The Kingmaker's Daughter (39 page)

‘Iz,’ I say gently. ‘We fear her because we know what our father did to hers, and we know how wrong it was. His sin is on our conscience and we fear his victims. We fear her
because she knows that we both hoped to steal her throne – one after the other – and we both were married to men who raised their standards against hers. She knows that both George and
the prince, my first husband, would have killed Edward and put her in the Tower. But when we were defeated she received us. She didn’t have us locked up. She didn’t have us accused of
treason and imprisoned. She has never shown anything but courtesy to us.’

‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘She has never shown anything but courtesy. No anger, no desire for revenge, no kindness, no warmth, no human feeling of any sort at all. Has
she ever said to you that she can’t forget what our father did to hers? After that first time? That terrible time when the witch her mother whistled up a cold wind that blew out all the
candles?’

‘One candle,’ I correct her.

‘Has she ever said she still feels rage? Has she ever said she forgives you? Has she ever said anything as a sister-in-law, as one woman to another, anything at all?’

Unwillingly, I shake my head.

‘Nor to me. Not one word of anger, not one word of her revenge. Don’t you think that proves that her malice is stored coldly inside her like ice in an ice house? She looks at us as
if she is Melusina, the emblem of her house, half woman, half fish. She is as cold as a fish to me, and I swear to you that she is planning my death.’

I shake my head at the server who is offering us a dish.

‘Take it,’ Isabel prompts anxiously. ‘She sent it from the high table to us. Don’t refuse her.’

I take a spoonful of the potted hare. ‘You don’t fear it is poisoned?’ I say, trying to laugh her out of her fears.

‘You can laugh if you like; but one of her ladies told me that she had a secret enamel box, and in the box a scrap of paper with two names written on it. Two names written in blood, and
that she swore the two named would not live.’

‘What names?’ I whisper, dropping the spoon in the dish, all appetite gone. I cannot go on pretending that I don’t believe Isabel, that I am not afraid of the queen.
‘What names does she have in secret?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘The lady in waiting didn’t know. She only saw the paper, not the words. But what if they are our names? Yours and mine? What if she has a
scrap of paper and the words written in blood are Anne and Isabel?’

Isabel and I have a week together at Fotheringhay before we go with the court to London. Isabel is going to give birth to this baby at their London home of L’Erber, and
this time I will be allowed to share her confinement. Richard has no objection to me staying with Isabel in the London palace, as long as I visit court from time to time with him to keep on the
best terms with the queen, and make sure to never hear one word against the royal family.

‘It will be so nice to be together for a long time again,’ Isabel says. ‘And I like it best when you are there with me.’

‘Richard says I can only stay for the last weeks,’ I warn her. ‘He does not want me under George’s protection for too long. He says that George is talking against the
king again and he doesn’t want me to come under suspicion.’

‘What does the king suspect? What does She suspect?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t know. But George is openly rude to her, Iz. And he has been far worse since the funerals.’

‘It should have been him to organise the reburial of his father but the king did not trust him with it,’ she says resentfully. ‘It should be him at the side of the king but he
is never invited. Do you think he does not notice that he is slighted? Slighted every day?’

‘They do wrong to slight him,’ I grant her. ‘But it is more and more awkward. He looks sideways at the queen and whispers about her behind his hand, and he is so disrespectful
of the king and careless with the king’s friends.’

‘Because She is always beside the king before anyone else can get there, or if not her then the king is with her Grey sons, or with William Hastings!’ Isabel flares up. ‘The
king should cleave to his brothers, both his brothers. The truth is that though he says he has forgiven and forgotten George for following Father, he will never forgive and forget. And if he did
ever forget, for even one minute, then She would remind him.’

I say nothing. The queen, though pointedly cool with Isabel and me, is icy with George. And her great confidant, her brother Anthony Woodville, smiles when George goes by as if he finds my
brother-in-law’s tinderbox temper amusing, and worthy of very little respect.

‘Well, at any rate, I can come for the last three weeks,’ I say. ‘But send for me if you are ill. I will come at once if you are ill, whatever anyone says, and at least I shall
be there for his birth.’

‘You are calling the baby “him”!’ she says gleefully. ‘You think it will be a boy too.’

‘How can I not, when you call it a boy all the time? What name will you give him?’

She smiles. ‘We are calling him Richard for his grandfather, of course,’ she says. ‘And we hope your husband will stand as his godfather.’

I smile. ‘Then you will have an Edward and a Richard, just like the royal princes,’ I observe.

‘That’s what George says!’ she crows. ‘He says that if the king and the queen and her family were to disappear off the face of the earth then there would still be a
Prince Edward Plantagenet to take the throne and a Prince Richard Plantagenet to come after him.’

‘Yes, but it’s hard to imagine what disaster could wipe the king and the queen off the face of the earth,’ I say, lowering my voice cautiously.

Isabel giggles. ‘I think my husband imagines it every day.’

‘Then who is doing the ill-wishing?’ I ask, thinking to score a point. ‘Not Her!’

At once she looks grave and turns away. ‘George is not ill-wishing the king,’ she says quietly. ‘That would be treason. I was speaking in jest.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1476

I should have taken a warning from that, but when we get back to London I am amazed at how George behaves around the court while Isabel rarely comes out of their private rooms
to join everyone, as if to snub the queen and her household. George walks surrounded by his own particular friends; he is never seen without men of his choosing, and they stand guard around him,
almost as if he feared attack within the high walls of Westminster Palace.

He comes to dinner in the great hall, as we all do, but once he is seated, in full view of everyone, he makes no pretence at eating. They set dishes before him and he glowers, as if he has been
insulted, and does not even pick up his knife or spoon. He looks at the servers as if he fears the dish has been poisoned, and he lets everyone know that he eats only what his own cooks prepare, in
his private rooms.

Any time of the day you can be certain to find the doors to the Clarence apartments bolted shut with a double guard on the door as if he thinks someone might storm the rooms and kidnap Isabel.
When I visit her, I have to wait outside the double doors for someone to call my name, then a shouted order comes from behind the closed door, and the guards lower their pikes and let me in.

‘He is behaving like a fool,’ my husband rules. ‘It is a performance of suspicion like a masque, and if Edward stands for it because he is lazy and indulgent with George, he
can be very sure that the queen will not.’

‘He cannot really think that he is endangered?’

Richard scowls. ‘Anne, I really don’t know what he thinks. He has not spoken to me about Edward since I told him that I took his warnings to be treason. But he speaks to many others.
He speaks ill of the queen—’

‘What does he say of her?’

‘He constantly speaks ill of the king.’

‘Yes, but what does he say?’

Richard turns and stares out of the mullioned window. ‘I can hardly repeat it,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t stoop to repeat it. Let me leave it that he says the worst thing one
can say of a man, and the worst thing one can say of a woman.’

I don’t press him, as I have learned that his sense of honour is always alert. Besides, I don’t need to ask, I can guess. George will have been saying that his brother Edward is a
bastard – slandering and dishonouring his own mother in the attempt to show that he should be king. And he will be saying that Elizabeth got into the king’s bed by witchcraft and that
their marriage is not holy or valid, and that their children are bastards too.

‘And I am afraid that George is taking money from Louis of France.’

‘Everyone is taking money from Louis of France.’

Richard laughs shortly. ‘None more than the king. No – I don’t mean the pensions, I mean that Louis is paying George secretly to behave like this, mustering men and reciting
his claims to the throne. I am afraid Louis will pay George to make an attempt on the throne. It would suit him to have the country at war again. God knows what George is thinking.’

I don’t say that George will be thinking what George is always thinking – how he can get the most advantage from any situation. ‘What is the king thinking?’

‘He laughs,’ Richard says. ‘He laughs and says that George is a faithless dog, and that our mother will speak to him, and that after all, there is little that George can do
except curse and glower.’

‘And what does the queen say?’ I ask, knowing that she will oppose any slur on her children, she would fight to the death for her son, and that it will be her advice that will
control the king.

‘She says nothing,’ Richard replies drily. ‘Or at any rate, she says nothing to me. But I think if George continues the way he is going she will see him as her enemy, and the
enemy of her sons. I would not want to be her enemy.’

I think of the scrap of paper in the enamelled box and the two names written in blood. ‘Neither would I.’

When I next go to the Clarence apartments the door is standing open and they are carrying boxes out, down the tower stairs to the stable yard. Isabel is sitting by the fire,
with her travelling cloak around her shoulders, her hand on her big belly.

‘What’s happening?’ I ask, coming into the room. ‘What are you doing?’

She gets to her feet. ‘We’re leaving,’ she says. ‘Walk me down to the stable yard.’

I take her hand to keep her inside the chamber. ‘You can’t travel like this. Where are you going? I thought you were going to L’Erber for your confinement?’

‘George says we can’t stay at court,’ she says. ‘It’s not safe. We won’t be safe even at L’Erber. I’m going into confinement at Tewkesbury
Abbey.’

‘Halfway to Wales?’ I exclaim in horror. ‘Iz, you can’t!’

‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘Help me, Anne.’

I take her hand in my arm and she leans on me as we go down the winding stone stairs and out into the cold bright stable yard. She gives a little gasp at a stab of pain in her belly. I am
certain that she is not fit to make the journey. ‘Isabel, don’t go. Don’t travel like this. Come to my house if you won’t go to your own.’

‘We’re not safe in London,’ she whispers. ‘She tried to poison George and me. She sent poisoned food to our rooms.’

‘No!’