For Anne, the hallucinogenic miles jolted on and on as the foolish man at her side warbled distractingly of chivalry and honour. She hardly heard him or took in the sense of what he said. The rope which burned her wrists, burned her heart as well. She ached all over, and fever from the wound to her throat deepened her despair at the loss of her purse of coins in the fight in Silver Lane — now all that remained was the one, single ruby. If she lost that, or if it was found by the mob of ruffians she’d been forced to join, she would be lost indeed.
In her misery, she hardly noticed that the cart had creaked to a stop until she heard Wat yell out, ‘Defend yourselves!’ at that same moment the baron roared, ‘To me, Wat, to me!’
Only presence of mind saved Anne’s life as an arrow fleeced the air between her face and the back-board of the cart. Hunching down as much as the ropes allowed, Anne huddled into a corner as the shouting and screaming began. Head down, hidden as much as she could, she did not see, but she heard. A mêlée engulfed the baron’s party as men and horses screamed, swords rang, grunt and clang, and arrows flew through the last of the light.
It was moments, moments which stretched to hours, before they found her, but find her they did.
‘Captain. There’s a woman.’
No use burying her head. No use for anything any more. Deliberately Anne straightened her spine and dragged herself up to a sitting position. Time to face death — it had truly found her at last.
Deborah cried in her sleep that night. In her distress she called out, ‘Anne? Anne!’
Her anguish woke little Edward and he began to wail.
That lonely little cry woke Deborah properly, and in a moment she had flung a cloak around her naked body and hurried over to the sobbing child, scooped him up and held him tight, rocking him, kissing his wet cheeks, until the sobs subsided into gulps and he was silent once more.
Quietly, soothing him as she walked, Deborah carried the little boy over to her own box bed and put him between the covers, climbing in beside him, pulling him close. She thought he’d gone to sleep, but then she heard his forlorn whisper.
‘Wissy?’ It was one of his few words — the word he used for Anne.
‘Ah my lamb, she’ll come back, she will. You’ll see. Our Wissy ... we’ll find her.’
Yet as she kissed the little boy and sang to him, felt him snuggle up against her, heard his breathing even out until he slept deeply, Deborah did not allow the thought to take form or substance.
But then it was impossible to hold back as the floodtide of fear lapped higher and sharper. Loneliness and death. There was a black, black ring around Anne and no matter how hard she tried to shake the feeling of doom that swaddled her like a cloak, she did not have the strength. Let it be dawn soon, let the night pass. May the darkness lift, may it lift.
Deborah was not alone in her prayers, for the king too, in the bleak, silent hours before dawn, found he could not stop his mind from roiling and roiling over the events of the last few days. At last he gave up trying.
Padding to the fireplace, he shivered as he felt the dank, icy breath of night against his naked skin.
It was grave-quiet. There was not even the rustle of a mouse or a rat to disturb the suffocating black blanket which was wrapped around him. Edward grimaced. He needed warmth, and he needed light. Flint; there was some here, somewhere.
Feeling around the hearth stone of the fireplace, Edward found the flint box. And, yes, pieces of pitch pine and a heap of wood shavings lying ready for the morning. He would restart the ashes and bring some warmth into this tomb of a bedchamber.
The sound of the flint as it struck sparks was alien in the quiet: too sharp, too metallic for the smooth darkness which clogged the room. It did its work, though: the white sparks fell amongst the wood shavings and soon a sharp crackle gave promise of warmth as the banked ashes brought assistance to the first tiny flames.
Edward moved quietly around his room. He did not want to wake the guard who was sleeping outside across the chamber door — he needed this moment of solitude, there were so few in his life and they were precious.
It was in solitude like this that he thought best and most constructively, without the clamour of other’s advice, without the distraction of competing obligations.
The fire had caught well now, generating light as well as heat, a red cave in the darkness. In the ruddy glimmer he saw the branch of candles on the gate-leg table standing beside the fireplace; more light flared in the gloom.
Sighing, the king turned to look at the scrolls heaped up on a chest standing against one wall. Each one of them demanded his attention. But there were other things to think about. More important things. Anne.
Brooding, Edward, King of England, sank down into a Cathedra that had been placed for him in front of the fireplace the night before.
It was a good chair, substantial. It even had a padded cushion stuffed with horse-hair and goose-down on its unforgiving plank seat. A rare luxury, one he liked. He grimaced as he shifted around to get comfortable. Even used to riding the distances he did out hunting and on campaign, the last days had been a marathon and he was still sore, despite the daily hot baths.
Anne. Panic gripped him. Could he remember her face? Could he summon it if he tried? Deliberately he closed his eyes and breathed deeply, thinking of her, thinking of their time together in Brugge. Imagining her body — her feet, her legs, then her belly, her breasts, her hair. Her face.
Yes. Her face. He could see her face. She was smiling at him, lovingly. Then she pulled him down to her so that her mouth was against his; he was lying with her, so warm and smooth, so ...
A knock at the door tore the fabric of the fantasy. He ignored it, trying to hold the feel of her skin in his mind, the softness.
‘Edward?’ His brother’s urgent voice.
The king stood and wrapped himself in the cloak, trying to ignore the ache in his belly as he strode to the door, wrenching it open.
‘What?’
Richard was ashen: the light of the sconces in the passage outside his room showed the pallor of his face. Silently he held out a vellum packet, sealed with an extravagant amount of red wax. ‘This has come for you just now. From Warwick.’ Edward hurried back inside his room, Richard at his heels, as he tore the seal and opened the document, holding it up to the candles to read.
‘To Edward, King of England, from Richard, Earl of Warwick, greetings. Know that today I was presented with something of value to your majesty. Lady Anne de Bohun. I have her safe in my care. A most charming lady and with such a surprising past.’
Richard saw the look on his brother’s face and swallowed fearfully. Edward was staring into the fire, his lips drawn back from his canine teeth. In the flickering and uncertain light it was as if he’d been transformed from a man to a wolf. ‘Richard.’ It was a whisper.
‘Yes, Edward?’
‘Get the horses saddled.’
Chapter Fifty-Six
Middleham Castle was said to be a fair place, in happier times.
As it was now, Warwick’s favourite castle was reduced from a home to a garrison stuffed with armed men, men who ate too much and quarrelled, and got in one another’s way when the rain stopped practice at the butts, or training with horses in the fields.
Anne looked down from the window seat in her room in the Round Tower onto the seething inner wards below. Even in the driving rain, which turned the sky into a brooding leaden mass, the men worked with all the industry of ants. Preparations were everywhere; preparations for war, preparations for the death of innocent people. That was the meaning of war. Always.
How strange, then, that she who knew death so intimately, who’d expected to die even so little time ago as yesterday, should feel so calm. Perhaps she was feeling-less after feeling so much?
Wearily the girl closed her eyes. She would think more clearly for a little sleep, just a few moments of rest and then she would assess what she must do. So tired, so very tired ...
Behind her, an iron-bound door opened silently and a man stood looking into the room, looking at the girl in the window.
Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, was a courtier to his fingers’ ends, a competent general and a good lord to his tenants, but above all, he understood politics, and played at them like chess.
Every instinct he had said that, in the fortuitous advent of this girl being picked up on the moors by men out on routine patrol of his lands, he had the Queen-piece in this current game.
Edward would not just be checked in the war of nerves they were waging on each other, he would be swept off the board.
For he remembered all the rumours, the mystery, the scandal of less than two years ago when it was said the king had found a new love, his greatest love, and that the queen knew. And yes, he remembered the tournament vividly, the tournament of Saint Valentine’s Day, when a veiled girl, riding into the lists on a donkey, had made her own challenge to the king. Now he knew it was this same girl, Anne de Bohun, the girl who’d been in sanctuary at the abbey, evading Edward.
He’d never seen her face then, of course, but he’d known her name, oh yes, he’d known her name. And now, here she was. And she wasn’t going anywhere.
Unconsciously his hand tightened on the pommel of the dagger in his belt. Then he relaxed. Gently he coughed, and Anne slewed around, instantly awake, unable to completely suppress the wariness of the captive.
‘And so, lady, I hope my people treat you well?’ He smiled charmingly, sweeping her a deep bow.
She refused to rise when he addressed her, he noted that with wry approval. He rather enjoyed women with mettle, though of course, in the end, it was a useless quality, irrelevant, in their sex.
Anne nodded graciously and he watched one white hand smooth the pretty surface of the gown she’d been given. It was one of his own daughter’s, kept in readiness for when the family was in residence — deep, almost night-blue velvet; it suited Anne de Bohun well. He saw too that the wound on her throat had cleaned well and was healing. It would leave only a faint scar on her throat, a white necklace. That pleased him: he did not like beauty to be needlessly destroyed.
‘I am well-housed, Earl Warwick, but I should be most grateful if you could arrange for me to journey on to my home as quickly as can be arranged.’
The earl nodded sagely, maintaining the polite fiction that she was his guest. ‘Ah yes, to your lands in Somerset?’ Anne smiled and, as if the thing did not have stakes, looked away idly and yawned delicately.
‘Yes, I am expected these last ten days. My people will be most concerned.’
The earl sauntered over to the window seat and gently sat at the furtherest end, facing her.
‘But the ways are foul, lady. Very deep with all the recent storms. I could not, in all conscience, allow you to leave us. Even with an escort, there are far too many wolvesheads about. You should consider yourself my guest until at least the spring.’
He looked regretful and sincere. Anne controlled her voice with effort, replying evenly, ‘Ah yes, I do understand, sir. But I see so many men about you, surely you could spare, say, ten, to escort me south? I would be delighted to pay you for their services.’
She turned towards him fully and smiled brilliantly.
‘But, lady, you have no baggage; nothing for such a journey at this time of the year?’
Anne nodded gravely in turn. ‘Alas no, Sir Earl. It was most inconvenient that I was robbed as well as kidnapped by the baron and his son.’
Both fell silent for a moment. After the fight on the moor, the fight in which Baron Stephen Hardwell had fallen as a knight should, sword in hand, and his son dispatched also by a zealous member of the Neville affinity, there was no one to contradict Anne’s story.
The earl sighed. ‘Truly, lady, a most terrible ordeal, but it will not be possible to send you back to your people, not with all the rumours of invasion from France. I should be failing in my duty to an unmarried lady, alone in the world.’ Anne, wound tight, smiled, though her teeth clenched and her breathing quickened.
‘Then, sir, perhaps I can help you change your thought in this matter.’ Reaching into a little pocket-bag attached to the high belt of the velvet gown, Anne brought out her last hope — the ruby. It lay in the palm of her hand like a drop of blood.
The earl smiled mirthlessly. ‘Ah lady, a stone such as this might buy much more than an armed escort.’
‘But I would be pleased to give it to you, Lord Warwick. A trifle to thank you for a service well rendered.’ She said it carelessly, with just the right degree of finesse. The man and the woman locked glances and Richard Warwick found he respected Anne de Bohun — a surprising development. Clearly she understood he had the power to take the stone, perhaps she was daring him to do it. And now he could not. Not if he was a knight.
‘A pleasingly bold move, Lady Anne.’
She smiled at him. ‘Are we players in a game, Earl Warwick?’
The earl laughed genuinely, openly, as he rose and extended his hand to the girl. ‘Well now, I have always considered life is but a game of chance. For now, as we consider its meaning, I find myself hungry. Will you break your fast with me?’
George, the young Duke of Clarence, was hungry also, and annoyed. He could not go into the great hall to eat without his host, but his gut was rumbling from lack of food, and fragrant smells were wafting up from the kitchens below. Altogether he was sick of roosting with Warwick in this draughty castle when it was clear that the decisive action they had planned might need to be abandoned, for all that Middleham was stuffed with soldiers.
Secretly, though, a part of him was relieved that the weather was so foul and that dispatches from France had confirmed that Margaret, the old queen, would not now bring men into the country in this season. No sane man likes entering into a fight that cannot be won, and the old queen’s presence with troops was vital if they were to have a quick, sharp, successful war with Edward’s troops in the border country.
He shivered. Successful. Yes, that was the rub. He didn’t like to acknowledge it, but he was afraid of Edward, even with Warwick there to lead the fight. Hard to forget, after all, that he was the king’s brother.
He shook his head to distract from the prickle of fear as he stalked over to a window embrasure with a grumpy sigh. But the fear seeped back, the fear inherent in this current situation, siding against Edward and Richard.
Privately, when he thought about it, even for a moment, he’d been stunned to hear that the French woman, the old queen, was even interested in supporting Warwick and him against his brothers.
There was much bad blood, much bitterness between Margaret of Anjou and the earl because Warwick had engineered Edward’s usurpation of her own husband’s throne. She’d not loved Henry VI, ever, but she had loved being his queen — the Queen of England. The fact that the earl was now courting her for his own good ends, that of toppling Edward and putting him, Clarence, on the throne in his place, would not endear the earl to her at all; she’d never trust either the earl or himself, surely?
George, Duke of Clarence, sighed. He hated politics. Hated all the waiting and the compromise, yet he knew that he must play this part, the disloyal brother, if his dream of ascending the throne were not to disappear like mist in the morning.
The duke snorted as he looked out into the miserable, driving rain which obscured the vale of Wensleydale; they could all think what they liked, plot all they liked. He didn’t trust any of them, or any of the promises. He’d use the earl as he needed to, and he’d take the throne, with or without him, just as Edward had.
George of Clarence bit his nails, moody and petulant. Life was so unfair sometimes; he hadn’t asked for all this bad feeling in the family, but Edward knew, quite well, that Clarence had more than enough reason to feel unfairly treated. The king had blocked his marriage to Isabelle, Warwick’s daughter, more than once and if that wasn’t unkind, unbrotherly, what was? Yes, he had good reason to challenge his brother
for the kingdom. He’d always been treated like a child, always been laughed at for perfectly reasonable ambition, but they’d see, they’d all see — and they’d sneer at their peril when he was crowned in Westminster!
‘George?’
Clarence wheeled and saw to his surprise that the earl was approaching with a good-looking girl on his arm — a very good-looking girl of about his own age. Clarence smiled brilliantly and sauntered towards them, pulling down his doublet so that it sat well and squaring his shoulders. He bowed charmingly at the girl. Things were looking up!
‘Lady de Bohun, may I present George, Duke of Clarence?’ The duke made another, even deeper and more graceful bow; not for nothing was he Edward’s brother. ‘Perhaps you knew one another formerly, at court?’
There was the smallest pause before the girl shook her head shyly, blushing becomingly as the duke discreetly looked her up and down.
‘Lady de Bohun and I have never met. A great loss, but now repaired.’ George gazed shamelessly into Anne’s eyes until, embarrassed, she dropped her gaze to the foor.
The earl frowned. George, who professed to love his own daughter Isabelle, showed far too much interest in his ‘guest’. The Yorks were like that, any woman was fair game; he would have to be careful. Briskly, he took the initiative.
‘Come, we are all famished. If you would, Your Grace?’
Bowing, the earl resigned the lady’s arm to the ranking duke, and George gracefully led Anne into Warwick’s hall where the Neville household waited obediently to begin the breakfast. Solemnly, with a suitably impassive face, George led Anne to a place of honour at the high board, where she was to sit beside her ‘host’, chatting loudly to her as they processed past the assembled ranks of the Neville retainers as if the other people in the hall did not exist.
A pretty girl always gave you confidence, George found, and he was getting on with Anne splendidly, almost as if they’d known each other since childhood. Yet though he was positive he’d never met this charming girl before, there was a familiarity about her face he found disquieting. It was like a word lost on the tip of the tongue ...
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