‘Margaret, what’s happening?’
‘The king refused our father,’ she says grimly, as I catch her in our bedroom, watching the maid sliding a warming pan in the cold bed, and the groom of the bedchamber thrusting a sword between the mattresses for our safety. ‘Shame on him. He has forgotten all that he owes, he has forgotten where he has come from and who helped him to the throne. They say that the king told your father to his face that he would never allow his brothers to marry the two of you.’
‘For what reason? Father will be so angry.’
‘He said he wanted other matches for them, alliances perhaps in France or the Low Countries, Flanders again, or Germany. Who knows? He wants princesses for them. But the queen will be looking out for her kinswomen in Burgundy, no doubt she will have some suggestions, and your father feels himself to be insulted.’
‘We are insulted,’ I assert. Then I am uncertain: ‘Aren’t we?’
Emphatically she nods, waving the servants from the room. ‘We are. They won’t find two more beautiful girls for the royal dukes, not if they go to Jerusalem itself. The king, God bless him, is ill-advised. Ill-advised to look elsewhere than the Neville girls. Ill-advised to slight your father who put him where he is today.’
‘Who tells him to look elsewhere?’ I ask, though I know the answer. ‘Who advises him ill?’
She turns her head and spits in the fire. ‘She does,’ she replies. We all know who ‘She’ is.
When I go back to the hall I see Richard, the king’s brother, in close conversation with his tutor, and I guess he is asking him for the news, just as I spoke to Margaret. He glances over to me and I am certain that they are speaking of me and that his tutor has told him that we will not be betrothed, that the queen, though she herself married the man of her choice, will make loveless matches for the rest of us. For Richard there will be a princess or a foreign duchess. I see with a little surge of irritation that he does not look in the least upset. He looks as if he does not mind at all that he will not be commanded to marry a short, brown-haired, fair-skinned thin girl who has neither height nor blonde hair and no sign whatsoever of breasts, being persistently as lean as a lathe. I toss my head as if I don’t care either. I would not have married him, even if they had all begged me. And if I suddenly grow into beauty, he will be sorry that he lost me.
‘Have you heard?’ he asks, walking over to me with his diffident smile. ‘My brother the king has said that we are not to marry. He has other plans for me.’
‘I never wanted to marry you,’ I say, instantly offended. ‘So don’t think that I did.’
‘Your father proposed it himself,’ he replies.
‘Well, the king will have someone in mind for you,’ I say crossly. ‘One of the queen’s sisters, without a doubt. Or one of her cousins, or perhaps a great-aunt, some old lady with a hook nose and no teeth. She married her little brother John to my great-aunt, you take care she doesn’t match you with some noble old crone. They called it the diabolical match – you’ll probably have one too.’
He shakes his head. ‘My brother will have a princess picked out for me,’ he says confidently. ‘He is a good brother to me, and he knows I am loyal heart and soul to him. Besides, I am of an age to marry and you are still only a little girl.’
‘I am eleven,’ I say with dignity. ‘But you York boys all think you’re so wonderful. You think you were born grown-up, and high as lords. You’d better remember that you would be nowhere without my father.’
‘I do remember it,’ he says. He puts his hand on his heart as if he was a knight in a fairytale and he does an odd little bow to me as if I was a grown-up lady. ‘And I am sorry that we won’t be married, little Anne, I am sure you would have made an excellent duchess. I hope you get a great prince, or some king from somewhere.’
‘All right,’ I say, suddenly awkward. ‘I hope you don’t get an old lady then.’
That night Isabel comes to bed shaking with excitement. She kneels to pray at the foot of the bed and I hear her whisper: ‘Let it be, lord. Oh lord, let it happen.’ I wait in silence as she sheds her gown and creeps under the sheets and lies first one way, and then another, too restless to sleep.
‘What’s happening?’ I whisper.
‘I’m going to marry him.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. My Lord Father told me. We are to go to Calais and the duke will join us secretly there.’
‘The king has changed his mind?’
‘The king won’t even know.’
I gasp. ‘You’ll never marry the king’s brother without his permission?’
She gives a little gasping giggle and we lie silent.
‘I shall have such gowns,’ she says. ‘And furs. And jewels.’
‘And does Richard come too?’ I ask in a very small voice. ‘Because he thinks he is to marry someone else.’
In the darkness, she puts her arm around my shoulder and draws me to her. ‘No,’ she says. ‘He’s not coming. They will find someone else for you. But not Richard.’
‘It’s not that I like him especially . . .’
‘I know. It is that you expected to marry him. It’s my fault, I put the idea in your head. I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘And since you are to marry George . . .’
‘I know,’ she says kindly. ‘We should have been married together to the brothers. But I shan’t leave you. I’ll ask Father if you can come and live with us when I am a duchess and living at court. You can be my maid in waiting.’
‘It’s just that I rather wanted to be a duchess myself.’
‘Yes; but you can’t,’ she says.
CALAIS CASTLE, 11 JULY 1469
Isabel wears a gown of brilliant white silk with cloth-of-gold sleeves. I walk behind her carrying her ermine cloak, wearing white and silver. She has a high headdress draped with a white veil of priceless lace that makes her look six feet tall, a goddess, a giantess. George, the bridegroom, is in deep purple velvet, the colour of emperors. Almost everyone from the English court is here. If the king did not know of the secret wedding he will have realised it when he woke this morning to find half his court is missing. His own mother, Duchess Cecily, waved off the wedding party from Sandwich, blessing the plans of her best-loved son George over the plans of her disobedient son Edward.
Richard was left behind with his tutor and friends at Warwick Castle; Father didn’t tell him where we were going, he didn’t even know we were coming here to celebrate a grand wedding. I wonder if he is sorry that he has been left out. I hope very much that he thinks he has missed a great chance and been played as a fool. Isabel may be the oldest Neville girl, and the most beautiful, she may be the one that everyone says is so graceful and well-bred – but I have an inheritance as great as Isabel’s and I may very well grow into looks. Then Richard will have missed a beautiful wealthy wife and some shabby Spanish princess will not be half such a treasure as I might have been. I think with some pleasure of him being filled with regret when I grow rounded and curvy and my hair goes fair like the queen’s, and I get a secret smile like hers and he sees me married to a wealthy prince, dripping in furs, and he knows that I am lost to him, just like Guinevere.
This is not just a wedding; it is a celebration of my father’s power. Nobody seeing the court assembled here at my father’s invitation, bowing as low to him as if he were a king when he walks through the beautiful galleries of Calais Castle, set in the fortress town that he has held for England for years, can doubt for a moment that here is a power equal to the King of England, perhaps even greater than the King of England. If Edward chooses to ignore my father’s advice he can consider that there are many who think that my father is the better man; certainly he is a richer man with a bigger army. And now here is the king’s brother, forbidden to marry, but freely taking my sister’s hand in his own, smiling at her with his blond easy charm, and pledging himself.