‘I can’t do it,’ I whisper to Isabel. ‘I can’t marry her son, I can’t be a daughter to the bad queen, to the sleeping king. What if their son is as mad as everyone says? What if he murders me, orders me beheaded as he did to the two York lords who guarded his father? They say he is a monster, with blood on his hands from childhood. They say he kills men for sport. What if they cut off my head as they did our grandfather’s?’
‘Hush,’ she says, taking my cold hands in hers and rubbing them gently. ‘You’re talking like a child. You have to be brave. You’re going to be a princess.’
‘I can’t be in the House of Lancaster!’
‘You can,’ she says. ‘You have to be.’
‘You once said that you were afraid that our father used you as a pawn.’
She shrugs. ‘Did I?’
‘Used you as a pawn and might let you fall.’
‘If you are going to be Queen of England he won’t let you fall,’ she observes shrewdly. ‘If you are going to be Queen of England he will love you and serve you every moment of the day. You’ve always been his pet – you should be glad that now you are the centre of his ambition.’
‘Izzy,’ I say quietly. ‘You were the centre of his ambition when he nearly drowned you at sea.’
Her face is almost greenish in the dim light of the church. ‘I know,’ she says bleakly.
I hesitate at this, and our mother comes up and says briskly, ‘I am to present you to Her Grace the queen.’
I follow her up the long aisle of the cathedral, the dazzling stained-glass window making a carpet of colour beneath my feet, as if I were walking over the sun in splendour. It strikes me it is the second time that my mother has presented me to a Queen of England. The first time I saw the most beautiful woman I have ever known. This time: the most ferocious. The queen sees me coming, turns towards us and waits, with a killer’s patience, for me to reach the chancel steps. My mother sinks into a deep curtsey and I go down too. When I come up I see a short plump woman, magnificently gowned in cloth-of-gold brocade, a towering headdress on her head draped in gold lace, a gold belt slung low around her broad hips.
Her round face is stern, her rosebud mouth unsmiling. ‘You are Lady Anne,’ she says in French.
I bow my head. ‘Yes, Your Grace.’
‘You are to marry my son, and you will be my daughter.’
I bow again. Clearly, this is not an inquiry as to my happiness. When I look at her again her face is bright as gold with triumph. ‘Lady Anne, you are only a young woman now, a nobody; but I am going to make you Queen of England and you will sit on my throne and wear my crown.’
‘Lady Anne has been prepared for such a position,’ my mother says.
The queen ignores her. She steps forwards and takes both my hands between hers, as if I am swearing fealty to her. ‘I will teach you to be a queen,’ she says quietly. ‘I will teach you what I know of courage, of leadership. My son will be king but you will stand beside him, ready to defend the throne with your life, you will be a queen as I have been – a queen who can command, who can rule, who can make alliances and hold to them. I was just a girl, not much older than you, when I first came to England and I learned quickly enough that to hold the throne of England you have to cleave to your husband and fight for his throne, night and day, Anne. Night and day. I will hammer you into a sword for England, just as I was hammered into a blade. I will teach you to be a dagger at the throat of treason.’
I think of the horrors that this queen unleashed on the country with her court favourites and her ambition. I think of my father swearing that the king had flung himself into a sleep like death because he could not bear waking life with her. I think of the years when my father ruled England and this woman raged in Scotland, raising an army which came south like a band of brigands, half-naked, stealing, raping and murdering wherever they went until the country swore that they would have no more of this queen, and the citizens of London closed their gates to her and begged her best friend Jacquetta Woodville to tell her to take the army of the North back to their home.
Something of this shows in my face for she laughs shortly, and says to me: ‘It is easy to be squeamish when you are a girl. It is easy to be principled when you have nothing. But when you are a woman and you have a son destined for the throne, after years of waiting, and when you are a queen and you want to keep your crown, you will be ready to do anything; anything. You will be ready to kill for it: kill innocents if need be. And you will be glad then that I have taught you all that I know.’ She smiles at me. ‘When you can do anything – anything – to keep your throne and keep your crown and keep your husband where he should be, then you will know that you have learned from me. Then you will be my daughter indeed.’
She repels me, she absolutely terrifies me. I dare say nothing.
