WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1471

The queen’s brother Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, holds a crusade of scholars in which theologians of the Bible argue with the translators of Arabic texts. The king comes disguised into the ladies’ chamber and amid much screaming and pretend terror holds them up like a pirate and steals their jewels from their arms and necks and replaces them with finer gifts. The queen, with her son in her arms, her mother at her side, and her daughters in her train, laughs with relief every day of the Christmas feast.

Not that I see any of this. I am in Isabel and George’s household living in the rambling village that is Westminster Palace, but I am not bidden to dinner, not as the daughter of a formerly great man, nor as a dowager princess. I am kept out of sight as the widow of a failed pretender, the daughter of a traitor. I have rooms in the palace overlooking the river, near to the gardens, and at mealtimes my food is brought privately to me. I go to the royal chapel twice a day and sit behind Isabel, my head penitently bowed, but I do not speak with the queen nor with the king. When they go past me I sink into a curtsey and neither of them see me at all.

My mother is still imprisoned in Beaulieu Abbey. There is no pretence any longer that she is in sanctuary, that she has sought a life of retreat. Everyone is absolutely clear that she is held as a prisoner and that the king will never release her. My mother-in-law is held in the Tower, in the rooms that belonged to her dead husband. They say she prays for him daily, and constantly for the soul of her son. I know how bereft she feels, and I did not even love him. And I – the last woman standing after the attempt to throw Edward from the throne – I am held in this twilight world by my own sister: I am her prisoner and her ward. The agreeable fiction is that George and Isabel are caring for me, have rescued me from the battlefield, they serve as my guardians, and I am living with my family at peace and in comfort. They are helping me recover from the terror of battle, from the ordeal of my forced marriage and widowhood. The truth, as everyone secretly knows, is that they are my gaolers just as the guards in the Tower hold my mother-in-law, and the lay brothers at Beaulieu secure my mother. We are all three imprisoned women, we are all three without friends, money, or hope. My mother writes to me and demands that I speak with my sister, with George, with the king himself. I answer her briefly that nobody ever speaks to me but to give me orders and that she will have to free herself, that she should never have locked herself away.

But I am fifteen years old – I cannot help but hope. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and dream that the prince my husband was not killed but escaped from the battle and will come for me right now – climb through the window and laugh at my astounded face, and tell me that there is a wonderful plan, an army outside waiting to overthrow Edward, and I will be Queen of England as my father wanted. Sometimes I imagine that his death was wrongly reported, that Father still lives and that the two of them are mustering an army in our lands in the North and will come to rescue me, my father high on Midnight, his eyes bright under his helmet.

Sometimes I pretend that none of it ever happened, and when I wake in the morning I keep my eyes closed so that I cannot see the small bedroom and the lady in waiting who sleeps in the bed with me, and I can pretend that Iz and I are at Calais, and that soon Father will come home and say that he has defeated the bad queen and the sleeping king and that we are to come with him to England and be the greatest ladies in the land and marry the York dukes.

I am a girl, I cannot help but hope. My heart lifts at the crackle of the fire in the grate. I open the shutters and see the milky clouds of the early morning, and sniff the air and wonder if it will snow. I cannot believe that my life is over, that I have made my great gamble and lost. My mother may be on her knees at Beaulieu, my mother-in-law may pray for the soul of her son, but I am only fifteen and I cannot help but think every day – perhaps today something will change. Perhaps today a chance will come for me. Surely, I cannot be held here, without a name, without a fortune, forever?

I am on my way back from chapel with Isabel’s ladies when I realise I have left my rosary on the floor where I was kneeling. I say a brief word to my companions and go back. It is a mistake, the king is coming out of the chapel as I am coming in, his arm linked with his great friend William Hastings, his brother Richard behind him, a long stream of friends and hangers-on behind them.

I do as I have been commanded, I shrink back, I sink down, I look down. I do everything to indicate my penitence and my lack of worthiness to tread the same rushes as this king, who walks here in pomp only because he killed my father and my husband on the battlefield and my father-in-law by treachery. He goes past me with a pleasant smile: ‘Good day, Lady Anne.’

‘Dowager princess,’ I say to the rushes under my knees, but I make sure that no-one can hear me.

I keep my head down as the many pairs of beautifully embossed boots dawdle past and then I get up. Richard, the king’s nineteen-year-old brother, has not gone. He is leaning against the stone frame of a doorway and smiling at me, as if he has finally remembered that once we were friends, that he was my father’s ward and every night he used to kneel for my mother’s kiss as if he were her son.