All the ladies and their women were herded into one cabin with a low ceiling and no windows, lit by a hanging lanthorn which swung slowly to and fro for no apparent reason. Isabel was right about the bad odour. It was nothing like the garderobe tower in the fortress, or the midden-heap in the courtyard, but it made Anne feel slightly sick as soon as she went in. She rapidly felt worse. Women she had known as aloof and poised, with never a wrinkle in their coifs or a spot of grease on their gowns, were slumping on to the floor, groaning and writhing, vomiting down their own gowns or their neighbours’, all dignity gone. From the corner where she had tucked herself Anne looked on with round horrified eyes, the bench heaving beneath her, the lanthorn swinging above her, her hands pressed to her unquiet stomach. Even Isabel, the grown-up, the assured, was weeping and retching loudly with her head in somebody’s lap. Closing her eyes did no good as long as the sounds and smells still attacked her, and after a while Anne curled herself up into a ball, pulled her cloak and hood round her, and tried to cut herself off from the terrible little world which had entrapped her.
When she dared to uncover one eye again, the lanthorn was hardly moving. Cautiously she uncovered an ear as well, and the bedlam of distress had changed to a hubbub of normal conversation. Deciding that it was safe to come out, she began to uncurl and discovered that both her feet and one of her arms had gone to sleep, and there was a painful crick in her neck. She rubbed her neck with the hand that was awake, and shook her other limbs anxiously to assure herself that they were still there. As feeling tingled back into them, she saw that although the stench was no sweeter and the cabin was still in chaos, her fellowprisoners were behaving in a much more recognisable way. Dishevelled and soiled as they were, they had found their small steel looking-glasses and combs and were prinking and smoothing and scrubbing themselves for all they were worth. There was an air of excitement about them, and several pale green faces were lit by smiles. Baffled by the sudden reversals of fortune, Anne smoothed her rumpled dress and waited. She was aware that Isabel was casting unfriendly glances at her, and noticed that her admired sister looked positively ugly.
They were released eventually, and Anne’s confusion increased as she scrambled up the ladder into the daylight. It was still raining; the sea was still grey and flat; the same ships lay at their moorings in the same harbour, with the same jostling houses on the quay. Had she dreamed that ordeal in the cabin, and was it all to do again? As panic began to build up inside her, she cast about for reassurance. And then the rain curtain drifted aside a little, and high above the harbour there hovered the ghost of a castle, which gradually revealed itself to be attached to an equally ghostly hill. Other contours loomed out of the mist as she watched. The harbour was guarded at each side by lofty cliffs such as she had never seen before. This was no familiar landscape. Beyond the commonplaces of the port, it was crushingly alien. This must be Home.
When she stepped on to the quay she stumbled and nearly fell; the solid stone seemed to be trying to heave her back into the sea. There were crowds of people waiting for them, and Anne’s father strode forward fearlessly to meet them. He was engulfed by flailing arms and howls of enthusiasm, and then he rose above them as he mounted his horse, still mobbed by his assailants. They were milling about the litters which stood ready for the ladies, and Anne realised that she would have to run the gauntlet of that mass of boisterous humanity to reach her place.
It was the beginning of another nightmare.
They were always moving, the litter swaying and lurching over cobbles and potholes, surrounded by the rumbling of baggage wagons and the clatter of hoofs, the red jackets with their bear and tree trunk bobbing alongside, always hemmed in by the mobs with their wideopen mouths and uncouth yells of welcome. It was like journeying to the church on Sundays, but going on for ever. Weary and nauseated from the motion of endless travel and not enough rest, Anne marvelled that her father could take so much pleasure in the journey. She had never known him in better spirits, exuding energy and happiness, sparing some of his good humour even for his younger daughter, who rather wished he would not. Her mother too had lost something of her careworn expression, and Isabel had recovered from her seasickness far enough to wave quite gaily to the crowds which beset them. Anne would have liked to share in the universal joy, but she could not; she could only cower behind the curtains of the litter and endure.
There was an interlude in the nightmare, like an intrusion from another dream. The blur of faces and noise and movement slowed to a pattern of hushed order and courtesy which was almost familiar. They had come to a place called Greenwich, a large building that lay beside a wide river. The mob was left outside the walls, and it was inhabited by ladies and gentlemen who seemed to have nothing to do but stand around and decorate the spacious rooms. No trace here of the bustle that had filled the fortress. Even Anne’s father restrained his purposeful stride as he led his family through a daunting succession of chambers.
In one of them he paused, and an exceptionally tall gentleman detached himself from one of the formal tableaux and came towards them. Anne recognised her cousin Lord Edward, and was surprised to see that her father, as well as the rest of his party, deferred to him. His voice, confident and vigorous, vibrated into the rafters.
‘Faith, cousin, you don’t waste any time.’ This to her father; then, turning to the ladies, he said smiling (Anne could hear the smile in his voice, for of course she did not raise her eyes to his face), ‘Welcome home, ladies. England has lacked your beauty for too long.’ He proceeded to kiss their hands, beginning with Anne’s grandmother, concluding with Anne herself. As he humbled his august height before her, she could not help glancing at him. His eyes, on a level with hers, were dark blue and sparkling, and the smile was in them too. ‘Not quite Westminster,’ he said, so low that only she could hear, ‘but nearly as good. Don’t break too many hearts.’ Anne felt herself go hot all over. She would almost have preferred the obscurity of the jolting litter.
Lord Edward had returned to her father.
‘The King is most anxious to receive you.’ There was a strange intonation in the simple words. ‘I’m sure he’ll give you audience at once.’
They left Edward and went on. Nobody had said anything about the Queen. Fear breathed on Anne. But surely everyone would not look so cheerful if the terrible Queen were about.
The throne room was musty and damp, as if it were not much used. It was also empty. Anne was taken aback, since the only kings within her knowledge, who hung on the walls of the great hall in the fortress, were seated stiffly on tapestry thrones wearing their embroidered crowns and carrying embroidered sceptres, and surrounded by banks of stiff embroidered courtiers. There was no one here at all, only a goldfinch in a cage which began to flutter about and chatter as its peace was disturbed.
And when someone did come in, it was a tall stooping man in a homespun gown, with a creased purple mantle huddled round his shoulders. He shuffled on to the dais and sat diffidently in the gilded chair. The soldiers who had followed him in took their places at each corner of the dais and grounded their halberds. Any man less like the kings in the tapestries, resplendent in their majesty, was hard to imagine.
Yet it was the King, for Anne’s father strode the length of the chamber and knelt before him, and he would have knelt only to a king. Extending his hand, the King said, ‘My lord of Warwick, we are graciously pleased to receive you again in our court.’ Anne could hardly hear the quiet greeting, and the rest of the King’s speech was lost somewhere in the chilly reaches of the throne room.
Then they were all before the throne, and kneeling in their turn to kiss the long thin fingers, on which hung several rings that looked too heavy for them. When it came to Anne’s turn she found she was not afraid to gaze up into the King’s face. A gentle face, and the eyes were dark and mild and a little frightened. Something moved inside her, as it had for nobody before, only, oddly enough, as it had when she touched the abandoned kitten and felt its t
rembling. Without thinking she smiled at him, and in reply she saw his lips widen, though his anxious expression did not change. Her father was ready to shepherd them all away, but the King had reached over to the cage beside him and taken out the goldfinch. For a moment it was a frantic bundle of brilliant feathers, but soon it settled into the King’s soothing hands, and he held it out towards Anne.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s my little bird.’ She stroked it with one finger, and it swivelled its head comically to look up at her.
They led her away, and from the door she saw the King bent over the bird, talking to it.
After that it was back to the endless road, and the strange meeting with the King faded behind the rumbling and creaking and shouting of the present. All jumbled up with the discomfort were shrill hordes of children in fancy dress at the gates of London, shrivelled heads like mouldy walnuts on London Bridge, the candlesoft hush of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, the sharp scent of danger as the whisper of ambush rustled through the cavalcade.
And at last it did end, with a climbing road towards some round turrets in a bank of trees which they said were those of Warwick Castle, her birthplace.
She had no recollection of it, and neither, she could tell, had Isabel. It was a vast pile, quite dwarfing the fortress across the sea. On the day after their arrival, Anne was lost for fifteen heart-stopping minutes in the warren of passages and spiral stairs, and she conceived a horror of being forgotten somewhere in the castle and wandering for ever in its stony half-light. There was no sea within sight or sound, although she thought at first there was. But the perpetual roaring under the windows of the great hall was the River Avon, swollen by the summer floods, hurling itself over a weir. Having once climbed on to the window-seat to look at it, frothing angrily round the rocks many feet below, Anne decided that it was worse than the sea and did not look again.
Apart from the increased scale of the surroundings, life soon settled down into a familiar pattern. Her mother’s embroidery frame came out, her father set off escorted by a train of red-jacketed soldiers, and Anne went down with a fever. Her bedchamber was bigger than that in the fortress, and the arras did not quite cover the walls. Also there was a draught from under the door which made the tapestries quiver slightly as if there were something hidden behind them. At the height of her delirium she caught sight of hands and claws, stealing into view for an instant before they withdrew to their refuge. Once there was a face too, and she screamed, but nobody heard her.
She was in bed again, though probably with a different bout of illness, when a thrill of alarm ran through the castle, echoing even in her remote sickroom. Her nurse, unusually com municative, told her with red eyes and many sniffs that her great-uncle the Duke of York and her grandfather and her uncle Thomas had all been butchered by the barbarous Queen. The Queen again! What inhuman kind of monster could she be, not only to murder so many important men, but also (the nurse went on in a sepulchral whisper) to nail their heads up on the gates of York. Anne thought of the mouldering walnuts on London Bridge, and her blood froze. The Queen would surely not dare to do that to her father, but what if she caught her mother? Or Isabel? Or her? She shrank beneath the bed clothes, and all the carefullyhusbanded warmth had fled.
A mass was said for the departed members of the family, and Anne was hustled down to the chapel from her bed to hear it. It was cold in the chapel, where the wilting Christmas greenery still stood on the altar, but not all the shivering of the congregation was due to the temperature. Although her mother’s expression was as patient as usual, her fingers moved rather fast on the beads of her rosary; a few people were weeping openly, and there were many apprehensive glances towards the door in the course of the service. Evidently Anne was not the only person to wonder how far the malevolence of the Queen could reach.
The castle was pervaded by uneasiness. There was no dividing ocean here to protect them from peril. The river and the dry moat, the stout walls and the many soldiers, were puny defences without the powerful presence of the Earl. He did not come back. Apparently he was holding London against the Queen, although, Anne heard one of her mother’s attendants mutter, that was precious little help to his household in Warwick. It was no comfort to Anne to sense that everyone was as anxious as she was. Grown-up people should be as sure and fearless as her father, even if they ignored her completely not sneaking down to the chapel and burning nervous candles to their favourite saints, and jumping edgily at every slight noise, and forever gazing over the northward-facing battlements. For her part, whenever she passed a window which gave on to the outside of the castle, she sedulously averted her eyes for fear of what she might see approaching.
It was from the south that someone approached, a tired man flogging a tired horse. He dragged his feet as he came into the great hall, and Anne thought that he looked very untidy. One of his sleeves was torn right off, and the tree trunk on his surcoat was stained brown. She saw her mother, with a swift movement quite unlike her, press her hands to her stomach; then she and Isabel were hurried away by the nurse. Later she heard that her father had been defeated by the Queen.
Life came to a standstill. Everybody stood around, saying nothing, doing nothing, only her mother’s eternal needle flickered in and out of the fabric. Isabel took to crying in bed, and sobbed out one night that they would never see their father again, and that the Queen would come and murder them all. Since she was voicing Anne’s secret dread, long after she was asleep her younger sister lay staring into the darkness, listening to the faint rustle of the tapestry and waiting for the Queen’s hands to reach out from behind it and strangle her.
But Isabel was wrong. Only a few days later the Earl came briefly, trailing a sorry band of cripples, some limping and helping each other along and others on carts. They were untidy too, and Anne found that they were the wounded refugees from the lost battle. But her father did not look untidy or defeated. On the contrary he was in wonderful spirits, and the despondency in the castle lifted immediately. Isabel wept no more, and mocked Anne’s long face. Her change of mood had something to do with a cryptic remark which the Earl had made, pinching her cheek in passing.
‘How would you like to marry a king, eh, Isabel?’ Since the King was the kind man with a bird, and he was married to the monster Queen, Anne did not attempt to understand. The mystery deepened on a morning in spring when all the bells in Warwick began to peal, and an excited Isabel told her sister that it was for King Edward. Who was King Edward? The king with the bird, Anne knew, was called Henry.
‘Our cousin Edward, you goose,’ said Isabel impatiently. ‘First he was the Earl of March, and then the Duke of York, and now our father has made him King.’ Anne did not see how there could be two kings at once, but she could not bring herself to ask what had happened to King Henry. She went away and sat in a corner of the solar, hugging her knees and listening to the clangour of the bells, wondering about King Henry and King Edward. Of course Cousin Edward would look right wearing a crown, because he was so beautiful, much more beautiful than the stooping homely man who had let her stroke his little bird. But it was her father who had brought about the change. Suddenly Anne was swept by a wave of awe which made her feel very small. He had made a king, and she had thought that only God could make kings. The Earl of Warwick must be the most powerful man in the whole world.
The Queen had been driven away by the Earl and his new King. Now the sentries leaned on their pikes gossiping in the sunshine, and the drawbridge remained lowered all day. They seldom saw the Earl, who was busy riding about the country keeping it safe for King Edward. Summer came; Anne stopped shivering in bed, and the weir beneath the hall windows lost some of its ferocity. Soon after her birthday her father paid one of his flying visits, and when he had gone she began to notice sinister changes in the daily routine. Large numbers of empty wagons were assembling in the courtyard. Bare stretches of wall appeared in the castle chambers and rolled-up tapestries descended to fill the wagons. There was a c
onstant tapping and stench of burning hoof from the direction of the stables. Anne could not mistake the signs. They were moving again. She thought that she would on the whole rather face the hazards of Warwick’s maze of passages than another journey.
For once Isabel was upset too. While Anne kept her lips pinched tightly together to contain her apprehension, her sister gave way to hers. It was not, however, the travelling that worried her, but the destination.
‘I thought we would go to London,’ she wailed, ‘so that I could be near the King.’ Personally, Anne could well do without the attentions of Cousin Edward, who must surely be even more awesome now that he was King.
‘Where are we going?’ she ventured to ask.
‘Miles and miles and miles away,’ said Isabel graphically, ‘up into the north where it’s wild and nobody lives at all, because of the Scots and other savages.’
‘Oh.’ Anne’s heart sank. She did not mind if there were no cheering crowds, but the Scots and other savages did not sound a good exchange. As usual she was sorry she had asked the question at all.
It was miles away. The long cavalcade wound down Castle Hill and lumbered northwards for several weeks. There were no crowds. Occasionally, passing through towns, curious knots of people would gather and raise a huzzah at the red-and-white pennants; ragamuffins would slide alongside the ladies’ litters, whining for alms, until the soldiers beat them off. But the Earl was not with them, and the mob followed him. Anne hardly noticed what was happening or not happening beyond the leather curtains. For days before their departure her stomach had been tying itself into knots; on the journey it was occupied in violently untying the knots. She was either feeling sick, or being sick over the side of the litter if she could reach it, several times over herself, once, to her great shame, over her mother. In between she dozed, and woke to be sick again. She was sometimes unsure whether they were travelling or had stopped for the night - nothing under her was solid and everything made her ill.
The White Queen of Middleham: An historical novel about Richard III's wife Anne Neville (Sprigs of Broom Book 1) Page 2
