The Last Daughter of York by Nicola Cornick

Author:Nicola Cornick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graydon House Books
Published: 2021-09-16T20:25:57+00:00

Chapter 14

ANNE

Minster Lovell

1476

Mother took one look at us when Francis and I came back from the lake that afternoon and told him very dryly that he had better set about arranging his household so that I might join him at Minster Lovell as soon as possible. I do not know what it was that gave us away—the grass stains on my skirts, perhaps. However, there was no censure in Mother’s words, indeed she seemed relieved, and when the time came for us to repair for the night, she allowed Francis to join me in my chamber, where the giggling maids were shooed away.

Early in the spring I traveled south to my new home. Francis’s presence on the journey distracted me from the heartache of leaving all that was familiar, and my own natural curiosity did the rest. Everything was new, and fresh and exciting. As for Minster Lovell, I loved it on sight.

I will be happy here, I thought, and there was no shadow cast over my mind when I thought it, no hint of the secrets that Minster Lovell held.

The manor was quite new. Francis’s grandfather had rebuilt it a mere forty years before, and it was spacious and comfortable. Despite that, Francis was determined to put his own stamp on it and planned a tower to the southwest, close by the river, where we might have a new range of apartments. He showed me the plans he had had drawn up. I wondered whether it was the need to distance himself from his father’s time that prompted him to create a new place where we might live. The old one was full of memories and for Francis, I knew, those had not been happy.

In the meantime, however, we shared the manor with the ghosts of his past, the high vaulted hall and the beautiful solar, and of course, the bedchambers with a view to the west across the little river and the fields beyond. In addition to Minster Lovell, I was also mistress of a vast number of other properties, including Wardour Castle in Wiltshire and Acton Burnell away to the west on the borders of Wales. Francis promised to take me to visit them all.

It was scarcely surprising that in the whirl of my new life I forgot all about the treasure that Ginevra had entrusted to me to return. The story of the Mistletoe Bride and that evening at the Duke of Gloucester’s wedding years before had slipped from my mind like a shadow, a fairy tale that belonged to my childhood. Now I was, of course, grown-up. I did not even remember the strangely shaped arrow until the day when one of the maids was unpacking my remaining trunks sent from Ravensworth and I saw her take out the plain wooden box that Crowther had made for me. She gave it only the scantest glance before discarding it, and as she put it aside, it opened and the little stone arrowhead fell out. She gave an exclamation, picked it up, and was, I thought, about to throw it on the fire.

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