‘And here is my little girl. Are you waiting to see me ride out?’ My father puts his hand gently on my head in blessing and then bends down to look into my face. He is as grand and as big as always; when I was a little girl I thought his chest was made of metal, because I always saw him in armour. Now he smiles at me with dark brown eyes shining from beneath his brightly polished helmet, his thick brown beard neatly trimmed, like a picture of a bold soldier, a military god.
‘Yes, my lord,’ I say. ‘Are you going away again?’
‘I have great work to do today,’ he says solemnly. ‘Do you know what it is?’
I shake my head.
‘Who is our greatest enemy?’
This is easy. ‘The bad queen.’
‘You are right, and I wish I had her in my power. But who is our next worst enemy, and her husband?’
‘The sleeping king,’ I say.
He laughs. ‘Is that what you call them? The bad queen and the sleeping king? Well enough. You are a young lady of great wit.’ I glance at Isabel to see how she – who calls me stupid – likes this? My father goes on: ‘And who do you think has been betrayed to us, caught, just as I said he would be, and brought as a prisoner to London?’
‘Is it the sleeping king?’
‘It is,’ he says. ‘And I am riding out with my men to bring him through the streets of London to the Tower and he will stay there, our prisoner forever.’
I look up at him as he looms above me, but I dare not speak.
‘What is it?’
‘Can I come too?’
He laughs. ‘You are as brave as a little squire, you should have been a boy. No, you can’t come too. But when I have him captive in the Tower you can look through the doorway sometime and then you will see that there is nothing for you to fear from him any more. I have the king in my keeping, and without him the queen his wife can do nothing.’
‘But there will be two kings in London.’ Isabel comes forwards, trying to be interesting, with her intelligent face on.
He shakes his head. ‘No. Just one. Just Edward. Just the king that I put on the throne. He has the true right, and anyway, we won the victory.’
‘How will you bring him in?’ my mother asks. ‘There will be many wanting to see him go by.’
‘Tied,’ my father says shortly. ‘Sitting on his horse but with his feet tied by the ankles under its belly. He is a criminal against the new King of England and against me. They can see him like that.’
My mother gives a little gasp at the disrespect. This makes my father laugh. ‘He has been sleeping rough in the hills of the north,’ he says. ‘He’s not going to look kingly. He has not been living like a great lord, he has been living like an outlaw. This is the end of his shame.’
‘And they will see that it is you, bringing him in, as grand as a king yourself,’ my mother observes.
My father laughs again, looks towards the yard where his men are as smartly dressed and as powerfully armed as a royal guard, and nods in approval at the unfurling of his standard of the bear and ragged staff. I look up at him, dazzled by his size and his aura of utter power.
‘Yes, it is me that brings the King of England into prison,’ he acknowledges. He taps me on the cheek, smiles at my mother, and strides out into the yard. His horse, his favourite horse called Midnight for its dark shiny flanks, is held by his groom at the mounting block. My father swings into the saddle and turns to look at his men, raising his hand to give the order to march out. Midnight paws the ground as if he is eager to go; my father has him on a tight rein and his other hand strokes his neck. ‘Good boy,’ he says. ‘This is great work that we do today, this finishes the work that we left half-done at Towton, and that was a great day for you and me, for sure.’
And then he shouts, ‘March!’ and leads his men out of the yard under the stone arch and into the streets of London to ride to Islington to meet the guard that has the sleepy king under arrest, so that he will never trouble the country with his bad dreams ever again.
BARNARD CASTLE, COUNTY DURHAM, AUTUMN 1465
We are both summoned, Isabel and me, to my father’s private rooms in one of our houses in the north: Barnard Castle. This is one of my favourite homes, perched on cliffs over the River Tees, and from my bedroom window I can drop a stone into the foaming water a long, long way below. It is a little high-walled castle, surrounded by a moat and beyond that a grey stone outer wall, and behind that, clustered around the wall for safety, is the little town of Barnard Castle where they fall to their knees when we ride by. Mother says that our family, the Nevilles, are like gods to the people of the North, bound to them by oaths which go back to the very beginning of time when there were devils and sea serpents, and a great worm, and we swore to protect the people from all of these and the Scots as well.
My father is here to dispense justice, and while he sits in the great hall, settling quarrels and hearing petitions, Isabel and I and my father’s wards including Richard, the king’s brother, are allowed to go out riding every afternoon. We go hunting for pheasant and grouse with our falcons on the great moors that stretch for miles, all the way to Scotland. Richard and the other boys have to work with their tutors every morning but they are allowed to be with us after dinner. The boys are the sons of noblemen, like Francis Lovell, some the sons of great men of the North who are glad of a place in my father’s household, some cousins and kin to us who will stay with us for a year or two to learn how to rule and how to lead. Robert Brackenbury, our neighbour, is a constant companion to Richard, like a little squire to a knight. Richard is my favourite, of course, as he is now brother to the King of England. He is no taller than Isabel but furiously brave, and secretly I admire him. He is slight and dark-haired, utterly determined to become a great knight, and he knows all the stories of Camelot and chivalry which he sometimes reads to me as if they were accounts of real people.
He says to me then, so seriously that I cannot doubt him: ‘Lady Anne, there is nothing more important in the world than a knight’s honour. I would rather die than be dishonoured.’
He rides his moorland pony as if he were heading for a cavalry charge; he is desperate to be as big and strong as his two older brothers, desperate to be the best of my father’s wards. I understand this, as I know what it is like to always come last in a rivalrous family. But I never say that I understand – he has a fierce touchy northern pride and he would hate for me to say that I understand him, as much as I would hate it if he sympathised with me for being younger than Isabel, for being plain where she is pretty, and for being a girl when everyone needed a son and heir. Some things are better never spoken: Richard and I know that we dream of great things, and know also that nobody must ever know that we dream of greatness.
We are with the boys in the schoolroom, listening to them taking their lessons in Greek, when Margaret comes with a message that we are to go to our father, at once. Isabel and I are alarmed. Father never sends for us.
‘Not me?’ Richard asks Margaret.
‘Not you, Your Grace,’ she replies.
Richard grins at Isabel. ‘Just you then,’ he says, assuming, as we do, that we have been caught doing something wrong. ‘Perhaps you’ll be whipped.’
Usually when we are in the North we are left alone, seeing Father and Mother only at dinner. My father has much to do. Until a year ago he had to fight for the remaining northern castles that held out for the sleeping king. My mother comes to her northern homes determined to put right everything that has gone wrong in her absence. If my Lord Father wants to see us, then we are likely to be in trouble; but I cannot think what we have done wrong.