JANUARY 1485

I am waiting for my girls to come home from court on a frosty afternoon in the middle of January. I expected them in time for dinner and I am striding up and down on my doorstep, blowing on my gloved fingers to keep my hands warm as the sun sets, red as a Lancaster rose, over the hills to the west. I hear hoofbeats and I look down the lane and there they come, a great guard for my three girls, almost a royal guard, and the three bobbing heads and rippling dresses in the middle. In a moment their horses are pulled up and they have tumbled off and I am kissing bright cheeks and cold noses quite indiscriminately and holding their hands and exclaiming at how tall they have grown and how all equally beautiful they are.

They romp into the hall and fall on their dinner as if they are starving, and I watch them as they eat. Elizabeth has never been in better looks. She bloomed, once out of sanctuary and out of fear, as I knew she would. The color is high in her cheeks, her eyes sparkle, and her clothes! I take another disbelieving look at her clothes: the embroidery and the brocade, the insetting of precious stones. These are gowns as good as I wore when I was queen. “Good God, Elizabeth,” I say. “Where do you get your gowns from? This is as fine as anything I had when I was Queen of England.”

Her eyes fly to mine, and her smile dies on her face. Cecily gives an abrupt snort of laughter. Elizabeth rounds on her. “You can shut your mouth. We agreed.”

“Elizabeth!”

“Mother, you don’t know what she has been like. She is not fit to be maid-in-waiting to a queen. All she does is gossip.”

“Now girls, I sent you to court to learn elegance, not to quarrel like fishwives.”

“Ask her if she’s been learning elegance!” Cecily whispers loudly. “Ask Elizabeth how elegant she is.”

“I certainly shall, when we are talking and you two are in bed,” I say firmly. “And that will be early if you cannot speak politely one to another.” I turn from her to Anne. “Now, Anne.” My little Anne looks up at me. “Have you been studying your books? And have you been working at your music?”

“Yes, Lady Mother,” Anne says obediently. “But we were all given a holiday at Christmastide, and I went to court at Westminster with all the others.”

“We had suckling pig here,” Bridget tells her older sisters solemnly. “And Catherine ate so much marchpane she was sick in the night.”

Elizabeth laughs, and that anxious look has gone from her. “I have missed you little monsters,” she says tenderly. “After dinner I shall play, and you can dance, if you like.”

“Or we can play at cards,” Cecily offers. “The court is allowed cards again.”

“Has the king recovered from his grief?” I ask her. “And Queen Anne?”

Cecily shoots a triumphant look at her sister Elizabeth, who blushes deep red. “Oh, he has recovered,” Cecily says, her voice quivering with laughter. “He seems much recovered. We are all quite amazed. Don’t you think, Elizabeth?”

My patience, which never lasts very long with female spite, even when it is my own daughter’s, is exhausted at this point. “Now that is enough,” I say. “Elizabeth, come to my privy chamber now; the rest of you can eat your dinner, and you Cecily can ponder on the proverb that one good word is worth a dozen bad ones.”

I rise from the table and sweep from the room. I can feel Elizabeth’s reluctance as she follows me, and when we get to my room she shuts the door and I say simply to her, “My daughter, what is all this about?”

For a second only she looks as if she would resist and then she quivers like a doe at bay and says, “I have so wanted your advice, but I could not write to you. I had to wait till I saw you. I meant to wait till after dinner. I have not deceived you, Lady Mother…”

I sit down and gesture that she may sit beside me. “It is my uncle Richard,” she says softly. “He is-oh Lady Mother-he is everything to me.”

I find I am sitting very still. Only my hands have moved, and I am gripping them together to keep myself silent.

“He was so kind to me when we first came to court, then he went out of his way to make sure that I was happy with my duties as a maid-in-waiting. The queen is very kind, a very easy mistress to serve, but he would seek me out and ask me how I was doing.” She breaks off. “He asked me if I missed you and told me you would be welcome at court any time, and the court would honor you. He would speak of my father,” she says. “He would remark how proud my father would be of me if he could see me now. He would say that I am like him in some ways. Oh Mother, he is such a fine man, I can’t believe that he…that he…”

“That he?” I echo her, my voice a little thread of an echo.

“That he cares for me.”

“Does he?” I feel icy, as if wintry waters are running down my spine. “Does he care for you?”

She nods eagerly. “He never loved the queen,” she says. “He felt obliged to marry her to save her from his brother George, Duke of Clarence.” She glances at me. “You would remember. You were there, weren’t you? They were going to trap her and send her to a nunnery. George was going to steal her inheritance.”

I nod. I don’t remember it quite like that; but I can see this makes a better story for an impressionable girl.

“He knew that if George took her as his ward then he would take her fortune. She was anxious to be married, and he thought it was the best thing that he could do. He married her to secure her inheritance and for her own safety, and to put her mind at ease.”

“Really,” I say. My recollection is that George had one Neville heiress and Richard snapped up the other, and they quarreled like stray dogs over the inheritance. But I see that Richard has told my daughter the more chivalrous version of the story.

“Queen Anne is not well.” Elizabeth bows her head to whisper. “She cannot have another child, he is certain of it. He has asked the doctors, and they are sure she will not conceive. He has to have an heir for England. He asked me if I thought it possible that one of our boys had got away safely.”

My mind suddenly sharpens like a sword throwing sparks on a whetstone. “And what did you say?”

She smiles up at me. “I would trust him with the truth, I would trust him with anything; but I knew you would want me to lie,” she says sweetly. “I said we knew nothing but what he had told us. And he said again that it had broken his heart but he did not know where our boys are. He said if he knew now, he would make them his heirs. Mother, think of it. He said that. He said that if he knew where our boys were, he would rescue them and make them his heirs.”

Oh would he? I think. But what guarantee do I have that he does not send an assassin? “That’s good,” I say steadily. “But even so, you must not tell him about Richard. I cannot trust him yet, even if you can.”

“I do!” she exclaims. “I do trust him. I would trust him with my life itself-I have never known such a man.”

I pause. Pointless to remind her that she has known no men. Most of her life she has been a princess kept like a statue of porcelain in a box of gold. She came of age as a prisoner, living with her mother and her sisters. The only men she ever saw were priests and servants. She has had no preparation for an attractive man working on her emotions, seducing her, urging her to love.

“How far has this gone?” I ask bluntly. “How far has this gone between the two of you?”

She turns her head away. “It’s complicated,” she says. “And I feel so sorry for Queen Anne.”

I nod. My girl’s pity for Queen Anne will not stop her from taking her husband is my guess. After all, she is my daughter. And nothing stopped me when I named my heart’s desire.

“How far has this gone?” I ask her again. “From Cecily, I take it that there is gossip.”

She flushes. “Cecily doesn’t know anything. She sees what everyone sees, and she is jealous of me getting all the attention. She sees the queen favoring me, and lending me her gowns and her jewels. Treating me as a daughter and telling me to dance with Richard, urging him to walk with me, to ride with me when she is too ill to go out. Truly, Mother, it is the queen herself who commands me to go and keep him company. She says that no one can divert him and cheer him as I do, and so the court says that she favors me overmuch. That he favors me overmuch. That I am nothing more than a maid-in-waiting but I am treated as…”