The Kingmaker's Daughter (31 page)

‘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.