Her brothers she marries off to anyone with a fortune or a title. Her handsome brother Anthony gets a wife whose title makes him Baron Scales; but the queen makes no proposal for us. It is as if the moment that Father said that we would not go to her court we ceased to exist for her. She makes no offer for either Isabel or me. My mother remarks to my father that we would never have stooped to one of the Rivers – however high they might try to fling themselves upwards – but it means that I have no marriage arranged for me though I will be twelve in June, and it is even worse for Isabel, stuck in my mother’s train as her maid in waiting, and no husband in sight though she is sixteen. Since my mother was betrothed when she was just out of the cradle, and was wedded and bedded by the age of fourteen, Isabel feels more and more impatient, more and more as if she will be left behind in this race to the altar. We seem to have disappeared, like girls under a spell in a fairytale, while Queen Elizabeth marries all her sisters and her cousins to every wealthy young nobleman in England.

‘Perhaps you’ll marry a foreign prince,’ I say, trying to console Isabel. ‘When we go back home to Calais, Father will find you a prince of France. They must be planning something like that for us.’

We are in the ladies’ chamber at Warwick Castle, supposed to be drawing. Isabel has a fine sketch of the landscape from the window before her and I have a scrawl which is supposed to be a bunch of primroses, newly picked from the banks of the Avon, beside Richard’s lute.

‘You’re such a fool,’ she says crushingly. ‘What good would a prince of France do us? We need a connection to the throne of England. There’s the new king on the throne, there’s his wife who gives him nothing but girls. We need to be in the line of succession. We need to get closer. You are as stupid as a goose girl.’

I don’t even flare up at the insult. ‘Why do we need a connection to the throne of England?’

‘Our father did not put the York house on the throne of England to oblige them,’ she explains. ‘Our father put the Yorks on the throne so that he might command them. Father was going to rule England from behind the York throne. Edward was like a younger brother to him, Father was going to be his master. Everyone knows that.’

Not me. I had thought that my father had fought for the Yorks because they were the rightful heirs, because the queen Margaret of Anjou was a bad woman and because the king had fallen asleep.

‘But now that King Edward is advised by no-one but his wife and her family then we will have to join that family circle to rule him,’ she says. ‘You and I will marry his brothers the royal dukes, if Mother can possibly get them for us.’

I feel myself flush. ‘You mean that I would marry Richard?’

‘You can’t like him!’ She bursts into laughter. ‘He’s so dark-haired and olive-skinned and awkward . . .’

‘He’s strong,’ I say at random. ‘He can ride anything. And he’s brave, and . . .’

‘If you want a horseman for a husband why not marry John the groom?’

‘But are you sure they are going to arrange it? When will we marry?’

‘Father is determined on it,’ she says, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘But She is certain to try to stop it. She won’t want the king’s brothers married to anyone but her family and friends. She won’t want us all at court, showing her up, showing everyone how a truly great English family behaves. She spends all her time trying to take the king away from Father because she knows Father tells him the truth and gives him good advice, because she knows Father advises the king against her.’

‘Has Father asked the king for permission? For us to marry?’

‘He’s going to do it while he is at court,’ she says. ‘He could be asking him now: today, right this moment. And then we two will be betrothed – both of us – and to the brothers of the King of England. We will be royal duchesses. We will outrank the queen’s mother, Jacquetta, we will outrank the king’s mother, Duchess Cecily. We will be the first ladies of England after the queen herself.’

I gape at her.

‘Who else should we be?’ she demands. ‘When you think who our father is? Of course we should be the first ladies of England.’

‘And if King Edward has no son,’ I say slowly, thinking aloud, ‘then his brother George will be king when he dies.’

Isabel hugs me in her delight. ‘Yes! Exactly! George Duke of Clarence.’ She is laughing with joy. ‘He will be King of England and I will be queen.’

I pause, quite awestruck at the thought of my sister becoming queen. ‘Queen Isabel,’ I say.

She nods. ‘I’ve always thought it sounded well.’

‘Izzy, you will be so grand!’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘And you will be a duchess beside me always. You will be the first lady of my household. We shall have such clothes!’

‘But if you live a long time, and have no sons either, and then George dies, then Richard will be the next heir and the next queen will be me: Queen Anne.’

At once her smile fades. ‘No, that’s not very likely at all.’

My father comes back from the court in stony silence. Dinner is served in the great hall of Warwick Castle, where hundreds of our men sit down to eat. The hall buzzes with the clatter of plates and the clash of mugs and the scrape of knife on trencher, but at the top table where my father sits and glowers, we eat in total silence. My mother sits on his right-hand side, her eyes on the table of the ladies in waiting, alert to any misbehaviour. Richard sits on his left, watchful and quiet. Isabel sits next to my mother, frightened into silence, and I come last as usual. I don’t know what has happened. I have to find someone to tell me.

I get hold of our half-sister Margaret. She may be Father’s bastard but he has recognised her from her birth and Mother paid for her upbringing and keeps her among her ladies in waiting, a trusted confidante. She is now married to one of Father’s tenants, Sir Richard Huddlestone, and though she is a grown woman of twenty-three and always knows everything, she – unlike everyone else – will tell me.

‘Margaret, what’s happening?’

‘The king refused our father,’ she says grimly, as I catch her in our bedroom, watching the maid sliding a warming pan in the cold bed, and the groom of the bedchamber thrusting a sword between the mattresses for our safety. ‘Shame on him. He has forgotten all that he owes, he has forgotten where he has come from and who helped him to the throne. They say that the king told your father to his face that he would never allow his brothers to marry the two of you.’

‘For what reason? Father will be so angry.’

‘He said he wanted other matches for them, alliances perhaps in France or the Low Countries, Flanders again, or Germany. Who knows? He wants princesses for them. But the queen will be looking out for her kinswomen in Burgundy, no doubt she will have some suggestions, and your father feels himself to be insulted.’

‘We are insulted,’ I assert. Then I am uncertain: ‘Aren’t we?’

Emphatically she nods, waving the servants from the room. ‘We are. They won’t find two more beautiful girls for the royal dukes, not if they go to Jerusalem itself. The king, God bless him, is ill-advised. Ill-advised to look elsewhere than the Neville girls. Ill-advised to slight your father who put him where he is today.’

‘Who tells him to look elsewhere?’ I ask, though I know the answer. ‘Who advises him ill?’

She turns her head and spits in the fire. ‘She does,’ she replies. We all know who ‘She’ is.

When I go back to the hall I see Richard, the king’s brother, in close conversation with his tutor, and I guess he is asking him for the news, just as I spoke to Margaret. He glances over to me and I am certain that they are speaking of me and that his tutor has told him that we will not be betrothed, that the queen, though she herself married the man of her choice, will make loveless matches for the rest of us. For Richard there will be a princess or a foreign duchess. I see with a little surge of irritation that he does not look in the least upset. He looks as if he does not mind at all that he will not be commanded to marry a short, brown-haired, fair-skinned thin girl who has neither height nor blonde hair and no sign whatsoever of breasts, being persistently as lean as a lathe. I toss my head as if I don’t care either. I would not have married him, even if they had all begged me. And if I suddenly grow into beauty, he will be sorry that he lost me.