At Lammas John Wrangwysh, who had finally realised that he was in love with Margaret, married her. The Duke of Gloucester, as her guardian, gave her away in the castle chapel. For her dowry he had restored the lands confiscated after her brother’s death at Barnet. Sharing their wedding breakfast, Anne wondered if John remembered carving the poppet for her so long ago in this same hall, and knew that he was not the kind of man to forget things. She was glad that she and Richard had been able to repay him for bringing them together. The event crowned the summer. Despite the faint threat of Richard’s leaving that hung over the autumn ahead, she was serenely happy.
One evening whilst they sat at supper in the great chamber, a messenger was admitted. Drawn laughing from Margaret’s witty chattering, Richard raised his eyebrows at being disturbed at table, but took the letter. As he read it the animation drained from his face, leaving it cold and dead. Without a word, he rose abruptly and, motioning the messenger to go with him, retired to his chamber. The merriment of the gathering was shattered; even Margaret attempted no more quips, and a low anxious hum of conversation replaced the usual hubbub. Eyes were constantly glancing at the door to the inner chamber, fearing at any moment the announcement of some disaster to the kingdom. But none came, save a page tendering the Duke’s apologies for not rejoining them that night.
Suddenly alone amid the speculation, Anne took refuge in silence, and her mother, a few places from her, might, if she had had the perception, have seen again the still, remote figure who sat ignored at Prince Edward’s left hand at Amboise. The friends who surrounded her were nothing; the cataclysm that would destroy her happiness was at hand, she was sure: it was time for payment. When the meal was finished she did not follow her husband as she was entitled, but stayed to hear - or rather to be present at - the music-making which often con cluded the day at Middleham. Richard would ask for her if he needed her. She would not make the mistake of interfering again.
He did not send, but when she was in bed with the candles snuffed he came, as was his custom, lighted by a page whom he dismissed as soon as he was inside the door. He made no attempt to rekindle the candles.
‘Richard?’ Anne spoke into the darkness, faintly leavened by the starlight through the uncovered windows, knowing it was he, wanting reassurance.
‘Yes.’ At that he moved from where he had been standing motionless, and lay down beside her. After another heavy silence he began to make love to her. It was not the same. Although he did everything that usually raised them to ecstasy, with the same skill and the same gentleness, it was as if there was no heart within it. Anne could find no satisfaction, and she sensed that he had little enough himself. Yet afterwards he held her very close, stroking her hair, and there was sadness in the soft slow caress of his hand.
She could not ask him. Fearing a rebuff if she did so, fearing still more what he might reveal to her, she watched him through two barren days. Outwardly he had thrown off his distress, and only the most observant could tell that it had simply gone underground. While Margaret was brushing her hair on the second night Anne appealed to her for help.
‘Meg, what ails my lord? Do you know?’ Margaret usually heard things before her mistress.
‘No, madame, I have no idea. John is worried about him too, and asked me the same last night. But it can’t concern you, or my lord would have told you.’
That was what he had said to her the other time: ‘I cannot share it. There is nothing that need trouble you.’ Could he not see that it did trouble her, that this absent-minded lovemaking was worse than leaving her to sleep alone?
He could see, and the next night she realised when he entered her chamber that he had come to a decision. Greeting her with formal courtesy, he sat down in the chair by the hearth. Under his bedgown, which was generally the only garment he wore in summer, she glimpsed with surprise and vague dread shirt and hose. She braced herself. Even so he could not find the words to begin and she had to prompt him.
‘What is it, Richard?’
‘I heard the other day of the death of a friend who was.…dear to me.’
Irrational relief lifted Anne’s spirits.
‘Oh, my love, I am sorry. I will have a mass said for him.’
‘No, Anne. It was not a male friend.’ His tone was hesitant, deliberately expressionless, and her relief evaporated. ‘She was a noble lady of Flanders, and I have known her since I was exiled in Bruges. Since our return to England she has been living at Pomfret. A week past she was thrown from her horse as she rode in the hills, and her neck was broken.’ The carefully controlled voice, speaking aloud what he had been brooding on since the messenger arrived, was full of misery, but Anne did not hear it. She was trying not to make sense of what he had said. But he stripped away the illusions she was calling up desperately to her aid. ‘She was my mistress, Anne. I did not tell you because I had no wish to cause you pain over something that was past and done. I would not tell you now but that she left me a charge that you must know.’ His wife’s eyes, fixed on his face, were dark with disbelief and dawning anguish but he went on steadily. ‘I fathered two children on her. They are only babies. I must take them under my protection. She did not need to ask -’
‘No.’ The trenchant monosyllable cut across his measured words and he broke off, staring at Anne, who was trembling violently, her shoulders hunched and arms wrapped round her, nails digging into her elbows. ‘I won’t have that whore’s bastards in my household.’
‘Anne! They’re my children too.’
‘Bastards! That makes it worse. To bring them here, to flaunt them before our friends. To shame me ...’
‘It is no shame to you. The shame, if there is any, is mine, and everyone will know that.’
‘Yes, yours!’ Immediately the strange terrifying wrath of his gentle wife was turned on him, and he quailed before it. ‘How dare you! You deceived me!’
‘I never deceived you...’ The denial stuck in his throat, as that torrid night two summers ago came back to him with full force. Anne had promised to marry him, and he had at the first set-back gone straight to the arms of his mistress. His son had been conceived of that fevered copulation, and he had been born two months after Richard married Anne. She was right; he had deceived her. ‘I would not have hurt you for the world - and nor would Marja. She never wrote to me, or asked to see me. But the children -,’
‘No! No! You deceived me … you lied to me ...’ He could not recall ever lying to her, but the cold guilt of her accusation penetrated to the depths of his being. His excuses were done. With head averted he sat on mutely, feeling the familiar intense gaze on him, charged with a shocking new hostility. At length he rose and went to her, trying the only way he knew of reaching her. But before he could touch her she stiffened and recoiled.
‘Leave me! Go away!’ For a second they hung there, frozen into the tableau of what he would never have believed possible - her rejection of him. Then he straightened up and quietly left the room.
She would not forgive him. She could not, for her faith in him had been shaken to its roots. As the death of her father had shattered her childhood world, so now the earthly paradise of Wensleydale was corrupted. The innocence had gone out of Eden. Rigidly governing her thoughts and behaviour, she carried on her normal routine, although she escaped more frequently to the nursery tower, where there was a new pleasure and a new distress in watching the slow progress of her son from helplessness to enterprise and discovery. It was necessary to be in Richard’s company as often as he was at home, and she maintained a façade of cordiality. He did not impose himself on her in private and for a week neither referred to the incident which had divided them so disastrously. Around them their friends looked on, discussing the breach mournfully between themselves, but not daring to offer any advice or comfort. Even Martin the Fool did not use his prerogative to comment on the situation, for he was as fond of his master and mistress as anyone at Middleham.
For Richard, seven days marked the limit of en
durance. It tore his heart to see Anne so unhappy, she whom he had pledged himself to protect. Respecting her resentment against him for so long, he had hoped that common sense would reassert itself and that she would relent. It did not happen, and he went to her chamber one night intending to explain more fully and gain her understanding. The coldness of his reception killed all eloquence on his lips, and he could only utter commonplaces, as if they were at table in the great hall. He longed to ask what she held so bitterly against him, to describe his relationship with Marja and how it could never endanger his love for her, to appeal on behalf of the motherless children living at Pomfret. The pale figure huddled against the pillows, wrapped in its unapproachable silence, forbade all that. Refusing to admit utter failure, he joined her in bed, but he could tell by the way she drew back from him that she would not let him compose the quarrel so easily.
They lay awake for many hours, a few feet apart, wishing occasionally that the other would reach a reconciling hand across the wilderness. For the most part, however, sleeplessness fed their rancour. He had not suspected her before of selfishness, of wanting him all to herself and ignoring the needs of his innocent son and daughter.
She brooded on his licentiousness, his weak succumbing to the vicious influence of his brother Edward, and looked back with revulsion on the amorous stratagems he had employed on her, learned no doubt from his paramour and passed off as pure gold on his unsuspecting wife. Doubtless he was expecting even now to win her back with the honey sweetness of a love-trick sullied by its use on another woman ...
It was a pattern of torture that they had set for themselves, strangers at board and in bed, the rupture widened rather than healed by proximity and time. They had always hitherto been so much in accord that they had not needed words to communicate. As a result, they knew none with which to break the deadlock. Richard made one attempt. He found Anne sitting outside the walls on the sunny southern slopes facing the old castle; she was trying to induce little Ned to crawl towards her by shaking a rattle of gilded walnut shells before him, while Jane dozed a short way off. So charming a picture of domestic calm, but as Richard approached, the rowels of his spurs chinking faintly, Anne stopped playing with her son and her head went up warily.
‘I must go to inspect some field-pieces that have arrived at Skipton,’ he said, and it sounded more like a military announcement than the casual remark he had intended. She did not answer, but picked at the gilding on the shells. Dropping to his heels beside the baby he put his forefinger absently into the child’s firm grip.
‘Anne, the governor of Pomfret is waiting for a message from me. The matter must be settled before I march south. Katherine is two. She is old enough to miss her mother, and weep for her. And although John is younger, he needs love just as much. If it were Ned -’
‘Don’t speak of those - those - don’t speak of them in the same breath as our son. They should never have been born.’
‘Perhaps not. But it is no fault of theirs that they were. Punish me if you will. They are guiltless.’ A spark of temper had entered Richard’s normally equable voice. Recognising it, Anne pressed her lips together and said no more. At that moment Jane awoke from her doze and beamed in her good-natured way at the Duke and Duchess, apparently made friends again by the benign influence of her precious charge. As soon as he could Richard escaped, and the wet-nurse’s fond hopes were dashed by the desperate face that Anne turned after him. If only he could forget the children. They could just as well be reared at Pomfret where they were already established. She could forgive Richard in time, if they were not forever close at hand, reminding her of his infidelity, of the woman who had reaped the first harvest of his love.
But Richard could not so turn his back on his responsibilities, even to regain his wife’s affection. That time he had called at Pomfret on his way back to Middleham and a pregnant Anne, he had been profoundly disturbed to find another baby in the cradle in Marja’s chamber.
‘But it was only one night,’ he protested, and she had said with her sidelong glance. ‘And your wife with child after two months of marriage
- you are very potent, my lord, that is all.’ It was a short visit - although Marja had declared laughingly that she was not going to seduce him if he stayed the night - and he had never seen his mistress again. As long as she was alive his conscience could rest, knowing that the discreet household he maintained at Pomfret would ensure a secure existence for Marja and their son and daughter. Now that she was dead, he was set on removing Katherine and John to his own residence. Even were it not for her last request to him, he would have done no less.
His emotions for Anne fluctuated between deep pity and extreme exasperation. Sometimes he wished she would scream at him, attack him or throw something at him, and then he could lose his temper too and there would be a battle, which would inevitably end in each other’s arms. Against this withdrawal of hers he had no weapon or defence. It was an admission of defeat that finally he had to assert his authority over her to do his will. The King’s summons had come, and he must lead his little army southwards without delay. The castle was overflowing with soldiers showing off with a swagger their new liveries of blanc sanglier, most of them amateurs and volunteers, but all determined to do credit to their Duke. To a background of mounting bustle, Richard completed his preparations and sent for his wife.
The formality of the interview in his chamber, a table with orderly piles of despatches freshly sealed, his secretary John Kendall scratching away at a further letter in the good light under the window, daunted Anne and put her on her guard before he began to speak. At first he ran over the routine matters he was leaving in her hands, as he generally did whenever he quitted Middleham for a spell. But when Kendall had finished his writing and laid it before the Duke for signature, Richard dismissed him. He scrawled his name, sanded it, folded the parchment and sealed it with his signet without saying anything more, as if the mechanical task required all his concentration. Only when it was placed on top of the pile did he look up.
‘I have instructions here for the governor at Pomfret Castle. He is ordered to make arrangements for my son John and my daughter Katherine to be conveyed to Middleham with their belongings and attendants. They will be arriving possibly next month, or in early November. It is difficult to be precise, because small children cannot be expected to travel fast. But I have asked the governor to keep you informed of their progress.’ He had paused at the end of each sentence, waiting for an outburst of protest. None came; Anne was sitting rigidly and there were two flaming spots high on her cheekbones. For an instant, forgetting the feud which was her reason for being here, he thought solicitously that she was running a fever and must be put to bed, before he came back to himself and realised that it was suppressed anger that coloured her. Still no reply, so he drove on, in that impersonal tone he had found himself using whenever he spoke of Marja or the children.
‘There will be sufficient time to make ready for them. It is my wish that they should be given a proper welcome.’ He could not be sure whether she understood what he was saying, or whether this was her ultimate defiance. One could not issue orders if they were not acknowledged. Intending to sound stern, he said, ‘Will you do this, Anne?’ But that use of her Christian name had so many times brought them closer, and he found himself adding, almost pleading, ‘Use them kindly for my sake.’ She flinched, and recovered herself.
‘For your sake, Richard.’ And he knew he had won no concession from her. She would do her duty as he had bidden her, because she was dedicated to obeying him. Against his natural children her mind was closed; there was no trace of compassion.
It was bitter anguish for both to part unreconciled. Yet as the orderly ranks of well-armed, well-trained men filed over the drawbridge and down into the September mist that lay still asleep in the valley, they trembled on the verge of a rapport. Their embrace was conventional, their kiss perfunctory, the roles they had played in public since the rupture. Then as they drew back
, Anne saw her husband with vision unclouded. In his armour, with the labelled leopards and lilies of England bright on his surcoat, he was suddenly at a remove from the administrator, husband and father she had come to know this past twenty months. He was the henchman who had ridden at the quintain bearing her colours, the very perfect gentle knight of Chaucer’s tales who had rescued her from the dread Queen Margaret, plucked her from the hearth, and made her his lady indeed. There was no flaw in him. She sought his gaze and held it, fumbling for the words that would make all well.
Time defeated her. All the men were out of the bailey, and Richard could not delay. With a slight shake of the head in which there was surely regret, he swung away and thrust his foot into the stirrup held for him by a henchman. The boy shook his hair out of his eyes and stared up at his lord in naked adoration for a second before dashing for his own pony to follow him under the gatehouse arch. It was the child’s worship, as much as the straight back of the Duke on his grey stallion, riding away from her, that plunged Anne abruptly into a pit of despair.
Only a few days after his father’s departure, little Edward fell ill. Jane blamed herself vociferously for bringing his cough into the nursery herself, but the damage was done and Anne did not add to the wetnurse’s self-reproach. Indeed, she saw in her baby’s sickness a kind of mystical judgement on her intransigence. She went straight from the sickbed to her confessor, and asked for severe penances for the breaking of her marriage vows. Her feelings for Richard had softened as soon as he was out of sight, and with this manifestation of divine wrath brooding over Middleham she yearned desperately for his forgiveness and his reassurance. Surely no harm could reach little Ned if his parents were at one. She wrote to Richard with her own hand, ostensibly to greet him on his twenty-first birthday, making light of Edward’s condition, never mentioning her longing for his return, simply tendering him her humble duty. It was the only practical reparation she could offer. For her son, she could only pray and watch by him.
The White Queen of Middleham: An historical novel about Richard III's wife Anne Neville (Sprigs of Broom Book 1) Page 26
