She soon found that Stanley’s soldiers treated her, as they did not treat Marguerite, with courtesy, even with a touch of deference. Only once on the way to Coventry had she been approached with insulting familiarity and almost immediately the offending soldier had been reprimanded. Even Stanley himself had shown her a consideration that she found totally out of character, and unwelcome, as well, for she’d rather not have had to speak to him at all. She finally decided that perhaps there were still those who held her father’s memory in esteem; there were Yorkshiremen among Stanley’s soldiers, after all. Perhaps it was the memory of old Neville allegiances that prompted civility toward the Earl’s daughter. She didn’t know, could only be grateful for it.
She never doubted, however, that no matter how dismal her future might be under York, as the daughter and widow of dead rebels, she’d still fare better with her cousin Ned than she would have as Édouard of Lancaster’s unwanted wife. She didn’t know Ned all that well, but she felt certain he’d not imprison her as he would Marguerite, not punish her for the sins of Lancaster or Neville.
Her greatest fear as they moved toward Coventry was that her fate would be found within the white-walled silence of the convent. Anne did not want to spend the remainder of her life as a nun. But she was apprehensively aware that Ned might see that as the kindest, most convenient way to rid himself of the embarrassment that was Lancaster’s widow. And even if he didn’t think of it himself, George would be there to plant the suggestion and then water it till it took root.
Anne remembered a girl in the village that clustered in the shadow of Middleham Castle. She’d been wed to a soldier in the service of Anne’s father. Rumor had him lost on a routine trip to Ireland for the Earl. But his death was unconfirmed and for nearly two years the girl had been trapped in her uncertain status, neither wife nor widow. Anne felt like that now. She was free of Lancaster. But she was not free to wed again. Not when she was heiress to one-half of her mother’s considerable estates. Not when George meant to claim the whole of the Neville and Beauchamp lands for himself. Anne needed no one to tell her that was her brother-in-law’s intention. She’d known George for eleven of the not quite fifteen years of her life.
She was his sister-in-law, not his ward. By rights, he should have no say over her. She knew that wouldn’t matter in the least to him. He was as careless of legality as he was of morality, and he had the power to win his way. He’d never give her leave to wed again, allow her to take a husband who might enforce her rights as she herself could not. Nothing could better please him than to see her safely sequestered, out of sight and memory of the world and would-be suitors. George would force her into a convent, unless Ned would gainsay him…and why should he?
She could appeal to Isabel, but she had none too sanguine hopes for aid from that quarter. Isabel was…was not always reliable, she acknowledged, finding neutral words to formulate an uneasy suspicion. Moreover, Isabel was subject to George’s will; she was his wife. She could not prevail against him. Only Ned could do that, Ned who had no reason to deny George for her sake.
Richard could. At once hating herself for thinking it. He could, though. If she appealed to him, he’d help her; he’d not let her be convent-caged against her will. But how could she appeal to Richard now? Had she so little pride as that?
Thus she tormented herself during the week that led inexorably to Coventry and the moment that filled her with emotion of an intensity and an ambivalence to set her to trembling. The moment when she would come face-to-face with her Yorkist cousins. Oh, how she lied to herself, even now! It was not Ned she was so reluctant to face. It was Richard. It had always been Richard.
Her unhappy reverie was abruptly dispelled by that happening which was both awaited and unexpected, the entrance of the King.
Anne’s pulse quickened, picked up a dizzying tempo. But she recognized only two faces among those accompanying her cousin of York, that of William, Lord Hastings, and the self-satisfied Stanley. Her breathing slowed somewhat, and she followed the lead of the other women, who were sinking down in submissive curtsies.
Marguerite alone remained standing, a figure carved in ice, waiting as Edward crossed the room. He stopped before her, seemed about to speak. She did not give him the chance. Her hand came up, with surprising swiftness. There were gasps from her ladies and his companions, but he readily blocked the blow, wrenching her wrist back and away from his face with almost contemptuous ease.
There was a horrified silence. Her cousin Ned had always been able to shield his thoughts when he so chose; Anne found his face unreadable. Like the others, she could only wait.
Marguerite stared at Edward, dark patches of color flaming across her cheekbones. Expecting his reaction to be one of violence, counting on it, she struggled with his silence, then said in a raw, constricted voice, “Tell me of my husband. Does he still live?”
Of Edward’s men, he alone showed no outrage at the insult. He nodded briefly.
“For how long?” she asked, and once more those who heard her were startled into exclamations of dismay or anger.
“Suicide be a mortal sin, Madame,” he said evenly. “And the sin is no less if you do not do the deed yourself, but contrive another to do it for you.”
One hand had moved to her throat, was pressing against the beating hollow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that you cannot provoke me into sending you to the block. However much you do deserve it…or desire it.”
“You did not spare my son,” she said stonily.
Edward didn’t even bother to deny the accusation, to remind her that her son had died on the field. Instead, he said with insulting forbearance, “I’ll not stain my hands with a woman’s blood.”
Marguerite drew so deep a breath that all could see her breasts heave. The hatred on her face was unmistakable, yet curiously muted. Like one forced to call upon remembered emotions, Anne thought; the light was there, but no heat, as if the sun had given way to a perpetual shadowed moon.
“Even if it were a mercy?” Marguerite asked, in dulled, queerly flattened tones, and Anne at last felt the faintest unwanted flicker of pity.
For the first time, emotion showed in Edward’s eyes. For an unguarded instant, they mirrored an unhealed hatred, gave an unnerving glimpse of a searing blue-white flame, all the more intense for being under such relentless restraint.
“Especially if it were a mercy, Madame,” he said bitterly, and turned away.
His gaze was now passing over the other women, the wives and widows of Lancaster. Anne’s heart began to pound again. As he moved toward her, she dropped down in a second curtsy. Then he was reaching down, raising her up. He bent his head; for a brief moment, she felt his mouth touch hers. She scarcely knew him at all, this glittering formidable cousin of hers, had not known what to expect; but certainly not this, never this, to be treated as if she were a cherished treasure long lost and at last recovered. His hands were warm upon hers, his eyes even warmer, the deepest, clearest blue she’d ever seen, and his voice was enough like his brother’s to fill her with a surge of feeling that had something in it of both pleasure and pain.
“Welcome to Coventry, Anne,” he was saying, with an astonishing gentleness. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”
Anne was alone with Edward, but she could find nothing to say, thinking only that if ever a man was born to win, always to win, surely it was this man…and Blessed Mother Mary, why had her father not been able to see that?
“You look woefully like the lamb thrust into the lion’s den! Come now, sweetheart, what were you expecting from me…the rack?”
Edward was not the first to have been misled by Anne’s surface shyness and now he was delighted by the candor of her reply.
“I dared not hope you would be so forgiving, my liege. Not to Édouard of Lancaster’s widow.”
“You are far more than that, Anne. You are my cousin; we do share the same blood. Moreover, you are but fifteen years of age, and I doubt that your
marriage was of your choosing; am I wrong in that?” Not waiting for her response, he tilted her chin up, warming her with his smile.
“We are kin, Anne, and surely that must count for more than a brief forced marriage with a youth no longer living.” Leaving the one reason unsaid, that his brother wanted her.
“Your Grace…” How strange that an unexpected kindness should be as unsettling as the careless cruelty she’d found in France. For he was being kind, kinder than she had any right to expect, and the arduously constructed defenses of the past year were crumbling; sympathy was the one weapon they’d not been structured to withstand.
“Ned,” he corrected amiably. “You truly did fear the worst, didn’t you?” In genuine surprise. “That’s hardly flattering to me, is it?” He grinned down at her, kept her hand in his as he said playfully, “Tell me, sweet cousin, just what did you fancy Dickon would be doing while I cast you deep into that sunless cell or cloistered convent?” Intrigued to observe what he could accomplish with the mere mention of his brother’s name.
Her face burning, Anne felt suddenly feverish, sunsick. Why did Ned think her plight would matter so to Richard? And why had he sounded so amused, approving even?
“Richard…. He still thinks of me?”
“Oh, now and then, I do believe,” he said, very dryly.
“And what does he think? Of my father’s betrayal? Richard loved him; you do know that? Yet had my father won Barnet, Richard would be dead, and I…I would one day have been Queen, Lancaster’s Queen….” She was fast losing control, but she managed to make the word Queen sound as if it burned her mouth.
She’d told him more of the past year than he cared to know. “No, Anne. No, little bird.”
He kissed her forehead and found a handkerchief in his doublet. She was wiping away tear traces with the finely stitched crest of the Rose-en-Soleil when he beckoned from the open window.
“Ah, at last. Come here, sweetheart.”
She knew, of course, even before she reached the window, gripping the casement as she stared down into the priory garth. He was mounted on an unruly chestnut stallion and he was laughing. He glanced up, unknowing, and she thought that had it not been for the brilliant sky-color eyes, he might have been a Spaniard. Blackest hair and thin sun-browned face. The dark one in a fair family. Her cousin Richard. The last time she had seen him, there had been no laughter between them, only silence. But he was laughing now, here in the courtyard at Coventry, giving commands with the sureness born of birth and a remarkable victory just seven days past…and Yorkshire, what could Yorkshire and Middleham possibly be to him now?
She turned away from the window. The minutes dragged by. And then with surprising suddenness, Richard was there, standing very still in the doorway, with a greeting frozen on his lips and eyes only for Anne.
Edward was grinning. “I do believe, Dickon, that I neglected to tell you this was the day Stanley would be meeting us at Coventry with the French harlot…and our fair kinswoman, Anne Neville.”
He didn’t linger; his sense of the dramatic was too finely honed and his sense of timing was inbred, instinctive. “Well, lad, I’d venture you need me here as much as Egypt did need the ten deadly plagues!” The door closing on the echoes of his laughter.
Richard came swiftly to Anne. His first impulse to take her in his arms, he carefully confined himself to the most cousinly of kisses; his lips barely grazed the corner of her mouth.
“Welcome home, Anne.”
He was unconsciously echoing his brother’s greeting, but no one had ever said her name as Richard did now, as the most caressing of endearments. Anne betrayed herself with hot color, but still she said nothing; she couldn’t, not trusting her voice. Once, years ago, she had accepted a childish dare from Francis Lovell and drank two goblets of burgundy in quick succession. She felt like that now, giddy and light-headed, her face scorched, her hands icy. How grey his eyes were! And yet she’d always remembered them as blue. She could still scarcely believe he was truly here, close enough to touch. She need only reach out. But nineteen months…Nineteen months was a lifetime; for them both, a lifetime.
Richard hesitated. He was disconcerted in equal measure by her nearness, after so many months, and by her continuing silence. This was not how he’d meant their reunion to be. She seemed fearful…. Not of him, surely? He found such a thought intolerable, but what occurred to him next was worse. Was it that she had learned to love Marguerite’s handsome son, after all? Did she grieve for Lancaster? Was it for him that she wore black?
“I truly regret your father’s death, Anne. I would never have had it so.”
She inclined her head. That she knew, with the same certainty that she knew the sun would rise each morn from the east, that His Holiness the Pope was infallible, and that ambition, more than any sin decried by Holy Church, brought men to ruin.
Strangers, Richard thought unwillingly; it was as if they were strangers of a sudden. He stepped back, appraising. She was taller, perhaps, since he’d last seen her, and softer, too, curved in places he remembered as flat, becomingly flushed; but too tense, too thin, and he found her wedding ring to be glaringly and blasphemously bright against the drabness of her mourning gown. She seemed reluctant to meet his eyes and was staring at the broadsword on his hip. Was she visualizing it wet with the blood of Barnet and Tewkesbury?
“Anne, I’d not lie to you now; I never have. I don’t regret Lancaster’s death. Had we met on the field that morn, I would have done my best to take his life myself. Yet I do regret, very deeply, any grief his death may have caused you.”
“Grief?”
Anne stared at him, open-mouthed. Grief? For Lancaster? Blessed Lady, he couldn’t think that she’d cared for Lancaster, that she’d gone willingly to his bed!
“Oh, no, Richard!”
Saying his name aloud at last, she felt the need to repeat it, as if to prove she could, after a full year of enforced silence, a year in which she so often heard his name spat as profanity.
“Richard, do you want to know how I felt when I was told that he was dead?”
She had moved closer, or perhaps he had, but there was no longer space between them. He nodded tensely.
“I could tell only you…only you,” she said, very softly now. “No one else, for it is a shamefully cruel and un-Christian admission to make. You see, I was glad, Richard. I was so very glad….”
He didn’t reply at once, reaching out to trace the curve of her cheek, his fingers light and cool to the touch against her skin.
“I think I would have given all I have to hear you say that,” he said, and the room blurred for her in a dazzling blaze of misted sunlight.
So close were they that he could see the shadows cast by downswept lashes; they showed golden at the roots, quivered against her cheek as he touched his lips to hers, very gentle and easy but far from cousinly, nonetheless.
2
Coventry
May 1471
Because Coventry was in ill favor with the King for having given aid to Warwick during his rebellion, Prior Deram and Lord Mayor Bette had determined to honor their disgruntled sovereign with hospitality so lavish he could not help but be more favorably disposed toward their city. An elaborate banquet was planned for that Sunday in St Mary’s Hall, at the city’s expense, but this Saturday noon it was the Prior’s turn. The dinner brought before the Yorkist lords in the Prior’s great hall was impressive even by Edward’s luxury-loving standards, and Will Hastings cheered Prior Deram immeasurably when he vowed that not even the Lord of Bruges, Louis de la Gruuthuse, had set so fine a table.
Will had not exaggerated by much. The usual royal dinner of two courses consisting of three or four dishes each had been replaced by no less than four courses, each of five separate dishes, served on plates of gilt. As it was a Saturday, meat was denied them, but the Prior’s cooks had produced a variety of fish dishes sure to tempt even the most jaded appetite: porpoise, pike stuffed with chestnuts, roasted eel, stu
rgeon baked in a “coffyn” with raisins, cinnamon, and ginger. Sugar, rather than honey, served as a sweetener, wine cups were kept filled with vernage, hippocras, and malmsey, and each ending course was graced with the appearance of an elaborate sugared “subtlety,” sculptured into unicorns, St George slaying the dragon, and the White Roses of York.
Will had enjoyed himself enormously, although it was his taste for malicious amusement rather than for the highly spiced dishes that had given him the greatest pleasure. For Will, the fun had begun when Richard brought to the King’s table a girl who, both by blood and marriage, was tainted with treason. Will had been hard put not to laugh at the befuddlement of the marshal charged with seating the high-ranking guests. However, the man had not been so flustered as to argue when the Duke of Gloucester insisted that the Lady Anne be seated at his left, even though that did disrupt the entire seating arrangement. By now it was becoming apparent to all that upon Richard shone the brightest rays of the Sunne of York. That, Will did not find so funny, but he hoped in time that he’d learn to live with it.
What followed was for him a very entertaining spectacle, with one of Edward’s brothers seemingly intent upon the most subtle of seductions and the other barely able to force malmsey past the gorge rising in his throat.
It was customary, of course, for a couple to share a wine cup and trencher plate, and good manners required that a knight would see to his lady’s eating pleasure before his own, just as a well-bred youngster sharing a plate with an elderly companion would select those morsels tender enough for aging teeth. But Will had never before seen politeness given such a high gallant gloss, and watching as Richard lavished upon Anne Neville so much care that he scarcely touched his own food, Will watched, too, as George’s complexion turned an interesting shade of green, and he was well content.
Once the meal had ended and the uneaten food was scraped from the trenchers into alms dishes for the poor, once Edward had dispatched eight shillings to be shared among the priory cooks and lavers of scented washing water had been brought for the guests, all scattered to their own pursuits. After ascertaining that Edward had no need of him at present, Will chose to follow Richard and Anne into the Prior’s presence chamber, for George had done likewise, and Will was drawn irresistibly by the lure of coming strife.