I glance back at Isabel, who seems a long way away. She tries to smile encouragingly at me but her face is strained and pale in the darkness of the cathedral. I remember her saying to me on her wedding night: ‘Don’t go.’ I mouth the words to her and then I turn and walk towards my father to do his bidding.
AMBOISE, FRANCE, WINTER 1470
I cannot believe the life that is unfolding before me. In the cold light of the winter mornings I wake beside Isabel and have to lie still and look around the stone walls of the room and the tapestries, dull-coloured in the early light, to remind myself of where I am, how far we have come, and my dazzling incredible future. Then I tell myself once more: I am Anne of Warwick; still me. I am betrothed to Prince Edward of Lancaster, I am Princess of Wales while the old king lives, and on his death I will be Queen Anne of England.
‘You’re muttering again,’ Isabel says crossly. ‘Muttering like a mad old woman. Shut up, you sound ridiculous.’
I press my lips together to silence myself. This has become my ritual, as regularly observed as Prime. I cannot start the day without running through the changes in my life. It is as if I cannot believe that I am here, without reciting my expectations, my unbelievable hopes. First I open my eyes and see again that I am in one of the best rooms of the beautiful chateau of Amboise. In this fairytale castle we are the guests of the man who was once our greatest enemy: Louis King of France, now our greatest friend. I am betrothed to marry the son of the bad queen and the sleeping king, only now I must always remember to call her Lady Mother, and him, my royal father: King Henry. Isabel is not to be Queen of England, George is not to be king. She will be my chief lady in waiting and I am to be queen. Most extraordinary of all, Father has already taken England by storm, marched on London, released the sleeping king – King Henry – from the Tower, taken him out before the people and had him loudly proclaimed as King of England, returned to his people, restored to his throne. The people welcome this. Incredulously, in France, we learn to celebrate the triumph of Lancaster, say ‘our house’ when we mean the red rose, reverse all the loyalties of my life.
Queen Elizabeth, in terror of the open enmity of my father, has fled into sanctuary and is in hiding with her mother and her daughters, pregnant with another child, abandoned by her husband. It does not matter now if she has a boy, a girl, or the miscarriage that George wished on her – her son will never sit on the throne of England, for the House of York is utterly thrown down. She is cowering in sanctuary, and her husband, the handsome and once-powerful King Edward, our friend, our former hero, has fled from England like a coward, accompanied only by his loyal brother Richard and half a dozen others, and they are kicking their heels and fearing for their futures somewhere in Flanders. Father will make war on them there, next year. He will hunt them down and kill them like the outlaws they now are.
The queen who was so beautiful in her triumph, who was so steely in her dislike, is back to where she started, a penniless widow with no prospects. I should be glad, this is my revenge for the thousands of slights that she paid to Isabel and me, but I cannot help but think of her, and wonder how she will survive childbirth in the dark rooms of sanctuary beneath Westminster Abbey, and how she will ever get out?
Father has won England – he has returned to his irresistible winning form. George was faithfully at his side throughout the campaign, despite the temptations to treachery from the House of York, and Father has done all that he said he would do. I am to join him, as soon as Prince Edward and I are married; we wait only for a dispensation from the Pope to confirm our betrothal. As a young husband and wife, we will join Father in England, and we will be proclaimed Prince and Princess of Wales. I will be at the side of Queen Margaret of Anjou; she is my mentor and my guide. They will send Queen Elizabeth’s ermines from the wardrobe once again, only this time they will stitch them on my gowns.
‘Shut up!’ Isabel says. ‘You are doing it again.’
‘I can’t believe it. I can’t understand it,’ I tell her. ‘I have to say it over and over again to make myself believe it.’
‘Well, in a little while you can mutter at your husband and see if he likes waking to a mad girl whispering away,’ she says brutally. ‘And I will be able to sleep in the mornings.’
That silences me, as she knew it would. I see my betrothed husband every day, when he comes to sit with his mother in the afternoon, and when we all go in to dinner in the evening. He takes her hand, I walk behind them. She takes the precedence of a queen, I am only a princess-to-be. He is three years older than me of course, so perhaps that is why he behaves as if he can hardly be troubled with me at all. He must have thought of my father with the same horror and hatred that we were taught to think of his mother; perhaps that is why he is so cold to me. Perhaps that is why I feel that we are still strangers, almost enemies.
He has his mother’s fair hair, fair almost copper. He has her round face and her little spoiled mouth. He is lithe and strong, he has been raised to ride and fight, he has courage I know, for people say he is a good jouster. He has been on battlefields since he was a child, perhaps he has become hardened and cannot be expected to feel affection for a girl, the daughter of his former enemy. There is a story about him, aged only seven, calling for the York knights who protected his father to be beheaded, though they had kept his father safe during the battle. Nobody tells me that it is untrue. But maybe this is my fault – I have never asked anyone of his mother’s court if such a young boy could do such a thing, if, in fact, it ever happened: if he blithely gave such a murderous order. I dare not ask his mother if it is true that she asked her seven-year-old son to name what death two honourable men should die. Actually, I never ask her anything.
His face is always guarded, his eyes veiled by his eyelashes, and he rarely looks at me, he always looks away. When someone speaks to him he looks downwards as if he does not trust himself to meet their gaze. Only with his mother does he ever exchange a glance, only she can make him smile. It is as if he trusts no-one but her.
‘He has spent his life knowing that people denied him the throne, some even denied he was his father’s son,’ Isabel says to me reasonably. ‘Everyone said he was the son of the Duke of Somerset, the favourite.’
‘It was our grandfather who said that,’ I remind her. ‘To dishonour her. She told me so herself. She said that was why she put his head on a spike on the walls of York. She says that to be queen is to face a life of constant slander and that you have no-one to defend you but yourself. She says . . .’
‘ “She says! She says!” Does nobody else say anything but her? You speak of her all the time and yet you used to have nightmares about her when you were a little girl,’ Isabel reminds me. ‘You used to wake up screaming that the she-wolf was coming, you thought she hid in the chest at the end of our bed. You used to ask me to wrap you tight and hold you tight so that she couldn’t get you. Funny that you should end up hanging on her every word and betrothed to her son, and forgetting all about me.’
‘I don’t believe he wants to be married to me at all,’ I say desperately.
She shrugs. Nothing interests Isabel these days. ‘He probably doesn’t. He probably has to do as he is ordered: like all of us. Perhaps it will turn out better for you two than the rest of us.’
Sometimes he watches me when I dance with the ladies, but he does not admire me, there is nothing warm in his look. He watches me as if he would judge me, as if he would understand me. He looks at me as if I were a puzzle that he wants to translate. The queen’s ladies in waiting tell me that I am beautiful: a little queen in miniature. They praise the natural curl of my auburn hair, the blue of my eyes, my lithe girl’s figure and the rosy colour of my skin; but he never says anything to make me think that he admires me.
Sometimes he comes riding with us. Then he rides alongside me and never speaks. He rides well, as well as Richard. I glance at him and think that he is handsome. I try to smile at him, I try to make conversation. I should be glad that my
father has chosen a husband who is so near my age and looks so fine and princely on a horse. And he will be King of England; but his coldness is quite impenetrable.
We speak together every day, but we never say very much. We are always under the eye of his mother and if I say anything to him that she cannot hear, she calls out: ‘What are you whispering about, Lady Anne?’ and I have to repeat something that sounds utterly foolish, such as ‘I was asking His Grace if there were fish in the moat,’ or ‘I was telling His Grace that I like baked quinces.’
When I say something like this she smiles at him as if it is incredible that he is going to have to endure such a fool for the rest of his life. Her face is warm with humour and sometimes he laughs shortly. She always looks at her son like the wolf they call her, like a she-wolf looks at her cub, with fierce ownership. He is everything to her, she would do anything for him. Me, she has bought for him, through me she has bought the only commander who could defeat King Edward of York: his former guardian, the man who taught him how to fight. Prince Edward the wolf-cub has to be married to this tediously mortal girl so that they can get back to the throne. They endure me because I am the price exacted for the services of the great general, my father, and she dedicates herself to make me a fit wife for him, a fit queen for England.
She tells me about the battles that she fought for her husband’s throne: her son’s inheritance. She tells me that she learned to be hardened to suffering, to rejoice in the death of her enemies. She teaches me that to be a queen you have to see any obstacle in your way as your victim. Sometimes fate will command that only one person can survive, your enemy or you, or sometimes it might be your enemy’s child or your child. When you have to choose, of course you will choose your life, your future, your child – whatever the price.
Sometimes she looks at me with a smile and says, ‘Anne of Warwick, little Anne of Warwick! Who would ever have thought that you would be my daughter-in-law, and your father my ally?’ This is so close to my own puzzled mutterings that once I reply: ‘Isn’t it extraordinary? After all that has been?’
But her blue eyes snap at my impertinence, and she says at once: ‘You know nothing of what has been, you were a child shielded by a traitor when I was fighting for my life, trying to hold the throne against treason. I have seen fortune’s wheel rise and fall, I have been ground to dust beneath the wheel of fortune; you have seen nothing, and understand nothing.’
I drop my head at her harsh tone, and Isabel who sits beside me leans slightly forwards so that I can feel the support of her shoulder, and be less ashamed at being scolded in front of all the ladies, including my mother.
At other times she summons me to her privy chamber and teaches me the things she thinks I should know. Once I go there and there is a map of the kingdom spread out on the table. ‘This,’ she says, smoothing it with her hand, ‘this is a precious thing indeed.’
I look at it. Father has maps in his library at Warwick Castle, one of them of the kingdom of England; but it is smaller than this and only shows the midlands around our home. This is a map of the southern coast of England as it faces France. The southern ports are carefully drawn, though to the west and north it becomes vague and sketchy. Around the ports it is marked whether there is good farmland to feed troops or victual a fleet, at the entrance to the ports it shows the bed of the river or sandbanks. ‘Sir Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, my friend, made this map,’ she says, putting her finger on his signature. ‘He made a survey of the southern ports to keep me safe when we feared that your father would invade. Jacquetta Woodville was my dearest friend and lady in waiting, and her husband was my great defender.’
I bow my head in embarrassment; but it is always like this. My father was her greatest enemy, everything she ever tells me is a story of warfare against him.
‘Lord Rivers was my dearest friend then, and Jacquetta his wife was like a sister to me.’ She looks wistful for a moment and I dare not say anything at all. Jacquetta changed sides like everyone else after this queen’s defeat and did well from it. Now she is the mother of the queen, her granddaughter a princess and she even has a prince as a grandson; her daughter Elizabeth has given birth to a son in sanctuary and named him Edward for his father, the exiled king. Jacquetta and this queen parted when my father won the final battle at Towton for Edward. The Rivers surrendered on the battlefield and turned their coats and joined York. Then Edward chose their widowed daughter for his bride. That was the moment he acted without my father’s advice, the first mistake he made; that was his first step towards defeat.
‘I will forgive Jacquetta,’ the queen promises. ‘When we enter London, I will see her again and forgive her. I shall have her at my side again, I will comfort her for the terrible loss of her husband.’ She looks resentfully at me. ‘Killed by your father,’ she reminds me. ‘And he accused her of witchcraft.’
‘He released her.’ I swallow.
‘Well, let’s hope she is grateful for that,’ she says sarcastically. ‘One of the greatest women in the kingdom and the dearest friend I ever had – and your father named her as a witch?’ She shakes her head. ‘It beggars belief.’
I say nothing. It beggars belief for me too.
‘D’you know the sign for fortune’s wheel?’ she asks abruptly.
I shake my head.
‘Jacquetta herself showed it to me. She said that I would know a life when I rose very high and fell very low. Now I am going to rise again.’ She extends her forefinger as if pointing and then she draws a circle in the air. ‘You rise and you fall,’ she says. ‘My advice to you is to guard yourself as you rise and destroy your enemies as you fall.’
Finally, after several applications, we receive the dispensation from the Pope, so that Edward and I, though we are distant kin, can marry, and there is a quiet ceremony with little celebration, and we are put to bed by my mother and his. I am so afraid of my mother-in-law the queen that I go to the room without protest, without really thinking of the prince or what is to come in the night, and sit up in bed and wait for him. I hardly see him when he comes in, as I am watching his mother’s avid face as she takes his cloak from his shoulders and whispers ‘goodnight’ to him, and goes from the room. It makes me shudder, the way she looks at him, as if she wishes she could stay and watch.
It is very quiet when everyone has gone. I remember Isabel telling me that it was horrible. I wait for him to tell me what to do. He says nothing. He gets into bed and the thick feather mattress sinks at his side and the ropes of the bed creak under his weight. Still, he says nothing.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say awkwardly. ‘I am sorry. Nobody has told me. I asked Isabel but she would say nothing. I couldn’t ask my mother . . .’
He sighs, as if this is yet another burden that has been put on him by this essential alliance of our parents. ‘You don’t do anything,’ he says. ‘You just lie there.’
‘But I . . .’
‘You lie there and you don’t say anything,’ he repeats loudly. ‘The best thing you can do for me, right now, is to say nothing. Most of all don’t remind me who you are, I can’t stand the thought of that . . .’ and then he heaves up in the bed and drops on me with his full weight, plunging into me as if he was stabbing me with a broadsword.
PARIS, CHRISTMAS 1470
The King of France, King Louis himself, is so delighted with our wedding that he bids us come to Paris before the Christmas season and celebrate with him. I open the dancing, I am seated on his right hand at dinner. I am the centre of attention for everyone: the kingmaker’s daughter who will be Queen of England.
Isabel comes behind me. Every time we walk into a room she follows me, and sometimes she bends and frees my train if it is caught in a doorway or sweeping up the scented rushes. She serves me without a smile; her resentment and envy is obvious to everyone. Queen Margaret, my Lady Mother, laughs at Isabel’s sulky face, pats my hand, and says: ‘Now you see it. If a woman rises to greatness she becomes every woman’s enemy. If s
he fights to keep greatness then everyone, men and women, simply hate her. In your sister’s green face you see your triumph.’
I glance sideways at Isabel’s sulky pallor. ‘She’s not green.’
‘Green with jealousy,’ the queen says, laughing. ‘But no matter. You will be rid of her tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ I ask. I turn to Isabel as she sits beside me in the window seat. ‘You are going tomorrow?’
She looks as stunned as I am. ‘Not that I know.’
‘Oh yes,’ the queen says smoothly. ‘You are going to London to join your husband. We will follow almost immediately, with the army.’
‘My mother has not told me,’ Isabel challenges the queen. ‘I am not ready to go.’
‘You can pack this evening,’ the queen says simply. ‘For you are going tomorrow.’
‘Excuse me,’ my sister says weakly, and rises to her feet and curtseys low to the queen, and briefly to me. I curtsey and scuttle out after her. She is tearing down the gallery to my rooms, I catch her in one of the beautiful oriel windows.
‘Iz!’
‘I can’t stand another storm at sea.’ Isabel rounds on me. ‘I would rather kill myself on the quayside than go to sea again.’
Despite my reassurance, I put my hand to my belly as if I fear that I too might be with child and my baby too would be put in a box and thrown into the dark heaving waters, just as they did to Isabel’s little son.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Isabel says shortly. ‘You aren’t pregnant, and you aren’t just about to give birth. I should never have gone on board. I should have refused. You should have helped me. My life was ruined then . . . and you let it happen.’