It was obvious that we had a serious security leak. I suspected Stanley, and I know that Lovell had him watched closer than ever, but to no avail.
Christmas was soon upon us, and Bessy and Cecily were provided with more new clothes, and of the very best, as if they were Richard’s own daughters. Moreover, as the festivities went on, Bessy and the Queen took advantage of their similar build, combined their wardrobes, and amused themselves by changing gowns with each other about every half hour. I know this because it was my job to help them, and I got a bit sick of it.
Courts are strange places for rumours. Before long word was abroad that Richard had made Bessy his mistress, and that she was to become Queen as soon as he had found a way to rid himself of Anne.
Richard and Anne could not win. This was their reward for treating their nieces with love and honour and kindness. Perhaps it would have been better to dress the girls in rags and set them to work in the kitchens. At least then the criticisms would have been well founded.
Anne had tried every trick she knew to get with child, and I helped her as best I could by dosing her with the appropriate potions, but it was hopeless. She was dying, and all we could do was watch. Her physicians told Richard that he could no longer sleep with her, for fear of infection, and this broke her heart, for it deprived her of her last faint chance of giving him a son. She seemed to shrink, day by day.
She died at last on the 16th March, and the sky darkened as she passed, for there was a total eclipse of the sun at that very hour. Westminster is a gloomy palace at the best of times, and the eclipse cast some very strange shadows. It seemed to me for an instant that I caught a glimpse of the Kingmaker in the crowd around the Queen’s bed, watching with sad eyes. It must have been a trick of the light.
Richard was cursed with ill luck. That eclipse was a natural event, as any man with a shred of learning will accept, and would have occurred whether Anne had died on that day or not. But you cannot explain such difficult concepts to the ignorant and the unlettered. They saw it as proof positive that he had poisoned her.
I have just had to break off writing again to deal with Sir Humphrey Berkeley. The fellow is becoming something of a bore, expecting hospitality at all manner of inconvenient times. He professes to be sorely hurt by my husband’s claim that he is in unlawful possession of some of our cattle. He suggests that the only balm for his wounded honour is Constance’s hand in marriage, with five hundred marks in dowry to go with her.
In the old days Roger would have ridden round to Berkeley’s joint with a few stout fellows, rearranged the furniture rather substantially, and smeared the insolent rogue’s innards all over the courtyard. One has to be slightly more subtle in these degenerate times, especially when one is tied up in Mr. Tudor’s web of parchment bonds and suspended penalties. No wonder the damned lawyers are all waxing so fat.
I don’t much care to be threatened under my own roof, however obliquely. Berkeley is blissfully unaware that I have broken my fast on bigger and better men, and spat out the bones. He has much to learn, and if he’s not very careful he’ll be going to church for his funeral rather than his wedding.
All this talk about death reminds me that I must go down to the church to see how the workmen are getting on with our tomb – mine and Roger’s, that is. We decided to place an order well in advance, because you can’t trust the young ones to look after these matters once you’ve gone. You’re quite likely to end up under one of those cheap, ghastly brass plates that you see all over the Cotswolds.
A little man came out to us from Bristol with his catalogue. He could knock you out a standard Knight with a Moustache and a Lion at His Feet for next to nothing. Apparently he bought up a whole load of bankrupt stock a few years ago, and has got the things stacked up in piles in his back shed. Good value I suppose, if you don’t mind posterity thinking that you used to wear your grandfather’s armour.
I insisted on a proper alabaster job, with full portraiture and heraldry. Our effigies will each wear Richard’s White Boar livery badge, and our hands should really be raised in two fingered salute to Henry Tudor. Unfortunately, the mason said that that was against his guild rules, and so Roger and I will lie there with his hand clasped on mine, holding it down.
This little lot is going slap bang in the middle of the chancel, so people are not going to forget us. We need a few prayers. Doesn’t everyone? To give an added boost to my hopes of salvation, I’ve put in a fancy new window down the road at Hailes Abbey, with a picture of me kneeling in the corner to make sure that God doesn’t forget who paid for it. Not even Henry Tudor can take that away from me.
Six days after Anne’s death, Richard despatched an embassy to the King of Portugal, proposing his own marriage to the Princess Joanna, and offering Bessy as a bride to the King’s cousin, the Duke of Beja.
You may think that this was a tad on the early side, but you must remember that negotiations of this kind take many months from start to finish, and that Richard was desperate for an heir. You can’t just send off for a princess on Friday morning and have her warming your bed on Monday night. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not like sending someone to market to buy a horse.
But what, you may ask, about the familiar tale that Richard intended to marry Elizabeth of York?
The familiar tale is another foul Tudor lie. Or, to be fair, a Tudor distortion of the truth.
The fact is that Bessy fancied Richard something rotten. She set her hennin at him almost from the first, and even wrote to the Duke of Norfolk asking him to help promote her marriage plans. I must stress that Anne was still alive at this point.
John Howard brought the letter to me. Jocky – everyone called him that, from the King down – was a stout old lion, afraid of nothing, but this sort of business was not really in his line.
‘Perhaps,’ he murmured, wriggling like a man with bellyache, ‘you can have a word in her shell-like.’
‘This letter is gonne-powder,’ I gasped, after a hurried reading. ‘If word of this reached Richard, the excrement would go flying from the trebuchets! If I were you, Jocky, I’d lock this up in a drawer somewhere at Framlingham, and make bloody sure no one sets eyes on it for the next century.’
‘You’ll speak to her, then?’
I thrust the letter back into his hand. He knew as well as I did that I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
I have had some lousy jobs in my life, and this was one of the lousiest. Bessy was a lovely girl, with not an ounce of malice in her, and I had to walk right into her dreams and shatter them.
‘There was a prophecy,’ she said, quite matter-of-factly, ‘that I shall be Queen of England. I never understood how that could be, until Richard took the throne. Now I see.’
‘You see wrongly,’ I snapped. We were in the gloomiest window-embrasure in Westminster. You could look out over the Thames and watch the sparkling turds and dead cats floating by on their way down to London. ‘These prophecies are two a penny, and don’t mean a damn. What joker came up with this one?’
‘An old Welshwoman,’ she answered, her blue eyes shining. ‘She came to me in the garden at Eltham, when I was just a little girl. She had a funny name. Teg something. I wasn’t frightened. She just took my hand, and looked at it, and said what would come, and then she vanished, while my back was turned. It was like a dream, but it wasn’t a dream, honestly it wasn’t.’