The Kingmaker's Daughter (27 page)

The monk stands to one side at the doorway and Richard takes me through into a small room, like a cell. Beyond that is another even smaller room like an alcove, and a narrow bed with a crucifix
nailed to the wall at the head. A maid rises up from a stool at the fireside and bobs a curtsey to me.

‘I’m Megan,’ she says, her words almost incomprehensible because of her strong northern accent. ‘My lord has asked me to make sure you are comfortable here.’

‘Megan will stay with you, and if there is any trouble she will send for me, or come to me herself,’ Richard says. His hands are on the ties of my cloak, under my chin. As he takes
the cloak from my shoulders his fingers brush my chin in a gentle caress. ‘You will be safe here and I will come tomorrow.’

‘They will miss me when they get home to L’Erber,’ I warn him.

He smiles in genuine amusement. ‘They will go as mad as dogs,’ he says. ‘But there is nothing they can do; the bird has flown and soon she will find another nest.’

He bends his dark head and kisses me gently on the mouth. At his touch I feel a longing for more, I want him to kiss me as he did when I ran to him, when he came to me disguised, like a knight
might come to a captured lady in a story. At the thought of this as a rescue, I take a breath and step closer to him. His arms come around me and he holds me for a moment.

‘I shall come tomorrow at midday,’ he says, and then he goes from the rooms and leaves me for my first night of freedom. I look from the little arched window into the busy streets
outside, darkened by the shadow of St Paul’s. I am free but I am barred from leaving the precinct of the church, and I may not speak to anyone. Megan is my servant but she is also here to
guard me. I am free, but imprisoned in sanctuary, just like my mother. If Richard were not to come tomorrow I would be a prisoner, just like Queen Margaret in the Tower, just like my mother at
Beaulieu.

ST MARTIN’S, LONDON, FEBRUARY 1472

He comes as he promised, his young face stern. He kisses my hands but he does not take me in his arms, though I stand beside him and long for his touch. This is an ache like
hunger. I had no idea that this was what desire feels like.

‘What’s the matter?’ I hear my voice is plaintive.

He gives me a swift, reassuring grin, and he sits at the little table beside the window, gesturing to me to take the opposite chair. ‘Troubles,’ he says shortly. ‘George has
discovered that you have run away, he has spoken to Edward about you, and is demanding your return. As a concession he says that I may marry you but we cannot have your inheritance.’

I gasp. ‘He knows I am gone already? What does Isabel say? What about the king?’

‘Edward will be fair to us. But he has to keep George his friend and keep him close. George has too much power and too great an affinity to risk his enmity. He is growing mighty. He may
even now be plotting with your kinsmen the Nevilles, for another try at the throne. Certainly he has a lot of friends coming and going at L’Erber. Edward doesn’t trust him, but he has
got to show him favour to keep him at court.’

For only a moment do I fear that he will give me up. ‘What will we do? What can we do?’

He takes my hand and kisses it. ‘You will stay here, safe as you should be, and not worry. I will offer my office of Chamberlain of England to George.’

‘Chamberlain?’

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. ‘
You
are worth more to me.’ He pauses. ‘You are worth more than anything. And we have another difficulty: your mother is writing to
everyone and saying that she is wrongly imprisoned and her lands are being stolen from her. She is demanding to be released. It looks bad. Edward has promised to be a just king. He can’t be
seen to rob a widow in sanctuary.’

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.

‘Fortunes of war.’ Richard repeats the usual comforting phrase. ‘But it means that I couldn’t see Edward before he left. Now he will be absorbed by the queen and her new
baby.’

‘What will we do?’ Yet again, it seems that I can do nothing without the knowledge and permission of the queen, and she is hardly likely to bless my marriage to her brother-in-law
when they all believe that her mother is dying of grief because of my father. ‘Richard, I can’t wait for the queen to advise the king in our favour. I don’t think she will ever
forgive my father.’

He slaps his hand on the table in sudden decision. ‘I know! I know what we’ll do. We’ll marry now, and tell them, and get the Pope’s dispensation later.’

I gasp. ‘Can we do that?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the marriage won’t be legal?’

‘It will be legal in the sight of God, and then the Pope’s dispensation will come, and it will be legal in the sight of man too.’

‘But my father—’

‘If your father had married you to Prince Edward, without waiting for that dispensation, you could all have sailed together and he would have won at Barnet.’

Regret stabs me like a sword. ‘Really?’

He nods. ‘You know it. The dispensation came anyway, it didn’t come any faster for you waiting in France for it. But if Margaret of Anjou and the prince and you had sailed together
with your father then he would have had his full forces at Barnet. He would have defeated us with the Lancaster forces that she would have commanded. Waiting for the dispensation was a great
mistake. Delay is always fatal. We’ll marry and the dispensation will come and make the marriage safe in law. It is safe before God if we say our vows before a priest anyway.’

I hesitate.

‘You do want to marry me?’ He looks at me, his smile knowing. He is well aware that I want to marry him and that my heart goes faster when his hand touches mine, as it does now. When
he leans forwards, as he is doing now, when his face comes towards me and he comes to kiss me.

‘I do.’ It is true, I am desperate to marry him, and desperate to be out of this half-life of sanctuary. Besides, there is nothing else that I can do.

ST MARTIN’S, LONDON, MAY 1472

For the second time in my life I am a bride, walking up the aisle towards the high altar, a young and handsome husband waiting for me at the chancel steps. I can’t help
but think of Prince Edward, waiting for me there, not knowing that our alliance would take him to his death, that we would be wedded and bedded for only twenty weeks before he had to ride out to
defend his claim to the throne, and that he would never ride back again.

I tell myself that this is different – that this time I am marrying and it is my own choice, I am not dominated by a terrifying mother-in-law, I am not mindlessly obeying my father. This
time I am making my own destiny – for the first time in my life I have been able to take matters into my own hands. I am fifteen, I have been married and widowed, the daughter-in-law of a
Queen of England and then the ward of a royal duke. I have been a pawn for one player after another; but now I am making my own decision and playing my own cards.