Anne remains where she is, by the window overlooking the courtyard, and draws her heavy shawl tighter around herself. By rights, she ought to be abed - the doctors will certainly insist upon it, when they find her - but she had to know.
She must see him, just for a moment, to be sure that he truly does live. Even if she half feels as though she hates him now, she cannot bear the thought of his dying before her, so she must wait, and see him ride through the gates, and then her heart will be eased.
There is a crown on his lovely dark head, heavy and golden, and it suits him better than it would ever have suited all-forsaken George.
It clangs, undignified, when it hits the cobbles. Richard, in his heavy armours, falls almost soundless into Lovell and Percy's waiting arms, and Anne turns away from the panic.
He has made it home - if he dies here, the succession will pass smoothly to his nephew, who is not Anne's nephew, and she will pass into obscurity. All the better - there, she will be free to mourn, and might find some balm for the fury that stirs her soul into constant storms.
Her breath still comes uneven, uneasy, but it comes and there is no more blood in her handkerchief. For that, she is as grateful as she can be, because she had thought that in dying she might join Edward.
She cannot dance, as the younger women do - as if she is an ancient! - but she sits, and watches, and envies Elizabeth Rivers more than she ever has any woman. Elizabeth Rivers, they say, has all that ought to be Anne's - the respect of the court, a bright future, the King's love and desire.
Does she believe that Richard would bed his niece? Should she? Like as not she shouldn't, but she does, sometimes, because why should he not? Thirteen years they've been wed, and not a moment she's doubted him - but he has only been a king for such a small part of those thirteen years, and kings are not normal men.
And Elizabeth is beautiful. Anne has never been beautiful, and perhaps it was foolish of her to think that Richard might love her even when the glow of youth left her face - it is long gone, now, stripped from her by grief and loss and sickness, and surely he will not want any part of her.
But she knows him, too, knows him better than anyone in all the world. His love for his brother would never allow him to bed his niece, even if he was so inclined - and were it not for the distance between them, even since before Edward's death, she would not believe him to have any such inclination.
But that distance has been there. He has not bedded her in so long that she seems to have forgotten the taste of his mouth, the weight of his hands, the warmth of his love.
She is still unwell enough that time passes oddly for her, in fits and bursts and startlement, and so it is that she is startled, but not surprised, to blink and find Francis Lovell kneeling before her.
He is haggard, Viscount Lovell, as if he has neither bathed nor shaved for days now, with shadows like the night under his bright-burning blue eyes. Francis has always been day to Richard's night, fair and golden where Richard is dark and moonlight, and Anne smiles to see him, even in such a state of disarray.
"We have sent you note after note, Your Grace," he says, and his voice is strained, pleading. "I beg you, my lady - come to him. I beg it."
"He will send for me if he wishes for me," Anne says, her smile falling away, because of course Richard has sent Francis to do this. "If he has need of me-"
"Dickon is dying , Annie," Francis hisses, too close to her to be proper and calling her by her name - by a name no one has called her since Isabel last did. "He has called for you every damned minute since the fever took him - please, Annie, for the friendship between us, for the love I know you to bear for him, I beseech you. Go to him. He needs you. He needs you more even than he usually does."
"His Grace has no need of me-"
"His Grace was weeping when I left him," Francis says, visibly despairing. "He is in the throes of delirium, Your Grace, mad with fever, and he weeps constantly that he has failed as your husband. He cries out for you, and for your son. But mostly it is for you. Please."
Richard has hardly breathed Edward's name since they lost him, and her heart stops dead in her chest to think of him lamenting their boy's loss even in madness.
She rises, slowly and carefully, and gathers her shawl close. Francis offers her his arm, but she waves him away - her ladies are all gathered close enough to hear, but looking away, looking busy.
"I will return for dinner," she says, hating how frail her voice is yet. "Nothing with beef, please."
The walk from her chambers to Richard's is short, but she has not made it in such a while that it feels long as the Thames.
A cry comes from behind his door, and she stumbles.
Her heart has started up again, racing now to hear his pain, and she hates herself for being so weak as to be moved without even looking upon him.
When she does look upon him - when Francis opens the door to permit her entry - she almost chokes on a sob, and is moved to tears and pain immediately.
His shoulder - his poor, crooked shoulder, of which he was always so conscious, so wary, the same shoulder she has spent hours and hours soothing with careful hands over their years together - is hidden in a mass of bloody, puss-stained bandages, fetid and stinking. The windows are all shuttered, and the room smells like a sewer.
"Open the windows," she says. "Open them wide, immediately!"
Some doctor moves toward her with outstretched hands, murmuring admonitions and Your Graces , and she slaps him away, moving to the bed.
She will be exhausted in an hour, like this, but she must act. How dare he think to die before her! How dare he!
"You stupid, wilful fool," she grits out, cutting through the bandages with the knife he always keeps tucked behind his Holy Bible on the low table by the bed. "How are you to rule if you die?"
The stench is worse when she finally splits the bandages, and she very nearly recoils from it herself.
"Send for the barber-surgeons," she calls over her shoulder, voice weak but firm, and she is gratified to hear the door slam open and slam shut in quick order. "Francis, hot water, and you, little Howard, as much clean linen as can be found, good boy."
They spring to it, and as little Edmund Howard lays a pile of linen as big as he is himself at Anne's side, Richard's eyes open.
They are glossy, star-struck, and a thousand miles distant. They still catch on her face, though, and Anne half wonders if he thinks her some terrible demon sent to haunt him, with how gaunt and haggard she has become.
"My lady," he breathes, and he tries to lift his ruined arm to touch her face. He has always liked touching her face, thumb to her chin as he kisses her hello and fingers curling around her jaw as he kisses her goodbye. She has missed his gently hungry hands more than any other part of him save his heart, this past while.
"What a mess you've made of yourself, Richard," she says sternly, as she used when he'd fall from his horse, or out of a tree while playing with Edward, at home at Middleham. His shoulder could be righted with firm hands and warm oil, then, but this is beyond Anne's meagre skill as a healer. "Whatever am I to do with you?"
"Withhold my privileges as punishment," he says, and she jumps at the hoarse rasp of his voice - she loves his voice, has always loved his voice, and it scares her to hear it so changed.
She blushes, too, because she has always teased that she will withhold his privileges as punishment, and it has always been a challenge for him to seduce her as repayment for worrying her when he is hurt. He must be truly delirious, if he is saying such a thing before company.
What if Francis is right? What if he is dying?
"Your privileges are being withheld whether or which," she tells him, dunking some of the linens into the steaming bowl Francis presents from nowhere. The water scalds, just a little, and she wrings out the cloth only very slightly before setting it to the mass of crushed flesh and bone where Richard's shoulder was, so recently.
He howls, and little Howard sits firm on his King's good arm without even being asked, when Richard begins to flail. Anne ignores him, ignores his pleading and begging because if she listens she will be brought back to his demanding that Edward live, and she cannot bear that. Francis stuffs spare linen into Richard's mouth before moving to hold his legs, and Anne is grateful for it.
She is aware that the doctors are somewhere by the fire, but she ignores them. It is more important that she clean Richard's wounds fully, hopefully removing any taint in his blood before it can spread.
"Your Grace, is there anything we can do to help?"
The Rivers girls are in the doorway, faces pale and jaws set, and they look more their father than their mother, in those shadows. Anne wishes it were otherwise, that they had more of their mother's witchery in their look, because she would give anything for Elizabeth Woodville and her maybe-craft, if it would save Richard.
"St. John's wort," Anne says. "Fetch that and allheal from the kitchens, and put it in boiling water - bring it to me then. As hot as they will give you, and as fresh of herbs. Go now - go!"
Both girls spin, although the elder Mistress Rivers dares to glance back over her shoulder with those innocent eyes of hers, and Anne wants to scream.
"Groundsel, too!" Francis shouts after the girls, and Anne is grateful to him. All her strength is needed to keep bathing Richard's shoulder, which is oozing rather than bleeding, and stinking more than anything. How have the doctors allowed it to come to this state? How have Francis and Hal and John and the rest of them?
"Your Grace, if we may," some fool doctor tries, but Anne holds up a hand to forestall him.
"The barber-surgeons have been sent for," she says. "You are not wanted here, Doctor, not when you have allowed your King's health to come to such a point."
It has been… Four days? Five? Since Richard's return. Had she been aware of just how ill he is, she would have come to him sooner, and dismissed the doctors.
Elizabeth Rivers probably knew - it warms Anne a little, to think of that abominable girl hearing Richard cry out not for her but for Anne, for Edward.
Richard screams, when she pours the great earthen bowl of allheal and scalding water over his shoulder, with Francis' help. She sobs to cause him pain, and because her arms shake so badly under the weight of the bowl that she would likely have killed her husband without Francis' help.
Cecily Rivers catches her when she stumbles back, and guides her to a chair that someone - Edmund Howard, she sees - has pushed to the bedside, just as the barber-surgeons make their entrance. There are two of them, one stout and the other slim, practical looking men with a leather roll of tools apiece and clean, starched aprons.
Anne doesn't know what she was expecting, but it was not this. They bow neatly, perfunctorily, and address her with deferring Your Graces when they need to address her at all.
But mostly, they attend to Richard.
First, they set a strip of leather between his teeth, and tie it behind his head - it muffles what sounds of discomfort he makes, and will stop him biting through his tongue, they tell her when she asks.
Then, they tear away the bandages that have been laid over the wound, murmuring between themselves as they poke and prod at the wound, and direct the boys and Francis and Hal and John, appeared from somewhere, to hold Richard down. Anne moves to help, but the stout one lays a broad, gentle hand on her arm.
"Please, Your Grace," he says, "he'll not thank us for saving him if we see you dead in the meantime."
She does feel a little unwell, but she will see him through this. He saw her through her pains, after all, sat as close as the midwives would allow - just outside her open door, so he could call encouragement - when she birthed Edward and lost their girl, their Cissy.
Have they ever had anything they did not lose? First Cissy, then the peace of Middleham, then Edward, then one another. What have they done to earn this pain, to be deserving of such punishment from God?
Richard screams around his gag, and arches and twists - the boys and the men are holding him down, blocking her view, but he screams her nameand Anne pushes past John de la Pole to sit on the spare pillow, moves so she can cradle Richard's head in her lap, and strokes his lovely hair.
"I am here," she promises him. "Don't you dare die before me."