He grimaces. ‘I know. It’s a high price for me. I was proud to take up the office, it’s the greatest post in England – and the most profitable – but this is worth more to me.’ He corrects himself. ‘
I look at this young man who has promised to rescue me, and who now finds himself against the two most powerful men of the kingdom, his own brothers. It is going to cost him dear to stand by me. ‘I won’t go back,’ I say. ‘I’ll do anything you want; but I won’t go back to George and Isabel. I can’t. I’ll go away on my own if I have to, but I won’t go back to that prison.’
Quickly he shakes his head. ‘No, that won’t happen,’ he reassures me. ‘We had better get married at once. At least then nobody can take you back. If we are married there is nothing they can do to you, and I can fight for your inheritance as your husband.’
‘We’ll need a dispensation from the Pope,’ I remind him. ‘Father had to apply twice for George and Isabel and they are related just as we are, but now, because of their marriage, we are even more closely connected. We are brother- and sister-in-law as well as cousins.’
He scowls, tapping at the table with his fingers. ‘I know, I know. I have been thinking about it, and I will send an envoy to Rome. But it will take months.’ He looks at me as if to measure my resolve. ‘Will you wait for me? Will you wait here where you are safe but confined, till we hear from the Holy Father and have our dispensation?’
‘I’ll wait for you,’ I promise him. I speak like a young woman in love for the first time, but in the back of my mind is the knowledge that I have nowhere else to go, and nobody else has the power or the wealth to protect me from George and Isabel.
ST MARTIN’S, LONDON, APRIL 1472
As the mornings grow brighter and warmer I have to wait in sanctuary and grow more and more impatient to be free. I attend the services at St Martin’s, and in the mornings I read in their library. Richard has loaned me his lute and in the afternoons I play, or sew. I feel like a prisoner, I am terribly bored and terribly anxious at the same time. I am utterly dependent on Richard for my safety, for visits, even for my keep. I am like a girl under a spell in an enchanted castle and he is the knight who comes to rescue me, and now I find that this is a most uncomfortable position to be in – utterly powerless and unable even to complain.
He visits me every day, sometimes bringing sprigs of trees with uncurling leaves, or a handful of Lenten lilies to show me the coming of the spring, the season of courtship, when I will be a bride again. He sends a seamstress to me to make me something new for my wedding day and I spend a morning being fitted with a gown of pale gold velvet with an underskirt of yellow silk. The tirewoman comes too and makes me a tall henin headdress with a veil of gold lace. I look in the dressmaker’s mirror and see my reflection, a slim tall girl with a grave face and dark blue eyes. I smile at my reflection but I will never look merry like the queen, I will never have the warm easy loveliness of her mother Jacquetta, and all the women of that family. They were not raised in warfare as I was, they were always confident in their power – I have always been afraid of it, of them. The tirewoman gathers handfuls of my red-brown hair and piles it on top of my head. ‘You’ll be a beautiful bride,’ she assures me.
One morning Richard comes, his face grave. ‘I went to see Edward to tell him of our marriage plans as soon as the papal dispensation arrives, but the queen’s baby is coming early,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t see him, he’s gone to Windsor to be near her.’
At once, my mind goes to Isabel’s ordeal in childbirth: a nightmare because of the queen’s witch’s wind which threw the boat round like a peapod on a river and meant that we lost the baby, a boy, a grandson for my father. I have no sympathy for the queen at all, but I cannot show this to Richard who is loyal to his brother and tender to his wife and child. ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ I say insincerely. ‘But does she not have her mother with her?’
‘The dowager duchess is ill,’ he says. ‘They say it is her heart.’ He glances at me with embarrassment. ‘They say her heart is broken.’
He does not need to say any more. Jacquetta’s heart was broken when my father executed her husband and her beloved young son. But she has taken her time in dying – more than two years. And she is not the only woman who has ever lost a loved one. My husband died in these wars and my father too – who has ever considered my grief?
‘I am so sorry,’ I say.
