It is a mistake, I say to myself. They must have mistaken us for King Edward’s ship. But then I look higher. Above the battlements is not Father’s flag, the ragged staff, but the white rose of York, and the royal standard, flying together. Calais has remained true to Edward and the House of York, even though we have changed. Father declared that Calais was for York, and it has remained loyal to York. Calais does not shift with the tides. It is loyal as we were once loyal; but now we have become the enemy.
The steersman sees the danger of the rising chain just in time and shouts a warning. The captain leaps down to bellow at the sailors. Father flings himself on the wheel, heaving at it with the steersman to turn the ship away from the deadly snare of the taut chain. The sails flap dangerously as we turn sideways to the wind and the heaving sea pushes the ship sideways and looks likely to overturn us.
‘Turn more, turn more, reef the sail!’ Father shouts and, groaning, the ship comes round. There is a sickening explosion from the castle and a cannonball drops into the sea near the bow. They have our range. They have us in their sights. They will sink us if we don’t get away.
I cannot believe that our own home has turned against us but Father gets the ship round and out of range at once, without hesitation. Then he reefs the sail and drops the anchor. I have never seen him more angry. He sends an officer in a little boat with a message into his own garrison demanding entrance of the men he commanded. We have to wait. The sea stirs and heaves, the wind blows us so that the anchor chain is taut, the ship pulls angrily, dips and rolls. I leave the cabin and go to the side of the ship to look back at my home. I cannot believe they have shut us out. I cannot believe that I will not be going up the stone stairs to my bedroom and calling for a hot bath and clean clothes. Now I can see a small boat coming out of the harbour. I hear it bump as it comes alongside and the shouts of the sailors who let down ropes. Up come some barrels of wine, some biscuits and some cheese for Isabel. That is all. They have no message; there is nothing to say. They sheer off and sail back to Calais. That is all. They have barred us from our home and sent wine to Isabel out of pity.
‘Anne!’ my mother calls, shouting into the wind. ‘Come here.’
I stagger back to the cabin, as I hear the anchor chain creak protestingly, and then the rattle as it comes on board and sets us free. The ship is groaning, released again to the mercy of the sea, pounded by the waves, pushed along by the wind. I don’t know what course Father will set. I don’t know where we can go now that we have been banned from our own home. We cannot return to England, we are traitors to England’s king. Calais will not admit us. Where can we go? Is there anywhere that we will be safe?
Inside the cabin, Isabel is up on the bed on her hands and knees, lowing like a dying animal. She looks at me through a tangle of hair and her face is white and her eyes rimmed red. I can hardly recognise her; she is as ugly as a tortured beast. My mother lifts her gown at the back and her linen is bloody. I have a glimpse and I look away.
‘You have to put your hands in, and turn the baby,’ my mother says. ‘My hands are too big. I can’t do it.’
I look at her with utter horror. ‘What?’
‘We have no midwife, we have to turn the baby ourselves,’ my mother says impatiently. ‘She’s so small that my hands are too big. You’ll have to do it.’
I look at my slender hands, my long fingers. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say.
‘I’ll tell you.’
‘I can’t do it.’
‘You have to.’
‘Mother, I am a maid, a girl – I shouldn’t even be here . . .’
A scream from Isabel as she drops her head to the bed interrupts me. ‘Annie, for the love of God, help me. Get it out! Get it out of me!’
My mother takes my arm and drags me to the foot of the bed. Margaret lifts Isabel’s linen; her hindquarters are horribly bloody. ‘Put your hand in there,’ my mother says. ‘Push in. What can you feel?’
Isabel cries out in pain as I put my hand to her yielding flesh and slide it in. Disgust – disgust is all I feel through the hot flesh, and horror. Then something vile: like a leg.
Isabel’s body contracts on my hand like a vice, crushing my fingers. I cry out: ‘Don’t do that! You’re hurting me!’
She gasps like a dying cow. ‘I can’t help it. Annie, get it out.’
The slithery leg kicks at my touch. ‘I have it. I think it’s a leg, or an arm.’
‘Can you find the other?’
I shake my head.
‘Then pull it anyway,’ my mother says.
I look at her aghast.
‘We have to get it out. Pull gently.’
I start to pull. Isabel screams. I bite my lip, this is disgusting, horrifying work and Isabel disgusts and horrifies me that she should be here like this, like a fat mare, labouring like a whore, forcing me to do this. I find I am grimacing, my head turned aside as if I don’t want to see, standing as far as I can from the bed, from her, from my sister, this monster, touching her without pity, holding tight onto this limb as I am ordered, despite my loathing.
‘Can you get your other hand in?’
I look at my mother as if she is mad. This is not possible.
‘See if you can get your other hand in, and get hold of the baby.’
I had forgotten there was a baby, I am so shocked by the horror of the stench and the sensation of the slippery little limb in my hand. Gently I try to press my other hand in. Something yields horribly, and I can feel, with the tips of my fingers, something that might be an arm, a shoulder.
‘An arm?’ I say. I grit my teeth so I don’t retch.
‘Push it away, feel down, get the other leg.’ My mother is wringing her hands, desperate to get the work done, patting Isabel’s back as if she were a sick dog.
‘I’ve got the other leg,’ I say.
‘When I tell you – you have to pull both legs,’ she commands. She steps sideways and takes Isabel’s head in her hands. She speaks to her: ‘When you feel your pain is coming you have to push,’ she says. ‘Push hard.’
‘I can’t,’ Isabel sobs. ‘I can’t, Mother. I can’t.’
‘You have to. You must. Tell me as the pain comes.’
There is a pause and then Isabel’s groans gather strength and she screams: ‘Now, it is now.’
‘Push!’ my mother says. The ladies get hold of her clenched fists and heave on her arms, as if we are tearing her apart. Margaret slips the wooden spoon in her mouth and Isabel howls and bites down on it. ‘You pull the baby,’ my mother shouts at me. ‘Now. Steady. Pull.’
I pull as I am ordered, and horribly I feel something click and give under my hands. ‘No! It’s broken, broken!’
‘Pull it. Pull it anyway!’
I pull, there is a rush and a gout of blood, a stink of liquid and two little legs are dangling from Isabel and she screams and pants.
‘Once more,’ Mother says. She sounds oddly triumphant, but I am filled with terror. ‘Nearly there now, once again, Isabel. As the pain comes.’
Isabel groans and heaves herself up.
‘Pull, Anne!’ Mother commands and I hold the thin little slippery legs and pull again, and there is a moment when nothing moves at all and then one shoulder comes and then another and then Isabel shrieks as the head comes and I clearly see her flesh tear, as if she were a crimson and blue brocade, red blood and blue veins tear as the head comes out and then the slithery cord, and I drop the baby on the bedding and turn my head away and am sick on the floor.
The ship heaves, we all stagger with the movement, and then Mother comes hand over hand down the bed, and gently takes up the child and wraps him in the linen. I am shuddering, rubbing my bloody hands and arms on some rags, rubbing the vomit from my mouth but waiting for the words that will tell us a miracle has happened. I am waiting for the first miraculous little cry.
There is silence.
Isabel is moaning quietly. I can see that she is bleeding but nobody staunches her
wounds. My mother has the baby wrapped warmly. One of the women looks up smiling, her face stained with tears. We all wait for the little cry, we wait for my mother’s smile.
My mother’s exhausted face is grey. ‘It’s a boy,’ she says harshly: the one thing we all want to hear. But oddly, there is no joy in her voice and her mouth is grim.
‘A boy?’ I repeat hopefully.
‘Yes, it’s a boy. But it’s a dead boy. He is dead.’
THE RIVER SEINE, FRANCE, MAY 1470
The sailors take down the sails and cart them to the sailyards for repair, and scrub out the royal cabin where the boards are stained with Izzy’s blood and my vomit. They say that it is a miracle we were not drowned in the storm, they speak of their own horror when the chain went up across the Calais harbour entrance. They say only my father’s weight on the wheel made it possible for the steersman to get the ship round. They say they never want to take a voyage like that again, but if they had to, they would only do it with my father at the wheel. They say that he saved them. But never again will they sail with women on board. They shake their heads. Never again with women who are chased by a witch’s wind. They are exultant in their survival. They all think that the ship was cursed with a woman in labour and a dead baby on board. They all believe that the ship was chased by a witch’s wind whistled up by the queen to blow us to hell. Everywhere I go on board there is an immediate and total silence. They think the witch’s wind was hunting us, will follow us still. They blame us for everything.
They get up the chests from the hold and at last we can wash and change our clothes. Isabel is still bleeding but she gets up and gets dressed, though her gowns hang oddly on her. Her proud belly has gone, she just looks fat and sick. Izzy’s holy girdle and pilgrim badges for her confinement are unpacked with her jewels. She puts them in the box at the foot of our bed without comment. There is a wordless awkwardness between the two of us. Something terrible has happened, so terrible that we don’t even know how to name it or speak of it. She disgusts me, she disgusts herself, and we say nothing about it. Mother takes the dead baby away in a box and someone blesses it and throws it into the sea, I think. Nobody tells us, and we don’t ask. I know that it was my inexperienced tugging that pulled his leg from the socket; but I don’t know if I killed him. I don’t know if Izzy thinks this, or Mother knows it. Nobody says anything to me either way, and I am never going to speak of it again. The disgust and the horror lies in my belly like seasickness.
She should be in confinement until she has been churched, we should all be locked in her rooms with her for six weeks, and then emerge to be purified. But there are no traditions for giving birth to a dead baby in a witch’s storm at sea; nothing seems to be as it should. George comes to see her when the cabin is clean and her bed has fresh linen. She is resting as he comes in and he leans over the bed to kiss her pale forehead, and smiles at me. ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he says.
She hardly looks at him. ‘Our loss,’ she corrects him. ‘It was a boy.’
His handsome face is impassive. I guess that Mother has already told him. ‘There will be others,’ he says. It sounds more like a threat than a reassurance. He goes to the door as if he cannot wait to get out of the cabin. I wonder if we smell, if he can smell death and fear on us.
‘If we had not been nearly wrecked at sea I think the baby would have lived,’ she says with sudden viciousness. ‘If I had been at Warwick Castle I would have had midwives to attend me. I could have had my holy girdle and the priest would have prayed for me. If you had not ridden out with Father against the king and come home beaten, I would have had my baby at home and he would be alive now.’ She pauses. His handsome face is quite impassive. ‘It’s your fault,’ she says.
‘I hear that Queen Elizabeth is with child again,’ he remarks, as if this is an answer to her accusation. ‘Please God she gets another girl, or a dead baby herself. We have to have a son before she does. This is just a setback, it is not the end.’ He tries to smile cheerfully at her. ‘It’s not the end,’ he repeats and goes out.
Isabel just looks at me, her face blank. ‘It is the end of my baby,’ she observes. ‘Certainly, it is the end of him.’
Nobody knows what is happening but Father; and though we seem to be homeless and defeated, washed up at the mouth of the Seine, he is strangely cheerful. His fleet of warships escapes from Southampton and joins us, so he has fighting men and his great ship the Trinity under his command once more. He is writing constantly and sending messages to King Louis of France; but he does not tell us what he plans. He orders new clothes for himself, and has them cut in the French fashion, a velvet cap on his thick brown hair. We move to Valognes, so that the fleet can prepare in Barfleur for an invasion of England. Isabel makes the move in silence. She and George are given beautiful rooms on the upper floor of the manor house, but she avoids him. Most of the day she spends with me in Mother’s presence chamber where we open the windows for air and close the shutters against the sun and sit all the day in warm gloom. It is very hot, and Isabel feels the heat. She complains of a constant headache, fatigue even in the morning when she first wakes. Once she remarks that she cannot see the point of anything, and when I ask her what she means she just shakes her head and her eyes fill with tears. We sit on the stone windowsill of the big chamber and look out at the river and the green fields beyond and neither of us can see the point of anything. We never say anything about the baby who was taken away by Mother in the little box and thrown in the sea. We never say anything about the storm, or the wind, or the sea. We never say much at all. We sit in silence for a lot of the time, and there is no need to talk.
‘I wish we were back in Calais,’ Isabel says suddenly one hot quiet morning, and I know she means that she wishes none of this had ever happened – not the rebellion against the sleeping king and the bad queen, not Father’s victory, not his rebellion against King Edward, and most of all: no marriage to George. It is to wish away almost every event of our childhood. It is to wish away every attempt at greatness.
‘What else could Father have done?’ Of course, he had to struggle against the sleeping king and the bad queen. He knew they were in the wrong, they had to be pushed from the throne. Then, when they were defeated and thrown down, he could not bear to see the couple that replaced them. He could not live in an England ruled by the Rivers family; he had to raise his standard against King Edward. He is driven to see the kingdom under the rule of a good king, advised by us; George should be that king. I understand that Father cannot stop striving for this. As his daughter I know that my life will be shaped by this unending struggle to get us where we should be: the first power behind the throne. Isabel should realise this. We were born the kingmaker’s daughters; ruling England is our inheritance.
‘If Father had not turned against the king, I would have had my baby at home,’ she goes on resentfully. ‘If we had not set sail on that day, into that wind, I would have a baby in my arms now. Instead of nothing. I have nothing, and I hardly care at all.’
‘You will get another baby,’ I say – as Mother has told me to. Isabel is to be reminded that she will have another child. Isabel is not allowed to indulge herself in despair.
‘I have nothing,’ she repeats simply.
We hardly stir when there is a hammer at the door, the double doors are opened by one of the guards, and a woman comes quietly in. Isabel raises her head. ‘I am sorry, my Lady Mother is away,’ she says. ‘We cannot grant requests.’
‘Where is the countess?’ the woman asks.
‘With my father,’ Isabel says. ‘Who are you?’
‘And where is your father?’
We don’t know, but we are not going to admit it. ‘He is away. Who are you?’
The woman puts back her hood. With a shock I recognise one of the York ladies in waiting: Lady Sutcliffe. I jump to my feet and stand before Isabel as if to protect her. ‘What are you doing here? What d’you want? Have you come from the queen?’ I have a pang of sud
den terror that she has come to kill us both and I look at her hands, tucked in her cloak as if she is holding a knife.
She smiles. ‘I have come to see you, Lady Isabel, and you too, Lady Anne, and to speak with your husband George, the duke.’
‘What for?’ Isabel asks rudely.
‘Do you know what your father is planning for you now?’
‘What?’
The woman looks towards me as if she thinks I am too young to be present. ‘Perhaps Lady Anne should go to her room while I talk to you?’
Isabel clutches my hand. ‘Anne stays with me. And you shouldn’t even be here.’
‘I have come all the way from London as a friend to warn you, to warn you both. The king himself does not know I am here. Your mother-in-law, the Duchess Cecily, sent me to speak with you, for your own good. She wants me to warn you. You know how she cares for you and for your husband, her favourite son George. She told me to tell you that your father is now dealing with England’s enemy: Louis of France.’ She ignores our shocked faces. ‘Worse even than that: he is making an alliance with Margaret of Anjou. He is planning to make war on the true king, Edward; and restore King Henry to the throne.’
I shake my head in instant denial. ‘He never would,’ I say. Father’s victories over the bad queen, Margaret of Anjou, and the sleeping king, Henry VI, were the stories of my childhood. Father’s hatred and contempt for them were my lullabies. He fought battle after battle to throw them down from the throne and replace them with the House of York. He would never, never make an alliance with them. His own father died fighting them, and Margaret of Anjou spiked the heads of my grandfather and my uncle on the walls of York, as if they were traitors. We will never forgive her. We will never forgive her for this, if we forgave her for every other sort of corruption and evil. Father would never make an alliance with her after that. She was the nightmare of my childhood; she is our enemy till death. ‘He would never ally with her,’ I say.
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