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The White Queen of Middleham: 978-1-86151-208-6
First Edition published 1978 by Bodley Head as “The White Queen”
Copyright ©2014
Lesley J Nickell has asserted her right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. This book is a work of fiction and except in the case of historical fact any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
PART I: DAUGHTER 1
1: HOME 1
2: RICHARD 18
3: WEDDING AT CALAIS 45
4: ORDEAL BY WATER 69
PART II:WIFE 91
1: VALOGNES 91
2: THE HOSTAGE 108
3: INTO LIMBO 128
4: THE COOK-MAID 149
5: THE AWAKENING 180
6: NEWCOMERS 202
PART III: QUEEN 233
1: THE PROTECTOR'S WIFE 233
2: A NORTHERN TRIUMPH 259
3: THE AXE FALLS 285
4: SPRING 309
HISTORICAL NOTE 338
EDITOR’S NOTE 339
THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET AND 340
THE HOUSE OF NEVILLE
Part I: Daughter
1: HOME
Anne was a timid child. She was frightened by the sweaty reek of the soldiers clattering through the fortress, and the great horses that lumbered into the courtyard striking sparks from
the cobbles with their iron hoofs. Although she slept in the same bed as her sister Isabel she was terrified of the dark, and she had nightmares about being drawn up with the draw bridge and impaled by the portcullis. She was afraid of the sharp-nosed hounds which followed her father around, lashing their tails like whips, and she hated it when he picked her up and threw her into the air, shouting that she still weighed less than a feather. He always caught her safely, but there was that panic-stricken moment every time when she could see the floor far below and feel herself plunging fatally towards it.
Her father did not so much scare as overawe her. He was a very important man. Not only the hounds fawned on him. The bright gentlemen who sauntered about the hall stopped whispering and sniggering whenever he came in and bent towards him with loud rustlings of silk and brocade. Anne and her mother and sister had to curtsey to the ground as he appeared, and not stand up until he commanded them. Once she had mixed up her foot with the hem of her kirtle and instead of standing up she fell over. He was not cross with her, but neither did he laugh like her least favourite among the gentlemen. He had looked at her thoughtfully for a moment as she struggled to her feet, and then turned away with a slight shake of his head. Later her nurse scolded her for her clumsiness.
‘It’s bad enough as it is, lady, without your making it worse.’ Anne tried unsuccessfully not to cry. What was bad enough as it was she did not know, but she was sure it was her fault.
Everything seemed to be well when she went out into the streets. Roars of enthusiasm greeted her, which were twice as loud when her father was there. His eyes would light up as he waved right and left to the motley groups of townsfolk, but Anne went stiff among the cushions of her litter, her stomach a hard lump of lead, dreading the grinning faces and dirty hands which thrust through the curtains.
Once a week at least the whole family left the fortress and progressed through the raucous streets to hear mass in the church. This was quite beyond Anne’s comprehension, since there was a snug little chapel inside the fortress with coloured paintings of angels on the wall and a shiny golden cross on the altar, and a ceiling low enough for her to see. The town church had a roof so high and gloomy that it was out of sight even when she dared to look up, which was not often. Although her confessor had told her reassuringly that devils lived underneath the earth and would only come and take her away if she was very wicked, she was convinced that some of them lived up there in the roof of the church, echoing mockingly the words spoken by the distant priest on the steps of the sanctuary. Sometimes the thought of those monsters with staring eyes and scaly wings and forked tails sitting up above leering at her drove every word of the mass out of her head and she could not even remember her Pater Noster. One Sunday she foolishly glanced upwards as they left the church, and caught a glimpse of one of them. It was hunched on the corner of the porch, grey and still, its mouth wide open showing jagged broken teeth - broken, she supposed, by the number of lost souls it had chewed up. She never told anyone about that.
Indeed there was no one to tell. It would not have entered her head to confide in her father. He was often away, doing wonderful things, she gathered dimly, like sweeping the Dons’ fleet from the seas, whatever that meant, defeating murderous mobs single-handed, and escaping miraculously from disasters. When he was there she hardly dared open her mouth in his presence, even to answer his enquiries as to how she fared.
Her mother, on the other hand, seldom stirred from the fortress. She spent her days sitting over a large embroidery frame in the solar, and her evenings seated on the dais in the great chamber. She smiled kindly at her daughters, and came to see Anne when she was sick and laid her long cold hand on her hot forehead, but she never said very much. And her face was so sad that Anne did not like to add to her sorrow with her own little worries.
Apart from the nurse, whose chief duty was to remind Anne that she was the youngest person in the fortress and should behave with corresponding modesty, that left Isabel. Isabel was four years the elder, and lived in a different world. Anne did ask her questions occasionally, which she answered, if she chose, with great condescension. She always knew exactly how to cope with things, and seemed surprised that her younger sister did not. If Isabel caught a cold, she managed her handkerchief so cleverly that her nose neither dripped down her chin nor turned bright red. Sniffing and scrubbing her nose on her sleeve, Anne was condemned to winters of sodden sleeves and raw sore noses. There was a wistful hope in her mind that some day she would catch up with Isabel, be just as tall and pretty and sure of herself, and not trip over her kirtle any more or feel breathless when
climbing the twisting stairs. But that was impossible, Isabel informed her crushingly when in a rash moment she revealed her hope. There would always be four years between them, and if they both lived to five hundred Anne would still be four years behind. Mutely, Anne took the pieces of her dream away.
One creature in the fortress had been smaller than herself, a kitten she found in the courtyard beside the body of its mother which had been savaged by the hounds. She took the wretched scrap of fur up to her chamber in the pocket of her pinafore, and when she had cuddled and stroked it for a little while it stopped shivering and, wonder of wonders, its body was shaken instead by a remarkably healthy purr. Only half believing in the miracle, Anne carried it everywhere in her pocket, until it grew too big and then she kept it hidden in her bed all day. Feeding it on scraps saved at mealtimes, she lived for the odd minutes she could pass petting and talking to it. The nurse tut-tutted and said it was unseemly; Isabel flatly refused to share her bed with a mangy cat. In vain Anne pointed out that it was not mangy and proudly showed her sister how cleverly the kitten had learned to wash itself; she would not even look. So it slept under the bed on a pile of rags, within reach of Anne’s hand if she rolled right to the edge. There was untold ecstasy in stretching her arm down into the darkness to receive the caress of that rough little tongue.
Then one day the kitten disappeared. Although Isabel said it had simply run off as cats do, Anne did not believe her. She searched, without optimism and without success, for several days.
At about the time of the kitten there were some newcomers to the fortress. There was much excitement, for they were both great men earls like her father and almost as famous. One was her grandfather, an old man who walked as if he were still on his horse and who took as little notice of Anne as everyone else. The other took rather more notice of her, and although she sensed that he meant it kindly she was overwhelmed by his attentions. He was, they said, her cousin Edward, but to her he was more like the Archangel Michael from the wall of the chapel. Descending from the skies above her, this magnificent personage came down to her level and said, ‘Give you good-day, little cousin.’ Even squatting on his heels he looked like an archangel, and Anne was so thunderstruck by the visitation that she merely stared at him with her mouth open. Cousin Edward-Saint Michael laughed. ‘Why, you’re as silent as Dickon,’ he said, and tweaking one of her plaits he rose out of her ken and up into heaven again. Through her daze she wondered what a dickon was.
The arrival of the earls brought a change in the atmosphere of the fortress. There were more comings and goings, more soldiers in steel helmets and leather jerkins, more busy lords hurrying to her father’s closet with important faces, a growing bustle of preparation for something. And through the winter and the following spring, shivering in bed or pushing crumbs around her platter, Anne heard recurring with increasing intensity, from servants and lords and men-at-arms, the same word. Home. They were going home.
Somewhere back in the mists of the past, last summer at least, she thought she had heard it before, spoken with the same eager expectancy, whispered from person to person like a secret that everyone shared except the Lady Anne. But suddenly the whispers had ceased, and everyone had assumed a tight anxious expression instead, until her father came back with her grandfather and cousin and the smiles reappeared.
Home, apparently, was more distant than the town church, beyond the town walls, beyond even the flat brown land that Anne had glimpsed once or twice outside the walls stretching to meet the sky. To have left the fortress for that vast emptiness would have been bad enough; she was dizzy at the thought and had to sit down. But the place where they all wanted to go lay in another and more perilous direction. Across the sea. The mere sight of that heaving sheet of grey made her feel unwell, and the prospect of actually launching out on to it, in one of those little ships that she had watched being tossed and buffeted, growing tinier and tinier until they fell over the edge, made a great well of blackness within her in which she struggled not to drown.
The fact that she had crossed the sea before, further back in her life than memory would reach, was no comfort. Isabel could remember perfectly (she said) leaving the castle of Warwick where they had both been born, riding along miles and miles of roads, and then spending days shut up in an evil-smelling box that pitched about all the time and made them ill. Anne was not sure whether to be glad that she had forgotten such an ordeal, or sorry that she had no forewarning of what a similar journey might be like. There was also something vaguely disturbing about having been born in a place called Warwick of which she could recall nothing.
Perhaps it would not happen. She closed her ears to all the murmurs of change, and pretended that they had stopped. Her father was unmistakably planning a new expedition; but then he always was. On a raw day in March she stood with Isabel and her mother on the quay and waved her handkerchief in the direction of her father’s ship, which was edging cautiously out of the harbour towards the angry white breakers beyond. Like the red flag straining at the masthead with its white bear and tree-stump, her handkerchief slapped against her hand, trying to tear itself away into the ragged clouds and balancing seagulls. She did not know where he was going, but the main thing was that she was still here.
It was full spring before he returned, bringing Anne’s grandmother with him, so that the entire family was in the fortress, and there was one more person to curtsey to at dinner time. The town was bursting with soldiers; the harbour was full of ships, large and small, with sailors swarming over them and up into the rigging like a plague of ants. Anne could not close her eyes as well as her ears to the crescendo of industry. Chests were humped with great difficulty down the spiral staircases; pieces of bed and bundles of arras were carried out to the courtyard and loaded on to wagons. Each time Anne returned to her chamber she dreaded to see the walls bare of their blue trees, prancing horses and fleeing deer, the bed dismantled and the chest which held her clothes disappearing to join the outward-flowing stream of baggage. She almost expected the walls of the fortress to be taken down, stone by stone, and stacked neatly on one of those wagons that rumbled off in the direction of the harbour.
All the earls were going, and most of the other men were going with them. But not, as yet, the ladies.
There came a day in summer when Anne was in bed with a headache - a bed that remained intact - and unusually her father came to her room, with her cousin Lord Edward. Their spurs clashed as they came in, as if the noise were inside her head. The open door let a shaft of sunlight into the darkened chamber, striking splinters of gold from the chains around their shoulders. On her father’s breast was the white bear and tree trunk he wore when he was leaving on his expeditions; Cousin Edward wore a silver falcon, rousing its feathers and opening its beak in a most lifelike manner. Anne found she could never look higher than Cousin Edward’s chest. Her father leaned down and pecked her on the brow.
‘Be good, and don’t disgrace your lady mother,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back for you soon.’ His voice battered at her throbbing head, and she knew she ought to have got up and curtsied to him but she did not have the courage to risk making the pain worse. Then Edward bent over her, swooping from the sky. Instead of kissing her for he took up her hand which lay on the coverlet and she felt his warm moist lips on it. Her heart started fluttering, and as soon as he let go she tucked her hand hastily beneath the covers.
‘What a coquette she is, Richard!’ he cried to her father. Bending down again, he said, ‘Well, sweeting, the next time I see you, we’ll be at Westminster, God willing. There you can flirt to your heart’s content.’ He laughed heartily, and as they turned to go Anne looked up under her eyelids to see if her father was laughing too. No, there was nothing but a rather absent smile. She thought that perhaps he did not understand what her cousin was laughing at either.
The door shut behind them and the restful dusk filtered down once more. Muffled by the thick walls she heard their departure, the hoofs scuffling, the
wagons rumbling, the spatter of cheering as they emerged from the gatehouse, and then fading away into the distance. Everyone had gone down to the harbour to see them off, and as far as she could tell there was nobody left in the fortress but the Lady Anne, in bed with her headache. And if they all climbed into the waiting ships and sailed off to Home leaving her here, she would not know, and she would stay here for ever on her own until she died of her headache. The silence was so good for the beating in her head that she did not care.
And anyway it was no good pretending any more. Her father had delivered the sentence himself. Wherever he was going, and however long he was away, he was coming back for her. Soon. She lay in the gloom with her eyes closed, and the ache behind them was no worse than the ache in her heart.
He was as good as his word. Having felt sick continuously since he left and regarding with fear every potential messenger who cantered his horse through the gates, Anne saw the reappearance of her father to fetch his family as almost a mercy. Isabel was positively pleased, though the only reason she would give her sister was that they were to be presented to the King. Anne had not heard of the King before. Of the Queen she had caught an odd word here and there, mostly accompanied by sour faces and, in the case of servants and soldiers, spitting or a curse. Why Isabel should want to meet anyone connected with this unpleasant person was not clear. Her only answer to Anne’s tentative questions was, ‘Because he’s the King of course.’ Since she could not bring herself to ask if they were to meet the Queen too, Anne’s vision of Home was further darkened by the shadow of the wicked woman who was her father’s deadliest enemy.
She watched her chamber emptying, the clothes-chest, the tapestries, the furniture, and then she was following them down to the harbour. It was raining steadily, as so often that summer, and the sea was a dull sheet of lead pitted by numberless drops of rain. The sails, ready spread, hung wetly from the spars. Shepherded on board by burly sailors, Anne clung for a moment to the head of the ladder which led down into the dark belly of the ship, gazing back bleakly at the crowding roofs of the town where she had spent all her conscious life. It was indistinct already, separated from her by a sullen veil of drizzle. Someone prodded her on, and she slithered down the steep rungs, too numb to mind if she reached the bottom safely.
The White Queen of Middleham: An historical novel about Richard III's wife Anne Neville (Sprigs of Broom Book 1) Page 1