Word came that Anne was at Warwick Castle to the south, ailing, and I was to be brought to her at once. The Countess had remained in France with Isabel, who had been married in Calais to King Edward's brother George, Duke of Clarence. As the King himself had forbidden this marriage—well, the King was not pleased—but by this time, he had other, more immediate troubles. All over the countryside, men were taking up arms. It seemed the Earl of Warwick and his friends were on the move.
When I arrived at Warwick Castle, I found my dear Anne quite ill. It was not her lungs, but guts and bowels, puking and purging from something she'd caught over there. It took a long time to get her well, for she'd lost a deal of flesh. As a result, I spent that summer in lush Warwickshire, at her father's most beautiful and luxurious castle, caring for her.
We cried with joy at our reunion. Anne, as she recovered, had a thousand stories to tell, of all the places and people she'd seen and of her sister's wedding to the Duke of Clarence. We were well tended, but left pretty much to ourselves by the other servants, which was all right with us. Busybodies like Agnes were far away, attending Lady Isabel and her mother.
I had seen both King Edward and the Duke of Clarence on several occasions, and their size, strength and good looks had dazzled. Such was the golden spell cast by these two stalwart sons of York.
"George can be funny and charming—when he is not crawling on the reeds, babbling drunk—which, unfortunately, is the latter part of every day."
"Your father married Lady Isabel to a drunkard?" I was shocked. The Earl did not share this vice. To his wards and young knights in training he constantly extolled the virtues of hunting and hard training as far better ways to exercise youthful high spirits.
"You know it doesn't matter what George does while he is the king's heir. My father will unseat King Edward and put George in his place. That is what all these rebellions are, my father's friends a-stirring. Isabel shall be queen and bear royal children and the Earl My Father shall pull the drunkard's strings."
She now spoke this treason as if all was a matter of course. Even then, to my young and simple mind, none of it seemed likely. I wondered where Dickon was in all this. I couldn't believe Anne had so quickly forgotten him. I certainly hadn't.
"How is Isabel?" I asked to avoid a doubtful subject. "Does marriage please her?"
"She seems happy," Anne said. She shook her head, puzzled. Clearly, she did not see how Isabel could be happy, but she was, so there must be a reason. Anne began to suggest some, hoping to convince herself along with me.
"In spite of how scandalously he drinks, George is handsome and he makes a big fuss over her. He is always kissing and hugging, and telling her she is the most beautiful woman in the world. He gives her jewels—oh, heavens, Rosalba! You should have seen the ruby ring! It was big as an egg!"
She blushed, put a hand over her mouth to hide a smile and then leaned forward, blue eyes sparkling, long braids shining. She shared, in whispers, things Isabel had confided about what went on inside the ducal bed curtains.
"But—a drunken man—cannot—" I blushed at what I knew.
Anne’s shoulders shook with laughter. "When he can't—he does it—with—his tongue!"
We both screamed and fell over in bed, shrieking with disgust, giggling wildly and kicking our legs. The image of George Plantagenet's blond head bobbing between Isabel's white thighs was supremely undignified. Far more so for the Duke than for his wife, who was, after all, the one pleasured.
When I finally stopped laughing, I said, "That won't get her a baby."
"No." Anne turned onto her belly, waving pale, bare legs in the air. "She says he tries to make a baby in the morning, when he's sober, if his head doesn't ache too much."
Illness had turned my mistress into the courtly ideal of beauty. She was starvation thin, fair skin tautly stretched over breast bone and ribs, with a waist you could span with your hands.
No peasant in his right mind would have bartered for such a bride. In my village, they would have said Anne Neville needed a great deal of "feeding up." They would have joked about bruising themselves on her prominent hip bones or say disdainfully that they "don't jump boys."
On the other hand, each and every nobleman who saw Anne that summer wanted to ravish her. Her pallor, her forehead, the hair line plucked high in French fashion, her chest with a pair of lemon halves, her sharp angles, were the pinnacle of fashionable desirability.
There is no accounting for taste.
* * *
Warwickshire was green and lush, warmer and brighter than Middleham. This splendid castle was a fine place for Anne to recover and a safe haven for us during that disturbed summer. Things were falling apart all over England. Old blood feuds were rekindled and neighboring lords began to attack each other, to ravage one another's property. The king himself was under siege and there was no one now to put a stop to the ever-growing turmoil.
Months passed. Uprisings took place in those ancient seats of disaffection, Devon, Wales, and Kent. Some rioters favored the restoration of Henry VI, the deposed Lancastrian king who was imprisoned in the Tower, some were simply looking to settle ancient feuds, which burst through the civic flesh like cysts draining.
At one point, the Earl actually captured King Edward and sent him north under guard to Warwick Castle. Here, Anne and I, from a distance, again saw him, tall and fair, the best looking man—I swear by the Holy Well—I'd ever in all my life clapped eyes upon. From Warwick, he was sent north to safekeeping in the heart of the Earl's domain, Middleham.
Anne could not ask, but I could, so I found out what had befallen the Duke of Gloucester. It seemed he had been with his brother, traveling to Our Lady of Walsingham's shrine with only a few hundred archers when her father had captured the royal entourage.
Warwick had freed Richard and a bosom companion of the king's, one Lord William Hastings. Richard and Hastings had ridden off, no one knew exactly where. Anne and I wept and prayed for our Dickon. Nothing but a horse and few archers between him and who knew what mischance!
The Earl, now in control, began to clean house. To start, he ordered the beheading of his court enemies. The hated, upstart Woodville Queen's father and one of her many brothers were among the first to be topped.
The devils my master had set loose could not be kept leashed. As always happened when things fell apart in England, the Scots came over the border to burn and plunder. I prayed for my Aysgarth home place. I prayed for my mother and sister, for only too well I remembered True Thomas' bloody stories.
This forced the Earl of Warwick to allow King Edward a certain freedom in order to raise troops to deal with the foreign invader. The King first went to seven-towered Pontefract Castle, ancient seat of the House of York, and who should next appear at the gate of Pontefract, but Richard of Gloucester, Lord Hastings and other loyal lords of the Court, with a heavily armed force of their own? The Scots were successfully beaten back, and several disaffected Northern lords, taken in battle, were beheaded.
King Edward had simply walked out of the Earl’s cage. Suddenly, the shoe was on the other foot, and Warwick and his allies were on the run. Anne and I found ourselves collected—along with baggage and treasure—and sent to take ship for Calais. I was terrified. I’d never even seen ocean before, much less traveled upon it.
It seemed the Earl was a power at sea as well as upon land. He'd found gold here in earlier times, preying upon the ships of other nations in the channel. With his fleet, we embarked for Calais, where a welcome was supposed to be waiting. However, Lord Wenlock, captain of the place, whose allegiance the Earl thought he had in his pocket, changed sides and said he was, once again, King Edward's “loyal servant.” Instead of welcome, Wenlock gave our ships cannon fire, and we had to lie offshore in those heaving channel waters.
We were all desperately sick, of course, standing in rows clutching the rails, showering puke over the side. Another ill star sent Lady Isabel, now great with the Duke of Clarence's first child, into labor. As there were only supplies laid in for two days, not enough for a long time at sea, wine ran out. At first, Wenlock would not even send a bottle to ease poor Isabel's suffering. We had loaded in such disarray our apothecary chest had been placed in another vessel. Though row boat messages were sent between the Earl's ships, no one could locate it.
I had never felt so helpless in my life! The Countess, Anne and I, and a new woman servant, a pretty dark woman called Ankarette, did what we could, ministering to Isabel in that cramped low cabin. Opium we could not give for fear of slowing the labor down and killing both mother and child. We had simples: nettle, wise hemp and raspberry; we had the bitter beer of the sailors. None came near the pain Isabel suffered, trying to force a child through her too narrow passage.
Ankarette was an experienced midwife, and I was glad the terrible responsibility was hers. She and the Countess conferred, gave what aid and comfort they could and instructed the rest of us. We took turns with the Duchess, holding her and listening to her scream, crammed into that narrow, dark cabin, trying not to upset the lamps and set ourselves afire, trying to see what we were doing, to give that Isabel comfort and prevent her bleeding to death. Ankarette and I let mutual suspicion slip and were soon sharing what we knew as well as charms to stop blood, charms to free the child. We tried everything, but to no avail.
Isabel labored for nearly two days and was close to dying when the baby came. Toward the end of this dreadful labor, her mother had called in the priest. The child paid the price, a full term son born still. We wept again for the duchess, but there was not a blessed thing more we could do.
And, ah! The Duke of Clarence, her adoring husband! He of sweet lust, of compliments and rubies! Upon entering the cabin drenched with blood and birth, faced by that poor half-dead girl, now passing in and out of consciousness, Clarence said sternly, "You have sorely failed me, My Lady. I hope you do not prove as poor a breeder as your mother."
He turned on his heel, slamming the door behind him. I heard the Countess of Warwick roundly curse him to eternal flames, while Ankarette wept and bathed Isabel's forehead with cold, new fallen rain water.
Anne and I, and a few sailors watched from the tossing deck while that same priest who had given Isabel unction blessed the dead, blue-faced child and then dropped his corpse over the side. Though weighted with a ballast stone it barely made a splash, and was swallowed at once by the angry waves.
Finally, we came ashore at Honfleur, arriving as exiles, not moving an inch out of doors except in the company of soldiers. Around us a port town careened; a strange language hummed and buzzed in our ears. I hated the dirty closeness and I feared the French.
I think Anne was not as frightened as I, partly because she knew the language. Still, I was the one who had to go to the kitchen of the inn we occupied, the one who endured smirks hidden behind grubby French hands and laughter at dirty jokes even the deaf could understand.
From Honfleur, the Earl and his soldiers raided the channel, taking prizes from every country, a new and terrible fleet of pirates. After a few months of that, Louis, King of France—truly called "the Spider King," spun a new web, woven on purpose to get peace for his kingdom, by tearing our dear England apart.
* * *
"Edward of Lancaster!" Anne choked.
I'd had moments of jealousy when we'd been small, but not for an instant since her father's intrigues had begun. Fortunately, I was on my knees when the Earl of Warwick made his design known to us, or I would have fallen down in shock. Never, ever, could I have imagined such a plan. To put King Henry back on the throne, that old prisoner in the Tower! To bring back his Queen, Marguerite, the "bloody-minded French whore," of my childhood, the "She-Wolf" whose army had blazed a trail of murder and rape across England! And, worst of all, to wed my dear mistress to this evil woman's son!
Noble ladies had a soft life, yes, but there was a piper to pay. And, here he stood, pitiless hand outstretched! As Anne twisted a sapphire ring helplessly, lip quivering, I thought I'd never felt so completely sorry for her. The Earl of Warwick arched a blond brow at her dismay. Her mother remained expressionless.
We do as we are done by, I thought. Her mother had been given no choice, either. The Countess, once Anne Beauchamp, had long ago been delivered to the Earl of Warwick, whose primary interest had been, of course, her vast inheritance.
The Earl cleared his throat. A look of daggers went toward his wife, as much as to say, "Woman, in how many ways you have failed me!"
The Countess took her cue.
"This is not the proper response, Anne, when your father proposes to make you Queen of England."
"What—what—of our Cousin of York, King Edward?"
"Edward of York is a thrice-damned fool! I shall show him what it means to be a king—to be—by Christ!—a leader of men!"
"My dear Lord Father, I—I thought Queen Marguerite was our enemy and that George of Clarence and our dear sister Isabel—"
"My plans have changed." Her father cut her off. The plain fact was, he'd been seduced by King Louis, who had whispered this idea in his ear. Louis had thought of a way to get all these armed English out of France and back home destroying each other as soon as possible.
"I—I—don't want to be Queen." Anne stood proudly as she'd been taught, head up. She was a shining angel at fourteen, the fairest fair of every illumination, all blonde hair and pink flesh, the blood royal shining.
"Anne!" The Countess said, all of her considerable force of will aimed at that bright, lovely daughter. “Your duty!"
Anne drew a deep breath, but, instead of collapsing in tears, she threw back her lovely shoulders. Then, slowly, gracefully, eyes open, tears tracing her rosy cheeks, she subsided in a profound, straight-backed curtsy. The sight of her regal submission came near to breaking my heart.
"I am your humble, grateful child, dear Lord Father." Her voice came cold as January. "Your wish is my command."
"Good girl." He fetched up a smile—a poor reward.
All at once, I despised him, saw my golden benefactor as mean and false, a foolish, petty tyrant. To know this so suddenly was terrifying, as if once solid ground had shaken beneath my feet.
"I only ask one boon, good My Lord Father." Anne spoke again.
"Eh?" The Earl's blond brows drew together in a frown.
"Please, Father, I must have Rosalba always with me. I will do all I am asked, by you and mother and by Queen—Marguerite—but—but—she is the one who knows best how to keep me in health."