No past grief, however, had prepared her for the loss she’d suffered at Sandal Castle. Nothing would ever be the same for her again, not from the moment she stood on the stairway at Baynard’s Castle, staring down at her nephew and knowing, even before he spoke, that he brought death into her household. She sought refuge in hate and then in prayer, and at last, recognized that her grief was not going to heal, that it would be an open, gaping wound she’d take to her grave. Once she came to terms with that, she found she could once more take up the burdens of daily living, the numbing duties of motherhood. But she’d lost forever the ability to sympathize with the weaknesses of others, would never again find patience for those who broke under pressure.
If at night she allowed herself those bitter hours till dawn to grieve for her husband, her murdered son, her days now were given over to the living, to the children whose need must come first. With the arrival of her eldest son’s letter, she felt the first flicker of hope. Edward was, for the moment, beyond the reach of Lancaster. He was young, so very young. But unlike her husband, Cecily had never been deceived by Edward’s wildness into underestimating his ability; she knew he had a shrewd, discerning mind, a will of granite and a jaunty confidence in his own destiny that she never completely appreciated but recognized as the strength it was. And his conduct since Sandal Castle had given her only pride, fierce and intense and maternal.
He’d continued to gather troops to his banner, with a coolness that the most experienced battle commander might have envied, and rumor had it that he’d already claimed his first victory. Most heartening of all for Cecily, he had somehow raised the money to ransom Rob Apsall, the young knight who’d been with Edmund on Wakefield Bridge. She could not stifle her dismay that she’d not thought to do this herself; she saw her failure as an inexcusable dereliction of duty, a lapse not much mitigated in her own mind by the magnitude of her loss. But Edward hadn’t been as remiss as she; he’d recognized their obligation to one who’d loyally served the House of York, served Edmund. Cecily saw more than generosity in her son’s action, saw it as the responsible and honorable gesture of a man grown, for she so desperately needed for him to evidence that now.
But for her, the most meaningful action he took in the wake of the slaughter at Sandal Castle was to write to his little brothers and younger sister. To Cecily, the letters came as a godsend, a lifeline thrown to her troubled children at a time when her own efforts seemed to fall just out of reach. She understood, comprehended that only a man could stand between them and the unspeakable horrors now bound up for them in the name Lancaster, and Edward seemed instinctively to know what they needed to hear.
Each of her children had responded in characteristic fashion to these letters addressed to their personal pain, their private fears. George read his letter aloud to all who wanted to hear it, and to those who didn’t, as well, explaining proudly that this, the first letter he’d ever received, was written by his brother, the Earl of March, who was now Duke of York, too. Margaret had come into Cecily’s bedchamber that evening to share selected passages with her mother, tears freely streaking her face as she read aloud in a clear unfaltering voice. And what Edward had written to Richard, Cecily was never to know.
The little boy had retreated with it up into the stable loft, to emerge hours later with swollen eyes and set pale face. He made no mention of the letter, and Cecily, acting intuitively, forbore to question him about it. But the next day, while attending a Requiem Mass for the dead of Sandal Castle at St Paul’s Cathedral, Richard had become violently ill. Cecily had not known of her son’s distress until the completion of the Mass, when she suddenly realized that both her sons had disappeared and Warwick’s wife leaned across her own little girls to murmur that Richard and George had slipped out midway through the Mass. That was so flagrant an offense that Cecily felt a throb of alarm, sure that only dire necessity could have occasioned such a breach of conduct. She’d hastened down the length of the nave, and on impulse, crossed through the small doorway in the south aisle that led out into the cloisters.
She’d found them there on the lower walk of the cloisters, almost directly across from the towering octagonal Chapter House. Richard was as white as the snow that lay just beyond in the inner garth of the cloisters, slumped against an arched pillar as George searched in vain for a handkerchief inside his doublet. Richard was too sick and George too intent to notice her approach; as she drew near, she heard George give an exasperated cry.
“Jesú, Dickon, if you’re going to puke, don’t do it in here! Lean over, out into the garth!” And with surprising skill, George, who could be both the bane of Richard’s existence and the most steadfast of allies, supported the younger boy until the spasm passed. By then, Cecily had reached them.
Richard suddenly realized that the soft cushion for his head was his mother’s lap, and he started to sit up, unable to believe his elegant, immaculate mother was actually sitting upon the ground of the walkway, heedless of the velvet skirts bordered in sable.
“Lie still,” she said firmly, and he was too weak to resist, lay back gratefully.
“I’m sorry I was sick, Ma Mère.”
“I do feel sick, too, Richard, when I think of what befell your father and brother.” She saw his face twitch, said softly, “That was it, wasn’t it? During the Mass, you were…remembering.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “I cannot stop thinking about…about what happened at Sandal Castle. I think about it all the time, Ma Mère. I don’t want to, but I cannot help myself.”
“Are you afraid, Richard?” she asked carefully, scarcely daring to believe she’d broken through his barriers at last.
“Yes….”
“You feared it might happen, too, to you and George?”
He nodded. “Yes. And to Ned…. To Ned, most of all.” His face was hot against her fingers; she could see tears escape the tangled wet lashes, streak unevenly across his cheek.
“But it won’t now,” he added, and opened those heartbreaking dark eyes to regard her confidently.
“Ned did promise me,” he said.
It was very late when Cecily at last walked from the Lady Chapel at St Paul’s, was taken by litter the short distance to Baynard’s Castle, through city streets bereft of all signs of life. Already, London resembled a city under siege.
On her way to her bedchamber, she found herself faltering, stood for a time alone on the narrow darkened stairway that led to the upper chambers. And then she turned right rather than left, passed through the doorway that led to the small bedchamber shared by her sons.
The door was ajar; a candle burned, low and sputtering, on the coffer chest by the bed. The bed-curtains were open, the blankets rumpled, and as she leaned over, it seemed as if she could still feel the body warmth of the boys in the indented hollows where they’d lain but hours before. Almost without volition, she sank down on the edge of the bed, staring into the dark.
The sound came from the garderobe in the far corner of the room. She raised her head abruptly, suddenly alert. It came again. She didn’t pause to reflect, snatched up the candle and swept aside the heavy curtain that blocked the garderobe doorway.
Far above the garderobe seat a narrow window glinted, an arrow slit enlarged during the last century, acting as a filter now for the faintest glimmer of moonlight. The walls were hung with russet and amber tapestries to combat the pervasive chill of stone and mortar; it seemed to her that in the darkest corner the material was billowing out from the wall, bunching queerly near the floor. As she watched, it rippled again, as no draft could have done. She reached for the tapestry, jerked it back.
“Anne!”
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find, but not this little face upturned to hers, a delicate little heart as pale and exquisitely drawn as white Spanish lace, the most fragile of frames for the enormous dark smudges that seemed too grave and too fearful, by far, for the eyes of a child still more than three months from her fifth birthday.
 
; “Anne,” she repeated, more gently, and reached down, drew the child from her hiding place. She seemed lighter than air to Cecily, no more substantial than the cobwebs catching the candlelight above their heads.
“Don’t scold me,” the little girl whispered, and buried her face in Cecily’s neck. “Please, Aunt Cecily…please.”
The frail little arms clung with surprising tenacity, and after a moment, Cecily no longer tried to disengage her hold, sat down instead on the bed with Anne on her lap.
Cecily was very fond of Anne, the younger of Warwick’s two daughters and so loving, so sweet-tempered a child that there was not an adult heart within the household of York that had long withstood Anne’s artless siege. Even Edmund, who’d not been particularly comfortable with children, nonetheless found time to show Anne how to cast shadows on the wall, to help her search for her strayed pets. The memory sent scalding tears to burn Cecily’s eyes. Resolutely, she repressed both and rocked the silky head against her breast, wondering what could have driven Anne from her bed and into the silent darkened chambers of the castle at such an hour, for Anne was, she knew, a rather timid child, the least likely candidate for such a rash escapade.
“Whatever were you doing here, Anne, and at such an hour?”
“I was scared….”
Cecily, who had so little patience with adults, could, when the need arose, have all the patience imaginable with very young children, and now she waited without prompting for Anne to speak.
“Bella…my sister,” Anne added conscientiously, as if her great-aunt might otherwise confuse the nine-year-old Isabel Neville with any other like-named children possibly residing in Baynard’s Castle, and Cecily hid a smile, said encouragingly,
“What of Bella, Anne?”
“She told me…she told me Papa was dead, the Queen had taken him…had take him and cut off his head like she did with our grandpapa and Cousin Edmund and Uncle Tom! She told me…”
“Your father is not dead, Anne,” Cecily said swiftly, with so much conviction that Anne gulped, swallowed a sob, and stared up at her with mouth open and improbably long wet lashes fringed with tears.
“Truly?”
“Truly. We do not know where your father is right now, but we’ve no reason to think him dead. Your father, child, is a man who knows how to see to his own welfare. Moreover, had harm come to him, we’d have heard by now. Here…take my handkerchief and tell me how you came to be here, in my sons’ bedchamber.”
“I wanted to see Mama, to ask if Bella spoke true. But her ladies said she was in bed, that her head hurt, and said, right sharp, that I was to go back to bed. But I know why her head hurts, Aunt Cecily. She was weeping. All day, she was weeping! Why was she weeping…’cept that Papa was dead, like Bella said….”
Anne’s voice, muffled against Cecily’s breast, now grew more certain. “So I came to wake up Dickon. But he was gone, Aunt Cecily, he and George were gone! I waited for him to come back, and then I heard you and got scared and hid in the garderobe, and please, Aunt Cecily, don’t scold me, but why isn’t Dickon here and why did Bella say Papa was dead?”
“Bella is fearful, Anne, and when people are afraid, they often confuse what they dread with what they know to be true. As for your cousins…Richard and George have had to go away from here for a while. They didn’t know they were leaving, had no chance to say farewell to you and Bella. It was sudden, you see….”
“Away? Away where?”
“Far away, Anne. Very far….” She sighed, shaping a simple explanation to enable Anne to understand where Burgundy was, when the little girl made a soft choking sound and then wailed,
“Dead! He’s dead, isn’t he? Dead like Grandpapa!”
Cecily stared at her, appalled. “Oh, Anne, my dearest child, no! No, Anne, no. My God.”
Anne had begun to squirm; Cecily had unconsciously tightened her embrace. Now she brushed her lips to the child’s forehead, said with quiet and compelling force, “Anne, listen to me. People do go away without dying. You must believe that, dearest. Your cousin Richard is not dead. He will come back…as will your father. I do promise you.”
With that, she pulled the coverlets back. “Would you like to sleep here in Richard’s room tonight?” And was both touched and faintly amused when Anne at once brightened at the prospect.
The little girl had proven that autumn to be a source of considerable embarrassment to Cecily’s youngest son; easily the most sensitive of her children, he was genuinely reluctant to cause hurt to the adoring little cousin who was, from the superior vantage point of his eight years, a mere baby. Cecily suspected, moreover, that Richard was secretly flattered by Anne’s unabashed admiration, and she’d noticed that he was willing enough to play with Anne if there were no boys available as playmates or if George was elsewhere. But he clearly had no liking for the amused glances of the adults as Anne trailed him in loving pursuit, and still less did he care for the merciless teasing he was subjected to by George, who’d infuriated and discomfited Richard only that week by announcing loudly at supper that he meant to name his pet turtledoves Dickon and Anne.
While memories could comfort, they could also rend without pity. This was not the night to dwell upon past remembrances; Cecily knew herself to be too vulnerable. She reached down to pull the blankets over Anne, and stopped in midmovement, staring down at a threadbare woolen blanket that looked strangely out of place among the other coverlets piled upon the bed.
The blanket, once a vivid sun-yellow and now a drab mustard color, belonged to Richard. In one of his few overt concessions to childhood frailties, Richard insisted upon having that particular blanket on his bed, would not go to sleep without it. How and why it had come to mean so much to him, Cecily did not know, somehow had never found the time to ask, merely trying to see that it was laundered occasionally. Even George, who was too quick, for Cecily’s liking, to jeer at the weaknesses of others, no longer baited his brother about that blanket, having once provoked Richard into a wild and uncharacteristic rage when he theatened to cut it up into mock battle standards for his endless games of warfare. Cecily plucked now at the faded gold wool with nerveless fingers, thinking of her youngest alone out in the dark upon the treacherous English Channel without the talisman he seemed so desperately to need.
She was so immobile that Anne became uneasy, slipped a small hand into the sleeve of Cecily’s gown in a gesture of uncertain consolation. Cecily smiled at her great-niece, and tucked the blanket securely around her, saying steadily, “There…. This is Richard’s blanket. He left it for you. Sleep now, Anne.”
With the frayed familiar wool drawn up to her chin, Anne was content, and all at once, very sleepy. “Can I keep it till Dickon comes home?”
“Yes, dearest…till he comes home.” As if she were sure that one day her sons would, indeed, be able to come home.
Cecily softly closed the door of Anne’s bedchamber, stood irresolute for the space of several deep breaths. Within, Anne’s elder sister Isabel slept, curled up in a tangle of coverlets at the foot of the bed. Cecily’s flaring candle had tracked the trail of tears on the girl’s face; shone upon the swollen puffy eyelids, upon the thumb, long since freed from its nightly bondage to Isabel’s mouth and now suddenly pressed back into its former servitude. Cecily had backed out stealthily, now struggled to control her rage, rage directed at Nan Neville, her niece.
Warwick’s wife had never been a favorite of hers. When word reached London of Warwick’s rout at St Albans, she’d done her best to console his stricken wife, insisted that Nan and her daughters leave the Herber for Baynard’s Castle, but her sympathies were strained through a finely veiled contempt. Nan had no reason to think her husband dead. Yet for three days now, she’d scarcely ventured from her bed, and when Cecily had ushered her frightened little girls into the chamber, she’d outraged Cecily by drawing her daughters tearfully to her and sobbing so incoherently that both Anne and Isabel at once became hysterical.
Now Cecily thought of
Nan sequestered in her bedchamber while Isabel cried herself to sleep and Anne was compelled to seek comfort from her eight-year-old cousin, and she felt a terrible anger. Nan was very much in love with Warwick, she knew that. But she herself had been in love with Richard Plantagenet, the man who’d been her playmate in childhood, then friend, lover, companion, and husband during an enduring and eventful marriage, and she had not permitted his children to see her weep for him.
The urge was overwhelming in its intensity to confront her niece in her tear-sodden bed, to accuse her of an unforgivable indifference to the daughters who needed her more than Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, ever would, to vent upon Nan all of the anguish and rage and frustration of the past seven weeks. She was not a woman, however, to give in to urges. She’d speak to Nan, but tomorrow…tomorrow, when the anger had congealed into ice.
She found her daughter Margaret in the solar, wrapped in a fur cover before the fire, blonde head bent over a book. Cecily stood unobserved in the doorway, watching the girl. Margaret was nearly fifteen. Too pretty, by far. It was a thought alien to the world as Cecily had known it before Sandal Castle, a fear she’d never have expected to feel for a daughter of hers.
“Ma Mère?” Margaret had looked up at last. “Did you see George and Dickon safe on board?”
Cecily nodded. Her daughter’s eyes were suspiciously circled, her eyelids reddened; it was Margaret who had acted as a surrogate mother to her younger brothers during Cecily’s frequent absences.
“Were you weeping, Meg?” she asked softly, and Margaret gave her a startled look, for her mother alone of all the family preferred to address her children by their Christian given names. She dropped the book by the hearth, went to Cecily. They were, by temperament and training, a restrained and undemonstrative family; only Margaret and her brother Edward were naturally given to physical expressions of affection. Now she hesitated, and then slipped her arm around her mother in a tentative embrace.