The Kingmaker's Daughter Read Free

promise.
    I can’t help but wonder if the old king, the sleeping king, is awake tonight, somewhere in the wild lands of the North of England. It is rather horrible to think of him, fast asleep but
knowing in his very dreams that they are dancing and that a new king and queen have crowned themselves and put themselves in his place, and tomorrow a new queen will wear his wife’s crown.
Father says I have nothing to fear, the bad queen has run away to France and will get no help from her French friends. Father is meeting with the King of France himself to make sure that he becomes
our friend and the bad queen will get no help from him. She is our enemy, she is the enemy of the peace of England. Father will make sure that there is no home for her in France, as there is no
throne for her in England. Meanwhile, the sleeping king without his wife, without his son, will be wrapped up warm in some little castle, somewhere near Scotland, dozing his life away like a bee in
a curtain all winter. My father says that he will sleep and she will burn with rage until they both grow old and die, and there is nothing for me to fear at all. It was my father who bravely drove
the sleeping king off the throne and put his crown on the head of King Edward, so it must be right. It was my father who faced the terror that was the bad queen, a she-wolf worse than the wolves of
France, and defeated her. But I don’t like to think of the old king Henry, with the moonlight shining on his closed eyelids while the men who drove him away are dancing in what was once his
great hall. I don’t like to think of the bad queen, far away in France, swearing that she will have revenge on us, cursing our happiness and saying that she will come back here, calling it
her home.
    By the time that Isabel finally comes in I am kneeling up at the narrow window to look at the moonlight shining on the river, thinking of the king dreaming in its glow. ‘You should be
asleep,’ she says bossily.
    ‘She can’t come for us, can she?’
    ‘The bad queen?’ Isabel knows at once the horror of Queen Margaret of Anjou, who has haunted both our childhoods. ‘No. She’s defeated, she was utterly defeated by Father
at Towton. She ran away. She can’t come back.’
    ‘You’re sure?’
    Isabel puts her arm around my thin shoulders. ‘You know I am sure. You know we are safe. The mad king is asleep and the bad queen is defeated. This is just an excuse for you to stay awake
when you should be asleep.’
    Obediently, I turn around and sit up in bed, pulling the sheets up to my chin. ‘I’m going to sleep. Wasn’t it wonderful?’
    ‘Not particularly.’
    ‘Don’t you think she is beautiful?’
    ‘Who?’ she says; as if she really doesn’t know, as if it is not blindingly obvious who is the most beautiful woman in England tonight.
    ‘The new queen, Queen Elizabeth.’
    ‘Well, I don’t think she’s very queenly,’ she says, trying to sound like our mother at her most disdainful. ‘I don’t know how she will manage at her
coronation and at the joust and the tournament – she was just the wife of a country squire, and the daughter of a nobody. How will she ever know how to behave?’
    ‘Why? How would you behave?’ I ask, trying to prolong the conversation. Isabel always knows so much more than me, she is five years older than me, our parents’ favourite, a
brilliant marriage ahead of her, almost a woman while I am still nothing but a child. She even looks down on the queen!
    ‘I would carry myself with much more dignity than her. I wouldn’t whisper with the king and demean myself as she did. I wouldn’t send out dishes and wave to people like she
did. I wouldn’t trail all my brothers and sisters into court like she did. I would be much more reserved and cold. I wouldn’t smile at anyone, I wouldn’t bow to anyone. I would be
a true queen, a queen of ice, without family or friends.’
    I am so attracted by this picture that I am halfway