‘I’ll wait for you,’ I promise him. I speak like a young woman in love for the first time, but in the back of my mind is the knowledge that I have nowhere else to go, and nobody else has the power or the wealth to protect me from George and Isabel.
ST MARTIN’S, LONDON, APRIL 1472
As the mornings grow brighter and warmer I have to wait in sanctuary and grow more and more impatient to be free. I attend the services at St Martin’s, and in the mornings I read in their library. Richard has loaned me his lute and in the afternoons I play, or sew. I feel like a prisoner, I am terribly bored and terribly anxious at the same time. I am utterly dependent on Richard for my safety, for visits, even for my keep. I am like a girl under a spell in an enchanted castle and he is the knight who comes to rescue me, and now I find that this is a most uncomfortable position to be in – utterly powerless and unable even to complain.
He visits me every day, sometimes bringing sprigs of trees with uncurling leaves, or a handful of Lenten lilies to show me the coming of the spring, the season of courtship, when I will be a bride again. He sends a seamstress to me to make me something new for my wedding day and I spend a morning being fitted with a gown of pale gold velvet with an underskirt of yellow silk. The tirewoman comes too and makes me a tall henin headdress with a veil of gold lace. I look in the dressmaker’s mirror and see my reflection, a slim tall girl with a grave face and dark blue eyes. I smile at my reflection but I will never look merry like the queen, I will never have the warm easy loveliness of her mother Jacquetta, and all the women of that family. They were not raised in warfare as I was, they were always confident in their power – I have always been afraid of it, of them. The tirewoman gathers handfuls of my red-brown hair and piles it on top of my head. ‘You’ll be a beautiful bride,’ she assures me.
One morning Richard comes, his face grave. ‘I went to see Edward to tell him of our marriage plans as soon as the papal dispensation arrives, but the queen’s baby is coming early,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t see him, he’s gone to Windsor to be near her.’
At once, my mind goes to Isabel’s ordeal in childbirth: a nightmare because of the queen’s witch’s wind which threw the boat round like a peapod on a river and meant that we lost the baby, a boy, a grandson for my father. I have no sympathy for the queen at all, but I cannot show this to Richard who is loyal to his brother and tender to his wife and child. ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ I say insincerely. ‘But does she not have her mother with her?’
‘The dowager duchess is ill,’ he says. ‘They say it is her heart.’ He glances at me with embarrassment. ‘They say her heart is broken.’
He does not need to say any more. Jacquetta’s heart was broken when my father executed her husband and her beloved young son. But she has taken her time in dying – more than two years. And she is not the only woman who has ever lost a loved one. My husband died in these wars and my father too – who has ever considered my grief?
‘I am so sorry,’ I say.
‘Fortunes of war.’ Richard repeats the usual comforting phrase. ‘But it means that I couldn’t see Edward before he left. Now he will be absorbed by the queen and her new baby.’
‘What will we do?’ Yet again, it seems that I can do nothing without the knowledge and permission of the queen, and she is hardly likely to bless my marriage to her brother-in-law when they all believe that her mother is dying of grief because of my father. ‘Richard, I can’t wait for the queen to advise the king in our favour. I don’t think she will ever forgive my father.’
He slaps his hand on the table in sudden decision. ‘I know! I know what we’ll do. We’ll marry now, and tell them, and get the Pope’s dispensation later.’
I gasp. ‘Can we do that?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the marriage won’t be legal?’
‘It will be legal in the sight of God, and then the Pope’s dispensation will come, and it will be legal in the sight of man too.’
‘But my father—’
‘If your father had married you to Prince Edward, without waiting for that dispensation, you could all have sailed together and he would have won at Barnet.’
Regret stabs me like a sword. ‘Really?’
He nods. ‘You know it. The dispensation came anyway, it didn’t come any faster for you waiting in France for it. But if Margaret of Anjou and the prince and you had sailed together with your father then he would have had his full forces at Barnet. He would have defeated us with the Lancaster forces that she would have commanded. Waiting for the dispensation was a great mistake. Delay is always fatal. We’ll marry and the dispensation will come and make the marriage safe in law. It is safe before God if we say our vows before a priest anyway.’
I hesitate.
‘You do want to marry me?’ He looks at me, his smile knowing. He is well aware that I want to marry him and that my heart goes faster when his hand touches mine, as it does now. When he leans forwards, as he is doing now, when his face comes towards me and he comes to kiss me.
‘I do.’ It is true, I am desperate to marry him, and desperate to be out of this half-life of sanctuary. Besides, there is nothing else that I can do.
ST MARTIN’S, LONDON, MAY 1472
For the second time in my life I am a bride, walking up the aisle towards the high altar, a young and handsome husband waiting for me at the chancel steps. I can’t help but think of Prince Edward, waiting for me there, not knowing that our alliance would take him to his death, that we would be wedded and bedded for only twenty weeks before he had to ride out to defend his claim to the throne, and that he would never ride back again.
I tell myself that this is different – that this time I am marrying and it is my own choice, I am not dominated by a terrifying mother-in-law, I am not mindlessly obeying my father. This time I am making my own destiny – for the first time in my life I have been able to take matters into my own hands. I am fifteen, I have been married and widowed, the daughter-in-law of a Queen of England and then the ward of a royal duke. I have been a pawn for one player after another; but now I am making my own decision and playing my own cards.
Richard is waiting at the chancel steps; his kinsman and mine, Archbishop Bourchier, stands before him, with his missal open at the marriage service. I look around the chapel. It is as empty as for a pauper’s funeral. Who would have thought this was the marriage of a dowager princess and a royal duke? No sister – she is now my enemy. No mother – she is still imprisoned. No father – I will never see him again. He died trying to put me on the throne of England and he and his hopes are finished. I feel very alone as I walk up the aisle, my leather shoes tapping on the memorial stones beneath my feet as if to remind me that here, lying in unending darkness, are all the other people who thought that they too would play their own cards.
We have nowhere to go. That is the great irony of our situation. I am the greatest heiress in England with an inheritance, if we can win it, of hundreds of houses and several castles and I have brought them all to my husband, himself a wealthy young man with revenues from some of the greatest counties in England – and we have nowhere to go. He cannot take me back to his London home – Baynard’s Castle – for his mother lives there and the formidable Duchess Cecily frightened me enough as my sister’s hard-faced mother-in-law; she will terrify me as my own. I dare not face her at all after making a secret wedding to one of her sons, against the wishes of the other two.
Obviously we cannot go to George and Isabel, who will be beside themselves with anger when they learn of this day’s doings, and I absolutely refuse to return to the guest house of St Martin’s in my kitchen maid’s cloak. In the end, our kinsman the archbishop, Thomas Bourchier, invites us to his palace for as long as we want to stay. It identifies him even more closely with this secret marriage, but Richard whispers to me that the archbishop would never have opened the marriage service before us if he had not had Edward’s private permission to perform it. Not much happens in England now without the knowled
ge of the York king and the assent of his queen. So though I had thought we were rebellious lovers, acting in secret, marrying for love and hiding for our honeymoon, it was not so. It was never so. I had thought I was planning my own life, without the knowledge of others; but it turns out that the king and my enemy, his grey-eyed queen, knew of it all, all the time.
LAMBETH PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1472
This is our summer, this is our season. Every morning I wake to find golden sunshine streaming through the oriel window that looks out over the river, and the warm tumbled presence of Richard in my bed, sleeping like a child. The sheets are in a tangled knot from our lovemaking, the beautifully embroidered counterpane is in a heap half on the bed and half on the floor, the fire in the fireplace has fallen to ashes as he will allow no-one to come into the chamber until we call them: this is my summer.
Now I understand Isabel’s slavish loyalty to George. Now I understand the passionate bond between the king and the queen. Now I even understand the queen’s mother Jacquetta dying of heartbreak at the loss of the man she married for love. I learn that to love a man whose interests are mine, whose passion is given freely and openly to me, and whose battle-hardened young lithe body lies beside me every night as his only joy, is to utterly change my life. I was married before; but I was never shaken and touched and puzzled and adored before. I was a wife but I was no lover. With Richard I become wife and lover, counsellor and friend, partner in all things, comrade in arms, fellow-traveller. With Richard I become a woman, not a girl, I become a wife.
‘What about the dispensation?’ I ask him lazily, one morning, as he is kissing me carefully, counting as he goes, his ambition being to get to five hundred.
‘You have interrupted me,’ he complains. ‘What dispensation?’
‘For our wedding. From the Pope.’
‘Oh, that – it’s on the way. These things can take months, you know that. I have applied in writing and they will reply. I will tell you when they reply. Where was I?’
‘Three hundred and two,’ I volunteer.
Softly, his mouth comes down on my ribcage. ‘Three hundred and three,’ he says.
We spend every night together. When he has to visit the court, on its summer progress in Kent, he rides out at dawn with a group of his friends – Brackenbury, Lovell, Tyrrell, half a dozen others – and back at dusk so that he can see the king and come home to me. He swears we shall never be parted, not even for a night. I wait for him in the great guest chamber at Lambeth Palace with a supper laid ready for him and he comes in, dusty from the road, and eats and talks and drinks all at the same time. He tells me that the queen’s new baby has died and the queen is quiet and sad. Jacquetta, her mother, is said to have died the very same afternoon as the baby; some people heard a lament sung around the towers of the castle. He crosses himself at that rumour and laughs at himself for being a superstitious fool. Under the table I clench my fist in the sign against witchcraft.
‘Lady Rivers was a remarkable woman,’ he concedes. ‘When I first met her and I was just a boy I thought she was the most terrifying and the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. But when she acknowledged me as her kinsman, when Elizabeth married Edward, I came to love and admire her. She was always so warm with her children – and not just them, with all the children of the royal household – and loyal to Edward; she would have done anything for him.’
‘She was my enemy in the end,’ I say shortly. ‘But I remember that when I first saw her I thought she was wonderful. And her daughter the queen too.’
‘You would pity the queen now,’ he says. ‘She’s very bereft without her mother, and she is lost without her baby.’
‘Yes, but she has four other children,’ I say hard-heartedly. ‘And one of them a son.’
‘We Yorks like to make a big family,’ he says, with a smile at me.
‘And so?’
‘And so I thought we might go to bed and see if we can make a little marquess?’
I feel my colour rise, and I acknowledge my desire with a smile. ‘Perhaps,’ I say. He knows that I mean ‘yes’.
WINDSOR CASTLE, SEPTEMBER 1472
Once again, I am waiting to go into the presence of the King and Queen of England, once again I am fearful and excited. This time there is no-one to precede me, no-one ready to scold me. I need not fear stepping on the train of my mother’s gown for she is still held at Beaulieu and even if she were free she would not walk before me, for now I outrank her. I am a royal duchess. There are very few women whose train I will follow.
I need not fear Isabel’s hard words for now I am her equal. I too am a royal duchess of the House of York. We have been forced to share our inheritance, our husbands now enjoy equal shares of our wealth. We have shared the boys of the House of York – she has George, the handsome older brother, but I have Richard, the loyal and beloved younger brother. He is at my side, and he gives me a warm smile. He knows I am nervous and he knows I am determined to walk into the great royal court and have them acknowledge me for what I now am: a royal duchess of York, and one of the greatest ladies of the kingdom.
I am wearing a gown of deep red. I bribed one of the ladies of the wardrobe to discover what Isabel is wearing tonight and she told me that my sister has ordered a gown of pale violet, that she will wear with her amethysts. My choice will make her colour fade into insignificance. I am wearing rubies around my throat and in my ears and my skin is creamy against the darkness of the gown and the fiery sparkle of the stones. I am wearing a headdress so tall that it rises like a church spire above both me and my husband, and the veil is scarlet. The hem of my gown is embroidered with dark red silk and the sleeves are cut daringly high to show my wrists. I know that I look beautiful. I am sixteen and my skin is like the petal of a rose. The Queen of England herself, Edward’s adored wife, is going to look old and tired beside me. I am at the very peak of my beauty and in the moment of my triumph.
The big doors before us swing open and Richard takes my hand, glances sideways at me and says ‘forward march!’ as if we were mustering on a battlefield, and we step into the blaze of light and warmth of the queen’s presence chamber at Windsor Castle.
As always with Queen Elizabeth, her rooms are shining with the brilliant light of the very best candles, and her women beautifully dressed. She is playing bowls, and from the laughter and round of applause as we come in I guess that she is winning. At the far end of the room there are musicians, and the ladies are dancing a circle dance where they hold hands and form lines, and look around and smile at their favourite courtiers who lounge against the walls and inspect the ladies as if they were high-bred hunters, trotting out. The king is seated in the middle of the chamber talking to Louis de Gruthuyse, who was his only friend when my father drove him from the throne of England, and looked certain to be the victor. Louis was Edward’s friend then, taking him into his court in Flanders, protecting him, and supporting him while he recruited men, raised ships and funds and came back to England like a storm. Now Louis has been made Earl of Winchester, and there are to be days of celebration to welcome him into his earldom. The king pays his debts, and always rewards his favourites. Luckily for me, he sometimes forgives his enemies.
King Edward looks up as we come in – his beloved brother and his pretty new wife – exclaims in pleasure and comes forwards to greet us himself. He is always informal and charming to those he loves and who amuse him, and now he takes my hand and kisses me on the mouth as if he had no recollection that the last time we met was when I was in such disgrace that I was not allowed to speak to him, but had to silently curtsey when he went by.
‘Look who’s here!’ he calls delightedly to the queen. She comes to receive our bows and lets Richard kiss her cheeks and then turns to me. Clearly she and the king have decided that I am to be greeted as a kinswoman and a sister. Only the tiniest flicker of malice in her grey eyes shows me that she is amused to find me here – at the greatest feast of the year to welcome her husband’s ally – rising
up now having been down so very low. ‘Ah, Lady Anne,’ she says drily. ‘I wish you joy. What a surprise. What a triumph for true love!’
She turns and gestures to the ladies behind her and my courage fails me as my sister Isabel stalks forwards. I cannot stop myself shrinking back against the comforting shoulder of Richard, my husband, who stands beside me as Isabel, pale and contemptuous, sweeps us both the most shallow curtsey.
‘And here you are, Warwick’s daughters, and yet both royal duchesses and both my sisters,’ the queen says, her voice lilting with laughter. ‘Who would ever have thought it? Your father gets his first choice of sons-in-law from the grave. How happy you must be!’
Her brother Anthony glances at her as if they are sharing a joke about us. ‘Clearly, a joyous reunion of the Neville sisters,’ he observes.
Isabel steps forwards as if she is embracing me and holds me close so that she can whisper fiercely in my ear. ‘You have shamed yourself and embarrassed me. We didn’t even know where you were. Running off like a kitchen slut! I can’t imagine what Father would have said!’
I twist out of her grip and face her. ‘You had me as your prisoner and you were stealing my inheritance,’ I say hotly. ‘What would he have thought of that? What did you think I would do? Bow down and worship George just because you do? Or did you wish me dead like you wish our own mother?’
In a quick gesture she raises her hand, and then instantly snatches it down again. But she has showed everyone that she longs to slap my face. The queen laughs out loud, Isabel turns her back on me, Richard shrugs, bows to the queen, and draws me away.
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