Queen by Right (16 page)

Richard grimaced. “I suppose he is smiling now that he finally has his cardinal’s hat,” he said half to himself. “Pray put Henry Beaufort from your mind, Cis. I have some news that will affect us, and though ’tis everything I could have hoped for, I believe it may cause you distress.”

Cecily drew in a breath and played with the long liripipe of her floppy felt hat. “You are going to France, are you not?” A simple question, plainly asked, and Richard could do nothing but nod. He stood by quietly, expecting a flood of tears, but instead Cecily held her head high and tried to sound grown up as she wished her betrothed God speed.

“’Tis what you wished for, Dickon, and I shall manage, I dare say. Mother
needs me, and I promised Father I would stay with her. We are to return to London for the winter—or perhaps to Windsor to be with the king. Like as not, I shall be well amused.”

Richard was astonished. He was certain his volatile Cecily would have begged him not to go or turned on her heel and walked off in a huff. He reached for her hands and fingered the ruby betrothal ring. “I promise I will be back to wed you, but for now I need to learn to be a soldier and I cannot do it hawking in Leicester, as much as I have enjoyed our afternoons.” He looked at her impassive, lovely face and tried to read her expression, but she was giving nothing away. “We leave on the morrow,” he finished. “Early.”

After formal farewells the next day and Richard’s pledge that he would be a better correspondent this time, Cecily tucked a silk kerchief in his tunic for luck and looked into his honest gray eyes. “I think I love you, Richard Plantagenet, if I understand what love is. I pray you, return to me safe and sound.”

Before he could answer, and before the tears that were held back by sheer force of will overcame her, Cecily reverenced him and walked calmly away. Richard stared after her, part of him wanting to run and hold her, part of him lacking the courage.

“I think I love you, too, Cecily Neville,” he whispered into thin air. “God keep you until we meet again.”

7
Windsor, Winter to Summer 1429

C
ecily sighed with frustration when drifting snow in the middle of January put a stop to her favorite activity. And so she whiled away the winter hours learning French and Latin with her tutor, working on a tapestry with Joan, learning to play the psaltery, or on her knees in the chapel at Windsor, where the king and his court had chosen to spend her thirteenth Christmas and Twelfth Night.

Not long after, Cecily was overjoyed to receive a letter from Richard, which she opened with trembling fingers.

Orléans, Yuletide 1428

Right well beloved Cecily,

It is with deep sadness that I send news of our great commander Salisbury’s death on the third day of November last. May he rest in peace. It is said that he was struck by debris from a cannonball that flew through the window of a tower where he was surveying the scene across the river. He did not perish instantly but was transported to a small town nearby, where he died a week later.

I am writing from outside the walls of Orléans on the Loire, where we have been besieging the city since October. Upon learning of Salisbury’s death, our brave English soldiers appeared to lose their confidence, and the new commander, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, chose to withdraw most of the troops from the walls, leaving only a small garrison to guard the tower guarding the bridge over the river and into the city. Many of us who have only minor appointments thought it was foolish, but what could we do? I am happy to say that Lord Talbot, upon hearing of Suffolk’s rash decision, immediately sent us all back again.

Do not concern yourself for my safety, Cis, because other than a few daily skirmishes here and there, most of our time is spent waiting for the city to surrender. I have become adept at chess, and before the snow came a week ago, I caught many a fish along this beautiful river. I often wondered what war was like, but I did not imagine this inaction. Other than one day when my little band was attacked for half an hour, I have not used my sword in service of the king once—but I killed a rat with it a week ago.

But now the cold keeps me and most of my fellow captains huddled in our tents, warming our hands over braziers, praying, swapping stories of our childhood, or writing letters. The poor billmen and archers have naught but their cloaks and open fires to keep them warm. I cannot believe the people inside the walls can survive much longer, and we pray daily for a command to breach the walls and finish the job or to see the French garrison commander send out a message of surrender. I think of you in your cozy apartments, fires blazing in the hearth, shutters and arras to keep out the winter wind, and good food warming your bellies. How I wish I could be there to celebrate Christ’s birth with you and your mother.

I believe you will need to comfort your sister-in-law, Alice, in her loss. She was Salisbury’s only child, I seem to remember. I expect she may have received word before this. Now the only consolation is that it will not be long before her husband has the Salisbury earldom awarded him through her. Your brother is a good man and will wear the rank nobly.

May the Blessed Virgin have you in her keeping each and every day. I shall count the days until I have news from you. Your letters brighten my days and oft-times make me laugh. Pray also remember me dutifully to your mother and my guardian, the countess.

Your devoted Richard.

Cecily refolded the letter tenderly and stared at the falcon and fetterlock seal of the house of York. She had sometimes been curious as to why an instrument of imprisonment had been chosen as a badge. The falcon was perched, wings open and ready for flight, and yet it was clearly manacled to the fetterlock. The meaning was lost on her.

Cecily shivered as she imagined Richard huddled in his tent, blinding snow whirling around outside and howling winds penetrating the canvas. She tucked up her feet under her warm velvet skirts and gazed into the bright flames of the fire in Joan’s spacious solar. She liked Windsor, its round keep upon the motte high in the center of the extensive castle walls giving one a view of the Thames flowing through its wide valley on its way to London and the sea. True, the countryside here was also mantled by snow, but it was a peaceful, bucolic scene unlike that under the walls of a besieged city, where at any moment boiling oil, arrows, stones, and cannon balls might rain down upon the attackers.

“Mother, does Alice know her father is dead?” she asked Joan, who was peering at Christine de Pisan’s book
City of Ladies
through her gold-rimmed spectacles.

“Aye, poor lamb,” she said, sighing. “I thank God your brother was home from the borderlands when the news reached them at Bisham Manor. I did not think to mention it to you, Daughter. You did not know the man, but he was England’s best general. God rest his soul. ’Tis said Suffolk took his place, but we have heard no more.”

Cecily rose from her window seat and grandly gave her mother and the other ladies Richard’s news, proud to be more informed than they. Joan was plainly astonished that Richard would entrust such important information to his young bride-to-be. Such indelicacy, she thought. She resolved to talk to him of it as soon as he returned to England. She entreated St. Brigid to return him soon from this dangerous adventure to which she had agreed far too readily. Cecily did not need to be widowed before she was even properly wed, Joan thought. If he came within the next few months, she would insist on the formalizing of the marriage, and she would ask Duke Humphrey of Gloucester to find a place at court for Richard that would preclude his running back to the French war. She well remembered consoling Cecily when the girl’s twelfth birthday—the time when she might legally be wed—came and went without a sign from the young duke.

“I thought he would surely return as soon as it was legal for us to be married, Mother,” Cecily wailed a month after her birthday while staying with Alice at Bisham. “He promised!”

“Hush, Daughter,” Joan had snapped, turning her irritation at Richard’s silence on Cecily. “There is naught you can do, so resign yourself and learn a little patience. Our lives as wives and mothers are all about waiting—waiting
for our husbands to return from somewhere else, then awaiting their pleasure, or waiting for the next babe to come. You must learn how to fill your days so that you do not notice the waiting. ’Tis the best advice I can give you.”

Joan smiled to herself now as she recalled Cecily’s uncharacteristic acceptance of the little homily with a demure, “Aye, my lady.” She wished for the thousandth time that Ralph could see how Cecily was growing—nay, blossoming—from cygnet to swan. She was tall for her almost fourteen years, and the gawkiness of pubescence was disappearing. Her waist was tiny and her breasts, although not yet fully formed, filled the bodice of her gown with a promise of the voluptuousness that was fashionable in this time of low-cut gowns, their generous collars plunging from the tips of the shoulders to a wide V at the cinched high waist. Perhaps her neck was a little too long, but the eye was quickly drawn to a perfectly oval face, cherubic mouth, and those glorious gentian-colored eyes. How fortunate that Cecily had inherited the shapely Neville nose and not the Beaufort beak, Joan mused. Aye, it was time York claimed his young bride or she would have trouble keeping her daughter’s virginity intact, she chuckled to herself.

J
OAN HAD CAUSE
to worry, for Cecily had had several opportunities to explore her sensual side since feeling the first flutters in the hermit’s cell at Leicester. There were many eligible young squires who made sheeps’ eyes at the youngest Neville daughter, and Cecily was becoming increasingly aware of her own beauty and its effect on the opposite sex. She was attracting their attention. But her fear of betraying Richard’s trust—not to mention her fear of being branded a harlot—had so far kept the young men at bay. Her height, regal posture, and direct gaze made Cecily’s admirers afraid of approaching her. She was, however, never at a loss for a dance partner.

In truth, one seventeen-year-old tow-headed squire—the same Will who had taught her to fish—had appeared in some of Cecily’s dreams of late and flustered her when he smiled across the room at her. She did not know quite how to respond to a lightly pressed hand, a murmured compliment, or over-long kiss on her fingers. Soon Richard’s teasing nickname, proud Cis, was being bandied about the squires’ hall and dormitory in quite another context, for all the young men were of the same mind: to break down her reserve and steal the first kiss.

As the winter turned to spring, Cecily practiced waiting. It was time to take Nimuë out of the mews to exercise her beautiful wings as well as to let
her jennet stretch his legs across the fields. The hours following Mass and before the main meal of the day were Cecily’s favorites. Then she joined young squires and other ladies in riding to the hunt, accompanied by fewterers handling lithe greyhounds, and falconers. It was on these rides that those same squires who so admired Cecily’s beauty saw the young woman shed her aloofness and handle a horse and hunt as well as any man.

One particularly successful late-May morning, Cecily murmured farewell to her merlin, making sure that the bird had received the choicest of meat tidbits from the two hares she had caught, and hurried back to her apartments to change her habit for a more suitable gown for dinner. She arrived breathless at the top of the spiral stair and stepped into her mother’s solar just in time to see Joan react to a piece of gossip that had been passed on by one of her ladies.

“Scandalous!” Countess Joan declared. “Sweet Jesu, but Queen Catherine must indeed be her wanton mother’s daughter. Such disregard for her rank, for her son, and indeed all of us.”

“What has the queen done, Mother?” Cecily cried, removing her green felt bonnet and pushing a wayward strand of hair from her face. Jessamine waddled toward her to be patted, and Cecily bent down to make a fuss over the old dog.

“She has given birth to a bastard,” Joan answered, fairly spitting out the distasteful word. Cecily hid a quick smile in Jessie’s brown and white fur. But Mother, she wanted to say, you were a Beaufort bastard once. Instead, she lifted her head, eyes wide with surprise. “A bastard? Do you know who the father is?”

Joan’s companions all swiveled their heads from daughter to mother, agog to know the answer. The gossipmonger had not been given that information. Joan lowered her voice, and four necks craned to hear who might have sired a child on the king’s mother.

“I cannot know for certain, but before she left court,” Joan told them, “it was apparent that she was enamored of a servant of her late husband, King Henry, one Owen ap Tudor—a Welshman and a most handsome gentleman, but . . . a servant!” Two of the women nodded, snickering. “He became her own keeper of the wardrobe, if you remember.”