From the HBT Originals anthology Tales from Fallen Empires, by Evelyn Marlowe. This is a free preview — Part 1 of 3 — narrated version below, with the text underneath if you’d rather read.
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The queen's rooms smelled of beeswax and rue, and of something else that Margery Lound had learned, over twenty-three years of service, to recognise without naming. It was the smell of a house that had held death and not yet released it — a stillness in the hangings, a dimness in the plate, as though even the silver had chosen to grieve. Anne Neville, Queen of England, had breathed her last on the sixteenth day of March, in the year of Our Lord fourteen hundred and eighty-five, and the court at Westminster had not known, since, quite what face to wear.
Margery had come to the queen's service as a girl of fourteen, following her mother, who had herself attended Anne's mother, the Countess of Warwick, in the old days at Middleham when the earl was still the greatest power in England. That was before the earl had turned his coat — turned it twice, in the end — before the battles and the attainders and the long, strange unravelling of everything the Nevilles had built. Margery had outlasted all of it. She had watched her mistress grow from a fragile girl passed between powerful men like a letter no one wished to open, to a queen who sat at her husband's right hand with a dignity that asked nothing of anyone. And now she had watched her die.
The pension had been arranged by one of the king's clerks, a pale young man named Ferrers who delivered the news of it with the manner of a physician announcing a necessary amputation. Twenty marks a year, payable at Michaelmas. A letter of commendation. Safe passage north to Sheriff Hutton, where she had a brother-in-law who kept a modest house and a modest farmstead and had always, she suspected, slightly disapproved of the court.
"His Grace wishes it known," Ferrers had said, studying the document rather than her face, "that your service to the queen has been noted and valued."
"I am glad of it," Margery had replied, because there was nothing else one said.
She was not dismissed in disgrace. She understood that. She was dismissed because there was nothing left to serve. The queen's household was dissolving around her like salt in warm water — ladies returning to their husbands' manors, to their fathers' halls, to the ordinary textures of lives that had been suspended while they attended a dying woman. It was natural. It was right. And yet Margery found herself lingering, her trunks half-packed in the small room near the river that had been hers for three winters, the window fogged with cold, watching the boats on the Thames moving through a January mist that seemed too thick for February, too grey for hope.
She saw the king twice before she left.
The first time was by accident — or close enough to it. She had gone to return a psalter to the royal library, a small illuminated book that had been Anne's particular comfort in the final weeks, and she had rounded a corner of the eastern corridor to find Richard standing at a window that looked out over the river. He was alone, which was itself unusual enough to stop her feet. He was wearing black, as the whole court wore black, but on him it had a different quality, less a garment than an expression. He was not tall — he never had been, being the shortest of the surviving York brothers — and in the dim January light he looked diminished further, his left shoulder bearing its familiar, subtle differentiation from the right, his hands clasped behind his back with a grip that suggested the effort of stillness rather than its achievement.
He heard her step and turned before she could retreat.
"Mistress Lound."
"Your Grace." She curtseyed deeply and held it, feeling the familiar ache in her left knee that had plagued her since autumn.
"Rise, please." He said it without impatience, but without warmth either. He said most things that way now. She had noticed it spreading over him like frost over a pond, this quality of controlled, exhausted containment — as though all the ordinary expressions of a man had been placed under governance. He looked at the psalter in her hands. "Hers?"
"Yes, Your Grace. I thought it ought to go back to the library, rather than — rather than be packed with the other things."
He crossed the short distance between them and took it from her. He did not open it. He held it for a moment the way one holds something that one is deciding whether to keep or to surrender, and then he tucked it under his arm with a preciseness that was almost bureaucratic.
"She read from it each morning," Margery said, and then wished immediately that she had not spoken. It was not her place to inform him of what his wife had done.
But he only said, "I know," quietly, and looked back out at the river. "You travel north soon."
"At the week's end, Your Grace. As soon as the roads will allow it."
"They will be bad past Grantham." He said it the way men who have campaigned say such things — practically, assessingly. "Tell your escort to take the Fosse road north of Leicester rather than the direct way. The draining is better."
"I will, Your Grace."
He nodded, still looking at the river. She waited a decent interval and then curtseyed again and withdrew, her heart doing something strange and uncomfortable in her chest that she would not, for some time, be able to properly name.
The second time was not accidental at all, and she felt guilty for it afterwards, or not guilty exactly, but aware that she had wanted something she had no right to want — a final fixed image, perhaps, or the satisfaction of a farewell that meant something. She had positioned herself near the great hall on the morning of a council meeting, ostensibly to speak with one of the other departing ladies about a shared wagon, but in truth to see the king pass.
He passed in company. That was what she noticed first — not the men themselves, several of whom she recognised, but the quality of their proximity to him. Lord Stanley walked three paces behind and to the left, which was correct in terms of rank and precedent, but there was in those three paces a distance that felt architectural rather than ceremonial, as though Stanley had measured the space to a tolerance that allowed him to deny, later, any particular significance to it. His son Lord Strange walked beside him, and neither of them spoke to the men around them. They were present at the council and absent from the court, and everyone in the corridor understood this without anyone remarking upon it.
Margery watched Stanley's face as he passed. It was a face she had studied for years, as one studies a landscape one crosses regularly: familiar in its contours, opaque in its depths. Thomas Stanley had survived every change of fortune since the days of Henry VI by a faculty she had once heard described, by one of the queen's sharper ladies, as ‘the political genius of never quite being anywhere.' He had been Richard's own steward, and now — she did not know what he was. Nobody knew what he was. That, she supposed, was precisely the point.
Francis Lovell passed with the king, talking quietly and earnestly in a way that suggested business rather than comfort. John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, whose broad face always wore an expression of practical determination, was saying something about provisions and the southern ports. Men preparing. Men calculating. The air around them was not the air of a court in mourning; it was something older and more specific — the air of a camp before a muster, of men making peace with what was coming by attending to what was immediate.
Henry Tudor was in France. Or rather, Margery corrected herself — he had been in Brittany, sheltered for years by Duke Francis, and then France had drawn him in when Brittany became complicated, and now he was preparing something on the Normandy coast, though the preparation had been preparing for some time and the something had not yet arrived. But it would. Everyone at Westminster understood, without saying it plainly, that it would. The spring would bring him, or the summer would, or the year after — but the logic of it, the terrible gravitational logic of it, was as legible as a sentence in plain English: there would be a battle, and the battle would settle everything, and nothing that happened between now and then could alter that fundamental shape.
— End of preview. The rest of “The Last Winter of the Plantagenets” continues in Tales from Fallen Empires, available now.
Get the full story (and four more) in Tales from Fallen Empires →
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