The Kingmaker's Daughter (9 page)

Once again Isabel and I walk into the queen’s rooms sick with apprehension. The queen is in her great chair, her mother Jacquetta standing like sculpted ice behind her.
Our mother comes behind Isabel but before me, and I wish that I were young enough to get my toes under her train and pass unnoticed. Nobody will think I am charming today. Isabel, though a married
woman and this queen’s sister-in-law, has her head down, her eyes down, like a child in disgrace longing for this moment to be over.

My mother curtseys as low as she must do to a Queen of England and comes up, standing before her, hands quietly clasped, as composed as if she were in her own castle of Warwick. The queen looks
her up and down and her eyes are as warm as grey slate in icy rain.

‘Ah, Countess of Warwick,’ she says in a voice as light and cold as drifting snow.

‘Your Grace,’ my mother replies through gritted teeth.

The queen’s mother, her lovely face blank with grief, wearing white, the royal colour of mourning of her house, looks at the three of us as if she would cut us down where we stand. I do
not dare to do more than snatch a glance at her before I drop my eyes to my feet. She smiled at me at the coronation dinner; now she looks as if she will never smile again. I have never seen
heartbreak engraved on a woman’s face before; but I know that I am seeing it in the ravaged beauty of Jacquetta Woodville. My mother inclines her head. ‘Your Grace, I am sorry for your
loss,’ she says quietly.

The widow says nothing, nothing at all. We all three stand as if we are frozen in the ice of her gaze. I think – well, she must say something, she will say something such as
‘fortunes of war’ or ‘thank you for your sympathy’ or ‘he is with God’ or any of the things that widows say when their husbands have been lost in battle. England
has been at war with itself, on and off, for the last fourteen years. Many women have to meet each other and know that their husbands were enemies. We are all accustomed to new alliances. But it
seems that Jacquetta, the widow of Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, does not know these conventions, for she says nothing to make us any easier. She looks at us as if we are her enemies for life, as
if she is cursing us in silence, as if this is the start of a blood feud that will never end, and I can feel myself start to tremble under the basilisk hatred of her gaze and I swallow, and wonder
if I am going to faint.

‘He was a brave man,’ my mother volunteers again. In the face of Jacquetta’s stony grief the comment sounds frivolous.

At last the widow speaks. ‘He suffered the ignoble death of a traitor, beheaded by the Coventry blacksmith, and my beloved son John died too,’ the queen’s mother replies.
‘Both of them innocent of any crime, in all their lives. John was just twenty-four years old, obedient to his father and his king. My husband was defending his crowned and ordained king yet
he was charged with treason, and then beheaded by your husband. It was not an honourable death on the battlefield. He had been on dozens of battlefields and always come home safe to me. It was a
pledge he made to me: that he would always come home safe from war. He didn’t break it. God bless him that he didn’t break his promise to me. He died on the scaffold, not on the
battlefield. I shall never forget this. I shall never forgive this.’

There is a truly terrible silence. Everyone in the room is looking at us, listening to the queen’s mother swear her enmity against us. I look up and find the queen’s icy gaze, filled
with hatred, is resting on me. I look down again.

‘These are the fortunes of war,’ my mother says awkwardly, as if to excuse us.

Then Jacquetta does an odd, a terrible thing. She purses her lips together and she blows a long chilling whistle. Somewhere outside, a shutter bangs and a sudden chill flows through the room.
The candles bob and flicker throughout the chamber as if a cold wind has nearly blown them out. Abruptly one candle in the stand beside Isabel winks and goes out. Isabel gives a little scream of
fright. Jacquetta and her daughter the queen both look at us as if they would whistle us away, blow us away like dirty dust.

My formidable mother shrinks before this extraordinary inexplicable behaviour. I have never seen her turn from a challenge before but she flees from this, as she ducks her head and walks to the
window bay. Nobody greets us, nobody breaks the silence that follows the unearthly whistle, nobody even smiles. There are people here who danced at the wedding at Calais Castle where this whole
terrible plan was set in motion; but to look at them you would think they were utter strangers to us three. We stand in stony shame, quite alone, while the gust of air slowly dies down and the echo
of Jacquetta’s long whistle goes silent.

The doors open and the king comes in, my father at his side, George his brother on the other side, Richard the younger York duke a little behind him, his dark head high and proud. He has every
reason to be pleased with himself; this is the brother who did not betray the king, the brother whose loyalty was tested and stayed true. This is the brother who will have wealth and favour poured
over him while we are in disgrace. I look towards him to see if he will acknowledge us and smile at me; but it seems that I am invisible to him, as we are to the rest of the court. Richard is a man
now, his boyhood in our keeping far behind him. He was loyal to the king, when we were not.

George slowly comes over to our lonely little corner, looking away from us, as if he is ashamed to be with us, and Father follows him with his long loping stride. Father’s confidence is
unshaken, his smile still bold, his brown eyes shining, his thick beard neatly trimmed, his authority untarnished by defeat. Isabel and I kneel for Father’s blessing and feel his hand lightly
touch our heads. When we rise he is taking Mother’s hand as she smiles thinly at him, and then we all go into dinner, walking behind the king as if we were still his dearest friends and
dedicated allies and not defeated traitors.

After dinner there is dancing and the king is cheerful, handsome and buoyant as always, like the lead actor in a masque, playing the role of the merry good king. He claps my
father on the back, he puts his arm around his brother George’s shoulders. He, at least, will play his part as if nothing has gone wrong. My father, no less cunning than his former ally, is
also at his ease, glancing around the court, greeting friends who all know that we are traitors and are only here on the king’s goodwill and because we own half of England. They smirk behind
their hands at us, I can hear the laughter in their voices. I don’t look to see the hidden smiles; I keep my eyes down. I am so ashamed, I am so deeply ashamed of what we have done.

We failed, that was the worst of it. We took the king but we could not hold him. We won a little battle, but nobody supported us. It was not enough for my father to hold the king at Warwick, at
Middleham; the king simply ruled from there and behaved as if he were an honoured guest, and then rode out and away when it suited him.

‘And Isabel must join the queen’s court,’ I hear the king say loudly, and my father replies without taking breath: ‘Yes, yes, of course, she will be honoured.’

Both Isabel and the queen hear this and look up at the same moment and their gazes meet. Isabel looks utterly shocked and afraid, her lips parting as if to ask Father to refuse. But the days
when we could claim to be too good for royal service are long gone. Isabel will have to live in the queen’s rooms, wait on her every day. The queen turns her head with a little gesture of
disdain, as if she cannot bear to see the two of us, as if we are something unclean, as if we are lepers. Father is not looking at us at all.

‘Come with me,’ Isabel whispers urgently to me. ‘You have to come with me if I have to serve her. Come and live in her household with me, Annie. I swear I can’t go on my
own.’

‘Father won’t let me . . .’ I reply rapidly. ‘Don’t you remember Mother refusing us last time? You’ll have to go, because of being her sister-in-law, but I
can’t come, Mother won’t let me, and I couldn’t bear it . . .’

‘And Lady Anne too,’ the king says easily.

‘Of course,’ Father says agreeably. ‘Whatever Her Grace desires.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1470

The queen is never rude to us: it is far worse than that. It is as if we are invisible to her. Her mother never speaks to us at all, and if she passes us in the gallery or in
the hall she steps back against the wall as if she would not let the skirt of her gown so much as touch us. If another woman stepped back like this I would take it as a gesture of deference, giving
me the way. But when the duchess does it, with a quick step aside without even looking at me, I feel as if she is drawing her skirts away from foul mud, as if I have something on my shoes or my
petticoat that stinks. We see our own mother only at dinner and at night when she sits with the queen’s ladies, a little circle of unfriendly silence around her, while they talk pleasantly
among themselves. The rest of the time we wait on the queen, attending her when she is dressing in the morning, following her when she goes to the nursery to see her three little girls, kneeling
behind her in chapel, sitting below her place at breakfast, riding out with her when she goes hunting. We are constantly in her presence and she never, by word or glance, ever acknowledges that we
are there.

The rules of precedence mean that we often have to walk immediately behind her, and then she is simply blind to us, speaking over our heads to her other ladies. If the two of us happen to be the
only ones with her, she behaves as if she is quite alone. When we carry her train she walks at the same speed as if there were no-one behind her, and we have to scuttle along to keep up with her,
looking foolish. When she hands her gloves to us she does not even look to see if one of us is ready to take them. When I drop one she does not demean herself to notice. It is as if she would let
the priceless perfumed and embroidered leather lie in the mud rather than ask me to pick it up. When I have to hand something to her, a book of tales or a petition, she takes it as if it had come
out of thin air. If I pass her a posy of flowers or a handkerchief she takes it so that she does not touch my fingers. She never asks me for her prayer book or her rosary, and I do not dare to
offer them. I am afraid she would think them defiled by my bloody hands.

Isabel sinks into a white-faced sullenness, does as she must do, and sits in silence, never volunteering a remark while the ladies chatter around her. As Isabel’s belly grows the queen
asks her to do less and less, but not as a courtesy. With one disdainful turn of her head she suggests that Isabel is not able to serve her, is no good as a lady in waiting, is good for nothing but
to breed like a pig. Isabel sits with her hands folded over her belly as if to hide the curve, as if she is afraid that the queen will cast her eye on the baby.

But still, I cannot see the queen as my enemy, because I cannot rid myself of the sense that she is in the right and we are in the wrong, and that her visible contempt for me and my sister has
been earned by my father. I cannot be angry, I am too ashamed. When I see her smile at her daughters or laugh with her husband I am reminded of the first time I saw her when I thought her the most
beautiful woman in the world. She is still the most beautiful woman in the world but I am no longer an awestruck little girl; I am the daughter of her enemy and the murderer of her father and
brother. And I am sorry, deeply sorry for all that has happened – but I cannot tell her so, and she makes it clear she would hear nothing from me.

After a month of this I cannot eat my dinner at the ladies’ table. It sticks in my throat. I cannot sleep at night; I am always cold as if my bedroom in her household is whistling with a
chill draught. My hands shake when I have to pass something to the queen, and my sewing is hopeless, the linen covered with spots of blood where I have pricked my fingers. I ask our Lady Mother if
I may go to Warwick, or even back to Calais, I tell her that I feel ill, living at the court among our enemies is making me sick.

‘Don’t you complain to me,’ she says shortly. ‘I have to sit beside her mother at dinner and be chilled to my soul by that witch’s ice. Your father risked
everything and lost. He could not hold the king a prisoner on his own, the lords would not support him and without them, nothing could be done. We are lucky the king did not have him executed.
Instead we are in a fine place: at court, your sister married to the king’s brother and your cousin John betrothed to the king’s daughter. We are close to the throne and may get closer
still. Serve the queen and be grateful that your father is not dead on a scaffold like hers. Serve the queen and be glad that your father will seek a good marriage for you and she will approve
it.’