The Uncrowned Queen (41 page)

“Lady Anne?”

She was staring into the fire, remembering, just as he had, when first she'd come to this place. If she looked at the door, it seemed it would open at any moment and there would be Piers, Mathew's son. She shivered as the pictures forced themselves behind her eyes. He'd tried to rape her, tried to… she shook her head. She would not allow that dark night back into her mind.

Anne looked at her former master and smiled warmly. “After all this time, I'd so much rather you called me by my name. It was good enough for all in this house once.”

Mathew picked up one of Anne's hands and kissed it in the gallant French manner. “Each wish of yours is my pleasure and command.”

“Bravely said, master. Bravely said.”

Mathew smiled at Anne a little ruefully. “Do you know, child, I think it most unlikely that any man will be your master ever again. Not even the king.”

Anne was silent for a moment as she gazed at her good and kind friend. Then she kissed him gently on the cheek. Her breath was sweet. Mathew resisted the urge to touch the spot where her lips had been.

“I am so grateful to you, and to Lady Margaret, Master Mathew. You're my real family, with Deborah and little Edward. I owe you much; so much it will be very hard to repay even a fraction of what you are due. And now this. Sanctuary.”

The old man felt the unexpected prick of tears and was astonished by the rush of feeling. He cleared his throat noisily. “I am due nothing. And this is certainly your sanctuary until you choose to go elsewhere. It has pleased Our Savior to give some part of your welfare into my keeping. I am honored by His trust in me.
You are important to our king. You will always be important to me and mine.”

“Amen to that, husband. And now it is time for rest. Come, Anne, your bed has been warmed.” Lady Margaret had returned with Mathew's last words and was holding out her hand to Anne, as a mother to a daughter, happy her child was warm and safe.

Now it was Anne's turn to swallow tears as Mathew and Margaret smiled at her together.

“Good night, child. Tomorrow we will speak of the future. For now, you are safe with us. Sleep without dreams.”

And as Anne lay warm in her lavender-smelling bed and listened to the wind hunt around the buttresses and battlements of the old house, in the moments before velvet oblivion took her, she said a prayer.
Keep him safe also, Mother. Keep him safe…

But she saw two men in her dreams that night.

Edward.

And Leif.

“But where is he now?”

Elizabeth Wydeville was pacing the Jerusalem chamber, up and back, up and back, as the rain beat hard against the black windows. It was the coldest hour of the night but she could not sleep. Sometimes, she felt as if she would never sleep again.

“Calm yourself, daughter. This will not be good for the milk, or the child when you feed him.”

The queen rounded on her mother. “Calm? How should I be calm? My son does not need me calm, he needs me to be queen of England so that he can be acknowledged as who he is, the rightful prince of Wales instead of that Anjou woman's bastard. We've heard nothing for days and days, Mother. I must know where the king is!”

Jacquetta winced; it was remarkable that such a volume of sound had its source in such a slender woman. She sat back from her embroidery frame with a smothered sigh and rubbed her temples, forcing herself to speak softly. One of them had to remain calm. “Very well, let us review what we do know, shall we?”

Elizabeth made a sound between a bark and sob and sat abruptly in one of the two chairs the vast chamber contained. It was an old-fashioned piece of furniture and unforgiving, made of sturdy oak with a very straight back. She wriggled to get comfortable and waved her hand. Perhaps that was agreement. Of sorts.

Her mother held up a finger. “One. We know that Charles has given the king money.”

“Yes, but how much—and what about the ships, and—”

“Do not interrupt! I repeat. One. Edward has money. A substantial sum: enough to bring men to him and buy armaments. Two. Charles is fitting out ships for him at Veere. Three. The English merchants in Brugge are supporting him. That much is certain—your brother Rivers has told us so. And, four. Well, it is clear the tide is turning with the barons here at home. And Clarence.”

“Clarence! I swear, if I should meet that man again I'll have him flayed and—”

Jacquetta was implacable. “That would be very foolish. Edward needs Clarence. If the duke returns to your husband, he'll bring many of Warwick's supporters with him and the rest of the waverers will begin to turn again in our favor. For all his foolishness, Clarence can see what's happening. His chance at the throne has gone.”

Elizabeth stared mutinously into the fire, biting at the edge of one finger. Jacquetta sighed.

“Ah, daughter, daughter, we need them all. Each one of them. Even Clarence. When Edward lands—”

“If Edward lands,” the queen muttered.

“When the king returns, he must pull the country together again, unify the lords and the warring factions. He's the only one who can. The barons are uneasy; they know this truce between Warwick and Margaret can't last. Enmity that deep doesn't just disappear. No, they're just waiting now, you'll see. They'll follow Edward, not Warwick and Margaret, once he's back in the country because of your son. The dynasty is safe now. And no one truly wants the French queen back; they're all too frightened of what she'll do.”

Elizabeth shuddered at the word “queen.” “But Warwick's
married his daughter to her son! You know that's true. Anne Neville could reign in this country one day. Anne Neville!”

Jacquetta shook her head. “Really, Elizabeth, you were not brought up to be so poor-spirited. This is a marriage of convenience only. It will mean nothing at all when Edward returns; it won't be worth even this.” The duchess held up a hank of red embroidery silk. “Expensive, decorative, but, in the end, only embroidery, nothing of substance. You'll see. Have faith.”

Elizabeth leaned forward and poked savagely at the fire. The logs collapsed and threatened to roll out onto the flagged hearth. The queen kicked at them just in time. Flushed from her exertions, she plumped back into the chair, staring moodily into the flames. Then her expression lightened.

“I wonder if they burned Anne de Bohun, in the end? At least that was a bit of good news: the monk denouncing her on Christ-mass day. Just what she deserved. It must have been so very embarrassing. Rivers was quite naughty about it all when he wrote.” She giggled and flashed a glance at her mother. “I always thought she was a witch, you know.”

Jacquetta's tone was caustic. “Unlike you, you mean? Or me.”

Elizabeth was shocked. “Mother, how can you say such things? It's dangerous.” And then she laughed, long and loud. “Gone. She's really, truly gone. At last. Gone for good!”

Herrard Great Hall. It had only been a name, something she'd seen written on parchment, but now, at last, as the battlements rose up from behind the trees, she understood. Anne de Bohun had come home, truly home. To her mother's house. The house she had never seen.

It was late February of the year of our Lord 1471 and it was fiercely cold, yet this afternoon, as the sun began its slide to the west, long, pale light silvered the black trees and the surface of the road sparkled. It was ice, but it looked like diamonds.

She'd not known, not understood, how much she missed the wooded depths of England since she'd been away, but as Anne sat in the body of the cart behind the yoked oxen, the clean smell of the winter forest restored her soul to childhood.

“Edward! Wake up. Look. We're home. We've truly come home.”

Anne de Bohun's son, worn out by the excitement of their long journey from London, was cuddled up asleep in a nest of rugs behind Anne's plank seat. He'd hated to miss even a moment because each turn in the track brought places and sights and sounds he'd never experienced before, but, this late in the day, the wayfaring had finally made him drowsy. Now he was awake in an instant. “What?” He sat upright, flushed from sleep, as the wagon lurched to a stop.

Anne climbed down and stood on the hard roadway beside the
bullocks' heads. She turned back to look at little Edward. “Come with me. We should see this together. Just the three of us. Deborah?”

During the long miles that Anne and her party had covered since first light, Deborah too had fallen asleep, slumped against and between piled-up coffers in the second cart. She startled awake, finding her henin askew over one eye, with its sarcenet veil nearly blinding the other.

The little boy, scrambling down into his mother's arms, laughed. “Deborah looks funny!”

“It's very rude to laugh at old ladies. There'll be terrible, terrible trouble and you'll have seven years' bad luck. Tell him, mistress.” Deborah's smile belied the severity of her words as Anne helped her down from the dray. The three men that Mathew Cuttifer had supplied to guard the women, the boy, and the carts relaxed in their saddles.

Edward giggled; he'd heard such threats before. “Seven? Bah! I'll be big when I'm seven and I'll chase all the bad luck away!” The triumphant flourish of a wooden sword by the small but doughty warrior left them in no doubt of his determination in the contest to come. Even the phlegmatic bullock drivers, Wat and Crispin, joined in with the laughter of the Londoners from Blessing House. The men watched the little boy prancing happily between the women as they walked on down the track toward the gap in the trees.

Wat Anderson shifted his aching buttocks on the seatboard of his cart and stretched his arms and shoulders. He yawned and got down into the roadway, scratching. Crispin, too, got down from the second dray to stand beside his lead bullock, Davey. Perhaps he should hobble the animals if they were to wait for a while? He patted the placid creature between the ears. “Hungry, Davey-boy? So am I. Anything to eat, Ned?”

Ned was one of Mathew Cuttifer's town servants. He sighed as he slung a leg over the pommel of his saddle and jumped down to the roadway, joining his mates. “There's ale, but we finished the bannock a while back.”

He unhooked a leather bottle from his saddlebow and turned
to the others, waving the flask. Ale, even one small flask among several, was a powerful pleasure at the end of a hard, cold journey. A good swallow each was all they got, but in winter men are opportunists. The big old house at the end of the road would have more, much more—cauldrons of it, surely. Home-brewed ale. And, perhaps if they were lucky, a pretty alewife. Good ale, a pretty face to look at, and clean hands to serve it up in a nice warm kitchen—these four made up for much. The men stamped their feet, hoping to shock some blood into their frozen toes. What was keeping their mistress?

“There's no one here. The place is empty. And it's huge.”

The two women and the boy were staring up at the walls of the house in front of them, intimidated. It was mellow stone, to be sure, but the walls were very high. And with castellated tops. There was a dry moat—now a wide, puddled ditch—and the front of the house presented a blank face except for arrow loops and a pair of massive gates.

“I thought it was a hunting lodge?”

Anne nodded slowly. Deborah was right: the king had told her that Herrard Great Hall was a former royal hunting lodge with its own chase. “Yes. It was. But I think it must have been a fortress once.”

Deborah held out her hand to the little boy. “Stout walls are no bad thing in these times. Come, Edward, let's explore.”

Chatting loudly to subdue the silence, the two women each held one of Edward's hands and, picking up their skirts, marched across the drawbridge that spanned the moat. Creeper twining through gaps in the boards beneath their feet said it was a long time since anyone had raised or lowered this particular form of defense. Their footsteps echoed beneath them.

Anne felt a sharp tug on her skirt. She looked down at her son. “How do we get in, Wissy?” he asked.

Anne laughed from nerves and the oddness of this homecoming. “Well, we have a key, my darling.”

She thrust a hand into the pocket-bag at her waist and withdrew it holding the biggest key that Edward had ever seen. His eyes widened with astonishment. “Let me see.” When she placed it
in his hands, the length of the key shaft spanned both the child's palms. It was old and black and cold.

“Let's see if it fits.”

It was hard to find the keyhole in the outer gates—they were massively iron-bound and studded with black boltheads in an intricate pattern. Then Anne smiled, relieved. Within the shape of one of the two great gates there was the faint outline of a smaller door: the long slant of late afternoon light showed it to her. “Ah. See here—there's a little door within the big one. And there's the hole for the key. See?”