Edward encourages this. He needs someone to keep the North at peace, and to defend England’s borders against the Scots, and there is no-one he trusts more than his youngest brother.
But I have another reason to refuse to stay at court, a reason even better than this. I curtsey to the queen and say: ‘Your Grace must excuse me. I am . . .’
She nods coolly. ‘Of course, I know.’
‘You do?’ At once I think that she has foreseen this conversation with her witch’s gaze, and I cannot restrain my shiver.
‘Lady Anne, I am no fool,’ she says simply. ‘I have had seven babies myself, I can see when a woman cannot eat her breakfast but still grows fatter. I was wondering when you were going to tell us all. Have you told your husband?’
I find I am still breathless with the fear that she knows everything. ‘Yes.’
‘And was he very pleased?’
‘Yes, Your Grace.’
‘He will be hoping for a boy, an earl for such a great inheritance,’ she says with satisfaction. ‘It is a blessing for you both.’
‘If it is a girl I hope you will be godmother?’ I have to ask her; she is the queen and my sister-in-law, and she has to assent. I don’t feel any warmth or love for her and I don’t think for one moment this means she will really bless me or my baby. But I am surprised by the kindness in her face as she nods. ‘I shall be pleased.’
I turn so that her ladies can hear me. My sister, her head bent down to her sewing, is among them. Isabel is trying to look as if she has heard none of this conversation; but I have to believe that she is yearning to speak to me. I can’t believe that Isabel would be indifferent to me, pregnant with my first child. ‘If I have a girl I am going to call her Elizabeth Isabel,’ I say clearly, pitching my voice for her ears.
My sister’s head is turned away; she is looking out of the window at the swirling snow outside, pretending to be indifferent. But when she hears her own name, she looks around. ‘Elizabeth Isabel?’ she repeats. It is the first time she has spoken to me since she scolded me when I came to court as a runaway bride.
‘Yes,’ I say boldly.
She half-rises from her seat, and then sits down again. ‘You will call a daughter: Isabel?’
‘Yes.’
I see her flush and at last she gets up from her seat and comes towards me, away from the queen and her ladies. ‘You would name her for me?’
‘Yes,’ I say simply. ‘You will be her aunt, and I hope you will love her and care for her. And . . .’ I hesitate – of course Isabel of all the people in the world knows that I am bound to be afraid of childbirth. ‘If anything should ever happen to me, then I hope you will raise her as your own child, and . . . and tell her about our father, Iz . . . and about everything that happened. About us . . . and how things went wrong . . .’
Isabel’s face twists for a moment trying to hold back her tears, and then she opens her arms and we cling to each other, crying and laughing at the same time. ‘Oh Iz,’ I whisper. ‘I have hated being at war with you.’
‘I am sorry, I am so sorry, Annie. I should not have acted as I did – I didn’t know what to do – and everything happened so fast. We had to get the fortune . . . and George said . . . and then you ran away . . .’
‘I’m sorry too,’ I say. ‘I know you couldn’t go against your husband. I understand better now.’
She nods, she doesn’t want to say anything about George. A wife owes obedience to her husband, she promises it on her wedding day before God; and husbands exact their full due, supported by the priest and by the world. Isabel is as much George’s possession as if she was his servant or his horse. I too have promised fealty to Richard as if he were a lord and I was indeed a kitchen maid. A woman must obey her husband as a serf obeys his lord – it is the way of the world and the law of God. Even if she thinks he is wrong. Even if she knows he is wrong.
Isabel tentatively puts out her hand to where my belly is hard and swelling beneath the gathered folds of my gown. I take it and let her feel my broadening girth. ‘Annie, you are so big already. Do you feel well?’
‘I was sick at the start but I am well now.’
‘I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me at once!’
‘I wanted to,’ I confess. ‘I really wanted to. I didn’t know how to begin.’
We turn away from the court together. ‘Are you afraid?’ she asks quietly.
‘A little,’ I say. I see the darkness of her glance. ‘A lot,’ I admit. We are both silent, both thinking of the rocking cabin on the storm-tossed ship with my mother screaming at me that I must pull the baby from her, the horror as the little body yielded inside her. The vision is so strong I am almost unsteady on my feet, as if the seas were throwing us around once more. She takes my hands in hers and it is as if we had just made landfall and I am telling her about the little coffin, and Mother letting it go into the sea.
‘Annie, there’s no reason that it should not be all right for you,’ she says earnestly. ‘There is no reason that it should go wrong for you as it did for me. My pains were so much worse for being at sea, and the storm, and the danger. You will be safe, and your husband . . .’
‘He loves me,’ I say certainly. ‘He says he will take me to Middleham Castle and have the best midwives and physicians in the land.’ I hesitate. ‘Would you . . . I know that perhaps you . . .’
She waits. She must know that I want her to be with me for my confinement. ‘I have no-one else,’ I say simply. ‘And neither do you. Whatever has passed between us, Iz, we have nobody but each other now.’
Neither of us mentions our mother, still imprisoned in Beaulieu Abbey, and her lands stolen from her by our husbands working together to rob her, and then competing to rob each other. She writes to us both, letters filled with threats, and complaints, swearing that she will write no more if we don’t promise to obey her and get her set free. She knows, as we do, that both of us let this happen, powerless to do anything but our husbands’ bidding. ‘We are orphans,’ I say bleakly. ‘We have let ourselves be orphans. We have made orphans out of ourselves. And we have no-one else to turn to but each other.’
‘I’ll come,’ she says.
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SPRING 1473
Being in confinement with Isabel for six weeks in the Lady’s Tower at Middleham Castle is like re-living the long days of our childhood again. Men are not allowed inside the confinement chamber, and so the wood for the banked-in fires, the platters for our dinner, everything that we want has to be handed over at the foot of the tower to one of the women attending me. The priest comes across the wooden bridge from the main keep of the castle and stands at the door behind a screen to read the mass, and gives me the Host through a metal grille, without looking at me. We hear almost no news. Isabel walks across to the great hall to dine with Richard once or twice and comes back to tell us that the little Prince of Wales is to take up his residence in Ludlow. For a moment I think of my first husband; the title of Prince of Wales was his, the beautiful castle of Ludlow would have been ours, Margaret of Anjou planned that we should live there for some months after our victory to impose our will on the people of Wales – but then I remember that all that is gone now, and I am of the House of York, and I should be glad that their prince has grown old enough to have his own household in Wales, even if it is under the management of his uncle, Anthony Woodville, the widower who now rises, through no skill of his own, to his dead wife’s title of Baron Scales.