Isabel tentatively puts out her hand to where my belly is hard and swelling beneath the gathered folds of my gown. I take it and let her feel my broadening girth. ‘Annie, you are so big already. Do you feel well?’
‘I was sick at the start but I am well now.’
‘I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me at once!’
‘I wanted to,’ I confess. ‘I really wanted to. I didn’t know how to begin.’
We turn away from the court together. ‘Are you afraid?’ she asks quietly.
‘A little,’ I say. I see the darkness of her glance. ‘A lot,’ I admit. We are both silent, both thinking of the rocking cabin on the storm-tossed ship with my mother screaming at me that I must pull the baby from her, the horror as the little body yielded inside her. The vision is so strong I am almost unsteady on my feet, as if the seas were throwing us around once more. She takes my hands in hers and it is as if we had just made landfall and I am telling her about the little coffin, and Mother letting it go into the sea.
‘Annie, there’s no reason that it should not be all right for you,’ she says earnestly. ‘There is no reason that it should go wrong for you as it did for me. My pains were so much worse for being at sea, and the storm, and the danger. You will be safe, and your husband . . .’
‘He loves me,’ I say certainly. ‘He says he will take me to Middleham Castle and have the best midwives and physicians in the land.’ I hesitate. ‘Would you . . . I know that perhaps you . . .’
She waits. She must know that I want her to be with me for my confinement. ‘I have no-one else,’ I say simply. ‘And neither do you. Whatever has passed between us, Iz, we have nobody but each other now.’
Neither of us mentions our mother, still imprisoned in Beaulieu Abbey, and her lands stolen from her by our husbands working together to rob her, and then competing to rob each other. She writes to us both, letters filled with threats, and complaints, swearing that she will write no more if we don’t promise to obey her and get her set free. She knows, as we do, that both of us let this happen, powerless to do anything but our husbands’ bidding. ‘We are orphans,’ I say bleakly. ‘We have let ourselves be orphans. We have made orphans out of ourselves. And we have no-one else to turn to but each other.’
‘I’ll come,’ she says.
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SPRING 1473
Being in confinement with Isabel for six weeks in the Lady’s Tower at Middleham Castle is like re-living the long days of our childhood again. Men are not allowed inside the confinement chamber, and so the wood for the banked-in fires, the platters for our dinner, everything that we want has to be handed over at the foot of the tower to one of the women attending me. The priest comes across the wooden bridge from the main keep of the castle and stands at the door behind a screen to read the mass, and gives me the Host through a metal grille, without looking at me. We hear almost no news. Isabel walks across to the great hall to dine with Richard once or twice and comes back to tell us that the little Prince of Wales is to take up his residence in Ludlow. For a moment I think of my first husband; the title of Prince of Wales was his, the beautiful castle of Ludlow would have been ours, Margaret of Anjou planned that we should live there for some months after our victory to impose our will on the people of Wales – but then I remember that all that is gone now, and I am of the House of York, and I should be glad that their prince has grown old enough to have his own household in Wales, even if it is under the management of his uncle, Anthony Woodville, the widower who now rises, through no skill of his own, to his dead wife’s title of Baron Scales.
‘It will mean that the Rivers run Wales in everything but name,’ Isabel whispers to me. ‘The king has handed his only heir into their keeping and Anthony Woodville is head of the prince’s council and the queen rules everything. This is not the House of York, this is the House of Rivers. D’you think Wales will stand for it? They have always been for the House of Lancaster and the Tudors.’
I shrug. I am lapped in the serenity of the last weeks of pregnancy. I look out over the green fields nearby and beyond them the rough pasture with the lapwings wheeling and crying up to the moorland. London seems a long way away, Ludlow a lifetime. ‘Who should rule her son but the queen?’ I ask. ‘And he couldn’t have a better governor than his uncle Anthony. Whatever you think of the queen, Anthony Woodville is one of the finest men in Europe. They are a close family. Anthony Woodville will guard his nephew with his life.’
‘You wait,’ Isabel predicts. ‘There will be many who fear to see the Rivers become over-mighty. There will be many who warn the king against trusting one family with everything. George is against them, even your husband Richard does not like to see all of Wales in their keeping.’ She pauses. ‘Father said they were bad advisors,’ she reminds me.
I nod. ‘He did,’ I concede. ‘The king was very wrong to prefer them to our father.’
‘And She hates us still,’ Isabel says flatly.
I nod. ‘Yes, I suppose she always will; but she can’t do anything. While George and Richard are in the favour of the king all she can do is be as cold as the fish-woman on her family’s flag. She can’t even change the order of precedence. She can’t ignore us like she used to do. And anyway, when my baby is born I don’t plan to go back to court.’ I touch the thick wall beside the glazed window with satisfaction. ‘Nobody can hurt me here.’
‘I shall stay away from court too,’ she says. She smiles at me. ‘I shall have good reason to stay away. Do you notice anything about me?’
I raise my head and look at her more closely. ‘You look—’ I hunt for a phrase that is not impolite: ‘Bonny.’
She laughs. ‘You mean I am fat,’ she says joyfully. ‘I am getting good and fat. And I shall call on you to come to stay with me in August.’ She beams at me. ‘I shall want you to return the favour I am doing here.’
‘Iz—’ In a moment I understand what she means and then I take her hands. ‘Iz – you are expecting a baby?’
She laughs. ‘Yes, at last. I was starting to fear . . .’
‘Of course, of course. But you must rest now.’ At once I drag her to the fireside and pull her into a seat, put a stool under her feet, and smilingly regard her. ‘How wonderful! And you must not pick up things for me any more, and when you leave here, you must have a litter, and not go by horseback.’
‘I am well,’ she says. ‘I feel far better than last time. I am not afraid. At any rate I am not very afraid . . . and – oh, just think, Annie! – they will be cousins, my baby and yours, they will be cousins, born in the same year.’
There is a silence as we both think of the grandfather of our babies who will never see them, who would have regarded them as the fulfilment of his plans, who would at once have started new and ambitious plans for them, the minute that their little heads were in the cradle.
‘Father would have had their marriages laid out, and their heraldry drawn up already,’ Isabel says with a little laugh.
‘He would have got a dispensation and married them to each other,’ I say. ‘To keep their fortunes in the family.’ I pause. ‘Will you write and tell Mother?’ I ask tentatively.
She shrugs, her face closed and cold. ‘What’s the use?’ she asks. ‘She’ll never see her grandchild. She’ll never get out, and she has told me that if I cannot get her released then I am no daughter of hers. What’s the use in even thinking of her?’
The pains start at midnight, just when I am going to sleep with Isabel in the big bed beside me. I give a little cry and within moments she is up, throwing a gown over her shoulders, lighting candles from the fire, sending the maid for the midwives.
I can see that she is afraid for me, and her white-faced ordering of ale and her sharp tone to the midwives make me afraid in my turn. They have a monstrance with the Host inside it set up on the little altar in the corner of my room. I have the girdle that was specially blessed for Isabel’s first birth tied around my straining belly. The midwives have spiced ale
for me and everyone else to drink, and they send orders to the kitchen for the cooks to be woken to make a great dinner, for it will be a long night and we will all want sustaining.
When they bring me a fricassee of game followed by some roast chicken and boiled carp the smell of the food turns my stomach and I order it from the room and prowl up and down, turning at the window and at the head of the bed while outside, in the presence chamber, I can hear them eating greedily and calling for more ale. Only Iz and a couple of maids stay with me. Iz has no appetite either.
‘Are the pains bad?’ she asks anxiously.
I shake my head. ‘They come and go,’ I say. ‘But I think they’re getting stronger.’
About two in the morning it gets a lot worse. The midwives, flushed and merry from the food and drink, come into the bedroom and walk me between the two of them. When I pause they force me to walk onward. When I want to lie down and rest, they cluck and push me on. The pains start to come more closely together and only then do they allow me to lean on one of them and groan.
At about three in the morning I hear footsteps coming across the bridge from the great chamber, and there is a knock at the door and I hear Richard calling: ‘I am the duke! How is my wife?’
‘Merrily,’ says the midwife with rough good humour. ‘She’s doing merrily, my lord.’
‘How much longer will she be?’
‘Hours yet,’ she says cheerfully, ignoring my moan of protest. ‘Could be hours. You get yourself some sleep, Your Grace, we’ll send to you the moment she takes to her bed.’
‘Why, is she not in bed now? What is she doing?’ he demands, puzzled, the door barred to him, knowing nothing of the mid-wives’ arts.
‘We’re walking her,’ the older one replies. ‘Walking her up and down to ease the pain.’
Pointless to tell them that it does not ease the pain at all, for they will do this, as they have always done it, and I will obey them, for I can hardly think for myself now.
‘You are walking her?’ my young husband demands through the closed door. ‘Is that helping much?’
‘If the baby was slow in coming we would toss her in a blanket,’ the younger one replies with a hard laugh. ‘She is glad we are just walking her. This is women’s work, Your Grace. We know what we are doing.’
I hear Richard’s muffled expletive, but then his footsteps go away and Iz and I look bleakly at each other as the women take my arms and lead me from fireplace to doorway and back again.
They leave me as they go to take their breakfast in the great hall, and once again I find I cannot eat and Iz sits beside me as I rest on the bed, and strokes my forehead like she used to do when I was ill. The pains come so often and so powerfully that I think I cannot bear it any longer. Just then the door opens and the two midwives come back in, this time bringing with them the wet nurse, who sets the cradle to rights, and spreads the sheets on the birthing bed.
‘Not long now,’ says one of the midwives cheerfully. ‘Here.’ She offers me a wooden wedge, polished by use and indented with teeth marks. ‘Bite on it,’ she says. ‘See those marks? Many a good woman has bitten on that and saved her own tongue. You bite on it when the pain comes, and then you take a good hold of this.’
They have tied a cord across the two bottom posts of my big bed and when I reach forwards from the day bed I can get hold of it and brace my feet against the foot of the big bed. ‘You pull on that, and we pull with you. You bite on the wedge when you feel the pain rising, and we roar with you.’
‘Do you have nothing you can give her to ease the pain?’ Isabel demands.
The younger woman unstoppers a stone bottle. ‘You take a drop of this,’ she suggests, pouring it into my silver cup. ‘Come to think of it, we’ll all take a drop of this.’
It burns my throat and makes my eyes water but it makes me feel braver and stronger. I see Iz choke on her draught and she grins at me. She leans forwards to whisper in my ear: ‘These are two greedy drunk old women. God only knows where Richard found them.’
‘They are the best in the country,’ I reply. ‘God help the woman in travail with the worst.’
She laughs and I laugh too but the laugh catches in my belly like a sword thrust, and I give a great cry. At once the two women become businesslike, seating me on the birthing bed, putting the looped cord into my hand, telling the maid to pour hot water from the jug at the fireside. Then there is a long confused time when I am absorbed by the pain, and the firelight reflected on the side of the jug, the heat of the room, and Isabel’s cool hand bathing my face. I feel as if I am fighting a pain in my very bowels and it is a struggle to breathe. I think of my mother, so far away from me, who should be here with me now, and I think of my father who spent his life fighting and who knew the final last terror of defeat and death. Oddly enough I think of Midnight, throwing up his big head as the sword went in his heart. At the thought of my father, going out on foot to put down his life in the fields outside Barnet so that I might be Queen of England I give a heave and I hear a crying, and someone saying urgently, ‘Gently, gently now,’ and I see Isabel’s face blurred with tears and hear her say to me: ‘Annie! Annie! You have a boy!’ And I know that I have done the one thing that my father wanted, the one thing that Richard needs: I have given my father a grandson and my husband his heir, and God has blessed me with a baby boy.
But he is not strong. The midwives say cheerfully that many a frail boy makes a brave man, and the wet nurse says that her milk will make him grow fat and bonny in no time, but through the six weeks of my confinement after his birth, before my churching, my heart quails when I hear him cry, a little thin reedy sound, through the night, and in the day I look at the palms of his hands which are like little pale leaves.
Isabel is to go back to George in London after the baby’s christening and my churching. We call him Edward for the king, and Richard says that he foretells a great future for him. The christening is small and quiet, as is my churching, the king and queen cannot come and although nobody says anything, the baby does not look likely to thrive, he is hardly worth the cost of a great christening gown, three days of celebration in the castle, and a dinner for all the servants.
‘He will be strong,’ Isabel whispers to me reassuringly as she climbs into her litter in the stable yard. She is not going to ride, for her belly is broadening. ‘I thought he was looking much stronger this very morning.’
He is not, but neither of us admit this.
‘And anyway, at least you know now that you can have a child, that you can have a live birth,’ she says. The thought of the little boy who died at sea, who never even cried out, haunts us both, still.
‘You can have a live child too,’ I say staunchly. ‘This one, for sure. And I shall come to your confinement. There is no reason that it should not go well for you this time. And you will have a little cousin for Edward, and please God they will both thrive.’
She looks at me, her eyes hollow in her face with fear. ‘The York boys are lusty stock but I never forget that our mother conceived only me and you. And I have had a child and lost him.’
‘Now you be brave,’ I order her, as if I am the older sister. ‘You keep your spirits up, and all will be well with you as it was with me. And I will come to you in your time.’
She nods. ‘God bless you, Sister, and keep you well.’
‘God bless,’ I say. ‘God bless you, Iz.’
After Isabel has left I find that I am thinking of my mother, and that she may never see this, her first grandchild, the boy that we all wanted so much. I write her a brief note to tell her that the child is born, and that he is thriving so far, and I wait for a reply. She answers me with a tirade of rage. To her my child, my darling boy, is illegitimate; she calls him ‘Richard’s bastard’, for she did not give permission for the wedding. The castle where he was born is not his home but hers, and so he is a usurper, like his father and mother. I must leave both child and husband at once and go to join her at Beaulieu. Or I must go to
London and petition the king for her freedom. Or I must command my husband to set her free. George and Richard must return her fortune, they should be charged as thieves. And if I do none of these things then I will feel the coldness of a mother’s curse, she will disown me, she will never write to me again.
Slowly, I fold the letter into smaller and smaller portions, and then I walk to the great hall where the fire is always burning and drop the wadded paper in the back of the fire and watch it smoulder and burn. Richard, coming by with his deerhound at his heels, pauses at my solemn face, and looks at the little flame in the grate.
‘What was this?’
‘Nothing,’ I say sadly. ‘It’s nothing to me any more.’
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, JUNE 1473
It is the time of day that I love the best, the early evening before dinner, and Richard and I are walking around the walls which run around this great castle, a long square walk which takes us to all points of the compass and begins and ends at the prince’s tower where my darling little Edward has his nursery. To our right is the deep moat. As I look down I can see them pulling a net from the moat gleaming with wriggling silver fish and I nudge Richard and say, ‘Carp for dinner tonight.’
Beyond the moat is the jumble of stone and slate buildings of the little town of Middleham and all around the town the rich pasture that runs up to the moorland. I can see two milkmaids with their yoke and pails over their broad shoulders, carrying their three-legged stools, going out to milk the cows in the fields, and the cows raising their heads from the grass when they hear the call ‘bonnie coo! bonnie coo!’ and walking slowly towards them. Beyond the fields the lower slopes of the hills are dark green with bracken and beyond that, higher and higher, is the misty amethyst tinge of flowering heather. This has been my home, and my family’s home, forever. Most of the boys in the cottages are named Richard after my father, and his father before him. Most of the girls are called Anne or Isabel after my sister and me. Almost everyone has sworn obedience to me or to the new Richard here – my husband. As we turn the corner on the walkway of the castle and go away from the town I see an early barn owl, white as a cloud, floating silent as a falling leaf along the bushy line of the hedge. The sun is sinking down into a layer of rose and gold clouds, my hand is tucked in Richard’s arm, and I lean my head against his shoulder.