Free The Exiled by Posie Graeme-evans Page B

Westminster to Brugge, that is, if the king was finally able to convince his sister of her duty to marry Duke Charles.
    Margaret was headstrong. Hers was the power of acknowledged beauty coupled with much of the king’s own force of character. She was accustomed to being indulged. However, she was in her early twenties, old for a royal bride, and Edward was entirely determined to make her see reason before she lost the currency of youth on the international royal bridal market.
    This alliance with Burgundy was most necessary if Edward was to win the ever-expanding battle for influence on the continent and head off French ambitions for European dominance. In a way his sister was making the marriage he might himself have made — to a member of the Burgundian Ducal House — if he hadn’t happened to have met Elisabeth Wydeville first, sheltering from a storm under the oak trees at Greenwich.
    And too, Edward was neither stupid nor heartless. As a brother he understood his little sister might be repulsed at the thought of marrying a widower some years older than she was, especially when there were so many gallants at home literally panting to be her husband — but Margaret could have no choice if he so instructed her. To oppose his will in the matter of her marriage was, after all, treason. What did royal children exist for if not to help the future of their houses by intermarriage with allies?
    Excellent in theory, of course, but difficult in practice. Margaret was his sister and painfully direct at times, just as he was. Only this morning, she’d flung into his face his own hasty marriage to Elisabeth Wydeville in the most strident terms.
That
had hardly been for the good of the country, had it? Edward hadn’t brought a
useful
alliance of any kind to the House of York with that marriage, had he?
And
he’d defied Warwick’s plans for a French alliance in marrying his base-born
old
queen — look at the trouble he’d caused doing
that
!
    Sadly that same queen, entering the room unexpectedly in the middle of this very frank confrontation, heard Margaret’s viciously energetic remarks with unflattering clarity. Alas.
    The queen knew well the king’s family resented her marriage to Edward, and was therefore implacable in her determination that they acknowledge her in every possible way as God’s chosen, anointed queen. She was also more than sensitive to being five years older than her husband at a court filled to bursting with ambitious, well-born girls all enthusiastically determined to provide the king with any kind of sexual favour he might require.
    Margaret’s heated remarks, therefore, were fat on the fire when Elisabeth heard them. Outraged, the queen demanded from Edward that the Lady Margaret and her mother, Duchess Cicely, suffer for their scorn of her — and in a public way before the court!
    Her dangerous mood was partly caused by the fact that she’d become certain at last, this morning, that she was in the very earliest stages of breeding again — no bloodied rags with her moon this month — which was something miraculous in itself, considering she and the king had had so little to do with each other recently.
    So far, of course, Elisabeth had only borne Edward girls and she was very sensitive about it. Each pregnancy raised the stakes; surely God would grant her a son this time? And her fragile emotional state was not helped by apparently ‘well-meaning’ advice from her mother-in-law after the confrontation with Margaret. Cicely, the mother of multiple sons herself, dared to offer advice to her, the Queen of England, about how she could ensure that the child in her belly was a son. She would not be patronised by either of the York women!
    It was more than unfortunate, therefore, that the queen then happened to glance at a small letter scroll, partly unrolled on her husband’s work desk. Neatly lettered at its foot was the signature, Anne de Bohun — and, of course, it all came back: the searing