyone could remember.
Such love; such grief. Was it always so in life? I wept at their misery, my eyes lingering on the lonely figure of the king riding ahead.
Even at night, I found myself unable to stop thinking of King Richard, whose silent agony was wrenching. I wished to help him, but there was nothing I could do.
CHAPTER 8
Good Queen Anne, 1484
THE NORTH MOURNED WITH KING RICHARD AND Queen Anne, but in the rest of England men murmured that Ned’s death was divine retribution. Had he not died on Easter Monday, the anniversary of my father’s death? In the taverns, the blacksmith shops, on the farms and in the manor houses, people crossed themselves and muttered that never before was the hand of God seen so clearly. Some who had not believed King Richard had done my brothers to death before were persuaded now. And I could say nothing. Nothing to anyone.
King Richard was not told what his people believed, but it was obvious that he knew, and whom he blamed for the rumors: Henry Tudor. Like me, he had heard the whisperings in the castle, read the condemnation in the eyes of the villagers and townsfolk the nearer we rode to London. Even I found it hard to bear the mute pity on the faces of those who believed Ned had been poisoned. Out of nowhere had come this rumor, to be added to the rest. It was clear that the queen believed it, and clear whom she held responsible for the death of her child. In her drugged sleep she kept crying out “Poisoned . . . Tudor . . . Poisoned . . . Ned, O my Ned—my babe—”
Henry Tudor’s name had become the hissing of an adder in the privy chamber of King Richard and Queen Anne.
The steady clippity-clop of horses’ hooves filled my head as the queen’s litter wobbled along beside me. My heart twisted in my breast. It was July, three full months since Ned’s passing, and the queen was ailing, unable to ride, with scarcely enough strength to sit up. It was no wonder. She didn’t eat, didn’t sleep. After Ned’s funeral, King Richard had removed her from the oppression of Middleham and taken her to Barnard’s Castle, where they had spent the first honeyed weeks of their marriage, but to no avail. From there, he moved her to York, where the townsfolk had surrounded her with an outpouring of love, then to the hills of Pontefract where the air was cool; then to the sea at Scarborough, where it was fresh. But she was a mother who had lost her only child, a woman who could never bear another; nothing helped ease the affliction that ailed her. All laughter was gone; there was no music for her anymore, no joy at all.
Again, my gaze went to King Richard, riding ahead, casting anguished glances back at his queen’s litter. The rumors Henry Tudor put out about him plagued him to misery, for they struck at his core, attacking his good name and his honor, for which he had made such sacrifice all his life. All over the land, placards nailed to church doors proclaimed King Richard the murderer of his nephews, a tyrant, a usurper. But the worst rumor of all was that God, in an act of divine retribution, had seized King Richard’s own son. A Prince Edward for a Prince Edward.
Aye, Tudor was much on King Richard’s mind these days. After months of naval warfare with Brittany, he’d managed to force Brittany to sue for peace. As part of the agreement, Tudor was to be returned to England, but Tudor, well served by either friends or fortune, galloped across the border into France, his pursuers hard on his heels, and reached safety barely minutes ahead of them. King Richard had signed the truce with Brittany anyway, and tried to make a treaty of amity with France, as he was doing with Scotland. But France, though weak and divided by the problems of a minority reign, was united against him. They thought him an enemy of the realm, a notion bequeathed them by the Spider King, Louis XI, whom Richard had offended by refusing his bribe during the expedition to France. Now France sheltered Tudor with promises of aid. Richard’s spies had sent word that he would invade England in the spring with a French army at his back.
London loomed against the horizon. King Richard drew in his reins and stared ahead. The royal procession came to a silent halt. I knew he was bracing himself. He had always hated London; it was why he had avoided my father’s court. He was a man more at home galloping across the moors with the wind in his face, and his friends were men like himself, who spoke bluntly and didn’t hide lies behind their smiles. I followed his gaze as he stared mutely at the line of city wall, towers, steep roofs, and bridges that he had always hated. At the winding river crowded with boats, barges, and ships. At the dingy gray skies.
The sun was not shining on London this day.
QUEEN ANNE SEEMED TO WITHER AWAY AS I GAZED. Always frail, she was unable to fend off the sickness that ravaged her. As I sat in her bedchamber at Westminster Palace, waiting to be of service to her mother, the countess, I knew beyond doubt that Queen Anne had lost the will to live. She seemed to welcome death, to embrace it as a blessed release. But if the queen died, what would become of her king?
A stir in the antechamber announced the arrival of King Richard. We stood and curtsied, Cat and I, but he didn’t notice us. His gaze was riveted on the delicate form on the bed, sleeping now, thankfully. I watched him cross the room to her side. He was dressed in plain black saye, unadorned by a girdle or mantle; the tight-fitting cote and long hose that molded his strong muscular body were unrelieved by any trimming, not even a gold collar. He wore no jewels except the sapphire his queen had given him, and another, shaped in the image of a gold griffin, and his own signet ring. His complexion was ghastly pale, his cheeks were sunken and sharply drawn, and pain was etched mercilessly in the lines around his eyes and mouth.
The countess vacated her chair beside the queen’s bed. The king sat down, and took the queen’s hand into his own. Bewailing my own helplessness, I almost cried out as I watched him. There was naught to do but pray—and how I had prayed! Amid the tolling of church bells, the flickering of candles, the chanting of monks, I had prayed for the sweet queen—for a posset, a charm, for something that might save her.
I turned my tearful gaze to the dismal sky. A silver flash came and went in the gloom, lighting the dark clouds for a bare instant. Though I knew it was only lightning, it felt to me like a gift from God, for it brought with it a revelation. I am not helpless; there is something I can do! If the queen were to recover, then King Richard could endure, could go on, do his great work changing the world. Queen Anne was letting herself die because she was unaware of her husband’s agony. If I could make her see that she was taking him away with her, maybe she’d find the will to recover.
I knew I had to speak to the queen, and I found my chance the next day. The countess left to rest and handed me charge of the royal bedchamber. I slipped into her chair and threw a glance around the room, empty but for a tiring maid who moved quietly about, smoothing a cushion here, exchanging a burned-out candle there. I took a wet rag from a bowl of rosewater set on a small table beside the queen’s bed and wiped her damp brow. I handed the basin to the tiring maid and asked for fresh water. She nodded, and quitted the room to do my bidding.
Queen Anne stirred and gave the whisper of a moan.
“My lady queen, may I speak?” I asked hesitantly, drawing near and kneeling by the bed. The queen opened her eyes and looked at me. “There is something you—something which—” I paused, rushed on.“I have no right to speak of it but . . . but . . .”
The unfocused look left her eyes, and they took on a puzzled expression. Then she blinked with astonishment. Reaching out a limp hand, she touched my hair, my face, as if marveling. I had no idea what was on her mind.
“I thought . . . I
was seeing myself . . . we look alike, Elizabeth. I never . . . noticed before,” she explained.
“My lady queen—” I said anxiously, not wishing to be diverted. “There is something I need to tell—” I fell silent, suddenly ashamed, and averted my face. What am I doing? I have no right to meddle in private royal affairs!
“Speak, child,” the queen whispered, her voice labored, breathy. “What . . . is it . . . you must tell me?”
I regarded her. She was waiting expectantly. I had no choice. I braced myself and continued. “My lady queen, forgive me, ’tis about your lord husband, the king.” Again, I lost my courage and dropped my lids.
I felt the queen’s eyes on me. Not daring to look at her, I folded and unfolded a pucker of silk sheet. Her hand came to rest on mine, her touch as light and warm as a gentle breeze. Courage found me again.
“My lady, I fear for the king,” I blurted. “He is in great pain, but he mourns in silence. He needs you,Your Grace; he is so alone. The entire way from Nottingham, he rode ahead of your litter and cast back looks of such longing and sadness that I—I—” I broke off again, unable to meet the queen’s gaze. I couldn’t confide in Queen Anne how my heart had contracted to see his lonely figure riding ahead, how I had longed to gallop to his side and comfort him. “You must get better or I fear the king . . . the king . . .” I swallowed and looked away in confusion.
The dainty hand squeezed my own. “Speak,” commanded the soft voice. I lifted pained eyes to the wasted, once lovely face. “Without you, I fear the king may not survive.” I bit my lip to hold back the tears that threatened.
The King's Daughter (Rose of York) Page 11