The Kingmaker's Daughter

He laughs. ‘Is that what you call them? The bad queen and the sleeping king? Well enough. You are a young lady of great wit.’ I glance at Isabel to see how she – who calls me stupid – likes this? My father goes on: ‘And who do you think has been betrayed to us, caught, just as I said he would be, and brought as a prisoner to London?’

‘Is it the sleeping king?’

‘It is,’ he says. ‘And I am riding out with my men to bring him through the streets of London to the Tower and he will stay there, our prisoner forever.’

I look up at him as he looms above me, but I dare not speak.

‘What is it?’

‘Can I come too?’

He laughs. ‘You are as brave as a little squire, you should have been a boy. No, you can’t come too. But when I have him captive in the Tower you can look through the doorway sometime and then you will see that there is nothing for you to fear from him any more. I have the king in my keeping, and without him the queen his wife can do nothing.’

‘But there will be two kings in London.’ Isabel comes forwards, trying to be interesting, with her intelligent face on.

He shakes his head. ‘No. Just one. Just Edward. Just the king that I put on the throne. He has the true right, and anyway, we won the victory.’

‘How will you bring him in?’ my mother asks. ‘There will be many wanting to see him go by.’

‘Tied,’ my father says shortly. ‘Sitting on his horse but with his feet tied by the ankles under its belly. He is a criminal against the new King of England and against me. They can see him like that.’

My mother gives a little gasp at the disrespect. This makes my father laugh. ‘He has been sleeping rough in the hills of the north,’ he says. ‘He’s not going to look kingly. He has not been living like a great lord, he has been living like an outlaw. This is the end of his shame.’

‘And they will see that it is you, bringing him in, as grand as a king yourself,’ my mother observes.

My father laughs again, looks towards the yard where his men are as smartly dressed and as powerfully armed as a royal guard, and nods in approval at the unfurling of his standard of the bear and ragged staff. I look up at him, dazzled by his size and his aura of utter power.

‘Yes, it is me that brings the King of England into prison,’ he acknowledges. He taps me on the cheek, smiles at my mother, and strides out into the yard. His horse, his favourite horse called Midnight for its dark shiny flanks, is held by his groom at the mounting block. My father swings into the saddle and turns to look at his men, raising his hand to give the order to march out. Midnight paws the ground as if he is eager to go; my father has him on a tight rein and his other hand strokes his neck. ‘Good boy,’ he says. ‘This is great work that we do today, this finishes the work that we left half-done at Towton, and that was a great day for you and me, for sure.’

And then he shouts, ‘March!’ and leads his men out of the yard under the stone arch and into the streets of London to ride to Islington to meet the guard that has the sleepy king under arrest, so that he will never trouble the country with his bad dreams ever again.

BARNARD CASTLE, COUNTY DURHAM, AUTUMN 1465

We are both summoned, Isabel and me, to my father’s private rooms in one of our houses in the north: Barnard Castle. This is one of my favourite homes, perched on cliffs over the River Tees, and from my bedroom window I can drop a stone into the foaming water a long, long way below. It is a little high-walled castle, surrounded by a moat and beyond that a grey stone outer wall, and behind that, clustered around the wall for safety, is the little town of Barnard Castle where they fall to their knees when we ride by. Mother says that our family, the Nevilles, are like gods to the people of the North, bound to them by oaths which go back to the very beginning of time when there were devils and sea serpents, and a great worm, and we swore to protect the people from all of these and the Scots as well.