Obviously we cannot go to George and Isabel, who will be beside themselves with anger when they learn of this day’s doings, and I absolutely refuse to return to the guest house of St Martin’s in my kitchen maid’s cloak. In the end, our kinsman the archbishop, Thomas Bourchier, invites us to his palace for as long as we want to stay. It identifies him even more closely with this secret marriage, but Richard whispers to me that the archbishop would never have opened the marriage service before us if he had not had Edward’s private permission to perform it. Not much happens in England now without the knowledge of the York king and the assent of his queen. So though I had thought we were rebellious lovers, acting in secret, marrying for love and hiding for our honeymoon, it was not so. It was never so. I had thought I was planning my own life, without the knowledge of others; but it turns out that the king and my enemy, his grey-eyed queen, knew of it all, all the time.
LAMBETH PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1472
This is our summer, this is our season. Every morning I wake to find golden sunshine streaming through the oriel window that looks out over the river, and the warm tumbled presence of Richard in my bed, sleeping like a child. The sheets are in a tangled knot from our lovemaking, the beautifully embroidered counterpane is in a heap half on the bed and half on the floor, the fire in the fireplace has fallen to ashes as he will allow no-one to come into the chamber until we call them: this is my summer.
Now I understand Isabel’s slavish loyalty to George. Now I understand the passionate bond between the king and the queen. Now I even understand the queen’s mother Jacquetta dying of heartbreak at the loss of the man she married for love. I learn that to love a man whose interests are mine, whose passion is given freely and openly to me, and whose battle-hardened young lithe body lies beside me every night as his only joy, is to utterly change my life. I was married before; but I was never shaken and touched and puzzled and adored before. I was a wife but I was no lover. With Richard I become wife and lover, counsellor and friend, partner in all things, comrade in arms, fellow-traveller. With Richard I become a woman, not a girl, I become a wife.
‘What about the dispensation?’ I ask him lazily, one morning, as he is kissing me carefully, counting as he goes, his ambition being to get to five hundred.
‘You have interrupted me,’ he complains. ‘What dispensation?’
‘For our wedding. From the Pope.’
‘Oh, that – it’s on the way. These things can take months, you know that. I have applied in writing and they will reply. I will tell you when they reply. Where was I?’
‘Three hundred and two,’ I volunteer.
Softly, his mouth comes down on my ribcage. ‘Three hundred and three,’ he says.
We spend every night together. When he has to visit the court, on its summer progress in Kent, he rides out at dawn with a group of his friends – Brackenbury, Lovell, Tyrrell, half a dozen others – and back at dusk so that he can see the king and come home to me. He swears we shall never be parted, not even for a night. I wait for him in the great guest chamber at Lambeth Palace with a supper laid ready for him and he comes in, dusty from the road, and eats and talks and drinks all at the same time. He tells me that the queen’s new baby has died and the queen is quiet and sad. Jacquetta, her mother, is said to have died the very same afternoon as the baby; some people heard a lament sung around the towers of the castle. He crosses himself at that rumour and laughs at himself for being a superstitious fool. Under the table I clench my fist in the sign against witchcraft.
‘Lady Rivers was a remarkable woman,’ he concedes. ‘When I first met her and I was just a boy I thought she was the most terrifying and the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. But when she acknowledged me as her kinsman, when Elizabeth married Edward, I came to love and admire her. She was always so warm with her children – and not just them, with all the children of the royal household – and loyal to Edward; she would have done anything for him.’
‘She was my enemy in the end,’ I say shortly. ‘But I remember that when I first saw her I thought she was wonderful. And her daughter the queen too.’
‘You would pity the queen now,’ he says. ‘She’s very bereft without her mother, and she is lost without her baby.’
‘Yes, but she has four other children,’ I say hard-heartedly. ‘And one of them a son.’
‘We Yorks like to make a big family,’ he says, with a smile at me.
‘And so?’
‘And so I thought we might go to bed and see if we can make a little marquess?’
I feel my colour rise, and I acknowledge my desire with a smile. ‘Perhaps,’ I say. He knows that I mean ‘yes’.
WINDSOR CASTLE, SEPTEMBER 1472
