Isabel tentatively puts out her hand to where my belly is hard and swelling beneath the gathered folds of my gown. I take it and let her feel my broadening girth. ‘Annie, you are so big already. Do you feel well?’
‘I was sick at the start but I am well now.’
‘I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me at once!’
‘I wanted to,’ I confess. ‘I really wanted to. I didn’t know how to begin.’
We turn away from the court together. ‘Are you afraid?’ she asks quietly.
‘A little,’ I say. I see the darkness of her glance. ‘A lot,’ I admit. We are both silent, both thinking of the rocking cabin on the storm-tossed ship with my mother screaming at me that I must pull the baby from her, the horror as the little body yielded inside her. The vision is so strong I am almost unsteady on my feet, as if the seas were throwing us around once more. She takes my hands in hers and it is as if we had just made landfall and I am telling her about the little coffin, and Mother letting it go into the sea.
‘Annie, there’s no reason that it should not be all right for you,’ she says earnestly. ‘There is no reason that it should go wrong for you as it did for me. My pains were so much worse for being at sea, and the storm, and the danger. You will be safe, and your husband . . .’
‘He loves me,’ I say certainly. ‘He says he will take me to Middleham Castle and have the best midwives and physicians in the land.’ I hesitate. ‘Would you . . . I know that perhaps you . . .’
She waits. She must know that I want her to be with me for my confinement. ‘I have no-one else,’ I say simply. ‘And neither do you. Whatever has passed between us, Iz, we have nobody but each other now.’
Neither of us mentions our mother, still imprisoned in Beaulieu Abbey, and her lands stolen from her by our husbands working together to rob her, and then competing to rob each other. She writes to us both, letters filled with threats, and complaints, swearing that she will write no more if we don’t promise to obey her and get her set free. She knows, as we do, that both of us let this happen, powerless to do anything but our husbands’ bidding. ‘We are orphans,’ I say bleakly. ‘We have let ourselves be orphans. We have made orphans out of ourselves. And we have no-one else to turn to but each other.’
‘I’ll come,’ she says.
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SPRING 1473
Being in confinement with Isabel for six weeks in the Lady’s Tower at Middleham Castle is like re-living the long days of our childhood again. Men are not allowed inside the confinement chamber, and so the wood for the banked-in fires, the platters for our dinner, everything that we want has to be handed over at the foot of the tower to one of the women attending me. The priest comes across the wooden bridge from the main keep of the castle and stands at the door behind a screen to read the mass, and gives me the Host through a metal grille, without looking at me. We hear almost no news. Isabel walks across to the great hall to dine with Richard once or twice and comes back to tell us that the little Prince of Wales is to take up his residence in Ludlow. For a moment I think of my first husband; the title of Prince of Wales was his, the beautiful castle of Ludlow would have been ours, Margaret of Anjou planned that we should live there for some months after our victory to impose our will on the people of Wales – but then I remember that all that is gone now, and I am of the House of York, and I should be glad that their prince has grown old enough to have his own household in Wales, even if it is under the management of his uncle, Anthony Woodville, the widower who now rises, through no skill of his own, to his dead wife’s title of Baron Scales.
‘It will mean that the Rivers run Wales in everything but name,’ Isabel whispers to me. ‘The king has handed his only heir into their keeping and Anthony Woodville is head of the prince’s council and the queen rules everything. This is not the House of York, this is the House of Rivers. D’you think Wales will stand for it? They have always been for the House of Lancaster and the Tudors.’
I shrug. I am lapped in the serenity of the last weeks of pregnancy. I look out over the green fields nearby and beyond them the rough pasture with the lapwings wheeling and crying up to the moorland. London seems a long way away, Ludlow a lifetime. ‘Who should rule her son but the queen?’ I ask. ‘And he couldn’t have a better governor than his uncle Anthony. Whatever you think of the queen, Anthony Woodville is one of the finest men in Europe. They are a close family. Anthony Woodville will guard his nephew with his life.’
‘You wait,’ Isabel predicts. ‘There will be many who fear to see the Rivers become over-mighty. There will be many who warn the king against trusting one family with everything. George is against them, even your husband Richard does not like to see all of Wales in their keeping.’ She pauses. ‘Father said they were bad advisors,’ she reminds me.
