Wooed and Won
Anne thought her heart would break when she received the news. Not three months before her husband had been killed, not even on the battlefield, but murdered while he lay helpless and weaponless in front of the rebel Duke of York.
And now, now his father, Good King Henry, had been killed, too. Knifed in his sleep, several times, until his chest was but a constellation of bloody wounds.
Anne had requested, and obtained, the honour of cleaning and dressing his body. She wept and prayed as she wiped the blood and grime gently with a soapy rag. Once it was done, she dressed the king in a plain white tunic; he'd never much liked finery when he'd been alive, and anyway she hadn't been able to procure any. She was, after all, a hostage, as much as he'd been.
When she was done, she stepped outside the room and called to the men who were waiting. There were only two, junior sons of insignificant families, hardly the proper retinue for a dead king's funeral. Even if that king had been deposed, debased, used as a pawn in a fratricide war.
Anne swallowed her tears and instructed the gentlemen to lower the body into the coffin. One of them made a move toward the lid, but Anne stopped him.
"No. Let them see. May the sight of this gentle soul, so brutally departed, strike repentance in their hearts."
The gentlemen exchanged a glance, then nodded in unison.
"Very well. Where to now, my lady?" one said.
Servants hoisted the hearse on which the coffin rested up on their shoulders. Anne took a few moments to steel herself. She hadn't broken down yet; surely she would not now? She took a deep breath.
"St Paul's. Will you come with me? Do your orders extend so far?"
"Speak nothing of orders, my lady. Our duty to our king compels us to honour his royal corpse by guarding it to his last home."
The silent one beside him nodded in agreement.
"Thank you, gentlemen. May I have the name of those who will walk this pitiful procession with me?"
"Tressil, and this my companion is Berkeley. Your servants, my lady."
Anne bowed her head in thanks before covering her hair with a black veil.
"Let us go, then, the smallest funeral procession an English King ever had."
Just outside the porch of the cathedral, Anne bade the bearers to set their load. The servants retreated, while her Gentlemen-at-Arms unobtrusively stood guard a few feet away.
The despair that had been threatening to flood her ever since she'd learned the news was now in great danger of drowning her.
She started talking, the words coming to her easily, pouring into them both her sorrow and her hate toward the man responsible. At last she fell silent, exhausted by the strength of her emotions.
Calmer, Anne instructed the servants to take on their royal load again. A rude voice interrupted them. Gasping, Anne recognised the man, though surely he wouldn't dare . . .
Tressil stepped forward, trying to protect her from the intruder, only to be brutally insulted. Ignoring the man for now, Anne reassured her people, letting them know with a smile that she wasn't holding any blame against them.
Clutching the small cross around her neck, Anne whirled to face Him. That monster. He was looking at her as if he had any right to be there, by his victim's side, as if she was somehow in the wrong for ordering him to leave.
He was horrid to look at, really. Hunch-backed, scarred, and with a withered arm hanging uselessly on his side. And of course his mind was more twisted than his body.
And he had the audacity to try and pacify her with empty words! Anger as she'd never felt it welled within her. She looked aside, her eyes falling on the king's body. With mounting horror, she realised that blood was seeping from King Henry's wounds, staining his shirt.
She looked back at Gloucester. This, this was proof enough that he had killed the King, the lawful King, probably with his own two hands. Half-choked with disgust, she cursed him, hoping that God would look kindly on her pleas and strike him on the spot.
Of course, God was above meddling in the affairs of mortals and nothing happened. Well, nothing good, as Gloucester again reproached her her lack of Christian virtue. She took a second to digest the irony of it before leashing again.
In addition to being a vile murderer, the man must have been mad, because he seemed to take it as permission to court her. Anne listened in increasing disbelief as he paid her compliments after compliments, often turning the insults she hurled at him on their head and using them as springboards for yet more compliments.
At last he had the audacity to claim he had not killed her husband, her fair and gentle Edward, to lie the blame at his brother's feet, to accuse twice-bereaved Margaret of slander. At least he did not deny killing the King, not when irrefutable proof was still oozing from his wounds.
Though it seemed strange to deny one murder and acknowledge another. It wasn't as if the penalty was lass severe; no one was gifted two after-lives to spend in eternal damnation.
But no. She mustn't doubt. Anne steeled her heart, which wasn't too difficult when the meaning of Gloucester's next words sunk in. She let out a small derisive laugh, unable to believe he might actually be serious. Her bedchamber? Really, her bedchamber? Was he completely out of his wits?
And then of course, her tongue tripped her and said what she'd never meant. Or rather, Gloucester unearthed hidden meaning in her every word. No, she didn't hope to lie with him. Not now, not ever. The very idea was preposterous.
Gloucester abandoned his games for more directs arguments, starting with a dithyrambic eloge to her beauty. Her beauty! As if she didn't know about her swarthy skin, her dark hair, her black eyes, her too thin figure. Beauty, ha!
She fought a blush that she'd never admit was only partially in anger.
Anne forgot the compliment when Richard dared comparing himself to her sweet Edward. As if any comparison was possible between this villain, in deeds if not in birth, and the finest, fairest knight in Christendom.
She spat at him in contempt, unmoved by his whinging complaints. A man such as he didn't know the first thing about love, let alone dying of it.
Her train of thought was derailed when he offered her his sword and his naked breast. What on earth . . . ? Were his wits so addled that he thought she wouldn't take the chance to avenge all the men he'd killed? Her father, her husband, his father, and countless others she'd never heard of but who'd left behind them widows and orphans.
She gripped the sword, pressing it a little. A few drops of blood welled up, and Anne knew then that she couldn't do it, that she couldn't kill in cold blood, not even this most hated man.
She let the sword fall aside, the clang of metal against stone echoing the pangs of her heart. She avoided Gloucester's eyes, unwilling to face the smug triumph she knew he must feel.
He stood up, picking up his sword and putting it away in his scabbard, and stepped close to her. He gripped her elbows, strong and forceful and yet surprisingly gentle, and she felt herself grow faint. His smell filled the air, manly and spicy, and suddenly she was weak at the knees, her entire body tingling with a sensation she had never experienced before.
Richard's hands were stroking her arms, his touch light, almost imperceptible, and still managing to set her alight. She let him push his ring on her finger with barely a word of protest, already too aware that the man had managed to win her.
They both looked down at the ring, heavy, masculine, a boar's head engraved in the polished ruby, proclaiming to the world that she was his. The idea did not fill her with the disgust she knew she'd have felt not one hour ago.
Anne was lost, and she knew it. She agreed to the favour he asked of her, letting him steal her mourner's veil—and blushing when he brought it to his nose, his eyes closed and his mien happy. She made her escape before she forgot herself entirely.
END