Free The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III by Freda Warrington

Even at ten, she suspected her mother was angry because Edith had touched a raw truth. Now, at sixteen, the ghostly warnings were ever more insistent. However steadfastly she and Eleanor ignored the problem, it would not go away. Without a husband, she thought, without his shield and his armour, his title and his knights, we are naked… and Mama hates this! And so do I.
    Among the sisterhood of Auset, most of Eleanor’s friends kept silent on the matter. Only Anne Beauchamp, the Countess of Warwick, confronted her.
    “You should think about a husband for Katherine,” she told Eleanor at every Motherlodge gathering. “You have your principles, but we must be realistic. We can’t live entirely in the hidden realm. Unless we conform to the outer world, we won’t survive. My daughters know that. Choose her a husband, before one is imposed upon you!”
    ###
    There was turmoil in the outer world, as always. Edward’s victory hadn’t stopped the fighting. Marguerite, in exile, hadn’t ceased trying to reinstate Henry as king, and she had a half-grown son to promote, Edouard of Lancaster, Henry’s heir, whom some said was not Henry’s child at all.
    When told of his son’s birth, so the story went, Henry was astonished and remarked that the conception must have been effected by an angel, since he had no recollection of it.
    Kate still laughed every time she thought of this.
    The conflict grew worse. On their travels to York and to Nottingham for Motherlodge meetings, Eleanor and Katherine gathered news. King Edward and the Earl of Warwick – the Kingmaker who’d placed Edward on the throne – had quarrelled.
    Kate asked her mother what the quarrel was about.
    “Politics,” Eleanor answered flatly. “I like the Countess of Warwick well enough but I don’t trust her husband. The earl thought he could manipulate Edward like a puppet, but Edward has a mind of his own. He married the wrong woman, a commoner, Elizabeth Woodville, instead of the foreign princess Warwick had arranged. Warwick was furious. So now he plots to create a different king instead, one who is more easily bullied.”
    “Who?” Kate asked in amazement.
    “I don’t know,” Eleanor said thinly. “The one woman who might know the truth, the countess, has not shown her face since this began.”
    “There’ll be more fighting, I suppose,” said Kate.
    “Dear, it’s never really stopped.”
    Within her mother’s demesne, it was hard to imagine nobles at war in the outside world. Here, life was peaceful. Spring was in full bloom, as warm as summer. Kate rode her dapple-grey mare Mab up to Lytton Edge, where lines of rock swept above them like the crumbled ruins of a Roman fortress; over the heathery slopes of Bride Cloud and down into the oak-veiled chasm of Lytton Griffe. Along the banks of the surging Melandra she went, across the Sheepwash Bridge, through heavily-scented avenues of may trees. Impossible to imagine anything disturbing this sweetness.
    This morning, she’d visited a sick villager, a man who’d fallen from a cart and impaled himself on a stake. The wound was healing now, thanks to the skills Kate had absorbed from her mother. Brews of certain herbs for cleansing, others to ease pain, honey ointment for healing. Incense to encourage kind elementals and repel the less savoury ones. The man had joked about battle wounds, and she wondered how she would feel if his wound was a sword-thrust. She thought about Raphael.
    “There’s something worse than having to marry,” she said to her mare. “What if a woman grew fond of her husband, and he rode off to be killed in battle?”
    Sweat prickled her skin, made her head itch under her hennin of green silk. Impatiently she tore it from her head. The fluttering veil made Mab dance nervously. Kate let her gallop.
    Arriving at the house in disarray with her hair loose, the mare skittish and sweaty beneath her, she was shocked to find visitors in the stable yard. There were a dozen horses,