The Kingmaker's Daughter (13 page)

Inside the cabin, Isabel is up on the bed on her hands and knees, lowing like a dying animal. She looks at me through a tangle of hair and her face is white and her eyes rimmed red. I can hardly
recognise her; she is as ugly as a tortured beast. My mother lifts her gown at the back and her linen is bloody. I have a glimpse and I look away.

‘You have to put your hands in, and turn the baby,’ my mother says. ‘My hands are too big. I can’t do it.’

I look at her with utter horror. ‘What?’

‘We have no midwife, we have to turn the baby ourselves,’ my mother says impatiently. ‘She’s so small that my hands are too big. You’ll have to do it.’

I look at my slender hands, my long fingers. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say.

‘I’ll tell you.’

‘I can’t do it.’

‘You have to.’

‘Mother, I am a maid, a girl – I shouldn’t even be here . . .’

A scream from Isabel as she drops her head to the bed interrupts me. ‘Annie, for the love of God, help me. Get it out! Get it out of me!’

My mother takes my arm and drags me to the foot of the bed. Margaret lifts Isabel’s linen; her hindquarters are horribly bloody. ‘Put your hand in there,’ my mother says.
‘Push in. What can you feel?’

Isabel cries out in pain as I put my hand to her yielding flesh and slide it in. Disgust – disgust is all I feel through the hot flesh, and horror. Then something vile: like a leg.

Isabel’s body contracts on my hand like a vice, crushing my fingers. I cry out: ‘Don’t do that! You’re hurting me!’

She gasps like a dying cow. ‘I can’t help it. Annie, get it out.’

The slithery leg kicks at my touch. ‘I have it. I think it’s a leg, or an arm.’

‘Can you find the other?’

I shake my head.

‘Then pull it anyway,’ my mother says.

I look at her aghast.

‘We have to get it out. Pull gently.’

I start to pull. Isabel screams. I bite my lip, this is disgusting, horrifying work and Isabel disgusts and horrifies me that she should be here like this, like a fat mare, labouring like a
whore, forcing me to do this. I find I am grimacing, my head turned aside as if I don’t want to see, standing as far as I can from the bed, from her, from my sister, this monster, touching
her without pity, holding tight onto this limb as I am ordered, despite my loathing.

‘Can you get your other hand in?’

I look at my mother as if she is mad. This is not possible.

‘See if you can get your other hand in, and get hold of the baby.’

I had forgotten there was a baby, I am so shocked by the horror of the stench and the sensation of the slippery little limb in my hand. Gently I try to press my other hand in. Something yields
horribly, and I can feel, with the tips of my fingers, something that might be an arm, a shoulder.

‘An arm?’ I say. I grit my teeth so I don’t retch.

‘Push it away, feel down, get the other leg.’ My mother is wringing her hands, desperate to get the work done, patting Isabel’s back as if she were a sick dog.

‘I’ve got the other leg,’ I say.

‘When I tell you – you have to pull both legs,’ she commands. She steps sideways and takes Isabel’s head in her hands. She speaks to her: ‘When you feel your pain
is coming you have to push,’ she says. ‘Push hard.’

‘I can’t,’ Isabel sobs. ‘I can’t, Mother. I can’t.’

‘You have to. You must. Tell me as the pain comes.’

There is a pause and then Isabel’s groans gather strength and she screams: ‘Now, it is now.’

‘Push!’ my mother says. The ladies get hold of her clenched fists and heave on her arms, as if we are tearing her apart. Margaret slips the wooden spoon in her mouth and Isabel howls
and bites down on it. ‘You pull the baby,’ my mother shouts at me. ‘Now. Steady. Pull.’

I pull as I am ordered, and horribly I feel something click and give under my hands. ‘No! It’s broken, broken!’

‘Pull it. Pull it anyway!’

I pull, there is a rush and a gout of blood, a stink of liquid and two little legs are dangling from Isabel and she screams and pants.

‘Once more,’ Mother says. She sounds oddly triumphant, but I am filled with terror. ‘Nearly there now, once again, Isabel. As the pain comes.’

Isabel groans and heaves herself up.

‘Pull, Anne!’ Mother commands and I hold the thin little slippery legs and pull again, and there is a moment when nothing moves at all and then one shoulder comes and then another
and then Isabel shrieks as the head comes and I clearly see her flesh tear, as if she were a crimson and blue brocade, red blood and blue veins tear as the head comes out and then the slithery
cord, and I drop the baby on the bedding and turn my head away and am sick on the floor.

The ship heaves, we all stagger with the movement, and then Mother comes hand over hand down the bed, and gently takes up the child and wraps him in the linen. I am shuddering, rubbing my bloody
hands and arms on some rags, rubbing the vomit from my mouth but waiting for the words that will tell us a miracle has happened. I am waiting for the first miraculous little cry.

There is silence.

Isabel is moaning quietly. I can see that she is bleeding but nobody staunches her wounds. My mother has the baby wrapped warmly. One of the women looks up smiling, her face stained with tears.
We all wait for the little cry, we wait for my mother’s smile.

My mother’s exhausted face is grey. ‘It’s a boy,’ she says harshly: the one thing we all want to hear. But oddly, there is no joy in her voice and her mouth is grim.

‘A boy?’ I repeat hopefully.

‘Yes, it’s a boy. But it’s a dead boy. He is dead.’

THE RIVER SEINE, FRANCE, MAY 1470

The sailors take down the sails and cart them to the sailyards for repair, and scrub out the royal cabin where the boards are stained with Izzy’s blood and my vomit. They
say that it is a miracle we were not drowned in the storm, they speak of their own horror when the chain went up across the Calais harbour entrance. They say only my father’s weight on the
wheel made it possible for the steersman to get the ship round. They say they never want to take a voyage like that again, but if they had to, they would only do it with my father at the wheel.
They say that he saved them. But never again will they sail with women on board. They shake their heads. Never again with women who are chased by a witch’s wind. They are exultant in their
survival. They all think that the ship was cursed with a woman in labour and a dead baby on board. They all believe that the ship was chased by a witch’s wind whistled up by the queen to blow
us to hell. Everywhere I go on board there is an immediate and total silence. They think the witch’s wind was hunting us, will follow us still. They blame us for everything.

They get up the chests from the hold and at last we can wash and change our clothes. Isabel is still bleeding but she gets up and gets dressed, though her gowns hang oddly on her. Her proud
belly has gone, she just looks fat and sick. Izzy’s holy girdle and pilgrim badges for her confinement are unpacked with her jewels. She puts them in the box at the foot of our bed without
comment. There is a wordless awkwardness between the two of us. Something terrible has happened, so terrible that we don’t even know how to name it or speak of it. She disgusts me, she
disgusts herself, and we say nothing about it. Mother takes the dead baby away in a box and someone blesses it and throws it into the sea, I think. Nobody tells us, and we don’t ask. I know
that it was my inexperienced tugging that pulled his leg from the socket; but I don’t know if I killed him. I don’t know if Izzy thinks this, or Mother knows it. Nobody says anything to
me either way, and I am never going to speak of it again. The disgust and the horror lies in my belly like seasickness.

She should be in confinement until she has been churched, we should all be locked in her rooms with her for six weeks, and then emerge to be purified. But there are no traditions for giving
birth to a dead baby in a witch’s storm at sea; nothing seems to be as it should. George comes to see her when the cabin is clean and her bed has fresh linen. She is resting as he comes in
and he leans over the bed to kiss her pale forehead, and smiles at me. ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he says.

She hardly looks at him. ‘Our loss,’ she corrects him. ‘It was a boy.’

His handsome face is impassive. I guess that Mother has already told him. ‘There will be others,’ he says. It sounds more like a threat than a reassurance. He goes to the door as if
he cannot wait to get out of the cabin. I wonder if we smell, if he can smell death and fear on us.

‘If we had not been nearly wrecked at sea I think the baby would have lived,’ she says with sudden viciousness. ‘If I had been at Warwick Castle I would have had midwives to
attend me. I could have had my holy girdle and the priest would have prayed for me. If you had not ridden out with Father against the king and come home beaten, I would have had my baby at home and
he would be alive now.’ She pauses. His handsome face is quite impassive. ‘It’s your fault,’ she says.

‘I hear that Queen Elizabeth is with child again,’ he remarks, as if this is an answer to her accusation. ‘Please God she gets another girl, or a dead baby herself. We have to
have a son before she does. This is just a setback, it is not the end.’ He tries to smile cheerfully at her. ‘It’s not the end,’ he repeats and goes out.

Isabel just looks at me, her face blank. ‘It is the end of my baby,’ she observes. ‘Certainly, it is the end of him.’

Nobody knows what is happening but Father; and though we seem to be homeless and defeated, washed up at the mouth of the Seine, he is strangely cheerful. His fleet of warships
escapes from Southampton and joins us, so he has fighting men and his great ship the
Trinity
under his command once more. He is writing constantly and sending messages to King Louis of
France; but he does not tell us what he plans. He orders new clothes for himself, and has them cut in the French fashion, a velvet cap on his thick brown hair. We move to Valognes, so that the
fleet can prepare in Barfleur for an invasion of England. Isabel makes the move in silence. She and George are given beautiful rooms on the upper floor of the manor house, but she avoids him. Most
of the day she spends with me in Mother’s presence chamber where we open the windows for air and close the shutters against the sun and sit all the day in warm gloom. It is very hot, and
Isabel feels the heat. She complains of a constant headache, fatigue even in the morning when she first wakes. Once she remarks that she cannot see the point of anything, and when I ask her what
she means she just shakes her head and her eyes fill with tears. We sit on the stone windowsill of the big chamber and look out at the river and the green fields beyond and neither of us can see
the point of anything. We never say anything about the baby who was taken away by Mother in the little box and thrown in the sea. We never say anything about the storm, or the wind, or the sea. We
never say much at all. We sit in silence for a lot of the time, and there is no need to talk.

‘I wish we were back in Calais,’ Isabel says suddenly one hot quiet morning, and I know she means that she wishes none of this had ever happened – not the rebellion against the
sleeping king and the bad queen, not Father’s victory, not his rebellion against King Edward, and most of all: no marriage to George. It is to wish away almost every event of our childhood.
It is to wish away every attempt at greatness.

‘What else could Father have done?’ Of course, he had to struggle against the sleeping king and the bad queen. He knew they were in the wrong, they had to be pushed from the throne.
Then, when they were defeated and thrown down, he could not bear to see the couple that replaced them. He could not live in an England ruled by the Rivers family; he had to raise his standard
against King Edward. He is driven to see the kingdom under the rule of a good king, advised by us; George should be that king. I understand that Father cannot stop striving for this. As his
daughter I know that my life will be shaped by this unending struggle to get us where we should be: the first power behind the throne. Isabel should realise this. We were born the kingmaker’s
daughters; ruling England is our inheritance.