The Kingmaker's Daughter Read online

  In an instant she pulls me closer and puts her fingers firmly across my mouth. ‘Shut up! Don’t speak like that of them! Ever!’

  Without thinking I nip her hand, and she gives a yowl of pain and rears back to slap me hard across the face. I scream at the blow and push her back. She rocks against the wall and we both glare at each other. Suddenly I am aware of the stunned silence in the room and the delighted gaze of the audience of ladies. Isabel stares at me, her cheeks red with rage. I feel my own temper drain away. Sheepishly, I pick up her ornate headdress from the floor and offer it to her. Isabel smooths her gown and takes her headdress. She does not look at me at all. ‘Go to your room,’ she hisses.

  ‘Iz—’

  ‘Go to your room and pray to Our Lady for guidance. I think you must have run mad, biting like a rabid dog. You are not fit to be in my company, you are not fit for the company of ladies. You are a stupid child, a wicked child, you may not come into my company.’

  I go to my room but I don’t pray. I pull out my clothes and I put them in a bundle. I go to my chest and I count out my money. I am going to run away from Isabel and her stupid husband and neither of them will ever tell me what I shall or shall not do, ever again. I pack in a feverish haste. I have been a princess, I have been the daughter-in-law of the she-wolf queen. Am I going to allow my sister to make me into a poor girl, depending on her and her husband for my dowry, depending on my new husband for a roof over my head? I am a Neville of the House of Warwick – shall I become a nothing?

  I have my bundle in my hand and my travelling cloak around my shoulders, I creep to the door and listen. There is the usual bustle in the great hall as they prepare the room for dinner. I can hear the fire-boy bringing in the logs and carrying out the ashes, and the clatter as they slam down the trestles and bang the table-tops on them, then the squeak of wooden feet on floorboards, as they drag the benches from the sides of the room. I can slip through everyone and be out of the door before anyone notices that I am gone.

  For a moment I stand, poised on the threshold, my heart hammering, ready to run. And then I pause. I don’t go anywhere. The resolve and the excitement drain from me. I close the door and go back into my room. I sit on the edge of my bed. I don’t have anywhere to go. If I go to my mother it is a long journey, across half of England, and I don’t know the way, and I have no guard, and then at the end of it is a nunnery and the certainty of imprisonment. King Edward for all his handsome smile and easy pardons will just lock me up with her and consider it a little problem well solved. If I go to Warwick Castle I might be greeted with love and loyalty by my father’s old servants but for all I know George has already put a new tenant in my father’s place, and he will simply hold me under arrest and return me to Isabel and George, or worse, hold a pillow over my face as I sleep.

  I realise that although I am not imprisoned like my mother-in-law Margaret of Anjou in the Tower, nor like my mother in Beaulieu Abbey, equally I am not free. Without money to hire guards and without a great name to command respect I cannot go out into the world. If I want to get away I have to find someone who will give me guards and fight for my money. I need an ally, someone with money and a retinue of fighting men.

  I drop my bundle and sit cross-legged on the bed and sink my chin into my hands. I hate Isabel for allowing this – for colluding with this. She has brought me down very low – this is worse than the defeat at Tewkesbury. There it was a battle on an open field, and I was among the many defeated. Here I am alone. It is my own sister against me, and only I am suffering. She has let them reduce me to a nothing and I will never forgive her.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1471

  Isabel and George attend the king and his queen at their triumphant Christmas feast, restored to their beautiful palace, at ease among their friends and allies, a byword for beauty, for chivalry, for royal grace. The country has never seen anything like it, ever before. The citizens of London can speak of nothing but the elegance and extravagance of this restored court. The king spends his newly won fortune on beautiful clothes for the queen and her pretty princesses; every new fashion from Burgundy graces the royal family from the turned-up toes of their shoes, to the rich colours of their capes. Elizabeth the queen is a blaze of precious stones at every great dinner, and they are served from trenchers of gold. Every day sees a new celebration of their power. There is music, and dancing, jousts and boating on the cold river. There is masquing and entertainments.

  The queen’s brother Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, holds a crusade of scholars in which theologians of the Bible argue with the translators of Arabic texts. The king comes disguised into the ladies’ chamber and amid much screaming and pretend terror holds them up like a pirate and steals their jewels from their arms and necks and replaces them with finer gifts. The queen, with her son in her arms, her mother at her side, and her daughters in her train, laughs with relief every day of the Christmas feast.

  Not that I see any of this. I am in Isabel and George’s household living in the rambling village that is Westminster Palace, but I am not bidden to dinner, not as the daughter of a formerly great man, nor as a dowager princess. I am kept out of sight as the widow of a failed pretender, the daughter of a traitor. I have rooms in the palace overlooking the river, near to the gardens, and at mealtimes my food is brought privately to me. I go to the royal chapel twice a day and sit behind Isabel, my head penitently bowed, but I do not speak with the queen nor with the king. When they go past me I sink into a curtsey and neither of them see me at all.

  My mother is still imprisoned in Beaulieu Abbey. There is no pretence any longer that she is in sanctuary, that she has sought a life of retreat. Everyone is absolutely clear that she is held as a prisoner and that the king will never release her. My mother-in-law is held in the Tower, in the rooms that belonged to her dead husband. They say she prays for him daily, and constantly for the soul of her son. I know how bereft she feels, and I did not even love him. And I – the last woman standing after the attempt to throw Edward from the throne – I am held in this twilight world by my own sister: I am her prisoner and her ward. The agreeable fiction is that George and Isabel are caring for me, have rescued me from the battlefield, they serve as my guardians, and I am living with my family at peace and in comfort. They are helping me recover from the terror of battle, from the ordeal of my forced marriage and widowhood. The truth, as everyone secretly knows, is that they are my gaolers just as the guards in the Tower hold my mother-in-law, and the lay brothers at Beaulieu secure my mother. We are all three imprisoned women, we are all three without friends, money, or hope. My mother writes to me and demands that I speak with my sister, with George, with the king himself. I answer her briefly that nobody ever speaks to me but to give me orders and that she will have to free herself, that she should never have locked herself away.

  But I am fifteen years old – I cannot help but hope. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and dream that the prince my husband was not killed but escaped from the battle and will come for me right now – climb through the window and laugh at my astounded face, and tell me that there is a wonderful plan, an army outside waiting to overthrow Edward, and I will be Queen of England as my father wanted. Sometimes I imagine that his death was wrongly reported, that Father still lives and that the two of them are mustering an army in our lands in the North and will come to rescue me, my father high on Midnight, his eyes bright under his helmet.

  Sometimes I pretend that none of it ever happened, and when I wake in the morning I keep my eyes closed so that I cannot see the small bedroom and the lady in waiting who sleeps in the bed with me, and I can pretend that Iz and I are at Calais, and that soon Father will come home and say that he has defeated the bad queen and the sleeping king and that we are to come with him to England and be the greatest ladies in the land and marry the York dukes.

  I am a girl, I cannot help but hope. My heart lifts at the crackle of the fire in the grate. I open the shutters and see the milky clouds of