The Kingmaker's Daughter Read online

  ‘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