The Rose of York: Crown of Destiny Read Free Page A

best after all!”
    ~*^*~

Chapter 2
    “Lo, mine helpmate, one to feel
    My purpose and rejoicing in my joy!”
     
     
    Seated at the cradle, with her babe asleep at her shoulder and her faithful hound curled up at her feet, Anne Neville, Duchess of Gloucester, gazed out the window into the fading light of day. The gentle hills surrounding Middleham Castle glowed a deep green after the rain, and pear trees dotted the landscape with luminous white blossoms. Sheep bleated, and the church bells, never silent for long, tolled the hour of Vespers across the dales.
    Day is already ending , she thought. How late it was. How quickly the seasons had flown! In this happy period of her life, time had a way of vanishing, and already the enchanted summer of 1474 that had brought her child into the world had yielded to the spring of 1475.
    Servants entered to light the torches. She closed her eyes and nuzzled her sleeping infant, seeking strength from his warmth. Exhausted, she had taken a moment to rest from the endless stream of petitioners that filled the antechamber, but dismissing those who remained was out of the question. She could not turn her back on need. Once she had laboured as a scullery maid herself, and now, even her exalted status as Duchess of Gloucester failed to erase the memory of that desperate time in her life.
    She took the sleeping child from her shoulder and laid him gently into his cradle. He stretched and gave a yawn. Anne smiled tenderly and adjusted his blanket with a gentle touch. Christened Edward, in honour of Richard’s royal brother, the babe was a beautiful child, with Richard’s dark hair and Neville-blue eyes that brought to mind her father, the proud Kingmaker, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. But it was the babe’s dimples, which could only have come from her uncle John, Lord of Montagu, that caught the heart.
    She smiled as she rocked his cradle. Reluctant to be parted from her little one, whom they affectionately called Ned, she used the nursery as a state chamber, giving orders to stewards and chamberlains, answering letters, arbitrating quarrels, and receiving petitioners. Her little Ned didn’t seem to mind, and cooed or slept peacefully most of the time.
    She felt a hand on her shoulder, and looked up from the cradle. “Let me dismiss them, my dear. Just this once?” said her mother, Anne Beauchamp, Countess of Warwick.
    “No.” Anne struggled to her feet. “I’m their only hope, Mother, or they wouldn’t have made the arduous journey. You know I can’t turn them away. Tomorrow there will be as many more.”
    “If George had not left me a pauper, I could help you,” the Countess said.
    The mention of George’s name seemed to blow a cold wind into the room. Anne shivered. George was Richard’s brother, who, after the civil war ended, had spitefully abducted her and hidden her away as a servant in a London kitchen so that she couldn’t wed Richard. He had also stolen—there was no better word for it—her mother’s lands and wealth, leaving her impoverished without even a roof over her head, and forced into Sanctuary. George had also tried to take Middleham Castle from them—Middleham, so full of memories, so much a part of them! She and Richard had met at her father’s castle of Middleham when she was seven and he was nine, and they’d grown up to fall in love. Fortunately, Richard had won that dispute, and then invited the Countess to live with them.
    “I know, Mother, but this is the way it is, and we must carry on as best we can. I just wish Richard hadn’t left. I miss him so.” She cast her sleeping babe a look of yearning as she tore herself from his side. Richard’s absence ached in her heart as fiercely as it had during those terrible years when their families had been swept apart by war, but here, in this babe, lay solid remembrance of him, and a reminder that the fearsome past was dead.
    It was a reminder she found herself needing constantly. She was secure