Thwarted Queen (51 page)

“Did you know he was a spy?”

I stared at my guest, as everything slid into place. The fact that Blaybourne knew so many languages. The humble background, the courtly behavior, the education at an Italian university. Even his advanced degree.

“I had no idea,” I said, gripping the arms of my chair as I stared into the fire. The flames flickered, giving me an image of Blaybourne saying farewell to me all over again.

“He must have been in some danger while he was visiting me, for he had no protector.”

The grandson smiled. “My grandfather was extremely well educated, and valuable for that reason.”

“Whom did he spy for?”

“The Medici bank of Florence.”

Yes, he had used that name when giving me his last instructions.

“Banks need information about which way the wind is blowing before they lend money,” continued the young man. “My grandfather was trying to find out whether the English were likely to win their war against the French, so that the Medici bank could determine if it would be wise to give the English king a loan.”

“Is that why he came from Pontoise?”

“Yes. After getting information about the campaign against the French, he planned to go to the court at Rouen to gather more information before returning to Italy. He was detained by a fair lady.”

My cheeks warmed.

“The lady was enchanting, so I’ve heard,” observed the young man smiling. “My grandfather delayed until he could do so no more.”

“Until he had to leave,” said I, conjuring up the image of the moment when Richard had announced his return outside Rouen Castle.

There was silence for a moment.

“He wasn’t a nobleman,” I sighed.

“No, but he could assume the guise of a nobleman. He said it made it easier to conduct negotiations.”

“I always wondered how he managed to do that.”

“The monks taught him his manners,” replied Olivier de Blay. “As you know, some of them come from aristocratic families.”

I nodded, too weary to pursue the matter further. “What happened to your grandfather?”

“He gave up the roving life of a spy, returned to Florence and worked for the Medici bank in other ways. Several years later, he settled down, married a young lady whose father was a wealthy merchant and produced a son. My father Cecilio.”

“Cecilio?” I clasped my hands and smiled. “He remembered me!”

“He couldn’t forget you.”

“He was not happy?”

“He was well enough.”

I looked down. Even when I was nine years old, marrying Richard hadn’t felt right. Granted, I reveled in my power and influence. But had it been good for my soul? I examined my hands, now knobbled with arthritis. What would I have done had I known what that choice would entail? Would I have had the courage to leave three children and cause a scandal for a husband who loved me, in exchange for a life of study and companionship with Blaybourne?

No. For the cost would have been too high. True, I would have been spared the drama and tragedy of a life encrusted with power. But could I have lived with myself?

I felt inside my fur wrap and brought out the leather-bound book, handing it to the young man.

“My life is in my memoirs,” I said. “Take this book to my daughter Margaret for safekeeping. For Tudor would destroy if he knew of it.”

The young man bowed.

“Tell me more about your grandfather. Is he alive?”

“No, my lady, I regret to say not. He died some thirty-five years ago.”

“The very same year as my lord husband,” I murmured.

I leaned back in my seat, feeling Lady Fortune completing her circle. If I shut my eyes, I could see their faces: Mama’s, Cath’s, Anne’s, Audrey’s and Jenet’s. They were laughing at something I said.

We were sitting in Bulmer’s Tower at Castle Raby, discussing Chaucer. The day was warm and fresh. Mama smiled at me and patted my hand.

NOTE

Cecylee, Duchess of York died on May 31, 1495 at the great age of eighty. She is buried in the Collegiate Church of Fotheringhay, opposite her husband, Richard, Duke of York.

This manuscript was taken to Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, who placed it in safekeeping at the convent of Roosendael just before her death, in November 1503. Unfortunately, this convent was destroyed in 1576, during the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. The manuscript has only recently been unearthed.

About the Author

Cynthia Sally Haggard was born and raised in Surrey, England. About thirty years ago she came to the United States and has lived there ever since in the Mid-Atlantic region. She has had four careers, violinist, cognitive scientist, medical writer and novelist. Yes, she is related to H. Rider Haggard, the author of SHE and KING SOLOMONS’S MINES. (He was a younger brother of her great-grandfather.) She got into novel writing by accident, when an instructor announced one day that each member of his class had to produce five pages of their next novel. She took a deep breath and began. She hasn’t stopped since.

Connect with me online at my blog:
http://spunstories.com/

Acknowledgments

This book took me seven years to write. I could not have done it without the help of many people. The first person who deserves thanks is my friend Beth Franks, a talented writer in her own right, who patiently went through several drafts of
Thwarted Queen
, and made innumerable suggestions for improvement.

Next, I want to thank my wonderful editor Catherine Adams, formerly of the
Iowa Book Doctors
now of
Inkslinger Editing
, for her structural editing of the manuscript early on, and the many helpful suggestions she made then that brought the novel to a new level. This summer, Catherine did a magnificent job in the line-by-line content and copyediting, gently pruning the manuscript to give it what I hope is a polished, professional feel. Any mistakes are my own!

I also wish to thank Lord Barnard of Raby Castle in County Durham for his interest in my novel, and for allowing Clifton Sutcliffe, the docent, to take me on a personal tour of Cecily’s childhood home in July 2007. Mr. Sutcliffe showed me the Keep where Cecylee was locked up by her father, and explained to me about the wooden walkways that criss-crossed Castle Raby to make passage from one tower to another easy in the event of a raid. I am also indebted to him for bringing to my attention John Wolstenholme Cobb’s
History and Antiquities of Berkhamsted
, in which he quotes
The Orders and Rules of the Princess Cecill
.

I wish to thank the United States Military Academy Department of History for allowing me to use the map of England and France circa 1422, and for Emerson Kent in helping me to find it.

I was privileged to take classes with many wonderful teachers during my long journey with
TQ
. I wish to thank Mark Spencer, professor of English and Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Arkansas at Monticello for his class
Successful Self-Publishing
, given during the spring of 2011; Curtis Sittenfeld, author of
American Wife
, for her sensitive reading of the novel during the
2010
Napa Valley Writer’s Workshop
; Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency for her class
Secrets of Publishing Success
given at Book Passage in Corte Madera CA, during the fall of 2006; Janis Cooke-Newman, author of
Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln
, for her invaluable help on the end of the novel; Michael Neff, creator of
Web del Sol
, for his wonderful classes on craft at the
2005
Harper’s Ferry Workshop
; Junse Kim, who taught
Introduction to Fiction: You Can’t Build a House without Foundations
and Otis Haschemeyer, who taught
Introduction to the Novel
at the
Writing Salon
in Bernal Heights San Francisco during the fall of 2004. I could not have written and published my novel without the help of these professionals.

My friend Beth Robertson deserves thanks for sharing her expertise on Chaucer, and her knowledge of subversive activity amongst medieval ladies, who would often read material that would not have pleased their husbands. Such inflammatory scrolls were secreted in the saddle bags of Abbesses and other ladies, who were ostensibly just making a social call.

I wish to thank the following writers for reading the manuscript and making useful suggestions: Kristin Abkemeyer, Myrna Loy Ashby, Sharyn Bowman, Peter Brown, Julie Corwin, Eric Goldman, Joy Jones, Phil Kurata, Nadine Leavitt-Siak, Michelle McGurk, Amanda Miller, Rose Murphy, Nicole Nelson, Dan Newman, Desirée Parker, Walter Simson, Kevin Singer, Judy Wertheimer, Jun Yan.

Last but not least, I wish to thank the talented Heather Hayes for donating her time to model for Cecylee; her friend, Whitney Arostegui, for donating her time to shoot the photos that were used for the cover of the novel; Dave Graham for donating his time to convert my cover images to CMYK mode and teaching me to make the necessary edits; my husband Georges Rey for prodding me to continue with Cecylee, and my sister Melanie, for giving me the idea in the first place.

Author’s Note

Thwarted Queen
is set in the hundred years that led up to the Reformation in England. During Cecylee’s lifetime from 1415 to 1495, the church in England was ruled by the Pope in Rome, as it had been for nearly one thousand years. The Wars of the Roses were therefore not about religion, for everyone worshipped in the same way.

Thwarted Queen
naturally divides into four books.
Book One: The Bride Price
is about Cecylee’s girlhood.
Book Two: One Seed Sown
is about her love-affair with Blaybourne.
Book Three: The Gilded Cage
is about Richard of York’s political career from 1445 to his death in 1460, and covers the opening of the Wars of the Roses.
Book Four: Two Murders Reaped
is about Cecylee’s actions in old age, and how she may have had a hand in the murder of the two little princes in the Tower. I used different points of view to convey mood and setting. T
he Bride Price
is written in first-person present to capture the freshness of a young girl’s voice.
One Seed Sown
is written in first-person past to make Cecylee seem older and more mature.
The Gilded Cage
had to be written in third-person to capture all of the different voices and the complexity of Richard’s political life.
Two Murders Reaped
is written in first person past, to capture the voice of the old woman that Cecylee became.

In thinking about Cecylee and what kind of person she must have been to have lead the kind of life you have just read about, I decided I needed a heroine. I needed someone that Cecylee could emulate both as an impressionable young girl and as an older woman. I chose Queen Alainor of Aquitaine, known as Eleanor of Aquitaine to modern readers. She was a real person who lived between 1120 and 1204. Like Cecylee, she lived to a great age and was the mother of two Kings of England; Richard I
Coeur de Lion
(
the Lionheart
), who reigned from 1189 to 1199, and King John, who reigned from 1199 to 1216. She repeatedly broke the rules of what was considered seemly behavior for ladies. Her first act of independence came when she divorced her first husband – Louis VII of France – and married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II of England. Later on, after she inspired her sons to rebel against her husband, he locked her up for sixteen years. However, she outlived him, and was let out of prison by her son Richard I. She ruled England for King Richard during his many absences, and won a reputation for fair dealing and wise judgement at the many assizes she held throughout the country. I saw in her the perfect role model for the young and subversive Cecylee.

Why didn’t I choose Joan of Arc to be Cecylee’s heroine? Because she didn’t make her appearance until 1429, and the story of Cecylee’s girlhood in
Thwarted Queen
covers the years 1424-1425.

The most controversial part of Cecylee’s early life is her betrothal in October 1424. Most historians think she married Richard at that point, and the young couple went to live at the court of King Henry VI. Though this is certainly possible, I made the ceremony a betrothal because I found it hard to believe that Cecylee didn’t produce any children for fourteen years. Cecylee was fecund, her children were born in 1438, 1439, 1441, 1442, 1443, 1444, 1446, 1447, 1448, 1449, 1450, 1452 and 1455. Although she was only nine years old in 1424, she could have started producing children by 1430, when she was fourteen turning fifteen. I reasoned that she was not
living with Richard until 1437 at the earliest, and that the reason she wasn’t living with Richard was because she wasn’t married to him.

In thinking about who might have stopped the marriage, I noticed that her father died in 1425 when she was ten years old, and that Richard’s wardship passed into her mother’s hands. The person most likely to have prevented this marriage was Cecylee’s mother Countess Joan. The reason for doing so probably stemmed from the fact that Cecylee was the youngest daughter and all of Countess Joan’s other daughters had already been married off and left the family. It is also possible that Countess Joan did not like Richard. I used a fictional episode toward the end of
Book One: The Bride Price
to motivate her dislike.

It seems that Countess Joan was interested in literature. She may have leant two books to King Henry V (her half-grand-nephew) when he went to fight the French at the Battle of Agincourt. And Hoccleve may have dedicated one of his books to her. It is true that Geoffrey Chaucer was Countess Joan’s uncle-by-marriage and so she probably owned some of the original manuscripts, which have since disappeared. I do not know if Countess Joan held a reading circle, but it would have been typical of the time period for her to do so. I understand that Abbesses would ride from one great house to another with provocative manuscripts tucked away in their saddle-bags, using the reading circles as a forum for subversive activity, rather like the women writers of Afghanistan who carried on under the guise of sewing circles, as described in
The Sewing Circles of Herat
. (Anyone who has read the
Wife of Bath’s Tale
knows how subversive it is.) Apart from the
Wife of Bath
, I have also included some lines from Chaucer’s
Parliament of Fowls
and the opening of
The Owl and the Nightingale
– which was written anonymously in around 1272 – to give a flavor of the times and some idea of the kind of literature they were reading. Of course I could not quote Shakespeare, as he was not born until 1564.