The Kingmaker's Daughter (16 page)

‘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 she fights to keep greatness then everyone, men and women, simply hate her. In your sister’s green face you see your triumph.’