I cross myself. ‘Don’t say it!’ I glance at the high table. The queen is dipping her fingers in a golden bowl of rosewater and wiping them on a linen towel held out to her by a kneeling manservant. She does not look like a woman who keeps herself safe by putting spies in the households of her sisters-in-law, and sticking pins in images. She looks like a woman who has nothing at all to fear.
‘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.’
