‘I can’t believe it. I can’t understand it,’ I tell her. ‘I have to say it over and over again to make myself believe it.’
‘Well, in a little while you can mutter at your husband and see if he likes waking to a mad girl whispering away,’ she says brutally. ‘And I will be able to sleep in the mornings.’
That silences me, as she knew it would. I see my betrothed husband every day, when he comes to sit with his mother in the afternoon, and when we all go in to dinner in the evening. He takes her hand, I walk behind them. She takes the precedence of a queen, I am only a princess-to-be. He is three years older than me of course, so perhaps that is why he behaves as if he can hardly be troubled with me at all. He must have thought of my father with the same horror and hatred that we were taught to think of his mother; perhaps that is why he is so cold to me. Perhaps that is why I feel that we are still strangers, almost enemies.
He has his mother’s fair hair, fair almost copper. He has her round face and her little spoiled mouth. He is lithe and strong, he has been raised to ride and fight, he has courage I know, for people say he is a good jouster. He has been on battlefields since he was a child, perhaps he has become hardened and cannot be expected to feel affection for a girl, the daughter of his former enemy. There is a story about him, aged only seven, calling for the York knights who protected his father to be beheaded, though they had kept his father safe during the battle. Nobody tells me that it is untrue. But maybe this is my fault – I have never asked anyone of his mother’s court if such a young boy could do such a thing, if, in fact, it ever happened: if he blithely gave such a murderous order. I dare not ask his mother if it is true that she asked her seven-year-old son to name what death two honourable men should die. Actually, I never ask her anything.
His face is always guarded, his eyes veiled by his eyelashes, and he rarely looks at me, he always looks away. When someone speaks to him he looks downwards as if he does not trust himself to meet their gaze. Only with his mother does he ever exchange a glance, only she can make him smile. It is as if he trusts no-one but her.
‘He has spent his life knowing that people denied him the throne, some even denied he was his father’s son,’ Isabel says to me reasonably. ‘Everyone said he was the son of the Duke of Somerset, the favourite.’
‘It was our grandfather who said that,’ I remind her. ‘To dishonour her. She told me so herself. She said that was why she put his head on a spike on the walls of York. She says that to be queen is to face a life of constant slander and that you have no-one to defend you but yourself. She says . . .’
‘ “She says! She says!” Does nobody else say anything but her? You speak of her all the time and yet you used to have nightmares about her when you were a little girl,’ Isabel reminds me. ‘You used to wake up screaming that the she-wolf was coming, you thought she hid in the chest at the end of our bed. You used to ask me to wrap you tight and hold you tight so that she couldn’t get you. Funny that you should end up hanging on her every word and betrothed to her son, and forgetting all about me.’
‘I don’t believe he wants to be married to me at all,’ I say desperately.
She shrugs. Nothing interests Isabel these days. ‘He probably doesn’t. He probably has to do as he is ordered: like all of us. Perhaps it will turn out better for you two than the rest of us.’
Sometimes he watches me when I dance with the ladies, but he does not admire me, there is nothing warm in his look. He watches me as if he would judge me, as if he would understand me. He looks at me as if I were a puzzle that he wants to translate. The queen’s ladies in waiting tell me that I am beautiful: a little queen in miniature. They praise the natural curl of my auburn hair, the blue of my eyes, my lithe girl’s figure and the rosy colour of my skin; but he never says anything to make me think that he admires me.
Sometimes he comes riding with us. Then he rides alongside me and never speaks. He rides well, as well as Richard. I glance at him and think that he is handsome. I try to smile at him, I try to make conversation. I should be glad that my father has chosen a husband who is so near my age and looks so fine and princely on a horse. And he will be King of England; but his coldness is quite impenetrable.
We speak together every day, but we never say very much. We are always under the eye of his mother and if I say anything to him that she cannot hear, she calls out: ‘What are you whispering about, Lady Anne?’ and I have to repeat something that sounds utterly foolish, such as ‘I was asking His Grace if there were fish in the moat,’ or ‘I was telling His Grace that I like baked quinces.’
