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There are four of us working in the cookshop that winter, and on cold nights we push our pallets together and share stories.
That is the only real currency we had, says Bess. The pair of pence Cook doles each of us out once a week hardly matters. Bess is the oldest among us, and secretly I believe we are all a little afraid of her. But –worse still– we believe her just the same, and so none of us dare speak and sacrifice what value we have until she huffs an impatient sigh.
“Faugh!” she snaps. “How can you expect us to become sworn sisters if you haven’t a speck of generosity between the three of you?”
I laugh at that. “Being sisters has nothing to do with being generous.”
“Does too,” Margery objects. “My sister’d happily starve before she nicked so much as the last summer plum from me.”
“Mine wouldn’t,” whispers Annie into the darkness, and speaks no more that night, even when Bess got to pinching.
In the morning I find her curled up on her side like nothing so much as a lost kitten, and toe her awake before Cook might catch her still abed. “It’s all right, you know,” I tell her as she hurriedly shakes out her drab kirtle. “Wherever you were before. You’re here now.”
“I know,” Annie says, gray eyes enormous. “That’s what’s wrong.”
I began work barely a fortnight before Annie did, which means I was there when she first stumbled down the low stairs into the kitchen. Her fine pale hair hung wild about her pointed face, and whoever had found her shoes clearly hadn’t bothered to make sure they fit. It was the Holy Virgin’s mercy she didn’t tumble all the way down into the main cookfire, and I couldn’t help but giggle.
“Poor lamb,” I murmured, pulling her to her feet, “where did they find you?”
She flushed. “This city–London-town–It’s all so much.”
That much I understood. I am a Northern girl by birth myself. So I went on to show her around the bits of the kitchen I’d learned in the time I’d been there, and invented explanations for the bits I hadn’t.
I have always been resourceful, after all; my father would expect nothing else.
Annie tried her best to follow, truly she did. Only she had a particular talent for letting the bread burn, or spilling the choice cuts of meat onto the floor, or placing her elbow particularly in Cook’s favorite sauce, which grew only more pronounced with time.
Cook takes me aside on the fourth day. “You oughtn’t help her,” she says, frowning. “Don’t think we haven’t noticed: salting the stews when her back is turned, slipping her ruined pastries to the mice. You’ll only make it worse when she’s on her own, though Lord knows when that day will come.”
I keep my attention pointedly on cracking eggs for the frumenty, until she has to chuckle in resignation.
“A boar rooting in the woods would call you pig-headed,” she says with a sigh, and then, more sharply “--that’s enough eggs, mind! Do you think us made of money?”
By which, I glean, I am forgiven.
On our way home from church, they whisper of a missing girl.
“Lady, rather,” whispers Margery. “Her that was Princess before the King–God save him!--returned!”
She peers about her anxiously. The uncertainty of the last few years might have ebbed, now that the brothers of York were fully in control of the throne; but it still didn’t do to have the wrong person overhear you voicing the wrong thing.
“Might she be with child?” Bess counts the months since the bloodbath at Tewkesbury on her fingers. “No, it will have been too long by now.”
“Or she might mean to join her lady mother in sanctuary,” offers Margery. “Allowing she can bear to spend a life behind the abbey walls.”
“Don’t be stupid. Then why shouldn’t she have set out from her sister’s house with full honors?”
“Perhaps,” Annie whispers, “It was no choice of her own. Perhaps she doesn’t know how to say that she wishes to be found.”
I frown. For myself, I say nothing at all.
Eventually at night the talk turns to who we’ve left waiting behind.
Bess preens when she speaks of the man she’s promised to, who’s serving in the guard and ever eager to walk out with her on holidays. Margery speaks of no man at all, but of a pretty pink-cheeked friend in service in Somerset.
When it’s my turn, I smile. In this at least Bess isn’t mistaken; it’s a kind of power, to have enough stories secreted away that you can choose which one to share. I tell them of a boy I knew, surly and scowling and so solemn it wrung the heart. He never knew half of what I felt for him, but then again, neither did I. It’s not much of a tale, with an end too often told (“and then he rode off to the wars and I never laid eyes on him again”), but it makes Bess soften and Margery cluck and Annie wipe away more than one tear.
“I was married,” Annie says baldly when we prod at her to join in, and we all start.
“What manner of unholy priest married an infant barely old enough to talk?” Margery wants to know, while Bess storms that we aren’t meant to lie , that sworn sisters would never –
“Was?” I ask carefully.
“Yes.” She studies her hands. “He died.”
Certain things begin to come together in my mind, inferences and implications I mislike. It won’t do to have anyone else know, or even suspect. Loudly I clear my throat.
“Why, what a surprise,” I say cheerily; “So too was I wed once, and most merrily widowed,” and when the scrutiny and the exclamations shift to me instead, I tell myself I don’t mind, if it’s for Annie’s sake.
Trouble finds us not long after Lady Day.
Annie and I are in the back, kneading tomorrow’s dough when Margery scrambles in, color high. “You’ll never believe it,” she gasps, “the horses outside!”
I still. Annie squints. “Horses?” she repeats.
“A score of them, kitted out like lords, and they say Gloucester himself at their head?”
“The King’s brother? Why would he be here–” Annie pauses, turns to me. “Why, Nan, you’ve gone white.”
Have I? I might assure her it was only with anger, if we weren’t then joined by men in York livery, and Cook and Bess, this ridiculous procession followed by:
“Richard.”
His black brows crease together. “Anne. You’ve led us a merry chase.”
“ Us ? Never tell me you’ve joined the cause of my sister and my lord Clarence.” My voice wavers, caught between the court phrases I was born to, and the coarser accent I’ve learned. I hate it. “Though regardless they have what they want. George and Bella take possession of my inheritance whether they can explain my disappearance or not.”
“Any efforts I took to discover you,” Richard replies carefully, a flush forming high upon his cheeks, “were entirely for my own benefit.”
That is precisely what I fear.
I let my eyes travel pointedly around the small crowd of spectators all about, which Richard at last seems to notice. He clears his throat and says, in that tone of command which yet surprises me, “We shall speak alone.”
“Please,” I add as they all file out, still goggle-eyed. Annie lingers long enough to squeeze my hand, and then she too is gone, leaving me alone with Richard.
There is flour on my chin, and grease on my hem, and I am alone with Richard.
“Anne–” he begins in rather a changed tone than he used before, but I’ve no patience for it.
“Not again,” I say.
“You know Edward would approve–”
“Why shouldn’t he, with his favorite brother made wealthy –”
“It would see you safe–”
“The last of the Lancasters nestled away–”
“You might be happy,” he interrupts, surprisingly earnest. He spoke so as a boy, creeping into the solar to beg my favor on the tilting-yard. “I would see you happy, Anne.”
I laugh; the sound rings harsh even to my own ears. “I married once on the weight of such promises.” They had come from my father rather than my intended, but it had all come to one in the end. “Surely you remember what came of that.”
"Then what?" His composure is lost at last. "Do you mean to stay here and--and scrub dishes for the rest of your days?"
That is more than enough. I slip my hand into my apron pocket, and hold out the dozen pence I've so carefully saved. They are not the gems I wore once, nor the Warwick estates, but they are the fruits of my own honest labor, and the proof that I might survive with my own sovereignty intact.
Richard shakes his head when I explain this. "I thought you might say as much." He holds out a sheaf of parchment, finely lettered and not yet sealed. "And so I brought you this."
He is good enough to hold his tongue while I read it, and read it again. It takes me only a few words to recognize the beginnings of a formal petition to His Holiness, to provide proper dispensation for purposes of marriage, and not very many sentences more for me to see what is wrong with it. I know our lineages as well as anyone else, not to mention our wedded brother and sister; Richard, who mastered and memorized the law even before I did, should surely have noticed this long before.
But when I look to him, he only shrugs. "There you have it," he tells me. His voice is very gentle when he adds, "You won't be trapped again, Anne."
He's right, of course. No one expects a lady to be particularly clever, not even the Kingmaker's get. She might easily assent to be wed, and then--at any time she saw fit--be forcibly reminded of her blunder and safely seek an annulment. She might know that even if she should want to leave, she could do so with the knowledge that there would be at worst a cookshop ready to take her back in, friends waiting to bring her into the fold. She might know, too, that each day a certain error was ignored was in fact a new promised of continued love, rather than the consequences of two souls yoked together all too soon.
I put the parchment down. "Very well," I say, and surprise myself when my heart doesn't quicken with the panic that sent me fleeing my sister's home.
Bess was right, after all; secrets are the only security one can have.
When we walk up the kitchen stairs, hand in hand, Cook and the girls do their best to look as though they haven't been listening at the door. Not that I can blame them; I know quite well it's the most interesting thing to happen to any of us in months. Richard, however, has no such reason for sympathy; and so he only takes himself off to see to our departure with a black look.
Cook promptly falls into a frighteningly deep curtsy, babbling nonsense that seems to be half apology, half accusation for not telling us sooner. Bess wrings my hand, clearly already preparing to tell all and sundry of how the Lady Anne Neville herself was her bosom friend and companion. Margery, being ever of a practical disposition, asks if I won't need some bread and cheese for my journey.
I dismiss them all as quickly as I can, and turn to little Annie. If ever I thought her wide-eyed before, I was wrong. Her gray eyes are enormous in her face, and she stares at me as though she expects me to pluck stars from the sky and hand them to her.
"You needn't be afraid," I tell her once again. "Wherever you were before. Whatever you were."
For once she seems to believe me. The benefits, I suppose, of distinction.
"My sister has a servant," I go on. "A goodly woman, a widow. Ankarette is her name, just like you. Tell her I sent you, and she'll see you're cared for." What I think but don't add is that Ankarette Twynyho has more than enough soothing balms and potions in her possession to help Annie forget what haunts her and what decisions I suspect she made to rid herself of a marriage that pleased her not. And even if not--a lifetime seeing to herbs and poultices would suit my friend much better than the cookshop.
Annie nods, shoulders lowering, hands coming to rest at her side. "And you?" she asks, at the last moment possible, just when I think ours will be only a silent goodbye. "Where will you go?"
Richard has proposed the sanctuary of St. Martin le Grand, while I favored his mother's house. That doesn't seem to be what Annie means.
"Wherever I please." I consider this further, and begin to smile. "Wherever I please."