GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE,

SPRING 1464

I gather my children about me and Elizabeth comes home with her two boys from Groby Hall. She is all but penniless; her mother-in-law will not pay her dower and in these troubled times we have neither power nor influence to make her keep her side of the marriage contract which gave me such pride and pleasure only a few years ago, and now means nothing.

Richard and Anthony are given official pardons and appointed to the Privy Council. The new king turns out to be an astute commander of men, a king for all parties. He rules with the advice of the Earl of Warwick who put him on the throne, but he calls as many of the lords into government as will come. He does not favour York lords, he truly seems to want to be a king for all the people of the country. A few lords go into exile, a few are with the queen, sometimes in Scotland, sometimes in France, forever raising forces, threatening England, planning a return. I think I will never see her again, the pretty French girl who would not marry until I had told her what her destiny would be. It has been the wheel of fortune indeed. She was the greatest woman in England and now she cannot have so much as a roof over her head in her own country; but she is hunted down like the last wolf.

I hardly ever hear of her, my news is all of the parish and the gossip is all from the neighbouring town. I see my son Anthony married to Elizabeth, Lady Scales, I start to consider suitable partners for my other children; but we do not command the wealth and the power that we had when Margaret of Anjou was on the throne and I was her dearest friend and lady in waiting, and my husband one of the great men of court. Now we are only squires of Grafton and though I find I am interested in my growing orchard, and even more in my children and grandsons, it is hard for me to look at other small country squires and think that my children should be married among them. I expect more for them. I want more for them.

Especially for my Elizabeth.

One day in spring, I go to the great chest in my bedroom, and I take out the purse that my great-aunt Jehanne gave me, all those years ago. I look at the charms, and at all the choices that there might be in the world for Elizabeth: a young woman – but not in the first blush of her youth; a beauty – but not a maiden; a clever scholarly girl – but not with the faith to make an abbess. I choose the charm of a ship to signify that she might travel, I choose the charm of a little house to signify that she might win her dower lands and get a house for herself, and I am about to choose a third charm, when one of them breaks from the bracelet and falls into my lap. It is a ring for a small finger curiously wrought in the shape of a crown. I hold it up to the light and look at it. I start to try it on my own finger and then I hesitate. I don’t want it on my finger, I don’t know what it means. I tie it on a long black thread, and tie the other two on their own long black threads and I go out of the house as the early silver moon starts to rise in the pale sky.